In this episode of Thick & Thin, host Alex Blumberg sits down with feminist and writer Christina Summers to talk about her journey to becoming a feminist, how she became one, and how she got her start in the feminist movement. They also talk about gender neutral pronouns, feminism, and what it means to be a feminist in the 21st century. This episode was produced by Tall Tales and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Build Buildings. We are produced by Riley Bray. The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our companies. We do not represent the views of our employers, employers, or any other third parties. We are not affiliated with any of these companies, unless otherwise specified. Thank you for listening and supporting this podcast. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our other shows on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser.fm, and leave us a five star rating and review on iTunes. If you like what you hear, please consider leaving us a review and a rating and a review on your favorite streaming platform. Thank you, and we'll be looking out for you in the next episode! next week's episode will be out next week! XOXO, Sarah and I hope you're having a wonderful week! xoxo, Sarah, Alex, Briana, Caitie, Jenna, Emily, and Jenna, Alex, Alex and Sarah - Sarah's new book, "Feminism Is a thing? Caitie's new novel, "The Real Talk" is out now! , and we hope you like it's a good one, too, Sarah's book is out soon! . . . and we love you, too! - Sarah, Sarah is a little bit more than halfway through the first episode of the podcast, and she's a little more? - and we can't wait to hear back from you, but we'll get back to the rest of it! Sarah, we'll figure it out in a week or not? . We'll see you soon. - we'll hear from you soon! - Sarah's next week, we're in the rest in a couple of weeks! Thanks, Sarah will be back! -- Sarah, too much so much more! --
00:00:21.000One of the major Ivy League schools was adding a bunch of different gender-neutral pronouns, like Z, H, E, and they were adding a bunch of crazy new ones they have invented.
00:02:51.000So that made me get Deeper into the rabbit hole of Miss Christina Summers and then I started watching your factual feminism videos and I started listening to some of your conversations and I became very impressed but I also became very perplexed because you face a lot of backlash and I found that perplexing because everything that I saw you seem to be very reasonable very measured very informed like how did you polite very
00:03:21.000polite and How did you get on this kind of crazy journey, almost as like, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like, I don't want to say you're redefining feminism, but you're redefining it after it's been redefined.
00:03:35.000Right, you're actually taking it back to its original noble purpose, which was about equality, basic fairness to women, that women and men should enjoy Equal liberty and dignity, rights, of course.
00:03:50.000But feminism has drifted into, I think, a kind of female chauvinism.
00:03:55.000And I became a feminist many years ago, decades ago, because I did not appreciate male chauvinism.
00:04:09.000I mean, is there one thing that you could point to where this all started?
00:04:12.000Because it seems like the origins of, like, if you go back and watch, like, old movies and take a look at old culture, it's very clear there's a lot of sexism going on.
00:04:21.000Like, men would smack women in old movies, and it was, like, it seemed like, that's, like...
00:04:27.000Other than reading books, that's the best interpretation of the time.
00:04:33.000So if you go back to those 1950s films and look at how people treated each other, it seems like there were much clearer definitions that women were struggling against, like this idea.
00:04:44.000That women were inferior, that the whole stereotype of women belong barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.
00:04:51.000This is what young women were fighting against, what women, period, were fighting against when feminism sort of started its march.
00:04:59.000And then what happened, particularly in the academy, and I was teaching philosophy in the 1980s, And the chairman of my department asked me to teach a course in feminist theory.
00:05:48.000They were a series of mutually reinforcing readings, and it was a conspiracy theory about the patriarchy, buttressed by inflated statistics.
00:05:58.000So after spending a summer reading these books, I wrote a paper and went to the American Philosophical Association and presented it.
00:06:08.000And I will tell you, typically at the American Philosophical Association, if you give a paper, People are...
00:06:53.000Why would we want to teach courses like that that demonize men?
00:06:58.000Let's celebrate humanity and have, you know, and also accuracy, because these texts were filled with With what I've come to call advocacy statistics, or in some cases hate statistics, sort of designed to create just anger in women.
00:07:15.000And they happen not to be true, but they work very well as propaganda.
00:07:18.000So as a philosophy professor, I was very upset to see classrooms being used to disseminate propaganda and twisted conspiracy theories about patriarchy.
00:07:29.000So I tried to correct it, and what happened was the radicals were already there in the academy, and they do not tolerate dissent well.
00:07:39.000What you're seeing happening on the campus today at Yale, these terrible confrontations between these, some are calling them cry bullies now, and professors and so forth, these angry mobs.
00:07:52.000I have been confronting them for years, but now the public is beginning to notice more.
00:07:58.000Well, you've been confronting them only from the standpoint of feminism, right?
00:08:01.000I mean, what was going on in Yale was a professor had written a letter saying that children should probably have the right to be a little bit outrageous and perhaps even offensive in their Halloween costumes.
00:08:15.000And just Halloween costumes, this led to this massive outrage.
00:09:07.000And a mob mentality is a very real mentality, whether it's an actual mob out on the street in the middle of a riot, or whether it's a bunch of people on Twitter that get riled up into a frothy rage.
00:09:54.000Well, it seems like what that woman did when she wrote that original letter was take a little bit of a chance against the mob, was take a little bit of a chance.
00:12:53.000Why are there not more measured, intelligent people that are trying to Raise children and teach them how to be measured and intelligent adults and look at things objectively.
00:13:04.000What is causing this underlying sort of theme, this delusional theme that's repeating itself?
00:13:12.000Well, first of all, there are lots of reasonable professors.
00:13:15.000Even in women's studies, there are reasonable professors.
00:13:21.000There's a vocal minority of professors who are apparently, for certain students, charismatic.
00:13:29.000And they have, for years, been teaching these students.
00:13:33.000These paranoid views of the world and inciting rage against men, gender profiling of men, and they have a following.
00:13:44.000And this little following has been there all along, but about two years ago, the Department of Education sent out essentially an edict warning colleges that We're good to go.
00:14:16.000They believed the propaganda about what's happening on the college.
00:14:21.000And they gave a cure that was worse than the disease.
00:14:25.000I mean, the cure was to turn campuses into a little pink police state, some call them, feminist police states, where every joke is now monitored.
00:14:34.000And you're supposed to be reporting other students if you hear a remark that could be interpreted as sexist.
00:14:40.000And this is happening at public universities, where the last time I looked, we're, you know, part of, you know, the U.S. Constitution applies.
00:14:49.000The students are being policed by people that have no right to do it, but this was incited by the Department of Education.
00:14:59.000So that's the original, that's the root.
00:15:03.000If you go back and look, when did words like trigger warning, safe space, microaggression, you know, we didn't hear these three, four years ago.
00:15:12.000What happened was that these angry groups who've always been there, they were empowered by the Assistant Secretary of Education, the Department of Education.
00:15:22.000She basically told them, you can make a federal case out of someone walking by and a microaggression.
00:15:30.000And they consider everything a man does a microaggression.
00:16:30.000You will never emerge as a sane person.
00:16:35.000Over the last two years or so, when I started going down this rabbit hole, I started visiting these websites and visiting a lot of forums that you could easily just call echo chambers and Looking at what happens first of all when someone disagrees even politely they're banned instantly when someone had any there was a there was one was a topic about Sexual assault
00:17:05.000in terms of drinking, about what is rape.
00:17:09.000And the subject was, they were discussing, they were accusing someone, a man, of rape because he and a woman had gotten drunk together and had sex.
00:17:39.000And she thought that was a perfectly possible, you know, situation.
00:17:44.000And that is such a degradation of language, a trivialization of a serious crime.
00:17:49.000But they have expanded the meaning of terms so that now sexual assault encompasses Just normal behavior that people enjoy, which is, it has been known to happen that people have drinks and then have sex.
00:18:03.000Well, it's a giant percentage of the culture becomes rapists then.
