The Munk Debates Podcast - Be It Resolved: Men Are Obsolete

Episode Date: August 26, 2020

Since the beginning of human civilization, men have been the dominant sex. But now, for the first time, a host of indicators suggest that women are not only achieving equality with men but are fast emerging as the more successful sex of the species. Critics of the argument that men are in decline argue that the age-old power structures associated with “maleness” remain as entrenched as ever. They say men still retain significant control over the workplace, the family, and society at large. The Munk Debates shares an abridged version of the 2013 debate about gender in the 21st century featuring four female public intellectuals: Hanna Rosin, senior editor at The Atlantic, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, Maureen Dowd, world famous academic on gender and culture, Camille Paglia, and Caitlin Moran, author of the global best seller “How to be a Woman”. Sources: CTV, CBS, CNBC, MSNBCBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesmen to statesmen like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background to where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. Welcome to the Monk Debates podcast. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. Free of spin, focused on the facts and animated by smart conversation.

To arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved, men are obsolete. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. Well, since the beginning of the first of the debate, be it resolved, men are obsolete. Well, since the beginning of human civilization, men have been the dominant sex. But now, for the first time, a host of indicators suggest that women are not only achieving equality with men, but are fast emerging as the more successful sex of our species. Women now make up the majority of university degree holders,

and while women's participation in the workforce is on the rise, the opposite is true for men. Joining me from Philadelphia. A new study claims one reason behind the steady decline in the United States. States' marriages is a shortage of, quote, economically attractive men. Cornell University researchers. By that measure, women chief executives have made more than their male counterparts over the last five years. That's according to a new...

Critics of the argument that men are in decline argue that the age-old power structures associated with maleness remain as entrenched as ever. They say that men still retain significant control over the workplace, the family, and society at large. On Thursday, the last woman with a viable shot at the nomination left the race, leading to the reality for many women that no matter which party wins, for four more years, the White House will once again be occupied by a white man. On a previous main stage monk debate at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto, four leading female public intellectuals examine the question of where the sexes are headed in the 21st century. Here for your listening pleasure is an abridged podcast version of this memorable Monk debate. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Monk Debates. My name is Rudyard Griffith, and it's my privilege to act as both the organizer of this debate series

and to once again serve as your moderator. And tonight, ladies and gentlemen, we want to expand the focus of this debate for the first time beyond geopolitics, beyond international economics to consider one of the big sociological questions of our time. That being the decline of the performance of men relative to women, in the family, in the workplace, in schools and universities, and in once all male bastions such as politics and business. Is this a broad and permanent trend in post-industrial societies such as Canada, one that will fundamentally reshape family life, gender relations, our workplace, and society at large? Or, and it's a big or, are the millennial old power structures, economic, political, cultural,

created by men, for men, still firmly embedded in our society. suggesting that men and mailness is anything but a spent civilizational force. Speaking first for the motion, be it resolved, men are obsolete, is the senior editor of the Atlantic Magazine, the author of the definitive international bestseller on tonight's topic, The End of Men. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Hannah Rosen. Joining Ms. Rosen on the pro side of the debate is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. the author of her own big book on this subject,

Are Men Necessary? And as we know her so well, a celebrated New York Times columnist, please welcome her first time to Toronto, Maureen Dowd. Now, let's get our second team of presenters out here, center stage. She's rightly lauded as one of the world's top public intellectuals.

She's the author of a string of iconic books on gender and culture. She writes regularly everywhere from the New York Times to the Hollywood reporter. We know her well. Ladies and gentlemen, Camille Pahlia. Ms. Pallia's debating partner is a cultural phenomenon in her own right. She is a cultural critic,

TV critic at the Times of London, the author of a big global bestseller and new feminist anthem, How to Be a Woman, direct from London, England, Patlin Moore. So it's now time for our debate to formally get underway.

Our speakers, as I mentioned, to have six minutes each. As is customary, the pro side will speak first. Hannah Rosen, you're up. Wow, there's a surprising number of men out there. That's really not good for us, but we'll try. Are men literally obsolete? Of course not.

If we had to prove that, we could never win this debate. For one thing, we haven't figured out how to harvest their sperm without, you know, keeping them alive. It's the end of men because men are failing in the workplace. Over the last few decades, men's incomes have been slowly declining, while women's incomes slowly rise. Last year, only one in five men were not working, something that economists called the greatest social crisis we might face.

