All Episodes
Previous Next
July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:50
THE FRIEND ZONE
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
Welcome to your daily argument from Stefan Molyneux.
So, the friend zone.
Ooh, we've all circled that drain at one time or another.
The basic idea is that there's some attractive woman, some great woman, but she is drawn like an atom to a black hole to the gravity well of dysfunctional guys.
And you know they're bad for her.
And in some weird way, she knows that they're bad for her.
But she keeps going back to the bad boy, unemployed, ask you for money, beat up car, seven different colors, tattooed jerk, rather than staying with your fine, productive and responsible self.
Now, what happens is you kind of float around this woman.
And what happens is she ends up being harmed by this crazy guy.
She's going out with and then she comes and cries on your shoulders, and you're like hey Let me comfort you honey, but she just doesn't gravitate towards you now and maybe later on in her life You know when she hits the wall late 20s early 30s depending on how hard-living her lifestyle has been what happens is She kind of comes back to you, and it's ready to settle down, but you know that you're like sloppy seconds.
You're not High up on her list.
She'll settle for you because the bad boys are looking for younger meat.
And so then maybe you'll marry her, maybe you won't, but it probably won't last because when women have been with a lot of guys, they're bad marriage material.
Statistically, like a woman who's been with like 15 or 16 guys, she's like 80 to 85% likely to divorce you or you're going to get divorced.
So damaged goods from a huge amount of injections.
So the friend zone is interesting because it's kind of a new phenomenon.
So when I was in college, I took a course on the origins, the rise of the novel, because it was all about economic productivity back in the day.
And one thing that was interesting was how repetitively these novels had the same kind of theme.
The same kind of theme was this.
Ladies, I know he's pretty.
I know he's charming.
I know he's got glib superficial charm and high cheekbones and great hair, but don't marry him.
Don't marry him.
He's a narcissist.
He's a sociopath.
He's a psychopath.
He's cold-hearted.
He's a player.
He's going to sleep around on you.
He's unstable.
He won't be able to keep a job because he's too vain.
It was all about piercing women's desire for male ruggedness and male charm and saying forget the outside look to the inside Now, that has largely fallen away.
Now it's all about find your bliss, and also there's this weird kind of Marxist hatred for the bourgeoisie.
You know, like if you have a husband who's an accountant, he is by definition in modern art going to be boring and he's going to be stayed.
He's not going to want to try anything new.
And you should divorce him and go and screw the painter down the street who hasn't had a job in 15 years, survives off government grants, but knows how to make a mean latte and an orgasm.
So this idea that if you marry a stable provider, that things are just going to be boring for you and be bad for you.
And what you need to do is follow your sexual, romantic, and self-actualization bliss.
Think of Kramer vs. Kramer, a movie that back in the day when you had to pay for movies every time, I went to watch three times when I was in my early teens because Meryl Streep divorces Dustin Hoffman for no particular reason.
No particular reason at all.
Just dissatisfied.
And provoking this general air of dissatisfaction is kind of what the leftists do.
So my question is, Well, it's a rhetorical question because I'm going to answer it too.
My question is, why was there no friend zone before the welfare state?
In what I've read in the past, what I've seen, there's no friend zone in Shakespeare.
Because the whole point of art, back in the day, was to train women to think with their minds rather than their vaginas, right?
I mean, in the same way that men, you know, he's attractive, right?
statement that somebody asked Melania Trump, would you be with Donald Trump if he wasn't rich?
And she said, would he be with me if I wasn't beautiful?
Well, although of course, they're both smart and all that.
But it's an interesting question.
How do you bypass your natural Lizard brain lusts to make sure that you partner up with somebody who's good and kind and noble and virtuous and all of that courageous and productive and stable and all that kind of stuff.
Well, that used to be a lot of training to sort of lasso and harness the mad lusts of youth.
And I remember Socrates later on in his life said that being freed of sexual desire was like being released from the possession of a demon.
