Shattering the Glass Ceiling for Dads Overcoming Bias in Parenting with Jack Kammer

Are traditional gender roles in parenting holding us back? In this thought-provoking episode, I sit down with Jack Kammer, a passionate advocate for men’s issues and author of three books on male gender dynamics. We explore the complex landscape of modern parenting, challenging long-held assumptions about men’s roles in family life and society at large.

Jack shares his journey from radio host to social worker, revealing how his experiences shaped his understanding of the challenges men face in a world that often misunderstands their needs and desires. We discuss the impact of stereotypes, the importance of equality in both professional and domestic spheres, and the potential for positive change when we break free from outdated gender expectations.

Key Insights:

• The evolution of gender roles in parenting and how societal expectations affect both men and women
• Challenging the notion that men are inherently less nurturing or capable as caregivers
• The impact of stereotypes on custody decisions and family dynamics
• Strategies for men to embrace their role as active, engaged parents

Redefining Fatherhood

Jack offers a compelling perspective on how men can reclaim their place in the family sphere:

• Embracing vulnerability and emotional intelligence as strengths, not weaknesses
• Challenging societal norms that discourage men from prioritizing family life
• Building a support network of like-minded individuals committed to positive change

Towards True Equality

We explore actionable steps for creating a more balanced approach to parenting and relationships:

• Advocating for fair treatment in custody decisions and family court
• Encouraging open dialogue about the challenges men face in modern society
• Promoting the value of engaged fatherhood for children’s well-being and societal progress

This conversation is a must-listen for anyone interested in the evolving dynamics of gender, parenting, and social progress. Whether you’re a parent, a partner, or simply someone who cares about creating a more equitable world, you’ll find valuable insights to challenge your thinking and inspire positive change.

Don’t miss this opportunity to gain a fresh perspective on the role of men in modern families and society. Tune in now and start giving a heck about breaking down gender barriers and fostering true equality in our homes and communities!

Connect with  Jack Kammer

Website: https://www.malefriendlymedia.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrLW85qrmP5ezOvz1M–INw
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/malefriendlymedia/
Substack: https://mensturn.substack.com/

Connect with Dwight Heck:

Website: https://giveaheck.com (Free Book Offer)

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/give.a.heck

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dwight.heck

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Giveaheck

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@giveaheck

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dwight-heck-65a90150/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@giveaheck
X: https://x.com/give_a_heck

 

Chapter summary(Full unedited podcast transcript follows):
00:00:02
Introduction to Jack Kammer: Advocate for Men and Boys
Jack Kammer, a long-time advocate for men’s issues, shares his background in radio, social work, and corrections. He discusses his journey in understanding and addressing social problems related to men and boys, and his authorship of three books on male gender issues.

00:02:32
Jack’s Origin Story: Early Experiences Shaping His Perspective
Jack recalls childhood experiences of being praised for being “good with babies for a boy,” which made him uncomfortable. He reflects on how this early encounter with gender stereotypes influenced his later interest in addressing sexism and misconceptions about men and boys.

00:05:26
Childhood Experiences and Gender Stereotypes
Dwight shares similar experiences of being praised for childcare skills “for a boy.” They discuss how these gendered compliments reveal underlying societal biases and expectations for both men and women, highlighting the need to challenge these stereotypes.

00:07:37
Jack’s Family Background and Father’s Influence
Jack describes growing up with six siblings and a father who was a dedicated doctor but often absent at home. He shares poignant memories of his father’s storytelling and later struggles with alcoholism, highlighting the complexities of male roles and expectations.

00:14:40
Reflections on Fatherhood and Societal Expectations
Jack discusses his father’s eulogy and the realization of his father’s complex character. He connects this to broader societal misconceptions about men, emphasizing the need to recognize men’s emotional needs and challenges in a culture that often dismisses them.

00:17:49
Double Standards in Perception of Men and Women
The conversation shifts to discussing societal double standards in how men and women are perceived, particularly in cases of inappropriate relationships with minors. They highlight how these biases affect public opinion and legal outcomes.

00:19:35
Generational Changes and Persistent Gender Stereotypes
Dwight shares observations about generational changes in gender expectations, noting improvements but acknowledging persistent stereotypes. They discuss the need for mutual understanding and appreciation of strengths between genders, emphasizing the importance of communication in relationships.

00:24:18
The Feminine Mystique and Evolution of Feminism
Jack introduces Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” and its impact on feminism. He contrasts Friedan’s inclusive approach with later, more radical feminist views that excluded men’s issues, discussing how this shift affected gender equality discourse.

00:28:33
Challenges in Publishing Men’s Issues Books
Jack shares his experiences writing and attempting to publish books on men’s issues. He describes the resistance and cancellation of his first book by St. Martin’s Press, highlighting the challenges in addressing men’s perspectives in the publishing industry.

00:36:13
Impact of Books and Publishing Challenges
Dwight and Jack discuss the impact of Jack’s books, particularly “If Men Have All the Power, How Come Women Make the Rules?” They explore the difficulties of marketing and selling books on men’s issues, touching on the broader challenges of the publishing industry.

00:40:54
Societal Changes and Gender Roles
The conversation turns to the need for societal changes in perceiving gender roles. They discuss the challenges men face in gaining acceptance as primary caregivers and the resistance from both societal norms and some women to men’s increased involvement in traditionally female domains.

00:46:49
Personal Experiences of Single Fatherhood
Dwight shares his experiences as a single father, highlighting the challenges he faced in gaining custody and societal acceptance. He emphasizes the importance of perseverance and self-belief in overcoming stereotypes about male parenting capabilities.

01:41:18
Closing Thoughts on Masculinity and Self-Definition
Jack offers a powerful closing message: “A real man is a man who does not care at all about anybody else’s definition of a real man.” This statement encapsulates the discussion’s core theme of challenging societal expectations and embracing individual authenticity.

Full Unedited Transcript:
[00:00:02 – 00:01:23]
Good day and welcome to Give a Heck. On today’s show, I welcome Jack Kammer. Jack started a radio show on men’s Issues in 1983. From his weekly interviews he quickly came to see this Serious social problems are enmeshed in fallacious thinking and reasoning about what men and boys want and need. In 2005, he left his IT job and entered a dual school master’s degree program, social work and business, in the hope he could find work in social services or public policy related to the social needs of men and boys. No such job materialized. He did, however, find work as a correctional office in the infamous Baltimore City Jail, then as a parole and probation agent in Central Baltimore, and then as a trainer for the National Fatherhood Initiative on running the Inside out dad program for incarcerated fathers. He is the author of three books on male gender issues and is now retired but still actively advocating for men and boys. I’d like to welcome you to the show, Jack. Thanks so much for agreeing to come on and share with us some of your life journey.

[00:01:24 – 00:01:29]
Thank you Dwight for having me on to talk about some of my life journey.

[00:01:29 – 00:02:31]
Oh, I’m excited. For those that are familiar, longtime listeners of Give a Hack, you know that I’ve talked about it before. I always start before we even record. We’ve already had a conversation, got to know one another, and I think we’re going to have an amazing conversation that’s going to actually give you that light bulb moment that maybe you’ve been waiting for to change the trajectory of your mindset. Your emotional and your mental IQ can increase any point in time in your life. You just have to be that person that is the willing to learn. So listen closely to what Jack and I talk about. It could make a big difference in your mindset. Maybe it makes you have a quicker, you know, step. Maybe you have a little hop. Maybe you have a bigger smile after you’ve listened to this or practice some of the things that we talk about on the knowledge side of things dealing with men and boys. So Jack, please tell me your origin story. What key things from your childhood to your adulthood that led you to where you’re at currently?

[00:02:32 – 00:05:24]
So the earliest thing I can remember, Dwight, is when I was probably 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years old somewhere back there. And I’m going to tell you what I remember. But what I’m going to tell you is probably something you haven’t heard before. So I’m going to first tell you something you have probably heard before that is closely related to what I’m going to tell you that you haven’t heard before. And the thing that we are aware of, the thing that you’re familiar with is the fact, especially because you’ve got, what, four daughters, right? So. So we know that. We know that if. If any of your girls were good at sports or good at math or good at science, it wasn’t a good thing. If somebody were to come up to them and say, gee, Susie, you’re really good at science for a girl or really good at math for a girl or really good at sports for a girl. We know that that’s not really a compliment. And it’s really sort of a way of making the kid think, wow, are they telling me something’s wrong with me, that I’m an odd. I’m an odd little girl, that I want to do these things and that I’m good at it? What I used to hear as a little boy was, gee, Jack, you’re really good with babies for a boy. And I always remembered thinking, where is that coming from? And what are they trying to say? Are they trying to say that I’m odd? That I shouldn’t be good with babies for a boy? That it’s not really the proper place or the role of a boy to be good with babies? I didn’t have any words for it. I didn’t know the word sexism. This would have been in the 50s, late 50s, probably. But I knew I didn’t like it, and I knew that something was up with that. And it wasn’t until much, much, much later in my life that I started learning about sexism and stereotypes and that I was, you know, a victim of a stereotype about boys, that because I was a boy, it was worth commenting on that I was really good with babies. And isn’t that interesting when really the suggestion was that it’s a little bit odd. And I always remember that. And it stayed with me.

