Stefan Molyneux and Karen Straughan aka. GirlWritesWhat discuss female responsibility avoidance, the female role in the cycle of violence, feminism as a government program and blame as relief plus helplessness. Misogyny. Patriarchy. Feminism. Oh my!
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| I'm here with Girl Writes What, aka Karen, the Queen of Infinite Renovations. | |
| I hope you're doing well. | |
| Thanks so much for taking the time. | |
| I'm doing alright. | |
| The renovations aren't done though. | |
| No, no, the renovations are never done. | |
| Didn't you know that? | |
| You actually just have entered a Kafkaesque nightmare of money and time and filthy sailor language. | |
| Oh yeah, no, it's a money pit. | |
| Oh my god. | |
| Right. | |
| No, but it's true. | |
| I think that it is really much the greatest relationship test, both with your own sanity and your partner. | |
| Although kids seem to enjoy renovations, they all seem kind of disappointed when they're done. | |
| But how are your kids enjoying the process? | |
| I actually had my daughter help with all of the painting for about two months. | |
| And she says if she never picks up another paint roller again, it'll be 50 billion years too soon. | |
| Well, that's good. | |
| Now, keep it away from manual labor as a career choice. | |
| I find exposing kids to manual labor early on is a great way of helping them value education. | |
| So, good job! | |
| Well done. | |
| Now, I just wanted to mention just a business out of the way. | |
| So, you and I are going to be speaking at the International Conference on Men's Issues June 26-28. | |
| In Detroit, where the world comes to play and dodge feminist signposts. | |
| And I really wanted to recommend, I mean, I think it's going to be a great conference, but Karen, you're good in front of a webcam. | |
| You are great in front of a crowd. | |
| I've been watching your, particularly your Q&A sessions are really riveting and brilliantly done. | |
| So I just really wanted to compliment you on the public speaking stuff. | |
| I don't know how working with a webcam It helps you work with crowds. | |
| I think it does, but I just really want... | |
| So if you want to come out and see a great speaker, Karen is the person to see. | |
| Just wanted to sort of mention that. | |
| So what are you going to be chatting about, do you think, in Detroit? | |
| You know, I don't know if that's actually been decided yet. | |
| There was some kicking around the idea of sort of taking on the broader topic of whether feminism is really about equality. | |
| But yeah, that has not been decided. | |
| I like to ride by the seat of my pants, the skin of my teeth, write that speech up in the airport while I'm waiting for the plane. | |
| My particular preference is I say I really like a long Q&A session because then there's much less speech to prepare. | |
| It tends to be more filler, more powder in the cocaine, I guess you could say. | |
| So, for those who don't know you or don't know your approaches, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your broad approach as you talk about writing fearlessly on gender issues for the last couple of years. | |
| Because most people, of course, assume that the word feminism has to do with equal rights and equality before the law and so on. | |
| Your take on it, I think, as is mine, is a little bit different. | |
| So I wonder if we could, I guess, gently coat the red pill before inserting it to give people a bit of perspective. | |
| A little lube on that. | |
| But no, no, my approach is basically that, you know, and I really don't have a problem with equal rights for women at all. | |
| But there's just been a pattern, even since the 1850s. | |
| Of women's advocates, whether you call them feminists or not, back then, of wanting equal rights without, you know, they wanted equality with men but in good things, in the rights and the freedoms and the opportunities, but they sort of don't seem to want a whole lot in the way of equal responsibilities and equal obligations. | |
| And one of the biggest things, I think, the biggest dangers is Sort of the theoretical framework that they sort of operate in, where, you know, there's this big oppressive patriarchy. | |
| And, you know, so, I mean, like, you're looking at... | |
| It's not just a movement. | |
| It's an ideology. | |
| It's fact-impervious or evidence-impervious. | |
| And they're right in there in... | |
| Into government policy and into legislation, changing things around to compensate for what they see as how the world works, which isn't really how the world works. | |
| You know, the whole gender is a social construct, and the moment that you talk about innate differences, they scream bio-truther, you know, and it's just, you know, it's just insane. | |
| I mean, like, anyone who's had more than one child knows that you're not born a blank slate, that you actually have a personality when you're born. | |
| Or at least the beginnings of one. | |
| A temperament. | |
