4138 The Myth of Patriarchy | Peter Lloyd and Stefan Molyneux
Summary: "Men are brilliant. Being a man is brilliant—except for penile dysmorphia, circumcision, becoming a weekend father, military conscription, critics who've been hating on us for . . . well, pretty much fifty years—oh, and those pesky early deaths. Fortunately, Peter Lloyd is here to tackle controversial topics in this fearless bloke bible, part blistering polemic, part politically incorrect road map for the modern man."Peter Lloyd is a journalist at the Mail on Sunday and MailOnline, a Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mirror contributor and the author of "Stand by Your Manhood: A Survival Guide for the Modern Man."Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/suffragentlemanBook: http://www.fdrurl.com/stand-by-your-manhoodYour 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
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine.
Hope you're doing well. Here with Peter Lloyd, a new guest in the roster.
He is a journalist with The Mail on Sunday and Mail Online and a contributor to The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mirror.
He is also author of a book that I strongly urge you to get.
We'll put a link to it right below and it's called Stand By Your Manhood, A Survival Guide for the Modern Man.
You can follow him on Twitter.com forward slash Sufra, gentleman, S-U-F-F-R-A, gentleman.
Peter, thank you so much for taking the time today.
No, thank you for having me on.
I've been following you for a while.
This is like being blessed by the Pope.
Well, no pressure.
All right. So what was it that prompted the book?
Was it something in your life?
Was it stuff you saw as a journalist?
Was it your mates? I mean, what was it that made you – because for those who don't know, writing a book is kind of like extracting an encyclopedia out of your ass.
It starts off a lot of fun and then by the 12th rewrite with more edit notes than you can possibly imagine, it turns into a whole lot less fun.
And so everybody who's written a book and got it to the publishing stage has my admiration.
And for those who don't know how difficult it is, I do have to kind of ask that question.
What was it that had you put yourself in the line of fire in this way?
You know, it's funny. I've been asked that a few times.
And I always give the worst answer because my personal life is really pretty fortunate.
My parents are still together.
They've been married for – they recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.
I've got three elder sisters who I'm really close to.
They're all very happily married.
You know, I've never really been burned, you know, by a kind of relationship in any way.
So my motivation for writing the book wasn't necessarily personal.
It was political. I kind of always grew up.
Even as a young boy, I was kind of aware of the ethical inconsistencies in feminism and the man-hating that was at its core.
And I always remember thinking, all the men in my life are great.
My father is probably the coolest guy I know.
Apart from you, Stefan, who obviously I know now.
But there was always a disconnect there.
And I always question, why aren't the men in my life getting the kind of Due reverence that they deserve.
I mean, I see praise for women everywhere, but the men in my life were being derided, maybe not directly, but certainly through society and culture and the news.
And I just found that frustrating and it just evolved as I grew up and I saw more and more of it.
And as I became more kind of politically awake, I just realized that as a journalist, it was kind of my duty to write something, even if it was uncomfortable for people to hear.
It was my duty to write it.
And so when I became a journalist, it was just an obvious topic for me to touch on.
And it's funny because this whole question of the patriarchy, I'm older than you, but I was raised in this sort of man-hating patriarchy, women are champs, and a man who doesn't need a woman is a loser, but a woman who doesn't need a man is empowered.
And I just remember...
As life experience began to accumulate, realizing that there was a growing gap between the theory and the practice, you know, patriarchy rules the world and subjugates women for its own advantage and all of life is designed to serve men.
It's like, oh, can you explain war?
Can you explain the draft? Can you explain why men get shafted so often in divorce courts?
Can you explain why we live shorter, vote less?
Can you explain why molds are basically gynocentric, altruists to inconsequential materialism?
And it just began to be like, well, if you could design a world to serve men, I have no idea how it would end up being the world that currently is.
And so there's this theory and then there's this practice.
And the two were so widely divergent that it, for me, promoted a certain crisis where it's just like, no, no, this can't be true.
None of this can be true. So why is it even there?
Exactly. Exactly. I mean, the book jacket, the reverse of the book actually says, you know, men must be the worst oppressors in history because, you know, we pay the most taxes.
We get the least state support.
We even have to play longer matches at Wimbledon for the same prize money these days.
It's insane. But, you know, we're also jailed more.
We're drafted. We lose access to our children in divorces.
We get shafted in family law courts.
You know, the education system is failing boys.
And on top of all of that, we die sooner.
So it has to be the worst patriarchy ever.
I mean, for goodness sake, I want a refund for my application to the patriarchy.
It's like we have this battle cry.
It's like, guys, let's get together.
I've got a wonderful slogan for the patriarchy.
It's called pay. Die and shut up.
Once we take the ramparts of civilization, we'll turn it against ourselves, elevate women to the top and end up brutalized and suicidal.
What do you say? Are you with me?
It's like the worst Lionheart speech that you could conceive of to rally the troops for a suicidal lemming rush off a cliff.
Oh, absolutely. And that's precisely why I wanted to write the book because no one is having this conversation.
Nobody is telling men the truth about their lives.
And I wanted something that was almost like a red pill for them to swallow.
And I wanted them to wake up and realize how they were being played by the system.
And it sounds like a cranky conspiracy theory, but if you read the book, it's absolutely true.
And it's enshrined in government.
I mean, here in the UK, earlier this week, the Ministry of Justice actually announced, formally announced, that they weren't going to jail women Unless they'd committed incredibly serious crimes.
Men will be jailed for a whole manner of different crimes, but women will only be jailed for the uppermost worst crimes possible, which is, of course, murder.
And even then, you know, Judges are reticent to kind of give women custodial sentences because they often have children.
Also, murder, I believe, in the modern Western legal system is justifiable if you've been the victim of mansplaining or manspreading.
And so there is that balancing out.
But people might write off meninism, or me being what I call a suffragette, and talking about these things.
But actually, if you look systematically, if you look at the system, this stuff is absolutely enshrined.
And I don't know what patriarchy they're talking about here.
We have a female monarch, and our prime minister is a woman.
So in terms of patriarchy, I don't see much evidence of it here in the UK and I certainly don't see it in Canada where you're run by Trudeau.
Christ! My God!
I think there's somebody who stopped right in the middle of the pendulum swing between the genders.
So I was in boarding school which was sort of all male and I guess you could say was somewhat patriarchal in the traditional sense but I think in the chivalric sense in that we were taught to defer to women, we were taught to be chivalrous towards women but for the most part growing up As the child of a single mother.
And of course, when you do that, generally you fall to sort of the bottom economic layers where there's just single moms around everywhere.
And then going to schools where I was taught almost exclusively by women, there was usually some male sort of principal somewhere off in the foggy distance that you hoped to avoid.
And then looking at the magazines that were all for women, going to the malls, which were all for women, and then someone coming along and saying, ah, it's a patriarchy run by men.
And it's like, again, that empirical experience, particularly for so many children.
I think you point out in the book that there are 4 million children in the UK who don't have access to their fathers.
So when you're raised by women, birthed by women, and when you see more women represented in politics and you point out in the book so many more women in higher education, it's really hard to see where this patriarchy exists in the West.
Now, you can certainly see it existing in, say, Iran.
And I don't see a strong feminist movement where there really is A patriarchy.
And so for me, if you can criticize the patriarchy, it's not very oppressive.
You know, like if you want to go criticizing communism in Chairman Mao's China, or you want to go criticizing national socialism under Hitler, then you're going to have a pretty short lifespan.
So the fact that you can continually rail at and have a society for cutting up men and have yourself be just fine, in fact, Lord, it means it's really not very oppressive at all.
Yeah, exactly. And of course, if you look at most of the actions by men in power, often they are motivated by the protection of women.
Most government officials who are male will pass legislation which is very feminist, or they will support feminist causes.
So even when you have men in power, Often they prioritize the care in the interests of women over men, not least because women are the bigger voter demographic here in the UK. So it amazes me when people talk about this kind of structure which is dominated by men for men's benefit.
