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March 6, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:07
127 Feminism Part 2: Divided We Fall
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Good afternoon, it's Steph everybody, I hope you're doing well!
It is 10 to 5 on Monday the 6th of March 2006, and I was listening to my podcast very briefly just after I finished it this morning, and lo and behold, there are the clickity-tappity-whackity-whacks of something or other, and I think it may have been my sunglasses clicking against the headset.
I have a new noise-canceling headset, and I know you're all fascinated by my continual desire to improve the audio quality of this podcast while sitting in a car, but it has become my white whale!
It has become my Everest!
So, I think that it was probably something to do with the clicking of my sunglasses as I moved my head against the Against the headset.
So I'm going to try not doing that.
Staring straight into the heart of the sunrise here.
And we'll see where we're going to.
I haven't done song references in a while.
Or song recommendations.
A song that I think you'll really enjoy.
It's a wonderfully sung song by a singer who I very much enjoy.
Named Sam Cooke.
And try listening to a song.
You probably know him from, you know, Don't Know Much About History.
That song.
But if you listen to a song he did, it's an old classic soul song or gospel song called A Change Is Gonna Come, G-O-N-N-A, if you're searching for it in some online tool.
A change is going to come.
Listen to this man sing this song.
It's aching.
It's beautiful.
Anyway, so this is Feminism Part 2.
And let's talk a little bit about what relationship feminism has between the sexes.
And let's try and figure out what we can't tease apart in terms of how it may not have served the interests of people in general, but rather political monsters in particular, because wherever everything has a broad movement these days, I would say certainly this century, the last century, wherever anything has had a broad movement, certainly since the introduction of the public school system, you've just got to be suspicious!
You've just got to be suspicious!
And it's not just something I make up because I enjoy being oppositional, But whatever is popular is wrong.
It just seems to be the case.
People are so... Their minds are so harmed within their public school education and within their families as a result.
It's sort of a yin-yang.
It's hard to say which is worse, but I think public school education is the one thing that we can control relative to the family.
But ever since the introduction of public school education, things have just been bad.
And it's just what you would expect.
I mean, it is the worst thing in the world.
And I'm yet to do my podcast on the media, but I will give you a little taste of the screeching, sky-rending rant that is coming down from that altitude.
And what that is for me is the idea that if you're interested in something like the media and its effects in terms of propaganda on people's minds, well, I mean, where would the media stand relative to the mindless indoctrination of children which goes on for six, eight, ten hours a day when you combine schoolwork with homework?
What would you place that relative to something like a couple of ads on Saturday morning?
I'm just curious, you know, where people would rank those in terms of the effectiveness.
Like, if you had the choice to choose one medium of communicating with people in order to brainwash them.
Would you choose a captive, moral audience of children for six, eight, ten hours a day?
Or would you throw where they had to go, and if they didn't go, and didn't stare at the teacher, and didn't agree, and didn't approve that they were going to get unbelievable sanctions and make no headway whatsoever in society, would you choose that one?
Or would you choose a couple of commercials on Saturday morning for the kids who watch TV, and they don't have to do it, and they're not getting mocked in it, and their future doesn't depend on it, and all that kind of crap?
Well, I tell you, I know if I put my evil hat on, I know which one I would choose.
But that's a subject for another podcast.
I just sort of wanted to point out that broad-based intellectual movements after the introduction of the public school system are all uniformly terrible.
It's sort of similar to if you think of a dance instructor who methodically breaks the legs of his dancers, you could say pretty much, I think, and continually breaks them so that they're hobbling around and broken-legged and crying out in pain, you can sort of say that the quality of dance, when that kind of dance instructor became universally required for every dancer, that the quality of dance would go down just that the quality of dance would go down just a little.
I think that would be fairly safe to say.
Similarly, when you look at broad-based intellectual movements after the introduction of the public school system, the quality goes down just a little.
Feminism is one of those products.
I know that I'm Joe Caveat this week, and I apologize for my craven intellectual cowardice, but I do want to be clear.
