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Dec. 31, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
50:12
2291 Why Men Don't Want To Get Married

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, defends the honor of men.

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Hello, hello everybody.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Oh, it's December the 31st, 2012.
I hope you're doing well.
So, this is going to be a show on why men don't want to get married.
You selfish, selfish bastards.
But just before we start, I want to mention, it's been a fantastic year for the show.
I've spoken all over North and South America many, many times.
The show has been downloaded or viewed 14, 15 million times.
Million times!
This is a significant spatterpaint, point-of-light constellation of laser precision surgery philosophy flaying down on the world and lighting up the foreheads.
Not with bullets, but with the barbshots, a glowing fluorescent truth.
And it is...
Due to you the success of this show and the success is only going to continue this coming year with a whole bunch of stuff that I'm working on with a bunch of partners and so it's all going to be continuing and thank you thank you thank you but I mean I just want to be frank that it does get a little frustrating at times I hope you will bear with me and I hope that you will not take this personally it is a little frustrating at times because I do ask for 50 cents a show.
That's not a huge amount.
And the show is downloaded a million, million and a half times a month.
So clearly I should be sitting on a huge amount of money with which I can use to grow and spread philosophy.
And I'm not.
Because the donation rate still hovers around about 2% of listeners.
Now look, come on.
I mean, I'm not telling you anything you don't know.
I'm just reminding you of what you do know, which is that it's not my point studying philosophy and then not acting with integrity.
That's the deal.
I put my 30,000 hours of work in philosophy and all my education and all of my talents and skills and abilities, such as they are, to the sole purpose of spreading philosophy in the world.
I get up at 4 o'clock in the morning to take flights with a three-year-old so that I can go and give a speech.
I don't really charge for my speeches, at least very rarely, and even then it's not very much.
Because I want to make sure that I get the word out to as many people as possible.
I'm working pretty hard.
I'm working pretty hard at this.
I stay up till 2 o'clock in the morning finishing a book for someone I'm going to be interviewing so that I can speak with some vague intelligence about the topic.
And I answer, I don't know how many emails a day.
I have conversations with people on the side to help them with philosophical issues and issues in their life.
So I'm working pretty hard at the show and So when you download a podcast, you're kind of downloading the fruit of all of that, right?
I guess I'm 46 now.
I got into philosophy when I was about 16.
So 30 years of fairly continual study and so on about how to make the truth risable and visible in our lives.
Now you get that at the click of a button.
And if you've downloaded a bunch of shows, I mean, look, if you've downloaded five shows, don't bother saying it'd be $2.50 after PayPal.
Anyway, but if you've downloaded a bunch of shows, if you've shared a bunch of shows, if you've watched a bunch of videos, if you've read a bunch of books, again, all free, all the fruit of many, many, many, many hours of research and thought and writing and polishing and editing and designing book covers and audiobook reading and so on, If you have consumed the effort, you need to do the right thing.
You need to do the right thing.
We need to show, I don't know, Scientology or, you know, we need to show religious sects or whatever that we can have...
At least 10% of the integrity of the superstitious and the cultish.
That's all.
If we could get donations up to 10% of listeners, well, then there would really be no stopping the show.
I mean, if you think the show is helping to spread the word of philosophy, then Getting behind it from a financial standpoint, or if you don't have any money, just, you know, sharing and talking it up and so on.
I mean, this is more than a show, right?
We know that.
Tens of thousands of people have stopped spanking their children because of this show.
Tens of thousands of people have stopped spanking and aggressing against their children because of this show.
That changes the course of the DNA of the species, you understand that?
This is not entertainment.
Hopefully it's entertaining, at least at times, but that's what you're contributing to.
And even if you've got everything that you want to get out of the show, it is helping to spread it to new people.
You send somebody the facts about spanking or the story of your enslavement or the money that is sold abroad as you or whatever it is, a book.
You send it to them.
It begins, for many people, it begins that path which takes them to the enactment of the non-aggression principle, fundamentally in their own lives.
And that is essential.
That is essential.
There's no other way to do it.
The concept of the voluntary family, that relationships with parents are, you know, when everyone is an adult, are voluntary.
Fantastic.
Essential.
There's no more single thing that can improve the quality of any relationship than the introduction of volunteerism into that relationship.
This is statistically well known.
When no-fault divorces came in, whatever you may think of them, when no-fault divorces came in, female suicides declined by 20% over the long run, and abuse against women declined by a third.
