Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 872: Dr. Warren Farrell- The Boy Crisis
Episode Date: October 4, 2018In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin speak with Dr. Warren Farrell, the author of The Boy Crisis. Dr. Farrell is a controversial but very level-headed and well-spoken activist that is pushing for the r...eturn to sanity with respect to gender roles. Why one sex is not bad and the other good. (7:12) Why men are the disposable sex. (16:12) How we have trained men to constantly test each other and disconnect from their feelings. (21:19) Why men earn more. (28:40) How men have evolved from human beings to human doers. (32:20) Why you have to do, what you have to do. The male obligation to support their family. (37:30) His thoughts on the movement to dissolve gender roles. (40:25) The ultimate dance: Getting men and women to understand each other. (50:29) Boy’s lives matter. (59:34) What are the consequences of being a child of divorce? (1:02:00) Statistics of children growing up without a father. (1:09:00) Why training children to win, comes with training children to lose. (1:14:50) Is victimhood a result of growing up without a father? (1:16:56) His take on the anti-bullying movement. (1:22:51) “I am women, I have been wronged.” His stance on the Kavanaugh investigation. (1:28:58) Whenever only one sex wins, both sexes lose. (1:34:49) The pivotal movement that got him to switch his stance on the NOW movement. (1:36:53) Why does he feel he gets so much hate? (1:41:33) Can the blame fall on politicians for the victimhood mentality? The gender pay gap. (1:43:40) What issues we will face in the future? (1:46:10) Why it’s not a good definition of power to feel obligated to earn money that someone spends, while we die early. (1:54:15) The value of training the concept of the Male Warrior. (1:59:50) Featured Guest/People Mentioned: Warren Farrell, PhD (@drwarrenfarrell) Twitter Website 1440 Multiversity: Event in Scotts Valley, CA Jordan Peterson (@jordan.b.peterson) Instagram Thomas Sowell (@ThomasSowell) Twitter Links/Products Mentioned: The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do about It – Book by Warren Farrell PhD (Author), John Gray PhD (Author) Warren Farrell protest at University of Toronto - Full version Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap -- and What Women Can Do About It – Book by Dr. Warren Farrell (Author) Why 43% of Women With Children Leave Their Jobs, and How to Get Them Back Parental ADHD Symptomology and Ineffective Parenting: The Connecting Link of Home Chaos General Prevalence of ADHD Statistics About Children of Divorce The Myth of Male Power - Book by Warren Farrell The Consequences of Fatherlessness Father and Child Reunion: How to Bring the Dads We Need to the Children We Love - by Warren Farrell (Author), Ph.D. (Author) Would you like to be coached by Sal, Adam & Justin? You can get 30 days of virtual coaching from them for FREE at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Get our newest program, MAPS Strong, an expertly programmed and phased strongman inspired training program designed in collaboration with World’s Strongest Man competitor Robert Oberst to trigger new muscle building adaptations and get you STRONG. Get it at www.mapsstrong.com! Get MAPS Prime, MAPS Anywhere, MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, MAPS Aesthetic, the Butt Builder Blueprint, the Sexy Athlete Mod AND KB4A (The MAPS Super Bundle) packaged together at a substantial DISCOUNT at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Make EVERY workout better with MAPS Prime, the only pre-workout you need… it is now available at mindpumpmedia.com Also check out Thrive Market! Thrive Market makes purchasing organic, non-GMO affordable. With prices up to 50% off retail, Thrive Market blows away most conventional, non-organic foods. PLUS, they offer a NO RISK way to get started which includes: 1. One FREE month’s membership 2. $20 Off your first three purchases of $49 or more (That’s $60 off total!) 3. Free shipping on orders of $49 or more Have Sal, Adam & Justin personally train you via video instruction on our YouTube channel, Mind Pump TV. Be sure to Subscribe for updates. Get Organifi, certified organic greens, protein, probiotics, etc at www.organifi.com/mindpump Use the code “mindpump” for 20% off. Go to foursigmatic.com/mindpump and use the discount code “mindpump” for 15% off of your first order of health & energy boosting mushroom products. Add to the incredible brain enhancing effect of Kimera Koffee with www.brain.fm/mindpump 10 Free sessions! Music for the brain for incredible focus, sleep and naps! Also includes 20% if you purchase! Please subscribe, rate and review this show! Each week our favorite reviewers are announced on the show and sent Mind Pump T-shirts! Have questions for Mind Pump? Each Monday on Instagram (@mindpumpmedia) look for the QUAH post and input your question there. (Sal, Adam & Justin will answer as many questions as they can)
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If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go.
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We are introducing, maybe our oldest interview. What do you mean? Was
Warren the oldest guy we've had? Was he? He's 107, right? No, no, no, no, God, you're gonna
fight. I got a jab because he called me skinny. Oh, he called me smaller than
South. Yeah, he called me the least developed in the group. That just shows he is quite
observant and is that
but war farewell was actually only man to be elected three times to the
national organization of women's uh... board so that's a bit of this
movement yeah as part of the seventies wow and then he left the feminist
movement and uh... started advocating for boys and for men because what he
saw that was going on yeah what happened. Well, you'll find out in this episode.
I think you'll find out.
He talks a lot about data and statistics.
He is totally an advocate for everybody,
for both genders, and what he sees that's happened
in the past and what's happening right now
is probably not good for boys or for men.
I mean, suicide rights through the roof for men, forcing incarceration through the roof for men. I mean, you know, suicide rights through the roof for men,
you know, forcing incarceration through the roof for men.
And he debunks some myths.
It's funny that it's considered controversial
what he talks about because he's not like anti women
or anything like that.
He's for both genders at the end of the day.
He wants everybody to have equality.
Yeah, and in the true sense, right?
Like, well, this is one of my favorite guests
that you've ever brought, Sal.
This is definitely Sal who brought this,
and I was unfamiliar with him until we started doing research
on him, and I thought, man,
with the climate that we're in right now,
this guy has to have one of the best messages
and his ability to articulate his points is just incredible.
This is a very powerful episode in my opinion. He's definitely talks a little slower, a little bit
quieter, but that's because he takes his time when he speaks and he says really, really intelligent
stuff. We also did a YouTube video of this. So if you want to watch the video, it's going to be on our mind pump TV channel so you guys can watch it on YouTube,
if you like. But this guy was just in close to two hours full of information. And in fact,
I told Katrina when I got home, she asked me how the interview went. And I said, you know,
I don't honestly listen to the show that much anymore unless somebody is, you know, we're getting
lots of comments on a specific show, then I'll go back and listen to the show that much anymore unless somebody is, we're getting lots of comments
on a specific show, then I'll go back and listen
to something to find out what it was that everybody liked.
This is one of the episodes I 100% will listen to
because there was so much information in there.
I enjoyed listening to him in the two hours.
I want to go back and definitely retain all that.
You and parents, I mean, I highly suggest this.
For parents, he gives like real good insight.
Especially divorce parents.
Oh, yeah.
He gave me in the fields, man, when he started talking about divorce
and how to fix kids and what you can do.
Yeah.
I mean, the guy is brilliant.
He's a, you know, he's a PhD.
He wrote the current book that's out that's making waves.
It's called The Boy Crisis.
He co-authored that with John Gray,
who's the author of the famous book,
Menor from Mars, Women of From Venus.
All right.
So that, he wrote some stuff in there too.
So it's a really interesting book.
He also wrote a book called The Myth of Male Power.
And another book, Why Men Earn More.
They're starting the truth behind the pay gap
and what women can do about it.
They're also hosting an event October 26th to the 28th
with John Gray and Ashanti Branch.
This is gonna be in Scott's Valley.
It's in my backyard.
It's an interactive workshop on the boy cross,
it's crisis.
How do they sign up for this or how do they even go to it?
I think they have to go to the 1440 Multiversity website.
Okay, not sure exactly what the URL is for that,
but if you search on Google, you can find it to search it. It's on the. Hopefully it'll
be in the show notes. I'm sure Jack you'll get it in the show notes. You guys can just go
to there and probably click over to the link if you guys want to sign up. You know, he
also touched on Black Lives Matter, which is really cool. We even talked about cry closets
a little bit with him. Like we get some really
good topics and he's a very gender identity, right? He's a very intelligent empathetic person,
which I think is important when you're communicating, you know, what he's trying to say with how sensitive
some of these topics have become. Now he's lived on both sides of the spectrum. Right, right,
right. It's refreshing. Now the 1440 Multiversity, it believes on 800 Bethany Drive
in Scotts Valley, so people are trying to look it up.
Sign up for it.
It looks freaking awesome.
Now, other than that, do we have a website or something
we can point people to to find him, Doug,
or should just people just get his book online?
Actually, just go to 1440.org.
That's where the multiplicity is located
and you can find his details about the workshop there.
As far as the books, go to Amazon.
Excellent, thank you very much, Doug.
Also, I do want to mention,
people have asked us for the past, I don't know, year,
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It went gangbusters.
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It's really the program, that kind of programming is the type of programming Adam used when he
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You need to be at least moderately advanced even to do the program because it's so much
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It's half off.
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Go to mapsblack.com.
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You want to burn body fat some of our other maps programs may be more appropriate or you can get a bundle where you can combine maps programs and
Train yourself out for six months or a year, all those programs are find at mindpumpmedia.com.
You know, I saw a video of you on, I think it was, it was either Stossel or Reason that
posted it where you were doing a talk at, I believe it was a Canadian university, or protesters.
Only a hundred.
Protesters outside of it.
Is that a low amount of protesters?
I know, you say that's a lot.
That was the most...
I mean, I've never had more than four protesters in any other event.
And this was not a hundred protesters only.
They created a body block to prevent people from coming.
Yeah. Wow. We're going right now. You can pull that closer because this is fascinating.
They literally were preventing, this is what I saw in the video at least and I guess it's
been confirmed. They were literally preventing people from just hearing him talk and you know what
they were chanting? Fuck, they were saying fuck Warren, fuck Warren over and over again.
It was like, I was like, what are they doing?
Why are they so angry?
They were angry because they felt that when I talk about the politics of sex in a book
I wrote called the Myth of Male Power, that I talk about that there's a whole sexual
dance that men and women have.
The traditional female dance has been a tracked resist and the traditional male dance has been attract, resist,
and the traditional male dance has been pursued, persist,
and that that tango is beginning to change,
and it's probably very healthy that that tango
is beginning to change,
but that it isn't a one sex is bad,
and the other sex is good.
And so we see this now with Kavanaugh,
where the current culture of Hashtag Mi 2
is being so a boy today, ready to go into college.
In 26 states in the United States, he needs to get affirmative consent, which means the
woman needs to say an affirmative yes before he holds her hand.
So he needs to ask her if he can hold her hand and then she needs to say yes. And so
if he doesn't say yes, he can legitimately be accused of sexual assault for touching her hand
without getting an affirmative consent. Now, this is in 26 states. This is in this is the law.
Some variation of that law very close to what I saying, in 26 states in the United States.
This is a result of the Office of Civil Rights under the Obama administration saying that
there was, the first layer of this was that rape on campus was a common thing, which was
not true, but it was based on the rape being defined, have you ever had sex in a way at
a time that you didn't feel like you wanted to have sex.
No one explained that men, males on campus answer that question almost to the same degree
as females do.
But for both males and females, the great majority of times, it is like, you know, I got drunk
and I got involved and I got started.
It was a little bit like asking the question, have you eaten potato chips
more frequently, more potato chips than you've wanted when you started the process? And so both
males and females feeling comfortable have had an experience at some point of doing that, but they
use the female statistic only to just to say that there is, you know, there's a rape epidemic on
campus. So from that, the Office of Civil Rights
in the Department of Education issued it,
but they call it dear colleague letter.
And this letter said, if campuses must do the following,
they must have this affirmative consent.
And then, if the mail is accused at any,
so let me go back to the original part of that.
The male who does not get that affirmative consent,
who does get that affirmative consent,
if the woman's, he must also get it
at every other stage of intimacy in the relationship
up until intercourse.
