Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark - “Women’s Suffrage Was A Mistake?!” - With Professor Nancy Pearcey

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

Here to debunk the "toxic masculinity" myth, explain what society gets wrong about Christian marriages, why she believes women’s suffrage has been a net negative on the culture, and why the red pill movement is so dangerous is Nancy Pearcey, the author of The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes. She’s also written bestseller Love Thy Body, is a professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University, and has been hailed as one of the top five ...

Growing up all I heard as a girl was how much harder women have it in America, how the system is rigged against us, that everything is built to benefit men and put women at a disadvantage. It's funny. I'm hearing one thing, but I'm seeing another. It's completely socially acceptable and normal to have open hostility towards men. Why can't we hate men? Asked the Washington Post. Almost half of American men agree with the statement.

These days, society seems to punish men. just for acting like men. In her new book, my guest this week explains how secularism has villainized the concept of masculinity. Where did the idea come from that masculinity is toxic? What impact did secularism have on the script for masculinity? And how do Christian men shatter the negative stereotypes? Let's face it, when people complain that masculinity is toxic, they often point to evangelical men as their prime example. But social science debunkes, that stereotype. Research shows that committed Christian men who attend church regularly test out as the most loving and engaged husbands and fathers. In fact, they don't want you to know this,

but Christianity has the power to overcome toxic behavior in men and reconcile the sexes, an unexpected finding that has stood up to rigorous empirical testing. This week's guest has a lot of opinions on masculinity, femininity, and the battle of the sexes, including on the topic of women fighting for the right to vote. Does she believe that women's suffrage has been a net negative or net positive in society? I'm going to find out. The spillover is produced by a nonprofit and is only possible to produce with the generosity of cute servatives like you.

If you would consider pledging, even a small amount each month to go towards set costs, guest booking and travel and equipment needs, we can keep educating people on how to live counterculturally. Support the show financially by clicking the link in the show description. If you can't, please leave a five-star review. Each episode is available to watch on the real Alex Clark YouTube. Please welcome bestselling author Nancy R. Piercy, who wrote Love Thy Body and her newest book, The Toxic War on Masculinity. Let's learn how to win it this week on The Spillover.

Who do you think has it worse in America today, women or white Christian men? Well, I'll tell you what, the surveys show. The surveys show men. The surveys show, oh, at least men think so. there have been surveys in which they were asked, do agree with this statement. Today, discrimination against men has become as bad as discrimination against women. And in surveys, men say yes. They think that discrimination against men has become as big of a problem as discrimination against women.

And they were asked sometimes, I have several surveys in my book. And so another one did ask, you know, do men have it harder now or women? And a lot of men said, yeah, we think men have it harder now. And I quote, I quote a psychotherapist, True Rights regularly for the Wall Street Journal. In fact, you've had her on here. Erica Commissar. Love Erica.

One of my most favorite guests I've ever had and one of my audiences' most favorite guests I've ever had. Well, she said, I have a quote from her in my book, because she said, especially young men. She said, young men coming into my practice are feeling defeated, demoralized, depressed, because they feel like they're growing up in a culture that's hostile to masculinity.

A survey by the Pew Foundation found that 46% of American men said that life is harder for men now than for women. So the surveys show that certainly men are feeling that way and that's what counts. If they feel that way, that means it's a problem. What are some different metrics

that prove that men do have it worse than women right now in America? Oh, well, men are falling behind on all kinds of metrics. And this is very concerning. Boys and men. So boys are falling behind at all levels of education.

Starting in kindergarten. You know, they don't have the fine motor control that girls have and they can't operate as scissors as well. So already in kindergarten, they're feeling like, you know, they're falling behind.

All through grade school and high school, the grades are worse, the test scores are worse. When they get to college, I don't know if you realize this, but college is now 60% female students and only 40% male students. Some colleges are actually instituting quietly, not publicizing it, but they're instituting affirmative action to get more male students.

Really? Harvard is doing this. Yeah, I've got some articles on it in my book where they admit places like Harvard. They don't publicize it. But they realize that eventually the girls won't show up either, right, if there's no guys there. So, and then graduate school, professional school, more women. women than men at both levels. And then outside of school, male adults are falling behind, both where they were and falling behind relative to women on issues like more likely to commit

suicide, more likely to have mental illness, more likely to be homeless, more likely to be victims of crime, more likely to commit crime. 90% of people in prison are male. And unemployment now, this was shocking. Unemployment is that great deprivation. era levels. It's not showing up in the unemployment statistics because they stopped looking for work. And so researchers had to dig deeper, and they now tell us that male unemployment is at great depression era levels. And then life expectancy. Men's has gone down. Women's have stayed the same, so it's not a general trend. Male life expectancy has gone down so that a magazine called the new scientist did a report on this, and they said, the major demographic factor now in early death,

is being male. So men, I think it's time for us to say, let's have compassion on men. Let's see if we can have some programs that are geared specifically toward men and boys. The trouble is that people have tried to start programs for boys, and they usually get shut down by people who say,

well, men end up in the top positions in our culture and our economy anyway, so men don't need help. But, you know, the reason girls got ahead is because we did get, special programs for girls. 1972, Title IX, 9, 1994, the Gender Equity Act. We've put millions of dollars into helping girls.

Equity workshops, curricula that was supportive of girls, training workshops and training materials. And so we thought we thought we would bring girls up to where boys were. Nobody realized that, no, girls would shoot right past them. And that's what's happened. Girls have shot right past boys. and are now doing better on all levels of education. And even economically, in the large cities now,

a single woman earns more than a single man does. Women have pulled ahead, which is great. We don't want to sound that that's a bad thing. It's a great thing. Remember, women were not even allowed to go to college until about the mid-20th century, depending on which college you're looking at, roughly mid-20th century.

So I'm glad I wasn't born before that. Glad I had a chance to go to college. So we don't want to sound as if we think this was a bad thing. But it is time to say, shouldn't there be some special programs for men and boys that are geared to their style of learning, you know, geared to their character traits and so on that would help them now catch up with girls? We are consistently told that evangelical Christian men are dangerous, that they are oppressive patriarchs prone to abuse, but you actually say that the science proves otherwise. I was as surprised as anyone because like everyone else, I've read the accusations. In fact, it was easy to find them online. But I'll give you just one.

So this is a quote from the co-founder of the Church 2 movement, which followed the Me Too movement. And she said, the theology of male headship feeds the rape culture that we see permeating American Christianity today. And the Church 2 movement, would that be like all the Hillsong pastors that were outed? There was like that whole slew of just a ton of pastors all of a sudden? Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, the Me Too moniker, you know, worked really well.

So they came up with Church, too. And so the surprising thing is that the social scientists were listening to these accusations and saying, but where's your evidence? You're making these charges. What was your data? And so they went out and did the studies. And in my book, I quote about half a dozen, a dozen or so studies, in which social scientists, so these would be psychologists and sociologists, did the studies and said,

actually, Christian men who attend church regularly, who are committed to their faith, actually test out as the most loving and engaged husbands and fathers. They interview the wives separately. I always get asked that. People say, oh, of course their wives said they were happy. The husband's sitting right there. Exactly. That's what I was going to say, too.

Okay. No, most of these studies, now there's a variety of studies. So some of them were done by Christian researchers. A lot of them, however, simply use these large public objective databases. Like the largest one that was done was done by a sociologist who teaches at the University of Virginia, Brad Wilcox. And he used large objective studies like what's called the General Social Survey, which is done by the University of Chicago, and is used by policymakers, journalists, scholars, and so on, who will pull out of that whatever data they happen to be studying.

And so, yes, the women were, in fact, interviewed separately and not by Christian, you know, interviewers who they might want to try to impress. So I think the data is pretty reliable. And so the Christian women, in fact, did say that they were the happiest when they were asked questions like, are you happy with the love and affection that your husband expresses to you? They were the most likely to say, yes.

