Man Shaming and The Patriarchy Virus

Foreign.

Shaming and the patriarchy virus. This is what we're going to be talking about today. I have noticed, and maybe you've noticed that there is a massive rise in the social acceptance of openly, publicly, behind closed doors, person to person, shaming men, right? Some people call this man shaming. But it's basically when people, women, culture, society, shames men for just being male, for having preferences that are male, for enjoying male oriented things. You know, maybe you saw this James Cameron comment, I think it was last year where he was like, if only we could get rid of testosterone. It's like, well, that's shaming the hormone that makes us what we are. Which is asinine. It's insane, right? I mean that, that testosterone probably helped him to produce some of the amazing works of art and movies that he did in his career. But it's become commonplace to openly shame in online, to screenshot, you know, what a guy texted you, or to record a man in public trying to pick up a woman or trying to talk to a woman and shaming him to, to shame a man for his male oriented behavior. Now the, the ridiculousness of this is as follows. 1. Shame is a very, very, very, very potent tool. It is something that many of us try and deploy to shift and alter our behavior. And you maybe grew up in a house where shame was deployed as a means to try and control you, right? When you are unruly, when you were loud, when you were maybe hitting, when you, you know, didn't do what your parents told you, maybe your parents deployed shame. What's wrong with you? Why? You know, why can't you just get this right? You know, where's the other 5%? Right? You bring home a 95% test, where's the other 5%? What's wrong with you? So maybe you're, you grew up in a household where shame was deployed to control you, to control your behavior, to shape your behavior, to shape your character. That shame will always and inevitably produce some type of a side effect. Resentment, hostility, animosity.

Some type of pushback, it will produce a side effect. Shame is not a healthy way to motivate or incentivize people. It is an effective way to motivate and incentivize them sometimes by. But it will not last and it will have a consequence. And so if you are a man or a woman who grew up being shamed and you've tried to deploy shame as a means of motivating yourself, changing your behavior, controlling your behavior that has a consequence, you don't like yourself, the way you speak to yourself is heinous. The way that you interact with other people is stunted because of it. But this has become commonplace in our society where when we don't like a man's behavior or we want men to behave a certain way, shame is the tool that gets deployed to try and do that. Now, it might work on some men, but for the rest of men, what it's going to produce is animosity, anger, frustration, hostility, rejection, and. And it will create a divide between men and women. And that is exactly what is happening in our culture. There is this large divide between men and women. And I see this all the time in relationships, right? It has become. And ladies, I'm going to speak to you directly for a second because it has become commonplace in the lives of women to deploy shame in relationships, in the workplace as a means of trying to get a man to. To comply, trying to get a man to do what you want, trying to get a man to act and behave in the way that you want. And the problem with that is, as I've said, shame is never a good motivator. It is never a good incentivized program in order to have a man show up, authentically show up in a healthy way. But it has become acceptable for women to deploy shame. And I tell you this because so many times when a couple comes to work with me, when I do work with a couple, what inevitably happens is that the man is receiving a ton of shame in the relationship. Now, this isn't universal. It's not every single time, but often what is happening is the woman is saying, I don't like something, I want something different, or I want you to behave a certain way. And what she's deploying is shame. What's wrong with you? Why can't you do this? Like, how come you can't just X, Y and Z and the shame and the belittlement sets in and the resentment on his side starts to build up and the divide and the disconnection intensifies. Now this, that dynamic between a man and a woman in a relationship kind of exemplifies what's happening in our society. There is a ton of hostility and shame being deployed to. To try and get men to comply with how women believe they should behave. And there's a lot that goes into this, right? There's so many different layers that we could talk about. But what I really want to talk about is something that I've called the patriarchy virus. For me, I believe that all of this stems from this notion of the patriarchy virus. And the patriarchy virus is very, very, very, very simple. It is the notion, the belief, the value system, that says that men are the oppressors and women are the oppressed, full stop. It is the notion that anything wrong in the world is wrong because of men. All the evil that's committed in the world, committed by men, all that is dangerous and harmful and bad and dysfunctional, that's a result of men or masculinity or the expression of masculinity or systemic misogyny or whatever it is. And that what men want is also bad. What men contribute is ineffective or not good.

