Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Janice Fiamengo on Critical Theory, Feminism, and Anti-Feminism

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/QwT-w47Il5cJanice Fiamengo is an associate professor of English at the University of Ottawa. She specializes in Canadian literature and has published widely on early Canadian writers.Better Left Unsaid trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQIzgoFBCnY Better Left Unsaid film (to purchase): http://betterleftunsaidfilm.com/Patreon for conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, and God: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Help support conversations like this via PayPal: https://bit.ly/2EOR0M4 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Google Podcasts: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Id3k7k7mfzahfx2fjqmw3vufb44 iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id152175880200:00:00 Introduction 00:01:18 Janice's writing process 00:02:31 What are Critical Theory and Feminist Theory? 00:04:00 How did Janice go from being an ardent feminist to an anti-feminist? 00:08:20 Why is feminism attractive? 00:10:14 We hear about women being disadvantaged, so how are women advantaged? 00:11:11 The difficulty of hiring a male over a woman 00:13:25 How are women disadvantaged? 00:15:44 On the resume studies that demonstrate discrimination 00:21:09 How to not contribute to systemic sexism 00:26:02 The "shadow" and deleterious applications of feminist theory 00:29:48 Harry Frankfurt's BS 00:35:28 The "oppression narrative" 00:55:45 What is is it all about? Power? 01:01:04 The overt oppression has changed to microaggressions and insidious systemic 01:04:47 Trust requires the potential for damage 01:08:32 How the "humanities" and the "arts" have been corrupted 01:12:58 How has sexism been redefined? 01:15:19 Class action lawsuits that found men were being paid less, despite the counterclaim 01:17:09 If the choice was between "more power" or "the destruction of the West"... 01:21:37 The Soviet Union, and wanting harm to befall you 01:25:26 Self-loathing and rejoicing / fervor when Shakespeare is found racist (for example) 01:27:23 Where does the left "go too far"? 01:28:45 Free speech erosion* * *Subscribe if you want more conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, God, and the mathematics / physics of each.* * *I'm producing an imminent documentary Better Left Unsaid http://betterleftunsaidfilm.com on the topic of "when does the left go too far?" Visit that site if you'd like to contribute to getting the film distributed (early-2021).

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Approximately 1.5 years ago, I interviewed Janice Fiamengo. This was in preparation for a film that www.BetterLeftUnsaid.com too far or extremism on the left, though we do explore extremism on the right. This interview is from when I was less experienced as an interviewer. I was younger. I was a whippersnapper. I was nervously interrupting in an attempt to impress Janice, who at the time I wouldn't have called a friend per se. I would have called a gentle mentor. But now I'm proud that I can say that Janice is a friend. And hopefully you can see the more tender and kinder side of her, the side that I see

through this conversation as well as through the extra footage at the end. friend and hopefully you can see the more tender and kinder side of her, the side that I see through this conversation as well as through the extra footage at the end. If you'd like to see a part two then please comment below and as well as make sure to leave any questions you have for Janice. All right, I'm here with Janice with the unassailable, impregnable, insurmountable, ineluctable insuperable janice via mango do you say that for everyone no you can see i put them all online it's true i didn't remember that okay tell me about your writing process when it comes to these studio

brulee brulee, or however you pronounce it. Yeah, Studio Brulé, I think is how Steve pronounces it. My writing process. Well, I mean, how it all begins, how I get the idea in the first place. Yes, so you come up with some idea, you just notice it online, and you then start to write about it, and then it takes months. Sometimes, sometimes, yeah. You know, people send me things all of the

time now, um, you know, outrageous articles, um, instance in incidents on campus where either a speaker has been prevented from giving a talk or has been protested or someone has been fired from his job for what seemed to be kind of dubious reasons, or a particular course in toxic masculinity that's being taught somewhere, all these kinds of things. And so then I think about whether, you know, what what I might be able to say about it. And then I, I just, I, sometimes I try to link it to an aspect of feminist critical theory or social justice theory in general. Can you give us a rundown of what feminist current feminist theory is and critical theory as well? Well, whatever I say, feminists will say it's much more subtle and

sophisticated than that. But as far as I can see, feminist theory is pretty much the same as it has always been, which is that it believes that we live in a patriarchy, which is a society that is male-centered and in which men control and oppress women through discourse, through law, through culture, through even jokes, and in which women are in some way objectified or prevented from being their full selves. I think that it's fair to say. And feminism has become more sophisticated over time in that it claims now that it is intersectional. That's the really popular term, which means that there are all sorts of intersecting identity vectors that impact one's experience as a woman in patriarchy and also even impact one's experience

as a man under patriarchy depending on race on sexuality on a whole you know variety of other identity categories you started from a radical feminist to becoming the anti-feminist. How did that happen? I mean, I think I always knew in some way that it wasn't so because feminism posits that the experience of being a woman or a minority in North American society is an experience of having your very existence in some way under threat, feeling that your central elements of your identity are subjugated and denied and scorned. And I never had that experience. From day one, I had many male and female mentors who encouraged me to use my gifts in whatever way was best for me. So I always knew that my experience was not an experience of being terrorized in any way or of having my central self questioned or denied but i believe that some people must have that experience because feminist theory says it is and there are all sorts of stories of horrific things happening to to women and members of minority groups so so that was what i believed

as a grad student really and and and the thing that i the thing that that was most significant i think about becoming a feminist was that you have this exhilarating sense of you know rebelling against an oppressive tyranny and so you feel that everything you do and say from a feminist perspective is really valuable and really important and that you can silence a room by telling your victim story or by referring to somebody else's victim story. And it's a very, very powerful, it's a heady, exhilarating kind of rush to accuse others of not being aware of the suffering of people in the society and to feel that you're speaking on their behalf. So I really like that. I think because we all want to feel that we're good in some way

and that what we're doing matters. And so I was very much caught up in that. I marched in Take Back the Night marches, and I denounced things that feminists denounce as, as damaging to women. Um, but then it just all began to, you know, it began to feel like a house of cards because I could, my, my experience had never been that. It had always been an experience of being treated with respect, with love, a feeling that my, you know, my male friends, my male mentors, my male teachers obviously cared about me and wanted me to succeed

and didn't want me to be hurt in any way. And I wasn't hurt. So and then I could see that when I became a teacher, I could see that women in my classes were not oppressed, they were full of self confidence, even self righteousness. And the men were not privileged, you know, oppressive beings who scorned women. In fact, often they seemed kind of abashed and a bit ashamed and hesitant to speak and quite deferential to women. And in some ways I thought, well, that's good. It shows, you know, they're very respectful and kind and everything. But I also started to see they're being constantly told that they better be quiet and listen and that they're very respectful and kind and everything, but I also started to see they're being constantly told that they better be quiet and listen

and that they're responsible for all these terrible things and that they should be ashamed about the history of North American society and that somehow they were responsible for so-called centuries of oppression. And so the whole enterprise at that point started to look dubious to me because i you know at at least i felt it should be acknowledged that whatever the past had been and even that i began to question but whatever the past had been even if we accepted the feminist story about the past it was no longer that in the in the in the present that was obvious so what do you think motivates them motivates the feminists to view the world in this way even though like you said in classes at least the men are the ones who are more quiet and

more docile compared to the women yeah well i think it is a it feels very good it gives you a sense of purpose gives you a reason to get up in the morning. It gives you a reason to, it makes you feel very courageous for speaking out against this so-called oppression. It gives you a, you know, a sense of agency and it gives you a sense of power because you know that you can stand up in a room and say, my experience as a woman or my experience as a woman of color, my experience as a lesbian woman of color, whatever it is, and a hush will fall on the room. And whatever you say from that point is going to have incredible authority. And no one is going to dare to contradict you or to dismiss what you say after that. So you know, who wouldn't enjoy that and claim it?

And I think once you come to believe, I mean, that suggests that all of this is very insincere, which I think some of it is insincere, actually, but a lot of it is also sincere. It's a sincerely held belief that this is the way the world is. And once you believe that, then you don't want to have someone, you know, you're not going to allow yourself to be talked out of that, because then that would be to in some way, surrender the righteousness of the struggle against oppression, and it would be to side with the oppressors. And of course, nobody wants to do that. so you end up having to to keep on believing even when evidence is brought forward that your position is false or even when you can see that nobody is treating

you badly because you're a woman of color so what are some of the ways in which women are advantaged well um they're advantaged in all sorts of ways. I mean, specifically in academia, women have been advantaged for decades now through affirmative action hiring programs and through all sorts of special scholarships, special funding mechanisms to advance women's scholarship. You know, in every way, the academy has tried to demonstrate over the last 25 to 30 years that it is an inclusive place for women. And that means that, and I've sat on many hiring committees where

it was clear that we wanted to hire women and we wanted to hire especially women of color, lesbians, et cetera. And so if you fit in one of those identity categories, you had a huge advantage. I know some professors even in the STEM fields, so people would say, well, the STEM fields aren't affected, but I'm talking about professors in the STEM field who said, if there's an application for a professor and it's a man, they can reject it. But if it's a woman, they have to have a very, very, very good reason why they're rejecting it. Oh yes, absolutely. Yeah. We had, we operated in the English department and I know that STEM fields now are the ones that are really feeling

that pressure. It's called an equity protocol. And it means that if you have amongst the pool of applicants, a number of women, that yes, not to hire the woman, to hire a man over a woman, you would have to, you have to actually write to the Dean and explain why you made that decision. And I've even heard of cases where the hiring was overturned by higher ups who felt that the rationale given wasn't strong enough. So some stats, I remember that you were saying that women are likely to be hired in this subfield in this particular universe. Yeah, that's a particular, there is a Cornell study and I can get you the actual study. There was a Cornell study from a couple of years ago, specifically looking at STEM because STEM has been the area

where feminists have been you know most adamant that that the that equity has failed that women haven't been hired so there was a very extensive you know hundreds of universities surveyed that that found that women were twice twice as likely to be hired as male applicants, even while women continue to, feminists continue to insist that more needs to be done. And there are all sorts of now women-only positions also that are being advertised. So it's even more overt. The man doesn't even have a chance at all. In Australia, there have been many, both in math and in physics, there have been women-only positions advertised over the last few years. In Ireland, just this

