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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:00:29
Women on Pedestals Can Only Fall | GirlWritesWhat and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I'm here with Girl Writes What, who writes from Girl Writes Where.
We just don't know.
It's a mystery.
So, welcome.
It's great to see the kitchen is looking good.
And there are, of course, going to be the inevitable comments about your place in it.
But thank you so much, of course, for all the work that you're doing.
I have been listening to your show for a year or two now, and we've chatted once before.
I think we've got a show coming up with Dr. Warren Farrell, who had enormously kind And I think justly deserved praise for your work.
So thank you so much for taking the time.
I was extremely flattered by that, actually, and I'm really looking forward to talking with you and Warren.
And just to let you know, my kitchen is not as clean as it looks.
I've piled most of the mess in behind the tall cabinet here and in the sink.
So, you know, if anybody wants to get on me about dirty dishes and stuff, go ahead.
Just bring it on.
Well, actually, right behind this curtain is a garbage dump with seagulls.
So we all have to, you know, cover up as best we can everything that's going on in our lives.
So, how are things going for you?
I guess we last talked about a year ago, maybe a little less, and I think that you've been obviously doing some great work.
You've garnered some great interest, as is generally the case when you deal with any essential topics.
The interest generated has been both positive and negative, in other words, fair and reactive.
So, how's it been going for you?
You know, it really has been going well and I think probably the ratio of positive to negative as far as responses to my stuff, it's about 90% positive.
I get messages every day from men, you know, sort of telling me their stories and, you know, I'm just really glad that there's somebody out there who's talking about this stuff and all of that.
And even the negative stuff is kind of pathetic.
You know, the negative feedback that I get is, you know, they will try and twist something that I said, or, you know, and then, did you really say that?
And did you really mean that?
You know, blah, blah, blah.
And I don't even respond.
So, you know, I don't get death threats.
I don't get, you know, any kind of threats at all, really.
So there you go.
Well, that's good to hear.
So Margaret Thatcher just died.
And You know, I was actually kind of getting a little bit misty in the car on the way home from dropping my kid at school when I heard that.
Even if you don't like her politics, you have to sort of admire her toughness.
So, you know, I was kind of sad to hear that.
Yeah, I mean, there are a number of, I think, incredibly prominent and high-achieving women that have been somewhat ignored.
I mean, of course, I'm a huge fan of Ayn Rand, and I was very interested in Margaret Thatcher.
I mean, I thought her politics were fascinating.
I, of course, was for the smaller government, not so much with the pro-war stuff, but I So I thought but but she was a very you know powerful.
I think of obviously a blindingly intelligent resourceful Courageous in her own way and all of that and I do remember at the time a fairly universal scorn coming from other women towards Margaret Thatcher as as did towards Ayn Rand as has towards Phyllis Schlafly and Ann Coulter and all of the other people who would be viewed as more on the right stuff to put Ayn Rand in any political spectrum she has her own political universe, but
I remember at the time, when I was younger, thinking that that seemed different from promoting the success of women.
Ayn Rand has written the most influential book in the English language after, you know, God's Little Tome, and so that's quite an achievement.
And this is an achievement from a woman who's written one of the most popular English novels while not speaking English natively.
I mean, it's an incredible accomplishment.
And yet just universally scorned.
And that seemed odd to me.
I mean, I thought that the sort of ideal of promoting women was to, you know, attempt to help promote and recognize the accomplishments of women in new fields.
And I just sort of named four who seemed to be not promoted by women.
And I remember that at the time was like, well, then there must be something other than gender that's going on here.
And that's when I began to become a bit more skeptical about the political bent of this movement.
Well, what I think, too, I think all of those particular women, sort of, I know Ayn Rand, whether you can pinpoint her politics or not, they're decidedly not Marxist, and Shirley.
And when you look at Thatcher and Ann Coulter and Phyllis Schlafly, I think that all of them would say I really don't owe anything to the women's movement.
I really don't owe anything to feminism.
I've gotten where I am on my own.
And the moment that you say that, that you are basically proving or you're coming out and saying the women's movement isn't necessary.
Women have been able to do it all along.
Really, they have not been held down by anything other than lack of technology and their own biology and their own choices.
Everybody's choices in the past were much more limited.
But when you look at it in 1432 or something, the London Blacksmiths Guild had two female masters.
Right?
So these women were not denied an education.
Back then, an education for most people was learning a trade.
And women were not denied this.
They were able to go into something like that and go through the entire grueling, long process of, you know, basically indentured servitude through apprenticeship.
And often, if you wanted out, you'd have to buy your way out.
And so they would go through this, and these are women, they ended up, you can't work at a blacksmith's forge with a baby strapped to your back, or while you're pregnant, you just can't.
And you cannot get married if, at age 25, you're still a journeyman.
Right?
Right.
So, you know, women, they've always had this choice, they've just had, it's been a harder choice.
Yeah, I mean, it seems to me that the devaluing of motherhood that seems to have gone on, again this is just sort of my personal impression, the devaluing of motherhood that's gone on since the post-war period has to me been really fascinating.
I mean, I think you have three kids, I have one daughter, and I'm a stay-at-home dad with her.
Boy, you know, I can't think of anything that is, you know, it's a cliche and it's in every Hallmark card, but it's genuinely true for me.
Like, I can't think of anything that's going to be more important that I'm going to do in my life than, you know, be a parent and raise a great human being.
It's something everyone says, but, you know, we don't really act that way as much as we say we do in society.
