Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses the men's movement with the YouTube star 'girlwriteswhat.' Her channel is available at http://www.youtube.com/girlwriteswhat
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| Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| I'm honored and pleased to have the extraordinary Girl Writes What? | |
| What? What? Girl Writes What? | |
| at YouTube. Can we dare we say sensation? | |
| And I think a very powerful and compassionate and rational thinker and communicator, highly recommend her channel at youtube.com forward slash Girl Writes What? | |
| Is that the right channel? | |
| Thanks so much for taking the time. | |
| I've really been enjoying your videos. | |
| It's interesting because people have suggested that we have a chat, which I think is a good idea. | |
| And through watching some of your videos, I've never given a huge amount of thought to... | |
| Gender issues in the way that you present them. | |
| And I know, I don't know if it's called the men's movement or the men's rights movement or whatever, but the idea of a true equality, an empirical equality between the genders has always seemed to me to be a very good idea. | |
| But what's your history in this area and how did you, do you think there were things that contributed to the genesis of your approach to these topics? | |
| Well, I suppose I've always sort of, right from the get-go, I've been kind of an anti-feminist, like right from the time I was in high school, because a lot of the things that they seemed to focus on just really did not make sense to me. | |
| The equality of opportunity is something I can get behind. | |
| My mom worked for a living and she was a kick-ass woman. | |
| My grandmother was a career woman. | |
| She was born before women even had the vote. | |
| I think she only made it up to grade three or something. | |
| She was an extremely well-respected, successful woman in her career. | |
| And did the whole family thing and everything else, too. | |
| Extremely busy woman, never sat down. | |
| But neither of them had any time or patience for feminism. | |
| What's all this then? | |
| There's things to do. And so... | |
| I was sort of coming at it with sort of this, oh, those feminists, they're on again, about like, you know, why don't they just go out and get those jobs? | |
| Why don't they just go out and tough it out, like my grandmother did, competing against men and prove themselves, or let women prove themselves now that they've had opportunities to do so, without all the extra help and sort of the leg up, the extra funding, the extra protections and everything else. | |
| Because you can't really prove yourself by only doing easy things or by demanding that they be made easy for you. | |
| It's not the way that you get respect. | |
| But I didn't really quite see how... | |
| There goes my phone. | |
| How harmful some of the... | |
| Let's just wait for that to finish and I'll just edit this part out. | |
| Okay. Here, let me go... | |
| Get rid of it. It's a virus. | |
| There we go. | |
| It's no one I want to talk to anyway. | |
| So. | |
| But as I was saying, I never really looked at some of the harmful things that that feminist theory has has really led to. | |
| The kind of domestic violence legislation that we have and other aspects of our law. | |
| That are extremely indiscriminatory against men and that it's legal to do that because they're not a protected class. | |
| Our human rights legislation in Canada does not consider men as a group to be worthy of being included in our human rights legislation. | |
| So you have all of these issues that men are trying to get help for and they just hit a wall every single time. | |
| And a lot of that wall is feminist theory. | |
| Sorry, just before we go on, I just want to make sure because without definitions, the language can be an empty vessel which people can pump all sorts of emotional projections into. | |
| So when you talk about feminism, what's the definition that you would use in terms of the aspects that you are critical of? | |
| I would say that anything that is, because there's the dictionary definition of feminism, which is usually something along the lines of, you know, a movement that wants to promote social, economic, and political equality for women. | |
| And that, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, totally behind that. | |
| When I say feminist theory, I mean patriarchy theory, The ideas of male privilege, female gender depression, things like rape culture, that just don't seem to pan out when you actually look at empirical reality. | |
| When you read studies that ask the same questions of both men and women, That hold both genders to the same standards of acceptable behavior. | |
| You know, even things like how forced sexual intercourse perpetrated on a woman is considered rape, whereas if it's perpetrated upon a man by a woman, it's considered, the CDC considers it other sexual violence. | |
| The FBI, even now with their new improved definition, doesn't consider it rape. | |
| And then they They put out these numbers saying, you know, one in however many women are raped and one in some ungodly huge number of men are raped, when in reality it's because they don't consider forced sexual intercourse perpetrated on a man by a woman to be raped. | |
| So when you define things so that men can't be victims of them, then of course you're going to have fewer or no male victims. | |
| And there is, of course, the aspect as well, the data that I've heard is that in terms of domestic violence, I was just listening to the radio today, CBC, and they had stories of domestic violence and how it's so hard to get out of violent relationships. | |
| Yes. And I thought I heard that it was going to be a man talking about his experience of domestic violence at the hands of a woman. | |
| Unfortunately, they had just disguised the woman's voice. | |
| And it was almost like, oh, of course it's going to be a woman. | |
| Like, why can't... Because the statistics seem to be quite clear that when it comes to domestic violence... | |
| Gender symmetry. | |
| Gender symmetry. So women initiate domestic violence as often as men do. | |
| Yet you almost never see... | |
