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Oct. 19, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:47
2825 Feminism: Unequal Opportunity Nagging

Listener Question: "Feminism is literally defined as the idea that men and women are equal, and yet no facet of feminist media ever actually provides any logical backing to this claim. This does not mean it isn't true, but they aren't justifying it at all. It would be like having an atheist movement filled with people who didn't give any reason for why there is no God. What are your thoughts on this criticism?"

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Hi everybody, this is Femme Olley from Freedom Main Radio.
Question from a listener.
Feminism is literally defined as the idea that men and women are equal, and yet no facet of feminist media ever actually provides any logical backing to this claim.
This does not mean it isn't true, but they aren't justifying it at all.
It would be like having an atheist movement filled with people who don't give any reason for why there is no God.
What are your thoughts on this criticism?
Well, again, first of all, of course, feminism is a big topic, and you can find a wide variety of feminist thinkers.
So I realize that in responding to this, I'm going to be painting with a broad brush, but I'm going to sort of focus on statist feminism in this.
Now, the question of equality is a very interesting one, because I question the degree to which it's even an important question without a government.
Without a government, what does equality mean?
Well, of course, there are two ways that the word equality is used.
One is equality of opportunity, and the other is equality of outcome.
And these two are virtually...
As diametrically opposite as any two things can be.
Equality of opportunity is there should be no forceful impediments to the peaceful activities of human beings, of adults.
Of children too, but...
So women should not be barred from entering into contracts.
Women should not be barred from owning property.
Women should not be barred from any particular professions and all that, right?
And without a state, without a government, how could you possibly bar women from any particular profession?
Let's say you thought women should never be engineers.
Well, I guess if you wanted, you could hire, like you could start an engineering company, you could not hire any women.
I guess that would, in a tiny way, reduce the demand for female engineers, but no, you couldn't possibly bar women from entering any particular profession.
Let's say you didn't want women to own property, but I guess you could make a bunch of houses and refuse to sell them to women.
But so what?
What if the people you sold them to sold them to women?
You can't really do much to prevent that.
You can enact your own private sexism or prejudice in your own private sphere, but But you cannot bar the rights of other people.
Now, you could say, well, what about a society where nobody thought women should own property?
Well, okay.
Not that that would ever happen, because some of those people would be women.
But if everybody denied women the right to own property, then in a government, the government would reflect the will of the people and it wouldn't happen anyway.
So...
When it comes to equality of opportunity, those opportunities can only fundamentally be denied through the government.
It was governments that enforced segregation.
It was not private businesses that were able to universally enforce segregation between blacks and whites.
In the South, it was governments that enforced slavery by socializing the cost of capturing and returning slaves and upholding the contracts of slave owners and slave sellers.
So equality of opportunity is the natural order of things, with, again, a few exceptions.
Most people don't mind if children come and get a ball that's landed on their lawn, but there are a few tight-suspended, checkered-shirt boo-radleys in the population who are like, kids, get off my lawn, you know?
So equality of opportunity is in a free society, like in a stateless society, that's just the natural order of things.
And this, of course, is one of the great tragedies of feminism, at least the degree to which feminism stays true to its largely Marxist and socialist origins.
Is that to the degree to which women were oppressed throughout history, it was governments that oppressed them.
And after universal male suffrage, the next thing that happened was universal female suffrage, which resulted in the most pretty man always being elected president.
A topic for another time, perhaps.
So equality of opportunity is the natural order of things.
It certainly does not need a government to enforce it.
If the government stays out of the way, then people don't have the power to exclude women and prevent women and hold women back and so on.
If you don't want women to get higher education, I... I guess you can go start a college and not let women in and so on.
You know, fine.
It's alright.
There were women's clubs in my college that didn't allow men.
No problem there, right?
So, of course, the removal of legal impediments to women's equality was the original somewhat stated goal of both the civil rights movement and of the feminist movement, right?
Let's get these legal impediments to our people, our gender, out of the way, and then we're done.
But of course, whenever there's a government, the revolution never ends, because people make it their job, their career, their occupation, their calling to continue this revolution.
