Nov. 18, 2015 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:52:52
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Three, two, one, and booyah! | ||
| We're live. | ||
| So, you have a wonderful nickname, Ms. Summers. | ||
| Do people still use Ms? | ||
| Is Ms. gone? | ||
| I don't see that anymore. | ||
| You see it on forms. | ||
| MS, as like a possibility. | ||
| It's a possibility. | ||
| Harvard, was it Harvard? | ||
| One of the major Ivy League schools was adding a bunch of different gender-neutral pronouns, like Z, H, E, and they were adding a bunch of crazy new ones they have invented. | ||
| Have you seen these? | ||
| Yeah, things like Gyno-American. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
|
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That's a good one. | |
| What does that mean? | ||
| That's what I am. | ||
| A gyno-American? | ||
| I think I want to be one. | ||
| Can I be a gyno-American? | ||
| Is that okay? | ||
| Aspire. | ||
| Do you have to be... | ||
| One of your nicknames, though, is a based mom. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Which is, I know that term from the rap world, like based. | ||
| What's that dude? | ||
| Lil B, the based god? | ||
| Is that his name? | ||
| But I didn't know what based means, but I've heard it used a bunch of times, and it's always a positive descriptive, right? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I had to... | ||
| Jamie's very... | ||
| He's into the hip-hop world. | ||
| If I have to go to him, the young kids. | ||
| So I had to Google it. | ||
| And there's an urban dictionary definition. | ||
| Based is all about being yourself and not caring about what anybody else thinks. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they use it as an... | ||
| script sorry they use it as a an example it's when you don't care like that bag looks gay on you I don't care I'm based I didn't know that. | ||
| That seems like... | ||
| I thought it would be a different definition. | ||
| I thought, like, based mom is like, you're cool. | ||
| That's what I thought. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I said so because they called me that for quite a while. | ||
| It was mainly the gamers in Gamergate. | ||
| And then they explained that, no, it means to be authentic and you say what you think. | ||
| You're not hypocritical. | ||
| So it's... | ||
| I mean, I think it's a great compliment being based and being a mom. | ||
| It seems quite positive. | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| But it was a very funny nickname. | ||
| So you got involved in this whole Gamergate thing because I found out about you through, I guess, through the whole Gamergate thing. | ||
| Because someone had called me an MRA once. | ||
| And I don't remember what the context of it was, but it was something... | ||
| Involving something that had to do with feminism. | ||
| And they called it to me as a pejorative. | ||
| And I was like, what is an MRA? So I had to Google it. | ||
| And then when I realized it was men's rights advocate. | ||
| And I was like, I can't believe that a feminist is making fun of me. | ||
| It's using a negative term, men's rights advocate. | ||
| So that it gets bad to care about men's rights? | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| So that made me get Deeper into the rabbit hole of Miss Christina Summers and then I started watching your factual feminism videos and I started listening to some of your conversations and I became very impressed but I also became very perplexed because you face a lot of backlash and I found that perplexing because everything that I saw you seem to be very reasonable very measured very informed like how did you polite very | ||
| polite and How did you get on this kind of crazy journey, almost as like, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like, I don't want to say you're redefining feminism, but you're redefining it after it's been redefined. | ||
| Right, you're actually taking it back to its original noble purpose, which was about equality, basic fairness to women, that women and men should enjoy Equal liberty and dignity, rights, of course. | ||
| But feminism has drifted into, I think, a kind of female chauvinism. | ||
| And I became a feminist many years ago, decades ago, because I did not appreciate male chauvinism. | ||
| I still don't. | ||
| But I don't like female chauvinism. | ||
| That's what we have today, too much of that. | ||
| And is there an origin of all this? | ||
| I mean, is there one thing that you could point to where this all started? | ||
| Because it seems like the origins of, like, if you go back and watch, like, old movies and take a look at old culture, it's very clear there's a lot of sexism going on. | ||
| Like, men would smack women in old movies, and it was, like, it seemed like, that's, like... | ||
| Other than reading books, that's the best interpretation of the time. | ||
| So if you go back to those 1950s films and look at how people treated each other, it seems like there were much clearer definitions that women were struggling against, like this idea. | ||
| That women were inferior, that the whole stereotype of women belong barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. | ||
| This is what young women were fighting against, what women, period, were fighting against when feminism sort of started its march. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And then what happened, particularly in the academy, and I was teaching philosophy in the 1980s, And the chairman of my department asked me to teach a course in feminist theory. | ||
| And I thought, fine. | ||
| I'm a theorist. | ||
| I'm a feminism. | ||
| I sent away for the textbooks. | ||
| I was shocked by what came through the mail. | ||
| I spent the summer reading these books. | ||
| And as a philosophy professor of many years, I thought there was a sacred commandment about college teaching. | ||
| Thou shalt teach both sides of the argument. | ||
| It never occurred to me it was my job as a teacher to take my views about the world and And implant them in the minds of my students. | ||
| I wanted to give them the techniques to make their own decisions. | ||
| And you do that. | ||
| One way to do that is to give them the best that was thought and said on both sides of a contentious issue. | ||
| Well, these textbooks... | ||
| We're not like that. | ||
| They were a series of mutually reinforcing readings, and it was a conspiracy theory about the patriarchy, buttressed by inflated statistics. | ||
| So after spending a summer reading these books, I wrote a paper and went to the American Philosophical Association and presented it. | ||
| And I will tell you, typically at the American Philosophical Association, if you give a paper, People are... | ||
| It's very combative. | ||
| But then you go out for drinks. | ||
| Well, we did not go out for drinks. | ||
| I gave this paper. | ||
| Women, mostly women in the audience, were hissing and booing. | ||
| And I was excommunicated from a religion I didn't even know existed. | ||
| The Church of Feminism. | ||
| I considered that I'd committed an act of heresy. | ||
| What was your take on it that was so offensive? | ||
| Well, I said that... | ||
| That feminism should be about mutual respect. | ||
| It should be about equality, not the demonization of men. | ||
| It was as if they had, if you could reduce it to a few phrases, it would be, women are from Venus, men are from hell. | ||
| And I thought, that's absurd. | ||
| Why would we want to teach courses like that that demonize men? | ||
| Let's celebrate humanity and have, you know, and also accuracy, because these texts were filled with With what I've come to call advocacy statistics, or in some cases hate statistics, sort of designed to create just anger in women. | ||
| And they happen not to be true, but they work very well as propaganda. | ||
| So as a philosophy professor, I was very upset to see classrooms being used to disseminate propaganda and twisted conspiracy theories about patriarchy. | ||
| So I tried to correct it, and what happened was the radicals were already there in the academy, and they do not tolerate dissent well. | ||
| I mean, you see it today on campus. | ||
| What you're seeing happening on the campus today at Yale, these terrible confrontations between these, some are calling them cry bullies now, and professors and so forth, these angry mobs. | ||
| I have been confronting them for years, but now the public is beginning to notice more. | ||
| Well, you've been confronting them only from the standpoint of feminism, right? | ||
| I mean, what was going on in Yale was a professor had written a letter saying that children should probably have the right to be a little bit outrageous and perhaps even offensive in their Halloween costumes. | ||
| And just Halloween costumes, this led to this massive outrage. | ||
| Explosion. | ||
| Anger. | ||
| What seems like to me, something about it just seems really fake. | ||
| Something about it seems like there's people that have the green light. | ||
| There's a lot of these issues where I feel like... | ||
| The reaction that people have, it's not a genuine reaction. | ||
| What the reaction represents is a green light to be an asshole. | ||
| To be really mean. | ||
| They're really mean to these people. | ||
| And they want people's jobs. | ||
| They want their heads on a platter. | ||
|
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They want you fired. | |
| I never argued with anybody that I wanted to fire them. | ||
| You want to convince them. | ||
| But this is something different. | ||
| This is fanatical. | ||
| Well, it's because there's a certain amount of power that's involved in social media, a certain amount of power involved in this. | ||
| It is, in fact, a mob mentality. | ||
| And a mob mentality is a very real mentality, whether it's an actual mob out on the street in the middle of a riot, or whether it's a bunch of people on Twitter that get riled up into a frothy rage. | ||
| Dangerous. | ||
| And start attacking people. | ||
| The way this one girl was screaming at that professor, who was speaking in very logical and very measured tones. | ||
| And she was screaming at him. | ||
| A mob can't be reasoned with. | ||
| It's the worst possible display of irrationality and to have it on a campus. | ||
| And right now the deans, the college presidents, they are so craven and they are writing these... | ||
| You know, self-abnegating letters and saying, oh, I'm so sorry, and I honor this conversation. | ||
| Honor the conversation with an angry mob. | ||
| I mean, it's sad. | ||
| Well, it seems like what that woman did when she wrote that original letter was take a little bit of a chance against the mob, was take a little bit of a chance. | ||
| And this is the reaction. | ||
| The mob was like, fuck you. | ||
| You know, no, we're the mob. | ||
| And that woman screaming at her husband, who I believe is her husband, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| A distinguished, I think he's a sociologist. | ||
| And he was being very fair and engaging them outside in the open in this incredibly large group. | ||
| But it was funny how he had to do it because there were so many people around and some of them couldn't hear what he was saying. | ||
| He's saying, well, I will raise my voice so that you will be able to hear me, but I'm not yelling at her. | ||
| I'm raising my voice. | ||
| So you can hear me. | ||
| And then they'd say, don't yell at us. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| He would turn to one group of students because they would say, you're not looking at us. | ||
| He would turn and then the students behind him would say, you're not... | ||
| This man could not win. | ||
| He was in a terrible situation all because of Halloween costumes. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| These children... | ||
| I call them children. | ||
| I wouldn't have called college students children, but now they're so infantile. | ||
| But it's worse than that. | ||
| It's infantile, yes, but it's... | ||
| Infused with bitter, divisive, hardline politics that they learned in their classrooms. | ||
| And that's how I tie it to what I read in these textbooks, these paranoid theories. | ||
| These theories that I read incited a fair amount of women, not most. | ||
| I mean, I think most college women would read these texts and just move on. | ||
| But about 10 to 15 percent will become fixated and sort of intoxicated with rage. | ||
| And I saw it over the years, and now, I mean, similar things have gone on with race scholarship and gender politics. | ||
| They're similar phenomena. | ||
| Well, it seems to me that certain ideologies can become contagious, and they're also very intoxicating. | ||
| It's very intoxicating to be a part of a group that's being opposed and that is opposing. | ||
| You're on a team. | ||
| You're in a war. | ||
| You're on an army. | ||
| And you're against the patriarchy. | ||
| You have an enemy. | ||
| And you're against whatever the hell it is. | ||
| Like, when those kids stormed that... | ||
| Did you see the latest one where they... | ||
| There's a study hall. | ||
| And these kids in there are studying. | ||
| And these guys came in with signs screaming, Black Lives Matter. | ||
| Black Lives Matter. | ||
| Like, okay. | ||
| Are these people who are studying? | ||
| Are they the ones who are oppressing you? | ||
| Who are you trying to impart this wisdom to? | ||
| I know. | ||
| They went... | ||
| It was ridiculous. | ||
| I saw it. | ||
| And if the students didn't get up and join them, they came over and accused them. | ||
| It looked like a struggle session or something in a fanatical government. | ||
| And they don't have power. | ||
| But what if they did? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They would be very scary. | ||
| Well, it looked like an Onion article come to life. | ||
| I know. | ||
| The world has become, and on campus is an Onion cartoon. | ||
| Yeah, it's almost impossible to distinguish. | ||
| So what caused all this, though? | ||
| How did this happen? | ||
| Why are there not more measured, intelligent people that are trying to Raise children and teach them how to be measured and intelligent adults and look at things objectively. | ||
| What is causing this underlying sort of theme, this delusional theme that's repeating itself? | ||
| Well, first of all, there are lots of reasonable professors. | ||
| Even in women's studies, there are reasonable professors. | ||
| But they are not the vocal. | ||
| There's a vocal minority of professors who are apparently, for certain students, charismatic. | ||
| And they have, for years, been teaching these students. | ||
| These paranoid views of the world and inciting rage against men, gender profiling of men, and they have a following. | ||
| And this little following has been there all along, but about two years ago, the Department of Education sent out essentially an edict warning colleges that if you don't take strong measures against sexual harassment and the rape culture, they didn't use the word the Department of Education sent out essentially an edict warning colleges that if you don't take strong measures against sexual harassment and the rape culture, they didn't use the word rape culture, but they alluded to | ||
| Now, to the Department's credit, they wanted to do something about campus assault. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| But they went too far. | ||
| They believed the propaganda about what's happening on the college. | ||
| And they gave a cure that was worse than the disease. | ||
| I mean, the cure was to turn campuses into a little pink police state, some call them, feminist police states, where every joke is now monitored. | ||
| And you're supposed to be reporting other students if you hear a remark that could be interpreted as sexist. | ||
| And this is happening at public universities, where the last time I looked, we're, you know, part of, you know, the U.S. Constitution applies. | ||
| The students are being policed by people that have no right to do it, but this was incited by the Department of Education. | ||
| How bizarre. | ||
| So that's the original, that's the root. | ||
| If you go back and look, when did words like trigger warning, safe space, microaggression, you know, we didn't hear these three, four years ago. | ||
| What happened was that these angry groups who've always been there, they were empowered by the Assistant Secretary of Education, the Department of Education. | ||
| She basically told them, you can make a federal case out of someone walking by and a microaggression. | ||
| And they consider everything a man does a microaggression. | ||
| What is a microaggression? | ||
| Give me a definition of a microaggression. | ||
| Well, an aggressive thing would be to punch somebody. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or to use an obvious, you know, just intolerably sexist or racial slur. | ||
| A microaggression would be something that is demeaning, but a person doesn't necessarily intend it. | ||
| And they would say, you know, somebody saying, hi, beautiful. | ||
| That's a microaggression. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| A man holding a door open for a girl, I've heard. | ||
| For many, that's benevolent sexism, and those are microaggressive. | ||
| Maybe not micro, maybe nanoaggression. | ||
| What if you're a straight man and you hold open a door for a lesbian? | ||
| Well, if she's a nice person, she'll be grateful. | ||
| What if you're a gay man and you hold up at the door for a straight man? | ||
| Do you get accused of microaggression there? | ||
| It seems like perhaps there's some flirting involved. | ||
| You're trying to tease out the logical implications of their views. | ||
| Can't mess with it. | ||
| You said before it's a rabbit hole. | ||
|
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You will never emerge as a sane person. | |
| Over the last two years or so, when I started going down this rabbit hole, I started visiting these websites and visiting a lot of forums that you could easily just call echo chambers and Looking at what happens first of all when someone disagrees even politely they're banned instantly when someone had any there was a there was one was a topic about Sexual assault | ||
| in terms of drinking, about what is rape. | ||
| And the subject was, they were discussing, they were accusing someone, a man, of rape because he and a woman had gotten drunk together and had sex. | ||
| So the man had raped the woman. | ||
| And it was very bizarre. | ||
| Well, they say that. | ||
| And you'll say, wait a minute, what if they are both equally drunk, And I asked this. | ||
| I was at a debate at the University of Virginia. | ||
| I debated a law professor. | ||
| I said, then, are you saying two people could rape each other at the same time? | ||
| You know, they're both drunk. | ||
| And she thought that was a perfectly possible, you know, situation. | ||
| And that is such a degradation of language, a trivialization of a serious crime. | ||
| But they have expanded the meaning of terms so that now sexual assault encompasses Just normal behavior that people enjoy, which is, it has been known to happen that people have drinks and then have sex. | ||
| Well, it's a giant percentage of the culture becomes rapists then. | ||
| Yes, most of the people, even throughout history and throughout the world today... | ||
| Yeah, 90% of the adults of the world would probably be deemed rapists. | ||
| And I also don't understand why it is automatically the guy's fault If it's consensual, I'm not talking about someone being incapacitated, blackout drunk. | ||
| That's reasonable. | ||
| People would see that as an assault. | ||
| But just that you're both really drunk and you have sex. | ||
| Why is he the rapist? | ||
| Because that tends to be what happens on the campus. | ||
| They do blame the young man. | ||
| They don't say you raped each other. | ||
| They will take her side if she can show they had drinks. | ||
| And I find this, another strange thing that's happening with feminism today is that it's going, I call it fainting couch feminism. | ||
| It's almost as if we're going back to the Victorian era where there were delicate ladies preyed upon by men and as if the women aren't moral agents. | ||
| I mean, if you take a lot of drinks, you probably have made a decision to lower your inhibitions and be wild. | ||
| All kinds of things are going on. | ||
| That would explain that you're still an agent in charge of yourself, self-mastery. | ||
| But they deny this of women. | ||
| Women have no agency and are constantly triggered, need safe spaces. | ||
| At Brown University, by the way, they had... | ||
| Two feminists debating. | ||
| One of them was a libertarian, Wendy McElroy, and she didn't believe the statistics. | ||
| And another was Jessica Valenti, a hardline feminist. | ||
| They were debating. | ||
| But that was fine. | ||
| It was a debate. | ||
| You'd think that would make everyone happy. | ||
| Both sides well represented. | ||
| No. | ||
| The brown feminists were traumatized by the very idea that someone would be invalidating our experience. | ||
| They used that phrase. | ||
| And they formed a safe room. | ||
| A safe space where you could go, which had videotapes of frolicking puppies, coloring books, bubbles, stuffed animals. | ||
| No. | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| For adults? | ||
| And this was described in the New York Times, a cover story in the New York Times Magazine by Judith Shulovitz. | ||
| And this was the safe space. | ||
| And you read it and you're astonished of the infantilization. | ||
| Puppies? | ||
| Puppies. | ||
|
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Puppies. | |
| Frolicking puppies. | ||
| Safe spaces. | ||
|
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Bubbles. | |
| Coloring books. | ||
| Yeah, I get it. | ||
| It's kindergarten for college girls. | ||
| It hurts my brain. | ||
| It hurts. | ||
| I just don't... | ||
| I think there's a connection that a lot of people have that somehow or another sex with regret is bad. | ||
| It's negative. | ||
| And that sex with regret when it comes to alcohol, that perhaps... | ||
| Since men are classically the pursuers, that there's coercion involved. | ||
| And even though the man is intoxicated, he did that on his own. | ||
| He did that in order to sort of lure the girl in and then have sex with her. | ||
| But that's not rape. | ||
| And at the end of the day, even though that's kind of sleazy behavior, at the end of the day, it's just sex. | ||
| Why is sex so bad? | ||
| Sex is not terrible. | ||
| What's terrible is rape. | ||
| Actual rape is terrible. | ||
| Right, and being terrified and thinking you're going to be killed or whatever, some horrible experience. | ||
| And this is a bad date, or a bad hookup, I guess they would call it, where you didn't know, maybe you'd regret it the next day. | ||
| And we do see on campus—I've watched these cases where these young women will—they don't report these things, and sometimes they have to take a gender studies class a year later, and then they bring charges. | ||
| And there is no way—it's metaphysically impossible to have any evidence of what happened, but if she can—and young men have been thrown off campus or, you know, sort of tarred with the stigma of being a rapist— I had Thaddeus Russell on, | ||
| who's an author and a professor at Occidental, and he was talking about how there was a case where a man and a woman who were going to school there got drunk and had sex, and the man was accused of rape because of this and kicked out of school. | ||
| And the girl stayed. | ||
| They were both equally drunk. | ||
| She sent him texts saying, you know, come on over. | ||
| Oh, I know. | ||
| Do you have condoms? | ||
| Like, the whole deal. | ||
| But somehow or another, you're not responsible for sexual activity when you're drunk, but you are responsible for driving. | ||
| You're responsible if you commit violence. | ||
| You're not exonerated from any of those things if you're drunk. | ||
| But somehow, if a woman has sex when she's drunk with a man, there's a man involved. | ||
| We'll try this out on the LAPD. You drink a lot, and let's say I get stopped by the police, and then I say, He gave me drinks. | ||
