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Aug. 16, 2021 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
02:37:15
The Four Dos and Don'ts of Divorce | Warren Farrell | EP 187
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Why in the world should we assume that the topic of your book, the title of your book, refers to something that is real?
And if it's real, why aren't we attending to it and why is it important?
Well, first of all, it's real because in all 56 of the largest developed nations, boys are falling behind girls in almost every single academic subject, including reading and writing, which are the two biggest predictors of success or failure, as you can probably imagine.
And boys who do badly in those subjects are much more likely to drop out of high school.
Boys in general are much more likely to drop out of high school, especially in the United States.
And boys who drop out of high school are more than 20% likely to be unemployed in their 20s.
This is a statistic before COVID, when the unemployment rate in the United States was 3.4% versus more than 20% for boys.
Hello, everyone.
I'm pleased to be talking today with Dr.
Warren Farrell, who I spoke with three years ago, almost to the day, about his previous book, Why Men Earn More.
We're going to talk today about The Boy Crisis, which was published just after our last interview, so that's in 2018.
Dr.
Warren Farrell...
Was chosen by the Financial Times as one of the world's top 100 thought leaders.
His books have been published in more than 50 countries and in 19 different languages.
They include the New York Times bestseller Why Men Are the Way They Are, which must be a very thick book, plus the international bestseller The Myth of Male Power.
His most recent is The Boy Crisis.
We mentioned Why Men Earn More as well, which is a very good book.
His most recent is The Boy Crisis, as I said, 2018, co-authored with John Gray.
The Boy Crisis was chosen as a finalist for the Forward Indies Award, which is the Independent Publishers Award.
Dr.
Farrell has been a pioneer In both the women's movement, elected three times to the board of the National Organization of Women in New York City, and the men's movement, called by GQ magazine, the Martin Luther King of the men's movement.
He conducts couples communications workshops nationwide.
He's appeared on over a thousand TV shows.
That's way too many TV shows.
And has been interviewed by Oprah, Barbara Walters, Peter Jennings, Katie Couric, Larry King, Tucker Carlson, Regis Philbin, and Charlie Rose.
He's frequently written for and been featured in the New York Times and other major publications worldwide.
He has two daughters, lives with his wife in Mill Valley, California, and resides virtually at www.warrenferrell.com.
As I said, we spoke three years ago.
It was May 6, 2018, just before Dr.
Ferrell's book, The Boy Crisis.
It was published.
We'll concentrate today on this book and associated topics.
Hello, Warren.
So good to see you.
It is so good to see you.
More than normal, Jordan, for all the, you know, we've had more than the boy crisis.
We've had the Jordan Peterson crisis, obviously.
Yeah, a very dull topic, that.
I don't know.
It's just amazing to me that during this process of you going through what you went through, not only with yourself, but with Michaela, with Tammy, that you're not only alive, but that you also produced an extraordinary book as well in that period of time.
It's just beyond me.
No, thank you.
Yeah, well, it helped keep me afloat.
So I've been reviewing the boy crisis in quite a bit of detail over the last few days.
It's something I haven't thought about for a while.
Certainly, I've thought about it since our last conversation.
The world has twisted and turned in all sorts of strange ways since then.
And I suppose this issue has been pushed, this particular issue, the boy crisis, let's say, has been pushed to the back burner in a major way by all sorts of, well, cultural movements and by COVID.
And it's not precisely on the radar.
You mentioned to me just when we were discussing this issue, for example, at the beginning of our conversation today, before we started taping, that President Biden established a White House Gender Policy Council, which is supposed to focus on gender issues, but in your opinion, pretty much only focuses which is supposed to focus on gender issues, but in your opinion, pretty much only focuses on women and girls and is also supposed to focus on race, but pretty much ignores black boys, which is perhaps the intersectional place, to use a
is the most noticeable thing So, why in the world should we assume that the topic of your book, the title of your book, refers to something that is real?
And if it's real, why aren't we attending to it and why is it important?
Well, first of all, it's real because in all 56 of the largest developed nations, boys are falling behind girls in almost every single academic subject, including reading and writing, which are the two biggest predictors of success or failure, as you can probably imagine.
And boys who do badly in those subjects are much more likely to drop out of high school.
Boys in general are much more likely to drop out of high school, especially in the United States.
And boys who drop out of high school are more than 20% likely to be unemployed in their 20s.
This is a statistic before COVID, when the unemployment rate in the United States was 3.4% versus more than 20% for boys.
And so that's just the academic part of it.
On the mental health part of it, When boys and girls are nine, they commit suicide about equally and very minimally.
Between the ages of 10 and 14, boys commit suicide twice as often as girls.
Between the ages of 15 and 19, they commit suicide four times as often as girls.
Between the ages of 20 and 25, they commit suicide about five times as often as girls.
And most people don't even know this, pay attention to this, but this is only the tip of the iceberg of the mental health issue.
Boys are far more likely to die from drug overdoses, opioid overdoses.
They're far more likely to be depressed if you measure depression in a way that includes male symptoms of depression.
Much more likely to enter into places that take care of people who have mental problems and so on.
And so I started asking myself, what causes all this?
And when I first submitted The Boy Crisis to the publisher in form of proposal, I outlined 10 causes, and those causes included the environment and schools and so on.
But I kept coming back to realizing that the hub cause of the boy crisis was dad deprivation, that the boy crisis resides where dads do not reside.
And so that got me really thinking about that.
So for example, boys who are raised by moms and dads together And go from an intact family to a school that has very few male teachers, there's not a huge impact, a little bit of an impact that's negative, but not much.
But if they go from a female-only home environment, have only a female role model, then they go to a school with almost no male teacher role models.
They are much more subjected, much more vulnerable to being seduced by gangs as a pseudo-family, Or not having the postponed gratification that dads tend to bring to the family.
And so therefore, without that postponed gratification, they're more vulnerable to a drug dealer saying you can make money really easily by dealing drugs.
You don't have to worry about getting the best grades in school and you'll prove everybody that you'll drive around in a nice car.
You'll be able to get the girls you can't get because you're sort of a loser at school, et cetera.
So I just started looking at all these things.
I saw that the sperm count of boys Had dropped 50%, that the IQs of boys had dropped 15%.
And just, I started, you know, looking and wondering about, you know, two things.
One is how amazing, how much evidence there was for the boy crisis.
And the second was exactly the question you asked.
Since it's so evident and we're so focused on girls' and women's issues, why are we not even seeing the boys' and men's issues that are coming up and how damaging it is to women To not have father involvement, for example.
Women that I had dated between my marriages were constantly talking about being overwhelmed.
And so women are losers by fathers not being involved.
Fathers feel a lack of purpose and they deal with the whole thing that you talk about.
In your first rule of not having some type of change of culture where there's a vitality to give them purpose.
And so we're in a very challenging situation.
I did come to understand what the cause of it is, but it really is depressing to see how ubiquitous that cause is.
So why do you think, if the crisis is of the magnitude that you suggest, You cite some statistics in the early part of your book.
More men in the UK have died by suicide in the past year than all British soldiers in all wars since 1945.
Suicide now takes more lives than war, murder, and natural disasters around the world combined.
That might not include COVID, I presume, that statistic.
Stealing more than 36 million years of healthy life, and the rate of suicide is growing much faster for men than for women.
You mentioned that boys' IQ has dropped about 15 points since the 1980s, and make a case in your book that that's related to fatherlessness.
We'll get back into that.
Boys scored lower than girls in the 63 largest developed nations in which the PISA, a set of international standard tests, was given.
Boys are 50% more likely than girls to fail to meet basic proficiency in any of the three core subjects of reading, math, and science.
By eighth grade in the U.S., 40% of girls are at least proficient in writing compared to one in five boys.
One in five.
Boys who perform as well as girls are graded less favorably.
You know, we did some research years ago showing that agreeable children get better grades than their IQ would predict.
And girls are more agreeable than boys.
And so what that means is if you're less agreeable and more likely to be troubled then, because that is associated with being less agreeable, then...
You're graded more harshly than your pure cognitive ability would predict.
And that probably accounts for the gender difference, or at least for part of it.
Not that it particularly matters, but...
Boys have gone from 61% of university degrees to 39%.
Girls, the reverse.
Percent of boys who say they don't like school has gone up 70% since 1980.
I imagine it was already pretty high in 1980.
Boys are expelled from school three times as often as girls.
That's the same statistic, basically, as boys are more likely to be arrested for conduct disorder, juvenile delinquency.
Men are much more likely to be imprisoned.
It's the same pattern there.
One in three children in the UK and the US grow up without a father.
And, you know, our culture pushes the idea constantly that all families are of equal virtue, let's say.
And I suppose that's justified in that it's self-evident that Of all the things that people strive to do well in their lives, they strive to raise their children, I would say, more diligently than they might meet any other requirement or responsibility.
And so it seems cruel to...
Judge the quality of a family, given the commitment that it takes, for example, to be a single parent.
But I'm releasing a podcast this week with Richard Trombley, who's perhaps the world's foremost authority on the development of aggression in children, development and regulation.
And his data certainly indicates that having a single mother, especially a single mother with issues, is...
A predictor of the maintenance of aggressive behavior throughout the lifespan.
A major predictor.
Now he associates that more with trouble on the maternal side.
Young mothers, young uneducated mothers, young uneducated mothers with psychiatric and other health difficulties who lack social support.
He hasn't concentrated so much on the fatherlessness end of it, but...
The upshot or the takeaway is the same.
These are families that are not producing children who have the same probability of thriving, let's say.
You said also Japan has increased its vocational education programs so that 23% of its high school graduates study at vocational schools and they have a 99.6% employment rate.
That's something we can talk about as well.
So your book is peppered with, well, Painful statistics, I would say.
Why do you think we don't attend to this, Warren?
I think historically and biologically, men were programmed and really through animals, including insects, right on through to human beings.
We were programmed to be able to be willing to die in order to get women's love.
And so in every generation had its war.
And in each generation's war, we said some version of Uncle Sam needs you.
And we pointed to the uncle who in the Marine uniform on the couch.
And we were so proud of him.
He died in World War I or II. And the boy sees that the way he can get love and approval and respect, even though he's being criticized by this person or that person or in school or at home, he can be a soldier.
And so we inspire Boys to be disposable.
And when somebody is likely to be lost, you don't develop as much emotional attachment to that person.
And if your way of surviving is for males to be willing to lose their life so we're not under Nazi rule, et cetera, you begin to develop a connection between caring about It's
a disposable male hypothesis.
That would be the hypothesis on the evolutionary psychology front.
One of the things I've noticed is that My critics, let's say, like to parody my audience as, well, angry, white and young and male, let's say.
But the thing that's interesting about that is that Perhaps you could give me the benefit of the doubt and say that if that is my audience, and my audience is certainly much broader than that, and that wasn't who I was targeting, let's say.
But even if it was, well, is there something wrong with talking to those people who are alienated and angry and perhaps for some reason?
The answer seems to be, the default answer seems to be, they're so contemptible that anyone who even tries to help them is to be regarded with extreme suspicion.
And it seems to me that that's in some manner a reflection of the phenomenon that you're discussing, which is a very...
What would you say?
If it's very deeply rooted and fundamental, at least from one perspective.
So, you know, I was thinking today, maybe our culture is set up so that the most esteemed people are highly successful men, but the least esteemed people are unsuccessful men.
And so maybe that's the strange paradox, is that Men, in some sense, have it the best if they're occupying the pinnacle of achievement, but they have it the worst if they're at the bottom of the heap.
And that seems right.
If you look at women's dating preferences, for example, compared to men, women are disproportionately attracted to successful men and disproportionately likely even to rank men of average attainment as below average attainment.
Whether it's attractiveness or any of the other criteria by which such things might be judged.
So the question is, if it is so deeply rooted, well, one question is, if it's so deeply rooted, what makes you think there's anything that we can do about it?
I mean, you haven't had any luck, for example, convincing the White House over years to pay some attention to Boys, essentially, even though they're the problem, let's say, you might think that even from the perspective of prevention, there would be some attention paid in that direction, but this bias is so pervasive that it seems to even interfere with that.
Absolutely.
So lots of really good things you brought up.
So let me deal with the first thing on the anger issue.
I don't know if we've discussed this before, Jordan, but I've been teaching couples communication workshops for 30 years and just produced a Zoom course on that a few days ago.
And one of the things that is fundamental to that course is Is that men and women, and this is gay couples as well, and trans couples, and even parents and children all complain about their partners or their parents or their child's anger.
And one of the things that I work with them on is to understand that anger is vulnerability's mask.
And the moment you see your partner as angry, look for the vulnerability that created that anger, the fact that they felt rejected or the possibility that they felt rejected, the possibility that they felt misunderstood, the possibility that they said what they feel that bothers them over and over again.
But it's been ignored, and every time that they say what bothers them, there's a response to it that cuts them off and interrupts them before they finish their full feeling.
They're not drawn out, and the response that they get is an argument, and so they tend to not bring up Issues that really concern them because it's only going to be met by an argument that will escalate the problem.
And so they end up walking on eggshells.
Now, who does that?
Men, women, both sexes do that.
And it doesn't make any difference whether it's straight or gay couples.
They both do.
This is a complaint that I hear from literally everybody.
And so when your audience is...
