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May 3, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:13
2685 The Myth of Patriarchy - A Conversation with Paul Elam
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I am here with the voice from a voice from Manpol Elam, I think for your third round on Free Domain Radio.
How are you, Paul?
I'm fine.
I'm glad to be here, Stefan.
Thank you.
So, a lot has been going on, I guess, in the manosphere recently.
Science and facts and data and research all seems to be getting behind, I guess, the movement, you could say.
What is the stuff that's come out recently that you've found to be pretty encouraging for men's rights?
Well, in terms of research, one, I would have to say the RAIN report coming out, which was very significant in that they're the largest sexual abuse advocacy group in the world, literally.
We've released a statement and some study information that It indicated what most of us with common sense knew was the truth, that rape is not a cultural phenomenon.
It is not something that the culture produces or that we have normalized or condoned, and that we have reason to believe that every young woman on a college campus can't make it from one class to another without being raped.
And they have identified that it is indeed a small group of a criminal element that commits most rapes, and that It is misleading to the public to go forward with the idea that it's a cultural factor, that masculinity and men need to change,
and also the resultant star chambers that they're running now in our colleges and universities that take young men who are accused, hold them to a preponderance of the evidence standard, where we had gone on clear and convincing evidence for hundreds of years.
For crimes of that nature, and literally put felony crimes in the hands of untrained college students to make determination about people's future with almost no evidence, and sometimes no evidence against them at all.
And so it is, that report from Ryan questions a lot of how we're handling the rape issue, and I think in a very positive way.
Now, you see a small subset of criminal elements.
What percentage of the male population, or I guess the human population, is predisposed to rape?
I don't know if that's even measurable.
I certainly haven't seen any statistics that I would trust to say, oh, okay, it's X percent.
But we do know that rapists, like actual genuine pedophiles, tend to reoffend repeatedly, that they will have a large number of victims, not a small number.
So I'm guessing, since 99% of men are not ever even accused of rape in this culture, that the percentage of actual rapists is small, and that unfortunately many of them are committing a great many rapes.
But that is a criminal issue, not a cultural one.
Yeah, because there is this sort of idea floating around that there's sort of like rape guys, you know, and sort of one, you know, and then there's like nice guys, and there's some sort of thread between them, some sort of like, I really like this girl, really, really like this girl, really, really like this girl, I'm gonna rape this girl.
Like, it's just some sort of escalation of natural masculinity when I just, I find that an incomprehensible and, of course, highly insulting notion.
Well, that fact isn't even something new.
I mean, we have from Susan Brownmiller, 25, 30 years ago, saying that rape was the instrument by which all men kept all women living in a state of fear.
We've had feminist ideologues for the past 40 years saying that even consensual sex is rape because the society has brainwashed women into a Sort of manufactured consent.
This has been an insane ideological position for some time.
But now, unfortunately, and also as we're seeing in California, we're starting to see this insane ideology legislated.
Yeah, usually it's only a matter of time before madness becomes policy if people stick with it.
I remember, first I heard this idea was actually on the back of an old Al Franken book.
He's, of course, the comedian who's now become a politician.
And he said, there are some women we hear who believe that all heterosexual sex is rape.
I've only heard of, I've only actually ever met one of these women and I've been married to her for 20 years.
But that's the only time I've ever really encountered that idea just as a sort of throwaway joke from a comedian.
But the idea that somehow masculinity is not sort of benevolent and protective and hardworking and so on, but as somehow predatory and, you know, one One step away from bestial criminality is a strange idea.
You know, I sort of got to think that this speaks more towards the men that these women would have grown up with or who hang around rather than any sort of objective analysis of masculinity as a whole.
I think it really speaks more toward political power.
If you can demonize half the population and find reasons to control them and to make the general public suspicious of them, as we have like now on the airlines, there's We have many airlines that will not allow an unintended child to be seated next to a male.
They will find a woman on the plane to designate as a babysitter who does not know the child any better than the man.
We have posters going up on campuses everywhere saying that men can stop rape, not that rapists can stop rape or that law enforcement can stop rape, but that men can.
I mean, sorry, what is the theory behind that, that we all know some guy who's going to say, I'm going to go rape this woman, and we say, great, you know, good idea.
I've never heard anyone in my entire life, and I've traveled the world, I've met I don't know how many tens of thousands of people probably by this time, I've never met one man who has said, you know, it'd be great, let's go rape some people.
Like, how am I supposed to stop something that I don't even know how it exists, where it exists, who it comes from?
