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Nancy Pearcey: Understanding The ‘Toxic War On Masculinity’ · Worldview Matters With David Fiorazo

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  Welcome to World View Matters, discussing controversial issues, discerning current events,
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  defending biblical Christianity.
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  No topic, off limits.
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  And now, here's your host, David Firazzo.
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  Hey, friends, God bless you, brothers and sisters in Christ.
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  Thank you so much for tuning in and sharing the podcast.
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  Let us become socially acceptable to express open hostility against men today.
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  The Washington Post asks, why can't we hate men?
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  Almost half of American men agree that these days society seems to punish men just for
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  acting like men.
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  Bestselling author of Love Thy Body, Professor Nancy Pierci is here today to explain how
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  secularism has villainized the concept of masculinity.
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  And it seems the primary target is Christian men in America, her latest book, which we'll
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  be talking about today is called the toxic war on masculinity, how Christianity reconciles
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  the sexes.
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  This reveals surprising answers to at least three big questions.
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  Where did the idea come from that masculinity is toxic?
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  The second question, what impact did secularism have on the script for masculinity?
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  And the third, and there's many, many more, but these are three big ones, how do Christian
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  men shatter these negative stereotypes?
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  Professor Nancy Pierci is the author of the toxic war on masculinity, as well as Love Thy Body,
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  the soul of science, saving Leonardo, finding truth, and total truth.
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  She is professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University.
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  I wanted her on this podcast for a long time.
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  She's been quoted in the New Yorker Newsweek.
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  She's been on Huckabee and other outlets.
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  She's highlighted as one of the five top women apologists by Christianity today and hailed
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  in the economist as America's preeminent evangelical, Protestant, female, intellectual.
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  Welcome to the world view of matters, Nancy, good to have you.
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  Thank you.
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  It's good to be here.
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  I appreciate it.
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  Yeah, that was a mouthful.
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  I couldn't barely get that out.
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  But a very important book and you've written about this before in these topics and you
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  comment on these, you do a lot of interviews on these.
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  So let's start with you just responding to basically why this book as a follow-up to
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  Love Thy Body.
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  Yeah, well, my attention was caught by the kind of quotes that you started with.
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  You know, the one that you mentioned, the Washington Post saying, why can't we hate men?
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  That was the one that really caught my eye and I said, I've got to write about this.
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  But it's everywhere, the Washington Post editor said she tweeted, hashtag, kill all men.
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  And then said it was a joke and speaking of jokes, you can buy t-shirts that say things
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  like so many men, so little ammunition.
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  And books with very blunt titles like, I hate men and no good men and I'm men necessary.
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  And then what really is a bum, my heart actually was that men are jumping on the same bandwagon.
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  A male author wrote a book in which he said, talking about healthy masculinity is like
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  talking about healthy cancer.
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  And then this one you may have seen because it was in the news just a few months ago, the
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  director of the movie Avatar said testosterone is a toxin that you have to work out of your
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  system.
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  So this is the first thing I wanted to do in the book was where is this coming from?
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  Why does the secular world get its view of masculinity so wrong?
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  You know, how can we critique it as Christians and how can we offer biblical alternative?
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  So how far back in your estimation in your studies, do you think this, there were probably
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  catalysts for this kind of thinking this ideology, which is so much, the LGBTQ or so many
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  things come, the feminist radical feminism and other things, does it go back to the fifties?
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  It seems like in the forties and fifties, America was somewhat balanced and well adjusted
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  and family oriented, but maybe I'm wrong, just share some insight on that for us.
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  Yes, so this was really surprising because most people think it probably started with
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  second wave feminism, 1960s, but when I started looking at the research, it turns out
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  that you can find this negative language applied to men already in the 19th century.
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  It starts after the industrial revolution because before that men worked alongside their
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  family members all day, the wives and their children on the family farm, the family business,
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  the family industry, and so the cultural expectation on men focused much more on their caretaking
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  role.
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  In fact, surprisingly, the vast majority of the literature on childbearing and parenting
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  was addressed to fathers.
