3987 The #MeToo Backlash | Tom Golden and Stefan Molyneux
As accusations of sexual assault and harassment cascade along the social landscape, a growing backlash is growing against the #MeToo phenomenon. Tom Golden joins Stefan Molyneux to break down the historical momentum of accusation credibility when is creating a dangerous climate and the state of masculinity in the western world. Tom Golden 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."http://www.tgolden.comhttp://www.menaregood.comhttp://www.meninsocialwork.orgTwitter: twitter.com/trgoldenYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hope you're doing well. Back with a good friend, Tom Golden.
He is a speaker, a 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.
You can find him at tgolden.com, the entirely sexist menaregood.com, and meninsocialnetwork.org, and on Twitter, twitter.com forward slash trgolden.
Golden Tom, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Thank you for having me, Stefan. It's good to see you.
Good to see you, too. So, we're going to talk a little bit about this Me Too movement, which has me torn asunder.
I will tell you, it has me torn asunder, because on the one hand, women have been terribly mistreated, and it's, you know, it rouses my lingering white knight, old-style Sir Lancelot, right, to the rescue staff.
On the other hand, I think, as you pointed out, there's not a massive excess of due process in this stuff.
And much though I want to help women, the due process stuff is kind of tough to just wave away.
So where do you stand in this stuff?
Well, I'm with you. It's important that people come up with what's happened to them.
I mean, all the trauma they've been through, it's good.
The Me Too thing is a good thing in a lot of ways.
It gets the word out there.
But I think we're only looking at one side.
And I think that any time you look at just one side of things, you're in trouble.
You know? And we only look at the side, I mean, think about it.
When someone's accused of sexual assault or rape, automatically the assumption is that man is guilty.
That man's guilty.
And not only that, but he deserves punishment.
And a lot of that comes from the fact that there was due process.
And so by the time somebody's accusation goes public, usually there's been quite a lot of work behind the scenes in the past.
Now it's a tweet, it's something online, there's no due process.
And I think it's getting the gravity of the prior legal situation is now kind of reaching like these cadaverous hands into the present and bringing all of that prior credibility with it.
Yes, yes. So, you know, I'm very concerned about the lack of due process.
I think that's a critical piece of this.
And not to take away from the MeToo piece altogether, but it's just, it's dangerous.
It's really dangerous because our freedom is based on some sort of due process.
And the interesting part of this, Stefan, is if you look at why we're thinking this, I mean, look underneath the hood, and what you find is the feminists for years now have been pushing this idea Of destructing due process.
You know, the End Violence Against Women International Group has created a manual back in 2006 that told the investigators how to act around sexual assault.
And they then turned that manual into workshops that were funded with millions upon millions of dollars in 2011, I think.
But the underlying piece of all this, the first thing they say is, believe, start by believing.
That's the key word. Start by believing.
So, yeah, okay, start by believing.
All right. But what happens to the accused if you start by believing?
Somehow that's not working right.
But this is a part of why I think our culture has just...
Assume there's no such thing as due process.
And assume that he's guilty no matter what.
It's because they've been whacking away at due process by this idea that you should always believe.
You know, start by believing.
Now that didn't work so well with Crystal Gale Mangum.
You know? Do you want to unpack that for some of those who weren't around in the day?
Boy, that seems like a short time ago to me.
But the, yeah, Duke Lacrosse, there are three Duke Lacrosse players who were accused of rape.
And it turns out it was a faulty assumption.
She was lying. And they went through a year of battling in the courts.
And luckily, the boy's parents had enough money to pay for really good legal services, which saved them.
And this is even when there were alibis, like a guy was out in an ATM getting his money at the same time as the rapes were supposed to have occurred.
There was lots of reasons to...
I guess like the Hulseclaw thing, right?
There's lots of reasons to believe that the boys were innocent about this process ground on.
And what was it?
The DA ended up being fired?
Or like it was just pretty crazy towards the end.
It was disbarred. Disbarred, right?
Yeah. Crazy situation altogether.
But that just tells us there is such a thing as a false accusation.
There is such a thing, and we need to be careful of that, because we need to protect our men from being falsely accused.
It's a horrible thing, Stefan, to be falsely accused.
I don't know if you've had anything like that before, but you can't really do anything about it.
I mean, how do you disprove a false allegation?
You can't. Well, see, now this is the challenge.
I mean, every sane human being has massive sympathy for any rape victim, whether it's male or female.
And that almost goes without saying, but I think it's worth mentioning here because the challenge is, like if some woman crawls into the police station and, you know, she's bleeding, she's beaten up, her vagina is torn, clearly this is rape and there's no such thing, I can't imagine any such thing as a false accusation in those kinds of situations.
Then it's just a matter of finding the perpetrator or perpetrators.
Here's the problem though.
The reason why there were strict rules around sexuality in the past, largely driven by religion, and rightly so in my view, is that if there is no evidence of physical assault, I have no idea, if there's no physical evidence of attack, Sexuality is a private matter.
If there's no physical evidence of violence, it is he said, she said, and I have absolutely no idea how that rises beyond the level of reasonable doubt, which is 90 to 95% certainty.
It is a he said, she said, they say start by believing.
In other words, they want the woman's word to be magically multiple times stronger than the man's word, while at the same time they say, well, we'd like equality with men.
Well, of course, if you can have it both ways, I suppose you'd want to, but it's not just.
