Join David Tian on the “DTPHD Podcast” as we explore deep questions of meaning, success, truth, love, and the good life.

Join our private Facebook group here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dtphdpodcast/

NOTE: The audio quality for this podcast is better on the audio-only platforms, such as Spreaker, Soundcloud, iTunes, etc. See the links below.

For over a decade, David Tian, Ph.D., has helped hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find happiness, success, and fulfillment in their social, professional, and love lives. His presentations – whether keynotes, seminars, or workshops – leave clients with insights into their behavior, psychology, and keys to their empowerment. His training methodologies are the result of over a decade of coaching and education of thousands of students around the world. Join him on the “DTPHD Podcast” as he explores deep questions of meaning, success, truth, love, and the good life. Subscribe now.
*****

Connect with David Tian here:

Website: https://www.davidtianphd.com/
David Tian Ph.D’s Therapeutic Coaching : https://www.davidtianphd.com/ifs-therapy/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/davidtianphd
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAuraUniversity
Man Up Show Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/manupcommunity/
DTPHD Podcast Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dtphdpodcast/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidtianphd/
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/masuline-psychology/id1570318182
Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9tYXN1bGluZXBzeWNob2xvZ3kubGlic3luLmNvbS9yc3M
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4LAVM2zYO4xfGxVRATSQxN?si=URDTzPtwS–HK5boiYm33Q
Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9kdHBoZHBvZGNhc3QubGlic3luLmNvbS9yc3M
DTPHD Podcast: https://www.davidtianphd.com/dtphdpodcast
Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-podcast-factory/masuline-psychology
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-980450970
Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/bkcgh-1f9774/Masuline-Psychology-Podcast
Tune In: https://tunein.com/podcasts/Education-Podcasts/Masculine-Psychology-p1449411/
Anchor: https://anchor.fm/davidtian
LinkedIn: https://sg.linkedin.com/in/davidtianphd
Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidtianphd
Invincible Reviews: https://www.auratransformation.org/david-tian-invincible-review/

*****

Resources mentioned:

Boundaries Updated and Expanded Edition: When to Say Yes, How to Say No To Take Control of Your Life by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend

*****

*****

DTPHD Podcast Episode 13 Show Notes:

00:30 My reflections on the Tony Robbins and #metoo controversy

04:20 Why some women put up with corrupt men

08:57 What the #MeToo movement wants

14:08 How to get closure from a traumatic experience

18:45 Why it’s hard to prosecute sexual assault cases

23:03 The thing that men need to understand when a woman is sexually assaulted

27:13 The aftermath of the Weinstein controversy

32:26 What makes the #MeToo movement toxic

36:40 Some of my personal experiences with feminist or #metoo witch-hunts

42:26 This happens when people don’t go under personal transformation

48:10 The repercussions of a witch-hunt environment

52:40 Why the #MeToo situation is confusing for men

57:50 This is the future trend of dating

01:01:51 What the toxic #MeToo movement violates

*****

Has #Metoo Become Toxic? Also Tony Robbins, Aziz Ansari, & The Aims Of #Metoo

• David Tian Ph.D. shares his thoughts on the controversies that followed Tony Robbins, Aziz Ansari, Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement.

• The Weinstein Effect is a trend that has affected men globally, David Tian Ph.D. talks about the aftermath of the controversy.

• David Tian Ph.D. scrutinizes the goal of the #MeToo movement and how parts of it is becoming toxic.

• The #MeToo movement sometimes lead to a witch-hunt which David Tian Ph.D. personally encountered, he narrates his personal experience and how he dealt with it.

• In this podcast episode, David Tian Ph.D. tells us what the #MeToo movement violates and how it affects the future of dating and relationships.

Truth, love, and the good. Here we go.

David Tian: Welcome to the DTPHD Podcast. I’m David Tian, your host. This is a solo podcast. In case this is the first time you’re hearing this, for over the past over ten years I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people in over 87 countries attain success, happiness and fulfilment in life and love. That’s my spiel. Alright, let’s get into it.

I posted earlier at DTVlog and it was entitled ‘My initial thoughts on the Tony Robbins #MeToo controversy’ or conflict, and that got us a bunch of messages and comments that got me thinking that I really should put out my post-initial thoughts. This is the first attempt to do so.

Actually, we filmed another video that’s on the toxic #MeToo, and how there’s legit #MeToo and then how it became toxic, and how it violates boundaries, like in the clinical psychology sense of boundaries. Go watch that video. It’s a quick one, a couple minutes. And it makes a point. I’ll be coming around to that point again later.

This podcast is an attempt to understand the #MeToo movement from a man’s perspective. The other thing is, I’m living in Asia right now. And I’ve asked all my male and female friends, what they think of the #MeToo movement. And I live out here in Asia, bouncing between Bangkok, Singapore, Bali, Jakarta, places like this. So anyway, I asked my friends, they’re all English speakers and spent considerable time in the West as I have.

And they all sort of look at me like, “Yeah, that’s the feminist thing, right?” Like, this not an issue for the people here, generally. And that’s a good thing, in my opinion. But what made it hard to do was getting research on the ground about what the #MeToo movement actually wants. What do you want?

Now we all know, I’m assuming, the early #MeToo movement cases like the Salma Hayek one and so many others, the Harvey Weinstein issue, and all of that, these are heartbreaking stories of sexual assaults and harassment and so on. And I don’t know any man who wouldn’t side with the women on this. But to hate on men, as like half the world because of what less than 1% of men have done is just obviously ridiculous.

And a lot of what I’m seeing now as the #MeToo movement devolved a few months into it into a kind of toxicity. I want to take the time now to point out that’s a kind of immaturity. But that’s okay. I think there’s some good reasons for why that had to happen. And I think there’s a reason why mature men also just stayed out of it, mostly, to let it play out. And this is about time when we need to start speaking up.

Men need to start drawing the boundaries. Now, I think it’s been quite enough time for the toxicity, but probably not. But anyway, the first question is, “What do they want?” It’s sort of like that Gosling movie, The Notebook scene, “What do you want?” So what do they want? And it was hard, I tell you.

In preparation for this podcast which I hope to have shot, which I was planning this shoot a few days ago, I did a lot of research on this. And again, I couldn’t get much information on the ground because none of my circle in Asia seemed to think much about it. But all of my research, trying to figure out, what is it that they want other than attention and people to listen to their stories?

So I think a lot of it was just empathy. Like, they just want to be heard. They want to have attention, they want to be validated. And so, that’s one thing. That’s a good thing. I think that’s an important part of it, for men to pay attention to how pervasive this is. But many men in positions of power also realize that’s how it works; that there are many corrupt men.

If you think about the industries of fashion and Hollywood, movies and entertainment, the men who are in there, a lot of them abuse their power. And we wonder, the good men wonder why the women put up with this. But that’s because like — there’s like all these comedies of like — I can’t remember the name of some of these movies, but the ingénue actors who sleeps her way into movie roles.

