Christina Hoff Summers joins me to talk about how she went from being a Marxist to being a feminist, and how she became a feminist that feminists love to hate. She also talks about her experience as a professor on a ship that went around the world, and why she doesn t think women should be oppressed as women. She's a force to be reckoned with, and she's one of the most well-known foes of the modern feminist movement. She's also the Factual Feminist at the AEI, where she's a regular contributor to The Femplainers and The Weekly Standard, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. In this episode, we discuss how she got her start as a leftist academic, and what it means to be a feminist in the 21st century. We also talk about the importance of life insurance and why you should get it if you're going to die in the next 20 years. And, of course, we talk about feminism and sex differences. Thanks to our sponsor, PolicyGenius. Go to policygenius to get your quotes, apply in minutes, and it's that easy! It is that easy, and you should do it right now, it is the best time to compare and buy life insurance. You can compare quotes from the top insurers to find that best policy for you, and when you compare quotes, you save money! it is that simple! It is indeed that simple. Get quotes, get quotes, and save money, and get your quote in minutes! It s that simple, it s that easy!! and you can t be a happy person, right now! Go to Policygenius. It s That Easy! - It is That Easy, and You should be a Happy Person! Get your quotes and Apply in Minutes, and then you can save money and be a whole lot more than you ve got the best deal on your life insurance by going to the best place to compare quotes for you can be happy, you can do it in minutes. - That is that is that Easy, right here! And you should be happy and you re a happy, and your quote is that right, right there, right? . And it s That Is That Easy - it is That Simple, It s a Happy, It is a Happy Place to be Happy, And You Should Be That Easy.
00:00:58.000PolicyGenius has helped over 4 million people shop for insurance, placed over $20 billion
00:01:03.000In coverage, they don't just make life insurance easy, they also do disability insurance, and renter's insurance, health insurance, all sorts of insurance.
00:01:09.000If you care about it, they can cover it.
00:01:10.000So if you've been putting off getting life insurance, there's no reason to do so any longer, because if you put it off too long, you're gonna be dead, and then it's gonna be too late.
00:01:17.000Go to policygenius.com, get your quotes, apply in minutes, it is that easy.
00:01:33.000It infuses me with happiness, because you're a happy person.
00:01:35.000So let's talk a little bit about your background.
00:01:38.000So for folks who don't know, Christina Hoff Summer, she's the feminist that feminists love to hate, because you actually say factual things about males and females, and sex differences, and the hot topics today.
00:01:48.000We'll get to all those hot topics, but first let's talk about how you got where you are politically, because you weren't always conservative.
00:01:53.000In fact, in some areas you still don't consider yourself a conservative.
00:01:55.000So how did you go from being kind of just an academic professor to being
00:02:01.000One of the most well-known foes of the modern feminist movement.
00:02:05.000Well, first of all, I was brought up in L.A., not far from here.
00:02:08.000I went to university high school in Brentwood.
00:02:13.000And I was very left-wing, especially in high school.
00:02:18.000I read the Communist Manifesto, and it all made sense.
00:02:22.000It seemed so right, of course, to each according to his need, from each according to his ability.
00:02:29.000And so I was quite carried away with that for a while.
00:02:33.000And then, I don't know, in college, I remained not a Marxist, but just my default mode was always liberal.
00:02:41.000My parents, very, very liberal, bordering on
00:02:43.000Communist, but then in 1988 I was a professor, a college professor, and I was invited to go on semester at sea.
00:02:52.000It's a ship that goes around the world and it's a university at sea and so somehow I got on this thing and I was teaching and I guess I was I'd been teaching maybe for 10 years or something, but I had never sat in my fellow professors courses before and so this ship was about 500
00:03:13.000Undergrads, mostly conservatives as far as I could tell from USC, SMU, pretty wealthy.
00:03:20.000You know, mom and dad could afford to send junior on a trip around the world.