year, it was announced that over the next couple of years, Ireland will hire many, many, a number of dozen of women-only positions in an attempt to increase numbers. What are some ways in which women are disadvantaged? You're talking to the wrong gal for that answer. You know, what women will, what feminists will say, I don't think very many women who are not feminists will say this about their experience of academia. But I think what feminists will say is that they are treated differently as women, that they are condescended to, that they, you know, that people have different expectations of them as women, you know, that they'll be assumed to be the secretary rather than the physics professor

that they actually are you know that kind of thing and that and they will claim that this is deeply devaluing you know that it really harms their ability to to work in that environment that it's a kind of microaggression is what they would say and are there studies on that studies to validate what they say so there's some studies how can it. How can it validate it though? I mean, if somebody thought I was a secretary, it would mean nothing to me. I mean, I suppose if from the time I was six years old, I had been given a message, both subtly and overtly, that I could never be a professor at a university. That would obviously have a damaging impact. But if the message I had received from my culture at large was,

you can be anything you want to be as long as you work hard at it, and occasionally someone assumed I was the secretary, I don't think it would have any impact at all. And I just don't see how anybody could actually legitimately claim that we live in a culture that discourages women from doing whatever they want to do. I've never met a man who wasn't enthusiastic about having women as colleagues, as long as they were good enough. There are men who are resentful about all the special hiring protocols and all that quite understandably so but i've never met a man who said he didn't believe you know a qualified woman could do the

job never and certainly in our culture at large it's the exact opposite everything in our culture is is cheering on women and encouraging their their aspirations i don't know of the specific studies but i've heard now this may be from feminist sources I don't remember where I heard this but if you have resumes that are sent out and they have female names versus men names and the men names are more likely to get called back and same with cited research I'm not sure if that yeah it's true but I want to know what your thoughts are you know I mean these these studies yeah I've looked into some of those kinds of studies. There are also studies that say the opposite.

So I looked at one study. It was a very small sample size, and it made that claim. I think this was a particular study, and I can't remember the exact details, but I think it had to do with a hiring of a lab supervisor, so in some science discipline. And the claim was that the male applicants on identical resumes were more likely to be chosen. There were all sorts of problems. It was a very small sample size. The median age of those who were making the choice was quite old, actually. It was, I think, 50 years old. There were questions about the cultural background of those who are making the selections.

There's also the possibility that, you know, and this is sacrilege, but there's also the possibility that in some cases the experience of those making the choice had been that a male lab supervisor had actually been more successful in the past than female lab supervisors so you know there might actually be a reason why it wasn't just pure sexism um but but um yeah i mean you know there would have to be much more work done on a very large sample size, I think, before anybody could determine conclusively anything like that. Something I've been asking myself is what evidence would have to exist in order for me to believe that there is systemic racism? As much as I look into systemic racism and the claims of the radical left, I don't see that it holds much water. And then I thought, okay, well, the best evidence that I've seen is the resumes between blacks and whites, you know, with the whiteness of the names. I don't know if you've seen that

study. So it's similar where you send out resumes to different agencies, and then the ones with black names get called less. But then if they change their black name to a white name, like Connor, instead of O'Shane, then they're more likely to get called back. But when I looked at the studies, the actual studies, also Asian names got called less. So then you would expect that Asians would do worse in society, but then Asians tend to do better. So is it that they do better despite it? Asians are doing the best of any group in North American society in terms of median income.

So what evidence would change your mind? It's very difficult, isn't it? I mean, I was thinking more, too, about what you're saying about the female names on applications. Like, we're now in a situation to where a person and the thing that that that I remember the feminist claim to is that both women and men if they were making the choice about this lab supervisor tended to choose the man so you know what what does that say about sexism if if women make the same

choices that men make I mean that's gets really complicated you know so then we have all this emphasis by feminists on hiring more women but what difference would it make then if women themselves tended to prefer men in certain circumstances but but but to go back to that like if if you could prove and I think it's very, very difficult, but if you could prove that there was a bias, how could you prove what the source of the bias was? That's the real difficulty. Because I think we now live in a society where if I were a man and I was looking at two candidates and one was a woman and one was a man, I don't want to get into the racial thing because that seems different, but as a man, I would be very reluctant to hire a woman if the man was equally qualified, precisely because we live in this situation where every man knows he's just one false accusation away from reputational and career suicide. Who could blame a man from deciding

he doesn't want the hassle? Sure, maybe he loves women and, you know, in general thinks they're potentially just as brilliant as any man, but he knows that we now live in the Me Too era and have lived in that era for a lot longer than Me Too has been in action, where if he just happens to get one of the few women who is a little bit crazy about these kinds of things, who's hypersensitive about perceived sexism, and she makes an accusation against him, it's over for him. You know, his life is destroyed.

Who could blame a man for wanting to protect himself against that kind of grief? So sometimes, you know, feminist initiatives might have all sorts of unintended consequences. And I would think that resentment on the part of men and also, well, caution about exposing themselves to the hazards of having women in the workplace, those would be possible unintended consequences. So the resentments on both sides, then, because there's, as far as I see from the feminist theorists, it seems as though they're motivated by resentment. And then that engenders resentment on the side of the men, which then breeds more resentment on the side of the women. Yeah, it's a vicious circle as far as I can see.

What can we do? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, this is... Does it have to be the men that stops resenting the women or the women that stops resenting the men? I think that everybody should just stop resenting individually. So each person, each person should. But in your point of view, what do you think a feminist...

What if there's a third year feminist watching this and she's understanding that you're making some sense, you're saying some things that she wanted to say, and she has wanted to say and continually wants to say, but can't, because the repercussions. What advice would you give to her? To not contribute, because I see that they are contributing to the problem that they're trying to solve. Absolutely. I mean, that's the whole thing and and they make themselves deeply deeply unhappy in

the process I mean there are all sorts of studies on the internet where you take a look at someone before she became a radical feminist and she's you know happy and smiling and having a great time with her life and then after she becomes a radical feminist you know she's dyed her hair blue she's all pierced and she's got an extremely dour and angry look on her do you think that's a causal effect or do you think that she starts to become now this is this is unpolitically correct but she starts to become unattractive and then feminists became more resentful as they start to appeal to her you know it's it's probably a complicated, you know, and it might well be because she had some bad experiences that turned her that way too. So one shouldn't be too superficial about it.

Are there studies done on the attractiveness of feminists versus some other control group? I'm serious. I actually want to know. I don't know. I don't know if there have been any studies done. What would you expect the results of that to be? I don't want to get you in any more hot water but you seems like it doesn't matter to you i don't know i don't know david and i have talked and laughed about this just recently actually we were looking at you know some university presidents and other academics who were very strident feminists and noting that very few of them were were very attractive but but I'm not sure about that. I mean, I've had interviews,

in fact, I think with Gad Saad, he tried to make that claim. And I actually, I'm not sure. I've met many beautiful women who were also really angry feminists. And so I don't feel that that's necessarily the cause or the result. But, you know, I feel that women are in a position where women can back off feminism. Because at least in my experience, and I don't know that this would be an experience accepted by most feminists, but in my experience, most men, despite their resentment about what has happened over the last 20 to 30 years, most men are willing to call off the gender war. Most men, even if they hate feminism with a passion, are interested in living with women, both on an individual personal level, having relationships with women and working with women in a peaceable

way in society they're not interested in keeping women down or anything like that and all these claims about how they want women to go back into the kitchen or whatever i've never met a man like that um so so i think men are willing to to call off the war and and if women would just be willing to but i don't know what there there just does seem to be that a deep resentment begins for women as soon as they encounter feminism maybe it's there maybe that's one of women's weaknesses you know i mean we know what men's we know what men's weaknesses are we know the shadow side of men and that is aggression competitiveness capacity for violence what's women's shadow side and i and we've never discussed that as a society i don't think women are happy to look at women's shadow side and men aren't either men tend to

put women on a pedestal and i think one of women's shadowy elements is a tendency to resentment, to self-pity, to blaming of others, to refusing responsibility for the things that make one happy in one's own life. And so I think feminism really plays into that because it says, it's not, you know, none of this is your responsibility it whatever happens in your life whatever form of dissatisfaction or unhappiness it all has this external source and you're just an innocent victim of it and that's both incredibly attractive and a recipe for continued you know unhappiness and anger and frustration were you using the word

shadow in a union sense or just shadow in a personality just in a general sense okay yeah because that's something i'm actually exploring i think that's the the core question of the documentary because it is it does seem to be a political documentary on the face of it which is when does the left go too far but as i study it deeper and deeper it seems to me to be more psychological and philosophical in that when can excess unexamined compassion go too far? Yeah. So where do you see it going too far?

Well, what are some, give me some examples of particularly ruinous feminist theory or feminist theories that have gone too far off the deep end? Well, gee, where do I start? In application. Yeah, I mean, you know, all sorts of ruined male lives, both young men at university who have been, you know, investigated and expelled for various infractions or forms of misconduct, sometimes even as insubstantial as i i one young man wrote to me he'd been expelled from his school because two young women had complained about him that his gaze was too intense that he had looked at them too intensely and there actually is built into

sexual harassment policies at universities all across North America, that looking can be a form of sexual harassment. So sexual harassment guidelines that have gone completely crazy is a really good example. And it has hurt young men. All it takes is for a woman to complain. I have heard from countless men who simply for not picking up on women's very subtle social cues and I think you know this is one of those cases where men don't tend to pick up on those women are very very sensitive about these things and they think men should be able to pick up and so if a young man is interested in a young woman that he's met at college and he starts asking her out and that's what he thinks he should do and she's

too shy or nervous or um cowardly to just say look i'm not interested in you so she she never really says that but she never says a definitive no. She'll say, I'm busy. I'm busy. Or I'm sorry. Sorry, I can't do it. I'm not feeling, you know, whatever. So she never says no. And he keeps pursuing her because that's what men do.