I'm fully aware that I'm sailing against the grain for many people who are listening to this, and I particularly want to reassure The wonderful female listeners who are listening into this, that this is not, you know, he-man, woman-bashing hour.
I think women are just about the most wonderful thing in the world.
I think that any man who represses or suppresses or harms women in any way, shape or form, especially a lover, especially the murderer of his children, is just scum of the worst order.
And I think that women have as many powerful gifts and capacities and wonderful things about them as men do.
And I want a situation where men and women work as a team, and I'll talk about that today.
But please understand me when I say that I am enormously pro-woman, and because I am pro-woman, I am not so much with the feminism, at least not the feminism that I'm going to talk about today, which is of course not all feminism.
It's just the feminism that tends to be most in academia and other state-funded institutions, and there's pretty darn good reasons for it, too.
So let's talk about men and women sort of up front.
The basic biological unit.
The group that loves to make the beast with two backs.
The twin biological agents whose naughty bits fit together in delightful ways.
Let's talk about men and women and understand that men and women are the most natural team in the known universe.
That men and women are perfectly complementary.
That men and women fit together in a way that is more beautiful than just the naughty bits.
Because you sure as heck can fit the naughty bits together with people who ain't so beautiful.
Trust me, I know that one.
So men and women are a perfectly natural and wonderful and concise and efficient and joyous and blissful and productive and magical And loving and all the superlatives that you can heap in a big pile and set fire to so that they're visible from space in a big orgy bonfire of joy.
Well, that's men and women.
And so we like them.
We like the men and women.
We like the male-female team.
We think that... And this is sort of we, being Christina and I, who have talked about this quite a bit.
Men and women are the most natural and wonderful and complimentary team in the known universe.
And so the question is, why don't... Why don't they get along?
Why don't they just get along a little better than they do?
Now way back in the dawn of time, when I was doing these podcasts, when I was talking about how I could never quite understand why men and women just couldn't get along, why people just couldn't be nice and all that.
And it's true!
It's true now that I've found the right woman, and I've found a moral woman, and a decent woman, and a woman with Great integrity, and great joy, and the best-natured human being.
You think I'm good-natured?
Oh my God, you should see my wife.
She absolutely bounces out of bed every morning with an enormous smile, and is happy all day, and it's just a joy to be around.
And we're a great team, and I'm not going to go too much into our relationship, because every relationship is different.
I manage some of the emotional aspects of the relationship.
I'm a little bit more in touch with my feelings at times than she is, and that's simply because I've been further away from my foo for longer, so I have more true self, access to my true self.
So I notice when things are a little off or when she's concerned about something.
And so I can help her to sort of deal with that and work with that through that in a productive manner.
And so that's great.
I really keep us on keel emotionally and she does everything else.
It's a great deal, I gotta tell you.
No, I mean, she runs the finances.
I make a little bit more money than she does, but she runs the finances and we both go shopping for the household stuff together.
She does a little bit more around the house.
I'd say it's probably, and she'll correct me if I'm wrong when she hears this, Something like, I would say, 70-30 or maybe 75-25 in terms of housework.
But it's 90-10 in terms of keeping us on track emotionally, and it's 50-50 in terms of finances and so on.
So it all kinds of balances out and it's like a jigsaw puzzle that fits together beautifully.
And that's something we both have natural talents that are complementary, which is good.
But we also talked about things that we enjoy doing and things that we find not enjoyable doing.
So Christina hates cleaning the bathrooms and I don't.
So I will clean the bathrooms and the tub.
And the sinks, and the toilets, and the showers, and the shower heads, and the faucets, and all that.
And that's, you know, for three bathrooms takes quite a while.
I do that every weekend.
It's great.
I love it.
I have no problem vacuuming, things like that, and I have no problem... She's better at cooking, and she also has a pretty delicate palate.
She's lactose intolerant and a vegetarian.
So, the food is... She's better at preparing it.
She knows more dishes along those lines, and she's usually home long before I am.
So, these sorts of things work together beautifully, harmoniously, and it's never fixed in stone, right?
So at any time, we have an open covenant this way, right?
