March 1, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:50
4309 "What my dissident dad taught me about privilege" - Freedomain Article Rebuttal
https://www.macleans.ca/society/what-my-dissident-dad-taught-me-about-privilege/"What my dissident dad taught me about privilegeA young woman and her father clash over what it means to fight the powers that be—and correct injustice "As a woman, I became especially attuned to the ways in which females were portrayed as lesser because of their roles in the home. How were women supposed to climb the corporate ladder, or any ladder, if they were so busy doing the taxing, often thankless, work of looking after the family? And why did we have to climb ladders in order to prove our worth? I’m embarrassed to say it took me so long to come to these epiphanies; I cringe now to think of the ways I reprimanded, even mocked, my mother for complaining of being tired as a stay-at-home mom, for having the gall to say that she worked as hard, if not harder, than my father at times, which, of course, she did.Everything was illuminated for me during that time of un-learning, and on trips home I began to pick up on things I hadn’t noticed before. The way my father waited for dinner to be served, for example. Or how rarely he did his own laundry. Little things like crossing the street without looking, or butting lines in traffic, irritated me. What I once saw as a willful disobedience, a sticking it to The Man, now seemed a display of privilege; he didn’t have to worry about following the rules because he, a well-to-do white man, had never had to worry about them. I became sharp and contrarian in response to just about anything he said. We got into deadlocks often in our conversations, both refusing to acquiesce to the other person’s point on view. He thought I was being too sensitive. I thought he was being too flippant.We were usually able to find common ground sooner or later. When the Black Lives Matter campaign swept the world and my dad informed me that he, like so many of his kind, believed all lives matter, we had a discussion that could be described at the very least as heated. “We know that white lives matter,” I said to him. “What we don’t know is that Black Lives Matter. If you want all lives to matter, then we need to support black lives first.” It was the same line of logic I used when he bucked against the term feminism. “I’d be happy to use the term humanism when woman are equal to men,” I told him over dinner. After both conversations, he apologized to me the next day, saying he thought about it and decided I might be right after all.Which is why when I showed him my “Smash the Patriarchy” plate in my apartment in Vancouver some months later, I thought he might get a kick out of my millennial version of idealism. After all, this is the man who taught me to rail against hegemony, to step outside the flow of normalcy. This was the man whose final thesis in school was that all history was a story.▶️ Donate Now: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterYour 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▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms🔴 Bitchute: http://bitchute.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Minds: http://minds.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Steemit: http://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux🔴 Gab: http://gab.ai/stefanmolyneux🔴 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Facebook: http://facebook.com/stefan.molyneux🔴 Instagram: http://instagram.com/stefanmolyneux
A young woman and her father clash over what it means to fight the powers that be and correct injustice.
And here they have, in the print version, they say how a young woman went to college and found her voice.
I don't know what that means.
It doesn't mean knowing facts, having good arguments.
She just found her voice.
So she starts off by saying, let me begin by saying my father is an exceptionally kind person.
The examples are he let the kids walk their muddy feet up the front of his starched white shirt while they held onto his thumbs.
Recent hiking trip in Scotland, he waited for the most elderly couple on the trip to safely make it around each bend, feigning exhaustion himself.
I don't know if that's kind or not, but anyway.
Her father was born in 1955 and held Ho Chi Minh, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell as icons.
Ho Chi Minh, of course, a communist who helped sort of found the dictatorship that slaughtered tens of millions of people in China, so that's not good.
Of course, she doesn't know anything about that because she's gone to college.
He wore his hair long until his late 20s, smoked enough weed for the both of us, and believed wholeheartedly in taxes, free speech, and the futility of the Vietnam War.
The reason why the left was against the Vietnam War was that the Vietnam War was being fought against communists, which they loved, which is why they opposed it.
So he hitchhiked, blah, blah, blah.
So he moved from downtown Toronto to a more cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood.
Oh, the dislike that leftists have for suburbia is so boring, so predictable.
It's like waiting for them to denounce Leave it to Beaver.
So yeah, he became senior partner at an esteemed architecture firm, a corporate title he tried to shake off by wearing Hawaiian shorts, shirts, sorry, Hawaiian shirts to work.
So, senior partner at an esteemed architectural firm, well that is a lot of work.
That is complicated stuff.
And it's a running family joke that my father inhales his food rather than eating it.
So, we've got a guy who starts as a hippie, loves communists, ends up as a senior partner at an esteemed architectural firm, which is kind of not what he wanted.
If he was a drug-smoking hippie-dippie, then he wanted something more rebellious, but he had responsibilities to family and so on, right?
So, it's a running family joke.
My father inhales his food.
He was the youngest of a Dutch immigrant family with five kids, and often there wasn't quite enough food on the table to satiate the growing children's stomachs.
When he was eight, his father, so this girl's grandfather, was committed to an asylum for paranoid schizophrenia, leaving the grandmother, his mother, to care for her five children on meager savings.
One had to eat fast if they wanted any chance of seconds.
So you understand, this is just cold-hearted stuff.
The father went through a very, very difficult childhood.
By the time the father is committed to an asylum, I know a little bit about this, by the time the father is committed to an asylum, there have been years of incredibly dangerous, messed up, dysfunctional, insane, crazy, terrifying behavior.
