Radio 3Fourteen - July 23, 2014


The Myth of Male Power


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 15 minutes

Words per Minute

159.76456

Word Count

12,124

Sentence Count

523

Misogynist Sentences

71

Hate Speech Sentences

69


Summary

Dr. Warren Farrell is the author of seven books on men's and women's issues. He came to prominence in the 1970s when he championed the cause of feminism, serving on the New York City Board of the National Organization of Women (NOW). Now, when NOW took anti-male and anti-father positions, he began advocacy for boys, men, and fathers. He s now recognized as one of the most important figures in the modern men's movement.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Music
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00:00:28.000 This is
00:00:35.960 Radio 314 on the
00:00:37.840 Red Ice Radio Network.
00:00:45.820 Hello ladies and gentlemen, this is Lana.
00:00:48.380 I wanted to let our Red Ice listeners
00:00:49.880 know that we've been offline this week due to
00:00:51.960 a lightning strike that affected our
00:00:53.880 internet. In fact, this interview
00:00:55.800 that you're about to hear was recorded by our
00:00:57.540 portable studio at a friend's house.
00:00:59.780 That's how dedicated we are.
00:01:01.600 Anyway, we're back online and we're working to
00:01:03.480 upload new Red Ice programs for this week,
00:01:05.480 which will be available as soon as possible.
00:01:07.940 The following program is not a
00:01:09.560 topic that you hear discussed often,
00:01:11.680 if ever. We're going to discuss
00:01:13.600 the myth of male power.
00:01:16.120 Want to blame all the problems in the world
00:01:17.700 on men? Then I highly recommend
00:01:19.620 you stick around and listen to this talk.
00:01:21.740 My guest is Dr. Warren
00:01:23.380 Farrell. He's the author of seven books
00:01:25.460 on men's and women's issues.
00:01:27.340 He came to prominence in the 1970s.
00:01:29.740 Originally, he championed the cause
00:01:31.600 of feminism, serving on the
00:01:33.400 New York City Board of the National
00:01:35.480 Organization of Women.
00:01:37.380 Now, when Now took anti-male
00:01:39.840 and anti-father positions,
00:01:41.520 he began advocacy for boys,
00:01:43.800 men, and fathers. He's now
00:01:45.520 recognized as one of the most important
00:01:47.400 figures in the modern men's movement.
00:01:49.840 Yes, it's a movement and we'll discuss
00:01:51.740 why. Farrell is currently the chair
00:01:53.860 of the commission to create a
00:01:55.620 White House Council on Boys to
00:01:57.700 Men. Warren has taught at the university
00:01:59.640 level in five disciplines and
00:02:01.500 appeared on more than 1,000 TV and
00:02:03.620 radio shows. He's been featured
00:02:05.440 repeatedly in Forbes, the New York
00:02:07.320 Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
00:02:09.680 Welcome, Warren. Thanks for coming to
00:02:10.940 the program.
00:02:12.200 I'm looking forward to our dialogue.
00:02:14.780 Well, you have a very interesting
00:02:16.780 background. You once taught women's
00:02:18.400 studies and gender studies, and now
00:02:20.180 you're one of the prominent voices of
00:02:21.940 the men's rights movement. At what
00:02:23.720 point did you wake up and say, hmm,
00:02:25.400 feminists are a little crazy? Okay,
00:02:27.680 those are my words.
00:02:29.300 Yeah, I never woke up and said they
00:02:30.460 were crazy. I think what changed my,
00:02:33.600 there were two things that had a little
00:02:35.120 bit of a perspective shift for me. One
00:02:37.820 was when, so for example, I was on the
00:02:40.320 board of directors of the National
00:02:41.240 Organization for Women in New York
00:02:42.800 City, and we're sitting at a board
00:02:44.080 meeting in the early 70s, and the topic
00:02:50.040 comes up of, you know, of our position
00:02:54.220 on children being involved with their
00:02:56.620 parents after divorce. And so from an
00:02:59.980 equality perspective, it's really clear
00:03:03.800 what we, what our position should be. Our
00:03:06.580 position should be that, you know,
00:03:07.740 children should have an equal amount of
00:03:09.480 time with both parents after divorce. The
00:03:12.180 the children are not the more the right
00:03:14.420 of the mother or the father any more
00:03:16.100 than a job is more the right of a, of a
00:03:18.320 man or a woman. And so that was, you
00:03:21.240 know, from, from my perspective as being
00:03:23.320 on the board of now, and they're, they
00:03:26.140 being the most mainstream and largest and
00:03:29.160 most powerful feminist organization, it
00:03:31.760 was crystal clear. And for most of the
00:03:34.080 people on now's board, it was as well, but
00:03:37.020 there was a, there was a cognitive dissonance
00:03:39.020 experience happening, which was many of the
00:03:41.880 women, um, who, many women were writing
00:03:44.140 now, um, and saying, we are, you know, we're
00:03:47.020 now members and we believe in a lot of
00:03:50.040 what you're doing, but I just got a
00:03:51.640 divorce and I don't want my father, the
00:03:54.500 father of the child to be equally involved
00:03:57.620 with the children after divorce. I think I
00:04:00.900 know my children the best. I've been the
00:04:03.280 one that's been the primary parent. I feel
00:04:05.940 I need to move to a new area for a new job. I've
00:04:09.020 met or, and or I've met a new man and I, I
00:04:12.320 want to have a new life with him and start
00:04:14.620 over again. We've had so much bad stuff
00:04:16.380 between us. And so now we're dealing with
00:04:20.200 politics. Um, and so the, the political
00:04:23.480 decision for, for now was, I don't want, we
00:04:27.480 don't want to, to contract. If, if we
00:04:30.520 alienate this woman, uh, then she will not,
00:04:33.800 no longer be a now member and she'll have a
00:04:35.700 reason to speak up against, um, now because
00:04:38.580 we're taking away a right of a woman to
00:04:42.120 have the option to have the child, to make
00:04:44.840 the decision as to what's best for the, for
00:04:46.840 the, for the, our children. And so, um, and
00:04:51.120 so I'm saying, well, wait a minute, that's
00:04:53.220 the same, you know, and, and they're, and
00:04:55.120 they're beginning to say, uh, well, you
00:04:57.680 know, women, mothers do know the best and
00:04:59.960 mothers have a more of a natural, you know,
00:05:01.720 um, instinct with the children. And I'm
00:05:03.860 saying, wait a minute, you know, if I
00:05:05.920 said men do know the, you know, the best
00:05:08.680 about, um, how to run a company or how to
00:05:11.020 run a, you know, how to be a doctor or how
00:05:12.500 to be a lawyer and then have a natural
00:05:14.520 instinct to be a doctor, a lawyer, or run a
00:05:16.180 company, you'd have my head and you're
00:05:18.540 sure that's everything that you're, that's
00:05:19.900 everything you're opposed to. And so I
00:05:22.660 thought that I was, you know, I was a PhD
00:05:24.460 student at the time and I thought I was
00:05:26.060 making a lot of sense. And I thought that
00:05:28.440 I would be responded to, you know, by
00:05:30.180 people like Gloria Steinem and Betty
00:05:31.700 Friedan, both of whom, by the way, were
00:05:33.800 saying what the world needs is more
00:05:36.080 fathers, um, in the home and more, more
00:05:39.740 women at work. And I and Betty and Gloria
00:05:43.560 all agreed on that. And so, um, but, but
00:05:46.820 the board of now was beginning to see the
00:05:49.340 politics of that. And they moved in long
00:05:52.220 story short, they moved in the direction
00:05:54.020 of saying, um, we, we are a national
00:05:57.000 organization for women and whatever, and,
00:06:00.500 and taking away a right of a woman to be
00:06:04.860 the primary, um, parent, um, and to make
00:06:08.840 the decision as to what she thinks is the
00:06:10.560 best for the child, something that we are
00:06:12.280 not as a national organization for women
00:06:14.300 doing. So it was no longer a national
00:06:16.660 organization for equality. It was a
00:06:18.920 national organization for women and whether
00:06:20.920 or not that, that accentuated the amount of
00:06:24.640 power decision-making that the child, that
00:06:26.920 the mother had and without regard for the
00:06:30.700 single most important question, which is
00:06:33.120 what is best for the children. And so, um,
00:06:36.020 yes, no one was, you know, asking that
00:06:38.320 question except what I did. Um, I was sort
00:06:41.800 of ostracized and pushed away. And the
00:06:44.520 other person to give credit, you know, where
00:06:46.120 credit is due is, um, the, um, a woman named
00:06:50.720 Karen DeCroix, who was a former president
00:06:52.800 of, uh, the national organization for
00:06:54.460 women. She, um, stood much less strongly, but
00:06:59.280 she, she also basically held my position
00:07:01.980 that children probably do best with both
00:07:04.380 parents. And I said, probably because in
00:07:06.080 that time we didn't know for sure what we
00:07:08.740 know now, which is we know when I did the
00:07:11.180 research for a book called father and
00:07:12.700 child reunion, I discovered really clearly
00:07:15.400 that, that children, boys and girls do
00:07:18.800 better in more than 30 different areas of
00:07:21.700 growth and development and social health
00:07:23.840 and psychological health and, um, physical
00:07:26.700 health and also, um, academically in every
00:07:29.160 single area when they have about an equal
00:07:32.560 amount of father and mother when they're
00:07:34.200 raised in an intact family. And so I didn't,
00:07:37.280 I had, we had the beginnings of the
00:07:39.040 research to indicate that, um, back in the
00:07:41.520 early seventies, um, and that, and, but we
00:07:44.480 didn't have clear cut research, um, to
00:07:47.280 indicate that. And so, but as I began to do
00:07:49.820 the research and began to bring it to the
00:07:51.400 board of now and, and, and began to mention
00:07:54.440 it to, in my speaking engagements, instead
00:07:57.300 of the speaking engagement and saying, wow,
00:07:59.200 that's fascinating. We all, we all want
00:08:01.100 what's best for the children. Uh, the
00:08:03.680 audiences in the speaking engagements, you
00:08:05.600 know, the, the, the standing ovations
00:08:07.220 turned into sitting ovations, the sitting
00:08:09.520 ovations, um, that you, the standing
00:08:11.820 ovations that used to lead to three or four
00:08:14.480 or five speaking engagements per speaking
00:08:16.340 engagement were now leading to two and
00:08:18.600 then one and then zero. So I was, I was
00:08:21.920 beginning to see, you know, when I mentioned
00:08:23.460 to you offline here before that, you know,
00:08:25.820 if I was politically correct, I would have
00:08:27.420 a lot more money. I began to realize at
00:08:30.520 that time that I had a choice to make. And
00:08:32.480 that is, you know, do I, do I remain
00:08:34.480 politically correct, uh, and make a lot
00:08:36.720 more money or do I say what I feel is most
00:08:39.260 honest and lose all those speaking
00:08:41.640 engagements, so to speak.