And I think we've all had that feeling from time to time.
So training the youth to bypass their, our selected, lizard brain, physical lust metric and go for personality and quality and stability was the point of a lot of Christianity, of a lot of art, of a lot of elder wisdom that was passed down.
And of course, there were the smoking craters of people, and in particular women, who had followed lust off a cliff, right?
They had gotten together with some guy and they had to suffer and bite their lips in silence as he philandered all the way through the village like Genghis Khan in slow motion.
And, or, you know, he'd just leave them or, you know, some disaster would occur.
And then the parents had the oogie boogie, right?
Remember Sally down the road?
Well, she decided to marry for lust rather than for quality.
And look, her life is now terrible and her kids don't have a father and she's broke all the time and she's got a...
Blanche Dubois style depend upon the kindness of strangers in order to survive.
That's a famous line from the play.
I've always depended on the kindness of strangers.
Well, that's the welfare state, right?
Except it's not kindness, and they're more like your tax livestock than strangers.
But where was the friend zone before the welfare state?
Well, it didn't really exist.
Now, once the welfare state comes along, Than a woman who is evolutionarily designed to acquire resources for her offspring.
I mean, let's just be basic and factual about it.
There can be love for virtue, for quality, for self-knowledge, for moral courage, and all this kind of stuff.
But basically, biologically, we're evolved for men to gather resources to access the eggs of the highest quality woman around.
Which is why when you get the welfare state, you get a lowering of male ambition.
Because if you're a poor man getting more resources doesn't really get you a high quality woman because she can just go marry the state and get her resources through the coercive redistributionist welfare state.
If you get your money from the welfare state, then you don't need male quality.
You don't need male virtue.
So the demand for male virtue declines.
And then you wonder why, or worry why, in sort of inner cities and ghettos and so on, female dependence on the state goes hand-in-hand with increasing male criminality and sociopathy and cruelty and violence and lack of a work ethic and so on.
Well, of course.
Because men acquire resources in order to get access to eggs and women acquire men in order to get access to resources, because evolutionarily speaking, from her teens until her thirties, a woman was pretty much economically disabled by being pregnant, having children, breastfeeding, and rinse and repeat.
And so women are designed to get resources.
Now, if women can get resources from the state, then they don't need men, which means that the demand for male virtue goes down.
And it also means that women then can be free To insult men, to denigrate men, to think that all men are rapists and patriots and male chauvinist pigs and whatever, privileged.
They can do all of that because they don't need men.
They can get money.
Or rather, they do need men, but they don't need men directly.
They need men to be productive so that male taxation can be grabbed at gunpoint by the state and redistributed to women.
I mean, the national debt is largely because of welfare in the West.
I mean, in America it's because of the welfare warfare state.
But national debt is significantly because of welfare.
And welfare is almost exclusively because of single mothers, right?
It's not the welfare state, it's the single mom state.
And so you can be friend-zoned because the woman is getting her resources from the state.
And therefore, she can pursue silly, sentimental, hormone-based lusts for fast-talking bad boys because she's guaranteed to get those resources if the relationship doesn't work out.
And remember, women don't have empathy for men.
Women have empathy for their children, right?
There's an old song, I think it's from the 1920s.
Get out of here and get me some money too.
And it's all about the woman just demanding that the man go and get some money.
Because women need resources for their children.
And if the man has to go and work a dangerous job, well, that's just what he's got to do.
That's the reason why, you know, 95% of workplace injuries are male.
And so the woman doesn't have empathy for the man, she has empathy for her children.
And therefore she needs the man to get resources.
But when she can go and get those resources from the state, well then the man becomes the boy toy.
And coldness and harshness and prettiness become the sexual market value coin of the realm.
And good men, the value of good men diminishes enormously.
And when the demand for virtue diminishes, the supply of immorality goes through the roof.
Thank you so much.
Stefan Molyneux, your Daily Argument.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection