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Feb. 28, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:24
118 Female Violence (Part 1)

The moral perils of motherhood

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Good morning, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is quarter to nine on the 28th of February, 2006.
Hope you're doing well.
I thought that I would get to a podcast that I've been planning for quite some time.
So hopefully we'll be a little bit more coherent and a little bit less rambly.
After picking on the cats in blue yesterday, I thought it would only be fair to begin picking on another fabulous institution of modern propaganda.
That lovely, lovely, cozy maternal harbor we call motherhood.
And I think it's an important topic, and it is one of the great unspoken topics of the world.
In the propaganda war that has gone on between the genders, for as long as I've been alive, it's been nothing but, at least for me, I'm just sort of talking from personal experience, this isn't a syllogistical proof or anything, It's just been such a... men are bad, men are bad, men are bad, men are bad.
And for those men who aren't bad, they're worse.
And it really is kind of dull and repetitive and irritating to constantly get this message about how women are these creatures who are kind and gentle and nice and in touch with themselves and in touch with their feelings.
And all they care about is others, and they want to make everybody happy, and all this sort of stuff.
Whereas men are sort of dull and not at all in touch with their feelings, and everything that they do is sort of selfish and slightly retarded, and that's the best.
I mean, we're not even talking about war and the patriarchy, but that's sort of the best that you can expect from men, and it really is a very popular notion in society.
And there does seem to be, at least in my experience, this kind of war over which approach to life is better, the masculine approach or the feminine approach.
And it is something that I experienced in a number of relationships before I met Christina, And Christina and I deal with none of these issues.
In fact, we both have very particular strengths in our relationship.
She's great at organizing.
She does fantastically with the finances.
She runs the household in a magnificent manner.
And I've really reaped the benefits of having that skill set in my life.
And one of the things that I can do well in our relationship is I have a very strong nose for any kind of false self, if that makes any sense to you.
So I'm very good at understanding when the false self is present, when things that have been inherited from the family of origin are rearing their ugly head in our marriage.
Then I'm very good at talking us through all of that stuff and getting us back on track.
So, Christina runs a lot of things fantastically.
I run a lot of things very well and the sort of merger of the two is great and she fully respects.
I won't say it's masculine because I don't know whether it is or not.
I think it's slightly more common among men than women.
But she respects my masculine sort of common sense and my down-to-earthliness and my lack of being impressed by things like Motherhood and the family and culture and all that sort of stuff.
So I've really helped her to try and become free.
And I think she is magnificently free these days.
She's really been freed from a lot of the illusions that tied her down.
And those illusions were, to a large degree, but not entirely inculcated by her mother.
The illusions of social conformity, the illusions of being nice, the illusions of perfectionism, the illusions of making, like, of the absolute being that you can never ever let anybody be uncomfortable around you, that that's just wrong, that you have to have a perfect house, that You have to be presented perfectly with no hair out of place, and Christina is not too bad this way at all.
I mean, she's really, as you can imagine, she's loosened up quite a bit since we've gotten together, but definitely she'd inherited some of that, and it was kind of stifling to her because she's naturally much more of a free spirit, but she was Constantly bullied into this perfectionistic corner when she was a child and that's just one of the things that we took issue with with her family After we got married to a very exciting degree, which perhaps I will tell you about someday when Christina tells me that it's okay
So, there's no need for this conflict between the sexes, at least in my experience, and it only really takes one example of it working to show that it is not a general principle that we really have to worry about.
And so, I would say that This propaganda that we've received for so many years, at least that I've received, I'm sure it's not just me, where men are considered to be sort of defective women, right?
Womanhood is the standard of perfection, femininity is the standard of perfection, and men are just broken women, basically, and need to be fixed.
And this is a joke that I used to make before I got married with people, that When I was dating, it was just too funny for words because it would be, yeah, I'd meet some woman and we'd enjoy each other's company and we'd start to go out and I sort of went with the basic assumption, you know, call me crazy, but I sort of went with the basic assumption of, well, you are going out with me on a date or two or five
Therefore, there is something about me that is good, that you like, that is fine, that is acceptable, that you approve of, that matches with your values.