Partly, this is because the global economy has been changing rapidly, and men are failing to adjust. Meanwhile, women are moving in the opposite direction. In 2009, they became the majority of the American workforce for the first time in history. And now in every part of America, young, single women have a higher median income than single men, which is incredibly important because that's the age when women and men are sizing each other up and deciding what their futures are going to look

like. As one sorority girl I talked to about her boyfriend put it to me, and remember, sorority girl, not the president of the Women's Studies Center, men are the new ball and chain. It's the end of men because men are failing in schools and women are succeeding. In nearly every country on all but one continent, women are getting about 60% of college degrees, which is what you need to succeed these days. And boys start to fall behind as early as first grade, and many of them just can't catch up. It's the end of men because the traditional household, which was propped up by the male breadwinner, is quickly vanishing. Women and men learn their

social roles at home. Man hunter, woman gatherer, man breadwinner, woman homemaker. But that whole hierarchy is completely broken down. Now we have a new global type called the Alpha Wife, a woman who earns more money than her husband. In the 70s, this was a totally rare breed. You could rarely find her. And now she makes up about 40% of American couples. Women are occupying positions of power that were once totally closed off to them.

The end of men is even more prominent in the working class. When I speak to working class communities, the women in the audience look at me, like what I'm saying is totally completely obvious. The working class is where the men are losing their jobs and losing their roles in their families, and women are doing almost everything, creating virtual matriarchies

in the parts of the country that used to be our bastions of macho traditional values. And when I ask these women, why don't you live with the father of your children? They say to me, shrugging, because he would be just another mouth to feed. I heard that many times, many times when I was reporting. It's the end of men because men have lost their monopoly

on violence and aggression. Women are becoming more sexually confident and something Camille might appreciate, more aggressive in both good ways and bad. Going to war, going to jail, playing sports, and in the case of the real housewives of New Jersey, beating up anyone who knocks a drink out of their hand.

We don't want to castrate men, we don't want to turn them into Unix, we don't even want to feminize them that much. We just want to keep whatever we love about manhood and adjust the parts that are holding men back. Good evening. If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct unless we rush down that ominous, brave new world path where females will clone themselves by parthenogenesis,

as famously do, Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers. A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second and third wave feminism. Men's faults, failings, and foibles have been seized on and magnified

into gruesome bills of indictment. Idiolog professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology. It was always the proper mission of feminism to attack and reconstruct the ossified social practices that had led to wide-ranging discrimination against women.

But surely it was and is possible for a progressive reform movement to achieve that without stereotyping, belittling, or demonizing men. History must be seen clearly and fairly. Obstructive traditions arose, not from men's hatred or enslavement of women, but from the natural division of labor that had developed over thousands of years during the agrarian period and had once immensely benefited and protected women, permitting them to remain at the hearth to care for helpless infants and children. Over the past century, it was labor-saving appliances invented by men and spread by capitalism that liberated women from daily drudgery.

What is troubling in too many books and articles by feminist journalists in the U.S., despite their putative of leftism is an implicit privileging of bourgeois values and culture. The particular focused clerical and managerial skills of the upper middle class elite are presented as the highest desideratum, the ultimate evolutionary point of humanity. But Rosen's triumphalism about women's gains

seem startlingly premature when she says of the sagging fortunes of today's working class couples that they and we had, quote, reached the end of 100,000 years of human history and the beginning of a new era, and there was no going back." This sweeping appeal to history somehow overlooks history's far darker lessons about the cyclic rise and fall of civilizations, which as they become more complex and interconnected,

also become more vulnerable to collapse. The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal. After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again. Oh, sure. That will be the opportunity. gun-toating Amazonian survivalist gal who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock,

but most women and children are expecting men to scrounge for food and water and defend the home turf. Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees,

and bulldozing the landscape or housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings. It is men who do the harrowasing work of in setting and sealing the finely tempered plate glass windows of skyscrapers 30 stories tall. Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world.

These stately colossi are loaded, steered, and offloaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic in which women have found a productive role, but women were not its author. Surely modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due. Maureen Dowd, you are up for your opening statement, please. I've never debated before, and I am so screwed. Even though I grew up in the shadow of the Washington Monument, the Judding Freudian symbol of a capital under male dominion for centuries,

I always knew that men were doomed. That's because I was raised on a steady diet of femme fatals. I love film noir and film noir has one inviolable rule. Deadly is the female. Guys who could be framed easier than Whistler's mother tangled with women who are trouble. And the guys always end up looking like they took a hayride with Dracula. Film noir is about lady killers and women who aren't ladies.

