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March 14, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:03:11

2344 Circumcision, Divorce and Male Disposability - Paul Elam on Freedomain Radio

Paul Elam of A Voice for Men - http://www.avoiceformen.com - discusses men's issues with Stefan Molyneux, Host of Freedomain Radio.

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	Hello, hello.
	It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	I hope you're doing very well.
	I am here with Paul Elam, who is a therapist, ex-military, and an advocate for the, I guess, oddly named men's rights.
	It seems to me quite a strange situation that we should not just be talking about human rights in general, but I think that it's an important...
	Aspect of modern intellectual and egalitarian thought, so thank you so much for taking the time to chapel.
	I'm very pleased to be here.
	So let's have a little bit of a chat about men's rights.
	And we were just chatting before the interview about how it's perceived to be sort of anti-women and so on at some levels.
	And I think I'm not even going to really dignify that with a response.
	I think that focusing on equality is not to be against other people.
	In fact, I don't really believe that either gender can be that happy without the other people being happy without the other gender being happy.
	So I think to focus on women's rights and women's equality is to enhance the happiness of just and honorable men.
	And I think that to focus on men's rights and men's equality is to focus on the happiness of just and moral women.
	So I'm not going to sort of work that angle because it seems just kind of silly.
	But you've said that you've encountered that quite a bit in some of your interviews.
	Oh, absolutely.
	Most of what I've encountered in talking to members of the mainstream media field questions along the lines of, Why do you hate women?
	Why do you want women to be stuck back in the kitchen?
	Why do you want to turn back the hands of time to the 50s?
	Don't you believe in women's bodily autonomy?
	Why do you support rape culture?
	We have a very feminized, and when I say feminized, I don't mean female.
	I'm talking about feminism in particular.
	We have a feminized media that most of their members think along these lines, and they just hear the word.
	Men's rights and it's sort of like saying rich white people's rights to them.
	There's a sort of visceral reaction to the idea that perhaps there are issues for men that our culture is getting wrong.
	And that there are injustices and that we need to fix some of them.
	It's very difficult to get them to focus on any of those issues, though, because they're too busy demonizing anybody that would have the audacity to say that they're for men's rights.
	Right.
	Okay, so let's talk about some of the general areas that the men's rights movement is focused on.
	What are sort of the top three or the top five that you think are the most important for people to understand?
	You could probably get a lot of different activists to disagree and argue about what the top issues are, so I'll just give you some of the top ones as I see them.
	There is certainly an issue of perceptions, particularly in regards to matters like domestic violence, where the general mainstream consensus is that violence is a problem, Perpetrated by men on women, and that pretty much sums it up.
	Of course, a lot of the research and data suggests that that is absolutely not true, that there is what is referred to as gender symmetry in domestic violence.
	Another issue that's a really big one is false accusations.
	There are, of course, a lot of disagreement about the frequency of false accusations.
	I've read Statistic that range anywhere from 2% to 41%, 45% I think the Kanan study was.
	But the issue really isn't the matter of frequency.
	The issue is that false accusations do happen and due process for accused rapists has been undermined so much in this culture that it is Whether people want to argue about the frequency of it, for the men that it happens to, it's a real big problem.
	Many of them end up in prison.
	They end up being raped and beaten themselves for crimes that they didn't commit.
	So that's another big one.
	There is the matter of circumcision.
	That is another hot point.
	And by the way, I want to go back for a moment to something that you said, Stefan.
	This is a human rights movement.
	As a matter of fact, we've taken the editorial position at A Voice for Men some time ago that we are not, at least editorially speaking, referring to ourselves or our staff as men's rights advocates or activists, but as men's human rights activists to put the focus on that we are supportive of all people's rights.
	And, of course, that counters a lot of what has been said in the media, what the SPLC said about us, which I don't know if you're familiar with that, the Southern Poverty Law Center, all but called us a hate group, and then backpedaled on it, but that's a different story.
	But it's a human rights agenda.
	This is about equality under the law.
	Now, particularly for myself, I'm of the mind that actual equality It's an ideal to pursue, and it's a good one.
	Whether it's achievable between any two human beings is a matter of doubt, and certainly between two entire classes of human beings, I think it's highly unlikely that you can achieve equality.
	But I think that the ideal of equality, striving for it in terms of equal treatment under the law of equal expectations socially, a really good goal, and that is a lot of what we stand behind.
	Well put.
	And it is hard to imagine how being against male circumcision would somehow be anti-female.
	I mean, I don't even see, in a sense, what women would have to do with that.
	I mean, other than the fact that, of course, moms are making some of the choices.
	But how is saying, how about not hacking off the end of a baby's penis somehow interpreted as anti-female?
	When, of course, female circumcision, I think...
	I think it was Ann Coulter who said it was disallowed the second day after everyone heard about it.
	And yet male circumcision still continues, even though it has catastrophic effects, as far as I understand it, on male sexual pleasure and so on.
	And so how that could be construed as somehow being anti-female is sort of beyond me.
	Well, but it's true.
	It is being construed that way.
	And when you look at the recent upsurge in activity for intactivists, I believe they call themselves the anti-circumcision movement, we actually saw an uptick in feminist-oriented articles that were talking about how women liked sex better with uncircumcised men.
	Shaming men for even talking about circumcision in terms of mutilation, even though it is a mutilation.
	It certainly is.
	But there's a sense of one-upmanship there, but the whole idea, and I don't know if feminists are really Pro-circumcision as much as they are anti-men addressing themselves in terms of their human dignity.
	They seek to shut us up at every turn, no matter what the issue is.
	We could be talking about prostate cancer, and they say, breast cancer's worse.
	This is sort of the environment that we deal with, but it's not only with feminists, it's across the board culturally.
	And that is another part of when to answer your question about What is it we do?
	What are our positions?
