The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 8 - The Great Disadvantages Our Sons Face In Modern America

00:00:00.340 Welcome to the show, everybody. Thanks for watching. Hope you've had a great morning so far.

00:00:05.000 So I want to get into something I wrote about yesterday. I wrote a piece yesterday called the,

00:00:11.000 what was it called? Oh, the four things that are destroying boys in our culture.

00:00:18.760 And I want to get, I want to talk about that. I want to bring that conversation over to this

00:00:22.460 forum as well, because I think it's so important. Especially in a society where we hear so much

00:00:29.580 about, we hear about two things quite a bit. We hear number one, that boys are privileged,

00:00:34.560 that men are privileged. There's this, this mystical male privilege that we're always told

00:00:40.980 about. And that's, you know, we rarely see it manifest into anything, into, into anything

00:00:48.780 tangible, but we're told that it's there, that men are, men are so privileged to be in this culture.

00:00:54.360 And then number two, we're, we're told about the persecution and the oppression of women.

00:01:01.140 Um, and in the midst of all this, while we're having this discussion about male privilege,

00:01:06.500 and while we've got feminists complaining about, oh, they're so, they're so persecuted, 1.00

00:01:10.820 uh, they're persecuted because, you know, female actresses in Hollywood don't make as much. A female 1.00

00:01:17.300 actress in a movie made only $5 million while a male actor on the same movie made 15 million.

00:01:22.780 Oh my gosh. While we're talking about that kind of persecution or, or, oh, oh my goodness,

00:01:29.320 you don't want to pay for my birth control. Are you kidding me? I'm, I'm oppressed pay for my birth

00:01:34.420 control. So while we're having that conversation, boys concentrating specifically here on, on, on boys,

00:01:43.380 on young men, um, they are dying. Um, I mean, literally dying in many cases. Um, but also inside guy,

00:01:55.620 men are dying inside. There's this emptiness, this, um, this confusion, this kind of hollowness

00:02:05.640 that we are fostering in boys. And so I want to discuss that and talk about the things that,

00:02:12.620 that lead to that, you know, the great, the great challenges that boys face in our culture

00:02:18.120 or another way of putting it, the disadvantages. There are some unique disadvantages that men,

00:02:26.880 particularly young boys suffer in our culture that women either do not suffer at all, 0.51

00:02:31.860 or they don't suffer at all to the same degree. So the first thing, um, and I talked about this in

00:02:38.420 the video I did yesterday as well, but, uh, I want to focus on it because I think this is one

00:02:44.960 aspect of the plight of men that isn't focused on nearly enough, but our culture

00:02:50.360 just relentlessly preys upon a boy's weaknesses. We now, I just imagine the world that a 13 year

00:03:05.100 old boy inhabits. Okay. Just put your, if you can just put yourself into the, into the world,

00:03:11.460 into the mindset, put yourself into the shoes of a, of a 13 year old boy of the average 13 year

00:03:19.100 old boy in America. Uh, so if you're this boy, that means that, um, you know, you've long since

00:03:24.080 been exposed to hardcore pornography. You probably watch it regularly. The average age of first

00:03:29.960 exposure to pornography is, um, I think 10 or 11 by according to most studies. And I think that

00:03:37.080 that's, I think that's a pretty conservative estimate. I think for many kids, it's much,

00:03:41.360 much younger than that, but let's say 10 or 11. So he's long since been exposed to hardcore

00:03:45.580 pornography. Uh, he watches it regularly. Probably doesn't really understand what it is or why he's

00:03:50.640 even finds it appealing, but he watches it. And then puberty hits at right around 13 and his hormones

00:03:57.640 are going crazy. They're going haywire inside his head. His brain is hardwiring itself to focus

00:04:04.700 obsessively on sex. Now that isn't his fault. He didn't, he didn't choose this. This is just how he

00:04:10.940 is. This is what, this is the biological imperative. Um, there's been, there's, there was a study done

00:04:16.760 a little while ago that said, uh, that men, I forget how it was phrased exactly, but basically

