TRIGGERnometry - Why Men & Boys Are Struggling and No One Cares - Dr Warren Farrell

Episode Date: September 27, 2021

Warren Farrell is a political scientist, activist, and author of seven books on men's and women's issues including his latest title “The Boy Crisis” (co-authored by former Triggernometry guest John Gray) https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-boy-crisis/warren-farrell/john-gray/9781948836135 Get TICKETS to TRIGGERnometry Live with Peter Hitchens here: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873620658 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod​​​ Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I have no problem with society opening up the option of more feminine behavior on the part of men, as well as having opened up the option of more masculine behavior on the part of women. But we're not just doing that. We're making the feminine behavior as the superior behavior and the masculine favor as the toxic masculinity. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a political scientist, an activist and a prolific author, including of his latest book The Boy Crisis. Dr. Warren Farrell, welcome to Trigonometry.

Thank you. I'm looking forward to being with you both. It's such a pleasure to have you on the show. We're going to talk about some subjects that are fairly controversial in our society at the moment and fairly difficult to discuss. So I think before we get into them, it's important for people to understand your background because you were actually one of the first men to be involved with the women's movement all the way back when. And it's been quite a radical journey for you since. So talk to us a little bit about your life story. How are you where you are? What's been the journey that brings you to be here talking to us about the boy crisis?

Sure. I guess it was about 1969. I was in New York doing my doctor. at NYU. And the women's movement surfaced and I took an interest in it. And I was teaching also at Rutgers at that time, Rutgers University in New Jersey. And the students, when I was talking about the women's movement, they were really saying, you know, you have fire in your belly, Warren, when you're talking about the women's movement, you know, and they said, well, what are you doing your dissertation on? And I said what it was. And they said, you should think about changing it to something on the politics of the women's movement because my doctor was in political science. And so they, I ended up convincing my, my, the people, the, the,

my doctoral committee, I was very reluctant. They said, you know, oh, no, this is, you know, this is just a fad. It's going to go away very soon. And I said, no, I disagree with that. I think that it's, that there's an evolutionary shift happening. And the shift is that, you know, up until this point in history, in most developed nations, we were concerned with survival. And, we, we're you're concerned with survival, you have to have very strict roles to be able to do whatever helps your generation survive. Women's roles raise children, men's roles raise money. And so I think that that's going to become much more flexible for both sexes. And they sort of rolled their eyes, but at that point, I had been also appointed to be

assistant to the president of NYU. So I was in some way as their boss at that point as a student. And so they sort of backed off and let me do my thing. And that got me immersed in the women's movement. And then as part of my research, I joined now the National Organization for Women in New York City. That led long story short to my being elected to the Board of Directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City. And that led to my speaking around the world on women's issues. and that lasted a few years, a number of years, about a half a decade. But then in the mid-70s, early mid-70s, I began to see that there were a lot of divorces,

and I began to see the first bit of research that was suggesting that children who did not have fathers, a lot of father involvement after divorce, were not doing very well. And so I brought this up to the board of now, and they responded. well, you know, Warren, women who are joined now, they want the option of being with their children full time or not if they divorce. And they want the option to divorce and the option of being with their children full time if they divorce. And so I said, well, but don't you care whether or not it's the best for the children? And they said, listen, you know, we do care that it's the best for the However, there's a bigger issue here, which is that we have lots of fish to fry.

It's not just custody issues, and we have equal pay issues and sports issues and so on. And so we can't afford to lose membership. And so I'm saying, I can understand this politically, but to sacrifice our children because it's best politically is not a good tradeoff from my perspective. And I said, you know, women, I'm 100% in favor of women having the option to have children or not have children, of course. But once a woman chooses to have a child, that's like me choosing to take on a job. I make a commitment to that job. I show up every day. And if I make a commitment to have a child, I put the child before me.

And if it looks like the child does best when there's fathers and mothers both involved, then I have to pay attention to what is best for that child and not. what is best for me primarily unless it's so not best for me so to speak that that there would be that that would end up hurting the child and so we went back and forth on this but i could see that you know i had said that you know the the research wasn't thorough at that point because you know in order to find out whether something's best for the child you have to not only look at one point in history you have to wait for the child to get to be 15 20 25 30 to see how that child longitudinally does well or poorly. And so I acknowledge that that was not something we had enough longitudinal data to prove one way or the other.

