The Candice Malcolm Show - March 14, 2022


Modern leftist feminism is making everyone miserable

Topics
academic feminism impacts trans women in sports
Hosted by
Candice Malcolm
Guests
Janice Fiamengo
Mentioned
Christina Hoff Summers Studio B. Janice Jordan Peterson Leah Thomas Elizabeth Cady Stanton Camille Paglia Daphne Pattai Seneca Falls Steve Brule Kathy Young Ben Shapiro Jane Austen Austin
Out with the Canadian flag, in with the Ukrainian one INTERFERENCE： Freeland’s office “pressured” legacy media to change critical stories

Episode Stats


Length

35 minutes

Words per minute

151.71

Word count

5,384

Sentence count

223

Harmful content

Misogyny

42

sentences flagged

Hate speech

17

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Janice Fiamenga is a retired professor of English literature at the University of Ottawa. For many years, she has been an outspoken critic of modern feminism and is one of the most prominent anti-feminist crusaders on social media. In this episode, she shares her thoughts on modern feminism, the Me Too movement, and its impact on our society.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.360 Modern leftist feminism is one of the most harmful forces in our society. 1.00
00:00:04.300 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:10.480 Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast.
00:00:13.040 So as you know, we usually cover politics, federal politics in Canada,
00:00:16.040 all things kind of political in Canada.
00:00:18.180 Sometimes we like to take a break from the day-to-day politics in our life
00:00:21.460 and look at the bigger picture, look at culture,
00:00:24.080 and dive into some of the cultural critiques that I myself have
00:00:27.280 and that are prevalent out there.
00:00:29.400 And one of my biggest critiques is against modern feminism,
00:00:32.840 the Me Too movement, and the way that it denigrates men.
00:00:35.840 It tells men that they're toxic, that they're destructive,
00:00:38.540 while also, ironically and contradictorily, telling women to be more like men.
00:00:43.220 So these disastrous mixed messages in our society have had a catastrophic impact,
00:00:47.980 especially on young people trying to find someone to spend their life with,
00:00:52.600 someone to get married with.
00:00:53.960 And I think it's so important to look at these harmful forces
00:00:58.780 and to debunk them.
00:01:00.100 I'm so pleased today to be joined by one of Canada's foremost public intellectuals
00:01:04.160 who clearly and courageously debunks the harmful messages of modern feminism.
00:01:09.420 So I'm pleased today to be joined by Janice Fiamengo.
00:01:12.320 Janice is a retired professor of English literature at the University of Ottawa.
00:01:16.440 For many years, she has been an outspoken critic of modern feminism
00:01:19.920 and is one of the most prominent anti-feminist crusaders on social media.
00:01:24.520 Janice hosts the Fiamengo Files on Studio Brulé,
00:01:27.340 where she challenges modern far-left feminism
00:01:29.800 and the woke indoctrination at academia and universities.
00:01:33.480 Back in August 2021, Studio Brulé was removed from YouTube, censored.
00:01:38.380 However, you can still find Janice's video on a new channel they created, Studio B.
00:01:42.320 Janice is also the author of an excellent book,
00:01:44.360 Sons of Feminism, Men Have Their Say, which was published back in 2017.
00:01:48.400 So Janice, thank you so much for joining us.
00:01:50.440 It's a pleasure to see you and have you on the show.
00:01:52.240 Well, thank you very much, Candice.
00:01:54.520 That's a very generous introduction.
00:01:56.500 Thank you.
00:01:57.000 I feel very flattered.
00:01:58.860 It's wonderful to be on your show.
00:02:00.480 Thank you.
00:02:01.540 Yeah, it's so great to have you.
00:02:03.100 So since I spoke to you last,
00:02:04.660 you have retired from your position at the University of Ottawa.
00:02:07.800 And I also recently learned that your YouTube channel was shut down and censored,
00:02:10.940 which is such a shame because you have so many excellent videos up there.
00:02:14.180 I was telling you before the interview started that I started watching those videos
00:02:17.320 back when you were covering the Jian Gomeshi trial.
00:02:19.820 I know you covered the Brett Kavanaugh trial and you have so many interesting insights.
00:02:24.580 So can you tell us a little bit about, first of all, you leaving the University of Ottawa
00:02:29.400 and also what happened with your YouTube channel?
00:02:33.140 Yeah, well, I retired in 2019.
00:02:35.300 And I was fairly happy to leave the University, although I was sad to leave many of my wonderful
00:02:42.780 colleagues.
00:02:43.460 But I find that the University, as probably everybody who is not a leftist would agree,
00:02:51.240 it's a fairly uncomfortable place for dissident intellectuals or dissident thinkers in general,
