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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:04:27
Love, Peace and Gender | Dr. Warren Farrell, GirlWritesWhat and Stefan Molyneux
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Hello, everybody. It's Stefan Molyne of Freedom in Radio.
I am thrilled.
This is really my first three-way, and I'm very happy to have Dr.
Warren Barrel and Girl Writes What on the line.
These are two people who have shaped my thinking much in the way that Patrick Swayze shapes pottery in that famous scene from Ghosts.
So it's a real honor and a pleasure to have you both on the show.
Thank you so much for taking the time tonight.
Thank you. You're welcome.
You can call me Karen if that's better for you.
Okay, so let's start with, you know, maximum volatility.
And I'll put forward a few very brief ideas and get your thoughts on it.
The cycle of violence.
There was a terrible, horrible shooting that occurred in Montreal in the early 90s, where a young man specifically was targeting women, and Marc Lapine, I think his name was, His hatred of feminism, his hatred of women, was just considered to be something that would be only introduced to some sort of cultural.
We're having some technical difficulties.
Uh-oh. I was doing my undergraduate degree at McGill at the time,
and I remember having some pretty interesting or challenging conversations with people, wherein I said, I don't think that men have some sort of innate fear or hatred of women.
But men have moms, and this can't be completely unrelated to somebody who grows up with hostility towards women, to look at perhaps a cycle of violence transferring through the maternal line as well.
And this, I just remember, because I've always had a pretty open...
I think it's hard to be offended by anything.
Almost every perspective has some interesting validity behind it, some good arguments behind it that are worth examining.
But that was the first time I got the full frontal blowback of, like, this is unspeakable, we can't talk about this.
You know, as you pointed out in one of your books, Dr.
Farrell, I mean, you know, the two-thirds of moms are still hitting three times or more a week children who are under six.
In the UK, 80 to 90% of moms are hitting children who are under a year old, which can't conceivably be imagined to be disciplined in any way, shape, or form.
And the idea that women's or, you know, primary caregivers, which is generally women's, harshness towards children might be contributing to the cycle of violence is so shockingly absent and so shockingly obvious, a question at least to be raised, that it seems to be kind of incomprehensible that it's not part of our discourse about the cycle of violence.
What are your thoughts on that? Well, you look at all of the, what little research that there is done on the childhoods of, say, rapists. And when I say rapists, I'm talking about the rapists that would have been convicted in the 1980s.
So we're talking sort of stranger rapists who act out of anger, jump out of the bushes, because really other forms of rape weren't necessarily recognized back then.
But the majority of them were heterosexually abused during their childhood or adolescence.
And so they suffered sexual abuse by women when they were children, when they were adolescents.
And so you look at it and you think, okay, so if a man is violent with a woman, what is it in his history?
Because honestly, if you think about it, Men, if you're talking about evolution, if you're talking about pre-programmed behaviors that are wired into us, there is no genetic interest for men in harming women.
None. There's a large degree of genetic interest in harming other men, but not in harming women.
Every woman is a potential path to getting his genes in the pool.
So physically harming or killing a woman is really something that, I mean, there's no natural component to that.
It would have to be all acculturation as far as, or mostly acculturation as far as I'm concerned.
So I would definitely look into anyone, any man who is extremely violent with women.
You know, violence against other men is, you know, you could say there's a natural, it's chimpanzees, it's all these other species engage in that, but there's very little actual, the level of violence or the level of aggression that males enact on females and other species,
it's like it's a tenth the severity that they would, you know, So you have to sort of look, if there's a man being extremely violent with a woman, you have to actually look at what happened to make him into that, because I don't think that men have any natural disposition toward that.
I just don't. Yeah, I agree.
I think that we have the opposite of that.
that.
I think, as you know, when I did the research for The Myth of Male Power, one of the things that was really core to that book was the understanding that actually the subtitle of it was "Why Men Are the Disposable Sex".
Fascinatingly, Berkeley Books, who bought that book with that subtitle, took the subtitle off of the cover of the book, and even the inside of the cover.
But because it's so hard, what really is hard to look at is not the cycle of violence against women.
We, as soon as a woman is raped, we all, you know, as in the Lapine situation, we just all focus on that because we are just in shock and we are angry at a woman Being a victim of male violence or even female violence, but especially male violence.
And the history behind that is that both biologically and also in every culture that survived, survived based on its ability to train its sons to be disposable.
Disposable in war and disposable in the workplace.
And therefore that has not even been not only not questioned, But it's been rewarded.
We call it football. In Canada we call it ice hockey.
And, you know, we call it boxing.
We call it X Games.
We call it, you know, all of the major video games that are played by boys and males are male-to-male violence.
They're, you know, black ops and, you know, just all the major characters in the video games that are the heroes.
Those are guys that look like violent creatures at the very most, but they're violent toward other men.
And so, you know, as Karen is saying, this is really the crucial issue.
And our dating process is really a setup for a type of Missing the process of how much men love women.
men will compete to do almost anything to risk violence against themselves on the football field or to make themselves heroes in order to get women's attention, women's love, women's affection, and become part of the next generation of parents who then train their sons and become part of the next generation of parents who then train their
So it's really, yes, it is true that moms are much more likely to abuse their younger children than fathers are, even when you control for the fact that mothers are more frequently involved with their other children, so you really have to control for that issue first.
