All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 8, 2019 - The Matt Walsh Show
36:46
Ep. 171 - Masculinity Is "Harmful," According To Psychologists

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says it's more important to be morally right than factually right. There's one point about her comment that a lot of people have missed. Also, the American Psychological Association says masculinity is harmful. Finally, why was Lil Wayne dressed like Gandalf dipped in tie dye? Date: 01-08-2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Today on the Matt Wall Show, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says that it's more important to be morally right than factually right, and this is obviously a stupid thing to say, but there's an important point about her comment that a lot of people have missed, and we're going to talk about that.
Also, the American Psychological Association says that masculinity is harmful.
And finally, why was Lil Wayne dressed like a Keebler elf on acid last night?
We've got to discuss that as well today on the Matt Wall Show.
All right, let's talk about AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
I just complained last week about people talking about her too much, conservatives talking about her too much, and then here I am a few days later like a hypocrite.
But I feel like it's not that hypocritical because I don't want to talk about her exactly.
There's just one thing that she said, one thing that's gotten a lot of attention, like everything else she says gets a lot of attention.
It's also attracted a lot of criticism, rightfully so.
But I think we're kind of missing an important point, because there's something legitimately interesting and kind of instructive about what she said, but we're missing it.
We're missing it.
So this was on 60 Minutes, not long after she proposed that 70% tax, which would result in massive unemployment and destroy the economy.
But she said something, you know, on this, during the interview, she said, I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.
Okay, so she's complaining that people are more concerned about being factually right than about being morally right.
Obviously, as many people have pointed out, the number one problem here is that this is what we call a false dichotomy.
It's a false choice.
She's making us choose between two things when actually we can have them both.
You can be factually correct and morally correct.
Most of the time, the two things aren't even necessarily, you know, they aren't necessarily related.
So if I were to say that A triangle has three sides.
I am factually correct.
Am I morally correct?
Well, it's a morally neutral thing to say.
It's not... I don't think anyone would say that triangles are morally correct.
They're just... that's what they are.
It's just... it's a matter of fact.
But...
Whenever you do or say something, if you make a point that is morally correct, then you are also going to be factually correct.
So, I can say that abortion is morally wrong because you're killing a human being, which is morally wrong.
I am both morally correct and factually correct.
It wouldn't be possible.
Now, so it is possible for me to say things that are factually correct, Like a triangle has three sides, and yet morally neutral.
But it's not possible for me to say something that's factually correct and morally wrong.
Because if it's factually correct, then it's true.
And if it's true, then either it's just morally neutral, just is, or it's morally right.
So this isn't something we have to choose.
So, we have to decide, when someone says something like this, if we wanted to be generous to them, if we wanted to find a way for it to make sense, then maybe we would say, well, the point that she's trying to make is that people get too caught up on the semantics of things, and they're looking at the minutia and everything, when really, let's look at the moral core of what we're talking about, and not get hung up on all the little specifics and details.
If we wanted to be generous to her, we would say that that's what she meant.
But I don't know if there's any reason to be generous to her in this case, especially because based on other things she said and based on what the left says in general, the other way of interpreting it is that she's saying, well, sometimes morality can trump truth.
You know, sometimes you do have to choose between the truth, between what's factually correct, And what's morally right.
And in those cases, then you have to choose what's morally right.
The problem, though, is that when she says morals, what she really means is feelings.
So what she really means is sometimes you have to choose between what's actually true and what feels good or what feels right.
And so that's what she means.
And that's completely wrong.
But that's not really the point, okay?
That's not the point that I want to make here.
Um, the bigger point, I think, is that you have this, whatever, 29-year-old Congresswoman, the big star of the Democrat Party.
And she's on 60 Minutes, and what is she doing?
Okay, how is she... She's trying to justify her various terrible positions and opinions, and how does she do it?
She does it on moral grounds.
She is making a moral argument.
Now, it's a faulty moral argument.
It's a ridiculous moral argument.
And her idea of morality is completely wrong.
As I said, when she says morally right, what she means is feels right, feels good.
