Transcription
If you don't have sex before you're engaged, well, engagement leads to marriage. You may end up with very little sexual fulfillment. So, there's no working on your sexual life, on your intimacy during marriage. That's not possible. It's just sort of an apple that you pick from a tree. It's either good or it's bad.
It's a completely juvenile attitude towards relationship and marriage, as if sex is the only important thing in marriage. It's like, wait a minute, wait a minute. How about love?
She doesn't like rules. She doesn't like that women should never be told, you know, not to do certain things because it might be harmful. But now she's calling people that if they like missionary sex, I should say the missionary position, it's not missionary sex. I become just so judgmental and holier than thou.
Welcome back to PsychoBabble, where we expose bad therapy and the liberal narratives that contribute to our poor mental health. Today is a very special episode. We're going to do a joint PsychoBabble Men Are Good episode. So, I'm joined by Tom Golden and Janice Fango. They're good friends of mine and we usually do our conversations on the Men Are Good podcast, so you should go and check those out if you haven't.
Tom is a longtime therapist and an author and he's appeared on Psycho Babble twice before. Some of my most popular episodes. So good in fact that the advice he has on how to raise sons is the best I ever heard. It's so good that in our household whenever our kids, our sons, are acting up, our first question is, what would Tom do? So you should really go and check those out.
And Janice, she is literally the reason that I embraced the anti-feminist psychiatrist title. It's all because of her Fiamango File on YouTube. It broke my last feminist convictions. So I owe her my insights to her. So if you haven't already, then go and check out her Substack or the YouTube, both Fiamango File. So the three of us have become sort of an anti-feminist trio, which I just love. And so today we're going to do just that, just break down some of these mainstream narratives. So welcome to the show, Tom and Janice.
Thank you, Hannah. It's good to be here.
Great to be here.
Today we are discussing, finally, an episode of The Diary of a CEO. It is one of the biggest podcasts out there. It's got 12 million subscribers and they did a full, more than two-hour episode called Feminist Women Versus Non-Feminist Women. The podcast is hosted by Steven Bartlett. There was a debate between Louise Perry, who has a popular book against the sexual revolution, focusing on women's suffering in the aftermath of that, and Erica Komasar, who's a psychoanalyst specializing in child attachment, and Deborah Francis White, who's the host of The Guilty Feminist podcast. And this was portrayed in the media as a sort of clash of ideas, a feminist wakeup call. But we found ourselves asking, was it really? So that's what we're going to get into today. But first, let me hear from you. Let's start with you, Tom. Five words takeaway after listening to the whole episode.
Three feminists talking about feminism.
Exactly. Good. Wrong.
Yeah. What could be missing from that? Feminists talking about feminism and how good it was, or whether it occasionally wasn't quite so good for women, but nobody talking about whether feminism has been good for society and nobody talking about whether women owe society anything. It's all about what society owes women. Sorry, that was more than five words.
I'll accept it. I'll accept it. So they did, I mean, obviously we can't go through the whole, the whole two hours, more than two hours, but they touched on everything from casual sex, marriage, traditional relationships, motherhood, daycare, education, and male mental health. And, um, yeah, so what I've done, what we're going to do, semi-structured. I've put together some highlights that we're going to react to for you guys. That's the sort of the most important. And then if you find something missing, then you can go and check that out or tell me in the comments. And with that, we're just going to get started with the first clip. Are you guys ready?
Ready.
I say that freedom can become its own prison. So if you think about the early feminists, the really early feminists, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, those women were fighting patriarchy. They were fighting a system that said they had to be a certain way. So of course, I don't accept what Iran does to women. I mean, that, you know, but what's happened is if the pendulum swings too far, you have a different kind of patriarchy on the other side. You know, we say the extreme left and the extreme right actually meet in the middle. And so have we just not, we never want to take choice away. The idea of taking choice away from women to have sex with whoever they want to have sex with, that's not the point of this. It's, have we created a society which pressures young women in its own way to be promiscuous? Who wants to go first? Should we start with Janice?
Yeah, there's so much to say here and I'll try to leave some things to say later. Um, but my first thought was, I tried to imagine a group of men, three men coming together to discuss, has the red pill gone too far? And, um, you know, I just couldn't imagine it happening without some discussion about men's responsibilities, whether the red pill enables men to make a contribution to their society, with some discussion of whether the red pill is unfair to women and children, whether it means that men are cruel to women and children, you know, things like that. And so it's shocking to me that, um, this is the same old, well, it's not that shocking, I guess, but it's striking that what we have again is a discussion about how women are victims and we have three women disagreeing about the way, the manner in which they are victims and the manner in which society had better do something for them. But ultimately, that remains the framework that all do not question. You know, that women are essentially children and that women have no agency, that if women are unhappy, the entire society must mobilize to make sure that they're not unhappy. And I think it's quite startling to hear a feminist say that freedom can become a prison. I'll leave it at that for now.
