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March 7, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:16
128 Feminism Part 3: Women Need Men

Although women are often told that they don't really need men, they do!

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Good afternoon, everybody.
It's Steph.
I hope you're doing well.
It's four o'clock on Tuesday, March the 7th, 2006.
I'm actually taking a day off from work today, so naturally I have been working on Free Debate Radio, because that's what I do with my time off.
Isn't it amazing?
They say, do what you love and the money will follow, so I guess we'll just have to be patient.
So, I would like to finish off the topic of feminism.
Astute listener alert!
I have had a message posted on the boards, which is great, which points out something that I knew, but did not make the connection to, so all praise to alert listener number six million, who said that one of the things that I should talk about when I talk about women and their entry into the workforce is, of course, World War II, where Women were encouraged, yea, almost bullied through propagandistic levels of enticement, to enter into the workforce.
And they were unceremoniously dumped out of the workforce then, at the end of the war, to make way for the returning G.I.s.
And that was a very important aspect, of course, of the women's movement.
So, you know, you didn't just want the people out there doing the murders, you needed them to have supply to them.
The weapons of murder, and therefore you had to have the women in the factories taking care of all of this stuff.
And there were very strong propagandistic campaigns to get women into the workforce to promote this sort of hard-working, firm-jawed woman with the vaguely socialist red kerchief tied around her head, determinedly staring into the future to do her bit to serve the masters of death and destruction.
And this sort of was encapsulated in a character called Rosie the Riveter, whose riveting, ba-dum-bum, exploits were recounted in various propagandistic tomes and comics and posters.
And she was, you know, rolling her sleeves up and getting down and dirty into the war effort.
And then when the G.I.s came home, These women were all, everything was, the social engineering was completely reversed, right?
So it was, ladies, it's a complete virtue to get into the sweatshops and start making the bombs and the guns and everything.
And then, when the war's over, ladies, it's a complete virtue to get all girly again and go back into the house and cook for the little ones.
And that was something that has quite rightly been pointed out, is a very important aspect.
And something which I think If we did not have a public school system, of course, if we didn't, we wouldn't have World War II or World War I.
But something which could have given women some pause about the consistency, rationality, and benevolence of the state.
As you get sort of herded from one end of the social spectrum to the other, from being an at-home mother to being a hard-working, tough-minded line worker to produce the guns and the bombs and the planes, and then to be sort of herded back into the home again.
All based on propaganda might have given women some questions or hesitations about the virtue of the state But it didn't really occur to the majority of feminist theoreticians And so we ended up with the mess that we have come up with I've often had this vision and I have somebody out there I can remember this film.
I can't remember which film it was.
It might have been one of the airplane movies, the old sort of spoofs on disaster movies.
Don't call me Shirley.
That one, if you've seen it or not, I don't know.
But in it I think that there is something that I've always thought of in terms of the state and in terms of propaganda that there are a bunch of people in a terminal and they're sort of laden down with all these bags and so on and you hear over the terminal It's like, gate, you know, flight such and such has been moved from gate 7 to gate 12.
And of course everyone's like, "Rrrrr!" and they start sort of shambling and lurching with all their bags towards this gate.
And then you hear the announcer say again, "This flight has been moved from gate 12 to gate 19!" And everyone sort of slowly reverses themselves like supertankers and turns around, "Rrrrr!" They start heading back towards the other direction.
And I've always sort of thought that that's a pretty apt metaphor for how we react to statements about a government and about who our enemies are supposed to be.
They're sort of like Frankensteins.
They just lurch into whatever direction they're herded into and call it virtue and patriotism and so on.
So I thought that was an excellent comment, very apt.
As the late great Harry Brown mentioned, I think once on his radio show, or maybe it was more than once, he said that another thing that occurred at the end of the Second World War, which was quite interesting,
was the government was concerned that all of these soldiers were coming back and that they would not have any jobs to come back to and of course it's not so much that the government is very keen on taking care of its citizens it's just that when you have a lot of people who the government has turned into efficient murderers and who are very proficient in the use of arms coming back to sort of to the mother country you kind of want to find them jobs Right?