| Sorry, go ahead. In some cases more. | |
| I've read some studies that indicate that severe unilateral violence, like the That really, really bad violence perpetrated by one person on a non-violent partner, up to 70% of that is female perpetrated. | |
| And that women tend to, in some of the studies, it's shown that they tend to instigate violence slightly more often than men. | |
| So they're the ones hitting first slightly more often than men are in those reciprocal Reciprocally violent relationships. | |
| And violence in lesbian relationships seems to be quite significant. | |
| It's probably, you know, when you can actually find studies that look into that, you have lesbian relationships way up here with the amount of violence and then het relationships and then gay male relationships down here somewhere. | |
| And that may have to do with men tending to under-report violence. | |
| And especially, I would think, if they're with a male partner, a little shove is not something that they're going to really necessarily even be considered worthy of mentioning because they're just a little bit more physical to begin with. | |
| And women tend to over-report at times, over-report both their victimization and their perpetration. | |
| Right. | |
| And also, when you hear the theory, as I think everybody who grows up in the West has heard the theory fairly incessantly, that marriage is dangerous for women, When you actually look at these statistics, it seems that, like, not even close, by far the safest place for a woman to be is in a long-term committed partnership, whether it's marriage or not. | |
| But it seems to be where the least amount of dysfunction occurs relative to, you know, living boyfriends, cycling boyfriends, and so on. | |
| And this, again, goes, the statistics seem to go quite counter to the theory, but the theory does not adapt to the facts, and that always raises my levels of suspicion a little bit. | |
| This is really what it boils down to, is that I think that they broke Sherlock Holmes' first law. | |
| And he said, what was it in his last, you never start with a theory. | |
| You start with the facts, and then you build the theory. | |
| You don't start with the theory and then collect facts because then you're just looking for facts that conform to your theory. | |
| And that's really what most of the early research into domestic violence did. | |
| It looked at arrest rates, it looked at report rates, it looked at conviction rates, it involved interviewing women who were, or the people who were in domestic violence shelters who were all women, And it looked at, it interviewed the people who were in domestic battery treatment programs, who were all men, because we do have this, and this has been around since the Victorian times. | |
| I remember seeing a cartoon in a paper of this huge, beefy matron in a dress, just like, just the most angry looking woman ever, and she's carrying this skinny little guy, little guy, terrified looking guy, under her arm. | |
| Right? Just carrying him along. | |
| And she's going up to the police officer and saying, I want my husband arrested for wife battering. | |
| Right? Because it's a joke, right? | |
| It's always been a joke when a man was, they'd call him hen-pecked or whatever. | |
| But I mean, the whole matron wielding the rolling pin, all of that, that's been around forever. | |
| This isn't, this reciprocal violence thing isn't a new thing. | |
| It's been around forever. | |
| It's just when it happens, when a woman beats on a man, it's always been considered a joke, or he deserved it, or he should be able to handle it on his own. | |
| Or she's struggling back against patriarchy and loses some of the moral responsibility for her own actions. | |
| Well, that's what it became when patriarchy theory was sort of first developed, I guess, in the mid-1900s as far as Like, really fleshed out as far as women have always been oppressed, | |
| men are the oppressors, you know, it's this whole huge power dynamic with men way up here and women way down there, and men created society to oppress women for the benefit of men, which just ignores so many things, so many facts, and so much reality. | |
| But at the same time, It plays on our instincts as far as how we view men and women. | |
| We view men as powerful because the ones who've survived their role are generally the powerful ones. | |
| And we view them as potential threats because that's how we've had to view them all through history, right, like all the way back to two million years ago. | |
| And we view women as requiring and being deserving of protection. | |
| Well, it's funny. | |
| Just to share the genesis of my experience of patriarchy, I come from a single mom household and like most kids who grew up in the 70s, the majority of my friends also came from single parent households. | |
| Divorce rates went up like 300% in the 70s. | |
| So my experience was, you know, I'm born into a world of women. | |
| There was my mom, there were her friends, my aunts were home, the men were all out working. | |
| My initial experience of authority was almost entirely like I can't even remember a single counter example, almost entirely feminine. | |
| And then I was in a daycare where women were in charge and running everything. | |
| And then I went to school where the women were all teachers. | |
| And until I actually met a male authority figure, it was quite a few years before I met a male authority figure. | |
| And I just I remember being told about the patriarchy sort of in my early teens. | |
| And all I'd grown up in is this world where women run everything. | |
| And women are the disciplinarians and women are responsible for, you know, when you go to bed, when you wake up, when you eat, when you sleep, when you crap, when you pee. | |
| Exactly. And then somebody said to me, you know, the world is patriarchal. | |
| Yeah, you live in this male-dominated society, right? | |
| What do you mean patriarchal? | |
| Are they all in drag? | |
| I mean, what does that mean? | |
| I mean, there's nothing but women running everything, as far as I could see. | |