Tom, what would you, would you like to say something about this pendulum?
Oh boy. You know, the thing that caught my ear and eye, the thing that caught my ear and eye was the whole pendulum argument. You know, oh, the pendulum swung this way too far. It's like, no, there's no such thing as a pendulum. You know, where did you get that idea? I mean, what, where does it come from? And it's an excuse for what they're doing now. It's almost an excuse. You know, they, the pendulum was so far for men before, now we need to swing it for women. And it's like, you know, wait a minute. Tell me, tell me the specifics here. What, what went too far? Because the men were in charge, the men were the leaders, but the men, when they were leaders, thought of both men and women and children. They considered everyone, you know, and it's like, this is not what the way it is now. The way it is now is it's swinging in the direction of only consider women. And as one of the feminists points out later, it's not even considering children. It's only considering women and not men. So that's what got me, Anna.
Yeah, that's, that's, I think it was Karen Straw, who I'm a huge fan of as well. She said it's not a pendulum, it's an engine. It's the feminist engine that just keeps on and just gathers more and more momentum. And that's that stuck with me. I think that's true. So every time I hear this pendulum argument, I think, is it? But we'll get back to that, I think. Also, I think it's a very good point that this, they thought about everyone. And now, I think they try to bring in the children, but only in a way that they sort of buy that with calling themselves feminist. Like, as long as you call yourself a feminist, then you're also allowed to maybe talk about children. And I do think it's worth noting that it's worrisome to see a conversation that quite frequently evokes an earlier feminism that some of the panelists think was good, in which it's clear that those discussants actually don't know anything about that earlier feminism. I've studied it extensively. I tear my hair out every time I hear feminists evoke the first wave, the 19th century feminists, the Mary Wollstonecrafts, as somehow models that we can follow and go back to. First wave feminism was hostile to men and families through and through. It's true that there were some individual feminists who were not, but overall the movement was always an angry movement. It promoted free love and it made clear that free love and free sex are incompatible with the goodness of, with the welfare of children. And so we're having a discussion about the welfare of children here and women. Oh, well, we mustn't prevent women from having sex with as many men as they want. Wow. The, the cognitive dissonance and the dishonesty about earlier waves of feminism are both quite disturbing.
Yes. I was wondering what you thought of that when I heard them talk about it. I was thinking, "Oh, I bet that got to Janice."
Yeah, it really does. Yeah. The whole idea that these women were fighting a patriarchal system. Well, Mary Wollstonecraft published a book called A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, the same year in which she traveled to Paris. She was a British woman, of course, traveled to Paris to observe the French Revolution firsthand. She was a big supporter of the idea of the French Revolution. And even when she stepped in blood of the people who were being slaughtered by the guillotine during the heyday of the French Revolution's excesses, she still was a French Revolutionary apologist. She made a living for years as a writer because men were interested in hearing what she had to say and in promoting women writers. The idea that there was this patriarchal system that denied women the opportunity to be professionals, to be writers, to have a voice, later on in the 19th century, to be lawyers, to be doctors, to have their property rights, to be artists, to be shopkeepers, to run businesses, and etcetera, etcetera. It's just not true. And so everything that they're complaining about, everything that they're claiming feminism was necessary for is false. Men were always interested in women who had things to say, partly because they wanted to make money by publishing their books and there were a lot of readers who were interested in what women had to say. And so there was no feminism really before Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a whole society of Bluestocking women. And those were intellectual women who had discussions with men on a basis of equality about their societies and published books about their societies. Their names are Maria Edgeworth and Hannah More and Frances Brooke and Frances Burney and, you know, I could go on and on. This is the 1700s we're talking about. So the notion that they were fighting this patriarchal system that hated women and told them what to do is simply untrue.
Yes. And if you want a lot of information on this, Janice has Fiamango File, which is just filled with fascinating information about the early feminists and what they did. I highly recommend.
Yeah, that's what turned me around because I was like, "Oh, yeah." And none of this is what I thought.
It's all bulls.