00:04:24.620 men focus more on sex than they do on food. So if a man had to choose between food or sex, 0.78

00:04:31.560 he would take sex. Now I think some of that stuff is kind of sensational. I think, you know, 0.72

00:04:35.640 if a guy's starving to death in the desert and he has to choose between the two things,

00:04:39.480 he's probably going to take the food. I would think, but even if that's a little sensational,

00:04:45.700 we know the reality is that especially for boys, when they're going through puberty,

00:04:49.400 there is this intense preoccupation with sex that just kind of hits them all, all of a sudden,

00:04:58.820 like a ton of bricks and they don't even know where it's coming from. They don't understand it.

00:05:02.180 Um, and he feels just this biological impulse to go out and to find a sexual partner, even though

00:05:12.600 he, he doesn't understand this urge. Uh, his conception of human sexuality has been perverted

00:05:19.040 and degraded and confused by the porn habit he developed in sixth grade. But still he is now at

00:05:25.700 the age of 13, a boy becomes fertile, fertile, a boy can conceive a child at the age of 13.

00:05:32.560 Even, even though girls, his age for the most part, um, are not fertile. So this is, this is,

00:05:38.460 again, this is biology. This is his body doing this saying, Oh, well now you can have babies.

00:05:43.960 Now you're going to be focused on sex. And the boy, even though of course he's too young for all

00:05:50.640 this, he's too, too young for sex, but, uh, he can't escape it. He can't escape sex. It's all over 0.98

00:05:55.860 his computer. It's all over his phone. It's all over social media. It's all over the TV. It's all

00:06:01.500 over the music he listens to. It's all over the advertisements. He's, you know, it's, it's billboards

00:06:06.080 and just everything, everywhere he turns, uh, you know, even the magazine rack and the supermarket,

00:06:11.740 I mean, everywhere he turns and his, his hormones are already going crazy. He's already

00:06:17.100 preoccupied and everywhere he turns, there's this temptation. There's this, there's this preying

00:06:23.160 upon, um, what's already preoccupying his head. And then he goes to school and he sees that his

00:06:30.920 female classmates are dressed like strippers. And in fact, most of the places that he go,

00:06:35.640 that he goes in life, that's how the women are dressed. And because they say, well, this is my 1.00

00:06:42.140 body. It's my, you know, you just don't look. It's not my problem. It's not my problem. If I'm,

00:06:47.960 you know, leading these boys into sin, it doesn't, it's not my problem at all. It's your problem. I

00:06:53.140 don't care about them because that's the attitude that we fostered in girls. It seems that everyone 1.00

00:06:59.920 is doing everything they can to make a degenerate and a creep out of him, even as they demand 0.77

00:07:07.420 that he not become a degenerate or a creep. They're doing everything they can, literally

00:07:14.740 everything they can to make him into one while saying, well, Hey, never become this thing that

00:07:20.940 we are trying our hardest to turn you into. Uh, and so we demand self-discipline. We demand

00:07:26.780 self-control from this boy while providing him absolutely no tools whatsoever to develop them.

00:07:33.320 And rather than tools, we just give him temptation upon temptation, upon temptation,

00:07:38.400 nonstop temptation, everywhere he goes all day, every day, right at the moment when his brain is

00:07:43.780 least able to cope with it or overcome it. And even if, so that's all bad enough.

00:07:52.840 Even if the boy possesses this kind of superhuman moral fortitude,

00:08:00.280 the kind of moral fortitude that he's going to need to pursue chastity and purity in the midst of

00:08:08.080 this, um, in the midst of this degenerate sex craze culture, even if he has that,

00:08:15.180 well, what's he going to meet when he goes out and he, and he tries to pursue chastity and purity,

00:08:21.520 what's he going to meet from our society? Mockery, discouragement,

00:08:25.280 the very people who demand that he respect women and control himself, um, those same people

00:08:33.780 will then heap scorn on him. If he tries to do exactly what they demand he do.

