Inside the Mind of Misogyny: A Conversation with Lundy Bancroft on Toxic Masculinity

Welcome back to the female dating strategy, the Meanest Female Only podcast on the internet. I'm your host Diana. And I'm Rose and today I could not be more delighted Diana. Who is our illustrious guest of the hour? We have D to enroll. Lundy Bankraft. Oh, Lundy Bankraft, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for all the fuss. Are you on a custom to all the fuss when you're on a show? I can't really claim to be on a custom to all of us know. Well, you are not only the one time male exception. We make to this podcast. You are now the two time male exception because this is the second time we're having you on and we're so excited. We wanted to make sure that today we have something new for all of you because we've been seeing a lot of really disturbing things happening in the press and the media and in the world and general and it seems like it's a sad scary place out there. We thought, you know, now is the time to hear from Lundy and for him to give us some solid vice as he usually does. And so yeah, let's just jump right into it. One thing I wanted to ask Lundy, do you remember the last time you were on the show with Savannah and Ro? I do, but I have to admit it's a fairly dim memory at this many years out. True. This is why we wanted to host you again because I don't know if our current listeners have even know that you once recorded an episode with the prior host. And so we wanted to make sure that, you know, another generation of women are being introduced to the really important work that you do. One way that I found you before I think even FDS was I love to go coast along on the world of reddit and see what's happening, especially in the subreddits of women dating. And your name appears again and again and again. Why do you think that is? Well, there's a few things that I think are the outstanding points. One is that the whole world tends to assume that an abusers got something psychologically wrong with him. A man that abuses women. And so the assumption is that the problem is somewhere in his heart and we have to figure out what's bothering him and help him work out his issues and figure out what happened in the family he grew up in. And try to fix him psychologically. And it's very misleading because that turns out to have almost nothing to do with why a man who abuses women is doing what he does. And the problem turns out to be almost entirely in his mentality and very little in his psychology. By the way, I'm not saying that this is true of all destructive behaviors. I think there are some destructive behaviors in the world that are very much driven by psychological problems. This just turns out not to be one of them. And I was reluctant myself when I first came into the field to accept the extent to which this is a problem of learned values and attitudes. It's a belief system problem that's rooted in a whole set of entitlements that this man started learning usually quite early in life. That say that he has the right to simply require certain things of his female partners and he has a right to punish to enforce those demands when he feels she's not meeting them adequately. So I talk a lot about how much abuse is really about enforcement of his will like his feelings don't have much to do with it. He's got the same feelings almost everybody has almost everybody has insecurities almost everybody has times of feeling bad about themselves almost everybody gets everybody actually does get angry. So that's very little to do with that it has to do with his sense that he gets to enforce what he wants and require things to happen in his way. So that's unusual enough that I think that's part of why there's quite a bit of attention to my work. There's the fact that I'm man, which gives me a certain kind of credibility when I'm speaking very critically about the behavior of some men. Because women tend to get silenced a lot and shut down and ridiculed when they talk frankly about male behavior. I agree I just have to say I really want to thank you for the book to begin with because not that I've personally been a victim of any sort of abuse, but I've had a lot of friends who've been in really abusive dynamics with their boyfriends or their husbands. And sometimes like no matter how much advice I gave them that I thought was sound I felt like they wouldn't listen to me. I feel like many times you've been the neutral third party in my friend group where I'm like well, just listen to Monday and just read his book and it's just been like an easy way for me to give them the information without it coming from me because I do agree that for some reason for a lot of women, it carries a lot more weight when it comes from a man. I just wanted to ask you a question about I have a lot of pushback from friends who think that abuse is something that can be like thereby is the way a lot of people will say, you know, he just needs to go to therapy or like, you know, a man will do anything but go to therapy. And they seem to think that you know when they're an emotionally abusive relationship with their partner, like just going to therapy will be like a bandaid solution to fix it in your experience working with men like this. Like do you feel like that's effective or no? It has zero effectiveness and that's one of the ways that we started to catch on to the fact that this was not a psychological problem was noticing that there was never any gains made from a guy going in therapy and all different kinds of therapist using all different