Well, again, I think giving you a problem that you can't solve is a guarantee that there's going to be a need for agencies and money and power and control forever in order to control this imaginary problem.
You know, all of this hinges with feminism on patriarchy theory.
This is how they explain domestic violence with the Duluth model, by saying that patriarchy was a system that ruled and oppressed women And that benefited men at the expense of women, and gave men undue power, and that domestic violence is really representative of just patriarchy's extension of male power into the home.
And that's where they came up with the canard, that the rule of thumb actually meant that a man could beat his wife with a stick no wider than his thumb, which is absolutely untrue.
It was a carpenter's measurement.
But they're able to sell these myths because, one, One, there's money and power in it.
And two, there are a lot of men that will react knee-jerk because men are the opposite of how feminists are portrayed, because men are instinctively protective of women and will instinctively run to their rescue, often mindlessly.
If they are given the call to wear a white ribbon to show that they're one of the good guys, that they're not going to beat their wife or rape women, they'll do it.
And they will support legislation, and they will support even the most insane theories in the world turning into legislation.
And were it not for men, we wouldn't have this happening.
If we're going to generalize about men, that's how I would do it.
Now, what are the arguments against sort of patriarchy theory?
I mean, I, of course, went to school and did graduate work in Canada where, you know, classism and patriarchy theory.
And so I find myself sort of sometimes so up to my eyeballs in historical theorizing that it can be tough to see around that blimp, so to speak.
What are the best and most concise arguments against patriarchy theory in your opinion?
Well, the fact that we have a flourishing feminist ideology is a pretty good argument against the fact that they're able to demonize men, to put men in prison falsely, to throw men out of their homes in family courts.
If you look within the legal apparatus in the United States, and I dare say Canada too, in the family courts or in cases of accusations of sexual assault, Or in cases where, say, a woman has her husband or tries to hire a contract killer to kill her husband, and then a Canadian Supreme Court decides she's been through enough.
If there's a system that supposedly, or Carla Homolka, if there's a system that supposedly benefits men and oppresses women, where is it?
Where do we find this?
What we find in the legal environment, what we find on battlefields, what we find in the workplace in terms of workplace mortality, where we find the homeless, where we find the drug addicted, where we find all these social maladies, they are dominated by men.
If there is a system that benefits men at the expense of women, that benefits all men at the expense of all women, Why isn't it reflected in any of our key social factors that we use to measure how well a society is doing?
Where is it that women claim to get 77 cents on the dollar?
And when you look into that, you find, well, there's a little bit more to this story, or actually a lot more than there is on the surface, what's given by ideologues.
My deepest question is, show me patriarchy.
Just show it to me.
If you show it to me, I'll be a believer.
Right, and do you think that, I remember reading, I think Bill Gairdner, who's been on the show a couple of times, wrote a book about Canadian families where he was pointing out the tens or sometimes even hundreds of millions of dollars pumped into women's groups, and the fact that what is public feminism is really a creature of state funding, not a genuine reflection of lived female experience.
Are those your thoughts as well, or do you think it's something different?
Absolutely agree.
Women's lived experience, in most cases, when you talk to most women, does not match up to living in slavery.
It actually matches up to having quite a bit of personal and social power that women have these days, which is visible to most anybody.
Just this whole idea of women suffering.
When you take, for instance, my website.
It is audacious enough that I even titled something A Voice for Men.
Society around me has reacted to it like, what do you mean A Voice for Men?
How can we, in a society that supposedly favors men, that supposedly favors them at the expense of women, take such a hostile reaction to even the words A Voice for Men?
And the reaction being, what do you mean?
Men always have the, well, where's my voice now?
I've been attacked by every media source in the United States just about and mischaracterized by feminist ideologues and shunned and had difficulties at times making connections with people publicly because they were afraid of the affiliation with something called a voice for men.
That does not speak to male empowerment at all.
It speaks to just the opposite.
Well, of course, that's true, but of course, once you find the secret handshake that lets you into the patriarchy, then that will all change, and you will be able to control the flow of time, the flow of water back uphill, you will be able to cool fire With a glance of your chilly eyes.
But, you know, once you're out, if you're still outside the patriarchy, I can see why it would feel that way.
I would like to inform the utility companies, too.
I tried in my early 20s.
I was a very poor young man and they cut off my electricity for nonpayment.
I told them that I was male and I told them that I was a member of the patriarchy and they cut it off anyway.
Revenue Canada still wants me to pay taxes, even though I've informed them that I'm white, I'm male.
I think that's about it.
And so I should not have to pay anything.
And they said, sorry, really doesn't...
