Christina Sommers critiques modern feminism’s shift from equality to female chauvinism, exposing flawed advocacy stats like Mary Koss’s one-in-four campus rape claim and ideological distortions in gender studies—e.g., "ovular" replacing "seminar." She highlights mob tactics (safe rooms, armed escorts) silencing dissent at Oberlin and Georgetown, while Joe Rogan notes social media’s role in amplifying outrage, from Nancy Grace’s Duke Lacrosse backlash to comedians facing harassment. Both agree that resilience and open debate, not censorship, are key to dismantling extremism and fostering societal progress. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.