You don't want to have these guys lurching around with their strong weapon skills and cold, stone-cold soldier's hearts, lurching around Washington looking for soft-bellied senators because they're out of work.
Not really what the parasites who live on our jugulars really want to have happen.
So they were very keen to have these... Sorry, just to point out, I don't think Harry Brown went quite as florid in his description.
He was a little bit more efficient than I was in his use of language.
So, there were all these programs set up to figure out how to get these GIs back to work.
And, of course, they would say, well, you know, we only have this many jobs, and before they went away there was a depression, so how are we going to know what's going to happen?
And so all these government programs were set up.
But they couldn't come to any agreements, right?
They sort of fought back and forth about who was going to do what, and who was going to fund what, and who had what power.
And then by the time that they had sorted everything out, like 18 months had gone by, and everyone was back to work anyway.
Because they weren't economically very intelligent, or if they were, they hid it pretty well, they didn't understand that when you get a bunch of people coming back from war, you have the creation, or the importation, I guess you could say, of an enormous demand for goods and services.
So everyone who's coming back They want a car, they want suits, they want houses, they want, you know, whatever, marriages, they want weddings and so on.
So there's just an enormous amount of demand.
So there was really no problem whatsoever getting these people into the jobs that they needed once they came back from the war.
So fortunately, the government was too busy fighting, the politicians were too busy fighting amongst themselves to quote, help the problem.
And therefore they stayed out of the way enough so that the free market could solve the problem in a natural and productive and positive way.
So, I guess we can be thankful for certain kinds of government inefficiencies at least.
But anyway, let's get back to offending the feminists, at least those irrational ones that we disagree with, and talk about some of the interesting biological facts about women and men, and the relationship between them, based particularly on reproduction.
Now, one of the things that feminists generally recommend to women is that they try to get into the workforce, get educated, get into the workforce when they're young.
And then maybe later sort of figure out the whole families and kids things.
And I think it's worth having an economic look at that to see whether it's a good idea or not.
And the one thing that's always struck me about that particular approach, and it's something that I can tell you that I experienced in my early 30s to mid 30s before I got married as well, Which is that women who take that time when they're young, they tend to end up putting off marriage and putting off finding a suitable boyfriend or a suitable fiancé, I guess you could say, until later on in life.
And one of the things that does occur, and there's not much that can be done about it because it's kind of basic and biological, One of the things that does occur between men and women is that as you take two men and women the same age, as men and women get older, the value of a man
from a reproductive or familial or biological standpoint goes up whereas the value of a woman goes down and that's not me talking out of my uh... elbow that is simply a fact right so as a man gets older He gets more and more resources, right?
You have your career down, you have paid for your education, you've probably amortized the price of your car, you've got a house or you've got a condo, you're making good money, and of course you're still fully fertile, right?
I mean, so the value of a man goes up proportionately as his age increases, the value of a man in terms of reproductive success.
Now, I mean, it probably peaks at some point and begins to decline, because I don't notice a lot of 80-year-old guys dating starlets unless they happen to be producers.
And so for a man, it does drop off at some point, but generally it only begins to seriously drop off when he becomes so old that it's unlikely that he would be around much for raising children.
So we're talking like, I don't know, 70 or something like that.
And I think it was Anthony Quinn who had a baby or his wife had a baby when he was 78 or something like that.
But that's sort of something that's important to understand, that if you take a man and a woman, what happens?
Well, the man becomes more attractive as a partner in marriage for the raising of children the older that he gets.
Now what happens to a woman is quite the opposite.
So when she's young, She is very fertile.
I mean, obviously, this is like biology, not even 101.
99, let's say.
