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Oct. 6, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
23:49
2813 Gone Girl: Battle of the Sexes!

Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio unravels the complex gender roles and conflicts behind the smash movie 'Gone Girl.'

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyne from Freedom Main Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
So this is the philosophical review of the new film by the director of Seven and Fight Club, Fight Club being one of my favorite movies of all time, which is called Gone Girl.
And there are going to be some spoilers in this, so if you haven't seen the movie, you might want to go and do that before listening to the rest of this.
So...
The writer of the novel that the movie is based on, who also adapted the screenplay, wrote that she said, what I've always been interested in portraying is the particularly female brand of psychological violence, which is very different from the male, and scarier, I think, often.
And this is well explored in the film, women's capacity for violence and destruction, particularly using institutions.
In other words, there's a certain kind of female aggression That relies upon calling the cops, or relies upon framing, or relies upon family court, and so on.
The use of institutions.
Now, the institutions are very often filled with what some people call white knights.
And white knights are a species of men, and to some degree women, who, whenever they see a woman in distress, say...
They ride over the hill in their armor and their armored horses quite often and come to the Roman's rescue.
And of course, a lot of women know this who have malevolent intentions and therefore will continually portray themselves as victims and thus trigger the white knight response where men come in to save the women.
And this, of course, is what the protagonist says to the woman.
I've come to save you at the very beginning.
So there's a very interesting moment.
I'll show you a picture of this.
So, Nick is played by Ben Affleck, and he goes to the Bar of Leons.
We find out that he's chatting with his sister.
His sister is wearing a t-shirt, right?
This t-shirt.
And the t-shirt, as you can see, this is for the people just listening to the audio, has a picture of a squirrel with a bat protecting his nuts.
And underneath it says, protect your nuts.
Now this, I think, would have been my title for the film, Protect Your Nuts, because it really is a lesson to men and to women about the dangers of shallow sexual attraction and how that eats out a relationship from the inside.
Relationships that are based on sexual lusts As their primary fuel, particularly if they lead all the way to marriage, hollow out and eat themselves out and collapse in on themselves to usually incredibly destructive effect.
Obviously, this is pretty exaggerated in the movie, but I think that's one of the lessons.
So Protect Your Nuts is a great t-shirt because A, it's saying to men, here's some indicators of how dangerous some kinds of women can be.
So Protect Your Nuts.
But also, it has a double meaning.
Maybe more than two, but the two I think that are most important.
One, protect your balls, keep yourself safe from predatory women.
The second is, society protects its nuts.
And protect your nuts is sort of the commandment of the white knights, particularly if the nuts are attractive females.
So protect your crazy people, protect your nuts is one of the things that you see happening over and over again in the movie, that people rush to the defense of the wife and attack the man.
So, Amy starts off as very attractive and with a calculated air of flirtatious And enigmatic, flirtatious and enigmatic personality.
So at the beginning, Nick goes up and says, who are you?
And she says, well, I'm someone who works with their hands, and I'm a middle-sized medium warlord, and I'm someone who writes personality profiles for women's magazines.
And he's like, well, your hands are too delicate for manual labor.
I subscribe to Medium Warlords Monthly, so I would have recognized you, so you must be this.
That's a very...
Flirtatious and enigmatic and disruptive way to start a conversation.
Like, I can't imagine in a business meeting I've ever introduced myself as one of three possibilities that you have to guess.
I mean, that would be kind of nuts, right?
So, there's this kind of empty, kind of enigmatic, very flirtatious beginning to their relationship.
Which begs the question, why does Nick love Amy?
Now, in my philosophy show, Freedom Aid Radio, I talk about love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we are virtuous.
It's how we feel about someone who exhibits moral courage, who has legitimate pride for virtuous actions, who fights evildoers and aids the innocent victims of those evildoers, who encourages other people to be good, who takes a moral stand.
You think of abolitionists in the 19th century.
They were brave and courageous, faced a lot of social hatred for advancing the moral course.
So if we see people who have moral courage and we ourselves are moral, we will feel involuntarily love for them.
Now, that's sort of at a sort of very Aristotelian abstract philosophical level.
There is, of course, however, the biological level.
At which point are naughty bits, like other people's naughty bits, for the well-formed naughty bit creation of children that they can produce.
So, you know, even features and a hip-to-waist ratio that indicates fertility for the men being slightly older, usually having access to resources.
So there's a very monkey-lizard-brain biological impulse that, let's just say, hopefully complements our sort of abstract desire for people.
But there's no particular virtues that either of these people Have.
