Andrew Clavin and Christina Hoff Sommers dissect the left’s "war on manhood," tracing its roots from Harvey Weinstein scandals to campus moral panics where "vigilante feminism" demonizes all men, citing Princeton freshmen avoiding women due to fear of false accusations. Sommers frames this as "fainting couch feminism"—a fragile, victim-centric ideology that conflates predatory outliers with universal male guilt—while Clavin contrasts it with Christianity’s acceptance of evil in a free world, using Stephen Wilford’s faith-driven confrontation with the Texas shooter as a counterpoint to leftist calls for government suppression. They warn that socialism’s historical suppression of God and the decline of gentlemanly values leave boys without moral frameworks, arguing that patriarchy’s flaws don’t justify its collapse, especially when alternatives like Houellebecq’s dystopian Submission loom. The episode ends by framing modern gender battles as a clash between embodied spirituality and secular utopianism, where the left’s rejection of "thoughts and prayers" reveals deeper ideological divides. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, sometimes on this show, we fall into the habit of condemning all leftists as godless buffoons who hate America and everything it stands for and who sort of preem themselves on being having this kind of elite status that they in no way deserve.
We'll also have Christina Hofsommer here to talk about the war against manhood and Harvey Weinstein and all sorts of things.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is ticky boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped, tipsy-topsy, no one does it bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoora.
All right, it is mailbag eve.
It is the day before.
The mailbag, you want to get your questions in if you're a subscriber, if you're paying your lousy 10 bucks a month, or if you've paid 100 bucks for a whole year and you're sitting there sipping your leftist tears tumbler, which you get with a year's subscription, you can ask questions.
The way you do it is you go on, let's let me get this right because I'm always afraid I'm gonna press the podcast button and then you press the Andrew Clavin show.
Andrew Clavin show and then there is a mailbag button.
You can ask anything you want, personal questions, religious questions.
We really get some great questions.
And yes, so go deep, go deep, because the answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
But you have to subscribe.
So that's the mailbag coming up.
I also just want to say, I have to say this, you know, we've been touting, I've been plugging this thing, Another Kingdom, this fantasy suspense story that I've done with Michael Knowles.
Knowles, I wrote it, Knowles is performing it.
And it's been just getting these great reviews.
It's getting great numbers.
It's really doing well.
And I hope you'll go on iTunes and subscribe and rate it.
It helps us.
But it finally got a not, I mean, it's getting ecstatic reviews, and it's finally got a not ecstatic review.
Another Kingdom Shave Club00:02:45
The guy loved the story, loved the story, but he hated Knowles.
He says, I do not know what Knowles has on Clavin or the Daily Wire that they keep involving him in projects.
There has to be something in the closet to continue to push this no-talent hack into every aspect of the Daily Wire sphere.
And I just wanted to address that.
You remember yesterday I was talking about the fact that Knowles inexplicably has engaged this absolutely terrific woman, Elisa, and we're trying to get her free, basically.
We're trying to convince him to let her go without anybody getting hurt.
And so you have to subscribe to Another Kingdom.
And eventually, if we give him enough love, we may be able to coax him out of the house.
And Elise can then run out the back door.
And now everything is explained.
Yeah, exactly.
Now, if there is one thing that I know about, look at me.
You just have to look at me.
You can guess what I know about it.
It is shaving because I do a lot of shaving every day.
I have a lot of real estate that has to be shaved.
And even before I came here to work at the Daily Wire, even before they became my sponsor, I was a member of the Daily Dollar Shave Club, dollarshaveclub.com.
And the reason is they, instead of going to the store, first of all, instead of going to the store and getting a disposable razor, which, you know, you just have to wait till it runs out.
And the way you find that it runs out is blood is streaming.
Like, and also they lock them away.
I guess people must shoplift them because they lock them away.
So you just get, you just sign on for the kind of razor you want.
They send it to you.
And they have all kinds of other products that really make shaving kind of fun.
I use their butter.
They have this clear butter so you can actually see what you're doing.
I started out with what they call the humble twin, just two blades.
Now I'm using their super duper razor, which is incredible.
I mean, I shaved with it about two hours ago.
It is still shape.
There's so many blades on it.
It is still passing over my head, keeping me great shave.
Just so much easier.
Plus, it's the holidays coming, so it's a great time to give the Dollar Shave Club a try, and you can get your first month of their best razor along with travel-sized versions of shave butter, body cleanser, and yes, even butt wipes.
I have not tried these for just $5.
$5, they send you a kit.
It's very cool.
They send you a kit, and after that, replacement cartridges ship for just a few bucks a month.
It's the DSC starter set, and you can get yours for just $5 exclusively at dollarshaveclub.com/slash clavin.
Dollarshaveclub.com/slash clavin, and for just five bucks, they will send you their starter kit.
