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Lundy Bancroft Takes The Queens Inside The Minds of Angry & Controlling Men (Part 1)
100 Plays4 years ago
We break our "Female - Only" Rule for the man who wrote THE bestselling book on abusive men, Lundy Bancroft, author of the oft-cited and highlighted "Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry & Controlling Men". Lundy provides insight on how cultural forces help create abusive men, why its concerning to call all abusers "narcissists", and how the legal system is rigged against mothers, which inspired his new novel "In Custody" : https://www.amazon.com/Custody-Carrie-Green-Novel/dp/B09BGLY3P8
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Links to Lundy Bancroft's Book: "Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-He-Do-That-audiobook/dp/B0058R8AP2/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1254N0S500UM&keywords=why+does+he+do+that&qid=1641976095&sprefix=why+does+he+do+that%2Caps%2C154&sr=8-1
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
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That's simply earth.com forward slash FDS.
Patreon Benefits and Community
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Hey Queens.
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Speaker
Are you ready to level up?
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Speaker
Then join our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash the female dating strategy, where you can find weekly bonus content and FDS commentary on all the latest pop culture relationship and dating news.
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If you just want to listen to the extra bonus content, we have the Lurker Mode tier on our Patreon.
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If you want merchandise, access to the private FDS Patreon Discord, which also includes a monthly book club with FDS and feminist-themed books, as well as FDS merchandise, t-shirts, mugs, and the opportunity to discuss topics with the FDS Podcast Queens live.
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as well as submit stories for our Rose to Scope, Queen and Nasus discussions on the podcast itself.
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So if you'd like access to all this and more, visit our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash the female dating strategy.
Introducing Lundy Bancroft
00:02:02
Speaker
What's up, queens?
00:02:03
Speaker
Welcome to the Female Dating Strategy Podcast, the meanest female-only podcast on the internet.
00:02:07
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I'm your host, Ro.
00:02:08
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I'm Savannah.
00:02:08
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I'm Lilith.
00:02:09
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And today we have a very special guest, a guest who we broke our normal parameters of interviews for because we generally like to keep our podcast female-focused, but we figured we'd make an exception for one man and one man only, and that is Lundy Bancroft.
00:02:26
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author of Why Does He Do That?
00:02:28
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Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men.
00:02:31
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He has 35 years of experience in the field of domestic violence, both as a counselor, evaluator, and investigator of abusive men, and as a workshop leader and educator for women.
00:02:40
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His book is one of the most recommended books on the FDS reading material list, often quoted, often cited, often highlighted.
00:02:48
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Lundy Bancroft.
00:02:50
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Thank you for letting me infiltrate your podcast.
00:02:53
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Female only space.
00:02:54
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No.
00:02:56
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Our sacred female only ground.
00:02:58
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But no, actually, I'm really glad you could be here.
00:03:00
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I love your book.
00:03:01
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So thank you.
00:03:02
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Thank you.
00:03:03
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Just to kind of kick off the discussion, you go over a lot of the themes that we're going to cover, I think, in this interview in your book.
00:03:09
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But for the audience that has not yet read your book, could you tell us about your background and what led you to
Insights into Abusive Behaviors
00:03:15
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write?
00:03:15
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Why does he do that?
00:03:16
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So I started, you know, when I was fairly young, being a counselor for abusive men in an abuser program.
00:03:23
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And so that's where I got trained.
00:03:25
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And that's where I started to really be able to grasp the issues.
00:03:29
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And we got so much attention.
00:03:32
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insight into abusers largely because the program that I worked in, we did confidential interviews with the abused woman where he's not there.
00:03:44
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And you get such a completely different story from the abused woman because abusers just lie and distort.
00:03:52
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And I mean, they just create an entire false image of what's going on in that relationship.
00:03:59
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So then when you talk to the
00:04:01
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woman and hear the real deal, it kind of like wakes you up almost out of some dream you've been in.
00:04:07
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And I think what's most educational or what was most educational for me was then seeing the contrast, like seeing how he, the abuser, while he's in his abuser group, how he describes what's going on.
00:04:22
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versus what I know is really going on because I've been talking to her.
00:04:26
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And so that became a huge education in how abusers think and how they frame what's going on in the relationship and just all kinds of things that we'll talk about, about why they behave the way they do and how they justify behaving the way they do.
00:04:44
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Then I had multiple people in my life saying like,
00:04:47
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you've got all this information in your head, but the people who need it are women.
00:04:52
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So I was encouraged by people to write a book that really puts out what I was learning from working with abusers in the abuser program.
00:04:58
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And one person characterized it in a way that I thought was really...
00:05:03
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was really good, which is she said that you're like someone in a football game who got like the other team's playbook and leaked it.
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And I like that.
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It's like, yeah, I'm like an infiltrator or a traitor or whatever that's going to give out all of abusive men's secrets and strategies.
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I'm going to leak them to women.
00:05:22
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I actually had that same thought when I was reading your book.
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I was like, wow, Lundy's like a snitch.
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He's like snitching on all the secrets.
00:05:30
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It's so true.
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I'm a proud snitch.
00:05:34
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Snitching on abusive men.
00:05:35
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Yeah, it's something to be proud of.
00:05:37
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I guess the question would be, I guess, in the forefront of everyone's mind is like, why do you think that your framing of this issue was so popular?
00:05:45
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Because this book is really, really popular.
00:05:46
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This book has been cited many, many times.
00:05:48
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What do you think that this book brought that's really been missing from the profile and diaspora of books about violent men?
00:05:55
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Well, I think a lot of it is that so much of what's written and said about men who abuse women focuses mistakenly on what's going on in this guy's feeling world, like his emotional world, his psychology.
Roots of Abuse: Attitudes vs. Emotions
00:06:10
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There was even a whole book written about the psychology of abusers that was just like, to me, almost complete nonsense.
00:06:16
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It's A, wrong.
00:06:18
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B, it's focusing on the wrong issues, even if it weren't wrong, but it's wrong.
00:06:22
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And certainly there are behavioral problems that are rooted in people's emotional issues, but men's abuse of women is not one of them.
00:06:29
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Men's abuse of women is rooted almost entirely in how they think.
00:06:33
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And a woman who's in an abusive relationship works so hard to figure out, like, why does he get so upset?
00:06:39
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And why does he act so jealous?
00:06:42
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And why does he get so mad?
00:06:44
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And all these things about trying to understand his emotions and
00:06:47
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And like, how can I make him feel better?
00:06:48
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And she works herself like to death trying to get him to feel better.
00:06:52
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And it doesn't seem to do any good.
00:06:55
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And the reason it doesn't do any good is because that's not where the problem lies.
00:06:58
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The problem lies in his attitudes and values.
00:07:01
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The problem is in his thinking world.
00:07:03
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As far as I know, why does he do that was the first book that ever zeroed in on how do these guys think.
00:07:08
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you know, inside the minds of.
00:07:11
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And what happens when abused women read that is that it just seems to so quickly click.
00:07:19
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Because she's been struggling with the whole emotional thing with trying to make him feel better.
00:07:22
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So she's already felt like that, geez, it doesn't seem to work.
00:07:25
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So then when she reads something, it starts to lay out how he thinks.
00:07:28
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And she goes, whoa, he does think like that.
00:07:31
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And yeah, he does think like this other way you're saying.
00:07:34
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And oh, yeah, he's clearly got these attitudes you're saying he has.
00:07:37
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It just clicks.
00:07:39
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That makes sense, at least to me, because I feel like part of the reason that female dating strategy took off as well is that we don't focus as much on like the feelings or like why necessarily that men do things.
00:07:52
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We don't believe men's lies.
00:07:54
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But not even just that, it's that like we don't like take on our responsibility to figure out like abusive men.
00:07:59
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Right.
00:07:59
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Whereas I feel like so much of the self-help process.
00:08:02
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genre before has always been about trying to understand all of their psychology so that you can almost tie yourself in pretzel knots, trying to like therapize a person or get a person who won't go to therapy to therapy and also like overcomplicating the reasons why the men do things, right?
00:08:18
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It's like sometimes they just do things because they can.
00:08:20
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It's not necessarily like your job to go back in his childhood and figure out like all the steps it took for him to be like an abusive person.
00:08:27
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Sometimes with other self-help books or relationship books, they put so much of that emotional labor on women.
00:08:32
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And that's how women end up in these cycles of abuse, not understanding like how to get in, get it out or set appropriate boundaries.
00:08:38
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I think that's all true.
00:08:40
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But I would just add that different kinds of behavioral problems come from different places.
00:08:45
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And men's abuse of women is almost entirely culturally trained.
00:08:49
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He could have had a great childhood or he could have had a rotten childhood.
00:08:51
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He could have had awesome parents or rotten parents.
00:08:54
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That turns out to have almost nothing to do with it.
Cultural Training of Abuse
00:08:56
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Growing up in a bad situation is going to affect you in all kinds of other ways, but that's not what turns you into an abuser.
00:09:01
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There was a very interesting study done a long time ago that looked specifically at boys who'd grown up
00:09:07
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With an abuser in the home, their mom was being abused by their dad or stepdad or whoever the key man was in the home.
00:09:13
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And it compared boys who'd been more traumatized by the abuse they witnessed to boys who'd been less traumatized by the abuse they witnessed and found that those two groups had the same rates of abusing women in their own adulthood.
00:09:28
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The kids who'd been less traumatized were abusing women just as much as the boys who'd been more traumatized.
00:09:33
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Then that same study divided them into some other groups to try to see like, well, what's the difference?
00:09:38
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Like the boys who were this or the boys who were that.
00:09:39
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And where they found the big difference, the boys who bought in to the abuser's way of blaming it on mom versus the boys who had not bought in to the abuser's ways of blaming it on mom.
00:09:49
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In other words, men's abuse of women is almost entirely societally taught by growing up into a set of values, saying that men have a right to require women to provide certain kinds of emotional and physical and sexual services.
00:10:04
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And men have the right to enforce that.
00:10:07
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And when women don't cooperate, men have the right to punish.
00:10:11
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I'm really glad you've raised that, Lindy, because working in the violence against women sector, which is what I do, and we get that defence all the time.
00:10:19
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Oh, he was abused as a child.
00:10:21
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Oh, he doesn't know any better.
00:10:23
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Oh, he was, you know, beaten by his dad.
00:10:25
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So this is why he goes on to beat other women.
00:10:27
Speaker
So it's really, really, really good to know that that is just a baseless excuse.
00:10:33
Speaker
And I think you touch on it in your book as well.
00:10:34
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And the explanations around why that's a baseless excuse is also really, really solid as well.
00:10:40
Speaker
For example, I have never once seen an abusive man make any changes in how he treats women from any process of emotional healing.