It was a comedy, so it would only be funny if there was grain of truth in that. And you just sort of like “Okay, this is what she’s doing in this shameless way.” But that’s how it works. Fashions run by gay men, and old ladies, old women, older women. And then there are the creepy guys, creepy straight guys in there, as well as creepy homosexual men.

And to just point out straight men as the root of the problem, like, there’s corruption all the way through there. So anyway, what do they want? I couldn’t really find it other than getting attention, on stories that, we already would all say that’s horrible. And there are laws supposedly to protect against this. You should take to the core of law.

And I guess publicly shaming is the one way of drawing attention to how pervasive it is, so that’s an important thing. And those who in the know already knew how pervasive it was but no one did anything, because the people in power, like I said, the older ladies and the gay men didn’t do anything else. So, stop working with those guys.

If those producers are creepy people, then stop working with them. But the thing is, you want their talent but you don’t want them as people. Like, they’re creepy but they’ve got talent. You could’ve just excommunicated them entirely, but you’re like, “No. I really want to do this movie with them.”

Well, that’s like a first world problem, in my opinion. I’ve had a lot of issues with people that I didn’t like, that I didn’t want to put up with their shit, and then I just stopped working with them entirely. And if they controlled an entire industry, then find another fucking industry or just create your way through it. Create better work so that people want to work with you.

This is the same issue with racial issues. Like, Asian-Americans who are always ignored in Hollywood and so on. You can whine and bitch about it and like force the hand of a producer who doesn’t want to work with you to force them to work with you for political correctness, or whatever, or you can do your own thing.

I understand that there are atrocities that happened, but there didn’t need to be a movement for that to be impressed upon the men. The men that you’re bullying now in the #MeToo movement, like from the get were on your side for cases of sexual assault, and harassment and so on.

It’s where like, when the women don’t draw the freaking line. Anyways, I looked recently to Tarana Burke’s tweet in response to the Tony Robbins thing. So, the whole the thing, this is precipitated by the Tony Robbins controversy of his flip-flopping attitude on this. Anyway, I think he really hedged on that apology which is —

Anyway, she said something it was quite interesting. Maybe we can get some of what they want. What does the #MeToo movement actually want? Like if we talk to a dude, you can just whine and bitch all you want. But like they’re going to ask, “Okay, but what do you want?” Because a lot of dudes aren’t in touch with their emotions.

So if you want us to just empathize with you, that’s not going to last very long because most dudes don’t empathize with anyone. They don’t even empathize with themselves. So, what’s valorized in masculine culture? Navy SEALS, the military. Hopefully, I can go there so at least all you politically correct liberals won’t just like shit on the military, though that’s probably not beyond you.

But there’s something very valuable there. I hope that even the toxic #MeToo folks can get with that, but I don’t know. But anyway, they’re just ignoring their feelings as well. So you’re asking for some pity, or actually what you’re asking for is empathy. And those who are already inclined to empathize will empathize and those who are not will not empathize.

And instead, what men will ask is, “Okay, what do you want now?” And then if you say what you want then we can think about whether we can support you or not on it. Instead of just like, “Shut up and listen.” That’s what I keep seeing in the research. I literally spent a week and a half for hours every day reading and watching, trying to figure out what the #MeToo movement wants. It’s actually turned my heart. It was probably too late in the podcast for this to happen, I’m sure any #MeToo supporter would have turned me off already, but hopefully you’re staying on for now because I wanted to say that I did come around to seeing more of why they’re expressing themselves in this way even though I may disagree with it.

If we go back to Tarana Burke’s tweet to Tony Robbins, and we see some of the things that they want. So she says in her tweet, suggesting Tony Robbins talk to more survivors and less sexist businessmen. I’m going to get to that. “Maybe you’ll understand what we want. We want safety.” Okay, cool. I think all men want safety for women as well. “We want healing.” Yeah, I think everyone wants healing. I think it’s good that you heal.

I think that, again, is boundary violation and I made a separate video on that but I’ll get to it at the end. I’ll preview a little bit of it now. Your healing is your responsibility. Okay? Your healing is your responsibility, not anyone else’s. We can’t heal you for you. You’re foisting your shit on us, and demanding something from us for you to heal is a boundary violation. You heal, okay? And you shouldn’t expect other people to change in order for you to heal.

Like, if somebody else has to change for you to heal, then you’re basically violating that persons boundaries. They may be dicks, they may be complete douchebags, but if you require their cooperation for you to heal, and then you demand it, the demanding of it from them is violating the boundaries; and it’s a very, very ineffective way to heal. This is just straight up clinical psychology.

I can’t believe I need to say this, but a lot of clinical psychologists like Tony Robbins has have folded to the political correctness and have said things that I think that they don’t actually believe. But anyway, whatever, that’s their balls that they’ve dropped. “We want accountability.” Okay, here we are. So, this I get. What’s the accountability?

One of the issues that a lot of men have raised over the #MeToo controversy is that there is no due process. It’s not like you’re taking people to court. It’s not like you’re taking these guys to court. Now, the ones that go to court like sexual assault, harassment, that are written into the wall, that all the men would support you on. I mean, there are horrible things that have happened, and abuses of power among 0.1% of men. I mean, yes, there are horrible people.

But to then generalize from that one single case to the entirety of males is a horrible logic mistake. Anyway, what’s the accountability you want? You want to have your own vigilante justice. Since you can’t take them to the court of law because of what they’ve done is actually not illegal or against the rules or whatever, you’re just going to publicly shame them. The shame is so strong because you not only have social justice women, but you also have social justice men who are ‘virtue signaling’, that means that they’re hoping to look good, so that they can get the approval, attraction, and validation of women.

These are mostly white knight nice guys who are joining in on the fray in Twitter or whatever, and that’s the accountability you want. So, this isn’t illegal, but I’m going to shame them. That’s the accountability you want. What will that give you? Will that give you healing? If you can publicly shame somebody, will that make you feel better?

It probably would, actually, in a kind of immature way, but I don’t think you’re going to heal from it. “We want closure.” I think that’s a great thing. I think healing and closure are great things. The closure is your responsibility. If you were married to a monster and he beat you and all of this, and then you had to do the work to figure out why you got into that relationship in the first place, why you couldn’t get out very easily and so on, and then you go back to the monster and say, “I want closure”, the monster’s going to punch you in the fucking face.

Your closure should not depend on that monster’s actions. The actions and feelings of that monster are his responsibility. And then of course, the court of law can go and punish him for his actions, and that’s a legal issue. But your closure, there are many cases that are much worse than actually #MeToo. Like, I’m in Asia, every day we read about rape cases in India. Fuck man, the other day I read a headline. I see these so often I don’t want to get into them because they make me so riled up, of some 11 year old girl who was raped by 18 men or something.

They’re trying to find these men. And this is like rural India, I believe. I realize Indians from India are very sensitive to this because they don’t want to make it look so bad. But the statistics are reported rapes something, like 1 every 20 minutes or something. Anyway, will that girl get closure? No. Let’s get her health, let’s get her heal physically, let’s get her heal emotionally. One part of that is letting go. I mean, she can watch them all hang and burn, and then it will be empty at the end.