And then it just is so easy to do after this.
You don't have to take any trips to the store, and they have all kinds of products, and it just shows up.
And you can press it, if you don't want it for one month, you can just press a button to skip the month.
It's really easy.
All right.
Prayers And Thoughts00:14:28
I want to talk about God.
I'm going to talk about God.
We're going to get.
Yeah, I know, I know, boo God.
Well, that's what we've been hearing for two days.
Boo God.
So, you know, I don't actually like the way God is presented.
I especially hate the way that God is presented in the arts and stories.
You know, Christian art used to be the greatest art on earth, and now it's kind of anodyne.
It's sort of smiley-faced.
Everything is going to be good because Jesus is here.
And then when we die, we float up to heaven on these golden wings.
And you wonder why people don't believe this stuff, you know.
And it's like, it really is interesting.
And I'm not, you know, when I was going through the struggle to convert, I talk about this in the Great Good Thing, my memoir, about how I went from being an agnostic, really an atheist Jew, to being a believing Christian.
And it was a struggle, you know.
And as I was struggling, one of the things I was afraid of is that I'm a very hard-boiled novelist.
The stuff I write, the stories I write, have a very hard edge to them.
And I kept saying, please, Lord, whatever happens, don't turn me into a Christian novelist, because I didn't want to end up writing these stories like, you know, God is Not Dead and the prayer, the war room, and all these stories that make a gazillion dollars.
And I have nothing against them.
They represent faith in the same way that romantic comedies represent love.
That is, they represent a fantasy of faith, and there's nothing wrong with going to the movies to catch up on your fantasies and all this stuff.
But there really is a problem in describing the world in Christian terms because what you're talking about is something invisible, which is faith.
And I don't even like C.S. Lewis.
C.S. Lewis is one of my favorite writers.
I love his philosophy and his Christian writing, but I'm not a big fan of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe stories, the Narnia stories.
And the reason I'm not is because they start out with great premises, great fairy tale premises, and then Aslan, the lion who represents Christ, shows up and everything is solved.
And that's kind of the problem with Christian writing: Jesus solves everything.
And in our life, of course, we have faith that everything has a broader framework in which we live, and that will, in fact, turn everything to the good.
But in our life, there's a lot of grief and pain.
And one of the things I'm struggling with now as a writer, this happened to Wordsworth.
Wordsworth became a Christian and never wrote a good poem again.
And people say, well, he kind of lost it.
But no, he solved the problems he was writing about.
And I'm struggling with this in my own writing.
I think I've actually found a way forward.
And Another Kingdom is one of my first products in this thing: how do I write about the suffering of the world from a position of faith?
And how do I write stuff that's not smiley, happy talk stuff?
Some of the people who listen to Another Kingdom are complaining because there's some language in it.
I actually wrote the first draft, the entire first draft, without any cursing in it.
And I just thought, this is not the world.
I'm not doing my job as an artist.
As a guy who God appointed to be an artist, I'm not doing my job of representing the world.
And so I went through it and actually put the cursing back in just where it would be.
There's not a million curse words.
It's just where the guy would curse.
He curses.
So I do not like this idea of Christianity as being a kind of panacea.
And that's what the left is reacting to.
So after the tragedy in Texas, people offered thoughts and prayers.
And you know, the left just comes out and it's ugly.
They come out and they hate on you for this thoughts and prayers thing.
Some of this stuff was really, when Paul Ryan had this tweet, this actor Will Wheaton just called him a filthy name because he was having the prayers.
And Wheaton, to his credit, apologized.
He said he was speaking in anger.
You know, I get that.
You know, I was angry too.
I understand, so he made a mistake.
But still, a lot of this stuff came out.
And if you're wondering, well, let's take it, we have a montage of the news selling this meme of like, let's not go to the thoughts and prayers stuff.
They were already praying.
Thoughts and prayers did not stop an oversight from the justice system, which enabled a guy who attacked his stepson and assaulted his wife from getting a gun.
Thoughts and prayers didn't stop a troubled person from buying assault-grade weapons that took the lives of 26 people in an instant.
We see a pattern in elected officials saying we need to send our thoughts and prayers to the families, to the victims, but then not proposing any action.
And this morning, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapaul of Seattle responded: They were praying when it happened.
They don't need our prayers.
They need us to address the gun violence crisis and pass sensible regulation.
Thoughts and prayers are not enough.
Moments of silence are not enough.
Maybe, Mr. Speaker, instead of a moment of silence, the American people could get a moment of action.
Now is the time for action.
We are past the point of platitudes and prayers.
Send the people of Texas your thoughts and your prayers.
But first, send them money.
How about that?
Yeah?
Send them money.
But right now, these thoughts and prayers and sympathies have become a mask for inaction.
Our thoughts and prayers are not even close to enough.
