The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 8 - The Great Disadvantages Our Sons Face In Modern America

Episode Date: April 12, 2018

We're told that men have all the privilege, but that's not true. Females are the beneficiaries of several enormous privileges in our society. Boys are broken down while girls are built up and encouraged. Here are a few examples of how this works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the show, everybody. Thanks for watching. Hope you've had a great morning so far. So I want to get into something I wrote about yesterday. I wrote a piece yesterday called the, what was it called? Oh, the four things that are destroying boys in our culture. And I want to talk about that. I want to bring that conversation over to this forum as well because I think it's so important.

Especially in a society where we hear so much about. We hear about two things quite a bit. We hear, number one, that boys are privileged, that men are privileged. There's this mystical male privilege that we're always told about, and that we rarely see it manifest into anything, into anything tangible, but we're told that it's there, that men are so privileged to be in this culture. And then number two, we're told about the persecution and the oppression of women. And in the midst of all this, while we're having this discussion about male privilege, and while we've got feminist complaining about, oh, they're so persecuted, they're persecuted because, you know, female actresses in Hollywood don't make as much. A female actress in a movie made only $5 million while a male actor on the same movie made $15 million.

Oh, my gosh, while we're talking about that kind of persecution, or, oh, my goodness, you don't want to pay for my birth control? Are you kidding me? I'm oppressed. Pay for my birth control. So while we're having that conversation, boys, concentrating specifically here on boys, on boys, on young men, they are dying. I mean, literally dying in many cases. but also inside. Men are dying inside.

There's this emptiness, this confusion, this kind of hollowness that we are fostering in boys. And so I want to discuss that and talk about the things that lead to that. You know, the great challenges that boys face in our culture. Or another way of putting it, the disadvantages. there are some unique disadvantages that men, particularly young boys, suffer in our culture that women either do not suffer at all or they don't suffer at all to the same degree. So the first thing, and I talked about this in the video I did yesterday as well, but I want to focus on it because I think this is one aspect of the plight of men that isn't focused on nearly enough.

but our culture just relentlessly praise upon a boy's weaknesses. We, now, I just imagine the world that a 13-year-old boy inhabits, okay? Just put your, if you can, just put yourself into the, into the world, into the mindset, put yourself into the shoes of a, of a 13-year-old boy, of the average 13-year-old boy in America. So if you're this boy, that means that you've long since been exposed to hardcore pornography. You probably watch it regularly. The average age of first exposure to pornography is, I think, 10 or 11 by, according to most studies. And I think that that's a pretty conservative estimate.

I think for many kids, it's much, much younger than that. But let's say 10 or 11. So he's long since been exposed to hardcore pornography. He watches it regularly, probably. He doesn't really understand what it is. or why he's even finds it appealing, but he watches it. And then puberty hits at right around 13. And his hormones are going crazy.

They're going haywire inside his head. His brain is hardwiring itself to focus obsessively on sex. Now, that isn't his fault. He didn't choose this. This is just how he is. This is the biological imperative. There was a study done a little while ago that said, that men, I forget how it was phrased exactly,

but basically men focus more on sex than they do on food. So if a man had to choose between food or sex, he would take sex. I think some of that stuff is kind of sensational. I think if a guy's starving to death in the desert and he has to choose between the two things, he's probably going to take the food, I would think. But even if that's a little sensational, we know the reality is that especially for boys

when they're going through puberty, there is this intense preoccupation with sex that just kind of hits them. All of a sudden, like a ton of bricks, and they don't even know where it's coming from, they don't understand it. And he feels just this biological impulse to go out and to find a sexual partner, even though he doesn't understand this urge. his conception of human sexuality has been perverted and degraded and confused by the porn habit he developed in sixth grade. But still, he is now, at the age of 13, a boy becomes fertile, a fertile. A boy can conceive a child at the age of 13, even though girls his age, for the most part, are not fertile. So this is, again, this is biology. This is his body doing this, saying, oh, well, now you can have babies.

now you're going to be focused on sex. And the boy, even though, of course, he's too young for all this. He's too young for sex, but he can't escape it. He can't escape sex. It's all over his computer. It's all over his phone. It's all over social media. It's all over the TV.