| He gave me drinks. | ||
| Oh, then they arrest him? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I think that we recognize that I would be the guilty party. | ||
| In this article or this forum that I was reading where they were accusing this guy, his name is Michael Shermer. | ||
| I don't know if you know who he is. | ||
| You know his story? | ||
| He's a famous skeptic. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| Of course I know his story. | ||
| He was the guy who was accused. | ||
| And he was accused of... | ||
| Being a womanizer and a drunk and that he got some girl drunk and had sex and they were calling it rape. | ||
| And one of the things that they were saying during this whole thing was someone had come in and said, well, why is it that when you're drunk You're responsible for all these other things, but you're not responsible for sex. | ||
| And that person was immediately banned from the forum. | ||
| They were immediately kicked out. | ||
| Like, you can't entertain that angle. | ||
| You can't entertain that possibility. | ||
| Well, that's why I would call these people fanatics, because it's not simply that they... | ||
| You know, want to do all they can to promote their side. | ||
| They don't want the other side to get a hearing. | ||
| They do not believe in intellectual pluralism or political pluralism. | ||
| It's my side and only my side and everyone is discredited immediately simply for not agreeing with them. | ||
| And they're being reinforced by these incredibly bizarre men. | ||
| These male feminist men. | ||
| And not all of them. | ||
| I mean, some of them are doing it for all the right reasons. | ||
| Some of them are doing it because they want equality and they think that women should be treated as equals. | ||
| But there's a lot of them are doing it for social brownie points. | ||
| And they're doing it to be considered as like a higher ethical or moral standard to the women that they're pursuing. | ||
| Well, I think a lot of them do it also because they believe it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And maybe they had very feminist mothers, reinforced by teachers, and then if they took gender studies, my goodness, it's all there in the texts. | ||
| And so people, I mean, I forgive students because I know that they have gone through relentless propaganda when it comes to gender because the gender activists have not allowed... | ||
| Dissident voices. | ||
| And that we are here, there are many professors that agree with me, people like Camille Paglia and Wendy Kaminer, many journalists like the great, you know, Kathy Young and on and on. | ||
| But we have been, you know, demonized and our voices are not, you know, we're not invited to the table. | ||
| Well, classically, feminine women are also demonized. | ||
| Women who wear skirts and high heels and just painted nails and makeup and things that people may enjoy that look. | ||
| For some reason, that's a negative thing. | ||
| For some reason, you're... | ||
| Falling into what the patriarchy has set up for you. | ||
| You're fulfilling their self-demeaning stereotypes in some way. | ||
| You can't like it. | ||
| You can't like lipstick. | ||
| You're not allowed to like fake eyelashes or whatever the hell you like wearing. | ||
| Unless you're transsexual. | ||
| If you're transsexual, you're allowed to go full whole hog Betty Davis from the 1950s. | ||
| You can do whatever you want. | ||
| Yeah, there are different schools. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Some of them, they don't go after that, but they want you to know that femininity and masculinity are strictly performances, that none of it has a basis in biology. | ||
| That's where it gets crazy, right? | ||
| And it gets very crazy. | ||
| Social constructs. | ||
| Yes, it's all a social construct. | ||
| Well, it's partly... | ||
| Of course, culture plays a role, but biology does too. | ||
| And there's a kind of nature-nurture divide, and it's not sensible to teach... | ||
| Students both. | ||
| And if you look at the biologists, the physiologists, many of the psychologists, they'll tell you there are very clear male-female differences. | ||
| And not that everyone embodies them, but most of us do. | ||
| And so they're denying what almost everyone can see with their own eyes. | ||
| So that's also people that can really buy into this sort of intense gender activism. | ||
| They have to be able to believe what they're reading in the text and not what they see with their eyes or even in their own hearts. | ||
| So it has the makings of, as I've said, a sort of fanatical movement. | ||
| Well, it's loony. | ||
| It's not just fanatical. | ||
| You're listening to some of the things that people say. | ||
| I watched a video where a woman was talking about gender being a social construct, and she was talking about the differences that are often cited between men and women physically, and they're just because of physical activity, the activities that the men choose versus the activities that the women choose. | ||
| And if the women engaged in the same activities, they would have the same physical abilities as the men. | ||
| I was like, What the fuck are you talking about? | ||
| That's denying testosterone, the role it plays in muscle development, and the difference in bone structure. | ||
| It's denying... | ||
| Science. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, people talk about, oh, on the right, they're anti-science, and there's some of that. | ||
| But on the left, it's more consequential because these people are in the universities. | ||
| Kooks on the right tend not to be on the campuses. | ||
| But these people are teaching in our most elite schools. | ||
| Well, gender is the only area where it doesn't seem like you are allowed to have an objective conversation about the statistics or the facts. | ||
| Like, if you question things or if you have any questions about the facts or the statistics, You become questioned like you're a bad person. | ||
| You're a person with alternative motives. | ||
| You can't just be looking at an objective like, what is the number one? | ||
| Someone had told me one in four women have been raped. | ||
| And I'm like, wow, that doesn't seem right. | ||
| One in four women have met creeps? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| It's probably more like 90%. | ||
| 90% of women have met creeps, right? | ||
| How many have actually been raped? | ||
| Is it one in four? | ||
| Is that real? | ||
| So we started Googling it, and we found all these different numbers, but there's no hard line numbers, and that could be attributed to a bunch of things. | ||
| First of all, the very real fact that Many women that have been involved in a horrible situation like that don't want to report it. | ||
| They don't want to be shamed. | ||
| They would rather pretend it didn't happen and move on with their life. | ||
| They'd rather bury it. | ||
| That is a certain percentage of the population. | ||
| And then how many have actually been raped? | ||
| I mean, how many have falsely accused men of rape when nothing really happened? | ||
| You can't even say that. | ||
| If you say that, if you even admit that that's a reality, you are some sort of an apologist, you're a rape apologist, you're a rape enabler. | ||
| A rape denier. | ||
| Yeah, there's something... | ||
| But these are facts that's happened to friends of mine. | ||
| I've had friends that have absolutely not raped someone and been accused of it and had to go to court and had to deal with a bunch of things and hire lawyers and eventually the charges were dropped but the fact remains that they were accused. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Of course it happens. | ||
| This one in four and one in five, it's been around for years. | ||
| What is the origin of it? | ||
| Oh, it started with research promoted by Ms. Magazine. | ||
| It was one of the original what I call advocacy studies. | ||
| It was someone that did a study not to find the truth But to buttress an ideology about patriarchy. | ||
| In this case, I don't want to keep going after her, but it was a professor at the time. | ||
| Well, I think she's at the University of Arizona. | ||
| And she, if you look at the survey, she asked a series of questions. | ||
| So some of them were good. | ||
| And she didn't ask, were you ever raped? | ||
| If you ask people, you get a very low number. | ||
| So what they've learned to do is ask around and say, have you ever been violently threatened and then someone had sex? | ||
| Well, that's fine. | ||
| But she also said, have you ever had sex when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol? | ||
| And anybody that said yes was counted as a rape victim. | ||
| Now, I can imagine cases where you had sex when you didn't want to because, you know, you passed out. | ||
| No one denies that as rape. | ||
| But this question invited people that... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Regret. | |
| Well, yeah, I did have sex. | ||
| I really wish I hadn't had it. | ||
| And yeah, I was drunk. | ||
| All those people. | ||
| Now, this became the basis. | ||
| This study became the basis for the one in four number. | ||
| Now it's one in five because there have been other studies that sort of copied this methodology. | ||
| The second thing she found, the vast majority of the women did not think it was rape. | ||
| They thought it was miscommunication. | ||
| So they did not agree that she was classifying it as rape and put that number out there. | ||
| And I think a majority dated their alleged rapist again. | ||
| Not what you'd expect from someone who's a victim of a heinous crime. | ||
| You know, crime. | ||
| So they ask vague questions and then they get their numbers. | ||
| And then it gets into the media. | ||
| And the media doesn't realize, I think, that the gender scholars have an agenda and they're not like... | ||
| If you teach in a women's studies, I don't want to say women's studies because there are serious scholars, but if you're in a gender studies department or gender theory, your views are not checked by... | ||
| Objective scholars. | ||
| They're just checked by other people that share your worldview. | ||
| So there hasn't been this quality control. | ||
| Like there would be in the sciences. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So we're getting a lot of just specious statistics that are out there. | ||
| This 1 in 4 is the classic case. | ||
| When the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which sets the gold standard for research on crime, they find on the campus that the number is closer to 1 in 50 or 1 in 53 for sexual assault. | ||
| And they define sexual assault by... | ||
| Is that rape? | ||
| It's both rape and it's some kind of serious physical... | ||
| That's still pretty horrible. | ||
| It's terrifying. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| One in 50 is awful. | ||
| It is. | ||
| But one in 50 versus one in four, it's the difference between war-torn Congo and the United States. | ||
| Right. | ||
| One in four is the Congo, right? | ||
| It's probably more like 90%. | ||
| There are places in time of war where rape is used as a weapon of war, but Swarthmore College, Yale University, Berkeley, they are not the war-torn Congo. | ||
| So, yeah, there is too much. | ||
| I always say there is too much sexual assault on campus, and it is probably part of the combination of the hookup culture and the binge drinking culture. | ||
| It's a big problem. | ||
| But it's not a problem of patriarchy. | ||
| It's probably, you know, just, it needs a different solution. | ||
| But what they do is want to make it seem as though we have these sex criminals, these predators, hunting for young women on the campus. | ||
| And it's probably, you know, an awkward 19-year-old boy who, you know, thought this girl liked him and they got drunk and had sex and then she can say that he was a rapist. | ||
| And he had no intention and no awareness of doing anything wrong. | ||
| And he could be ruined. | ||
| I mean, instantly ruined. | ||
| I hear from some of these young men, and I know of a psychologist. | ||
| Psychologists are beginning to get these young men in their practice because they are devastated. | ||
| You become a non-person, and you are shamed. | ||
| It's one of the worst things you can do to a person. | ||
| If you're a victim of a crime, it's a horrible thing, but people will sympathize with you and your dignity is intact. | ||
| But if you are accused of being like, I mean, it's like being accused of being a child molester or to be called a rapist. | ||
| It's not much better. | ||
| And people revile you. | ||
| And now we're doing this very casually. | ||
| Young men on our campuses can be called a rapist because of a drunken hookup. | ||
| And then he will bear that stigma for life because the Internet never forgets. | ||
| And in some cases, the colleges will put it on his record. | ||
| And when he goes to transfer, I'm just going to get out of here and start over. | ||
| He can't because it's there. | ||
| So we've got to change this. | ||
| This is a terrible miscarriage of justice. | ||
| Now, this person, you don't have to name her, but the woman who created this study. | ||
| Mary Koss. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Actually, she's become more reasonable lately. | |
| It's probably a blowback to people recognizing that her statistics are kind of shitty. | ||
| I think she's shocked by what's happened. | ||
| Well, she became quite famous and quite sought after because of this. | ||
| That's very intoxicating as well. | ||
| Yes, you can. | ||
| Here's the thing to know about academia. | ||
| You can make a career on documenting victimization, especially if you can get high numbers, victimization of women. | ||
| Now, if you come in with low numbers, it's the opposite. | ||
| It can be career diminishing. | ||
| And there are very serious, wonderful criminologists who did studies and came up with relatively low figures, and they become demonized. | ||
| They found themselves not invited, you know, to... | ||
| Apply for jobs or denied tenure. | ||
| There are no motives. | ||
| There's no motive right now to tell the truth about women's victimization. | ||
| There are huge incentives to exaggerate it, and so it stays there unchallenged. | ||
| I think the journalists don't fully understand this. | ||
| They said, but I got this from a scholar at the University of Arizona. | ||
| I got this from a scholar at Cornell. | ||
| What they don't know is this scholar may be an ideologue or had an agenda that got in the way of her or sometimes his objectivity. | ||
| Well, it seems like this is the type of cyclical thing, this... | ||
| Reinforcing ideologies that you're going to teach these children. | ||
| These children will grow up to complete their education and become professors and continue that sort of cycle without ever breaking this pattern. | ||
| And it could be a real problem if the universities continue to teach these ideologies without question, without some sort of a Reality check. | ||
| I would say peer review, but it seems like their peers are just reinforcing ideologists. | ||
| So how does this ever get... | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| Maybe it gets fixed from you. | ||
| Maybe it's a feminist. | ||
| Well, doing those videos, you're so calm and logical, and you're very reasonable, and they have a tremendous amount of views, and I think there's a lot of people that When they get called a rape apologist or a bigot or whatever, when they don't agree with it, they get angry and then they join the other team. | ||
| They're like, well, fuck these feminists. | ||
| They're all crazy bitches. | ||
| I'm on team men. | ||
| Like Alfalfa joined the He-Man Woman Haters Club. | ||
| Remember that, our gang? | ||
| Most people don't. | ||
| I'm old. | ||
| But the reality is... | ||
| Most people, I think most people just want to be around nice people. | ||
| Most people. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Most people, and most people, they don't want to discriminate. | ||
| I think most people don't want to discriminate about when it comes to race or when it comes to gender or when it comes to anything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Most people just want people to rise through their life or get through whatever they're trying to get through by virtue of the quality of their acts, by virtue of their behavior, by virtue of their work. | ||
| Like, you want to treat people the way they deserve to be treated, and we all want to sort of elevate through this existence. | ||
| So this idea that there's these teams, the problem is you get pushed back from one side, and then you just join the other team. | ||
| Well, it is creating blowback, but most people, I don't think, even join another team. | ||
| They just withdraw. | ||
| Not everybody's temperamentally suited to be in this. | ||
| It's combat. | ||
| And believe me, I did not... | ||
| I didn't consciously think, oh, I'm going to confront these people and be a warrior. | ||
| I thought, naively, I'm going to confront them and then maybe I'm a little bit wrong, but they're a little bit wrong and we'll meet in the middle or who knows. | ||
| That didn't happen. | ||
| So that's why I just don't like bullies. | ||
| Gender studies is the result of a massive, endless bullying campaign by those who will not... | ||
| They just accept dissident voices. | ||
| Yeah, it's very strange. | ||
| It's a very strange predicament because I don't see a clear exit strategy. | ||
| I look at this confusion, and one of the things I also started doing after being called a men's rights advocate is to find out, well, what are these fucking crazy bastards into? | ||
| Well, they've got some goddamn good points, too, unfortunately. | ||
| You go to men's rights advocacy websites, and you see these horrible stories of these guys getting Destroyed in divorce court and losing everything they have, being preyed upon by unscrupulous women that go after them and marry them and take all their money and they have no recourse and that they were set up, | ||
| women set up some sort of a, got some restraining order against them by a judge and that sets up the idea that they're some sort of an abuser and without any physical proof they can be accused of these things and then When they go to court, this all comes to light. | ||
| I've seen some crazy shit that I've read online about child custody battles where the men were accused of sexually molesting their children by the woman where there was no evidence whatsoever and the women coached the kids into saying these things. | ||
| Horrific, horrific stuff on both sides. | ||
| And then these men, they all lump into these men's rights groups, these guys that have been destroyed by women, and then just decide that women are assholes, decide that women are the enemy, and that they just want to go to South America and get prostitutes. | ||
| I've literally read these articles where these guys are talking about, like, this is how you do it. | ||
| You go to South America, and you find a girl that she's willing to have sex with you for money, and they're way hotter than American women. | ||
| I'm like, what? | ||
| What the fuck is going on here? | ||
| Well, you know, they need to know a couple of things. | ||
| One is that, believe it or not, most women are still nice and they love men. | ||
| I want to say most women. | ||
| It's a good percentage. | ||
| A good percentage. | ||
| 60%? | ||
| I don't know a percentage, but let me put it this way. | ||
| It's unusual to be that carried away with gender politics. | ||
| Now, there may be more today because it's getting more currency and it's become sort of fashionable, so to be snarky and unpleasant. | ||
| But you have to be a little neurotic, I think, to be that vulnerable to these hate ideologies. | ||
| So it's not the average young woman that would be vulnerable to these ideologies. | ||
| But a lot are. | ||
| You should have to stay away from them. | ||
| But there are many sweet women out there who will not behave that way and are fair-minded. | ||
| The other thing is that I don't call myself a men's rights activist. | ||
| I'm not advocating for men. | ||
| I'm advocating for women. | ||
| Truth. | ||
| It just happens that most of the misinformation, not all of it, but most of it is now targeted against men. | ||
| So I do this weekly video series that, you know, I just try to correct a myth each week and most of them are feminist myths about how bad men are and they're almost always wrong and I correct them. | ||
| So people say, well, you're a men's rights activist. | ||
| No, I'm a human rights activist. | ||
| I'm a truth activist, a common sense activist. | ||
| And if you want to call me a men's rights activist, fine, but that's not actually what I'm doing. | ||
| Well, I have a friend, Cara Santa Maria, who's a brilliant scientist and neurosurgeon, or she was a neuroscientist, rather, and just not a surgeon, just operating on brains. | ||
| But she said, you're a feminist. | ||
| And I'm like, I'm definitely not a feminist. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| I'm a humanist. | ||
| It's a term that people like to use, but I like people. | ||
| I like smart people, whether they're men or women. | ||
| I know, me too. | ||
| I don't want... | ||
| There to be only men in power or only women in power, I think that's stupid. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I like Chinese people. | ||
| I like people from Vietnam. | ||
| I like people from everywhere. | ||
| I like people that are interesting. | ||
| And I just want people to actually be judged or to be considered based on their merits, not instantly judged or demonized because they happen to have a penis or instantly demeaned because they happen to have a vagina. | ||
| I think it's stupid. | ||
| It's stupid. | ||
| It's identity politics, and it's going nowhere. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Except all it does is divide people and make people bitter. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it has to stop. | ||
| Now you say, well, how's it going to stop? | ||
| Face mom. | ||
| Well, I'm trying, but I'm also optimistic that there has to be a limit to irrationality, and eventually it will fall. | ||
| I just wish it would be sooner rather than later. | ||
| Well, I think what we're dealing with today, with our new access to information that we've enjoyed over the last decade or so, I think two decades, but really it's sort of taking hold with social media, where people don't just have access to information, but they also have a voice. | ||
| You're finding echo chambers, like we discussed earlier, where you get these radical groups on both sides. | ||
| There's the red pill men's rights debate people and the people that are on the side of women's rights and then these male feminists. | ||
| And there's a thing called Atheism Plus, which is fucking hilarious. | ||
| I can't figure out atheism plus. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is it? | |
| They can't figure it out. | ||
| It's a religion. | ||
| It's basically a religion. | ||
| It's atheism. | ||
| They don't consider deities, but they want a group of core ethical and moral values. | ||
| So I think if you wanted to boil it down, a lot of people would be atheism plus atheism. | ||
| The idea being that you want to be a good person, and you don't want to sexually discriminate or racially discriminate, and you also don't happen to believe in a magic person that lives in the clouds. | ||
| That seems fairly reasonable. | ||
| Until you listen to these fuckers talk, and they give the most pedantic, boring fucking lectures. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| I sat down. | ||
| I smoked a joint and I watched this one guy's lecture. | ||
| And I'm like, this is like the longest... | ||
| You know how they have those videos they do on dating sites where people... | ||
| Hi, I'm Mike. | ||
| I like to play tennis. | ||
| This is like his version of it. | ||
| Just saying how abhorrent sexual discrimination was or racial discrimination was. | ||
| It's basically like just open... | ||
| It was duh. | ||
| That's what it was. | ||
| It was like duh. | ||
| You shouldn't murder people. | ||
| Duh. | ||
| You shouldn't steal. | ||
| Duh. | ||
