Welcome back and thank you for joining us.
This part of the show is where we look at mental health matters and all things to do with psychology.
Stay with me because I'm just going to read out something that came out in the census.
The transgender and non-binary people have been counted for the very first time in the 220-year history of the census for England and Wales. It revealed that 262,000 people identify as a gender different to their sex registered at birth.
Now the England and Wales census also recorded sexuality for the first time with 1.5 million people aged over 15 or 3.2% identifying as gay or lesbian, bisexual or other sexual orientation.
The Charity Stonewall, which has long called for the inclusion of gender and sexual identity questions, described the results as an historic step.
Canada has also recorded similar figures.
Now a lot of people, I have to say I don't include myself in this, but a lot of people will be asking why is LGBTQ+ so prominent? Why do we keep hearing about it?
I've heard people on this station and call us into many other stations say why do there seem to be so many LGBTQ or transgender or why is this such a thing at the moment?
Well one reason is because people feel that they can talk about it more easily. That's not to say there aren't significant barriers and discriminations, but that's one issue.
Is there anything else into the equation?
Well this is a question on my next guess.
I'm thrilled, thrilled, thrilled to have. I know he got a huge response last time he was on the show from Israel.
Dr. Sam Vaknin, Professor of Clinical Psychology.
Sam, welcome back. I mean our last talk, I can't tell you how interesting it was. Love it, love it, love it.
So gender wars and the emergence of a unigender, as I said, I mean so many people are saying why is this a thing? What's going on? What is your take on this?
This is part of a historical process. The two world wars created a shortage of males and then capitalism has transitioned into a paradigm of eternal growth, constant growth, continuous growth, which required the introduction of women into the workforce and also as consumers.
Of course we only have 24 hours a day and if you spend your time at the workplace and then spend even more of your time consuming, then you have less time left for family, intimacy, marriage and so on and so forth and there has been a tectonic shift in the way genders interact and team up to reproduce and to perpetuate the species.
This is one of the greatest revolutions in human history in my view and the outcome was the emergence of what I call the unigender.
The unigender is a genderless person, someone who identifies less with social constructs such as gender, stereotypical male or stereotypical female and identifies much more, for example, with a career or with a lifestyle or with a sexual preference or orientation rather than with gender.
Gender was an organizing principle. Gender is performative, it's a social construct, it's actually a script, it's a form of acting and so now we have different other scripts.
So studies by Lisa Wade and many other scholars are showing that women are defining themselves as masculine while men didn't complete the transition from masculine to feminine and this is called the Stonewall Revolution.
Women have become men but men have remained men. End result, we haven't seen them.
So let me, when you say that, that's taking it away from the social construct of what a man does and who he is and what have you, because before, up until recently, we had all sorts of, as you say, a script for what men were identifying by what they did, their jobs, their roles in the family, etc. and likewise with women.
With the erosion of that, with both sexes having, you know, with a lot of crossover, if you take yourself away from those constructs, from those definitions like a man puts out the rubbish and does what have you, you then become what's floating between the two because what I find is interesting in many African societies before colonialism, before invasion and all this before slavery because the tribe had to work together to get the harvest in. They couldn't, you know, one lot do one thing and one not do another. Everyone had to work together.
The constructs of male and female that we have in the West that we recognise, they weren't like that and so you had many quote unquote genderless people that you looked at and you couldn't readily identify as being a male or a female because people enveloped both sides just to, just so the tribe could exist.
Then along comes faith and religion and what have you and says no, men do this, women do that but it's something that existed centuries or, you know, hundreds of years ago and you're saying now it's coming back if you like, it's coming to the West.
Yes, what's happening now is not that the genders are exchanging scripts. It's not a swapping of scripts. It's a conversion, convergence on a single gender and the gender is masculine.
Gender is becoming masculine regardless of genitalia.
Now, the construct of gender emerged originally when people began to create surplus wealth. Prior to capitalism and prior to industrialism and prior to urbanism, we had hunter-gatherer societies.
