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May 18, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:05
242 Reclaiming Masculinity Part 1: Specialization

Getting in touch with your 'inner Fabio'

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Good morning, everybody.
How are you? Hope you're doing well.
It's time, my friends, to embark upon a journey.
A journey towards the often absent and slightly phantasmagorical nutsack which we men are supposed to have, which quite often we simply don't.
And this is going to be something that will be offensive to some and exciting to others, and I hope that you enjoy it.
By the way, there is a new article from Freedom Aid Radio on lewrockwell.com.
A reader made the suggestion that I turn Space Aliens from Luxembourg into an article, so I did that.
Lou's tricky, of course.
He used to write me back and tell me he was going to publish, so I was surprised that I haven't heard from him in the day or two since I sent it in, but it's there now.
Today, May the 19th?
18th? May the 18th? Wait, let me check my phone.
May the 18th, 2006, 8.35 in the morning.
So, this issue of masculinity, reclaiming masculinity, is, I think, a very central issue in the modern world.
I think that what I view as the feminization of the state which is the use of state resources to minimize risk with no consciousness of the violence involved is to some degree a feminine principle and I will go into why I think that and I'm gonna have one big caveat at the beginning and then I'm just gonna plow on the big caveat that I have at the beginning is that these are my theories these are my ideas these are not scientific these are certainly not proven there's evidence for them but I would not claim that they're so logistical so these are simply my opinions But the feminization of the state that has occurred,
which is the reduction of risk with the use of force that is invisible, is a feminine principle, and I'll go into that in a little bit.
But first and foremost, I'll tell you a little bit about my own sort of struggles with masculinity and where I'm coming from, just so you can see that it could be possible that I have something of value to offer because I've had my own struggles with the whole topic.
And the results of those struggles and my thoughts thereof are worth, I think, worth talking about.
Just a sort of a point of discussion starting off point.
But I grew up without a father.
My father left when I was very, very young.
Too young to remember him even being there.
And my father is a highly neurotic, highly low self-esteem, a very low self-esteem kind of guy who has had constant problems with self-destructive tendencies.
He's highly educated, I guess highly intelligent.
He's got a PhD in geology.
But he battled lifelong depression, significant lifelong depression, more than the blues, like to the point where he's had two suicide attempts, he's been hospitalized for this depression, he's received electroshock therapy, which has actually turned him religious.
I guess that shows you what state the brain needs to be in to accept religion.
And he's currently embarked upon a mission to unite the common theses of all the world's religions, which has been going on for about the last 10 years since he retired.
And he's emailing all the professors in the world trying to get their input and help with this rather mad topic.
And, of course, I haven't really had anything to do with him in many, many, many years.
He used to send me a letter a week when I was a kid, but they were just so weird, and his handwriting was so chicken-scratchy that I just never read them.
They just all piled up.
And I really haven't had anything to do with him for...
I haven't seen him probably for eight years, and I really haven't had anything to do with him for quite some time.
And I really doubt that I will have anything to do with him before he shuffles off this mortal coil, kicks the bucket, and joins the choir invisible.
Now, my mother is somebody who is a hyper-feminine caricature.
There's a reason why this Marilyn Monroe thing came to me fairly easily, because my mother is one of these breathy, manipulative, but secretly violent women.
So my mother is certainly not someone that I would say is...
She's about as feminine as a gay man.
It's not an organic kind of femininity, but something that, you know, in the certain more queen-y types of gay men, is sort of a caricature of femininity, in the same way that, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis and the action heroes are sort of caricatures of masculinity.
True gender differentials, I think, are much more subtle and much more rich, as you would naturally expect from what is portrayed in the media.
So, I have had...
Oh, my eldest brother has often been mistaken for a gay man.
He dyes his hair.
My eldest, my only brother.
He dyes his hair.
He used to wear this little leather waistcoat.
He's never... I don't think he's ever had a gay experience or anything like that, but he's often mistaken for a gay man.
In fact, there's a funny joke that when we were down in Texas...
When we started our business, we were down in Texas doing some business with Bell South, and we were staying in a hotel, and to save money, my brother and I shared a room.
We're brothers, what do we care?
But this is when he was at his electric bottle blonde face with his little leather waistcoat.
And so, of course, we'd be checking in and saying, yeah, we're brothers, and we don't look that much alike.
He's a little taller than I am, and he kept his hair.