I would just ask, you know, if you look at that anger as the vulnerability, how is that audience not being heard?
And the way you are serving that audience is to hear, to the degree that that audience is part of your audience, Is serving that audience by healing them, by having them have a place where they feel heard, as opposed to dismissed.
When someone feels dismissed, they become depressed, they turn inward.
An example of that is when men and fathers and mothers go through the family court system, fathers are much less likely to feel heard in the family courts, to feel treated as equals.
That's another reason why I wanted to talk to you before.
And today, in my clinical practice, I had men who were fine, upstanding men who were absolutely ground into nothing by the family court system.
I mean, I pulled all the tricks I had out of my hat.
One client in particular, a medical professional whose life was completely destroyed by the family law system.
It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion, to use a terrible cliché.
We tried every trick in the book to keep him afloat.
What he wanted was 50% access to his three kids.
And he was a really good father.
I went out with him a number of times with his kids and watched how he interacted with them and how he taught them and how he cared for them and went to his house and looked at how he set up their bedroom.
And this guy did everything right.
He was extremely high in conscientiousness, so unsurprising.
But I know he had his driver's license taken away.
He had his passport taken away.
He had his livelihood demolished by ill-founded rumors by a spouse that was hell-bent on his destruction.
I mean, we even went so far as to have him pick up his kids when they made the switch in front of a really, really busy supermarket.
She would pull up behind him right in front of the doors of the supermarket.
The kids would come out.
She would stay in the car.
The kids would come out and go into his truck and pull away so that everything that transpired between the two of them was in full public view all the time.
And despite that, she managed to get into his car a number of times.
But anyways, he was just demolished.
And I've seen this.
And, you know, I get criticized.
Maybe we can go into this a little bit.
I get criticized for a couple of things by men regularly.
One is, I get criticized because I stand up for traditional marriage, and there's always a proportion of men who write, and they're usually men who've been demolished by the family court system, who say, look, you should stop telling young men to adopt a permanent relationship,
get married, because the family court system is so prejudiced against men that To sign a marriage contract, if you sign it with the wrong person, is, you know, tantamount to a, well, let's not call it a death warrant, but it's a very bad idea, you know?
And my response to that is, well, you're basically married if you live together for six months anyways, and so I don't see how the marriage actually adds to that, you know, in terms of risk.
But it's not like I don't understand that there's a point there.
And it's interesting, because I do believe that the family court system, I've looked at it, I've been involved in it several times, wasn't to my benefit, I would say.
The men who are objecting have a point.
And then I'm also suggesting to young men, another point of criticism, that they adopt traditional responsibilities to the degree that that's possible and that that's where they'll find meaning.
But some of your work makes me second-guess that, at least to some degree, wondering if I just don't see an alternative, I suppose.
That's really the issue, is that, well, what do we have?
We have our jobs, we have our careers, we have our loved ones, we have our families.
That's life.
And if you don't have that, well, then you're adrift.
That's the purpose void that you talk about in this book.
But if the traditional...
Pathways to meaning, let's say, are no longer reliable.
What's a guy to do, let's say?
To affirm what you're saying and put a piece of data to that, when people are going through the family court system, mothers and fathers are going through the family court system, the father is eight times as likely as the mother to commit suicide.
From the frustration, obviously, of not feeling able to connect to his children.
What very few mothers and fathers understand is that, you know, dads have adopted in their traditional role sort of a father's cast 22.
They learn to earn money.
They learn to love their family by being away from the love of their family.
They often do things like they may drive cabs.
They may They may quit their passion of being an elementary school teacher, becoming a superintendent or a principal of schools.
They hate administration, but they end up earning more money because they want their children to do better than they had a chance to do in their life.
They want the children to go to a good school, which means a good school district, which means a more expensive home, which means that if they were a musician or an actor or an Or a writer or that elementary school teacher, they have to give up that for the most part because they'll earn more doing something that they like less.
Right, which is part of the pay gap that's never really emphasized, is that one of the ways you earn more, and you outlined that in, I think, a great book, Why Men Earn More.
I think that is a great book.
You know, you point out that you earn more for doing jobs that are less desirable, intrinsically desirable in some sense.
I mean, that's part of the equation, at least.
Their jobs are more dangerous.
They take you away from home more often, etc.
And those are disproportionately male jobs.
I mean, the guy that I saw who got demolished so badly, you know, his wife claimed to be the primary caregiver and the courts are tilted so that they favor the mother, especially in the first three years of a child's life.
And I've had some sympathy for that perspective for a variety of reasons, although I think I've rethought my stance and believe that 50-50 custody default is the appropriate situation.
Default.
Just like 50-50 default with regards to money earned during the life of the marriage is the default.
But my client worked a lot to provide for his family, and his wife stayed at home and was with the kids all the time as a consequence.
And because of that, when they went to court, she had the upper hand in the...
In the custody negotiation, because the judge believed, perhaps, that it was in the best interest of the children that they continue with their primary caregiver.
And that's a very hard argument to push aside, given the strength of the mother-child bond, especially in the first year.
Maybe the first year is exceptional.
Perhaps it's not.
Perhaps we have to move to 50-50 regardless.
But what do you think about that?
One of the things that I talk about in the boy crisis is the four must-dos after divorce.
And this is like I'm now putting huge amounts of research together into sort of four simple things.
But the number one and most important By the way, this is if you want the children to do almost as well as they would in an intact family.
Not as well, but almost as well.
Okay, so this is a child.
See, that's something we should establish here, too, as a principle.
My sense is always marriage is for children, not for adults.
Exactly.
They're the primary target of marriage.
Of rank-ordered importance.
Children first, then the adults.
Marriage is for children, not for adults.
That's a very immature way of looking at the world, if you think your marriage is for you.
You have a free choice when you have children to have the children or not have the children.
That's like having a free choice to take the job or not take the job.
But once you take the job, you take the responsibilities with it.
And so in court, what I talk about, I do a lot of expert witness work on this issue.
And in court, what I explain is that we now, for the first time in the last five or six years, we now have really incontrovertible evidence That four things are really needed if we want the children to do the best to divorce.
Number one is an equal amount of time with mother and father.
The closer you get to 50-50, even when the child is like one year old or just born, that leads to the greatest possibility of a positive outcome on so many measures that we'd have to spend almost a half hour talking about those measures.
I would like to talk about that to some degree because it's somewhat counterintuitive.
So I think it's important to delve into that.
Absolutely.
And I'll be happy to do that.
Okay.
And then number two is that the father and mother live within about 20 minutes drive time from each other because when they don't, oftentimes they become very resentful of the other parent because they have to go to that other parent's home and miss their soccer practice.
So therefore they don't get the skills and the teamwork and the continuity to be good on the soccer team or miss their best friend's birthday party or whatever.
And so there's a tension when the father and mother live after divorce, more than about 20 minutes of drive time from each other.
Number three is that the children cannot experience any bad mouthing or negative body language from mom toward dad or dad toward mom.
Because when the child looks in the mirror, and let's say the child's a boy, and Here's that your father is irresponsible and your father's a liar and your father is this and that.
That boy is looking in the mirror and saying, well, maybe I'm a narcissist like my dad.
Well, the boys, young boys play dad.
And so whatever they think of as dad is going to enter their space of fantasy.
And I mean, what they play out in their fantasy play is their destiny.
And so that image of future masculinity, I mean, I always think of Captain Hook when I think of that, because Peter Pan stays Peter Pan because he doesn't want to be Captain Hook.
And it's brilliant mythologically, that story, because it's got it exactly right.
If you conceptualize the Great Father as power-hungry tyrant, which is increasingly the way we conceptualize our entire society, and we call it patriarchal, Then why would you want to grow up to be that?
Why do you want to be that adult?
And so if the mother is modeling her opinion that that's what constitutes dad, she's also modeling her opinion that that's what constitutes future mature son, since he's going to be dad.
Yes, exactly.
And then that boy hearing that both, let's say if he hears that from the mother, by the way, this is true of father to mother also.
I mean, head mouthing in the part of the father of the mother is really damaging to the child because not only is that child half the genes of the other parent, but also the child can't bring it up to either parent because if it brings it up to the parent that made that complaint, it loses that family.
The favoritism of that parent, if it brings it up to the other parent that your dad said this or mom said this about you, that destabilizes the child's future even more.
So the child has a terrible secret all the time.
Betrayal.
The child's in a state of betrayal all the time no matter what.
Exactly.
And I've seen children used as weapons continually in exactly that manner.
It's appalling.
It's appalling beyond comprehension.
And then the fourth thing that's very important is that the children, that the parents rather, are in couples communication counseling or relationship counseling, not just when there is an emergency.
When there's an emergency, everything has to be made as a quick decision and there's a tendency to see the other parent's worst intent.
Whereas long-term counseling allows the father and the mother to see, to have time to hear the mother or father's best intent about what they're doing and why they're doing it.
Well, so at the bare minimum, that means that the couple gets together in an administrative sense to sort out the necessary details in the presence of a relatively, what would you say, interest-free, commitment-free, bias-free third party.
Exactly.
So it's really a management ploy, in some sense, rather than a counseling ploy per se, or at least you could parse it out in those two ways.
Obviously, once you have children with someone, you're married to them permanently in some real sense, and so that has to be taken care of, and a lot of taking care of a marriage.
I do make this point to some degree in Beyond Order when I talk about making space for romance, a fair bit of Marriage is administrative detail and getting that right.
I mean, that does allow you to see some goodwill on the part of your partner as well.
Yes, absolutely.
And you brought up a moment ago, too, the different developmental advantages that happen when father and mother are both involved.
And those developmental advantages include the father involvement.
So after marriage or after divorce, father involvement, lack of father involvement, is the single biggest predictor of suicide.
It is one of the biggest predictors of a child not graduating from high school, dropping out of school.
It's a very big predictor of a child having Being aggressive but not assertive.
And last time when we did our last interview together, we talked about the whole roughhousing dimension of things.
And I'm not going to go through that again because of the fact that people can go to that other interview and see that.
But there are about nine differences between dad-style parenting and mom-style parenting.
And a lot of those differences, moms are so good at, say, spotting sons and daughters' gifts, like, say, sweetie, you sing so nicely, or you're going to be a A great actress or a musician or whatever, you should try and do that.
And dads are likely to affirm that, but not so vociferously at first, but are more likely to say some version of a, well, you know, if you want to be in the Olympics, you've got to practice all the time.
And yes, we'll give you the Some tutoring will go out of our way to take you to gymnastics practice.
But if you're not really focused on responding to tweets and going to parties and doing other things, you're never going to become an Olympic gymnast.
So you have to make a trade-off.
And the data is much more likely to enforce the boundaries around that trade-off.
And require the child to focus and discipline, focus and have postponed gratification around what they say they want to do and give up support for the child if the child doesn't follow through with that and only has a dream that they're not willing to have the discipline to facilitate.
Okay, so there's a real hypothesis there, which I think is worth delving into, because one question obviously is, well, why is it not good to be without a father?
And is it not the case that someone else, maybe two females, for example, could play the paternal role?
And obviously that's true to some degree, if we could specify what the paternal role is.
But you make a very specific case, which is quite an interesting one, which is that it's fathers primarily who are responsible for the instantiation of delay of gratification.
Now, we should point out that among psychologists who are leery of IQ as the best predictor of success in the long run, the vast majority of those psychologists, whose opinion I do not agree with, by the way, is that the thing that predicts better by the way, is that the thing that predicts better than IQ is the capacity to delay gratification.
And that seems to be associated with trait conscientiousness.
And trait conscientiousness, which is dutifulness and industriousness and orderliness, the ability to make and maintain verbal contracts, conscientiousness is the best predictor of long-term success outside of general cognitive ability.
I would also say that in cultures where families are more likely to be intact, and so we could say Southeast Asian cultures, for example, and point out that children from Southeast Asian cultures do disproportionately better in North America than children of North American and point out that children from Southeast Asian cultures do disproportionately The reason for that seems twofold.
One is more correlational, perhaps, in that those families are much more likely to be intact and so to have fathers— But the second is that the advantage that is accrued to those children seems to be in the domain of conscientious striving.
It's work ethic.
It's the ability to delay gratification.
And so if it is the case that father involvement is a key predictor of the capacity to delay gratification...
Then that's an absolutely crucial issue.
And we need to know, well, is that true?
And we also need to know if it's true, why it's true.
And perhaps it has something to do with the relative disagreeability of fathers.
So women are...
We're more prone to negative emotion than men, and they're more empathic and compassionate and polite than men.
Men are more disagreeable, and disagreeableness is the best predictor, by the way, of criminal behavior from the personality perspective, even though it's not a very good predictor.
But if you're really, really disagreeable, That's one of the things that can land you in jail because you don't take other people into account.
You can be callous and cruel and unkind.
But just because something has its pathologies in the extreme doesn't mean it's not necessary in moderation.
And disagreeable people are better at saying no and at setting boundaries and at being cruel to be kind, let's say.
Well, sure, you're good at that.
You want to do that.
But here's what it's going to take.
And I'm going to draw boundaries and I'm going to draw lines.
And you think that's father's.
And what evidence do you have for that?
Oh my goodness.
For example, one of the things I'll talk about is the difference between boundary setting and boundary enforcement.
