[00:00:00] Dylan Bain: It is time to reject the domestication of a manufacture society and reclaim the human wisdom that lives within our hearts. Welcome to The Human Revolution. I’m your host, Dylan Bain

[00:00:27] Anya Shack. Welcome to the podcast.

[00:00:29] Anya Shakh: Hey Dylan, I’m so happy to be here. Yay, we made it!

[00:00:33] Dylan Bain: it’s been, we had a couple of bumps and bruises trying to get this all to, to come together, but I’m really, really happy we did. I want to start off our conversation, just looking at your work and what you’re doing is you had the Venus and Mars podcast, you’ve rebranded into this ancient intelligence and you’re really focusing a lot on like things we’ve forgotten and the gap that seems to be growing between men and women.

[00:00:54] Why do you think that gap first off exists and why do we think it’s growing?

[00:00:59] Anya Shakh: Love that question. So I’m going to start with an anecdote. What I love about life is that it’s perfect and it always gives you everything you need in the moment you need it. And I was just listening to a video of this 106 year old grandmother talking to her 38 year old granddaughter.

[00:01:14] And she basically was saying a slew of things, but essentially one of the things was, I can’t believe you’re 38 and you’re still not married. You ain’t nothing without a man. And the granddaughter says, What do you mean, grandma? I’m everything. I’m great. I’m perfect. And in that statement lies a whole bunch of layers that most modern women are not privy to.

[00:01:41] And one of the layers in that statement of the grandmother saying, you ain’t nothing without a man, is she doesn’t mean that Her granddaughter is worthless, or women in general are worthless without a man being by their side. She actually means that you are not going to be able to access the depth and capacity of life that you are destined to live and feel and breathe until you have the love of a man and know what that feels like. And that for me was like, that’s what this grandma is saying. She’s not saying that girls without boyfriends are worthless or without husbands. She’s saying that there is this deeper level of life that is possible when the sexes look at each other as partners and compliments, and that is something that we have not been able to access for, I would say, since the industrial revolution began. Like on a mass scale, I’d say we’ve lost that.

[00:02:49] Dylan Bain: There’s an interesting pin to be definitive. Okay. This gap started in England with the industrial revolution. Damn waterframe came for gender cooperation. Everyone thought it was coming for their jobs, but it wasn’t. It came for the harmony between the sex.

[00:03:04] Why the industrial revolution though? that seems like an interesting place to put it. I think most people would put it in the 1960s, but you’re putting it further back. Tell me more.

[00:03:12] Anya Shakh: Yeah, I’m putting it further back. It’s really interesting because when people say, Oh, traditional gender roles, traditional masculinity and femininity, we think they’re talking about the fifties and the free love pre civil rights life, like the forties and fifties.

[00:03:26] But actually, in my opinion, traditional goes further back. It goes pre industrial. It goes back to agrarian civilization and someone that I research and I love is as amazing British author named Mary Harrington, and I follow her work quite closely and she talks about how just one example of what women were doing before the Industrial Revolution was weaving, for example, weaving was done by women for 20, 000 years before it was brought from the home into industry.

[00:04:00] So it was always a women’s job. And so women and men were collaborating. They were like partners. Women were doing women’s jobs. Men were doing men’s jobs. Women were doing the weaving and the sewing and the knitting. They were doing things that needed to be done to sustain a household, and the men were doing other jobs that needed to be done to sustain a household.

[00:04:23] What was very important is that None of these jobs intersected because you couldn’t have two people doing the same job. You needed multiple different jobs to be done to sustain the home. And so women were so hard at work, actively participating and collaborating like in this essentially pre industrial agrarian economic system where the home was the economic center of essentially, each home was an economic unit, if you think about it. So, if a couple were doing their jobs, and for example, you would have a group of neighbors, and one home would be maybe making gifts, one home would be making linens, the other home would be making wooden items, and so these people would all Share and barter and collaborate and trade.

[00:05:16] And so the moment that these jobs began to essentially left the home and went into industry is the moment that women started to feel themselves out of work, essentially. And so at that moment, I mean, this lasted over a hundred, 150, 200 years, the women had to stay home, right? Because The children needed to be tended to and that was an essential job of the woman.

[00:05:43] And so you think about the primary role of the woman and what she’s there for and her womb and providing life and providing that maternal nurturing and support. She was still doing all of that, but then she wasn’t able to do all of the other things that she was kind of in a collaborative partnership with.