00:02:58.460 especially for those of us sort of on the conservative side of cultural politics.
00:03:03.420 It's a place where you don't feel that you're able to make arguments about a whole wide range of hot button issues,
00:03:11.940 you know, from a from a wide variety of perspectives.
00:03:15.480 So so I retired then.
00:03:17.240 And part of what I was looking forward to doing was was doing more writing and of course, doing writing more video scripts,
00:03:25.700 because that had been something I was doing since 2015 at Studio Brulé.
00:03:32.440 And I had a long running series on academic feminism and its impact on modern culture.
00:03:41.640 And my take generally was that what happens in academia, unfortunately, never stays in academia.
00:03:48.580 It moves out into the wider world and it has real world impacts so that ideas about the oppressive male gaze
00:03:56.460 or about women's lived experience and standpoint theory or about the creation of docile bodies through patriarchal power.
00:04:07.240 All of those ideas become public policy.
00:04:12.040 They become part of journalism.
00:04:14.040 They become part of health policy.
00:04:16.300 They invade the sphere of law.
00:04:18.940 All of the feminist complicating of the idea of sexual consent, 1.00
00:04:25.080 whether women can actually consent to sex in a patriarchal,
00:04:29.880 allegedly patriarchal society in which women don't really have power or agency. 1.00
00:04:36.620 All of those ideas have had a very significant impact in the wider society,
00:04:42.140 often a very, very damaging one for individual men, for freedom of speech,
00:04:48.780 for the presumption of innocence in all sorts of quite horrific ways.
00:04:54.820 And so I wanted to try to chronicle that and to show people where these ideas came from in academic feminism.
00:05:03.000 And yeah, and then last summer, so we were going along.
00:05:06.560 My producer, Steve Brulé, and I were making more videos.
00:05:10.000 And all of a sudden, we were permanently banned from YouTube.
00:05:14.160 And of course, they never tell you why.
00:05:16.180 They just tell you that you've in some way contravened the community guidelines.
00:05:20.860 And so that was the end of, you know, all of these videos that we had produced.
00:05:26.740 We lost all of the view numbers, of course, and the comments underneath,
00:05:31.240 which were often fascinating conversations.
00:05:33.700 That was really disappointing.
00:05:34.980 But we have started up again now.
00:05:36.860 And we're called Studio B.
00:05:39.280 And so we're on YouTube again.
00:05:42.860 And I hope people will come in and find us there.
00:05:48.740 I'm doing a new series on the history of feminism now, focusing especially on the 19th century
00:05:56.800 and the origins of the feminist movement.
00:05:59.880 And my point is to show that although we have this idea that feminism started as a really good idea, 0.51
00:06:05.020 you know, it was all about equality, certainly there were some feminists who wanted to take their equal share of the burdens, 1.00
00:06:13.560 as well as the rights of citizenship.
00:06:15.640 But my point is that actually feminism was always deeply implicated in man-hating, in toxic resentment, 1.00
00:06:26.520 and in female moral superiority. 1.00
00:06:29.080 And so I'm trying to bring out some of those strands in my analysis of early figures who were involved in the movement
00:06:36.040 and the various issues that those early feminists tackled. 1.00
00:06:39.940 Well, that was going to be my next question, because I know that you refer to yourself as an anti-feminist. 1.00
00:06:45.880 The first time I ever heard that, I was in Washington, D.C., and I happened to go to a seminar hosted by Christina Hoff Summers.
00:06:52.440 One of my friends brought me.
00:06:54.080 And I was just so, like, it was so enlightening to me to see her speak.
00:06:57.800 And I know that she also kind of takes that name, an anti-feminist, but she would consider herself a first wave 1.00
00:07:05.120 and probably even a second wave feminist, whereas I don't know that you have that same connection. 1.00
00:07:11.060 So I was going to ask you, if you do consider yourself a feminist in any way, 1.00
00:07:16.420 I think a lot of people agree that third wave and fourth wave feminism has really turned into a very negative,
00:07:22.920 masculine, man-hating environment.
00:07:25.800 And not just that, but also, you know, the whole intersectional, you know,
00:07:30.380 white supremacist accusations that we now hear.
00:07:33.140 But could you maybe walk us through what the difference would be between yourself and Christina Hoff Summers
00:07:38.280 and what it is about first and second wave feminism that you, I think, I don't want to put words into your mouth, 1.00
00:07:43.340 but I think that you reject?
00:07:46.160 Yeah, thank you.
00:07:47.100 That's a great question.
00:07:48.560 I think Christina Hoff Summers, whom I admire a great deal, she's done wonderful work.