It's just not true, and especially when you also count in the fact that male suicide rates are at a record high, the education system is failing boys, and we are still a nation where our National Health Service is circumcising young boys needlessly.
I mean, that is an outrage.
I mean, that's a slightly separate issue, but these things I find so frustrating, and they never seem to get any airtime, which is why I wrote the book, because I almost wanted to kind of Break that silence and just throw that grenade in there and watch it explode.
And it's been great fun because so many feminists who claim to be equality advocates, many of the men actually can't defend their actions and can't defend the logical inconsistencies in a lot of their arguments.
Well, I think the circumcision point is wonderful.
I mean, what possible group would try and set up a system wherein significant portions of them would have a third of their penis skin removed surgically for no reason whatsoever?
Unbelievable. When I talk about this, people sometimes say to me, oh, well, you must be circumcised.
You must have had a terrible experience with this.
And I say, well, you know, not to reveal too much information here, I don't want your listeners to lose their lunch, but I'm not circumcised.
But I can identify what's outrageous about it is that you are performing, you know, very painful, life-altering surgery on a child's genitals without their consent.
And Whether people say there is a comparison between FGM or not, the principle of genital integrity is equally important for boys and girls.
There is no way around that.
You cannot say that a vagina is worth more than a penis or vice versa.
The integrity of each is the same.
And if we are truly going to live in an equal society, we need to start recognising that.
But here in the UK, we have campaigns to kind of end FGM and even get a single conviction for FGM in London, where it's unfortunately increasingly common.
But as I said, circumcision is performed on the NHS. It's funded by taxpayers.
And it's performed on innocent boys who often end up, you know, going through a fantastically painful experience.
They have reduced sensitivity in the penis.
Their sex life is affected for the rest of their lives.
And they're also psychologically damaged by it.
And worst of all, there's no good reason for them to have this procedure done in the first place.
The foreskin is not an accident of nature.
Mother nature is It's a smart woman.
She knows what she's doing. The foreskin is like an eyelid.
It keeps the head of the penis, which is the most sensitive part, nourished and sensitive.
When you remove that foreskin, you are desensitizing the penis.
The head of the penis chronitizes.
It's like it dries out like a callus on the foot.
And that's why a lot of men who are circumcised have reduced sensitivity.
Parents, if you're out there and you're considering doing this to your son or you know someone who is, seriously, think again, you haven't thought it through.
It's the same as FGM. And often, I get a lot of flack for saying this, but I don't care.
Often, boy circumcision is worse than FGM. You know, in some instances, FGM can be just a pinprick.
I say just, I mean, obviously, that's still bad.
But in terms of circumcision, it can be the entire removal Of the hood of the foreskin.
And in some cases, boys are killed.
Boys die. They bleed to death from this practice.
Oh, and I've had a male caller on my show whose penis was virtually destroyed by circumcision.
And we know so scientifically that the cortisol, the stress hormone levels of boys who are circumcised, remains higher six months after the procedure.
It is a physical trauma.
It is basically like, well, imagine doing this with barely any local anesthetic as an adult.
It is literally you're out of the womb and it feels like you're being attacked by a rabid animal that's chewing.
Yeah, I'm not circumcised either.
The sensitivity issue, you know, every now and then if you're not circumcised, you get the roll back and you walk around in your underwear and it's like, this kind of chafey.
And it's like, I can't imagine this for my whole life.
Like the first thing you've got to do is go to the washroom and do the roll down because it's like, no, no, no, we don't want to see daylight.
Thank you very much. We are very tender.
Yeah, and this practice is still happening.
I mean, thankfully, it's reducing in the US and across Canada.
But of course, there was the famous Canadian case, David Reimer, who was circumcised in the 70s.
And the surgeon was a bit trigger happy with, I think they were kind of cauterizing the foreskin of his penis off.
I think that the surgeon made an error, and he did too much.
He took too much off and he essentially damaged the entire penis.
And what ended up happening was, this was in the early 70s, of course, medical practices weren't necessarily as sophisticated as they are now.
And the surgeon met with the parents and they concocted this plan to force this boy to undergo a sex change.
You know, at the age of like one or two.
And they raised him as a girl to try and cover up this atrocious accident that had happened.
And then eventually, you know, I think he was raised with the name of like Barbara or something ridiculous.
And when he got to 15, he ended up thinking, oh, my God, I'm transgender.
I feel like a man. And then the whole secret came out and he ended up killing himself in his 30s.
An absolute tragedy.
And it was emblematic of something which is suffered on a much smaller scale by millions and millions and millions of men and boys all across the world.
And I think it's a form of branding, which says that you are ours to do with as we see fit, that you have no right to bodily integrity, that surgeons can violate the basic commandment of do no harm.
And then even worse, people will somehow kind of justify it down the road.
Well, you know, there could conceivably be a tiny reduction in the tiny prevalence of penile cancer and so on.
But of course, far more dangerous than a man's penis to bodily survival is a woman's breast with breast cancer rates being relatively high.
And we would never say, well, you can live without your breasts.
So we're going to remove them as a baby so that you don't ever have to worry about breast cancer.
So it really brands men and says, listen, you're just a bunch of workhorses.
We can do with you what we will, and you have no rights relative to women.
And it's every time, I guess, a circumcised man looks down, every time he goes to the washroom, every time he has sex, he's reminded that he's been branded for service to the collective.
And if he ever starts to complain about it, people will not only mock him, but they will openly make jokes.
There are jokes in movies.
I was watching, I think it was Bad Moms, and they make Endless jokes about it's physically unattractive to have an uncircumcised penis.
And jokes and ha ha ha and so on.
And I mean, good Lord, how cold and callous.
You know, reading your book, Peter, I was really reminded of...
We're always told about this famous female empathy and sensitivity and caring and how wonderfully warm-hearted and cuddly and sensitive and so on women are.
And it's like, well, you don't have to go to the Sharon Osbourne making fun of the woman stuffing her husband's penis down a garbarator, but just start to bring up circumcision and you'll see just how warm-hearted a lot of women are and, well, spoiler, they're not.
Exactly. I mean, as if the priority in this debate is women's preference on penile aesthetics.
I'm sorry, sisters, it's really not about what you like.
It's what men feel.
That's the priority. Men's ownership of their own penis, their own bodily integrity.
That's what's important.
I don't care whether women like it or not.
That's the reality. Uncircumcised sexuality is easier on the woman's vagina.
Because it's like a toy subway train in an oven mitt, so to speak, right?
Because when you're thrusting into a woman's vagina and you're not circumcised, then it's less friction for her.
I mean, there's a reason why everybody needs half an oil, Derek, to have sex these days, and it's because the natural ease for both parties has been stripped away surgically.
Yeah, precisely. One of my other favourite myths about circumcision is, someone said to me only last week when I was having a conversation about this, and of course it was a woman and she said, yeah, but circumcised penises are more hygienic.
I said, look, can I just stop you there?
Because rolling a foreskin back in the shower is not difficult.
You know, we did build civilization.
We can figure out how to rub our own penises with soap.
It's really not the end of the world.
You know, I know we're living in a Me Too environment at the moment, but if you want me to display this and how easy it is, I'm more than happy to do it purely for demonstration purposes, you know, just so you can explode that myth in your mind.
Men can get to the moon, but we can't figure out how to wash our own body part.
Unbelievable. And we hear all the time how women are so emotionally evolved and superior and terrifying if that's the case.
So while we're on the subject of penises, and I'm very glad to be talking to you about this, of course, let's talk about size.
Now, I was kind of surprised when you had a chapter on that in your book, and then I did remember the Jude Law incident where he was photographed in the nude while he was changing And of course, everybody remembers the fappening, you know, when some of the celebrities had their photos in the cloud hacked and so on.
And this was just such a violation of their privacy and so on.
And Jude Law was photographed, for those who don't know, while he was changing.
He wasn't sort of doing some dance with a pole or something.