Any time that anyone feels like they'd like to switch roles with someone else, fantastic, let's do it.
We have no problem with that.
It's an open, flexible system where it's a complete win-win.
I am so enormously better off in my life as a whole since I got married that I just could spend a couple of podcasts boring you, yay, under the valley of tears with this, but I'm just so much better off than I was before I was married, and I think that Christina is as well.
She's much happier than when she was single.
I'm much happier than when I was single.
We have a beautiful house.
We have a wonderful relationship.
We love each other to death, and every moment I spend with her is pure magic.
Now, of course, it only takes one possibility for it to be a possibility.
It only takes one instance for something to be a possibility.
You know, I can't jump to the moon, but if some guy could jump to the moon, then it would be possible for human beings to jump to the moon.
I just need to work on my legs, my quads a little more.
Now, I did run through a couple dozen girlfriends before I ended up with Christina, and latched onto her like a remora under the underside of a shark's jaw, to use a wonderful Hallmark-approved metaphor.
And so I know what it's like to have relationships where there's not mutual trust and joy and all that kind of stuff.
And so I know, I've had a lot of experience with what it's like to be around women who feel that exploitation is just around the corner.
That exploitation, unless they're like, you know, they're like if you run a convenience store and the local thug Hoodlum kids come in.
You know, you get to watch them like a hawk.
I mean, you can't exactly throw them out, because you maybe kind of need their business and you don't want to get into any sort of trouble.
You don't want them to sort of turn on you or anything.
So, you sort of got these kids in there and you know, you just know they're there to steal something.
Someone's going to create a distraction.
Someone's going to steal from you.
You're going to lose out somehow.
You're not sure how, but boy is it ever going to happen.
So you're watching your Big disco ball mirrors at the end of the corridors and you're watching them like a hawk.
And, of course, they get kind of irritable, right?
Like, what are you watching us for?
What do you think we're going to do, man?
And, uh, there's not meant to be any kind of ethnic accent.
It's just a not-me accent, right?
Uh, so, you know, they're just going to get upset if you're watching them and, you know, then they're going to say, steal stuff from you.
Well, you thought we were going to do it anyway, so we decided to.
You know, all this kind of nonsense.
But, basically, when you feel that exploitation, theft, corruption, and despoilation is just imminent and is absolutely going to happen unless you keep a fierce and serious eye out, Well, then you're probably not going to be able to relax and enjoy the natural give-and-take ebb and flow of a wonderful and beautiful romantic relationship.
And I would say that to some degree that was the case with women that I knew in the past.
That I always felt that they were kind of guarded about the give-and-take thing.
And that's something that I experience a lot of.
And actually I should say that they were guided about the give thing.
I would not necessarily say so much that they were guided about the take thing.
So I went out with a woman in my twenties, as I mentioned before, and we ended up making a movie together.
She wanted to get into the movie business, so we... I wrote a script, and we hired actors, and it cost a fortune to make this film.
And it did pretty well.
It was a finalist in the Hollywood Film Festival.
It's still shown on TV pretty much once a year.
It's about a soldier coming home from World War II, so it's shown on Remembrance Day, usually.
And so this woman was pretty much okay to take the money from me to make the film, and I was keen to do it because I sort of felt that it was virtuous to do it, to give, and to be generous and all that.
I had a real mistaken idea about what it was to be kind and generous, so I basically I offered myself up for exploitation fairly regularly and thought that it was a moral thing.
And this is because I was, to some degree, still under the influence of my brother's soul-emptying, altruist, be an altruist until you are shivered into atoms kind of philosophy.
And so what happened was, I was very generous and would be very kind and would give, give, give.
And then I would find that not so much with the boomerang giving, not so much with the returning, And so what happened was I began to, as I sort of grew up and began to become more mature and confident with myself and with the very idea of reciprocity, which as I'm sure you're aware was not exactly lesson one in my family of origin, then I would begin to ask for things in return.
So one of the things that occurred with the woman I was living with in my twenties, well, I went out and lived with her for a short period of time, is that we did this film together and then I asked her To read a novel of mine that an agent was interested in.
To give it an edit.