Christian fathers also spend the most time with their children, 3.5 hours more per week than secular fathers, both in shared activities like church youth group and sports, and in terms of discipline, like supervising homework, setting limits on screen time. Christian couples are the least likely to divorce, 35% less likely to divorce than secular couples. And then finally, they have the lowest rates of domestic abuse and violence of any major group in America.

So the data has completely debunked the notion that Christian or evangelical men are particularly, you know, Exhibit A of toxic masculinity. It's completely debunk that. In fact, let me give you a quote. Sometimes a specific statistic can kind of crystallize it. So Brad Wilcox, the sociologist I mentioned at UVA, is considered perhaps the top. marriage sociologist in the country. So he gets published in places like the New York Times, gives you a sense of his stature. So this was an article in the New York Times, and he said, it turns out, direct quote, it turns out that 73% of women who hold conservative gender values

and attend church regularly with their husbands, report high quality marriages. And here's how he puts it the happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives. So I did see some survey recently that said that conservative Christian women are having better sex. Oh, that's in my book too. And you know what? That came out in 1970, for the first time we know of at least, in 1977 in Red Book magazine, which is probably before your time. It was a book, it was a magazine for women, sort of housewife women.

And they did a very large survey. and they included religion in there. It's not a Christian publication. But they did include religious questions in their survey. And they discovered, 1977, that conservative religious women reported the highest level of sexual satisfaction in their marriage. And there's been countless additional studies all showing that, which is totally contrary to the secular narrative. Right. The secular view would say that conservative Christian women that, you know, were boring in bed, that were just like,

like sticks in the mud, you know, no fun, prudes. So that's very interesting. Yes. And on top of that, you know, they have more sex. Both men and women who are married report more sex because you have a partner right there. And they report higher levels of satisfaction. And so if Hollywood wants to encourage women, you know, to have happy sex lives, they should encourage them to get married and go to church. If you've been noticing a lot more hair loss than usual when you're washing or brushing your hair,

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for a year. That's good ranchers.com with code Clark. Find everything in the show notes below at any time. good ranchers, American meat delivered. So when I talk about the sociological data showing that Christian men test out as the most loving and engaged husband of the fathers, the first pushback I always get is, but haven't we all heard that Christians divorced at the same rate as the secular world? Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking. And so the researchers did go back to the data, and they made a very important distinction. They looked at men who are truly committed, you know, who attend church regularly, versus nominal Christian men. Like Christian in name only.

That's what the word nominal means, right? Yeah. See, my students don't know what the name, what nominal means. Yeah, like just, you know, Christmas, what do they call that, Christ or Christian or whatever, Christmas and Easter only type of people?

Exactly. It comes from the Latin word, N-O-M means name. So nominal means in-name only. And so these are men on a survey like this might check, say, the Baptist box. This is what happens to me

on every first date I go on, Every guy's like, oh, yeah, I'm a Christian. And then I, like, ask like two follow-up questions. And then it ends up being, well, I went to Catholic school as a boy. So therefore I'm a Christian, you know, and they've never stepped foot in a church since or been disciples or, you know, anything. Yeah. And actually, I was a little surprised at the numbers. Because, you know, you and I probably hang out mostly with committed Christians, I thought the nominals were a fairly small group.

They're not. They're about the same size. The only study I read that actually gave numbers, committed Christians, and nominal Christians are about the same percentage of the population. So you're right. That means you're 50% likely to run into a nominal Christian when you're dating. Oh, I'm experiencing it. It is so frustrating.

I've been telling churches. Now, you need to be telling young people, young women, that the 50-50 chance that the guy they're going out with is going to turn out to be nominal. Yeah, this just happened to me on a first date a few weeks ago. And he was really, he was very witty and he was fun and whatever throughout the whole. date, you know, I had no gripes about any of that. But when we got into a little bit of theology and beliefs, I mean, that's essentially his answer to me was he was a nominal Christian, but he didn't realize that. So when he asked me to go on a second date, I was very kind, but I said, you know, I just think that we have vast differences in faith. And he was so

confused by this. Did not understand. He said, well, I don't understand. I am a Christian. And I'm like, you're not. But, but. But. But. But. But. they are passionate in that they are. Well, let me get into the details on how they are different. Yes. Because the, so when the sociologists did the studies and they looked at the nominal Christian men, they tested out shockingly different. They test out with all the toxic stereotypes.

Their wives report the lowest level of happiness of any group. They spend the least amount of time with their children, less than secular men. they have the highest rate of divorce, 20% higher than secular men. And the real shocker is they have the highest rate of domestic abuse and violence, even higher than secular men. So this was a shock to me because if you just do a survey on evangelical men, it's going to be very misleading because you're going to have men who are better than secular men and men who are worse than secular men.

So no wonder the numbers are misleading. and some people have asked me, well, why would they be worse than secular men? And apparently it's this. You know, they feel religious justification for the way they're acting. So the average secular guy who's maybe hitting his wife and kids doesn't feel any religious justification for that. But the nominal Christian has hung around the fringes of the Christian world enough to pick up language like headship and submission and will justify his abuse by using Christian language and feel like, well, I'm the head,

so I have a right to do this. I actually quoted one guy who said he was sexually abusing his kids. And when he was asked, why did you do that? He said, well, I just figured I'm the head of the household and I can do what he want with my, I can do what I want with my wife and kids. Or they will say things like, well, she wasn't submitting, so I had to put her in her place. So they will use religious language to justify it. And then the media takes that and says, look how crazy and scary evangelical Christian men are.

They're the most abusive or whatever. But the reality is that you're saying is that those men are not Christians. They are the ones who are ruining our reputation. Yes. You might say. Yeah, because there's enough of them that many people have probably encountered a nominal Christian whose behavior is worse than secular people. So secular men.

So, yeah, you're right. That's where all of the negative stereotypes are coming from is from the nominal. Christian men. I don't think I had ever known this before reading your book. You write that there were actually a lot of women who were against women's suffrage at first. Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you read even the feminists at the time, they, and I have the quotes, I have the receipts. I have the quotes from the leading feminists at the time saying, you know, the biggest barrier is that women, is that other women are not in favor of the vote. And so that's very puzzling. So I looked at what was going on at the time.

And the debate, you see, the vote meant something very different. You know, my, my, my, um, female students are like, well, if I didn't have the vote, you know, I would feel like I was in a full citizen. But that's not what it meant back then. Back then, only landowners, at the beginning, only landowners had the vote. That meant, remember, since the, since we had home industries, you know, family industries, if you were the homeowner, you also were a business owner. Right. And so it was assumed that if you were a landowner, you had experience running a business. And so you weren't just, you know, an average person on the street. You were someone who had run a business and had a lot of responsibility. And it wasn't only women who didn't have the vote. A lot of people didn't have the vote. So women didn't feel, you know, set out. You know, they didn't feel like, oh, I'm especially unprivileged because I don't have the vote. Nobody had the vote except the landowner. You know, if you were not.

if you were a servant, if you were a hired hand, if you were a working class person, if you were the extended family, you know, if you were not responsible for the home, the household, you know, it was called the household back then, you know, you didn't expect to have the vote. And by the way, it's interesting, even the word family was usually used for the household. They used the word family for anyone that you were responsible for, even if you were responsible for. if you were not biologically related. Why would it be important in a book about toxic masculinity and, you know, the misconceptions surrounding that term

to include a section about women's suffrage? Yeah, so when the women's vote came up, the debate was not over men's votes versus women's vote. It was household vote versus individual vote. And if you read the anti-suffergist back then, many of them said explicitly, you know, we want household suffrage because otherwise there's just the individual in the state. You know, we don't want that kind of individualism.