| Well, the thing is, too, is they've done studies and they've found that it's women, mothers, who have the biggest influence on teaching Sexist attitudes to children, gender roles, gender norms, and enforcing those. | |
| So it made me really happy that I had a mom who was a tomboy, because she wasn't interested in putting me in dresses. | |
| I think I probably would have turned into a very, very angry person if I'd been forced into that as a child, or making me play with dolls or anything like that. | |
| She was perfectly happy with me just getting on my bike with my buddy Darren and riding all over the place and not coming home until I was hungry and playing with Legos and things like that. | |
| But it really definitely is women who control the teaching and the passing on of cultural attitudes towards pretty much everything. | |
| Well, and since the statistics, at least in the U.S., seem to be pretty consistent that upwards of 90% of parents hit their children, given the fact that most of those parents are women, mothers, if you sort of expand the definition of domestic violence to include aggression, aggression, hitting, spanking, or verbal abuse against children, then it seems indisputable. | |
| Again, I'm always open to counter arguments and counter evidence, but it seems indisputable that if we expand and extend the definition of domestic violence to include not just women dependent on husbands, for which I'm sure there are, but children who are far more dependent upon parents than women are on husbands. | |
| I mean, women can leave husbands and get alimony and get child support and have a pretty positive time of it in the court system relative to men, but children have no such options. | |
| have a pretty positive time of it in the court system relative to men, but children have no such options. | |
| So it seems that if we look at that and we want to help to break the cycle of violence, which I think is every just and moral human being's strongest, strongest desire to break the cycle of violence, it seems to me, and again, I'm happy to hear arguments of the contrary, it seems to me that we do have to turn the focus on mothers and it seems to me that we do have to turn the focus on mothers and the degree to which they may be aggressive towards their children and how much that plays into the Well, I'm not going to lie. | |
| I have spanked my children. | |
| There were days, not very often, there were days, though, maybe once every six months where, you know, after 10 timeouts, you're just at the end of your rope. | |
| And honestly, I think mothers probably tend to do that more Than fathers, just on sort of a casual, mundane, not the serious, you know, I'm going to belt you or whatever, but, you know, a swat to the seat of the pants or something. | |
| And I think it's because they don't... | |
| Men are more able to sort of walk softly and carry a big stick, but never have to use it. | |
| Right, so sort of the shrieking mom kind of thing? | |
| Just because of those instinctive ways that we see... | |
| Men and women, and I think those instincts are quite, I think that a lot of them are sort of there in the back of our heads, right from the word go. | |
| That you just, even when you're two years old, you know that if the man snapped, he'd be able to damage you. | |
| You need to be more intimidated by him. | |
| So he doesn't need to be as angry. | |
| He doesn't even need to get angry. | |
| Sort of, he just needs to put on the stern face and say, please stop doing that. | |
| And a child will generally respond better to that than to all of the shrieking that you could do as a mother. | |
| And part of that too is the amount of time that kids spend with mothers and they feel very secure in pushing boundaries and getting themselves into trouble and, you know, she's not quite mad enough yet She hasn't lost her patience yet or whatever, but I do think that because of those gender differences, | |
| just in the way we view men and women, men are going to have an easier time just kind of crossing their arms and saying, that's enough, than women do. | |
| And I think that this is one of the huge losses in the breakdown of two-parent families, is that you don't have that kind of quiet authority figure Who's just kind of frowning as he's reading the paper and glances over and says, that's enough kids. | |
| And they stop. You just don't have that anymore. | |
| It's not available. So I can definitely see how a lot of single mothers especially, because I think that they are the biggest demographic of individuals who abuse children. | |
| I can definitely see why that is. | |
| Yeah, I was just reading in the New York Times that now a majority of women under 30 who are having children are having children out of wedlock and I'm not a big fan of the government regulating marriage but That's not great for kids. | |
| There are certain statistical arguments to be made that almost the biggest single determinant of negative results for children is single motherhood on the parental side. | |
| And that's a big problem. | |
| And again, it's not to say that's the only problem, but it's something that it really doesn't. | |
| Ever since Dan Quayle put his face into the cheese grater of the Murphy Brown debate, what, 10 or 15 years ago, it's just something that nobody talks about. | |
| And that's really not a good thing if we really care about children in the future. | |
| Well, the issue too is that a lot of people will say, well, but they're being born outside of marriage, but a lot of them are being born in cohabitation relationships. | |
| But the problem with that is, as well, is that relationships where a man and a woman are just living together don't tend to be as stable as marriages are. | |
| I think they have a five times greater likelihood, I just recently read, of breaking up, dissolving before the child is three years old. | |
| So, and a many times greater likelihood of breaking up before the child is 15. | |
| Well, and of course, sorry, just to point out that that's the break, but the cracks appear long before that, right? | |
| So, it's not just the break at the age of three or 15, it's all of the stresses that lead up to that, of the relationship sort of falling apart, so to speak. | |