He was photographed while he was changing at his mother's villa, France, I can't remember.
And he has an average normal-sized penis.
Here's the part of the show where we talk about Jude Law's penis.
Just for those who don't know, I wasn't expecting it.
But, you know, we follow where the data goes.
I didn't realize this was the bulk of the interview.
No, but it's important because there was mockery of a perfectly normal male penis.
And at the same time as women are extraordinarily sensitive about body shaming and, you know, I get to be 300 pounds and get to be called sexy.
But a man with an average size penis and, you know, suddenly gets mocked and attacked and he's no longer a sex symbol.
And it's like, again, ladies, this whole sensitivity thing, it might be taking just a little bit of a blow or two.
Yeah. And this is one of many, many, many inconsistent principles I touch on in the book.
And it's so frustrating because we hear all the time, as you say, about body positivity and, you know, I'm fat and I'm still beautiful and you must find me attractive.
And if you don't find me attractive, then you're sexist and you're sizist.
And yet at the same time, these are the same women Who are branding absolutely normal, healthy sized penises as deficient and small and instilling a sense of shame in millions of young men who have the exact same size penis as Jude Law.
I mean, Jude Law's penis, if you look at the picture, I'm sure you can still find it floating around online somewhere.
If you look at the picture of his penis, I mean, the Google searches now for Jude Law's penis are going to be going through the roof.
But if you look at it… Sorry, I already have a Google alert for it anyway, so easy enough.
Well, it's the screensaver on my iPhone.
It's an absolutely normal penis.
It's not the biggest you've ever seen.
It's not the smallest. But even if it were the smallest, it would still be a perfectly fine penis.
And this is what I wanted to kind of get across in the chapter about penis size.
It's called the politics of the penis because what I say is every penis is absolutely fine and perfect and wonderful exactly how it is.
The penis creates life.
It has its dual function.
It allows you to go to the bathroom and urinate.
It gives you incredible pleasure.
It produces, you know, life.
It's a wonderful part of the human anatomy.
And in every single form, I say it's wonderful.
And I wanted to say that because I've never ever heard that before from anyone.
I've never heard anybody say that every penis is exactly perfect the way it is.
And I think I wanted men to hear that because it's absolutely true.
Penises are not there for the preference of women.
It's the same with the circumcision debate.
You know, women can state their preferences all they like.
That isn't the priority. The primary function of a penis is not to aesthetically please a woman.
It's to serve the man it's attached to.
And as long as it's doing that, that is all that matters.
Well, then there's something that never struck me at all, and this is why there's a lot of these kinds of gems in the book, where you talk about the size of the woman's vagina.
Because, of course, the man is, oh, the penis is too small, and so on.
Well, you know, it could be that the lady's vagina has, you know, forced belonging expeditions and a Safeway truck in it.
You know, like, it could be that the vagina is too large, because vaginas vary in size as well.
And there's certainly more options with Kegels.
But, yeah, that's one thing that is never discussed.
Absolutely. I mean, I say this in the book, if we're going to have the size debate, then let's also talk about the size of vaginas, because not only do they vary as much as penises, but they also change in size during sex.
I mean, an erect penis usually stays the same size, but vaginas actually shift in size throughout the process of intercourse.
So what I say is, well, look, you know, sisters, if we're going to talk about penis size, then let's also talk about your anatomy, because the two go together.
And actually, even if you look at the Karma Sutra, it states that there are three categories, three categories of sizes of penis, and there are three corresponding size categories for the vagina.
And The combination of those is a personal preference.
So let's explore that myth that vaginas are all one size and that if a woman is dissatisfied with a man's size for whatever reason, that it's solely his fault.
Maybe she's too big?
Right. Now, let's talk about the marriage.
And the Fraud of the Rings is the chapter title.
And I got to tell you, I mean, I'm happily married myself, have been so for 15 years.
Oh, are you? Yes.
And we're going to go the distance for sure.
But we got together based upon, you know, shared values, shared interests, I guess, similar levels of education and so on.
And when you do get somebody similar levels of education, sort of same values and so on, marriages tend to be kind of stable.
I think there's a lot of, you know, well, she's hot or, you know, I haven't had sex in a while and let's get married kind of thing that goes on.
I do find a certain fascination in reading these horror stories of which there seem to be almost no end of the men who end up – what was it?
The man who ended up his wife was making – 6,000 pounds every day of their marriage after he got married and she ditched her 85,000 pound a year job and so on.
I find these stories quite fascinating and I think men track these a lot more than women do and I think that this lack of visibility for these stories for women or maybe women celebrate them whereas men feel terrified of them.
I mean John Cleese, funny guy.
Went through a lot of therapy, wrote books with a psychologist, but by God, he doesn't seem to learn from having his genitals repeatedly crushed in the vice of family court systems.
But where do you think men are as a whole these days, young sort of younger unmarried men with hearing these stories?
I think they're slowly waking up to it.
I mean, the rates of marriage are declining in the UK, and there are a number of reasons for that.
I think one is that there's also been a decline in religion, that there's probably less respect for traditional values.
So they are two factors.
And also, marriage is expensive.
But I think at the same time, men are also on...
Some think of a marriage strike.
They may not necessarily know it.
They may not be conscious of it.
But I think that men have a trepidation about marriage.
And I think it's a trepidation which is absolutely justified.
I mean, let me clarify.
I have the utmost respect for people who are married and have successful relationships.
As I said, my parents are still together.
They still hold hands. You know, they've just celebrated 50 years and my three sisters are married and I have lots of friends who are married.
But The reason I warn men of it is because it's almost always men who are utterly shafted when it goes wrong.
And when I say it goes wrong, I mean it goes wrong in about 40% of cases.
So that's almost a 50-50 chance of you ending up in the divorce courts and having to pay alimony for the rest of your life.
I mean, why would you want to do that?
You may as well just find a woman you don't like and give her a house.
It's much easier. Well, no, because giving the house is a one-time thing.
Now, I just want to push back slightly against this sort of 40-50% thing that the math is complicated.
They basically will measure number of divorces, number of marriages in a year and so on.
And you can reduce those rates significantly with some sort of proactive strategies of, you know, value matching and so on.
But the stories, you point out in the book how there's a proposal being put forward, I think, by the Law Society in England, saying, can we just limit this to like three years, say?
And I think that's the case you point out in Scotland.
In Scotland, yeah. And suddenly, because he's elevated this woman to a particular lifestyle, he is now obliged to maintain her in that lifestyle for the rest of their natural lives.
And that, to me, is astonishing.
Even in California, which is a basket case in America, I think you have to be 10 years before that happens.
But that kicks in very quickly in England, and that's just absolutely appalling.
Yeah, well, the short answer to that is that we view men as success objects.
No, we really do.
I mean, we're told all the time that we mustn't view women as sex subjects.
But at the same time, we absolutely view men as success subjects.
And we see them as workhorses.
Somebody needs to bankroll this relationship.
Somebody needs to be the financial underwriter for a woman or a family.
So it has to be the man.
And that's why I encourage men and not women to avoid marriage, because it's men who always end up being fiscally responsible.
For the fallout of a marriage.
And it's so outdated.
And what's really unfortunate is, and people forget, marriage is a contract.
It's a legally binding contract and once you sign it, once you say I do, you are locked into that contract and you have to abide by whatever the family court rules and if that's that you've got to give your house to your ex-wife and give her $100,000 every year until the day you die, you have to do that and if you don't do that you go to jail.
I just think that that is such a huge injustice to men.
Men who often work hard and are very active fathers and great husbands and maybe their marriage falls apart for no real reason.
It just happens to die out.
Maybe the man isn't to blame.
And yet he's still absolutely penalized both by his ex-wife and by the system which is designed to protect women.
So I just think it's such a risky endeavor for men.
It's not worth it. And when it does go wrong, it goes It's fantastically wrong.
You can end up losing access to your children.
You can end up being forced to give up half of your pension.