Now, a lot of people wonder where this came from because it's like a talking point.
They're all doing it.
I believe it came from a comedy routine by Anthony Jeselnik that was put out on Netflix, I think, in 2015.
And Jeselnik does this routine.
I really like him.
He's a really funny comedian.
And his routine is: I'm a bad guy.
I'm the guy who says all the terrible things.
I have no heart.
I'm creepy.
You know, all this stuff.
And he does this routine.
That's his persona as he does this thing.
And he did this routine.
And I think this is where this all started.
People will say, Anthony, what's funny about Aurora?
What's funny about the Boston Marathon?
What's funny about your grandmother's funeral?
Nothing.
Nothing is funny about those things.
That's where I come in.
So I see these texts and I'm like, oh no, what happened?
But I also think I've got a job to do.
This is who I'm making fun of when I make a joke on Twitter the day of a tragedy.
The people who see something horrible happen in the world, and they run to the internet, and they run to their social media, their Facebook, their Twitter, whatever they got, and they all write down the exact same thing.
My thoughts and prayers.
My thoughts and prayers with the people in Aurora.
My thoughts and prayers with the families in Boston.
Do you know what that's worth?
Nothing.
So the whole routine, the whole show, is called Thoughts and Prayers.
And I believe that this is where it started because I didn't hear this before.
So think about that for a minute.
This is the left basically looking at this guy playing a dirtbag.
That's his persona and saying, yeah, that's what we want to be like.
We want to be like this guy, you know, and they're doing it seriously.
But I wouldn't pick on them for it if it weren't inherent in their philosophy.
Remember back in the 2012 convention when they tried to put, they had taken, purposely taken God out of the platform.
They had taken any mention of God out of the platform.
And the mayor of Los Angeles got up and he took a voice vote, can we put God back in?
And they started booing him because he said, well, the eyes have it.
The third time he tried it, he said, the eyes have it.
And it was clear he was wrong.
The people in the crowd were right.
You couldn't tell that the eyes had won the day, but the people who were, so they were yelling at him because he put God back in basically against the will of the Democratic Party.
They booed, they denied God thrice.
It seems to me that has happened once before, but I can't remember.
Yeah.
It sounds familiar, but yeah.
So, you know, this whole idea didn't save them.
It didn't save them.
And of course, Christians don't think that it's going to save you.
Christians don't think that we can pray and get only good things in the world.
We know that there's suffering in the world.
Why do we know this?
Because God has made us free.
He has freed us for freedom.
And we know that in a world of freedom, bad things must be allowed.
See, this is the whole difference between Christianity, in which we understand that there's evil in the world and it's going to have its say at times, and the left, which thinks it can basically construct a government big enough to snuff evil out.
But let's just take this from another point of view for just a moment, because there's a big narrative fail here.
The guy who stopped this killer, and I haven't even bothered to learn the killer's name because I don't even care what his name is.
God knows his name.
He's in enough trouble without me knowing it and without me spreading it around.
But the guy who shot this bad guy, first of all, it was the government that screwed up, right?
This guy had been convicted of beating up his wife and his child terribly, beating up this toddler, and he had been cashiered out of the Army, the Air Force, and the Air Force forgot somehow, neglected to put that into the records so that he couldn't get a gun because if it had been in the records, it would have shown up on his security check and they wouldn't have given him the gun.
So the government basically made a mistake because the government is not very competent.
It's never very competent.
And so that's the first thing.
So more laws are not going to help if the government can't do its job.
Anyway, the laws were in place.
They're also attacking the NRA.
But the guy who shot the bad guy, Stephen Wilford, the plumber who lived right around the corner from the church, he was an NRA instructor and, of course, a gun owner.
And Steve Crowder did a great, our pal Steve Crowder did a great interview with him yesterday.
And he talked about where his power came from as he confronted this guy.
And by the way, you will notice he's got a kind of white Santa Claus beard on.
And the reason he's got this, he's grown, he's a real beard.
And the reason he's got that beard on is because every year he and the guys from this Baptist church that was assaulted, they get on their motorcycles and they deliver gifts to kids who don't have anything.
And so he grows a big white beard so he'll look a little bit more like Santa Claus.
So that's who this guy is.
So here is his description to Crowder of his confrontation with this guy.
This is cut number one.
My daughter said that it had an AR-15, but when I saw him, he had a handgun.
Okay.
And he had a tactical helmet on, like a SWAT team would use, with a black visor.
And he had Kevlar vest, and you could tell it was a bullet vest.
He had that on.
And, you know, I'm a Christian, sure.
And I believe at that point, and maybe this sounds a little off, just some of your viewers that aren't Christians, I believe the Holy Spirit was on me because I had the presence of mind to look at what was going on.
And as we exchanged fire, I noticed that the side was one of those tactical vests that Bel crows across.