But a woman is very fertile when she's young, and then she gets less fertile, and it kicks in, I think, around the age of 34 or so.
That a woman is going to start to drop off infertility.
Now this, of course, raises a lot of problems for men, if you get involved with a woman who's older, because you might get a baby, but that baby might have genetic problems and so on.
The quality of the eggs deteriorates for a woman starting just before her mid-thirties.
And so if you sort of work backwards from that and just realize that for most people it takes a little bit of time to figure out whether they want to get married, right?
So Christina and I met and we knew very quickly we got married within 10 months of meeting.
And so that was unusually quick, and we were very certain.
But that was partly because we weren't in our 20s anymore, and we kind of knew what we wanted.
But for a lot of people, it takes a couple of years, right?
So if you just sort of work the math backwards, and you say, okay, so let's just say around the age of 33 or 34, a woman's reproductive quality begins to decline, which makes her less I'm not talking about personality or charm or wit or intelligence.
I'm just talking about base biological functionality, not counting things like, you know, I don't know, surrogate mothers, egg transfers, fertility treatments, which are risky as far as I understand it.
And if we simply look at what happens to a woman's reproductive quality or her attractiveness in terms of being the foundation of a family, it's going to start to diminish in her early to mid-30s.
Now let's just sort of work backwards from that a little ways and just say that most people don't want to get married and have kids right away.
Right?
So you don't want to sort of get married and immediately start trying to get pregnant.
You would like to ideally, I think, have a couple of years of ironing out the adult to adult stuff, of getting the hang of living together, of figuring out how you want to spend your time, your energy, your money, all of which you should have discussed before you got married.
But, you know, there's still a little bit of work out time involved after you get married.
And so you don't really want to do that.
So let's just say three years to settle into marriage.
Ideally.
Not sort of absolutely, but ideally.
So three years to settle into marriage before you want to start having children.
Now another thing that's true is that as you get older it takes longer to get pregnant.
So let's just say that it's going to take you six months to get pregnant.
And so let's just say we've got three and a half years, so you've got to come back from thirty, then the woman has to get married at thirty years and six months.
It may be seven, it may be five, I don't want to get overly precise, we're just talking roughly.
So, the woman should get married in order to maintain her optimal desirability for reproductive success when she's 30.
Let's just round down to make it easier to say 30.
Now, very few people are going to meet each other and get married very quickly.
There's usually two to three years of dating, right?
So, sort of work your way back from that, and from 30, you're talking that a woman should meet the man that she wants to marry and have children with at the age of 27 or 28.
And if you work backwards from that, and say that she takes four years to complete her college after doing her high school, The woman then graduates at the age of 22, and then until 27 or 28 she is, I guess, the time is her own.
She doesn't have to plan for that much, but that's assuming, of course, that she meets the guy that she wants to meet at the right time.
And so basically from 22 she might take a little bit of time to travel after she's graduated from college and might take a little while to get a job that she wants and sort of settle into the right thing.
So let's just say 23.
to 27, so four or five years that she is... I guess her time is her own and this that and the other.
So it's sort of important to understand that sort of basic differentiation, right?
That as a woman ages she begins to lose her value from a reproductive standpoint, whereas a man ages he continues to gain his value until, you know, what at least to me seems still far in the distant future.
But that's sort of an important thing to understand.
This is not something that generally is really well explained to women, that, you know, when you're in your twenties, you don't have, you know, a bucket load of time that goes out from here to eternity to figure out what it is that you want to do and who it is you want to marry.
This is assuming that you want to get married and you want to have kids and so on, but that's something that's sort of important to understand.
Now, there's something else that goes on.
which is that as a woman gets into her thirties the number of available men who are of high quality obviously is beginning to diminish and the other problem that she's going to face is that the men who are of high quality who are left
will or may or it would seem likely would not want to marry somebody their own age right so let's just say you're some thirty five-year-old guy and you know you're attractive in personality or physique or hopefully both and you have a good job and you've got some savings and you're responsible and so on you're nice to animals and so on then the question is are you going to want to marry a thirty five-year-old woman
You know, obviously it's possible, but it doesn't seem to me to be very likely, because for a 35-year-old successful man to marry a 35-year-old woman, he is going to place his reproductive chance of success significantly lower.