And they sort of basically said, well, you know, Warren, we thought you were really a big supporter of us. And, you know, you realize that all over the world, the reasons you're speaking all over the world and on all these TV shows and, you know, and getting famous is because, you know, it's the recommendations of us. And so why don't you continue doing your research? you acknowledge yourself that you know that it's you don't have enough longitudinal data well i can see the handwriting on the wall was basically uh you you know it's going to be the end of my um career the you know the income i was producing etc etc if i chose to you know just follow the research without regard to for the politics and but i did choose to just follow the research and but increasingly the research to a much greater degree than i would have even predicted at the time

show the children who were growing up that were dad deprived, those children were doing worse in all countries where there were significant percentages of children that were being raised without their dads. The UK, the United States, to a slightly lesser degree, Germany, all of this was being, you know, it became very clear. So I did start speaking up about that. And, you know, everything that, you know, that was part of

my infrastructure for producing income. And every article I used to write for the New York Times used to be published. And once I started to explain boys and men's positions, they were not published anymore for the next 29 articles. And all the TV shows, the Oprahs and so on that I would be on, they stopped calling me, et cetera. And so it was, you know, I went from doing extremely well financially to, you know, doing much more marginally.

Fortunately, I'm a reasonably decent business person and was able to invest the money I had made during the women's movement in order to support myself being able to share a more full story of what was happening with boys and men. And in your book, you detail in excruciating detail some of the things that are happening and have happened since those days, particularly obviously to boys and men. For people who haven't yet read the book, I'm sure lots of people will go out and buy it after this interview, but for people who haven't read it, in a nutshell, what is the boy crisis? What is it that is happening to boys and men in our society in your view?

In all 53 of the largest developed nations, boys are falling behind girls in every single academic subject, but especially in reading and writing and reading and writing of the two biggest predictors of success or failure. And so I started looking at why that was the case, and I'll get back to that in a moment, but the key word is developed nations. The second thing I was noticing is that boys in all the developed nations were having, they were having mental health problems. They were, so when boys and girls, for example, are of nine years of age, they're very rarely likely to commit suicide.

But when they do commit suicide, it's about equally. Between the ages of 10 and 14, boys commit suicide at twice the race. rate of girls between the ages of 15 and 19, it's four times the rate. Between the ages of 20 and 24, it is five times the rate of girls. And so very few people know that and or ask the question, why is that the case? On the mental health level, boys are far more likely to get in, feels depressed, to feel that they have no option but to get involved with being addicted to drugs or being addicted to opioids about the opioid deaths for boys versus girls is about four to one in the United States, about five to one in Canada. Boys are far more likely to be

addicted to porn, be addicted to video games. Video game, you know, involvement is actually healthy up to a point, but the point to which males are more likely to do it, especially certain types of males, that it becomes addictive, that it becomes destructive. And so the, That's just the mental health. The physical health problems, very manifest, boys are far more likely to be obese. They're more likely to not attend school fully. They're more likely to have to drop out. Their grades are worse. They have to drop out of high school to a much greater degree than girls do. Boys who drop out of high school are far less likely to be employed in their 20s. Boys who aren't employed are more likely to live with their parents.

boys are 66% more likely in the United States to live with their parents between the ages of 25 and 31. And the average girl that I know who goes out looking for a guy is not looking at unemployment lines and searching out parents' basements for boys to have a children with. And so these boys are feeling not only like they're losers living with their parents, but they're also feeling like they're deprived of sexual intimacy, and they feel like if they reach out, they're always going to be rejected. That often makes them depressed.

That often makes them get into porn because porn is accessed to a variety of attractive women without fear of rejection at a price that they can afford. And since they're not earning money, that's the price they can afford. So they get into porn. But one of the problems with porn aside from it, objectifying women, is that it also, it uses men because it gets men addicted to beautiful women's bodies. First, it's just the body that he sees, it gets him excited. But after he's seen a few hundred bodies, he needs to move to some type of sexual behavior

and then more advanced sexual behavior or more challenging sexual behavior, like watching a guy come in a woman's face. And then he gets, finally, he gets to meet a real-life woman. and he's so addicted to what porn has addicted him to in order to keep his excitement up, that the woman feels like she's a porn object and she feels, and because she is a porn object, and so she withdraws from him, which only reinforces his feelings of being sexually rejected, and therefore addicts him more to the porn. So there are so many vicious cycles like this that I talk about in the Boy Crisis book,

that boys are involved with. And so, you know, obviously this is, you know, the academic health, the academic lack of academic success leads to a lack of economic success. The lack of economic success means that girls aren't interested in you. Leads to depression, leads to sometimes suicide, leads to boys acting out. So, you know, when I started researching the mass shooters who were school shooters, So, for example, in the United States, in the 21st century, there are only five school shooters who have killed more than 10 people, but whose family backgrounds we know of.

And all five of them, 100 percent, are dad-deprived. The ISIS recruits in the United States are almost all dad-deprived children, including the ISIS recruits, smaller percentage of ISIS recruits who are girls. And so the prisoners in the United States are 90s. of those 93% men, but of those 93% men, about 90% are dad deprived. And I base this on my research going around from prison to prison in California when I ran for governor of California and asking prisoners, you know, how many had dad involved dads when they were growing up?

