April 13, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:03
4055 Toxic Masculinity | Suzanne Venker and Stefan Molyneux
Suzanne Venker is the author of "The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know - and Men Can't Say," "The War on Men," "How to Choose a Husband: And Make Peace With Marriage" and "The Alpha Female's Guide to Men and Marriage: How Love Works."Website: http://suzannevenker.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/SuzanneVenkerThe Alpha Female's Guide to Men and Marriage: How Love WorksThe Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know - and Men Can't Say: http://www.fdrurl.com/flipside-of-feminismThe War on Men: http://www.fdrurl.com/war-on-menHow to Choose a Husband: And Make Peace With Marriage: http://www.fdrurl.com/choose-a-husband7 Myths of Working Mothers: Why Children and (Most) Careers Just Don't Mix: http://www.fdrurl.com/myths-of-working-mothersThe Two-Income Trap: Why Parents Are Choosing To Stay Home: http://www.fdrurl.com/two-income-trapYour 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
She is the author of The Flipside of Feminism, What Conservative Women Know and Men Can't Say, although this man might try.
The War on Men.
How to Choose a Husband and Make Peace with Marriage and The Alpha Female's Guide to Men and Marriage, How Love Works, Suzanne Venker, that's S-U-Z-A-N-N-E-V-E-N-K-E-R, SuzanneVenker.com, and the appropriately named Twitter.com forward slash Suzanne Venker.
Suzanne, thanks a lot for taking the time today.
I'm not creative. Well, no, I don't think we want to be creative when it comes to branding.
So, what is going on with men and boys these days?
You know, there's a lot, because we've just had this shooting and so on, and there's a lot of stuff floating around about toxic masculinity and men are dangerous, men are deadly, men are doomed, and what's your take on where society is and its understanding of these issues?
I think that Americans understand, regular, everyday Americans understand what's going on, but I do not think the powers that be do.
And there's a big disconnect there.
The whole concept of toxic masculinity and the idea of blaming men or boys for simply being male, which has been going on for decades now, is not related to these major tragic encounters that of course are done mostly by men or boys.
You have to really dig deeper To understand how we got to this point because, of course, you know, the differences between women and men have been around forever.
Masculinity has been around forever, but school shootings are new.
So we have to really look at the last 40 years of what messages have been sent to men and young boys in particular that would have created this type of Action.
Now, there's more to it than that.
We all know that. There's more to it than that.
It's just not a one-answer kind of thing.
But my issue is honing in on masculinity is tragic.
I mean, it's more than just wrong.
It's tragic. And it's...
It's a terribly dangerous path to travel because it's not going to be any helpful, it's not going to be helpful at all to boys and young men to hear that when they're already dealing with a country that is totally anti-male and does not think that boys and men have anything of any unique value to bring to the table.
And they've been hearing that forever in a thousand different ways.
You and I both know that.
We've been fighting that for some time.
So this is just another manifestation of, you know, anytime something happens, The media and the powers that be, as I said, are going to jump on this narrative that they've been selling.
Well, then it's really terrible to me.
If you're lost in the woods, you should just stay there, you know, because you could head off in the wrong direction.
But what I'm concerned about is not only we lost but we're steadfastly and resolutely heading in the wrong direction.
Which is really frustrating because they say well it's a presence of masculinity that is causing problems in society when it seems to me it's quite the opposite.
That we have in the states 40% I think it is now of boys growing up without a father.
And of course if we and not are they just they're not just growing up without a father they're growing up without male role models.
Because the only male role models are like bizarre superheroes in like absuits that they can't relate to.
Video game avatars, which are mostly killing machines, they are in daycare, overwhelmingly raised by females in primary school and all the way up to high school.
It's significantly, if not overwhelmingly female.
And if we took girls and raised them in this sort of Spartan paramilitary all-male environment, we'd say, well, yeah, I could see why they might be a tad confused about their femininity, but we just don't seem to see it when it comes to boys.
Isn't that funny how easy that is to visualize as soon as you put it that way?
The idea that boys are, you know, reared by women across the board, they come out of women, they're mostly raised at home by women, then they go to the schools, as you say, and they have mostly female teachers.
This is huge.
This is not a small thing, especially when you add in, of course, the fatherlessness piece that you mentioned, which was the article that I wrote for Fox the other day, because I knew that the toxic masculinity thing was going to come out, and I wanted to shed light on On the truth of this, which is that, and I even use my own story as an example.
I have a 15-year-old son, and I said I simply could not, he would not be who he is without his father.
I mean, I'm to the point where I kind of feel like I'm completely superfluous.
I could walk away, and he'd be absolutely fine for a few days, and I said that when he was young, you know, children need their moms the most, I believe that, and that fathers become, particularly to boys, but also to girls for different reasons, totally indispensable.
And I shudder to think about You know, who my son would be without his father.
So the idea that you can just remove that from the equation and think you're going to get or think it's going to be harmless is ridiculous.
I mean, this is an example of, in my opinion, boys crying out.
To say, hello, I'm here.
You've been mistreating me.
You've been missing the point altogether.
I'm lonely. I've spent hours with nothing to do.
I'm constantly hearing that I'm no good.
I have no model for what it means to be a man.
I can't present for my son what it means to be a man.
I can't do that any more than my husband can for my daughter.
We have a daughter. That's why there's such thing as a mom and a dad, and why children need both of them in their lives.
That's really just the bottom line, and when you pull it from them, Bad things happen.
