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Oct. 14, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:03
Emma Watson: Marriage is VIOLENCE?
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All right, everybody, hope you're doing well.
Stefan Molinier from Free Domain, Free Domain.com slash donate, and for subscribers, I have created a feed of my new novel Dissolution, which I hope you will check out.
You'll find it in the donor section.
Alright.
So I asked subscribers for questions, and uh got a good question.
I did see this article when it came out at the time.
And the question is, what are we to make of someone like Emma Watson's recent comment that she considers it almost like violence or it is violence to ask women to uh get married and have children a younger,
she's now uh thirty-four, and she says, well, or thirty-five, something like the thirty-four, thirty-five, and she says, Well, I wanted to find myself, to be myself, to whatever, whatever.
And what am I uh to make of this?
And he went on for sort of more, but I'm just gonna go by that issue.
So there's a couple of important issues in there.
First of all, because the demand for celebrity is so high, and celebrities are largely disposable, then celebrities are controllable.
If you've ever seen there was some movie, it was pretty bad with Michael J. Fox from many years ago, about everybody being nice to a grandmother who was uh dying or was old and she had a lot of money to leave to people in her will, and so everybody was, you know, desperate to be her best friend and backstab each other and all this kind of stuff.
And so when there's a bunch of money floating around, you get a bunch of control.
I mean, this is the whole point of, you know, if you want the vote of a certain demographic, then you just give them what they want, right?
You give them uh money or benefits or whatever it is, right?
You just offer them stuff for quote free, and so you can control you control people who want your money.
Now, of course, every celebrity feels important, uh irreplaceable, and of course, you know, they're paid a lot of money, and and that's good.
But, you know, who is it?
Who is it who just died at the age of I think it was seventy nine, Diane Keaton.
Yeah, Diane Keaton was this quirky she played uh Michael Corleone's wife in The Godfather.
And she played a lot with uh in Woody Allen movies, and she played this quirky, ironic smile, vaguely frightened, hyper self-conscious kind of woman.
She popularized this sort of dressing half like a man defeminization of women.
I guess it's a long way from Marilyn Monroe to Diane Keaton dressing in a tie and a little waist jacket and a pantsuit and just being sort of sexually unavailable.
And she didn't actually have any kids, she'd adopted some kids, I think, and then talked about how motherhood was.
Ah, it's a whole other topic.
So Diane Keaton, you know, retired some time ago.
Jack Nicholson hasn't made a film in years, and you know, people are just aging out of the celebrity conveyor belt uh all the time.
Celebrities come along, and then they're famous, sometimes for years, sometimes for decades.
Robert Redford, a hyper lefty uh died uh a couple of weeks ago, and you know, people who are sort of very important, right?
They I don't even know and it's funny, you know, I've I've just just by the by, I've just kind of lost track of music.
I've lost track of music.
I don't know who's producing new music.
If I want to listen to music, I'll go to some old sort of tried and true albums, and singers and songwriters and so on.
And I listened to the ill yes's last album, the band Yes.
Uh it was bad, uh boring, derivative.
Although John Anderson's voice is held up really well, as a lot of sort of counter-tenoral voices or high general voices seem to.
I listened to Sting's last album.
It's bad, boring.
I listened to Paul McCartney's last album.
Also bad, boring.
Uh a lot of the uh fire and intensity and curiosity and creativity has gone out of uh people as a whole.
I just don't really keep track of.
I used to love it when I knew I remember when Mercury Falling was coming out, I was really keen to listen to it.
Wasn't a great album, but I was brought to my senses, it's got a pretty beginning and uh so on.
But people come and go.
Sting was huge in the 70s and eighties.
I think I think the band split up, the police split up in 1984, and now Sting is being sued for the what couple of hundred thousand pounds a year generated by every breath you take, because Andy Summers says he did the guitar lake, and Stuart Copeland is saying that he did the complex drumming, and therefore they should be collaborators or co-songwriters, which would give them access to a lot of money, including massive amounts of back pay and so on.
But Sting sold his catalog for like three hundred and fifty million, and I don't know what would happen to that sale.
But yeah, so now these guys are pretty pretty pathetic, they're in their seventies, right?
And they're bickering about money from almost half a century ago.
It's really uh it's really kind of pathetic.
Actually is in 1984.
Yeah, close to.
I mean forty, four years, but you know, they they first got together uh in the mid-70s, I think.