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  Today, if you go into a typical bookstore, they're addressed to mothers, but fathers
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  were seen as the primary parent because they were home all day and so they were interacting
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  with their children just as much as mothers were.
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  And so the question is, how did we lose that?
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  The industrial revolution took work out of the home and so of course men had followed
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  the work out of the home into factories and offices, and for the first time instead of
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  working with the family members, people they loved and had a moral bond with, they were
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  working as individuals in competition with other men.
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  And as you can imagine, it was a very different environment.
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  And that's when you see the literature start to change.
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  Already back then, people started to say, men are losing that caretaking ethos.
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  You know, they're beginning to be egocentric, self-seeking, greedy, acquisitive, turning
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  their jobs, their career success into an idol.
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  That was a common phrase back then, by the way, that the society is secularizing and
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  men are turning their work success into an idol.
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  And so actually that's what was surprising is it started back in the 19th century and
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  of course that does also indicate what we need to do to fix it.
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  If it was started because men were separated from their families all day, the solution
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  has to be, can we find ways to reconnect fathers with their families, even in industrial
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  age, other ways we can tweak the workplace and get fathers to have more time with their
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  families?
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  Wow.
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  I mean, there's so much that goes into this to the modern attacks on the family make this
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  even worse.
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  I want to give the website's friends, I didn't give that up front, but Nancy's website
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  of course, Nancy Pierci.com.
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  In the book, five star reviews, it's doing incredibly well over on Amazon, the toxic
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  war on masculinity.
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  So you say, Nancy, the Bible calls men to be both tough and tender, both courageous and
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  caring, men who know they are made in God's image can be full persons, reflecting all the
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  rich dimensions of God's own character.
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  So let's start with the good news.
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  People often accuse evangelical Christian men of being oppressive.
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  You know, they're all against the patriarchy, right, prone to abuse, but you make the surprising
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  claim that they test out as having the lowest levels of abuse and divorce.
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  Please explain this because people are hearing the opposite all the time.
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  Absolutely.
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  I sort of stumbled on this research and I was as surprised as anyone.
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  You know, I was doing my research on the secular view.
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  Then I ran into the sociological research on Christians and said, oh, wow, I've got
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  the answer.
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  You know, but what happened is, you're right, the secular narrative is that Christians are
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  if anything, exhibit A of toxic masculinity, I'll give you just one example, it was easy
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  to find.
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  But the co-founder of the church to movement, which followed the Me Too movement, said the
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  theology of male headship feeds the rape culture that we see permeating American Christianity
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  today.
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  Wow.
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  And what happened is social scientists were listening and saying, but where's your evidence?
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  You're making these charges, but where's your data?
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  And so they went out and did the studies.
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  And I cite about a dozen different studies in my book where they find that evangelical
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  Christian men who are committed, who tensures regularly, who authentic in their faith,
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  actually do test out as the most loving and engaged husbands and fathers, though wives
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  test out as the happiest.
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  And by the way, they do interview the wives separately.
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  I'm constantly asked that.
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  So I have to mention that they're going to be separately.
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  Christian couples, Christian fathers spend more time with their children 3.5 hours more
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  per week than secular men.
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  And couples divorce, as you noted, at a lower rate, 35% lower than secular couples.
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  And then the real surprise is that they actually have the lowest rate of domestic abuse and
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  violence of any group in America.
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  Sometimes a quote can kind of crystallize it, so let me give you a quote.
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  The sociologist who did the largest study is from the University of Virginia.
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  And to give you a sense of his stature, he gets published in the New York Times.
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  So this is a New York Times article in which he said, direct quote, it turns out that the
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  happiest of all wives in America are religious conservatives, fully 73% of women who hold conservative
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  gender values and attend church regularly with their husbands have high quality marriages.
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  So this is not a pep talk from some religious later.
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  This is solid empirical research.
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  This is evidence-based findings.
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  We should be very confident about bringing it into the public square to defeat the secular
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  narrative, but also under the churches, because it's not there yet.
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  I had to go digging in academic journals to find this.
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  So it's not in the churches either.
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  We need to bring this out where we can use it to encourage and support Christian men
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  who are, in fact, doing very well.
