boys adrift
Lately, there has been lots of talk about the gender gap. For most people the gender gap refers to disparities in treatment between men and women with the focus solely being on female inequality. The truth is that male inequality has been thoroughly ignored and boys and men are losing out. Males are falling behind in various aspects of society including education, employment and health. They make up the majority of suicides, high school dropouts, the homeless and workplace fatalities all the while being excoriated in misandrist attacks for their 'toxic masculinity'. Is it any wonder that men, marked as disposable, are deciding to go their own way? And if the patriarchy reigns supreme, why are males in such dire straits?

Join us for this episode of The Health and Wellness Show where we'll discuss the state of men and boys in the West and the continuous whittling away of their status in society by radical feminists and the efforts to combat this trend. For contrast, we'll also take a look at some actual toxic males who give a bad name to all the good guys out there.

Running Time: 01:23:35

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript of the show:

Jonathan: Welcome to the Health & Wellness Show everybody. Today is Friday, July 13, 2018. My name is Jonathan. I'll be your host for today. Joining me in our virtual studio from all over the planet we have Doug, Erica and Tiffany. Hey guys.

All: Hellos.

Jonathan: So we have an interesting topic today. It may seem on the surface a little bit out of our normal range because we are a health and wellness show but you could say this ties in a little bit to mental health. But we also do touch from time to time on the state of culture and how that pertains to everybody's mental health, so that's what I'm going to claim is the connection here today. {laughter}

Tiffany: That works for me.

Doug: It works, yeah.

Jonathan: We did want to talk about this. So our topic today is Dudes in Distress - the State of Men and Boys in the West. We were inspired to talk about this because of the emergence of the word "incels" in popular culture and our listeners may or may not have heard this. "incel" is short for involuntary celibate and as you may, as everyone else who has heard this term, roll your eyes because it does seem like on the surface, "give me a break". We have so much identity politics going on right now and so much victim culture and this just seems like, guys are involuntarily celibate, that's the oldest story in the history of humankind.

Doug: Yeah. Isn't everybody who's interested in sex who isn't having it, technically involuntarily celibate?

Jonathan: Yeah. But it's the propensity of our culture to give words and terms to groups now, I think. It's more a part of that. Along the lines of this topic today we're also going to touch on MGTOW which stands for Men Going Their Own Way. Some of you may have heard of this group and the MRAs, Men's Rights Activists is a whole other thing as well. We've talked about it a little bit before but I think, just to get us started off - again, our listeners may or may not be familiar with a commentator named Ben Shapiro. He's quite popular these days. He's got a little bit here on incels. So I'm just going to play this. It's three minutes and then we'll come back.

Ben: There's a very weird thing that people are now talking about online. It's something that they call incels. What in the world are incels and why do they matter? Incels are involuntary celibates. In other words, people who want to have sex but are not, right? Which is to say, most of the population, I assume.

But incels are involuntary celibates. The reason that they've become a thing is because last week, a couple of weeks ago, there's a 25-year-old Canadian killer who rammed his van into a crowd of people killing 10 and injuring 15 and the killer had written a Facebook post stating that the incel rebellion has already begun and all the Chad's and Stacy's - which I guess is some sort of slang for attractive people, would pay the price.

There have been a bunch of think pieces about how to solve the problem of involuntary celibacy. Point number one: I don't understand why involuntary celibacy is a problem. If you haven't earned somebody's love and affection enough for them to have sex with you, I don't understand why this is society's problem. But it just demonstrates that the victimhood mentality has taken over everyone in our society. If you're a loser and you can't find somebody to marry you? Maybe it's because you ought to get your act together and maybe the reason you're involuntarily celibate is because you have not made enough of yourself to earn somebody else's love and affection.

But when you live in a society where sex is believed to be owed, when you live in a society that's constant promising that sex is right around the corner, casual sex is easy to get, it's not a problem, no one's ever going to require anything of you, when you watch TV and everybody's jumping in and out of the sack with everybody else, it does lead to a mentality of "I am owed this thing. I am owed sex. Everyone's getting it except for me. Involuntary celibacy is obviously a societal problem."

This is a very perverse view of sexuality. Ross Douthat of the New York Times has pointed out that for purposes of discussion there are two types of incels, a man who can't get sex as a general rule - it's usually men who are worried about involuntary celibacy - and people perceived by the left-wing to be victimized by a society that has unfair standards of sexiness. So this would be people who are trans, who say that they can't have sex with the kind of people that they want to have sex with because as trans people, society has set up rigid standards of sexuality and people are falling prey to all of that.

Well Douthat had suggested the solution posed by those who see involuntary celibacy as a problem to be solved, will be the redistribution of sex, that in the end what we will end up doing is sponsoring people so that they can hire prostitutes or we can develop new technology like sex robots so we can have equality of sex. In the Bernie Sanders model, 'the top 1% of the 1% are having 99% of the sex and we must redistribute the sex as well as the pudding'. This is the sort of move that Douthat sees coming with regards to involuntary celibacy.

Now, we all rightly rebel at this idea because this idea is gross and stupid. It's not your responsibility to make sure that anybody else has sex - obviously! Nor is it your responsibility to have sex with somebody just because they would like to have sex with you. It's idiotic! But the reason this has even become an issue, the reason there are now all these think pieces - a lot of think pieces in the last week about involuntary celibates and how we solve their problems - is because of this stupid victimization mentality with regard to sex.

Jonathan: So that's Shapiro's take on it. I think it's pretty accurate.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Doug: Yeah. I read something interesting about it. This was a guy, an author and unfortunately I don't remember his name. He's a French author. He's written a lot of books and it was an article talking about how this guy was talking about this sort of thing in his books for a long time. A lot of his main characters were like these incel-type people, really bitter and having difficulty with women and that sort of thing. What his position on it was that the sexual revolution and getting rid of a lot of the mores and taboos against sex and casual sex, had created this thing because it turned the sexual relations into another dominance hierarchy where suddenly because it's a free-for-all and everybody can have sex with anybody else, then suddenly a hierarchy is going to develop where the most attractive or desirable people are at the top and they're having all the sex and the 99% at the bottom and maybe 99% is a bit strong - which is what Ben Shapiro was going into there - are the people who are disenfranchised at the bottom of this pyramid, the people who are forgotten and become bitter and consider themselves victims. I thought it was an interesting look at it.

