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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
58:35
Primal Desire Versus Rational Love - Dr. Warren Farrell Interviewed on Freedomain Radio
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Warren Farrell is an American educator, activist, and author of seven books on men's and women's issues.
He came to prominence in the 1970s as one of the leading male thinkers championing the cause of second-wave feminism and serving on the New York City Board of the National Organization of Women now.
However, when Nao took policy positions that Farrell regarded as anti-male and anti-father, he continued supporting the expansion of women's options while adding what he felt was missing about boys, men, and fathers.
He is now recognized as one of the most important figures in the modern men's movements.
His books cover twelve fields—history, law, sociology, and politics—the myth of male power.
Couples Communication Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say and Father and Child Reunion Economic and Career Issues Why Men Earned More Child Psychology and Child Custody Father and Child Reunion and Teenage to Adult Psychology and Socialization Why Men Are the Way They Are and The Liberated Man All his books are related to men's and women's studies, consistent to his books since the early 90s, has been a call for a gender transition movement.
I'm incredibly pleased to have him on the show.
This is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I am thrilled, delighted, honoured, tickled, pink as a pony, to have Warren Farrell, Dr. Warren Farrell.
on the show.
He is a activist, thinker, and a truly great writer, and a truly great public speaker, if you ever get a chance to see him, particularly if you can cut through the fracas at the University of Toronto, which we'll talk about a little later.
He's been recommended to me by a number of listeners, one of whom said that the insights that Dr. Farrell brings to the challenges of men's and women's rights are brain-joltingly intense, so I recommend that you watch the interview with a helmet and possibly a crash pad.
So thank you so much for taking the time.
I'm looking forward to being with you.
That brain jauntingly quote, that was for me, I'm quite sure.
Yeah, well, you know, I like to raise the standards so that you really feel you've got something to aim for.
Now, the background people can read about, and so I don't want to get too much into the history of where you came from, although it is very interesting.
I'll certainly put a reference to it, to the articles that are associated with the videos, but Where you stand right now seems to me to be with a great deal of sympathy for the challenges that men face in terms of longevity, in terms of mental health, in terms of suicidality, in terms of intimacy, vulnerability, emotional, all kinds of emotional openness and so on.
I wonder if you could give a sketch as to where you see the major challenges for men and where you see them relative to where women are?
Yeah, basically I feel that There's been a very fundamental mistake made, which is believing that we lived in a patriarchal world, which was ruled by men who created rules that benefited men at the expense of women.
And I think that that distorts history.
And I think what history is about is that, historically speaking, the dominating force was the need to survive.
And that men made, and both sexes had, made oftentimes the rules in the areas where they took the dominant amount of responsibilities.
So very frequently, you know, men often felt that his home was not his castle, but his, his, his obligation to pay a mortgage.
And, and he didn't feel so much like the head of the family, even though he was called the head of the family.
But he often felt like the you know, that he was, you know, he had to, In coal mining areas, he had to take off his shoes in the basement and come into the house.
He was the person expected to be drafted in a war.
And we often said that men were in charge.
But in fact, if men were in charge and writing rules that benefited them at the expense of women, many, many things would be different.
Men wouldn't send themselves off to die and be killed before women We're sent off to die and be killed the obligation to earn earning money was not about power and privilege for many men.
The man was a coal miner.
He didn't go into mining doing mining of coal because.
He wanted more power and privilege if he drove a cab.
It wasn't about driving a cab for 70 hours a week because he wanted to.
He felt that that was a powerful position.
The great majority of men, they worked hard to be able to make their children's lives better than their lives were.
And so what controlled them was the need to survive.
And if they didn't have the means to survive, or they didn't have the possibility of the means to survive, there were very few women who were interested in marrying men, reading why men are the way they are in the unemployment lines, if you will.
So both sexes, now this didn't mean that women didn't make sacrifices, they too were willing to risk their lives and childbirth for the possibility of of having children that the society and their parents and their friends expected to them to have if they were women, they didn't get a chance to have the right to make their own decision.
So my feeling is that for the most part, with a number of exceptions here and there, that women and men, historically speaking, didn't have rights, they had obligations, they had responsibilities.
And if we don't believe this, just ask a grandparent and how they grew up thinking about the world and both the fathers and the mothers felt that they had responsibilities and obligations to do certain roles and rights and power.
Power is about, should be redefined.
Power is about control over your own life.
And historically speaking, neither sex had power.
Both sexes had roles and roles by definition is not control over your life.
It is conforming to a role.
Yeah, and it sort of struck me that if men had it easy at the expense of women throughout history, it wouldn't really explain why men have had to develop such strong physiques relative to women.
Because there are some mammals, of course, where the male and females have similar muscle masses, but if men had it so easy, why on earth did we ever have to become so big and strong relative to women?
Well, it's because there was a huge amount of effort that was put in by the man to take care and feed mouths other than his sometimes, which seemed to come in a pretty endless procession.
So I think that's sort of one evidence to support that thesis as well.
I think the other big issue, too, on that is the area of sexuality.
If the world was made by men for men's privilege, then women would be sexual all the time without having to marry the woman.
Sexual availability would be rife because men are interested in sexual availability.