And once you control for that issue, you still have moms being three times as likely to be violent toward their sons and their daughters, but more so toward their sons than their daughters, than dads are.
And so, what is that about?
That helps us really understand what the cycle of violence is about.
Are mothers Exercising their power over their children.
No, what they're doing is they're expressing their feelings of powerlessness.
And the violence isn't a momentary active power, but it's a momentary active power designed to compensate for feelings of powerlessness.
And the most important thing, I think, though, to understand about ending the cycle of violence is a discussion that you and I had, Stephan, in our last poll together, which is communication.
Let's take a moment to look at the power and the importance of communication in relation to reducing violence, because that's really what we all care about.
And so if, let's say, Karen and I are sister and brother, and we have, you know, a big argument between the two, And Karen always says, you know, Dad always paid more attention to you than he did to me.
And I interrupt Karen, and I sidestep and counterattack, and I distort what she says.
The chances of her hitting me go up.
But if I say, my goodness, Karen, I never saw that from your point of view before.
Tell me more about that. That must really hurt.
It must be so painful.
How did you deal with that?
I so respect you for, you know, dealing with that all your life, and thanks for sharing this with me now.
The chances of her hitting me go down to about zero.
In fact, the chances of hugging each other go up significantly.
And so those are, so that good communication, taking the feminist position on violence, So hurts women and men, because by looking at it as men are powerful and women are powerless, and that's what violence is about, exercising male-powered privilege over female, we really miss the solution.
And the solution is not getting men to be more powerless, The solution is trying to get both sexes to be able to empower each other.
And you do that by listening to the person, and internally inside of your mind, saying to yourself, I know that the more I listen to my sister Karen, and the more I hear her out, the more she'll care for me, the more she'll love me, the closer we'll become, and that's what I want.
And so those are, you know, that's really what needs to be, in my opinion, gotten at.
To not just understand the cycle of violence, but really to stop the cycle of violence.
And it seems to me that the feminist argument, if I understand it correctly, is something along the lines with regards to male aggression, is that there's a power disparity between men and women, and because men have more power, they can act more aggressively towards women.
Now, if we take that as a template, obviously I know that there's lots of arguments against that which we can touch on, but if we take that as a template, Then surely there is an even greater power disparity between a mother and her child.
If power disparity breeds aggression, or at least creates an environment where aggression can flourish, then man having more power allows him to be aggressive.
But surely there's no greater power disparity in the world than that between a parent and a child.
I mean, if a man is aggressive towards a woman, she can call the cops, she can leave, she has economic independence, she has Lots of support places she can go to and so on.
She's a legal adult. She can sign contracts.
She can go do whatever.
She can leave the country. Whereas children, of course, have almost zero options if they're the victims of aggression from either parent.
This is where my brain sort of short-circuits trying to square this circle.
If a power disparity is the cause or a significant contributing factor to aggression in relationships, Surely we should look at the parent, which for the majority of cases is the mother-child relationship, before we even consider the male-female relationship as adults, because there's just no greater power disparity.
And surely if power disparity breeds violence, that's where we should look first and foremost.
But it seems like that's completely excluded from the discussion of power disparity and aggression.
Right, because if you went there with that argument, you'd immediately see that women are more, a person of feminists doesn't want to deal with the fact that women are more like mothers, are more likely to be violent, abuse and kill their are more likely to be violent, abuse and kill their children than dads are.
And they certainly don't want to deal with it when you control for the amount of time and you still have that result even though to not the same degree.
When does a mother feel powerless and end up being violent toward a child?
It's when she feels out of control, when she feels helpless, when the child is screaming constantly, when she's poor or wealthy, more likely poor, when she knows good communication skills or not, more likely when she doesn't know good communication skills.
The more powerless a person feels, the more likely they are to feel, to be It has more overt power than a child, to the degree that she feels duty and responsibility to bring that child up effectively,
is the degree, and she has a lack of resources to do it, is the degree to which she can Even that lack of power, feeling overwhelmed at 3 in the morning when the child won't stop crying and is, you know, going to the bathroom and there's no husband to support her process, that she's likely to just do something like put the child in a dumpster or hurt the child and then be potentially very sorry afterwards.
And so this is, and that's where we have to start with violence.
It's a momentary act of power to compensate for an underlying experience of powerlessness.
And the solution is to undo the powerlessness.
And the feminist perspective on this, it really leads us down a path of increasing violence between and among people.
Karen, I've enjoyed your skeptical face for the last few minutes.
I've been enjoying your look at extreme temperatures.
Well, you have to look at...
Well, no, I do agree with everything.
I do think that a lot of women's aggression and a lot of women's violence and a lot of what women look for in their potential partners has to do with their own insecurity and a sense that they're physically weaker, they're maybe less capable, this kind of feeling that they need to have somebody who is able to do for them.
And I do think that one of the ways in which men are programmed to be disposable is not just in war, not just at the workplace, but also as the proxy dispensers and absorbers of violence on behalf of women.
That this is really one of the main things.
And I think that all of that, I mean, you look at the White Feather Campaign, And women shaming men into enlisting in World War I. I mean, you wouldn't have been able to have children shaming men into enlisting or, you know, even other men shaming men necessarily.
But with women, I think you have to also, with women and their abuse toward their children, you also, I think, have to look at a sense of biological ownership, right?
That a woman is extremely biologically invested in her child.
She's invested a lot of calories, a lot of time, a lot of risk.
