Dec. 15, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:36
3530 The War Against Men | Tom Golden and Stefan Molyneux
While being derided by claims of male privilege and patriarchy, the already negative treatment of men in society keeps getting worse. Tom Golden joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the state of masculinity in the United States and the most important issues men face today. Tom Golden, LCSW is a speaker, psychotherapist and the author of "Helping Mothers be Closer to Their Sons: Understanding the Unique World of Boys," "The Way Men Heal" and "Swallowed by a Snake: The Gift of the Masculine Side of Healing."Get more from Ton Golden at: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/1menaregood1Twitter: https://twitter.com/trgoldenhttp://menaregood.comhttp://meninsocialwork.orghttp://tgolden.com/newsletterHelping Mothers be Closer to Their Sons: http://mothersclosetosons.comRed Pill Movie: http://www.theredpillmovie.comFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
I'm Tom Golden, a licensed clinical social worker with 30 years of experience, which means next year he really starts to hit his stride.
And he's the author of a number of great books, Swallowed by a Snake, The Gift of the Masculine Side of Healing, and The Way Men Heal, as well as Helping Mothers Be Closer to Their Sons, Understanding the Unique World of Boys.
And you can find Tom's work at menaregood.com.
We'll put, of course, the links to that in the low bar.
Tom, thanks so much for taking the time today.
I'm glad to be here, Stephan.
So, Tom and I first met, I think it was in 2014, at a Men's Rights Conference in Detroit, where we gave some speeches.
Both, I think, were excellent, and we'll put the links to those as well.
And for the new listeners who may not really know what men's rights are, or just associated with the term patriarchy, we're going to talk about some developmental issues with regards to testosterone and aggression and all that kind of stuff.
We're going to start, Tom's going to take us through the Men's Rights 101, some of the major hot-button issues that men face in the modern world.
So, if you'd like to take it away, I'll throw in snarky comments from time to time.
Good.
Please, more snarky comments or better.
You know, the bottom line is, men deserve compassion and choice.
And I think that it's easy to see that women deserve compassion and choice, but harder for us to look at men in that position.
But there's all sorts of places where men don't get compassion and choice.
You know, domestic violence is one.
You know, where the world thinks that domestic violence is big men beating up on small women, when the research really tells us something a little bit different, and that is that it's really a two-sided story.
It's both men and women.
But somehow, it gets turned into men not even being there, and so men lose the capacity to have compassion and choice over that issue.
Suicide.
You know, men are 80% of completed suicides, and no one seems to really care so much.
I'm on a commission for suicide prevention in Maryland, and I keep hammering away over and over again, you know, look, it's 80% males.
Shouldn't we spend 80% of our time looking at what you can do for men?
And they kind of go, well, yeah, maybe.
So, you know, you find this kind of indifference to the needs of men.
You'll find it in all the different issues, whether it's suicide or Domestic violence or what are some other ones, Stefan?
Circumcision is a big one.
Well, circumcision is a huge one.
Female circumcision is illegal and millions of men are circumcised every year perfectly legally and in some cases even subsidized by the state.
Yes.
It's crazy stuff.
So, it's just a matter of looking at men deserving to be treated like people.
It's not a matter of, you know, I want rights.
It's a matter of just men deserving to be treated in a compassionate sort of way.
Well, and there is the general feminist argument, which I agree with, that there are times when there are disparities between male and female experiences that can't always be explained away by mere biology, which we need to look at and attempt to close whatever gap there is as possible.
So, of course, men are dying five years earlier than women, and nobody really knows the cause.
Maybe it's stress, and they die of just about every major ailment sooner than women, and there's not a lot of exploration as to why.
There are, of course, countless government agencies dedicated to specific female health issues, and almost none for men, even though men are dying earlier.
Yeah, it's not almost.
It is none.
You know, there's seven commissions in the country for women's health, but zero for men.
If you go to womenshealth.gov, You get a pretty website.
If you go to girlshealth.gov, you get a pretty website.
Go to menshealth.gov, you get file not found.
Same thing with boyshealth.gov.
Nothing's there.
I mean, that just says it all right there.
Bingo!
And in war, of course, 98% of the casualties are men.
Men are subject to the draft or selective service.
Men are 93% of workplace deaths.
Boys are falling behind in school.
and hitting higher education at lower rates, which is not being even thought about, let alone addressed.
There are huge issues of paternity fraud, as you point out in one of your videos, Tom.
A third of men who go for paternity testing find out they're not actually the father that the woman has lied or kept information at best, is what we can say, about that situation.
And the man sometimes is still on the hook for child support, even though he's not the biological father anymore.
And in the UK, I believe it is, the man has to get the permission of the woman to do paternity testing.
Can you imagine a woman having to get the permission of a man to deal with something so intimate and so personal?
It's shocking.
And it's the kind of thing that until you know it, until you notice it, it's sort of like the air you breathe.
You don't even think about it.
Yes.
The only reason I found out about it was because the work I was in, I had worked with lots of men, and lots of men who were traumatized, and so it became very clear to me very quickly that people responded to these men very differently from the way they responded to women in the same kind of situation.