I hope you’re mature enough if you’re watching this to realize that taking it out on the other person will give you temporary relief, but it won’t actually heal or give you closure. If you’re demanding from somebody else something for you to heal or for you to get closure, you’re actually violating that person’s boundaries. You’re actually not going to get the healing or closure that you’re looking for.

I don’t know, man. Where are all the clinical psychologists on this? This is just textbook boundary violation. “We want to live a life free from shame.” Wait, you’re going to do that by shaming others? All right. Like, shame is something that you got on yourself. Shame is subjective. Shame is in your head. Right now, for all I know, every time I post — I know when a video is good because we get a lot of comments. I love the negative comments just as much as the positive comments — Alright, that’s not true.

I like positive comments better, but I like the negative comments more than no comments. And for a while when we first started our YouTube channel for the first three years or so, we used it mostly as a hosting platform for other strategy reasons. So we closed down the comments and we closed down likes and so on because we didn’t really care about those.

We were embedding these videos on other websites that we were using for other purposes. But then I thought, I really started to get into YouTube and in the ecosystem like Gary Vaynerchuk and Casey Neistat, people like that, so I thought we should open up the likes and comments. And now, I like getting these negative comments. Just let me know what you think. And the thing is, a lot of people try to shame me, but whether I feel shamed is up to me.

That’s my thing. That’s my responsibility. My feelings are my responsibility. You can try to shame me and that’s your deal. You got to live with that, but I’m mature enough that I realized, I’m not trying to make myself sound like a big deal but I have done enough growing that I realized in the hard way actually, that my happiness, my shame, my sense of well-being, my pleasure, my peace, comes from inside and I have control over that. That’s my responsibility.

Everyone else’s bullshit, and if they’re going to go the other way, that’s their shit. If I can take them accountable in front of the court of law or whatever, and they should have those punishments; but I’m not deriving pleasure out of it. Well, that’s not true. I’m just like anyone else. I’ll derive a little bit of pleasure out of it. But hopefully, you’re mature enough that you realize that that isn’t going to bring any lasting peace, or contentment, or healing, or growth.

That’s the reality of the #MeToo movement, [INAUDIBLE 00:17:25], and then they’re shaming Robbins and he folded which was very disappointing. But I get it. That was helpful, though. Now, at least they tell me what they want, right? They want safety? Cool. They want healing? Cool. They want accountability? Okay, in their way. They want closure? Again, cool. But they’re going about it all the wrong way.

Safety is important though and I’m going to get to that but that’s the one place where I changed my mind as a result of this week and a half of deep hours’ long research, and reading the opinions, writings of people that I disagree with quite strongly. I work with a lot of men. I mean, it doesn’t affect me personally here very much. But I work with a lot of men that it does affect. That’s why I feel quite strongly about this. So, Tarana Burke, that helps. What do they want? They want these things: safety, accountability, closure, healing.

The sexual assault cases that we’ve read about, so as far as like accountability and safety goes, this is something that I’ve been convinced on to change my mind about. Or actually, it’s not so much that I changed my mind. I just became more aware of the other point of view more forcibly. And it’s the fact that sexual assault cases are painful for the victims to prosecute. I kind of knew this.

One of my favorite movies growing up as a late teen was The Accused by Jodie Foster. If you haven’t seen that, I highly recommend it especially if you’re a dude. It’ll help you kind of understand. I didn’t re-watch it or anything, but it brought that to mind. I’m sure there are better ones on this topic since then, but this is a classic. 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, great movie.

Anyway, it’s a great depiction of the fact of how hard it is to prosecute sexual assault cases. Because it becomes like a he-says/she-says issue. In her case, it was much worse because it was in a bar, the rape. She was surrounded by dudes, and only one dude was willing to vouch for her. They were both getting bullied.

It’s a good movie to watch. Hopefully, you know what the plot’s about. What that reminded me of was how difficult it was for her to be believed. Because people thought, “Oh, you’re a slut.” or whatever, the town slut. And then how she had to relive the sexual assaults in court. So, this is probably obvious to all of you but I’ll give you an example.

If she agrees to go on a date, maybe second, third date, maybe it’s the first date with a dude back home and he rapes her, and there’s no evidence for this because they didn’t record their date. I think nowadays, maybe if you bring the girl back to your place maybe you should hit record on the audio. I don’t know. Consult your lawyer on this, but that might be a good — maybe she should record it because then — it’s become he-says/she-says, and then it becomes about character.

And then throw out all of these character witnesses, and then it’s really though to adjudicate because there’s no actual evidence of whether it was coerced or not. And because of the difficulties of this part, I think partly because of this, the university campuses, many universities adopted a preponderance of evidence policy for prosecuting rape on campus, though this is not a criminal thing.

They would just kick you out of school if the preponderance of evidence was against you. And a lot of dudes, apparently, though that part of the research I haven’t done the statistics on, but in a bunch of other interviews and TV shows, I’ve noticed experts saying that a lot more dudes are getting kicked out of school because of that.

Because it all it takes is for her to say that he raped her and that’s not enough. False accusation? That works. You’re going to believe the woman, not the man. She was intoxicated, he was intoxicated but it doesn’t count for him, it counts for her. I kind of understand the motivation behind that because of the difficulty of prosecuting sexual assault cases for the victim, and so they’re erring on the side of like, “Let’s side with the physically weaker party here, or the more vulnerable party here.”

I think all reasonable people would understand that motivation, though the application of it was faulty. And I think that was like Obama-era policy and then Trump rescinded that. So, I don’t think there’s any more preponderance of evidence as a way of adjudicating cases. But then there’s the affirmative consent. I don’t know what the current cases are on that.

I wanted to put the podcast out because I was just getting lost in the research, there’s so much to research. But again, that’s like getting her to say yes every step of the way. And I think a guy who’s got game now, because there’s an old — I’ll get into this when I get to the Aziz case. But that’s another issue right there, affirmative consent: you got to get yes all the way. And this is again, like, maybe it’ll work out. Maybe in the future, the couples will swipe on an app to agree to have sex or something. But with fingerprint? I don’t know, whatever.

Thinking back to that Jodie Foster movie, that was enough for me to see why there would be so much fear and the motivation to do that. To take those measures. So that’s something that we all need to, as men, need to understand. That if she is raped or assaulted, and there are no witnesses, it’s in private, there’s no recorded evidence, like she has got no recourse, and she’s the physically weaker party —

And I do get like the older generation’s advice of like, “Why would you put yourself in such dangerous situations?” But I’m definitely down with that. You should train your daughters and so on to do that, to take extra precautions. Like, whenever you’re in the physically weaker or outnumbered situation, this is just self-defense.

But in the West, there’s this sort of YOLO generation of the previous millennials which was sort of naive and innocent about these sorts of things, it seems. They wanted equality for women, and they didn’t realize that there’s still this dynamic of the weaker and the stronger. You would ideally have a situation, a world in which you could trust everyone, but it’s time for realism.