[00:05:26 – 00:07:03]
Yeah, that was one thing that I can look back and think about it in my mind’s eye. I can visualize the amount of times I heard that throughout my life, too, because I was really good with kids, really good with babies. I was a sickly kid, bullied. I had asthma, allergies. So I didn’t get to go do a lot of things that I wanted to when I was really young and I babysit, right? I’d look after kids, relatives. Sometimes you get hired to babysit and, oh, you’re so good with kids for a guy or a boy, whatever term you want to put in there. But it happens consistently and constantly. I’ve seen that through with my four daughters, too. Right. And how they were treated, that this is their life. What are they going to do? Right. Oh, they could do this. They’re a girl. Or they do really well. One of my daughters would come home and they’d be doing school sports, and they outperformed a boy. And they’d hear comments like that. Right. About their performance. Oh, you’re so, you know, going up against a boy, you’re doing so good as a girl. Good for you. It’s an. It’s not a compliment. It’s an underhanded slight. And people are just. They don’t think before they open their mouth and remove all doubt, just like I said. Right. My listeners understand that, that phrase. That’s why I always tell people, you’re, you know, better to be thought an idiot than open your mouth, remove all doubt. And it’s so true. At the end of the day, just look at that person and go, good job. You’re fantastic. Good effort. Don’t make it about gender at all. Really hard for people, though, especially because of generational learning problems. Correct?

[00:07:04 – 00:07:08]
Yep. Way, many, many generations of learning.

[00:07:09 – 00:07:36]
So how did you grow up with your life? Like, do you got siblings? Were you very much in an indoctrinated learning process from parents or surrounding people that were saying things that, you know, programming you to be that person because you’re a male, that you’re at tab bravado and that you’re just. You’re better than girls and that you should accomplish things more. Don’t cry. As a kid, like, did you go through all that growing up?

[00:07:37 – 00:14:36]
No. I had four brothers and two sisters. I had a mother and a father. And with six males in the house and three females, it was very clear to me that it wasn’t quite true to say that men have all the power because the three females in the household, you know, they. They got their way quite often. It’s. It’s important in my life trajectory to mention that I remember my father, when we were little kids, being really kind and caring and loving and fun. He would have the three of us, little ones. I was five. I had a six and a seven, a boy and a girl, a brother and a sister younger than me. We were the little ones, and he would sometimes have us hop up into bed, and we would beg for him to tell us daddy stories. And he would tell us these fantastical stories about some calamity that had happened in Baltimore, which is where we lived. One, I remember in Particular was a nearby dam was getting ready to break and all the people downstream were going to get washed away. And somehow he coped up some scheme where the camera kids call the camera kids. They can fix it. And the camera kids did something to, I don’t know, save the dam or save the people after the dam broke. I don’t know what it was, but I do remember that every camera, every, every daddy story ended with hooray for the camera kids. And it was just so sweet. All right, so that was the sweet part. My father had seven kids. He was an old time family doctor and he made house calls late into his career. I mean, even after he officially retired, he would occasionally get up in the middle of the night. I remember I was home from college one summer and he woke me up and said, would you carry my bag? I got to go see an old patient and I’m too tired, I’m too weak to carry the bag. So I got up and went on a house call with him. That’s how dedicated he was as a doctor. But he was a doctor much more than a father. And that’s really sad and hurtful for me to have to say when he died. There are two things I want to mention about when he died. One is that we had the wake at the funeral home and my six siblings were at the wake. And lots of patients would come to, came to see my father to pay their last respects. And they all told us about how kind and caring and warm and gentle and patient and loving Dr. Kammer was. And we were, you know, all pretty well grown by then. I was in my 30s, so it was no longer time for daddy stories about the camera kids. This was after my father was tired and grumpy and tired of putting kids through college, and he was pretty much a stranger in his house. We didn’t know him as a kind, caring, gentle, warm, loving, patient man. So at the wake, we, my siblings and I all looked at each other as if to say, are they talking about our father? Dad? Kind, patient, caring, loving warden? And indeed they were. The second piece of this situation around his death and the funeral was that nobody in the family really wanted to give his eulogy. And I just determined that I was not going to let some priest who didn’t know him spiel off some boilerplate, some standard baloney verbiage that they use when they don’t know what else to say about somebody, about what a kind, caring, loving, warm father who was the beloved of, you know, his seven children. I wasn’t going to have him lie in his eulogy because my father was a good man. Even when late in his life he became an alcoholic, he was still a good man. He was still a good man. And so I, I said, I’m gonna, I’ll do the eulogy. I’m not gonna let some priest do it who doesn’t know him. The priest actually had me audition. I actually had to go and talk to the priest to tell him, give him an idea of what I was going to say. I guess. I guess that in situations where the father has been somewhat difficult and estranged, I guess they’ve had situations where kids sort of, you know, really disrespect the parent in the eulogy and maybe that gets really ugly and uncomfortable. And maybe the priest knew my father was an alcoholic and he wasn’t the most wonderful father in the world, and he wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to say anything stupid and rude. I told him what I want. I. I didn’t really actually know what I was going to say because I didn’t know what I was going to say until the morning of the funeral. But I. I guess I must have given him assurance that, you know, I respected my father and I knew he was a good man. He just was not a great father. And so he said, okay, you can do the eulogy. So the, the morning of the funeral, I still didn’t know what I was going to say about him. But then it dawned on me. I’m going to tell the truth. What’s the truth about my father? He was a doctor. He was a doctor. And he spent a lot of time at the office, spent a lot of time on house calls. And that meant he didn’t have a lot of time and energy for his kids. But he did put us through college. And I don’t even know that we ever did really say thank you to him. So I remember a priest afterward came up to me and said, God bless you. God bless you for that. Because he had probably seen some, you know, situations where, where fathers who were not such great fathers got, you know, sort of five star reviews for being good men, you know, And I, so I felt, I felt really good about that. That might be one of the best things I ever did in my life, was to. To tell the truth about my father and honor him in a way that he deserved.

[00:14:36 – 00:14:39]
Well, you got closure other people didn’t get.

[00:14:40 – 00:14:44]
Maybe. Maybe. Yeah, you might be right. You might be right.

[00:14:45 – 00:14:47]
I’ve heard that from a lot of people.

[00:14:47 – 00:17:12]
I. I tended to see my Father as, as sort of a tragic figure in the family. I think at least some of my siblings thought of him as a villain in, in the family because, you know, he was. He was an alcoholic and he was. He was sometimes a rage aholic. And it was just ugly and sad and. And tragic. But this all ties into my earliest memories of why I pursue this mission that I’m on, of getting the. The world to think differently about men and boys and what the. What the lives of men and boys really is about in the context, in the cultural context of the world. Thinking that men have all the power. It’s so easy being a man. It’s unfair. All the privileges that Men have. Men have it so easy. And that was not my vision of my father’s life. Worked his ass off for a bunch of kids who didn’t really appreciate him. And so where did he spend his time? He spent it at his office. He spent it with people who loved him. I mean, he just wanted love. He wanted to be respected. He wanted to be appreciated. And that’s what I think, all of us, men and women. But you know, especially it’s worth mentioning about men because, you know, you even hear people say things like, oh, men don’t have any feelings. You know, just that kind of really cold, callous thinking about men. And when you put that kind of thinking about men into, you know, a social situation or a cultural situation or a social policy situation, you know, it’s garbage in, garbage out. You know, the garbage in is that men don’t have any feelings. They don’t understand love, they don’t care about love. And so therefore we don’t need to have any social policies that help them get love.

[00:17:13 – 00:17:49]
Well, society is terrible. And how they project and continue to empathize, the fact of what you’re talking about, it still isn’t any different. In my opinion. It’s still the same. Men have to be this stout person, they have to be strong. They can’t cry. They’re not supposed to show emotions. And yet when women go through stuff and then men don’t show emotions, then we’re beat up on because we didn’t care enough or we didn’t, you know, console them properly or whatever. It’s like we’re caught between that. Like they say, catch 22. We’re damned if we do and he damned if we don’t.

[00:17:49 – 00:19:34]
Yeah. Yeah. There. There is always. There are always two ways to spin a story. At least two ways. Always at least two ways to spin a story. And those people who don’t really care about men of whom there are many will always find a way to say well that’s because something negative. Whereas if a woman had done the same thing, well, that’s because something positive. For instance, a classic case is when a female teacher has a relationship with a male student in junior high or high school. Well, that’s because she just wanted love. If a man does it, oh well, that’s because he’s a pervert and a sex fiend and he should be locked up and the key should be thrown away because he’s a, he’s a lascivious sexual predator. You know, it’s, it’s, that’s a, a classic case of how we do not understand that. You know, maybe the man wasn’t getting much love at home either. And maybe the woman really just thought this 17 year old quarterback on the high school football team was kind of hunky and she wanted to have sex with him. You know, it’s, we are very ready to think the worst about men and it’s very damaging to men as individuals and to men as a huge important demographic that needs to play a huge and important role in a healthy society.