| It is, it is. And I mean, this is probably one of the reasons why I look back with my 2020 hindsight and I wish that I had made a clean break of my relationship with my ex. | |
| Maybe about four years before I did, I stuck it out. | |
| I wanted to keep my promise. | |
| I wanted to, and I felt responsible for him in a lot of ways. | |
| He's part of my tribe and you just don't cut somebody loose. | |
| Um, but at the same time, I think, uh, we, you look at the divorce rate and it's, uh, something like 70%, uh, are initiated by women and, uh, 20% of, uh, of divorces. | |
| So up to, up to 90%, um, are instigated by women. | |
| Like they, they will go out and they, they'll cheat or they'll They'll just behave in unacceptable ways in order to convince, you know, push the husband into filing. | |
| And so, I mean, really, women tend to want to be the ones to end marriage. | |
| And then when you look at the reasons that they give, You know, they don't tend to be like abuse or adultery or even irreconcilable differences or say, like with me where, you know, we were financially just like going into the toilet and to the point of I'm going to be recovering for about 10 years just from the last four years of my marriage. | |
| But you don't have those kinds of reasons put forward by these women. | |
| You have, I wasn't satisfied. | |
| And basically, I wasn't 100% content. | |
| And for this, they are going to break up their family. | |
| Not the marriage, but the entire family. | |
| Well, much to the detriment of their children, of course. | |
| This is really the thing. | |
| And then when you look at some of them and how they are extremely irresponsible towards their children as far as facilitating the father's access to them, encouraging that relationship to continue... | |
| Which is almost always, even in the case of somebody like my ex who just isn't not the greatest father. | |
| He's just not the most responsible person to begin with. | |
| My children benefit from their relationship with him. | |
| They know he's not, you know, a hero. | |
| But they do, they talk to him quite often. | |
| They talk to him online. | |
| They talk to him on the phone. | |
| They saw him often when we were living close enough to do that. | |
| And I like that. | |
| I like that they have contact with him. | |
| I like that they are engaged with him. | |
| And because that's good for them. | |
| Right? Even if he's not the best Role model out there. | |
| That's what's best for them is to have a dad that they know who cares about them and even if he isn't perfect. | |
| But I think so many women, they gatekeep, and men do this too, but men don't have the We're good to have systemic power to make it a systemic social problem because they don't get custody to the same degree that women do. | |
| So they don't get to play those games with access and put conditions on, well, you can't see them if you don't, this or that. | |
| My boyfriend, his ex, was, well, you can't, I won't have my daughter sleeping on a couch, so you have to get a bigger apartment so that she can have her own bedroom for the one night a week she stays there, which is just ridiculous. | |
| I was sending my kids to stay at their dad's when he was living in one room. | |
| Right. It's not the comfort, it's the contact. | |
| It is, it is. It's like, so they're sleeping on the floor, it's okay. | |
| We started in caves, so we can do that. | |
| We have to, right? You can live in a cave and you can still do it. | |
| I remember Desmond Morris saying, you know, in one of his programs, you know, a baby would rather sleep in a hole in the ground with its mother, next to its mother, than in the most beautifully appointed nursery in the world. | |
| That's very true. He's the guy who wrote The Human Zoo and The Naked Ape. | |
| The Naked Ape, yeah. Right, right. So, yeah. | |
| So, can we just jump back to the spanking thing for a sec? | |
| Because I'm always quite interested in that. | |
| I've... I've made a commitment to not take that approach with my child so far. | |
| What are the circumstances where that occurs for you? | |
| You said it was after a certain amount of conflict, if you don't mind. | |
| When you have a kid that is just absolutely just Acting out, acting out, like we're talking every three minutes you're dealing with this child and correcting their behavior for whatever reason. | |
| And what sort of behavior, just so I can follow that? | |
| Oh, getting into things, putting things in the light, in the wall sockets, or, you know, because they could pull out the little safety thingies. | |
| At a very young age, my daughter learned how to open the cabinet locks. | |
| I put them on the cabinets when she was about 11 months old, and by the time I had three installed, she'd figured out how to open them. | |
| And so, I mean, Things like that. | |
| Just really, any time that they're going to actually be a danger to themselves. | |
| And I know that the natural consequences of sticking that butter knife in the wall socket, that's probably going to hurt. | |
| You know, they can have just a... | |
| And it's not even like I... Because they weren't designed to hurt. | |
| They were designed to jar the kid. | |
| You know, just kind of jar them. | |
| Yeah, so it's not a physical pain situation like a pain diversion therapy. | |
| It's just a startling kind of getting to go the other way. | |
| Yeah, like standing there and going, boo. | |
| I had my oldest, he had a real problem with timeouts. | |
| I think he was always kind of clingy, but then he was never a really badly behaved child either, so I don't even remember ever having to spank him, or feeling like I needed to spank him. | |
| But the timeouts, the amount of crying And he'd be just absolutely, you know, even just a minute, you know, alone for him was just an agony. | |
| He'd still be an hour later. | |
| So, you know, I had to sort of come up with ways to deal with him where, you know, he was sitting in one spot, but I was never out of sight. | |
| And my daughter... | |
| She was a danger to herself and everybody else for about five years. | |
| She started walking at eight months and when she was 11 months old, she was being quiet in the kitchen and she's being quiet, there's trouble. | |