We want the basic unit of society to remain the household. We don't want the basic unit of society to be the individual. Wow. So that was their argument. It was a political philosophy. You know, what is the basic unit of society? You know, is it of household? Or is it the bare, you know, isolated, discontalienable?

And they are so right on with that prediction of what would happen. Exactly. And of course, people say, well, why did the vote finally pass then? Well, it took a long time, almost a century. You know why women were finally won over by the temperance movement? Francis Willard, who was the president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, began to feel that women would have more power over against their drunken husbands if they had the vote. She argued that women had no recourse if their husbands were drinking away the family money and leaving the family destitute, if they were coming home drunk at night and beating the wife and kids. So wait, temperest movement is what, like alcohol prohibition stuff? Yeah, yeah,

prohibition. In other words, you have to almost back up a little bit to understand even why that was such an issue. As men became more secular, sort of the traditional male vices became worse. In other words, in the 19th century, there was a huge increase in fighting, gambling, drinking, crime, prostitution, the number of brothels mushroomed. Sometimes the individual fat can help. So in 1830, Americans drank three times as much as they do today. So there's a reason, there was a temperance movement. Alcoholism was a, you know, public alcoholism was a problem the way, you know, drunk, drug addicts are today. You walk down in San Francisco or someplace.

Like the fentanyl crisis today was really like the alcohol crisis then. Yeah, you see, yeah, today you see people, you know, drug addicts on the streets. Well, back then, people were falling down drunk in the, you know, in the alleys and so on. And so the Tempice view movement was really about trying to protect women who had nothing, no legal recourse, you know, against drunken husbands. And so that's how they finally won the vote when they said, Francis Willard actually renamed the vote, the ballot for home protection.

So they didn't win it on feminist grounds. Feminists were arguing things like autonomy and individual rights. That didn't win over the women. The women were won over when it was labeled the ballot of home protection. I've never heard any of this in my entire life. I've never heard any of this in my life. So knowing this background does help us understand

that there were huge mental shifts happening. So today, when we think, oh, well, if you don't have the vote, you know, you're not a true, you know, you're not a full citizen. That's not the way it was thought of. In fact, in fact, there was another turning point that was very important. Universal male suffrage. When you went from only the landowner, the head of the household holding the vote to universal male suffrage, that came first. Well, all of a sudden you had men who were uneducated, drunk, you know. Women are saying, wait a minute, these guys vote and I can't.

Yeah, that would be frustrating. You know, people who had no civic spirit and Christian. You know, women are saying, look, you know, we're going to vote by biblical principles. And you're letting these secular guys who are alcoholics or, you know, fighting, drinking, visiting prostitutes, and they have a right to vote. And I don't. So we get women suffrage. Now looking forward all these years later, where we are now, do you?

you believe that women's suffrage has been a net negative or a net positive for society? Yeah, that's a big, that's a big, that's a big question. I think it's been a net negative to go from the household vote to the individual vote. You know, that shift in political philosophy. It was a shift from, well, classical republicanism in the colonial era, the dominant political philosophy was called classical republicanism. And it was the idea that social institutions like the family are organic structures. In other words, it's not just a couple of individuals, an aggregate of individuals who happen to have common interest. No, there's a connection between the family.

We have a loyalty and a love and a connection that's organic that goes beyond just individuals. Here's how you can explain it to modern people. When people date, when they're in a relationship, they will sometimes say, well, there's me and there's you. and there's our relationship. And they'll sometimes say, we need to work on our relationship. And they sense that there's some third entity that's beyond just the individuals involved.

We really do. And in class of republicanism, that was called the common good. It was the good for you and that was good for me. But who looks out for the common good, which is the good of the relationship itself? That was the common good.

And that's what authority was for. That's why men, you know, when men had authority, it's because they were responsible for the common good. What happened with a political shift is we shifted to what's called social contract theory. Social contract theory was Locke, Hobbs, Rousseau, and basically they were all trying to say, let's have a new foundation for politics. Let's propose that there was a state of nature. And individuals running around in the state of nature, completely autonomous, disconnected individuals

who then come together out of self-interest and form the state. And that became this sort of origins myth of how the state came about. It was clearly an alternative to Genesis. It was clearly an alternative to, we don't want a Christian origin of the state. We want to have a secular origin. So we'll have this myth of the state of nature where we're intrinsically autonomous separate individuals

who come together and form a contract. Well, what that did is it said, there are no such things as organic social structures. There's just individuals, the aggregates of individuals who come together. And if there's no organic structures, then there's no common good. So men were basically let off the hook. They were no longer responsible for the common good. Now, to me, this is the most compelling argument for why women's suffrage may have been a mistake,

way more than women being more likely to vote left. Oh. What I usually hear when people are talking about this is that is the argument they bring up. Well, look how this was a mistake because women are just more emotional. We're not capable of being rational. And so because of that reason, we are more susceptible to leftist policies. But while there is an argument for that, I do, I see that. But also what you're saying, I think, shows a bigger picture of how damaging this was

and to just it led into everything, how we split up the family unit. and all these other problems, I see it stemming from that one decision. We went from the idea that the family is an organic structure with a common good. And, you know, common good, of course, everyone benefits from the common good. You know, the good of the family benefits all of us. And it's the same with the church or any other social institution. The good of the whole, you know, benefits all of us. We went from that to social contract theory where the family is just a collection of individuals

all looking out for their own good, the own interest. and that was a huge political shift. And I think it has affected even Christians. Even Christians no longer look at marriage as, you know, a covenant. They look at it as, well, if it's meeting my needs, but as soon as it's not meeting my needs, I'm out. Yeah. You know, they're treating it like a contract rather than a covenant.

You are a former agnostic, which is so interesting to me. How did you go from being an agnostic female to now a Christian female defending men? It was a long and difficult journey because in this book I do talk about how I did grow up in a very abusive home. My father was abusive. He was, you know, beating us and kicking us. And he was very open about it. He didn't say, do this all spank you. He'd say, do this all beat you?

And then he would carry through on his threats. And so not surprisingly, when I became a teenager, I totally left my Christian upbringing behind. and became a radical feminist. I read all the feminist books. I loved reading sort of the groundbreaking ones like Ready for Dan and Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett, Susan Brown-Miller. I read all the foundational books on feminism. And so I was obviously one of those people who just thought men were pretty much evil,

and that's because that had been my experience. And then I became a Christian. And how old were you? I was 19 or 20 when I became a Christian, and it was through discovering apologetics. Do you know the work of Francis Schaefer? Here's how I tell my students in my classroom. I said the two major apologists of the 20th century were Francis Schaefer and C.S. Lewis in terms of the sheer number of people who were either converted through their work

or brought through a crisis of faith through their work. So Schaefer's not as well known, but he influenced all. also a huge swath of that generation. Large numbers of people became Christians through his work. And I happened to have a chance to go to his ministry, which is in Switzerland. We had lived in Europe when I was a child. And so all through high school, I saved my money to go back. Wow. Through just sort of circumstances, I ended up stumbling across Francis Schaefer's ministry in Switzerland. And I had never encountered Christian apologetics before. I had no idea that Christianity could be supported by good reasons and arguments and evidence

and that it could hold its own against the secular philosophies, worldviews, isms. You know, I was totally blown away. I had no idea. I was blown away. In fact, I was so impressed that I left. Yeah, you probably had to just kind of take it all in and think about it, process. Exactly.

I was afraid I might be drawn in emotionally because it was just so, it was so attractive. Yeah. Yeah, it was compelling. It was attractive. I felt such internal. pressure to make a decision. Yeah, you felt conviction. And so I went home, but because of that, I had discovered there was such a thing as apologetics. I discovered Seas Lewis and G.K. Chesterton

and Oz Guinness, who actually was teaching at LaBrie at the time. I'm sorry, I didn't say the name. The name of Francis Schaefer's ministry was LaBrie, which in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and LaBrie means the shelter. So just through my own reading, I became a Christian. I decided I was intellectually convinced it was true. and then I thought, where do I find Christians? I wasn't in a church or anything. I didn't know any Christians. And with your work, you've really focused on kind of countering a lot of cultural lies that we are told in society.