So like, can I hold your hand?
Yes, can I kiss you?
Yes, can I hold you?
Yes, can I touch your breast?
What if I can, can I kiss you? Can I check this? Can I go from kissing? Yes. Can I kiss you? Yes. Can I hold you? Can I kiss you?
Can I kiss you?
Can I go from kissing your lips to kissing, tongue kissing and so on.
And if he doesn't get that, he can be accused of sexual assault at any given stage.
But here's the amazing thing, is that if he does do all that and gets an affirmative consent,
and then later he's the one to initiate,
excuse me, a breakup in the relationship,
she might be angry at that and then say,
well, you really didn't get an affirmative consent
at this stage or that stage.
And so he has no paperwork to indicate that he does.
So theoretically, if he really wants to protect himself,
he has to have paperwork to submit to
her at each stage of intimacy.
So you can, you know, and if I mean that's sexy.
I mean, could you imagine getting signed off?
Exactly.
And I'm going to blow job.
Hey, let's listen to my job.
Well, no, that's a very good point, Justin,
because I don't even think women want that.
Could you imagine being with a girl
feeling the chemistry and then saying,
you know, can I kiss you?
Maybe that's okay, but then, hey, you mind if I use my tongue?
You mind if I do this?
You mind if I do that?
She might not even want that.
I remember, right.
Well, exactly.
I remember when I was in college and I said to,
I don't know if you, if the word parking,
like you go out parking, is that still a word these days?
No.
No, okay. Like go to the drive is that still a word these days? No. Okay.
Like go to the drive-ins.
Thanks you could have lied.
I was,
I was,
throw me a pony around.
I was,
I was,
I was,
so parking was like necking or,
you know,
or making out that type of thing.
And so I said to this woman that is out with Iris,
I still remember her name because of her response.
And so I said, we had a wonderful evening.
I said, we'd like to go parking and she goes, Warren, you don't ask a woman if she wants
to park.
You park.
I don't want to, you know, this forces me into having to admit that I want to do this.
You know, I want you to take the lead, take over.
Right.
If I don't want to park with you or I don't want to do something,
I'll let you know.
I just will let you know in words.
And so, and this is, of course, the dynamic that women have traditionally expected
and most women today, if a guy is coming around in a date and he has
11 different forms there for each set of intimacy, just like you said,
this is going to make like a really a turn off.
Because, and the function of this historically
has been, if a woman says no, first of all,
a woman felt that she wasn't respected if she didn't say
some knows between eye contact and intercourse,
and given us guys with artistosterone.
If the woman didn't say no, we'd be having intercourse
within about 10 or 15 minutes
at the most after the first hand holding. But the functions of the woman saying no, was she
discovered which guys, how did a guy handle notes, which gave her information about how does a man
as a future salesman handle a no? The first note is he back off and you know not come back again
And that's not a guy that's gonna be a good provider on the other hand if he gets furious and upset and starts accusing her of things
He's not gonna be a good husband and so she got all this information
It's important from this from this from this process, but the feedback is dependent on a
mode of male female connection and that mode was that we as males were expected
to do the risking of sexual rejection.
Women have the option of risking sexual rejection,
but the expectation is still on our shoulders.
And what I was suggesting in the boy crisis
and in other, you know, in the boy crisis in particular,
is that this needs
to change.
If we want, you know, right now, virtually every entrepreneur, the common denominator of
every entrepreneur, is the willingness to take risks.
Virtually every multi-millionaire or multi-billionaire entrepreneur that we know of, that's self-made, that hasn't come from a background
of wealth is a male.
And one of the reasons that the entrepreneurs
who are billionaires and self-made are males
is because we learn during all the vulnerable years
of our life to be figure out how to take risks,
how to get rejection, how to go back,
and come at it with persistence,
but with style and class or humor or some combination of both that fits the occasion.
And that's what an entrepreneur needs.
So the women are complaining.
The feminists are complaining that there aren't equal numbers of women in high places. Well, one of the many reasons why there aren't
is because that they aren't trained in risk taking nearly as much as guys are.
And so if women are going to say what they want,
they need to say what they want, not just in terms of veto power.
They need to take responsibility and be accountable
and take the risks of rejection and start being trained to do that.
The age is of 14, 15, 16 when they start to begin to be interested in sex.
Now, Dr. Ferrell, do you think this is because evolutionarily speaking,
you know, I've heard scientists and anthropologists say that men from an evolutionary standpoint are disposable.
In the sense that you could have a society of 1,000 women
and 100 men, and that society would succeed and be OK.
But if we flip that, it would never work, just because men
can't bear children.
But we can impregnate multiple women
within a short period of time.
So it makes us, evolutionarily speaking,
we were the ones that took the risks because we could die and we would be okay.
So we would be the ones that would go hunt, which was very dangerous, or we would historically
be the ones to die in battle and war because if we died it was okay.
And so it's part of that, would you say it's part of that evolutionary process where
you know, through cultures and through maybe even biology, we're just, we're supposed to
be the ones
that take risks for a long period of time,
but now that we have a modern times,
maybe it's changing because it's not as necessary.
So you're putting your fingers on an extremely important issue,
which is when I wrote the book, The Myth of Male Power,
the subtitle of it was,
why men are the disposable sex?
Oh wow.
And so this gets us into a number of different,
really important areas.
One is that we've been trained historically speaking
to have heroic intelligence.
And heroic intelligence is intelligence for a short life.
Mm-hmm.
Whereas the alternative to heroic intelligence
is health intelligence, which is intelligence for a long life.
And so with heroic intelligence,
we were trained to do things like associate the willingness
to dispose of ourselves with being a hero,
like being a general and an army.
And until recently, until about 30, 40, 50 years ago,
almost all the presidency,
a very high percentage of the presidency
that at United States had military background,
many of the more generals like General Eisenhower.
And so we had a huge respect for men who managed
to be willing to risk their lives and save us,
but who did survive the process.
And so part of what we did was give our boys social bribes
and the parents wanted their son on the one hand
to be safe.
On the other hand, oh man, I'm so proud of him.
He joined the Marines.
Look, here's a picture of him in his uniform.
Doesn't he look great?
And it's just like his dad and his grandpa,
they all were top level Marines. And oh my goodness, not only did he join the military,
but he joined the special forces, you know, he joined some elite groups.
So the word elite was another social bribe to get him to be willing to risk his life at
an even deeper and greater level.
And so all of this was training for heroic intelligence. And part of the way we train boys for
heroic intelligence is at a very early age to get them to associate their preparation for their
disposability with being proud of themselves. And so we got them to play football. And we got the cheerleaders, the most attractive girls
in the school, to say first in 10,
you know, risk a concussion again.
You know, she was an executive,
that would be a great cheer.
Yeah, we did.
And which is,
CTE, CTE, very good CTE.
Everybody, CTE, don't know what you'll be.
It's hurt to me, yeah.
A little bit.
A little too close to home.
And so, you know, the, the, the, the, you know, there was, the cheerleaders never said,
be careful there, be safe again.
You know, make a plan that isn't so, so, so, destructives you.
It was, you know, hit them again, hit them again, harder, harder. You know, which is basically, you know, hit them again, hit him again, hard or harder, which
is basically hit him again, hit him again, concussion again, type of thing.
And so we learn to associate the willingness to risk those concussions with being a hero,
being an honor.
And the cheerleader would cheer for us.
And we're 14, 15, 16, 17 year old boys, and we're looking at the most beautiful women
in the school, kick their legs up,
and we see it at their dress,
and they're the ones that are available to me,
if I'm willing to risk my life.
And so those became the associations
or what I call the social bribes
that associated being willing to be disposable
with being loved.
And so women associate being loved with being cared for, attended to, bought gifts, you
know, bought diamonds being paid for.
We associate love with having to perform to get to be able to not only have the love
of the woman, but to risk our lives and show that we're disposable to take
and then to go ahead and risk rejection and then to pay money.
And the more she's beautiful, the more we're expected to take her to a nice restaurant.
And every kiss begins with K.
Now, the result of this, now that you're saying this, it makes perfect sense.
Because the result of that, if you stretch it out and extrapolate,
what would be the result of that of the societal pressures like that?
Where the boys are encouraged to take these risks with their lives,
if you will, either symbolically or literally,
and with the fact that you're saying the girls associate love with care
and whatever, what that ends up looking like is more
extremely successful men, but also more men
that have died at work, more work accidents,
more maybe suicide, more, you know,
the other type of risky behavior that may not be so
desirable like jail or whatever,
does that make sense?
Is that-
That's exactly the follow-up on that.
Okay. And so, you know, men have learned that all the hazardous jobs
are 90 to 100% males, 93% of the people who die
and work in general are killed at work are males.
And so if there is a shortage of money,
especially in inner-city communities,
you take risks and sell drugs,
and then you may kill off an opponent
that's trying to poke in your territory. And so that then gets you in jail to a much greater degree.
And so you're the one that makes the plan to rob the bank. You're the one that does something
that's risky to earn money so you can get the car, get the drugs, get the reputation,
to earn money so you can get the car, get the drugs, get the reputation and get a woman. Not the only, it's not the only goal to get a woman, but it is one of the goals to get
a woman to get the parental respect and to get your self-respect.
And so we have trained males to get self-respect by, so now here's the connection to health
intelligence or the disconnection to health intelligence.
If you're going to be prepared to be in war and die, and your first step is boot camp.
And so a boot camp, let's say someone is Jewish, they're going to call that person an anti-Semitic
name.
And the purpose of calling them an anti-Semitic name is so that they cannot be thrown off. God, you're training them to disconnect from their feelings
and you're going to push them to do something that's very risky
in order to repair themselves to be killed.
I want to interject there because we've speculating on this talk about this.
Yes, because for anybody who's maybe not following along or maybe doesn't agree, you just look and see
the way men tease each other
and the nicknames that men give each other
versus the nicknames that we miss.
The worst nicknames we could possibly come up with.
We are literally terrible to each other
and we love it and laugh about it.
You know, I tell the story all the time,
I had a friend who had a restaurant
and he was giving me a tour once
and he was introducing me to everybody.
This is John, this is Susan, and then he introduces me to someone and
says, and this guy's name is nine. We keep walking. And when I come back around, I said,
nine. It says that German name and everybody starts laughing. And he says, hey, show him
why they call you nine. He holds his hands up and he's missing a finger. And that's
a classic way that men nickname each other. I don't think women call each other terrible nicknames as well.
And you're saying it's because we're literally constantly testing each other.
Well, we're constantly testing each other.
And we saw this as, you know, I came into the studio this morning.
And you had mentioned that it was 17 years and 16 years and 15 years and the first thing
I did is said, oh, I could tell by the amount of, you know, you're pumped up.
Yeah, exactly.
And so we liked you. Yeah you know, you're pumped up. Yeah, exactly. And so we, I immediately liked you.
Yeah.
Even though you put me down.
Yeah.
It was a way, it was my way of saying, like,
I find you guys, you know, I like you guys.
I have, I like your energy.
And we bond through that, you know,
what covered put downs.
And anyone that can't hand that, we don't trust.
And the reason we don't do so,
if we're, we're a firefighters, let's say, and all the hazardous. And the reason we don't, so if we're fire fighters,
let's say, in all the hazardous professions, the more hazardous the profession, the more
the commerce of the male and the hazardous profession is the trading of what covered
put down. And the reason for that is, let's say I'm a firefighter and the son of the fire chief who graduates from Harvard
is coming in. Well, I'm not sure that that son of the fire chief that graduated from Harvard
is going to risk his life to save mine. And so I imagine that if we go into a house
and the roof falls in and I'm trapped underneath that guy is not sure he's going to risk his life to save me.
And so, if he's a primadonna, I have to worry.
If he's a guy that can sort of like be put down, who can handle criticism, who can go with the flow,
he's far more likely, I sense, to be willing to risk his life because he doesn't treat
himself so seriously.
And he's willing to be part of a team that can do that, be self-effacing.
