The Deception of Feminism | Janice Fiamengo EP 12

Once you become convinced that the history of your group is this history of unremitting cruel oppression in which you have been denied even the most basic rights and principles and in which the other side, the oppressor group, has taken everything and given nothing, and that is over and over again the feminist position, the feminist description of women's lot. Once you believe that that's true, then I think you lose any empathy or ability to see things from the other group's point of view or to accept that they too might have had their sorrows, their burdens, their difficulties, their suffering. You simply shut your mind to it. You don't believe that it's true anymore. And you believe then that that actually, you might not say it in that manner, in fact feminists deny it, but you would believe that a kind of revenge, you know, a collective process of group vengeance is perfectly justified.

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Welcome to my podcast today. Today I have a retired professor. Her name is Janice Fiamenko. She's agreed to come on my podcast. She's a professor of English from the University of Ottawa. She began the Fiamingo File series on YouTube videos in 2015 to discuss the fraud of academic feminism and its devastating social effects. Her book, "Sons of Feminism: Men Have Their Say," was published in 2018, containing stories from men who have suffered under our feminist culture. She is now working on a new video series to uncover the anti-male bigotry and female supremacism at the origins of feminism in the 18th and 19th centuries.

I, I watched all many, all, I think all of the YouTube. Her YouTube videos are, I think about 30 minutes, but they might be longer. Anyway, I watched all of them and they were very instructive. She has a good, discriminating mind and she has really combed through the literature and found all sorts of uh history that all of us need to know. It's a wonderful thing to talk to Janice. I, I've known her just very peripherally for the last few years and I really look forward to speaking with her because she has so much knowledge uh on the subject. And as usual, I want to be able to bring to light issues that are necessary for our way to have a better life. And so that's what you're going to see now. Thanks.

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Hi Janice.

Hello, Tammy. How are you doing?

Good, man. We haven't seen each other for years.

It's true. Yeah. But I've seen you a lot on YouTube lately.

Oh, yes. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate your willingness to to watch a lot of those videos. I really. Well, I have to say that I'm uh, I studied sciences in university in the 80s and there were some courses, mostly in education, that I questioned their teaching tactics. They were teaching me learning theories and things that didn't really make much sense to me. But other than that, I was taking chemistry, biology, math. And so I didn't really run into feminism in the university in the 80s as some people did. I know because it's been around for a very long time. But uh, looking at your YouTube videos, I, I've been learning a lot. So and I'm really glad that you have done the history of feminism because uh, we need to know the background. We need to know the background and where where we are today from where we began. And I think, I'm not sure, but about 1850 seems to be where the data starts to show that people were talking about it and getting started. And it started possibly with the vote. Is that right?

Yes. Um, and I just, before I answer that question, I, I want to um, agree with you that I do think it's so important to study the history of feminism because I so often hear people say that feminism began with good intentions and it was a legitimate movement. Women had legitimate grievances. Feminism in its early days was a sane, rational appeal for women to have equal rights with men and that it went wrong at some later stage in its development as a movement. And some people think it was fine up through the, what's called the second wave. Some people think it went wrong with the third wave. We get, we could talk about those waves if you want. But um, and I, I hear that so often and I believed it myself, um, until I really started looking critically at the texts and the major leaders of the early feminist movement and I discovered that no, it wasn't the case. It was never sane. It was never without deep rancor and bitterness against men. It was never free from the claim that women were absolutely innocent victims of male predation. It was never uninterested in destroying the family. It was never [Music] inaccurate in its claims about women's social situation and it was never fully willing to slander men in the most vicious and unpitying ways. And it never expressed any appreciation for men or any recognition that men had ever made any contribution to society or that men had ever acted out of genuine love and concern and compassion for women in the laws that had been made or in the social arrangements that had been developed over time. It was just, yeah, it was always a really um, deeply uh, misandric, um, man-hating, man-blaming kind of movement. And I think that that, it's really important to know that so that we, as you said, know how we got where we are. And and my contention is that all the seeds of what we see now in the crazy, irrational, completely hysterical denunciations coming out of the mouths of of feminist activists, all of that was there in the in the early movement. So yeah, we could go back to around 1850 as you say. Like some people would even say, um, there were feminist discussions even earlier. You can go back to, I just did a video on um, feminist foremother Mary Wollstonecraft. She was a British writer and philosopher and activist and she wrote a a pamphlet book, long essay, I'm not sure what to call it, called "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" that was published in 1792. And it was already um, characterized by the same kind of thing, the double standards, the complete refusal to um, accept that women had any agency in the relationships that developed in the way women were in society, the the blaming of men always, the crediting of men with the worst possible motivations in the laws they enacted or in in their their behaviors, always this utopian idea that if only women were free and given a lot of power, that the entire world would improve. Uh, always the the stress on on women's superior morality.

So 1792, that was the French Revolution.

Yes. Yes.

Did she have anything to do with what was going on in the French Revolution?

Well, she was, she was impacted by that. Oh, yes. Yes. Good question. Yeah. She um, she was, I think 30 years old when the French French Revolution began in in 1789. And she was part of the British circle of philosophers and radical thinkers, you know, progressives who were very impressed by the French Revolution and and who were um, as I think intellectuals and others often are, were um, inspired by that idea of tearing down an imperfect social system, completely demolishing it, and rebuilding a perfect order from the rubble. And and so she went to the French to, she went to Paris to observe the French Revolution up close. She went there in, actually after she'd written "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," um, shortly after. And she went at the time when the most vicious and vengeful aspects of the French Revolution were just getting into into swing. Um, the the really radical arm of the uh revolutionaries, the Jacobins, had taken power. They were um, you know, executing all of those who were seen as counter-revolutionaries, thousands and thousands of people, some of whom Wollstonecraft knew personally, were were guillotined. And she observed all that and yet remained committed to the ideals of the revolution. She was only saved from execution, at least potentially, because she was involved romantically with an American businessman, diplomat, and adventurer named Gilbert Imlay, who registered her as his wife with the Parisian government and thus saved her from execution as an American. And but yeah, she was there. She saw, um, she records that she, she stepped in the blood running in the streets from the number of people who are being executed. And yet she could still defend the aims and the methods of the revolution, as she did in a book that she wrote about it. So that that revolutionary spirit, that utopianism, uh, that has a deep role in a great deal of feminist ideology that was developed at that time and later. The idea that we can, we can change human nature by changing our society. And the rejection that there is anything fundamental in human nature. The rejection of the idea that anything we've developed over time has been developed because it worked, you know, to some degree, which is the, you know, the conservative kind of view, I guess, that the the society that's passed down to us should be at least respected, even if we want to change things in it, it should be respected as something that established a way of of working that that was functional. Um, but the the utopian mindset that we often find in feminism and in other forms of progressivism completely rejects that. And we see that very clearly in in Wollstonecraft.

Yes. So she was in, she was a British woman.

She was a British woman. Yes. She was a British woman. And it, I read something, uh, or I, I heard something on your YouTube video. She didn't take into consideration the difference between the career a woman could have and whether and whether she would do uh, be fulfilled by being at home with children and taking care of a house. That, uh, she couldn't see the idea of having children, being married, being fulfilling without a career. Is that, is that accurate to what she was thinking?