Well, a year and a half later, I went back to LaBrie just to finish that part of the story. And I stayed four and a half months. So that's where I really got grounded in Christian worldview and apologetics and so on. And you're right. all of my work since then, all the books I write are all unapologetics in some way. I wanted to reach out to young people who had the same kind of questions I did because, you know, until I went to LaBrie, I didn't find any Christians who could answer my questions. In fact, I was always made to feel like something's wrong with you.

You know, why do you have questions? Why don't you have faith? As if there was a moral problem, you know, with asking questions. And so I really have a heart for young people who are asking questions and having doubts about their faith today. Yeah. So I guess one thing, a question that people reading your book or listening to this conversation about toxic masculinity and how it's basically it is a myth, they would probably say, well, if men occupy every single position of power, how could we have compassion for them? How could you possibly say that, you know, they have some kind of disadvantage if they're occupying every position of power? What would your

response be? Well, you know what we said earlier about, men falling behind on all levels. And unfortunately, for a long time, people have been unwilling to listen to that message. The first book on the subject, really, was a book called The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Summers, who has self-identized as a feminist, by the way, but she calls herself the rational feminist. But Hertz was the first book and trying to, you know, sound the alarm that actually we need to start paying attention to men and boys.

they are falling behind on all levels. And she was skewered in the media. She was skewered, especially by feminist, who said, you know, no, we can't take any resources away from girls and give them to boys, as if it was a zero sum, which it's not. Yeah. Well, that also reminds me of Dr. William Farrell, who wrote The Boy Crisis. And I've had him on the spillover several seasons, but he, several seasons back, but he had the same situation where when he would start speaking about this, which he was, he's, he's, identified as a feminist and then totally changed his tune because he started coming out and talking about, wait a minute, there's some real problems happening with men and boys in this country and

people didn't want to hear it. They were very resistant. Yes, he's a great writer too. He wrote The Boy Crisis and there have been other books like Why Boys Fail and the Problem with Boys. There's been a whole slew of books on this problem. And you know what? The good news is there's finally somebody with impeccable liberal credentials who's come out on this subject. It's Richard Reeves, and he wrote a book that's just simply called of boys and men. It's very recent. And it's the first time somebody from a more liberal background wrote a book and made it now an acceptable thing for even liberals to pay attention to the problem that the boys are facing. And that's a good sign to me. It means it's getting out of the sort of the conservative. Yeah, thought bubble. Yeah, thought bubble. And finally,

there's somebody on the liberal side. And once he started saying it, it became okay, right? Okay for liberals to acknowledge it. He's even started his own organization. He was at the Brookings Institution. And when he wrote this book, he decided this is important enough. I'm leaving Brookings and I'm starting my own institution. So I think this is a very good sign.

Of course, I immediately got on his mailing list. So this is the best news I think out there now is that it's finally becoming acceptable for people to acknowledge. that we need special programs for boys. And it's becoming more socially acceptable to say that. Well, these stereotypes that men are always the villain, women are always the victim, they have to stem from somewhere.

So where did these stereotypes come from? Yeah, one of the things in writing my book is I wanted to trace where they came from, you have to ask where something comes from and how it developed, if you want to stand effectively against it. And I found that a lot of these trends have much deeper roots than people realize.

So, for example, we probably think the concept of toxic masculinity, you know, rose out of second-wave feminism, 1960s. Yeah, that's what I assumed. Right, and it goes much further back. Let's get the big picture. The big picture is it goes back to the Industrial Revolution. Before that time, most men worked alongside their wives and children all day on the family farm, the family industry, the family business. And so the cultural expectation of men focused much more on their caretaking role.

In fact, here's an interesting historical fact. Most books and literature on parenting was addressed to fathers, not to mothers. If you go in a bookstore today, most of them are addressed to mothers. But fathers were considered the primary parent, and they did, in fact, spend as much time with their children as mothers did, which is hard for us to even imagine. But especially their sons. You know, their sons were practically apprentices working alongside them in their trade or their craft. And so where did we lose all that? The Industrial Revolution took work out of the home.

And of course, men had to follow their work into factories and offices. And for the first time, men were not working with people they loved and had a moral bond with, you know, the family members. Instead, they were working as individuals in competition with other men. And that's when you see the literature start to change. People started to protest that men were losing the caretaking ethos that they'd had in the colonial era,

that they were becoming egocentric, self-centered, greedy, ambitious, aggressive, looking up for number one. And interestingly, many people began to complain that men were making their jobs, their idol. That was the language used back then. We're not traditional enough. People who claim to be traditional, you know, wanted to recover traditional sex roles and so on.

You know, one of the things I say in the book is they're not traditional enough because they were going back to the 1950s. In the 1950s, fathers were already out of the home. mothers were already trying to fill in the gap by being the primary parent. And there was a lot of father hunger. You know, even if fathers were technically in the home, they were going all day. And when it first started, by the way, in the 19th century, because it was new, it was new for fathers to be out of the home.

There was a huge outpouring of literature, books and articles deploring the fact that the fathers were missing. and 1842, Parents Magazine had an article saying, the greatest cause of a domestic sorrow, direct quote, domestic sorrow is paternal neglect. Paternal neglect. And it said the father is outworking in his business early and late and is failing to do his duties to his children. Wow.

Frances Willard, who was president of the women's Christian temperancey movement, is considered perhaps the most influential, woman of the 19th century. And she said, the father is the prototype of the divine, because, you know, God is our father. And yet the prototype of the divine is gone. He's out of the home from Sunday to Sunday. You know, this is not tenable. In fact, a lot of the laws that were passed back then, we're not, we now think we're for religious reasons, were actually to bring fathers back home, like blue laws, blue laws to close the stores on Sundays. It was not religious people driving that. it was women saying, we want men to have at least one day at home with their family.

This is so interesting because recently a couple of my close friends who are married have been kind of talking to me about that, how they wish that their husbands worked remote or had that option because they wish that their husband could be more involved on a day-to-day basis at home. So what is your opinion on that? Do you think that men who have the opportunity to work remote should or what? Absolutely. I'm really big on that. I think we should try to recover

the pre-industrial style of work as much as we can. So what would that look like ideally if it was done today? Well, you know, let me tell you, the pandemic was a game changer. A lot of people discovered they actually liked being home more and actually liked being with their family more. Harvard University did a study. It was after my book came out, so it's not in there.

Harvard University did a study, and this was their conclusion, during that pandemic, 68% of fathers said that they got closer to their children and they don't want to lose that. During the pandemic. And they said, you know, after the pandemic, we'd like to have some kind of at least hybrid situation where we can have some home-based work, do some remote work. I'll give you an anecdote because they're fun. one of my graduate students, her husband is an IT professional. And so during the pandemic, he came home. And since he was home, he did more of the homeschooling. The family was homeschooling.

Because he was home, he decided he would be the one to make lunch for the family every day. He was available now to take the kids to soccer practice or choir practice. He picked up so many of the family responsibilities that she was able to start a part-time business. Wow. And the whole family benefited from the added income. And so I interviewed her husband. And he said, our life is so much more balanced now. I am never going back to 40 hours in a cubicle.

And then the final kicker was he said that when the time I used to spend commuting to work every morning, I now spend praying with my wife. Wow. Love that. And see, that pre-industrial revolution type of family situation that you're describing and how men are like, I wasn't designed to sit in a cubicle nine to five. I also don't think that women were designed to sit in a cubicle 9 to 5. I think that we as women flourish better whenever our home is our main responsibility and priority. And I mean, what you're saying makes me think, wow, maybe men, that it's the same for men too. We just were designed to be together as a family unit way more than we are.