And so keeping sex, historically speaking, keeping sex in short supply until a man married a woman and in essence paid for her for the one act of sex with a lifetime of economic security.
That was certainly not a plan created by men for the benefits of men at the expense of women.
It was really to a large degree created by the needs to survive.
Because in survival rules, it was important for
Men to be able to to support the children that they created and therefore Supporting children was best done in in a contract of something like marriage Which was a stabilizing contract and the stable and that allowed men and women when they did have children It allowed the society to have the means to support those children because if men had sex with women every time they wanted and a large percentage of those Resulted in pregnancies that be children running around that the society
couldn't support, and so that society, that kinship network, would have fallen apart and been destroyed.
And so the entire feminist thesis, the good news about feminism is that it has expanded opportunities for women, and women are playing in sports in ways that they didn't, when I was growing up, that they are, they feel that the world is their oyster, which was not the case when I grew up.
And I think that's, that part of feminism is a blessing that should never be undermined.
But the part of feminism that was negative was the part that demonized men and undervalued the family.
And those parts have to be corrected.
And we have to create a not a feminist movement that oftentimes demonizes men or a counterpart men's movement that would potentially demonize women, but a gender transition movement That helps everybody think through the old stereotyped roles of the past and make transitions into more flexible roles for our future.
Now one of the things you've talked about at length is men being the suicide sex and the degree to which men's success in the world comes at the expense of emotional vulnerability that if you're vulnerable as a man you tend to get kind of shafted in various ways where if you're vulnerable as a woman you tend to get supported in In many ways.
Do you think that that lack of emotional expressivity and openness is one of the reasons why men seem to have such grave difficulty with things like divorce and the death of a spouse?
Absolutely.
And just to sort of verify what you're saying that most people don't realize that when a man and woman get divorced, a man is ten times as likely as a woman is to commit suicide.
When a man and woman has a death of a spouse, if the woman is the spouse that dies, A man is also 10 times as likely to commit suicide as is a woman.
And so when there are emotional crises, men are very ill-equipped to handle them.
The qualities that it takes to become successful at work involve the repression of feelings, not the expression of feelings.
And this is highly dysfunctional for men.
Feelings, telling a man not to cry, is literally biologically the same thing as telling somebody not to pee.
The purpose of urination and tears are very similar.
They clean out impurities in your system, which is why we often say, I feel so much better.
I've had a good cry.
I feel better.
Or at least women say that because women are allowed to do that type of crying.
And so the, uh, but it was important historically for men to repress their feelings because when the going got tough, the tough couldn't say, gee, you know, things are all falling apart here.
I need time to cry.
Um, and men were expected just to pull their act together and not go to psychologists and analyze it.
But just if the house was falling, the house was burning down, you risked your life.
You went in, you saved somebody, you pull them out.
You didn't say, This is really disconcerting to me.
I think I should go to my therapist while this house is burning down and sort out my feelings.
Men were programmed to be able to solve the problem at the moment.
That's quite functional.
We should be able to keep men being able to compartmentalize when they need to.
But we need to add to that the need to express feelings Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S.
syndrome of one order or the other that ends up waking up in the night with nightmares or killing somebody you love or becoming abusive to alcohol.
Right, right.
And if I understand that the continuation of that thesis in regards to problems between men and women goes something like this, which is that women will select men who are going to be economically successful, productively successful or whatever, and that success in the material or economic world and that success in the material or economic world tends to be driven by emotional unavailability, cold, calculating, advantage-seeking, lack of empathy, victorious over the other silverbacks or Wall Street traders or whatever you want to call them.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S.
and Israel.
Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA, SIFMA.
Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC.
be frustrating but i don't think that they make that connection so easily with that's kind of why they chose them to begin with yes yes um when i did the research um for the myth of male power one of the things i really got in touch with was the degree to which the um both sexes fall in love with the members of the other sex were the least capable of loving them um Men tend to fall in love with the younger women and the beautiful women.
Younger women, as a rule, are less mature.
Less mature people tend to be less able to love more fully.
Younger women and beautiful women tend to be competed for to such a degree by men that they become often spoiled and more narcissistic and self-centered, unless they really fight against that.
And so they tend to be less giving and more expecting of being given to, even in ways that they don't understand, than are less attractive women who tend to sort of be more likely to defend for themselves.
Conversely, women tend to fall in love with men who are quite successful at work and or have potential.
But the process that it takes to become successful at work, really successful at work, Is inversely related to the process that it takes to become successful in love.
So, for example, if I'm a really good attorney and you and I are debating, I am thinking as you were talking, not about what you say and all the valuable points you're making, but I'm thinking about.
What's the first mistake that you're making that I can pounce on?
How can I interrupt?
How can I cut you off?
If you're making good points, how can I distort those points in a way that the opposition will think is credible, and then argue with the distorted version of what you said?
If I do that really well, I'm a good lawyer.
If, on the other hand, you're not my opposing attorney, but you are my client, and I'm representing you, There's an opposing attorney out there and the opposing attorney makes the argument and I say to you, you know, Stefan, we haven't thought of that argument before.
That's really a good point.
Excuse me, opposing attorney, sir or ma'am.
Can you tell me more about that and explain that even to a greater degree?
Because we didn't understand that before and I really facilitate and.
and work to help that attorney express him or herself even more effectively.