There was even a case here where there was a couple who'd been divorced.
They'd actually been divorced for 20 years.
And when they were married, they both had no money.
They were both skin. I think they both lived in a trailer.
And then after the divorce, about 15 years later, the man He set up a green energy company.
Within five years, the green energy company went on to be a huge success and made millions and millions and millions.
His ex-wife of 20 years came back with a legal team who were working on a no-win, no-fee basis because they know that women are so successful in these claims.
She demanded something like a 20% cut of his fortune that he made after their divorce and she won.
Well, you've probably heard the story of, do you remember the old Al Pacino movie, Serpico?
That this was based upon a real cop in, I think it was in New York City.
And, you know, he had spent decades in the line of duty.
He'd been shot. He'd, you know, obviously had a very, very tough life and time as a career.
And so he ended up with a fairly decent pension, but his...
Divorce resulted in him giving half of his pension to his wife.
So he goes through the mean streets of New York for decades, gets shot, exposes corruption, and then his wife, well, she marries and divorces him and gets exactly the same payout as he does.
And it's so retro. This is what drives me nuts about this kind of stuff.
It's so retro. I can understand way back in the day when the woman was running the household, raising the children.
And the idea that this is unpaid labor is ridiculous.
Of course you're getting paid. Every time a bill comes in and it gets settled, somebody's paying for it.
So the idea that raising some man's children is unpaid is like, really?
Are you getting your house paid for?
Your groceries paid for?
Your health care is being paid for, either directly or through taxes, your insurance, your vacations, your clothing?
You're not working for it.
Your husband is paying you because you're getting more than half of his money, even in the marriage when you count in the kids.
But back in the day when women would be providing, it's a very essential civilization maintaining service to have and raise the next generation of children.
Wonderful stuff. So I can understand how there would be some, you know, the woman has no skills.
But at this point now, it's a business contract.
But the weird thing is...
Is that you get paid even if you get fired or you quit.
Everybody's job, you go through times where it's tough.
And it's like, well, if I work for someone else, if I get fired, guess what?
I don't get to get a paycheck.
If I quit, I don't get to get a paycheck.
And if you divorce a woman, you're firing her.
And if she divorces you, she's quitting.
Why on earth would she keep getting paid?
Who on earth would go to work if you got paid either way?
Exactly. And you have to look at the reality.
I may sound like I'm being critical of women here, but here in Britain, women instigate something like 70% of divorces because they know it's such a cash cow.
They know they are going to win.
And I've spoken to lawyers, I quote female divorce lawyers in the book, and even they say, look, women marry men for financial security.
They know they can take them to the cleaners.
And become solvent and even rich beyond the wildest dreams through a divorce.
And so that is why I say to men, look, you have to view this realistically.
Don't let romanticism go to your head and cloud your judgment.
You have to view it as a business deal, and a business deal where you're on the back foot, because if it does go wrong, the courts will always look more favorably on the female party, even if she doesn't have a child.
She will be given a huge lump sum of the money you've worked for.
And look, if you've gone to work enslaved for this money, then it's yours.
You should enjoy spending it.
Don't give it away on a broken relationship.
It's just not worth it.
Well, I would say that it's even worse than a business relationship because if you can't pay your bills in a business relationship, you can declare bankruptcy and walk away scot-free.
There's no such thing as a debtor's prison anymore.
Those have been outlawed for many decades.
So it's more dangerous than a business relationship because a business relationship doesn't send you to jail if you can't foot a particular bill.
Very true, actually.
Very true. I mean, there is no escape.
And I've spoken to so many men who've been left Very, very depressed, even suicidal by the kind of burden that's been placed on them by divorce courts and the amount of money.
I know men who've had to leave wonderful houses with a property portfolio or whatever and had to move into bedsits or studio apartments.
While their ex-wife lives in the old family home with her new boyfriend and the children.
And it's devastating.
It's just so unfair.
And I want to try and educate young men out of this mindset that marriage is just a natural step in the process of life.
It doesn't have to be. Have relationships.
Have long-term relationships.
Treat your partners with respect.
Don't be reckless with someone's heart.
That's all advice I would give.
And invest if you can in long-term relationships, but just don't put a ring on it.
It's expensive, and you'll be paying for it for the rest of your life.
Well, I mean, I don't know what the laws are like in the UK, but in many places in the West, it doesn't matter if you put a ring on it or not, because you're equivalent to married after a certain amount of time anyway.
Right, yeah. And that's a big change.
How are prenups?
I mean, you mentioned, in the context of John Cleese, you mentioned the value of prenups.
Certainly in the States, prenups are...
A little bit of a dice roll because the woman can always say, oops, I didn't understand what I was, you know, whatever it is, right?
So do they hold up in the UK these days?
No, not really. I mean, they have more waiting than they did do maybe 30 years ago.
And actually, now people are getting post-nups, which is, you know, they're kind of getting financial agreements after their marriage.
They're kind of backdating their agreements on the division of assets, you know, in the result of a divorce.
But frequently, it's easy to kind of just toss them out.
I mean, judges will often just dismiss them.
What people often don't realise is that judges are human beings and they often are politically motivated in their decisions.
I have friends who are lawyers and they say on certain days, if you get a judge and she's a feminist judge or he's a judge that hates men, you're going to be treated badly.
So you're rolling a dice and taking a gamble and running a risk on so many different levels.
People often say to me, oh yeah, but you know, these judges often argue that the woman needs to be kept in the manner to which she's become accustomed.
And this is the reason Why is she getting this financial reward?
And I say, okay then, what is she doing to keep her ex-husband in the manner which he became accustomed?
Is she still doing his ironing?
Is she still giving him sex?
Is she still cooking his dinner?
Why is it a one-way relationship where only the man has to maintain some kind of civility in the process of a separation?
What's her duty to kind of smooth the process and keep her husband in the kind of manner to which she's become accustomed?
We never hear of that No.
And that's because the system is so skewed.
Well, and another issue too, and you touch on this with regards to male friendships, is that a lot of times I've heard from men who get into relationships with women that the women kind of...
put blocks between the man and his friends, the friends that he had before.
Now, I'm always suspicious of that because I'm always concerned that the woman's kind of nuts and she wants to floridly exhibit her craziness in the relationship and she doesn't want the man to have a support system of other guys who are going to say, oh, she's crazy.
You got to get out.
And so if women work to separate men from their friends after a relationship or in particular after marriage, then the big danger, of course, is that then the woman, if there's a separation that goes on, the woman can fall comfortably into the couch of her female friendships and get lots of support and all of that.
And of course, the society as a whole supports her.
he may have lost a lot of his friendships along the way.
And that he's facing, for men, it is a horrible thing to feel like you can't control the outcome, particularly of a very long-term battle, you know, because we're used to that fight or flight.
We get the surge of cortisol and adrenaline because we either outrun the bear or not.
But it's not supposed to drag on for years and make you feel helpless.
And then if you end up stripped of a lot of your resources, then you're depressed, you're anxious, you're friendless, you're isolated, and you don't even have the resources that might help you to get a new girlfriend.
You've really been broken down for decades to come, if not the remainder of your life.
And I think a lot of men who see that and experience that kind of reality, it does make them suicidal for reasons that I think don't pass understanding for anybody with a shred of heart.
There is a study which I cite in the book which says that men experience negative aspects of divorce much more than women do.
And I think for all of the reasons that you've just mentioned, often men end up being isolated by women and kind of broken down in that respect.
And then when it does go wrong, all of the services, socially, publicly, legally, socially, Favour women.
So men are isolated, not only in the relationship, but in the fallout of the relationship, which is devastating.
I mean, people say that men are quick to recover and that they really invest their feelings in these kind of relationships.
That's just not true.
It's devastating to see.
And so when I ward men off marriage, it's purely as a self-preservation tactic.
It's just because I want them to be safe.
Well, we also haven't talked about something that is so common that it's got its own acronym, SAID, which is Sexual Allegations in Divorce.