00:18:08.000Yes, most of the people, even throughout history and throughout the world today...
00:18:13.000Yeah, 90% of the adults of the world would probably be deemed rapists.
00:18:19.000And I also don't understand why it is automatically the guy's fault If it's consensual, I'm not talking about someone being incapacitated, blackout drunk.
00:18:45.000They will take her side if she can show they had drinks.
00:18:49.000And I find this, another strange thing that's happening with feminism today is that it's going, I call it fainting couch feminism.
00:18:56.000It's almost as if we're going back to the Victorian era where there were delicate ladies preyed upon by men and as if the women aren't moral agents.
00:19:04.000I mean, if you take a lot of drinks, you probably have made a decision to lower your inhibitions and be wild.
00:21:22.000Right, and being terrified and thinking you're going to be killed or whatever, some horrible experience.
00:21:25.000And this is a bad date, or a bad hookup, I guess they would call it, where you didn't know, maybe you'd regret it the next day.
00:21:35.000And we do see on campus—I've watched these cases where these young women will—they don't report these things, and sometimes they have to take a gender studies class a year later, and then they bring charges.
00:21:47.000And there is no way—it's metaphysically impossible to have any evidence of what happened, but if she can—and young men have been thrown off campus or, you know, sort of tarred with the stigma of being a rapist— I had Thaddeus Russell on,
00:22:03.000who's an author and a professor at Occidental, and he was talking about how there was a case where a man and a woman who were going to school there got drunk and had sex, and the man was accused of rape because of this and kicked out of school.
00:23:19.000Being a womanizer and a drunk and that he got some girl drunk and had sex and they were calling it rape.
00:23:26.000And one of the things that they were saying during this whole thing was someone had come in and said, well, why is it that when you're drunk You're responsible for all these other things, but you're not responsible for sex.
00:23:40.000And that person was immediately banned from the forum.
00:24:43.000And maybe they had very feminist mothers, reinforced by teachers, and then if they took gender studies, my goodness, it's all there in the texts.
00:24:53.000And so people, I mean, I forgive students because I know that they have gone through relentless propaganda when it comes to gender because the gender activists have not allowed...
00:25:10.000And that we are here, there are many professors that agree with me, people like Camille Paglia and Wendy Kaminer, many journalists like the great, you know, Kathy Young and on and on.
00:25:20.000But we have been, you know, demonized and our voices are not, you know, we're not invited to the table.
00:25:27.000Well, classically, feminine women are also demonized.
00:25:30.000Women who wear skirts and high heels and just painted nails and makeup and things that people may enjoy that look.
00:25:41.000For some reason, that's a negative thing.
00:26:12.000Some of them, they don't go after that, but they want you to know that femininity and masculinity are strictly performances, that none of it has a basis in biology.
00:26:43.000And if you look at the biologists, the physiologists, many of the psychologists, they'll tell you there are very clear male-female differences.
00:26:52.000And not that everyone embodies them, but most of us do.
00:26:56.000And so they're denying what almost everyone can see with their own eyes.
00:27:01.000So that's also people that can really buy into this sort of intense gender activism.
00:27:07.000They have to be able to believe what they're reading in the text and not what they see with their eyes or even in their own hearts.
00:27:14.000So it has the makings of, as I've said, a sort of fanatical movement.
00:27:23.000You're listening to some of the things that people say.
00:27:25.000I watched a video where a woman was talking about gender being a social construct, and she was talking about the differences that are often cited between men and women physically, and they're just because of physical activity, the activities that the men choose versus the activities that the women choose.
00:27:41.000And if the women engaged in the same activities, they would have the same physical abilities as the men.
00:27:45.000I was like, What the fuck are you talking about?
00:27:47.000That's denying testosterone, the role it plays in muscle development, and the difference in bone structure.
00:27:59.000I mean, people talk about, oh, on the right, they're anti-science, and there's some of that.
00:28:03.000But on the left, it's more consequential because these people are in the universities.
00:28:08.000Kooks on the right tend not to be on the campuses.
00:28:11.000But these people are teaching in our most elite schools.
00:28:15.000Well, gender is the only area where it doesn't seem like you are allowed to have an objective conversation about the statistics or the facts.
00:28:25.000Like, if you question things or if you have any questions about the facts or the statistics, You become questioned like you're a bad person.
00:28:36.000You're a person with alternative motives.
00:28:39.000You can't just be looking at an objective like, what is the number one?
00:28:42.000Someone had told me one in four women have been raped.
00:28:45.000And I'm like, wow, that doesn't seem right.
00:28:59.000So we started Googling it, and we found all these different numbers, but there's no hard line numbers, and that could be attributed to a bunch of things.
00:29:07.000First of all, the very real fact that Many women that have been involved in a horrible situation like that don't want to report it.
00:29:35.000If you say that, if you even admit that that's a reality, you are some sort of an apologist, you're a rape apologist, you're a rape enabler.
00:29:45.000But these are facts that's happened to friends of mine.
00:29:47.000I've had friends that have absolutely not raped someone and been accused of it and had to go to court and had to deal with a bunch of things and hire lawyers and eventually the charges were dropped but the fact remains that they were accused.
00:31:50.000And the media doesn't realize, I think, that the gender scholars have an agenda and they're not like...
00:31:56.000If you teach in a women's studies, I don't want to say women's studies because there are serious scholars, but if you're in a gender studies department or gender theory, your views are not checked by...
00:32:23.000When the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which sets the gold standard for research on crime, they find on the campus that the number is closer to 1 in 50 or 1 in 53 for sexual assault.
00:33:05.000There are places in time of war where rape is used as a weapon of war, but Swarthmore College, Yale University, Berkeley, they are not the war-torn Congo.
00:33:21.000I always say there is too much sexual assault on campus, and it is probably part of the combination of the hookup culture and the binge drinking culture.
00:33:35.000It's probably, you know, just, it needs a different solution.
00:33:39.000But what they do is want to make it seem as though we have these sex criminals, these predators, hunting for young women on the campus.
00:33:47.000And it's probably, you know, an awkward 19-year-old boy who, you know, thought this girl liked him and they got drunk and had sex and then she can say that he was a rapist.
00:33:57.000And he had no intention and no awareness of doing anything wrong.
00:36:27.000What they don't know is this scholar may be an ideologue or had an agenda that got in the way of her or sometimes his objectivity.
00:36:37.000Well, it seems like this is the type of cyclical thing, this...
00:36:46.000Reinforcing ideologies that you're going to teach these children.
00:36:51.000These children will grow up to complete their education and become professors and continue that sort of cycle without ever breaking this pattern.
00:37:00.000And it could be a real problem if the universities continue to teach these ideologies without question, without some sort of a Reality check.
00:37:10.000I would say peer review, but it seems like their peers are just reinforcing ideologists.
00:37:28.000Well, doing those videos, you're so calm and logical, and you're very reasonable, and they have a tremendous amount of views, and I think there's a lot of people that When they get called a rape apologist or a bigot or whatever,
00:37:46.000when they don't agree with it, they get angry and then they join the other team.
00:37:50.000They're like, well, fuck these feminists.
00:38:21.000Most people just want people to rise through their life or get through whatever they're trying to get through by virtue of the quality of their acts, by virtue of their behavior, by virtue of their work.
00:38:33.000Like, you want to treat people the way they deserve to be treated, and we all want to sort of elevate through this existence.
00:38:40.000So this idea that there's these teams, the problem is you get pushed back from one side, and then you just join the other team.
00:38:47.000Well, it is creating blowback, but most people, I don't think, even join another team.
00:39:02.000I didn't consciously think, oh, I'm going to confront these people and be a warrior.
00:39:08.000I thought, naively, I'm going to confront them and then maybe I'm a little bit wrong, but they're a little bit wrong and we'll meet in the middle or who knows.