I've made a lousy lawyer, but I'm developing characteristics to be a great husband and a great father.
And so the attorney that's good at interrupting and good at distorting and good at listening to himself create a better argument if the other person is speaking,
Those are qualities that when he takes them home to his wife or if he's gay and it's a male husband or his children, his partner or his children do not feel heard and loved and understood by somebody who's constantly interrupting them, distorting them, or thinking of their own best argument or even addition while they're talking.
Many women don't realize that the process that it takes to become successful at work is inversely related to the process that it takes to become successful in love.
So they fall in love with the men who are the least likely to be able to love them.
And then they complain about those men for having characteristics that they chose.
So in summary, both sexes, when you complain about the other person, really need to look in the mirror and see, And understand that when you marry somebody, basically the person that you marry, that's the best statement that you can make about the choice of your values.
And so look in the mirror first and look at what you chose and why you chose that person before you condemn the person that you chose.
Right.
Now, a thesis, we chatted about this before the show, the show but a thesis that christina hoff somers and i think yourself as well have put forward is that feminism has gone beyond seeking equal opportunities uh for for women which i mean who you know what sane and empathetic human being could ever have a problem with that to seeking either an egalitarianism of outcome or pitting the genders against each other in a way that seems pretty toxic
given that i think we kind of all developed to be partners i mean that what possible breeding partners in the history of any species have been antagonistic or predatory in the long run towards each other It wouldn't make any sense evolutionarily.
Why do you think it's gone so much further than its original intent in seeking egalitarianism of outcome rather than opportunity and to some degree to male bashing?
Yeah, I think the shadow side of feminism has not been questioned and so the feminist movement when it says that men had the power and women didn't That perspective allowed feminists to sort of look at themselves as ants and men as elephants, and you couldn't, no matter what you said and did as an ant, you couldn't possibly harm the elephant.
And so there were a lot of, so that's the abstraction.
The concrete examples of that are things like when I was on the board of directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City, I remember it was the beginning of the time where divorces were beginning to occur.
It was in the mid-1970s, and I noticed that there were A huge number of my feminist friends were getting divorced and people in general were getting divorced in the industrialized world in very large numbers.
And so that, of course, left the decision about what happens with the children.
And so being an egalitarian and on the board of NOW and hearing Gloria Steinem say things like, you know, what the world needs more of is it needs more fathers and less mother involvement.
And so I assumed that the next position of the National Organization for Women was going to be very strong support for children being equally involved with both parents after divorce.
But there was a little bit of time when that idea was put out.
But then a number of women responded and said, I want the option of being able to have the children after divorce.
Should I want that?
I don't want feminism taking that away from me.
And we on the board of NOW and other National Organization for Women chapters and the National Organization for Women in general, then finally came out with the decision that the woman should have the decision as to what happens with the child after divorce, which would be like saying men who are male doctors should have the decision as to what happens in medicine.
The very essence of equality was being undermined.
And I said, wait a minute, this, you know, Isn't, aren't we supposed to be in favor of both sexes having equal opportunities?
And the response that I got very openly and frankly was, if we take away opportunities from women, then we'll lose our political base.
Larger numbers of women will be opposed to us.
We have to always expand opportunities for women.
And I said, well, this isn't asking the crucial question, which is what's best for the child.
So that's what led to the research for Father and Child Reunion, which I discovered that Children who have access to both parents about equally after divorce, as long as there's no bad-mouthing and as long as the parents live close to each other, those are ones that do much better than children that don't have access to both parents after divorce.
Yeah, I mean there has been a really chilling, and I remember this even when I was growing up, and you still see it in popular culture where the women are smart and wise and the men are buffoons and so on.
If you portrayed any other group in the way in which men are portrayed in popular culture, I mean, you would just be accused of the most astounding bigotry, but it's just something we've kind of gotten used to.
And I remember as a kid growing up, I mean, I grew up in the age of divorce and all my friends were, you know, divorced, their parents were divorced and so on, and there was not a sense that anything in particular was missing.
You know, that if you just kind of take a nuclear shadow and put it in the portrait of the family where the father used to be, and there was this sense that, you know, maybe you've taken away a guy who scratches himself and demands a beer after dinner, but you haven't really taken anything away, and boy oh boy!
I mean, as a kid you know that.
You know that deep down something is missing, and the statistics that have come up since then on the effects of fatherlessness upon boys and girls is so catastrophic.
That it is just astounding, and it is also astounding the degree to which it remains relatively underreported, I think.
Oh, I would say extremely, that you're very accurate there.
It's extremely underreported.
So, you know, for your listener, just let's be really concrete and clear about some of the things that are missing when fathers are missing.
Children that are raised without significant amounts of involvement, about equal amounts of involvement from dads, they're far more likely to do less well academically.
They're far less likely to have less empathy, much less likely to be less assertive, but more aggressive, inappropriately aggressive.
They're more likely to wake up at night and have nightmares.
They're likely to have temper tantrums.
They're more likely to be absent from school.
They're more likely to have problems with physical health.
They're more likely to have psychological problems.
They're much more likely to do things like the massacre in In Newtown, a very high percentage of children, boys that grow up to kill and to misuse their masculine energy or that have what might be called a failure to launch.