Declined by a third.
Physical abuse against women declined by a third when the marriage became more voluntary.
Well, if relationships with parents are voluntary, child abuse will decline even more substantially than that.
Even more...
I mean, the law can't do it.
Child Protective Services can't.
I mean, that can't happen.
Society, sure as hell, isn't doing much to stop it.
But if the concept of adult relationships with parents being voluntary, which means if you love them, you love them.
If you don't love them, you can't fix them.
You can choose whether to stay or to go.
In the same way that if you're abused by a spouse, by a husband or a wife, then you can choose to leave.
And we all respect and perhaps even applaud that choice to get out of a vicious, toxic and dangerous relationship.
Voluntarism within the adult-parent relationship is the single biggest concept that can spread to reduce child abuse.
And I'm not making this up.
No-fault divorce, which is much less of a powerful idea, though obviously very beneficial in many ways.
No-fault divorce.
One-third reduction.
In physical abuse against women.
Imagine what the world would look like if we had a one-third reduction, even just, I think it would be more, but just a one-third reduction in child abuse, or at least physical abuse towards children.
It would be astonishing.
It would be astonishing, and truly, the first giant glowing Godzilla step towards the mountain of a free future.
So, if you're consuming, I'll stop lecturing, and I apologize for this.
If you've listened, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
If you've donated, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
But if you've consumed without contributing, come on.
Freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.
Just do the right thing.
That's what philosophy is all about.
Do the responsible thing.
Help spread the word.
Okay, so let's get on to the topic of today, which is why don't men want to get married?
The Girl Writes What is always a provocative and interesting lesson, and she was talking about how monogamy, a monogamous, lifelong marital relationship, is generally to the benefit of women because From a pure biological standpoint,
men's reproductive value goes up over time as they gain resources and so on, and the decline in sperm quality, if you're not French, is actually not too bad, at least certainly compared to what happens with ovaries and eggs for women.
A woman's reproductive value declines, over time a man's reproductive value increases, and therefore monogamy is really for the benefit, to the benefit of women for the benefit of women.
So, she makes that case.
And she also does sort of point out that if marriage is so negative towards women, why is it that women are constantly complaining that men don't want to get married?
And it's true.
It is true.
The proportion of men who are never married has gone up like five or six times over the past 30 or so years.
And, of course, women having children out of wedlock is...
Massively high.
It was in the single digits in the early 1960s, and now for women under 30, it's over 50%.
Over 50%.
And in some places, in some truly low-rent districts of America, 80 to 90% of children are growing up without a father.
Now, it certainly is true, particularly in the black community, that Generally, unjust incarceration has to do with that, certainly in terms of the drug war and so on.
But it's a significant portion of, quote, absent fathers who just live around the block.
So there's a lot of socio-economic causes for all of this.
But I don't think it's that essential to get into these.
I mean, this is just some thoughts that I've had and some research that I've done about why men don't want to get married.
It's a very, very interesting question.
One thing that's fundamental, of course, is that marriage is something that was taken over by the state.
And so, when people rebel against marriage or say, well, it's just a piece of paper and so on, well, okay, it involves a piece of paper now, but marriage predated the state significantly.
So, don't make the mistake that statists make, right?
They say, well, Government took over the roads and therefore without the government there'd be no roads.
And that's really quite mad.
That's like saying a government pays physicists now and therefore without the government there'd be no physical laws and everything would be a weird kaleidoscope of nothingness.
Not particularly believable, but don't make the mistake of thinking that because the government has co-opted something it now becomes statist.
I mean they're just taking over something.
And the reality, of course, is that marriage is fundamentally around children.
And What that means is because, as a species, we are ridiculously slow to mature.
You know, the first year of life is sometimes called the fourth trimester, right?
So we give birth to our young, as a species, way too early.
Way too early.
Horses can walk within a day or two of being born.
Babies, it takes ten months or a year.
We're born ridiculously prematurely.
And the reason we're born ridiculously prematurely is we have these ridiculously large heads.
Or in my case, ridiculously square with large heads.
And so we have to be born at that time because if our heads get any bigger, we simply won't be able to fit through the birth canal, right?
A woman would explode, I think is the technical phrase.
So we're born ridiculously early, ridiculously underdeveloped, and it takes a quarter century for our brains to reach full maturity after birth.
And so of all the mammals, we have perhaps elephants accepted, but we have the greatest need for massive investment of resources to bring a child to maturity.