	I think the biggest one for me personally, aside from false accusations and domestic violence and circumcision and so many other issues, is that at least my personal belief is that we have a cultural denial about the pain of men, that our predisposition to have men in the roles of protector and provider And to burden men with the responsibilities of things like fighting wars and doing dangerous jobs and earning income for families,
	that we've actually just blinded ourselves completely as a species to whatever it is that men go through.
	As a matter of fact, we glorify it.
	We give them medals for having no legs when they come back from Afghanistan.
	And we're not seeing that we have ripped somebody's legs off in order to fight an imperialist war.
	And I don't want to turn this into a political argument, but, you know, whatever the purpose for the war has been, it's the men that come back legless with their psychological world being shattered, dead, everything you can imagine.
	And of course, we've had people like Hillary Clinton out there saying that women are the primary victims of war.
	And that's the level of denial that we're on.
	And so it's the mission of A Voice for Men more than anything else to assert that men are human beings, that they have pain, that they have problems, that they have issues that need to be addressed.
	I don't think we're near as big on turning toward government as feminists are to address those problems.
	I think that men can address a lot of those problems themselves simply by changing their mindset.
	But the whole premise of what I started A Voice for Men 4 to begin with is that men are human beings and they need to be recognized as human beings.
	And I would say also that society developed out of a variety of physical necessities, you know, the incapacitation of women through childbirth, the obvious physical challenges of trying to get food for an entire family, which is why human beings as a species, in differentiation to a bunch of different mammals, have men who are physically stronger.
	Well, that's because of the amount of energy it took to gain food for a family and the incapacitation of women in those situations.
	So as a variety of Sort of physical, biological factors that aren't anyone's fault.
	You know, it's just the way that – so there's that aspect, the way in which men have developed.
	But there is, of course, also a very political and economic and cultural element to it wherein the biological stuff tends to last longer than it should, I think, because it gets entrenched in our culture.
	Right.
	The culture is not quite as nimble.
	We all want to upgrade our computers and get watches that can teleport us from planet to planet.
	But when it comes to our cultural beliefs about gender and so on, it tends to be kind of sticky, I think.
	It tends to be kind of retrograde.
	And it's a challenge, and I think part of that is because people form relationships based upon some cultural stereotypes.
	If those cultural stereotypes are challenged, as women nobly did in the 50s and 60s with regards to homemaking and wifedom and so on, I think people's relationships are challenged.
	If I upgrade my computer, nobody freaks out.
	But if I want to upgrade my status as a gender, That throws some of my relationships into challenge, I guess.
	And so I think that has something to do with it.
	And I certainly don't want to, you know, speak for, you know, as a voice for men, but I think we really want to focus on the stuff that has accumulated through history, through politics, and look at it with fresh eyes and question it.
	So let's start with some of the basics because I think you and I are more familiar with this than some of my general audience.
	So let's talk a little bit about male disposability because that's something that I had a girl who writes on this channel a while back and she's one of my most popular interview subjects.
	She's fantastic.
	And her videos are mostly sort of 10, 20, 30, 40,000 views.
	This one is huge.
	So let's talk a little bit about, and you come from a military background.
	You were in the military and, of course, you've worked with a lot of vets.
	So I think you have a pretty keen eye for this.
	What is male disposability and where does it come from?
	Well, I think it's just as you have described it.
	There were evolutionary mandates for human males to stand at the entrance to the cave, to go hunt down large animals, to defend in tribal wars.
	This we're talking about three million years of sociobiological programming.
	For human beings that require the bigger and stronger and more aggressive of males and men and women to be the one to take on that responsibility.
	I want to go back, I want to talk about that more, but I want to go back to something that you were just saying about the difficulty in breaking away from this, which I think is a real important thing, is that when we look at this through the new lens that you're talking about, if you start to examine feminism, The more you see it is just an extension of what we've always done as a human species.
	Feminism is women first.
	Patriarchy is women first.
	Chivalry is women first.
	All of our social customs and traditions is about taking care of women.
	Okay, sorry.
	Let's back up because I think I just heard a collective short circuit of about 150,000 brains when you said patriarchy is women first.
	That is so counter to the information that people have received, I think, through culture and education.
	Let's just break down that a little bit.
	I think we understand chivalry is women first and the lifeboat scenario, women and children into the lifeboat and men go down with the ship.
	Even in the movie Titanic, that's what happened with Leonardo DiCaprio and...
	But you can't separate.
	I mean, if you're looking at 1912 America when the Titanic sunk, that was patriarchy at its height, that era.
	You can't separate what happened on the Titanic from the entire system that governed matters between men and women at the time.
	And that's one of the worst things that feminists do, is that they cherry-pick facts from history.
	Oh, women couldn't vote.
	Well, women weren't forced into conscription in wars either, but we don't hear feminists talking about that.
	That's an element of patriarchy, too.
	And men couldn't vote for approximately 99.5% of human history anyway, but again, that's not something that's been really addressed.
	Yeah, we're going on the top level of information here, and the gap in years between Male landowners being the only ones that are universal suffrage for men and women beginning to vote was very short.
	We're talking about just a blip on the radar.
	But what I'm talking about, patriarchy ostensibly assists them that passed property and name and title down from father to son in families.
	That property, those titles, everything that they did, We're still focused around the evolutionary necessity to provide for women and to caretake.
	That was the whole system.
	We can't just separate out and say, well, look, men had all the power.
	Well, when it came time for war and men were forced at gunpoint to be conscripted to go fight for a country and king, it wasn't women that came and got.
	This was part of the burden of that system that fell on men.
	Well, and again, not to overgeneralize women, but women had a lot of power in the social pressure for men to go and fight.
	I remember reading about how one of the early suffragettes, I can't remember her name, was involved in the White Feather campaign in the first world.
	Sylvia Pankras.
	Okay, so she would hand out these white feathers to indicate cowardice to any man of military age she found walking around the streets of London, because it was getting kind of tough to convince people to go into the, you know, combine harvester, man-mashing blood fest of the First World War trenches, and women were very active, a lot of women, not all, but a lot of women were very active in shaming men into going into...
