Janice Fiamengo: Feminism, Anti-Feminism, and Common Sense

[Music] hi and welcome to the origins podcast i'm your host lawrence krauss in this episode i have a discussion with the professor of english social commentator and uh social critic janice femingo janice may not be well known around the world but i think she should be more well known for her remarkably cogent commentary both her writing and her videos in particular her videos for the fia mango file that she produced which confront a major issue feminism from a different perspective in her most recent set of videos she actually discusses the history of feminism and demonstrates that much conventional wisdom about its history is actually misplaced janice is not a an ideologue or a firebrand she's a calm and very gentle speaker but her arguments are full of logic and data which is something i particularly appreciate i really enjoyed my conversation with her and i think you'll find it provocative at the very least but i hope you'll listen to what she says because after all freedom of speech is really the freedom to listen and uh she may change some of your views as as she's affected some of mine uh it was a real pleasure to talk with her and i i hope you'll enjoy this conversation you can watch it ad free by subscribing to our sub stack channel critical mass and all proceeds from subscriptions will go to supporting the non-profit origins project foundation which supports the podcast and several other activities or you can watch it on our youtube channel or you can listen to it anywhere where podcasts can be listened to either way i hope that you will enjoy the podcast and it will be entertaining and cause you to think which is really the point of it all thanks [Music] well janice i i really appreciate your coming on the podcast i as you know i've been a fan of yours for some time so thanks for being here well thank you very much for for having me on your show well you know i i first discovered you from your videos and i was always impressed by their strict logic and and and detail and how willing you were to go against conventional wisdom when the conventional wisdom is nonsense and uh and that's something i've always been impressed with so it's real privilege to talk to you and in fact for full disclosure also i i you were actually one of the panelists that we had planned to have on the very first origins project foundation public event in phoenix and it was it was planned and then and then unfortunately the world decided kovid would get in the way and and maybe we'll redo it again sometime and have you in in person in phoenix i hope so i was really sorry to miss the opportunity you had a really nice lineup there it was a great lineup and and and rather pres oh i thought it was prescient but i of course people like you are aware of the issues that were that we were going to talk about for years before and and and that's what i want to talk about but this is an origins podcast and that means i first go into origins i want to discover what led you to the path that you eventually took to to where you're at now and and and the things you've talked about you you you you grew up in bc right yes and and and but one thing i don't know is were your parents uh i mean you you obviously decide to become an academic uh did were your parents uh academics at all or my mom uh had worked at an insurance company and she quit her job when she had me so i had a fairly traditional i guess i would say lower middle class i grew up in a kind of lower middle class working class neighborhood and i um my dad's sister taught creative writing at the university of british columbia so i did have that connection um yeah i don't know how much that it must have influenced me but you know i wasn't aware like you know of particularly choosing to follow my dad's sister's path but she was a you know she was a major figure in my life i loved her and she loved literature and always bought me books and but i i yeah i don't know i mean maybe it was genetic i love to read you know from my mom and dad read to me from before i could read and i i don't even remember learning to read it seemed to come naturally and you know i just always i wanted to write i wanted to talk about books from the time i was probably you know in my early teens i wanted to be a teacher um by the time i was in high school i think i i wanted to teach at a university if i could i didn't think i would but um and yeah i just you know i just i was one of those i was an only child so that probably contributed to it as well i just i loved i i spent all my time really uh just sitting by myself reading and and being enchanted by words and imaginary worlds and just wanting to to talk about language and you know stories and and what stories do and all of that and so that's what i did i i had um just a wonderful time at university i did a master's degree i i thought i would stop then i taught for a while as a sessional instructor part-time instructor at the university of british columbia and at simon fraser university in vancouver and but then i decided why not keep going i love this so i did a phd and i got a job at the university of saskatchewan i taught there for four years it was a wonderful place and i got a job at the university of ottawa and i taught there for the next 16 17 years before i took early retirement and yeah it um it was a very smooth path for me and i i imagined that i would do that you know until they kicked me out because i i love you know it's such a privileged job you know to be able to do the thing you love and get paid very well for it and i had to have so much time relatively free time to to do one's own writing and research and really to be able to shape one's own research profile and all of that it was it was just it was lovely at the same time of course i was becoming aware of the darker currents that are have have overtaken i would say academia now the obsession with victimhood and and remedying victimhood uh and um yeah i i so i started to to speak about that and and the thing i knew best was of course feminist ideology um the feminist approach to literature is a dominant one and i had studied feminist theory for years when i was a phd student and i was just taken for granted that that's the perspective that one taught from including other victim-oriented theories such as post-colonialism and anti-racism and all of those kinds of things and and uh yeah i just i i reached a point where i you know it started gradually i i i stopped really identifying as a feminist because i became aware of what a just unforgiving relentlessly aggressive and mean-spirited and simplistic kind of perspective it offered i looked out at all the young men well there weren't that many of them but you know they're about 20 of of the ordinary english literature class but i looked out at those young men and i it was just so obvious to me that not only were they not privileged and entitled and oppressors but that they were well bewildered um shamed often unable to voice um their life experience in any way that would be validated uh you know i just uh i i just i couldn't go on pretending that everything women did was to be celebrated that women were these heroic survivors who had overcome generations of sexism and now must be celebrated and men were always you know these privileged oppressors who didn't care about women who in fact objectified and oppressed and hated them held them back and should now uh in in recompense for the sins of their fathers step back entirely and allow women to take over the world because women would do a much better job of it allegedly i that just you know i i i couldn't be a part of it anymore and and finally about uh i guess just about 10 years ago now i gave my first public lecture speaking against feminist criticism and really the whole orientation towards grievance studies and and victimology that is so popular at every university in north america and so and then i started making my um my videos the fia mango file wow well i this is great your your your monologue just now covered much of many of the questions i had and anticipate them of your background there's a perfect description of where you are i i there were a few things i wanted to fill in um so you did your phd also at ubc at ubc and and just to point out you'd studied feminists as you said started from feminists there your phd as i understand it was actually about uh female journalists in early canada is that the case so it was actually kind of a feminist kind of uh view of journalism what it was yes i it was it was it's called um well the book i published um based on the the thesis was called the woman's page and it was about women writers in general essayists novelists but especially journalists also public speakers activists in uh late 19th century early 20th century canada and and really i think writing that although i was certainly steeped in feminist theory at the time it also it made me realize that the feminist view of history simply wasn't true in that here were women writing over a hundred years prior to when i was talking about them and they didn't see themselves as oppressed and at least most of them didn't a number of them were feminists and were able to articulate their stridently feminist and even quite uh vociferously anti-male views even back then in the 1880s 1890s first decade of 20th century they found a willing audience their radicalism was celebrated they were able to to make careers out of voicing these heterodox opinions and in fact they had a great deal of authority and legitimacy as women speaking to these various social issues so i realized that something had to be wrong in the feminist version of history if these women were able to give voice to very radical ideas and in some cases to live very unconventional lives with very few limitations relative relatively little criticism or opposition and and so that was what started me i think on my journey away from the feminist perspective although that was quite a a while before you eventually gave the talk so in fact you've explained i some a question that i wanted answered i guess i you know when you started university of ottawa when in 2009 which was at when you were by many standards somewhat older than than than than and so i wondered what you had done in between but part of it was uh teaching but um no it was actually 2003 yeah and i my first job was at the university of saskatchewan i started there in 1999 i'd had a postdoc before then i actually got my phd in 1996. so i was a little bit older like i was in my early 30s by the time i got my my first job first full job at the university of saskatchewan i'd taken a little bit three years off between my master's and my phd so i was that little bit older than than most phds do i may be too intrigued ask did you during those three years did you work at something else interesting you didn't go fishing or anything no i didn't do anything interesting i taught i taught i taught at you know at ubc and sfu i i thought at that point that that i you know i might get a college job at that point you could easily get a college job there are lots of colleges in in vancouver so i thought that i might like to do that but then i just thought i'm gonna keep on because i like this so much now when you um in your after the i'm interested in your academic um sort of specialty after after the the uh the phd on on on female journalists in early canada what what was your research area or or area of publications also related to sort of feminist things or was it did it go in a different area it was it was basically that yeah and i i became i think what someone might call a member of the loyal opposition i was still kind of working within feminist frameworks i was still working mainly on women writers not entirely my focus was still the early 20th century late 19th century in canada although i started broadening out two british 19th century writers but yeah it was still basically i i was especially interested in in um non-fiction writers uh those who wrote about social issues and how literature and and um just cultural discourse in general uh was impacted by changing by social movements that that sort of thing but but i was you know i was questioning i think the the dominant frameworks of the academy good thing to do when you and you and you started to do it in a wonderful way and i i you said your first you gave your first talk on on sort of and let's make it clear you define yourself as an anti-feminist and we'll get to that and i think that's incredibly interesting but you gave your first public talk on this in 2014 what uh how how did that arise and what was the response of your colleagues and at the time it was actually in 2013 okay yeah in march of 2013 how it arose was that um in in the fall of 2012 i had seen the um planned lecture by warren farrell do you know who warren farrell is uh i think i saw him referred i think i saw when i was reading and going through many all of your stuff lately i saw that name come up and now i can't remember he's um he's a major he was a feminist uh he was involved in the national organization of women but he he broke from feminism for the same reasons that i did really he he found its relentless anti-male animus and endurable and though he always has expressed a great deal of sympathy for women