Latest / The Lila Rose Show / E99: Why Gender Matters

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E99: Why Gender Matters · The Lila Rose Show

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Very enlightened parents who were determined to breakdown
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gender stereotypes gave their daughter trucks for her 4th
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birthday and she was absolutely thrilled with the present and
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took them off to her bedroom and the parents came in and they put
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the trucks in bed and pulled the covers up so that only the
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headlights were showing. Same behaviors have been
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deserved. Watching chimpanzees in the
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wild. The juvenile female chimpanzee
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is cradling the stick and pretending it's a baby.
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Where's the juvenile male chimpanzee is whacking his
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friend with the stiffest? The argument that the the
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differences are socially constructed certainly can't be
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cool story. Hey guys, welcome back to the
0:40
Lila Rose podcast. Today we have a special treat.
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We're going to be having Doctor Leonard Sachs in studio.
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We actually talked with him before on the show about Boys
0:47
Adrift. Why is the modern world so tough
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for boys? Why are they struggling so much?
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Today with Doctor Sachs, who was a family doctor, an MD and APHD
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in psychology, we are also going to talk about why gender
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matters. He wrote about a book called Why
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Gender Matters back in 2005. It matters more than ever today,
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talking about the differences between boys and girls.
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We're going to talk about the research behind why gender
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matters and why boys and girls are, yes, news flash, different,
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as well as why it has gotten so chaotic today with the trans
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ideology, so many young girls, over 35% of them identifying as
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non straight, as queer or non binary or as lesbian.
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What's driving that? And we're also going to talk
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about the importance on the power of intergenerational
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formation and development and how we've lost that as a
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society. I also have some hypotheses that
1:37
I throw at Doctor Sacks and get his response.
1:40
Enjoy the episode and don't forget to subscribe to the show
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if you aren't already. Support us on locals and Patreon
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1:48
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Doctor Leonard Sachs, welcome back to the podcast.
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Thanks for inviting me. You were a very popular episode
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with you before talking about boys and their struggles in
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modern in the modern world, but you've written a lot of other
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really important books. So I'm excited that we get
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another try at this. And thanks for coming in studio.
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You're welcome. How was the travel in?
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Tiring. OK, well hopefully this will be
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a lively discussion that will keep us awake.
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All right, so for those that don't know you, maybe they
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haven't heard the last episode, are not familiar with your work
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yet, give us a little bit of your background as a
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psychologist. Well, I am first and foremost a
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family doctor. I'm a medical doctor.
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I earned my MD as well as my doctorate in psychology at the
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University of Pennsylvania. I am board certified in family
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medicine and I am a practicing family doctor.
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I've been a family doctor for over 30 years.
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I have signed off on over 120,000 patient visits over 30
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years time. I'm also a PhD psychologist,
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which is little unusual for a family doctor.
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And that has given me, I think, a unique perspective in some of
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the challenges that kids are facing, that families are
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facing. So you've written several books
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and we've talked about one that focuses on the plight of boys,
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but there's a couple more that I think are so timely and
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important. One of them is The Collapse of
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Parenting, the New York Times bestseller, and the other one is
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Why Gender Matters. You wrote Why Gender Matters.
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You first wrote the 1st edition, came out 2005.
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OK, What inspired you in 2005 to write a book called Why Gender
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Matters? Clearly we understand why it
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matters today, why we should be talking about why it matters.
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But what inspired that in 2005? So when I I attended public
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schools in Ohio K through 12, and I vividly recall our high
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school honors assembly when I was a junior in 1976.
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The the Honors Assembly, all the kids who been recognized for
4:01
outstanding achievement were up on the stage, and it was all
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boys. The editor of the school
4:06
newspaper, Andy Borowitz, was a boy.
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Andy has gone on to have an amazing career.
4:10
He writes a column for the New York New Yorker magazine called
4:13
The Borowitz Report. He's a celebrity.
4:16
He wrote Fresh Prince of Bel Air for Hollywood.
4:22
The editor of the poetry journal was a boy.
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The editor of the yearbook was a boy.
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The there was all boys up on stage and there were people back
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then, like notably Myra and David Sadker, 2 American
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researchers who were writing books called Failing at
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fairness, How Schools Shortchange Girls published in
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1994 based on their research in the 70s and 80s showing how all
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the valedictorians are boys, all the high achievers are boys.
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Schools are failing girls. That's the world I grew up in.
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That's how old I am. So then I graduated from Penn
5:02
with my doctorate in psychology and my medical degree.
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I did a three-year residency and family medicine.
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And then I started my own practice in Montgomery County,
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Maryland, just outside Washington, DC in 1990.
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And moving through the 1990s, I was like, boy, this, this place
5:19
is really strange because when I attended school in Ohio, the
5:24
high achievers were boys and, and now I'm seeing something
5:28
very different. I'm seeing families where the
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high achievers are girls and the boys are goofballs who don't
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care and are not motivated. And my first thought is, what's
5:36
wrong with Montgomery County, Maryland?
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But then in the late 90s, I began to reach out to colleagues
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across the United States and back home in Ohio and other.
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And this is not confined to Montgomery County, Maryland.
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This is a national phenomenon. What's going on?
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What changed over a comparatively short period of
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time for the mid 70s to the mid 90s that flipped the script so
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that suddenly girls were outperforming their brothers?
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Incidentally, it became very clear as I began to research
6:11
this. The gender gap was widening,
6:14
with boys falling farther and farther behind, not because
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girls were doing better, but because boys are doing worse.
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And so I began to look into this.
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And that led to an article I wrote for the American
6:31
Psychological Association 23 years ago called Reclaiming
6:36
Kindergarten, Making Kindergarten Less Harmful to
6:39
Boys, where I talked about how early education changed, how
6:43
kindergarten used to be about duck, duck, goose and singing in
6:47
rounds and going on field trips. And by the year 2000, it was all
6:50
about literacy and numeracy and how that was immensely harmful
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to boys. Because we now know that the
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language areas of the brain of the five year old boy look
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pretty much like the language areas of a three-year old girl.
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It's not developmentally appropriate to ask a 5 year old
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boy to sit still, be quiet, and learn about diphthongs for 40
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minutes. I want to stop you right there
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because that's so fascinating and most people don't know that,
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especially in our world that's increasingly erasing gender and
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the sex differences. So little boy's brain at 5 in
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terms of its. The language area.
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It's language. Area areas of the brain develop
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in a different sequence in boys compared with girls and.
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Girls develop earlier is what you're saying and.
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That's. In some areas when it comes to
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their language. Yeah, language.
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The girls are way ahead of the boys.
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And so I wrote this article, a scholarly paper, peer reviewed
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scholarly paper for the American Psychological Association, just
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really to get it off my chest. And to my surprise, it was
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picked up by the national media of Richard Rothstein, who was
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the education columnist of the New York Times, wrote about it
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in his in the New York Times. And I was on television in in
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Canada. It was the front page of the
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National Post, which is Canadian National newspaper.
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And so I actually began to be invited to visit schools and I
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had visited a number of schools in in researching this question.
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And and then I started speaking in more schools and was really
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struck by how the lack of awareness of gender differences
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harms both girls and boys. And so that led me to write Why
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Goodranchers.com So since then, a lot has changed.
9:21
Mostly I would say not so much in the status of the fact that
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they're different biologically boys and girls, but in politics
9:27
and culture and how we see boys and girls.
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Let's breakdown. I'd love to hear you breakdown
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for us. What are the differences between
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boys and girls? This is how it sounds like very,
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very well. I have a 7 hour workshop on that
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for teachers where we go through all the differences and and how
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those differences, what implications those differences
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have for best practice in the classroom.