And so they begin by fighting against legal discrimination through the state, and they end up by fighting against biology, which never works.
And let me sort of explain what that means.
So, feminism, when it promoted legal equality between men and women, yeah, I mean, I'm not a statist, but at least that's consistent and fair.
But women...
In general, as a whole, most women have children.
And women cannot compete in the marketplace with men because men don't have children.
Men don't breastfeed.
And this sort of fundamental fact, it results from...
Equality of opportunity.
It is a biological fact.
I'm sure it's part of the patriarchy because a male god designed us all.
But it is a biological fact that women get pregnant, have babies, and if they're even remotely interested in being decent moms, stay home with those babies for at least 12 to 18 months to breastfeed.
I think World Health Organization recommends 18 months of breastfeeding.
And they get up at night to take care of the babies and all of this wild, amazing, wonderful, beautiful maternal stuff that happens.
That's what they do.
And so generally they have a baby and generally they'll have another baby.
And after they stop breastfeeding, if they want the kids to be reasonably close in age, you know, less than three years...
Then they will start trying to have another baby which has them pregnant and still taking care of an infant and thus pretty much unfit for a goodly amount of productive labor.
Then they have another baby and then they are breastfeeding for another 18 months and getting up and taking care of the babies.
But now there's two I mean, it's a staggering amount of work.
You know, I didn't even do as much as my wife does.
I've been a stay-at-home dad for like almost six years.
And I mean, it's truly a staggering, staggering amount of work.
Now, when a woman decides she wants to have children, right?
I mean, responsible women and men make the choice to have children.
And when a woman decides to have children, I mean, it can take 6 to 12 months to become pregnant.
And, of course, if you get married and you know you want to have children, In the long run, then, you know, most people have children within a couple of years of getting married.
And then the woman is going to take, you know, five years at a minimum off from the workforce, and then she's going to have a diminished capacity to work afterwards.
All right?
It's just a fact.
Just a fact.
Because she's got kids who get sick and then she has to stay home.
She has childcare challenges, particularly if your husband is ambitious and travels, and so she's less available for travel.
She can't put in the hours.
Because she wants to be a good mom, which means leave work and get home and be with her children.
Can she do a lot of work at nights and on the weekends?
Of course not.
Listen, it's nothing.
I admire and respect it.
I do.
And when I was a manager, not absolutely, but very much in general, you could see the air shadows left by the women who vanished at five o'clock.
And then the young men would sit around and we'd play some unreal tournament and we'd fight around.
We might go for dinner.
We'd bond.
We'd come back, do some work and all that.
And this was true to some degree of the men as well.
But the women had to leave.
They had to go pick up their kids, and good, that's what they should be doing.
Of course they should.
For the young guys, it was like, hey, want to go to California for the week?
Young guys were like, yeah, fantastic.
And the young, sort of unmarried women, yes, fantastic.
But the women with kids were like, ooh, I don't really think so, I got kids.
And this is not any kind of criticism, it's simply a statement of economic reality.
When a man gets married, he tends to work harder, and when a man has children, he tends to work harder.
When a woman gets married, she tends to be less available for work if she wants to have children, because she knows in a couple of years she's going to be squeezing out some pups, so she's just not going to be as hard-driven for her career.
She's going to want to come in, she's going to want to get her paycheck, and then she's, you know, why drive, you know, it takes you 10 to 15 years of like seriously hard work to get to management or partner or something like that.
And if you know you're bumping out of the workforce for five years and have a diminished capacity to work after that, why would you put the work in?
I mean, it would make no sense whatsoever.
And so women work less hard if they want to have kids, particularly if they're married.
And again, it's not a criticism in any way, show, or form.
And of course, there are exceptions.
Phyllis Schlafly had like six kids and then became a lawyer in her 50s or something and was voted, what, Illinois Mother of the Year?
I mean, the woman is a powerhouse.
But she had an occupation that, as a writer originally, a choice, not an echo, which allowed her to set her own hours.
And the constant stream of little chores that need to happen when you're a parent.
You take your kids to the dentist.
You've got to go get them their shots.
You've got to pick them up some clothes.