00:08:42.860 We, we, we, we, we, we blame boys for not being virtuous enough. And then if they try to be

00:08:48.360 virtuous, we laugh at them. That's the situation a boy is in. Again, in that case, the boy is going

00:08:58.560 to need to call upon this kind of superhuman courage one more time. So we can, just like he

00:09:03.960 rejected the temptations. Now he has to, now he has to reject all the jeers and everything so that he

00:09:08.860 can walk this path to virtue. And he's going to have to walk it on his own from, with no help from

00:09:13.500 anyone, including his parents much of the time. Cause that brings us to the second disadvantage

00:09:21.840 in our culture. There is a lack of male leadership and male role models, and it is truly catastrophic.

00:09:32.000 We know some of the statistics. We know that a 20% of the kids in this country grow up without

00:09:36.760 dads in the home. That's 17 million kids in the black community. The percentage is 70 or 80%. Okay. 1.00

00:09:44.160 70 to 80% of the kids in the black community grow up in fatherless homes, which is again, a catastrophic 1.00

00:09:52.100 apocalyptic number that a community cannot survive like that. When you've, when you've only got,

00:10:01.520 when you've only got 20 to 30% of your kids who have dads at home.

00:10:08.940 Now, on the other hand, almost every kid has a mother in the home with rare exception.

00:10:16.520 So a girl will have a female role model in her mother. And not only that, but when she goes to 1.00

00:10:23.280 school, most of the teachers, I think 75, 76% of the teachers in the public school system are women.

00:10:29.180 So she goes to school and she's got female role models at school. And she's even more likely to 1.00

00:10:34.280 have a grandmother in her life than a grandfather because men die five or six years before, before, 0.55

00:10:40.080 before women do. So she's got no shortage of female role models. She's got female role models 1.00

00:10:45.460 just basically falling out of the sky. I mean, they're everywhere, everywhere she turns,

00:10:49.360 there's a female role model, which is great. And we should celebrate that. We should be happy for that.

00:10:53.380 That's a fantastic thing. It's also a profound advantage that girls have over boys, even though

00:11:03.100 boys have privilege. They're so privileged, but they're not even privileged enough to have a dad

00:11:07.980 around to say, Hey, this is what a man is supposed to do. Um, and even the boys who have dads in the

00:11:14.860 home, that doesn't mean that they have male role models. You'll find very often that despite the

00:11:21.440 father's physical presence, the mother is still the spiritual leader in the home, uh, among Christians,

00:11:26.700 I don't know what the exact number is, but statistically, um, it's the mother who takes the 0.78

00:11:34.240 child, the children to church while the dad stays home in his pajamas, too lazy to even get up and go

00:11:40.080 to church. Uh, she's the one who takes over the religious duties of the family. In most families.

00:11:47.720 Now the, the mother is the spiritual leader. So the father, what is the father? He's a warm body,

00:11:53.740 you know, you know, taking up space. He's a, he's a paycheck. Maybe hopefully he goes out and brings

00:11:58.420 home a paycheck at least, but many of these dads, they're not leading their family and they are not

00:12:05.120 providing an example to their sons. They're just leaving their sons, hanging them out to dry and

00:12:12.560 saying, Hey, you figure it out. So if a boy wants to be a man, if he wants to know how to be a man.

00:12:21.220 And that by the way, is something that we need to teach kids. Um,

00:12:28.680 a boy needs to be taught how to be a man. A girl needs to be taught how to be a girl, how to be a woman. 0.91

00:12:37.440 But many boys, they don't have anyone around to teach them that. So either they can turn to their

00:12:44.540 mother and they can hope that their mother can somehow teach them how to be a man and she can

00:12:48.140 do her best. And she can even do a heroic job in trying to teach that lesson, but she's never going

00:12:53.760 to be able to do it the way that a man can. Because when it comes to how to be a man, a woman can tell you

00:13:01.000 based on her observations, what she thinks a man does, but she cannot show you. She's a woman. All

00:13:10.020 she can show you is what a woman does. It takes a man to show another man what a man does. 1.00

00:13:18.000 So if he doesn't have, if he doesn't want to turn to his mother, then what's he going to do? Um,

00:13:21.840 what, what do many boys in this culture do? What's the next place? You can't, you can't look in the

00:13:26.280 home. You don't look to the schools. You know, you're not going to church. You can't look to the church.