[00:06:00] So marriage before Industrial Revolution was this like partnership, collaboration, we are different, but we are working together for this greater good. And so the moment that men started leaving and going to work in the industries and then women were essentially without work at that point is when the rumblings of feminism really began in a big way because women were feeling purposeless.

[00:06:26] And so that is kind of how the divide began.

[00:06:30] Dylan Bain: It’s interesting. I live primarily with women. I’ve got my wife, my two kids, they were both daughters and I’ve got my roommate who’s female as well. And we were having a discussion about feminism. And one of the things that my wife, the PhD level engineer says is, I don’t, she told, she said this the other night, she goes, I don’t think feminism arises without an industrial society that idles enough people.

[00:06:54] Yeah. And I had never thought about it that way until she said, so for you to come back and point that out again, it’s interesting when people look at similar problems and come to similar solutions or similar explanations.

[00:07:07] Anya Shakh: So true. And I think one of the key, I guess, if we continue to follow history a little bit, Mary Harrington talks a lot about this.

[00:07:15] There were two types of feminism that began to be birthed at the time. There was a feminism of care and there was a feminism of freedom and this was definitely a class issue. So the feminism of care was thinking like, well, how do we get women the rights that they need so they can be able to find the money that they need?

[00:07:35] Because they’re in a bad way, right? It’s a class issue. They’re having a hard time providing for their families with just the man’s salary. And so there is all of this conversation and rumblings about like, how do we support women knowing that Their mothers, they get pregnant knowing that their frame is different.

[00:07:52] Maybe they can’t work in the factories in the same way that the men can. And then on the other side, you’ve got the feminism of freedom. It’s more of a upper level kind of bourgeois feminism that erupted from lawyers, the clergy, people, men that were not really doing physical labor. So then if you think about In those societies, the women were really pushing for, well, I’m no different than you.

[00:08:16] I’m exactly the same as you. There should be no difference between me and the role I can fulfill as a lawyer as you. And so you got this really big battle between Let’s take care of women and create life in a way that supports women as different from men, and then let’s make sure that women are treated exactly the same as men.

[00:08:39] And so eventually the freedom, the feminism of freedom won out and that’s why things look the way they look today.

[00:08:46] Dylan Bain: That’s really interesting because I remember when I was in graduate school, I do my education masters.

[00:08:51] Anya Shakh: Yeah.

[00:08:51] Dylan Bain: One of my professors was very heavily on trying to bring gender studies into, what she called a critical pedagogy, basically how you teach.

[00:08:59] I asked her at one point, it was like, can you give me a concise definition of what feminism is? And she says, feminism is a radical idea that men and women have equal rights. And my question to her at the time was, well, then why call it feminism and not humanism?

[00:09:14] Anya Shakh: Yes.

[00:09:15] Dylan Bain: And she didn’t have an answer to me other than to tell me that I had all the rights.

[00:09:20] That interaction has always stuck with me a lot because it kind of was like, well, if that’s true, if it is about this, we can start to see a lot of externalities that start falling out, whether it’s in the educational system where you look at workplace deaths, you look at who dies in war, we talk a lot much about the glass ceiling, we don’t talk a lot about the glass floor, look at unemployment rates or statistics that say things like, well, one out of every four homeless people is a woman.

[00:09:47] Well, what about the other three? And so it’s interesting to me that’s the one that won out, right? It would make sense though, if it is a class thing, then of course the one got funded and the other one didn’t. So if we bring that forward, as we moved from the industrial revolution into the technological age, all right we’re talking like 1950s, what happens to that gender gap?

[00:10:08] Anya Shakh: So everything changed with the pill, the introduction of the birth control pill, like before the birth control pill, essentially we were still doing this kind of Old world romance dance within courtship. It was like, all right, I have the sexual access you need, you have the provision that I need. We’re going to do this dance and get together and we’re going to call it romance and it’s going to be really fun, and we’re going to have dates and it’s going to be great. The moment that the birth control pill was introduced on a mass scale, and mind you, the purpose, the original purpose of the birth control pill was to really help married women deal with not having extra kids that they didn’t want to have.

[00:10:53] It was really to help and support married women in their lives so that they could stop after two or three if they so chose. But what ended up happening was the birth control pill became massively available and instead of deterring unwanted pregnancies, what ended up happening was sex just became, it was the beginning of the commodification of sex.

[00:11:17] That is what happened. I’ve read a couple of things where they’ll talk about this, how before the birth control pill is you really could say if a guy wanted to sleep with you, you could say, I can’t, right? And then at the point that this birth control pill was introduced, it was like, well, you have the pill now. Why can’t you?