I'd like to also mention something that is pretty important, and until you notice it, again, it doesn't really hit your consciousness, and that is the way men are portrayed and dealt with In movies.
There's something you could, I guess, reasonably term the Schwarzenegger principle.
Some godforsaken soul with too much time on his or her hands went through all of Schwarzenegger's films and hit up the death count.
And I think it was 500 plus have met their demise at the burly ones' meaty fingers.
And 98% of them, not counting aliens, 98% of those victims are men.
And when you start watching movies, you'll really...
Notice some of what happens.
They're called mooks by some people, but basically these giant tides of men who are just thrown against the hero so that he can mow them down or chop them up.
They're very just disposable men in order to enhance the sympathy for the male.
And if you look at how women are portrayed, if you really want to motivate a man, you put a woman in peril.
And if the man doesn't decide to go and help the woman, then he's a coward and he's a terrible guy and his gene pool ends with him and he gets handed a white feather and has to go live in the woods or something.
Whereas, of course, if the man is in danger and the woman runs for help but doesn't go and help him, she's not given that same particular approach.
Right.
If you want to advance the story, you put the woman in danger, and then that's going to motivate all the men.
But if the man's in danger, not so much.
In a horror movie, you want to be a female virgin.
Boy, if you're a female virgin, you have this, like, Star Trek shield around you.
No chainsaw, no axe can penetrate.
It just bounces completely off you.
And you can look at the disposable male and how it's reinforced in In movies.
And that the men aren't supposed to have any preferences of their own.
I was just watching a Brad Pitt movie about tanks.
And the men are just like, you know, we got to go do what we got to go and do.
We got to man up.
We got to prove ourselves.
You know, women don't have to prove themselves.
Women don't have to say, I'm a real woman.
Whereas, of course, men, and we'll talk about this in a second with regards to teenage years in particular, men have to prove themselves in order to have value.
Women simply have to exist.
Yes, that is so true.
The research now has caught up with that idea and they call it precarious manhood.
You know, where the researchers now say that across the world, across the globe, that boys and men have to prove themselves over and over and over again in order to be considered men.
Whereas girls don't have any kind of proof like that.
As soon as they hit menses and they've gotten through puberty, they're women.
And so this puts a different spin on And I, like most people, blame the sperm.
It's the sperm disparity.
The eggs are rare, the sperm are common.
As you point out, if you have 10 women and one man, you can repopulate.
You can make 10 babies in, I guess, one dozy man.
And if you have 10 men and one woman, you can only produce one baby.
So those tribes that tried to be egalitarian in everything to do with gender ended up with the egg rarity and the sperm abundance ended up kind of withering away.
And that basic biological fact, which has conditioned so much about how we have evolved emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and so on, is a basic fact that needs to be understood and acknowledged.
Now, in the modern world, of course, it's less relevant, less important, because we don't pump out kids like, you know, cannonballs from a cannon these days anymore because infant mortality is down.
And we can be reasonably assured that our children are going to be able to take care of us in our old age, as pensions and so on.
But back in the day, you know, the women had to be the baby-making machine and that rarity and scarcity combined with the fact that human beings take an ungodly amount of time to develop and grow.
You know, a horse can walk within a few days, human beings take like a year or more.
So you need the participation and involvement and voluntary You've got to get the woman engaged in wanting to raise your children, which means you've got to woo her.
And the woman, by being disabled, you know, childbirth and breastfeeding and so on, well, she needs resources.
You know, women were generally disabled for like 20 years having kids, so the man has to prove himself.
The woman only has to be fertile.
The man has to prove his ability to gather resources.
Yes.
And what you're describing is the whole theory of gynocentrism.
And there's a great site, gynocentrism.com, put up by Peter Wright, a buddy of mine, and it's just wonderful.
He describes this whole issue where basically what it is is that women and children need to be protected and provided for at the expense of men.
This is actually something that's helped us.
I mean, you know, the whole idea that men would expend themselves, would be disposable in order to save women and children has created a culture.
I mean, if we didn't have that and we didn't have women, we wouldn't have a culture.
We'd be sunk.
You know, so the whole thing of gynocentrism is just critical and it underlies this issue of discrimination against men.
And it underlies the issue of not being interested in men's emotional pain.
Because if men are there to protect women and to provide for them, they're not there to emote.
They're not there to be unhappy.
There's this quote by this guy, Peter Maron, where he talks about the issue where men cannot be dependent.
You know, they simply cannot be dependent.
And if they are, if men are dependent, then suddenly the world sees them as not being worthy of getting help.
You know, so there's this irony.
It says, you know, if you're strong and say, I'm fine, then no, you don't need help.
But if you say, I do need help, then you're not worthy of it.
Well, if you need help, it means that you're in the biological position of consuming resources rather than providing resources, which is the exact opposite of high sexual market value throughout most of our evolution.
Yes.
There's a quote.
Is it okay if I read a quote?
Yeah, please do.
Yeah, this is a guy, Peter Marin, who wrote an article about homelessness.
