On today’s episode of Human Events Daily, Jack Posobiec is joined by Libby Emmons and the two get into a riveting discussion about the state of women and family in the United States. The duo work together to get to the heart of what American women want versus what they’re told to strive for by mainstream culture and third wave feminism. Next, Poso and Libby look at their own lives and the role strong female role models have played in each of their experiences. Finally, Jack and Libby discuss ...
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the Poso Daily Brief. - Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard today's edition of Human Events Daily powered by Turning Point USA.
Today we have on Libby Emmons, the editor of the Postmillennial, the editor of HumanEvents.com, my boss at HumanEvents.com.
Libby, I have a question for you, not as a boss, but more of as a friend and someone who I think is knowledgeable about certain things.
And maybe that's my mistake for thinking that.
But, you know, I look at these stories about The decline in relationships, birth rates are down, dissatisfaction in youth, the dating scene just seems like an absolute mess.
Here's my thing.
What is wrong with American women?
What is going on?
Explain this to me.
Oh my goodness.
That is quite the question.
What is wrong with American women?
And there's certainly plenty wrong with American men.
I will say that as well.
So I do think that there's a Too much gambling.
Way too much porn, I think.
I think porn is a big problem.
Um, and I think we've, we've seen that.
So what is wrong with American women?
I think American women have absolutely no idea what they want in life.
I think they don't know what they want in relationships.
And I think that they are holding themselves to conflicting expectations and do not know which master to serve.
What do you mean by conflicting expectations?
Conflicting expectations.
So, you have the expectations that were laid out primarily by the feminist movement, and the Cosmo Girl of the 1980s, and the careerist of the 90s, and then the follow-your-dreams bliss of the early 2000s.
So, we look at all of this, and what does that tell you?
That tells you that you are supposed to be powerful, and strong, and independent, and imaginative, and dreamy, all rolled into one.
And then you also have the expectations of creating a family and being a mother and securing your home and providing security and having love and a foundation to build a family on.
These two things are in direct conflict.
I have not yet met a woman who has been able to achieve both, though most women that I meet tell you that you can do it all.
I do not think that you can do it all at all.
I don't think that's even remotely possible.
I saw an interview several years ago with Condoleezza Rice, who was the Secretary of State under George Bush and who I think is actually a pretty amazing woman.
And she was talking about her relationship with her students when she was a professor at Stanford.
And she told her students that there are phases to life and you can have everything, but you can't have everything all at once.
And I thought that that was interesting as well.
This idea that you can have a career, but you can't have a career and be a mother at the same time.
And Valerie Jarrett, who worked in the Obama administration, was also on that program.
And was talking about how she would not have been able to have her career in the White House while she had young children, and that she was only really able to have that career when she was older, when her children had grown up.
But Condoleezza Rice never married and had no kids.
That's correct.
That's why you have to take what she says with a little bit of extra salt.
Just maybe even some MSG.
And I'll be charitable here.
Maybe she was in a sense trying to say, um, I went all in too much and didn't set up, see my life as phases.
And I tried to just take one thing and put all of my emphasis into that and did not try to balance it out to the point where There is a time for career and there is a time for family life.
She completely, obviously, as we know, and for a lot of women of that generation, I think, as well, just completely eschewed family life whatsoever.
And you see this, many of these childless leaders, Um, that are around even today, um, who in many cases, I'm trying to look up when was she born?
She was born in 54.
She knew some of the girls that died in the Birmingham church bombing.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
And, and she talks about that a lot that cause she was, she's from Birmingham.
Um, and that, uh, Kamala Harris is someone who, okay, so she, you know, she got married to someone who had his, his children, but she has no children of her own.
Um, you can see, you can see this in a variety of examples.
Hillary Clinton just has one child.
Hillary Clinton has one child.
And so there is this, this sort of sense that the, these, the feminist movement in even, even when you look at some of the, the biggest names that are associated with it, They themselves do not have families.
And I think that that's something where, and by the way, I say it on the show all the time.
And so for all the ladies out there listening, men are in an absolute state of shock right now, a state of decline.
Men are totally messed up, but that's not what we're talking about today.
Because, you know, we spend an awful lot of time these days talking about women's rights, but we don't talk a lot about women's wrongs.
You know what I'm saying?
What I'm saying?
I can give you an example from my life that I've always found to be rather interesting.
My mother and my father split up before I was one year old, and I grew up with my father.
I lived with my father.
He was my primary caregiver.
