The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 153 - How Feminism Destroys Marriage

Episode Date: November 30, 2018

Today we’ll talk about the poisonous effect feminism has in a marriage. Also, what are essential oils? Are they really essential? Finally, the Huffington Post has noticed some huge problems with the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer story. But I’ve noticed an even bigger problem. Date: 11-30-2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the show, we'll talk about the poisonous effect that feminism has in a marriage. Also, what are essential oils? Are they really essential? Finally, the Huffington Post has noticed some really significant problems in the Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer story, but I've noticed an even bigger problem with the story, and we're going to talk about all of that now on the Matt Wall Show. Yesterday, we discussed an article that has been getting some attention online, mainly because feminists seem to really like it. The article was written by a woman who complains about all the cooking that she did during her marriage. And she would cook while her husband was at work.

And it was very, it became very traumatizing for her to have to do all this cooking because she decided that she didn't, she didn't find it exciting anymore. It wasn't fulfilling. So she boycotted and said, I'm not going to cook anymore. Then her marriage fell apart. And now she has vowed to never cook a meal for another man ever again. the whole thing was, it was a very bitter, very angry, very self-centered, melodramatic diatribe. Well, I got a few emails in response to that discussion. I wanted to share one email that came in.

This is from Catherine. She says, Matt, your podcast today was very offensive to me. The woman you mocked had legitimate concerns. One of the reasons my own marriage fell apart is because I was expected to do all the cooking and all the cleaning. women are tired of that. Feminism doesn't hurt a marriage. You can't have a healthy marriage without feminism.

Marriage is last if they are equal, all caps, period, all caps. Okay, so you can't have a healthy marriage without feminism. And other emails echoed basically that same sentiment. And first of all, listen, I don't mean to be cruel or anything like that. But I do wonder how someone who is divorced can make pronouncements about what constitutes a healthy marriage. You know, I find this a lot. Whenever I talk about marriage, there are people who, they'll begin by admitting that they've been divorced at least once, and then they'll go on to talk about and give all their wisdom on what makes a good, healthy marriage, and so on and so forth.

I mean, is it possible that you might have some faulty ideas about marriage, and perhaps that's something that fed into the fact that you're no longer married? I mean, isn't that something that certainly is something that you should maybe look into? I don't know, but I do think that the opposite is the case here. Feminism is not essential to a healthy marriage. Feminism destroys marriage. not just feminism, by the way, but any ism, any ism whatsoever. Marriage is not a place for isms.

You can't go into a marriage with some kind of political or ideological system as your guiding principle in the marriage itself. I'm not saying that you can't have a political or ideological system and be married. I'm saying that that system cannot be what makes your marriage function. Even though I'm a conservative, I also, I would never say, well, you can't have a healthy marriage without conservatism. Marriage really has nothing to do with the conservative political ideology, or at least it's only connected in a very secondary sort of way. Marriage depends on the love and devotion that both spouses have towards each other. That's what makes a healthy marriage.

That's really it. if you try to filter that love and devotion through an ideology, especially in ideology like feminism, you're going to be in trouble because it complicates things. It dilutes things. It throws your priorities all out of whack. So I have found that maintaining a successful marriage is extremely simple. Now, I won't say it's easy all the time,

And I certainly won't say that I personally have come anywhere close to mastering the art of maintaining, you know, of mastering the art of marriage, I suppose. I'm no expert or guru. But I do know that it's simple. There are a lot of things that we can tell the answer is simple, even if it's hard sometimes to do. So it's simple with marriage. It's not complicated. You just, you love the other person, be willing to sacrifice for them, make their needs. and their desires a priority to you.

And that's kind of it. I think if you do that, you'll be fine. You'll be able to get through any challenge if you do that. And then here's the other thing. This is part of that. But you have to serve your spouse without keeping score. And this is where feminism really screws things up, I think.

It's with the scorekeeping. Because once you get into the scorekeeping, you're in trouble. There has never been a healthy or good or joyful marriage in history with a scoreboard. Anytime there's a scoreboard in a marriage that once you notice that there's a scoreboard, like hanging in your living room, at least a metaphorical scoreboard, once you notice that, you've got to go to the marriage counselor because you're in trouble. Good marriages don't have scoreboards.