Yes, way back then. Yes. Yes. Uh, she, she was, she made a kind of double-edged and self-contradictory argument in the sense that she agreed, actually, as many later feminists did not. She agreed that that women's primary role in society would be as mother, you know, as wives, companions, helpmates, and mothers. She agreed. And now, I don't know whether she, you know, really personally believed in that. She herself was a professional woman. She was a writer and and that was the thing that that she deeply, deeply valued. Um, but but her argument, which um, was a sounded quite conventional, was that for women to be the best wives and mothers they could be, they deserve to be far more fully educated than they were and they deserve to have professional opportunities to to, you know, bring their talents into the public sphere to do whatever. That sounds good. And that sounds good. And I know that there's research that if women are educated, their children do better. And that was the argument that she made. If women, you know, if women are to be moral, virtuous citizens, and if they are to bring up their children to be good citizens, they they should be well educated. And so that that sounds great. I don't have, of course, any, you know, any disagreement with that. I believe that every person, regardless of the circumstances of their biology, you know, should be able to be well educated if they so wish and and to bring their gifts to do whatever they're talented at doing. So so that was the argument. But um,

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but she did not seriously consider the tension that would arise between women's what she said was their particular role as mothers to bring children into the world and to help them nurture them, create a home for their husbands and families, and the other challenges, the other kinds of tension and stress and everything else that come from a public role. She never did acknowledge that there is a tension there. She simply asserted that women should do both and that this would make them better mothers. She even made the argument that that women would be more loving, more contented in their domestic roles, more genuinely attached to their husbands and children when they were given greater freedoms and and greater opportunities and more power in the society. Now, she never really philosophically defended that position. Why would someone become more attached to the home when all of a sudden all of these other opportunities are granted? And I do think that's one of the continuing problems within feminism, maybe just generally within our society, is that what has tended to happen for a lot of women is that they have been interested in in a career or at least been interested in a kind of life outside of their homes and have been, I think, often surprised by the stresses and boredoms and tensions and unhappiness that work outside of the home often involves. But rather than recognizing that that is just a thorny fact of life, many feminists and women in general, influenced by feminism, have have seen that as something that is being denied to women specifically because they're women or imposed on women specifically because they're women and have said, you know, we, we are owed something to fix this. Whether it is state, um, state mandated and state paid for daycare, so that, you know, somebody else can look after my children. Of course, that creates all sorts of problems and, you know, emotional stresses, etc. Or, uh, that the workplace should change to accommodate women's particular circumstances, which also creates its own set of problems and expectations and women feeling that they are judged as as less professional, um, because they have certain home responsibilities. Like there are just so many problems that arise out of that assertion that women should be able to have both. And and

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rather than recognizing that as just a, a fact of the matter that has continued as as one of the major complaints of feminist ideology, this is something that that the state or that men in particular owe to fix. You know, owe women to to fix it. And it's, it's a very difficult problem to fix.

Yeah. Well, I think I, I mentioned to you that I, we were in Hungary and we spoke to the president of Hungary, who was in parliament for a number of years. And she was in charge of family, family policy in the government. And they set up in Hungary a family policy where now, if a woman, first of all, if people get married until they're 25, they're not charged any income tax. So as married couples, they're not. So that hopefully will allow people to become married and start a family because they have a little bit of a tax break, which would be a state perk for people who are married and for people having children. And then if you have one child, a woman pays 10% less income tax for the rest of her life. If she has two children, she pays something like 25% less. If she has three children, she pays 40% less. And if she has four children, she never pays income tax for the rest of her life. And they have, uh, they've improved the rate of marriage. They've improved the fertility rate, some over the last 10 years. I think it's gone from 1.25 children to 1.57. So it's gone up. And the divorce rate has gone down. So less stress on the family, or at least financial stress. And that's one of the stresses. And also, um, the abortion rate has actually been down 40% because of it, with no compulsion and change in that. So it's possible that we haven't found the right policies yet to to help with that. But it's bigger than it's man's fault, right? It's a bigger problem than that. It's like it's like having, uh, uh, the, inequality be due to capitalism when it's, when inequality is due to a principle of inequality that holds true for, you know, the amount of blood in your blood vessels is a few blood vessels have all the blood, and a few rivers have all the water, and a few stars have all the mass. And so it's, it's a very long, uh, natural law that isn't due to capitalism. And so women, and this natural duty and gift of having children, is is much, much bigger than a societal problem. It, it, it's so complex because it's a natural law that you become pregnant and that, and that you want children, and you have, and that you have this need inside you to have children. And to blame that on men, who are really sharing the boat with us, is, uh, superficial to say the least. It's superficial analysis, right? So anyways.

Absolutely. Well, I think what you said is is so good. And and that's the thing that has struck me every with every single uh feminist leader, every important text in feminist ideology that I've read, starting back there with Wollstonecraft and then continuing through the 19th century, looking at the American leaders too, is that they, that is the thing that's never acknowledged. There is never recognized anything natural. That, you know, it's not recognized that, um, that that men have anything naturally good in their desire for women, their their longing to protect and provide for women. I mean, either that isn't acknowledged at all, or it's rewritten as a form of coercion or, you know, power over or or domination or subjugation. Like the, the, um, the attitude is just so mean-spirited and so jaundiced in its, it seems deliberate misinterpretation of how the the male-female bond was socially um, supported, you know, and why things were, why certain laws were put into place. For example, you know, in the, in the 19th century, up until the fairly late 19th century, it was just understood that man and woman were one person. Once they were married, they were one person in law, and each had duties, different but equally important duties toward the other. And so it was understood that yes, the woman was the man's companion and helpmate, and she was to bear him children, if that's, if that was possible, um, and that also she gave her consent to sexual relations within the marriage. And that has been seized on by feminists as a horrific um, imposition on women, as a denial of female bodily autonomy, as a form of sex slavery. That phrase, sex slavery, is used by, well, it's used by Engels in his 1884 work, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property in the State." He speaks specifically about marriage as a form of prostitution or a form of sex slavery. And many, many feminist ideologues also talk about female sex slavery and marriage. So that, you know, by the by the end of the 19th century, that notion that sex itself was a form of subjugation of women and that it was an intolerable burden placed on women in marriage, that was already deeply ingrained in the feminist idea of that institution. And many, many feminists, therefore, called for marriage to be essentially, you know, dissolvable at will. They called for various versions of free love. They were insistent on the need to liberate women from this intolerable burden. What they never talked about at the same time was the fact that the man also had obligations. He had the obligation to provide for his wife, to pay all of her debts, even if that landed him in debtor's prison. And many men, I read, go, I read, but you said was that even if they're divorced? Yes. And and she, uh, needed help, he was still, even if they were divorced back then, I don't know. It was, I can't remember exactly what the quote was, but it had something to do with being divorced, uh, and also having to pay. Yes. Uh, yes, yes, maintenance if she left him. Uh, if she left him, that was it. Yeah. If she left him, um, he no longer had any right then to sexual companionship. The the law was that only while she was still living under his roof did he have a right to sexual companionship. But even that is really complicated once you get into reading conduct books and advice manuals of the time, which were always insistent that the woman should be the one who determined sexual relations. So the man should never force himself, that he should always wait for her to to invite him, essentially. And so there was a great deal of concern for, uh, women's power within the sexual relationship. But if she left him, she was still entitled to his support, his maintenance. That was something that, you know, that was just a bedrock of the understanding of what men owed to women in marriage. And so, um, you know, this, like feminists often, for example, will talk about the, um, how unjust it was that up until actually well into the 20th century, a woman had to have her husband's signature in order to get a credit card. And that was seen as an intolerable example of, you know, patriarchal infantilization of women or control of women's finances. But the reason for that was that, you know, very late, a man was responsible for his wife's debts. And that was a, you know, pretty serious burden that the man had to shoulder. And what feminists then tended to advocate for was the liberation of women from their burdens. So many, many feminists spoke about the, um, intolerability of, uh, women owing their husbands sex. They wanted to liberate women from that. They wanted women to be able to leave their husbands once they were, you know, not in love with them anymore, and that sort of thing. But they never advocated that men should no longer have to support their wives. So, you know, that, that, and that attitude of demanding rights while not giving up the privileges that had been part of the earlier notion of male-female relations, that's the thing that has struck me as so startling. It, as a, as a through line in in feminist complaint.