Now, this is an extreme bad thing, but there's a lot of other bad things that fall under the radar that we don't hear about in the news that are happening for the same reason.
Well, and there is this pattern that is pretty...
CNN compiled a list of a couple of dozen recent shooters and research went through and all but one of them were raised without father, without a father.
Now, some of them, of course, like the recent one, it's more of a tragedy of widowhood than a choice of single motherhood.
But nonetheless, it is a risk factor that is enormous, not just in the shootings, of course, you know, the millions and tens of millions of boys grow up without fathers who don't become criminals, but it's a risk factor nonetheless.
Only one out of two smokers die from smoking, but we wouldn't say that that makes smoking safe.
It is a significant risk factor.
And what's frustrating to me, Suzanne, and really frustrating, Is that we keep having the social agenda pushed on us like some weird external alien force of social disintegration, despite the fact that it's making men less happy, boys less happy, moms, wives, girls, everyone is becoming less happy time after time, decade after decade, unhappiness increases.
And it seems like we just can't pull out of this nosedive of reaching for these easy Explanations that we've been trying to assiduously apply for more than half a century that just keep making everything worse.
Excuse me. I'm a little under the weather.
I'm convinced that that's because the wrong people are in power.
I can't undo that overnight, or ever maybe.
But what I'm saying is that the vast majority of regular common sense people who think for themselves and can see things for what they are and they don't have this ideological agenda, don't have the power that the ideologues do.
The ideologues are in power and they're pushing something and they have the money and the power behind them.
And it really takes, you know, a lot of People like you and me doing what we're doing a lot to be able to counteract that in any major way.
And of course, I like to say that the people who are really commonsensical and living their lives are just too busy.
They're not the people who get involved in politics or I talk about this with feminists all the time.
It's feminists you see in power because they're not wives and mothers.
They're not happy wives and mothers living their quiet lives.
They're angry. They're upset.
They want to change the world.
They want to prove something.
They have a completely different mindset.
And those are the people we see and hear the most of, but they are not representative of the average person.
I've been thinking about that over the last couple of weeks.
Suzanne, so let's dig into that a little bit more.
I mean, as a guy who has a job and I'm also a stay-at-home dad, you're kind of busy.
Your day is like, I mean, I'm like shot from a cannon.
I arc through the day and I land at some point at the end of the day wondering what the heck happened to my day.
I go to sleep, I get up and I do it again.
And not having the kind of time That younger people have, that people without kids have, that ideologues have.
It's really an unequal battle.
Now, I can combine my job with talking about these things, so I have that kind of rare confluence, but most people don't.
Most people don't. Like, why is it that there are all these late-night riots about stuff and it's a bunch of feral leftists?
Well, because a lot of people who aren't on the left, they've got to get up and they've got to get to work.
I couldn't get involved as a kid in anything nasty because I had like two jobs and I had to make rent.
You just can't compete with all these people who have all this time on their hands because you're busy producing things that they want to take from you and creating the next generation that they want to use as collateral for their social engineering.
You know, you've heard about Jordan Peterson lately, how he's risen in the last several weeks in terms of, you know, people being aware of him.
And he had a conversation with Camille Paglia on YouTube that was like an hour and a half long.
And in there, they were discussing, you know, basically the potential collapse of Western civilization.
And Paglia was suggesting that men really are going to have to stand up and demand that they be respected as men again.
And Peterson, who I... While I support that, theoretically, completely, I tend to agree with Peterson that it's never really going to happen, because ultimately men can't fight women and win, because no matter what they do, they're kind of damned if they do and damned if they don't.
So that it's going to take, quote-unquote, sane women to fight against...
Wait, I'm going to ask you about that giggle in a moment, but keep going.
Yeah, I know. So it requires...
Undoing this madness requires sane women to go...
Fight back against their crazy, quote, harpy sisters, which I thought was great.
Because, of course, he just was talking about my life work in the last 15 years, assuming I'm the same one.
And I think he's right about that.
But then he followed that up.
He said, but the problem there is, same women, they're not out front and center.
They're busy living their lives.
Some of them don't even pay attention, or they rely on people like me to bring the information to them, to tell them what's going on, and encourage them and support them.
Then they do dig themselves and go out and fight it.
So it's a complicated situation.
We don't want men's value to be reasserted because society becomes barbaric again.
You know, when society becomes, when food supplies break down, when currency breaks down, all of a sudden men get hugely valuable because all the comforts of civil, like we don't want to get there.
I mean, it's going to reassert itself one way or another because our current course as a civilization, just looking at the debt numbers, it's completely unsustainable.
So we would really we're gonna have to land this crazy overbuilt mothership at some point and I'd like it to be a landing wheels down rather than wheels up because that produces a lot of sparks and explosions so the value like society has a way like nature of balancing itself and if we've gone too far in a particular direction It will swing back,
and of course we want to stop the pendulum somewhere in the middle rather than having it go to another extreme, but the value of man is going to reassert itself one way or another, and it would be better if we could do it ideologically rather than out of necessity.
Agreed completely, and I just used that analogy the other day about the pendulum, although I would say the pendulum, you know, we were over here, now we're over here, and I'd like to think that we're going to end up back in the center, so I don't know how much further we can go, I'm trying to help get back into the center.
And of course, any time you try to get back into the center, you're accused of wanting to go back to some terrible, horrible place.
It's always the 50s, but whatever.
