The Bear vs. Man Meme is a Big Deal
Summary
Would you rather question a random man or a bear? What kind of bear would you choose? What would you do if you were stuck in the woods with a bear or a stranger? Simone and Simone discuss this and more in this episode of the podcast.
Transcript
00:00:07.380
This is why it's so important that I elevate this,
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Because it's a reaction that many people will have
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If you lived in a society, like if in America today,
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people were responding the same way to a question about Jews or black people,
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would you be like, holy, we have a big problem in this country
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and we need to do something about it immediately?
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Yeah, you would be raising every alarm bell you could raise.
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I am so excited to be chatting with you again today.
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There has been a meme, and whenever we try to do timely episodes,
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because that's just not how we produce our videos.
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Would you rather be in the woods with a bear or a random man?
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Yeah, as long as it's a genuinely random man, obviously a man.
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Okay, so a lot of women, and I've seen this done on shows and stuff like that.
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It seems to be like 50% of women or more, maybe within these more progressive environments
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like college campuses, you're getting like 70% to 80% of women are saying a bear.
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What I'll say is the standard mind-dead take on this is are they either not aware of how dangerous bears are
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or the standard take on this is, oh, women these days, aren't they silly and hasn't feminism gone an extreme degree?
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And if we weren't based camp, if we were some basic podcast, that's the take we'd be having.
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But I actually think that what can be gleamed from this particular meme is much deeper.
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And that's why I wanted to make sure to do an episode on it, even if it's not appearing while this is still in the zeitgeist of the topic.
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Because I think that this was actually a great sort of natural experiment
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to see where our culture is heading and to predict where things will go downstream of here.
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What this really indicates is what media has done to female audiences,
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which is that when they hear the word average or random guy,
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they assume some kind of aggressor, some kind of dangerous person.
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They're evoked set for random guy rather than your brother, an uncle, a family member, a co-worker.
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They further ask this. If it was your dad, would you say no? They'll say.
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I choose the bear every time. If it's my boyfriend, the bear, a friend, the bear, my dad, the bear.
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Life and men have given me enough reason to choose the bear any time over any of them.
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Whether they're family or friends or stranger, I choose the bear.
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Yeah, I think you always, and a lot of people do this.
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They're like, Malcolm, you go too hard against the monoculture and stuff like that
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because they assume that the monoculture is their perception of the monoculture
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Not the, like, they don't know how brainwashed and culty some individuals have gotten.
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But what I would say is the first thing to understand what we're really learning from this
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is I'm going to play a clip of somebody interviewing a bunch of women.
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But first, I'm going to slightly change the question that's being asked.
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Would you prefer to be in the woods with a bear or a random black man?
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What I've heard about bears, they don't always attack you, right?
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100% a bear, which is, like, terrifying to say, but...
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Even some men are saying bear, although we could predict that this man's opinion
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If I were alone in the woods, would you rather me encounter a bear or a black man?
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I don't know, because I feel like I would know what the outcome would be with a bear.
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And I think when you hear this, now you get really uncomfortable.
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When you hear the way people are responding to the initial question,
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but I have changed the context slightly, you get really uncomfortable.
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I could say, would you rather be in the woods with a bear or a Jew?
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This would be really offensive if they had asked one of these other questions.
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And this is because what you are actually seeing within this meme is just pure, uncut bigotry.
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Um, and you are seeing the extreme levels of bigotry that have become normalized in our society.
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And this gets really interested because now you get into how does bigotry spread?
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And so first, something that's useful to note whenever bigotry spreads, because when I say
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this, if you're in the cult, you're like, men don't count as a class that is worthy of any
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They do, they're not worthy at the same level of human dignity of other classes.
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This is always the first step in the proliferation of systemic bigotry.
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The first thing the Nazis did was to compare the Jews to animals.
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The same thing we see happening again within the Palestine protests and stuff like that
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was the, we've talked about this in another episode, actually one that might go live after
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But yeah, you first need to, like racism never is, oh, we have a lot of people.
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It's no, this group is genuinely lesser, genuinely deserving of lesser protections before you
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And people can be like, come on, men have all the power in our society.
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And I'm like, have you looked at like college admissions rates recently?
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Like men are being systemically pulled out of our economy right now.
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And anyone who does, if you look at like the number of scholarships for men versus the number
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of scholarship for women, that's 10 to one, even with the higher rates of men.
