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April 9, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:11:18
4051 The Boy Crisis | Warren Farrell and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux.
Hope you're doing well. Back with a good friend, Dr.
Warren Farrell. He is a great, great writer, great thinker, the author of many best-selling books, including Why Men Are The Way They Are, Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say, The Myth of Male Power, Why Men Earn More, The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap, and the new, brand spanking new, The Boy Crisis.
Why our boys are struggling and what we can do about it.
Dr. Farrell, thank you so much for taking the time today.
I am looking forward to talking to you.
You're always a bright, thoughtful, curious interviewer.
So this is a pleasure for me.
Thanks. So the first thing that I thought was that the real boy crisis is that there's no perception of the boy crisis.
Well, that is a good part of the boy crisis.
And where that part of it comes from is that historically speaking, we needed our sons to be willing to be disposable, to die in war so that we could survive.
And so when you are training someone to be potentially disposable, it's hard to let yourself psychologically attach to somebody who you can lose, who is responsible for your surviving.
So there's a There's a tension between the biological instinct to be able to survive and the biological instinct to love your son is in tension with the biological instinct to make sure he prepares for war, to be able to make sure we don't become under Nazi rule or under whatever fear we had for each generation's war.
And so that is part of why when boys are at risk, we aren't as worried about it.
We've been trained to have boys be at risk historically.
And so that's one aspect of why the boy crisis has been ignored.
Conversely, we've been biologically prepared to protect women.
So when women in any way, shape or form cry, complain, express fears or feelings, we have learned historically and biologically To compete with each other.
Stefan competes with Warren, if we were normal guys, and we try to make sure that you're the biggest jock in the protector group, or I am.
Part of heroic intelligence was preparation for a short life, whereas health intelligence is preparation for a long life.
And so now our parents have a real challenge before them.
Which on the one hand, they want their sons to be heroes.
On the other hand, they want their sons to be healthy.
And so part of what I try to do in the Boy Crisis book is to look at why the very problems boys are having are so invisible to us.
It's strange too because this elevation of masculinity into this Caesar bestriding the world kind of patriarchy where we have so much power and so much control and so much authority and so many privileges, it seems like a very sophisticated and elegant way of saying, shut up men, we don't want to hear about your problems.
And that conflation of massive power with...
Coldness, if not downright, contempt for emotional problems is a very jarring thing when you first begin to really see it.
Yes, it really is.
And throughout all of the women's movement's development, they've always said, you know, men have the privilege and men have the power.
And particularly if you're a white man, well, I agree that white people have a type of privilege that, for example, African Americans do not have.
But there is a difference between white people and white men versus women.
The power that men have, the earning more money, is not earning more money for the same work.
The pay gap is not between men and women, it's fathers and mothers.
And when a man and woman became a father and a mother, both the mother and the father had different expectations.
The pressure on the woman was to risk her life in childbirth, And the pressure on the man was to risk his life in war to protect the children that the woman bore.
And so the additional money that the man made was discrimination against him.
It was a result of the pressure on him not to be considered worthy if he wasn't earning more money than he was before he had children.
And so we do see men earning more money than women, but instead of looking at that as privilege, most men who earn more money go from driving a cab 40 hours a week to driving a cab 70 hours a week when they would prefer to not drive a cab at all.
Or they go to, you know, instead of being in a coal mine, they would prefer to be an artist.
The jobs that men make the most money at Often take them away from love.
The Father's Cash 22 is that men learn to love the family by being away from the love of their family.
But when the Pew Research Center asks men who are fathers, who are full-time workers, which would you prefer to do?
Work full-time or be full-time involved with the family?
49% of men say, I'd prefer to be full-time involved with the family and not work outside the home at all.
But I need to work outside the home because that's my obligation.
That's my expectation. That's what our family needs the money.
And so what we've seen as male privilege is actually not male privilege.
It's male obligation and fulfillment.
But when our son walks into high school and hears about male privilege, And the message, as you said, really underneath it is, shut up.
You have male privilege.
We don't have to listen to you.
It's the others of us that have not had this privilege that we need to listen to.
It is a very inviting environment for him in high school or in college.
And this is especially dangerous in college where many of our sons will be experiencing Most states in the United States have laws now which are called affirmative consent laws where they can't even reach out to take a girl's hand or a young woman's hand without the possibility of if they do that and the woman is not interested and they haven't asked her ahead of time whether it's okay to hold her hand she can sue him for sexual harassment and once she does that lawsuit The chances of him,
he doesn't even have due process in the college or university.
So this becomes a very fear-based time for many of our sons who are wanting to pursue the higher education that is necessary to have a good job that is necessary for a woman to be attracted to them.
Yeah. And I've characterized it, people always say failure to launch, and I really characterize it as nowhere to land, which is a very different thing.
And the sort of twin aspects, the causality is complicated, and you do a great job of exploring it in the book.
The fact that war requires much less labor now than it did in the past, because you have weapons of mass destruction, means that men aren't even as valued as the sort of throw them into the fire, like vengeful kids with toy soldiers of war, the First and Second World War.
So men aren't as necessary for war anymore.
And through the welfare state, men are no longer required to provide resources for a woman to survive with offspring.
And so I think there is this...
Amazing. And I really have two minds about it, Dr.
Farrell, because on the one hand, it's catastrophic, but on the other hand, it is the kind of space or pause or option that allows for a reassessment of gender roles and carries within it, I think, the seeds of great possibility, which is if we can have a life outside of the biological necessities of provision and war, what possible lives could men have?
And we kind of hang, I think, at a crossroads now between a sense of nihilism and a sense of possibility.
Well, you're absolutely right.
One of the first chapters in my book looks at what the evolution of all this was.
And I started out looking at 63 of the largest developed nations All have boys falling behind girls in almost every academic area, as well as in social areas and social skills, falling behind psychologically,
being more likely to be depressed and suicidal, falling behind in their physical health, falling behind in their IQs, IQs dropping, sperm count getting lower, social skills getting less and less effective as they immerse themselves in video games.
And so I started asking myself, What is there about developed countries?
Is there any commonality there?
And I realize that in developed countries, there are two things that are much more allowed than in non-developed countries.
One is permission to have divorce.
And that tended to lead to two groups of people.
One was the group of boys that still had significant father involvement after divorce.
