All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 18, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:05
Bossy Wife? Call Suzanne Venker!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Mullen from Freedomain here with a good friend Suzanne Venker.
That's V-E-N-K-E-R. She is an author, columnist, and radio host.
She's known as the feminist fixer, which sounds a little bit more mafioso than it...
Oh, no, yeah, actually could be kind of mafioso.
She teaches women how to succeed with men in life and in love by rejecting the concept of sexual equality.
Dun-dun-dun! Oh, no!
The horror and embracing male and female nature instead.
We've done shows before.
Suzanne, thanks so much for coming back.
A great pleasure to chat. Thanks for having me.
It's great to be here. So you and I both been in the media recently, and I was written up on lipstick, which is not a phrase I was entirely certain I was ever going to be saying in my life.
Turns out I am. And then you were written up as a female misogynist.
Internalized patriarchy, something along those kinds of lines.
Yes, yes. I hate women.
What did they say about you and what do you think is bothering them so much?
They said that I hate women and that I clearly have hate for myself.
So I have self-hatred because of what I do for a living, I guess, is the gist of it.
And the message is, you know, the takeaway for me is very simple.
You know, when you... When you don't have an argument, you resort to name calling.
End of story. It's just no more complicated than that, in my opinion.
So we kind of take it with a grain of salt and laugh, right?
Well, I mean, this is straight up.
This is sort of an old Marxist idea.
And the idea goes something like this.
I'm sure you're aware of it, which is that, you know, the class system says that you have to think this way.
Like, if you're bourgeois, you have to think a certain way.
If you own the means of productions, you have to think a certain way.
If you are a worker, you are oppressed just by the nature of the system.
Now, if you don't feel oppressed...
In other words, like when I worked in retail stores and hardware stores and so on, the people looked at the boss with a mixture of contempt and pity because, you know, he was always sitting there in his desk.
He's getting yelled at by people.
He's got to do taxes. You know, yeah, he gets paid a little more, but he has to stay when everyone else gets to go home.
Like I remember working at a restaurant.
Where it was so stressful for the owner, he actually used to throw up after every lunch.
Because it was one of these places where you get your food in five minutes or it's free.
So it was horribly stressful for him.
And I remember the waiter was like, man, who wants that job, right?
So the way the Marxists work is that if you don't feel what they tell you you should feel, then it's called false consciousness.
Like, you're wrong.
And they don't have to explain why because the theory is more important than your own lived experience and your own lived thoughts.
You are in a category.
Now, you're in a category called female, of course.
I'm going to go out on a limb here.
And you therefore must feel that the patriarchy is true, that you are oppressed, that you are controlled, that you're part of this, you know, sinister eyes in the forest rape culture and so on.
Now, if you don't feel that way, There's something wrong with you.
And that is a really chilling kind of collectivism that we're all kind of suffering under these days.
Oh, unquestionably.
I mean, that's in a nutshell.
And so the work that I do and the reason why, you know, I'll get the backlash is because I'm essentially undoing that or attempting to undo that, at least in terms of helping individual women understand that you don't have to follow that script, even if your friends and your family members do.
And it can be very... Enticing because you know as well as anyone that we are tribal by nature and we need to feel good about what we're doing based on what other people are doing and it's just very difficult to go against the grain.
So in a sense what I'm doing is very much countercultural and you're gonna get fewer people around you openly verbalizing That it's okay to go against the grain, and by the way, here's how you do it.
So, there's a target on my back from that end, but I don't worry so much about that.
I'm just focused on You know, my message and working with the people who want it and welcome it, which is plenty, and I just kind of tune out the naysayers.
They're not a concern of mine.
It's a funny kind of thing, too, as you know, Suzanne, because one of the promises of feminism was you get to charge your own course.
Women can be individuals.
You can be anything you want to be.
Except somebody who's of your mindset or other similar mindsets and therefore that's bad.
And so this promise of opening the gates and the doors to women to be whatever they want feels like a little bit of a bait and switch.
Like you can be anything you want except critical of these ideas and these ideas and these ideas and this perspective and this approach and so on in which it feels almost more restrictive than, you know, the cliche of the sort of 50s stay-at-home housewife.
Oh, absolutely. And I think...
I think, I have to say, I feel like a shift is really occurring now, that people are starting to see that, perhaps in conjunction with everything else that's going on with political correctness.
But whatever the case may be, I think that that false premise is becoming really, really clear now in a way that it just wasn't 20 years ago, which is when I started writing about these issues.
It was just a different climate then.
So I have hope.
Now, for those of my audience, I guess our combined audience, when this goes out, what was your journey to where you are?
I'm always really fascinated.
People who end up going against the grain, a lot of us, and certainly I was a socialist in my teens and so on and accepted all of this stuff, I'm always really, really fascinated, I think most people are, about how you got to where you are in life.
Yeah, it's a great question, and you're right.
Most people, if they do feel, the people who do feel the way that I do tend, usually they came about it later in life, you're right.
And I never did go through a period of where I, you know, fell for the feminist stuff, but that has to do with the women in my family and my background, which is essentially they're all very strong-minded, can-do women who taught me that I could do whatever I wanted, but hey, Guess what the greatest thing in the world is, is being married and having kids, and that nothing else is going to compare to that.
So it was a mixture of watching them be successful in pretty much both realms, though at different times of their life, and simultaneously not having a victim mentality and very anti, you know, just not a group mentality whatsoever.
Fiercely independent thinkers.
And so I was raised around that from day one, and I guess for me, it just took, because I'm still that way today.