And dads and moms will both set boundaries very similarly.
They'll both say, you can't have your ice cream until you finish your peas.
And children will test boundaries pretty much exactly the same way.
Absolutely.
And they balance on that edge and push because they want to find out exactly where that border is.
My son, who's relatively disagreeable, man, he pushed boundaries at every opportunity when he was between two and four.
It was really something to behold.
He was a force of nature in going right up to the line and pushing on it just to see what was going to happen, you know, and And so, go ahead.
Yeah, but the difference between moms and dads is not the boundary setting or the children's challenge, but rather the boundary enforcement.
The child will be able to say to mom some version of like, you know, I had a tough time in school today.
I really fell down because I was teased by this boy, and he's the most popular boy or the most popular girl in the school.
Usually it would be the boy that would tease him.
And, you know, and so mom is saying to herself, you know, well, what am I going to do here?
Am I going to get into a big argument over a few peas when he's depressed?
That would be insensitive and stupid.
So I'll tell you what, sweetie, you know, you can have this many more peas and then you can have your ice cream.
And then the boy will see, ah, negotiating is, or girl will see, negotiating is a possibility here.
From a position of weakness.
Yes, exactly.
I will have Half that many peas that mom, you know, set aside.
And then mom is going again, you know, all right, now he at least tried.
Give him the benefit of the doubt.
Okay, you can have the ice cream now.
Whereas dad is much more likely to go, I'm sorry, we have a deal here, sweetie.
I know you had a bad day in school, but you need to finish the peas, the deal is, before you get your ice cream.
Oh, daddy, you're so mean.
Mommy doesn't do that to me.
She went...
And dad goes, well, you know, you can continue to complain, but this is my rules now.
And if you continue to complain, there'll be no ice cream, even as a possibility tomorrow night.
Now we're forcing, the child is getting forced to have to pay attention to doing what she or he needs to do, finish the peas before she or he gets the ice cream, what they want to have.
Okay, so let me take what you said apart a little bit from a personality perspective.
Okay, so I'm going to hit it from three perspectives.
So the first is, I've always been entranced by the Disney movie, Pinocchio.
And Pinocchio is about the development of an autonomous individual, right?
Someone who's free from having his strings pulled by others, and who isn't a wooden head, but someone who's alive and can think for himself.
As Pinocchio develops, he faces a number of temptations.
One is to become an actor, which means to become a deceiver or a player of parts rather than the real thing.
But another is to become a neurotic wreck who wants vacations.
So he's tempted by Pleasure Island.
And the way the fox and the cat tempt him is by convincing him that he's ill.
Convincing him to capitalize on that and convincing him that the respite for his illness is a vacation from his, a permanent vacation from his responsibility.
So the temptations are deceitful actor and neurotic victim.
So it's a very perspicacious film.
It's a remarkable film.
But in any case, now, let's take that apart a little bit.
I'll first make an observation for my own marriage.
My wife is no pushover, and she's relatively low in agreeableness by female standards.
But what I observed in our relationship was that it was hard for her to discipline the children, especially when they were very young.
And I think the reason for that was partly temperament, because I think the feminine temperament tilts towards compassion and nurturance, whereas the masculine temperament tilts more towards Tough love.
Yeah, yeah, fine.
That's good.
Thank you for filling in there.
Yeah, yeah, it's conditional.
There's a conditional element to it, a judgmental element.
Unconditional love, by the way, but conditional approval as part of total love.
Right.
Good.
Good clarification.
Absolutely.
Right.
Because the container is love.
Yes.
But that can mean delay of gratification, right?
And there's a cruelty in delay of gratification, even when you impose it on yourself.
It's a cruelty in the local sense because it causes distress.
I mean, right now, my son and daughter are teaching their son, who's only slightly over one, No.
And I told them how to do it.
So, for example, he sits at our table out in the backyard and he reaches behind and he's tearing the plants out of the green wall that's behind him.
And so that's a no.
And I said, I encouraged them.
I said, look, take his hand, hold it.
Firmly, so that he can't move it.
Say no.
Hold him until he stops struggling to undertake his goal-directed activity.
He'll probably cry.
As soon as he stops resisting, let go and give him a pat.
So you do that 20 times.
Then when you say no, he'll cry and stop.
And then 20 times after that, he'll just stop.
He won't cry.
So 40 times and you've taught him no, which is an amazing thing because then you can let him go free because whenever you say no, he'll just stop.
And so you can facilitate his freedom instead of having to be Helicopter tyrant parent, who I've seen many of, who is one step behind their ambulatory two and a half year old, you know, interfering with absolutely everything he does because he can't grasp a basic principle of socialization.
In any case...
No has some pain associated with it, because otherwise it wouldn't produce tears.
And no is a very, very hard thing to learn.
And no is what the world teaches, not just what people teach.
In any case, back to my wife.
She spent the first year bonding with the child and also learning how to respond, essentially, especially in the first six months, to his or her every whim.
Because a crying infant demands instant recourse.
And a crying infant is always right, especially if they're under six months of age.
But then when the kid becomes ambulatory and starts to require discipline, the woman is required to switch from this primarily empathic role, which is facilitated by hormonal transformation post-pregnancy, by the way, from this primarily nurturing role to a role that from this primarily nurturing role to a role that is in some ways in the local environment it's antithesis.
It's very hard for women to do that.
And so my observation has been that they need, they require someone else to bolster that element because it runs at counter purposes to what they're required to do in early infancy.
And so, okay, so delay of gratification.
We're going to focus on that.
An example illustrating what you're saying, and this is hard data-based example that I talk about in the boy crisis, is bedtimes.
So what we know when we look at bedtimes set by mothers and fathers is that moms will set bedtimes earlier than dads will.
Dads will set bedtimes later, but the children end up, when studied, going to bed earlier when they're with the dad than they do with the mom.
And so why is that?
What the dad will be more likely to do is say some version of like, okay, bedtime is 9 o'clock, and whatever, when you get all your chores done, when you brush your teeth, you change your clothes, you've done your homework, etc., and I see your homework and it's done well, Then any time that you have between when you're finished, when your sister and brother are both finished, your homework, etc., that time you have to play or ask me to do whatever I want, read your favorite story, etc.
With mom, she's more likely to...
And so the kids end up rushing to get through...
Everything that they need to do is postpone gratification in order to get what they want to have.
This story read to them, some roughhousing before bedtime, and something along those lines.
And then with the understanding that they will then, everything will be cut off at 9 o'clock.
The children with mom are more likely to, mom says bedtime is this time, it's 9.30, let's say, and the children It gets to be done at 30, and one of the boys or kids will say, you know, well, I haven't done my homework, you know, knowing that mom will want the child to have done his or her homework rather than go to bed without having homework be done.
And so mom will say, well, all right, you should have done your homework before, but we'll allow you a little bit more time to finish your homework off.
And so the boy is able to, or a girl, is able to manipulate more time Then that 9.30 time and stay up even later.
What the dad makes clear to the child Is that if he or she does not, if they use up all that time and they haven't done the homework and it's now 9 o'clock your bedtime, sorry, but you will just go to school and not have your homework done.
That's your responsibility to get that done by this point in time.
And so that's one of the sort of dynamics that happens that leads to children being more likely to be focused on doing what they need to do.
And also, children brought up by mothers are more likely to be ADHD. If they're brought up predominantly by mothers, 30% of children are ADHD. That includes the average between boys and girls.
Boys are obviously more likely to be ADHD. Whereas with fathers, brought up predominantly by fathers, only 15% are likely to have ADHD. Because you can see from those examples that the boy or the girl, the children, are required to focus on doing what they need to do, get that homework done, get their teeth brushed before they get what they want to have.
And the same, we talked last time about roughhousing, how the children were...
Prevented from having more roughhousing fun if they pushed their sister or their brother out of the way and they didn't consider the needs of their brother and sister.
So back to the personality differences.
So women are higher in negative emotion and they're higher in trait agreeableness.
And so the way to manipulate someone who's high in negative emotion is to manifest negative emotion and to say, here's a bunch of reasons why I'm not doing so well, and so I deserve a break.
And so because of the sensitivity to negative emotion, the fact of the negative emotion is more compelling because it's more deeply felt.
And then the agreeableness means that there's a much higher probability of being felt sorry for.
And you can see that in the positive light when you're dealing with infants, because when they're in distress, the proper response is immediate gratification of their desires.
But that's not a good long-term strategy, which is, I think, likely why...
Well, I don't exactly understand the relationship with lower agreeableness.
It's certainly the reason for the emergence of conscientiousness, which is a cold virtue and which involves delay of gratification.
Now, men are not more conscientious than women.
They're more industrious to some slight degree and less orderly, and those two combined make conscientiousness.
But the agreeableness difference is definitely, you know, it's quite pronounced.
And so, you know, partly what you're arguing for from the perspective of a personality psychologist is the necessity for two parent families really on temperamental grounds and really on biological grounds.
I mean, these things are mutable to some degree, but not easily.
And the other thing that's quite interesting is that, and this is something everyone should really listen to, is that They're anti-mutable, given the way that our society is proceeding.
So you might say, well, there are these personality differences between men and women, higher neuroticism in women, so that's proclivity to negative emotion, and higher agreeableness.
But if we made our societies equal, those personality differences would go away, and then we wouldn't require bi-gendered parenting.
But...
What's happened is that if you go to the Scandinavian countries, where the attempts to equalize the social landscape have gone the furthest, and in some sense had the most success, there are notable exceptions.
So if you rank order countries by the egalitarian nature of their social policies, Now, that doesn't require that any of them have perfectly egalitarian policies.
It just requires that you admit that some cultures are more egalitarian than others in their attempts and their practices.
And I think only a fool wouldn't put the Scandinavian countries at the top of that list.
Well, what that should mean is that in Scandinavia, the personality differences between men and women are minimized, and in authoritarian countries, they're maximized.
And exactly the reverse is what happens.
If you iron out the wrinkles in the social landscape so that it's more egalitarian, men and women get more different differences.
With regards to their interests, people versus things, so women get more interested in people and less interested in things and less interested in the STEM fields, at least in partial consequence, science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and they get even more different than men in terms of their neuroticism and their agreeableness, not less.
And so that argues against easy social amelioration of this necessity for Yes.
Yes, the children that seem to do the best are ones that have, they're in intact families, or as I mentioned before, the children have about an equal amount of time with both parents, and that there is a checks and balance parenting.
So a child will come to the father, the mother, and say, can I climb the tree in the backyard?
And mom will say, well, maybe in a few years, sweetie, but not right now.
You're too young and you could really hurt yourself.
And the child will ask the same thing of a dad and the dad will be more likely to say, well, yes, I guess so, but be careful.
And then if the mother finds out, the father and the mother will go, well, wait a minute, you know, you're not blah, blah, blah.
You're playing one against the other here, kid.
Good work, but no.
Yes.
Well, the kid will play one against the other, but one of the best responses to that is for the child to be able to see the mother and father negotiating.
Right, right.
Absolutely.
And saying, you know, well, yes, you can climb the tree, but you can't go beyond this branch this high, and you can't, you know, go on these branches.
And dad...
You need to be out there under the tree so that in case the child falls, the child will be cushioned by your fall and don't get preoccupied with the cell phone.
In fact, maybe give me the cell phone while you're out there with Ginger or Mary under the tree.
Right, so they see the negotiation between masculine and feminine taking place.
Why do you think that's so important?
And you say there's research supporting that specific proposition.
It's a very specific proposition.
So, what's the research?
It's both specific and metaphorical.
Specifically, we now know that children climbing trees...
It makes them worry about what risks are worth taking, what risks are that fires synapses that are outside of their normal synapse firing development.
And the data that we have for that is that the IQs of children doing risk-taking behaviors like climbing trees increase as they do that risk-taking behavior and they increase their psychomotor functioning.
Okay, so there's this concept that a Russian developmental psychologist came up with, Vygotsky, called the zone of proximal development.
And one of the things he noted was that, I believe it was Vygotsky who discovered this.
It might not have been, but it's the same phenomenon, so it doesn't really matter.
So if you analyze the way that parents talk to children who are developing their language, so infants who are still learning to speak, the adults don't speak to the infant in terms that the infant can understand precisely.
The adults speak to the infant slightly ahead of its developmental trajectory.
And Vygotsky called that the zone of proximal development, which is the key zone to be in if you're going to learn.
So imagine, and I make much of this in my books, that there's a domain that you've already mastered.
And so that when you operate in that domain, the things you want to happen, happen.
That's the domain of order.
And then there's another domain where all hell breaks loose and you don't know what to do.
And that's the domain of chaos.
But there's an intermediary where you're expanding your zone of competence through exploration.
And that's really where consciousness operates.
And that's where we learn.
And so risk-taking behavior isn't exactly risk-taking behavior.
It's embeddedness in the zone of proximal development.
I'll give you an example.
So it's germane to your example.