So this is a very, very tough upbringing.
So by this point, Her father, right?
This is the girl's father, working his first paper route.
See?
By the age of eight!
Working his first paper route.
By the time he was seventeen he spent summers driving heavy duty machinery on the Dempster Highway alongside his two older brothers because the money was good and easy to save.
And expand to think of my dad as the type of person who leans in when you're talking.
Who asks follow-up questions and follow-up questions to those questions!
You see, so...
She's very, very keen, you see, if you don't understand someone's perspective.
Her father taught her that what you do, you see, is you ask questions, right?
You try and really understand the other person's point of view, blah, blah, blah.
All right.
It's a tale as old as time that children leave the parents who raised them, fed them, read to them, taught them how to clean the boogers from their nose, only to come home with new eyes and criticize the hell out of them.
I flew the coop when I was 18 to study general arts at the University of British Columbia.
I guess every country has their California, except China perhaps, and Sub-Saharan Africa, but Canada's California is B.C., right?
Leftist, socialist, downright communist, and University of British Columbia, very lefty, very commie.
So she took English mostly, sprinkled with some Spanish psychology and philosophy courses.
Quick question.
Do you think this woman, who's taking completely useless stuff in higher education, is ever going to complain about the wage gap and have no idea how the wage gap comes to be?
Hmm.
I'm gonna go with yes on that, Dan.
Alright, um... I can't say when it was in particular, whether the classes, being far away from home, but somewhere along the way, the veneer of social pretense has peeled back until I was able to peek at the workings underneath.
So she involved, or imbibed, or got hold of nothing particularly conscious, nothing particularly reasoned, but she inhaled a kind of ferocious resentment.
It became more and more evident that the hierarchies I took to be inherent were actually finally constructed to keep those who were in power at the top.
The idea of a meritocracy, wherein people actually get what they deserve based on work ethic alone, an ideal of my father, seemed nothing more than a pipe dream.
Now that's a fair point.
Of course, the idea that you're just going to get what you deserve based on work ethic alone is false.
You know, you can practice singing all your life, but if you don't have a good voice to begin with, you're just not going to be a singer.
I can comb my hair repeatedly, I'm never going to be a hair model, except perhaps as the before photo.
And so if you don't have high IQ, working hard will definitely have you keep your job, and you mean lots of fine jobs you can have, fine lives you can have.
But if you don't have a reasonably high IQ, and her father is probably 130 plus based upon his professional, Success?
Then, yeah, you're not going to get what you deserve based on work ethic alone.
Now, if you have high IQ and you work hard, you're probably going to do pretty well, but yeah, that's fair.
As a woman, oh no, dun-dun-dun!
As a woman, I became especially attuned to the ways in which females were portrayed as lesser because of their roles in the home.
How many women?
How were women supposed to climb the corporate ladder or any ladder if they were so busy doing the taxing, often thankless work of looking after the family?
Hmm.
Now that's interesting because in my experience, and I don't think I'm alone in this, I don't think there have been any studies, women get thanked a lot more than men.
And I remember having this conflict with a woman years ago when I was living with her, where she would say, well, you've got to thank me for, you know, the work I'm doing at the home.
I'm like, I absolutely will.
You've got to thank me for going to work and bringing home the money.
She didn't like doing that at all, right?
It had to be a one-way thing.
So women often get thanked, and has she thanked her dad for developing a strong work ethic for starting work when he was eight years old?
No, she hasn't thanked him at all for that, right?
Yeah.
Taxing thankless work is looking after the family.
No.
It's kind of why you're alive, so got to be some value in it.
And the other thing too is that, I mean, I don't know what passes for a big revelation in the female mind.
I'm afraid to kind of probe that particular hole with no bottom, but the idea that you can't be in two places at once, it's not particularly revelatory.
It's not a massive insight, is it, to say, Huh, that's very interesting.
Do you know I can't actually be at home taking care of children and at work working at the same time?
Anyway, and why did we have to climb ladders in order to prove our worth?
I don't know what that means.
I'm embarrassed to say how long it took me so long to come to these epiphanies.
Well, maybe you should be, but... Epiphanies.
You can't be in two places at once.
I'm pretty sure most of us have that epiphany about the age of three, when we realize we can't both be playing video games and going to the washroom at the same time.
At least, I hope not.
She says, I cringe now to think of the ways I reprimanded, even mocked my mother for complaining of being tired as a stay-at-home mom.
For having the gall to say that she worked as hard, if not harder, than my father at times.
Which, of course, she did.
So, she's saying that her father generally works harder than her mother, right?
Because her mother works as hard, if not harder, at times, right?
So, in general, the dad's working a lot.
There's a picture of the dad, and so on.
All right.
Everything was illuminated for me during the time of unlearning, and on trips home, I began to pick up on things I hadn't noticed before.
The way my father waited for dinner to be served, for example.
Or how rarely he did his own laundry.
The brute!
How is it possible for him to wait for dinner to be served after he's been working all day?
I'm sorry, this is strange to me.
It's strange to me.
He waited for dinner to be served.