I mean, they can banter.
They're a little bit witty.
So what?
What does it mean anything?
There's no foundation for...
So sexual attraction...
And this is so well known that it's almost embarrassing to repeat, but it's something that people really continually seem to need to be reminded of.
Sexual attraction is a terrible basis for a relationship.
And you hear people sort of, well, I didn't feel the spark, you know?
You know what often comes after a spark?
Something that burns down your entire life.
So, everyone's looking for a spark.
Of course, we all know I'm 48 years old, and we all know that...
Our sexual attractiveness is going to decline over time, particularly true for women, because, of course, they start running out of fertility in their late 20s, early 30s.
And by the time they're in the mid to late 30s, it's very much reduced.
By the time they get into the early 40s, it's kind of risky to have kids.
So a woman's fertility peaks and then declines.
But a man's sexual value continues to increase over time as he gains more and more resources.
And this is something I haven't seen.
I did read a couple of other reviews.
I haven't really seen this talked about with regards to this film, but...
One of the things that we can see happening in the movie is that Amy is played by an actress, a good actress, and she's 35.
I think Ben Affleck is in his early 40s.
So the woman is 35, and Ben Affleck wants to divorce her, and he's got a mistress, and his mistress is half his age, right?
He's 42.
At least Ben Affleck is 42.
I don't think the character's...
Ben Affleck is 42, and the woman he's dating is 21.
So the woman is half his age.
And she was one of the dancers in the Blurred Lines video from last summer and has a few assets that may not be as much Aristotelian as they are squirt inducing.
So not necessarily virtue that he's attracted to, but youth and fertility.
So to some degree, I would characterize this movie as obviously a very exaggerated reaction of a woman who has hit the wall in terms of physical attractiveness.
And, you know, when you see her bravely played by the actress in the movie for quite some time without makeup, it's quite a different look.
And so she's 35.
Her husband wants to divorce her.
Now, what happens if a 35-year-old woman is dumped back out onto the dating market?
Well, any sensible man is not going to want to date a woman who's just been divorced, is going to wait for a little while, by which time she's in her sort of mid-37, 38, 39 years old, in which case men who want to have children are not really going to want to date her.
So she has no money.
She's stuck in a town that she doesn't want to be in.
They had to leave New York because of the recession.
They both lost their jobs.
So this woman...
Amy, 35 years old, about to be dumped by her husband for a younger woman who is sexually, you know, perfect if you're into that kind of young fertility thing.
So, this is sort of the rage of a woman who used her own sexual attraction when she was younger, right?
You live by the makeup, you die by the makeup, right?
If you use sexual attraction, then when your husband then finds another woman more sexually attractive, this brings up a lot of rage in some women, right?
But you know that's coming.
This is how biology works.
Men continue to get more attractive as they age, in general, you know, overall.
Whereas women peak and decline.
A man's 40s is like a woman's early 20s when it comes to sexual desirability, you know, if he takes reasonable care of himself and has a decent career and so on.
And so this message, which I think is really important, is kind of obscured because of the histrionics and extreme situations of the film.
But...
It's always worth repeating.
I've said this in my show a million times.
Do not base your marriages on sexual attraction.
You have to really like the person.
You have to imagine this person when they're 80.
You have to imagine how this person is going to be when your child with colic spits up for the third time at night.
Then her great ass isn't going to do you a whole lot of good because it's the baby who needs nurturing and care and you need a partner.
Uh, who's going to get up and do that?
Uh, how, uh, how is the woman, uh, going to be, uh, when she's, uh, if she's going to have kids, right?
If you want to have kids and how's the woman going to be as she ages, how's the woman going to be when she's sick?
How's the woman going to be when you get sick?
How's the woman, right?
And this is true for women as well, right?
It's just that I think women get a little bit more warning about the negative consequences of dating based solely on looks.
So, uh, When it comes to getting married, when it comes to dating, for heaven's sakes, you know, don't get drawn into this.
Also, I mean, there is a challenge.
It's not an absolute rule, but there is in general.
So if she's 35, they've been married for five years, you know, they dated or whatever.
So she was like 29, 28 or 30 or so on when they met.
And here is a beautiful woman who's single and available.
Well, that, of course, is a giant red flag.
And we find out that this woman, Amy, according to the ex-boyfriend, fabricated a rape charge against him and completely destroyed his life.
He hasn't had a job in eight years, hasn't had a date in a decade and so on.
Right.
So and then she ends up framing two men for rape.
She ends up framing her husband for murder.