00:10:49
Speaker
And I've seen that tried
Manipulation and Sympathy
00:10:50
Speaker
a zillion times.
00:10:51
Speaker
We do occasionally see abusive men change, but only through a process of changing their values and attitudes.
00:10:55
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Emotional healing never leads to any improvement in how he treats women.
00:10:59
Speaker
Yeah, and you mentioned this in the book, but I just want to say for the audience that hasn't read it yet that abusers often use this sort of emotional manipulation to... It is emotional manipulation.
00:11:09
Speaker
They'll be like, I was traumatized as a kid.
00:11:11
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Or, you know, men who sexually abused women might be like, I was sexually abused as a child, even though most of them were not just because they know that they can get a lot of mileage out of making people feel bad for them.
00:11:21
Speaker
I've experienced that a lot for men.
00:11:22
Speaker
So it was really great to have someone call that out.
00:11:24
Speaker
I'm glad.
00:11:25
Speaker
So when we talk about male violence, there's always like a knee-jerk defense against calling out the specific attitudes or cultural attitudes that are contributing to male violence or acknowledging that those attitudes contribute to the problem at the very least, especially at the cultural level or societal level.
Challenging Cultural Norms
00:11:43
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How have you particularly moved past the discomfort of seeing these attitudes that men have as a man yourself?
00:11:49
Speaker
Or like what really pushed you to
00:11:52
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go from absorbing a lot of these messages and then creating this framework?
00:11:57
Speaker
Wow, it's such a complicated process that I think I'll only be able to point to a couple aspects of it.
00:12:01
Speaker
But so much of it to me comes down to having women in my life that I really care about.
00:12:08
Speaker
You know, my sisters, my mother, my close friends, and think like,
00:12:12
Speaker
why would I want people that I care about to be treated this way?
00:12:15
Speaker
Like, this is awful.
00:12:17
Speaker
And I don't think people learn history enough.
00:12:19
Speaker
I mean, they learn history the way you were taught it in school of like, oh, memorize the Roman emperors or some junk like that.
00:12:25
Speaker
But they don't learn history about like real life social history, about things that matter to human beings.
00:12:29
Speaker
So fortunately in college, I also just learned a lot of women's history and the history of oppression of women, of men's oppression of women.
00:12:36
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And a lot of things look different when you actually know your history.
00:12:39
Speaker
So that was a really important factor.
00:12:41
Speaker
And I think that allies are important to any movement.
00:12:45
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And it's like, why wouldn't you just join forces with the side that's right?
00:12:49
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Thank you.
00:12:52
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That's what I'm saying.
00:12:54
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That's what we've been saying.
00:12:55
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Yeah.
00:12:58
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You know, I have an interesting experience as a man who's been involved throughout my adult life in fighting violence against women is that people often look at me a little funny and they say, like, what's this really about?
00:13:09
Speaker
Like, was your father an abuser or, you know, were you an abused child?
00:13:14
Speaker
Like, what's up?
00:13:15
Speaker
Like, what's up with you, buddy?
00:13:16
Speaker
Kind of thing.
00:13:18
Speaker
And when a white person devotes their life to fighting racism, people don't say, wait a minute, what's up with you?
00:13:26
Speaker
You know, when men take on fighting for women's rights, that shouldn't be any bigger deal than when white people take on fighting for the rights of people of color.
00:13:37
Speaker
The attitude should be like, oh, good, you're doing a good thing.
00:13:39
Speaker
That's what you should be doing.
00:13:41
Speaker
not like, oh, you must have some special connection to the issue.
00:13:44
Speaker
It's like fighting for justice is a good human impulse.
00:13:47
Speaker
Like, yeah, do that.
00:13:48
Speaker
And the thing is, there are actually a lot of men who care about women's rights, but they don't tend to be as outspoken as they need to be.
00:13:55
Speaker
I feel like we just should treat allies as like valuable helpers who we also need to slightly keep an eye on.
00:14:02
Speaker
I think that's how any movement needs to treat its allies.
00:14:05
Speaker
And like, yeah, glad to have you around, but we are going to watch out a little bit too and not make too big a deal about it.
00:14:12
Speaker
Yeah, that's fair.
00:14:13
Speaker
I agree.
00:14:14
Speaker
Like, yeah, you should be fighting for it.
00:14:15
Speaker
Like I said, you know, just to repeat what I already said, like you should be fighting for justice.
00:14:19
Speaker
Like that's what you ought to be doing.
00:14:22
Speaker
Why Does He Do That was written 20 years ago now.
00:14:27
Speaker
Is there anything you would change or add to the content of the book in terms of do you think anything has shifted either socially or culturally that has made the abuse phenomena either better or worse?
Narcissism vs. Societal Issues
00:14:42
Speaker
I'm glad you asked me that question because I haven't been asked that in exactly that way before.
00:14:45
Speaker
And it really makes me it makes me think about a number of things.
00:14:49
Speaker
One is I'm quite concerned.
00:14:51
Speaker
And I've just written a blog post about this recently, a couple of them, about how the popular term for abusive men is switching over to referring to them as narcissists.
00:15:02
Speaker
And that, I think, is a big mistake.
00:15:04
Speaker
The nature of narcissism, of really severe self-centeredness is in many ways so different from men's abuse of women.
00:15:10
Speaker
It has a lot of common ground, which is part of why it's become popular to call abusers narcissists.
00:15:16
Speaker
But there are ways that it's very different.
00:15:18
Speaker
And the reason it concerns me so much, or one of the reasons why it concerns me so much, is that it completely takes the responsibility off the community.
00:15:27
Speaker
It completely takes the responsibility off of the society.
00:15:30
Speaker
It obscures the question of men's oppression of women.
00:15:33
Speaker
And instead, it all becomes about his psychological issues.
00:15:36
Speaker
Like, you know, he's got early narcissistic injuries, as they call them.
00:15:40
Speaker
And oh, let's see what happened in his family of origin.
00:15:43
Speaker
And this whole structure of exploitation and silencing of women, suddenly you get to ignore by labeling all abusers narcissists.
00:15:52
Speaker
So that worries me.
00:15:53
Speaker
Another thing that's on my mind is that the atmosphere for doing women's organizing in general is difficult right now.
00:16:02
Speaker
And we just need a lot more activists.
00:16:04
Speaker
We need a lot more women and a lot more male allies out there, you know, fighting for women's rights in like a slightly rude way.
00:16:11
Speaker
Like we got to stop being we got to go back to the days of not being quite so polite.
00:16:16
Speaker
Hey, Lundy, have you met us before?
00:16:18
Speaker
No, I haven't.
00:16:21
Speaker
Do you know what rude fems are?
00:16:26
Speaker
Like feminists that are rude?
00:16:28
Speaker
Allow us to introduce ourselves.
00:16:30
Speaker
The meanest female we place on the internet.
00:16:32
Speaker
I am honored to meet you.
00:16:34
Speaker
We were called the meanest female-y place on the internet.
00:16:37
Speaker
It's mostly a joke.
00:16:37
Speaker
We're actually not that mean, but it's only because men think that we're mean when we call out their abusive strategies.
00:16:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:44
Speaker
And it's because we just say it as it is.
00:16:45
Speaker
We don't, like, sugarcoat.
00:16:47
Speaker
I think that's awesome.
00:16:48
Speaker
Abusers and various other destructive people make it sound like you're being mean to them when all you did is describe exactly what they did.
00:16:57
Speaker
Yes.
00:16:59
Speaker
That's so true.
00:17:00
Speaker
Yes.
00:17:01
Speaker
This is my ex in a nutshell.
00:17:03
Speaker
Just tell the truth about oppression and people start talking like you're some kind of out of control radical.
00:17:07
Speaker
And all you did was like, I just described what happened.
00:17:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:10
Speaker
I always say to people, I'm not insulting you.
00:17:12
Speaker
I'm just describing you accurately.
00:17:15
Speaker
And it's not even like I'm not even describing you as a person.
00:17:18
Speaker
I'm describing what your actions were.
00:17:21
Speaker
These were your actions.
00:17:22
Speaker
It's like, what, I'm not supposed to say what your actions were?
00:17:25
Speaker
And then the other thing that has really concerned me over the 20 years since I wrote the book, and it was concerning me at that time, but it's much more concerning to me now.
00:17:34
Speaker
And there are a couple of things, actually, I would specifically like to say to your audience about this next subject, which is that the court conditions for mothers regarding child custody are getting worse and worse and worse and worse.
00:17:45
Speaker
They're worse now than they were 20 years ago.
00:17:47
Speaker
They're worse than they were 30 years ago.
00:17:51
Speaker
They're worse than they were five years ago.
00:17:52
Speaker
They're just getting worse and worse and worse and worse.
00:17:55
Speaker
And the myth that the family courts favor mothers is still so widespread through our society, even though if that ever was true, it certainly hasn't been true for at least 40 years now.
00:18:09
Speaker
It's been at least since the late 70s that the maternal advantage was gone.
00:18:13
Speaker
And the current family court atmosphere is really hostile, outright hostile to mothers.
00:18:19
Speaker
It's become an unbelievable scene.
00:18:21
Speaker
This is what my latest book is about, which we can come back and
Dangers of Custody with Abusers
00:18:24
Speaker
talk about that.
00:18:24
Speaker
So a couple of things that I really want people to be aware of is that it's very dangerous to tell yourself, well, I'm going to have a child with him and that's going to solve the problem.
00:18:37
Speaker
And there are a couple ways that I've seen this sort of thinking play out.
00:18:39
Speaker
One way is the, well, then he'll finally see I'm not cheating on him because so many abusive men are so jealous.
00:18:45
Speaker
That's a lot of how they're... It's really possessiveness.
00:18:47
Speaker
I think jealousy is not even really the right word.
00:18:49
Speaker
They're possessive.
00:18:50
Speaker
And so that's a lot of how their abusiveness comes out.
00:18:52
Speaker
That kind of ownership mentality comes out through their sexual jealousy.
00:18:57
Speaker
And she thinks, well...
00:18:59
Speaker
If I'm pregnant, then I'm obviously not out cheating on him.
00:19:01
Speaker
And if I'm home taking care of our child, then I'm certainly not out cheating on him.
00:19:06
Speaker
So if we have kids, you know, that's going to solve the jealousy problem.
00:19:10
Speaker
And it doesn't because the problem is possessiveness.
00:19:13
Speaker
And he just goes right on accusing her of all the same stuff right through her pregnancy and right when she's trapped at home with three and four kids.
00:19:20
Speaker
He's still calling her all the horrible names and saying that she's sleeping with every man in town and all that stuff.
00:19:24
Speaker
because it has nothing to do with his behavior.