	I'd like to talk a little bit about the shaming aspect, which is very powerful.
	Women did participate in the male disposability and did participate in social forces and cultural forces and shaming forces that literally resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of men.
	They participated in patriarchy, full pledged.
	Also, it should be noted, as long as we're going to talk about Sylvia Pankhurst, that she's identified and memorialized in Great Britain as one of the early suffragettes She also was not for universal suffrage.
	Her agenda was totally for affluent white female landowners to be able to vote.
	I just wanted to throw that little tidbit in there so that we're just making sure that we get a little bit more history corrected as we go along here.
	But yeah, in terms of disposability, I just think it's very simple.
	Men were historically Regarded as disposable because they were.
	It only took one man to impregnate any number of women.
	Women had to be protected through the period of gestation.
	They had to be protected through the early childhood of infants in order for the species to survive.
	So men were disposable, absolutely, and they needed to be, or we would have been a dead-end evolutionary experiment.
	What I think is different now, though, is that we don't need that type of systemic control of human beings in order to survive as a species.
	As a matter of fact, the more we look at it, the more we're starting to see that following those old dictates are just resulting in problems for us, certainly socially.
	That's one thing feminists do have right now.
	Gender roles, I think, need to change.
	We need to look, at least, I mean, it's not like we can sit up here and have a discussion or sit up in academe and dictate to the world that gender roles are going to change.
	Human beings are going to do what they're going to do.
	But I think that the choice for individuals needs to be put out there, that men can decide, I'm not going to be disposable.
	I'm not going to be the guy that stands there and plays the fiddle while the women Fill the lifeboats, which we still have a tendency to do.
	But I think what's more important, though, is to get the understanding across the board to men than it is to make women understand this.
	Men are horrific at stepping up to the firing wall.
	My experience with them is that sometimes they appear to be more like lemmings than they do men.
	I think that...
	I try to look at these things theoretically, but also through the lens of personal experience.
	And I've recently finished, of course, a great book.
	I'm sure you've read it by Dr.
	Warren Farrell called The Father and Child Reunion.
	And in terms of male disposability, I think one of the ways that men are raised in this kind of way is boys are raised without a strong sense, I would argue, of their value to society.
	And so boys are raised like they're kind of troublesome, they're kind of noisy, they're kind of loud, they're kind of rude.
	They're basically just broken girls.
	You know, if we could only get boys to be like girls, everything would be just fantastic.
	And so that's sort of one aspect.
	So in a sense, when society says go sacrifice yourself, well, if society doesn't really care for you that much or hasn't really helped you to understand your value, then it's a little easier to feel like you're more disposable.
	And I think in terms of male disposability, we've talked about war and some economic aspects, but I never got a sense, and I still remain deeply shocked at the studies that have come out, I never got a sense of the importance of fathers.
	I mean, it's not a sort of win-lose situation, but kids from single-parent households headed by fathers do a lot better than those headed by mothers and so on.
	I never got a sense of how absolutely essential For the flourishing of any kind of civil society, for peace, for intelligence, for social skills, for negotiation, for anti-violence, for avoidance of criminality and addiction and self-destructive habits and other destructive habits, no one ever told me.
	And apparently, as far as I understand it, the research has been out for decades.
	It's completely hidden.
	The degree to which fathers are necessary for parenting, for the healthy raising of children, and for the happiness of women.
	It was always like, well, you know, single women are so much happier, and men are just pigs, so you've got to clean up after it.
	They scratch themselves, and they don't get involved, and they drink, and they sleep around.
	There was all this negative conditioning, no understanding of the positivity, and boy, I mean, of all the people to pay the price for that.
	If you make a mistake, then you suffer.
	If I make a mistake, then I suffer.
	But when we make a mistake about the importance of men, and particularly fathers, it's the children who suffer, and I really would like to see people focus a little more on that.
	Sorry for the rant, but that was sort of my experience.
	No, that's okay.
	I think it's a very important subject.
	But, you know, I will say that I don't think the data has been hidden so much as...
	Again, going back to our tendency to be blinded to these things, we had the advent of no-fault divorce in the late 1960s, which essentially destroyed the idea of marriage as a contract and said if one party wants out, particularly her, then the court will go after whoever has the assets and rip things to pieces and she can go find herself or do whatever the therapists of the time were recommending happening.
	When we had no-fault divorce implemented The divorce rate skyrocketed absolutely through the ceiling.
	Fatherlessness skyrocketed at that time.
	When you start ripping men out of their homes, when you do it with restraining orders, when you make them a visitor in their children's lives rather than a father, when you remove their authority from raising those children, you remove their influence over them, a lot of men just say, screw it.
	You know, we talk a lot in this culture about men that We've certainly got a president that wants to tell fathers, especially absent fathers, who aren't allowed to be in their kids' lives that they need to be a strong influence in their kids' lives.
	These kids are starving for fathers.
	They've filled gangs across this culture.
	We saw gangs multiply exponentially with what I think is a direct correlation to no-fault divorce.
	And here we are 40 years later, and we still have social scientists saying, Gee, why are these kids in gangs?
	Well, of course they're in gangs.
	Their fathers have been taken away from them.
	If you look at the incidents of fatherlessness in prison convicts, in male prison convicts, Gang membership, in drug addicts, in alcoholics.
	I mean, across the board, you pick any social malady that you want to examine, and you study the men that are afflicted by that problem, you will see fatherlessness as a dominant factor across the board in all these things.
	And yet, we will do, as a culture, we will do anything except address what's really happening to them.
	We'll talk about bad Hollywood, But we won't talk about fathers.
	Right, yeah.
	So, okay, so something you said there, I just wanted to pause and look back on it.
	You said men whose children are taken away from them.
	Let's look at that a little bit more clearly.
	I mean, the men choose to get married to the women.