And then the other for mostly a majority of boys that did not have significant father involvement after divorce.
Then I looked at the 53% of women under 30 in the United States who are having children without being married.
And discovered that among that group of women, there was also a division between the group of women who were not married when they had children, whose fathers remained involved, and the group of women who had children without being married Whose fathers did not remain significantly involved.
And again, among the group that had significantly involved fathers, they were doing not as well as children do in an intact family, but they were doing close to as well as that, versus an enormous gap between what I call the dad-deprived boys, the dad-enriched boys, And what I ended up calling the dad-deprived boys.
When boys have minimal or insignificant amount of father involvement, they do terribly, I discovered, on more than 70 different areas of success, of being able to be empathetic, being able to be assertive but not aggressive,
being, when they have father involvement, much less likely to have depression, delinquency, discipline problems, drinking, drugs, To be involved in computer game addiction, as opposed to just computer games, which up to a point are very healthy, being involved in porn and addicted to porn.
When you look at ISIS recruits, they almost all have in common the lack of father involvement.
When you look at school shooters or mass shooters, whether it's Adam Lanza or Elliot Rogers or Dylann Roof, Or Nicholas Cruz or Steven Paddock.
They're all boys who did not have significant amount of father involvement.
And so there is this enormous divide occurring.
And I would predict that this divide that came from Advantage, the ability to survive, has ended up creating permission for divorce.
And then boys Don't have the same purposes today that they used to have.
So one of the reasons that boys without father involvement are so devastated is because in the old days, even if you didn't have father involvement, you had two senses of purpose.
You knew that as a male that you had to do two things.
One was prepare yourself to be a worrier or disposable in that way, or prepare yourself to be the sole breadwinner.
Today, the warrior, as you said, is less important.
The sole breadwinner does not make a man's identity a man.
And so the boys have to learn, how do I take a less defined sense of purpose and discover a sense of purpose?
Well, the most important Role model in helping him discover a sense of purpose is a father working with him and helping his son develop two things.
One is a sense of what he is as a boy, what he is as a unique human being, what is most fulfilling to him.
But once he decides what is most fulfilling to him, Also, how to have the postponed gratification that gives him the ability to achieve what is fulfilling to him, because the more fulfilling an occupation is, the harder it is to be successful at it, because the more fulfilling the occupation, the more competition, the more people want to be there, the more competition.
So therefore, the more discipline that is necessary to do an occupation that is fulfilling.
So the boy has to have both a sense of What his uniqueness is and a father's uniqueness can help him discover that.
And then also has to have a way of learning the postponing gratification that dads tend to bring to the family environment by enforcing boundaries more effectively.
That tends to be what they bring to the family table.
And as you point out very eloquently in the book, in the past, men were disposable, but they were praised.
And now, men are disposable and are insulted, and that's kind of a double whammy for a lot of men to try and navigate.
And they don't usually have a very conscious or verbal, and this is why these books are so important, a conscious or verbal way of expressing what's going on.
There's just an incoate sense of negativity or futility or nihilism, and trying to Find the problems and put them into words is a way, of course, of empowering people to at least recognize what's going on, which is the first step to trying to find solutions.
You're absolutely right. And so part of what sometimes is mocked is, you know, boys getting in touch with their feelings.
Well, we have to recognize that heroic intelligence has always been in tension.
with health intelligence.
Heroic intelligence was the preparation of a boy for a short life.
Health intelligence is the preparation of a boy for a long life.
In the old days, we just focused on the heroic intelligence.
Today, most people have a mixed feeling as parents.
On the one hand, you want your boy to be on the football team, and the football team is preparation for heroic intelligence or a short life.
The cheerleaders go, first in 10, do it again.
First in 10, do it again means first in 10, risk a concussion again.
First in 10, get across that To the to the end zone and we will cheer for you and we will also approve of you and we will also Love you and we will also have sex with you and not only will we do that as the cheerleaders But the you'll you'll be talked about in the school assembly Your father will be saying when you catch that touchdown pass.
That's my son He caught the pass and so we have to realize the social bribes we give our sons to be heroic and That may undermine their health intelligence and now for the first time in history The good news is we can create a balance between the two There's a lot of aspects of masculinity that are very important To know that when when the going gets tough the tough get going is very useful for up to a point But if you don't tune into your feelings and find out when you go over your edge and you're willing to get concussions and spinal cord injuries that ruin you for life and Then that's gone over the edge.
In the old days, we couldn't pay attention to whether a boy went over the edge.
We just admire him for toughing it out, no matter what the situation was.
Today, we have to balance boys not being too fearful, but at the same time, boys knowing that fear is an emotion that warns them against being physically and emotionally hurt.
Yeah, I think I've actually in my life heard more about carpal tunnel syndrome from women typing than brain damage from men in extreme sports and at work.
Now, the health gap is really, really important because the health gap, there's something which struck me like a blow to the chest.
When you pointed out that Anyone, any medical researcher who could find a way to close the male-female gap in mortality would do more for human health than discovering a cure for cancer.
Yes. What a statement.
It really is. There are so many things that we do for our sons throughout all their lives.
What I mentioned to you before about the football player and the father yelling, that's my son.
That's what I call son dropping.
And the message is very apparent that it's telling the boy, you will be more loved When you risk your life or a concussion, doing what you need to do to score that touchdown.
But what is very rarely picked up is that his brother in the stands, standing next to the father, often hears the brother being praised who is risking his life, but not him being praised for his ability to be kind to his sister.
For his ability to call a play fair when he's playing ping pong or something like that and his opponent just nicks the head to the end of the table but he can get away with calling it.
His opponent missed the table but he goes ahead and gives the point to his opponent and the opponent wins the game.
That type of kindness needs to be, what I'm asking our parents to do, is to focus on many ways of giving your son Attention and approval that leads to their long-term health because the connection between that boy who calls the shot in favor of his opponent is that he develops a greater bond with his friend.
And the greater bonds are healthier, make that child feel good about himself in school, develop more friends, are less likely to lead to depression, alienation, and rudderlessness.
And so there are so many dimensions of Of the different ways that we encourage and discourage our sons, we need to develop.
And so I have a whole series of litmus tests about what we can do as parents and what are we encouraging our sons to do and what are we discouraging.
And I think maybe perhaps the most important part of the boy crisis, Stephan, is learning how to set up Family dinner nights so that they don't become family dinner nightmares.