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  I'm glad I'm sitting down, because you said that even the New York Times reported this.
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  So I love where you said, where's your evidence, right?
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  Because they put out the talking points, and they don't feel like they have to defend them
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  because it's a barrage of accusations and criticisms against Christian men in America,
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  and it has become toxic.
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  But in the book, Nancy, 32 images and a study guide for either personal or a small group
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  study, your book says men are being torn between two competing scripts for masculinity.
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  What are these two scripts?
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  Yeah, I put this right at the front of the book, and I have to tell you a little bit of the background.
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  It's the most controversial book I've ever written, which surprised me, you know,
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  because my earlier book on Love Thy Body was on abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism,
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  and I just had no idea that masculinity was a bigger trigger word.
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  Wow.
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  I always do a lot of reading groups on my books to rub off the web edges,
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  and when they would tell their friends and family, they were going to a manuscript on masculinity,
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  invariably, the first question was, who side is she on?
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  And men tended to assume that a woman writing a book on masculinity would be a male bashing feminist,
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  and more progressive types tend to assume that you were a red pill, you know, culture warrior.
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  So I put this at the front of the book to be able to say, look, you're not either pro or con
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  masculinity. There are different versions out there, and this came out of a study by a sociologist,
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  and the sociologist is very well known, it speaks all around the world.
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  And so he came up with a very ingenious experiment to find out what young men themselves
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  are feeling these days, and he asked them two questions.
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  First, she says, what does it mean to be a good man?
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  If you're at a funeral and in the eulogy, somebody says he was a good man, what does that mean?
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  And the sociologist said all around the globe, young men had no trouble answering that.
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  They would immediately start listing things like honor, duty, integrity, sacrifice,
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  do the right thing, be a provider, be a protector, be responsible.
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  And the sociologist would say, we're doing that.
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  And they'd say, I don't know, it's just in the air we breathe.
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  Or we would say the men are made in God's image, and they do have this universal innate sense
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  that their unique masculine strengths are not given them to get whatever they want,
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  but to provide and protect those that they care for.
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  It seems to be part of general revelation, or Romans 2, we all have a conscience.
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  But then he would follow up, the sociologist would ask a second question.
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  He'd say, what if I say to you, man up, be a real man?
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  And the young men themselves would say, no, no, no, that's completely different.
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  That means be tough, never show weakness, suck it up, win at all costs, play through pain,
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  be competitive, get rich, get laid, I'm using their language.
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  And so he concluded that men do feel trapped between these two competing scripts.
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  That there is this innate and universal sense of the good man.
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  And I find that very encouraging, that men do have a sense of being made in God's image.
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  And these were not just countries with a Christian background.
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  This was around the whole globe.
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  But they also feel cultural pressure to live up to the quote-unquote the real man.
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  And those traits are quite different.
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  Not that they're all bad, we want people who can hang tough in a crisis.
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  But if it gets separated from a moral ideal, then which it is in the secular world today,
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  then it can slide into misogyny, dominance, control, and so on.
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  But this, it also gives us a better way to deal with these issues.
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  Most men don't respond very well to being called toxic, like nobody would.
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  So instead, can we tap into that innate universal inherent knowledge, what it means to be the
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  good man. And that gives us a much more positive way to approach these issues.
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  Oh, friends, so much more to come. We're speaking with Nancy Pierci, the book, The
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  Toxic War on Masculinity. You get on Amazon or her website, nancyperci.com. We'll be right back
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  Back with Nancy Pierci, so I wanted to ask you about this before there's so many questions I have,
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  but I want to skip ahead because I think of what Hollywood has done. And I, you probably know
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  better than I do. I'm thinking of how they portrayed men in the 70s, 80s, 90s, particularly everybody
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  loves Raymond. Raymond was just an idiot. Men were really portrayed as almost useless.
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  Um, dumb, you know, bumbling unnecessary. Maybe, um, they made a mockery of so here's your thoughts on
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  that this strategy must have started even in the media and Hollywood. Go ahead and share what
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  you know about that. Yeah. So the homeless Simpson pattern, right? Where fathers are portrayed as
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  a bumbling idiot. One of my sons loved the baronstein bears and the father was always the stupid one.