But he says here, And I remember as a kid reading a book,
Great Disasters of the 20th Century, and in it was the Titanic, and in the Titanic was put forward front and center the ethos, women and children first.
Men die a frozen tundra Leonardo DiCaprio-style death in the deep of the ocean, women and children first.
And I remember thinking, like, oh!
So...
I'm not even on the list here.
It's not women and children first, then let's save as many of the honorable men as we can.
It's like, women and children first.
Period.
Nothing after that, and I'm not even on the list.
So I remember when I first started hearing about patriarchy, I just remember flashing back to that book where I read it.
I was like six or seven.
I read this book, and I thought, wait a minute.
I'm in charge.
I'm not even on the list of people to be saved.
How on earth is that, being in charge?
That's the deal.
That's the deal.
Now...
It is also instructive because another thing that I remember reading about in that book was the First World War and the White Feather Campaign, which I'm sure you've heard about.
And just very, very briefly, men who didn't volunteer for service, I think it was in England, women would walk up and down to find any able-bodied young man, not in uniform, and hand them white feathers, which were symbols of cowardice.
And this has been portrayed a bunch of times in movies and books and so on.
And in a sense, you're killed by a feather.
I mean, it's kind of like a strange weapon to hold.
And I remember when I was a kid just trying to figure that one out, and it took me many, many years to figure it out.
Let me run past a particular scenario and see if it makes sense according to what you think, Tom.
So why would a man go to war rather than be handed a feather?
A feather is not going to remove your arm.
It's not going to give you shell shock.
It's not going to detonate your inner ear or anything like that.
But I think the answer is that if you go to war, let's say you've got a 50% chance of survival, then a woman will mate with you if you return.
But if you don't go to war and a woman won't mate with you, and the white feather is like, you are barred from the eggs.
No eggs for you!
So if you go to war and survive, then you have a chance to reproduce.
But if no woman will breed with a man who doesn't go to war, then you face gene death.
In other words, the feather ends your entire lineage, whereas if you go to war, at least you've got a 50% chance of continuing your genes afterwards.
And I think that helped me sort of understand it, if that makes sense to you.
Yes, it makes all the sense in the world.
I agree 100%.
And that is the great tragedy.
And this is, of course, why gynocentrism is important, because men propose, women dispose.
If you simply look at who asks who out and who pays for what and who has to display the resources, there are not a lot of women out there buying Lamborghinis to impress men, right?
I mean, they're not showing excessive resource abilities in order to gain access to men.
And I think that fundamental thing that men ask and women say yes or no means that it is a seller's market when it comes to reproduction and that is not men in the seat of power.
Yes, and it means that men are in a competition against each other.
You know, I mean, we compete against each other, and in fact, men are biologically geared to compete.
You know, that's what we do.
Well, and it sort of explains some aspects of biology that remain confusing to people, and I'm going to unabashedly say that race is not a social construct, and we'll get to some of the biology of its evolution, especially in the womb in a moment.
But...
When it comes to things like IQ spreads, you know, ironically, male IQ spread is more like a breast and female IQ spread is more like a penis, right?
It's more centered around the middle.
It's, you know, hey, don't blame me.
This is just the way the math pans out.
I mean, I may have doodled a little, but nonetheless, this is the way it pans out, that men have a scattershot with regards to intelligence, which is why you have… More male, low intelligence and more male, higher intelligence on average.
Lots of exceptions.
That's because nature is more prone to experiment with men because the rewards of hitting the gas, the rewards of high intelligence are so great that it's worth the risk for low intelligence whereas for women, biologically, I would say it's less because they're on the receiving end of what is being proffered.
And so all of these males desire to take risks and so on, entrepreneurial desires and so on, resource gathering requires an intense competition.
Very hard for men, as you point out, to be in solidarity with each other because we're all competing for the prettiest eggs on the block.
Unless we're on the same team.
And that's where men feel close.
You mean in war teams, in sports teams?
When you're on the same team fighting against someone with the same goal, men get close.
Because they feel safe there, you know?
I wonder if that holds true when there are women in the platoon.
I wonder if that's changing things a little bit.
Because they're all surviving each other to get back to the egg.
They're all helping each other survive to get back to the eggs.
But if the eggs are right there...
They're going to help the egg more than they're going to help the guy next to them.
That's the problem.
Right, right.
So let's start talking about the developmental aspects of...
A lot of people don't realize that we all start off as female and then, well, there's a bit of a U-turn for some.
Yeah, there's this great thing called a testosterone flood that happens two months in utero.
And it's this increase in testosterone that changes the baby boy's brain and changes some baby girl's brains.
You know, that's what makes things so interesting and so complicated is that this testosterone flood is not just for boys.
I think the estimates are about 80% of boys get the flood, 20% don't.
About 15 to 20% of women get more testosterone than other women.
So the impact of this flood changes the boy's brain into what the researchers are calling a systems brain or a systems sort of brain.
Systems are important to them, knowing where to put things together, where to take things apart, what changing one little piece of the system does to the rest of it.
You know, think Legos.
You know, I bet you've seen little boys, you know, sitting and playing with Legos for hours.
They're playing with that system.
