Karen Strawn is a third-wave feminist and men's rights activist. She's been around since the early days of the feminist movement and is a tireless advocate for a more balanced and positive understanding of masculinity in the third wave feminist community.
00:01:23.000Yeah, you know, broad is kind of complimentary when you think about it because it typically means one is bosomy and that was something that men were attracted to.
00:01:29.000So, okay, for people who aren't familiar with you yet, Karen, and they should be, girl writes what?
00:01:49.000Well, I mean, people ask me what I identify as.
00:01:53.000Primarily, first and foremost, it's anti-feminist.
00:01:58.000And secondary to that is advocacy for the problems of men and boys and sort of a more balanced and positive understanding of masculinity currently and historically.
00:02:12.000And some people sort of call me a gender theorist.
00:02:16.000You know, I kind of go into the evolutionary psychology of men and women and how all of that works.
00:02:24.000And so, you know, it's kind of a mixed bag.
00:03:39.000But you do point out People would expect you to be a feminist because you show up at a lot of these panels and you come across very intellectual.
00:04:33.000You really do point out some glaring inconsistencies in modern feminism.
00:04:37.000And you argue that actually men right now have it worse off, that women have a leg up as far as sort of the cultural playing field right now.
00:04:48.000And people throw a fit and they get furious at you until they actually listen.
00:04:53.000What brought you to that and why do you think people react in the way that they do?
00:04:57.000I think that they react in the way that they do because there's the sort of the cultural or the acculturation, the sort of education that they've got where, you know, so they've been exposed since early childhood to this narrative that women were always oppressed and they didn't have equal rights and they don't get equal pay for equal work and there's all of these memes going around that most of them are Either outright false or questionable, right?
00:05:56.000This is why I go into evolutionary psychology a lot, just how we perceive other individuals, how tribalism works, how sexism works, how all of those things work.
00:06:06.000And so it's very, very easy for, you know, for feminists to convince an entire society, a society that has seven different federal departments dedicated to women's health and wellbeing, none for men, that has affirmative action for women, that has done nothing that has affirmative action for women, that has done nothing but pander to women, women's interests, women's needs, spends way more money on women's health, despite the fact that men die earlier than women of 14 of the 15 leading causes of death, that, you know, more
00:06:31.000despite the fact that men die earlier than women of 14 of the 15 leading causes of death, that, you know, more focus on depression and mental illness in women, despite the fact that men are three to four times more likely to commit suicide and be addicted to drugs and all of these things, right? despite the fact that men are three to four times Right.
00:06:51.000You can convince society that this society that focuses entirely on women's well-being to the detriment of even children Right.
00:07:49.000You just used the N-word and you weren't quoting Kanye.
00:07:53.000So I think men are inclined to believe it because men do see women as more helpless than themselves, as those in need of protecting themselves.
00:08:01.000They're like, wow, God, I don't want to mistreat them.
00:08:03.000Yeah, we should give them that extra special precaution.
00:08:07.000Do you think that's deliberately preyed upon?
00:08:11.000One of the problems with the feminist narrative over that, you know, it's misogynistic to consider women weak and consider them in need of extra protection and blah, blah, blah, because women are just equally as strong and capable as men.
00:08:23.000But that's not why men feel that way about women.
00:09:33.000And you find even, like I hear feminists saying all the time, you know, like the reason why the suicide rate for men is so high is because we teach boys and girls that they're different and we teach boys that their feelings don't matter.
00:09:46.000And these are things that happen, you know, boys are encouraged to play further away.
00:09:51.000From the parents, they're encouraged to be more independent.
00:09:55.000They tend to fuss more, but parents wait longer before picking them up and comfort them for less time, on average, than with girls, right?
00:10:14.000The reason why we treat boys that way is because we're preparing them for what's going to happen when they sprout a little shaggy here and get the little bump in their throat and their voice cracks, at which point even feminists are going to be like, oh yeah, you whiny piss baby, I'm just going to drink your male tears.
00:11:44.000They found him on a security camera for three days prior in his lunch break walking back and forth on that walk before he actually threw himself over.
00:11:52.000It turned out he had some kind of debts that he wouldn't have been able to protect his family from.
00:11:56.000He thought that was a better option to protect his family.
00:11:59.000And that really shocked me as a kid going like, well, I mean, this is not a guy who was trying to.
00:12:03.000This was a guy who absolutely wanted out.
00:12:12.000But, you know, if you bring up male suicide as a man, you'll have people say, well, women attempt it more, and you're just trying to make men out to be the real victims of suicide.
00:12:26.000It's almost like they cannot think other than in zero-sum terms, right?
00:12:30.000When you say men are also victims of suicide, Yes.
00:12:37.000They assume that you're saying, oh, so you're saying men are the real victims of X. Right.
00:12:43.000And nobody else can be a victim of it.
00:12:45.000That's important because I also, I'm not in the men's rights camp where you get these people on YouTube who are like, actually, men, I don't want any special concessions made for men.
00:12:54.000I think I'm totally fine with acknowledging that we're different.