I visited with my mom.
I saw her when they lived in the same city, when we all lived in D.C.
I saw her on weekends and things like that.
I don't quite remember what their custody arrangement was, but my dad and I moved to Massachusetts, where his family was from.
And my mom moved to New York City, which began my love of that city.
But I only saw my mom on school holidays.
I saw her on summer breaks.
I saw her on alternating Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays.
And that's the only time I saw her family as well.
My grandma, my great grandma, you know, my cousins and stuff in Brooklyn.
And my dad remarried when I was Six years old, six years old, something like that.
Yeah.
So my mom was an attorney.
She had this amazing career.
She had worked for the SEC.
She's really quite brilliant and had, you know, worked in law for her whole career.
My father Remarried when I was six years old and remarried a woman who was the receptionist at his law firm.
Fell in love with her and she was substantially younger.
She was like 10 years younger than him and she really wanted to have a family.
All she wanted was to be a mom.
She had wanted to be a mom her whole life.
She had, you know, I was around.
She took to raising me.
She's the one who I can thank for making sure that I was Catholic.
I was baptized Catholic when I was seven, under her direction.
And I was able to, yeah, take part in the church, in a life of sacraments, which I'm extremely grateful for.
My mom was in New York.
She was pursuing relationships.
She had not a ton of boyfriends, but she had a couple boyfriends that I remember specifically.
Um, and my stepmom it turned out was unable to have children.
So the woman in my life who most wanted to be a mother was unable to have natural children.
The woman in my life who was a mother eschewed motherhood.
I didn't really seem to want Eventually she and my dad adopted my brother, which I'm of course very grateful for, and has informed my view on abortion 100% because I'm so grateful to my brother's mother.
But both of these women in my life considered themselves to be feminists.
My mom and my stepmom, they both thought that.
They were both relatively leftist, which in the 80s was Fairly conservative anyway.
You know, it's not necessarily like the progressivism of today, for sure.
But my stepmother fully resented my mom for having been able to birth a child and then not raising the child.
And my mom eventually, I think to a certain extent, resented my stepmom for taking the place of a mother.
And there was definitely a conflict.
between what these women wanted and what these women sought.
And they both looked at the other with a mix of resentment and envy.
So looking at that as I was growing up, I was proud of my mom and her accomplishments.
You know, she's this career woman.
She lives in New York.
It's like all of this wonderful, you know, she had money.
And it wasn't until I had my own son, Um, later in life, I think I was 35 when he was born, but it wasn't until I had my own son that I realized what my mother had given up and how much I wish she hadn't given that up.
And I started to have my own resentment about that, which I don't think I had.
Prior to that, I mean, if you ask my playwriting professor from Columbia, he would say, yes, you were fully resentful of your mom because he was always telling me that.
But anyway, I didn't realize it.
When you become a parent for the first time, you look on your childhood a lot differently.
And you suddenly see your parents in this whole other light where, you know, your whole life you've been thinking of them as the people that are Constantly boxing you in, the people are constantly telling you no, the people who are saying, you know, why are you out so late, et cetera, et cetera.
And then you realized that it was because they love you that much.
Through that love, that should anything bad happen to you, it would absolutely devastate and crush them.
Oh, it's, yeah, I could not, it's horribly destructive.
You think about on a, Absolutely frequent basis of something bad happening to your children and we have a obviously a biological and spiritual imperative to protect our children and so You know, I I remember like I actually I actually went to after after my first son was born.
I actually was having Just just those feelings and was rethinking a lot of things and I went to my parents and I said I just want to clear the air on some of these things and at times where I got mad at you or Times when, you know, I talked back when I was a teenager, etc.
I'm sorry.
I'm so sorry that... And that's life, right?
You don't, you can't know.
You can't.
You know, you can't know when you're in the moment and you want to be rebellious.
And, you know, me being rebellious is like growing my hair out and, you know, going to concerts in Philly.
Like, that's probably the grand scheme of things.
It's not that much of a rebellion, to be honest.
It's actually a commodity these days.
But, you know, it's and I've generally always had a pretty good relationship with my parents, but it was definitely something that I went back and looked at and said, you know what?
I get it now.
I get it.
You know, and my mom said something to me once where she said that I was like, I can't believe, you know, Jack Jack's walking.
I can't believe, you know, it blew my mind that, you know, this this this infant who used to just like Sit in whatever spot you left him in.
It was now mobile.
It had the ability to walk around.