And she feels, I think a lot of women feel like, I have the right.
I have the right to treat this child.
And I can have another one.
It's very easy for a woman to get sex and pass on her genes.
Pretty much any woman could...
Acquire sex and pass on her genes.
So I think in some ways, because men find it so much more difficult to pass on their genes than women, and it requires a lot more sort of voluntary labor and voluntary investment rather than just the sort of the after-conception investment that women go through, that really men maybe see their children not as replaceable as women do.
And I think that might have something to do with, you know, in the wild, when resources are scarce, that's when infanticide happens, or a mother will just stop nurturing her baby.
It's not worth it to invest further in that child.
Investing in this child will actually cripple my future reproductive success, and therefore I'm just going to cut my losses and try again next year.
And so I think that really there is a sense of biological ownership and there is a sense of having biologically invested a huge amount and saying, okay, well, I get to say.
I get to say what happens to this child.
I get to say whether this child is going to get spanked or not.
I get to say whether this child is going to end up in a dumpster or not.
It's my child. And...
And I don't think that men are capable of viewing things quite that lightly.
I would, two major points I think that you made, Karen, that I see.
One is the proxy violence point, and I very much agree with you there, on the point about mothers feeling that they have the right to be violent to their children.
I know in my everyday life experience, you know, I do a lot of work, expert witness work, where I try to help fathers be equally involved with their children after divorce, and the story I hear over and over again from dads It's the degree to which mothers feel super protective of their children, especially their girl children, and to the point of their protectiveness of them is something that leads to major problems for the children.
They won't let the children, you know, if they fall down on a ski slope, they want the child to, you know, they give the child every option possible to not try skiing again.
If they, you know, We wanted to do something like, you know, go into overnight, hike for woods there, doing everything to So I see mothers as,
if anything, being reflexively oriented toward a protection of the children that in the overprotection modality very frequently hurts the child.
And one of the reasons that fathers and mothers are so very important to both be involved in the raising of the child It's because the father and the mother have a check and balance with each other.
You know, the father often says, no, you know, let our son or daughter climb that tree.
And the mother will say, no, you know, in a few years maybe, but not right now.
And if you do, you take the cell phone away from you and put full focus on there, and not this branch, and not too high, and so on.
And so those are, you know, it doesn't mean that the mother doesn't feel she has more right to the child.
I think the mother does feel. She has more right to the child in every way, shape or form.
But most of that is focused on, I have the right to the child and the obligation and responsibility to protect that child, and usually that ends up being overprotection.
Now the proxy issue, I'll get to in a moment, but I see you shaking your head, so I want to give you a chance to maybe comment on that.
I do agree.
I do agree. The right to the child, the sense of ownership of a child, it really does translate in both directions.
It does. You feel more protective.
This is my kid. I put all this work into it.
I want to make sure that it's safe and successful and all of this and doesn't get hit by a car and all of these things, right?
At the same time, I think that sense of ownership, I think that men, they don't have that sense of...
And I don't think this is a conscious thing in women.
I really don't. But they don't have this sort of security in that, you know, well, I could have more children.
Because they really, there's no guarantee.
There's no guarantee for men that they'll have any children, let alone more than the ones that they have.
Or the ones that they think they have are in fact theirs.
And it's odd hearing you talk about the different parenting styles of men and women and I'm thinking back to my former marriage and my ex was the one who was like, you can't let them go to the park across the street by themselves.
Oh my god, just let them go.
They're not going to die.
I was always the one that pushed them.
The other parents, especially the other mothers, used to look at me really funny because my daughter was a huge handful.
She was insane.
She was like the Tasmanian devil.
And she would literally, she'd climb up to the top of the monkey bars and she would fall off.
This is at age two. And she'd kind of whine a little and she'd come running for me.
And then by the time she got to me, she was done crying and I'd kind of dust off her pants and her shirt and she'd go off and do it again.
And I would let her do it again.
And like, how can you let her climb up there?
And I'm like, what am I going to do?
Tie her to a tree? Like, You've got to pick your battles.
This kid, she just climbed the cupboards to...
I caught her standing on the stove when she was nine months old.
You know, she opened the oven door and climbed up the racks, right?
You know, you pick your battles.
And I don't want to tether her, you know, to a tree to keep her safe.
It's just pointless. But there you go.
Obviously, A, you are an unusual woman.
And the normal reaction of women is the ones of all the women that were around you looking at you in total shock.
And number two, interestingly, you chose a husband who is far more protective, and very frequently couples do that.
We choose people who tend to balance us out, and then we get into arguments with them about why they are the way they are.
Stephan, you look like a comment.
To me, I'm a big fan of the blank slate approach to social problems.
In other words, let's throw away all our preconceptions.
When I was in my 20s, I read a lot of Enlightenment articles.
and Voltaire championed these as well, there were a lot of articles written from the perspective of a sort of noble savage coming from North America and viewing European civilization and how insane it actually was.
Like, explain to me how the king is the king and why does he have all these golden toilets and why are people starving?
And like trying to understand your culture from outside your cultural reference points is a real challenge.
And it seems to me that if we were, you know, aliens or, you know, we're coming from some other dimension and we said, let's look at the problems of human violence, we would very quickly find out that human beings are epigenetically, socially, culturally conditioned by early childhood experiences and that they have a huge impact on later violence, then we'd say, okay, well, who's in charge of the children?