Yes, I agree. But they go a step farther.
You know, the start by believing is just the first step.
The second step is that they encourage investigators to have what they call trauma-informed investigations.
Hmm. Trauma-informed investigations.
This means that if there's inconsistencies in the complainant's story, if she's fragmented in her memories, even if she lies sometimes, this may be because of the trauma.
And they go through this whole thing of saying that there's neuropsychological evidence that this is caused by the trauma.
And there's a lot of people out there that say, no, that's not quite right.
In fact, there's some fascinating research that says just the opposite.
It says, when you're traumatized, your memory goes up.
You remember more, not less.
Oh, and I think if most people think in their lives, in histories of where something really terrifying or really unpleasant happened, it's vivid.
I mean, in my childhood, I remember things that were traumatic with extraordinary memories.
Vividness. Now, the before and after days, I couldn't tell you for the life of me what the heck I was doing, but for those 10 minutes or those 20 minutes or those five minutes, boom.
Now, is the memory perfect?
I have no idea because there's nothing to compare it to, but it's really, really vivid, and I wouldn't say, well, I was in this room, and then the next day say, well, I was in that room.
It would be consistent with itself, for sure.
Yes, yes. And, you know, to be fair, a lot of the research out there says that People respond very differently to trauma.
Some people are going to respond one way, some people are going to respond another way.
But I think there's enough evidence out there that says that the memory is actually increased to say that this whole thing of trauma-informed investigations is a little suspect.
It flows down from this whole thing of start by believing.
Here's another reason to believe them.
Even if it looks like they're lying, maybe they're not.
Maybe it's because of the trauma.
Then where, of course, does the null hypothesis come in?
Because in a court of law, in a legal setting, you're trying to establish facts, not feelings.
The feelings are already assumed to be in opposition because there's a legal case, like if there's a civil case.
Of course people are disagreeing otherwise they wouldn't be suing or ending up in court.
So the feelings are already in opposition but the purpose of the law is to try to establish the empirical facts.
If there's no physical evidence of assault, we have a big problem because it's he said, she said.
And then if her story is self-contradictory or changes details and so on, and if that then becomes because women are so fragile that their memories just get scattered, and like children they can't be expected to hold a consistent story together despite the fact that it's vivid enough for them to want to take a man to court, then we have a situation wherein there is absolutely no way To disprove it.
No physical evidence of assault and even self-contradictory stories don't make sense.
And of course, police and the FBI and so on will constantly try to get people to contradict themselves and then use that to say you lied to the police, right?
This happens all the time.
We can see this happening with the FBI. They say they'll interview you over three separate days and if anything you say contradicts itself, boom!
You've lied to them.
And so for men, it's a whole different standard.
But this idea that you can just point your finger At someone.
And then, you know, there's this phrase, witch hunt, you know, where you're trying to find females.
And it's just, but this is kind of turned, now the witches are doing the hunting, so to speak.
And that one point, that one accusation can destroy your life.
And even if it turns out that the woman was lying, even if the woman turns out to recant her story, The negative repercussions.
I mean, I've read these things in British newspapers where after the fifth false rape allegation, you know, maybe she gets some time in jail.
But man, I mean, if you run at someone with an accusation and it's false, you should get the punishment of the accusation.
That to me seems very basic.
I think that's very basic and it does not happen.
False accusers are rarely prosecuted, you know, so it leaves them with no reason to be accountable.
You know, there's no drawback to false accusing.
And there's no repair. I mean, okay, so you don't end up in jail if the accusation is proven to be false.
Yes. But it's not like there's a big retraction button on the internet or in people's memories.
It lasts and it lasts.
And this is very strange to me fundamentally.
Because if you want freedom, with freedom comes responsibility.
That's sort of the basic thing.
If you're 16, you want to drive your dad's car, okay, well...
If you damage it, then you're on the hook, right?
With freedom, with that kind of freedom comes responsibility.
And women do want to have freedom to pursue their own sexual pleasures and preferences outside of marriage, outside sometimes even of a stable relationship or a stable partner.
And like they want to troll the back alleys of the leather-clad tattooed guys who, you know, have tons of warning flags all over them.
And sometimes that is going to be, you know, there was a story when I was a kid looking for Mr.
Goodbar about the dangers of that kind of promiscuity.
And so if women are statistically the safest inside a marriage, inside a pair-bonded relationship, the data on that is...
Unequivocal. That is by far the safest place.
They're also safer on campuses than they are off campus, by the way, although you wouldn't know that.
So if women say, we have society has worked to create, Western society, create this wonderful enclosure, so to speak, For women to keep them as safe as humanly possible.
And if they want to go outside that enclosure, it's risky.
And I'm sorry that it is risky, and I wish it wasn't, but we have to deal with the facts as it stands.
And with that risk, now, that doesn't mean, of course, that if a man assaults or he should be prosecuted, full extent of the law, and so on.
But if something happens that is unpleasant rather than illegal, that seems to me the risk of going outside the statistically safest place for the women to be.
Yes. And the problem is that the enclosure that you're talking about, that safety enclosure, has been dubbed oppressive.
Safety, very oppressive.
Yes. It's storming outside.
I'm in my comfortable house.
No, it's a prison! That's it.
That's exactly right.
And all of this stems from gyno-centrism.
All right. So that's a term that may be a little startling to people.