It doesn't mean that the woman's not going to be great and wonderful and funny and so on, but that is a fact that he has to sort of be aware of, that he's going to have to cut short the courtship, that he's going to have to cut short the adjustment time after getting married, because the clerk is going to be working against them.
So that doesn't mean that he won't get married to this woman, but she's going to have to be substantially above quality, I guess you could say, in order to attract and sort of keep this man.
And so that's something that is also not talked about so much, so that for women to leave their reproductive decision-making until later.
And I knew a lot of women who did this kind of stuff when they were... Doesn't that make me sound like a stud?
Yo, how you doin'?
But the women who sort of went through this process of dating the cute guys and the pretty boys and the funny boys and the unstable boys and the bad boys and the, you know, all the men clearly not marked out for long-term reproductive success.
Whereas, and I've heard this complaint from a lot of men, that they are nice guys, that they want to provide for a wife, that they want to settle down, but that the women are drawn to the tall guys or the pretty guys or the, you know, the cool guys or the guys with the 29-inch waists who've just come back from Guatemala and know how to play the bongos and work in health food stores and, you know, all that kind of nonsense.
And I think that is something that is frustrating for men in their twenties, that they can just see these women frittering away their sort of greatest biological good.
I'm not just talking about base reproductive biology here.
They can see these women frittering away their greatest good, which is their reproductive capacities, on these sort of series of dumb, silly men who they're never going to start a family with, which is the exact opposite of what, from a biological standpoint, what should be happening.
So when I was, oh gosh, I was 31 or 32, maybe 33, let's say 32, and I sort of half went out with and half didn't go out with.
I was stuck in the friend zone from here to eternity, so who knows?
In fact, I went out with this woman who was, I think, nine years younger.
And she at the time had a vague long-distance relationship going on with a guy who worked as a drummer on a cruise ship.
Now please tell me that that's somebody who you're going to want to settle down with.
And this was a smart woman.
She ended up going into medical school and so she was not stupid but uh she had this um thing going on sort of with this drummer and it sort of reminded me i saw this movie it wasn't a very good movie but this part i thought was quite funny um with nicholas cage and meg ryan something about him being it was a remake of an old vim venters film uh Wings of Desire, I think it was.
I can't remember what the new name was.
But anyway, so she sees this Nicolas Cage character in a park and she says, you know, I keep seeing you.
Every time I see you, you're in a park.
Are you unemployed?
Are you homeless?
No.
Are you a drummer?
You know, that's even lower down the economic spectrum.
You know what they say about musicians, what do you call a musician without a girlfriend?
They're all homeless.
Anyway, so I guess that I made a play for this girl, woman, and she was interested but hesitant.
And she was obviously concerned about the age difference.
And she also, I think, wanted a, you know, a prettier, younger, maybe hairier, I don't know, hairier fellow.
And I already talked about this yoga teacher who was going out with this guy who talked basically about how he was, you know.
Helping her greet the one-eyed trouser snake when he was in the locker room with the other guys, which was pretty sleazy, of course.
And so these were women who were, to me at least, frittering their youth, their vitality, their fertility, and so on, on these guys that just, you know, low-quality, doofus guys.
And you see a lot of this where the women are going for these sort of shallow things, which don't give them long-term happiness.
And then I think what's sort of not explained to them, what feminists are not being honest about or upfront about is...
As you go forward in time, things get more and more and more difficult for women.
So sort of by the time women wake up and say, okay, I've had enough fun, I've gone to enough parties, I've gone discoing enough, I've done this, I've done that, I'm ready to settle down.