[00:11:33] Dylan Bain: So on some levels, they didn’t have the potential pregnancy to point to as an excuse. They would have to take ownership of their own desires. Yes.

[00:11:41] Anya Shakh: Yes, we had to shift paradigms and we weren’t ready psychologically yet to do that because we had just been living in this like romance courtship thing where sex was still held back. Yeah.

[00:11:53] Dylan Bain: It’s interesting. You talk about like with a pill bringing into the commodification of sex and if we go back Further in time. I think there is this idea that there was a lot more prostitution in the old days. women were married off particularly getting less western centric and looking at what happened in true Japan and China and where daughters were literally sold.

[00:12:13] So do you think that there, that really became commodified? Or do you think commodification just changed?

[00:12:18] Anya Shakh: I think I’m speaking from a very narrow Western perspective. Definitely. I haven’t done enough reading about China or Eastern civilizations to talk about this, but specifically to like the UK or the United States.

[00:12:32] I think in my view, it was the beginning of the collapse of female empowerment and sexual promiscuity together. Like those two things had to go together because right before the pill, It was something that was so forbidden, right? Sex was something that men got to have, as opposed to women getting to experience sexual pleasure for themselves.

[00:12:57] And so the idea of having this like freedom for sexual pleasure and the freedom to have sex is a really great idea. And I actually think it was quite a noble idea the feminists had, but without the knowledge of the ramifications that promiscuity has on the psyche of womanhood, it proved to be quite dangerous. And I think it’s still quite dangerous today. So that’s kind of where I stand on it.

[00:13:25] Dylan Bain: Well, tell me more about that because there is a prevailing argument that sex is without meaning, right? It’s a biological thing that people do. One person I knew, a female feminist, I knew in college, we got into discussion.

[00:13:39] Now I went to a Catholic university, so we were both, setting is important in this conversation. And One of the things we were discussing was, well, what is the meaning of the sexual act? And her response was, sex doesn’t have meaning. And if it does, it shouldn’t. And so it’s interesting to say that to hear that on the other side, the promiscuity Actually does have an effect because for, at least for me as a guy, one of the things that I’ve been counseled most of my life is to accept a woman’s sexuality, to accept that she’s allowed to have sex with whoever she wants, when it was she ever she wants, where she ever she wants.

[00:14:15] And that I don’t get a say in it, which I’m not saying that you’re saying that I do, but now we’re coming back around and saying, well, no, maybe there is something more to this. So I’d like to know more.

[00:14:25] Anya Shakh: Yeah, I think there is something more to it. I think we have to ask ourselves why has sex become just an act?

[00:14:33] Right? It’s devoid of meaning, just like you said, like, why are we in that sort of mindset right now? And my answer, and the answer that I’ve been able to come up with based on reading and what people like Mary Harrington say and other, specifically Louise Perry, who wrote the case against the sexual revolution, is because of economics.

[00:14:53] If it wasn’t for a free market economic system, we wouldn’t have seen the vast commodification of sex in the way that it’s gone down the last 40, 50 years. Because if that weren’t true, if that didn’t happen, I think we would still be treating sex asthere’s a moral bucket, and then there’s free trade, capitalism, free market, and I really believe, this is my personal belief, and this is something that I think I will fight until the day I die, is that sex and relationships and love goes in this, moral bucket that shouldn’t be Touched by capitalism and free market and money.

[00:15:33] And so living in a society where those things are separate is a really good thing. And before the pill in the United States, for example, we were still living in a society like that. Not to say that there wasn’t prostitution, and of course, this is just a general sense, the general average American was living in the world where there’s morality and then there’s capitalism and they’re separate.

[00:15:59] And so because those things are no longer separate in our society, in order to justify it, in order to justify only fans, in order to justify the making of money through all these different means, we have to come up with A justification which says sex is meaningless. And I don’t believe that’s true, especially for women.

[00:16:19] Dylan Bain: It’s fascinating you, you tie that into capitalism because there’s like this tension in society right now. That’s all it’s socialism or capitalism good versus evil. And it’s no, stop for a second. Like not everything should be commodified. And I think about this all the time with the anti human society, right?

[00:16:35] Like we’ve commodified everything. The reason my girls love the library is it is the one place we can always go that we can just be there and we don’t have to pay to be there. No one’s expecting any. we can just exist. And as we’ve continued to move forward with how do you find, oh, we created this food system and oh, and now people are obese.