| Like what you... | ||
| Who the fuck are you talking to? | ||
| You're preaching to the choir. | ||
| I mean, you were at a fucking Atheism Plus conference, and you're preaching about the idea that you shouldn't sexually or racially discriminate. | ||
| And did the audience react well? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It's fucking boring! | ||
| What he's saying is boring. | ||
| There's no original, unique points. | ||
| It's just reinforcing the idea, which is better than a hate rally. | ||
| It's better than going to see a bunch of skinheads, talk about the white man needs to get back to power. | ||
| It's definitely better than that, but it's still a lot of duh. | ||
| And what's the point of it, really? | ||
| They get together. | ||
| They have these conferences. | ||
| They have atheism conferences. | ||
| The point is these are social gatherings where they all reinforce their ideas. | ||
| And they're all PC? Is that what it is? | ||
| They drink and then they rape each other. | ||
| That's what happens. | ||
| They drink and then they have sex and they're both raping. | ||
| That's what happens. | ||
| It's a lot of what these things are, social hookups. | ||
| These people get together and it becomes a main focus of them. | ||
| They also make a certain amount of money because they charge money for people to come to these gatherings. | ||
| So they come to these gatherings. | ||
| They rent out like a conference hall somewhere and they come and they hand out pamphlets and they sell t-shirts and then they have these little parties and these little events and then they, you know, you have to pay money to get a badge and you go to this fucking thing and these people talk and then they drink. | ||
| It's hilarious. | ||
| Nothing gets done. | ||
| I mean, literally, absolutely nothing gets done. | ||
| But what they're doing is they're sort of reinforcing their ideas. | ||
| They're not negative ideas. | ||
| They're fairly positive ideas. | ||
| It's not bad. | ||
| It's not horrible. | ||
| They're not bad people. | ||
| They're good people. | ||
| When the guy was standing there on the dais and he was explaining all his core values, I'm like, oh, good. | ||
| I agree with you on everything. | ||
| But fuck, man. | ||
| You can't just say that. | ||
| I think you should eat healthy food. | ||
| I think you should get eight hours sleep at night. | ||
| I think if you're driving in your car and an old lady's on the road, do not run her over. | ||
| Yes, don't run the old lady over. | ||
| You know, what the fuck, man? | ||
| Don't shoot puppies, you know? | ||
| Don't fucking drown kittens. | ||
| It's a lot of duh. | ||
| There's a lot of that, I think, in the academy where it will be just bromides and pointless truisms mixed in. | ||
| With harsher things. | ||
| So they'll say, and we all agree, you should be respectful of other people and not demean them with costumes. | ||
| And fine, I don't want to see someone in blackface or humiliating someone with a costume, but then they will, so that sounds fine and we all agree, but then they will go after a museum because they have an exhibit of, you know, kimonos and say that's cultural appropriation. | ||
| This is the new thing. | ||
| I saw that. | ||
| Cultural appropriating costumes. | ||
| So we can't, Well, cultural appropriation, that is what most of the history of culture is. | ||
| Well, it was a kimono night at a museum, right? | ||
| Yes, a beautiful thing they were doing at the Museum of Fine Arts. | ||
| They were bringing in exquisite kimonos, the public was learning to appreciate them, and you could try one on, which I certainly would have wanted to do and have a picture, because they're so lovely. | ||
| And I'm sure the Japanese love this. | ||
| Most people, if other cultures are interested in your art forms, you're proud. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, people with too much time on their hands staged an angry intervention. | ||
| This was a microaggression or a macroaggression. | ||
| And I think the museum had to apologize. | ||
| Yes, they did. | ||
| And they're not going to do it anymore. | ||
| It's so stupid. | ||
| It's like if you go to a Hawaiian hotel, a lot of times they'll give you one of those grass skirts. | ||
| They're pretty cool. | ||
| They don't get mad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, maybe we can't wear leis anymore when you get... | |
| Well, they give them to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They put them on. | |
| They say welcome. | ||
| If you go over the border in California to Tijuana, everyone's selling sombreros. | ||
| They're going to drive them out of business with this. | ||
| Cultural misappropriation. | ||
| This is horrible. | ||
| This is the patriarchy. | ||
| Black lives matter. | ||
| What about brown lives? | ||
| Brown lives matter? | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| The whole thing is ridiculous. | ||
| But I think a lot of it is what we're saying, is that When we have social media and when you see these people that are saying all these things on social media that a lot of people agree with, a lot of really relevant points when it comes to racism or sexism or all these things, why are they saying these things? | ||
| Are they saying these things because these things are actually important to them or are they saying these things because they know people are going to read them and they're going to like them because of what they said? | ||
| It's almost like the whole world is becoming slowly but surely a giant reality show. | ||
| Because if you watch reality television, when those people behave on those shows, when those cameras are on them, they're very aware those cameras are on them. | ||
| So they say crazy shit, they do crazy things, like... | ||
| I have a friend who has a friend who's one of those housewives, the real housewives, and it's a sad story. | ||
| The real story is sad. | ||
| She's just trying to get attention, and she wants to write books and try to make money, and she's a single mom. | ||
| There's a lot of sadness behind it, the reality. | ||
| But when you see her on the show, you see this big, boisterous, you see a lot of acting out, a lot of craziness, and you would go, oh, well, that girl is a this. | ||
| But in reality... | ||
| She's not. | ||
| She's not a bad person. | ||
| But she's being this bad person because she knows it's going to get a reaction. | ||
| It's not a good reaction. | ||
| It's not a very well calculated one. | ||
| But I think that's a lot of what you get from these so-called social justice warriors on Twitter, these hashtag activists. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What you're getting from a lot of people is they're in a fucking giant reality show. | ||
| They're in a giant reality show and their method of communication is through Twitter or through Facebook posts or through YouTube videos or whatever the fuck it is. | ||
| But when they're saying these things, they're not just communicating. | ||
| They're communicating to try to get likes. | ||
| They want to get upvotes. | ||
| They want people to favorite their tweets. | ||
| It's calculated. | ||
| It's fake. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's a lot of bullshit to it. | ||
| And I think you get a version of that in college campuses because to become like a really radical advocate and a radical activist and really become a part of this or to even – I'm going to have a hunger strike. | ||
| Go for it, Johnny! | ||
| Yeah, a hunger strike over Halloween costumes. | ||
| Women are only making 75 cents on the dollar. | ||
| I'm going to starve myself. | ||
| Fuck yeah! | ||
| Let's fight back against white people. | ||
| Whatever you're doing. | ||
| See, this is the thing. | ||
| When they say women are only making 75 cents on the dollar, I just want to politely raise my hand and say that's not quite accurate. | ||
| It's accurate in the sense there is a wage gap, but it can be explained innocently. | ||
| Women major in different topics in college. | ||
| They work fewer hours per week and the men take the more dangerous jobs with impossible hours. | ||
| It's simply a difference. | ||
| When you do all those adjustments, the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing. | ||
| So they're enraged. | ||
| They're virtue signaling one another. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| That's true? | ||
| So I thought though in specific occupations that women would make less money than men. | ||
| Let's look at the occupations. | ||
| For example, you will see doctors, and male doctors may considerably more. | ||
| But then you look at the subspecialties. | ||
| Far more men go into the higher paying specialties, like cardiology, anesthesiology. | ||
| The lower paying fields are pediatrics and family medicine. | ||
| Women are more likely to work part-time. | ||
| They are more likely to take a few years out of the workplace or cut back, way back. | ||
| These are differences that have to be calculated and have to be factored into this calculation. | ||
| And the gender activists for years have just put out this statistic. | ||
| Women are being cheated out of almost a quarter of their salary by this system rigged against them. | ||
| When in fact, there are innocent explanations. | ||
| Look at what men and women major in in college. | ||
| It's amazing after all these years of feminism. | ||
| You will not make very much money if you want to go into early childhood education. | ||
| You will have a rewarding job if you love that, and many people do love it and do very well personally, but you will not make money. | ||
| I lectured at Oberlin College, and they were hissing and booing and carrying on. | ||
| They went crazy on you, didn't they? | ||
| They went crazy, yes. | ||
| They had a safe room, and I triggered them. | ||
| For you! | ||
| I know. | ||
| In the first two rows, there were young women with duct tape on their mouths. | ||
| What? | ||
| Duct tape. | ||
| Red duct tape. | ||
| I didn't know what to say. | ||
| They duct taped their mouth? | ||
| And they stayed there for the whole lecture. | ||
| I mean, how could you even breathe? | ||
| In the first row? | ||
| Two rows. | ||
| That's kind of hot. | ||
| Why did they do that? | ||
| I still don't know. | ||
| I guess I could only think of... | ||
| There was a novel... | ||
| I don't know what it was. | ||
| I still don't know. | ||
| I didn't ask. | ||
| You didn't ask? | ||
| I never saw them. | ||
| I mean, they were... | ||
| Oh, then people rushed out. | ||
| I triggered people and they went to the safe room. | ||
| I triggered about 30 people and a dog. | ||
| There was a therapy dog. | ||
|
unidentified
|
LAUGHTER And they went to this safe room. | |
| I feel bad about the dog. | ||
| I do. | ||
| But this was at Oberlin College. | ||
| And what was interesting is they had their safe room, but the college administration I was looking at their Facebook postings and their antics and got worried about my safety. | ||
| I had to have armed guards. | ||
| I had two armed policewomen escort me around. | ||
| I love it how you police women, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like how they went with policewomen. | ||
| Why did they go with policewomen? | ||
| Well, in Oberlin, they had to be... | ||
| They had to be perfectly correct. | ||
| If you get more correct than Oberlin College, I mean, you will vaporize. | ||
| I don't know what is the next step. | ||
| What is the next step? | ||
| I grew up in California. | ||
| I was there for my sister's generation, a little older, that was the free speech movement in Berkeley. | ||
| But it was all about liberation. | ||
| Leave us alone. | ||
| We did not want authority figures or deans or assistant librarians on committees making rules. | ||
| We did not want it. | ||
| We rebelled. | ||
| And there was this period when I was in college where we were just free. | ||
| I don't think I ever met a dean, except it was something academic, but certainly not in my personal life. | ||
| And we drove out the dorm advisors. | ||
| There was no dorm advisor. | ||
| We were there. | ||
| Well, maybe they were there. | ||
| We never saw them. | ||
| They had no power. | ||
| And now they want them there. | ||
| And again, it's this going back. | ||
| But anyway, I just want to finish about Oberlin. | ||
| I told the Oberlin students, they were saying, but women are being cheated out of their salary. | ||
| And I explained. | ||
| And I said, right now, today, you can take a step to closing the wage gap. | ||
| Don't major in feminist dance therapy. | ||
| Major in electrical engineering. | ||
| But feminine dance therapy is so necessary for our culture. | ||
| Well, they think it's an injustice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You should be, why can't I be a dance therapist? | |
| And, you know, why shouldn't I be rewarded for that? | ||
| And, you know, people aren't paid for what their jobs are worth. | ||
| Well, that's probably true. | ||
| And I mean, I agreed with them that I don't feel I'm paid. | ||
| As a philosophy PhD, we are not well paid compared to other... | ||
| You know, people with PhDs in computer science or electrical engineering or petroleum engineering, there's where the money is. | ||
| And I said, I'm considered unfair as a philosopher because we should be valued. | ||
| But, you know... | ||
| You realize there is something called the market. | ||
| There are forces that determine what people will pay. | ||
| That's why socialism is so important in summers. | ||
| In socialism, the feminist dance therapist would get their due. | ||
| They get paid as much as the electrical engineer. | ||
| How much would you get? | ||
| How much do you think it's worth for feminist dance therapy? | ||
| Is that a real thing? | ||
| Did you make something up? | ||
| I'm being fanciful, but there are crazy majors. | ||
| And they waste their time. | ||
| And I was the one speaking at Bryn Mawr. | ||
| Well, I was actually at Haverford and the Bryn Mawr girls came. | ||
| It's still a women's college. | ||
| And first of all, they were knitting. | ||
| The whole time I was talking, they were knitting. | ||
| And I didn't know what that meant. | ||
| And there turned to be a number of Wiccans in the audience. | ||
| But they weren't on my side. | ||
| They weren't against me. | ||
| They weren't mad at me. | ||
| So I didn't want any hex, any spells cast. | ||
| I don't think they're really witches. | ||
| Wiccans? | ||
| Yeah, I don't think they're witches. | ||
| I think they are. | ||
| I think Wiccan is like, it's almost like a pagan worshipping the earth sort of a thing. | ||
| Well, they defend witches. | ||
| They do? | ||
| Yeah, because I tweeted something about the witch hunt on the campus and a Wiccan was angry about it. | ||
| Here's a Wiccan is a member of the pagan revivalist religion known as Wicca. | ||
| It can be a male or female practitioner or lay follower, either solitary or members of a coven. | ||
| No word witch. | ||
| No warlocks. | ||
| I'm sure there's more. | ||
| Followers of neo-pagan religion, Wiccans are polytheistic nature worshippers. | ||
| They worship a moon goddess and a horned god. | ||
| They observe eight Sabbaths. | ||
| Blah, blah, blah. | ||
| They are based off seasonal changes and harvests, which also represent changes in their god and goddess. | ||
| Wiccans are not evil and generally do not do bad magic. | ||
| So I guess it's implying they do do magic. | ||
| They follow rule of three, the belief that whatever you do comes back to you three times as bad or good, depending on what it was you did. | ||
| In some respects, Wiccans, whatever. | ||
| Well, they sound fine. | ||
| These young women were fine. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| But one of them, not one of them, but a young woman in the audience said, are you telling me? | ||
| I am a gender studies major at Bryn Mawr. | ||
| Are you telling me I've wasted four years? | ||
| And I didn't know what to say, but then I just said, yes. | ||
| Oh! | ||
| And the audience sort of laughed, but I'm just telling anyone who's even thinking of wasting four years studying gender. | ||
| Gender theory, which has no basis in reality or in serious scholarship. | ||
| I'm sure there's some exceptions, but those exceptions don't come close to the rule, which is that it's a waste of time. | ||
| I would have told the young lady that anything that you do where you're thinking is not a waste of time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But if you're trying to make a lot of money, gender studies is not necessarily where it's at, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, this is the thing. | ||
| If you ask men and women, what do you want? | ||
| And we have great data on this from vocational counselors. | ||
| You remember in junior high, there were vocation counselors that would tell you what you should be based on your abilities and interests. | ||
| We've been giving these tests for years, and men and women answered somewhat differently. | ||
| And women care more about fulfillment. | ||
| They care more about jobs where they can be... | ||
| Women are very attracted to jobs that involve caring and nurturing. | ||
| And men, considerably less. | ||
| So you do find far more men in sort of people-free zones or jobs where they ask people, would you rather spend a week taking apart a machine and putting it back together, or would you rather spend a week sitting with a group of people talking about their problems? | ||
| And far more men say they'd want to be with the machine and far more women say talk about the problem. | ||
| So you have to factor those in. | ||
| Now, it just turns out that overall, if you are working with, say, computers and you're an engineer, you're at that high level with the education, you get paid well. | ||
| People need those skills. | ||
| If you have the skills of a nurturer, you do need the education in the background, but there are a lot of people that want to do them, and there just isn't, where is the money? | ||
| Who's going to pay you that kind of money? | ||
| So they do not earn as much, and they resent that. | ||
| But, as you say, you would tell the young woman, I would tell them, you know, you're not going to make as much. | ||
| But she probably would say, but it interests me. | ||
| I mean, someone could have told me, don't major in philosophy, major in Or metallurgy or petroleum engineering, I wouldn't even want to see the textbook for that. | ||
| I loved my philosophy books. | ||
| And if they told me you won't earn as much, it didn't. | ||
| If it does matter to you, then change your major if you're going into one of these fields. | ||
| Well, I think what you're saying, it highlights a real problem that human beings have in choosing an occupation and choosing what path they want to go to in their life. | ||
| And I think oftentimes people, they go the way they think is going to earn them the most money instead of going the way that's going to make them fulfilled and happy. | ||
| And there's a lot of things that I could do that I should maybe have done when I was younger if I wanted to make money, just make money. | ||
| And there's a lot of people my age that are way more successful than me and make way more money than me. | ||
| I don't know if they're happier than me, though. | ||
| And I think what I figured out how to do somewhere along the line through trial and error is do things I actually enjoy. | ||
| And somehow or another, that's lost in a lot of people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And people say, oh, well, you got lucky and you can do that and this and that. | |
| It's not available to everybody. | ||
| I don't know that that's true. | ||
| I don't know that it's true. | ||
| And I don't know that this is the only thing that what I wound up doing is the only thing that I actually love. | ||
| I love a lot of things. | ||
| I love writing. | ||
| I love art. | ||
| There's a lot of things that I love that I probably could have been equally happy pursuing. | ||
| I don't necessarily think that when you look at life, you should look at it in terms of what is the best way to make the most amount of money. | ||
| So when we're talking about things like the wage gap, what about the happiness gap? | ||
| Because men are much more likely to commit suicide. | ||
| That's one thing. | ||
| Men, I think a A lot of men suffer from depression, as I'm sure a lot of women do as well, but I don't necessarily think we should look at it in terms of what's going to earn you the most money, and is that what you're preparing for in school? | ||
| But every time someone uses that wage gap statistic, that's how they're judging society, and they're saying women are cheated. | ||
| No, what you want to know is what they should ask is how much do you like your job, how fulfilled you are, and then look at the sex difference. | ||
| And see what it turns out. | ||
| Maybe there is a happiness gap. | ||
| There certainly is a fatality gap, which is that men are vastly more likely to die on the job because men occupy the gritty, dangerous jobs, you know, working as loggers and roofers and, you know, outside and, you know, on, you know, fishing and fisheries and things. | ||
| The dirty, gritty jobs are done by men. | ||
| It's like there's an invisible army of men I'm doing all of this work. | ||
| There's a big construction site near where I live in Washington, D.C., and they're building a big complex. | ||
| I have seen dozens of men out there, not a single woman, every day for a year. | ||
| It could be cold. | ||
| It could be really hot. | ||
| They get there early. | ||
| They stay. | ||
| It's just hard, back-breaking work. | ||
| About the unpleasantness gap or the danger gap. | ||
| And all that has to be factored in. | ||
| When it is, what you find is that in the United States, for the most part, people are doing what they want. | ||
| Well, are there jobs, though, that are closed off to women that are very difficult for women to enter into? | ||
| I'm sure that there are... | ||
| The old boy network, the glass ceiling, those are the terms. | ||
| There are, but here's the thing about that. | ||
| People say, well, there aren't as many female physicists. | ||
| If you look in the sciences, women are flourishing in... | ||
| It feels like biology, that we've all but taken over veterinary medicine. | ||
| These used to be male-dominated. | ||
| But once the gates were open and we could sort of do what we wanted, there weren't these arbitrary barriers. | ||
| Women just moved in into areas that had been once just more or less restricted to males. | ||
| They did not do that with engineering. | ||
| They didn't do it with computer science. | ||
| And what I need to know is, well, are the computer scientists and the engineers, are they really sexist in the way that, like, lawyers? | ||
| Men used to be all the lawyers. | ||
| Lawyers aren't known to be particularly sensitive. | ||
| Were they so much more receptive to women? | ||
| Because women are approaching parity with men now in law school, for sure. | ||
| And so you have to look at where men and women are in our society, as a free society and an educated society. | ||
| I credit it to personal aspiration. | ||
| And I think in the road to happiness, men and women take somewhat different paths. | ||
| College seems like such a mad dash, too. | ||
| A mad dash to figure out your path is four years. | ||
| And then graduate school. | ||
| But the four years of trying to figure it out, like figure out what your occupation is going to be, where you're going to go and what you're going to do. | ||
| And then you look at all these supposed barriers and boundaries that are in front of you that are going to prevent you from doing what you want to do or getting in the way of you being justly rewarded for what you're going to do. | ||
| That's why I get mad at some of my feminist colleagues for constantly telling young women, oh, tech is rigged against you. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| The guys in tech, for the most part, there are exceptions, but for the most part are welcoming, and many of them want to have more women because it looks bad not to have them, so they're doing what they can. | ||
| But we're telling young women, oh, you're not welcome in tech. | ||