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But OK, we'll take a stab at three top.
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Three top differences. Developmentally.
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Behaviorally. We'll try one and we'll see how
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we do with that. So I cite 12 studies in which
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researchers have given young children of choice of playing
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with a doll or a truck, basically a girl toy or a boy
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toy. As I said, we have 12 different
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studies that have done basically this.
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They're all the studies are a little bit different in how they
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did this and what toys they offered.
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But we have many, many different studies over over many years,
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some recent, some going back 50 years, in which researchers have
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given little kids 3456 years of age a choice of playing with a
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doll or a truck. What do you find?
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You find that girls are somewhat more likely to play with dolls
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than they are with trucks. Boys are much more likely to
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play with trucks than they are with dolls.
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Now, this is not a new finding. 40 years ago, I took a graduate
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seminar in developmental psychology with the late Justin
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Aaron Fried at Penn. And we had a few of these
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studies way back then. And Professor Aaron Fried asked,
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why is this? Why do 4 year old girls slightly
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prefer to play with dolls rather than trucks?
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And four year old boys greatly prefer to play with trucks
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rather than with dolls. Professor Aaron Fried said it's
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because of the social construction of gender.
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We teach kids how to do gender. And by the time kids are 3-4
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years old, girls have learned that they're supposed to play
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with dolls rather than trucks. And so they do.
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But the girls do spend some time playing with trucks.
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But Professor Aaron Fried said we send a much stronger message
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to boys that boys absolutely we're supposed to play with
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trucks and absolutely not for the Barbie doll.
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And when I'm doing the presentation, we show the graph
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and the boy picks up the the Barbie doll and drops it like a
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hot potato. There's very little variation
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among the boys. Very, very few boys spend any
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time playing with Barbie dolls. Or.
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They use it like 3 or the well, but in the studies that I'm
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citing, they just don't play with it.
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Yeah, I didn't question that notion of the social
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construction of gender, and I don't know anyone who did back
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in the 1980s. Back then, everyone agreed that
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sex differences in the play preferences of young children
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was due to the social construction of gender.
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Why didn't anyone question that? I'm just it it seems like it.
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Seemed perfectly plausible. It just seemed plausible.
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Jerry and Alexander, who was then at Yale, was the first to
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to come up with the idea of giving the same idea to juvenile
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monkeys. Give juvenile monkeys a choice
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of playing with dowell or truck, and her findings have
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subsequently been replicated by Kim Wallen and colleagues at the
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Yerkes Primary Research Center studying a different species of
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monkey, and as well as by Richard Ragam and colleagues
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observing chimpanzees in the wild.
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The female monkey slightly prefers to play with Dowell's
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rather than the trucks. The male monkey greatly prefers
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to play with trucks rather than dolls.
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Now you could try to you could try to invoke you could try to
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invoke the social construction of gender.
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To explain that finding, you'd have to assert that the monkey
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and authority is saying something like, now, son, don't
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let me catch you playing with no Dal.
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But this does not happen. The monkey and authority is
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making paying no attention to the choices made by the juvenile
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and makes no difference. If you conduct a study in
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isolation or or in the colony, you cannot plausibly invoke the
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social construction of gender to explain the fact that juvenile
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monkeys, greatly juvenile male monkeys, greatly prefer to play
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with a dull grey chalk than rather than a colorful doll.
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And this finding has to be hardwired because it's observed
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in four different primates, human, chimpanzee and two
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species of monkey. Jerry and Alexander was the
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first to document that finding in a non human primate and also
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the first to propose a plausible explanation.
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And it's her explanation that many teachers have found useful
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in creating gender aware instructional strategy.
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So I do go into it in some detail in my book Why Gender
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Matters. I have an appendix on this
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topic. It turns out well.
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Neuroscientists have known for 40 years that there are two
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visual systems in the brains of all higher primates, human,
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chimpanzee and monkey. One visual system is looking for
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color, detail and texture. The other visual system is
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looking for speed, change in direction, collision.
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The what system and the where system is the way they're
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sometimes referred to or the parvo cellular or the Magna
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cellular or dorsal and ventral referring to their The fact that
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these are anatomically separate streams of information in the
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human brain and in the brains of monkeys and chimpanzees.
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Jaron Alexander was the first to argue 20 years ago that the the
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P system, the system looking for color, detail and texture,
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predominates in females, and the M system, the system looking for
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speed, collision, change in direction, greatly predominates
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in primate males. You know, when she made that
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argument 20 years ago, it was a conjecture, it was hypothesis.
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But over the last 20 years, we've gotten a great deal of
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research that provides strong support for her hypothesis.
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For example, Katrina Almonds and her colleagues in Germany taking
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slices through Hoc 5, that area 5 of human occipital cortex
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that's looking for speed, collision, change in direction.
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Find you can take a slice through the human brain and Hoc
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5 hold that slide up to the light, and say without error
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whether that piece of brain came from a man or a woman.
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There is no overlap between the sexes.
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The organization of the brain is radically different at Hoc 5,
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even after adjusting for any size differences.
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So, so just to pause here for a moment, this is separate from
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your, the structure, the fact that men are physically
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stronger. It's a separate from, you know,
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hormone changes in the body, estrogen versus testosterone.
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You have more testosterone also leads from strength, maybe more
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agility. This is just about brain
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development. This is about the organization
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of the brain. Yes, the visual system in the
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brain. And Jaron Alexander has read my
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discussion of her work, and she's given it her approval.
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Why do girls slightly prefer to play with dolls rather than
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trucks? Because girls have more
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resources in that part, in that visual system that's looking for
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color, detail, and texture. So they're more interested in
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things that have an interesting color, detail and texture.
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Boys, Jerry and Alexander asserts, have more resources in
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the magnicellular visual system, the system that's looking for
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speed, collision, change in direction.
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Why do juvenile males, whether human, chimpanzee or monkey,
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greatly prefer to play with a dull Gray truck rather than a
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Barbie doll? Because it's got wheels.
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It goes kaboom. Now at this point many people
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are thinking, OK, I can see how this might be interesting if I
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were on neuroscientist interested in sex differences in
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the visual system. But how does this help me to be
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a better parent or better teacher?
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Well then I said 5 studies in which researchers gave young
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children a blank piece of paper and a box of crayons and said to
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each child, draw whatever you want.
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What do kids draw when you give them a blank piece of paper and
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a box of crayons? I have a study from the United
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States, from England, from South Africa, from Japan and from
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Thailand. The girls everywhere draw
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people, pets, flowers and trees. Typically 2-3 or four arranged
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on holes on the ground. Again, in the presentation I'm
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showing the pictures that little girls What age are.
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We talking. Here Doctor 5678 and the girls
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use 10 or more crayons for the predominance of red, orange,
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yellow, green, mage and brown. The people are people,
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recognizably people with eyes, hair and clothes.
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What do boys draw on this parameter?
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Boys form a bimodal distribution of variance which is highly
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kurtotic and skewed, which is a fancy way of saying the boys
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form 2 clumps. In each of these five studies,
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about 8% of boys, about one in 12 boys draw pretty much what
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the girls draw. They draw people, pets, and
18:05
trees. Turns out that boys who draw
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people, pets and trees have a lot in common with other boys
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who draw people, pets and trees. They're at least three times
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more likely than other boys to have allergies, asthma, or
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eczema sufficiently severe to warrant ongoing consultation
18:20
with a physician. They may be athletic, but
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they're not playing football or ice hockey.