So there’s that, but I’m going to get to the affirmative consent thing. One thing I want to say is getting to — So that was about the rule of law, and it’s going to public outrage and shaming. But then it gets toxic. There is a noble cause that started this, and I think all reasonable people can get behind it. But then it started getting toxic when there were things like — I didn’t write it down. I made notes just before I pressed record on two little sheets of paper.

There was a Google spreadsheet of men in media, and it was anonymous. I think it was started anonymously. And basically, women were just going on there and anybody who had the link could access the Google document and it was editable. And they just added names of guys they knew. Whether they worked with them or not, it didn’t matter, because it was all anonymous.

And they just write the guy’s name and then write what the offense was. It was like this blacklist. And eventually, it got taken down but it was going around for quite a while. And this was socially acceptable. I guess like you can imagine like a bunch of dudes putting together like a shit list like that, maybe like a slut list, and these are the sluts. But I think like the motivation will be different, like the guys would be like, don’t get into a relationship with these girls on this list but definitely take them out or something like that. There would be shame for the women on the dude’s slut list.

The women were trying to do the same thing. They were putting together a shame list and there was no due process. You could just be accused and people just assumed that fact that you were accused was enough. And the woman that confronted Tony Robbins wrote a few different comments and messages here.

So on her message she wrote that, “The benefit I get from other women sharing has nothing to do with criminal charges being filed. None of the experiences I could share would be subject to prosecution since the limitation is long run.” She has not personally shared the names of the men involved in her #MeToo experiences. In the vast majority of cases, the cases you’ve never heard about, because they’re not famous, no one is named. Women are simply sharing the trauma they experienced. So, the problem is they are named.

There are quite a few people who are being taken down just because they’re named. There is in fact a Wall Street Journal list. You can Google this, and let me pull it up on my phone here. It’s called After Weinstein. Let me just refresh this. It was last updated on my side here, February 8th of 2018. There are 71 firings and resignations and they just write them out with a date.

February 12: Javier Palomarez, Chief of the US-Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Accusation was sexual harassment of a female co-worker. Fall out: Stepped down. His response, “I categorically deny these deeply troubling allegations.” Didn’t matter! Didn’t matter that there was no due process just the fact that he was accused and shamed, he stepped down.

An investigative reporter at NPR, Daniel Zwerdling was accused of sexual harassment including unwanted kissing and touching. He retired. His response, “The allegations are not true.” There are few of these where the guy admits to it, as with anything else, but we can just keep going here.

Steve Wynn. This is the one that she actually stood up on because Steve Wynn is a good friend of Tony Robbins, the lady at UPW confronted him. I think she stood up because he started talking about Wynn and defending him maybe. I didn’t get that footage, so I made a mistake in the DTVlog where I said he must have worked with her for half hour. Somebody filmed the entire time she was standing, it was like 11 minutes.

I just assumed that there was more to it since it seems like why would he be talking about #MeToo all of a sudden? But I guess he was talking about #MeToo before she stood up. Anyway, it was about Steve Wynn. Steve Wynn was accused of sexual misconduct with casino employees over decades. He resigned from his company and stepped down from the RNC. His response, “The idea that I ever assaulted any woman is preposterous.”

But it doesn’t matter! We’re not going to court. I don’t know. I think for him, he settled out of court. And for rich men of course, of you end up taking it to court, it could cause you a lot more trouble than just settling. So just settling isn’t in and of itself saying that he’s guilty or admitting that he’s guilty. There’s so many of these.

Patrick Meehan, US representative for Pennsylvania. Accused of sexual harassment of a former aid. Fall out was removed from the House Ethics Committee and will not seek re-election. His response, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Anyway, there’s just so many of these. It seems most of them, I haven’t read all 71 here, but there’s just so many. Anyway, I’m getting lost in reading them. I suggest that you check it out. New York Times. It’s not the Wall Street Journal, I’m sorry.

It’s the New York Times, the left-wing publication and it is entitled after Weinstein. 71 men accused of sexual misconduct and their fall from power. So, to say that there’s no repercussions for this is disingenuous and dangerous. One thing that Jordan Peterson pointed that in a couple interviews was that, one of the dangers is that they’re conflating offenses. So it’s not clear what’s allowed, what’s not allowed. And there’s an excellent article on this that I’d recommend. This one is entitled: “What Does Sexual Misconduct Mean?”

This is by Michelle Cottle in The Atlantic, and just getting into the nitty-gritties of what sexual misconduct or misbehavior, what’s like shame-able, and what’s prosecutable. The law recognizes a number of categories of sexual offense, and they include assault, abuse, battery, rape, statutory rape and so on. And then there’s workplace misbehavior, Title 7 of the Civil Rights act, and so on, on sexual harassment. These are clearer guidelines and laws. But now it’s not. Now, it’s not clear. And so, we get to toxic #MeToo.

And before I get to Aziz, I guess I should share my own — One of things is that I realized that there are a lot of issues that are a big deal in America that I just don’t really feel anything about it. Gun control is one. I’ve fortunately not have had to deal with any gun violence in my life, probably now I just jinxed it. So, I’m sort of neutral on it. And over the past few years I’ve gotten a lot more understanding of why Americans are so into their guns and cling to that particular freedom so much.

But I don’t have a bone to pick on that one. I think if I lived in America I’d probably get a gun and learn how to use it just because everyone else has got one, to defend myself against it, because the system is rigged against me if I were not to have the gun. But on this one, I was a little bit more emotional and I thought maybe it’s more than just my clients that I’m helping who are personally struggling with this. In every case of reading about #MeToo, the people who support toxic #MeToo, the witch hunt variety, of the boundary violation variety, they almost always had a bone to pick of their own, like a personal vendetta or agenda.

Because, well, that would be what would drive them to go through the trouble or writing something up and so on, of sticking their neck out. So I should share my own personal things about this, of why this matters. And it’s probably small compared to other dudes dealings with, sort of like toxic #MeToo. The first one actually preceded the #MeToo movement and this is when I first started teaching as a professor at the National University of Singapore, and in my first month there, I agreed to do a newspaper article and it ended on my dating coach practice which I was doing on the side.

Of course, I was pretty green back then so I didn’t understand the complexities of working on the side in the weekends. I thought that was my free time do what I wished, but apparently it’s not. I didn’t know that. I was explained that later, those were the rules. So, I changed to fit the rules. But at the time I put out that newspaper article and the headline was — I can’t remember it right now but it was something like, “30 in two months or 30 women in two months.”

It was quite inflammatory of a headline. So then in the second year or second semester of the first year, I can’t remember now, I had an upper undergraduate class, a third year class. It was a smaller class, maybe 15 students. These students started coming up to me in the middle of the semester to say, “Hey Dr. Tian, do you know that the chair of the department was a middle-aged woman?” The time who really didn’t like me and what I stood for personally.

And they’re like, “Do you know that she’s arranging private one-on-one appointments with all of us and pulling us out into her office and grilling us on whether we know of any students who had sexual relations with Professor Tian?” And of course, I didn’t know that any of this was going on and I was just shocked. And that was the turning point of me of like, “Nope, that’s it. I’m drawing the line there.”