00:03:24.000And the professors were socialist to Marxist.
00:03:28.000And so I started to bicker with them in this course we had called Core.
00:03:35.000And then suddenly at the end of the trip this older professor who was very left wing warned me, you better be careful.
00:03:41.000You're going to end up being just like Jean Kirkpatrick.
00:04:02.000So you've been in academia for a long time.
00:04:03.000Have you seen active changes in the way that academia has operated?
00:04:08.000Since the 80s or do you think that it's been pretty consistent, it's just more well known because of social media now in terms of the sort of radical leftist dominance even in some of the hard sciences in terms of shutting down debate and investigation into knowledge?
00:04:20.000It's gotten worse and worse and here's why.
00:04:23.000It used to be that universities always, you know, tend to be liberal.
00:04:30.000However, there are a lot of radicals that came out of the late 60s, 70s, for various reasons, went into the universities.
00:04:38.000It was the one institution that you could take your radical politics and find a home there.
00:04:45.000They were more radical than the liberal professors who hired them.
00:04:50.000The liberal professors who hired them might have believed in intellectual diversity, so maybe they would have allowed some conservatives and moderates and then some radicals.
00:05:00.000The radicals didn't think the same way.
00:05:02.000So as the older scholars retired and the young radicals gained a foothold in many departments, I mean certainly women's studies, they were always there.
00:06:18.000Because obviously a lot of feminists would accuse you of not being a feminist because you don't agree with sort of prevailing left-wing trends inside feminism.
00:06:25.000So what do you think true feminism is?
00:07:21.000To which, and I credit equity feminism, just equality feminism, where you just don't have arbitrary barriers against women.
00:07:28.000But there's another school of feminism entirely that is not part of this kind of classical liberal tradition of greater opportunities for people.
00:07:39.000This is what I've called gender feminism because they believe in what they call the sex gender system.
00:07:45.000And that women are not merely held back by old-fashioned laws or customs.
00:07:50.000It's not enough to change the society.
00:07:57.000And so it's a much more radical approach.
00:08:00.000And they think of American women as an oppressed class of people.
00:08:07.000And so after I was on that ship and there were some radical feminists there too, I wrote a piece about what I experienced on that ship called Professor at Sea and I sent it to The Atlantic.
00:08:20.000And I'd written about the feminists on ship who were very colorful and extreme and we were seeing the whole world.
00:08:28.000And we'd come into ports, and the students could go and see some of the glories of civilization, the Alhambra, you know, they could go to Seville, and they would take them to wedding stores to see how the wedding industry oppressed Spanish women and things like that.
00:08:44.000So I just wrote about this, and Michael Curtis, this editor at The Atlantic, said, I can't really use the piece that you wrote, but the way you talked about the feminists is so different, so interesting, and you're doing it as a feminist.
00:08:56.000And he said, I'd like you to write about that.
00:08:59.000And that later became my book, Who Stole Feminism?
00:09:04.000I pointed out that there are these two traditions and that one of them is everyone should be every contemporary American
00:09:14.000should be an equity feminist and we have pretty good data which shows they are.
00:09:17.000Most people believe in equal pay for equal work and they want their daughters and sons to have the same opportunities.
00:09:23.000So equity feminism, I believe that we owe most of women's progress to that classical liberal tradition that came originally from the European Enlightenment.
00:09:33.000Gender feminism does not come out of the European Enlightenment as such.
00:10:27.000And if you are a dissident feminist, and you could be a feminist, you could be a scholar, you can be a Laura Kipnis or a Katie Roife, Christina Somers, Camille Polly, but all of us have been critical of
00:11:16.000And so we have lots of young people coming out, becoming bloggers, becoming activists, who've never heard the other side.
00:11:24.000They've read it in their textbooks, they've heard it, and that whole worldview was reinforced.
00:11:28.000Now, it's truth, they looked at the real world, it doesn't seem to match, but it's not majority.