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One of the things that shocked me was I was recently walking around the Stanford campus for my reunion
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and there was an entire building dedicated to helping women.
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It'd been converted to an entire building just for increasing the enfranchisement of women.
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What's odd is, but women are the majority of students coming into campus now.
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To have an entire department dedicated to servicing the needs of the privileged group within a campus
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The typical woke female college student would respond to you saying, that's exactly what colleges
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You'd go and then there'd be some exclusive male fraternity to further enfranchise the men
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And this is just our version of correcting societal ills.
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They would say that, but those fraternities often weren't directly integrated with the university.
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Even if you take the direction that says, okay, well, women used to be discriminated against
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and that's why these were originally built because there were counter institutions on
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Well, those counter institutions don't work anymore.
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So these things that were built to counter systemic sexism on campus are now institutionally
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furthering the very type of sexism that they were built to dismantle.
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What's interesting is just the extent to which we're making men into bears.
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We're making men into things that can and should be scarier than bears because we're forcing
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Like by subjecting men, especially like we'll say cis, otherwise privileged men to higher selective
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pressures, you are forcing them to become the best and the brightest and to build their own
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If you look at the statistics of men today versus men in the past, they are lower testosterone,
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Do you think that basically most men indeed are experiencing that disenfranchisement, but
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then the 20% that are ultimately going to matter that historically always were the ones who ultimately
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built everything are the ones who are ultimately being pushed to thrive even further?
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It's a fantasy that there is this dangerous male group that they are concerned about is
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not particularly more dangerous than any other group that they could be exposed to.
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They have chosen, because of bigotry, because of assumptions about groups, to make these biases about men.
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If you look at male violence statistics, right?
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I'm not referring to dangerous in terms of violence, by the way.
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I'm referring to dangerous in terms of having all the agency and power.
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You're reframing the question to try to—and I think this is useful, because this is a way that
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many progressives or people who grow up in this environment intrinsically attempt to reframe
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the issue in their own minds when they're engaging with it, so they don't understand how genuinely
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horrifying the normalized bigotry within progressive circles has become.
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And this is why—I think for a while as a society, we didn't understand why we needed to treat racism
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with such an immediate and angry response, why we needed to treat anti-Semitism with such an immediate
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Because if you don't, if you allow it to begin to fester within a population,
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you then have it become a status hierarchy signaling mechanism.
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And if it becomes a status hierarchy signaling mechanism, then it self-extremizes like we have
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already had happen within women in our society today.
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To the extent where they would say something that is the equivalent of saying,
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would you rather be around—be exposed to a random male in the woods or a random black male in the woods?
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Or to treat them through IVF just so they could be sure that they don't have any male children.
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But we're going to talk about that in a second.
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And I would point out here as well, if they're like, look at X statistics, right?
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Any statistics that a woman is going to find that indicates that coming across a random male in the woods
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might be a scary thing for her is going to apply extra to black males.
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And so why is it that they are not allowed to ask this question about black males, right?
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It is because they have learned that by taking stances like this publicly, they can achieve higher status.
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And so it signals to the public what group they're in.
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And so now we're going to talk about how extreme this has gotten because it's really quite terrifying.
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So there was an article recently in Slate called It's Illegal in Most of the World.
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In America, new parents are embracing it for better or worse.
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And it is gender selection within IVF, which of course we support.
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But here are some quotes from the article, which I think shows you the level of dehumanization
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and bigotry that has become normalized within the urban monoculture.
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Grace, a 31-year-old woman who works in human resources, told me,
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when I think about having a child that's a boy, it's almost a repulsion.
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Grace and her fang, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, engineer, fiancé,
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are freezing embryos to preserve their fertility and to ensure that they avoid that
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After she turned 30, her fiancé wanted to make embryos the right way.
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Grace wasn't particularly eager to kick off the kid having process.
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I don't want kids anytime soon, especially when that's a boy.
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But she also thinks that her feelings around kids may change.
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And she wants to be able to dodge the possibility of becoming a quote unquote boy mom if they do.
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Said many women I spoke to, even those who were sadly already boy moms.
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For many, going through all the trouble to ensure a girl feels like a social good.
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Amy's partner, Guthrie, believes that because oldest children tend to be more successful,
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if everyone did sex selection, we could quash inequality by manipulating birth order.