00:39:39.000It's a very strange predicament because I don't see a clear exit strategy.
00:39:43.000I look at this confusion, and one of the things I also started doing after being called a men's rights advocate is to find out, well, what are these fucking crazy bastards into?
00:39:53.000Well, they've got some goddamn good points, too, unfortunately.
00:39:57.000You go to men's rights advocacy websites, and you see these horrible stories of these guys getting Destroyed in divorce court and losing everything they have, being preyed upon by unscrupulous women that go after them and marry them and take all their money and they have no recourse and that they were set up,
00:40:16.000women set up some sort of a, got some restraining order against them by a judge and that sets up the idea that they're some sort of an abuser and without any physical proof they can be accused of these things and then When they go to court,
00:40:35.000I've seen some crazy shit that I've read online about child custody battles where the men were accused of sexually molesting their children by the woman where there was no evidence whatsoever and the women coached the kids into saying these things.
00:40:49.000Horrific, horrific stuff on both sides.
00:40:52.000And then these men, they all lump into these men's rights groups, these guys that have been destroyed by women, and then just decide that women are assholes, decide that women are the enemy, and that they just want to go to South America and get prostitutes.
00:41:07.000I've literally read these articles where these guys are talking about, like, this is how you do it.
00:41:12.000You go to South America, and you find a girl that she's willing to have sex with you for money, and they're way hotter than American women.
00:42:20.000It just happens that most of the misinformation, not all of it, but most of it is now targeted against men.
00:42:28.000So I do this weekly video series that, you know, I just try to correct a myth each week and most of them are feminist myths about how bad men are and they're almost always wrong and I correct them.
00:42:42.000So people say, well, you're a men's rights activist.
00:42:45.000I'm a truth activist, a common sense activist.
00:42:48.000And if you want to call me a men's rights activist, fine, but that's not actually what I'm doing.
00:42:52.000Well, I have a friend, Cara Santa Maria, who's a brilliant scientist and neurosurgeon, or she was a neuroscientist, rather, and just not a surgeon, just operating on brains.
00:43:33.000And I just want people to actually be judged or to be considered based on their merits, not instantly judged or demonized because they happen to have a penis or instantly demeaned because they happen to have a vagina.
00:44:04.000Well, I'm trying, but I'm also optimistic that there has to be a limit to irrationality, and eventually it will fall.
00:44:13.000I just wish it would be sooner rather than later.
00:44:16.000Well, I think what we're dealing with today, with our new access to information that we've enjoyed over the last decade or so, I think two decades, but really it's sort of taking hold with social media, where people don't just have access to information,
00:45:00.000They don't consider deities, but they want a group of core ethical and moral values.
00:45:09.000So I think if you wanted to boil it down, a lot of people would be atheism plus atheism.
00:45:16.000The idea being that you want to be a good person, and you don't want to sexually discriminate or racially discriminate, and you also don't happen to believe in a magic person that lives in the clouds.
00:46:12.000I mean, you were at a fucking Atheism Plus conference, and you're preaching about the idea that you shouldn't sexually or racially discriminate.
00:47:11.000They rent out like a conference hall somewhere and they come and they hand out pamphlets and they sell t-shirts and then they have these little parties and these little events and then they, you know, you have to pay money to get a badge and you go to this fucking thing and these people talk and then they drink.
00:48:20.000So they'll say, and we all agree, you should be respectful of other people and not demean them with costumes.
00:48:26.000And fine, I don't want to see someone in blackface or humiliating someone with a costume, but then they will, so that sounds fine and we all agree, but then they will go after a museum because they have an exhibit of, you know, kimonos and say that's cultural appropriation.
00:48:46.000So we can't, Well, cultural appropriation, that is what most of the history of culture is.
00:48:52.000Well, it was a kimono night at a museum, right?
00:48:54.000Yes, a beautiful thing they were doing at the Museum of Fine Arts.
00:48:56.000They were bringing in exquisite kimonos, the public was learning to appreciate them, and you could try one on, which I certainly would have wanted to do and have a picture, because they're so lovely.
00:50:04.000But I think a lot of it is what we're saying, is that When we have social media and when you see these people that are saying all these things on social media that a lot of people agree with,
00:50:19.000a lot of really relevant points when it comes to racism or sexism or all these things, why are they saying these things?
00:50:27.000Are they saying these things because these things are actually important to them or are they saying these things because they know people are going to read them and they're going to like them because of what they said?
00:50:38.000It's almost like the whole world is becoming slowly but surely a giant reality show.
00:50:46.000Because if you watch reality television, when those people behave on those shows, when those cameras are on them, they're very aware those cameras are on them.
00:50:53.000So they say crazy shit, they do crazy things, like...
00:50:57.000I have a friend who has a friend who's one of those housewives, the real housewives, and it's a sad story.
00:51:05.000She's just trying to get attention, and she wants to write books and try to make money, and she's a single mom.
00:51:11.000There's a lot of sadness behind it, the reality.
00:51:14.000But when you see her on the show, you see this big, boisterous, you see a lot of acting out, a lot of craziness, and you would go, oh, well, that girl is a this.
00:51:42.000What you're getting from a lot of people is they're in a fucking giant reality show.
00:51:47.000They're in a giant reality show and their method of communication is through Twitter or through Facebook posts or through YouTube videos or whatever the fuck it is.
00:51:55.000But when they're saying these things, they're not just communicating.
00:51:59.000They're communicating to try to get likes.
00:52:12.000And I think you get a version of that in college campuses because to become like a really radical advocate and a radical activist and really become a part of this or to even – I'm going to have a hunger strike.
00:55:24.000And what was interesting is they had their safe room, but the college administration I was looking at their Facebook postings and their antics and got worried about my safety.
01:01:15.000So you do find far more men in sort of people-free zones or jobs where they ask people, would you rather spend a week taking apart a machine and putting it back together, or would you rather spend a week sitting with a group of people talking about their problems?
01:01:33.000And far more men say they'd want to be with the machine and far more women say talk about the problem.
01:01:40.000Now, it just turns out that overall, if you are working with, say, computers and you're an engineer, you're at that high level with the education, you get paid well.
01:01:53.000If you have the skills of a nurturer, you do need the education in the background, but there are a lot of people that want to do them, and there just isn't, where is the money?
01:02:02.000Who's going to pay you that kind of money?
01:02:04.000So they do not earn as much, and they resent that.
01:02:07.000But, as you say, you would tell the young woman, I would tell them, you know, you're not going to make as much.
01:02:13.000But she probably would say, but it interests me.
01:02:16.000I mean, someone could have told me, don't major in philosophy, major in Or metallurgy or petroleum engineering, I wouldn't even want to see the textbook for that.
01:02:27.000And if they told me you won't earn as much, it didn't.
01:02:29.000If it does matter to you, then change your major if you're going into one of these fields.
01:02:35.000Well, I think what you're saying, it highlights a real problem that human beings have in choosing an occupation and choosing what path they want to go to in their life.
01:02:43.000And I think oftentimes people, they go the way they think is going to earn them the most money instead of going the way that's going to make them fulfilled and happy.
01:02:52.000And there's a lot of things that I could do that I should maybe have done when I was younger if I wanted to make money, just make money.
01:03:01.000And there's a lot of people my age that are way more successful than me and make way more money than me.
01:03:05.000I don't know if they're happier than me, though.
01:03:07.000And I think what I figured out how to do somewhere along the line through trial and error is do things I actually enjoy.
01:03:14.000And somehow or another, that's lost in a lot of people.
01:03:17.000And people say, oh, well, you got lucky and you can do that and this and that.
01:03:30.000There's a lot of things that I love that I probably could have been equally happy pursuing.
01:03:34.000I don't necessarily think that when you look at life, you should look at it in terms of what is the best way to make the most amount of money.
01:03:42.000So when we're talking about things like the wage gap, what about the happiness gap?