kinds of approaches zip. So that was one of the things that tipped us off there also started to be some research. Showing that this is not rooted in the man's psychology and at the same time I understand when you're living with someone that's being really mean to you that you care about and so you're starting to feel trapped there. You want to put your hopes on something and so it's very tempting to think well if I could just get him to therapy. So he'd work on his issues that would help an abuser program what what's typically called a batter intervention program is completely different from therapy. It's not actually trying to address his emotional world much at all. It's almost entirely working on changing his attitudes and getting him to develop some empathy for the harm that he's doing. So it's a completely different kind of program. And Lundy isn't this the program where in a Richard and sure success you also would have check ins with the spouse or the partner who was the battered victim. Yes, and any program that's being properly run is either contacting the woman or making sure that an advocate that they're working with is contacting the woman. For one thing, abusers are completely unreliable in their own descriptions of what's happened. So working with him is meaningless if you're not finding out what's really going on. You tell him I mean what she says you shouldn't tell him what she says that would blow up in her face. But it still keeps you awake and guides you in how you work with him and how you aim discussions with him and gets you not to start buying in. The his very twisted way of characterizing what's going on. So you can't do this work safely or productively if you're not hearing the woman's story of what's actually happened. The other thing is that he will lie to her about the program itself. If the program's not in touch with her, you'll say things like, oh, I learned from the program that when you yell at me, that's what really sets me off. So you can't yell at me anymore and things like that he'll figure out ways to use the program against her because that's part of what abusers do is they figure out how to use everything against her. We're also seeing really disturbing trends of younger boys exhibiting really abusive behavior. Do you feel like there's been a rise in that in the last 30 years or so. I do, although I should say it has always been a problem because the boys who grow up with being exposed in the home to a man who's abusing their mother, maybe their father, maybe their stepfather, maybe a mom's boyfriend, whoever it might be. They will start mimicking those behaviors from a really early age, especially if the abusers of the style that kind of tries to draw the boys into it and tries to get them imitating his style, but even if he doesn't kids will start to imitate it just because kids imitate adult behavior that they see around that's part of what they do. So it was already a problem and it's already one of the huge warning signs that a woman is being abused when you're seeing, you know, abusive or very anti female behaviors or statements from her sons. But yes, I also do believe it's escalated. The internet, unfortunately, the level of discourse on the internet is rock bottom. This is like not humanity that's best. This is humanity at its worst in how comment threads go on the internet and how people post stuff because they're not accountable. They don't even have to use their real names and faces. They're not going to be answerable for how they behave. So it brings out the worst in people and kids younger and younger ages have access to social media and the internet. And so we're getting such young access to pornography. We're getting such young access to young boys being able to listen to adult men talking trash about women. And so yeah, the influence is getting more pervasive and getting down to younger and younger ages. Lundy, just last week we had a Dr. Gil Dines on the podcast. Are you familiar with her work? Oh, yes, very much so. Wonderful interview with her and in that interview we were discussing there was a recent show that was popular on Netflix in the pre interview you mentioned you hadn't seen it to be honest, I hadn't either because I knew what it was about I know my limits when it comes to what I can actually watch on media. But the show is called adolescence. It's about a young boy, I believe he's 12 years old and it talks about it shows sort of the environment around him and what led him to murder a classmate of his for rejecting him. And this is something that I thought was so interesting because it really showed the perspective of how the women in his life were you know sort of negligible his mother his sister the school teacher who noticed something was wrong, but nobody really wanted to listen to her even the female police officer who was doing a lot of the detecting work. So it all the ways in which their perspectives were sort of slided or pushed aside and it showed how his own father had anger issues and the inability to to have intimate, healthy relationship with his son, and ultimately how this feels our young boys in teaching them how to be whole and healthy human beings, first and foremost, before it even delves into what it means to be a man. With this rise of media that shows more and more what's happening behind the scenes, how would you talk to parents, but what they need to do in order to help their children confront this really crazy, wild, less world of social media that we live in today? - Well, before I answer that question, I wanna say that I've