That if the woman accuses the man of sexual impropriety, particularly with the children, I mean, boy, that is a nuclear strike on his life.
Very easy. Yeah, very easy.
It immediately gets her custody.
It immediately gets him out of the house.
And, man.
It's so common.
I was working for a long time behind the scenes with an actor here called Lawrence Fox.
He's a British actor.
And he was married to a woman, an actress called Billy Piper, who She started in Doctor Who and she's done a lot of theatres since then.
I think she did Broadway as well.
He recently did a story with The Mail on Sunday.
I kind of encouraged him to do it and eventually on Father's Day, earlier in the month, he did a big tell-all about how devastating his divorce was and how he had to fight tooth and nail just to get access to his own two sons, who he was bankrolling, by the way.
He kind of really broke the silence on that in the last few months.
It was even for someone who is successful, rich, young, good-looking like Lawrence Fox, it was absolutely devastating.
And I know so many other famous men who've been in that position.
And I always say, perhaps more ordinary men like you and I, is that if there are men out there like Brad Pitt and Lawrence Fox who have a wealth of wonderful life experiences and lots of money in the bank and grand connections, if it's still incredibly difficult for them, imagine what it's like for men At the bottom end of the scale, it's absolutely devastating.
Yeah. So, all right.
Let's brush that one back because that's a hole with no bottom at the moment.
And let's talk about the male pill, which is something I have not heard a lot of, I don't want to say activists and so on, but it is a fascinating question.
Now, I get it's easier to stop an egg than to stop, you know, 12 billion sperm or whatever.
A million sperm, yeah, yeah. I've always found it quite fascinating how some hardline feminists push back against the very idea of a male pill.
Yeah, it's incredible. There was actually a prototype in the 70s that was designed, I think it was a Mexican scientist came up with a concept for effective and reversible control of male sperm.
And it was presented to the World Health Forum.
And what happened was in the middle of the presentation, a group of hardline, placard-waving feminists came in and shut down the presentation.
They disrupted it and they said, we don't want men deciding when they become fathers.
We will decide when they become fathers.
Well, that's leverage for women, right?
Hang on a second. So if it's my body, my choice for women, why isn't it my body, my choice for men?
Your wallet, my choice, I think is the main thing.
Yeah, precisely.
So there is the added complication of political resistance, which is why we still don't have a male pill.
For the book, I went in and I met a few scientists.
I actually met one scientist in his lab and his team in Scotland.
And he was kind of talking me through the process and their findings.
And a number of scientists, there's one in Germany, there's one in America, and I believe there's one in Asia, in Japan.
And they're all on the brink of a breakthrough with a male contraceptive.
And I think it's going to happen in the next 10 years.
And when it does happen, it's going to be an absolute game changer.
Because what you're going to have is You're going to have men, not women, controlling the outcome of their own sexual encounters.
And that is going to be revolutionary between the genders.
It's going to be incredible. It's going to be a huge power shift in men's favour because, I mean, look, only in the last few days, Drake, you know, was clearly targeted by a woman who fancied a baby with a rich man and she got what she wanted probably pretty easily.
I mean, I don't know how that happened exactly, but there are lots of women out there who accidentally on purpose forget to take their contraceptive pill and then They suddenly end up pregnant and it's never by a poor man.
It's always by someone with lots of cash in the bank.
Men are going to be able to sidestep that from now on and they're going to be able to say, I'm going to control when I become a father.
I don't want somebody else deciding when I become a parent.
And they're absolutely right to do that.
It's not an infringement on women's rights for men to have control and agency over their own reproduction.
Men should have that. And so I outline in the book why it's such...
I call it the best thing we've never had, because I think when it does come, there'll be a little bit of trepidation about it.
Men will be thinking, oh, I don't really want to mess around with my sperm production.
Or, you know, is this going to affect...
How I feel or perform sexually.
And of course it won't. By the time it comes on the market, those things would have been ironed out.
But hopefully the men who've read the book will be kind of primed psychologically and ready to embrace it when it does happen because it really will be the best thing for them.
I mean, it's astounding that you have pointed out one of the greatest frauds that can be perpetrated human being to human being is for a woman to commit paternity fraud against a man.
Yeah, which happens all the time.
Yeah, it happens all the time.
I remember reading these studies where – this is back in the day, but some optimistic, eager teacher was in the UK.
I think it was Wales.
I could be wrong though.
But assigned the blood test, you know, like, oh, well, if your mom has this blood type and then you have this blood type, then your father has this blood type, then you're going to end up with this blood type and handed out these questionnaires and came back with like staggering numbers of – well, no, it's not.
It's not possible for you to be the offspring of your father and it is horribly common and also so incredibly destructive because, of course, the man is denied his own progeny by pouring resources for two decades into a child that's not his own. the man is denied his own progeny by pouring resources And it fundamentally can fragment the relationship between father and child.
It certainly would fragment the relationship between husband and And as you point out in the book, there's not been one single prosecution for this.
And if, you know, untold numbers of women were given the wrong babies in hospital because wristbands got mixed up, everybody would be going insane.
It'd be outrage. It'd be front page news.
You'd have people foaming at the mouth over it.
Lawsuits. Oh yeah, people would probably end up in jail, but not one single prosecution that has succeeded in paternity fraud.
And that is no accident.
That is no accident.
They don't want to do that.
The Crime Prosecution Service here in this country and probably in every other Western country isn't going to embrace that because once they do, it's going to be such an epic task.
It would utterly overwhelm them to the point where it would debilitate them.
And isn't it the case in the UK? That you can't even get a paternity test without the permission of the mom.
How outrageous is that?
Yeah, you can't actually- Because patriarchy.
Because the patriarchy, exactly.
And this is all designed because the state know, people know that paternity fraud is so common.
Okay, there aren't official numbers out there, so we don't know for sure what the rates of paternity fraud are.
But the reason we don't know is because It's all deliberately kept from public view.
Men are not allowed to go and have a paternity test.
It's illegal for a man to do that unless he has his wife's permission.
And the reason for that is that people don't want men to wake up and know the real deal.
And it's terrifying.
I mean, I'm lucky that I don't have children, but there are millions of men out there raising children who they've got no idea aren't theirs.
Right. And I mean, it's just, it breaks my heart a little bit, Peter, when you talk about I'm so lucky that I don't have children.
I mean, that we have a society where someone is going to say, woohoo, no kids, end of the line, four billion years of evolution stops with me because the laws are so terrible.
It's really tragic.
No, I mean, of course, having a child would be a blessing.
What I mean is, what I'm saying is, By not having a child, there is an absence of doubt.
You know, I don't have the possibility of doubting whether that child is mine.
That's all I'm saying. But the reality is that, and this is something that it's just biological.
And now, I mean, I think that gender relations would be pretty good.
It's just that right now, gender relations are another giant government program.
state and war and imperialism and debt.
And so it's messed everything up in the way that only governments can.
But everybody knows that there's this basic reality that once a woman gets pregnant, she has society by the balls.
Because once a woman gets pregnant, she needs hundreds of thousands of dollars or I guess, I don't know, a hundred thousand pounds or whatever to bring that child to maturity.
And nobody's going to sit there and say, well, you got pregnant, you don't have any job skills, and the father isn't sticking around, so good luck, honey.
What are you going to do? You've got these sad-eyed, les misrables children wandering around the streets, you know, crying bitter tears of Victor Hugo impotence.
What's society going to do?
Well, once the woman gets pregnant – this is why there used to be this no sex before marriage and you've got to keep both feet on the floor when you have a man in your room and you kind of close the door.
There used to be this terror of unwanted pregnancies or pregnancies that existed outside of a man's capacity to pay for the child because once the woman gets pregnant, what's society supposed to do?
You got to give her resources otherwise the child is doomed.
And if the man's not around, it's going to come from the public purse, but that fundamental power that women have over society because we care about children, oh man, does it get abused when it's combined with the power of the state.