She was an English major, so she knew that stuff pretty well.
And to help me out with it.
And she said, yeah, yeah, you know, I will and so on.
But, you know, I just kind of noticed that she never got to it.
And so, you know, one day I sort of sat her down and said, okay, you know, I have a bit of a problem with the disparity here.
She's like, what are you talking about?
And I said, well, I poured a huge amount of money into your film, and I helped you make it, and I was the producer, and I went out to pick up McDonald's food for everyone when they had to work late, and I did this, that, and the other.
And, you know, we flew down to Los Angeles.
You weren't making that much money at the time, but I footed the bill, flew down to Los Angeles, we entered it in the Hollywood Film Festival, and all this.
So I feel like I put a lot of effort into that.
And so, of course, she gets cold-eyed and, you know, the lips get all thin and tense and so on.
And I said, well, you know, and what I've asked in return, and I'm not asking you to put a fortune into my art, but if you, you know, I've sort of said now for two months, would you mind reading this novel to give it an edit, because an agent's interested in it, and you haven't.
And we went back and forth for a while, but the upshot was, and everybody knows the details aren't that important, but the upshot was that she said, well, I just haven't really felt motivated to read your book.
You haven't really put it in a way that motivates me.
And I got a sort of click experience with that sentence where my eyes just sort of went a little wide, and I physically remember the blood draining from my face as I realized the enormous disparity in our value system.
It's the kind of thing that you want to talk about right at the beginning of a relationship, not when you've been in it for a while.
But that I felt that it was important to be generous to you and to give to your partner as much as possible, and that she felt that I had to motivate it and make it fun for her to do something like read a book of mine.
And I did say that to her at the time.
I said, well, it wasn't that you motivated me to make the film.
And then, of course, I knew you were just going to bring that film thing up, and I knew that if I took that from you, that it was going to cause problems.
I knew I shouldn't have blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And so, of course, we never got to the topic, and we broke up shortly thereafter.
But what I think is interesting about that, and there's a couple of dozen other stories I could talk with about this kind of thing, is that... And I don't think it's just me.
I dated a lot of different types of women, but I felt that this problem of The fear of exploitation coupled with an innate sense of entitlement was really strong in the women that I went out with.
And that's kind of important to me.
And I think it's important to a lot of us.
I don't just mean men, but I mean women.
When you look at the mythologies that women have been handed down from the popular culture about men, that men are kind of emotionally retarded and only think about one thing and don't have any depth and, you know, there's sports and beer and scratching and that they aren't romantic and that they, you know, they're sort of like
You know, I would say that the closest thing that, as far as a metaphor goes, that I could use to talk about how women perceive men, at least in my generation, perhaps has changed in the next generation, and boy does it ever make me feel young to say that, but men are sort of viewed as Bulky, smelly, occasionally cute, but mostly exasperating pets that you've inherited from somebody accidentally, right?
So some aunt willed you a pet and died.
Some sort of big Newfoundland dog or some big ugly dog that's, you know, affectionate and panting and cute at times, but mostly just knocks things over and is kind of exasperating.
I definitely got that impression of what the value of men was to women when I was younger.
And I would say that it's desperately sad.
It's desperately, desperately, desperately sad.
I don't go as far as Ayn Rand does and say that a woman can't be happy unless she's worshipping a man, but I sure as heck can't imagine going back to a state of not worshipping my wife, and I certainly wouldn't imagine that she would ever imagine or want to go back to a state before she was worshipping me.
There's an unbelievable joy which has, I think, been somewhat stripped from men and women, and a lot of it has come out of feminism.
There is this thing that is so common, like I remember hearing, I'm just sort of rolling over some examples in my mind and trying to pick some good ones, I remember hearing a comedian once, and it was a male comedian, so please, I'm not saying this is all women, but to me it comes from a particular approach to gender, the stereotyping of gender which comes out of the feminist movement in my view.
And this comedian was saying, you know, ladies, you're often coming up to your man and you're saying, hey, what are you thinking?
And the truth of the matter is, you know, and I don't mean to shock you, the truth of the matter is that, you know, most times, ladies, nothing.