been very, very heavily influenced by Gail Dines' work and by Jackson Katz's work. And I think they both really help us understand that boys, young boys are not just learning a kind of toxic masculinity of being sort of unemotional and overly violent and overly focused on courage and having to be never afraid and all kind of stuff, but that they're also being specifically socialized at very young age to feel superior to females, to feel superior to girls and women, to look down on them from a very young age and it's shaping what happens. You know, parents can't magically fix these huge influences coming from so many different places, but there are a few things that they can do. And one thing they can do is first of all, make sure that their boys are growing up, being encouraged to feel feelings and not to be unfeeling, not to be brave all the time, you gotta let your boys cry, stop telling your boys not to cry, so that they have room from the beginning to have a normal range of feelings and to not be shut down. And at the same time, they have to be taught from very young ages, starting as young as age three, about respect for females. Honestly, three years old is not too young. To start talking to girls are equal to you and you're doing a treat them with respect and you're going to treat women with respect. And boys have to be kept on a very tight leash about how they talk to their mothers, not that they can't be angry or complain or have grievances, they should be allowed to do that, but that they can't be insulting, that they can't be demeaning, that they can't give orders to their moms. And mothers are very heavily socialized to believe that they need to put up with this stuff from boys and that boys will be boys. And that's not true. If she doesn't like how she's being spoken to, she needs to listen to that gut reaction. And you know, I watch these interactions a lot, for example, where a mom is telling a boy, well, you have to say you're sorry. And finally, he'll say he's sorry, except he'll say it in a way where he's still obviously didn't mean. He'll just go, okay, I'm sorry. And that has to not fly. It has to be like, no, we're not moving forward from here until there's actually a change in how you're being towards me. And if he says, where's my orange juice? Rather saying, oh, sorry, honey, I'm really busy. She needs to say, there's not going to be any orange juice this morning after you talk to me like that. No, orange juice is waiting till tomorrow morning. Now you can't talk to me like that. But the thing is, if she has a male partner, her partner's got to back her up on that. They had her stepped out or whatever, because it doesn't work. If she is the one setting limits on the boy, and he's not supporting that, and he's not doing it himself, or he's actively undermining her, there's going to be great limitations to what she can do. So those two things have to happen at the same time, the overall raising sensitive boys, and the messages, like we treat everybody equally, which means it's best to pair that with teaching boys from three years old about not being racist, about not being homophobic. In other words, they've got to have just a general sense from very early in life, that mistreating or looking down on females is part of prejudice in general. And we all agree that prejudice is bad. And the reason I'm underlining that point is because there are a lot of families where prejudice is not okay, except if you're talking about females, then it is okay. And that's got to stop. Well, I have two questions here. One is, how would you advise single mothers to handle this if they didn't have a male figure to back them up? And the second is you mentioned that a lot of the boys learn this from the male figures in their household, but I feel like what I'm noticing is that we live in this culture of hostility now where a lot of the prominent men in the world are for lack of a better word, assholes. And so they have a cultural environment that is reinforcing them to be terrible people. And so how would you advise both single mothers, but also just people who might have a great family setup but then the boy is still getting corrupted by all their forces? Like how would you advise them? Well, first of all, I don't think she needs a male partner that I really just think that if she does have a female partner, he needs to be on board or there's gonna be a real problem. Right. A single mother can raise boys in ways that really respect females if she's not being undermined by the rest of the world, but as you're pointing out, the rest of the world is also working against her. And nowadays when you try to restrict your kids' access to social media, they're really upset with you about it. And you have to deal with a lot of anger and resentment from kids 'cause they start to feel cut off from their friends. And that's something parents, to some extent, just have to sweat out in my opinion. Like your kids are gonna be angry at you and we're still gonna say, "Sorry, you can't be on your phone. "Sorry, you can't be on social media till you're quite a bit older." We're just not doing that. Or if you can talk to your friends on the phone, but let's focus on getting you and your friends together in person, 'cause also a social trend of kids simply getting together a lot less than they used to and hanging around on social media instead of physically getting together. But then we really need to look for ways to connect boys to good men. And there are good men out there. And I actually think there's just as many good men out there as