	The men obviously are not doing something that the women like.
	So the men have a role in obviously getting married and getting divorced.
	So when you say that the men have the children taken away from them, can you just explain that a little bit more?
	Well, the standard operating procedure for family courts in this day and age is for the woman to file, which happens in most cases.
	She will do so with an ex parte restraining order as part of the divorce strategy, because without evidence of corroboration, she can have the man removed from the home, literally taken out, and He will be told by the court and by police officials that he no longer lives there, that he can't come around his children, perhaps without supervision.
	If there's been an allegation that he has been violent, whether it's true or not, he may be mandated to take anger management courses.
	He can have, at this point, keep in mind his property's been stripped away, his relationship with his children has been severed, His relationship with his wife has been severed.
	Everything that has formed the core of his identity for the years of his marriage, has just been ripped away from him.
	That is a pretty devastating blow.
	I think we have a tendency to say, okay, well, you just need to suck it up and be there for your kids.
	It's really not that simple for a lot of men who work like dogs every day to play for a home, put it over their kids' heads, feed them, clothe them, put them in decent schools.
	And, of course, now there's always some guys that, you know, I would divorce them too.
	I mean, I'm not trying to make it look like that there's no such thing as a man that a woman should not divorce.
	Certainly there is.
	But the fact of the matter is that marriages stayed together intact with children having fathers and staying out of prison and staying off drugs for a lot of generations before we had no-fault divorce because people had to stick to the contract.
	There were pressures to do it and it was a rarity to get a divorce and probably warranted.
	The idea of no-fault divorce was that, oh, there's all these women that are trapped in abusive relationships and they're financially dependent and we've got to save them And, you know, there's some merit in that, that if somebody is in a financially dependent situation because they've been a homemaker, and they have been raising kids, and he's the one with the income, and let's say he's a guy that's super abusive and really hurting her, hurting the children, hey, there needs to be some legal remedy to that.
	But we didn't develop a legal remedy to that.
	What we developed was ex parte restraining orders where any accusation whatsoever However unsubstantiated is enough to have him pulled out of the home in handcuffs if he resists.
	And if he tries to buck the system, he'll end up in jail.
	And this is happening.
	We have over a million of these a year issued in the United States alone.
	If you can imagine the level of what's going on, a million ex parte restraining orders and divorces per year Where men are literally just removed from their homes, removed from their children, removed from their income, forced to pay for her lawyer.
	That's why the suicide difference between men and women is normally one to five, about, or one to four, depending on where you are.
	During the process of a divorce or a serious breakup, the differential is one to ten.
	And that's one woman suicide for every ten male suicides?
	Exactly.
	That's the difference that we're looking at.
	And again, a lot of this goes back to no-fault divorce, I believe.
	You know, this is not something that's been empirically proven, but I've looked at studies that go back to what the divorce rates were like prior to 1968 and what they're like now, and they've skyrocketed.
	And the only difference there is no-fault divorce and these restraining orders.
	Well, and there seem to be some studies as well that say that when women have less to gain financially and quickly from a divorce, divorce tends to go down.
	And again, I mean, nobody's saying anybody should stay in an abusive relationship.
	But the reality is that people who are unhappy with their marriages, statistically, if they tend to stay in those marriages, I mean, if they're unhappy, like I'm discontented or, you know, feel lonely or whatever it is, if they stay in those marriages, the majority of people who stay in five years later are happy that they stayed married.
	There are rough patches in marriages that everyone goes through, I think.
	So far, 10 years.
	No problems.
	But there are rough times in marriages.
	If you stick it out, you tend to do well.
	But there is, of course, a no-way-back grenade pin that often gets pulled in divorce situations where there is strong legal and financial incentives.
	And there is this myth that That women aren't going to lie, that women aren't going to be false about this.
	And these days, of course, if you have an abusive husband, I mean, everybody has a high-definition camera on their cell phone, for heaven's sakes.
	I mean, getting the evidence is as easy as pushing a button these days.
	I mean, it's really simple.
	And so the idea that a woman's word in a volatile, difficult, emotional, win-lose situation like a potential divorce, that a woman can't lie, is statistically false.
	Of course, the majority of abuse cases against husbands that are brought forward by women are not substantiated, to put it as nicely as possible.
	So women do lie in these situations, and we should, of course, maintain the innocent until proven guilty standard that applies to the rest of these kinds of allegations.
	And that's exactly what we don't do.
	You know, Stefan, there's also something to be said for following through with obligations.
	It's one thing if you've got an abusive partner, a really abusive partner.
	I wouldn't wish that on anybody or to force them to stay in that relationship.
	But if you're simply not happy and you have a 12-year-old son, my response is tough.
	Wait six more years.
	Until that son is 18 years old, at least with their high school education and moved on to college, and then go find yourself.
	But ripping a son away from his father because you're not happy, it's narcissism.
	It's absolute, and I think it's practiced to a level these days that it's sociopathic, and that we have enabled that And I'm sorry to say, but I'm going to say it.
	We've enabled that in the women in this culture.
	And I don't mean to say that this is women's innate problem.
	And I'm certainly not excusing men for their huge role in fostering this sort of conduct.
	It wasn't women who passed no-fault divorce laws.
	And it's nine times out of ten, it's not a woman that's Hitting a gavel down at an ex parte restraining order and ripping a man out of his home.
	It's another man.
	But we have fostered a culture of liars and thieves in family courts.
	And a lot of that is happening.
	The conduct of a lot of that is from women.
	And we glorify it where you go, girl.
	We have coined terms like take him to the cleaners.
	We add women on.
	You could turn on any daytime TV show designed for women and hear them talk about their divorces and to absolute wild applause when they talk about how they got it back.
	This is what our culture is doing right now, and it is destroying children.
	And this is the part that I really can't help but get on a soapbox about, is that we are undermining the future of our children by allowing family courts to destroy families instead of restructure them, and by allowing people to just walk out of a marriage and take a child away and say, by the way, he's Uncle Daddy now.