[00:19:35 – 00:24:17]
Well, they certainly do. But you talk about the fact of that’s teacher in the school circumstance. Neither of them are right, of course, but at the end of the day you’re right. One person is going to get lambe more so than the other person. And there’s more understanding toward one gender than another. I do see it getting better over, over time. I know being a dad of five kids, four of them girls, that what they went through as young kids based on what my grandkids are going through, there’s more social pressures, there’s more social structure for what’s expected of them and, but yet a lot of it is still controlled by the learned teachings of centurions. To the baby boomers, to the X generation, to the millennials. It, it, it’s, it’s going to take a lot more generations until people realize that equality works on, on both ways. A male may be stronger like a typical male. Female, male may be stronger. They may have different coping mechanisms. They have strengths the woman doesn’t have, but the woman has her, her, her weaknesses and strengths. We need to appreciate one another and do what we, we should always do is I define and work on relationship strengths that are my strengths, you work on yours. We work together. Things are weak on. Maybe we need to conversation. Communication is the biggest fault of anything. And how we say stuff like we talked about before we got on recording, being a wordsmith, when I realized I was a wordsmith, to try to incite different responses or different reactions because then I felt safer, right? Or I’d feel more happy or whatever the case may be. So people saying sad situational comments about women like there’s women do it and they get put in jail, but yet the media slants at a completely different way. Like you said, between a male and a female, that has to stop. Whether they’re both lacking love or not. That’s wrong what they did, right? At the end of the day, there’s a price to pay. But yet on the social stage, on the media stage, we get picked on more. We obviously do. And yes, women have been marginalized and you know, years have gone by where things are still better, males still get paid more, they still get more decision making power. But that can continue to change. We have to as men though and sight change by saying, you know, we’ve been marginalized, we’ve been put down, here’s how, here’s how women are. Let’s have a conversation how we can help you get out of yours and you can help us get out of ours so we can move forward as a society and quit saying men are better than women or women are better than men. And I just having conversations with my daughters in their 30s that are professionals and what they’ve gone through, been overlooked already for promotions. My one daughter found out a male doing the same job as her was making 30,000 US a year more than her and she actually had more responsibilities, brought it to attention of males, the bosses and she got tossed under a bus and basically said, well blah blah, blah blah blah, you know, this person like they tried excusing what was going on, right? And using that male bravado instead of just saying, you know, you’re right, we’re sorry, we didn’t realize this was still happening and fixing the circumstance. So much so that she left that company and it devastated that company because of her role was so, so intent. And now she’s moved to another company where she feels like she’s an equal, that she’s appreciated getting paid the same as everybody else. The reality is people listening and watching. It’s happening every single day out there. If you see it happening and you are confident enough person, help others deal with it. Help them figure out that men aren’t as bad as they as the society wants us them to believe that we are. And women aren’t as fragile as everybody wants us to believe they are either they have their strengths. Let’s work together. Let’s create more synergy and not have to worry about male getting beaten up all the time. About being a male. Right. And realizing as a male, if you’re listening, you can adapt and change, you can grow, you can become better. Right.

[00:24:18 – 00:25:36]
So adaptation is something that I was hoping we would talk about today. The situation that has adversely affected your daughter with the inequitable pay structure is something we’ve been working on for 60 years. Made a pretty decent amount of progress at overcoming it. It’s not complete. It probably can’t be complete until we start the second half of what should have started. At the same time as we paid attention to the ways in which women were discriminated against, if we had paid attention to the ways in which men were discriminated against, we could have made a lot more progress together. So if you don’t mind, I would like to talk a bit about the situation that I see that’s adversely affecting men. Sure. In a big picture way. This is sort of the theory of the case that I see that men need to put forth and argue. Have you ever heard the name Betty Friedan?

[00:25:37 – 00:25:38]
No, actually.

[00:25:39 – 00:25:45]
Okay. Betty Friedan in 1963, published a book called the Feminine Mystique. Does that ring a bell?

[00:25:45 – 00:25:47]
Yes, I’ve heard of the book. I just didn’t recognize the name.

[00:25:48 – 00:40:54]
Yeah. Okay, so Betty Friedan in 63 published the Feminine Mystique. And the book is largely credited with igniting the current wave of feminism. Although Betty Friedan would say that the current wave of feminism is not really the wave of feminism that she envisioned in her book. When I went back to read Betty Friedan’s book about 10 years ago, I expected. I was very much into men’s issues at that point. I expected to read a book that was very nasty, negative, ugly, sarcastic about men. The reason I thought that was because so many books 10 years ago were like that. You know, just did not want to cut men a break and. And blamed all problems between men and women on male chauvinism and, you know, male beastliness and male urge for power and control and just general male lack of virtue. But Betty Friedan’s book was not like that at all. Her book talked about the fact that the situation for men and women, the situation for men back in the early 60s when she wrote her book, was not great for men either. She even included in her book some mentions of some articles in popular literature. She specifically mentioned one in Red Book magazine, which was a big women’s Magazine back in the 60s, she approvingly mentioned a Red Book article titled why Young Husbands Feel Trapped. She was clearly aware of the fact that what is going on between men and women wasn’t a picnic for men either. So what has happened to completely remove any empathy or sympathy for men from the brand of feminism that Betty Friedan was trying to put forward? She didn’t blame men. She blamed the culture. She was interested in men. She recognized that men had problems, but because of sexism. So what happened? Why isn’t feminism paying much attention to the problems of men these days? My belief is that shortly after 63, this happened. In 69, a group of women in New York called the Red Stockings, sort of very radical feminists, were interested in trying to get women to join the organization that Betty Friedan’s book sparked, the National Organization for Women. Betty Friedan was the first president of the National Organization for Women, but now had a little bit of a problem in that a lot of women were hearing that equality was going to go both ways. And there were men like me who were. I was 18 in 69, who were thinking, well, this, you know, the women’s movement is going to be good for men too, because we won’t be responsible entirely for making the money, and we’ll be able to have more time with our kids at home. You know, we’ll sort of swap roles. Women will get more equality in businesses and careers. Men will get more equality in families and relationships. It’s going to be good. Well, the people in the women’s movement who wanted to get more women to become ardent feminists realized that a lot of women weren’t really interested in the second half of the equation. They weren’t really that interested in giving up their primary spot in the family, their. Their predominance in the relationship domain. They were perfectly happy to insist and demand and to get increasing equality in the male domain of jobs and careers, but not so much interested in sharing equality in relationships. Well, how could the women’s movement completely ignore what men might want or need? What would gender equality look like to men? And the way the Red Stockings completely. They justified or attempted to justify completely ignoring men and what gender equality would look like for men the way they did it was to issue a manifesto that cast men as the enemy. Not as partners, not as lovers, not as friends, not as husbands to wives. No, men were oppressors. The Red Stockings manifesto said, women are oppressed. Our oppression is total. Women’s oppression is total. We identify men as the agents of our Oppression. And from that moment on, there was no need to even consider how to make life better for men in this supposed equality movement that was going to put an end to sexism. And it has only gotten worse. The reason it has gotten worse, the reason feminism has gotten meaner and meaner and meaner to men and less and less caring about men and less and less interested in looking at men’s problems, is because men like me have said no. We want to move ahead with this non sexist movement and we would like to support you in your careers by taking over some of the burden you have at home. Because there were plenty of men and there are plenty of men, and I’m one of them who would like very much to have more time with our kids. The Pew Research center recently published research that found that men, even more than women, say they do not spend enough time with their kids. With more and more men trying to get equality in the family space, the backlash from women to try to keep men out of that family space has gotten worse and worse and meaner and meter and uglier and uglier. So, you know, just as there were terrible stereotypes about women back in the early 60s about why women didn’t belong, didn’t deserve to have equality in the workplace, women cry too much. They’re not logical. They can’t make tough decisions. They just want to file their nails and go shopping and eat bonbons and, you know, girls, women are silly. So that’s why they can’t be over here in our, our wonderful careers today. What we have is a lot of stereotypes about men. Men are sex fiends. They’re violent, they’re mean, they’re cruel. They can’t multitask. They don’t have a clue. They’re stupid. They just want to have sex all the time, sit on the sofa, drink beer, and watch football. All of which stereotypes serve the purpose of women who do not want men to have equality in the family sphere. All of these stereotypes help to make it possible for a judge or for a woman to say to a judge, your Honor, he’s a very bad husband, he’s a very bad father. And so, yes, we’re getting a divorce, and of course I should have custody. And it’s very difficult for men to overcome that bias, that stereotype, that kind of sexism. Other recent research has found that the most implicit bias, the strongest implicit bias of all. We started talking a lot about implicit bias after George Floyd got killed. And we talked about Black Lives Matter and we started talking about Implicit bias. The worst implicit bias is not against blacks because of racism. It’s not against any ethnicity, because if ethnicity, ethnic bias, or racism, it’s not against women by virtue of sexism. The strongest implicit bias of all is against men. And rather than working to undo implicit bias against men, there is a huge campaign at work to make men look as bad as possible for people, for women to revel in making men look as bad as possible, to celebrate and glorify all of the mean and unpleasant things that are often said about men. Primarily, in my view, to serve the purpose of maintaining the female domain for women, even though at the same time they are demanding that the formerly male domain be opened up equally to women. And that is the challenge for men, is for us to insist that we can be as good in the family domain as women have demonstrated they can be in the business domain. And we don’t really, we haven’t taken on that challenge yet. And I think it’s because the women’s domain is pink. You know, it’s sort of feminine. And men are very insecure about being manly. And the idea of a man reinventing himself to have equality in the formerly female domain can be very threatening to man. But as you mentioned, the key word is adapt. Men have adapted throughout history to changes in civilization. Perhaps the greatest adaptation of all, or one of the greatest adaptations of all that men were called upon to make that has served us well was the transition that civilization made from a hunter gathering culture to an agricultural culture, such that men who used to be out with spears hunting and trying to kill ferocious animals suddenly didn’t have to do that anymore. And they made their livings and they advanced civilization and provided food for their families by walking behind a plow and planting food and crops. That was a huge adaptation for men. And you can just imagine that the, the late changers, the men who were reluctant to put down their spears and go become farmers. You can just imagine that those farmers were originally ridiculed as being unmanly. That’s not a manly thing to do. Men carry spears, men hunt. What you’re doing is, it’s, it’s not manly. Similarly, the idea that men can reinvent themselves with the economy creating more and more jobs that are very friendly to women because they’re very communications oriented. Jobs, word jobs. Frequently with women, with, with the economy switching to jobs that are very friendly to women, we need to adapt to jobs that are very friendly to men. And if you think about it, one of the best things about men is the ways in which we, when we are good fathers, help to raise strong, healthy kids. You know, there are consequences for your bad behavior. Whereas a father might impose a reasonable amount of discipline for bad behavior for a child, a mother might be more likely to just forgive the child and say, please don’t do that again. Fathers are interested in teaching their kids. Mothers are too. But the, the balance that a father can adopt in the, in the struggle, the, the, the back and forth between safety and adventure, between safety and pushing the envelope for a child, between keeping a child safe and helping a child grow into confidence is something that could be very beneficial to kids. These are just a few ways in which men could be very, very comfortable, very effective and very wonderful in assuming a stronger role in the family, just as women have done something very wonderful by assuming a stronger role in the economy. But there is a backlash going on to keep men from achieving that equality and to keep women as the primary controllers of the nurturing domain. And the nurturing domain is something that men need and want. Men need to be loved, they need to give love, they need to get love. And what better place to get it than with your own kids? That’s, that’s. Go ahead.