they've ever been. I just think that the bad men are getting worse. But. (laughs) - There. - Including, there's a lot of great young guys. I mean, I see so many like high school and college age boys now, who are so cool, like they're hyped up on women's rights and stuff. And they're pushing gender stereotypes. So yeah, there's a lot of things to be really disturbed by. There's also a lot of things to be really encouraged about, but we have to figure out, well, how do we connect to those things? Like how do we get our boys connected to these other kids? And how do we get boys connected to different kind of men in their adult contacts? It can be hard to find these people. And you can sometimes find them through a faith community and sometimes other faith communities are just riddled with these real patriarchal attitudes. Sometimes you can find them through a boys and girls club. Sometimes there's big problems at the boys and girls club. It really takes a lot of digging around. And a single mom has only got so much time. Like she can't be an endless researcher. It's very, very challenging. - Right. Well, the other thing I wanted to ask about as well is that is there anything new that you've been observing just because I think these days, you know, almost everything is online. And I think that the usual tools that women had, you know where they met a guy at a bar or an event or a hobby has kind of been like, it used to be the norm, but now it's really not. And I feel like almost everyone I speak to is dating someone off an app. And I mean, in general, we feel like that doesn't really promote safety for women because there isn't really an element of any kind of vetting. A lot of these apps are essentially selling your data and so they don't really care about the kinds of people you're meeting. So is there anything that you would advise women who are using apps or who are meeting that they don't know to watch out for that could be a potential sign of abuse? - Well, I mean, the obvious thing is meet several times in very public settings before spending any time alone together. And as you're saying now, the dating app is all about presentation, right? It's all you're putting forward an image of what you wish you were or not even that of just how you want other people to think you are. And so it's tremendous artifice and that's a huge, huge problem. But there are a couple of other things because you don't tend to find tons of people even on a dating app that you want to meet. It's very tempting to just start saying, well, you know, this guy's wrong in three different ways, but there's a couple ways that he's right. And he kind of seems like a nice guy. So let's go forward. And you've got to keep a much shorter list. You've got to just routinely say nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. And it's discouraging, but you really need to do it. Otherwise, you spend so much time on people who end up really not being ready to give anything significant to a woman in a relationship. But then the last thing I would say is the trickiest, which is, you know, women are up against the fact that you've been socialized from the youngest of ages by heavy social pressure to be attracted to exactly qualities that you should be running 100 miles an hour away from. By movies. I think of Twilight, I'm thinking of 50 shades of gray. And that was just, you know, in the last decade or two. But obviously it far predates that. In the first 20 pages of 50 shades of gray, which is as far as I got, I couldn't stomach any more than that. But he has covered every warning sign in my list of warning signs that I share with women about early dating. Wow. About things you want to watch for from the beginning of a relationship, he covered them all. Like that guy is batterer, extraordinary, rapist, such, you know, horrible, horrible, horrible guy. And you're being taught that this is sexy, right? And the thing is that that kind of early conditioning is hard to break. Like you can't just wake up in the morning and think, oh, I need to change what I'm attracted to because I may attract it to things that aren't good for me. Like attraction runs deep enough that we can't just totally control what we're attracted to. Although over periods of years you can, actually, if you really work at it, you can reorient what you're attracted to. You can't do it overnight. But there's a side issue here about 50 shades of gray, which is that there's, because of the whole world of pornography and how awful it is, there's really almost no kind of healthy erotic, like non-pornographic sexual materials out there for women and men. And so something that is presented as being four women is like, oh my god, erotic of four women, that's great. And 50 shades of gray, I would not call erotic, that's pornography. And if you want me to explain what the distinction I make and I'm happy. be a do that, but it's totally pornographic, but that's a lot of why it gets away with doing that is because there's not a lot out there. That's for women so that you can get sucked into that kind of thing. But yes, that's just warning signs, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, all the boxes. It's so destructive. And yet you're being conditioned that that's what's really sexy. And I think that there's like a larger cultural narrative at play to kind of convince women that these kinds of disturbing portrayals of men are romantic. I mean, sexy is one thing, but it's also like this is desirable in a partner, which I think is scarier because I feel like we're just having this