And so now the trouble comes.
And this is, you know, the original question was, why was I protested?
Because all of these things, we all know are true. I mean, all of us
guys know are true, and thoughtful women know that are true, but the feminist community, that I
was a part of, that I was on the Board of Directors of the National Organization. The only man,
I think, one of the only men ever. Ever elected three times to the Board of now in New York City,
and so I'm a very deep supporter of true women's liberation.
But when women's liberation, when feminism created a basic ideology that said the world is
a patriarchal world that is where the rules are made by men to benefit men at the expense
of women, that completely misunderstood the role of men.
When men do earn more money than women, but not men in general, dads earn more money
than wives to, than mothers do, and they start earning more money than mothers do because
they increase their obligations and their responsibilities when they become dads.
So we give up doing the things we want to do,
like teaching, which is a passion,
or being an artist, which is a passion.
And when you have children, you give those things up to do things
that make money.
So you give up being that teacher
and you become an administrator.
You give up being able to come home every night
to see your children, to see your family.
And you become a national sales representative instead of a local sales representative.
And because we make more money as the local sales representative
or we drive an Uber 60 hours a week,
the feminist community says see on average men earn more money
and they imply that men earn more money for the same work.
But when I wrote a book called Why Men Earn More and What Women Can Do About It, I found
that there are, in fact, 25 measurable differences between what men do to earn more money and
what women do and what women do those same things they actually earn more than their male counterparts.
And we see that as you dig deeper, that women who have never been married,
who have never had children earn 117% of what men who have never been married and never
have children earn. And this is controlling for a number of years' work, age, and education.
Now, let me comment on that because I'm gonna make a Speculation and this is just me guessing but I'm guessing it's because
Knowing myself. I'm a father and having friends that became dads when men become dads the first thing that we think is
I need to make more money
I need to bust my ass and you get serious
Women think that when they don't have kids. Okay. I don't have kids
I don't have family. I need to bust my ass make make a lot of money. And maybe they're doing it because of their career.
When women tend to have children,
what I've seen is they tend to value
flexibility in their work,
wanting to spend more time with their kids.
This is obviously traditional stereotype,
but I think it's probably true more often than not.
Am I offered?
No, you're 100% on.
This is exactly what I found when I did the research
for Y-Men or more.
And these are all things that women can do.
So when you see this particularly, many women say,
well, bosses have a stereotype of women.
And so they feel that when a woman's gonna have a child
that she's gonna be less devoted to her kids,
to a work, and it turns out that this is actually quite accurate.
So women who have master's degrees, MBAs,
who start their own business earn only 49% of what men earn
who start their own business.
Because and why?
When we asked the men what they wanted
out of starting their own business,
76% said their first priority was to earn money.
Women's first priority by their own acknowledgement
was to have flexibility, exactly what you said,
was to be able to be close to home,
to be near the children, to be able to have free time, to be their own boss, to be fulfilled.
And then down the scale about number five was to earn money.
And so the importance of that statistic is that women who own their own businesses have
no bosses to discriminate against them.
It's their own.
As their own choices. is have no bosses to discriminate against them. It's the wrong one.
As their own choices.
And your original point about the women who have never
been married and never had children, you're exactly right.
When a woman senses that she wants, she's not going to be married
and not have children, she doesn't sense that she's going to
have somebody else to support her.
So she goes out there and makes a good living and does very well. And she
gets promoted more quickly than her male counterpart, even in the 500 top companies in the country.
I think it's important to note too that the important thing is that people have the
freedom to choose whatever direction they want to go. And when you look at the societies
with the most egalitarian type policies,
like some of the Scandinavian countries,
you actually find that the disparity between the jobs
that men and women choose are even greater.
And it's not because they're being forced,
it's because they tend to like and choose different things.
They have the freedom to choose different things.
Women have as much freedom to choose know work 80 hours a week and be
ECO and men have just as much right you know a freedom to choose to stay at home
But they they even more so choose the different things and what they actually found and some other data that I read was that
The the more the more difficult
Circumstances were the more likely women were to seek out jobs that made more money and you saw a smaller gap, mainly because they kind of had to.
But once things were more prosperous
and they had more freedom to choose to be at home,
that tends to be more often than not
what they choose to do and the men more often
than not choose the responsibility of being the breadwinner.
And I don't see why this is a bad thing necessarily.
Now you were in the feminist, you were part of the now group,
and that was back in the 70s, I believe, right?
Yes, correct.
Has feminism changed since then?
Because I keep hearing people talk about
third wave feminism and how it's changed.
And what were they fighting for before
and what's different about it now?
When I started my work with the feminist movement,
a glorious dynamin, Betty Friedan used to both say
pretty much the same thing.
Gloria Steinem put it in these words,
what the world needs is more women at work
and more men at home and more men as dads.
And I agreed with that because what I,
what my belief was at the beginning
is that we have mastered survival enough
in developed countries to be able
to allow people the freedom to be who they want to be, to be human beings rather than human
doings. We men were never trained to be human beings, we were trained to be human doings.
I'm a doctor, I'm a lawyer, I'm an author, I'm a soldier. And so we knew that if we were to be worth anything as a man, no woman was going to marry
a guy who's unemployed, but I love the books he reads.
And so he's very thoughtful and sensitive and caring and warm, but I don't think he's going
to earn any money.
So I'm going to marry him because he's really sensitive and warm.
And so we all knew this and women knew this and women among themselves are very specific
about they want you know, give me a salary man.
It's what the way they put it in Japan or you know, you know, you find me a man that's
wealthy, which what does he do?
What does he do?
And so we're basically, we were trained to be human doings.
And so, but net so as a feminist movement evolved, two things
happened. Well, lots of things happened, but two of the things that happened is one was
that there was a higher, we evolved out of the civil rights movement in which there was
an oppressor and an oppressed. There was a slave owner and a slave that we evolved from.
So there was a clear hierarchy of oppressor and oppressed.
And then the early part of feminism,
a good portion of it was Marxist feminism
and Lenin believed that the nuclear family
was set up to be oppressive to women.
And so the feminist movement grew out
of another oppressor versus oppressor. It was Marxist feminism. You had the oppressor
class and the oppressed. And so we, since we earned more money, mended, we were considered
a kin to the oppressor class. And so that, and that was the fault of us as feminists.
We assumed that because men earned more money,
it was about male privilege or male power.
We didn't understand that the road to high pay
is a toll road.
And when you become a dad, you're willing to make those tolls
because you care more about your children not having
to pay those tolls in the future.
So walk out, you know, if we wanted to go from here to the airport, any airport, we would
probably call Uber or Lyft.
And 90% of those drivers are going to be males, not because they have male privilege, but
because they have male obligations to support families and anybody can become a new driver.
And the men do it more frequently than the women
because they have more obligations once they have children.
Or they're planning to be single
and they're wanting to have enough money saved up
so that they can be valued enough
to be able to ask women out and pay for women.
And so what the women's movement did
is started gender courses all over the world.
And so when the men earn more money,
they immediately call that power in privilege
rather than calling that,
I am so appreciative of men for when the children come
and that we try to create options for our wives to be with the children or not with the children.
And so we have, in this current moment, when many women have children,
40% of women do not work outside the home at all.
40% of women work full-time, which is 35 hours a week or more, and 20% work part-time. So, women have the
choice of working full-time, children full-time, or some combination of both. But, and men have three
choices too. Option one is to work full-time, option two is to work full-time, and option three is to
work full-time. And that's considered male privilege. Do we know what the statistics are, how many men
work full-time when they have children versus how many men who stay at home?
Yes, it's about, let's see, I think of the,
of among the people who stay at home,
it's about six or seven percent males
who stay at home full-time.
And so that, but there's some men and women
who don't stay at home at all,
where both of you have people work.
Now, I do see that the early feminist movement or women's movement was addressing some real issues
that needed to be addressed, right? Like voting, there were laws where women couldn't do certain things
without their husband's consent. Society speaking, women were, if they did anything outside of what a woman was supposed to do, it was,
you know, the pressures were terrible and they weren't given necessarily the freedoms to be whatever
they wanted to be or do whatever they want. So I could definitely see the value in that.
But that kind of movement never really has happened for men where we feel that same kind of freedom.
Right. And so the two parts of what you said are very important because women did not have freedom.
Neither did men.
And so the, our parents did not go around talking about, oh, I'll give you
an example, my father, when I started in high school, I started taking an
interest in writing.
So I wanted to go to the public library to sort of do some research for my book.
And my father said, no, you have to say care of a weeding
and mowing the lawn and taking care of all these things
by the time I got finished with my chores.
I had maybe a half a day, a week to be able to go to the library
and that's about what he allowed.
And so when I wanted to write my first book,
he said, well, first of all, when I wanted to get a PhD,
he would say to me, Warren, maybe you should get not a PhD,
but a J-O-B.
Because he was fearful that I would try to do something
like be an author.
And he knew accurately that about 99% of authors,
just don't make it as authors.
It's a very, very challenging
way to make a living. If you don't have a family, yes, you could be an author. And, you know,
you could live off a small amount of money. But, so he was warning me right from the beginning,
it was not until I got my third book contract of more than $100,000 that he said, okay, I see,
maybe you can make it as an author, because he was
training me to be responsible.
And so not to have choice.
And so I didn't feel free.
And if you look at the biographies of Picasso or almost anybody who's an artist, almost
all of their fathers and mothers were saying, this is not responsible for a male to do.
Unless you came from a wealthy family,
you could not be, and something,
you could not do what you wanted to do.
You had to do what you had to do.
That was the job of a man.
And the feminist movement has taken
that set of obligations on men
and turned, because it led to men earning more money,
so their children could do better
and not have to earn more money
and have more options in their lifetime.
It took that set of willingness to be able
to support our family, the male obligation,
and it turned that into, oh, you earn more money,
therefore you have more rights,
therefore you dominate.
So how do you feel about this current movement
to dissolve gender roles?
I think it's wonderful to dissolve gender obligations.
That is, the obligations, so in other words,
I've always been in favor of what I call gender liberation.
And that's liberation from the rigid roles of the past
to more flexible roles
for the future for both men.
So we'll have some boys that will sort of naturally be, we don't want to do things that
are higher risk taking and that are, you know, that go to the military to be firefighters
and so on.
And if that boy chooses that, with knowing of the risks and chooses to play football, knowing
of the risks, great.
But let's see now if he's playing football at age eight, is that something that he's
consented to or is he picked up a desire to sort of, what are his motivations?
And the job of us as parents are to sort of talk through our children's motivations and
make sure that their motivations are not based on, I think I'll be more loved or I'll be
more respected and therefore be a victim of what I call social bribes.
It's to think through what they want for themselves in their life.
My father was the only strong part of myself
as a human being physically is my legs.
And when I was in high school, I was able to kick very far.
But I was 100, yet I was 149 pounds and six foot one.
And my father said, if you're a good kicker,
you'll be tackled and mangled.
And so my father prevented me from doing that kicking,
which I didn't like at the time,
but I'm glad he's probably saved by a self
in a significant way.
And so he helped me, in his case,
he didn't give me the option when I was in high school
to think that through, because he knew
that I would choose adulation over
a common sense preservation of my body.
And he just made clear, listen, your student body president, you have enough respect, give
other people a chance to have some respect.
It was his way of, you know.
Right.
So I talk about on the show a lot that, you know, as humans, we tend to do this when, because
I agree with you that the dissolving of gender roles is a good thing. But one of the things I talk a lot about
is that we tend to swing from one side and then we go the opposite extreme. Do you see
any of that happening right now with the dissolving of the gender roles? Is there anything
to worry about?
Yes. Well, first of all, I don't approve of dissolving of gender roles just because I don't believe in parenting by saying,
listen, I don't want you to do what's natural, if what's natural for you happens to be a gender role orientation.
So it is not freedom to be told you can't do something, you can't do your male role, you can't do your female role. It is freedom to sort of help parents to help think through.