00:11:34.000Majority of students don't become angry feminists, but enough do, and now they're moving into society.
00:11:40.000What do you think of the idea that this is part and parcel of the hunger for a sense of victimology that seems to be kind of crossing all political boundaries.
00:11:50.000It now applies to a lot of people on all sides of the political alley of folks who think that they are victims of foreign trade, people stealing their jobs.
00:11:56.000You have people who think that they're victims of an overarching racist American system.
00:12:00.000And now you have women who, again, are living in an extraordinarily privileged time by any dimension.
00:12:11.000But they've had to come up with some framework in which they are victims.
00:12:15.000How much of this do you think is actually prosperity eating itself?
00:12:18.000It's just a prosperous group of people who have decided that they have to maintain some sense of victimhood in order to give them a sense of purpose in the world.
00:12:24.000It could be that it's, you know, I don't want to speculate too much about their psychology because I'm just not sure.
00:12:41.000I think maybe there's something wrong with me.
00:12:42.000Maybe I am an agent of the patriarchy and I'm not seeing it.
00:12:46.000And so then I try to go back and read it and think, OK, I've missed something.
00:12:50.000And maybe women really are oppressed in some hidden way that I can't appreciate.
00:12:56.000Now, I've looked pretty carefully, along with a lot of other people, at things like the wage gap and the glass ceiling, and I just can't help but see there are just other reasonable explanations that have nothing to do with discrimination.
00:13:09.000But I honestly try, because it worries me that so many of them are carried away with it.
00:13:15.000And, you know, why wouldn't there be more
00:13:35.000And the more intelligent you are, there's been good psychological documentation that just the more you can talk yourself into a belief system and maybe they, you know,
00:13:48.000Had a bad experience in their projecting?
00:13:51.000I know, you know, Catherine McKinnon, who was sort of the leader of the gender feminist movement, and she thought that the patriarchal oppressive system was so good, it was almost perfect, so perfect that people couldn't even see it.
00:14:39.000We won in the court of public opinion.
00:14:42.000Camille Paglia, you know, she was on covers and things and we won the argument.
00:14:48.000They won the assistant professorships and that mattered more.
00:14:52.000So let's go through some of the myths that have been pervaded by the modern feminist movement because you spend an awful lot of time doing that.
00:14:58.000But first, let's talk about your online security.
00:15:00.000So whether you are in a cafe or hotel, we often rely on public Wi-Fi to use the internet on the go.
00:15:05.000But something as simple as paying your bills online from a Starbucks can actually leave your data exposed.
00:15:09.000A hacker could easily intercept your information.
00:15:11.000They could steal passwords, credit card numbers, personal details.
00:16:43.000When you do these controls, the wage gap begins to narrow, and in some studies, it vanishes.
00:16:49.000So, if you look at majors, college majors, you will make more money, on average, if you go into, I don't know, petroleum engineering, or naval architecture, or metallurgy, apparently you make money, a PhD in metallurgy.
00:17:04.000But if you go into early childhood education, social work or women's studies, not as much.
00:17:22.000So that is not, you have to take into account these relevant factors.
00:17:27.000And what I see in study after study is they either don't do it or they play a little game like the American Association of University Women.
00:18:42.000Now, when I debate them, they'll say, yes, okay, fine, you're right.
00:18:47.000But it's still discrimination, because why is it that men take those jobs and women take their jobs?
00:18:54.000And why are women's jobs degraded and so forth?
00:18:57.000Well, that's an interesting question, but they've now changed the focus of the argument, because we're not talking about equal pay for equal work.
00:19:05.000We're now talking about they sort of want comparable pay for similar work, or they want
00:19:12.000The main reason women earn less is that when women have kids they tend to work less and when men have kids they work more.
00:19:50.000That's a different set of arguments, but even there, their arguments are not persuasive, because if I look at patriarchy and say, okay, that's my hypothesis, that we do what we do because we've all been conditioned under patriarchy.