It just blew my mind.
And then she said, you think that's good.
Wait till he starts driving.
Right.
And then, and then it made me think it's like, Oh, I see now.
So every time I got behind the wheel, You were scared something might happen to me.
Yeah, my son is 13 now.
It may have come across as anger, but now I realize that it was, no, it's just your parents love you that much, your mom loved you, my mom loved me, and she was worried about me.
That's all it was.
And you're talking about something, too, where your mom had to trust you, right, to do the right thing and had to trust that her parenting had been enough, had given you the tools that you need to go out there and live your life and to make responsible choices.
And I think when we talk about what's going on with relationships today, we are missing a huge trust factor.
That's so important.
And what we need is, you know, when you fall in love, if you're going to fall in love, if you're going to fall in love and raise a family, you need to trust that you are falling in love with someone who is going to value your heart, value your person, value your offspring together, help you create a secure lifestyle in which to raise those children.
Value your opinion, all of these things.
And I think also we have moved so far away from the concept of a traditional family.
And this is someone, you know, I come from generations of divorce.
And I look at my life and I say, you know, no wonder you're divorced.
Like, you come from generations of divorce.
How do you even know how to put together a stable family?
My son asked me once, how am I going to have a stable marriage if I, if everyone's been divorced in my life?
And I said, we'll work on it because I would like that for you.
When you fall in love, you need to trust someone.
You need to trust.
And we don't have a lot of trust among each other now.
And there's this constant idea that you can just spin off your desire and just, oh, I desire something else now.
Let me go pursue that.
And that's exactly the wrong perspective.
We have disposable relationships.
And what we'll do is we'll use these words that I feel like we never should have even started saying these words in the first place.
Words like gaslighting, words like narcissism, because every single time I hear this, I'll say, I hear this all the time.
Oh, my.
Well, he was a narcissist.
Oh, well, he was gaslighting me.
Oh, well, you know, he was this.
He was that.
It's like, no, I'm sorry.
Not every guy is doing that.
Right.
But in many cases, what you're doing is you're creating a false justification in your mind so that your own decisions in retrospect, your own decisions and your own actions weren't actually the causes of the relationship to fall apart or whatever argument that led to the race, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
It's it's no it's it's it goes back to what you're just saying right here.
It goes back to an underlying lack of trust and the lack of being willing to actually commit to something because you look at what the words we use today for relationship that if you and everything right if you if you show earnestness at all and something either you're either either you being cringe or you're being a simp.
So, and if you say, well, I think that's great.
I really like that.
Oh, you're such a, you're such a simp.
Oh, that's so cringe.
Right.
You know, and it's like, well, how do you have a relationship if everything is simp and cringe?
The other thing is how do you have a relationship if you don't care about your promises?
Right.
So when you make a promise, when you stand there before God and everyone, And you say, you know, I'm going to be with you this whole time.
If your promise comes to nothing, and if you're willing to let your promise come to nothing, if you undertake that promise with the idea that you can throw it away as soon as your, you know, whim changes, then that's not a promise.
And that's a real tragedy, I think.
The decline in marriage is a real tragedy.
The decline in two-parent households, I think, is a real tragedy.
The decline in men feeling like they need to lead a family.
And I think this is a mistake.
We talk a lot about this in our culture.
We're so advanced and whatever else.
But men have been told that they shouldn't lead families.
Men have been told they shouldn't be the leader.
They have.
And that's really such a mistake.
I think families probably work best when there is trust, mutual caring, when the promises are valued, and when each person in the family knows what their job is, right?
Like, you can't go into work if you're not the boss and suddenly start telling everyone what to do.
If you're not the secretary or whatever, you can't go into work And start, you know, mucking around at that person's desk.
Everybody has a role to do.
Everyone has a role to play.
And I think that a man needs to be the spiritual leader of the family and needs to make sure that his wife feels secure and safe and cared for so that she can take care of him, take care of the home, and take care of the children without feeling like the bottom is going to just drop out underneath her.
At any moment.
How can you raise a stable family?
How can you make sure that your home is tidy and cared for?
If you're worried that the man hasn't been paying the mortgage but is telling you that he has been.
Or if you're worried that the man has been, you know, telling you he's going to work but really he lost his job six months ago and he hasn't been to the office since.
Or if you're worried that this man who you have put all your trust in is actually, you know, getting it on with somebody else and potentially bringing diseases home or fathering children elsewhere, squandering your money, squandering your trust.