Jonathan: Totally. I think one aspect of this is companionship. It's not just sex. If sex were the only issue I think it would be a much different conversation. But I do think it comes down to a sense of loneliness among this group of young men. Please don't mistake me as trying to justify anything that's stupid that they're claiming. What I'm getting at is that I think that there's something that needs to be looked into and discussed. Why do these men feel so disenfranchised when I think we all understand at a core level that as you develop yourself and if you decide that you're looking for a partner, you need to meet them halfway and be somebody who is attractive to be with. Not physically. Sure, physically if that's something that's important, but I think it's more so about character and about what you have and what you've built in life for yourself; not even success but just stability and things like that, that people are looking for.

I was reading about this before the show and seeing pictures of these men that claim incel status and I had to chuckle a little bit because a couple of them I thought were, to me, more attractive than I consider myself to be. So what's the deal here? {laughter} Then it occurred to me that it might be a character thing and it might be something where bitterness has so enveloped these guys in their minds that they are now not attractive because of that, because you can sense that, when somebody has that held bitterness and jaded sense towards life.

Tiffany: I think that's a big part of it, the character. I think there's a difference between these hard-core incels and just your average everyday Joe who just yearns for a girlfriend but he's somewhat socially inept and he doesn't score at all. But these incels, if you read about them, or actually read about some of the things that they say on their groups, they're pretty much a hate group and I don't think it necessarily comes down to just them being mad because they can't have sex. I think that if they were having sex they still would be just as hateful as they are. I think there's just something pathological about these particular people, these hard-core incels.

Jonathan: Totally. If they got into a situation where, as you said, they were having sex with a woman or some kind of relationship, the instant that woman maligns their character in any way or their manhood or something like that, who knows? They could have an outburst or at the least become even more jaded. Because I think that's part of the thing. Deep down evolutionarily - if that's the right word - we attach our sexual status in society to our own perception of ourselves. It's like an old, old thing that's baked into us.

So these men who are having a hard time, let's just say, finding relationships consider that a reflection on their own worth as a man, as a human but also as what we consider a man to be. There's a quote from Joe Rogan where he was talking with Jordan Peterson about this and he said "incels need to become men" and I thought that was a really interesting quote because I went through that process in my own life where my current partner, Katie, we've been together for nine years, and when we first met I was scared shitless - pardon my French - but mainly of all women and it came out when we would hang out and I'd be so nervous about everything I said and everything I did and it was really a turn off. I got told that, like "You've got to relax". I'm grateful to her for telling me that, but a lot of women I think when they encounter that are like "Get away!" {laughter} I think that's what a lot of these guys are like. They're afraid of women because of how it reflects on their own status and their perception of themselves and that comes out and then causes them to be repulsive in a certain sense.

Tiffany: Well some of them go so far as to actually profess their hate for women. Some of the things they say, like comparing women's vaginas to roast beef if they're not virgins, or calling for rape of women or just having this sense of entitlement that they should be able to have sexual access to all beautiful women, young women preferably, at will.

Jonathan: Yeah, that really is ugly. It's really ugly. I'd propose that that is at least one result of porn culture.

Doug: Absolutely. I think the media actually does have a lot to do with this. You talked about this before Jonathan, but it's like we have this projection from our media, from television shows, from movies, that everybody has a right to some kind of relationship with a super sexy woman or whatever. You've got Instagram models coming through your feed all the time. It just warps the perception, not even getting into porn, which completely warps perceptions. By having this dangled in front of you constantly, there's a certain entitlement almost that seems to come into the brain. "This stuff is all out there. Why don't I have it?" Before all this media there might have been a few outliers but I don't think anybody really had this kind of attitude, that they had a right to sleep with whatever attractive woman they wanted to. Psychopaths probably did.

Tiffany: Yeah. I think these really hard-core incels probably are psychopaths and now they have a platform and some average Joe who's just a lonely guy living in a basement somewhere who can't get a girlfriend gets on these sites and they get radicalized maybe in some way maybe and the movement grows. But I think at the very heart and at the very top of it is psychopaths or pathological types spreading their ideologies.

Jonathan: The power of a group that you identify with, like your example Tiff, a guy who's a psychopath who utterly hates women and has completely embraced this sense of rejection and so now he's pulling other men into his sphere. And on the other side of the country there's some kid who's 21, who's unsure of himself and has been rejected by a lot of women and all that, sees these messages online, identifies with that and then gradually over time it takes root. Then he might find himself a year or two later, saying things hateful about women when that may not have been his original state of mind. So I think it's a small scale example of ponerogenesis, how that happens in those groups.

Erica: And a lot of these guys may have had one bad experience and instead of picking yourself up and learning from it or maybe realizing that not all women are that way, that maybe they just had a bad experience, those online ideas reinforce that, that all women are that way. It becomes very black and white thinking instead of living in the grey area.

Jonathan: I wonder where this idea really takes root because I'm not trying to hold myself up and say I'm better than anybody else, but I'm thinking of examples from my own life, how to identify with it. I've had women laugh at me before when I tried to flirt and it's incredibly hurtful but it didn't make me hate women. I have my own failings. I have hated before. I have felt all sorts of messed up things before. So how come I didn't go in that direction? What stopped me from hating women after that encounter?

Tiffany: Probably because you had other positive experiences with women to balance it out.

Jonathan: Sure.

Tiffany: I wonder about these radical feminists. What happened to them? What did their father do to them? Why do they hate men so much? There's also another movement, I forget what they call themselves, but Save Yourselves Black Men or something like that. These are black guys who will not date black women, so on this particular site they post all this denigrating stuff about black women and how they'll only date outside of their race. This particular leader in this group will post something about his mother and he'll call her his incubator or something like that. I'm pretty sure that his relationship with his mother was not good. So I'm wondering if one of the reasons that these incels are formed, the really pathological ones, is because of some really awful things that happened between them and their mothers. Maybe, like some awful things that might have happened between radical feminists and their fathers.

Erica: Yeah, or that radical feminist view that all men are just sperm donors and that's all they're really good for.

Jonathan: Somebody in our chat asked what Chad's and Stacy's are. Oh, they got a response. Yeah, but that is a term that you might come across. Chad's and Stacy's are people who are having relationships. Everybody else are Chad's and Stacy's. I keep coming back to this feeling of why are we talking about this. {laughter} But I do think that it's indicative of something larger because normally we would just say these are a small group of guys. I know there was the Toronto bus murders, the attack with the bus in Toronto, that that guy claimed that he was an incels. It doesn't mean that all incels are dangerous. It means that some people are dangerous and unstable.

Doug: Anybody who labels themselves as an incels doesn't mean they're all capable of murder of course, but if you look at any of the things that they're posting, if you're calling yourself an incels it's saying that you are this radical, misogynist - what's it called when somebody hates all humanity? Because that's more or less what they are.

Erica: Hater?

Doug: Hater. There you go.

Jonathan: Humanithist?

Doug: Misanthropist?

Tiffany: Yeah, misanthropic person.