You've got to get them involved in activities.
All these kinds of things.
It's just very time consuming.
Not a lot of moms in World of Warcraft.
At least not young moms.
Now, when the kids go to school, then you have some more opportunity to work, but you've still got to leave to pick them up.
Usually, they've got some after-school care, and then you have to leave.
Five o'clock.
Sweat your way to pick them up at the daycare or wherever they are.
So, I mean, just off the top of my head, to do the very sort of back of the napkin calculations, let's say a woman gets...
Let's just say a woman gets a job and she gets married.
So she knows in two or three years she's going to have kids.
So she's just not going to work to try and bust her way up the ladder because she's about to leave, right?
I mean, she's going to put the work in.
She's not going to be too ambitious.
She's going to be competent.
She's going to be fine.
She's going to be smart.
But it just doesn't make as much sense to grind your way towards partnership, which is going to take far longer than you're going to be constantly in the workforce.
So then, she has her first kid, and she goes, up here in Canada, you get a year of mat leave.
Kind of inconvenient for employers, but that's neither here nor there.
Look, for women who are great, for women who are fantastic workers and really competent, and yeah, I mean, you'll do whatever you can to make it work, because really competent people are hard to get.
But...
She takes her year.
Now, you don't know if she's coming back.
She doesn't have to tell you if she's going to come back or not, or she can come back and put in a month or two or three and then just leave.
So, meanwhile, you've got to train her replacement, and then you've got to let that replacement go or find some other place, not knowing if she's going to stay or not.
And you know that there's one of two possibilities, right?
Either she's going to be a terrible mom and work all the time, which is kind of disturbing and not much fun, like go home, see your kid, heaven's sakes, right?
Or she's going to be a good mom and then be less available to work.
Sorry, ladies.
It's a zero-sum game.
Time you spend at work is not time you're spending with your child, and vice versa.
So, let's just say she wants two kids, and she's going to do what's recommended as healthy for the child in terms of breastfeeding.
And if she's not going to do that, I've got some concerns as an employer, right?
That she's not responsible as a human being to do the right thing by her children, wherever possible.
So then, she has two kids, and she takes them at least to breastfeeding, and you don't know, maybe to school age, right?
Well, now we're talking about a decade, a decade of diminished work just to get the kids to school age.
And even after that, she has diminished work capacities.
Now, 23, 24, 25 years after she's married, her kids are up and grown and so on.
And now, almost a quarter century later, after her first job, she is available for unfettered full-time work.
That's the reality.
And so, in a state of equal opportunity...
Women, economically, don't do as well as men because men don't carry the babies, men don't breastfeed, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
And so, of course, traditionally throughout history, what has happened is women have chosen men for their capacity to provide resources to the women and the children.
They've needed reliable men, steady men, good-natured, smart, generous men.
And if a woman chose wrong, her life was ruined.
Ruined.
If she had two kids with a guy who was beater or drunkard or whatever, right?
Well, she's really in trouble, right?
I mean, she can get a divorce and so on, right?
And then the state can force the man to pay for the kids and so on.
But it's a huge mess, right?
So sperm hunting was like an Olympic sport for women in the past.
Find me some good sperm.
Now, of course, the challenge for women in sperm hunting is that the better the sperm, the better the opportunities for the man to sleep around, right?
I mean, a minority of men get the majority of dates, right?
The more alpha the male, the more attractive the male, the more the woman wants to have his children, but then the more he's going to want to sleep around with other women and have that opportunity, and other women are going to throw themselves at him and so on, right?
So women, you know, would do the sort of regretful compromise thing, right?
Which is, well, you know, he may be a bit of a schlub, he may not be the hottest guy in the known universe, and there's a bad boy with a motorcycle and a six-pack of beer and abs, but I've got to grip my teeth, cross my legs, and not do the Marlon Brando, but instead do the Tony Randall, right?
Oh, I don't know, ask your parents.
So, in a state of equality of opportunity, women, in aggregate, don't make nearly as much money as men.
And this is, I mean, this is well known.
This is why it's illegal to ask a woman if she's married.