So it's morally right to tax rich people up to 70%.
It's morally right in the fact that it makes people feel good.
It feels like they're too rich, so let's take their money.
That's what she means by morals.
Now, that's the case.
But the fact remains, she is still trying to make a moral argument.
And this is a point that I've been making for years now.
This is what the left does.
The left makes moral arguments.
Yes, they make them wrongly.
They have the wrong idea about what morality is.
They make the arguments dishonestly.
Yes, that's all true.
But they still latch on to that concept of morality, and that's how they package their arguments.
Bernie Sanders did the same thing.
Nancy Pelosi is running around this week saying that, well, we can't have a wall down on the southern border because it's immoral.
Walls are immoral.
It's immoral to have walls.
Of course, except for the walls that she has on her house, right?
Those walls are perfectly fine.
And most of the other walls that she comes across in her daily life that are meant to keep people out, she's fine with that.
But just having a wall on the southern... And for other countries to have walls on their borders, that's fine.
She would never judge them, right?
You can't judge other cultures.
But it's our... Our wall is immoral, she says.
Again, it's a stupid moral argument.
It's a wrong moral argument, but it is still a moral argument.
The significant point is that what the left does, even though they're moral relativists, and even though most of the time they sound like hedonists, and even though they'll stand up and justify things like killing babies in the womb, they still make the moral argument.
And why do they do that?
They do that because that's what speaks to people.
Okay?
That's what gets people motivated.
That's what sends people into the streets marching.
You're not going to find anyone at a march or a rally with like a practical slogan on their banner or the poster that they're carrying around while they're chanting their mottos.
No, the slogans, the things that you put on the banners and the signs and the mottos that you march under are always moral.
It's always, this is right, that's wrong.
You know, we're standing for what's right.
We're standing against what's wrong.
Nancy Pelosi knows that on a practical level, there's no way to, you can't, on a practical and economic level, there's no way to argue against protecting the border.
It obviously makes good practical sense and it obviously makes economic sense.
What she's saying and what the left always says about everything is, yeah, you know what, even if it is practical, even if it is economically the right thing to do, it's just wrong.
It's morally wrong and so that's why we shouldn't do it.
So while the left has been making the moral argument for these many decades, the right increasingly has fled from those kinds of arguments.
People on the right, you know, what you find, the common kind of Republican idea is that if you want to speak to people, if you want to win people's hearts, then you get to them through their wallet.
Or you get to them through their practical concerns.
But we don't want to talk about morality, we don't want to get into that, because then we're going to be accused of being theocratic and trying to legislate morality and so on.
We don't want to be accused of that, so we're going to make the practical argument, we're going to make the economic argument, because that's what people care about.
Wrong.
Actually, that's wrong.
Of course, people do care about money.
They do care about practicality.
But the thing that speaks to people's hearts most, first and foremost, is our principles.
Morality.
People want to feel like they're just, they're living the right way.
They have the right views on things.
They're standing for the right principles.
And if people are going to mobilize and take to the streets and make sacrifices for something, they're going to do it for something moral, because they think they're on the right moral side.
And the problem is that on the right, we have basically ceded that ground to the left.
It's almost as if we've said, well, you know what, if you care about morality, go over there.
We're not talking about that.
Which is exactly the wrong way of going about it.
What we need to be communicating, whether it's with the wall, or with taxes, or gun rights, or any of the so-called social issues, abortion, whatever, on any of these issues, I think the first thing we need to be pointing out is that this is morally right.
This is the right moral thing to do.
To protect the border is the right moral thing.
It's morally right.
To give people economic freedom.
Yes, it also is going to lead to job growth and all that great stuff.
More money in your pocket, more money in your wallet.
But before any of that, it's morally right.
A man has the moral right to his own, you know, to the fruits of his own labor, to put food into the mouths of his children without it being stolen by the government and given to someone else.
That's the moral.
That should be the first argument we make, because that's what speaks to people.
And that's why the left has been winning for decades, is because they're speaking to people on that level.
If you want your cause to win hearts and win minds, it has to position itself as the right moral cause.