Doug: Yeah. They're talking about these rape fantasies. They at least fantasize about mass killings and there was even one post I saw from one guy saying killing is a waste of time because these people need to be punished. So he was favouring things like acid attacks. It really is at the very least sick and twisted. Even if those people aren't going to act on it, they're encouraging others to act on it. I think what you were saying Jonathan, is because somebody is involuntarily celibate they aren't dangerous, but I think if somebody actually identifies with that group incels, there's something severely wrong with them.

Erica: Are there women incels too?

Tiffany: Incels will claim that no woman can claim to be an incel.

Erica: Okay. Because women aren't involuntarily celibate?

Tiffany: Because anybody would just have sex with a woman. It doesn't matter. {laughter} But I think the reason that this is important and why we're talking about it is because this kind of adds fuel to the feminist fire when they start railing on and on about toxic masculinity, all males are violent and they're all shooters and they're capable of killing and rape and they're just born bad. So this kind of give credence to their arguments, but this is such a small percentage of the male population but it's getting a lot of attention now.

Jonathan: Yeah, I agree.

Doug: That term 'toxic masculinity' is so brutal. It's toxic in and of itself I think, as if this incel movement somehow is the same thing as masculinity. It's the idea that there's something inherently wrong with masculinity that makes these guy go crazy or school shooters go off, all that kind of thing. It really is extremely damaging to compare all men to these kinds of extremist sickos basically.

Tiffany: Yeah, they're not toxically masculine. They're just toxic period. They're toxic people and toxic people come in both sexes.

Doug: I totally agree.

Jonathan: Tiff when you mentioned the idea of black men who only date white women, that struck me that bringing race into this topic is so...

Tiffany: Intersectional. {laughter}

Jonathan: It's so incendiary. It's already hard to talk about topics in public with people. I feel like when we start mixing all these things together it becomes so fraught with not danger, but it's so easy to ramp up the energy around a conversation to the point where it'll get derailed and then you've lost whatever you're trying to achieve there, more so I think online and social media, less so in face-to-face conversations.

Erica: Well there are no solutions offered. It's not like "Let's talk it out or work it out".

Tiffany: Well the incels want government-sponsored girlfriend programs. {laughter} That'll solve all of their problems. That's the incel utopia.

Erica: What's the acronym for that? Sexual welfare?

Jonathan: Would they be considered politically left then because of that? Which is another interesting conundrum because a lot of them, I think would consider themselves alt-right.

Doug: It's just identity politics at that point I think. It's more of the victim Olympics. "No, I'm the biggest victim".

Tiffany: And then even when you boil it all down, if you look at these incels, to me they're pretty much male versions of radical feminists, just on the other end of the spectrum. It's the same quest for power and to try and take it from anybody that they can get it from.

Jonathan: So that brings us on to MGTOW, Men Going Their Own Way. Incels the word just popped up because...

Doug: The Toronto attack.

Jonathan: ...of the Toronto attack. But the MGTOW group has been around for some time. I came across it last year. I had a friend who was telling me about it. It's another interesting cultural phenomenon. There's a lot of hate. There's a lot of hate in the MGTOW groups because the idea is men saying they don't need women for anything, except reproduction of course. That's part of it. A big part of the MGTOW thing is hiring prostitute because that's essentially what women are for, for sex, in their view. Disrespectful is the wrong word. It's out and out hateful.

But what I find interesting about this from an anthropological perspective, like with the incels, is how do these men find themselves in this place? I think it's a culmination of - I'm trying to say what I can picture in my mind. Ponerogenesis happens when psychopaths are at the top of the power chain and their attitudes and disregard for humanity trickle down into the attitudes of the society that they govern. I can see that happening in MGTOW as well and it happens from men who have run into, say, a psychopathic woman and the men may not be psychopaths themselves but they've had such a damaging experience that now they feel so motivated to start a crusade against women because it was such a damaging experience that that seed of negativity and hatred spreads out. I'm sure many people are familiar with this, but if you care to look it up it's a pretty interesting story. Dave Foley from Kids in the Hall, if any of you guys remember that show, a Canadian Kids Show from back in the day.

Doug: Yeah.

Jonathan: He went through an awful, awful divorce. The story is just horrible. To the point where now he lives in the States, he can't go back to Canada. He has to make a least a million dollars a year to pay his ex-wife, ordered by the Canadian court.

Doug: Oh my god!

Jonathan: If he doesn't do this he'll be extradited and if he goes back to Canada he'll be put in jail because he can never pay all of what he owes. It really, really sucks. Until this woman dies or drops the lawsuit he's in for all this money for the rest of his life. So that's a man who I could see going to a group like MGTOW.

Tiffany: Probably a lot of guys who join that had some really awful, awful experience with a female psychopath. They probably didn't know she was a psychopath, thought she was crazy and difficult. But I can see why a lot of men would join a group. Then on the other hand if you had positive relations with women, with your mother in particular, growing up, with sisters and aunts and all of that, I can't see how one or a couple of bad experiences can totally just ruin how you think about women.

So there's something about some of these guys. Maybe they have some kind of fragility or a history of unstable relationships with women. I don't know, I can't really say. But it just seems strange how people can have a bad experience and just go to such extremes.

Jonathan: Exactly. And that's the thing with the Dave Foley story. I've heard him talk about this in interviews and he doesn't hate women. If anybody should, it should be him. There are men who have been through less than he's been through and are more bitter about it. I do think it's a defect of character and it's a sense of entitlement and whininess. Basically you just want to smack somebody and tell them to get over it.

Doug: As you guys have been saying, to go through a bad experience and then paint an entire group of people with the same brush! Some of these people might have had several bad experiences or something but to be able to say "I had a really bad experience with this one woman, therefore I'm going to apply what I went through with that to the entire group of all women. They're all like that."

Jonathan: This is an interesting point because painting groups of people with a broad brush is what we do now. It's the main thing now, just like with the race issues and the gender issues and sexuality issues. I haven't even been as much as most people, but it surprised me how many times I've had people say something like, "Well you're just a cis white man". And I'm like, "Dude! That's exactly what we're trying to get away from." So I understand the concept that reverse racism doesn't exist. I get that the power structure is there and why people would come to that conclusion, but the attitude is the same. And it's the same with gender and with sexuality and stuff too. The scales have tipped so hard to the other side that now the original problem, which was painting people with a broad brush, now we've come back to that.

Doug: Right back. Yeah. Probably where I see it the most is actually in politics. Republicans painting all democrats as this and vice versa. It's crazy. It's like the identity politics thing. The funny thing is that a lot of republicans will complain about leftists being obsessed with identity politics but then they just turn around and engage in it themselves. It's crazy.