Nobody's recognizing our privilege, I know.
Yeah, it's terrible.
I mean, I try upgrading to first class just based on testicles and skin color and no luck.
So, one of the ideas that I put forward recently that has received a fair amount of shock and awe campaign from outraged people, which always helps you to know when you're doing something that's good and useful and right, is the idea that sort of when men grow up with a lot of hostility towards women,
and there certainly are men out there with a lot of hostility towards women, just as there are some women out there with a lot of hostility towards men, I think we can understand that a woman might have hostility towards men because maybe she had a real, you know, drunken, abusive bastard for a father or whatever.
But when I put forward the idea that some men may grow up with anger towards women because they've been mistreated by women when they were growing up, maybe a mother or an aunt or a sister or an older sister or a teacher or a nun or something like that, that seems to quite short circuit people.
The idea that the cycle of violence might also include women It's quite shocking.
And I just recently read and commented on an article, one of the first live articles on how women parent in the States, where women were found to be hitting their children aged 7 months old to 4 years old an average of 18 times a week.
And if you're getting hit by a woman when you're a toddler 18 times a week, I can see how you might grow up with some anger towards I mean, it's unjust to generalize and attack other women on that, but I could sort of see how that might happen.
And this really seems to short circuit people's brains to think of the possibility that women might be part of the cycle of violence that we're all struggling to overcome and oppose.
Well, if you're over the target, you're more likely to get black.
That is certainly You know, what you're describing there I think extends into even a much bigger picture.
Take the individual young man, boy, who is hit 18 times a week by a woman, and then put him in first grade into an educational system that is almost entirely dominated by females.
And when there is you-go-girl messages and girl power and boys are sort of Psychologically, emotionally shuttled off to the side.
And we've seen this begin to reflect on their test scores.
Now their boys are lagging behind girls, even in mathematics, whereas they used to excel.
That used to be their strength.
They come into a hostile educational environment.
Then you run into the problems of medicating boys for traditionally masculine behavior, for being rambunctious.
They end up in colleges where men can stop rape and we're going to kill the patriarchy.
And a lot of negative male stereotypes in the media that they're immersed in their whole lives.
I would argue that most misogynists are made.
They're not born.
And that it doesn't justify hatred of a class of people.
That's not at all what I'm talking about.
But what I'm saying is if you want to look at why people develop dysfunctional belief systems, if you're not willing to look at their environment and their development and growing up and their experiences at the hand of representatives of that group, then you're not really trying to understand anything.
And you are quite correct.
There is a lot more child abuse by women.
Of young males, by far.
That's the largest two groups of perpetrators and offenders when it comes to the physical abuse of children.
We need to look at that as a culture.
If we don't want them to grow up hating women, then maybe not beating on them is a good start.
And I find it...
I don't know.
I mean, I guess I've always been a bit of an idealist.
Perhaps an unrealistic one at times, but I was raised to say, you know, treat women as equals, treat women like you would treat men and so on, right?
And to me, the assassination of moral responsibility is a fundamental mark of respect.
You know, I don't give it to a cat.
The cat scratches me.
I don't assume it's consciously malicious.
I don't give it to a rock that falls on my foot or anything like that.
So to me, the assassination of full moral responsibility is a deep mark of respect.
And I find, again, not always, but there is this tendency that when I say to women, well, yeah, you're responsible for child abuse and the women who do abuse children, and I've never said men don't, but the women who do are part of the cycle of violence, which is the assassination of moral responsibility and a request for change, there's like this recoiling that happens.
We can't talk about that.
That's not part of the discussion.
And it seems incredibly disrespectful towards women.
To attempt to shield them from moral judgment, from moral responsibility, and the capacity for growth and change and self-reflection.
It's misogyny, in my opinion.
What it is, is that we have a standard in this culture where we must infantilize women.
That if they're upset, we must fix it.
We don't need to ask whether or not that they probably would grow as human beings if they faced their anger and understood that there was a reason Why they felt the way they felt.
What we need to do is to change the environment so that they're not angry anymore.
This is the ultimate in crippling of human beings.
I was talking about this with Warren Farrell last night, and he was talking about early days in feminism when something didn't go right at a panel discussion, and one of the women would get up and stomp out of the room.
That all the energy in the room became focused on fixing whatever...
Nobody asked, okay, maybe she's inappropriately angry.
Maybe she's angry because she heard the truth.
Maybe we need to respect her agency as an adult enough to let her be angry and to let her walk out and for us to continue.