The devaluing of motherhood and the promotion of careerism It seems to be something that's hard to comprehend, like why you'd want to give up spending time with your kids to go and grind away at some usually quite dull, quite uninspiring job.
You know, the quality of jobs in the business world is like the distribution of money in the art world.
Like 99% of the money goes to 1% of the people.
99% of the fun jobs goes to like 1% of the people.
And how do you think this was brought about?
Because it seems so counterintuitive and counter, like, boy, I mean, if somebody said, well, you can't now be a stay-at-home dad, you have to go work in a factory or in an office, I'd be like, oh man, which kidney do I have to sell to avoid this fate?
That's right.
But you look at it and you think feminism, the earliest proponents, the suffragettes, when you look at the old photos of how they were dressed, they were not dressed for work.
And you look at All of these women who were privileged in some way in the very, very early women's movement in the 1800s, you know, Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the 17% of the British population at that time who could read and write well enough to sign her own name.
So she was incredibly privileged.
And I mean like there was a big deal made out of the fact that her father took her trust fund to pay off family debts when they fell on hard times.
But that just says she had a trust fund to begin with.
So I mean these are privileged women.
These are women who are looking around and they're not saying, you know, why can't I work in a coal mine like my husband for 14 hours a day?
No, they're looking and saying, why can't I be a barrister like my father?
Because that would be really exciting.
And it's an avenue to power.
There's no avenue to power in, you know, when you're chipping coal by hand out of the walls of a mine.
That's just scraping by.
It's not even economic power that you're getting there.
It's just economic, you know, self-sufficiency.
That's all it is.
And when you look at How long the women's movement, even prior to the suffragettes, was
You know, these white, wealthy, upper middle class, not just middle class, because the middle class couldn't afford to be feminists any more than the working class could, but upper middle class, the elites, this was who was the driving force behind all of this up to the point where the technology had made it safer and easier for women to go to work, and then it really caught on.
Right?
Because now you're not working outdoors, you're not shoveling coal onto a lorry because that's the only thing that you're qualified to do.
Now you've got publicly funded education, you can read and write, and you can go and answer phones in an office that's climate controlled, and you don't have to walk five miles to get home.
So, and when you get home, you're not taking the rugs out and beating them by hand in the yard and doing laundry in a cauldron.
So, I mean, all of these things change to make working outside the home more amenable to women.
But, you know, in the beginning of feminism, it was all upper middle class, the ones who would be working in an office, not, you know, out in a, I guess, in a tannery or, you know, things like that.
Yeah, it is.
And of course, Mary Wilson Craft Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein and Vindication of the Rights of Women, did not face any particular barriers to getting published.
I mean, nor did any of the 18th or 19th century female novelists who had a great time.
If there was a market, then people would happily publish them.
So there weren't any particular barriers.
Well, you even look at Lucrezia Marinella of, I think it was Italy, in the year 1600.
She wrote a book all about how women are awesome and men suck.
And she was like, of course you see the wife of a porter or a butcher dressed in fine silks with pearls and rings and all of these things.
That's only fitting.
Because even if she's humbly born, she deserves that for her feminine excellence.
And then you look at her husband and you see him, you know, all in ragged clothes, all covered in blood from cutting the meat.
And this is fitting, too, because his existence is as a little ass bred to her service, right?
This is actually written in 1600 and published in 1600.
So, I mean, I can't imagine that that woman felt depressed.
I really can't.
So how do you think, I mean it's hard to see, the ruling elites always sort of brings around this sort of reptilian overlords and so on, but I think that there are those in power who have very good instincts for staying in power and why wouldn't they?
I mean, being in power, I hear, is quite a lot of fun.
But how on earth were they able to convince women?
Like the typical thing that I sort of heard about is sort of women in the 50s and 60s would have like a click moment.
They'd sort of be driving their kids to some other extramural activity and they'd say, oh, you know, I'm a smart woman.
I've got some education.
Why am I just a chauffeur?
Why am I just – you know, I've got to do more with my life.
I've got to be more.
Well, I don't understand why they didn't do what my mother did, right?
So when my mother was like, oh, this is boring and I got to do something to keep busy, she grew a vegetable garden and she canned and froze the vegetables and she made gems and she stained the siding on the house and she painted the entire interior, including the ceilings.
And she replaced doorknobs and installed light fixtures and did all kinds of stuff like that.
She cleared all of the sod that needed to be cleared for the concrete foundation for the garage to be built with just a shovel and a wheelbarrow.
So, I mean, she found things to do.
There were always, always, always things to do to keep yourself busy that had, you know, they had a great economic value toward the family because it meant that my dad didn't have to pay somebody to stay in the siding and he didn't have to pay somebody to paint the inside of the house.
And he didn't have to pay somebody to clear away that sod.
And so all of those things she did contributed economically to the household and made it so that she can, number one, stay home with us and number two, not be bored.
And number three, learn all kinds of useful skills and kind of have fun and do the whole raw, I did that, right?
I did that difficult thing that's even maybe a man's job, right?
Or typically a man's job.
And there was, of course, also an extraordinarily long tradition of female charity and volunteerism for the stay-at-home moms, and so when a lot of women went into the workforce, that kind of fell away, and of course did coincide to some degree with the rise of the welfare state, because there was less, you know, bringing soup to your neighbors and going off to work, and because there was that social fabric that had frayed or diminished.
It seems like it, it's hard to say cause and effect, but it seemed like it coincided.
Well, I mean, like, my mom was also a block parent, right?
I don't know if everybody's going to know what that is, because I don't know whether they have them anymore.