00:08:42.600 Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I want to get into
00:08:44.320 political correctness later with you and
00:08:46.220 how that's affecting young boys growing
00:08:47.660 up and men today, but you mentioned
00:08:49.220 Gloria Steinem. Now, what do you make
00:08:51.820 of it? She admitted she was a CIA operative
00:08:53.820 working for a CIA front organization. So
00:08:56.320 what side was she playing for?
00:08:58.540 Did she, um, ever admit that?
00:09:00.620 Yeah, apparently she did.
00:09:02.160 It was just rumored that she admitted that.
00:09:03.460 Apparently she did admit it. I need to go
00:09:05.140 watch the program or, or read the article
00:09:07.780 myself, but, uh, Independent Research
00:09:10.320 Service was a CIA front organization.
00:09:12.600 And, and apparently several other people
00:09:14.180 outed her as well.
00:09:16.280 Mm-hmm. I don't, it, that seems unlikely,
00:09:19.380 um, because of the fact that she is
00:09:22.000 extremely anti-hierarchical and I can't
00:09:24.480 imagine anything more hierarchical than the
00:09:26.320 CIA and the, you know, and the military,
00:09:29.600 you know, they're all based on hierarchies.
00:09:31.000 And Gloria is, you know, very, very, um, she's
00:09:35.080 very much the, you know, anti, the, you know,
00:09:38.640 the male power structure. And she, Gloria is
00:09:41.560 far more radical than, um, than Betty Friedan
00:09:44.660 was. Betty Friedan really, in her book,
00:09:46.680 Second Stage, she wrote, you know, the, the
00:09:49.300 second stage needs to be men getting on board
00:09:51.740 and, and getting liberated themselves. And that
00:09:55.580 book, of course, made her unpopular among
00:09:57.420 feminists for a while. And then, and then
00:09:59.180 she went back to being, um, popular again.
00:10:01.640 And that book just sort of disappeared. And
00:10:03.140 most people don't even know that it's
00:10:04.480 written. But the, but Gloria is, um, was
00:10:08.040 always very, she always differentiated
00:10:10.120 between us and the enemy. And the enemy
00:10:12.400 was, you know, the, you know, the patriarchy
00:10:14.700 and the enemy was, um, the men that didn't
00:10:16.780 agree, um, with, um, the feminist, um,
00:10:19.500 politically correct ideology. And she was, she
00:10:21.820 was much more narrow-minded that way, even
00:10:24.640 though as a person, she was by far and
00:10:27.300 away a much wonder, more kind and caring
00:10:30.340 and, uh, facilitative and non-egocentric
00:10:33.400 human being than, than Betty was.
00:10:35.140 Okay. Well, believe it or not, I've heard
00:10:37.200 feminists and minorities argue that we
00:10:39.220 need to level the playing field and have
00:10:41.000 our chance because men have had their day.
00:10:43.000 So what do you think about that statement?
00:10:45.620 Yeah, that's a very important question
00:10:47.260 because behind almost all the support of
00:10:51.580 feminism is an underlying belief in
00:10:53.660 exactly what you just said, which is
00:10:55.120 basically that we've lived in a
00:10:56.380 patriarchal world in which men have made
00:10:58.960 the rules to benefit men at the expense
00:11:00.800 of women. And, um, and here's what the
00:11:03.840 world would look like if men made the
00:11:05.600 rules to benefit men at the expense of
00:11:07.660 women. Men would make sure that every
00:11:10.380 girl and young woman was trained to really
00:11:13.760 desire a lot of sex.
00:11:16.000 Yeah, exactly.
00:11:17.660 From the age of about 13 on and that, and
00:11:22.120 that the younger she was involved with men
00:11:24.860 sexually indesirous of that, the more
00:11:27.160 feminine she would be considered being and
00:11:28.980 the more moral she would be. And that
00:11:31.380 because women wanted it so much, um, and
00:11:34.240 men, if anything, we would be trained to
00:11:36.580 sort of keep our sexual desires in
00:11:38.660 relatively short supply. So we would reverse
00:11:41.460 the power balance between men and women. And
00:11:44.060 so men, so women would be paying for men on
00:11:46.460 dates and women would be paying for drinks
00:11:48.520 for men to get, to get men high and, and, um,
00:11:52.220 easy. Um, and women would be paying for the,
00:11:55.840 that's just the dinners and the dates, but
00:11:57.160 the expenses on driving and buying us flowers.
