GENIUS FORUMS

In what will prove to be the Reasoning Show's most controversial production to date, host Dan Rowden and guests Rich Zubaty and Sue Hindmarsh walk the oily tightrope of the issue of Feminism and attempt to stride the gaping chasm of Woman without losing their footing and falling in headlong. In this episode we look at the politics, psychology and spirituality of the feminist movement and the female nature per se. Has feminism damaged or improved society and women's place in it? Have men be falsely demonised so as to facilitate feminist demands? Are women conscious of the dynamics involved? You be the judge.

The World of Woman

[Transcript available]

A lively show.

All three participants make some interesting points in what is a difficult topic. Zubaty presents better than I thought he would, making a lot of good mid-range observations, although he does come across as a little bitter at times - which, given the subject matter, is understandable. To his credit, he does think with some courage. Sue goes straight to the core of the issues with her usual aplomb. Some of the points she makes are very insightful. Dan links well with both and ties the points together nicely.

Had to laugh at Zubaty's lack of willingness to understand why he needs a blowjob every couple of days in order to function. He put it down to biology, but it is clearly psychological. That little episode revealed a lot about him, I thought.

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That was the most vile, biased diatribe I have ever heard. I actually had to grab the waste can because I thought I was going to vomit.

Rich talking about his ex taking over, always wanting more, not doing anything as she told him to do things - I had my house before my ex moved in. Somehow within 6 months after he moved in, he had entirely taken over the master bedroom and master bath as my stuff slowly moved into another room. When we got married I had everything paid off, and he had a great deal of debt. I ended up paying off his debt, and now I'm the one in debt - and he left the marriage debt-free. During the marriage, he announced that we were having financial difficulties, so I took some extra shifts. He took some vacation time and unpaid FMLA because he needed some rest to recover from worrying about financial difficulties. I could go on - and you could look up my previous posts on the topic - it isn't always the women who use and abuse others.

There are users and losers in each gender. There are certain things that are more common for women to do (both positive and negative) and things more common for men to do (both positive and negative). One gender is not all good nor is the opposite gender all bad.

As for Rich's rant about women sitting on chairs made by men, driving cars made by men, living in houses made by men - well the obvious retort is that those men were made for their first 40 weeks by women out of 50% raw materials from men, and 50% of their own raw materials - but both of these are petty, nit-picking, fight starting pissing and moaning. I worked in respiratory for a number of years in multiple hospitals, and in most of the hospitals, the women did at least twice as much work as the men. Different fields have different sets of experiences. None of us has experienced everything first-hand.

Men would be just as bad off without women as women would be without men - and actually if women don't start standing up and calming the men down, men are going to blow up the entire planet and neither gender will be around anymore. There are some peaceful-minded men - including the ones that these 3 broadcasters were calling "feminized" - and there is nothing wrong with finding a peaceful solution to things rather than just blowing the whole thing up. Both genders need to be able to reason better. Slamming all women is not going to promote the kind of cooperation we need to accomplish the ultimate achievements. It promotes petty, retaliatory snapping.

And the comments about men being more shy about talking about sex? Really? In the last week or so here we have seen screen names of pen15 and Monster Cock. We have never had screen names like bountiful breasts or tantalizing twat.

As for the draft - yes, if men have to sign up for the draft, so should women. A better and more reasonable alternative would be to do away with the draft for both genders.

I thought it was the best podcast yet. So timely for what I'm personally going through, too. This is first one that made me want to jump into the radio studio and participate during the broadcast. So many good points made by all three participants.


David wrote:

Well, it's clearly both, it's just that the psychological part is the one that we can actually do something about.



Well, I think we got a full-frontal look at everyone on that podcast, there's no doubt about that. I think Zubaty is not nearly as individualistic as Dan and Sue, so his vision of masculinity is more tainted. For example, I think the ritual of preparing men for a job when they're young and male initiation rituals are pretty feminine expressions of masculinity actually and don't really get to the heart of masculinity is very well. They're feminine social activities that are merely relatively more masculine than other ones like Christmas with the family or whatever. I think they're excellent starting points for discussions about masculinity, but he doesn't seem to take them to the next level and use them to point out what they mean for the individual. Well, I guess he does when he talks about hazing people on the construction site. I mean, don't people haze the new guy to make sure that he can stand on his own as an individual and support the team rather than being dependent on the team and functioning as dead weight? I guess he didn't really go into that, but I think it's an important point to make about it if you're going to go into it at all.

Anyway, great job guys, that was an amazing podcast! I'm still trying to absorb all the content of it. So many good points.

