Lydia Greene dismantles "gender yin-yangism," the flawed narrative framing men and women as polar opposites, despite shared traits and biology—just one chromosome difference. She critiques societal devaluation of women’s strengths like childbirth and emotional resilience, excluded from war/politics narratives, while men’s worth is tied to productivity. Research shows women live longer, thrive independently post-trauma, and bond freely, unlike men’s toxic isolation. Lydia’s parenting rejects "battle of the sexes" rhetoric, fostering universal values instead, exposing misogynistic extremes like Andrew Tate as outdated backlash. True gender equity means recognizing shared humanity over false binaries. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host, and I'm back again today with returning guest, Lydia Green.
How are you doing, Lydia?
Good.
Thanks for inviting me out.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Most of your sort of public discourse is on vaccines and your vaccine activism, but we're talking about something completely different today.
So that'll be fun.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have a concept in my mind of a thing that I don't, I haven't seen any names for.
I haven't seen anyone describe this.
And it was kind of neat when I kind of came up with it.
So today the topic is a thing that I call gender yin-yangism.
So yeah, people immediately, what are you talking about?
As I get all the time in my life and on this podcast.
So in Eastern philosophy, there's a thing, there's a concept called the yin and the yang.
And in Eastern philosophy, it's usually represented by a thing that most people have seen by now.
It's sort of sort of two teardrop shapes, a white one and a black one.
And inside each teardrop shape is a dot that's the opposite of that color and then chasing each other.
And it's meant to be, I think originally it's meant to be two opposite but interconnected forces, like active and passive.
And they, you know, this is a force that drives the universe.
It's a sort of interesting spiritual concept.
But many people just sort of generally in the undescribed sort of zeitgeist of our world see men and women as the two opposite but interconnected sort of the male and female of our world being two sort of drivers of our universe.
And no one really talks about this, but it's sort of just sort of there in the background.
And so I kind of want to talk about this.
When I think about this and I ask people about it, I usually ask people to create a list of all the words that would describe what they consider to be a man.
And then after they make that list, make a separate list of all the words that would describe a woman and then see how many of those words are just antonyms of each other.
Right.
Because once you start this in your mind, the inference is that they have to be opposite.
And of course, we know in our biology now that this isn't really true.
So this is kind of where we're starting.
What's your first take on this concept?
Yeah, I think there is this narrative that gender is opposite.
Like man is literally the opposite of women and or women.
And I don't think that's the case at all.
I think we have far more in common than the different.
There's a small amount of things that are different, but even like genetically, the difference between like genetically male and female is just, you know, one chromosome.
Yeah.
So like you either have an X or a Y.
And now we know there's like variations on that, you know, that occur naturally in populations, but there's not like compared to the other sets of chromosomes, like there's not a lot of information on that chroma, like comparable to like the rest that just make us human.
So the idea that like men and women are just these total opposite forces, I think is kind of, it puts too much emphasis on that when we're actually quite similar.
Absolutely.
And I think that, You know, what the one thing that I didn't say before that I probably should is that once once a person goes through this exercise that I described of creating descriptive words for each of these two men and women.
And if you come up with antonyms, what you'll probably find is that most of the traits that would be considered to be like positive traits would generally be in one column.
And that's also part of this sort of lever that leads people to think less well of women, I think.
Like, what, you know, what are your thoughts on this?
Yeah.
Well, yeah, because then the opposite is if you say men are strong, then women are weak.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, or so, like, men are durable and women are delicate, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Who wants to be the delicate person?
Yeah.
And it's disingenuous because women are strong too.
Yeah.
And in a different way, but it is strength.
It's just not strengthening muscle mass, but that's not the same thing as being the opposite of strong.
And anyone that works around women who deliver babies knows how strong women are.
Yeah.
You know, but it doesn't, because men can't do it, it's not valued by men at strength, I think.
And that's a huge part of the issue, too.
It's like, yeah, historically, that's been the case.
That motherhood's also not usually in history typically hasn't been seen as an important part of lives in the past because motherhood didn't determine the course of wars or politics or anything like that.
Yeah.
But that's been wrong.
Yeah.
It is.
They should ask mothers because mothers are the ones giving up their children to go die in these wars.
And they know exactly how hard it is to create that life to begin with.
And I think that they should have a say because when there is a catastrophic loss of life, they're the ones, you know, picking up the pieces and replacing the people that die.
Yeah.
But that's not really, that's just a fact of life.
It's not really considered valuable or like looked at as in like in a regard, you know?
Yeah.
And the way we view this, I mean, we, we have a history, a long noted history, and most of our history is just told in stories.
The way we've told stories in the past has been from a primarily a male perspective.