And we look quite a bit different.
My sort of secret theory is that I was the child of an affair.
That's my sort of forever unverifiable affair.
A theory, but it would certainly explain why I'm so different from the family and why I look like my mom, but not at all like my dad.
So we're down in Texas, and we've got a rough and gruff salesperson with us who we worked with.
And my brother was sitting down to dinner with this guy.
This guy hadn't seen him for a while before he had his dye job.
And this guy says to my brother, what the hell is your hair?
What the hell happened to your hair?
And my brother said, oh, you see the problem is my stylist just went far overboard with this.
It really wasn't supposed to be this blonde.
He's like, I think I got your problem right there, fella.
See, most of us call it a barber, which I thought was pretty funny.
But my brother has always had this fruity air about him, and so I would say that within my family, gender is a rather mixed-up concept, let's say.
My father was pretty whipped by my mom.
I only knew this, I didn't know them as a married couple, really, other than stories that I've heard, but...
She was constantly suing him to get more money all the way through our childhoods.
I remember she would sit down with me and we'd make up lists of every expense that we could possibly have that we were going to forward to my father.
And of course there were lots of problems with this because it was hard for my father to get money out of Africa.
He lived in Africa at the time. As a geologist, of course, that's where you want to be.
So this whole gender thing was really kind of backward and messed up.
And it was the case for most of the people that I knew growing up.
I lived in a pretty poor section of Canada.
In England, we had a pretty nice place.
It was heavily subsidized.
But in Canada, not so much.
And we grew up in the series of tiny box-like single or two-bedroom or occasionally three-bedroom rental apartments.
That I used to call the matriarchal manners because it was all single moms who were there and the fathers were all significantly in absentia.
So... I would say that...
It was certainly a shock for me, personally, when someone told me about the patriarchy.
That was just very funny to me.
Of course, my father grew up as the youngest son of four sisters, and the male part of his father's clan was all wiped out in World War I. And so it was a pretty matriarchal society in England and Ireland, especially among the upper class who all went off to war and got killed.
So for me, having sort of heard all these stories, having seen how bossy my aunts were, my aunts were very, very bossy, because they grew up without fathers around.
Those fathers had all been killed.
And so they really didn't...
It was a very matriarchal society that I grew up in.
The women had all the power.
The men were kind of...
Good for moving furniture and making an income, but we're bothersome kind of pets.
This is sort of the way that they were generally viewed by the women.
Lots of eye-rolling.
Lots of disrespect. And lots of sheepish men, right?
This is sort of the character of 20th century manhood.
It's kind of sheepish, kind of apologetic.
Secretly rational, right?
This is something that I really truly believe about men.
And I'll get into sort of why in a little bit.
But we're sort of secretly rational.
We know better, but we'll do a lot to make the peace because we feel like we run up against...
These icy, icy glaciers of female contempt and indifference, and in order to keep the peace, we simply agree or back down.
And so, this idea that when people told me about the patriarchy, it was like, you're kidding, right?
In some sort of reverse Kodak moment world, there's this patriarchy?
Because, of course, I grew up with nothing but single moms around.
I had nothing but bossy aunts who dominated their husbands.
When I went to school, of course, all the teachers were women.
And so, for me, it was just funny.
Like, it was like, I'm sorry?
Like, in what non-empirical world is this theory being derived?
I just thought it was kind of funny.
Yes, I mean, I did see as I got older that the political leaders were men and so on, but it really was not something that, from my own personal experience, My own personal experience, it had no resonance.
And this is something I'm always nagging, not so much you guys, but nagging the rest of the world or in our interactions with the rest of the world, for people simply to work empirically.
That's all we're really asking for when it comes to philosophy and politics and politics.
Just work empirically.
That's all we're talking about.
Just work empirically. So if you have something that's true from your own life, for sure, let's talk about it.
You can use it as the basis of a theory, and then you can put it out like I'm doing with this series.
But let's just start working empirically.
So if somebody starts telling you about the patriarchy, just think back about your own life.
Think back about your own experiences.
Have you, in fact, felt that men have this sort of Asiatic or Muslim or Aztec manhood that women simply scurry around doing things for them and never bat an eye and never raise their voice and never talk back, that men just sort of squat around on their divans while women peel grapes and feed them?
It's like they've never even met any North American women.