Now, also, I mean, having two people in the kitchen is not always that great, particularly when you've got a bunch of pots on the boil.
It doesn't really help.
And I regularly get shooed out of the kitchen when something big is going on.
So he waited for dinner to be served.
Oh, how rarely he did his own laundry.
Oh, God forbid he really did his own laundry.
Well, first of all, laundry is actually kind of a complicated thing.
You know, each laundry machine has its own little idiosyncrasies, knowing the bleach, knowing the temperature, knowing what goes with what, knowing what fabric softness to use, whether you scent it or unscent it, depending on blah, blah, blah.
It's not actually that simple, and it's a big, complicated conveyor belt to get.
Your laundry done on a productive and positive basis, and having two people do the laundry is usually not particularly helpful.
So, this is kind of funny, right?
So what she's saying is, you know, it's terrible.
It's terrible.
You see that my father went to work, and then when he got home, he didn't do housework as well.
At least not much, right?
He did dishes, I guess.
Sorry, he did laundry sometimes.
He rarely did his own laundry.
But here's the thing.
Does she ever say, I can't believe that my mother did not go in to my dad's work and help him type up his emails.
I can't believe my mom didn't go into my dad's work and help him negotiate with clients.
I can't believe that my mom didn't go into my dad's work and help him equally as he was working.
It's like, no, that's his job, right?
And the mom's job is, in this case, one of the aspects of being a homemaker is cooking and laundry and some other things as well.
So the idea that the dad comes home and does the wife's job is kind of as crazy as being angry or upset with your mom for not going in to do the dad's job from time to time on a regular basis.
Like, I don't know, it's kind of weird.
It's kind of weird.
Like, it's again, back to this relationship I had many years ago where she's like, well, you got to do half the dishes.
And I'm like, not if I'm paying all the bills.
Well, no, no, no, no, no, not at all, right?
And then she says, little things like crossing the street without looking or butting lines in traffic irritated me.
He crossed the street without looking?
He butted lines in traffic?
So this woman obviously benefited enormously from the material success.
That her father was able to provide the family.
And this is very, very typical of certain kinds of female thinking, which is, I want a guy who's very aggressive in business.
I want a guy who's really assertive in business and who fights to get to the top in business because that gives me a lot of resources.
But I don't want him butting lines in traffic.
I don't want him being assertive in traffic.
It's like, you gotta pick one.
If you want an assertive alpha type guy, You're going to get that kind of assertive, sometimes pushy behavior.
And if you don't want a guy like that, then you have to give up a lot of money because that's a lot of ways in which people like... So this guy became a top at a prestigious architectural firm, but lots of people wanted that job and he had to outmaneuver, out-compete, out-political them, out-work them, out-focus them and so on, out-travel them probably as well.
And so, yeah, he's got to be pushy.
And then the women are like, wow, it's really great that you get all this money by being pushy.
It's like, hey, you're butting into traffic.
That's really annoying.
I'm sorry, it's so ridiculous, right?
So now he says, what I once saw as a willful disobedience, sticking it to the man now seemed to display a privilege.
He didn't have to worry about following the rules because he, here we go, a well-to-do white man, had never had to worry about them.
And this is the insanity being foisted on innocent and, I think, a little vacant young men and women in what's laughingly referred to, or will be in the future if we have one, higher education.
See, her father never had to worry about the rules.
Never!
Never had to worry about earning money to pay bills.
Never had to worry about paying his taxes.
Never had to worry about controlling his temper.
Never had to worry about subjugating his own personal desires so that he could give up on his hippie dreams and go become a yuppie at an architectural company.
He never ever had to worry about the rules!
Never!
I don't know what it is about this ideology that comes between a dad and a daughter.
A mom and a son.
It's just strange to me.
Like, where do you get off saying, well, my father never had to worry, never had to obey the law, he didn't have to obey gravity.
It's just kind of weird.
So she says, I became sharp and contrarian in response to just about everything he said.
We got into deadlocks often in our conversation, both Refusing to acquiesce to the other person's point of view.
He thought I was being too sensitive.
I thought he was being too flippant.
The word flippant is not an argument.
So they talk about Black Lives Matter campaign and of course the dad is like, well, all lives matter.
And she said, well, we know that white lives matter.
What we don't know is that black lives matter.
If you want all lives to matter, then we need to support black lives first.
I mean, black lives don't matter.
I mean, the majority of welfare spending per capita goes to blacks.
In America, in particular, which is where Black Lives Matter started, based upon the lie of Mike Brown, the defenseless giant who was shot down execution style while saying, hands up, don't shoot, when he was in fact shot.
After he stole stuff, was walking down the middle of the street, attacked a cop in his car, grabbed his gun, the gun discharged, and then he charged the cop.
All six foot infinity of him, and he was shot in the front for attacking a cop.
So the whole thing started on a lie.
But in America, the government spends more per capita on black children than white children.
In fact, more per capita on black children than any other kinds of children.
So this idea that nobody cares about black lives and so on, I mean, in general, statistically, the people who don't care about black lives are blacks because they shoot each other a lot the vast majority of the time.
And it was the same thing with feminism, right?
So you got the sexism-feminism thing, right?