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Quote, maybe one of our best chances at trying to destroy the glass ceiling is to have women
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Among the moms I spoke to who already have boys, many want to give their sons sisters to make them
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They believe that girls can do anything, a conviction that often comes with a subtext
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that boys are incapable of doing their own laundry.
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Calling their moms, expressing empathy, or really being part of the family as they get older.
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Quote, I don't know a guy who has a strong relationship with his mother or his family,
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So there was also a case of a couple who sued a fertility clinic after having a male embryo
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You pay for services and they probably told them they were able to choose a gender and
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they were lied to, but still the fact that they-
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Yeah, but you've got to hear the way that they talk about it and think about it.
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I'll pull quotes from this after the recording.
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I had wanted skin-to-skin connection, but I ended up wearing things so he wouldn't touch
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When he did, it sent electric shockwaves through me.
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I started experiencing extreme anxiety and I would look at the baby and it would contort
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into the faces of all these grown men that I know.
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Whenever that happened, I had to give the baby to Robbie.
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But you hear a lot of talk from this couple that really is- compares carrying a child that
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is a male as grape because they have a male inside them involuntarily.
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They have a partner, like they married a partner.
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But you also get these in, I think the other couple that was talking, the first couple
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Well, they probably wouldn't call themselves heterosexual, but it was what we would call
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And to the people who want to be like, well, she was a assault survivor, you know, therefore
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And I would counter with, if somebody was a survivor and the assaultant was a black male
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and they reacted that way to black males specifically, would that be allowed in our society?
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Would people be like, oh yeah, it's okay because one black person did something to them for
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them to now react extremely negatively whenever they are touched by or around or talked to
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You cannot carve out specific subgroups as being less deserving of human decency than other
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More than all other elements, that's the core element.
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And this, so like when you hear this, are you beginning to understand or contextualize
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just the amount of genuine bigotry that's being normalized?
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It is not that they are, I think, genuinely more afraid of a man.
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Like when you hear man, you think a male person because you're still thinking like a human.
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Yeah, it's hard for me to parse out how much of this is part of progressive culture and
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how much of this is people with very strange phobias.
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There are people who are only capable of eating macaroni and cheese every day.
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But I also think that that's like an issue of availability heuristic with male figures.
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I don't think they think of the males that they interact with as males.
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And then when they're evoked set for a man is still like an evil aggressor in the patriarchy
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Let's unpack what you just said because this is important.
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It helps you understand how racism, anti-Semitism, and other types of hate evolve.
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Because it allows you to discategorize all disconforming evidence of actually being related
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Do you think many people who are racist or anti-whatever group have plenty of people in
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those groups in their lives that they just don't think about as being in those groups because
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they like, I don't know, they don't fit the stereotype.
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My heart especially breaks for this baby that was born via IVF that the couple didn't want.
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And a lot of the sons, even that are being raised by mothers who chose to have sons are
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not select for gender, but have just decided that I'm going to teach my son just how terrible
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And then a lot of them can just gender transition.
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When you hear about kids questioning their gender at three or something, a kid is not
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Not one of them had the faintest clue what gender is.
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This is from something I played in another show, which it's supposed to be a trans piece
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And they're trying to explain the consequences, lying to this young person about the consequences
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of the surgery, saying that it's pretty much assured that they'll be able to orgasm afterwards
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But then in like larger data sets, you're generally giving up the ability to orgasm if
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you're transitioning in this way, especially with heavy amounts of puberty blockers, which
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But this individual is admitting that they don't even understand why they're talking to them
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about this because they've never experienced an orgasm.
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So when the doctors are saying an orgasm is like a sneeze, I don't even know what she's
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So they can't even think or know or contextualize what's being talked about.
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And what this highlights to me is how early this individual went on puberty blockers.
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I it's very clear to me that for quite a while now, there has been an intense bias against
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men, especially in developed nations predominated by the urban monoculture.
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The fact that men are hearing again and again from potential employers, for example, you're
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We can't hire another man like we're not really like we're not allowed to or we can't.
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That's just a normalized thing that pretty much everyone we know who's male and who's
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on the job market has experienced at this point is insane.