She is a murderer.
She fakes a pregnancy.
She then sperm jacks Nick to keep him at the end of the movie, a complete and nasty, evil, manipulative witch.
Now, there is some things that it's great to hear these topics being finally emerging This is not a men's rights film, but there are certain elements that I think are really important.
Ben Affleck, when he's going on national television and people think that he's killed his wife, Ben Affleck is all, I guess I just got to portray myself as an idiot, as a fool, as a bumbling moron, because that's all men are supposed to be, right?
And that...
A prejudice is so common in sitcoms and in movies and in commercials and so on that is, at least it's actually being addressed, that there is horrendous, brutal, negative stereotypes of men that men have to throw themselves, the best they can do is throw themselves on the pity of people by conforming to the male stereotype of being a bumbling fool and so on.
There is a Kind of a chilling moment.
According to the diary, which turns out to be faked, Nick is supposed to have pushed his wife and her head hit a banister after she hit him twice, by the way.
And later he pushes her up against a wall after she reveals that she sperm jacked him, that even though he wants to leave her and he doesn't want her to be pregnant and he doesn't even want to be a father, she steals his sperm against his will, against his wishes and impregnates herself, she steals his sperm against his will, against his wishes and impregnates herself, which is, And his sister, who is very engagingly played, his sister says, well, you could get custody.
And he just basically rolls his eyes and says, you and I both know that I won't, even if he imagines everything about his wife is revealed.
Men get custody in about 10% of cases in family court.
And generally, those 10% is composed of women who don't even show up for the hearings.
So they only win in absentia.
So again, that's pointed out.
Prejudice against men is pointed out.
They still significantly in the minority, but life devastating accusations of false rape charges are in there.
The degree to which women, you know, tremble their lips, screw up their eyes and cry, and thus get resources fired at them by white nuts is very much addressed.
In this, and the degree to which women, these kinds of crazy women, are aware of how much in society is dedicated to giving them resources should they cry weakness.
As Dr.
Warren Farrell has pointed out, a man's weakness is his facade of strength, and a woman's strength is her facade of a weakness.
But, so Nick pushes Amy against the wall, and the whole crowd in the theater gasped!
Right?
But...
When she viciously murders and is bathed in the blood of a beta male she kept around in backup, there was no gasp, right?
So, you know, one woman gets pushed against the wall, which is obviously wrong and violent, but a man has his throat cut and bleeds out.
I mean, nobody...
Even really reacted.
And again, I just sort of pointed that out.
I don't know what people's emotional response was.
I found it much more unbearable to see that.
So the last thing I'd sort of mention is that I've not read the book, which is why I don't feel too uncomfortable with spoilers, because spoilers have been out there in this book for a couple of years.
There's this thing about the cool girl.
I sort of end with this, because I think this is another very important point.
I've been blissfully and joyfully married for, I think, 11 years now.
And, you know, we're going all the way to the tombstone together.
And I think I have some, you know, no defining things, but some reasonable things to say about it.
Marriage and how it works.
And my marriage is very easy.
My marriage is not, you know, everybody says, oh, marriage is hard.
It's like, no, crazy people are hard.
You have sane people around you.
You have healthy people around you.
You have people who have a good humor, good sense, and capacity to negotiate and don't fly off the handle, unaddicted to drama.
Marriage is very easy.
But one of the things that the writer has, and this is...
A little cut down in the movie.
But she's got this little speech about being a cool girl.
It goes on for pages in the book, but what is most often quoted is this.
Men always say that is the defining compliment, don't they?
She's a cool girl.
Being the cool girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes and burping.
Who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gangbang while somehow maintaining a size two because cool girls are above all hot.
My God.
The things that men have to listen to Listening to a woman tell us what we like is like listening to a space alien tell us about her lower intestine.
I mean, they just don't know a thing.
So apparently...
To be a cool girl, you have to love football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping.
Because, you know, that's just what men like.
Football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping.
Can you imagine if I said, well, you know what women really want is shoes, shopping, occasional sex, and a man with lots of money?
Okay, I'm sure there's a subset of women who are into that kind of stuff.
Not the deepest women in the world.
Are there men who only want women who adore football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping?
Of course there are.
I mean, there are unibrow, Cro-Manian men with an IQ of 90 who probably like that kind of thing.
But that's not really all men now, is it?
I mean, I think if you wanted to date Christopher Hitchens...
Anyway.
Apparently, also, the cool girl has to play video games, drink cheap beer.
You've got to love threesomes and anal sex.