Like I'm 30 or I'm 31 and now it's time for me to settle down.
Well, they start looking around.
And it's...
It's kind of a joke, and I don't know where the term comes from, but it's kind of a joke up here that I learned from my programmers that you go out to these clubs, and there are certain clubs that are known in Toronto for this, and there are this sort of species of females called cougars, and cougars are sort of women in their 30s who want to pick up young guys for one-night stands, and obviously that's pretty sad, not just because it's one-night stands, but because of the age difference and the obvious inability or lack of belief that one could have anything
To offer somebody else other than body fluids and orifices and naughty bits.
But this particular thing is going to occur.
So a woman in her 30s says, OK, I want to settle down.
And she is a bit of a ticking bomb, right, as far as that goes.
Everything's going to have to be pretty rushed and pretty efficient and it's not going to be very languorous and it's not going to be very romantic.
And, you know, show me your T4.
Okay, show me your family history.
I need a detailed medical report.
Let me check your teeth.
Can you do this trick?
Can you do that trick?
Now, do a somersault.
Now, it's going to be all that kind of stuff rather than, you know, hey, where'd you grow up and what you do and, you know, what do you think?
And that is not going to be terribly attractive to younger men.
And the men who are their own age, who are sort of available and quality men, of which there are perilously few when you get into your 30s, those men are looking for younger women where they aren't going to have that same level of time pressure.
And I think that's very sad because, I mean, women should have, if they want, the capacity to get really high quality men and have a great family life and to have kids when they're young and fertile and fecund, as the phrase goes.
And they should have all of that, and they should be made sort of aware, before they end up in this death spiral of their 30s, that they need to figure out what they want in terms of quality.
In terms of quality.
This is what Christine is always nagging her patients about, right?
In a very productive and therapeutic way.
What do you want in a guy?
Oh, he's got to be sweet, and he's got to be funny, and it's like, hello, wiki wiki.
This is not qualities you look for in a life partner that you're going to raise children with.
You look for things like intelligence, integrity, consistency, honor, decency, care, respect, concern, compassion, empathy, all of those things.
And it's sort of my goal, of course, to make the family and marriage and so on as honorable and noble an institution as possible.
And you're just not going to get that when you see these women talking about, I want a guy who's got curly hair and little hands and...
You know, whatever.
A tattoo of a butterfly.
This is just not stuff that you want to look for, and women, I think, have not been told the truth when you get these sort of wisdoms within society that you should be having fun, you shouldn't worry about settling down, this and that.
That you really do have to think about these things if you're a woman, because you're on a tighter leash than if you're a man.
You've got to get this stuff going, and figure out what you want earlier in life, and that will sort of make men better too.
Because right now I sort of believe, and this is based, a lot of this is theory, I mean some of it's obvious biological stuff, some of it's theory, and I do believe, based on conversations I've had with men, and conversations to a slightly lesser degree that I've had with women, sort of what it is that they're looking for, But I think good men are kind of left aside in the modern world.
I think that good, nice, solid, honest, dependable, rational, compassionate, nice men A little bit on the wayside.
We have a very shallow culture at the moment.
It's very much about flesh and gel and spangly clothing and knowing the right bands and the right dances and all this.
I mean, we have a really shallow culture at the moment.
There's no question of that.
And I think that in that realm, good men don't do as well.
And I think that that's part of what contributes to the deterioration of the relationships between the sexes.
Women don't understand, I think, and again, generalizing, apologize if I'm wrong, women don't understand early enough and consistently enough how much or how important it is to look for a man with the right qualities.
And so they'll basically not sleep around exactly, but they'll date around, let's say, or have flings, or, you know, I met this really great guy when I was backpacking in Belize, and we've decided to make a go of it, and he works for this NGO over in, you know, I don't know, someplace. and he works for this NGO over in, you know, and we're going to make a go I mean, you can waste a year of your life in that kind of nonsense.