You know, in the past, stories were generally written by men and they were meant to be for an audience of men.
And they tended to have male protagonists for that reason.
And that's not to say that it's an excuse.
It's just a reason.
But that's part of how we've cast our view of the world.
Whenever we look at the, you know, the totality of stories and all the stories are male heroes, that's the reason why.
And this is, you know, that's also a part of what we're really talking about here is that we have have you seen speaking of that.
Have you seen the reaction of certain men to the Barbie movie?
I guess this is an interesting week to record this podcast.
Yeah, that's so.
They are freaking out because Barbie has all of the roles, all of the occupations, and then Ken is just a prop.
He was and they're mad that Ken's a prop.
He's like a side project, side prop to like prop up Barbie.
And like, if you, I didn't even play with Barbie's that much, but even I understand that Ken was just an afterthought.
Yeah.
He's like a prop for Barbie to live her life.
Like he's an accessory to Barbie's life.
He's an accessory.
And so to see all these men just angry that Ken is just this himbo, doesn't have many thoughts, just kind of is a prop for the main character energy of the Barbie.
First of all, most movies are like that in opposite for decades.
They've been like that, you know, where women are just kind of side characters and props to make men look strong and desirable.
In many cases, the female character is meant only to expand and say something about the male character.
They're a married person.
They have sexual energy of this kind or whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not meant as like to be a deep, rich character.
And we've had to deal with that for years.
Yeah.
There's one movie.
There's a dual rules for this.
I can't remember the name of it.
What's the what's the rule about the female protagonist?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
There's a number of female characters and the number of actual lines they have in a movie.
The Bechtel test, which is sort of a measure of how many female characters are in a story, in a movie or TV show, and not only how many characters there are, but how many substantive lines they have, how often we hear them speak.
That's a real measure now.
And we're almost getting to the point where we sort of in some, in many cases, move past it, where we don't have to consider it much anymore, which is good.
But of course, in some cases, we still have to tell, you mentioned Barbie.
We can't mention Barbie without Oppenheimer.
But we have this situation where in the past, women generally weren't well represented in sciences.
And you tell a historical tale about Oppenheimer.
And I haven't read anything about the movie, but I assume it has to do with the atomic bomb and the making of it.
And there weren't a lot of women involved in that really on the forefront of that.
They were female mathematicians that were sitting in rooms doing calculations alongside male mathematicians because at long last, they needed to do something so quickly that they couldn't turn aside female help for it.
So they just took everyone who had any significant ability at mathematics and they set them in these rooms to do these calculations because without computers, it was a phenomenal amount of calculation needed to work out how to make an atomic weapon.
But those were the only women involved.
All the physicists were all men because they didn't have any.
They didn't train any.
They didn't, you know, there was so few women and women were discouraged from doing that because intelligence was considered to be a male thing.
Yeah.
Which is awful.
Yeah.
Men are good at math.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
That's what we're told.
How would that affect how you teach women math?
You know, if you're taught men are good at math and women are not, or boys are good at math and girls are not.
Like, how would you like teach girls if you have that bias?
Well, and also if we are subtly telling girls that they won't need to know it, how many will try?
Yeah.
So then it's going to look like, yeah, more men are.
That alone would affect how well they do on math tests in school.
If you don't try as hard for it, you're probably not going to do as well.
If you want to do it and you try harder, you're probably going to do better.
Yeah.
And then I think society also is catered to how boys learn because all of this, like all of our the structure for how we go about post-secondary,
especially and structure structure careers around education is mainly built around an ideal life structure for a male in our society.
Right.
And we got this in a lot of ways from ideas that the Romans had in ancient Rome.
As a male, you would go off to war or other things, and then you would start to think about marrying sometime around your mid-20s.
And you would, you know, try to, you know, ideally get yourself set up to marry someone who was younger.
You know, I don't know the exact age, somewhere around 15, 16, 17 kind of timeframe, right?
I mean, this was, unless you're a rich Roman, their lives were different, but ordinary Romans, this was well known.
As a young person, go off to war, as a young man, go off to war, come back from the war before you're, you know, start to decline in ability and then have children, have more Romans.
And we structure our lives this way now.
We educate and then we go to post-secondary immediately.
We say that it's because we want to have the most time to use that education and we do, but the prime childbearing years are also occurring in this time for women and not for men.
So it just so happens that men tend to be after their post-secondary once they're entering their kind of more of their, you know, their prime childbearing years are still well in availability.
Whereas most women who go through this arduous thing, especially if you do the really tough stuff like doctors and lawyers and whatnot, you either have to try to have children while you're doing all that, or you have to try to do it after.
Yeah.
And it's totally possible, absolutely, but it's just, it's just that many more degrees more difficult.