But, you know, anytime there was a kid who skinned his knee, or he, you know, felt scared, or there was a dog, he could come to see the sign in the window, come to the house, my mom would help out.
Now you go into these sort of suburban neighborhoods like where I grew up, and during the day, they're completely empty.
Completely empty.
Just absolutely silent.
There's no kids playing in the park.
There's no kids on the street.
There's nobody in the houses.
There's just nothing.
They're just dead zones.
And it's all very, very large houses on teeny tiny little lots.
Everybody's mortgaged to the hilt.
And they're working like mad, both of them, to make their mortgage payments.
I find that's played into it as well, too, is the idea that you have to have a house this size, you have to have a house that's this nice, you have to have new furniture, and you have to keep up to date, and those curtains are very shabby, and it all costs money, and it requires two people to go out and pay for that.
Now, would you say, as far as I understand it, The economic indices seem to appear that almost all the stuff that you're talking about is driven by female preferences rather than male preferences.
Do you think that's historical?
I mean, it seems kind of new that, to me at least, that women would prefer stuff to time with their kids as a whole.
It just seems like kind of a new phenomenon.
Is it driven by advertising?
Is it driven by vanity, competition?
I mean, how on earth was this sold to people that new curtains is better than a day with your kids?
I mean, it just seems so bizarre to me.
It does, it does.
I think one of the things that people don't like to talk about is hypergamy.
And that's the natural tendency of women to want to marry up, and it's not a bad thing.
It's part of what got us to where we are now.
Because if, you know, when you're looking at your entire future as, I'm going to spend two years out of every four either pregnant or attached at the breast to a baby, I don't just need somebody who's as good at picking berries as I am, right?
I need somebody who's better than that, right?
Who can provide for, you know, twice that much or even three times that much to support me and my children while we're kind of laid up and can't do as much.
So when you look at that natural tendency for women to marry up or to mate up, it's all perfectly normal and it's all perfectly explainable.
But when you economically empower women, And you allow them to, you know, she's gone to law school and now she's making $120,000 a year.
She's not going to want to marry somebody who's only making $70,000 a year and who has less status in his career.
She's going to want someone who's even better than her.
And a lot of the ways that, you know, and she can afford to buy all of this stuff, right?
And that's how she can compete and show herself to, you know, To be high status is I have all these nice things and I have this nice hair and I can keep myself in shape because I can afford this expensive gym membership and a personal trainer and to eat a good diet which a lot of poor people can't afford.
But not only that, he has to prove himself in a visible way by driving a nice car and having the latest gadget and all of these other things, right?
So materialism, when there were limits on everything and nobody had credit, when there weren't so many different things that we could own.
There were limits on it.
There were just natural constraints on how much you could acquire and especially on how much women could acquire if they wanted to be married.
And now there's just absolutely no limit on it and it's just gone haywire.
It's – we have an instinct toward glutting ourselves when there's – during feast times, right?
And just in case tomorrow is a famine.
And when the famine doesn't come until you're $300,000 in consumer debt, Right?
It's, it just, people just, they buy.
I've, I've seen, you know, I would watch, um, what was it, Till Debt Do Us Part?
I don't know if you've ever seen that.
Yeah, yeah.
Um, that show, and, and she would, she would be going through this, this woman, you know, her, her kid's closet, and she'd be finding dresses still with tags on for the daughter that the daughter has long grown out of, right?
30 of them.
And she's like, number one, what kid needs 30 dresses?
And number two, you know, these are just the dresses that you didn't get around to putting her in and she's already grown up.
Like, why would you buy this?
And it's just because I felt like I had to.
I saw it and I wanted it.
And, uh, yeah, it's crazy.
Yeah, I mean, as we talked about, yes, we talked about it, but the difference is, okay, but the difference is, like, okay, so I remember seeing a Murphy Brown when I was younger, this is going back in the day, probably too young, anyway, so a Murphy Brown when I was younger, and two guys were engaged in a sort of one-upmanship conversation, and Murphy Brown said to them, you know, just whip out your dicks and let's measure them and get this over with, right?
So she openly mocked the men's one-upmanship kind of thing.
So, okay, it's instinct.
Okay, absolutely.
I understand that.
But the question is, why is it not an instinct that society is skeptical towards?
I think that's sort of my major issue.
Because, yeah, men have their instincts, but men are mocked.
And men are, you know, in some ways, in a positive way, like a kind of joking way.
In other ways, more of a negative and hostile way.
But men's kind of one-upmanship is kind of mocked.
But women's acquisitiveness is not.
And that, to me, I think is I've really been striving for a long time to try to figure this thing out, which is, do women want me to treat them equally to men?
Because I would mock men for any kind of, you know, I've got hair plugs and a Maserati, you know, it's ground-up youth spread over the follicles.
You make fun of men for their vanities and for their and this is one of the ways it's a positive, anything kind way in which you can bring people back to Earth and away from sort of the biological vanity of the species.
That doesn't seem to be quite as common a topic, to put it as nicely as possible, in the way that women's consumerism and acquisitiveness and and competition and and vanity and so on is driving a pretty unsustainable economic paradigm.
Well, I mean, you look at it and you think, well, OK, so if if I look at that girl at work who because we were talking about haircuts because I recently just got myself scalped and and, you know, you go in, you say, give me the haircut of a nine year old boy.
She went a little bit shorter than normal, but, and I had a lot of people at work saying, oh my goodness, it looks even better than usual, and then They said, well, where do you get it done?
And I said, Singleton's.
I walk in, I pay my $19, and there you go.
It takes 10 minutes.