Men have been conditioned to do that from day one. And, you know, from our primitive ancestors. And so he keeps pursuing her. And then she complains about his behavior to somebody at the school and that's the end of it for him he's now charged with harassment and he's either disciplined in some way or even in some cases is expelled and so that i i would say sexual harassment the attempt to keep women safe even if what that means do you want me to move this no no I'm just kidding yeah just in case come down even what's his name again that's Stanislav Stanislav come down come down Danisla so even if it means like the idea of safety is one of the things I think that that

feminism has gone crazy with the idea of safety that and that means not just physical safety but psychological and emotional safety which really means that a woman should never feel uncomfortable even for a short period of time or even if the basis of her feeling of discomfort is completely irrational so I think that's a terrible way that that feminist theory about women's safety has just gone crazy and has ruined all sorts of lives um you know have you read frankfurt's essay on bullshit the technical bullshit bs no no okay that's from the 90s it's harry frankfurt i believe his name is he's i believe he was a

cognitive psychologist or just a regular psychologist and then he said what bullshit is now it's technical so i don't it's something like there's a salience landscape so i don't know how to explain this look we see a chair okay we look at that we see chair we look at that we see tripod we look at that and we see dvd a feminist might say well why are you putting them into the category of chair into dvd into tripod okay that's a valid claim now that's related to something called the frame problem in AI, which is how do you categorize an infinite amount that's in front of you? How do you put it into categories? But then there's actually a pre-egoic response. So why do

you even think of a chair as something to be put into a category? So there's something that happens pre-conscious, and that's related to the landscape that's in front of you, and what do you find salient? Or it's also called relevance realization. And Harry Frankfurt said that you can't lie to yourself. Now, I actually think you can lie to yourself,

and I think self-deception is a true phenomenon. But he was saying, let's say you can't lie to yourself because you can't tell yourself, I want to be interested in X, Y, or Z, and then just become interested in it. Or you can't tell yourself if you have low self-esteem, no, no, I'm the most attractive woman there is, or I'm the most attractive man there is. So you can't lie to yourself if you don't believe it, but you can BS yourself. The way that you can BS yourself is that you can present something as salient. So you look at this pen. Now the pen

has become salient to you. So you've looked at it. Remember, there's a landscape of salience. Now this is going to become more salient, which is going to make you pay attention to it, which is going to make it more salient. So there's a feedback loop of salience. He called that BS. The inappropriate hijacking of salience is BS. The most common example is something from the Simpsons where politicians do this, where in the Simpsons where politicians do this. We're in The Simpsons. Kane was, or Kodos or Kane, the aliens were becoming presidents and they were dressed as Bill Clinton.

And he's like, ladies and gentlemen, we must move forward, not backwards, not sideways, not forwards, but upwards and twirling, twirling, always twirling towards freedom. And the crowd just cheers. And it's because he's saying words that don't actually mean anything, but they evoke an emotional response. So something I'm wondering is the connection between BS and trigger words and this expansion of racism, sexism to mean things that are just benign or relatively benign compared to their original meaning. But yet the original, the original evocation attached to these original meaning but yet the original the original evocation with attached to these meanings the connotations remain the same and the punishments

also remain the same so that's something i was exploring i want to know what your thoughts were on that i don't understand the the theory very well probably but yeah i do think that that's what's going on is that the idea that uh you know, certain domains of expression can be very damaging, you know, for the vulnerable, the marginalized, the traditionally excluded or oppressed. This is something that feminism has really attached itself to. And so, whereas, yeah, I can see that, you know, a person advocating violence against women or something like that, or suggesting that all women's claims of violence are actually, you know, narcissistic projections or something like that. That would be, you know, pretty hideous. But the category of what is harmful to women has been so dramatically expanded over the last couple of decades that there is almost

nothing outside of actual feminist discourse that isn't considered deeply harmful and so that it would be you know to answer the question the original question where does the left go too far where does especially the feminist left go too far it's by continually expanding the category of harm and by claiming that words themselves harm and of course that's not you know entirely false since words do harm in in certain kinds of ways in different kinds of contexts, but by claiming that all sorts of previously quite harmless or maybe merely irritating types of discourse that I might disagree with, or that people could argue about, that that actually, that they actually constitute some kind of like existential threat to women or other categories of vulnerable people. And that's what's used then to, you know, deplatform and disinvite or, you know, it

gives the impetus to shout people down because supposedly their speech is so heinous, so damaging that it actually constitutes an existential threat to people. And you hear that all the time now, you know, that this so-and-so, if so-and-so is allowed to speak, it makes the campus fundamentally unsafe. How? You know, it's never made clear. Supposedly because it encourages men, you know, to do terrible things, to run rampage and start raping women because they've heard something that contradicts a feminist doctrine. I mean, it's just ludicrous, or that it damages women so much, you know, that,

sorry, damages women so much that they won't be able to get out of bed the next morning. You know, it's, it's, it's bizarre, but you see that all the time, you know, that you, in some way, you deny my right to exist. You see students saying that over and over again, merely because the speaker is articulating a, you know, a conservative view of of of gender or whatever it happens to be and so that so how do we overcome that that argument that rebuttal which is you're denying my identity which is me which is my right right to exist yeah yeah so how do you overcome that if you like if you're a trans person for instance and somebody is saying that that a trans identity is actually a form of mental illness or whatever and and and uh you know so therefore that that constitutes a fundamental

threat to the person's very existence i mean how do you overcome it i i don't know i mean you simply i would think that as the administrators simply have to say that's too bad you know that that the university is a free speech zone that that's the one thing sacred that you know ideas about inclusion and safety and comfort are secondary when it comes to university discourse but it seems that universities aren't willing to do that. And most university professors aren't interested in that. Well, what about the counter argument, which is that if I'm a man and you're saying gender doesn't exist and I identify as a man, is that not an attack against my identity? Well, I mean, attacks against men's identity are tolerated all the time. You know,

if we took seriously the feminist and social justice warrior kind of discourse about harms to people. Is that it has to be against a historically oppressed? Yes, it has to be. Yeah, right. Because, you know, the things that are going on now in university classrooms all across North America are deeply harmful to men, I would say. What about somebody who is, let's say, the pinnacle of historically oppressed?

So a black lesbian, a black trans person who is in a wheelchair and has glasses, and is extremely short, and is low on intelligence, is the most oppressed of all the intersections. So we get down to the root. What if they're against the historical oppression narrative, like them themselves, and they say, by you telling me that I'm historically oppressed, that goes against my identity of not being historically oppressed. So what would they say then? They would say that, I mean, I don't know what they would say, but probably that that person has internalized their oppression and doesn't understand, you know, I don't know what they would say, but probably that that person has internalized their oppression and doesn't understand.

And there are all sorts of cases of people. And it seems like it's unfalsifiable. It is, absolutely. That's why it's so powerful. Because it is unfalsifiable, it can always be reasserted. And that's what makes it so magical, is that no matter how many times you bring forward evidence to say that the claims are not true for various reasons,

the person making the original claim of oppression can always say, but, you know, unbeknownst to you, or there are all these invisible, I mean, that's the genius of all these social justice discourses, that they they've come up with ideas like microaggressions and unconscious bias and all sorts of things that can't really ever be measured but can still be asserted to exist especially in any case where the um the performance the outcomes of a particular identity group don't meet what the proponents say they should. So if, you know, for whatever, if it's, if it happens to be feminists who say that, you know,

the number of women in physics is not where it should be, you can say, well, we've got all sorts of initiatives to encourage women to come into physics doesn't matter that they'll still claim that there is some kind of systemic bias or some kind of unconscious oppression what if someone says i'm you're denying my identity and you say okay maybe i am is that the end of the world because look what if i say people who have had laser eye surgery so i've had laser eye surgery trying to come up with an analogy okay let's say people who have glasses people who have glasses are defective in some way let's just say I said that because I have used to have glass so I can say this yeah okay then you might say I'm challenging your identity but I can make that you can make that claim for any statement that I

make because ideas you can always attach yourself to an idea so why is the claim that you are challenging my identity a claim that shuts down conversations because any idea if you attach yourself to it can challenge an identity now they may come up with some sort of response which is that if it's gender sexuality or ethnicity those are the three primary they will say that those are but there's an explosion of those now so there's fat there's fat and then there's and then there's unattractiveness, which is associated with fatness. There's disability. There are all sorts of things.

But yeah, you could say that to attack my religion is a far greater harm. If I'm a devout Catholic, and every time I go into the classroom, my professor is mocking, or even not mocking, but simply attempting to disprove Catholic doctrine that would be deeply harmful and yet somehow you know that particular kind of attack on a person's core beliefs or deepest identity isn't one that social justice warriors worry about at all. So yeah you've just proved that it's it's you know completely artificial it's completely socially constructed to use the SJW term. They would say, I mean, most impacted by various forms of oppression. But, I mean, I'm not making a very good case for them.

They would also have to show that just by challenging someone who's historically oppressed and their identity, that in the manner in which it's happening in civil discourse on university campuses that that has a deleterious effect instead of a positive one also especially compared to the alternative which is being indoctrinated in a feminist or radical left theories and see the effects of that on well-being on well on well-being and then maybe monetary success so one would have to demonstrate that and you could never demonstrate it because you'd have to have some kind of control group that... Get some people from the STEM. Yeah, maybe. But yeah, that's the thing. Who's to say that having your identity, your core beliefs, or some aspect of yourself that really matters,

who's to say that having that attacked doesn't make you stronger? I honestly think that that's what should happen on a semi-regular basis, especially at university, because you're not going in 18 thinking that you're going to come out the same person when you're 22 if you were why go to university there's no point you're not growing you're not changing so you should have your identity well not necessarily attacked but definitely challenged and then you assess and change based on what you're hearing it is difficult because you know like with everything there is a core of truth in in feminist and other you know sjw kind of claims and it's true that if you are relentlessly told that you're no good

in some way um it's going to have a bad impact on most people some people will be strong enough to overcome it and actually in those cases will end up even you know maybe achieving more than they would have otherwise but a lot of people will be hurt by it and so yeah nobody wants a university to be a place where where people are belittled or scorned or mocked for either for for reasons beyond their control because of characteristics that they were born with or indeed really for, for their beliefs either. So there has to be some kind of balance where there's a kind of basic, a baseline of respect,

but also respectful challenge. And that's what has been completely lost at universities today. So there is no respectful challenge anymore. We know that it can go too far on one end, which is the constant denial of someone's potential inside by saying you can't amount to anything you're a woman and therefore you're never going to be good at spatial reasoning so just don't bother yeah so that's not good no one would say that that's good well very few very few people would say that's good very few people would say that's good that should ever be said to

anybody for any reason, especially because of some characteristic that they can't control. Okay. Okay. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars rover.