And about, you know, 10% did, but the other 90% did not. And so, you know, on and on. And so I began to look at, you know, why, you know, were boys having so many problems and it really wasn't all boys that were having problems. It was the percentage of boys who were dad deprived. They were the ones that were having problems. And so I found out that the boy crisis resides where dads do not reside. So that was the beginning of my exploration of what, you know, what is the connection between dad deprivation and the boy crisis? You know, why, what is the importance of dads. And then I found that dad's parent very differently than mom's parent, not all dads.

And I want to make it clear also that many children grow up with single mothers who are, I mean, almost all single mothers that I know of are devoted to their children. They're overwhelmed in their work that they do. And they care enormously. And many children grow up with single moms that do do well, boys as well. But where you see the boys who, don't do well, the great majority of those are deprived of their fathers. And so I started asking the question, you know, what is their dads do that moms, that is different from what moms do? And that's what really fascinated me about the differences between dad style parenting and mom style parenting and my findings in the boy crisis that made me, where I was able to report that the

children who do the best by a long shot are boys and girls who have what I call checks and balance parenting. They have two parents that are actively involved, even if they're divorced. They have two parents that are actively involved about 50% of the time. They live close to each other. They communicate well with each other. They don't badmouth each other. and if the children who are of divorce have those four must-does, 50% time with each parent, parents that live close to each other, parents that are involved with communication and counseling, so that they get on the same page with each other and see each other's best intent, and children that do not hear any bad-mouthing from mother to father or father to mother,

those are the children I found of divorce that do the best, and the rest of them that do the best are ones that are intact families. Warren, we're having this conversation and you're telling me all these things. Now, I used to be a teacher. I was a teacher for 12 years. But to me, this seems like common sense. Everybody would listen to us, would go, that makes absolute sense, of course. But why is it taboo?

Why is it taboo to suddenly say that children need fathers, that if you come from a broken home, you're going to do less well, your chances are that you're not going to be as successful, you're not going to stay in education as long, your grades aren't going to be as good, your life outcomes aren't going to be as positive. Why is that suddenly become a taboo thing to say? Because it reduces the, well, I'll give you an example.

In both the last two major elections, I went out to Iowa where the presidential candidates are beginning to try to make their mark. And I interviewed at one point all Republicans and another point all Democrats. and the Republicans tended to agree with me on this issue. And they said, yeah, this only makes it you said common sense. And I was able to talk to Andrew Yang, who was a leading candidate at that time,

and John Hickenlooper, who was a candidate at that time as well, and it was now a U.S. senator. And after I talked with Andrew Yang, who really understood the importance of fathers, the importance of families and the fact that boys were in crisis, the campaign manager overheard me. and Andrew Yang was, she could see Andrew Yang was really excited. And the campaign manager pulls me aside and says, you know, Dr. Farrell, we have a problem here because if Andrew Yang speaks up about these boys issues, that's going to make many of our feminist followers feel like he's pro-male and anti-female. And we're going to lose a lot of our feminist base.

And it's going to make a lot of single mothers feel like they're not adequate. And that's going to lose a single mother base. And our single mother base is largely a democratic base. And the women who want to raise children by themselves, they're largely a democratic base. And the feminist will turn against us. If we start losing our feminist base, there's no way we're going to win the Democratic. nomination. And, you know, after that, Andrew Yang did not speak up. And I had the same experience with John Hickenlooper, very understanding, very compassionate, wonderful man, really understood these

issues very well and had a good hour-long interview with him, educating him about this. And so, but the same reaction from the campaign manager. Whereas I went to the White House under the Trump administration to brief them on the Boy Crisis book. And there's 14 people sitting around, not just from the White House, but also from HHS, Health and Human Services, also from the Department of Justice. And they're all going, you know, my God, you know, on some level, everything you're saying is obvious. On another level, you're giving us precise data as to understand why. We understood that fathers were important, but we didn't understand what the value of rough housing was, for example, and we would never have suggested that the value of rough housing

among its values was postponed gratification. Among the values of postponed gratification is that postpone gratification is the biggest predictor of success or failure. And we never would have predicted that rough housing was a predictor of empathy. And when you're telling us why and how it's a predictor of empathy, all that makes sense that that's, you know, We couldn't know a man that we know says to his wife, you know, I'd like to roughhouse with the children, so it'll help them be more empathetic. The connection is counterintuitive, and this is what we're learning from you. And so it was these types of, you know, seven major differences and a number of minor differences between dad's style parenting and mom style parenting. That really were the eye openers, you know, that I think I was able to find when I researched the boy.

crisis book is to know exactly what the dynamics were that lead to so many children doing so much better when they have both dad-style parenting and mom-style parenting in their life. Warren, it seems to me that we don't take this crisis seriously enough. And I'll give you an example. A few weeks ago, I was reading about education results in the UK. And they were saying what you were saying, girls far outperformed boys. And the times in the UK, wrote this quasi-joking piece about how maybe girls were just smarter. And they couldn't have done that the other way around. Because if they did that the other way around, I would love to see them try. Maybe men are just smarter. That would make a great time. Yes, yes, exactly.