00:07:54.340 Her book, Who Stole Feminism, is just a primer in all of the inaccuracies and myths of feminist criticism 0.67
00:08:02.680 and so-called feminist research. 1.00
00:08:05.480 She's a wonderful woman.
00:08:06.720 But she calls herself an equity feminist. 0.99
00:08:09.120 And there are other women around who are also critical of many of feminism's exaggerations and inaccuracies. 0.99
00:08:16.600 Women like Cathy Young and Camille Paglia and various others.
00:08:21.840 A wonderful book or critic named Daphne Pattai, who's got a book about the sexual harassment industry. 0.70
00:08:30.000 I think she would also call herself an equity feminist. 1.00
00:08:32.260 And, yeah, I don't call myself any kind of feminist.
00:08:37.620 I obviously believe that every person, regardless of their sex or any other inborn characteristics,
00:08:44.740 should have an opportunity to make a contribution to society and that they shouldn't be hindered by any of their inborn characteristics.
00:08:53.680 But I don't believe that there was ever a time that feminism was free of female moral superiority and attacks on masculinity. 0.97
00:09:05.740 For instance, if you go back to 1848, which is sometimes considered the beginnings of the first wave feminist movement in the United States.
00:09:15.880 This was a women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York.
00:09:20.540 And those ladies, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was the primary mover and shaker. 0.99
00:09:26.320 But there were other there were some Quaker women involved. 1.00
00:09:29.100 And they were advocating for women's greater freedoms and rights, including the right to vote.
00:09:34.060 And they wrote a document called, I'm blanking on the name now, the Declaration of Sentiments is what it's called.
00:09:44.860 And it says, as its central thesis, that the history of mankind is a history of repeated usurpations and injuries by man against woman with the express purpose of establishing a tyranny over her.
00:10:08.280 That's the whole history of mankind is men oppressing women. 1.00
00:10:12.860 So that notion that the whole world can be divided up into an oppressor class and an oppressed class, which we now see everywhere in intersectional feminism, and that the oppressor class is blameworthy and toxic and responsible for evil, while the oppressed class is innocent, morally innocent, not responsible for evil. 0.85
00:10:41.640 That idea was there at the core of first wave feminism, and you can trace it right through to the present day. 1.00
00:10:49.440 So I don't believe there ever was a feminism that was really very interested in equality.
00:10:55.240 It was always about punishing men for the alleged sins of their fathers.
00:11:00.340 It was never about recognizing what men bring to civilization.
00:11:05.640 It was never about recognizing the significance of masculinity in creating cultures where women and children could flourish.
00:11:14.240 It was never about expressing any gratitude for men.
00:11:18.280 It was always about blaming and about asserting the alleged moral superiority of women who were supposedly, you know, much more nurturing, much more empathetic, wouldn't start wars, responsible for everything good and loving in the world.
00:11:33.620 And so that notion of collective blame that all men now, especially, of course, all white, able-bodied heterosexual men are responsible for everything evil.
00:11:45.480 And even if they've never done anything bad in their lives, should have to shoulder that burden and apologize for their alleged privilege and take a step back and allow their sisters to come forward and collect the special scholarships and be hired through affirmative action programs and be given all sorts of special programming and advantages.
00:12:06.860 Well, they just have to accept that because they were born male, that they are second-class citizens, that they're not only disposable, but they're blameworthy and hated, rightly hated. 0.97
00:12:18.300 I just think that is a terrible ideology.
00:12:22.300 There's nothing good to be had from it, and we should just jettison it entirely.
00:12:27.600 Well, it sounds a lot like communism and the sort of modern intersectional situation where, you know, everyone is an oppressor and an oppressor.
00:12:37.120 And one of the things about feminism that has struck me since I was in university myself is that it's so counter to our own lived experience in human nature. 0.57
00:12:45.480 Like, everybody knows that there are bad guys out there, right?
00:12:48.720 And the thing that you need in society to counteract bad guys is good guys, right?
00:12:55.280 Like, that's what our whole society is about, like having police officers there to protect you, you know, having a male friend walk you home at night, you know, when you're in university, getting married and having that partnership, someone there to have children and have that unity that you need,