Well, generally the women are in charge of the children, usually at least up until junior high or high school when they'll get a trickle of male teachers coming in.
So we'd say, okay, well, what role do women have in the propagation of the cycle of violence?
And again, these are all just questions, but this would be the logical place to go.
And it seems to me we've kind of lost that, in a sense, Cultural entrepreneurship to examine things from a blank slate perspective.
So we say, because we think we have all these answers, right?
So we say, why is there a cycle of violence?
Well, you know, men are aggressive because they have privilege or whatever.
How should we educate the children?
I don't know. Let's hand them over to a bunch of public sector unions and cross our fingers because the government does everything so wonderfully.
How should we deal with war?
We have all these theories that don't actually work.
How should we deal with the poor?
Let's get a welfare state.
In the welfare state, people get trapped in this underclass and the rich and poor gaps continue to get wider and wider.
There's this lack of cultural entrepreneurship.
To start with a blank slate, let's clear the decks, let's just look at the facts and start building our theories from a blank page.
It doesn't seem to work When there are vested interests, right?
So, I don't know if people who approve, say, government schools think they're just the best thing ever, or they just don't want to piss off the government unions.
Like, I don't know, because it's hard to say, because you've got to get through all the rhetoric.
And so, I guess my question is, since it is such an obvious place to look, and, you know, without blame throwing, but just to look at the etymology of violence, you would look at early childhood, which is dominated by women, Why are we not able to have an intelligent, open, non-volatile conversation about the true roots of violence?
Are we really interested in solving the problems of violence, which would include the questions around women and matriarchy?
Why is it so hard for us to have this?
Is it vested interest? Is it scar tissue?
This is a big question for me.
I actually think Go ahead.
Meeny, meeny, miny, no good.
That one will really be politically incorrect.
Oh yes, true. Okay, I was going to say there really isn't...
I don't think that there's a case to be made for looking at violence purely from a blank slate perspective because universally every single culture is more violent toward males than toward females.
This is just... How it is, how it's always been.
Now, there's a reason for that, and it's going to be, if it's universal among humans, and if it's universal among all of our nearest relatives, you know, species-wise, then there's got to be a biological component.
What I do find an interesting question is...
Does aggression necessarily entail violence?
Does competition between males necessarily entail violence?
And one thing that I found really interesting, I was talking, sort of arguing with a feminist online, and she had been...
Because I had said, like, honestly, I do not see...
You know, I don't get catcalled.
And this is even back when I was young and hot and had the body of a Victoria's Secret model and showed it off.
I never got catcalled.
I never had guys pulling up in cars and woo, you know, anything like that.
And maybe once every two years, something like that.
And so, you know, where is all of this happening?
Where is all of this street harassment happening?
Especially when the women that are complaining about it are not that attractive.
Not Victoria's Secret models.
She had said that there were several neighborhoods in and around London where she lived that it was really, really common.
I asked her, Would any of these neighborhoods happen to be neighborhoods with acres and acres and acres of council houses of mothers on benefits where there is not a man over the age of 24 for 10 square miles?
Right? Where none of these kids have fathers.
And she thought about it.
She said, well, yeah. And it's like, well, because when I was growing up, right, the absolute worst crime I could commit as a child, and especially as a teenager, was disrespecting my mother.
Right? That was pretty much the only thing that made my dad...
And he didn't have to ever yell.
He didn't have to ever raise his voice.
He never had to raise his hand to us.
Nothing. Just made him frown and made him growl.
You know, you don't talk to your mother that way.
And that's not how you talk to your mom.
But there's no male role models in these kids' lives.
These boys don't grow up knowing how to interact with women properly, respectfully.
They grow up, I think, I really think, disrespecting their mothers, probably the majority of them, not having respect, real respect for their mothers.
And they don't have respect for women.
They don't have respect for other men.
You know, there's nobody to help teach them how to channel male aggression, which I think is probably the whole reason why we have houses with shingles and central heating and all of these things.
Male-male competition.
That's why we have the society we have right now with all of these nice things that were generated by civilization.
There's no one in their life to tell them, here's how you do that productively, right?
And so I don't think that men, even if they're more aggressive with other men, even if they're programmed to be aggressive and competitive with other men, I don't think that that necessarily means that there has to be violence.
They have to be taught or shown or demonstrated in childhood that Either violence is the way to go because it's been demonstrated to them, or they have not been steered away from that and toward more productive things.
I think your point, especially about fatherlessness, certainly everywhere that I look around the world, where there are significant problems with boys and what I would call the failure to launch that boys experience, you have one thing in common which is, well, you have many things in common, about eight or nine things in common, but the one with the greatest ripple effect is a lack of father involvement.
And when you have a lack of father involvement, what you usually have Is you have boundary setting by the mother, but you don't have good boundary enforcement that you and I talked about in one of our past interviews, Stephan.
And when you don't have the good boundary enforcement, then kids learn to be able to do whatever they want.
The mother says, you know, you can't have your ice cream until you finish your peas, and the boy goes, Oh, I had a few more peas, Mom.
Can I have my ice cream now? And Mom goes, well, all right, you know, I'm not going to get into a big argument about the peas.
And then she lets the boy have the ice cream, or the girl have the ice cream.
And the boy and the girl recognize that I can always manipulate a better deal with Mom.
Whereas when Dad is around, the Dad will tend to set fewer boundaries, but enforce the ones that he does set.
We have a deal here.