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They're playing tennis, track or golf because they don't like to
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hit and they don't like to be hit.
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Is this the nerd stereotypically?
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Indeed, and they are much more likely beginning in middle
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school to become victims of bullying, because the favorite
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game among middle school boys is One boy comes up to their boy
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and says, hey, how about I hit you as hard as I can and you hit
18:45
me as hard as you can? This boy says, but I don't want
18:48
to hit you and I don't want you to hit me.
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He runs off and boom, marks himself as a victim of bullying.
18:55
What about the more than 90% of boys In each of these five
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studies I just mentioned, more than 90% of boys do not draw
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people, pets and trees. In each of these five studies,
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more than 90% of boys are trying to Draw Something radically
19:10
different, a scene of action at a moment of change, like a
19:14
monster eating an alien, a rocket smashing into a planet.
19:17
Human figures, if present, are often stick figures.
19:20
And I'm when I do the presentation, I'm showing you
19:23
these pictures of boys have drawn stick figures lacking
19:27
eyes, mouth, hair and clothes. The boys use 6 or fewer crayons
19:31
over the Browns of black, grey, silver and blue.
19:34
And again, Jerry and Alexander has read my chapter and she
19:37
agrees that most girls are drawing pictures that engage the
19:42
parvo cellular visual system that have color, detail and
19:45
texture. The great majority of boys, more
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than 90% are trying to draw pictures that engage the
19:50
magnacellular visual system that implies speed, collision, change
19:55
in direction. That's true.
19:57
That implies hypothesis, namely that if more teachers understood
20:03
these differences, we could break down gender stereotypes.
20:07
We could have 8 year old boys who love to draw just as much as
20:10
girls do. And, and then I, when I'm doing
20:13
the presentation, I show the pictures that the kids draw.
20:17
And, and I asked the attendees to imagine that you're a teacher
20:23
and you've got second graders and you ask them to draw
20:26
whatever they want. And here this girl has drawn.
20:28
Her and her little sister and her little Kitty and her
20:31
sister's friend and the teacher saying, oh, lovely, I love
20:35
wonderful, all the color and detail, texture.
20:37
Then she comes to this boy who's just drawn a bunch of squiggles
20:40
and she says, what are you trying to draw here?
20:42
And he explains he's trying to draw a car crash at the moment
20:45
of impact. This car has been crushed
20:46
between these two. And the teacher says, you know,
20:49
Jason, a car crash that's really violent.
20:51
People are going to get killed or paralyzed.
20:53
Look at Emily's picture. It's so nice.
20:55
No one's getting killed. You know, why do you have to
20:57
Draw Something so violent? And the unattended message that
21:01
boy is getting is the drawing is for girls.
21:06
So I was visiting a second grade classroom, and the teacher said,
21:09
free time, you can do whatever you want.
21:11
And some of the girls were sitting and coloring, and one of
21:13
the boys was running around the room making a buzzing noise.
21:15
And I got in his way and I stopped him.
21:17
I said how come you don't want to sit and draw?
21:20
And he said without hesitation he said drawings for girls.
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And I'm sure the teacher never said drawing is for girls, but
21:27
you might as well have. Because by praising and
21:29
understanding pictures with color detail, textured faces,
21:32
but not really getting the point of a picture that is all about
21:36
action, she is unintentionally sending the message the drawing
21:40
is for girls. The lack of awareness of gender
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differences has the unintended consequence of reinforcing
21:47
gender stereotypes, because this teacher, like most teachers, has
21:50
received no formal instruction in sex differences in the kinds
21:55
of pictures that girls and boys want to draw.
21:57
She got one more boy who's decided the drawing is for
22:01
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That's Seven weeks, coffee.com. So in that scenario, you just,
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you just shared, you know, the got the boys running around,
22:45
zooming around the classroom. You know, I've got 2 little very
22:48
young boys and they're zooming up until the moment of bedtime
22:51
and they're just wrestling, fighting, jumping in the beds.
22:54
I mean, they've got so much energy constantly, constantly.
22:57
And you know, I always look at other friends who have girls and
23:00
the girl has usually less energy, the little girl.
23:03
Is this a brain development thing?
23:04
Is this a biological system thing separate from the brain?
23:07
What? What is that?
23:09
I would dispute you on the facts.
23:11
My daughter was and remains huge.
23:15
She was energetic and you have girls who are very energetic
23:20
and, and my daughter absolutely at age 5 would be jumping off
23:25
the top of the couch, jumping off a 10 foot ledge onto the
23:30
floor below actually. And when I do that part of the
23:34
presentation, I show a picture of her admiring the cast, which
23:39
I applied when she jumped off the top of a nine foot jungle
23:42
jib and fell on her outstretched hand and broke her wrist.
23:46
I casted her wrist so I I don't accept your claim on the facts
23:51
that boys are energetic and girls are less.
23:54
Perhaps I. Miss Maybe I'm mislabelling it.
23:57
What it is it fair to say that very young boys versus young
24:01
girls are more interested in wrestling and, you know, a
24:06
physical? Let me physical finish my
24:08
comment about drawing because that boy was running around the
24:11
room making buzzing noises and not drawing because the teacher
24:15
had no idea how to encourage him drawing.
24:18
Margaret Paula Olafstadter overseas 17 schools across
24:22
Iceland K through 8 schools and she and her teachers know all
24:26
about sex differences in the visual system and how those
24:29
differences influence best practice in the classroom.
24:32
She sent 44 of her teachers from Iceland to Chicago, IL to attend
24:36
a 2 day workshop I hosted on this topic.
24:39
She then then sends sixty of her teachers from Iceland to
24:42
Orlando, FL to attend a 280 workshop I hosted on this topic
24:46
and then in my invitation she came to Houston to speak and
24:49
share her experience. She did a breakout session which
24:52
I attended, and she told us that in each of her 17 schools today,
24:59
since the teachers have had this training today when the teacher
25:04
says free time, you can do whatever you want.
25:07
The boy's favorite activity is drawing.
25:11
Boys love to draw. Girls love to draw.
25:13
I don't believe there's any innate difference between girls
25:16
and boys and how much they would like to sit and draw, but
25:23
there's a big difference in what they want to draw and if you
25:26
don't understand that, you end up with what We have a country
25:29
where second grade boys think drawing is for girls.
25:32
When you go to the College Board website and you look to see who
25:35
took. Among high school kids who took
25:37
the Advanced Placement exam in art history last year, girls
25:40
outnumbered boys by more than three to 1, which is ironic in
25:43
view of the fact that most of the artists they're studying are
25:46
men. The lack of awareness of gender
25:49
differences has the unedited consequence of reinforcing
25:52
gender stereotypes. If teachers don't have this
25:55
training, you end up with boys running around the room making
25:57
buzzing noise while the girls are coloring.
26:01
And again, Margaret Paula Alstotter is a great believer in
26:04
what she calls dare training. Getting girls to run around,
26:08
jump off things, walk on stones and their bare feet.
26:13
Because girls love to do that. If you encourage them, if you
26:18
understand gender differences, you can breakdown gender
26:20
stereotyes and the girls will be running U and down on on the
26:25
beach and the boys will be sitting and drawing.
26:29
So, so you think that it is a gender stereotype and not a
26:32
truth about gender that, you know, small boys versus small
26:36
girls are more interested in things like wrestling and.
26:41
Well, wrestling per SE, there is some evidence to support your
26:45
claim. OK, when you're talking
26:47
specifically about simulated combat is going to appeal to
26:51
boys, but. Or.
