Oct. 22, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
59:23
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Joining me today is a professor of English at the University of Ottawa, an author, a self-declared anti-feminist, and a campaigner for the right to dissent. | ||
| Janice Fimengo, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Well, thank you very much, Dave. | ||
| It's nice to have you here. | ||
| We were looped in by this Jordan Peterson fella, who apparently everyone knows this guy now. | ||
| So before we do anything else, I thought it would be interesting, since he looped us in together, what do you make of the Jordan Peterson phenomenon? | ||
| Well, to say the very least, I think what Jordan proves is that there is an incredible hunger out there amongst young people, maybe amongst young men in particular, but obviously amongst women as well. | ||
| For something that's really genuine and hard-hitting and real in terms of discussing what matters in the world today. | ||
| Something that we aren't getting in our public conversations at all. | ||
| And Jordan obviously offers that. | ||
| And all of the attempts to discredit him and to claim that he represents something really dark and nefarious. | ||
| It clearly isn't working in turning people off. | ||
| It ain't gonna stop though. | ||
| No, it's just ramping up I think. | ||
| Yeah, so what is going on in Canada that there seems to be a burst of Canadian professors | ||
| from Jordan to you and Gad Sad and plenty of others, feel free to name drop some others | ||
| that should be on my radar. | ||
| There seems to be a real pushback from Canadian professors, at least a small select group of them | ||
| against this sort of groupthink and pro-faux diversity and whatever you wanna call this whole movement. | ||
| Yeah, well, actually, I think it's unfortunately still a relatively small group, I would say. | ||
| I think there needs to be a lot more in the way of pushback. | ||
| The thing that really struck me about Jordan Peterson's situation when he first sort of burst onto the scene with his declaration that he would not, you know, he would not engage in forced speech. | ||
| And that not a single professor at the University of Toronto would come forward even to say, I may not necessarily agree with what he's saying, but I support his right to say it. | ||
| And that's one of the largest universities, if not the largest university in Canada, and probably the most prestigious one. | ||
| And the fact that not a single professor felt That he or she could stand with Jordan in that moment, that was astounding to me. | ||
| And so, yeah, there are a few and Gad Saad is a wonderful example. | ||
| I have a close friend at Acadia University who was actually just fired this year, Rick Mehta. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Who was inspired by Jordan. | ||
| He was someone who had been thinking for years a lot of the things that Jordan has talked about in terms of the group think in academia, the whole range of subjects that you can't even talk about. | ||
| Well, that you can't talk about from a variety of positions that you have to take one position on. | ||
| And so he finally started speaking out. | ||
| Before this, he was an award winning teacher. | ||
| And the year he started speaking out, he had so many complaints. | ||
| And he's now actually been fired, a tenured professor. | ||
| This is an astounding thing. | ||
| So unfortunately, I would say that what's happening in Canada is that a few people are speaking out and a lot of people are speaking privately, saying, you know, I really support what you're talking about and I really wish I could do it as well, but it's way too dangerous for me to do so. | ||
| And the case of Professor Mehta at Acadia proves that indeed, People have reason to be very fearful. | ||
| Yeah, you know, in the case of Professor Mehta, it's so interesting to me that one of the ways I get guests is that suddenly someone does something, often at a university, and then it starts bubbling, and there's some stories written, and then I start hearing about it on Twitter, and then it bubbles up enough, and then they usually end up right in that seat where you are right there, and I suspect he'll probably be in here too. | ||
| And in a weird way, all of you guys are just defending the ability To think about these issues. | ||
| The positions that most of you are taking often wouldn't have been considered radical 20 years ago. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| No, they wouldn't have been. | ||
| In fact, in Professor Mehta's case, it seems to me he is such an excellent example of the fact that this is not about Even an individual saying offensive things because what were the supposed offensive things? | ||
| Well, I mean, and he didn't take these as positions. | ||
| You know, he he, I think, would would identify himself as a classic liberal. | ||
| He's not particularly conservative, but he he wanted to talk about the full range of issues. | ||
| He objected to his university's indigenization program, which I think maybe was the most controversial of the subjects. | ||
| And this is I think this is probably now the top hot button issue at Canadian universities. | ||
| It's the The move to replace European-based knowledge as exclusionary and inadequate and subjective, and to replace it in some cases with indigenous knowledge, and even in something called indigenous science, which many scientists would say is actually not. | ||
| I mean there is only, there's science, right? | ||
| There's science, period. | ||
| That is all there is. | ||
| And so Indigenous science has to do with Indigenous ways of knowing, elders' knowledge, what some might say is superstition or magical beliefs, sort of anecdotal kinds of observations. | ||
| And, you know, there's an attempt on the part of universities in some ways, a laudable one, to bring in Indigenous peoples who've been Excluded from the university experience for many years for a variety of reasons, but the idea that indigenous knowledge is not to be questioned, that it has a value equal to supposedly European science, is a really incredibly worrisome and strange idea. | ||
| And so he objected to that. | ||
| Uh, and he raised a whole bunch of other questions, not even saying that he wanted to, that he was necessarily taking a position on them, but merely saying that, you know, he said that identity politics is divisive and causes resentment. | ||
| Who would have thought? | ||
| Can you believe it? | ||
| I've never heard that before. | ||
| Yeah, he talked about the psychological science about differences in preference and interest | ||
| and intellectual ability between men and women. | ||
| He, what else did he talk about? | ||
| The wage gap and said that there was a lot of evidence to suggest that it was based on preferences | ||
| and choices that people made rather than bias against women. | ||
| And there are a whole bunch of, he really was just trying to do what, | ||
