Ep. 153 - How Feminism Destroys Marriage
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Summary
Matt Walsh talks about the poisonous effect that feminism has in a marriage, and why essential oils are really essential. Plus, the Huffington Post has noticed some problems with the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer story, and we're going to talk about them, too.
Transcript
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Today on the show, we'll talk about the poisonous effect that feminism has in a marriage.
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Also, what are essential oils? Are they really essential?
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Finally, the Huffington Post has noticed some really significant problems in the Rudolph the
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Red-Nosed Reindeer story, but I've noticed an even bigger problem with the story,
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and we're going to talk about all of that now on The Matt Walsh Show.
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Yesterday, we discussed an article that has been getting some attention online,
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mainly because feminists seem to really like it. The article was written by a woman who
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complains about all the cooking that she did during her marriage, and she would cook while
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her husband was at work, and it became very traumatizing for her to have to do all this
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cooking because she decided that she didn't find it exciting anymore. It wasn't fulfilling.
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So she boycotted and said, I'm not going to cook anymore. Then her marriage fell apart,
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and now she has vowed to never cook a meal for another man ever again. The whole thing was
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a very bitter, very angry, very self-centered, melodramatic diatribe. Well, I got a few emails
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in response to that discussion. I wanted to share one email that came in. This is from Catherine.
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She says, Matt, your podcast today was very offensive to me. The woman you mocked had legitimate
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concerns. One of the reasons my own marriage fell apart is because I was expected to do all the
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cooking and all the cleaning. Women are tired of that. Feminism doesn't hurt a marriage. You can't
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have a healthy marriage without feminism. Marriages last if they are equal, all caps, period, all caps.
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Okay, so you can't have a healthy marriage without feminism. And I had other emails that echoed
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basically that same sentiment. And first of all, listen, I don't mean to be cruel or anything like
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that. But I do wonder how someone who is divorced can make pronouncements about what constitutes a
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healthy marriage. You know, I find this a lot. Whenever I talk about marriage, there are people who
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they'll begin by admitting that they've been divorced at least once, and then they'll go on to talk about
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and give all their wisdom on what makes a good, healthy marriage and so on and so forth.
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I mean, is it possible that you might have some faulty ideas about marriage and perhaps
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that's something that fed into the fact that you're no longer married? I mean, isn't that something
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that certainly is something that you should maybe look into? I don't know. But I do think that
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the opposite is the case here. Feminism is not essential to a healthy marriage. Feminism destroys
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marriage. Not just feminism, by the way, but any ism. Any ism whatsoever. Marriage is not a place for
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isms. You can't go into a marriage with some kind of political or ideological system as your guiding
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principle in the marriage itself. I'm not saying that you can't have a political or ideological system
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and be married. I'm saying that that system cannot be what what makes your marriage function. So even
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though I'm a conservative, I also I would never say, well, you can't have a healthy marriage without
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conservatism. Marriage really has nothing to do with the conservative political ideology, or at least
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it's only connected in a very secondary sort of way. Marriage depends on the love and devotion that
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both spouses have towards each other. That's what makes a healthy marriage. That's really it.
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If you try to filter that love and devotion through an ideology, especially an ideology like feminism,
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you're going to be in trouble because it complicates things. It dilutes things. It throws your priorities
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all out of whack. So I have found that maintaining a successful marriage is extremely simple. Now,
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I won't say it's easy all the time, and I certainly won't say that I personally have come anywhere close
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to mastering the art of maintaining, you know, of mastering the art of marriage, I suppose. I'm no
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expert or guru, but I do know that it's simple. There are a lot of things that we can we can tell
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the answer is simple, even if it's hard sometimes to do. So it's it's simple with marriage. It's not
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complicated. You just you love the other person, be willing to sacrifice for them, make their needs and
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their desires a priority to you. And and and that's that's kind of it. I think if you do that, you'll
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be fine. You'll be able to get through any challenge if you keep if you do that. And then
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here's the other thing. This is this is part of that, but you have to serve your spouse without
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keeping score. And this is where feminism really screws things up. I think it's with the scorekeeping.
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Because once you get into the scorekeeping, you're in trouble. There has never been a healthy or good
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or joyful marriage in history with a scoreboard. Anytime there's a scoreboard in a marriage that
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once you start, once you once you notice that there's a scoreboard like hanging in your living
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room, at least a metaphorical scoreboard, once you notice that you've got to go to the marriage
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counselor because you're you're in trouble. Good marriages don't have scoreboards. Competitiveness
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destroys a marriage, at least a certain kind of competitiveness. My wife and I are competitive
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in in in other kinds of ways. Like we're competitive when it comes to board games. And I'm way better
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at those. We're competitive about who's the better driver. I am by a mile. We're competitive about about
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parallel parking. Again, I'm better at that. We're competitive about about who can guess the ending
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of TV shows and movies. Anytime we're watching a TV show or a movie, you know, who can who can guess
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what the twists are going to be and everything. Once again, I nail almost every single time. So I'm
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better there as well. But there's that kind of I think that kind of competitiveness competitiveness is
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is OK, although although it can get a bit intense at times. I'm not going to lie. I mean, my wife and I
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have probably gone to bed angry at each other on more than a few occasions because of board games.