and for feminist issues he wanted to broaden the discourse to bring in men's issues too he i think became famous when he published a book in the 1970s called the myth of male power which i would recommend to anybody who is skeptical about whether there are legitimate men's issues or whether the feminist narrative is is inadequate in any way it's a it's a marvelous marvelous still extremely engaging and accessible book about about men's issues and um you know and just the um the inaccuracy of much of what feminism has to say about masculine entitlement and male power so uh he was um was to speak at the university of toronto in the fall of 2012 and he was actually speaking about um the boy crisis which has become his his that's his big topic really over the last 10 and more years he's the sort of writer who researches everything exhaustively he's got statistics on everything he's just incredible and you know he's become very concerned over the last couple of decades about what's happening to boys in our culture with all of the emphasis on making sure that girls grow up in a pro-female environment and schools being taken over entirely by female and usually feminist teachers and the effects of fatherlessness on boys and the difficulty boys have in finding male role models and what happens to them psychologically and emotionally when they're told that you know really their sex is responsible for everything evil in the world and their very sexuality their very nature is harmful uh you know he's he's uh looked into that extensively and so that's what he was going to be talking about at the university of toronto and he was going to be brought in by a group called the canadian association for equality and they had a there was a men's issues awareness student group there that wanted to have him come speak there was this huge protest oh yeah that's right i saw that protest in one of your videos i think yeah and it was it was it was um [Music] it was the first protest of that nature i'd ever seen they're now standard on university campuses and i'm sure there had been many before this well i know there had been because i started researching it then but um but this was the first one that um that i saw and uh that was so clearly wrong in every way the students that uh attended that protest knew nothing about warren farrell they hadn't read him they weren't protesting him they were protesting because their women's studies teacher had taken a single quotation of out of one of his books from decades previously taken it out of context and alleged that he was some sort of rape apologist which of course was the phrase du jour at the time every man who spoke in any way skeptically about feminist claims about sexual assault and sexual harassment was a rape apologist so they came out to make sure that nobody could attend his talk and they ripped the posters down they blocked the entrance ways and exits they gave the hitler salute to the campus security who were attempting to keep order there they verbally harassed screamed at yelled obscenities at the people who were trying to attend the talk one of the young men who was caught on camera by my person who eventually became my collaborator street steve brule who filmed the entire debacle one of the young men there was there because he had had two friends he was 18 or 19 he'd had two friends commit suicide in the past year and he was hoping that he might find some closure or at least some understanding from hearing warren farrell speak but he had he was subject to a bunch of screaming herodon's with nose rings telling him that that you know he was a fascist because he wanted to hear warren farrell so i saw that and i was of course you know appalled not really surprised and i contacted that group the canadian association for equality and said look if you've got a chapter in in ottawa i'd be really happy to be involved in any way even just as a like a mentor to young men if they want to come and talk to me about some of the feminist ideology that they're being presented with in their classes i'd be happy to be a sounding board or just you know just give emotional support really i already knew there was nothing much that could be done about it institutionally uh you know the the force of uh feminist ideology on campuses was already so dominant um but anyway so that's what i said and they invited me to speak the following uh spring and so i did i went down there and spoke and um you know toronto was about a six hour drive from ottawa for anybody who doesn't know and it uh it was protested the fire alarm yeah you know for the first three or four years of my life i never gave a talk that wasn't protested and uh yeah you know they pulled the fire alarm and uh you know all of that and and i gave other talks after that that were also um it's a fantastic famous one at university of ottawa library that i heard about maybe you talk about that for a second yeah yeah there well there was one at the university of ottawa itself that was prevented by the banging of drums and the singing of the communist international that one was really that was really crazy and um yeah i gave one in kingston that talk in in at queen's university and kingston did eventually go forward um with a lot of objection and heckling and all of that i get yeah i tried to give one at the uh ottawa public library where antifa and you know affiliated groups came out and chanted fiamengo and you know held up uh banners saying no platform for hate speech and all you know all those sorts of things so so yeah i i got a first-hand glimpse of the um maniacal ideological intransigence of um the sorts of students who are being um nurtured on university campuses so uh yeah that was that that was when when i first heard about this i remember it surprisingly because your your mannerism is anything but aggressive or or in your face it's it's it's it's by by nature you know if if just listening to you for two minutes it's clear that you're not you're not a strident you know and it's so it's ideologue and and and it's amazes me that people can in any way listen to you for two minutes and talk about hate speech that's that's what i i just found find incredible but any case um it happens i i i think i've already mentioned once on this podcast but i know back when we lived in oregon and i first time we saw it was my wife intended talk at a small liberal arts college would very woke and and i guess was christina huff summers i think was speaking but the students wouldn't it was a lot the law school which surprised me and the students wouldn't let her speak and the law faculty were there and no one everyone just sort of sat there and we you'd think in a law school that there'd be some semblance of the notion of free speech that at least at the very least and uh um and and uh and and such radical things as as saying that that there were intrinsic biological differences between men and women uh like for example men on average taller than women were shouted down yeah no that's not true i mean and um in any case uh i have to before we i you know i'm going to we'll get we'll get to hopefully a lot of thing there's so much here to unpack with you but um i have to ask you 20 you say 20 of the students in the in the in the um uh phd program in literature or whatever are are were male when you were about that yeah just before i left the university of ottawa we had to do one of those program reviews where you know you may write a huge 100 page report on every aspect of the department's programming and i and i remember then um we did have a gender breakdown of our students and at that point it you know changed slightly from year to year but it was around 84 to 16 female to male 1 has there ever been a large movement or the government suggesting that somehow that we have to do something about the male um policy of males in in in literature has there anybody what do you think there's never a movement to do anything and you know and english literature is not even the worst i don't think although it's probably one of the worst but uh you know in in education like the entire faculty of education the social sciences um they've been like they're completely dominated by by women and there is never any expressed concern about that yeah well i mean and something you talk about and i've talked about too but it's you know generally now in most universities it's it's it's now well over 60 percent of the undergraduate population it's female about 40 percent male but in in many disciplines including it's you know i'm a physicist and i hear about the policy women in stem but in a huge number of stem disciplines they're by far the majority in biology for example and um yeah but one only hears about the the disciplines where they where for some reason the demographics is such that they're not in the majority um now um the you you what was that well actually before we get to the details you you you your talks are protesting how do your how did your colleagues respond at all in in literature in the university elsewhere if you want to talk about it you don't have to yeah i don't know i you know by that point i was already you know i think i'd made it clear and it only takes you know one comment said in a department meeting and everybody knows oh she's not one of us okay and so by that point i think it was already pretty clear that i was uh you know a non-believer okay and so uh um and you know and uh i my colleagues were very nice to me they're very civil people and i did have a few friends but um i think i would have to say that i was essentially very nicely frozen out they must have known i i didn't you know tell anybody i didn't send around a mass email saying hey look i did this talk at the u of t yeah um but you know obviously they would have seen it and and been appalled and but they were nice enough not to say anything and and no no nobody came you didn't have a conversation there no there were no conversations about the intellectual content of that or or the whole issue or were there no seminars or what do you mean i mean i'm on on the issues you raised i mean on the issues raised in your public talk and and history of feminism and and uh um and and the claim and the treatment of man but there were no no no i mean in that last year when i told you we did the um the program review and i i was responsible for writing um writing up part of the our self-report document and i did actually comment on the paucity of male students and i said because we were always concerned with keeping student enrollment up yeah and i said you know one one really quick and easy way we could increase our enrollment would be to make our classes um more attractive to men and maybe we should have a conversation about how that might be done and whether that you know um could be done partly by changing the ideological approach of most english literature courses but that just gets frosted out it just it is never it's never picked up does it mate did it make it into the final report at least yes yeah it's there okay okay i think so um but but yeah it would never be actually flagged or or focused on well not when i i i i can't help but ask you when i heard that you had taken early retirement uh i wondered whether um why other than perhaps it was financially attractive because the university but did did you were you encour did you leave academia for the same reason a lot of people leave academia lately which is that it's just becoming impossible to be involved in open scholarship and discussion or yeah exactly for that reason i started to feel nervous while i was teaching i did think that it was only a matter of time before there would be a student complaint and uh you know what happens after that then then you get forced out and it's very very humiliating and horrible so yeah i was i was always nervous even just be you know giving basic information uh about the authors we were studying um yeah uh so i i it just became so uncomfortable and so from the time i was in my early 50s i started thinking if if i can go at 55 i will and and so i did and you know the fact that my mother was here in vancouver where we've moved to now after my dad died i i i thought i would like to live in the same city as my mother so my husband and i were kind of thinking along those lines too that's nice it's nice that you're both able to do that and i'm able to move did you did you think you didn't feel protected by the fact that you're a woman you i mean i assume if you've been a man you would have been already forced out oh yes yeah i would have been gone probably after that first talk you know or or shortly after definitely i i had my female privilege and uh it allowed me to say a lot of things that no man would have been able to say and it was a lot more difficult to make problems for me because you can't it's not as easy for a female student to say that she was sexually harassed or that i had created a toxic environment or whatever yes i was definitely lucky in that way yeah no i i think that's one of the important reasons you know one of the reasons actually interesting enough in the the program we were going to have and and we may still have an origins foundation was uh was an all-female panel about disease issues yeah i assume there would have been no protests that there were no men on it but but in any case um