Yes. You know, I have, I did a lot of studies that I cite in the book. For example, men report the same amount of work family conflict that women do. have students who said, surely not. You know, we've never heard this before. But it was a large meta study of like 350 studies, you know, that were all put together into one major study. And they found, to their own surprise,

the researchers found that men reported just as much work, family conflict. It's just that they don't feel as free to say so. If a man says, I'd like more time at home, he pays the daddy penalty. You know, if he wants to have more time at home, If he decides that he wants to leave early, so I had one student who was a graduate student that I left work at 4.30 to three days a week

to coach my son's soccer and basketball teams. My coach accused me of coasting. But it did not ultimately hurt my career. And when my sons grew up, they said, we want to be dads like you, which is a much better reward than anything you get in the workplace. Yeah.

But 95% of men say they wish they had more time with their kids. 95% say they wish more time with their children. And Christian fathers tested out the highest, by the way, in that, in terms of limiting their time at work, you know, not coming in, not staying late, not coming in on Saturday, saying no to moving, you know, moving to a different city at the drop of a hat. If it would tear up your children's relationship. relationships and friendships at school.

They knew that they would maybe sometimes not get promoted as fast. They would not climb the career ladder as fast. But they said it was worth it. In one study, they said it's having time with my children is worth it. Even if I have to pay a bit. Another study, trying to remember the numbers for you. In one study, 70% of men said they would prefer flexible hours if it allowed them more time with their children,

even if it meant they would pay some price, you know, financially, in terms of their taking a hit in their salary. 70% of men said, if I had to choose flex time over, you know, time with my family over career, I would choose flex time and my family. These seven-year-olds on TikTok bragging about spending $900 of their mom's money on anti-aging skin care has me feeling irate. I'm not even going to lie to you. It is completely out of control.

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skincare routine, it is never too late to start and it doesn't need to be complicated. Build a three-step plan for your skin type now at Nimi-Skinkare.com and use code Alex Clark for 10% off. Go to Nemeyskinkare.com and use code Alex Clark for 10% off or find this in the description below. I like this section of the book where you talk about, you know, we're always an undated with, we need equality between men and women. Men and women need to be equal. And you're like, well, we are equal. We're equal in sin.

Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I had to emphasize that just because we have had a double standard where, in a sense, people have treated women as if they were not equal in sin, is that they were better, if they were morally superior, that they're spiritually superior. And that started in the 19th century, too. Again, if we don't know the history, we tend to think it's just always been that way.

But actually, before the 19th century, it was thought that men were spiritually and morally superior. All the way back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, it was thought that men were morally stronger. And the reasoning was this. They thought that the insight into right and wrong was a rational insight. And they thought men were more rational insight.

and therefore men were more virtuous. In fact, the word virtue comes from the Latin word VIR, the root of the word virtue, means man. As in the word virile, virile means manly. And so the word virtue actually had overtones of manly strength and honor. And then in the 19th century, for the first time ever in human history, women was said to be morally superior. And here's why.

After the Industrial Revolution, when men were out in the public arena, they developed a sharp distinction between public-private, which hadn't been that way. You know, when you had home industries, there wasn't a sharp public-private split. You know, customers came into your home. If you were a teacher, you had your students in your home. But people began to argue that now that we have these large public institutions, factories, financial institutions, banks, universities, and of course, course, the state, in the 19th century, people began to say, well, these large public institutions should operate by scientific principles, by which they meant value-free. Of course. Yeah. In other words, don't bring your private values into the public arena, which is what we still

here today. And since it was men who were getting that secularized education and working in that secularized workplace, they did become secular before women did. And so if values are kicked out of the public realm, where would they be cultivated in the private realm? And who is responsible for cultivating them? Women, because women were still in the private realm. And so that was the first time ever that women was said to be the moral guardians of society. And they developed this double standard where we kind of let men off the hook. You know, they're out in the rough and tumble, amoral realm of business and politics. And then in the 19th century rhetoric, they were supposed to come home at night and be renewed and restored and refined by their morally superior wives.

And so that double standard, I think, has stayed with us since then. I was interviewed once by a young couple on the book. And so a young Christian couple. And so I decided I would ask them some questions. And I asked them, do you think the double standard is still, you know, in Christian circles? And they said, absolutely. Yeah, I would say yes. Would you say as well?

I would say yes. Their experience, they were newly married, and so they were talking about the dating scene and so. And they said, absolutely, it's just assumed that men are more prone to sin and vice and lust and pornography. And their lust is just roiling under the surface and that it's up to women to hold it in check. It's up to women to hold the line in terms of any physical involvement when they're dating. you know, it's up to women. And even after marriage, it's up to women, you know, to make sure that they're sexually available.

Otherwise, the husband will go to porn or adultery and it will be their fault. But everything you're describing also really reminds me of the red pill movement that we're seeing explode right now with young men. They have this idea where if you're not a virgin before marriage, you're worthless, but also men have to be able to sleep with at least 50 women before marriage. If they get married, which also marriage is too much of a risk. shouldn't get married anyway. So how can you expect women to be a virgin before they're married if you have to sleep with so many of them? You know what I'm saying? So they're they create the

problem that they complain about, but all the blame is placed on women. Yeah, let me give you some of the source of that as well. Like I said, in the 19th century, it began to be accepted that men were more more secular than women, that they were not, biblical morality didn't have the same hold on their hearts. But it really took a turn with the rise of Darwinian evolution. And this was a bit of a surprise because most people think, wait, that's about science, genes and fossils, but had a huge impact on American concepts of masculinity. Because Darwinian thinkers began to write that the men who won out in the struggle for survival would be men who were ruthless, barbarian, savage, and predatory. So if it's coming from Darwinism, then that proves that it's not from Christianity,

this idea of toxic masculinity. Yeah, I'm glad you, that's exactly the direction I'm going. Exactly. The traits that we tend to think are toxic are coming out of the secular script for masculinity, not from Christianity. And Darwinism is the most obvious example of that. And it wasn't just in Darwin's day, social Darwinism has now changed the label. It's now called evolutionary psychology. but it has the same negative message. There's a book called The Moral Animal. It was a bestseller by an evolutionary psychologist. And he wrote,

human males are oppressive, possessive, flesh-obsessed pigs. Giving them a book on how to have a successful marriage is like giving a Viking a book on how not to pillage. I thought, how do you get away with being so disparaging to men? How do you get away with that? But that's the Darwinian view of masculinity. And there's another book that also,

it's an older book that was just reissued called Men in Marriage. And that author also says that the male nature is irresponsible, sexually predatory, prone to drug addiction. And the deepest yearning of the male is to escape into a primal mode

of immediate and predatory gratification. I mean, that's a direct quote. immediate and predatory gratification. And I'm like, wait a minute, how do these secular people get away with having such a negative view of men? You wonder where the Andrew Tates of the world are coming from? That's the mentality. Or have you seen the newest one as Myron Gaines? I am blown away that you know who that is. So my conspiracy theory is that Myron's actually gay, but that's like a whole separate tangent that we could have. But that's my theory, because all of these red pill guys, I'm thinking that they're battling some sort of homosexuality. I don't understand

that like don't even date women. A lot of them even say it's gay to date women, but they don't date at all, don't get married at all. I mean, what is your thoughts on that? Well, Myron Gaines, well, his tagline, his tagline is, I help men transform from simps into pimps. That's, that's his tagline. And then in his book, you know, do you realize he's been a book? I did not know that. In his book, he literally says all relationships between men and women have been transactional. Direct quote, all men are John's. All women are horrors.