| Well, there was a time women weren't welcome in law or medicine or philosophy, and things changed. | ||
| And I suspect by now that the reason you don't find a high percentage of women in tech is because women just aren't as interested in tech as they are in other things. | ||
| Well, and be careful what you wish for, because I have a friend who's an executive at Google and she makes a shit ton of money, but she works ungodly hours. | ||
| I mean, it is essentially her life. | ||
| She is glued to her phone when she's not at work. | ||
| When she's at work, she's there all day long, 14, 15-plus hours a day. | ||
| It's brutal. | ||
| It's back-breaking. | ||
| It's not a career. | ||
| It's your life. | ||
| You're giving a... | ||
| What you have afterwards, I don't care if you make $5 million a year or whatever the fuck you make, your life is non-existent. | ||
| I mean, what are you going to do? | ||
| Are you going to fill it up? | ||
| Are you going to buy a new Tesla? | ||
| Are you going to feel great staring at your TV for the two hours that you're awake before you pass out and you have to go to work again? | ||
| You're never home. | ||
| I'm sure that for those who do it, they're probably having a great ride. | ||
| Here's what we do know, and this has been shown over and over again by researchers, including researchers at the Pew Research Center. | ||
| Men and women, if you ask, as the Pew has done, you ask mothers, like, what is your ideal life? | ||
| Mothers of young children. | ||
| A large majority of... | ||
| Well, actually, I'll first start with women, because this was a researcher at the London School of Economics. | ||
| She studied women in Western Europe. | ||
| What do women want? | ||
| She found out about 20% want to be full-time careers, like your friend at Google. | ||
| They are out there. | ||
| They want the money. | ||
| They want the power. | ||
| They want it all. | ||
| 20%. | ||
| About 20% want to be stay-at-home mothers. | ||
| They want to have a bunch of kids stay home, be a housewife. | ||
| And they will not work unless they're four. | ||
| 60% are, she calls, adaptives. | ||
| They're sort of in the middle. | ||
| They want to work part-time when they have little kids. | ||
| They want to go in and out. | ||
| So I think that right now we have a women's movement that works very hard for that 20% for their life preferences. | ||
| And the majority of women are left out. | ||
| The majority of women don't want that. | ||
| What your friend has, that's good, but a lot of women will not want that. | ||
| And there is just about as many women that would want quite the opposite. | ||
| So what I want is a feminism that accommodates preference. | ||
| And what do people want? | ||
| If I found out that all these women wanted to work full-time and the men wanted to stay home with the kids, fine. | ||
| But what you find is that that works for a few people, but it's not something most people seem to want. | ||
| And it's regardless of gender, really. | ||
| I mean, don't we want that across the board? | ||
| I mean, there's a wide variety of human beings on this planet. | ||
| Yes, for men, too. | ||
| I call myself a feminist, but it used to mean... | ||
| That you believed in equality of the sexes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so I try to hang on to that. | ||
| It's classical meaning. | ||
| But now it's come to mean, as I said, female chauvinism. | ||
| You only care about women. | ||
| And I do not want that kind of feminism. | ||
| One of the things that I found that's hilarious, it keeps getting repeated over and over again in feminist blogs and websites, is they won't address men's issues until all women's issues are... | ||
| They believe that Feminism addresses everything. | ||
| There's no need for men's rights advocacy because feminism addresses everything. | ||
| And once women are equal and treated equally and supported equally, you won't have any problems with men. | ||
| Oh, I don't understand the rational basis for that. | ||
| We can't do some good in many, many places at once? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course you can. | |
| Well, you can't even acknowledge that there's issues, because until the women's issues, which are overwhelming, until they're addressed... | ||
| If there's a person out there that thinks that way, that is a sign that you are fanatical. | ||
| Well, they certainly are, but it's also a bit of trolling because you're trolling for support from the people that read it and go, yeah! | ||
| And you're also trolling for an overreaction from the men, which will go, see, these men are assholes and they hate women. | ||
| I read this one woman's blog and she saved up all of her mean tweets that she got from all these anonymous retards out there. | ||
| And she said, what do these men have in common? | ||
| These are all men who hate women. | ||
| No, these are all men who tweeted you and you responded to them. | ||
| Like, they're trolling you. | ||
| They're saying mean shit. | ||
| You're a public figure. | ||
| You write a public blog. | ||
| You put your public Twitter out there. | ||
| You throw that net in the ocean. | ||
| Every day, you're going to catch a certain amount of different species. | ||
| You're going to catch tuna, you catch a marlin or two, and you're going to catch a few retards. | ||
| You're going to catch some really dumb people, and those really dumb people are going to tweet you, and you're going to copy those down every day and accumulate them. | ||
| Well, how many really smart people read what you had to say, disagreed, agreed, whatever, and didn't tweet you? | ||
| What you're getting is a bias sampling. | ||
| And by saving that bias sampling and putting up there, it's not proof that somehow or another you're being oppressed. | ||
| It's proof that you're crazy and you're paying attention to these dummies. | ||
| You're tapping into a well of human beings. | ||
| If you have something that reaches a million people... | ||
| If you have a blog or a YouTube video and you read the comments on them, you're reaching a phenomenal amount of human beings. | ||
| And you're always going to have a certain percentage of human beings who are unbalanced or they're fucked up in the head in some way or they're really dumb. | ||
| And those people, they're going to be more likely to comment you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So if you have a million people that read, 1% is a lot of people. | ||
| That's a lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| If you have a hundred, one person out of a hundred is going to be dumb. | ||
| You have a thousand, you get to a hundred thousand, you get to a million. | ||
| That's a giant number of people that you're probably catching in your net that are really stupid. | ||
| And that's a part of this life we live. | ||
| It's a part of this new era of social media, this new era of this open access to everyone and everything. | ||
| And I think it's beautiful in a lot of ways. | ||
| I think it's exposing all the holes and flaws in our culture. | ||
| It's exposing how there's marginalized and unrepresented people that are just sort of, they feel disenfranchised. | ||
| They feel left out. | ||
| And they feel like the only way they can get attention is to scream or yell or to say misogynist things or hateful things. | ||
| They're just trying to get attention. | ||
| At the end of the day, that's a lot of what they're trying to do. | ||
| But I'll also say the things that I write about, because I do think I am just speaking common sense about gender, that I have a lot of followers on Twitter and people that I encounter from the factual feminist who are just happy they were able to find someone. | ||
| And it's sort of absurd that you can't find a professor. | ||
| I mean, I left the university to go to a think tank. | ||
| I could still be there teaching, but it was lonely. | ||
| I didn't really have that many... | ||
| I had colleagues who would agree with me, and I had some that were very annoyed with me, so it wasn't a comfortable place. | ||
| So there's, for a dissident feminist or just, I think, as I said, the voice of moderation, they will not hear that if they're on campus, and now you don't hear it in the media. | ||
| So social media is a place where you can tell the truth and people can be exposed to ideas that have been edited out of the curriculum. | ||
| Well, you're an author, and you've written books, and you've written papers, and people have read those, but they're not going to have near the immediacy that something like a YouTube video has. | ||
| So what's fantastic about what you're doing... | ||
| I've never had anything like these videos. | ||
| They've had over 4 million views, I think, if you add them all up, and some more than others. | ||
| But we have a good one coming out tonight on the myth of male power. | ||
| I think you might like it. | ||
| So men are in power? | ||
| Well, this whole thing, men are supposed to, well, it's not the myth of male power. | ||
| It's about male privilege. | ||
| They tell men, check your privilege. | ||
| And so I look at men's, how privileged are men in our society? | ||
| Now, in some ways they are. | ||
| Just to be a man does afford you certain benefits, but so does being a woman. | ||
| Like, big time, we're better educated. | ||
| We live longer. | ||
| Women are better educated? | ||
| How so? | ||
| Oh, the majority of degrees go to women. | ||
| Women now earn 57% of bachelors, approaching 60% of masters, and 52% of PhDs. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It used to be the reverse, that you had more men getting the degrees and women were the have-nots. | ||
| When was the shift? | ||
| Well, it started to shift actually in the 80s, but in the 90s, it was an upward trajectory for women. | ||
| And here's where it really counts. | ||
| Among working-class kids, the girls are better educated than the boys. | ||
| If you look at different ethnic groups, African Americans, Latinos, working-class white kids... | ||
| The girls are doing better. | ||
| The boys are in big trouble educationally. | ||
| And it's creeping into the middle class. | ||
| The girls are way ahead. | ||
| They're winning the prizes. | ||
| There's a gap in education and boys are on the wrong side. | ||
| Do you attribute that to the women's rights movement and the gains that were made in awareness like during the 70s and the 80s? | ||
| I attribute it to a number of things. | ||
| First of all, girls have always liked school better and teachers have liked girls. | ||
| Girls have better behaved on average. | ||
| So it was always a trick to interest a boy, keep his attention. | ||
| But teachers used to make a big effort. | ||
| They don't anymore. | ||
| If they go to a school of education, they may be reading these fashionable texts about how women are the silenced, underprivileged, and so they think that they have to, you know, focus on the girls, and the boys, the typical behavior of little boys has been redefined as pathology. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| So you'll find little boys being, you know, suspended for playing cops and robbers or wanting to play a raucous game in the playground, dodgeball or tag. | ||
| Now, girls like to play, too, outdoors and have recess, but typically they will do a little bit of that. | ||
| They will also do that, a lot of theatrical imaginative games, playing house, playing school, or Sharing confidences with your best friend. | ||
| You know, girls do that. | ||
| Boys hardly ever do that. | ||
| They want to go out there in this roughhousing, or it's called rough and tumble play. | ||
| Schools are making rules against it. | ||
| They don't understand that it's very different from aggression. | ||
| When boys are being mean and aggressive, violent, let's say, there are tears, there's anger, there's, you know, it's not a happy sight. | ||
| When boys are rough and tumbling, There's joy. | ||
| They're forging bonds. | ||
| They're learning limits. | ||
| It's a critical part of their socialization. | ||
| And we are a society that has lost touch with that. | ||
| And we are defining it as pathology. | ||
| And it happens as early as preschool. | ||
| And parents should know that when your little boy gets to, you know, the kindergarten class, it is geared towards the girls. | ||
| What do you think is the cause of this lack of understanding between the difference between the way boys play and girls play? | ||
| Because I have all daughters, but I have a buddy that has all sons. | ||
| And when I'm around his house and I see his kids, this fucking house is chaos. | ||
| Everything's broken. | ||
| Broken. | ||
| He's not an aggressive guy at all. | ||
| He's a professor, actually, at Stanford. | ||
| And he's super mellow. | ||
| And he barely exercises. | ||
| He rides his bike. | ||
| He's not aggressive. | ||
| He doesn't watch any sports. | ||
| And his kids are fucking maniacs. | ||
| They run around. | ||
| They throw jumping sidekicks against the couch. | ||
| And they're just fucking crazy. | ||
| And my little girls come over his house and they're like, Jesus Christ. | ||
| What is going on with these apes? | ||
| Well, I have two sons, and for years, anybody would come. | ||
| The main thing they'd want to do is get a football and go outside and throw it around. | ||
| I just don't recall wanting to do that at someone's house. | ||
| I mean, we might do that, but we'd probably go into her room and be talking and listening to music or something. | ||
| And the other thing I learned, too, about boys with video games, My parents were very disapproving. | ||
| Teachers don't like them. | ||
| But I always remember, I'd go and see my son downstairs playing these games. | ||
| And I was writing my book, The War Against Boys, and people were worried about the games. | ||
| And I looked at the boys, and some of the games were wild and violent, and I didn't like what I saw, but they were cheering each other on. | ||
| They were teasing each other the way boys do. | ||
| I mean, men show their love by insults and razzing each other. | ||
| It was camaraderie. | ||
| It was just bonding. | ||
| It was a happy group engagement. | ||
| And it would have been terrible to say, you stop playing these games and this is bad. | ||
| It wasn't bad behavior. | ||
| But people don't understand it. | ||
| They hear boys putting each other down and you have to listen because when men put each other down, including men and boys, it's often the way they show friendship. | ||
| You're telling me I'm a comedian. | ||
| That's all we ever do. | ||
| It's all you do. | ||
| If I ever based my own self-esteem on how my friends have talked to me, I'd be fucked. | ||
| No, my two sons, all they do, they get together and it's immediately... | ||
| But it does make men funny because they learn it starting in first grade because this is the way boys are with each other. | ||
| But we have psychologists who say, oh no, it's a culture of cruelty. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they think it's bullying. | ||
| You've got to know the difference between affectionate, you know, kind of joshing and teasing and... | ||
| Violent bullying. | ||
| It's something. | ||
| And we, again, we're not making good distinctions. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think there's also, there's something to be gained from that type of insulting behavior with boys and even teasing each other back and forth as long as it's good natured. | ||
| Because even though it does kind of sting when someone mocks you and makes fun of you, it also motivates you to do better at whatever they were mocking you at. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it strengthens you. | ||
| And men are a little more stoical. | ||
| And I read this great study by these psychologists. | ||
| We always hear, well, men have to talk more about their feelings. | ||
| Men have to be... | ||
| And they interviewed hundreds of kids, adolescents, and they asked the boys... | ||
| And the girls, how does it feel to talk about your problems? | ||
| And for most of the girls, it made them feel better just talking about the problems. | ||
| The boys said, it didn't make them feel better, and they said, and it was weird. | ||
| And I thought, oh, the psychologists are going to say the boys have to learn to do it, but they didn't. | ||
| What they said was, hmm, maybe it's adaptive for young men, you know, because they don't ruminate so much, and there is a lot of depression in adolescent girls, and There may be two interiorized. | ||
| They're ruminating. | ||
| They're going over and over. | ||
| And these psychologists said that they thought it was probably maybe the girls should see what, look what the boys are doing. | ||
| That, you know, it's not necessarily the boys have to be like the girls. | ||
| And then they said something very interesting. | ||
| If a boy does have a problem, he's got to talk about it. | ||
| Don't say, oh, well, let's sit down and talk, sweetie. | ||
| You know, tell me your feelings. | ||
| He is going to, you know, bolt. | ||
| You have to say, you have to engage his problem solver, you know, and you have to say, we've got to do this, we've got to conquer it, and turn it into a challenge. | ||
| And then when I read that, I thought, my God, there's probably a whole field of male psychology that's been ignored. | ||
| It's almost as if modern psychology and clinical counseling has been based on women and their needs and what works for them. | ||
| But what about what works for guys? | ||
| Fortunately, the Australians are actually working on this. | ||
| Australians? | ||
| Yeah, they're working on male psychology and male, you know, counseling. | ||
| Well, school is a very strange place for everybody, right? | ||
| I mean, you're forced to sit in a class and listen to a course, and the teacher's teaching you the facts and statistics, and it might not be anything you're even remotely interested in. | ||
| And when you're seven years old or eight years old, and you're a little kid, and you want to play, you're filled with energy, you want to bounce off the wall, it's strange to have to sit in some class and listen to someone talk to you about arithmetic, or listen to you talk about Listen to someone talk to you about grammar or reading. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| It's hard for kids to sit and pay attention. | ||
| And it's hard, I think, if you are a boy and you have all this extra energy and you're told there's something wrong with you because of it. | ||
| I have my old next-door neighbor. | ||
| They moved out, but they had their kid on Ritalin. | ||
| And I was around this kid all the time. | ||
| He wasn't fucked up. | ||
| He just had a lot of energy and he was kind of being ignored by both parents, worked all the time, and he was bouncing off the walls. | ||
| And he was just not paying attention in school and acting out and wasn't very disciplined like a lot of young boys are. | ||
| So they just medicated this kid. | ||
| Oh, this breaks my heart. | ||
| And it's so sad because a good teacher who was in tune with boys... | ||
| We'll find a way to capture his imagination. | ||
| But right now, for example, most of the reading assignments are fiction. | ||
| And this wonderful guy who goes around teaching how to engage boys, he said, it's almost as if teachers only like kind of the confessional poet. | ||
| You ask a 12-year-old boy to be a confessional poet, he's not going to do it. | ||
| And he'll act out and he won't do the assignment. | ||
| But let him write what he wants. | ||
| What happens though is little boys, five or six years old, they'll be asked to write something and they want to write about something like, you know, I don't know, a monster destroying a city or about their skateboard or their video games and the teachers don't like it. | ||
| They get mad. | ||
| They get mad. | ||
| And fortunately there are some that are beginning to notice because now people are getting worried about what's happening to boys' education because it has all sorts of ramifications for the economy and You have to worry about having a large cohort of boys disengaged from education because they're not going to have a future in an information economy. | ||
| We've got to solve the problem. | ||
| So there are teachers thinking about it, but one thing they notice is you take a little boy, And girls that are playing. | ||
| And play is the basis for learning. | ||
| I mean, that's how we learn as animals. | ||
| We learn from play. | ||
| But boys are disapproved of. | ||
| So they want to play superhero, which every, not every, but most four- or five-year-old boys, that's what they want, and vanquish the bad guys. | ||
| And there's a lot of, you know, sound effects and what seems to be violence. | ||
| It's actually something very different going on in his imagination. | ||
| But we're policing the imagination of little boys and calling them pathological. | ||
| I just never forgot the story. | ||
| I read about a little boy named Justin in California, and he was well-behaved. | ||
| He loved sword fights and pirates. | ||
| The teacher called his parents. | ||
| She was very worried about Justin. | ||
| He'd written a story and illustrated it with a scene with pirates having a sword fight. | ||
| And there was chopped heads and all sorts of things, wild. | ||
| And the parents came in and said, yeah, what did he do? | ||
| They were shocked because he was never in trouble. | ||
| She said, well, look at this drawing. | ||
| As if Justin was a proto-sociopath. | ||
| And his father said, yeah, well, he likes pirates. | ||
| You know, it makes me read him stories. | ||
| The teacher was very worried about his values. | ||
| Well, the father said, I'm very worried about my son's fate in a classroom with a teacher that has no sympathy for his imagination. | ||
| What that father said about Justin, that pretty much describes the predicament of a majority of boys in our schools right now. | ||
| The teachers don't have sympathy. | ||
| They haven't been taught. | ||
| Now, most teachers are just, they'll adjust and they like boys. | ||
| They'll do their best. | ||
| But that is despite what they learned in a school of education. | ||
| Does this coincide with larger classrooms? | ||
| Because if you have 40 kids in a class and one of them is a rambunctious boy, you want to silence that kid because he's disrupting your educating the other 39 kids. | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
| In schools, the majority of teachers, it's a feminine profession, and the classrooms have been feminized. | ||
| The readings, the... | ||
| I mean, there are books that are irresistible to a typical little boy, but we don't assign them. | ||
| The British got so worried about the reading gap, because girls are way ahead in reading, they now have a list of books that teachers are aware of, books that a kid can't, a little boy can't resist. | ||
| We don't have that. | ||
| We would immediately have dozens of feminist groups. | ||
| There would be hearings on Capitol Hill. | ||
| What are the books or what are the subjects? | ||
| Well, this is just a few that I remember. | ||
| One is that a lot of little boys like nonfiction. | ||
| If you give them the Guinness Book of Records, he could be lost for days. | ||
| They like things like that. | ||
| Arcane information. | ||
| Give them a choice. | ||
| And yeah, sometimes stories about a monster devouring a city. | ||
| There are lots of books. | ||
| There's actually a website called Guys Can Read. | ||
| And they have books, the best of books for little boys. | ||
| With girls, there are so many books written for them. | ||
| They're going to find them. | ||
| Their teachers are going to assign them. | ||
| You can't assume that with your son. | ||
| I sympathize for teachers, though, in a lot of ways, because if they are, especially a lot of teachers don't have children, and if they don't have children of their own, and they're teaching a group of boys, and there's 40 kids there, and one of them is a really rambunctious boy who's A little maniac and he's running around being crazy. | ||
| I could see how you would want this little kid to calm down and be silenced. | ||
| I totally agree with you, but what if it turns out That there are just ways to do this. | ||
| What if you had a lot of assignments where the kids have to stand up? | ||