00:11:59.680 And if they were lucky enough to continue
00:12:02.580 winning their, our approval to pay for us
00:12:05.720 at every single step, they would be lucky
00:12:07.880 enough to buy us diamonds, um, and, and for
00:12:10.700 which we would reciprocate with no diamonds at
00:12:12.480 all. Um, and so this is, you know, this is,
00:12:16.020 and that's just in the sexual area. We would
00:12:17.940 then change the draft laws. And so that
00:12:20.580 there would be in the United States today,
00:12:22.620 there's male only draft registration. If you
00:12:24.760 don't register for the draft when you're 18
00:12:26.420 before the age of consent, by some people's
00:12:28.980 definition, um, is you, you, you are subject
00:12:32.920 to a quarter of a million dollar fine, um, to a
00:12:36.060 year or two in prison. You can never work for
00:12:39.260 the government, for a university, for anything
00:12:41.200 that gets federal money. Um, and that's just
00:12:44.320 for not signing up, registering for the draft,
00:12:47.120 um, at the age of 18. So if you have ambivalence
00:12:50.260 about the war in Afghanistan, Iraq, or the
00:12:52.600 Vietnam War before that, you, you were
00:12:55.500 potentially, you would be on a watch list of
00:12:58.920 suspicious characters and you're, you could
00:13:02.000 expect that your, um, you, that your, um,
00:13:06.060 taxes would be investigated much more
00:13:08.040 frequently and so on. Now, so we would set up a
00:13:11.140 system where only women, if we had a
00:13:13.140 patriarchy, patriarchal system set up that
00:13:15.300 only benefited men at the expense of women, we
00:13:18.220 would have female only draft registration and
00:13:20.660 females, you know, operating in combat zones
00:13:23.420 to the point that females died in, in, in battle
00:13:26.400 at, at a ratio of 27 to one, which is, which is
00:13:29.880 what it is now in reverse. And so we would be
00:13:32.480 doing lots of things like that, um, to make
00:13:36.620 life, we would have seven offices of men, federal
00:13:40.160 offices of men's health and no office, federal
00:13:42.580 offices of women's health, as opposed to having
00:13:45.000 what is in reality the case, seven offices of
00:13:47.980 federal offices of women's health and no
00:13:50.020 offices of, uh, men's health. Uh, we would, uh, we
00:13:53.880 would be astounded and, and, and advertise the
00:13:56.960 fact that, that men over 85, um, uh, commit suicide at
00:14:01.940 1,350, um, the rate of women over 85. Um, and, and, and,
00:14:07.900 but right now, um, the system that's set up, we don't
00:14:11.860 even know that men over 85 commit suicide at
00:14:15.100 1,350, the rate of, of women over 85. So, and we would
00:14:20.400 go on and on. We would make sure that, that the, that
00:14:22.880 the hazardous jobs were jobs that women took so that,
00:14:26.280 that women were the ones, uh, risking their lives in,
00:14:28.960 in coal mines and, um, and, and, and working in
00:14:32.680 sewers and cleaning them out and, um, you know,
00:14:35.200 working on oil rigs and so on. This is the way the
00:14:37.940 world would look if the world was a patriarchy, which
00:14:40.520 meant that it was set up by men to benefit men at the
00:14:44.820 expense of women. Then what the way the world was set
00:14:48.800 up in the system had nothing to do with patriarchy
00:14:51.760 per se. What it had to do was the needs to survive. And
00:14:55.880 in the needs to survive, neither our mother nor our
00:14:58.640 father had rights. Um, they had responsibilities,
00:15:01.960 they had obligations. If we talked to, you know, when
00:15:04.340 I talked to my father about the, you know, when I
00:15:06.520 was at the beginning of the feminist movement, yeah, he
00:15:09.020 would say things like, you know, I just had this
00:15:13.340 problem with this, this word rights. Um, it's sort
00:15:16.340 of like we, our life was not Warren about rights. It
00:15:20.400 was about responsibilities. It was about obligations. You
00:15:23.300 know, and it was like, you know, it was just
00:15:24.860 something, it was, it was like a fingernail that a
00:15:27.240 chalkboard from his perspective. And he saw the
00:15:30.920 future of people who talked about rights, of the
00:15:33.540 future of the people who talk about rights with
00:15:35.360 entitlement. And entitlement was not what created a
00:15:38.620 good human being. It was not what created good
00:15:40.820 relationships. It's not what created a strong
00:15:43.100 country.
00:15:43.880 I completely agree with that. I, it bugs me when I
00:15:46.180 keep hearing rights. You're not born with any
00:15:47.920 rights. You're just born.
00:15:49.620 Totally, totally. I mean, you're not even born with a
00:15:52.000 right to live. You're, you're, you're born, period.
00:15:56.360 Exactly.
00:15:57.160 That's it.
00:15:57.920 Well, today you can easily say that men,
00:15:59.900 specifically, I'd say white, straight men are the
00:16:02.060 worst treated demographic today from affirmative
00:16:04.380 action to college admission and scholarships, to
00:16:07.580 portrayal in media and TV, to courts that side with
00:16:10.140 women in custody cases. And then of course, there's no
00:16:12.580 protection under hate speech laws for this
00:16:14.380 demographic. Yet somehow this discrimination is
00:16:17.080 okay. And feminists actually wonder why there's a
00:16:19.460 men's rights movement that's growing in numbers. So
00:16:22.060 if men are the force and power, why are they being
00:16:23.800 so discriminated against, right?
00:16:26.220 Yes. Well, they're being discriminated against in
00:16:28.320 part because they are believed to be the ones that
00:16:31.700 have the power. So until you understand, and, and, and
00:16:35.780 so people who believe in equality of opportunity,
00:16:39.220 confuse equality of opportunity with equality of
00:16:43.020 outcome. And they, you know, they say if everything
00:16:45.780 isn't equal, it must be because the white males have
00:16:49.440 made a system that doesn't allow us to become, or this
00:16:52.740 group or that group to be equal to another group. And
00:16:55.540 that would be a little bit like saying, you know, that,
00:16:57.560 you know, the NBA, the National Basketball Association,
00:17:00.980 it really discriminates against whites because there are
00:17:03.680 more percentage of whites in the NBA than there are
00:17:06.500 blacks in relation to the population. And so, you know,
00:17:10.460 we, and so the deeper question that always needs to be
00:17:14.620 asked is, um, do men have power? And if, if they do, and we
00:17:21.560 want a world that is egalitarian, that has equal, at least equal
00:17:24.880 opportunity for everybody, um, is, is, is the fact that more men
00:17:30.920 are in positions like Congress or the Senate, uh, Senate or, um, on
00:17:36.440 the, um, Supreme Court or in CEOs, does this mean men have more
00:17:41.100 power? And from, if you define power as influence in institutions
00:17:48.300 outside of the family, men clearly have more power and white
00:17:53.900 males clearly have a disproportional amount, um, of that
00:17:57.840 power. The, um, but if you define power differently as having
00:18:02.700 control over your own life, being able to make the choices that
00:18:07.200 you want with your life, having the encouragement to go inside
00:18:10.840 of yourself, uh, when you're a child and decide who you are and
00:18:14.380 what you're motivated by, and then being honored by the rest
00:18:17.760 of society for the choices that you make, then we're talking
00:18:21.400 about a totally different game. So for example, when a woman
00:18:25.600 and a man, um, are married in their middle class, uh, and
00:18:28.880 above, um, and they have a child and the, um, the, the woman
00:18:33.460 generally generates in that situation three decisions. Um,
00:18:37.160 do I want to be full-time involved with the children or the
00:18:39.600 child? Do I want to be full-time involved with the workplace
00:18:43.060 or do I want to do some combination of both? Uh, the man has
00:18:47.020 three options also. Um, option one is to work full-time. Option
00:18:51.580 two is to work full-time and option three is to work full-time
00:18:55.640 or, you know, if he's a working class man, work two jobs, or
00:18:59.460 if he's a corporate man, you know, working overtime at the job
00:19:03.080 that he, that he has. And so the, so he will then, so then
00:19:07.980 let's look at what happens. So let's say the woman says, I
00:19:11.160 really want to be home with the children. And 40% of women
00:19:14.220 say that. And among women who are married and are middle-class
00:19:19.720 women, the much higher percentages of women say, I want to be
00:19:23.280 home with the children full-time. That's, that's their desire.
00:19:27.020 That's their choice. Um, and so the, so when that decision is
00:19:31.920 made, first of all, the man is usually not even a part of that
00:19:35.380 decision-making process. So that's the first really major
00:19:38.840 inequality. If the, a man and a woman are supposedly equal in
00:19:43.980 having children, then both of them should have as much say as
00:19:47.100 to who wants to work full-time, who wants to work part-time, who
00:19:49.580 wants to be full-time involved with the children. But normally
00:19:52.760 speaking, the woman generates a choice among those three options. And
00:19:56.580 the man sits back and supports her choice. And then based on her
00:20:00.500 choice, she, he then figures out whether he needs to work more
00:20:04.260 hours than he did. So if she chooses to stay home full-time
00:20:08.060 with the children, now they have one source of income rather
00:20:10.940 than two. And so he will, statistically speaking, begin to
00:20:14.960 make more than he's ever made before. So the feminist look at
00:20:19.500 his now making more than he's ever made before as just one more
00:20:24.380 example of a man earning more than a woman and therefore having more
00:20:28.300 power than a woman because he advances more quickly through
00:20:31.340 whatever hierarchy he's a part of. But if you look at power as control
00:20:35.160 over your own life, that man is actually has less power than a woman
00:20:39.760 because he never had a chance to make a decision as to whether he
00:20:43.500 wanted to be full-time involved with the workplace at home or some
00:20:46.280 combination of both. And he's now feeling obligated to earn money that
00:20:50.440 somebody else will spend, the family will spend, while he will probably be
00:20:54.420 more stressed and die sooner. And feeling obligated to earn money that
00:20:58.020 somebody else spends while you die sooner is not my definition of power.