We're not thinking anything.
Nothing's going on up there.
And then you're sort of stuck as a man, right?
You're sitting in the kitchen, just staring off into space.
And the woman comes in and says, hey, what are you thinking?
And you're like, it's like zero to 60.
In four seconds, it's like, I'm thinking about how much my life has been enriched by knowing you.
And so that idea that men are just sort of these empty vessels of sexual need and insensitivity and base, sort of body-feeding, sensual passions and hungers, and that women are sort of sophisticated and delicate and emotional and wonderful and sensitive, I mean, that to me is just complete nonsense.
And I think what it has done is, and this is what is so sad about it, What it has done is that, oh brothers and sisters, it has so much turned us against each other.
And we, men and women, are the most natural team in the universe for families, as friends, as lovers, as parents, as We are the most natural team in the universe.
That is exactly how nature has evolved us to be as complementary.
To take joy in the different skills that each gender brings to bear on the problems of life.
We are natural, natural partners.
We are a yin and a yang.
We are two sides of the same coin.
And it is so, so, so sad That we have been so turned against each other and that men and women just have so many difficulties getting along.
I don't have to quote you too much.
Look at the statistics.
You have a divorce rate of 50 percent.
I think it's a 55 or something now.
Let's just say 50 percent.
You have a divorce rate of 50 percent.
You have The fact that not all of the 50%, it's not like you've got this line down the middle, like this blade that goes through a cake.
And on one side are the divorced people, and on the other side are the really, really happy people.
No.
There are the divorced people, and then there are people who wish they were divorced, and then there are the people who are staying together for their children, and then there are people who are staying together out of financial necessity, and then there are people who are staying together because one partner, often the woman but not always, has had their soul crushed into a fine atomic dust by a continual sadistic verbal or physical or emotional abuse from their partner, so they have no self-esteem.
You have people who are staying together just because they're old, and they can't get anyone.
Else.
You have women staying with men because they're 35 and they know that if they don't have kids with this guy, they're not going to find another guy in time to cash in on the old egg situation.
I mean, when you really come down to it, I mean, there's like 12 happily married couples in the world.
I've actually verified that statistically.
But it's not many.
You know, 50% divorce rate or more.
And it's not like everybody else who stays together is happy.
I don't know that many happy couples.
I know couples who are staying together because family pressures.
Oh, there's the other couple.
They stay together because they don't want to admit they're wrong.
Staying together because You know, they're Catholic or Jewish, and you just have to.
I mean, there's just not a whole lot of people who are together because they're just so happy to be together that they can't take it.
That's the wrong way of putting it, but I think you know what I mean.
And that's a pretty desperately bad situation.
And when I talk about, as I talked about in Liberty Under the Lash, you absolutely want to find freedom within the world that you're living in.
And you want to find that freedom primarily in your personal relationships and only secondarily in your political beliefs and opinions.
Because we live our family.
We live our marriage.
We don't live the state.
We just knuckle under the state.
I think it's so desperately sad that men are now portrayed as kind of broken or rundown or women that need to be fixed.
Men are just broken women.
And you hear a lot of this kind of stuff that, you know, if I could just... You say women.
Oh, if you were a guy, whatever, right?
And, boy oh boy, I think that you see children who grow up without fathers, and for the most part, they are a mess.
And look, I mean, I'll be perfectly honest with you, in my early twenties I was kind of a mess too.
And it took a lot of work and fight and effort and resources to turn that around.
So I think that you can't just say, oh, let's have the women raise the children without needing men.
Because look, men and women are a team.
We've evolved that way.
The skills that men have innately and the skills that women have innately And I'm not going to sort of enumerate them, and perhaps I'm completely incorrect, and it's all socialization, but I don't think so, because biology and genetics usually have a pretty powerful motivator in terms of getting skill sets distributed among the most productive segments of the population.
So if you look at the skill sets that women and men bring to bear on especially raising children, they're complementary.
They're absolutely complementary.
And if you're missing one of them, then it's like a table with only two legs.