| exactly as you said, professors once were supposed to do. | ||
| And that's now no longer possible in the university classroom. | ||
| And I think a lot of students probably liked him. | ||
| I mean, he got these teaching awards and he had a lot of support even up until the point that he was fired. | ||
| But because a cadre of very angry students and also very angry colleagues, and it is often professors who are persecuting other professors, they claim to Complained about him and said that he was, you know, harassing them. | ||
| So let's put the student part aside for a second, because we're gonna get to that in a little bit, but the colleague part. | ||
| The fact that so much of this is being driven by other professors. | ||
| I mean, we saw this with Brett Weinstein at Evergreen State. | ||
| Jordan and many of my other friends who are professors now tell me they often get support privately from professors, but not publicly, which is the most enraging. | ||
| Gad tells me about this all the time. | ||
| But what do you make of professors that are leading this? | ||
| The charge against inquiry and thought. | ||
| Well, they're true believers, I think, many of them. | ||
| Some are true believers. | ||
| They see themselves as part of a revolution that's absolutely necessary. | ||
| They believe that our society is one of entrenched inequality and structural violence against women, against racial minorities, against Indigenous peoples, against trans people and, you know, all the claims. | ||
| And so they see that any attempt to argue against their positions or to simply call for more open discussion is a way of reasserting a very unjust They would say, you know, deathly status quo. | ||
| And then a lot of people, I think, are not true believers, but are just going along for career reasons or because it's easier to go along. | ||
| They just want to do their research and they can only do it in peace if they say all the correct, you know, platitudes. | ||
| So, I mean, what happened was that I think gradually the idea of the university was destroyed. | ||
| Whenever it started, how it happened, I mean it seems to have started sometimes in the | ||
| late 60s. Alan Bloom, I'm sure you've read The Closing of the American Mind, you know, | ||
| his claim is that professors lost faith in the idea of the university as | ||
| a sort of separate space where you simply thought about things, you didn't get | ||
| involved. And he has a wonderful line, I remember something about how Socrates | ||
| felt that it was more important to think about justice and to really... | ||
| learn what justice is rather than try to implement whatever partial version of it | ||
| is roiling the public consciousness of the day. | ||
| And so that was what the university had meant at its best, I think. | ||
| Right, so in a weird way, this is a case of where the university original mission | ||
| of being a place to find truth and giving people the opportunity to think about these | ||
| issues debate these issues, et cetera, has taken a complete 180 | ||
| because now it seems to be the breeding ground for the opposite of those ideas. | ||
| It is a breeding ground, for sure. | ||
| I mean, it's where all-- | ||
| All of the indoctrination takes place and then, of course, the students who are indoctrinated go out into all the major spheres of our society. | ||
| They go to law school where they read critical legal theory that tells them that there's nothing unbiased or objective about the legal system that we have in North America, that it needs to be completely remade. | ||
| They become journalists and they go to journalism school where they learn the same thing and they're told that a journalist should be somebody who attempts to improve and change society, make it better rather than just report what's happening. | ||
| They become teachers, they go into the education faculties where they're also being radicalized and so it's not surprising that This is where we're at now. | ||
| One of the things that fascinates me about this, every time I hear another professor come in and talk about it or I just see another breaking story about it or another monument taken down or whatever it is, this erasure of history, is that what you said before about the indigenous sciences, it's like they don't want you to just say, okay, maybe we could have an extra course in this and teach it hopefully with the same academic rigor as you would teach European sciences or what's known, as you said, as science. | ||
| We could have a parallel course if you want to take that as well, but they actually want to replace history, and that seems to me to be the most dangerous part of this. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But it's not surprising. | ||
| If you believe that the system that we have now is, you know, kills people. | ||
| It's always the rhetoric is really, really extreme. | ||
| It's like, you know, what you're saying is violence to me and my family. | ||
| What you're saying, you know, causes people to die. | ||
| So if you really believe that in some way, then you can't just bring in, you can't just have add-ons of other courses. | ||
| It is that this is not a reform. | ||
| You gotta burn the witches, basically. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And it's not a reform movement even where you could get to a point where you would say, okay, we've made certain structural changes to satisfy these various concerns. | ||
| It is a radical revolutionary movement that Everything has to be smashed and rebuilt. | ||
| And I think there's a very naive confidence on the part of many professors that they know better than generations and generations of people who came before. | ||
| And they will be able to build Jerusalem. | ||
| I somehow doubt it. | ||
| All right, so let's back up a little bit and get to your involvement in all of this. | ||
| So a self-declared anti-feminist, the defender of dissent. | ||
| I'm a big fan of dissent. | ||
| So just tell me a little bit about your academic background and what sort of brought you to believe some of the things that you believe now. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, I started off as I think, a pretty, well, to go back further, I started off as a, as just a, you know, someone who loved literature. | ||
| I was a nerd, I love to read. | ||
| And that was all I, you know, I, from the time I was very young, I wanted to be a university professor, I wanted to So then I got into graduate school and I was radicalized there, I would say, like everyone. | ||
| And that experience was really important to me in that I realized how incredibly pleasurable it is to be a radical. | ||
| Can you describe that a little bit, that feeling? | ||
| Because I know some of the young people are getting slammed with this now. | ||
| Yeah, it's very addictive and maybe it is even a kind of addiction. | ||
| I'm sure that there are all sorts of chemical changes that go on in your brain when you're feeling this. | ||