I think that we simply just need to start working empirically and empirically I've had some struggles with what I sort of call gentle or firm or relaxed masculinity simply because I had no template and the women were all opposing any kind of certainty that I had.
And the men were opposing it too, but I feel that the men were opposing it to some degree out of fear of women.
A fear of women is something that is very fundamental.
To society.
And it's not just to our society.
Fear of women is one of the great unspokens in the world.
And I don't know any man who's honest, who doesn't talk about...
I've actually...
My relationship with Christina is the first time I've not had any fear of a woman.
Christina is a glorious, godlike woman of virtue, is not somebody who's scary, which doesn't mean that we don't have conflicts, but we resolve them in peaceful and amical and positive ways.
The fear of women is very common.
I remember reading a metaphor some years ago about a dog breeder.
Yes, I told you it was going to be offensive, so just let me go with this and see where I end up.
And he was saying that when he breeds dogs, the female dogs, we won't use the Every now and then, just up and attack and charge and bite at the male dogs.
And he said this kind of random and unpredictable behavior, and the job of the male dog, all he would do was try and turn his shoulder to the female dog so that the female dog would sort of bite at him but not really do him any damage, right?
So he wouldn't let her get hold of a leg or anything.
He'd just sort of turn his shoulder where she couldn't really get any purchase with her jaws and just let her bite, and then she'd stop biting and move on.
He said that if a male dog ever fought back, he knew that he could never sell that dog.
Because if the male dog ever bit back the female dog, it meant that there were going to be huge problems in the pack and there was this big issue and so on.
And I believed this for a while.
Until I met Christina, I believed this for a while, that this was sort of in the nature of femininity, either because of hormones or because of the way that they've been given all of this sanction in society, which we'll also talk about soon.
But that women simply felt that it was perfectly acceptable for them to just sort of up and be grumpy or moody or negative or hostile or bitter or put-downy or whatever.
And it would always be the man's fault.
And it would always be something that he hadn't done that he should have done or that he had done that he shouldn't have done.
And that gave them the right to be moody and negative and critical and hostile.
And you just kind of had to wait it out, right?
There was no way of talking the woman out of this.
this, you just kind of had to let her go for you until she was sort of tired.
And then she'd sort of, you'd sort of say sorry.
And then she'd sort of shrug and smile tightly.
And then things would be okay for a while.
So that metaphor of the dogs just sort of made sense for me at the time.
I don't believe it anymore, but I certainly remember it being quite compelling at the time that there was something in women's nature that just caused them to have this particular approach to relationships.
So... This is what I've learned in my journey around masculinity, and this is what I'll share with you.
As a complex journey, I'm going to try and reduce it to something that's sort of bite-sizeable, but this is sort of the main thing that I have learned in my journey towards masculinity.
Now, the templates that I'm using for masculinity and femininity, this is not a caveat, but just a caution.
The templates that are using are those that are developed throughout human history.
So when I talk about femininity, I'm not talking about your average Radcliffe grad.
I'm talking about female nature as it would be developed through biological necessity throughout human history, and the same thing with male nature as well.
It's not going to help you if you take my templates and apply them to the average modern man and woman, because I think that the genders are not doing so well.
And I think that's pretty evident in terms of divorce statistics, unhappy relationships, abuse, and so on.
And so I would say don't compare what I'm talking about to modern.
I would say that masculinity has been developed to deal with two things.
Femininity has also been developed to deal with two things.
Masculinity, in its optimal state, develops to deal with two things.
The first is reality, objective material, tangible external reality.
And the second is women.
Obviously. I mean, men have to deal with external reality because they have to bring the foodstuffs home to feed the women and children.
And yes, women and children contributed to the food as well, but men as hunter-gatherers were fairly significant in getting the levels of protein you just can't get from a vegetable patch.
So men had to go out into the world and deal with predators and had to deal with dangers and rock slides and ice cliffs and so on and extreme heat and extreme cold and harsh elements of every kind, storms.
And so men had to attune themselves to tangible material objective reality and to really understand the nature of violence.
If you really want to know why the libertarian movement is so male-dominated, it's because men instinctually are much easier.
It's much easier for men to understand violence.
It's sort of what we're built for in some ways.
The male body is bigger, stronger, and faster.
So we have a better understanding of violence than women, and especially the violence that is required to shelter and protect, right?
So men are trained to deal with objective reality.