00:19:27
Speaker
Abusive men use their jealous accusations as a way to cut her off from people and as just another thing to hammer her with.
00:19:34
Speaker
Another thing I hear along these lines is, well, if I have a kid with him, then he'll finally have to settle down and stop drinking so much and start being more responsible and stop being so mean to me because he'll have to be a responsible parent.
00:19:46
Speaker
Like, no, he doesn't.
00:19:47
Speaker
Unfortunately, abusive men don't turn into responsible fathers.
00:19:51
Speaker
They turn into quite lousy, manipulative, et cetera, fathers.
00:19:54
Speaker
And what happens is once you've got a kid with him, then there's no way to get away from him.
00:19:59
Speaker
I mean, you can break up with him, but you can never get him out of your life.
00:20:03
Speaker
You're not literally married to him, but in another sense of the word, you're married to him forever.
00:20:08
Speaker
Once you've got kids with him, he's got parental rights and the court is not going to keep him away from those kids.
00:20:13
Speaker
You can go to the court and say, he did this and this and this and this to me.
00:20:16
Speaker
And the court will say, what's that got to do with the kids?
00:20:18
Speaker
And you can even say he did this and this to the kids and they'll say, oh, well, that was in the tension of your difficult marriage.
00:20:23
Speaker
You know, it's all fine now.
00:20:25
Speaker
He can have him 50-50.
00:20:25
Speaker
I mean, this is the big push in the courts now.
00:20:28
Speaker
It's 50-50 time between the father and the mom.
00:20:31
Speaker
So please, you know, please do not have kids with an abusive man.
00:20:38
Speaker
It's not going to make things any better.
00:20:39
Speaker
And then the power he's going to have over you through the child custody system is never going to
'In Custody' and Anti-Mother Biases
00:20:44
Speaker
end.
00:20:44
Speaker
My new book that just came out a few months ago is called In Custody.
00:20:47
Speaker
And it's different for me because it's a novel.
00:20:49
Speaker
It's actually a suspense novel.
00:20:51
Speaker
I decided I wanted to head in a completely different direction.
00:20:54
Speaker
And so I wanted to write a book about the corruption and the very anti-mother atmosphere that has taken over nationally in the family courts.
00:21:01
Speaker
But I wanted to do it in the form of like a more entertaining suspense, romance, et cetera, kind of novel.
00:21:08
Speaker
And I also wanted to create something that you could hand to someone who really doesn't get the issue and say, here, here's a fun suspense novel to read that simultaneously will get you to understand what's happening currently to mothers in the family court.
00:21:20
Speaker
The family court system is interesting because it seems like, yes, for the past maybe 20 or 30 years, there's been a concerted effort on behalf of men's rights activists or father's rights activists to change a lot of the default court rulings or the perception of fathers in court rulings.
00:21:37
Speaker
Because they were successfully able to create a narrative within the legal system that it's not that fathers are abandoning their children, it's that mothers are withholding access to the children and that a lot of the abuse or psychological damage or emotional damage or even physical damage that are caused by fathers is negligible to their right to have access to the children.
00:21:58
Speaker
How would we even overcome narratives like that at this point?
00:22:01
Speaker
Because like you said, that's been the push for the last 40 or 50 years.
00:22:04
Speaker
They've been incrementally and very successfully trying to force women to keep in contact with men who are very, very abusive.
00:22:10
Speaker
And I can even count in my own life, within my own relatives, this being the case of them being around abusive men,
00:22:17
Speaker
Sometimes these kids would go over to their father's house, their father would have a new girlfriend, he's abusing the new
Father's Rights Activism in Courts
00:22:23
Speaker
girlfriend, right?
00:22:23
Speaker
And they're experiencing all this trauma.
00:22:25
Speaker
Like, how do you then, how do we shift the narrative to actually what's best for the children?
00:22:30
Speaker
Well, you have to be careful asking me that question, because that's the kind of thing I get started on, you'll never get me to stop.
00:22:36
Speaker
Okay.
00:22:37
Speaker
But no, I'll discipline myself here.
00:22:39
Speaker
So the first thing is, it's unfortunately too late to change family court attitudes through training.
00:22:46
Speaker
Like I've done tons of training.
00:22:48
Speaker
I've probably trained family court judges specifically on domestic abuse in over a dozen states, and it just didn't do any good.
00:22:55
Speaker
So the first thing is mothers have to organize.
00:22:58
Speaker
And unfortunately, the abusers organized and they organized well.
00:23:01
Speaker
They started organizing back in the 80s.
00:23:04
Speaker
And that's when they created their whole abuser movement, the father's rights movement.
00:23:08
Speaker
And it's which is really a father supremacy movement.
00:23:11
Speaker
You know, calling them a father's rights group is like is like calling the Ku Klux Klan an equal rights for white people organization.
00:23:18
Speaker
They're not interested in equality for fathers at all.
00:23:20
Speaker
They love that term.
00:23:22
Speaker
They love to say they're for equality for fathers.
00:23:24
Speaker
But as soon as you see what their actual stands are, they're for father supremacy, just out and out.
00:23:28
Speaker
But it's hard for mothers to organize because they're trying to raise their kids and they don't have any money.
00:23:33
Speaker
Because they're actually raising the kids.
00:23:34
Speaker
Exactly.
00:23:35
Speaker
That's basically what it is.
00:23:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:37
Speaker
Men have way too much free time.
00:23:38
Speaker
OK, deadbeat dads have too much free time to organize amongst each other to fuck over women.
00:23:43
Speaker
I've got to tell you my prized story about this.
00:23:45
Speaker
It was because I used to be a guardian ad litem.
00:23:48
Speaker
I used to serve as a guardian ad litem, which is for people who don't know that it's a type of custody evaluator.
00:23:52
Speaker
And I was a custody evaluator on a case I didn't realize until I was deeply into the case that the father was one of the most visible father's rights activists in the state of Massachusetts, that his name was actually known all over the state.
00:24:04
Speaker
I didn't know his name because I wasn't up on that.
00:24:07
Speaker
But I started to realize, whoa, this guy's had his name in the paper and everything.
00:24:09
Speaker
This guy is a big name.
00:24:11
Speaker
And then his boys say to me, I say, so what kind of thing, you know, as just part of my evaluation as the guardian ad litem, I say, so, you know, what kinds of things do you do when you're at your father's house?
00:24:22
Speaker
What do you, you know, how do you spend your time with him?
00:24:23
Speaker
Like trying to get a read on their connection to him.
00:24:26
Speaker
And the boys who are both young teenagers say to me, oh, you know, we don't really spend a lot of time with him when we're over at his house.
00:24:33
Speaker
He's really busy with his father's organization.
00:24:36
Speaker
Wow.
00:24:38
Speaker
I mean, I can personally attest to something like that.
00:24:40
Speaker
Like when my parents were divorced and I would have visitation with my dad, he would just drop me off at like my great aunt's house.
00:24:47
Speaker
And then I would just watch TV with her all day.
00:24:49
Speaker
And I'm like, why did you pick me up?
00:24:51
Speaker
But it seemed like it was more of a control issue over my mother than it was like that he actually wanted to parent me.
00:24:57
Speaker
So that's bad enough.
00:24:58
Speaker
But to me, it takes it to another level of irony when the reason he can't spend time with them is because he's too busy with his father's organization.
00:25:07
Speaker
Right.
00:25:08
Speaker
Because he's too busy fighting for the rights of fathers.
00:25:10
Speaker
It shows that that's, as you're saying, it exactly shows what you're saying that has nothing to do with fathering and everything to do with control.
00:25:16
Speaker
Yeah, it's been really frustrating seeing how men have very effectively wielded and weaponized the legal system against the women that they abuse.
00:25:24
Speaker
In my own family, I have a few uncles that are
00:25:28
Speaker
highly abusive.
00:25:29
Speaker
They'll demand custody.
00:25:30
Speaker
They'll go to the court.
00:25:32
Speaker
That bitch is taking my kids away from me and not letting me see the kids, blah, blah.
00:25:35
Speaker
They'll fight for visitation and then they'll not show up.
00:25:38
Speaker
And so what'll happen is my, he'll, he'll schedule the visitation.
00:25:42
Speaker
My aunt will be like, okay, you're going to see daddy today.
00:25:45
Speaker
And then he'll just not show up.
00:25:46
Speaker
And then the mother's left with this emotionally broken child to, you know, try to pick up the pieces of
00:25:52
Speaker
After, by the way, he's gone through and put the whole family through this whole legal hell, right?
00:25:56
Speaker
So, yeah, it is really frustrating to see this sort of lawfare almost that abusers have been waging against women.
00:26:04
Speaker
And so, yeah, I'm very interested in, like, what are some, like, counter strategies against that?
00:26:09
Speaker
So, so, and by the way, I take on the whole father's rights movement in that book in custody.
00:26:14
Speaker
Also, I really believe that mothers are going to have to organize court
Mothers Organizing Against Court Bias
00:26:20
Speaker
by court.
00:26:20
Speaker
And they're going to have to find other moms whose cases are out of the same court.
00:26:26
Speaker
And we have to start developing a whole system that makes it easier for moms to find out what other mothers have their cases out of the same court.
00:26:34
Speaker
and start picketing courts, even if they have to wear masks so the judges can't tell who's out there, because the judges will get them back for that, and start leafleting.
00:26:44
Speaker
The focus, unfortunately, tends to be on governments, like, oh, we're going to pass new laws, and we're going to press our elected officials.
00:26:51
Speaker
And it doesn't help, unfortunately.
00:26:53
Speaker
A lot of states now have much better laws about child custody with respect to domestic abuse.
00:26:57
Speaker
It doesn't matter, because the judges don't care what the law is.
00:27:01
Speaker
The family law judges don't care what the law is.
00:27:03
Speaker
So the focus has to be on protesting the court, not trying to go through legislatures, state or federal legislatures, like proved laws don't do anything.
00:27:12
Speaker
So there's a new organization that's forming.
00:27:14
Speaker
I'm actually connected to the people who are starting it called Mothers on the Rise.
00:27:18
Speaker
That's going to have as a big part of its focus, helping mothers do this kind of county by county, court by court on the ground, grassroots, the real grassroots organizing.
00:27:29
Speaker
is the only way we're going to win this.
00:27:31
Speaker
There have been 30 years now.
00:27:33
Speaker
I just read a book recently that's still in draft.
00:27:36
Speaker
It could be a long time before it's out, unfortunately, that somebody from the California Protective Parents Association is working on writing about the whole history of the battle for custody reform for the past 30 years, mothers fighting for custody reform.
00:27:48
Speaker
This book just shows how effort after effort, effort after effort that's been top down has just not worked.
00:27:53
Speaker
To try to influence policy people, to try to change laws, to try to hold conferences.