Meaning he has Kevlar in the front, Kevlar in the back, nothing in the side.
So he saw the opening in the Kevlar and he shot it.
And he says the Holy Spirit was on him.
That's what we're praying for.
That's what people are praying for.
They're praying that as we go through this incredible torment of life, this wild storm of life where the waves are rising, the dark is falling over us.
We know what the world is like because Christ told us what the world was like.
We're praying that the Holy Spirit is going to be with us and show us which direction we're going in.
You know, Molly Hemingway said this best.
She said, when we're talking about guns, since we know every time the narrative just collapses, right?
The NRA guy is the hero, the God guy is the hero, the God is the hero, God who lifts this guy up and lets him do what he needed to do.
All of these left-wing narratives fail, so we're obviously not actually seriously debating whether what they say is any good or not.
What Molly Hemingway said was that we're really debating whether government can be big enough to suppress evil.
And of course, the answer, as every Christian knows, is no, because evil, this is a world of evil.
You know, so you know, the choice, the choice is not between God and freedom.
Like if you believe in God, you're not going to be free.
The choice is between whether God is God or government is God.
That's really the choice that we're trying to make here.
So here at the Daily Wire, it's really interesting.
We have so many different kinds of Christian worshipers.
And of course, we have Ben, who is a Jewish worshiper.
And we've got Knowles, who's a Catholic, and he's always giving Jeremy Boring, who is the God-king of the Daily Wire, who has a different point of view.
He's always giving him a hard time.
They drive each other crazy in a good way.
And Jeremy is what's called an anti-nomian, which I think it means Jeremy believes in God, but he doesn't believe in gnomes.
I think that's what no, that's gnome.
It's from a Greek word meaning law.
He believes that Jesus has replaced the Old Testament law, and so that now we are only saved by faith in Christ alone.
And then there are people involved with the Daily Wire, some of our funders who believe the exact opposite, who believe that Jesus grafts us on to the branch of the tree of Judaism so that we still have to obey the laws as they're outlined in the Old Testament.
And so we have all kinds of different people.
And I'm kind of like this little guy on the side because I come, because it took me 50 years of agnosticism to come to Christ, because I will start out from a totally different place without the language and the traditions and all this stuff.
I don't care.
I don't care whether the transubstantiation people have burned each other over the question of whether bread and wine actually becomes the substance of Christ, changes its substance to become the body and blood of Christ, or whether it's just symbolic.
I'm an artist.
So those two things are exactly the same to me.
That when something becomes a living symbol, that is its substance changing.
If you're an artist, that's what that means to me.
And of course, it doesn't matter to me whether you follow the Catholic Church.
I believe in what's called the Nicene Creed, which is the statement basically that comes out of the Catholic Church, what we believe in the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit.
We believe that Jesus was killed for us and resurrected and will come back to judge the living and the dead, and all these things.
I can say that creed without any kind of problem whatsoever.
But I don't, I'm not going to fight over the traditions of any one church because what I believe in is the events that started this.
I don't even take the Bible as, you know, the Bible.
Some people worship the Bible as the words themselves.
I don't think of it that way at all.
I believe that the Bible is a report of something that actually happened, a cosmological supernatural event that changes everything.
The birth, death, preaching, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
I'm going to talk about that in a minute, but we're going to have to break.
Press The Button, Find Your Keys00:02:07
So, first, let me talk about Tracker.
That's what I should talk about.
I was a little bit off there in the heavens.
I had to come back to earth for just a minute so we can keep the lights on.
I hope you guys will visit our sponsors because they do keep our lights on.
This is Tracker, T-R-A-C-K-R.
There's no E in Tracker.
But Tracker is this, it's amazing.
I am like totally absent-minded.
I forget, I lose everything.
If there is a zombie apocalypse, I'm going to be the guy who's going like, I have to get my, you know, my buzzsaw.
Oh, I forgot, where did I put my, like, I'd be a zombie in 10 minutes, you know, like I would never be able to find this.
But with tracker, it's the size of a dime, maybe between a dime and a nickel.
It's this little device.
You put it on your stuff, and it will locate your stuff.
So you get an app on your phone, and you press the app, and it will turn on the tracker so that it makes a noise.
You say, where are my keys?
Press the button, you find the keys.
Where's my glasses?
Press the button, you find your glasses.
And if you lose your phone, you press the tracker and the phone starts making a noise.
So you can find your phone.
It really is.
For people like me, it is absolutely great.
I've used it any number of times.
I've used it an embarrassing number of times, both to find my phone and also to find my keys, which kept falling out of my pocket.
They fall out of my pocket because I pull out my phone and the keys fall out.
Yeah.
So I'm just using it all the time.
If you go now to thetracker.com slash clavin, you will get 20% off any order.
That's the tracker, T-R-A-C-K-R.com slash Clavin.