And so if you're going to have a child with someone, then there is a kind of contract, right?
So if you're going to say, you and I are going to have children together, well, if we're going to make this decision to bring this life into the world that's going to take us 20 or 25 years to bring to maturity, Well, I need to know that you're going to stick around and do this thing together.
It's a contract.
And at a base economic biological level, I mean, it's a very, very important contract.
I mean, being a parent, as those parents know, is a massive amount of unpaid, underappreciated, sometimes fought against labor.
Massive amounts of, quote, inconvenience, you know, getting up at all hours of the night and It's very, very expensive in money and other resources.
I think it's about a quarter mil to bring a kid to maturity now.
And that probably hasn't changed much in terms of relative resources forever, right?
So you're getting into a massive, long-term, elementally essential deal with someone.
And nobody would think of entering into a 20-year deal to develop real estate without a contract that was enforceable.
And the contract is for the person, and absent the person, the contract is for the resources.
So if the person leaves, he's still responsible for bringing food and shelter to his children and so on.
So that's the reality of what marriage is all about.
Marriage is fundamentally a contract.
Between two fertile adults to band together to raise children, to commit to each other to raise children.
And the reason, of course, this goes on for your life, rather than saying, well, we raise children, then we'll split up, is that, from a biological standpoint, grandparents are incredibly important and incredibly effective.
Studies have been done which show that Menopause tends to hit when the value of caring for grandchildren exceeds the value of incredibly aging eggs that a woman may be carrying.
So grandparents are essential.
So in terms of banding together to reproduce the DNA, primary parenting of your own kids is essential, but then staying together to be there for the grandkids is also very essential.
And so marriage As a ceremony, as a commitment, is a public declaration of the intent to stay together for life, and at the very least to stay together for the raising of children and with any ideal sort of to the raising of grandchildren and then of course to be there for each other in old age and its infirmities and so on.
So that's the contract.
The way that it was generally enforced was through social pressure.
Obviously there was religious elements and it was a sin to get divorced and so on, but there were also social elements like divorcees where people who started talking about divorce were Kind of pushed back.
You know, I was thinking of that scene in the movie with Rayleigh, Goodfellas, right, where he's tarting around with some hoe and the boys all sit down with the guy and say, you've got to go back to your wife.
She's the mother of your children.
You can go have your fun if you need to, but you've got to get back together with your wife.
And so when you got married, you were staking your honor, your reputation, on a public declaration of, this is it, I'm together forever with this person.
And that public declaration was important because then, if you talk about breaking up, people say, no, you made a public declaration, you have children, you have responsibilities, so suck it up and deal with your marital problems.
As opposed to, you know, you go on four dates with someone and And then you say, well, I don't think it's going to work out.
People are like, okay, well, sorry about that.
So the public declaration is, this is my intention.
This is my honor.
And this is what you did as a man and as a woman.
You stayed and you worked it out.
And the reality is that people who get divorced, statistically, they end up the same, if not worse off, in terms of happiness.
So if you're going through marital problems, some people get divorced and some people sort of hang in and try and stick it out.
And the people who get divorced Don't end up happier than the people who stick it out.
And 60% of the people who stick it out in a rough patch of a marriage, five years later, they report being in a happy marriage.
Solved the problems, moved on.
Whatever transition was going on has been resolved, has been dealt with.
And so, except in cases of abuse and so on, I mean, it's pretty immature to get divorced.
Because you can work it out.
You can work it out.
And it's bad either way, right?
So if you can work it out and you get divorced, then that's really bad.
I mean, if there are kids in particular, it's really, really bad.
Otherwise, it's just bad.
You just broke up a marriage and you didn't need to and would have been better off if you hadn't.
But if you get divorced for, quote, dissatisfaction or marital problems or conflicts, not abusive ones, and there are kids involved, then that's just incredibly selfish.
Now, of course, in the past it was known that this was incredibly selfish and a person's reputation and their social standing itself will plummet, they may be ostracized or whatever it is.
Lots of very powerful stuff that goes on to get society to...
If the government steps out, social strength, social power steps in, which is fundamentally much more effective and responsive to these situations than any kind of bureaucrat with his armed friends.
But, of course, if you say, well, I have to flee this situation because the husband or the wife was abusive, well, that's, of course, much more understandable.
But then, of course, you do face the problem of you chose to get married and have children with somebody who was abusive.