It's all over the music he listens to. It's all over the advertisements. It's billboards and just everywhere he turns. You know, even the magazine rack and the supermarket. I mean, everywhere he turns, and his hormones are already going crazy, he's already preoccupied, and everywhere he turns, there's this temptation, there's this praying upon what's already preoccupying his head. And then he goes to school, and he sees that his female classmates are dressed like strippers.

And in fact, most of the places that he goes in life, that's how the women are dressed. And because they say, well, this is my body, it's my, you know, you just don't look. It's not my problem. It's not my problem if I'm, you know, leading these boys into sin. It's not my problem at all. It's your problem. I don't care about them because that's the attitude that we fostered in girls. It seems that everyone is doing everything they can to make a degenerate and a creep out of him,

even as they demand that he not become a degenerate or a creep. They're doing everything they can. literally everything they can to make him into one while saying, well, hey, never become this thing that we are trying our hardest to turn you into. And so we demand self-discipline. We demand self-control from this boy while providing him absolutely no tools whatsoever to develop them. And rather than tools, we just give him temptation upon temptation, upon temptation,

non-stop temptation everywhere he goes all day, every day, right at the moment when his brain is least able to cope with it or overcome it. And even if, so that's all bad enough, even if the boy possesses this kind of superhuman moral fortitude, the kind of moral fortitude that he's going to need to pursue chastity and purity in the midst of this degenerate sex craze culture, even if he has that. well, what's he going to meet? When he goes out and he tries to pursue chastity and purity, what's he going to meet from our society? Mockery, discouragement.

The very people who demand that he respect women and control himself, those same people will then heap scorn on him if he tries to do exactly what they demand he do. We blame boys for not being virtuous enough, and then if they try to be virtuous, we laugh. at them. That's the situation a boy is in. Again, in that case, the boy is going to need to call upon this kind of superhuman courage one more time so he can, just like he rejected the temptations, now he has to, now he has to reject all the jeers and everything so that he can walk this path to virtue, and he's going to have to walk it on his own with no help from anyone, including his parents much of the time. Because that brings us to the second disadvantage. In our culture, there is a lack of male leadership and male role models.

And it is truly catastrophic. We know some of the statistics. We know that 20% of the kids in this country grow up without dads in the home. That's 17 million kids. In the black community, the percentage is 70 or 80%. Okay, 70 to 80% of the kids in the black community grow up in fatherless homes, which is, again, a catastrophic, apocalyptic number that a community cannot survive like that

when you've only got 20 to 30% of your kids who have dads at home. Now, on the other hand, almost every kid has a mother in the home with rare exception. So a girl will have a female role model in her mother. and not only that, but when she goes to school, most of the teachers, I think 75, 76% of teachers in the public school system are women. So she goes to school and she's got female role models at school. And she's even more likely to have a grandmother in her life than a grandfather because men die five or six years before women do.

So she's got no shortage of female role models. She's got female role models just basically falling out of the sky. I mean, they're everywhere. Everywhere she turns, there's a female role model. model, which is great, and we should celebrate that, we should be happy for that. That's a fantastic thing. It's also a profound advantage that girls have over boys, even though boys have privilege. They're so privileged, but they're not even privileged enough to have a dad around to say, hey, this is what a man is supposed to do. And even the boys who have dads in the home,

that doesn't mean that they have male role models. You'll find very often, that despite the father's physical presence, the mother is still the spiritual leader in the home. Among Christians, I don't know what the exact number is, but statistically, it's the mother who takes the child, the children to church while the dad stays home in his pajamas, too lazy to even get up and go to church.

She's the one who takes over the religious duties of the family. In most families now, the mother is the spiritual leader. So the father, what is the father? He's a warm body, you know, taking up space. He's a paycheck maybe. Hopefully he goes out and brings home a paycheck at least. But many of these dads, they're not leading their family. And they are not providing an example to their sons.

They're just leaving their sons, hanging them out to dry and saying, hey, you figure it out. So if a boy wants to be a man, if he wants to know how to be a man, and that, by the way, is something that we need to teach kids. A boy needs to be taught how to be a man. A girl needs to be taught how to be a girl, how to be a woman. But many boys, they don't have anyone around to teach them that. So either they can turn to their mother and they can hope that their mother can somehow teach them how to be a man. And she can do her best and she can even do a heroic job in trying to teach that lesson.

but she's never going to be able to do it the way that a man can because when it comes to how to be a man, a woman can tell you based on her observations what she thinks a man does, but she cannot show you. She's a woman. All she can show you is what a woman does. It takes a man to show another man what a man does.