| And they seem to think that they can just strong-arm society into some kind of perfect utopian equality. | |
| And the problem with utopianism is that often you don't really care how you get there. | |
| And you don't really care how many people are hurt. | |
| And you just want your vision realized. | |
| And I think that that's a huge danger. | |
| So, I mean, like, it's really the ideology, it's really the paradigm that they're working from, and the fact that so many people have bought it. | |
| I mean, I was talking with Aaron Pizzi on the radio, on The Voice for Men's radio show, Revelations, with Aaron Pizzi, and I said, you know, like, What's most amazing to me is how society seems to actually be operating within this kind of collective delusion as to how the world actually works and what needs to be done to change things that must be | |
| changed because they're bad somehow. | |
| And it's all bad news. | |
| It's not a nice thing, feminism, at all. | |
| Yeah, I mean, and the funny thing is, and it is tragic for those of us who are working for true equality, which is there are great human movements that arise throughout history, and they're fantastic and wonderful and aim for, you know, the end of slavery and equality before the law for various groups, including genders. | |
| And then what happens is the government comes in and starts taxing and funding and manipulating. | |
| And then the groups begin to face the government and it becomes sort of propagandistic. | |
| And these revolutions don't know when to end. | |
| The whole point of a revolution is you're supposed to end it. | |
| You know, you're supposed to get rid of slavery and then go find something else to do. | |
| But when the government takes it over, these things get sort of financed beyond all reason and start inventing problems. | |
| And then what happens is people who are skeptical of the government program called whatever it is, are then considered to be against the original cause behind it. | |
| If you're against government education, somehow you don't want children to be educated. | |
| And if you're against government sponsored and funded and fundamentally coercive feminism or feminist social policies, somehow you're against women. | |
| And that's so tragic for people to think that the government program is the initial impulse, but it's something that needs to be constantly reiterated to people. | |
| Oh, well, that's it, too. | |
| I mean, like, if you're against sort of the continued erosion of due process in sexual assault cases, then you must be pro-rape. | |
| And if you're against the sort of the hogging of all the resources for female victims of domestic violence and you want those resources shared, whether they're community-provided, you know, on a private donation basis or whether they're government-provided, if you want some share of that to go to male victims as well, Then you don't want to stop violence against women. | |
| What a horrible person you are. | |
| It's almost like they have to work as much as feminism talks about how there is no gender binary. | |
| There's no strict binary. | |
| That's the world that they're operating in, where there is this binary. | |
| And the binary is man bad, woman good. | |
| The binary is man up. | |
| Women need help. | |
| Men are oppressors. | |
| Women are oppressed. | |
| Men are privileged. | |
| Women are disadvantaged. | |
| It's got such a lack of nuance. | |
| And then what they do is say, but intersectionality. | |
| We're past that now. | |
| We have this intersectionality thing. | |
| Where, you know, we have these intersections of oppression based on not just gender, but on race and class and, you know, whether you're able-bodied or disabled or, you know, and all of these things, right? | |
| But in the hierarchy, men are still privileged by maleness and women are still disadvantaged by femaleness across the board. | |
| It's kind of like having You know, a bowl full of lettuce and saying it's a salad and then adding some like, I don't know, a piece of chicken on top and saying it's no longer a salad. | |
| It's intersectional now, right? | |
| You know, it's the same thing. | |
| It's just got all this window dressing on it. | |
| There's an old statement, I think it was Emerson, who said, mistrust any enterprise that requires the purchasing of new clothes. | |
| For me, it's mistrust any ideology that requires the invention of new words. | |
| We've got great words like justice, truth, virtue, rationality, equality, and so on. | |
| When people start inventing new words, I just assume I'm going to be taken for a sophist ride and end up quite a bit lighter in the wallet. | |
| One of the things that I find frustrating as well is the degree to which When women have deficiencies, statistically, it's the man's fault. | |
| Interestingly, when men have deficiencies, statistically, it's also the man's fault. | |
| So it's somehow men's fault that women earn less, even though the fundamental fact that women are pregnant and breastfeed, I think, would have some impact on income capacities. | |