And then I would find, and Christina certainly helped me to see that in hindsight it wasn't exactly impossible to see up front, but I would find that These women would, after a certain, after we sort of flipped from dating into boyfriend-girlfriend, that there would be this sort of corner that would get turned.
That was, after a while, I could almost see it coming.
And that corner was, okay, now that we're going out, now that there's a possibility of a long-term relationship, or we're aiming at a long-term relationship and possibly marriage, of course, in the end down the road, Well, now everything needs to change.
I just thought that was really funny.
I think I said to one woman who We started going out, and after, I think, two months or three months, she began to correct me in a way that's, you know, originally it's sort of nice, originally it's sort of helpful, and then it turns not so helpful and kind of persnickety and kind of overly detail-oriented.
You know, you didn't fold the table napkins correctly.
I mean, it wasn't that bad, but it's that kind of stuff.
And I said to her, I said, you know, this is something that I've experienced before in relationships, and help me understand it, because I do find it very odd.
It's sort of like this.
It's like a woman goes out, and she needs a mode of transportation.
She needs to get from A to B. So she goes shopping all over the place, and she looks at every single car and truck and so on under the sun, moon, and sky, and then she buys a BMW.
Because it's absolutely perfect.
She's window-shopped around, she's test-driven, she now knows that the BMW is the one, and she takes it home.
And then, she puts it in her garage, and she takes out her power tools, and she puts on her welding helmet and says, right, now I'm going to turn this BMW into a boat, which is what I really want.
And I sort of told her this story, and she gave me the thousand-yard stare, which I've often gotten from women when I've caught them in a sort of logical contradiction.
And don't get me wrong, I get it from men, too.
I just tried to explain to her that she dated... I didn't say, look at all the men you dated!
My God, it was thousands!
But, you know, she dated around and she sort of was not 18 anymore and she knew what she wanted, I assumed, because she chose me.
So it didn't sort of make much sense to choose someone to go out with and then to want to change them into someone else.
That really is kind of mean, right?
It's sort of a bait-and-switch.
You know, it's like that song starts off, uh, don't go changing, and that ends up with, uh, okay, you will now have to be completely re-made up from the ground up to match my fantasy of what it is that a man should be.
And of course, the other thing that I mentioned to this woman, or I think it was that woman, was something like this.
You are not a lesbian.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
And so you want a man, and I am a man, and I have male characteristics which are not that uncommon, which is a slight lack of interest in Whether we have unwrapped or wrapped seashell soaps in the guest bathroom.
I really didn't understand doilies until I lived with a woman, but then I was supposed to really care.
I don't enjoy shopping for home furnishings that much.
In fact, I don't enjoy shopping for anything except electronics.
And there was, you know, I mean, I could sort of go on and on, and some of them are pretty cliched, but, you know, the men and women are different, you know?
I mean, I'm sure it's not just a shock.
When we regard the naughty parts, it's fairly evident that it's not just the naughty parts that make men and women different.
And I do believe complementary as long as there's mutual respect for the skills that each other bring to bear on the challenges of family.
But I just was never quite sure that it's like you sort of wanted a man and now you kind of want to turn me into a into a woman.
And as I said to the woman that I was living with that I was going to get that I proposed to like a mad fiend and then backed away from I said, you know, this is sort of why God invented girlfriends, right?
If you want to go and do these girly things, fantastic!
I mean, I like doing doodly things, so... and I have male friends to do those with.
I don't... I don't take your rock climbing, because you don't like it.
I don't ask you to come and shop for video games with me, or to do, you know, to look, or to spend two days in a stereo store.
So, because, you know, that's just a guy thing, and all my guy friends like to do that, and none of my female friends like to do that, so that's sort of a guy-girl thing.
And she wanted me to do all this.