And the women who aren't ladies wind up killing the lady killers. The men seem under a dark spell as though they know their futures are all used up and that femme fatals have the right to pursue happiness in all directions. A classic film noir exchanges, man, you're never around when I need you. Woman, you never need me when I'm around. These mesmerizing black widows make love to their prey and then consume them, which is actually a fairly common practice in nature. Since we're coming up on Valentine's Day, I'll mention that there are more than 80 species

that feature leech babes that devour their male lovers before during and after mating. Praying mantises, green spoon worms, there's a tiny female midge who plunges her probiscis into the male midges head during procreation. Her spittle turning his insides to soup, which she then enjoys as an apra sex snack. beats a cigarette. The male orb weaving spider kills himself before the female has a chance to kill him, turning himself into a plug to prevent other males from copulating, thus ensuring his genes are more likely to live on.

Even more ingenious gene-wise are the whip-tail lizards in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, who procreate on a purely female basis, no males required. Oh, what a tangled gender web we weave. As the great idol of Pino said in Roadhouse, doesn't it ever enter a man's head that a woman can do without him? Women have finally clicked their ruby stilettos three times and realized they have the power. Norman Mailer used to be terrified

that women were going to take over the world and punishment for being bad to them over the centuries. All women needed, he said, were about 100 semen slaves that they could milk every day to keep the race going and have the earth all to themselves. Dream on, Norman. All women need is a few cells in the freezer next to the cherry-flavored vodka, and we're all set. Men are so last century. They seem to have stopped evolving, sulking like Achilles in his tent. Evolutionary biologists, were predicting that in the next 100,000 to 10 million years,

men could disappear, taking video games, Game of Thrones on a continuous loop, and cold pizza in the morning with them. The Y chromosome is renowned evolutionary biologist, David Page told me, fell asleep at the wheel 200 million years ago and was headed toward the cliff. But Paige and others have now learned

that suddenly about 20 million years ago, the Y woke up and veered away from the cliff, repairing itself with duplicates of the cliff, its own genes. Page deduced that the Y said to itself, I don't have a lot left, but what I have left, I'm going to keep. While the Y was shrinking, the X, formerly considered a stayed pristine relic, was growing larger and stronger, acquiring new bunches of genes, some of which play roles in producing sperm. So all those centuries, when you guys were asleep at the wheel, we were tinkering under the hood. When I wrote my book, Armin Necessary, my mom told me to

change the title to men are necessary, period. You'll hurt their feelings, she said. So I want to end with a truism. The comedian Sarah Silverman tweeted recently, Dear men, just because we don't need you anymore doesn't mean we don't want you. Love forever women. Are men obsolete? If men are obsolete, then I personally aspire to this level of obsolescence, holding 99% of the world's wealth, totaling 66 of Forbes's 71 most powerful people in the world list, being every single Pope, American President and Secretary General of the UN, and in charge of every military force on earth. If this is men becoming obsolete, I'm intrigued to see what they will be able to achieve once they've downloaded some

manner of software update. Men are doing quite well all things considered. Of course, I understand the general argument here. We've basically got to do it. a shifting global labour market that increasingly favours someone who can spend 10 hours a day wearing a headset, eating wreaths' pieces, and making emotionally intelligent chitty chat. We favour them over someone who can

break a pig in half with their bare hands. Whilst men might not currently be obsolescent, the future does look 100% female. Except, if true, that would suck as much as when the past was 100% male. I don't have many rules in life other than do not eat

feta cheese that tastes fizzy. But my big one is be polite. All harm and wrong in the world occurs when people forget to be polite. Ladies, remember how annoyed we were when men said that women were obsolete? How all those millennias of men treating women as like second-class citizens seemed impolite? And we took all that valium and essentially self-harmed by getting massive perms. Let's not now do the same thing back to men. Not least because the state, statistics that suggest that men are becoming obsolete. Aren't the kind of men that I wish would become obsolete, asshats in private jets,

furthering the various sundry causes of evil, but essentially working-class men. Given that my feminism is, A, strident, B, fueled by cocktails and C. Marxist, I'm kind of not really up for women with soaring prospects dumping on working-class men, who are essentially just standing around and going, where have all the jobs in low-paid pig-harving gone?

And why is my wife making her hair so huge, dry and curly? I'm confused and unhappy. Look, my feminism is neither pro-women nor anti-men, but thumbs up for the seven billion. Thumbs up for everyone on this little blue-green planet trying to get through the day. In a world of infinite trouble, the idea of equality isn't some fabulous luxury

that we can gift ourselves when we're feeling morally flush. Equality is not humanity's cashmere bed socks. It's not a present like champagne, absolute human equality is a necessity like water, because if we look at a map of the world where every nation struggling with poverty, child mortality and political instability is marked in red, it's notable that its bright red shaming rash

coincides almost identically with the most unequal countries in the world. In the 21st century, humanity's greatest resource isn't oil or titanium or gold, it's brains. Anytime we make a choice as a society to offline a section of society, we waste these billions of tons of brains, a million ways for the world to be better. And this is equally true when men said for 100,000 years,

women will never happen, as it would be now for women to say for the next 100,000 years, men are obsolete. If feminism is the simple, truthful observation that women should be equal to men, then the future is that we must do everything to achieve that, whether in some cases it's men helping women achieve equality or in other cases women helping men achieve equality.