Going back. But you have to move back to get away from the extreme to get to the center.
So it's not going back.
It's just moving a little bit back into the center.
But yeah, it will not sustain itself.
And the hope is that it We get back to the middle, you know, so the pendulum can swing kind of nicely instead of being at these extreme points.
And I think that's what's so frustrating for just the average Americans.
They're watching all this stuff just sort of happen.
And it's so overwhelming that they just choose to live their lives quietly and not speak out and get involved because it's so big and overwhelming.
So you have those people living, you know, The way we want the people in power to get, excuse me, to live.
But I, you know, their agenda is always going to be there.
And I do believe, unfortunately, that they're always going to be the ones in power, as I say, because regular, healthy, sane people don't live the lives that they live.
Right. Yeah. I mean, it's like the taxpayers versus the people who are receiving the tax money.
I mean, there's the incentive of, well, I've got to work and I don't have much time.
And let's say I fight back against one particular government program.
It might save me, you know, 10 bucks a month.
But everyone who's relying on that government program, that's their sole source of income.
They have huge amounts of time to devote to it.
And it really is kind of like the old showing up to a...
To a joust with a toothpick.
So what do you think of the fundamental errors that are driving all of this policy stuff that is so divisive and so not working for society?
How far down have you looked to try and figure out where the fundamental errors are coming from?
To me, it's really about, well, two things mainly.
A consistent cultural Narrative that's sold repeatedly day in and day out until the people who are on the receiving end eventually just sort of, especially if you get them really young, like in college, they absorb it and then just repeat it.
So the source of it is those in, going back to, those in power who are teaching this and getting them while they're young.
And then that just sort of perpetuates itself.
But of course the biggest group that I have written about and fought about for so long is feminism.
And I do think that feminists are behind The vast majority of social change in this country, and it's masked in all kinds of beautiful language that sounds really benign, and people who don't do their homework tend to think, yeah, that sounds good, maybe we should do that, and then they don't really realize how it's going to affect their lives.
And the problem there, of course, that's been around for a while, but it's gotten worse I think recently because of the politically correct nature, the political correctness that we've been dealing with that's gotten so much worse than it was in the last, I don't know, I would say five years, ten years for sure, but five years big time, that that mixed in with this already destructive movement that has kind of infiltrated into society.
Has made it so that now it's no-win game, like this James Damore Google memo.
Did you hear the recent ruling a couple days ago?
I did a show on it. I certainly did.
So, I mean, basically the message from the highest point of our land is saying you cannot even allude To the differences between women and men.
It's against the law to allude to it.
I mean, that's so huge.
And even that alone I don't think would have happened ten years ago.
So I think it's the confluence of the damage that feminism has done mixed with this politically correct environment that we live in now where it's just, you know, mashed.
And it's a mess.
Yeah. There is, of course, a huge problem when science is considered sexual harassment.
And the thing is, too, is that there are wonderful female scientists, great female rationalists, great female philosophers, I've been very influenced by female thinkers, who would go against the sort of cliché that women are too emotional to be able to reason and too hysterical to be able to deal with facts and so on.
And the feminists who claim to want to empower women seem to be manifesting the worst clichés, like you could not invent A more clichéd response, you know, because, as you know, hysteria was associated with women, with having a womb, which is why it's called a hysterectomy.
And so this hysterical response to facts, this feels over facts, this is a cliché.
And then when you see women cheering the idea that scientific facts represent sexual harassment, you couldn't make it more clichéd and you couldn't make...
A scenario in which men or whoever might look at women and say, I don't know if you're really puncturing these cliches in the way that you want.
I mean, that's so brilliant that Yeah, that, you know, you make this statement, you say, what?
We're not emotional! And then you start a, you know, a revolution over it.
But no, you're not more emotional.
Well, and of course, there's this, one of the other big five personality traits that women generally score higher on is agreeableness, that they want everyone to get along, they want everyone to play nice, to be nice.
And then when you have this view that comes down from this labor relations board, which affirms that a man who might conceivably cause conflict must be ejected because women want everyone to get along, it's like, again, you have this cliché.
And I don't, the lack of self-knowledge, like you would try to cloak it a little bit because I think you'd say, well, you know, if we're saying that science is sexual harassment, that might be a bit obvious.
Maybe we should tone it down a little, but they don't.
And it's right out there for everyone to read.
I know. I know.
But you really have to be paying attention and lay it out for people, for them to even go beyond just reading the headline and the ruling and what that means to them.
It is a goal with no end point, Suzanne.
I think that's one of the reasons why it escalates with no end in sight.
You know, if you want, I don't know, let's say you're a suffragette, you want equal votes for women, at some point you've achieved it.
Oh look, we want women to be able to sign their own contracts.
Fantastic! I want that too.
I want my daughter to grow up and be able to sign contracts.
So, at some point, if you're aiming for equality of opportunity, equality under the law, you have achieved it and it's like everybody goes home and gets on with their lives.
But if you're looking for equality of outcome, you have just set yourself a mountain that can't possibly ever be climbed.
Absolutely, absolutely. That was one of my favorite parts of the Peterson, Kathy Newman interview.
Did you notice that she literally, I mean, this is what I mean about why it's such a hopeless cause.
She's a hard-line feminist, right?
She had no...
No idea what he meant by equality of outcome.
None. She was just lost.
Of course, that's the ideology that when you're consumed by it, you don't even realize that there's another way to think.
