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June 12, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:48
WOMEN WERE NOT EXPLOITED THROUGHOUT HISTORY!
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Time Text
And it was then that I remembered just how frustrating it can be to watch debates.
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
Hope you're doing well.
Given the new rules, just wanted to mention that this talk in no way is meant to imply or argue for any discrimination between the genders.
Both genders are equal, should be equal before the law, and so on.
But let's drive a stake through the heart of this conspiracy theory called endless male patriarchy throughout history.
And this comes out of Listening to, I think it was the first 15 minutes or so of some debate.
It wasn't really a debate.
It was supposed to be an interview turned into a debate.
Between Jordan Peterson and some woman.
And of course the woman advised the idea that throughout history there was this endless evil patriarchy that ground down women and oppressed them and exploited them and pillaged from them and it was only because women fought back with estrogen-based sisterhood and managed to claw their way toward economic and legal equality with men and so on that this evil patriarchy was driven back.
There's an endless amount more to do, and so on.
So, I just... I need people to just basically be factual when it comes to history.
Okay.
I don't know.
It's such a weird thing to debate about.
I really feel the world has gone quite mad, and I may be shouting into a wind, but maybe if you and I shout enough into the wind and enough people join us, our hot breath of Deep reason can push back what is so destructive and toppling over society.
So, the analogy, of course, was made, well, it's like slavery.
You know, women were enslaved and subjugated throughout history.
Alright.
Basic facts.
Women, throughout history, were, for most of their adult lives, and by adult we kind of mean 13 and onwards, were disabled by childbirth.
So women had babies, had endless series of babies.
And when it came to the end of their baby-making run in their late 30s and early 40s, well, the children they'd given to earlier themselves started to have babies.
So you went from mother to grandmother, you helped your children, and you were basically disabled by childbirth.
Pregnancy is tough on the woman's body.
Birthing is tough on the woman's body.
Breastfeeding, sleeplessness, and so on.
And so women were producing human beings.
They weren't producing the resources to keep those human beings alive.
In general.
In general.
Now, if women were subjugated and enslaved throughout history, just think of the relationship that occurs within slavery.
So in slavery, you buy a human being and you take a significant proportion of that human being's output, right?
So you put them to work in the fields, you pay for their room and their board and their health care and so on and the food that they need for themselves and their babies and so on.
You take 20 to 30 percent of the slave's output for yourself and that's your incentive for investing in the slave.
Now whether that's hugely profitable or not is a question for economic historians.
A slave cost like a mid-range car in America in the sort of 18th, 19th century.
So how profitable it was?
Well we can see it really wasn't very profitable at all because when slavery was abolished As when serfdom was abolished, you've got the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and all of the massive productivity gains of the 20th century, where we had from the 17th century or 18th century to the 20th, 21st century, you had massive increases in income, 20 to 30 times by some estimates.
So, if you look at slavery, here's a human being who's owned.
And the resource transfer is from the slave to the owner, right?
If it was the other way, it wouldn't be a slave-owner relationship, right?
So you buy a slave, you work your slave.
It's all immoral and all.
You buy a slave, you work a slave.
And it's completely a one-sided equation.
You pillage and you take resources from the slave to yourself.
Now, think of a man with a wife and a couple of kids.
Where does the resource transfer go?
Now, if women are pillaged, exploited and ground down like slaves were, then the resource transfer should go from the woman to the man.
It's not that complicated, right?
But that's not what happened.
And I really, I stand agarg in the face of a world that can ignore this basic fact.
Women were largely disabled through childbirth and child raising.
And, you know, the cooking and cleaning and running the household, like all of the Home-based reproductive necessities for a tribe to continue.
Women were disabled.
Economically.
For the most part.
And so, for the women who could not produce enough calories and resources to keep themselves and their children alive, for women and children to survive, which way did the resource transfer go?
It's not complicated, right?
If a woman can't earn enough calories to keep herself and her children alive, particularly when she's breastfeeding and so on, extra calorie requirements, then the resources you see must be coming from somewhere outside the home.
What a shocker, right?
So this exploitation of women, according to this theory that's been pushed for the last 100 years or 150 years or so, This exploitation of women theory requires that men provide massive resources to women and children.