but i think it's it's it's important to see that because people automatically um you you are allowed to say um things that that that men couldn't and but it's important that they be said and it's important we all have the discussion and i wanna what i'm gonna do even though i like history and i know you like history is i'm going to be very a-historical i want to i want to i want to start by talking about a recent piece of yours actually came out august 10th uh now and then go back in time back to to um to uh the early times but actually i wonder whether i want to put it yeah before i get there you point out you started to do the videos the videos from which actually i first learned about you the fiamengo files beautiful set of videos when when you look up now you see that the original videos aren't there you want to explain to me what happened yeah well eventually uh i think it was last summer around this time the the entire channel uh which was called studio brule that's my collaborator steve brule who did all the production of the videos uh it was it was permanently banned and we'd been um you know obviously on youtube's not approved list for some time all of the videos were eventually demonetized and then there were individual bans on certain videos you know for very they never tell you exactly why they just say that you contravene their community standards and things like that and and then eventually there was just the complete ban so they are now on odyssey although i find them kind of hard to to find and and all all of the view numbers of course and all of the comments too are gone and that that ladder thing is so so i i just i you know it's so sad because they the comment section especially on some of them it was a sight to behold they were there were hundreds and hundreds in some cases thousands of really interesting conversations often very civil debates and exchanges of views and it's really sad that that that that's all gone but yeah that's that's what happened but um um steve and i have have started up again now we're starting over again with a very small channel called studio b yes on youtube again and and people have said that's a very bad idea to go back to youtube which yes i can see why it is but uh youtube is still it's still kind of the place to be and uh so we're there at studio b i would encourage anybody who wants to see um what's going on in my new project to to take a look there there are a number of studio b's so it's sort of hard to find but if you put studio b fiamengo into a google search you should be able to find it or not or even the fiat mango file which is i think how i found it yeah okay great yeah yeah it's the fia mango file 2.0 now and yeah so we're doing a series on the history of feminism which is what i want to get get back to that history and that's how we'll land we'll get there eventually actually the good news i'm not you should must be aware the good news is that there's fear mango file too but but somehow three uh um uh feminine go file originals are still on uh episode one episode six and episode three somehow survived and they're still on youtube oh interesting they maybe they're on somebody else's no they're on no no no it's studio b one of the channels is the original fiamingo file just you know and maybe i should announce it because maybe it'll give i finish and remove it but then there's but they're there they're there oh that's true yes steve did remount some of the originals he was thinking um i think originally he was thinking that he would put up the ones that we thought were the most important but then we ended up just getting into the 2.0 but yes they there are still some of those very old ones from way back in 2015 there the first episode which is very important which is why i'm an anti-feminist which i want to sometimes get to um is up it's still up and it's a it's very important but it's always a shame and not only when youtube does it but i know universities including my own university just take down videos where there's which are for which there's lots of nulli public comments but there's resources and and and and uh and references and learning tools and teaching tools and they take it down as and and pretend they're interested in teaching it was really it's really yeah i know it's so it's so incredible i remember when um remember when alessandro stroomia did his uh lecture at cern uh you know which um of course was immediately taken down from from the cern website so that people couldn't even go they just had to read about how what he had said was absolutely indefensible and unacceptable but you couldn't even go and find out what he'd said in order to test his decide for yourself yeah decide for yourself or look at the evidence that he had provided or anything i mean i just find it just extraordinary that these people can claim to be in any way interested in education public knowledge research when you know debate certainly not you know when they do these kinds of things yeah it is it is and you can imagine certain emotional roofs but when it when when academic groups start doing it you know it seems like and and and we're going ahead again but the whole the whole rationale is that somehow the facts hurt if the facts hurt the facts should never be discussed yeah because and and and and incredible yeah that yeah yeah it is yeah that facts or arguments are a form of violence now that started to be the the the dominant claim i don't know how long ago 15 years ago perhaps became you know really popular about 10 years ago to shut down anything that uh these groups didn't like and it's just yeah it's incredible it's so ridiculous so facile on its face and yet it has enormous power both within and outside of academia to prevent people from exploring all sorts of subjects that have you know great public import i wonder if you'd be allowed in the english department now to talk about the childhood nursery rhyme that we used to say when i was in the playground when i was a young boy and or and listen to and young girls said it as well which was sticks and stones will break my bones but but what names will never hurt me yeah and now names will definitely are yeah it's uh absolutely opposite and and so anything you know uh i mean it isn't like i don't think they really believe those things i don't think the people claiming to be hurt are really hurt i mean it's just a very convenient piece of rhetoric it's a pure power play it's about who gets to decide what's acceptable and what's not it's about whose feelings matter it's about which victim group uh you know can excoriate which other so-called privileged group although obviously they're demonstrating that they're not really a disempowered group at all if they have that kind of power but you know those contradictions don't stop them and so it's just a way of of demonstrating that certain groups of people uh have got to face the facts that they are no longer able to speak honestly about a whole range of subjects in in any kind of public forum anymore and the people who are who are not able to do that are the people who are supposedly been we've been told have the power and you know that i and to date this and as you know i i recently wrote a piece saying that that part of the problem is that is if you let i don't think i don't know if i use the word spoiled children in the piece but people behave like spoiled children and academia and yeah and academia is allowing that to happen without with with impunity yeah um then that's going to continue and until someone said says stands up and some institutional leader and and you can understand have i've seen it happen i've seen it happen to me when i've talked about this you get barraged immediately it's very difficult you can understand it's not as if people are cowards it's it's awful if you when people speak up and and are just attacked yes speaking up so you can see why academics have become afraid but somehow we'll talk at the end about what we can do but let's go let's this is your chance and not mine so as some people are immediately going to write in the comments section of this you know let her speak um but uh so um your mo this piece that i just picked up most recently men have been psychologically abused by feminist ideology for decades in some sense it's a review of some of the history from from your discussion but but i i you it came in the context of a of a i can't believe it i could believe of a tv program i guess when when um in the uk in the election one of the liz truss i guess has said that she's going to make um catcalling illegal and and and and cat-calling wolf whistles and down blousing which i've never heard of which is apparently photographing a woman's cleavage um which that would be illegal of course you know you wouldn't want to i guess the whole grammy awards would not be impossible yeah right yeah but but if you suggest that maybe women shouldn't bear their cleavage in the way they do oh that's a terrible sexist thing to say yeah yeah exactly in any case but but in the context of that you talked about the debate that happened and and and i want to just quote some of the numbers because it's the uk numbers but but um basically you're saying look um not only is the legislation of course divisive and insulting to men as you point out it's it's also state overreach but um that people disa you're one of the points you've raised often is that they ignore and feminism particularly ignores the difficulties of of young men and males and who are supposedly so privileged and you talk about in the context of history but here are the statistics in the uk 75 percent of suicides in the united kingdom are committed by men um uh men are 95 of the prison population 85 percent of the homeless rough sleepers and 77 of alcoholics workplace deaths in the united kingdom are 94 male boys are performing far worse than girls in the uk and primary systems at the tertiary level young men are out numbered by women at close to two to one and and as you point out wouldn't you think feminists might spend a few days at least pretending to care about men's issues not in your life they continue to hammer away at male entitlement so those are some of the statistics that but maybe but let but i'll let you elaborate because it's a nice article on on sort of where to go from there yeah well i mean it's uh and the statistics by the way are for north america of course are pretty much identical or even worse i think men are 80 percent of suicides in the united states and they're 97 of workplace deaths and yeah 96 perhaps of the prison population yet we still have these programs for uh how to keep women out of prison um nothing about how to keep men out of prison you know we just yeah it's just um like the glaring contradictions don't seem to phase feminist ideologues or even the general public and i think that that's the thing that i find so um [Music] so frustrating at times is that wherever you are on the political spectrum i know there are leftist men who don't consider themselves feminists there are certainly many conservative men who don't consider themselves feminist and yet most of them to some degree or other often to a large degree accept the feminist claims and feel compelled to express uh concern you know about the paucity of women in stem or concern about the problem of sexual harassment or concern or or their you know how um how horrific it is that women have to walk down the street and face cat calling and wolf whistling uh yeah and yet are uh either don't know about the the reality of how boys and men are falling behind or struggling or or even don't care i mean and that is the problem is that that feminist ideology has has ridden high on a deep um well we use the term gynocentrism in men's issues circles but just a just a deep preference for women both men and women find it hard to care as much about the struggles that men face that this has been amply psychological you know documented by um experts in psychology there's a woman named alice eagley who's done a lot of research on this and antonio mladnik and various others roy baumeister as well and they just keep finding over and over again that women have an in-group bias women tend to care more about other women they have a strong sense of of their of belonging to that that group womanhood uh and men have a strong bias towards women and so when women say that something is hurting them or something needs to be done to support women men tend to be willing to jump and do it whereas when men complain or raise issues that are affecting boys in our society everybody gives the collective yawn and and that's how feminist ideologues have been able to get away with decades upon decades of programs to advantage women which have disadvantaged men and it's why we're not very interested now in in doing doing anything about the asymmetry that has resulted yeah no in fact um the when i first began to sort of think and question this as i was a chairman of the physics department you know when i was told that that that people weren't incentive to women's issues i i looked all around and was is quite the opposite because most of us when i first heard we know i looked at the policy of women in physics and we tried to do something about it it's a natural thing to want to do to to help and and and and we'd in studio programs