They just don't do well in life.
They're ensconced in video games.
They're immersed in video porn, but they are fearful.
In that immersion in video porn, being involved with real life women, they're more comfortable with the lack of rejection that comes from turning on a porn flick.
They're very comfortable with Madden NFL, if you will.
Madden NFL, NFL being National Football League, in case somebody's not familiar with football.
And but they're not at all good at playing football.
And, and so, and the reason one of the reasons for that is that one of the things that fathers contribute to a family is the greater tendency on average, to be more tough love oriented to enforce boundaries.
So, for example, after a divorce, if a child is having a dinner, a mom will take and dad will typically set the same boundaries with the child.
You can't have your ice cream until you finish your peas, but the mom will say to, and then the child will always test the boundaries with both parents.
With the mom, it'll, it'll have a few more peas and say, now I've had a few more peas, now can I have my ice cream?
And it will say the same thing to the dad.
But the response in a divorced family, usually of a mom versus a dad is often very different.
A mom is much more likely to say after the child has a few extra peas, Okay, sweetie, I did ask you to finish your peas before you had your ice cream, but I'll tell you what, you did try hard.
And so you can have your ice cream now.
And mom is thinking, you know, we're divorced.
We've had a hard day.
We have only a few precious moments together.
Am I going to get into an argument over a few peas?
And in the past, she's seen her husband get into an argument over a few peas.
She's thought, how insensitive of him.
The father, on the other hand, will say, excuse me, You can choose to not finish your peas, but you know we have a deal here.
And the deal is, if you finish your peas, you'll get your ice cream.
And if you don't, you won't.
So you make the choice and you take the consequences.
And the boy or the girl child will yell and say, oh boy, you're so mean.
Mommy lets me do it differently.
And lets me have the ice cream.
And the father says, well, you can continue whining also.
But you'll also, if you continue whining, have no peas, no ice cream tomorrow night either.
And the boy gets the understanding with the father that it has no option but to finish the peas in order to get the ice cream.
So boys with fathers are far less likely, less than half as likely to have ADHD as boys raised predominantly by mothers.
So let's look at that example in relation to ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
And the boy with the mom is learning that if I Manipulate a better deal.
I'll get the ice cream.
I won't learn postponed gratification.
I have to eat the peas in order to get the ice cream.
I'll learn that manipulation will get me what I want better and it's less effort than having to finish the peas.
With the father, the boy has no choice but to learn postponed gratification.
I have to finish the task of eating my peas before I get what I want.
So the boy with the dad is learning unconsciously that he has to complete certain he has to do things that he doesn't want to do in order to get to do the things that he wants to do.
And without postponed gratification, that probably is more important than any other skill set.
to being able to accomplish whatever you want.
You can't be good at anything unless you have postponed gratification.
One of the key qualities of maturity is having the quality of being able to postpone gratification.
And so the boundary enforcement that fathers tend to be more comfortable with, the willingness to get into a temporary argument with the son or the daughter, so that in the future they don't have to deal with the issue,
It each time leaves the father far less exhausted leaves the children and the father far more connected leaves the child much more successful in life and far more empathetic because those same types of skills mean that the child is thinking of what the dad wants and the dad's needs to get the dinner over or whatever.
rather than just thinking of himself or herself.
And so that just gives you one clue out of some 30 different examples like that that I could give you that create different qualities that tend to be more positive in children raised by with an equal amount of father involvement.
Now, that doesn't mean that mother involvement isn't also important.
It is crucial for fathers to know that when, for example, a boy falls over on the ski slope, And that there's a need for that child to cry after he falls and hurts himself and that the crying and the father shouldn't just say, okay, you fall and get back on your skis and ski.
On the other hand, the mother who tends to be a lot better at letting the child cry often says, now, sweetie, if you don't want to ski again, or if you don't want to do that anymore, or if you want to quit the soccer team, you can do that, whatever you wish to do.
So the combination of both the mother and father, the checks and balances of male and female energy tends to be what works best for children, whether of divorce or of an intact family.
Yeah, I think that's very well put.
And it has struck me many times that this is true of even couples who stay together where both people work outside the home.
I'm fortunate to be able to stay at home with my daughter and I'm willing to have conflicts with her over important things because those conflicts only constitute a very small proportion of the time we spend together.
Whereas if I have maybe an hour of, quote, free time with her, I don't want to spend half of it fighting.
And so there does tend to be this let it slide thing, or it'll sort itself out, and so on.
And I think that is to the detriment of kids in the long run, because they do need that referral of gratification, as you point out.
It's the essence of both maturity and success.
Do you think this contributes to a statistic that every time I come across statistics in gender areas as in other areas, they literally blow my mind.
The statistic, I think it's particular to the US, I don't think it's much better up here in Canada, which is that half of boys do not complete high school.
Did I get that right?
Why are the skies of policymakers not raining down horror and solutions upon this unbelievable decimation of male potential?
No, it's not half of all boys.
I think that's half of African-American boys who complete high school.
I believe that's the data.
I'd have to check that out.
In Canada, there's also a big gap between male and female completion of high school.
One of the big gaps in Canada, too, is in the differences in scores between girls and boys in reading scores and writing scores.