And more than that, it has to make moral demands.
It has to ask for sacrifice.
On the left, that's part of the attraction of... that's why they're always arguing for higher taxes.
Because... now it's true that the people who are demanding higher taxes won't be the ones paying the higher taxes, so it's easy for them to say, right?
But...
Even so, part of the attraction for the left when it comes to higher taxes and when it comes to their economic philosophy in general is that it feels like a sacrifice, even though they're not making any sacrifice.
But it feels like one.
And people want to feel like they're sacrificing for a cause.
And the leaders of the left understand that.
And so that's why they unabashedly are going to say, yeah, let's pay higher taxes.
You know what?
We all need to make sacrifices.
Again, yes, when they say we, they don't really mean we, they mean they.
But they say we.
Because people want to feel like that.
That's one of the secrets of progressivism.
Just like it was one of the secrets of communism.
Actually, yeah.
I read this book recently.
It's called, it's an obscure book, Dedication and Leadership, which, I don't know if you can find it anywhere, by a guy named Douglas Hyde.
And the interesting thing about the book, this guy was, it was written, I don't know, a few decades ago, and this guy was an avowed communist back in the 70s.
He was a big-time radical communist, and then he got out of communism and came to the light, but then he wrote this book talking about what communists did right, how they were able to attract so many people, especially young people.
And this is one of the points that he makes, is that communists, the reason why that movement appealed to young people so much, is that the communists made demands.
They made moral arguments, bad moral arguments, but they made moral arguments, and they made demands of their adherence, and they asked for sacrifice.
And that's what people want.
That's how you motivate people.
And this is something that I just think the church needs to realize this, and the right needs to realize it.
Conservatives need to realize this.
We need to stop letting the leftists be the only ones who talk about morality.
That's the point.
Okay, the APA Monitor, which is the flagship magazine of the American Psychological Association, had this headline on Twitter yesterday.
It says, APA has issued its first ever guidelines for practice with men and boys.
They draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage.
Traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful, they say.
So let's take a look at this from APA.org.
The article about the guidelines at APA.org says, in part, Prior to the second wave feminist movement in the 1960s,
all psychology was the psychology of men.
Most major studies were done only on white men and boys who stood in as proxies for humans as a whole.
Researchers assumed that masculinity and femininity were opposite ends of a spectrum,
and healthy psychology entailed identifying strongly with the gender roles conferred by a
person's biological sex. Well, yeah, I mean, that's basically right, actually.
But just as this old psychology left out women and people of color and conformed to gender role stereotypes, it also failed to take men's gendered experiences into account.
Once psychologists began studying the experiences of women through a gender lens, it became increasingly clear that the study of men needed the same gender-aware approach.
The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity, marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression, is, on the whole, harmful.
Men socialized in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors.
And researchers at Boston College found that the more men conformed to masculine norms, the more likely they were to consider as normal risky behaviors such as heavy drinking, using tobacco, and avoiding vegetables.
And they were more likely to engage in these risky behaviors themselves.
Avoiding vegetables is now considered a risky behavior?
I had no idea I was such a rebel.
I mean, I'm kind of... I'm excited, actually.
I was thinking recently how I don't really engage in any risky behaviors anymore.
I feel sort of old and lame, but I didn't realize that every time I forego my vegetables in favor of another helping of just pure meat, that I was doing something risky and rebellious.
So that's kind of exciting.
All right.
Stoicism, competitiveness, aggression are harmful traits now.
The problem, of course, is that these have been male traits since time immemorial, since the beginning of time.
And you are calling something harmful, which has always been a part of the male identity.
Now, psychologists and psychiatrists, they try to flip this around, and it's kind of a chicken-or-egg thing.
So, what they'll say is that, well, no, you see, society decided that men were supposed to be stoic and competitive and aggressive, and so then little boys grow up, and they see what society is saying, and they try to conform themselves to those expectations.
But actually, you see that?
This is what you get from psychologists and psychiatrists and the so-called mental health experts.
They make these proclamations that are ideological, philosophical, theoretical.