She wanted me to come shoe shopping with her mother.
I mean, oh my god!
I mean, holy double blast of estrogen!
I think my hair would grow back.
So I just sort of pointed out that this was something that I didn't really enjoy and I didn't think that it was that unusual that I didn't enjoy shopping for shoes where I would get asked for my opinion and have none whatsoever.
And not because I didn't care.
I just didn't know and you know, it would be kind of silly.
So I did have these kinds of problems as well, that I really felt that with women, I was sort of being asked to be turned into a sort of woman with a pee-pee kind of thing.
And of course I really couldn't do that, not because at times I didn't want to, because I had received so much propaganda about how women were superior and men were broken, that I sort of felt, well, gee, I guess I really should try and be a better man, which means being more like a woman.
Now, I had some male friends who fortunately talked some sense back into me, and I won't go into the details of these conversations.
If you're interested, you can email me and I'd be happy to share some details, but I'll just sort of stay on this side of the fence for the moment.
They sort of talked me out of it and said, you know, you're a guy, you're not going to be able to turn yourself into anything else and you've just got to, you know, reach down and grab your pair and remember where they're attached.
And so I began to realize... Oh, and I also read another book by a Globe and Mail writer, a reporter.
Globe and Mail is a newspaper in Canada and she was a columnist for a while.
And she wrote a really great book called Lip Service.
You can probably get it in back order or out of print or you can probably find it on Amazon.
I found that fascinating.
She wrote about how The idea that women are really in touch with their feelings, and men are not, is really sexist.
And I know that this is one of the traps that people get into, and I hope I'm not offending too many people out there, especially the lovely ladies, who I think are fantastic.
Oh, really, I do!
But when you fight back against propaganda, the term of abuse that the propaganda contains is always used against you.
Well, we know this as libertarians, right?
So, when we say that we don't like the welfare scheme, well, the welfare scheme is put in place because people believe that, or, I don't know, the propaganda says that People don't care about the poor, so without the welfare scheme they'll die in the streets.
And so when we say the welfare scheme is immoral, then that same term of abuse that we use to create the welfare scheme is then applied to us, where you don't care about the poor and you want them to die in the streets.
And the same thing is true when you bring up issues of sexism or issues of gender disparity.
So when I say that men and women are equal, Which I'm going to get to today and also this afternoon in a way that may not make some people feel too comfortable.
If I say that men and women are equal, morally equal agents, then I really mean that.
But what happens is then, when I push back on the abuse that's been heaped upon men over the last generation or two, then I'm called sexist.
And this has happened to me more times than I would care to count.
And it is, of course, an entirely frustrating situation to be in.
To be...
striving for an equality of understanding and to be called a bigot in the process.
Well, I mean, we've all been there and we all know and I'm not going to show my wounds to the general battlefield because we've all had this experience.
So, when it comes to understanding what it means to be a moral agent, What I mean by that is that you have responsibility for your moral choices that you are not acted upon.
So if you are kidnapped and thrown in a basement, then you're not a moral agent if you're chained up and so on.
And if someone points a gun to your head and tells you to do something, you're not a moral agent.
You're just trying to survive and whatever you do has no moral content because it's not the result of choice.
So women, of course, are moral agents as equally and perfectly and wonderfully as men.
And I want to sort of put together one of the things that is very important to understand when we're talking about men and women and comparative virtue.
One of the things that I've always shocked women, or I guess I wouldn't say women, this is feminists, when I have conversations with them is they basically will come down about the patriarchy and men are this and men are that and blah blah blah and they're bad and they're not in touch with their feelings and they're sexist and they're They throw their weight around, and they don't use their napkins, and they burp, and all that kind of stuff.
I said, well, the thing that I find confusing about the idea that men are defective and women are better is the basic sort of issue that nobody talks about, that men are raised by women.
I mean, that's kind of so obvious that you'd think that it would be sort of understood and that you couldn't blame men in isolation from women.
Because it's a system.