Erica: The Prime Minister of New Zealand had her baby at work and they made of point of saying that she was not married. That was the defining aspect of who she was, that she didn't need to be married to have this baby. It starts to make your mind a little fuzzy. For me it's like wow! I don't even know what to think anymore.

Tiffany: I think one of the bad things about this is that it's kind of like the MeToo movement and how they completely trivialize sexual harassment which doesn't really have a definite definition anyway. It takes away the nuance. Everything is black and white. Again with this incel thing, there really are men and boys who are struggling. They don't go to extremes. Men have gotten the short end of the stick in a lot of ways, especially recently. They comprise most of the high school dropouts. They are most of the people that are in prison. They get harsher sentences for the same crime that a woman commits. They get screwed in family courts and criminal courts. They are enrolling in college in lower numbers than women. So there really is something that is going on with men and boys completely outside of this incel movement.

Erica: One of the articles we read was about how two generations of over 50 years of single mothers raising boys. So if there's no positive male role model, even not a father, but like you were saying uncle or brother...

Tiffany: The neighbour down the street even.

Erica: Yeah! And then they're being told that they're going to be a rapist or that they shouldn't be boyish. Oh my gosh! In the next 10 or 15 years it's just going to get to the point where it's frightening. Already it's hard enough growing up in the world as it is without all these different aspects to muddy the waters even more.

Doug: It's like Jonathan was just saying, how everything has come back on itself. It seemed like what we were working for since the '60s was a freedom and accept someone for who they are; don't look at people as a member of a group that you can paint with the same brush. It came all the way back around to "all men are like this and it's toxic". They're looking to institute programs from kindergarten where they're telling boys that they have to suppress this masculine part of themselves, that it's toxic, that it's bad. Can you imagine how damaged a kid would be if from the day that he enters school essentially he's told that everything about himself is bad and that he's a potential rapist and that he oppresses women? You're going to have generations of boys who are so damaged that they're just completely dysfunctional.

It's kind of no wonder, like we were talking about on last week's show, that people are retreating into video games and porn. It's not surprising. There's nothing of value out there in life for them.

Erica: And then things like being a gentleman, opening a door, offering a girl a coat, all these things that are I would think normal, a nice gesture.

Doug: Chivalry.

Erica: If I can't lift something I'm going to ask a guy to do it. Is that bad? I don't know. What are kids at a young age supposed to do? Act more like girls?

Tiffany: I don't know. It's basically telling boys that they're disposable. They have no role. They have no place in society. Their biological jobs as providers and protectors of women and their families are told nobody needs them. So what are they going to do?

Erica: Play video games and watch porn.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Doug: More or less. It kind of seems like it's an outgrowth of feminism because if women can do anything that men can do only with high heels on then what use is a man? If the man's role has been just completely taken? I don't necessarily blame the feminists for having that perspective because again, we can't paint everybody with the same brush and there are going to be women out there who can do the same or similar jobs to what men can do and there are going to be women who are attracted to a more traditional female role. I don't think that people should be assigned something based on their sex. That's ridiculous. But if you are in a society where men's role is no longer defined because there's got to be a woman out there who can do it at least as well, if not better, then what are they left to do, other than just sit there and rot?

Jonathan: There's the "nice guy" issue. You always hear that women don't like nice guys. They want a bad boy kind of thing. I've heard women say that before too. "You're too nice". Not to me but to other people. I have had it said to me but a long time ago. But what I've seen over and over and over, not in my own life but over and over in all of my friends' lives and I've seen this in other contexts, where nice guy with a woman, "He's too nice. She doesn't have any excitement in her life. She's going to go date a bad boy." That lasts for about a month and then they come back. "Oh he was mean" or "That was too much or too intense", back to the nice guy. Well now the nice guy's too nice again after another month or two.

What I think that people are missing in this picture is that what men should be - and I hesitate at the word 'should' - but I think deep down what we yearn to be is a mixture of those things, gentle but strong when you have to be; able to lift heavy things and also be intimate, a combination of gentleness and strength, compassion, consideration for other people, these elements of character coming together. That's what people are looking for but we're so keyed in on extremes that you either have to be one of the sons of anarchy or like Mr. Rogers. {laughter} These are these two extremes.

Tiffany: I think that what these so-called bad boys are good at is providing a caricature of that strong, confident, masculine man that most women want but then once the woman gets to know him a little better she finds out that he's all types of crazy and that confidence isn't really confidence. It's just...

Doug: A shell.

Jonathan: Bravado.

Tiffany: Yeah, bravado or a mad quest for power and domination and they think that it's confidence and it's really not and then they go back to the nice guy. But in some ways the nice guy probably shouldn't be so nice.

Jonathan: Yeah, exactly.

Tiffany: He should probably work on his confidence and his strength.

Doug: I think that's part of it. I think that it's termed 'the nice guy' but really what it comes down to is a guy who can't stand up for himself. It's like the stereotype of the cuck...

Tiffany: The C-U-C-K?

Doug: Yes. Who's always "yes dear", "okay dear", "no problem", the guy who won't stand up for himself and set boundaries. So it seems like that's what you want, "Oh I've got a servant. How nice." But you're not going to be attracted to that servant. Eventually you're going to be like "Dude! Stand up for yourself."

Jonathan: I think they called it whipped back in the day.

Doug: Yeah.

Tiffany: Or doormat.

Jonathan: And that is unattractive. It's even unattractive in a non-sexual sense, just in a human relations sense when you see somebody who's a pushover, a doormat. You feel compassion for that person. You want them to stand up but you also want to say "Come on! What are you doing?"

Doug: Where's your spine?

Jonathan: Yeah. So I think it's repulsive because it's not one of our ideals.

Erica: And women do the same thing too, that sickening sweet 'I'll do anything' and then they fall apart and they turn psycho. Just reading Gabor Mate's When the Body Says No about all these women who serve, serve, serve out of some sense of duty and then get sick and die because they can't make boundaries for themselves. So I think every human being struggles with nice and not nice and where is the balance between the two.

Tiffany: It all comes down to character. It's not anything that can be ascribed to any one sex or gender or whatever we're calling it these days. {laughter}

Erica: Fill in the blank.

Doug: This is kind of a half-formed thought, but I think that it seems like what this whole toxic masculinity is pointing towards is that women are saying that that's what they want. a guy who has solid boundaries, will stand up for himself. Those things are painted as toxic. It's more the aggressive side of that that they're objecting to in a lot of cases. But it seems like that's what they're calling toxic. So they're saying they want men who are more like women, gentle and pushovers more or less when I think that what we're saying here is that it's probably the case that women don't actually want that.

Jonathan: Right.