[00:40:54 – 00:46:48]
The thing is though is you talk about the changes and stuff required, but as long as we have governments, major majority of governments run by, you know, men around the world that aren’t open minded to understanding that society or the people that they’re controlling or advising require the ability to go into the woman’s camp and be that nurturer and the women to go into the men’s camp and be that intellect that a man is supposedly better at. When I know women that can be, are phenomenal. Right. And you look at the fact of. You also talked about the generational challenges that men can’t, shouldn’t be in that camp. They can’t be a good parent, they can’t do good things for their families. You look at myself, joint custody back in, you know, it’s already been since 2008 where I ended up going to court, dealing with old minded judges and the first judge that had any sympathy to give me controlling interest in my kids until all the court stuff happened, an interim judge, she was a female. The male judges, 70s and 80s and age doesn’t necessarily isn’t a key on this but that they were, they were in their 70s and 80s, were so attuned and structured based on societal teachings, family teachings, that they still had that mindset that the mom was the better parent. Right. And through psycho like having to get assessments and get all this stuff done. It was proven I was the far superior parent. I was the one that was more stable. I was the one that was going to care more. Well, my learned behavior, it goes all the way back, listeners to the learned behavior of my mom and dad. My dad was the breadwinner, very successful mom, stay at home, be the caregiver. I had health issues, so I wasn’t out and about playing as many sports as other kids. And I seen her nurturing side. I seen how she raised my two older sisters and me, I was the baby. I seen so many different things that when I finally got married and I’m hearing from all the societal screams about the fact that I’m the breadwinner. Breadwinner, you know, don’t be emotional, go out and earn. Let your significant other, your wife, take care of the kids and this and that and, you know, work more, work more, work more. So I’d work more trying to be my dad. Wasn’t a round of kids growing up similar to what you went through with your father? Great man, had, have a lot of respect for my father, but that’s the role he played. My mom played her role. I become a young adult, start having kids, being pushed into that role, and then all of a sudden I get. We get separated and divorced and now the differences between us even shine more. So those people that are separated, divorce. You understand what I mean? Split, split parentage. But I grew up in a home that was loving, that was very supportive. My mom was very much the center of my thought processes and how to be empathetic and kind, you know, cook meals, do this and that. So all of a sudden, joint custody situation. My kids were enjoying being with me more. As they got older, things got really stressful in their, in their other family situation. I went to court, spent three years working with three different judges and how many different lawyers to prove to the system that I was a better parent than the other and it shouldn’t matter that I’m male. And then I started joining different organizations around North America, not just Canada, because men are slighted all around North America and around the world and losing contact and custody of their kids over women saying he, like you said, he’s a bad parent. And there’s no real justification for it. Judges goes, oh, well, this is the way it’s always been. This is what we always hear. So that must be true too. So we’re not going to let you see your kids. Right. I had that happen with one of, one of our, one of my five, eight months, didn’t see my kid until I got a female judge that had some compassion and empathy and wasn’t stuck in the stone age and realized that men can be good. It took a long time. I had to prove myself. Had. Like I said, we went through assessments, we went through different things. I had 18 affidavit letters going into court. My ex had one. Mine were from doctors, dentists, teachers, community sport coaches and stuff like that. Saying how I was the one always taking the kids to their stuff. I was the one that was always there picking them up if their lunch didn’t come to school. When I didn’t have them, I still brought it. I still paid their extracurricular. I did all the things that a woman in a traditional sense would do in the man would be the breadwinner. I was doing both. Was I doing them both great? No. Because I wasn’t taught. I wasn’t given that opportunity to be in that camp like the rest of the world expected me to be. In the work camp, I was in the home camp. Right. All of a sudden, now I had to structure and change my business. I couldn’t work as many hours. I had more extracurricular stuff. Now I’m doing it four weeks a month, not just two. Right. And I just kept on moving forward. And still today I hear from people, oh, we don’t know how you did it without a good woman in your life. Oh, I did it quite well, actually. Talk to my kids, ask them. See what they’ve accomplished and what they’ve learned and the lessons that I’ve taught them. I was not perfect, but I worked to be that. And still today I’m. I get these people, men and women, go on that. Can’t believe it that I raised five kids as a single dad when I got on.

[00:46:49 – 00:47:05]
How different do you think your life would have been if you had not gotten treated the way you were treated by the divorce system? How would your life be different? Happier, not happier?

[00:47:06 – 00:48:26]
Well, that. That is a great question, Jack. At the end of the day, I think if I would have been treated like that, I don’t think about how it would have affected me. I think about how it would have made my kids life better because of it. I had to take them to counseling constantly because the stresses they went through, they had to have their own lawyer because I was told that my lawyer wasn’t serving them properly and just stuff like that. I think if things could have been better in the court system, maybe my kids would be more stable today. Emotionally and mentally because of all the stories and lies they heard. Until the truth come out, they’re still scarred by all that stories, those experiences that they went through with their other parent or what they heard lawyers say about me that they knew weren’t true, yet they weren’t old enough to be able to vocalize. So to answer your question, would have my life been better if the court system would. Better? Yes, it would have been, but it would have been directly because my kids would have been happier. They wouldn’t have been crying in their beds going, why does this other person say this about you, Daddy? You’re not like that. You. You cook for us, you do laundry, you help us with school, you get us to stuff on time. You’ve been doing this for, you know, they. They never do any different. It wasn’t like all of a sudden I became separated, divorce. And I started doing it. I was already in it.

[00:48:26 – 00:48:36]
Well, let me ask my question more clearly. I. I didn’t ask it clearly. So you are concerned about what your kids went through in this ugly mess?

[00:48:37 – 00:48:38]
Yeah.

[00:48:38 – 00:49:47]
And it’s very nice of you to be concerned primarily with your kids. However, you do have a right to happiness if all of the bad things that happened to your kids happened to them, and you got treated badly in the dis. In the custody decision, as well as your kids being treated badly, if you were also treated badly and you didn’t get to see them, and you. And. And your wife was empowered to keep you at a distance from them and your wife was empowered to alienate them from you by doing what some women do, perhaps many women do, perhaps a lot of women do. Nobody really wants to study this. You don’t have your kids. Would you be as happy a man and as positive a man as you are today, as productive a man as you are today?

[00:49:47 – 00:50:48]
No. Absolutely not. I wouldn’t be as happy. Like, honestly, when you think about it, you’re right. I was living a life of quiet desperation through all that period of time, putting a mask on, coming down with a smile on my face, making lunches, making supper, whatever, doing whatever I needed to do and masking how hurt I was inside, putting on something on my face which wasn’t the reality of my. My internal being of who I was. So had the court system treated me differently, had it made it easier for the kids to deal with it and not hear all that garbage that they. Or the labeling of. Of who they thought I was when I wasn’t, you know, obvious, I would have been way happier had it Been an equitable and fair system. Which is still isn’t today, right? It still isn’t today. And I’ve been. I’ve been separated, divorced since 98. It still hasn’t changed.

[00:50:48 – 00:50:56]
So let’s think about the fact that you are pretty successful business owner. Would that be fair to say?

[00:50:56 – 00:50:56]
Yeah.

[00:50:57 – 00:50:59]
You’ve got a little. You’ve got your own company, right?

[00:50:59 – 00:50:59]
Yeah.

[00:50:59 – 00:51:23]
What do you. What do you think we need to think and say and do and feel about the fathers who don’t have the ability to talk to 18 experts to deliver letters and affidavits to a court so that these fathers can maintain a relationship with their kids. What do we need to do for those fellows?