So When my kids were little, I bought this old wrecked wooden playset, monkey bars and swings.
it was dilapidated but i took it home and sanded it down and repainted it and you know gave it about five or six more years of life and uh my daughter who was about two and a half at the time would go out there on that monkey bar and so it was a ladder going up about six feet which was a pretty decent ladder for for a little two and a half year old you know
and so we were inclined to watch her and she would stand on the first rung and then move her foot a quarter of the way up towards it and then half a way up towards it and then three quarters of the way up towards it and then she'd put her foot on the rung and then she'd do the same with her next foot staying in that zone of proximal development can i move a quarter of step can i move half a step can i move three quarters of a step and we'd watch her do that and doing that she pinned all those movements together and mastered climbing up the monkey bar and
And it was much to our satisfaction to watch her because she wasn't taking a risk exactly.
She was pushing herself out into the zone of proximal development and engaging in this mastery behavior.
So you could say in some sense, and I believe this to be the case, that the masculine spirit encourages and facilitates the transformation.
So if the feminine is...
The masculine is concentrating on who the child is now and what that child now needs.
The masculine is concentrating on how that child can move to the next developmental stage and pushing that along.
Is that a reasonable presumption?
A, yes, and B, here's an example of that also that coordinates or connects perfectly with that.
The data shows that dads are more likely, for example, to use words that the child does not yet understand or does not understand at that time.
And the mom is oftentimes looking at it and saying, well, why are you saying that?
The child doesn't understand what you mean.
And the dad's conscious or unconscious sort of feeling is, I want to plant seeds.
And after the child hears this in different contexts, she or he will begin to sort of understand what that word is and what that means.
And moms feel it's just, moms are more likely to feel, that's just so insensitive.
So being in this zone of proximal development, like, I brought that into the conversation because you talked about risk-taking.
And so what you could say is that as you push the boundaries of the zone of proximal development, you enter the domain of risk.
And so then the question would be, what Personality elements are capable of tolerating the transformation of the zone of proximal development into the zone of risk.
And the answer to that would be lower neuroticism and lower agreeableness.
Because lower neuroticism would mean you wouldn't worry as much.
So the magnitude of the perceived risk would be less, and lower agreeableness would mean, well, even if there is some risk, you don't care as much.
It's like, it's okay.
Now, it's not like you don't care about the risk, exactly, although it is that in some felt sense, but the reason for that is that, well, there's another judgment, which is, well, the risk is worth taking, because there's more than one risk at play here.
There's the proximal risk that you engage in when you push yourself, but there's the distal risk that you engage in when you don't push yourself.
Yes, you're right on target there now.
And this is why so many of the differences between male and female style parenting are so important to understand.
And one of those that sort of connects to what you're saying is that the differences that moms and dads tend to get into about dads teasing children.
Which feels to many moms like it often results in the child crying when the teasing first starts, but it begins to teach the child a whole series of skill sets.
What tones of voice are teasing or playfulness?
It's like roughhousing.
Teasing is an abstraction of roughhousing.
Exactly.
Precisely.
You know, what eye contact is being playful.
What eye contact is serious.
What body language?
I'm exaggerating now.
You get off the bed because if you don't get off the bed, daddy will always make life hard for you.
You know how bad daddy is.
And, you know, the child starts laughing.
Maybe after a while, maybe one time, this going like that, the child goes, oh my goodness, he's scared.
And so then after a while, the child learns that, oh, that's daddy having fun.
That's us having fun.
And they begin to distinguish between, make sure you get off the bed.
Right.
Well, they also learn to distinguish between what's mean and what's funny.
I mean, when I was watching my children, especially with regards to their sibling rivalry, which is likely to emerge in children who are less than three years apart in their birth order and sort of in proportion to the closeness of their birth, So if you want to minimize childhood sibling rivalry, you space the children out three years.
We don't know what that does to their relationship across time, but we know it minimizes sibling rivalry.
In any case, I wanted them always to stay on the funny side of teasing, because teasing can easily turn into torture.
And so they had to learn these extremely fine gradations of humor.
And to do that, they had to play on the edge.
And the question is, how necessary is it to have the capacity to allow your children to play on the edge?
And fathers have that by temperament more than mothers do.
Now, but you pointed out something really interesting.
You didn't exactly make the claim that the father was necessary.
You made a more subtle claim.
Which was that the dialogue between the father's higher risk tolerance and the mother's lower risk tolerance is necessary.
And that can take place within an intact marriage.
But you also said it can take place in a marriage that's been broken apart as long as the couples commit to a long-term supervised communication strategy.
Yes, yes.
So it's the dialogue maybe that's really the issue here.
It's the interplay between masculine and feminine.
Is that the key thing, rather than the presence of both?
Because you can imagine a man and a woman in a household who don't communicate ever about anything.
And I can't imagine that that's going to be an optimal environment for a child, despite the fact that both parents are nominally there.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
The children do well when both parents are involved about equally.
And that's because of a lot of subtle things here.
One, for example, is hangout time.
And particularly boys, if you ask them, like, how is soccer today?
The boy will say, okay.
But with hangout time, and not much more.
Well, what else happened?
What happened at soccer today?
Nothing much.
But if the father has hangout time, let's say in a divorce situation with the child, the child is likely maybe they're One's doing homework, the other was doing their different type of work, and they end up in the kitchen together and they're looking through the thing, and then the boy will say, you know, Daddy, I don't get it.
If you're playing soccer and you're doing really well, and I was goalie last week, and this week I wasn't goalie, but I thought I did really well, and the coach even said I did really well, but now he put in Jimmy for goalie instead of me.
What's that about?
And that's when children with hangout time, both boys and girls, tend to do much better than they do when they just are asked a quick question for a conversation.
They need time for the questions to bubble up.
Of their own accord.
Exactly.
Or some little thing reminds them of something.
If you ask a child, how are you doing?
Oftentimes they'll say, fine.
But if you ask them something specific, how did you like having the ice cream taken away from you by somebody at school?
Then they'll have a response to that.
So when something triggers something that is very specific, the child will tend to sort of open up And on his or her own terms.
And interestingly, I said hangout time was very important for boys.
Psychologically, some researchers at the University of California, Irvine, said it's the single greatest predictor of psychological security in girls, hangout time with dads.
And hangout time with moms and dads has a different dimension to it.
The children know that if they say a problem to mom, she's more likely to be reassuring.
I'm sure that I'm sure he really wanted you to do really well.
He was probably just giving the other person a chance in order for them to feel good about themselves like you did when you played goalie.
Whereas the child is usually likely to know that the dad is more likely to say, well, what did you do that maybe was not so good as a goalie?
What do you think you can do that's different with the coach next time?
Did you ask the coach directly why she or he took you away from being a goalie?
That's more of a problem-solving approach.
And you think that's associated with a positive developmental consequence for IQ? I think it is.
It's not that lower IQ fathers tend to get divorced more often by any chance, is it?
Well, we do know that mothers who are well-educated are far more likely.
About 90% of divorces come from mothers are initiated by the plaintiff who's the mother.
And when the mother is well-educated, she has other sources of income, other sources of education and security.
And she also knows, obviously, that in the family courts, she's far more likely to have the children and the father is far less likely.
She's more likely to have the right to the children.
He's more likely to have to fight for the children.
And so there's all sorts of dynamics going on there.
But I think the most important thing here to understand is that Like we were talking a bit before about teasing, there are so many developmental advantages to a lot of the things that dads do, but I want to really make it clear that dads don't say to moms things like, I'd like to roughhouse with the children because it will increase the children's empathy.
I'd like to roughhouse with the children because it will increase their social skills.
I'd like to tease with the children because it will increase their social abilities to break.
Right, God, who can stand to be married to someone who did that?
Yes.
And the result of that is that, you know, moms can't hear what dads don't say.
And so one of the reasons why communication...
about what is, and dads need to take responsibility for reading about what there is that we do that's differently and what the outcomes are of the things that we do differently.
So I've never heard of a father say to a mother, you know, the teasing that I do with our daughter or our son, you know, when we go into, when kids go into the workplace and they haven't learned how to be, they haven't learned teasing, They feel the teasing is sort of an insult.
Right, they're touchy.
They're touchy.
And they can't take a joke with a sense of humor.
Exactly.
We had very explicit discussions about such things in my household.
So, I mean, I wanted the kids to be inoculated against casual insult.
You have to take that with a sense of humor, or it just mounts.
I've seen...
People who can't respond to that initial testing.
You know, and it's partly what people do to see if you're socialized.
You see, because people want to socialize with people who are about as socialized as them.
And so what they'll do first is throw out some teasing and see what happens.
And if it evokes a playful response, then they know that the person that they're dealing with can be relied on to play and has been reasonably socialized.
You're hitting the nail right on the head.
The commerce of masculinity is the trading of wit-covered put-downs.
And men learn as they grow up that I think probably the reason that that happens is because men learn that if you If you can't handle criticism, you're not going to be successful.
You're also unpredictable because it means that if something small and upsetting comes along, you're going to get big and upset.
And that isn't what you want.
You don't want someone who's going to get upset about something small.
It's too dangerous in a crisis.
Absolutely.
And so from a male point of view, from most men's point of view, The feeling is, if you can't be teased, you can't be trusted.
Right, right, exactly.
You can't be really respected.
And here's the type of problems that that creates in the workplace.
So if you're a dad talking to the mom about teasing children, help her see how this evolves into the workplace.
So in the workplace, a woman oftentimes may get teased.
And she will interpret that teasing like, you know, did you see you have a new dress on?
Did you get that to flirt with the boss?
Or do you have, you know, you must have dressed in the dark last night?
Something like that.
That's something if you say it to a guy, they come back at you with some funny counterpoint like, Well, that would be typical for a short man to say, a version of that.
And the men with each other, when they can tease each other like that and play with each other, that means that they're beginning to trust that man and move them into their league of people they can respect and trust.
Whereas if the woman hears something like that comment, she might feel it means that she's being discriminated against in the workplace.
So she takes that perspective and says...
That would be particularly true, I suspect, if she didn't have a lot of masculine presence in her life.
Exactly.
You know that girls who don't have brothers are much more likely to be raped.
I didn't know that.
That's interesting.
And I do believe that.
And because a lot of the, and this does confirm a number of things that I've heard of people who are experts in that area.
And that's very, very deeply sad.
And particularly what's reinforcing this, you were talking about how things in today's culture sort of reinforces.
So let's say this woman is new to work and she's being tested out by being teased.
And she feels really insulted and she interprets the teasing as discrimination against her as opposed to interpreting the teasing as an attempt to include her.
To include her.
Yeah, exactly.
So she goes to HR. It's an invitation to play.
It's an invitation to play.
If you're skilled at it, right?
I mean, a tease can go too far and then it's insulting.
But the really good tease is right on the edge, right?
And then that's also a compliment to the person who's designed to receive it because you're Facing them with the proposition that they can tolerate a comment.
They're sophisticated enough to know when a comment is right on the edge, and they're resilient enough to tolerate it and respond in kind.
So it's a complement of the highest order to push like that.
It is so important that you said that, and that's exactly right.
That's exactly what teasing does test for.
And that's exactly what men who tease each other are testing for, to see if the playfulness can be met with playfulness, it can be met with even a greater challenge that requires them to participate in the process.
But institutionally today, we've taken...
And you think part of that's crucial to IQ development?
That's interesting, because that teasing banter is a form of dynamic wit.
It's like a dance.
Some cultures have really perfected that.
There's subcultures in England, particularly, where that's Elevated to an art form.
And you see that in places like Newfoundland and Canada as well, and in Alberta as well, I would say in the rural areas in particular.
Yes, absolutely.
And so now what we've done is institutionalized this teasing as a problem.
So the woman, upset that she's being discriminated against, goes to HR and says, I was discriminated against what he said to me.
Thus failing a test in a more profound way, because one of the things you do when you're in elementary school and junior high school and high school, for that matter, and then in the workplace is tease someone and see if they run off to find a figure of authority or whether they can deal with it themselves.
Because you assume that if they have to run off and find a figure of authority, that they're not mature enough to solve their own problems.
That's exactly right.
And so the woman reports it to HR, and HR really is no longer HR. It really should be called H-E-R, because it focuses almost always a complaint by the woman about usually a man.
Do you know what the stats are in proportion of workplace complaints that are brought forth by women compared to men?
I know the OCR stats, the Office of Civil Rights stats about complaining is about, I think it was...
There's a fellow named Joseph Ek who's done the research on that, and I think he said it was like 19 to 1, 19 complaints by women about men for each one complaint by men about a woman.
Right, and that's funny because, you know, the men probably generate the grounds for complaints more often, being more disagreeable, and the women are more sensitive to the negative consequences, being less emotionally stable, more neurotic.
So that's a place where men and women don't feed back so well to one another, you know.
And it's unfortunate.
But while I have wondered, you know, if men and women can inhabit the same workplace over time, we don't know that.
I mean, I've been called reprehensible for even bringing that up as an issue.
But it's not like we know.
We haven't.
We've only been working together, in some sense, for 50 years.
And there's plenty of evidence for sex segregation.
It seems to be the norm rather than the exception that, you know, once a gender, a sex, starts to dominate a field, that that dominance becomes more and more predominant until it becomes almost total.
You see that with engineering.
You see it with nursing.
Those are extreme cases, but it certainly does happen.
Well, they're not as extreme as bricklaying, which is like all men, but women haven't moved into the bricklaying domain, so we don't know what would happen if they did.
They won't, so we won't know.
No, and the challenge here is really enormous because in the sexual area, it's very rare that a woman is interested in dating somebody at work who is earning less than she is and doesn't have as high status.