And it's sad that it is startling, but I wonder if you can mention what you mean by that.
Well, gynocentrism, just as a plug, there's a site, gynocentrism.com, that's run by a friend that is an excellent site to start with.
But basically, it's saying that gynocentrism is the importance of providing and protecting for women and children at the expense of men.
And so... Men are expected to provide and protect.
They're expected to sacrifice, to go to war, to be the police, to make things safe, etc.
And to pay far more taxes usually than women do while women receive the effect of that taxes.
Yes. And, you know, the people like the in Violence Against Women International are flowing along the river of gynocentrism.
I mean, gynocentrism makes their job easy.
You know, because they're saying, oh, protect women.
We need to protect women.
And so everyone goes, yes, of course.
And that's because we all have these glasses on.
It says gynocentrism.
And that's the way we see the world.
It's like wearing sunglasses.
After a while when you wear it, if you take them off, you go, oh my.
You know, how about that?
But while you have them on, while you have this gynocentric glasses on, that's the way you see the world.
That's the way you see it. And people don't even know they've got the glasses on.
In fact, think about it, this whole Me Too thing.
Yes, men are somewhat responsible, but think about it.
My old buddy Paul Elam says, men use power to get sex, but women use sex to get power.
So there's two sides.
This is a dance going on.
This is not a one-way valve.
But because we have gynocentrism, it looks like it's a one-way valve.
Oh, it's only the men, these bad masculine men.
But think about it. All these bad masculine men, Stefan, are high-status males.
Think about all the Me Too's have come out.
High-status males.
Not your average man.
Men. How successful would Harvey Weinstein have been?
In his pursuit and predation upon women if he'd been a janitor.
You're right. No one's gonna go to him.
You know, nobody. Exactly.
And that's what we need to look at is both sides, not just one.
And I'm not saying that, you know, women are responsible for their assault or anything like that.
I'm just saying there's two sides of this that are worthwhile just having a look at.
That the women went to Harvey for a reason.
You know, they wanted that role.
They did, yes. I mean, I think that's fairly beyond doubt.
That the reason that, I mean, again, if the janitor of the hotel had said to some of these women, come back to my hotel room, they would have said no.
So they went there.
And, you know, this naivete thing, I don't know.
It seems kind of hard for me to follow.
You know, like, well, I just thought he was taking me to his hotel room at 11 o'clock on a Friday night for a business meet.
Like, you know, it just seems a little hard to follow.
I think they did very well while they were there.
I'm sorry. I think they knew very well why they were there.
The risk of it, yes. For sure, it's not like, here's a meeting with all of the investors at 8.30 on a Tuesday morning, right?
I mean, that's one situation.
But this hope, of course, that you can dangle your sexual attractiveness in front of a man in order to get what you want and never have to consummate it is very tempting, I think, for a lot of women who are pretty.
And I do not mean to relieve Weinstein of responsibility in this.
That's not the point. No.
We need to see that this is a dance going on.
This is something that's happening between men and women.
It's not just a one-sided piece where men are bad.
Well, and the entirety of those who came in contact with someone like Harvey Weinstein were the enablers.
So the question is, of course, if he did grab at these women or the other things that he's accused of, You go straight to the cops with the evidence, with all of that.
Now, there was the Italian woman who went to the cops and nothing particular happened.
But how many people were involved in enabling this behavior?
Yes, he was a horrible predator.
Yes, there were men around.
But there were also women who did not act decisively in order to do this.
And we can see this, of course.
I mean, if you look at the poster boy for this kind of stuff is Roman Polanski.
You know, who drugged, allegedly drugged, but certainly admitted to having vaginal and anal sex with an underage girl and celebrated in Hollywood.
So the idea that Hollywood is interested in protecting women and protecting girls, that's something they'll put in the movies, but not while they're making the movies.
Well said.
Yes. Yes.
Now, here's another issue that I think is a bit of a challenge for a lot of men to follow.
When I first started doing this public intellectual work, Tom, I was very clear to myself and I have all of these objectives that are written even down somewhere and everything.
And I said very early on that I wish to provide the same agency for men as to women.
And that is a really, really challenging thing.
And I actually did that originally because that's what women told me they wanted.
You know, as a guy who likes to please women, as how is a race, single mom and all that, I'm like, oh, well, women want equality.
So, good. Okay, so women will...
Respect being given full moral agency.
Boy, how young I was.
How young I was.
Because it's kind of funny.
So when I started talking about single moms and saying, well, they had children out of wedlock and that's bad for kids.
It is almost an environmental toxin to be raised by a single mother in terms of the outcomes.
I mean, if there was something in the food...
That produce that level of addiction and dysfunction and promiscuity and early death and criminality and so on, we'd say, my God, BPA? Oh no, I think we have something even worse, which is the single mother toxicity environment.
And I said, well, you know, women have agency in the creation of children.
And people say, well...
It's half men, right? So immediately, the moment it's like trying to put these two reverse magnets together, you say, women have agency, straight to men.
Say, well, it's half men.
It's like, well, okay, I guess you could say that, but women are still the gatekeepers of sex.
Men ask women out, men try to get into the pants of women, and women say yes or no.
And the vast majority of men accept what women say as the yes or no.
Yeah. They want to be asked out and to be wooed and to be taken out and to be passive in that sense and to be the yes or no, right?