| What if instead of in desks, they have to be sitting up? | ||
| Boys, if you use humor, boys will love you. | ||
| Boys like jokes. | ||
| Teachers have to try to be funny, even if they're not that funny. | ||
| I read about this one male teacher. | ||
| He'd give back papers and he'd make them into paper airplanes. | ||
| I mean, there are just things that are amusing to kids. | ||
| My favorite example was a school in West Virginia The boys in that school were not reading. | ||
| West Virginia is some of the lowest scores, and this school was bad. | ||
| This wonderful, it was a female teacher, she started an all-boys class, and she had something called Battle of the Books. | ||
| They had to read these books and then have some kind of a, I think it was like a Jeopardy battle or some kind of game. | ||
| The boys loved it. | ||
| And they wanted extra books to read over summer. | ||
| And she said it was the first time in the history of West Virginia the boys asked for extra reading over the summer. | ||
| And they came back and the sixth grade boy class did better than the eighth grade co-ed class. | ||
| So this was working. | ||
| The ACLU went in there because there were gender activists in the ACLU that said separating by gender is a kind of apartheid, gender apartheid. | ||
| What? | ||
| They call it apartheid? | ||
| They call it gender apartheid. | ||
| They compare it to discrimination. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And they stopped this class. | ||
| There is no boys class with Battle of the Books. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| So that's where we are. | ||
| There was a young boy that was recently suspended. | ||
| It was a big national story because he had a fake bow and arrow. | ||
| He was using an imaginary bow and arrow and shooting at boys in his class. | ||
| And so they suspended him. | ||
| I think he was very young. | ||
| He's very young. | ||
| Younger than 10. I've heard stories about 6-year-olds. | ||
| That's how they're playing. | ||
| And then when they play, they want to write stories. | ||
| So that's where you get kids like Justin. | ||
| He'll want to write about it. | ||
| If we have a bunch of little boys, the moment they set pen to paper, there's disapproval. | ||
| That's probably the worst thing that we could be doing, and that's what's happening. | ||
| When I was in high school, I wanted to be a comic book illustrator, even before high school. | ||
| And if any psychologist got a hold of any of my illustrations, it was all like axe murderers, like werewolves, dragons. | ||
| It was all crazy. | ||
| But that's what I enjoyed. | ||
| I enjoyed reading those kind of comic books, and I enjoyed drawing those things. | ||
| And I didn't turn out to be a serial killer. | ||
| No, they don't. | ||
| The vast majority don't, and... | ||
| But we're treating them that way. | ||
| That's the argument about gamers, right? | ||
| I mean, isn't that the argument about gamers? | ||
| That was a big part of the whole Gamergate, the response that gamers had. | ||
| I was like, no, just because we like engaging in this fantasy and just because we enjoy playing Grand Theft Auto doesn't mean we're going to go out and shoot people. | ||
| This is stupid. | ||
| It's fun to fake shoot people. | ||
| It's fun to play... | ||
| Call of Duty and have your friends on the other side. | ||
| You're shooting your friends. | ||
| You don't want to shoot your friends, but guess what? | ||
| When you shoot your friends in the game, nothing fucking happens to them. | ||
| It's very different. | ||
| Their family doesn't cry. | ||
| Their children don't grow up without a father. | ||
| No, they regenerate, and they're back in the next round. | ||
| This idea that when you play a game, Or when you engage in any sort of a fantasy activity, that that automatically equates to how you're going to behave in society and that we have to stop that and we have to limit that. | ||
| Instead of just addressing, like, what is it about these fantasies that is exciting for people? | ||
| Is there some sort of inherent need that men have for adventure, for a certain amount of violence, even if it's just cathartic, some sort of a fake release? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And there is no good evidence that playing a violent video game makes you violent. | ||
| God knows people have tried to prove it, and they have failed. | ||
| And they even tried to prove to the Supreme Court a few years ago, and Justice Scalia just said, he wrote a beautiful opinion about how they just did not make their case. | ||
| And no one has been able to do it. | ||
| Now they've come along and say, oh, well, these games cause sexism. | ||
| Well, the first thing to know is since kids started playing video games, great numbers in the 90s, Video Game Nation, crime has actually gone down. | ||
| I'm not saying there's a correlation, but there's certainly no... | ||
| Correlation between playing games and violence, or you would expect that it would have gone up. | ||
| Well, games are addictive. | ||
| They spend all their time playing those games, and they don't have time for violence. | ||
| That's what's going on. | ||
| Possibly. | ||
| And it's the millennial generation. | ||
| They're the least sexist and homophobic and all that than other generations. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Yeah, they have more. | ||
| Oh, yeah, sure. | ||
| So the newest kids coming up are the most open-minded, most progressive. | ||
| That's beautiful. | ||
| You question their attitudes compared to Kids from the 80s or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, or certainly baby boomers. | ||
| You'd find they're more open-minded. | ||
| Isn't that amazing? | ||
| Well, that speaks to my optimism, because my optimism is that what we're getting out of the Internet, what we're getting out of this open forum, this ability to communicate with each other, is even though there's the sort of... | ||
| Ganging up mentality on someone when they say something wrong, the attacking. | ||
| But ultimately, I think people are communicating in a freer way. | ||
| And we're getting to understand what is offensive about racism, what is offensive about homophobia or sexism or any of these things that we're sort of... | ||
| Cultural norms or they had a place in your particular neighborhood or community and now your community is sort of the world. | ||
| And in doing so, in expanding our community like that and creating this one world community, I think we're learning that the differences that we have between each other are more imagined than they are real. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I think that, anyway, about with the games, they had just made all these false assumptions. | ||
| And I think people try it. | ||
| We hear, oh, people are being destroyed by the Internet. | ||
| Some people are. | ||
| Some are. | ||
| Actually, anything you do, there are going to be some that are destroyed. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, playing cards. | ||
| People have addictive personalities. | ||
| I once met a psychiatrist who told me he was studying people and their addictions. | ||
| He said almost anything people do, about 5%, you know, if it's gambling or if it's... | ||
| Bicycling or dog racing, about 5% will become compulsive. | ||
| Well, you know, I work with a lot of fighters and martial artists because I'm a commentator for the UFC. And in working with these people, you find correlations between people that are... | ||
| They become very excellent at fighting or something like extremely, extremely dangerous. | ||
| And they become more subject or more suspect. | ||
| They have more potential for addiction, I think, in a lot of ways outside of that. | ||
| It's famous amongst fighters like Joe Lewis went on to become a cocaine addict and he had a lot of issues before he died. | ||
| Sonny Liston got involved in heroin. | ||
| Addictive behavior is extremely common with fighters. | ||
| Alcoholism is extremely common. | ||
| Same with ballet dancers. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Well, certainly for a while. | ||
| There's high levels of anorexia, kind of an obsession about food, but also of cocaine use. | ||
| So maybe that combination of obsessive perfectionism. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, I think the obsessive focusing on something, even focusing on a negative thing like gambling, it becomes a part of How they transition out of this world. | ||
| Because the world of mixed martial arts or fighting in general is very intense. | ||
| There's a short amount of time where you can do it and compete at a high level. | ||
| It's a percentage of your life. | ||
| And if you get really lucky, you can get 10 hard years in. | ||
| You know, if you're an outlier, you can stretch that out. | ||
| But a lot of people that compete, like in the UFC, they're gone within a couple years. | ||
| And you find that in a lot of sports, the NFL as well. | ||
| A couple years for most of them, and their bodies just can't hang on anymore, and they're gone. | ||
| And they had this one thing that occupied all their thoughts all the time. | ||
| Now it's gone. | ||
| And they have to figure out a way to... | ||
| Sort of transfer that energy in a positive manner. | ||
| And what makes you really good at things can also be a trap. | ||
| I had a problem when I was young with video games. | ||
| And it's not that video games are bad, but I have a very addictive personality. | ||
| And I used to play video games 8 to 10 hours a day. | ||
| I used to play online. | ||
| I just play a game called Quake. | ||
| It's a Quake game online. | ||
| And I recognize, I go, okay, I just can't do this. | ||
| Like, my brain and this is a fun game. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| But my brain is just not good for this. | ||
| Because my brain had developed doing martial arts and competing. | ||
| And I went from that... | ||
| To stand-up comedy. | ||
| And then this other thing, this video game thing, got implanted in my brain. | ||
| And I recognized, like, okay, this is not going to be productive for me. | ||
| It's enjoyable, but I'm too crazy for this, so I've got to put it aside. | ||
| But for a lot of people that get involved in, like, these singular pursuits, where they become so dedicated and so focused on one thing, it's extremely hard when that thing is taken away from them. | ||
| And sometimes they fall into negative things. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that the video games are negative. | ||
| That doesn't mean that video games are causing them to lose their life. | ||
| What they need is some sort of mental management. | ||
| And we need to recognize that there are certain people, especially people that excel at certain things or people that become obsessed with perfection or obsessed with success, that those things, you can get diverted down these paths, whether it's gambling or there's a I like that phrase, mental management. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That should be more available. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's not video games. | ||
| Video games don't turn you into sexist. | ||
| Video games don't turn you violent. | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| Arguably, we have the most access to violent information, whether it's in a media form, online. | ||
| We have more access to it than any human beings that have ever lived before. | ||
| We have more access to instantaneous violence, seeing things online, being able to play video violent games, but it's arguably the safest time to live ever. | ||
| And some of the most violent games I hear are in Japan, and they're not very violent. | ||
| They play the most violent games? | ||
| I think they have some of the most violent video games, and they have a lot of, a very permissive internet presentation of pornography and wild things and violence. | ||
| They're in tentacles and stuff, right? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Anime? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I don't know what's going on, but I'll check it out sometime. | ||
| Yeah, it's a weird culture, Japan. | ||
| They also have weird things that you could do. | ||
| Like you can buy women's panties that women have worn. | ||
| You can buy them from vending machines in certain places. | ||
| On vending machines? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Buying them at all is strange. | ||
| On vending machines is deranged. | ||
| It is. | ||
| But is it? | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, what is so horrible about that? | ||
| It seems like You know, if you wanted to buy, like, severed feet, yeah, that'd be kind of fucked up. | ||
| That'd be worse. | ||
| But, like, if a girl wants to wear pants... | ||
| I have a girl who's coming on soon. | ||
| She's a professional humiliator. | ||
| She is hired by these, like, CEOs and these people that have tremendous power. | ||
| And they want to be dominated. | ||
| And she has all these things that she does with them. | ||
| She makes them give her their bank account information so she can steal money from them. | ||
| I'm not saying anything horrible. | ||
| I'll shield you from any unpleasant thoughts. | ||
| But some people have these bizarre needs for things that you or I would have no desire for. | ||
| But at the end of the day, it's an agreement that these two have. | ||
| She does it professionally. | ||
| There's no confusion here. | ||
| I don't see what's bad about it. | ||
| I'm trying to explore it. | ||
| Have you heard about furries? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| I don't know about it much but a nice furry told me on the internet that not to worry that most of them don't and I don't know that every time I bring it up people are it won't really tell me what it is and I don't fully want to know but from what I've learned there are many different kinds yes some people go deep with it and some people it's just fun it's just fun yeah I was accidentally at a furry convention and There was a time where I was in Pittsburgh, and it coincided with a furry convention. | ||
| And while we were driving down the street, we were looking out the window, we're going, what the fuck is going on here? | ||
| So it's everyone wearing mascot costumes. | ||
| They were all big squirrels and rabbits and stuff. | ||
| And I'm like, this is so strange. | ||
| And then when we got to the hotel, one of the guys that worked there, he... | ||
| He opened up to me as we stayed there and he started telling me the weirder aspects of furries. | ||
| Like that they requested a litter box. | ||
| I'm not going to shield you. | ||
| Nothing crazy. | ||
| The sexual stuff I'll shield you from. | ||
| They had requested a litter box for the lobby. | ||
| Like they literally wanted to go to the bathroom in the lobby in a large litter box. | ||
| They were going to set it up. | ||
| Maybe I'd rather hear about the sex part. | ||
| Well they rented out the entire hotel except for a couple rooms and I was one of those fucking rooms that they hadn't gotten. | ||
| Because I had made my reservation in advance and so I'd done it like a few months out and the furries hadn't taken over the hotel yet. | ||
| That is so funny to imagine you at a furry convention. | ||
| It was hilarious. | ||
| They're friendly. | ||
| They're all nice. | ||
| They high-fived me and stuff. | ||
| You don't know who you're high-fiving. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| They could be making the meanest evil face in the world behind that big smiley chipmunk mask, but it was very strange. | ||
| They requested bowls. | ||
| They wanted to eat out of bowls on the ground like a dog. | ||
| They wanted their food to be served on the ground. | ||
| The human mind is so complicated. | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| You just don't know. | ||
| Let's get back to your point of focus. | ||
| Gender studies. | ||
| How did gender studies become primarily something that women focus on? | ||
| Because gender studies is not really gender studies. | ||
| When you talk to someone and they say they're involved in gender studies, it's either a guy who's some fucking weirdo feminist dude or it's women. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, probably there's a healthy instinct to avoid a major that entails your feeling ashamed all the time. | ||
| But is that what it is? | ||
| Why does it have to be that? | ||
| Well, also, men don't major anywhere near the same numbers in these somewhat peripheral things. | ||
| Men are more practical. | ||
| They come to college, they overwhelmingly Are they engineering majors, the econ majors, the practical majors? | ||
| Well, but there's liberal arts majors and there's philosophy majors. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, but it's mostly women. | |
| It's majority. | ||
| Well, philosophy is a little different. | ||
| But in most of the humanities, it's more men. | ||
| I mean, I'm sorry, more women. | ||
| French literature. | ||
| And I've often thought it's partly... | ||
| Sometimes people have said to me, well, you're suggesting that women are more interested in the humanities and men are more interested in the sciences, but in... | ||
| In Mexico or India, you know, they have just as many... | ||
| They give me some example of places where women have the same majors. | ||
| They're typically societies where people are very at risk economically, societies that are not as prosperous. | ||
| If you get to a prosperous, you know, advanced democracy where it can afford you the opportunity for sort of high levels of self-realization, then people do what they... | ||
| What they most want to do. | ||
| And so women get to college. | ||
| They don't have to be an engineering major. | ||
| They can major in art history or feminist dance therapy, if that exists, or whatever they want. | ||
| And I think that women feel a little freer. | ||
| I think there are a lot of men that would prefer to do something other than what they're doing, but they're a little more practical. | ||
| I think most men think they are going to work a full-time job. | ||
| They don't have options. | ||
| I think a lot of women suspect that they might not have to. | ||
| So that's why they're getting involved in gender studies? | ||
| Because they don't think they're actually going to have to make a living? | ||
| I don't know what would... | ||
| Well, it's a big generalization to say, to look at it all, if it is one person. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm sure there are many different reasons. | ||
| Actually, now, you can make a little career for yourself by working... | ||
| You know, there's a little network of women's organizations. | ||
| I mean, quite a large network. | ||
| So they'll find a place there. | ||
| Do they do conferences and stuff like that? | ||
| All that. | ||
| But, you know, you can't expect to make much money. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And if you care about that, that maybe you'll be fulfilled if you care about... | ||
| Carrying on this campaign, this twisted, propaganda-ridden campaign against patriarchy. | ||
| And by the way, I should add that it's too bad gender studies is that way, because gender is interesting, and we should study it, but it should be done by objective people with different agendas. | ||
| We all have agendas, but you want to have a field where you kind of cancel out one another's agendas and get closer to true understanding. | ||
| Yeah, that was why I wanted to ask you about it because it is... | ||
| I mean, the whole idea of men and women trying to figure each other out has always been problematic because we're doing it under the guise of trying to mate. | ||
| We're trying to mate with each other. | ||
| So we're trying to figure each other out while we're both bullshitting each other. | ||
| You know, it's like both people are wearing a mask and trying to figure out what they look like underneath that mask. | ||
| And that's... | ||
| That's how a lot of people get to the point where they're married and even they get divorced. | ||
| Well, I'm never falling for that shit again. | ||
| And then they fall into another nice little trap. | ||
| And I think that it would be really fascinating to have an honest class on what is the difference between men and women and what are the biological reasons for certain reactions. | ||
| Honest and helpful. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| To know what to expect. | ||
| When you get married, your husband's probably not going to be like your college roommate. | ||
| When you have children, chances are, for most women, it's not all the majority, this is the most... | ||
| You fall madly in love, and you become obsessed, and it really hurts you to go away for... | ||
| Very long, you know, 40 hours a week. | ||
| And a lot of men can go away. | ||
| I mean, they can go away forever. | ||
| Men do abandon children or they're less fixated on them than women. | ||
| This is just a fact of our nature. | ||
| There are exceptions. | ||
| I'm just talking about overall. | ||
| You don't find women abandoning children usually unless there's mental illness or drugs, something. | ||
| But men do it all the time. | ||
| I think fatherhood, you know, it has to be supported and encouraged, and we're better all around, but it can't be taken for granted. | ||
| And the worst thing we can do is to set people up just to be angry at each other, because you're going to be married to a man who's not going to See the world exactly as you do. | ||
| Who's not going to care as much about your window treatments or whatever. | ||
| Who's not going to care as much. | ||
| Especially after you have babies. | ||
| A lot of girls are slobs. | ||
| When you have babies, there's something that changes. | ||
| You want the house clean. | ||
| Feathering the nest. | ||
| In your nest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And men don't seem to have quite the same experience. | ||
| So people need to learn about it and learn how to argue. | ||
| There's so much insulting. | ||
| A lot of women, I see this happening, they become their husband's mother. | ||
| They become nags, which is just a recipe for either misery or divorce. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| because he doesn't want to be married to a nagging mother. | ||
| And women should know that it's going to be frustrating because he will not be as much help as you want. | ||
| But you're frustrating to him because he probably has to do a lot of things he doesn't want to do. | ||
| So it's a big compromise and young people should know this. | ||
| Well the biological implications, the biological reality of being an animal is that most animals are raised by their mothers. | ||
| I mean, we would all do much better if the father was a loving father and was around, and it's a great thing to concentrate on. | ||
| Human beings, in a lot of ways, mirror the activities that we see in other mammals. | ||
| In other mammals, the women primarily, or the females, primarily take care of the babies. | ||
| I think that if we looked at gender studies from a biological standpoint and then looked at them from a sociological standpoint as well and tried to figure out, like, what's the comfortable middle ground and how can we better understand each other from the biological perspective and from the social perspective, It'd be really interesting. | ||
| Really interesting. | ||
| But it becomes a battleground for ideology more than anything else. | ||
|
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It's a waste of time. | |
| And an indoctrination. | ||
| Or worse, it's indoctrination, as you say. | ||
| And it's not... | ||
| Another thing we need to know is what's easy to change and what isn't. | ||
| For example, males are... | ||
| We've got very good evidence. | ||
| They're greater risk takers and rule breakers. | ||
| And you see this even evidence from the earliest ages. | ||
| Little male toddlers have more accidents. | ||
| They're more in the emergency rooms more. | ||
| They're doing crazier things. | ||
| It's more of a challenge. | ||
| So you need to know that, and then what do you do with it? | ||
| And I see the need to channel that. | ||
| You take that male risk-taking, which is very valuable for Our species, that risk-taking and you direct it to good ends. | ||