And the great majority of women that I've seen that were single when they entered the workplace and then married somebody, a significant percentage of them have married somebody in the workplace.
But the great majority of that significant percentage have married somebody at least at their level and usually above them at work.
Yeah, it's hypergamy, right?
And it characterizes women with regard to potential for generous earning, essentially.
And unsurprisingly, I think it's an attempt to balance the economic scales because women take the brunt of pregnancy and the brunt of the first year of child rearing, I would say, as well.
And they make themselves vulnerable as a consequence.
So they need to redress that inequality.
And that's how they do it.
But there are consequences to that that are very severe in the socioeconomic and the social spheres.
And then when a man above her does take interest in her and is explicit about it, it can either result in courtship or a law court.
Courtship of one form or the other.
Yes, courtship of one form or the other.
And what the biggest problem that's happened in the last 15, 20 years, especially since Hashtag Me Too, I have not yet spoken to a single corporate CEO who has not said some version of the following to me.
Warren, I used to love mentoring women, but I have a wife and I have children.
There's no way, shape, or form that I will mentor a woman today.
Well, it was increasingly insisted upon in my workplace at the university that if I ever had a female in the room with me, that the door be open.
I mean, and as soon as that's the rule, you're done.
You have to start rethinking everything.
Can you travel with your graduate students?
Can you be in the same hotel?
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
As soon as you have to start thinking about those things, that means the risk has become so great that you're much less likely to engage in such activity.
And mentoring is a very intimate relationship.
So it's...
It is, and it oftentimes does.
I mean, many men are particularly inspired to mentor to a woman who's younger that is attractive, and many younger, attractive women increase their caring about and their love for a man who they see Yeah, well, you know, across cultures, women prefer men who are about four years older.
There's some variation, and that actually is one of the things that is moderated in the Scandinavian culture.
So that age gap is less rather than more in the Scandinavian cultures.
But that goes along with the general tendency to hypergamy, which is preference for a mate who's at or above you in the social hierarchy or the socioeconomic hierarchy.
It's really the social hierarchy, though.
Which create enormous problems in different cultures, like in China.
When we do analyses of the dating, the most popular dating site in China, you see that women want a very high percentage of women, I think it's in the 92 to 93 percentile approximately of women, want men who own homes and own cars.
But of the people on the dating sites who are males, only a very small percentage of them own homes and cars.
Well, and we should also point out that women aren't actually going for the home or the car.
They're going for the ability to produce the home and the car.
Of course.
They're using them as secondary markers for competence, essentially.
You cite an interesting stat here, too, which I thought was worth talking about.
On who should pay the bill on the first date, 72% of women Think that a man should pay the full bill on the first date.
Now, remember, they've already selected this man, and what that means is that he's likely to be at or above them in the socioeconomic hierarchy, and perhaps slightly older.
So, you know, in some sense, he can afford to pay better than she can.
But in any case, 82% of men think the same.
And so men are playing the hypergamy game even more intensely than women are, at least with regards to that particular statistic.
And this gets into the psychology of the pay gap because many women feel okay about that because they feel like, okay, men earn more than I do for the same work.
And in fact, that is not really accurate.
Here is what is accurate.
Fathers earn more than moms do.
The pay gap is not men, women.
The pay gap is dads versus moms.
And when dads become dads, they're far more likely to give up the things that they love to do that pay less.
And do the things that they like to do a lot less.
Quit that musician gig that paid much less and do something responsible, quote unquote, like selling product Y. That's also in line with the data that show that most young men, many, many young men, abuse alcohol.
Most of them stop around 27, but that's also when they get married.
And so they stop engaging in primary gratification.
And that's another example of that delay of gratification, as far as I'm concerned, that ability or willingness to sacrifice.
Yes, and it's also part of your whole rule about the, you know, it's important to have stable structures, but it's also important to have flexibility in structures.
You know, it's so funny that we, it's so rare that we can have a real conversation about this, because let's say that the pay gap, well, you know, it's certainly not obvious what degree the pay gap is caused by female hypergamy, right?
right, if men demanded of their dating partners that they earned more than they do, my guess is that there'd be a pay gap in favor of women, because men are incentivized to earn more, because if they don't, the consequences in the sexual market, but it's not the sexual, it's the the consequences in the sexual market, but it's not the sexual, it's the intimate interpersonal market, right, to not be cynical about it, because it's not all short-term mating that people are motivated by,
Well, they're motivated to take the dangerous, more dangerous, less desirable, farther away from home and family and interest, for that matter, jobs.
Because the payoff is disproportionately large for men who do so.
And you see that, you know, you see...
And it's exaggerated at the upper end of the distribution as well, which is what you pointed out with regards to the dating sites.
You know, like 70% of men are rated as below the 50th percentile in attractiveness by women.
And so...
Not only are there rewards for earning more, there are disproportionate awards for men for earning more.
And that goes along with the proposition that we put forward at the beginning of this conversation.
I think that was recorded as well, that The most admired people are men, but the least admired people are men as well.
And there's a lot more least admired men than there are most admired men.
And that's true in brutal force on the dating scene, on the websites.
Absolutely.
And as I said, part of the reason that this is sort of all justified is because, you know, after all, men have privilege and the pay gap is really a reflection of the fact that men do less work and earn the same.
Yes, which is complete bloody nonsense.
That's just not true.
There is a gap.
But the reason for the gap is very, very complex and involves many factors, including the ones we discussed here, which you take apart so nicely in your book, Why Men Earn More.
I think you have 13 reasons that men earn more.
That's quite a few reasons.
And privilege isn't one of them.
It's actually 25 differences between the choices that men tend to make and the choices that women tend to make.
25.
25 differences are things that do lead to men earning more money.
Could you list a few of those now?
Because it's such an interesting topic.
Men are more likely to take hazardous jobs.
They're more likely to take jobs like logging or trucking.
They're more likely to take jobs that require them to work weekends or evenings.
They're more likely to take jobs that have very little people contact, like being an engineer.
But most men do like people contact.
But many of the jobs with less people contact, like being an engineer and mathematician, tend to pay less.
The men are more likely to, let's see, work longer hours.
So the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, when you hear Somebody works full-time.
That only means that they work 35 hours a week or more, not 40 hours a week, which is what you usually think of as full-time.
Well, the average person who works 44 hours per week makes twice the money as somebody who works 35 hours a week.
It's twice.
I see.
Well, I remember one of your stats, which was, I think, 10% more working hours is 20% more income, something like that.
But that's a much more dramatic statistic.
44 hours is twice as valuable as 35 hours.
Yes.
And men are much more likely to work that 44 hours or more per week.
Right, and thus not be there for their children as is exposed in family court.
Exactly.
And that, of course, is very fascinating.
It's what I call the Father's Catch-22, that dads learn to love the family by having to be away from the love of their family.
But when the Pew Research Center asked dads who were full-time working dads, would you prefer to remain full-time working or If you had the option of leaving your job full-time and being full-time with the children, which would you prefer?
49% of dads said who worked full-time, so these are not sort of loser dads or dads not inclined to work, 49% of dads who work full-time said that they would prefer to be home with their children full-time.
And maybe work a little bit or not outside of the home.
And yet, that question is almost never even asked of dads.
Usually when middle and upper middle class people are married and they have children, the mom generates three options.
Option one is to work full time.
Option two is to be full time with the children.
Option three is to do some combination of both.
And dads, they have three options too.
Option one is to work full time.
Option two is to work full-time, and option three is to work full-time, or more accurately, if they're a working-class person to work two jobs, if they're more of a white-collar worker, they'll tend to sort of work more hours at the job that they're doing.
And so these types of differences are not seen.
And the easiest way to see these is that women who have never been married and never had children, they earn 117% of what men who have never been married and never had children earned.
It's only when men get married and have children that they begin to do what you were talking about before and start taking on a commitment, a new responsibility Okay, so your claim, it's no wonder you're so popular.
Your claim is essentially that men don't earn more because of privilege.
They earn more because they take responsibility.
Not that women don't.
I'm not saying that.
But I'm not saying that they're taking responsibility in a different way because they're focused on the children and maybe they sacrifice their career for that.
And maybe that's what they want to do, but it doesn't matter.
They're still doing it.
But...
The reason that men earn more is because they're earning more for the people they love.
Yes, even politically liberal people who normally believe in minimal sex roles, when it comes to the children being born, the mothers are much more likely to sort of, even if they're working full time, remember we said full time is 35 hours a week.
They're much more likely to go from maybe working 45 hours a week before to doing a few things that are different.
One is to working not only fewer hours, but finding a job that is closer to home so they can be more flexible.
And we see this, the best way I think to understand the difference in the pay gap is to look at what happens with women who own their own businesses versus men who own their own businesses.
So take two groups that are quite equal.
They both have MBAs and so they're committed, obviously, to work.
The Rochester Institute of Technology studied both groups of men and women with both MBAs who owned their own business.
Women earned only 49% of what men earned.
And so the assumption when they started this was, wow, women who own their own business, they don't have the discriminating male bosses, and so therefore they'll be valued more.
They'll probably earn as much or more than their male counterparts.
And the answer was no.
So the Rochester Institute of Technology then investigated that further, and they asked women and men, which is the most important values for you in owning your own business?
72% of the men said the most important value for me was greater income.
Only 29% of women said it was greater income.
The women wanted more time.
They wanted time.
They wanted stability.
And they wanted safety also.
Men were much less concerned about safety than women were, which is why all of your hazards...
That's why Uber drivers make more when they're men, at least in part.
Higher risk tolerance.
Yes.
And let's say you don't have a college education or even you've dropped out of high school.
And so you might get a job as a garbage collector.
You have to get up early in the morning.
It's dirty.
It's hazardous.
And yet a female who has an art degree, a master's degree in art, may earn less than that garbage collector.
And partially it's because people tend to need their garbage picked up more than they need a new piece of art.
And so these are so many of the 25 differences that are between men and women.
But the good news about this...
How did we get to an estate, Warren, where...
Given 25 differences is a lot of differences, and it doesn't make for a very big difference in pay, by the way.
Even the most radical proponents of the unequal pay theory are struggling to come up with a figure that exceeds 15%.
So 25 differences amounting to 15% isn't that much of a difference.
But, you know, if the data are so clear that it's fathers who are driving this, and it's relatively self-evident, I would say, if it was single guys that were driving this, you could make a case that it was for selfish, pleasure-seeking purposes, right?
And that would fit pretty nicely into the privilege narrative, right?
Power-hungry, greedy, selfish, short-sighted men with privilege make more money.
It's like, well, wait a minute, it's fathers.
Oh, so why are they doing that?
And never married women who have never had children earn 117% of what never married men who have never had children earn.
Never married women who have never had children, they are more likely to plan for their careers and they do earn more.
And what's most astonishing is that never married women who have never had children Have earned more than never married men who have never had children since the 1970s.
Just now it's 117% more.
And so exactly what you said is true.
It is not.
Never married women with They tend to focus on their careers, whereas never married men who have never had children, they're much more likely to be able to do something like music or art.
And gay men, historically, have often been very successful in art because they've been usually never married men who have never had children, and they've been able to afford to do things that were less likely and dependable to produce money.
Oh, I've never heard that explanation before.
That's...
That's quite an explanation.
So let's delve into that a little bit more deeply, the time and money issue.
So when women...
Rank order their preferences when they have options.
So these are the middle class, upper middle class women you talked about.
They're going to go for more time.
And I presume that they want more time to spend that with their kids.
That's been my observation.
That's the number one thing.
Okay.
And then men are making more money instead.
But it's fathers that are making more money.
So they're making more money for what reason?
Exactly.
Is it for their kids?
Is it for their wife and kids?
Is it so that their wife...
It maintains her attraction to the man, because that's a big issue that no one ever talks about, right?
I mean, within marriages, I've seen this many times, within marriages, if the male takes a status hit, He also takes an attractiveness hit, and it's a severe hit.
I've seen this many, many times, and no one will ever talk about it, but it's definitely the case.
Here's the best way to understand that, Bridge.
The man takes a status hit.
He starts losing respect for himself.
His wife starts losing a little bit of respect for him, wondering whether or not this is going to result in a job down the line, or whether some promise or belief that he has is going to manifest.
Yeah, or if she's really the man he thought she was, she thought he was.
He feels that less respect.
And a woman, and I think every woman will agree with this, it's almost impossible for a woman to love a man she doesn't respect.
I think the opposite is true, too, but maybe the grounds for respect differ.
The grounds for respect differ.
And also, there's more flexibility with a man on the respect issue.
There may not be more flexibility in terms of first falling in love.
On the beauty issue, women have their burden that they have to live up to as well.
But on the respect issue, It's very challenging for if a woman begins to lose respect, she begins to lose love, and men sense this, and therefore they oftentimes brag or boast or overstate their potential in order to be able to make themselves attractive.
And we see this in so many levels, in the Lois Lane level.
Lois Lane, she had no interest in Clark Kent, but she fell in love with Superman.
And once she fell in love with Superman, she wanted Superman to be able to cry and express emotions.
But the man who did cry and express emotions and feelings and sensitive, Clark Kent, she has zero interest in.
You know, women are oftentimes saying, I'm opposed to war.