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So that has happened. But I think the really bad kinds of competitions
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are the competitions over who works the hardest, who does more around the house, who did this, who did that.
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The competitiveness that disguises itself as a desire for equality.
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That's the stuff that kills the marriage. And that's what feminism brings into the marriage. And
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that's why it is lethal to a marriage. And you notice something about that.
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Whenever somebody complains or, you know, says that they want equality in their marriage,
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it always, have you noticed this? When someone says, oh, I just want my marriage to be equal.
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When they say that, it always involves them doing less and the other person doing more. Have you
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noticed that? So someone will say, I want things to be equal. And what they mean is, I want my spouse
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to do the dishes more often or whatever. You never hear anyone say, I want things to be equal,
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so I'll do the dishes. That never happens. So this desire for equality, this scorekeeping,
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it's always self-serving. Anytime someone in a marriage checks the scoreboard,
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they're always going to discover that they're ahead in that they've done more, they've done more around
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the house. So now they get to kick back and let their spouse catch up. That's what's really
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fascinating is that anytime you look at the scoreboard, you're always going to be ahead.
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That's the problem with the scoreboard. The woman who sent the email, Catherine,
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she says that in her former marriage, she was expected to do all the cooking and all the cleaning.
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And so the question is, what did her husband do? Maybe he did nothing. Maybe he was a worthless,
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useless oath. It's possible. There are people like that in marriages. Who knows?
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But oftentimes you find that when one spouse is going on about, I always am the one who does this,
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whatever this is, very often there are a million other things that the other person always does on
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their own. So I think this attitude just doesn't work. A marriage can't work this way. It can only
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work if your first priority is to serve your spouse and your family. But again, this is the problem with
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feminism. Feminism wants nothing to do with that. Feminism doesn't want a woman to serve her husband
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and her children. You're never going to hear a feminist say that. You're never going to hear a
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feminist talk about serving their husbands. To a feminist, the idea of serving anyone, especially a man,
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is repulsive. And that's why it doesn't work in a marriage, because that's what marriage is.
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They say, oh, I can't serve. That's demeaning. That's degrading. That's belittling.
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Well, if you can't serve, if you don't want to serve someone, then don't get married.
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If you're a woman and you're not interested in serving your husband, then don't get married. It's
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not for you. And if you're a man and you're not interested in serving your wife, then don't get
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married. You're not man enough for marriage. You're not strong enough. You're not mature enough.
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If you're not interested in serving, because that's what marriage is.
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And by the way, I'm not trying to paint some unrealistic portrait here. People say, well,
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marriage isn't 50-50. It's 100-100, because you always give 100% to your spouse. Well, yeah, but nobody
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gives literally 100% all the time. Nobody is perfectly selfless, right? Nobody is. So I'm not
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saying that in a marriage, your sole single only priority all the time is the happiness of your
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spouse. It's not as if we should have no concern for our own happiness. I'm not saying that. That
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would obviously be absurd. We're human beings, after all. And I do think sometimes people can go too far
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in the other direction when they're making the point that, well, marriage is about service,
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it's about giving to the other person, it's not about you, it's about them, so on and so forth.
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That's true. But at the same time, we're not supposed to be martyrs. You don't want to martyr
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yourself in a marriage, because that's not healthy either. But that's part of the service,
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I think, is recognizing that your spouse is going to be selfish sometimes, needs to be selfish
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sometimes, really. Selfish just in the sense of tending to their own happiness as well,
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getting a break. And I could say in my marriage, my wife and I, as I said, we're not marriage experts
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by any stretch of the imagination. I think we need to get a few more decades in before we can call
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ourselves that. But one thing that we did figure out early on that's not hard to figure out,
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seems pretty obvious, is that we both need to give each other breaks as often as possible.
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That's just, I think it's a really important part of marriage. So it's become kind of an organic
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thing for us. It's not systematic, so there's no scoreboard for this. We're not keeping track of
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how many minutes of a break each person has gotten and making sure it's exactly even.