Basically, the man is applying for sex like you'd apply for a job and she's the hiring manager who says yes or no.
And so if the woman has agency and is dating and having sex with these guys, particularly if she has, you know, sex with different guys and keeps having kids and so on, that she's responsible for that.
And the moment you try and put this agency on women, some women welcome it.
And some women are like, yes, hell yes.
Somebody, you know, women have 18 different forms of birth control.
Of course they're responsible if they get pregnant and have kids.
But there does seem to be this massive Roman-style phalanx that just, you know, circle the eggs, circle the eggs, set fire to the flaming moat, release the alligators, the crock, and you name it, because somebody's trying to give women equal agency to men.
Really? How is this controversial?
Isn't this what women wanted? Well, no, I don't think so.
I mean, they want... Sorry, they said they wanted, you know, like, be romantic while I go buy a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey.
Yeah, I mean, the accountability piece is just missing.
No. You know?
And I agree with you, 100%.
And it's a shame because the joys of adulthood are largely around the joys of accountability.
Really? You can be proud of anything you don't feel responsible for.
And I think that by holding off this responsibility from women, we're kind of denying them the real joys of full adulthood.
And accountability is a great joy.
I don't know why people fear it so much.
Like, I'd rather win or lose by my own merits than be carried on the back of a camel and think I won a race.
So you should just give women this.
How can they be happy?
Maybe it's a male perspective, but if somebody, hey, I slept through the race, but I got a participation trophy.
It's like I'd burn that damn thing because it would be so embarrassing.
And just every man would burn a damn thing.
Yeah, I don't want that. Don't give me, ew, I didn't earn that.
Keep that thing away from me.
Part of what we're talking about is the difference between men and women in that men tend to be hierarchical.
You know, we tend to be hierarchical in who's first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and this starts very, very young.
I'll bet you can remember when you were in elementary school.
I'll bet you can remember the boy in your class that was the fastest, that was the toughest, that was the tallest, anything with EST on it, you know?
That's what boys remember, because they're trying to be the fastest.
They're trying to be the tallest.
They want to be EST. The girls are not thinking about EST. Well, that's why boys like superheroes, because there's no number two.
That's it. It's not like, I'm halfway to Superman.
It's like, I want to be the ultimate alpha, even if it means coming from another planet.
That's fine with me.
Yes, and this hierarchical piece for men means that you have to compete with other men, and you have to accept that you get beat sometimes.
You know, I mean, that's part of being a guy, is you accept where you are in this hierarchy.
Yeah, he's better than me, but I'm better than him, you know?
And it's like, this, I think, breeds accountability.
When we can compete and say, yeah, that's where I am in this hierarchy, I think that breeds accountability.
We sort of know in our gut that this is And here we're going to strive to get a little bit higher, you know?
And we can't fake it.
Like, if you're in a running race with other guys and you come in last, everyone sees that you came in last.
You can't fake it. There's no makeup.
There's no push-up bras.
There's no Spanx. There's no, like, you can't tease your hair.
You just, you came in last.
Sorry, where you are in the pecking order can't be faked.
Whereas, of course, because it's a softer, gooier kind of...
Interdimensional relationship kind of pecking order for girls and they can fake a lot of stuff.
There's not that same level of just bland, bold objectivity of it either worked or it didn't.
Either won or you didn't.
Yeah, yeah. And for the women, you see, because the men had to provide and protect, they compete in order to be the highest as they can to the hierarchy in order to get the girls.
The more status you got, the more likely you're going to get the hot woman, right?
But the women don't have the same pressure.
They don't have the same kind of thing.
You know, the whole precarious manhood thing.
Do you know about precarious manhood?
It's fascinating. The researchers are just finding out now.
Seems like something that would involve blue pills, but I'm certainly willing to listen.
This is definitely a red pill, but they don't even know it.
But what they found is that girls, when they have their menses, when they are hit puberty, after that, they are considered women.
But boys, when they hit puberty, after that, they are not considered men.
In fact, they have to, not just adolescence, but from then on, they have to prove every day that they are, quote, a man.
And they call this precarious manhood, because his manhood is precarious.
It can slip off any time and he can be falsely accused.
Boom! He's gone! Or get fired or have an injury or whatever, right?
Lose your utility as the conveyor belt of resources.
Exactly. Exactly.
And it's all this part of hierarchies.
Precarious manhood and hierarchy and trying to be the best.
And women, because they're being taken care of, don't have that same kind of dilemma.
They just don't have it.
In fact, the women, the evolutionary people are saying that the women...
Tend to want to depend upon the group because they're going to be very dependent at childbirth and taking care of little teeny kids.
So the women depend on the group.
And rather than challenge their people around them, what do they do?
They cooperate. And it's this cooperation that builds community.
In fact, if you have a woman who says, I'm better than you are, she gets attacked.
Well, that's fascinating. And that explains, of course, why there's the phrase man up, but there's not the phrase woman up.
There you go. Because the man has to be in an elevated position in order to be called a man.
Oh, man, even now I've got that, how many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man, right?
How far do you have to go before there's nothing like that for women?
Yes, exactly. How do you prove that you're a woman?
One fascinating thing they found, Stefan, is that at work, in the workplace, when women...
Achieve something and get higher than other women.
It's the other women who attack them.
They attack them because they have left the group.
They're trying to say they are different or better than the group.
And therefore they get attacked by the other women.