And we don't have, I think we're getting there.
We're getting to a situation in some areas of our world where it's easier to take time off to have relationships and maybe have children and whatnot.
But we still haven't really found a way to get there across all of our society.
And that's that that's not ideal for women.
It's it's less ideal for women, much less ideal for women.
And that's another reason why, just one more thing, one more reason why women might choose to start families rather than go to college, for example, even now.
Even, I mean, this isn't the 1950s or 60s.
This is the, you know, 2023.
And we still have real structures in our world that would, you know, in many, many subtle ways, encourage a young woman to settle down and make a family right after high school rather than to go to college and get an education.
Yeah.
Depending on your culture and what kind of family you're in.
And yeah.
Yeah.
Or even just my, I'm not, I'm not encouraging my daughter to do that right after high school, but I did tell her as a mother that had a kid in her 20s, my kids are very far apart.
The amount of energy you bring your kid in your 20s is vastly different in my experience and probably others, I don't know for sure.
When you're almost 40, you know, the amount of energy you have for them when you're younger is a lot better.
And the patience you have is a lot greater.
And so I've told her, like, I'm not saying you should have all your kids, you know, when you're out of high school, but if you are, you know, with someone you're looking to do that with maybe mid-20s, it would be better if you're wanting to have energy.
Well, she has the benefit of a supportive family that, you know, will help her.
And hopefully she chooses a good partner and all that.
She's, she's still quite young, but yeah, a lot of hoops to jump through.
There's a difference between having kids when you're young and having them when you're older.
And both are valid.
I mean, some people want to do their career while they're young.
And I did both.
I ended up having to go back anyway because if you start with your career and then raise kids, they're not going to like hold your job for you if you decide to raise them more than a year, you know, before you return to work.
So the time goes by, my education became out of date.
So I'd have to do all this like post-secondary upgrading anyway, because I wasn't actively in the field.
And so I just like, why do that when I could just start fresh and pick something else?
Right.
So I think a lot of women don't realize is you're going to go back to school anyway, whether you have kids young and go back to school after, or whether you, you know, had an education and took a break.
Like people change their careers multiple times in their lives.
And it doesn't factor necessarily.
Yeah.
So I think we should circle back to kind of get back on track here.
It's been a great tangent and it's all good.
But I just think that we should try to stick to where we are, which is, which is this podcast is all about that, but it's all was also about me wrangling people back to where we got to be.
So gender yin-yangism, this, this idea that we have that men and women are opposites and we this opposite, you know, life force or whatever.
There's a couple of things that generally come up in conversations about this that I want to bring up and we just talk about each one briefly.
So first of all, in a sexual context, it's often cast as givers and receivers, which is sort of a euphemistic way to describe the sexual act, but also, I think, increasingly just not all that accurate as far as these go.
And we're going to, you know, probably try to not get too into the details on this, but The idea that men are always the sort of initiators or the dominant in these, in these scenarios, is increasingly pierced by all the things that happen in pornography, where this isn't happening,
or this is happening in many different ways all over the place.
And while some people try to cast that as, oh, those are, you know, those are extreme people or extreme examples of things, and they don't represent normal everyday people.
And well, I don't know what happens in the bedrooms of I think it is warping other people's real life expectations.
Sure.
I think the media, what people consume in media, whether that be, you know, Instagram models or flat out pornography, is warping people's minds.
I saw a post where they, a guy called Margot Robbie, who is gorgeous, mid.
And I was like, you, sir, you need to go outside.
I think you've been consuming so much touched up, photoshopped, filtered media that you forgot what women look like.
So hold on.
So I have this straight.
This was a guy.
A guy on Twitter actually posted that Margot Robbie, who is Barbie, Barbie and gorgeous.
Yeah.
He called her mid, which means like a five out of 10.
Oh, right, right.
Not that attractive.
Yeah.
This is.
And I was like, you need to go touch grass and see people in real life.
Like go to a carnival.
This is the upset male who is attempting to drain the social value from a woman and thinks that her only value to society is her looks and therefore removing some of the value of those looks.
Oh, she's not that attractive.
So obviously she's not worth that much.
That's also hilarious because if anyone in our world has a right to be called objectively beautiful, it's Margot Robbie.
I know, right?
Like insane.
Call that as it is.
Like, yeah.
And then, of course, you look at his profile picture and you're like, yeah, you look like someone who should be the arbiter on who is and who isn't mid.
Have you looked in a mirror?
It's always the most pathetic looking people that will say the nastiest things about women's bodies or faces.
Right.
And that kind of sort of puts the edge on the way this is cast unfairly against women, which is that he will say that his value is not found in his attractiveness.