and and um and uh and you know when i was chair we we hired the first women in physics and we even got a first all-female class to matriculate in in at least of offers in graduate school and i didn't think twice about that because it is true that it seems natural to try and assist in those things when you've grown up and heard about the problems but then you look around and say well but there are all these programs that are working why why are we systemic what are where are the systemic inequities um there are where are the and and and and one of the things that you bro broke me up when i was reading is you talk about the that we need to do this would be a wonderful speech to begin with we ne which might get you in the door but then kicked out very quickly afterwards but we need to do something about systemic inequities in universities and get applaud the systemic inequities against men and and and that would really which is what you said you want to comment on that i mean i was pleased i was amazed actually i guess i've given away that i was pleased but but i was uh the the uh to see you use those terms because it's so unusual i'd never seen anyone talk about systemic inequities you hear the president united states you hear the head of the national academy of sciences the head of the national institute of health the heads of the all the major scientific organizations talk about systemic inequities against women and minorities um yeah but not not against men certainly not against white men and uh you know i've spent years now like putting things up on twitter about yet another round of women-only appointments at you know some various universities and i always get comments by both men and women but certainly by men saying oh big deal you know so what so that here's you know for one year some men are going to be discriminated against boohoo and i try to tell them well actually this has been going on and you know you can you can read about it there's a book called um uh uh it's by martin loney it's called um in pursuit of division race gender and equity hiring in canada he wrote it in the 90s and it documents the beginning of all of this in the late 1970s and 1980s he was writing as as a not exactly a socialist but certainly a left leaning person interested in social justice and all this and he was saying this is not the way to go and um and he used all he had all the statistics showing that in fact like you just you can't break down um issues in these very binary simplistic terms because it simply isn't the case if you're looking at income level you know you'll find immigrants from [Music] greece and portugal right in there with immigrants from jamaica in terms of their income level so you can't say that all whites have privilege and all blacks don't you know that all those kinds of things and you know he really gets into it and he provides the same kind of very meticulous analysis of the position of women um you know over those decades and um so this is something that has been entrenched in academia and elsewhere in this society for decades i mean i find it breathtaking that that this is what men have had to endure and yet still feel ashamed for their alleged privilege that at least two generations of men have been discriminated against in hiring overtly legally that there have been positions either held only for women or at least you know where yeah men could apply but they weren't going to be even given a serious look at if there were any women who were even close to similarly qualified i saw that myself with my own eyes at the university of saskatchewan year after year starting in 1999 so i've seen it personally for over 20 years i mean i just if i were a man i would i i mean i would feel really angry about it and and i think we you know but yeah they don't and and i mean i think we should be men and and non-feminist women should be marching in the streets and saying no more no more discrimination let's live in a culture let's live in in societies where people have equal opportunities to bring their gifts to the world and to pursue their ambitions and their talents and that's an end of it let's stop this i mean i just find it outrageous and and you know and if you talk about this and you know the source of male anger most men aren't angry and the vast vast vast majority of men just want to say okay let's just let's call it quits now let's start over again the vast majority of men just want to live in harmony with women and they want to to form partnerships and they want to work together and build a good society together and there's so many women who are still angry about their issues and not at all interested in listening to what men have to say i've given talks where at the end of the talk after i went through all the statistics some of which you read a woman will stand up at the end and say i mean i'm thinking of a particular example and give an anecdote about something that happened to her in 1988 where some man made a sexist comment and everybody will applaud and the clear implication of her comment is this happened to me 35 years ago i'm still angry about it and i'm not interested in hearing about 80 percent of suicides being male i don't give a damn about men dropping out of you know the school system i don't give a damn about any of those things because i'm holding on to my grievance my victimology matters more than anything else and people will applaud that and i'm and i said to this woman i'm not interested in collective vengeance seeking i don't think even if it were true that men up until 30 years ago had exercised absolute dominance and subjugation of women why should the younger generation of men have to pay for that in their own lives i don't believe in that that's that's the way to guarantee deep social dysfunction and it isn't even true and that's what i've discovered in my research it is not true that that's what men did to women 50 years ago 100 years ago 150 years ago feminism was always built on lies and it was always built on the social preference that we have for women and the great concern and compassion that men have for women and so um i think i got off topic there but you know it's all right i'm enjoying listening to her but but that you know that's the difficulty it is it is that people forget that that the the kinds of um ameliorative policies that various universities are putting forward now that they've already been tried they've been in place for for decades for decades i mean i'll you know i i want to come back actually i will you actually again as usual i anticipated where we're going which is the history of feminism and we'll get there but um yeah when i talked about my experience as chair i'm talking about the 1990s yeah talking about the fact that that um that when whenever we hired anyone and that was the 19th early 1990s if we didn't hire a woman we had to write a special letter to the administration explaining why we didn't hire women that was 1990s that's 30 years ago so that was it was i know well where and when i was at the university of saskatchewan starting in the late 90s and at the university of ottawa was the same thing if you didn't hire a woman or somebody else in another equity group yeah you know there were the various groups the indigenous and people of color and the disabled you had to write if you hired a white man you had to write and explain why and so that it's been going on all these years and uh yeah it's it's it is really extraordinary now you um it's um it it is extraordinary and it's a little more as you as listeners will know i or viewers i've moved back to canada and and i was kind of amazed um discovered that actually this discrimination can be explicit in canada it's implicit in the united states i mean you where you in the united states you're not allowed to have an ad and a university saying only only available for women faculty positions uh men you know or women or minorities are disabled um in canada you can do that and there and and and i i just wrote about one or two you know uh major positions in physics for example that were only open and and um and worse than that the the the advertisement said not only that it was only open to women some versions women minorities and and and other disadvantaged groups but in the in the in the application you had to show how you have worked to empower groups that deserve equity oh yeah yeah deserving and i thought how can who is anyone equity not deserving i mean is anyone that's that shocks me he's allowed by the law to write that i know it's just horrible isn't it used to be equity-seeking groups yeah for a long time and then they changed it to equity deserving groups only certain groups deserve equity i mean it's right there the bigotry is so blatant in everything that they write and and yet it is somewhat uh startling to to know that that is part of canadian law it's right there in the canadian charter of rights and freedoms that that you have um everyone has the right to be treated equally except if what you're trying to do is correct for so-called historic uh you know marginalization and inequalities in that once you you can make that claim all bets are off and and nobody has a right no man has a right to be treated equally anymore do does just out of a point of information is there a discussion anywhere of what equity deserving means i mean it was the first time i'd seen it is there do people write specifically what that implies i mean is there is there a legal or any i'm sure there is i don't know you know i don't know i never looked but but i'm sure it's defined and you know it would be defined in exactly the way that it's always been defined it would be women and people of color etc yeah now again you know not only am i going historically in terms of history feminism i'm going historically in what i plan to talk to you about but you brought up so many interesting points in the last discussion in particular you point out how the how the how um [Music] men who um are uh not only have bought in you know are particularly sympathetic to these issues because they've been told their whole lives but you talk interestingly enough about even people who point out the problems with that um the fallacies of some of that uh those arguments inevitably implicitly buy into them you wrote an article saying accused men on campus are up against decades of feminist myth myth making but you but what um what fascinated me was that you quoted stuart taylor jr junior give a warning to parents about how difficult it is for their sons and and and when it's one of those things you read on the surface you go yeah yeah yeah yeah but then you parse it which is a wonderful thing for a professor of literature to do so let's let me give the quote and then let me let i'll let you parse each other i don't know if she can remember why okay oh i'm gonna give you the quote and then you well okay we'll see this would be a good test it said so the quote from him is you should of course treat women with respect avoid making unwa okay okay okay hold on we'll go through each of those words because i think you'll remember once i give you the sense okay you should of course treat women with respect avoid making unwanted sexual overtures and be quick to help the victim of an apparent result sexual otherwise what be what may be less obvious is that just as women in college face grave dangers from rapists and other sexual predators men like you face grave dangers and false accusers and and and you go on but but but what amazes me say okay you read that and you go good he's he's he's pointing he's out but then you point out each of those claims is itself not true so let's go you should let me why should you treat women with respect i mean i agree that we should approach every individual we meet with you know the intent of being civil i don't know about respectful exactly but certainly civil and polite why should men respect women are women ever hectored to respect men no of course not uh and and if if women were like if if we want to make that our uh cultural bedrock that each sex treats the other with respect okay that's fine but of course that's not true um women do not respect men and men shouldn't have to respect women if the women aren't behaving with respect and the implication there of course is that a special standard is required for women and there's also a kind of female moral supremacism built into that which is that somehow women are more worthy of respect than those disgusting dirty you know horrible men so yeah i reject that right right from the outset it's it's all part of that we should believe women you know we have to protect women well why if they're if they're liars if if they act uh dishonestly aggressively shamefully and then i don't respect them yeah yeah i agree i i guess i'd i'd give him a little leeway i think you don't need to respect people some people aren't disrespecting but treat people respect i think just means courteously civilly and that i'm all in favor of and absolutely the people who are idiots you might as well treat them at least courteously and civilly with and with kindness because there's i agree yeah i agree but it's the implication that men don't treat women with respect to begin with and that women are uniquely deserving of respect while men aren't that really bugs me okay second