What they aren't is scientific.
It seems very rare these days that you hear anything actually scientific from these people.
They just declare these things about how people work, how men work, how women work, how people are supposed to be, how society is supposed to be.
And we all just listen to them, unquestioning.
Because they have an M.D.
or whatever.
Well, actually, psychologists don't even have M.D.s.
Or psychiatrists don't have M.D.s.
I forget which one it is.
It doesn't matter.
That's not a scientific conclusion.
Because the fact is, it goes the other way around.
Men are just naturally more competitive, more aggressive, less emotional.
That's how men have always been.
It's biological.
It's ingrained.
And society noticed that about men.
So it's not that society, as this kind of abstract entity hovering above us, decided that men are supposed to be that way.
No, society, which is just, we're all, society are just a group of people.
It's just the people, we all live together in a civilization.
We're a society.
And so we have noticed this about men and about ourselves.
And so that's where these gender norms came from.
They're not arbitrary, is the point.
This is just how men are.
So when you say that it's harmful, what you're saying is that the male identity itself is harmful.
And then you wonder why they complain in this article about how men are less likely to go and seek help from mental health experts.
Well, do you think maybe this is why?
Because you're sitting there saying that there's something wrong with all men.
That there's something diseased and disordered about manhood.
And then you expect men to go to you?
And listen to you?
As you try to turn them into women?
Now, I'm not saying that all psychologists and all psychiatrists do that.
That's not my point.
But when you have this kind of thing coming from the American Psychological Association, it's going to have the effect of turning men off of psychology and psychiatry.
It's not the fault of men, it's the fault of them, of these so-called mental health experts.
Who have long ago ventured way outside of the parameters of actual mental health and they have gotten into philosophy and social engineering and all that kind of stuff.
And by the way, what's wrong with being stoic or being competitive?
What exactly is wrong about it?
You know, of course, all personal traits have to be balanced.
So it's possible, whatever your personality is, whatever personal character trait we're talking about, it's possible to be too much that thing.
And there are going to be situations and circumstances for you that call for you to be less one way and more another way.
So obviously there's got to be a balance, but generally speaking, Men are going to be less emotional, more competitive, more aggressive.
There's nothing wrong with that.
That's just how we are.
There's nothing wrong with it.
Again, that is a subjective determination that the American Psychological Association has made.
And there's no reason why we should listen to it.
Who are they?
Who made them experts on people?
That's the problem.
They do not confine themselves to talking, you know, only about the brain and what's going on in the brain and what's going on neurologically with people.
Instead, they have the, you know, psychiatrists and psychologists, what they've done is they have declared, you know, this is how a human being is supposed to be.
And if you're not that way, then you need drugs.
That's what they've done.
But they have no authority to do that.
They are not experts on the entire human person.
This is the disease-ifying of masculinity, and it continues unabated.
It starts at a very young age with boys in school.
I've talked about this many times.
There's a reason why ADHD seems to mysteriously affect boys much more often than it affects girls.
And nobody ever asked that question.
Again, so many people, they just go along with it.
Because they're told.
They've got psychologists going around saying, well, the ADHD, and so everybody just listens and says, okay, well, they said it, so it must be true.
Nobody ever stops and thinks, now, hold on a second, why is it that this, if this is some neurological condition, why is it so much more common in boys?
And why, you know, why does it seem to only really be a problem in the public school setting?
Why do we have so much ADHD coming out of the public schools and not very much of it coming out of homeschooling?
Why is that?
Nobody ever stops and asks these questions.
It's because we have taken boyhood, and we have disease-ified it, and medicalized it, and we have slapped this medical label on it and called it ADHD.
So it starts at a young age, and then it goes all the way into manhood and adulthood, and it just never ends.
And we are destroying entire generations of men by telling them that there's something wrong with the fact that they are men, and that they should be fundamentally different from how they naturally are.
And that just ruins people.
It destroys people.
All right, I want to make brief mention of this.
The BBC, BBC3 actually, tweeted an article a few days ago with an interesting title.