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and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything. If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart plus 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g.com slash everything and use the code everything so why don't you give me some more examples of feminist theory gone wrong in practice so for example i remember you wrote about well all of your studio brew videos are this yeah they're all about that yeah I'm just well you know so many professors male professors who've either lost their career altogether or have had terrible experiences as a result of claims, mostly by women, that they've been, you know,

committed some kind of misconduct. All of that is completely out of control right now. I mean, I did a case just recently, a man at Brock University, for example, who, it's not clear what he did, but he was investigated for sexual harassment and he was found guilty of sexual harassment and the claim was that he went out drinking with a couple of his students they were of drinking age they went out drinking um after class two of the students one male one female came back to his office the male left the office i guess it was fairly late at night by this point i think they were still drinking maybe in his office the woman stayed on female student and he approached her in some way he went and sat next to her he touched

her not sexually from the sounds of it but he touched her and he expressed some kind of desire. And for that, he was suspended for a number of years. He had to go through all sorts of training and, you know, he was publicly humiliated. And he tried to come back to the classroom about four years after this alleged incident occurred. A huge student protest. incident occurred. A huge student protest. It was said that he was a perpetrator of violence. Again there's that language, you know, that he had perpetrated sexual violence and therefore he should not be allowed back into the classroom. So there's always this alighting of very minor forms of misconduct with really serious forms of misconduct. He never did violence to anybody. There's absolutely no evidence that once the woman said no or left his office or

whatever happened that he in any way you know tried to pursue her or didn't take no for an answer or was threatening or anything like that and they actually cancelled his class as a result of the student protest. And it's not clear what's going to happen to this guy now, but his, his career is over. He'll probably be quietly retired or, or something. It's doubtful he'll ever be back in the classroom and, and, you know, he's publicly disgraced for doing nothing or for what, you know, at, at worst, it was a moment of drunken indiscretion. So things like that are happening all the time.

And there's a whisper network in academia where a number of women can decide that they don't like a particular professor or graduate student or whatever it happens to be. It might be just because he's creepy or whatever it happens to be might be just because he's creepy or whatever it happens to be um you know here's here's where the the inequality of of sexual attractiveness you know really comes into play it's a kind of bigotry in itself a very handsome man can probably get away you know and a very sexually confident man can probably get away with all sorts of things if the women find him attractive that a less attractive man can't get away with. I did a female file just recently on a

man, a very elderly man at UC Irvine who was forced to retire at age 84 if you can imagine and complaints had begun against him when he was in his 70s. The complaints were that he lavishly complimented women sometimes with sexually tinged expressions of admiration. They were things like he said he is alleged to have said to one woman I've just been told that women don't like to hear that they're beautiful, but I know that that isn't the case for you. The woman is reported to have been too intimidated to tell him that she didn't like to be complimented. Various women came forward and complained about him

and said that they felt demeaned and undermined in their professional capacity because he would make these compliments he also kissed them on both cheeks he was a spanish-born man so this was his cultural context um so what did they do go to his supervisors and then the supervisors had a talk or yeah they they complained about him he was told to stop he didn't stop, it went to a, you know, a board of investigation that found him guilty of these various allegations. No, I mean, a bit of physical touching, but nothing, you know, he would touch somebody on the shoulders, but it was essentially the compliments. I can't imagine that he was teaching at this point in his late 70s, but he was still on campus. He had donated a lot of money to his faculty and he was in love with the discipline and also in love with women.

And so eventually they forced him to retire. He's not allowed to return to campus. His name is being taken off two buildings that he endowed financially with his own money. And it's also being taken off various scholarships and fellowships that he contributed to. And basically, you know, the final years of his life, he's now been completely disgraced because he complimented women and made some sexually tinged. At one point he said to somebody, I think the worst thing maybe he's alleged to have said, although he denies it, was point he said to somebody I think the worst thing maybe he's alleged to have said although he denies it was that he said to one woman you were so animated while you were making that presentation that I thought you were going to have an orgasm oh my goodness you know how

terrible he has to be ejected from from the campus so that you know that kind of thing I just think that is utterly ridiculous and excessive and it says something appalling about the delicate sensibilities of these women professors and graduate students. I mean, couldn't they have simply avoided the man? Couldn't they have actually said to him, I would really prefer that you not speak to me in those ways because it makes me uncomfortable. I appreciate the compliment, but please don't say it anymore. It seems none of them could. They had to go to a higher authority and then they had to be, have him, you know, dealt with in this very humiliating and demeaning way. So things, things

like that, um, the, you know, the constant redefining of ordinary human interactions. Oh, and the reason that I thought of him was that it goes back to, because someone actually wrote to me after he saw my video, and he said that he had taken a class from this professor years and years ago in the 1980s. And when he was a younger man, he was really good looking. And lots, you know, people loved him him so probably this was a behavior maybe he took it from Spain I you know I don't know and this was a behavior that had been rewarded or at least happily tolerated for years and years while he was a professor then once he was a much more elderly man and there was this younger cohort of women it was no longer acceptable you know it seems a kind of really flagrant bigotry that he happened to be an elderly man and this was no

longer acceptable and so he had to be drummed out so there's just so many examples of this where either false allegations often allegations that could never be proved of things you know supposedly done or said behind closed doors the man denies it the woman insists it's the case he has to go or cases where even if the man admits it's nothing like sexual assault you know or it's nothing like some a man saying you know look i'll give you an a if you sleep with me and if you don't sleep with me i'm going to fail you in this course, which obviously is totally unacceptable. But you know, there are cases of an older man, usually falling in love with a beautiful woman and telling her that, and that's it. That's enough to get him, you know,

you know, sometimes people write and say, well, you know, he shouldn't have done that. Okay, sure. But you know, the, the ruination of a person's long respectable career because of one bit of misconduct that I cannot believe actually seriously damages the person who receives it. And that's the other thing is that feminism does really induce in those who embrace it, a desire to be damaged by these basically non-damaging actions and there are all sorts of articles where you read about how you know the woman was deeply depressed she couldn't finish her course of studies because this man told her that he was

in love with her i don't know what to say about that you know what can't believe it, that being told that you're so beautiful and attractive and desirable and this man's in love with you is going to make it impossible for you to get out of bed and continue your studies. It just doesn't make sense to me. But that is presented to us as the real harm of this what's called now sexual predation. And so this man's life has to be ruined as a result and so the suggestion is that women are such frail reads that they can't deal with you know anything at all uh and and that um but of course in other cases if they had been themselves in love with the professor then that would have been a very different kind of thing. So it's all based on the, you know, the perception of the young woman. And depending on whether the advance

is welcome or not, you know, it's either a harm or it isn't a harm. And the man's life is decided based on her perception. So I come across those kinds of things all the time and find them bizarre and disturbing. I see university as almost like a boot camp, like the SEALs have Hell Week. The SEALs have Hell Week. And university is like a timid version of Hell Week, but it's still a boot camp for four years, and you're supposed to prove yourself,

and that's what the degree is. It's I withstood this. Not necessarily some sort of sexual. Yeah, no, of course, violent, violent. No, you. But it is supposed to be you're supposed to deal with this much stress. I went through this much cognitive effort. Yeah. And I came out. Yeah. And it's a proxy for the real world. And so if you can't handle the university, then what are these faculty doing when they're shielding them in this bubble saying you're ready for the real world and so if you can't handle the university then what are these faculty doing when they're shielding them in this bubble saying you're ready for the real world and also especially

if feminism says that the real world is as bad as really or even worse university university is just a reflection of the real world so you're sending them out in the real world where there is no there is no agency to just expel somebody for giving you a compliment. Well, you know, I think that actually... And they want to create that. Yeah, they do want to create that. And that is being created. There are all sorts of cases of, you know, in the workplace now where there are sexual harassment guidelines. And I don't think it's possible to have a company anymore that doesn't have sexual harassment guidelines.

And it's illegal illegal you know to to sexually harass anybody and and what that means of course is not the terrible thing that that you know where somebody uh insists on some kind of sexual favor from somebody but you know anything sexual joking you know telling an off-color joke uh expressing sexual interest in someone, asking someone out on a date, all those kinds of things can get men fired now. And so yes, I think feminists are trying to... So what is their end game? Do they just want power? Is it all about power? They don't care about reason or logic or consistency? What is it? Well, they certainly wouldn't accept that characterization. They would say that they want a world in which women don't have to feel vulnerable

to male sexual or other kinds of harassment or intimidation. Okay, so what I would say would be something like, that sounds like an Oedipal mother. You have to instantiate some sort of totalitarian regime in order to make sure that every interaction that a woman has with a man or another woman or a man with a man, although they don't seem to care about that too much, is peaceful. Yeah. Now they might say, they would say that that's worth it. Also they would say, well, look at progress. We didn't accept, we used to be able to accept catcalling on a regular basis. Now that's not socially acceptable.

Yeah. So this is just in line with the march of progress. Okay. Yeah. I'm not sure what to say to that because that does sound to me, if social values are just changed on a regular basis, which they are, does sound reasonable. Now what would the counter argument to that be? Well, they have massive double standards in how all of this is going to be implemented, because there is no reasonable standard of interaction. If you are a hypersensitive,

you know, fainting couch feminist, there is no kind of interaction that might not potentially be offensive and discriminatory and uh you know damaging uh if i make a sexual joke okay i i i maybe i'm a man i i have to accept that i can no longer make a sexual joke can i come to your cubicle and make a non-sexual joke maybe the woman is going to say that that made her feel undermined in some way or vulnerable or harassed can I contradict an idea that you have in a in a committee meeting when we're throwing around ideas can I interrupt you if I feel that you're going on too long can I point to you and say what do you think I mean there you know there's just so many different things there was a recent case that you're going on too long? Can I point to you and say, what do you think? I mean, you know, there's just so many different things. There was a recent case that you may have heard of because I think it was fairly well known. This is a meeting, I'm doing a few mango file on this.

There's a meeting of a body called the International Studies Association. So this is people who do, you know, conflict analysis and basically experts in international affairs they have a yearly meeting they their meeting last year in last april 2018 they were at a con at the conference and it was in a hotel they were all in an elevator going up and a woman professor professor of gender studies asked everybody what floor they would like and she was you know standing near the whatever it's called and so she was going to punch everybody's floor in one elderly man said ladies lingerie and i guess this is a joke referring to the time when there used to be um you know conductors and and elevators, you know, and they would take you to the different floors in a department store.