[00:16:55] Oh, okay, well, we’ll offer a gym and, we, we’ve commodified health and then we commodified, we made it a premium thing to be able to walk around. I’m lucky to live near some trail systems so I have this nice commodity near me that other people don’t have access to. And it’s interesting that you point that out because that commodification process got going at the end of the seventies and into the 1980s.

[00:17:17] I was going to bring this point up later, but I’ll bring it up now. When you look at the current crop of newly minted adults, gen Z, they’re having less sex than ever before. They drink less, they smoke less, they take less risks. They having less sex. I look at this and be like, because I listened to my mother, who’s a boomer.

[00:17:38] Right. And I’m listening or my aunts are also boomers. And they’re like, oh, the sex is all over the place. People are like, really? Not really. I don’t think it is.I know more people who can’t get laid right now than people who are getting laid. So it’s interesting to see that shift. So, so talk to me as we moved into this technological age to our present place. What is currently driving this gap between men and women?

[00:18:07] Anya Shakh: It’s like there are two opposing arguments going towards each other and within the masses. And then there’s this kind of niche, what would you call it? Like the counterculture. And those groups are happening as well, but they’re still so small.

[00:18:24] And so what I’m talking about, for example, is just like this idea of the mass market feminist experience. So your average woman, twenties, thirties, what work was sold to her as the most important thing she would do, right? She spent so much time focusing on her career and becoming a boss babe, and casual sex is cool and fun.

[00:18:44] And. She’s lost touch with her feminine self in many ways, right? She’s really become very hyper masculinized person. And then you’ve also got on the other side of things, you’ve got this kind of like red pill style content where there’s just these groups of men that have been burned a lot by This maybe overhyped, overmasculinized female.

[00:19:07] And so they kind of project all of their ideas about how women are no good. They’re gold diggers. They will leave you if you’re not providing for them anymore. They don’t actually take care of themselves. All of these just like projections onto women. And so then, yeah, the feminist side feels all of that.

[00:19:27] And then they say, well, there are no good men anyway. So all the men are gone. And so that’s this argument that goes back and forth.

[00:19:34] Dylan Bain: It’s interesting. You bring up that tension because I like, and I’ve had this conversation with some women who are in their early forties, where they’re like, well, I can’t go date because there’s incels out there.

[00:19:45] And I was like incels by definition wouldn’t be in the dating pool.

[00:19:48] Anya Shakh: They’re not out there. They’re inside.

[00:19:52] Dylan Bain: So you’re safe. And they’re like, no, like they’re out there. They’re on Tinder. And I was like, I don’t think they, by, again, by definition, they’re not. So it’s interesting that’s become almost like a scarecrow of Andrew Tate exists and he has minions everywhere.

[00:20:08] Whereas, then you look at my men’s group and the men that I mentor, and it’s some of them are just like, I’ve tried to get a date.

[00:20:14] Anya Shakh: Yes. And the women’s groups that I’m in. So I would say that is still niche, like you and your men’s group where we’re still niche, like the women’s groups that I’ve been a part of.

[00:20:23] I’ve had the third woman that I’ve talked to over the last few weeks that has told me that she has been celibate for at least a year. We have this like women’s moment where there’s this group of women that is like, Oh my God, back to what we talked about in the beginning. I just, I don’t care about anything.

[00:20:42] I just want a good man to love me. That’s all I want, And I’ll do whatever it takes to have it. And I just, I’m scared cause I don’t feel like it’s happening cause I look at the media and social media and all I hear is this like feminist versus red pill back and forth that doesn’t even represent who I am.

[00:21:00] So I feel for that. that’s really just the moment of, yeah.

[00:21:04] Dylan Bain: Well, it’s interesting. Even when I say Oh yeah, I run a men’s group and I do men’s coaching. I had this conversation with my roommate when I first started and I was like, yeah, I’m gonna get ready to join the manosphere. And she was like, why would you do that?

[00:21:16] I was like, you’ve known what I’m doing for a year now. And she’s well, that’s different than the manosphere. I was like, it really doesn’t matter because I’m going to be lumped into that area anyway. So, I may as well just go, yeah, this is where we’re at. This is where we’re going. And my version is a group of men who are celebrated for who they are and what they can do.

[00:21:38] And that what they can do is more than just their production. It’s their ability to hold structure to be, to that soft structure that allows the feminine to blossom, to be able to have a conversation, to both be fierce, both in the way that they love and the way that they protect. Like these things are bigger than any of those one off movements.

[00:21:56] Anya Shakh: Yeah, 100%. And it’s so sad. It’s just so sad because I see so many things. Like I see how misunderstood men are. And that’s like my own personal, come from and reason why like the father wound at the root of all of these issues for both men and women. And just emphasizing with just how misunderstood men are in culture and society.