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And I think the fact that even people like me, I hear this bear thing and I try to shrug
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it off is an indication of the extent to which we've normalized this misandry in society,
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because now it's just so obvious to me that I don't think twice when we see new examples
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And new infractions would have to be so extreme that by that point, we're just rounding
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Like for you, if you heard and you have even in this podcast tried to dismiss this as maybe
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Maybe if you because you'll hear answers like one of the girls who gave an answer said bears
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So maybe imagine thinking men attack every time.
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And then there's another group where they were like, what's the probability that the man will
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And people were giving answers like 80 percent, 50 percent.
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And they're standing on the street where theoretically 50 percent of those also out on the streets
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Was it an female panel in a building full of all women?
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Let's say you were alone in the woods and you walked past a man.
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Like, what do you think the probability is that just any random man would attack you?
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There is a chance that a man would attack, but I don't know what the percentage is.
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85, I'd say 50, 50, very low, like less than 10 percent.
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So they just think maybe they think that once isolated, men will strike.
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The woman who said the least number on the panel said 10 percent.
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She said, I'm going to be very conservative here and say only 10 percent.
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That 10 percent of men would attack you on site.
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Now, I will say there are parts of the world in which I could be dropped into a random street that is abandoned with one other randomly selected male from that city.
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And my odds of being attacked could be pretty high as well.
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I know, but my point to you is that I think that the evoked set of these women is those sets.
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They're talking about the men they interact with.
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I don't know if they think of the men they interact with as men.
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This is why it's so important that I elevate this.
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Because it's a reaction that many people will have that shows how dangerous this has gone.
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If you lived in a society, like if in America today, people were responding the same way to a question about Jews or black people, would you be like, holy, we have a big problem in this country and we need to do something about it immediately?
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You would be raising every alarm bell you could raise.
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And yet, because it's men, you have said they must have been misunderstanding the question or it couldn't really be that bad or it couldn't.
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Even on my own Facebook page, I've seen posts recently.
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Women are the only animal that needs to mate with its own natural predator.
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First, I'm like, do you not have the barest grasp of biology?
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Also, I'd like to point out here from a biological perspective.
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Males of a species almost never would kill a female of a species to eat.
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Whereas females of species frequently kill males of species to eat when they're not interested in reproducing.
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Because if a male has inseminated you from a biological perspective, literally the last thing he would want to do is have you killed.
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Even if women are like, you as men don't understand what it's like to be a woman in our society today.
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And I'm like, or you could look at the statistics and see that men in America are much more at risk.
00:25:00.300
I think it's two times more at risk or maybe even three times more at risk of being attacked by a man than a woman in America.
00:25:06.800
So, no, you as a woman are not experiencing more attacks by men than men.
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And men make up 79% of homicide victims worldwide.
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So, you're literally five times more likely to be murdered by someone if you're a man than a woman.
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And we'll assume that most of those doing murders are men for the sake of misogyny.
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So, when you look at statistics like that, it's one of these things where it's, holy moly, this is not because of their lived experiences.
00:25:41.500
It is because of a reality that they have constructed for themselves around themselves based on a fabricated reality of business.
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Now, the fortunate thing is that this group is breeding very little.
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And so, the key is to just not really engage with them.
00:26:05.020
It's very important, like with my spouse now, that I'm talking to you about this because what can happen in relationships is guys who live that standard lifestyle where they go off to work, their wife goes off to a different job, they're apart a lot of the time, can start consuming content like this on TikTok or something like that and become brainwashed into this position of extreme misogyny.
00:26:25.480
Yeah, and I think we've even met couples recently.
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I'm not going to name names, but we were at a dinner the other day where one couple that we'd known from the beginning, actually, even before they were engaged, had reached this point where the wife kept saying these insane things that the husband just had to, like, nod to.
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And her husband's just sitting there and he has this help me look on his face, but he can't say anything to her.
00:27:00.020
And, like, he at one point said something that defended, like, a reasonable point.
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And it was really clear that this is one of those relationships where she had become radicalized.
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And yet, because they have children together, he's not in a position where he gets to, like, what do you do?
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A lot of people will say, I couldn't have philosophical conversations like you do with your wife.
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And what I would say is, you better learn how to, because if you are not influencing her philosophical position, other people can be.
00:27:39.360
Like, undoing this, I think, is going to be a hell of a lot harder than finding a way to have an open dialogue and to inoculate people against insanity.