And the one girl, she says, every time I get my hair done, it's $85.
And, I mean, she's still in high school.
Right?
She works and she's still in high school and she's paying $85 every month to get her hair done.
And I just, I just want to just, I put my head in my hands and like, what are you doing?
I mean, to straighten it and frost it and highlight it and layer it and get hair extensions and for what?
And a lot of that, I think, is a lot of women's fashion is a way of saying, look at how much work I don't have to do.
Right?
Look at my high heels.
Look how far I don't have to walk every day.
And look at my fingernails.
Look at how much physical work I don't have to do.
And look at my perfect hair and how little time I have to spend sweating or being out in the wind.
Look at my really, really difficult fashions that are completely, you know, just inconvenient for getting anything done in, right?
That means I don't actually need to do anything for myself.
And it's a way of conveying that you have status, you have money, you have resources, or you have somebody who's willing to get you all of these things.
You don't have to do all that work.
Well, that's true.
And of course, as you probably know, the history of muscularity in men is when manual labor was the norm, not being muscular, like Humphrey Brogat's professional spaghetti arms, like not being muscular was a status symbol because it meant you didn't have to work in Now when physical labor is not the norm, having muscles shows that you have that.
But the thing is, and I agree with you about the explanations, But men, at least any reasonably enlightened man, looks at a man who's displaying this kind of ridiculous, conspicuous consumption and says, you're kind of a dick.
Like, it's ridiculous, it's embarrassing, and it's stupid.
And I don't know that that's really part of how we look at this female conspicuous consumption.
No, we don't.
And a lot of that has to do with, like, I don't tell that girl, like, what the hell, are you crazy?
Spending 85 bucks on that?
And you know what?
Honestly, if you went into singletons, it would probably look just as good, right?
So obviously, clearly, you're an idiot.
That would hurt her feelings.
Yeah, but men have feelings, and when we have ridiculous excesses, like the man who's 50, who's got hair plugs in the new sports car, is mocked in general.
And okay, it hurts his feelings, but, I mean, having your feelings hurt is, I think, part of overcoming silly things that you're doing, right?
The vanity, of course, having your vanity prick hurts.
We don't care about hurting men's feelings.
There's no taboo against hurting men.
Right?
There's a serious taboo against hurting women.
You know, injuring them, harming them, making them feel bad, making them cry.
It's a huge, huge thing.
It upsets us.
I mean, even just like that woman in the blue bra, right?
And I showed that video in one of my videos or You know, in a link underneath.
And there was a guy who said, I didn't even realize, I didn't even see the guy like 10 or 15 feet away who was getting beaten even worse than she was.
I didn't even notice him.
All he was fixated on was this woman who was being hurt.
So, like, we have a serious, it's biological as well as sort of culturally and socially amplified aversion to, you know, you don't want to be mean to a woman.
Yes, but I mean, is that not, I mean, it's so obvious one barely even needs to say it, but is that not ridiculously condescending?
I mean, building this moat around women, you know, like, y'all are just alabaster little goddesses who, you know, the faintest breath of criticism or questioning is going to fall over, certainly doesn't speak to the very tough, very impressive women that I know.
I mean, I'm married to a very tough, very impressive woman, and my daughter is very tough, very impressive.
The idea that we sort of dig this moat around women and protect them from the breaths of change and criticism and so on, it seems to me positively medieval.
It's extremely Victorian.
I mean, you look at, I don't know if you've heard about, you must have heard about Donglegate, right?
I think I would remember that.
The PyCon tech conference.
Adria Richards, who was supposedly a tech evangelist for a tech company.
So she's out there, you know, PR, you know, talking up a store.
I'm trying to get people interested in open source and in coding and things like that.
And she's sitting at this conference and there's these two guys sitting behind her and one of them says, You know, you see that guy's source code, oh my god, I would totally fork his repo, which is a tech term for taking that guy's code and taking it in a different direction.
And then the other guy, you know, at some point, I got some big dongles, and it's just like, It's a ridiculous pun.
It's one of the oldest ones in the profession.
She not only complained to the conference organizers about the sexist, sexist jokes behind her, and there's nothing sexist about a sexual joke.
I'm sorry, there just isn't.
She not only complained about them to the conference organizers, she tweeted A picture of them.
She turned around, snapped a picture of them, and tweeted it, and, you know, oh, the sexist, horrible, you know, dongle jokes and forking repos, oh my god.
And one of these guys was fired.
Wow.
Because of this.
From his job.
And this guy with three kids.
And then the internet just exploded, and She ended up being fired.
4chan got involved and went on a campaign of harassing her employer to get her fired, and she got fired.
Personally, I think that it would have been probably she created so much controversy that she couldn't have held on to her job regardless, just because what she did and the controversy she created just undermined PR for that company.
You know, you look at it and you think, it's a dongle joke, you know?
Like, does it have, like, is she really that fragile?
That hearing a dick joke, basically, right?
Not directed at her, not involving her, not...
No, conversation between these two guys and she called herself a Joan of Arc.
I'm thinking of the little girls who will never be able to get into tech and learn to love technology because she called them ass clowns.
Ass clowns like these.
And I'm thinking to myself, What?
You know, like, this is, uh, this is the attitude of a Victorian-era, um, you know, oh my goodness, he said something vulgar!
I'm going to retreat to my fainting couch!
You know, someone, someone avenge my honor!
You know, I've been besmirched!
Now I'm soiled for having heard his vulgar- and then the guy earns himself a beating because he said something, you know, he made a double entente or something like that, right?