So is that an intolerable, off-limits assault on a female sensibility? This woman felt it was. She did not confront him about it in the moment but she complained to the international studies association um i don't know the the body that that makes decisions about membership and conduct and everything and and they decided that he had contravened their code of conduct and that he would have to apologize to her he didn't feel he wanted to apologize because he didn't feel he'd done anything wrong and so he refused to apologize and that's it he's he's out of the the organization now that that person does not strike me as the sort of person she of course feels that you know

she's striking a blow for women's dignity and what he said was you know clearly completely socially unacceptable that i don't want that person or a person with that kind of mentality adjudicating what kinds of interactions adult scholars can have at a conference because that is a person who would never be satisfied. That is not a reasonable person. That's not somebody that could ever really be satisfied. I can imagine that that person would find all sorts of reason to feel aggrieved and upset over however she was treated in the course of various academic conversations. What if you challenged her interpretation would she see that as you know what if you challenged her feminist reading of some kind of situation anyway anything would would make a person like that you get accused of that just by

challenging people's feminist opinions that you are exciting violence inciting violence yeah sure anytime you challenge anything that a feminist deeply believes, it's seen as a kind of personal assault with widespread damaging consequences. So I don't want to live in that world. I mean, I guess it might be possible to imagine what that world would look like. And a feminist would say that's better than having to live with the day in, day out sexism of the society we used to have, which I don't believe ever existed. You know, I've talked to all sorts of men who grew up in the 1950s and 60s, and they said, you know, there was never a time when it was acceptable to, you know, be really crude and horrible to women. There were always codes of conduct. And sure, some people broke them, but in general, people work things out. but this is the thing that the feminist insists

has never existed and now supposedly it's as bad as it ever was but yeah i don't want those people in charge of human interaction so do they see it as being as bad now as it was back then or do they see a line of progress and if so how do they measure that progress well i you know you'd have to ask them i don't i don't know i mean, I think many of them would say that nothing has really improved. Or that it's now changed. It's subtle. It's systemic. Yes.

Yeah. Now it's much more subtle. Now it's microaggressions. Now it's, you know, a whole different range of ways that men assert their dominance over women or, you know, undermine women's sense of self or whatever. Yeah, that's what they'd say that, that, that the sexism is constant at the form it takes probably changes. I've talked to another man, um, speaking of the same association, the international studies association. He, um, you know, often it is older men who, who maybe, you know, don't quite understand

all the nuances of what you're allowed to say and what you're not allowed to say. But that's always been the case. That's always been the case. Older people have always been disconnected with the younger generation in almost every respect. Yeah, and what I find remarkable is the entire lack of tolerance or compassion on the part of younger women towards these older men. This fellow, he was asked to be what's

called a discussant, which means basically that he's tasked with, once there's a panel discussion, he's supposed to respond and ask them questions about their papers. And so he, and he was an expert in military intervention, and they were all talking about women in conflict zones so the first thing he did was he wanted to write an email to these women and say you know I'm the discussant and just kind of introduce himself so he wrote an email and the subject was hello women I don't think he said ladies I think think he said women. Hello, women. Immediately, he got an email back from the chair of the panel saying, you know, some or all of these members may identify as women, but they don't appreciate, you know, being addressed in this kind of way. So he said,

okay, okay, you know. I mean, he just didn't get it. And then at the actual discussion, he questioned their feminist framework. They were all speaking from a feminist point of view. He questioned their feminist framework and asked them various questions about very basic things. Aren't women actually better off in the West now as a result of centuries of progress than they are in certain other countries? And they were outraged at the racism and the sexist assumptions. result of centuries of progress than they are in you know certain other countries and you know they were outraged at the racism and you know the sexist assumptions they complained about him too and he was investigated for you know some kind of vague harassment or just failure to respect

their feminist principles so what these cases to me indicate is that there really is, there's no way that you could ever, you know, if we tried to create a rule book telling people, you know, what exactly constitutes respectful interaction, because that's what it always says in these codes of conduct. What constitutes treating someone with respect? I might feel that treating me with respect means you never contradict me, you know, you never challenge my ideas. Somebody else might say that's not respect, that's condescension. I want to be challenged, I want to, you know, be challenged to defend my ideas and be treated like an equal. So basically there's no way that you could ever know for sure that you're not offending

someone in a way that they're going to perceive to be sexist. And so this, for one thing, I don't agree that the utopian ideal of a world in which people never just sort of spontaneously say things to one another, I don't want to live in that world. I don't think things are bad as they are. I trust my fellow human beings to, you know, if they say something appropriate. Well, you also just said something interesting, which is trust. I trust my fellow human beings. And something I've been researching with regards to trust, first of all, trust is the number one resource of any country that's productive. And second, you can't have trust without allowing the other person the freedom to fail. To fail. Otherwise, there's no trust. That's why when you

fall backwards, it doesn't mean anything if you're falling backwards on the couch you have to have someone else there who could move their arms and you can get hurt yeah exactly so in order for there to be trust that means that you have to allow the other person to potentially hurt you yeah now if you're never allowing that then there is no trust no there's no trust and there's only enforcement there's only exactly one road to walk down yeah it's going to be a very totalitarian environment. And you're still not going to achieve what you say you want to achieve. Because, you know, there's a million ways I can offend you. Okay, so part of the problem seems to me to be that a discussion as to what constitutes excessive hurt.

That to me is fine. That to me is fine. But then the problem to me seems to be discussing the limits of that boundary is not acceptable by anybody who's not the person who's being offended. So that to me seems to be the... what would be you know because in different contexts you know different things are appropriate and you know it's so incredibly complicated how human beings interact and if if we're not going to accept that women and other traditionally marginalized peoples are adult adult enough to be able to say in the moment i would prefer that you not you know blah blah blah and then you know and deal with it in a in a in in in the moment if we're not going to trust that people can do that then i don't i don't know that we have a basis to go forward at all and that's what it seems that so many of these movements want to create is some sort of overlord you know some sort of body that they control that determines when others have stepped over the line but the line is constantly shifting and the person who

is offended doesn't have to take responsibility for being offended because they can often you know what what these people want often is to be able to complain anonymously they don't even want to take responsibility for their own anger and hurt i mean it's it just seems to me it's completely unworkable it sounds like i don't i hate this i hate to to make an exaggeration and point to the 1950s or 1940s but in i believe in east germany one-third of people were government informants. Exactly, were informants. Yeah, and that's exactly what... Have you studied much about communism in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s? Not to the extent of an expert like Jordan Peterson.

I mean, I was always fascinated by, as I think many people are, by those regimes and how they came into being and how people adapted themselves to them. And I do see that that's what we're often doing now, is just adapting ourselves to this ever-increasing panoply of rules of conduct and just trying to not be run over by this machine that is being created. Can you tell me about how the humanities are corrupt? Can you expound on that?

Well, I think the basic thing I would say is that they're corrupt in that they're no longer about the subjects they claim to be about, that they've all been corrupted by activism. Let's restate that, but say humanities, just in case I want to cut to this, I don't want people to say, what is she saying when she says they are correct? Yeah. The humanities, I think have stopped being about the particular subject. So art history is not really about art anymore.

Not, not fundamentally art is the means to the end of social justice. That's the same thing for, to the end of social justice. That's the same thing for literary studies. It's the same for various other classical studies even now. I've got a story about classical studies, but I won't bore you with it. But they all have essentially, I think, surrendered a commitment to the subject itself as valuable. And we used to say that you know

studying English literature was valuable in itself because there's something about reading great works of literature that gives you access to the human experience in all of its complexity and that in itself is is valuable you learn something about what it means to be human you don't necessarily approach it from one particular angle you approach it from a variety And that in itself is valuable. You learn something about what it means to be human. You don't necessarily approach it from one particular angle. You approach it from a variety of angles, but it's valuable in itself to know this body of work, to read and to think about the human experience over time. Now we read literature to understand the experience of marginalized peoples

and to strive for social justice. So it has been, I don't want to say hijacked, but that's the word that comes to mind, but it's become less important for its own self. It's a means to an end of this larger activist goal of becoming a better person, becoming a social social justice warrior so why is this such a big problem why isn't it just some esoteric squabblings between pedantic philosophers in university why does it not just stay there because it doesn't i mean because of course if you believe that once

you once you embrace that ideology you're not going to leave it in university you're going to take it out wherever you go and um because if your goal is to radically transform the world, and if you believe the world is a terrible, terrible place where all of these injustices are taking place every day, then of course you're not going to leave it. It's never going to be just an intellectual endeavor. It has to be an activist endeavor. It has to be something that you carry with you into

everyday life and that's what you know and and and these um social justice warriors these radical leftists have not been content to just attack the discipline of literary studies they've they've gone after law you know they're going after the the you know the core of Western civilization. For example? Well, they're interested in changing how we understand what the law is and how it should function. Changing the whole idea of what it means to live in a society governed by the rule of law. From what to what?

Well, feminist activists, for example, want to change, they want to essentially weaken the presumption of innocence in cases of sexual assault. It's one of their primary goals, so that women don't have to, or that the system doesn't have to prove a man guilty, that he will actually have to prove himself innocent. I mean, this is a fundamental

transformation. And this is seen as appropriate because women have for too long, according to feminists, not been able to get justice when they're sexually assaulted. So, you know, activists are taking their deeply held beliefs and taking them into, you know, all corners of the society. And so yeah, it's never going to change. It's never going to remain just an intellectual endeavor. Can you tell me how sexism has been redefined? And then if you like, you can also tell me how rape has been redefined and violence. We've touched on it, but to reiterate explicitly. Let's see. How has sexism been redefined? Let's see. How has sexism been redefined? I guess sexism has been redefined from explicit, clearly identifiable acts of injustice against women to something that is seen as systemic, that is present in all sorts of very subtle, often invisible forms of objectification,

of demeaning of women, the creation of all sorts of individual, or sorry, invisible barriers to women. I'm kind of losing it now. It's okay. It's okay. You can start over. Think about it. Think about it because this is, I might want to just take this clip. I know this is a lot of pressure, but I want to include someone explaining what racism used to be. I know you're not talking about racism. That's not your field, but feminism, what feminism used to be, sexism used to be, violence used to be, rape used to be in the context of men versus women or women, women's issues, to let the audience know, let me know what, what did it used to be violence used to be rape used to be in the context of men versus women or women women's issues to let the audience let me know what what did it used to be and what has it become well i think the main thing is that it used to be something that was that could be very clearly

measured that it was specific and intentional acts of discrimination big bigotry, or hatred against women, um, actions or, or expressions or laws, you know, that were discriminatory. Whereas now I think the idea is that it, you know, it has become because that kind of overt discrimination is much, much more difficult to put one's finger on, I would say because it doesn't exist, it has now become something primarily... You mean to say it's easier to put your finger on it, but it's just less, it's just happening less and less. Yeah, it's...