So celebrities are coming and going.
Everybody wants to be a celebrity, you make a lot of money, you get a lot of attention, it's good for the ego, good for the vanity.
And so because everybody wants to be a celebrity, it's it's a kind of paradox.
Because everybody wants to be a celebrity, you are kind of replaceable.
Even the band Journey, didn't they end up with some Filipino singer who won some journey singer sound uh sing along or sound alike kind of contest and all that just toured with that guy instead.
So Emma Watson is she irreplaceable?
Uh no.
She's not.
And of course, every now and then you'll see a little article or social media post, which is like here are all the actors who were considered for this role.
And it's like half a dozen actors and so on.
And of course, like you get it, like I mean, when you see Jack Nicholson The Shining, it's hard to imagine anybody else doing that work or his work in A Few Good Men and and so on.
Um as good as it gets, you know, that kind of stuff, right?
So new little salads, just not anyone in this car.
So you know that they seem irreplaceable, but it's not like the movie industry ended when Jack Nicholson retired.
Or Diane Keaton, or Robert Redford or anything like that.
These things didn't end.
Nick Knalty was a big movie star, and then last thing I saw him in was an adaptation of Bill Bryson's book about a long hike.
Uh, and uh he's uh he's not quite a sex symbol anymore.
But anyway, whatever happened to, right, there was a spinal tap, you know, currently residing in the Where Are They Now file.
So if you're a celebrity, a couple of things happen.
The economics I think are really important.
So if you're a celebrity, then you make people a lot of money.
I mean, the people who hang around celebrities make millions and millions and millions of dollars, right?
I'm talking the the touring crew, backup dancers, agents, the publishers, the record companies, the I mean, honestly, the the list just publicists, they just they're just good lawyers, it just goes on and on.
Like the people make millions and millions of millions of dollars by hanging around and floating around a celebrity.
And their goal is not the celebrities' happiness.
Their goal is to make millions and millions and millions of dollars off the celebrity, which is why celebrities work so hard.
Because everyone is telling them, listen, if you don't do at least two movies this year, everyone's gonna forget about you, and then they'll quote all these people, hey, Steve Gutenberg, right?
All these people who just are gone, and nobody cares.
They're just gone.
So you got a lot of people around you who just want to keep you working like a racehorse, like a dre horse.
And if you're not making money, they're not making money.
So they just want to keep you working, and one of the ways they keep you working is to remind you, no matter how important you feel, you're replaceable.
I mean, what was the last movie that Sylvester Stallone was in?
I know he's been in one, because I see this kind of boring speech from time to time that he gives to some younger person about fighting and blah, blah, blah.
But I mean, he used a huge star, now he's gone.
Dolph Lundgren, who a friend of mine famously christened Dolph Lugnitz.
But Dolph Lundgren, I mean huge star.
Uh very vivid, right?
Sorry, he wasn't a huge star, but very vivid star, very good looking guy, very athletic.
He's been battling health issues for years, and I think he's in a couple of movies, or uh Val Kilma.
Anyway, uh you understand, like you could go on and on.
But these people who seem kind of essential because they're burned into our brains, well, it could have just been other people who were essential and burned into our brains, right?
So you are replaceable and you better keep working.
Now, because you are replaceable because if you're not replaceable, the project simply doesn't get made, right?
I mean, if you were irreplaceable and the project had to get made, you could command a hundred million dollars to make a film, right?
I mean, if Emma Watson had not been available to star in Disney's remake of the animated classic Beauty and the Beast, like the live action rinnate remake.
If Emma Watson had not been available or had asked for fifty million dollars to make the movie or something, the movie just wouldn't have gotten made.
So you're not irreplaceable, even if you are irreplaceable, if you demand too much, the project just doesn't happen.
Just doesn't get made.
I mean, Tom Cruise is going to retire at some point when his cyborg body gives way, and uh, you know, somebody else will come along.
Maybe they won't be doing less grossman J-Lo dance moves at uh some VMA awards, but they will be doing somebody will come along, and the uh the industry won't won't stop, right?
Freddie Mercury dies, the music industry goes on.
There's Paul Rogers, and then they get uh the American Idol Guy and you know, just don't write your new songs, I don't think, but uh Adam Lambert.
So you don't have much choice as a celebrity.
Everyone thinks that being a celebrity makes you brings you freedom, it doesn't.