00:20:04.000And then I see the United States is less patriarchal than it's ever been.
00:20:08.000Women are constantly encouraged to do all sorts of things.
00:20:12.000In schools, little kids are encouraged to play with all sorts of toys, but the kids insist.
00:20:18.000The kids are the ones that, you know, they stereotype themselves.
00:20:22.000And you even see the kinds of play, little girls with dolls.
00:20:26.000Feminists have been very upset by that because they think that that conditions them to be mothers and we should bond little boys with dolls.
00:20:34.000And then the little boys will, you know, turn them.
00:20:36.000I've been to conferences where they'll cry to say, well, yes, I tried to use bubbles and dolls and get the boys to play.
00:20:43.000And then they turn them into torpedoes, you know.
00:20:47.000And by the way, the gender feminists don't like it when I bring up, you know, any of us bring up those examples because they still think it's conditioning.
00:20:55.000Well, maybe it was conditioning that made them gender feminists.
00:20:58.000Then we get into an argument about free will and determinism, and we've changed the ground again.
00:21:02.000It's an interesting argument about ultimate freedom, self-determination, but I think that we have to, at this point, credit women with agency when they choose what they're going to major in, when they choose the field, if they want to stay home with kids.
00:21:17.000Then I think that it's matronizing to suggest that they aren't responsible for their own lives.
00:21:23.000And this is one of the funniest things about these particular statistics.
00:21:26.000You look at nations like Norway, which have tried to forcibly disabuse people of the patriarchy.
00:21:31.000And in some of those nations, there's a much larger pay gap than there is in some of the developing nations where women are actually forced to work jobs that they don't want to.
00:21:38.000It turns out that when women are prosperous, they would very often less like to work those jobs where they're dealing with heavy equipment and not being able to be home with their kids.
00:21:46.000Well you just, yeah, and people have done surveys on preferences, like what would you like, what would be your ideal situation?
00:21:54.000And over and over again you find the following, and this was Catherine Hakim, formerly at the London School of Economics, the Pew Research Centre has found that if you ask women
00:22:07.000In the United States, about 20% want to work full-time.
00:22:10.000They want to be high-powered careerists.
00:23:11.000Betty Friedan was not consistent, but I've reviewed both of their books recently and found a lot that I liked.
00:23:17.000Although Simone de Beauvoir was kind of, she was actually on amphetamines and not sleeping, chain smoking, and she just went into the Bibliothèque Nationale and wrote everything, everything.
00:23:29.000Anyway, but she did very harsh things to say about motherhood, but she certainly did not have harsh things to say about love affairs.
00:23:39.000She frustrated the feminists by saying the most important thing in her life was Jean-Paul Sartre.
00:23:46.000Well, why do you think it is that the feminist movement has decided to obliterate sex differences?
00:23:50.000Because it seems like that's what it comes down to, is that a lot of this is preference-based.
00:23:54.000I mean, if you go back to biology itself, I mean, there are studies of rhesus monkeys that show that female rhesus monkeys prefer dolls and male rhesus monkeys prefer weapons.
00:24:03.000This is deeply embedded in evolutionary biology because it was the job of females, typically, to have babies and then raise them, and it was the job of men to go out and protect the mothers so that they could raise the babies because otherwise everybody would die.
00:24:16.000When did it become the mission of the feminist movement to say that there is something fundamentally wrong if women and men have separate preferences?
00:24:24.000Because it seems like this has infused so much of our conversation now about men and women.
00:24:28.000Well, I think they did it for a few reasons.
00:24:31.000One is there was a time where any woman who defied the stereotypes of femininity—let's go back in the 30s and 40s, 50s—for her, it was a stultifying conformity that was enforced.
00:26:07.000She walks around the house saying that her brother is going to be a radio host like Daddy, and she is going to be in the sciences like Mommy.