| And a father is helpful, or a male role model, or a coach, athlete. | ||
| There are all sorts of things we do to socialize male energy. | ||
| And a society where the males are socialized, most of them, to do good, you'll build... | ||
| You know, you build the United States of America. | ||
| I mean, that's a healthy society. | ||
| But if you have a society like we have, these dysfunctional, pathological societies, you get destruction and mayhem because there is a pathological masculinity. | ||
| Most men aren't like that, but it exists. | ||
| So you need healthy masculinity. | ||
| You need to nurture that. | ||
| So we need to understand it, not resent it, not pathologize it, not criminalize it. | ||
| And yet we're doing this. | ||
| Toxic masculinity is one of my favorite internet expressions. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| But there's toxic femininity, too. | ||
| There is, but it's not as funny. | ||
| No. | ||
| Toxic masculinity, especially when men are using it, when men use that term, like, oh, Christ. | ||
| Toxic masculinity. | ||
| Good Lord. | ||
| So silly. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| You would die in the woods. | ||
| It would have been interesting to study gender objectively, and it should be based in the sciences. | ||
| You should have input from... | ||
| Is it universal that gender is taught in school, that gender studies are feminist-based ideologies? | ||
| There could be exceptions. | ||
| I haven't seen them. | ||
| You haven't seen them, literally. | ||
| Even in Norway and Sweden, you go to the departments and they're full of people with degrees in sociology but who are very soft and who are strongly ideological. | ||
| Well, how do they get away with saying things like gender as a social construct? | ||
| Because there's so much evidence to the contrary. | ||
| The question is, how do you get away with questioning it and have a career in the academy? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's the problem, right? | ||
| I questioned it. | ||
| And I had a colleague when I was, I told you earlier about reading these feminist textbooks and being horrified. | ||
| I remember one of them. | ||
| First of all, the author dedicated it To the women in my women's studies ovular in the spring of whatever year it was, 91. And I hadn't seen the word ovular, and I always like to look up new words. | ||
| And I was about to look it up until it hit me. | ||
| I would not find it. | ||
| She made it up. | ||
| She didn't like the word seminar. | ||
| With its root word associated with the very essence. | ||
| Yeah, don't ask. | ||
| Yes, yes, don't think it through because it's annoying. | ||
| But she wasn't, you know, the thing is... | ||
| She called it ovular instead of seminar. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Oh, good Lord. | ||
| Now, the thing is... | ||
| How about group? | ||
| Just forget it. | ||
| What about gender neutral? | ||
| Why does it have to be vaginally based? | ||
| There was another woman who said that she had a theory that we were all born bisexual, and then through socialization, you know, our parents and society turn half of us into... | ||
| Female human beings and half into male human beings. | ||
| And then she said, one destined to command and the other to obey. | ||
| I remember reading that to my husband. | ||
| Sounds like a fun date. | ||
| And he said, like, which one commands and which one obeys? | ||
| No, but I'm just saying they have these views that would not survive in any kind of functional academic environment where people could freely exist. | ||
| It's not that they can't voice them because sometimes people that have kooky views, sometimes people test it and they can't find fault and they end up being right. | ||
| So you have to be open. | ||
| Polyamorous relationships, things along those lines that actually do work for some people. | ||
| You have to be open to that. | ||
| You have to resist that. | ||
| Closed-mindedness. | ||
| In the ideal university, you bring in people that challenge, and you're constantly either reinforcing what we already know or challenging it or bringing in new ideas. | ||
| It's an exciting thing. | ||
| What we've done to our universities is so sad. | ||
| Now, what I just described, that's going on in computer technology. | ||
| It's going on in the sciences. | ||
| It's been shut down. | ||
| In the humanities and to some degree in the social sciences and in education. | ||
| Is it possible that, as you said, the millennials today are the most open-minded, the least likely to be racist or prejudiced, that there's a good trend going on? | ||
| Is it possible that this same trend could eventually extend to the universities? | ||
| Where these kids will realize how preposterous some of this behavior is, and they'll reject some of this teaching. | ||
| And they'll understand that, like, yes, there is a certain amount of prejudice that some people have, but let's get to the root of it and find out why they have these misconceptions. | ||
| Why do they have these ideas in their head that are ultimately biased and wrong or degrading or whatever it is. | ||
| But is it possible that through conversations like this, through things like your YouTube videos, through more people discussing these ideas in an open forum, And more people mocking things, like what happened at Yale? | ||
| Or what happened at... | ||
| Name the college. | ||
| There's probably something going on right now where someone's screaming at someone because they want to go to a lecture that's, you know, being taught by a man who said something offensive about women's roles. | ||
| Or wore the wrong shirt or something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, like that scientist that wore the... | ||
| So silly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The problem is that these bad ideas have tenure. | ||
| Tenure. | ||
| They have tenure. | ||
| Tenure is interesting. | ||
| They are there. | ||
| So it's going to be hard. | ||
| I think what's going to happen is the universities are maybe going to become obsolete. | ||
| I think a lot of education is going to move to web-based education and cyber courses. | ||
| But where will people get laid? | ||
| I know. | ||
| I think it's sad if we lose our colleges. | ||
| But the colleges, I'm telling you, They will vaporize. | ||
| Yale is at risk right now. | ||
| Amherst College, some of our best universities. | ||
| It is so crazy what's going on there. | ||
| And it's as if they've weaponized the sensitivities of the most neurotic students on campus. | ||
| And these kids are now riding roughshod over everyone else. | ||
| That can't go on. | ||
| So they will become so dysfunctional. | ||
| Well, they need to film it. | ||
| We need films. | ||
|
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We need films. | |
| When they filmed that one kid who, by the way, was an Asian-American who was trying to take photographs of the African-American guy who was on the hunger strike, and they were accusing him of being a part of the patriarchy. | ||
| He was a fucking student. | ||
| He was a student. | ||
| And then that professor. | ||
| She was a professor of communications. | ||
| She had requested. | ||
| We need some muscle over here. | ||
| Oh, that was nice. | ||
| She had requested the media come and cover this just the day before. | ||
| The day before. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
|
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That's rich. | |
| She made a tweet. | ||
|
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Oh, God. | |
| Talking about this hunger strike. | ||
| You know, this is a really important cause. | ||
| Can the media come and cover this? | ||
| So the media, in the form of student media, comes, this kid, and this lady's like, you have to leave. | ||
| You have to leave. | ||
| They had decided that a public place was now private because this guy had created a safe space and they were going to do a hunger strike there. | ||
|
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Like... | |
| What in the fuck? | ||
| And what are they protesting? | ||
| But the video. | ||
| But the video got out. | ||
| And the video got out. | ||
| The whole world responded. | ||
| She had to resign. | ||
| The whole world realized how preposterous this behavior is. | ||
| But when we get a chance to see it, we meaning people on the outside, get a chance to see that video and comment on it from our own perspective, not from the perspective of someone engrossed in that sort of ideological trap, then you get to realize that these kids get to see how crazy we all think it is. | ||
| I think that there's a benefit in that. | ||
| There's a benefit in that. | ||
| But there's also a benefit in kids on campus who are sensible and who do not want to be the generation where freedom came to die. | ||
| Because believe me, millennials out there, you are that generation. | ||
| Now, every generation has had big challenges to liberty. | ||
| Everybody finds new ways to challenge liberty. | ||
| You're tested, and you have to meet the test. | ||
| And we've been through the McCarthy era and all sorts of things in the Vietnam era. | ||
| And it had to be worked out. | ||
| This is your challenge. | ||
| And I say, start the resistance. | ||
| And there's a wonderful group called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE. What I like about it, it's bipartisan. | ||
| It's liberals and conservatives who love freedom. | ||
| Because I think that's what unites most Americans, is that we can have our political differences, but we have this common commitment to freedom and to try to increase it and preserve it. | ||
| Now, this group, FIRE, has replaced the ACLU for civil liberties. | ||
| The ACLU is asleep at the wheel. | ||
| You never hear from them about these campus, you know, this zealotry and these moms. | ||
| Well, I think they don't know how to approach it because the very people that are involved in that zealotry will also support the ACLU every step of the way because I think it's pretty universally acknowledged the ACL does great work. | ||
| They're very important. | ||
| My mother was a member, and I don't know if I've ever been a member, but I loved Nadine Strassen. | ||
| She used to be the president. | ||
| It's great, but it has been relatively silent. | ||
| I think they're scared. | ||
| The ACLU can't be scared. | ||
| They must be scared. | ||
| They can't be scared. | ||
|
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But they're not scared. | |
| No, I think they're intimidated. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Intimidated is scared, isn't it? | ||
| Well, it's a little more complicated because I think they also may be... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm not a psychologist. | ||
| But I will tell you that there are groups like libertarians, I noticed, atheists, You know, the ACLU lawyers, where they have a small cohort of very angry women. | ||
| And the majority of people are thoughtful, well-meaning, and they listen to these angry women. | ||
| They think, maybe we should be respectful. | ||
| Maybe they really are. | ||
| And they don't realize that it's a small group of bitter people who believe twisted theories and false statistics, and they're imposing that on the whole. | ||
| But these groups of women have been very divisive for libertarians. | ||
| They did it to the atheists. | ||
| I think they did it through the ACLU. The mighty ACLU fell before a small group of zealots. | ||
| And they're more likely to be suing a school for having a boys' class to help boys read than they are to be going on the campus and calling out hordes of, you know, vigilante groups. | ||
| There was one professor that I follow who is kind of a radical, almost communist, very socialistic. | ||
| But he was saying that the only mistake that the woman made was that she did it before she got tenure. | ||
| And I was like, that is hilarious. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| She will get tenure. | ||
| This will not hurt her. | ||
| This will help her. | ||
| She's a celebrity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She'll get a better... | ||
| I mean, I don't know, but I... But didn't she resign? | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| She was... | ||
| You're talking about the one... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The muscle? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that she was asked... | ||
| She has an appointment in the communications, but I think she was teaching by invitation for the School of Journalism. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And University of Missouri has a storied, wonderful, you know, journalism school. | ||
| And I think they were horrified to have, on a public university, to have a professor throwing out the police. | ||
| So she was disinvited from being part of that program. | ||
| But no, no, she'll be at Wesleyan. | ||
| That's very cynical. | ||
| It's not cynical. | ||
| It's the factual feminist. | ||
|
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I like you. | |
| It's horrifying, though, that someone with that kind of thinking, that telling some person in a public space— Go back to—do you remember the Duke Lacrosse case? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| How about the University of Virginia case that was in Rolling Stone magazine? | ||
| Oh, well, that—but even before the Duke Lacrosse, these young men falsely accused, a flagrant lie. | ||
| Well, 88 professors, long before anything was known about it, they came out in an advertisement—I don't know if it was in the school paper or a local paper— Siding with the accuser against the boys. | ||
| And some of them were very viciously outspoken. | ||
| And they basically were part of a vigilante group that conducted the equivalent of a witch hunt. | ||
| And there were no consequences. | ||
| They've gone on to better jobs, some of them. | ||
| Wow, really? | ||
| That's horrific. | ||
| That's absolutely horrific. | ||
| That was one of the things that made me hate Nancy Grace. | ||
| Oh, Nancy Grace was terrible. | ||
| Don't say hate her because I don't know her. | ||
| I hate what she represents on television. | ||
| Maybe she's like one of those people that's just like reality TV acting out and she's nice. | ||
| Those Duke Lacrosse boys! | ||
| Yeah, she was horrible on that. | ||
| And it turns out that she was absolutely wrong and never apologized. | ||
| And those kids didn't... | ||
| Well, I don't know what they did, really. | ||
| I'm just... | ||
| And that night they did nothing, apparently. | ||
| One of them wasn't even there. | ||
| He had proof that he was not there and it wasn't enough. | ||
| Well, again, it's the lynch mob mentality and trying to keep them away from you, you know, and trying to turn them away from you so you have to say something that's going to exonerate you from being guilty by association or guilty by the way you view the case. | ||
| You're not a part of the problem. | ||
| You're a part of the potential solution. | ||
| But I think liberal students and conservative students could unite on campus just in favor of free expression. | ||
| Are they the most maligned students on campus? | ||
| Conservative students? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Here's the good thing for conservative students and libertarian students. | ||
| When you get to campus, you're going to have your ideas challenged morning, noon, and night. | ||
| And that's probably good. | ||
| You're going to become very conversant in the ideas of the other side, which one of my favorite philosophers, John Stuart Mill, said, you can't understand your own position unless you understand your critics. | ||
| You have to understand your critics almost as well as you understand yourself to truly be able to defend a position. | ||
| So conservatives have that advantage. | ||
| And their professors, the majority, we have very good data, vast majority liberals. | ||
| So they will hear that. | ||
| And then they're going to make good friends if they hang out with each other. | ||
| They'll make buddies, you know, it's like comrades in war. | ||
| They'll be friends for life. | ||
| Then there are liberal students that go there and they have to be careful because they're just going to be in an echo chamber, you know, and they'll hear it and it'll be reinforced and they better be careful. | ||
| And try to make a point of attending a lecture if someone comes that's offering a different point of view, because they won't hear it. | ||
| But the conservative kids, up till now, up till a couple of years ago, they were fine. | ||
| I mean, people would occasionally be mean. | ||
| But now I'm a little worried because this outburst of fanaticism, this outbreak of cry bullies, they could be very punishing. | ||
| Can you even have a Young Republicans conference on a major campus? | ||
| Well, it's an interesting question. | ||
| There are. | ||
| They do have college Republicans. | ||
| I was invited to, even though I'm still a registered Democrat, the college Republicans and Libertarians at Oberlin invited me, and it was the college Republicans. | ||
| Is this after you had already been, like... | ||
| Triggered the dog? | ||
| Triggered, and the people came with a tape over their face? | ||
| No, that was the same. | ||
| They were the ones that invited me, and then all these kids found out. | ||
| And the same at Georgetown. | ||
| So you were invited to speak to Republicans. | ||
| Yeah, and libertarians. | ||
| Well, that's probably a big part of what went wrong, right? | ||
| They just assumed you were part of the problem because of who invited you? | ||
| They didn't even care about that. | ||
| It was my name, and they'd seen a snippet of something from the factual feminist and said that I was, I don't know, a bad person. | ||
| They didn't want to hear. | ||
| They just did not want me on campus. | ||
| And, you know, I always try to put myself in the other person's position, and I think, what would upset me like that? | ||
| A lot of people, I would be very upset, you know, if a Nazi were coming, or Even someone who I just thought was reckless and defamed people. | ||
| First of all, I'm not like that at all. | ||
| I haven't done anything like that. | ||
| But I can imagine being upset. | ||
| But even then, what would I do if someone invited a horrible person? | ||
| I would not. | ||
| I would... | ||
| Write an op-ed! | ||
| On the campus, that's the place where you should learn to fight these things. | ||
| You fight bad ideas with good ideas. | ||
| Not by spitting on them, which happened at Yale, and not by intimidating them, which happened at Yale and Missouri, and not by this kind of mob hysteria. | ||
| Who got spit on at Yale? | ||
| I think it was—this is typical of what happened. | ||
| Greg Lukianoff from this group, FIRE, that I urge people to check out, because they're really taking—they're leading the way fighting this nonsense on campus. | ||
| Well, he was speaking at Yale. | ||
| And he's actually the one that filmed... | ||
| Wait a minute, am I confusing my schools? | ||
| He filmed a student... | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It was at Yale. | ||
| He was speaking, and he had an iPhone, and he was with a professor whose wife had challenged the Halloween costumes, and he actually was put on his iPhone. | ||
| Not because he wanted to make a viral video, but because he'd seen things like this happen, and then students misrepresent what happened. | ||
| He was afraid they'd say the dean... | ||
| He got, you know, was screaming obscenities. | ||
| So he filmed it for that reason. | ||
| Well, before that, he was giving a talk about free speech on campus. | ||
| And he was talking about some of the craziness going on. | ||
| And he just said in passing, they're treating, you know, the dean's wife. | ||
| I'm not sure this was an example, but it was something like this. | ||
| They're treating the dean's wife as if she's some kind of war criminal, as if she burned down an Indian village, like she's a genocidal maniac. | ||
| Some protesters said, Indian Village, you're making a joke about genocide? | ||
| And then he went crazy and had to be removed from the room. | ||
| Then word got out that somebody had joked about genocide. | ||
| And it was complete nonsense, a complete mangling of what Greg Lukianoff had said. | ||
| This is what's happening. | ||
| They take a little comment, totally out of campus, then the hysteria spreads because they're just ready to be triggered. | ||
| Well, I think it's, again, what we said. | ||
| There's just people looking for the green light. | ||
| They're just looking for... | ||
| There's a green light. | ||
| I see Indian. | ||
| Go! | ||
| And they just decide to get angry. | ||
| It's not a rational response to someone saying something that's callous or rude or prejudiced. | ||
| It's a green light. | ||
| These are certain subjects where you're allowed to be offended. | ||
| And now, anything will offend these groups. | ||
| So it's more and more... | ||
| There was a time where... | ||
| Our campuses were so segregated and they were being integrated and these, you know, you see videos of, you know, you see footage of what it was, you know, and photographs, famous photographs of when they first integrated the University of Mississippi and I guess it was James Meredith going on campus and just horrible behavior and that is so offensive. | ||
| That is racism. | ||
| Now, somebody drives by in a truck and maybe shouted something, that mobilizes the campus. | ||
| It's interesting that decades later, things have changed so much that they have to search to find things to really truly be upset about. | ||
| To be offended. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's very fascinating. | ||
| These are grievance collectors. | ||
| They're chronically offended people. | ||
| I mean, what is that that would motivate someone to want to be in that mode As I said, I'm not a psychologist. | ||
| I'm a philosopher. | ||
| I recognize bad ideas and nonsense, but I don't understand that attraction. | ||
| I assume that they need real problems. | ||
| I assume that they need some real adversity in their life. | ||
| They need something real to do battle against. | ||
| And some have said it may be the result of the helicopter parenting and the self-esteem education. | ||
| So they're overprotective kids. | ||
| Every little... | ||
| A setback. | ||
| You know, there were parents and teachers and everyone, you know, oh, poor thing. | ||
| So they never developed that healthy resilience. | ||
| They go to campus. | ||
| They hear a dean's wife writes an email about Halloween costumes they don't like, and they flip out. | ||
| Like, does anybody really believe that that girl who screamed at the dean when yelled at, this is my home, you know, like all that crazy shit that she was yelling at? | ||
| That crazy shit. | ||
| Would she have done that if they were alone? | ||
| Does anybody believe that? | ||
| Does anybody believe that if they had met in an office somewhere and had a rational discussion? | ||
| She was acting. | ||
| She was putting on a theatrical performance for all the people that were involved. | ||
| But she was also probably kind of worked up by the energy of the crowd. | ||
| By the crowd. | ||
| And you have to be careful of that. | ||
| I just warn people, be careful of that emotion of rage. | ||
| It doesn't lead to good places. | ||
| And feeling really self-righteous. | ||
| And grandstanding. | ||
| And grandstanding. | ||
| There was a lot of grandstanding in that. | ||
| All of that behavior, you have misinformation, twisted theories, moral fervor. | ||
| History is one long lesson in the dangers of combining these things. | ||
| And what we talked about before, that life essentially has become some sort of a bizarre, open-ended reality show. | ||
| And that these people are jockeying for a great position on the social ladder. | ||
| And by being the person who yells at that guy on social media, that girl got a lot of pounds the next day at school. | ||
| Girls would give her knuckles and hug her. | ||
| That was amazing. | ||
| Did you see you got a hundred likes? | ||
| I'm just glad there was no social media when I was in college. | ||
| Are you? | ||
