During this pandemic, I have developed some extremely worrying new habits. One of them is talking to my coffee mug. Her name is Minnie, and we are old timers.
The other day, all by my lonely self, cry me a river, I spoke to Minnie and asked her, Minnie, why do women behave the way they do? Did you watch my latest video, where I bemoan women's tendency to emulate and imitate psychopathic men? Where I explained that the fact that women provide free sex disincentivizes men, removes the incentives for men to commit and to invest and to create families, for create, etc. Did you watch this video, Minnie?
I asked her, and Minnie said, of course I watch this video. I watch all your videos. I'm your biggest fan.
But let me tell you something, said Minnie. Women are behaving this way because no men are left. Men are pathetic. They're not even mugs.
Shocked by this revelation from my trusted coffee mug, coffee cup, sorry, I decided to delve a bit deeper into the issue.
And so today we are going to discuss men.
What's wrong with men and how what's wrong with men?
Drove women to behave the way they do today, which is extremely dysfunctional and problematic.
But the focus of today's video is not going to be misogynistic as usual. It's going to be misandrist for a change.
Okay, Shoshanim Chavivin.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, and I'm also a professor of psychology to the detriment of all my students. No exceptions.
And so today we are going to discuss the state of menhood.
Let's start with some basic statistical facts.
Compared to women, men are uneducated. More women graduate from colleges throughout the world, by the way, it's becoming a global trend, not only in North America. But more women are graduating from various higher education institutions than men.
Now we know from numerous studies that the best predictor of lifetime wealth and lifetime income is your level of education. If you don't have an academic degree, if you don't have a postgraduate degree and so on and so forth, you're going to earn much less.
Women are closing the gap in terms of wage with men, and they far outweigh men in terms of cumulative higher education. Men are underachievers. Men are underemployed. Men are overrepresented in menial, dead-end make-job jobs.
And of course, men are resentful. They're resentful because it is the natural tendency of human beings, and some men are human beings. It's the natural tendency of human beings to blame others. It's called alloplastic defenses. We are never responsible for what's happening to us. Everyone else is responsible.
The more narcissistic men become, the more they tend to blame others for their mishaps, misfortunes, failures and wrong choices and decisions.
And so men are resentful. What do they do best? They slack. They sulk. They act as atomized losers and failures. They are defeated by life. They have thrown in the towel. Defitism.
Defiction.
So men have given up, have given up and have retreated to the dens where they play video games, according to statistics.
Most men nowadays play anywhere between four to six hours a day of video games. Yeah, it's a men activity. It far outweighs sex and dating, as we shall describe soon.
Now men are widely portrayed, both by men and by women, as emasculated, castrated, effeminate. They have lost their virility. They are no longer men. They had become women.
The truth is, this is wrong. The truth is, it's not true. Men are not more effeminate than they used to be. If anything, they are more bullying. They're more psychopathic. They're more narcissistic. They're more abusive. They're more predatory, according to statistics.
There is something called the stalled revolution. That's a clinical term. It's used in the literature. It means that women describe themselves in masculine terms. Women identify themselves more and more as men, classical, traditional men.
Women regard themselves as having taken over the traditional gender roles of men.
Then men, on the other hand, had not discovered their femininity. Men did not find in themselves the softness, the empathy, the networking skills, the emotionality, etc., that women excel in.
Men remained cavemen, and women are becoming cavemen.
This convergence is what I call unigender.
Unigender creates gender vertigo, not my term.
Gender vertigo means simply that people don't know anymore how to behave like men or women.
Gender roles have become fluid, in flux, fuzzy, ill-defined, ill-boundaried, so people don't know how to believe.
There is a problem with sexual scripts, with gender roles, and with gender scripts.
This creates competition between men and women. If women pretend to be men, if they curse as men do, if they sleep around as men do, if they drink as men do, if they compete in the workplace with men, if they are closing in on the wage gap, if they are much more educated, etc., men feel threatened. They feel threatened. They feel confused. They feel angry, and this leads to misogynistic movements, misogynistic mass movements, and I'm referring, of course, online to MGTOW, men going their own way, incels, involuntary celibate people, and red pillers, among many other groups.
All these groups are narcissistic and misogynistic, but we can find misogyny, and especially narcissistic misogyny, also made in the mainstream.
For example, a lot of the work of someone like Jordan Peterson is what I would call soft misogyny. It's like soft pornography. It's misogyny light, and misogyny goes hand in hand, as I said, with narcissism and entitlement, and could lead to very untraverable outcomes, shall we say.