| But the fact that men die earlier is also men's fault for just being addicted to workaholism and status. | |
| Well, you know, the pregnancy thing is the man's fault too, right? | |
| I mean, he got her pregnant. | |
| She had nothing to do with it, right? | |
| I think there's one, though, there is, but to be fair, there is one woman in theological history who can claim that. | |
| But after that, the question, Cyr, the issue of personal responsibility for pregnancy post Holy Ghost seems to be a bit dubious. | |
| Yeah, well, I think there is just a general, and I don't think that this is a feminist invented thing. | |
| I've done entire sort of analyses On this phenomenon, it's not a feminist invention that we transfer responsibility, that we offload responsibility from women for their own actions, right, and on to the nearest available man. | |
| And if there isn't a man around, right, we have this handy-dandy boogeyman now named Patriarchy, and so we can blame that. | |
| And, you know, this is sort of an age-old It's a psychological phenomenon. | |
| It's been around forever, right? | |
| Look at coverture laws, right? | |
| Men were held responsible for their wives' criminal behavior. | |
| She was not seen as responsible because vagina. | |
| And, you know, like... | |
| So, I mean, like, you have all of these things that have been going on forever, and feminism has really... | |
| Prided itself on dismantling all of these old traditional ways of thinking when in reality they are perpetuating them and they're exploiting them and they're manipulating the public's natural inclination to see things that way. | |
| You even see this with domestic violence. | |
| Our natural inclination up to the domestic violence movement probably was if you saw a woman hitting a man. | |
| The first thought that would pop into your head would generally be, I wonder what he did to deserve that. | |
| He must have done something, because she can't actually act just out of her own desire to act or her own volition. | |
| Her actions have to be justified or excused or have a reason, have a cause outside of herself, because otherwise she'd be responsible for that. | |
| What the domestic violence movement and the Duluth model, the patriarchal terrorism model did, was it basically enshrined that in policy and law. | |
| You can read, I read one study, it was a feminist study, where in the tables it listed as for motivations for why you're hitting. | |
| 8% of men who hit said they hit in self-defense and 7% of women who hit said they hit in self-defense. | |
| But in the results section or the discussion section, it says, you know, while women generally hit only in self-defense, men tend to hit to coerce or control their partner and dominate their partner. | |
| So, I mean, they're taking data from their own tables and kind of changing it and twisting it or completely ignoring it. | |
| Oh, my God. | |
| Yeah, no, I mean, I see this everywhere. | |
| I mean, when I was doing research on women's role in the cycle of violence, because there's this belief that men just sort of grow up hating women because patriarchy, right? | |
| As opposed to a study that I had a psychologist on the show recently, a study came out which showed that women were hitting their children 900 times. | |
| Plus times every year. | |
| One thing that could occur is if you're a little boy, and of course it's terrible for little girls as well, but if you're a little boy being repeatedly fundamentally battered by your mother, then you might grow up with having some resentment towards women. | |
| But every time I see this, so you see domestic violence conversations, particularly in sociology, and, you know, men hit because evil, because patriarchy, and so on. | |
| But whenever we talk about women hitting, either in domestic violence situations or against children, which is far more egregious, then the excuses come pouring out. | |
| Well, they're stressed, they're worried, they're upset. | |
| Because patriarchy, evil, but women are like, the excuses come flowing out. | |
| And it's a very hard thing to look at women's role in the cycle of violence. | |
| Well, it really is. | |
| And, and what, what's so frustrating to me, cause I was watching, it was, it was a BBC documentary, uh, that was aired. | |
| It was, it was a while ago. | |
| Um, but they interviewed some, uh, feminist, uh, she's sort of, uh, she's for years, she studied the hacker community, right? | |
| And it's about online trolling and things like this. | |
| And, uh, And misogyny online, because trolling men is just trolling, but trolling women is misogyny. | |
| But she actually came out and said the problem is that men have been raised to hate women. | |
| By who? | |
| Who raised them? | |
| I'm thinking to myself, do you even realize what you're saying? | |
| If men are being raised and enculturated and socialized to hate women, the entire first 10 years of their lives are dominated by women. | |
| Sometimes they may not encounter an adult male role model in a position of authority other than the principal of the school. | |