| And I go in there and the oven doors open and she's climbed up the oven racks and she's standing on the stove. | |
| And, you know, this is in three minutes. | |
| Of not being supervised. | |
| So I mean, she was really, really, really into everything. | |
| And so she was a bit of a handful. | |
| But honestly, I know I swatted their behinds a few times, but I can't really remember doing it even more than maybe four times each in their lives, even with her behavior. | |
| And she was just, it was maybe because she was just completely fearless. | |
| How old was, sorry if you don't mind, how old was she when you and your ex split? | |
| Let's see, that was in 2008. | |
| So she would have been, I think she was 13 and my oldest was 14 and my youngest was six. | |
| Okay, okay. Because that's when she was a very little kid. | |
| This is many years ago. Oh, yeah. | |
| It was ages ago. | |
| But yeah, she was like a one-person doomsday machine. | |
| Like, literally, we were at Discovery Zone, which I don't know if they have them anymore, but sort of like the big McDonald's play places with the tube slides and everything. | |
| Oh, yeah. Only about 100 times that big. | |
| And... And they have this sort of mesh on the outside of it to keep kids from climbing on the outside of it. | |
| And my son, I take them there and my son was, I guess he was about three and she was about a year and a half. | |
| And I let go of their hands and within 30 seconds my son's crying because it's like chaos. | |
| Kids everywhere and he's upset. | |
| And my daughter's gone. | |
| Like she's just gone. | |
| I no longer see her. | |
| And then a couple minutes later I see her whiz past on this bridge and then she's gone again and the next thing I know there's gasps from all these parents and I look up and she's about 20 feet up on the outside of this play structure on the mesh. | |
| That's not good. You know, and like at about 18 months of age, right? | |
| And she'd used the hilarious thing, there was a sign, a little wooden sign saying Do not climb on the outside of the play structure or something like that, right? | |
| And she'd use that as a foothold to get up. | |
| And I actually had to start climbing up after her before she would listen to me and come back down. | |
| So, I mean, she was just extremely... | |
| She was very body confident. | |
| I can climb that. | |
| I can jump from there. You know, like I said, she was walking at eight months and running a week later. | |
| So, I mean, she was a handful. | |
| She was definitely a handful. | |
| So, I'll give you a brief overview of the challenges that I see in discussing sort of gender issues in the present as an idiot outside amateur, and you can tell me your feedback on it, because I know you've struggled. | |
| I know you've had some significant criticism about this area as well. | |
| For me, there's a great... | |
| There's a quagmire, a tar pit called victimhood. | |
| And there is, you know, it's really tempting, you know, because if you get victimhood, then you get moral excuses. | |
| If you get victimhood, you get funding. | |
| You get cookies. For victimhood, and we've seen this with a number of groups within society, minorities and so on. | |
| I think the black community is doing some fantastic work at the moment, saying, okay, enough about the death by racism stuff. | |
| Yeah, okay, maybe racism is out there, it's something we need to deal with, but let's start Fixing what we can control within our own communities first. | |
| Let's start having more intact families. | |
| Let's start investing more in our youth. | |
| Let's start, you know, fighting for better schools. | |
| Things that we can do something about rather than just, you know, we're just getting hell from Whitey from here to eternity. | |
| So in other words, they are seeking agency. | |
| Yeah, and so this is a great challenge, right? | |
| Because when you give people victimhood, it's like, it's a relief in some ways. | |
| And it's not to say that it's not accurate in some ways as well. | |
| But the problem I've always had with victimhood is the loss of moral agency, is the loss of responsibility. | |
| There's an inegalitarian aspect. | |
| to victimhood that seems very hard to recover from and then you get sort of like an industry and it doesn't usually come from the private sector it usually comes from academia, government funding and various other kinds of status monopolies but you get a kind of industry that feeds off the inegalitarian nature of victimhood and exacerbates it and I think it's much to the detriment of the group that they claim to represent And that's, | |
| again, that's a really, really brief overview, but I think that really caring for other human beings means giving them responsibility. | |
| I think a lack of responsibility is like an addiction. | |
| It's like a drug. You can give it to someone, they'll feel better in the short run, but I think it really decays their sense of purpose and efficacy in the long run. | |
| But when you've had people who've been told that they're victims and they can do whatever they, quote, want in a sense, because they're victims, everything will be excused. | |
| When you bring responsibility back to the equation, there almost seems to be a recoil and a backlash against that. | |
| And I think that's a real shame because I think that we grow when we accept more and more responsibility. | |
| We grow when we accept responsibility over and above. | |
| What we should. I think we have to reach further to take responsibility for our lives, even than what history may dictate, what gender discrimination or racial discrimination may dictate. | |
| I think we have to swallow that big, bitter pill of responsibility, and I think that's the only way to outgrow it. | |
| It seems that focusing on the victimhood seems to be a kind of paralysis. | |
| That's the end of my rant. I just sort of wanted to get your thoughts on that. | |
| I really do tend to agree with that. | |
| I think some of the harshest criticism that I received from feminists was when I wrote about my sexual assault when I was 14. | |
| Not so much the assault itself, but the fact that when I wrote about it, I wrote about the fact that leading up to that, leading up to what happened, I made some serious, glaring, like, neon-colored errors in judgment, and I knew that they were errors when I was making them. | |