00:27:58
Speaker
It's all good ideas.
00:27:59
Speaker
It's all important ideas.
00:28:01
Speaker
It hasn't worked.
00:28:02
Speaker
We're going to have to do a bottom-up grassroots organizing approach.
00:28:07
Speaker
That's interesting.
00:28:07
Speaker
So even when the law is more favorable to mothers, the judges, there's a lot of quote-unquote activist judges or judges who feel that... Judges who are sympathetic to the abuser.
00:28:18
Speaker
Yeah, to abusers, which is not surprising.
00:28:21
Speaker
I mean, there's layers and layers and layers to this stuff.
00:28:24
Speaker
And as I say, I could talk to you about it all day, but just one...
00:28:28
Speaker
One way to frame it, and then this reminds me of another thing I should say, is that judges tend to be people who are pretty into power, particularly in family law, because they have extraordinary power.
00:28:40
Speaker
A trial court judge doesn't have nearly the kind of power that a family law judge has, because a family law judge is the judge and the jury.
00:28:47
Speaker
He or she is making all the decisions.
00:28:49
Speaker
They have extraordinary power and they get into it.
00:28:51
Speaker
They get very addicted to it.
00:28:53
Speaker
And if you're faced with someone before you, you have two people, one of whom is a reasonable looking person and another one who is accusing him of being a power abuser.
00:29:07
Speaker
Your heart's not going to go out to her.
00:29:09
Speaker
Your heart's going to go out to him.
00:29:11
Speaker
Because you're attracted to power also.
00:29:13
Speaker
It's not that you're going to think of him as abusive.
00:29:15
Speaker
You're not going to think of him as abusive, but you're going to think of him as being kind of like you.
00:29:19
Speaker
You're going to connect with him.
00:29:20
Speaker
Intuitively, you're going to connect with him and she's going to get on your nerves.
00:29:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:24
Speaker
And I think I read a statistic somewhere that over 70 to 80 percent of family court judges are male.
00:29:32
Speaker
So it's just like it's a system by which there's just by value more male judges.
00:29:36
Speaker
And so they're probably going to have a little bit more of a
00:29:39
Speaker
sympathetic attitudes towards other men.
00:29:41
Speaker
But unfortunately not.
00:29:43
Speaker
Really?
00:29:44
Speaker
Unfortunately, the female judges are just as bad to moms as the male judges are.
00:29:48
Speaker
Really?
Internalized Oppression in Courts
00:29:49
Speaker
Why?
00:29:51
Speaker
But I think that's because there is a product still of a whole male-dominated socialization of the legal field.
00:29:57
Speaker
How, you know, how they, all kinds of steps they had to go through to ever become a judge, that by the time they're there, they're pretty much thinking like men.
00:30:05
Speaker
Wow.
00:30:05
Speaker
Yeah, they're pick-me's.
00:30:06
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense.
00:30:08
Speaker
Women get blown, mothers get blown away by how they're treated by female judges.
00:30:13
Speaker
They're thinking, this judge may even be a mother herself.
00:30:15
Speaker
How can she possibly be treating me like this?
00:30:19
Speaker
But they're into power.
00:30:20
Speaker
That's the thing.
00:30:21
Speaker
By the time they get to a judge, they're much more identified with power than they are with their femaleness.
00:30:26
Speaker
That makes sense because we do often talk about the power structures that exist and how the type of women that are successful within that are often the type of women who are willing to push male narratives with a female face.
00:30:38
Speaker
Right.
00:30:39
Speaker
So just because they're also women doesn't mean that they're necessarily sympathetic to women's causes.
00:30:43
Speaker
In fact, in order for them to get the positions that they're in, they may have to demonstrate that they're demonstrably not sympathetic to female causes.
00:30:52
Speaker
In an organization that I created, we talk about the concept of internalized oppression and how you sometimes start to like try to be like the people that are keeping you down to sort of prove that you're not.
00:31:03
Speaker
You know, I'm not one of them.
00:31:04
Speaker
Oh, I'm not like other women.
00:31:05
Speaker
Like I'm more like the guys.
00:31:06
Speaker
I'm going to get in good with the guys kind of thing.
00:31:08
Speaker
There was one thought that I had that I thought might be important for your audience is that one of the many things that has driven these terrible changes that have happened over the past 30 years in the whole custody environment is early studies that came out that claimed to find that children were doing much worse if they were growing up in single parent homes.
00:31:28
Speaker
with growing up with single moms and that children really need a father.
00:31:32
Speaker
And these studies were showing, oh, that they had higher rates of this and that and the other and the other thing.
00:31:37
Speaker
And this was a fraud because these studies, well, it was one study actually that got the most news, but it was, I think there were some others, if I remember right, that were related to it.
00:31:46
Speaker
These studies didn't control for class.
00:31:49
Speaker
And single mothers are poor, by and large.
00:31:52
Speaker
And what these studies were showing was how destructive poverty is.
00:31:57
Speaker
You should look at that study and say, this society needs to get much more serious about doing something about poverty if it cares about kids.
00:32:04
Speaker
They in no sense proved that kids are damaged by not having a father.
Critique of Blaming Single Mothers
00:32:08
Speaker
Single mothers can raise kids great.
00:32:10
Speaker
Single fathers can raise kids great if they're loving, responsible, non-abusive fathers.
00:32:15
Speaker
It's like the problem is not whether there's one parent or two parents there.
00:32:18
Speaker
The problem is...
00:32:20
Speaker
A, is there enough support for those kids, which we really need four, five, six adults for, let's face it.
00:32:25
Speaker
And is there enough economic resource?
00:32:27
Speaker
My other problem with those studies is that they're comparing single mothers to intact families.
00:32:34
Speaker
I would like if they would compare single mothers to abusive families, because there are some families where the abuse is so bad that it is actually better to just be raised by a single mother.
00:32:43
Speaker
For the man to be in that picture at all is more harmful to the child than if you weren't.
00:32:49
Speaker
In fact, I would argue it's always better for kids to be with a single mother than to be in a family where their dad is abusing their mother.
00:32:56
Speaker
I would argue that's always better.
00:32:57
Speaker
Always, yeah.
00:32:58
Speaker
That's been a really, really, really big Manosphere talking point.
00:33:03
Speaker
Fatherlessness is a problem.
00:33:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:05
Speaker
It's been like a complete and total demonization of, yeah, single mothers and that single mothers are the problem and that fatherlessness is the problem.
00:33:11
Speaker
But it also has like a really weird Western focus because it's not as if other countries where marriage is either culturally enforced or legally enforced don't have domestic violence and don't have problems and don't have like men that go off the rails, right?
00:33:26
Speaker
Like there's a lot of countries right now where the marriage rates are high, the divorce rates are low and the violence rates are really, really high still, right?
00:33:34
Speaker
So it seems to me that by framing it as a single mother issue or a fatherlessness issue, it's just another way to blame women instead of like the societal structures, because marriage or not marriage doesn't really change the attitudes that men have, especially if they have a proclivity towards being abusive and violent towards women.
00:33:52
Speaker
And you can be a high marriage rate society with quote unquote fathers in their home that's still of dysfunction and abuse.
00:33:59
Speaker
So I think that narrative really, really needs to change.
00:34:01
Speaker
And in fact, high divorce might be an indication that a society is somewhat healthy because then women can leave abusive men.
00:34:09
Speaker
Versus like other societies where divorce is frowned upon and they can't go anywhere.
00:34:14
Speaker
And in fact, studies confirm what you're saying.
00:34:16
Speaker
Studies confirm that in society where women have less access to divorce, they face higher rates of domestic violence.
00:34:22
Speaker
That's already been demonstrated.
00:34:25
Speaker
And notice that these hypocrites do not seem to be concerned about motherlessness.
00:34:29
Speaker
They're not wringing their hands about all these kids that are out there being raised by single dads, and there's a lot of kids in society being raised by single dads, and they're not at all concerned about the ways that family courts are cutting mothers off from their kids.
00:34:42
Speaker
It's all about, oh, let's talk about how these courts are cutting fathers off from their kids, which they're not doing, but boy, are they cutting mothers off from their kids.
00:34:48
Speaker
Why aren't you concerned about motherlessness?
00:34:50
Speaker
Yeah, what about all the women who get murdered by their partners?
00:34:53
Speaker
You know, what about those kids who are now orphans, effectively?
00:34:57
Speaker
So, you know, they never seem to give a shit about that.
00:34:59
Speaker
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Speaker
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00:36:07
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And back to the show.
Toxic Influences of the Manosphere
00:36:09
Speaker
So what do you think of the manosphere?
00:36:11
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:36:11
Speaker
There's just been a huge rise of these different movements coming from men, Red Pill, MGTOW.
00:36:19
Speaker
Incel movement as well.
00:36:21
Speaker
Incels, right?
00:36:23
Speaker
Our friendly neighborhood incels.
00:36:27
Speaker
It sells low key are kind of hilarious.
00:36:29
Speaker
So the only group where like I read it, I'm like their self-owns are actually masterful comedic displays.
00:36:35
Speaker
Well, because they don't have access to women, right?
00:36:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:38
Speaker
But the red pillars are the ones that actually scare me because they're the ones who are advocating for dating practices that are effectively emotional abuse.
00:36:46
Speaker
It's abusive, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse.
00:36:49
Speaker
So yeah, Lenny, I'm curious what your, what your thoughts on, you know, it's, it's,
00:36:55
Speaker
First of all, it just blows my mind that they can succeed in making a movement out of the fact that they have made themselves so unappealing that no one will sleep with them.
00:37:08
Speaker
It's like maybe the problem is that you're an asshole in a ratty t-shirt.
00:37:14
Speaker
Why would somebody want to sleep with you?
00:37:16
Speaker
Based.
00:37:19
Speaker
I mean, we have tried to tell them that, but they just still don't listen to us.
00:37:23
Speaker
We've been screaming it from the top of our lungs.
00:37:26
Speaker
Bave yourself!
00:37:29
Speaker
But on a slightly more serious note, although I was pretty serious about that, too.
00:37:35
Speaker
Oh, we are.
00:37:36
Speaker
We're serious.
00:37:37
Speaker
Oh, I'm sorry.
00:37:38
Speaker
We laugh at our trauma.
00:37:40
Speaker
We use humor to cope with the pain.
00:37:45
Speaker
And I often often when I laugh at something, people start to say, what I'm saying is true.
00:37:50
Speaker
And I said, I'm not laughing because I don't think what you're saying is true.
00:37:53
Speaker
I think the truth is often funny.
00:37:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:56
Speaker
But I believe it's ultimately about oppression.
00:38:00
Speaker
I believe that people who are behaving oppressively or even who aren't behaving that oppressively, but are connected to an oppressive group and are getting the benefits that that oppressive group gets from ripping off the other group.