| If you're a decent kid, you won't interact with much at all. | |
| But you might not encounter your first male teacher until you're in high school. | |
| How can she say that and yet somehow there's no culpability on the part of women. | |
| There's no culpability on the part of mothers, of daycare workers, of elementary school teachers, of all of the women that control pretty much every aspect of a child's life. | |
| How can she... | |
| Like, misogynists are not born. | |
| They are made. | |
| But who are they made by? | |
| Yeah, I mean, it's... | |
| When I was growing up, and I grew up with a single mom, my friends were all, you know, we were on the sort of low-rent single mom farm because I was part of sort of the wave of divorces in the 70s. | |
| And so, yeah, we grew up single moms. | |
| The teachers were all women and so on. | |
| And I, you know, by the time I got to sort of my early teens and began to hear about patriarchy, I was literally baffled. | |
| I was like... | |
| Wait, I have this superpower I didn't even know about? | |
| I could just command women and they'll do what I say because penis? | |
| I mean, it never seemed to work. | |
| I just remember thinking, it's just like terrible. | |
| It was just one of these awful things. | |
| It was like, wait, I can fly? | |
| Let me try jumping off this building. | |
| I mean, it just doesn't make any sense to me. | |
| Well, and, you know, like they've done some research and they've found that sexist attitudes, children learn sexist attitudes primarily from their mothers. | |
| Well, of course they do. | |
| They learn everything about life, primarily from their mothers. | |
| You know, like, fathers, if you have an involved father, if you're very lucky, you learn a lot of other stuff about life from your dad. | |
| But if you are, you know, the child of a single parent, if you are, you know, if your dad is a primary breadwinner or a sole breadwinner, and he's only home two hours a day while you're awake through childhood, You're just not going to be learning a whole lot about, you know, like the learning by osmosis that kids do just through observation and interaction with other people. | |
| You know, you're learning all of those things from your mom, right? | |
| And your daycare worker and your school teachers. | |
| So... | |
| Well, and I, you know, again, growing up in a single mom household, there were lots of men who were flocking around my mom. | |
| She was very attractive. | |
| Lots of men flocking around my mom, taking her out for dinners, taking her to the theater, taking her to movies and so on. | |
| And so I saw men in a sort of supplicating role. | |
| Basically, bribing for sex was the basic equation. | |
| And just all circling around her. | |
| I'm not a very high quality woman, to say the least in my opinion. | |
| But they're all circling around her. | |
| So sort of my model for men was, okay, so you kind of throw resources at a woman in the hopes of sleeping with her. | |
| Again, I wouldn't say the highest quality men either. | |
| But this idea that then somehow it's a patriarchy was just shocking to me. | |
| I mean, whoever gets the ring is kind of in control. | |
| And when I talk to people on my show, if they've had bad problems with their families, and they say, well, my dad was this terrible guy, but my mom, you know, put up with it or suffered through it or whatever. | |
| And I have to keep reminding them that the woman chose to marry him and probably had the choice of more than one suitor. | |
| And it's responsible for a lot of what happens afterwards. | |
| But women take all this choice in society and want the ring and want the dinners and so on, and then play victims if their choices don't work out. | |
| And that just seems foreign to me fundamentally. | |
| Yeah, you know, like, it's a difficult thing. | |
| I mean, the thing is, like, there's room to make mistakes, and there's room to make a bad decision and learn from it. | |
| That's the thing. | |
| You know, you can't learn from it until you own the fact that that was your choice. | |
| But, I mean, taking responsibility, again, I've sort of discussed... | |
| This in-depth, you know, in several videos and all of that. | |
| Like, women are, I think, biologically programmed, if they can, to avoid negative consequences or avoid taking the negative consequences and avoid obligations and avoid costs and avoid risks and all of these things. | |
| So, I mean, like, they're happy to take credit when something awesome happens, right? | |
| But they really don't want the blame. | |
| And you see this constantly when you're arguing with feminists. | |
| When women got the vote, that was a victory for all of feminism, right? | |
| And when Erin Pizzi, who wasn't even a feminist, opened the world's first battered women's shelter, right? | |
| That was the start of a victory for all of feminism. | |
| So they'll even take credit for things they didn't do. | |
| But when it comes to the negative impacts, oh, feminism isn't a monolith, right? | |
| Not all feminists are like that. | |