You understand?
This is mad.
It's mad.
It's a completely mad interpretation of history, right?
Remember, the slave is exploited by the slave owner.
The slave owner takes 20 or 30 percent of the slave's output.
The slave provides resources to the slave owner.
However, Women and children are resource black holes, resource wells, resource sinkholes for men.
Men have to go out and hunt and trap and fight and plant and grow and sew and maintain and build fences and all of that in order to provide for their families.
I've seen some estimates where a man without a wife and children can live on about 10% of his income.
In other words, throughout human history, for the most part, about 90% of a man's productivity was consumed by his wife and his children.
So that's worse than slavery, just in terms of resource transfer, right?
Let's say it's way too high an estimate, right?
Let's say that only half of a man's economic productivity went to his wife and children.
Which, I mean, just go to a mall, look at how many stores there are for women, and look at how many stores there are for men, and you'll get an idea of this, right?
So let's say it was only half.
Okay, so the slave owner takes 20 to 30 percent of the slave's resources, but the wife and children takes half of the man's resources.
Again, it's probably 90 percent or 75 percent.
Just say half.
It doesn't really matter.
The idea that if you are getting half or three quarters or 90 percent of someone's income, that you are oppressed and exploited is truly Staggering.
It's truly staggering.
Women and children were the recipients of the vast majority of male output throughout human history.
And we know that because they're alive.
Now, you can of course say, well yes, but they were the man's children too.
Absolutely.
Both genders contributed massively to the success and survival of the human species.
You know, particularly those times after the last ice age when we were down as an entire population to about 10,000 people.
So yes, the woman is providing a service to the man by raising half of his gene pool.
Well, cross your fingers boys, let's hope that it's half of your gene pool.
The woman is providing great value, no question.
But she's also receiving great resources.
So this is the exploitation scenario.
That women took the vast majority of men's resources, and children took the vast majority of men's resources, and this is somehow called men exploiting women.
You understand, when you look at it, just in a basic rational way, the resource transfer follows the, quote, exploitation, right?
Resource transfer from slaves to slave owners follows the exploitation.
In the Marxist model, right, the resource transfer wherein you pay your workers less than you're selling the value of their labor for, right?
You pay a worker $10 but you sell his labor for $11.
Well, that $1, you see, you're getting additional resources out of your worker.
But we're not talking a profit margin of 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 percent here.
We're talking about a woman who gets 90% of a man's resources.
Now, she cooks, she cleans, she works, she raises her children, and she does produce some food.
So I'm not saying that women were exploiting men.
But the idea that men were exploiting women while turning over the vast majority of their very hard-won and hard-fought-for resources is crazy, right?
Now, the other thing, of course, is you play this horror Olympics of which gender was mistreated the most.
Well, you see, women were beaten and women had to suffer through childbirth and so on.
It's like, yes, it is true that some women were beaten throughout history.
It's sort of a boring thing that happens.
Economists go mad about this kind of stuff, right?
So, if you say, you don't want to invest in a house, you want to invest in the stock market, right?
Or, if you don't want to invest in the stock market, you want to invest in a house.
Doesn't you take the down payment for your house?
You see, a house goes up in value, right?
You take your down payment for your house, you put it in the stock market.
Well, the stock market over time, well, for a while at least, is going to go up in value.
Houses can crash.
You look at the benefits, right?
You should rent.
You should not rent, you should buy a house.
Why?
Renting has advantages, which is you don't need a down payment and you're not locked in.
And repairs are taken care of by someone else.
So if you take the down payment that you would have made, if you go and rent, you take the down payment, you go and invest it in something or start your own business, that's a great idea.
So if you just look at the benefits of one thing without looking at the benefits of another, it's kind of boring and it's a big waste of time.
And it's kind of an IQ test, right?
So if you look and you say, well, women were beaten and sometimes when tribes were conquered, the women were raped and taken as concubines and so on.
Yeah, that was tough.
There's no question that was tough.
But they weren't dead, right?
See, if women didn't want to be taken as concubines throughout history, they could have fought to the death, right?
And then they would have been killed.
But they didn't choose to fight to the death, which was probably not an option that the men had, because the men know, throughout a lot of human conflicts in human history, if you lose to a competing tribe, well, the men are killed, right?