And you've probably seen a little girl do the same thing, but mostly the boys.
You know, it's this whole thing they know now.
And the way they found out is really fascinating.
You know, one of the researchers in Great Britain, I think, took a bunch of amniocentesis samples that the hospital saved for years and years and years.
And he measured the testosterone in those samples and then found the babies who were now grown, you know, young people, school-age kids and older, found those and started to look at what are the differences between the high testosterone and lower testosterone and came up with some really fascinating connections.
But one of those connections is the systems brain versus the empathic brain.
That doesn't mean that men can't be empathic.
We can.
I'm a therapist, for crying out loud.
I'm more on the female side.
So we're all a blend of this stuff.
It's not like it's black and white.
We have to think in terms of blend and gray, not one way or the other, because you can't put all men in one pile and all women in the other.
But most men will have more of this testosterone flood, and most women will not.
So it changes us in the way we then grow.
They know now that there's what they call the mini-puberty.
Which is right after the little baby is born, the baby boy gets another burst of testosterone that lasts for, you know, I think up to a couple of months, maybe more.
But they don't even know exactly what that does to masculinity, but they know it's involved somehow.
So we're right on the edge of things and understanding what's going to happen.
But the important thing is that our biology does determine some of what goes on.
You know, they know now this testosterone flood impacts four things.
It impacts Our sexual orientation, who we want to sleep with.
It impacts our gender identity, who we think we are.
Do we think we're a man or a woman?
It impacts our play behavior, which are huge differences in behaviors.
The little boys play versus the little girls play, and it impacts aggressiveness.
So all of those things they're fairly sure now are involved in being determined or at least partly determined by this flood.
Now, you know, Genetics is also involved.
They're finding that the SRY gene is probably involved in masculinity also.
It's one that they know turns on the testes, I think.
But now they're thinking, oh my gosh, this is involved in masculinity characteristics, just like the testosterone flood.
So they're finding all kinds of things as they go along.
And we're just at the very tip of the iceberg to understand what's happening.
But the important thing is that our The way we are is not just socialization.
It's our biology.
It's our genetics.
It's our socialization.
It's our hormones.
It's our brain differences.
All of these things rolled in together.
It's just amazing what you find.
Yeah, and I sort of have the perception that we can talk about Vince Folletti's fantastic Adverse Childhood Experiences study in a few minutes because I know you've looked into that and I've had him on the show.
Really?
To talk about it.
Yeah, it's fascinating stuff.
I've got an entire presentation called The Bomb in the Brain talking about this stuff, but there are cues that the environment is going to give to us about how we should optimally develop before we're even born.
If the mother is undergoing a lot of stress, then it seems likely that the child is going to grow up slightly more aggressive, slightly more punchy, and even the girls may have slightly more masculine characteristics.
If there's want or stress, then it means that The men are probably absent at war or you've been taken over or there's some sort of scarcity so you're going to want to be more aggressive in your pursuit of resources.
This all starts from the very beginning of things and then of course after birth, if there's no father around, girls end up developing menstruation sometimes a year or two years earlier.
Because again, we're looking at a situation of scarcity of male absence and therefore you want to pump out as many kids as possible for, you know, you're going to do a scattershot rather than a laser approach to raising children.
So there's a huge amount of epigenetics, right, which is the relationship, you know, when I was a kid, your genes, you just photocopy, push the button and out it comes and that's the way it is.
But now, of course, we know that genes turn on and off relative to environmental cues and that is something that we are not born out of concrete.
We are born out of plasticine.
And you can get molded significantly by experience.
And none of this is designed to infer any kind of biological determinism.
Knowledge is power.
The more we know about this stuff, the more we have choices.
Yes, exactly right.
But it is fascinating, all the interplay.
You know, the hormones will turn on genes sometimes.
The hormones will change behavior.
Behavior changes the hormones.
And it's just all this stuff together is just amazing, you know?
So let's talk about testosterone, which is...
I guess chief demon among certain people's perspectives of the world.
Yeah, so...
Yeah, you know, you and I, of course, having less hair means slightly more testosterone, as far as I understand it.
A well-worthy trade for me, since you have to be kind of punchy to make your way in the world these days.
But let's talk about testosterone, because, of course, most people think, as I did for many years, that more testosterone means more aggression.
And I think you found that that causality is backwards.
Oh, yeah.
You know, they found that the...
Testosterone is very different from what Alan Alda assumed as us being testosterone poisoned.
And what they're finding is that testosterone really is about striving for status.
Striving for status.
So men have eight to ten times more testosterone than women.
They're going to strive for status in a different kind of way than women are.
Now, how does testosterone go about helping us strive for status?
It does a bunch of things.
One of which is it reduces fear.
So, people who have higher testosterone, their fear levels are going to come down.
It also increases our willingness to take risks.
So, scratch head.
Okay, who's more likely to succeed?
Someone who's willing to take risks and who's fearless or someone who's going to sit on the sideline and worry about when to jump in?
You know, I think we know.
They've also found...
Well, sorry to interrupt, but if that were the case, then we'd have no fear whatsoever, because there is an evolutionary strategy called let the guy take the risk, and if he fails, I'll get the girl.