So that's the view that he's communicating through his channels. You know, he has that TV program. Fresh and fit. Fresh and fit. And he argues that, like you said, he argues, don't even get married. It's okay to have one main woman. That's okay. But don't get married.

and make sure that your main woman understands you can have several women on the side because men are just naturally sexually promiscuous. That's the male nature. There's nothing women can do about it. They just have to accept it. To which we would say, you really think that's how God created men? Are we really going to let men off the hook that way? That's not how God created men.

Go back to Genesis 1. How did God create men and women? In my book, I take people back to the cultural mandate. My students don't even know what that word means. Cultural Mandate is the word that theologians give to the verse in Genesis, where God has created the universe, he's created the animals, and he creates the first human couple. And what's the first thing he says to them?

He tells them why he made them. What's their purpose? He gives them their job description. Be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth. And in the very streamlined language of Genesis 1, If you fruitful and multiply, well, anthropologists tell us, of course, all social institutions grow out of the family. So it's not just to have kids. It means all the social institutions.

It becomes an extended family, a clan, a tribe, a nation. And of course, you have social institutions for particular purposes, like you need a state, you need a church, you need a school. You need a marketplace. And so it really means create all of the social institutions as well as the rules that apply to them. and constitutions. So it's a very rich understanding of building society. And Sudu the Earth means all the creative activity that you put into harnessing the natural resources.

So most cultures start with agriculture. But then it moves to mining and technology and creating laptops and composing music. One of my students said, oh, come on. Composing music. So I said, I play the violin. What's the violin made out of? Wood. What's the bone band?

out of horsehair. So all the transcendent beauty that we associate with music starts with harnessing the natural resources of creation, Genesis 1. And so I think it's a much richer, fuller understanding

for men, it's given to both men and women, but today we need to recover it, especially for men. But your job, you know, the job that God has given you in just being a man is to roll up your sleeves and get deeply embedded in building up the social institutions

and in doing creative and productive work that glorifies God and serves your fellow man. So it's a very rich understanding of what it means to be a man if we go back to the cultural mandate. Speaking of the red pill stuff, conservative women, I don't know if you've seen this, conservative women across the country are experiencing an abnormal amount of men on a first day asking if they are willing to be submissive. Now, this is all stemming from red pill content, which is getting increasingly more and more popular and viral online. What do you think about that? That's a good question.

Of course, I have to deal with headship and submission in my book because those are the key words in scripture. And so I go through both of them. Headship in scripture is obviously not just I get to do whatever I want because I'm the boss. right? It's never that. Headship in Scripture. You know what I did? I didn't just go to the theologians. I didn't want to just know what the experts said. I wanted to know how real Christians live it out. And that's why I went to the social sciences. In my book, I go through the social science data where sociologists and psychologists go to ordinary Christians and say, well, what do you think it means?

How do you live out the biblical view of headship? And the reason I did that is because the charge is that the doctrine of headship, you know, headship in the home, turns men into overbearing oppressive tyrants. Well, that's an empirical claim. Does it? So that's what I wanted an empirical answer. You know, let's look at what it does.

When men actually hold these views, do they become overbearing tyrants? The evidence was absolutely not. I was astonished when I read the actual surveys done and what Christian men and women said when they were ask, you know, what does headship mean? How do you live it out in your life and your marriage? And it was amazing how loving and respectful and mutual, many men said things like,

Christian men would say things like, well, it means you go first. You know, we love because he loved us first, right? That's the scriptural view of how we respond to God. We respond to his love. And so headship authority, the actual meaning of the term comes from author. You know, authority comes from author. An author means a person who institutes something, who initiates something, who writes a book, for example, who does a program. So it means that you're responsible for initiating, for going first.

And it means, you know, if you want to have a better marriage, you work on yourself and you go first and say, follow me. If you want a deeper spiritual life for yourself, your family, you work on having a deeper spiritual life and say, follow me. You know, if you want your household to run better, you do the work and say, follow me. So that was the language that I got from so many of these actual interviews with real live, you know, Christian men and women. They said, yes, we believe in hutchip, but we define it in terms of, you know, the man having responsibility for the well-being of his family. In fact, if you go back to the 19th century, authority meant something quite different. It meant who was responsible for the common good? Who was responsible for the common good of the marriage, you know, the church, civil society, whatever. The authority was not, you know,

I get to do what I want. It meant I was responsible for the common good of, you know, whoever I was responsible for. And so, I think we've totally lost that notion. So knowing that that is what the biblical idea is of what does it mean to be a submissive wife, it's way more of a collaborative effort, respect, and that he has to be willing to die for you, you know, and exactly what you're saying, go first. He's the one that has to take things head on and then set that example for the wife. So if he's wanting her to be one way, then he's got to be willing to show that for himself, etc., etc., everything you said.

If your husband is telling you things like, well, I need you to be a submissive wife, if you're not allowed to eat breakfast with me, unless you do this, this and this, just barking orders that way, I would say that to me isn't showing the fruit of truly being a Christian and being saved, just acting in that way. Would you agree?

Leadership means being out in front doing something that's worthy of emulating. The leader has to be acting in a way that people want to follow him. You know, I have a whole section on authority where I said, look, we have a negative view of authority. But let's look at it in a sense of how authority is actually liberating and empowering. I have played in many orchestras, you know, as a violinist.

If you did not, if everyone in the orchestra did not follow the direction of the conductor, there would be chaos. It would sound horrible. So in that sense, following the authority of the conductor actually liberates you to play a symphony that you could never play on your own. As a single violinist, I couldn't play a Beethoven symphony. But if I accept the authority of the conductor, I can play a Beethoven symphony with the whole orchestra.

And so authority is meant to be liberating. It's meant to be a way to empower you to coordinate with others to get a bigger job done than you could ever do on your own. And I would like to see people have that vision for the family. You know, the family should have a ministry in mind. It's not just, you know, we live together to fulfill each other's emotional needs. You know, we should have a larger mission from God, you know, that as a family, we have a ministry to our culture, to our society, starting with our church.

We have ministry to others, and our family is our ministry. It's not just for our own sake. It's for ministering to others. If you have a loving, faithful husband or wife, and you know, and you have a warm, happy, happy, family. This one's just for you. Right. That's so that you can reach out to hurting people and have a ministry. Yeah, I did a great episode with Jefferson Bethke on this topic. It was all about multi-generational living and creating family teams and having a mission for your family on what you're fighting for and then who your family enemy is. And he talked about, you know, maybe if your family

mission is that it's hospitality, if you as a family, you feel like all of your talents together, your mission should be hospitality, then your enemy of your family would be loneliness. And so, you know, working to how are we going to fulfill our family mission, et cetera, et cetera. But bringing up a guy on a first day asking a girl, are you willing to be submissive, the other thing is, is that we are not called as women, Christian women, to submit to men that are not our husbands. So that, to me, huge red flag. But this idea, the Christianity and Red Pill, they cannot.

coexist together because everything that Red Pill believes, I would say would be the opposite of what Christianity believes. And Myron has publicly been saying in the last several days that feminism has warped and destroyed our culture so severely that it is a joke to think that Christianity could save these women. Oh, I haven't heard them say that. Let me talk about, since I talked about authority, let's talk about submission a little bit. First of all, Submission does not mean, you know, you have no voice and you have no choice. Because when we submit to God, do we lose ourselves? You know, does God just walk all over us?

Does God say, you know, I want you to do things that are not gifted for? No, God has gifted us for certain ministries and he wants us to use those. I like to go to Scripture and look at, you know, David who pours his heart out before God, you know. Or when Abraham challenges God and says, you know, should not the judge of all the earth do justly, you know, he feels free to challenge God on God's own standards, of course. Elijah, who's so depressed that he goes into the wilderness and says, just kill me, just kill me. You know, God understands we can be our full selves with God. We are submissive to God, and that doesn't mean that we can't be our full selves.