You'll get 20% off any order.
Thetracker.com slash Clavin for 20% off thetracker.com slash Clavin.
And if you lose that money that you saved, you can find it with your tracker.
All right, we've got to say goodbye to YouTube and Facebook.
But you want to subscribe, not just because the mailbag is tomorrow, though that is a really good reason to subscribe.
You also want to subscribe because the conversation is coming up.
And this time the conversation is with Michael Knowles, and you can ask him, what does he have on us?
He'll see if he'll confess to what he has on us that makes us give him all these great jobs, like the Michael Knoll show and another.
I mean, we just keep giving him jobs.
The Body as Expression00:06:33
It's got to be something.
Inexplicable.
This is on Tuesday, November 14th at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific.
It's Michael Knowles answering all your questions.
It streams live on the Daily Wire website, Facebook page, and YouTube channel, and it'll be free.
Everyone can watch this, but only subscribers can ask the questions.
So subscribe today to ask Michael questions and watch him stare into space as he tries to come up with some kind of answer.
Join the conversation, just a lousy $10 a month or $100 for the whole year, plus you get leftist tears, which fills up.
This fills up every time Knowles speaks.
All right, come on over to dailywire.com.
can listen to the rest of the show.
So, you know, when I say these things about the Bible just being a report, I believe it's an inspired report.
I believe it's the book that God means us to have.
And I believe the churches can be these repositories of wisdom.
That's why talking to Catholics, by the way, is always so interesting because they have these thousands of years of collected wisdom.
And I don't treat any of that stuff lightly.
But I do believe that ultimately my conscience, the Holy Spirit working in me, is how I make my decisions.
So if even people that I just love, like the last Pope Benedict or C.S. Lewis, when they say something that doesn't quite hold together for me, I take it very seriously, but I don't always agree.
So what does this cosmological event mean?
Let's just talk about this just for a minute.
It means, first of all, in the resurrection, we see that the moral logic of the world is larger than life.
If that's not true, if we just live and are here and we die, then we would be living an entirely different way.
And one of the things you see on the left is they do want to live an entirely different way, where, you know, sex is a prime value instead of love, and where, you know, pleasure is kind of a guiding light instead of what?
Moral goodness, where you don't have any kind of, you're not trying to discern the wisdom of God.
You're just trying to find out what feels right, who we are, as Barack Obama said.
That's not who we are.
Who cares?
And what I keep saying is, who cares what we are, who we are?
What do we believe?
What are we following?
So that's one thing.
We believe that the moral value, the moral logic of life is bigger than life.
And there are things that happen in life that are evil that will be turned to good over time if we follow God.
Secondly, we believe that we're embodied spirits, that the flesh is a kind of a language.
It's not, people think that this is a long, I won't go into a long philosophical rant about this, but basically with Descartes, people have this idea that there is a spirit and there is the body, and these are two separate things and they kind of communicate through some mysterious way.
But that's not the way to think about it.
The way to think about it is that your body is like a word that expresses an idea.
You know, it's a just like a word expresses an idea.
The idea exists without the word, but you can't communicate the idea.
You can't embody, you can't incarnate the word without, you can't incarnate the idea without the word.
In the same way, you can't incarnate your spirit without flesh.
And so your flesh is a language speaking to you.
But like in all languages, it doesn't quite communicate the full truth.
And that's what they mean when they talk about the fact that we are sinful, that we are corrupt, that we are not fully translating our souls, our spirits, into our flesh.
And that's one of the reasons so often these conversations come down to sex, and I hate that.
But the reason they come down to sex is because sex is so close to the borderline between spirit and flesh.
It's a way of expressing love.
It's a way of creating new life.
But it's also a way of just using people that can be used for just using people and hurting people.
And it drives us to do things that we don't want to do.
It's the way that most people know that there's this disparity in them because that is where you do things that you don't want to do.
You want things that you don't want to want.
You have desires that take you over and do make, you know, and you wake up the next morning and you think, oh my God, what have I done?
You know, that's the way most people experience their sin because most of us don't have a lot of power.
We don't have a lot of power.
And it's in power when you have power, when you're set free from the constraints of other people, that's when you start to experience how bad you are.
If you have a little brother, a little sister, someone who's really smaller than you, you've mistreated them.
You have mistreated them.
That is a place where I don't think there is anybody who has a little brother or little sister who doesn't wake up every now and again at 3 o'clock in the morning, thinking, you know, I shouldn't have done that when he was three.
You know, I shouldn't have done that.
Because when we have power, we do bad things.
So this is the whole thing.
Nowadays, you're starting to hear people bring socialism back.
You know, they want the millennials want socialism.
It's a really wonderful thing on Campus Reform.
Did this tape where they, a video where they interviewed all these kids and they said, yeah, socialism, we like socialism.