| Yes, because I was a... | ||
| Were you crazy? | ||
| Crazy, and not that crazy, but a little crazy. | ||
| And I was on the periphery of a mob at NYU that occupied a computer. | ||
| It was a big deal. | ||
| There was a computer. | ||
| You occupied a computer? | ||
| Yeah, it was a big thing. | ||
| Now they're occupying a whole street. | ||
| No, this was the Courant Institute, and we were going to destroy the computer. | ||
| What? | ||
| I hadn't thought it through. | ||
| Why were you going to destroy the computer? | ||
| Oh, because we thought they were doing research for the war. | ||
| This is a long time ago. | ||
| Okay, this was 69, I believe, maybe 70. And I was on the periphery of a crowd. | ||
| And I do think there was a moment where a dean came, and I may have had words with him. | ||
| Did you yell at him like that girl yelled at that girl? | ||
| No, not like that. | ||
| Close. | ||
| But he just said something, young lady. | ||
| However, the difference is, once I knew he was a dean, I ran away. | ||
| I didn't want to... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm just glad there isn't a videotape. | ||
| So how were they using the computer for the war? | ||
| I think it was a mathematical institute called the Courant Institute, and they had a computer which was a big deal. | ||
| It was huge. | ||
| And I think they thought they could go in and destroy it. | ||
| But I'll tell you, it was probably one of my first moments of awareness about the dangers of the left, even though I was an enthusiastic participant. | ||
| We did break into the building, and we were in someone's office. | ||
| And I was kind of thrilled. | ||
| I'm at the military-industrial complex, and this is the brain center. | ||
| And I was in an office, and somebody started punching out somebody's slides. | ||
| You remember slides? | ||
| They were punching them out. | ||
| And I thought, oh, what is that? | ||
| And I looked, and it was like a professor's photographs of his kids. | ||
| And they were destroying them? | ||
| They were destroying them. | ||
| And then I looked around and thought, this is just some person. | ||
| And I kind of slowly retreated. | ||
| I felt very ashamed. | ||
| I didn't know what I... There were thousands of us there, all right? | ||
| I'm not confessing to a crime. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But I was part of a crazy mob. | ||
| And I never forgot that. | ||
| And then I started... | ||
| Well, I mean, I still remained a protester for a while, but never... | ||
| Was I ever on the part of anything like that? | ||
| Well, I think then you uniquely understand the whole hysteria behind it and how you can get caught up in it. | ||
| And I understand something else. | ||
| Some of the craziest ones are going to defect to my side, eventually. | ||
| Because among the Marxists, for example, some of the best anti-Marxists were former Marxists. | ||
| Some of the people who had the most penetrating analysis of what's wrong with totalitarian systems, they were once people who were part of it. | ||
| I think there are a lot of smart kids Who had an education. | ||
| They've been robbed of a serious education. | ||
| They're going to realize it. | ||
| And they're going to reflect. | ||
| And they are going to be radicalized in a good way. | ||
| Well, you see that a lot of people who are former cult members go on to become members of cult awareness groups or lead cult awareness groups. | ||
| I actually had a couple on that have been in cults and have talked openly about their... | ||
| I think they share something in that people love to be a part of a group. | ||
| It's a tribal thing. | ||
| It is tribal. | ||
| I remember chanting and it was exhilarating. | ||
| You're like, hell no, we won't go. | ||
| Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And you marched on Washington. | ||
| That's a cause, though, that made sense. | ||
| Vietnam was a fucked up war. | ||
| It was. | ||
| I don't think my understanding of it totally made sense, but in retrospect, it was a messed up war. | ||
| Oh, you don't swear? | ||
| I do. | ||
| Just not on podcasts? | ||
| It'll just become one who'll take it out and put it on the AEI website. | ||
| Very aware. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very aware. | |
| Interesting. | ||
| You have to worry about that. | ||
| That's the beautiful thing about being a comedian. | ||
| You don't have to worry about that shit. | ||
| You know, I don't worry about it because... | ||
| I just worry about it because I... It's been done so many times. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Every little thing they'll take and then, you know, there's always... | ||
| My 92-year-old mother, somehow she's on Facebook and she sees these things and she says, what were you doing, darling? | ||
| Why did you say that? | ||
| Well, she's very left-wing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But she totally agrees with me about my critique of feminism because she likes men. | ||
| She's never been that kind of a feminist. | ||
| She's a feminist. | ||
| She loves humanity. | ||
| She's a little naive, I think, in her politics because she's still very left-wing. | ||
| But it comes from a good place. | ||
| So I'm sympathetic. | ||
| Not only was I once a radical, but I'm sympathetic to leftists because some of the people closest to my heart are very left-wing. | ||
| But they're not haters. | ||
| They don't take whole groups of people and impugn them as evil. | ||
| Well, I'm very sympathetic to a lot of the ideas that left-wing people have. | ||
| I don't know if I consider myself left-wing or libertarian or what, but I'm kind of in the middle on a lot of different things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're probably like me. | |
| I'm homeless, politically homeless. | ||
| I try to think, well, maybe I agree with the Republicans, and then they'll say something that's so unacceptable. | ||
| And then I think, oh, maybe Bernie Sanders, and then... | ||
|
unidentified
|
90% of all... | |
| Yeah, then he'll say something, and I thought I could be behind Hillary, but she's... | ||
| Kind of irritating. | ||
| And I think on these women's issues, it's going to be... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| She could be very bad for, you know, issues I care about. | ||
| How so? | ||
| She might not be. | ||
| But, well, in the current administration, there's an invisible government. | ||
| In all administrations, there's an invisible government of people who, you know, regulators and people who work in little agencies in the government. | ||
| And they write policy. | ||
| They write regulation. | ||
| And so we've seen our schools, a lot of the things I've been talking about that are contrary to the interests of boys, this is coming out of government, and it's coming out of these agencies. | ||
| And Democrats, they exist both, Republicans can't stop it, and they do it in other areas that I don't know as much about. | ||
| In the democratic, the social issues, anything that affects education or media, they're doing things that I just find very problematic and not in the interest of liberty or well-being. | ||
| And so that's what I worry. | ||
| But she might not do it. | ||
| She might surprise us. | ||
| Well, I always assume that those directions are being prompted by special interest groups and people that have gotten people into power in the first place. | ||
| By the time you get to be a president, you have so many people you're beholden to, so many people that have spent so much money. | ||
| You almost have very little time to think about anything other than reconciling that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's probably not your primary interest, but you're... | ||
| You want to help out the American Association of University Women. | ||
| And you assign people to deal with that. | ||
| Deal with it, make them happy. | ||
| Yeah, and then they run with it and make policy that you may or may not even agree with, but you're kind of committed to it. | ||
| Some really bad policies, in my opinion, in education. | ||
| So I worry about the Democrats there. | ||
| So there's a lot to worry about in both parties, so I'm kind of homeless. | ||
| But do you take satisfaction in what you're doing? | ||
| Do you enjoy making these factual feminist videos and... | ||
| I do. | ||
| I wish I weren't doing it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| In this sense. | ||
| There's so many things. | ||
| I have a lot of interests and I would also like to spend some period of my life just being a dilettante because I love music and literature and art. | ||
| I love to go to travel and this takes a lot of time. | ||
| It takes a lot of energy and not always good energy because you're dealing with... | ||
| Once again, I have to read something that is so problematic. | ||
| And sometimes it takes a long time to untie knots in the truth. | ||
| It's easier to tie a knot in the truth than untie one. | ||
| So I'll have to write a long article explaining why someone was so wrong. | ||
| And I have to do it over and over again. | ||
| So it's tedious. | ||
| On the other hand, I don't want to see bullies winning. | ||
| And so I welcome the time where more people come forward. | ||
| But we do need to have more professors coming forward because you need scholars and you need people who can look at the data. | ||
| You need statisticians. | ||
| It's not enough to have activists. | ||
| So this can't be done by pundits. | ||
| The heavy lifting to push back the politically correct forces of unreason on campus, it's going to have to be other scholars that put up the stop sign or that encourage a move towards a more rational it's going to have to be other scholars that put up the But what's going to motivate them to do that, to make a shift? | ||
| It's possible that things are getting so bad that more will be emboldened. | ||
| They're more realized, like, what happened to the Yale guy. | ||
| For example, there's Steve Pinker. | ||
| Yeah, he's at Harvard. | ||
| And there's Jonathan Haidt at, I believe he's now at NYU, was at the University of Virginia. | ||
| They've been outspoken for a long time, but they are really starting to come out and call, cry foul about what's going on. | ||
| And they're powerful. | ||
| And they're brilliant guys. | ||
| And tremendous command of... | ||
| You know, the literature in their fields and they're able to bring that to bear. | ||
| Fantastic lectures and Essays and books and so forth. | ||
| So there's Jonathan Haidt, there's Steven Pinker, but I want more women. | ||
| I think that it's going to take women scholars to challenge the hegemony of this hardline male-averse feminists that have a monopoly now on gender studies. | ||
| It's going to take some women scholars. | ||
| So I'm waiting for them to come. | ||
| But so far it hasn't happened. | ||
| There are a few, but not very many. | ||
| Is there a single man out there that teaches gender studies? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| What are they like? | ||
| I'm thinking of one person. | ||
| I won't mention him, but he's so frustrating. | ||
| You reacted so quickly. | ||
| There was such a visceral, built-in... | ||
| Oh, I'm thinking of a particular individual who is so frustrating. | ||
| Why is it so frustrating? | ||
| You don't have to name his name, but what's wrong with this poor bastard? | ||
| You know, I will say what's wrong with him. | ||
| And his name is Michael Kimmel. | ||
| And what frustrates me, he is a male feminist, as radical as any that I've mentioned, and he was given a fortune, or maybe not a fortune, but a sizable amount of money, to start one of the first centers for the study of men. | ||
| So he's at, I think it's SUNY or one of the New York campuses, and he has all this money for a center to study men. | ||
| And he doesn't like men. | ||
| He doesn't like men. | ||
| Well, he's a hardline feminist. | ||
| He believes that In toxic masculinity, he loves to talk about things like that. | ||
| He takes the worst case male You know, a school shooter or some deranged sociopath and makes that a metaphor for all men. | ||
| He does that sort of thing. | ||
| You know, the Columbine killers. | ||
| Those are our boys, all our boys. | ||
| No, they're not. | ||
| They are psychopathic killers, and they are extreme even among psychopathic killers. | ||
| And they're medicated. | ||
| They don't represent our boys. | ||
| And I'm overstating a little bit, but not by much. | ||
| We finally get a center that's going to study young men, and it's run by him. | ||
| And who does he put on the board? | ||
| He's got Eve Ensler, who wrote the vagina monologues, which was kind of male-averse. | ||
| I don't think there's any positive males in that. | ||
| I guess it may be Vagina Bob, but he's not very sympathetic. | ||
| And then there's Gloria Steinem and Carol Gilligan, It's not going to work. | ||
| So he's a male gender studies professor. | ||
| He's a feminist sociologist. | ||
| Feminist sociologist. | ||
| What does this gentleman look like? | ||
| Does he look like what you would expect? | ||
| I don't know what you're imagining. | ||
| Is he an overweight woman with pink hair? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, he looks normal. | ||
| No, I don't know what he's... | ||
| I don't know what forces... | ||
| But that's what we're dealing with. | ||
| So there's a few, a few of those. | ||
| They're like vampire familiars. | ||
| That's what they're like. | ||
| You see that movie Blade? | ||
| He would have these little sycophants around him that were not really vampires, but they wanted to be vampires. | ||
| They were hoping the vampires would turn them and they would say anything. | ||
| Well, he believes it, and he believes the statistics. | ||
| You know, I was thinking maybe when he started this center, he'd become a little more sympathetic towards... | ||
| I don't see evidence of that. | ||
| He's still... | ||
| Well, you could certainly, if you looked around... | ||
| The problem is the numbers of people that you're dealing with. | ||
| You're dealing with 300-plus million people in this country and decades of news stories. | ||
| And if you wanted to look at the numbers in that way, you could find a lot of evidence that men have done horrible shit. | ||
| I mean, there's no doubt about it. | ||
| There's no question. | ||
| You look at our prisons. | ||
| And we talked before, that male violence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| They are more violent. | ||
| And a society that doesn't take an account, the male... | ||
| Capacity for rule-breaking and risk-taking. | ||
| Boys who are insufficiently socialized have very unpleasant ways of making themselves noticed. | ||
| And you have to be careful. | ||
| But it's this tiny minority. | ||
| And it usually takes other men to protect the rest of us from them. | ||
| And I always wonder... | ||
| Just the other day in Paris, there was this horrible terrorist attack. | ||
| And there was a little story... | ||
| In the news about this cafe. | ||
| And these people were slaughtered in the cafe. | ||
| And there's this lovely young woman who was in the hospital from trauma. | ||
| And there was this beautiful man who'd thrown herself on him. | ||
| His instinct was just to protect her and protect as many people as he could. | ||
| This beautiful guy. | ||
| And I thought, why can't we take him as emblematic of what men can do? | ||
| But the gender scholars, we never find him. | ||
| We find serial killers. | ||
| They say, well, that's what men do. | ||
| Well, there certainly are a lot of men serial killers. | ||
| The problem is, I think, when you focus only on the negative aspects of it, you also run the risk of self-definition. | ||
| By the people that listen to what he has to say and take his class, you become guilty by association. | ||
| You are a man. | ||
| Like, you get those guys who make those videos that I am apologizing for every man ever before me, and they want to distinguish themselves as being different, and they want to go way out of the way. | ||
| Have you ever seen that Dear Woman video? | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Yes, I have. | ||
| It's the worst kind of gender profiling, isn't it? | ||
| No, it's perfect. | ||
| It's perfect because those guys are the guys that wouldn't survive. | ||
| If you took those guys on like a trek through the woods, those are the guys that would have the sprained ankles and they would start weeping. | ||
| Those are the guys. | ||
| And those are the guys that if you had left, they would be at home with your wife and they would say horrible things about you and what a terrible person you are and try to get her to love them instead of loving you. | ||
| Because they're weak. | ||
| They're what... | ||
| Pardon my French. | ||
| Weak bitches. | ||
| That's what men like to call men like that. | ||
| And that's why they make those videos. | ||
| Those videos, they're not made by normal. | ||
| Why would a man apologize for things that other men have done? | ||
| If you've done something horrible, you should say, Dear Women, I've done some fucked up shit. | ||
| I've made some horrible movies that portrayed women in a very unfavorable light, and I didn't consider the fact that some women would watch those movies and it would somehow or another define them in their own way. | ||
| I shouldn't have done that. | ||
| Well, this isn't what they're doing. | ||
| What they're doing, they're apologizing for the other men, and therefore setting themselves up on a moral high ground, which is what a lot of male feminists do. | ||
| They're weak men. | ||
| They're really weak men. | ||
| They're unfavorable sexually, and they're not the type of men that women would choose. | ||
| So what they have done is they've tried to figure out a way in the game. | ||
| What men want is people to love them. | ||
| Women want it. | ||
| Everybody wants people to love them. | ||
| And when they don't have any particularly outright masculine characteristics, they're not attractive, they're not handsome, they're not bold, they're not daring, they're not creative, they're not profound or charismatic, they become male feminists. | ||
| And that's what they do. | ||
| They become these sort of gender traitors that they call out all the weakness of all the other men to sort of highlight themselves as being different. | ||
| I'm not saying it's all male feminists because, again, I think there's a lot of male feminists that they take on this idea because they do see sexism. | ||
| They want to be nice. | ||
| They want people to be equal. | ||
| They want to be judged based on the merits of who they are as a human being. | ||
| And I can respect them. | ||
| I just would like them to consider that things are not exactly the way they think and they might have been taught by a charismatic women's studies professor they might be more complicated. | ||
| And they should know That there was efforts to keep people like me and Camille Paglia and Wendy Kaminer and a long list of us. | ||
| There were a group of feminists who were not male-averse, who were sex positive, and we were driven, you know, we were not included. | ||
| We were not invited to the table. | ||
| And there's a reason why kids, they don't read us. | ||
| Or if they do, you know, it's immediately just savaged and very selective in what they assign. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they haven't had the advantage on these issues of hearing from a full range of opinion. | ||
| Yeah, it's fascinating because none of what you're saying is offensive. | ||
| None of what you're saying is derogatory. | ||
| And the idea that you would somehow or another trigger people or cause the creation of safe spaces is preposterous. | ||
| It's absurd. | ||
| I needed armed guards. | ||
| Me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I love it how there were women. | ||
| I love that there were women armed guards. | ||
| Well, they were protecting me because they both – and this happened at Georgetown. | ||
| They gave me security guards. | ||
| At Georgetown as well. | ||
| And you know what else was happening at Georgetown? | ||
| For whatever reason, among social justice warriors, as they're sometimes called, clapping is thought to be triggering. | ||
| And so when they approve of what you or their comrades say, they do jazz hands or clicking. | ||
| And yes, if you watch some of the mobs on campus, they're clicking their fingers. | ||
| Yes, you can see it. | ||
| I just want to say, even as a former radical, like, don't do that. | ||
| Because clapping is like beating. | ||
| Like someone could be beating you. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| It's just, whatever. | ||
| It's just upsetting and distressing. | ||
| And otherizing. | ||
| It's otherizing? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Is that real? | ||
| Otherizing? | ||
| Is that a real term? | ||
| Otherizing. | ||
| You're treating it as the other. | ||
| And by the way, nobody does more otherizing and demonizing than these hardline feminists. | ||
| It's like everything they say men do, not everything, but most of the things they say men do, they do. | ||
| They stereotype, demonize, otherize. | ||
| And they don't just do microaggressions. | ||
| They're macroaggressive. | ||
| They're very rude. | ||
| What is this fashion now among so many feminists to be so snarky and mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't think being mean – I mean men didn't succeed in the world because they were mean and vicious. | ||
| Why do they think that that is – A recipe for success. | ||
| Because it gets effect. | ||
| It has an effect. | ||
| Today in our social media climate, the fact that we have this new world, this new environment, those snarky posts get the most reaction. | ||
| They get the most retweets and favorites, and they get the most likes. | ||
| And that is seen as currency. | ||
| It's seen as like a social media currency. | ||
| And so by attacking people, you can also get them to respond and engage you. | ||
| And it's a way they seek out High-profile people that might have a difference of opinion with them, they'll seek them out and insult them and force them to engage. | ||
| Because you read something insulting about it, you're like, whoa! | ||
| Like I told you, when I'd been called a male rights advocate by this really obese feminist woman, I was like, what is that mean? | ||
| What is an MRA? And I had to read it. | ||
| I just blocked her. | ||
| I'm like, I'm not going to engage with someone who just insults me and just says a bunch of insulting shit and calls me a moron and an asshole and all these different things. | ||
| I never even communicated with them. | ||
| I had no communication with her whatsoever. | ||
| She just decided to single out. | ||
| And it wasn't just one. | ||
| There was quite a few of them. | ||
| And it's because a lot of people will react. | ||
| You get that, and it's your automatic reaction to react to them. | ||
| You know, that's why they're yelling things at you. | ||
| They're trying to get you to react to them. | ||
| If they just talk to you in a normal way, and there's a bunch of people talking in a normal way. | ||
| Yeah, I used to be drawn in on Twitter. | ||
| Not because I wanted to react. | ||
| I always... | ||
| I am... | ||
| It is the mother and the professor in me. | ||
| If someone's carrying on, I want to reason with them. | ||
| And then I have learned that it's a waste of time in some cases. | ||
| But we're all learning. | ||
| We're all learning how to handle this new world. | ||
| Write, engage, late at night. | ||
| It keeps you up. | ||
| I've been tweeting like at 3 in the morning. | ||
| I think this is insane because I've gotten some exchange or I'm watching an exchange. | ||
| It's not a good thing to do. | ||
| Do not tweet after midnight. | ||
| I think it's wonderful in a lot of ways. | ||
| And I hope that all this ridiculousness is something that's going to be ironed out. | ||
| And I think that this is something that all human beings are starting to learn how to navigate. | ||
| The world of social media. | ||
| And that this kind of behavior where someone just immediately gets snarky and becomes insulting just in order to get attention, is going to be laughed at. | ||
| I think that's a good point. | ||
