We Demonized Masculinity and Made Boys Afraid To Be Themselves - Erica Komisar

0:01 young men are frightened of women. Um they're they're frightened of the power that women have to accuse them of of you know. So I I mean I think again to look at it in a balanced way is to say and a more objective way is to say that at some point society idealized men and diminished women. It needed to be balanced. But in trying to balance it, we imbalanced it. It's it's it's the way, right? The pendulum swings from one side to the other. Um women used to resent men because they were misogynistic. Um and now men resent women because they have so much power over young men. Um and young men are afraid. Quite frankly, the young men who come to see me are afraid of women. either they're afraid that women are um are going to reject them because as my son said they're they all seem so together and they're all looking for you know someone who's as together and can make lots of money because we've also become a very material culture. So the idea that women will marry only at their level or above is also socioeconomically.

1:16 Oh yeah, for sure. You got to be taller. You got to be looking right. I mean my son has talked about this. He he said the um the expectations even at high school age are are super extreme. Yeah. Perfectionistic for this idealized thing. And the swipe apps allow you to just filter until you find somebody that looks like they meet this narrow criteria. And then the way that distributes is also crazy. like the percentage of candidates that get swiped in the affirmative male to female is totally different. Yeah. So, it's like we've got a lot more men being rejected and a lot more So, there's all these other things going on. Well, remember what I said about boys being more fragile? They're more neurologically and emotionally fragile. Always were. It's just the way of biology. they always have been. And so when you take away their identity and you tell them that being boys and being masculine is bad and they're bad um and they're toxic and you know then you you've basically robbed them of some of their confidence, some of their identity, and then they're afraid of what women can do to them, what young young women can do to them. So it's a power imbalance really. Um men and women should share power always. Relationships are meant to be partnerships meant to be teamwork. You know you don't generally have two CEOs. It doesn't generally work. Um you have a CEO, you have a CFO, you have a head of marketing, right? In any company you have different roles that people play. We're not the same. We have different roles we play. We're a team. And so that idea has been exchanged for this idea of competition to be the same. So when women, interestingly, when women were empowered, they didn't become better women, more like the best women they could be. They became more like men.

3:25 Right? Even in the culture, we've seen this, right? the the the superhero the female superheroes are like a copy and paste job, right? It's like now you can beat now you can beat up the giant Russian agents. And I'm not saying that's always bad. I mean, we've had great female superhero characters, but there is a kind of like thoughtless Yeah. copy and paste. Copy and paste, right? So, I'm going to outdo men. I'm going to be a better man than a man. And so what that diminished again is the the yin and the yang, the sort of the the team approach with two different genders that each had important very important roles to play in society in in the workplace in you know so the idea that you can be equal in intelligence and ambition but be different too and that's all been diminished.

4:23 I um I've been playing around with something that's a very simple way to think about some of this and not probably all that unique, but it seems like we had I call it like the the cultural bell curve. We had this natural order of things as tribal creatures was that if if you sort of say like along the horizontal axis is behavior and the vertical is social acceptance. Mhm. There was a certain set of behaviors that were accepted and and if you weren't in the tribe and if you didn't obey the the the rules of the tribe, you were thrown off. It looked like a building. It was like flat at the top or maybe graduated like, you know, but but then steep fall off. Mhm. And in response to that steep fall off and the total rejection of anything that wasn't inside of what's normal came I think a well-intended desire to say no the the ideal sedate is flat. All behaviors are equal except not not just acceptable but but but there is no differences between any of us between men and women um between people of different capabilities. Nope.