[00:51:24 – 00:53:15]
Oh my goodness, the amount of groups and the conversations I had with people. What can you do? You can have support systems or masterminds or whatever where you can have conversation and you can give them advice. But depending on where you live, depending on the circumstances of what the judicial system is been through or continuing to indoctrinate into our future cases, their future cases, the same pattern of being on that hamster wheel, there’s nothing I can really tell them to get through it except to never give up and be purposeful about your life and do what you’re allowed to do. Because a lot of times it’s financial based. Right. My divorce and then substantial. Pardon me, I couldn’t think of the word my. You know, after the divorce and then having that joint situation, getting into the. Getting into the custody battle years later, I didn’t have any of those support. Even being in those groups, they couldn’t really give me advice on my specific circumstance. Because every judicial system is different. You can be in one community in my province of Alberta that they’ll say that the family judges deal this way and three hours away in another, another courthouse with other judges, they deal with things differently because it’s based on who lives in that area. Is there more wealthy people? Is it more middle class? Is it more poor? And the judicial systems contrary to what people think are different from city to city. So what advice can I give a male? Just if it’s what you want and it’s connect with people that can at least support you through the hills and valleys, the garbage that you’re going to hear and realize that it is tied directly to money, the support you’re going to get within the legal system. It really is. I wish it wasn’t.

[00:53:15 – 00:54:11]
So rather than think about what advice can we give to individual men in a sort of a clinical setting where we’re actually trying to deliver therapy for injuries and dangers that are currently existing. What should. What should men be thinking about? How to change the system, the laws, the whole conception of us as fathers and why we have to fight and pay and work so hard to be seen as the equals of mothers? What about. Why aren’t men taking political action on these issues the way women take political action on their issues? What’s going on with us?

[00:54:11 – 00:55:51]
I think it’s a great question. There’s so many different things a person could answer that men need to band together, but yet they’re always fearful of reprisals. Right. We are always fearful of what society or who’s going to say something to us, male or female genders. So if we all band together to fight the court system, which I was part of that back in the day, part of groups that were doing things in the U.S. part of people that were doing things in Canada and lobbying and trying to, you know, communicate and write letters, but there’s not enough. So standing and uniting and fighting against stuff like that takes. Takes an army, a group, people that are going to be saying, you know what? This is what I experienced. Dwight, this is what you experience? Sam, this is what you experienced, Jack, let’s all of us get together and fight. Well, no, it took all the energy out of me. I just can’t fight. I can’t talk about it. I can’t be vocal about it. I’m just wore out. Well, what about the person that’s just going through this now? Don’t you think they deserve to have something change? And until we speak up as a group saying, this is what we went through, we’re going to fight so that you don’t have to go through that, yes, we went through a lot. Yes, I’m torn down, I’m beaten down, but anytime people want to talk about it with me, men or women, doesn’t matter. My clients, I’m very honest with them and say things aren’t going to change unless men just stop trying to be the. The unit and be the group and work together. An axi fight for change.

[00:55:51 – 00:57:57]
It’s understandable that men think of themselves as the unit. What mean what men go through in divorce and. And you. It’s horrible a lot what you went through. You went through a lot, but it turned out beneficially for you and your kids. Men to whom good things do not happen are very much like soldiers coming out of. Of a war zone with ptsd, and they do not want to stay in that arena. They want to get out of it. They want to forget about it. They don’t want to. They don’t want to be reminded of how blown up they got. And so my suggestion, my belief is that we need to. We need to find what is the underpinning of all of these stereotypes about men that make it so easy to treat men terribly in so many ways. And here we’re talking about primarily the primary way, probably, and that is our relationships with our own kids. What is the prime. What is it that makes it possible to treat fathers so badly? And what I would suggest is that it is the stereotypes, in particular the central stereotype about men. And that is that men are violent. And if you can, if you can get it into the culture and if you can get the media to buy that men are violent, plus all of the other little personality characteristics that go with people being violent, selfish, cruel, uncaring, power and control issues.

[00:57:58 – 00:57:59]
Dismissive.

[00:58:00 – 00:58:07]
Yeah, Just no empathy. See, now, empathy is one of the key things you need to be for as a parent. Right?

[00:58:07 – 00:58:08]
Of course.

[00:58:08 – 01:00:05]
Kind, caring, gentle, not violent. You have to be those things you have. The judge has to believe you are those things before the judge is going to feel safe because the judge is in jeopardy, too. If the judge makes the wrong decision and gives a bad man custody of his kids. That judge is going to be in big trouble with the. Well, with the politics, the women’s groups who are going to raise hell with the judicial board about how he ignored all of this great evidence about how mean he was and how wonderful the woman was. The judge is much safer. The judge is much safer just taking the side of the favored person. I mean, think about what went on in Southern towns back during Jim Crow. Southern American towns back during Jim Crow. You know, the judge just knew he was not going to get in trouble for saying that in this fight between a white man and a black man, he takes the white man’s side. He knows he’s not going to get in trouble for that. If he takes the black man side, he might very well get into trouble for that. Similarly, we have two sexes, not two races. In Divorce Town, the judge is much safer going with the woman than he is with going with the man. There is a huge imbalance, a huge, A hugely slanted playing field. And what’s at the base of that? What is at the center of that? It’s the idea that men are violent and everything that goes with violence.

[01:00:06 – 01:00:21]
Well, the uncaring, uncompassionate, all the things you mentioned. Right. It’s just. Yes, we’re labeled because of it. And you’re right, it does tie to violence. And yes, you know this. He beat his wife. He did this and did that. I got accused of all that stuff. It was all found to be untrue.

[01:00:21 – 01:00:23]
Yeah, there you go.

[01:00:23 – 01:00:28]
Right. But yet the male judges I dealt with, they automatically defaulted, like you said.

[01:00:28 – 01:00:34]
To a woman, because they were vulnerable. The one vulnerable, the one that stuck.

[01:00:34 – 01:00:45]
The one that stuck up for me and started the process, was a woman judge. She actually was very empathic. And it ties back to what you were saying. Empathy is important to be a caregiver. Right.

[01:00:45 – 01:00:49]
And she was not vulnerable to being called a male chauvinist pig.

[01:00:49 – 01:04:36]
No, you’re right. Exactly. So when she made that ruling, we actually had to have closed court all the time because my significant other would get really emotional and the lawyers that she had, you know what I mean? So it got to a point where it was so refreshing for that female judge to say, you know, this has been eight months. You’re getting access to your. Your one child that the other judge said you couldn’t have access to. Right. It was just totally ridiculous. But like you said, the judge defaulted to the female position as opposed to listening to the argument and looking at all the data and all the proof. Right. So you’re right. It is prevalent, and it’s still prevalent today. I have clients that are going through divorce right now. They’re dealing with all that stuff. And the secret, well, we need to understand that we can fight to get what we want. It’s going to be the battle that we have as men versus the battle women have has gotten to a point where our battle is way more difficult, in my opinion, when it comes to family, career. Right now, women are getting promotions and jobs like men used to get, where it was unfair. Right. The man got a promotion because he had a. It wasn’t because necessarily it was a male. It was because he had a connection or he had this or that in his life. So they got a promotion. Now, I know men that have lost out on promotions because the company wants to ensure they’re not looked at as being sexist. Right. That they’re going to hire that female in the role, and the female isn’t the person that should be in the role. Right. But they want to look good. They’re putting on that shiny mask to fool the society that, you know, they’re into equality. And. And so now men can suffer because they’re the better. But don’t get that they got nobody sticking up for Them out there and it propagates into our divorces, into our careers, into everything we do. What do you mean you think you should be on? I used to get looked at strange for taking my kids on their field trips. Being that parent helper, being the only male. You know what they would do? They’d make me watch all the boys. I’m serious. It was just, I went through all that stuff. Right. And did I get through it? Absolutely. Because I’m a tenacious person and I believe tenacity is a superpower. I don’t take no for, you know, I will have a very confident conversation with you. Male, female, I don’t care who it is. You need to justify to me in a calm way why you don’t think I can do this. Why do you think I am less? Why do you think I’m not as good as a parent. And I used to have group of women and, and men that would stand away from me. We’d be waiting, let’s say a school event or whatever. I’d be in the gym and they’d. I get ostracized. And there’d be a small group of people that actually knew me prior, knew I was a good person and they’d come over. Majority was over here, Committee of A was over there. He’s a bad person. They said, did you hear what he did? You know, this is what he should do. And there’d be other community of people that would be around me that would give me support and love and, and say, you know, and women and men, you know, sorry you’re going through that. So we were that small little segment of population that wants to change and grow and be empathetic. Well, the majority of the population which I still see today is caught in the commedia. They thinking they know how to run everybody else’s lives better than they do, yet their own lives they can’t run. Right.

[01:04:36 – 01:04:54]
So anyway, so I want to mention one, one more point about the centrality of the violence stereotype about men. Have you ever heard of the Violence Against Women act in the United States?

[01:04:54 – 01:04:55]
Yes.

[01:04:56 – 01:05:06]
Do you know how much money is allocated to domestic violence programs by the federal government every year?

[01:05:07 – 01:05:10]
I don’t know. I’m going to guess a billion, billion and a half.

[01:05:10 – 01:05:31]
A billion. A billion dollars. A billion dollars. Do you know what the science shows about the initiation of domestic violence according to sex? Which sex is more likely to initiate domestic violence, A man or a woman?

[01:05:31 – 01:05:44]
It’s a woman. I only know that because I went through it and I Had to understand the numbers. And being part of those groups in the States and Canada, I learned a lot about it, and I was shocked.

[01:05:44 – 01:05:59]
And do you have any idea what percentage of the billion dollars is devoted to helping male victims of domestic violence? Especially male victims of domestic violence who have children that they are worried about?

[01:05:59 – 01:06:00]
Probably zero.

[01:06:01 – 01:06:02]
Very close to zero.