This is why it's illegal to ask a woman how old she is.
This is why it's illegal to ask a woman if she plans to have children or has children.
It's illegal.
Because women don't want equality of opportunity in the feminist paradigm.
Women don't want equality of opportunity.
They want equality of results.
They want to make as much as men do, while at the same time staying home with children.
Have your cake and eat it too.
Have kids and make as much money as if you didn't have kids.
I mean, it's madness, but given that men are so keen on just giving women whatever they want, because men are egg hunters and women are sperm hunters, you know, it's a madness that works.
Because women will seriously stomp their feet and say, I don't make as much as men.
And then men will say, well, wait a minute.
How about if you're not married, same education and been in the workforce for the same amount of time as a man?
Oh, you actually make slightly more than men.
So this is not true.
Women who want to have kids and take time off from work and work part-time and flex time and job sharing and all, they want to make as much as if they were there.
So you want to have your cake and eat it too.
I get that.
Look, men want that too.
We want the stability of monogamy and the variety of polygamy.
But, of course, if a man wants his cake and eat it too, he's an evil adulterer, right?
He's a cheater and must be railed against, divorced, and strip-mined through the court system of all available testicles.
So when a man wants the stability of monogamy but the excitement of polygamy and acts on it, he's terrible.
But when a woman wants to have her cake and eat it too, She wants to have kids and take time off from work and then earn as much as if she was still at work.
Well, that's called equality.
I mean, it's just mad.
Men got to grit their teeth and stop enabling this stuff.
I mean, I don't know the degree to which the change is going to come from women, but...
So equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome is a very different thing.
In my way of thinking, and it's not just like an opinion, it's not certainty, but I think there's a good case to be made.
I view feminism as enormously retrograde, which means, of course, a throwback to the past.
I mean, what fundamentally is feminism other than women complaining to men and manipulating men into giving them resources?
It's so retrograde.
It's so...
It's such a throwback to all of the cliches of femininity that have been upheld throughout history.
Women whine and complain and nag and men give them resources.
Women play the victim and men throw resources at them.
Women want freedom, but the moment freedom becomes alarming or challenging, they run to men for protection.
Because the reality is that feminism is female and the state is male.
So if you want to understand feminism, again, a sort of more modern Marxist feminism, if you want to understand feminism, feminism is the wife and the state is the husband.
This is feminism is the wife and the state is the husband.
This is the only way to understand feminism and how ridiculous it really is.
And the reason that the state is male is many-fold, right?
Yeah, there are female politicians, but the state is not about politicians.
It's like saying the mafia is about the charisma of the godfather, right?
No, the state is about guns.
Guns were invented by men.
The police force is overwhelmingly male.
Prison guards are significantly male, at least in mixed or male prisons.
So the state is male.
Propaganda arm is female, at least in terms of early public school education.
But the state is as male as the Catholic Church.
Yeah, yeah, there are nuns.
But the Catholic Church is a sausage fest.
And the state is a sausage fest as well.
And to the degree with which female police officers are used, the danger increases of guns and lethal force, right?
Because women are smaller, they're more likely to go for their gun when in trouble.
They can't wrestle, they can't fight nearly as much, particularly with oversized men.
And so the more female cops there are out there, the more deadly force is used.
So the state is male, right?
There are male feminists and there are females in the state and so on, but the state is male.
Also, the majority of taxes come from men because men have higher incomes and all that, right?
So if you want to understand feminism, feminism is the nagging wife and the state is the beleaguered husband.
If I give you stuff, will you shut up?
I want this.
I want that.
Things aren't equal.
I need pay equity.
I need this.
I need preferential treatment.
I want abortions.
I need this.
Okay, here you go.
God.
And of course, because it's appeasement, women are never satisfied and never happy.
Oh, good, that's enough, right?
I need more.
I need this.
I need that.
I need to not be asked if I'm going to have children.
I want to never be fired.
I want a union.
I want more welfare.
It's like, oh, okay, fine, fine.
Take it.
Can you stop talking?
So, feminism is the wife and the state is the husband.
This is why it's so retrograde.