And fortunately for me, all of those students had integrity and just told the truth. But like reflecting back on that, I realized that if one of those students didn’t like me, maybe I gave her or him a B- when they thought they deserved an A, and they wanted to screw me over, there’s a great opportunity. And the chair would’ve taken it with glee, and I’m sure like the mob would have descended very easily on that, no one would’ve believed me.

I get it, okay. But that was enough for me. I started planning my escape route, an escape plan. And then luckily after I handed in my resignation and quit, about four or five months into my own business I had already tripled my income. So, that was a little bit of goodness coming out of that. It turned out well, but in the end, I too was a victim of the sort of rules that always will go against the man. That was a straight up witch hunt, pulling all 15 of my students into her office without letting me know, and they were scared.

They’re like, “I don’t know what this is all about, sir. What happened?” I’m like, “Ah. It’s all this newspaper stuff.” She never said anything to me at all, to my face, nothing. And luckily, they all told the truth. There was nothing to tell. The second one is #MeToo and it was a feminist academic.

I’m not going to name any names. Luckily, since I quit the university and academia which got even more toxic after I left. It’s incredibly toxic now. Safe spaces and trigger warnings and all that bullshit. And a lot of the humanities research and publications that are coming out, there’s like no original work being done like in history or something. There’s no primary sources that are being unearthed and giving us new information. It’s just like new readings of old stuff. It’s so easy to do. When you’re a grad student, if you just want to make a quick paper, just write a postmodern analysis of something. You can do that in your sleep.

Anyway, you should read Jonathan Haidt. Great writer. Anyway, he’s doing some work on this. It’s very good. And of course Jordan Peterson, you probably have come across him on YouTube, plus many others in their circle, or those that be connected with that are still in academia, bless their souls. I’m so glad I’m not.

But one of the issues was last year, I had two papers coming out in a book to be published by Columbia University Press. And leading up to this, there were two conferences over the period of two years and I spoke at both conferences. And part of the conference theme, part of the reason why they chose that theme was because of a paper I published earlier that was on the theme.

And it was one or two of the only papers that were sent to all of the participants. Anyway, I had two papers in that volume, and I think everyone else just had one. I can’t remember. But I was quite well-represented there, and I went to those conferences, I took time out of my company work, where my team was working and I’m trying to do some work while I’m sitting there in the all-day conference, like full days. Because it’s a small intimate conference, but it’s three days of sessions from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM, then you got to do the dinner, and then you got to the socializing or you’ll look anti-social.

And they pay you economy class airfare there in a four star hotel and all that. I went for the camaraderie. I went to have reunions with my old grad student friends who are now all professors and my advisers, some of whom were there. And I did it because I loved doing philosophy. It was a hobby and I loved it. I got no personal benefit from it at all other than the emotional and social benefits of hanging out with my old friends.

And the intellectual simulation of the conference. Actually, it cost me money to go, thousands of dollars, of delaying projects and so on for me to write the damn papers that I had to present, and then to sit there through the conference. But I gladly did it, again, for those things. Anyway, so a feminist academic, who is excluded from all of that, who hasn’t published for, I mean I’ve read a couple of her things. Anyway, that’s you know, that’s my opinion, I’m sure she has the same negative opinion of my work but she wasn’t invited..

I published in multiple places even after I left academia just because I love it and it’s a hobby. I do say I’m a professor or a former professor. I use the Ph.D. after my name as a kind of social proof just to remind people I’ve done all that, and I am an academic by training. She made it sound like I use my position as a Chinese philosophy professor for financial gain. Actually, I think it hurts me more than anything else.

Because people are like, “What’s Chinese philosophy?” Luckily, I did a lot more than just Chinese philosophy. I did a lot of work in philosophical psychology. I taught moral psychology at the graduate level, and so on. Ethics was a big interest of mine and I taught that at the graduate level as well, and published on that in addition to the history of Chinese philosophy. But she said she didn’t like my past.

And she basically just took these webpages that our team — because we keep changing. We’ve been migrating membership sites and different websites and try to just improve them each time. And every time we migrate a website, there are web pages that are lost. We have thousands of webpages on every site.

So, it’s a monumental task to actually move sites. We have dozens of sites that we maintain for various reasons, and various niches, and various industries and so on. Anyway, she found two errant webpages that I didn’t even know. One of them I knew was there that we hadn’t cleaned up and I should’ve cleaned it up years ago but I just was too busy with other things.

And then another one that I didn’t even know was still published was still active. I thought we had deleted that page. So I went and deleted it, and then I’ve cleaned up the other page. But that didn’t satisfy them. Instead, the mob descended. Some grad student who was like a jerk, he was like this grad student, this is one like — then the personal attacks came. You’d expect the philosophy professors to be the most detached, but they were the most personal and emotional about it. It was shocking, actually. But I guess when you ignore your emotions for so long by occupation, you just —

Anyway, so you’re repressing your emotions so you don’t have any awareness and control of them when they come out. Anyway, so this grad student was like, “I’ve taken snapshots or screenshots of the cached versions of them so he can’t pretend like they weren’t there.” These were all pages that we wrote seven or eight years ago as if I can’t transform.

And part of the reason I know that they have this trouble understanding that is because they haven’t transformed. They’re pretty much the same person that I met 15 years ago in grad school or in this case the student maybe never changed, and they don’t know how to have to personal transformation. I’m in the business of personal transformation. I’ve personally transformed to have achieve new goals like several times in my life.

So, to think that you can hold something against somebody from something that they did seven or eight years ago, which wasn’t even a criminal offense in any sense of the word, and it was just something you didn’t like. So luckily, I grew up with a religious community that understood conversion experiences and you don’t hold their old shit against them if they’ve paid their dues in the old shit. But anyway, luckily, it didn’t even matter to me in the bottom-line or anything. I was more amused by it all. This has happened before in other cases that I haven’t brought up here just to keep this a little shorter, but it’s already happened several times where philosophy professors get on their high horse and try to moralize, but ironically.

But one thing that did bother me was a senior professor that I did hold in high esteem threw me under the bus on this one. I remembered that when he was a tenured professor in two different departments, very senior, when I first in started in grad school, and he was fired summarily just like that. Just like one week he was there and we were ready to meet him, start the school year, the next week his whole office had been changed and he moved out, everything. He never did tell us anything but what we were told, we grad students were told, was it was a sexual harassment thing.
And because of the preponderance of evidence, he was forced out.

He didn’t want to have to be dragged through a litigious, like all of this, court case, and the girls’ father was a lawyer. I don’t know. I don’t know the details but that’s what was going around. And now if that’s true, I kind of get it. This would’ve triggered him. Like this feminist academic saying, “Woe is me. I’m never getting in these journal articles. I’m never getting in these conferences because I’m a woman. Not because my work isn’t relevant, but because I’m a woman.

Meanwhile, this other guy who was a player before and he was a despicable clubber, player, or whatever. And she really exaggerated. Whatever, she can do what she wants, but a personal attack on me because I don’t like him personally and yet he still keeps getting invited. There’s nothing about competence there, of course. So then, I get thrown under the bus. It was the personal betrayal, not just the senior professor but a couple other guys that I knew, grew up with, in fact, who just felt, “I’d rather take the politically correct side and throw you under the bus.” And then I was just sort of like, “Screw you.”