[00:22:21] And so that’s just something that I feel on a daily basis. And I feel that what I’m beginning to do more of and where I’m coming to especially this year is to own that perspective and share that in a bigger way.

[00:22:34] Dylan Bain: Tell me more about that.

[00:22:36] Anya Shakh: Yeah. I think that men are doing men’s work, and it’s so wonderful, and it’s just like incredible, and only men can teach men masculinity, and I’m just like fully supporting that, and all the women that I’m in circles with are like fully supporting that from the side.

[00:22:49] We’re like, you go, guys! You got this! go for it! But there’s also this Mass culture that just misunderstands what men are doing, why they’re doing it. They misunderstand like the values of paternal love and the necessity for the father and his role within a family. And I think on a massive scale, like this is the foundation for healthy, flourishing societies, like a father being there in his family, running the show, if you will, really being that kind of the lead of the family in that way and helping people understand why that’s a positive thing for everyone and not just for men. That’s really important to get to in our society.

[00:23:34] Dylan Bain: So on the topic of fatherhood, just to switch gears kind of radically. So I have a friend who is a hormone specialist. She does a lot with a lot of work with hormones and particularly with women during menopause and stuff like that.

[00:23:46] But her and I have a very lively discussion. She is really all about the idea that we need a male form of birth control so that men now have a choice over paternity. And before I share my opinion, I would love to know what your thoughts on that are. Like for one, do you think that would have an appreciable impact on the dating scene?

[00:24:06] And two, do you think that’s something that we’re just as a society we’re longing for?

[00:24:11] Anya Shakh: I believe that something like that is a Band Aid. It’s a Band Aid. It’s the same as well, after the pill was introduced and more and more people started having sex, way more people started having abortions.

[00:24:24] But if the pill wasn’t introduced, we wouldn’t have as many abortions. So it’s one of those things where I actually believe that it will make society even more sterilized in my opinion. I think it’s really anti human. I think it’s really, again, I’m very much of this thinking that the moment that we Try to numb out or cancel or sterilize these very natural processes in our body, we’re no longer humans,

[00:24:56] Dylan Bain: really. That’s interesting. I mean, one of the things that this woman talks about frequently is the idea of you’re not broken. Getting your hormones, right. We’ll write, that’s how your body regulates itself. My point to her was with one of the things that, that I, in my view changed with the advent of the pill was that the responsibility for reproduction moved from men to women.

[00:25:19] And I’ve gotten a lot of pushback on this, but I also have a number of uncles who got married at the barrel of a shotgun. My uncle Roman being a great example, he was quite literally a hobo who rode the rails and he knocked up my grandmother’s sister at one of his stops. And when she told her brother, it is her brother, brother got him and a couple of friends and they went down to the train station before he could jump the next train and explained to him how it was going to go. Wow. And he stayed for the next, I don’t know, 60 years in that town, had several kids, had raised them and stuff like that. And because he was the responsible party, the fact that she wanted to be sleeping with him, didn’t factor into the discussion.

[00:26:00] And so you think about that of you have to do the right thing. And I think about like my grandfather, the way my grandfather’s talked about it was like, if you knock her up, you do the right thing. They both told me that, they both gave me that counsel. Now you switch to my dad’s generation. My dad was 16 in 1969, the summer of free love.

[00:26:17] Right? He’s grown up with for as long as he’s known the pill and his whole thing is, well, it’s her body, her choice. She should be on the pill. If she doesn’t want to run that risk, she should be on the pill. So we moved the responsibility back over to her and took it away from men. So if we introduce male birth control, that piece doesn’t change.

[00:26:38] And it’s I’ve heard said a lot, like a man’s choice in having a child is the decision to have sex and everything after that as a woman’s choice. And until that changes, I don’t think men are going to care.

[00:26:48] Anya Shakh: I agree. I totally agree. And I think that until sexual freedom is no longer synonymous with empowerment for women, that’s not going to change either.

[00:26:59] I think empowerment in my view has many different meanings and it’s changed for me a lot over the last few years. And I think we need to define it differently than

[00:27:09] Dylan Bain: we are. How do you think we are defining empowerment? And how would you want to redefine it to be more useful?

[00:27:15] Anya Shakh: Okay, I think that the way we’re defining it is Under the guise of extreme short sighted thinking, you do you, yes, girl, whatever you feel like doing, do it, you do whatever you want, it’s your body, your choice, your life, whatever, go home with the guy, you’re empowered, you’re free, you like a guy, you think he’s hot, go home with him. I think that’s a really bad way to define empowerment, with this kind of like autonomy, As the definition, I think we are not autonomous.