| There's a million different kinds of feminism, right? | |
| Or there's a million different ways to be a feminist, right? | |
| Duck blame, duck blame, whatever you do, just run, run, right? | |
| Because here comes the blame, and nobody wants to take it. | |
| Nobody wants to have it stick to them. | |
| And this is a uniquely female... | |
| I think behavior, this extreme, extreme... | |
| I mean, nobody likes to take the blame for something. | |
| Nobody likes to be criticized, right? | |
| But this extreme avoidance of any of that, right? | |
| It's... | |
| yeah. | |
| And it's so frustrating. | |
| You know, I mean, you have a daughter, I have a daughter, and one of the things that is really kind of uniquely terrifying for me as a parent is the degree to which my daughter is going to be launched into a society that is going to make up excuses ad infinitum, ad nauseam, for any negative decisions she might make. | |
| You know, after all my careful parenting and responsibility and ownership and not evading The consequences of one's actions. | |
| She's going to go out into the world with a massive Greek chorus of excuses and avoidance. | |
| And that's one of the reasons I need to sort of build her up so strong because society is going to kind of erode her down and say that she's not responsible and she's a victim and so on. | |
| And boy, you know, after 150 years of feminism, we sure hope that some of this victimhood could at least have been cured by now. | |
| And And with all the power that women have in voting and property rights and contract and family law and preferential policies and affirmative action, you'd think that by now some of this victimhood might have been blunted, but I guess it's the engine that makes the state money flow, so it's kind of hard to disregard. | |
| But it's a horrible thing to launch a child into a society that will tell her she's a blameless victim her whole life. | |
| I mean, that's such an erosion of autonomy that it's really scary. | |
| Yeah, well, I mean, and I thought it was hilarious because Gloria Steinem was interviewed not that long ago. | |
| I forget who she was interviewed by, but... | |
| Jennifer Aniston? | |
| Do I have that right? | |
| Did Jennifer Aniston interview? | |
| I read something. | |
| I think she was interviewed by Jennifer Aniston in sort of her peak of her intellectual career. | |
| But anyway, it doesn't really hugely matter. | |
| The interviewer asked her, well, you know, would you say that women are... | |
| Feeling more oppressed than ever. | |
| And Gloria Steinem says, yes. | |
| Yes, they are feeling more oppressed, and justifiably so. | |
| They have good reason. | |
| And I'm thinking, so basically you've declared feminism a unilateral and catastrophic failure, right, in that statement, because after 50 years of feminism, if women are more oppressed, right, because if women are feeling more oppressed with good reason, And it's because they're more... | |
| And then, of course, her solution, more feminism, right? | |
| Because, yeah, the whole... | |
| Definition of stupidity thing doesn't seem to apply to feminists. | |
| Oh, Karen, you know, this is a government program. | |
| Like all government programs, the problem gets worse, which justifies more funding. | |
| You know, like apparently we need more funding for education now, even though in some places in the U.S. it's close to $20,000 per year per student being spent. | |
| This stuff doesn't work. | |
| And after trillions and trillions of dollars have been poured into, you know, I've read good studies that say that the growth of the welfare state is the growth of the single mother population. | |
| I mean, more money has been poured at feminism than most of humanity had throughout most of its history. | |
| And if the result of that massive amount of resource thievery and movement, Is that women feel more oppressed than ever, then clearly we should be doing the opposite of whatever we've been doing, you know. | |
| My smoking cure for lung cancer doesn't seem to be helping, so maybe we should stop smoking. | |
| But, you know, that's not going to happen because you say whatever you can to get more money and power, usually. | |
| Well, I mean, it's, you know, and going on the entire, you know... | |
| The idea of our daughters being surrounded by this, you're blameless, it's not your responsibility, it's not your fault. | |
| Anything that happens to you, you're just a victim and there was nothing you could do. | |
| Making excuses. | |
| My daughter, I catch her doing that. | |
| I don't stand for it. | |
| But here's the thing, kids of both sexes will do that. | |
| I mean, literally, kids will lie like a rug if it means somebody else's neck is going in the news. | |
| You know, who did this? | |
| Oh, it was him! | |
| Right? | |
| My invisible friend stole the candy bar! | |
| Right. | |
| I had to eat it because his teeth are new. | |
| You know, like, kids don't need to be taught even more to avoid responsibility for their actions. | |
| And yet, you know, you just see this. | |