We need with urgency to stop terming things in terms of problems of men and problems of women and start seeing all problems for what they are, the problems of humanity. Women cannot win if men are losing and vice versa, because we all live quite near to each other. We keep having sex with each other and giving birth to each other and being related to each other. When half of us falls, the other half staggers. If working class men are struggling, the first people it will impact on are working. working class women. It's easy to forget this, but we are the same species. Women are not

from Venus and men are not from Mars. I know because I shared a bunk bed with my brother and unfortunately for him at the time I discovered masturbation, he was not 34.8 million miles away. Good. Anyway, if men do become obsolete, if men do become obsolete, then as anyone who studies popular culture will tell you, it won't be for long. They'll be phased out for 10 years and disappear and then some hipster will find one in a thrift store and go, oh my God, do you remember when we had men? It'd be like so ironic and amusing if I had one of these back in my house. And suddenly men will be fashionable then and you'll have to pay 900 pounds for them on eBay. And people will start making them on Etsy out of bits of wire and beads. Do we want that?

No. Think about it. Do women gain anything from men becoming obsolete? If we are the only ones triumphing in work and education, economy and politics and business, but yet we still retain our old kingdoms of homemaking and child raising, do we win? No, because if that happens, then we will be doing everything. And I don't know about you, but I'm quite knackered. The question is, are men obsolete?

And my conclusion to this question is, no, I won't let you be, you f***ers. We are going 50-50 on this way. Hannah, I've seen you diligently taking notes through these opening statements, because you spoke first, I want to give you the first chance to rebut, something that you've heard on the other side. Anything that I heard on the other side? Yeah, look, what jumps out is you at saying, look, you've got it wrong on this point. Oh, just this idea that, like, somehow this is being mean to men.

It's like, if you were up to me, we would just put all the damn factories back in all the places where the men have lost their jobs. Like, talking about what the truth is is not the same as being mean. Like, there's this thing about men where you're never supposed to say that they need any help, or you're never supposed to say that they're suffering in any way because that is mean. or that's degrading them. It's just the truth. Like, we just have to face the truth that, like, there's a certain kind of manner

sort of disappearing from the face of the earth, and you've got to try and help them, and you can't help them unless you tell the truth. So... It is very even-handed. There is none of the rancor that I spoke of, I think, in your book. But it does seem to me there's an unfairness

insofar as the only men who gain voice in your book are those who are willing to confess their victim status And I felt that there was a kind of an absence of the very strong voices of men that I hear as I listen to sports radio, which I do around the clock. You listen to sports radio? Yes. That is the only place where working class men can be heard in our culture. Men are calling from trucks, from highways, from construction spots, and so on. Men who have not graduated from high school, but who would analyze an incredible detail,

exactly what was wrong with the defensive line of the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday. Would you like hang out at construction sites? Since my first book, sexual personi, I have sung the praises of construction as a sublime male poetry. And I think that the indifference of the upper middle class feminists, okay, to the actual labor that is going on all around us by these men who are very, gallant in their silent service I think is a distortion. Let's bring, yeah. Katlin, come in this because you are a self-described Marxist, so surely you have a classical

Marxist analysis here for it. Well, first of all, I just want to say that although the nobility of construction is amazing, I did get ripped off on my double glazing by the last guys that came in the did by house. Do you get recommendations, not all men are trustworthy builders. I just want to point out the irony of the fact that it's taken for women to discuss the end of men. Like, why aren't men discussing this and working at what they're going to do next? Kind of, you know, in a world where...

You know where they're not discussing it because they just pretend it's not happening? Like, they just sort of crawl off and pretend it's not happening, which just drives me nuts. It's just quite funny, though, you know, kind of multitasking anyway. We're doing everything and we're also going to make... You're kind of ending. Come on. Come on. Come on. Get a plan together.