00:13:14.240 someone to go out to, you know, take care of the family, someone else to stay home with the children.
00:13:19.320 And yet, this message is so prevalent, especially in academic circles.
00:13:25.100 Why isn't it refuted and debunked more often?
00:13:27.560 Because to me, it's so counter to human nature that it almost doesn't even need to be said because it's almost laughable.
00:13:33.920 Yeah, it is so bizarre.
00:13:37.680 The contradictions in feminism are so evident to anyone who thinks about it, even for a few minutes. 1.00
00:13:43.920 Exactly the points that you just made.
00:13:45.760 Men are told over and over again that they are, by nature, violent and that their masculine qualities like aggression, assertiveness, competitiveness, risk-taking, etc., all these things are allegedly toxic.
00:14:01.200 They should become more like women. 1.00
00:14:03.680 But then they're also expected to step forward if they see a woman in distress.
00:14:09.260 Yes, and they're expected even sometimes to risk their lives, and men do risk their lives for women, even for strangers.
00:14:18.920 And somehow that toxic aspect of their masculinity is required in particular situations if they're encountering another toxic man or a threat to a woman.
00:14:31.380 So the contradictions right there in how men are supposed to behave are never really clearly resolved.
00:14:39.840 And as you say, we all know that, you know, in our society, there are many men who absolutely love women and are interested in working and indeed sacrificing and have created this incredibly flourishing, secure civilization that we're now fortunate enough to live in.
00:15:03.120 Out of, in many cases, out of, in many cases, out of, in many cases, love for women and the desire to create safe spaces for women and children to flourish in, and yet none of that is acknowledged.
00:15:13.420 So we live in a strange society in which the, I think the mutual recognition and reciprocity between the sexes that is so important for a functioning society has broken down.
00:15:27.680 Men are still expected to care for and support and applaud women.
00:15:32.560 They're expected to encourage women to enter all of the spheres that were once mainly masculine spheres of endeavor, including the military, policing, firefighting, all those areas have now been open to women. 0.85
00:15:46.760 And they're supposed to, men are supposed to welcome women into those spaces.
00:15:50.560 And yet it's not clear what women are supposed to do in response to men and what men are entitled to in our society.
00:15:58.980 That even word entitlement has become kind of a dirty word.
00:16:03.700 So, yeah, there are just so many contradictions that I think really prevent, especially young people being indoctrinated into this toxic ideology,
00:16:13.480 prevents us from recognizing what is good in our society and what should be preserved.
00:16:20.200 One of the other contradictions that I always noted was that from the time I was in university,
00:16:24.120 I took one women's studies course and I found it to be so lacking any intellectual rigor. 0.91
00:16:29.800 It was so frustrating to me to hear the discourse of the other students.
00:16:33.260 There would be like, like not exaggerating, a girl would cry like almost every class just talking about something.
00:16:39.400 And it was, it was just, I couldn't even attend the class.
00:16:42.060 I actually made an arrangement with the professor where I would do the lectures in the library and I wouldn't go to class because it was too infuriating to me.
00:16:49.780 But that's an aside that, that, that we're told that men have all of these negative qualities.
00:16:55.600 And yet at the same time, women, especially in my generation, we're told to be more like men.
00:17:00.500 You know, when it came to sexuality, even like public drunkenness and, and, and, and you see more and more women going out and drinking.
00:17:08.680 And that's like part of the culture, something that, that, that didn't used to be the case, for instance, in my mother's generation and, and, and focus so much on career, like to the extent where it's like you wake up and you're 30 and you're like, oh, I forgot to get married and have kids.
00:17:23.740 And, and, and, and I'm like not setting myself up for an important, uh, well, well-rounded life because I've been focused so much on career.
00:17:31.500 And I know so many women, um, in my age group in their thirties, uh, who, who have neglected that sort of like personal aspect.
00:17:38.780 So, so whilst telling men that they should be less like men, we're telling women to be more like men, more like men. 0.93
00:17:45.000 And, and I think that the result is that both men and women are sort of miserable unless they have some wisdom to go back and look at the sort of traditional lifestyles that, that, that people had, you know, what did your parents do?
00:17:57.980 What did your grandparents do?
00:17:58.880 What did your great grandparents do?