Well, first of all, it's important for parents to do the type of boundary enforcement
that then trains children to have post-bone gratification, which then trains the child to be able to accomplish
whatever she or he wishes to do.
So she doesn't have to, she or he doesn't have to wish,
it doesn't have to resort to getting approval,
but out of this few competences it may naturally have.
But once you know how to do what you, how to do what you need to do, how to achieve a goal. If you
have a dream, let's say to be a gymnast, but your father and mother, every time you said,
I want ice cream, and your father and mother said, well, you could have ice cream after
you finish your peas, but then you had a few peas, and your father and mother said, well, you could have ice cream after you finish your peas. But then you had a few peas, and your father and mother said, well, OK, you had a few peas.
That's good enough.
Now you can have your ice cream.
You learn to manipulate a better deal, and you don't learn to finish doing what you have
to do, your peas, to get what you want to do, your ice cream.
Therefore, your goal of becoming a gymnast cannot be achieved because you haven't learned the discipline of
doing what you need to do to be a great gymnast or a great football player or a great scholar
or a great at anything. So no matter what your dream is when you're a kid, you cannot fulfill it.
That's if you don't have post bone gratification and you don't get post bone gratification without
a parent's enforcing boundaries.
And parents with forcing boundaries, oftentimes mothers will say, you can't have your ice
cream until you finish your peas.
And then especially if the mother and father are divorced, the mom will say, well, gee,
the kid has gone through a divorce.
He's feeling badly.
He was bullied today.
And she'll find some reason to say,
okay, sweetie, I'll tell you what, have a few more peas and then you can have your ice cream.
So the kid learns, oh, with mom, I can manipulate a better deal.
With dad, he's much more likely, or she's much more likely to hear, excuse me, we have
a deal here.
The deal is you can't have your ice cream until you finish your peas.
And so the kid goes, you're so mean. And dad
goes, you can cry about being my being mean too. And then there'll be no more ice cream
tomorrow night either. And so the kid with dad was much more likely to go, all right, the
only way I'm going to get this ice cream here is to finish my piece. So children raised
by dads primarily, only 15% likely to have ADHD. Children raised by moms are 30% likely to have ADHD.
And one of the reasons for that
is that the children raised by dads
learn that they have to focus their attention
on doing what they have to do,
otherwise they don't get what they want to do.
And we as dads do this through things like rough housing,
as well. We with rough
housing, we create a bond. And that bond is makes kids less less resentful about doing
something that we say that they need to do. Like, okay, we'll do some rough housing until
nine eight thirty, then you have to get completely ready for bed. Bedtime is 9.15.
And if you get completely ready with your homework
and chauires, et cetera, by 9 o'clock,
we'll have from 9 to 9.15 to do anything you want,
including rough housing.
Mother goes, why, you must be kidding,
you can't get the kids riled up before bed.
And she's also going when she sees mom
into dad rough housing.
Like, you not realize here that sooner or later,
somebody's going to get hurt.
Sooner or later, somebody's going to, you know,
inevitably somebody cries.
And inevitably somebody cries.
And so mom is going, I feel like with dad,
I have only one more child to have to monitor.
Yeah.
And so, and then, but dads don't read the boy crisis
or anything else on parenting to learn that there's about ten differences
between dad-style parenting and mom-style parenting, and each of dad-styles parenting have two things in common.
They help children enormously, and dads don't know how they help children.
And moms can't hear what dads don't say. And so just taking the rough housing example,
very few dads will say, you know, when I rough house,
here are some of the outcomes for the children.
They learn a greater amount of empathy.
Empathy, you must be a thing kidding.
You know, how can you have rough housing
be associated with empathy?
And here's how.
Let's say John and Jimmy and Jane, brothers and sisters, and the game is to pin down
dad in a wrestling match.
And dad versus dad pinning the three of them down in the wrestling match.
And so dad throws the three of them on the couch, and the three kids jump off the couch,
all trying to be the kingpin.
And so in the process of being this kingpin,
Johnny pushes Jimmy aside and Jimmy pushes Janie aside.
And so dad said, whoops, I'm sorry, you can pin me down,
but you can't push the other one aside,
you can't poke them with the elbow and so on.
All right, all right, daddy,
let's go back to the rough housing.
And so they go back to the rough housing.
And mom's watching this and sooner or later,
with a 100% likelihood of prediction,
somebody will hurt themselves or somebody will end up crying
or somebody will end up angry and hitting the other one.
And so mom is feeling guilty that the dad is doing all of this.
And then the kids did cry just like she predicted in her mind.
And she feels guilty.
She didn't proactively intervene first.
And then dad returns to the rough housing
after some of the crying.
And she has no idea that why dad should be so insensitive
as to return the exact same process that
led the kids to hurt themselves.
And here's what happens in the process
that dads don't explain.
By returning to the rough housing,
he has told the kids what they can't do.
And then he's given them a chance to try it out again.
And so he's training them to have
emotional intelligence under fire.
To know when you're going too hard or when you're going hard enough,
when I can't hit my mouth.
When you can assert yourself and what is actually like violence.
Precisely.
What's the gap?
And so the children who do a lot of rough housing,
aside from having a much deeper bond with parents
and being much more willing to do what the parents say
because they're going to return to
fun and get more fun, they learn exactly what you just said, which is what is being assertive and what
is being aggressive. Now mom and dad can explain to the kids what is being assertive and being aggressive
or wait, can they? Or they can experience it. They can experience it exactly. And so because you
cannot explain intellectually,
what is being assertive versus being aggressive.
Especially to a child that you talk about this.
Yeah, because this is definitely something
you don't see a lot in schools.
And I found a good school that actually had
rough and tumble play.
And I thought that that was,
it was brilliant that the teacher actually
did the research and saw that psychologically
this really helps, not just boys, but also girls as well, right? Absolutely. It helps girls as well. And when you do it, and so one of the big differences between,
where does the boy crisis reside? There's 10 causes of the boy crisis, but the single biggest cause
is lack of father involvement. Basically, the boy crisis resides where fathers do not
reside.
I have a question about that because we're talking about,
earlier we were talking about the feminist movement
and what it was trying to do, which
was to give girls and women the freedom to be whatever they
wanted.
Boys and men didn't necessarily experience
that same type of growth.
And you're saying a lot of it was driven behind this paradigm that the men or males or
the oppressor and girls or women or the people being oppressed.
And over time, understanding that and viewing society that way, I could see how public
policy and attitudes sort of treating girls as, oh no, you're the oppressor.
When we need to do everything we can to help you, you're the oppressor's boy, so we need
to kind of ignore you and not worry about it.
And then you come out with laws that give single moms lots of benefits, for example, not
so much to single dads, or pushing policies that give mothers the ability to take the children
and do what they want
through divorce was the men have.
And by the way, statistically speaking,
if you're a father and you get divorced
and you go to court, you're in the,
and she fights for custody and you guys have a fight,
the odds are she'll win if somebody wins.
She's those are the odds because we viewed things that way,
has, what else is that caused as a result?
Like I know single parenthood is exploded
and more often than not,
it's men that are not there.
By the way, I think some of that
is also to blame for men.
I think men do more often than not,
feel like they can, maybe just leave
and they don't have the same pressure to stick around.
But there's also things like in the classroom.
Classrooms have changed quite a bit
where they seem to be catered more towards girls and
female type intelligence versus boys.
Is that all true?
Am I making direct comments?
As in the past, every single thing you've said is well informed and right-hotted and
hitting some of the most important points.
The really important underlying point that you just put your finger on is once we started from the assumption
that it's males or oppressors and women are the oppressed, then everything we did for women
we couldn't do enough
and so that began to get women to be entitled and
feel that if they so for example you had the hashtag me to movement entitled and feel that if they, so for example, you have the hashtag Me Too movement now,
and hashtag Me Too is wonderful that women are speaking up and explaining what's bothering them.
However, hashtag Me Too is also extraordinarily sexist because any change in the male-female
dance, the tango that men and women do, needs to have both sexes
speaking up.
If you have a tango, women attract resist, men pursue, persist.
That's the basic male-female tango, the traditional male-female tango.
And if you're going to change part of that tango because somebody doesn't like it, then
the entire tango, by definition, has to change.
And so, if you don't have mail saying,
well, here's the part of the tango I like,
here's the part of the tango I don't like,
here's the way it feels to me,
and how does it feel to you?
We're not training people to do exactly what we need to do,
which is to communicate with each other
and hear each other's pain and feelings.
So, for years, maybe 20 years, I went around the world and I conducted,
I wanted to get men and women to understand each other.
And to do that, I had conducted, I said to every man in the audience,
every woman is in a beauty contest every day of her life.
Guys, if you want to be in the beauty contest,
the beauty contest of every day life that women go through, come up on stage and be in the beauty experience, the beauty contest of everyday life that women go through,
come up on stage and be in this beauty contest. And so I'd have maybe, in those days, I was much more popular,
it would be before I started speaking out against some of these things that I'm talking about now. And so I got,
maybe I usually had four or five hundred guys in the audience that would come up on stage and in the aisles,
and be in this beauty contest. And I'd have all the women be the judges in the beauty that would come up on stage and in the aisles and be in this beauty contest
and it would have all the women be the judges in the beauty contest of everyday life. And the guys
competed to win pretty ferociously, but the ones that got to be the top six finalists when I
interviewed them later, they, you know, in front of the entire audience, they said, man, I was on the
one hand competing to be seen as the best looking guy. And on the other hand, the way I was on the one hand competing to be seen as the best looking guy. On the other hand, the way I was being treated was that nothing about me was at all of value
except my looks.
And I have a lot of important things to me.
I have my values.
I have my integrity.
I'm a pretty good student.
I'm this and that.
I'm more than just a body.
And now I'm seeing that when I only focus on women physically, which
I tend to do, I'm sort of leaving out a lot that would be really wonderful for me to focus
on. And I can see why the woman feels often resentful. So then I'd have, I said, this
is role reversal. So the women's turn now was to risk sexual rejection with the man. So I've calculated that there's in typically
about 100 risks of sexual rejection
between eye contact and intercourse.
And so I had just the women do the first few.
The first thing I persuaded the women to do
was to compete for the man that they were most attracted to.
So oftentimes there was 11 or 12 women
competing for the winner of the beauty
contest who now had both status and physical attractiveness. And then about six to seven
women competing for the other finalists. And the women after the, I had them just asked
the guy out, get it, be the one to win, to ask the guy out, and then at least hold the man's hand
and at least kiss him on the cheek.
That was all that was required.
And the man's requirement was to not be too easy.
And so...
Real hard for us to be open.
Yeah, yeah.
That is real task.
That indeed was the tougher challenge.
Sure.
And so when the women came back and they said,
every time in my life,
when I have used the word jerk,
I have to admit that it was a man that I was talking about.
But tonight, I was the jerk.
I was the one that said to the man that I,
you know, I was doing a better occupation
than I actually was, that I had better occupation than I actually was.
That I had better prospects than I actually do,
probably, that I have a better car
than I could actually materialize.
I promised to take them to a restaurant
that I can't afford, you know, and that type of thing.
And then I physically took him by the hand
because I wasn't winning,
and I pulled him away from the other women.
Now that was usually the woman, that one, that guy.
And so that she physically took over the situation.
And she said, man, I acted like a royal jerk.
I was a liar.
I was physically aggressive.
I didn't allow the women.
I didn't even think about allowing the women
an equal opportunity to speak up.
And so, and they really got, you know,
the pressures on that role.
And so, my desire in male, female issues
has been to say both sexes have roles that leave them feeling badly about themselves in different
ways, and hashtag me too should be about a sharing of how that happens and what we want to
change about it and where we want to have options and where we want to still have roles.