It's very sad. But literally had no idea what the difference was between outcome and opportunity.
My favorite moment of that debate was when she just went randomly to the lobster and all I could think of, hey, there's another red thing with claws.
But anyway, go on.
That's funny. I wrote a piece on the Women's March saying exactly what you just pointed out, that if there was a goal, it would be such a different thing.
And somebody had written, some male, older man who had lived long enough to see all this, and he was very gentle in his approach in his writing by saying, you know, I support all this in the past, but I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, is there really anything, what is it that you're fighting for?
And of course, there isn't.
So this kind of ranting and raving It has no end, as you said, because there's no goal.
Well, and there was a study, I'm sure you saw it, that came out recently regarding Uber drivers.
Now, Uber is completely gender neutral when you call for a cab.
It doesn't say the gender of who you're calling for.
You call for a ride. And they found, I think it was 7% higher When they controlled for everything, 7% higher earnings on the part of male Uber drivers as opposed to female Uber drivers.
And it turned out that it's because they drove slightly more aggressively, slightly faster, seemed to have a better knowledge of back alleys and shortcuts and so on that might not be on GPSs and so on.
It's like, so that's as neutral as you could conceivably get.
You know, they're controlling for a number of hours worked.
They're controlling for experience.
They're controlling for type of car.
And you still can't close that gap.
And if your goal is to close that gap, well, my goodness.
I mean, we want everyone in the world to have enough to eat.
And that's a good thing that we can probably work to achieve.
I mean, hunger has gone down enormously just over the past 10 years.
But if your goal is to have everyone the same height, ooh, well, then you're in a whole different world.
Well, and not only that, they don't want to achieve gender equality because they don't have nothing to do.
I mean, it's absolutely no...
Not only is there not a goal, and it's completely impossible to reach, even if you did reach it, they wouldn't want to reach it.
Well, and as you know in college, gender Equality has been bypassed for the sake of female superiority.
Because when you have 60-70% of undergraduates, particularly in the arts, being women, there aren't any calls to scale back female outreach.
There aren't any calls to try and get more men into college.
There is, in fact, an ever-escalation of the hostility and rhetoric against men by saying it's all a rape culture, and if a man wants to buy you a drink, then clearly he's a rapist.
It just tends to snowball and this concept of appeasement solving this problem is not going to work.
They will not stop until there is an ideological pushback that is going to be verbally ferocious.
It is going to be verbally ferocious or until the whole damn thing collapses and we really want to avoid that.
We do. We do and I agree.
It's not going to be good, whenever it happens.
Of course, I think it is happening to some degree, but I still think we're at the beginning of it, not even in the middle.
Right. And it's funny, too, because Of course, this is never how it's sold, right?
I mean, so we just want equality.
And it's like, well, who's going to argue against equality?
Especially when society has a lot of resources, right?
I mean, I've made this case before.
If you have one village that doesn't have much money in the Middle Ages, and you can only train one physician, then it's going to have to be a man.
Because the woman is going to be, well, I don't know, Pregnant, breastfeeding, pregnant, breastfeeding, breastfeeding, taking care of babies, and it's going to be unavailable.
So, of course, you're going to try and put more of the professions in the hands of men because prior to birth control and all that kind of stuff, women were generally unavailable to pursue their goals.
And you can get mad at that, but the person you have to get mad at is Mother Nature, and she's supposed to be a woman anyway, so you still can't blame the patriarchy, unless, I guess, you say Darwinianism, the patriarchy, but anyway.
Equality is great.
When you have enough resources, fantastic.
But that's not what has actually played out.
What has actually played out is a thirst for power and domination on the part of feminists that shows absolutely no signs of abating and has no end goal that can be explicitly defined where they say we're done, except for maybe some theoretical equality of outcome.
But even that has been blown past in the female-dominated spheres.
Yeah, no question. They want a matriarchy.
Equality has nothing to do with it.
It's a matriarchy. They don't really make any bones about it.
I mean, I wrote about that quite a bit in Flipside.
I referred to the Shriver Report, which is Maria Shriver, named after Maria Shriver, and she got together with a bunch of her feminist friends and got with the Center for American Progress, which is a liberal think tank, to create this new, what was called, A Woman's Nation. And at the end, the conclusion was emergent economic opportunity will give women a new seat at the table, dash, at the head of the table.
Period. I mean, if you dig deep into their work, you know, they don't make any bones about what they want.
It's right there. Yeah.
Well, and I don't think men Well, let's put it this way.
I don't think men would have quite as much of a problem with the matriarchy if it was the women who did all the difficult, dirty, unpleasant, and dangerous jobs and paid the majority of the taxes.
You know, I mean, every man wouldn't mind, hey, you know, my afternoon is going to be spent doing sit-ups and having a protein shake so that I can stay pretty for my matriarch.
You know, that may, but generally the matriarchy involves a pretty much surf-like slave horde of men doing all the difficult, dangerous, and unpleasant works and generating all the income that's required to fuel all the feminist egalitarian fantasies.
Right, so they can sit in their nice air-conditioned offices while you're out sweating your, you know, wet off and potentially, you know, dying.
Yeah, no, I do sometimes when driving, there was a terrible power outage recently not too far from here, and we were driving around and we were having a game called Spot the Women in the Trees.
Spot the women up the poles.
And, you know, I'm not trying to, you know, I'm not saying she can't do it.