So it's a very different kind of thing than the male hierarchy.
And this whole thing I think plays out in the sexual assault stuff too.
Because the men are striving for status to try and acquire the hottest woman they can get.
And the women are...
Not competing in the same way.
They are, what's the word for it?
Depending on their environment, on their people around them.
I'm messing up my words.
Well, the men have to do and the women have to be, right?
That's the foundation of attractiveness.
So the woman has to be – now, it's not like the woman doesn't have to do anything.
She should exercise.
As a friend of mine used to say when I was a kid, there aren't any ugly women.
There are only lazy women, right?
So they exercise, eat well, personal grooming, whatever it is that they do to be attractive.
But the woman basically is passive.
I mean, she's passive.
She puts herself out there like you're just putting your art on display, right?
And just see who wants to wander by and pick it up.
So the women, of course, are passive because their role is...
be inseminated and to raise the man's children.
That's the role.
Yes.
That requires that she engage with people, right?
With her husband as a source of resources, whereas for the husband, it is reality, objective reality that is the source of his resources.
He doesn't go and usually pillage it from other people.
He has to go and earn it or hunt it or grow it or whatever it is.
So for women, there's a passivity involved in attraction.
The man is the hunter. The woman isn't even the hunted because the hunted is trying to get away, so to speak.
But she's just on there on display.
Like I remember when I was in junior high school, oh no, grade six was my first.
I was actually in grade eight for a while when I first came to Canada.
Then I got dumped back in grade six.
But I was at my first dance.
And I remember this really, really clearly.
I'm sure everybody has the same memories for men in particular.
And the boys are on one side, and the girls are all on the other side, right?
And the girls look great. And your goal, like none of the girls were coming over to ask the boys.
Maybe it's changed now. This is back when I was, I guess almost 40 years ago now.
No, 40 years ago. Oh, Lord.
Anyway, so, oh, Lord!
And you know, this is part of the, I remember it because it was kind of exciting, a little traumatic.
And so, all the girls on one side, all the boys on the other side.
And your goal was to cross that big hardwood canyon, right?
To go over. And you'd pass by the girls.
And you'd try to find a girl.
Who was not so attractive that she'd never go out with you, but also not so unattractive that your friends would make fun of you for asking her.
Like trying to find that sweet spot.
And that's where you try and find out where you are in the hierarchy.
And that was women standing there looking – or girls, I guess, standing there looking pretty, boys crossing the canyon, the Hartwood Canyon to try and find where they stand in the pecking order.
And that's a pretty wild thing in terms of the boys are actually doing something.
The girls are just being passive and attractive.
And that, I think, shapes a lot of these interactions.
And he has to take responsibility.
And he's the one who's going to get hurt if it doesn't work.
Well, no. See, I mean, I agree with you.
But where I disagree is, and I think about this now occasionally, I was walking past the girls.
And if I was walking past the girls, as some of the boys, as the boys in general were...
Well, that's hurtful because...
And she can't even do anything about it.
Like, I could go up and did.
I would go up and ask out the alpha girls.
And occasionally it would work, and generally it wouldn't, but occasionally it would.
So I at least could do something.
But if the boy passes you by, you're standing up there against the gym wall.
If the boy passes you by, and you don't get that special excitement of trying to both slow and fast dance to Stairway to Heaven, then what can you do?
You're just there. And you're like the piece of art that the buyer passes by.
You can't... And there is a certain rejection of that.
You're absolutely right. There is a rejection in that.
But there's also, I think, more rejection in having to put yourself out and say, would you dance with me?
And if she says no, wham!
And everyone can see it.
Exactly. Like, if you pass by the girl...
Not everyone notices that interaction, but of course, you know, we were all watching because you scope out the other men, right?
Oh, we're focused on women for sure, but we're focused on the men as well to find out where they stand in the hierarchy.
So if you went and asked a girl out, oh, but first of all, you couldn't ask the girl out next to her because that was just plain insulting because you know that she's, oh, so you wouldn't go out with the one, the one you wanted to wouldn't dance with you.
So I guess I'm like sloppy mental seconds, right?
So then you had to make the cross back across the great canyon of despair and everybody would be like, crash and burn, man!
Crash and burn! Flames down!
Houston, we have a problem!
Fourth engine is out! We're going down!
Oh, that was rough, man.
But, you know, it's a necessary rite of passage.
I just wanted to point that out.
But at the time, it's like, oh, man.
Because then what happens is you get stuck like a flying amber in your hierarchy.
And working to change that is another thing.
Because if you're like, if you're at the top, fantastic, right?
But if you're kind of in the middle or lower down, even if two-thirds, if you have ambition, you want to, your teeth, it's like climbing Mount Everest with your teeth.
You've got to find a way.
And that's why we have a civilization.
Yes, exactly. And the other reason we have a civilization is testosterone.
And this is what fuels the boy's willingness to take a risk.
You know, they know now that testosterone is not about violence and aggression.
Testosterone is about striving for status.
And so the more testosterone we get, the more we strive for status.
And the other thing most people don't know is testosterone limits our emotional tears.
So, when you were 13 and the testosterone started to hit, I'll bet you cried a lot less than when you were 7 or 8.
I don't think I got a massive flow of testosterone because of the aforementioned single mom stuff.
Yeah, so go on a little bit more because that is associated with aggression.