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We don't do that. But I'll watch the kids sometimes so that my wife can go out on her own,
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do her own thing. She'll watch them for me. And so if she's got something she wants to do,
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like she wants to go out for drinks with her friends or she wants to go to a women's group
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thing at church or whatever the case may be, I consider it a high priority to make sure that she can do
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that because I know that she needs that time. And she recognizes the same for me. So I can say that
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in seven years of marriage, pretty much any time that I've said to my wife, hey, I want to go out
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with some friends or I want to go fishing on Saturday morning, pretty much any time I've said that,
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she's said, yeah, absolutely. Let's try to make that happen. And so I try to do the same for her.
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And I think that's important too. But the general idea, the underlying thing in a marriage is still
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one of service and of kind of looking after the other person. And that's why feminism makes a
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marriage dysfunctional. I think feminism makes everything dysfunctional. Feminism doesn't really,
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feminism doesn't work in any context, whether it's at work or anywhere else in society,
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but especially in a marriage, it doesn't work because feminism is always about keeping track
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of where the man is and then making sure that the, that the woman is exactly even,
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or even a little bit ahead. Like it's always about that. And it just doesn't work. And that's why I'm,
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I've always been uncomfortable with this idea of marriage as an equal partnership. I think I've
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talked about this before. That's, that's the, the popular modern enlightened thing is to say,
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well, my marriage is an equal partnership. And in a sense, yeah, marriage is obviously a partnership.
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And in a sense it is equal in that you're both serving and giving to the other person. So in that
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way you could call it equal. Nobody is inferior to the other person. So you can call it equal in that
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sense. But those are the only senses where marriage is, is, is, or can be, or should be equal.
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In, in many ways, it's not equal. It's not equal, first of all, because men and women are different.
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Not that one is superior and the other is inferior, but they're just different. You're just a different
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person. So you're not the same. You are not literally equal to the other. You are different. And
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you also have different skills. You have different, um, uh, you have different strengths
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that you bring to the table. And so it's not equal in that sense either.
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And just the, the point is that I think most of the time, and you could probably think about this
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in your own life or in your own marriage, anytime that you've stopped and thought to yourself, well,
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is this equal? Is it, is everything equal right now? Anytime you've stopped and thought that to
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yourself, it's probably always in a selfish way. You know, it's always in a, it's a selfish way for
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yourself in an accusatory way towards your spouse. And, um, that's the problem with it. And that's the
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problem with feminism in a marriage. All right. So I've been getting some, um, messages about essential oils.
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I don't want to get, I'm not going to get into detail about essential oils. I just,
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I made a joke about essential oils on, on Twitter, um, yesterday. And so I've been, I've,
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I've been getting all the essential oil defenders coming after me and I'll admit,
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I have no idea what essential oils are. I don't know what they are. I have no idea.
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I just, I, I keep hearing about them. My wife talks about them. I don't know if she uses them or not.
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Maybe we have essential oils in the house. I don't know where they would be if we had them.
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Maybe she doesn't hurt her friends. Talk about them all the time.
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Anytime there's sickness in the house, like someone has a cold or the flu or whatever,
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or a stomach bug, everyone's telling us, oh, you got to get essential oils, essential oils.
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I don't know what they are. I, the only oils I know about are olive oil. And then the oil
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that you put in your car, those are pretty essential to my life, but I don't think that's
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what they're referring to. What I will say is this from the messages people have been sending me
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about essential oils. Um, the, the one word that keeps coming up is people are telling me
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that essential oils are, are homeopathic. And I do know that homeopathic is Latin for scam.
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I know that. So anytime you're telling your, if it's homeopathic, it doesn't work.
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And also someone on Twitter said to me yesterday, they said, uh, well,
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people have been using essential oils for hundreds of years. It's a, it, it has to be
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better than modern medicine. People have been using it for a long time. You see, I don't understand
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that approach. I don't understand that attitude. Um, I don't understand advocating for a certain
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medicine, uh, a certain medicinal approach by saying that people did it 150 years ago.
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Uh, people died from colds 150 years ago. The life expectancy was like 55 back then.
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Why would I want to practice their version of medicine? Society has, has, there are many ways
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in which modern society has not progressed and has actually regressed. And I'd be the first to point
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that out. But one area where I think we, we should be all able to agree one area where there has been
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pretty much a steady unbroken progression is in the area of medicine. Our medicine is definitely
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better now than it was at any other point in history. I don't think there's any doubt about that.
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And, uh, you can see that in any measurable, whatever measurable you want to look at,
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whether it's life expectancy, infant mortality, whatever it is, it just in every conceivable way,
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uh, our medicine is, is better now. So I'm, you know, I'll, I'll generally stick with the modern
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versions when it comes to that. But I will also say that I do believe that the psychosomatic placebo
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effect is a real thing and it, and it, and it, and it does work in that way. So if you really believe,
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if you really believe that a certain random thing like oil makes you healthier, then it may not really
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be making you healthier, but it will make you feel better. So in that sense, go ahead and do it.