	Here's a new boyfriend.
	How do you like that?
	This is terrible, terrible stuff going on in the lives of children and we've come to normalize it.
	So yeah, that is a big part of what I'm glad we ended up talking about tonight because we're watching a culture that's deteriorating and we still haven't reached a point that we can even talk about why it's happening.
	We can't talk about why young men are in gangs and on drugs and are failing to launch and are addicted to video games.
	A lot of that goes back to that there's no role model for them to do anything else.
	They're left to their own devices.
	The only mandate that they have in their lives is to please their mother.
	And there's something horribly, horribly wrong with this that needs to be changed.
	Yes.
	I mean, obviously, I'm a philosopher by trade, and so I always look for universals.
	And I remember as a kid hearing a lot.
	Actually, my parents got divorced when I was a baby.
	And my father ended up on a different continent.
	And it was only when I got a little older that I began to see sort of the vindictiveness of my mom in the pursuit of stuff from him.
	He always wanted to take him to court, always wanted to get more money and so on.
	So I remember when I was a kid reading a book, I think it was called Made in Heaven Settled in Court or something like that, which was all about the strategies that women could use to get profitably divorced and so on.
	And these kinds of help books were out there quite a lot.
	And I do remember thinking at the time because I got so much information, a lot of which I completely agreed with about women are equal, women should be equal.
	But what I translated that to in my head, which I think is something we still don't quite get as a society, is that women are equal, absolutely.
	And women are equal in their capacity for virtue and hard work and intelligence and compassion.
	But they're also equal in their capacity for malevolence and destruction and vindictiveness and abuse and so on.
	Like as you point out, domestic abuse is half men and half women.
	Domestic abuse from men gets reported because men are stronger, gets reported a little more because men are stronger and therefore more likely or more capable of doing physical harm.
	But I think that we have elevated women to positions of equality in society only on the sunny side of the street, only on the virtues.
	Whereas when it comes to the vices, to their capacity for abuse and destruction and selfishness, and as you say, narcissism and so on, we then rush back into the 17th century or 12th century Lancelot, let's circle the wagons and protect the women stuff.
	And it seems to me that if you want to be equal, then...
	Then be equal.
	But everybody wants the equality that's beneficial and not the equality that exposes them to skepticism.
	I don't know if that makes any sense, but that sort of thought...
	Oh, yes.
	We call it equality plus.
	And it certainly is.
	We deified women in this culture.
	And that is not just...
	I'm not just pointing the finger at feminism for that.
	Our own traditional values have a lot to do with deifying mothers, with deifying wives, with making them sacrosanct.
	We have almost a religious affinity to protect the image of women.
	And that's turning out to be not so healthy.
	When you look at the fact that, for instance, that the greatest majority of child abuse, sexual, physical, all kinds, happens at the hands of women toward young children.
	And we don't, I think it was just, not just last year at some time, the Houston Press ran an article, the 10 hottest sex abusing females in Texas with their photographs.
	Hottest, like sexiest?
	Yes, yes, sexiest.
	Yes.
	And, I mean, there was some outrage.
	There was actually a fair amount of outrage about the article.
	But could you imagine...
	If we were doing a similar article with male pedophiles, the publication would have been shut down over it because we wouldn't tolerate that sort of thing.
	We have a very strange set of standards that we're practicing nowadays.
	We glorify women's violence.
	You can see it throughout the media.
	It's hard to even watch a movie anymore where some guy isn't getting kicked at the groin so that everybody can have a good laugh.
	And I don't mind the comedy so much, but it is a reflection of a lot of our attitudes about how we see women and how we see men.
	And right now we're not in very good shape.
	We've deified women to the point that they're beyond reproach.
	We can't talk about what they're doing collectively.
	We can't talk about their victims.
	I mean, we have to remember that every time we talk about a female child abuser, we're talking about a child that's being abused.
	But we are so women first in this culture that we've sacrificed the children in order to make sure that we don't talk about the women.
	It's a pretty sad state.
	Yeah, it reminds me of something Dr.
	Farrell said that A man's facade of strength is his weakness and a woman's facade of weakness is her strength, right?
	So when women cry victim, as a male, we have this impulse to go protect them.
	I mean, I think that's biologically ingrained.
	It's culturally ingrained.
	If men do, we laugh at them.
	If men cry for help, we laugh at them.
	That's the way things are.
	And when women cry for help, I mean, there is some speculation out there.
	I don't know if you've watched the Jody Arias trial.
	But there is some speculation out there that she's got a shot.
	She stabbed a guy 27 times, cut his throat from ear to ear, and shot him in the head, and claimed it was self-defense.
	She lied about it all kinds of ways to the police, saying that she didn't kill him.
	Then she said somebody broke in.
	First she said she wasn't there, and then she said she was there.
	Somebody broke in and killed him while she was there.
	Then she finally admitted, when all those stories washed out, that she did kill him, but it was because he was abusive.
	And did all that rage killing on him, hid the weapon, demonstrated consciousness of the guilt a hundred different ways, and there is a chance that she will get exonerated of this crime.
	She may not.
	I'm hoping not.
	But that's how bad things are got.
	You know, we talked about equality under the law.
	The sentencing disparity between men and women is greater than it is between whites and other minorities.
	Women receive 66% less time in incarceration for the exact same crimes that men commit, because we don't want to punish women.
	We don't even want to admit they did it half the time.
	We have a bunch of women in this country that have murdered their husbands and were cleared based on the battered wife or battered spouse defense, whatever that's supposed to be.
	And that includes women that have killed them in their sleep.
	Yeah, they killed them in their sleep, but that is the idea that if a woman...
	And again, we are generalizing here, so this is all the caveats, but the general idea seems to be that if a woman does evil...
	It's, in sort of a weird kind of self-defense, it's always the responsibility of somebody else who put upon her, who cornered her, who ground her down, who beat her up and so on.