Family dinner nights are so pivotal in differentiating successful children from less successful children, but many parents don't know the absolute sine qua nones of setting up a family dinner night without which it can, as I said, become a family dinner nightmare.
Well, and I say this in my own family.
Every now and then we drift from conversation and I say, well, I got into a family life because of conversation and very little else.
That to me, that you build everything around conversation and take it from there because that's where the connection occurs.
And let me just tell you sort of an emotional response I had to the book.
An immense feeling of frustration and chaos.
And I'll tell you what that meant for me.
Let me know what you think. It just feels like, and this has been particular since maybe the mid to late 19th century, we've just been engaged in these mad series of social experiments throughout the world.
Like, I don't know, let's create a system with no private property and no profit motive and the government owns everything.
Let's see how that turns out and, you know, kills tens of millions of people.
Or let's try fascism or, I don't know, let's destroy the family.
Let's create family courts that are parent hostile.
Let's create a giant welfare state and displace men as the providers of the family.
I mean, it's just these wild, let's take the father out of the equation.
Hey, let's just see what happens.
Let's just, you know, we'll just move the chess pieces around a little bit, see what goes on.
And we're not really designed for those kinds of radical experiments.
Yes, if they grow organically out of society, that's one thing.
But it feels like, you know, the laws, the policies, everything is kind of just chaos and a whirlwind and emotional and cold in a way.
Because to treat people in a sense as lab rats, you have to treat them as less than human beings.
And in reading through this, and I do want to drill down a bit more in the details, there's just this, you know, over the last 50 years, Hey, let's see how boys do without fathers and without male role models and without male teachers.
Let's, you know, let's just roll those dice like Common Core was never tested.
Let's just change this whole education.
Let's just see what happens.
It's like they're children.
They're not guinea pigs.
What are we doing? Yes, absolutely.
You're unfortunately absolutely right.
And I think some of the evolution of this has been feminists wanted to have more opportunities for them in the workplace.
And so I think it was wonderful that there was an expansion of women's opportunities and freedoms.
But a number of things happened in the process.
One was feminism adopted a hierarchical structure evolving from the civil rights movement where there were slave owners and slaves.
And then Marxism where there were the privileged class and there were the oppressed class.
And so rather than say, oh, with men and women, we're all in the same family boat.
Our mothers made sacrifices to risk their lives and childbirth, and they sacrificed their careers.
They made sacrifices of careers, but our fathers made sacrifices in careers.
So both mother and father were trying to do the exact same thing.
Which is make the types of sacrifices that were necessary so that their children could have lives that were better than theirs with more options, with more freedoms.
But the feminist movement didn't see that.
They saw because men's role was to earn more money, they didn't see the obligation and the responsibility and the pressure on men to do that earning of more money.
They called that earning of more money privilege and power as opposed to an experience of powerlessness.
That the men had to experience in order to earn more money.
So they looked at men earning more than women do and said, okay, men earn a dollar-free 79 cents that women earn, as if it was for the same work, which nowhere close to is.
And then they said that's male power, as opposed to understanding that that was discrimination against men.
Sorry to interrupt, but just for men as a whole, ask yourself this question if you're a father, and particularly if you're a provider for a family.
Let's say you get a big raise.
Do you sit there and say, woohoo, that's all for me!
Yay! I get all this money, I can go buy a boat!
No, you recognize that you're going to get to keep pennies on the dollar if you're lucky from that raise.
If you're single, you might say, I can go by the boat so I can attract a woman who wants children so I can eventually divide my money more with other people.
But if you're married, you absolutely know that if you're going to be at all respected or that you are going to be a father who is going to put the primary money To making sure that children are healthy, they live in a good neighborhood where they can have access to good schools, the types of friends you want, and all of that costs mortgage money, tax money, orthodontist money, and security blankets in order to be able to deal with emergencies, and so on.
And that's what the feminist movement completely misunderstood.
So it's core.
Challenges was that it tended to demonize men and also undervalue the family.
And so by emphasizing female freedom, what ended up happening is that women said, well, now I'm free to have children without having fathers, but without recognizing that you are free to have children.
But the second you have children, It is your obligation to put your children's welfare above yours and therefore you are not free to not have fathers involved.
You're free to make a decision as to what leads to the best outcome for your child And your child's best outcome is almost invariably, not exclusively, but almost invariably going to be a lot better if you have both a mother and father involved and not just the father earning money, but the father's understanding the contribution that dads tend to make to the family.
And this is the crucial thing, because many times there's mothers and fathers involved, but the father experiences a father's catch-22, in which he learns that the way to love the family is by being away from the love of the family, and therefore his son doesn't get a chance to see him a great deal.
And while that is useful for earning money to live in nice neighborhoods, We now know that children do, especially boys, do much better with time with dad than they do with the dime from dad, so to speak.
They are far more likely to...
And so let me be very specific as to why.
And this, by the way, applies to girls, our daughters as well, but it just applies to a greater degree for our sons.
A mom and dad will tend to...
Bring to the family table different qualities.
So if the child is having, they'll both say, you can't have your ice cream until you finish your peas.
And the child will do the same with both parents.
Test the boundaries.
Try to have as few peas as possible before it gets its ice cream.
Mom will then tend to sort of try to negotiate a few more peas.
Like, sweetie, you didn't finish your peas, but maybe could you have a couple more and then you can have your ice cream.
So the child learns, aha, with mom, I can manipulate a better deal.
With dad, the dad's more frequent response is something like, excuse me, we have a deal here.
The deal is you finish your piece, you get the ice cream.
You don't get to renegotiate after the fact.
Exactly. You don't get to negotiate.
And so the boy goes, oh, you're so mean.
Dad, mom, let's be sort of have my ice cream sooner.
Then you do. I want to go with mom.
And so the dad goes, you can continue complaining about this restriction.
Then you'll have no ice cream tomorrow night either.
Well, now the kid is furious.
But the kid learns that when dad's rules apply, it has no option but to finish the chore that's assigned.
that is to and that's the beginning of learning postponed gratification and life and adulthood i mean you know you go for a job say oh i want fifty thousand dollars a year i'm gonna work five days a week and they say sure okay come work for us and then you're like you show up and then on your second day you know i think sixty thousand for four days a week is where i'd really like to take this and they will help you take it just out the way you came in that's That's kind of life. That's reality.