Hey, she wants to do it. More power to her, but let's just deal with the facts.
And I do want her... To, of course, appreciate the wonderful gifts that women bring to the world, but I also do want her to see the massive superstructure of...
Like, society is like a duck, and men in general are the feet, like paddling madly while the duck appears to be sailing serenely across the water.
And I do want her to appreciate that kind of stuff, but I don't think that appreciation is as common as we'd like it to be.
Well, no, because there's no really discussion...
One discussion that just flat out isn't had is...
The fact that when you talk about that word, equality, nobody asks anybody to define it.
I find this very funny. When someone asks me this, as a feminist usually, you really have to ask them back.
What do you mean by equality?
What does that look like?
That question is rarely discussed, and it has to be, in order to continue with the conversation.
So that's number one. What do you mean by equality?
If it's, and of course we know, you and I know, that it's about sameness at this point.
It's about androgyny and interchangeability.
That's what they want. But they're not going to put it in those terms, but that's clearly, you know, obvious.
But when you talk about equality and you go back to the 1960s, And the original argument of feminism, or one of them, the idea was that women were oppressed, right, being, well, still there, in doing the job that they still choose to do after all these decades,
which is care work and, you know, caregiving and doing mostly that, taking on most of that responsibility and men taking on mostly of the breadwinning, even if you switch it up and you still have women and men choosing those, Gendered norms, even in places like Sweden, where gender equality is supposedly a thing.
What's wrong with that?
I mean, it's never asked that said, well, the only reason you're saying that and could argue for this so-called faux equality is if you think less of one of those tasks.
Well, if you genuinely don't think less of one task versus the other, Why do you need to make anything equal?
You already know that they're of equal value.
They just are different tasks.
But if you're married, you're working towards the same goal.
You and I have the same lives.
I'm home, plus I do this other thing.
That's the same with you. And it doesn't matter who's doing what.
You're a teen. And that's what marriage is about.
It's that you're doing different tasks, whatever works for your personality.
And most people, it's a gendered thing.
So what? No one ever asks that.
Why do you need to change that up if you actually value it?
And of course, the answer is because feminists don't value it.
They do not value the work that you and I are doing on the home front and have been doing.
They don't have any respect for that whatsoever.
But regular people do.
So that's, again, part of that disconnect.
We don't discuss that, though, that you don't need to make something equal if you already think it's equal in value.
Well, this is the amazing thing to me, and maybe you can, well, I hope that you can Tell me what's going on here, because I find this astounding.
So looking throughout history, women were generally excluded from wartime.
And throughout most of human history, wars occurred away from population centers.
There were no bombs, there were no planes and so on.
And so it would be like, you know, 10,000 knights and serfs and guys grabbed and so on who'd be fighting in some distant field.
And women would be protected throughout whoever went in the conflict because women would have that value.
And you had, when I was a kid, I had a copper mug and the bottom was glass.
And it was kind of cool, like you could pour it and look at your drink from the bottom.
And I said, well, what's all this? I remember a man said to me, he said, oh, yeah, well, those came about because back in the day, if you took the king's coin, you could be drafted into the Royal Navy.
And the way that they would give you the king's coin is they would put a gold piece or a silver piece into your beer.
And the moment it touched your lips you were now in contact with the king's coin and you could be dragged off to serve 20 years in the Royal Navy and you actually had a higher chance of dying from scurvy than from an enemy cannonball because it took them forever to figure out the need for vitamin C. And so you had this glass on the bottom so that you could pick up your cup of beer or whatever, look and see if there was a coin in there before you drank it because that's how susceptible you were to being enslaved in the military industrial complex of colonial times.
Now, that seems kind of harsh and not exactly an all-powerful patriarchal machinery.
It's not like the average guy who wonders, hey, can I be a serf and dragged off to war for no reason whatsoever?
That's the way I would design society if I could.
And also, I mean, if men design society, at least young men, it's not like monogamy would be the rule.
And so if you have throughout women, throughout history, women who were largely excluded from war, from conscription and so on, and who did work at the home and had their material needs provided for by a hard-working man, like men have to work 10 times as hard to sustain a family as if they were just single guys.
I know this having spent quite some time as a single guy.
And it's weird to me, sorry for the last speech, but it's kind of weird for me, Suzanne, that after an entire history of, to some degree, privilege relative to certain aspects of masculinity, right?
Exclusion from the draft, not being killed in wartime, and having their needs provided for by a male workhorse.
How do you sell oppression?
To an entire group of people who've had, like, where is the big giant secret button that just says, well, if you frame it this way, I guess I was oppressed.
It would be easier to sell oppression, I think, to men than to women, but it's quite the reverse has occurred.
Where do you think people, women in particular, but men and women, I would say, would get that information?
There's only two sources that I can see.
Well, three. But your parents, when you're growing up, they sell you, not sell you, hopefully not selling anything, but they teach you whatever they're going to teach you.
Then you go off and you're taught by your professors.
That's the second set of instructors or mentors.
And the third I was going to say is the culture and whatever you want to study yourself if you dig into it.
But since most people don't dig into the stuff that you and I do, they're dependent on their parents and their mentors and teachers.
To convey what you just conveyed.
And who the hell's doing that?
Who? I mean, they don't either know it themselves, they just don't even know that information.
Like, I'd say parents are more on the innocent side.
And then college professors, even if they did know it, would never teach it in that realm because that doesn't fit their ideology.