Oh, of course. Sorry, there wasn't a question in that.
I apologize for that completely.
No, but you're right.
And a lot of women believe that they are, especially single mothers, believe that they are liberated and that they're, you know, I'm doing this on my own without the presence or the assistance of a man.
And you think, who are you kidding?
All right, maybe you don't have a husband who is bankrolling your existence with this child, but you have The male public purse, you know, you have the public purse which is funded predominantly by men through income tax.
I mean, men pay the majority of income tax.
And so it is men collectively rather than one individual man who is picking up the tab for that child.
Oh, and without even having to provide any useful services as a wife.
It is extraordinarily predatory.
And even the national debt. If we said to people who wanted to bankroll the national debt in Western countries, if we said, well, you can lend to us, but the only asset we're going to provide in return is women's contribution to the tax pool.
Ooh. I'm not a mathematician.
I'm going to try to do this on the fly, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say, not a lot of national debt rolling in.
It is male productivity that drives the capacity for governments to go into debt and pretend to provide value that they don't provide in the present.
And it's driven by female voters.
And there is this cliche.
It's a little bit borne up by statistics that women are worse at managing debt.
And we have really seen that since women have gotten the vote, government spending has absolutely exploded without any particular consideration for the future.
And that has really followed in line with female voting.
I have to tell you as well, there was a story that is horrifying that a friend of a friend told me.
And this is to illustrate to all your male listeners how much women value male sperm and how much women, no matter what they say, they often want to get pregnant.
There was a case where a female friend of a friend who I don't really know but wanted a child and she wasn't in a relationship and she was thinking, how am I going to do this?
So she thought, I know what I'll do.
I'll join Tinder and I'll get out there and have some dates and I'll have sex with some of them and what I'll do is I will take my own condoms and I will use a pin and I will pierce the sealed condom with a pin and then when I present it to the guy and we have sex and he ejaculates he won't know but there's a chance that I'll still get pregnant and of course she did and this poor guy who I actually don't know but I know of He ended up being lumbered with a child with a woman he never wanted.
He never signed up to have a child.
He never wanted a baby with this woman.
And once she conceived, he had absolutely no control over the matter.
And he is now, I think he's three years into paying 18 years of child support to a child he isn't allowed to see, never wanted, and with a woman who he doesn't even care about.
So it's a very, very depressing situation.
Men, I fear, aren't as alert about this as they should be.
There are a lot of women out there who are more than happy to get pregnant by a guy because it's easier to have a baby with someone who's going to cough up money every month than it is to go alone or go to a sperm bank and pay for it yourself.
Well, it's three minutes of fun followed by 20 years of baby jail.
And the culture serves female preferences in this way.
If there was a patriarchy, this would be blared from every poster, it would be part of every movie and TV show, this danger of being sperm jacked in this kind of way and losing control of your life.
I mean, this is like you are now, this is indentured servitude, without a doubt, and we would be horrified.
If any private business ended up tricking people into signing into a contract with no knowledge of it, like if there was a sort of a little claw somewhere buried deep in a cell phone contract or a visa contract or a student loan contract, Well, actually, there kind of is. And student loan contracts can't even discharge those through bankruptcy.
But if there was something kind of buried in there that was obfuscated or something that was an addendum that was added later that you didn't sign that put you into debt for a quarter of a million dollars or 150,000 pounds for 20 years, this would be a cause for Lawsuits, jail time for the executives who did it.
But of course, because we care for children and once women get pregnant, they've got society by the short and curlies.
What are you going to do? Well, what you do, of course, is you appease women and you sacrifice men.
Because men, despite paying most of the bills, aren't speaking up, aren't speaking out, aren't getting together, and aren't fighting back as yet.
Which is partly why I wrote the book.
It was a call to arms, really.
I wanted to say to men, look, you've got to wake up.
You've got to realize what's going on.
I'm not asking you to wave placards and wear protest t-shirts walking down the street.
I'm not asking you to do that.
What I am asking you to do is just wake up and acknowledge the reality of the interplay between men and women.
It may not be comfortable to admit, but in many cases, men are on the back foot and you have to acknowledge his power.
If you're aware of this, you can defend yourselves from all the difficult situations.
And look, I'm not saying that all women are predatory and that all men are victims all the time.
I'm definitely not saying that.
But there are certain situations where men are compromised because they are men.
And if you're alert to that, if you're aware of it, you're empowered and you can avoid it and you can lead Your best possible life.
And I actually mooted a point recently on Twitter, I said, I think there was an abortion referendum in Ireland, and it passed in the end.
And what I mooted at the time was, If women have control over the fate of their pregnancies, should men be allowed within a similar time frame as an abortion to be able to have what I call a financial abortion?
It's quite a crude term, but you know...
We're talking about being in the red.
Should men be able to relinquish their financial and parental rights Within a certain window period within a pregnancy, if it's a pregnancy that they've decided they didn't want or that was sprung on them or wasn't planned.
And the overwhelming majority of men said, absolutely, that should be a right that we should have.
If a woman can abort a child or give a child up for adoption, then men should have similar rights to have those choices, especially if they're held equally as accountable to women after the birth.
And of course, there were some women who were also supportive.
But of course, most of the women in that thread were absolutely terrified at the prospect that men might have some element of control over their reproduction.
And that's because it's just one epic power play.
So going back to the male pill, that's why it's going to be such a game changer.
Because guys, once you start taking that, you can have so much consequences.
It's free sex, apart from STIs, which is still a consequence.
But STIs aren't going to cost you, you know, half a million dollars in child support for 20 years.
Well, I mean, this is why they say empowerment, not responsibility.
We want to be empowered, which means we want access to male resources through the power of the state without having to provide services in return.
That's empowerment, just means I want free stuff.
And then when you say, well, would you like some responsibility?
It's like, no. No, why?
And this is the thing, too, is that it's making women worse on the whole.
Power, you know, we all have this thing which we learn with any decent education pretty young, right, Peter, which is, you know, power corrupts and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.
We all understand that power corrupts.
Now, women, because they live longer, because they vote more, because of the natural chivalry of the Western condition, because we have to woo women, we have to defer women, we have to please women because we don't have a patriarchy of arranged marriages and subjugation of women as there are in other cultures – So the basic reality is that women have a lot of power naturally.
And when you combine women's power because of Western male deference as a whole with the power of compulsion that they have through the state by being more committed, more consistent voters, a woman who's pregnant is more committed to political solutions to providing resources to her children than a man is to protect abstract property rights that don't seem to have quite as much of a vivid and immediate impact on his life.
Man loses his job, you know, you go couch surf for a little while, you can kind of get along.
But if a woman, you've got a baby, you've got to provide resources to that kid or that kid's going to die.
So they're much more motivated to gain access to this kind of power if they've made bad decisions.
And so I think the problem is that female nature...
It has been corrupted to some degree – and this is an aggregate statement.
I think it holds true simply because power corrupts and women as voters in control of governments that have the power to create and transfer trillions of dollars to women, well, that power has corrupted them.
And sure, you might find people in some totalitarian regime who have power who are relatively nice and trying to use it for good, but they won't be the norm.
And the amount of power that women have been handed in this democratic vote for what you want redistribution estate apparatus has corrupted female nature to the point where negative judgments about women have growing empirical evidence.
It's not because women suddenly became mean.
It's just because power corrupts and they have way, way too much.
Yeah.
I mean, it's the inverse of what we are told.
Women are so hugely powerful, not just biologically in terms of the interaction between men and women.
I mean, if you think about it, women are the gatekeepers to when men have sex.
That's why men woo women and take them out on dates and pay for dinner.
Because women are the gatekeepers to sex.
So they have a kind of biological advantage in that respect.
Men may be physically stronger, but when it comes to sex...
But that's to protect women, not to violate them.
No, exactly. But if you combine it with the power in the state, which is what you're saying, it's just...
It's epic. It's like a juggernaut.