It's an ecosystem.
It's a back and forth.
It's a pendulum.
Women give birth to men.
Women raise men.
And then if men turn out to be, let's say, let's just say, I mean, that men turn out to be homicidal maniacs like that fellow Marc Lepin in Montreal.
I think it was 1989.
He went into a university screaming that he hated feminists and gunned down a bunch of women.
Now, whether he hated feminists or not, I don't know.
It sounds like a bit of propaganda, but I think he left some notes behind.
I've never read them, of course, but I do remember sort of thinking at the time, and back then I was far too cowardly to bring this up with anyone other than my closest friends, because it was just too explosive an issue.
And I'm fine with explosive issues now because I'm older, but back then I was not, because I still felt that compromise was going to have some kind of value or gain me some kind of compromise in return from others, but it never works, right?
Compromise is appeasement, and appeasement never works.
But I remember sort of thinking to myself, okay, so the women all having these candlelit vigils, the feminists, and they're saying just how he represents the patriarchy and men don't want women to be free and this was this kind of violence as part of the systemic backlash against growing female independence and blah blah blah.
I mean, these people are just living in a kind of world that I don't understand because the The idea that, as men, we sort of sit around saying, ah, how are we going to plot violence against the women?
It's just like the He-Man, Woman-Haters club in the old Alfalfa and Spanky series, Our Gang.
It's just kind of silly, but one of the things that I do remember thinking during that time in Montreal, and I was living in Montreal at the time, was, well, why does he hate women so much?
I mean, that's kind of an important question.
It's an important question that you want to answer without reference to brain-dead ideology that just makes up devils out of thin air.
It's a kind of anti-Christ religion to just make up these things that... There's a patriarchy that programs people to go and kill women.
I mean, all that's just nonsense.
Now, Marc Lepin did not have any exposure to this abstract concept called the principle, but I'm pretty sure he was born of woman and raised by woman, and I guess if, you know, I'm guessing, I mean, call me crazy, I'll go out on a limb here, and I will openly say that I'm guessing that somebody like Marc Lepin
He grew up hating women because his mother was vicious and violent and brutal and murderous and just every kind of hellish evil you can imagine under the sun.
And, of course, we've been talking recently about this thing called the disparity of power.
The disparity of power creates corruption, creates an abuse of power.
If it is not generally understood that this is a risk, then it absolutely creates terrible power.
And Lord Acton's phrase, that absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely, is nowhere more prevalent.
than the relationship between the mother and the infant.
It is nowhere more prevalent than the relationship between the mother and the infant.
You can take all of your totalitarian regimes, roll them up into one ball, and you cannot lay them, in terms of its effect on an individual, you cannot lay them on a little toe of a woman who has given birth to a baby and is mothering that baby for the first four or five years of its life.
And that is something which is absolutely unspoken in society, that the cycle of violence is mother to son, to wife, to mother, to son, to wife, to mother, to son, blah blah blah.
And it's not the only cycle of violence, there are many others, but this is one that is not spoken of.
It's absolutely not spoken of.
So, in Toronto recently, not recently, but three or four years ago, a woman who was a psychiatrist or a psychologist Pushed her child, or threw her child, onto subway tracks because she was... And was she evil?
Oh, no!
No, absolutely not!
Not evil at all!
Postpartum depression!
You know, women get the blues!
I mean, they just toss their babies onto... It's hormonal!
It's not their fault!
Well, I mean, and this is the kind of thing that you constantly see whenever a blatant example of female violence is shown in the media, is ever discussed, the first thing that is always reached for is an excuse for the female violence.
She was depressed.
She was a single mother.
Her husband beat her.
She grew up without her parents.
She was this.
She was that.
So anytime that there's blatant female evil, and my God, is not the harm to children the worst evil in the known universe?
Is it just not the worst and most destructive and heinous crime that any human being is capable of?
I mean, I've talked about this before, so I won't get into it again, but There is no greater power disparity.