And that, of course, is a problem for you, and it's a problem for your entire community.
Like, why the hell didn't your friends and family strongly step in and intervene?
And what the hell happened in your childhood that led you to think that this kind of stuff was normal and so on, right?
So, anyway, and we went through this whole experiment, right, in the 70s.
I've heard 300%, I've heard 600% increase in the number of divorces.
In fact, I think it's in Malta, they recently, no, sorry, some South American country, pardon me for not remembering what it is, Chile, Uruguay, Chile maybe, they finally put in no-fault divorce, and divorce right now is 80% and has been for some years, because there was a backlog of people who really were desperate to get divorced.
And this, of course, happened in the 60s.
There was a massive increase when no-fault divorce came in.
Now, for those who don't know, prior to no-fault, you could get divorced.
You were allowed to get divorced by the state if you could prove adultery or abuse.
Then you could get divorced.
And so, you know, people would lie, of course, accuse them of all these false things and so on.
And this changed to no-false in a wide variety of different places and a wide variety of different times.
Like in the past, it used to be an active parliament.
You had to get an active parliament to get divorced in Canada.
And then no-fault divorce came in.
And no-fault divorce is, you can just say, I want to get divorced.
And you don't have to prove any wrongdoing.
On the part of the other person.
You don't have to prove that they were abusive.
You don't have to prove that they were drunk.
You don't have to prove that they were a man whoring their way across the continent of willingly splayed genetic DNA legs.
So you could just say, I want to get divorced.
And you just reconcile differences.
Now, the significant majority of divorces, like two-thirds, I guess 66%, 70%, are initiated by women.
And the number one reason is dissatisfaction.
And that's something when we talk about why men don't want to get married, that has something to do with it.
Like, divorce is a far more serious commitment regarding infinitely more serious matters than A mortgage, say, or buying a car.
Put in some 20-year mortgage.
I mean, you get married at 30, you live to 80, that's 50 years.
And a little bit more significant than shoveling money at a bunch of banksters.
So you can just decide to unilaterally end the marriage contract without proving any wrongdoing on the part of the other.
And of course, in general, the courts will Side with the woman, and the man can be kicked out of his house.
The woman can make false accusations.
It does happen, tragically.
Statistics seem quite clear that, I mean, if you just talk about rape, I mean, close to 40% of rape allegations are disproven, and in fact, in, I think, 20, 25% of them, the accuser withdraws her accusation.
I mean, this is just completely tragic.
In a sane society, there would be incredible social sanctions and legal sanctions against false accusations.
But the woman can cry that there's something bad going on.
The man can be basically kicked out of his own house in a moment's notice, or the shared house, and his access to his children will be severely curtailed.
And this can all happen.
Very quickly.
And there's the legal aspect of it, which of course is pretty terrifying for men.
And there's also the social aspect of it, which is that generally, you know, the single moms and so on, in the media, are portrayed as these heroic, flinty, courageous, Grapes of Wrath-style heroines who are just trying to do the very best under very difficult circumstances that they had no hand whatsoever in creating and so on.
I mean, this is just the general...
Mythology, right?
That men are useless and women are heroic.
I mean, it's just the stuff that's been pounded in for a couple of generations now.
I think at least two generations.
We've come a long way from All My Sons or Leave It to Beaver or whatever, I mean.
And we'll get back to that in a sec.
So the risks that the man faces where a woman can just decide that she doesn't want to be married to him anymore and she can go to a lawyer and she can have him kicked out of his house and she can take his money for the next 20 years and she can restrict access to his children, she can accuse him of all these things which he then has to try and disprove which is a pretty impossible standard.
So there's a significant risk.
For men in these areas of getting married.
Look, I understand.
Marriage is not perfect for women in its current state.
I get all of that.
But we're just talking about the male perspective.
We're talking about my perspective on the male perspective.
I can't speak for men, but I can only sometimes speak for myself.
But that's pretty negative.
And, you know, I did a A podcast called Parenting Sucks, which means status parenting sucks.
And status marriage kind of sucks too.
And because parenting sucks, so the man is signing up for getting the worst aspects of parenting with the risk that his wife might just find someone else and destroy his life.
And...
And, of course, the problem of spousal abuse is significant.
Spousal abuse appears statistically to be evenly split, in that women's abuse against men is roughly proportional to men's abuse against women.
But, of course, you really don't see a lot of female abusers in the media, or in the culture, or arts, or anything like that.