There have even been cases of murder by incels, incels who had murdered women, because they had felt that women were mistreating them by withholding sex, etc.
So misogyny is a serious problem, and it's a mounting problem, but it is the fever, the fever of the disease.
The disease is the conflict, the war between the genders, and men are losing, men are losing this war. Women are going to take over because women are much more qualified for the postmodern society, postmodern environment.
Women network, women have empathy, and so on and so forth, and these are skills that are in great demand in modern life. Women are caregivers, for example. The healthcare sector is exclusively growing. It's an exclusive growth sector, and so on and so forth.
So women are taking over, and men react with misogyny.
But to a very large extent, men have themselves to blame.
Let's start with the most basic interaction between a man and a woman.
No one wants, when I was young, a sex. Most men are hyposexual. Many men are asexual.
I advise you or recommend that you watch my video on youth sexlessness. My video on youth sexlessness contain references to numerous studies.
Men, especially young men, are not having sex.
The dating, dating is down by a whopping 60% since 2008. Men have shifted to playing video games. That's the main occupation of men under the age of 25. All men, regardless of age, are addicted to pornography.
The problem with pornography is that it teaches you the wrong sexual practices. It teaches you to objectify mainly females to reduce women to body parts or to treat them as sex slaves to be degraded.
I refer you to studies by Lisa Wade and others.
There is a problem of sex between the genders. It's becoming increasingly more difficult for young men and women to find sexual partners.
Consequently, sexlessness enforced celibacy. Involuntary celibacy, to borrow from a misogynistic movement, had exploded not only among men, but also among women.
But largely, it is men's fault because studies show that men are withdrawing. Men are actually, contrary to all stereotypes, men are avoiding sex.
This created a new shift in attitude among women. Women are now looking for pliant, better males, males who are inferior to them. Women are becoming much more narcissistic according to many studies, twins for example, and women are becoming more psychopathic.
So like all narcissists, they want to surround themselves with inferior intimate partners.
So women are looking for inferior intimate partners even for one night stands.
The whole premise of the MGTOW movement is counterfactual, is not true, is wrong. Women are having much less sex than let's say 30 years ago.
And the few who are having sex are having sex with males who they perceive to be inferior to them or what the MGTOWs call better males.
But this is of course the outcome of the unavailability of young men. Unavailability because of all the trends that I had described in this video and I'm about to describe.
So sex, sex is gone, dating is gone, porn addiction took over and we will come a bit later to the implications of this critical fact and dangerous development.
Now men are immature, narcissistic. How do we know?
Because there are studies, studies by Twenge, studies by Kit Campbell, studies by many others which demonstrate conclusively that narcissism, narcissistic traits and behaviors and even dark triad narcissism had exploded among the young and especially among young men.
So young men today are five times more narcissistic, the young men in the 1980s. They're immature. That's the Peter Pan syndrome. They're eternal, eternal adolescents. They refuse to grow up. They refuse to own up. They refuse to commit. They refuse to invest.
We'll come to all this a bit later.
In this environment of childlike or childish men, women recoil because they find men repulsive, off-putting. A woman doesn't want to date a child. A woman wants to date a man.
But where are they? These men, the garbage men, they're nowhere to be found.
So women gradually gravitate to much older men, even men my age. Women age 20 and 30 are now dating much more than they used to men age 50 and 60 because there are no men left in the age brackets 20 to 40.
Additionally, there's another trend of women gravitating towards minorities, minorities and foreigners from countries where there is still a modicum of traditional gender roles and preservation of the conventional interactions between men and women.
Countries such as Italy, countries in the Middle East, etc.
So we see in North America, for example, many more women dating members of ethnic minorities, which come from these places because they feel they are with men. North American males are widely described by females as non-men, not men. They're not men. They're not interested.
We should remember that all these wannabe men, so-called men, imitation men, fake men, you call them what you want, all of them are children of divorce. Many of them are children of single parenting.
In North America, 40% of all children grew up in single parent households. Divorces are about 50% of all marriages end in divorce. And in the majority of these marriages, there are children involved.
So these are generations from 1990 on. These are generations which are said, and I don't want to say defective, but the said and impacted ones of divorce.
Now this has a dual effect, somewhat paradoxical, somewhat mutually exclusive and contradictory. One effect is these men want to avoid the same traumatizing mistakes that their parents had committed.
These men watch their fathers. They see unhappy marriages. They see abuse. They see dysfunction within the dyad, within the family unit.