You just flabbergasted. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, so we're going on to the next. We're coming back to all of this. It probably be repeated. I think that we should, as feminists, describe sex as at least special, like having some kind of special status. All this kind of trivializes, right? And then also say, oh, but consent is extraordinarily important. Like, why do you not see the contradiction there? Autonomy. If I want it, if I want somebody, especially penetrative sex, you're talking about rape. You're talking about penetrative sex. There's nothing worse than somebody inside your body. What?
Yeah, that was, I thought that was especially, the whole autonomy. So they're talking about how sex should be sacred and how it should be, you know, what relationships should be for women. And, um, I think it's interesting how they just elevated autonomy and choice and dependence and consent to the highest virtue, and everything else just falling, falling secondary.
Yes. Um, let me, is Tom's thoughts?
Well, I think that Debbie, I think her name is, um, did something that she's done throughout the entire video, and that is she personalized it. And instead of arguing against what was said, she talks about her own personal experience and how that is proof that she's right. It's like, wait a minute, wait a minute, that's not proof. And you see it over and over and over again. She does the same things. I mean, actually, the video is an exercise in understanding relational aggression, you know, because this woman uses relational aggression to either change the subject, squirrel, you know, or or all kinds of relational aggressive techniques that will help her in changing the subject or not dealing with exactly what's said. Because this Erica woman, as I'm sure we'll get to, you know, she has a number of really good points.
Yeah. I mean, I thought it was funny, just as a side note, just she keeps talking about how she was in a cult. And then that, just, but I just want everyone to know, she was a Jehovah's Witness. Like it's not, but yeah, she, and I, because I checked, what is this cult that she gave her this trauma? And it's, I mean, people leave Jehovah's Witnesses all the time. It's not, I wouldn't, it wouldn't be the first sort of cult that I would think about when someone talks about their trauma being in a cult. I mean, it's fault, but it's not funny. And I think that's just the most interesting thing about her.
It is about all the time. When when she introduced herself as having, you know, grown up in a cult, I thought, well, from one cult to another, you know, she's gone from that cult to the cult of feminism. I mean, it's like that's just, okay. She's the same thing, just different.
Janice. Yeah. And and they they spend a lot of time, probably about an hour and 15 minutes, if I'm remembering correctly, essentially arguing about whether women need to be having more sex and feeling really good about the sex that they have, or whether women should be having less sex and being protected from the bad feelings that they may have if they're having too much sex. And I, you know, again, I just, I found the discussion so, um, so trivial in a way. Again, I try to imagine, you know, a man sitting there saying, I didn't get enough sex and now I'm able to have the sex that I need. And anyone taking that seriously, uh, you know, it's just not clear to me at all what is preventing any woman from making her own choices. I mean, I do agree that there is pressure on young women to be promiscuous. I, that's one point at which I agree with both Louise Perry, who I believe argues that, and Erica Komasar. I do, I do agree with them. Uh, to elevate that to the status that it's elevated to in this conversation as something that all of society has to mobilize about, I find infantilizing. And it is so interesting to see that whenever they present information about that, for example, I think Komasar talks about how 72% of young men and something like 82% of young women said they had bad feelings, they had low self-worth, they had embarrassment, humiliation, sense of self-hatred around their promiscuity. Uh, I think at that point, um, I can't remember the woman's first name. Um, but Francis, yes, Deborah, Deborah Francis White, you know, says, "Well, you're you're biased. You're you're you're looking at people, you know, you have a lens that is warped by the fact she's referring to Komasar, who's a psychoanalyst, and you know, you're seeing a biased sample, but everything that she talks about is filtered through her personal desires." And Exactly. So yeah, it was just such a.
To that point, when she says that, yeah, she has a skewed sample, but if you look at the psychiatric trends, the increase in psychiatric burden across the board, it's very clear that this modern life isn't good for anyone. So it's not like she has a skewed sample. It's very clear, which is why I found it sort of interesting that they had to even discuss, well, the whole discussion was like, was how are women doing?