00:21:02.400 My definition. So what men have learned to call power is learning how to
00:21:07.480 climb each rung of a ladder to get to the top of that ladder. And feminists
00:21:14.480 have said, ah, there's more men at the top of that ladder than there are
00:21:18.780 women. Men have more power. And what I'm saying in the myth of male
00:21:22.720 power is, excuse me, until you have the choice of which wall you put that
00:21:29.740 ladder on, which the wall of being a corporate male, the wall of working for
00:21:34.860 the government, the wall of working for a public, a law firm that's publicly,
00:21:41.160 does public service, a law firm that doesn't do public service, you being an
00:21:45.400 artist, a writer, or being supported by a woman economically while you take care
00:21:49.440 of the children. Those would be examples of the different walls. Until you have a
00:21:54.300 choice of which wall you want to put that ladder on, you don't have power. If all
00:22:00.540 your social pressures and your willingness of a woman to marry you is based on your
00:22:08.060 willingness to put the ladder on the wall of money producing, then you don't have that
00:22:15.460 choice to feel like you're valued, loved, cared for, and respected as a man, not just
00:22:21.660 by women, but by your parents and by male peers at your 20th high school
00:22:26.380 anniversary reunion. And so that's the questions that are not being asked. That's the
00:22:32.020 questions that are core to the under, until that re-examination of what I, or in the
00:22:39.480 myth of male power that I talk about, the re-examination of what power is, occurs, we
00:22:46.520 will always believe that the white male is the, is the, the usurper of more power when
00:22:55.800 in fact he's the one at this point in history that has the least amount of choice
00:23:00.120 and their belief power. Yeah, definitely. Well, feminists and Marxists, they love to
00:23:04.520 blame men for colonialism, slavery, racism, war, corrupt governments, you know, all this
00:23:09.080 stuff, and they leave out all the good stuff. But how do you respond to those who try and
00:23:12.420 blame men for events in history or current political problems? Because that's a common
00:23:16.260 theme I keep hearing. You know, that's as, that's as accurate and as inaccurate as
00:23:21.540 blaming mothers for all the problems in history, because as the Catholic Church says, give me the
00:23:26.340 child for the first five years, and I'll give you the adult. And, you know, you can, you
00:23:31.800 can say that, that, that the mother who had the responsibility for the primary, the socialization
00:23:39.340 of the child in those first five years was responsible for training boys to be more likely
00:23:45.640 to go to war, training girls to be more likely to be at home. You know, they were, mothers were
00:23:52.220 oftentimes the, the, the, the dictators of what, what morality was in a culture and so
00:23:57.480 on. Or you could say that it had nothing to do, you know, with mothers per se and fathers
00:24:02.980 per se, that we, that, that, that the really controlling force was the need to survive. And
00:24:09.860 to survive, we, you know, almost everything, almost all the decisions we made in the world
00:24:15.840 were ones based on that, that, that, that parameter. And the people who didn't make that
00:24:22.040 with, with, with survival in mind, didn't survive. So they're not here today, you know, to talk
00:24:30.520 about it. And, and so, yeah, so whenever you look at something through one ideology of, if
00:24:38.240 you, if you start out with men have the power, then it appears that men have been in charge
00:24:44.460 of everything. If you started out from a different ideology that, that because mothers had the
00:24:49.920 control over the children for the most part in most countries, in most places, in most
00:24:54.340 points in history for the first five years, therefore they had the power. But in maybe
00:25:00.080 upper class, upper class homes, nannies had the power then by that type of logic. So there
00:25:06.080 was, you know, we, and it's, but the, but the issue was not men or women. The, the point
00:25:13.620 that feminists miss is that men love women. Men were willing to die for women. Men are
00:25:21.440 willing to die before women are even hurt. That's why men in the 19th century who were
00:25:27.040 called gentlemen had to wear a sword so that if their fiance, anybody who became their fiance
00:25:32.780 or more serious, their, their wife, they, if that fiance was even insulted, they were expected
00:25:40.220 to take a sword and to challenge the man who insulted their wife or their, their fiance to
00:25:45.380 a duel. Um, and so we, we sort of talk about, you know, women were property. Well, that's
00:25:51.420 true. Women were often treated as property and men were expected to, to die to protect their
00:25:57.460 property. Um, and so in a way that put men at a lower position than the women did, you
00:26:02.920 know, and men weren't at all lovable by women or respected by men until they had property.
00:26:07.980 And so it was to look at it as, um, to look at it without understanding the, the role of
00:26:13.620 survival in the process is to pretty much guarantee that you're, you're going to misunderstand
00:26:17.880 everything. And unfortunately the people in the world who know the least about men, who
00:26:23.340 have the least compassion for men, who understand the least about male, female relationships are
00:26:29.600 the, are the leading feminists in the world. And unfortunately they're located at our top
00:26:34.820 universities. Um, and they're, they're teaching gender studies courses. Um, and they're, so we
00:26:40.820 have the people who know the least about men teaching courses on male, female, gender at the
00:26:47.640 top universities in the world. Well, most of those teachers, they don't even like men. They don't even
00:26:51.860 have sex with men. So I mean, I don't, I don't know the data on that, but the most important thing
00:26:58.280 is whether they like or dislike or have, or don't have sex with men is that they do not
00:27:03.020 have a way of looking at men that helps boys and men and women and girls love each other.
00:27:11.520 And that is where that's, you know, you know, to paraphrase John Lennon, it's all, you know,
00:27:17.420 um, it's all, it's really all about love. Well, just the other day I was reading some,
00:27:21.700 I say insane gender studies courses being taught. One I saw was, and was how to be gay,
00:27:27.920 male homosexuality and initiation. Another one was encouraging the feminization of men for the
00:27:33.180 fate of the planet. So is there a push to feminize men at this time? Yes, there is. And part of that
00:27:40.640 push is good. And part of that push is bad. Um, you know, our gender, our, our traditional gender
00:27:45.780 roles were very narrow and confining and women didn't have nearly as much opportunity to, you
00:27:53.320 know, express the assertive side. I remember when I went to high school and, um, the, you know,
00:27:58.560 my guidance counselor would, um, you know, if, if, if, if a, if a girl, young girl or young woman
00:28:04.160 in my, um, high school was, um, really bright and, you know, and had, had it together. Um, you know,
00:28:11.960 she, the, the guidance counselor would say, well, you can be a nurse, you can be a teacher. Um, you
00:28:17.100 know, and, you know, um, that, that would be pretty much the options, professional options she was
00:28:23.080 offered as a bright woman. And, um, and so it's wonderful that young women today are being told,
00:28:31.680 you know, um, you go girl and, you know, do anything you want and get the wind beneath your
00:28:36.640 wings and all options are, uh, you know, should be open to you and there's, it should be nothing
00:28:41.220 that you shouldn't consider the possibility of doing. Um, and we need to, to, to, um, mix that
00:28:49.760 in with helping the young woman understand the trade-offs of becoming whatever she wishes to
00:28:55.480 become if she becomes an Olympic star. Um, that's wonderful if you hold open that possibility
00:29:00.380 for her, but it's sad if you don't help her understand that everything she's going to have
00:29:05.180 to give up in terms of friendships and time and free time and, um, so on in order to become
00:29:10.580 that Olympic star. And so sometimes we paint the dream without the, without the hard work
00:29:14.980 that it takes to get to that dream. Um, and so conversely, um, men in order to protect women
00:29:20.860 and in order to be willing to go to war and die, uh, for both women and, um, their country
00:29:27.180 and to protect other men and children, uh, they had to learn to disconnect from their
00:29:32.380 feelings. So for example, if you, um, if I'm at war with a guy and I really get very, very
00:29:38.480 close emotionally to him, um, the closer that I get to him emotionally, if when he, if he's
00:29:44.900 killed and his blood spatters all over my body and bits and pieces of his skin and guts are
00:29:50.800 falling all over me and I, the closer I am to him, the more, the more emotional damage
00:29:59.460 that it's going to do to me, the greater the chance of my never recovering from that.
00:30:05.140 So I had to learn that when the going gets tough, the tough get going, not when the going
00:30:09.280 gets tough, the tough get in touch with your feelings. Um, or, you know, when I, when I
00:30:13.280 learn, when I meet a man, instead of like say, Hey bro, you know, how are you? You know,
00:30:17.780 that type of thing or, Hey dude, um, you know, and you know, um, you, I really get to appreciate
00:30:23.380 him, know him, know what's going on inside of him. And so in every way, and you know,
00:30:29.140 when, when a football player in a, in a high school in the United States today is playing
00:30:34.820 football, um, you know, the cheerleader is going first and 10, do it again. Now exactly
00:30:39.320 what is she cheering for when she cheers for do it again? She's not cheering for him expressing
00:30:44.760 his feelings. She's cheering for him, risking spinal cord injuries, concussions, broken noses,
00:30:50.180 uh, dislocated shoulders. And she's saying, do it again for the sake of bringing a piece of leather
00:30:55.320 a few yards further on the football field. And if he does do it again and does it effectively,
00:31:00.520 he's considered a hero and her body is being, you know, that saying first and 10, do it again.