You know, as I said to my daughter, you know, we don't get to renegotiate the mortgage after we sign the papers.
When we sign the papers, that's your promise.
And the promise is not something that's fluid.
It doesn't have a tailspin that you can play with.
And the promise is the promise.
It doesn't mean you can never renegotiate, but it's pretty rare.
And it is at the discretion of the person.
We can go and renegotiate with the bank if we want, but we have to ask them on bended knee, would you mind, please, please, please, as opposed to, I think I'm just going to change my mortgage payment.
Absolutely. And at the level of the boy and girl crisis, the translation of that is when the boy does not have that postponed gratification coming from boundary enforcement.
The boy then has maybe the parents love the boy because he's sensitive and sweet and so on, and they encourage him to have dreams.
Well, he goes to school and he doesn't have the postponed gratification to even finish his homework.
So he becomes a little bit ashamed of himself when the other kids are getting better grades than he is.
That doesn't feel right to him.
The girls don't sort of respect him because he's sort of like a failure to land and failure to launch.
When it gets to be dating time, girls tend to go out with winners rather than losers.
And so he senses that he's being rejected or avoided by the girls, that guys don't have a real respect for him, that teachers aren't nominating him to the Honor Society.
And so he begins to withdraw to maybe something he can succeed at, like identifying with a character in a video game, and then becomes addicted to that as he's able to win in video games.
But the more he gets addicted to that, and the fewer friends he has at school, the more he feels this sort of discomfort and this alienation and this And this rudderlessness.
And when he has a dream, like I want to become, I'm really good at basketball.
I'm tall. My dad is tall.
So I'll play basketball and I'll be an NBA player.
And then he can't even follow the routines of the different strategies that the coach operates because he gets distracted by a video game or distracted by something else.
Or, you know, a message from a friend.
And so he gets distracted and then is a failure at that also.
So the bigger the dreams that his parents paint for him, saying, you can do anything you want to, Jimmy, the bigger his disappointment is in himself.
And that's what begins the cycle that sometimes, in its worst case scenario, leads to depression.
And then in its worst case scenario, suicide.
And in its super worst case scenario, The mass shootings that we see when a boy feels, okay, for one time in my life, I can get someone's attention.
Maybe they'll ask, what am I about?
Who am I? He was a sweet boy.
They'll say nice things about me.
And so if I shoot up this school, that'll show them.
And that's the slippery slope that happens when father involvement doesn't lead to the postponed gratification.
And that's just one of many characteristics A father is contributing to the family that needs to be integrated in order for our children to do the best, and especially our sons.
Yeah. This great intergenerational challenge, and I speak a little bit from personal experience.
My parents split up when I was a baby, and I did see the difficulties that my father had with the court system and so on.
And I think for... I was really struck by your description around the world.
This is not just, of course, in North America, but...
In Japan, where you have these herbivore men, the dry fish ladies, who just, they look at the past and they say, okay, so success for my father was working 80 hours a week and dropping dead at 55 of a heart attack while shoveling money at the family and never seeing anyone.
That is not success.
And other men will say, well, looking at my father, you know, there's a smoking crater where, frankly, his balls were.
It was taken out by the family court system and, you know, rampaging hostility and male indifference and ended up living in a car down by the river.
So that could be my future as well.
And if we don't have things to offer young men as a society, like how do the wild energies, testosterone ambition and aggression of young men, how does it get, in a sense, tempered into something that's productive and useful to society?
Well, you have to have something to dangle in front of young men in order to gain their allegiance to social norms.
And when society doesn't really have much to offer men, you're not going to get respect.
If your wife decides to leave you, you could get completely destroyed.
Through the family court system.
If you make more money, we're going to tax you more.
And if you go to school, you're going to be told that you're bad for being male or bad for being white.
And if you look at a woman the wrong way, or she has a drink and then kisses you and regrets it, your life could be destroyed.
We are running out of things to offer young men.
And if we don't have things to offer young men, I have no idea how we can ask their allegiance to social norms.
I so agree with you, and this is absolutely in accord with the findings in the boy crisis.
It was like the old days, if you think what the word respect means, when we gave our boys what I would call social bribes to be willing to die, and because they put on uniforms that girls respected, most girls were more interested in marrying the officer and a gentleman than the private and the pacifist.
And most parents were more proud of their sons if they were an officer in any of the military branches, especially in the elite ones like the Navy SEALs, etc.
Than they would if their son had gone off to Canada to become a conscientious objector, even against a war that they ended up disapproving of.
And so these were all ways that we said to our sons, we will respect you if you are willing to risk your life and possibly die or come home with PTSD or paralyzed.
And the fact that they knew that they could get respect this way, they were willing to give everything of themselves, including their life.
Now what we need to do is to find different ways that we respect boys because, as you said, every way a boy turns, if he succeeds, he's told he has privilege.
If he doesn't succeed, he's ignored.
If he opens the door for a woman, does he think this woman can't open the door for herself?
And he's a male chauvinist.
If he doesn't open the door for the woman, he's impolite and disrespectful of a woman.
And so if a woman says no and he backs off immediately, the woman gets a sense that the guy is a little bit weak.
If the woman gets no and he tries to figure out other ways to get her to say yes, he's a potential date rapist or a sexual harasser.
And this interfaces with so many other things.
The environment, for example, in rivers and streams and lakes, We have plastics that leach their phthalates into rivers and streams and lakes.
And these phthalates exude estrogen, they mimic estrogen, which develops our daughter's maturity faster than our son's maturity.
So the gap that you and I all knew about, where girls in adolescence matured more quickly than boys, all around the country and around much of the world, This gap is increasing even more.
But with the girls being significantly more mature than the boys, we're still saying to boys, boys, you have the expectation of risking sexual rejection by reaching out to these girls.
And by the way, sex is dirty, but you risk being the dirty jerk who takes the initiatives.
Girls can do it by option, but you have to do it by expectation.
And so you have the less mature sex Expected to initiate something he feels ashamed of, his greater desire for sex, which in this culture is akin to dirty jokes.
And he then can't, if he doesn't have an interest in sex, he has a low testosterone level that makes nobody interested in him.
If he has a lot of interest in sex, he's more likely to reach out and make mistakes.