So, you know, you're going to have both floating around as we see in the human soup.
Everything's relative, and testosterone is the same.
Sometimes you lose your risk.
There you go.
I can make this jump!
And I'm telling you, that happens, because, I mean, we have this thing that says, I can do this, I can do this.
In fact, They now know that there's stress resilience built into testosterone.
So that when you do fail, it says, you can do it.
Keep trying.
Keep at it.
Keep at it.
You know, think, what's his name?
The light bulb guy, Edison.
I mean, he just over and over and over and over again.
And part of that is testosterone pushing him.
He says, you can do this.
You're okay.
Keep trying.
Especially during, especially, sorry to interrupt, but especially during the time of initial sexual market value.
Like, I think of the risks that I took when I was a teenager.
Like, I look back through the tunnel of time.
No!
Whatever you do, it doesn't matter whether you can cross that train bridge and the train doesn't count.
Well, don't do it!
You know, but now, of course, I'm, you know...
Achieve my sexual market value.
I'm a father and all that.
It doesn't matter as much.
But boy, when I was a kid or in my teens, that's when you get this teen immortality bulletproof thing because that's, I think, where it's at its highest.
And that's good old testosterone is helping out there.
The other thing they found with testosterone that's fascinating is threat vigilance.
What this means is that when someone's status is threatened, if he's got testosterone, the testosterone says, don't let him do that.
Challenge that.
And they did a gender study about this, and they found that the men were much more likely to defend their status than their women.
Women simply are not, you know, what?
Why would he be upset about that?
The guy's upset because his status has been challenged, and his testosterone says, don't let him get away.
You know, get back at that guy.
So we've got all of these things going on.
The testosterone is just so far different from we ever thought.
In fact, if you look at the research and all the things that are going on, you realize that men really are good.
Men are fine the way they are.
Well, and that is something that, again, is sort of to revert to the popular media thing, which is where a lot of people get their impressions of the genders.
I remember watching, I think it was a Murphy Brown episode where two guys were struggling over status.
And the Murphy Brown character basically said, why don't you just whip out your penises and measure them, right?
That, of course, is a sort of an idiot perspective on what it is because to say, well, you know, male competition for status, male competition for excellence, male competence and desire for system building… It's somehow petty and immature.
It's like, hey, do you like civilization?
Do you like not having wolves eat your babies while you sleep?
Hey, how about them walls?
Aren't they kind of cool?
I like them quite a bit.
Do you like having a phone?
You know, a lot of this comes out of male status seeking, male resource gathering, male system building, male competition, all of these.
Do you like, hey, how's air conditioning?
Do you like that epidural so you don't have to scream blue motor while giving a baby?
You know, thank male competition.
But no, it's all about whose penis is bigger, which completely misses the point.
Yes.
Yes, couldn't agree more.
Couldn't agree more.
So, you know, what I was trying to say is that all of this stuff, all this research about testosterone and the testosterone flood and whatever shows us a very different side of men.
And it's in contrast to this whole toxic masculinity thing that we see so prevalent in the media, in academia, and in even our legislations.
You know, it's like there's something wrong with men.
They need to be more like women and then the world would be a better place.
Yeah, more wars now than ever.
But anyway, the other thing too that's interesting, which I think people mistake both for men and sort of free market principles as a whole, is that men compete.
Yes, absolutely, we compete.
However, we compete to make the world comfortable for women and children.
Because the man who can make the world the most comfortable for women and children has the highest sexual market value.
It's not competition like I want to hit you on the head with a log.
The competition is, can I outbid you in making the world comfortable for women and children?
And the more successful the man is, the more women tend to hold the man in contempt.
Because all the dangers have gone away, so male competition appears to be unnecessary.
But I think we'll find as civilization moves forward, particularly in Europe at the moment, I think we're going to find that just because the world is safe doesn't mean that male vigilance is no longer necessary.
And if we then scorn men and men withdraw from guarding the frontiers, from recognizing external threats and so on, I think we'll find that the world is going to get just a little bit less comfortable quite quickly.
I think the stock in masculinity is going to go up pretty soon.
I think you're right.
Right.
So, with regards to testosterone and aggression, Tom, you've talked about this, and if you can elucidate on this a little bit more, I think it would be very helpful.
It's not, as far as I understand the thesis that you work with or that you've researched, it is not that extra testosterone breeds aggression.
It's the other way around.
Well, yeah.
They found that...
The assumption always has been that aggression and violence were somehow related to testosterone, but what they found more recently is that it's actually the aggression that raises the testosterone, not the testosterone raising the aggression.
And so the whole thing gets thrown out the window.
Every piece of research that's trying to link aggression and testosterone is pretty much inconclusive.
If you read the meta-analysis of all of it, they kind of say, I'll know that some of it may be, but no, it's not conclusive.
We don't have that attitude at all.
But we do know that it's related to striving for status.
And it makes so much sense.
Because if you look at men almost in any sphere, they're striving for status.
You know, the monk, the Buddhist monk will strive for enlightenment.
The criminal, male, will strive for the best crime.