There is no greater victimization than that which is possible between a mother and a child.
And I think that it's true.
I was talking about this with Christina last night, so I'll just put it out as an unformed idea.
Let me know what you think.
But I think that it's true that women do end up treating sons a little bit better as they get older, but that's only because the sons grow bigger.
The sons grow bigger, outgrow their mothers, and so violence is probably not the way that you want to go.
But if you look at this fundamental level of propaganda that occurs with female violence, it is absolutely staggering just how complete a level of corruption it is and a level of falsehood and lying and cover-up for evil that it is whenever A woman is portrayed as... a woman does an evil action.
She must automatically, without thinking, she must be recast as a victim.
There is no possibility for society as a whole to look at female violence directly and straight on in the face.
Everybody is terrified to do it for two reasons.
One is the level of propaganda and the level of social rage that you will receive when you simply talk about female violence.
Because everybody thinks that you're then excusing men or you're blaming women.
Blaming the victim!
Blaming the victim!
Well, okay, if we're going to talk about victimhood, let's talk about children.
Let's talk about toddlers who are shaken, toddlers who are yelled at, toddlers who mothers are impatient with, toddlers who are not given their just rights as individuals, toddlers who are bullied, toddlers who are ignored, women who go back to work and leave their children in the care of virtual strangers.
Selfish women.
Brutal women.
Unpleasant women.
Difficult women.
Violent women.
Raging women.
Sadistic women.
Narcissistic women.
Megalomaniacal women.
Hypochondriacal women.
Of course these terms all apply to men as well, but we don't have any problem looking at male corruption and violence.
We know all about it.
We talk about it in politics.
We talk about it in the patriarchy.
We talk about it in society.
We talk about it in the media.
We talk about it in terms of husbands and brothers and everyone.
Corporate executives are corrupt.
They're all men and we all know about male corruption.
We've all had it drummed into our head over and over and over again and that's fine.
No problem.
But let's at least be honest with each other.
Let's at least be honest with each other and say that these men were all raised by women.
Sure, there are a few men who are not raised by women.
But statistically, all men are raised by women.
I'm not just talking about women in the home.
Look at daycare.
I worked in a daycare.
I was the only guy there.
Anybody who thinks that there's not an innate difference in the genders should look at a gym and compare the number of men in the aerobics room with the number of women in the weight room.
But women are in the daycares.
Women run the home care daycares.
Women are the primary school teachers.
I mean, for the first, oh gosh, I don't know, seven years of my life, six years of my life, I had no idea that men could be authorities in any way, shape, or form.
I thought it was complete matriarchy.
I swear to God I did.
I had no idea whatsoever that men could hold positions of influence, because the only positions of power that I ever saw were women.
And they were all abusive.
I gotta tell you.
Except for the nanny who, I understand, took care of me after my mother cratered into a depression after she gave birth to me.
Except for that woman, who I have no conscious memory of, who apparently was wonderful.
And except for Christina... I'm trying to be generous here.
I'm trying to be kind.
Well, what are the really pleasant women that I've known?
Loving and kind and warm and generous and sweet and curious and intelligent and... It doesn't even have to be intelligent.
It's just sort of innate niceness.
I'm not saying that I've known a heck of a lot more men than I have of women, but all of the authority figures when I was growing up were women, and they were all abusive to one degree or another.
They all exercise their power over children in a way that I would consider pretty bad, pretty corrupt, pretty wrong, and in some cases outright evil.
I mean, it's sort of hard for me to understand about the power of the patriarchy after seeing my mother bully my father my whole life, after the only violence that I've, the only significant violence, physical violence that I've ever experienced in my life, which went on for 14 years, was at the hands of a woman.
So it's kind of hard for me, at least, when people talk about violence in society, when people talk about the problems of corruption and evil and brutality, for them to associate it, in my experience and in the experience of other men that I've talked to, It's really hard for me to understand why any of these sorts of things are laid at the feet of men.
I've experienced almost no abuse from men.