26:54
Yeah, using using toys as guns or energetic girls can be very
26:59
energetic and should be and. It was a bad word.
27:03
But they channel the energy in different ways.
27:06
That makes sense. So when you see a small child,
27:10
let's move from drawing to wrestling.
27:12
Or you know, using a toy as a gun as opposed to what maybe the
27:16
toy might be for. I see.
27:18
My impression has been that is usually more prevalent amongst
27:22
males. Why is that?
27:24
So indeed, and why gender matters, I share a story from my
27:27
own practice when very enlightened parents who were
27:32
determined to breakdown gender stereotypes gave their daughter
27:39
trucks for her for her 4th birthday and and she was
27:43
absolutely thrilled with the present and took them off to her
27:47
bedroom. And the parents came in a few
27:50
minutes later and the daughter said they're sleeping.
27:54
She put the trucks in bed and pulled the covers up so that
27:56
only the headlights were showing.
27:58
And the. These enlightened parents
28:00
likewise gave their son a doll which he used as a weapon and as
28:07
a projectile, but did not use the doll as it was intended to
28:10
be used. And again, these the same
28:15
behaviors have been preserved by Richard Wrangham watching
28:20
chimpanzees in the wild. The juvenile female chimpanzee
28:25
is cradling the stick and pretending it's a baby, whereas
28:28
the juvenile male chimpanzee is whacking his friend with a
28:32
stick. So the argument that these
28:34
differences are are socially constructed, while it may have
28:40
some truth, it certainly can't be the whole story because we
28:43
observe this same pattern of behavior in chimpanzees and in
28:48
juvenile monkeys. These same sex differences
28:52
observed in other species that do not construct gender in the
28:56
way that humans do. So for the boy then that's using
28:59
the toy as a projectile or as a weapon versus the girl who might
29:03
take a toy that is designed to look like a weapon, but you
29:05
know, maybe nurture it in some way.
29:08
What does that speak to in their in the sex differences
29:11
biologically? Where's the biological evidence
29:13
for why that's happening? Those different responses?
29:20
Well, I think we can say with confidence that it is
29:23
genetically programmed because it is conservative across
29:28
species. It is not a function of
29:30
testosterone. Juvenile males and females prior
29:35
to the onset of puberty don't make testosterone.
29:37
If you draw blood from a four year old, there are no sex
29:41
differences in testosterone levels comparing 4 year old boys
29:44
with four year old girls. And so these differences clearly
29:50
are to a considerable degree hardwired.
29:56
And again, I cited an astonishing study of more of
30:01
researchers looked at more than 1000 samples of human brain
30:05
tissue from dead people at every age of life, including prenatal.
30:12
So mother is in a car crash, she dies.
30:15
The baby she's carrying dies. You take the baby out of the
30:18
wound, you cut open the brain and you test the brain tissue.
30:22
That's how the study is done. And you and and the brains of
30:25
dead children and adolescents and young adults and middle-aged
30:29
adults. In the elderly, you look to see
30:31
what genes are active in brain tissue when this person has
30:36
died. You find very little sex
30:39
differences in adults in patterns of gene transcription,
30:44
but huge profound sex differences in the baby prior to
30:49
birth. The biggest differences in gene
30:54
transcription in the human brain is prior to birth.
30:58
We are born male or female. Genesis 127 in the image of God.
31:06
He created in male and female. He created them.
31:10
We are indeed born male or female with some very rare
31:14
exceptions. There is a phenomenon called
31:16
intersex where So for example, an XXXY chimera, an individual
31:21
who's a mixture of XX cells and XY cells, classically a 5050
31:27
chimera, that individual's going to have may have a ovary on one
31:32
side, testicle on the other side, their blood equal mix of
31:38
male and female hormones. So true intersex individuals,
31:41
these are exceedingly rare. Fewer than two in 10,000 humans
31:46
are intersex. Now the Biden administration,
31:49
United Nations, the New York Times, and many other sources
31:55
will claim that no, no, no intersex is as common as red
31:58
hair. The 2 and 100 humans are
32:00
intersex. That's false.
32:04
And if your listeners are interested, I would refer them
32:08
to my paper titled How Common is Intersex?
32:12
Where I show that the correct number is fewer than two and
32:14
10,000 and that the claim made by Anne Fausto Sterling at Brown
32:18
University that it's 2 and 100 is is wildly false and is based
32:23
on on, on lies. It's hard to use any other word
32:30
because she's including disorders like late onset
32:33
congenital adrenal hyperplasia, where you have men who look like
32:37
men and can father children and women who look like women and
32:40
can bear children who have this condition that causes acne.
32:45
And she claims it's intersex because they're not perfectly
32:48
male or female. Any departure from the
32:52
Aristotelian perfection in her definition makes you intersex,
32:56
which is simply psychotic. It's detached from reality.
32:59
If someone looks like a man, has XY chromosomes, is male and can
33:04
father a child, to say that no, no, no, he's not male because he
33:08
has bad acne, that's it's, well, it is.
33:13
It's a lie in pursuit of an agenda.
33:15
And Fausto Sterling wanted to assert that male and female are
33:19
not binary, that there's this big population of people who are
33:25
both male and female. And so she's lying in pursuit of
33:29
that political agenda. So and the United Nations and
33:37
the Biden administration, The New York Times follow that line
33:40
for political reasons. But in truth, fewer than two and
33:46
10,000 humans are intersex. It is a very rare anomaly,
33:51
roughly on the same order of magnitude as conjoined twins,
33:55
what we used to call Siamese twins.
33:57
We don't create a theory of personality based on Siamese
34:00
twins. We recognize that 2 heads
34:04
sharing one body is a very rare anomaly.
34:06
It is not the ground for thinking about how personality
34:11
develops because indeed Siamese twins 2 heads sharing one body.
34:16
That's a very unusual situation. Likewise intersex very rare
34:22
phenomenon. Those unfortunate individuals
34:25
certainly are deserving of care, should not be subjected to
34:29
surgery and as infants. But that's not grounds for
34:35
saying that the binary they this division of the human race into
34:43
male and female is somehow called into question, any more
34:46
than we would say that the division between day and night
34:50
is meaningless because there is such a thing as dusk and dawn
34:54
and twilight. The existence of twilight
34:56
doesn't render meaningless the division between day and night.
35:01
The existence of intersex does not render meaningless the
35:04
division between male and female.
35:07
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out for 10% off your order. There's some recent studies out
35:51
that are seen very troubling, you know, 1/4 to 1/3 of gen's
35:57
ears or millennials depending on the study identify as LGBTQ, you
36:01
know, whatever other numbers or plus or whatever and many of
36:05
them in that pocket. It's not just lesbian or gay
36:09
anymore, it's a lot of trans non binary.
36:12
Well, it is. There's certainly a growing
36:14
number of trans but so for the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the
36:18
most recent iteration, this is more than 12,000 adolescents
36:23
interviewed nationwide. In a demographically
36:26
representative sample, 38% of girls said teenage girls said
36:34
they are not straight. So they're lesbian, gay,
36:37
bisexual, questioning and a few are trans, but most of them are
36:43
saying they're not straight. Now, having talked with these
36:46
girls, I can tell you that many of them are running away from
36:51
something rather than running towards something.
36:54
They are repulsed by the idea of being a straight girl, and for
36:59
good reason. Because contemporary American
37:05
popular culture, by which I mean the culture of WAP, of Cardi B,
37:09
of Megan the Stallion, of Bruno Mars and Drake, is a culture
37:13
that teaches girls that it's a girl's job to get on her knees
37:17
and give oral sex to boys at 15 years of age.