Tiffany: No. But they'll have all these university programs or they'll make these young guys sit in confessional booths and confess their crimes of hyper-masculinity. {chuckles}

Jonathan: Yeah, that is an interesting thing, how might you be toxic. I've heard that that's part of some of the curriculum that are happening right now. I think more so in the context of racism and bigotry where you're supposed to explore how you might be a racist that you have not yet discovered. {laughter} I do think that there's something interesting in there because we all have things about ourselves that we haven't discovered and you have to delve into your own mind to learn about who you are. But they're not framing it in that context at all. What they're saying is "You're a racist. You need to tell me why."

Doug: I think it's really ridiculous.

Jonathan: And it's the same thing with the misogyny too. I'm sorry Doug, I cut you off.

Doug: No, no. That's okay. I was just going to say I saw something very interesting. A guy in a YouTube video the other day who was talking about how to say that all white people are racist is kind of ridiculous on its face. What he was saying is that there is a natural tendency for people to be more comfortable with their own in-group. So you are a white person. You've grown up around white people so you are going to have more a more comfortable level with other white people and when you're suddenly in a group of black people, there might be some level of "Oh, I'm not in my usual milieu here so I might be a little bit more nervous or I don't know how to act. I don't know what's cool here and what's not." But to call that some kind of subconscious racism is just ridiculous. It's an inborn biology that people are more comfortable with their in-group.

So the idea that there are these micro-aggressions, I think that you can be very conscious of whether or not you are actually racist. Do you wish harm upon this other racial group? No? Then I'd say you're probably not a racist. I think that these things get exaggerated and that it's probably the same kind of thing with the misogynist issue. Dudes probably have a certain level of comfort around other dudes. It certainly doesn't explain everybody because I know there are a lot of guys out there who are actually perfectly comfortable hanging out with a group of women. But I think that might be part of what's going on there.

Jonathan: With respect to what you're saying, I find myself feeling sensitive about things in the current socio-political sphere when I'm with a group of women. So in my context, I referee for roller derby so this actually happens quite a bit where I'm the only man with 20 women and it comes up in my mind, "What should I say" or "Don't look at somebody the wrong way". You think these thoughts and I think that that's part of the current environment coming up but if I let those thoughts go we're just people hanging out and if I really delve into that in my own mind, all of the awkwardness and all of the weird things that are overlaid on that interaction, come from the media or external influences. They don't come from my own intentions towards other people. So now I'm convinced that I think something that I don't really think or why am I nervous? There's no danger that I'm going to ogle somebody.

Doug: Yeah.

Jonathan: But I'm afraid that I might. It's very strange.

Doug: It's the same kind of thing as telling all young boys that they're all potential rapists. If they internalized that and they actually think it then of course they're going to be uncomfortable in a group of women. "Jesus, I might accidentally rape one of these women even if I never wanted to. Jesus!" {laughter}

Tiffany: Well there has been some push-back against this. There was a documentary called The Red Pill Movie by a woman named Cassie Jaye who used to call herself a feminist until she did this movie. She actually talked with a bunch of guys that were in the Men Going Their Own Way movement and she actually saw their point of view and she doesn't claim to be a feminist anymore because she was able to get to know people personally and not paint them with broad brushes. But she got excoriated by feminists for even making this movie and people were telling her that her career was over. Netflix wouldn't carry the movie. So she got a lot of flack from that but I think on certain levels that people are waking up to this whole identity politics BS, toxic masculinity crap that's being peddled by the media.

I think that's a big reason why Jordan Peterson is so popular now. A lot of his critics like to point out that the majority of his audience is young men but if that is true, and it probably is - I saw him speak once and there were a lot of men but there were a lot of women there too. It's not like I pulled out my clicker and started counting.

Erica: Very diverse group.

Tiffany: Yeah, young and old alike.

Jonathan: Yeah, I've heard him say that. He said he thought it was about 40% women, give or take.

Tiffany: But he's obviously saying something that people find meaning in. People can resonate with it. And he's given people a lot of hope and he's telling people basically to clean their room. Stop being a victim and get yourself together. He's a role model for a lot of people, not just young men and boys, for women too. He's playing a good role in society and people hate him for it.

Jonathan: Well a lot of people like him and that's going to be the same with anybody. A lot of people hate and a lot of people like. I'm grateful to him that he has the resolve to keep going because certainly all of the flaming that he's getting would drive anyone insane if you were to actually get into it.

But speaking of Peterson, I wanted to talk about his idea of enforced monogamy. I think that that's getting super, super misinterpreted if you've seen any of the hit pieces on him that cite that quote. But it's especially incendiary right now because there's that show The Handmaid's Tale and a lot of people are seeing that as a new Orwellian prediction that men are going to take over society and oppress women into an old biblical type of society and that's playing into that. Now when people hear Jordan Peterson, who in their minds is this alt-right guy - he might as well be Richard Spencer or something - they hear him saying enforced monogamy and of course that sounds on the surface of it that we're going to round up women and make them be with one person. But what he was talking about was culturally enforced and the idea of it being a value that people hold so that if your friend is sleeping around with a lot of women and hurting people or doing things that are destructive, you say "Hey dude, you probably shouldn't be doing that." You use your status as a friend and you use the moral standards of your culture to "enforce" that standard.

So that's what he was talking about, not actual physical enforcement. So I thought that was interesting. But I have heard a lot of people saying, especially recently, that Peterson wants to round up women as sex objects which is just so over the top.

Doug: His response to that is really funny too because he says "Why would they accuse me of having a perspective that nobody has? Nobody feels that way. That's just ridiculous."

Jonathan: Nobody feels that way.

Doug: It's just ridiculous. There is no segment of the population, other than perhaps incels that actually would support something like that. So for them to smear him with that is just ridiculous.

Erica: Well wasn't it a psychology term? I can't remember.

Doug: Sociology I think.

Erica: Sociology, yeah. So it was a term that was taken...

Tiffany: Enforced monogamy?

Erica: Yeah. That was taken out of context.

Tiffany: Well somebody said isn't that what marriage is? Who gets married and says "Oh, I figure my husband's going to cheat on me and I'm going to cheat on him." Nobody goes into marriage thinking that! They think they're going to be the two of them just for each other for the rest of their lives.

Erica: Unless you're a polygamist. {laughter{

Jonathan: Well people do have open relationships but I've never heard of it working.

Tiffany: I did read a piece recently but I think it was completely bogus. It was allegedly some study - and I couldn't find the original source - but they said that open relationships are just as successful as monogamous relationships.

Doug: I don't believe it!

Erica: Just as successful, full of drama.

Tiffany: There was an agenda behind that.

Doug: Yeah, totally. He's trying to convince his partner.