Maybe men have achieved more and earned more money because even if they're not intellectually smarter. They know how to balance all of the parameters of life better than women do. Can you imagine a headline like that? But my question is, why is that acceptable to do that? And we talk about, you know, male mental health, you know, suicide rates going through the roof, you know, more and more men feeling displaced from society, feeling angry, the rise of the in-cell culture. But yet it's acceptable to write a piece about that? I don't get it. Here's why. And this is not an easy answer to hear, and it's going to take us deep. And the brief reason, the headline reason, is that the reason we males exist as humans and as animals all the way from insects to human beings

is we exist to be willing to die to protect women. The essence of the masculinity is the preparation for disposability. In every war, men were told you will be a real man. If you, if, you know, in the United States, we said, Uncle Sam needs you. Boys, you know, grew up and they saw their, you know, the Uncle Joe with a Marine uniform on. And everybody talked about Uncle Joe as a hero who died when he was 17 or 18 in World War I. And when the boy is being criticized by his mother, his father, and mocked by other kids at school, he says, all right, there's a way I can be a hero. And that way that he can be a hero is to be willing to be disposable in that generation's war and to think that he will be a hero, that he will be respected. And he's disposable in order

to be able to save all the women in the society and the children and other males that aren't in that war or weren't courageous enough to join that war. And if it's not wartime, he learns that he also needs to be historically in previous generations, he learned that he learned that he needed to be the primary breadwinner, that he needed to earn money. And so he learned to climb the ladder of success and not to ask himself, should I do what I want to do? What do I want to do?

But what do I need to do to earn more money? When it was a parent, when I was in high school, that I might be a decent writer. My father took me aside and said, Warren, you are a good writer. but you know only about one out of a hundred you know writers even get a publisher and if you can't find a publisher you'll never find a wife a newly said a good wife that one that's not worthy of you and so you gotta you know drop this little dream more and of being you know a writer and even after I published my first book and got a very good advance for it he said that's right you got a good advance you lucked out but you know supporting a family is not about lucking out once and then taking a chance with your family. After that, it's about doing what you need to do, Warren. It's not doing what you want to do. So get out of your mind the focus on doing what you want to do or what you're, quote, gifted at. Do what you need to do, which is raise money that's predictable and dependable so you can support a wife and children and family. Now, fortunately,

in the last generation or two, women have shared a lot more, many women have shared a lot more of that burden, but even women who do share more of that burden are usually looking for men to marry if they want to have children. If they want to have children, they're looking for men to marry who are earning at least as much or more than they, or soon will have the potential for earning as much or more than they, to give them the option of being full-time with the children, part-time with the children, or full-time in the workplace. And so men are still learning today that if they're not doing what they need to do, they're not going to be wanted by women. And so we often hear that the pay gap is about men earning more than women for the same work.

That's not true. What the pay gap is about is dads who do earn more than moms, but not for the same work. Men will tend to give up if you have a young German male who's on the next train to be the next Beatles. Well, he may not know he's on the next train to be the next Beatles practicing in Germany, whether he's in England or in Germany. And it's a risk that he will be only about at 1,000 and 10,000 will become the next Beatles. If that's probably an exaggeration in terms of the percentage that will become. So he's worried that he's not going to be able to make a good living doing that.

Or let's say he's an elementary school teacher and he's passionate about teaching his children. children come along and he says, you know, I can make twice as much money as a superintendent of schools or a principal of schools. I'll have to work much more. I hate administration, but I will give up what I want to do being a great elementary school teacher, being an artist, a writer, an actor, or a musician, and I'll do what I need to do to earn more money to be able to give my wife the option of working as much or as little as she wants while the children are being raised. And so therefore, those men end up earning much more money doing, but, and what we in the feminist movement did is said, ah, men earn more money. Therefore, they have more privilege. They have more power. In fact, men were forfeiting privilege and forfeiting power because the road to high pay is a toll road. Men were willing to pay more tolls to get more money to give up the things they wanted to do, which is not power.

It is the sacrifice of power and the sacrifice of privilege. And so because nobody, virtually nobody understands this. And I think I explained this best probably in both the boy crisis and the myth of male power. Because nobody understands this, it becomes taboo to write about the privileged as if they're not privileged. And that has seeped into our culture at the elementary school level. I hear kids telling me in fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh grade that their teachers are talking about men who have power and men who have privilege and women who are living longer and living to be older and not having enough Medicare and not enough social supports when they live older, particularly in the United States. Without any turning to the fact that, wait a minute, what about the people dying sooner who has more advantage? Is it an advantage to die sooner rather than just have certain disadvantages when you are living longer?