5:36 It's this sort of blank slate vision of humanity and then the problem with that was that well the blank slate except if you're a certain unacceptable deplorable type and then off the side you go right and in in reality we've got this uncomfortable thing we have to face that is what I'm hearing you say which is behaviors distribute in certain ways that are just natural and are different and there is masculinity and femininity they they're not in two different worlds But they are different. To try to flatten that doesn't produce utopia. It produces um a lot of social problems. It is like one step forward, three steps back. Is that how you think about it? Yeah. So Freud said that there's masculinity and femininity in everyone. But he didn't It's always misinterpreted that people say, "Well, that means everybody's bisexual." And that's not exactly what he meant. He meant that we all have masculine and feminine characteristics just like we all have estrogen and testosterone. We all have oxytocin and you know and vasop prein. There's different hormones that we have but to varying degrees. I mean men have much more vasopressin what we call the protective aggressive hormone. Women have more oxytocin the sensitive nurturing empathic nurturing hormone. Um you know men produce oxytocin too to a lesser degree and when they produce it it has a different behavior uh associated with it. it it's more playful tactile stimulation with children uh not sensitive empathic nurturing you know so um there are just differences and there have always been to a varying degree um you know uh for instance maybe a woman would have masculine characteristics but she'd still have more feminine ones a man might have some feminine characteristics but still more masculine ones um and I think what we've done is we've taken that away. Uh and we've said that, you know, women have to be 50% masculine or 80% masculine. Uh men to be accepted in society as metrosexual or have to be 80% feminine. And so, you know, we're not allowing for the differences. And I think that's really it's sad for society. Um it's troubling doing what I do in terms of parenting and seeing how um children in this whole paradigm are the ones who are the losers. They're they're abandoned because if you have two people vying for the same role of being masculine, then you have nobody who's vying for the role of being feminine. So some fathers are vying for the role of being feminine, staying home with their kids. It's possible. But for the most part, what we have is a society that's become very masculine. But women are becoming more masculine than men, and that's pissing off men.

8:30 It's an interesting way to think about it. It's like we're becoming more of the worst kind of masculine. That's right. Right. Not a healthy masculinity. The healthy part of masculinity was the protective aggressive part. Um, I think I mentioned this on your last show, but for anyone who doesn't remember it, I'll mention it again. Um, there was a study done where two or mother and father lay in bed together and the baby cries. And when the baby cries, the mother wakes up because she's very vigilant to the distress of the baby. The father sleeps through the baby's cries. Soon as there's rustling of leaves outside the window, the father wakes up and the mother sleeps through it. Why? Because the father is sensitive to predatorial threat. So what was the good part of masculinity? Being protective. It was protective aggressive nature to protect your family. A father lion on the plains of Africa is going to protect his his group. Right? So that was the good part of masculinity. And what we've done is we've taken that away from men. Women say, "I don't need you." And you know what's interesting is this election where Trump got up and said, "I'm going to protect you." And all of the feminist women said, "I don't need protection.

9:46 What do you mean?" And the truth is that, you know, he wasn't eloquent in saying it, but there was an aspect of masculinity that was, I'm the daddy of the family. I'm going to protect my young. I'm going to protect my partner who's protecting my young. A team exercise. Whereas today, women are getting angry about that. They're resenting it. And so it leaves men identityless. It leaves them not knowing who they're supposed to be.

10:16 Their hormones tell them to do one thing, but now women in society are telling them to do something else. It's both confusing and it strips men of their essential identity. By the way, it also strips women of their identity, right? Yeah. I mean, there's a um it's funny because immigration is such a big issue this year and and not just in the US and Western Europe and and uh you know, I'm a right of center guy, but I am more pro-immigration on average probably than you know, even my viewers, they they know that you and I are sort of in the same place, you know. Yeah. Well, maybe.

10:53 Yeah. Right center, but still have liberal values. Yeah. Yeah. You know, properly understood. Um human dignity. universal human dignity. Yes. And um I think that that one of the things that that has sort of pushed to the macro scale is exactly what you're talking about a a the destabilizing force the sense of an actual foreign aggressor and that the president saying I will protect you like it's primordial the sense in which that connected with people I think effective aggressive it was like you know what happened to this this was part of our evolutionary sort of way of being for millennium for thousands of years and what happened to it in just 75 years you can't turn around evolution in 75 years it doesn't work like that right so now how do you well I have two questions let me start with the let me start with the why it's easy to say we we as the society it's very socializing like definitionally of responsibility Why did this happen this way? How do you understand the causal forces? Is it whacked out academics taking things to the extreme and overtaking the academia?

12:15 Like it isn't like we we all woke up and had a different way of thinking about this stuff. There are players and institutions and forces that have made this happen. So why how do you understand what's taken place? Well, again, I benefited from the feminist movement, but I would say the feminist movement was a little bit misdirected in in its telling women that they should become more like men because from the beginning they should have said um men and women are equally important to society and you have a right to have choices. if you don't want to get married and have children, you should have that choice. You should have that choice to be out in the work world or to work or um but it didn't it it undermined the differences between men and women and that was the beginning of it, right? And so, you know, as soon as we undermine the differences, so again, women became more like men and then men were expected to become more like women.