And even if he's a great guy, it's not something that's going to lead anywhere.
And I don't think that women really get a strong sense of, you know, figuring out the right thing.
I mean, I know that, boy, it's probably not more than two generations ago that you hear stories like, Well, if a man took a woman on a date more than three times and he wasn't intending to propose to her, then he was kind of like a cat.
I mean, as you'd call it, a bounder.
A bad guy.
A guy who was sort of wasting her time.
And that is something that the sort of efficiency of courtship that was pretty recognized early on, which is not really recognized so much anymore, I think it does create problems between the sexes.
And it creates resentments on the part of men in their twenties.
Again, really broad generalizations.
I apologize for if this doesn't apply to you.
It creates resentments among men when they're in their 20s because they feel, the good men at least, feel that they're chasing after these shallow women who aren't interested in settling down and are just looking for, you know, cute and funny and pretty guys and so on.
And then what it does is it creates resentments among women towards men when the women are in their thirties because they can't quite they can't quite grab onto a guy in the way that they want, right?
And so you start to get these strained dating rituals in their thirties, right?
Sort of speed dating is one of the things that came in during this because of this particular phenomenon of people getting married later and later where women really have to be hyper-efficient So, I mean, we're talking sort of a rational efficiency in the 50s and so on, where you sort of went on a couple of dates and, you know, if you didn't feel it was going to work out to marriage, you would find somebody else.
But now, women in the 30s have to get into this hyper-accelerated mode of trying to figure stuff out.
And yes, there is a quite a sort of desperate air to this kind of stuff.
It is the kind of thing that really can't be turned around.
I mean, you could say, well, we can get married later because we live longer, so the 20s is what the teens used to be.
Well, that's fine.
But the fact of the matter is we still haven't found a way scientifically or biologically to extend the life of eggs, to allow a woman to be fertile in any kind of non-freaky, invasive way.
In other words, like transplanting eggs from a younger woman.
We haven't found a way to extend the fertility of eggs and it doesn't look like that's going to happen anytime soon.
Women are born with millions of eggs and they get released, they get sort of activated during puberty and then released a couple every month and the quality of the eggs that are sitting in the body just deteriorates and there's really nothing that can be done and there's nothing on the horizon that's going to change that.
And so this problem does become pretty significant.
And I think that I certainly felt this, and I mean, maybe this sort of reveals me as one of the pettiest men in the known universe, and that certainly may be the case, but one of the things that I noticed was that In my twenties I felt that I was chasing women, and then in my thirties I felt that women were chasing me, and I was resentful.
I was really resentful.
Really resentful?
Maybe not really resentful, but it bugged me.
It bugged me because I was still the same guy that I was in my twenties.
I mean, I was older, right?
I mean, I assumed that I was more physically attractive in my twenties.
And so I was older, but now I had a great job and I had all this.
So I felt like my worth had gone up and that women sort of began to notice my attractiveness, I guess you could say, more in my thirties.
But I kind of felt resentful because it's like, well, where were you all in my twenties when this could have been something a little bit more useful?
And so obviously I was enormously relieved and overjoyed to meet Christina and to settle down into an absolutely blissful union, but it was not something that I was anticipating happening based on sort of what had happened.
And I think that women, because they've been taught that they need to have, and this is another big complicated topic which we don't have to get into much right now other than to touch on it, But women have been told that they have value independent of their, you know, you're not just a womb, you're not just fallopian tubes, you're not just an egg machine, you're a goddess and so on.
You know, women are goddesses if they're wonderful and moral, just as men are gods if they're wonderful and moral.
But the fact of the matter is that a man who wants to get married does usually want to have children and a woman is going to be judged to some degree by her capacity to have children and you can't get away from that and you can't snap your fingers and make it not so and this sort of brings me to my last topic which is the kind of virtue that women should be looking for and again in my sort of humble opinion
when they are trying to figure out a guy, right?
A guy to settle down with the qualities they look for.