Do you have amnesia? Sue and Dan just spewed the same garbage they have been spewing all along.

Yeah, I think I do. Maybe the three of them should do another podcast.

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Yes, we have spoken about doing another one in the not too distant future.

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Elizabeth wrote:


Ah, proof of a job well done!

Your response also highlights how very attached people can be to Woman; for the comments Rich, Dan and I made are so obviously true that to not see them as such shows a far greater emotional investment in Woman than in the Truth.



Liz, the description you give of the relationship between you and your ex only reinforces what Rich was saying about women always wanting more. You obviously wanted your husband to be different than what he was. You literally wanted more from him. Your husband, on the other hand, seemed to know exactly what he was getting, and if your stories are true, he made the best of it.
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Very good show, with the usual limitations of having to use so many gender based generalizations. It's powerful that way but lacks quite a bit in exactness. Like memes vs genes, brain chemistry versus environment and random variations worldwide. These are questions of science and research versus personal experiences and will always be subjective and highly contemporary and as such always debatable.



But Elizabeth, your personal life stories only illustrate the masculine and feminine problem. You obviously contain some degree of masculinity that was way above what your ex had. So you experienced in a male role the abuse, childishness and irresponsibility of the typical feminine character. And the mistake on your side is this tendency to fall for it, take care of it and love it, surrender to it. Your feminine biology made this tendency even worse than you would have had as a male.

You can also see it as illustration how the 'meme' rules these days over both genders, from mother to child.

The only masculine trait that seems to be missing in your story on your part is the ability to take sole responsibility for every aspect of your situation. You were the creator and your ex was just responding on your lead, service and sacrifice.



It's correct that gender roles are a bit more complex but when we can map much of the psychological aspects onto the biological aspects in a historical context, it justifies to a certain extent a gender-based division. The shock value in itself is very useful to open some eyes and chase away anyone not willing to question or debate in a rational way.



Male doctors and surgeons are still considered the best overall with an unbeatable margin. Male nurses have a very good name as far as I have heard, often preferred over their female counterparts by colleagues. Some patients and colleagues fear the sexual and competitive elements but often that discrimination is fueled mostly by their expectations. But as you say, none of us have experienced everything first-hand.



Newsflash: waving a cock around is not the same as talking about sex.

Interesting points:

Rich couldn’t understand the subtle aspects of feminine psychology, mainly because he still had many feminine aspects within his own personality.

It was ironic of how he couldn’t understand that to be truly masculine, one needs to have more refined and subtle feminine characteristics.

It was good of Dan to point out that a sane individual has both refined masculine/feminine characteristics, whereas an insane individual has vulgar, more animalistic masculine/feminine characteristics.

Much of his attack on the feminine stemmed from his bitterness towards the female sex, and he didn’t seem capable of turning the criticism of the feminine inwards to examine his own behavior. Anytime his own behavior was examined, he always made a joke of it, disagreed, or went off topic in a direction that wasn’t so personal.

As you should know, my goal in life is to promoting peace grown out of rationality. Your podcast was the antithesis of peaceful, rational discourse. It was a woman-bashing fest, which is no better than feminazi man-bashing fests.



I wanted us to contribute to each other approximately equally, and I was willing to take on the onus of contributing more in an overall 60-40 up to 70-30 relationship. Not only did he stop contributing enough to even cover taking care of himself, but he started taking even more from me than I was willing to give, right down to violently and forcefully raping me.



Why should I take sole responsibility for his misdeeds? I do take responsibility for my contribution, and I did take enough responsibility to get a restraining order after a year of marriage (the divorce took another full year due to his delays) - but there is no reason for me to take full responsibility for things that were not my doing. It is equally silly for men to take full responsibility for things that are the woman's fault - so yeah, I do lack that silly masculine trait.



I disagree. If you want a rational debate, you must present your case in a rational manner - and then you only have a chance against rational people. By firing up the cannons at the starting gate, you immediately put the opposition on the defensive which naturally lowers their capacity to reason, and gather the irrational fire of extremists who really are misogynistic, and reinforce their delusions.



So are you saying that women talk about sex for practical reasons, whereas men are more likely to just try to show off their ability to be vile? Okay, I'll agree to that.

Actually, I did not catch that. I'll see if I can force myself to listen to it again.

One thing that I did notice was that Rich and Dan had similar enough voices that at a couple of points it was difficult to discern which of them was speaking.