00:26:13.000So I obviously agree with the basic idea that in America pretty much everybody is raising their kids, or at least a huge majority of people are raising their kids to basically do what they want to do.
00:26:22.000And if your daughter wants to be a scientist, I don't see a lot of fathers who are standing in the doorway like John Lithgow in Footloose, saying you're not allowed
00:26:49.000One is that I think that they wanted to liberate people that were forced into the role and then they didn't realize that that might not be liberating for everybody.
00:26:57.000You want to liberate the people that don't like it, not human nature as we experience it.
00:27:04.000There was a second reason is that historically there have been a lot of
00:27:10.000Disparaging and false things said about women that held women back.
00:27:16.000So women, you know, my field of philosophy is among the worst.
00:27:19.000If you read Nietzsche or Kant and it's endless.
00:27:23.000Just all sorts of, you know, generalizations about the females, the fair sex and how, you know, we couldn't, didn't have the stamina for a court of law and, you know, all sorts of things.
00:28:07.000If you look at, they don't say in most stores now, men's magazines, women, but you kind of know if you go and the women's, you know, typically there'll be children or, you know, faces and men, there's a lot of stuff.
00:28:21.000You know, there'll be a race car and cars.
00:28:39.000There's also the norm, and I think the thing is, yes, it is intolerant to force a kid who defies the stereotype of his or her sex, force them to conform, but it's also intolerant to take a gender-conforming kid and force them to do what they don't want to do, and to force a boy to play with a doll if he doesn't want to.
00:28:58.000And one of the things that's been really fascinating to watch is how the transgender movement has turned all of this on its head.
00:29:03.000Because the transgender movement has basically now suggested that men and women being, as feminists claimed, exactly the same.
00:29:08.000A man can actually be a woman so long as he claims that he's a woman.
00:29:11.000And this has led to a bizarre backlash from people like Germaine Greer who have said, wait, hold on a second.
00:29:15.000There is something special about being a woman after all.
00:29:17.000And we're not just going to admit biological men into our category because they say they ought to be admitted to that category.
00:29:22.000Well, I have yet to hear a coherent explanation.
00:29:27.000I mean, I'm more tolerant trans than you are, mainly because, for one reason, at AEI, one of the first trans people that I met was Deirdre McCloskey.
00:29:41.000Who's my favorite economist, philosopher.
00:29:44.000I haven't seen her lately, but she, it was just so impressive.
00:29:48.000And I just read her book and her story, and I think there is a legitimate human rights issue there.
00:29:54.000However, and I think she would agree with that, it's all been politicized.
00:29:57.000And you have people that may not even be trans, but who are wannabes or pretend.
00:30:03.000And who, you know, won't allow anything to be debated or discussed.
00:30:08.000And you're constantly getting into fights.
00:30:13.000People used to attack me by saying Christina Hoff Sommers and Margaret Thatcher, those two female impersonators.
00:30:22.000Someone criticized me as a female impersonator.
00:30:25.000And it happened on Tumblr a few months ago and they got called out for using the phrase female impersonator and acting as though that was a criticism.
00:30:54.000Whether you're a side sleeper, a hot sleeper, whether you like a plush or a firm bed, with Helix, there's no more guessing and no more confusion.
00:30:59.000Just go to helixsleep.com slash benguest, because I have a guest, take their two-minute sleep quiz, and they will match you to a mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life.
00:31:06.000For couples, Helix can even split that mattress down the middle and provide individual support needs and feel preferences for each side.
00:31:46.000Back to some of the myths that are being purveyed.
00:31:48.000So, one of the big ones that you've taken on is the myth that America has a deep-seated rape culture.
00:31:54.000And I've always been sort of bewildered as to what exactly people mean when they say rape culture.
00:31:58.000Like, is there some vast group of men out there who are very pro-rape that I've been missing somehow?
00:32:03.000And is there, in fact, some sort of rape culture that's happening on campuses?