So if you're out there trying to get food for your wife and your children or your tribe, and you're sort of closing in on your woolly mammoth, and there's some saber-toothed tiger around that you don't hear or you're sort of going to die, right?
So you really have to be pretty attuned to the evidence of the senses, to material objective reality, and that is why...
Men are a little bit more drawn towards philosophy, and prior to the feminization of Western society, why men are often...
Well, and now, indeed, with mathematics and physics and biology and the sciences in general, there are many more men than women, and I would say this is simply because men's nature, men's brains, men's physiologies...
Are all developed to attune themselves to respect external reality and to know that logic and empiricism are the way to go.
Logic and empiricism, the evidence of the senses, is the way to go.
And so that is why we know Plato was gay.
No. That is why men are generally drawn towards thought systems that are more rigorous and more objective and more empirical and more logical and why we know violence when we see it in a way that men who have been stripped of their masculinity through brutality or women in general have more trouble with it overall.
Ayn Rand, of course, being the magnificent counterexample, but even she didn't go all the way towards a libertarian society based on no state at all.
So that's the two things that men primarily are designed to deal with that women primarily are not designed to deal with.
And why? Well, because you have to remember that throughout most of human evolution, women were pregnant pretty much from the age of 13 until they died at the age of 40 or 30.
So this constant pregnancy is pretty significant in terms of figuring out how women's brains and natures should be best optimized to help them survive.
So one of the great challenges of being a woman is that sexual allure is very, very powerful when a woman is young.
So when a woman sort of is in her prime, when she's in her, I guess, biologically speaking in sort of late teens, when she's in her prime, she's, you know, the sexiest thing on earth and all the men drool and so on.
And this, of course, to me was also very interesting.
When I was more cynical about femininity before I met Christina, I thought, I used to think, well, if women are so innately useful, why on earth do men have such strong sex drives?
Ha ha! In other words, what value would men find in women in the absence of their own sex drive, of their male sex drive?
And the degree that the male sex drive is very high is the degree to which women are negative or difficult or complicating factors within life.
Because all I was looking for was just be positive, be a net positive to my life.
And I refused to take the sex drive into account in this particular situation.
Because you can't claim that someone has value because of your sex drive, right?
I mean, that's just Mother Nature herding you into a...
A kind of prison where you end up paying alimony for the rest of your life.
So that's something we'll talk about later in the series.
But the sexual attraction of women is something that men absolutely have to fight.
It is an absolute demon that you have to fight.
I mean, I don't mean when you're in a relationship with a woman you love.
I mean, that is a wonderful thing.
And, you know, revel in it and enjoy it all you can.
But to be attracted to a woman and to act on that just because she's sexually attractive is an absolutely terrible, disastrous, completely boneheaded idea that is going to cause you nothing but pain and possibly financial and emotional destruction.
But we'll talk about that later in the series.
So, a woman is sort of at her prime and...
She draws men to her, and of course one of the men will impregnate her, and then she will be pregnant where she becomes less attractive, and then she's going to keep pumping out kids and get less attractive all the time.
So the woman faces that sort of particular challenge, that as her needs arise, i.e.
protection and security and protein, as her needs rise, her attractiveness diminishes, right?
Because they only rise because she's got lots of kids, and therefore her attractiveness diminishes.
This is one of the great challenges of femininity.
So men deal with reality and deal with women, and women deal with men and with children.
Again, this is all a big simplification, but I still think that there's real value in it based on my experience, and perhaps you can let me know how you feel.
So, women deal with children, of course.
This is a big thing that women deal with, because they're the primary caregivers throughout almost all of human history, and now, for sure, they are the primary caregivers.
Even more so than throughout human history, because now there are so many single parents.
You couldn't have this many single parents without the state, right?
This is why women who flee to the state for protection end up with miserable lives, because that's what happens to everyone who flees to the state for protection.
Oh, we need support!
We need child support! We need the courts to give us alimony!
Well, all that happens is that no one wants to get married to women because it's too risky.
Divorce is so high and you don't want to have kids with women, so everybody holds off until later and then it becomes difficult to have children because the women get older.
So, you know, if you're not in your 30s, I'd say, and you have the woman you want, get to it.
Don't wait until later. So all that happens is that men stop wanting to get married to women, or at least decent men, men who have brains and who understand the consequences of actions, stop wanting to get married to women.
And so women end up with these shifty men who just vanish, or men who don't want to get married to women.