A woman who complains about being victimized, against all evidence, a woman who complains about being victimized and runs to men to protect her from the consequences of her own behavior, is like a caricature of a woman.
This is like woman as retarded child.
It is a horrible caricature.
Every time a woman suggests a law, she's demanding that men fix helpless women's problems.
Every time a woman runs to the state, she's demanding that the patriarchy intervene to save her from the consequences of freedom.
For a woman to use her femininity as a tool to manipulate resources out of exhausted and beleaguered men, It's the ultimate retrograde caricature of bad femininity.
There was a law proposed recently in Florida, and the law was, custody just gets split, right?
Forget it.
Custody gets split, and nobody gets child support.
Well, that's called equality, right?
And feminist groups, National Organization of Women, all descended on Florida and railed against this, right?
Women who run to men to be protected from the consequences of the freedom they demanded from men in the first place are ridiculous human beings.
I mean, they're not ridiculous because it works, right?
I mean, they're philosophically ridiculous, morally they're ridiculous.
They're not ridiculous because women stamping their feet very often shake the apples of resources from the outstretched arms of men, right?
I demand freedom.
With freedom comes responsibility.
I don't want that.
I want freedom, and then I want to be protected from the consequences of the freedom that I have so strenuously demanded, right?
So women want the freedom to divorce men.
Great.
Great.
So you have the freedom to divorce men.
So if you choose to quit your job of being a wife, you don't get paid anymore.
So if you divorce a man, then don't take his money.
No, I don't want that.
I want the freedom to quit, but I still want to collect a paycheck.
I want the freedom to divorce a man, But he must still pay me money as if I'm married to him.
Well, then you don't really want freedom, do you, right?
With freedom comes responsibility and consequences.
And so a woman demanding freedom, fine, great, here's your freedom.
And then a woman demanding that men protect her from the consequences of bad choices means that she doesn't want freedom anymore.
I want to be free!
When it suits me.
When things go badly, I want to run to the government, run to the men, run to the patriarchy, so that men can be forced to pay for the consequences of my mistakes, of my bad decisions.
I mean, it's so absurd, it's pitiful.
And, you know, again, a hundred years in the future, they'll wonder how the hell we even tied our shoelaces.
How come they didn't all use Velcro?
I mean, how could they possibly tie their shoelaces, acting in such an irrational and ridiculous manner?
And this process has no end.
Because you're fighting against biology.
And even asking women to not manipulate men into giving them resources is kind of fighting against biology.
I mean, other than a few fetishists, there's not a lot of people who enjoy looking at nude pictures of grandmothers.
Gmail 101.
I mean, men are physiologically and biologically attracted to fertility and to even features and hip-waist ratios that indicate good genes and, right, can't fight biology.
You won't see Grandma Moses.
I think she's dead now, but when she was alive, you wouldn't see her in a Victoria's Secrets movie.
Catalog.
Can't fight biology.
But you can pretend to, whatever, right?
But women complaining in order to extract resources out of men, it's what homely women do to get resources, right?
I'm sorry to be so brutal, but biology is biology.
Attractive women don't need to complain and nag to get resources because they're physically attractive enough and have enough signs of fertility and fecundity to get resources from men.
Like a woman who looks like a 10 sitting in a bar doesn't need to nag men to buy her drinks.
Nagging comes from unattractive women who want resources and cannot provide sexual attractiveness in order to get resources.
And they're frustrated and all that and so they nag and they complain.
And why do moms do it?
Why do they nag and complain?
Because moms are less physically attractive.
They've lost the zing that comes from being unattached and pre-child, right?
Their eggs are booked.
They're no longer in the sexual marketplace, and so they can't get resources by sitting in a bar and looking purdy.
They then have to get resources by nagging, right?
So, when a woman is fertile, she gets resources for her fertility.
After she has children, after she is spoken for, after she is married, then the tendency is to—she can't get resources from men by being attractive because, you know— Leaky boobs, stretchy belly, figure wrecked, no sleep, bags under her eyes, sitting around in sweatpants with curlers in her hair, you know, not sexual juice-o-meter 12,000 model of feminine allure, right?