| It's a combination of sort of euphoric rage and self-righteous indignation and Yeah, righteous outrage. | ||
| So yeah, I did all the things. | ||
| marched in take back the night marches and I worked at a women's shelter and | ||
| and suddenly then I started to see that my purpose in becoming a university | ||
| professor would be to radicalize other students and to show them what I had | ||
| come to understand and yeah and it's a very heady experience and I've | ||
| thought for years and years like then I came off it because I think partly | ||
| because of my background my parents are lower middle class and my dad died last | ||
| year but somehow the that outrage it just didn't fit with the values that | ||
| they'd given me and it I I couldn't hold on to the conviction. | ||
| How long did it last for you? | ||
| It lasted while I was a graduate student really, so like from about 1991 to 94 or something around there, and then it started to fade off. | ||
| Do you remember moments? | ||
| Was there a seminal moment? | ||
| There wasn't one moment I wouldn't say but there there were just there were a number of moments where I just I couldn't hold on to the sense of conviction. | ||
| I can't think of a specific moment until like by the time I started teaching full-time I started teaching full-time in 1999. | ||
| And at that point, I would have said that I was, I probably would have said I was still a feminist, but I would have seen myself as more of a moderate feminist. | ||
| And I wouldn't, that wouldn't have been my primary self-identification. | ||
| I would have said I was an animal lover, you know, or something else like that. | ||
| And then, but 9-11 was really my, that was my moment. | ||
| And it was because at the university that I was teaching at the time, University of Saskatchewan, I'll never forget that morning. | ||
| I was already at work. | ||
| The secretary said that, you know, planes had flown into the towers and I was But I noticed that the mood at the university, and in my department in particular, it was one of like barely contained sort of vaunting pleasure. | ||
| I couldn't believe it. | ||
| And or at least I mean, maybe that's, you know, maybe not everybody felt that that could have been just my my sense of it, but certainly a kind of satisfaction. | ||
| And in fact, one of my friends came into the mailroom and said, well, they've got what they deserved. | ||
| This is like, you know, within an hour of the news. | ||
| Another said that she was going to teach about it that day, and this was like really early on in the term, so she hadn't even really started. | ||
| I think this would be like our first week, probably. | ||
| Yeah, first week or maybe the first part of the second week, but anyway, and she was going to teach about | ||
| the event and she was going to talk about how how this would be used by | ||
| reaction how this would likely be used by reactionary forces in the United States and how it would be | ||
| very interesting to watch over the next few days who they would blame and | ||
| how they would begin to manipulate. I thought wow like it hasn't I mean, you know | ||
| She never even thought that maybe there would be students in the class who would be really upset | ||
| who might even you know, know somebody who knew somebody or it was just the the lack of human empathy | ||
| And the the hatred the satisfied hatred that that was really my moment that turned me off completely | ||
| from everything to do with the left, the progressivism, the anti-Americanism, the anti-Western culture, everything. | ||
| Then the other thing that was happening at the same time, well, in the year before, too, | ||
| was that my department was doing a fair bit of hiring. | ||
| And we were doing what we called equity hiring, affirmative action hiring. | ||
| And we were very, very keen to hire more women and to hire members of visible minorities and indigenous people. | ||
| And I just, you know, and there was, you weren't allowed to obviously object in any way and nobody did. | ||
| Everyone, except maybe occasionally privately a bit, a bit of demurrel, but basically everyone was publicly very enthusiastic and it just struck me as the most unjust, ridiculous thing. And basically, like no men, no | ||
| white men were even considered for any of the positions that were offered. And I couldn't see how | ||
| that was a good thing in any way at all. | ||
| And it just, it seemed to me, outraging. And we would get hundreds of applications for some of | ||
| the positions. And all of these men who had done all these amazing things, just being put aside, | ||
| and women who had done far, far less. | ||
| being considered and brought in for interview and always the idea was that | ||
| this was equity hiring which meant that if two candidates were equally | ||
| qualified then we would choose the woman. But of course as soon as you're | ||
| looking to hire for a political reason you're not considering the true | ||
| qualities of the candidates at all. So in a situation like this if you | ||
| had two candidates that had the exact same criteria and you had a department | ||
| that was say 90% male, in that case what would your position be on this? | ||
| If they truly, I know what you're saying, it's like, you'd never get to that place where it's exactly the same. | ||
| Yeah, I wouldn't accept the proposition. | ||
| No, there are never two candidates who are exactly the same. | ||
| And I honestly could never see a situation where it would be so urgent that you would hire on the basis of you know, an identity category. I can't believe that, I | ||
| mean the arguments for changing the, you know, the demographic mix of workplaces | ||
| or whatever, I can see them applying in very narrow circumstances. | ||
| For instance, in primary school, I would say, yeah, it's probably a good idea that children have a mix of men and women and as teachers and maybe even an ethnic mix if it's an ethnically mixed school. | ||
| I could see that as important. | ||
| important. And in fact that doesn't happen because you know most primary | ||
| schools are taught almost entirely by by women. So little boys who might not have | ||
| a dad at home are not even getting a chance to have a male role model | ||
| at primary school. So that would be a place where I could maybe see the case | ||
| But at a university, I just I really can't see the necessity. | ||
| I don't believe that any promising young person is actually going to be turned off a subject because they don't see somebody who looks exactly like them reflected in the professoriate. | ||
| And if they do, then what a deeply profound Disturbance has already happened in the education system, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean I just I mean I don't believe that our system is is so | ||
| exclusionary and you know that I mean we hear this so much about how now especially women in STEM and and also I guess | ||