And so on, let's have a good dialogue and in order to have a good dialogue,
we have to have one thing, which is the ability to hear each other's perspectives without
becoming defensive because the Achilles heel of human beings is our inability to handle
personal criticism without becoming defensive. And so I see that the reason I do communication
workshops around the country is because I see that as being more important
to solving these problems than any other single thing. Well, it's as if we are far more complex than
we think we are and we try to simplify everything and say, oh, that's good and that's bad, not realizing
there's much more to the story. Exactly. Exactly right. And this is why I am protested
Exactly right. And this is why I am protested because I am confronting and challenging the belief that
it's women good and men bad.
You've also, I've heard you, and correct me if I'm saying it wrong, but I think you addressed
it this way.
I think somebody was talking about black lives matter and you said it should be boys lives
matter.
Yes.
Explain that.
Yes.
So, when a policeman, a white policeman, or a black policeman, kills, shoots somebody,
he's 24 times more likely to shoot a male than a female.
So he's only slightly more likely to shoot a black person than a white person. But
when the police officer shoots someone, the ratio of male versus female far exceeds the
ratio of black versus non-black.
Now, is this controlling for similar circumstances?
Because men do commit more crimes than women.
So is it controlling for, in other words,
both people have a knife, one's a man, one's a woman,
much more likely to shoot the man type of deal,
or are they controlling for those types of things?
Let's see, it's the,
that I'm not sure.
Okay. The chances are probably not sure of.
The chances are probably not.
But the, I think for me, the takeaway here is that the role you play as a male, that
is more likely to have you do the robbing of a house, to you to be in a fight with another
gang leader in order to get more
drugs or that type of thing.
The role you play as a male is likely to lead you to have that gun that knife and then
be in that victim role.
And you need to reexamine that role more than you and look at the impact of that, the
sexism of the role rather than the racism only. And the
racism is much more contributor to that shooting.
Interesting. Yeah, because I think there are some biological drivers, but I think there's
also the societal ones. And I think you're right. I mean, you know, when it comes to risky behaviors, including the risky behaviors that are breaking the law, which is a risky behavior,
because we're more likely to do risky things, we're probably more likely to break laws and
place ourselves in those types of situations. We've gone through, God God in the last maybe 50 years or so in explosion in single parent households,
most of which are father absent, so there's no dads in the home.
And we've now gone through at least a couple generations of that, where we can start to see the result of generations,
one or two generations being raised in a house without a father.
What are the consequences that we're seeing from that?
There's nothing that is more important
than that question and the answer to that question,
for example.
I found that children, boys, were doing worse
in all 63 of the largest developed nations.
Develop nations had in common their ability,
the permission for divorce and permission for women
to have children without being married.
So in the United States of the present moment,
53% of all women under 30 who have children
have children without being married.
One's where there's not even living with a man,
the man is almost never involved with the children
even from the beginning.
The one's where they are living with a man.
That's more percentage.
That man, the children are likely to not have
father involvement after age three, three and a half to four
in that area.
And so the great majority of father absence is among children born to women who aren't
married and among children who are experiencing the outcomes of divorce.
And so if you're a woman or a man listening to this and you're contemplating getting
a divorce, there are four things that you can do to minimize the impact on children.
I'm divorced, so I'm very interested in that.
Okay.
Those four things are that there's an equal, after divorce, that there's an equal amount
of time that the children have with both the mother and father.
Second is that the children, that the mother and father not be more than about 20 minutes
of drive time from each other, so the children who don't have to give up an activity or friend,
birthday or in order to go to the other parent's house and therefore resent the parent, the
parent whose home they're going to.
Third that the child is not able to hear or detect any bad mouthing from mom to dad or dad to mom.
Because when the other parent is being criticized,
the child is half of the other parent.
And so the child doesn't, isn't able to articulate
that when you're criticizing dad or criticizing mom,
you're criticizing them.
And so that is one of the most underappreciated dimensions
of child abuse in the culture.
And then fourth, that mom and dad
have consistent relationship counseling,
not just emergency-based relationship counseling,
so that when you have only emergency-based relationship counseling,
everything is so compressed and you have to make the decision fast,
and you tend to only treat the other parent as that's typical of you.
You made that decision for this reason or that reason,
whereas when you have a longer term, not such an emergency-based counseling,
you can start seeing the best intent of your divorce partner strategy.
And when children have all four of those conditions
are met, they do almost as well as they do
in an intact family.
However, boys suffer considerably more
from any type of relationship breakup than girls do.
This is counterintuitive.
Interesting.
So the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, moved thousands of families
from poor neighborhood to wealthier neighborhood with a better school system.
And under the belief that poverty was part of the problem, that they hurt children so
much and they wanted to give children a fair chance.
Well, the girls in the new neighborhood
ended up doing very well.
The boys in the new neighborhood did worse as a rule.
They were more likely to be depressed.
They didn't, it seemed like they were gonna do
much better because they'd say, okay, you know,
I'll see you again, no problem, no problem, you know,
and without, you know, sort of crying it out and stuff like that.
And then they got into the new neighborhood and they weren't able to adjust.
They missed the people that they were so used to, to a greater degree, because the emotional
skill sets and nuances of knowing how to integrate was less for boys than for girls.
So they had fewer outlets for their grief and the sorrow.
And they sought less support,
and they got less support in part
because they sought less support
and in part because we don't expect to give boys more.
So in other words,
boys are encouraged to not cry out or say,
I'm sad as much as girls are,
and we tend to be viewed as tougher.
Exactly. So they just don't get as much help.
Precise.
And part of what I say in both the myth of male power and in the boy crisis is that men's
weakness is our facade of strength. And this is true not only with males, but it's also true with
with animals from insects to birds to all animals. So for example, here's a really fun example.
Among buck elks, among all insects and birds and animals, about 85% of the procreation comes from the females procreating with the perceived alpha male.
Okay, so to be an alpha-buck elk, you have to have the biggest rack. And to get,
and then to get, but to get that biggest rack, you have to, you have to exhaust about 30 to 35
percent of your minerals, calcium, and nutrients from your body.
So you are the apparent alpha-strongest male, but in fact you are the weakest male.
So weak that if the buck elk doesn't get rid of his racca immediately after the mating
period, he's in great jeopardy of dying from malnutrition before the winter sets in. And there's not
enough nutrients to replenish it. So what is considered his strength is really his facade
of weakness. So men's weaknesses are facade of, I'm sorry, his facade of strength. So men's
weakness is their facade of strength, whether it's the buck elk or among us as males in other ways.
I'm sure you see this in bodybuilding.
In bodybuilding, yes.
Yeah, I could totally see you eat on the parallel there.
Yes.
Oh yeah, when they're on stage and they look the most ripped and whatever, they're the weakest because they're so depleted.
So what are some of the consequences of, you know, lots of kids and especially boys being raised without
fathers?
What are the statistics show?
I have in the boy crisis book 70 areas that boys who are dead deprived are hurt.
So boys who are dead deprived, I was mentioning before, are much less likely to have that
rough housing, that connection, that bond.
Girls who are dad deprived are much less likely to have that as well.
It manifests in girls differently than in boys.
So the rough housing, for example, gives a girl an opportunity to be physically close
to someone she can trust and not feel that being physically
close to the male means automatically being sexual.
Oh, fascinating.
And so girls who don't have fathers are far more likely to be pregnant out of wedlock.
And then later regret it because they feel like they want to keep a hold of the boy, but
they don't know all the
nuances of how to do that. But they do know one thing that they can keep a hold of him by being
sexual with him, especially if Jane might be. And she may, might be rejected because she's not
going to be sexual. She doesn't have other avenues of doing that. Or alternatively, they're so afraid
of male intimacy that they can connect and be intimate and open to begin with.
And so they tend to err on both sides of the spectrum.
But so boys are damaged by being less able to complete tasks and therefore less able
to do their homework effectively.
Therefore they do worse.
Boys who have our our dad deprived,
do worse than every single academic subject then.
So if you look at children in a good school system
without a dad,
they do worse in math and science,
especially the boys do,
then children in a poor school system with a dad
and in a poor community.
And here's maybe a perfect metaphor for the difference between what happens to boys and girls. So I'll just give you a few of the
list of things of maybe five or six of the 70 children without dads, especially boys.
Boys without dads is the number one predictor of suicide is not having father
involvement. The number one predictor of committing crime is not having father involvement.
The number one predictor of dropping out of high school is lack of father involvement.
When you drop out of high school as in your mail, if in your in your 20s, the unemployment
rate is more than 20%.
The under employment rate is a great majority of the rest of the boys who drop out of high
school.
The much more likely to be depressed and much more likely to withdraw into video games
and become video game addicted.
A certain amount of video game playing is actually good for the brain. But at the addiction level, which is usually 13, 14 hours or more per week, and the video games alone,
as this is not all electronics, just video games, you start moving toward addiction. And
the average boy plays 13 hours of video games per week.
But it's not delayed gratification. Precise is very much a pulse of.
Precise, the entire, your finger right on it the entire
video game industry is serving
immediate gratification now some
parts of some games are delayed
gratification and but there is
exiled up. It takes forever.
So so but there but the addiction of to video games is of course the problem.
And when boys don't do, when boys is a result of not having dads, don't learn the postpone
gratification, they can't do their homework well, they can succeed in sports, they can
succeed in weightlifting without the steroids or additional things to help them.
And so they don't get the respect of girls, women, teachers,
and they start feeling ashamed of themselves. So when it comes to boy girl time,
they find that the girls are more interested in the winners than the losers and they're a loser.
And so they start withdrawing into video porn.
A video porn, so what do guys get out of porn?
We get access to a variety of attractive women without fear of rejection.
Without fear of rejection is the important thing.
At a price that you could afford.
So the combination of all of that leaves the boy, he gets turned on by a certain sexual scenario.
But then the next time it doesn't turn to him on as much,
because there's not as much dopamine released,
but that same scenario being repeated.
So he needs to go to a riskier and riskier scenarios.
So when he finally does attract a woman to his bed,
she feels like an object and like, you know, wait,
we want me to do this risky stuff
in this way and why, you know, you want me to have anal intercourse and you want to come
over my face and like, I know, I really don't want to do that and I feel really objectified.
Right, it's only my second time.
This way, I'm going to say what he is.
Exactly.
And so the woman is like, exit.
And so the guy is then like, you know, man, I'm just what I thought.
I'm not good with girls.
And so that only sends them back to the video porn that increases the addiction because
basically the mechanism of addiction is that it's constantly increasing your dopamine,
which is your feel-good drug, you only feel good when you take more and more risks and
get more and more.
So you just keep pushing it.
It works for the pizza guy, right?
Yeah, it's not working for me.
I made the speculation a while ago,
we've talked about in our show early on, in fact,
how frustrating and annoying it is to see,
I have two kids and they'll play sports.
And I think it's silly that they'll play
and they won't keep any score
And I'm not talking about when they play on their own because they always keep scoring when they play on their own
I'm talking about
Organized leagues who will say oh, yeah, the kids are gonna play. There's no score
And so we always talk about that silly because nobody learned you learn more from losing many times
They need you from winning and it's silly that they don't do that
But I speculated that that was probably the result of a lot of fatherless homes and you have a lot of moms
who now are organizing these leagues and they don't want
anybody to lose.
And it's usually the dads that are ones pushing
for the winners and losers.
Do you think that's an accurate speculation?
That is again, right on purpose speculation.
And it's always bonus points. No, I'm glad
it's right because I've said that several times. I want to make sure I'm not wrong.
No, it's messing. This is absolutely the case. And what moms, so what does need to communicate
to moms is that your training children to win comes with training children to lose.
When you train someone to lose gracefully and lose,
you train them to focus, you train them to be a good sport,
you train them to take risks
and to know what doesn't, doesn't work and have it be measurable.
You do have a greater likelihood of increasing the adrenaline
to experiment to do with what works and what doesn't work.
You're training children for being able to be successful
in business, being able to be successful and be rejected
by somebody else that you watch.
Checked real life.
Real life.
You'll lose a lot in real life.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And to protect children until they're in college
and then continue protecting them in college
like we're doing now.
And then to send them out to real life is cruel.
Do you think that what we're seeing now
with the cry closets and the victimization,
everybody's a victim, by the way?