sentence poor guy he was trying so hard and you just destroy him anyway not really destroying but the language second is the parsing is really interesting the second claim which sounds reasonable but then of course you argue against avoid making unwanted sexual overtures your turn yeah what does that mean unwanted i mean come on how is the guy to know we still live in in human communities where men make the vast majority of romantic and sexual advances that's just i think that's human nature if you want to argue that's just learned okay fine it still is most women do not make the first move so how is the man to know whether the sexual overture uh is wanted or not i mean this is the whole problem with sexual harassment legislation it says that anything that's unwanted falls into the category of sexual harassment so if a man asks a woman out for a date and she says oh gee i'm busy that night and then he asks her again not realizing that oh i'm busy actually meant you know bug off but she couldn't say it because that's how women often are then he's now guilty of of uh an unwanted advance so you know that's that's just you see i'm a scientist and it seems to me maybe a quaint notion that to find that that you base your presumptions on empirical evidence so it's har in this case it would be hard to know um what was unwanted unless without any empirical evidence exactly and yeah and one of the ways would be to to ask someone out or something like that and then you might find get some evidence but okay and you know and this is a this this whole idea of the unwanted advance it it has built into it a a privileging of a certain type of man who is very very attractive to women his advance is not going to tend to be unwanted but the nerdy guy who has spent all of his life let's say you know reading about astronomy and doesn't have that much experience with women but uh you know still really likes women and the only women he's ever going to meet are are the women either in his classes that he's taking at university or if he goes on later maybe women in his lab or you know whatever it happens to be um what so what is he is he supposed to live as a monk is he not even allowed now to make an advance without that being somehow uh considered unacceptable even by a guy who has spent his life writing about the injustices to accused men on university campuses even he's bought into the rhetoric yeah yeah exactly and and and another issue which i which i guess i i credit my wife was teaching me about because she's a woman and attractive women as she i think she is um uh um laura she said you know you learn how to kindly and gently say no but it's not a it's not traumatic it's i mean every it's something you it's something mothers or fathers teach young girls is how to women are going to be you're going to be you're going to be a someone's going to ask you out and you may not want to do that and how to do on how to how to do it kindly or if if the if the proposition is is rude and how to say buzz off and just go away and not feel like you've been um traumatized for the rest of your life it's just it's just part of becoming an adult and and and similarly from this is very difficult you know quite frankly it it's quite difficult it's difficult for the woman to say no often she doesn't want to have the guys exactly it's very difficult it can't it's very difficult to say i just don't find you attractive at all and i never could you know that's awful and so so lots of women don't want to say that and so and the guy i mean what what have guys been taught even now in our feminist approved culture the idea of the masculine hero um the most chivalric hero he he he tries he wins the woman you know that's what he does and maybe he does great exploits he defeats the you know evil in his town or he does something wonderful and he does those things for the girl he loves who maybe wasn't interested in him at first but now she is because she sees what a wonderful man he is i mean i think that's still a an admirable romantic paradigm but what that means is that the guy is often primed not to take no for an answer at least not the first time and and who can blame him like lots of guys have said to me you know if i had taken no for an answer i would never have married the woman that i love well it's actually the basis speaking of literature person someone pointed out this out to me it's the it's the basis of essentially every romantic comedy voyage girls out and she says no boy gas girls out she says no you know finally blast girls out she said yes you know i mean that's the basic basic uh and and and the other part of this and you know i wasn't going to talk about this because because i'm a man i mean i'm not supposed to but again my wife has pointed this out it's not of course it's difficult for a woman to turn someone down gracefully it's a hard thing to do and it and you can damage people by you know you can imagine how bad you feel if you say no you're not attracted to me i'd never go out with you it but if you're a man it's also it's very difficult to ask a woman out at i mean i certainly was afraid to in high school because you know you get rejected it's really diffic it really is deflating and it's it's a it's a this whole on both sides it's a whole this interpersonal relationship is difficult and complex and to boil it down to such a facile statement of of avoiding making unwanted sexual overtures is is to demean both men and women yeah i absolutely agree and and i you know and and the fact that you know when i said it's hard for the woman to say no uh i think it's much harder to be the man who has to keep asking and and being turned down all the time wow i mean that that's incredible that's that's really hard and the fact that the feminist movement has has i cast all of that into the realm of you know male predation on women and that supposedly the only thing we're supposed to care about is women's alleged feelings of fear and apprehension when they're having these unwanted advances again it's just so so lacking in compassion and humanity well you know but we're going to keep going we're going to keep parsing but now you've reminded me of something else i want to get later so i might as well get you now two things you said when you talk about being an anti-feminist and we'll eventually get to the definition of anti-feminism in a second but um i told you working backwards is you you say two things that are really quite provocative or at least would be seem quite provocative in our current world one of them is you talk about seeking equality for women and you say men and women aren't equal so you want to expand upon that well they aren't and and it's really interesting to see feminists now talking about that the turfs you know the uh gender critical feminists as they call themselves who have split from the social construction as feminists for many many years we were told that everything was a social construction every behavior even physical strength i have read articles and i've written about them that claimed that physical strength itself was socially constructed from everything from what women are expected to do and allowed to do physically to the the uh the amount of food um you know the amount of protein that parents tend to give girls as opposed to boy you know all that crazy stuff yeah um and but you know now it's coming out yes okay i mean if that were true then we would just open all sports competitions to everybody why have women sports teams and men's sports teams now with the trans issue of course a lot of angry women are coming forward and saying hey this isn't fair now women are being prevented from competing with other women and women aren't as strong as men so there's that and you know there's so many other differences there's so many psychological differences women and men have different interests they have different aptitudes and we simply have to recognize that and although there are individual uh differences i mean there are individual exceptions i should say some women are taller than some men you know that kind of thing but in general men are taller than women so and you know and and let's you know like there's so many when a man and woman are lying in bed at night and all of a sudden there's a loud noise right around the front door okay i admit that maybe in one or two percent of households it's the woman who goes down to investigate but i think in the vast majority of households it's the man who goes down to investigate and it's the man who kills the spider in the bathtub and you know all these kinds of things so so so this idea that equality is our new god and we're going to have to rearrange everything and force people into boxes because we believe in equality i i just think that's a very bad postulate to be well and the point is that what people don't realize is the thing that people aren't equal is not a a judgment call it's not it's not a pejorative statement it's not it's not a value judgment because you know they're they're in they're in inequalities but they're going you know it's not to say one is better than the other it's men are taller than women maybe men are stronger women but it's also true that women are socially more adept than men on the whole socially more aware which is allows them in fact to sometimes manipulate situations and maybe gives them an advantage even when you think the power advantage is somewhere else so it it's just the recognition that there are differences but it's not to say that the fact that their differences makes one better than or or worse than another it's really it's and i've i've not met very many men who are interested in talking about the general inferiority of of women again i keep coming back to this but i've talked to so many men since i started doing this anti-feminist stuff who just although they are very angry at feminist ideology they still really love women they love women's bodies they love women's minds they love the way women are like they they you know this notion of objectification oh this is a terrible thing you know men objectify women what that really means is that men many men love women's bodies so much that they will actually allow themselves to be killed in order to protect those bodies that they fantasize about those bodies not just sexually per se but you know they just they're they're obsessed with with women and this goes back i'm sure to the experience of the baby boy at his mother's breast or even before that his sense of her body is of this nurturing enveloping safe space a girl has a very different relationship to her father it is not the same thing and so uh you know there just are all of these differences and it has very little to do with men wanting to oppress women i have met a lot of women who don't like men very much i'm sorry to say who have contempt for men at best are indifferent to their needs or concerns or even have a vengeful kind of satisfaction that they take in the thought of a man suffering i've had conversations with women where they talk about how i had one conversation with a woman who talked about how men suffering kidney stones was a kind of revenge for the fact that men don't give birth and so therefore don't experience that pain that women experience and she she laughed at the idea ha ha finally men were having to experience pain i really have never met a man who took pleasure in the thought of a woman's pain during childbirth and in fact the history of medicine has been the history of men trying to medical men trying to cut down on the pain that women suffered during childbirth so you know there are all of these inequities and um i don't think male superiority over women is a problem that we face in our in our society i just i do not see it okay well i think we we've gone over the men not equal women thing although i will say just you know again for full disclosure that in in um we lived in australia and these big spiders and it would be my it would be my wife who take care of them just so you know anyway okay there we go but um the um or at least at the beginning but um the uh the other thing you say which of course permeates a lot of this but i want to get it out now is you say that one of the big problems that the feelings become more important than reality and and and it's related to that i want to relate since we're i'm still going in that part parsing that second unwanted sexual overtures but the the feeling of of um uh of of uh of infringement on your personal space when someone may ask you out um it may lead to a feeling of you know may you you feel badly and you may feel personally friends but but um but then that feeling becomes more important than the reality of someone having just asked you out in the office or and so but that's just one example do you want to go into it more because yeah i mean yeah that's a huge topic really and and it's difficult for me because i don't ever remember really having that that feeling i know i don't remember ever feeling threatened by men and you know it could be i i wasn't a particularly beautiful young woman so maybe the experience of really beautiful young women who are constantly you know they can't walk down the street without men turning their heads and maybe that's different i've heard theories that that especially women in certain ages that they're kind of programmed