And, you know, it's absolutely... It's just... It just seems so stupid.
But this is really where feminism is going.
Have you ever... I mean, of course you have.
I mean, if you've ever overheard women at work talking about their husbands or men in general, I mean, you actually do need smelling salts sometimes.
You actually do need a fainting couch sometimes.
I used to have a friend, we'd sit down, we'd have coffee, one of my step-sons would always want to encroach on the conversation, he was about 10 at the time, and I would finally look at him and I'd say, OK, you need to make yourself scarce or Kelly and I are going to start talking about our periods.
And then he'd go away, right?
I mean, so, you know, you look at that and how I can actually make him go and find something else to do besides bugging the grown-ups by saying, this is what we're going to talk about, something that's going to make you uncomfortable, so you better leave now.
But you look at it and you think men aren't allowed to have those conversations.
They're not even allowed to have those conversations in the men's washroom now.
I was reading an article by someone who was asking advice from a feminist who's a man.
He'd overheard some sexist comments in the men's washroom at a wedding and he wanted to know how he could intervene and let those men know That it was not okay to talk about those things, right?
It's not okay for you to say that.
I'm thinking it's the men's room.
You'd think men would be allowed to talk about, you know, talk freely there, you know.
No, no, but what you don't understand, of course, is that sexism creates germs and they're going to breathe that air out into...
You know, it's just the whole idea that talking about even just, you know, oh my goodness, she had a really nice, that, that, did you see that bridesmaid?
She had a really awesome body.
Like, so what?
You know, Obama saying best looking attorney general, you know, in history.
And he's got, he's forced to apologize.
Well, and I mean, this is something where for somehow for For men to talk about women's attractiveness, of course, is considered sexist and so on.
But not that I'm a regular reader, but, you know, Teen Tiger Beat magazine does not seem to have a lot of highly intellectual chess nerds on the cover.
You know, I mean, the boy bands are all gorgeous.
And Justin Bieber is, you know, like, you know, a young Elvis with cream on top.
And, you know, when you sort of hear about what the young girls want, it's, you know, it's cute and funny and, you know, with a nice car.
Like, so it seems, again, it's just a double standard.
Oh, my God, did you see his abs?
Oh, yeah.
His abs are so tight.
It's such an obvious double standard.
She's actually just talking about me.
But it's just such an obvious double standard.
You know, like the man goes to the strip club and it's exploitive and the woman goes to Chippendales and it's, you know, a woohoo fun girls night out.
And it just seems...
You even look at the ways that men at the strip club behave compared to women at the strip club.
I mean, I've been to both.
And generally, when you have a bunch of men watching female strippers, there's an extreme amount of, you know, distance and respect.
And I mean, there's not too much.
I mean, they cheer and stuff or applaud, but they They really are not over the top.
It's always just very much, I have to be well behaved or I'm going to get kicked out.
And then you look at the difference when women go to male strippers and it's just a freak show.
It's as if these women have no ability to control themselves.
They're not expected to.
I feel that this is footage that needs to be incorporated into some video of yours in the future.
I will be looking forward to seeing the feed for that.
Now something I've read about that I find quite interesting, and one of the videos that I did recently that got quite a fair amount of feedback, was why men, and I know you've tackled the subject too, why men are sort of fearful of getting married.
And I've read something about men going their own way, which seems to be sort of a specific avoidance of marriage due to the legal and financial dangers involved.
I sort of came across Zeta Male, and I don't know if you know more about the term, but I had a bit of trouble finding any kind of coherent definition and, you know, trying to wade through the YouTube videos on it seemed a bit excessive.
I think I understand the men-go-in-their-own-way thing, which is basically saying until the climate, the legal climate for marriage and its potential dissolution improves, or at least balances out, it's too risky to get married, and maybe even too risky to engage in sex.
And the Zeta male, though, seems to be something around being annoyed at women's priorities in their 20s and then not wanting to sort of take hand-me-downs, so to speak, in their 30s.
Do you know more about that or am I completely backing up the wrong tree?
Zeta Male is sort of a philosophy of men self-defining, right?
So they are defining masculinity, they're defining themselves and their own maleness and their own place in the world based not on any criteria that women It's basically, I'm just going to be my own man.
A lot of them are very much frustrated with the idea that women, because women's sort of window of Sexual attractiveness.
Like their highest point in the sexual marketplace as far as their market value, if you want to use crude terms like that, is between the ages of, say, 18 and 26, right?
That's when they're most attractive.
That's when they get the most attention from men.
And they're the most fertile, of course, right?
Yes, yes, and that's why.
And you look at men.
Men can be attractive into their forties because the criteria, the female criteria for attraction to a man is not based on his fertility.
He's fertile all the way through.
It's based on status and attitude and, you know, like, is he in shape and does he have the respect of others and, you know, can he bring in resources and the whole bit, right?
A man in his 40s can actually be what a woman wants, but a woman who is 40 years old, she's going to have to have something extra to offer above and beyond, in a relationship above and beyond what that 26-year-old, you know, it has to outweigh that higher attractiveness.
She has to offer something just much, much better to a man in order for him to feel like he hasn't been cheated.
I mean, he's basically, she spent her twenties just getting an education, sleeping around.
She's gotten to the point where she's the least attractive, or she's lost her attractiveness.
And now she's like, well, where are all the good men?
You know, all of these men who are actually considering me, they're bigger losers than the seven guys I dumped in my twenties.
And that's because she's priced herself out of the market.
She's gone.
She's got a PhD.
She's got a high-powered career.