And they say, I'm not going to have the same. I'm not going to get married. I'm not going to have a family. I'm not going to be my father.
And so they avoid women.
And the other outcome is they give up without a fight.
The first sign of trouble in the relationship, they are out. They bail out. They don't invest in a relationship. They don't commit. They don't try to compromise, to negotiate, to sort out the problems, to try to seek help from the outside.
No. Today, the first sign of trouble, you bail out. And you bail out because your next intimate partner or so-called intimate partner is swipe left away. You just have to swipe left or right. And you find the right part, the next partner.
So people go through a whirlwind, men especially, go through a whirlwind of one-year relationships, six-month relationships, one-month relationships. And they call it relationships.
But of course, these are not relationships. These are extended one-night stands. These are glorified hookups. These are not relationships if you don't invest and you don't fight and you don't move heaven and earth for the woman you love.
So in these so-called relationships, there's actually intimacy aversion, intimacy anorexia. And a great number of these relationships actually open relationships with both members of the couple, the ostensible couple, date and have sex with other men and with other partners. And in the case of women, with other men.
The rise of open relationships, polyamory, open marriages and so on is indicative of a pathology, a social pathology. It's not the outcome of a more liberal approach to sexuality and a redefinition of the marriage institution or a redefinition of what it means to be in a relationship.
No. Open marriages, polyamory and so on are the outcomes of giving up. These are the sad and tragic outcomes of having realized that intimate relationships are no longer an option. They're no longer a possibility within intimate relationships and abuse had exploded. I mean, just go online and have a look.
Narcissistic abuse, other forms of abuse. Abuse is now a defining feature of intimate relationships. The victims of abuse have flooded the dating marketplace and rendered it accessible because they're hypervigilant. They are a bit narcissistic and psychopathic themselves.
So abuse creates a vicious cycle. The victims and the perpetrators reenter the dating scene, thereby polluting the dating scene, making it impossible to form healthy, new connections and relationships.
But abuse is exploding. There's no, there are no studies on incidents and prevalence, but with the exception of physical domestic violence, all other forms of abuse had literally skyrocketed in the last 30 or 40 years.
And then there's, there are many men who are predators. These are men who, you know, you hook up with in parties or clubs or through dating apps. They're predators in the sense that they objectify women. They use them for sex only and then dump them cruelly and refuse to, to remain in touch or in contact. And even if the woman is, after a one night stand, she still wants a cuddle. She still wants some warmth, a display of emotions, even faked emotions, something affection, attention, compassion, something. These men are incapable of all these. They're incapable of faking it, but they're incapable of all the genuine versions. They are predators, they're psychopathic and today all dating venues, all the options for dating are actually hijacked by these predators. You can't find normal, normal men in any of these. You can't find, it's extremely difficult to find normal men on Tinder or in nightclubs or in dancing bars. Forget about it. Even hotel bars are interested by these predators.
So predatory attitude of the remaining men, those who still are looking for sex because majority of men are not looking for sex and not looking for relationships. They had given up on both.
We know this because there's been a collapse of marriage rates and because the overwhelming majorities of men and women are single and had been single in the preceding year in each and every year since 2016.
Men today are parasitic. They're exploitative. Boomers, children, majority of Boomers are not women, are actually men. Boomers study longer. They study forever. They never finish their studies. They live with their parents well into their 30s and sometimes 40s. About one third of all men above the age of 30 currently cohabit with their parents at their parents' expense.
The numbers are much higher in other countries, for example, Italy. So men had become utterly parasitic and exploitative.
Now, of course, if you talk to young men, they will tell you, well, the economy, they will whine about the economy and about COVID and about this and about that. I have a surprise for these young men or wannabe men because they're not men. They're children, spoiled, petulant, repulsive children. I have a surprise for these cadre of lost men who could have been men had they shaped up and shipped out. I have a big surprise for them.
Previous generations have dealt with minor issues such as World War II, the Great Depression, the Spanish flu, and in the 14th century, the plague. Previous generations have managed somehow. They didn't live at their parents' expense. This is a copout. This is narcissistic entitlement. This is utter unmitigated rubbish. These excuses, I'm living with my parents because I can't find a job or because the economy is bad or because there's COVID and I don't want to put a mask or I don't know what other nonsense, these so-called men can come up with.
And women look around and they see these weasels, these losers, these failures, these walking, talking defeats, these slackers, unkempt, disgusting. Women look around and they say, biak. There's a collective biak. Men are disgusting, simply disgusting nowadays.