So if you were going to think about that psychologically, the fact that women were asking for freedom without the responsibility that would come with it, you know, so being taken care of, having freedom, but also being taken care of, so having both sides of it. Yes. What kind of psychological attitude would bring about that kind of a desire? Because it's not a, it's not a finding truth through love kind of desire. It's finding, it's finding what what I want, what I need, what I deserve. It's, you know, it's all, it sounds like it's all focused on the woman's side of things. And it's a pretty narrow view. So how do you, just can you describe the the psychological makeup of a woman and the doctrines that were being laid down in history of what they, where their point of view was from? Like what kind of point of view? It sounds very, it sounds like a very self, uh, self-pitying. It sounds like self-pity.

Yeah, pretty much. I agree. Uh, but why would that be the case? Why would they be in that situation and feel that way? I do think that, and you know, this is, you're getting at the core, really. And and it's a question that I ask over and over again. And and part of the answer, I think, is that once you become convinced that the history of your group, and we're talking about, uh, sexual antagonism, but I think it can apply to other group identities, once you become convinced that the history of your group is this history of unremitting cruel oppression in which you have been denied even the most basic rights and principles, and in which the other side, the oppressor group, has taken everything and given nothing, and that is over and over again the feminist position, the feminist description of women's lot. Once you believe that that's true, then I think you lose any empathy or ability to see things from the other group's point of view or to accept that they too might have had their sorrows, their burdens, their difficulties, their suffering. You simply shut your mind to it. You don't believe that it's true anymore. And you believe then that that actually, you might not say it in that manner, in fact feminists deny it, but you would believe that a kind of revenge, you know, a collective process of group vengeance is perfectly justified. That now men must be made to pay. They have left a bloody, you know, blood-stained trail of women's tears and suffering and oppression of mind and body. So now they deserve to pay just some fraction, even of what they have inflicted on others. And women deserve to be liberated from those burdens and supported. And I really think that that is, maybe not the whole story, but I think it is a big part of it. And there's a fascinating novel. It's one of the, one of the videos I made is about Henry James's novel, "The Bostonians." He describes exactly that psychology. And this is a novel that was published in 1886, and he's describing the situation that he observed, I assume, in in the 1870s in the Boston area. And he describes the the like the coming to feminist consciousness of the two women, Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant, in in the novel, as exactly that. Like, basically, they immerse themselves in these stories of of women's oppression. And they they believe that men, you know, have always been privileged, that in every situation, men benefit and they use women for their own pleasure and purposes. And so they came to believe that now is the time for men to pay for what they had done. And you see that even in a little earlier. If you go back to 1848, which is in some ways the the origins of the fem, the organized feminist movement in the United States, uh, and this was a women's convention that took place at Seneca Falls, New York. And it was led by the woman who became the acknowledged leader of the American women's movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. And she and other, mostly women who had been involved in the abolition movement and then who had become politicized as a result of their activism, in the movement to abolish slavery, and they'd become angry about what they saw as as women's subordinate status, uh, in their society generally and in that movement. And they signed a document called the Declaration of Sentiments. And it was modeled on the Declaration of Independence. And it was essentially a declaration of war against male sex slavery and subjugation of women. And their primary statement in that document, which a number of women, I forget the exact number, over 100 women signed who who participated in the convention, and men signed it too, and it said that the history of mankind is the history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of men against women, the objective of which is to establish an absolute tyranny over her. That's what they said was the entire history of mankind. And men present, well-intentioned abolitionist men who had attended the conference, signed it, admitting that they were participants in this act, you know, this this horrible history of repeated injuries and usurpation in an attempt to establish an absolute tyranny over women.

And well, if it's, if it's resentment, if it's resentment that's at the bottom of this, men and women can have resentment. Men can have resentment just as well as women can. And so this isn't exactly a women's movement. That's why it's called feminism and not womenism, because it's not just women. It's feminism, which is, which looks to me, after watching all your videos and writing all this down, like a movement of resentment. And men can be resentful. Uh, women are often more resentful, more because they're more agreeable. So they are more apt to not stand up for themselves at at every, uh, juncture. Whenever, if anything happens, sometimes they'll, uh, uh, because they don't like conflict, straight, they don't like straight conflict, then they'll avoid conflict over time. And then get to a point where they can't stand it anymore. And then resentment takes over, because this anger has just built up over time and time again. And I know this, um, you know, everyone has experienced anger. And and women more than men, even have often experienced resentment, something that is like a grudge that you have against someone. And that you're willing to, and that you are holding on to that grudge because you're getting something from it that you want. Otherwise, you'd let it go. Because, well, resentment is, uh, it's a brutal thing to hold. And is a, is one of the worst, uh, emotion. If you're going to have an emotion of fear, uh, of, uh, of anger, resentment is the one of the worst things that you can fall prey to.

Mm-hmm. Fall prey. Absolutely. Read. Yes. Right, right. And so, um, I read that there was a man named Bennett. Let's see where I can't, you know, I have a lot of notes and I can't find them. But I remember that you talked about a man named Bennett. And this was about prostitution, I think, wasn't it?

Oh, maybe Geraldine Butler. Is that that? Oh, Butler. That was it. Butler and prostitution. Let's talk about that just a little bit.

Yeah, that was shocking to me. Yeah. That's another, that's a very interesting arm of the, um, of the feminist movement.