Because it is easier to point out when someone's been violently raped. Sure, yeah, absolutely, yes. But in society as a whole, it's very difficult to point to legal you know legal instances of uh discriminatory treatment of women in fact what you find instead is cases where women are discriminated in favor of rather than against did you did you hear about google and someone some woman was yes google yeah tell me about that well i haven't read about it yet, but women in high tech are finally starting to speak out and to say that they've watched as highly qualified men

are passed over for less qualified women and they're fed up with it. They think it's unacceptable. I was talking about something else where I saw that a woman sued Google because she's being paid less than her male counterparts. Well, I was talking about something else where I saw that a woman sued Google because she's being paid less than her male counterparts. Oh, I see. And then what happened was an investigation was conducted

and it turns out that the men were being paid less. Yeah, I read about that too. Yes, exactly. Yeah, well, I mean, there are many cases in academia where there have been class action suits where women's pay has been raised across the board because they were in general being paid less. But it's far from clear

that the reason they were being paid less had anything to do with sexism. There are all sorts of reasons why one person might be paid more than another, even in academia, because you've taken on an administrative position, because you've done much more, because you've won special award you know there's all sorts of reasons and and so this idea that sexism is to blame and i guess that comes back then to your question about you know

what is it about you know what has sexism become it's essentially become anything any case where a woman can allege discrimination on the basis of any sort of unequal outcome so I guess to simplify it one could say that has it has gone from being a case where one could point to inequality of opportunity that used to be where women were barred from certain things or whatever now it has become a case of any time one can point to an unequal outcome where the woman is disadvantaged sexism is always what is alleged to be the cause only in cases of course where the woman is disadvantaged you can also say well look there are many many more men in prison today than there are women and nobody's going to say that's because of yeah it's always been the case i think it's 93 or 94 percent of prisoners are male and if you ask a feminist about that she'll say that's because

men commit more crimes but why are there more male um nobel prize winners not because more men have done these brilliant things. It's because women were discriminated against. So there's always that double standard in operation. You know, so if you find a case of, a feminist will point to the number of women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that's evidence that women are being held back

because women do not operate or do not, um, occupy 50% of those positions. But if you ask how many men and women are in, you know, coal mining or, uh, construction work or, you know, whatever it happens to be, you work in the logging industry or the fishing industry with the very high fatality and injury rates yeah um and you say well what how do you explain that well that's a totally different thing and nobody is interested but they would say that that's also the patriarchy acting yeah they might but they're not they're not working very hard to get more women into those positions i've never seen a group of women advocating that you know the number of women in logging in logging be evened out so that more women can die or be maimed in these positions.

So I guess that's probably maybe the truest definition, is that we've gone from worrying about equality of opportunity and identifying barriers to now worrying about equality of outcome and whenever you know an outcome is seen to discriminate against women sexism is what is alleged even though it's impossible to prove that it's the case they use a little bit of sleight of hand here because they would say we also actually care about equality of opportunity only but we use evidence of the unequal outcomes as evidence evidence that there isn't equality of opportunity exactly yeah yeah even though you can never put your finger on in what way is a woman being held back of going into from going into mathematics they'll bring forward various types of arguments so do you do

you think feminists or the radical left even though feminists are a particular subset of the radical left let's talk about the radical left as a whole do you think they care more about power or the destruction of the west and this is something that i've been thinking about because they do talk about the abolishment of ideals from the i yes ideals from the enlightenment enlightenment yeah and that's west that's the west in a nutshell judeo-christian greco-roman in in its current form yeah and they seem to want to do away with that but at the same time they want power and so i wonder do they care more about power so that is if you if you put give them this choice you can have power? So that is, if you gave them this choice.

You can have power, but the West is strengthened somehow. Whatever that means. The hierarchies remain, but you have power. Or we can have the destruction of the West. So no hierarchies, but you have no power. Which actually would be the case if there were no hierarchies, because no one would have power. Which one do you think they would want?

Well, I don't think that they would see that it has to to be a choice their power would be used to destroy the west and and to destroy but if they had those two in front of them they had to choose one which one do you think i know you're not a radical feminist so you're going to have to conjure up a virtual feminist in your head which one do you think the hatred of the west i think is a very powerful impetus i do believe that so that i i would see that that is perhaps the the primary motivator so i've come to a similar conclusion i see power as the means to destroying the west and not and not the destruction of the west as means to attain power yeah yeah i i would agree yeah i think that um i i'm not sure how it is that um all of these people many of whom you know have very comfortable affluent secure

prosperous lives in the west how they come to so deeply um disassociate themselves from it, to resent it so deeply, to hate it, to prefer any other system, even systems that have resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people, to the Western system. Well, there's that Peterson's Slavoj Zizek debate recently. I don't know if you've seen it. Yeah, I didn't see it, no, but I heard about it. But at one point, Peterson said that there is a bloody violent revolution there would be a bloody violent revolution if so-and-so happened and as soon as he said that then the audience were like yeah yeah and then he just paused he's like are you just he didn't say anything he didn't comment on it but they're just clapping for bloody violent revolution it is quite it's astounding really it is it's astounding um and and

um you know i think there is an element of a death wish in in that too you know that there's a kind of admiration for murderous regimes that kill dissidents because they're strong and i think something happens to people in the west a kind of um you know a sickening contempt for the softness of the West, even though that's not how they themselves would define it. They would say that people are being oppressed and people are dying and they're not living a quality life as it is now. But they must know that, relatively speaking, that simply isn't the case,

you know relatively speaking that simply isn't the case that all other regimes have done a much poorer job of guaranteeing you know the the basic opportunities of their citizens than western democratic capitalism has done um but there is this i think a deep desire to um to see destruction and even maybe to be destroyed themselves. Uh, there's a, um, I'm thinking of Jamie's book. There's a book. Have you read, um, Jamie Glazov's, uh, United in Hate? What's the subtitle? Do you remember? I can't remember the subtitle, but the main title is United in Hate. And, um And that's what he posits. I haven't read the book now in a decade at least, but he posits that something happens in the radical leftist

that propels him to identify with murderous regimes, actually because they are murderous, even though ostensibly the reason for the identification is because these are fairer, even though ostensibly the reason for the identification is because these are, you know, fairer, juster regimes, but that there's a deep knowledge that they actually aren't, and that the radical leftist actually falls in love with violence and would go so far as to prefer to be killed by one of these regimes, or or at least you know to have his individuality erased in union with the collective and so it's it's something there it's some sort of deep disconnect

from his own individuality in a free society and a desire for union with the collective he was writing that about his experience or he's writing that about well he based on his study of especially of the soviet union and of westerners who covered up the crimes of the soviet union various leftists who traveled to the soviet union and saw what was going on or at least had a sense of what was going on but lied about it when they came back things like that and um uh and you know he looks at um celebrity leftists and various people who have been in love with you know with north vietnam with north korea there's always people willing to sean penn, you know, who's, I think, went to North Korea and thought it was a wonderful place. Or no, he went to Iran, I think, and

carried water for that regime. And there are always these people who, although you would think that they would feel some kind of basic gratitude to the country that has given them so much, but actually hate it and would like to see it destroyed, even if that resulted in their own destruction. It's deeply irrational. Yeah, this ingratitude is something that I see even when it comes to literary work. It's not that Shakespeare is great

and it sucks that he was also sexist or that there's sexist elements in his plays. It's not that. It's that Shakespeare is a white male and he's sexist and we despise him and I hate him. It's not, it sucks plays it's not that it's it's that shakespeare is a white male and he's sexist and we despise him and i hate him it's not it sucks that it's yeah he is huh we get to hate him now so there's an ingratitude there yeah it seems like there's some resentment there's an element of that yeah and a deep rejection of one's own intellectual and cultural inheritance there's a

celebration of the fact that there are other people who are racist because then they can point to them as the enemy and the source of their woes. Yeah. It's a bizarre combination of superiority because you're one who sees the racism and sexism of your own culture and you rise above it and you fight it, etc. So there's a kind of self-love in that. But there's also this deep self-love in that. But there's also this deep self-hatred, I think,

in that you become alienated from your own people, your own history, your own communities. It's a bizarre combination. To recapitulate, what do you think is the line that separates the moderate left from the extreme left? I guess I would say the main... Okay, now I remember what you said before was something like when they go too far with expanding the domain of what constitutes an expression of hurt or a feeling of hurt. And that is too vague because what's too large? So if you could somehow make it more clear.

I think the main thing I would say about where the left definitely goes too far is that one, it's the identification of words with violence and therefore an argument made for extreme censorship of words. And the other thing is through the identification of words with violence, therefore there is a justification of using violent methods against those with whom one disagrees. And we see that in the riots that have taken place in various places. At Berkeley, for example, where a professor of situational ethics threw a bike lock at somebody for simply speaking in a way

that he found repulsive or that he condemned. So I think those would be the two things I would say. The identification of words with violence and therefore the argument being made that those words can legitimately be censored, that whole swaths of discourse can be called off limits because they supposedly uphold an unjust status quo. Part of what the left often claims is that freedom of speech only should apply to what they identify as liberatory speech, not speech that reaffirms injustice. That goes way back to Marcuse.

And it's not even free. Yes. It's not free yes it's not free i know placing limits and of course then some people would say some limits exist yeah there already are but that's also one of the reasons why hate speech is so pernicious and maybe it shouldn't be a concept that that we instantiate into law yeah well exactly the united states doesn't have it it doesn't no it may soon but yeah the canadian supreme court has has uh you know tried to define hate speech but and you know and why it why a principle supporting freedom of speech doesn't apply to hate speech but they just end up you know you can't write a logical explanation for why freedom of speech shouldn't apply to hate speech. They end up saying things like, well, hate speech doesn't contribute to freedom of speech. Therefore it shouldn't be covered by freedom of speech

because hate speech supposedly prevents others from being able to respond. And therefore it, you know, it isn't really free. It doesn't contribute to freedom. It's just crazy. There's no way you can make the argument. So that I think is a fundamental where we start defining speech as violence and then therefore justify violence or the violence of the law or actual physical violence in order to shut down this supposedly violent speech. Those would be my two. Thank you so much, I appreciate it wow okay

so now, this is extra this is pretty much for me, I had some questions that I was just personally interested in yeah, yeah, you're welcome why don't you come in yeah, I'm still recording you come and sit down I need a sip of of water i should

have got something maybe get kurt his uh yeah ginger ale would be great just hot water thank you thank you here's who you are yeah okay i'm sorry i don't think i was very good Are you worried about how you performed? Yeah, I mean, I was all muddled, and I'm just terrible in those situations. Thank you. Some of what I wanted to ask you about was how you're actually pretty quick on your feet. Even though you said that you're an introvert, which I am an introvert too. You are, really?