Had I been a woman, I would be celebrated till the end of my life or I would travel very, very frequently to some other country to find men desperately.
And there is this huge movement of women. I don't know if you realize, women are moving all over the globe desperately looking for men. They do it via the internet, social media, creating apps and so on. And they do it physically. They travel. For example, there are many, many women from Eastern Europe who travel to Southern Europe and men from Southern Europe travel to Eastern Europe and Asia.
I mean, everyone is desperately looking for real men and real women. They're nowhere to be found. They're nowhere to be found.
The men of today, they are irresponsible. They're unreliable. They're entitled. How do we know this?
Because there are studies, there are studies about the conduct of millennials and Z generations, the Z generation in the workplace. Every employer will tell you, every single employer on earth will tell you how horrible these generations are in the workplace, how you can trust them, how they are incapable of critical and analytical thinking, how they are just cliche-spewing fools. I mean, they really suck. They're not committed to anything, not to intimate relationships, not to a career, not to workplace, nothing. It's a carpe diem. It's a day-to-day existence, one day at a time.
And many of these men are reckless, defiant, impulsive. They feel immune to the consequences of their actions because everything is a simulation. Everything is reality TV. Everything is a digital version of itself. Everything is virtual reality.
They don't come to make the distinction anymore between what is on the screen and what is outside the screen. They live within the screens and within the screen. Nothing much happens. There's always the backspace button or something. Go back. You can always redo. You can always erase your mistake.
Not in life, but they're not in life. These men are not in life. They're not in reality. They're cocooned. They are dummies and mummies.
My heart goes out to young women, absolutely goes out to them.
There's never been a generation with fewer men. There's never been a greater asymmetry between qualified, beautiful, amazing women, and amebas, plankton. I don't know what zoological metaphor I can use to describe these non-entities that pass for men nowadays.
So my heart goes out to women because they're forced to behave like sluts, like narcissists, like psychopaths. They're forced into these roles. These are reactive roles.
When women had gained ascendance, when they had gained equal access, equal rights, and so on, the backlash by men was such that no men were left.
So women are today forced to fulfill the traditional roles of women and the traditional roles of men.
If you look at addictions, of course, the vast majority of addicts are actually men. There are women who are alcoholics and drug addicts, of course. No one is disputing this.
But the vast majority of men are men.
There are two psychological parameters where men predominate. Aggression, most aggressive acts and aggressive people are men. And addiction, most substance abuse addictions are populated by men.
I mean, these are men who are doing this. So men are addicts as well. They're addicts and they don't want relationships. They have no relationship skills, no intimacy skills, no social skills. It's a pandemic of autistic deficiencies among men.
What do men do? Virtue signaling. They enroll in mass victimhood movements. Jamboree. It's great fun. It's like camping. And they go into this mass victimhood movements, sporting badges and banners and speeches and I don't know what. And they signal virtue. It's a narcissistic act. They don't do this in one on one interactions.
Studies show that in one on one interactions, these very people are actually psychopathic and narcissistic.
Studies in the last two years have demonstrated conclusively that many participants, especially dominant and prominent participants in these victimhood movements are actually psychopaths.
So they are using virtue signaling as a substitute for real life and the skills that you would require in real life.
And this is the picture of modern masculinity. Some of it is toxic. It's small minority. This is toxic masculinity.
But there's a small minority. The vast majority of men are not toxic. They're just not there. They're absent. Elvis is not in the building anymore. They have left.
And now women are all alone. And of course, men, especially in misogynistic movements, men tend to blame women because they have this conspiracy theory that women had somehow conspired with legal institutions and the apparatus, the machinery of the state to take over men's assets and deprive them and denude them of all the life's achievements. And I don't know what else. It's a conspiracy theory.
So of course they blame women.
But if you look at history, history is absolutely clear.
Number one, men enslaved and mistreated women badly. Number two, men had liberated women. Men did this. They invented the pill. They invented technology. They gave women equal rights, etc.
So men enslaved women, men liberated women. But then having liberated women, men were shocked by the fast, amazing ascendance of women within less than 40 years. Women now constitute a majority of the workforce. 43% of households, the primary breadwinner is a woman. 63% to 67% of college graduates are women in many professions from law to teaching. Women predominate gradually in the medical world as well.
I mean, men were shocked. Men were shocked by the acceleration and the unforeseen takeover by women. And they interpreted this takeover as a hostile takeover. And they reacted. They reacted by absenting themselves, by giving up. And so they withdrew.