So it was the same logic, same line of logic, she said, I used when he bucked up against the term feminism.
Quote, she says, I'd be happy to use the term humanism when women are equal to men.
I told him over dinner.
What does it mean to be women are equal?
Women are not equal to men.
Men are not equal to women.
Dissimilar doesn't mean unequal.
But what does it mean to say?
I mean women have 40% less upper body strength.
They have half the lower body strength.
They're shorter.
They live longer.
And they tend to be at the highest levels of intelligence.
There are far more men Then women.
So these are just basic facts.
Women get pregnant.
Women give birth.
Women, if you want to be a really, really good mom, then you breastfeed your kids.
So, you know, childbirth from conception through to when you stop breastfeeding is, you know, two to three years, depending on how long you want to go for.
So, yeah, these are just basic realities.
Women enjoy working more with people, and men enjoy working more with things, objects, abstracts, and in a highly abstract economy, Or where economic value is the greatest, where the abstractions are the greatest, yet you end up with a lot of men making a lot of money.
And I don't know, this is not... The more free women get, the more they choose to work with people rather than things.
So this idea that women are equal to men, what does that mean?
I mean, look at this woman's father and mother, right?
So the guy, let's say the dad started working, well, he started working at the age of 8, right?
Let's say he retires at 68.
Okay, so guess what?
He just worked for 60 years.
You know what the mom doesn't have to do?
Raise children for 60 years.
The really intensive part of child raising is, you know, 0 to 5 kind of thing.
Or 1 to 5.
0 to 5.
You know, 6, generally kids go to school and things kind of ease up a little bit.
And then, you know, when they get into their early teens, they're over at friends' places a lot.
They're socializing a lot.
They're out a lot.
They're at the mall or movies or whatever.
And so if you have two or three kids, you know, you may be talking ten years of really intensive labor, which means that the equivalent would be he starts working at eight and ends at eighteen, or he starts working at twenty-five and ends at thirty-five, and that's really his major work, but that's not the way it works.
Women, when they're mothers, focus on raising children for ten years or so, the most intensive part, and then they're kind of in semi-retirement.
The dads, on the other hand, well, they just got to keep working decade after decade after decade after decade.
So, not a lot of equality there when you think about it.
And, you know, the general statistics.
Men live less long than women.
Ninety percent of the workplace deaths are men.
Men commit suicide a lot more and lots of other ways in which men get the short end of the stick.
But, anyway, so, this is the big crisis that they had, right?
So she says, which is why when I showed him my smash the patriarchy plate in my apartment in Vancouver some months later, I thought he might get a kick out of my millennial version of idealism.
After all, this is the man who taught me to rail against hegemony, to step outside the flow of normalcy.
This was the man whose final thesis in school was that all history was a story.
So, I thought he just might get a kick out of my immature idealism.
It's not really serious.
Right?
But my father only looked blankly at the plate and said the patriarchy is just a rule in the way the world works like a stop sign.
Now, I don't know what he actually said.
I don't it doesn't I don't know what this really means to be honest.
I don't know what this really means at all.
The patriarchy is just a rule in the way the world works like a stop sign.
Now, she earlier praises her father for asking questions and really getting to know what's going on and really understanding things.
She just loves the way he pursues.
Does she do that?
Does she say, well, Dad, I don't know what you mean.
What does it mean, right?
No, because now you see she's been programmed that anyone who questions or opposes her point of view is a nasty, evil, entitled, cisgender, probably white, patriarch, and therefore it's the worst thing in the known universe to disagree with her.
So what happens?
This is a woman who I guess feels that she's competent in the realm of ideas.
Now when I was a teenager, and of course this happened long after I was a teenager, I would get into very, very Loud and sometimes obnoxious debates with my friends.
You know, we debate abortion, we debate the death penalty and taxation and foreign policy.
And I remember having a very loud and raucous debate about colonialism when I was about 16.
And the idea that we'd get hysterical and run away screaming and sobbing into a pillow would just be incomprehensible.
You fight for what you believe in and maybe you'll win, maybe you'll lose, but either way you're going to win because you get better thinking, better arguing, better debating.
So, her father says the patriarchy is just a rule in the way the world works, like a stop sign.
Now, he could be saying, well, you can change that rule, right?
You can change a stop sign, you can get a stop sign removed.
I think there was somewhere in one of the Scandinavian countries, they did a show on this years ago, they got rid of all the traffic signs and road signs and so on, and traffic accidents and problems and congestion went down enormously.
So what is he saying?
I don't know what he's saying!
Because she didn't ask any questions!
Not one!
She said, I don't think I knew what disappointment, true disappointment felt like.
Until that moment, it felt like 100 jellyfish stings.
It felt like someone pushed me over and then told me I'd asked for it.
It felt terrible.
My body reacted before my mouth could.
Heat, sorry.
My body reacted before my mouth could.
Heat was already climbing my face.
My hands shook.
A stop sign, I asked.
Yes, he nodded.
Okay, so this is just hysteria.
And this is every cliche that people have about women and debates and arguments and being disagreed with.
Literally shaking is like the joke, right?
So the father says something somewhat ambiguous.
It could be that he actually agrees with her.
I don't know because she didn't ask any questions.