00:18:00.480 And, and looking at that wisdom, as opposed to the sort of modern day advice that people are given.
00:18:05.960 And so I, I, I'm wondering what your advice is to young people, people in their twenties, people in university, now both men and women about how to engage in relationships, what the proper role for men and women is.
00:18:18.600 Cause I think I, I know so many people now that, you know, they're not married because they can't find someone who, you know, what they're looking for because they think that, oh, that men my age are terrible or women my age are terrible.
00:18:30.040 And I can kind of understand and relate, but I'm wondering what, what your advice is for young people about gender roles.
00:18:37.180 It's a really big issue.
00:18:39.560 And, you know, you're right that, that women are encouraged to think that their fulfillment and sense of life satisfaction is going to come from achieving what men have traditionally been exhorted to achieve.
00:18:55.220 And, you know, there are all sorts of studies now coming out showing that women in general are much less happy and less satisfied with their lives than they were earlier.
00:19:06.520 In fact, there was a huge study by two professors out of the university of Pennsylvania that looked at all sorts of different surveys.
00:19:14.480 It was one of these meta studies that collected data over the last 50 years.
00:19:18.720 And it clearly found that starting in the 1980s, women in general have progressively become less and less satisfied with their lives, both absolutely in comparison to women of previous generations and also in comparison to men, interestingly enough.
00:19:36.940 And so, you know, as women's economic opportunities have clearly improved, as women are freer to do, you know, take on professional careers, you could even say as women are freer, as you pointed out, to engage in more masculine and less moral kinds of behaviors.
00:19:59.180 Women can divorce their husbands, women can divorce their husbands and live off their husbands earning, they can abort their children with impunity, they can walk in the slut walk and declare their right to be as sexually promiscuous as they want, and nobody dares say no, and yet they're not happier. 0.99
00:20:18.000 And the researchers themselves who are feminist researchers really couldn't, they had no way of offering an explanation and they ended up falling back on things like, well, the feminist movement, the gains of the feminist movement have actually improved the lives of men more than they've improved the lives of women, that's what they were reduced to speculating.
00:20:39.080 Or women still take on more of the emotional burden of caring and looking after a household and that's why they have greater stress, you know, they made up all sorts of answers and it seemed to me that a big part of the answer was that women no longer have a sense of what it means to be a good woman in the world. 0.91
00:21:01.900 Women are no longer exhorted to pursue virtue, men still have an idea of what it means to be a good man, despite all the slander, all the anti-male discourse around, which is a very heavy thing for men to have to take on, but they still know what a good man is.
00:21:19.780 A good man is a good man is a good man is a good man is a good man is a good man who achieves and makes a contribution to his society, he looks after his family, he protects and provides, he seeks justice, he defends the weak, you know, we have all of those classic masculine virtues, they're still in place.
00:21:36.260 Whereas what is a good woman now, if you ask a feminist what a good woman is, she'll just laugh and say that those are ideas that tried to create women and turn them into dupes of the patriarchy. 1.00
00:21:49.500 So she'll say a good woman is a good woman is a good woman who smashes patriarchal oppression and subverts the social order. 1.00
00:21:56.980 We used to have ideas about femininity, about being a good help meet, about being nurturing and caring, about looking after one's family, the maternal virtues, you know, all of those kinds of things, being chaste, being sexually virtuous, being faithful, all of that.
00:22:18.720 And I think it's time that we have to seriously start thinking again about what the feminine virtues are and why they have mattered historically, and why they still matter today.
00:22:30.580 Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, I listened to recently, Jordan Peterson did an interview with I think it was Ben Shapiro. And Ben asked something about like, is there is there a example in like, mythology or in like Disney movies or something of like, the female that that everyone ought to aspire to that women ought to aspire to.
00:22:52.360 And I think Jordan Peterson talked about Belle from Beauty and the Beast, because, you know, she was she liked to read and she was interesting, and she was introspective, she didn't care about society. And there was this, you know, the sort of main guy in the in the movie that everyone liked in the town, I don't know if you're familiar with the story of Beauty and the Beast, but guest on, he, you know, he was the hunk in the town, and all the women liked him.