00:32:06.000What are the actual facts with regard to the idea that America is in the midst of a rape culture right now?
00:32:11.000Well, first of all, for them, a rape culture is a society that is supportive and encouraging of, you know, male predation.
00:32:20.000And they would say that it's just ubiquitous in films, in songs, and they will point to a song like, remember, Blurred Lines, I Know You Want It?
00:32:32.000And so they take that line, I know you want it, I know you want it.
00:32:36.000That's a man intimating that, you know, no matter what she says.
00:32:41.000But then, you know, other people would point out that there were a lot of songs, even songs, I think even Beyonce had a song that said that.
00:32:49.000And so it's never quite, it doesn't, you know, I try to find this culture because to me, it looks like we're a culture, properly so, that is,
00:32:59.000That's why it's very important to have due process because it's such a serious allegation because we have little tolerance.
00:33:18.000And then look at American society, and you look at the data, and you see that all violent crime has gone down.
00:33:25.000No one knows quite why, but lots of theories.
00:33:28.000But rape and sexual assault, it's down, except on the campus when they do these studies that are flawed.
00:33:37.000So they have, it's called advocacy research.
00:33:40.000You can prove anything if you rig the study.
00:33:49.000And you administer, maybe online, you have a survey with some vaguely worded questions, and you ask them to a non-representative group of people, and then you can project into the whole school or the whole town or the whole world.
00:35:21.000You know, the girls are frightened of these Swarthmore, these
00:35:24.000At these elite schools, I mean, now I'm not saying there can't be boorish behavior and that boys should be gentlemen and the girls should be ladies, all of that, but there's no, you can't find it.
00:35:37.000It was manufactured through a combination of twisted theories about the patriarchy and propaganda.
00:35:44.000I mean, they are in a gender war, and in every war, the first casualty is truth.
00:36:31.000Women do make up accusations, and women do lie, not because they are women, because they are human, and human beings will sometimes lie, especially about sex.
00:38:34.000Nobody knows what's going on or where it leads, so it's not helping anybody.
00:38:39.000Fortunately, I think the current Department of Education just announced they're going to change the requirements for college and undo some of the new rules that were put in by the last administration.
00:38:50.000As someone who's been accused of catcalling for asking a woman to debate me publicly, I definitely understand the kind of broadening of the terminology.
00:39:00.000A solution for this because it seems like if you wanted to create a recipe for a bunch of false statistics and false positives in cases of rape, what you would first do is suggest to men and women that there are no differences between men and women.
00:39:13.000Then you would tell them that to explore their best selves, that they should have as much sex with as many partners as possible.
00:39:18.000And then you'd put them alone as much as possible.
00:39:20.000And then you would set no standards for what actually rape constitutes.
00:39:23.000And finally, you would say no evidence is necessary in order for us to convict you.
00:39:26.000And you would say you can do it all with infinite amount of alcohol.
00:39:30.000So it's always, you know, it's alcohol-saturated.
00:39:33.000So it seems like they've removed all the traditional standards and then they've decided to become prudes about the results of a lot of this stuff.
00:40:19.000Well, now a gay guy, Nimrod Reitman, young, he's about, well, I don't know what he is now, but he was maybe in his 20s when this happened, this was a few years ago.
00:40:29.000He's now accused her of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and he's gay, she's a lesbian, and she's a leading figure, you know, in sort of postmodern
00:40:45.000So 50 leading feminist scholars gathered around her, you know, and wrote a letter excusing her.
00:40:52.000And the letter looked like the kind of excuse people would give for Ray Moore or something, you know, like, oh, well, it was a different time and we really don't know what was happening.
00:41:02.000And then it turns out she had an affair.
00:41:03.000So she's a great interpreter of the philosopher Derrida.
00:41:07.000Now it turns out she had an affair with his son when the son was 16.
00:41:29.000But I can understand the people that love her, that are on her side.