romanticized at a large scale where a lot of women are finally checking out of relationships altogether. And they're like, this is a very scary ecosystem for me in which to date with all my human rights being stripped away and what men just being a lot angrier than they used to be. And now it's like, you know, you hear all these things about like the male loneliness crisis and like the solution seems to be that women are the ones who have to solve this for men somehow. I don't know if there's any merit specifically for women to socialize men who are anti social because from what I understand of even from remembering what I read of your book, it seems like women trying to do that and fixing them. It doesn't go anywhere. It's a disaster. I completely agree with you fix the guy. A guy who's really kind, thoughtful man who's a little bit shut down emotionally, you may be able to bring along, but a guy who's like, doesn't treat women well or has negative attitudes or doesn't respect your opinions, forget it. You're not going to bring him along. And I forget if I explain this in why is he do that, but I've explained it in blog posts that I've written is that men's attitudes towards women don't come from their experience with women. Men's attitudes towards women come from their experience with men. And so there's nothing that there's very little a woman can do to change a man's attitude towards women. He has to start hanging around with different kinds of guys. And the parallel that I use with people is when you meet a white person who's really racist, you don't think, oh, this person must have had bad experiences with people of color. You think, oh, this person must have grown up and be hanging around the wrong white people. Right. Yeah. When we see a guy who's really hostile towards females, we think, oh, he must have had bad experience with females. No, it's going to fit that same pattern as a white person who's got bad attitudes towards people of color. It's about the same way that's about the white people that raised him and that he's been hanging around all his life. With a man, it's like about the men who influenced him growing up and the men he's been around in his thought life. You know, I talk about the temptation that a woman has to be like the ambassador for women. I say, you're going to want to be the ambassador for women and prove to him that women aren't so bad. And unfortunately, I understand it's all the best intentions, but it's not going to work because for now, you'll be like, if he'll say, oh, you're different from other women. And then that you're from now, who be saying you're just like other women. Right. Right. Because the underlying hostility isn't really going anywhere. But that metric would it be a good suggestion to women to observe his friend group when you're dating him because that says a lot about who he is as a person. Because early on in this podcast, I remember telling Rose, I was like, you're the thumb total of your five closest friends. And I think this is really true for men as well. I think it says a lot. And unfortunately, a lot of guys are kind of isolated, but, but women are not responsible for that. However, they can't fix that either. But yes, I think I want to know, for example, does he talk with friends about real stuff, or is it all was just 100% superficial? But I also want to know one thing that's kind of hard to find out, which is, are his interactions with males, largely about bonding against females? Because that's how a lot of guys operate is when they're hanging out with the other guys. They're talking bad about women, or they're talking in very objectifying sexual dehumanizing ways about women. And get a glimpse into that. Well, eventually you tend to, I think, if you're going out with a guy, but it might have to be going out with him for a little while, you start to see. And I always tell people, be very, very careful about anything that he says, like, I'm just joking. Or my friend was just joking, or we're just joking. Watch out, because that stuff tends to be not just joking. I mean, it may have been in the form of a joke, but it tends to be very revealing of really real issues. So don't, don't buy it when he says, oh, we were just kidding around. You got to have a sense of humor. Watch out. This reminds me of how, you know, they say in Vino Veritas, like, when one is in their cups of alcohol, that's when the truth comes out. I always feel like the equivalent of that with men is, I'm just joking. If you hear it, I'm just joking. No, that they're not joking whatsoever. Like, that's actually typically what they believe. And they're sort of testing the waters to see what they can get away with. Because it's a gradual erosion and broaching of boundaries and respect. Would you not agree? It's not like it comes overnight. But it's something that happens, I think, gradually over time. And so this is another way in which women tend to be bamboozled because they think, well, it was so good in the beginning, he was so respectful and I must not be communicating properly, you know, to those women who are just so unsure about how it could have gotten to how bad it is. Like, what would you say to them? And you just describe perfectly, by the way, exactly the kinds of things that go on, where he's on much better behavior in the early stages. Because on some level, consciously or subconsciously, he knows that that's, you know, he's not going to have a relationship. And let's, for at least a while at the beginning, he makes things look better than that. Then, yeah, then the slide begins