And even, I quote one Christian psychologist who says, you know, if your husband's responsible to bear your burdens, to quote Galatians, you know, bear one another's burdens. How can he do that if he doesn't know what your burdens are? You have to tell him. You have to tell him what your thoughts and you needs and your, you know, your experiences are. How can he be responsible for your spiritual well-being if he doesn't know what your thoughts are? So think of it this way. The word submit is used in other context too, right? It's used when a lawyer submits a brief. It's used in an academic context. you know, which is my world.

Sometimes when people put out an argument, you're making a case for position, they'll say, I submit to you that. That's very common in philosophical language. Well, what does that mean? It means I'm offering my best thoughts, my best work, my best insights, you know, for your consideration. Well, that's what the submission means.

You're supposed to bring your best self, your best ideas, your best thoughts. Now, is there ever a time that you think that a woman shouldn't submit to her husband? Oh, well, if you ask you to do something wrong, of course. Yeah, I mean, I think that's every scripture. Every scripture would say that. Submission, the specific commands to husbands and wives cannot override the commands that are given to us as brothers and sisters in Christ. You know, brothers and sisters of Christ, we are called to hold each other accountable, you know, to,

Martin Luther said, every man is, you know, the priesthood of all believers. He said, every man is a priest and every woman is a priestess. And they both have the right to, you know, communicate God's truth to each other and to hold one another accountable. I liked that because we've all heard of the priesthood of believers, but I'd never heard somebody say, and it was Luther. And you know, that means women are priestesses too.

So he specifically says that. And of course, he says they're priests to their children as well, because it's parents who teach their children the gospel. But sometimes it's good to do word study. One of the things I've gotten jumped on, you know, this book, by the way, this book has proven to be the most controversial book I've ever written, which I just was not expecting. Because my earlier book, A Love Thy Body, was on questions of abortion, homosexuality,

transgenderism, which is such an issue today. people say it's more relevant now than when I wrote it. And still, I got more controversy with this book. Masculinity is more of a trigger word. Why do you think that is? That's a good question. Let me tell you, though, I always do a lot of reading groups on my books because I want to get a lot of feedback, rub off the rough edges.

And when these participants in my reading groups would tell their friends and family that they were going through a book on masculinity, invariably the first question was, who side is she on? Invariably. Like, men tended to just assume that if a woman is writing a book on masculinity, she's some male bashing feminist.

Yeah, that it's negative. Exactly. And then more progressive types tended to assume, you know, some angry, reactionary culture warrior, red-pilling people. And so I had to, actually one of your questions had to do with a study. I put this study right at the beginning of the book

to kind of overcome that initial hostility or at least suspicion. There was a study done by a sociologist. He's not a Christian, but he's well-known in his field, and so he speaks all around the world. And he came up with this ingenious experiment where he would ask young men, two questions. First, he would say, what does it mean to be a good man?

If you're at a funeral and in the eulogy, somebody says he was a good man. What does that mean? And the sociology said all around the world, young men had no trouble answering that. They would immediately start listing off honor, duty, sacrifice, do the right thing, look out for the little guy. I like that part. Be a provider, be a protector, be irresponsible. And he would say, well, where'd you learn that? And they would say, I don't know, it's just in the air we breathe.

But if they were in a Western country, they would often say it's part of our Judeo-Christian heritage. And then he would follow up with the second question. And he'd say, what if I say to you, man the F-up? You know, he'd kind of be a real man. And the young man would say, oh, no, that's completely different. That means be tough, never show weakness, play through pain, win at all costs, be competitive. get rich, get laid, using their words. And so the sociologist concluded that young men actually do feel torn between two conflicting scripts.

On the one hand, they do know what it means to be a good man. I would say they are made in God's image. And they do have this innate, inherent knowledge of what it means to be a good man. It was global. It was not only the countries that had a Christian background. So it's an inherent part of just being made in God's image. but on the other hand they do feel cultural pressure

to be the quote unquote real man which were very different traits and they're not all bad I mean we do want people who can stand tough in a crisis but if it is disconnected or decoupled from the moral ideal of the good man

then it can slide into entitlement, dominance, control, misogyny it can slide into Myron Gaines and Andrew Tate By the way, one of my former graduate students is now teaching at high school. And she emailed me and she said, all my male students are fans of Andrew Tate. Oh, that's terrifying.

They're even using Andrew Tate quotes in the yearbook. I said, where do you teach at a classical Christian school? This is what I'm telling people. That is freaking insane. You have to homeschool your kids. You cannot trust anyone. You cannot trust anyone. your kids in classical Christian school are quoting Andrew Tate.

That is crazy. Exactly. And they, you know, the teacher, of course the teachers are all upset. The teachers are trying to say, wait a minute, you know, look at what Andrew Tate's really. Andrew Tate, I heard him in an interview once where he openly said, I'm a pimp. Yeah, that's what I am. And he openly said what I produce is pornography. Right.

So he's quite open about this, but they're not listening to that part. They're listening to the image part that says, be strong, be tough, you know. And if Christians are not out there, giving a positive biblical view of masculinity, then our young people are going to be drawn into the Ander Tates and the Myron Gaines. And that's, you know, my concern is, I can see you are too. For a while, our big concern was men are just becoming passive, right?

Young men are sitting in the mom's basement playing video games, your failure to launch. But I think, like you, I think that now we're seeing, a different trend. The trend now is the red-pilling. It's like, it's the manosphere. It's even young Christian men reaching out and saying, you know, where's a positive view of masculinity and reaching out to these secular influencers, which makes it all the more important that we have a biblical view of masculinity and that we're really teaching it in our churches? There was a study done two years ago that showed when consumers ditched parabins and phallates

in their personal care products, 70% of breast cancer. cells in their body were turned off within a month. Avoiding paraben and phallate-containing beauty products suppressed pro-carcinogenic phenotypes at the cellular level in only 30 days. Ladies, we can literally reverse pre-cancerous cells with this simple step. Switch to alleviate prebiotic organic body wash. You probably were gifted some sets of lotion and soap from those endocrine disrupting stores in the mall for Christmas. I know I was. Throw them out. I know that these people love you and they meant well, but throw them out. Alevia's organic prebiotic body wash has less than 10 non-toxic ingredients from land and sea in every bottle

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A lot of people do think that is. You know, I'm going to rely on the studies, okay? Bring us back to the facts instead of just, you know, our intrinsic sense of, you know, what I think's happening. So the top marriage researcher in the nation is arguably John Gondon. John Gottman, Jewish background, was a mathematician before he became a psychologist. And so he does these highly quantified studies. So he brings couples into a lab that's made up like a bed and breakfast. And they stay there for a couple days and they get wired up for their breathing rate and their heart rate and the sweat rate and their stress hormones.

And of course, gestures like rolling your eyes and disgust. Gosh, they're watching that too. And of course, all their words, you know, from put downs to placating. And all of this is set into a computer. And he became famous because with this kind of data, he was able to predict with 93.6 accuracy, which couples would divorce? Wow! After a very short observation period. And even when?

He said, well, this couple will make it seven years. This couple will make it not 15 years. 93.6 accuracy. And the other thing that he found that I thought was most interesting is he found that the health of the marriage depends mostly on the husband. What he found is that 65% of American men do not respect their wives.

Do not, you know, pay attention to their thoughts and ideas and concerns. Cut them off, criticize them, put them down. 65%. So a majority of men do not respect their wives. and so he's written several books where he tries to help men realize, hey, you actually have power to fix your relationship, since you're the one who's not working on the relationship. Let's face it, most of us know that it is primarily women who read books and articles on relationships, women who go to therapy, women who go for pastoral advice on their marriage, women who are trying. Here's how John Gottman puts it. He said, of course it's important for, women to respect their husbands.