| It's going to evolve and there will become sort of unwritten rules of the game. | ||
| And I hope one of the rules is don't join a hitter, a Twitter hate mob, and attack some hapless professor or someone that you heard from somebody told a joke. | ||
| And by the way, can we just leave jokes alone altogether? | ||
| I mean, let comedians tell their jokes. | ||
| You can't now have a comedian on campus because everyone will be triggered. | ||
| Well, comedians are bullies. | ||
| If you make a joke about something, you're a bully. | ||
| If someone disagrees... | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I grew up... | |
| People like George Carlin were... | ||
| That was where they were. | ||
| They were on campus. | ||
| And, you know... | ||
| Yeah, most of us won't work on campuses now. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Yeah, a big percentage of comics won't work on campuses. | ||
| And apparently they're little committees. | ||
| I read this story about little committees who decide which comedian to invite, and they have to try out. | ||
| And there are so many ways you can strike out. | ||
| I mean, forget the obvious ways. | ||
| Everything is offensive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everything is offensive. | ||
| Jokes are offensive. | ||
| Jokes are triggering. | ||
| I had a guy... | ||
| I mean, this is going way back. | ||
| This is going back to the early 90s. | ||
| I used to do a lot of colleges when I was coming up, but it was way easier back then. | ||
| There was no social media. | ||
| It was not hard to do. | ||
| And this was like... | ||
| Early, like, 90, 91, 92, pre-internet, I used to do a lot of them, because it was a great way to make money. | ||
| But I remember one time, I used to do this Q&A thing with kids. | ||
| They would ask me questions, and, you know, I would just joke around after the show. | ||
| So I'd do my show, like, I didn't have anywhere to go, so I'd have. | ||
| And so the guy goes... | ||
| The guy goes, I forget what he said, something about tell a joke. | ||
| So I said, two Jews walk into a bar. | ||
| They buy it. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| It's a joke. | ||
| And he came up to me after the show and said, that was really offensive, what you said about it. | ||
| And I could tell he was testing the waters of whether or not he should actually be offended. | ||
| I go, you're really offended? | ||
| I go, what's offensive about that? | ||
| It was a stereotype. | ||
| It's stereotypical. | ||
| And I'm like, well, it's about Jewish people buying things, being successful in business. | ||
| It's not negative at all. | ||
| He was perplexed. | ||
| I find it funny. | ||
| But it's a stupid old street joke. | ||
| But saying that it's offensive was an automatic reaction to this young kid that hadn't yet experienced this wave of social justice warriors that were reinforcing these stupid ideas he has in his head. | ||
| Like, he had decided that since I was saying something about an ethnicity or... | ||
| Just even saying it. | ||
| Yeah, it was a minority, and just even saying a joke about it was offensive, which is clearly not an offensive joke. | ||
| It's about Jewish people being good at business. | ||
| I mean, that's the whole—it's not even a good joke. | ||
| It's terrible, but I'll never forget it. | ||
| Him coming up to me and saying that I found that really offensive. | ||
| I'm like, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| You didn't think that was offensive? | ||
| That's not offensive. | ||
| It's just not. | ||
| It's not good, but it's certainly not offensive. | ||
| Well, I hope he doesn't see any Mel Brooks movies or listen to Jackie Mason or, you know— Well, it's just, it's that thing where you're young and you want to kind of establish your viewpoint and you want to separate yourself from the fools of the world and say that, you know, you're going to be different than your parents and you're going to branch out on your own and you're, you know, you're a fucking young mind. | ||
| They're 18 years old, 19, 20, whatever they are, they're off away on their own, staying in dorms and reinforcing each other's terrible ideas together. | ||
| And some of them more sensitive than others. | ||
| And some of them grew up in a more suppressive environment than others. | ||
| Some of them more easily led than others. | ||
| And some of them will have ideas that they will nurture when they're 18 or 19 years old. | ||
| They will completely abandon when they get into their 20s. | ||
| And they realize how preposterous those ideas were. | ||
| They get completely indoctrinated and then they go on to become a part of the very system that indoctrinated them themselves. | ||
| I think that's a lot of the fears that a lot of people looking at it from the outside, like me, that's a lot of the fears that we have. | ||
| Like we wonder, like this is sort of a closed loop The closed loop of becoming an academic yourself and reinforcing these ideas without a whole lot of interaction with the real world, without a whole lot of interaction with people that have differing opinions that may be just as intelligent as you, and maybe you can learn from each other or come up with some sort of a middle ground, but that's not tolerated. | ||
| You don't tolerate anybody that looks at these ideas from a different perspective or from A singular point of view. | ||
| It all has to be in this very rigid, ideological, predetermined pattern of behavior that everybody locks into. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, we need a rebellion, a youth rebellion. | ||
| Don't you think that's kind of going on, though, the reaction to these videos? | ||
| There's a rebellion. | ||
| It is a rebellion, and this will give you heart. | ||
| When you read, as I do, because on Twitter people send me these things, You'll read an article in the Yale Daily News or the Amherst, whatever newspaper they have. | ||
| People will write something very annoying, PC to the extreme, and then you read the letters. | ||
| And those give you heart because you still see there is still very reasonable people in these colleges who are not buying it. | ||
| But they have to Be somehow empowered. | ||
| I don't know how to do that. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know how to do that either. | ||
| But I think information and open discourse and just those – that's exactly what's going on right now with the internet and with social media. | ||
| Those two things are the most important aspects of a society evolving and a society without – Really without anybody running it. | ||
| I mean, the thing about colleges and the thing about a university course is that you have a professor, you want to get a good grade, the professor has an ideology that they're sort of passing on to you, and you want to try to manipulate them a little bit and write in a way that you think that they will appeal to their sensibilities, their ideology. | ||
| Well, the internet doesn't have that. | ||
| I mean, you have giant groups of people, but ultimately you just have people. | ||
| I mean, that's really what it is. | ||
| There's a lot of different kinds of ideas that are floating around out there, and you're going to find people that resonate with your ideas and people that don't. | ||
| And along the way, you're going to have people that read some of the things that you've written or some of the things that you've said. | ||
| And take it down and call you a fool. | ||
| And you're going to have to look at that. | ||
| And you're going to have to go, wow, maybe when I yelled at that Yale dean, I was being a fucking idiot. | ||
| Maybe that is grandstanding. | ||
| Maybe that is preposterous. | ||
| And maybe I would not have done that if I was alone with him. | ||
| Maybe that is just something that I did because I was caught up in the fervor of the group think. | ||
| By the way, that professor. | ||
| Who really shamed herself by acting out, and it got on the media, the one from the University of Missouri, the communications professor. | ||
| She wrote an apology. | ||
| And I thought it was... | ||
| I mean, I'm willing to forgive her because it was heartfelt. | ||
| And she did say that she was sort of horrified to watch herself. | ||
| And so I'm thinking, now, she may be just a... | ||
| Good for her. | ||
| But I thought people were saying, oh, she's just trying to keep her job. | ||
| Well, first of all, I don't think we should be after people's jobs in that way. | ||
| She did teach a lot of weird courses. | ||
| She taught a course on... | ||
| Abstinence and... | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Fifty Shades of Grey. | ||
| Is it 50 or whatever? | ||
| 50, yeah. | ||
| She taught us a course on Fifty Shades of Grey and she taught a course on... | ||
| Abstinence and the Twilight series. | ||
| Oh, she did? | ||
| Yes, about how Edward didn't have sex with her. | ||
| Meanwhile, she wrote Edward was 17 years old. | ||
| The fuck he was. | ||
| He was 100 years old. | ||
| He just died when he was 17. He became a vampire. | ||
| That's a goddamn pedophile movie. | ||
| Saying he's 17 years old, you should check your privilege, lady. | ||
| Yeah, and her privilege. | ||
| But I didn't... | ||
| I need a jazz hands, but it's hard to do that for audio. | ||
| Most of our audience is audio only. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Massive amount. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, good. | |
| They don't see my tics. | ||
| You look great. | ||
| Don't worry about it. | ||
| I touch my hair too much. | ||
| It's not a bad thing. | ||
| If I had hair, I'd throw it over my shoulders. | ||
| I'd flip it. | ||
| Don't you hate sometimes seeing yourself? | ||
| I'm so used to it. | ||
| Oh, you're used to it. | ||
| So I've watched some lectures, and I have tics, and I don't know what to do. | ||
| And I thought, oh, by my age, I'm not going to go change. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you learn a lot about what's annoying to you. | ||
| A lot of people do things that are annoying to other people, and they don't know it. | ||
| You learn a lot about speech tics. | ||
| We were just talking about that in the last podcast we did. | ||
| The expression like, like people say like all the time. | ||
| There's like a thing like that you do like. | ||
| There's like a sophisticated version of um. | ||
| When I'm lecturing, I do a lot of ums. | ||
| That's normal. | ||
| You're thinking. | ||
| We sort of accept it. | ||
| That's why it's so impressive when you meet a guy like Sam Harris that can get through... | ||
| An hours long conversation with no preparation whatsoever and never um. | ||
| And speak in perfect paragraphs. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know how the fuck he does it. | ||
| Did you ever hear Christopher Hitchens? | ||
| No, no, I never had a chance. | ||
| I would have loved to get drunk with that guy. | ||
| I know. | ||
| As long as I didn't say anything stupid and have him eviscerate me. | ||
| I remember him with Mos Def. | ||
| He was on Real Time with Bill Maher with Mos Def, and Mos Def didn't know what the fuck he was talking about. | ||
| Who I love as a rapper. | ||
| I think he's an awesome musician. | ||
| But he was talking about the difference between the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and he didn't understand the difference between the two, and Hitchens just lit them up. | ||
| He was drunk. | ||
| He had a couple of drinks in him, and he just decided, like, this is the problem. | ||
| These people with opinions that have never bothered to research exactly what they're talking about, and he just lit them up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You do not want to be taken down by someone like Christopher Hitchens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He was very funny and provocative in a lot of ways, too. | ||
| He wrote that Vanity Fair piece, which is very funny, about women not being funny. | ||
| You know, why women aren't funny. | ||
| Which, of course... | ||
| It's not really true. | ||
| There's a lot of women that are really funny, but he was pointing to the fact that women that are funny are kind of like, they're butchy in almost like a masculine sort of a way. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he's not really right about that, but he's- He's not right about that, because Sarah Silverman's one of the funniest people on the planet, and she's very feminine. | ||
| She's not butchy at all. | ||
| Yeah, but even going back, do you remember Madeline Kahn? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| She's so funny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very funny. | |
| She was fabulous. | ||
| Joan Rivers. | ||
| I mean, look, Joan Rivers is one of the best all-time comedians. | ||
| Best. | ||
| She was vicious. | ||
| Don't you miss her? | ||
| Yes, I do miss her. | ||
| Oh, we need her now. | ||
| Look what's going on on campus. | ||
| She would be so great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Well, she was back then even. | ||
| She was talking about it. | ||
| I mean, when she was alive, she was talking about how ridiculous it is that these kids are fucking babies, you know? | ||
| And she would be... | ||
| And young women need to see people like her. | ||
| I mean, she was funny and she was smart. | ||
| She was fast. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of young up-and-coming comedians right now, too, that are women that are really hilarious, that are very feminine. | ||
| You don't have to be... | ||
| And then they should be one thing. | ||
| They can be feminine, but they shouldn't be politically correct. | ||
| It would be terrible if we had a group of feminists that did that, actually practicing comedians that would then start policing. | ||
| I don't see that, but it has happened in other professions. | ||
| Well, there are some male feminist comedians, and they're fucking brutal. | ||
| They're brutal. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Are they listened to? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, they have small groups of people that subscribe to their ideas, and they're happy to join in, and they think they're great, and they're reinforced by the echo chamber, but they're saying nonsense. | ||
| But I would think comedians, like the atheists, these are skeptics. | ||
| They are people who thought through for them. | ||
| You would think that they would not be vulnerable. | ||
| To sort of a political hijacking by a group that believes a lot of things that are demonstrably false, and yet they were vulnerable. | ||
| Not all of them. | ||
| I mean, there was a division. | ||
| It was very divisive. | ||
| Well, people don't like being criticized, you know? | ||
| And if you're criticized and you're mocked and you're taken down because of your ideas, you'll soften those ideas. | ||
| You'll bend with the wind. | ||
| Yeah, but I'm saying if it happens to comedians, it won't happen. | ||
| You know, it just can't, because it's going to be so tempting for someone to come and... | ||
| And you just blow it away. | ||
| The way we got to be comedians in the first place is by resisting all that stuff. | ||
| The real problem becomes when they become successful in maybe another arena, like maybe they become a talk show host or they have a big important job with a network on some sitcom or something like that and they don't want to rock the boat. | ||
| You'll notice a lot of comedians, they get sitcoms and then the sitcoms become really popular and they pretty much stop performing. | ||
| They stopped doing stand-up. | ||
| That happened with a lot of them. | ||
| Jerry Seinfeld didn't perform for a long time. | ||
| Because you can be... | ||
| Tim Allen. | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| You can get in trouble. | ||
| I know of guys who had sitcoms where the network actually told them to not do stand-up. | ||
| Just put it aside for a while. | ||
| That was... | ||
| What the fuck's his name from... | ||
| The John Stamos sitcom. | ||
| Bob Saget. | ||
| Bob Saget, who was a really dirty act, but was on a family sitcom. | ||
| They shut him down. | ||
| He stopped doing stand-up for a long time. | ||
| Well, I wish we had George Carlin. | ||
| I wish we had Mort Saul. | ||
| Mort Saul's still around. | ||
| He's still around. | ||
| Yeah, he tweeted at me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did he? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| He's on Twitter? | ||
| About a year ago. | ||
| Oh, my goodness. | ||
| Yeah, Mort Saul's on Twitter. | ||
| He's still doing some stuff. | ||
| There's a few of those guys that are still out there. | ||
| You know, Dick Gregory is actually at the Comedy Store this Sunday. | ||
| I'm going, man. | ||
| I'm going for sure. | ||
| I mean, while he's still alive, I want to come see him. | ||
| Dick Greger is the guy who, I mean, he's not just a comedian and an activist, but he actually is the guy who brought Geraldo Rivera, the Zapruder footage, where he showed it on television. | ||
| Like, I think it was 10 years after Kennedy was assassinated that showed Kennedy's head violently going back and to the left and made people start to consider the fact that maybe he was shot by someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald and started all those conspiracy theories. | ||
| So he's a fascinating kind of a guy. | ||
| He is. | ||
| My father was a big fan of his. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lately... | |
| I don't know. | ||
| He's taken some odd positions, but... | ||
| On what? | ||
| Dick Gregory? | ||
| On what? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| I just remember thinking, what happened with him? | ||
| But people do that, and then they come back. | ||
| Well, also, they get really old. | ||
| He's fucking wacky. | ||
| I'm sure he was... | ||
| In his prime, he was so funny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he's a very important guy. | ||
| And it goes back to Lenny Bruce. | ||
| I mean, he's gone, but those... | ||
| That spirit. | ||
| I'm sure it's alive. | ||
| Because it's the spirit of comedy. | ||
| There's a lot of those out. | ||
| Bill Burr's a great guy for that today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's very funny. | |
| There's a lot of those people out there that are just, they need to be mocked. | ||
| And, you know, for comedians, that's fuel. | ||
| It's like, we feed on dry wood. | ||
| A fire catches dry wood. | ||
| We need a comedian invasion of the campuses. | ||
| But we're not going to do it. | ||
| It's not worth it. | ||
| There's too many angry people. | ||
| We'll crack one joke and we'll get angry quote-unquote hashtag activists that will attack you for days and days. | ||
| Chris Rock said that. | ||
| He said, I'm not going to go. | ||
| It's not worth it. | ||
| They'll start chanting in the middle of your show and disrupt your performance. | ||
| They think that their sensibilities are more important than your performance. | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| Make them go out there and earn a living, pay bills, get drunk, do stupid things, get their car towed, then come to a show. | ||
| Come to a show when you understand reality. | ||
| Come to a show when you understand bills and frustrations. | ||
| Come to a show when you're an adult. | ||
| Right now you're a baby. | ||
| You're a child who's essentially gone from your house to some sort of a holding penitentiary. | ||
| They're indoctrinating you with all these wacky ideas. | ||
| You want to yell at people. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap this thing up? | ||
| We just did three hours. | ||
| Are you serious? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| Flies by. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| That's how it goes. | ||
| It's been fun. | ||
| Yeah, it's been great. | ||
| In your man cave here. | ||
| Have people seen this? | ||
| Some people have seen this. | ||
| It's getting more manly. | ||
| That's a recent addition, that mule deer head. | ||
| That's a recent one. | ||
| But yeah, it's all stuff that either people have given me, like this little Biggie statue or this Buddha. | ||
| I don't know, it just sort of accumulates. | ||
| More stuff that I put here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But this is where I told you before the show started, I have to do this. | ||
| Because in my house, I'm a little bitch. | ||
| My house has been completely womanified. | ||
| Well, I recognize things that my sons or husband might have brought in and I would have... | ||
| Pushed aside! | ||
| I found a place for them in the attic. | ||
| I have things like this in the attic. | ||
| Yeah, when I shot that elk that's out in the hallway, my wife was like, what are you going to do with this? | ||
| I'm like, don't worry, I'll bring it to the office. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| That's how it goes. | ||
| Listen, thank you very much for doing this. | ||
| I really appreciate you flying out here. | ||
| And thank you for doing that video series. | ||
| I think it's excellent. | ||
| I think it's really important. | ||
| It's important for people to see that you are a kind and thoughtful person who is just, you are expressing yourself because you feel that there is an unchecked point. | ||
| Or that there's a position that a lot of people have sort of taken on feminism that's not necessarily in line with how you think the true nature of it was supposed to be when it was originally established. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And if they show me I'm wrong, I'll change my point of view. | ||
| I'm open. | ||
| But don't cut off debate. | ||
| That's what's happened. | ||
| So I had to go on YouTube. | ||
| I'll visit the campuses, but mainly now I'm making videos for maybe the kids younger than the millennials. | ||
| They're going to come along and rebel against these people in college now. | ||
| I think very likely that's possible. | ||
| I think, as we were saying before, that these people that are just learning how to navigate social media, and we're learning sort of the... | ||
| The do's and don'ts, the etiquette that's involved in communicating with people online. | ||
| And I think the more intelligent, rational people are realizing, well, you should communicate with people online the way you should communicate with them if they were right there in front of you. | ||
| And if we start doing that, and I also think that this technology that we're experiencing right now is really the beginning of some sort of a much more invasive interfacing between human beings. | ||
| Invasive, I should say, Instead of invasive, it'd be much more comprehensive. | ||
| I think we're going to get some sort of a visual interaction with each other and maybe even some sort of a sharing of data where it's not even based on reading things, but you're actually going to be able to transmit thoughts to each other. | ||
| They've already figured out a way to transmit words. | ||
| It's like an extension of our minds, and then there can be merging. | ||
| Oh my goodness, what are we going to have? | ||
| I would like to live to be 500 or 1,000, just to see what happens. | ||
| You might live to be 500 when you look at what science is doing today. | ||
| Things are getting very strange. | ||
| I think I'm just going to miss that. | ||
| Darn! | ||
| Well, if you do miss it, I think what you're doing, like I said, is very important, and I think you're opening up a lot of people's eyes. | ||
| You're a great spokesperson for it because you're balanced and rational, and it's easy to accept. | ||
| You're a nice person, so what you're saying is coming from your point of view. | ||
| You're not grading on people. | ||
| It's nice. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| So I want to thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much for your series and thank you for doing this. | ||
| And if you ever have anything you need promoted, please just let us know. | ||
| I'd be happy to get it out there for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Christina Summers, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Show's over. | ||
| Good night. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bye. |
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