I often wonder whether professors, left-wing professors, do know real history and understand it and just Specifically, they teach the other side or if they really don't know.
And I don't see how I'd get the answer to that question.
But regardless, the end result is that they don't teach it, period.
So where is anybody going to know this?
When I tell people stuff like this, they look at me like I have 10 heads.
They've never heard of any such thing before.
I don't think they know.
No. I mean, like Kathy Newman's face, as you pointed out earlier, Suzanne, when Dr.
Peterson was talking about equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome, he might as well have broken affluent Klingon as far as like she just or hearing any kind of pushback against the arguments for wage, the wage gap being, you know, the result of sexism and so on.
They just don't have access to that information, which to me is quite fascinating and a weird kind of paradox, I suppose, which is that the group that most claims to value diversity has a monoculture that puts, like, ancient Greek Aristotelian society to shame.
I know. It's really scary.
And you look at it and, I mean...
You just sort of, you don't know what to do with it, because there's really nowhere, I mean, you got to the realization at the end of that interview, even after he had that gotcha moment, still, she went from gotcha to right back where she was.
There's no growth.
There's no working with it.
So you just, when you're talking to somebody like that, you almost just have to give it up, because it's just never going to happen.
They're not going to allow themselves to be, of course, that's what the definition of an ideologue is.
You're married to the ideology, not to the facts of the truth.
Right, right. You have the conclusion and you work backwards from there and no data can sway you from your goal.
I mean, I have respect for the person if they acknowledged everything and just chose the wrong side.
Well, they can't help it if they're on the wrong side.
But as long as you know your facts first and then you happen to choose wrong.
I'm just being funny. But yeah, they just are clueless.
So that makes it even worse.
Here's an odd thing too, which is this question of agency.
Has been quite powerful for me.
And I absorbed a lot of this when I was younger, particularly an undergraduate, around, you know, female agency, women have agency, women have power, women are independent, women are strong, you know, the branding that goes along with that.
Now, call me crazy, but to me, if you claim to have power and agency, you get this wonderful thing called responsibility.
At least if you're a man, you do, right?
I mean, if you're the man and you're in charge, then you are responsible for what happens.
There is this weird flipside thing that occurs, I'm sure you've seen it about a million times, where a woman says, you know, strong, independent, agency, free will, responsibility, but then when the responsibility goes against a victim narrative, suddenly they're these frail Victorian couch fangers,
you know, so women have agency, women have choices, women are strong, women are independent, but if a woman ends up as a single mom, it is zero percent her responsibility and a hundred percent The responsibility of this nasty Heathcliff bad man who just took her virtue and thundered off into the sunset with his hunting dogs, you know, and it literally comes out of like, it's like something out of a Samuel Richardson novel.
And I find this one of the most frustrating things is that, you know, I am woman, I am strong, I am independent, I have agency.
It's like, oh, okay, so then you're responsible for your choices.
Well, no.
No, no. I don't want that kind of agency.
I want the kind of agency that comes with praise, not with responsibility.
This is the number one disconnect in the whole feminist scene, like just the basic understanding of what it is.
To me, it's mind-boggling how you could actually not understand that you can't have both those things.
You cannot empower somebody by telling them they're a victim.
And nobody today would argue that that's what feminism is about, is a victimhood.
I mean, even feminists know that.
Even followers of feminists know that.
You can't not, because that's what, like the Me Too movement, any movement, it's all based in that women are oppressed.
But at the same time, that's the group that's going to empower women.
Those two absolutely cannot coexist.
They cannot. So I don't know, if you ask someone that directly, they can't claw their way out of that, because there's nowhere to go from there.
It's very obvious. But the problem is people don't ask.
I don't think people ask enough of feminists for them to define.
I was thinking the other day about how when I'm on TV or there's a media journalist who's interviewing me and 99% of them are feminist minded and they don't like me before I even come on the air.
I would love to be able to turn around and ask I would interview them, and the whole scene would change if we could interview them.
They're never on the receiving end.
They just get to throw daggers and ask questions.
That's so easy. If you had to answer why you think the way you think, especially when there's a disconnect with how you think, the whole country would get such a different perspective of these media personalities, and they'd see how unbelievably clueless they really are.
Oh, well, that's the Peterson-Newman conversation that he actually puts back.
You saw the deer in the headlights moment.
Now, here's another, I think, challenge in the land of consistency with regards to these kinds of ideas.
When it comes to Choice and consequences, then women do want, of course, all the choices, and they do want to be shielded from negative consequences.
And I think that, to me, creating this shield of legality around women is treating them as infants.
Yes. Because it's like, well, we want to...
We want to be paid what men are paid.
It's like, okay, well then go and up your skills and go into the highest value occupations.
They tend to be challenging topics like oil engineering and stuff like that.
And then go negotiate hard for what you want because you are the strong, independent, fierce, you know, hear me roar, I don't need no man kind of thing.
But then it seems to be it's like, okay, so we've identified this inequality.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's described openly as a patriarchy by the feminists.
It's like, why are you running to the patriarchy to get free stuff, so to speak, if you're the strong, independent women who hate the patriarchy?
I mean, good lord! That's the other disconnect that is never discussed.
And they're never asked to explain, do you not see that that makes no sense?
And if you throw it, of course, I've done that in speeches, you know, one-on-one.
You can't necessarily see it from TV or YouTube.
And they are stumped.
They really don't have an answer.
It's really very easy to stump a feminist.