You can't have your ice cream until you finish your peas.
You can either finish your peas and have your ice cream, or not finish your peas and not have your ice cream.
and if you whine or you cry, there will be no ice cream next week either.
And then the child learns eventually that not only do I have to focus on doing the things that I need to do, but I have to do, and therefore the child is less likely to have attention deficit disorder because they focus on the attention to doing what they need and therefore the child is less likely to have attention deficit disorder because they focus on the attention to doing what they
And so whenever you don't have a parent like that, the child, in fact, as you said, does end up disrespecting the parent, not because they're a female, not because they're a male, just because they are a parent that has no spine.
And the child can get what it wants without the respecting of the parent.
And winning is an investment on the part of the child that winning, getting the ice cream that is, is associated with the lack of respect for what the parent says.
So it's not in your best interest to respect that parent.
And so, That's true, I think, all over the world.
I think on the issue of violence, I think it's a number of important things there in relation to your original blank slate point, Steph.
And one is that, you know, when I talk about every society that survives, surviving based on its ability to train its boys to be disposable, what the implication of that is, is that If we start helping our sons, say, create questioning whether or not they really want to work on a construction site that doesn't have a lot of safety regulations, to get those safety regulations is going to cost more.
If we want to extend affirmative action to a program which requires half women and half men to work at every construction site, Women are not going to be willing to work at a construction site for the same price that men do because they value their lives more.
Therefore, the home will cost more in a free market situation.
And so you have that Aspect of the problem.
The important dimension of that is, if, you know, Hitler was coming to invade the United States and Canada, and we said, well, we should look at this from Hitler's point of view, and, you know, maybe he looks at the Jews in this way, and we should consider this type of way as being valid, and, you know, and that type of thing, and you're really thoughtful about this in a multi-dimensional way, and maybe we should negotiate with the Jews, you end up becoming a chamberlain, and you end up probably being taken over by Hitler.
And so every society has an investment in not getting its sons to question their disposability, because to question their disposability is to make the society more vulnerable to attack or having places because to question their disposability is to make the society more vulnerable to attack or having places cost more to be able to build or oil costs
So, I think, but in terms of violence and competition, those are not at all connected, they're connected correlation-wise, but they're not connected causality.
So, for example, if I saw you beating up Karen, I would risk myself significantly to beat you up in order not to prevent Karen from being beaten up, and you would do the same in reverse, I'm sure, if you saw me beating up Karen.
You don't have to use me as the example in all of this, right?
Actually, my examples do extend beyond you, but I'm assuming the intelligence of the type of listener that comes here to Stefan's site is going to be able to extrapolate beyond Karen.
Well, I did send you the Karen hand puppet, right?
So you can use the Karen hand puppet instead.
Oh, the Karen hand puppet.
Yes, exactly. I can't get the angle right.
But we will compete against each other in a non-violent way or a violent way to protect women.
But getting women's love, attention, and affection requires competition.
In certain classes, that competition may be becoming President of the United States, or it may be becoming something that requires violence.
But if in the middle of a basketball game, I don't like the fact that you pass to somebody else rather than to me, and I beat you up, So the lack of respect, love, attention, and affection that I'll get from females and parents in that audience will be an incentive to keep me from being violent in order to effectively compete.
So what we want from men is providers and protectors and heroes, but the way they get to be heroes and what we reward tells you whether or not they're going to be violent in order to get to be that provider, that protector, or that hero. Okay, so let's make a note.
I think we had some completely fascinating filibusters not answering the question of why we can't talk about this stuff and what the vested interests are.
We'll come back to that, but this male disposability, I mean...
The vested interest is women don't want to take any blame.
That's the vested interest.
Well, who does want to take blame?
We don't compete to not blame women.
Well, and men will compete to keep blame off of women.
They will compete with each other.
They will throw other men under the...
It's all men's...
It's all those other bad men's fault, right?
That our children are becoming more violent.
It's those bad men's fault.
It's the deadbeat dads, right, who were prevented in court from any involvement in their child's lives.
It's the video games. It's the movies. It's the media. It's the rap music.
Yeah. Well, and the whole video game thing, I think feminists were perfectly happy with boys just sitting glued to video games for quite a while.
Because, hey, if they're sitting glued to video games, they aren't attacking women, right?
They aren't out raping women, they aren't beating women, and they aren't competing with women for jobs.
It's win-win. Who cares if they're failing to watch?
I think that sort of...
I would have to defend the feminists a little bit on that issue, but I think what I don't defend the feminists is on the issue of the amount of, historically and biologically, we do compete to protect women, and that's a fundamental misunderstanding.
Any woman who says that men use their power and privilege to hurt and rape women just understands that And what men and men's male biology is about.
Male biology is about learning to compete and look good and do anything we need to do.
If women started to organize and say, we'll have sex and give love to all men who walk on their hands, we'd be having hand-walking competitions with enemies.
And then we'd be trying to walk on one hand.
All our sphere change would be falling out of your pockets, and yeah.
Exactly. There we go, exactly.
So that's the biology, that's the starting place.
With the feminist movement, the propensity to not criticize women or blame women for anything has become institutionalized.
And any man in a corporation who disagrees with a feminist, a woman in the corporation who says that she's being discriminated against, And tries to play in a company.
It is more complex than discrimination about women.
He's immediately looked upon as being the devil.
