Elk Deer and How Women Love Us for OUR Racks

True master of several arts: history, philosophy, podcasting, martial and (almost there in…) economics–Thaddeus Russell just posted his interview with the sublime Warren Farrell, hated truth-teller.

Topics covered include gender roles, parenting, developmental psychology, the history of women’s and men’s liberation (former is much more storied and longer than the latter), the Cold War and even elk deer bulls’ racks.

That’s some damn good copy I just wrote! Listen/view here and then I have composed some key takeaways below.

• Thad often states (and I certainly agree with him in my own experience): “I love being a dad. I hate parenting.” Warren Farrell has spent a good portion of his life and career explicating why that is.
• Farrell began his illustrious career as an academic and public intellectual advancing women’s rights and challenging the shackles that come with traditional, survivor-mode gender roles. But ever since he advocated for children to have fathers based on overwhelming data, ever since he argued that gender role liberation must include men as well, well let’s just say he’s no longer in NOW’s good graces…
• Per Farrell, staid gender roles relegated women to be “sex objects” and men to be “success objects”.
• “Lois Lane was not interested in Clark Kent. Only Superman.”
• Women are not to blame, nor is the women’s liberation movement by and large to blame for the clear, current, and on-going degradation of boys and men. People, people in modern society have lionized the men who go off to war, fight fires, hammer away in steel mills, build towers, destroy their brains in professional sports. And should they die in such endeavors, they are canonized. In other words, men are disposable at war and work.
• Mothers tend to provide children with necessary empathy; fathers tend to provide children senses of righteousness and justice. Kids get messed up and become messed up adults without both.
• Elk deer females mate with the alpha males with the biggest racks. In order to get the biggest rack possible, the elk deer bull must consume 30% more nutrients than other elk deer, which when winter comes and food is scarce, endangers the very survival of the bull.
• On a personal note then… I am an alpha male because I have a big brain… Ladies? Hello? Does that work/do it for you?!… Damn–didn’t think so.

*NOTE: At least the big brain as rack did work on a special, special night in December 2007 at Farthings Four.