And even when I was a teenager, when most people want to feel comfortable going with what their classmates are doing, I was pretty comfortable not doing that.
So it is a unique trait, and I think it's probably led me to doing what it is I do.
Right. One of the things about escaping the trajectory of early youth is you get to see these life arcs, and this has really informed me.
Like, I'm an empiricist, so I like the theory, but you know, like science, it's the empirical evidence that trumps everything.
What have you seen in your life, Suzanne, that gives you a sense of the validity of your position?
So, I mean, I've seen people who've chosen this hyper-feminist lifestyle and so on, and, you know, my mom was one of these don't-need-a-men kind of people, and, man, I tell you, it plays out really badly.
Other people who've kind of said, okay, you know, I want to be ambitious and all that, but, you know, family's important to me, and children are important to me, and a loving relationship is important to me.
That seems to have played out Well, as I'm, you know, I'm north of the half-century mark, so I get to see the plot lines.
You know, I'm not just at the beginning of the movie like, hey, is it going to be a horror movie?
Is it going to suspense? Is it going to be comedy?
You kind of see how this plays out.
Given that you have ideas about this, how has it played out?
It sounds like gossip, but I guess it kind of is.
But nonetheless, how has this played out in the people that you know or the people that you've known, I guess, from your youth?
Um... Well, in terms of my personal life, the people around me, I live in the Midwest, and it's not been...
Of course, feminism is everywhere, and the whole mentality is everywhere, but it's less so here in the middle of the country than it is on the coasts.
So in terms of the people I know, and I'm not sure it's been too much of an issue, but in terms of the people that I've heard from over 20 years, all over the country, but world too, but country, I've seen just...
There's been a trajectory just in the last 20 years of people who were sort of, oh, what are you saying?
This is so new and just sort of warming up to it and not sure what to do with it, to just sort of a gradual, well, yeah, this is, yeah, why didn't anyone tell me this before?
I mean, if I had one theme of people that I work with or talk to about these issues, The one thing that they all seem to say is, if I had just known this 10 or 15 years ago, I wouldn't be in this boat.
And then I say to them, funny enough, I'm trying to get to the women before that happens.
I mean, my message is really for anyone from 20 to 40, but for the older women, they say that and then my heart kind of sinks.
And then I think, well, okay, but when you were 23, would you have listened to me?
And they'll say, I don't know.
And then I think, Okay, so who should I focus on?
Because I'm not sure exactly where the most receptive group is going to be.
Well, I know the most receptive is later, but unfortunately, they're in a pickle at that point, which is not ideal.
So it makes it a little bit harder, but I work with that group as well.
Okay, so let's unpack the pickle.
Let's say that three times fast.
So let's unpack the pickle.
When you're talking about the older women, usually it's women, of course, have got well-educated, they've got their careers going, and there's this law of diminishing returns when it comes to money-making and careerism.
So what is the pickle that you're talking about for women who are a little older?
So the pickle is, well, it could be several things.
It's, oh my gosh, I don't have time to have a second baby because I just got the one in and that's all I can do right now.
Or, or not right now, I mean, it's all I can do, period.
Or, well, here's one that's interesting.
I just did a coaching session with a couple who ended up getting married when they were, when she was around 40.
I mean, 38, 39, I think 39 or 40 actually.
And then they, Managed to have a baby.
She's now 43 and she's talking about having another one and I had to talk with her about like how she spent 20 years basically in terms of why she waited so long, who she passed up in the meantime,
why they married when they did and the end result was well they they pretty much got married because guess what you know you've as you've written about there's your biological clock it's now or never and that's not really a reason to get married You know, and that's, I don't want people, we always hear that, this idea of, for the last 20 years, it's been the status quo to assume that we should never marry on the younger side, because we don't want to end up like our parents who married the first guy who came along, and then they always wondered what else was out there.
So this took, and people listened, and instead of just maybe delaying it a few years, they really delayed it, and then they just brought on a whole other set of problems, and I think what's worse about waiting for marriage is It's exactly what I just ran into, where you're basically marrying the guy you happen to be with when you're 38, for one obvious reason, and that's just not a reason to get married.
That's a pickle. Well, and for men in that age group, if they are high status, they can often go for women where it's not gun to the head, tick, tick, tick, tuck, tuck, tuck time.
And it is a little bit harder to feel wanted for who you are as an individual when you know that the woman is kind of grabbing at the last sperm life raft to have a child in that time period.
And it's tough to feel like it's just a kind of pure love, if that makes sense.
It's like, okay, I really, really want a kid.
You'll do. And that's not really complimentary in a way.
And I wonder how many men really, when they're in that boat, I didn't ask this particular gentleman in the session, but I mean, I wonder, did that cross their mind and they just dismissed it?
Or do they really not even realize that that's part of it?
Because you can get so caught up in the cultural trends.
And when everyone else around you is doing it, sometimes you're just not that reflective because you think it's normal.
So it's not until you get into a And there's this energy of youth that people can coast on for quite a while.
One of the tweets that I quote It was pointing out that, you know, women live to 80-ish, whatever, right?
So, you know, your fertility declines significantly and risk of defects increases significantly late 30s, early 40s.
And, you know, just taking it as easy as possible on the math challenges, yeah, that's half your life.
So when you're young, you spend your first 20 years being a kid, and then you spend four or five years in college on this train track, and then you try and get a job and into your career.
It's really not until your 30s that you have any capacity for true choice and individuation, for most people anyway.
And so comparing the second half of your life to your first half is...