And the reading scores and the writing scores are the two most important scores because they're the greatest predictors of who will be able to be employed.
And that used to be true, but it's even more true in the future because a lot of it in the past when a boy didn't do well in academia or reading and writing or math or whatever, he could get a job as a mechanic or get a job using physical labor to quite a bit of degree.
And so he would maybe go into construction, let's say.
But nowadays, or let's say he's a welder.
But in the future, welding is not just going to be a physical activity.
Welding will require you knowing chemistry, knowing physics, knowing a certain amount of algebra.
Being in construction is going to require you knowing a significant amount about robotics and electronics.
Even a car mechanic today needs to know a lot more about electronics than used to be true in the past.
And so there's not going to be an easy escape for decent paying jobs for people that don't do well in school.
And so the attention to our boys and the other big issue is when boys don't get jobs, women don't marry boys and men who are in those unemployment lines, as I mentioned before.
And so so women then end up instead of marrying men who are earning significantly less or unemployed, they end up raising children by themselves.
And those children become children without postponed gratification to a large degree.
And obviously, many women counter that and are effective, and they spend their life working extremely hard to raise children as successfully as they can.
And so this is no fault of the woman.
It's the male-female dynamic that doesn't work effectively to maximize the child's benefit.
And so when you don't have children doing well in reading and writing, boys doing well in reading and writing, and they can't get jobs and don't get married and can't be fathers, and then the children don't have father involvement, that perpetuates a cycle that is extremely destructive, that perpetuates a cycle that is extremely destructive, not only to the family, but boys who don't do well in the economy, and they have energy.
And when male energy is not used constructively, it is used destructively.
Men are either your biggest constructive or your biggest destructive force in the society.
We're either the most likely to be the inventors and the creators and the CEO, Well, we're also most likely to be the serial killers and the murderers and the major thieves.
And so if you don't do well by boys, you don't do well by the society.
Right.
I just looked it up while I was listening.
It's 65% of boys do graduate, 35% of boys don't, and I think 72% of girls do.
So sorry, it was a little off, but yes, you're right.
For African-American, it's half the boys don't graduate.
I'll just share with you a thought that I've had off and on over the years and get your feedback on it.
The cycle of violence tends to be well understood in obviously in psychological and in sort of self-knowledge circles.
You know that there's a greater propensity for victims of abuse to abuse and so on.
And yet it's always seemed curious to me that women seem to be largely excluded from visibility in the cycle of violence.
You know, for instance, a boy who grew up sort of hating women or being a misogynist or whatever, I don't think that many people look there and say, well, who were the female influences early in his life who may have been disappointing or abusive or neglectful and so on that may have given him this negative view of women that is too deep to be rational, is too deep to be empirical, must be sort of early childhood experiences.
Certainly when I was growing up, I mean, it was a world of women.
I mean, you know, female nannies, daycare teachers, all the teachers, most of the teachers for early childhood is When I worked in a daycare, I was like the only guy.
There were women all over the place.
And the degree to which women influence early childhood and the degree to which early childhood influences adult morality, it just seems like – I don't know.
I don't know how to put it without sounding offensive to someone, so I'll just sort of out and say it.
It seems that we are not giving women the egalitarian potential to do harm that we accept in men.
You know, that women can do evil and men can do evil, and that the women that evil may or may not be doing to kids when they're young, neglect or abuse or whatever, is part of the cycle of violence.
But it's not something that we really talk about or discuss very much.
What are your thoughts on that?
Yes, I think you're absolutely right.
And we, we look, we often hear, well, men create wars or corporations are led by men.
They're greedy.
And this is, you know, a result of male responsibility type of thing.
And we sort of, we're very quick to be able to associate the, um, the negative sides of corporations or governments, um, um, doing war or corruption, corruption with, with those were predominantly
Positions held by males and males as a result of that, we'd have a much better world if we had equal numbers of women in corporations or equal numbers of women in government is a very common statement, but we don't say, but wait a minute, all these children to a much greater degree were statistically speaking more likely to be brought up by by women, but particularly recently go from an all female home
into an all-female elementary school and have a female nanny.
And so oftentimes for boys that discovered, for example, gangs, that was their first male role model.
And it was a result of, in part, a result of having no male role model until they got six, seven, or eight.
And we don't say, gee, is there any responsibility for all these women
Who were the ones to bring up this this boy that isn't even that isn't even on the radar of most people's willingness to ask and most people that did ask that and try to apply for a Mainstream job while asking that question would be or making that comment or making that observation would be Would unbecome a candidate for a mainstream job merely by but it nicely mentioning that statement so
You and I are now unbecoming a candidate for a mainstream job.
Excellent.
I have always considered that, like my hero Socrates, a mark of honor rather than of dishonor.
It's like being on Richard Nixon's enemy list.
Yeah, yay, good for me.
And I think it is tragic and I think it is something that, I mean, I almost feel this visceral resistance among certain politically correct segments of society to look at the mess, the abominable mess that has been created over the past 30, 40, 50 years.
I mean it's a variety of things of course.
I mean one of the things that tames man's often wild energy, as you point out, we tend to not cluster around the center of the bell curve in terms of moral energies and abilities.