And then they asked them, what is socialism?
So here's just that clip of kids answering, what is this thing they want so much?
This is cut 14.
How would you define socialism?
I mean, honestly, that definition gets thrown around a lot.
I'm not exactly sure.
How would you view what socialism is, though?
Economically, what is socialism?
Economically.
All right, you can turn it off.
All right, we're not going to play the whole thing because I want to bring Christina Hoff Summers on.
But the thing is, why are we so opposed to socialism and why does socialism not have God in it?
It's because in the Christian understanding of God, we want the power to be dispersed.
We always want systems that are going to use our sinfulness for good purposes.
That's why we have marriage.
Marriage uses, you know, channels the sexual urge into good purposes.
The same thing with capitalism.
Theoretically, it channels your urge to acquire things, to get power, to get your channels your greed.
It channels your greed into, you know, building stuff and inventing stuff and making stuff that actually the other people in the world want.
When you have socialism, you transfer all the property to the government.
And people think, you know, the left thinks, oh, well, that's going to be great because the government will save us.
But the government just becomes a bunch of powerful people and it becomes the center of power where power is centered.
And that's why socialism always ends.
This is a good time to talk about this because this is the anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
This is the day on which the Russian Revolution was won by the communists, sparking a movement that has resulted in somewhere between 60 million and 160 million deaths.
And it suppressed God everywhere it went, and that was the result.
And so we already know what a world without God looks like.
All right, let us bring on Christina Hoff Summers.
She is one of our favorite guests.
Toxic Masculinity Confusion00:13:44
And I'm sorry, it's been a long time since we had her on.
She's a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a terrific book called Who Stole Feminism and another terrific book called The War Against Boys.
She hosts a video blog on YouTube called The Factual Feminist, and you can find her at CH Summers, S-O-M-M-E-R-S, on Twitter.
Christina, it's good to see you again.
Can you hear me?
Yes, how are you?
All right.
I'm sorry, it's been so long since I've seen you.
So much has happened here, I neglected to bring you on, but I always think that you're somebody I want to be asking questions of because your factual feminism is really a welcome perspective, let's put it that way.
So I want to talk to you first.
I want to get to Harvey Weinstein, some of the sex scandals that I've been sort of dealing with a little bit in Hollywood.
But I want to start by asking you: I wrote this wonderful book called The War Against Boys, and I talk a lot about the war against manhood.
Is that still going on?
And is it, are they winning?
Is the war, or are men losing the war against men?
I think so.
And very little has changed for young men in school.
They're still falling behind.
And yet, there seem to be no efforts to strengthen them.
We had programs to strengthen girls when they were behind in math and science.
There has been nothing for little boys in everything else, reading, writing, school engagement, college matriculation.
But worse than that, there is now a kind of vigilante feminism alooza on campus where men are guilty because accused.
And I see no change there.
If anything, it's intensifying.
So on the campus, you have more and more women and fewer and fewer men.
And the women still think of themselves as victims put upon.
I say the women.
I don't mean the women.
This is not the majority.
It's a small but very vocal group, you know, from the women's center, the intersectional feminists.
And they have a very negative view of masculinity.
Do you see, aside from the obvious, you know, the obvious points of men getting fewer places in college, being tormented by these kangaroo courts over sexual harassment?
What about in personal lives?
Do you study this at all?
Like, what is the effect of this kind of feminism on the average person's personal life?
I think so many young men must be confused.
A friend of mine has a son that just started Princeton this year as a freshman, and she thinks he's afraid of girls.
He's very active and very lively, very wonderful young man, but just so worried that if he says anything or is misinterpreted, maybe he'll outgrow that he's a freshman.
But I would be, if I had a son in college right now, I would be very worried.
Again, the majority of girls aren't hysterics.
They're not neurotic, but maybe as many as 10 or 20 percent, they take one too many of these gender studies courses, which tend to be male phobic and encourage this kind of what I call fainting couch feminism.
I grew up and still believe in feminism that asserts equality with men.
Fainting couch feminism wants protection from them and treats women as if they're fragile birds who can't cope.
Now, stipulate, life is full of danger, and there are pathological criminals, and I would consider Harvey Weinstein to be one.
But this is not the male norm.
But what you will see, and this is happening in social media right now, it's happening on campus.
They will take the worst case sort of male predator and hold him up as if he's an exemplar of the entire gender.
Well, that's kind of what is happening out here right now.
I mean, it is, you know, the it's funny.
I was talking to someone I work with in the film business yesterday, and he was telling me that they're having daily meetings now as predators are caught and people who have harassed women for years are caught and fired.
For instance, if an agent gets fired, then all his clients are now free.
So they're trying to find out who's going to go next so they can scoop up all his clients.
I mean, that's what.
Well, you know, it begins to sound a lot like McCarthyism.