| racial minorities, but but I hear more about women, you know, they just can't go into astronomy because | ||
| Supposedly there aren't enough female astronomers a friend of mine who actually left | ||
| Australia he was working as an astrophysicist in Australia He left there and went to China because he realized that | ||
| there was no future for him at all like no he couldn't possibly get a | ||
| tenure-track position because they were so set on hiring women or other identity categories and | ||
| He always sends me things and recently he sent me something a few | ||
| A PhD student was being brought in to talk to, I think, his old department. | ||
| He said, I'm so glad I'm not there anymore. | ||
| And she was going to be talking about how, you know, there are not enough women represented in astronomy, because even like the laws are named after, they're all named after men. | ||
| Newton's law, you know, Kepler's law. | ||
| Yeah, and that was the idea that some of these laws should actually be named after somebody else even though they're | ||
| named after the men because the men obviously were the ones that discovered the laws. | ||
| I mean, it's just it's ludicrous. | ||
| They could try to make their own discoveries and then name them after themselves regardless if they're... | ||
| But they couldn't because they're just so, you know, so beaten down by the oppressive maleness of the discipline. | ||
| And it's just, it isn't true. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| I mean, I could see if, you know, male professors were standing up telling these female students, look, you're never gonna, you know, you don't have the right brain for it or whatever. | ||
| Well, that would be different. | ||
| But nobody is doing that. | ||
| Nobody's doing that. | ||
| You know, professors are delighted to have anyone who's promising and capable, male or female, or whatever color their skin is. | ||
| It just isn't the case that there are all these, you know, systemic barriers to participation. | ||
| So when you had these two experiences, so 9-11 and then the hiring practice, what I find often, and I think it sort of happened to me, is once you have your little wake up about what this sort of unending monster on the left is, everything else collapses pretty quickly. | ||
| So how did that collapse, if the rest of the collapse was pretty quick, how did that lead you to where now you're so outspoken about feminism and a series of other issues? | ||
| Yeah, well it just, it did. | ||
| Everything else did collapse pretty quickly and what I became especially upset about was what I came to see as the really negative environment for young men at university because I began thinking about what it must feel like to sit there Day after day after day hearing about how all the good things in the world are the contribution of women and all the bad things are the contribution of men and how what young men have to do today is basically just take a step back. | ||
| Step away from the power, as Professor Susanna Walters said in that Washington Post piece, Why Can't We Hate Men? | ||
| You know, that's what you have to do as a man. | ||
| You have to bear the weight of centuries of male privilege and oppressive behavior. | ||
| And so you just have to step back, don't run for office, don't do anything. | ||
| I mean, you know, as if I mean it's unbelievable, but yeah, basically yeah, and you know be abject Apologize for your so-called privilege and let your sisters Come forward and make the world a better place and and that is I mean that it's so crude and so ridiculous But I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that that is the message that most young men are getting at University today that the only way to be a good man is to focus all of your | ||
| Energy and attention on someone else whether it's a You know on helping women or in helping the indigenous or whatever it happens to be that you can't have your own Concerns you can't have your own needs and you certainly can't have your own problems or issues That's the only way you can be a good person. | ||
| So yeah, I just seemed to me outrageous and I kept waiting for other people like to Isn't that a weird position to be in? | ||
| And I would occasionally talk to others about it and they'd say, "Oh yeah, they could sort of see," | ||
| but they weren't willing to stick their necks out in any way. | ||
| And so finally, I just got to the point where I thought, "Well, I should do it then." | ||
| Isn't that a weird position to be in? | ||
| Because I do find so many of the people that I've talked to that have had similar evolutions to you, | ||
| they don't think of themselves as particularly brave or particularly like, | ||
| "Oh, I was the one that wanted to save the world," | ||
| or anything, but you get pushed to a point where then finally you're at that ledge | ||
| and it's either they're gonna push you over and you'll never speak again and you'll disappear | ||
| or you kind of turn around and fight back. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, in my case, I especially, it's not that I don't, because I do get a rush out of conflict and that sort of thing, but for this particular issue, I don't think I'm very good at it. | ||
| I mean, for one thing, it's very difficult to be on the other side of a social justice issue, because to be on the right side, the left side, Yeah, the correct side, I should say, the left side. | ||
| It's easy because you hear the arguments over and over again. | ||
| So, you know, you just have to open your mouth and out they all come. | ||
| And usually people are stunned into embarrassed silence as soon as you start attacking them with your various claims and your various charges against them. | ||
| But to be able to argue really effectively on the other side, you not only have to know | ||
| all the left side arguments, but then you have to research all these things that you'd | ||
| been taught were simply not true or were unthinkable or were impossible. | ||
| And it's not my area of expertise, certainly. | ||
| My area of expertise is literature, and I don't think I'm very good. | ||
| You have to be good in debate and answering people's challenging questions. | ||
| I hate all that. | ||
| I'm terrible at that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What a fine mess you've gotten yourself into. | |
| And I didn't really, you know, and I didn't entirely understand what it would be like, like when I gave my first couple of talks and they were protested and they pulled the fire alarms and there were a lot of really angry students in the audience. | ||
| I really had no idea that it was going to be like that. | ||
| I thought it was just going to, I was sort of going to talk about academic feminism in a sort of bounded way. | ||
| And I knew that because I'd studied it for years. | ||
| But I didn't realize I was going to be asked to answer questions about, you know, everything to do with the relations between men and women and, you know, rape and all of these big issues. | ||