	Yet the reality is that, of course, the majority of men who end up in prison were raised by women, heavily influenced by women, whether it's the mom at home, a single mom at home, or whether it's raised by extended family of women, or daycare, where I worked as a teenager, there's mostly women, where women are educating most of the kindergartners in the early grades and so on.
	So it's a gynocentric universe for young men.
	and the idea we'd never say to a man well you see the reason that you you know strangled that homeless guy was because you were harmed by women when you were growing up that would be a ridiculous thing And yet, we will accept, at some emotional level, we have a tendency to accept the argument that a woman who shoots her husband while he's sleeping does so because he did wrong to her.
	And the idea of, in a sense, non-reactive female malevolence is foreign to us.
	It's not foreign to history.
	We just look at Lady Macbeth, Lady Madea.
	There are tons of examples in history and in literature of malevolent women That seems to have kind of gone by the wayside these days, with some exceptions, but for the most part, the idea of a, quote, causeless female evil that's not a reaction to some external suffering, it's hard for us to comprehend, and I think that goes to the idea that, you know, if the woman says in the divorce that the man was mean, well, he must just be, because, you know, that's just how we've been conditioned.
	You know, one of the things I would like to recommend to your listeners about this subject is to go take a visit.
	Always first visit a voiceformen.com, but go to unknownhistoryofmisandry.com and look through the exhaustive library of meticulously researched information on that site.
	You will find stuff that will absolutely blow your mind from throughout history.
	What I've heard from feminists and others and men many times is, well, why is it that all the men are serial killers?
	They're not.
	I was just absolutely shattered to find out, and in my life it's hard to shock me, that most of the world's serial killers throughout history have been female.
	And there is an exhaustive list of them and their victims at that website.
	So I recommend going there.
	If you want to sort of get a shocker for what is really going on, what the different sexes are capable of, it's there.
	The point, though, is not to demonize women either.
	It isn't to say that as a class that they're worse than men or better than men or anything like that.
	That's one thing I would like to really get away from as much as possible and just sort of help people understand that in sexualizing problems, if we look at social problems and we want to assign a sex to them, we lose every time.
	We lose with rape.
	We lose with violence.
	We lose with murder.
	We lose with child abuse.
	The moment we try to view it through the lens of sex, we start distorting the picture and we're missing a good piece of the information.
	So anyway, I wanted to close on that.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	There's one or two topics I think that are worth mentioning.
	These are, again, statistics that shock me and since you're by far the better expert in the field, correct me where I go astray.
	10% of men are raising unknowingly children that aren't theirs.
	Is it 30% of men as a whole or 10% of each child?
	I would say 10%.
	Yeah, I think that number is right.
	I was confusing it with another number.
	Actually, 30% of the men that get suspicious and go and test fraternity find that the children are not theirs.
	But yeah, I think it's around 10% of men out there are raising children that are not theirs biologically.
	Unknowingly, of course, assuming.
	Now, that is a completely astonishing, heartbreaking, soul-rending fraud that it's hard to imagine what bigger betrayal could occur in a marriage.
	I mean, that makes, you hear about men sleeping around, that makes that as nothing compared to, I mean, yeah, okay, there's life there and I'm sure that the man loves the child and so on, but the idea that you would have an affair, have a child as a result of that affair, Not tell the man, and then the man would pay and raise the child as if it were his own.
	Again, it's mind-boggling how much it is.
	I would have guessed a percentage or two, but 10% is truly shocking.
	And that's just completely malevolent, irresponsible, destructive.
	It's completely abusive in my mind.
	And the courts enforce that, by the way, in a lot of states.
	You can prove it's not your child.
	They don't care.
	If you were married when she got pregnant, it's your child.
	Right, right.
	And so this is not even generally criminal.
	I mean, to me it would be completely criminal, a complete fraud.
	And yet, and even if men, like if they're divorced and so on and they find out that the child is not theirs, oftentimes the court was still forced to pay.
	Now, of course, it's not the child's fault based upon what the mother did, but we're just not having a discussion.
	No, it's not.
	But it's not that duped dad's fault either.
	It's not the patsy's fault.
	I certainly agree with you.
	It's not the child's fault.
	The child should not suffer.
	The question becomes, does the suffering or potential suffering of the child rise to the level of extorting money from an innocent man in order to pay for their upbringing?
	And I think that question is worth a lot of debate.
	Alongside, of course, the question of a brief affair or a fling or a one-night stand or whatever, where the woman gets pregnant, decides to keep the baby.
	And in many places, of course, the father is then responsible for the upkeep of that child for the next two decades plus.
	Which seems...
	Again, it seems to me that if you want to have a child and...
	I mean, you obviously want to have a man to father the child.
	It's just a fling.
	The man doesn't know about it.
	Maybe you say you're on birth control, which happens sometimes as well.
	It's hard to see how the man can then be forced to basically be a serf to that desire of the woman for the next two decades.
	Well, and that is the very core, I think, of what we're talking about, Stefan, when we talk about male disposability.
	How can it be that somebody can steal a condom with sperm in it and impregnate themselves and still get child support?
	How can they go to a sperm donor who signed a contract with no parental rights or obligations, and they can come back and get him for the child support?
	We've had cases where women did not tell the man that he had a child, raised a child for 15, 16 years, And then figured the arrears of child support at that point and then show up in his life one day and say, guess what?
	You owe me $300,000.
	Pay up or go to jail.
	That is what men are faced with in this culture.
	We have a man that was in a coma and was raped by his nurse.
	She managed to get him to get an erection while he was in a coma, got impregnated, And after he came out of the coma, she sued him for child support, and he won.
	There are young men who had been molested by their teachers at 13, 14 years old, who when they turned 18 were sued by their rapist, and they won.
	To get the child support.
	We are just scratching the tip of the iceberg on the insanity of this culture when it comes to rushing, to damseling women, to rushing to their aid for any horrific choice they make.
