In this episode, Simone and I discuss toxic masculinity and femininity and how they are related. We discuss the difference between them, and why femininity is considered more dangerous than toxic masculinity. We also discuss the effects of hormones such as estrogen, testosterone, and other chemicals such as endocrine disruptors, which are making many males think more like females.
00:00:00.000Women, historically speaking, and weak men, they were rewarded for relating to truth where the things that are true are the things that are least likely to get me killed for believing.
00:00:16.460The things that I believe are true are the most normative things within our culture and the things that will upset the minimum number of other people.
00:00:26.260This is because women are physically much weaker than men, and there is a set of men who just adopt a mindset like this as well, and that segment is growing due to exogenous chemicals such as endocrine disruptors, which are making many males think more like females.
00:00:44.260I mean, it could be argued that the feminization of society is a product of female empowerment.
00:00:49.540Do you think it's that, or do you think it's that the organizations and the pathways to power now?
00:00:54.320If you didn't have the women's rights movement, society would become more feminine as it developed these large bureaucracies.
00:01:07.640So today, let's talk about toxic masculinity and femininity, because it is something that comes up, especially I hear people talk more about toxic masculinity than femininity, but I think we should talk about both.
00:01:20.900What is your understanding of toxic masculinity?
00:01:29.420Because what it means to me is, is like, when people talk about toxic masculinity, it's really more that they're just shitting on masculinity.
00:02:02.900That men should be allowed to be aggressive.
00:02:06.460And I think what's really interesting is I see, personally, toxic masculinity the same way that I see mental health problems or, like, a mental health disorder, which is a perspective, actually, that you gave me when you were writing one of the books that we've collectively wrote, really, that you wrote, that I edited.
00:02:23.100But you explained to me and our readers that, really, the DSM, which is the primary body establishing what is a mental disorder, is more a reflection of societal norms than a reflection of what is actually healthy or unhealthy.
00:02:38.700Yes, this is really important to note.
00:02:40.700So if you look at the DSM, which is a standard diagnostic manual, if you were to look at it in the 70s, being gay would be considered a psychological illness, right?
00:02:49.440And if you look at it today, one of the debates they're having is actually removing sadism as a psychological illness, because they're like, oh, this is like a BDSM thing, right?
00:03:00.280But in the past, wasn't being gay on the DSM?
00:03:03.600As I said, in the 70s, it was on the DSM.
00:03:05.620It was considered a psychological illness.
00:03:07.660So as things get normalized in the society, we change them.
00:03:10.180And a lot of when we're talking about mental health, there is, I think, an average male psychology, and there is an average female psychology, and there is gender dimorphism there, and society adapts to that.
00:03:23.420However, not all males fall perfectly into the average male social set, or the average female.
00:03:30.660And so I think what's toxic is when you create an environment in which status is based on one's normative behavior patterns tied to their gender of birth, so that they achieve status within a community by masturbating a specific set of practices that they associate with being masculine or feminine.
00:03:51.620However, just acting on your own behavior, I don't think it's toxic in either context, although it's more toxic on the feminine side.
00:03:59.400And it's more toxic on the feminine side, because a group that is all acting according to feminine biology, but is also intelligent, can move much more towards internal entities of control in a way that really damages them.
00:04:16.060Yes, let me expand on that and clarify what you're saying here.
00:04:19.200So what you're saying is, yes, people on average are going to behave probably in accordance with like their, you know, both genetic and hormonal profile, and men and women have average, on average, different genetic and hormonal profiles, that men are going to behave a certain way, that women are going to behave a certain way.
00:04:36.940And in our current society, and in our current society, often those dimorphic, sexually dimorphic behaviors are seen as toxic.
00:04:43.640And still, what you're saying furthermore is that toxic masculinity is actually less dangerous than toxic femininity, because toxic femininity is more likely to elevate and accept and condone an internal locus of control, and to give people a color on why we think that is so dangerous.
00:05:02.500An internal locus of control, an internal locus of control, an internal locus of control, women with a feminine profile is more likely to have an external locus of control.
00:05:11.340So as a recap, a locus of control being internal means when something happens in life, whether it's your fault or not, you're like, it's my fault, it's my responsibility, I need to fix it.
00:05:20.440So if there's a mess, you clean it up.
00:05:22.540If something bad happens, well, what are you going to do about it?
00:05:24.820If you have an external locus of control, nothing is your fault, that happened because so-and-so was a jerk, that happened because I was given terrible circumstances, it's not fair.
00:05:33.660Or racism, or sexism, or nothing is your fault.
00:05:37.420And that that view, regardless of gender, is inherently very bad for a population.
00:05:51.300There's been a lot of research on this.
00:05:52.520It causes more mental health issues, which again, you see much more in progressive communities than right-leaning communities.
00:05:57.740It causes people to be less happy, less successful.
00:06:00.100It's just all around a terrible thing.
00:06:02.280Even when things aren't your fault, you should never internalize them as not your fault.
00:06:05.520But we've talked about that in other videos.
00:06:07.400Yeah, so I think what makes toxic gender dimorphism, you could say, so toxic masculinity or femininity interesting, especially today, is that now, really, like I was saying, I only really hear about toxic masculinity.
00:06:20.140And that is a sign, again, with this idea of toxicity really being more a sign of social norms than what's actually toxic, that we have entered into a, at least like in terms of mainstream culture, a feminized culture, at least in most developed wealth.
00:06:39.240And that's interesting, I mean, both because it shows some very scary signs, including a more pervasive, condoned external locus of control, but also that just, just sexually dimorphic behavior, like being masculine, is now seen as bad.
00:06:58.240Kids of people who are energetic and who act out are now being medicated, put on tons of Ritalin and other things, or just punished for it.
00:07:07.180And then it's just being beat out of them.
00:07:09.380It's no surprise that we're seeing like crises of gender identity, mental health, success in life, all sorts of things.
00:07:16.720Well, I mean, the biggest risk associated with all this, and I'm like, why is this so bad?
00:07:22.120It has to do with how individuals at a biological and instinctual level relate to truth.
00:07:27.560Women, historically speaking, and weak men, they were rewarded for relating to truth, where the things that are true are the things that are least likely to get me killed for believing.
00:07:44.140The things that I believe are true are the most normative things within our culture and the things that will upset the minimum number of other people.
00:07:54.680This is because women are physically much weaker than men, and there is a set of men who just adopt a mindset like this as well.
00:08:03.300And that segment is growing due to exogenous chemicals, such as endocrine disruptors, which are making many males think more like females.
00:08:12.820And I'm not going to go into the study again because we talk about it so much here, but just trust me, this is biologically happening in the world today.
00:08:19.260And so women in a tribal, like ancestral context, this more female mindset was not optimized for finding truth in reality.
00:08:31.440It was for finding the belief that was least likely to get you killed.
00:08:37.680Whereas for masculine men, the leaders of the community historically, that correlated very strongly was what was true.
00:08:47.760For the leaders of these historic communities that were much more hierarchical than our existing society, they actually needed to optimize for whatever was true.
00:08:57.780When they got that truth wrong, the followers in the community, the women and the weaker men, they were better off learning to believe the wrong truth than disagreeing with the guys who could kill them.
00:09:10.360And there's some great anthropological studies of the Ache, which is this tribe, I think in the Amazon, of what that means for a community.
00:09:18.320Because we see in this community, the dominant men regularly killing members of the community who disagree with them or who annoy them.
00:09:25.780So I think that people today might, we have this noble, savage archetype, when the reality is that in many of these tribal communities, the dominant males regularly kill other members of the community if they annoy them.
00:09:38.440So this was, this was something that was really strongly selected for an ancestral context, but this creates, which we call justicalism in our book, which is a worldview that believes what is true would be the thing where the world would be the most just if it was true.
00:09:56.540Which is a strong way of also saying the thing that is going to piss the fewest number of other groups off at you for believing.
00:10:04.180But the problem is, is that now this has led to a society that's society-wide because we have so many dominant groups that have this sort of incredibly feminine perspective on things.
00:10:14.300And keep in mind, both women and men can take the masculine perspective.
00:10:18.000Just as I've said, many men end up taking a very feminine perspective.
00:10:21.880Many women, like my wife, I think have a very masculine perspective on reality.
00:11:02.360So in a world that is run by bureaucracies, especially like ossified large bureaucracies,
00:11:10.460the feminine mindset and what we would call toxic femininity is the way you get ahead.
00:11:17.080And because we live in an age of large ossified bureaucracies, both governmental but also private, because trust busting has become so weak, maybe it's soon to change.
00:11:28.120We just have, maybe that's contributed, right, to the feminization of society.
00:11:32.140Actually, I was, I am curious, people have said, for example, that female empowerment is going to be the downfall of civilization.
00:11:40.520I mean, it could be argued that the feminization of society is a product of female empowerment.
00:11:46.520Or do you think it's that the organizations and the pathways to power now?
00:11:50.540The women's rights movement, society would become more feminine as it developed these large bureaucracies.
00:11:56.920And this is, this is why we are, we call ourselves bull moose Republicans instead of libertarians, which is we believe in trust busting just as much as, as, as we believe in small government.
00:12:07.020Which is any large bureaucracy becomes evil over time because it compounds human evil, whether it's Google, Facebook, or the government itself.
00:12:15.480I think it's sort of the, the, the, the, the highest virtues of humanity can only be achieved through group action within small competing organizations, not large stagnant organizations.
00:12:30.020But as society feminizes both biologically and with women out-competing men within these larger organizations, or a feminine mindset out-competing a masculine mindset within these larger organizations, which impact our, our world culture more, we, yeah, we're beginning to see the world and a government reward large coagulations of power over, over non-coagulated power groups.
00:12:58.700And I think that this is the core divide you have between the globalists and the nationalists.
00:13:03.560Do you think that the world is better if it's coagulated into this giant bureaucracy?
00:13:09.480And I'd say that we largely think, no, it's not.
00:14:08.120It's not fair that this is the truth, right?
00:14:10.560But reality isn't based on what's fair and what's not fair.
00:14:15.160I like a world in which my daughters are able to be empowered and my wife is able to be empowered.
00:14:20.340But I think there are ways we can realistically do that that take our biologies into account and the sociological differences between males and females into account and the differences between different females into account without just saying we need to pretend like there's no differences between males and females.
00:14:37.860Which, thank God, with the rights of the trans movement, this is the thing I love about the trans movement, and they have forced progressives to admit that men and women are different.
00:14:47.760Because you might forget this, but before the trans movement, the mainstream progressive ideology, and this is what the terrorists still believe, because they're on the last code of rules that the progressives had, is that men and women are exactly the same.
00:14:59.760And we're only different because we're socialized to be different.
00:15:15.500What would you say to men in positions in society where, like, they really do feel like they're being subject to toxic masculinity?
00:15:24.780For example, there have been times where people have been sent to these really all-male boarding schools where they just get beat up again and again.
00:15:35.700It just seems that kind of the way that the two sexes have evolved is that, like, men are high risk, high reward, right?
00:15:43.040It's not that they're disposable, but they're utilized by evolution in a way where they can propagate software updates very quickly and effectively.
00:15:51.260Where, like, when one male significantly outcompetes, he's able to just have a ton of kids with all the women and, like, quickly, quickly push his software update to a large portion of the population.
00:16:01.480Whereas women are more like the stable, just, like, updating machines that sort of play a role in the process.
00:16:08.300So they're not high risk, high reward.
00:16:22.960And I'm not saying that historically men died at higher proportions because they went to war.
00:16:27.100Because actually, someone pointed out in a podcast, and it, like, blew my mind, that based on some stats, women and men died in similar proportions.
00:16:35.240It's just that women died in those proportions in childbirth, and men died in those proportions in, like, dangerous birth and war.
00:16:40.780Well, I'll also keep in mind that if you look historically during the transition to the agricultural period, we can look at DNA evidence.
00:16:48.540And I think it was, yeah, one man would breed for every 14 women that would breed.
00:16:54.360So, I mean, on average, every man had 14 wives.
00:18:21.060But I think if you're looking to create a fair society, but that is still optimal, what you need to do is have women adapt a, as they did historically, and even today, when they enter leadership roles, they adapt more masculine perspectives.
00:18:35.040And you see this historic, like, women who have more masculine perspectives enter leadership roles at a higher rate.
00:18:40.400And when they're in a leadership role, they adapt more masculine perspectives.
00:18:43.100But we need to accelerate this behavior pattern.
00:18:48.080Because I think that when you realize that both femininity and masculinity are, to an extent, mindsets, and some men have a feminine mindset and some women have a masculine mindset, I think we can create a fairer society that keeps our gender dimorphism in mind in terms of how it's structured.
00:19:10.180I do think it's stupid to pretend, like, there isn't gender dimorphism in how we structure society.
00:19:15.720Or to force, like, the California law, this, like, women need to be on boards at exactly the same rate as men.
00:19:22.600And yet we know, like, this is something that's been studied.
00:19:26.300Boards with equal gender representation perform less well economically than boards without it.
00:19:32.380This is what I remember the consensus being the last time I looked into this issue.
00:19:36.200But when I was going over the studies again, well, I could find a few studies, like the one referenced here, that showed that women hurt board performance.
00:19:44.540It seemed like the majority opinion was that they had no effect.
00:20:01.220You can't say, and this is fundamentally one of our biggest disagreements with the progressive movement, is they claim to care about diversity, yet they fail to acknowledge that the value in diversity comes from the fact that we are different.
00:20:18.820The value in diversity in men and women comes from the fact that we are different and that we're better at different things on average.
00:20:26.620And that allows for different specializations and different ways of doing societies.
00:20:29.520And whether you're talking about cultural groups or men and women, the value of diversity is our differences, not our similarities.
00:20:39.560So I think a viewer or listener of this podcast episode is going to assume, which also, even if they know other things about us, like, we only want to give male names to our daughters, for example.
00:20:52.340I think a masculine mindset is better.
00:20:54.780And I think that women with a masculine mindset outperform women with that one, because that's what the data says.
00:20:59.160So they're going to assume that we're going to raise our kids in a hyper-masculine household.
00:21:50.460I'm not trying to force my daughters to be masculine, okay?
00:21:54.000I'm trying to allow them to become like you.
00:21:57.520I think that the iteration of femininity that you embody and are a paragon of is an iteration of femininity that both works very well with my iteration of masculinity, right?
00:22:11.460But that is also really, really great for our current, I think, economy, environment, technology.
00:22:20.820I think you represent sustainable femininity, and I represent sustainable masculinity.
00:22:29.080This brings us, I think, to a final point in this podcast that I think is worth talking about, which is non-toxic or beneficial femininity and masculinity.
00:22:38.100So, for example, I think, like you say, and I can completely endorse this, that your form of masculinity is quite benevolent, not toxic.
00:22:48.540So, I can contrast this with one hyper-masculine, and I would say like genuinely, not like toxic, I'm not saying like culturally toxic, but like dysfunctional masculine household that I grew around, like they were family friends.
00:23:02.240And I remember like both the man and the son were super macho, and I remember the son at one point being like, my mom's afraid of me.
00:23:09.980Like it was just like that kind of masculinity that feels abusive, like woman giving my beer kind of thing.
00:23:15.460And I think that that's an example of dysfunctional masculinity, like masculinity that's just not being done.
00:23:20.720And this dovetails with the podcast episode we did on like, why bother being a gentleman?
00:23:25.780Like real masculinity isn't in being a dick to people.
00:23:29.620Real masculinity is having the grace to condescend to those weaker than you and to help them and to show them grace.
00:23:36.880So, I think what I love about what you are already teaching our boys is that it's always fine to punch up, that they're encouraged to be defiant, to question, to be adventurous, but that they are never, ever, ever okay to punch down, to hurt someone smaller than them, to be cruel.
00:23:56.320So, I'm okay with teaching my kids to do that, but I do worry about society that enshrines out of the value, because I think society can always recontextualize which groups have more power and which groups have less power.
00:24:06.520Right, like, for example, look at our society right now, where they pretend like LGBT people, they're like disempowered, yet they're literally having giant parades that are supported by both the government and businesses through the center of literally every center of power in our society today.
00:24:30.640When the Nazis were anti-Semitic, when the anti-Semitism, they were saying it's because the Jews control everything, and they're using that to hurt us.
00:24:38.180Whenever a group tries to hurt another group, they always pretend like they're in positions of power to pull one over on the dumb people who are like, I want to hurt those in positions of power.
00:24:48.200Okay, so, acknowledge that there are limitations to that.
00:24:51.020So, I mean, I psychologically try to prime my kids with this value set, but hold on.
00:24:55.300What I actually want to say is what I think non-toxin femininity is, which I think is very important, which is something that you embody, which I think non-toxic femininity, and really the beneficial type of femininity that I admire so much in you, is I guess what I would call like workhorse femininity.
00:25:13.160Which is to say, it's femininity where, yes, it is submissive, but the type of submissive it is, is productive, aggressive, and indomitable.
00:25:27.580That it is just going to, juggernaut, plow through every obstacle in its path to reach its end state, and that is what glorifies it.
00:25:40.780So, it is very masculine in that it is aggressive towards the problems in its lifestyle, but it's very feminine in that it is undertaking the responsibilities for the family.
00:25:55.340You are always there to carry all of our burdens, and you are always asking me every day, what is the thing that you dread most this day, and how can I take that from you?
00:26:06.560And I think that this is where toxic or non-toxic masculinity and femininity pair, it's like a yin and yang, where this non-toxic femininity is, how can I take from you the things that are bothering you?
00:26:20.320And with masculinity is, how can I protect you from the things that are bothering you?
00:26:47.600I mean, I think the biggest thing is to remember that confidence in masculinity, the antithesis of them, is feeling the need to constantly show your dominance over others.
00:27:00.360That dominance is something that you show, don't tell.
00:27:03.840You show through your competence and success in the real world.
00:27:08.020You show through the things you need from other people, like validation and stuff like that.
00:27:13.020But if you are constantly out there signaling your need for validation, signaling your need for other people to see you as dominant and above them, then one, you are not dominant.
00:27:24.500And two, you are the very weakest, most pathetic, and most disposable kind of male.
00:27:29.660So, long story short, benevolent dominance or benevolent masculinity is confidence, initiative, and problem-solving, and benevolent-
00:27:57.220A woman who is great at being a woman within this traditional context that I think you really embody is a woman who is useful to her family.
00:28:05.500A man who is good at being a man is a man who is successful and brings his family resources and protection.
00:28:11.680And people look at this and they say, well, you can't say that because not every man can live up to that and not every woman can live up to that.
00:29:10.920I really hope that all of our kids, especially our daughters, learn what it is to be feminine from you because you are such an inspiration to me.
00:29:23.240And while my position vis-a-vis my gender has put me in a position of dominance over you, I think that your level of perfection as to who you are is much higher than my level of perfection.
00:29:37.580And it humbles me and it gives me a higher state to aspire to, to be worthy of having a wife like you.
00:29:46.180Well, I very much believe that people become the person that their partners create.
00:29:53.460And you're the kind of person who instills dedication and hard work because you're worth it.