She wants a man who's got a better career than she does and who brings in more money than she does and who's not too much older than she is.
And yeah, she's winnowed the pool of men that she's willing to consider, and those are not the men who are willing to consider a 40-year-old woman because they can get the 26-year-old.
Yeah and I remember in my early 30s I dated a woman who was I think eight or so years older and she said you know I really really want to have kids and I think she was 40 or 41 at the time and part of me and I did actually we did have conversations about this I was annoyingly frank even back then but I do remember saying to her well Did you not know about the sell-by date?
I mean, did you not know about the expiration date?
Because it just seemed to me that if this was a very important value of hers and she had waited this long to pursue it, that did not speak well to her judgment or maturity.
Like, so it's almost like, okay, so there's the sell-by date and all that, but if a woman then gets to be 40 and really wants to have kids or, you know, late 30s or whatever, You know, I think in any reasonable environment, it at least takes a couple of years to have the kids.
If you want to be sensible, you've got to meet the man, you've got to date the man, you've got to get engaged, you've got to hopefully get married or whatever it is that's going to happen.
And I just remember really questioning her judgment.
If this was an important value for her, then how had she ended up in this situation?
So I think it's a negative, not just because of the aging and the lack of sexual attractiveness, but the fundamental questions it raises about judgment and character.
Well, I mean, you look at it, you think, as far as that 35-year-old man, right, with the 35-year-old woman, if he goes with somebody who's younger, he's not going to have the same amount of pressure to get it done immediately.
He has time to build up some resources and get a house and even decide that this is what I really want with this person if she doesn't have baby rabies because it's her last shot.
You look at it and you think it's a bill of goods that women have been sold.
The script that women have been told that they should follow is actually sort of backwards.
What they should be doing is they should be getting out of high school, maybe get an undergrad degree, right?
And find someone in that pool of, you know, how smart I am because I'm in college and this guy is smart and he's got a career ahead of him and I'm looking to have a career too, but I'm going to wait to specialize until after We've been married, and I've had kids, and then the kids are in school, and then I'm going to go back to university and get my master's or my PhD, and then I'm going to actually start my career, and it won't be interrupted, and if it's one of those careers that requires constant updating, I'll be all up to date.
I won't have to update after I take my break, right?
I mean, and you even look at the quality of children.
genetically that come out of relationships between older people.
I mean, by the time you're 26, your eggs are starting to go a little wonky.
They're getting stale, and once you hit 30 to 35, your risk of Down syndrome and all kinds of other things increases.
It's a foolish, foolish, foolish thing to approach things that way.
And again, it's always, I think, been frustrating for men that women do seem to be spending their sexual coins badly, so to speak, when they're young, and then being kind of surprised when there's something problematic when they get older.
And it seems to me that some of the reaction that men have is, okay, so you chased the pretty boy rich players who had no intention of settling down with you.
You tried to snag them in your 20s.
Now you're going to settle for me.
Well, I don't want to be someone that you settle for, and I don't want to be your second or third or fifth or 20th choice.
So I think that makes men kind of skeptical.
And obviously there's some frustration, and obviously the legitimate frustration, because you can be a great guy who'd be a great dad, a great husband, a great provider.
But if you don't happen to fit the template of what the woman either feels herself is going to be sexually attractiveness or who her friends are going to say, Ooh, what a great catch, you know, That's a huge thing, too.
That's a huge thing, too, is social proof.
Social proof.
When a man is dating a woman, and she goes to her friends, and she's like, oh, I'm dating John, you know, John Smith, and they're like, oh, that's nice.
Right?
And then that's it.
It's all over for that guy.
Right?
It's just, it's all over for him.
You mean, it's that pause?
It's his death knell, really?
It's that, it's that simple?
Yeah, oh yeah.
Just, oh.
Oh.
Oh, well that's nice.
You know, that, that's, yeah.
He's, he's done.
And that's, uh, based upon his, um, status, right?
Yes.
Yes, he could be the greatest guy.
He could be an incredible guy.
He could be the best guy that she's ever had in bed.
Um, but, He can make lots of money, he can have a good career, but if her girlfriends find him just a little off, you know, or just, hmm, I wouldn't be attracted to that guy, or I'm not jealous of you for having him, then forget about it.
Wow.
Beginning of the end.
Yeah, because then I guess there's a whole new light shining on him now, which is her girlfriend's skepticism and disapproval, and there's nothing he can do.
She's looking for flaws at that point.
She's looking for, okay, so they're not that enthusiastic, so what are they saying that I'm not?
And she will pick him apart until she finds whatever it is that's not quite right with him.
That could actually happen because they're jealous and want to undermine, right?
Yes, yes.
Well, I mean, you know, I don't really see women At least the kinds of women who are going to fall prey to those kinds of instinctive things like social proof.
I don't see the women that they're going to hang around with being able to undermine, you know, consciously undermine.
I'm jealous so I'm going to undermine your relationship by pretending that he's lame and then you'll break up with him.
There are some women who aren't going to buy that kind of thing.
They're not going to fall for, you know, They're going to do what they want, and they're going to know what they want.
But it requires a certain level of meta-awareness of how your brain works, you know, so you can sort of catch those, you get that niggling in the back of your head and then you're like, okay, wait, is what I'm feeling right now rational?
Or is it just based on some kind of hardwired response that even guppies, even guppies, guppy females fall for social proof?
Right?
Female guppies, right?
That's good.
You know, the next topic was fish sex.
So let me just cross that off.
There you go.
Make sure that we got that sorted out.