Come on. We're taking out to it. Come on. We're going to help you out here. But, Catlin, address what... I mean, it's happening in the UK as much as in North America. There is now... You line it up. education, work participation, family life, there is a type of man out there who is falling behind, has fallen behind in a pretty profound way. What's striving that in society? Well, capitalism, obviously. I mean, the thing that I think is very important is, you know, as I've learned more about feminism

as I've gone along, that it's very important, and I sort of said that in the speech, that we stop talking about problems of men and problems of women and talk about problems of humanity. This isn't a question of kind of women overtaking men. It's a question of the economy changing, and the global economy is changing. And I think it's a massive diversionary tactic that we kind of, you know, that we phrase it as men against women, where it's, you know, it's the underclasses

and the peasants that need to revolt against the oppressive, the impressive emperous. But I will say I'm fairly neutral on whether the end of men is good or bad. Like I don't think the end of men is like totally awesome and women win and like, yay, yay, yay, yay. Some parts of the stuff I describe in my book is like terrible that there are no dads around

or that women have to do absolutely everything. I'm just saying it's happening. I'm not saying it's awesome. I'm just saying it is, you know. I don't accept this dark view of men fading on the world economic landscape. I just don't accept it. And part of my opening statement I didn't have time to read is that I've been calling for 20 years for a revalorization of the trades in modern education.

I feel that there is a very banal, compulsory college track these days in primary schools, with funneling smart students along to a university curriculum that's extremely vapid. And that what is needed is much more of, something like this going on in Germany, which is cooperation between primary schools and industry and real vocational technical training going on. I think that the upper middle class has to get over, its social snobber. about manual labor

because I've been teaching in arts okay hold it well Camille let's have the other side I'd say I couldn't agree more I mean that's why I talk about this stuff it collides perfectly with the huge problem of income inequality which is like the biggest sin

that's going on right now all over the world and so you keep saying look these guys are hurting these guys are hurting these guys are hurting and then maybe someday someone will do something about it I always talk about Germany because Germany has this like great respect for the dudes who can you know make the perfect excellent refrigerator or whatever.

Like, I wish we had such great respect for those dudes. Camille, you want to jump in on that? Well, I'm just saying, I've been teaching for 40 years in art schools, where people work with their hands. And I come out of an Italian-American culture where to work with your hands and to make beautiful things and not just art objects, but things with fabric

and, you know, and metal and basket weaving and so on, and leather. And I said that's what we need to do. We need to raise up the cultural status of manual labor. This is, to me, one of central points about the low esteem in which working class men are held is partly due to this shift to a very snobbish, white upper middle class elite sensibility in the U.S.

No, but I mean, Camille, you always thinking like this is feminists putting this out there. It's not feminist, it's just the reality. It's like the manufacturing era is over. feminist didn't like create some fiction about the working class man. The working class man is rude right now. Can I also just stick up for the idea of kind of middle class elitist, academic feminist, of which I'm not one, I never even went to school. But can we not have both the idea that we could revive, you know, the thing is,

you know, with men and women, if men have created something, we can keep that and preserve that and keep that going, and then women can go off and create something new and the two can run side by side. It's not like one system has to win out over the other. Maureen, let's have you come in on this point. I'm just, you know, manliness today, that iconic image of the construction worker. It's not really as much of the male identity now

as it was a generation ago. No, I think we just need to reassure men and, you know, that they can lie back and relax and relinquish some of the burdens of responsibility that you've carried so sturdily for millennia. Try on a frilly apron over your white beater t-shirt, see how fetching it looks while you fetch. Rather than being a boring old necessity, you are now a luxury like ice cream. Now, Camille, this is what you rally against this kind of ornamentalization of men.

You think men are quite different in terms of the trajectory of civilization? Yes, yes. In fact, one of the things that kind of rankled me in Hannah's book, at one point where she says that manhood has so receded that pickup trucks are now mere accessories. Okay. In other words, and that really bothered me because it's simply not true of the contractors who arrive at my suburban house. What to do the lawn and the roof and everything. Pickup trucks are not accessories for working class men. I'm talking about Brooklyn, where you walk into a shop in Brooklyn and no doubt Toronto.

and in that shop, it's like this sort of ornamentalized masculinity. So the dudes from both, they have a beard, you know, they buy a flask and a playboy. Like that's all that these shops sell. They sell lumberjack shirt, flasks and a playboy. That's, you know, there it's ornamental, like in other places. Well, I just, as a student of history, I just have a sense of foreboding about processes that are at work in the world. I think she's incredibly, pardon me, with all due respect, naive, okay, to think that we are moving towards some sort of, you know, an

economic paradise where the women are going to gain control. I think that with the women's advance is one of many things in the West that jihadists consider decadence. I think it's, you know, it's one of the targets of jihadism, and that, you know, I've studied my entire life, the fate of Rome, and how Rome thought it would last forever, but there were the determined bands of vandals, very fast-moving, who were able to bring that culture down. I'm concerned about anything which undermines the identity or prestige of men, because I do believe there are going to be political consequences to a culture where women are, women who tend in general in a non-militaristic direction.