00:12:57.000Some advantages women will have, some advantages men will have.
00:13:00.000And they've been largely unwritten but agreed upon since the beginning of time, and I'm okay with that.
00:13:06.000Yeah, no, the issue for me is that what feminism has seemed to want to do is give women all of the advantages that men have historically enjoyed, but none of the disadvantages, and to maintain all of the historic privileges of women.
00:13:20.000So if you look, if you go back in, you know, to the 1700s and Blackstone's commentaries on the laws of England and Wales, you'll find that there is a provision in the criminal law at that time for domestic violence, to protect women from domestic violence.
00:13:37.000One second, because I know the point you're going, and I dig it, but we have to keep the lights on from these evil capitalist sponsors.
00:13:50.000Sorry, I cut you off, but I've heard you made this point because I've watched your long talks on YouTube, Pillar to Post, and you were talking about the criminal justice provisions for domestic abuse.
00:14:08.000Did he include these provisions that protect women, that women have the security of the peace against their husbands?
00:14:15.000But he also went and dissed the men of previous generations at the same time, and this is sort of what I call one good man syndrome, right?
00:14:22.000So Blackstone is like this revolutionary man, right?
00:14:26.000In modern times, you know, in the more enlightened era of Charles II, he's saying those men back then were really horrible and violent with their wives, but we men now, we're better than that.
00:14:38.000And so then you go fast forward to Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 in his State of the Union address, and he was proposing bringing back the corporal punishment, the whipping post.
00:15:19.000You can't actually refer to the anatomy because I've heard someone call Barack Obama a pussy actually on this home station here in Detroit.
00:15:27.000But you can't say, she had a glorious, so continue.
00:15:45.000But essentially, so you had that or you had the riding the donkey backwards or they'd strap him to a cart and they'd parade him around town and people would throw stuff at him and jeer and call him all sorts of names.
00:15:56.000The kind of stuff that when happened to a gay guy, I think Texas A&M was a national outrage.
00:16:00.000This is just another Tuesday night for the pansy on the block who got swatted by Lucy.
00:16:08.000And, you know, but one of the interesting things about it is like, so feminists came along with their revolutionary idea that domestic, hitting your wife is wrong.
00:16:20.000Society supported it and all of this stuff.
00:16:23.000And we all bought it because, you know, because it actually...
00:16:27.000Some men hit their wives and because of that, you know, it's like it's easy for us.
00:16:31.000We get so outraged by it when you see that happening and you can see it in these social experiments on the street where, you know, you have a man who's being rough with a woman and it's all staged.
00:16:43.000And there was one where he had three guys rush him and they shoved him down and he got all scabby on his arm and he had to yell, we're filming, we're filming.
00:16:53.000Was this in Central Park and the black guys grabbed him?
00:17:26.000I don't understand how we can live under this collective delusion where we somehow think that there's a war on women and that...
00:17:34.000Gender violence against women is normalized and supported by society, and it's like a function of patriarchal masculinity.
00:17:42.000Patriarchal masculinity, we have an entire body of Western literature going back hundreds and hundreds of years that defines the hero of the story as the guy who is willing to avenge wrongs done against a woman.
00:17:55.000And the villain is instantly identified by his willingness to harm a woman or even be mean to her.
00:18:02.000Yeah, well, women are children, generally speaking, and that kind of goes back to the idea that, you know, it's one of those things, and I've talked about this.
00:18:26.000You know, he's like, you know, every time I get punched in the face, you know, there's some point where I'm driving home, you know, and I'm thinking back, and, you know, I was kind of actually being a dick back there.
00:19:03.000I just – and I like left to grab a drink and acted like I was upset.
00:19:08.000But really I was just thinking just put that one on the ledger for Stephen because I'm walking out of this one a winner.
00:19:13.000So that's just like – that's why I want to make clear.
00:19:17.000I'm not whining and saying, no, I'm fine with it.
00:19:20.000I'm fine that every now and then I get swatted because my wife thinks it's acceptable because I crossed the line and I don't get to do it with her.
00:19:26.000On the flip side, she puts up with a lot of stuff that I do that I would not put up with for I would be like, what are you doing?
00:19:39.000But here's the thing that drives me crazy, because I think that domestic violence, there are several different types of domestic violence, right?
00:19:48.000So you've got the mutually combative couple.
00:19:54.000And then there's unilateral female violence against a male partner, and then there's unilateral male violence against a female partner, and that is actually the most rare form that there is.
00:20:06.000Female violence, sort of non-mutual violence is twice as common, where the woman Is extremely, sometimes extremely violent and the man never hits back.
00:20:16.000She's trying to stab him and he doesn't even, he just grabs her wrists and never actually retaliates.
00:21:19.000Usually we go straight to the web extended version, but I felt like it required some context because I just sort of let the bomb drop that my wife beats me.
00:21:25.000So, Karen, you were talking about the domestic abuse statistics and information, which I find incredibly interesting.
00:21:32.000Well, OK, there is a difference between, I think, violence and abuse.
00:21:37.000And common couple violence sort of illustrates this.