Yes. And you know, except white males. Right, right. That's the one that is. Now with the like the cry closets and the victimization everybody's a victim by the way and
Except white males right right that's the one that is it do you think that that is the result of like now maybe two generations growing up
You know half of them without fathers. You think maybe absolutely both of you know part of what dads
Need to communicate and as I said before
Don't let's blame the moms here. We
dads have to take responsibility for reading about what our unique
contributions to parenting is. And then we have to explain that to moms. And then
we have to be strong enough to be okay with moms being sexually withdrawing
from us, or emotionally withdrawing us from us,
while they and we talk through intention mode,
what is best for the children?
Now, why did you say that?
Is that because when a wife or a mom sexually withdraws
from a man we give in?
That's right.
We just say, we need to be okay with that.
Like in other words, she might not wanna sleep
with you for a couple of weeks while you argue over this. We'll be okay with that. That's right. We need to be okay with that. She might not want to sleep with you for a couple weeks while you argue over this, be okay
with that.
That's right.
We have to have the strength to be okay with not being manipulated by sexual withdrawal.
And the strength to be okay, it's a very powerful tool.
And it's not just sexual withdrawal, it's also a emotional withdrawal.
And very few women have any idea of how much we want to be loved by women.
Because we can't communicate with each other in very loving and caring ways,
we have more dependency, we have more of our emotional eggs are in the basket of women.
And so very few women know that and get at the same time they know that.
And so they do withdraw and then we eventually give in.
And so then we ask and then we eventually give in.
And so then we ask ourselves the question, okay, the one thing we are valued for is bringing
home a good paycheck.
So I'll go back to, so I withdraw from being an e-mailer.
And then just work more.
And so then we experience what I call the Father's Cash 22, which is we learn to love the
family by being away from the love of the family.
But when we ask men a different question, by the way, you just explained my whole divorce, right there. That's 100% what happened between the two of us. Tell us more.
Oh, it's 100% what happened. The withdrawal from, you know, you know,
connection, you know, sex connection, my withdrawal to work. And that just for 15 years.
And it just turned into a divorce.
100% will you just explain?
So, yeah.
And it's deeply sad because there's a liberal think tank called, and research center called
the PUE research center.
And for the first time, they asked dads who were working full-time. What would you rather do? Work full-time or be
with involved with your children full-time? That is completely give up work and be involved with
your children full-time. 49% of fathers said they'd prefer to be with their children full-time,
but they couldn't be because they had to earn the money.
And that is what feminists are completely missing.
And that is what is, and so almost every problem of the boy crisis goes back to that fatherlessness
because it is fathers who are more comfortable requiring children to go out of their comfort zone.
So, for example, a kid comes home from school and let's say he's seven or eight years of age
and he says, Mrs. Moyers, she hates me.
I want to get out of Mrs. Moyers class and it's the first week or two of school.
And so, mom is far more likely to say something like, oh, sweetie, I don't want you to have
a bad experience in school right when you're so young and formative years.
So, or she's thinking that to herself
if she doesn't say it in those words to her seven-year-old son.
And she's saying, I'll tell you what, sweetie,
I'll meet with the teacher, the principal,
and we'll get you the other teacher
who will probably be better for you.
And so, and dad is more like they say, you know, sweetie,
you know, in life, you're not gonna get along
with everybody.
And you have to learn how to get along with somebody.
So maybe you should move out, but before you move out, let's find out for Mrs. Moir's
why she's behaving the way she is.
You share with Mrs. Moir's what your upset is and listen to Mrs. Moir's, what her upset
is.
By the way, sweetie, what do you think, if I talked to Mrs. Morris, what do you think she would say?
And then the mom will be looking on and saying,
well, what do you mean?
Our son is suffering here, and you're asking him what's
wrong with him.
And so the dad then gets from the son, well, Mrs. Morris
thinks that I don't pay attention in class.
Well, why does she think that?
Well, I do pass off notes to Jimmy, but it wasn't me passing off notes.
It was Jimmy passing off notes and I gave a note back to him.
I got blamed for it.
So Mrs. Moir is blaming me.
And so when did Jimmy pass off the note to you?
The moment Mrs. Moir turns her back on us, he passes off the note to you? The moment Mrs. Moyers turns her back on us,
he passes off the note to me.
Then I pass the note back to him and she catches me.
So aside from not being a great manipulator,
he's beginning to already see
what maybe is creating the problem.
And then dad finally persuades mom
to set up a meeting with Mrs. Moyers and him.
And Mrs. Moyersis and him, and Mrs. Moiris
and the teacher and their son have a chance to talk with each other about what is bothering
them and reach some type of understanding.
And maybe that won't work and maybe that does, but dads are far more likely to sort of push
outside of the comfort zone of kids and ask them to do, require them to do
what needs to be done to communicate about
something rather than just play victim.
Now, talking about the schools right now,
and when you first came in,
and we started this conversation around
the teasing of each other, right?
So how do you feel about this anti-bullying movement that we've been going
through in the last decade or so? Yes, the best way to minimize bullying and
you know I grew up in the 50s and 1950s not 1850s. That's what bullying was
cool. Yeah that's right. Precurs were some jobs. Yeah everybody it
build everybody but yeah some of the bullying was so bad
that, you know, you were left with scars for a lifetime
on the bullying, or you were left with trying to prove yourself,
you know, to the bully.
And so bullying, taking into a certain,
past a certain point, is really bad.
But on the other hand, what we find is that bullying,
the bullies and the bullied have
very similar personalities.
They both have low self-esteem.
They both don't do that well in school.
They both are filled with different types of fears.
They just have different ways of manifesting it.
And so the bullies are likely to be physically stronger and bigger, but they are also coming from a very fragile place themselves.
And so the solution to bullying, in my opinion, is probably best done in Denmark.
In Denmark, in the ages of first and second grade,
they have classes in which they talk about,
everybody talks about the feelings that they have, and what they're experiencing, and what they experience,
everybody else to be like, and what their own set of problems are.
And so kids get to see each other as full human beings, and not as objects.
When you can reduce somebody to a simple name, and get some pleasure out of bullying them and make yourself feel better.
That comes from a personality that has only that way of feeling better about themselves.
And so the solution to bullying is to work on the self-esteem of the bully as well as the bullied
and to also work on the communication process. So everybody in that classroom sees each other as a full person
and sees the amount of pain that occurs and feels the pain that occurs
from somebody that is bullied or pushing her.
I also think with you want to go.
Yeah.
Do you see any value too with some schools I know that have structured it
where they have different age groups all learning in the same facility.
And that way, you're able to inevitably, you're going to see the older kids kind of sheltering
the younger kids, the younger kids looking up to the older kids.
And I'm pretty sure they've shown a little bit less on the bullying because of that as
a result, but have you looked into that at all?
Yes. on the bullying because of that as a result, but have you looked into that at all? Yes, there's two important dimensions to that.
One is when you have that, it's often coupled
with a mentoring process.
And so where the older boy or girl has somebody
that they're mentoring and where the younger boy or girl
is being mentored by somebody.
And so being mentored by somebody is very helpful. But more helpful than being
mentored by somebody is being a mentor. So when you have that type of integrated class
age-wise, let's say I'm a 14-year-old boy, and I have a tendency toward bullying, but
bullying is not approved of in the school.
And so when I start to bully, I worry about how the nine-year-old boy is going to think
of me if I'm seen as somebody that's negative in the school and not a really good role model.
So the power of being a mentor is like being the power of being a dad.
You start becoming more responsible.
Oh, that's a really important thing.
And more balance.
Interesting.
I do think that the, you know, I think we tend to do
like what Adam said where we take the pendulum
and we swing it so far.
Obviously, if kids are being physically bullied
or emotionally bullied and tormented,
that's terrible and you want to put a stop to it.
But I also think there's some value in sometimes letting kids
figure them things out for themselves. Like if my kid comes to me and says
so-and-so pushes me around bullies me, before I go and interject, I may say to my kid,
okay, I want you to stand up for yourself and try and solve it yourself. Because we jump in too
quickly, too often, because we're so afraid of everything.
And we end up losing the lessons that can be learned.
That is exactly right.
And that is why things like teasing and which now are called bullying, we protect the
kids against that.
And there is a tendency of, you know, moms are very wonderful at nurturing and protecting, and they often
take that much too far, much too quickly.
So it is when all females get together and form teams that they want everybody to be nurtured
and no one to learn the risks of, you know, what you were teased, you were bullied.
So what do you do about it?
Where do you go with that?
Why do you think that happened?
What could you do about it? Where do you go with that? Why do you think that happened? What could you do differently?
You know, what's the best what are some options for best responses?
You know if you were if you were a dad
How would you tell your son to do that? Yeah, those are all the discussions that come from
situations that are inconvenient
Uncomfortable and even hurtful and if we protect our kids from all those things
We are not educating them and preparing them for life.
Because we're not making them strong.
We're just protecting them.
I mean, look at what you have to do
if you're anyone who is successful, if you're a Kavanaugh,
and you're wanting to become a Supreme Court justice,
are you going to be able to do that without criticism?
Every part of your past is gonna be ripped apart.
Now, if you're somebody that could only take praise
and you can take criticism,
you're gonna fall apart in the process
of becoming successful.
Let's talk about that for a second.
That situation with Kavanaugh,
he's the gentleman that's going to be potentially appointed as a Supreme Court Justice,
and a young lady comes out and says that he sexually assaulted her 37 years ago.
So she was 15, he was 17 years old, and I'm not on either side, maybe he did, maybe he didn't,
but here's the part that I find extremely frightening.
In this maybe a consequence of this, males or the oppressor, women or the oppressed, you know,
victimhood type of mentality and the me too movement. And that's
that we have to listen to her because she's the want, she's the
girl, she's the female, she makes the claim, we have to listen to her,
we have to take what she's saying is truth. And a lot of people are
doing that, they're saying, listen, listen to the listen to the
victim, 100% of the time all the time.
Now, I understand where that sentiment comes from.
If you are somebody who's abused sexually or however else, it can be very scary to come
forward.
You don't want to feel ridiculed or criticized because that may prevent people from stepping
forward.
But at the same time, you can't presume guilty and then prove an innocent.
It's the other way around. Do you think this is the result of kind of like a little bit of a consequence of this whole mentality that mannered the oppressor?
So if a woman says something, 100% of time it's true, listen to them every single time.
Yes, and it is really, and first of all, I very much agree with you that when, and I love the part of the hashtag me to movement
that I love is that women are speaking up and letting and letting the world know what is bothering
them. So it now it does create a bit of a challenge because on the one hand for the past 50 years
we've learned I am woman I am strong and now we've learned I've been I am woman I've been wronged
and so it's a little bit of a, let's see,
is our women strong and they can speak up and say what they want and they need, or they
fragile enough, they're repressing things that are happening, and it's only going to come
up 20, 30 years later that they're bit angry. And so we're going to have to sort of work
out that disconnect. But secondly, the office of civil rights literally prevented their investigators
from writing into a report. Anything that any time a woman said that the sex that she once
said was harassment or a date rape was in fact that she lied or didn't tell the truth because for whatever reason.
So for example, two women and a man get drunk together
and they have consensual sex.
But the woman gets realized that she didn't call
her boyfriend.
That was in a different area, like she usually does.
And so she says, well, I was in a terrible situation
last night. I was raped. And so because says, well, you know, I was in a terrible situation last night.
I was raped.
And so because she made a bad decision.
And so if she does that, and the boyfriend says, well, you should, you know, you should
call the police about that or you should report that.
And so then she reports it to prove that she, in fact, you know, was telling the truth.
And then it's investigated.
And she begins to feel badly that she's ruining that boy's life.
She then says to the investigator, actually it was consensual sex at the time, but I was
afraid to say so.
The Office of Civil Rights required the investigator not to put that second level of comment that in fact it was consensual,
they could not write that in the report.
Why?
Because of exactly what you said before,
a woman who comes forward has to be believed.
And that's just to encourage,
I can see where that comes from.