You think that we're heading toward a nanny state mentality, where we're just going to cater to social needs, and that there's no necessity for us to remain vigilant about the future. So I'm very concerned. So what would you have us do, just like plug the men's ears and pretend it's not happening? Just be like, it's okay, it's okay. You're okay.

I want to build up men's sense of masculine identity again. I want to liberate education. I think that our primary school system is constructed like a prison. And that it teaches absolutely nothing except socially approved, trendy thoughts. Yes, and it totally favors girls. And so until you are actually honest about the boy crisis, until you actually allow people to hear the word

that boys are like seriously suffering in school. You know, in America, people have been talking about the boy crisis since 1990, and we pretend. still it's not happening because we can't accept this idea that boys might need help or that boys are suffering. So we're just like, it's okay, everything's okay. But it's not okay. As you point out, when Christina Hoff-Somers raised these issues, many people said, oh, this is not true, and now it's become absolute common wisdom, okay, that, yes, boys are in crisis.

And as far as I'm concerned, the way to do it is to really look at our educational system. I think that it's toxic. It's toxic for creativity. It produces clones. Okay, it produces people who have been, who are deprived of energy and thought. We have an extremely mediocre educational system right now that is whittling down male initiative

and is compounding this problem. And I totally acknowledge, and as overall point, about this long transition between the old manufacturing base and the white collar. But Camille, this is what, you're agreeing with, Hannah, so what I'm trying to understand is, do you think this is a moment, a phase it will pass, and that qualities of mailness and male identity will reassert themselves, so therefore

things will be better in the future? I guess when I'm just trying to... No, I'm saying that... No, I say maleness is not going to reassert itself until we revolutionize the educational system. And another thing I've been calling for is for us to be looking at the way young women are put onto a male track in terms of their own college and graduate and postgraduate education, that there's no room in there for wiggle room for an ambitious, smart, talented young woman to decide that she would like to have children early. So I've been calling for colleges and universities who profess to endorse women's rights to be much, more flexible. That's a very good point. Let's have Marine come in on that because, you know, luckily we're not the United States where what do you get? Three, four weeks of maternity leave?

I mean, there are a lot of structural barriers in American society and Western society that prevent women from being as successful as they would like to be. So doesn't that suggest that men aren't obsolete? Yes. Well, obviously we should be more like France and that respect in terms of health care for women. But I just wanted to tell a funny story because I spent a lot of time in Saudi Arabia. And so the last time I was there, I was doing a feature for vanity fair

and traveling around. And so I had read that the grave of Eve, the original Eve, was in Saudi Arabia. So I asked my guide to take me there. And he just looked at me like I was crazy. and he goes, you can't go there, you're a woman. For a second, I tried to reason with him and explain why a woman should be allowed to see Eve's grave.

But Saudi Arabia at least is still more modern than the Catholic Church, so there's a lot of work to be done there. Ouch. Hannah, I can tell you want to come in on this point? Which one? Are we talking about maternity leave or international? Just the structural barriers that suggest that, I mean, you've written about this, these structural barriers,

maternity leave, how are the world. workplace is set up so that, you know, work hours, the very structure of modern professional life often is antithetical to a lot of the things that women want to do and how they want to live. Yeah, so we're actually the worst. We don't actually have any maternity leave that's paid at all, and we're maybe one of three countries that doesn't. So it's actually very pathetic. And so the American workplace actually doesn't recognize the person as a whole human being who might have other needs. But if I had my druthers, I actually wouldn't do the Swedish system where you have a year of maternity, because that puts all sorts of pressures on women to behave in a certain

way, and they actually have a more gender, unequal workplace than we do. I think what you have to do is actually Sweden 2.0, which is consider it a kind of gender-neutral proposition. Like you have men and women can take time off, which is, I think, what Canada just did, or you do what France doesn't like focus on child care rather than just maternity leave. So you create a thing where it's not like women. So the employer's not only looking at the women and saying, oh, they're the ones who are going to screw me and take a year off. It's like everybody's job to take care of the children, not just the women's job, even though women like do it more. You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast. If you like this podcast, check out our other episodes, including debates on everything

from the U.S. election to the effectiveness of COVID lockdowns to whether it's to defund the police. All free to download or stream on our website, monkdebates.com. Okay, we are going to go into closing statements. That was a great discussion. And as we agreed beforehand, we're going to have the closing statements in the opposite order. Catlin Moran is going. First, you're up, three minutes. Okay, two things. One, life on earth is an experiment. We are a blue-green petri dish. And two, if you add up all the oppressed minorities of the world, so that's all the women, all the LGBT people, all the disabled and all the people of colour, that's about 80 to 90% of the world.

