It's not exactly true to say that feminists hate masculinity. Actually, they are jealous of masculinity and want nothing more than to be masculine themselves. What they hate most of all, in the end, is femininity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hello, everybody. As you can see, a different studio today. | |
| This is our other car, or the big car, as our kids call it. | |
| Or as my wife, my wife says that it's her car because it has all the car seats in it, and so she's the one driving it around for most of the day. | |
| But I strenuously object to that description of it. | |
| Anyway, over the course of the... | |
| Of this past weekend, some controversy erupted. | |
| And you know it's a big deal when there's controversy. | |
| I mean, in our society, if there's controversy, you know something serious has happened. | |
| Because controversy is so rare these days, right? | |
| It's like there's hardly ever anything that people are outraged about. | |
| So if they're getting outraged, you know that it can't be frivolous, right? | |
| So in this case, the outrage, the anger, the hurt, the heartbreak, the sadness, was directed at former NFL kicker Jay Feely. | |
| And you see Jay Feely posted a photo on Twitter. | |
| This is a former NFL kicker who posted a photo on Twitter. | |
| So we know, as I said, we know it's serious business. | |
| And the photo depicted him posing with his daughter and her prom date. | |
| And Feely has his arm around his daughter, kind of protective, in this sort of protective way. | |
| And then his other hand is holding a gun. | |
| A gun. A shooty thing, okay? | |
| A shooty, shooty, dangerous thing. | |
| And so this is a classic dad joke. | |
| I mean, this is, it's even cliche. | |
| And it's a dad joke that 10 years ago, nobody would have noticed or really cared. | |
| Maybe a few people would have laughed. | |
| Most people would have rolled their eyes because that, as a dad, I know that that's the, really the appropriate response to a dad joke is just to roll your eyes and move on. | |
| But this is not 10 years ago. | |
| This is 2018. And so in 2018, the photo went viral with thousands of people expressing their righteous indignation at this terrible, awful, offensive photo. | |
| Now, before I go any further, I need to stipulate that when I say people were outraged and they were angry, just keep in mind that really there are quotes around that. | |
| There are sarcastic air quotes around outrage and anger. | |
| Because as I've said before, the main thing about the collective outrage that goes on is that there's very little authentic outrage in it. | |
| I mean, I don't think anyone really actually cared that much about what Jay Feeley posted. | |
| Most of the things, when we get this huge outrage, everyone's so angry, most of the people who are outraged and angry, they are not really outraged or angry. | |
| What they're doing is they're just seizing on this opportunity to make a point and to destroy somebody. | |
| And we know that that's been going on since the dawn of time. | |
| What makes it different now is that it used to be, you know, if you were a politician or a political figure of some kind and you said anything at all, then yeah, you're gonna have people from the other side who try to take your words and use it against you to try to win, right? | |
| And I think it used to mainly be reserved for people like that, people who are in controversial jobs or jobs that inherently involved controversy. | |
| But now what we find is that anybody at all, it's just any old average person, doesn't matter what you do for a living, doesn't matter who you are, doesn't matter what side you fall on, it doesn't matter if you're completely apolitical. | |
| Anyone at all, if you put something out there publicly, people will seize on it and try to destroy you. | |
| To the point where even an NFL kicker, he's just a retired NFL kicker. | |
| I mean, even if what he did was terribly, even if that photo really was legitimately awful, which of course it isn't, but even if it was, Who cares? | |
| He's just an NFL kicker. | |
| What does it matter? I mean, why would anyone care what he posts? | |
| Just let him be. Just whatever. | |
| So he's got to... Who cares? | |
| What are you hoping to win or accomplish by taking this and making a thing out of it? | |
| So the anger is not really authentic, but be that as it may. | |
| We will deal with it anyway. | |
| So this fake anger seems to be based on two things. | |
| One, they say that he's making light of gun violence. | |
| And it's dangerous to have a gun out like that, they said. | |
| Because I saw a lot of people say, if that was my son, I would be so angry that he put him in harm's way with that gun and Because these people think that a gun, through some mysterious gravitational force, could actually load itself and then point itself and pull its own trigger. | |
| That's what they think could happen. | |
| But in reality, the gun did not pose a threat to anybody because it wasn't loaded and he had it pointed down and he didn't even have his finger on the trigger. | |
| So really, that gun posed as much of a threat to the people in that photograph as there would have been a threat if he was holding like a pancake or something. | |
| It posed zero threat whatsoever. | |
| But the other source of outrage is the one that I want to focus on. | |