Kind of crazy because, like, I put this out there, like, what are you going to do for the second half of your life if you don't have a family, right?
Okay, so maybe you'll work till 65.
You might still have 20 years to go.
That's a long time to be invisible in society.
And people would say, well, I'm going to do for the second half of my life what I did for the first half of my life.
And I'm like, you're really not because it's not the same.
It's not the same, and that's one of the biggest problems that the modern generation has, in that they do not think beyond, you know, next week.
You know, we've always been taught in the past, and I think this has a lot to do with war and depression, and those things, of course, make people grow up faster and think more deeply about things.
And we used to think out 50 years.
Well, of course, we assumed marriage was for life.
So you think about things in a much healthier and more mature fashion.
But But they're not doing that.
And so if you're not planning for your 40s and your 50s when you're in your 20s and 30s, chances are you're not going to make the best decisions, which is kind of what you're getting at.
Because the way you're going to feel as a 45 or 55-year-old being childless, if that's how it ended up, is very different the way you're thinking about it when you're 25.
Because all of a sudden you have all this life left and you don't have a family to share it with.
You know, you got that pushback because anytime somebody says something that's true and helpful for the majority, the fangs come out about the minority of men or women for whom that will not apply.
So I always like to say, look, we've got enough, plenty of help and assistance and support and encouragement for minorities.
Fine. But who's speaking up for the majority?
95% of people are going to do something a certain way.
They need a voice. And so I'm always talking about the average male, the average female.
And that's important to distinguish because that's what you got was just the pushback from people for whom that doesn't fit, which is not the majority.
Well, and the entire arc of males and females It's, in a sense, complementary, but there's certainly oppositional elements to it.
So if you're a man and you focus, say, on education and human capital and skill sets and career and money-making and so on, well, then your value in the dating market goes up, 20s to 30s and 40s, like you make it six figures or whatever it is that you're doing, like you're then like a rock star, so to speak.
But for a woman who focuses on, you know, career and education and so on early on rather than, say, later, which is what I have talked about with people, her sexual market value actually kind of declines because she's put all of this energy into a career that, if she wants to be a good mother, is not going to continue, right?
I mean, if you're going to have two kids and you want to stay home at least until they go to school—I'm a big fan of homeschooling, but let's sort of take the majority position— Then you can't really work.
So all of this value that you've accumulated and gathered just kind of vanishes.
You know, it'd be sort of like your husband.
Maybe he's a lawyer, right? And he makes $200,000 a year.
And then shortly after you get married, he's like, no, I want to go pick grapes in Queensland.
I want to be a sculptor.
And, you know, you'd be like, hey, wait a minute.
What about all this income that we can need for kids?
And so it doesn't really work.
What women... Add value to, in their 20s and 30s, if they want to become moms, that value kind of evaporates, unless you want to end up in that kind of sweating through traffic, watching the digital clock nightmare of screaming from a high-demand job to daycare to pick up your kids, which is, I mean, boy, that's just not, I've seen that parenting up close, and it's a whole, whole bag of not fun.
A whole bag and not fun and a whole bag and not good for kids.
So that's literally the reason what you just described is the reason I have this book that's coming out in October called Women Who Win at Love.
And it's basically a roadmap or a guide for how to map all this out and have a successful dating life and have a successful marriage and also, by the way, deal with that work and family issue.
But it requires Thoughtfulness and planning and maturity to think through these things that are maybe not popular, but they are the reality of life.
So the basis of that book is sex differences.
So I'm encouraging people to chuck equality and start embracing sex differences.
And if you do that, you're going to have much better luck being successful in love and in life.
And that's the argument for it.
The roadmap, if you will, just flies in the face of what women are taught in the culture, so it's very controversial.
I prefer the word countercultural, which I wear with a great honor.
I'm old enough to remember when the left used to love being countercultural and controversial and didn't side with big corporations and call themselves the resistance.
But, you know, that's a topic for another time.
So what are your arguments, Suzanne, about...
The major differences, and again, I think we are on the same page.
When we talk about differences, we're not talking about differences under the law.
We're not talking about differences in value of being a human being or anything like that.
We're just talking about, you know, like two jigsaw puzzle pieces that both needed to finish the puzzle.
One isn't better or worse than the other, but they're not the same shape, so to speak.
So what are the major differences that you think people have forgotten that we kind of have to do this great relearning about?
Well, let's start with sex.
Because to me, that's where it all begins.
The actual act of sex and how men and women approach, think about that subject and just basic human desire.
So we know that men are more capable than women of separating emotion from sex due to women's oxytocin levels, which are off the charts compared to men's.
And that men are more favored with testosterone, which controls lust, not attachment, the way oxytocin does.
So biologically, we are wired for love, right?
We're wired for relationships.
We're wired for nesting.
And men can do those things and will eventually want to do those things, but they can separate them more easily.
And so that's the reason, well, you look at Me Too.
Why do we have the Me Too issue that we do?
And this is the This is part of the lies of the whole feminist argument.
If women are really just as sexual and just as sexually minded, you know, if we have the same sexual desires in mind as men, why is Me Too even a thing?
I mean, why is all the rampant college sex turning into potential rape when we're just as sexual as anybody else?
So if we were all the same, we'd just be humping each other like rabbits and there'd be no problem.
The whole reason for this disconnect between men and women when it comes to sex is because we're not the same.
It's because we don't think about it the same way.
It's because we...
I mean, girls on campus have to get drunk in order to have it, right?
Hookup culture is not happening sober.