Because, again, this idea that women are heroic victims, This hangover of the Tony Soprano, my mother was a saint, kind of delusions.
It's just so strongly entrenched for, you know, fundamentally reasons of political and economic power.
If you can portray yourself as a victim in a state of society, you get resources.
And all of the propaganda about women and the propaganda about men, the positive propaganda about women, the negative propaganda about men, I mean, it's fundamentally about Evoking pity, which is what sociopaths like the most as an emotion, one that leads you to be most susceptible to manipulation and exploitation.
But it's fundamentally about using the state to transfer resources, and the best way to do that is to evoke pity, right?
Which is why you're always robbed from, because you care about the poor, right?
You care about the sick, you care about the old, you care about the poor children, and so on.
Which, of course, we do, but in a state of society, Art follows commerce, right?
And the commerce of trading the blood money of politics is the creation of the victim.
And this is why women's role in the cycle of violence, that women abuse more children than men do, and that women choose to have children with bad men, that women choose to have Children without men around and all of the incredibly negative consequences of that.
I mean, children growing up without fathers, well, growing up fatherless is the single biggest disadvantage you can conceivably give a child.
It's more significant than race, more significant than money, more significant than neighborhood, more significant than culture.
It is the most destructive thing that you -- most single destructive thing you can do to a child is raise him or her without a father.
So I think that's -- there's a sort of calculation of risk that goes on.
So, okay, so why don't men want to get married?
Well, because marriage and parenting, marriage is very risky, and parenting kind of sucks.
Because if you've got two people working in particular, that's, you get the worst aspects of parenting.
So it's just not that appealing.
There's a big risk, big downside potential.
You can mess up your life, like seriously mess up your life.
Guys who get divorced are prone to all kinds of physical and psychological problems.
It's horrible.
It's just a wretch.
It's a mess.
And what's this wonderful brass ring?
A monopoly on sex?
Well, it's true that married men have more sex than single men, but It's not like sex is unavailable to the single man.
So you can have sex if you're a single man.
You can even live with a woman if you're a single man without getting into the complications of marriage.
But in terms of really settling down and having children, hugely risky, hugely problematic.
Not that appealing in terms of Yelling at your kids to go to bed after a hard day at work, that's not any kinds of fun.
And the downside and the risk of so on is really, really, really challenging, really problematic.
And you know, marrying into a bunch of crazy in-laws, if they're crazy, it's just not that appealing.
So at the same time, of course, not getting married has become Even more appealing, right?
Because you have the video games, you have pornography, you have more disposable income for a lot of young men, you have cheaper travel, you have recreational drug availability is very high.
So, you know, this sort of maxim laddie perpetual adolescence situation Which men are often berated for.
Men are just not growing up.
They're not assuming their responsibilities.
Which generally translates in a state of society, not assuming your responsibilities means not producing stuff that I can steal from you.
It generally is what it means.
Put the translation out to be clear to people.
So the appeal of not producing Getting married and having children has gone up enormously.
The recreational lifestyle available to men is huge, significant and so on.
And, you know, if you're a reasonably good-looking and reasonably socially competent, romantically competent man, then you shouldn't be hugely short of willing sexual partners and so on, so you get all that, you know, variety and all that, which, you know, I mean, I'm a married guy, so coming on for 10 years, the variety is, trust me, highly overrated.
Highly overrated, but, you know, certainly has its appeal when you've not tasted the deep wine of the alternatives.
But I think most fundamentally, most fundamentally, I don't even speak from deep personal experience here, so I hope this makes some sense, but if it doesn't, I apologize.
But still donate, please.
Well, when I was growing up, I would say that there was almost no more foreign concept Than the idea that a man had any kind of utility within the family.
That was about as weird an idea as you could think of, as you could imagine.
When I was growing up, a father's men were portrayed as buffoons.
I mean, okay, if you wanted to dive a car and have it turn into a submarine and take out a Russian nuclear submarine with poison-tipped batwing missiles or something, then obviously a guy was going to be your man, and James Bond was his name, and that was all.
But, you know, assuming that wasn't your daily vocation, the idea that a man had any kind of fundamental utility To a family.
To a woman.
Was incomprehensible.
Because you almost never saw it.
You almost never saw it.
You know, women were competent, more attractive, cockier, and women put up with men.
Right?
That was the general story of the entire culture around me when I was growing up.
Women put up with men.