	And we love to do it to say, oh, it's for the best interest of the child.
	Well, you can't tell me that if you've already raised a child and you're just going back to get the child support arrears, that this is done in the best interest of the child.
	It's not done in the best interest of the child.
	Well, and sorry to interrupt, but if we were so damn concerned about the best interest of a child, we'd have a cooling off period for divorce and wouldn't rip the father out of the child's home if we were all so fired up about the best interest of the child.
	Not to mention, The horrible public school system which everybody seems to be allowing to continue.
	Not to mention national debts which sell off the unborn to foreign bankers.
	Not to mention, not to mention, not to mention circumcision.
	Is that in the best interest of the young child?
	Good heavens!
	So yeah, the best interest of the child is an argument that I just, I completely roll my eyes so far around that you just see it go up like casino slots.
	I get my fingers on the chalkboard when I hear that one.
	Every time I hear it in the best interest of the child, it is like rubbing styrofoam together for me.
	I just, I can't stand it.
	So let's just end up with a little thought experiment here.
	Because, again, I mean, I recognize the sensitivity, blah-de-blah, of this topic.
	But there's a pretty easy way to find out if anything we're talking about is anti-women.
	So at the beginning, we talked about circumcision.
	And all you have to do is switch the genders.
	It's a pretty easy thing.
	Just switch the genders, and then you can figure out whether our innate conscience-based sense of justice has a problem with it.
	So if you and I were having a discussion about how we really prefer having sex with circumcised women and so on, and women should stop just bitching, moaning, complaining, and whining, We're good to go.
	You know, that men should have the right to kick the mom out of the house and keep her away from her children just on his say-so, this would be perceived as pretty medieval.
	I'm sure you've done these a million times.
	What are other kinds of ways that people can try to understand the male perspective by switching the genders and having, hopefully, it hit them at a different emotional place?
	Try 98.9% of the body bags coming back from the Middle East being filled with female bodies.
	Imagine society's reaction and our willingness to get into war over whether it's oil or politics or whatever excuse du jour that we have for bombing people these days.
	Imagine death row where Once every 30, 40 years a man is executed and everybody else that's executed is female.
	Imagine laugh tracks on sitcoms where when women are slapped or kicked in the groin that people roll hysterically with laughter about how funny that is.
	Oh, the list could go on.
	As a matter of fact, you know, one of the strategies we do, we've got over 2,000 articles on my website from a team of really, really good writers.
	And I do want to plug AVoiceForMen.com.
	I want to encourage people to come there and read some of the articles on that site.
	There is some great stuff there that you won't find anywhere else.
	And one of the things that you'll see from time to time in articles is just what Stefan and I are talking about right now is role reversals of putting men in women's place and putting women in men's place.
	And you'll see that we have a society that runs on a thousand different rules that would be unconscionable if it were happening to women.
	People would be outraged.
	It would never be permitted.
	Heads would roll.
	Politicians would lose jobs.
	The world would shake over this stuff.
	But it happens to men each and every day And we have blinders on it.
	We can't see it.
	And it is very, very difficult to get society motivated to do anything about it.
	We are starting to see, I'm happy to say, some minuscule progress.
	We're starting to push that boulder uphill just inch by inch a little bit.
	But we have a long way to go.
	But the first thing that has to happen is that Unfortunately, and it's hard for most human beings, is that they have to see men as human.
	And most people will tell you, of course I see men as human.
	But when you really press them about it and hear their points of view about what happens to men in different circumstances, you see that they really don't think men are human.
	They think men are utilitarian, and they think men are there to be controlled with either shame or lauding for their heroics.
	In order to sacrifice.
	But whether they're human or not, the jury is very much still out on most of society right now.
	Yeah, two others that come to mind.
	Imagine, I think it's 97 or 98% of all workplace injuries and deaths were women.
	And men flocked to the safest occupations and then demanded equal pay.
	Or imagine if breast cancer killed a lot more Women then prostate cancer killed men but got a tiny percentage of the funding and visibility.
	Again, this is just part of the...
	Men are kind of like tin soldiers on a conveyor belt going past in society and not, you know, full spiritual human beings with wants needs, preferences of their own.
	And I think the extension of full personhood to masculinity, tragically, I mean, tragically, even in this 21st century, remains a little bit of a challenge.
	So, listen...
	Go ahead.
	Well, I wanted to say the time for that is over.
	And while I have time, I just wanted to finish addressing something when we started chatting.
	And I just would like to challenge people to consider, when I talk about feminism, I am talking about nothing new.
	Feminism, according to what most feminists will tell you, is about equality, and it's about ending gender roles, that it's about breaking out of the mold.
	And then they proceed to turn the state, to turn every system they can, academe, into an enabling, protecting and providing system designed just to protect women.
	This is Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
	Feminism is nothing new.
	It is what human beings have been programmed to do for generations.
	It's why it was so wildly successful.
	It's why there was almost no resistance to it, because the idea of sacrificing for women and putting them first is very, very much a part of the human condition.
	The challenge in the men's human rights movement is to acknowledge the fact that men are human beings and this is where we really see a movement for the first time that really is about breaking the gender role and we do it by addressing our roles as utilitarian and as protectors and providers And men standing up and saying, I'm choosing not to do that anymore.
	And then you watch society around just go absolutely nuts with anger and rage and shame toward those men who say, I'm not going to do this anymore.
	That is what real change looks like.
	Feminism isn't changed.
	It's the same thing over and over again.
	I certainly agree with that.
	I remember hearing so much, of course, about how women would say, well, look, if you're in an abusive relationship, you really should leave, right?
	And then, you know, but if you say to someone whose mom is abusive, you know, you really don't have to see that person.
	It's like, what?
	She's your mother!
	That's completely different!
	And it's like, well, wait a minute.
	I mean, the marital relationship is chosen.