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  Um, and, you know, we all know that, but most of us don't know where it came from. Yeah.
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  And it turns out once again, it started at the Industrial Revolution because when fathers
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  were taken out of the home, they were no longer with their children all day. And so they got sort
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  of disconnected from the family dynamics. They didn't know their children as well. They didn't know
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  what their children were feeling and thinking and experiencing throughout the day. At already in
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  the 19th century, I was just shocked when I saw this. You start to see fathers portrayed as
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  irrelevant, superfluous, and incompetent. I thought really all the way back then. But what we
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  don't realize, you see, is we're so used to fathers being out of the home that we don't realize
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  how traumatic that was at the time. People felt like the family had just been gutted. You know,
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  1842, parents magazine said, the greatest source of domestic sorrow today is paternal neglect.
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  And another one said, the main state, the central, the central person of the home, you know,
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  is hardly able to live with his family anymore. And the president of the Women's Christian
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  Temperance Union, who many historians say was the most influential woman of the 19th century,
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  said the issue facing the family today is father absence. And here's how she put it,
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  God is our father. And yet the prototype of the divine is gone from his family from Sunday to Sunday.
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  And so when we look back at that, we realize this was really a huge change. And historians say
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  things like it is especially hard for for worries, right? Since we're talking about masculinity,
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  girls at least still had their mother in the home as a model. But boys no longer had a day in
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  day out model of what it meant to be a man. And so historians write things like this was the first,
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  you know, identity crisis for boys, you know, that boys got out of touch with the adult world.
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  They lost their connection to the world of adult males. And so it was much harder for boys than
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  for girls. And of course, that's what we're seeing all the way up to today, whereas, you know, boys,
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  boys are the ones who are falling behind in school. You know, boys are the ones falling behind
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  at all levels of education, you know, all the way through high school, college, you know, the
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  average college now is 60% female, 40% male students. And then when the adults were men are falling
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  behind, men are more likely than women to be a dick of the drugs and alcohol, mentally ill, suicide.
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  Unemployment has gone way down. It's not showing up in the unemployment statistics because they
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  stop looking for. So researchers had to dig deeper and they tell us that male unemployment is
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  at great depression era levels, which was also shocking. And then life expectancy has gone down as
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  well. Women's has stayed the same. So it's not a general trend. But a magazine called The New
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  Scientist had an article on this data and it concluded the greatest demographic factor today for
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  early death is being male. So I'd say it's time for us to have compassion on boys and men and
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  start looking at, you know, aren't there maybe some programs we should have to help boys and men
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  that they are the ones who really need to help these days? Well, were you just listed rattled
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  off education, health, employment, why do you think are are speed so many people ignoring these
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  very real problems facing men today? Well, you know, the first book written on boys falling behind
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  in school was called The War Against Boys. It was by Christina Hoffsommers who herself as a feminist.
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  But she reports, she calls herself the rational feminist. And she reports that every time she tried
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  to push for some kind of special programs for boys, it would be shot down by feminist groups
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  because they after this, if it's a zero sum proposition, you know, that if you help boys,
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  you're not going to help girls anymore, which is not true, you know, we can do both. You realize
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  that the reason the girls pulled their hat is because they did get a lot of support.
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  1972 title nine, 1994 gender equity act, millions of dollars were poured into equity workshops
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  and curriculum and training materials. And the idea was we're going to bring girls up to where
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  boys are. Nobody anticipated that girls would shoot right past the boys, but that's what happened.
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  They've shot right past them. And so now we need to say, well, we gave girls that kind of support.
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  Maybe it's time to give boys that kind of support. And fortunately, I will tell you,
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  there's a new book out by a liberal writer. See, this issue has gotten coded conservative,
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  like it's conservatives who care about boys and men. And that was another reason.
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  Liberals were like, no, we're not going to talk about this. But fortunately, there's a liberal,
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  as the name was Richard Reeves, he's at the Brookings Institution. And he took the fun.
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  She was told, do not touch this issue. And he still did. He wrote a book called of boys and men.