We tend to be really good or really bad, really smart or really dumb, and to harness and manage that It has taken usually bringing down the wild testosterone horses of male energy with the soft lassoes of, you know, matrimony and fatherhood and so on.
And since women have tried to go it alone, it hasn't diminished the need for resources within the family.
They've just been shifted from individual men to collectivized taxpayers.
You know, now, of course, we have massive subsidies towards single parent households, most of almost all of whom are headed by by women.
And so in a sense, men have like, OK, we have kids.
And now, quote, society as a whole is going to pay for their upkeep and their education and their health care and so on.
And it's created a very unstable kind of situation where men tend to have fewer responsibilities.
And normally in the past, if you didn't take on your responsibilities, you wouldn't get to have sex because women would say, well, no, thanks.
You're a shiftless bum and I don't want to have anything to do with you.
But that's really changed, and I mean, what a disaster for children as a whole, and for men, of course, and women, too.
Yes, I think it's changed and not changed.
The interesting thing is that there's a much greater percentage of boys who have what is called a failure.
Well, what I call in the book I'm doing now, Boys to Men, called a failure to launch and that just don't have their act together.
That that are listless, that are, you know, that are preoccupied with playing video games or are satisfied with video porn.
And when you ask them, you know, don't you want to do something more?
They sort of half of them says, well, sort of.
And the other half says, well, why should I?
Because, you know, life is working OK as it is.
And perhaps on some unconscious level, there's an unconscious wisdom to this.
You know, they look at the people who have launched and, you know, who are fathers with divorces or fathers in dead end jobs that they are that make decent money, but they hate the jobs.
And, you know, or and they say, you know, what is your father?
And so they look at a father that's divorced and has lost his children, but it's still paying for an ex-wife and the children financially, but is not really having a lovely life or a lovely connection.
And they ask themselves.
Do I really want to go there?
Is that if that's what launching is about a failure to launch seems fine with me.
But this creates enormous amounts of psychological problems for the boy who really, when he does want to be interested in something, he has something, let's say, in a community college that he sees as an opportunity, and he just can't finish his homework because he hasn't had that discipline of postponed gratification to even succeed at anything that he might discover that he wishes to succeed at.
And that obviously makes him depressed.
And so he might get on to Adderall or Ritalin or some type of drug to sort of help him tame his ADHD.
But that only creates different problems in the brain that leaves him with another series of problems down the road.
And so if we don't deal with the issue of having both mom and dad involved with the family and a dozen other issues, having the school system become more user-friendly to boys, like having more recess time.
When boys don't have physical activity to integrate with their grades, their grades go down.
When boys do have physical activity, their grades go up.
The amount of time used in physical play up to a certain point actually increases grades for boys.
It does not decrease grades for boys.
And it does for girls almost to the same degree, but not to the same degree as it does for For boys, girls have a lot more tolerance for being able to sit and take notes and be less fidgety.
And vocational education, the school systems have by and large cut back to a great degree vocational schools, whereas in Japan and in Germany, vocational schools are much more integrated into the system.
And when people graduate from vocational schools in In Japan, more than 98% of them get jobs.
And so that's way, way over what happens for boys when they graduate from school in the United States and in Canada.
And so taking away things that are user-friendly for boys in schools has been an enormous mistake that we're all paying a price for and turning the government into a substitute husband To pay for boys and girls being raised without fathers is a very penny-wise and pound-foolish way to raise children.
I think in the US, 40% of children are now born out of wedlock.
Would we not call that a failure to defer gratification on the part of the women?
Like, just wait until you're married and in a stable relationship, for heaven's sakes, like every generation of women up until the 1970s, until you have And this failure to launch thing, I mean, I certainly heard about it and we talked about it.
I've read Dr. Zimbardo's – it's a great book, The Demise of Guys.
Yeah, it seems almost it's not so much a failure to launch as it is nowhere to land.
I mean, I remember growing up, as I said, I grew up in the 70s and 80s.
And I really remember not having any particular clue that I was of value to society or that I was necessary for a family or that I was important to the world as a whole.
I mean, teenage boys were always kind of portrayed as kind of annoying, kind of snarky, kind of smelly, kind of self-involved, kind of lazy, kind of scrawny, and all that, and there was no sense that I ever got.
I mean, I certainly got the sense that women were essential to the world, that women were hugely important to the world and women were generally considered to be better.
You know, men are just broken women.
That's a sort of sad statement.
But I never really got the sense, I think this is probably true, it must be even worse now for people, men younger than me, never got a sense that society really needed me.
Like, I was just something that society had to put up with until I, you know, learned how to shower twice a day or something like that.
I mean, and I think that this lack of respect for young men.
And the data is so clear that without young men, families tend to go, I mean, as I think the American writer Ann Coulter has pointed out, there's no single worst predicting factor for the outcome of a child than being from a single parent household.
I mean, gender doesn't do it, race doesn't do it, socioeconomic status doesn't do it, health doesn't do it, location doesn't do it, the single worst factor outcome.
And so young men are essential to a family and society is collapsing without them.
And it just, it would seem kind of nice for society to mention this to young men once in a while, but it seems like there's just this massive, I don't know if it's pride or the sort of fallacy of sunk costs or confirmation bias, but people are just not willing to say, oops man, sorry, we thought you were disposable.