Competitiveness destroys a marriage. at least a certain kind of competitiveness. My wife and I are competitive in other kinds of ways. Like, we're competitive when it comes to board games, and I'm way better at those. We're competitive about who's the better driver. I am by a mile. We're competitive about parallel parking.

Again, I'm better at that. We're competitive about who can guess the ending of TV shows and movies. Anytime we're watching a TV show or a movie, who can guess what the thing is. the twists are going to be and everything. Once again, I nail it almost every single time, so I'm better there as well. But there's that kind, I think that kind of competitiveness is okay,

although it can get a bit intense at times. I'm not going to lie, I mean, my wife and I have probably gone to bed angry at each other on more than a few occasions because of board games. So that has happened. But I think the really bad kinds of competitions are the competitions over who works the hardest, who does more around the house,

who did this, who did that, the competitiveness that disguises itself as a desire for equality, that's the stuff that kills the marriage. And that's what feminism brings into the marriage. And that's why it is lethal to a marriage. And you notice something about that. whenever somebody complains or says that they want equality in their marriage,

it always, have you noticed this? When someone says, oh, I just want my marriage to be equal. When they say that, it always involves them doing less and the other person doing more. Have you noticed that? So someone will say, I want things to be equal. And what they mean is, I want my spouse to do the dishes more. often or whatever. You never hear anyone say, I want things to be equal, so I'll do the dishes. That never happens. So this desire for equality, this scorekeeping, it's always self-serving.

Anytime someone in a marriage checks the scoreboard, they're always going to discover that they're ahead in that they've done more, they've done more around the house, so now they get to kick back and let their spouse catch up. That's what's really fascinating. is that any time you look at the scoreboard, you're always going to be ahead. That's the problem with the scoreboard. The woman who sent the email, Catherine, she says that in her former marriage, she was expected to do all the cooking and all the cleaning. And so the question is, what did her husband do?

Maybe he did nothing. Maybe he was a worthless, useless oath. It's possible. There are people like that in marriages. Who knows? But oftentimes you find that when one spouse, is going on about, I always am the one who does this, whatever this is, very often there are a million other things that the other person always does on their own. So I think this attitude

just doesn't work. A marriage can't work this way. It can only work if your first priority is to serve your spouse and your family. But again, this is the problem with feminism. Feminism wants nothing to do with that. Feminism doesn't want a woman to serve her husband and her children. You're never going to hear a feminist say that. You're never going to hear a feminist say, talk about serving their husbands, serving. To a feminist, the idea of serving anyone,

especially a man, is repulsive. And that's why it just doesn't work in a marriage, because that's what marriage is. They say, oh, it can't serve, that's demeaning, That's degrading. That's belittling. Well, if you can't serve, if you don't want to serve someone, then don't get married. If you're a woman, you're not interested in serving your husband, then don't get married. It's not for you.

And if you're a man and you're not interested in serving your wife, then don't get marriage. You're not man enough for marriage. You're not strong enough. You're not mature enough if you're not interested in serving, because that's what marriage is. and by the way I'm not trying to paint some unrealistic portrait here people say well marriage isn't 50-50

it's 100 100 because you always give 100% to your spouse well yeah but nobody gives literally 100% all the time nobody is perfectly selfless right nobody is so I'm not saying that in a marriage your soul single only priority all the time is the happiness of your spouse. It's not as if we should have no concern for our own happiness. I'm not saying that. That would obviously be absurd. We're human beings after all. And I do think sometimes people can go too far in the other direction when they're making

the point that, well, marriage is about service, it's about giving to the other person. It's not about you. It's about them. So on and so forth. That's true. But at the same time, we're not supposed to be martyrs. You know, you don't want to martyr yourself in a marriage because that's not healthy either. So, but that's part of the service, I think, is recognizing that your spouse is going to be selfish sometimes, needs to be selfish sometimes, really. Selfish just in the sense of tending to their own happiness as well, getting a break. And I could say in my marriage, my wife and I, as I said, we're not marriage experts by any stretch of the imagination. I think we need to get a few more decades in before we could call ourselves that.

But one thing that we did figure out early on that's not hard to figure out, seems pretty obvious, is that we both need to give each other breaks as often as possible. That's just a, I think it's a really important part of marriage. So it's become kind of an organic thing for us. It's not systematic, so there's no scoreboard for this. We're not like keeping track of how many minutes of a break each person has gotten and making sure it's exactly even. We don't do that.