Well, look, this is the basic fact about my opinion between the sexes, and this is why men and women are so compatible and why we need to be teams and to join together and not fight with each other and focus on our common enemy, which is the state and the church and the family of origin, if it's corrupt.
And what I'm trying to say is this, that Women need men.
Women need men.
Yes, men need women.
That's not in dispute.
That is not something that popular culture rails against.
But all you ever see in popular culture these days is that men are annoying and intrusive and only vaguely at times useful maybe when you need to get the gutters cleaned out.
Men are needed by women.
Women need men.
And men and women are different.
And men have strengths that women don't have.
And women have strengths that men don't.
But again, that's not in dispute.
If you think that men and women are equal, that's fine.
Then what you need to do is you need to start lobbying the tennis association and every other sport which splits up sports people or sports matches by gender and say, you know, men and women are equal, so what we need to do is have tennis matches where the men are mixed in with the women.
And everyone would say, well, are you crazy?
We split these things up because there are specific and disparate capacities between the genders.
So women really need men.
Women really need quality men.
They need quality men to be their husbands.
They need quality men to take care of them when they are pregnant, and when they have given birth, and when they are breastfeeding, and when they are merging with their infants in the way that I think is absolutely essential, right?
The one time in your life where you can let all of your boundaries and barriers go down is when you have a baby around, because it's the only way you're going to be able to empathize, is by trying to inhabit that baby's skin, sort of mentally and psychologically.
And women need men to care for them.
They need them to protect them.
They need them to be gentle with them, and to get them things, and to carry them, and to really take care of them during that time.
It's an enormous drain for a woman to have a baby, and it's an enormous drain on her identity to merge with the baby in the way that's necessary.
I mean, she grows a thing in her belly, she's breastfeeding it, they're really bound up together.
A woman needs a man to support her during that time, and also to bring her back when that time is complete.
Some of the most damaged people that I know psychologically are the single sons of single mothers, because they neither have siblings with whom they can bond with outside of the primal sort of mother-child relationship, but also there aren't any fathers around to bring the mothers back to adulthood after they sort of been lowered or bungeed into the well of merging with the infant.
So women need men in a very fundamental and important way.
And this is true even if you don't have kids.
I mean, you just need a partner of the opposite gender.
Again, this is not to count anything to do with homosexuality or lesbianism.
I'm just talking about the base biology here of reproduction.
But even if you don't have kids and you're heterosexual, you need The opposite gender person in your life.
Women need men, but they need the right kind of men.
They need the kind of men who are going to be like what used to be called stand-up guys, or guys who will be strong and firm and helpful and emotionally productive.
Women also go through a little bit of a rollercoaster every month when it comes to the hormones, and men don't, right?
So there's a stabilizing factor that men can bring to some of the mood swings that women have.
Unfortunately, this doesn't occur at all in my marriage, but let's just say theoretically it were possible.
But women need men for emotional grounding.
They need them to be firm and to be strong and to take care of the discipline.
It's harder, in my humble opinion, it's harder for women to discipline effectively compared to men.
Simply because the women carried the baby in their wombs and breastfed and merged and it's very hard for women to discipline in a way that doesn't involve anger or irritation.
It's hard for women to discipline children in a way that is more firm.
And you see this with single moms all the time, right?
The sort of screechy, frustrated single mom who just wishes that her children would respect her and do what she wants them to do.
This is very common.
Men can discipline children in a way that is stronger, that is more beneficial, and women can do great things that men can't do in their relationships to children as well.
But the basic fact of the matter that's been so obscured in popular culture and in academic philosophy and in literature and movies Women really need men.
Children really need fathers.
If you don't have a man in your life when, and I don't just mean a guy who's kind of passing through, not a bungee dad, but if you don't have a stand-up guy right there with you when you're having your kids and bringing them up, then you are going to have a lot of trouble in your family.
And this is one thing that is just so desperately sad.