It turns out that nature was right.
Sorry for the long rant.
It turns out that nature was right and you are absolutely necessary.
Please come back.
Yes, and that's because, first of all, I totally agree.
And certainly, once you accept the feminist premise that men had all the power and women didn't, and you define power as your metric is, are women equal numbers of members of Congress, Senate, Supreme Court, and so on, then you can give yourself the excuse to neglect boys and men until the metrics that you measure equality by
Are are are equal and you blind yourself to all the other variables and things and considerations That are you know that are that are part of this process, and you don't answer that you don't understand the core question I mean men do earn more money than women and they but they earn more money than women not for the same work But for 25 different work life choices that men and women on average tend to make at work
And when we, when we just assume that the, and so for example, never married women who have never had children have earned more than never married men who have never had children since the 1970s.
And recently they earned 117% more than never married men who have never had children.
And so when you don't see the world in terms of when you see it only in one way, And you don't look at all the variables and dimensions of it.
You can then excuse things like Homer Simpsons and the transition that we've gone from Father Knows Best to Father Knows Less.
Or if you watch Lifetime Channel from Father Knows Best to Father Molests.
And the boy grows up looking at what is a male?
He's either shooting somebody, he's using a gun, he's doing harm, or he's a super success.
And if I can't be a super Um, success in a hero.
Then I'm left with the Homer Simpson types of images and no one is questioning that we have, you know, kids with t-shirts and, and postcards and so on saying, you know, boys are stupid, throw rocks at them.
And, you know, no one would say blacks are stupid, throw rocks at them, or Jews are greedy, throw rocks at them.
Um, those things would be caught immediately as being, um, you know, or women are stupid, throw rocks at them would be just considered outrageous and hate speech and so on.
So because we've said that the world is run by men, for men, at the expense of women, we've given ourselves the excuse to never look at the problems that boys have because they appear to still be in charge.
But it's exactly the appearance of still being in charge that's part of the problem, that they can never acknowledge where they're failing, how they're hurt, and what they're feeling.
And those things become very dangerous.
Those are things we need to look at or we're not going to have boys that are worthy of our daughter's love.
Yeah, it is a strange thing and I think, I don't want to get overly libertarian, but it is a strange thing that when you start to get governments involved in the family, and this is back to Charles Murray's losing ground argument from the eighties, when you start to get governments involved in the family you fundamentally change cause and effect.
You change incentive structures in very catastrophic ways.
If governments are going to pay for illegitimacy, then women become less interested in quality men, and men become less interested in sticking around the consequences, and society as a whole becomes less interested in promoting the values that will try to avoid the quote, you know, old-time shame and the sort of forties and fifties of having a baby without
Having a husband, which was, you know, considered a very bad thing, and statistics have shown, even if you support women financially through the state, it's still a very bad thing, because you're still not having a configuration that we've sort of evolved to have.
And I think that bypassing of male breadwinners, and the very idea, of course, that if women want to have, you know, two, three, or four children, that this is not going to, and want to breastfeed them, which of course I hope they would, that this is not going to have an impact on their professional trajectory.
I mean, it takes an enormous amount of ideology to believe some really ridiculous things that, you know, I think your average ape would be able to figure out fairly easily.
I mean, if you said to a woman, I mean, I would love to be your husband, but the odds are 90 to 95% that I will wander off for a couple of years, a couple of times, how do you think?
And she'd be like, well, no, I think I'll stick with someone who'll stick around and employers face the same challenges.
So again, it's just one of these things like, well, of course, there's going to be a diminishment of salary when you take time off to have children.
That doesn't mean that it's a bad decision.
It's wonderful to have children, but they have your cake and eat it too.
I mean, I think that's male pragmatism doesn't accept that as so much, but if you can convince society that you're a victim, you gain resources when the government is involved in these kinds of things.
You You can bully or browbeat or whine or complain or, you know, attack or wave picket signs and, you know, as what's happened with your speech at the University of Toronto, you can raise a ruckus and people will throw you money and power through the state.
That doesn't really tend to happen in civil societies much, but sorry for this again, long tangential rant, but once you get the state involved, complaining and setting people against each other can get you resources that otherwise would never materialize.
Yes.
Unfortunately, feminists have specialized in victim power.
And when you start competing to be the best victim, then you create not female empowerment, but female disempowerment.
And that's been a real mistake.
And certainly the government has become a substitute husband to a large degree.
And when you start giving women incentives to not be married and not have the man involved, In order to be able to get more money by not having the man involved, you are reversing the incentives that would be functional.
The one area of government involvement that I think has proven to be fairly functional for a more effective family unit is the law in Sweden that says that if you take a paternity leave for, I think it's up to six months or a year, I'm forgetting which, Um, then if you don't take that paternity leave, you will lose it.
And, um, and, and that has gotten a lot more father involvement in, um, in countries where the, uh, in Canada also has, they used to have a law that, that did not, uh, that was very tight on paternity leaves.
And when that law was loosened, uh, in Canada, there was a much greater increase, um, in the percentages of men that took paternity leaves, because anyway, in the old days, if you didn't have any type of incentive, to take a paternity leave, you just wouldn't take it because you would fear cutting back too much on your work.