[00:27:51] We are interdependent. We’ve always been interdependent. Your decisions, your actions have consequences. Sometimes it’s important to think about five years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now, I cannot tell you the number of times I have cried. Listening to a 43 year old woman, a 45 year old woman talk about how they really messed up.

[00:28:16] It’s over for them. Like they can’t have a kid anymore because they didn’t prioritize it. That kind of grief is heartbreaking and nobody’s being honest to young girls. Nobody’s telling them the truth. Nobody’s telling them that, yeah, it actually is really slutty to go home with someone that you just met five minutes ago.

[00:28:37] It’s not a good idea for your wellbeing, for your self esteem, for your empowerment. It’s not a good idea. So empowerment to me is like finding your self worth, like really owning your self worth. like Cleopatra owned her self worth. You are radiant. You could be wearing a fully covered dress and just your smile could make a man look up from whatever he’s doing. That’s a power that women have. And until we get that back, we’re going to be lost.

[00:29:08] Dylan Bain: That is an interesting way to put it, especially the piece about not being honest with young women. And one of the things that I think is really interesting from that standpoint is for women, there’s a biological window. For me, I could get this done when I’m 80.

[00:29:24] Anya Shakh: Yes. Yeah.

[00:29:25] Dylan Bain: Yeah. I mean, it happens with frightening regularity. And so I think that there is this idea that’s out there that you will be forever young and those options are always down the road, always down the road. And I have, I look at the women in my life of who paired off and early on and they’ve got most of their kids are now graduating from high school.

[00:29:47] They’re living pretty stellar lives and women who have careers and don’t have anyone in the picture and they’re living a stellar life. And I look at women who got to 37 and we’re like, you know what? I want to have a kid, but I clearly didn’t learn to do this relationship thing well, so I’ll just go it alone.

[00:30:04] And that’s what they did. and I can’t say that any one of those things is wrong, but the idea that empowerment is more than just license I think is an interesting thing. The point you brought up of yeah, maybe you should stop and think about before you go home with that guy, you should think about that.

[00:30:21] And for me, as the guy on the other side of the transaction, to me, it’s what have you signaled is success in the marketplace. Right. And this is the one thing I hear all the time. It’s well, and Liz Plank put this in her book, for love of men. You get one chance to ask her out, right?

[00:30:37] One chance. And if she says no, that’s it, you’re done, walk away. And then you hear women go, well, he doesn’t pursue. He’s not persuasive. Well, but you said no, but more to the point, who then does get the girl? It’s the guy who took six months of basically sexual harassment. And then you say, yeah, sure.

[00:30:58] You wore me down. It’s okay. Now you learn two things as a guy in the outside of that transaction. Number one, she was not honest with you. Because no didn’t mean no, meant just keep asking. And number two, listening and trying to follow what she tells you, isn’t going to make you successful. And people have gotten on me a lot about that idea, but at the same time,

[00:31:20] Anya Shakh: No, you’re not wrong because there’s so much nuance to this.

[00:31:22] I think what’s behind that is imagine how different these interactions would go if we didn’t have this perpetual fear of each other. If there was a benefit of the doubt of the opposite sex, right? Like maybe he’s a little awkward. Maybe he said something a little wrong, but like I give him the benefit of the doubt for being who he is.

[00:31:45] And it would be great if he asked, if he tried again, or if he asked me out again, or it would be great if for the first time I said, Oh yeah, I’ll, I’m just available for a coffee. Right. But then once we got to know each other, then he got the hint and he asked me out to dinner and on the flip side, it would be great.

[00:32:01] If men saw women as well, she’s actually in tune with herself. She’s actually thinking deeply about how she feels in your presence. She’s going to be really honest with you. You’re going to pick up the cues, whether she likes you or not. She’s not going to play games with you. Right? They think that if you don’t play games with a guy, then you’re just going to be easy.

[00:32:26] But what if you’re not playing games and you’re not easy. You’re just genuinely showing interest, but you’re also very clear that you’re not sleeping with anybody unless you’re sure about them. I’d love to have coffee with you. I’d love for you to meet me at the library. Oh, I’d love to see you next Saturday for a hike.

[00:32:44] I’d love all of that. These are all like wholesome things, but not everyone is interested in that.