Just before we we go to that, I wanted to say one more thing to him, which was that when you were talking about resentment, and I think that's such an accurate thing to say, because if you read the Declaration of Sentiments, and I would encourage everybody, because I've never even heard of it. I mean, that's so embarrassing. I've never heard of it. Yeah. I, I, you know, I, but I did a PhD in women's writing about social issues, mainly focusing on the Canadian, um, context, but still, the Canadian women in the 19th century were very much influenced by what was going on in the United States. The fact that I didn't know about the Declaration of Sentiments, or at least I might must have known of it at some point, but I didn't read it. Uh, it's only, you know, a few pages long. And it is a fascinating, like, it is an articulation of that kind of resentment. And and there's a whole series of statements that come under that initial, you know, against men. And it contains overt lies that the women who wrote it must have known. They did know they were lies, and yet they put them in the document as justification for their anger and their resentment. And one of them, for example, was that women, all avenues of education were closed to women. That was one of the things they said as proof that men had tried to establish an absolute tyranny over them. Wasn't true. There were all sorts of institutions of higher learning specifically established for women from the earliest days of the founding of the Republic, and certainly from the early 19th century. Elizabeth Cady Stanton herself had attended the Troy Seminary, which the whole purpose of which was to give women of the upper middle class women an education that was equal to that that men received. The United States believed strongly in the necessity of education for both men and women if the Republic was going to survive and flourish. And she received that education. She knew, she, you know, learned Latin and Greek and all of the things that the very well-educated person would would learn. And yet she denied it in the document that she herself authored. Like, it's just astounding to to read that. And I think, you know, as you point out, that is a product of that deep resentment. And I would say even further, when pleasure becomes part of that resentment, or when the resentment turns into pleasure, because I think there is that too. There is a relishing of the anger. And you can see that when you read many of these documents. It and because once you have decided that you are the victim of eons of oppression, and that somehow, you know, that is all you know, it's all been channeled through your sex and into your personal circumstances, I think that's extremely, like, it gives a heady rush when you think you are the innocent victim of all this. So every single thing that is wrong in your life, or that you imagine to be wrong, all of your dissatisfactions and failures, etcetera, none of them is your responsibility. It's somebody else's fault. Somebody did this to you. And somebody else should have to pay for it and fix it. And you're going to stand up and declaim that. And when you add to that that women could from these earliest days stand up and make their declarations and people would listen respectfully and applaud, and you would be called a heroine and a courageous person for saying these things. Now, and that's where I think men have a greater difficulty in being resentful, because resentful men do not tend to be applauded. At least not if they're declaring they know they're victims of sex injustice. They don't tend to get a very sympathetic hearing. Whereas women always have. And I think that's the danger of it. That becomes then one's entire identity. And one gets a great deal of satisfaction from nursing that sense of resentment, that grievance, and speaking about it and being told that you're a wonderful person for having the courage to speak about it. And I think that, you know, that's, uh, it's a very, it's morally incredibly dangerous and also very seductive.

Well, I think if it's, if it's resentment, because resentment, it's kind of like a spirit. The spirit is a spirit of resentment. It's an emotional, it's a harmful emotional spirit. Yeah, resentment. Right. And so, in one way, if someone was speaking up about it, it would have been helpful if there would have been some people who could speak up on the other side of it. [Music] Kind of in support of the woman, but not in support of the doctrine. You know what I mean? Because, because the women, I feel like women have been subjected to feminism. I would say that it's a, like Marxism, right? I mean, Marxism, we know is a, it's a philosophy, it's a movement, it's a, it's a spirit of, um, it's, it, oh, how do you describe it? It's, you know, someone is trying to be, they're seeing the world in terms of us and them. Yes. And feminism isn't us and them. Marxism isn't us and them. So it's a real, it's a divisive, it's a divisive movement. And so, and that's so sad, because here it is, men and women become married, and there is a, there is a union, which is what you hope would be the culmination of both those people. And it would be better, right? The the marriage. And that you're both, um, less important than than the marriage, which means that, you know, you're going to have children. And those children are going to be encompassed in the marriage. They're not part of the husband or the wife, but they're, they're the marriage, right? They're the, they are in flesh and blood, the, um, the spirit of the marriage. There it is. And that's a culmination of a marriage, or at least that's what we used to mean and to think. And to think that women have been come under the spell of this ethos that is only, is only, and it's funny because it's, I'm a victim, but, but I want to push you down. But I'm very powerful too. Yeah, right. I'm a victim, but I want to push you down. So, so it's the, it's almost, you know, a mother, a mother is all kind and all nourishing when she has a little baby. That's true. But if a stranger comes in the house, she turns into a, a predator, because she'll get rid of whoever comes in the house that shouldn't be near the baby. And I'm not, I'm talking about not the husband, I'm talking about if the woman encounters a stranger, then she's going to be on the side of her baby a hundred percent and would put herself in harm's way to protect the baby. Or that's how it used to be, right? That was marriage. And that was, that was, that was it. But so now there's this doctrine of resentment, which is, I've been wronged, I've been wronged, and you're at fault, because if I've been wronged, somebody has to be at fault. So it must be you. And you're the closest one to me, you're my husband. Yeah, right. So you're the one in the marriage. There's just you and I. But the problem is, it isn't just you and I, because it's the wife, the husband, and the marriage. There's actually three. And the third person is the marriage that's been forgotten. Yes. That's totally been forgotten.