And of course, for a lot of society, healthy, and I get this all the time in my show, Tom, like when I'm assertive, everybody thinks I'm being abusive.
Like if I won't accept bad behavior and I constantly, if I call people out on it and won't accept it and so on, I'm not yelling, I'm not calling people names, I'm not being abusive.
That's masculine!
Yeah, it's like I'm not out of control because I have assertive standards.
That's healthy. You're setting limits.
Yeah. Setting limits is a masculine trait and masculinity is forbidden.
Right. You're toxic masculinity, Stefan.
You know? My gosh, it's absolutely crazy.
And toxic masculinity is not even usually defined as the differentiation between toxic and healthy.
It's just all toxic, all the time.
Well, if you look closely at what they're doing, toxic masculinity is actually an attack on alpha males.
This is why people hate Trump so much.
He's an alpha. He is literally an alpha.
I think he's not an alpha.
I think pretty much he's the alpha.
He's the alpha. I don't even know.
Exactly. It's a fascinating mess, eh?
So let's talk a little bit more about testosterone because, funnily enough, I didn't learn a lot about that in the female-dominated health classes in my junior high school.
So if you can break that down a little bit, and as we know, of course, I just want to point this out before we start, Tom, testosterone is catastrophically falling throughout the West.
Like we have half what we used to have just a couple of generations ago.
So what the hell is going on?
Yeah. You mean, what's going on with the drop?
Oh, just the whole, like, what are the factors?
And just bathe me in testosterone.
That's all I'm saying. Well, the most important piece is that testosterone has been found now in the last, I think it's 10 years.
It's been found that it has to do with striving for status.
I can remember when I was a little guy, when I got that testosterone, I wanted to get up and go farther and beat the next guy, you know?
So, striving for status is the piece of testosterone.
Think about it. People who have a lot of testosterone are going to strive for status.
Women don't have a lot of testosterone.
You know, so this gives men a huge advantage in the workplace, particularly with very difficult jobs.
I mean, if you've got testosterone, you're going to be pushed.
Not only does it make you strive for status, it increases your ability to take risks.
You know, you'll take risks more likely if you've the more testosterone.
It also, oh God, what does it do?
Risk-taking, slows down the tears, you know, so you're...
You're more stealth, right?
Yes. This is sort of the stereotype of the man who's allowed one single tear while at his father's graveside, but other than that, he's like Mount Rushmore, right?
You know, it's another thing funny about tears is that the male tear ducts are bigger than the female tear ducts.
And they're thinking that that's why men...
Their eyes will just glisten when they're really sad.
Have you ever noticed that? Men's eyes will just glisten.
Whereas women, the tears are like falling down the face.
And a lot of it may have to do with A, testosterone, but B, the tear ducts.
So you're not going to see tears streeping down a man's face in the same kind of way.
I also think that this is obviously not scientific in any way, shape or form, Tom, but to me, testosterone gives me significant drive to go and master things in reality, whereas I think for women, it's more about mastering relationships and where you hire.
For me, the hierarchy is relative to objective resources in reality.
How much money, how much influence, the size of the house, the car, whatever it is, right?
How much status do you actually have that's measurable in objective reality?
Because those are the resources you need to bring to your family so that your wife and children survive and flourish.
On the other hand, it seems to me that the sort of soupy-goopy status that women go for is much less objective.
It's much more based on relationships and it's much more susceptible to To destruction, in a way, right?
Like, we all know the girls, they spread rumors about the other girls, and she did this, and she did that, and whatever.
And it's funny how that's almost...
Back to the... Me Too movement, the fact that women are so vulnerable to these kind of whisper campaigns, it's almost like, well, not almost like, they are in a way reproducing that very vulnerability and susceptibility to men.
It's almost like they are demanding or enforcing that men be subject to the same devastating whisper campaigns that girls are so terrified of throughout their youth.
That's one of the things that men face today that's a real danger, and that is that they're expected to be more like women.
It's like, Stefan, why are you setting limits?
That's a terrible thing, Stefan.
Don't set limits. Don't call people's cards.
So you're expected to be more feminine.
It's crazy. It's a crazy place we're living in, basically.
But the whole thing with relational violence is important, or relational aggression is important, too.
And that's what you're talking about with the gossip and stuff.
They've done some fascinating research on this.
I don't know if you know this. Rich Savin Williams, I think was the guy's name, the researcher.
And he did this research where he was in the 80s.
And they had these cabins of summer camp.
They had boys' cabins and girls' cabins.
And the guy had a researcher in every cabin.
And they were counting behaviors over and over and over again.
They were counting dominance behaviors.
What they found was the boys, as soon as they hit the camp, as soon as they get in the cabin, one boy is pushing everybody else around.
And they're all trying to get up to the hierarchy.
Who's going to be first? And they say that the boys set up their hierarchy very quickly.
Within a day or two, it's all set up.
The girls, they said, for the first week, they're all really nice to each other.
That's because they need to find the vulnerable weak spots to know where to put the shiv in.
And they're setting up themselves to have support.
And then after the first week, they started with the relational aggression, which is the gossip and the lies and the false accusations and things like this.
And it's absolutely fascinating stuff.
You know, we boys and girls tend to get what they want in very different ways.
The boy will push you out of the way to get what he wants.
He'll use physical means.
He'll use intimidation. We're good to go.
Yes. Exactly.