00:13:30.380 So where do you look then for your male role model? You turn on the TV and many of these boys,

00:13:36.460 um, now they're turning to musicians. They're turning to actors, celebrities, superheroes for

00:13:44.300 their idea of masculinity. And they develop this cartoonish kind of hollow idea of manhood and they

00:13:54.020 become cartoonish hollow men. That's what I noticed when I, you know, when I look around, I see

00:14:01.980 a lot of cartoon men walking around. Do you know what I mean? A lot of these men, they're cartoons.

00:14:14.180 They've got this idea of masculinity that's cartoonish and they're walking around. It's like

00:14:19.880 they're wearing a costume because they don't even know who they are. Um, so that's another

00:14:27.760 disadvantage. Third, the education system is designed for girls. There's a reason why girls 1.00

00:14:38.580 outperform men, uh, outperform boys in the school system. And it's not because they're smarter

00:14:43.820 statistically. You know, girls are not any smarter than boys yet. They do so much better in school,

00:14:50.060 even though the boys with all their privilege, somehow they can't even get, somehow they can't

00:14:56.820 even get good grades in school. Why is that? Because the classroom is set up, is set up to foster or to

00:15:05.020 cater to the girls. It is set up to reward the kind of calm, organized demeanor. That's natural to 0.86

00:15:14.380 girls. Boys are not like that for the most part, with exception. Boys are not like that. Boys are

00:15:20.200 rambunctious. They have physical energy. You know, they're, they have trouble sitting still. I got a

00:15:25.900 four-year-old boy at home. This is him totally. I mean, he's got, he's bouncing off the walls. He's got

00:15:30.760 all this energy. He's got trouble sitting still. He doesn't like sitting still. Um, you know, he's

00:15:35.600 not able to focus attentive, attentively on a dull task for a prolonged period of time. My, my, my,

00:15:41.860 my daughter can sit there and, you know, she can draw a picture. She can, she can sit still for,

00:15:46.860 for, um, an hour or more and just do something. I mean, she could sit there and brush her doll's hair.

00:15:53.460 She could set up a tea party. She could do something like that. Meanwhile, my son is bouncing off the walls.

00:15:58.080 He's pretending to be the Hulk. He's, uh, you know, that's what he's doing. He's saying, daddy,

00:16:03.140 let's play. Can we go? Let's play tag. Let's play hide and seek. Can we go outside? I mean,

00:16:07.120 he wants to do things. That's what, that's what boys want to do. But the classroom is not designed

00:16:17.300 for kids like that. It doesn't know what to do with them. It can't do anything with them.

00:16:23.100 So it penalizes them. It penalizes boys for being boys. As a result, boys get lower grades.

00:16:31.940 Boys are more likely to drop out of school. Boys, boys are more likely to be expelled, to be suspended.

00:16:37.720 Remember with all their privilege, we've, they've all got this privilege, but they're failing out

00:16:42.400 of school. They're dropping out. They're getting expelled. They're getting suspended.

00:16:45.000 And worst of all, I think, cause that boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD.

00:16:54.380 Listen, listen to this figure. Okay. By high school, 20% of boys will have been diagnosed with ADHD

00:17:04.060 and a large number of them will be on drugs. Somehow, you know, we never stopped to ask ourselves,

00:17:12.000 why is it that boys are somehow more susceptible to this mysterious mental condition?

00:17:22.820 That's crazy, isn't it? If this is really just a mental condition and anyone can get it,

00:17:28.240 then why does it always affect boys? Why are boys the white? Can anyone explain that?

00:17:34.040 We never stopped to consider that maybe what we're doing, it's that we're not diagnosing individual

00:17:42.780 boys with ADHD. What we're doing instead is we are diagnosing boyhood itself. We're, we're,

00:17:49.800 we are saying boyhood itself is a disease and there's no place for it in school.