It brings you a bunch of obsessive people around you who need you, but can't just lie to you and say, listen, I just need you to work because I need a paycheck.
They have to lie to you and say, no, no, no, it's really good for your career.
No, no, no, you really gotta work.
No, no, it's just so e people are so easily forgotten, blah, blah, blah.
You know, and once you get out of the public eye, it's almost impossible to get back, and you've got to they just lie to you, right?
Just lie.
Keep keep the uh keep the uh old goose popping out the golden eggs.
So because you are replaceable, and everybody wants to be you and there's this constant supply of new talent, then you are pretty easy to control.
So if you look at people like Taylor Swift, or you look at people like Emma Watson, they have a bunch of people around them who don't want them to get married and have kids.
Because tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars of economic activity swirls around just those two people over the course of their careers.
And that's sort of the immediate financial incentive.
The more sinister shadowy Geppetto, string pulling incentives are even worse, which is, you know, there's lots of people who don't want overpopulation, right, of certain groups, let's just say that.
And so they don't want the role models of women being women who give up their girl boss stuff in order to have a lot of babies.
So there's a whole sinister there's the immediate people who are making tens of millions of dollars off these people, and then there are people who are more shadowy who just want to pull all the strings and so on.
And it's hard for men straight men, it's hard for men to understand just how susceptible women are to imprinting from female celebs.
Honestly, it's it's a phenomenon that you know, like it's like women feeling overwhelmed, right?
Um overwhelmed.
It's like men, we don't really get overwhelmed because we just stop doing stuff.
Oh, I can't do that much, I'll just stop doing stuff.
So we don't really get overwhelmed.
But uh women have a tough time not doing stuff, and one every and and everything is kind of equal or higher priority, and everything's an emergency, and so they get overwhelmed.
And again, not a complaint, uh, it's uh it's a feature, not a bug, but it's a fact nonetheless.
And for some reason, that uh perhaps we could go into another time, sort of evolutionary reasons for it, but for some reason, women get incredibly imprinted upon by female celebrities, which is why, you know, the Kardashians were an absolute disaster for the West.
I mean, I'm not kidding about that, like an absolute horrible disaster for the West.
So women get programmed, and women say, well, I mean, Emma Watson's not having children, or married even, and uh Taylor Swift is a girl boss and she's having a great time, and the Kardashians are fantastically rich and pretty and blah, blah, blah.
And so it's fine.
It's fine.
It's fine.
It's like if you're an actor and you're like you're in New York and you're struggling to get roles or something.
If you're an actor and you've gone there, you know, with a couple of other friends to all become actress, if everyone's struggling, you feel okay.
If, you know, one by one your friends get really successful, then you're gonna feel worse as a whole.
So for a lot of women, childless celebrities are a buffer that has them not freak out.
And if you don't want women to have babies, then you've got female celebrities, and you will get them to postpone having babies.
And then, honestly, like a lot of women's opinions are just pulled after celebrities.
They have seem to have as little choice as sort of being dragged behind a speedboat as a water skier, maybe a bit of back and forth, but you still got to go the same direction.
And again, it's hard.
You know, you you see these uh Swifties or or other sort of celeb fetishists, you see them in their fifties or forties or 30s, and they're just uh so emotional uh they're in the concert and they're crying, and and it's hard for men to fathom this, but it is a chillingly real phenomenon.
I mean, I predict that if Taylor Swift has a bunch of babies and is really happy, women will have a bunch of babies.
And will be pursuing that.
If they can't, I mean they might be too old, right?
It's one thing to be in your mid-thirties and a slender I don't know, I don't hugely like her look.
It's too sour and pouty, but you know, whatever, an attractive woman and very rich and so on, a lot of charisma.
So she she can get married and have kids.
Her followers, not so much.
So there is an enormous amount of pressure from both the immediate profiteers and the shadowy puppet masters for celebrity females to not have to not have children.
And there is a punishment too.
So if you are a female celebrity, uh, and you choose not to have sorry, you choose to get married and have children, then you will be disappeared from the tabloids.
Unless you serve some other sort of propaganda purpose, but you will be disappeared.
Nobody will write about you, nobody will call you.
You will be unpersoned, and you probably won't be allowed back.
I mean, there's lots of people.
Again, we don't usually see them directly, but there's lots of people who want to lower the birth rate.
And if you are a celebrity, you have a bunch of kids, and you say, Oh my gosh, being a mother is way better than being famous.