[00:32:50] Dylan Bain: Yeah, it’s interesting. One of the guys that I’m mentoring right now, he’s got advice of he’s got like a cute card of like, how long do you wait to text your back and stuff like that? And he asked me about it and he was like, well, I was like, well, for starters, I haven’t been in the dating market in 15 years, so take it with a grain of salt.

[00:33:09] Anya Shakh: Yeah.

[00:33:10] Dylan Bain: But I would say if you want to text her, text her. And if you don’t, don’t don’t. And he’s like, well, but I want to make sure I’m sending the right signal. I was like, then respect her enough to just be honest with her. If she doesn’t handle that, then understand that maybe she’s not for you.

[00:33:23] He’s well, I can’t do that. I was like, well then why’d you ask? To me, when you say we’re not honest with young ladies, I, on a lot of levels, I think it’s hey, this whole like sexual freedom thing also came with sexual responsibilities. And part of those responsibilities is to understand that yes, men should always be respectful of what you say and you need to be consistent. Men need to, you’re never asking for it. That’s never a thing. And predators exist.

[00:33:51] Anya Shakh: Yes.

[00:33:51] Dylan Bain: Right. Exactly. There are so many of those things of like in the before time,go back to my aunt and uncle, her brothers were the one in charge of her safety. Well, we fucking failed. So now we gotta do the next best thing is she’s getting married today.

[00:34:07] And so that’s what happened, but that type of thing would be unheard of now. And that’s because we remove those protections. So, okay, that’s fine. And I think that’s probably needed, right? We do live in a modern society, but we need to be more honest with the women about well, yeah, but that came with a lot of responsibilities.

[00:34:24] I know you were very focused on all of the rights you were going to get, but here’s the bill and this is what it looks like.

[00:34:31] Anya Shakh: This is something that women don’t understand collectively. This is something that women are going to need to learn very quickly. With great power comes great responsibility.

[00:34:40] Something that men have been privy to for thousands and thousands of years. You’re absolutely right. If you take it even outside of the sexual context, in the mating context, men, but it’s women are just like, Oh, all the men, the patriarchy, they’re all at the top. All the men are CEOs. And it’s okay.

[00:34:56] Yeah. It’s mostly men up at the top 1 percent of society, but it’s also mostly overwhelmingly men at the bottom percent of society. It’s mostly men that are doing these extremely difficult jobs like logging, where like a hundred men dies every 10, 000. And it’s women aren’t doing these jobs. Women are never been expected to do these jobs.

[00:35:17] Women have never Been given that responsibility because they had a different responsibility. Women had the responsibility of childbirth and nurturing for all of human time. That’s the responsibility women had, and they’ve done great at it. And men have done great at their responsibilities. So now that we live in this like little new world order where personal autonomy is like the way of the land, now women have to realize, okay, if you want power, Then it’s going to come with a shit ton of responsibility. And how are you going to handle that? And so I think women don’t know how to handle it very well, in my opinion. I

[00:35:57] Dylan Bain: would argue most men at this particular, most adult males don’t know how to handle that either.

[00:36:02] Part of it is in, my good friend and mentor, Dewey Freeman put out on Instagram the other day about toxic masculinity isn’t a thing. It’s immature and that’s not toxic. It’s just. It’s just immature,so when you look at those attachment wounds, we live in a society that’s anti human, that hates us, that wants to extract from us.

[00:36:21] And so it’s generating people who have insecure attachment. And as a result, when your attachment is low, your protection goes up because your trust goes down, then your control goes up and the power actually goes down. And the way that he defines that power is the ability to influence and be influenced by another person.

[00:36:42] It’s power with not control over. When he said that, I was just like, wow, we just tapped into some real ancient wisdom here. I don’t even know how to process that, but he has been right. And the more I’ve thought about it, the more that’s when you think about that pre industrial gender dynamic, there is an ebb and flow to it where one is influencing the other, and it’s moving back and forth.

[00:37:06] But when everything becomes commodified and extractive, That goes away.

[00:37:11] Anya Shakh: Yes. I read this like excerpt from Mary Harrington’s book, Feminism Against Progress. And there’s this like 1770 something exchange between a man and his wife. And he comes home and he’s what did you do all day? And she’s like, way more than you let me tell you.

[00:37:28] And it’s just like super comedic cause it sounds like some argument that would be had right now. It’s like her listing all the things she’s done. And, they had this You know what that made me think of? It made me think of Alison Armstrong. She and her content always ask okay, all the men that she asks, what do you really want?