01:03:47.000Because men are much more likely to commit suicide.
01:03:51.000Men, I think a A lot of men suffer from depression, as I'm sure a lot of women do as well, but I don't necessarily think we should look at it in terms of what's going to earn you the most money, and is that what you're preparing for in school?
01:04:07.000But every time someone uses that wage gap statistic, that's how they're judging society, and they're saying women are cheated.
01:04:13.000No, what you want to know is what they should ask is how much do you like your job, how fulfilled you are, and then look at the sex difference.
01:04:24.000There certainly is a fatality gap, which is that men are vastly more likely to die on the job because men occupy the gritty, dangerous jobs, you know, working as loggers and roofers and, you know, outside and, you know,
01:04:39.000on, you know, fishing and fisheries and things.
01:04:44.000The dirty, gritty jobs are done by men.
01:04:47.000It's like there's an invisible army of men I'm doing all of this work.
01:04:50.000There's a big construction site near where I live in Washington, D.C., and they're building a big complex.
01:04:58.000I have seen dozens of men out there, not a single woman, every day for a year.
01:06:50.000But the four years of trying to figure it out, like figure out what your occupation is going to be, where you're going to go and what you're going to do.
01:06:56.000And then you look at all these supposed barriers and boundaries that are in front of you that are going to prevent you from doing what you want to do or getting in the way of you being justly rewarded for what you're going to do.
01:07:06.000That's why I get mad at some of my feminist colleagues for constantly telling young women, oh, tech is rigged against you.
01:07:14.000The guys in tech, for the most part, there are exceptions, but for the most part are welcoming, and many of them want to have more women because it looks bad not to have them, so they're doing what they can.
01:07:25.000But we're telling young women, oh, you're not welcome in tech.
01:07:27.000Well, there was a time women weren't welcome in law or medicine or philosophy, and things changed.
01:07:33.000And I suspect by now that the reason you don't find a high percentage of women in tech is because women just aren't as interested in tech as they are in other things.
01:07:44.000Well, and be careful what you wish for, because I have a friend who's an executive at Google and she makes a shit ton of money, but she works ungodly hours.
01:10:18.000And I do not want that kind of feminism.
01:10:20.000One of the things that I found that's hilarious, it keeps getting repeated over and over again in feminist blogs and websites, is they won't address men's issues until all women's issues are...
01:10:30.000They believe that Feminism addresses everything.
01:10:34.000There's no need for men's rights advocacy because feminism addresses everything.
01:10:39.000And once women are equal and treated equally and supported equally, you won't have any problems with men.
01:10:49.000Oh, I don't understand the rational basis for that.
01:10:52.000We can't do some good in many, many places at once?
01:11:54.000Every day, you're going to catch a certain amount of different species.
01:11:58.000You're going to catch tuna, you catch a marlin or two, and you're going to catch a few retards.
01:12:02.000You're going to catch some really dumb people, and those really dumb people are going to tweet you, and you're going to copy those down every day and accumulate them.
01:12:10.000Well, how many really smart people read what you had to say, disagreed, agreed, whatever, and didn't tweet you?
01:12:16.000What you're getting is a bias sampling.
01:12:20.000And by saving that bias sampling and putting up there, it's not proof that somehow or another you're being oppressed.
01:12:27.000It's proof that you're crazy and you're paying attention to these dummies.
01:12:32.000You're tapping into a well of human beings.
01:12:35.000If you have something that reaches a million people...
01:12:38.000If you have a blog or a YouTube video and you read the comments on them, you're reaching a phenomenal amount of human beings.
01:12:45.000And you're always going to have a certain percentage of human beings who are unbalanced or they're fucked up in the head in some way or they're really dumb.
01:12:55.000And those people, they're going to be more likely to comment you.
01:13:50.000At the end of the day, that's a lot of what they're trying to do.
01:13:53.000But I'll also say the things that I write about, because I do think I am just speaking common sense about gender, that I have a lot of followers on Twitter and people that I encounter from the factual feminist who are just happy they were able to find someone.
01:14:10.000And it's sort of absurd that you can't find a professor.
01:14:13.000I mean, I left the university to go to a think tank.
01:14:15.000I could still be there teaching, but it was lonely.
01:14:20.000I had colleagues who would agree with me, and I had some that were very annoyed with me, so it wasn't a comfortable place.
01:14:27.000So there's, for a dissident feminist or just, I think, as I said, the voice of moderation, they will not hear that if they're on campus, and now you don't hear it in the media.
01:14:36.000So social media is a place where you can tell the truth and people can be exposed to ideas that have been edited out of the curriculum.
01:14:45.000Well, you're an author, and you've written books, and you've written papers, and people have read those, but they're not going to have near the immediacy that something like a YouTube video has.
01:14:55.000So what's fantastic about what you're doing...
01:14:57.000I've never had anything like these videos.
01:14:58.000They've had over 4 million views, I think, if you add them all up, and some more than others.
01:15:03.000But we have a good one coming out tonight on the myth of male power.
01:16:49.000If they go to a school of education, they may be reading these fashionable texts about how women are the silenced, underprivileged, and so they think that they have to, you know, focus on the girls, and the boys, the typical behavior of little boys has been redefined as pathology.
01:17:07.000So you'll find little boys being, you know, suspended for playing cops and robbers or wanting to play a raucous game in the playground, dodgeball or tag.
01:17:18.000Now, girls like to play, too, outdoors and have recess, but typically they will do a little bit of that.
01:17:24.000They will also do that, a lot of theatrical imaginative games, playing house, playing school, or Sharing confidences with your best friend.
01:20:06.000They hear boys putting each other down and you have to listen because when men put each other down, including men and boys, it's often the way they show friendship.
01:20:52.000And I think there's also, there's something to be gained from that type of insulting behavior with boys and even teasing each other back and forth as long as it's good natured.
01:21:03.000Because even though it does kind of sting when someone mocks you and makes fun of you, it also motivates you to do better at whatever they were mocking you at.
01:21:22.000And they interviewed hundreds of kids, adolescents, and they asked the boys...
01:21:27.000And the girls, how does it feel to talk about your problems?
01:21:31.000And for most of the girls, it made them feel better just talking about the problems.
01:21:34.000The boys said, it didn't make them feel better, and they said, and it was weird.
01:21:41.000And I thought, oh, the psychologists are going to say the boys have to learn to do it, but they didn't.
01:21:46.000What they said was, hmm, maybe it's adaptive for young men, you know, because they don't ruminate so much, and there is a lot of depression in adolescent girls, and There may be two interiorized.
01:22:23.000You have to say, you have to engage his problem solver, you know, and you have to say, we've got to do this, we've got to conquer it, and turn it into a challenge.
01:22:31.000And then when I read that, I thought, my God, there's probably a whole field of male psychology that's been ignored.
01:22:36.000It's almost as if modern psychology and clinical counseling has been based on women and their needs and what works for them.
01:22:48.000Yeah, they're working on male psychology and male, you know, counseling.
01:22:51.000Well, school is a very strange place for everybody, right?
01:22:56.000I mean, you're forced to sit in a class and listen to a course, and the teacher's teaching you the facts and statistics, and it might not be anything you're even remotely interested in.
01:23:06.000And when you're seven years old or eight years old, and you're a little kid, and you want to play, you're filled with energy, you want to bounce off the wall, it's strange to have to sit in some class and listen to someone talk to you about arithmetic, or listen to you talk about Listen to someone talk to you about grammar or reading.
01:23:24.000It's hard for kids to sit and pay attention.
01:23:26.000And it's hard, I think, if you are a boy and you have all this extra energy and you're told there's something wrong with you because of it.
01:24:02.000And it's so sad because a good teacher who was in tune with boys...
01:24:07.000We'll find a way to capture his imagination.
01:24:10.000But right now, for example, most of the reading assignments are fiction.