And the football player will strive for the NFL. I mean, but we strive in our own niche.
You know, we strive in our own niche in the way that we want to do, you know?
Oh, yeah.
A lot of the stuff, particularly with men, is the, you know, opening umbrellas makes it rain kind of cause and effect stuff that goes on.
Because it is – it's sort of like saying, well, you get the cortisol, you run away, and then the bear appears.
It's like, nope.
First the bear appears, then you get – then you run away or whatever it is that you're going to do.
And when a man is in a situation of competition, when he is in a situation of status seeking, status striving, then he's going to need that extra juice of assertiveness is probably a better way of putting it.
Because, you know, way back in the day when our IQs were lower and our foreheads were slopier and our hairs were even – our arms were even hairier, aggression usually meant physical aggression.
But now, aggression means outmaneuvering people in the marketplace.
It means coming up with a better particular slogan.
And it's not… Men versus men, because as you point out, teams are very important.
People do compete within Apple, but they compete with Microsoft.
They compete with other companies in particular.
So it is not that men are against other men.
Men are more than willing to work together if the sum of their working together is greater resource accumulation and status than if they work singular, which is why men do make very good teammates in sports and in war and other places.
So it's not men versus men atomistically, if that makes sense.
Yes, absolutely.
I found that out from my work with men in finding where their friends were.
I mean, the men become so close.
I work with a lot of police officers in, and they become very close with the men they're with because they're shoulder to shoulder, doing the same job, working for the same goal.
Their lives depend on each other, you know?
And that's where men feel close.
Not a face-to-face.
God said, when I first started doing therapy, right after I got out of grad school, you know, I'd sit and do face-to-face, right?
And it worked great with the women.
But it didn't work so great with the men.
And it was obvious that I was making them feel uncomfortable.
And it took me a long time to figure out that eye contact means something very different for men and women.
You know, eye contact for women means, oh, we're close.
But for the man, it means challenge.
Hockey has a face-off.
Boxers face each other.
You know?
I mean, that's where we, the face, so if you sit in therapy with a man and you face him and you look at him, you know, it's like he doesn't feel so comfortable in that spot.
Anyway.
No, attempting to read the facial expressions man-to-man is usually an act of dominance rather than an act of empathy because it's often win-lose in those kinds of interactions.
Maybe that's why Freud put the couch and staring away from Freud particularly at the beginning.
I've learned quickly that oblique offices are much better with men.
They like it when you can sit shoulder-to-shoulder almost, you know?
And here's something else that's, to me, kind of heartbreaking about the state of masculinity at the moment and maybe throughout history.
And I think we're actually in a pretty good place for being able to have these kinds of discussions at the moment.
So we have more opportunity, I think, with the internet now without the gatekeepers than we've had in the past.
I remember, you've probably heard this both from clients and from readings in the media.
How many times do you hear that men say, my best friends were in the army?
The closest I got to people, the most intimate and connected relations I had were when we were under fire in the army.
And those relationships, they can last a lifetime, and they tend to be hard to replicate in other situations.
I mean, it's great that they have those relationships, but what a terrible thing that it takes war to bring men that close.
Because you see in war movies...
There's a common sort of, it's become kind of a cliche now, it happened in Fury, the Brad Pitt movie, it happened in Saving Private Ryan, that the tough alpha leader at some point will go off into the bushes and cry.
And we accept that man is crying because he's got blood on him and because there's shells going off and because he's grimy and because he hasn't bathed in three weeks and because he's facing death every day and mutilation and dismemberment and because everyone's depending on him, so he's allowed to cry.
And because we also know he's going to get up off his butt and go win the war.
Right, right.
So we'll give him that moment.
He's earned it.
That's right.
With four years of facing constant death, he's earned a 30-second cry.
And we're okay with it, as long as he uses that to build himself back up to go out and kill more people.
Yeah, yeah.
So...
Let's talk about the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, which is one of these great untapped resources, I think, for a lot of social scientists.
Some are definitely working with it, but we really need more information about it.
I wonder if you could talk to people what it's about, how it came about, and what some of the conclusions are.
It came about in an interesting way.
The fellow you had on was doing weight loss stuff for Kaiser, I think.
He was really successful.
Some people were losing huge amounts of weight.
But then he found, after they lost all this weight, they disappeared from the program.
A lot of people disappeared from the program after they were so successful.
And he couldn't figure out what was going on.
So he started talking to people.
And one woman said, you know, I was sexually abused as a child.
And I thought, well, that's something.
But then the next week, another one said the same thing.
The next week, another one said the same thing.
So he started getting this pattern...
That the people who were backing out were abused as children.
And it turns out what he realized later was that the eating was a defense for them.
It made them safe.
It made them feel safe from this prior abuse that was just sitting inside and percolating.
So he got together, he started, he did a little study, I think, again, on his own, where he looked at what are these different kinds of scores, child aversive scores, sexual abuse, physical abuse, I think there's 10 that they've boiled it down to now.
And he got some interesting results.
Then he went to CDC. The two got together, and they did this huge study of 17,000 people where they looked at the scores for these ACEs questions.