[00:37:47] What do you really want with a woman? what do you want? And most of them say a version of, I just want a partner. Like a partner in crime, someone to be my partner in this life and that pre industrial dynamic speaks to exactly that. These two were just like straight up partners, collaborators, almost in the way that you would be with your favorite colleague at work.

[00:38:12] It’s You both don’t do the same job. You do complimentary jobs that get the greater work done. It’s just normal. It’s just human. it’s almost like a quote that I heard. It’s you marry your best friend plus the erotic elements. That’s like what a perfect marriage is.

[00:38:27] So I think that we’re missing that we’re missing that, Oh, what are you looking for in a man? What are you looking for in a woman? Like checklist. It’s yeah, there’s levels to the masculine and feminine dynamics there, but mostly it’s about partnership.

[00:38:42] Dylan Bain: The partnership ideas is interesting to me because I feel like there’s an egalitarian idea of if we’re partners, then we’re equal in this relationship and that’s never how it goes.

[00:38:52] in my own relationship where we, that was what we said, we wanted an equal partnership. Well, turns out that was always a fantasy because when it came right down to it, I can’t breastfeed. And so, when we had our first daughter, my, my wife would come home and be like, all right, well, I’m going to the grocery store because you’re busy and she’d be doing the wash and whatnot.

[00:39:11] And I was out driving trucks, trying to make rent and as you move through these different states, and as you, you look at this, it’s if you want an equal partnership, and this is, I think, applicable to everyone, are you capable of being a partner?

[00:39:26] Anya Shakh: Yeah.

[00:39:27] Dylan Bain: Can you know that sometimes you’re going to have to pick it up more, and sometimes you’re going to have to let go?

[00:39:33] Do you have the skillset to come in? Do you know how to handle them? Do you know how to sue the wound? Do you know how to act in an emergency? Do you know how to plan a dinner? Can you be decisive? Can you balance a checkbook? I think about today, my daughter, my youngest daughter, Agatha has got a blister on her finger.

[00:39:52] She’s freaking out about it because we don’t know where it came from and she thinks that she cut it and it got infected. And so I was looking at it and I’m doing my medical thing and I’m also like talking to her gently and softly and everything else like that. And when we finished up, my wife looked at me and was like, and that was real.

[00:40:09] That was big dad energy is what that was. Because here I am seriously doing a clinical examination of the wound and being super gentle with my daughter who’s crying and freaked out and scared. Men, you got to be able to do both.

[00:40:26] Anya Shakh: Totally. Oh, I love how you just split the BDE to big dad energy. I like that.

[00:40:31] Nice.

[00:40:32] Dylan Bain: Oh yeah. I think about when people talk about like the alpha, it’s interesting when we talk about alpha wolves, right? Because that study was done on wolves in captivity that didn’t know each other. So the alpha wolf was the biggest male in a time of war, essentially pushing everyone into formation and like being aggressive to the world to defend whatever they needed to be.

[00:40:53] But then when you, when they released him in the wild, the alpha was just like the cool dad who was like making sure everyone was taken care of. So like a true alpha male energy is yeah, I’ve scanned the crowd. I’ve understand the perimeter. I know where the exits are and I’ve got snacks for the kids.

[00:41:09] Anya Shakh: Totally responsible. Just like responsible. Yeah.

[00:41:12] Dylan Bain: Yeah. I’ve thought it through. We’re going to have a great time at the water park, right? that’s alpha stuff too.

[00:41:17] Anya Shakh: agreed. That’s so important. People don’t understand that. People don’t understand that. So we gotta help demystify that. I think I saw something like, yeah, maybe we don’t want the patriarchal way of life the way that we’ve defined it in the negative, but paternal, like a paternal hierarchy is very important.

[00:41:39] Dylan Bain: There’s a long conversation to have about whether or not structures are patriarchal or matriarchal. Such a good point, but that I think we can do at our, and our next conversation, because we’re going to have you back on. Love it. If people are listening to this conversation, you know what, I need more Anya in my life.

[00:41:57] Where can they go to find more of you?

[00:41:59] Anya Shakh: They can go, to find me on Instagram at Anya Shack. So it’s A N Y A S H A K H. So find me on Instagram there. You’ll be able to link to my podcast and some of the one on one work that I do with both men and women helping men and women fall in love with each other.

[00:42:17] So love being on, Dylan.

[00:42:19] Absolutely amazing. My pleasure. Thank you so much.

[00:42:22] Bye everybody.

[00:42:28] Dylan Bain: Thanks for listening. The conversation doesn’t stop here. You can find me on all the social media platforms at TheDylanBane and you can sign up to get updates on workshops, events, and more at dylanbain.com.