[01:06:02 – 01:06:04]
Very close to 0.5%.

[01:06:04 – 01:06:06]
Very close to zero.

[01:06:06 – 01:06:20]
I shouldn’t laugh, but it’s the same here. There’s so much money delved out to women’s support men. It was so hard, I had to pay for it. Women can get it for free. I went to male support groups. I paid for it. Well, right, so.

[01:06:20 – 01:08:29]
And what percentage of the billion dollars would you guess? I don’t think anybody really knows, because nobody wants to know. Nobody wants to conduct audits. The organizations that get the money aren’t required. Well, they are required, but they flaunt the requirement to. To file their reports. But a very large portion of that billion dollars goes to organizations that are ostensibly to provide support, supportive services to domestic violence victims, which translates as female domestic violence victims. And that all translates into supporting the prevention of domestic violence and supporting changes in domestic violence laws and changes in domestic violence policing strategies and trainings for judges and trainings for social workers, all of which are around the negative stereotypes of men as violent and men being enmeshed in an overwhelming drive for power and control. And as the Redstockings mentioned, to oppress women. And in some cases, they’ll even say, to oppress women and children, as if that’s, you know, we want to oppress children. A billion dollars. A billion dollars is allocated by the federal government in the United States to. To programs that. That are very largely about making men look as bad as possible in the parenting realm. And that, to me, seems like the place that some political action could be taken. There’s an organization in the United States called the National Coalition for Men. Was that one of the organizations you were associated with?

[01:08:30 – 01:08:32]
I can’t recall. It’s been a long time.

[01:08:32 – 01:11:06]
Okay. Well, the. The president of that organization just today, I think it was, his name is Harry Crouch, wrote a fabulous letter, an open letter to Elon Musk and Doge, you know, the Department of Government Efficiency, and said. And said, hey, you want to find some ways fraud and abuse. Take a look at vawa. And that, to me, would seem like a really good way to sort of unpack this tyranny of stereotypes about men, which have male violence at their center, at their core. And if we could unpack and, and debunk the idea that men are way more violent than women are and are to be much less trusted with children than women are, then we could have a situation where men are supported in getting into the, the female realm. And the payoff here, Dwight, is that there are, there are some women who are really, really doing well in their careers and they want to be CEO in eight years, nine years, 10 years. And they know that that means they’re going to have to work a lot of hours and they’re willing to do it because that’s what fulfills them. They also have kids, they also love their kids and they want to know that their kids are safe. It’s hard to find good daycare. How happy would they be to know that their husband, the man they love, the man who they know loves their kid about as much as they do, that the man is at home taking care of the kids, maybe doing a little side hustle on the job on the side with some kind of online business or some part time business. The man’s perfectly respected for being at home, really enjoys taking care of the kids, being a father, not an assistant mother, but being a father and fathering the way the father’s father or parenting the way that fathers parent. Everybody wins. Everybody wins because there are tons of men who have had it up to their eyeballs in the corporate world who would be very happy to get the hell out and go home and be with their kids.

[01:11:07 – 01:11:08]
Absolutely.

[01:11:08 – 01:13:23]
The problem here is that not every woman has a fabulous job with a fabulous career. A lot of women just have jobs, nine to five jobs. They’re always watching the clock and they want to get the hell home. Why? Because that’s where their love is. Even more to the point is that there are a lot of women who do not even have jobs other than to be mothers. They are not at all interested in having a man say I want to be the co CEO of this little family unit that you’re the CEO of right now. They’re very not interested in sharing that. So it seems to me that we demonstrate that this notion of male violence is very much connected with women’s interest in maintaining their dominance of the female sphere. And that their dominance of the female sphere is just as selfish as the male desire to dominate the male sphere. And maybe more selfish because actually the kids are hurt too when the father isn’t around. That to me, is the way we, we, we achieve the transformation that needs to be changed, that needs to be made. You know how women often say, well if women ran the world, there would be no more wars. I would be willing to take that bet. I would say, great, let’s try that. At the same time, let’s put men in charge of raising the kids and we’ll see whether we don’t have any more wars or let’s see if we’re raising healthier, happier kids with men being the primary nurturers.

[01:13:23 – 01:15:54]
That would be an interesting, that would be an interesting experiment because at the end of the day, all the years of being told I couldn’t do it because I was a male, yet all my kids graduated from school, none of them are in jail, which I’m quite proud of, you know, and as a male, being the guy that helped four daughters through their, when they started with puberty, with their, you know, with their monthly visitor period, whatever you want to call it, being the guy going to buy their, their, their monthly feminism, feminine products, they needed being the guy that listened to their stories about boys. Yes, Women listening. And we’re not, I’m not disparaging you saying that there’s not some great ones out there. You’ll have a great conversation with your daughter. The dad’s point of view and thought process is just as important as you said a co CEO as a males like a female and male perspective makes a rounded out individual as long as it’s not, you know, toxic. Right? So my kids, people said, oh, they need, you need to be married. You need a woman in your life to help you raise those kids. Guess what? I have a tribe. I have two sisters, I have a mother, I have aunts, I have good, good friends of mine that are ladies in marriages. Right. That the kids could talk to them. Right. And sometimes they come back to me and say, this person said, this woman said this to me, dad. And you said this. We like what you said better. Or hey dad, this person said that to us and you said this. And we like, can we talk about. Okay, let’s talk about it. At the end of the day though, I was still the decision maker. I still had to make the decision and do what’s right. But I had a tribe of people. So if we change the rhythm of stuff and made men be the home care and the women earn it and say they could get rid of war, great. You’re still going to need male input just like we still need female input. We still have women that will correct our thought processes or challenge us, hopefully in a kind, compassionate way. Not so much emotion involved in it. Because at the end of the, at the end of the day, it’s still the end of the day and I still needed to raise my kids the best way possible. Close out the noise, make sure I had a tribe of people belonging to these different groups I talked to you about and commenting. I’m going through this. Anybody else going through this?

[01:15:54 – 01:15:55]
Right?

[01:15:55 – 01:16:03]
Reaching out to women and saying hey, I got this feminine issue to deal with. My girls are going through this.

[01:16:04 – 01:16:05]
Guess what?