You gave into the #MeToo, like Tony Robbins caved, and it’s not about truth anymore. It’s more of like, I’m going to give in to the shame storm instead. And it’s just, well that’s what you get in this environment. That’s my personal deal and that’s my personal agenda, so you can understand where I’m coming from. Why it’s so scary for dudes, is because it doesn’t matter if you’re innocent, and it doesn’t matter what the truth is.

The only thing that matters is, how many people are screaming at you, and with the preponderance, like how much shaming there is. How many people are in on the witch hunt? And that seems to be the only thing that matters to a lot of people. And so, going back to Tony Robbins. It wasn’t really about the truth anymore, I guess for him, he did the about-face, but it’s ironic that it took #MeToo for me to appreciate Donald Trump.

I was coming around the past year or so, as I research more and more what happened to the left in America. Because I was very strongly liberal left while I was living there and until like past couple years. But I’m personally affected by it, so I was motivated enough to look into it. And I loved the work of Jordan Peterson, talked to him before. He and I see eye-to-eye in a lot of things, and seeing how he gets attacked was just crazy.

So anyway I moved to the right and one of the things Donald Trump said is like, “I’m not going to apologize for the truth.” He says, “I’m not going to apologize for the truth.” I’m not going to apologize for the truth but a lot of people do, they just cave. And what’s scary is, in the NUS witch hunt situation for me, it would have taken just one student to have not liked me enough to screw me over and it would’ve been done.

And I wouldn’t have had time to formulate my escape plan and all that. I would just been fired, I think, plus probably shame publicly. And then of course, I did get thrown under the bus in the other case with the Columbia University Press thing. It didn’t matter if it was true or not. It didn’t matter the intention behind it. The witch hunt succeeded there.

I understand why Tony Robbins said — a lot of what, like the sexual harassment issue about the employer, about the rich guy who didn’t want to hire unattractive women because he was afraid. Most of the women didn’t understand that. Like, I shouldn’t say just women. And the liberal social justice men. It’s not the he couldn’t keep it in his pants. Like if you’re a rich powerful man, you can buy that, you can buy a hot girl. That’s not his problem. His problem was that if she just accused him of sexual assault, or harassment, or whatever, everyone would believe her; that would be enough.

That would be enough for him to have to resign and lose his share you know, and whatever repercussions there are in this witch hunt environment. I realize it’s night time, so in the video it must look pretty weird now. I don’t know what it looks like here, but anyway, so we got to wrap up.

So let me get to Aziz, but I just want to point out: The reason why dudes are afraid is because there is no due process. Because it is witch hunt time. And this thing, what she was saying in that comment to me, the woman who spoke back to Tony Robbins, Ms. McCool, is that no man was really harmed by this. That’s bullshit. It’s total bullshit, but you can live on your own dream world and think, “Oh, we’re just women talking.” But there are real consequences to this. I’m going to get to Aziz Ansari.

So when I first read Aziz’s case, I was very strongly on Aziz’s side. A lot of intelligent women really stood up for that, like saying this is going way too far, prosecuting this guy in a bad date. And there are a couple times on her account where he went too far, but after doing all this research I did realize what had happened. Now, I saw the #MeToo movement women use, they succeeded in getting me to see a different side of things.

What he was doing was a very poor attempt at what pick-up artists call cave manning or what they call– what’s the word plowing. Cave manning means, you sort of pick her up, take her to the bed. So it’s sort of like the Warren Buffet saying. I saw this Warren Buffet quote on a #MeToo supporter’s tweet, so if I’m wrong then the #MeToo supporters are wrong.

Anyway, it was, when women say no, they mean maybe. And that’s sort of the idea behind plowing and cave manning; for her to not feel like she’s a slut, she’s got to say no. So the idea is that the pick-up artist then just persists. And cave manning is much worse, it’s physically persisting. Plowing might be physically, but often it’s just verbal. Those are just bad techniques all around. There’s a company that taught this a lot, like they taught the claw, and all these other things like, “It’s time to fuck” as a device.

But there are plenty of others, not just them. But they’re still very strong on YouTube. They start with the word ‘real’. Probably know them if you’re on YouTube. And that’s just bad. You could see that the guy’s just plowing in his apartment, and he’s not picking up on the fact the she’s uncomfortable. So plowing and cave manning are forms of sexual harassment or assault. And that, I can get behind.

I can say to men, stop doing that. And hopefully, you’ve stop doing that for many years, but maybe you’re still doing it because you’re following the wrong people. But the affirmative consent is what basically came down to like, yes he didn’t break the law, he didn’t do anything illegal, but he should’ve gotten consent verbally. He should’ve gotten a firm yes before he proceeded. And I say, dudes, let’s give it to them. Like, if that’s what they want, if that’s what they want on the date. They don’t want to give into a dominant man anymore.

And instead, you’re going to need to exert psychological you know, you’re going to have to be in charge of your own psychology. You’re going to have to be not needy. You’re going to have to get her to beg for it. You’re going to have to hang back and not escalate, what we call the Kino escalation back in PUA days, but that’s like escalating physically, escalating touch.

Make her escalate physically. Make her take your clothes off. Now, you’re the hot girl in this situation. That’s the only way to work, that’s the only way to protect yourself. But even then, after the sexual act, she can go out and say a completely different story, And then it’s just he-said/she-said. And guess who they’re going to believe? They’re going to believe her.

So the only defense here is to get an audio recording of some kind. Get her to say yes on your phone. Record the yes and say, “I’m not going to do it unless you say yes.” You can turn this into a game if you want, but that’s the only thing that’ll make these women happy. And that’s what they’re asking for; that’s what they want.

Now they’re all going to say, “No, that’s not what I really want. I want to be romanced. Just listen.” It’s this ambiguous, vague language they keep throwing out there. “If you would just listen, they should just know, they all know what it really is.” No, they don’t. Women have no idea how confusing it is for dudes. Most dudes are already so numb to their own emotions because of macho culture, “Don’t cry. Be a man.” All that stuff, that they don’t even often know what they’re feeling. And of course there are a lot of, like Asperger’s cases, and there are a lot more men who have Asperger’s than women.

But not going that far, but I would venture to say 80% of men don’t know when they should kiss a woman. They don’t know unless they’re over 30 or unless they’ve had a lot of experience. If they’re relatively inexperienced in their 20s or earlier, they don’t know whether a woman wants to be kissed or not. It’s not like something you’re taught. And no, they don’t just pick up on it. If they did, there would be no need for pick-up artist coaches or dating coaches. There would have never been a fascination around Neil Strauss’ book The Game if it was just obvious the way it is to women.

I guess at the end, what I say to the men is, “Be a lot more careful, be a lot more cautious.” You’ve now got to really be non-needy and to understand the psychology of denial, like denying them what they want. Hanging it out there, saying, “This will be really great if we could do this. It will be really great but we’re not — because you don’t have my consent, you got to get my consent. And I got to get your consent, so this is not going to work out.”