His value to society is not found in his attractiveness.
It's found in whatever else, what he does for a living or whatever, right?
And that's that's more of this thing where we tell little girls that they should try to be beautiful and little boys that they should try to be useful.
You know, taken to a set about generation after generation and then let loose on the world and the internet, that's that's its manifestation in real life right there.
Have changed the way I raise my kids a little bit in terms of like traditional.
I look at it as like, regardless of who they partner with, I want them to be a good partner.
And the values that I adhere to my boy kids and my girl kid when it comes to being a good partner are the same.
Right.
And it has nothing to do with, you know, these like traditional roles is like, are you helpful?
Are you in tuned with somebody's emotions?
Can you look at someone and go, wow, you look like you're having a bad day?
You want to talk about it?
Like things that make you a good partner and make you good to live with.
Because everyone wants their kids to find someone good, but are your kids good?
Yeah.
Like, are you good?
Everyone wants to find a good partner, but are you a good partner?
Well, you know what this is, right?
This is the parenting version of the Michael Jackson principle, which is that in order to change the world, you change the man in the mirror.
Only in your case, you don't change everyone else's kids.
You change your own kids.
Yeah.
Like, this is how you be a good partner.
This is what a good partner looks like.
Yeah.
We try to role, role model a respectable relationship because I want it to be so absurd when something disrespecting happens.
I want it to be like an insult, like an immediate insult where it feels wrong, you know?
So if my husband and I are fighting and calling each other names, when my kids go out into the world and someone does the same to them, it's just something that becomes comfortable.
Something they recognize.
Yeah.
Where if you raise your kids to not just not have these gender roles, but just to be a good partner, and those qualities are universal to all partners, I think we'd have a lot better because there's a lot of resentment, I think, between men and women because there are these, so to speak, gender roles that grow up with and expect, but our current society isn't like that anymore.
The fact that we won't openly talk about these sort of hidden social expectations in our world only adds to the confusion that we experience once we are, you know, put in the world to face them.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
And I can see it when my husband's with my kids, and then he's doing like basic parenting and like older people will come up to him and act like he's a god, like, oh my God, look at you.
Go.
Wait, go to level expectation.
Yeah.
He's literally just wearing our baby in a baby carrier while we're walking around the grocery store.
True, but he's holding his kid.
I will say that I will back that up.
That we do need to, in some ways, it is somewhat disheartening that men will get that level of praise for something so simple.
But I also think that we do need to be in a place where we first recognize the utility and give praise to men who actually do that because, you know, that's already a step forward.
Hopefully we get past that step and it doesn't.
Yeah, we haven't really got there yet.
And so we need that step where people, you know, give actual positive praise to men who do that.
And hopefully then we move past that phase and move to the phase where that's just normal and expected of every father.
I'll think we're there when we stop saying men babysit their kids.
Right?
Yeah.
I'm watching them.
I'm taking care of them.
I'm parenting, but when you say my husband is babysitting, I'm like, no, no.
Yeah.
And that's well, that's that's interesting how we use just how we word things affects how we see things.
Yeah.
Which brings me to some other things that we uh phrases that we have in our world that have uh enhanced this idea.
The idea that I'm trying to tear down slowly as we go here.
You know, and I just have a thought on that, sure, yeah.
And maybe it's because babysitting is literally work, it's paid work, right?
But like, mothering is just expected of me, and like I should be doing it.
Why would I get praise for that?
Right?
That's the level of social expectation for you is that you yeah, but like when men watch their kids, they call it babysitting because it spins it in this like frame of like he's working, he's working, it's work for him.
Probably we should call it fathering, yeah, which should be no problem with right, yeah.
Yeah, I do notice there's more social media groups that are devoted to being good dads, right?
There are, and that's what I love, like social media has been awful, but it's also been good in that it's allowing men who want to change and be good dads and be good partners to kind of talk to each other and say, I want to do better, you know, like trying to find ways to be better, yeah, yeah, and resources for that.
So, I think that's that's interesting that there are, there are men that are trying to change, and that's where I judge like because there are male feminists that specifically talk to women about their feminism or whatever, and I don't trust them because why are you telling me about it?
I don't need to hear it, I know exactly what goes on out there.
Why are you telling me?
That sounds like some virtue signaling action to me.
Yeah, like I don't care what you think about this, you don't need to tell me.
I already live this.
You need to go talk to the other men.
I have a episode that I did that's one of my favorites now.
Um, it's it's a concept called the explicit paradox, whereby once a person is uh attempting to explain a concept, usually about themselves, that really they should just be doing and demonstrating with their everyday activities, but instead are attempting to explicitly speak about it.
The audience tends to get their intended audience tends to get the impression that it's less like that than more so like that.