| So I didn't do a very good job, I didn't think. | ||
| But, but, you know, nobody else is doing it. | ||
| And so I want to keep on. | ||
| And I started doing my video series three years ago and And that has given me a lot of satisfaction, actually, because, well, as soon as I started speaking in public, I got a lot of emails, an incredible number of emails, mostly from young men, some from men not that young, talking about their experiences. | ||
| And It blew me away, and I know Jordan's talked about this too, but the amount of pain that there is out there. | ||
| The number of young men who just want to, they love women in most cases, | ||
| they want to have a happy relationship. | ||
| They've never intended to hurt or oppress anyone, and yet they're told that even without intending to, | ||
| they do, just by looking at a young woman, or asking her out on a date, | ||
| they're doing some sort of violence. | ||
| And the pain that that has caused, and the uncertainty and the confusion, | ||
| and the resentment as well. | ||
| So it's-- I-- | ||
| You know, and some of these young men have themselves been abused, their parents, sometimes their mothers have been abusive, or girlfriends, and yet they're in, you know, they have to hear over and over again about how it's only men who are ever abusive, and yeah, it's amazing to me. | ||
| Like, once you go into Down the rabbit hole or whatever it is, and you see our culture from the other side. | ||
| And every time you turn on the news, there's yet another story about, you know, whatever, the terrible problem of cat calling and how it represents, you know, the deep misogyny of North American culture and what needs to be done about it and, you know, all that kind of thing. | ||
| Yeah, it's astounding. | ||
| So now I sort of feel like, with my videos anyway, that my role is to at least to say to young men that you're not crazy. | ||
| Our culture is actually crazy. | ||
| All right, so let's talk about this crisis in masculinity. | ||
| Is that the right way to phrase it, do you think? | ||
| Sure, yeah, that's fine. | ||
| That'll work? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| That there do seem to be so many men who, as you said, they don't hate women, they don't hate themselves, but they're sort of wounded and confused. | ||
| I see these people often at Jordan's shows, and I don't even mean that shows are filled with these people. | ||
| There's just people that are kinda confused. | ||
| Their roadmap is a little screwed up, and he's kinda helping them get back on the road. | ||
| He doesn't even talk about gender that often or any of that stuff. | ||
| For whatever reason, his broader message of clean up your room, get your stuff together, fix yourself before you fix the world, that seems to be a message that these people are hearing. | ||
| This crisis, are you able to really figure out how widespread it is? | ||
| I mean, I know you're getting sort of emails and you're putting up your video series and all that, but can you really tell how much of this has just sort of gone across culture? | ||
| Because it does seem to sort of be the beginnings of the next culture war. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's hard to say exactly. | ||
| I mean, certainly at the university, there's been a tremendous decline in men attending. | ||
| Women now dominate in numbers at pretty well every university, at least in North America, and I assume it's true in Western Europe as well. | ||
| Now, there might be lots of reasons for that, but one has to assume that at least a part of the reason is that men feel That there isn't a place for them at the university. | ||
| And the relentless man blaming and man shaming that goes on there has got to have something to do with that, I would think. | ||
| And there are a number of reports certainly that I've read recently indicate that in a whole bunch of other ways men are just not doing very well generally either. | ||
| There was a report that came out a few years ago called Wayward Sons. | ||
| It came out of MIT, two economists talking about how in a number of | ||
| different metrics, whether it was skills acquisition, real wages, just employment numbers, | ||
| job status. | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| Men are falling behind women really shockingly. | ||
| And then that's leading into all sorts of other social problems too. | ||
| Men are not getting married because they're not in a position to be able to support a family. | ||
| There are many other reasons why men are not getting married as well. | ||
| And so then that means that more and more women are are raising their children outside of marriage and that | ||
| often has very bad impacts for the boys in those single mom situations. | ||
| They tend to be the ones that are hurt most by the lack of a father. | ||
| And so, yeah, it certainly seems that there's some pretty widespread problems. | ||
| Suicide, male suicide, is something that a lot of people that I work with are very concerned about. | ||
| Mental illness, what they call failure to launch, meaning just a lot of young men feeling that there isn't anything for them in society, and so why even try to contribute anything to it at all. | ||
| It does seem to be a pretty widespread problem from what people like Warren Farrell | ||
| who've studied the subject for years, certainly, and of course, Christina Hoff Sommers as well. | ||
| Yeah, what are the tactics that you've seen work effectively to, | ||
| if someone contacts you and they're feeling all of the things that you've discussed, | ||
| or not feeling them, they're experiencing all of these things. - Yeah, they're experiencing | ||
| them. - Yeah. | ||
| Do you have a sort of groundwork for how they can kind of get their lives in order | ||
| and fight some of this? | ||
| Or it's really just you're just making them aware? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I befriend them and I tell them that what they're feeling has a real basis. | ||
| I mean, that part of the problem is that they're told that their only problem is a sense of entitlement, you know, which is the last thing that's true about men's experience today. | ||
| So part of the thing is that, I mean, I think many of the young men that write to me, It's not that they necessarily think they're the biggest victims in the world. | ||
| It's that there is not even a smidgen of awareness that they would ever have anything to worry about, the sense that everything that they have, it's because they're so privileged. | ||
| So in a weird way, through that lens, it's like society, you should have everything, you should feel great, look, you've been handed everything, but then society's continually making you feel like crap, which is like a completely double-edged sword, because you're supposed to feel great, you feel like crap, they're never giving you a chance to feel good, because there's nothing you can do to get yourself out of this. | ||