01:24:14.000And this wonderful guy who goes around teaching how to engage boys, he said, it's almost as if teachers only like kind of the confessional poet.
01:24:24.000You ask a 12-year-old boy to be a confessional poet, he's not going to do it.
01:24:30.000And he'll act out and he won't do the assignment.
01:24:36.000What happens though is little boys, five or six years old, they'll be asked to write something and they want to write about something like, you know, I don't know, a monster destroying a city or about their skateboard or their video games and the teachers don't like it.
01:24:50.000And fortunately there are some that are beginning to notice because now people are getting worried about what's happening to boys' education because it has all sorts of ramifications for the economy and You have to worry about having a large cohort of boys disengaged from education because they're not going to have a future in an information economy.
01:25:24.000So they want to play superhero, which every, not every, but most four- or five-year-old boys, that's what they want, and vanquish the bad guys.
01:25:32.000And there's a lot of, you know, sound effects and what seems to be violence.
01:25:37.000It's actually something very different going on in his imagination.
01:25:40.000But we're policing the imagination of little boys and calling them pathological.
01:26:50.000But that is despite what they learned in a school of education.
01:26:53.000Does this coincide with larger classrooms?
01:26:55.000Because if you have 40 kids in a class and one of them is a rambunctious boy, you want to silence that kid because he's disrupting your educating the other 39 kids.
01:27:15.000I mean, there are books that are irresistible to a typical little boy, but we don't assign them.
01:27:20.000The British got so worried about the reading gap, because girls are way ahead in reading, they now have a list of books that teachers are aware of, books that a kid can't, a little boy can't resist.
01:28:19.000I sympathize for teachers, though, in a lot of ways, because if they are, especially a lot of teachers don't have children, and if they don't have children of their own, and they're teaching a group of boys, and there's 40 kids there, and one of them is a really rambunctious boy who's A little maniac and he's running around being crazy.
01:28:36.000I could see how you would want this little kid to calm down and be silenced.
01:28:40.000I totally agree with you, but what if it turns out That there are just ways to do this.
01:28:48.000What if you had a lot of assignments where the kids have to stand up?
01:28:51.000What if instead of in desks, they have to be sitting up?
01:28:54.000Boys, if you use humor, boys will love you.
01:29:57.000The ACLU went in there because there were gender activists in the ACLU that said separating by gender is a kind of apartheid, gender apartheid.
01:31:28.000That's the argument about gamers, right?
01:31:30.000I mean, isn't that the argument about gamers?
01:31:31.000That was a big part of the whole Gamergate, the response that gamers had.
01:31:36.000I was like, no, just because we like engaging in this fantasy and just because we enjoy playing Grand Theft Auto doesn't mean we're going to go out and shoot people.
01:32:02.000Their children don't grow up without a father.
01:32:05.000No, they regenerate, and they're back in the next round.
01:32:08.000This idea that when you play a game, Or when you engage in any sort of a fantasy activity, that that automatically equates to how you're going to behave in society and that we have to stop that and we have to limit that.
01:32:21.000Instead of just addressing, like, what is it about these fantasies that is exciting for people?
01:32:26.000Is there some sort of inherent need that men have for adventure, for a certain amount of violence, even if it's just cathartic, some sort of a fake release?
01:32:40.000And there is no good evidence that playing a violent video game makes you violent.
01:32:46.000God knows people have tried to prove it, and they have failed.
01:32:50.000And they even tried to prove to the Supreme Court a few years ago, and Justice Scalia just said, he wrote a beautiful opinion about how they just did not make their case.
01:33:03.000Now they've come along and say, oh, well, these games cause sexism.
01:33:06.000Well, the first thing to know is since kids started playing video games, great numbers in the 90s, Video Game Nation, crime has actually gone down.
01:33:16.000I'm not saying there's a correlation, but there's certainly no...
01:33:19.000Correlation between playing games and violence, or you would expect that it would have gone up.
01:33:52.000Well, that speaks to my optimism, because my optimism is that what we're getting out of the Internet, what we're getting out of this open forum, this ability to communicate with each other, is even though there's the sort of...
01:34:04.000Ganging up mentality on someone when they say something wrong, the attacking.
01:34:08.000But ultimately, I think people are communicating in a freer way.
01:34:13.000And we're getting to understand what is offensive about racism, what is offensive about homophobia or sexism or any of these things that we're sort of...
01:34:24.000Cultural norms or they had a place in your particular neighborhood or community and now your community is sort of the world.
01:34:32.000And in doing so, in expanding our community like that and creating this one world community, I think we're learning that the differences that we have between each other are more imagined than they are real.
01:35:09.000I once met a psychiatrist who told me he was studying people and their addictions.
01:35:14.000He said almost anything people do, about 5%, you know, if it's gambling or if it's...
01:35:20.000Bicycling or dog racing, about 5% will become compulsive.
01:35:25.000Well, you know, I work with a lot of fighters and martial artists because I'm a commentator for the UFC. And in working with these people, you find correlations between people that are...
01:35:35.000They become very excellent at fighting or something like extremely, extremely dangerous.
01:35:40.000And they become more subject or more suspect.
01:35:46.000They have more potential for addiction, I think, in a lot of ways outside of that.
01:35:50.000It's famous amongst fighters like Joe Lewis went on to become a cocaine addict and he had a lot of issues before he died.
01:36:22.000Well, I think the obsessive focusing on something, even focusing on a negative thing like gambling, it becomes a part of How they transition out of this world.
01:36:33.000Because the world of mixed martial arts or fighting in general is very intense.
01:36:38.000There's a short amount of time where you can do it and compete at a high level.
01:37:49.000And then this other thing, this video game thing, got implanted in my brain.
01:37:54.000And I recognized, like, okay, this is not going to be productive for me.
01:37:58.000It's enjoyable, but I'm too crazy for this, so I've got to put it aside.
01:38:02.000But for a lot of people that get involved in, like, these singular pursuits, where they become so dedicated and so focused on one thing, it's extremely hard when that thing is taken away from them.
01:38:14.000And sometimes they fall into negative things.
01:38:17.000But that doesn't mean that the video games are negative.
01:38:19.000That doesn't mean that video games are causing them to lose their life.
01:38:22.000What they need is some sort of mental management.
01:38:24.000And we need to recognize that there are certain people, especially people that excel at certain things or people that become obsessed with perfection or obsessed with success, that those things, you can get diverted down these paths, whether it's gambling or there's a I like that phrase,
01:38:54.000Arguably, we have the most access to violent information, whether it's in a media form, online.
01:39:02.000We have more access to it than any human beings that have ever lived before.
01:39:05.000We have more access to instantaneous violence, seeing things online, being able to play video violent games, but it's arguably the safest time to live ever.
01:39:15.000And some of the most violent games I hear are in Japan, and they're not very violent.
01:39:21.000I think they have some of the most violent video games, and they have a lot of, a very permissive internet presentation of pornography and wild things and violence.
01:39:33.000They're in tentacles and stuff, right?
01:41:05.000I don't know about it much but a nice furry told me on the internet that not to worry that most of them don't and I don't know that every time I bring it up people are it won't really tell me what it is and I don't fully want to know but from what I've learned there are many different kinds yes some people go deep with it and some people it's just fun it's just fun yeah I was accidentally at a furry convention and There was a time where I was in Pittsburgh,
01:41:32.000and it coincided with a furry convention.
01:41:35.000And while we were driving down the street, we were looking out the window, we're going, what the fuck is going on here?
01:43:11.000How did gender studies become primarily something that women focus on?
01:43:18.000Because gender studies is not really gender studies.
01:43:22.000When you talk to someone and they say they're involved in gender studies, it's either a guy who's some fucking weirdo feminist dude or it's women.
01:44:13.000Sometimes people have said to me, well, you're suggesting that women are more interested in the humanities and men are more interested in the sciences, but in...