They put the two identical males on opposite ends of the tank and they stick an older female in with one of them and they The female goes through the process of courtship and everything, right?
And the younger female is watching.
And when they let everybody out, where does the younger female go?
To the one that was favored by the older female, because she's thinking, that older female must know something that I don't know.
And the only times it doesn't work is if there's no courtship behavior between the older female and the male, or if the female who's doing the social proof is not older.
No more experienced.
So a good a good t-shirt or banner or bumper stick it would be.
Surmount the guppiness!
Overcome the gap.
There you go.
But when you look at these behaviors and you think, you know, even fish do this stuff, right?
So, I mean, you sort of have to get to the point where the front of your brain is in charge.
Otherwise, your instincts are just going to get in the way of your happiness.
Without the observing ego, every yesterday is just another tomorrow.
So, I mean, I always get asked this question and I don't have a huge luck answering it, but what are your suggestions for men to do?
I mean, I definitely say look for women who have self-knowledge.
I mean, I say that about all relationships.
Look for people who have self-knowledge.
A little bit of therapy doesn't hurt.
You're not necessarily somebody who's watched every episode of Dr. Phil, because every now and then I'll watch a Dr. Phil episode and somebody will come on and come on and say, "Oh, I've been a fan of yours for years.
I've watched all your shows." And they have like the self-knowledge of the aforementioned guppy.
In fact, it's almost. - Yeah. - So I think look for genuine self-knowledge and a genuine curiosity about how the world works, how the self works.
I think that can be very helpful.
But what are your suggestions for guys to make sure they don't end up in some toxic honey trap? - Well, okay.
I think that basically you sort of have to prioritize.
You have to sort your priorities.
What do I absolutely want?
If what you absolutely want is a relationship, there are things that you can probably do to make that happen and make it safer than it might be, right?
Which would be go to some pickup artist sites and learn the attitudinal, the behaviors and all of that that attract women to men.
As much as a lot of people in the men's movement really don't like pickup artists, as much as feminists hate pickup artists, as much as traditionalists are like, oh those guys are so sleazy because they sleep with women and that's all they want, they do have a lot of tools that you can
Tailor your behavior to the point where you can use it in a long-term relationship and keep your partner kind of feeling happy, right?
My dad, I think he's sort of a natural.
My parents have been married for 50 years and he teases my mom.
He kind of, you know, pesters her and teases her and treats her like a little sister sometimes.
These are all the tricks of the pickup artist community and he just does it naturally.
So, you look at that, that would be one way to go.
I think that men who have those skills, and they're fairly easy to learn and you just get them through practice.
They will help you actually maintain a relationship if that's what you want, and they'll help you keep a woman from disrespecting you or losing respect for you.
Other than that, you know, Zeta Masculinity, if you're willing to go without the relationship and without children, you know, I know that that's got to be a very, very difficult choice.
A lot more men are making it.
But that would be the other way to go, I think.
There's really no making relationships safe for men, and a lot of people think that this is a misogynistic sentiment, and it's really not.
Can you imagine how angry Feminists would be if marital rape was not illegal at this point.
They'd be fuming.
It'd be so misogynistic.
And it would be about how men can exercise this power with impunity.
Right, but there are all kinds of legal mechanisms that allow women to just completely destroy men that they've entered relationships with.
And somebody, I forget who it was, I'm going to quote him, you know, when a man rapes a woman, the state avenges her.
When a woman rapes a man, the state is the tool that she uses to do it.
So, and frankly, marital rape against men is still legal, so we're just going to set that aside.
Right, and by this you mean, sort of, if there's a divorce, that the woman can accuse the man of sexual attack, of predation upon the children, and so on, and the automatic guilt is assumed, and to clear his name takes forever, and it can be incredibly, obviously is enormously stressful, and so on, so...
You mean the mechanisms by which women can exact just a terrifying vengeance upon men, which has driven some men to suicide, even to setting themselves on fire, the degree to which they can continue to extract money for a child that is not the man's or that he didn't want in the first place and so on.
Those kinds of dangers, right?
Oh yeah.
You look at it post-divorce.
In the year or two immediately following divorce, men's suicide rates are 11 times what women's are.
So you're looking at, they're more likely to lose custody or access or contact with their children.
They're more likely to end up paying the other spouse.
They're more likely to end up living in a studio apartment, or sleeping on a friend's couch, or being homeless.
They're more likely to end up in jail if they aren't caught up on their child support payments.
Women are more likely to default on child support payments, but men are much more likely to lose their driver's licenses, lose their passports, and go to jail for it.
So, I mean, you look at all of those things.
It's like we've got men in this vice where we're telling them, man up and get married.
You know, okay, so she's 35 and she has two kids by two other men, right?
Man up and marry her.
Who else is going to take care of her?
And you're just a loser if you're not willing to do this.
And then you have, when they do it, then They're basically opening themselves up to, you know, not every woman is going to take the state upon all of these offers to destroy a man.
But the fact that she can, and there's no punishment for it.
There's only social and legal approval.
That's the real danger.
Well, I think wise words of warning and definitely men who are, you know, interested in marriage and kids, which is, you know, it's a great thing with the right person, but the emphasis is on the right person.
Try not to aim at marriage and kids.
Try to aim at the right person and I think just about everything good flows from there.
And I think that the The advice that women have received over the years to not define themselves according to the man they can attract or whether they're sexually attractive and so on is good advice.
I mean we do have to rise above the biological and so I think the same thing is important for men as well to make sure that what you're doing is in pursuit of your own, hopefully rational, highest values.