37:21
And many girls are really turned off by that.
37:25
And I can tell you about 16 year old boys demanding anal
37:28
intercourse from their 15 year old girlfriend because this
37:32
boy's been living on pornography for the last three years and he
37:36
says, yeah, women love it. No, they don't.
37:39
No one has explained to that, boys.
37:41
Those are actresses being paid to pretend that they enjoy it.
37:51
News flash, most girls don't enjoy anal intercourse.
37:56
Or as one teenage girl said to her boyfriend when he proposed
37:59
anal intercourse, she said, yeah, how about if we try
38:02
shoving something hard up your behind?
38:04
See how you like it. But again, many parents are
38:08
clueless. They don't realize that their
38:10
son has a smartphone. At 13 years of age, he has
38:13
unlimited access to pornography. He doesn't need a credit card.
38:17
He just needs to say that he's 18 and he can access anything.
38:22
And this is a real problem. And we have, look, almost every
38:28
culture of which we have any knowledge has taken male, female
38:33
relations seriously and has limited and governed and guided
38:39
how girls and boys get together. We no longer do that, and the
38:44
result is a culture of boys who have learned about sex from porn
38:49
videos at 16 years of age, expecting the girl to get on her
38:53
knees and give oral sex to the boys.
38:56
And the girls are getting tired of it.
38:58
And that, in my judgement as a family doctor, is the primary
39:02
factor driving this explosion in the proportion of young girls
39:06
who say I'm not straight or as one, A young woman said to me,
39:10
She said I don't care if I never see another penis as long as I
39:13
live. I'm sick of it.
39:15
I'm sick of it. We have lost any clue as to how
39:22
to teach boys to be gentlemen, how to teach girls and boys to
39:28
engage in romance rather than hooking up.
39:31
Hooking up is the opposite of romance, and the result is a
39:36
growing proportion, 38% of girls who say I'm not sure what I am,
39:40
but I'm not a straight girl because I don't want to do it.
39:46
Do you see that? I'm not sure what I am, but I'm
39:48
not a straight girl. A journey of I don't know that
39:51
it becomes pathologized to the point where she all of a sudden
39:55
so hates being a woman, having a woman's body that she considers
39:59
or she thinks she may be trans. And then I mean I I just see
40:03
the. Anecdotes so if you if.
40:04
You're just hating their. Body, Google my name and WAP.
40:07
Are we allowed to say what WAP stands for?
40:09
I mean, I think the audience is. Familiar with this?
40:12
WAP was a hugely popular video starring Cardi B and Megan Thee
40:16
Stallion, as as well as a cameo by Kylie Jenner.
40:21
It stands for Wet Ass Pussy, where these two women sing that
40:28
they want to be tied up, they want to choke on a man's penis.
40:35
And this video not only was #1 most popular video in the United
40:40
States broke all kinds of records for downloads,
40:44
93,000,000 downloads in one week, but was also praised in
40:49
the New York Times, in the Wall Street Journal as empowering
40:54
women. And this is so great that women
40:58
are now telling us what they want.
41:00
Well, what's a girl supposed to think when she sees that the
41:03
most popular video in the country is a girl is 2 young
41:07
women saying how they want to choke on a man's cock.
41:10
They want to be tied up handcuffs.
41:16
It's basically. Girls, some girls are saying
41:20
yuck, that is not me. But hey, the New York Times,
41:24
Teen Vogue, and the Wall Street Journal all say this is great.
41:27
Well, you know what? Maybe I'm not a girl then,
41:29
because this is not me. Maybe I'm something else.
41:33
Maybe I'm a boy because certainly the idea of being tied
41:37
up and choking on a man's cock doesn't appeal to me.
41:41
But according to the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal
41:43
on Teen Vogue, it should. So, you know, forget that.
41:49
Have you seen a connection between a rejection of basically
41:52
the sexual objectification pornification that girls are
41:56
experiencing? In addition, add on the fact
42:00
that after puberty and just generally speaking, you have
42:02
body image issues where girls don't like their bodies
42:05
generally speaking anyways, or they're overweight, or they
42:08
struggle with just body acceptance.
42:11
And so you have this lethal combo of the sexualization piece
42:15
where they're rejecting that they don't want to be seen that
42:17
way. And then they also are
42:18
uncomfortable in their bodies. And so does that create a?
42:22
Could that create a perfect storm for saying, well, I'm just
42:24
going to. I don't know.
42:26
You're sounding. You're sounding awfully, 2007.
42:29
Oh, really? Yeah.
42:30
Because what? Happened in 2000 and.
42:33
Seven, well, 15 years ago, 16 years ago, 20 years ago, you
42:37
could make a plausible case that hey, magazines, there used to be
42:42
magazines back then like Teen Vogue and Cosmo Girl that
42:45
depicted these slender models. And you would go to the
42:50
department store, go to Target and you'd see big posters of
42:55
slender models. That's very 2007.
42:59
You go to Target now and you see a lot of fat women as the
43:03
models. And that is by design and body
43:08
body positivity. I think that's what I'm probing
43:12
out here because I agree with you.
43:13
It's not like be fat. You're going to be, you're going
43:15
to be happy and great. But do you think they're
43:17
actually happy and great? It varies.
43:21
Everyone is different. I have met slender girls who are
43:26
miserable and I've met fat girls who are happy.
43:30
So I am not persuaded by your implied claim that girls who are
43:39
not slender today uniformly torture themselves.
43:45
There are certainly some who do without it to be.
43:47
Clear, it's not just girls that are not slender, it's generally
43:50
girls that struggle with, you know, eating disorders is sort
43:53
of a, you know, you, you'd say you have an eating disorder, but
43:56
they struggle with body image and they could be very skinny,
43:58
they could be very fat, but they are not happy with their bodies.
44:03
Yeah. But I, I don't think that's new.
44:05
I think that I don't think that's new.
44:07
I think that's certainly been with us for at least.
44:10
The last I, I guess what I'm saying, when I was a girl, you
44:12
know, and struggling, you know, I struggled with body image
44:15
issues. I had a, an eating, you know,
44:17
disordered eating at one point. A lot of other girls in you had
44:20
that today's average girl. We still have tons of eating
44:23
disorders today. But now you have this additional
44:25
option if you're struggling with your body and with food of
44:28
exploring being trans as a way to deal with your not, not body
44:33
dysmorphia, but your actual body.
44:36
You know, you know, your your anorexia or your bulimia.
44:39
Yeah. So your question we're grappling
44:41
with is why this explosion and the number of young women who
44:44
say they're men, the number of teenage girls who say they're
44:47
boys? And yeah, I, I, I think that you
44:52
have proposed a reasonable hypothesis, namely that one of
44:59
many factors driving this is that this is now an option for
45:04
that girl who's unhappy with her body, that, hey, if I was a boy,
45:09
it wouldn't, it wouldn't matter. We did.
45:11
We have something pretty ancient in our civilization that says
45:17
that how you look is really important if you're a girl and
45:21
not important if you're a boy, or much, much, much less
45:24
important. And that is not at all new.
45:26
So when I talk to students or teachers about this topic, I
45:30
often cite The Lord of the Rings.
45:33
So the Lord of the Rings has only a few female characters.
45:38
The books, not the movies. The The books have only a few
45:41
female characters who have names, and they're all described
45:45
as staggeringly beautiful. Ewan is amazingly beautiful.
45:50
Arwen's amazing, amazingly beauty beautiful.