And part as friends. And it was actually possible because physical aggression does not mean that a friendship cannot form.
Relational aggression is very much burning the bridges and this is one of the reasons why I think male friendships can be more sustainable or more stable in some ways because you can have that physical aggression and you can become friends afterwards.
And that certainly is true in competition.
We know the boys who compete with each other can be friends.
They can switch teams. They can do all of that stuff.
But when the girls compete, say for a boy, if the one boy gets the girl and the other girl doesn't, that relationship often is, you know, flamed.
Yes, yes.
And the important piece here is that the relational aggression is, at least in adolescence and early childhood, is more female.
Some people are not sure about what happens after that, but I think it's more female.
At any rate, that's the very thing that fuels false accusations, is the relational aggression.
So this is even more reason to be very careful when people are accused of something, you know, because this is, and we don't really pay any attention to the relational aggression.
We don't pay attention to it in the same way that we obsess with men's violence.
Men's violence has been condemned over and over again, but women's relational aggression is almost ignored.
Well, and I think we should, I'd like to get back to that in a sec, Tom, but I think it's worth mentioning that all of the studies, I mean, without exception, I'm certainly not an expert, but all of the studies that I've read clearly state that with regards to physical aggression and physical violence within a relationship, women initiate it more often than men.
Yes. And that is something, violence against women, it's like, yeah, okay, that's bad, but can we actually deal also, perhaps a tiny bit, with the statistical majority of domestic abuse situations which are women abusing men, physically.
Not just like you're a mean guy, you're a bad guy, you're a bastard, you're a son of a bitch, but like physical attack.
And you see what's going on there, Stefan, is that that's in relationship.
Women are violent. But outside of relationship, it's the men's domain.
I mean, the men are the ones who tend to be more violent and aggressive and murder and this and that.
And so the feminists look at that and go, see?
It's all the men who are violent.
Oh, it's outside of the biosphere of the home.
Therefore, it's more visible. Well, of course, women are smaller and weaker than men.
Of course, they're not out there punching strangers in a bar because they're not going to do very well.
But in home where they have power, and this is with regards to they have power because of the backup of the state.
And also because of male deference and also because they will injure men less in general unless they use and implement it.
But to me, the big issue, Tom, with regards to this kind of family violence, which I've certainly talked about ad infinitum, perhaps just touch on it here, is that when women have power, and feminists say this, well, when you have power, you're more likely to be aggressive, right?
And the patriarchy, their power, and more...
But the greatest power disparity in general in the world is that between mother and child, right?
So a man who's beating up his wife, the wife can call, she can leave, she can get the police, she can go elsewhere, she can get support, she can get welfare, she can go to a home, she can get just about any support or resources that she could possibly imagine will be provided to her.
Children have no such luxury, no such opportunity to leave, no such independence to get away.
And where women have power over children, women hit a lot, abuse a lot, and again, it's behind closed doors in general.
Women in public often very nice to their children, but it's very much like, you wait till we get home kind of stuff.
And then when they're out of sight, then the fists come out or the slapping or the spanking comes out.
So is it mothers who are more violent with their children than the fathers?
Well, there is that for two reasons.
One, it does seem to be foundational that women hit more than men.
But also, and this is part of it, and I don't think anyone knows objectively how much of it's part of it, women spend more time around children than men do.
Yes. And so that doesn't seem to answer the entire question.
In other words, women spend three times the amount, but they hit more than three times.
So it doesn't seem to answer the entire question, although that is a part of it.
But yeah, there have been real-time studies of women hitting their children and being mean to their children.
And it sometimes is a pretty constant refrain.
And we all know that power corrupts and the power of parenting is the greatest of all.
It reminds me of some research I read a long time ago about they had men and women playing this video game where they were bombing things.
And the men bombed a lot more than the women in almost every arena, except for one.
When no one was looking, the women bombed a lot more than the men.
That always tickled me.
And it's the same thing.
At home, they're going to be different than they are out in the shopping center.
Same kind of thing.
Both genders have their light and their dark aspect.
I mean, I don't want to get all completely Jungian with the shadow and all, but all humanity have our angels and our devils.
And those are...
I mean, they have moral qualities, but they're also just survival qualities.
And my concern has been that there's just been this weird and almost totalitarian shift in perspective where only the dark aspects of male nature are discussed and only the positive aspects of female nature are discussed.
And there's no subtlety, no examination, no humility, no curiosity about looking at the positive aspects of male nature and the negative aspects of female nature.
So it really is like a court where only the prosecution gets to bring evidence and arguments and the defense just has to cross their fingers and shut up.
And I think that is the fundamental sexism that's going on.
There are wonderfully positive things to female nature, there are wonderfully positive things to male nature, and there are terrible aspects to that as well, as you would expect from all sexism.
biologically evolved organisms.
There's the capacity to heal and the capacity to hurt.
There's the capacity for love and there's the capacity for hate.
There's the capacity to help and to abuse.
And we have just so relentlessly focused on one aspect of male personality.
And we've only relentlessly focused on one aspect of female personality.
Trying to flesh this stuff out a little bit is pretty, pretty important.
I mean, it really is.
We've got conversations about gender that seem to me about as subtle as a Marxist analysis of who owns the damn means of production.
Capitalists are evil monocled pigs who should be hung from trees.
The workers are all virtuous ants who just liberate and urine to be free.