00:41:33.000You know, I've seen this with young men, their families, you know, they see it differently because they're looking at it from his point of view.
00:41:40.000And then she's now has her, you know, she has got her side and the grad student has his side and the whole academy is now all in a dither over this.
00:41:49.000But to me, the only way we could find out would be in a court of law.
00:41:54.000And he is suing, so maybe, interesting, we will see if she really wrote these things or said these things.
00:42:00.000But it proved to the whole academy the need for due process.
00:42:04.000What bothers me about it is I wish these 50 scholars had noticed that this was happening.
00:42:11.000Not just to their friend, Avital, Ronell, Professor Avital, but it's been happening to young men on their campuses.
00:42:18.000It's happened to a lot of male professors where you're just run out of town and assumed guilty because accused.
00:42:23.000I mean, Laura Kipnis basically got shellacked at Northwestern for simply suggesting there'd be some sort of form of due process for a male professor who was accused of basically similar activity.
00:42:32.000And she was investigated, this professor was investigated for an article that she wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
00:42:41.000But, you know, what do we do about it?
00:42:44.000I'm just hoping, you know, that's a good question.
00:42:47.000I mean, I'm not I'm not sure I was going to ask you, what's the importance of the Me Too movement?
00:42:50.000Because obviously there's been a lot of focus on hashtag Me Too and people telling their stories.
00:42:54.000And again, it seems like there's a lot of conflation here where people say hashtag Me Too about I was once cat called on the subway versus Me Too, as in I was raped by
00:43:02.000A male relative or something, and it's all supposed to be in the same category, and then anybody who suggests differently is ripped up and down.
00:43:07.000I'm trying to remember which actor suggested recently that there were gradations to severity of... Matt Damon.
00:43:15.000Matt Damon said that he was being interviewed, I think, on ABC News, and he said he was, he just seemed very nice, and he said he cared about the movement, and he, like a lot of good men, liberal and conservative, they are as horrified by the Harvey Weinstein stories as anyone.
00:43:30.000And he was like, he says, I care about that.
00:43:33.000However, there are degrees of guilt and some proportion in terms of punishment that's appropriate.
00:43:42.000He said, you know, patting someone on the ass isn't the same as rape.
00:43:46.000And immediately, his former co-star, Minnie Driver, in this new, this angry woman thing, you know, angry woman on Twitter, she starts screeching, you know, you, you know, there is, what are you saying?
00:44:01.000He just said there, I mean, this is fundamental to our legal and moral system that we make, you know, judgments of serious and less serious.
00:44:09.000She ruled it out of order and then she said Matt Damon should just, you know, basically told him to, shh, I can't say much.
00:44:21.000And to me, this is gonna undo the movement because I do think that we have to bring relations between men and women up to 21st century standards in the workplace.
00:44:31.000There was, you know, too much going on and making people unhappy.
00:44:35.000But it's something men and women should do together.
00:44:54.000And you know, if Matt Damon, and he had to do that, I think, because there was a petition and 30,000 me tours were trying to get him erased from his next film.
00:45:03.000Yeah, and I mean, the same thing happened, or something similar happened to Henry Cavill, who just suggested, look, in my personal life, I'm a famous guy, and when I go out for a date, I have to worry about the fact that the person sitting across from me knows I'm rich and famous, and so any false accusation could ruin my career and cost me millions of dollars, so I'm more likely to go out with an ex-girlfriend who I at least know and trust than to date a new woman.
00:45:21.000And he just got destroyed for it, because how dare he suggest something so logical as that.
00:45:32.000And it's actually going to ruin the movement.
00:45:36.000And now we have, what's her name, Asia Argento, you know, who's got a complicated story.
00:45:43.000One of the things you learn when you study this is, and I actually found it in this NYU case, I read his, he's suing, and I read his complaint against Avital Rannell, and I thought, oh, she's a monster, this poor boy, and I felt so angry at her and protective of him.