| Plenty of feminists were scandalized or pretended to be scandalized because, as they put it, Feely was treating his daughter as property. | |
| And how dare he? | |
| Just as one example, feminist Lauren Duca, or Dusa, I don't know how to pronounce her name, but she's got a lot of Twitter followers, which means she's important, by the way. | |
| So she said that the photo was a violent reminder that Feely considers his daughter to be his property. | |
| Now, first of all, Jay Feeley did—well, he didn't quite apologize, but he did post something clarifying the tweet and explaining it, which I wish he hadn't even done that much because it required no explanation and it required no clarification. | |
| And anybody who was offended by it, their feelings do not matter at all in this case. | |
| But I understand why he did because, like I said, he's not a political figure. | |
| He's not— He's not like even someone like me, where I know that everything I say, there are going to be people who try to take it and I'm going to get hate mail and everything. | |
| So I know that. I know that's what I do for a living, so I understand that. | |
| But Jay Feely, that's not what he's looking for. | |
| He just thought he was posting a funny picture. | |
| It turned into a whole thing, so he's like, fine, I'll just post something clarifying. | |
| And what he said was, the prom picture I posted was obviously intended to be a joke. | |
| My daughter has dated her boyfriend for over a year, and they knew I was joking. | |
| I take gun safety seriously. | |
| The gun was not loaded. | |
| It had no clip in it. And I did not intend to be insensitive to that important issue. | |
| So this is where we are now as a society, where a guy has to explain that a picture of himself holding a gun in a prom picture with his daughter and her boyfriend is a joke. | |
| He has to explain that. | |
| To all of these people that, again, already know. | |
| They know that he's joking. | |
| Which is the main reason why I think there shouldn't be an explanation. | |
| But putting all that aside, I think what we really see here, more than an attack on guns, we see an attack on the role of fathers. | |
| Because it's a father's job to protect and defend his family. | |
| And he ought to be protective of his daughter. | |
| He ought to be protective of her dignity and protective of her innocence. | |
| Obviously, Feely's photo was a deliberately cartoonish, exaggerated, humorous depiction of that role. | |
| It wasn't supposed to be serious. But what we see is that feminists are mad, or pretending to be mad, about the role itself. | |
| They hate the idea that a man would protect his family Especially that he would protect his daughter. They hate that idea So this again goes back to the piece that I wrote a few weeks ago about the challenges that men face in this culture Where a man really can't win because a man who is not there for his family a man who does not protect his family does not Defend his family a man who has no problem with his daughter shacking up with any old scumbag That sort of man is still rightfully derided and shamed in our culture | |
| But a man who does the opposite the opposite sort of man is also derided and shamed in our culture So again, men are left saying, well, what do you want me to do? | |
| How am I supposed to be? | |
| What would make you people happy? | |
| Now, I don't ask that because I don't care what makes anyone happy, but a man who is concerned with how society views him is going to be very confused because literally no matter what he does, He's gonna hear it. | |
| And I'm not just drawing all of this from this one reaction to this picture. | |
| I'm drawing it from society in general, but there are also plenty of other examples. | |
| For instance, if you really want to get a headache, if you feel like having a migraine, here's what I recommend. | |
| Go on Google and type in father-daughter dance and then just see all the blog posts that pop up talking about how problematic And weird and creepy and old-fashioned and patriarchal these father-daughter dances are. | |
| Because this is a good example of how the role of the dad has become this evil, creepy thing. | |
| Here's a bit from an article on Romper.com titled, Father-Daughter Dances Are Anything But Innocent. | |
| Let me just read you a couple, a few sentences. | |
| The writer says, These aren't sweet. | |
| They aren't cute. They're creepy. | |
| And they seek to enforce patriarchal notions of femininity. | |
| These little girls who are taken out on dates by their fathers are taught that men should do everything for them. | |
| Men open the door. | |
| Men pull out the chair. Men buy everything. | |
| It's incumbent on the man to ask questions and draw her out. | |
| This is 2017. | |
| And newsflash, women don't need men to do things for them. | |
| We don't need some big, bad patriarchal figure to hold the door or compliment our inner beauty. | |
| We deserve men who are equal partners, who share life's journey with us, and who treat us as equals. | |
| Daddy-daughter dates include an implicit power dynamic, and it's not in favor of the girl. | |
| I mean, just imagine being the sort of person who hears about a man taking his little girl out on a father-daughter dance, and the first thing they think is implicit power dynamic. | |