Warren, let me ask you something because when Francis asked you about why things have become taboo, it seems to me that there's a thing underpinning all of this that I find incredibly wrong and distasteful, which is we've somehow ended up in a position where the relationship between men and women is seen primarily through the prism of competition, when that is frankly absurd historically, isn't biologically, evolutionarily, historically, to suggest that men and women should be in competition with each other instead of in collaboration.

It's the most self-destructive way of looking at this whole thing that you could possibly imagine, isn't it? I could not agree more. Part of what I say in the boy crisis is that, rather than think about competition between men, women, men win, women lose. Basically, we are all in the same family boat. When only one sex wins, everybody loses. And this is something that we and the feminist movement, and as you know, my background was as a, you know, speaking around the world as a male feminist. And the,

and this is a huge mistake that we made. It was like, you know, women are put down, women must be oppressed by men. Men are earning more money. We must be the oppressors, as opposed to understanding everything I was just mentioning to you a few moments ago, that biologically and historically, historically, if you look at earning money as a toll road very frequently, and yes, if you're one of the 1% or so that earns a great deal of money,

you've usually sacrificed your life to do that. You usually will go to your deathbed saying, I spent more time with my family. You'll be usually disconnected from your feelings in order to be able to repress your fears and your feelings of inadequacy in order to prove yourself in order to not acknowledge any weakness that other people can take advantage of in order to become, quote, successful and you're successful at work, but you're often successful as a human doing, not as a human being. We often said, you know, if women go to a party and they're single and they're looking for a

future husband. The other woman at the party says, oh, you know, go over there to Warren. His books are selling really well. Go over there to, you know, Joe, he's a doctor. He's so-and-so. He's in law school. He'll be making a lot of money. He's really sharp. They don't say, you know, there's a sensitive, loving, you know, Francis guy. Look at how sweet he is. Why don't you go over and make contact with Francis? He really listens better than most people do. And you'll feel really heard by him. And so It's really destructive to see men and women as opponents because, you know, great, you know, in my couple, I do couples communication workshops around the United States. And in my couple's workshops, about a third of the people are there on the verge of divorce. And yet I have people make secret little notes to write in a piece of paper.

If your partner's life was in jeopardy and there was a hundred percent chance that they will die. but you knew that you could save them and you'd have a 100% chance of saving them, but a 50% chance that you would lose your life in the process. Would you do it? Now remember, a third of the people in the workshop are considering divorce. And between 90 and 95% of the men say, nevertheless, that they would be willing to risk their life at the 50% level in order if they had 100% guarantee that they could save the life of this woman

that they might be divorcing or breaking up from. And as well as the ones who are there just to improve their relationships, when women are asked the same question, and this is all done secretly, the partners never find out what the answers are. It's about 75, 80% of the women still feel that way as well. And so mostly men and women will forfeit an enormous amount, to save their partner, to be connected with the other one.

And yet, as you mentioned, we're treating men and women as if they're competing with each other. And the gain of one is the loss of the other. Warren, do you think, and you touched on this in your book, that society has become more and more and more feminized, especially when you compare it to 50, 60 years ago? Definitely. And I have no problem with society opening up the option of more feminine behavior on the part of men, as well as having opened up the option of more masculine behavior on the part of women.

But we're not just doing that. We're making the feminine behavior as the superior behavior and the masculine favor as the toxic masculinity. And there is a lot of toxicity in both sexes, both sexes that took their femininity or masculinity to the extreme. Both sexes became toxic in the process. And so women who were not ever comfortable taking a sexual initiative directly had to learn to take sexual initiatives indirectly. If they didn't learn to take sexual initiatives indirectly, which is a type of, of manipulation, then they didn't get a man that they wanted. They didn't get a man that they wanted. They were often very unhappy. And so women developed a lot of toxic behavior if they weren't able

to express a more masculine side of taking the risk of asking a man out, taking the risk of sexual rejection, taking the risks of starting a business that might fail. And so it was very helpful for women learn male skills, but either gender skills taken to their extreme became toxic. On the male side of the coin, men, in order to be loved, had to be willing to risk their lives, like dying in war, risk their lives in a different way by, you know, working either if they're a working class male in the hazardous jobs, as we, as I'm sure is true in Europe, there is about 93% of the most of the people who die in hazardous jobs are males. And those are the ones that just die in hazardous jobs,

ones that die in jobs that have what is called remnant deaths, like black lung disease from working in coal mines, where you don't, as a firefighter, you don't die right away on the job. You die much earlier after you leave your job because of the black lung disease, etc. those are almost all men. So if you're in a boot camp and you learn that your job is to be willing to die for your country, and the sergeant or the person above you, the officer in the boot camp says, you know, makes some anti-Semitic comments or some anti-female or anti-male comments.