So then when a woman can no longer get resources because she's sexually desirable, and again, please understand, I'm not trying to say that moms are not sexually desirable.
I'm married to one.
I'm the last guy in the world to say that.
But what I'm saying is that biologically...
A woman gets fewer resources after she's married and has children from other men.
And she is less sexually attractive from a biological standpoint because she already has children.
In the same way that a father, a single dad who has two kids, is less attractive than a single man with no children.
All other things being equal because his resources are going to be consumed by kids and he may not want more and all that, right?
It's just the way it is.
I am far less attractive to women as a whole because I'm married, I'm a stay-at-home dad, I'm devoted to my wife and child, and blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
I mean, I don't want to have my—I don't pretend to have my cake and eat it, too, right?
And so there is a conflict on how you get resources.
And the less attractive a woman is, the more she nags, right?
And the more attractive she is, the less she nags.
And a woman who is attractive has a positive but contemptuous view of masculinity, right?
Like, I wear a low-cut top and drinks magically appear in front of my cleavage, right?
Whereas a woman who is less sexually attractive has a contemptuous but negative view of men.
And, of course, a mom, you know, this is even creepy to talk about, but, of course, a mom is not going to control her children through her sexual wiles, right?
I'm withholding sex from you, Johnny, because you didn't finish your veggies, right?
I mean...
Too creepy to even consider or contemplate.
And so, if a woman has not figured out win-win negotiations and sort of grown up quite a bit from the early and youthful sexual allure, then she's not going to be able to use her sexual allure in family situations.
And of course, it diminishes with regards to her husband.
Now, of course, women artificially prop up their sexual allure in marriage by making it monogamous, which, again, I think it's great, but, I mean, that's sort of a fundamental reality of why it happens.
And so, there is sort of this trope that feminists are unattractive.
Now, unattractive women...
They either have to put out more easily than attractive women or, you know, to get resources out of men.
And that tends to not get any permanent resources out of men.
Like it might get them a dinner, but it's not going to get them a house to raise their kids in.
So there is this cliché that feminists are unattractive, right?
So then they've switched into maternal unattractive mode of getting resources, which is to bitch and moan, right?
Complain.
And then men give them resources to stop them from complaining.
In the fantasy that it will stop them from complaining, and it won't.
It will simply escalate the complaints.
So instead of what I call positive economics, which is I reward you with access to my eggs, the post-attractive woman goes to negative economics, which is I will remove the annoying sound of my nagging if you give me what I want.
And non-sexual, non-powerful creatures do that.
Children whine and complain as well until they get what they want.
They can't bribe you and they don't have sexual power because they're...
Children, right?
So whining and complaining is a mark of, I want resources, people won't provide them positively for my attractiveness, and so I have to nag and complain.
And it works because so many men are raised by women who nag and complain and bitch and moan.
The moms, right?
And see that as a dynamic that occurs in the marriage.
I mean, one of the things that, one of the almost infinite things that I love about My wonderful wife is that she has never nagged.
Like, not even a hint.
Never nagged and almost never complained.
Even when it could be argued she has a reason or two, too.
So, a feminism, the reason why it gains so much traction so quickly is that it's a nagging wife complaining to the state, the husband, to give resources, which is a pattern as old as human history, right?
That...
Young women are sexy and get resources and older women manipulate, whine, nag and complain and that's how they get resources.
Young women get resources to open up and older women get resources to shut up.
And again, I'm speaking in very, very broad generalizations.
There are obviously hundreds of millions of exceptions the world over, but...
I think it helps to understand.
So if you look at feminism like a nagging wife and the state as the husband, then it all makes sense, right?
This is why it works and why it continues, and why the men in the state or the state as a masculine entity can't say no.
Because, you know, being trapped with a nagging woman, which is kind of what happens, is, you know, nagging has evolved to be incredibly annoying so that people will give you resources to stop, right?
And so that's, I think, the way, at least that I understand particular aspects of leftist and Marxist feminism.
It's not a full story.
It's obviously a tentative thesis, but I hope it's useful in helping you to look at how it could be working.
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