	The mom is not a chosen relationship.
	You just happen to be born wherever you're born.
	Surely the standards should be higher.
	Of quality interactions and love.
	The standards should be higher for involuntary relationships, but it's just people can't...
	They just can't process this.
	Everybody uses these universals to basically rip people off and then the moment you try to extend it against their interests, they suddenly flip on you and it's like completely a different story.
	So yeah, I think that that is a point, that it is the men who are drawn and conditioned to placing women's interests first and to not giving women the true respect of recognizing that they're capable of just a bad set of behaviors as men.
	And so it's something that I think we have to resist as strongly as we have to advocate for equality.
	Yes, it infantilizes women, and we need to remember that, that by rushing to their aid to make sure they don't suffer consequences for their behavior, by making sure that everything they believe is agreed with, by calling people woman-hating, by disagreeing with them, we are turning them into toddlers and helping them stay toddlers.
	If you respect women, in my opinion, if you respect any human being, you treat them with regard and you treat them with accountability.
	And you expect accountability from them.
	We don't expect accountability from women.
	And to that extent, we've infantilized them and we've robbed them of their agency.
	And that is a tremendous disservice to any human being, to take away their agency and the expectation for them to act accountably for their actions.
	Yeah, I mean, I think that's beautifully put.
	And the last point I want to mention, I'll give you the last word, of course, but the last point I want to mention is that it seems odd to me how the men's rights movement is accused of being woman-hating.
	And I, in doing the research for conversations I've had with men's rights advocates and in preparation for tonight's conversation, I've read a lot of stuff.
	I've not read any mainstream men's rights advocates who writes with hostility and anger towards women as a gender, who is the classic sort of woman-hating stereotype that is portrayed.
	On the other hand, if you read feminist writings, and these are mainstream lauded professorships, they got awards, they've got books, they're on TV shows, I mean, the amount of man-hating that comes out of the mainstream feminist camp is truly, I mean, it's like, put on your hazmat suit before you wade into that toxic prose or you're going to lose an eyebrow or two.
	So it's funny, it seems to be just a case of pure projection, that the men's rights movement seems to be quite gentle, whereas the women's rights movement has had an enormous amount of hatred towards men, and yet that's not discussed, and yet the non-existent hatred of women that's supposed to come out of the men's rights group is talked about as if it were real.
	One of the things I've done over and over again when being supposedly confronted by feminist ideologues, I've been asked, of course, a million times, why do you hate women?
	Why do you have a website that advocates hate for women?
	And I invite them to go ask the women that are the senior editors of the site, to ask Erin Pizzi, who is the founder of the Women's Shelter Movement, Who is also on the Aborts for Men editorial board and our advisor on domestic violence policy.
	Why not ask some of these women that are activists on behalf of men and boys, why not ask girl rights what?
	They don't want to.
	There is a tunnel vision about this stuff One, we have to remember that with many feminists, this is not just about their blindness to men's suffering and pain.
	That's part of it.
	But they're a well-heeled, monetized agenda.
	Bob was just reauthorized.
	We're talking many, many hundreds of millions of dollars that are being spread around, a lot of it without accountability, to people to basically We make themselves over and over again.
	This is what is done with that money.
	And so they're very, very dependent.
	We are finally emerging.
	The Voice for Men is doing extremely well.
	We're getting gangbusters in traffic.
	We're getting a lot of attention from the media.
	We've got a lot of strong writers and activists out there getting the message out, and it scares the living hell out of them.
	That's why we were attacked by the SPLC. That's why the University of Toronto Students' Union sought with the administration of that school to not only have us banned from university servers, but to try to move to get the website shut down with our hosting company.
	They are getting desperate to shut us up.
	And it's certainly, one, it's not going to happen.
	We're going to continue.
	But they're not interested.
	I mean, we're not talking about people that are interested in reasoned discourse here.
	You're right.
	A lot of their stuff is driven on hating men.
	They want to paint anybody who disagrees with them as woman-hating.
	That's not likely to change.
	Sorry, sir.
	Please finish your point.
	No, I was just going to say that the only thing that's likely to change is that enough men and women will get sick of this stuff.
	Enough to continue to speak out against it, to move against it philosophically, and to push for it.
	And we're starting to see that to happen.
	We're starting to see these men's groups form on universities.
	And I know that is striking terror into the heart of feminists in academia.
	They don't want men organized on university campuses, contesting their data, their research, and asserting the issues that affect men and boys, because it's about the money.
	And that's what I have for it.
	Yeah, I mean, William Gertner, a Canadian writer who's been on the show a couple of times, has pointed out that just up here in Canada, The government has spent over $300 million, this is of about 10 years ago, over $300 million subsidizing women's groups.
	Of course, you can't find a single thin dime for men's groups.
	And that kind of, I mean, there's a staggering amount of resources to pour into an intellectual discourse, which completely warps it, which is why it has become so divorced from the majority of women's issues, because it is Created its own little financial academic hate cyst that is reliant on government funds rather than from funds which would be coming in from women and from men who care about these issues as well.
	So we're not dealing with a reflection, I think, of the majority of people's willed and curious discourse.
	We're dealing with a government enclosure, which generally does not tend to maintain its funding by being overly polite.
	I shouldn't agree more.
	Well, so of course the website is avoiceformen.com.
	I'll of course put it all over the video and the show.
	I hope we didn't go too long for you.
	I really, really appreciate, of course, the work that you're doing.
	I have a daughter, so I'm very happy for the work that you're doing because I want her to grow up And to meet men who do not view themselves as disposable and don't defer to her potential dark side and infantilize her by pretending that she's some sort of a sugar farm pliary on top of a wedding cake, but is a full human being with the capacity for good and evil just like we all have.
	So I thank you on behalf of my daughter for hopefully the parenting and men that you're influencing.
	You're more than well.
	I very much enjoyed speaking with you.
	Thank you for having me.
	Take care, Paul.

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