And by contrast, what women want, how women feel, what women think, what women contribute, all of those things, those are good. So this is the patriarchy virus, then. This has been embedded into our communities, into our societies, into our culture, into the cultural conversation. Now, I'm not saying that all women believe this. I'm not saying that all women push this notion. I'm not saying that you listening to this, believe this at all, right? In fact, my guess is that if you're listening to my show, you probably have a pretty solid outlook on men. You probably like men. You probably enjoy masculinity. However, there are a large subset of people out in the world that do not like men, that think that men are the problem, that think that men have all the power, that think that men are the reason that everything in the world is wrong and dysfunctional. And because of this, we have not we. But. But the narrative is that this is a result of what? Of the patriarchy. And so what ends up happening is everything related to the patriarchy, everything related to men, should be quote, unquote, dismantled. And this gets pushed out through modern commentary, modern rhetoric, or modern narratives. And it is a purported way to create equality, which is a bit ironic. Creating equality, creating equity through the shaming, through the diminishment, through the. The degradation and the degrading of one entire sex, one entire gender. This is the patriarchy virus in a nutshell. And I remember last year I put out a video where it was specifically targeted towards men. And I said, guys, here, if I was single, here's what I'd be asking women on probably the second or third date. Tell me what you think about men. Do you like men? Tell me about some of the men that have been in your life. And I would listen very, very closely for a woman to then start to either confirm that the patriarchy virus has been embedded into her head, that, yes, men Are bad men are the problems in relationship because it creates this deep, disproportionate, oppressor, oppressed dynamic, where I would then know that if I was sitting across from a woman who was saying, you know, none of my last relationships works because the guys were X, Y and Z, or, you know, a lot of the problems that happen in our society today are a result of men. And, you know, men just need to rise up. Men need to be better. Men need to. If I heard that type of rhetoric, I would know that that person has become ideologically captured, that that person has been infiltrated by the patriarchy virus, and that I would always be seen as the fundamental problem in that relationship, because to that woman, I am the oppressor. I am the problem. And anytime that that dynamic is set up, here's the irony of it. Equality and equity cannot be possible. Equality and equity cannot coexist with the notion that I am an oppressor to you. It can exist because it sets up a automatic power dynamic, a one up, one down, one power dynamic. And in today's culture and society, the person or the people who hold the most amount of power are the perceived oppressed. And the person or the people who hold the least amount of power are the people who are seen as the oppressors, even if they are not right, even if you are not an actual oppressor. And so this sets up a really big problem because what ends up happening is in relationships, online forums, online conversations, is that people justify shaming men, saying things to men that they would never, ever, ever say to women, to children, to certain races or ethnicities. But they shame men. They deploy this tactic of behavioral control, coercion and compliance. The result is, is what we see today, Men checking out from relationships, men seeing marriage as a bad deal. And again, I'm not blaming it all on this patriarchy virus. Okay, I want to make it very clear because I can hear the YouTube comments coming. It's like it's more nuances. It's not that simple. I understand that. I understand that there are so many layers of complexity to what I am talking about. What I am saying is that I'm distilling this down to a fundamental idea that, that is so highly problematic to modern relationships that it needs to be addressed and talked about. Because the reality is, is that if you watching this video, whether you're a man or a woman, if you believe in your core that men are the fundamental problem with all of existence, that the patriarchy is the fundamental problem with all of existence, And I get that the patriarchy. The patriarchy is a system, is an idea, an ideology that people say needs to be dismantled. But at the end of the day, what's on the receiving end of that are men. And it's oftentimes men that do not hold the power, right? Like when people talk about wealth inequality, it's like, well, there's very few men that actually hold a lot of the wealth. And then the rest of the men that are working nine to five jobs, building bridges, you know, electricians, it's like they don't generally hold a ton of financial power, right? We don't generally hold a lot of the political influence, a lot of the corporate influence that is seen. But when you just take an ideology or an idea and you extrapolate it and, and sort of based it over and layer it over every single man you come into contact with and you say, well, you're just part of the patriarchy, that then becomes a problem because you have dehumanized that person, you have objectified that person, and you have objectified that man to then just become nothing more than.

The projection of how you see the idea of patriarchy. And so I think that we need to take a step back and not allow shame to be a tool that is deployed for any type of relational change, right? And let's just bring this back to you personally. We'll take it out of the esoteric existential notion and we'll bring it back to all of us personally. Shame will never produce a positive behavioral change in you personally, and shame will never produce a positive reaction relational change in your relationship ever. It might create a little bit of change for a brief period of time, but it will have a consequence that is negative down the road, I promise you. So shame cannot be used to try and.

Coerce other people into specific behavioral change. I see this all the time online where people are like, some people should be shamed. It's like, well, that won't work. You can try it. You can do it. It's not going to work. It's not going to get you the result that you want. So we have to remove this notion of all men bad. We have to check our bias, which people on one side of the political equation love to talk about all the time, right? It's like, you need to check your bias. You need to check your bias. Need to check your bias. Okay, check your bias. The notion that all men bad, all problems can be traced back to the patriarchy is an asinine and ridiculous notion that only leads to the fundamental systemic hate of men, which is going to likely, if you are a woman, leave you lonely, leave you disappointed with men constantly, and leave you never getting your needs met. And guys that hate other men or believe in this patriarchy virus use shame to try and get other men in their life to act the way that they want. Whether it's your father, whether it's your friends with another man online that you disagree with, that behavior is only going to disconnect you from your own masculine essence, from your own maleness in the first place. And it will create a rift internally, psychologically, with who you already are. And it will create a rift with your ability to build strong, trusting, loving, kind.

Brotherhood and relationships with other men. And so we have to begin to cancel the shame. Don't shame people for shaming. Just start with, with you. Stop shaming other men, stop trying to blame everything on men or men writ large. And let's all take a step back and see how we are contributing to the gender war, how we are contributing to the divide between men and women. Because I don't know about you, but I for one am tired of going online and seeing all the hate against women and all the hate against men and all the blame that. Well, if women just didn't this and if men just didn't that, it's like, really, all men, all 3.5 billion of them. All women, all 3.5 billion of THEM, really. So we need to take a step back and move aside the shame. We need to recognize that some of us have been infiltrated. I don't know how else to say it. We have this patriarchy virus inside of us. And I'm not saying that it's you if you're watching this. I'm just wanting you to look out for it and to see if you can challenge people that have that patriarchy virus. All men, bad. Every problem ends with men. Men are disproportionately the problem in relationships. Okay, let's challenge that. Let's talk about that. Let's poke some holes into it. So comment below. Let me know what your thoughts are on this concept. I'd love to hear it. Good, Bad, Ugly. Whether you agree with me or not, it's not about agreeing with me. It's not about agreeing with me. I'm more interested in the dialogue. So comment below, man it forward and don't forget to subscribe to whatever platform you are tuning in on. See you next week.