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I used to swear by Zycam. I don't know if you've heard of Zycam, but it's, you can find it in the,
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in the cold and flu section of the drugstore. And so I used to take Zycam all the time and I would
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swear by it. I used to swear that it was a wonder drug, uh, because anytime I felt even slightly a
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little bit sick, I would take Zycam and then it would go away. And so I went through about two years
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and I never got a cold. I never got sick. And I would tell everybody it's, I would,
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I would preach the good news of Zycam to everyone, everyone that would listen. I would tell them,
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I would say, I'm telling you, Zycam is what is keeping me healthy. Zycam will make me immortal,
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I believe. But then one day I happened to stumble across an article that someone shared on Facebook
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claiming that Zycam is a scam and it doesn't actually work. And so then I started researching it
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and I discovered that there is no evidence or proof whatsoever that Zycam really does anything.
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And as soon as I discovered that Zycam stopped working and then I started getting colds again.
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Um, so there was, I had, my mind had, I had been tripped. I had tripped myself into feeling better.
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And then the illusion fell apart and, um, and it didn't work anymore. The placebo effect was destroyed.
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So what I'm saying is, you know, I'm, if the essential oils are homeopathic, then I'm pretty
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sure they don't do anything. But if you believe that they do something, then keep believing it
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and don't research it. Don't look it up. Ignorance is bliss. If you believe in it, then in some way,
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it will make you feel better. And that's, and that's great as far as I'm concerned. All right. One last
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thing, Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer is coming under fire. The Huffington Post put out a video
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this week highlighting the problematic elements of the story. The, the story encourages bullying
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and racism for one thing and homophobia somehow. I don't remember there being a gay reindeer in the
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story, but apparently maybe there was, there's homophobia. Look, I think all of these criticisms
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are perfectly valid and important and warranted as I'm sure you agree. But as I've been thinking
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about this since Huffington Post brought it up and you know, I've been thinking about Rudolph the
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red-nosed reindeer now. Um, and I've realized that there's a bigger problem with the story
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and it has to do with plausibility. Now stay with me here because I know you're thinking,
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what are you talking about, Matt? What a story about a flying reindeer? How is that implausible?
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Well, I know on the surface, it seems like it makes perfect sense, but just let's review.
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Let's just think about this for a second. And somehow the Huffington Post, they missed this.
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Okay. They're criticizing all these other parts. They missed this part of the story.
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Santa is about to head out with all the toys, but then he sees that it's foggy. So he goes,
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well, we're going to have to cancel Christmas. No Christmas. It's foggy. We can't go out. We can't see.
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You know, how am I supposed to fly this sleigh when I can't see? But then he says, hey, hold on a
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second. Where's that freak with the shiny nose? Yeah. Get him in here. Um, and, uh, and, and maybe
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he can finally be of some use. And so they fly off with Rudolph leading the way through the fog and
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everybody lives happily ever after. Right? Not so fast. This doesn't actually make sense. Think about
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it. Santa was about to cancel Christmas because of a patch of fog, but then Rudolph bailed him out.
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So am I supposed to believe that Santa had never run into fog before? He flies around the entire world
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in December and he never hit bad weather, never fog, never a snow storm, never, never a blizzard,
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never a rain storm, nothing. He had no contingency plan for bad weather and had to rely on the
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convenient facial deformity of a socially scorned reindeer. Not to mention he carries out this
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operation at night. And this is the first time he ever needed a headlight. Something is not adding
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up here. That's all I'm saying. Now I know you might argue. And I thought about this too. I said,
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well, uh, well, we don't know exactly when the Rudolph story took place. Maybe it was,
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maybe this was, um, Santa's first ever mission. Well, that doesn't work either. Watch the show,
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do your research, look at the kinds of toys that are in Santa's Santa's sack that he's bringing to all
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the kids. There are toy trains in there. What does that tell you? Well, steam locomotives didn't exist
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before the 19th century. Saint Nick was born in the fourth century. That's 1500 years. That means he
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was on the job for at least 1500 years. And never once had he dealt with fog in 1500 years.
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I'm not buying it. I'm just not buying. Now, don't get me wrong. Um, I don't doubt the general
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historical veracity of Santa and Rudolph. I'm just saying something is wrong here.
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Santa wanted Rudolph on that sleigh, but it had nothing to do with the fog.
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I don't know. But I'm going to find out. Cue dramatic music.
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And I want to thank Huffington Post for bringing up this subject. Um, so that maybe finally we can
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get to the bottom of all of these mysteries. Hope you guys have a great weekend. I'll talk to you next