| And, you know, I was watching some clips... | |
| from the White Privilege Conference and having a big national conference of educators and policymakers and stuff all converging to discuss white privilege and how they're bringing it into elementary school classrooms. | |
| Arguably, yes, life is easier for white people, right? | |
| Just sort of It's not quite as difficult based, you know, all other things being equal, if you're white than if you're black. | |
| Skype for it. | |
| Sorry, Karen, if you could just take it up from the white privileged man's conference. | |
| I just, you know, like they had, they showed video clips of these little eight-year-old kids talking about white privilege in the classroom and kids at that age really don't have the cognitive abilities to They tend to think in, ironically, sort of black-white ways. | |
| And if this person is being harmed because they're not white, then that means I'm the villain. | |
| This is sort of how kids will interpret it in a very simplistic way. | |
| So, you know, like introducing concepts like that at that early age, that just seems like a recipe for... | |
| It's basically a way to indoctrinate Students into feeling guilty because they're white. | |
| Well, and I'm, you know, I'm personally, I'm happy to take on the mantle of white privilege and make my abasements and amendments thereby. | |
| But my sort of concern is that when people slough off responsibility to an other group, then they, to the degree that they do that, there is a tendency for them to work less hard at fixing problems within their own group. | |
| So I'm certainly happy to take on white privilege. | |
| But, you know, first and foremost, you know, minority communities need to They need to be hitting their children less. | |
| They need to have more commitments to education and rationality. | |
| As an atheist, I would assume that they would need to be a little bit less religious since I think that is kind of harmful to critical thinking. | |
| So there's a long way for minority groups to go. | |
| Less criminality and less violence and so on. | |
| That can't all be put at the feet of the terrible white men. | |
| Usually white men, I guess, and white women if it's white privilege. | |
| So, yeah, my concern would be, okay, yeah, you know, blame white men. | |
| I do too. | |
| You know, a lot of history is terrible things were done by white men. | |
| But, you know, the important thing is say, okay, well, if that's the case, then we better really up our game to sort of bring ourself up to the same level. | |
| And my concern is that the blame game ends up without the self-reform reality that is really the only way to progress. | |
| This is really it. | |
| It basically says to people that you don't need to, you know, you shouldn't have to work harder than that other guy to get the things that he has, right? | |
| Because everything should be equal right from the get-go. | |
| And, I mean, like, my boyfriend's dealing with this in trying to get a job. | |
| I mean, he's in a field where most of the people who are recent graduates, they get a job through their families. | |
| They have an uncle who works here or they have, you know, they even have like a big display of, you know, the family trees of all the people who have gone to that university and taken these courses, right? | |
| You know, like it's just, it's like a pay-in to nepotism, right? | |
| And so you just, you look at it and he doesn't have those family connections. | |
| He doesn't have any of that head start. | |
| He's going to have to work a lot harder. | |
| And yeah, he sometimes bitches and moans about it, right? | |
| Mostly he bitches and moans that nobody's willing to admit that they got their job through their uncle. | |
| They want to think that it's perfect meritocracy, right? | |
| No, they got there entirely on their own. | |
| But on the other hand, you know, You just have to, you know, you have your little bit of a moan and then you get to work, right? | |
| Yeah, well, blame is relief. | |
| Sorry to interrupt. | |
| Blame is relief plus helplessness. | |
| And that is the great challenge. | |
| Sorry to interrupt. | |
| Go ahead. | |
| No, no. | |
| I was pretty much done. | |
| But, yeah, no, it's a really difficult thing because, you know, you're caught between acknowledging that there is an issue, right? | |
| And you have to acknowledge that there is an issue. | |
| Just like... | |
| with male privilege You know, and female disadvantage, yes, that is an issue. | |
| There's also the issue of female privilege and male disadvantage. | |
| It doesn't quite work the way it does with sort of a tribalistic thing like race, because men and women have always had a sort of balancing set of advantages and disadvantages, privileges and obligations, all through history, right? | |
| There has to be some kind of acknowledgement of that But, you know, there really has to just be an acceptance that, okay, this is the way it is, at least for now. | |
| Let's get on with it. | |