And I know a good number of men this way.
Or if they do get married, they'd only want one kid or at the most two.
Everything's changed. And everything's changed for a variety of reasons, but a lot of them have to do with state power.
So, women have to deal with children and women have to deal with men.
In other words, they have to have control over their social environment as their primary source of survival.
Just as men have to have control or at least acceptance of material reality as their primary source of survival.
The men's value in a family is brought by the man's ability to interact successfully with both material reality and with women.
And women's abilities and value within a family is dealt with by her ability or sort of expressed by her ability to successfully raise children and to deal or to continue to gain resources from the man.
So the women are innately, and historically, I mean, now it's a different story, but historically, women are innately second-handers.
Men deal primarily with reality and can't survive without the women.
But women, because of their susceptibility to pregnancy and child raising, historically have to deal with other people and cannot survive without those other people.
I guess they can survive if they abandon their children, but then they still face the possibility of seduction or rape and therefore more children.
So this sort of basic vulnerability of women that for good portions, in fact, most of their adult life, they're either pregnant or breastfeeding or recovering from pregnancy and have children in tow clinging all over their bodies, This basic fact of women's life means that they're vulnerable and means that they need the tribe, they need social systems for protection.
And cannot at all survive in a state of violence.
I mean, they can as sort of slaves or chattel or harem groupies or whatever, but women are fundamentally vulnerable in a way that it's very hard for men to understand.
The vulnerability of women, not just in terms of pregnancy, but even if you're not pregnant anymore, but you have four children, you need someone historically to provide you resources.
You simply can't leave those children alone because they'll be taken down by predators or wander off cliffs.
And so you can't go out into the world and get the protein that is required for children to survive when you can maybe get a vegetable patch going and so on, but you simply are vulnerable in a way that it's very hard for men to understand.
This vulnerability of pregnancy, this vulnerability of having children and breastfeeding and Having the kids in tow.
I mean, if you watch the super nannies and see them with single moms, the single moms are completely at the edge of their rope.
And this is with a lot of state subsidies and welfare and social programs.
It is enormously difficult for anybody to raise children alone, even with the existing state supports.
And without those state supports, it would be a real challenge.
You'd really have strong social sanctions against those.
And the charities would be pretty eager to get you a guy who would be able to help you out with the task.
So, what is a man's survival mechanism tuned to?
Reality and women. And what is a woman's survival mechanism tuned to?
Children and men, right? The responsibilities and the requirements.
So, the responsibilities are to support women, for men, and the requirements are to deal with reality, to successfully deal with reality.
And for women, the responsibilities are to support children, and the primary survival mechanism is to deal successfully with men, to make sure that men continue to provide them with resources.
So this is a very important thing, I think, in terms of understanding the difference between the nature of the genders, not sort of the current propaganda or even opportunities around the genders.
Of course, it's great that women have all the freedoms in the world.
I wish that men had as many freedoms as women did these days, but it's great that women have all the freedoms in the world.
But still, the nature is the nature, right?
You can't say that gender is a social construct because there are biological differences between men and women, In terms of their neurochemistry, biological chemistry, their neuropsychology, their brain structure, hormonal structure, physicals, there and that.
There's lots of differences between men and women, and men and women do score quite differently on certain tests.
So there really is a difference between the genders.
It can't be sort of wished away.
And of course, if there is no difference between the genders, then heterosexuality is just bizarre, right?
The natural prevalence of heterosexuality, it would just be a very strange thing if there were no innate differences between the genders.
Now, one of the things that occurs when the value of women goes down, in other words, as women become more difficult and more risky to take on as life partners, and now is probably about the highest that it's ever been throughout history.
The risk for men is prodigious.
If you want to have a family, you damn well better choose the right woman.
And you damn well better stay away from women who aren't the right women because they will take you down, my brother.
They will take you down.
Down. You will spend 20 years of your life paying for a family you barely see.
You'll be living alone in a single sad old little bachelor apartment.
You'll never be able to get any dates because women don't want a guy who's paying alimony out through his nose for the rest of his life.
And your children will grow up distant and resentful and your wife will constantly be doing this, that or the other to you that's unpleasant.
You will live a life of sheer misery and that is a significant risk.
Significant risk for men.
It's one of the reasons why the birth rate is going down so precipitously.
So as the value of women goes down in a sort of practical sense, then what happens is women focus a lot more on their sexual attraction.