Men were selfish.
Men were difficult.
Men were entitled.
Men were lazy.
Men were incompetent.
Men were clueless, fundamentally.
That's the big story.
It's like the woman would have a headache and the man would still want to have sex.
He'd be clueless about things.
The woman would go away and the dishes would pile up and he'd just sit around in his underwear.
Picking Cheetos out of his belly lint.
Men were clueless.
Men were incompetent.
Men were childish.
Men were overgrown infants.
Men were needy.
Men were pathetic.
And the women put up with him.
Oh, I have only two real children, but I have three children.
Ho, ho, ho, Bobby's such a fool.
And this continues.
You look at the sitcoms, of course.
The women are always smart and competent, and the men are always ridiculous.
You couldn't conceivably get away with portraying any other group with such a singular level of Malevolence.
Without being called an unbelievable racist or bigot.
Like if every black character in the media was portrayed as your average white male was portrayed in the media, I mean, the accusations of racism would arise mere nanoseconds after the beginning of the airing of the first episode.
And there would be more than accusations.
There would be They'd be accurate.
That would be true.
Or if you portrayed women or if you portrayed gays with the same singular Haughty contempt and maliciousness with which men are portrayed.
Homophobia and...
I mean, it would be...
The media would be all over you.
But men, particularly white men, of course, are the group that can be regularly slandered and portrayed as idiots, fools, needy, malicious, mean, destructive, entitled, foolish, irresponsible, And that is something that was just...
It was omnipresent.
It was omnipresent.
That women were brusque and competent and sensible and women cared about other people and women were interested in making sure that everyone was happy and the men were just blundering around like bulls in a china shop wrecking things and needing things and wanting things and pawing at things and, you know, basically it was like living with a fairly large, pretty smelly drunken bear that wanted to copulate with you on a regular basis.
this is how being a father being a husband being a family man was portrayed over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again relentless propaganda of course And women had to be portrayed as heroic, and women had to be portrayed as victims, as long-suffering, as putting up with men, because...
Women, as a whole, needed a huge amount of stolen resources to provide for the children they had irresponsibly had with incompetent or absent fathers.
It's just a...
It's just a bait and switch.
It's a smash and grab, right?
I mean...
It's still omnipresent, right?
So The Good Wife is actually a pretty good show.
Julian Magellus and Chris Noth and some other really...
Christine Baranski and...
I mean, she's a great actress.
And in it, of course, Chris Noth plays the husband and the husband is terrible.
I mean, he's a philandra.
He sleeps with hookers.
He does drugs.
He's a politician.
He's just terrible.
Terrible all around.
And so she kicks him out and her children...
Who statistically would go to pot, figuratively and literally, are doing great.
They're wonderful children, fantastic, handling the divorce with great aplomb and so on, right?
They don't act out.
They don't get bad grades.
They don't do anything bad or wrong.
Everything is just peachy keen.
And she's a struggling, heroic single mom.
And so what value does a man bring to the family?
What value?
If you're a dude, just look in the mirror.
What was I told was my value to the family?
Were there shows wherein a selfish woman divorced a decent enough man and wrecked the lives of her children and then had to beg him to come back because she only got everything that he was bringing to the table after she kicked him out?
It's not an implausible story.
It happens every day.
Well, the first half of it happens every day, thousands of times.
Did you ever see that story?
Did you ever see what happens to a family when a father is kicked out or is absent and that the woman is behaving badly?
Same story, but I just want to point this out.
How many times were men portrayed positively?
And I don't mean, and then, women were portrayed negatively.
But, you know, if there's going to be dramatic tension, then one person has to be acting better than the other, at least in the moment.
So was it at least 50-50?
Did you see the stories of the selfish and destructive women who made decisions who couldn't be reasoned with and who destroyed their own families through this selfishness?
Well, no, of course not.
You should see that at least 50-50.
I mean, did you even see women who...
See, every time a woman is abusive, it has to be explained away.
Every time a man is abusive, it's causeless, right?
Again, this is something we don't even notice.
It's so pervasive.
But as a man...
Did you feel essential to the family?
You are essential to the family.
Statistically, factually, scientifically, you are absolutely essential to your children.
That your presence and your absence in your children's lives is the single biggest determining factor as to their success or failure in life.
Do you know that as a man?
That you are absolutely essential to your children.
Do you know that a woman is the very safest in a marriage?
This marriage is always portrayed as dangerous, right?