And women found themselves orphaned.
Because I believe that women miss men. I believe that women want men. It's a fun experience when you have men around, you know? And it's a fun experience when you have a woman around.
Intimacy is built into, hardwired in our biology, in our hormonal endocrine system. Intimacy is not a social construct. It's a biological construct.
So is sex. Gender is a social, cultural construct. And that's why gender can be fluid.
But the rest is biological.
Women transgender, they transition from one biology to another. It's not a social thing.
And so men had denied biology and forced women into the traditional roles of men.
But honestly, women had been slaves for at least 5,000 years. They don't have the capacity, the knowledge and the experience to be men. They don't know how to play the gender role of a man.
Now that they are forced, now that women are forced to become men, they don't know how to do it.
So what they do, women, they imitate bullying, psychopathic, narcissistic men because they think they misidentify. Bullying with strength, the misidentified narcissism with self-interest and boundaries and assertiveness. They misidentify psychopathy with fake it till you make it and the way to win the game and to realize the American dream.
And of course, women need a few centuries, a few centuries to accommodate themselves to the new realities. As men do, it's a new world. It's a new normal. It's a new reality.
Of course, both genders have to accommodate, to digest, to accept, to reject, to do something with this new universe.
But men had abdicated. They packed their things and they left women to fend for themselves and, may I add, for their common children.
It is unconscionable what men had done. It wasn't coordinated. It was not a conspiracy. It's just that men had experienced a massive notification, narcissistic mortification or narcissistic injury. And they reacted as all narcissists do. They sulk, they become aggressive, they hit back, they become vindictive, they become predatory, they become abusive, etc.
Narcissistic rage. If we don't shape up as men, we're going to end up in a world without women.
Because many women already had been men for too long. They don't remember how to be women. And many generations of women, two or three generations at least, had never been educated to be women. They didn't have role models of a woman around. They had masculinized women.
This told revolution. We are taking as a species and enormous risk. We may end up being in a world where everyone is a man with two sets of genitalia. Sexual attraction will die, procreation will die.
And yes, we do need children more than ever. Why?
Because about 25% of the global population are old men like me. And old men have a tendency to do two things, to consume the resources produced by young men, by young people, and then to die. We need children more than ever to sustain the welfare state, to support the elders in our population, all the cohorts.
But these children are not forthcoming in the majority of industrialized countries and in many not so industrialized countries. The replacement rate is not accomplished.
In other words, women don't create enough children to replace part of a population that is dying.
So the population is shrinking, sometimes dramatically. Of course, in other parts of the world, there's overpopulation and too many children. But it's not relevant.
Because you can't export and import children. It's not a commodity.
What had happened between men and women is a calamity, the likes of which had never happened before in human history.
And I'm very worried about the future.
Because to some extent, I'm not sure we have one. I'm not sure we have one.
And why do I care? I mean, I'm 60 years old, I probably will die. I'm still talking to many.
You know, in a while.
So why do I care?
Well, I care because I don't want us to disappear. I don't want us to disappear.
I think that overall we were an interesting, fascinating, sometimes beautiful experiment. We're going through by far the greatest upheaval in human affairs. Millennial old organizing principles and fundamentals are being challenged and torn asunder.
Every transformation has its costs. The current transformation involves losses too many to enumerate.
One of the major ones is the disappearance of intimacy and relationship skills, as I mentioned. Sex is now a mere mechanical release, leveraging the bodies of strangers on so-called dates and hookups. Food and dining are now relegated to gorging on junk food and microwave dinners.
Majorities of men and women are single. They lead largely sexless lives. The frequency of dating had declined by 60%, 60% since 2008. People had resigned themselves to a lonely existence for the rest of their natural lives.
Communal institutions and social safety nets have been rendered obsolete by recent trends.
Friendships, marriages, childbearing, intimate relationships, face-to-face interactions have gone the way of the dodo long before the pandemic.
We no longer press the flesh. We press buttons. We press icons instead.
Our only friends, quote-unquote, are random passers-by on the misnounced social media, really anti-social media.
Can our species survive without intimacy? Possibly. Maybe yes. Would such a dystopian future be worth living for, living in?
I'm not sure.
The young are born into this new normal. They see nothing wrong with it. They think that's the way of the world.
But what about us? What about an old codger like me? What about us?
We still harbor the memories. We still recall a smile and a handshake and making love and sitting around the campfire.
Where do people like me go from here?.