Or a feminist follower.
Because they genuinely don't have a winning argument.
Seriously. So if you ask them, you will end up looking, it'll be like a Peterson-Newman situation where you'll end up looking very knowledgeable and they'll end up looking really dumb because they don't have an answer.
But not enough people, I don't think, ask them to make sense of those disconnects that you just described.
Do you not understand that if you remove the family, you'd remove the husband as quote-unquote provider, you have to replace them with something.
And so that's where the government comes in.
That's ultimately what's happening.
And how can relying on the government be better than relying on a husband?
Right. And I think people don't challenge feminists in this way, because everybody knows the next act in this little play.
And the next act in this little play, which was admirably Performed by one Cathy Newman is to go from bully to cry victim.
Because don't you know, Suzanne, after that, after that debate, after that debate, The amount of threats and horror and misogyny and sexism that she received, even though statistically it was far lower than what Jordan Peterson received, everybody knows that it is sort of like,
it's the woman, oh yeah, yeah, I'm gonna hit you, yeah, hit me, hit me right here on the chin, hit me right, boom, oh my god, I'm calling the cops, you're going to jail forever, and it's like, You know what the next step in this play is and then you're gonna be standing over this twitching fetus thumb sucking woman looking like the most horrifying patriarchal brute in the known universe because women are strong and independent.
Oh my god, it's so maddening.
It's so maddening.
All right, so let's meet to it up for a sec here because that's a big phenomenon.
Now when I was growing up I did see, of course, you see, and it's a fairly common scene in movies and television, is, you know, the lecce guy who's trying to get hold of the woman's assets, you know, in some disreputable manner.
And it can be sort of explicit or implicit.
And what I saw, and I'm not quite this old, but, you know, we had a big fetish for older movies in my household.
You see the Marlene Dietrichs, you see the Katharine Hepburns and so on, and they just cut a man down to size.
They put him in his place.
They are verbally adroit.
They might even slap his face.
They throw a drink in his face.
It was like they shut that down so quick.
Your head spins. And after 50 years of feminism, I keep reading the same story, which is, something bad happened, Suzanne.
And I froze. I was paralyzed.
I didn't know what to do.
I lay there wishing I were somewhere else.
And it's like, what? Who cut your Geppetto Strings woman?
I mean, I saw women handling this stuff.
And I think it's something Ann Coulter said, that a high school girl would know how to handle these guys 50 years ago.
But now you have these strong, empowered women who go all rubber bones.
And it's like their soul leaves their body and they have no capacity to move themselves.
And it's like, how is this empowering?
And you, again, ask them and see what they would say.
I mean, the evidence is right there.
We have this nation of women who cower and do not know what to do in the face of basic male and female interaction.
Basic male and female interaction.
And no is part of that.
The power of no has been known since the beginning of time.
That's certainly how I was raised.
And those old movies, like you said, they are strong and empowered pre-feminist era.
So, you know, essentially, feminism is done the complete opposite.
It's an infantile, how do you say that word?
Infantilized? Infantilized.
Infantilized. Women.
Again, complete opposite of what they claim to do.
And it is kind of like a lambs to slaughter thing, too, because to me, the trick in life is prevention, not cure.
Now, it used to be, of course, common knowledge that there are lecce men out there who want to grab women in return for economic or career opportunities, you know, particularly when the supply of women vastly outstrips the demand, such as in movies and modeling and whatever it is, right? And lots of women want in and there's, you know, gatekeepers and the gatekeepers may want something in return that's unsavory.
And this was well understood and well known.
And 19th century, 18th century novels used to talk about this all the time, that you've got to keep your wits about you.
And it's all about prevention.
And so if a guy, you know, this is like pro tip 101, if a guy who's a gatekeeper for something you want, something you really want, invites you to his hotel at 10 o'clock on a Friday night, unaccompanied, This is not, you don't have to be psychic to figure out what might possibly occur within that room.
And the prevention part used to be very clear.
And the prevention, of course, you know, some people think it went too far.
You got chaperones. I don't know if you remember, you've got to keep the door open in your dorm room.
And you always have to have at least one foot on the floor, which I guess challenges people's sense of acrobatics.
But yeah. The whole point was to work with prevention because there was this understanding that you can't cure this after the fact because when it's 10 years ago he said she said the law can't say anything because there's no objective proof and people's words so prevention, prevention, prevention and now because this has all been stripped away and women just wandering into these compromising situations they're actually I think increasing risks for women by not telling them about the reality of some of these situations.
But I think it goes back to what you said before about wanting To be empowered without the responsibility piece.
Because once you remove the idea that a woman is in any way, shape, or form responsible for anything, which they have, I mean, women are never, ever, ever blamed.
You get divorced, it's his fault.
If you have sex with him and you didn't mean to, well, he raped you.
If your husband has an affair, he's a bastard.
If you have an affair, it's because your husband doesn't fulfill you.
There you go, right there. And nobody would deny that that's the thought process.
Come on. So that removal of any responsibility on the part of women makes them be able to sell the idea that to be empowered doesn't require this other piece, which thereby allows you to constantly point the finger despite your empowerment.
Because that's what they've taught empowerment is, having the agency but no responsibility.
Which is ultimately very paralyzing.
And this to me is so frustrating, is that if you don't need no man and you end up raising your child alone, even taking out the sort of prop up of state resources that are forcibly extracted from usually male taxpayers, you're really not very free.