So if he doesn't want to turn to his mother, then what's he going to do? What do many boys in this? culture do? What's the next place? You can't, you can't look in the home. You don't look to the schools. You know, you're not going to church. You can't look to the church. So where do you look then for your male role model? You turn on the TV. And many of these boys, now they're turning to musicians. They're turning to actors, celebrities, superheroes for their idea of masculinity. and they develop this cartoonish kind of hollow idea of manhood,

and they become cartoonish hollow men. That's what I notice when I, you know, when I look around, I see a lot of cartoon men walking around. Do you know what I mean? A lot of these men, they're cartoons. They've got this idea of masculinity that's cartoonish. and they're walking around, it's like they're wearing a costume

because they don't even know who they are. So that's another disadvantage. Third, the education system is designed for girls. There's a reason why girls outperform men, outperform boys in the school system. And it's not because they're smarter, statistically. You know, girls are not any smarter than boys. Yet, they do so much better in school.

even though the boys with all their privilege, somehow they can't even get, somehow they can't even get good grades in school. Why is that? Because the classroom is set up, is set up to foster or to cater to the girls. It is set up to reward the kind of calm, organized demeanor that's natural to girls. Boys are not like that for the most part, with exception. boys are not like that. Boys are rambunctious.

They have physical energy. You know, they have trouble sitting still. I got a four-year-old boy at home. This is him totally. I mean, he's got, he's bouncing off the walls. He's got all this energy. He's got trouble sitting still. He doesn't like sitting still.

He's not able to focus attentively on a dull task for a prolonged period of time. My daughter can sit there and, you know, she can draw a picture. She can sit still for, for, um, an hour or more and just do something. I mean, she could sit there and brush her doll's hair. She could set up a tea party. She could do something like that. Meanwhile, my son is bouncing off the walls. He's pretending to be the Hulk. He's, uh, you know, that's what he's doing. He's saying, Daddy, let's play. Can we go? Let's play tag. Let's play hide and see. Can we go outside? I mean, he wants to do things. That's what, that's what boys want to do. But the classroom is not designed

for kids like that. It doesn't know what to do with them. It can't do anything with them. So it penalizes them. It penalizes boys for being boys. As a result, boys get lower grades. Boys are more likely to drop out of school. Boys are more likely to be expelled, to be suspended.

Remember, with all their privilege, they've all got this privilege, but they're failing out of school, they're dropping out, they're getting expelled, they're getting suspended. And worst of all, I think, is that boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. Listen to this figure, okay? By high school, 20% of boys will have been diagnosed with ADHD,

and a large number of them will be on drugs. Somehow, you know, we never stopped to ask ourselves, why is it that boys are somehow more susceptible to this mysterious mental? condition. That's crazy, isn't it? If this is really just a mental condition and anyone can get it, then why does it always affect boys? Why are boys the white, can anyone explain that? We never stop to consider that maybe what we're doing. It's that we're not diagnosing individual boys with ADHD. What we're doing instead is we are diagnosing boyhood itself. We're, we are saying boyhood itself is a disease, and there's no place for it in school. Now, if the school system were not predicated

on sitting still and memorizing and regurgitating information and filling out dittoes and worksheets, okay, if the school system were not predicated on that, there would be no ADHD. It would be like magic. All the ADHD cases in the world would just evaporate. It would be gone because it's all conditional. ADHD. exists in the classroom. It doesn't exist in the woods when your son goes out and plays in the woods and he's playing with sticks and he's climbing trees. There's no, there's no ADHD there, is there? There's no ADHD in a tree, in a tree fort. It's only in a classroom. Because we've decided that, well, we need boys to sit still for seven hours a day, five days a week for 12 years, nine months

out of the year repeating information. That's what we need them to do. And if they can't do it, we will stuff pills into their face and make them. And if they still can't do it, kick them out of school. But that's privilege. That's their privilege. I mean, seriously, before you tell me about male privilege, have we turned womanhood into a disease? Well, actually, we kind of had. That's, that's We actually have done that with the birth control pill. But that's a different conversation. Number four, masculinity is denigrated in this culture. Now, you'd think after we just got through the first three steps,

and you'd think, well, that's enough. I mean, we can lay off now, right? We've done enough to these boys. We've thrown sex in their face every second of the day. we have deprived them of role models, we have put them into an education system that treats their personality as a disease. So we've done all that.