01:44:23.000In Mexico or India, you know, they have just as many...
01:44:27.000They give me some example of places where women have the same majors.
01:44:31.000They're typically societies where people are very at risk economically, societies that are not as prosperous.
01:44:40.000If you get to a prosperous, you know, advanced democracy where it can afford you the opportunity for sort of high levels of self-realization, then people do what they...
01:45:50.000And if you care about that, that maybe you'll be fulfilled if you care about...
01:45:55.000Carrying on this campaign, this twisted, propaganda-ridden campaign against patriarchy.
01:46:03.000And by the way, I should add that it's too bad gender studies is that way, because gender is interesting, and we should study it, but it should be done by objective people with different agendas.
01:46:18.000We all have agendas, but you want to have a field where you kind of cancel out one another's agendas and get closer to true understanding.
01:46:25.000Yeah, that was why I wanted to ask you about it because it is...
01:46:29.000I mean, the whole idea of men and women trying to figure each other out has always been problematic because we're doing it under the guise of trying to mate.
01:46:48.000That's how a lot of people get to the point where they're married and even they get divorced.
01:46:52.000Well, I'm never falling for that shit again.
01:46:53.000And then they fall into another nice little trap.
01:46:56.000And I think that it would be really fascinating to have an honest class on what is the difference between men and women and what are the biological reasons for certain reactions.
01:47:54.000I think fatherhood, you know, it has to be supported and encouraged, and we're better all around, but it can't be taken for granted.
01:48:03.000And the worst thing we can do is to set people up just to be angry at each other, because you're going to be married to a man who's not going to See the world exactly as you do.
01:48:13.000Who's not going to care as much about your window treatments or whatever.
01:49:13.000Well, the biological implications, the biological reality of being an animal is that most animals are raised by their mothers.
01:49:21.000I mean, we would all do much better if the father was a loving father and was around, and it's a great thing to concentrate on.
01:49:29.000Human beings, in a lot of ways, mirror the activities that we see in other mammals.
01:49:34.000In other mammals, the women primarily, or the females, primarily take care of the babies.
01:49:39.000I think that if we looked at gender studies from a biological standpoint and then looked at them from a sociological standpoint as well and tried to figure out, like, what's the comfortable middle ground and how can we better understand each other from the biological perspective and from the social perspective,
01:51:01.000But if you have a society like we have, these dysfunctional, pathological societies, you get destruction and mayhem because there is a pathological masculinity.
01:51:11.000Most men aren't like that, but it exists.
01:52:00.000Even in Norway and Sweden, you go to the departments and they're full of people with degrees in sociology but who are very soft and who are strongly ideological.
01:52:12.000Well, how do they get away with saying things like gender as a social construct?
01:52:15.000Because there's so much evidence to the contrary.
01:52:18.000The question is, how do you get away with questioning it and have a career in the academy?
01:52:33.000First of all, the author dedicated it To the women in my women's studies ovular in the spring of whatever year it was, 91. And I hadn't seen the word ovular, and I always like to look up new words.
01:52:46.000And I was about to look it up until it hit me.
01:53:12.000Why does it have to be vaginally based?
01:53:13.000There was another woman who said that she had a theory that we were all born bisexual, and then through socialization, you know, our parents and society turn half of us into...
01:53:24.000Female human beings and half into male human beings.
01:53:27.000And then she said, one destined to command and the other to obey.
01:53:31.000I remember reading that to my husband.
01:53:34.000And he said, like, which one commands and which one obeys?
01:53:38.000No, but I'm just saying they have these views that would not survive in any kind of functional academic environment where people could freely exist.
01:53:50.000It's not that they can't voice them because sometimes people that have kooky views, sometimes people test it and they can't find fault and they end up being right.
01:54:14.000In the ideal university, you bring in people that challenge, and you're constantly either reinforcing what we already know or challenging it or bringing in new ideas.
01:54:37.000In the humanities and to some degree in the social sciences and in education.
01:54:41.000Is it possible that, as you said, the millennials today are the most open-minded, the least likely to be racist or prejudiced, that there's a good trend going on?
01:54:51.000Is it possible that this same trend could eventually extend to the universities?
01:54:55.000Where these kids will realize how preposterous some of this behavior is, and they'll reject some of this teaching.
01:55:01.000And they'll understand that, like, yes, there is a certain amount of prejudice that some people have, but let's get to the root of it and find out why they have these misconceptions.
01:55:08.000Why do they have these ideas in their head that are ultimately biased and wrong or degrading or whatever it is.
01:55:16.000But is it possible that through conversations like this, through things like your YouTube videos, through more people discussing these ideas in an open forum, And more people mocking things, like what happened at Yale?
01:55:31.000There's probably something going on right now where someone's screaming at someone because they want to go to a lecture that's, you know, being taught by a man who said something offensive about women's roles.
01:56:46.000When they filmed that one kid who, by the way, was an Asian-American who was trying to take photographs of the African-American guy who was on the hunger strike, and they were accusing him of being a part of the patriarchy.
01:57:30.000They had decided that a public place was now private because this guy had created a safe space and they were going to do a hunger strike there.
01:57:44.000The whole world realized how preposterous this behavior is.
01:57:48.000But when we get a chance to see it, we meaning people on the outside, get a chance to see that video and comment on it from our own perspective, not from the perspective of someone engrossed in that sort of ideological trap, then you get to realize that these kids get to see how crazy we all think it is.
01:58:04.000I think that there's a benefit in that.
01:58:41.000And there's a wonderful group called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE. What I like about it, it's bipartisan.
01:58:49.000It's liberals and conservatives who love freedom.
01:58:52.000Because I think that's what unites most Americans, is that we can have our political differences, but we have this common commitment to freedom and to try to increase it and preserve it.
01:59:05.000Now, this group, FIRE, has replaced the ACLU for civil liberties.
01:59:10.000You never hear from them about these campus, you know, this zealotry and these moms.
01:59:14.000Well, I think they don't know how to approach it because the very people that are involved in that zealotry will also support the ACLU every step of the way because I think it's pretty universally acknowledged the ACL does great work.
01:59:55.000But I will tell you that there are groups like libertarians, I noticed, atheists, You know, the ACLU lawyers, where they have a small cohort of very angry women.
02:00:06.000And the majority of people are thoughtful, well-meaning, and they listen to these angry women.
02:00:11.000They think, maybe we should be respectful.
02:00:14.000And they don't realize that it's a small group of bitter people who believe twisted theories and false statistics, and they're imposing that on the whole.
02:00:24.000But these groups of women have been very divisive for libertarians.
02:00:29.000I think they did it through the ACLU. The mighty ACLU fell before a small group of zealots.
02:00:35.000And they're more likely to be suing a school for having a boys' class to help boys read than they are to be going on the campus and calling out hordes of, you know, vigilante groups.
02:00:47.000There was one professor that I follow who is kind of a radical, almost communist, very socialistic.
02:00:55.000But he was saying that the only mistake that the woman made was that she did it before she got tenure.
02:01:53.000It's horrifying, though, that someone with that kind of thinking, that telling some person in a public space— Go back to—do you remember the Duke Lacrosse case?
02:02:01.000How about the University of Virginia case that was in Rolling Stone magazine?
02:02:03.000Oh, well, that—but even before the Duke Lacrosse, these young men falsely accused, a flagrant lie.
02:02:08.000Well, 88 professors, long before anything was known about it, they came out in an advertisement—I don't know if it was in the school paper or a local paper— Siding with the accuser against the boys.
02:02:21.000And some of them were very viciously outspoken.
02:02:25.000And they basically were part of a vigilante group that conducted the equivalent of a witch hunt.
02:03:13.000He had proof that he was not there and it wasn't enough.