45:54
The Lady of Le Florian is amazingly beautiful.
46:00
There are other women, but they are unmentioned.
46:03
The only women who are mentioned are amazing, beautiful.
46:06
Well, the heroes of the story, Frodo and Sam, aren't
46:10
attractive. They're not big.
46:11
They're not strong. Frodo, Sam, Pippin, Mary.
46:17
Males aren't anything at all special to look at.
46:22
One of the unintended messages of The Lord of the Rings is that
46:27
if you're a man, it doesn't matter what you look like, but
46:30
if you're a woman, it's essential that you be beautiful.
46:34
If you're not beautiful, you're nobody.
46:36
Literally. There is no named character.
46:40
You don't. Even make a you don't even get a
46:42
name, so that's nothing new. OK, Tolkien wrote those books in
46:47
the 1940s, so we have a long history in Western civilization
46:56
of prioritizing looks for girls and for boys.
47:03
It's who you are for girls, it's how you look.
47:07
There's nothing new about that, unfortunately.
47:10
Where does that come from? Oh my goodness, that's that's
47:12
very ancient. Now I am not an anthropologist,
47:15
but I have consulted with real anthropologist who have found
47:21
something similar in other cultures, Not necessarily in all
47:26
other cultures, but in many other cultures.
47:28
So certainly there's something about our species that
47:33
prioritizes looks for girls and women and achievement for boys
47:40
and men. So for boys and men it's
47:44
important to do and for girls and women it's more important to
47:49
look good. And that is immensely toxic for
47:52
girls and women and we. But that, that is not new is my
47:58
point. That is, there's nothing new
48:00
about that. You have suggested that maybe
48:02
that's part of what's driving girls to be trans.
48:07
And I've pushed back a bit because the trans thing is very
48:10
new. It's really new. 20 years ago
48:13
when I wrote the 1st edition of Why Gender Matters, there's like
48:17
2 sentences on transgender. 30 years ago, just 30 years ago,
48:22
the American Psychiatric Association estimated the
48:24
prevalence of transgender. They said it's so rare it's hard
48:28
to say, but we think it's one in 30,000 men and fewer than one in
48:33
100,000 women. That was the American
48:36
Psychiatric Association exactly 30 years ago, 1994.
48:41
And now we've got, you know, easily 4% of teenage girls in
48:47
this country saying they're trans.
48:51
Well, I. 19% of teenage girls. 4% of teenage girls say they're
48:55
trans, 38% of teenage girls say they're not straight.
49:01
So going from basically zero to 4% in, in 20 years, it's hard
49:11
for me to to say, Oh yeah, that's, that's because of the
49:14
toxic effects of body positivity, because we've had a
49:17
toxic culture with regard to body positivity.
49:19
What would be the toxic effects of body idol worship?
49:23
I mean, when it comes to appearance, well.
49:25
And I think there's some there are other factors driving this
49:29
explosion in, in the trans identification for.
49:32
Girls, what would you say those are?
49:34
All right, so how much time do how much time?
49:38
Do Yeah, we'll go. We'll go.
49:39
At least we'll go 10 more. All right, so the 1st edition of
49:45
my book, Why Gender Matters, had almost nothing on trans.
49:48
The second edition has 12 chapters, the last four of which
49:51
are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex.
49:55
And I dive deeply into this question of why?
50:00
Why this explosion and the proportion of kids who say
50:03
they're trans? Almost every culture of which we
50:08
have substantial knowledge has taught girls to be women, has
50:12
taught boys to be men. What does that mean?
50:14
Well, it actually means something different in each
50:16
culture. And in the Japan of the Tokugawa
50:21
Shogun 816 O3, it meant something very different than it
50:25
means for us today are. There core through lines though
50:30
for for all. Well, one example I give is the
50:33
meticulous preparation and serving of tea in 16 O 3 in
50:37
Japan was exclusively the province of men.
50:39
Women were not even permitted to attend tea ceremony and and
50:44
making it look good and doing it just right was taught by men two
50:50
boys. Now in our culture in 21st
50:54
century America, meticulous care and the preparation of serving
50:57
in tea we would tend to think is more of a feminine trait than a
51:00
masculine trait. How cultures construct
51:04
masculinity and femininity does vary quite a bit from one
51:08
culture to another, with a few exceptions.
51:13
So training in the skills required to kill other humans is
51:18
exclusively male in essentially every culture of which we have
51:23
any knowledge. There are only mythological
51:25
exceptions like the Amazons. So training humans to kill other
51:30
humans is almost exclusively male.
51:33
But almost every other domain you look at, whether it's
51:37
cooking or clothing, you can find a culture where men
51:41
dominate and where those are masculine occupations.
51:47
But to don't to interrupt here, but I want to interrupt here
51:50
because childbearing is an exclusively female domain.
51:55
Obviously men can be very involved with children and they
51:58
should be, I believe. But childbearing is exclusively
52:01
female. So you say them what's across,
52:03
you know, across cultures, across time for men, it's being
52:06
trained to kill for women. Can you?
52:08
Is it fair to say being trained to basic?
52:10
Training on the question we're trying to figure out is what's
52:13
driving the explosion of trans and one of the one of several
52:18
answers. It's not just one answer, but
52:19
one of several answers I give in those final four chapters of Why
52:23
Gender Matters is We no longer teach girls to be women and boys
52:28
to be men. And so I'm asking what does it
52:30
mean through? It means you have a community of
52:33
men for for boys and a community of women for girls.
52:36
So Robert Putnam at Harvard spent decades leading an army of
52:40
graduate students across the United States, documenting that
52:43
50 years ago you had a community of women for girls.
52:48
Well, how, how does he document that?
52:49
Well, he goes to Lake Forest, IL and, and bowling.
52:53
Bowling used to be a lot more popular in the United States.
52:55
But more importantly, from Doctor Putnam's perspective,
53:00
most of the bowling 50 years ago was in bowling leagues.
53:03
And Tuesday night might be the women's night.
53:04
And Thursday night was the men's night.
53:06
And he and his students dig up. All right, who was in the
53:08
bowling league in Lake Forest, IL in 1970?
53:13
Well, let's see. On this team there was a 53 year
53:15
old woman, a 37 year old woman, a 26 year old woman, a 17 year
53:19
old girl, and a 12 year old girl.
53:21
People in the United States still go bowling, but they go
53:23
bowling alone. To borrow the title of Doctor
53:25
Putnam's best known book, meaning not literally alone, but
53:28
instead of this 17 year old girl going bowling with a community
53:31
of women, she going bowling with a bunch of 17 year olds, girls
53:35
and boys mixed together. Which as far as Doctor Putnam is
53:38
concerned, is bowling alone. When Doctor Putnam uses the term
53:41
community, he means bonds across generations, and the bonds
53:45
across generations have been broken.
53:47
We used to have a community of women for girls.
53:50
We used to have a community of men for boys.
53:52
We don't anymore. We set kids adrift in the
53:57
culture of Instagram and TikTok to figure out for themselves
54:01
what they're supposed to be. And the result is they are
54:04
confused. And that confusion, I assert, is
54:09
one of several factors driving this explosion in girls who say
54:14
they're boys and boys who say they're girls.
54:17
It's so fascinating. What is so powerful about
54:19
intergenerational community? Oh my gosh, that is core to the
54:25
human experience. So look, what is childhood for?