But no, what the whole room did, both men and women, was go into a mode of trying to ameliorate the problem as though it could not be her.
And this is how we have...
Developed as a culture to treat all women.
If they're upset, we need to fix it.
I think this is not only insulting, I think it is the misogyny of low expectations, if you would.
And it is infantilizing.
It is teaching women that no matter how crazy they behave, no matter what they do that's wrong, that this society is responsible for taking that on their backs and making sure that she is blameless.
And that's an insane way to run a culture.
And it is, you know, Paul, one of the things that alarms me most as a father to a wonderful five-year-old daughter, It's the very real possibility, in fact, almost the certainty that she's going to grow up in a culture that is going to attempt to explain away any bad behavior she might have,
is going to attempt to mollycoddle any negative emotional experience she may have that is going to sort of bend around her and try and make sure she's as happy as possible, whether her happiness is just or her desires are just or not.
It is the worst thing for me to imagine that my daughter is going to go out into a world, especially because she's pretty too, where people are just going to make up excuses for anything that she does wrong and she's not going to hit that hard edge of responsibility and feedback.
We owe it to our daughters to ensure, I believe that parents do owe it to their daughters to ensure that there is limits set on them and there is dialogue with them and understanding with them that just because the world runs around kissing your butt doesn't mean that that is a real sense of entitlement and that you have moral obligations and that you have a responsibility To be accountable for your actions.
Because, unfortunately, the world out there is not particularly depending on how attractive a woman is.
The more attractive she is, the less responsibility she has to take.
It was uttered in one of the famous trials down here of a woman, Deborah Lefebvre, that molested a young boy.
The prosecutor, I believe it was in the case, said she was too pretty to go to jail.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's terrible.
I mean, yeah.
Now, sorry, just before we started the show, we were talking a little bit about, I was talking with you about studies around male victims of sexual assault.
And again, this seems Confusing to people and of course you get the inevitable jokes like a man can't be sexually assaulted because we're perpetually horny, blah blah blah, sex robots and all that.
What is the latest research that's coming out about male victims of sexual assault and its prevalence?
Well, again, I want to qualify something.
When we talk about new information coming to the surface, we're really not talking about anything new.
This stuff has been out there for a long time.
If you look at the CDC reviews and the results of those studies, they indicate that if it comes to forced envelopment or men who are coerced into sex by women using drugs, some other kind of force, that those numbers have nearly paralleled.
They're just shy of what is considered rape, which is by definition now penetration.
We've known this for a long time.
It's nothing new.
We also know that we're getting more than just jokes about it.
The fact of the matter is that Adele Mercier, a professor from, I think it was Queens University, came out talking about boys who were incarcerated Being sexually abused by their captors, by their female captors, saying that that could not possibly be raped, that they were all high-fiving each other, and that they wanted it.
Literally saying that the victim wanted to be raped.
And she wasn't joking.
And she came back later after that and reasserted that she stood by her words.
This is absolutely not a joke coming from this establishment.
They treat male victims of rape, sexual abuse, as though they deserve it.
And this is coming not from comedians on Jay Leno.
It's coming from our institutions of higher education.
It is a very serious matter, and that's part of what we're going to try to address at the conference coming up in June.
Oh, yes.
Okay, so Detroit in June, of course, I will be there.
Karen Strawn, Girl Right Swat, will be there.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what's going on in June.
It sounds like a really fantastic event.
Well, first, I think this is a great opportunity to announce, and I know this will come as very welcome news to the readers of AVFM, or 98 percent of them.
There's 2 percent of them that don't want me to speak there.
But Stefan Molyneux will be joining us on the roster of keynote speakers.
We are sorting out the details of his appearance and the subject he will address But I'm very excited about that.
Stephan has always been somebody I admired for quite some time now, who does a fabulous job at speaking, and I think he will add a dimension to this conference about the issues of men and boys that it really does need.
So first, welcome Stephan.
I'm glad to have you come to the conference.
Thank you for the invitation.
The other thing is, what is the conference going to cover?
Oh, you know, I still, at this point, can't recite a complete list of the speakers and different people that will be there in the audience.
And there's an audience content here that is just as impressive as the lineup of speakers.
But we have people like Paul Nathanson, people like Robert Franklin, Karen Strawn, Senator Ann Cools, Tom Golden, and it just goes on down the line.
Warren Farrell.
Warren Farrell will be there.
Yes.
Yeah.
I hope people know that.
Warren Farrell, basically the inspiration for all of this with his incredible work.
And it is going to be, I think, a historic event.
The response to it has been great.
I am getting a lot of media contacts.