I don't think you think I am. No, you don't seem like it at all. You seem very gregarious to me and extroverted i've become that way but it's not as if i guess they say people become more introverted over time the definition of an introvert is that when you're out in the party you'd rather go back home and recharge exactly yeah yeah i find that Exactly, yeah, yeah. That's not the big five definition of introversion. I find that. Like, I get exhausted really quickly.

I can spend months at home and never speak to someone else. We're like that too, both of us, yeah. I prefer that. Okay, so what I wanted to note is, on that Steve Pagan panel, was that your only Steve Pagan panel? Yeah, yeah. So there's a lady beside you who goes berating me.

Yeah. And for me, if I'm being attacked, now I don't know as much about the subject matter as you, but I would get flummoxed, and I wouldn't know how it works together in order to respond. But you did a fantastic job. Wow, that's very nice. I didn't, yeah, Justin, he's very very articulate but he's very good no well that wasn't

my I mean my that was I think my worst that was one of my first sort of public things really and I was so embarrassed afterwards and did you see Karen Strong's comment about you uh I don't know I might have okay well she said Fia M mango i love her i don't know how she managed to stay so composed when i was talking to naomi wolf who was less of an intellectual compared to the lady in orange that was sitting next to you yeah i got hot-headed i'm just paraphrasing what she said well karen's drawn would never be flummoxed she's so good but no I did feel I mean there's there's pictures there's some like film footage in that panel discussion where I I'm just sitting there I'm kind of I'm I'm staring ahead I I just felt so

yeah I can't even describe it. Was it all about confrontation? It's not that. It's not that I don't like confrontation. It's just I'm very dissatisfied with my own ability to respond. And I get, it's just like you said, I get flustered, flummoxed. I can't think of any words. Literally, I feel like my vocabulary, which, you know know when I'm just sitting on the couch I feel like I have a

you know access to every single word yeah pretty much I might have to think for a while we always forget words but you know pretty much I can think of words but yeah in the moment

it's like my vocabulary reduces to about one tenth of its actual size. You know, see, in a way, they didn't present you properly. I was there, and they made her up as if she was some kind of Japanese mannequin. She looked like a Japanese mannequin. And I really... All of it put on a whole bunch of makeup. I really lost it.

I mean, she looked like she had just stepped out for Halloween. And I said, you can't do this because she's beautiful, and just leave her, let her be. And then I was really upset with the way Steve Paikin, I always call him the Paikinese, I can't help it, but the way in which he negotiated that confrontation, that discussion. And I was really upset because he didn't seem to give Janice the opportunity to respond properly and they were too against her. And Justin, who was in the middle was pro and con you know it was I don't think it was a fair setup so afterwards I went back you know into the back room the green room whatever it happens to be and I verbally attacked

yeah no no his his love is love existence almost Yeah? He just took it with a neutral face? No, no. His Slavic, his Slavic assistant almost threatened to beat me up and I turned and I let him have it and then I had this long email conversation exchange with Pekin for about a month afterwards. I'm surprised he even responded because to him it's like… He was trying to justify himself after He wrote to me and said, I actually calibrated the amount of time I gave to everybody. And in fact, I didn't really legislate against her. She had enough time compared to the others. Even if I'd had more time, I wouldn't have been any good.

I said no because there were two others. And Justin Trottier, he was presumably café on her side, but on the other hand, he was attacking Ann Coulter. I would maybe agree with it now, because I think she's gone off the deep end. But at that time, she was an ally. And I just thought the whole way in which the proportions were arranged was completely, no, no, it was completely non-democratic, let us say. Even if I'd had more time, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't, I could, I didn't equip myself well, and I wouldn't have been able to, and I still don't really think I would have, I would be able

to. It's just one of my weaknesses. In the moment when I really want to be able to marshal an argument, my mind just goes blank. I can hardly, be able to marshal an argument, my mind just goes blank. I can hardly, you know, I've been thinking about these issues for five years now. I've read all sorts, you know. And in the moment, I can hardly remember a name. I can't remember examples. I think for me, the reason why is that I don't have an angry mind.

I very rarely get angry, but I get anxious. Yeah. So Peter says that the type that can get angry and I'm right very few moments in my life that I have been angry I can think so so quick it's my ability to access any word in any order and even just I can even I can even construct false arguments just to disprove the other person because I used to do stand-up comedy and so that's oh really what you do as a comedian oh my goodness you're proving what's false and then that gets a laugh like Seinfeld does that I'm going to tell you why this is ridiculous and then he proves it and usually there's some element of false well there's some element of truth too but it's ridiculous it's a it's a I just proved something to be true that you know is not true and then you laugh there's

something incongruent right incongruent so that's what stand-ups do but i can't do that when i've never really been attacked though although i do have someone in my family who's a part of the radical left and yeah i can't well she's also a part of my family so i can't just berate her okay but i'm so on we don't talk to each other no but i also found that whenever I talk to her, if I talk to her instead of in a manner that's conducive of conflict, instead, if it's a dialectic, like we're just trying to get to some shared truth, then the conversation goes so much smoother for both people.

I'm more articulate. She is as well. I understand. So it's just better if I go in thinking, okay, there's something that I don't articulate. She is as well. I understand. So it's just better to try to go in thinking, okay, there's something that I don't know. I hold a partial truth. You hold a partial truth. What is it?

It's just both. It's some shared negotiation. Part of the problem, like you were just articulating, is that why sometimes one doesn't rise to the challenge of an interview in the full way that one would like to is because there's too much information. There's just too much evidence to deal with at one time. It's like, as I say, it's like juggling medicine balls.

You don't know what you're going to go. For example, this argument that you brought up, or this question you brought up about, and that you were discussing about this hate speech, oppression, unpleasant things said about other people, that kind of... Does it really affect one in such a way that one is no longer able to respond properly and, as you said, reduces the accidental dimension of your life and so on?

I mean, a perfect example of why that is false is Judaism. I grew up in a little French-Canadian town, Sénégal-des-Monts-Caulisses, up there in Quebec. I was beaten up constantly for being a Motsi-Juif, a bad Jew. I still have certain scars. And that pebble there, you know, slingshot, all kinds of stuff. My stepsister couldn't, you know, to get into McGill, she had, it was at numerous causes, she had to have 80%. Other people would get in at 60%, 55%, but she had to have 80%. In my case, it was just about that time, too, when I went to Yale. So we studied hard, and we led our classes,

and we were admitted afterwards. That was dropped. You look, for me, the chief example, it was so beautiful when you think of it, is Barron Bing High School in Montreal on St. Urban Street. That was the very poor Jewish district. How did they make a living at that time, all these immigrants?

They sold junk, they had little grocery stores in the front room of their little hovels and so on. Who came out of that? Our greatest poet, Irving Leighton. Our greatest novelist, Mordecai Richler. One of our great, actually, though he was NDP, politicians, David Lewis. They were all Jews, grew up in absolute crushing penury, but had the Torah, the book behind them, the Bible behind them. They read, they studied, they did all kinds of ridiculous things too, and maybe things that weren't so acceptable. But these people, look what they became. And then when you get.08% of the world population winning 8% of the Nobel prizes, and these are people who have been oppressed since Mesopotamian times.

And there are lots of stupid Jews. Are you the most oppressed group? In the world. It's the only prejudice that has never ceased to exist. That's true. So what happens there? People who have been attacked, who have been brutalized, who have been condemned,

who have been reduced to non-entity, who've had to travel from country to country. Who've had their actual humanity questioned. And their humanity questioned. And killed, of course. Their lives annihilated. These people read, studied, whether it was Torah in the synagogue, or whether it was just the books at home,

or whether it was the sage grandfather, or whatever it happened to be. And they made themselves, through all that horror and terror and inflammatory rhetoric and devastation, they made themselves into the leading intellectuals of our time. Also the great fools of our time, too. That's the answer. But there it is. So the attack on your sense of identity does not necessarily by any means mean that you're going to be deprivileged. It may mean, and it has for Irving, it did for Leonard Cohen, though Leonard was rich, but he had his problems too. It did for David

Lewis, it did for Mordecai Richler, it did for all these great writers of our time and great scientists as well. What it did for them is they rose above all that condemnation and denunciation and all that oppression and prejudice that they had to face. I mean, I grew up in Senegas. I couldn't swim in certain beaches. No Jews allowed. This is what I grew up with. I was ambushed every second day on a long walk to my high school and my public school

by the French kids around me. And, you know, I even thought, I spoke French almost before I spoke English. public school by the French kids around me and you know I even thought moods is with damn Jew I spoke French almost before I spoke English but I thought it was one word they would call me a movie with a damn was only later on I realized it's two words moods II damn did we have to do so it was one word you know because I got it all the time well Well, I don't know, maybe I didn't rise above those challenges, but I published 35 books. I represented Canada in the Department of External Affairs in Europe,

stayed with ambassadors, lectured at universities. I have five degrees, which makes me unemployable at this point. Everything from a B.A. to a doctorate, three M.A.s and so on. What were the degrees then? My B.A. was in philosophy and English. I BA'd a doctorate, three MAs, and so on. What were the degrees then? My BA was in philosophy and English. My QMA was in drama. And then I had a creative writing, but that was just a joke, just for salary purposes. I got a degree in education at the University of Sherbrooke.

That was also a joke, but the degree is there. And I got my doctorate in North American Studies at Lajoska-Scherzog University in Debrecen, Hungary, where I've often lectured. How fast do you both read? I read one book a year. Slow, slow, slow. Let's say you're to read this.

How long would this one page take you? It depends. I don't know. I'm pretty fast, I think. I don't know. I'm not sure. Have you always been fast? Yeah, I think so. Ever since you were a kid?