It moves in the opposite direction.
And I think that's what you're noticing there is that the more they talk about it, the less you think they're really doing it.
Yeah.
I have cracked jokes like, I, dude, I wouldn't let you watch my cup of coffee.
Okay.
Just so we're clear, there's something about you preaching this to me and other women that makes me find you very untrustable.
Yeah, you know what?
Just do it.
Just do all those things.
Just talk to the other men.
Just demonstrate doing it to them.
Just and then expect it of them too, silently.
Yeah.
But we have a couple other phrases here that we use in our parlance and they attempt to, they, they sort of, I don't know if they fit inside this idea.
They come from this idea, or maybe they just help to cement this idea into place that I think shouldn't be here at all.
But one of them is that opposites attract.
So I've always, for a very long time, railed against this for other reasons, but mostly as a person trained in physics, in physics, things that are electrically opposite in charge do attract each other.
But that's only in the electrical, physical sense.
Gravitation does not work this way.
You don't have to have an opposite gravitational charge for two pieces of mass to attract each other.
It's just a sort of a thing that people talk about.
They talk about magnetism and opposites attract.
And this is not, in my experience with humans, isn't really true.
You don't need opposites in order to have two people be attracted to each other.
It's just sort of a common trope that's often dramatic.
There are commonalities, right?
Yeah, you have to have things in common.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, there's it's nice to have some conflict, like positive conflict, because there's positive conflict in relationships, right?
And through that conflict comes growth.
Like, for instance, my husband is a homebody.
He is not a fan of travel.
He finds the idea of it very stressful.
And I am an adventurer.
I very much fly by the seat of my pants.
And so I'll plan trips.
And then he'll join, he'll join and he'll be like not wanting to at first.
But once we get where we are and everything's working out, he's very glad that I came up with the idea.
Right.
And so in that way, we complement each other because he's more cautious.
Reluctantly dragged along.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's more cautious.
And sometimes he'll temper me when my ideas are a little too out there.
Because sometimes I dream big, you know.
Put a little cold water on that.
So he'll like, and some, and so we kind of balance each other that way.
But in terms of like hobbies, things we like watching, things we like doing, we have everything in common there.
Right.
So we're not opposite in like what we like and enjoy, but we are opposite maybe in our temperaments and how we approach problem solving.
Right.
But if you have two people that are different, sometimes like that, it can be frustrating, but it also can be how you get the best outcomes from situations.
Yeah, well, it's, it's really just a thing that we just generally deal with in our lives.
It's definitely not necessary to have someone of an opposite, opposite temperament to be your partner in life.
Yeah.
It's just a thing that when there are differences, you either have to find a way to work with them or find a new partner.
That's just what that means.
It doesn't need in order for attraction to occur.
But the way that we use this saying, it sort of implies that there does need to be this and that there does need to be this separation, which is totally not true at all.
Right.
And in fact, if there's too much difference, you're not going to, you're not going to be compatible because there's just too many differences.
It just won't work.
Yeah.
It just doesn't work because now one person is having to give up who they are or what they enjoy.
So the other person is comfortable.
And that's no way to live your life.
Like that's not fun.
So, which, I mean, this lends directly to the next sort of common saying that we have.
We have a concept of the battle of the sexes, which we've all heard this.
It's the idea that there's a battle going on between men and women and that they are at odds with each other and that they're on opposite sides of a battle and that they're never going to be on the same side.
There's always going to be this conflict going on.
I mean, this imagery is sort of always cast in this scenario.
And I don't know the origin of this expression.
I think that there's like this ownership with men, like a club that I can tell that where they're reluctant to let women in on.
And in terms of like careers and hobbies and stuff, like men are like, oh, like, no, we don't want women here or like they get like kind of gatekeeping about what they're doing.
Where like if men show interest in something I enjoy, I'm happy to share with them.
Yeah.
Even if it's like not, even if it's not a traditionally feminine thing, let's say, but even if it is, like, if you want to know something about, let's say, makeup or whatever, like traditionally female hobbies, baking, whatever, I'm more than happy.
Like, I'm not going to gatekeep and be like, well, you know, that's not a man's thing to know kind of thing.
Yeah.
Where I feel like, especially as a female gamer, you know, when I play like competitive games like Overwatch or whatever, and then I talk in a female voice, they're like, make me a sandwich, you know, and I'm like, cause they just don't want you there.
Or they call you a fake gamer because you're trying to, you know, be cool or whatever.
Like, you just get all these accusations.
Yeah.
Like the fact that you're female at all, because you would get attention in that scenario.
The fact that you would let anyone know that you're female is itself some kind of virtue signaling.