And particularly if it's a largely female organization like social work or psychology or that type of thing, then he knows he's hurting himself significantly in the company.
And so when you institutionalize a false belief that men Are to, in a way, blame for everything.
Then you have a really dangerous situation of nobody being able to share nuance, and the blank slate that you talked about is completely wiped away.
Okay, so let me throw another one in here.
This is great. I feel like I'm getting just great, great stuff here, so thank you.
It seems to me that If there's a problem with the culture, we would look at the main cultural transmitters, right?
Who is it who transmits culture?
And since culture seems to be something that does happen to early childhood and so on, we would look at, I think, again, women.
Because women say that we're victims of culture, but it seems to me there's an old, you know, my mom is German.
There's an old saying in Germany.
This comes from, I think, the 19th century.
It said that, you know, the three things that women are good at and want, you know, church, kitchen, and children.
And this always struck me as something interesting about the degree to which, say, religiosity is transmitted through the maternal line.
I mean, obviously, in Judaism, that's very strong even in terms of the actual presence or category of Judaism.
But if there's an issue with culture, again, wouldn't we look at the degree to which women transmit culture and the effects of that transmission and how it works?
Karen, I can see you agreeing with me.
I assume that it's just an opposite universe here.
Of course we wouldn't do that, because even if all the teachers in the elementary school are women, the man is the principal.
I think we have an issue with measuring power in our society.
We seem to feel like the only power is legitimized power.
Authority. Legal and formal authority.
That's the only economic authority, right?
That's the only power that we're willing to look at.
So all of these other forms of power, you look at a mother's power over her children.
Oh, well, she doesn't have power and women have never had power over children, ever, because women and children were owned as chattel.
Well, okay. No, no, no.
But I mean... So it's still all men.
Okay. All right.
I mean, the counter argument to me...
Yeah, the counter argument to me for that would be that, okay, if you're going to talk about teachers in public schools, maybe you'd get patriotism or nationalism would be transmitted through that.
But, I mean... That's not where religion is transmitted, not through public schools.
I mean, there is a large separation of church and state in the public schools in most of the West, and yet religiosity thrives, and gender is usually not transmitted.
Even Homer Simpson, it's Marge who drags the kids to church.
Yeah, so I mean, in terms of culture, it would seem to me that the women would be their primary transmitters, ubiquity and presence in early children's education.
I mean, and I mean informal.
I mean, culture is not transmitted usually through school, but, I mean, nationalism and so on.
But it would seem to me then that you would look at that and say, well, how is this being transmitted?
So let's look at something like male disposability.
How is male disposability transmitted intergenerationally?
Because women's love is conditional.
Go on.
I would agree, yeah.
But it's conditional on disposability.
It's... No, see, you say that like that answers something, but there's like Krakatoa of questions going off in my brain.
So, you know, if we can move out of the shorthand of everyone who knows everything.
Well, I mean, we all have our conditions.
We all have our conditions, and for women, male disposability is the condition.
Yes, but tell me more.
So how is that communicated to children?
No, I think it's more complex on this issue here.
First, I think the initial point you're saying, Stefan, is, you know, You're setting up the framework here in which we say, alright, remember the Catholic Church used to say, give me a child for the first five years and I'll give you the adult for the rest of your life after that.
And that's clearly the case.
And most children learn most everything they learn from their moms.
And then if they're inner city children, it's often only from their moms, and then in inner cities they go from moms to female-dominated schools where oftentimes they don't get a significant responsible male role model until the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh grade. And then we wonder why they're attracted to gangs.
So what the feminist movement has completely done is made it Politically incorrect and you will be not rewarded, but you will be ostracized and punished if you even bring the issue up of female responsibility for what males become.
And you have to blame it on something more abstract like the patriarchy.
But at the same time, there's this worship of motherhood.
It's all patriarchy.
No, no. But then wouldn't we have to say that moms are disposable if the presence of women in early children's lives have nothing to do with how they turn out, then surely it would be moms who would be disposable, not the men.
That's right. You're now making a fatal flaw.
You're using logic and thoughtfulness to analyze this.
It's all emotional.
It's all emotional and cognitive dissonance.
With disposability and kids, I think with both parents, both mothers and fathers, there is a cognitive dissonance that is ever-present.
And that is, every parent, virtually, wants their child to be safe.
Mothers, in particular, focus on safety.
And at the same time, the mother goes to the football game, or the ice hockey match, where the boy is risking spinal cord injuries, concussions, dislocated shoulders, and so on, And if the brother is sitting there that's sitting on the stand next to the family, the brother's getting the feeling that, gee, you know, my brother who's out there playing football, he's getting, you know, my parents are name-dropping my brother, not me.
Because he's the one.
So we have this preparation for disposability that is rewarded on almost every level by parents, and at the same time, this cognitive dissonance of, I want my child protected.
And no one is even willing to, you know, I spoke the other day at the Rotary Club, and the people at the edge of their seats, dealing with, my God, I've never even thought of this cognitive dissonance before.
And, you know, these were liberals, conservatives, old people, young people, mostly old people.
But, you know, they even woke up from their after lunch naps to consider this possibility.
So anyway, that I think is...
So if we could get cheerleaders for the mathletes, then this would change things, right?
Because of course, you know, the stereotypically most attractive females are out there cheering the guys in padded suits who are pounding their heads against each other and risk getting carried off in a body bag.
And so that cheering of virility and masculinity being associated with hierarchical capacity for self-destruction based on orders, which, you know, I've always...