They will give you a wish and they will keep you away from the public.
You won't see a bunch of articles about how happy so-and-so is because they quit and had kids and it's way better, and blah, blah, blah.
You just won't see it.
Again, maybe some exceptions if you so serve some other propaganda purpose, but you will be kicked out of the club and you will not be allowed back in.
So that's the sort of economics of it as a whole.
Now outside of the economic stuff, there is the hedonism stuff.
Now, I was really sort of racking my brain ahead of time.
I don't know how to communicate this to men very easily.
I'll do my best.
I'll I've sort of come up with a couple of different analogies and so on.
But men have a very tough time imagining what it's like to be an attractive young woman.
Which you should, you should think About that, so that you can understand women and the pressures and opportunities that they face or receive.
So the only thing that I can sort of think of is, you know, the Mel Brooks line, it's good to be king, or, you know, being king and and you can have any woman you want, or being a rock star in his prime, and you know, you just have to go out and play some music for an hour and a half, and you get all the drugs and sex and rock and roll that you want and all of that sort of stuff, right?
So if you have that kind of life where you can uh like stuff is just delivered to you on a silver platter, and there's no reality, and you can have anything that you want, and everything that you want is at your fingertips, why would you want to give that up and settle down?
Why would you say to Steve Tyler or I don't know, McJagger or whoever?
Like, why would you say to them when they are twenty five and you know their careers are just really cooking, saying, okay, uh, so you gotta give all of this up and stay home and be a house husband.
Well, that's uh they would say no.
Right?
They would say no.
They'd say, no, I love writing music, I love touring, I love the groupies, uh, all of that sort of stuff.
And so, as a man, to imagine being an attractive young woman, imagine being a rock star, and people trying to convince you to give up touring to stay home and wipe diapers and raise babies.
It'd be like, what?
Now, the average, especially the age of social media, the average attractive young woman has the sexual power of a male rock star.
People are constantly offering her men, or maybe mostly men, are constantly offering her free stuff, and they're offering her free trips, uh, they're offering her dates, they want to buy her stuff, uh, they want to uh send her money, uh, and and that's a lot of fun.
And it's got sexual power, she gets a lot of dopamine, a lot of addictive chemicals ride around in her brain because of all of that stuff.
And so she has a real high, a literal real high.
It's addictive.
It's addictive.
Men don't realize just how many compliments women get.
Like it would completely short circuit.
Like I sold this as a teenager, right?
This one woman who was drunk, that's a girl who was drunk when I was a high school, I played was in Fontainewilde as our town, and uh she was drunk and she said, Well, you're gorgeous, but you just flip flirt with everyone.
And I literally hung on to that for like ten years.
You don't know.
I mean, go and look at any attractive woman's picture on social media and look at the absolute tsunami of hyperpraise thirst comments being posted underneath those pictures.
It's incomprehensible for men to understand or process how much praise and compliments women get.
It is so easy to get addicted to that.
Men live on an absolute desert of positive feedback for the most part, relative to the giant hot jungle tsunami of compliments that are constantly showered upon women.
And if you can imagine you are so good at your job that even when you are not looking for work, you get a hundred emails a day of people offering you work.
Even part-time, even this, even that, anything, right?
It is an unreality that is incomprehensible to men.
Like that level of unreality is incomprehensible to men.
All unreality, genuinely incomprehensible, but it is I mean, almost impossible.
If you've got an attractive female friend, you know, just just look at her inbox.
Look at how she experiences the world of omnipresent, insistent, constant, permanent, monsoon intrusions of male praise, male offers, Male desire.
Mayor, male dates, male gifts, male, unfortunately, Richard Picks and so on, right?
It's uh it's incomprehensible.
Now, if you look at that, you look at sort of daydreaming about, you know, some guy, he's gonna take you the year, he's gonna take you there, he wants to buy you dinner, he wants to, you know uh take you to the four seasons, he wants to like just take you to you know, Jamaica for the weekend, like whatever, right?
All of that stuff is, you know, it's sexy and it's fun, it makes you feel desired, and it's it's dopamine addictive and so on.
And to give all of that up.
For what?
For what?
Unfortunately, because of her atomized society, it's not like for women, it's like, well, all of my friends are getting married and have children, so if I don't get married and have children, I've got nothing in common with anyone, and we have no connection.
But that's not how it is now.