Yeah. Well, once marriage was was redefined as a, uh, oppressive institution, and that it was a form of sex slavery, it, it wouldn't be something that would need to be protected or regarded in any manner as a good. And that's the thing, you know, the idea of a marriage as a, as a, a place of companionship, uh, a place to establish a stable home for the benefit of both the husband and the wife, and then any children that they might have, like all of that is absent from the discussions. And in fact, it's startling how children themselves are almost entirely absent from even those earliest discussions after Mary Wollstonecraft. And then, you know, we get into all of these discussions about how marriage should be much more easily dissolved. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was certainly a very strong proponent of, um, of, you know, much more easily granted divorce. Like it was possible to get divorced in the 19th century, but, you know, there were only very strict grounds. It was very difficult. It was a lengthy legal process, and you had to prove that you'd been deserted, or you had to prove cruelty, or something. There were certain grounds upon which a divorce might be granted, but it was rare and and difficult. And the idea was that divorce, uh, divorce should be rare, and marriage should be a permanent institution. And the idea that that, you know, there was any good in that idea of marriage as a permanent institution that anchored the society, and especially created a stable home for children, that's just not there. And so when Elizabeth Cady Stanton talks about how she actually supports free love, I found a really interesting talk that she gave in 1870 where she outlines why she believes in that. She doesn't mention children once. She only talks about the benefits for the women. And she says, maybe men would benefit too, because to to stay married when you're not in love anymore, when the passion is gone, you know, that this is really oppressive. She never talks about those who are left behind. She never talks about the psychological and emotional trauma of either the partner who does not wish the marriage to be dissolved, or especially the children of these shifting, you know, kaleidoscopically changing, ever-changing unions. I, it's, it's, it's amazing how quickly the welfare of the next generation disappeared out of the minds of these various reformers. Again, because I think of the power of resentment and the inability to actually see the needs of others. And, you know, even the idea that the needs of others, including children, should impose obligations on the mother. It's always understood that the father would have to bear, you know, the, he'd have to be responsible for the needs of others. But that the mother should have to be responsible for the needs of others, that became seen as an intolerable oppression. It's, it's, it's quite startling. And, and when you were talking about, oh, sexual attraction as ultimate good. Yes. As the ultimate good of of the man, of life. Yeah. So it was sexual attraction above above everything. Above everything. Yeah. And and, you know, I think, and your point about how like how how damaging this is, obviously for men, but for women too, like that it's so evident. The whole idea that to be happy, you have to be you have to be virtuous to be happy. That was an ancient idea. The the, you know, the Greeks talked about the necessity of virtue to to be happy. Uh, certainly the the Christian philosophers talked about virtue as a, as the ground of happiness, and as more important than happiness, actually. But, but then, yeah, this idea that sexual joy and satisfaction, that those would be the primary objects that one would pursue in life, that was already there, very clearly articulated in these feminist philosophies. It's quite startling to see it. And, um, yeah, and and the fact that they couldn't see or or just weren't interested in thinking about how this was destined to produce not happiness, but deep dysfunction, and then more resentment and unhappiness. It's, it's, yeah, it's, it's just remarkable. And just in terms of that, this, this, um, problem of of women's unhappiness under feminism, there was a very large meta-study published some years ago now, I think about 10 years ago, by two researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. And they published their their study, and it's not just their own, um, survey, but they looked at many, many surveys of women and men beginning from the 1970s and and moving up until the present time. They they published their study called "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness." And they found that over those decades, really since feminism became kind of entrenched as a major part of the culture, starting in the 1970s, they found that women's absolute happiness and life satisfaction have steadily declined, both in comparison to women of previous generations and in comparison to men, interestingly enough. And so all of the, and and, you know, they're, as as their progressive researchers, so they they called that a paradox because according to, you know, all of their assumptions, as women have more greater economic mobility, as women's professional opportunities have improved, as access to abortion, you know, has increased, and all these things that they thought should make women more satisfied with their lives, they've actually made women less satisfied overall with their lives. And you can see the marked decline from the 1970s on. It makes sense too, and that feminism as an ideology is not really interested in women's happiness, even though it says it is. It is interested in [Music] destroying the society as it now exists. And that's possible only when both women and men are both deeply divided, as you just said, and deeply discontented. So unhappy women keep the state expanding and keep the feminist juggernaut um moving forward. So yeah, it's, um, it's, well, it's, it's startling to see the seeds for that dissatisfaction so very clearly being planted, uh, in in these these texts and and documents. But so that was a big detour because you had wanted to ask me, I think, about, um, Josephine Butler and and her activism against, um, all men's actions come from only depravers of society, for God made man for unchastity and women for his degraded slave.

Yeah. Uh, yes. Yeah. I mean, the, yes, the fervor, the, uh, yeah, just the refusal to believe that there is anything good in, um, men's longing for female sexual companionship. So the background to this, I won't go into too much detail, but Josephine Butler, she was a British woman. Um, she, her, she was the daughter of a man who was deeply involved in the anti-slavery movement, and she was an evangelical woman. And she became involved in a campaign to abolish what were called the Contagious Diseases Acts. And these were a series of acts instituted by the British government to try to curb the spread of sexually transmitted diseases spread through prostitutes. And so the acts gave the power to police officers in various military towns or port towns to arrest and have, uh, women who were prostitutes or suspected of being prostitutes examined by medical doctors to see if they, they had syphilis or gonorrhea. And, um, and they were quite, they were these were brutal, um, civil rights denying actions. Women, just working-class women, who could be suspected of being prostitutes, could be taken off the streets, brutally examined, and it was horrible for them. And so women started speaking out against this. But almost right away, instead of just speaking out against the specific wrong, all of this anger and resentment, this this ideology of um, alleged male sexual predation, got mixed in with their advocacy. And so they started to say that this, this act embodied the sexual double standards by which women were subjugated by men. They were either subjugated in marriage, or they were subjugated in prostitution. Again, this link was formed between the treatment of women in marriage and treatment of women in prostitution. And yes, Butler was the most articulate and most powerful proponent of this idea that every man was guilty, should be held guilty of the most abominable degradation of women, simply because he didn't out and agitate for the, um, you know, changing of the laws and the destruction of of prostitution itself, that somehow all men were complicit in male degradation of women. And we see this, this is carried on in the 1980s in the activism of feminist activists like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, very similar types of arguments that all men benefit from the subjugation of women in prostitution and elsewhere. And yeah, that that was the idea that she articulated. That, and like, just the refusal to believe that that a man might visit a prostitute, for example, out of loneliness, not because he hates women and wants to degrade them, because he, it longs for physical intimacy with a woman. That's just not, not part of their thought processes. And and she is not the only one. There are many others who articulate various versions of that idea that every man is a depraver. There is nothing human in male sexual and

Other longing for women. Maybe the most famous example is a woman named, um, uh, oh, I'm just forgetting her name right now. The daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, who is a major suffragette leader, and her daughter Christabel also became, uh, deeply involved in the suffragette, uh, militant arm of the, uh, agitation for the vote. She wrote a, uh, just, it's, um, bloodcurdling pamphlet called "The Great Scourge," and that scourge is sexually transmitted disease and how to end it. And that the motto was, "Votes for women, chastity for men." And again, it was this emphasis on the depravity of male sexual desire, and always that it was, it was a means by which men subjugated and degraded women in the most hideous form possible.

And so it's not surprising that brings me, that brings me to Adam and Eve and the apple, and how we understand that, that there was a division that happened right at the beginning. When Eve ate the apple, she gave it to Adam, and when God asked Adam what he was doing, he said, "The woman gave it to me." So there was deception going on right at the beginning of our religious understanding. And then, of course, Cain and Abel, the first men who were born from, from a man and a woman. And the spirit of Cain is the spirit of resentment. That's the spirit of resentment, wanting to get, wanting to destroy his ideal, which was his brother, right? His perfect brother, who was, uh, good in God's eyes. Instead of looking to himself to see how he could improve, or what he might be missing, if he was missing something, what he might be missing. All he did was look to his brother and be envious of Abel's relationship with God, and to kill him.

So it's, and so women looking, instead of looking at themselves to see what they might do, you know, I mean, it's, it's a terrible thing to, instead of looking to see what they might do, looking to their husbands and seeing them as the perpetrator of the discomfort and the unease that they feel. Instead of understanding. And I know, like, I'm, I've gone through, I was very sick, you know, a couple of years ago, and then in 2019, and I had quite a, uh, spiritual, um, awareness that that came upon me of service, of the, of the necessity, necessity for service above all else, you know. And I don't think I knew that before that. I tried to live in truth, and all of, I tried to tell the truth and to love, but there was never, I never understood just how, uh, absolutely pivotal the value of service was to accepting life on life's terms. And so if men were still, if men are still willing to have the service of, of taking care of their wives and their children in marriage, and women aren't, then they've lost the spirit that will guide them in their most desperate moments. Yeah.

And this is a, well, you know, I know it's a spiritual problem that we're dealing with, that it's not a political problem. But feminism isn't a political problem. It was, you know, it was all about the vote, and it was all about inequality, and all of that, which sounds political. But no, I agree. Yeah, I absolutely agree. Yeah. And, and, um, yeah, that's, that's what I came to realize as well.