It's happening drunk for a reason, because you have to let your inhibitions down to do something that is just really not natural to do at all, which is to just go to sleep with someone you just met.
So that's the sex piece.
And then we, of course, come to marriage with a different, or really relationships, but marriage in particular, with a different set of needs with respect to work and family.
So my argument has always been that women don't work for the same reasons men do.
Work meaning being employed, or I should say wives and mothers don't work for the same reason most husbands and fathers do.
I want to say that right. So, and the only way I know how, the only best way I know how to explain it is that who's the person who produces life in her body, carries that body, carries that life for nine months, nurtures it, and feeds it?
It's women. And we are, and nobody's ever going to change that.
That's the way that it is. So, what do men bring to the table when it comes time to settle down like that?
His ability to provide for that life he helped create.
This is the average man, the average woman.
So when you yank, when you tell women that they need to adopt this more traditionally masculine role in addition to the other role, is it any wonder why they're fraught with guilt and stress and all the rest?
Because it's simply too much to take on and too much to do.
And they're never going to feel the I mean, plenty of women want to work, for example, but they don't work in order to provide for their husbands.
Like, even saying it's a little weird, because that's not the impetus, unless they're single mom, but we're talking about just your average married couple here.
And so it's just unnatural to have two people trying to take on both of those roles in full force like that.
For example, when a man comes home today from work, he's expected to do the second load that his dad wasn't, right, back in the day.
And so they're sharing everything, which is fine in theory, and it can work to a certain degree, but you're not going to come at these chores in the same way, and you're not going to Feel the same way.
For example, a man might not notice something that a woman would notice on the home front because he's not as tied to the home front in a way that she is.
And so then that can cause conflict because he's not doing it the way she wants him to do it and so on and so forth.
So if you understand the male mind and the female mind and how they differ, it's much easier to cope with those or to get along, for lack of a better way of putting it.
Yeah, no, I remember learning about this pretty early on in my marriage.
We'd been married a couple of years, and I wanted to go on a hike with my wife.
And I'd had a book on hiking in Ontario, which had kind of been floating around.
It was in my car for a while, and then it was in some cupboard for a while.
And I'm like, yeah, I remember we had this book on hiking, and my wife's like, she gets up and she goes and gets it.
And I'm like, whoa!
Sorcery! It's voodoo!
How do you know where everything is?
She knows the expiry dates of everything in the house.
Unfortunately, not me. To me, that's a superpower.
She likes my sort of creativity and the rationality of my approach to arguments and all of that.
Rational herself and all.
But she views some of what I do as a superpower and I view some of what she does as a superpower.
I'm really good like a laser.
She's really good like sunlight, you know, lighting up everything.
And once I sort of accepted that, our brains worked in different and complementary ways.
Man, did it ever take off in terms of the marriage and how productive we could be.
Oh, hugely.
I mean, I'm just a huge proponent of...
It takes it away from being personal, right?
It's not, oh, this guy's not the way I want him to be.
Or this woman's not the way I want her to be.
It's, oh, this is how she or he is made.
Let's work with that.
You know, what can I learn about the way he or she thinks?
And go with that and work with that to make it easier to get along.
So there's just a myriad of ways in which...
We can learn about each other that will make life easier.
And it's this, unfortunately, this competitive approach that we're taught to take, specifically women, to take with men through life that's causing them so much pain and misery because they're being taught to operate in their masculine all the time because they're supposed to compete with men because you're supposed to keep yourself from being oppressed because, of course, that's what men have done to women for centuries.
This is what they're told.
So it's in their brain that they always have to prove their value In this typically masculine domain.
And that if they don't, and if they can't make it work, well, there's something wrong with them.
And then there's the tears, and there's the guilt, and then there's, you know, it's completely unnecessary, and it's ruining people's lives.
Oh, this... Oh, don't get me started!
The oppression narrative, to me, is so destructive.
And it is selfish.
It is also misandristic.
Because for me, the way that I sort of look at it, very, very briefly, is, you know, history sucked for just about everyone.
Just about everyone.
History was a terrible, terrible situation.
Men got stuck in wars.
Men had to defend against constant predations from other tribes and fierce animals and so on.
War, famine, pestilence, plague, you name it.
It kind of sucked throughout most of history.
And because the death rates of children were so enormously high...
There's that wonderful scene in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, about the drawer full of dead baby clothes that every woman had in the 19th century.
And further back, it was even worse.
So just to keep the population going, women had to be pretty much continually pregnant.
And like, sorry, if you're continually pregnant and breastfeeding and chasing after toddlers, it's kind of tough for you to be a physicist.
Now, you know, on the other side, it was not many men got to be physicists either in the world.
So we were all just treading water on very scarce resources in a very dangerous environment.
The most dangerous, of course, being, you know, things like mosquitoes.
You know, mosquitoes have killed more people throughout human history than I think war has.
So history sucked for a lot of people, but sort of looking at the most advantaged men and comparing them to the most disadvantaged women doesn't tell you anything other than the prejudice of the person making the comparison.
It's a very important perspective.
I'm really big on perspective.
If you hear something explained in a way that has never been explained before, like, for example, the fact that, oh, you think feminists are the ones who created all this Incredible opportunity for women today.
I mean, tell me another one.
There's a reason why we got here, and it's a very slow process that involves mostly male inventions.
It was technology and the mechanization of housework and time and science that got us where we are now, where, well, just take the birth control pill alone.
A feminist didn't create the birth control pill.
And so that alone did more for women in terms of freeing them up to not have these very taxing lives with, you know, six, seven, eight, nine children and all that work, housework that had to be done on top.