00:23:15.360 But Belle didn't like him, because she thought that he was too arrogant. And then instead, she chose this other man. So the story was kind of more about her in regard to, you know, getting married or who she who she chose to partner with. But it was just the question itself was an interesting question, because we have a lot of stories of men and great men still in in in our culture, whereas less so for women. So maybe I'll put that question to you. Are there are there any women in literature, you have an English literature background,
00:23:43.320 that you would point to as what you think of as an ideal woman in, in, in, in myth or in stories?
00:23:49.360 Oh, gee, that's a good question. I don't think I have a good answer. But, you know, my favorite author is Jane Austen. And, and she was deeply interested in the question of the virtues, both the Christian and the classical virtues, and her, she is interested in masculine virtue, certainly, but she focuses especially on, on heroin.
00:24:13.180 And on how they have to learn these various virtues of, you know, and they're the traditional virtues of bearing up under suffering, and being faithful, and enduring, and examining the self, in order to look clearly at one's weaknesses.
00:24:42.260 Overcoming selfishness, overcoming selfishness, and narcissism, caring more about others than about oneself, you know, those, those are the, the very traditional kinds of virtues. And I, I, and I think as I get older and older, I appreciate the, the importance of that of caring about others, and, you know, not, not being selfish, making a contribution to one's family,
00:25:12.240 finding the balance, finding the balance, finding the balance, finding the balance in one's life, so that one can give to the people one loves. I think being nurturing, being empathetic, we're told that those are the virtues that women naturally possess, but I think modern feminism often encourages women to be the opposite of those things. 0.68
00:25:31.020 So, so for me, that's a, that's a, that's a, Austin's heroines offer really interesting examples of good women learning to examine themselves and to become stronger and better.
00:25:44.840 Oh, that's interesting. That's great advice. Well, I, I did have one other question that I wanted to ask you about. You mentioned researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, and it reminded me that I wanted to ask you about this trans swimmer named Leah Thomas.
00:25:56.520 So the NCAA swimming champions are happening, championship is happening this week. And there's a trans swimmer on the University of Pennsylvania team. So a biological male who competed with the men's team, and then had a transition or began identifying as a woman.
00:26:12.420 And now that, that, that Leah Thompson swims with women has just shattered all of the records. And I, I've been reading into it. I, I take some interest in it because it's a fascinating sort of human events story. And when I read about it, I mean, there's two emotions that I feel. One is like just a kind of remorse. Like I feel sorry for this individual because it's such a spectacle taking away from the sport. I feel sorry for the girls involved. I feel pity for everybody involved in the situation because it's so excruciating.
00:26:41.420 Excruciating seeing this tension between a clearly, you know, biological male who can swim at a pace. It's just nothing like what these women can swim at. And then also a sense of anger and frustration that, you know, you have this separate division. NCAA still splits sports into men and women. 0.89
00:26:59.240 And the whole purpose of women's sports as a dedicated, separate event for men's is so that women can succeed and women can have their own, you know, can compete on a level playing field. And it's just so, so much injustice here that it's, it's so out of hand. So I wanted to get your take on this because it kind of adds in another element to your critiques on feminism. How do trans women, like Leah Thomas, fit into that?
00:27:25.820 Yeah, well, that's a really big subject.
00:27:55.800 Feminist theory.
00:28:25.780 Feminist theory.
00:28:27.780 So she's been, I think, she's been, I think, doing a year of hormone therapy. Her body is still a male body. And to pretend that it isn't, that it isn't so much significantly stronger and faster than a female body. I mean, men have a larger muscle mass, a much larger heart and lungs. 0.94
00:28:49.140 Their upper body strength is significantly greater than women's. Men have much greater hand grip strength. You know, their bones are heavier and larger. You know, a year of hormone therapy doesn't change that. And so if we can't recognize the fundamental truth of biological reality, we are really at sea as a society. 0.68