Straight white men, the patriarchy, have shaped and ruled our world for 100,000 years on what is basically a skeleton staff. You know, they are a tiny, tiny proportion of the world. They are basically the night shift. They are the holiday cover. And in that time, they raised the pyramids and put Stonehenge in the middle of Salisbury planes and invented the gods and the rick and back of guitar. and New York and Twitter and John Frieda Frisies serum and Lycra.

Yada, yada, yada, oppression. Yes, but you can't deny they got shit done. So, back to life on earth being an experiment. And the most fascinating experiment that we have the potential to run right now is, A, seeing what women turn out to be when they're not afraid and they are empowered and they're not impoverished and have achieved equality, and then B, what as a consequence, men will turn out to be, when they have women as their equals

and finally debate these things together. What will men turn into? How will the triumphing of feminism make us all evolve? I'm so excited to see what little boys will be like when they grow up in a world filled with female presidents and female sports stars and a band that they call the new Beatles that is all female, and his friends scream at that band in the way that girls used to scream at the Beatles.

And then how in turn girls will change when they see boys reacting like that. The kaleidoscopic dizzying wonder of everything that can happen makes me so excited. We are so early on in the experiment of what it is to be a human on earth, and we have so much to look forward to if we hold our nerve. We are on the brink of being able to turn into a whole new species. When we merge physically in the old-fashioned way, we make that most astonishing and precious and awe-inspiring thing, a baby, a new human, a small, infinite future. Imagine what we will make when we merge on every level by merging our intellectual and emotional chemistry into the first ever society that is equally male and female,

when we collaborate on humanity 2.0, how will this change our fundamental ideas of gender and sexuality, what is normal and natural? What is actually female and male? Basically, I'm imagining a world full of moonwalking pansexual David Bowies and Janelle Monase here, and I've genuinely never heard of any better plans for the future than that. So, if you vote against this motion, that is scientifically what we are guaranteed to get. Guaranteed. Literally cash back if you don't, although bear in mind I do get on a plane at 6 a.m. tomorrow

and my cell phone goes straight to answer phone. Thank you. Well done, Catlin. Up next, Maureen Dowd, your final three-minute statement, please. Okay, I'm going to talk really fast. I didn't want to mention this the first time around, given that you were my host. But in order to prove definitively that men are not necessary,

I only need two words. Ted Cruz. I come here seeking refuge from the apocalyptic terror of Ted Cruz's Thunderdome. How on earth did a Canadian almost destroy America? Canadians are usually so nice. For centuries, it was widely thought that women were biologically unsuited to hold leadership positions. It was felt that power was best wielded by men because men were impersonal, unemotional, forthright, and reasonable. Now it is the highly unstable male temperament that is causing alarm.

Male politicians are engaging in sneaky, catty, weepy-ditsy, shrewish behavior that is anything but reasonable and impersonal. We can't even count on men to be effective tech geeks, given the situation with Obama's rollout on health care. Women are affected by lunar tights only once a month. Men have raging hormones every day. As we noticed when Dick Cheney rampaged around the globe like Godzilla, Rob Ford, your hot mess of a mare,

has had many wild outbursts that, if he were a woman, would certainly be labeled hysteria from the Greek for womb. But Hubert a hysteric excuses himself for smoking crack by saying he was in a drunken stupor. And then talks to reporters about his adventures with lady parts. I do want one. one of those bobbleheads, though. Ted Cruz is a scary mean girl.

He threw a hisy fit over Obamacare that shut down the government for 16 days and cost the American economy $24 billion. Rand Paul, the libertarian senator from Kentucky, grew sulky and needed a feigning couch when Rachel Maddow blasted out that he was a kleptomaniac with Wikipedia. The most emotional member of Congress is Speaker John Boehner, who starts blubbering into his Merlot at the slightest sense. sentimental provocation. Unlike his macho-democratic counterpart, Nancy Pelosi, he's not adept at math and counting.

He keeps acting ditsy, bringing Tea Party bills to the floor of the House that do not have the votes to pass. If you want to talk about caddy behavior, consider this. Ken Cuchinelli refused to call Terry McCullough after the Virginia governor's race to congratulate him. Men played so rough and heedlessly with the globe, they almost broke it. So we're going in a different direction. Heck, they wouldn't even ask for directions.