00:17:54.920 Now, if the school system were not predicated on sitting still and memorizing and regurgitating

00:18:05.480 information and filling out dittos and worksheets. Okay. If the school system were not predicated on

00:18:11.340 that, there would be no ADHD. It would be like magic. All the ADHD cases in the world would just

00:18:18.520 evaporate. It would be gone because it's all conditional. ADHD exists in the classroom.

00:18:27.160 It doesn't exist in the woods when they're, you know, when, when, when your son goes out and plays

00:18:31.540 in the woods and he's, and he's playing with sticks and he's climbing trees. There's no, there's no ADHD

00:18:35.740 there, is there? There's no ADHD in a tree, in a tree fort. It's only in a classroom because we've

00:18:43.920 decided that, well, we need boys to sit still for seven hours a day, five days a week for 12 years,

00:18:53.880 nine months out of the year, repeating information. That's what we need them to do.

00:19:00.320 And if they can't do it, we will stuff pills into their face and make them. 0.97

00:19:05.680 And if they still can't do it, kick them out of school. 0.98

00:19:14.060 But that's privilege. That's their privilege.

00:19:20.720 I mean, seriously, before you tell me about male privilege, have we turned womanhood into a disease?

00:19:26.240 Well, actually we kind of had that. That's, that's, we actually have done that with the birth

00:19:32.860 control pill. Um, but that's, that's a, that's a different conversation. Number four,

00:19:41.280 masculinity is, uh, is denigrated in this culture. Now you'd think after we, we just got through the

00:19:50.160 first three steps and you'd think, well, that's enough. I mean, we can lay off now, right? We've done

00:19:55.620 enough to these boys. We've, we've thrown sex in their face every second of the day. Uh, we have 1.00

00:20:00.760 deprived them of role models. We have put them into an education system that treats their personality

00:20:06.480 as a disease. So we've done all that. I mean, aren't we satisfied now? Can we just leave them

00:20:12.660 alone at that point? Can we just let them be? But no, because if they managed to survive that gauntlet,

00:20:20.080 then the next step is we bury them under just mounds and mounds of self-loathing.

00:20:28.220 We attack masculinity. Now femininity is also attacked in our culture, 1.00

00:20:33.020 but not nearly as explicitly, not directly. Okay. Nobody is, is, is, um, is going around and saying

00:20:43.120 that femininity is toxic or fragile. Nobody talks about female privilege. Uh, nobody does that. 1.00

00:20:50.500 Nobody's going to say that all women are dangerous. Nobody's saying that. These are the special 1.00

00:20:56.280 denigrations and accusations that are reserved for men and for boys. So think about what happens.

00:21:05.340 Think about a boy, you know, just follow along these four steps and think about a boy that falls

00:21:12.800 into every category I've listed. And that's, that's millions of boys do. There are millions of boys who

00:21:19.480 you start with, they're, they're watching porn at 10 or 11. They hit puberty. They're dealing with all

00:21:26.040 that. They don't have a dad at home. They go to school. They get diagnosed with ADHD. They're told

00:21:31.840 there's something wrong. Their, their, their entire time, they spent 12, 13 years in, in, uh, in grade

00:21:37.200 school. And the entire time they're there, they're told there's something wrong with you. There's

00:21:40.780 something wrong with you. Sit down, shut up, repeat the information on the ditto, shut up, sit down. 1.00

00:21:47.120 There's something wrong with you. You're diseased. You have a condition. Take this pill. Why didn't you 1.00

00:21:51.780 take your pill today? And that's what the boy is dealing with for 12 or 13 years.

00:21:59.440 And then he comes out and let's say he manages to go to college and that's when the feminism hits 1.00

00:22:06.940 him. And that's when the feminists go after Abby. He's just, he's barely, he can barely walk. He's

00:22:12.160 emerging from this gauntlet, like just, just, just bruised and battered and, uh, and on drugs and

00:22:19.180 everything. And he gets to college. And then that's what, you're a man. You've got privilege. Men are

00:22:25.500 dangerous. And then at that point, it's just his defenses are down. He's susceptible to it.