It's like a footstool with a leg and a half gone.
Sorry, I can't think of something which is... It's like a soccer post with one, you know, whatever it is.
It's missing.
It's missing half and it can't stick up.
The men and the women are two sides of the arch and the union of them together is the keystone that keeps it all together.
And if you want to write in about homosexual relationships, fantastic.
Tell me about how all of those work.
I know perilously little about all that, so I'm just talking about from a biological standpoint that it makes sense to me that we have evolved or adapted ourselves to absolutely be complementary.
And the very sad thing is what's happened as a result.
Well, men and women have been turned against each other, and all this has done is expanded the power of the state.
The power of the state, and I'm going to use this as a very broad generalization, the power of the state is directly inversely proportional to the power and virtue of the family.
So the power and evil of the state is inversely proportional to the power and virtue of the family.
Where families are strong and virtuous, the state is weak and unnecessary.
And where families are corrupt and broken and destructive, the state grows in power.
Because you get so many non-functional, dysfunctional, under-functional, broken, angry, destroyed, bitter, entitled, Just, you know, messed up people coming out of broken family situations that, you know, crime goes up, the demand for the welfare state goes up, and schooling has to, the quality of schooling has to go down because you just don't have people who have particular focus or a stable enough home life so that they can
actually deal with even things as simple as homework and stuff like that.
So it is a desperately bad situation when families get messed up.
And this is why I'm so interested in improving the quality of families.
And you can't improve the quality of families without getting rid or punishing those who are bad at being a family member.
And so I think that one of the first orders in terms of what you have in control of is to improve the quality of your family.
But that means that men and women have to look at each other with respect.
Men and women have to look at each other with appreciation.
I say, I must say, three or four times a day to Christina just how much I appreciate everything she does and how I notice everything that she does.
I mean, she'll take my little cables when I have headphones by the bed.
She'll take them and as she's tidying up, she'll wrap them up and put a little elastic band around them.
I notice that.
I'm not tripping all over them.
They're put away.
I mean, I tell her, thank you so much for doing that.
It's wonderful.
I haven't thought about it.
I would never have crossed my mind.
I would never even do it if she wasn't there.
But the fact that it is done is fantastic.
So, men and women have got to start appreciating each other so much more than they do at the moment.
They're all eyeing each other with suspicion.
Like we're each the enemy.
Like we're the enemy.
Heck, men and women, romantic relationships, familial relationships in the West at least, are voluntary.
They're voluntary.
You don't have to get married.
You don't have to get married to anyone.
And whoever you choose to get married to is your choice.
So the idea that we're the enemy and exploitation is going to come from freely chosen, familial, husband-wife, family relationships.
My God!
You know who's going to exploit you?
Who's going to exploit you is two people.
And number one is your family, your family of origin.
It's not a chosen relationship, so they're going to exploit you if they can and if they're bad people and whatever, right?
So, they're going to exploit you and the state is going to exploit you.
Now, the church is going to exploit you to a smaller degree, but it really depends on the family, right?
People go to church to please their families, not because of anything to do with God.
So, the people who are going to exploit you if they're bad people, and I think a good chunk of them are, well, the state all, right?
You're going to be exploited by your family and you're going to be exploited by the state.
You cannot claim exploitation by a romantic partner that you yourself have chosen.
So the idea that we're worrying about being exploited by our husbands or our wives is completely lunatic.
It's completely insane.
And it is this turning man against woman and woman against man.
And I think that it's been more woman against man over the past 30 years or so.
But the turning of Women against men has been one of the saddest and most destructive of all state-coerced ideological systems.
It has been unbelievably wretched in terms of its effect on the family and, of course, because of the destructive effects of the family on the subsequent growth and expansion of state power.
So let's not fall into that trap.
Women out there particularly please.
All men want to do is make you happy.
All we want to do is please you.
And we're really not out to exploit you, and we're really not out to make your life worse.
So let's all get together, and stop fighting amongst each other, and let's start remembering who the real enemy is, which is the government, and the corrupt family of origin.
Thank you so much for listening.
Oh, 10 seconds!
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