He said, but in my data, women already do. He said, even in troubled marriages, women are still reaching out for connection. And he's done the research where he can say that. And so he says it's mostly whether a marriage succeeds or not, is mostly whether the man responds. And he says, unfortunately, the majority of the cases they don't. And so he writes these books trying to persuade men. And he says, I'm not trying to blame or shame men.

I'm trying to give them a sense of how much power they actually have in their relationship. In one of his books, it's written to a young man, he turns to men directly and he says, you need to realize how much power you have to make or break your relationship. It's the man, he says, who has by far the most, that's a direct quote. The man has by far the most influence on whether he has a happy marriage or not. And so he tries to persuade men. It's really in your power to make a break your marriage. Here's what's compelling to me, and as you're talking, I'm just putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

So we know that the data shows that the happiest marriages are truly Christian marriages, and that we have this large number of people saying that they're Christian, but they're actually not because they're nominally Christian. And then you say that 65% of men don't respect their wives, the data shows. And I'm thinking like, okay, what scripture says is true that the road is narrow and that way fewer people than you think are truly Christian and when they are you are going to see that fruit and when they're not you're not. Let me give you another number. He said, when a man does not respect his wife and here's how he puts it, they do not accept influence from their wives. It's kind of a nice way of putting. He said if they don't share power with their wives, that's the

other way he put. Accept influence and share power. That's kind of the words you use. If they do not share power with their wives, their relationship has an 81% share. of self-destructing, either breaking up in divorce or settling into long-time unhappiness. 81% likelihood of being unhappy if the husband does not share power with his wife and respect her. How can a man bring out a woman's true femininity and soft side? And how can a woman bring out a man's true masculinity and strong side? A man can bring out his wife's femininity if he respects her. A lot of men don't respect a woman's gentleness.

They don't respect her when she's gentle and, sweet and compliant and loving and supportive. You know why? Because he's used to men, and men interpret that as weakness. And another man, he would interpret that as weakness. He would say, this guy's not strong, I can run all over him. And so when a woman is soft and sweet and gentle, a lot of men don't make the mental shift.

They don't respect her. They think, oh, I can run all over her. I can take advantage of her. You know, and even something like this, let me give you a study. even something like fear, the biggest emotional difference between men and women, according to one study, is fear. Women, from the time they're infants, studies have been done all the way back to infancy. Babies, babies show, girls show more fear than baby boys do. For example, if you surprise them with a loud noise.

Girls get scared, boys get angry. Boys are like, who are you? Even as infants. And the marriage counselors who write about this in one of the books that I quote said, well, it makes sense, you know, because women are, the world is more dangerous for women. They're smaller. They're physically weaker. They're sexually, you know, they're sexually vulnerable to sexual assault. They can be raped, in other words.

And when they're, when they have children, they're economically vulnerable. because it's very, very hard to raise a family, you know, to work full-time and raise a family. Most women cut back on their work, 65% of women, according to a recent Pew study, 65% of women don't want to work full-time when they have kids because they want to have the ability to focus on their children and do a good job of raising them. The preferred mode, by the way, is part-time work, so they can kind of keep their finger in. 35% want part-time work. And at any rate, women know and their bones that when they have kids,

they need somebody they can rely on for financial support. They are economically vulnerable when they have kids. And especially pre-modern times, which is most of human history. Through all millennia of human history, you know, pregnancy was more common. Pregnancy was more common. Most women spent most of their adult life pregnant, nursing, or carrying a baby in arms, or all three. Right?

So they knew that they needed somebody who would provide and protect. There's a reason that in all cultures men are expected to provide and protect. Let me give you a study on that one, by the way. There was a first ever cross-cultural study of concepts of masculinity by David Gilmore, an anthropologist. And what he found was, despite whatever cultural differences there are, there is a common code for manhood that's universal. And he summed it up by calling it the three Ps, provide, protect, and procreate.

Become a father. Build into the next generation. You know, have responsibility for the future. Provide, protect, and procreate. And these were not, again, not Christian, countries with a Christian background or anything. This is universal. This is God's image in men. Yeah.

They understand, like the earlier study I quoted, it's universal. They know what it means to be a good man. They know that their unique, masculine strength. because they are stronger. You know, let's face it. Physically, by the way, sometimes feminists will say, well, if women would just work out, they'd be as strong too, you know. It's not true.

Men are physically stronger. They had 75% greater upper body muscle mass. They have 90% greater upper body strength. They have more fast-twitch muscles. I had to learn that one. That means they can react more quickly. Yep. At any rate, men are bigger, stronger, faster,

and that's just the creational givens. That's how God made them, and we need to honor and respect and value that. But it also means that these studies show that men intrinsically know that those strengths are not given them just to get what they want, you know, to dominate the weaker people. But it's given them to provide and protect and procreate. So I think it's intrinsic, and this gives us a much better way to approach these issues. Most men don't respond very well to being called toxic. Nobody would. But what we can do is say, how can we affirm support and encourage men in that intrinsic, innate knowledge of what it means to be a good man, what it means to be given that strength to provide, protect, and procreate. Where can people find your book, The Toxic War on Masculinity? Well, you know, I hope you come to my website. My publisher just redesigned it, so it's nice and colorful.

So, Nancypiercy.com. Come there. Of course, you can be. buy it on Amazon. They come to my website and you can browse my other books. You can leave a comment, which is really fun. I like to read comments from readers. I don't always have time to respond, but I do like to read them. NancyPiercy.com. Come on over and say hi.

Awesome. Is there any new topics that you're just such a phenomenal writer? Are there any new topics that you're thinking about writing about in the near future that we can look forward to? Politically, I think the biggest challenge to us, the biggest issue right now is globalism. You know, is that we're losing national sovereignty. You know, the national borders are no longer considered important.

There are so many people who are just, you know, want to form these transnational organizations, transnational corporations, the W.EF, the World Economic Forum, the WHO, the World Health Organization. These large transnational entities are accruing more and more power. And I think that might be the area that's the biggest challenge for us politically right now. My biggest fear, in 2020, they use the pandemic, I think, to swing votes a certain way. I think that everything that's going on now, especially the fight now that you're seeing between the Biden administration and Texas in the last few days, I can just totally see now states getting involved and trying to help with, you know, their sovereignty and all that kind of stuff.

I am just very nervous that the next plan for 2024 is to incite civil war. Yeah, although I think even that might be the step towards stepping in then, the globalist powers then saying, well, look, we've got to solve this war. Exactly, exactly. Nancy, you're just a phenomenal mind to kind of just get to know and talk to. And I've listened to you on other people's podcast for years and admire you so much and love your writing. so thank you so much for coming on the spillover. Oh, thank you. I'm so glad to be here.

I've enjoyed your programs because you like to have fun. When I walked out the door, my husband says, you know, good luck or whatever. I said, it's going to be fun. I know it's going to be fun. It's going to be fun. It's going to be fun. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Nancy is a phenomenal woman and writer. I love listening to every interview she does because I always learned something new, and it was just truly a treat to get to meet her in person. Next week, I'm bringing back our most popular guys. we have ever had to discuss hormone testing, how to get it done, how to understand what the results mean. And I actually got my hormones tested for the first time. So we're going to go over my results for the first time live on the episode. I have no idea what they are. The only thing I know is that he did tell me, he said, wow, yours are jacked up. They are definitely not right. So he said,

it's going to change your life when you find out what's going on with you. He asked me what my goals are. I told him right now, I really want to grow my hair out. I want to put poop regularly, and some other things. So we're going to get into all that, all my TMI about my body. Don't you just love that all next week? Don't forget to please leave a five-star review, let others know why they should listen to The Spillover. Make sure you're subscribed, so episodes automatically download. I'm Alex Clark, and this is The Spillover. Love you, mean it. Bye.