She encountered someone who did not instantly agree with the programming she had received, and she reacted in full-on, rampant hysteria.
Right?
Heat was climbing my face, my hands shook!
It felt terrible!
100 jellyfish stings!
Not just one, not 50, not 99, not 101, 100 jellyfish stings!
But this is somebody who's not, there's no business in the realm of ideas.
This is like a doctor who faints at the sight of blood.
Or a surgeon, I guess, who faints at the sight of blood.
Like, if someone doesn't immediately agree with you, And you feel like you've fallen off a cliff and somebody pushed you and you've got a hundred jellyfish stings and your hands are shaking and your face is exploding.
I mean, it's not for you.
The realm of ideas is not for you.
At all.
Because I don't even know what the man meant.
I doubt she does either, but it was not instant agreement.
This also shows you that in her education, which is not education, but sheer leftist indoctrination, she'd never been exposed to counter-arguments.
It's this is the truth, this is the reality, these are the facts, and anybody who disagrees with you is evil.
Well, that's a cult, you understand.
That is not education.
That's a cult.
A stop sign, I asked.
Yes, he nodded.
You think the patriarchy works like a stop sign?
He nodded again, but perhaps seeing the changes in my demeanor, more hesitantly this time.
So, does she ask him what he means?
Does she ask him to explain his perspective?
I mean, he's a man.
Shouldn't he know something about them?
Patriarchy?
Is she gonna mansplain the patriarchy to him?
Anyway.
Oh, chicksplain, I guess.
Femmesplain?
I don't know what to call it.
The fact that there isn't word for it tells... speaks volumes!
So then, you get the, um... kind of an emotional terrorism thing here, right?
So then she says, Have you ever walked with keys between your knuckles at night?
Have you ever had your body grabbed in public?
Have you ever been paid less than your co-workers because of your gender?
Okay.
Yes, it is true.
Women are small, smaller, and some men, a small, very small percentage of men will attack women for sexual purposes.
And yes, sometimes women get their body grabbed in public.
So, I've been the subject of sexual harassment.
A woman promised to get one of my early plays on the radio if I would go on a date with her.
A woman offered to publish my book if I would date her back when I was desperate for all this kind of stuff.
And yeah, it happens.
It happens.
What can I tell you?
Men experience more physical violence outside the home than women do.
So for men, it can be very dangerous to wander around in the middle of the night as well.
So don't do it.
Just have some basic street sense and don't wander around as a young, attractive woman in the middle of the night alone or in some dangerous neighborhood or go with friends.
I mean, men have to do this kind of stuff too.
It's not like the world is only dangerous for women.
Have you ever been drafted to fight in a war against your will?
Have you ever had vast swaths of your tax money taken from you and given to the opposite gender?
Opposite sex?
Have you ever had your body grabbed in public?
Yeah, that's, you know, that's tough for sure and that should be improved.
Have you ever been paid less than your co-workers because of your gender?
Well, the answer to that is no, because it's actually illegal and it has been since the 1960s to pay women less for the same work.
So, no.
My dad looked at me dumbfounded, his eyes wide.
I should, I knew I should probably let him take in what was happening.
How the conversation went from floral plate, from the floral plate I had mounted on the wall to here, but I couldn't stop.
Right?
She's out of control.
Out.
Of.
Control.
And she's not asking any questions, she's just bullying him with endless litanies of female woes.
She says, have you ever been given a date rape drug?
Have you ever worried about a partner hurting you or been hurt by a partner?
Well, the date rate drop is not good, obviously.
I don't know if there's an equivalent for men.
But yeah, have you ever been dragged through a divorce proceeding where a woman erroneously accused you of sexually abusing the children so that she could gain custody and your money?
Have you ever been terrified of going to jail for not paying child support, even though it's very tough to get a job sometimes when you're stressed and worried and sleepless and all of that?
Have you ever had 90% of your sex die in workplace accidents?
I mean, come on!
Men and women can cast victimization at each other all day long.
Have you ever worried about a partner hurting you or been hurt by a partner?
Are you kidding me?
You don't think men are attacked by women?
You don't think men are assaulted by women?
When it comes to domestic violence, first of all, the most violent relationships in the world are lesbian relationships, and that's two women, if I remember the internet correctly.
When it comes to initiating physical altercations, fistfights and so on in a relationship, well, women do it as often as men.
So yes, men do worry about being pillaged and brutalized in a divorce.
Men do worry about being, like, nagged to an early grave.
Like, nagging will wear you down.
It's like putting a snowball In a tumbler, like in a dryer.
Nagging will wear you down.
Nagging will shorten your lifespan.
Nagging spikes your cortisol.
It stresses you out.
Have you ever got married and then your wife just suddenly decides never to have sex with you again and there's nothing you can do?
You understand?
I'm not saying I know what to do legally, but it happens.
And yeah, what can a man do?
So yeah, and a man can be hurt by a woman, believe it or not.
Women can have affairs, women can hit men, women can accuse men of terrible things.
This sexual allegations in divorce is so common it's got its own acronym, S.A.I.D.
Sexual Allegations In Divorce.
That's how common it is.
And that's a hell of a lot worse than having your butt grabbed on a subway.