Sue,

That would be sweet! I hope you guys can cover the approval/rejection dynamic a bit more, because what seems to me to be at the core of everything romantic is the constant flipping between the feelings of approval and rejection. I think if you wanted to secure someone's capture, you would simply try to make that dynamic as extreme as possible in order to deepen the person's emotions towards you, giving them strong indications of approval followed by strong indications of rejection, constantly flipping back and forth.

Elizabeth,



Elizabeth, the goal of enlightenment is to not be offended by anything. Just based on how you react to attacks on femininity illustrates your own irrational identification to your gender.

You never seem to understand that these are generalizations, and every generalization is incomplete. However, overall, Sue is correct in describing women’s difficulty in being philosophers. It rarely ever happens because a woman’s biology prevents her from being radically profound.

A man has his own preventative factors, but a woman has a much more difficult time, so difficult in fact that she usually never even considers it her entire life.

Have you ever noticed that the most intelligent women are always very masculine-looking? Intellectual women are always sexually unattractive because they are more masculine by nature.

Beautiful women always have the minds of children, whereas masculine-looking women are more intellectual.

The universe is basically illustrating the direction we should be moving in.

Well, I didn't mean to say that "shock value" implies irrational observations or a lack of founding in science, history or psychology. I only meant that most people seem deaf and blind, or irrationally hostile to the issue and there's no need to be too subtle, introductionary and long winded especially in a podcast. Another example who understands this would be James Randi when he deals with quackery.

You are on this forum for quite a while and have absorbed a lot of this stuff and still you want to vomit from this show. So I cannot imagine any political cautious approach with flowers at the starting gate that would really make a difference to the audience.

Again, the show didn't seem to have as purpose to convince people, only to connect a few people together. If one doesn't agree yet a little with the overall topic, even considering it would be beyond ones willingness to understand or even listen to. It's like a blind spot, it's there or not.

Having said that, I disagree with some of the thinking of the show in that femininity seems already spread over both genders to such a degree that it might not be worth calling for masculinity anymore under that name. It becomes then more of a technicality that much of the blueprints can be found in original biological gender roles.

In general I'm way closer in thinking to Zubaty than Hindmarsh and especially like his ideas about initiation into adulthood (manhood). The increasing lack of this creates an unhealthy society of kids, small in thought, small in desire and big in pollution and war.

Sure, but one should never lose sight of what is offensive or one becomes ignorant to that - and there is no such thing as an ignorant enlightened person.



I get equally nauseated when people insult black people, and I'm a white person. This has nothing to do with the fact that I'm aware that I'm a female. If you called yourself a man (Princess) I would not call you irrational.



Those who accuse me of this never seem to understand the damage that phrasing generalizations as universals does.



Put these pieces together. I seriously doubt that you actually meant to say that the universe is directing men to procreate with non-intellectual women.



And if I, after being on here a year and absorbing what the admins claim to mean underneath the "shock value" statements, am distracted by the appeal to emotion that this podcast delved into - how can we expect someone less seasoned than I am to even bother to listen to the whole show - or even come back to listen to other podcasts?



I agree that the lack of definite initiation into adulthood, like was done in so many cultures (but even when it is done in American culture it gets watered down to near meaningless ritual), is unhealthy and draws some offspring to never leave the nest. It is unfortunate that a lot of girls who have babies when they are young do so as an initiation into womanhood. It is less common for males to sire a child for this reason, although especially amongst southern US black males, it seems more common.

I found it strange that Rich said (in connection with this) that males must be told what to do while females are born knowing what to do. Basically he countered his earlier claim that women are useless because the world is made by men by implying that without women to tell men to build things, men are not going to figure out to do anything for themselves. I'm quite sure that if there were only men, and reproduction was accomplished by fertilizing sheep with clones or clone-blends of men, men would still have figured out how to create labor-saving devices and made life more comfortable than living like wild beasts.

Brilliant show, definitely the best so far. And to think, Ryan thought it would be boring to have a show where everyone agrees! :-)

Also thought Rich tried to blame too much on basic instincts rather than ignorance for his feminine behavior. He exposed his one short-comings as soon as he announced he needed a blow-job and a meal cooked for him every day he comes home from work. Or in other words, he still needs mom around to fix him supper and rub his belly when he's feeling beat up.

Elizabeth wrote:



Why? Your egalitarian views are nauseating. All races are not born equal. For instance: As a whole, the Asian races are clearly more intelligent than the Black races. Your inability to perceive inferiority in others makes you inferior. Grow some masculine balls damn it!

Elizabeth wrote:



Yes, what I am saying is that natural selection is backwards. Men are attracted to the dumbest females, so the gene pool is not improving, the species is remaining collectively dumb. However, wise people could consciously choose a mate that is more masculine, and she wouldn’t be all that beautiful as a result, but she would produce intelligent offspring, rather than unintelligent ones.