| And, like, I knew that, you know, this isn't a good idea. | |
| Not a good idea, but, you know, nothing will ever happen to me. | |
| Because you're, you know, a teenager, right? | |
| And that when it was over, and I was okay, you know, I was scared, I was shaken, I wasn't physically hurt, but I actually on the walk home, in the time it took me to walk home, I looked at what part I had played in leading up to what happened. | |
| And even the things that I did while it was happening, because I did the whole resisting, physically saying no, all of that stuff, trying to be firm. | |
| Even though, you know, you're scared so it's hard to be firm when you're scared. | |
| And the fact that because I had made those mistakes, then I knew that I didn't have to make those mistakes again. | |
| You know, that I had actually a great deal of power in that situation leading up to it, all the way through it. | |
| I had a huge amount of agency in Of choices. | |
| A choice between A and B. A choice between A, B and C. And it was partly based on my choices that what happened, happened. | |
| And that helped me get my sense of safety back. | |
| Right, because if it's entirely outside your control, then in a sense you have to live in fear for the rest of your life. | |
| That's right. Like I keep saying, I keep saying is when you are the equivalent of the person who gets struck by lightning while sitting in their living room on a clear day, right, then nothing you do was nothing you did, so therefore nothing you ever do can prevent it from happening again. | |
| And, you know, I got called a victim blamer. | |
| I got called self-hating. | |
| And that I was taking responsibility for the assault, you know, and I was taking blame off of them. | |
| And even though I've stated completely in the article that, you know, it was their fault. | |
| They made a choice to assault me. | |
| But I could have prevented it if I'd been smarter. | |
| And it wouldn't have involved doing anything. | |
| It wouldn't have been involved putting on a burka or hiding in my house. | |
| It would have just involved thinking about my own safety, you know, and not doing completely stupid things that I knew were stupid when I was doing them. | |
| And so that whole argument that I was victim blaming just seemed completely Well, and it is very much, well, of course, I just, of course, want to say how incredibly and desperately sorry I am that that occurred for you. | |
| That's just absolutely heinous and wrong. | |
| I know you're over it to a large degree. | |
| I just want to express my incredible sympathy for that. | |
| But it seems very much at odds with the arguments, like to say, that if you take some level of responsibility for being in that situation, and this is a trivial example that Camille Paglia wrote about many years ago, which is to say, if you leave your wallet on a park bench in Central Park, And someone takes it, the person who takes it is wrong. | |
| They're still a thief. They're still a thief, and that does not excuse what they're doing. | |
| But you did leave your wallet on a parking, right? | |
| There is something that you did that allowed that to get stolen more easily. | |
| And that's a trivial example. | |
| I just wanted to point it out. | |
| It is. Saying that there's nothing that you can do to prevent yourself from being a victim of sexual assault or being a victim of anything. | |
| Is really taking power away from the individual. | |
| And, you know, it might be nice to say, well, we need to change society. | |
| In the case of something like rape, I don't think that's ever going to go away. | |
| I think there are biological factors involved. | |
| Ironically, now that we have abortion and long term birth control and things like that, it may Be reduced just by biological means, because if it wasn't an effective reproductive strategy, people wouldn't do it. | |
| And so much of sex in nature Like between animals is kind of aggressive and forceful and all of that. | |
| So I think that it's always going to be, it's one of those things just like with anger, aggression of any kind, it's going to always be there to some extent. | |
| It's never going to completely go away. | |
| But basically what feminists seem to be wanting to do is They want to tell women, you shouldn't have to do anything to protect yourself and you shouldn't have to do anything, think about making wise choices or adjust your life in any way. | |
| It's society that should have to change. | |
| And while it It's a laudable goal to change society, and I think that there's definitely ways to work on that. | |
| Because we all have these sort of instinctive drives that can lead us, but we're supposed to be able to get ourselves about that. | |
| Well, and it's not just women. | |
| I mean, men... We have to be careful as well. | |
| I mean, you don't go into a biker bar with arseless chaps on and a lupachi top. | |
| There are things that men need to do to avoid physical attack as well. | |
| I think men need to be more worried about that than women, since men are probably three to four times more likely to be victims of violence to begin with. | |
| And the really interesting thing that I found was that I was reading An article about depiction of violence gendered violence in the Globe and Mail that I mentioned in one of my videos and he said mentioned something about how women are much more afraid than men of being violently attacked even though men are three to four times more likely to be violently attacked and Men are more afraid of property crime Even though women are slightly more likely to be the victims of property crime, | |
| victims of purse snatchings and things like that, or, you know, just break-ins, things, getting their cars stolen from. | |
| And when you look at... I'm sorry, I would argue that that's because there's more that men can do. | |
| Sorry, men are more afraid of property crimes. | |
| Is that right? Did I... They are more afraid of property crimes. | |
| And I actually think that it's because of those gender roles that have existed forever, right? | |
| Where a woman brings to the relationship. | |