Erica: "Look, everyone's doing it. We should too."

Jonathan: Yeah. It's an interesting concept and I think it also requires some subtlety to talk about because I don't think Peterson's not saying that people should date either. By the idea of dating, just to be plain about it, say you meet a person. You go out on some dates, four or five dates, you have sex. You might be together for three months. It doesn't work out. Then you start looking for somebody else to date.

Tiffany: That's not even my definition of dating. {laughter}

Jonathan: Me too, but I grew up in the church so I always figured I had a skewed vision of it. But to me in my own mind, dating is going out on some dates and you see if you're compatible. In the context of the church of course, you date until you decide that you might want to get married and you don't have sex until after you get married. I personally don't agree that sex needs to be in the confines of marriage but I do think that it needs to be dealt with pretty carefully.

Tiffany: Yes.

Jonathan: So that's where I'm saying it requires some subtlety. I don't think Peterson is saying that everybody needs to be a prude and not have sex with anybody. I think what he's saying is we need to tone it down a little bit and you shouldn't have 30 sexual partners by the time you're 30, that kind of thing.

Tiffany: Yeah, treat sexual relations with the respect that they deserve. It's serious business.

Erica: But that's not what the media culture displays at all.

Jonathan: Right. So we want to have men trying to align the visions of these various groups - and I'm being a bit facetious here - so we want to have men be deferential to women on all accounts, all the time, every time and never...

Tiffany: Even if she doesn't deserve it. {laughter}

Jonathan: Yeah. And never claim anything that could be inferred as manly or masculine in any way. And yet we want to promote a culture where sex is the end-all/be-all and you can go out and have sex with anybody you want and what comes with that is surface qualities that are held up as ideals, namely physical shape. So that's the whole quagmire of magazine models and beautiful people on magazine covers and on TV and creating this false standard for people.

So what I'm trying to say is they want men to be a certain way but they also want to enforce a culture that will end up with men being the opposite, if that makes sense. If we enforce a sexually promiscuous culture, men are not going to be the men that you want them to be. That's my opinion.

Erica: Or the men that are like that are going to sin against themselves because they think that they should be more sexually promiscuous.

Tiffany: It just creates confusion all around. These people who have these really strong beliefs are aiming for some kind of utopia but they can't even define what that would look like. Basically they just want everything that they want when they want it and that for them is utopia and I don't think they even think about the social ramifications.

Erica: The long-term.

Tiffany: Yeah. Of everybody just doing what they want.

Jonathan: And what it comes down to too -and this may seem off-topic but I think it applies. I was thinking recently about how if you look at the left and the right politically - and I know there are simplistic categorizations so I'm not meaning to be overly simplistic - but for the example, the left generally thinks that rights are given by the authority structure that's in place and the right generally thinks that rights are inherent, that your rights are "god-given", or you have them no matter who tells you what rights you do or don't have. But if you look at it in that way just as an example, it does spread out into other areas, like sexuality, finances. There's a group of people who think that the power structure that's in place should give them those things as opposed to them needing to work for and earn those things.

Erica: But then like Jordan Peterson says, where's the responsibility in that?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Erica: It's like the abortion issue - not to go off-topic. Sure it's a right and this whole Roe v. Wade thing, but it's also a personal responsibility.

Doug: Well going back to the enforced monogamy thing, I'll ask you guys a question. The whole enforced monogamy thing came up from this whole incel business. When incels really broke onto the scene with this whole Toronto van attack, Peterson said he thought the solution to it was enforced monogamy. I know that Joe Rogan said "I don't really see that that is necessarily a solution", so I'm just wondering what you guys think. Sorry to put you on the spot.

Jonathan: I think solution is a funny word. I think Peterson was saying that because that's how you need to say that to have an efficient conversation. You have to use words that could easily be misinterpreted but that's why you have a conversation, so you can delve into it. I think if you grilled him about it he wouldn't say that that would fix it. And I think that that's how people interpreted it. "Ah, he's saying that enforced monogamy will just fix all this and we'll stop having random violent attacks from people."

But I do think it's an interesting concept. I think to his idea of culturally enforced monogamy, if we were to work on restoring that value without the prudish and dogmatic edge that protestant Christianity has had for so long, and Islam to be frank, but a lot of these religions, that have this real, real hard edge about abstinence that I also don't think is the right way to go. We need to find some sort of a balanced viewpoint on it. But if we could culturally enforce that, ultimately more people would have value in their life because their value systems would be stronger.

So if you build up people's core value systems and turn them into something that's rewarding in their life and creates satisfactory experiences that aren't tainted by negative impulses, then you build those things up, that over time we would find that we have less violent people coming out of the woodwork. I think that's kind of where he was going and I think that that's the case but it's such a long view.

Tiffany: Yeah I agree with that too. If you have a couple together, they have a household, they have children that they raise together, it's not just that those two parents are just having sex with each other. It comes with a whole gamut of other responsibilities. You have to be responsible, have a job, provide for your family. So it's not just the sexual aspect of a monogamous relationship. The effect ripples out into all other areas of your life. So if you're doing that and your neighbour's doing that and the neighbours down the street and everybody in the society is doing that, can you imagine what the effect of that would be?! If you all have the same value that this is your family unit and you're going to maintain that, everybody knows how to act so there are going to be fewer outliers who go off shooting people or ramming vans into people because they don't have a role in society. So if everybody engages in enforced monogamy, if you even want to call it that, then it'll have long-term effects that will be beneficial for society.

Erica: I think that's what he was talking about, that polygamous societies don't really survive, that they disintegrate.

Doug: Yeah. It's the incel perspective on things. "Everybody is out there having sex except for me and that's not fair." So in a culture that actually did have an enforced monogamy, where monogamous relationships were the things that were valued and it wasn't some big orgy out there, that a certain segment of the population is going to feel like they're missing out on, it seems like that would kind of take care of the problem in a certain respect. I'm sure there would still be issues with some people of "I can't find a wife" and that would be an issue in and of itself. It almost takes away that whole entitlement attitude.

Jonathan: Yeah. We need to find a way to catch people who are in that transitory space where they're feeling lonely and jaded. somehow. I'm not trying to say we need social programs to do that but as communities, and understanding and seeing where people are at.

Tiffany: Because pathological types take advantage of people's feelings of jealousy or loneliness or entitlement. So that's one way that pathological types can get an in with some of these people who, if they thought of things in a different way or had more responsibilities or a role in their life, they wouldn't fall for the pathology.

Jonathan: And I would say, just real quick, speaking to men - and sorry to be so agenderphobic - {laughter} sorry, couldn't help it.

Erica: I'm going to mute my headphones. {laughter} No.