into starting to more and more feel comfortable enough to show his true self. And we don't want to see his true self. And by that time you're dating him, you have investment. Your emotions are starting to be involved in it. It's you start to have hope and some things that you're really craving and longing for, you start to think maybe you're going to get met. So it's very tempting then to start to make excuses or let things go by. Then combined with all those messages, which you also just pointed to that women get that say you're overreacting, you got to just stick with him, love heels all, and all this, I'm sorry to say, but it's crap. It is, it is crap. So then you hit up against this stuff. And I think the way you just articulated is perfect. That you have to go on the assumption that actually, this is when you're seeing the real stuff. It's not the early stuff that was the real stuff and don't discount anything. And with respect to your Latin phrase there, take it seriously what he does when he's drinking too. And I know you you meant that more analogous to other situations, but it was also true literally of when he's drinking because it's all I was drinking. It's like, Oh, God, what people do when they're drunk, reveal so much of what's really true about. I always as you my meeting they represented the first few months. I'm like, this is his representative. This isn't him just yet, you know, that's right. He's a no his agent. That's great. That's good. I'm they like that a lot. Right. I think that that's the best way to see it because I think this was your book. I don't remember, but I remember somewhere reading that, you know, when someone is trying to charm you instead of saying, Oh, this person is charming. Ask yourself, you know, why are they charming me specifically? Because I think a lot of women aren't able to discern between a man being emotionally vulnerable versus weaponizing that emotion because a lot of women think that, you know, he opened up to me so fast and like, I could have a heart to heart with him like right away. And they see this as like a green flag and I have to let them know that actually it's not really a good thing that he's opening up to you quite this quickly because you've just known him like what 20 days less than that. And in most cases, he's just a stranger to you. And it's really hard to like impress upon them because they really want to believe in like this goodness of men narrative that he's just trying to be honest with them and it's not like a ploy or a game or like love bombing or something. And that's the thing. How do you differentiate between what is vulnerability and what is him just putting on a mask or a role to try to convince you to, you know, give him material to use? Well, the first thing I guess I would say is keep watching what he is orientation is towards you because so far, this is just about what his orientation is towards himself, you know, what his relationship is to his own feelings. But is he interested in your feelings? Is he actually thoughtful? Is he actually seat show signs of he's thinking about you? And like, is there any sense of balance there? So that's one issue. Another issue is what you already point to do is are the things just feel like they're happening too fast and you have to trust your gut about that. Like yeah, it's great that he's opening up. But if he's opening up at this really odd rate to be on guard about that. But a lot of what I end up saying about a number of things that are kind of in this in the gray area because as you're saying, it's kind of a gray area could be that he's actually a feeling guy, which would be a lovely thing is keep just don't decide yet. Keep your eyes open. And I have a similar thing that I say about charm in a different sense about charm in the sense of the guy who's very smooth and knows what he wants to do that evening and has a plan for you and says, oh, let's go do this and then let's go do this and he's poised and self confident. And we tend to take the attitude of somebody's very charming of oh, that's like two points in his favor and it's going to take me extra bad stuff to convince me that he's bad. And I encourage people to put charm in the opposite category say no, no, that's two points against him. It's going to take extra good things to convince me that he's bad. And there are some charming people that are good people, but charming people generally are bad, you know, more than half the time in my experience, charming people are bad news actually well more than half time, charming people are bad news. Why? Because developing charm is a lot of work. That doesn't come naturally to someone. They did that over a period of years by working hard to develop it. And so then you have to say, well, why? Why do they want to put so much energy into developing charm? Well, when a man is putting that much energy into developing charm, it's usually because he's into power over women. And he's figured out that that's a yet power over women. This is one of the things that I most say is that The abusive man's problem is that his attitude about an intimate relationship is not really about intimacy and connection. It's about power It's about what can put him in a more powerful position and so you want to have big radar out for it for well Is this starting to look like a power maneuver and that reminds me of another point that I think is important with all these different styles the Charmer the rapidly emotional guy the guy who you know, you're a little concerned about how he is with his friends Or you're concerned