00:38:12
Speaker
They become very attached to their comforts.
00:38:13
Speaker
They become very attached to their privileges.
00:38:15
Speaker
They become very attached to being catered to.
00:38:17
Speaker
I mean, rich people act as if giving up three out of their six Rolls Royces would traumatize them.
00:38:27
Speaker
So the ability of people in positions of privilege to whine until the rest of us are deaf about what it would be like if they didn't have these horribly unfair privileges, I just have zero sympathy for this stuff.
00:38:42
Speaker
And what dominant groups do is...
00:38:45
Speaker
is when they lose a tenth of what needs to be taken from them, of what would fairly be taken from them, they're immediately in a horrible victim crisis about it, making themselves into the victim and acting like terrible things are being done to them.
00:39:02
Speaker
It's like, we haven't nearly taken from you what needs to be taken from you yet.
00:39:06
Speaker
Are you kidding?
00:39:07
Speaker
Yeah, that's one of the reasons why we've made the decision to not sugarcoat or be nice about a lot of the topics that we cover is because of what you're saying is that the reaction is extreme when you ask for a little bit, right?
00:39:19
Speaker
So it's like, just ask for everything you want.
00:39:21
Speaker
You may as well ask for a lot.
00:39:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:23
Speaker
Good for you.
00:39:24
Speaker
You mentioned in the book that there's no right way to ask for something from an abuser.
00:39:28
Speaker
And I find this to be very true with women when we're talking about relationships or bad male behavior, whatever we ask men to shape up.
00:39:35
Speaker
They always have this, even when what we're asking for is completely reasonable, they have this completely distorted, excessively angry response to, you know, shove it back down our throat and to make women think twice about asking for more again.
00:39:48
Speaker
So, um, yeah.
00:39:50
Speaker
Yeah, I just feel like the internet is creating that on like a massive, massive scale.
00:39:53
Speaker
It's taking that problem and putting it on steroids.
00:39:56
Speaker
Yeah, and it really, it just turns the worst aspects of people absolutely loose to blossom, which is too bad.
00:40:04
Speaker
And I think that anger is a very, very powerful and important force in people who are downtrodden, people who are kept down.
00:40:14
Speaker
And I know that anger can have unhealthy aspects because it can eat you up inside and give you ulcers and that kind of stuff.
00:40:19
Speaker
And I'm not talking about that aspect of anger, but I'm talking about being angry, being outraged.
00:40:24
Speaker
There's tremendous power in that.
00:40:26
Speaker
There's tremendous liberating power in that.
00:40:28
Speaker
And people should be proud of their anger.
00:40:30
Speaker
And should consider their anger really important and really justified, assuming that it is justified.
00:40:35
Speaker
I'm not talking about men's anger, but I'm talking about women's anger.
00:40:37
Speaker
Although men sometimes have things to be legitimately angry at, just not at women.
00:40:42
Speaker
Men have very legitimate anger as working class people, as men of color, as people who've been ripped off in other kinds of ways.
00:40:47
Speaker
They're directing their anger at women at exactly the wrong direction.
00:40:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's been weird watching the men's rights activists.
00:40:53
Speaker
All of their platforms are just specifically anti-feminist.
00:40:57
Speaker
And a lot of times they assign feminism to the reason that something is quote unquote unfair to men, but like it's not feminism that created the problem.
00:41:04
Speaker
Like they'll talk about the male homelessness problem.
00:41:06
Speaker
And I'm like, what does feminism have to do with male homelessness?
00:41:09
Speaker
Like that's a society-wide issue.
00:41:12
Speaker
And the way that we structure capitalism, I don't feel like women aren't responsible.
00:41:16
Speaker
for that in particular, but it's just a way for them to be anti-feminist while pretending that they're actually caring about men.
00:41:23
Speaker
And to me, it's no different from people who just are on and on and on about people on welfare.
00:41:27
Speaker
It's like, oh, let's blame the people who have the least influence over societal decisions for what's going wrong in society.
00:41:34
Speaker
It's like, that's just, it's absolutely backwards.
00:41:37
Speaker
It makes zero, absolutely zero sense to blame the people that have the least say.
00:41:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:42
Speaker
I wanted to zero in on the Manosphere a little bit, though, because I just for some context, Lundy, when I read your book, Why Does He Do That?, I read it two years ago.
00:41:51
Speaker
And this was after I'd already grown up with the Internet.
00:41:55
Speaker
I already knew about the red pill.
00:41:56
Speaker
I already knew about incels.
00:41:58
Speaker
You know, I already knew about the Manosphere stuff.
00:42:01
Speaker
And reading your book...
00:42:03
Speaker
I was horrified to realize that a lot of the strategies that abusers use are narratives that are perpetuated on the manosphere.
00:42:14
Speaker
And in your book, you say that the reason why men abuse women, it's not because of emotional trauma or it's not because of this or that, it's because of attitudes and because they feel entitled.
00:42:23
Speaker
And I feel very strongly that the manosphere, you know, incels, red pill, pickup artistry, all that is...
00:42:31
Speaker
It's almost like all of the abusive men just got together to create an online movement and to create a whole ethos around perpetuating their abuse.
00:42:40
Speaker
And they're also grooming men who might not otherwise have been abusive, but they're taking men who maybe didn't
00:42:46
Speaker
come with those entitled attitudes or maybe weren't as entitled and they're making them more entitled or they're either making their attitudes towards women worse and more abusive and so you know you talk about you know the cultural training that men receive and I do feel quite strongly that the manosphere is probably the number one most toxic place that men get that kind of cultural training
00:43:08
Speaker
I think you are 100% right.
00:43:10
Speaker
I think it's horrible.
00:43:12
Speaker
And it's clearly feeding people.
00:43:15
Speaker
There's just no question that it's feeding the worst aspects of men.
00:43:19
Speaker
And there are a lot of decent men in this world.
00:43:21
Speaker
And there are a lot of men who are sort of teetering in the middle somewhere.
00:43:24
Speaker
And then there's a lot of abusers.
00:43:26
Speaker
And
00:43:27
Speaker
And abusers are going to be abusers, although it's still not good for them to be feeding off of each other because it makes them even worse.
00:43:33
Speaker
But I'm with you that it really worries me most of all about these men who are somewhat teetering in the middle.
00:43:38
Speaker
And it's going to be the perfect thing to recruit them.
00:43:41
Speaker
The whole man's fear is like a recruiting system for abusers.
00:43:45
Speaker
It is a training ground for abusers as well.
00:43:47
Speaker
Yeah, as well.
00:43:48
Speaker
You're absolutely right.
00:43:49
Speaker
You're absolutely right.
00:43:50
Speaker
In your estimation, approximately what percentage of the male population has the capacity to be an abuser?
00:43:56
Speaker
There's some women who are like, oh, it's 100%, whereas men seem to think it's only a very small number of men who are abusers.
00:44:03
Speaker
Do you think it's like... 40%, 50%?
00:44:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:08
Speaker
I don't know.
00:44:08
Speaker
I mean, I can tell you that one man in six who is currently in a relationship is abusing his partner in a way that includes some element of physical violence.
00:44:20
Speaker
So that's already a ton of people.
00:44:23
Speaker
when we start to think about extreme coercive control, like dominating who she can talk to, where she can go, taking money away from her, humiliating her sexually, all this kind of stuff.
00:44:31
Speaker
This is so rampant in how men treat women in intimate relationships.
00:44:38
Speaker
It's the product of a whole societal system that for thousands of years has been working to keep women down.
00:44:44
Speaker
And this term that I think the historian Howard Zinn used, and I'm sure various other people used, and I just think was so correct of calling it intimate oppression.
00:44:52
Speaker
It's rampant.
00:44:53
Speaker
And what matters most to me about this is that it means that a woman can be involved with two or three, or I don't know, maybe more, but at least she can be involved with two or three, at least, abusive guys in a row without that saying anything about her, because there's so many of them out there.
00:45:12
Speaker
And, you know, if you've been involved in with six or seven in a row, maybe you should try to look at what's going on.
00:45:17
Speaker
But I feel like there's all this pathologizing of women like, oh, why is she involved with another abuser?
00:45:22
Speaker
There must be something up with that.
00:45:23
Speaker
It's like, no, they're all over the place and they don't have an A on their forehead.
00:45:29
Speaker
And a lot of the clients that I worked with over the years, a lot of the abusers that I worked with over the years, part of their style was to go after a woman who was coming off of an abusive relationship and be like, oh, I can't believe how he treated you.
00:45:42
Speaker
What a horrible thing.
00:45:44
Speaker
I would never treat a woman like that.
00:45:46
Speaker
And he's actually her helper.
00:45:47
Speaker
So she feels grateful to him.
00:45:48
Speaker
Like, oh, he was one of the people that got me out of this other situation.
00:45:51
Speaker
And now he's abusing me too.
Media's Role in Disregarding Instincts
00:45:53
Speaker
It doesn't mean anything about her.
00:45:56
Speaker
Modern cultural society often grooms women out of their self-protective mechanisms as well.
00:46:01
Speaker
And that's something that we've railed against on our podcast quite a bit, especially certain aspects of liberal feminism.
00:46:07
Speaker
Like we were just discussing like the Armie Hammer case and he's been accused of rape and all sorts of abuse.
00:46:14
Speaker
But he also had this quote cannibalism fetish and there was like an entire article that was put into the
00:46:21
Speaker
women's magazines like, oh, the cannibalism fetish isn't the problem and that like you shouldn't kink shame.
00:46:27
Speaker
And we're like, if a man says he wants to cook and eat you, it's probably time to hang it up.
00:46:32
Speaker
And then have sex with your body parts.
00:46:34
Speaker
This is probably a disturbed individual.
00:46:36
Speaker
And like, just on the off chance that he's not lying about that, or that it's not just like a fantasy realm, that you should probably not take your chances with this person.
00:46:45
Speaker
But this was published in Cosmo, a major magazine for women, where they're telling us that we need to be more understanding of men with cannibalism fetishes.
00:46:55
Speaker
And I'm like, at this point, like, just tell us to like butter ourselves down and marinate in a tub and like wait for the cannibals to come.
00:47:01
Speaker
Like...
00:47:02
Speaker
Actually, an insane narrative that is being pushed by mainstream women's media, right?
00:47:09
Speaker
It's not even like men's media, it's women's media.
00:47:12
Speaker
And so anything that the average person would have a knee-jerk, self-protective response to, there's an element of women's media that is like contributing to grooming women out of basic self-protective instincts.
00:47:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:26
Speaker
Okay.
00:47:27
Speaker
So I'll get on another one of my soapboxes.