Or enslaved and therefore have no capacity to reproduce.
The women are taken as concubines, and the women choose that over death.
It's never a good day when you have to choose between being taken as a concubine or being killed, but given that most women chose to be concubines rather than fight to the death, it was a choice they preferred, and it was not a choice that was really offered to the men who weren't taken as concubines.
So, yeah, men were worked to death, men were out hunting, men were killed in wars, men were drafted, and men were killed when conquered, whereas women weren't.
Again, just looking at the bad things that happen to women without looking at the bad things that happen to men is really, really boring.
So, to understand how we ended up in general with the gender relations that we did, there's two things you need to understand.
Number one, throughout almost all human history, people were in a state of near constant starvation.
And if they weren't starving, then they were being overrun by disease.
Or if neither of those two were happening, then there was probably some kind of war going on.
So it was brutal throughout most of human history.
Human beings were just scrabbling to survive.
And up until 18th, 19th, 20th century, there was no real meritocracy as far as the free market went.
So these two things that you need to understand.
Once you understand how scarce resources were, then you understand why Women were discouraged from becoming, say, doctors or lawyers or hunters and so on.
Why?
Because resources were incredibly scarce.
And so men competed for resources in order to win the most attractive women, right?
So men competed for resource production and provision to families, and women competed for homemaking skills, physical attractiveness, and congeniality, and so on.
So men evolved to fight hard to get resources, and women evolved to say no until a monogamy commitment was made from the man that was legally binding, so that the man got access to sexuality and the woman got access to resources that she needed to raise the consequences of sexuality which are the couple's children.
So this is foundational to understanding why things work.
If you have a small town and the small town needs two doctors And you say, well, it's got to be 50-50.
We've got to have one male doctor and one female doctor.
Well, you're going to end up with one male doctor, right?
Because you're going to train both men and women to become doctors.
And due to an absence of birth control and sometimes religious injunctions against the use of birth control, the woman would simply not end up being a doctor.
Why?
Because she'd be pregnant and breastfeeding and raising children and exhausted and busy all the time.
So when you needed something done, that wasn't running a home or raising children, you had to have a man do it.
Again, in general, women are competent, intelligent, blah, blah, blah, of course, right?
But you need two doctors in a town.
And if you make one of those doctors a woman, throughout most of human history, then you're going to train her the same way you would a man, she's going to be a fine doctor, she's going to get pregnant, she's going to be unable to be a doctor, fundamentally, right?
So, you simply end up wasting resources Because you train for two doctors, you end up with one doctor.
So you're one doctor short.
So what was the point of training women into the professions for the most part?
Now there are some women who shouldered their way into professions, and some women who didn't want children, and some women who were lesbians and so on, but we're just talking in general.
In general, because of gender segregation, if you want to have female students in a university, then you need separate facilities, you may need separate dorms.
I mean, it's very, very, very expensive.
And if you understand just how incredibly scarce resources were throughout most of human history, they couldn't afford to train people who wouldn't perform particular professions, right?
They simply couldn't afford to train.
And people say, well, yes, but women didn't have the right to legally own property free and clear and so on until such and such a time.
It's like, well, you know, Men didn't exactly get to own much property either when they were slaves or they didn't get self-ownership when they were drafted into the armies as they were endlessly and they really didn't have a whole lot of ownership when they were bought and sold tied to the land because they were serfs.
So this idea that men had this massive privileged position throughout human history that was denied through meanness and bigotry to women It's just false.
It's just such a delusional misreading of history that, again, it's hard to even know where to start.
So, here's another instance, right?
So, 4,000 to 8,000 years ago, according to some studies, for every one man who got to reproduce, 17 women got to reproduce.
So, you know, that could be polygamy, could be a harem situation and so on, but that's the reality that when it comes to protecting members of the tribe, the tribe needs to reproduce or it ceases to exist and therefore men are expendable and women are to be treasured because one man can have many children but it doesn't work the other way for women because childbirth and so on, right?
So male disposability throughout most of human history is very key, right?
I was just watching The mini-series on Chernobyl the other night.
And, yeah, just about all men who go, male privilege gets you melted, right?