The title was, We Need to Talk About Thin Privilege.
The article apparently is from a few months ago, but it's making the rounds now for whatever reason.
Let me see if I can find the article.
The title of the article is, What is Thin Privilege and Who Has It?
Well, I'm guessing thin people have it.
My guess is thin people have it, but we'll find out.
It says, buying clothes in high street shops and sitting comfortably in train and plane seats are things some people take for granted, but not for much longer.
As lingerie blogger Cora Harrington says, these things mean you probably benefit from thin privilege.
Lingerie blogger.
Does that mean that you're blogging in your lingerie?
I don't know what that means.
Or you blog about lingerie every day?
How much is there to say about lingerie that that could actually be your job?
But we'll put that to the side.
In a detailed Twitter thread, Cora says, You don't have to feel thin to have thin privilege.
It just means you're not on the receiving end of other people's fat phobia.
Yeah, fat phobia is a thing.
And you don't find it difficult to do everyday things because of your size.
And then she goes on, quoting from her tweet thread, explaining what thin privilege is.
She says, my job involves looking at photos of models who are much thinner than me, so I rarely feel thin, but I can also walk into almost any clothing store and expect, without even thinking about it, to buy something in my size.
That is thin privilege.
And then she goes on to explain and describe other examples of thin privilege.
Just one point, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but it's just, First of all, this idea of privilege has been just stretched into oblivion.
I mean, 20 years ago, if you said, oh, that person over there is privileged, Everybody would know what you're talking about.
They would get a general idea.
They would think of, like, a rich guy on a yacht.
Or they would think of a, you know, a rich kid at a fancy private school, okay?
That's privileged.
Someone who has a lot of money, hasn't faced a lot of challenges in life, silver spoon, all that, that's a privileged person.
And so we all, and okay, so that's what it meant.
But now we have kind of dissected people into a million pieces and analyzed every part of their life and said, okay, that part's privileged.
You've got privilege over there.
You've got privilege there, privilege there, privilege there.
And it doesn't mean anything.
So now everybody's privileged in one way or another.
So they say that, you know, you have white privilege, but then if you're fat, then you don't have privilege.
So then what about a fat white person versus a skinny black person?
So, you know, who has more privilege there?
We get into a privilege, we get into the privilege oppression Olympics, right?
And we have a competition about who's more privileged, who's less privileged.
It's just, it's so ridiculous.
It's not the word doesn't mean anything anymore.
And even if it does mean something, you know what?
Stop whining.
Just stop whining about, oh, they have more privilege than I have.
Okay, well, just shut up and just live your life.
Okay, yes, everybody is going to be privileged in certain ways that you aren't.
And then you're going to have certain privileges that other people don't have.
I mean, that's just, that's what it means to live and to be a human being.
There are certain advantages that you have that other people don't.
There are advantages that they have that you don't.
And if you chose, if you choose to focus on the advantages that other people have and you don't have, that's your, that's your fault.
That's your problem.
And if you choose to see society like this and to see life this way, as this constant, like, jockeying for position about who's going to be more victimized, if that's how you want to live, that's your choice.
But that's not much of a life.
The other option is just to shut up about it and just live.
It's, uh, What is?
you And also, obesity is not an identity, okay?
It's not a community.
So we can't talk about, well, the obese community and the struggles that they face.
Yes, people that are overweight, they do face certain struggles.
I'm not downplaying that.
But that's not like a category of person.
If you're obese, it just means you have a little bit extra weight on you.
And probably if you go on a diet and you get some exercise, you'll get rid of some of that weight.
So it's not, that doesn't make you, I might as well talk about the, you know, I'm six foot one.
I might as well talk about the six foot one community.
And here are the struggles and challenges that we face.
It's not a, it's not a, it's just, that's just how tall I am.
And that, actually, I can't do anything about.
But if you've got extra weight on you, you certainly can do something about it.
Now, it may be true that you're never going to be rail-thin, but that's fine.
But everybody in the world, you know, whatever your weight is now, you can change it, at least to some degree, just by changing your lifestyle and your diet and everything else.