Yeah. I mean, I mean, the whole, like the framing, if we're going to frame these discussions always in terms of, are women happy? Is this making women happy? Then all the discussions are going to be incredibly narrow. Because if that's what we're going to hinge social policy and visions of the good social good around, we're never going to really be able to have fruitful discussions. We need to talk about how women can be, can live a good life and what's good for our societies and what kind of society we want to have. And if we have women bristling, as Francis White always does, about, oh, we mustn't have rules. Well, would she say that about men too? Is it wrong for men to have rules about men's behavior and for us to talk about what men owe to their communities? These obviously not. So why are women to be treated differently? And if that's going to be your lens always, then don't be surprised when people don't believe you when you say you're interested in equality, because you're clearly not. And I'd like to say one last thing about that point about, you know, it's what I want. If I want a man inside my body, then it's fine. And if I don't want it, it's the worst possible thing. Well, perhaps that was just a figure of speech. But I do think this is the classic cudgel that women always use in any discussion about sexuality. And they use it to beat men over the head. Rape is the worst possible experience that anyone could ever have. Only a woman can truly understand how violating it is. And therefore, you don't have the right, men don't have the right to speak about it. And it's not true. It's true that rape is a terrible thing, but it is not the worst possible thing. There are all sorts of things that are worse. Getting your arm broken is probably worse. Working at a job that gives you cancer in your early 30s because there were no safeguards. You know, it was mining or firefighting or whatever it happened to be, which has been men's experience throughout human history and is still men's experience. I'd say that's a lot worse. Getting your arms blown off, you know, from an IED because you're forced to go to war, that's a heck of a lot worse. You know, there's a whole bunch of things that men regularly experience, including an incredibly high still death on the job or just harms on the job as a result of the way we, abortion work in our societies to protect women and to make men disposable. Those are all worse things than being raped. So I think we should be clear on what are the worst kinds of suffering in our society and stop pretending that women have some kind of lean on that and they can shut men up by using it.
Yeah. No, but I don't know if you've watched anything on Netflix recently, but I do. I shouldn't, but I do. And they always say stuff like, you know, you can get murdered or even raped. Yeah. And I always find that funny. We always send comment how it's like it's murder and then the worst rape. Yeah. I find that funny. But they sort of put that into women from very, very early on. Now the hierarchy is like torture, murder, and then rape.
Yeah, I know. It's amazing. And I, I think when we concede to women that that is the worst possible thing that can be experienced, of course, men are raped too, but women aren't interested in that. Um, you know, but when we concede that that is the worst possible thing, um, right there, we've lost the possibility of having a sane conversation.
Yes. And and also when you put this choice and consent as the highest, highest virtue, then you end up with the Lily Phillips. Like, why? And when you hear her, she was the woman who slept with a hundred men in one day. And when you hear her retelling of it, it's like, why? This is what they told me to do. Why shouldn't I? And I completely understand. And what happens then? No, they try to pathologize her. She must be sick. No, she just listened to you guys.
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Okay. Are we ready for the next one?
Ready.
If I want somebody, especially penetrative sex, you're talking about rape, you're talking about penetrative sex, there's nothing worse than somebody inside your body. End up having a life of very boring missionary position sex. If you encourage young people just to have sex with the first person they meet and stay with that person, which I'm not saying you're saying, but I am saying if you don't have sex before you're engaged, well, engagement leads to marriage. You may end up with very little sexual fulfillment.
Men, if men traumatized you and you saw a man abuse your mother, of course you're not going to want men in your life. So a lot of it, I think, I think the feminist movement does something which it, it's first of all, I'm going to say it's done a lot of good. I wouldn't be here, none of us would be here without it. Those women that took the risks, we have to be grateful toward. But I mean, what it also did is it, it distorted a lot of the importance of relationships.
Okay. Sorry, that was the first bit was what we already talked about. And the second part, um, was, uh, god, with this, yeah, I wanted to say something quickly about this sex and marriage. What really annoyed me, that was the first thing where I started fuming in this conversation. I was listening to it with my husband and we were just like, so there's no, no working on, on, on your sexual life, on your intimacy during marriage. That's not possible. It's just sort of an apple that you pick from a tree. It's either good or it's bad.
Yes. It's, it's, no, what a completely juvenile attitude towards relationship and marriage.
So that, that was my, that was my fuming. Uh, Tom.
Well, what struck me too was that she was going as if sex is the only important thing in marriage. It's like, wait a minute, wait a minute. How about love? How about loving each other? Couldn't that be also kind of important? But she doesn't even talk about that. Sex. You might be have a life of sexless. Oh god, I'm giving a break. You know, they're they're completely missing the love aspect of it and the joy of having children. Oh, they miss it. Completely miss it.
Not to mention, like, just ridiculously condemnatory. She doesn't like rules. She doesn't like, um, being that women should never be told, you know, not to do certain things because it might be harmful. But now she's telling people that if they like missionary sex, I should say the missionary position, it's not missionary sex. I mean, you know, it's just so judgmental and holier than thou and.