| It's even just falling into the things that men and women find attractive to look at. | |
| You know, men want to look at pictures of naked, young, fertile women. | |
| And women want to look at pictures of essentially rich men or men in Firemen outfits or in uniform, men who are representing what they have. | |
| Alpha male status dudes, right? | |
| Whether it's physical strength or wealth, it's alpha male status. | |
| Well, it's what the man brings, what he can bring in resources. | |
| She's showing off, and men are attracted to her because of what she brings in her physical form. | |
| Fertility, youth, all of the things that are attractive. | |
| When you're looking at having children and you're living in a cave 20,000 years ago and, you know, you're going to need to have eight babies to have two of them survive, so she's got to be young, she's got to be healthy, right? | |
| And then you look at what women are attracted to in men, the signs of wealth, the signs of, you know, of work, right? | |
| Signs of work. And, uh, so what they bring as far as resources. | |
| So when you look at what women fear to have damaged, they fear to have their bodies damaged, right? | |
| Men fear to have their resources taken and all of this sort of, I was thinking about it, like maybe it all ties into what makes them sexually attracted to the opposite sex. | |
| Right. So, you know, that, that could be a great deal to do with it. | |
| Um, men definitely, uh, I think they do need to be a little bit more aware of the greater danger, the greater risk that they have of being attacked. | |
| And one thing that I find really ironic in how fearful women are of being attacked and how there's usually a great deal of talk about women being targeted for violence, women being targets, women, you know, violence against women, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is that even when you look at things like muggings Women now have as much mobility as men do, right? | |
| I mean, they're out, they're about, they're walking around, sometimes at night. | |
| They're out in the world, just as mobile as men. | |
| And yet, even criminals would rather attack a man than a woman. | |
| You would think that women being weaker, women being more vulnerable, women being easier targets, that women would be the majority of muggings. | |
| Women would be the majority of robberies, robbery victims. | |
| But it's still men. | |
| Right, right. Yeah, and I mean, when I was sort of thinking about... | |
| I start with the personal, look for the data, and then try and develop some sort of theory, because I think personal experiences are very important. | |
| And given that I was spanked and beaten as a kid by my mom, and given that most of my friends were spanked or hit by their moms, and given that most of the discipline that occurred for me when I was a kid, with the exception of one headmaster at boarding school who caned me, was being hit by women. | |
| Again, it was one of these things where I sort of popped out into the theory of gender relationships, where I was told that the big problem is men hitting women. | |
| And it's like, well, wait a sec. I've never, with the exception of one headmaster, I've never been hit by a man, but I've been hit by... | |
| Probably a dozen women over the course of my life. | |
| And again, it's just one of these things where you sit there and say, well, wait a second. | |
| This doesn't even come close to my... | |
| Didn't they ask any men when they were going... | |
| Anyway, so that's sort of where I'm like, how does this make any sense empirically or factually, let alone... | |
| Anyway, so I just wanted to point that out. | |
| It makes sense to armadillo oblongatus. | |
| It does. Because people are simply going to understand on a very basic level that men are... | |
| potentially more dangerous than women just because they are physically stronger. | |
| And, and, um, also I think it has a lot to do with, uh, because patterns of violence between men and women tend to differ quite a bit. | |
| Um, women do tend to be more violent within their little sphere, within their family. | |
| Right. | |
| And men, uh, I read in one study that even extremely violent men, um, tend to be more violent outside of their relationships than within them. | |
| Um, whereas women, it's completely the other way around. | |
| And when you look at, uh, the woman being sort of in the, the domain of home, the, That's her sphere of existence. | |
| That's where she acts. | |
| But that's all that matters, fundamentally. | |
| If someone gave me the opportunity to change the world, what a lovely idea that would be. | |
| If somebody gave me the opportunity to change the world, I would say, let's change the way that babies and infants are raised. | |
| Just give me five years. | |
| Five years to provide all the love and nurturing and resources that could conceivably be showered upon And we would have a different world. | |
| And that is largely the role of women in society, whether it's, you know, moms or, as I see a lot of the stay-at-home dad, grandmoms taking care of kids or daycare workers who are almost always women or teachers or whatever. | |
| Then what I would want that, because it's so, what seems to be missing from the explication of the cycle of violence within society, which again, we all want to do our best to arrest and break, These are men raised by women. | |
| These are men? It's a great line from Fight Club. | |
| 78% of the men incarcerated in the U.S. were the products of single mother households. | |
| Right, but even if it's a dual, again, for reasons of breastfeeding and all of that, even if it's two-parent household, it's moms who primarily stay home. | |
| And so when we look at an adult, male, without looking at the fact that he grew up largely in a matriarchy, that women... | |
| And it's not to blame all women for it. | |
| It's just to look at the simple facts that these are products of women, of women's upbringing. | |
| And if we don't see that... | |
| Then it's really, and you know, there's no greater power disparity between a parent and a child or a caregiver and a child. | |
| I mean, the power disparity between a husband and wife is non-existent relative to the power disparity between parent and child. | |