13:25 But it seems to me that women slipped into the role of masculinity more easily than men slipped into the role of femininity. And there's a reason I think for it, which is that what was expected of men for millennium is that they were the aggressors. Mhm. Right. They also had to perform, right? You have to perform sexually. Women don't have to perform sexually. Men have to perform sexually. That involves aggression. There's an aggressive. So we call it primal scene. When children walk in on their parents having sex because children stuff now. Yeah. Children perceive of it as aggressive. They get scared of it because it looks like daddy's doing something terrible to mommy. And um the truth is it's an aggressive act. It's a loving aggressive act in most cases unless it's rape. It's a loving aggressive but it is an aggressive act. So men were always the aggressors. it was expected that men would step forward, ask women out um that men would take the initiative that men would perform sexually. Um and so that was a very important part of men's identity. You take that away from men and then you have those young men sitting in their bedroom being afraid to be the aggressors, being afraid to take the initiation with a with a woman. not only that they'll reject him, but that, you know, their their masculinity being diminished, they won't be able to perform. I can't tell you how many young men are on ED medication. I was just thinking this, it was the next question I was going to ask is I I've read about this and it is as an older guy, it's shocking to me that you that you're in your 20s and you're going to struggle to get an erection. Well, there there are websites now to provide medications online. And I won't name them, but it's because there's such a demand. I have a psychiatrist I refer young men to who specifically deals with the emotional aspects of ED. It's not physical. You could say it's organic because um you know the emotions affect one's physical performance, but it's emotional. So again, you know, men without their identity um are lost. These young men are lost. They can't perform. And what we don't understand, and we're starting to understand because there's more research going on, when oxytocin levels go up, meaning when men are feminized, their testosterone goes down.

15:57 Why? Because the investment in mammals, because we're just mammals, the investment in mammals in nurturing diminishes the investment in mating. So, when we nurture and become more feminine as men, I'm not a man, but your testosterone levels go down. So, what's happening is there's less sex going on and there's less good sex going on and men are having a hard harder time performing and they're needing to take they're needing to take these medications to perform. Well, I understand is this part of the sort of the dad brain effect. So, you know, when you, you know, Warren Ferrell has talked to me about this and he he writes about in his book that, you know, we as men, I experienced it. Um, in when my son was born, there's a you get rewired.

16:46 Um, and you you do become more nurturing. You be you you change what you are when you become a dad. But the way that dads are nurturing, which is playful, tactile stimulation, resilience building, encouraging exploration, separation. So what we're finding is with these single mothers by choice, women who go out to a sperm bank and, you know, say, "I can't find a man." This is like a phenomenon. I can't, there's plenty of men around. I can't find a man to love who's 6'5 and makes 150K and has a PhD because I have my masters, right? So, I'm going to go to a sperm bank. Now, they go to a sperm egg. They have a baby on their own.

17:27 These babies can attach to the mothers, but there's no one to help with the separation because fathers were always the the vehicle of separation. When mothers were the attachment object, love object. Fathers were the separation love object. So, without fathers around, babies sleep in their mother's beds for a very long time. They don't learn to separate in the same way. they don't have a model and learn how to be masculine from a masculine role model.

17:58 Uh they don't learn to regulate their aggression. Um and so this is a problem. But the obviously the biggest problem is that you know you have little boys out there not learning to be boys and not learning to be men. Well, you don't find any any role models in school. So you're you you know this is the this is the this is the sort of terrifying feedback loop of leaving the world in fatherlessness, right? It's like so you have fatherlessness. It creates this um imbalanced psychologically fragile broken situation that then repeats itself because now you're a worse mate.

18:39 So you're getting shunted off into incel territory. That's right. Because if you're again, incel territory is limbo. It's purgatory. It's neither here nor there. That's really what it is. You're not a girl, but you don't feel like a boy. I mean, people that listen to this are going to get upset with that, but that is the truth because we're not allowing boys to be boys. Not awful boys, not toxic masculinity. masculinity, just protective, aggressive, taking initiative, um allowing boys to be masculine and not punishing them for it. So, they're feeling they can't go there, but they're not really girls, so they're stuck in their rooms in purgatory. If you like this clip, you should check out the full video and all the other great content we've got at Dad Saves America. So, be sure to hit the like button, subscribe, and ring that bell so you won't miss our new stuff as it drops each week.