Yeah. Um, but, but you, yeah, I mean, the, the, uh, there's so many things going on there. Again, I, I just, I, I mean, I really, I have to say that as a, I guess as a social conservative, I just find the whole thing so, um, I don't know, just trivializing. Really. Wow. I, silly. So reductive. Yeah. So reductive. I'm embarrassed that that women who are obviously all very smart. I mean, they carried on a conversation for two hours and 20 minutes. I could not have done so well. Like to go back and forth and be arguing and I, I mean, it's, it's really, it's difficult and yet they chose to talk about such a, such a trivial matter, really, for for an hour and 20 minutes. Anyway, yeah. But, but the thing that stuck out for me is, um, this notion that we have to be grateful to the feminists who took all those risks. First of all, I don't want, I want to get into that, what risks she's talking about. Women made demands at various points in the over the past 200 years and men acceded to them. Sometimes not quite as quickly as the women wanted. Uh, sometimes really startlingly quickly. So, um, I'm not sure what risks she's talking about. I suppose the suffragettes who set off bombs and burned country homes across England and mixed sulfur and phosphorus and put it into mailboxes so that when the letter carriers dumped out the letters, their hands went on fire, you know, and did all of smashed shop windows and heckled politicians and tried to assassinate a number of politicians and sliced a guy's ear off when he was traveling in a carriage with Lloyd George. And you, I suppose those suffragettes were taking some risks indeed in engaging in their terrorist activity. They, some of them did go to jail for it and were treated an awfully lot more leniently than men would have been treated in the same position. So yeah, they took some risks, but other than that, I don't really see what she's talking about. And and that, that is something that I hear all the time, that I should be grateful for to the feminists who went before me because otherwise I wouldn't be, you know, even allowed out of the house.
Yeah. And, um, of course, it's an attempt to back any anti-feminist or non-feminist or men's rights activist into a corner where you either have to say, "Well, yes, I am grateful for that." And then they can say, "Well, then you shouldn't be making these criticisms." Or you have to say, "I'm not grateful." But the whole argument is completely illogical. Um, if I'm to be grateful to these various feminists, am I not to be just as grateful, even more so, to the many, many men who were in positions of power and might have refused the various demands that were being made and instead went out of their way to accommodate them? I mean, the Married Women's Property Acts that were passed across the United States and indeed in Great Britain and Canada, um, throughout the 19th century, really before there was much of an organized feminist movement, granted women all sorts of property rights in marriage that men didn't even have. Men who brought property into a marriage, that property became the common property of the man and his wife. As a result of the Married Women's Property Acts, the woman's property was her property alone to dispose of as she saw fit, and her earnings were her property alone. There wasn't much of a patriarchy that in the mid-19th century was already so concerned with women's economic well-being and indeed autonomy, to quote Francis White. So, I, you know, it's, it's a ludicrous kind of argument. Yes, we should also be grateful to men who cared about women and passed laws at a time when women didn't even yet have the right to vote. And neither did all men, by the way, but passed laws that showed their care for, for women and children. The other thing is that I, I really hate that idea that I should have to be grateful for many things that I despise. I am not grateful for the million unborn children who are aborted every year as a result of feminism. I'm not grateful for affirmative action hiring that has discriminated against men for the last 50 years. I'm not grateful for the MeToo movement and all of the unfounded accusations that have led to men having their reputations destroyed and losing their careers and their life aspirations on the basis of no evidence at all. I'm not grateful to the outpouring of hatred towards men and boys that has been the result of the feminist movement and all the lies feminists have told about the past and the present. I'm not grateful for the future is female, which I think is an absolutely asinine and obnoxious and misandrist, you know, platform. I'm not grateful for women like Clementine Ford, who tweeted out that men weren't dying fast enough during the COVID pandemic at a time when men were dying at a greater rate than women and nobody gave a damn about it.
Like, you know, I, I just, I really resent the, the manner in which these women will then immediately say, "Oh, that's not feminism. That has that's to do with something else." Yes.
So we only can ever talk about the alleged good that feminism has done and we are to be grateful for it and pass over in silence its utter disregard and contempt for men and all of the terrible things that it's done to women and children as well. That really annoys me.
Yes. So we're going to continue exactly this train of thought. That was brilliant. But there's more. There's going to be more of exactly this. But this concludes the free episode of PsychoBabel and Men Are Good for the day. But continue, join us for the paid content and you will find it in the links below very easily. So have a nice day and we'll see you next time. Right, Tom?
Right, Tom.
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