| Or imagine being the sort of person who sees this funny... | |
| Nice, cliched photo of Jay Feeley and sees it as some kind of patriarchal conspiracy and that he thinks he owns his daughter like a slave. | |
| I mean, I pity. | |
| I really have a lot of pity for these people, for feminists and all these people in our culture because they live in such a miserable world. | |
| I can't imagine living in the world that they think we live in. | |
| I can't imagine having that mindset. | |
| So the question is why? | |
| Why are so many people so hostile to the idea of a man being a figure of protection or security or authority in the home? | |
| And I think there are two reasons. | |
| The first reason is pretty simple. | |
| We have to remember that many feminists are feminists because they had no father in the home. | |
| At least they didn't have a good father. | |
| That's not the case for all of them, of course. | |
| It's theoretically possible that a good father could produce a feminist. | |
| Very unlikely. Probably if your daughter ends up being a radical feminist, it means that you as a dad screwed up big time, most likely. | |
| But I mean, I'm saying it's theoretically possible that you could have a good father. | |
| Because people, you know, human beings make their own choices. | |
| And even a woman who's raised right could end up, unfortunately, going down the path of feminism. | |
| So most of them had, one way or another, absent fathers. | |
| And there's this certain kind of childish self-centeredness that's really common in our society where people insist on spreading around their misery. | |
| And they came from broken homes, so they must attack and hate homes that are not broken. | |
| It's envy. And it even goes a little bit beyond envy, actually, because a really envious person knows that he doesn't have something, and so he covets the people who do have it. | |
| But here, though, what we see so often in our society are people who don't have a certain good thing, in this case, an intact family, and so they insist that the thing must not be good. | |
| So rather than trying to have what other people have, they say, well, nobody should have it. | |
| But second, the reason why people, especially feminists, lash out at men who protect and provide is really this. | |
| And I've said it before. Feminists, they don't really hate masculinity. | |
| I think we have it wrong. | |
| We don't really understand The motivations behind modern feminism. | |
| And I say it myself, just kind of for the sake of argument or just sort of laziness, I'll say, well, feminists hate masculinity. | |
| Because in a sense they do. | |
| But I think even deeper than that, they actually idolize masculinity. | |
| So it's more accurate to say they hate men who are masculine Because they themselves want to be masculine. | |
| Masculinity itself is what they idolize. | |
| They want to be that. | |
| So they say, well, we don't need no man to protect us. | |
| This is 2018. We don't need that. | |
| Because they have idolized the ability to protect. | |
| They have taken this and decided that, well, everyone should have that ability. | |
| They want it for themselves. | |
| The kind of physical masculine strength that a man has, they want it. | |
| They hate it when men show it because they want it. | |
| They have idolized it. They have decided that masculinity is really the height of existence. | |
| And that's why you get all these silly movies with the kick-butt female action heroes who go around beating up men and everything. | |
| And it's just, again, it's kind of this silly, childish thing that feminists do where they say, well, men have all the action heroes, now we want some. | |
| Well, one of the reasons why typically men are the action heroes in movies is because men are the action heroes in real life. | |
| And you're simply not going to get a woman who's running around just hand-to-hand combat, beating up a bunch of strong, beefy men. | |
| That's just, that's not going to happen. | |
| In real life. And yeah, it is a movie, so fictional things can happen. | |
| But generally, you want a movie, even an action movie, to be grounded in some sense in reality. | |
| So that's why typically you don't have as many movies like that. | |
| But feminists covet the strength of men. | |
| They covet masculinity itself. | |
| And they want to have it. | |
| Or to use the common phrase now, they want to appropriate it. | |
| Which is why... | |
| If a woman had taken that exact same photo that Jay Feeley took, holding the gun and everything, feminists would have celebrated it. | |
| They would have said it was the greatest thing ever. | |
| Because they don't hate toxic masculinity. | |
| They just hate that men are so much better at being masculine. | |
| And they think they're in a competition with men. | |
| Really, in the end, we should stop saying that feminists hate masculinity. | |
| What they really hate is femininity. | |
| That's what they hate. | |
| They hate themselves. | |
| They don't want to be themselves. | |
| They want to be men. | |
| And so they hate men who are men because they see it as some kind of personal attack on them. | |
| That's what lies underneath all this controversy. | |
| Which, as I said, it's not even a real controversy, so maybe I didn't even need to spend 20 minutes explaining it. | |
| But I just did, so I hope you enjoyed it. |