It's a kind of sexual McCarthyism.
Now, there were communists in the State Department.
There were communists who were on the payroll of the Communist Party in Moscow.
But there were the majority of people who were accused were not dangerous people, yet they were harmed by the scare.
And I think we're seeing it again.
I think we will look back.
I think a lot of innocent people are going to be ruined all because of this twisted politics, gender politics, and this kind of moral panic.
When feminists come out and they do this, and they do it certainly online a lot, and they blame, for instance, Harvey Weinstein on this new phrase, they always come up with, they're so good at coming up with these condemnatory phrases.
They have this phrase, toxic masculinity.
What do you think is the result of that?
For people like me, I'm so old-fashioned, I actually ascribe to the laws of being a gentleman.
I mean, you and I are kind of, you and I have a Venn diagram where we sort of meet, but I am an old-fashioned gentleman.
And so, and one of the things I miss is I miss why was there no boyfriend or husband here who just punched Harvey Weinstein's lights out?
I mean, I don't understand where the that I could have used a little bit more of that toxic masculinity to shut a guy like this down.
Well, yes, in fact, that's what you will find that men are as much or more horrified by Harvey Weinstein.
I mean, they can't stand him and want to, yet somehow that did not apply in Hollywood.
You know, all the moralizers in Hollywood telling the rest of us how to live, and yet this was able to persist for years.
And again, this is not low-level teasing or flirting or not, I mean, this was criminal predatory behavior.
If these cases are true, and when you get in a case like Cosby or Weinstein, you have so many women coming forward.
It's very, you know, I do believe in due process and innocent until proven guilty, but that's true in a court of law, but in public opinion, we don't have to obey that in cases where there's such tangible evidence from so many people.
So there is such a thing as toxic masculinity or pathological masculinity, but it is not that there's also healthy masculinity.
And a healthy masculinity is characterized by not exploiting and tormenting women, but having feelings of respect and protectiveness and not tearing things apart, but building.
Toxic masculinity is something very different, and it's a mistake to attribute that to most men.
So, this is one of the things I actually wanted to ask you: what is it?
It seems right now that people have societal guidelines on what to teach girls.
They should be strong, they should be fearless, they should be this, but no guidelines on what to teach boys.
Now, you're a mom, right?
I mean, what do you think mothers should teach their boys about being men?
Well, first of all, it's a mistake to think that you can turn them into girls.
And what I see in the schools and what I see coming from gender theory is, oh, well, if we just gave boys dolls and nurturing toys and we didn't allow them to play cops and robbers, that encourages this toxicity.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
There is a way to raise a boy, which is respectful of his young masculine nature, which is to teach him to be a gentleman, to teach him to be a good sport, to teach, you have to open up a boy's heart.
But you can't do that.
It's not quite the same with a girl.
With a girl, both children, male and female, need character education, moral education, good examples.
But with a boy, you have to respect his young manhood.
And I do think through sportsmanship and the relationship with coaches and fathers are very important.
We're not hearing much about that.
As well as this idea of a gentleman.
And when I wrote The War Against Boys, I interviewed boys from all sorts of different subcultures across, you know, surfers in Los Angeles and urban kids in DC.
And they all liked the idea of being a gentleman.
They didn't quite know how to do it.
It means something positive to them.
I think that we could work with that.
And both my boys are gentlemen.
Not that they're perfect, but they are kind and considerate and respectful of women.
Here is a philosophical question that I want to ask you because it's kind of bothering me.
Recently, I read a novel called Submission, which is, I think, the masterpiece of a very fine French novelist whose name I can't pronounce, but it's something like Michelle Huillebeck.
Yeah, I'm afraid of that book.
Is it God?
I thought it was terrific.
I thought it was terrific and memorable and deeply disturbing.
And it's about the Islamic takeover of France.
And one of the points he makes in the book is that Islam offers patriarchy and patriarchy works.
And it made me think back on the famous book from the 80s called The Closing of the American Mind, in which the author says, Yeah, Alan Bloom says that patriarchy, essentially, he doesn't use that term, but he says the patriarchy is not fair, but it worked, and we may wish there was something to replace it, but there may not be.
He doesn't say there isn't, but he says there may not be.
And that kind of is what submission puts forward: that when Islam comes in, the guys are kind of going, yeah, this works.
This will work.
And what we had before didn't work and was empty and it had no moral value.
Do you think that there is something, if the patriarchy must go, is there something to replace it?
Is there an idea that can replace it and still have normal, fruitful relationships between men and women?
Yes, I think that sort of, you know, an enlightened democracy that we have, more or less, it's not perfect, but if you look around, just think most workplaces, men and women get along.
Yeah.
I mean, you don't believe the, don't buy into the moral panic that it's all just, you know, predatory behavior and this hidden, this hidden state of siege.
Women are living in it.
It's not true.