00:29:47.800 And there's a man's body. And there's a man's body. And there are many other examples of this. And yet, you know, I can't help sometimes but feel a kind of rueful, not satisfaction. Well, yeah, it is satisfaction. I have to admit, I do. I feel a kind of satisfaction.
00:30:47.800 definitely point to and that much of what we think we know about the differences between male and
00:30:53.600 female bodies is as a result of social conditioning women are supposedly trained you know from the 1.00
00:30:59.540 time they're two or three to act differently from men they move differently in space they they're
00:31:06.320 told they throw like a girl and therefore they do throw like a girl like they make those arguments
00:31:11.200 over and over again if we had not allowed those arguments to achieve credence in academia and
00:31:18.840 then moving out into the wider world we would not be where we are now with this bizarre situation
00:31:25.220 where a good portion of feminist intellectuals and others claim that simply by deciding that a man 0.92
00:31:36.340 wants to be a woman that that man becomes a woman it's truly bizarre and on the other side of course 0.99
00:31:43.520 then there is this um sort of a grieved entitled anger on the part of uh other feminist women who 1.00
00:31:54.060 do not appreciate the encroachment into women's sports and other female domains of
00:32:02.620 male persons claiming to be women and but that falls often back into a kind of feminist um grievance
00:32:12.800 argument about how these men are oppressing women this is just another example of patriarchal oppression
00:32:21.000 these men want to be women because allegedly you know men hate women and but somehow want to destroy
00:32:29.120 women and take over their spaces and so and and that i think you know that really gets at that tension 1.00
00:32:35.640 that is so much a part of feminism on the one hand women are no different from men we should never say 0.92
00:32:41.700 that women can't do certain things because that's sexist and yet now suddenly again we hear that women 1.00
00:32:48.040 need special rights they need special women only spaces where you know male bodies must not intrude 1.00
00:32:56.160 all the while though um over the last 30 years male spaces have been continually eroded um you know
00:33:04.580 if if men in a fire hall said you know look we're really uncomfortable with the idea of having women 0.73
00:33:10.220 working as firefighters along us because they are simply they don't have the strength they can't do
00:33:15.600 what is required to fight fires same with the military all sorts of standards have been lowered
00:33:21.860 in these various formerly male domains in order to admit women and to pretend that there is no 0.81
00:33:28.120 significant difference between women and men so i think we have to stand on the the bedrock ground 1.00
00:33:35.540 of biological reality if we've lost that we really can't have sane conversations about any of these
00:33:42.360 issues uh and i'm not that sympathetic to either side of the feminist debate uh on the question of trans
00:33:50.500 women in sports because i think both um you know buy into various feminist postulates either 1.00
00:33:57.560 anger at at men uh and and and exaggerated claims about uh toxic masculinity and patriarchal oppression
00:34:07.100 or the gender as a social construct position neither of them is helpful in finding a sane solution to
00:34:14.520 these kinds of conflicts i tend to agree i i sometimes just sort of sit back and laugh at the two
00:34:20.460 uh sides of the left you know warring over this issue uh the the only reason i i i i want uh
00:34:27.220 this issue to be resolved is because i have a daughter and i want her to be able to enjoy
00:34:31.240 women's sports like i did growing up i loved playing sports i was on a a hockey team i played with the boys
00:34:36.920 until i hit uh about 12 and then i went on to a girls team i played soccer baseball and i love that
00:34:42.640 and the idea that perhaps if we continue down this path like the idea of women's sports just simply
00:34:48.220 won't exist because we'll go back to to mixing so that's that's that's part of the reason why i think
00:34:53.740 it's important to uh push back at least and try to find some truth here because truth seems to be
00:34:59.920 left behind well janice thank you so much for your time thank you for your clear explanation of these
00:35:05.740 issues it's always really a pleasure uh to speak to you so i really appreciate your time today thanks for
00:35:09.860 joining the show well thank you i really enjoyed it obviously we could go on for much longer there's
00:35:14.320 so many fascinating issues so thanks a lot for for having me on your wonderful program well thank you
00:35:19.600 i'm definitely gonna have to have you uh back again so janice human go thank you so much i'm
00:35:23.920 kenis malcolm and this is the kenis malcolm show
00:35:25.820 you