02:03:18.000Well, again, it's the lynch mob mentality and trying to keep them away from you, you know, and trying to turn them away from you so you have to say something that's going to exonerate you from being guilty by association or guilty by the way you view the case.
02:04:36.000Then there are liberal students that go there and they have to be careful because they're just going to be in an echo chamber, you know, and they'll hear it and it'll be reinforced and they better be careful.
02:04:46.000And try to make a point of attending a lecture if someone comes that's offering a different point of view, because they won't hear it.
02:04:54.000But the conservative kids, up till now, up till a couple of years ago, they were fine.
02:05:01.000I mean, people would occasionally be mean.
02:05:03.000But now I'm a little worried because this outburst of fanaticism, this outbreak of cry bullies, they could be very punishing.
02:05:14.000Can you even have a Young Republicans conference on a major campus?
02:05:25.000I was invited to, even though I'm still a registered Democrat, the college Republicans and Libertarians at Oberlin invited me, and it was the college Republicans.
02:05:33.000Is this after you had already been, like...
02:06:10.000And, you know, I always try to put myself in the other person's position, and I think, what would upset me like that?
02:06:17.000A lot of people, I would be very upset, you know, if a Nazi were coming, or Even someone who I just thought was reckless and defamed people.
02:06:28.000First of all, I'm not like that at all.
02:06:52.000Not by spitting on them, which happened at Yale, and not by intimidating them, which happened at Yale and Missouri, and not by this kind of mob hysteria.
02:07:05.000I think it was—this is typical of what happened.
02:07:10.000Greg Lukianoff from this group, FIRE, that I urge people to check out, because they're really taking—they're leading the way fighting this nonsense on campus.
02:07:29.000He was speaking, and he had an iPhone, and he was with a professor whose wife had challenged the Halloween costumes, and he actually was put on his iPhone.
02:07:37.000Not because he wanted to make a viral video, but because he'd seen things like this happen, and then students misrepresent what happened.
02:07:51.000Well, before that, he was giving a talk about free speech on campus.
02:07:56.000And he was talking about some of the craziness going on.
02:08:00.000And he just said in passing, they're treating, you know, the dean's wife.
02:08:04.000I'm not sure this was an example, but it was something like this.
02:08:07.000They're treating the dean's wife as if she's some kind of war criminal, as if she burned down an Indian village, like she's a genocidal maniac.
02:08:15.000Some protesters said, Indian Village, you're making a joke about genocide?
02:08:20.000And then he went crazy and had to be removed from the room.
02:08:24.000Then word got out that somebody had joked about genocide.
02:08:27.000And it was complete nonsense, a complete mangling of what Greg Lukianoff had said.
02:09:11.000Our campuses were so segregated and they were being integrated and these, you know, you see videos of, you know, you see footage of what it was, you know, and photographs, famous photographs of when they first integrated the University of Mississippi and I guess it was James Meredith going on campus and just horrible behavior and that is so offensive.
02:10:39.000They hear a dean's wife writes an email about Halloween costumes they don't like, and they flip out.
02:10:45.000Like, does anybody really believe that that girl who screamed at the dean when yelled at, this is my home, you know, like all that crazy shit that she was yelling at?
02:13:06.000And I think they thought they could go in and destroy it.
02:13:10.000But I'll tell you, it was probably one of my first moments of awareness about the dangers of the left, even though I was an enthusiastic participant.
02:13:17.000We did break into the building, and we were in someone's office.
02:14:20.000Some of the craziest ones are going to defect to my side, eventually.
02:14:25.000Because among the Marxists, for example, some of the best anti-Marxists were former Marxists.
02:14:33.000Some of the people who had the most penetrating analysis of what's wrong with totalitarian systems, they were once people who were part of it.
02:14:41.000I think there are a lot of smart kids Who had an education.
02:14:46.000They've been robbed of a serious education.
02:14:51.000And they are going to be radicalized in a good way.
02:14:53.000Well, you see that a lot of people who are former cult members go on to become members of cult awareness groups or lead cult awareness groups.
02:15:02.000I actually had a couple on that have been in cults and have talked openly about their...
02:15:07.000I think they share something in that people love to be a part of a group.
02:17:34.000But, well, in the current administration, there's an invisible government.
02:17:38.000In all administrations, there's an invisible government of people who, you know, regulators and people who work in little agencies in the government.
02:17:51.000And so we've seen our schools, a lot of the things I've been talking about that are contrary to the interests of boys, this is coming out of government, and it's coming out of these agencies.
02:18:02.000And Democrats, they exist both, Republicans can't stop it, and they do it in other areas that I don't know as much about.
02:18:10.000In the democratic, the social issues, anything that affects education or media, they're doing things that I just find very problematic and not in the interest of liberty or well-being.
02:18:29.000Well, I always assume that those directions are being prompted by special interest groups and people that have gotten people into power in the first place.
02:18:36.000By the time you get to be a president, you have so many people you're beholden to, so many people that have spent so much money.
02:18:43.000You almost have very little time to think about anything other than reconciling that.
02:19:26.000I have a lot of interests and I would also like to spend some period of my life just being a dilettante because I love music and literature and art.
02:19:35.000I love to go to travel and this takes a lot of time.
02:19:39.000It takes a lot of energy and not always good energy because you're dealing with...
02:19:43.000Once again, I have to read something that is so problematic.
02:19:48.000And sometimes it takes a long time to untie knots in the truth.
02:19:52.000It's easier to tie a knot in the truth than untie one.
02:19:54.000So I'll have to write a long article explaining why someone was so wrong.
02:19:59.000And I have to do it over and over again.
02:21:21.000You know, the literature in their fields and they're able to bring that to bear.
02:21:26.000Fantastic lectures and Essays and books and so forth.
02:21:31.000So there's Jonathan Haidt, there's Steven Pinker, but I want more women.
02:21:34.000I think that it's going to take women scholars to challenge the hegemony of this hardline male-averse feminists that have a monopoly now on gender studies.
02:21:48.000It's going to take some women scholars.
02:22:26.000And what frustrates me, he is a male feminist, as radical as any that I've mentioned, and he was given a fortune, or maybe not a fortune, but a sizable amount of money, to start one of the first centers for the study of men.
02:22:38.000So he's at, I think it's SUNY or one of the New York campuses, and he has all this money for a center to study men.
02:26:31.000Like, you get those guys who make those videos that I am apologizing for every man ever before me, and they want to distinguish themselves as being different, and they want to go way out of the way.
02:26:40.000Have you ever seen that Dear Woman video?
02:26:49.000It's perfect because those guys are the guys that wouldn't survive.
02:26:53.000If you took those guys on like a trek through the woods, those are the guys that would have the sprained ankles and they would start weeping.
02:27:00.000And those are the guys that if you had left, they would be at home with your wife and they would say horrible things about you and what a terrible person you are and try to get her to love them instead of loving you.
02:27:14.000That's what men like to call men like that.
02:27:16.000And that's why they make those videos.
02:27:18.000Those videos, they're not made by normal.
02:27:21.000Why would a man apologize for things that other men have done?
02:27:24.000If you've done something horrible, you should say, Dear Women, I've done some fucked up shit.
02:27:28.000I've made some horrible movies that portrayed women in a very unfavorable light, and I didn't consider the fact that some women would watch those movies and it would somehow or another define them in their own way.
02:27:41.000What they're doing, they're apologizing for the other men, and therefore setting themselves up on a moral high ground, which is what a lot of male feminists do.
02:28:07.000And when they don't have any particularly outright masculine characteristics, they're not attractive, they're not handsome, they're not bold, they're not daring, they're not creative, they're not profound or charismatic, they become male feminists.
02:28:23.000They become these sort of gender traitors that they call out all the weakness of all the other men to sort of highlight themselves as being different.
02:28:34.000I'm not saying it's all male feminists because, again, I think there's a lot of male feminists that they take on this idea because they do see sexism.