And this is a thing that should be poo-pooed on, which the idea that someone's entire person itself is a smarmy virtue signal is pretty dark.
And like I say, I don't know if I've put on this podcast anywhere else, but I mentioned that I used to play World of Warcraft a lot, but I met my wife playing World of Warcraft.
That's amazing.
And my husband and I played so much wow together when we first started dating.
And I remember I was pregnant with my first kid and I'd like have like junk food like resting on my fat belly wow, eating candy and donuts.
But I, I, she experienced this and other women experienced this.
And it would, it became a real, uh, a thing that I still think isn't very well spoken or very well articulated about what was going on in that game, which was that when you had different guilds, you would tend to have an atmosphere within that guild based on how the people were interacting.
And based on how that atmosphere was, you would either be a guild that had no women at all, essentially no women or like maybe one or two, or like a bunch because the women were fleeing those other social spaces because they didn't feel comfortable and going to ones in which they did.
And that was a, was a sort of a undercurrent in my wow life was was realizing that once you got to a certain point of sort of a like a critical mass, if you will, of female influence in a guild.
And like I was in some guilds where there were women there, but they never talked.
And then it was hard to get to that level of critical mass because they just weren't engaging.
But once you got to a certain level of that, the men behaved differently.
They were just more calm, social.
They were more aware of what they were saying.
They were less like a locker room.
They were more like a lunchroom, right?
And that's, I saw that happen in different guilds.
And it was amazing to see.
And I, once I realized what was happening, it was just really amazing.
I was like, oh, this is happening this way because we have just a bunch of women here and the women feel comfortable and all of that is just working together to make a whole different atmosphere.
You want to know something interesting that I've been looking in is psychology and like end of life and mental health.
And the funny thing is, women do phenomenally well without men.
They do.
They live longer, they're happier, they form meaningful relationships.
They are able to move on with their lives once they untangle trauma and things like that that make them think they need to be codependently involved with men.
Once they get that healing in and they decide, you know what, I'm just going to live my life and I'm going to live it for me and I'm going to do what I want.
And they have really fulfilling lives.
And a lot of men, when they see women like that, they'll be like, enjoy dying alone with your cats.
And it's projection.
And here's why.
Men die alone.
They die alone often and they die younger than women.
And it's not necessarily that they have more health issues than women.
It's that when they reach end of life, they don't form meaningful relationships.
They don't help out with grandkids.
They tend to isolate.
They don't try to make new friendships and bonds.
And they do end up dying alone.
In old folks' homes, I saw that a lot, where like men didn't have visitors, didn't have family come in, like they were alone.
You just said a lot of sort of really incredible things all at once there.
So I'm wondering if I can unpack them simply without making a whole new episode out of it.
So first of all, I think that the idea that women do better on their own is probably more true when those women are financially stable.
Yes.
And in our times now, that's more true than it used to be.
And that's good.
So that I think I can just unpack that, leave that right there.
Another thing is that that resentment that you have undoubtedly seen in your life about this idea that, oh, be happy.
I hope you die alone with your cats or whatever it was you said.
You said it better than I did.
That comes from, and this is the one that's going to be tricky for me to unpack and sort of the most, I don't know, probably potentially explosive or whatever, but it comes from the idea that less so now, but men of an older generation, and technically I am part of that generation, less so mine than the one before me,
but still part of it, which was that in so many thousands of tiny, tiny ways, when I was growing up and becoming an adult through my teenagehood and all of this, I was taught that I wasn't taught as in anyone just told me the words.
I was taught, like I say, in many, many thousands of many, many tiny ways that my value, and we touched on this earlier, my value would be in what I could accomplish and produce in society.
It wasn't going to be in any way involved in what I look like really or any of those things.
It was all going to do with what I could accomplish.
And that's, I mean, we can look at it as a thing that drove men to accomplish things.
It encouraged them.
It raised the level of social expectation in regards to what they should accomplish.
And maybe that was good.
But it also told me that in relationships, my value in the relationship was going to be in, wrapped up in what I could bring materially to the relationship.
And it was my generation was sort of a little bit, a little bit more divorced from the idea that the man should be the breadwinner.
It was still there.
But it was sort of the idea that the, you know, the two, you know, man and woman will work, but the man will have the majority of the wealth brought to the relationship.
And so most of the, not all, but most of it will fall on them.
And so when I see a man saying things like this, I disagree with them, but I do understand why they think that.
It's not great.
It's, but it's not enough anymore.
It's because they, they felt that their value should be in what they could provide.
And they are sort of, it's a smear.
It's a sort of a backhanded, I mean, it's obviously an insult, but it's a backhanded way of trying to say, because I'm and men like me aren't going to provide for you, you will die poor and also alone.