I mean, we have a lot of laws that are like that,
where they're based off of feeling good,
but nobody really looks at the potential consequences.
Today, I can understand why they might wanna put that law forward
and say, okay, we don't want women to be afraid,
we want people who are salted to come forward
because it takes a lot of courage many times.
So I can see the sentiment behind why,
but what a terrible consequence.
Yes, it's a good case in the legal field.
They have an expression called good cases make bad laws.
And so when we're so desirous of protecting the female, we are willing to give away due
process.
And we've grown up, you know, the very core of America, which makes it a special country
in many ways, but other countries have this
too, is you're considered innocent until proven guilty.
And so the person who makes the accusation has to prove that accusation.
And we've suddenly said, oh, but the exception of women who feel that they were sexually
abused or sexually assaulted or, you know, and, you know, or had a date rape experience, you are not only to be believed,
but even if you acknowledge that you did lie, then we won't believe you because we know
we're going to pay attention to any expression of upset that you had more than an expression
of, well, actually I lied for this reason or
that reason.
And we know we have very few good studies of the percentage of time that women lie in
these situations.
But in the myth of male power, I did uncover four or five very good studies of this effect
in the range was between 40% and 60% that women did not tell
the truth.
Wow, I would never guess that.
I would have thought it was an extremely small percentage.
And that's what we're left with from the feminist statements, but if you wish to see the
hard data behind that in the myth of male power in the chapter on the politics of sex and the politics of rape
I sort of discuss all the other studies. How long were you
Part of the feminist movement. How long were you part of the now organization?
I was elected three times to the board of now in New York City
And then I'd say that was like 1970 to 1973 74
Okay, and then I was, my former wife became a White House Fellow,
so we moved from New York City to Washington, DC.
Okay.
I became the wife of a Fellow, if you want.
Okay.
So are you now advocating for boys and men?
Because, because I know there's gonna be some people
listening right now, we're thinking, oh gosh, you know,
we don't, men don't need an advocate,
men don't need somebody speaking out for them,
women are the ones that need,
but in some cases I agree,
but also women do have a lot of advocates,
a lot of people speaking out on their behalf,
and there's nothing wrong with that.
Did you, are you doing this for men
because you just see nobody's doing it?
That's basically correct.
I've seen, and as you were saying,
we have a tendency for the pendulum to swing
from one extreme to the other.
And when I started to speak out and say some things
that, well, wait a minute, we have to be fair
to both boys and girls.
So my basic attitude is that we don't have a system of oppressors and oppressed.
We have a, that when it comes to male, female issues, we're all in the same family boat.
Whenever, either, whenever, only one sex wins, both sexes lose. Because, you know, my wife
and I were in this together. And if she's hurt, I'm hurt.
And if we get a divorce, our children suffer.
And so I was beginning to see the balance, the pendulum swing to the other side.
And so I started to say, well, wait a minute, to be fair here, there has to be an understanding
of what boys are going through as well as girls
and which is why did the Royal Varsal date and the men's beauty contest both because I was
getting both sexes to walk a mile and each of those muckets. No, no, no, sorry, go ahead. Was there a
a pivotal moment that switched you doing that like did something happen? You're like, whoa,
that's not fair. And then you began speaking out on the other side. For the most part it was very evolutionary but I'd say if there was one moment that was
more pivotal than the other, it was I was on at a board meeting with now the National
Organization for Women and one of the women on the board of now said we're having a
problem that a lot of we're getting a number of letters from some of our now members
saying that
they don't like it that when our position unequality
Seems to be being interpreted that when there's a divorce that the father has as much right to the children as the mother
They didn't like that. They didn't what the the women writing in were saying they didn't like that. They didn't, well, the women writing in were saying they didn't like that.
And they were going to withdraw their now memberships if they felt that now was not supporting
them, them, the mother, knowing what was best for the child.
And so I listened to that.
And their reasoning was they were worried about losing their dividing and losing now members and therefore being
a less potent group and they felt they had a lot more to work with for than just custody
issues.
And so while they understood that equality should be applied to both sexes, they at the same
time were cared about their political power.
A lot of them persuade their decision.
Exactly. And so I said, wait a minute.
The issue here should not be where our political power
rests, but rather it should be positioned by position.
We should be asking the question, not what's best for women,
but what's best for the children.
And so they said, well, women should have the freedom
to raise the children the way they want.
And I said, well, you should have the freedom to raise the children the way they want. And I said, well, you should have freedom to have children.
But once you have children, that's a free choice to forfeit your freedom and exchange it
for whatever best for the children.
Your personal freedom does not trump your children's best outcome.
And so they said, well, so what do you think we should do?
And I said, well, I think if you want to work from an equal perspective, children should
have both mother and father.
And well, then what about a woman who meets a new man and wants to get rid of an oppressive
husband and wants to move to a new area, which is the new man is a better and out of state.
And they should have the right to do that.
And I said, well, we have to do research and find out how children turn out when they
have this outcome.
So then I began my research that led to a book called Father and Child Reunion.
And I started to see that my instinct on that, the children do best when they have both parents,
was way, it was much more accurate than I expected.
But then this was 30 years ago, 20 years ago,
when I started doing, when I had this dispute with now.
And that, but that led people at now to be suspicious
that I wasn't just supporting women, that I was
also taking fathers into consideration and children into consideration.
And so I began to lose some of my speaking engagements, and then I had to ask myself,
do I want to, you know, I was doing extremely well financially, speaking all around the world
in women's issues, and it was really clear to me that if I started to do this type of thing,
that I was going to lose that type of career support.
And I was able to get on, I was on every major TV show that today show that tomorrow
show in People magazine, Parade magazine.
I was center, you know, centerfold features and stuff like that.
And I had a huge, and people were coming to my performances at, you know,
in numbers over a thousand.
And so it was, you know, it was seductive in a lot of ways and very financially helpful.
And so I really had to confront myself and say, you know, am I in this for the money
and the fame, or am I in this to really help men and women understand each other?
God, how many people struggle with that decision right there?
Yes, yes, exactly.
And what happened when you made that switch, Did you just lose gigs and ridicule? Oh, yeah, I went
from maybe 50 to 60 highly paid speaking engagements at universities per year to zero to one. Oh,
shit. Just like that. At universities. I do, you know, since the boy crisis book has come out,
I've been doing them speaking engagements at a lot of different types of places,
but not any at universities sponsored by university.
Wow.
I've watched a lot of your videos and talks,
and obviously now we've talked now for over an hour,
and to me, you're advocating for real equality,
freedom for everybody, both genders, you're saying things like,
look, here's the problems that are that men or boys
are encountering, you're advocating for fathers to stay,
to be fathers, you know, and you're saying that it's best
for a child to have both parents, which sounds like
common sense to me.
Why are you getting so much hate?
Why are people, it doesn't make any sense to me. I don't understand it. Is it? It's rational thinking. On one level, it doesn't make any sense to me.
I do remember when I first started coming out with these things, guys would come up to me,
men in my men's group and say, really, Warren, you realize, if you say this, what will the feminist think? And it was like, you know, Bob,
I'm not gonna live my life trying to cow-tow to somebody's thinking that I don't feel as good in the long run.
Well, you're gonna lose all the income you're making
in the gigs and he was 100% right.
But I so I said, well, I got a PhD for a reason.
And one of the reasons I got the PhD was so I could be
economically secure,
if I, you know, if this, if my speaking out in this way does not succeed. And clearly
I lost, you know, multiple millions of dollars. And I was up for, apparently I only found
out later a MacArthur Genius Award that, you know, when I found, when they found out that
I was, you know was taking the positions,
I was taking apparently somebody spoke up
and volunteered that information
and I was dropped from the consideration.
And a number of things like this
that I don't wanna say elaborate on too much
because I don't wanna sort of be in that position.
Sure, sure.
But there's, so I knew I was going to pay a price.
But I also knew that I had saved up enough income
to feel like if I completely lost my economic security,
I had a little bit to work on and I can make a transition.
Do you think some of this can be blamed on,
because I know when, especially when
those presidential elections,
it's a lot of money being spent on trying to sway voters.
And one of the easiest way to manipulate people,
and I talk about this all the time, the show,
is to make someone feel like they're a victim.
If you can make someone feel like a victim,
and that you have the solution,
they're gonna vote for you.
And so, do you think some of the blame
can be put on politicians?
Because I remember recently,
it became a big deal, the pay gap I remember recently, it became a big deal,
the pay gap, the gender pay gap became a big deal.
Now, if economists, when they break it down,
most economists will break it down and be like,
okay, there really is no gender pay gap.
That's due to sexism.
There is a pay gap, but it's due to differences
and preferences.
And here's a bottom line, by the way.
If a company can hire an employee that does the same work for less money, that's all they'll
do.
So in other words, if it were true that women got paid less purely because they were women,
women filled the companies.
Companies would hire all women.
They outsourced to other countries for this exact reason.
They would do the same thing here, so we know it's false, but politicians push it because, hey, we're going to have the solution.
If you vote for us, we're going to make legislation that will actually probably be damaging.
Do you think some of the blame can be placed on politicians trying to make people feel
like victims, especially women?
Because I feel like they've been manipulated quite a bit by political parties.
Yes. Politicians can only be a step ahead of the people.
And so if people, and so when we approach politicians, I share a commission to create
a White House Council on Boys and Men, and we went out to the Republican candidates for
president when they were running in the primaries.
And we talked to them about this issue,
but I could just feel and see that no politician
was going to say that the pay gap is not about sexism
because he was going to make a shitty sheet
or he was going to make their constituency furious at them.
And they were going to lose a huge amount of votes. Who cares?
Who cares? That is true that women are the victims of discrimination, mostly women.
And where the majority of his votes, mostly women. And so it was just a lose situation.
Now to be clear, men get manipulated by politicians too, just differently.
They tend to appeal to our nationalism and strength and all that other stuff. So we all tend
to get manipulated. It seems as if humans evolved with this balance of things that women tend
to bring to society and what men tend to bring to society. I know Jordan Peterson calls
it order and chaos. And if you go two extreme of one direction,
you know, if you go two extreme in the male direction,
you end up with, you know, fascism and, you know,
and these nationalistic type of, you know, very violent,
you know, too much order, too much law.
And if you go in the other direction,
then it's the opposite.
And so the pendulum is just doing this thing back and forth.
What do we see?
What are we looking forward in the future then?
What are some of the issues?
I know there's some statistics like,
for the first time ever,
boys are going to be less educated than their fathers.
And boys are doing worse in college than girls are
for the most part.
And it's like the first time ever,
is that the result of this pendulum being swung over?
Yes, well, in a lot of different ways.
The boys have been doing,
there's been a smaller percentage of male college graduates
for quite a long time now.
And since the, I think it's the late 70s.
Oh, wow, that long.
So, and so the, so boys have been, we've been
giving scholarships to girls in schools in many different areas,
and pretty much the only scholarships to boys are in sports areas, which are not for academics,
but obviously for sports. And so we have really, and I saw this, I was in touch with the data
on this for many years, and so I saw the swing happening, but I saw it happening more and more,
and then instead of encouraging boys to get involved
in areas where they weren't involved with because
of their gender, things like social sciences
and psychology and the health professions,
which are the growth oriented professions of the future.
We were just focusing on getting girls involved
in the STEM professions of science,
technology, engineering, and math.
And so this was, I know I was very pleased
with the encouragement of girls and women
to be involved with science, technology, engineering,
and math, but I was very displeased with the fact
that we were in helping our sons be trained
for emotional intelligence and getting involved
in the caring professions and becoming father, what I call father warriors.
You know, I think if we really want to help the future, more than any other single thing
we need to develop and nurture the concept of father warriors.
And by that I mean, from the first second grade on,
our children need to be involved in communication classes,
what we were talking about in relation
to minimizing the bullying,
so that boys in the future who are not expected
to earn all the money as a sole breadwinner,
the degree to which men do not earn money as sole breadwinners
is the degree to which women will want something from us other than money.