And jam hot dogs and hamburgers into your mouth, all while maintaining a size 2.
So, this is the list of what is considered desirable by men.
And a more shallow and insulting list of male preferences could scarcely be imagined.
And I've not read a lot of people saying, that is incredibly sexist and hostile to men.
It degrades men.
It denigrates men to say that this is what men are looking for.
Of course, nobody cares.
We're just apes, right?
So the quote goes on.
Hot and understanding.
Cool girls never get angry.
They only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want.
Go ahead.
Shit on me.
I don't mind.
I'm the cool girl.
That's amazing.
Shit on me.
I don't mind.
So is this what men really want?
Is just a shit on women?
Is that what is being portrayed?
Do men somehow really value girls who never get angry?
This is the sociopathic, manipulative, empty witch.
Right?
This kind of person.
When women, like certainly for me and my male friends, like when we hear what women think men like, it's like, have you ever actually really asked a man or are you just going off the stereotypes of sitcoms?
Are you just like, do you have any idea what men really like, what men really value, what men really love, what men really want?
How about asking men once in a while?
A more stereotypical and ball-hating list could scarcely be imagined, I mean, to reduce men to this nonsense.
So one of the motivators apparently for the wife in the movie for Amy's rampages is she feels like frustrated that she has to keep faking.
Well, you know, I hate to shock people, but the consequences of faking early in a relationship is one of two things.
I guess one of three things, three being very rare.
So if you fake things, if you pretend to be someone that you're not early on in a relationship, one of three things is going to happen.
Either the relationship's going to fail because you're going to be unable to maintain the facade.
And even if the person likes who you become when you're faking is down, they won't like being faked, having been lied to and manipulated.
So that's number one, the relationship will end.
Number two, which is even worse, the relationship won't end because you're both faking or because the person prefers you faking or doesn't even notice the difference.
And so then the relationship goes on and on and on.
And then what happens is you get resentful that you have to keep pretending.
But you started pretending and that's the basis of relationship.
Like if I pretend to be a doctor, I got a white coat and go walk around a hospital with a clipboard and authority and I pretend to be a doctor and I go back every day and say I start drawing a paycheck and then I say, I can't believe people expect me to pretend to be a doctor.
It's so confining to me.
It's like, well, but I kind of started the whole charade so I can't really blame other people.
I mean, I can, but that's just even more ridiculous.
Then I'm not just trying to fake other people.
I'm trying to fake myself.
Now, the third possibility is that you drop the act and the person really likes who you are and so on.
But somebody who really likes authenticity can spot a fake like that.
It's one of these thin slicing Malcolm Gladwell, that's a fake piece of art crap.
I can spot phonies from the opposite side of an airplane hangar in the dark when things are on fire.
So, if somebody has the capacity for authentic, true human connection, Then when you start faking and manipulating and fogging and all that kind of stuff and being elusive and evasive and so on, people will notice that right away.
What the hell is the basis for Nick and Amy's relationship?
The only time they go into a bookstore is not to read books.
They never have any intelligent discussion.
They only go into a bookstore to rut, basically, which is also pretty gross.
Hey, man, other people got to use those tables.
You know, everyone's like, when Amy spits into another woman's glass, everyone's like, ah, that's horrible, horrifying, disgusting, right?
But these people are having sex on a table in a bookstore that other people are going to sit at.
And it is nice to see, of course, a woman being downright evil.
It's nice to see gender equity in villains.
That's cool.
It is nice also that when Amy gets robbed, she says to the...
Woman, oh, he put you up to it, right?
Like she has no knowledge of female legal, and the woman says, oh, no, no, no, I put him up to it.
I'm doing it, right?
So this focus, as I've mentioned in many of my shows before, we're really not going to end the cycle of violence until both men and women accept and understand their roles in perpetuating the cycle of violence.
There's still work to do with men, of course.
But the great blank spot in the cycle of violence is women's refusal to accept their capacities for violence.
And it is good to see that explored in this film.
So I definitely would recommend it.
It requires a strong stomach.
I don't think I'll ever be able to watch Doogie Howser in quite the same way again.
Actually, I've never watched a Doogie Howser.
But it's worth watching.
Stay alert throughout the movie, though.
And I think that you will get some very valuable insights into the pretty horrifying state of gender relations at the moment.
But I think it also points a way forward that can be very helpful.
So this is Stefan Molyneux for Freedom Aid Radio.
Please like and share and subscribe and do all of that other kind of YouTube-y goodness to this video.
Thank you so much for watching.
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