But I'll watch the kids sometimes so that my wife can go out on her own, do her own thing. She'll watch them for me. And so if she's got something she wants to do, like she wants to go out for drinks with her friends or she wants to go to a women's group thing at church or whatever the case may be, I consider it a high priority to make sure that she can do that. Because I know that she needs that time. And she recognizes the same for me. So I can say that in seven years of marriage,

pretty much any time that I've said to my wife, hey, I want to go out with some friends or I want to go fishing on Saturday morning, pretty much any time I've said that. She's said, yeah, absolutely. Let's try to make that happen. And so I try to do the same for her. And I think that's important too.

But the general idea, the underlying thing in a marriage is still one of service and of kind of looking after the other person. And that's why feminism makes a marriage dysfunctional. I think feminism makes everything dysfunctional. Feminism doesn't work in any context, whether it's at work or anywhere else in society. but especially in a marriage, it doesn't work. Because feminism is always about keeping track of where the man is and then making sure that the woman is exactly even or even a little bit ahead. Like, it's always about that.

And it just doesn't work. And that's why I've always been uncomfortable with this idea of marriage as an equal partnership. I think I've talked about this before. that's the popular modern enlightened thing is to say, well, my marriage is an equal partnership. And in a sense, yeah, marriage is obviously a partnership. And in a sense, it is equal in that you're both serving and giving to the other person. So in that way, you could call it equal. Nobody is inferior to the other person.

So you can call it equal in that sense. But those are the only senses where marriage is or can be or should be equal. in many ways it's not equal. It's not equal, first of all, because men and women are different. Not that one is superior or the other is inferior, but they're just different, you're just a different person. So you're not the same. You are not literally equal to the other. You are different. And you also have different skills. You have different strengths that you bring to the table. And so it's not equal in that sense either. The point is that I think most of the time, and you could probably think about this in your own life or in your own marriage, anytime that you've stopped and thought to yourself, well, is this equal? Is everything equal right now? Anytime you've stopped and thought that to yourself, it's probably always in a selfish way. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify.

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All right, so I've been getting some messages about essential oils. Now, I don't want to get, I'm not going to get into detail about essential oils. I just, I made a joke about essential oils on Twitter yesterday. And so I've been, I've been getting all the essential oil defenders coming after me. And I'll admit, I have no idea what essential oils are. I don't know what they are. I have no idea. I just, I keep hearing about them.

My wife talks about them. I don't know if she uses them or not. Maybe we have essential oils in the house. I don't know where they would be if we had them. Maybe she doesn't. Her friends talk about them all the time. Anytime there's sickness in the house, like someone has a cold or the flu or whatever, or a stomach bug, everyone's telling us all.

You've got to get essential oils, essential oils. I don't know what they are. The only oils I know about are olive oil and then the oil that you put in your car. Those are pretty essential to my life, but I don't think that's what they're referring to. What I will say is this. from the messages people have been sending me about essential oils, the one word that keeps coming up is people are telling me that essential oils are homeopathic.

And I do know that homeopathic is Latin for scam. I know that. So anytime you're telling you, if it's homeopathic, it doesn't work. And also, someone on Twitter said to me yesterday, they said, well, people have been using essential oils for hundreds of years. It has to be better than modern medicine. People have been using it for a long time. You see, I don't understand that approach.

I don't understand that attitude. I don't understand advocating for a certain medicine, a certain medicinal approach by saying that people did it 150 years ago. People died from colds 150 years ago. The life expectancy was like 55 back then. Why would I want to practice their version of medicine? Society has, has, there are many ways in which, modern society has not progressed and has actually regressed. And I'd be the first to point that out.

But one area where I think we should be all able to agree, one area where there has been pretty much a steady, unbroken progression is in the area of medicine. Our medicine is definitely better now than it was at any other point in history. I don't think there's any doubt about that. And you can see that in any measurable, whatever measurable you want to look at, whether it's life expectancy, infant mortality, whatever it is. In every conceivable way, our medicine is better now. So I'll generally stick with the modern versions when it comes to that. But I will also say that I do believe that the psychosomatic placebo effect is a real thing.