This is why it's women and children first, and the men, as they did vastly disproportionately, go down with the ship in terms of the Titanic, right?
So, when it comes to the tribe, just think of some tribe in some areas.
This could be pre or post-agriculture, but we just talk about the tribe.
How does that work?
Well, how are women at hunting?
Well, not great.
You need a lot of physical stamina.
Women are physically less strong than men.
Women are on their period, which means they can be scented by predators, by prey, and so on.
And, of course, when you're out there hunting, you have a big, heavy deer or buffalo, or whatever it is, or whatever it is you're hunting, it's really, really heavy to bring back.
So you need a lot of leg strength, upper body strength, and so on.
And, of course, when you're out hunting, you can very quickly, like that, become the hunted, because there could be some other tribe That is following you, waiting for you to kill something, and then taking your kill.
Or attacking you, driving you off, or whatever, so...
Women were not particularly helpful when it came to hunting, right?
So, hunting of course was very foundational to humanity.
One of the reasons we have brains is that it takes hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of extra calories just to run our brain size and it's kind of tough to get that from vegetables and fruits and particularly, right, the protein.
So, with all due respect to my vegan and Vegetarian friends, we wouldn't be human beings most likely if we didn't eat meat.
And eating meat usually meant hunting and trapping and all kinds of dangerous stuff.
And, of course, that became easier with the domestication of animals.
But there's a lot of physical strength required to domesticate and maintain the domestication.
A lot of fences need to be built.
And, of course, you've got to go out and gather all the grain.
All stuff can get stolen.
So there was a lot of brutal combat for resources in the past.
And that favored men's strength and stamina and so on, right?
So, just in terms of the division of labor, if you take your women out as hunters, you will hunt less effectively, less usefully.
And of course, when they're out hunting, they're not getting pregnant and raising babies.
And remember, infant mortality was extraordinarily high throughout most of human history.
Equal to or more numbers of babies died than survived.
Now, once you made it to adulthood, you were probably okay.
But making it to adulthood was a hell of a thing.
And as I talked about in my speeches in Australia, some of the cultures, some of the tribes had extraordinarily high rates of infant mortality.
Infanticide as well.
They would just kill infants.
And that is a tough thing.
Think of some woman who's born, like a baby, a female baby is born with a hairlip.
Do you want to pour resources into that if the tribe considers that person cursed or they're not going to reproduce or whatever?
Well, no.
There's all of this terrible stuff that goes on in terms of eugenics.
We can see this just in terms of in India, right?
There are significantly more men than women because of infanticide of females and this also happened in China under the one-child policy, so it doesn't It doesn't take a lot to figure out that if women aren't constantly cranking out babies throughout most of human history, there is no human history.
I mean, that's the division of labor, right?
That needs to be there.
So when it comes to providing resources or producing resources, are women better at hunting or are women better at giving birth to men who can become hunters in the future?
In terms of getting resources, getting food.
Well, the answer, since it's pretty universal across human culture, the answer is that you have women home making babies and cleaning the carcasses and growing some local food and raising the kids and breastfeeding.
You do that because the best way that women can produce value for the tribe is to produce men who can then go out and produce more value for the tribe, which they then give to the women and children.
So that's just a, again, a kind of reality that's Hard for people to understand, but I'm not sure why it's so hard for people to understand.
Now, here's another.
I mean, you can say, oh, this is all theory, this is all theory.
It's like, no, it's really not.
So, one of the things that's pretty common, pretty key, in evolution is that if you have to work less, your body, gets weaker, right?
I mean, if you have to work less, your body gets weaker.
Your body does not pour energy into the development of things that it doesn't need, right?
Now, it may not strip them out like the appendix and so on, but it doesn't pour energy into things that it doesn't need.
You sit on the couch, you don't develop much muscle tone, right?
You work out or work hard, and you do.
So, if men exploited women throughout human history, Then why did men end up 40% stronger in the upper body than women?
It doesn't make any sense.
If men can go to women to get their resources rather than trying to wrestle those resources from nature, and if women are being so exploited, then women would get physically stronger, evolutionarily speaking, and men would get physically weaker, where they'd end up like those weebles in the WALL-E movie at the end, right, on the spaceship.
But that's not the case.