And in the pursuit of virtue, you can attract good and virtuous people in your life.
That's certainly been my experience.
But if you pursue an end, especially if it flies in the face of rational virtues, it's almost always a disaster.
And if it's not, then you jumped out of a plane without a parachute and just happened to land in a haystack like some roadrunner cartoon.
But always aim at the good, always aim at integrity and virtue, and then great things can happen.
But make sure you don't get suckered into some argument from a fact and the shaming language and the, oh, you just, you don't like women because you can't get laid, you know, all that sort of stupid stuff.
Oh, yeah.
What are you gay?
You know, all of these things.
Yeah, it's just, I mean, Men's roles in society have always been much more rigidly controlled than women's, and I think that part of it is because women's primary option, right?
Like I said, those blacksmiths in the 1400s, right?
Women had that option, right?
But their primary option, their main option, is something that men absolutely cannot do.
Men absolutely cannot get pregnant and give birth and lactate.
And so, men, their options are really supposed to be, OK, she's going to do this, and she's maybe going to do this, this, and this.
Now, you do all the other stuff that she can't or doesn't want to do.
That's men's options.
Their options are actually narrowing in some ways, at least if they want to actually have a relationship that's long-lasting and have the approval of society and all of these things.
They're supposed to fit into a sort of a narrower and smaller box of behaviors and actions.
that are seen as socially acceptable and healthy and helpful to women and helpful to society.
Women can do all of those other things that men used to do, right?
So now men have to do, you know, you should be down in the ground fixing the water main in February.
That's what you're doing now.
You know, and I was listening to a feminist at the protest at the University of Toronto just the other day, And she's saying that the reason men die at work so much more than women is because men have kept women out of dangerous and strenuous jobs.
Oh, dear.
And I don't know.
I'm thinking to myself, you know, like at one point we're going to get the whole construction industry automated and it's going to be like remote controlled robots, you know, riveting the girders and, you know, doing the roofing, you know, putting the shingles on and everything.
It's going to be all that.
And when that happens, women will flood into that industry and then they will complain that they've been kept out.
Because now it's easy, and it's doable, and you're not going to mess your hair up, and you're not going to be exhausted when you get home.
And you're not going to be in the rain while you're doing it, right?
When I was, after high school, I wanted to get some money to go to college and so I was a gold panner and claim staker and, you know, explorer of the wilderness for about 18 months.
And I worked with two women during that time and there was never any barriers whatsoever.
One of the women was, you know, like she couldn't go into town without an hour of makeup and she didn't like to go into the woods because the bug spray did bad things to her skin or whatever it was, right?
And so she basically ended up with an in-office job.
The other woman was a Korean woman who weighed all of 90 pounds, who was incredibly strong and would, you know, carry these 80 pounds, almost her whole weight, you know, over tree limbs and tree trunks and of all the earth we dug up.
She carried drills.
She did everything a man did without self-consciousness or complaint.
And so she was sent out to do all of this kind of work because that's what she wanted to do.
She was fantastic at that stuff and nobody thought twice about her gender.
And so that was a very instructive thing For me to see just the degree to which personal preference drives these kinds of opportunities Well, yeah, and and you look at it and you think like she was not excluded a lot of the my boyfriend when he was in university he worked in a paving company and I mean some of that was you know holding a 60-70 pound jackhammer above your head and running it and
And this is 12, 14 hours a day in the Edmonton heat, right?
And they would have women, they would come in, they would be assigned to light duty, and they'd work for two weeks and then they'd be gone.
Like, I can't stand it.
I'm not going to do it.
I can go work at Starbucks for almost the same amount of money.
Honestly, I don't think women should be forced into those kinds of jobs if they don't want them.
But I don't think that they should be told that they're being kept out, because that's absolutely ridiculous.
Yeah, no, I've never seen an instance.
There can sometimes be some skepticism due to the lack of upper body strength and so on, but anyone who proves themselves proves themselves.
I mean, capitalism is too profit-oriented to stop at boobs.
You know, they'll drive right past them to get to the work ethic underneath.
Now, we talked a little bit beforehand that you may be speaking somewhere.
Are you going to talk about that?
Is this something you wish to release into the wild?
You know, I'm kind of holding on to that.
It'll be a fairly sizable speaking engagement.
But yeah, I was gonna wait until all my travel arrangements are locked down and everything's all tickety-boo and then I will be making an announcement on my channel.
Well let me know and I'll make sure I put it in the bar here to see if I want to make sure to get as many people out to come see you as humanly possible because I mean I do a fair amount of speaking and it's just it's great to meet people on the other side of the screen who can say to me you know you look a lot younger in 240p.
Yeah yeah I haven't you know I've been told Get a better camera, and I'm like, okay, then you'd be able to see the wrinkles on my forehead and the ones between my eyes from frowning.
Right, right.
From arguing with feminists.
It's our Martin Vaseline.
You know, it's the Vaseline on the lens that, like, the 40s actresses... And you'd be able to see that I haven't wiped down my calendars, so...
Well, I hope you get a chance to speak and I hope we can drive as many people out as possible to see you.
And you and I are going to have a show coming up with Dr. Warren Farrell about relationships and I'm really, really looking forward to that.
So, of course, thank you so much for your time and attention.
And thanks, of course, for your conversation today.
Always enlightening.
Thanks again so much for your videos.
I find them one of the most stimulating things that I can inject into my brain and I would really recommend.
The channel, of course, is youtube.com forward slash girl writes what.
So thank you again so much for your time and we'll be talking again soon.
Thank you.
Bye.
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