A hell of a lot worse.
Have you ever been accused falsely of raping someone?
Come on.
All right.
I took a deep breath.
I closed my eyes.
Do you still think the patriarchy is like a stop sign?
When he mumbled something like yes, I took off down the hall and into my room, slamming the door.
On the other side of it, I could feel my parents' shock in their silence.
Even as a child, I had not been one prone To outbursts?
Ah, so what's changed?
Well, she's got a whole lot of propaganda stuffed into her brain.
Eventually, I heard my mother usher my father out the door, and with a soft click of the lock, they were gone.
Meanwhile, I was doubled over, cross-legged on my bed, crying.
I know it sounds dramatic.
It felt dramatic.
But what had just taken place was more than what had just taken place.
It was the confirmation of a suspicion I'd had ever since I'd peaked behind society's screen.
Ah, yes, the hidden machinations.
See, she's really, really concerned about patriarchy.
Just, man, patriarchy.
So, you know, I just, I guess, if she ever watches this, my question to you is, were there no Muslim men in your classes?
Because, you know, It could be called a wee bit of a patriarchy.
Just, you know, potentially, possibly could be called a wee bit of a patriarchy in the Islamic world.
Indian men, where sometimes the women are arranged marriages and so on.
You know, just curious.
Did you ever confront any of the, you know, More vivid patriarchies, or it's just you're this brave warrior child, so you just try to take on your fairly reasonable dad.
That's your big moral courage there.
Did you bring up Islamic teachings?
Did you bring up other teachings that are pretty patriarchal.
Did you bring up the fact that you know where there's a real patriarchy comes along with socialism?
It's in Venezuela where women have had to sell themselves into prostitution just to get food for their children.
No, of course you didn't, right?
Because you're such a brave moral warrior that the only person you talk to is your fairly reasonable dad.
The only person you confront and attack and rage against is your reasonable dad.
You don't take on any Islamic fellow.
You don't take on other belief systems or anything like that.
No.
It's, you know, you pick on a white male.
Ooh!
The moral courage that that takes can scarcely be described in any reasonable fashion, so.
Ah, okay, the suspicion, blah blah blah.
Even if everyone who was oppressed understood that their lack of power wasn't their fault, it wouldn't matter because those who held the power couldn't ever understand how much they held.
After all, how do you make someone see something that has been invisible to them their whole lives?
Well, apparently what you do is you just scream abuse and then run out of the room, right?
My dad is a kind man, a smart man, blah blah blah.
He was not being stubbornly obtuse or intentionally hurtful.
It's just that to him, the patriarchy is another benign system to manage chaos, like a stop sign.
Well, you don't know!
You don't know what he meant, because you never asked him.
You just got hysterical.
This is a horrifying paradox of privilege.
The more you have of it, the less you're able to see of what you have.
Now, was the dad privileged by getting a job at the age of eight and having to work all the way through and working probably sixty hours a week to get one of the top-notch executive jobs, being a partner in a prestigious architectural firm?
Did she get a job at the age of eight?
I'm pretty sure she didn't.
I'm pretty sure she didn't.
Did either of her parents end up in an asylum?
Well, I guess one of them might.
The more you have of it, the less you're able to see of what you have.
Now, she thinks that she's referring to her father, but of course she's not.
She's referring to herself.
I was still crying on my bed when I heard a light knock on the door of my apartment.
Right?
So, the parents had left, had a long conversation, and she's still crying.
Why?
Why is she still crying?
Because her father didn't instantly agree with everything she said in the way that she wanted.
The mom says, you have to understand, your father wants to believe you're the privileged one.
I pause, blah blah blah.
She said, of course, in many ways I am the privileged one.
Like my father, I am a cisgendered, heteronormative, white person, a confluence of factors that grants us both unjust advantages.
So, alright.
And because of my father, I never had to compete for food on the table.
I didn't have to hold down a job before I went to middle school, and I was encouraged to pursue not one, but two degrees.
He had worked tirelessly to ensure my sister and I didn't face the same hardships, and thanks to him and my mother, we didn't.
We faced different ones.
So she didn't have to get a job, and when she got a job, I assume it was recreational, her father paid for, I assume, her two degrees, either directly through subsidies or indirectly through his taxes.
So, yeah.
What can I say?
She's ridiculously privileged, and She's complaining that her father doesn't see his own privilege, right?
So here she's talking about all this kind of stuff, right?
He had worked tirelessly.
Father paid for her, worked for her, sacrificed for her, gave up his dreams probably for her, right?
I had thought that having experienced hardships as a child, my dad might empathize more with women's plights.
Oh yes.
Father, no understanding of women.
He's had a successful marriage for decades, but no understanding of women whatsoever.
So what she's saying is that being a woman is the equivalent of a man having an insane, deranged, dangerous father who gets institutionalized so he half-starves to death as a child and has to get a job at the age of eight years old.
In the cold, delivering papers.
I had that job when I was eleven.
It is a nasty, difficult job.
It's cold, I got paid one penny a paper to insert advertising papers into the newspaper.
And you've got to go around and pick up everyone's money.
I guess it's different now, but back then you had to.