But look at the, she's much more likely to fall in love with the officer and a gentleman than she is the private and the pacifist.
And we talk about this even in high school.
Almost everybody's gone to high school and most high schools have football games.
And the women are the cheerleaders to go first in 10, do it again for the guy that scores the touchdown.
Or either by throwing the pass or catching the pass.
And if the guy feels like it's too dangerous for him to play football and he leaves the football team, it's very rare that the cheerleader says, you know, I noticed how good your listening skills were when you were in the huddle and how warm and tender you are.
I want to continue cheering for you.
No, she tends to cheer for his replaceable part.
Another number seven, risking his life with a concussion or a spinal cord injury.
Well, this is non-trivial behavior.
I mean, because you look at the football team, I've been writing about that recently.
The football example is particularly interesting, especially because it's such a trope in American, especially in American popular culture.
Everybody knows the story, right?
But what's so interesting, too, is the men on the team will elevate their best player to the highest position of status, despite the fact that they all take a hit in terms of sexual attractiveness by doing so.
I mean, maybe being on a winning team elevates a rising tide lifts all boats.
Well, definitely.
But it's still the case that they'll take a relative hit within the confines of the team to elect the man to the position where he's most likely to receive the favors of attraction from the most valuable, the most desired women.
Yes.
So, I mean, trying to puzzle out the role of sexual selection, thinking that through, because men select the men that women select.
It's very, very interesting to watch that happen.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you'll see this.
Both sexes figure out very carefully.
When people say, well, men are more competitive than women, that's not really true.
Both sexes are very competitive for having the goodies for That lead them to have the greatest amount of choice.
So women will compete with other women about how they dress, what their dresses look like.
If a woman is at a party and she's interested in one or two of the guys at that party and a really attractive woman comes through the door, she will assess what her chances are and how she should position herself to make sure she gets They can contact with the man that she really wants to make contact with, and the men will do the same type of thing around the things that they feel will lead a woman to be attracted to them.
Well, this also makes it very...
Difficult?
For men to figure out...
This is another reason why I question the long-term viability of...
Not that I truly question it, but these questions arise in my mind.
The long-term viability of mixed-sex workplaces.
The rules for competing with other men are pretty clear.
The rules for competing with women are not clear at all.
Yes.
Because if you're a loser, you're still a loser.
But if you're a winner, you're just so easily a bully.
Mm-hmm.
So it isn't obvious how men can negotiate that.
Well, they have to negotiate it through negotiation.
That's the only possible outcome.
But it definitely makes things much, much more complex.
And it's also, it's complex, at least in part, because as you just pointed out, within the sexes, The competition is about different things.
Sorry, between the sexes.
No, no.
Within the sexes, the competition is about different things.
So when a woman competes with a man for status, she's competing for male status, not female status.
And so, what to make of that?
Well, why that would be rewarding to her isn't that obvious, and I think that's part of the reason why so many women bail out of high-pressure situations, jobs, when they hit their 30s.
I mean, part of it is that they would rather be with their family, for obvious reasons.
But the other unspoken elephant in the room is always, well, why would it be particularly rewarding for a woman to attain status in a masculine hierarchy?
What benefit does that confer on her?
Well, more income.
That's one of them.
But that confers no attractiveness advantage, whereas for men, it accrues a tremendous attractiveness advantage.
It's definitely disproportionate male versus female.
I would say, though, that if a man has a choice between two women and they're both equally attractive and their personalities are pretty much the same, etc., and one is more successful than the other, the man is likely to be more attracted to the more successful woman But he's also likely to be afraid of rejection by that more successful woman.
Yes, definitely.
He will feel that that more successful woman will have more options.
She will have more options.
She will have more options.
And she'll have higher demands as well, because she's going to want to make...
That's the real issue.
That's where the rejection issue comes in.
It's not even necessarily that she has more options.
It's that because she's more successful, her criteria for what constitutes acceptable are going to be elevated.
They may even be elevated to the point of impossibility for her.
And the real fear that the man has is the fear of being rejected.
Yes, definitely.
And I think that, well, I've made light of that by teasing my class, my students.
You know, I said, well, what's the joke?
Well, you're perfectly suitable as a companion, but in no way should your genetic material be allowed to propagate itself into the next generation.
Right?
That's the core of rejection.
And it cuts to the bone.
It cuts to the bone, and it isn't obvious that that's sufficiently understood, how terrified men are of female rejection.
Well, that's part of the turning to pornography, I would say.
And the advantage of dating sites like Tinder, because the rejection is taken out of the game, essentially, or it's hidden, masked.
Tinder is a revolutionary technology, because it alters the The reward structure, reward and punishment structure in dating.
I mean, it's incendiary and named properly.
Pornography is basically access to a variety of attractive women without fear of rejection at a price you can afford.
Right, and with the commensurate responsibility.
None, except to yourself.
Right, but that's easily foregone in the moment.
And the challenge of it is that the more, so boys who are usually doing less, young men who are doing less well in school, who are not the football players that are getting the 15 different women coming up to them and risking rejection,
who are not the student body presidents, who are not standing out in one way or the other, who are not getting great grades, not part of the honor society, etc., The non-standout men, the ones that are oftentimes dad-deprived, that have minimal postponed gratification and so on,
and they tend to do badly in school or drop out of school, those boys feel like losers and they know that women tend to not date losers, they tend to date winners, and they end up in the unemployed And what women are looking for, and much more likely to be in their families, live with their families, 66% more likely.
Oh yes, that's another statistic.
Young men between 25 and 31 are 66% more likely than young women to be living with their parents.
Yes.
And more young men are living with a parent than with a partner.
Yes.
Yes, and you don't find women looking for men that are living in their parents' basement or looking for men...
No, well, that's just a joke, which is why you could insert it there as a cliché.
Everyone understands exactly what that means.
It means failure to launch.
It means Peter Pan, right?
It's a joke.
And those women are therefore more like...
I'm much more likely to turn to pornography because they sense they're being rejected by women and then they turn to this beautiful woman that they can be turned on by.
The challenge with pornography is that the more you get into it, the more you tend to be stimulated by more and more risky things and more and more salacious things or things that are...
Yeah, well, that's because novelty enhances pleasure.
So that's the addictive element of it.
Precisely.
And then the female who is interested in that guy and does come over to be with him physically, she often feels like this guy is more interested in something that happened in the pornographic things that he's been watching.
She feels like an object, and because she is being treated like an object, Well, and also those are the men who aren't going to be particularly sophisticated in their treatment of women because how can they be?
They have no experience.
Precisely.
And so the pornography ends up haunting them on multiple levels and leads them to often turn back to pornography to avoid continuing rejection.
And only convinces them that a real-life woman is somebody that he would fail on one level or another with.
Have you ever seen Robert Crumb's representations of bird-headed women?
No, no, I haven't.
Robert Crumb's an underground cartoonist, and he was the feature of a documentary which you and everybody else who's listening to this should definitely watch.
It's the best documentary I've ever seen about anything ever.
And he draws these women.
He was a loser in high school by his own admission, by every single category you could possibly generate.
And so it's a study in loser psychology.
But it's really complex because he was a loser who was extremely intelligent and unbelievably creative and who had two brothers who were probably more intelligent, more creative than him, although also more psychopathological.
And then he became successful.
He was one of the establishers of Of underground cartooning back in the 1960s and spawned arguably even graphic novels.
I mean, he's a major player in that niche.
And the documentary is a brilliant analysis of the relationship between failure and success and sexual failure and sexual success.
Because in one memorable scene, he talks about...
He drew this card when he was a high school kid of a heart being ripped apart when he got rejected by this girl, or by all girls.
He said he was beneath contempt.
He wasn't even in the category of comprehensible dating partner, right?
He was outside the game entirely.
So he's rejected by the feminine as such.
He draws these pictures of bird-headed women with teeth.
You know, they're powerful, big thighs, big...
Big rear-end, like, powerful, physically powerful, intimidating women, like mothers, draws sometimes these characters of little tiny men climbing up the legs of these huge tree-like women, but they're very aggressive and domineering.
And the reason for that, at least in part, is because every woman he ever...
What he approached was rejecting and aggressive in the extreme, treated him with nothing but contempt.
And then he says in an unbelievably memorable piece of the documentary, that all changed when I got successful.
You can just hear the resentment and the bitterness in his voice, even though it did change.
And he wasn't that old when he became successful.
He was in his mid-twenties.
You know, plenty of time to be on the outs completely and to experience life at the bottom of the male dominance hierarchy and even farther down the female dominance hierarchy, let's say, in terms of desirable men.
It's called Crumb, the documentary.
I would highly recommend it.
It's absolutely brilliant study.
And he had...
Well, he had an authoritarian father and an indulgent mother, and she plays a key role in the documentary.
And it's awful.
It's awful.
It's a study in Freudian psychopathology that's deep beyond belief.
I've seen it like 40 times, showing it to my classes and walking through it clip by clip.
But...
But anyways, it's a study.
You don't see the world from the perspective of down-and-out male loser.
You know, there are subcultures that sort of exist there, but this is the only examination of that place in the world I've ever seen that I thought was...
Really, really nailed it.
The documentarist was a friend of the family, so he...
And Charles Brothers, one of them ended up a sexual offender who lived on the streets of San Francisco, and the other committed suicide by drinking furniture polish when he was like 55, after being bullied terribly in high school and living in his mother's basement, essentially, for his entire life.
Ugh...
Awful, awful.
But, you know, you watch the documentary, it's not like people really...
You generate some compassion for the people in the documentary and what they've gone through.
But I wouldn't say that compassion is what's primarily elicited by the documentary.
And that goes back to this discussion we had right at the beginning about, you know, what kind of empathy we have for the men who aren't making it.
And the answer seems to be very, very little.
Let's go to social policy with that.
We might ask, OK, in light of this, what do we do?
And I would say this is what I've recommended.
I've recommended to young men that they take that these are the facts on the ground and they're not going to change.
And that if you're being rejected chronically by women or if you're terrified out of your mind about that, and perhaps rightly so, you should take a good hard look at yourself and see what it is that you have to offer and.
And so, are you as educated as you could be?
Are you working?
Are you looking for a job at least?
Are you trying to get out of your parents' house?
Are you taking the steps necessary to become gainfully employed, productive, generous, and attractive?
And...
That tangles us back up with something we also talked about in the beginning, which is the criticisms that have been directed my way by men, which is, well, you're asking men to live up to a stereotype that essentially undermines and devalues the vast majority of them.
You're part of the problem, not part of the solution.
And your emphasis on responsible marriage, given the state of current family law, is nothing short of reprehensible.
And so my approach is, Do what you can at the individual level to put yourself in the game.
But there's much more to the story than that.
Absolutely.
This is really complex because the good news is there's a lot you can do to choose a woman who is the right woman.
And so, for example, looking at when you both go out to dinner, is she open to paying?
If she isn't paying, does she cook a dinner for you the next time around?
How does she treat the waiter?
Somebody that can't do her any good.
Ask her about her former relationships, how they broke up, and who was at fault.
Is there any accountability and responsibility on her part?
Of course, ask these same questions of yourself as well, especially about former relationships and how they broke up.
And so choosing the right woman is probably...
So what are you looking for there?
You're looking for...
Generosity?
You're looking for kindness down the hierarchy, right?
So that's how does she treat people who are social inferiors, so to speak, at least in that context, like waiters.
And then with regards to previous relationships, is she capable of some self-analysis or is it always the guy's fault?
That reminds me of that Atlantic Monthly article, one of them.
I unfortunately can't remember who wrote it, but...
It was this woman in her late 40s detailing out all the high quality men that she had rejected many, many, many men by her own account.
And during the entire article, there wasn't any recognition whatsoever of any time when it might have been her.
It was like, these 40 men didn't live up to my standards.
It's like, well, after the fifth one, didn't you start thinking maybe the problem was on the other side of the dating table?
But the answer was obviously no, and she was obviously still single.
So what are you looking for there exactly?
And why did you bring that up at that point?
Well, because one of the ways that you can be involved in the game of marriage in a way that is positive is by making the choice of the woman differently than what we tend to do.
Many men look at a woman, she's beautiful.
And our desire to be sexual with her leads us to sort of, okay, we'll pay for dinner.
We'll promise this.
We'll go here.
We'll go there.
We should point out, too.
I just want to point out something.
I talked to Randy Thornhill recently, one of the world's preeminent biologists, and Before we get to thinking that this sexual attractiveness is nothing more than mere shallow-mindedness and impulsive gratification, is all the cues of sexual attractiveness are tightly associated with physical health and fecundity, which is the ability to procreate.
And so even if men are blinded by...
Beauty, which I do believe is true enough, their reasons for that at the deepest possible level still have to do with the desire to continue the human species.
So it's shallow in one sense, but not in another.
But your point is there are other markers that are characterological, that are more subtle, that need to be taken into account.
Yes, both sexes have very huge reproductive draws.
I mean, from an insect right on up through human beings, women tend to procreate and have children with the alpha male.
A good example of this is buck elks.
And among buck elks, the females, 85% of them will have reproduced with the male that has the biggest rack.
But what it takes to get that biggest rack is an exhaustion of 30% of the minerals, nutrients, And calcium in the buck elk.