Jonathan: Men and women, but I'm thinking of men, say you have a friend who was dating a girl and now all of a sudden you haven't heard anything about them for a while and you're not sure if they're still together and come to find out they broke up and he's really lonely and he's spiralling into this space or whatever, you can reach out and say "Let's hang out" so that the outcome is not that guy sitting in his apartment reading MGTOW forums and getting more and more bitter. But you can then be the male influence that says "Hey, let's go do something" and have conversations about how to be in the world. "Yeah, you guys didn't work out and that's fine. You don't need to be filled with hate because it didn't go your way". And have those conversations with people.

I think women can too but a man who's jaded out of a breakup is going to have a less meaningful conversation with a woman, I think generally. Because you don't feel free to share and all that kind of stuff. But I think you can reach out to people and keep an eye out for where your friends are at and I think that that can mitigate some of where this goes. But also, speaking to the cultural enforcement of things, it's just speaking out too; not just things like you know a friend is cheating and you should probably say something to him on the side. Not just that but other things too. Say somebody throws a beer can on the ground when you're out at a park and you might feel like saying something but you don't because you don't want the confrontation, but really in the standard of your own value system and to respect yourself, you don't have to be rude but say "Hey, there's a trash can right over there" or something like that.

But speaking up in those uncomfortable situations would create more of an atmosphere that would foster better value systems. The problem is the people that are speaking up right now have no idea why they're saying what they're saying and they're just entitled and screaming at the top of their lungs and there's no meaningful structure behind what they're saying. That's why it seems so crazy.

Doug: Culturally enforced monogamy, what you're talking about Jonathan, I think it is the case, people speaking up. But I think it's also what the culture places value on. If it is through the media and things like that, it isn't people just sleeping around and glorifying this type of lifestyle. It's placing value on the family structure and devaluing things like cheating. I have an example, using your litter analogy. When I was a teenager I had this friend and he was just a good guy. He was a solid guy who had a very clear understanding in himself of what was right and wrong. We were just walking along one time and I was a stupid teenager and I think we'd had a slice of pizza and I just took my plate an I threw it on the ground. He didn't actually say anything to me. He just picked it up and when we got to a garbage can he threw it out. It was like, "Okay. Message received." Why did I just throw that on the ground? There's no real reason for me to do that. Nothing was said, but the message was received. And I haven't littered since.

Tiffany: It's role modelling.

Doug: Exactly.

Tiffany: Yeah, you don't have to beat somebody over the head with your virtues. You just be a good person and maybe somebody else will take notice.

Erica: It's back to what you were saying Tiffany about husband and wife and community and showing children, especially young males, that each person plays a role, whether the husband stays home and changes diapers while the woman goes and works or whatever it is, it's an individual sense of responsibility instead of blaming. "I'm this way because of this, that and the other thing." Well maybe you could do something different.

Tiffany: I think there was a study I read about recently talking about how boys who don't have fathers in the home have poorer outcome in education and jobs and behaviour and different things like that. But there were certain areas scattered all around the country with boys who, even if they didn't have a father in the house, seemed to do well. The researchers looked further into it and they saw that even though the boy didn't have a father in his particular house, there was a lot of people in his neighbourhood where there were fathers around and he could use these guys as role models even though he didn't have the same influence in his own house personally.

Doug: That's encouraging.

Tiffany: Yeah. I don't know though. Is it too late? Is our culture so screwed that there aren't any good real life role models? You have to go onto YouTube in order to find somebody to look up to? {laughter}

Doug: Jordan Peterson is the surrogate father of an entire generation.

Jonathan: Yeah. I just heard an interview with Peterson. I don't know if you guys are familiar with a stand up comedian called Theo Von. He did a podcast and Peterson was on there and Theo Von is so funny. If you don't know him look him up. He's really funny. But he was like, "You're just like everybody's uncle man." I thought that was accurate.

Erica: We all need a good uncle.

Jonathan: Yeah. I had a point before I started saying that and I lost it so it must not have been that important. I think what we're talking about, the cultural enforcement of value systems, would be a good antidote to this. Oh, I was going to say I do think that we might actually be too late on avoiding extremes.

Doug: Yeah, it is too late, definitely.

Jonathan: I know I keep harping on the idea that there's no subtlety in conversation anymore but I notice that every single day and I think that we might have tipped over some event horizon relating to extremes in our culture to where it's only going to keep getting more and more extreme and each of these groups are going to become more and more insular and they're going to deny their relationships with each other and their commonalities to the point where you will have to be a part of some group, you can't just be a person. It may even be that way already right now. I don't know if it's so extreme across all levels of society. I think right now it's mainly in the media. You'll see that if you watch the news or modern media or social media. But if you go out into town and talk to people I think you find that it's much different. But I think that's going to leak out into the "real world" fairly soon.

I have a haircut that's short on the sides but kind of a Mohawk on the top, but buzzed on the sides. I've been told that I had a Nazi haircut. {laughter} It's hard to come up with something to say. How do I begin to explain that that is exactly what you're railing against? What you said is what you're railing against in society. So those extremes I think are going to become more and more pronounced to the point where you can't relate. Maybe it's the death of compassion. Maybe that's what's happening because compassion arises out of connections between people and if we sever these connections we'll have less and less of that.

Erica: Or understanding too. That people are just different.

Tiffany: And being able to accept that and be okay with it and not try to enforce your views on anybody else.

Erica: And have humour. Jonathan, I don't know I probably would have found something snarky to say if somebody said that to me about my haircut.

Jonathan: Oh yeah. Fortunately it wasn't aggressive. It was more good-natured. A friend of mine who lives on the SJW side of things but we're good friends so it was good-natured. But it still came out and I had to be like, "What?! What are you talking about?" I think that that's endemic. So I think that the way that we can fight that in our own interactions is just to be reasonable with people and try to be reasonable.

Erica: Civil?

Jonathan: Yes, civil. Don't come back with the attack right away. It happened to me about a year ago where a friend of my said something online about how all men are pigs. I said "Hey, do you think I'm a pig? Say it to my face!" And then she was like, "No, I don't think you're a pig." Then we got to talk about it a little bit. But I think those little things where you can say "Hey, do you really mean that?" Or "What are you talking about?" and start discussions about it instead of playing into it. When people play into it, it escalates and it just gets worse and worse.

Tiffany: So hopefully it's not too late.

Jonathan: Hopefully not, but I don't know.

Tiffany: I don't know how we can have a rational conversation about enforced monogamy and its benefits when on the other hand people are trying to get us to accept paedophilia. How can you even navigate in a world where that is okay?

Doug: I don't know. It kind of does make you lose all hope.