00:47:33
Speaker
I read about 20 pages because it's as much as I could stomach.
00:47:38
Speaker
And it's funny because often people can then tell me what book I'm referring to before I say it.
00:47:42
Speaker
Fifty Shades of Grey.
00:47:45
Speaker
Savannah can go off on that too.
00:47:47
Speaker
I'm sorry.
00:47:48
Speaker
In those first 20 pages, I don't know if it was even 20.
00:47:52
Speaker
I mean, the whole thing was so disgusting.
00:47:54
Speaker
But within that first whatever that I got through, roughly 20 pages, the main character there, his name is Gray, right?
00:48:00
Speaker
That's the main character.
00:48:01
Speaker
Yeah, Christian Grey.
00:48:03
Speaker
He's one of the two main characters.
00:48:05
Speaker
He had covered something like nine out of 12 of the warning signs that I teach teen girls about who's likely to be an abusive male.
00:48:17
Speaker
So it's like, this was a study in warning signs being presented as erotic.
00:48:24
Speaker
And I
00:48:26
Speaker
I'm not unsympathetic to women about the draw of a book like that because there's so little good erotica out there for women.
00:48:37
Speaker
And so there's this kind of sense of like, oh, something that's like that's erotica aimed at women, like, thank God, you know.
00:48:43
Speaker
And you realize, unfortunately, it does it by just completely perpetuating the entire – it's not good erotica for women.
00:48:49
Speaker
It's actually still totally promoting the male agenda.
00:48:52
Speaker
It's freaking horrible.
00:48:53
Speaker
It's a nightmare.
00:48:54
Speaker
It just worries me so much to have that kind of behavior sexualized.
00:49:01
Speaker
The only thing that's on the same level that I can compare it to is the song that Eminem did, unfortunately, with Rihanna participating called Love the Way You Lie.
00:49:10
Speaker
That's one of the most watched videos of the century, which the entire video is the eroticizing of...
00:49:18
Speaker
violence, specifically male violence, domestic male domestic violence, intimate partner violence against women.
00:49:22
Speaker
That entire video is just the eroticizing of the violence.
00:49:25
Speaker
It's quite insidious, though, as well, how things like Fifty Shades of Grey, things like 365 D&I, which we roasted recently, which is its European cousin, in how they, you know, present these abusive men as something desirable, what they do.
00:49:42
Speaker
And I've read a lot of these
00:49:44
Speaker
is that they master the abuse behind his wealth, behind his extremely good looks.
00:49:50
Speaker
So instead of looking at the behaviour for what it is, women tend to focus on the fact Christian Grey's hot or the fact he's got a lot of money.
00:49:59
Speaker
And someone always said, like, if you had, say, Christian Grey was living in a basement and was doing all that, people would call out his behaviour.
00:50:08
Speaker
They would know that he's abusive straight away.
00:50:10
Speaker
But when you add in the wealth, when you add in the power, when you add in the physical looks, you know, that message seems to get lost.
00:50:17
Speaker
And it's quite almost sick how they sort of, you know, use women's desires for what they want, because most women want to be with an attractive man.
00:50:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:27
Speaker
sort of against us to indoctrinate us to accept more abuse.
00:50:30
Speaker
That's right.
00:50:30
Speaker
And that reminds me actually of why I, thank you, because it also reminds me of why I brought up Fifty Shades of Grey, is that it's specifically training women to go towards what they should be running 180 degrees away from.
00:50:43
Speaker
And then blaming women when they're attracted to that.
00:50:46
Speaker
It's like, but wait a minute, you told women to be attracted to that.
00:50:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:51
Speaker
I also wanted to touch on what you said a few minutes ago about how women who've just been in abusive relationships tend to end up in future ones because they disclose to future partners that they were in relationships.
Risks of Sharing Personal History
00:51:04
Speaker
abusive relationships so within fds we often like tell women to be careful what they disclose to men especially if they've been abused before because if we were to tell a man oh i've been abused or i've been assaulted or something like that um in an abusive man's mind he's almost scoping you out as to what you're willing to accept or tolerate do you find that that is actually the case that abusive men sort of almost stake women out you know for the abuse they've tolerated in the past
00:51:34
Speaker
That's one style of abuse and it's a very, very widespread style.
00:51:38
Speaker
So I would say that's really, really common among abusive men.
00:51:41
Speaker
It's not the only style.
00:51:42
Speaker
Like there's another style of abuser who wants a woman who seems kind of uninjured, who seems really quite together and powerful because then if he dominates her, he feels like he's caught a bigger fish.
00:51:53
Speaker
But yes, the style you're talking about is a very common style of one who wants to look for where she might be feeling vulnerable or where she might be wounded and really wants to prey upon that.
00:52:04
Speaker
What I think is one of the most important things for a woman who's coming off of an abusive relationship is to not get involved with anybody for quite a while.
00:52:13
Speaker
But that's so hard to do because when you're coming off of an abusive relationship, you've been made to feel uncomfortable.
00:52:18
Speaker
ugly, you've been made to feel like there's something wrong with your sexuality or your sexual desires.
00:52:24
Speaker
And you feel lonely as well.
00:52:25
Speaker
And he's, well, he's often outright destroyed your friendship.
00:52:28
Speaker
So you often are very lonely.
00:52:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:31
Speaker
And it's very hard when you're coming off an abusive relationship not to jump really quickly.
00:52:37
Speaker
into being with somebody else so you won't be so lonely and so you can get reassured that you are attractive and also sometimes sort of for protection if the last guy is of the scary style of abuser.
00:52:48
Speaker
And it's important to really fight that temptation and try to get connected to other women and do other things to take care of yourself and fight that temptation to jump into another relationship because you need a break to heal and also because if you jump in too quickly, you're not going to jump with your eyes open.
00:53:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:05
Speaker
And I want to reiterate what Savannah is saying there, because that's like criticism that we get from quite a few women critics of FCS is that like we tell them don't disclose your trauma history on your dates and probably not for quite a long time until you're very sure this person is safe.
00:53:20
Speaker
And a big reason is because of the fact that it is literally like a big juicy steak to a large percentage of abusive men.
00:53:28
Speaker
A lot of women think like, oh, if I share this information, it'll bond us closer or help us connect.
00:53:33
Speaker
But like the risk that you'll attract an abuser is actually higher than you'll actually attract a man who can connect with you on a real serious level.
00:53:40
Speaker
I'm not saying there's not men like that out there, but like...
00:53:43
Speaker
The problem is, is thinking that leading with that kind of thing.
00:53:46
Speaker
The messed up thing about that is like in the moment when it's happening, the woman who's disclosing her trauma, her abuse, she does feel like they're connecting.
00:53:54
Speaker
He'll usually say something like reassuring or like, I'm so glad you shared that with me.
00:53:58
Speaker
I know it's really, you know, so hard for people to talk about stuff like that.
00:54:02
Speaker
He'll make her feel comforted.
00:54:04
Speaker
And then it's not until a few weeks later, a few months later where he'll throw it back in her face when it's convenient for him.
00:54:09
Speaker
And that's not how people picture an abuser.
00:54:12
Speaker
They don't picture an abuser being someone who's capable of giving this kind of compassion and saying, oh, God, I can't believe that happened to you.
00:54:19
Speaker
Oh, that, you know, you obviously didn't deserve that.
00:54:21
Speaker
They go, well, he must look, he gave me such a good response.
00:54:24
Speaker
You know, that's further confirmation that he's not an abuser.
00:54:26
Speaker
And it isn't.
00:54:28
Speaker
And I would also say, like, what have you lost?
00:54:31
Speaker
Why not wait?
00:54:34
Speaker
Like, that's not gonna, you're not gonna lose a good guy because you waited, you know, several more weeks or months before you disclosed your deepest stuff.
Dangers of Overemphasizing Communication
00:54:44
Speaker
That's not gonna lose you a good guy.
00:54:47
Speaker
But as you're saying, it will increase your vulnerability to a jerk.
00:54:51
Speaker
I think, you're absolutely, I don't understand how anyone could criticize you for telling women to not be too quick to expose themselves.
00:54:56
Speaker
That just seems like absolutely great advice.
00:54:59
Speaker
Because I think a lot of times people fall on the trope that communication can solve everything.
00:55:03
Speaker
And that's been pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed by women's media.
00:55:06
Speaker
Like, just communicate, just communicate when it comes to what your needs and vulnerabilities are.
00:55:10
Speaker
So a lot of women think like, oh, if I tell him, hey, I'm struggling with this or I have this, then a man will necessarily meet you with the same good intention and the same openness.
00:55:21
Speaker
First of all, you have the guys that are just like, whoa, I don't want to get involved.
00:55:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:24
Speaker
And actually, those guys are probably preferable than to the guys we're talking about that and look like, oh, fresh meat, right?
00:55:29
Speaker
Or blood in the water.
00:55:30
Speaker
I can come in, swoop in, be the quote unquote knight in shining armor.
00:55:33
Speaker
These guys love Bauman, present that image at the beginning and then completely switch up, you know, down the line.
00:55:39
Speaker
It seems obvious to you and I, but I think because of the popular narratives that are constantly pushed by media for women to like just use communication as some kind of catch all to deal with men in that
00:55:50
Speaker
these self-protective measures are mean, judgmental or sexist to do to men.
00:55:54
Speaker
We're being socialized out of basic self-protective measures that women should have because of the fact that this is how our society is.
00:56:01
Speaker
This is a really frustrating one for me.
00:56:04
Speaker
And I feel like people have this response to other power mongers too.
00:56:08
Speaker
Like someone will report being horribly mistreated by their boss at work.
00:56:12
Speaker
And people will say, oh, well, there's a communication issue here.
00:56:15
Speaker
And it's like, no, this boss is a tyrant.
00:56:18
Speaker
It's not a communication issue.
00:56:20
Speaker
And I get really concerned about people's inability to call tyranny, tyranny.
00:56:25
Speaker
And also just to understand the level of destructiveness of certain individuals.
00:56:29
Speaker
Now I'm not even talking about men who abuse women.
00:56:31
Speaker
I'm talking about other people who are destructive in other styles.
00:56:34
Speaker
As soon as the destructive person is talking to someone else alone, they start to get that person's sympathy.
00:56:41
Speaker
The same way abusers, when they're talking alone to people, start to get people's sympathy.
00:56:45
Speaker
And the person who's getting sucked into being sympathetic starts thinking, oh yeah, they just all need to open up about their feelings and it's going to be okay.
00:56:52
Speaker
And it's like, oh no, it's not.
00:56:54
Speaker
Try opening up about your feelings to your tyrannical boss.
00:56:57
Speaker
How do you think that's going to get used?
00:56:58
Speaker
Big mistake.
00:57:00
Speaker
Big mistake.