And it's like, can we evolve a little bit beyond this ridiculous black and white stuff that is a low IQ, immature personality, black and white divisiveness?
That's why I like to go out in public and say, men are good.
It really pisses people off.
Right. And men are necessary.
Men are necessary even to create this delusion that women are strong and independent.
Because the amount of resources – there was an Australian study that figured out how many – how much taxes is paid for by the men and how many taxes are paid for by the women.
I saw that. And how many – like astonishing numbers of resources are transferred from men to women.
Now, if it was the other way, everyone would be going insane.
Mental. Correct. Completely insane.
Oh, the women are just livestock workhorses for the vanity of the men.
But because it's going this way.
So even this delusion that there's this massive equality and so on, hey, I do want equality under the law.
I do want equality of opportunity.
This equality of outcome and massive resource transfers.
I mean, the brave, independent single mom is only kept afloat.
By this massive fire hose of public resources continually sprayed in her direction.
And if that's the only thing sprayed in her direction, I think we're doing pretty well.
Which is fueled by men. Yeah, fueled by men.
Paid for men. Subsidized by men.
So it's so astounding to me.
It's like a little kid saying, I'm Superman.
I can fly. While six guys hold on to him and fly him around the backyard.
I'm flying. Look, I'm flying.
It's like, no, you've been held up by men.
You are not a superhero.
hero.
You're just a kid with delusions.
Yeah.
So where do you think it would be most productive for, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say maybe a few more men than women watching this conversation.
Where do you think it would be most productive for men to start looking who are newish to these kinds of topics?
Where on the web, you mean?
Where on the web? Or isn't just topics themselves?
Where do you think is the most...
Like if you get some total blue-pilled guy who walks up to you and says, women are angels, women are perfect, single moms are heroes, and women are always victims.
See? They're both incredibly empowered and endless victims, but no problem with that.
So what would you first say to him, not just necessarily web resources, but what are the most productive topics for him to focus on first?
You know, the thing that caught my attention first, Stefan, was the domestic violence stuff.
And it was just so clear and so obvious that it was biased.
It just blew my mind.
I ended up writing a report for the Maryland Commission for Men's Health on male victims of domestic violence and learned a huge amount about the whole history of that and how it worked out.
You know, in the 1980s, there was this big tussle between the family therapists and the feminists.
Over domestic violence.
The family therapist said, these people need to have family therapy so that we can help them work with conflict resolution.
You know? And the feminist said, no!
Men are bad! We can't do that!
And of course, who won? The feminist won.
They threw out the family therapist.
But, you know, so that kind of caught my eye back then, too.
But that is one issue.
The other, you know, there's all kinds of issues out there.
The suicide issue breaks my heart.
You know, with 80% of suicides being males.
80%. If that was 80% of anybody else, there'd be huge fireworks about how terrible this is.
But even in the suicide prevention websites, there's nothing on the first page that says the biggest risk factor for suicide is being male.
No one says it. No one.
It's just unbelievable.
So, you know, the suicide issue, the domestic violence issue, what else?
What would you say? I got to start with cunnilingus, frankly.
I have to start with cunnilingus.
No, this is not a pickup line. No, I do.
And this is something that can really shock people.
So there's a particular cancer that's called by HPV, which actually comes from cunnilingus.
And so cunnilingus can give you cancer if the woman has this particular virus.
That's a pretty serious sexually transmitted disease, in fact.
You know, cancer is a big deal and can kill you.
Now, a sexually transmitted disease that can kill men, kill men, is pretty important, I think.
And we don't hear that much about it.
Right. I haven't heard anything about it.
Because that's women's pleasure and men are disposable.
Right, right. And so...
We can go with the breast cancer versus prostate cancer risks and fatalities and so on.
But I think that's quite interesting.
It's quite interesting to look at that.
If blowjobs caused women to die, do you think we'd hear a little bit about it?
So it doesn't go both ways?
I'm sorry? It doesn't go both ways?
No, no, it doesn't.
No, it doesn't. Interesting.
It doesn't. And so these are the kinds of things.
You triple process kind of information and it's like, you know, if blowjobs killed women, I think it would be on every news network.
It would be massive ads everywhere.
There'd be like, you know, these public service announcements everywhere.
Because, you see, women would be endangered.
Right, right. But the fact that men can get cancer from cunnilingus...
It tells you something about gynocentricism, about the fact that this information is suppressed because women like getting cunnilingus and men are disposable.
Yes, indeed.
Wild. Well, you just got me on a new crusade.
Good. Good. I will send you the link.
Yeah, I'd really like to see it.
The other thing you can do is just go look for womenshealth.gov on the website, girlshealth.gov on the website, but then look for boyshealth.gov and you get a 404.
And men'shealth.gov, you get a 404.
How about that?
Well, you see, on a farm, the farmer gets health insurance, but not the cows.
You see, the livestock not really showing up in the ER a whole amount because, you know, the livestock is pretty disposable.
I mean, of course, you want to keep the livestock healthy.
But only because they're a source of meat and milk and profit.
There you go. All right.
Well, listen, I really, really appreciate your time.
Always a great pleasure to chat.
Just wanted to remind people we'll put links to your books below.
Always worth a good check out.
Tgolden.com, MenAreGood.com, MenInSocialWork.org, and the Twitter feed, Twitter.com forward slash TRGoldentom.
Always a great pleasure. Thank you so much for your time today.