Men are taller and physically stronger with stronger bones and so on.
Why would that be the case if they were just exploiting women?
Well, the answer for that, of course, is that women were not being exploited by men.
The men were out there trying to gather resources and in a physically dangerous and difficult situation, which is why they end up taller and physically stronger than women, right?
So this clear example, the clear evolutionary proof that women were being nurtured by men because women were physically weaker and men were physically stronger, which meant that men were out there wrestling resources and providing them to women.
Women didn't need to be as strong because the men were doing the battling with the elements, the battling with the predators, the battling to get food, the battling with other men, and women were more protected, which is why women ended up physically less strong than men on average, right?
So, Again, this is just have to look at a man and look at a woman and say, well, how could the woman be exploited by the man if the man is taller and physically stronger?
It means that evolution must have been that he's out there competing with other men to gain resources for his family.
And this is this weird thing too, like they talk about this at the moment.
Women's unpaid labor.
Women's unpaid labor.
Women are working around the home.
Women are unpaid labor.
It's like, no, it's never unpaid labor.
It's never unpaid labor.
And again, it's one of these, it just takes a moment, it just shows you how the matrix, how the propaganda is so strong.
It just takes a moment to realize that there's no such thing as unpaid labor for women because resources don't magically pop into women's houses when they have children.
Food doesn't gather itself together in some Roman-style phalanx and march up her doorway.
The heat doesn't manifest itself and move like vengeful ghosts in Lord of the Rings into the woman's house to keep her warm in the winter.
Of course, when women are home and not producing resources but rather consuming additional resources because they're pregnant and have children and are breastfeeding and so on, there's no such thing as unpaid labor.
So we say, oh, well, the woman works around the home, the woman raises children, she's unpaid.
It's like, she can't be unpaid!
It's not possible.
If she was unpaid, she'd starve and her children would starve.
So how do women get resources?
Well, women get resources when they need them for raising kids one of three ways.
Either from a man voluntarily, from generally men involuntarily, or through charity.
Now, you could say, ah, well, she could go out and work and so on.
She could go out and work, absolutely, but then she's not parenting, right?
She's kicking her parenting off to someone else, usually some minimum wage person who has no emotional investment in her children, though it could be, of course, shipping off kids to grandparents, in which case the grandparents are unpaid labor supporting the woman, right?
So there's no such thing.
Children need resources and women who are pregnant and breastfeeding need resources and men give them the resources because the men are married to them and the men go out and work.
Or women run to the government and then the government forces the mostly male taxpayer base to pay for the women.
Or a charity, right?
If you can't get either.
It used to be the case that charity would deal with it.
So the idea that women get resources but they're not being paid is, I mean, it's ridiculous.
It's like saying, well, a woman who goes out to work and gets paid $1,000 a week is working, but a woman whose husband earns $2,000 a week but he gives half of it to her is not being paid.
It's like, of course she's being paid.
Of course she's being paid.
She couldn't survive otherwise.
I mean, again, it's just one of these things.
I don't know why this is controversial.
I have no idea why this is challenging to understand.
Now, I do understand the purpose of it all.
The purpose is very, very clear.
The purpose is very clear.
So, the purpose is to make women fear and resent men.
To reduce the incentive for men to get together with women and have babies and enjoy their family life and it is to cripple and eviscerate, to really disembowel the reproductive capacities of particular cultures where this horrible conspiracy theory of male exploitation throughout human history.
I mean, it's just designed to destroy the happiness and comfort and synchronicity of roles between the genders, right?
So what you do is you say, oh, well, raising children is an idiot's job, and you've got to get out there and work, and it's like, yeah, it's raising children.
I mean, I've for 15 years run the world's Give or take off and on Biggest Philosophy Show, because it didn't start out that way on my first podcast, right?
But I've been doing that for 15 years.
I've been a stay-at-home dad for 10.
Being a stay-at-home dad is incredibly exciting and challenging, deep and enriching intellectually.
So this idea that, you know, what would you just wipe in their asses and playing tiddlywinks and it's like, no, no, no, no, come on.
This is ridiculous.
This is ridiculous.
So, That's why it's kind of frustrating to hear these debates, because people don't point out these basic reality checks and biological facts and historical realities.
We were just struggling to survive.