00:31:06.600 That's, you know, for in seventh grade, a beautiful girl's body. This is the first exposure
00:31:12.300 for many guys to a beautiful woman in the flesh. And she's basically saying, when you do it again,
00:31:18.120 when you risk your body, when you risk your, um, your, your mind, you can cut it in the terms
00:31:23.580 of a concussion again, um, my love, my sexuality, my adoration of you will increase. And so he's
00:31:30.980 learning. And, and also his, his guy friends, um, are saying the same thing to him and his parents
00:31:36.180 are coming out on Thanksgiving and cheering for him when he risks his body. And I just went to my
00:31:40.800 50th high school reunion, not too long ago. And, you know, the, the guy who was the quarterback
00:31:45.220 and the other guy who was the, and who scored the most touchdowns on the football team, they
00:31:50.780 were by far and away the most sought after people, um, in, you know, in the, uh, um, at the
00:31:57.200 50th high school. So you have the legacy of, you know, just performing well in high school.
00:32:03.760 Um, but all of this required these guys to disconnect from their feelings. And, and so
00:32:11.660 now, is it more feminine to be in touch with your feelings? The standard stereotype ways?
00:32:16.960 Yes. Is it healthy for men to be more in touch with their feelings? Overall? Yes. In relation
00:32:21.460 to what men are. On the other hand, you can take every virtue taken to its extreme becomes
00:32:25.760 a vice. Um, if you get so in touch with your feelings that every time something goes wrong,
00:32:30.180 you're crying and you're, you're, you're a drama king or queen, then you have, then, then
00:32:35.080 you prevent yourself from doing what you need to do in emergencies. And so we, you know, both
00:32:40.880 sexes need to understand and, um, get skillsets that were, that were deprived, uh, that were
00:32:49.640 deprived, uh, in the normal traditional socialization of, of, uh, gender roles.
00:32:54.520 Yeah. Do you ever think about what was it like in pre-Christian pagan days with the, the roles
00:33:00.680 were between the genders and what their relationships were like? Do you think it was healthier than
00:33:04.120 this modern liberalism kind of religious thing we have going today?
00:33:08.300 I think overall the religious part, no, but the, uh, we, we've always been, um, in the United
00:33:15.340 States and most, you know, most countries in the world throughout history have had very strong
00:33:19.160 superstitions and religions. That's the only way that we could cope with the stress, you know,
00:33:23.200 and, you know, the fear that there would be, you know, seven years of, of feast would be
00:33:27.980 followed by seven years of salmon. And so almost all religions were very crucial to the survival
00:33:33.760 of a culture because they helped to unify that culture. So, you know, we probably haven't
00:33:39.320 inside of us a little bit of a, um, a gene for the belief in, in, um, in God, because the
00:33:45.180 belief in God allowed us to unify and therefore battle an opposing, um, uh, kinship network
00:33:53.200 or opposing, um, country and be more successful in doing so. If you had that type of belief,
00:33:58.720 that doesn't mean there is a God. It just means that the belief in there being a God,
00:34:03.240 um, um, is, um, probably had some positive functionality for many years. The problem is
00:34:08.920 that it is, it is, um, it is also, you know, very dysfunctional in many ways to believe that
00:34:15.780 something external is magically controlling your future or that it, that if you just, um,
00:34:21.720 you know, that if there's, um, a trillion people out there that, uh, a prayer and saying,
00:34:27.740 gee, I would like some, um, some ice cream for dessert for dinner, um, that that will be paid
00:34:33.300 attention to, um, by you, um, by the, somebody listening to you upstairs.
00:34:38.440 Yeah, I was thinking about that European pre-Christian pagan days, and I was thinking,
00:34:44.460 hmm, I wonder if suicide rates were high then, and probably not because one, men were their
00:34:48.480 own masters, and two, they probably had healthier relationships and they were more in touch with
00:34:52.300 the primordial traditions and, and nature, not this religion and liberalism we have today.
00:34:57.940 Just a theory.
00:34:59.760 No, I would overall, let me give a perspective on that. Um, one of the things I do is teach
00:35:04.840 couples communication. And, um, during the class, I teach people how to, um, how to handle personal
00:35:12.180 criticism without becoming defensive. And I basically start out with the class and saying
00:35:17.120 that historically speaking and biologically, when we heard a criticism, uh, we responded,
00:35:22.820 um, it had the potential for being an enemy. So it was functional for us to get up our defenses
00:35:28.600 to defend against being killed by the enemy. And it was even more functional for us to kill
00:35:33.040 the enemy before the enemy killed us. If we did that, we survived. However, if, um, you
00:35:39.580 and your partner, um, in life, um, are having challenges with each other and you open up and
00:35:45.660 express some of your feelings of, of hurt or pain to your partner, and he or she says, you
00:35:51.680 know, some version of, um, and, and he, he or she becomes defensive, um, you learn to shut
00:35:57.620 your mouth and to not open it again, because unless you really, unless it's so important that
00:36:02.700 you're willing to risk the possibility of escalation. And so the, what was functional
00:36:08.180 for survival is dysfunctional for love. Um, and so the, um, it really, but if I ask, so
00:36:17.020 I, I, I work with the people, the couples in my group to, to learn that. And somewhere
00:36:21.540 during the workshop, I say, by the way, um, how many of you feel that your communication
00:36:26.540 even before you came into this workshop was better than your parents and your
00:36:30.640 grandparents and virtually everybody in the group says yes. And then I say, well, if I
00:36:36.380 were to, but we all agree that our grandparents had a divorce rate that was lower than the divorce
00:36:41.880 rate of people today. And so does that mean that, um, better communication leads to more
00:36:50.440 divorces? And of course the answer is no, that's not what it leads to. That's a correlation that
00:36:56.800 doesn't have a cause attached to it, but what the cause of the greater amount of divorces.
00:37:02.680 And if you ask a different question and say, who, who's happier us today or our grandparents,
00:37:11.400 that's a much tougher question to ask, even though their communication, I mean, that doesn't ask
00:37:16.820 but answer, even though our grandparents communication was probably significantly worse
00:37:23.140 than most couples communication is today. Um, the grandparents may have been happier because
00:37:29.440 they had lower expectations because life was simple. The choices were simpler. Um, and, you
00:37:35.680 know, now if, you know, if a kid doesn't have an iPhone, you feel, you know, he or she feels
00:37:40.680 like, you know, they're discriminated against and they're left out of the group and they're,
00:37:45.540 you know, that type of thing. And if the parents prevent them from having a Facebook page or
00:37:49.140 doing Twitter or whatever, um, you know, they, they feel deprived. And, uh, and so, um, you
00:37:54.920 know, whereas my father used to say, you know, what I got for Christmas was an orange each year
00:38:00.460 and that was it. And, and so, you know, the, the idea of us getting more than a couple of
00:38:07.380 presents for Christmas was sort of really hard for him to work with. And my dad was born on
00:38:13.280 Christmas and he just got a Christmas and birthday gift all in one. For him, I do feel sorry.
00:38:19.140 So if we discuss our PC culture today, do you think it's negatively affecting men and young
00:38:25.640 boys growing up in this kind of environment? Yes. Um, you know, I've given complex answers to
00:38:31.680 every question, but I love that when I can give a clear yes to, um, and it's because PC isn't by
00:38:39.960 definition bad, um, if it's at the very beginning stages, but almost every, every, almost by definition,
00:38:47.920 political correctness means that you can't speak about certain things, um, without getting into
00:38:54.400 trouble. And the moment you move speech into that context, you undermine the very concept of what the
00:39:00.560 first amendment and freedom of speech was about. And you certainly undermine everything a university
00:39:06.160 is supposed to be about. And so for there to be, you know, when I grew up and I'm 71 years of age and
00:39:12.040 I grew up during the Vietnam war and the free speech movement was, you know, the, with that,
00:39:16.360 the universities were the center of freedom of speech. We were the center of the group of people
00:39:20.780 that, that said that, um, that the, you know, the McCarthy was, you know, just an evil person for,
00:39:28.320 you know, wanting to, you know, make sure that anyone who spoke in positive, in positive ways about
00:39:33.520 Russia or communism was immediately going to be suspicious. And so here we are at a point. We,
00:39:40.580 we were at that point, a point in a point in history where the universities were at the core
00:39:45.000 of articulating the importance of, of, of multiple ways of thinking and looking at things and questioning
00:39:51.620 the way, you know, the, the, the, the center of the first group in history that said, maybe going to
00:39:58.100 war, uh, was not the right thing to do. We need to question the war and ask for the motives and
00:40:02.940 things like that. And then we've gone from the university being that to not being able to say
00:40:08.280 in the university, anything in a gender class, almost anything that is male positive without
00:40:13.800 being ostracized in that class and without being, and if you challenge, you know, so for example,
00:40:19.820 I'm playing tennis a few years ago with, um, with the president of Northwestern University and we
00:40:25.120 finished the tennis, um, we were, we belonged to a same thing tag together. We didn't know who the
00:40:29.100 other one was before we played tennis. We just got, we just met at the tennis court and we finished
00:40:33.620 the tennis game. And he says, well, you know, what do you do? And I tell him that, you know,
00:40:36.340 I'm into, and I describe what, um, men's issues are. And he goes, wow, that's really fascinating.