Yeah.
And that's awful.
Like that, why we don't look at that and see that as a sign of a sickness in our society is a thing I think we should try to change because that's not how it should be.
Untrue.
It's less true today.
Yes.
It's less true today.
It's less true.
Yeah.
It's less true today.
Women are the majority of people in post-secondary right now are women.
Women outnumber men pursuing education.
Women are a lot more capable of supporting themselves.
And another phenomenon I've seen on social media because they are just not getting the respect in dating culture that they want is they've given up.
And what they're doing is women are cohabitating.
They're doing the things that they would do with a husband.
And it's not homosexual in nature.
They are settling down with their best friends.
They are buying parts together, in some cases, having children together.
And this wraps, sorry, but this wraps right into the third incredible thing that you, I mean, you threw them all out about forces.
I've been doing this a lot.
I've been doing a lot of like because you've gone off.
You said that when the women who were no longer with their partners were doing better as they get older, they were, it was easier to make friends than the men.
Yeah.
That is all to do with the effects of masculine toxicity, right?
Yeah.
It's because of the way that we've, you know, we didn't raise men to be this way, I don't think, but we've allowed them to be this way.
We've lowered the level of social expectation for them such that they can, men can be that way.
And we're less good at making friends, being okay with other men, all of those things.
And that's, again, slowly going away where we have a word to describe that effect now, which is good.
And we, so we have a way of pointing it out and pointing out why it's wrong, why we shouldn't be that way.
It'll probably still take several generations.
Recently, I don't know if you noticed my post about actually meeting friends.
I did.
I went out with friends last night and they're new friends because COVID nuked a lot of my relationships as you know, changing my perspective on a lot of stuff.
I felt maybe I didn't fit in with some of the friendships I used to have.
And so it's been a few years since I've had a local friend where I could just call up and say, Hey, you want to grab a coffee or a drink somewhere?
I have no, and when I finished my final final for nursing school, I felt lonely.
My husband was working nights.
I felt pretty lonely.
I was like, I'm so bummed.
I don't have relationships in this town, you know?
And I said, you know what?
Never mind.
I'm going to change that.
I'm going to do something about it.
It's never going to change unless I do something about it.
And I have social anxiety.
I can talk to 200 people in a room, no problem.
But I don't know.
I'm going to try to get to know them.
But to like introduce myself.
Experience empathy with them.
That's different.
Yeah.
So I started a nerd group a few months back because I wanted to know who in town likes nerdy stuff.
And nerds tend to be a bit more progressive.
And I'm kind of picky about that.
I don't want to hang out with bigots.
So I found two women that I recognized from the school pickup.
Are you bigoted against bigots?
Yes.
How dare you?
No shame.
And so I found two girls in the pickup line that I liked.
And I was like, you know what?
I'm going to ask them to join me for a celebratory drink because I'll never know unless I ask.
And it was an awkward.
I'm like, I know you barely know me.
And I know we haven't actually talked, but like, would you join me for a drink tomorrow?
And both said yes.
And my husband, who is a fairly progressive man, said, you know what you just did?
This is why I admire women because they can just do stuff like this.
And I would never, because my husband doesn't have friends in town either.
It's like, I would rather die of loneliness and suicide than do what you just did.
Yeah.
And I, he's like, I know that that's bad.
And I, you know, I know that that's wrong.
Yeah.
But like, this is how you're conditioned.
Like to do what you just did, say, Hey, I know we don't know each other, but you want to hang out as friends.
Yeah.
Like, that's so hard for men to do.
Oh, yeah.
And they often do die alone because their suicide rates are much higher.
Yeah.
You know, because they really cannot say something as simple as, will you be my friend?
Yeah, I admit, even now, knowing that, I still would have difficulty doing that.
It's, it's a weird part of my social constructs inside my brain that veer me away from that.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Part of it, it's there's so many different roots in toxic masculinity.
Like men are supposed to be tough and go at it alone.
There's also the no homo thing.
Like what is yeah.
And part of that is what I mentioned about about the expectation was that we be useful and do all the things and therefore have to not suffer any weaknesses or downturns or anything like that.
And definitely don't show them.
Yeah.
Like, or if they do ask someone to hang out, they're like, no homo.
Yeah.
They have to make it more awkward because they think it's making it less awkward, but it makes it more awkward when they say that.
I am guilty of that.
I am guilty of exactly that exact thing.
This is, this is funny.
This happened.
This was a person that I work with who might even hear this episode.
I don't know.
But he was joking one day at work and we were talking about something.
And it's like, yeah, now we're best friends.
And my immediate response, partly because I thought it was just humorous, but my immediate response was to tell him, okay, but no dick pics.