I mean, aren't we satisfied now? Can we just leave them alone at that point? Can we just let them be? But no. Because if they manage to survive that gauntlet, then the next step is we bury them under just mounds and mounds of self-loathing. We attack masculinity.

Now, femininity is also, attacked in our culture, but not nearly as explicitly, not directly. Nobody is going around and saying that femininity is toxic or fragile. Nobody talks about female privilege. Nobody does that. Nobody's going to say that all women are dangerous. Nobody's saying that. These are the special denigrations and accusations that are reserved for men and for boys. So think about what happens. Think about a boy, you know, just follow along these four steps. And think about a boy that falls into every category I've listed. And that's, that's millions of boys do. There are millions of boys who you start with, they're watching porn at 10 or 11. They hit

puberty. They're dealing with all that. They don't have a dad at home. They go to school. They get diagnosed with ADHD. They're told there's something wrong. Their entire time, they spend 12, 13 years in grade school. And the entire time they're there, they're told there's something wrong with you. There's something wrong with you. Sit down, shut up, repeat the information on the ditto. Shut up, sit down. There's something wrong with you.

You're diseased. You have a condition. Take this pill. Why didn't you take your pill today? And that's what the boy is dealing with for 12 or 13 years. And then he comes out and let's say he manages to go to college. and that's when the feminism hits him and that's when the feminist go after

Abby, he's just, he's barely, he can barely walk, he's emerging from this gauntlet, like just bruised and battered and on drugs and everything, and he gets to college and then that's what, you're a man, you've got privilege, men are dangerous,

and then at that point it's just his defenses are down, he's susceptible to it, there's nothing he can do. So after we have broken men, down, broken boys down, I should say. The final step, now that we have them like putty in our hands, now the final step is to remove their masculinity from them, a masculinity that they've never really come into in the first place, that they never understood, that they never grew into because they never had, because of the last three things I mentioned. And so it's not very hard for

our culture then to come in and the feminists and the college colleges, they can come in and they can just take this masculinity that's already bruised and battered and they just remove it from the man and feminize him. Why do you think it is? There's another medical mystery here. So we've got the medical mystery of why is it mostly boys that have ADHD. Another medical mystery is, why is it mostly men that are transgender? Have you noticed that? Most of these stories that you hear about transgender eight-year-olds, whose parents are so accepting of it, which is, by the way, their parents are abusive and should be in prison,

but their parents are so accepting. In almost every case, it's a boy, turning into a girl. And then as you get older, the transgender community is, the transgender community is comprised primarily of men. Why is that? could it have something to do with the fact that there is a crisis of identity in American manhood? There is a crisis of identity because we've got these boys to grow up, and they never learn what it means to be a man. They never learn to embrace their masculinity.

They never learn to see it as a good and constructive and beautiful thing. they never learned that there's a place for men in society. They never learned that society needs men to be men and to do certain things. And men are the ones who are fighting the wars and building the bridges and building the buildings and protecting and providing. It's men doing that mostly. I mean, men literally built this civilization. But they don't learn that because that would be upsetting to the feminists. And that might hurt a girl's feeling.

so we can't talk about that. And so what do we do? All of the things that men uniquely contribute, we say you can't talk about that. No, you're not unique at all. You don't contribute anything special at all. Shut up, you're sexist, patriarchy. How dare you suggest that there's anything special about being a man?

There's nothing special about you. You're not special. Being a man is nothing. A woman can do anything that a man can do. that's what we say to men. But to women, we say, oh, my gosh, being a woman is beautiful. It's a special. You can do anything.

I mean, the world needs women. I mean, we need more women's CEOs and more women in business. We need more women in the military. We need women. We need more women. We need women ghostbusters and women superheroes. We need women all over the place because, you know, we can do. It's just men, women are so special.

And then a boy tries to pipe up and say, well, what about being? I'll shut up you. And then somehow mysteriously, we end up with a bunch of men who are feminized and in some cases literally feminized. They literally

try to become women. I think all these things are related. And I think we need to face this because this is what our sons will face and we shouldn't look away from it. And if we care about our sons and we love our sons, then we need to prepare

them to deal with all these things because this is the world that they're entering into. All right, everybody. Thank you for watching, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.