Let's just stop focusing.
That's my proposal, okay?
For everybody.
I mean, whatever you are.
Fat, skinny, whatever race, whatever culture, however much money you have, stop focusing on privilege and what other people have and you don't have.
Stop whining about it and just go and live, okay?
That's my pep talk for the day.
All right.
Finally, well, two other things.
Two little pieces of video I want to show you here.
We go first to an incident at the Fort Lauderdale airport.
A woman was apparently denied entry onto a flight because she was intoxicated.
And then, well, here she is interacting, shall we say, with the gate agent.
What?
Get me out of here!
Get me out of here!
I'm f***ing gunned on me because I'm homeless!
Get me out!
She's a gun, she's a gun.
She's in there, yeah, she's in there.
She's in, she's in.
She's in that thing.
Okay.
I just...
I just want to say one thing here, okay?
I'm not going to criticize this woman, actually.
I totally understand where she's coming from.
I mean, I feel exactly the same way every time I'm in an airport.
I have exactly the same feeling.
Who among us has not been sitting at the gate screaming silently to yourself, you know, get me out of here.
No, I don't want to do this.
That's, I think that every single time I'm in an airport.
In fact, I scream in agony to myself at airports, at the DMV, the grocery store, the mall.
I scream to myself in agony anytime somebody calls me on the phone rather than text me and I get sucked into an actual conversation.
The whole time I'm thinking this, the exact same thing the woman said.
And it's even worse at airports because you're sitting in this horrid environment waiting to be in an even more horrid environment.
And that's what makes waiting like at the dentist so terrible also.
Because it's not like you're waiting in line for a ride at Disney World.
You're waiting, and it's not fun, but then what you're waiting for will be even less fun.
So you're waiting in line at the airport for the privilege of being You know, packed into a tin box like chickens on one of those poultry trucks you see on the highway, and then you're gonna be suspended 30,000 feet in the air where one wrong move, one gust of wind, one cell phone not put on airplane mode could send you plummeting to the earth in a death spiral.
So yeah, I get where she's coming from.
The only difference, the only thing that really separates the sane from the insane is that insane people scream out loud, whereas sane people keep it to themselves.
Being able to scream silently in agony in your head, that's what makes you sane and normal.
And we all do it.
So let us not judge this woman for expressing herself and for exercising her free speech rights as well.
Even though she did say that she had a gun at the airport, which, you know, I guess is ill-advised.
Okay, last thing.
The College Football Playoff National Championships happened yesterday.
Clemson won handily, but something very strange occurred during the halftime show.
The band Imagine Dragons gave a perfectly subpar performance, and then the rapper Lil Wayne came out in his Technicolor Dreamcoat.
Here's how that went. So it appears that Lil Wayne's stylist is from Middle Earth or something.
He's a good guy.
He looks like what would happen if somebody slipped LSD into my grandmother's tea.
Okay, it looks like his fashion designer is like an elf who made his outfit by, you know, killing a unicorn.
You know, he looks kind of like the love child of Elton John and a Muppet.
Or he looks a little bit like the mascot on a box of cereal.
Actually, he looks like what would happen if Tim Burton had a fashion show.
You know what?
No, no.
I think this is it.
He looks kind of like a four-year-old girl raided her mom's closet and tried to dress up like a grown-up, but it just so happens that her mom is Cruella de Vil from the 101 Dalmatians.
But you know what?
He pulls it off.
I mean, he doesn't pull off the music so much, which is terrible, if you can even call it music, but the outfit.
I mean, he pulls it off.
We gotta give him credit.
So I get it.
I get what he was doing with the whole ensemble.
And I kinda like it.
Alright.
We'll leave it there.
Thanks for watching everybody.
Thanks for listening.
Godspeed.
Hey, this is Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show, and today I'm going to talk about
why I have been in a grumpy mood ever since the midterms.
It's not the left that bothers me.
The left has already left the American building.
It's the right.
It is Seinfeld conservatism, a movement that is now about nothing.
Come on over and listen to The Andrew Klavan Show.
▲
Export Selection