Now it's like, okay, so all of my friends are out there having fun, and there's a sort of certain momentum to this kind of stuff, but all of my friends are out there having fun.
And uh if I get preg get married, get pregnant, have kids, I'm gonna be home alone.
You know, it's not like uh all of my uh my sisters and cousins are all having kids together and all hanging out together and all having fun together.
Nope.
It's isolating.
It's you and a baby for ten plus hours a day while your husband is off at work, and you are alone on an empty freaking street.
Because all the other moms are out there working, or they're not there at all, or whatever, right?
So uh you know, you don't speak the same language or whatever, right?
So you are alone with a baby.
And that's it.
You often don't even have a church full of people who are having babies that you can hang out with, and so on, right?
You're alone.
And it's tough.
I I've done you know, when my wife was uh at a professional training weekends, uh, it would just be me and Izzy when she was little, and it was a lot of fun, don't get me wrong, it's not I'm not any big complaint, but you're pretty happy when someone comes home and you can have an adult conversation.
And that was just for say three days.
We're talking years.
Would you rather be flown for a sexy weekend to a tropical island where somebody else is paying for everything and room service and disco and dancing and right?
Would you rather do that?
Or would you rather wake up three times a night to a screaming baby and change diapers?
And again, I'm not I'm not trying to diss or be negative towards motherhood.
I'm just saying from the perspective of a young woman.
You get all of this fun, sexy, free, and now you also get status, right?
So in the past it was low status to do this kind of stuff.
Now it's high status, because you know, here I am being flown out, and you just see this sort of hairy forearm of some guy in a private jet.
Again, I'm not saying this is every woman's experience, but uh it's high status, you know, so-and-so's flying me out just for the weekend, haha, LOL, and oh, look at the put look at the handbag he bought me and all the oh, I'm so jealous, you know, like all the other women, oh, it's so great.
Oh, you're so lucky, ah, but you.
I mean, that's that's catnip, man.
That is a serious freaking drug.
Now, you can't say that.
You can't say I prefer having sex in the presidential suite of a five-star hotel in Jamaica rather than change diapers and breastfeed.
You can't say that.
So, and again, I'm not talking about I don't know what Emma Watson's dating history is, other than I heard rumors that she talked about wanting a sensitive guy and ended up dating the captain of the rugby team.
Anyway, I don't know.
I don't know what her dating history is.
So this is nothing to do with Emma Watson.
But you can't say that.
You can't say I would rather have easy frivolous sexy and and for a lot of women it's not even directly about the sex.
It's about the being desired and being paid for and all of the sexy power that comes with that.
So it's not even necessarily about having sex.
I mean, there are lots of sugar babies who will go out and have stuff bought for them, but they won't have sex with a guy.
So I'm not, you know, I'm just saying it's not all about the sex, a lot of it, but not all of it.
And the simple clear reality is that they can't say, I would rather have men buy me stuff than have a baby.
They can't say that, because that sounds terrible and shallow and frivolous and foolish.
And you know, a little tardy to be honest.
They can't say that.
So they have to create something else that sounds spiritual.
And that's the find myself, I gotta find myself.
No, no you don't.
Uh you look down.
You're right there.
So that is something that is you can't you can't compete with that.
You can't a men cannot compete with the security of the government giving women money.
And a man who's offering a woman motherhood, right?
Wife and mother.
I'm offering you wife and mother.
You cannot compete with wealthy guys showering her with offers and gifts and vacations and handbags and and again, it's not necessarily even that there's sex in return or anything like that, but that is you you can't compete with that.
Because one is fun, and one is a lot of work.
Now of course you can say, ah well, but uh it's uh you know it's fun that's worth it's fun that it's difficult but it's worthwhile.
And of course it is, of course I'm very happy to be a father and all of that.
You can say all of that, but that's not how young people think.
In the same way that you can say to a young woman, well, you can go and get a job, uh with just a high school education, or what you can do is you can uh you can uh ta take out a bunch of debt that's kind of abstract and then go have a huge amount of fun at college, uh partying and uh having a blast that way.
And so all of that is uh the sort of pressure that is uh there, the sort of incentives and the pressure that is there regarding these situations.
So again, this is nothing personal to Emma Watson, what do I know?
But those are the general pressures that are going on, and this is all just uh statism.
So I hope that helps.
Freedomane.com slash NA lots of love from up here, my friends.
I will talk to you soon.
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