[01:16:05 – 01:27:10]
Nowadays and even back then I still have the power of the Internet. I searched and looked for answers and I didn’t look for confirmation bias to support my what I believed. I looked for the alternate opinion so that I could either increase my knowledge and, and, and cement my opinion and how I’m going to raise my kids or I was going to decide to change it and, and fine tune it or realize that hey, you know, I don’t know it all, but I’m willing to learn and that’s the solution for all of this. Are you willing to stand out of your comfort zone, men? Are you willing to stand up what is right for you in your life and for your kids lives? Are you willing to be uncomfortable, to be challenged that and told that you aren’t good enough? You’re a male. How can you talk to a girl about this sort of stuff? How can you raise your son to be compassionate toward woman if there’s, you know, you don’t have that woman in the house. Do I think that husband and wife being together is better for kids? If it’s healthy, sure. But I don’t believe that men are any worse of a caregiver or a parent. And I would challenge anybody listening to this. Reach out and ask any of my kids privately to me. I’ll connect you to one of them. Why? Because they’ll openly, you can ask them whatever questions. It’s not like I sat them in a closet with a dim light bulb and only fed them a little bit of water and bread and brainwashed them. They’re all in their adult years. Some of them have kids. They know exactly what I did and didn’t do for me. They’ll openly tell me at their age, dad, you could have done this better. But you tried your best. It’s never negative. Dad, sometimes you could have listened a little bit more. Yeah, you’re right. I wish I would have told my 19 year old self that somebody would have told me listen more than you talk, right? I wish they would have told me, hey, you’re an empath. That’s why you’re so kind and gentle. You’re really good as a dad. You know, you’re really good. Take the dad, mom out. You’re really good as a parent. You’re. You’re what’s best for the kids. I was. I was a minority. I was like a little black fleck in a sea of white, standing out against the masses, saying, I couldn’t do it. And I’m a tenacious person, Jack. I fought back and I proved that I was what I knew I could be, not what society told me I should be. Right? So those listening, sometimes you do have to pull up your boots and, you know, you just have to pull up your bootstraps. And you got to realize that you’re going to hear a lot of negative. Find some people groups like Jack’s, talking about associations where you can be hearing things that are going to empower you, not give you confirmation bias and say, women are bad. Women have been misunderstood just like men have been misunderstood. You need to go out and do your part and say, I am just as good as a woman to parent my children, to be compassionate and caring and loving. You’re just as good as me to be a critical thinker, a logical person to go out and run this corporation, to be that CEO. This is what you want to do, Honey, that’s fantastic. My job, I really don’t like. I really enjoy being with the kids. Like you said, I want to. I want to stay home. And I do. People listening. I do have more than one of my clients where the male gave up their career and is raising the kids and the wife’s going out and making stupid amounts of money. That is their wheelhouse, their compassionate level or their empathy is driven to career. They still love their family, but they have a confident spouse at home. The male changing the diapers, wiping the nose, dealing with the colds, going on the parenting trips at school, like, you know, just doing whatever it takes. Quit making everything about gender and make it about what you believe you can be. I believe I. I believed I could be a good parent. I knew in all my heart I had a good tribe of people telling me, yes, you can, but you can’t do that doesn’t make them a bad tribe. And I had to look past that noise of that learned behavior and realize that is a weakness you think I have. I’m going to make that into a strength. Or wait a minute, that’s already a strength of mine. What are you talking about? Right? I go to the store, my daughters will call me and say, hey, dad, before you come home, grab me this at the drugstore, Right. It’s the monthly visitor. I didn’t think I had enough and I thought I had enough. I didn’t. Can you stop and get it? Okay. Can I call you when I’m there so I make sure I get the right one? You all are different. Oh, sure. Okay. I would, I’d be in the aisle and women would be looking at me and I’m at the tampons and I’m picking through stuff and they’re going like, they’re looking at me like I’m. I’ve got a couple horns coming out of my head. Right. I’m serious. And hey, such and such. Dad’s here. What do you need? Oh, okay. Dad, tell me what’s there. Great. Okay. Can you get both, dad? Sure, why not? Why am I going to argue with them? That’s just. They know their needs. I’m supporting their needs, right? Oh, I’m unsure about their needs. Okay. Call my tribe. Hey, sister, I’m going through this. What am I missing? What did I. Well, you’re not missing much. You just, you know, fine tune this, do that. This is the result you get. Or I’m not sure, brother, maybe try the other sister, maybe try mom. Maybe it wasn’t even a feminine thing. Maybe it was just an emotional la. Right. Because boys are taught to keep it all inside and then it just festers. And I raised my son differently because of it, because of four daughters. And I think they’re pretty well rounded individuals. And you know, anybody listening to this, you can reach out to me, you can reach out to Jack. We’re not ant. I’m not anti woman and I don’t think Jack is either. We’re just anti men getting beaten down and treated like we’re lesser. And women are tired of getting beaten down and told that they’re lesser by a portion of the male population that is still not growing up. They’re still mentally stuck in the, in the Stone Ages. I want equality. Do I think one of the questions I had here was do you think it’ll ever happen? How many generations will happen until we have equality? I know my answer is going to be I’ll be long dead. Maybe my great, great, great grandkids will have equality. But as long as we’re governed by genders and roles upon those genders and not open to seeing and hearing my story, which is even in my book about raising kids as a male in a female dominated world of being told that they’re better parents than me, they’re more loving, they’re more compassionate. You know what? I wish my kids would stand out. You know, start taking them on a speaking tour with me and let them tell wake up people in the world that males are just as important women as women are in, in the home. And women are just as important in the corporate world. If we allow them to shine and grow and support them as a male because we decide we want to be that caregiver, there’s nothing wrong with it. Just figure your wheelhouse out, fight for it. Find people to support you and move on, right? Move on with your life. Get rid of the naysayers. I don’t care. Not everybody’s meant to be in your life for every season. Maybe your season of life, your marriage, you had friends, now you’re divorced. Okay? Now you lose some of those friends. They weren’t meant to be in that season, the season of marriage. Now you’re in the season of divorce, right? It is what it is. People aren’t meant to be with your whole life. And, and the sooner you realize that you don’t need 100 friends and you’re good with just the five. Right? Five closest to you and a few others that you can have a strong, meaningful life. And you will find people that, that agree with you more often than not. They’ll support you through your smart decisions and your dumb decisions, right. That are just there to us. And you have to be open minded again. Always remember, you need to be a person that is willing to change. Listen to advice, stew, percolate on it. You don’t need to respond all the time. If somebody says negative things. Wait till the next day, a few hours from now. Think about it again. Talk it out loud to yourself. I’ve had I tell people that. Talk out loud to yourself. If you have to record it and listen to it, right? Think how your responses are going to affect people before you send that text. Wait. Before you send an email, wait. Read it out loud so your brain can actually hear you say it. And you’ll think to yourself, man, do I sound dumb, Right? Maybe I need to not say that or do that. Maybe I need to rewrite this. Maybe just don’t worry about it. Maybe you just needed a little bit of pressure valve relief, right? Men and women out there, we deserve to be equal. We’re never going to be equal in, in, in our anatomy ever. Yes, you can medically go get changed if you want to, but the way that you’re born is the way that you’re born, right? You decide what you’re going to do with your building block, your foundation of your life. And even if you hit a hump and you don’t like what’s going on in life, time to climb again. Find those, those associations of what you read, listen to what you. Who you talk to, right? Look at your associations and the association saying you can’t be what you want to be as a man, that you have to stick in that little boys don’t cry, right? Go earn the. Go on the bread and the bacon and bring it home. And you, you know, don’t talk to our kids like that. What do you know? You’re at work all day. You don’t have good advice. If you’re hearing all this negative stuff, I feel sorry for you. I don’t feel pity for you. I feel sorry for you. If you’re feeling like you’re helpless because you’re not helpless. That’s what Jack and I are telling you. You can make a difference and change. It’s going to be an uphill battle depending on how bad it is in your life. But it’s either that or stay on the hamster wheel. Go to nine to five. Go work, go home, get paid, come home on the weekends. Jump into your addictive personality. Start drinking, start. Maybe you’re drinking drugs, maybe you’re binge watching sports. You’re ignoring your family still and the only time that you have to spend with them because you’re a workaholic. But on the weekends, you don’t work and you’re just disconnected from the family. And then Sunday night, you’re pissed off because tomorrow it starts all over again. Right? That’s not life to me. That’s not life. You can have more purposeful living. Takes effort. One baby step at a time. Pick up a book you don’t like reading. Get Audible. I love Audible. Right. Listen to some great podcasts. Read things that are going to excite you and give you hope, not diminish your. Your hope and quash your faith in. In humankind.

[01:27:11 – 01:27:12]
Amen.

[01:27:13 – 01:27:45]
So anyway, soapbox off. I had other things that. The last thing. There’s two last things I want to wrap up. They’re going to wrap up the show. One of the things that you’ve done, you’ve written three books, which I think is amazing. And I, and I read about it last night and I was reading on Pod Match and I googled you and read about the fact of that one book that you implemented. And the publisher, I won’t say the names, the publisher. You could. I could care less if you do, but I won’t.

[01:27:45 – 01:27:47]
I’m not going to St. Martin’s Press.

[01:27:47 – 01:28:31]
Yes. Thank you. Now I can say it. St. Martin’s Press, you know, you had a lot of. Initially, it was great support. Then all of a sudden, some people got their, you know, their panties or their boxers in a knot and, you know, it went south on you. But that’s not the. What I really want to talk about. When you wrote three books, out of the three books, which of those three books impacted you the most? And why did it impact you the most? I don’t care if they sold well or didn’t sell well. What book would you think would have impacted you the most as a person? When I wrote my book, it was very cathartic. It really helped me out. But I’ve only got one to reference. You’ve got three.

[01:28:33 – 01:36:13]
Well, that is very interesting question. The first book, the one that was canceled before canceling, was a thing by a small contingent of female staffers at St. Martin’s Press who refused to continue working on it, getting it into distribution and marketing it and promoting it. That book was. That’s. That’s my favorite book. It’s the book I spent a year and a half on. It was a very helpful healing book. It was a book of interviews with 22 women who were ready, willing, and able to talk not just about women’s disadvantages as women, but women’s advantages as women. And not just interested in talking about men’s advantages as men, but also men’s disadvantages as men. Sort of the missing half of the gender equality equation. Following the Red Stockings manifesto, which basically said, men are scum. They’re oppressors. We don’t care about them. We don’t need to think about them. We don’t need to think about how they’re disadvantaged by sexism. We don’t need to think about how we are unfairly advantaged by sexism. Women unfairly advantaged by sexism. It was. It was a very nice book. When it died, when it was killed, when it was murdered, when it was canceled, I was pretty crushed. I was pretty crushed. So you wrote your book as a catharsis? I wrote my second book as a catharsis. The title of the second book is a reflection of what happened at St. Martin’s Press, where all of the big editors. This was back in the night, early 90s, 1994 was when the book was published. Briefly. Most of the big wigs in publishing were men back then. And I thought to myself, what had happened at St. Martin’s Press. And I asked myself the question, well, if men have all the power, how come women are making the rules? And that’s the title I put on this second book that I wrote as a catharsis because I could not stomach any longer the world seemingly believing that men have all the power and women are oppressed. So I wrote a book that did its best to just blow that up. And I have to say that it’s been called by some people, you know, who were not necessarily friends of mine. I don’t think I even know them. But, you know, some of the reviews say this is the best primer on men’s issues ever written. It was. That’s. That was what I intended to do. Just put it out there to try to blow up this crazy idea that it’s a man’s world and men have all the power. Unfortunately, although it’s not really a very nice book, it’s very pithy, very wry, kind of witty, kind of sarcastic. I didn’t go out of my way to be mean, but I didn’t go out of my way to be nice either. That book, unfortunately, is the book that has sold the most. Now, when I say that, I don’t mean it has sold a lot because I’m not a very good marketer and I hate social media. I just sort of. I’m a different generation and I. I’ve never been good at it. That book is sold the most. I could not get that one published either. I mean, I got the first book published briefly, but then they killed it. I found an agent for if men have all the power, how come Women make the Rules? This agent, a New York agent, could not get it published. She actually sent me a note from another big deal, white male publishing executive at Warner Books who wrote back to her. Nancy. Her name was Nancy Love. Nancy. I wasn’t particularly crazy about the one liner approach because I made it very pithy, didn’t want people to have to spend a lot of time reading it. I wasn’t very crazy about the one liner approach, but there was a lot of truth at the heart of this book. However, the amount of rancor. I forget the exact word. The amount of rancor this book would stimulate among the women in house at Warner Books, that is, would be enormous. I’ll let one of my male competitors be the one to be pummeled so bad again. Again, fear of making a woman making women unhappy controls what we think, what we say, what we do, how we pursue our lives. This second note again proved well, it proved the premise of the book that it rejected. Men don’t have all the power and women are making the rules, at least in the realm of sex and gender and sexism and sex roles. And who gets to go into the female. Into the formerly male domain and who doesn’t get to go into the formerly female domain? Who’s making those rules? It ain’t men. We’re sort of kind of going along with it, and we should, because what women wanted in the male sphere was fair and just. But what we want in the female sphere is fair and just. But it ain’t happening because of a backlash. The third book was a book that I wrote for, for boys. I didn’t even try to get that published. I mean, I put it out there, tried to, you know, get some tweets going about it, but I could, Man, I’m just no good at that. That book went nowhere. I will say, though, that a fellow who is a high school teacher bought 10 copies of that book out of his own pocket and gave them to students and. And teachers at his school. That’s how much he loved this book. I, you know, apparently he believes that I really nailed what is going on with what boys must be thinking about, what the hell is going on all around them about how I’m privileged because I’m a male, not my lifetime. And the President Obama has a White House council for women and girls. As if only women and girls have problems. That’s not right. So I, I tried to write a book to try to help boys figure out a good way to deal with all of that was basically about making allies with friendly constituents wherever you could find them and nurture them and. And build them.