| And the only person that I can control is me, right? | |
| Margaret Thatcher didn't get where she was by pissing and moaning about male privilege and the old boys club and all of that other stuff, right? | |
| And she didn't get where she got by... | |
| Blaming other people because it's harder to get where she got if you're a woman, right? | |
| So I just, it's just excuse making. | |
| It's just, you know, it's not helpful. | |
| It's not healthy for people. | |
| So... | |
| Yeah, I mean, there's little greater contempt that you can have for any class of people than to remove their agency in your mind or to tell them that they're less responsible than other people or they can't get ahead because, you know, that is a terrible old-time, like, disturb-the-mummy's-tomb kind of gypsy curse to put on an entire segment. | |
| And when segments are disadvantaged in society, it gives them relief because it takes, you know, okay, so it's not me or whatever. | |
| And of course, to some degree, there's truth in that. | |
| But the reality is that I think it's an incredibly destructive thing to do to an entire group of people to strip away their moral agency, to give them not just the temporary relief of blame, but the permanent morpheme drip of helplessness. | |
| It really becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, which I think is loathsome for women, for minorities, for natives and for every group. | |
| Well, one of the interesting things with feminists is this idea of victim-blaming, that you can't victim-blame, which I suppose is correct. | |
| I mean, you can't really go up to a rape victim and say, it's your fault you were raped, you obviously were asking for it. | |
| But that's not all that they describe as victim blaming. | |
| Victim blaming is, you know, you have preemptive victim blaming where you're saying, you know, I don't think you should stay at this party. | |
| I don't think you should drink so much. | |
| You know, if you want to stay safe, you should do this and this and this, right? | |
| And maybe don't go home with that guy on one night's acquaintance, right? | |
| That you should behave in ways that minimize your risk of being victimized. | |
| That is also what they call victim blaming. | |
| And one of the things about trauma response, whenever anything bad happens to a person that is very, very traumatic, emotionally traumatic, one of the things that they will do, their brain will immediately start to do this once they realize that they're safe, again, is figure out what they did leading up to that. | |
| If there was anything that they did That contributed to the situation in which that happened. | |
| So if I'm walking in the woods and I'm letting my kids, my young kids, run up way ahead on the path and one of them gets picked up by a cougar, once that whole huge turmoil is calming down, I will immediately be telling myself I should never have let my kid run up ahead on the path. | |
| Am I blaming myself? | |
| Yes! | |
| But this is a survival strategy. | |
| This is what your brain makes you do so you can learn a lesson so it won't happen again. | |
| And one of the interesting things is I think that the people who have the most trouble processing a traumatic event or getting over or getting past it or moving on, The trauma was the equivalent of being struck by lightning while sitting in their living room on a clear day. | |
| You can never keep yourself safe in the future, so your flight mechanism never diminishes, really. | |
| That's right. | |
| As far as I'm concerned, the cruelest thing you can say to somebody who's been traumatized, you don't have to say anything at all in regard to what they did or didn't do, but the cruelest thing you can say is there's nothing you could have done. | |
| Because that just tells them there's nothing you can ever do to keep it from happening again. | |
| This is what feminists seem to want to do to female victims of trauma, female victims of rape, female victims of domestic violence. | |
| It was never your fault. | |
| Nothing you did led to that happening. | |
| It's almost like they really want to... | |
| Alison Tiemann, she blogs under the name Typhon Blue, She once described it as keeping victims in a pen so that people can look in at these victims that are still victims. | |
| They'll always be victims because they're being kept there by the rhetoric of feminism. | |
| They will never get over it. | |
| They're there for show. | |
| They're there to be paraded out when it's time to change legislation. | |
| If they actually ever healed, They wouldn't be as useful to the feminist movement as if they're kept in a state of perpetual victimhood. | |
| And that is probably one of the cruelest things that I think feminism does. | |
| And the same thing happens with government programs. | |
| Whoever is supposed to benefit from the government programs can be viewed as a kind of crop that you need to keep watering and replanting so that you can continue to maintain your income as a farmer. | |
| And it is a form of livestock management. | |
| It's pretty chilling. | |