When we transitioned to agriculture, following the agricultural revolution, we started to generate surpluses. Surpluses accumulated as wealth and you needed to transmit this wealth from one generation to the next and to do so, you needed to control reproduction. You needed to be sure that your child is your child and not someone else's child and to accomplish this certainty, you needed to imprison women, essentially, to imprison women, to be sequestered and this is when gender roles emerged culminating in the Victorian era.
But today, of course, the emphasis is not so much on reproduction. There are numerous mechanisms for transmitting wealth. Everything is contractual. Scripts are fluid. Sex is fluid, etc.
So there's no need for the old constructs such as family, such as marriage. Marriage has declined by 50 percent. That's five zero percent from 1990. We don't need these institutions anymore.
However, it is very unfortunate that we have converged on a single gender that is toxic.
Both women and men... Why? Why is it toxic?
It's toxic because women have adopted a male role model, which is psychopathic, narcissistic, aggressive, bullying, dysempathic. Women did not adopt a male role model, which is hardworking, altruistic, empathic, loving, compassionate, caring and protective. Women are emulating and imitating the worst conceivable men and men are doing the same.
So we have a toxic convergence. The uni-gender is a toxic convergence.
So why is that? Is it because it's still seen as all of those negative values that you talked, the narcissistic one, the aggressive onesare still seen as the tools of power? Is it because being male or being seen as being more male or having more, quoteunquote, male qualities is seen as the path to having power and control?
Men have not become more feminine. Men have remained stereotypically masculine, almost a caricature of masculinity. Women have transitioned to toxic masculinity rather than men. Men have remained stuck there.
So we have a situation where everyone agrees that values such as ambition, callousness, ruthlessness, suppression of empathy, competitiveness and so on and so forth, everyone agrees now, men and women alike agree that this should be the guiding light. This should be the northern star of one's life.
Today, two and a half times more people say that they would prefer a career to a relationship lifelong. 38% of people in the United States are lifelong singles by decision.
So we have created a masculine world which is a caricature of what real healthy masculinity is. And then we have adhered to it male and female alike. And this is the unigender. It's a toxic, sick, pathological construct.
Now, what about gay men then?
A lot of people would say that, and it's a generalization, I know, because, you know, but a lot of people would see very gay of you, like very camp men, let's say camp, because, you know, you could be camp and not gay, but very camp men as having what we see as female qualities.
Or is that just a guise? Is that a caricature of female qualities?
Many women would tell you that the best thing that could happen is having a gay friend, one you can trust without the constraints of sexual expectations and even sexual assault.
Because sexual assault is on the rise. Sexual practices are heavily influenced by pornography. Heavily influenced by pornography, and these practices have entered the daily sexual practice of the vast majority of young people under age 35.
Sex today is a ritualized form of extreme aggression. There's nothing there anymore.
Yes, please.
Really? I mean, there are people like Andrew Tate, I don't know if you've heard about that influence, is Andrew Tate.
And then there's the Incel, you know, the whole Incel movement as well, which is women hating, feminine quality hating, if you like, and promotes violence against women and what have you.
But I mean, many of us would see that as something that's fringe.
But let's just come back to the previous point that when with gay or very camp men, then where do they lie in all of this? Do they not have more, quote unquote, feminine qualities or is that a guise?
Feminine and masculine, as I said, are social constructs.
So of course a guy can be feminine. A guy can be feminine without being gay.
Femininity is simply a set, a list of traits and behaviors which denote, for example, enhanced empathy, caring and connectivity rather than aggression and competitiveness, which are stereotypically masculine.
But gay men aside, I don't see any other enclaves of femininity even among women.
And when I said that sex is ritualized aggression, regrettably, it's also among the gay community. Sex in general is becoming way more aggressive. For example, the incidence of choking on sexual dates has quantupled in the past 10 years alone. Anal sex had replaced vaginal sex as the main practice and anal sex is very painful to women. So there's an orgasm gap.
