Radio Mano, Papa Chango.

You are welcome to this special bonus episode of tangentially speaking, a recording of an event that happened last week at the strand bookstore on Broadway in beautiful NYC with myself, Neil Strauss, the author of the truth, which just came out last week and the game, which everyone's heard of and everyone who hasn't read it hates, including myself.

I read some of it, but when I first heard about it, I really didn't like the idea. And an Esther Perel, who wrote, meeting in captivity has been doing couples therapy for 30 odd years, I think she said, and has a lot of insights in how relationships work and don't work and so on and so forth.

As is clear, if you listen to the last episode of tangentially speaking, Neil and I are friends and whatever issues I had with him about the game and about the whole pickup artistry scene are no longer issues because I didn't know him that he was just, you know, this public figure and I thought that that was kind of a lame approach to dating.

But you know, it's easy for me to say because I've been relatively successful in dealing with women. I've, in fact, when I first met Neil, within half an hour of chatting, he said to me, I'll bet you had sex with a woman before you were 16 or 17, right?

And I said, yeah, he said, I said, how do you know that? He said, well, guys who have success, success with women in their sort of mid-teen years are always comfortable with women thereafter, whereas men who don't have success with women until they're in their 20s or later will never be successful, will never be comfortable with women.

And I can really, I can relate to that. I think there's a lot of angst, anger, rage that's built up by teenage guys who are just overwhelmed by desire for intimacy.

And it's not just sex. It's being loved, it's being touched, it's being held. And yes, there's a lot of it is testosterone-driven libido.

But when that doesn't have a healthy expression, it builds up and, and curdles into rage. And often that rage is directed against women for the rest of these guys' lives.

And now it's very important that we all understand that women aren't the cause of this problem. Women are holding back from these guys because they live in a culture in which they're told that their sexuality is something that needs to be hoarded and bartered with on the marketplace of relationships because it's one of the few things that they've got of any value.

So, you know, the monopoly has to be defended at all costs. But aside from the question of who's to blame, there is the undeniable fact that there's an awful lot of sexual frustration among young men. And that that often expresses itself as violence.

Violence against women, violence in language and thought in terms of misogynistic media that's produced, the sort of sick jokes that one can hear in around a certain kind of frat boy-asshole society.

And violence against other people, you know, as I said in a previous podcast, this guy in Oregon started out his declaration by saying, I'll die of urgent. And then there was the guy in Southern California who was all pissed off because women didn't like him.

You know, you look at these things, I think Bill Mar did a bit about this in his show last week about how sexual frustration is fueling a lot of this rage that is expressed as, you know, school shootings in the United States.

And by the way, it's something we have in common with the Taliban yet again, another thing that we have in common with those guys.

There's a great paper from the, I think it was published in the 70s by James Prescott about how he did a meta-analysis of all the anthropological studies that had been done of different societies at that point.

And he wanted to understand the relationship between bodily pleasure and violence. And his hypothesis was that societies in which physical pleasure was acceptable and easily found and expressed would be societies in which violence levels of violence were lower.

And he found that overwhelmingly that's the case. The factors he looked at were how long women breastfed their babies and how much direct physical contact there was between babies and adults and how free teenagers were to play sexually and express themselves sexually on the one side.

And then on the other side, he was looking at violence both within the society and a war between that society and other societies.

And yeah, he found that the more relaxed the societies were about bodily pleasure, the lower their levels of violence were. That's not coincidental, right? If you want to have a mean guard dog, you abuse it and you make it frustrated.

Angry. And it'll be mean. If you want to have a warlike society, you find ways to inculcate that violence in young men. You find a way to make them frustrated, angry, full of rage. And then you take that energy and you direct it where you want.

But sometimes that energy can't be directed. Sometimes it explodes like any internal combustion engine. Sometimes things go awry. And that's the world we live in. That's the country we live in, those of us in the United States or in those crazy Arab societies in which sex is seen as a devilish thing.

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