And basically just couldn't leave the house.
But it wasn't a man doing that.
It was the circumstances.
And the reason why you have the life that you have now is because of technological advances.
It wasn't feminists storming the streets.
With their whatever hats and their taking off their bras or whatever that did anything for you.
It was these inventions.
It would have happened anyway naturally over time.
And so I think that perspective is certainly not shared openly and often, but it gives tremendous perspective to women's lives today in terms of understanding, oh, what if I really do have it wrong about The way I view men.
If you don't even have an option to think differently about it, you're going to kind of go along with what you've been taught, which is that, oh, it's men who have held us back and we have to get our place in life.
And what does it mean to hear that, guess what, it wasn't that way at all?
You've been fed a lie?
I mean, think about the people who are 30 and 40 years old who bought into that and think about the choices that they made based on that assumption, based on that Why?
Right? I mean, it's pretty daunting to hear, what do you mean that isn't true?
Which, hence the pushback, because it's not that I'm saying anything wrong, it's that I'm saying something that completely undoes the way they've been taught to think, and it's going to require some serious self-reflection to make some changes if you shift to the truth from the propaganda.
Well, and people get angry.
They get angry, in particular because this kind of propaganda that raises suspicion and hostility between the sexes.
It destroys people's capacity for love, for intimacy, for trust, for surrender.
I mean, when you fall in love with someone, I mean, you're handing them your heart on a platter.
And if you believe that they have sinister motives, and look, this happens, you know, some of the MGTOW guys look at women this way, some of the women and the feminists look at men this way.
But anything which says the other sex is fundamentally malevolent and untrustworthy and so on, Boy, the cost of that.
You know, it's one thing to believe in communism, you know, which is, to me, a monstrous system that's destructive.
But, you know, how many decisions are you really going to make based upon an abstract economic theory?
But, man, things like trust and oppression and patriarchy and gynocentricism and...
You know, not all women are like that kind of stuff.
This really cuts to the heart of how people connect, how they're able to fall in love, whether they have families and children.
This is an ideology that cuts right to the heart of where people live.
And if you've made foundational decisions based upon a wrong belief system that costs you personally so much, man, is it hard to dig yourself out of that.
Right, exactly. I mean, think about just the marriage message.
Think about just the decline of marriage.
We hear about this divorce rate decreasing.
Well, don't get so excited about that.
That's just because there aren't many people marrying and they're cohabitating.
Or cohabiting? I never understood which word it is.
I think it's cohabiting. I think.
Okay. Cohabiting.
So when you do the math on it, at the end of the day, marriage is still viewed not as The beginning of your life, the way it was in the past, but the end.
Like, I've got to hurry up and get all this...
I've got to have this life before I do that, right?
And I'm saying that whole mentality that you've absorbed is the reason why you're struggling so much with the institution, because of the way you look at it.
Of course, anything that you're going to look at in that way is going to end poorly because you think so negatively about it.
I mean, if... I mean, if you said anything else, it would make perfect sense that it wouldn't, you know, losing weight.
I don't know. Well, if you thought that somehow that's...
So you thought negatively about, I can't ever do that.
That's never going to happen. Well, of course it's not going to.
So it's kind of the same idea.
I'm not a very good analogy giver, but anyway.
So one of the things that I found kind of surprising in my wrangle with the wine aunts on Twitter and others was this perspective that to me is really chillingly cold, almost sociopathic, which is when you sort of talk about motherhood and parenting and so on, you get this Acid splash venom of, like, women aren't just broodmares, you know?
We're not just here to make babies for men.
You know, like, the act of birth is somehow just crapping out a baby.
And that's it.
That's motherhood. And to me, that...
That's like saying becoming a classical pianist is just buying a piano.
That's necessary but not sufficient.
So why do people have this belief that motherhood is just giving birth and then what?
Eating bonbons while your children slowly electrocute themselves with forks in a wall socket?
So I just finished a podcast and then wrote a couple of articles about The early years, the first three years of a child's life.
And it was a fantastic podcast with Erica Komisar who wrote the book, Being There, Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters.
And it's just chock full of information that you will never hear in the media because it would completely implode the idea that A, daycare is harmless, B,
nothing really happens in those early years, It would ruin the decisions that people have made and scare them if they heard the significance of, for example, learning how to be emotionally resilient in those early months and how your emotions are regulated by the mother or by the primary caregiver.
That would never happen in daycare because then if you hear that and your kid's been in daycare, well then now what?
I just want to jump in real quick because people may not know this.
This is a self-soothing idea that children, babies, find their own emotions largely unmanageable, but they learn how to manage their own emotions and self-soothe, which is a fundamental aspect of life.
By being comforted by their mother, by knowing that on the other side of those emotions is peace of mind.
And I would argue that this whole hysterical, triggered, reactionary, hypervolatile culture comes out of kids being dumped in daycares and so on and not learning how to self-soothe and knowing that there's peace on the other side of upset and then they see something online or whatever, they get triggered and it's just like this thermonuclear chain reaction that doesn't end up being able to settle down into anything sane.
So that's exactly what this podcast was about.
She's a psychoanalyst and she's receiving these kids 10 or 15 years later and their anxiety and depression and problems she figured out were linked to, you know, that lack of mother presence in the first three years.
But you can imagine, you know, the reaction from the media when you want to say something like that.
What was the initial question?
Oh, why people believe.
So just the idea that it's the push for, I mean, it began 40 years ago with the push to get moms out of the home and the workforce under the guise that they need to be equal with men because they were less than, which is bogus, but that's what people believed.