And you're, let's say, short. He makes a comment about being, you know, a little pygmy or a mid-examined. and you say that's, you know, really racist or that's sexist or, you know, or that's anti-Semitic. The job of that officer in the Army is to tell you, oh, you sweet little boy, you're going to make a really wonderful soldier worrying about what's anti-Semitic. Your job is to die to be part of the war machine. Your job is to be a cog in the war machine. The war machine does not work well with squeaky wheels like you. Get down and do five push-ups.

Get down and do 20 push-ups. If that doesn't work, get down to do 40 push-ups. Guys, you have permission to mock this guy until he gets straightens up, and he stops being concerned about who he is and what his sensitivity is. And focuses on recognizing

that he's here to be willing to die so this country can survive and to live. And now does that develop toxicities? it certainly does. It means you know, men learned to not be even in touch with their feelings. It wasn't that we just learned to not express our feelings. We learned that men are very bottom-line people and we learn that if, you know, expressing our feelings doesn't get us anywhere. It really doesn't help to be in touch with feelings we can't express. So we might as well repress even getting in touch with those feelings. And that's toxic. When you can't get in touch

with your feelings, it comes out. out in different ways. You act out. You hurt people. You become hurt inside of yourself. And, you know, hurt people, hurt people. And this is, and so you see almost all your mass shooters are very hurt people, usually not just dad deprived, but usually deeply hurting inside. And they act, they acted out. And so both sexes have toxicities, but we have framed the world in the last 50 years as there's, you know, there's toxic masculinity. and there's sort of, if you will, superior femininity. And that's just a miscalculation of the understanding of both sexes.

And Warren, another thing that I found really interesting was the point that you made in the book where you were talking about the men who felt unheard, these were liable to be your Brexit voters, your Trump voters, because the only way that they had of actually making themselves heard was at the ballot box. Yes. Yes. And Trump was sort of like, he was articulating without worry about what he said and just sort of like, you know, I'm going to lambast,

it's going to land where it does, I'm going to tell the truth from the way that a lot of people in the United States who felt left out, who felt unheard, especially the more developed, the woke culture became, the more canceling, the cancel culture became, the more junior high school teachers were saying the future is female and boys. we're feeling that, you know, I'm a male, and I'm hearing that the future is female, that doesn't inspire me very much to do really well in school and to really, you know, watch out for my future, because if I succeed, I'll be told, I'll be told this because I have male privilege. If I fail, I'll be, you know, I'll be ignored. And so a lot of people felt caught between a rock and a hard place. And it appeared to them like Trump, you know, for all the bully that he was,

was just cutting, you know, cutting right through that rather than sort of what they would think of as NAMB, Pambing around saying everything with precise sensitivity and precision that so many politicians did on the part of both the left and the right. And so, yes, there was, there's so much that the political left was not hearing about what the average experience was of the average person. And the average family felt that they saw the father going out early in the morning, becoming that firefighter, becoming the logger, doing the hazardous job, becoming working, you know, making more money at a career, but also sacrificing being away from the children, experiencing what I call the father's catch 22,

the dad learning to love his family by being away from the love of his family. Most women got this. Most families got this. but they didn't feel that the political left got this. And so when Trump was willing to speak about these things without any fear of stepping on toes, it felt like finally they had a champion. That's very interesting. And you alluded earlier when you were talking to the kind of angry, bitter young men

who often find themselves in positions where they're so angry that they start acting out. and obviously the extreme end of that is the mass shooters that you talk about. But there's a bigger, seemingly a bigger culture, a bigger movement or a bigger group of people who've been enabled by social media and technology to congregate, to share thoughts, to kind of talk to each other, whether it's in cells or whatever that is. What should society's attitude be to those people? because I have to say, as a man who's always tried to embody the traditional qualities of masculinity, which is you strive, you work hard, you have ambition, you have drive, etc.

I do struggle to have empathy. I mean, just in general, because I'm Russian, but in particular to that group of people, because I always, there is a kind of what now is fashionably termed victim blaming in my psyche, which is like, well, why don't you get up off the couch? and go and try and do something. And of course, I recognize that factually, based on what you've said, it's a lot more difficult for them than it maybe was for me when I was growing up. Well, it's a very good question.