Really basically felt that sports is just a training ground for empire and imperialism.
And there's this old saying in England.
I went to boarding school. I grew up in In boarding school where you say that the First World War was won on the fields of Eton and you know like the kids or the wars in England were won by the sports.
Winston Churchill, yeah.
And the women who cheered this and there is of course it's such a stereotype that barely needs mentioning that you know there are lots of great guys with great intelligence, great integrity, great virtue you know who Join the math club and play Dungeons and Dragons and so on, and they don't get the alpha females, at least the physical alpha females, because they're all out there cheering the lunkheads who are willing to pound their heads against each other on the say-so of some guy with a usually overly large Nietzsche-style mustache.
And so you're saying that it's the degree to which women praise and...
You could also argue, doesn't that come a lot from the men who want their sons to be sports heroes, or is that in order to get women?
Yes, the straitjacket for masculinity is that everyone, out on that football field, are not just women, the cheerleaders saying, first and ten, do it again, but there's also the fathers cheering them on, and there's the mothers cheering them on.
I just went to my 50th high school reunion, and there was an unusual amount of discussion.
And desire to make contact with the quarterback hero in our school 50 years later.
That was the person who was magnetically, you know, being drawn by sophisticated PhDs and people who had fairly sophisticated psyches were still wanting to edge their way to the now limping Quarterback, you know, on our football team 50 years ago.
And so this is, you know, but there's no one to blame here.
The women are doing it, men are doing it, male peers are doing it, parents are doing it, and that's the straitjacket of masculinity, is because there's no, with women, Do you have a career?
And if they're fully involved with a career, people will ask them, well, do you have children?
Or how are you doing with your children?
And so women never feel completely ostracized or completely rewarded, no matter what choice they make.
Whereas men, if we fail to make the choice of climbing the ladder of success, no one asks us whether we put that ladder on a wall that we don't want to be climbing toward.
We're only asked to be human doings, not human beings.
I have another question, but Karen, if you had something you wanted to add.
No, no. He's pretty much said it all.
Warren, the gentle Buddhist in you is making the case that no one is to blame, but a little earlier you said that if women wanted us to walk on our hands, and Karen mentioned that we'd be losing our change to the subway grates.
So if you wanted to change the world, would you want to change the opinions of men first or women first?
I really don't think for men they're separable.
But probably if I were forced into a yes-no answer, it would be women first.
Because men are more dependent upon female love and approval and affection.
We put in relationships all our emotional eggs in one basket.
We are biologically pulled from a physical standpoint, a testosterone standpoint, and we're also emotionally, for the most part, men are most emotionally constipated.
And so the only place where we have an outlet emotionally is with women.
If women knew how much hold they had on us and how much we loved and cared for them, how much we appreciated them.
In the old days, we didn't respect women more than we respected men.
We loved women more than we loved men.
Today, we both love and respect women more than we respect men on average in the industrialized world.
The cure for men for emotional constipation is sex lax.
Okay, got it. And Karen, what about me?
I know, it's a bad joke, but I couldn't resist it.
I wrote it down. I'm like, should I say it?
Oh, why not. It was a good segue, wasn't it?
All right, all right. That was a good pun.
That was pretty good. Good pun.
I would have to say...
I would have to say that, yeah, it would have to be women's attitudes to change first because women are...
Because it's this way with every species.
The parent that puts in the heavier investment in children is the one that gets to be more choosy.
And so you look at what the options are.
The one who has the choices, the one who has the options, has to be the one that changes their option and opts for something else.
If women still want the football player, then men will still want to be that, or they will opt out and fail to launch.
If that's something that they don't think that they can be, or they don't think is worth becoming, they'll just opt out.
I think the larger picture...
Yeah, it's women who have changed.
And I think that the change can start from anywhere.
among my feminist friends and colleagues when I started out and being involved with NOW, a lot of women would say, you know, the system is run by men.
I can't do anything about this.
I have no power.
And I said, no, I think you have power.
And most of the feminists said, yes, we're going to go out there and try anyway.
And it was amazing how fast things at least changed for women.
They haven't changed that way for men.
But I think that it's also, you know, when I was, I was married for about 11 years, then divorced, I was single for a while before I got remarried, and during those single years, when I would say, you know, I would make my physicians very clear to women who were usually feminists in their orientation,
And I would expect to, and some women just sort of withdrew from me, but a lot of women responded by, wow, I really respect that you have the guts to stand up and say what you're thinking, and you've thought it through, and you have answers to my questions and my doubts, and I see that you're not getting popularity from that.
That takes guts.
So women are often not turned off when a man speaks up for himself.
And so, men have to understand that speaking up for themselves with respect for women, not dominating the conversation, but listening and hearing what she is saying, and also adding what you want to add, is something that does lead to women being more attracted to you.
Oh, I think that there's a hugely dangerous trap, which is to hope to be loved for a position rather than a process.
To be loved for a position very quickly becomes a prison, because your positions, if you're rational, are going to change, you know, as you get new information, new ways of thinking, and so on.
Or better ways of thinking. So, yes, you definitely want to put your thinking out front, say it's conditional upon reason and evidence, and that's going to change over time, because if you are loved for a physician, it becomes a very pretty and very ugly prison very quickly, because then you can't change, you can't grow.
So, yes, I think always put your cognitive, you know, the neofrontal cortex is the man's cleavage.