You get her to get your consent. Why are we trying to get women’s consent when they don’t even have our consent? Why? Because men are acting like dogs. So you’ve got to turn it around, otherwise it’s not going to work. This is what they want. They want equality. The way to give it to them is to flip the script. Now, the men become the women, the women can take the men’s role. And that’s not a bad deal. The women should pay for the meal. The women should open the freaking door. If they want equality, or we’ll go out the door together, let’s split the bill. What do you want? What do you want?

I think we should entitle this, “What do you want #MeToo?” What do you want? Do you want equality? Then ante up. If you want equality, then you’ve got to speak up because the men expect other men to speak up. The men expect other men to say no. That’s called assertiveness. You should have that. That’s a good healthy boundary to have.

In the literature, you also see the older women calling these younger women out. There’s a generational gap. I don’t know, there’s statistics that say there isn’t, but the women who write about it are more mature. And they say, “Look, if you’re an adult, you should say no.’

And the #MeToo women are saying, “But you don’t realize how triggered we are, we can’t say no because when we say no, men get really angry.” Okay, I get that. But then you’re like a baby, because the babies are scared. If you were going to be that scared to say no you shouldn’t have gone in there in the first place. You should have smartened up.

But look, you want us to treat you like a baby, you want us to treat you like a child. And this is where the older women are saying don’t infantilize, don’t force men to infantilize us. Infantilize us, treat us like infants, that’s what’s happening. So you want to get infantilized, women, then that’s what you’re asking for. You’re saying, “We can’t say no. We don’t have the wherewithal, we don’t have the emotional willpower, we don’t have it in us to say no.” So, you got to get the yes. Man to man, we expect the man to say no. If it’s two dudes, like, “Hey do you want to go out? Let’s get a beer.”

It’s up to him to say no. Like if he says, “Yeah. Okay, fine, we’re going.” It’s like, I don’t got time to read your fucking mind, dude. But hey, if you want us to treat you like as if we have to get the yes at every step, this is treating you like a child because you’re not strong enough to say no. That’s the issue. You’re not strong enough to say no. So that’s okay, we’ll infantilize you if that’s what you want. And in fact what will happen if the men smarten up — I mean, there are a lot of stupid men. There are a lot of needy men. And this might never happen, or it might happen in five, ten years, is that the roles will get reversed.

And the men who are sexually attractive, who have game, more confident, don’t need it, they don’t have that neediness, they’re going to make the women work for it as they already have. Like, that’s already happening; that’s always happened. But then it’ll become a lot more obvious because you’re forcing the issue. And then the guys who are going to learn this, who aren’t naturally that confident, they’re going to learn to do that. And then the women will have to chase. And maybe that’s a good thing. I think that’s a good thing.

That’s where advanced game should go. That’s the direction it should go. It should go in that direction of the man and women being equal in the chase, in the pursuit, but always beginning in the #MeToo politically correct movement time of getting the woman to get the consent from the man. Do you want this? Do you want to say yes?

So yes, we’re not going to do it. Just say yes. Nah, forget it, we’re not getting to do it. Alright, see you. And if you don’t like that, if you can’t get the yes from the man, you don’t have his consent. And I think that’s an important distinction to make, I think we should stick with that one. That’s the future trend I see.

Let this play out. I always say like, “Don’t fight it, guys.” You’re fighting the #MeToo, you’re fighting this thing, you’re fighting the sexual politics. Jordan was trying to fight the sexual politics. You’re on the losing side of history if you do that. What I’ve noticed is, human history has always drifted left.

So what’ll happen is, I’ll give you an example. 60s was like free love, free sex. It was like very far-left. And then you get the 70s, you start getting drugs and then the AIDS/HIV scare. And then you have the 80s, and it clamps down. So you get Reagan. You have Hugh Hefner defending himself all the time. Because the 80s became very conservative and about family values. And then you start to see that loosen up again. In the 90s, it loosened up.

In the 90s, by the time you get to the late 90s, it was a lot more liberal than it was in the 50s when it started. So it’s just going to drift. It’ll go really far and then pull back, but then it will end up further left than it was. It depends on what you mean by left, but I think it’ll drift back to — because right now you have excess. It’ll drift back. No more of this cave manning bullshit. No more of this plowing bullshit. And now, the men who are going to get the disproportionate mating opportunities are the men who can stand back, be not needy, take it or leave it, and force the woman to get his consent and are not like, salivating for it.

Because those men are just going to be in big trouble. Now, the women aren’t probably, that’s my guess, going to be dissatisfied with the nice guy white knights. The fake nice guys that you see over-represented on the left and liberal social justice warriors. I know a lot of these people, men and women on that side.

And I’m quite confident in saying they have very dissatisfying sex lives. You reap what you sow. So, on that, I’m obviously quite tired now, got to get to dinner. I went way overtime. Hopefully this was a better foray into my views of the #MeToo movement.

I would love to hear what you have to say about this. You can share with me inside the DTPHD Podcast group in Facebook. Click the link in the show notes. It’ll take you to the Facebook group. Just log into your Facebook account and then click join. That’s the best place to get a hold of me.

I would love to hear what you think. Obviously, you can put this in whatever comment section you’re listening or watching this in. We might see that, but we have this podcast spread out over 12 different channels and I’m just not able to monitor all of them. But get me in the DTPHD podcast group.

And there’s a good group of people in there, and going through some important readings as well and so on. So hopefully, I’ll see you inside the DTPHD Facebook group. Thanks so much for watching or listening. And I’ll see you in the next one. David Tian signing out.

Welcome back, I wanted to add this addendum to the podcast because it’s a very important point that I skipped. In fact, it might be the most important point and I skipped it. So, this is on the fact that #MeToo, the toxic version of #MeToo violates boundaries.

And boundaries is a foundational concept in clinical psychology, and the #MeToo movement clearly violates boundaries. Let me explain what I mean there. I’ll contextualize it by answering a comment that was written to me by the woman who confronted Tony Robbins, Nanine McCool.

She wrote to me saying, “The very term ‘victimhood’ blames victims of violence.” I don’t see why the word ‘victimhood’ blames victims of violence. Anyway, “The very term ‘victimhood’ blames victims of violence for having been victims of violence, and is a huge part of the problem. So when Tony Robbins says he’s not knocking #MeToo, he’s knocking ‘victimhood’. He is demonstrating that he doesn’t understand the movement and is mischaracterizing it.”

Okay so first of all, just the word ‘victimhood’ doesn’t seem to lay blame on anything in particular. It’s just saying that the victim is dwelling now on the identity of being a victim and using it, and then kind of getting lost in it as a trap. I am going to now cite a book, that is a New York Times bestselling book, and it’s on boundaries.

It’s called, Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life. It’s an excellent book. If you’re not Christian, because this is written by two Christian clinical psychologists, you can ignore the Christianese in there, but everyone can get some benefit from that.

Anyway, this book Boundaries, written by two clinical psychologists, I’m going to cite. This is page 97 of the book. “Many of us have known people who after years have being passive and compliant suddenly go ballistic and we wonder what happened. We blame it on the counsellor they’re seeing or the company they have been keeping.”