So let's look at the words like in-cell. In-cell for the novice of tuning in here. It means involuntarily celibate. Involuntarily celibate. So these people, these men, are saying that I don't want to be celibate. a bit. I'd like to be sexual with a woman, but I'm involunt, but I have to prevent myself from doing it because, you know, for example, if I put my penis in a woman's body, I'm putting my life in her hands. She can choose to have an abortion or she can choose to sue me for support. If I, if I, if I

if she decides to not abort and to have the child, I am sued and I'm sued for support from that one sexual experience, I put my life in her hands. There is, if I want to have equal access to that child, because even though I didn't intend to have the child, I nevertheless feel like I want to help raise that child because I know children are due best when raised by both parents, and I feel it's only fair for me to be equally involved. And I'm being told that I can, I don't have an option to be equally involved in that child's life. I only have an option to pay for that child's support. and I see that in court after court, I don't have more than a little chance of winning. And if I had a chance of winning, I at least have to spend the equivalent of $150,000 U.S. dollars to hire lawyers, higher expert witnesses,

hire people to convince the judge to allow me to be a good father. That feels like too much of a risk for sex. So you and I are programmed, Constantine, to work our rights. rears off and to do what we need to do. You wouldn't be doing this podcast if you were if you were that type of male. I wouldn't be writing books if I wasn't that type of male. But not every male is like that. Some men do not have, you know, they may have been brought up by them, you know, by without a dad themselves. They may not be as motivated. They may, but they still are heterosexual. They still care for women. But, but it's too complex. It's too dangerous to be involved. It's like

somebody wanting to, desiring enormously to ride a motorcycle and take risks riding that motorcycle, but then reading and understanding that it's 36 times more likely that you're going to get into an accident per mile of motorcycle riding. So you give up what you want to do because it's too dangerous to do it. That's in cells. And basically, that's the same psychology behind men going their own way. However, there's two types of things that can out of that. When men going their own way or in cells, meeting together and get together and sharing feelings and sharing their pains and sharing their anger and sharing sometimes hatred of women, because that either can be very healing because for moments when we're angry and we feel

vulnerable, anger is vulnerability's mask. And in any therapy group, every therapist knows. that sometimes the anger of a woman or the anger of a man will be exaggerated. I hate my husband. I wish he was dead. I wish I had never met him. I wish I'd never married him. Well, that is anger, of course. That is a hatred of the moment, of course. But almost always, I learn this again and again from doing my couples communication workshops. Anger is vulnerabilities mask. If you ask, what's the vulnerability behind this anger? You have a totally different feeling about what's happening. Usually what happens is the anger is a stage and having a chance to vent feelings is therapeutic as it is in a therapist's office. And this is a very healing, men like this getting

together and venting can be very healing. And occasionally it can be very destructive. if they don't get off the venting and move into a more constructive life. Now, for me, a constructive life is not withdrawing from women or withdrawing from society. For me, a constructive life is learning how to listen, learning how to interact, learning how to work things through. And, you know, I can write about what I feel and talk about what I feel. And I'm able to make a living doing that. And but let's open our hearts to the people who can't make a living doing that.

They're not saying, I want to destroy women. I want to hurt women. I don't want women good things for women. They're just saying it's too complex for me to be out there with women. I need to withdraw and be by myself. And Warren, the thing that really struck me when I was reading your book, which I really loved that, and it was very, very powerful, was a fact that really hit home, which was more people would prefer to have a girl than have a boy.

And that, to me, really hit home where the problem is, and that it seems to be as a society, we seem to prefer those now. Yes, yes, absolutely. And what I think is at the beginning of the boy crisis, I tend to talk about this. And one of the ways this came up was I was, you know, with a number of people in a dinner party. And, you know, one was a strong feminist,

and another one was, you know, a minister. And the other one was a former governor of a state in the country who's pretty well known. And so there were six of us around there. And so Sam Keene, the fellow that wrote, you know, the book on masculinity, he just asked the question, if you were having a boy or girl today, you know,

which would you prefer? and five out of the six of us said a boy. And so I started asking myself, I wonder whether this is true more than in a cherry-picked anecdotal type of way and was able to see the data on now today, the great majority of mothers and fathers would prefer to have a girl, even though the fathers say, oh, I'd feel like I could have a lot more fun with a boy.

I'd have a lot more permission to play soccer or football or roughhouse with him and really tease them and stuff like. like that. But so if I asked the question, with whom would you feel like you'd have more fun raising, the fathers would say a boy. But if I asked them, who would you rather have a boy or a girl? The fathers and the mothers both said a girl. And the reason the father said that when I questioned the fathers on that and confronted them, they said because a girl will have an easier options in the world at this time. They'll be more supported.

They'll be more loved. I'm afraid to bring a boy into the society at this time. And so this is statistically what both females, mothers and fathers, future mothers and future fathers would both today prefer to have a girl because they feel the girl will have more options, more support emotionally, more support. economically in this society at this time and for the future of their of their life. Warren, that's an interesting point. We're almost out of time, but I want to just, before we ask you our last question, just pick up on that issue because I hear that and that

makes sense, but there's also a part of me that thinks, if you have a boy in modern society and he's, you know, smart and talented and he's got the right education, whatever, But surrounded by boys who've not had the same thing, who we see increasing breakdown of the family, increasingly boys being encouraged not to act like boys. But at the end of the day, I also see around me, particularly among young people, that masculine men, I mean, they're cleaning up, right?