And when did you, when did you come to that realization? How long ago? Yeah, I've told this story so many times that I, I think, tell me how long ago. I've made it into a, you know, kind of false narrative. I, I, it's hard to pinpoint a particular moment, but I would say especially probably, uh, like, it came on gradually when I was teaching. Uh, like, was it, was this gradual awareness as I would stand up there and I was, you know, I, by the time I started teaching, I had been a feminist as a graduate student. But by the time I was teaching at my first job, the University of Saskatchewan, my first real job, um, you know, by then I was a little, I was older, and and, uh, I, I, I wouldn't have defined myself primarily as a feminist, though I still, of course, was was, um, influenced by many feminist ideas. But and, and I was teaching in the English department, and everything there is, is, I mean, it's predominantly female students, about 85, 15, you know, maybe 80, 20, uh, female to male. And, and in much of the criticism, the approach to literature is, is influenced by by feminist ideology, even in a soft form. Always the emphasis is on women struggling against, you know, difficult social circumstances and triumphing, and here's a strong woman, and we should admire that. And, and here are examples of men being unkind to women, or, or male privilege, all of that was just sort of deeply embodied in the most basic assumptions about the stories that we chose and how we discussed them and everything.

And, um, although always there's the tradition of of, um, male love poetry, you know, for centuries, thousands and thousands of poems about men longing for women, men pursuing women and frustrated by the coldness and the inaccessibility of the woman, or achieving the woman's love and then filled with delirious joy at the prospect of life with this woman, and praising the woman for her beauty, and praising the woman for her moral virtues. And, you know, all of that, which sits very uneasily on, on the notion that women have been oppressed by men who didn't care about them and who, who, you know, had had contempt for them and objectified them. But anyway. And, and I, so I think just gradually, you know, as I would look out at these young men in the, in the sitting in my classrooms, and, and I just started to think, what it must feel like to be a 19-year-old boy in this environment that we have, where everything is about women, and we have to promote girls and empower girls, and and girls bring something, and and boys need to learn, you know, to keep their hands to their selves. They need to stop objectifying, and they need to stop raping, and we're part of a rape culture, and boys need to get consent. And, you know, just all of that. And, and it's, it's women's time, you know, it's time for young men to take a step back and let their sisters come forward, because the whole history of humanity has been the history of male power, and what a mess men have made of the world. And now, what I see now, I, and now I see so, where are we at now? Now men and women are changing their genders. Yeah. Men aren't having sex. Men aren't having sex anymore in many societies. Unless, and yes, [Music] so they've been so demoralized now that they're not even showing that, uh, passion that they used to show. They don't show it anymore. They show less of it now. And now we're starting to, it's come so far now that we're going to deny that there are men and women. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the endpoint. Yes. And, and yes, exactly. You know, and, and, uh, wow. Yeah. So, so, I mean, that, that just came to me as I was lecturing. And I, I wasn't teaching from a particularly strong feminist perspective, but it, you know, it's there in everything. And, and the students, and, you know, and, and just noticing too, that like the idea that men are privileged. And even now, you'll still see this, that the men speak more in university settings, and they should be encouraged not to speak. And, and, you know, women are so shy, and they're so silenced. And it just, you know, it isn't the case. And, and I could see that the women, the women were confident overall. Uh, they had a, they had a narrative. They had been told, you know, that they should speak, and they were strong, and women should be encouraged. They'd internalized that so deeply. And the men, I could just see that they were certainly not privileged. They were aware that they were the bad guys. And, and I, I just, I thought it was intolerable. Like, even if it were true, as I, at that point, maybe still half believed, you know, that men of the past had had many more advantages than women, but so what? If it were true, then it isn't true now. So why would we be punishing these young men for the alleged sins of their fathers? It just started to strike me as what it should strike any reasonable person as completely unjust and horrible to visit that on young men. And, and I've noticed this so often. I remember I gave a talk in Renfrew, Ontario, for a wonderful friend of mine named Dave Ainsworth, who had a series of public lectures on issues of social import. And I was talking about the challenges and difficulties facing young men today. And, and the discrimination that they face, not only the barrage of negative messaging that's everywhere, but, but the actual injustice of continued affirmative action hiring, where they know that they have to be twice as good in many spheres of endeavor to be hired, because so many places are fulfilling their their equity mandates. And, you know, so I was talking about all that, and I finished the talk, and, and we started having discussion. And a woman stood up in the audience. And I can't remember now, exactly what she said, but she told a personal story of something that had happened to her in the 1980s, I think it was, when she was working somewhere, and a man had said to her, allegedly, that she should, she should be at home having babies rather than be working in this, wherever it was. And, and she brought that forward, and people applauded her. You know, telling this story of some comment that was made 30 years ago or more. And, and that was, and like, it had nothing to do with what I had talked about, except it was a kind of, "So what? This is what happened to me. And so I don't give a damn. Why should I give a damn what's happening to young boys or young men today?" That, that was the whole import of it. And I, all I could say to her was that, again, I don't believe in an ideology of collective vengeance. Even if it were true that this had been said to her, if it was just said by one person, maybe it was even well-intentioned, maybe it was a ham-fisted, she was tired that day, and he thought maybe it would be nice for her to go. Yeah, maybe it was a ham-fisted pickup line. You know, maybe he was thinking, "I'd like to marry you and, you know, give you a nice school." I mean, who knows what it meant? Who knows? Yeah. It wasn't necessarily, um, you know, a, a, a slight. It didn't necessarily express even, you know, contempt or anything. But she was still angry about it, you know, 35 years later. Well, if she still remembers it, there was something to it, you know. What it may be, there was probably a spirit of love there that she couldn't, that she didn't accept. And now she's still angry at it. And, and it also didn't accept it. That's, yeah, maybe. Yeah. I mean, who knows. And, and even, like, what I thought too, afterwards, was if that's the worst thing that ever happened to her, that's not very bad. Um, you know, most people have had worse things than that. Many men have had many worse things than that happened to them in the workplace. So, um, you know, but, but, but it was that, like, just what you were saying about the resentment. It was like she was not willing to listen to statistics about young male suicide, or, you know, male homelessness, or the prison gap between men and women, the sentencing gap. She was, like, she wasn't interested in any of these social issues. She wasn't interested in the effects of fatherlessness. She wasn't interested in depression amongst young men, because she'd had one incident that that made her so angry. And, and so that was, and everyone rallied behind her. Yeah, they did. Like, people applauded. And I just thought, wow. I just ended a long lecture talking about men's issues, especially young men. Yeah. Planning enrollment, you know, at university. Men are now the minority. You know, like nobody cared. Like they were more interesting. Well, that's how far we've gone. That's how far down that road we've gone, isn't it? Yeah, that you can outline dramatic, uh, statistics about the decline of, of, uh, male, uh, well-being in our society, and that someone would say something like, some like that, and everybody would applaud. That just shows how far down that road we've gone. And it's time. It's time for this to stop, you know.