So the women would raise the children and the men would have very minimal involvement.
And when the child was born, the father had to increase his focus on the workplace and therefore be away from the child during very crucial years.
So I think it's very important to not be controlled by either the ideology of the left or the ideology of That and always look at each individual situation and say, you know, what is there?
That's what are not just the immediate consequences.
I think many of the many left wing people tend to sort of say, if there's if there's somebody starving, let's give them a fish.
And if they're still starving, let's continue giving them a fish.
And I think libertarians and conservatives tend to understand that teaching them how to fish is better.
On the other hand, there are certain things that government can do.
put the incentives in a direction that might have long-term consequences that are valuable.
And so we should always say, you know, where do we need government and where is government going to be functional in the short run and dysfunctional in the long run?
For the most part, its involvement in family matters is dysfunctional in the long run, but that most part situation should never blind us to the possibilities of exceptions to that rule.
Right.
Well, I wanted to make sure, because again, we talked before the show.
Oh, I hate calling it a show.
It sounds like we're about to break into tap or something.
But we talked before about some of your upcoming projects.
Of course, I'll link to your website.
So you're writing a book with John Gray.
Is that right?
Yes, I'm doing a book.
It'll probably be called Boys to Men with John Gray, the fellow that wrote Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.
And although if someone's listening to this and they sort of want the core, the book that libertarians tend to love that I wrote is a book called The Myth of Male Power.
And that looks at some of the dysfunctional ways that government has gotten involved as substitute husbands that have tended to undermine the family, and looking at victim power and how dysfunctional that has been, and looking at a great deal of the The aspects of feminism that have been the shadow side of feminism, and so the myth of male power probably expresses that the best.
Alright, and it's probably worth adding, because of the volatility of the subject, the usual asterisks, caveats.
My wife practices psychology.
I think she's a wonderful opportunity.
My daughter, I want her to have all the opportunities in the world, but I definitely do want to remind men that whether you're told or not, you're needed.
You know, the DNA of society cries out for your involvement, cries out for your engagement, cries out for your resources.
And I'm sorry to men as a whole, particularly the younger men who've been told otherwise.
But if you stay off to the sidelines of society, the game tends to go very bad very quickly.
And I hope that this will encourage some men to think about engaging more actively in family life, in professional life, in deferring gratification, getting a good education, whatever you want to do, That is your passion, because the sort of quicksand of immediate gratification does lead to a very dead place, particularly when you get older.
Just to remind women as well to choose men with quality, choose men of longevity, long-lasting values of deep values and commitment.
I think the revolution to fix society really has to start in our personal choices, particularly our romantic choices, our family choices, our parenting choices.
It is very seductive.
This is true in the libertarian community in particular.
It's very seductive to get dragged into lots of very abstract debates about things you have no control over.
But to really focus on bringing our ethics of peace and commitment to our personal lives, I think, is the great revolution.
And of course, I think this is magnificent, the work that you've done in this field.
And I really wanted to thank you for that, you know, as a father, as a man, as a human being, as a part of the Western culture.
It's hugely important.
And it is a voice that the men's rights voice or the balancing rights voice, whatever you want to call it, It is so essential because it is a message that is so downplayed in society and it does sideline some of the people we need the most and I think that's really tragic and by the time they figure out they're sidelined it often is too late to circle back very easily and get themselves going again.
So I hope that the work that you're doing is going to wake people up to that.
Is there anything else?
Sorry again I'm doing the ramble here but is there anything else that you wanted to add because the work you're doing is so important.
I would hate to be the guy who gets the last word on you.
Yeah, no, no, that's fine.
I think I think the one of the words that you said, you know, the sense of we have a purpose and men need to know we have purpose throughout all of history.
The, you know, the societies that survive survive based on telling his boys that.
Your purpose was to be disposable.
Disposable in war, disposable in work.
We didn't say your purpose was to be disposable.
We said your purpose was to be a war hero, but that required the willingness to be disposable as needed.
Or we said we need you as a coal miner, and that required you to be disposable as needed.
But we got boys to be able to do these things by saying, you have a purpose.
And boys today oftentimes are not being told.
We have a purpose.
And when boys are not told they have a purpose, we tend to stagnate.
And so we really need to see how crucial we are in the process of raising children.
And we need to see that our energy, our types of energy, has an enormously important value in the workplace.
Our creativity, our willingness to not put friendship with children above a tough love and love in that way with children.
So these are the things that are really the crucial and understanding the workplace.
Um, when I did the research for a book called, uh, why men earn more and what women can do about it, I really discovered exactly, you know, a very libertarian philosophy that, you know, that the workplace really rewards people who serve it best.
And when people are not serving it effectively, it doesn't reward them regardless of gender.
And this is why children, women who, um, who put more energy into work outproduce male counterparts.
And so we need to realize that we haven't grown up in a world that is a plot against women and in favor of men.
We've really grown up in a world that is a lot more balanced than that.
And we have had a distorted view of that, that we really need to unweave before we have a tapestry of love.
Wise words indeed.
And I really, really want to thank you for your time.
I hope we can chat again and thanks again for all the work that you've done.
It's a pleasure and it's really great to see the work you're doing and that somebody is really thinking and going in depth rather than just brushing over the surface.
Thank you again.
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