A man needs to lead the family and be strong.
A man needs to make sure that his family gets to church.
And in this way, what he is doing is he is giving strength to his equal partner, who is the woman who has a different job.
Right.
And the man needs to provide that strength so that the woman can provide strength for him as well.
Women, I would say, you know, I'm sure I would get.
Canceled for this or whatever, but women want to take care of their man.
They want to take care of their children.
They want to feel valued in that way.
And the way that you can do that best is when you know that the man is taking care of you, right?
When you know that things are stable, when you have an understanding of what's going on.
I think that's really important.
And I think it's overlooked in our culture.
And I think that, you know, I think that that's sad and I think it leads to decline.
Discouraged, like you were saying.
It is discouraged.
It is the strong, independent woman, the career, the career girl, the girl boss, that entire personality narrative gimmick agenda is, is pushed because at the end of the day, you're not being independent and, um, and, and career minded.
What you're doing is you're becoming, you're going into servitude for a company.
You're going into servitude for another organization and organize, but here's the biggest difference.
And, and someone said this to me.
When I was just getting an extra set to me at Guantanamo Bay, believe it or not, a senior chief I had down there, he said, you know something?
One day, the Navy will just replace you.
You'll work as many years or serve as many years as you do in the Navy, and you'll have whatever great war stories and different missions and things that happen.
And, you know, got some good ones.
But at the end of the day, They'll give you a gold watch, they'll give you a nice lunch, and then you'll walk away, and they'll find someone else to warm your seat.
And what does it say that we have replaced the terms husband and wife with the term partner?
And instead we're encouraging the exact opposite.
Like it's a law firm.
Right, but we're also not encouraging a partnership.
We're encouraging two people to walk parallel next to each other, to not hold hands.
Oh that's right, as if it's interchangeable.
And it's not interchangeable at all.
No, your family is what is there for you at the end of day, at the end of your life.
Your family is what is there for you to tuck you in, to be with you in the morning, to be with you in the small hours, through thick and thin.
And if you so believe, as I know you and I do, that in the afterlife, your family is what you take with you.
It's not your money, it's not your possessions, not your material goods.
It is the people and the love that you make in this world, and specifically your family, really only your family.
And hopefully, and as a dad, you know, I think as well, not only do I have to get my kids through this world, I have to get into the next one.
And my whole family into the next one.
So it's, you know, it's a lot.
It's a lot.
But at the same time, if you run away from that, if you run away from it, you're losing something.
And that's why, I know we're sort of at the end here, but we had that story recently where there was that dad down in North Carolina with there were this crazy, crazy guy down the street started opening fire at his family.
And the little girl, poor little girl, six years, she was, I guess, a piece of a bullet fragment, I guess, grazed her cheek.
So she had to get stitches there.
The mom, I think something in her arm.
But what the mother had said was that the dad ran down the street and put himself This is William White is his name, and we've been sharing out his GoFundMe.
I did verify with the family that this is real.
He ran down the street, put himself in the line of fire, used his body as a shield, and took, it's unclear if it was one or two shots in the back that were intended for his daughter.
No one forced him to do that.
Nobody was, you know, hey Bill, you gotta go do that.
No, no, you know what you have to do.
Yeah, I have mad respect for that guy.
That's what dads are supposed to do.
You know what they say?
Gene Hackman has an old quote.
He said, what's the difference between a hero and a coward?
One step sideways.
Oh, ouch.
And that's an old quote, but it literally applies in this case.
A coward, one step sideways.
You took that one step sideways, your daughter... She's gone.
Yeah.
And then how do you live with yourself?
You can't live with yourself after that.
No.
No.
So I mean, uh, you know, I've, I've said it before.
I'll say it again.
That's when it comes to your family.
And that's when, when in the Bible, it says, it says women, women must most follow their husbands, right?
Do it says that men is the leader, but then it also says that men, men must love Their wives.
Leave their families and cleave to their wives.
And then love the families as Jesus loved the church.
And what did Jesus do?
Sacrifice himself, yeah.
Full mass, all of it, it's all sacrifice.
And so what it was telling fathers is that, hey, this is part of the deal.
That if that check comes one day, this is part of the deal.
Libby Emmons, final words before we sign off on this fantastic episode.
Despite all the madness, trust, vulnerability, partnership, and marriage, and raising a family is worth it, and it's better than a career.
Amen.
Libby Edmonds of the post-millennial humanevents.com.
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