| Now, Karen, I've heard tell, and it may even have been from your lips themselves, I've heard tell that you may be working on a book. | |
| Is this true? | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| Define working. | |
| Thinking about mulling over the possible construction of, arranging the table of contents in your mind, whatever it is. | |
| I'm sort of getting an outline done. | |
| You know, it's a really difficult thing to approach because there's just so much there. | |
| It might end up having to be more than one book, but there's just a huge, huge amount of ground to cover if it's going to be an introductory sort of for everybody rather than preaching to the choir. | |
| Or, you know, or educating those who already know. | |
| So, yeah, it's kind of a daunting thought. | |
| I mean, back when I was writing fiction, I would just start. | |
| I would just think of a couple characters, think of a scene, and start. | |
| And I didn't have to outline anything. | |
| I didn't write a synopsis. | |
| I didn't even know how the book was going to end. | |
| Sometimes I didn't know who the villain was until three-quarters of the way through it, right? | |
| So it just was an organic process. | |
| And this is just a little bit more regimented. | |
| See, you're just overthinking it. | |
| All you need to do is pay some South Korean service to transcribe your videos, put them together as chapters and call it a book. | |
| Take some donations. | |
| That's my approach. | |
| Actually, yeah, maybe I'll do that. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I don't know. | |
| It's hard to say. | |
| I do want it to be sort of a comprehensive book that goes from one subject coherently, you know, a little bit less a series of essays, a little bit more sort of an overview of everything that I think is going on. | |
| So, but yeah. | |
| Well, I certainly wish you the best. | |
| I know that going from... | |
| Particularly with non-fiction, I think I've done seven or eight, going from sort of the blank page to the finished product, especially when you're working, as I've done, on a series of books on voluntarism and so on. | |
| Yeah, it's a huge challenge. | |
| And of course, right in the middle of renovations, right in the middle of working, as you said, 80 hours a week when your boyfriend is looking for work, it's a lot to take on. | |
| But, you know, I certainly would eagerly await to get a copy. | |
| I've always really enjoyed your writing and your clarity of thought and exposition is Delightful. | |
| And there's not many who can surpass you in the explication of these issues. | |
| So, you know, when you get round to it, I will certainly be first in line to get a copy. | |
| Now, so you do have, of course, it's youtube.com slash girlwriteswhat. | |
| Highly recommended to check out your channel. | |
| And you're speaking, of course, as we talked about, we're speaking June 26th to 28th, 2014. | |
| Are you there for the conference as a whole? | |
| Are you going to bungee in and out? | |
| Oh no, I never bungee in and out. | |
| There's just way too much hanging out and partying and drinking to do. | |
| Excellent. | |
| All right, so you'll be there now. | |
| Do you have any other things going on over the next little while that people should know about? | |
| There's tentatively scheduled a conference at a university at Kennesaw State University that I've been invited to, but the details all have to be hashed out with that. | |
| I think that's going to be happening in November. | |
| And other than that, nothing really on my slate. | |
| I've sort of had a busy first little bit of the year with speaking and appearances, some spur-of-the-moment things that happened here in town. | |
| And that was actually really cool. | |
| It was a freedom school conference put on by a former member of the Wild Rose Party here in Alberta. | |
| And I was just sort of invited the night before to talk on a panel about political correctness alongside Janice Fiamengo, which was awesome. | |
| It was awesome to meet her. | |
| So, I mean, I've been doing stuff like that. | |
| Staying involved with Men's Rights Edmonton as much as I can, but yeah, a lot of working and No more things really in the foreseeable future. | |
| No more events. | |
| It's a lot of work, particularly when you have kids. | |
| I've yet to give a speech where I'm not tired from something or another. | |
| I certainly look forward to sitting down. | |
| Hopefully we can have a drink in Detroit. | |
| I really want to recommend Again, it's youtube.com slash a girl writes what. | |
| And you should just check out her speeches, if nothing else. | |
| I mean, certainly the essays are great. | |
| Speeches and the Q&A is fantastic. | |
| But thanks again so much. | |
| I think for your third time on the show, it's always a great pleasure. | |
| And I look forward to seeing you in Toronto. | |
| Oh, no, in Detroit. | |
| What am I talking about, Toronto? | |
| In Detroit. | |
| Sorry about that. | |
| All right. | |
| Thank you very much for having me. |