| Yeah, and it's, I mean, I think it is a devastating social problem. | ||
| And again, yeah, I don't know the exact extent of the problem, but from what people who know and who have studied it more are certainly indicating that it is a growing problem. | ||
| And, you know, in the circles that I sort of pay attention to, you know, there's this movement called MGTOW, which I know you know about, and of men who just have decided... What's the acronym break down to? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Men going their own way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm not an expert on MGTOW, certainly women. | ||
| It would be funny for them to think of me pronouncing on it, I'm sure. | ||
| And there can be different reasons. | ||
| In the broadest definition, I think it's just men saying, look, I'm going to focus my life around my own pursuits and I'm not going to focus my life around a woman. | ||
| And these men tend to think that actually that's a trap that a lot of men fall into, | ||
| is making everything about a woman. | ||
| And then you can get, you know, really, you can be destroyed. | ||
| If the woman you happen to focus your life around is crazy or malevolent in some way, | ||
| she can destroy her man by making a claim of abuse. | ||
| He can find that the marriage he built, the home that he built, | ||
| the children that he fathered, all can be taken away from him. | ||
| His life can be destroyed, his business can be taken away, his reputation can be ruined, you know, all of those things. | ||
| And so there's so much risk to these young men in these involvements that a lot of them are just deciding it's safer not to, you know, not to risk anything, but I think there's a more general | ||
| thing too. | ||
| It's just, and it has to do with that sense that every day, in some way, | ||
| some of these men are beginning to feel like their society just doesn't even like them. | ||
| It's not even that they're expendable, which I think most men who have studied the situation of men throughout history would say that's always been the case. | ||
| Men are the ones that go to war. | ||
| Why? | ||
| To protect the women. | ||
| So this idea that all of human history is about male power and privilege and men abusing | ||
| women, these men say it's actually the exact opposite. | ||
| Women have always been the ones who are precious in societies, particularly in Western society, | ||
| with chivalry and everything else. | ||
| So that was always the situation. | ||
| But expendability is one thing, but to be actually despised by your society and told | ||
| that there's nothing good about you, that even your sacrifices aren't good enough, and | ||
| yet you're still supposed to make the sacrifices, but you'll never get any kind of public acknowledgement | ||
| of that. | ||
| Well, that's why I always say it's bowing forever. | ||
| That's what they want. | ||
| There is no penance. | ||
| There is no reclamation here. | ||
| It's a perpetual stay there. | ||
| Yeah, you can never purge your toxic masculinity, no matter what you do. | ||
| Unless you die, I guess, you know, rescuing somebody, but even then... And they figure out a way to... Yeah, I mean, and then that gets flipped over and then that's an example of, you know, patriarchal, you know, objectification of women or something. | ||
| I mean, it really is, like, it's sick. | ||
| When you listen to, I mean, I've read lately so many studies. | ||
| One about, this was by a feminist sociologist, and sociology is really, I mean, it's just crazy. | ||
| This was a woman who has done work with the homeless in Ontario. | ||
| And her whole shtick was about how even amongst the homeless, Certainly, certain ideas associated with hegemonic masculinity could still be found in, she interviewed various homeless men. | ||
| And, you know, the fact that the homeless are overwhelmingly men, right away, you know, it points to something. | ||
| Doesn't it say something about male privilege in our society? | ||
| Yeah, you walk around the streets of Ottawa You almost never see a homeless woman. | ||
| You see a lot of homeless men and a lot of homeless white men as well as homeless Inuit men. | ||
| Anyway, so she had done this work with homeless men and she interviewed them and yes, she found that either they were lamenting the loss of their hegemonic masculinity or they were even so trying to assert their hegemonic masculinity in various ways. | ||
| I mean, it was just, it was truly crazy. | ||
| It had nothing to do, and she actually recommended at the end of the article that programs working with these men should perhaps, you know, help them to, whatever, renounce their hegemonic masculinity. | ||
| There was another article- That's obviously their number one problem. | ||
| Yeah, that's their number one problem. | ||
| I mean, it's just unbelievable. | ||
| There was another article I read just recently saying that programs to encourage men to be responsible fathers This was, I think, these were American programs I think she was studying. | ||
| Such programs also reinforce patriarchal because they reinforce this idea that, you know, men have an important role to play as fathers. | ||
| And she actually said that this was a typical reassertion of patriarchal thinking in that the implicit assumption was that women That mothers aren't sufficient for their children. | ||
| So, I mean, she basically outright said that children don't need fathers and fathers have no necessary role in their children's lives. | ||
| There's a lot of scientific evidence that that's not correct. | ||
| That's not correct, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, that it's deeply damaging to children. | ||
| Do you sense that there's a movement now for women, and I think you'd probably be included in this, But that young women that are looking to get married in their late teens, early 20s, that they want men back. | ||
| So I can only give an anecdotal example of this, but I have a lot of single, straight female friends that have their lives together, have jobs, take care of themselves, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| And we have this like running joke that I don't know Virtually any straight men like that. | ||
| I know a lot of gay guys that seemingly have their lives together and that are doing all of those things. | ||
| I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. | ||
| It's a sidebar, but it's sort of interesting. | ||
| They want there to be men to find. | ||
| It's become a running joke for me. | ||
| I don't know where they are. | ||
| Yeah, well, yeah, I think those women are going to have to start asking why it is that they're not there. | ||
| And some of the reason I would say is precisely that they're just not, they're not willing anymore to be there because it isn't possible. | ||
| I mean, obviously, there are lots of men who are still willing to take on responsibility and be the achievers and all of that. | ||