54:33
Literally what is childhood for? A four year old horse is a
54:37
mature adult. The Kentucky Derby has raced
54:41
with three-year olds. A four year old human is barely
54:44
begun humans or children or adolescents for more years than
54:48
most animals live. It can't just be about
54:51
biological maturation because a four year old horse is a mature
54:54
adult and it's a bigger animal than a human.
54:56
So why? Why humans are developing
55:02
Children are adolescents for more years than most animals
55:05
live. Why?
55:06
We don't have to guess. We have scholars like Doctor
55:08
Melvin Counter at Emory who wrote this 800 page monograph
55:12
published by Oxford University Press titled The Evolution of
55:15
Childhood, comparing development at our species with development
55:18
and other species, especially other primates.
55:20
And the answers the scholars give is that human development
55:25
takes as long as it does because it takes many years for the
55:30
grown-ups to teach the grown up culture to the children.
55:33
That's what makes us unique as a species.
55:37
That's what's programmed in our DNA.
55:40
So on the next page of my book, The Collapse of Parenting, where
55:42
I present this research, I say a column by Jennifer Finney
55:45
Boylan, a long time columnist for the New York Times, and she
55:49
wrote about enlightened parenting.
55:50
And in her column she says that enlightened parenting means
55:53
setting your child free to discover for themselves their
55:56
own right and wrong. And if in so doing your child
55:58
becomes a stranger to you, then so be it.
56:01
Quote UN quote. That might sound enlightened to
56:04
some, but it's not enlightened. If you set your child free to
56:07
discover that for themselves, their own right and wrong, and
56:09
then they have a device with Internet access, what they will
56:12
discover is Cardi B, WAP, Megan Thee Stallion, Drake, mainstream
56:17
pornography, and confusion about gender.
56:22
That New York Times advice to set your child free to discover
56:26
their for themselves, their own right and wrong is not only an
56:29
abdication of parental responsibility, it is profoundly
56:33
unhuman. It's not what we are programmed
56:35
to do. It's not what's in our DNA.
56:37
It's not why human development takes as long as it does.
56:41
Human development takes as long as it does because we're
56:44
supposed to have strong bonds across generations for the
56:47
grown-ups to teach the kids. And almost every enduring
56:51
culture, every enduring culture, every culture that lasts has
56:56
those bonds. And I say that having consulted
56:59
with the comparative anthropologist in my, which I
57:05
did for my book, Boys Adrift, and they will tell you that
57:09
every culture that lasts is characterized by strong bonds
57:12
across generations. A community of men for boys, a
57:15
community of women for girls. We used to do that.
57:19
As recently as 50 years ago, we had the sewing circles again.
57:25
Doctor Putnam and his colleagues document OK the sewing circle in
57:28
Shaker Eyes, Ohio, organized not by kin relation but by
57:31
geographic proximity, which is a fancy way of saying that the
57:33
girls and women in that sewing circle weren't related to each
57:36
other, they just happened to live on the same block.
57:39
There were innumerable mechanisms as recently as 50
57:43
years ago in the United States to have bonds across
57:47
generations, women with girls, men with boys.
57:50
Doctor Putnam's got pictures of guys working under the hood of a
57:54
of a car 50 years ago, and he and his students figure out who
57:59
are the men and boys in those photograph.
58:01
Whether we're older men, younger men and boys.
58:03
You go out today and drive around on Saturday afternoon,
58:06
you just might see 2 old geezers working to the hood of their 65
58:09
Corvette. But the boys are not with them.
58:12
The bonds across generations have been broken as a result.
58:17
We have a lot of confused boys, a lot of confused girls who have
58:21
no idea what it means to be a man because we no longer have a
58:25
community of men for boys, a community of women for girls.
58:28
When I speak to churches, I talk.
58:30
I share what I have learned visiting churches across this
58:33
country. A few churches still get it that
58:37
so. So I I show a flyer from a
58:39
church youth group, come to the pizza party and hang out and
58:43
have fun. That's not what kids need.
58:47
What a girl needs to become a woman of faith is different from
58:50
what a boy needs to become a man of faith.
58:53
Boys need a community of men. Girls need a community of women.
58:57
Now, I am not a fan of the Mormon religion, which I regard
59:01
as very bizarre, but they get this every Sunday in the Mormon
59:07
church. The girls go with the women, the
59:09
boys go with the men, and the Mormon church is thriving.
59:13
And I think a big reason it's thriving is because they get
59:16
this. Most churches in the United
59:18
States, Catholic and Protestant, do not get this.
59:21
And as a result, many of those congregations are dwindling.
59:25
There's a lot of fear, I think from, you know, whether it's
59:28
Gen. X to the Gen.
59:29
Z or, or it's the boomer to the millennial of, you know, not of
59:33
misunderstandings or wounds from how the person was raised.
59:37
And now they're not at peace with their parents.
59:40
So there's just a lot of division amongst the generations
59:43
that I think isn't beyond just there's not good social.
59:46
Well, it's hard wired and girls need a community of women and
59:49
boys need a community of men. And I always welcome the
59:51
opportunity to speak to churches because they are uniquely well
59:55
situated to create those communities.
1:00:00
And I share examples of how other churches have done it and
1:00:03
are doing it. So what I'm, what I'm, what I'm
1:00:06
going here with is there is perhaps fueling some of the
1:00:11
disintegration of the generations.
1:00:14
There's this generational divide where people look down on their
1:00:18
parents. You know, I think it's become
1:00:20
more in vogue for people to not want to talk to my parents
1:00:23
because of the way they hurt me or because of our differences.
1:00:26
And people are more drawn to their peer group.
1:00:29
Is this something that you're seeing as well?
1:00:31
Well. Sure.
1:00:32
And that's, that's of course a main phenomenon driving my book
1:00:38
The Collapse of Parenting, which is not just documenting the the
1:00:43
collapse of parenting, but the main point of the book is to
1:00:46
give parents some concrete pointers to prioritize the
1:00:51
family, to recreate those strong bonds across generations.
1:00:55
Do you think that the school structure today, the 8 sometimes
1:00:58
hours you're with a peer group, you're not with your family,
1:01:01
Then you go hang out and do sports with your peer group.
1:01:03
Then on the weekends you're hanging with your peer group.
1:01:05
There's just less physical time kids are spending with extended
1:01:08
family with. No, I don't buy that the the
1:01:12
structure of the school day is not radically different today
1:01:15
than it was 40 years ago. But parenting has collapsed over
1:01:19
the last 40 years, so I do not blame it on the organization of
1:01:22
the school day. I blame it on American popular
1:01:26
culture. More if I have to blame it on
1:01:27
anything. But 100 years ago, the school
1:01:30
room was a mixed age group, right?
1:01:33
100 yeah, if you go back more than 100 years ago when very few
1:01:37
Americans, the majority of Americans did not go to high
1:01:39
school. But, but I don't think that's a
1:01:44
useful lesson for us. The the structure of the school
1:01:47
day, again, has not changed radically in the last 40 years,
1:01:51
but there has been a collapse of parenting over the last 20 years
1:01:55
actually. And that's the focus of my book
1:01:57
Collapse of Parenting. So, so much more we could talk
1:01:59
about. I have one more question and
1:02:01
might lead to a little secondary question, but I've so much of
1:02:04
what you're saying begs this question for me and it's kind of
1:02:06
what we were discussing earlier. What are the differences between
1:02:10
men and women culturally that that have cultural
1:02:14
ramifications? So what I mean by that is you
1:02:15
said, you know, in this Japanese culture, the men were the ones
1:02:18
serving the tea. And you see all these different
1:02:20
activities that might be stereotypically male or female,
1:02:22
but they will flip based on the culture or the time.