Women experience orgasm six times less than men in most sexual encounters which are not committed, which are not in committed relationships and so on and so forth.
Obviously, we just went, sorry, Sam, just because we're talking in a day, we've got to be slightly less graphic. But do you think that's because of the rise of, and you mentioned pornography and we talked on this show about many young people learning about sex through pornography.
But coming back to the role of the roles of men and women and what you're saying about women becoming more, you know, take up the negative qualities of being masculine. Is that the way you see it? That's the way it's going to go? That's the way it is? Is it a fad? Is it a tide? Or is it this is what's happening to humanity that we'll see more and more and more?
It's interesting that I'm just thinking of, apparently, there are more when it comes to actually, and that's another issue, about people who say I'm not born the sex that I am, if you like, and having, you know, changing their gender through surgery and what have you. There's quite a big increase. I know there's a big increase in women, at least if they don't go the whole way, but having their breasts removed. And there's quite a big increase between more so than women doing that than men, because it's so difficult to come from a position of male power, if you like, to, you know, transitioning to a woman, because you may have the operation, what have you, but then your status, everything changes so much.
So, you know, do you see this basically, I'm asking just to finish up, is this the way it's always going to be? Is this the beginning of a tide? Or is it a trend?
No, I think that's the way it's going to be. And I think that's the way it's going to be for several reasons.
One, women, men have walked away, men going their own way, men have walked away. They refuse to accept responsibility, they refuse to commit, they refuse to invest, they refuse to form families, they refuse to engage in relationships, and so on and so forth.
In the absence of men, women have to be men. They have to fend off for themselves, they have to work hard, they have to make money, they have to attain financially dependence, and they can't trust men to be there for them, as they used to.
This is point number one. Point number two, capitalism and the technologies, various technologies, encourage women and men to be atomized. They encourage them to be self-sufficient, to need no one and to interact with no one, because there's a very simple trade-off.
Any minute you give to your spouse, any minute you give to your boyfriend, any minute you give to your child is a minute taken away from Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. And so there is a built-in incentive for technologies and capitalism to destroy your intimacy and your human relationships because they take you away from them.
Capitalism today is built on an unsustainable paradigm, it's built on a paradigm of eternal growth. And so for capitalistic societies to grow eternally, they need to generate consumption all the time, they need to interpolate you, they need to brainwash you into consumption.
Now if you are a single and you work, then consumption becomes your religion and your anxiolytic, your anxiety reducing activity. You consume in order to reduce or control anxiety.
And this is precisely what capitalism wants, the current iteration of capitalism. So everyone is encouraged to live alone, to consume Netflix, to consume online, to not interact with other people because it takes away from profit. Everything is bottom line oriented.
And of course women play the game because it's the only game in town.
And the irony is, this is a male game, it's not a female game.
Third and fourth generation feminism sold out women to men because today women construct themselves to fit into a male world. They behave, they convert themselves into sexual objects for the male gaze and the male grasp and the male use. This is more of a male. There's a lot there, Sam. I'm sorry, I'm just like, whoa, there's a lot there and I'm sure, I mean, I'd love to discuss it even further. I know there's a lot there, a lot there.
Sam, I hate to cut you short because it is a very provocative what you're saying and I'd love to go into it furtherand indeed we must on another showbut unfortunately have run out of time.
But wow, lots to think about. Sam, that's why I love talking with you because it makes smoke come out of people's ears and go away and consider things and at least think things through.
So please, Sam, do come back and join us on a future show.
Dr. Sam Vaknin, Professor of Clinical Psychology and that doesn't make you think, however you think about that, I'm sure you're all arguing about it somewhere in your household and whatever you think, but at least we've made you think, if that doesn't make you think, nothing will.
Dr. Sam Vaknin there on why he says that we've all come to one sex and it's not just about sex, it's about society, it's about consumerism and a whole lot of other things.
Wow, lots to think about there. We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to come back to your phone calls and messages of which there have been lots.
Back in a moment.