Well, it's dangerous in a marriage, you see, because the man might beat you up.
The man might be a drunk.
You weren't responsible for choosing him, but hey, The man is dangerous.
And then, of course, for the woman, it's like, I'm free.
If I get out of the marriage, then I get to date these sensitive artistic sculptor types who are slightly graying, slightly older, who awaken my sexuality.
All this nonsense that goes on in this mess.
I mean, do you know, as a man, that your wife is the safest she can be in a committed marriage with you?
That's the safest place for a woman to be.
That you are essential to your wife's safety, protection, security.
Do women know that?
If you're worried about abuse, well, you're far more likely to get it from a live-in boyfriend or a date, an acquaintance, boyfriend.
Far, far, almost infinitely less likely to get it from a husband.
A husband and a marriage is the safest place for a woman to be.
Do you see this story where the woman divorces her husband because she's dissatisfied, because some other woman is whispering in her ear, mm, foo-foo, all of this stuff about how life's just so great outside of a marriage, and she goes out, and she gets beaten up, and she realizes how nice and gentle and kind her husband was, and so on.
But is it something that you know about?
Statistically, these things are all true.
These are the facts.
These are the facts, incredibly hard-won.
At the cost of countless millions of children's lives, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of rapes and murders and assaults, violence, destruction, abuse, the Holocaust of so many children's lives over the past couple of decades, past two generations.
This is very, very hard-won knowledge.
It's not being told to men, of course.
Because the prejudice of men as essential and necessary equals is something that, if accepted, would fundamentally change our entire society, particularly our political chaos.
So the rise in child poverty in America over the past 30-40 years can all be directly traced back to the breakdown in the family.
There is not a problem with child poverty in the US, there is a problem with the breakdown in the family in the US. Marital breakdown should be a fundamental focus of environmentalists.
If you really cared about the environment, you would focus on keeping families together.
The environmental destruction that is wrought by family breakdown is huge.
It's one of the biggest factors around.
You need two houses where you only needed one.
You need a whole bunch of duplicate toys.
You need to drive back and forth all the time.
The cost of family breakdown to the environment is unbelievably high.
But will you get environmentalists doing something actually intelligent to solve environmental issues, which is to fund marital counselling?
Well, no, of course not.
Most of them are agents of the state, there to increase state power and so on.
But it's huge.
It's a huge effect.
Crime and, I mean, you go on and on.
The family breakdown is, in terms of the rise of the size and power of the state, monstrous.
I mean, if you dump a father, it doesn't mean you don't need additional resources.
You just have to get them from the guns of the government rather than the open hands of the father.
It could solve sociopathy in a generation if women would stop reading with sociopaths.
And if men would stop reading with sociopaths, too.
But I don't think that we've been told any of this fundamentally, we've been told all the complete opposite, that men are an eye-rolling additional burden for overworked and heroic women.
And you say that so that men don't complain.
It's like a bad boss who always threatens you with being fired.
Keeps you on your toes.
You're not going to ask for a big raise if you feel like you're just barely contributing anything and you're there At the long-suffering whim of your boss, who has a soft spot for you that he can barely understand.
If you have this sort of Kevin Spacey-style boss who is just constantly scorning you and putting you down, well, then you're not going to be competing with him.
You're going to be exploited by him.
You understand that putting people down is essential to exploiting them.
You cannot exploit a man or a woman with a strong sense of their own self-worth.
It's not going to happen.
And so men need to be exploited.
And as a result, you get married men working hard, providing beautiful things for their families, who end up having to pay a massive amount in taxes to pay for the shitty choices of women who have kids with idiots.
But what's terrible about our society as well is that there will be no turnaround, no apology, no admission of fault, no admission of error.
There are a few.
Phyllis Schlafly, Christina Hoff-Sommer, there's some women who are basically saying, sorry, not that they did anything wrong, but, you know, they're kind of saying, oops, right?
But this is the speech, of course, that men will never hear, that men are owed, that men are deserved.
And tell me if this strikes a chord with you at all.
It goes a little something like this.
Dear men, we are incredibly sorry.
As a culture, as a society, as women, as filmmakers, as other men, we are incredibly sorry.
We have been putting you down for years.
We have been insulting you for years.
We have been denigrating you for years.
We have been caustic.
We have been destructive.
We have broken you down.
Because we want things from you that are unjust.
In order to get you to bend over backwards for us, we had to break your spine.