And I think that we have to be realistic.
Hollywood obviously needs to do something, and they need an HR department for the whole industry.
But overall, rather quickly, men and women were, you know, found one another in the workplace.
And now most workplaces are, you know, co-ed and in colleges and so forth.
And it works.
And I think to our game, I mean, do people, I listen to some of these, the feminists who I think are quite hysterical.
I mean, do they want us to start wearing burqas or to have separate lives from men because they're so dangerous?
And, well, no, they say we just have to, you know, what?
What?
Put them in workshops or, again, change little boys from their nature.
That's not going to happen.
But we do have a time-honored method that works, which is, as I said, sort of raising considerate children and raise young men to be gentlemen.
And of course, it helps if young women are, dare I say it, ladies.
And you know what?
Where I visit colleges all the time, there are crazy kids protesting.
But the kids that invite me, that I go out to dinner with, I still see well-behaved young people getting along and working together.
I see that a lot too.
And I do hear women saying, yes, I have been harassed by jerks, but so many men have also mentored me and brought me forward and have treated me.
That's the point.
That's the main point.
We've all known troglodytes, we can name them, but in my lectures, I tell, when women start complaining about, oh, this man did that, I say, okay, I know there are bad characters out there, but how many men did the opposite?
How many men supported you?
How many men were encouraging to you and helpful to you and friends to you?
And the vast majority of women, it would be most of the men they know.
So we've got to keep common sense at the center of this discussion.
But social media doesn't help.
Marrying Yourself First00:03:53
No, it doesn't.
It's kind of like the matrix of stupidity.
It's true.
Christina Hoffsommers, thank you very much for coming on the factual feminist.
Find her at C-H-S-O-M-M-E-R-S on Twitter.
Is there anywhere else people should look for you?
The Factual Feminist on YouTube.
On YouTube.
That's a YouTube channel.
Okay.
Yeah.
And CH Summers.
All right.
Well, I hope it won't be so long before I see you again.
It's always a pleasure talking to you.
Lovely talking to you.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
All right.
That leads us naturally into sexual follies, right?
I can't stand it.
All right.
So my daughter, Faith Moore, did I send in the thing about the woman who married herself?
Did I give you that?
I don't think so.
Oh, no.
Okay.
All right.
Well, I'll just go to the.
Oh, we do.
Oh, we do have it.
Okay, good.
My daughter, Faith Moore, has a writes kind of feature pieces at PJ Media, and she has a piece about this woman.
We've talked about this salogamy where women marry, people marry themselves.
So here is a woman who married herself and then found that she was cheating on herself with a man.
So here's her description of that experience.
So I think that is the main point of confusion: self-marriage is about self-love.
And it's saying that self-compassion and self-care is as important as romantic love.
It doesn't mean you're rejecting all other meaningful relationships in your life and becoming a nun forevermore.
Okay.
It means you're rejecting bad relationships.
So is that not something that one should feel about themselves anyway?
And so you don't really need to go through a whole ceremony.
Absolutely.
If only there was a bit more self-love in the world.
But this is a sort of statement which looks to raise the profile of self-love, saying it's as important as romantic love.
So you don't, and you don't have to get divorced from yourself if you marry someone else?
Absolutely not.
Like, you know, marrying yourself is a long-life commitment to be responsible for your own happiness.
So divorce is not an option, of course.
Right.
So then Rory comes along and you meet Rory and you had a lovely relationship.
Loveli-ish, yeah.
A lovely-ish.
Yeah, from Rory.
Rory had come from a very different world, whereas Sophie had sort of made this decision to just look after herself and focus on herself.
You'd come from a world where anyone else would.
You can have your cake and eat it.
Literally.
Yeah, yeah, that's what Polyamory attempts to do at least.
Does it achieve it?
Well, no, I don't think so.
No, I think it's not just trying to have your cake and eat it, it's trying to have several cakes, and that's too many cakes.
And you had a tattoo done.
Can we see your tattoo?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, it's right here.
If you want to have that as a tattoo, go ahead.
There we go.
There we are.
Me.
It's a heart and it's that's great.
That's great.
What I like about this is like when you marry yourself and you fall in love with someone else, you actually are cheating on yourself because the whole entire premise that you need to express your love for yourself is mistaken to begin with.
You should really begin by, you know, you're supposed to love others as you love yourself because you already love yourself.
You know, you already care about the good.
What that means is you care that good things happen to you and you care for your own good and your own health and your own welfare.
And that to learn to do that to other people is the big trick of marriage.
You don't need to marry yourself.
You actually need to marry someone else to learn over the course of a lifetime what it means to love someone else as you love yourself.
All right, I'm going to New York, so tomorrow I'm going to be broadcasting from a hotel room, a secret hotel room, but beneath the earth, I think.
So that should be kind of interesting.
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