Jonathan: If you look at shifts in society, what would cause some kind of a shift? It has to be some kind of a movement or a leader. Trump's not going to do it. He's too divisive.

Erica: Well I think Jordan Peterson is doing it.

Doug: Peterson might, yeah.

Jonathan: Peterson might. But he's also pretty divisive, not of his own intent but just of the atmosphere. So I would put Peterson at about 30/70 as far as 30% of people like him and are into what he's saying.

Doug: That might be generous.

Jonathan: It might even be generous because the people that I do hear talk about him in a negative way, you would think that he is filled with hate and that he's spreading a culture of hate. When you listen to him it's just not there.

Doug: People are just reading the hit pieces.

Tiffany: And then we have a whole ton of people who have no idea who he is at all, never even heard of the dude.

Jonathan: Not to go on and on about this, but that lends to my point about how I think most of this is in the media because if you bring up popular terms that are around this kind of stuff like incels, MGTOW, MRA and then you go into Pepe and the Kekistanis and talking about Sargon of Akkad and internet trolls, nobody knows this stuff. People in the average world are like, "What in the hell are you talking about?!" {laughter} I think a lot of that drama is just held in the bubble of the media and it's not real, per se, but it's being made real. That's the scary part to me, that all this fake drama is spreading out as though it were something with a real basis.

Doug: I think that's a good point. I even once asked my dad, who is the psychologist, "Hey, have you ever checked out Jordan Peterson?" And he said "Isn't he the guy who refused to use transpeople's pronouns?" And I said, "Yeah, that's him." He said "Nah, I've never looked into it or anything."

Jonathan: I've said this quite a bit, you just can't say "X" anymore and I hear a lot of people say "You just can't say tranny anymore" or whatever word you want to inject there. But I don't think that that's true either, that 'you just can't say'. Again, that's all in the media. I'm not promoting hateful language. Don't take me the wrong way, but what I'm saying is I think this is fake and I think another way that we might be able to combat it on a personal level is by pointing out with supporting arguments clearly to people that it is fake. If you can shine a light on that and say "Yeah, it's happening, but it's only happening here and it's only happening because a small group of people are talking about it" - and I really think it's a super small group, like 10% maybe of the hard core activists that are making inconsequential things consequential - I think it's pretty small.

Tiffany: But they have really big mouths.

Jonathan: They do and they have the media as a platform.

Doug: Or Twitter. If you look at anything, the manufactured outrage that you see out there over any kind of given scandal of the moment, it gets so much traction because everybody just piles on. As soon as somebody does something wrong, it's like "Forget it. It's over." The tweet storm that follows and then it gets into the media, then "We don't like this person anymore because they said this". Like Roseanne. That's the latest one.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Tiffany: It used to be that you could do something wrong and the whole world wouldn't know about it.

Doug: Or they used to accept forgiveness. I read an interesting article the other day talking about an end of forgiveness. Actually it was a video by a YouTube channel called Mouthy Buddha. It was talking about forgiveness. Even though a person does something wrong and they say "I did something wrong. I apologize. I wasn't thinking, blah, blah, blah" and that's not good enough anymore. The apology is not accepted and the smearing just continues.

Tiffany: Yeah, your life must be ruined!

Doug: Yeah, exactly. The Roseanne thing is a good example. She said some stuff and it's interesting because what she said was deemed as racist. She even said "I didn't know that she was black when I said that". Whether or not that's true, whatever, but the fact of the matter is she came out and she apologized but no, forget it. You're done! You can't have a platform anymore. We've kicked you out of the group.

Jonathan: I think the Garrison Keillor story was one of the saddest ones. He's a sweet old man. He's not a letch. I've listened to Prairie Home Companion for 20 years. I promise you that guy didn't have ill intentions.

Doug: I don't know the story.

Jonathan: I don't know if you're familiar with it. A Prairie Home Companion is a radio show out of Minnesota, or used to be. It was totally down home Minnesota, apostolic Sunday radio; stories about the town and about Bob down there at the hardware store, that kind of thing. There was a woman who had some sort of event like a divorce so she was distraught and she was on his staff and he was consoling her and he put his hand on her back and apparently his hand dropped and he touched her lower back. Then he recoiled and said "I'm sorry" and she said "No big deal" and then later he wrote her an email, "Look, I'm sorry about that. It was an accident" and she wrote back and said "No big deal". Ten years later after all the Weinstein stuff and everything came out, she came out and said "Keillor harassed me" and they took his show instantly. He was fired, everything was taken from him. It's incredible. I think it was sad.

Again, I don't know the details. Nobody knew Cosby was raping people, so it's up in the air. But from what you hear, from the story itself, it sounds really unfortunate and I personally feel like I have some understanding of Garrison Keillor and that he was probably telling the truth. But who knows?

Doug: Yeah, that is sad.

Jonathan: But those things get conflated with the really, really bad stuff like the Weinstein story. He was a monster and he should be put in jail and yes, it was extremely bad and there's nothing equivocal to be said about it. But those things get conflated with the Garrison Keillor story or the Aziz Ansari story where he was having a bad drunken date with a girl which every man in their 20s has had at some point, or most. It's just so rife.

Doug: We're way off topic here but nonetheless, the thing about when Matt Damon came out and said what you actually said Jonathan, "I think we really need to be careful about conflating these kinds of issues. A hand brushing up against a back is not the same as sexual coercion or rape or something along those lines". And he got slammed! Absolutely slammed just for saying that, which I thought was ridiculous. I heard him speak and I thought "Right on. That's exactly right." People were just outraged by what he had to say.

Jonathan: Well I think we can actually tie this back into our topic in that that attitude is also what's also contributing to the prevalence of MGTOW and MRA and incels. We don't want to excuse the ones who are malicious and are hateful. But I think if we just objectively look at the situation we can see that the conflation of these events and saying some things are other things when they're clearly not, is part of what adds to that culture that brings these men to the surface. I'd be reticent to say that any man who's older than 21 or 22 shouldn't be able to just think for themselves and figure it out but in the current situation, young men, especially those between 14 and 19 are super malleable and they're getting the brunt of all of this talk right now about what you should and shouldn't be so they're extremely fearful about what they should do and say. It's just making it worse. It's causing them to withdraw. And then you get the trolly kind of folk who are a bit combative and if you tell them to do something they're going to do the exact opposite "just 'cuz'" and I think there's a lot of those and I think they've been brought into that circle.

I don't know how much more there is to say about it. We did get off topic there a little bit. We don't have a pet health segment for today so I think that we'll just wrap it up. We'd like to thank everybody in the chat for taking part in that. Be sure to tune into the SOTT radio shows this weekend on radio.sott.net and we'll be back next week with another topic.

All: Good-byes.