almost to um to be very aware of of that threat uh and that this has a kind of evolutionary mechanism but but um since i didn't like all the men i knew and as i said i grew up in a lower middle class working class neighborhood my my friends and i used to go roller skating for fun like from age 14 to 16 17 we we hung out with kind of rough boys and and yet my experience of young men was in general they were very gentlemanly overall definitely not interested at all in forcing a woman to do anything she didn't want to do or you know anything like that so um so i have trouble believing the claims of uh you know the damsel in disgra distress kind of cries that we hear so often again i see them as power moves but even if they are true that is certainly no reason why i mean we have now a situation where men are being fired from their jobs or disciplined for alleged sexual harassment for the most minor of missteps you know you can make a joke you can stand too close you can be accused as a man of having a gaze that is too intense um you know there are all sorts of very very minor i mean now hugging yeah let's get there hold off because you want to talk about your monster gaze thing which i enjoyed listening to but i mean that that those are all cases where even if i accept that the woman really did feel threatened by the man standing too close to her or giving her a pat on the shoulder whatever it happens to be to start making law and policy based on those exaggerated feelings or those hysterical dare i say feelings is is well it's just it's a recipe for injustice well let me let me for your sake and mine but let me just clarify one thing that your experience has been a good one but but neither you nor i but in particular you since you made the statement do not deny there are cases of men um enforcing themselves on women it's not that it's not that you deny that doesn't happen it's just no of course not yeah i want to make that clear to you i mean of course not but but i must say that um you know i i now like i read pretty well every while people send me all sorts of um articles about this this complaint of sexual harassment this complaint of sexual assault it's very difficult to find one where you say aya that their you know the guy was obviously guilty in so many cases they are murky at best um so let's distinguish we're gonna get there no no we're going to get there i'm not talking about the sort of the alleged claims of places like workplace or campus i mean they're illegal there are people go to court because some people have raped people and people and in the legal system this happens it's not as if it doesn't what you're referring to is the far vaguer area in campuses and workplaces which which i which i want to get to but uh and but before we get there i want you to parse this last sentence which will get us there um which is you say where is what may be less obvious is that just as women in college face grave dangers from rapists and other sexual predators that statement you point out as other people have is complete false he knows it i don't even know why he said that he's the one that brings out the statistics that every reputable study has found that the danger that women face in society at large is certainly higher like women are safer on college campuses in north america than anywhere else i mean there were cases where universities didn't receive a single report of sexual assault you know in in a year or two years so these are places where yeah women are very safe so i don't understand why it's always necessary to because as soon as you uh um [Music] as soon as you concede that ground then you're already in a place where you're not for one you're not talking about reality anymore and you're already back footed because you're going to have to agree that if college campuses are really such a dangerous place for women then you know we're going to have to have all of these various policies to try to protect them or or to try to expel men who did all these bad things that aren't happening on those college campuses you know heather mcdonald who who i've talked to and and has different politics i think than probably both you and i uh but we've agree on some things has pointed out something very true if that were really true universities wouldn't be able to recruit students and parents if they if they were to say you know what 40 of the girls on our campus are raped yeah would be it wouldn't be the selling point of trying to get in there what kind of what kind of father would pay for his daughter's education because they're not it's because it really happens that they're able to and you know and also to be frank about it things happen on college campuses but they are not that they are not the man jumping out of a dark corner forcing the woman you know and raping her they are women going out and getting drunk and men going and getting drunk men getting drunk too and then they go back to his dorm room and they have some fumbled sexual encounter of some sort and the next morning she wakes up and she feels bad about it or she feels angry or she feels embarrassed and then you end up with uh some kind of complaint not every time of course but but sometimes and you know i used to walk home from the university of ottawa i lived in the student area in the first few years when when i taught there and the bars would just be crammed and you know all night and i mean for one thing i always thought wow these are different students from the type i was they're not home doing their homework they're always telling me they don't have time to do their reading but you know they're on the bars every night but but also like if it were true that campus was such a dangerous place for women then they would not be putting themselves in these vulnerable positions they would not be drinking themselves into a stupor with guys they hardly know and let's make it let's make it but let's even be clearer men wouldn't put themselves in that vulnerable position either because right now they can wreck i mean most most young men i'm assuming in a campus realize that if they end up if they're drunk and they end up in a sexual encounter they're a risk now of of of being expelled as much as anyone else i think men you know and you know and heather heather's argument is you shouldn't allow kids to drink and maybe that's a little bit different maybe maybe maybe instead i think you and i would say maybe you should expect kids to begin to behave like adults and accept responsibility for their behaviors but both men and women um but so both sets if if it were so if it were so um dangerous would it wouldn't continue to to uh to occur on campuses well i don't know i mean i i think that for the men um i i do think that young men are unwise to to involve themselves in these kinds of drunken encounters i think the i agree you know i would i would certainly counsel them not to i would counsel them to have a girlfriend to know her very well to romance or you know do all the traditional things and and you know go that route even then unfortunately you're still not safe yeah there are many cases i've read about where they dated for years yeah and in the end she claimed that he had done something terrible to her he had forced her in some way so um so it is very difficult for the men but i again i mean i i have a i guess a little bit more sympathy for those guys because i think a lot of those young men they just want it so much i mean not just sex in a crude sense they they really want the the intimacy they want to have a girlfriend and so this is the way they see that they can can have that and they're just hoping that it's not going to happen to them and uh unfortunately often it does but um yeah for for and i do i feel for girls who because those girls too have been duped i think in in various ways they've been told by the whole culture uh influenced by feminist ideology that they are you know that's part of their liberation that girls should be just like guys their attitude to sex should be a casual one you see that in the movies all the time girls they take off their clothes it's no big deal it's an enjoyable thing they're very cool they go off the next day usually the guy then thinks wow and he pursues her or whatever in reality it is that you wake up the next morning feeling bad about yourself maybe the guys do too but i know for sure the girls often they they feel and and that's the really interesting thing too that feminists have always claimed that that's a social construction that has to do with societal attitudes i think it's it's deeper than that and the fact that girls still feel that says tells us that all the social constructionist talk and all the discourse about empowerment and you know sexual liberation and everything that it is not actually true doesn't help girls to act like that well yeah i and okay so let's talk about campuses a bit and then i want to get off but but we're on it now and i was going to talk about a and you've talked about um um the uh what i want to you've talked about where you view our various inequities and we can talk about that but but the response now just to give a sense and you talk about uh ohio state i think it's in the context of maybe the monstrous gays thing but but um you know universities are enacting regulations that define harassment in a way that's so difficult to say to say is harassment and yeah but hold on my dog is harassing me my dog wants to be picked up so i just have to kiss there we go so uh anyway um so you want to talk about ohio state well i i just remember it was one we just won them once oh no it's no yeah it has this crazy harassment policy that that defines staring as well as hugging and and patting on the back as forms of harassment and so once you're there there you know there's almost nothing that therefore wouldn't fall under that category and and it would be almost impossible then for how you know how could a young man defend himself against the charge of sexual harassment um yeah it's it's you know and even if we get to the to the more serious um the idea that uh any kind of sexual encounter if the woman has been drinking now that can be sexual automatically no consent yes consent i mean wow given that many young women use alcohol precisely to give themselves permission to be sexual and to loosen their inhibitions or nervousness or whatever men too men too of course but for the man it's never an excuse no matter how drunk he is that doesn't absolve him of responsibility but as soon as she's had a single glass of wine or whatever she now no longer has to take responsibility for what she did she by by definition cannot consent now of course again everybody would agree that a woman who was completely passed out is not capable of consenting but this is not what we're usually talking about we're usually talking about a young man and a young woman both quite drunk or a little bit drunk who maybe do things that they wouldn't have done if they were sober hard to say but suddenly she is not responsible and he's a villain i i just i find it outrageous again what about equality then what about women's moral agency feminine feminism always claims that feminism is about the radical idea that women are human as if men never imagined that women were human in the past well anti-feminism is the radical idea that women are adults and therefore they make their own decisions and are responsible for what they decide absolutely okay we're almost on anti-feminism by the way but i can't i can't there i i can't i i don't want to leave this completely because the staring thing really it really is i knew a man who who was uh disciplined at his university because two girls had complained that he had stared at them they were in an office waiting to see you know the dean of something and he didn't even know what they were talking about maybe he was staring at them you know maybe he was thinking about something and his gaze just happened to go over in their direction maybe he was trying to remember whether he'd known one of them in high school you know i mean it's just ridiculous i don't know i mean yeah i've been made uncomfortable by somebody staring at me so i get up and move right or somebody stops tearing yeah you respond like an adult but yeah but what i want to point out is that now it's gone from campus i was informed by a tv producer uh when we were talking to the show that netflix i think it is has new rules on the set you're not allowed to stare at anyone for more than four seconds on the set so how how you can have a conversation is is you have to is amazing to me but that's one of the rules the other one is that you're not allowed to exchange phone numbers uh um which and which is amazing because i i do think most people many people end up with their spouses from based on people they met at work at some level it's where do you where you meet people and um and so this this kind of notion that normal adult intercourse and by intercourse i mean social intercourse is um forbidden state you know if you're interested in somebody you know you're when you're having conversation with them you're actually looking at them and how you can tell the difference in that kind of stare and another stare is a it's so that kind of notion that humans can't interact yeah that interaction itself is dangerous that