I've known a number of single mothers, of course my own mother was a single mother, and I've known a number of others just in the neighborhood.
Naturally there were, given the, I guess the economic status of the neighborhood, there were lots of single mothers there.
And they just weren't happy.
They didn't enjoy their children.
They didn't enjoy their families.
They generally treated their offspring in general as if they were some Not exactly unpleasant curse, but not exactly a blessing that they enjoyed and had fun with and they felt pretty hard done by and pretty resentful and pretty unhappy.
And that's so sad that nature has so constituted men and women to be perfect teams, to love each other, to raise children in a healthy and wonderful way.
And we fight each other and we turn on each other and we are suspicious of each other.
And women feel, a lot of women, and there's a lot of propaganda about this, but women sort of feel that men are going to exploit them.
Men are going to exploit them.
I mean, of all the crazy things, men live to please women in general, I think, and they And we're going to be there for you when you're pregnant, and when you're breastfeeding, and we're going to rub your back, and we're going to do all these great things for you, and we're going to support you, and we're going to support our kids, and we're not going to complain about the cost of children, and the cost of college, and all that kind of stuff.
And we're not going to complain about the loss of income that's involved in motherhood, and we're going to be stand-up guys and do the right thing.
And that's all what men want to bring to the table with women.
And it's so sad that women feel that we are going to exploit them.
That the big exploitation in history is between men and women.
That, like, 50% of the population had this wonderful life where they're lounging back in the vans, eating peeled grapes and getting their foot rubbed, while 50% of the population were enslaved.
That's nonsense!
If you look back in history, 1% of the population was the aristocracy, 1% of the population was the priesthood and the church, and everybody else was their slaves.
And it didn't change when women were in charge.
It didn't change when you had Catherine the Great or Elizabeth I or Cleopatra.
There was no particular wisdom in women.
There's corruption in the class.
There's not corruption in the gender.
And for us to be fighting for 50% of the world, to be pitched against 50% of the world with children as hostages is sad and pathetic and if we let it continue, then as a culture, as a civilization, we deserve the demise that this is going to cause.
There is no innate brutality or corruption in the patriarchy.
There is no such thing as the patriarchy.
There's no such thing as the matriarchy, other than what we make up as collective concepts.
They do not exist.
Patriarchy doesn't exist.
Matriarchy doesn't exist.
Judaism, Christianity, nations, races do not exist.
Races exist as a biological construct, but not as a mental construct.
And the degree to which we let these imaginary petty divisions divide us is the degree to which our cultures are going to fail and fall, and fall apart and be swept into the dustbin of history, as they deserve to go, where they deserve to go, if we allow these kinds of divisions to keep us apart.
We need to unite against the people who are actually exploiting us.
And I'll give you a clue.
The people who are exploiting us, if you're a woman and you're a mother, the man, the person in your life who is exploiting you is not the man holding your baby, but the man holding the gun.
And that is the state, and that is the police, and that is the military.
And the people who had control over you when you were younger, your father perhaps, and your mother, and perhaps your elder siblings, they had power over you because you were a helpless child.
The state has power over you because the state has all the weapons and you can't fight it back.
And the man in your life is not your enemy.
And for guys, the woman in your life is not your enemy.
We've got to stop fighting with each other because we're not ever going to be free if we're down here in the sandbox squabbling over inconsequentialities while those who have all the power ride the whole culture straight off a cliff.
So that's my fundamental beef with feminism, that it creates these wedges between the most natural, co-joined, wonderful and complementary system and team and coupled them in the known universe, that of the man and woman.
So let's get together, let's stop all the fighting and focus on the people who are really exploiting us.
And it's not the patriarchy, and it's not the matriarchy, it's the family of origin and the state.
Thank you so much.
I have got some good feedback on the number of countdowns for the iTunes users.
For the non-iTunes users, you can turn it off.
For the iTunes users, I'm going to turn it on now.
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