00:57:01
Speaker
Oh,
00:57:02
Speaker
That's right.
00:57:03
Speaker
You're going to pay a big price for that.
00:57:04
Speaker
Your tyrannical boss will find a way to use that against you, you bet.
00:57:08
Speaker
I'm just frustrated by the whole bumper sticker mentality in general.
00:57:11
Speaker
And unfortunately, the social media has made that so much worse.
00:57:14
Speaker
The notion that somehow we can put the answers to complex human problems into six words.
00:57:19
Speaker
It's like, no, you can't.
00:57:21
Speaker
What you can do is feed the problem with your little six-word formulas.
00:57:24
Speaker
That's all it's going to do is feed the problem.
00:57:26
Speaker
We drag social media feminism a lot because of that.
00:57:29
Speaker
They have these little six-word tropes, and it doesn't really get to the root of the problem.
00:57:34
Speaker
It's centered around very easy answers to complex society-wide structural problem.
00:57:39
Speaker
And I think a lot of that is just because it's easier to sell products, right?
00:57:43
Speaker
Like, so that
00:57:43
Speaker
way.
00:57:44
Speaker
It's just the mechanism by which capitalism works.
00:57:47
Speaker
If you just tell women, if you tell women feminism is about body positivity, you can sell women like creams and lotions and, you know, hair products because feminism is about body positivity, right?
00:57:57
Speaker
Right.
00:57:58
Speaker
You're going to be an empowered woman because you're using a better moisturizer.
00:58:01
Speaker
Literally, though.
00:58:03
Speaker
We're actually not kidding.
00:58:05
Speaker
We made fun of this article a while back where a woman was, what was it?
00:58:09
Speaker
Her husband was cheating on her.
00:58:10
Speaker
Her husband was cheating on her.
00:58:11
Speaker
She had a bunch of young children.
00:58:13
Speaker
Her husband wanted the relationship to be open.
00:58:16
Speaker
Her husband was bisexual, started having sex with a bunch of men, refused to have sex with her when he came back and then resented her.
00:58:22
Speaker
And then the relationship that was given by the columnist was literally, you should practice self-care by moisturizing during this difficult time.
00:58:31
Speaker
And I was like, what?
00:58:32
Speaker
He was abusive to her, cheating on her all the time, ignoring their children.
00:58:37
Speaker
And the advice column is, this is Slate magazine, by the way.
00:58:40
Speaker
So a major media magazine was like moisturized.
00:58:42
Speaker
And we were just like, what?
00:58:45
Speaker
I mean, yeah, I grew up in the early, I'm older.
00:58:48
Speaker
I grew up in the early days of the, you know, this feminist wave when, you know, you could express your empowerment by smoking cigarettes and killing yourself, you know?
00:58:58
Speaker
The simple solution stuff is really disturbing to me in specifically also in a bunch of the ways that it plays out with respect to abusive relationships.
00:59:08
Speaker
Like one of the things that you'll hear custody evaluators now saying to women is, well, yeah, he's behaving in some destructive ways now, but that's because you've enabled him to do that.
00:59:20
Speaker
It's because you let him get away with it.
00:59:22
Speaker
over the course of your marriage.
00:59:24
Speaker
So that, like, even his abusiveness is blamed on her because, not for provoking him, but for allowing it.
00:59:29
Speaker
Of course, then if she tries not to allow it, then she's provoking him.
00:59:32
Speaker
So she, right, like, either way, in their eyes, she did it wrong.
00:59:36
Speaker
Like, there is no right way.
00:59:38
Speaker
There is no right way.
00:59:39
Speaker
Because if she stands up to him more than they say how provocative she is.
00:59:42
Speaker
It's a no-win situation.
00:59:43
Speaker
So, right, they've got her completely set up.
00:59:45
Speaker
But you also, you cannot...
00:59:48
Speaker
have any influence on an abusive man's treatment of you by standing up to him more or by standing up to him less.
00:59:57
Speaker
Neither of those will make any difference to how he treats you.
01:00:00
Speaker
And those two pieces of advice are the two pieces of advice she's most commonly going to get from people, that she should stand up to him more and that she should stand up to him less.
01:00:09
Speaker
And of course, what is she supposed to do with these completely contradictory pieces of advice, which, by the way, in some cases will be coming from the same person, the same person.
01:00:19
Speaker
They'll be couching it in slightly different language.
01:00:21
Speaker
But when you actually examine what the person is saying, they are simultaneously telling her that she needs to stand up to him more and that she needs to stand up to him less.
01:00:29
Speaker
But not only is that advice completely contradictory, it also is just plain wrong because you cannot influence an abusive man's behavior.
01:00:37
Speaker
He follows the script.
01:00:40
Speaker
He lives a script that he's going to live.
01:00:42
Speaker
And I have to modify a little bit what I'm saying.
01:00:44
Speaker
You can modify his behavior sort of today to get through the day.
01:00:49
Speaker
And if you're lucky, you might even be able to get through this week.
01:00:53
Speaker
But then he's going to do the thing he's going to do.
01:00:56
Speaker
You can't keep it from happening.
01:00:57
Speaker
All you can do is put it off a while.
01:01:00
Speaker
And sometimes that's worth doing.
01:01:01
Speaker
Abused women do manage the abuser in various ways to get through the day or get through the week.
01:01:07
Speaker
But it's not changing her.
01:01:08
Speaker
It's not solving anything.
01:01:10
Speaker
It's not changing her quality of life.
01:01:12
Speaker
She just has to, for the sake of her children or for the sake of herself, she's going to just at least not have him go off today.
01:01:18
Speaker
But then he's just going to go off tomorrow.
01:01:20
Speaker
This sort of, you know, bumper sticker feminism, like women need to learn to stand up for themselves.
01:01:24
Speaker
It's like, well, no, like, yeah, that's a great thing to work on, but that's, that's not a solution to anything.
01:01:31
Speaker
Like we have to look at the kind of prices that people pay or specifically pay.
01:01:36
Speaker
when we're talking about women, about the price that women pay when they stand up for themselves.
01:01:39
Speaker
It's like you sometimes pay a very high price.
01:01:41
Speaker
And women who aren't standing up for themselves are often not doing so because they can't stand to pay the price anymore that they've had to pay when they do stand up for themselves.
01:01:50
Speaker
And the answer, which to join your complaint about liberal feminism, is that the answer is in collectivity.
01:01:58
Speaker
The answer is in fighting back in groups.
01:02:01
Speaker
And in sort of the liberal version of things, it's always like, oh, you just need to change your individual behavior.
01:02:05
Speaker
You need to stand up for yourself more.
01:02:07
Speaker
You need to get a better education.
01:02:10
Speaker
You need to use the right moisturizer.
01:02:12
Speaker
And it's like there are so many human problems that you cannot solve alone, even if you do everything right.
01:02:20
Speaker
You're going to have to join with your people.
01:02:23
Speaker
And if you are a woman, your people are other women, right?
01:02:26
Speaker
If you're a person of color, your people are other people of color.
01:02:29
Speaker
You're going to have to join with your people and fight back collectively because, yes, there are collective solutions to problems, but there often are not individual solutions to problems.
01:02:36
Speaker
So it seems like in that particular arena, it's a reaction to conservatism.
01:02:40
Speaker
And I've shared this before in our Patreon.
01:02:42
Speaker
And there was also the same individualist mentality to solving domestic violence within the church, where often the solution for women was to be more submissive and be more feminine and give it to God and pray.
01:02:54
Speaker
And so I think some of the like reactionary liberal feminism is them trying to differentiate themselves from that traditional advice, which is like in an abusive situation, a woman is supposed to act
01:03:05
Speaker
meek.
01:03:05
Speaker
Both of those are individual solutions to a more collective problem.
01:03:09
Speaker
And there are so many pieces of advice that would actually be helpful if people wouldn't start to claim that they are somehow the solution to the problem or wouldn't universalize them.
01:03:21
Speaker
When people say that what you get back from the world depends partly on what you're putting out into the world, well, there's clearly some aspects of truth to that.
01:03:31
Speaker
But as soon as you make that an all-encompassing philosophy that says what happens to you is determined by what you're putting out into the world, you've taken a good idea and turned it into a horrible philosophy, a philosophy that blames all the world's oppressed for their conditions because they're obviously just not putting the right energy out.
01:03:50
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:03:52
Speaker
So while we're in this topic of conversation, what are the best ways to maintain boundaries if you're in a position where you can't cut contact with your abuser?
01:04:00
Speaker
Because you're saying that there are daily and maybe weekly tactics you can use to try to give yourself some cover or some space while you're trying to escape the situation.
01:04:08
Speaker
Do you have more details on that?
01:04:10
Speaker
You know, it's so specific to the particular abuser that it's hard to make general comments.
01:04:18
Speaker
Like some women figure out if I really butter him up and flatter him, that'll cool him out for a day or two.
01:04:24
Speaker
Like I'll be able to buy some time that way.
01:04:26
Speaker
Some women succeed in getting like his friends or relatives to just distract him or divert him or chill him for a while, you know.
01:04:34
Speaker
But it's so specific to what she knows about him.
01:04:39
Speaker
Setting clearer boundaries with him does not tend to be particularly helpful because he does not react well.
01:04:48
Speaker
He'll pretend at first to react well, but over time he's actually developing tremendous resentment about the way you've set boundaries with him.
01:04:55
Speaker
I think that's one of the reasons, there are many reasons, but I think that's one of the reasons why so many abusers mistakenly get called narcissists.
01:05:00
Speaker
Because that's one thing that people do who are very self-centered is they're resentful towards you for setting a boundary with them.
01:05:06
Speaker
If she's not involved with him anymore, then it does start to make a lot of sense to like stop reading his texts, block his number.
01:05:15
Speaker
It's very hard.
01:05:16
Speaker
Block and delete.
01:05:17
Speaker
Hashtag block and delete.
01:05:18
Speaker
That's what we say.
01:05:20
Speaker
That's another thing I loved about this book is it's like, if a man's abusing you, don't talk to him for a very long time.
01:05:26
Speaker
I find that that's a really, really hard one.
01:05:30
Speaker
So I'm glad you folks have pushed on that one.
01:05:32
Speaker
It's really, really hard.
01:05:34
Speaker
It just really tugs at your heartstrings.
01:05:38
Speaker
Like, what if this is a time he's finally sending a message that's nice?
01:05:42
Speaker
And or and especially when you've been traumatized, you get one of the bitter ironies of how trauma works is that the more you've been mistreated by someone, the more desperately you need that person to be nice to you.
01:05:54
Speaker
And that's a very unfortunate outcome of trauma that that you'll actually try harder to get someone to be nice to you who's been terrible to you.