normal direction is dangerous is such a sad idea it's it's a it's a it's a more than anything i find it tragic it is it's it's toxic too toxic of course to good human relationships and it's what makes me think that at some level whether consciously or unconsciously this whole project is intended to destroy human community it's intended to destroy everything that is good between men and women it's intended to break the pair bond between men and women which is the foundation of a flourishing society and obviously it's intended to make men extremely uncomfortable in their own skins they're attacked for the way they sit remember there was a big campaign about man spreading some time ago you're not allowed to sit with your knees apart um you know your everything the way men look at women uh a a nice comment that a man might make you know hey honey you're looking beautiful well maybe that's inappropriate but a lot of women enjoy it might make their day you know everything a man says or does is now potentially uh if not criminal at least you know somehow disreputable and it's also i think it ruins women too because it teaches them to second guess everything that they experience uh gives some [Music] perhaps women who are disordered in their thinking uh a very dangerous kind of narcissistic pleasure in accusing and berating men and it's just a it's a recipe for for social dysfunction [Music] which you've argued that feminism is but as we get about to get there we you basically say that that feeling of before we leave campuses that young boys go in and they're told at the very beginning they experience classes generally forced to have some classes where they said we're they're told that they're responsible for the inequity that and rape and society and pedophilia and that they're ultimately as you've written second-class citizens in both rights financial aid special programs and support systems so in some sense they're they're um they're already made to feel like they're they have an original sin just for being male yeah for being born male 1 and that's why i have argued that feminism is a kind of religion but it's a religion that has no notion of an all-forgiving god it has no idea of redemption you can confess your sins all you want you can declare yourself guilty but you can't have your sins washed away because you just have to keep apologizing for being male that original sin will stay there forever it is really a a gruesome inverted version of of christianity i think yeah no i've regretted that regarding all the secular wokeness is that the difference between secular religion and regular religion is there's no there's no redemption yeah i mean i'm not religious as you know i'm a vocal atheist but at least at least the conventional religions most of them not all of them have this notion of redemption um yeah well christianity has has very strongly the idea that god loves people that and that all have fallen short of the glory of god everyone is a sinner everyone you know needs to seek forgiveness and redemption but feminism doesn't have that women which by the way which which by the way i should point out that also bothers me just as much by the way but anyway uh they're christian at least at least at least it believes that you know each the line between good and evil goes to every human heart feminism does not believe that yeah yeah yeah and no i agree and um anyway let's get there finally why are you so your first video why you said why am i an anti-feminist we've sort of eluded it in many ways but i want you to um i basically you you argue what femi several things that you claim feminism was never all about equality etc so maybe you could talk about a little bit and then i want to talk about this new his series of videos on the history of feminism which which uh which confront conventional wisdom but first why are you an anti-feminist i should just mention uh larry that i just got a notice saying my internet connection is unstable which is a very bad sign so if i if i blank out um you'll know it's something going on here on my end it's long as long as your internet connection doesn't later on sue you for for abuse they're okay right exactly didn't consent to this long interview um yeah so why am i an anti-feminist well be just because feminism i think you know we have already alluded to it i see feminism as the ultimate hypocrisy i believe it is based on dishonesty and it is based on hatred i really honestly believe that feminism is a hate movement its object is to stir up hatred against men and it is fueled by irrational hatred uh especially stoked by a belief in lies about the past about the universal oppression of women by men so that that's that's really okay and a lot of people would counter and say but hold on feminism was just trying to counter the fact that you know women couldn't vote could work et cetera it was really it was really trying to uh right wrongs and and and what would your response be my response is unfortunately that isn't the case and this is now my big hobby horse and it's why i would encourage anybody who has doubts about what i've said what i am saying now to to take a look at studio b i knew this before because i had read feminist history but i didn't realize it as extensively as i know it now having done this dedicated research over the last six to eight months and i'm continuing to do more but it was never a movement that was at all interested in equality it was always angry it always had the worst things to say about men it castigated all men it never acknowledged any area where men had made improvements to benefit women where men had sacrificed for women where men had built societies that cherished women and made their lives better where men had expressed concern for women it denied all of that and it and the you know the the texts that prove this are the foundational documents of what's called now first wave feminism if you go back to seneca falls which is kind of the first women's rights convention in new york state in 1848 they were already peddling anti-male hatred the thesis of that document that was signed there which is called the declaration of sentiments which was modeled on the declaration of independence and it was in a sense women's declaration of independence the thesis of that document is that the entire history of mankind is the history of repeated injuries and user patient on the part of men toward women the object of which was to establish an absolute tyranny by man over woman and then they they have all these points underneath where they attempt to prove this including objectively false claims such as that all colleges were closed to women not true there were colleges specifically dedicated to giving women a very good education equivalent to men from very early in the 19th century so and and there are many other and we won't go into we can we can go live when you in your history i'll just give some of the titles of some of the we won't have time to go into them but yeah first of all never about equality feminism is never about equality feminism was about destroying the family um you have it and maybe i'd like to go into this one about the vote because it's another it's another sort of misperception the women you know women were not allowed to vote and feminism was about getting the vote it was a you say it was about the infantilization of men uh the victimhood craze in early feminism so victimhood isn't a new isn't a new thing you'd argue it goes back all a pathological male um sexuality in feminism uh how the future was female goes way back uh in the history of women how 19th century women got away with murder uh sexual insanity in women in the in the feminist movement so there's a lot of provocative titles there yeah they seem provocative until you actually you know read the texts that i'm basing all those on and it is startling and for anybody who is interested in a a primary document that that uh actually um makes some of the same arguments i'm making there was a man a journalist and a barrister and a socialist fascinating man named ernest belfort backs he wrote many articles in the 1880s and then right up until the early 20th century he published a number of books one was called the subjection the legal subjection of men it was in response to john stuart mills long essay the subjection of women and another one called the fraud of feminism and he talks about how even in the 19th century when we imagine that women labored under all sorts of legal disabilities that actually women had exemptions from certain crimes they couldn't be prosecuted for certain crimes they often were not prosecuted for for example the crime of infanticide because of the overwhelming sympathy of male jurors for women who killed their own children a woman who murdered her husband he said almost was never charged with murder would be charged with a lesser charge of manslaughter if possible or even exonerated if she made the plea that her husband had been abusive of her very similar to you know our current state a man who murdered his wife could never claim that he had killed her because she was abusive towards him although he recorded many instances of horrific abuse that women had had had done to their husbands and you know he he at that time said that that feminism had swept through british society he was a brit swept through to such an extent that two contradictory and competing claims were both accepted as true and this is so similar to the present time one any endeavor any area of society where women were not equally represented with men it was always a case of sexism it's always because of sexism because women were just as good as men at everything or better that was one brand of feminism but on the other hand women required special consideration women were different from men they were specially victimized they required special privileges special perquisites special protections and if they weren't given those that was an example of injustice to women of course the two can't both be true but we you know in our own society today it is the same kind of thing the insistence on equality is always coupled with the insistence that women deserve special perks and and special policies etc so it was already going on he saw it and he defended it in uh with some pretty compelling examples and from his position as a barrister and the legal cases that that he had looked at so um yeah it um i mean i've just been struck by the consistent representation on the part of these early feminists who are allegedly um you know humane and uh just wanted equality and just wanted to take up their responsibilities in society i've been really struck by the deep anti-male animus of all of their pronouncements the consistent pathologization of male sexuality the uh denigration of the family as a fundamentally corrupt institution an institution in which women were essentially prostituted to men many feminists made the claim that there was no difference between prostitution and the position of married women within the family that both were equally subject to male sexual tyranny uh the disregard for the position of children and for the well-being of children is consistent throughout all of feminist rhetoric uh the they advocated free love with absolutely no consideration for children they wanted divorce to be made much much um you know made much more accessible they of course they still wanted women to be be supported by by men they wanted to make divorce easier for women and more difficult for men they wanted the laws changed to protect women elizabeth katie stanton who is the major proponent of american feminism she was the acknowledged leader of the feminist movement along with susan b anthony in the second half of the 19th century she wanted women to be able to divorce their husbands for for drunkenness and for a whole host of reasons but still wanted women to be able to be you know um supported by by men's money and um yeah it's it's just really startling to see that the hatred and the unwillingness to admit that men in any way had their own issues or made sacrifices even during war there was you know women wanted the right to vote well that's how i was gonna i was gonna let that um you came right to where i was waiting because i i mean i think you know obviously you can talk about this and you do with with eloquence and depth and uh in your in your many videos and we're not gonna we're not gonna go over them there but but just to give a sense no no but just to give a sense that one of things is the misperception um and that that we have perceptions of of what of what purpose uh um was being asked for and one of the things i've always felt yeah the vote is a clear example women were asking for the right to vote and um and then you point out even that is a misconception that the right to vote i think in the africa us academy 1918 or something like that but at that time many men couldn't vote um yes and and moreover it was interesting that at the same time of course men were being conscripted to go to the world world war one so why don't you talk about that because i found that discussion yeah i mean that that one is it's a glaring example of feminist hypocrisy and the fact that no feminist today ever talks about that and that we all believe i certainly did even when i was doing my phd we all believed