Right?
So women will spend a long time worrying about whether they're pretty and going to the gym and doing themselves up rather than trying to be sort of useful helpmates to a man as a man is a useful helpmate to a woman rather than being supportive and kind and encouraging and helpful and positive and respectful and, you know, all of the things that we expect men to be towards women.
If women did that, then they need to spend a whole lot less time at the gym and dieting and worrying about how they look and who's hot and who's not.
I mean, because the woman would actually be useful.
It wouldn't need to just be a sexual play thing to evoke value in a man, which is pretty sad.
I mean, that's a pretty pathetic thing to do, to just want to be sexually attractive and, hey, that's what I'm bringing to the table, some flesh and your sexual drive, which you have very little control over.
I mean, in terms of the feeling of it.
So understanding these two basic differences in situations or in gender development is, I think, very important.
It's been very important for me.
Because what it does is it allows you, as a man, to be strong in the areas that you're strong in and to differ in the areas you're not strong in.
I mean, surely, ideally, a marriage should be a division of labor along lines that make sense.
So, I do things that Christina can't do, which brings value to us, and she does things that I can't do, which brings value to us.
That's one of the basic benefits of being married.
Now, of course, why wouldn't I just sort of pick some guy who's a good friend of mine and set up house and...
I mean, assuming that I didn't want kids or we could adopt or whatever, it wouldn't have to be a sexual relationship, but just sort of set up house and divide the labor so he does the taxes and I pay more into the bank account or whatever.
Well, because the genders work together this way.
And so Christina's ability to run a household astounds me.
I mean, I've run a company and I think sometimes it's a hell of a lot easier than running a household.
She's just really good at that.
And her ability to manage certain aspects of her social relationships is fantastic.
Her ability to work towards compromises and to manage relationships can be fantastic.
Now, without a man, and this is something I'm sure Christina would admit as well, without a man's objective gaze on relationships, women can spend a bit too much time compromising.
Women can spend a bit too much time trying to get along or feeling, right?
Women feel in a way that men don't.
Women feel that if their relationships fail, that there is a disaster that has occurred.
There's a really, really, really bad thing that has occurred, which is why women are prey to exploitation.
One of the ways that I would love to be able to help free women is to tell them not to worry about the success of their relationships so much.
And I don't just mean romantic relationships, but relationships among friends, relationships, and particularly relationships with their own mother.
And just don't worry about whether they'll succeed or fail.
It's not up to you. And of course you want to judge these relationships according to objective moral criteria, not your subjective desire for them to continue.
So one of the ways in which masculinity can be enhanced is to bring a clear-eyed, rational, objective view to these kinds of situations that women are in.
So a woman who complains, and you see this all the time in comedies, right?
A woman who complains about her boss won't act on it, and the guy's always saying, just go and talk to him.
Go up and talk to him and tell him this, that, and the other.
And she's like, yeah, yeah, I will, I will, but, but, but.
And this is, to some degree, women's nature.
Someone said women can nurse a grudge until it grows a beard.
But this is somewhat women's nature, is to feel slights very strongly and not to say anything about those slights to someone.
To be a little bit behind the scenes, to be a little bit kind of shadow puppety, to be a little bit manipulative, to be a little bit in control by balancing everybody's considerations and...
So on. And there was a film out once.
I watched it. It wasn't that good, but the title was good.
It's called Double Happiness. And what it means is that for a woman, it's very important that everyone in her environment be happy, and then she can be happy.
And the double happiness is, you know, that's double happiness for a woman, and it comes from a Chinese proverb who's...
Whose original phraseology escapes me.
But this is a very common thing among women, even now, right?
Even after all of the equality and liberation that's gone on, women feel like if somebody in their environment is not happy, that they can't be happy.
And watching a Dr.
Phil the other day, I mean, this is stereotypical, but I still think there's truth in it, that there's this woman who had...
Her son was a drug addict.
So, of course, she's all out there trying to help him, this, that, and the other.
And the husband, like the guy, is just like, yeah, well, I mean, if he breaks the law and he goes to jail, then he goes to jail.
And if he has no money, then he has no money.
And he's not staying here and doing drugs.
So he's more objective, right?
Whereas the woman's all like, oh, my baby.
So if you hearken back to sort of what I was saying earlier, this stuff kind of makes sense.
This stuff really makes sense, because for a woman, her social environment is her source of survival.