Almost none whatsoever.
But abuse from women?
Oh my lord.
I mean, I have, except for Christina, I don't think I've ever known a woman who didn't have significant problems with her temper.
And by significant problems with her temper, I either mean sort of acting out or not having any capacity to speak up about anything at all.
And then you'll say, or some people will say, well that's because they've grown up in a patriarchy and they've never been told how to deal with their feelings.
Well, I've got to question that.
I think we all need to, if we want to get to the root of violence in society, and the root of corruption in society.
You've got to look at the women.
You've got to look at the ladies.
You've got to look at the mothers.
Because a woman I, you know, if I went out with this woman and she had no capacity to deal with any criticism, she just would get sort of cold, or upset, or withdrawn, or, you know, she'd punish me in one way or another.
Well, I don't think it was the patriarchy that did that.
Because her father actually died quite young.
What happened was she was raised by her mother and she had an older sister, which is true of Christina as well.
I mean, obviously, Christina grew up with a father and so on, but her mother was the most involved in raising her and she had an older sister.
So, Christina was exposed to much more of a matriarchy than a patriarchy.
That was true of myself as well.
And it's true of most of the men that I know.
It's true of most of the women that I know.
It's a matriarchal society, just by the nature of the biology.
Everything is matriarchal.
So, I'm not saying that men have no involvement in the problems of violence and corruption and brutality and destruction, but I'm just not saying we wouldn't necessarily... I don't mind if we're second on the list, but I don't mind if we're second on the list or even if we're parallel as number one.
But if you're going to try and deal with problems of violence and corruption without looking at the problems of female violence, if you're going to try and deal with power structures and the abuse that results from disparities of power, you can't get anywhere without looking at the matriarchy.
You can't get anywhere without looking at female violence.
It is an absolutely explosive topic.
It's one of these radioactive topics that's like the third rail of moral philosophy.
It's something that nobody ever talks about.
It's so obvious.
It's so obvious a thing to look at.
Huh, this guy grew up hating women.
I wonder why.
I wonder why he hated women.
Was it his mother, maybe?
No, no, no, it wasn't the mother, it was the patriarchy!
It was the patriarchy!
And we know that he was part of the patriarchy because he grew up without a father.
Yeah, so absolutely, nothing but patriarchy all over his hide.
And that's just, it's so obvious a thing to examine, and it's so unspeakable a thing to examine, that sort of one of the major reasons why people find corruption to be invisible to them, and I've talked about this in regards to the family, but we might as well zero in on what I'm really talking about, Which is the mother.
And I've received emails, a large number of emails, over the last couple of weeks of people talking about, uh, yeah, my dad's okay.
I can talk about things with my dad.
But my mom, oh man.
Every time she writes me emails, she knows I'm an atheist.
She keeps writing me emails saying, God doesn't like the fact that we're not as close as we should be.
I mean, that's not exactly abuse.
It's not far from it, but it's not exactly abuse, but it does indicate a fundamental narcissistic selfishness that would give anybody pause when looking at this kind of woman as a mother.
It must have been a complete nightmare.
So, I mean, I'm going to go on about this a little bit more this afternoon, because it is a very deep, rich, and interesting, energetic topic, let's say, because it is such an obvious source of corruption.
Female violence, especially towards children, is such a source of corruption that To not talk about it in the context of moral philosophy is deranged.
I mean, it's absolutely missing the entire purpose of moral philosophy, which is to raise our understanding about how to be better human beings.
And it also doesn't help us in terms of politics.
Politics is about the exercise of power and the corruption of power.
And the first power is in the hearth.
This used to be a bit better known, right?
This old statement that said, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, which is an old phrase that you don't hear much of anymore.
But it basically means that if you want to look at why the world is the way it is, look at the effects that motherhood have on very young children.
And in our case, this would also have to include the effects that teachers have on very young children, because the teachers and daycare workers who are women to the vast majority.
Thanks so much for listening, as always.
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