And there weren't massive amounts of extra resources that we could just throw into the furnace of fantasies about social engineering.
Okay, now there's an excess of resources, there's birth control and so on, and so we can experiment with different ways of being.
But one of the reasons that I really want to talk about this stuff is I want you guys out there to enjoy the beauty and delights of love, of parenthood, of family life, of all of the wonderful things that we are emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and sexually designed for.
I want you to love women if you're a man.
I want you to love men if you're women.
We had it really hard throughout most of human history.
And pretending that one side was doing really well and the other side was doing really badly, it's just ridiculous.
Oh, well, you know, but the power structure, the generals were men and the power structures were men.
And it's like, well, yes, of course, because men get the higher quality women by competing for resources.
So men have all this extra testosterone and aggression and lack of congeniality and lack of desire to be considerate because that's how they go out and win resources.
and they only do that because women choose men So women are the fuel, women's choices are the fuel for male ambition.
It's like many, many years ago a guy I worked with, one of my bosses, sent me this picture.
How do you tell a millionaire from the back, right?
And it's this fat schlob with his cargo pants and next to him is this bikini babe who's 25, right?
And it's like, yeah, we understand, right?
Your daddy's rich, your mama's good looking, that's how things work.
So, women's choices determine, if women didn't want men with more resources, men wouldn't have evolved to fight in body, mind and spirit to get more resources.
So, women's choices, and it's not that hard to figure out why women would choose men with more resources, because more resources means a greater chance that the children will survive.
Not just in terms of starvation, but if your children are better fed, they have more chance to resist disease.
And if you are well-fed, you have more chance to give them the antibodies they need through your breast milk.
You understand all of this, right?
And, you know, as I've talked about before, women are part of the cycle of progress, the cycle of violence, right?
There's all this anger towards women in society.
It's like, well, men are raised by women these days.
These days in particular.
Significant portions of kids are raised without fathers or with very intermittent fathers.
I mean, the vast majority of primary school teachers and daycare workers are Women, right?
I mean, I worked in a daycare.
I was the only guy.
I worked as a teacher's assistant in a gifted kids program and there was just women, women everywhere, right?
And so the idea that women raise kids but male attitudes towards women have nothing to do with how they were raised.
Women hit children more than men.
Women yell at children more than men.
And so this idea that women aren't part of any of this cycle of aggression, again, it's It's crazy.
It's crazy.
It doesn't mean that the woman who's hit or yelled at is to blame for what other women have done.
I'm just talking in a very collective sense.
But if we have this suspicion and we have this fear and if women have it drilled into their heads that men just exploit them and prey upon them and so on because A lot of the kings and a lot of the bishops, most of the bishops, if not all, and the generals throughout history were men.
And it's like, yes, that's because women chose men who competed, so men competed up the hierarchy.
And women were disabled by childbirth and so weren't able to compete up the hierarchy.
It's not that complicated.
And also, how many men were generals?
Or kings?
Or bishops?
Or aristocrats of any kind?
One in a hundred?
One in a thousand?
Come on.
Most men were tax serfs and war slaves and resentful drones, sometimes endlessly providing resources to their families until perhaps they worked themselves to death, Karoshi style.
So, this resentment is terrible.
It strips life of love.
It strips life of trust.
It strips life of happiness.
And that's really the greatest tragedy, is how much venom gets poured into our hearts that replaces the joy of love that we used to have.
If you believe that men are just raging patriarchal monsters who want to exploit you and rape you and harm you and so on, you can't love.
You can't be loved.
We're divided.
We lose the family.
We lose trust.
We lose security.
Children lose resources, comfort, security, stability.
When we get wealthy enough as a culture, as a society, we don't really need the government as much anymore.
We can provide for ourselves.
And the government, in delivering, quote, security to us, does not want us to become secure ourselves, any more than a drug dealer wants his best client to kick the habit, right?
So we are destabilized for the profit of those in charge.
Don't let it happen.
Don't accept these paranoid conspiracy theories in place of love and contentment and security.
We are evolved within the family to love each other.
Don't let the sophists turn into hatred.
Or you lose that which is most precious in life and gain nothing but dependence and subjugation in return.
Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Demain Show on Philosophy.
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