1:02:25
They'll change. I don't know that I'm not
1:02:26
comfortable with the word. Maybe they won't flip.
1:02:28
They change. Every culture constructs
1:02:30
masculinity and femininity differently.
1:02:32
But you named one thing that is set across cultures and times
1:02:36
for men, which is to kill, to be trained, to protect.
1:02:39
Really. Let's say in killing other
1:02:41
humans is predominantly male in every culture of which we have
1:02:46
substantial knowledge. That's not mythological.
1:02:49
And what would be that activity or the activities that are
1:02:53
across time and cultures for women?
1:02:56
Bearing and nurturing very young children.
1:02:59
So I, when I think about the gender differences and there's a
1:03:02
lot of, you know, arguments and Tradcon, left Wing, Red Pill,
1:03:06
all of these different ideas about what it means to be a man,
1:03:08
what it means to be a woman. Is it fair to boil it down?
1:03:12
And you look at the trappings and of what culture kind of
1:03:15
builds up around being a man or woman?
1:03:17
You boil it down though, Women can bear children, very young
1:03:20
children men can't, and then then can protect the whole
1:03:24
project of the woman bearing a child.
1:03:25
What do you think of that? No, I'm not comfortable with it.
1:03:28
So again, one of the points I make in why not why gender
1:03:32
matters is that 50 years ago, the early gender theorists, I
1:03:38
believe that gender was on a continuum.
1:03:41
You could be very masculine, you could be very feminine.
1:03:44
It was a single one-dimensional continuum.
1:03:47
And if you were more masculine than you were necessarily less
1:03:50
feminine. That turns out simply not to be
1:03:52
accurate. Gender is 2 dimensional.
1:03:55
You can be masculine or not. You can be feminine or not.
1:03:59
You can be both, which is androgynous.
1:04:01
You can be neither, which is undifferentiated.
1:04:04
So gender is A2 dimensional space and part of becoming a an
1:04:09
adult who's comfortable in your own skin is figuring out where
1:04:13
you belong on that two-dimensional space.
1:04:15
So for example, I've been married for 34 years.
1:04:21
In my marriage, I do all the grocery shopping because my wife
1:04:24
hates to shop for groceries. She hates to make supper.
1:04:27
She loves it when I make supper. Or we neither of us make supper
1:04:32
and we make some other arrangement.
1:04:35
She doesn't like to cook, she doesn't like to shop.
1:04:37
She mows the lawn, she fixes the lawn tractor, which I would have
1:04:41
no idea how to do. But I'm a straight man.
1:04:47
She's a straight woman. We're comfortable as men and
1:04:50
women. We may be a little gender
1:04:52
atypical in that I love to shop for groceries.
1:04:55
I love ballet. She doesn't really care for
1:04:58
ballet and she'd rather mow the lawn, and that's fine to be.
1:05:04
Clear, Mike, what I was saying earlier is actually agreeing
1:05:07
with what you just said, that we overemphasize these
1:05:10
traditionally feminine versus masculine activities when we get
1:05:14
away from the core that matters, which is that the through line
1:05:18
for men is this protect thing, this I, you know, train for war
1:05:21
thing. And the through line for women
1:05:23
is they can only bear the children.
1:05:24
Those are really the fundamental differences that matter if we're
1:05:27
going to talk about gender. Well, I think one place that
1:05:31
we're failing is failing to teach girls and boys that then
1:05:36
the division of the human race into male and female is real.
1:05:40
It's not a social construct. But it's real to what end?
1:05:43
It's real to the procreative end.
1:05:46
It's real again tomorrow night at Jay Sarah, I'm going to go
1:05:50
over these differences with the parents.
1:05:52
It's it's real in the sense that.
1:05:54
You can book Doctor Saks on his. Website see differently, they
1:05:59
hear differently. They differ profoundly in how
1:06:05
they detect odors. For many odors, a girl, a woman
1:06:09
has a sense of smell that's 100,000 times more sensible than
1:06:13
a sensitive than a boy or man. So a man and woman walk into a
1:06:17
room and the woman says, Oh my gosh, it stinks, I'm going to
1:06:20
throw up. And the man says I don't smell
1:06:22
anything. And they don't understand each
1:06:25
other because the woman's like, what do you mean you don't smell
1:06:27
anything? And he says I don't smell
1:06:28
anything because no one has explained to them that gender
1:06:33
matters. These these differences are
1:06:35
real. I'll try one more time to see if
1:06:37
I, if we may align here at all, where with my current working
1:06:41
theory, which is that the, all of these differences that we're
1:06:45
talking about, that we've talked about today, let's say many of
1:06:48
them, you know, I'm not going to say every single one, but many
1:06:50
of them are connected back to when you go way back to the
1:06:54
biological difference between a man and a woman, that men father
1:06:57
and women mother. And the, the way that those
1:06:59
things happen fundamentally are different.
1:07:02
And so many of these other traits are connected back to
1:07:04
empowering the mother to mother well and the father to father
1:07:07
well, fair or not fair. Evolutionary biologists are
1:07:14
struggling to understand why these differences make sense.
1:07:19
Why would it confer evolutionary advantage for the man to smell
1:07:25
less? Well, there is no consensus
1:07:29
right now among the scholars as to why these differences have
1:07:33
evolved. And in the absence of that
1:07:36
consensus, I cannot endorse your conjecture.
1:07:40
It's it's a conjecture, but it's not it when I speak to parents,
1:07:45
it's evidence based parenting. And look, we may not be able to
1:07:51
say with certainty why these differences are there, but I
1:07:54
think it's very important for parents to know about the
1:07:58
differences because the woman is saying to your son, how can you
1:08:02
stand it in your bedroom? It stinks.
1:08:03
And the son says, I'll smell a little bit.
1:08:06
And and mom thinks her son is being defined and disrespectful.
1:08:09
He's not, of course. He really doesn't smell anything
1:08:12
mom needs. Going back to the original
1:08:14
example, the girl wants to play with a doll, The girl put her
1:08:17
trucks into a bed to sleep. And the boy wants to, you know,
1:08:22
he's tactile, he's movement. He, he, he's, he's conflict.
1:08:25
He wants to move things and shake things up, right?
1:08:28
Isn't it fair? You don't need an evolutionary
1:08:30
biologist to tell you that The girl's instinct to want to
1:08:34
nurture the doll and to notice the details of the doll and to
1:08:37
nurture the truck and the boy's instinct to, you know, prepare
1:08:41
himself basically for the conflict of all these activities
1:08:43
that he can design with them. Is connected.
1:08:46
Can connect back very, very directly over time to the girl's
1:08:49
ability to mother and need to mother a tiny, tiny little
1:08:53
infant, and the boys perhaps a relationship to want to protect
1:08:57
or create structures to support that activity that's so
1:09:00
fundamental to the future of the human race.
1:09:02
OK. Is it fair?
1:09:03
It's fair. OK, well, we'll have to revisit
1:09:06
this, but thank you, Doctor Saxon for for joining the
1:09:09
podcast. It's awesome.
1:09:11
Thank you. Thanks for listening to this
1:09:14
episode of the Lila Rose Podcast.
1:09:16
Check out Doctor Leonard Sachs's work and his book at the link in
1:09:18
the bio. I hope you enjoyed it.
1:09:20
And as always, don't forget. You can e-mail me or you can
1:09:22
message us. We love hearing from you guys on
1:09:24
the show. My e-mail is lila@gtbmedia.com.
1:09:27
And don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to your
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1:09:34
We'll see you next time.