So, yeah, put that front.
Sorry, Karen, you wanted to add something.
No, no, I would have to say that, yeah, I think for men who don't necessarily, that maybe they're not buff, maybe they're not football players, maybe they're not all of those things that are very superficially considered to be masculine ideals, definitely having an attitude of, I'm just going to say what I think and do what I want and, you know, Fuck you if you can't take a joke, or whatever, right?
I have the guts to actually, you know, express myself, and I don't care if you guys like me.
I think that that's extremely attractive to a lot of women.
And it's extremely attractive to a lot of men, too.
So, like, as far as, you know, admiration.
And that said, you know, speaking up and speaking your mind and saying what you feel is a virtue, but every virtue taken to its extreme becomes a vice.
And, you know, when you start becoming arrogant about it, then it moves into the slippery slope of not being sensitive.
Rush Limbaugh isn't really that attractive, yeah.
Yeah, that's exactly right. No matter which side of the political coin you are.
Okay, so let's just finish up, if you don't mind.
Honestly, I could chat the whole evening away, but the mechanism and process by which we can change.
I mean, if it is more important for women to change, but there's a whole series of barriers that have come in institutionally through the state, through funding, through prejudice, through media, to block that, what is our...
It's hard to say our best approach, like there's only one, but, you know, what are the top one or two things that you think would be the most important, both of you, to begin to dislodge what I feel is a very big cultural logjam.
You know, there's this old thing that says, if you ever want to figure out who's in charge in society, figure out who you're not allowed to criticize.
And that is something that I think is actually very true.
And to me, it has really reaffirmed the matriarchy that you can't point out flaws within women.
I thought the whole point, you know, when I was young and more naive, I thought the whole point was equality for women.
That means equality of vice as well as virtue, which means that, yay, you get the spotlight of good and evil.
You get the angel on your shoulder.
You also get the devil on your shoulder for everyone to see.
And the hypersensitivity to criticism or the fact that criticism was considered sexist just seemed to be like, well, that's sort of missing the point of equality now, isn't it?
But what would your thoughts be about the best way to approach change going forward?
You know, honestly, Just deprogram as many people as we can.
What I think that the main issue, sort of the underlying issue with all of this stuff, is the misidentification of the problem, or even misidentifying it as a problem historically.
I don't think it was necessarily a problem historically.
I think it only became a problem post-industrialization.
And so, you look at that, and then you have to actually take a good hard look at, I mean, Ernest Belfort Bax, a Marxist who wrote a couple of treatises on feminism in 1908 and 1911, was kind of infamous for saying, giving women suffrage while there was still sex privilege for women.
Would be the destruction of society.
In other words, if we Are going to still treat women unequally in the ways that they have privilege, right?
Giving them equal power to men is just going to be a huge, huge problem.
And 90% of the reason that you are not allowed to criticize women is because of the exact same privilege that they've always had, right?
They've been seen as deserving of protection.
They've been seen as, you know, a man's battle cry is, I'm going to kill you.
A woman's battle cry is, you're injuring me.
So, you know, as long as those things, as long as we still see women in those ways, equal rights is actually going to be social supremacy, really, for women and an inability to criticize them.
So, deep programming.
I think one of the ways to start the deprogramming process is through the listening process.
And I think that if I were to, you know, create one, if I had billions of dollars and I were to create one set of funding, it would be to go to every grammar school and start in first grade.
Getting boys and girls to know how to be able to hear personal criticism without becoming defensive.
And I would train trainers to do that.
That's what I do, you know, in my couple communication work.
And I have found The substance of what I wrote, that can only take you so far.
When I tried to get people to speak what was bothering them more lovingly, that only got them so far.
When I found that I made the most progress, when I got people to be able to hear opinions and perspectives, especially personal attacks on them, in a way that recognized that when I hear this effectively without getting defensive, the other person will get closer to me, that not further away So that would be institutional change.
But viable in the States at this point because there are bullying programs that are already funded.
And bullying programs that are already funded are very good at helping people express negative feelings more effectively, but they haven't touched helping people hear negative feelings more effectively.
And so if we're going to, in the old days, well even today, Male adolescence is about, the commerce of male adolescence is the trading of wit covered put downs between and among men.
And we do that because we, as an unconscious way of preparing each other to become successful.
Because on an unconscious level we know that no one who is successful becomes successful without getting a disproportionate amount of criticism.
And so boys prepare each other to do that.
But in the bullying programs, we're now beginning to protect everyone from criticism to such a degree that we're not preparing people to handle the criticism that is a prerequisite to becoming successful.
So that would be what I would do in the grammar schools.
On the college level, I think what is doable is someone in a Canadian college who is a student or a U.S. college needs to Petition the college for a men's studies program to have an equal amount of funding and male professors and or female professors that understand the male point of view in a real way, not just liberal female point of view, not just liberal male point of view.
Hi, everybody.
It's Stefan Wallen from Freedom Made Radio.
Sorry, just a little addendum to this video.
Tragically, the vast interstellar Internet trolls managed to eat the last 10 minutes or so of the interview.
But thank you so much for Dr. Farrell and for Gola Wright-Swat for having the conversation.
I think we covered most of the meat of the issues earlier on, but sorry for just a slight technical problem.
We did try and get the file rescued, but to no avail.
So thanks again so much.
I hope we can have them on again, and thank you so much for your time and watching.
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