00:40:41.600 We don't have any of that at Northwestern University. And I said, well, would you like to make
00:40:46.020 Northwestern University the first major university in the world that has a genuine male studies
00:40:52.840 curriculum to not be, uh, to not replace the women's studies curriculum, but to be synergistic
00:40:58.880 with the women's studies curriculum. He said, I liked the way you put that, but he said,
00:41:02.820 well, and he smiled at me and somewhat condescending smile. And he said, you know, Warren, I would be,
00:41:07.960 um, I would be not a university president long enough to get that implemented. If I even articulated
00:41:17.040 that the moment I articulated that the feminist would in essence kill me, um, you know, academically.
00:41:24.640 And so then I said to him, well, is there any way, shape or form that there could be, um, men's
00:41:31.500 studies courses at Northwestern University? And without missing a beat, he said, sure,
00:41:38.300 sue the university. And I said, tell me more. He said, if you, if you sued us, then I would be a
00:41:44.900 hero for preventing the university from losing money in a lawsuit. Um, and therefore my forming a men's
00:41:54.120 studies course or curriculum would see, would be, would seem to be the necessary political power
00:42:01.680 response to prevent the force of that lawsuit from overwhelming us. Then I'd be a hero. It took him a
00:42:10.380 minute to think of that. Um, so, and yet it's been hard for me to organize and get, um, in order to do,
00:42:18.460 do something like that, you have to have two major factors. You have to have students at a university
00:42:23.440 that are actually, that do want to belong to, or be part of a men's studies course. And then second, you have
00:42:30.220 to have some, you know, good pro bono lawyers or a good, you know, a good, um, um, contribution to finance
00:42:37.400 lawyers to, to make that happen. But I would pretty much assure one that if when, if, if a group of
00:42:44.620 students got together and did that with a couple of good lawyers working with them, that they would
00:42:49.500 make change, that that would make national publicity and that would get universities all over the country
00:42:55.880 to be very fearful of, um, doing anything, but, um, but really re-examining that issue. And that that,
00:43:04.060 and that that would lead to, and once that happened in the United States, it would begin to happen all
00:43:08.400 over the industrialized world. Well, it's as dangerous as starting a white students union.
00:43:13.280 You know, some people have tried to do that and all hell broke loose. People accuse them of being
00:43:17.440 Nazis and KKK immediately. Yes, yes, indeed. Um, it is very, you know, it's, um, it's very sad how we've,
00:43:27.700 we've limited ourselves and we can, I have more empathy for it in the, um, black, white area than I
00:43:36.820 have in the male or female area. And this is, I think, one of the, the major problems that, that
00:43:42.460 feminism made. Um, feminism came onto the scene. This second wave of feminism came onto the scene
00:43:49.060 in the early seventies. And we had just passed through two major, um, two major eras, if you will,
00:43:56.140 the era of the civil rights movement in which there were oppressors and oppressed and the era of
00:44:02.840 Marxism being very strong in Marxism divided, divided the world into the oppressors and the
00:44:08.900 oppressed. So when feminism came on board, it was like the, the, it was no longer, um, the oppressors
00:44:17.960 and the, they divvied up men and women into the oppressors and oppressed. And that was the false
00:44:25.220 division. Um, so when, when you talk about black studies, there really was a, an oppressed group,
00:44:33.640 um, that, you know, in the United States that, that had many, that we did not allow to have equal
00:44:40.420 opportunity very clearly. And so when you want to do something for that group, what you should do for
00:44:47.080 that group to empower them is very arguable. But the fact that they were in an oppressed position
00:44:52.440 is in my opinion, less arguable, but with men and women, it wasn't a matter of oppressed, oppressor.
00:44:59.140 It was a matter of men and women, both had it having obligations and responsibilities and strict
00:45:05.060 roles. And, you know, women's role was raise children. Men's role was raise money. Women's role,
00:45:10.680 um, men's role was to risk their lives in war to protect the children that women bore. And so we had,
00:45:16.800 we had all of that happening in which both men's lives were clearly more disposable and every culture
00:45:22.460 that survived, every, every culture that survived, survived based on its ability to train sons to be
00:45:27.540 disposable, disposable in war, disposable in work. And because many of those men who were killed in war,
00:45:33.540 killed in work were also fathers, uh, disposable as fathers as well. And so the, um, so all of this was
00:45:40.320 very, um, so being disposable, in my opinion, is not about being, you know, being an oppressor. Um,
00:45:48.240 it's more, it's closer, more akin to being oppressed. Um, but again, it was not about men being
00:45:53.860 oppressed any more than women. Women had to risk their lives and childbirth. And so what the real
00:45:58.500 issue was is every kinship network or nation figuring out a way or, you know, groups like, um,
00:46:05.460 Jews or Arabs or whatever, figuring out a way that that group of Catholics or whatever, whatever group
00:46:12.060 it was could survive and produce more Catholics and, and, um, and have, and have that religion or
00:46:18.220 that group or that ethnic, ethnicity survive. Now, another controversial one for you. Is it healthy
00:46:24.240 for boys to grow up with two moms and no father? Because a boy already struggles, I think, greatly growing
00:46:29.720 up with a single mom and no father. Yes. We don't have great evidence on the two mom situation.
00:46:36.800 What we do know is that children that do, um, the best have about an equal amount of father and mother.
00:46:45.140 Uh, they have, they have four things happening for them. They're, they're ideally in an intact male,
00:46:51.180 female family. That seems to be the, the group in which the, the way in which children do the best.
00:46:56.500 Um, the, um, the, the second way they do the best is they have to be brought up in a non-intact family
00:47:03.220 that they have about an equal amount of time with father. They have, the four things need to happen,
00:47:07.660 uh, simultaneously. They have to have about an equal amount of time with the mother and the father.
00:47:14.640 Second, the mom and the dad need to live close enough to each other so that the children don't have to give
00:47:20.880 up friends or activities to be involved, to see the other parent. Otherwise, there develops a
00:47:26.820 resentment toward the other parent, usually the non-custodial parent. And the, um, and that
00:47:33.060 resentment leads to, you know, negative things or the, and the child doesn't have a chance to develop,
00:47:39.200 to be involved with a soccer team and really get to be good on the team or, you know, develops a
00:47:44.360 friendship and can't go to that friend's birthday party. And so that's, that type of, um, that's
00:47:51.180 number. So the number two point is the children, the, the parents live to need, need to live close
00:47:56.580 enough to each other, usually within about 20 minutes from each other so that the child can go
00:48:01.380 from one parent to the other without having to miss, um, friends and activities. Uh, number three
00:48:06.800 is that the child is not able to overhear any bad mouthing from mother to father or father to
00:48:12.560 mother. And bad mouthing is a broad term word that I use to also cover negative body language. So
00:48:19.080 rolling, you mentioned your, you mentioned mom to dad and dad rolls his eyes at mom. The child gets
00:48:25.380 this, you know, that dimension of mom, the debt, the child gets the, uh, the, the, the feeling of the
00:48:30.980 understanding that it's not safe to talk to about mom in a positive way to dad or vice versa.
00:48:35.680 And, um, and then the fourth thing that's crucial to children doing well in a, in a non-intact family
00:48:41.880 is the, um, child, is the parents having, being consistently involved in, in, in counseling, um, not
00:48:50.480 just emergency-based counseling, but consistently involved in proactive preventing of problem
00:48:57.460 counseling at each stage of that child's growth and development.
00:49:01.640 Switching gears a little, are you aware of the type of feminism in, in Sweden?
00:49:05.680 I'm only, I've been to Sweden and, um, and certainly heard that it's, um, even if you
00:49:12.200 will, worse there.
00:49:13.680 Oh yeah.
00:49:14.440 More of, more of a straight jacket there than it is here.
00:49:16.700 Well, there's lots of female politicians and they're not any better than men. In fact,
00:49:19.960 I'd say they're probably even worse. There's one female politician she's suggesting for men
00:49:25.440 to sit down when peeing.
00:49:27.400 Oh my God.
00:49:28.280 Yeah. And now some Swedish schools have even suggested using genderless pronouns to
00:49:32.320 avoid pushing gender roles. What do you think about that?