00:22:34.820 There's nothing he can do. So after we have broken men down, broken boys down, I should say

00:22:42.520 the final step. Now that we have them like putty in our hands, um, now the final step

00:22:51.120 is to remove their masculinity from them, a masculinity that they've never really come into

00:22:57.620 in the first place, that they never understood, uh, that they never grew into because they never

00:23:02.780 had, because of the last three things I mentioned. And so it's not very hard for our culture then to

00:23:08.840 come in and the feminists and the college colleges, they can come in and they could just take this 1.00

00:23:14.080 masculinity that's already bruised and battered and they just remove it from the man and feminize 0.98

00:23:20.140 him. Why do you think it is? There's another medical mystery here. So we've got the medical

00:23:28.240 mystery of why is it mostly boys that have ADHD? Another medical mystery is why is it mostly men

00:23:36.340 that are transgender? Have you noticed that? Most of these stories that you hear about transgender

00:23:42.920 eight-year-old, eight-year-olds whose parents are so accepting of it, which is by the way,

00:23:49.540 their parents are abusive and should be in prison, but, um, their parents are so accepting of it.

00:23:54.940 In almost every case, it's a boy turning into a girl. And then as you get older, the transgender 1.00

00:24:01.840 community is the transgender community is comprised primarily of men. Why is that? Could it have 1.00

00:24:11.160 something to do with the fact that there is a crisis of identity in American manhood? There

00:24:22.880 is a crisis of identity because we've got these boys who grow up and they never learn what it means

00:24:27.980 to be a man. They never learn to embrace their masculinity. They never learn to see it as a good

00:24:34.840 and constructive and beautiful thing. They never learn to, that, that, that, you know, there's a

00:24:43.020 place for men in society that they never learned that society needs men to be men and to do certain

00:24:50.380 things and to, you know, men are the ones who are fighting the wars and building the bridges and

00:24:54.480 building the buildings and protecting and providing it's men doing that mostly. I mean, men literally,

00:25:01.160 literally built this civilization, but they don't learn that because that would be upsetting,

00:25:08.920 you know, to the feminists and that might hurt a girl's feelings. So we can't talk about that.

00:25:15.340 And so that means, so what do we do? We, we, all of the things that men uniquely contribute,

00:25:20.620 we say, you can't talk about that. No, you don't, you're not unique at all. You don't contribute

00:25:24.880 anything special at all. Shut up. You're sexist patriarchy. How dare you suggest that there's 1.00

00:25:31.600 anything special about being a man? There's nothing special about you. You're not special.

00:25:38.020 Being a man is nothing. A woman could do anything that a man can do. 1.00

00:25:43.060 That's what we say to men. But to women, we say, oh my gosh, being a woman is beautiful. It's a special.

00:25:47.300 You could do anything. I mean, the world needs women. I mean, we need more women, CEOs and more 1.00

00:25:51.540 women in business. We need more women in the military. We need women. We need more women. 1.00

00:25:54.800 We need women, ghostbusters and women, superheroes. We need women all over the place. Cause you know, 1.00

00:25:58.660 we can't do just men. Women are so special. 1.00

00:26:04.920 And then a boy tries to pipe up and say, well, what about me? I'll shut up you. 0.70

00:26:08.000 And then, uh, somehow, mysteriously, we end up with a bunch of men who are feminized. And in some

00:26:23.580 cases, literally feminized. They, they, they, they literally try to become women. 1.00

00:26:28.800 I think all these things are related. And I think we need to face this, um,

00:26:36.740 because this is what our sons will face and we shouldn't look away from it.

00:26:45.280 And if we care about our sons and we love our sons, then, um, we need to prepare them to deal

00:26:49.460 with all these things because this is the world that they're entering into.

00:26:54.380 All right, everybody. Thank you for watching. And, uh, I'll talk to you tomorrow.

The Matt Walsh Show - April 12, 2018

Ep. 8 - The Great Disadvantages Our Sons Face In Modern America

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