that all men had the right to vote you know sort of from the beginning of time and no women ever did and it was never that simple there were always property and financial considerations there were poll taxes and things that limited even in the united states men's access to the ballot and especially in the united states the vote the privilege of the vote always brought with it the responsibility to defend one's country even to the point of sacrificing one's life at a time of war that was always understood and yet that's never acknowledged by feminists the other thing that's really shocking in british and canadian cases is that even at the point of world war one 40 percent of british and canadian men working class men didn't have the right to vote yeah because of these um property and income qualifications and and the thing about um you know all of this uh romanticization of the suffragettes and their struggle throughout the 19th century there was a move to expand democracy incrementally in the early 19th century very very few a tiny percentage of men could vote in federal elections national elections in 1832 it was expanded to about one in six adult men in 1867 i believe no 1864 the second reform act expanded the vote to a some percentage of urban working-class men in 1884 it was expanded again to some percentage of rural working-class men always there were these property and income considerations so the fact that that was never mentioned by the suffragettes and that they were willing to watch these young men who did not themselves have a vote go off and die or be maimed in the trenches of europe and say nothing and still continue to insist that women were uniquely oppressed because they didn't have the rights they imagined men have i mean i i just find that stunning and at the same time the very same women who in britain they were extremely violent they set homes on fire they fire bombed post offices they had arson campaigns they i mean there were fires burning for years across britain in a mass terrorist campaign by suffragettes who are now lionized as these heroines of equality once the war started they suspended their agitation for the vote oh they also attacked police officers and parliamentarians they tried to assassinate sir herbert asquith when he was riding in a open motor carriage i mean it was just like they were terrorists and yet we're now supposed to imagine that they were somehow justified in in their incendiary rage as i titled the the video on them and then once the war started they they suspended their agitation for the vote and they started the white feather campaign many of the same women who went around pinning white feathers in the lapels of any man not in military uniform that they saw in order to shame those men into signing up for the war effort and they they succeeded many men um afterwards recounted their experience some of these were men who were home from their war yeah or had one medal sword one medal had one medals for bravery one man had his hand blown off he showed the woman his stump while she was putting the the uh white feather in his lapel some were under age and they were so shamed by being repeatedly given the white feather that they went and signed up and were then you know killed or or hurt or just experienced the hell of the first world war and this is the the attitude of those women that we now lionize as courageous defenders of equality at this utter inability to see the humanity of men of their own fathers and brothers and sons and the willingness even then of many people to turn a blind eye to their violence and their hypocrisy uh so you know that's the kind of thing that that i want to highlight really in in the series that's what i wanted to give you a chance to give give us a highlight of that but and one of the reasons i wanted to focus on the vote issue is because you know there would be a lot of people i mean of course most of them will complain about this without having without ever having listened to you on this podcast but those who listen there'll be some people who vehemently disagree which is allowed but one of the things i want to point out is that episodes like that the vote point out things that that are surprising that that basically cause you to sit back and think what i always thought might be wrong and that's one of the reasons why peop why you people like you you and others and maybe me and others shouldn't be silenced in the sense that you could actually listen even if you just agree listen to that episode of the vote say wow i didn't know those facts about men and not being able to vote or about other things and so that's what's so important about the freedom of speech is as as my wife again was putting it to me the other day is freedom of speech is really freedom to listen if you don't have that opportunity to listen you'll never learn that you're wrong and that's what my my old late friend christopher hitchens argued was the most important part of keeping freedom of speech and so i wanted to give a chance to talk about that and i'm sure um as i was going to say near the end of this i'm sure my bet is that i'll be castigated more for my allowing you to be on than what you have to say but in any case we'll have to see about that but but uh i i want to i want to close because we we've gone for two hours and and i've and i've loved uh the discussion i really appreciate you're being so both so eloquent and honest about these things uh which is i always have appreciated about you um you point out that basically we're stuck already we're not doomed but we're stuck that feminist theory is already sort of accepted it's the accepted part of universities and and and and university departments not just english departments where it used to be but but now science departments and now institutions and science that that women are are are inherently oppressed and we have to do something about it we're now seeing a similar in the last five years critical race theory has become the accepted adopted orthodoxy yeah and and and with a very similar thing where facts don't necessarily if you if you question the empirical basis you're you're immediately condemned um for this yeah and that comes out of feminism too i mean that it was there in the 1980s very strongly in intersectional feminist theory already it's just become mainstreamed more recently so you think the critical race theory is really really a derivative of the intersectional feminist theory do you think oh yes definitely yeah yeah it was it was there this idea that there were all these different axes of oppression all operating on that binary model of the privileged oppressor and the victimized you know innocent without agency etcetera that that began in feminist theory probably by the late 70s but really took hold there was that woman peggy mcintosh who talked about white privilege and she was primarily a feminist initially and then she moved into that area and that's really i mean she uh that was in the 1980s it's very much the precursor to things like robin deangelo's white fragility where you know you you are you are racist whether you admit it or not if you admit it then you're admitting it but if you deny it that just shows that you are even worse you know all that kind of thing and yeah that was there it's it's it's deeply part of of the whole ideological machinery of feminism that argument by the way it's what amuses me about it it's it when the moments when i'm amused and not outraged is is uh it's just so exactly the same as the argument against witches which is you used to be if you if you admitted your witch then your witch and if you and if clearly if you did admit you're a witch you know you were also a witch that was your you know and if you threw in if you drowned then you know then you weren't a witch but if you didn't drown you were witching i mean there was no way out it's the ult and and but so having having said all that um and pointed out these problems what can we do well that's always the big question yeah yeah we had the answer you know uh obviously we would be we would be working on it the only thing is that um you know and and you said you know if people can just stand up and it is very difficult but they don't you know it's like the the movie that we all watch where there's some force of evil and and or there's a horrible bigotry that is is causing all sorts of injustice and finally you know one person refuses to go along and they stand and say no i'm not going to do this i'm not going to persecute my neighbor and then everybody else stands at the same time and the evil is defeated and everybody thinks yeah that's what i would do you know i would be one of those ones who would stand but in fact the reality is that most people don't and the few people who do stand they get rolled over by the social justice tank and as mao said you know you kill one to warn a hundred everybody else sees that's what happens when you stand up nobody defends you and your life is destroyed and you're humiliated and you know it's awful it's where it's not it's not it's not one one person i was gonna say one man it's not it's almost it's it it takes a lot more than one person i mean again i i i've looked and obviously if there's no magic bullet here but i've talked to people and i look at the history of sort of mccarthyism and and how that eventually overcame and eventually it sure it wasn't it was a few people in powerful positions like uh uh ed romero i guess um and others who were able to speak out journalists but more importantly i think it's when when everyone sees when ultimately the abuses are so common that everyone sees that they not just that they can be next but that that that that somehow something needs to be done it somehow there's a minute there's a phase transition where people suddenly say this is outrageous and that unfortunately means as as a number of people who are close to me have said it's going to get worse before it gets worse yes and there's a grim satisfaction to be taken in that unfortunately especially for people like us who have now left academia is that we will see that some of those who have been the head of the mobs who have gone for good people on trivial grounds that they themselves will be attacked and they themselves will be persecuted and it will go on and as you say until it finally stops or until the whole system kind of collapses i mean i'm all in favor of trying to start new institutions building new universities from the ground up based on merit we long ago abandoned merit we allowed there to be a competing good and that competing good was justice or you know social justice not justice um and equality all of that sort of thing and and we have to get back to saying that merit can be the only good truth can be the only good not not these other inclusion equity etc um you know and that is possible i don't see it happening very much yet although there certainly are organizations that are attempting to resist and to bring sanity back to these institutions but hopefully they will grow and um yeah i i look i i used to think uh look we agree that that sandy has to come back i'm less we're saying i'm all in favor of new institutions i've been part of new institutions i think it's a great example but i don't think that's the solution i think the old i mean for there there are lots of people and the majority of my call ex colleagues and colleagues in dis institutions who still believe in all of those principles and are working towards them and you know in physics i i you know they they're working together to to understand the nature of reality it's not as if it's true that there's an there's a sickness in in in a bunch of academic institutions but it's not as if those institutions are irredeemable and i think ultimately the solution is going to happen within them and it's not going to happen because one or two other institutions get created that's my own view in any case i i do agree with you it'll probably take a lot of time a thousand points of light as someone used to say you know and uh uh and uh but i also think it requires people being courageous enough to talk about this which is why i was so happy to be able to have you on and why i enjoy listening to you and talking to you and i recommend again whether you agree or disagree for people to listen to some of the videos to get some of the the information and and just saw and then decide and based on an informed decision and informed consent about whether they'll whether they agree or disagree so thank you so much janice thank you very much that was lovely really enjoyed it you enjoyed it i hope you enjoyed it i i did too i i i kind of knew i would with you or i hoped i'd i'd rise to the occasion of talking to you so so thank you for that well thank you [Music] i hope you enjoyed today's conversation this podcast is produced by the origins project foundation a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world to learn more please visit originsprojectfoundation.org

Channel: The Origins Podcast

Views: 24,305

Keywords: The Origins Podcast, Lawrence Krauss, The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss, The Origins Project, Science, Podcast, Culture, Physicist, Video Podcast, Physics

Id: 2OX1H8vrLhA

Length: 118min 56sec (7136 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 09 2022