And at that time, it was a huge questionnaire.
But they boiled all those questions in that huge questionnaire down to about 10 questions now.
And you can find them online, just about any place.
We can leave a link in the low bar, I guess, for where people can go and look at it.
And you can do a self-scoring.
And you go through the 10, and you say, yeah, I had that one.
No, no, no, no, yes.
No, no, no, no.
And then you come up with, oh, I have an ACES score of 2, or 3, or 0, or 7.
And that score tells you a huge amount.
Because what they're finding is that the more higher your ACES score is...
The more likely you're going to have a lot of trouble, whether it's physical trouble or suicidal trouble or all kinds of things.
I mean, the research is fascinating where they've judged people's ACEs score and then they've put the incidence of different diseases next to it.
And for instance, heart disease, those who had an ACEs score of zero, it's like, you know, a small amount.
ACEs score of one is a little bit bigger, it's two.
And as you go up to an ACE score of six or seven, the heart disease is Huge amount.
So it's like they're finding this is connected to everything.
And so that's why it's so critical and important to me.
And the other thing is it's so easy.
So easy for people to take that and realize, oh, you know, I've got an ACE score of X. And then act accordingly.
Because if you've got one that's four or five or above, get to a good therapist.
You know, there are ways that we can work with that stuff.
I mean, we want people to be aware of the dangers of smoking and excessive fatty food consumption and lack of exercise and sitting while you work.
But we don't talk to people about the direct health consequences, both sort of internal to your systems and as part of your decision-making processes.
Child abuse is a massive, massive predictor, especially if not known and not dealt with.
I mean, I went to therapy for years as a result of a difficult childhood, and it has a huge impact and changes things considerably.
Yes.
But we don't tell people about this, and I think the reasons are partly to do with, again, protecting women, because women are responsible still for a significant proportion of child raising, and women, of course, choose the men that they have children with in almost all situations and circumstances.
So we're protecting people from the negative health consequences, information about it, because we want to protect women and bad decisions women may have made as mothers, as wives-to-be, and who they have as the father of their children.
So, and it's dose dependent, right?
It's not just like, well, it sort of staggers up.
It's like, you know, for instance, if you're going to smoke, bad childhood predicts that very, very consistently.
Alcohol abuse, promiscuity, getting STDs, domestic abuse, violence, criminality, all of these things are dose dependent.
And I am going to mention these because they are so important.
And again, these don't, they're not going to define who you are, but you just want to have these risk factors.
The way I sort of think of it and have talked about it before in this show, Tom, is to say, look, If you have a family history of heart disease, you want to know that so that you don't get heart disease, right?
So if you have a family history of heart disease, you want to know that so you can adjust your eating, your health habits, your exercise habits, whatever it is you can do.
You have information about these things, not to surrender to history, but to break from history.
So these are the 10 that are floating around at the moment.
This is things that you may have experienced as a child.
One, verbal abuse and threats.
Two, physical abuse, non-spanking.
I actually think that's going to change because the research that's coming out these days seems to be that spanking and beatings are physiologically and psychologically hard to distinguish for children, but that's the way it is right now.
Number three, did you experience molestation or sex, premature sexual experiences, of course, or rape?
Four, no family love or support.
Five, neglect, not enough food, dirty clothes, no protection or medical treatment.
Six, parents divorced.
I mean, that's so common now.
What is it?
You point out 39% of American kids growing up without a father in the house.
Physical abuse towards female adults.
Ah, there's a bit of gynocentrism there, but, you know, we'll have to hold our nose and keep going.
Eight.
Yeah, eight.
Lived with alcoholic or drug user.
Nine.
Household member depressed, mentally ill, or suicide attempt.
And ten, household member in prison.
Now, with seven, you know, physical abuse towards female adults, I'm going to assume that it's not just gynocentrism, that they don't care about the men, but I think they're going to assume because of our biology and because of our popular culture, it's going to be more traumatic viewing physical abuse towards a female adult rather than a male, but that's where it stands at the moment.
I gave them a pass because it was so long ago.
I mean, when they first started these questions, and they had to keep the same questions in the watered-down thing.
I mean, it was in the 90s sometimes, and I don't think they knew then as much about domestic violence as we know now.
Right, that it's generally 50-50, and sometimes it's initiated more by the woman.
But the man generally has the disadvantage of if there's a sort of mutual slugfest, it's almost always the man who's going to get arrested.
So you're kind of stuck there.
Now, how is...
I mean, you obviously are dealing with a lot of men and are more immersed in the movement than I am.
So, Tom, where do things stand with regards to men's consciousness of male issues, of men's rights issues, and so on?
Where is the state of masculinity?
Because I find it to be quite a fascinating topic at the moment.
Yes, it is fascinating.
And I'm happy to say that I think we're on the verge of something new, and that is the Red Pill.
It's coming out in October.
Do you know about the Red Pill movie?
No.
You don't know about that?
There's a movie that Cassie J did of J Bird Productions.
She's an award-winning documentary person and she went around and interviewed all sorts of men's rights people around the country and is putting together a movie about her experience and what happened.