If people turn against her in a social environment, she's cast out with her children into the wilderness.
I mean, it's just a death sentence for her children and for herself.
So women are very focused innately and involuntarily on the social world around them, whereas men are focused more on the objective material world.
And so one of the things that has occurred in my relationship with Christina, which is why it's a win-win, because she's very feminine, and I like to think I'm not very...
I shouldn't say very feminine.
She's feminine, and I'm masculine.
skill in.
And so there is a really great exchange of ideas and perspectives.
She respects the ethical approach that I've taken.
And she started to, well, she's not started to, she's for quite some time been imbuing this in her own therapeutic relationships with patients, this sort of objective ethical approach to relationships.
And I appreciate all of the value that she brings in terms of her sensitivity to relationships and the nuances of relationships in the complicated stuff that I'm doing at work.
She's been fantastic in helping me see the politics and help me understand the complex web of relationships that I'm trying to navigate through.
And so the fact that I bring something...
And look, this was not the easiest thing in the world.
She wasn't sort of primed because she grew up with the stereotypical eye-rolling mother and father who was out doing yard work and was kind of useful as a yard man but not useful in any other way.
She kind of grew up with that kind of family.
So it really wasn't the easiest thing in the world and it probably took about two years to really get her to respect the approach that I was taking to relationships.
I mean, she was always intrigued, but she just couldn't get there emotionally for quite some time because it was just so far outside of anything she'd ever heard of.
But of course, innately deep down, she got it, and that's the part of her I was trying to reach, and then we did, and our relationship's gotten even better.
This is what you need to have as a man, is you need to have respect in your innate reality processing capacities, right?
It's really, really built deep into your hypothalamus.
It's built deep into your brain.
It is the respect for the senses, the somewhat fundamental indifference to relationships.
I mean, this is what's so fascinating about Ayn Rand.
Like, as a woman, she was the real breakthrough person on this, but she didn't have any kids, right?
So that sort of helps to some degree.
I don't know if she was infertile or just chose not to.
But, of course, she might have had a different perspective as she had had children.
But I find that kind of stuff to be just absolutely fascinating.
It's very interesting for me to see that kind of stuff play out in the world, that women are going to absolutely judge themselves based on the success of their relationships, on everyone getting along.
They're going to make way too many compromises, and they're going to end up with these grudges.
They're going to end up unhappy. And that's where, of course, a lot of this emotional volatility comes from in women.
You know, this feeling of being enslaved to the needs of others, right?
It's kind of an unpleasant thing. And of course, it's no accident that a lot of the feminists in the 1950s and 1960s were themselves childless, right?
They didn't have any children. So they're all like, well, why?
Why are women so dependent on people?
And so they started to sell this idea of independence as if women didn't have children, weren't helpless and dependent.
And I use the word helpless.
I mean, look, getting pregnant and having a baby is something I can't even imagine how difficult it is.
But I simply mean in terms of being able to support yourself.
I mean, there's a certain helplessness involved in that.
It's not a bad thing. It's just, no, I didn't invent the gender.
I didn't invent biology or reproduction.
It's just the way things are. So, I think that one of the things that you need to get as a man is a basic understanding of these differences between the gender so that you can have some self-respect for what you bring to the table.
What you bring to the table as a man is very, very, very important.
In fact, what you bring to the table as a man, if you're going to have a family...
It's absolutely essential.
It is absolutely essential.
And there's a reason that young girls do very badly in school if their dads aren't around, right?
It's because they just don't have this objective training.
They end up focusing all their time on their relationships, which is where women drift towards in the absence of sort of clarifying and objectifying manhood around them.
They will end up spending their time focusing on...
How are my relationships? Who likes me?
Who doesn't like me? How are things going?
Who's positive? Who's negative?
Where is everybody? Who's happy?
How's the extended family? Who can I take care of?
I mean, that's as natural to women as staring after a pretty girl is natural to men.
I mean, there's just nothing that can really be done about that.
You can sort of rail against it, but it's just a reality to be managed rather than something to be railed against.
So this is sort of my take one on the value of masculinity.
And I would suggest that you need to explore this with the lady in your life, or if you're a woman, explore this with the man in your life, figure out where it is that you can get respect for your innate capacities, and that, my friends, is what is called a fantastic relationship, and I can certainly speak from experience there.
Thank you so much for listening.
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