Um, when I was in the hospital, and I thought I was going to die, because I was told I was going to die, I asked God, I said, "God, if you let me live, I'll talk to people and I'll tell them what I think." And I probably hadn't, up till then, really truly talked to anybody and said, "What is what I think is what the best part of me wants to say." And I would say, we've gone a long ways down this road, and it's time to wake up. It's time to wake up. It didn't work. It was an experiment. It was an experiment, a long experiment, but it's time to face what where we've come to, where we're not having any children. We're not having as many children. We're not even replacing. I mean, Elon Musk is worried that we're not going to have enough people because people aren't having children anymore. Men aren't having sex anymore. People are changing their genders. They're so horrified by being who they are when they're born. Yeah. It's like that experiment has gone wrong. People, it's just gone wrong. And the evidence is in. I mean, I don't know. Yeah. And I know anyone knows that. Anyway, I agree with you. And I know that, you know, some people listening might say, "Oh, Janice is, uh, she's biased, you know, against." Yeah, bias. She's not seeing the, the, the real suffering of of women in the past. Their suffering, of course, they're present, you know, suffering, absolutely. And, and, uh, but I, I guess, you know, I am biased in the sense that I, I came through the feminist perspective, and I, and I know how it closed my mind off to the experiences of men. Like, it, you do get so focused on this idea that women have, you know, uh, the women suffer in a special way, and then you get to the point where you, you just, you won't accept that men suffer at all, or even that men are really fully human. Like, it is a kind of denial that that men are human. And so, you know, I rejected all of that as a result of being a teacher and and seeing my male students and that. And, and, but I never answered your question. I think it was 2012, probably, was the, that was my real, that was my light, light bulb moment when I saw a protest at the University of Toronto of a talk that Warren Farrell. And I, I know your husband has spoken to him on at least one, maybe more occasions. Yeah. He wrote a book called "The Boy Crisis." "The Boy Crisis," and he's just like, he's the, the god of men's issues in, in a way. Uh, well, that's a bad way of putting it, but, you know, he just, like, he's got all the statistics. He's done such deep research into all of the issues. And he also wrote an amazing book called "The Myth of Male Power," you know, where he really gets into all these situations where women imagine men have power, but actually, you know, it's this really complicated, reciprocal thing. And, and, you know, it's never, never so simple as as it's often represented. And anyway, he had come, somebody, a men's issues group at the University of Toronto had invited him to speak. And, uh, it was just, it's, you can still find, uh, video of the, the protests. They, uh, some women's studies students tried to just prevent it all together, and they were chanting, and, and they went crazy, really, uh, fury and anger, and preventing people from getting into to see the talk. I mean, that's now quite common, but I think it was one of the first times I'd ever seen that. And, and my friend Steve Brule, uh, heard about the talk, and he went down there, started filming, and he interviewed people that were protesting, and he interviewed some of the young men who had wanted to to get in to hear Warren Farrell. And, you know, one of the young men, two of his friends had committed suicide in the previous year, and he wanted to learn more about why young men were committing suicide. And, and it was just so sad to see him wanting to to hear, you know, to have some some understanding of what was happening to to young people that he knew, young men in particular. And that's what Warren's research was really focusing on at that time. And to be prevented, and to be told that he was an oppressor because he wanted to hear Warren Farrell, it was just so outrageous and so unfair and horrible. That was really, and I said, that's it. I'm going to, I'm going to try to, like you, I just thought, and I'm going to try to speak from from what I know. And, uh, and so I gave a talk in the following, the following spring, March of 2013. That was my first talk. And I, I knew nothing. I didn't know what I was up against at all. And the same kind of craziness, you know, the fire alarm was pulled, and there were a lot of really angry people laughing, and, and, you know, making faces, and shouting at me while I was trying to give the talk, and everything. And it's true, I didn't know much about men's issues at all at that point. I just knew that feminist theory wasn't true. But what I wanted to say in relation to our, the sort of theme of resentment, uh, that's gone through our talk is, like, I've been so, I guess heartened in a way, and saddened too, to speak to many, many men. And from that first talk, you know, people started emailing me, you know, not to the extent, probably, that that you and Jordan get comments, but, but, you know, a lot of people wrote to me to tell me about the experiences that they'd had with feminism. You know, especially men writing about how, just how awful it was to have no ill will towards women at all, and to just want to build a good society, get married, have a family. That was the deepest desire of so many men who wrote to me, both young and old. Or men who'd been through horrible divorces where they, they don't see their children, they haven't been allowed to see their. Oh, yeah. The system is totally against it. It's just awful in divorce. I, I met a man who, went to South Africa, and came home and thought everything was fine in his marriage. His wife had thrown some of his clothes into his car and told him he couldn't come into the house. She called the police. She said that she was afraid of him because he had an antique gun collection. Most of them didn't even fire, apparently. But the police told him he couldn't enter his house anymore. And that was it. She just, she divorced him, and he never saw his children again. And, and, uh, he lost all his money trying to, you know, trying to fight her in court. And, and, you know, so that's just like, that's so typical. I've heard that story so many times. But the thing that is kind of heartening in the midst of all that, and I know that some people will will find this hard to believe, but I have not met very many men who are angry at women. I've met men who are angry at feminism, and at some particular feminist women, but I have not found that anger and hatred of women in in these men. Even the men that have had the very worst experiences, like they just want to call it quits. They just want to say, "Let, let's just end the gender war." They're perfectly fine with the idea of women's equality, at least in the sense of, you know, women, yes, they believe women should be able to do what what they're good at. They don't want to, you know, prevent women from becoming lawyers or doctors or whatever women might want to do. They, they just want to work together with women in peace and harmony. And they, they want to love women. And they just don't want to be, they don't want to be accused anymore, or slagged off, or told they have to apologize for some imaginary privilege or entitlement that they don't actually have. And it's like, I find it remarkable. If I talk to a group of women, even women who don't call themselves feminists, or if I talk to an individual woman, like, there's this kind of often automatic, um, dislike of men, or something. Like, they'll, they'll, I just find that that women will often say mean things about men as a group and laugh, and expect me to join in. Like, it's almost a way women bond now by by saying horrible things about men's idiocy, or men's, you know, uselessness in society, or things like that. And I just, I don't find that in the many, many men that I've spoken to, even men who've had these terrible experiences. They, I don't know, they, I just don't find that level of anger, and certainly not hatred and bitterness towards women in in them. So, um, there's, uh, even on, even the, uh, movies and the TV shows that are more, uh, modern, men are portrayed as useless and as misfits, and not, not the virtuous stories that there used to be back in the 70s, the 60s, and the 70s. And so the messaging that women are receiving, you know, the, the, we're making those movies. We're making. We are, you know, as a collective, we are. That's the message we're giving. And so that's the message that women are receiving, and men are receiving. And, um, it's not doing, it's not doing this any good. Yeah. Yeah.