There is a buzz developing around this that is even greater than I expected, because nobody before has taken, when we talked about placating women, making sure that nobody's feelings are hurt, that's been the rules at play.
We're getting ready to break all of them.
And they know it.
And it isn't to hurt women's feelings.
There will be a lot of women speakers there.
But it is a group of people that are tired of seeing society remain silent about so much abject pain and suffering.
And we're not going to anymore.
And this historic conference is going to be a first in that.
I'm totally excited about it.
And so the website is in Detroit, and the dates, just to make sure everyone can get their browsers pointed at the right place?
The dates, it starts on June 26th with a workshop by Dr.
Farrell that is designed for two reasons.
One, to help individuals deepen their compassion for the issues faced by men and boys.
But also, he is looking very much to look out for potential leadership in the men's movement, to make connections, to get to know people.
He does.
He's coming there because he wants to connect with you and to get to know you so that we can feel so much more confident about the work we do together in the future.
We're so often conversing online, talking online, talking, but there is no replacement for actual face time with people.
The conference itself proper is on the 27th and the 28th, and we will have a lineup of speakers each day from the morning until the evening, healthy lunch break and stretch breaks, things like that.
Friday night there's going to be an appreciation dinner that will include all the keynote speakers, all of A Voice for Men's key personnel, and other people by invitation.
And we're looking forward to that.
And we're scheduling social events, also, every night, so that the attendees of the conference can get together and have some fun.
Because this is going to be a party, too.
It's not just going to be a bunch of people talking about really, really depressing issues.
We're going to go have fun with each other, maybe like we never had before.
So I think it's going to be a great party and a great learning opportunity as well.
And a great refueling station, you know, when you are at the cutting edge of any particular kind of social change, you're doing a lot of ice breaking, sometimes it feels, with the very prow of your own head.
And being among like-minded people, or as I like to say, minded people, is a huge relief and a huge...
Recharging station, you know, in terms of getting activism, energy back, there's almost no better mojo than being with minded people.
And so, you know, I strongly urge people, I mean, I go to political events, I was just in Amsterdam speaking, they're like...
40,000 people.
And I met up with a philosophy group because I run this philosophy show, Free Domain Radio.
And it's just great.
You feel like you're stepping into the future, getting recharged, then coming back to the muggles to energize them for something better.
So I really, really recommend people.
I mean, the knowledge bomb is great.
You could probably get some of that stuff online.
But the contacts and the people and the refueling and the recharging that happens with people who are with the red pill people is something I really strongly recommend.
And we'll be glad to see all of them there.
This is first and foremost about the attendees.
We plan on making this an experience that's positive.
They're going to be well attended to.
We're going to make sure everybody's comfortable.
And as best we can, we're going to make sure everybody's happy and having a blast while they're there.
Beautiful.
Website, is there a specific URL for it?
Yes, there is.
It's called voiceformen.com.
And what you will find there At the top of the page, unless you happen to be on a Mac using Chrome, you will see a banner that has pictures and a description of all the speakers.
We will be adding stuff onto that.
Underneath the banner area, in the top right corner of the site, there is a section, a widget in there for conference information, the details of the conference, where you can buy tickets.
You can book your hotel room at a discount through us.
Doubletree has set up a discount for conference attendees and their own special webpage for booking rooms.
You will be able to find out the details on Dr.
Farrell's workshop.
And as we add more events and more things to come with that, you will also find them in that section.
So it's all laid out there for you.
And I will recommend to people, don't bookmark it.
Don't think about doing it later.
Seriously, just do it now.
Go to the website and sign up.
I know I've organized conferences.
It's always great for the conference organizer to know how many people are coming.
This last minute rush is always kind of chaotic.
Don't be the person who wants to go, wants to go, finally gets around to it in a month and finds that it's sold out or the hotels are sold out or something like that.
So just go and do it now at voicefromend.com if you're at all interested in going.
You know, happiness in life is made up of discrete, memorable experiences.
And rather than having another weekend that you're not going to remember in 10 years, Go someplace where you'll have great conversations, make great contacts, and really have a memorable time.
So that's my little pitch.
Just go and communicate and connect.
It can really change your life for the better, VoiceForMen.com.
So thanks, of course, for organizing it.
Thanks a lot for the time to chat tonight.
I'm sure we'll have a chance to chat more in depth in Detroit.
And VoiceForMen.com is always a great place to go, of course, for people who are interested in men's rights issues.
And thanks again, as always, Paul.
Always a real pleasure.
Pleasure to be here.
Take care.
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