I mean, you're a mom, I'm a dad.
I mean, if I didn't have my wife and you didn't have your husband to help you raise the kid, I mean, I wouldn't be able to do this.
I mean, I wouldn't be able to do this right now.
And so the idea that you're somehow empowered by not needing other people.
What a weird, almost sociopathic mindset.
You know, like I am at my most powerful when I'm completely isolated from all other dependence on other human beings.
What a nightmare existence that would be.
We need to write an article about how marriage is empowerment.
Now that would go over really well, because it's so different.
You've never seen such a thing.
Marriage is not slavery, it's empowerment.
Ow! And then lay it out.
Yeah, you're right.
I mean, that was the whole point of it from the get-go, is again, it's gotten away from that team mentality of, I can do this because you're doing that, and vice versa.
Two independent beings just coming together, sort of living side by side and supposed to be interchangeable and doing things 50-50 all the time.
Oh my God, don't get me started on that subject.
That's just a mess. Well, let me show you.
Let me tell you a secret. I got married because of one particular thing.
I mean, it was more than that, but let me just tell you.
So I just met the woman who was going to become my wife.
And we were on the phone and she was like, oh, what are you up to tomorrow?
And I was like, oh, I have a pair of sandals.
I just bought them and they tore, so I've got to go and return them.
And she said, oh, where are you heading?
I said, oh, I'm going downtown. And she said, well, I know you're working on a book.
Listen, I'm heading downtown. I'll do it for you.
And I was like, I tell you, Suzanne, I was like, what did I do?
I'm sorry. There must have been a bad connection.
Is there something in Japanese that sounds like that that has crossed over in the international wires of communication because you said what now?
And she's like, listen, I'm heading down.
I mean, I know you're working on a book.
You don't want to spend two hours. I mean, I'll be there anyway.
It's 10 minutes out of my way.
I literally, like, I was in my 30s and I was like, dear God, you know, drop off my sandals and pick up a ring, woman, because we're going to town.
That's it! I'm locking you down!
As hysterical as that is, it is so sad at the same time.
Isn't it? I mean, it's the great story of heartbreak and horror, and oh my god, why was I in my 30s?
I know, before you saw or heard anything like that, and then imagine if the world were Saturated in women like that or men like that.
It's just unbelievable. But the idea that a woman should do anything for you, it's more important that it's the woman that's saying that because they're the ones who are supposedly not supposed to do anything for you because, you know, you're a slave owner.
Oh my gosh, thanks for telling me that story.
That's great. And I could see why you decided right then and there.
I gotta marry this person.
It was at that moment, I'm like, oh, Lord, okay, you are not allowed to leave the house.
You are not allowed to meet another man until we're locked down in front of the altar, baby.
That's it. I'm tackling you.
I don't care if I put you in a beekeeper outfit.
Anyway, so... Yeah, no, that is remarkable because I honestly had not, you ask a woman to do something and it's like, oh yeah, patriarch?
I don't think so.
I don't think you're going to exercise your penis power over me.
And it's like, you know, and I've had to do an opposite thing with my husband where I've actually had to, over the years, tell him it's okay to ask me to do something.
It's really sad because, well, he's, you know, he didn't have a dad, grew up with mom and And the culture gets in us, whether we want it to or not.
I'm all about trying to extract it from everybody, but I think it's going to be a lifelong endeavor on my part.
But I'm always trying to help people extract those terrible cultural messages.
And I think even he got it.
Well, it has to do with his not wanting to ask anybody for help ever either.
But I have to teach him, it's okay to ask me to do your laundry or to ask me to drop off your drag thing, I'm happy to do it.
So we've had sort of the opposite.
Kind of sad. It's like, wow, you will quite often see a person riding a horse.
But in this case, it's like, wait, what?
A horse riding a person?
Now that's just not right.
That's going against nature.
That's wrong. I'm bad somehow, even for thinking that.
And it's still something. I mean, she's a wonderfully generous person and I love her to death, and I still sometimes am like, would you mind terribly if you have to sort of cringe and beg and plead on bended knee?
Would you mind please? She's like, I'm happy to do it.
But of course, I'm perfectly happy to do things for her.
And it's like a story I heard Daniel Crittenden wrote a book that I read before I got married.
But our mothers didn't tell us.
Yeah, yeah. I don't know if you remember the story in there where the woman was saying, oh, the husband asked, oh, I left my tennis racket back at the clubhouse.
Would you mind? No, get it yourself.
Yes, I did. We've kind of become these balky caricatures of non-compliant people and non-helpful people that we always said men used to be.
And I don't think we even noticed that Transition is a great book, by the way, if people want to read it.
It's a fabulous book.
And I'm going to use your story now in the book I'm writing.
Oh, yeah. No, please do.
If I may. That's great. That's a good example of how – Well, let's close it off here.
I do appreciate the time, and I do – I'm curious to have – you know, people will comment, and I'm looking forward to people's comments on it.
We'll put a link to your books below.
Great writer, great thinker, great communicator.
And the books are The Flipside of Feminism – What Conservative Women Know and Men Can't Say.
The War on Men, How to Choose a Husband and Make Peace with Marriage, and The Alpha Female's Guide to Men and Marriage, How Love Works.
The website, SuzanneVenker.com, and a great Twitter feed at twitter.com forward slash Suzanne Venker.
A great pleasure to chat.
I hope we can do it again soon, and thank you so much for your time today.