A friend of mine was, and I were talking about, there's this motif in many, many movies now where, um, the man, even like, I like watching police procedurals and detective, um, series and that kind of thing. Yeah. At least there, there's still this idea that justice, you know, can be done. And it's usually done in the hour or the hour and a half or whatever it is, and the murderer is discovered. And, you don't want to talk about justice. That justice is a bad word. Yes. Yes. And so, and so, and you, so even in those cases where the man is a hero, and those, those are one of the few, I think, genres left where you actually have heroic, intelligent men who can solve crimes and fight the bad guys, and sometimes use violence, you know, in, in a, a good end, and all that kind of thing. But even there, in his personal life, the man is almost inevitably a failure. I've really noticed this. They, they are often divorced, often the, the their ex-wives just got fed up with them because they were devoted to their work, and it became, they became intolerable because they weren't paying their wife enough attention. And, you know, which is, it's so odd. You're there, they were fighting crime and saving their societies, um, but that wasn't good enough for the wife, as she's portrayed in in these. I've seen this over and over again. And always the man, he, he, he still loves his ex-wife. He'd like to get back with her, but she won't have him back. And, and often his daughter, he tends to have daughters, and the daughter is often very angry at her father as well, for some perceived failure or inadequacy. And the man always feels guilty. He, he's trying to make up with his ex-wife. He's trying to, or estranged wife, he's trying to make up with his daughter. He's apologizing for himself, for his, all his various failures. And there's often a scene where he's calling out to the woman as she's walking away after she's just told him what a no-good he still is, and he's calling, "Susan, Susan," or whatever it happens to be. Oh, my goodness. Just leaves. And it's like, become this classic motif of the man begging the woman to forgive him for his failings, and she, she refuses that. She just walks away. And I just think, wow, it's so, like, yeah, why? What kind of a society thinks those are the sorts of scenes we want to watch? Yet obviously, somebody thinks these sum up something important about male-female relations today. It's so sad.

Well, yeah, and it's a culmination of where we've been heading. Yeah. And we have to be, we have to face that, that that is what we, the stories we've been telling. Those are the stories we've been telling. And the, the way things are going now is a consequence of our choices that we've made up till now. Yeah. And so there are, we, we can make a change. We can make changes in our lives. It, this, it, it's based on the choices that we make. And we are in control of our choices. Everything. We're in control of all of that. Uh, we're not in control of it, but we're, we have a choice always of whether of looking at something one way or another.

Well, I think particularly, like, I really appreciate you're speaking to me. And I appreciate your decision, you know, to, to be of service, as you say, and to, to raise your voice and say honestly, uh, what you're seeing and what you believe. And I do think that in this moment, women have a particular, um, opportunity, and even responsibility perhaps, to, to speak on this special, this issue of the, the demeaning of men, and the disempowering of men, and the blaming of men, because it's very difficult for men themselves. Uh, you know, Jordan has spoken about, um, you know, young men and how often at sea they feel, and besieged, and everything. And, and, uh, and then people are angry that he, that he's dared to express empathy for them, or to articulate their perspective. And I, I think it is, it's very difficult for men, especially men who have been wounded in divorce, or through a false allegation, or whatever it happens to be. It's hard for them to talk about their experiences, or to speak on behalf of men. They're seen as angry, they're seen as not wanting to give up their privilege, they're seen as misogynists and oppressors. Whereas women, I think, can more easily speak against the feminist narrative. So, I, well, the problem is, is that women, men have lost their, you know, their, their place in society. But women have lost their place in society because women are, uh, told when they're young, and they go to school, that their career is going to be of utmost importance to them, and they're dissuaded from having a marriage and, and family. And as you said, women aren't, women have been gotten less and less happy, or less and less satisfied with life. There's a reason for that. And I would say that the reason for that is that the narrative now is anti-family. It's anti-children, anti-family, very much. And so both men and women are losing out. Losing out in, it's, you know, I, I agree, like men are definitely losing out, but women are losing out anyway. And they're putting up a brave face because they feel like the career is going to be the thing. But when they get to be 40 years old, and they can't have any children, then then they have to face the fact that those, those are the choices that they made. And, and it wasn't anybody else's choice but their own to make that decision. And that's a big, that's a big thing to have to face, and a very terrifying and sad, uh, and frustrating, uh, realization to come to. I can imagine. But it isn't something that you can lay at the feet of anyone but you're, but ourselves. We make, you know, we, we made our decisions, and here we are, each of us. And so I don't, I don't have any, I don't have anything to say really to men and women, except for, look inside yourself. Look inside yourself and see where you are, and ask for, ask for mercy and forgiveness for your sins, and try to move forward in a better way. And that, that's about all we've got. You know, we have, we have, uh, vacated the churches. And I understand that. I mean, I vacated the church too, I think, when I was 13 years old. I started doing yoga instead. And yoga was really good. I, I really learned a lot. But when it really came down to it, and I got sick, I needed my Judeo-Christian foundation to bring me through it. And since then, I have realized that I need to learn more about it. So I'm learning scripture and praying every day. And, you know, I've taken that very seriously, as well as deciding to talk to people about these issues that are plaguing our society and ruining our families. And it's a, well, it's such a disaster that it has to be talked about. We can turn it around. We, we just have to humble ourselves. We can turn it around.

Well, and I do think now that, um, [Music] I agree with you that women are, um, you know, they're, we're taught from the time we first come to consciousness that we should articulate this sort of, you know, this angry, rebellious kind of stance. That all that stuff about, you know, "Don't tell girls not to be bossy, it's good when girls are bossy, it's good when they're aggressive, it's good when they, you know, lord it over the boys in their age group," etc. So women, young, well, girls and then young women are really encouraged to adopt all of these behaviors that don't serve us well at all. And, uh, but I would still say that for those women who, who are able to, like, for whom the, for whatever reason, the scales can fall from their eyes and they can see clearly, it's a wonderful liberation to realize that the bad news of feminism is not true, and that the, the world is not, um, stacked against women, and men do not wish women harm in general. Um, you know, not to say that there aren't bad individuals of both sexes, but that overall, men really feel a great deal of benevolence towards women, a fellow feeling, a lot of empathy for for women's legitimate struggles and issues, and are really excited and hopeful about moving forward in partnership with women. And I think women still have, um, we do have a voice in it. We can speak about our experiences in a way that tends to, um, I know, I just think people tend to to be more willing to listen to women giving their personal experiences and saying, "I was, I was under a misunderstanding. I've changed my mind about this. You know, I want to contest this issue. I want to look differently at something." I think that's possible for for women on a wider range of issues, and it is for for men. So, um, so I think that's hopeful, and that women can, they can use that particular kind of emotional power that women have in this society to, to speak the truth for good. Yeah, for good, exactly. And I have a friend who says that his anti-feminism, which he purveys on Facebook, it's the, he calls it the gospel, the good news. And it is good news, you know, it really is that all that stuff about oppression and, and male animosity, and, and contempt for women is not true. So that's, that's great. It is. And I think that's a really good place to stop, because I think we've had a good conversation, and I'd be happy to talk to you some more, because we only touched on some of the history. And, yeah, sure. And if you are, uh, interested, um, it would be fun, and, uh, it would be good for me to become more used to talking about these things, and have a deeper understanding of of them, and also to help people understand them, and to find us a way forward. Let's find a way forward, a good way forward. Yeah.

Well, thank you very much for letting me talk about a few of the things that I've learned, and I enjoyed the conversation. Well, I know you have so much to give us, because, uh, you've been such an advocate, uh, for men, and for trying to dispel the myths that we're living under right now. And I really appreciate it, and I'm so grateful that I get to talk to you, because, uh, we can, uh, we can converse and bring some things to light, and that's very exciting. Well, it was my pleasure. Thank you. Great. Thank you. [Music] You.