Yeah.
That was my first response.
Instead of being, yeah, cool, man.
Yeah.
You know what's funny is women can share like even that level of intimacy and not have it be romantic at all.
Yeah.
One of my best girlfriends, I can send her a picture.
Like, I think my boobs look spot on today.
And just send her a picture.
She'd be like, Yeah, that looks amazing.
Yeah.
And there's like nothing weird about it.
Yeah, there's no way.
Like, men never, and I'm not saying they should.
Maybe we're just a little too close.
But like, well, no, well, I don't, I don't know where the line should be drawn for anyone else.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I don't know if that puts anyone too close, but I think, I think you're right that we are raised differently in this way.
And that's not great.
But like, I wouldn't even have to clarify.
Like, I am not hitting on you.
Yeah, you wouldn't.
Like, there's no clarification.
Yeah, no, not at all.
Yeah.
And I've, I've overheard other conversations between women when they, you know, just because I was around.
And I, I know that that's they don't need to clarify that stuff.
They don't, it doesn't need qualifiers.
It doesn't need these gatekeeping markers to keep people at certain distances in certain aspects.
They, they don't seem to, or they, they probably have just fewer of those, right?
Um, than men do because of all the problems with, but I should just do a whole separate episode on toxic masculinity is what I should do.
That's obviously that's yeah, because that's never so I'm going to try to wrap this up here.
Um, tie this up in a bow in just a couple sentences here.
Um, in the same way that we now have the term toxic masculinity to refer to a concept that we'd like to point out and show why it's wrong, I hopefully would like to have gender yin-yangism become also a phrase that we can use for a concept that we would like to point out when we see it, to show people that it's not useful, um,
to continue thinking that way because it's very reductive.
Oh, yeah, yeah, it's it's far too simplistic to describe actual human life, um, and less so now than ever.
Yeah, so it's an idea that needs to go away, really.
I'm because a lot of men are kind of upset.
I think that's why we're seeing this Andrew Tate type uh masculinity come in is because men are starting to pick up that women have had enough and they're having like a temper tantrum about it.
Like it's the death rattle of misogyny, I think.
Yeah.
In the same way that when a when a society gets desperate, they tend to do more extreme things like suicide bombings and whatnot.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think that so whether that's what we're seeing with toxic masculinity, we're seeing sort of an increase in the level of rhetoric, not really suicide bombing, but increase in the level of rhetoric to try to protect an idea that they haven't even really thought about yet.
Yeah.
And the way they go on about relationships with women is so shallow and evil almost.
Like they really don't see women as people.
And I don't even think a lot of them like women.
In Andrew Tate's world, in Andrew Tate's world, the value of a woman is entirely reduced to their level of attractiveness.
Yeah.
Entirely.
That's a YouTube talk I'll send you after this that I made when I man.
So I had commented on someone's page and I said, you know, because I did get a little bit of Botox because I frown a lot.
People make me mad and I'm getting these like deep groups.
And a guy was like, gross.
I don't even like Botox.
And I was, I made this video where I just proceed to lose my shit on him.
Like, oh, were you going to date me with the with if that was like you're drawing the line?
You're, you're setting yourself up to ask me out on a date, but then you read that I got Botox two weeks ago and now you're not gonna.
Is that it?
Right.
Like, why do I care?
Why did that person feel like their level of judgment about you was useful in that conversation?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or did anyone else ask them?
Probably no one.
No.
I was talking to another one woman about beauty habits and beauty routine and things we do to make ourselves feel better.
I want her input, actually.
And I think a lot of women do when they put on nice clothes, they appreciate comments from other women because there's nothing attached.
Like we just appreciate each other, right?
And you probably get a more honest answer.
Yeah.
Where like men are like a more descriptive answer than I wasn't asking you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was asking you.
It's fine.
Yeah.
Like we don't do everything for you.
In fact, most things women do are pretty much for other women.
Yeah.
And they dress nice and they look nice and they go to work looking nice.
It's they're doing it for their female peers more than their male peers.
I promise you.
Yeah, I don't know.
And so they have this notion that everything we do is to make them happy.
Well, that's also the thing that's true in Andrew Tate's world is that the two things about women are that they should be attractive and that they should be attractive for the men.
And that's that's everything in his world.
It's so yeah, it's about making them feel good and not yourself.
And I said it before.
I just let him know my face.
Yeah.
Everything I do is for myself.
Well, everything I like what I see.
Should be for themselves.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the right people will like it.
Yeah.
So whatever.
I don't know.
Okay.
Well, I'm going to wrap this up now.
All right.
So it was great having you on again, Lydia, and talking about things that are outside the normal box of what we talk about.