So the second that he reproduces, if he doesn't get rid of his rack immediately, he's likely to die before winter sets in and he's able to replenish the nutrients and the minerals and so on.
So his rack Was very productive for being able to procreate.
It was very productive for being able to attract the female.
But it was also his weakness.
And that's very symbolic of men.
That men's weakness is our facade of strength.
Because it was strength because we could use that rack.
Not me, but the buck elks could use that rack to get rid of other predators.
Or people that the female didn't want to protect the female when she was creating the child and so on.
But he was also being used for being part of the next generation's benefit of producing the next generation's machine.
And as you said, once we have children, we really live for the next generation.
And so now the next question becomes, As humans, do we want to create more options for ourselves?
And are we at a point now where survival is mastered enough in the middle and upper middle class that we are chosen merely for our success?
And I think the best explanation of that comes in Japan, where the millennials in Japan have a game called Kuroshi and of course Kuroshi means death at the desk or death from overwork and the the game each person has a little Kuroshi figure and they compete to get to the top of the ladder it might be the political ladder might be the economic ladder it might be the religious ladder and and as they compete to get to the top of the ladder the one who gets to the top of the ladder first commits suicide not in real life but
in the game and the point that the Japanese millennials are communicating with each other Is that what we did to become that successful man who was the most able to be eligible for sex and for love is we unbecame a human doing.
Climbing to the top of the ladder.
I'm sorry, we unbecame a human being.
We didn't even think of ourselves as a human being.
That's why we're committing suicide.
We have just by competing to be at the top of the ladder, we've worried about what position we wanted, working more hours, pleasing the boss, pleasing the corporation, not selling something we wanted or doing something we wanted.
And we've lost, we never even considered ourselves as a human being.
And so now we Japanese millennials are going to start looking at the loss of ourselves as human doings, loss of ourselves rather as human beings.
And that is, and that's the, in my opinion, Where we need to consider going, that as we have children, there's this balancing act of helping our children see the value of being that artist, that painter, that's doing what you love to do, combined with Is it creating enough income to be responsible to your family to do that?
And yes, it will lose you some women, but if you're developing emotional skills and emotional intelligence, that may not attract as many women as the football player that risks his life and spinal cord injury, but it may attract the type of woman you want.
And for me, between marriages, when I would go out, I would share with them what I did, but part of that was sort of Redefining equality for them and it was not offering to pay for the bill, the whole bill on the first date.
It was talking to them about the options like I can pay on the first date and maybe you can do something like cook dinner for me on the second date type of thing.
But I'll tell you many many times I feared, not many times I feared, I know a few times that I said something like that that I knew there was going to be no sex that evening whereas otherwise it probably would have been.
You know, it's a risk that you take inside of yourself.
But for me, what I wanted to select for was a woman who wanted me more for who I was and less for what status I had or what predictable status I had.
So what do you think about the advice that I advise?
I don't really think I give advice exactly.
I'm trying to explore ideas and that exploration has certain consequences.
But certainly, you know, I do, as is my role as a psychologist, I do, you know, encourage the people who are reading me to do what they can with what they have to the best of their ability.
And I don't see that we have a truly viable alternative to essentially classic sex roles.
I know they're under pressure for all sorts of different reasons, including the ones that you've outlined, but in some sense it's the only game in town.
Now, there are things we can do, though.
You talked about Japan, for example, where they've really invested heavily in vocational training, which seems to me to be a no-brainer.
It's like, maybe without having to revamp the entire relationship between men and women, we could say, well, wouldn't it be good social policy for everyone concerned to pay some attention to the vast majority of men who...
Could use vocational training, for example, as an avenue to success in all domains of life.
And why are we so unable to do that when the Japanese can do it?
Yes, we really are.
There are so many things like that that we can do.
I mean, schools, for example.
We could have one of the things I've suggested to the White House, both under the Trump administration and also under the Biden administration, is starting a male teacher corps.
In which men are trained to be teachers, particularly in dad-deprived areas, school districts, and they get free scholarships.
They get full scholarships for college, but yet in exchange for that full scholarship for college, they have to serve three or four years as a teacher in a school district that has few male teachers.
Another thing I've suggested to both...
And so you think that's...
I'm thinking of objections to that selection on the basis of gender, let's say, which I'm, you know, pretty much temperamentally imposed to, but in some sense.
But this is a data-driven...
Suggestion.
The data suggests that there are areas that we...
So it's differentiated.
It's not ideologically driven.
It's a differentiated solution.
There's data indicating that the provision of male role models in places that are deprived of those...
The addition of male role models in the domains that are deprived of those would be of benefit to everyone concerned.
And so that's a targeted social policy.
It's not an ideological statement.
Precisely.
And in fact, it's even more complex than that.
The way that I've suggested it is that You don't just get males like me.
I consider myself more of a nurturer connector male.
You also get more traditional males so that no matter who your son is, if you've grown up in a home without a male role model in the home, without a biological father particularly in the home, that your son,
no matter what he's prone toward, what his unique self is, That he's able to go to school and find a role model that is not just another nurturer connector male, but a construction worker or a man that's retired from more of a profession that was more traditional, like a logger or whatever.
Firefighter and that your son is able to see that possibility and then also the nurture or connect your male as a possibility and so that those things be offered.
Another suggestion that I think is by far the most important one that I made to both administrations It is the importance of creating a father-warrior program, W-A-R-R. Historically speaking,
as you read in the Boy Crisis book about the purpose void that men have by no longer being as needed as soldiers and no longer being as needed as Full-time breadwinners, that the male have the option of seeing himself as possibly involved in something.
I lost where I was going with that.
You were talking about the male warrior idea and the need for purpose and the social policy associated with that.
Yes, and so what I've suggested to both White Houses is the importance of creating a father warrior program where we're saying we need young men to be fully involved, learn all the traits of being a responsible, emotionally connected father.
We need women to value this in men as well.
How would that work, practically speaking?
I'm always thinking about incentives.
If we wanted to incentivize young men to be responsible fathers, which I think is exactly the right role to be playing in virtually every role that a man plays is the role of responsible father.
That's the right role.
Not everyone, but virtually everyone.
How do you incentivize that at the level of social policy in a practical way?
The number one thing you do is you honor it.
So, for example, when we had each generation had its war, and we said, Uncle Sam needs you.
When men are told they are needed, that gives them purpose, that gives them drive, that gives them honor.
Okay, so how do we...
Say, fathers, you are needed, without saying, single mothers, you're inadequate, because that's the killer, right?
That's the killer right there, because one implies the other, or that's the theory.
So, you know, and this is a shoal upon which our culture is wrecking itself, is how do we reward behavior that is...
Eminently pro-social in the broadest possible sense of the word, without punishing, simultaneously punishing those who are Excluded from that, but struggling to do the best under the conditions that have presented themselves to them.
We say to mothers two things.
One is we honor mothers for being just overwhelmed.
I mean, I've never, between marriages, I dated a number of, almost all the women I dated were women who had children.
The word that they used most frequently was overwhelm.
And so many of the mothers, I tended to date very bright women, and so they often felt caught between they could do better in work They could go further.
They could go farther.
They weren't up to their full level.
And they could do better as mothers.
They felt guilty as mothers that they didn't have enough time for their work and they didn't have enough time.
Yes, yes.
Guilt all the time.
Whatever they're doing is inadequate.
Exactly.
Because they're not spending enough time with their kids and they're not spending enough time on their work.
And both of those are true in some sense.
Absolutely.
And when they would say, I want to spend more time with you, but I'm caught between my work and my love interest.
And so the larger social message that needs to come out to men is, men, Women need your help.
Women do not...
We must not leave women to feel like they have...
So is it women or mothers?
Mothers, I'm sorry.
No, it's okay.
I mean, it's just...
It's important to get it right, right?
Absolutely.
Women, you might not need men's help.
Mothers, you do.
And so do your children.
Right, exactly.
So that when you focus on mothers being overwhelmed...
Every mother hears that.
When a mother hears, we're now going to be emphasizing the importance of dads getting in there to balance the picture with you, to help you out, to not have you have the entire burden, mothers do hear that in a positive way.
If you are simultaneously saying, which I think is 100% true, That you've been overwhelmed and we respect and honor the fact that you've taken so much responsibility, but it is not helpful for you to be pulled in so many directions.
It is not helpful for the children.
It's not optimal for the children.
It's not optimal for the children.
And it's not helpful for the dad because the dad is experiencing a purpose void of feeling not needed and unwanted.
And men with purpose voids tend to look for a purpose.
Yes, tend to look for a purpose and or be negative sometimes in their purpose.
Yes, definitely.
We need to help mothers and fathers in the whole country understand that Okay, so this sounds great.
So why the hell don't you have any traction with Trump or with Biden?
Because that pretty much exhausts the options.
So what's going on?
Well, you know, with Trump, the Trump administration said they were very excited about it.
They asked me to write up a speech that Trump would give, and he never gave it.
Any idea why?
I mean, you'd think it would have been useful to him, you'd think, given his constituency.
I would have thought it would have been 100% useful to him.
I made the case that there are about 20 million parents that have children.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You know, the 14 people that I met with at the White House and with HHS, they said they were all, to a person, extremely enthusiastic.
With the Democrats, I've gotten much more of a resistance when the White House Council on Gender Policy was created, and I objected to that, not including boys and men and fathers, and said that you couldn't possibly say you were in favor of diversity and inclusion when you excluded fathers and boys and men.
It's only 50% of the population.
Yes, yes, or 49% or whatever.
But it's one thing if you just say boys and men are not important.
It's another thing to say I'm in favor of diversity and inclusion.
And then to say that the second mission of the Gender Policy Council is to have racial justice.
And not understand that racial justice can, that the single biggest group of people who are having challenges in the culture are black males.
And, you know, if you go to a home city...
Which is a prime example of the intersectionality that's being touted as crucial to the development of our entire culture.
Yes, yes.
Or it's the prime example, perhaps.
Indeed.
Because I think black women are outperforming black men on average.
In almost every metric.
Yes, yes, exactly.
So, you know, well, that does beg the question.
What question does it beg?
You know, maybe one question it begs is where exactly is the systemic racism?
Do you use a horrible phrase?
Yes, I don't even want to go to systemic racism, but if the goal of the White House Gender Policy Council Is to have racial justice as it says it is.
But then they go ahead and exclude Black males from racial justice and only focus on Black females.
That is undermining racial justice because, as we know since the 1965 with the Moynihan Report, When we did studies of inner city crime, and the fear when Patrick Moynihan went to do that study was, oh my goodness, he's going to be blaming black people as going to be racist.
In fact, he ended up finding that it was not blacks per se that were creating the crime.
It was just that one, 25, at that point in history, in 1965, it was only 25 percent Yeah, that hasn't changed.
Well, that hasn't changed, except one thing has changed.
The percentage of children who are raised in dad-deprived mode in the Black community It's gone way up.
25%.
What do you think of the counter-arguments to that that have been raised recently, that black men are just as involved with their children?
It's just that it's in ways that the privileged white community, Jesus Christ, Isn't recognizing and that that's just another form, that idea that, you know, the black father is less engaged is just another racist trope.
No, some black fathers, there are a significant number of black fathers who are involved with their children.
That is not where those children, that those are not the children that are having problems as long as the black mother is also involved with the children.
So whenever you have that, and of course, the social policies we were talking about before, You know, of giving money to the Women, Infants and Children program and other program where the female who did, the black female or the white female who did not have a father in the home, she would be helped if the father was not in the home.
That did reinforce very significantly We're good to go.
Now have more than 70% of the children who are raised with minimal or no father involvement or what I call dad deprived children.
But also at the time of the Moynihan Report in 1965, there was only 3.2% of Caucasian families whose children were living in dad deprived situations.
Now that's gone up to 35% in Caucasian families.
And so we had this enormous dad deprivation.
It's in these dad deprived families that watch what's going to happen in the fall.
We're going to have significant numbers of school shootings.
And one of the things that we see with school shooters in the 21st century, every school shooter who shot 10 or more people, killed 10 or more people, every one of them was dad deprived.
When you look at the prison population, it's 93% male, and the great majority of those males are dad deprived males.
I think I've never experienced something that was more touching for me than when I I ran for governor, and I spoke of California, and I spoke around at a few prison populations, and I talked to these prison populations, almost all male.
The first question I would ask is, you know, how many of you had an involved father in about three or four percent of the hands of the prison population would go up?
And then I would talk to them about all the things that dads do that are different from what moms tend to do, like the teasing, like the postponed gratification, like the roughhousing.
What the psychological value of those were for the children's growth and development.
And I had these guys with tattoos and, you know, muscles that I'll never have coming up to me and saying, crying and saying, I never realized I was worth anything.
I thought I was better off probably in prison because I was the worthless person in the family.
And suddenly for the first time, I'm feeling like I want to get out of prison to help my children not have the problems that I had and not make the mistakes that I made.
And so there's this enormous desire on the part of men to know that they're valuable as fathers.
You know, my sense as a clinical psychologist has always been that A kid has to have one role model sometime in their life to make it.
They have to have someone to mimic, or they can't make it.
Now, you can get that in a variety of ways.
I remember reading Angela's Ashes.
It's a great book by Frank McCourt, and his dad was a recalcitrant alcoholic who drank the family's livelihood and health away.