about his lack of friends because either of those can be a concern is you have to be challenging Early in a relationship and I don't mean be deliberately a jerk But I mean you have to be challenging you have to be deliberately uncooperative at times Because in early in a relationship when things are easy It's very tempting to think that everything is great because it's so easy But the thing is you can't see what a guy is like until things are not easy So you have to like deliberately do things like when he has a plan say actually that's not what I feel like doing tonight and see how he reacts to that You have to deliberately say like oh, you know, thanks for taking me somewhere But I actually didn't like the food that much you've got to deliberately be difficult That's not being a jerk those are things that someone has every right to say like no That's not what I feel like doing tonight. Or I didn't really like that food or no I need a night off tonight to hang with my women friends like do this stuff Not just in a natural way, but actually do it in an extra way do it on purpose We call it aim to be a problem once a month Good that's great. I like that because that's one of the only times you're gonna find out what's really going on is his reactions to being Thwarted that's what tends to most reveal where his issues are you know, Wendy This makes me think about the I don't know if it was glorious dinam, but somebody had the expression route They said everything is about sex except sex sex is about Paulo Have you heard this? I haven't heard that saying no. Yeah, everything is about sex except sex sex is about power And so I think I like when you were talking about how charm is often cultivated in order for a certain power to be Hell a power differential to be implemented right and I think that's what I think our listeners and myself as well Really need to understand is that for a lot of men It's not at what the possibility of a fulfilling relationship and a partnership You know and a lifetime of intimacy with someone. It's about the chance to hold power over another person So what if instead of looking for charm you were looking for things like is he fun? Does he seem free of ego? You know not big ego Does he have people in his life that he cares about and where you like how he talks about them like you like what he has to say about his Brothers and sisters or you like what he has to say about his friends Does he talk respectfully about his exes? And I don't mean you have to have great feelings towards them. We often don't have the best feelings towards our exes But talk about them in a way that sounds like he's talking about a human being that he had some difficulties with or couldn't get along with rather than talking about exes like they were pieces of dirt I think you can tell a lot how a guy talks about his exes and To really listen for what is his orientation towards People and particularly towards women And I'm not talking about the idealizes them because some abusers do like we'll talk about their mother like she's the greatest thing ever But I'm not talking about idealizing. I'm talking about really talking about people so it sounds like he's talking about people human beings This is something you actually mentioned in one of your quotes where you talk about how the idealization sort of the pedestalization of women is also another warning sign Yeah, because he's still not seeing her. Yeah When he's telling you you're perfect and when he's telling you you're awful Either way, it shows he's not seeing you because you're not perfect and you're not awful So that's one of the things you can just keep asking yourself is do I feel like he sees me? The crazy thing is I've seen this dichotomy play out in real life like in South Asia where there's like this massive goddess culture So people think that they're in the clear because they're like well, we worship goddesses But at the same time their intimate relationships with women in their lives is terrible But somehow it like it doesn't occur to them. They have this like compartmentalizing way of looking at life where they're like well, okay fine like these women are different But we worship goddesses. So somehow that's better like that means we respect women in general And I think like you know and a lot of these cultures women are socialized even in the US I think women are socialized to be really agreeable and Just downright people pleasers So I think for a lot of them is really hard to admit that they're being emotionally manipulated because they want to believe that the men in their lives Aren't trying to intentionally do something to them especially when it comes to sex right like it's like a lot of men We'll say whatever they need to if they're not that serious about you in order to get you into bed And I think a lot of women want to feel like they're the exception and not the rule So I mean one of the things I'm curious to know about is what is your advice to women who Have a hard time having boundaries with men because I think in general We always advocate that like prevention is better than cure It's better to just veto the kinds of men who are not good But then obviously there's some that are go through and that you date for a few days a few months etc And it's much harder to say no to people once you actually have a bond or relationship with them So how do you like cultivate this mentality of being able to push back and say no Well, let me say first that that was really interesting what you said about goddess worship and how it doesn't necessarily translate into