It's a nasty, difficult job.
And you've got to get up blindingly early on the weekends to deliver their Saturday and Sunday papers.
So it's a difficult job in the rain, in the snow, in slippery sidewalks, slippery ice on the driveways.
Hunger, starvation, want, get his first difficult, dangerous job at the age of eight.
Cars driving down, can't see you sometimes.
And you know what the equivalent to that is?
Having boobs.
That's the equivalent!
Being a woman is the absolute equivalent.
What can you even say?
What can you even say?
But in some ways my father's own struggles early on had actively reinforced his belief that he was exempted from those other modes of oppression.
He could not possibly be the oppressor or complicit in an oppressive system because he himself had been oppressed.
He had tricked the system in one of its elements, class, and therefore couldn't fathom that there were other elements in which his complicity made the lives of those around him more difficult.
Well, I assumed that he was a good architect, designed good houses.
I assumed he provided great value to his customers, otherwise he wouldn't have been promoted.
I know that he paid for you and your sister or sisters to live, to go to college probably, so, eh.
Ah, blah blah blah, that he would unintentionally be part of a system that endangered his daughters!
Ooh, you're really concerned about danger to women.
How about female genital mutilation and honor killings and forced marriages to your cousins?
That's not part of your father's tradition, but you can find that in some Muslim countries.
Are you taking any of that on?
Nope!
Punching whitey.
The most cowardly moral bullshit that you can get these days.
Alright, to acknowledge his power was to acknowledge his daughter's powerlessness over it.
Complicated a simple paradox I come to terms with, blah blah blah.
Nothing was as simple as I kept trying to make it seem.
I didn't speak to my dad again until the following day.
We were awkward around each other, barely making eye contact until he made a dad joke and I laughed and both our shoulders eased down.
So she's just saying she's not going to reason with him.
He's wrong.
She's right.
He's blind.
She's got sight.
He's a fool.
She's wise.
No compromise.
No discussion.
Right?
So she says earlier that when she'd have a conflict with one of her siblings, her father would say, there's three sides to every story.
I assume that means your side, your side, and the truth.
So that's how she was raised.
And she loved that saying, but now she's got nothing to do with it, because now she's right.
She's indoctrinated.
She's programmed.
She's certain.
Anybody who disagrees with her is not just wrong, but immoral.
The leftists, or the Marxists, in fact, call it false consciousness, right?
Which is that if you don't feel oppressed, it's false consciousness.
You are oppressed.
If you don't feel oppressed, you're wrong.
I'm right.
That's what they say, right?
It's crazy.
I think we were both so weary of another fight that neither mentioned what had transpired the night before.
Right!
No, it's because you went completely hysterical, kind of screened half an emotional abuse at the guy, basically accused him of not caring that you might be raped or date raped or whatever it is, right?
And then you ran off like a two-year-old and you stormed into your room and you slammed the door shut and you sobbed for an hour.
How are you supposed to negotiate with that?
Do you think that's how he got to be the top of his profession in the architectural world was by having panic attacks, hands shaking, running down the hallway, screaming, sobbing?
I mean, come on!
This self-indulgence of the feels is really, really terrible.
So no, he wasn't weary.
He was just like, well, you're crazy, right?
And you understand that this guy grew up with a schizophrenic paranoid father, right?
Father.
So for you to inflict this kind of abuse on the guy is to bring his father back to life right there in front of him.
Terrible, terrible thing to do.
All right, so I wish I told him something I realized about our fight.
I wish I told him that I am who I am now, not in spite of him, but because of him.
Well, that's true, because he worshipped a communist and paid for her to go get indoctrinated by a bunch of Marxists.
So yeah, this is what happens when boomers don't keep track of their own Leftist ideology.
It metastasizes and takes the brains of their children.
She says, growing up, I witnessed him questioning the nature of power in our world, fighting its injustices in the ways that he could, and giving us girls the tools to do the same.
He's a sexist, you see.
Even though.
Anyway.
All I'm doing is trying to carry that work forward.
I hope one day he can see that, and when my own children inevitably confront me with ideological beliefs that seem unfathomable, I can remember it.
Oh, it's tragic.
Absolutely tragic and absolutely horrible what's going on in this family.
The girl clearly has not been exposed to any counter-arguments.
She is getting mono-thinking.
She's getting conclusions that are not based on reason and evidence, but are based on hatred and fear.
And it's incredibly toxic and dangerous stuff.
That's why I say do not, do not, do not Send your children to arts education.
It's not education anymore.
It's pillaging the past when it actually had value and when fewer people went to school in the past it was 10% now it's 40 to 50% which doesn't mean that people are smarter it just means that the curricula have been dumbed down.
They're not being taught critical thinking.
They're not being taught reason and evidence.
They're being taught hateful conclusions that destroy their lives, destroy their family lives, destroy their capacity to bond.
I mean what's it gonna be like to date this woman for heaven's sake?
She's gonna be constantly scanning for any tiny thing that you might do that might be Patriarchy!
What's she gonna faint every time she sees a stop sign now?
This is rendering her unmarriable.
And what's it gonna be like for her to raise her kids?
Every time her daughter wants to play with the princess castle rather than a trunk, she's gonna be freaking out.