And it, I think, is going to open the door to a lot of understanding about what we're talking about.
You know, it's...
And that's going to happen October 7th that opens in New York City and the 14th that opens in Los Angeles.
So...
Keep your fingers crossed.
We'll see what comes up with that.
And the amount of information sharing between and among men is really fascinating at the moment.
I mean, from the 1930s, I think, you know, if people want to sort of understand the degree to which men sacrificed themselves for the women and children and their society as a whole, you know, men were dying of black lung, men were dying in machine accidents, men were dying with all sorts of farming accidents and so on.
And what came out first, labor-saving devices for women or life-saving devices for men?
Well, it was, you know, well, okay, we can expend 12 guys to produce this washing machine because that's going to raise the sexual market value of the one guy who survives the production line.
So that is some pretty chilling stuff.
I'm sorry?
It's worse than that, because in the...
First days of industrialization, the laws that came out were to protect women and children, not the men!
So if you were a man in the factory, too bad, hand cut off, so much.
But the women and children, there were laws to protect them.
But I think that the amount of information sharing that's out there now, I mean, the men going their own way movement, which I find quite powerful because men are looking at society and you can make the case that There's certainly a biological imperative to protect society, but you have to really like that society.
You're not going to protect someone or something or some structure that you don't like.
And I think that there used to be rewards for men who sacrificed.
Exactly.
Scorn and punishment for men who even think of sacrificing.
The sacrifice is still demanded because, of course, you know, a lot of women's groups want bigger government and more spending.
And it's mostly men who are contributing to the tax rolls compared to women.
So men are still supposed to sacrifice.
You know, my body, my choice.
Oh, your wallet?
Well, still my choice.
So men are still supposed to sacrifice, but they're not getting the praise that they used to get.
They're not getting the statues.
They're not getting the honor.
They're not getting the 21-gun salute.
They're not getting the ticker tape parades.
They're being scorned and the level of sacrifice is to some degree, at least financially, in terms of the wealth transfer enabled by the state.
Men are still being scorned and attacked and reviled and cast down and aspersions and insulted, but the level of financial sacrifice is ratcheting up.
And I think that combination is finally breaking men out of the vagina spell and having them ask that fundamental question that men are very good at asking, what's in this for me?
Yes.
And, you know, the fuel for masculinity is respect and admiration.
And men are getting almost none of that.
In fact, they're getting demonization.
And that's gonna, that hopefully won't take long before men start recoiling from that.
Because it's ridiculous!
Men are good!
Oh, men are necessary in this.
And it's a funny kind of thing because, again, when I was a kid growing up, there was this trope, the war of the sexes, which apparently never could be won because there's way too much fraternization with the enemy.
But this war between the sexes, I never really understood it.
I mean, it seems to me that men and women, not just physically but psychologically, like a jigsaw puzzle, fit together well and evolution has evolved us to be complementary and women have their wonderful strengths and abilities and deficiencies and men have their wonderful strengths and abilities and deficiencies and But nature would not bring us up to be in opposition,
I think, foundationally, but it somehow has become that way, that men and women have been turned against each other, and in that vacuum of gender separation rushes the power of the state and money manipulation and vote buying and so on.
And I don't know if men and women are just set against each other in that old Marxist dream as if you destroy the family, we can control society.
I think it's a bastardization of gynocentrism.
Because, you know, the whole feminist idea is in harmony with gynocentrism.
More things for women.
Protect women.
Take care of women.
Whereas the whole idea of men and men having compassion and choice goes against the grain of gynocentrism.
You know, men aren't supposed to do that, but women are.
So, you know, feminists have basically a downhill battle.
They roll downhill.
Whereas men have an uphill battle because of gynocentrism.
Right.
And there's that old...
It's sort of a cliche, although I've experienced it myself directly.
When I was younger, you hold the door open for a woman, she says, thank you.
And now, of course, sometimes you'll get a dirty look and I can do it myself.
Great, then I guess you won't need my tax money then because the welfare state has been ably and I think mathematically accurately characterized as a single mother state.
So if women can do it themselves, then why don't they need all this money from the government that is populated and largely funded by It seems an odd sort of independence.
I'd love to know the answer to that one.
All right.
Well, listen, I think we've given people enough to chew on and the first time round.
I strongly urge listeners and watchers to this conversation.
We've put some, you know, if you've not heard some of this stuff before, we've certainly put some bugs in your brain.
And don't just let it pass, you know.
Oh, that was interesting.
Squirrel!
Follow up.
Go to menaregood.com.
There's lots of resources on the web for people to figure this out.
We'll put links to Tom and I's speech from Detroit a couple of years ago.
These are very, very important issues.
I really believe that the future of civilization does hang on people really understanding these issues, and in particular men, to a degree, women as well.
Women who love men, women who care about men.
These are risks and dangers that the men you love are facing.
It is a male and female issue to start to understand some of this stuff.
And the consequences of avoiding it, I think, can be very catastrophic.
So thanks so much for your time today, Tom.
A great pleasure to chat.
Just to remind people, please go to menaregood.com for more of Tom's work.