01:06:02
Speaker
You put more energy into that person than you put into other people because they're connecting with you exactly where you're traumatized.
01:06:07
Speaker
But also because he's often been intimidating, it's very hard to not read his texts or listen to his voicemails because what if, you know, what if it's a scary message and I better know the threat he's making, you know?
01:06:18
Speaker
And, you know, I find that very understandable.
01:06:21
Speaker
But I also do find that almost always it's best if she just can block his number.
01:06:27
Speaker
It's such a hard step to take.
01:06:30
Speaker
But it's just what you got to do.
01:06:33
Speaker
We're all about block and delete.
01:06:35
Speaker
Much earlier than most people would recommend because of the fact that like you can get into that cycle where you're almost compelled to keep checking, compelled to like understand what's going on and being confused.
01:06:45
Speaker
And the idea is that like you don't have to feel bad.
01:06:48
Speaker
Feeling bad and continuing to engage is a choice unless obviously you have kids and you have to.
01:06:53
Speaker
But even the negative attention.
01:06:55
Speaker
Or just like the thought that they're getting under your skin is enough for these guys and that you can actually also escalate the desperation in them by continuing to engage.
01:07:04
Speaker
So it's almost best to just like block them on all platforms and then just leave them wondering.
01:07:09
Speaker
We had so much criticism.
01:07:10
Speaker
for this, by the way, like we tell women like walk away at the first sign of disrespect, first red flag, dump him.
01:07:16
Speaker
Like, and we're called like extremists.
01:07:19
Speaker
Oh, you're so unforgiving.
01:07:21
Speaker
You're heartless.
01:07:22
Speaker
You have no empathy for men.
01:07:23
Speaker
And it's like, all we're doing is describing red flags of abusive behavior, telling you to leave before it gets abusive.
01:07:30
Speaker
It's, it suggests that all men do this stuff, which I just don't think is true.
01:07:35
Speaker
Right.
01:07:35
Speaker
That's actually the implication, isn't it?
01:07:37
Speaker
Right.
01:07:37
Speaker
Like when you say like, oh, you can't do that because you'll miss really good guys.
01:07:40
Speaker
And I'm like, is this a common thing where these red flags are just impossible to avoid?
01:07:44
Speaker
If he was a good guy, he wouldn't do that.
01:07:46
Speaker
Right.
01:07:47
Speaker
And I think part of what abusers want you to believe is there aren't decent men out there.
01:07:52
Speaker
Or I mean, they, of course, have a completely different definition of what a decent man is.
01:07:55
Speaker
But what I really mean is they want you to believe that there aren't men who don't do what they do.
01:07:59
Speaker
I'll tell you, one of the most hysterical criticisms that I get for why does he do that?
01:08:03
Speaker
And I get it all the time.
01:08:05
Speaker
But I think it just practically makes me laugh out loud.
01:08:08
Speaker
And I'll explain to you why.
01:08:10
Speaker
I get these critics saying, the way Lundy defines what an abusive man is, any man could be defined as abusive.
01:08:19
Speaker
And with the kind of examples that he gives in his book, he's going to be destroying a lot of relationships because a guy one time did something that wasn't so nice.
01:08:27
Speaker
And then, well, you folks know because you're familiar with the book.
01:08:29
Speaker
You read the book.
01:08:31
Speaker
I am not giving examples of subtle behaviors.
01:08:34
Speaker
The examples in, I mean, those guys are being awful in that book.
01:08:38
Speaker
And if you can look at those incidents and say, well, Lundy's naming subtleties, then you're an abuser because no one else would think of those things as subtleties.
01:08:50
Speaker
Any non-abusive man is going to read those descriptions and go, oh, that guy's awful.
01:08:55
Speaker
I've seen articles that say that as well, Olundi saying every man is abusive.
01:08:59
Speaker
And I'm just like, isn't that more of an indictment on men if you think every man is represented in that book?
01:09:05
Speaker
Exactly.
01:09:06
Speaker
Isn't that an indictment on the male sex class?
01:09:09
Speaker
And it can happen that, like, cultures are pervasively abusive in the way that men are raised to think and act towards women.
01:09:15
Speaker
And it can be, like, a large majority of the men of a population.
01:09:18
Speaker
I don't want to quote a specific study, but I know that there have been studies in certain countries where like 60 to 70 percent of the male population thinks it's OK to hit your wife if you're having a disagreement.
01:09:28
Speaker
It can be that an entire population of men thinks really horrific things towards the female population.
01:09:34
Speaker
It just means that the society needs to change, not that women should tolerate more abuse so that we can be in relationships.
01:09:41
Speaker
Well, that's a really good point also.
01:09:43
Speaker
That's that.
01:09:43
Speaker
That's that.
01:09:44
Speaker
Yeah.
01:09:45
Speaker
I really like your point about how abusive men try to spread this narrative that all men are like that or that, you know, all men are abusive.
01:09:53
Speaker
I also find the very interesting doublespeak that we get when we talk about this is whenever we talk about abusiveness, they're like, well, not all men are like that.
01:10:01
Speaker
But if we talk about, say, like watching porn, they'll be like, well, all men are like that kind of thing.
01:10:05
Speaker
So they bring out the not all men are like that versus the all men are like that, depending on...
01:10:09
Speaker
what's convenient to them in the moment.
01:10:11
Speaker
But also the weird thing about the narrative of all men are like this is I actually see a lot of other feminists saying this.
01:10:19
Speaker
And it always makes me feel a little bit like, because, and by the way, this segment of feminism, we call them like black pillars.
01:10:27
Speaker
They're meaning black pill.
01:10:28
Speaker
I don't know if you know what black pill is.
01:10:30
Speaker
No.
01:10:30
Speaker
Like this very doom and gloom sort of like ideology where they basically think that like biological determinism is like absolute...
01:10:38
Speaker
male physical strength over women is impossible to overcome.
01:10:41
Speaker
They think that men are just like biologically pedophiles, abusers, and so on.
01:10:47
Speaker
They think literally 100% of men are abusive.
01:10:50
Speaker
And I'm always, you know, I understand they're coming from a place of pain and trauma and so on.
01:10:55
Speaker
But at the same time, this narrative that all men are demonic pedophiles,
01:11:00
Speaker
is beneficial to men.
01:11:02
Speaker
Like this narrative that all men are abusive benefits abusive men, you know, because women see that and they think, oh, well, all men are like that.
01:11:08
Speaker
You know, there's no point in looking for a decent guy.
01:11:10
Speaker
I have to just put up and make the best of whatever shitty situation I have with this man.
01:11:15
Speaker
That's a really interesting point.
01:11:16
Speaker
And it clicks for me that ultimately, ironically, you've come out to a place where you're back to justifying the behavior.
Separatist Feminism and Empowerment
01:11:24
Speaker
Yeah.
01:11:25
Speaker
That's certainly not what the person's intending to do, but... Like, they're separatists.
01:11:29
Speaker
As you're... I think you're pointing out that when you really look carefully at it, then ultimately it's justifying debate.
01:11:34
Speaker
Like, this segment of feminists, they're separatists, so their ultimate goal is they want men and women to, like, separate, and they mock, like, heterosexual women, and, you know, you don't have to date men, they're oppressing you, like, you're stupid if you date men because men are oppressing you, and so on.
01:11:49
Speaker
And, you know, maybe they mean well, maybe they don't, I don't know, probably not, but...
01:11:53
Speaker
My point being that most women look at separatists and think they're crazy and they're not going to be separatists, but they internalize that narrative of all men are like this and then end up... Normal women look at that and think, oh, well, I just have to put up with it kind of thing.
01:12:06
Speaker
I mean, I would just want to say...
01:12:08
Speaker
About separatism, to me, that means a lot of different things because I do believe it's really, really important for women to be able to, any people, members of any oppressed group, to be able to carve out substantial spaces and substantial hours of the day and just a lot of different places where you just don't have to have people from the dominant group around.
01:12:29
Speaker
I believe that people who are into power, who are power mongers, are aware of the power of the liberating power of the anger and outrage of the oppressed.
01:12:43
Speaker
And I think that's why they're so eager to make sure to take your anger quickly away from you, is that they know there's power in it.
01:12:49
Speaker
and i think that's why men shame women as being too and you're too angry or why white people you know are very fond of shaming african americans like you're too angry because they sense actually that there's liberating power in that anger so they want to stuff that your anger back down your throat as quickly as you can and that's why i encourage people to take pride in their anger and and not let the power mongers shame you as too angry or don't get defensive and don't start saying
01:13:15
Speaker
No, I'm not too angry.
01:13:17
Speaker
I encourage people to respond.
01:13:18
Speaker
Yeah, I'm angry.
01:13:19
Speaker
And I have every reason to be angry.
01:13:20
Speaker
And it's actually a really healthy response that I'm so angry.
01:13:23
Speaker
People should be
Preview of Part Two and Closing Remarks
01:13:24
Speaker
angry in the face of oppression.
01:13:25
Speaker
Hey Queens, Editing Lilith here.
01:13:28
Speaker
Just jumping in because we ended up talking to Lundy for two hours, making this a definite two-parter.
01:13:33
Speaker
Part two is where this conversation gets spicy.
01:13:36
Speaker
We talk about porn.
01:13:38
Speaker
My complaint about pornography is how is it portraying women?
01:13:41
Speaker
And it's a sewer.
01:13:43
Speaker
Pornography is a sewer.
01:13:44
Speaker
We talk about polyamory.
01:13:46
Speaker
She said, yeah, we had a polyamorous relationship.
01:13:49
Speaker
He did the poly and I did the amory.
01:13:52
Speaker
And we discussed the virtues of being a difficult woman.
01:13:55
Speaker
You actually need to be somewhat uncooperative to not go along with everything, to not agree with everything, to not just be pleased with everything, to actually be a little difficult at times.
01:14:07
Speaker
And I even coined a new dating phrase.
01:14:09
Speaker
If there's no term for it, I would like to henceforth call this backfooting, where men accuse you of something to put you on the back foot and behave in a way that's beneficial to him.
01:14:18
Speaker
Part two of this discussion will be uploaded to our Patreon this Friday.
01:14:21
Speaker
To listen to it, sign up at www.patreon.com forward slash the female dating strategy.
01:14:27
Speaker
And you will access all of our weekly bonus content.
01:14:30
Speaker
If you'd like to read Lundy's latest book in custody, a suspense novel about a mother and daughter going missing during a custody dispute, you can purchase it from Amazon.
01:14:39
Speaker
We will drop the link in the show notes.
01:14:40
Speaker
Thanks for listening, Queens.
01:14:42
Speaker
And for all you incels out there, we are begging you to bathe yourselves.
01:14:47
Speaker
And DimeBed, see you next week.