treating women a differently That was really interesting and it clicks for me because it's saying well all respected woman as long as she's a goddess And that as soon as she's like a person then she's not worthy of my respect Yeah, that's pretty much it What I would say about boundaries which is something I think about a lot but I'm far from incredibly knowledgeable about is that The developing of strong boundaries if you really haven't had them takes time and what I would most recommend is getting hold of one of the best books And I'd be happy to tell you a couple ones that I particularly recommend and we can put them in the notes for the show that they can step by step through how to practice establishing boundaries on every front in your life not just with people you're dating or in an intimate relationship with And I've read a couple books that are just terrific in how thoroughly they break it down Which is if you've had no control over your boundaries or little control over your boundaries for a lot of your life Then it's incredibly helpful to have a book like that that breaks it down into very small pieces And helps you work on it a piece at a time, you know your boundaries with your friends your boundaries with your own kids boundaries with your employers like if you have housemates like really breaks it down Including how to deal with your family of origin which sometimes is where the roots are of having some real boundary problems And so you I'll give you a couple good recommendations to pass on because that's what I would most recommend and One other thing that it sounds like a lot of women now are already doing which I do think is really good Which some time of not being involved with anyone and focus on your relationship with yourself And with your relationship with your friends it's such a temptation like always have a man at the center of everything And it's very hard I think to create new patterns And let's you really step out of that whole scene for a while and just focus on the development of the things you want to develop This reminds me of the next question I have for you Lundy because I agree with you and that's something that my therapist has helped me work on as far as like literally giving me a blueprint For how to start to implement boundaries that was really helpful for me because I come from the opposite of that in my family Situation, but the question I have for you then is Then the fact that it can be very helpful for women to step away from men But how do we do that when we're at a current political and legal era Where more and more we are being confined and sort of Curtered into like a general tenor of having to have a man and serve a man and be Subservant to men if we want to have any hope of sort of personhood in this country and even worldwide It's a really scary Backlash time against depressed people in general against women against people of color against immigrants It's a really hostile a scary hostile time and The only solution that I know of is bonding together because there when when things get that hostile I don't believe you can solve problems individually by by changing your attitude or by reading another self-help book or By doing this or that I mean do keep doing those pieces of work that you're doing but people have got to bond together and My feeling I know we can't relive the past. It's a mistake to try to relive the past But we can learn some things from the past and one thing that I think we really need now is to be drawing on things from 60 70 years ago from the you know 60 years ago from the 1960s when they were just a lot of women's support groups and there were a lot of women's events and women's rallies and the women really need to get back to bonding with other women and I know this next one's going to be controversial Maybe you'll want to edit it out, but I think women really need largely to have those groups be people who grew up female And just otherwise the discussion keeps changing and heading off in other directions and I I believe back in real concrete organizing support groups women's rights organizations the grassroots kind of stuff That stuff has really slipped away. I've been involved in you know feminist politics for for more than 30 years since I came into the domestic violence field And there was much more of a movement a sense of being part of a of a women's rights movement When I came into the field we called it the battered women's movement and we all consider that are ourselves part of the battered women's movement. There isn't really any such movement anymore. And so things really have to go back to a lot of in the street agitation, and not just polite marches, polite marches are great, but there has to be a lot of stuff that's not so polite. - Yeah, the collective liberation needs to be renewed. I call it gender unionization, but I think the point stands. Well, before we continue on, I wanted to remind our listeners that if they want to listen to the rest of this episode, please head on over to the bonus content. We want to make sure that you're able to hear the full extent of this conversation that we're having. But again, lovely, thank you so much for your time. We know we have to let you go, but we hope we can invite you back again sometime soon and keep fighting the good fight. - Thanks so much, same to you, and this has been a wonderful conversation and good luck to everybody that's listening. - Thanks, Lundy. And Diana, to all of our listeners, what do we tell the Scroats? - Diana. - Bye, lad, and see you next week. - See you next week.