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  And so now he's making it okay for liberal people to say, hey, you know, maybe it is time to say
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  that we need special programs for boys and men. So that's a good sign at least.
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  It's getting out of this sort of conservative ghetto. And it's becoming more acceptable to say,
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  boys and men need help. And let's talk about some programs.
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  Well, so I hope we have time to squeeze in. Two more questions with Nancy Pearce. Your book says
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  the Darwinian theory of evolution normalized many traits in men that today are labeled toxic.
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  How so? Oh, yeah, I love that question because some of my book I go through several stages
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  of how the script for masculinity turns secular. And that's one of the most important. And yet it's
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  one that we never hear about because most people think Darwinism is about science. But the social
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  Darwinists immediately began to say, oh, the men who came out on top in the struggle for survival
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  would be the ones who were ruthless, brutal, savage, barbarian, and predatory. And so instead of
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  urging men to live up to the image of God in them, they began to urge men to live down to what
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  they called the beast within. You know, they're presumed animal nature. And that's not just historical.
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  That was, that was the psychology is the new label for what used to be called social Darwinism.
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  And there's still books being written with that same message. A best-selling book called The Moral
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  Animal said the human male is an oppressive, possessive, flesh-obsessed pig giving men advice
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  on how to have a good marriage. It's like giving Vikings a booklet on how not to pillage.
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  I thought how does he get away with this negative view? But you know, he can say, well, see,
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  this is, this is the message of evolution. And there's another one as well called men in marriage.
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  It says the same thing. The male nature is violent, addiction prone, and predatory.
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  The male deepest yearning is not for wife and family, but for the male group escape the open road,
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  the motorbike, to a primal and primitive and immediate gratification. At any rate, to which we would say,
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  really, you think this is how God created men, to which you would also say, do you see the intellectual
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  sources of the Andrutate phenomenon? It's not coming out of nowhere. It starts with the intellectuals
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  talking like this, and then it produces the Andrutate who are out there promoting a vision of
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  masculinity of fast cars, fast money, fast women, and which even Christian men are reaching out to
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  a former graduate student of mine now teaches high school. And she emailed me and said, all of my
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  male students are fans of Andrutate. I said, where do you teach at a classical Christian school?
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  So if the church is not giving out a biblical, healthy view of masculinity, our young men are going
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  to be reaching out to these online influences. Wow. We just have a minute and a half left, Nancy. And
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  by the way, follow her on Twitter. She comments on so many important issues, friends. Nancy,
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  on Twitter, X, what practical steps, if you can just name a couple, can fathers take to be more
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  involved with their sons and, of course, their daughters? Yeah. I think sheer presence is a big part
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  of it. And the pandemic was a game changer. Harvard University did a study. It's so recent,
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  it's not in the book. But Harvard did a study where they said the conclusion was, during the pandemic,
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  fathers who worked from home said that they got closer to their children.
• 26:50
  68% of fathers said they don't want to lose that. They would prefer to have some sort of
• 26:58
  hybrid arrangement, some sort of flexible arrangement. Because they discovered they actually like,
• 27:04
  even in an industrial age, can we sort of tweak the workplace by having more flexible hours.
• 27:10
  And we found out we could. And by the way, we've got to get the CEOs on board too. So I have
• 27:14
  quotes from CEOs saying things like, we were a little suspicious about remote work.
• 27:20
  This is a direct quote. Derrick, the pandemic completely exploded our fears. We did not see
• 27:25
  any dishonable drop in productivity. So they're recognizing too that if you give fathers time to
• 27:31
  be better fathers, they also make better workers. Well, I thank you for this insight in this book.
• 27:39
  And especially connecting the dots to the industrial revolution that makes sense. And it's
• 27:44
  fascinating. Nancy Pierci, God bless you and thank you for all the work that you do.
• 27:50
  Thanks for having me. You're most welcome. And friends, we will continue next week with more great
• 27:56
  shows. But we appreciate your support and sharing, sharing, sharing the podcast where we are limited.
• 28:02
  God bless you and as always, keep speaking the truth about things that matter.