[01:36:13 – 01:36:22]
Yeah. And people can find these. You can find these books on Amazon. I’ve seen two of them. I don’t know if I’ve seen the third one.

[01:36:22 – 01:36:23]
All three are there.

[01:36:23 – 01:38:03]
Okay, so go to Amazon, check it out. At the end of the day, publishing companies are difficult. They’re controlled by so much. And a lot of times, many people, even the company I utilized to help me publish my book and edit it and stuff, we self published it. I got them to do it. But it’s self published because we answer to us, not to the masses. And they say, I just had a person on here recently that specializes in it, that in order for a book to be considered successful, like some of the most successful books that you maybe have heard of aren’t selling as many as you think you can have an average author, even if they’re published are selling five to 10,000 books. They’re not selling as many as you think because there’s so many books published every single day, self published or published by a publishing company that you become, you might be in the top for a day or a week and then all of a sudden you’re pushed down to 1,185,220. You know what I mean? Like at the end of the day, my book, I wrote it, it was cathartic, I want to help one person at a time, it’s sold pretty good but again I’m like you, I don’t market it enough and etc. Etc. I give away more than people ever buy. I buy them by the case, I car take them with me when I travel and people talk to me and I’ll say hey, did you read? Yeah, great, here’s a book and I’ll sign it for them. Let me know what you think. And I hear back from people even when I went to Europe in 2023, I took eight copies with me and what gave them.

[01:38:03 – 01:38:04]
What’s the title of your book?

[01:38:04 – 01:39:43]
Dwight Give a Heck how to Live Life on Purpose and not by Accident. Right. So you can see it right up for those watching on YouTube. It’s right over my shoulder right here. It’s in a. When it became a bestseller of my publisher sent me the book in a like a bookcase with a little label on it right there you can see a little brass label at the bottom. But yeah, it’s at the end of the day I wrote it for me and I hoped I could help one person. Would it be nice if it sold ten thousand? A hundred thousand? Yes. But for those listening, here’s a shocker for you. If a book is labeled a New York Times bestseller, they paid for it. That is not something that, that is a paid advertisement. You can look it up. New York Times bestseller is a paid thing. It is not necessarily. You know, they read my book and it sells tons of books all of a sudden, oh, it’s new on the New York Times bestsellers list. Go research, use Dr. Google and Google New York Times bestseller list and make sure you scroll down and go a couple pages to get to the truth because there’s so much sponsored media above it to prove to you that it’s worth your while. Wow, it is. Yeah. So note to self, check out things, learn, educate. Because if you could still think that it it is something that is earned, you’re sadly mistaken. It’s not. It’s purchased and there’s famous authors that have actually pulled the lid back on. On the New York Times bestseller list. Everything can be bought.

[01:39:45 – 01:39:46]
Except you.

[01:39:46 – 01:40:46]
You look. Yeah, nobody’s buying me. Look at. Look at. In Canada. I don’t know about the US they have on margarine for an example, which is one of the most unhealthy things for you. If you actually research nutrition like I do, and there’s a little heart thing on there. It says, approved by the Heart foundation of Canada. Paid. They pay for that. They pay for that. Talk about levels of corruption that help people eat something that is two molecules away from being motor oil. That’s literally it. It’s not healthy for you. Anything hydrogenated, anything processed is not good for you. Good old butter. People listening anyway. We’re not. This isn’t a nutrition podcast. I research. I’m very analytical. I do lots of research. But I’m glad you wrote those books. I look forward to checking out the one that is conscious. I like the. The one that you mentioned. The second one. Women about women control. Yeah.

[01:40:46 – 01:40:49]
If you have all the power. Huh?

[01:40:49 – 01:40:51]
If men have held the power. What.

[01:40:51 – 01:40:53]
How come women make the rules?

[01:40:53 – 01:41:15]
I. I want to get that book. I think it would be fantastic. So we’re. We. Man, what a great conversation. We’ve been conversing now for an hour and 30 minutes. Just about. So, Jack, if you had to give our listeners one last closing message, what would you tell them in regards to giving a heck and never giving up?

[01:41:18 – 01:41:50]
That is a perfect question for the thing that I would like to say. Perfect. I think this fits well. We talked about earlier how men are very concerned about being manly. So I would like to offer this definition of a real man. A real man is a man who does not care at all about anybody else’s definition of a real man.

[01:41:53 – 01:43:52]
Wow. Very simple. But impactful. Right. So people listening or watching, sometimes less is just as much as more. Right. Impactful. And if. Did that make you think those listening, watching. If not, rewind it and listen to that again. Right. Don’t care what people think. Think. Care what you think. Care what. You’re six inches. That’s one of the biggest things men have weaknesses in. Because I do a lot of life coaching with my clients and. And at the end of the day, they don’t have a lot of self. When they look at themselves in the mirror, they don’t see somebody that’s worthy. They’ve been beaten down so much for being male and for, you know, making more or doing this or doing that or their Abusers. We’ve been indoctrinated with so much garbage that at the end of the day we need to be loving ourselves, liking what we see in the mirror and be our definition of a male. Obviously, morally you need to have a moral compass. That’s a good moral compass. But do you? I do me and I don’t. I honestly don’t care what the rest of the world thinks of me as a male. At one time I did. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I did. But I don’t care anymore. I haven’t for a long time. One of my biggest advocates and cheerleaders are my kids and I earned that. I earned that. Listen to that. It wasn’t given to me. I had to fight tooth, tooth and nail to convince society around me that I was better than they give me credit for. And today people still don’t think I am. And that’s okay. The ones that do are in my season still. The ones that don’t. Bye. Bye. All right, so I appreciate it. What’s the best way for people to get a hold of you, Jack?

[01:43:53 – 01:44:25]
Mailfriendly media.com you can see it in, in the backdrop behind me. Mail friendly media.com it’s all one word. Mail friendly media and there is a, a follow menu item at the top menu all the way over to the right. If you want to click on that, give me your email address. I’ll keep you posted on blog posts that I occasionally write and I’ll let you know what podcasts I am going to be, you know a guest on.

[01:44:25 – 01:46:17]
Yeah, I joined, I, I put my email in yesterday and joined. So yes, I really appreciate you being on. For those that are new to this show, obviously the ones watching you see it behind his, his behind on Jack’s wall on his screen it shows that it’s mailfriendlymedia.com for those listening. Don’t pull over, don’t try writing it down. Just go to giveaheck.com go into the podcast part of the website. You’ll see it very nicely put together where you’ll be able to access Jack’s show for both listening. All the shortcuts are there for the different listening platforms. The primary one is set up for Apple. You can go down, there’s a link to YouTube to watch the show and then there’s you’ll see all, you’ll be see Jack smiling face. You click on it, you’ll see the show notes with all the links to that he’s talked about to his website to any social media he’s on. You’ll have chapter summaries as well as a full unedited transcript of the show so you can go read or see whatever you want to see. Understanding that it’s up to you to put in the effort. Are you in the committee of they Are you in the committee of the willing that want to change and adapt and and stop getting pressured to be a certain way when you know the seeds of greatness and you are there just find the things of the people or both that can water and make you grow and continue to be that purposeful person that for me that I talk about that God intended you to be right. You’re on this earth to serve others. Serve yourself first so that you can serve others. Be healthy, be happy, enjoy your lives and you know it’s never too late to give a heck. Any last comments you’d like to add before I wrap up the show?

[01:46:17 – 01:46:22]
Jack Just want to say it’s been really fun talking with you Dwight.

[01:46:22 – 01:47:16]
Yeah, it’s been great too. I enjoyed it. We’re definitely going to have to look to get together again in the future maybe six months out like we should have another episode talk about other things because men out there, we’re men and that’s okay. Never never apologize for being a man. Now if you’re a pos, you should apologize and change your life. But if you’re just somebody that’s out in in the ether world just floating around stuck in the hamster wheel, you’re worthy. You’re worthy as a man to be have the seeds of greatness water in you. Reach out to Jack, reach out to myself and we’ll do our best to help you. So on that note, thanks so much for being on Give a Heck Jack. I appreciate your time and sharing some of your experiences so that others too can learn. It is never too late to give a heck.