| But I think there has been sort of a general... A lot of men are disgusted with the paucity of options that are offered to them. | ||
| And they feel that there are too many risks for them involved in doing the things that they might have once wanted to do. | ||
| And I think a lot of men are damaged, too, from the decades of relentless propaganda, anti-male propaganda. | ||
| How do you think this is all connected to the Me Too movement? | ||
| So I just want to be clear on one thing. | ||
| So as we're taping this, because I'm on tour with Jordan at the moment, we are holding this video for a little bit. | ||
| So the moment we're taping this right now is the Kavanaugh hearings, and it just feels like everything that you've Yeah. | ||
| Well, there's so much about Me Too. | ||
| for the last 45 or so minutes, it seems like it's all being unearthed now publicly | ||
| in our political arena. | ||
| That's why I think this is so much more of a culture thing than a political thing directly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But can you relate all of this to Me Too? | ||
| Well, there's so much about Me Too. | ||
| I mean, I think partly what Me Too represented, for me anyway, like so many women have been told | ||
| for so many years that the whole history of our culture is a history of male privilege. | ||
| And so, but in fact, you know, most women, um, at least, um, I would say, um, you know, lower middle class to upper middle class women have had lives in which they've been told from day one that they really matter. | ||
| Certainly that was my experience. | ||
| I never, you know, I was born in 1964 so, I was going back to the, I guess I was the beneficiary of | ||
| the second wave feminist movement and certainly I always knew that everybody in my life, all | ||
| of the people at my school, you know, all the coaches, the mentors, teachers, they | ||
| wanted me to do well. | ||
| And I think a lot of women have had that message, you know, you can do whatever you want to | ||
| do and we encourage you to go girl, you know, you can be great, you can be a rocket scientist, | ||
| you can do something else, you know, and whatever you do, you'll be supported in it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But at the same time... | |
| So just to be clear though, as an anti-feminist now, second wave feminism back then, pretty | ||
| good. | ||
| Oh, well, that's a whole other... I mean, it had the seeds of the deep hatred of men in it. | ||
| I mean, it was the one that started rape culture, and that the history of women was a history of male sexual violence, and that men kept women in check by sexually abusing them or by threatening them with sexual abuse. | ||
| So, but when you said that you were born out of that, and that things were okay, Well, certainly things were wonderful in the 1970s. | ||
| I mean, my argument would be that they would have been pretty good anyway. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| I think ever since women got the vote and men were happy to extend it to them without any of the responsibilities that men who had the vote had always had to take on, such as military service and the willingness to die for defending your country, I think ever since that happened, basically men have shown themselves pretty open to admitting women into the professions and encouraging women | ||
| to make whatever kind of contribution they could make to our culture. | ||
| Anyway, so yeah, there's a lot of things to talk about there for sure. | ||
| So basically what I would say though is that women, while being encouraged, while feeling that an awful lot of positive attention and energy are focused on them, at the same time they've always been fed this grievance narrative. | ||
| You know, that somehow in the past it was all terrible. | ||
| For hundreds and hundreds of years they've been abused. | ||
| And so we're getting to the point now where having been fed that, and I really do think | ||
| it is an outright lie. | ||
| And the problem is, too, now that all of history has been sort of rewritten, and so it's actually | ||
| very difficult to find out the reality of history, because we have it filtered through | ||
| our popular culture and things we think we know about, for instance, women winning the | ||
| right to vote and the fact that there were a whole bunch of men, certainly in Canada | ||
| and Great Britain, who couldn't vote at the same time that women were campaigning for | ||
| the right to vote. | ||
| Almost nobody knows that at all. | ||
| Which men couldn't vote at those times? | ||
| Poor men. | ||
| There were property and wage qualifications at the time. | ||
| There were certain restrictions. | ||
| Many of the men who went and fought in the First World War, for instance, the young men, they couldn't vote either. | ||
| So, but we have this idea that for centuries, men could vote and basically ran society and women couldn't. | ||
| But in fact, that's not true. | ||
| There's a very narrow window when most men could vote and when women couldn't. | ||
| But anyway, and in all sorts of other ways, we have these ideas that women were the property of their fathers or their husbands or that they were, you know, abused, that nobody believed them, that nobody cared if they were raped. | ||
| That's the thing that's coming out now. | ||
| I've heard a number of high-profile female commentators say, you know, just up until the recent past, nobody believed a woman if she said she'd been raped, so now we're going to believe them. | ||
| Now, even if that were true, it wouldn't make sense and it wouldn't be just, obviously, to suddenly now just believe every time a woman says that a man has done something to her and we're going to destroy that man's career or we're going to put him in jail. | ||
| Is that the most pervasive part of this though, that there's a growing feeling amongst this crew that in order to make an omelette you're going to have to break certain eggs? | ||
| Yes, I think so. | ||
| I mean, because they're quite literally, I mean I see this again from that class of blue check Twitter, you know, feminists or reporters. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I've seen that over and over again. | ||
| It's perfectly okay because of the centuries and centuries of abuse. | ||
| That's a crazy idea of retributive justice. | ||
| Punishing people as a class. | ||
| But I think a lot of people, a lot of, well, both women and men who buy that narrative are so whipped up in outrage over women's supposed suffering over the centuries that they're quite willing to see some men suffer now. | ||
| I mean, I read an article, maybe you saw it too, saying that, you know, Kavanaugh should not be, that the nomination should be withdrawn because Although maybe we shouldn't put men into prison just based | ||
| on a woman's unsubstantiated story from 36 years ago. | ||
| But hey, come on, you know, Supreme Court, well, all but five men in the country don't get to do that, so big deal. | ||