We're not going to be a value to women unless we have the listening skills, the facilitation skills.
I spend almost an hour or a night listening to my wife who owns her company,
you know, dealing with the frustrations and problems
solving with her, but usually 90% of what I do
is just plain listen, and don't solve problems.
I ask, I do what you were talking about before.
I ask mostly questions like, well,
what do you think you should do about that?
And facilitate of questions that help her solve
her problems rather than me solve the problem for her.
Or say to her something like, you know, you should really don't worry about working. I'll take
care of that, you know, and try to protect her from something she gets a great deal of purpose out of.
Yeah, I think that's important. I think it's important that we create a culture where
boys and girls feel that they can be whatever they want. But I also think it's equally important
that we don't go so far as to create laws
that force situations to happen
because there's a lot of unintended consequences
of doing that.
If you think that the gender pay gap, for example,
is due to sexism, which it's not,
but let's say you pass law, you're like it is,
it's due to sexism, so you pass all these laws.
All you're doing is you're increasing the liability of potentially hiring a woman now
because a company is like, well, we got to be careful.
If we hire this woman, we got to get all these different laws.
Even if she chooses not to make as much, we got to be very careful.
And so in the reality, you actually end up hurting the very people that you're trying
to help.
This is, you have, again, put your finger on exactly why I am so motivated because what we're doing now is not
what feminism should be.
We are making women weaker.
We are, you know, we're making an employer who might have been afraid of hiring a woman
for one set of stereotypical reasons 50 years ago are afraid of hiring a woman because if somebody touches her the
wrong way, she can say it's a problem. If somebody decides to mentor her, many, many men
that I speak to in companies say, if I have a family, I'm not going to mentor. I have
a family. If I mentor a woman and she doesn't go as far as fast as she
thinks she should go, then I'm likely to be accused of being a bad mentor. Or if I
want to give her privacy, so I close the door to my office. If there's no window in that
door, I can be I got nailed for that one.
I can be, oh, did you?
Oh, yeah.
No, I had an employee one time that I was, you know, she did something wrong and I pulled
her in the office to speak to her and talk about it.
And she flipped it around on me and called HR for, you know, cornering her and locking
her into an office.
Right.
And because she's a female and it was just me and her, I almost lost my job over it.
Well, subconsciously, even if you're the most self-aware evolved individual, subconsciously her into an office and because she's a female and it was just me and her. I almost lost my job over it.
Well, subconsciously, even if you're the most self-aware evolved individual, subconsciously,
you may have these fears from hiring women or whatever because of some of these laws that
get passed because they feel good.
And then in the hurting people, it's funny.
Economists talk about this all the time.
Thomas Soles, an economist that I love reading.
And he talks about how if you know, if pay differences
were the result of discrimination.
If they were the result of sexism, which they're not, but let's say they were, what you're
doing by passing laws, forcing employers to pay them the same amount for the equal work
is you are actually taking away their bargaining chip.
So let's just say you are a woman and you do live in a society that's extremely sexist
to the point where an employer will pay you 75 cents on the dollar for doing
exactly the same stuff. And now there's a law saying you can't do that. Well, if they're
sexist, well, then I'm going to spend paying you the same amount as a man, then I'm just
going to hire a man. And so there's all kinds of unintended consequences that follow
from these policies that are passed because they feel good rather than being based
on actual reality truth and even just consequences.
Yes. And as you said before,
and when I did the research for Y-Men
earn more and what women can do about it,
the first thing that got me doing the research,
I was, I started thinking in this process
when I was with now, and I was leading the women's
strike for equality's man's section.
And these were the days when women were supposedly being paid $59 cents to the dollar for the
same work as men.
And I thought to myself, well, if I could start a whole bunch of companies, hire only
women.
And I could produce the same product for 59 cents that other people were producing for a
dollar. I'd wipe everybody out. And then I started asking myself, well, if I really,
if that I wonder if that's true or whether it's more complex than that. And that got me going
on wondering whether it was true or more complex with that because obviously, you know, and the thing is that somebody may not be
wise enough to do that, but the person that was wise enough to do with that would, would
finally, they would dominate, they would dominate. They would dominate. Do you also think
that maybe it's also, there's, there's, there's, there's societally speaking that the entrepreneur, the risk
taker, the money maker gets all a lot of the accolades. And so, and the, but the,
the person who takes care of the kids who connects with the other parents, who,
you know, who is in the community, which is, by the way, not equally as important,
in my opinion, probably more important, okay, in my opinion, probably more important.
But let's, let's just say it's more important, okay, in my opinion, probably more important.
But let's just say it's equally important.
Do you think that maybe, you know, they think of men as the oppressors because those
risky things get all the accolades, accolades, and what they're doing, maybe nobody's really
giving them credit, or they're not hearing a lot about it, and society doesn't seem
to value it as much.
Therefore, hey, it's not fair, you fair. I have to stay home and do this thing
over here, and they get all this attention because they're running this multimillion-dollar
company. So, this isn't fair. Do you think that may be part of it?
Yes. And it's part of what contributes to the deception. And the reason I talk in
the Boy Crisis book so much about social bribes is that one of
the ways we got men to work 60, 70, 80 hours a week to give up family, to do things that
they had to do, like be the principal of the school or the superintendent of schools,
rather than do what their passion was, we got them to do that to be, to join the military and, and be willing to
die. Was we, we bribed them with names and titles and accolades.
And glory and glory. Exactly. And so what we guys have to get is that it's a not a good
definition of power to feel obligated to earn money that someone else spends
while we die early.
If I were to say, I'm going to do an empowerment seminar for women, I'm going to teach you
how to earn money, feel obligated to earn money that somebody else will spend while you
die early.
I think it's like like you must be crazy. But we have been ignorant, naive, stupid
enough to accept that definition of power and to be a victim of the need to feel that
we have self-esteem by being praised and getting those accolades, rather than ask, but when the
Pew Research Center says to men, what would you really love to do? Still, even when in this
framework of these accolades, 49% of fathers said, prefer to be with my children, because
once you've had a taste of love, you realize that working
away from the home is not nearly as fulfilling as it to get love is not nearly as fulfilling
to most people now for some men it may be more fulfilling and for some women it's more
fulfilling obviously. But women have these three options, work full time, children full
time or some combination of both and our three options are still work full time, work full time, work full time, or some combination of both. And our three options are still work full time,
work full time, work full time.
And then we're told we have the power.
Do you think there's a lot of people,
because maybe let's say a lot of girls who grow up
and hear this, I'm a press, I'm a press, I'm a press,
that rather than doing what maybe they really want to do,
which is maybe work part time or not work
and have children that they'll be a mother. They push themselves to do, to work maybe work part-time or not work and have children that they'll be a mother.
They push themselves to work, work, work, go to school, get PhD, 37 years old, working,
I make a lot of money, 38 years old, whatever.
And then, do you think there's a lot of these people who are not finding fulfillment and
not being happy because they did the opposite because of the thought that they were being
oppressed? Yes, I think there is a certain percentage that way. The good news is
we for women, we do have a society where if the woman becomes like our daughter is
home taking care of our grandson and she's full-time home, she's working from home
with Etsy, but she works in a flexible type of way from home.
And so she feels perfectly acknowledged by us and most people for doing that.
If my son-in-law were to be the one doing that, there'd be much more of a mixed message.
On the other hand, if our daughter was more oriented toward earning a lot of money and was the primary
breadwinner, she'd be, she'd get mostly accolades for doing that. And if she did some combination
of both, we'd be okay with that. And so we're giving women much more permission to go the
direction that their personality dictates. And that's what we as parents need to do. The
first, you know, for the first
time in history, we have the potential for boys actually becoming human beings rather
than human doings for our, for our father. And so we have, we have to be encouraging our
sons as well as our daughters to get in touch with who they are and not what other people will
praise them for.
Praise is a social bribe that can be a prison for doing what you want to do.
And the degree to which a certain percentage of women have gone that way and just worked
and then they get to be 35 and they realize, my God, I've been so attached
to my work, I maybe can't have a child now.
And so that is a problem that a number of women are experiencing.
You said something earlier that I thought was really fascinating about the cheerleader
analogy with the football player.
Do we see this also in other examples in life?
I'm just curious if you've written about this in like adulthood.
Is there more examples that are similar to that, where the cheerleader is cheering us on to go take risks like that,
and so we feel compelled to do that as there's your examples of that in adulthood?
Well, basically, boys become men who are doing that type of thing all the time.
So when a man and a woman begin to think about having a child,
and the woman makes, you know, the family discussions are often,
you know, what will the woman do?
Well, she do this full-time work, full-time children,
some combination of both, and the man sits around,
set a waiting for, okay, after she makes her decision,
I have to figure out how much money I need to make to make it,
you know, to be able to move into a good neighborhood
with good schools and so on. And so he is, for the rest of his life, being praised or at least
minimally acknowledged for doing the earning of the money without ever asking himself the question,
do I, did I really want to remain a teacher or be an artist or an actor that doesn't make a
great deal of money and bring our children up at the $50,000 a year level rather than the
$250,000 a year level.
So I think men do this till the day they die. And oftentimes, when a man's reputation
is for, you know, he got to a certain level as a CEO
or as a top executive.
And that's what we admire him for.
In fact, when you ask him, would you
have loved to have spent more time at the office?
Or would you have loved to have spent more time with the office? Or would you have loved to have spent more time with the family,
almost to a man, men say, I wish I had spent more time with my family,
rather than at work?
I think if we continue, if we do what you say,
and encourage kids to, or at least create a society where they're free to choose whatever they want,
I think we'll still see
lots of differences, but we'll be okay with them.
I think, you know, if you look at,
there's a biological difference here.
I mean, you know, studies will show that, for example,
if a man has a scar on his face, many times women
will find him more attractive.
Well, you know, anthropologists say,
well, that's probably because he demonstrates
that he's really to take risks and you know fight for resources and whatever
That's not true. The opposite of a woman has a scarter face. She's not typically considered more attractive by a man
Because we don't necessarily value that in women where we as we may value more things like fertility
Empathy and care. They may value things like risk taking
Assertiveness and confidence in those types of things
So I think there's a biological driver and I think it's okay.
There's nothing wrong with that. I don't understand the push that's so hard.
I do understand early on. There definitely were some oppressive situations.
Women weren't given the same rights. They weren't allowed to vote.
They weren't allowed to do certain things.
But today we all are.
And I think it's okay if we choose to do whatever the heck we want.
Absolutely. The whole purpose agenda liberation is to create choice for both sexes.
And you're absolutely right that if we do that, there still will be a significant male
female gap in choices.
And that's okay.
What we do want to do though is see areas where there is a lack of encouragement and discouragement.
And that's particularly true with valuing men as potential fathers.
I was saying before about creating the concept of a father warrior.
And the first step is to train boys to be able to communicate in school.
A second step is to train parents to be able to, you know,
when asked, you know, if you have a younger sister, a younger brother, to change their diapers with them, you know, and to feed them together and to be considered
to them, but also be challenging of them to, you know, to learn from an early age that
you will eventually be a dad.
And here are the skills that it takes to be a dad and to value those.
And that is that to be a dad full time, it's going to take overcoming a lot of barriers.
That's why you're called a warrior because warriors overcome barriers.
And so if you, and then, so there's hundreds of things we can do in the school system
and at home to train boys to be good future fathers, including mentoring, including cup scouts,
boy scouts, and learning how to talk about their emotions and feelings rather than repress
their emotions and feelings. Excellent, excellent. Great conversation. Great conversation.
I really enjoyed this. Thank you for coming on the show. It's been really a pleasure.
They're always welcome down here. Thank you very much.
That's really nice.
All right, thank you.
Thank you for listening to Mind Pump.
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Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically
transform the way your body looks, feels and performs.
With detailed workout blueprints in over 200 videos, the RGB Superbumble is like having
Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers,
but at a fraction of the price.
The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money back guarantee, and you can get it now plus
other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com.
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