00:21:40.000You have a couple that they're having a really hard time for whatever reason, and they are arguing, they're having conflict, And one of them will push, you know, push the other or slap or whatever, right?
00:21:53.000And it's just out of frustration and stress.
00:21:57.000And typically those cases, they're extremely minor incidents.
00:22:02.000They don't tend to repeat once the stress is alleviated.
00:22:08.000You did your consumer proposal and now you have a way out of those bills or whatever, you know, your mother-in-law goes away.
00:22:16.000Once that stressor is gone, the incidents don't repeat.
00:22:20.000It's just how humans are when they get really, really stressed out and they have conflict.
00:22:26.000Sometimes they will engage in mild violence.
00:22:31.000Those, I think, they need to be dealt with from a public health perspective.
00:22:36.000rather than from a criminal perspective.
00:22:39.000Because if you have a situation where a wife slaps her husband and then he pushes her back or pushes her out of the way to leave the house, he's probably going to be the one arrested and charged, right?
00:22:55.000So even if he's just defending himself, if she has any marks on her, even if she doesn't have marks on her, and he does, he's probably going to be the one arrested because of the model of domestic violence that we use in our legislation and policy,
00:23:11.000which is written by feminists and it's all based on There's patriarchal norms and the subordination of women and male dominance and all kinds of other BS that doesn't actually make any sense.
00:24:13.000Well, that's one I was leading because I know if you take account actually the prison rapes, men are raped actually more frequently if you look at...
00:24:20.000Well, those are all perpetrated by men.
00:24:23.000They are perpetrated by men, but against men.
00:24:25.000Yes, I don't like to categorize the rape that happens out in society.
00:24:31.000It's a completely different thing from what happens in prisons.
00:25:19.000Those guys like the Greeks and the Lebanese in Montreal, it's that sort of mix of the cadence and the French-Canadian and they put the cuss word at the end of their sentence.
00:26:02.000Even in 1917, the Supreme Court of the U.S. sort of codified it in legal precedent that the draft was connected to citizenship rights.
00:26:13.000It was a required obligation on the part of citizens in return for the rights granted by government, which would include the right to vote.
00:26:22.000But as well as that, there was civil conscription, which included things like posses and bucket brigades if you were ordered by a fire marshal, a duty to assist the police if required, if ordered to.
00:26:34.000Going further back, there were things called hue and cry laws, which essentially male bystanders, adult male bystanders, Those standards could be held criminally culpable for not intervening if someone was being assaulted or robbed or whatever and was raising a hue and cry.
00:26:55.000That was the series finale of Seinfeld.
00:27:00.000It used to be law and now they're trying to bring it back.
00:27:03.000So these were all duties of citizenship that men had.
00:27:09.000Women never, I mean, women didn't even get drafted to pick up litter from the sides of highways for, you know, during wartime or if there was need or whatever.
00:27:20.000They didn't have to do mandatory war work, nothing.
00:27:26.000And they maintained a lot of the female privileges that they were afraid that they would lose, like a husband's responsibility to financially provide for them and immunity from repayment of their own debts and things like that.
00:27:40.000Well, that also is very tough for leftists to swallow because it flies in the face of, well, voting is just a birthright.
00:27:47.000Well, it's actually really considered a privilege, especially when you're considering a representative republic.
00:27:51.000And that's because you have the Bernie Sanders syndrome now where parasites will eventually devour their hosts if they can just vote in their own self-interest and not have any of the responsibilities.
00:28:00.000It's great to just say, yeah, I want to vote for that so you can pass the bill to this guy.
00:28:04.000And when there was a time where both women and men, and I think this is pivotal, this is just me interjecting, when both women and men felt responsible for themselves, women said, well, that's an additional responsibility that falls on me, not the taxpayer, not the men, and I don't know if I want to...
00:28:38.000But you had 70% of the women who cared enough one way or the other saying, "No, we don't want this," and 30% saying, "Yes, we want the vote." And so, you know, and part of me is like, what were these women stupid?
00:28:53.000Didn't they realize that they would get the vote for free, like, without any simple obligation?
00:28:58.000Like, what have they been smoking that they don't realize that they're going to just get it handed to them?
00:29:21.000And again, to clarify, making sure that people listening aren't appalled and have their little hate tweets ready, no one here is saying women didn't deserve the right to vote.
00:29:28.000It's an interesting historical context as to why the women who were engaged in the political process did not want the right to vote.
00:29:39.000Yeah, essentially it was pretty much the same afternoon that the majority of women decided that they wanted it, that they were granted the right to vote.
00:29:49.000But, you know, what's the government supposed to do?
00:31:24.000You introduce a woman into that type of environment, especially a high-stress environment, where it's absolutely mandatory that people work together Yeah.
00:31:49.000The military was a microcosm that was entirely free of politics or sort of cultural, I guess, movements at one point because you were supposed to be a number.
00:32:15.000I know you think this video is done, but if you click this box, you can actually go over to Karen's channel, Girl Writes What, where there is an extra hour of extended, uncensored interview where we talk about all things, not just feminism.