So we've done that, and it's 50 years now, and We realized, wow, maybe those mothers all those years, our mothers and grandmas were actually doing something significant and powerful and important.
And we kind of forgot about that in this attempt to do something else.
And we're reaping the results of that now.
So I personally feel like, I mean, of course, I don't know, but I do feel like there's going to be a shift in this regard.
Because I do think that the newer generation is at least, even if they're Crazy in a lot of other ways.
I feel like they sort of get this thing about the significance of babies and young and just, you know, parents taking care of their babies themselves and young people based on even if not no other reason for their own experience if they didn't have it.
So I'm hopeful. Well, I mean, I know that for myself, Suzanne, because my parents split up when I was very young, what happens is you kind of tumble down through the economic class layers and you end up, I mean, I wasn't quite at the bottom, but I was within spitting distance of the bottom.
And at that low level of economic attainment, it's almost all single moms, it's almost all broken homes and so on, because, as you know, when you break up a family, it's bad for the environment, it's bad for your economics and so on.
But I remember thinking, like, okay, when I get married, I'm going to hang on to that marriage like grim death.
Well, that's probably not the way that I proposed to my wife.
But, you know, it is this idea that you've got to write the pendulum.
You know, this disposable marriage stuff that was going on in the 60s and 70s and 80s, I think there's a whole generation that's grown up with that and said, man, that was terrible.
Like, that was a disaster for me, for society as a whole.
And if you've got a single mom, unless she's willing to go full welfare, I mean, she's got to go out and work.
And that means a lot of alone time for the kids to get up to no good.
And it also means that the peer influence vastly outstrips the parental influence, which means the teenage years are just hell on wheels.
So I know you've worked with a lot of couples, Suzanne.
What are the biggest themes that you've seen coming out about what people are struggling with in their relationships?
And what's the best advice you can give?
So I have to tell you, it always feels very...
The issue seems so singular every time.
And that is that the man is looking for respect and doesn't feel that he's getting it.
And the woman doesn't know how to give it or doesn't know how to show it.
And my last one, she said she felt very strongly that her husband needed to earn...
His respect before she'd give it to him.
You mean after they got married?
After they got married. That seems like something that should happen before you get married.
Precisely. And I specifically said, no, you have that completely turned around.
He gets it automatically because you chose him.
You decided he was worthy of becoming your husband forevermore.
So presumably you've already vetted him.
Now that you've done that, He doesn't have to earn anything.
He gets it automatically because he's your husband.
And until he does something to undermine that, you just assume that's what you do.
It was really, it was kind of life-altering for her because she really, truly believed he had to prove or earn it.
And because he wasn't the person she wanted him to be, well, she was never giving it.
So it was like, who's gonna go first?
How is this gonna get fixed?
Because they're really far apart.
So that's one common theme.
Another one is men getting sort of...
I mean, another...
They weren't married, but she was older than he was, and he could...
She was in her 40s, but she wanted to have children with him.
Here we go back to the same issue with fertility.
And I want to say to these people, because he wanted a family too, and he thought he was going to get it with her very easily.
And I had to sort of explain.
Now... What makes you think that you guys are going to get married and that part's going to all work out so well?
You know, and eventually, you know, it was, and he all, oh, here's another theme.
They're also out earning the men, and that's causing problems, which is a whole nother subject, which is a very, it's not unusual today, but it's an unusual situation to have work out well.
Let's put it that way. So I get a lot of heat for saying, beware of being the breadwinner if you're The woman, because while that can work in some instances, on the whole, I believe it causes a great deal of problems.
And it causes problems because of the way we're made, biology and what we need from each other.
And it's just very clear to me.
But of course, that's very countercultural as well, because that's not the way it's working today.
So that's another conversation. I think it's one thing if you don't want to have kids.
If you don't want to have kids, I think the income disparity is less important and can probably be worked out.
But, you know, if the guy's making $50,000 a year, and the woman is making $150,000 a year, and then she decides to stay home with the kids...
Man, you are crashing down through the layers, you know, and that's giving up a lot.
And so if it's like, okay, well, we used to live in this lovely house and we used to have two cars, we lived on vacations.
And now because I'm staying home with the kids, why?
Because I'm the breastfeeder and, you know, I'm the nurturer and so on.
And then you go from $200,000 a year combined income down to $50,000 a year.
It's like, yeah, you got to move.
You gotta go down to one car.
So the woman, this is a real crash when it comes to having kids, and that's, you know, that's rough.
You know, that's harsh for both parties.
And in many cases, it's not really resolvable.
I mean, it can be, but for many people, it's not.
So I think, where are all these people who aren't telling them before with the decisions they made prior to getting into that?
It goes back to the pickle again.
This is solvable stuff.
All you have to do is know in advance and plan in advance for what it is you want.
So I always come back to the same thing.
What do you want?
What do you want your life to look like?
You know, what's going to be in it?
What do you envision? And if you have down what you want, then the steps to make it happen doesn't have to be as hard as we make it out to be.
Because, for example, if you were planning on staying home, that's one of the things I say in this book, know who's going to take on the lion's share of the child rearing, the bulk of it, or who's going to be the main person or whatever, before you get married, and be in agreement on that.
And then, once you're in agreement on that, figure out then how you're going to do that financially, right?
If you're younger, you could get married and wait a number of years, and you can stockpile money in preparation for that.
I mean, there are things that can be done If you have the information you need ahead of time to make the smart decisions, and if you turn to the culture for those answers, you're going to fail.