And no, Sarah Palin, that still does not mean you. So you had eight minutes or eight seconds left. Let's give Hannah, we'll pass it over to you Hannah. We'll give you a little bit of grace when you speak last. Up next though is Camille Pallia. Camille, your three minutes, please. I was raised in the 1950s when it was unheard of for women to be ambitious for a career. And with the arrival of the Wims movement in the late 1960s, now young

women feel that every career path is open to them. What I'm concerned about is that feminism has painted itself into a corner and is now completely invisible, really. I mean, there are sites on the web that attract committed feminists, but there are completely invisible. They are completely invisible. Feminism has absolutely no important profile right now in the U.S. I feel that feminism has drifted from any sense of what most people are looking for for value in life. A career is extremely important, but ultimately other things become more important as you age. I often walk on the New Jersey Shore in a very working-class area, the wild woods,

and I'm very moved by seeing these working-class families, multi-generations vacationing together. Something that the upper-middle class ceases to do as it becomes more affluent. People take their own separate vacations. And I see there the joy that, elderly people take in what they have wrought. You have multiple generations vacationing together and these old people can barely get to the shore, to the edge of the water, are sitting in these deck chairs and watching as their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are running around.

No matter what you've done in life, no matter what your status, no matter how much power you've achieved, how much wealth, a point comes where it's all meaningless. There's nothing left but a sense of what you've contributed to life itself. I'm very concerned, okay, that the Western obsession with career success and with status and wealth is actually perverting and distorting our sense of the spiritual dimension, okay, and of the meaning of life itself. I think that feminism needs a major correction back. First of all, lifting the value of children. There's all this talk about child care and maternity leave and so on,

but in point of fact, the feminist movement, second wave feminism, has acted in a way that has tended to denigrate the stay-at-home mom, and in fact, in its obsession with abortion, has made it seem as if it's anti-life. Thank you, Camille. That applause does creep up on us faster than we might think. Hannah Rosen, you get the very last word tonight. All right, I'll take it. So I think that there's some confusion out there

about what you're voting for if you vote for us. So when we say men are obsolete, that doesn't mean they're worthless or we want to stomp on them or we hate them. It means something different. And I'm trying to think about it. I think you can think about it as being outmoded.

So let's say the twin combustion engine technically makes the bicycle obsolete. But that doesn't mean that we hate the bicycle or we want to throw the bicycle away. It just means that you want to use the bicycle exactly how you want to while recognizing that there's some need for efficiency and change. And I think the same is true for men.

So you are allowed to preserve the parts of manhood that you love and value, whether that's craftsmanship or machoness or, you know, machoness or eating nachos and playing video games, whatever it is about the manhood that you love, you should preserve at the same time recognizing that there need to be some adjustment if men, and particularly certain men,

are gonna survive in the modern world. Secondly, I think you think that by voting for us, you are voting for some kind of crazy triumphalist feminism and women won, and we like stomp on your car heart jackets and steal your pickup trucks, and we're really happy about it. But that's not true. It's, like I said, it's neither good or bad, you are just voting, acknowledging a reality.

So when Camille said that we don't recognize these things as valuable anymore, we don't have vocational programs to respect men, I totally agree with that. But that means that you should vote for our side, because then you're just recognizing the reality of what's going on. Thirdly, I think that you think that if you're voting for us, you're somehow blinded to the fact that men are the majority of CEOs or popes or whatever, like popes, who cares about But anyway. Yes, they are. That's absolutely true. But that's just a moment in time. If you look at the trends, it's completely obvious that that world is not going to last. And finally, I would say, you should just be brave enough to tell the truth about this, especially you men out there. Don't pretend it's not happening. I mean, I have a husband who totally still speaks to me, even after a year of me talking about the end of men. I have one son who still speaks to me and another son who

doesn't, but that's beside the federal. But I would just say, like, hiding our heads in the sand and pretending that there's no boy crisis, there's no crisis in working-class men, that there isn't a crisis in masculinity is not the way to go. I would urge you all to acknowledge the truth and vote for us. Well, that wraps up our podcast of a memorable monk debate held at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto, Canada, back in a time when it still was possible to argue persuasively in person. Prior to the debate, we polled the audience on their views on the resolution, be it resolved, men are obsolete. The results were 16% only in favor of the motion, fully 84% opposed. When we polled the audience at the end of the debate, opinions had changed dramatically.

44% agreed that men are obsolete, and only 56 were opposed. The pro side gained 28% and so they were declared the evening's victors. I want to thank our speakers who participated in this main stage monk debate, Anna Rosen, Maureen Daud, Camille Paglia, and Catlin Morin. They show that even on a contentious issue, it is possible to share opposing views in a civil and substantive way. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate one conversation at a time. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. The monk debates are produced. by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation.

Rudyard Griffiths, Marilyn Missouri, and Christina Campbell are the producers. The Monk Debates podcast is mixed by Kieran Lynch. The president of Antica Productions is Stuart Cox. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thanks again for listening.