| And that's certainly been the attitude about the tribunals that have been put in place in American universities too. | ||
| People would say, well, there are no standards of justice here. | ||
| There's no opportunity to cross-examine witnesses. | ||
| You're not allowed to have a lawyer. | ||
| Sometimes the men weren't even allowed to know what the charges against them were. | ||
| And they'd always come out and say, well, but they're not going to be put in prison. | ||
| They're just going to be expelled from university. | ||
| That's a pretty minor... Right. | ||
| Well, that's why I think this topic is so interesting, because I'm not particularly... I don't particularly care about feminism or any of these isms one way or another. | ||
| I want everyone to be treated equally, or at least I want the laws of a nation to treat everyone equally, and then it's on you to figure out the rest, and sometimes there are bad people and you have to go out and do it yourself and figure it out. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But what now I see happening, and now I see why this This sort of crazed feminism piece is so directly related to free speech and the issues that I really care about is the way that we're, this is connected to due process now. | ||
| This is connected to, yeah, we're gonna break a couple eggs and we're actually going, we're gonna probably jail people and we're gonna probably get people fired and all of these things that you've put out there. | ||
| So I do see these, These ties to much greater issues and this in a weird way this is why a lot of people I think Peter Boghossian who I've had on the show has talked about how gender studies really is ground zero for this entire movement right now. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And I've seen this, I mean, this has been going on in Canada for a number of years, and it does, and gender studies is the ground zero, I think, and part of it is this idea that the, you know, things like the presumption of innocence, that those really are structures designed, especially in the cases of, you know, sexual assault law, that that's designed to protect Bad men. | ||
| So I've read all sorts of articles by law students saying, okay, we know what rape trials look like when presumption of innocence is the default or is the standard. | ||
| What would they look like if we started by believing? | ||
| And that whole notion of believing women as the fundamental legal standard, it's terrifying. | ||
| What do you think are the best steps to help people that are waking up? | ||
| So you talked about how you get all these emails from men and you can hopefully listen to them and that sort of thing. | ||
| But if they're, because they're out there, they're watching this right now. | ||
| I'm not hopeful. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| I don't have the answers. | ||
| I really don't. | ||
| I think that we're really in a mess right now. | ||
| If I wanted to say something really inflammatory, what I would say is that when I was a PhD student, I used to read newspapers from the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, because that was my period that I was | ||
| working in. | ||
| And I wanted to see what kinds of conversations were going on. | ||
| And I did a feminist PhD. | ||
| I was interested in female journalists of the 1880s and 1890s. | ||
| And there were all sorts of debates about gender relations, as we would call it now, | ||
| going on then. | ||
| And one of them was the question of women's political role. | ||
| To what extent should women be politically involved? | ||
| And really, the late 19th century was a time when, because of advances in domestic equipment | ||
| and because of some rudimentary birth control measures, more women were able to make a contribution | ||
| at the public level in a way they'd never really been able to, unless they'd been single. | ||
| So there were all these debates. | ||
| And most men were pretty enthusiastic about the idea of women becoming more publicly involved. | ||
| And there was very much a sense that women brought a certain kind of morality, that women | ||
| were superior morally than men. | ||
| And we still see that now, I think. | ||
| The whole idea that women don't lie about things, about rape or about various other | ||
| things, or that women can end war, women can negotiate better than men, all that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hillary Clinton voted for a lot of wars, you know. | |
| Yeah, well, that's true, but still the idea that women have something in them that is perhaps morally superior or gives them certain qualities that men don't have, still there. | ||
| So it was very much that. | ||
| But the anti-feminist position at the time said, It's dangerous. | ||
| Women are too emotional. | ||
| Women are less rational than men. | ||
| They personalize everything, so they're not able to separate themselves and make decisions in an objective, unbiased manner, and that kind of thing. | ||
| And you know, this was related to women's biology and various things. | ||
| And I remember I used to laugh and think how ridiculous I was. | ||
| And yet I have to say that over the last 10 years, as I have seen, I mean, because MeToo, | ||
| which claims it's this new conversation, it isn't really new. | ||
| I mean, this has been going on at least since Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas. | ||
| And, you know, certainly throughout the 1990s, following Anita Hill's charges against Thomas, there was a lot of discussion about sexual harassment in the workplace and what we were going to do about it. | ||
| A lot of legislation brought in. | ||
| A lot of innocent men, you know, disciplined or fired from their jobs as a result of various claims women made that they'd been made to feel uncomfortable or, you know, whatever it happened to be. | ||
| So this has been going on for a long time, I think, and I have to say that it makes me wonder sometimes whether those anti-feminists from the late 19th century weren't right. | ||
| What is it about this mass movement, so angry, this movement of vengeance, that is starting to make these completely irrational claims about how we should proceed, who we should believe, why it doesn't matter that we suspend basic principles of presumption of innocence and due process? | ||
| How can it be this is actually being taken seriously in our public culture? | ||
| I mean, I don't know, but I do have to wonder whether the presence of women isn't having some kind of really deleterious effect on our public conversations about these things. | ||
| That was only if you wanted to end on an inflammatory note. | ||
| I've really thoroughly enjoyed this. | ||
| I mean, it's such an interesting topic because it hits on so many of the things that I care about. | ||
| I suspect we will do this again. | ||
| Well, thank you very much. | ||
| Yeah, thanks for coming in. |
Export Selection