| And so with that power disparity, with that level of authority, with that level of formation of the personality, you pointed out in one of your videos, again, very powerfully, I think, that Boys receive less nurturing, less care. | |
| There's a lot more sort of, suck it up, walk it off, and don't cry. | |
| And it's like, what if we could just change that and give boys the same level of nurturing that we give girls? | |
| I mean, which would largely be an issue which women would have to address with women. | |
| I mean, I don't know if a lot of women will listen to men about parenting, but they will listen to other women. | |
| Why not make that a focus? I don't know that we need to give boys the same level of nurturing and empathy and care that we give girls. | |
| I think that we need to take what we do with girls and what we do with boys and kind of figure out a way somewhere in the middle because frankly There's a great deal to be gained by being told to suck it up when you're a kid. | |
| By being told that, yeah, these stitches are going to hurt, but I'm not going to lie, but you are a brave girl, and I know you can handle it. | |
| Oh, so you mean like coddling as opposed to empathy? | |
| Yes. Yeah, empathy is about the long-term health and needs of the child, which, yeah, it's not kissing every person until it falls off. | |
| And, you know, I do tell my own kids, you know, suck it up, princess, or, you know, what do I tell my boys? | |
| Pull up your big girl panties. | |
| Sometimes, because they have a good enough sense of humor to take it, and sometimes they'll throw it back at me when I hit my thumb with a hammer. | |
| But it's, you know, and we do a lot of joking around... | |
| You can just tell how terrified my children are of me when I tell them, you're five minutes away from becoming an infanticide statistic and they just laugh, right? | |
| Because they know if I actually stop joking and get quiet, that's when I'm running out of patience. | |
| But I think that we really need to find a balance between Coddling and the way we deal with boys, which was a way that I really tried not to deal with my boys. | |
| But I did try and give all my kids the kind of upbringing that I had because I was extremely secure in the fact that my parents both loved me and were both very, very much invested in me being okay, no matter what. | |
| And my mom, she was a disciplinarian. | |
| She was another one of those, you know, she would get frustrated. | |
| She'd put her hands in her hair and go, that's it, I'm moving away from home or something like that. | |
| And then it would just kind of break the tension and we'd all kind of have a laugh. | |
| But, and my dad was always just sort of a very quiet presence. | |
| But I remember when I was 10, I got beat up by a bully who was, he was about a year older than me, and he was picking on a friend of mine. | |
| And wouldn't stop. | |
| So I hit him. | |
| And then he ended up, he bloodied my nose and gave me a fat lip and a shiner. | |
| And I went home to my mom and she said, oh my god, what happened to you? | |
| And I said, well, Ronnie beat me up. | |
| And she says, well, why would he do that? | |
| And I said, well, I hit him. | |
| And she looked at me and she says, well, what did you think was going to happen? | |
| And she fixed my bruises up and she got me all sorted out. | |
| And, you know, helped me feel better and cuddled me and stuff. | |
| But she did not go march into his house and tear a strip off of his mom. | |
| She said if he starts to really pick on you or anything, if he starts to, like, single you out, you let me know and I'll do something. | |
| But you hit him. | |
| You know, what did you think was going to happen? | |
| Right, right. I do want to make sure that my listeners do get the opportunity to read. | |
| You have a blog and you have, of course, the YouTube channel, which is Girl Writes What. | |
| Could you want to make sure that you get the blog name out for my listeners to go and peruse your writings as they see fit? | |
| Yeah, it's actually called Owning Your Shit. | |
| Yeah. It's really about agency, or it tries to be about agency and personal responsibility and kind of examining things from a non-victim standpoint. | |
| And I don't know, this is one of the huge failures of feminism that I've seen, is that it really has not empowered women at all. | |
| It's just left them... | |
| I mean, it seems to me that they're safer than ever, but they're walking around in more fear than ever. | |
| They seem to be more dependent than ever. | |
| Whether it's on men, or whether it's on the stage, or whether it's on services, or whether it's on help, you know, special programs, flex time, you know, all of these things that we have to modify in order to make them woman-friendly. | |
| So I just, it seems to me that, and honestly, how are you going to get women into politics if all you talk about in the context of women is how they're victimized all the time? | |
| I wouldn't elect an official that I thought was weak enough to be victimized all the time. | |
| So when I look at women as a group and I hear what's constantly portrayed in the media, I really have a hard time That person, that woman would have to be a seriously kick-ass woman with an attitude like Margaret Thatcher. | |
| Maybe not her politics, but her attitude. | |
| But in order for me to trust her. | |
| Because the respect Of women as capable and competent and powerful and all of that's been undermined as far as I'm concerned by feminist advocacy and all of the whining that they do. | |
| Yeah, I'm not sure. For me, trusting a politician wouldn't have something to do with gender much at all. | |
| As a category as a whole, I think I would be unable to go over there. | |
| But again, so, sorry, again, it's youtube.com, girlwriteswhat, all one word, to find your videos. | |
| And owningyourshit, is it owningyourshit.com? | |
| It's owningyourshit.blogspot.com. | |
| .blogspot.com for people who want. | |
| I really do want to take time to thank you for a really, really enjoyable and interesting conversation, and I hope we can talk again. | |
| I hope so too. I really enjoyed it. |