02:28:50.000I just would like them to consider that things are not exactly the way they think and they might have been taught by a charismatic women's studies professor they might be more complicated.
02:29:01.000And they should know That there was efforts to keep people like me and Camille Paglia and Wendy Kaminer and a long list of us.
02:29:09.000There were a group of feminists who were not male-averse, who were sex positive, and we were driven, you know, we were not included.
02:31:41.000It's seen as like a social media currency.
02:31:43.000And so by attacking people, you can also get them to respond and engage you.
02:31:49.000And it's a way they seek out High-profile people that might have a difference of opinion with them, they'll seek them out and insult them and force them to engage.
02:31:59.000Because you read something insulting about it, you're like, whoa!
02:32:01.000Like I told you, when I'd been called a male rights advocate by this really obese feminist woman, I was like, what is that mean?
02:32:11.000I'm like, I'm not going to engage with someone who just insults me and just says a bunch of insulting shit and calls me a moron and an asshole and all these different things.
02:33:33.000And that this kind of behavior where someone just immediately gets snarky and becomes insulting just in order to get attention, is going to be laughed at.
02:33:45.000It's going to evolve and there will become sort of unwritten rules of the game.
02:33:51.000And I hope one of the rules is don't join a hitter, a Twitter hate mob, and attack some hapless professor or someone that you heard from somebody told a joke.
02:34:03.000And by the way, can we just leave jokes alone altogether?
02:34:06.000I mean, let comedians tell their jokes.
02:34:10.000You can't now have a comedian on campus because everyone will be triggered.
02:35:58.000But saying that it's offensive was an automatic reaction to this young kid that hadn't yet experienced this wave of social justice warriors that were reinforcing these stupid ideas he has in his head.
02:36:10.000Like, he had decided that since I was saying something about an ethnicity or...
02:36:37.000It's not good, but it's certainly not offensive.
02:36:39.000Well, I hope he doesn't see any Mel Brooks movies or listen to Jackie Mason or, you know— Well, it's just, it's that thing where you're young and you want to kind of establish your viewpoint and you want to separate yourself from the fools of the world and say that,
02:36:56.000you know, you're going to be different than your parents and you're going to branch out on your own and you're, you know, you're a fucking young mind.
02:37:03.000They're 18 years old, 19, 20, whatever they are, they're off away on their own, staying in dorms and reinforcing each other's terrible ideas together.
02:37:13.000And some of them more sensitive than others.
02:37:15.000And some of them grew up in a more suppressive environment than others.
02:37:18.000Some of them more easily led than others.
02:37:20.000And some of them will have ideas that they will nurture when they're 18 or 19 years old.
02:37:23.000They will completely abandon when they get into their 20s.
02:37:26.000And they realize how preposterous those ideas were.
02:37:30.000They get completely indoctrinated and then they go on to become a part of the very system that indoctrinated them themselves.
02:37:36.000I think that's a lot of the fears that a lot of people looking at it from the outside, like me, that's a lot of the fears that we have.
02:37:43.000Like we wonder, like this is sort of a closed loop The closed loop of becoming an academic yourself and reinforcing these ideas without a whole lot of interaction with the real world, without a whole lot of interaction with people that have differing opinions that may be just as intelligent as you,
02:38:00.000and maybe you can learn from each other or come up with some sort of a middle ground, but that's not tolerated.
02:38:05.000You don't tolerate anybody that looks at these ideas from a different perspective or from A singular point of view.
02:38:13.000It all has to be in this very rigid, ideological, predetermined pattern of behavior that everybody locks into.
02:38:32.000It is a rebellion, and this will give you heart.
02:38:36.000When you read, as I do, because on Twitter people send me these things, You'll read an article in the Yale Daily News or the Amherst, whatever newspaper they have.
02:38:47.000People will write something very annoying, PC to the extreme, and then you read the letters.
02:38:53.000And those give you heart because you still see there is still very reasonable people in these colleges who are not buying it.
02:39:02.000But they have to Be somehow empowered.
02:39:07.000Yeah, I don't know how to do that either.
02:39:08.000But I think information and open discourse and just those – that's exactly what's going on right now with the internet and with social media.
02:39:17.000Those two things are the most important aspects of a society evolving and a society without – Really without anybody running it.
02:39:28.000I mean, the thing about colleges and the thing about a university course is that you have a professor, you want to get a good grade, the professor has an ideology that they're sort of passing on to you, and you want to try to manipulate them a little bit and write in a way that you think that they will appeal to their sensibilities,
02:39:55.000There's a lot of different kinds of ideas that are floating around out there, and you're going to find people that resonate with your ideas and people that don't.
02:40:03.000And along the way, you're going to have people that read some of the things that you've written or some of the things that you've said.
02:43:05.000But he was talking about the difference between the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and he didn't understand the difference between the two, and Hitchens just lit them up.
02:43:41.000There's a lot of women that are really funny, but he was pointing to the fact that women that are funny are kind of like, they're butchy in almost like a masculine sort of a way.
02:43:48.000Yeah, I mean, he's not really right about that, but he's- He's not right about that, because Sarah Silverman's one of the funniest people on the planet, and she's very feminine.
02:45:02.000I mean, they have small groups of people that subscribe to their ideas, and they're happy to join in, and they think they're great, and they're reinforced by the echo chamber, but they're saying nonsense.
02:45:13.000But I would think comedians, like the atheists, these are skeptics.
02:45:18.000They are people who thought through for them.
02:45:20.000You would think that they would not be vulnerable.
02:45:24.000To sort of a political hijacking by a group that believes a lot of things that are demonstrably false, and yet they were vulnerable.
02:45:55.000The way we got to be comedians in the first place is by resisting all that stuff.
02:45:59.000The real problem becomes when they become successful in maybe another arena, like maybe they become a talk show host or they have a big important job with a network on some sitcom or something like that and they don't want to rock the boat.
02:46:11.000You'll notice a lot of comedians, they get sitcoms and then the sitcoms become really popular and they pretty much stop performing.
02:47:15.000I mean, while he's still alive, I want to come see him.
02:47:17.000Dick Greger is the guy who, I mean, he's not just a comedian and an activist, but he actually is the guy who brought Geraldo Rivera, the Zapruder footage, where he showed it on television.
02:47:26.000Like, I think it was 10 years after Kennedy was assassinated that showed Kennedy's head violently going back and to the left and made people start to consider the fact that maybe he was shot by someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald and started all those conspiracy theories.
02:50:25.000It's important for people to see that you are a kind and thoughtful person who is just, you are expressing yourself because you feel that there is an unchecked point.
02:50:36.000Or that there's a position that a lot of people have sort of taken on feminism that's not necessarily in line with how you think the true nature of it was supposed to be when it was originally established.
02:51:11.000I think, as we were saying before, that these people that are just learning how to navigate social media, and we're learning sort of the...
02:51:20.000The do's and don'ts, the etiquette that's involved in communicating with people online.
02:51:25.000And I think the more intelligent, rational people are realizing, well, you should communicate with people online the way you should communicate with them if they were right there in front of you.
02:51:34.000And if we start doing that, and I also think that this technology that we're experiencing right now is really the beginning of some sort of a much more invasive interfacing between human beings.
02:51:47.000Invasive, I should say, Instead of invasive, it'd be much more comprehensive.
02:51:52.000I think we're going to get some sort of a visual interaction with each other and maybe even some sort of a sharing of data where it's not even based on reading things, but you're actually going to be able to transmit thoughts to each other.
02:52:03.000They've already figured out a way to transmit words.
02:52:05.000It's like an extension of our minds, and then there can be merging.
02:52:07.000Oh my goodness, what are we going to have?
02:52:08.000I would like to live to be 500 or 1,000, just to see what happens.
02:52:13.000You might live to be 500 when you look at what science is doing today.