But we aren't asking our daughters to share the responsibility of risking rejection.
We're asking the less mature sex To take the primary responsibility and to compensate for their inequality to women's possible sexuality by paying for them, paying for their drinks, paying for dinners, paying for the expenses of driving.
And then we're saying women are equal to men in responsibility.
But they're not. They're only more than equal to men in their ability to be able to credibly accuse a man of doing it incorrectly as opposed to sharing the burden for being incorrect or correct themselves.
And so as a result is we're not preparing our daughters for the key thing that would be helpful to our daughters careers, which is taking risks.
All the risk takers that have made money in our generation Have been the Steven Jobs, the Bill Gates.
Those are people that didn't have companies that discriminated against them.
They didn't have to climb a ladder where the people at the top were males.
They built their own ladders and their own companies out of their garages.
And they did it largely by risk-taking and calculated risk-taking and an extraordinary amount of hard work.
And so by not preparing girls to take risks and sexual rejection, We're also not preparing them to take risks that will help them succeed independently and on their own terms in their life.
And we're also not encouraging them to take the risks of what I call original choice power as opposed to veto power.
Veto power is what we've traditionally trained our girls to do.
You either veto or accept a boy's initiatives.
Oh, the man proposes, the woman disposes, right?
Yes, exactly. And we're not asking girls to do that by expectation.
We need to serve our daughters better because when children choose guys that they're interested in, that have body language that they're attracted to, they make original choices.
And they take risks with those original choices.
And therefore, the girls are likely to become women who are happier in their marriages.
And one thing that we know that Gottman has also helped us see is that when it is true, happy wife, happy life.
And so if happy wife, happy life is generally true, we need to have women Take charge of their life by having original choice power rather than veto power.
And so we have to help our daughters do that at places like family dinner night and avoid both the boy crisis and the crisis of not having our daughters be able to take risks that help them determine their own lives.
And I think that's the origin of the general notion that one of the problems these days is that women want choice without consequences and men don't want responsibility without authority.
And this is all, I think, fairly comprehensible and one of the great challenges of modernity with the relationships between women.
The sexes. And it is so confusing.
And I get lots of messages from young men in what I do, as I'm sure you do too, saying, you know, with all due respect, Mr.
Middle-Aged Guy, it's a different world out here now than when you were young.
And to me, one of the great watershed moments, I'm curious what you think, it's a little outside the scope of the book, but I'm just, I'm really curious what you think.
The Fifty Shades of Grey explosion in the emotional, literary, and sexual landscape of the West to me is quite astonishing.
Because I was raised...
Women want a sensitive man.
They want a man who's emotionally available.
They want, you know, money doesn't really matter.
And like the biggest selling book in the entire history of humanity, outside of religious texts, of course, is a sociopathic guy who can beat up a woman if he has a big enough helicopter.
And women love this stuff.
And it... It's just a little confusing.
Like, we hate patriarchy, but you know what would be great?
If we bring in millions of immigrants from really, really patriarchal cultures, that would be excellent.
And it's like, can a brother get a consistency vibe here in any way, shape, or form?
Yes, you're absolutely right.
I have never read a romance novel that was titled, He Stopped When I Said No.
And, you know... All the way back to Heathcliff, right?
From Wuthering Heights. Yes, absolutely.
And then, you know, what is the number one?
You were just talking about the number one best-selling fiction book is clearly, you know, almost sadomasochistic in its orientation.
And it's not men that are buying this.
It is women that are buying this.
What, though, is the single most Biggest grossing movie of all time.
It's gone with the wind.
And Rhett Butler doesn't say, oh, if you're not interested in going upstairs, that's okay.
No problem. We'll stay down here and have a good conversation.
But the women are reading the books where she's dragged upstairs and ends up becoming happy in the long run.
And it's called romance. So guys are seeing women talk about this as romance.
And then also, and the sales, 90 or so percent to women make it clear that this is one message women are delivering about what they really want.
And then another message about what women are delivering is coming up through the feminist movement and the development of the affirmative consent where a guy who does not ask ahead of time whether a woman would like to hold his hand and make sure he has a series of contracts with him For each stage of advancement in that sexual endeavor that the woman can sign,
yes you can hold my hand, yes you may kiss me on the cheek, yes you may kiss me on the lip, and if she doesn't sign those things he is vulnerable in court to her saying I wasn't interested and I didn't say yes to him saying she did say yes either in her body language or verbally.
And so these are things that are making it You know, very difficult for the less mature sex in high school, the boys, to understand about girls and women and to also have, we say we want boys to respect women.
Respect emerges from accountability, not from the sex that blames the most.
And so we really need to have And when you go to work, when human resources becomes not HR, but H-E-R, her, and it's only a monologue and not a dialogue, when Me Too,
hashtag Me Too, doesn't include the two that is also males that are being complained about and what their story is, a mature, accountable hashtag Me Too would be having full respect for women's perspectives But then also asking about men, what do you think? What's been your experience?
And paying as careful attention to the boys and men as we do to the girls and the women.
And so we need to move the cultural zeitgeist from monologue to dialogue around gender.
Right. Now, I think something that's also very important, there's sort of two bookended ideas.
The number one was when you talked to fathers-to-be and so on, or pregnant women, would you rather have a boy or a girl?
And the answer was overwhelmingly a girl because of...
I guess female in-group preference and gynocracy and so on.
But it also struck me that, of course, a lot of parents, as you point out in the book, are blaming themselves for what's happening to their sons.
And when you take the view as you do, this is from Part 1, Chapter 5, the crisis of our sons worldwide.
If it's happening around the world, you are involved in the problem, but you are not the source of the problem.
And I really want whatever I can do to give, or we can do, to give parents that sense of relief.
Because blaming yourself and feeling guilty is not going to motivate you to do what is necessary to begin to address these problems in a larger context.
We touched on this earlier, but just expand a little if you would.
How are the boys doing?
All around the world.
What does this mean for parents? We're doing terribly in developed nations for the reasons that I was mentioning before about the divorce and lack of father involvement is one of the major reasons.
Things like the environment and the leeching of filates is another reason.
But in places like Japan, Where there used to be a very strong sense of purpose when boys were trained to be warriors and part of the Axis powers and then they lost in World War II and the United States took over a protector role for Japan, taking away their ability to defend themselves and us playing that role of defender.