And it does work in that way. So if you really believe, if you really believe that a certain random thing like oil makes you healthier, then it may not really be making you healthier, but it will make you feel better. So in that sense, go ahead and do it. I used to swear by Zycam. I don't know if you've heard of Zycam, but you can find it in the cold and flu section of the drugstore. And so I used to take Zycam all the time, and I would swear by it. I used to swear that it was a wonder drug

because any time I felt even slightly a little bit sick, I would take Zycam and then it would go away. And so I went through about two years and I never got a cold, I never got sick, and I would tell everybody. I would preach the good news of Zycam to everyone, everyone that would listen. I would say, I'm telling you, Zycam is what is keeping me healthy.

Zycam will make me immortal, I believe. But then one day, I happened to stumble across an article that someone shared on Facebook, claiming that Zycam is a scam, and it doesn't actually work. And so then I started researching it, and I discovered that there is no evidence or proof whatsoever that Zycam really does anything. And as soon as I discovered that, Zycam stopped working, and then I started getting colds again. So there was, I had, my mind had, I had been tricked.

I had tricked myself into feeling better, and then the illusion fell apart, and it It didn't work anymore. The placebo effect was destroyed. So what I'm saying is, if the essential oils are homeopathic, then I'm pretty sure they don't do anything. But if you believe that they do something, then keep believing it. And don't research it. Don't look it up.

Ignorance is bliss. If you believe in it, then in some way it will make you feel better. And that's great, as far as I'm concerned. All right, one last thing. off the red-nosed reindeer is coming under fire. The Huffington Post put out a video this week highlighting the problematic elements of the story. The story encourages bullying and racism, for one thing, and homophobia somehow. I don't remember there being a gay reindeer in the story, but apparently maybe there was, there's homophobia. Look, I think all of these criticisms are

perfectly valid and important and warranted, as I'm sure you agree. But as I've been thinking about this since Huffington Post brought it up, and I've been thinking about Rudolph the Red Does Reindeer now, and I've realized that there's a bigger problem with the story, and it has to do with plausibility. Now, stay with me here, because I know you're thinking, what are you talking about, Matt? A story about a flying reindeer, how is that implausible? Well, I know on the surface, it seems like it makes perfect sense, but just let's review. Just think about this for a second. And somehow, the Huffington Post, they missed this. Okay, they're criticizing all these other parts.

They miss this part of the story. Santa is about to head out with all the toys, but then he sees that it's foggy. So he goes, well, we're going to have to cancel Christmas. No Christmas, it's foggy. We can't go out. We can't see. How am I supposed to fly this sleigh when I can't see? But then he says, hey, hold on a second.

Where's that freak with the shiny nose? Yeah, get him in here, and maybe he can finally be of some use. And so they fly off with Rudolph leading the way through the fog, and everybody lives happily ever after, right? Not so fast. This doesn't actually make sense. Think about it. Santa was about to cancel Christmas because of a patch of fog,

but then Rudolph bailed him out. So am I supposed to believe that Santa had never run into fog before? He flies around the entire world in December. And he never hit bad weather, never fog, never a snowstorm, never a blizzard, never a rainstorm, nothing. He had no contingency plan for bad weather and had to rely on the convenient facial deformity of a socially scorned reindeer. Not to mention, he carries out this operation at night. And this is the first time he ever needed a headlights? Something is not adding up here. That's all I'm saying.

Now, I know you might argue, and I thought about this too. I said, well, we don't know exactly when the Rudolph story took place. Maybe it was, maybe this was Santa's first ever mission. Well, that doesn't work either. Watch the show. Do your research. Look at the kinds of toys that are in Santa's sack that he's bringing to all the kids. There are toy trains in there.

What does that tell you? Well, steam locomotives didn't exist before the 19th century. St. Nick was born in the fourth century. That's 1,500 years. That means he was on the job for at least 1,500 years. And never once had he dealt with fog in 1,500 years? I'm not buying it. I'm just not buying.

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't doubt the general historical veracity of Santa and Rudolph. I'm just saying something is wrong here. Santa wanted Rudolph on that sleigh, but it had nothing to do with the fog. So what was the real reason? I don't know, but I'm going to find out. Cue dramatic music. And I want to thank Covino Post for bringing up this subject so that maybe finally we can get to the bottom of all of these mysteries.

Hope you guys have a great weekend. I'll talk to you next week. Godspeed. Thank you.