Well, I've done, I don't know how many, listener calls, Suzanne, with couples who were like, you know, we've been married for five years, we're talking about having kids, and we're on completely different pages when it comes to this.
And I'm like, okay, how long did you date before you got married?
Oh, you know, we dated for three years, then we got married, we've been married for five years or something.
What have you been talking about?
I mean, was the weather that fascinating?
Is Brad Pitt and Angelina's breakup so fascinating that you can't actually get down to the entire purpose of marriage, which is how to have and care for children?
I mean, what have you been talking about?
And nobody can remember.
No, it's just very sad.
And of course, this is a cultural change because people did do this ahead of time.
People, I mean, some assumptions were different back in the day.
In fact, they didn't have as many decisions to make because the roles were a little bit more, they weren't as questioned and people in our parents' day didn't have to deal with, you know, who's going to stay home.
But regardless, it has to be done today if you're going to be successful.
It just does. Or they're going to wind up, like you said, with With that situation.
We're what now? After the fact.
And so that is kind of another common theme, too, that I see.
Things that are solvable. Things that could have been avoided if somebody had just told them the truth.
Oh, yeah. This is like when I was pointing out, you know, by the time you're 30, 90% of your eggs are dead.
I know there's still a lot of eggs left, but this is still a basic fact.
Or, you know, like I got a comment on my...
Lipstick Twitter Wars video, which is not a title I ever thought I'd make in my career as a public intellectual, but it was this kind of like, oh, yeah, I just looked up my high school girlfriend.
She had a first child at 43, and it has Down syndrome, and it's like, yeah, you know, that's a...
That's a big risk when you start getting up into the dino eggs.
And I get why people are panicking and I get why women are like, you know, that's making me freak out.
And it's like, you know, freaking out isn't the worst thing in the world.
You know, when you're being chased by the bear of time, learning how to run away from it effectively is going to give you that next...
Generation. So let's talk a little bit about the book you have out, the book that's coming, and the work that you do, because I want people to read what you've written, to listen to the work that you do, especially women. You know, I hate to be all kind of sexist, but it's entirely possible it might be a little bit more palatable coming from you than from me.
Yeah, and the reason why this book is directed to women, and it's called Women Who Win at Love, How to Build a Relationship that Lasts, is the title.
And it's directed to women because one of my arguments in there is that women are the relationship navigators.
They pretty much determine which direction it's going to go.
And men sort of take their cues from women when it comes to love and sex and relationships.
Certainly sexually they have to, right?
Yeah. Men propose, women dispose.
Men ask and women decide.
Right. So I'm, you know, people get pushed back initially, again, because the equality theme they've fought into.
Why should I be the one?
Why should... It's always about how they can get rid of the responsibility and point fingers.
And some of that is just sheer immaturity.
I mean, you just have to take the bull by the horns and make...
A very mature, you know, handle things more maturely and stop trying to look at the other person.
But also it's because of biology, because women drive the boat as far as the relationship goes.
So the first part of the book is essentially a bunch of counter-cultural, you know, politically incorrect truths about the dating world and women and men.
So I have eight dating rules in there, which will probably ruffle some feathers.
There's eight dating rules specifically.
And there are, you know, things that wouldn't surprise you in the least.
But other people, I guess, young people, you know, don't make the overture.
You know, let him come to you.
Rule number one. Let him pay.
He asked you out. He pays.
Don't dress like a slut.
Dress like a lady. That's actually my morning mantra, but go ahead.
And then, I don't have sex on the first, second, or 20th date.
So people don't like that one.
They think, what? That's, you know.
And of course, I say that in a, it's meant, the point of it is to say, what the hell are you doing jumping into bed the moment you meet?
Like, that is not how it works.
Sex comes after the bond has been established, not before.
And if, literally, if women did nothing else but just close their legs Until they're involved and bonded and it's heading towards marriage.
You know, it's worth the wait.
At least a three-month rule.
Because I hate to break it to everyone, but when you get married and you have kids, you are actually going to spend quite a bit of time not having sex.
And if you don't like each other, if you don't like each other, then that's a whole lot of time where you've got to spend...
Where you're not having sex.
Now, you know, you're going to have a great sex life when you're married and all of that, but it's not exactly the same as going away for your first weekend, you know?
I can get into that in the book, but that's a really great conversation that I have yet to have, either in an interview or in my writing.
But I have so much to say about married sex versus pre-married sex.
Like, they're not even on the same plane.
Unless maybe you didn't have children.
But anyway, so that's a whole other conversation.
Um... I'm sorry, I keep interrupting you, which is very rude, but you were talking about your eight rules of dating?
Yeah. Oh, right, let's keep going.
Let's see, what are they all? I don't have them in front of me.
of me.
What's another one?
I think I gave you four or five.
Don't, I can't remember the way I phrased it at the end, but live your own life in the meantime and let him live his.
In other words, don't be demanding, right?
And then if you...
And the last one is if you don't...
If he's not committing, move on.
Don't waste your time.
I think there's a lot of people that just...
Especially women. They just think they're going to change the man.
Or they even move in with him.
Duh! Really stupid.
That's a whole other thing in the book.
Do not live with him.
Because you're removing that incentive.
You're making it easier to keep it going at that...
Playing field or whatever. So once you've assessed, like when you've been with them and you're dating for a while, assess if it's not going anywhere and then get out.
You know, don't waste your time.
Women waste years trying to make something happen and by the time they're ready to get into another relationship, they're old.