All of these boys who were growing up to be warriors suddenly were being taken care of by the United States.
And so they didn't have any role of worrier to develop, to look forward to, which in one way is wonderful to help world peace.
And who wants to really train your son to be dead?
And so that's the wonderful part of it.
But the bad part of it is that without father involvement, these boys didn't know what to replace.
The sense of purpose became a purpose void.
And one of the reasons why fathers are so important today, even more probably than ever before, is because moving from a purpose void to a sense of purpose, one that allows your son to be his unique self and also allows him to be responsible,
is a very nuanced journey where there has to be a sense of Of ability of the family to speak with each other, to talk about what is coming up at school, what it means, how to navigate it, for your son to have emotional intelligence, for your son to have discipline, follow through, but also explore his unique self, to know the trade-offs of becoming somebody who is a fulfilled person.
My father would say to me, you know, Warren, I see you're a good writer and you want to become an author.
But basically, that's no way to support a family, young man.
And you don't just have to get your PhD, you have to get your J-O-B. And when I didn't get a J-O-B right away, I wrote a book instead.
He said, all right, you lucked out this time, but you're still not an author and you'd better not plan to be an author.
And it wasn't until I got a good contract for my third book that my father said, well, I guess you're one of those one in 10,000 that actually can make a living from writing.
So you managed to save for your retirement by playing the lottery.
That doesn't mean it was a good decision.
Exactly. Exactly. And when, you know, one of the myth of male power didn't do as well as, you know, books before that had done, because I tried to explain more of the male perspective in that book.
Then he was like, I told you so.
The important point there is that around the world where there is a purpose void, there is even more need for fathers to help bond with children so they don't rebel against doing the postponed ratification that is so necessary To being able to complete their homework,
complete their chores, do the things that are necessary for accountability, and that are also necessary for being loved.
Women are not interested in men reading the boy crisis in the unemployment line.
They want guys who are...
They do care about sensitive men, but they don't care about sensitive Clark Kent.
They care about Superman, who Lois Lane is willing to...
You know, I want you to cry.
But she didn't want Clark Kent to cry.
She just wanted Superman to cry because women are more interested in men who have it together and are strong protectors first and then are able to be vulnerable afterwards.
That's a tough road to haul, but it is possible.
But it's possible when mothers and fathers know how to honor the best aspects of what they each bring to the family table.
Right. There's a very powerful argument in the book.
Sort of reminds me of that old Oscar Wilde line that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
And for a culturist, the only thing worse than failure is success.
And we've seen this when wealth arises in a country.
What happens is the women generally end up flocking more and more to female traditional occupations because there's more wealth in the family, which gives them more choice.
So why do more marriages fail in countries to succeed?
Well, because women are usually married to men who are still able to earn as much or more than they.
Even if a woman is earning a fair amount, she either doesn't want a man in her life because she doesn't want one more child to take care of, is the way she looks at it, or she finds a man who is able to earn more than she does.
And so the more she earns, the more she's free to Up her ante about what she wants in emotional intelligence from a man.
And so there's a lot of good news in that.
And the good news is that we guys have to work on developing emotional intelligence exactly because we're no longer the sole providers to women.
And so women can't just depend on us for money, keep their mouths shut, put their heads in the sand, and know that they have no choice but for men as a security blanket.
But on the other hand, what women are not doing, And girls are still not giving boys the signal that they're interested in being a have-it-all woman.
And what they can do as a have-it-all woman is to work full-time, have a career that's really successful, but be okay with or even honor a man Who stays home full-time and is with the children and is a father warrior, if you will.
We know now that children raised predominantly by fathers rarely lose their mother because the mother will always make time for the children.
And also when children are raised predominantly by fathers, They're very likely to have a positive view of the mother.
They're likely to have boundary enforcement.
They're likely to have very good bonding with the father.
They're likely to get to bed on time.
They're likely to be far more healthy.
They're likely to be very upbeat and productive.
They're very unlikely to be criminals, depressed, and have any of the other 70 sets of problems that are documentable That children have when they don't have father involvement.
But we need to know how to educate women and how to educate men about what they contribute and why.
So, for example, a man will be far more likely to roughhouse with his child.
And for longer because he's stronger.
For longer?
Both because he's stronger and also because he's just inclined that way.
You know, a mom can roughhouse with a child.
And the children and mother can bond very effectively doing that.
But as a rule, fathers are the ones to do that.
But when fathers are doing that, mothers are often looking at and saying, you know, Stefan, don't get too close with the kids to that table there because they could hurt their head on the table or, you know, the couch is, why don't you do this during the day, not at night?
And so... No food fights in nice restaurants.
Yes, I know. Yeah, exactly.
Right. Or the mother is saying to herself, even if just in the back of her mind, Oh, Stefan or Warren, there's just one more child.
It's like I had three, but now I have four.
Have you seen that?
It's a great meme. It's a father throwing the son up on a beach.
And what's actually happening is that the kid is like three feet.
What the child feels is like 10 feet.
What the mother sees is like 30 feet of death and doom.
I so agree with that.
That meme is in the Boy Crisis book.
So what the father needs to do is to know that, first, roughhousing is a way of helping his child or girl or boy make distinctions between being assertive and being aggressive.
If the child Hits the father in order to win at wrestling or kicks the father in the groin or pulls the father's hair or pokes the father in the eye.
The father goes ahead and says, you can win at wrestling by faking me out or doing a number of other things.
But you can't win in wrestling by doing these things that are aggressive, not assertive.
And then because the father is willing to enforce boundaries, if the child goes ahead and repeats the aggressive process, The father says, okay, that's the end of roughhousing for the night.
And if the kids go, oh, no, no, I won't do it again.
I won't do it again. The father says, you already had your warning.
And, you know, we'll pick it up tomorrow night and see if you're any better.
But so the child learns, I have no option but to be assertive rather than aggressive.
But the roughhousing creates a bond, and almost all dads, unwittingly, but not being able to articulate it, use that bond to say something like, I'll tell you what, bedtime is 9 o'clock.
If you've finished everything that you need to do, like chores and homework, by 8.30, we can have roughhousing or doing anything you want to do.
I'll read you your favorite story between 8.30 and 9 o'clock.
And so the boy then focuses on getting all those things done, and if she or he can't do them by 9 o'clock, the father says, sorry, you didn't do it by 9 o'clock.