This is like creating a weird kind of hypersensitivity to environment and internal stimuli that hasn't been matched since the hysteria.
Of the Inquisition, and of, you know, the monks, or the religious people in the past who constantly had to monitor themselves for anything that might be going wrong, or anything that might be changing, or anything that might be tempting, and it's a solipsistic monomania of self-analysis and hostility that just goes on forever.
And once this brain virus gets implanted, where does it end?
Is she going to be able to relax and enjoy her life?
Is she going to be a positive and fun person to be around?
No.
She's on a mission.
A mission to end all inequality.
And this is what the left does, right?
The left continually, and the right makes its mistakes, because the right thinks that just hard work will do it all, and everyone has the same opportunities, and everybody has the same capacities, and no!
There's an IQ bell curve.
And that's a reality.
And once you get into the IQ of the low 80s, there's really not much that a modern economy can find for you to do.
And that is a significant portion of the population.
In America, it's a huge percentage of certain ethnic groups and so on.
It's a big problem.
And so just this idea of buckle down, work hard and you can succeed at anything is absolutely false and very destructive and very dangerous.
The right gets that wrong.
The left though, what do they do?
They look at any disparities between ethnic groups, races, sexes, and they say, well, all disparities are the result of prejudice and oppression.
That's absolutely false, and it's been demonstrably false since the bell curve book in 1994.
It's just demonstrably false.
Women are not underpaid.
Blacks are not underpaid.
East Asians are not overpaid.
It is the customers who value and determine the pay of an employee.
It is the customer who determines it.
Like, why does Brad Pitt get paid $10 million for a movie?
Because people want to see Brad Pitt in a movie.
It's not the executives who decide Brad Pitt's salary.
It is the customers who decide Brad Pitt's salary.
How did this woman's dad get to the top of his profession?
by providing greater value than the other people who wanted his job.
It is the customers who promoted him.
It's the customers who paid his, what I assume is, a significantly high six-figure salary.
So, if you have a problem with women being underpaid, you don't have a problem with the capitalist.
You don't have a problem with the boss or the manager or the business.
You have a problem with the customers.
It is the customers who don't want to pay women more.
Now, why don't customers want to pay women more?
Well, because Women generally get disabled by childbirth for significant periods of their career, in general.
That's a fact, right?
If you have two guys who are equal, to put this in terms, so if you're a woman, right?
You've got two guys, you like them both equally, but one guy is going to go off and have affairs and may or may not come back and the other guy is going to stick with you forever.
Who are you going to choose?
They're both equal in terms of how much you like them.
One guy is most likely going to go off and have affairs and may not come back at all.
The other guy is going to stick with you the whole time.
Who are you going to date?
Who are you going to marry?
Who are you going to settle down with?
Who are you going to have children with?
Obviously the guy who's going to stick around, not the guy who's significantly likely to wander off and have an affair and may not come back.
Well that's How many business owners will look at hiring a man versus hiring a woman?
Because the woman is likely going to go and have kids, she's going to go on mat leave, and she may or may not come back.
Or she may just come back for the requisite amount of time so that she can go on mat leave again.
Which is disastrous for your business, particularly if it's high-skilled.
If it's a waitress, okay, you know the waitress.
But if it's a high-skilled, complex, customer-facing position, the relationships get torpedoed.
40% of women with MBAs aren't even in the workforce.
For heaven's sakes, it's just facts.
Just facts.
The man is not going to be disabled by childbirth and breastfeeding.
He's not.
going to wander off, maybe, I mean, I guess a tiny number of them decide to go and pick grapes in Queensland as a sabbatical or something like that, but it's pretty rare, particularly if the man has children, because men get significant boosts, work significantly harder, A, when they get married, and B, when they become fathers.
So if a man gets married and wants to have children, as an employer, you know he's going to work harder on average.
He's going to be more productive, more valuable, more dedicated.
If it's a woman, she gets married, she's going to have kids, Come on, I mean, I don't even need to say it.
I mean, this is so bloody obvious.
I mean, this is...
Ridiculous.
So what we can do is we can say, oh, well, you know, women make 70 cents, 73 cents, 75 cents on the dollar for men, and that's just terrible, and that's just wrong.
And you can fix that.
You can fix that.
Just women can't have kids, that's all.
So you can get equality to some degree between men and women, of course, because women like to work indoors, and they like to work in air conditioning, and they like to work, and they can't work at some physically demanding jobs because they lack the strength.
There are going to be limits, right?
But you can make women and men much more equal It just means that your entire civilization ends in one generation because there are no kids in the picture.
You can either have continuance of your civilization and accept some economic disparities between men and women, or you can say, well, men and women have to be perfectly equal, otherwise society is horrendously unjust, in which case you reach your perfection.
And then your society collapses because, funny story, Women who live longer than men and pay less taxes than men do.
Women want nice comfortable retirements with lots of free health care and pensions, right?
And if those same women don't have children, then there's no one to pay for their pensions.
So, I guess you get your equality right before you... Ah, here's the way of saying it.
So, if both men and women jump off a cliff, they fall at the same rate.
That's equality followed by extinction.
Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain Show on philosophy.
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