It was awful.
But he kind of separated his dad into good dad and bad dad, and bad dad was drunk evening dad, and good dad was sober morning dad, and he got his mimicry from good sober morning dad, you know, so you can pick it up in bits and pieces from different places,
but if you're Even if you have an intact nervous system, you know, and you're not suffering from burdens right at the point of your birth, from deprivation that began before you were even around, you need to have at least one model in your life that shows you what the good version of you could be.
Because otherwise, how the hell do you know what it is?
And it needs to be embodied, right?
So you can see it, play itself out, so then you can play with it.
Yes, absolutely.
And let me, to that effect, let me address the females in the audience here listening to this that are single moms.
And what can you do?
So the number one thing that you can do is take a look at the differences between dad-style parenting and mom-style parenting, because oftentimes the things that dads do Look like they're not caring about the children, the things like teasing, the things like roughhousing, the things that letting the children take risks, like climbing the trees like we talked about.
They all seem like the tough love decisions are often seen.
You see the toughness without the love very frequently.
And so take a very careful look at that.
Make sure that if you still have the dad at all around or available, That you get into family dinner night discussions where everybody learns how to listen to everybody else's perspective in the family.
Learn how to do a negotiating of that checks and balance parenting.
But it's absolutely impossible to get the biological father involved.
And I'm afraid that the biological father children do better with the biological father than they do with the stepfather.
Step-parent elevates risk for abuse by a hundredfold, if I remember correctly.
It's a very...
Stepfathers almost always are never allowed to be more than advisors.
If you do have a stepfather, work on that issue that I talk about in the Boy Crisis book on how to engage the stepfather as a real equal, assuming that he's a responsible and loving man.
But if all those things fail, make sure you get your child at the age appropriate time into Cub Scouts.
Children involved in Cub Scouts for two or more years have a very significant increase in character development over children that are involved in Cub Scouts minimally or not at all.
Boy Scouts are a wonderful deconstruction of masculinity.
They've really figured out how to bring out the best in boys.
Faith-based communities.
Children who are in faith-based communities, make sure your faith-based leader gets your son involved in small groups, with other boys his age, and make sure he encourages your son and all the boys in the group to talk about their feelings and their fears so that they can see that they're not alone in those feelings and fears.
Make sure your children are involved in what I call the liberal arts of sports.
By the liberal arts of sports, I mean team sports, also pickup team sports, And also sports where you have to develop your own skills.
You're part of a team like in gymnastics or in tennis, but you're not interacting with the team all the time.
Each of those things will develop in your son different types of skill sets.
The most important one that oftentimes moms don't realize the value of Is the value of pick up team sports.
Let your son or daughter be at the school without your supervision.
Let them pick up a game where they have to decide without somebody supervising them how big the court should be, the basketball court should be, should be half size, full size.
What are the fouling rules?
Who do you check?
It's perfect developmental skills for being an entrepreneur and being able to make decisions without supervision.
Obviously, team sports are pretty obvious what their benefits are, and developing skills that are dependent on this team are part of the liberal arts of sports.
So spend time in the Boy Crisis book looking at what you can do as a single mom.
Yeah, well, one of the things I liked about your books, and Why men earn more as well is that they're full of information, but they're also practical.
And they have practical advice.
Here's things you can actually do, which is something people apparently appreciate about my books.
So it's nice to have it detailed down to the level of action.
I want to close because I know we've exhausted you.
Why did you receive such...
I would like to know why you think you didn't get more traction with the Trump people, but then I would like you to tell me what's up with the Democrats.
Why did you get rejected so out of hand when you put forward these perfectly reasonable propositions, which in principle should be in accordance with what they're claiming to support?
Yes, even the Trump people, this is what I'm going to say now, is ten times, tenfold this issue with the Biden people.
But even the Trump people were fearful that the single mother would feel criticized, and they were afraid of losing the support from her.
And so that was what I heard behind the scenes, was the The gap between it being very much recommended by the people that I spoke with versus actually having a presentation delivered by Trump.
The other thing was that they were fearful that it would call attention to Trump's failed marriages and And his womanizing, and they didn't want to open that door.
So those were the two.
From the Biden side, it was like, it was, well, the best example of this is I went to Iowa and I interviewed nine of the presidential candidates that were Democrats.
And most of them were very excited, especially Andrew Yang and John Hickenlooper were very excited about what I was saying.
Andrew Yang already had a mastery of what the problems were with boys.
He was on the tip of maybe being able potentially to talk about the issue.
When I finished talking with both Andrew Yang and Hickenlooper, especially with Andrew Yang, the female Campaign manager came up to me and said, I'm sorry, Warren, we just cannot have him talk about these issues.
This will alienate our feminist base.
This will alienate women who are single moms.
We want also many of the women who are divorced, we want them not to feel that they won't have the choice of going off and starting a new life and bringing their children to a new location with a new man.
And so we are afraid of losing those two.
Yes, well, and to hell with the old man.
Yes.
And so it was really, and they were honest with me.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that this was the case.
And so when the Biden administration created the White House Gender Policy Council, which was a day or two before he was actually inaugurated, and it was focused on, you know, women and girls and, you know, Both Black women and girls and white women and girls.
I protested and talked with Jen Klein, who's the co-chair, about this many times.
And her only answer over and over again is, Warren, President Biden cares about men and boys.
Warren, President Biden cares about the fathers.
And my response, my constant hammering of her about, well, then it should be written into the White House Gender Policy Council to create these Father Warrior programs, to create these programs, dozens of which I suggested, that could increase and improve the lives of boys and men.
And I was met with no answer.
So what's the problem?
What's the problem as far as you're concerned?
We might as well have it right out.
What the hell's going on?
In Jen Klein's case and in the feminist, in the liberal political leadership and the Democrats, it is just a fundamentally and totally honest belief that women have it worse than men. it is just a fundamentally and totally honest belief that That boys and men and the constant image that comes up for the political liberals is Warren.
Right.
So it's the classification of the world by sex that's the problem.
It isn't who has problems and how do we help them.
It's the classification first and the problem second.
We live in a patriarchal world dominated by men who made the rules to benefit men at the expense of women.
The proof of that is that look at who's at the top of the political ladder.
Look at who's at the top of the corporate ladder.
Look at who's at the top of even the religious ladder.
Right.
So it's right back to where we started, which is identify that tiny minority of men who are hyper-successful.
Generalize that to the masculine universe at large and to hell with those that are in the middle or the bottom.
So what is that, hypergamy in female politics?
Is it the same thing?
It is not the realization that the men at the top are often at the top.
They're earning that more money, not because they feel more fulfilled or this is their choice, but.
They felt obligated to earn money that somebody else spent while they died sooner.
Right.
So it's not even true for the people who have the privilege, much less true for men anywhere else on the hierarchy.
Correct.
And when I say to them things like, you know, it isn't male privilege.
Do you consider it male privilege for every That's become a real issue in Korea.
Yes.
In South Korea.
Oh, actually, I didn't know that.
Oh, yes.
Yes, there are no shortage of men who are not thrilled about the fact that they are conscripted for two years and the women aren't.
Now, you know, my sense is, well, the women pay their dues in childbirth and pregnancy and, you know, but nonetheless, it's an issue and it's producing no shortage of resentment and friction among young Koreans.
And here in the United States, it's still the law, which is probably the most unconstitutional law that most violates the 14th Amendment's equal protection laws.
It is still the law in the United States that your son who's 18 must register for the draft.
If he doesn't, he could be fined a quarter million dollars.
He could be put in prison for a year or two.
In 42 states, he can lose his driver's license if he doesn't register for the draft.
And there's a whole series of other...
He can never go to a school that gets federal money, which is virtually every school, including private schools.
This is all the punishment that men have.
Your son has if he's 18 and doesn't register for the draft.
The punishment for females is zero because they don't have to register for the draft.
They have the option to join.
So what do you think of that, Warren?
The old-fashioned, patriarchal part of me thinks...
I think two ways at the same time, you know, unfortunately about that.
I think, you know, I do believe to some degree that that's the balancing of the scales.
You know, that as you pointed out in your own book, you know, men die in war and women die in childbirth.
Now, they don't die in childbirth so much anymore, but they did.
And in great numbers.
And it was terrible pain and all of the privation that went along with that.
Obligatory responsibility.
Tremendous amount of that has been ameliorated.
Not all of it, but a tremendous amount.
Thank God for technological progress.
But...
But having said that, well, it doesn't sit well.
The idea of women drafted for frontline combat doesn't sit well with me.
Yes.
And I think there's an answer to that, which is we don't have to draft people for frontline combat.
There are men that are not suited to that.
There are women that are not suited to that.
But I think a good solution would be either you don't have registration for the draft, which creates a different set of problems, not having a group ready, but you have people register at the age of 18 for some type of service of, say, six months or more.
And then you mark off the type of service that your personality, that your contribution can make.
You could be a healthcare frontline worker.
You can be a volunteer in this way or that way.
So if there's mandatory service, it's mandatory for all, but the service itself can differ.
And everyone could have some choice in that.
And who knows?
Maybe there'd be enough people picked frontline combat to fill the necessary places.
It's possible.
I mean, there are people who are constitutionally inclined towards that.
And if there isn't enough people for that, then you do a supply and demand type of phenomenon.
You raise the income for the people who do want to.
Right, right, right.
Which would be, that would, right, exactly.
That would be the equitable way of dealing with it, is increase the hazard pay.
Yes, exactly.
Right.
And you'd watch the supply increase.
Exactly.
Because there'd be people who are right on the line, right?
Right on the edge.
Exactly.
Right, right, right.
Right.
Any final things to say?
Yeah, I guess maybe the most important thing I'd like us to all get is that there are so many things like hashtag me too.
That are so valuable for us to hear the pain and the experience that women go through.
But hashtag MeToo as a monologue is a disaster because it needs to be a dialogue.
Yeah, just like it needs to be a dialogue between men and women in a family.
Exactly.
We need to hear that men have pain, men have all these, you know, the 50-plus developmental challenges that I talk about, that men feel lonely, isolated, that men, why men suffer more, because one thing, we need to do it just for compassion.
Secondly, there's so many misunderstandings and Anger that is happening by, we say on the one hand, men have toxic masculinity.
They don't express their feelings.
They don't say who they are.
And then we make men pay an enormous price when they do express their feelings.
And so, so many young men feel caught between a rock and a hard place.
Yes, well, I would say that's happened in my case, you know, because I have this unfortunate proclivity to burst into tears at the slightest provocation, which has haunted me my entire life, but is still quite pronounced.
And it isn't exactly obvious to me that, you know, my radical left wing critics are above using that as a weapon.
It's quite interesting to note, you know, and maybe they're justified in doing so.
I'm not saying that, but it runs contrary to their hypothetical theory.
Yes, yes, exactly.
And I've said man after man.
By the way, I have the exact same character.
If my wife were here listening now, she'd be really chuckling because...
I had to hold myself back when I was talking about the memory of the men in the prison population coming up to me afterwards and themselves crying.
I think you just about got me there too.
The hashtag MeTooDialogue is so important, not just for empathy, but also to eradicate the toxic part of masculinity that keeps feelings all to oneself.
Because when you do that, you end up having a volcano build inside of you and it comes out as the anger, it comes out as distance.
It comes out as drinking.
It comes out in destructive behavior.
And it also comes out in things like school shootings, mass shootings, committing crimes.
And so both to protect ourselves from the mass shootings, from the ISIS recruits, almost all of whom are dad-deprived males and females, and also out of the- Is there data on that, Warren, with regards to recruitment for- Yes, there is.
In fact, it was done- By three sociologists who looked at the studied ISIS recruits in Lebanon.
And after doing that, they anecdotally told each other afterwards, you know, a lot of these guys don't have their dads and they were trying to get involved with ISIS to have some sense of purpose beyond themselves.
And while it was never part of our questionnaire, they went back and then did a systematic study of the men including that question that had not been asked at the beginning and found that to be the single most common denominator of the ISIS recruits.
By the way, there's 89% male ISIS recruits and 11% female ISIS recruits.
And the females had dad deprivation as an issue, as well as the males as the single biggest characteristic.
Patriarchal ideology as a substitute for paternal relationship.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
And just a need to have some sense of purpose and feeling of being needed.
And that's one of the things that dads are so good at is working with moms.
Moms are so good at identifying a child's gifts, nurturing the child's gifts.
And dads are so good at the tough love oftentimes that are necessary to help the child achieve those gifts.
Yeah, well, I thought, you know, it seems to me that the central characteristic of the benevolent paternal spirit parodied as the patriarchy is encouragement.
Well, I would take a little bit of a different issue there.
I think moms and dads both encourage a lot.
But moms oftentimes repeat the encouragement.
And when the child fails, are still encouraging.
Whereas the dads say, if you want to get to that outcome, you need to not do that texting.
You need not to do all the things that that outcome requires.
And they tend to sort of enforce those boundaries and hold the child accountable to a greater degree.
Does that make sense?
Sure, sure.
Thank you very much for talking with me today, Warren.
It's much, much appreciated.
You don't exhaust me.
You energize me.
Oh, well, I'm glad to hear that.
And I hope that everybody finds this conversation useful.
Thank you.
Thanks again, Nate.
Thank you.
You too.
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