That's no roughhousing.
Whereas the mother's more likely to say, the boy's more likely to say to the mother, well, it took me longer because I needed to do my homework, or you wanted me to do my teeth really well, so I did them really well, and manipulate the mother into saying, okay, those things are all true.
I'll tell you what, we'll move the bedtime back to 9.30.
And so the data shows really clearly that the father that sets a bedtime, specifically, sets the bedtime later, but the children get to bed earlier for reasons like that.
And the child doesn't resent the boundary enforcement that the father does because it's bonded with the father through the roughhousing.
And so, but no father that I've ever met explains that to a mother and mothers can't hear what fathers don't say.
And so, you know, one of the reasons I really encourage fathers to not just, you know, many, the publisher always says, oh, mothers of sons will really love this book and get a great deal out of it.
Well, I'm saying fathers, you need to take responsibility.
We complain about women not being accountable.
They often aren't, but we need to be accountable in terms of learning what we contribute and communicating that to the women in our lives.
Now, for those men who are out there who are teetering and facing divorce or going through the process or something like that, you have some very good advice.
The four must-dos.
What do you think people really, men really need to do?
Because, of course, the men are most, as you say, they're agonized if they don't get to spend enough time with their children.
It destroys their hearts and their purpose, really, as men.
So what is it that is the most important checklist for men to deal with when they're facing these issues?
I say four things have to happen and for your children to do the best.
And so number one is about an equal amount of time after divorce between mother and father.
Doesn't make any difference how that time is divided.
Whatever parenting plan is best for you, it just has to be about an equal amount of time with mother and father.
And I explain all the reasons of the boy crisis for that.
Number two, the children need to not detect or overhear any bad-mouthing from mother about father or from father about mother.
That really undermines the child's belief in the part of himself or herself that is the other parent.
We're all 50% of the genes of a biological father and biological mother.
And if we're being told that the biological father is narcissistic or unreliable or a liar, Or irresponsible.
We start looking in the mirror and saying, gee, maybe I'm like that.
After all, I am looking in the mirror.
Maybe I'm narcissistic. Especially if the mom says, and I've heard this, I'm sure, the mom says directly to the son, you're just like your father, who's out.
That really shatters the bond.
Exactly. And then all those similarities of the son...
To the father are seen more quickly, and the son isn't able to articulate that to anybody.
He can say to the mother, I'm not like dad in a certain way, and why are you saying this?
Because he doesn't want to destabilize the one part of his life that's stabilized, his connection with his mom.
He doesn't want to say it to dad because he doesn't want dad to get into more of a fight with the mom.
And destabilize his relationship further.
So he keeps it inside of himself, which is part of what destroys himself and eats himself up.
So that's number two is no bad mouthing.
Number three is that children do the best when the mother and father live within about 20 minutes driving time from each other so that the child doesn't resent the parent that is not the primary parent.
And when they have the children's When they have their friends have a birthday party or when they're part of a soccer team and they can't go to soccer practice as often and so they don't resent the parent that they have to go away from out of state or you know 45 minutes drive where it's really hard to to get it together and then fourth is that there has to be consistent couples communication counseling not just when there's an emergency you call the family together because when there's an emergency you tend to see Everybody's in time pressure,
and you tend to take dichotomous positions with your spouse.
When you have couples communication counseling, you have time to understand your spouse's point of view in a much more calm environment, and that really creates a sense of stability that gets transmitted to the children.
It's tough, you know? I mean, it's hard to have any kind of good story coming out of divorce.
Because, of course, you don't want to badmouth the wife or the husband.
But at the same time, if you say they're great, the question then becomes, well, why did you divorce?
Oh, I love your mom. She's great.
Then, well, why are we living separately?
It's very hard to come up with a cohesive narrative for...
Kids, so let's...
Oh, so this goes way back for me, this question of ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
I remember probably 16, 17 years ago doing research for a book and coming across a nugget that kind of stuck with me.
I don't know if it's been replicated since, but ADHD symptoms virtually vanish in boys when they're interacting with their fathers.
Now, that does not strike me as an entirely biological illness, you know?
I have a tumor, but when dad's around, it vanishes.
You know, that doesn't make much sense to me.
So, where are things with ADHD at the moment?
And, of course, there are so many parents facing these issues, particularly with their sons.
What are their options?
Well, first of all, the bottom line first.
When children are raised predominantly by dads, only 15% are likely to have ADHD. Even though, and were raised predominantly by moms, 30% are likely to have ADHD. So the question is why?
Is it that the children that are in the worst shape are more likely to go to moms and therefore ADHD is more likely?
No, actually the opposite is true.
Children with developmental disabilities at the age of one are far more likely to go to dads.
And yet after a few years, they're much less likely to have the developmental disability Most of the developmental disabilities, but especially not ADHD. So what is that about?
The first thing is the fathers are far more likely to have the children be physical and be physical with them.
They're far more likely to coach them.
They're far more likely to roughhouse with them, as we just talked about.
And children who do a lot of physical activity, that's one of the antidotes to ADHD. The other is boundary enforcement.
We talked about the peas and the ice cream before.
When a child learns to focus on getting the peas eaten in order to have the ice cream, the child learns attention focus, not attention deficit disorder, which is what the child learns when instead of finishing the peas, it can focus on manipulating a better deal and therefore has a deficit of attention doing what it needs to do, finish the peas in order to get the ice cream.
Whereas the dad, by requiring the child to finish the piece, requires the attention to be focused on the piece to do what the child has to do to get what the child wants to have.
Huge difference.
And because that floats into so many other things such as the children who have that attention focus, are far more likely to be able to focus on the discipline of learning the right plays in the basketball game,
and so therefore are likely to be more physical on a team, more likely to be able to go to the school and do a pick-up game, be able to train themselves to be a gymnast or whatever.
And all of those things, physical activity, discipline, Focusing, those are all ADHD resistant things that don't require just prescription drugs to get used to.
So you're absolutely right when children are around fathers, especially fathers that are allowed to father in the way that fathers tend to father.
And are respected for fathering in that way.
But also, the fathers must respect the mother's way of mothering.
There is a value to negotiating deals with moms.
The kid says, can I climb the tree in the backyard?
And the mother goes, no, sweetie, in a few years, yes.
But right now, you're not capable of climbing that high.