They're doing very well because they are such a contrast to the rest of their peers, if you like. So isn't there also a truth to it, like, if you have a boy and he happens to be hard working and driven and have the kind of traditional male qualities, they will do very well. Isn't that also true? Well, on the attraction of the other gender level, if he's, if he has both mother and father and is bringing him up to be able to to have that checks and balance parenting that leads to postpone gratification, combination of empathy, emotional intelligence, and hard, you know, hard work intelligence as well.

And if you want him to be attractive to the sex, he has to be also tall, at least as tall as the average male, because females reject shorter men very, very frequently. Sorry, Mike. I'm tall enough, mate. So the, you know, or that, you know, the shorter man has to work even harder to be even more successful to compensate for his height. So the, and so the good news about children being raised by both. parents, especially if they're really involved with them and their balanced people themselves, is that the boy will make it through this enormous maze of challenges and probably be all the stronger for it. But the males, particularly those without dads, are really have a huge amount

of challenges before them. And that's, and that is deeply sad. And we really need to have. And so let me just spend a moment talking to the single mother that's listening here. So, you know, you may become depressive. I'm talking about the, you know, the importance of both parents being involved. And so the first thing to do if you are a single mom is to make sure that you look at the parts of the boy crisis that focus on what are the differences between dad-style parenting and mom-style parenting and what is what's the value of each of those differences. And so you when you value what dad's 10 can contribute and you let the dad know why you value him and why you need him in the child's life remember almost all throughout history when men were told they were

needed like uncle sam needs you um the government needs you to fight this war men are willing to die if they feel they'll be needed and be of value contributing so if you are understand what men, dads contribute, and you communicate that effectively to the dad, the chances of having him involved are great. However, if for whatever reason, the dad cannot be involved, make sure you get your children involved in what I call in the Boy Crisis book, the liberal arts of sports, pick up team sports, team sports, sports like gymnastics or tennis, which are largely based on the development of your own skills. Discover why all those are necessary.

Get your son involved in the equivalent of scouting. Find in each of the sports good male coaches who are willing to support him emotionally but also prod him on and expect more of him. Get mentors for him and have him read in the Boy Crisis book why being a mentor is even more important for your son than being mentored. Both are important, but a boy who has somebody to mentor begins to take on psychologically responsibilities that make him feel like he's needed if he succeeds as a role model to the boy he's

mentoring. So look at, there's many, many things you can do if you have the equivalent of Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts in your country, get him involved. in that. If you have a faith that you care about, get him involved in a faith-based organization, but make sure the faith-based leader gets your son involved in private conversations and group conversations with other boys his age. So your son can discover that all boys feel very similar vulnerabilities, that he's not alone, he's not out, he doesn't need to withdraw and be depressed because he feels nobody will understand him. These are just a few.

of the many things that a single mom can do both to get the biological father involved. The stepfather spend time reading why the stepfather is very rarely a substitute for the biological father. So all those things are important if you're a single mom to know in order to have the best your child, your children have the best chance of doing well. This is almost everything I'm mentioning is true for our daughters as well, but it's just more true. intensely true for our sons. Warren, I would have happily have spoken to you for another hour.

However, our time is up. Before we go, we always have one final question, which is always what's the one thing? We're not talking about, but we really should be. Well, sort of sadly, everything we've talked about on this podcast is sort of a way, the one series of things

we should be talking about that we are not talking about for the reasons I mentioned, we need to do with boys' issues and the importance of fathers, particularly the importance of fathers, and the understanding what the differences are between dad and mom-style parenting. We need to make that the equivalent of what the Green Party made the environment 40, 50, 70 years ago when nobody would hear about the importance of the environment and the Green Party lost election after election. articulating that, but now most of the world understands the importance of paying attention to the

environment. We need to be the political leaders, the school leaders. We need to petition and make sure our schools have good male role models. So girls and boys don't go from an all-female home to an all-female school. And then we look quizzically at why they get attracted to a gang or why they get attracted to selling drugs. These, we need to look at what we need to do, take responsibility politically and in our schools and at home for having children be raised by both parents in a completely, equally involved way. Dr. Warren Farrell, thank you so much for coming on the show. We will ask you a couple of questions very quickly for our supporters.

But in the meantime, thanks so much for coming on. The book is called The Boy Cross. I thoroughly recommend everybody gets it. And thank you all for watching at home. We will see you very soon with another brilliant interview like this one. Or a raw show which always go out 7pm UK time, 2pm Eastern Standard. Take care and see you soon, guys. We hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview. Remember to subscribe and hit the bell button so that you never miss another fantastic episode and if you believe that the work we do here at trigonometry is important support us by joining our locals community using the link below