00:49:35.720 Well, this would be as, as stupid. I mean, let's, let's take the first one first about
00:49:41.060 the sitting down while peeing. Think of the, think of the situation right now. When a man
00:49:47.160 goes into a men's room, almost all, at least in the United States and most of the world that
00:49:51.880 I've been to, um, there is an every men's room, a urinal. Every time he urinates, he uses
00:49:58.700 urinal, not the, um, not the, you know, the regular sit down toilet. When he goes, when
00:50:04.460 he, when he gets married, if he gets married and has a home, he can be a multimillionaire
00:50:10.000 and have a gorgeous home and there will be not a single urinal in that home.
00:50:16.880 And so can you imagine a maskless movement coming along saying what we should have, you know,
00:50:23.720 women should learn to stand up and pee like men do. And we should have only urinals in homes
00:50:28.740 that, that, that people use for, um, peeing and, um, and, you know, but, and people can use the,
00:50:35.640 the, the, the toilets for other purposes. And so it's sort of like so stupid, you know, like men
00:50:41.300 and women do have differences. Our differences are both physical, they're biological, they're,
00:50:46.800 they're, um, they're neurosciences. Neuroscience can articulate hundreds and hundreds, probably
00:50:53.060 thousands of differences between male and female in the, in the uterus. Um, um, you know, when you
00:50:58.960 become, um, when there's huge amounts of testosterone that go through the, the, uh, the
00:51:05.620 uterus to, to that flood the boy, the person, the, the embryo that's going to become a male
00:51:11.600 and, uh, that, that does not exist with the embryo that's going to become a female. And,
00:51:17.240 you know, a thousand other things, you know, we're, we as guys, when we see a woman who is
00:51:22.480 an hourglass type of figure, uh, we are pulled emotionally and sexually toward her once we,
00:51:29.340 once we enter puberty. And that creates a powerlessness among us, um, to that woman who
00:51:35.580 is young and beautiful. And, um, and so the, so we, we, the question that needs to always
00:51:43.340 be asked is what's functional and what's dysfunctional? Um, you know, men and women should be able to
00:51:49.160 do anything that they wish to do as long as it doesn't hurt other people.
00:51:52.480 Um, we should always be asking the question, not what is male or female, what is feministically,
00:51:57.860 you know, what is politically correct or not, but rather, you know, what is functional, what is,
00:52:02.560 um, and then what is functional, but we should be different for different people.
00:52:06.160 You know, we, we need our firefighters and our soldiers and we need our police officers.
00:52:11.720 And there's a traditional men may decide to be that way. So we should always honor and support
00:52:16.280 that willingness to risk their lives, but to have a boy grow up in a military family and be told the
00:52:21.500 only way that you can become a man is to become a soldier is, is to restrict his freedom to be
00:52:28.060 who he wishes to be. So the good news of feminism is that for women, it really very much expanded
00:52:34.920 women's options and, um, expanded women's psychology. And, and we saw to, you know, if people were to live,
00:52:43.780 grew up in the fifties, like I did. And people say, well, you know, when you get older, Warren,
00:52:50.060 more people, more people going to law school will be women than men, more people going to medical
00:52:54.140 school will be women than men. You know, I would have had a hard time following that, not for,
00:53:00.280 because, because I just would have, couldn't have imagined that. And so what, part of what,
00:53:04.260 what science teaches us is neuroplasticity and the brain of a woman or a man changes as we change
00:53:11.320 roles. When a man begins to father, uh, he's, his testosterone level goes down, his oxygen level
00:53:18.060 goes up, his nurturing skills increase. We are extraordinary complex as beings. We have extra,
00:53:24.660 and the, the, the way we are most, um, most functional is by our extraordinary ability to adapt
00:53:31.420 to changing circumstances. The people that survive the best and the longest are the ones, um, best able
00:53:36.760 to adapt. And so feminism has done a really good job of, of taking that adaptation assumption and
00:53:43.820 working with it. And they've, that turned out to be quite accurate, but it's been, but in the process,
00:53:50.960 it has done two major, um, major things that have been problems. One is it has undermined the family,
00:53:58.780 devalued the family and D and demonized men. And there was no reason to demonize men, except for
00:54:06.420 the fact that feminism got born in a period of history where, when you, when you, um,
00:54:14.420 where you created oppressed and oppressors, you dichotomize. And ironically, that's a highly
00:54:19.540 competitive modality that, that feminist claims to not be interested in is competition.
00:54:25.660 Yeah. You mentioned testosterone and you, you know, now I've spoken to other guests in the past,
00:54:30.880 most men suffer from low testosterone because of all the endocrine disrupting chemicals out there
00:54:36.500 and all the bad ingredients and food and all the other toxic exposure we get. And that actually makes
00:54:43.040 men suffer, makes them irritable, creates all kinds of problems. Have you looked into this?
00:54:48.040 Yes. Um, so this is really important what you're bringing up here and very few people know about this.
00:54:52.520 Um, so in the United States, as we all know, there's a lot of rivers where there's, um,
00:54:57.580 plastics that are, um, dumped, um, near the rivers or, or that go from the factories into the rivers.
00:55:05.460 And you see this especially around places like Lake Apopko and, um, outside of Disneyland where there's
00:55:11.380 millions and millions of, of, um, bottles, plastic bottles that leach into Lake Apopko and,
00:55:18.100 in studies of different rivers, um, at different junctions in the United States, there's, there's
00:55:23.620 studies showing that, that, that the plastics leach phthalates and the, and the phthalates, um, mimic
00:55:31.980 estrogen. And so particularly in areas where there's a high amount of estrogen in the water,
00:55:38.760 um, the, you have an acceleration of what I call the gender puberty gap. And we all know that
00:55:46.040 girls tend to mature more quickly in puberty than, than boys do. But when there is, um,
00:55:53.020 contact with water that has this, that mimics estrogen, uh, almost by definition, the girls
00:55:59.560 reach puberty even more quickly than the boys, than, than they did before. And the boys reach
00:56:04.920 puberty more slowly than before. So the old gender puberty gap in which girls matured more
00:56:10.560 quickly than boys is now accentuate, accentuated in many areas. And that's a real problem.
00:56:16.520 It's especially a real problem when you think about it in relation to sexuality, probably
00:56:20.820 the most vulnerable dimension of growing up, um, in, in your adolescent years is what happens
00:56:28.120 around sexuality and rejection and our self-concept. Uh, well, the least mature, when, when boys are
00:56:35.500 even less mature than in comparison to girls than they have been in the past, then we, um,
00:56:42.660 and, and they're still the one expected to risk sexual rejection when they, when they know barely
00:56:48.800 anything about sex and virtually nothing about girls. And they're, and get there. So there,
00:56:55.620 we're still live in a world where we're told sex is dirty. Uh, you see, if you see a man on TV,
00:57:02.700 your 13 year old and 15 year old daughter and son watching a male masturbate on TV, the chances are
00:57:09.420 most parents are likely to go over and turn that TV off. And so the, the, the message that comes
00:57:14.480 across to kids is that sex is dirty, but we still say to boys, you initiate the dirt. So we're saying
00:57:20.580 sex is dirty. The least mature sex that knows the least about girls and sex should be the one to risk
00:57:28.020 the sexual rejection, um, and initiating something that's dirty. That, what does that produce? That
00:57:32.760 produces shame and that produces self-disgust and, um, and feelings of guilt and feelings that we need
00:57:40.500 to compensate and be more, uh, do things in order to prove ourselves worthy of girls. So we begin to
00:57:46.660 start earning more money, um, to be able to add, afford to ask a girl out and pay for dinner and pay for
00:57:51.980 dates and pay for drinks and pay for, um, you know, um, for ultimately for diamonds, like I was
00:57:56.740 mentioning before. And so all those things lead to a, um, so, so that, that leaching of the lates in
00:58:04.840 our water that exaggerates the old, um, gender puberty gap, particularly in the light of sexuality,
00:58:14.280 creates, um, creates a magnification of problems, um, that have, we've never really faced in humankind.
00:58:21.400 And, and that magnification is increased still further by technology. In the old days, a boy had
00:58:29.040 to deal with asking a girl out. He was expected to ask a girl out. He was expected to screw it up.
00:58:35.440 He was expected to overdo it or underdo it, or, and he paid different prices if he overdid it or
00:58:40.480 underdid it. Um, but today, if he, you know, if he realizes he can't handle that, he turns to,
00:58:46.060 you know, a selection of 250 million free video porn, um, sites that, that helped him to be able
00:58:52.020 to hide in the, uh, hide in the, in the video porn, um, release himself sexually to that and therefore
00:59:00.760 be able to isolate himself further from real life women. A couple more questions for you. Circumcision.