And dad goes, you know, the same question asked the dad.
The dad's more likely to say something like, yeah, you can do that, but be careful.
Yeah, or I'll be here if you fall.
Yes, I'll be here. And with the mother, the mother is more likely to say, if they negotiate a deal between the two of them, what's more likely to happen is that the mother says, all right, you can climb the tree, but not above this level.
And you've got to be out there with them, Stephan or Warren.
But Give me the cell phone.
I don't want you to get distracted.
You would be out there with my son.
And so the mother contributes a protector, you know, sort of consciousness.
And the father contributes a let the child figure out what's safe and not safe to a large degree by himself and or herself.
And a result of that is the child gets the best of both worlds.
And when kids are very young, you need that hypercaution.
Absolutely. I mean, toddlers are like death magnets.
You know, like, I mean, there's so many things can just wipe them out.
So you kind of need that hypercaution.
But trying to pry the mom off the hypercaution thing, you know, don't leave the house, as a friend of mine, a comedian, Owen Benjamin, he says, don't leave the house, Timmy, there's autism in the grass, you know.
This level of caution, it's too much.
And one of the roles of fathers is to pry some of that hypercaution because we understand that to not take risks is the greatest risk of all.
If you don't go outside, you don't get healthy.
If you don't learn how to manage risks, you'll end up making foolish decisions.
Falling out of a tree is a lot better than driving poorly in a snowstorm in terms of consequences.
So for women in general, every...
It's like, they're going to be in hospital.
It's going to be a body cast.
It's all over. But for men, it's like, well, yeah, you need to learn.
If you fall off your bike, that's one thing.
And that is going to give you caution when you go skiing down the double black diamond.
So there is no greater risk than no risk taking at all.
I think we can see this with things like childhood obesity and the sort of bubble wrapped childhood and so on.
So sorry, I really didn't mean to take over that part.
I apologize. But I just wanted to point out that There is a tipping point where the male risk-taking displaces productively the female risk aversion, and it's hugely important for the risk aversion to be there earlier, but there is a tipping point that men and women need to navigate.
And this is one of the reasons why children do so much better when they have both mother and father, not only around, but valued.
And not only playing their traditional roles, But my father, for example, came back from Europe after managing a company in Europe.
And for a while, he sold full of brushes from door to door because he was older and couldn't get a job.
But then he eventually became a manager of a company.
And they kept offering him higher and higher positions.
And he just said right after the first position, nope, I have my economic stability.
I want time with my kids, time with my family.
Not more money.
Everything about my growing up benefited from more time with my dad.
We lived in a middle-class home and it was not great and it was on an average neighborhood, but it was more than okay.
But the time was where I learned how to be a good human being and a good man and have decent values.
But with a mother and father, a father that's home to a greater degree, and the tension That you often have between protecting and not overprotecting and not underprotecting and not overprotecting.
Mothers and dads have to learn that those checks and balances are exactly what is needed so that instead of thinking that their tension means that they're bad, that they're not meant to raise children together and therefore they should get a divorce, in fact that tension is exactly what is needed to keep children not too protected but not too underprotected, for example. So now we're going to close, but this is the time where Warren gets the blush, because I'm going to tell you why you need to read this book, and this is my very, very strongest recommendation.
Just a reminder, the book title is The Boy Crisis, Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It.
The website is Warren Farrell, W-A-R-R-E-N-F-A-R-R-E-L-L, warrenfarrell.com, and twitter.com forward slash DrWarrenFarrell.
You can get the book through the website.
So, I'll tell you why I love what you do so much and where I think your work stands, why it's so important.
Everybody, you know, you either were a boy, you know a boy, you're a grandparent, you're a niece, you know somebody or you are somebody who's had to struggle with these issues.
Everybody should read this book.
Everybody should get a copy of this book.
The problem with revolutions is knowing when to stop.
That's always... It's like we want them to be pendulums, but generally they're like avalanches, just gathering momentum until they wipe out entire villages.
And this is the same, like, were there injustices in the Russian land ownership in the 19th century?
Absolutely there were. Is the solution to kill all of the kulaks?
No, it's not.
Somewhere in the middle. Were there injustices against women and men?
Yes, absolutely. Is then the point of replacing the patriarchy to create a matriarchy run by the state?
No! No!
And pushing back against this acceleration, standing before this tsunami of escalation, of revolutionary escalation, is the job of all civilized people, because we do want this thing to come to rest somewhere in the Aristotelian mean.
And everyone who is pushing back against these escalations, against this snowballing mob mentality of gender relations, is to me a brother and a sister in the diminishment of I think?
But it always seems they go to the point of creating new grievances that then require another revolution to come back.
And those of us who are struggling to try and hold the middle course sometimes will get a lot of negativity from both sides.
And it is a challenging place to be.
And I just really wanted to express my very, very deep appreciation for the work that you've done.
I hope I haven't mischaracterized where I see you, not exclusively, but to some degree, in what's going on.
Because if we can, as you say, create a dialogue rather than a monologue, monologue's a dictatorial in essence, you know, it's finger wagging and another thing, you know, and there's no chance to speak back.
But where there is a dialogue, so also is there civilization, and is there peace, and is there the potential for...
A very conciliatory and positive future and all of those who are working in this area have my enormous respect and you are certainly very high on that list.
So I really want to express at least my appreciation for that.
Stefan, first, thank you very much.
Second, you've characterized me exactly correctly.
The reason I've ended up doing couples communication workshops around the country is that I have come to understand that probably the single biggest contribution we can make to Not taking every virtue to its extreme until it becomes a vice, is by learning how to handle personal criticism without becoming defensive.
And that's probably the Achilles heel of all human beings, especially when that criticism comes from a loved one.
And so I think if we want to keep families together, not by legislation, but by communication, this is what we need to start beginning to do in our elementary schools and our secondary schools.
We need to do this not only with families, but also with Republicans and Democrats and Libertarians and radicals.
Everyone needs to do much more dialoguing.
Every complex problem has a simple solution, the wrong one.
And so we need to be tolerant and inviting.
Well, I appreciate that.
And just a reminder, I don't mean to be repetitive, just pause the video, listen, just click below the boy crisis, why our boys are struggling and what we can do about it.
Dr. Farrell, thank you so much for your time.
I look forward to our next chat. Dr.
Me too, very much so.
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