Nick wrote:


Rich didn't actually agree totally because he didn't fully understand half of what Dan and Sue were talking about. Moreover, Rich is what gave the audience something to criticize because he was the weakest link. For instance: If Dan, David and Sue did a show together, there wouldn’t be much to criticize afterwards. Although, it would be a very truthful and captivating show, but after it was over, there wouldn't be any key moments of dissonance that would be remembered for discussion.

I wouldn't be too hard on Rich . . . he's by far the best guest they had on there in terms of creating interesting discussion. Plus, with the blowjob comment he was really just pointing out a dynamic of the male mind that he felt was universal. He later implied that he doesn't actually engage in any sexual contact with women at all. Who knows, maybe his contact with Sue and Dan will cause him to update his theory on sexuality.

There is a difference between an insult and constructive criticism.

Matt wrote:



this statement is a tad womanly isn't it Matt? Grow some masculine balls damn it! Don’t be afraid to hurt people’s feelings, that’s the only way someone can grow. Compassion is brutal and ruthless.

I already mentioned this to you once before, but you continue to defend people's emotions like a motherly figure. Destroy that protective mother within Matt.

And perhaps he was the best guest, and that gives me even more reason to be hard on him in case he’s reading this. Suffering is the only road for him to travel down if he's going to mature…

The strongest plants grow in the toughest environments, and if you try to protect a plant, by weeding all around it, watering it, spraying it with chemicals, and doing everything to take care of it, guess what? you get a feeble pathetic looking plant that dies prematurely.

So put down that watering can Matt, and pick up some insects, and help me chuck them at some of these plants.

Actually, Rich was referring to biological health benefits of sex. (This article sourced from Men's Health magazine.)

It sounds like his ex was possibly on par with my ex - so I can relate to his ambivalence. No sex is better than a bad relationship, but if the sex and the relationship can be good, that would be better than isolation. The questions we start asking after being burnt enough are "is it possible?" and "is it possible for me?" or "is it still possible for me, after what I've been through?" These are natural questions after going through hell. The unhealthy response, though, is to cultivate venom that would incite others to make more hell. The healthy response is "Yes, this sucked, this is why, and this is what to do to make sure that doesn't happen again." Granted that one conclusion is to stay out of it, and that may be the right answer for some people. If people can become mentally healthy enough to enjoy the benefits with a low risk of negative consequences, that's even better.

Swimming is good for most people, but it should not be done by someone who just had open heart surgery today, or people who had a tracheotomy, or currently have an open tracheostomy. That does not mean that people with tracheotomies should picket swimming pools. Same thing with sex and relationships. Just because I have not had sex in about 4 years and it might not ever be something I'll do again does not mean that I'm bashing it for all people. I'll speak out against people having sex for the wrong reasons or doing anything that will hurt each other, but I'm not standing around saying that since I'm not having sex, no one else should have it either. That's childish, and narrow-minded to not recognize that different people have different needs and different capabilities.

Hopefully he'll update his view on a number of things, but that remains to be seen. He was quite taken with the concept of society as Woman as he's seemingly not come across it before, which is a shame because if he thinks about it he will see some of the weak points in his thinking. His bitterness too is a problem in that he tends to speak from the heart instead of the brain and that causes him to miss the nuances that exist in these issues. His rhetoric leads him dangerously close to a complete dismissal of the role women play in society, which is obviously rather unfair. We will be doing a follow-up show on this one, but we'll have to decide on the exact format it will take.

I always love the way this issue polarizes people. In one corner, you have the people who instantly grasp the nature and purpose of the "woman" philosophy, can perceive its larger significance of it, and affirm it completely. They understand that it has nothing to do with generalizations or putting women down, but rather it is all about exposing deeper psychological and spiritual realities. And then in the other corner, you have those who only see hatred, misogyny and bias.

The "woman" issue is a bit like a hazing exercise for men. It puts men under the pump and tests just how deep their consciousness runs. Those who have the individuality and turn of mind to understand the woman issue and can discern its significance are far more likely to have the turn of mind needed for wisdom. Those who don't have no chance.

Diebert is an interesting case, though. It seems he can't really decide which way to go with it. Conflicting forces seem to be in play.

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The problem with this hazing exercise is that those who fail the test are left more firmly anchored to the wrong path. I recognize that you and Kevin only want to deal with those who have a chance of reaching the top rungs, but the top rungs won't be there unless someone stabilizes the ladder.

David, do you understand what I'm getting at here?