00:59:06.740 I mean, personally, I think it's completely unnatural. And if you're not Jewish,
00:59:10.160 why do it America? But psychologically speaking, do you think a boy is traumatized from circumcision?
00:59:16.220 Most probably. Yes. Um, how much the trauma, how long the trauma lasts and how deep it is.
00:59:22.420 The fact that we really have done very minimal research until recently on to get the answer
00:59:28.020 to that is part of, you know, our ask is part of the deeper, a deeper question, which is that
00:59:33.780 boys were trained for disposability, not for being caring about how, um,
00:59:39.840 here have having us care about the level of their sensitivity. And so clearly what we do now
00:59:45.460 is that when we take off the end of a male penis, that we, that we desensitize that penis in the old
00:59:51.780 days or in many warrior cultures, still a couple, even today, when the culture was truly a warrior
00:59:58.220 culture, a boy didn't get circumcised until he was about 13, 14, 12, 11. And then he got circumcised
01:00:06.540 in front of the entire tribe of males. And he, um, wasn't allowed to use anesthesia. No anesthetic
01:00:14.220 was used on him. And the cutting of his penis was done in front of the other males. And if he even
01:00:20.620 evinced an ouch or a pain or any type of, um, feeling of, of upsetness, he was not allowed to pass on to
01:00:29.600 being a full male. And so, and so the, the point of that is, is that he was, he was learning that
01:00:38.640 the circumcision was used as a rite of passage ritual that helped him, that taught him that
01:00:47.200 anybody that would be respected by his tribe or his culture was going to be somebody who would be
01:00:53.440 able to, when the going got tough, the tough got going and would never admit pain, who would die.
01:00:59.520 So others would live. That's the training that it took to be a male. So that's the history of where
01:01:04.420 it comes from and, and what it's related to and why we, you know, why we do it. Now, I personally
01:01:09.980 think that a male, a circumcised male penis looks nicer, more attractive than an uncircumcised male
01:01:16.140 penis. So, you know, but, but is, is, is, you know, we do a lot of things for looks, you know,
01:01:21.800 women get plastic surgery for looks. Is plastic surgery healthy for women? I don't think so.
01:01:26.720 But they do it anyway. And, and men are doing it increasingly now as well. And so the question
01:01:32.060 has to be, you know, if you do believe that a circumcised penis looks better than a non-circumcised
01:01:37.200 penis, then, then be part, try to be as supportive of a culture, which also does studies to find out
01:01:47.080 how long the trauma of the cutting of a, of a, an infant penis at an early age, how, how deep does
01:01:55.200 it go? How long does it last? What, what are the ramifications of it? And that at least will say
01:02:01.640 that we're beginning to care about what happens inside of men and boys. And so, you know, that's
01:02:08.700 the trade-off that we have to make. And the question, I think the underlying questions we need to ask
01:02:13.240 and to recognize that this is not about a religious thing. It's about a trade-off. It's
01:02:20.480 that the fundamental neglect has been to even care enough to study how, how deep the trauma
01:02:27.900 of the cutting goes. Last question for you. How do you see a healthy relationship dynamic between
01:02:34.360 a man and a woman? I think the single most important thing that the Achilles heel of all human beings
01:02:42.960 is male or female, is our inability to handle personal criticism without becoming defensive.
01:02:50.980 And so part of what I have started focusing on doing is to, and that's really hardwired into the
01:02:59.340 brain, but hardwiring doesn't mean it can't be changed. It's just like you have a hardwired computer.
01:03:05.660 You can develop a workaround to the software of the computer to accomplish something that wasn't
01:03:10.360 accomplished by the original programming. And so what I try to do with couples that I work with
01:03:15.520 is to, um, to, to say, basically, if it's biologically natural to not be able to hear
01:03:23.400 personal criticism and communicate with each other, then we have to create an unnatural way
01:03:29.160 to be able to emotionally associate what our partner needs to say to us that includes criticism
01:03:35.100 and emotionally associate that with love. So, you know, so, but you can't do that unless you meditate
01:03:42.880 yourself into an altered state so that you're ready and centered enough to be able to hear whatever
01:03:49.400 your partner needs to say. And then once you do that, you have to work with certain specific
01:03:55.960 dimensions of that meditation. So you, if you were my sister, let's say, and you always felt that I got
01:04:01.720 more attention than, than, than, uh, you did from dad and mom, uh, that you might, that I might,
01:04:07.660 instead of thinking of while you're talking and saying that that was true, I was starting to think
01:04:12.520 of all the responses that I had and all the ways that you were paid attention to more than by dad
01:04:16.760 and mom. And so, um, but instead I'm taught that, you know, I, I really, my main goal with you,
01:04:23.800 my partner, my partner, let's say, uh, my main goal with you is to be loved by you. And if I can provide
01:04:29.860 a safe environment for you to be able to share your story, your, your, the way you look at the
01:04:36.620 world, um, and that you will feel more loved by me, you will feel safer by me. And if I can do that
01:04:44.080 for you and you feel more loved by me, you'll feel more love for me. So that's the beginning of the
01:04:50.220 process of associating, um, someone else's criticism of a, with an opportunity to be loved.
01:04:56.660 That's, you know, that's the tip of the iceberg. If, if, you know, somebody wants more on that
01:05:00.120 issue or any of the other things that I've mentioned, it's, um, I have a website, warrenferrell.com
01:05:05.500 that, you know, somebody can go to and, you know, see any of the books on any of the issues that I've
01:05:09.380 been talking about, but that's, but, you know, if you, if you have to do anything, you have to focus
01:05:14.500 on anything that I've talked about, it's, you know, if you work on that single issue, whether you're a,
01:05:23.100 if you're a feminist, you'll be able to hear men. If you're Republican, you'll be able to hear
01:05:27.700 Democrats and vice versa, Israeli, Jewish, you know, behind all the problems of our time
01:05:32.820 is practically the, is more than any other single thing is the inability to communicate,
01:05:38.440 hear each other in a loving and compassionate way.
01:05:40.980 Absolutely. Well, thank you. I really appreciate your time today. And if you could one more time,
01:05:44.540 give out your website and any other information you want to give the audience.
01:05:47.300 Sure. warrenferrell.com. And the, the myth of male power that was discussed probably most in this,
01:05:55.640 um, discussion is now just available in a 2014 ebook edition for the first time.
01:06:02.240 And so I probably recommend that over the hardcover edition, um, because it's both up to date and has
01:06:07.420 a lot more access to videos and things like that in it that I was not able to put in my 1991 book.
01:06:14.880 Great, Warren. Thank you. I appreciate your time today.
01:06:17.300 It's been wonderful talking with you.
01:06:19.380 No doubt about it. The most delicate relationship in society is between the male and the female,
01:06:24.560 and the children rely on this relationship to be in balance and harmony. If the children are the
01:06:29.740 future, what kind of example are we setting for them? Both the male and the female are equally as
01:06:34.980 important. There's a saying that says the woman makes the man. And I also know based on my relationship
01:06:39.840 that the man also makes the woman. I personally feel empowered and more free because of the man I am with.
01:06:45.880 Women blaming men for the problems in the world is childish. First off, I wouldn't exist if it
01:06:51.500 weren't for a man. Secondly, my ancestors were also men who fought to protect the females in my line
01:06:57.240 and made possible my life today. Today, I wouldn't be enjoying the comforts of the Western world if it
01:07:02.560 weren't for men's ingenuity. And ladies, we inspire men to reach these great heights. Don't you know that
01:07:07.660 by now? I think feminists have greatly exaggerated with the help of Hollywood the mistreatment of
01:07:12.900 women in the past and in the present, as if all men have always been barbarians and a healthy female
01:07:18.520 male relationship never existed in the past. These are Marxist lies used to divide the sexes and disrupt
01:07:24.880 the family unit, which is a primordial tradition based on the natural order of nature. I really do feel
01:07:31.100 that before the religions of Abraham and before the religion of liberalism, the male-female dynamic
01:07:36.840 was more in tune with nature and folk traditions that were based on thousands of years of a sacred
01:07:42.180 natural order. Therefore, the sexes were healthier and happier. I will never be able to lift 200 pounds
01:07:48.000 and I'm okay with that. My brain might not be wired to set up recording gear and I'm okay with that too.
01:07:53.220 Men and women are unequal in many ways, but when we come together, it equals a whole that is equally
01:07:59.460 as important. Cheesy, I know. Stay tuned for much more coming up. Remember, you can sign up for a Red
01:08:04.980 Ice membership at RedIceMembers.com, which we greatly appreciate. Radio314.com and RedIceCreations.com
01:08:12.500 are the websites where you'll find more. We'll talk soon.
01:08:23.220 We'll see you next time.
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01:09:23.220 We'll see you next time.
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