It's so powerful.
And the irony is that a lot of these women still genuinely think that they are an oppressed underclass.
But that's their power.
That's their power. The pretense of weakness is women's strength, just as the pretense of strength is men's weakness.
I think Warren Farrell said that.
Yeah, and that's why we see endlessly the supply of so-called studies, and I say studies in inverted commas.
I mean, there was one that was released by Reuters, Thomson Reuters recently, that said something like America was in the top 10 of the worst countries in the world for women to live in.
The third most dangerous, I think it was.
Yeah, I think it was in the top five.
I mean, what a staggering...
A bit of agitprop.
I mean, that is absolutely staggering that people, A, would publish it, and second, that people would even believe it.
But of course, it's very convenient to play the victim when you're a woman.
And of course, before long, it went viral.
Rose McGowan was tweeting about it.
And, you know, there are women in America who genuinely now believe that they are victims.
And I think that's what's really sad about some of this is that, you know, not only is it destructive to men and, you know, and boys, but also to young women who are, you know, endowed with the possibility of living a wonderful, full, rich, accomplished life.
And actually, from the offset, they're being told that they're victims and that they should be angry and that they Somehow are, you know, are living a kind of quarter life of men and you think that's just not true and you're doing young women as well as young men a huge disservice when you're not operating on the truth.
It is genuinely stripping both men and women of love which is one of the greatest gifts in the universe because if you're told that you're being oppressed, if you're told that There's this horrible patriarchy that wakes up every morning, you know, jousts penis swords together and figures out how best to cut off future opportunities for women.
Well, that's a pretty horrible place to be.
And this stripping of love, you've got this great – I love suffragette, by the way.
I think that's genius. And I was – you definitely got a significant pang of envy from me for quoting that phrase.
And you have two others that you mentioned in the book.
Gal Qaeda. And shihadists, which I thought was pretty good.
And this unhappiness is showing up.
What is it? Like significant proportions of American women of middle age are on antidepressants.
Women's unhappiness has gone up and up and up as this narrative has taken hold because the basic facts are pretty clear.
The safest place for a woman is in a committed long-term relationship.
The safest place for women is on college campuses.
And they've been told that women enter into some sort of torture chamber when they get married and that women are most at risk on college campuses and so on.
And none of it is statistically true.
And then, of course, they also say that there's this mythical wage gap, which is explained by women's choices, not by men's oppression.
And the whole wage gap thing is ridiculous too.
And it shows how... The feminists just aren't particularly good at math.
Because if there are people who are underpaid, then the first thing you should do is hire a company and pay them slightly more if they're equally productive and go make a killing on the market.
But the fact is that they complain about it rather than exploiting it means that even they don't believe it in particular.
So I want to get to the activism stuff, but I did want to do a quick stop on...
Men's health. Men's health is really, really fascinating because in my experience and in the experience of men that I've talked to, the women, like here in Canada, the women that I've talked to are like, oh, the healthcare system is great and it does all this and you get referrals quickly and everything goes swimmingly and so on.
But the men that I've talked to are like, oh, I hate going to doctors.
I just get handed a bunch of pills and told to go on my way.
Nobody ever listens and I never get referrals.
And I had to have a referral once.
They said it was going to be 14 months.
14 months! By that time, I'm either better or dead.
You might be dead by then.
Either way, the problem is solved.
And men, knowing how bad, particularly socialized healthcare is for men, it's really, really important to take steps to protect your own health as a man.
Yeah, and if you look at the data, men lead in nine of the top ten killer diseases.
And despite this fact, funding for all of those diseases is absolutely gendered.
More funding goes into preventative care for women and treatment for women, even around areas like heart disease, than there is reserved for men.
And this is in the face of the fact that more men are dying of these diseases than women.
And at a much younger age, there is a huge life expectancy gap, and that's increased something ridiculous like 90% in 200 years or something.
There is an accurate statistic in the book.
But the situation, it hasn't even plateaued.
It's getting worse.
Men are dying at a rapid rate in comparison to women.
And then when you factor in the kind of mental health aspect and that men are killing themselves, you have to ask, look, what are these driving forces behind it and why isn't it being fixed?
And it's because, of course, the focus is always on women.
And when you also consider that now medicine is largely a female field, most doctors are women, certainly most young doctors are women.
Most students at university who are studying medicine are female.
And of course, when GP surgeries open up and doctor surgeries are seeing patients, most of the literature in there is designed for women.
Most of the people on the reception desk are female.
Most of the nurses in there are women.
So it's not even an inviting environment for men.
If you combine that with the fact that governments aren't spending equal amounts or necessary amounts of money to save men and intervene because they're scared it might be deemed sexist, Then, you know, it's almost like the government and society is complicit in men's early deaths.
It's really terrifying. And so men have to absolutely kind of take ownership of it for themselves because the government, the health system, it's not going to do it for them, unfortunately.
Well, as you point out, men retire later than women and die earlier.
And that is horrendous.
And of course, it's male taxes who are paying for most of this stuff.
And men are not being served by it.
And part of me thinks, and this is – I'm sort of two minds about this, Peter.
Let me know what you think.
So part of me thinks, but – Women have husbands and they have fathers and they have sons.
And so isn't that a factor in how they vote and how they think and how they consume media?
I mean, they don't want their fathers to die early, do they?
They don't want their husbands to die early.
They don't want their sons to be denied educational opportunities and hiring opportunities because of affirmative action for women.
Like where is the fabled love and connection and empathy and care of women for the men in their lives?
And so part of me says, okay, well, maybe it's still to come or maybe they're just not aware of it.
But another part of me thinks, I wonder.
I wonder.
Because throughout history, women had to be prepared for men to die in battle.
They had to be prepared for men to die while hunting or through industrial accidents or who knows what.
So I wonder how strong some of this bond is because if the bond were as strong, if you look at the bond that men have to women and how much they give to women, it's astonishing.
If you look at the supposed bond that women have towards men, I gotta tell you, Peter, like taking the ideology and just looking at it empirically, I don't really see it that much.
I don't really see it very strongly at all.
Yeah, it's an interesting point.
It is an interesting point. Perhaps it's because that issue of male health is so understated in the public narrative that it doesn't quite register with women when they go to the ballot box.
Maybe that's a factor to it.
But I think there's almost just...
And acceptance that men are biologically determined to die sooner.
I think a lot of women genuinely believe, oh, that's just nature.
You know, women just live longer.
We're just biologically designed to live longer.
And it's like, no, darling, the reason you're living longer is because you have millions more pounds pumped into your health system and, you know, initiatives to save you.
And, you know, there are hospital programs that are designed to intercept cancer in its earlier stages for you, and they're not available to men.
So, it's a very stark reality.
But I do, I mean, my goodness, people listening to this must think, this is the most dour, depressing book.
I'm never going to read this.
But it's actually quite funny.
And I try and make light of it because there is some humor in the tumor, as I say.
It is. It's one of the wittiest books I've read in a long time.
I really, really wanted to commend you on that.
And I actually was making notes while I was reading the book, Peter, thinking, yeah, I should really do a little bit more of this kind of stuff.
Because I have a pretty good sense of humor, but it is very funny.
And it is very engaging from that standpoint.
And I really want to remind people of that.
I mean, this is essential information.
And boy, talk about the sugar of humor that tells the jagged little pill go down easy.
So let's talk about...
The to-dos. Because, you know, we're guys...
You know, it's funny. I'm such a guy, Peter, that when you were like, men are number one in fatalities, I'm like, woohoo!
Oh, wait. No, no, that's bad.
That's bad. Wait, hang on.
No, that's not good. But let's start talking about the to-dos.
Because, you know, the brief burning, the tidy whities up in flames doesn't really seem to be very appealing to most men.
But there are things that can be done that are going to be enjoyable.
And I think community is very important.
I think talking about things...
Is very important.
Breaking out of the mold of, you know, silent oxen pushing the cart of society forward.