And we have relentlessly pounded you with insulting stereotypes, with destructive messages, with undermining clichés.
And we have pretended that we don't need you, that you are something we put up with, like a farty, stinky, ancient dog kept around for mere sentimental reasons.
And we have exploited you, and we have used you, and we have thrown you in jail for impossible standards of alimony and child support, and we have regularly used the courts, and we have regularly threatened you, and we have abused you while calling you the only abusers.
And as a whole, we have done all that we can to put you down and to turn you to the surface of our own narcissistic needs.
And we are incredibly sorry.
We made a huge mistake.
The evidence is in that you are essential to the family, that you are essential to the health and happiness of children, that you are essential to the health, happiness and safety of women, and that society fundamentally lives or dies by your honor.
And we have been teaching you for decades that you have no honor, that you are pigs, that you are selfish, that you're lazy, that you're greedy, that you're immature, that you're sexually obsessed, that you're untrustworthy, And we have, of course, pretended that the money that you bring into the relationship is immaterial.
The only thing that matters is our dishes, not your work.
And, of course, because the government will provide us all the things that you don't, you've become fundamentally much less necessary.
From a resource standpoint, from a financial standpoint, we can survive as a family because of the power of the state without you, the father.
But the children suffer enormously, sometimes irrevocably.
The girls suffer because they get pompous and arrogant and think that they can do it all by themselves, and the boys suffer because they get locked into a state of perpetual adolescence where they have tragically listened to the lies told to them about manhood and femininity.
Where they say, well, look, I guess I don't want to be a burden.
I'm clearly not necessary to a family.
In fact, I would just be another problem, another straw on the back of my wife's camel load of endless chores.
So, you know, I'm obviously dangerous.
I'm obviously bullying, selfish, lazy, greedy, grabby.
So I will not burden women.
The new nobility for men, and men want to do right by women, at least the vast majority, the new nobility for men is simply to not get involved in any of this stuff anymore.
Because when you're told that you're a problem, when you're told that you're a burden, when you're told that you're a foolish, farty family pet, it's constantly knocking over all of the wonderful, beautiful, feminine China in the known universe, then what you do is you say, well, okay, I will absent myself from this situation because I don't want to be an additional burden.
And as a result...
Because men, it is now considered honorable at a very deep level for men to not involve themselves in family life, to not get married, to not be an additional burden, to not cause additional problems for the long-suffering women who obviously do a great job raising children without men and in fact seem very eager to have men out of their lives because of this portrayal of men as these selfish, scratchy slobs.
Well, the new heroism, the new nobility, the new honor for men is to not impose their needy and empty and grabby and destructive selves on the noble women.
Right?
This is what male nobility has been tortured into.
It's changed from a recognition that women and children need men desperately to have a functional, healthy and happy family life and for the children to grow up wise and mature and responsible.
It has now become, well, my nobility is to not get married.
My nobility, my heroism, my contribution to society is to avoid Marriage and to avoid fatherhood.
Women have got it, and I'm told that I'm just constantly a burden, and I'm told that I'm a negative.
So, I am going to avoid that.
And then, as a result of that, men get a lot more disposable income, and the market changes to reflect that.
The propaganda occurred before the market shift.
Men were portrayed as foolish parasites.
And so men stop getting married and men have all this disposable income because they're not getting married and they're looking for other things to entertain themselves with and therefore the market provides all of this other stuff.
Right?
The travel, the games, the porn, the whatever, the toys.
But the propaganda came first.
And the apology will never come.
Nobody will ever say to you, we are so sorry.
We put you down.
We humiliated you.
We told you you were unnecessary, that you were a burden.
And the fact is, we were completely wrong.
We as a culture have destroyed the family, and it's only getting worse.
Men, we need you.
Men, husbands, fathers, providers, we need you.
We thought we could do it with the state.
And that means that children are all born heavily in debt to fatherless homes, to shitty schools, to a life of underachievement, of increased criminality, of distractedness, of lack of focus.
Of very little ability to forward plan, defer gratification, all the things that are required to be good husbands and fathers in the long run.
We are so sorry.
We lied to you.
We put you down.
We told you you weren't necessary and we were completely wrong.
We were worse than wrong because if you're wrong about something, it's just for yourself.
That's one thing.
If you're wrong about something and it harms your children, it harms the children of an entire two generations, we are so sorry.
We are so sorry.
We made a mistake.
Men, Please.
Please.
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