Well, yeah, they waste years in dead-end relationships as their sexual market value is declining and the men's around them are increasing.
And that's the kind of X that I really wanted to point out in my tweets recently.
So that's a theme of this book, actually.
I've co-authored it with an anthropology professor who's an expert in evolutionary roots of sex differences and that whole issue that you just described, and explaining to people in this book sexual market value and how that works.
I don't think that the average person, I don't know, I don't know, I've never polled them, but certainly in their 20s or 30s has ever been taught this or understands that as women As men get older, they become less desirable.
And as men get older, they become more desirable.
And if you explain why that is, they reject it because, again, we're supposed to be equal as in the same.
We're both living the same lives.
We both go to school. We both work.
Everything feels really equal.
And it really doesn't feel gendered, to use the word today.
Everyone knows that's nonsense when women are young.
A 20-year-old woman of reasonable levels of attractiveness is going to have guys asking her out all the time if she's single.
Right. And so this idea that, well, we're just equal, you see, is like, no, no, no, still 80 to 90 percent of dates are initiated by men.
Men pay the majority of time.
Like, don't give me this equality stuff.
And the idea that it's going to stay equal over the course of your entire life is delusional.
And just waking people up to this reality, boy, it just appears to be shocking because now it's gone on for long enough that there's a lot of people who've missed the boat.
And man, do they not like to hear about it.
Right. And that's why I'm hoping for the generation after them that they're more receptive because they're seeing that, even if it's just their older sisters, you know, who are struggling in their 30s to find good men.
And that's one of my favorite questions is where have all the good men gone?
And I've written about that extensively.
And I actually have a podcast coming up on that issue.
Sorry to interrupt. Maybe you can crack the egg on one of the greatest mysteries about the fairer sex to men.
And one of the greatest mysteries about the fairer sex for men is this.
An attractive woman surrounded by Reasonable, productive, intelligent men who are willing to commit and settle down and good conversationalists and well-educated.
They got a future. They got a nice family and all this kind of stuff.
And she's like, you know that tattooed biker down the road?
I got a thing for him.
And seeing women chase these...
Neanderthals off the cliff of fertility is something that's just a little bit frustrating for some men because women are like, where have all the good men gone?
It's like, you were surrounded by them in your 20s and you didn't want them.
I think that evolutionary speaking, in an evolutionary viewpoint, women are, they are sexually attracted To that type that you just described.
Even though they know from just...
They know from a reasonable standpoint that that's probably not going to make...
That person's probably not going to make a good life partner.
Or there aren't enough of those to go around, as you say.
They can't help but be lured by that.
I was listening to this podcast.
Have you heard of this Dirty John podcast?
It's not what it sounds like.
He's basically a sociopath.
And he... He's a bad guy.
And this woman, he was able to con these women who are lured by his physique, because he kept himself in perfect shape, he's very attractive, lying out the wazoo, and still manages to hone in on women who want that so badly,
they're willing to just sort of not see the other stuff, because they just are so I think it's natural, but it isn't going to be realistic because the majority of men aren't going to be this ideal man.
But I like to turn that around and say, but guess what?
What about the ideal woman, which we never ask?
Where have all the good women gone?
We have no problem focusing on what this ideal or perfect man is, but why don't we ever talk about what the perfect wife is or the ideal woman?
Yeah. So, I want to make sure people know where to get a hold of you on the web.
I'll, of course, put a link to this in the video and the podcast.
It's Suzanne Venker, as S-U-Z-A-N-N-E-V-E-N-K-E-R. Just give us the titles of your books, the name of your podcast, and all of that good stuff.
Oh, well, that's easy.
The podcast is The Suzanne Venker Show.
Yeah. And like I said, the site is SuzanneBanker.com and then the new book is Women Who Win at Love and that comes out in October but it's available now for pre-sale at Amazon.
But everything that you would need to know is at the site SuzanneBanker.com.
Alright, so let's accordion down your life's work into about 60 seconds.
Here we go. No pressure, no problems.
What's the takeaway that in particular for young women you would like them to most hear out of your life's work?
My number one goal is to help women have happy lives.
That's it. I want them to find happiness in their personal lives as much as they do in their professional lives.
And they have loads of support and encouragement for the latter, but they don't have anything for the former.
And to the extent that they do have any help, it's the wrong kind of help.
So I know for a fact that if they follow the cultural scripts that they've been told, And that are sent to them through music, TV, news reports, newspapers, magazines, whatever, they're going to fail at love.
And so I'm willing to be, I'm willing to sort of take the heat because of what I'm saying is so counterculture, politically incorrect, for the benefit of women to have the information that they need to have to make good decisions.
And it's wrong that they're being lied to.
And I want to help them Yeah.
Yeah, and it's a funny thing, you know, because there are people in life that you'll love now and hate later.
And I always wanted to be, if necessary, the opposite, that people can get as mad at me now as they want.
But later on, like my inbox is full, as I've said before, is full of people who are sending me baby pictures.
And I finally settled down.
And it's like, so then, you know, a couple of mean words on Twitter said, Sorry, I've got a magic wand, a truth that's creating life out of nothing.
So we do want people to be happy.
And, you know, women's unhappiness has been increasing decade by decade since feminism came along.
It's really something important to question.
I want my daughter to be happy.
I want my wife to be happy.
I want you to be happy. I want women to be happy.
And... The best place to start is with the facts.
So SuzanneFanker.com, really, really appreciate your time.
Let's book as soon as we can for October for when the book comes out.
We'll discuss things in more detail.
▲
Export Selection