Yeah, I think so. What about you? Very slow. So you're faster at writing than you are at reading? No, I'm slow at both. I'm very slow at both. Because everything I write, for example, the thing just went up now at PJ Media Town Hall,

it's up today or yesterday, called Life in the Biodome, which starts off, you know, when we went back, we were in Vancouver a month or two ago, and Janice took me to the Biodome, and I thought, here's a metaphor for Western Civ. But it was sitting there for the longest time, because, you know because I couldn't come across some way of dealing with it. And eventually I started to do it and sometimes it takes a day or two but it's because I've been thinking about it off and on for two months. And even when I don't think of it, and Janice knows this, it comes up in my dreams.

I'm totally unconscious of it and the words come up, phrases come up. So I know there's something called the mind behind the mind. I've often said this. You have your mind, so called, whatever it is that observes and makes decisions and judgments and so on. But behind that mind, there is another mind, which is

you and not you. And it's that mind that never ceases, never sleeps. It creates your dreams. She said we forget a word sometimes. Oh yeah, do you ever have that? Two days. Or you forget something.

I wake up at three, it's Lillian Hellman. Yeah. Two, three days later, I don't know, I haven't been thinking about it. So we have that mind that is constantly, it's a perpetual motion machine, constantly revolving and thinking behind the mind that is doing all the other things like right now, you know.

And that's the mind, I don't know if everybody has that, I presume, it must be a natural human phenomenon. But I know I have it and I'm infinitely grateful for it because without that, what would I do?

You know, it's what we do you know it's what we call inspiration it's what we call magic it's what you call being in the zone we have all these terms for it you know she has it too she's an amazing writer i mean i can't believe she'll sit down with very slow though very well because we go over things a million times i have the writing process yeah i don't i don't even know what it is you have your source on the screen no i i usually print my preference is actually to print things out whatever it is i'm reading and responding to and and um i don't even know what my process is you know i just start writing and then i but then i go over it and over it and over it and over it. How do you construct your sentences?

Does it come out of you in the same way that it is read? No, no, we hire a construction firm. It's called sentencing construction firm. We have an office in New York and we have one in Kingston. We call them up, we pay them an hourly rate, and they come and construct their sentences. I don't know how I do it but I I revise and revise and revise. I mean I really, Steve and I you know with the videos we often

talked about you know getting doing a certain number of videos that are on a contemporary subject so if some issue breaks try to do it right away you know while everybody's still. issue breaks try to do it right away you know while everybody's still i just can't do it i've done it i've tried like i really have a great admiration for journalists who who do that because i find i can't do it i'm very interested no i'm interested i just i can't really often i don't even know exactly what my argument is you know i've got an idea I've got points I want to make but I don't know like when when I'm really happy with a piece of writing it's when I feel that every part fits together and it all it all makes one not original I mean nothing's really original but what I feel is my original contribution.

And, and, and I, and, you know, and the ideal, which always doesn't always happen, even sometimes when I've worked on something for weeks, but the ideal is that it, it all like it's intricately, it seems really natural the way it flows, but that it all works together and the various parts, you know, one part leads into another, and then that counter counterpoints off this and then it all comes together with my final point. But that's so hard. Yeah, we... All the different versions. Yeah. versions yeah like you try to make it seem simple and straightforward really because often the way I first write is quite turgid and long sentences and too many words you know long phrases all very complicated and then part of the revision process

has to do with paring it down taking out all the unnecessary words and having it so that it seems very natural and very straightforward but so much work I really admire like some journalists can just you know they write one draft and and that's it and it reads really well and it makes their point and is well presented but I I can't do that often my stuff is really turgid and overly complex and not clear and maybe I'm going in a number of different directions and I haven't really decided how all those different directions work together and so yeah I'm constantly reworking and it's really it's fascinating I mean it is a fascinating process because sometimes I'll work all day on it

and it's just it's no good it's going doesn't it doesn't know what it wants to do I've got one point here it doesn't really connect with this other point and I don't even know what the relationship is. And then I'll go to bed. And like David was saying, the mind behind the mind or whatever, I'll wake up in the morning. I know exactly what it is. I've figured it out. And maybe it's just one sentence at the very beginning that then everything

else somehow fits together. Or I see how that first point connects with the second point. And so, yeah, but it just takes forever. Yeah, so I... Which is amazing because when you sit down and you just start writing, I can't do that. That's not true. I have to take out a contract on Steve

and the other side with his lawyer, it'd go crazy. That's not true. She's incredible. She's amazing. He does that too no he's hadn't had had his treats for some time. Okay. Some treats. But yeah, if I could, I would do way more. Like, I wish I could write way faster.

Because there's so many interesting things to write about. But I have to let so many things go by because I just can't get to them all. Do you mean other topics or topics within feminism? No, even within feminism. I mean, yeah, there are. I would like to write about other subjects too. But I'm kind of stuck in feminism right now. David and I have talked about this before that I should get out. Because there's other things that are really important in the world too.

Because it's the one that I have been working in for years now. And I, how much of your writing is research versus writing? Do you ever get stuck in this research rabbit hole where you do research and research and you realize that it's a form of procrastination or is it because you realize that you need to research and you don't know it? Yeah, there's that. I mean, there's so many things to know and yeah, that can take forever. But that isn't, it's not so much that I don't, you know, I do research, but I don't extensively research. A lot of my stuff is fairly straightforward. I'm either dealing with a specific incident that I want to say something about, or sometimes I'm responding to, you know,

a number of articles that are making some kind of claim about women in society or whatever that I want to counter and uh and so the thing that really takes the time is just figuring out how to how to present it that I just I find that really hard and often people will send me you know there's a lot of articles written by feminists attacking men you know laying out the usual statistics about why you know there's a lot of articles written by feminists attacking men you know laying out the usual statistics about why you know more needs to be done for women and all that and I often think I would like to I wish I could just bang out in an hour you know a quick response saying you know why this is wrong and I just can't do it like in the moment often I'll I just get so angry reading

that's part of it too or maybe it it's more anxious, but it's both. Like I get angry and anxious. I think, oh, how, like, this is just nonsense. So much of the stuff that's written is just, you know, it's, it's fantasy or, or, you know, it's ridiculous, but to, to figure out how exactly to respond to it, I'm often kind of at a loss I have to sit with it there's Megan oh yeah yeah anyway so yeah so so like there was you know there was a famous example um this woman she's a university professor as so many of them are her name was Susanna Walters and she wrote an article about a about a year ago or more than a year ago called why can't we hate men and it was actually not an ironic not joking not anything it was just a straightforward statement of why she hates men and why she thinks that's legitimate anytime you come

across these so there's Peggy McIntosh's white. White. Yeah. Would you want me to send you a few? Yeah. I'm going to at one point in the documentary, just list off. I guess snippets after snippets. Yeah. Okay. Sure. I'll send you some things.

Hey, hi, Megan. Come on in. We're just filming something for me and maybe it'll go on behind the scenes. If she approves, you'll get it before it goes out. And we're done. This one died, which is fine. It died about one minute before we needed to end, so it was fine. Okay.

That's not bad. Okay. Yep. Okay. Yep. And you were saying, oh, you know what I was thinking about is that lady who was sitting next to you, the lady in the white shirt, she was saying that, one, it wasn't a violation of free speech what those people did, which is technically true in terms of law.

It wasn't a violation of free speech to shut someone else's free speech down, but it definitely was a violation of the university's principles. Yeah, sure. So there's that. Yeah, I mean, what do you say to that? See, I was dumbfounded. And the second is that she said, well, look, you benefited. Yeah.

But then you can also make the counter thing well what about the people of me too are we to say that they are doing this yeah they can benefit they're benefiting yeah exactly i mean what a ridiculous thing to say yeah so the same logic there so if my leg is cut off i will probably receive a lot of attention too i might be interviewed by by cbc or whatever yeah 27 hours with james franklin exactly yeah the guy cut off his arm so are we going to say that that was really a good thing then that it happened it benefited yeah i mean that's just ridiculous yeah yeah i mean what do you say to that i mean i didn't even know what to say in a

way that it's exactly the same argument that was used for Lindsay Shepard, who was treated so terribly, and then a bunch of people said, oh, but she benefited. She received far more attention than she would have otherwise, and everybody knows who she is. Yeah, but I don't know what to even... That doesn't justify it. Yeah.

And also, that also could be an indication of how pathological the system is, that when you draw attention to it, people realize, realize okay we need to pay more attention to it so it's not necessarily that it's a net i mean it is a net positive it ended up i so i do believe that when you speak your mind and you tell what you think to be true in a courageous manner like yourself or lindsey shepherd or jordan peterson or brett weinstein wein don't know. Yeah, I think it's Steen, but I'm not sure. That, that, that I think in next, it will be better for you. So that's true. But that doesn't mean that you're doing it for the thing. Or that somehow, you're mixing up correlation. Yeah, I mean, it's really bizarre, or that somehow, therefore, the injustice or the wrong is in any way lessened

because something good came out of it because you drew attention to it and people noticed you when you spoke about it. It's just bizarre. Yeah. The suggestion was that one would plan for these things to happen because they would help you in some way oh yes i messaged her a long time ago about this documentary before i started interviewing

anybody and she said yes let's do it and then i just never contacted her again because i i wasn't sure who she was i just had a list of people I should contact. I contacted them to see who they saw, who would get back to me. And then I thought that she was somebody who wasn't credible. I didn't know. I didn't even check into her credentials. So I was like, okay, let me interview these other people first. But now that I researched her, oh, she has a degree in neuroscience. So she actually studied the sexual dimorphism between the differences between men and women neurologically,

which is extremely interesting yeah yeah she's she's a really interesting person i hope you will interview oh that's great yeah yeah and she's a very spunky person too yeah that's what she says i think sex should be talked about more and that goes opposite to the jordan peterson point of view which is which has turned out to be my point of view, which is that sex is extremely serious, and you shouldn't treat it as if there's such a thing as casual sex because you can't disentangle emotions.

Well, this whole Me Too movement is about why casual sex doesn't even exist. So while the left is clamoring for yeah more sex and yeah so they're also at the same time advocate realizing the ramifications of that and advocating for sexual totalitarianism yeah yeah all based on what the woman wants and whether it's a positive experience for the woman so if it's something she wants and she enjoys then it's good for it for to have a free-for-all but if she then changes her mind afterwards and said it was damaging in some way then all of a sudden that sexual misconduct it's totally crazy