00:46:00.000And then someone published a letter that she wrote explaining her side.
00:46:05.000And then I read it and thought, hmm, gee, maybe he's really out of control and he's the crazy one.
00:46:47.000A woman who is abused in some way should come forward and speak about we should all be on her side when there's evidence that this has happened.
00:46:54.000By the same token, the way that it's being approached right now is deeply flawed and undermining the foundations of the movement.
00:46:59.000What problems do you see women generally facing in the West or in the United States that you think people aren't talking about enough, if any?
00:47:07.000Well, the thing is that women's problems are talked about a lot because, for good reason, we had a women's movement.
00:49:06.000And other countries are addressing that problem.
00:49:09.000So, anyway, I do see the financial problem with women, but I think it's connected to men.
00:49:15.000The most serious problems for women, though, as you said, they're not in the West.
00:49:19.000I think there are many parts of the world where they have not had two major waves of feminism.
00:49:24.000They haven't had so much as a trickle.
00:49:26.000And I go to international women's conferences and I meet women coming from Somalia and Egypt.
00:49:34.000Iran, which is a kind of, you know, talk about a handmaid's tale.
00:49:37.000I mean, that's like 1984 for women in many ways, although it's terrible for men, too.
00:49:43.000But I meet the women that are sort of the freedom fighters, the Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth of those countries, and it's very exciting.
00:49:52.000But American women right now, especially on the campus,
00:49:56.000Who have so much to give and who are so gifted and, you know, there you are at Wellesley and you're at Swamp and they're turned in on their own oppression and not making common cause with these women around the world that need help and they come to these conferences they want.
00:50:12.000Help from American women because we did liberate ourselves and they want to do the same.
00:50:18.000And I don't understand why our women's movement wouldn't be so focused on making those connections.
00:50:24.000And, you know, you go back in the 80s on the college campus with apartheid in South Africa and, you know, the students were very focused on the social justice in South Africa.
00:50:37.000Where are they today on gender apartheid in, you know, Saudi Arabia or something?
00:50:42.000They're mostly talking about apartheid, gender apartheid in the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts or, you know, that we have separate, you know, that the language is all about, you know, of crisis for our society, which is not a patriarchy.
00:50:59.000Now, to come back to the United States for a second, it seems to me one of the big problems that I've seen, particularly among men, since we're going to talk about men, is this feeling of lack of purpose.
00:51:06.000And that seems like that's been exacerbated a lot by the false perceptions regarding gender and sex.
00:51:12.000That my contention has always been that young men particularly either create or destroy, and there's not a lot in between.
00:51:17.000And I can see it with my two-and-a-half-year-old boy.
00:51:19.000He's either building blocks or he's knocking them down.
00:51:21.000Those are the only two things that he's doing at any given time, and usually he's knocking them down.
00:51:26.000He's trying to kill himself full-time, and it's my job to stop him from doing that.
00:51:30.000And a society that fails to recognize that men actually have to be thrust into positions of responsibility, including the responsibility to protect women, shouldn't be all that surprised when it turns out that men are destructive in the absence of those responsibilities.
00:53:25.000And then there are ways through sports and through athletics and so forth with the coach, and there are ways to focus that energy and that, you know, creative
00:53:51.000But what we're really failing, where I see we're failing most seriously is engaging young men academically.
00:53:59.000And I see a lot of evidence that our schools are increasingly, they favor kids who are happy to be sedentary and talk about their feelings.
00:54:12.000There's a lot of writing and reading is about shared feelings.
00:54:20.000So a kid that comes in that likes rough and tumble play and can't sit still, it's almost as if girls are the gold standard and boys are being measured.
00:54:32.000So their first experience with school is frustration and sometimes failure.
00:54:39.000Much higher rates of boys getting suspended and thrown out, even in preschool.
00:54:45.000People say, I mean, we don't, as I said before, we don't have these groups.
00:54:48.000We don't have activist groups for boys.