“In reality, they had been complying for years and their pent-up rage explodes. This reactive phase of boundary creation is helpful, especially for victims. They need to get out of the powerless, victimized place in which they may have been forced by physical and sexual abuse, or by emotional blackmail or manipulation.”

“We should herald their emancipation. But when is enough, enough? Reaction phases are necessary but not sufficient for the establishment of boundaries.” Now again, in case you haven’t seen my two-minute video on boundaries and #MeToo, toxic #MeToo, you can read this in the book Boundaries, the definition of boundaries.

You can also see it in an excellent article written by my friend Mark Manson on boundaries, if you just Google that. “Healthy boundaries are where you take responsibility for your own feelings and actions and do not take responsibility for the feelings and actions of others”

And if you read the book and you read the article about Mark it’s very good, Mark Manson. If you watch my two-minute video, I go into more detail on what that means and some examples. But anyway, I’m going to assume some knowledge of that and not get into the details here on what boundaries actually mean.

But just assume that you know the definition of boundaries, that you’re not to take responsibility for other people’s feelings and actions. Because when you do that, you’re in fact violating their boundaries. And if they ask you to do that, if they demand that you take responsibility for their feelings and actions, they’re violating your boundaries.

But when is enough, enough? The point is, people who have been abused for years and years, it’s good for them to suddenly explode in rage because this reactive phase of boundary creation is helpful. They need to get out of the powerlessness and the victimization, that place in which they may have been forced through the abuse or the manipulation.

So, this is good. But when is enough, enough? Now back to the citation here, or the quote. “Reaction phases are necessary but not sufficient for the establishment of boundaries. It is crucial for the two-year-old to throw the piece at mommy, but to continue that until 43 is too much.”

“It is crucial for victims of abuse to feel the rage and hatred of being powerless. But to be screaming victims’ rights for the rests of their lives is being stuck in a victim mentality. Emotionally, the reactive stance brings diminishing returns. You must react to find your own boundaries. But having found them, you must not use that freedom to satisfy the other nature.”

And then he gets into some Christian stuff here. But the more you repeat that last sentence in the previous paragraph, “It is crucial for victims of abuse to feel the rage and hatred of being powerless.” Yes. “But to be screaming victims’ rights for the rest of their lives is being stuck in a victim mentality.” That’s what Tony Robbins, I believe, was getting at when he was saying, “I’m not knocking the #MeToo movement if it’s about empowering empathy.” He’s knocking victimhood. Which is where you start to tell the story of your life as a victim and blaming whatever problems you’re having in your life on the fact that you’re a victim.

So okay, you’re a victim, alright. Then what? Now what? And? …What? Okay, you’re a victim of violence. So, get angry, get sad, whatever emotions you feel as a result of that. Now what? And if the now what is going to be a story about how you’re still a victim, well then, that’s going to be mired in victimhood, and that will not serve you or the people who love you or around you. It will not serve your life. That was the point.

Of course, those who are stuck in their victimhood won’t see it because they’re still in the rage and hatred phase. But you’ve got to get out of that in order to grow and to mature. So, a lot of the toxic #MeToo is a very immature reaction to what they’ve gone through.

So the answer is, “Okay, now what?” But to be screaming victims’ rights for the rest of their lives is being stuck in a victim mentality. Now, this is like the standard book on boundaries, one of the best. You can also check Nathaniel Branden’s work, including The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, and he talks about boundaries there or a few different chapters in a few different ways.

But this book I think is the clearest on it, and again, Mark does a very good job of summarizing the concepts of boundaries. But you would have read about in a course in clinical psychology. And I just had one more thing here from page 36 of that book Boundaries.”Victims of physical and sexual abuse often have a poor sense of boundaries. Early in life, they were thought that their property did not really begin at their skin. Others could invade their property and do whatever they wanted. As a result, they have difficulty establishing boundaries later in life.”

“What that often means is they allow other people to violate their boundaries later in life.” And then they end up in abusive relationships and so on because of that, the poor sense of boundaries that developed or that didn’t develop, since the boundaries didn’t develop early in life.

And when they start to establish boundaries later in life, they go through this phase of the rage, and the anger. But they’ve got to grow out of that to grow. There’s another phase, then what? Now what? Okay, you’re feeling these things. Now what? What do you want? What do you want to happen next?

You just want to continue this narrative and get more empathy? Anyway, there you go. I wanted to put that out there. It’s an excellent book, Boundaries. And if you’re a secular person you can look past the Christianese in there, it’s a very good book.

And finally one last point to end off, because I wanted to talk about future trends which I did just before this part. Nanine wrote to me again and she wrote, “I continue to be intrigued by this idea that the #MeToo movement is a witch hunt. To date, I’m not aware that anyone who has been outed in the #MeToo movement has been prosecuted, unless you want to include Bill Cosby who was charged with multiple accounts of assault and rape before the #MeToo movement became a hashtag.”

“You seem to think that the movement only has a role of someone committed a crime, in which case you agree that they should pay for it. However, as a woman…” She says, “I continue to be intrigued of the idea that the #MeToo movement is a witch hunt. To date, I’m not aware of anyone who has been outed in the #MeToo movement and has suffered prosecution.”
So again, I’m just going to make it really clear. You can just Google it. There’s a New York Times Article that was last updated a couple months ago in February. The title is 71 Men Who Have Been Outed, lost their jobs, forced to resign, etc., including Steve Wynn who instigated her, the story that Tony Robbins gave about Steve Wynn was enough for Nanine McCool to stand up and create that questioning that created the video.

So obviously, shit’s gone down and stuff’s happened and men have suffered. All it takes is an accusation. There’s no due process. So to the men who are watching this, because it’s 90% men who consume my material, I believe that, the excesses will start to get reined in, hopefully, maybe later this year, maybe next year, and then it’ll start to come back to the middle. But the middle now, the new middle will be a far more towards the left than it was before, and you’ve got to be prepared for that. Just understand, and I drew some of those conclusions earlier in this podcast.

Alright so, join the private DTPHD Podcast Facebook group and join the Man Up group too if you want. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on the #MeToo movement, the toxic #MeToo excesses and anything I’ve said in this podcast, these are my second round of thoughts on this. But it’s pretty deep and wide-ranging. I’d love to hear your responses. See you inside the Facebook group. David Tian, signing out.

Hey, it’s David again. Before you go, a couple last things. First, all the show notes and links to resources can be found at DavidTianPHD.com/dtphdpodcast. Or you can just go to DavidTianPHD.com and find it through the top navigation menu.

Second, if you’d like to interact with me or other like-minded fans of the podcast, then join our private DTPHD podcast Facebook group. We’ve got an awesome community of intelligent, wise individuals from literally all around the world. You can send a join request to the group using the link you’ll find in the show notes of every podcast at DavidTianPHD.com/dtphdpodcast. Click the link. Log into your Facebook and then click to join.

We approve join requests every day. So, go to DavidTianPHD.com and click the link to join. See you inside our group!