What are the things that you would suggest men get involved in?
In this, you know, this could be a new kind of battle.
And men kind of love that stuff.
And it can be really enjoyable and engaging.
And it sure as hell is better than suffering in silence.
I suppose the primary thing I would urge men to do is to kind of vocally and publicly have confidence in criticizing feminism.
If one thing I accomplished from doing this book was to prove that You can criticize and critique feminism without being a misogynist, then I've done my job and I can retire.
Because that is primarily what I wanted to do.
Critiquing feminism is not being misogynistic.
It's not hating women. There are lots of men out there who identify as feminists.
Feminism, like any other ism, is a political ideology.
It's like socialism or Marxism.
And it's a set of ideas.
It's like a filter you view the world through.
And it's absolutely okay.
In fact, it's your duty as a sentient being in the world to question these things and to pull out the kind of ethical and political inconsistencies and say, well, hang on, look, this just doesn't work for me.
I mean, if two men were sat around I'm not going to be disrespectful to women.
I'm not going to be rude or swear or anything.
But I am going to call out this political mindset and I'm going to say, I'm sorry, the wage gap isn't real.
You're wrong. Or, you know, you're going to call out something else and have confidence in doing that.
That's the first step. And having pride in it.
I remember when I first started doing this, I thought, oh my goodness, am I going to lose friends over it?
Are people going to judge me differently?
And a lot of men out there thinking, oh my god, is this going to limit the amount of vagina I'll get access to?
This is terrifying. I'm not going to do that.
I want to maximize- Don't throw sand in the conveyor belt of vagina.
Oh, no. Yeah, look, I want as much vagina as possible.
I don't want to minimize it. It's hard enough getting it.
I don't want to minimize my chances of getting more vagina by speaking up about men's rights.
You think, look, right. But if that's the kind of vagina you get from being quiet, it's not the kind of vagina you want.
Yeah, you don't want the vagina with shark teeth attached to lawyers and state power.
That your vagina dentata is definitely not the way to go.
You want to go in and also be able to get out as well.
Absolutely. And so that is really the primary thing that I would say to men is that you can absolutely – you have my permission and I am living proof that you can do this.
You can be critical of feminism and the modern women's movement, which is not credible really in the West.
No, it's bad for women.
Like I have a daughter.
I want her to grow up not being told she's a victim.
I want her to grow up with the capacity to see the good and the bad in the world.
And I don't, I view this, it's like a form of devilry.
It's like that horrible animated mother in Pink Floyd's The Wall movie, you know, like it's this whispering seductive tales of Iago style oppression into your ear is a great way to poison drip you into a modern horror of barrenness and resentment and rage and frustration and eventually despair. like it's this whispering seductive tales of Iago style oppression You know, we want to be able to love each other.
We want to look at the good and bad in male and female nature and encourage all of us to sort of mount those thorny steps to a higher plane of being and a better way of living.
And this victimhood mentality – I mean, they basically shifted from class in Marxism to gender and race in modern – We just have to push back against it.
It's just another one of these asshole evils that's infesting the world that needs to be pushed back against with the sunlight of reason and evidence.
It's for the good, even if the people who fall prey to these illusions, you know, we wouldn't walk past a lake where somebody was drowning and be indifferent to it, would it?
And when people are drowning in bad ideas, yeah, I think we want to wade in and give them a hand.
Sure, they may fight us, but who cares?
I mean, we have to do what's right even if we're despised.
That's how we got a civilization and that's the only damn way we're going to keep it.
Right, absolutely. And there are two other probably core things that I would advise men to do, and that is to kind of not give your power away easily.
Men are at the height of their power when they are single and childless.
And look, if you want to get married and have children, wonderful, go for it.
But don't let somebody else take that power from you.
Give it away voluntarily when it's right for you, but you have to guard it because other people want to take it.
And so you have to first do that.
You have to not give your power away involuntarily.
And there are people out there who will take it.
So don't get somebody pregnant unless you absolutely want to have children with them.
Don't agree to marry someone unless you're absolutely certain that you want to do it and that you're willing to take the potential risks that come with that and the losses.
That's important. And then the secondary element to that, which is the third point, is we've got to start teaching and inspiring boys to do the same thing.
And a core element of that is to ditch chivalry.
We've got to start teaching young men to stop being chivalrous.
It's the little things like paying for dinner on a date.
You don't have to take some woman you don't know to some expensive restaurant and buy a wonderful meal and a fantastic bottle of expensive French red wine.
You don't have to do that.
Why on earth should you bankroll that?
Take her for a coffee. Take her for a coffee and be generous.
That way it'll cost you $5.
The gesture is there, but you're not looking like a desperate idiot and you're not giving away your money and your power.
We have to stop teaching boys to be chivalrous because chivalry is It's almost like the umbilical cord to being manipulated by women.
And so I always encourage men, don't be chivalrous and don't teach young men to be chivalrous.
That's really important. Even when I get on the tube in London on the underground, I have this little thing in my brain where I say, okay, I will offer you a seat if you're a pensioner or if you're pregnant or if you're disabled or whatever, then I will give you a seat.
But I am not going to give a woman who is my age Or a woman who's younger than me, a seat because she's a woman.
And I've refused to do it before.
I've had young women who said, oh, you know, there's been one seat left in the carriage and we've both gone to it at separate times at rush hour.
And I've got there slightly before her.
And the look of expectation on her face said, I have a vagina.
You should give me that seat.
And I say, sorry, I got here first.
And if you don't like it, that's the penalty of equality.
You don't have to be rude about it.
Stop deferring to women as some kind of, you know, superior beings who deserve this kind of treatment.
They don't deserve it. And it's a two-way thing.
They should be treating men with the same kind of regard.
And reverence that we're expected to give them.
And so pull back on the chivalry, guys.
It's not good for you.
Well, there's nothing more expensive than trying to buy a vagina with a plate of pasta.
Boy, will that ever turn out to bite you up.
The car-based prostitution is not the way you want to go.
And when I met my wife, she was like, yeah, you take me out.
It's great. I'll take you out next time and I'll pay the bills.
And you want that kind of woman who's got that independence and that pride.
I mean, a woman with self-esteem and pride is not going to want to be bought.
With a glass of wine, that's terrible.
You know, what a horrible thing to get into.
And you can also, of course, try this thing where you say, I don't want an expensive wedding and I sure as hell don't want to fall into marketing ploys and buy you a diamond ring because de Boer's monopoly tells me to.
And if the woman is like, no, you must buy me with the rocks from the center of the earth, it's like, well, that's kind of materialistic at your expense.
That may be a bit of a foreshadow that you want to keep an eye on.
Yeah, alarm bells.
That sound you hear in the background is alarm bells ringing, gentlemen.
You should take notice of that.
That's your brain telling you to beware.
Right. So, first of all, I want to thank you for your time today.
Really enjoyable conversation.
And I do want to point out the book is great.
The book is Stand By Your Manhood, a survival guide for the modern man.
You can get it and download it right now as we speak.
You know what?
I'm just going to wait here for a moment.
We'll play some rock, paper, scissors while people do that.
Go get it.
You can follow Peter's great Twitter account at twitter.com forward slash suffra gentleman.
That's S-U-F-F-R-A-G-E-N-T-L-E-M-A-N.
Suffra gentleman.
Great Twitter feed.
The book is fantastic.
Get the ideas into your head.
Get them out into society.
It's time for men to have a voice.
We have suffered and shouldered the burdens of societal decay long enough.
It's needed. Women need us to do it and we shouldn't do it because women need to do it, but it is a side benefit.
This comes not out of hostility to femininity, but the natural pushback against unjust power that characterizes the progress of Thank you so much for your time.
I hope we can do this again.
And just in case people didn't get the message, buy the book!
Yes, buy it now. Thank you for having me on the show.
It's great. If you're ever in London, I'll buy you a pint of London ale.
All right. I will then put out. Thanks very much, Peter.
