Audio only:
Joe gives his take on the Shane Gillis controversy and why it’s really more related to the men’s loneliness epidemic than we’d first suspect.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Recently, the comedian Shane Gillis got into some hot water for suggestion that women often dress immodestly at the gym.
CLIP:
Also, I haven’t been to the gym in so long, I didn’t know women just dress like whores now. <laugh> Look, I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe… I said, have you seen it? I’ve seen it. The shorts. Have you seen the shorts? Those neon, they’re like the only, they’re like artificial bait colored. And don’t look, you’re not allowed to look. For real, don’t look because they are filming. I’m, I’m in the background of like 10 TikToks right now.
Joe:
This immediately led to a backlash from people saying that it was misogynistic, that it contributed to the sexual objectification of women, even that it somehow contributed to sexual violence against women. And most of all, the women at the gym are dressed like that because they’re exercising not to impress you.
CLIP:
Nobody is at the gym for you. Women aren’t putting on their gym clothes thinking about, “Oh, I sure hope Shane Gillis doesn’t think I’m a whore today.” Like we don’t need this. I don’t need to be sitting here as a man discussing women’s gym clothing and he doesn’t need to be doing it either. And yet, here we are.
CLIP:
And the audience, like all the women laughing, what is wrong with y’all? Like this is ridiculous. Like, and yes, by the way, you’re not supposed to be looking at women’s in the fucking gym. Women are not existing simply for your viewing pleasure. We wear to the gym because A, we like it. B, we’re planning on sweating and C, nobody judges you all for you wear.
Joe:
So on the one hand, Shane Gillis and his defenders are arguing that there are a lot of women at the gym and clothes that are immodest and distracting. And on the other hand, you’ve got a lot of women and effeminate men who argue that women are dressing like that at the gym because workout clothes are almost by definition form fitting. That they’re not doing it to attract the male gaze and that they shouldn’t feel unsafe or preyed upon by men while they’re trying to exercise. And look, both sides are making good points. It’s easy in response to that to wanna get into the weeds of the debate. Is this given woman dressed like that for legitimate workout reasons or is she doing it to attract attention or both? But look, there’s an obvious solution to this problem that I think both sides are missing. It’s just that neither side seems to realize quite how deep the problem is or how much bigger it is even than the debate about modesty.
So let’s start with the easy solution to the gym clothes problem and then move out from there. Shane is right that a lot of women dress immodestly at the gym. Let’s stop pretending that’s even somehow a debatable point. But the women are also right that most of them, I would guess, are doing it for innocent reasons for functional purposes. They’re dressed to perform the tasks that they’re trying to perform at the gym. And fortunately, there’s a solution that should make everybody happy. Have spaces that are men’s only gyms and women’s only gyms or have times in which the gym is open to one sex or the other. And I’d argue that this is the obvious Catholic response. Popius XI warned that in gymnastic exercises and deportment, special care must be had of Christian modesty in young women and girls, which is so gravely impaired by any kind of exhibition in public.
But notice his solution wasn’t that girls should stop wearing neon shorts to the gym. It was that gym classes shouldn’t be co-ed. And while he’s talking in that context to high school students, the basic principle doesn’t stop applying once you turn 18. Men and women want to be able to work out without being either sexually docked at or titillated or hit upon or made to feel uncomfortable because of somebody else’s leering or because of somebody else’s exhibitionism. There’s an easy solution to that problem, just have separate gyms. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. It used to be that men were expected to go out regularly and hang out and talk in the company of just other men. I was reminded of this recently in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock presents that I was watching with my wife, and I was struck by this scene in which a man says to his wife,
CLIP:
“Belonging to a lodge is every man’s civic duty, but joining too would be selfishness.”
Joe:
Now, obviously the fact that this was expected, that a man would be at the lodge or the club or the pub once a week doesn’t mean that women were always eager to have their husbands gone. And even as that clip suggests, sometimes men overindulge. They were selfish, they drank too much or they were simply away from home too much. So there is a push and pull there. And G.K. Chesterton talks about that when he observes that in every age, in every land, in every tribe and village, there’s been waged the great sexual war between the private house and the public house. Now the public house is what we just call a pub. And British pubs historically were often places where men would gather with other men and women were frequently, even explicitly, forbidden from joining. Now eventually some feminists actually sued over this and in 1982, a court in the UK ruled that women must be permitted into the pub.
But even at that time, there was a recognition that allowing women in might be the end of traditional pub culture. And for a pretty simple reason, men and women are romantically attracted to one another. And so there’s a desire to perform in the presence of the opposite sex. So adding that dynamic along with alcohol changes the whole culture of pub life. Going to a bar to meet girls is a fundamentally different thing than having a drink at the end of the day to unwind with some of your male coworkers. But if men sometimes overdid it in ages past, it does strike me that we’ve swung to the opposite extreme now. There was a fascinating conversation recently on Twitter about millennial dads getting shamed for going out for a few beers. This behavior which had once been seen as normal now gets treated as a Homer Simpsons-esque childish waste of time.
Now, admittedly, this is anecdotal, but the conversations that followed from this were pretty revealing. Many of the men didn’t feel like they had the space to even go out with their guy friends. And if they did go out, they were just waiting for the text or call telling them it was time to come home. And I think that’s a real loss. But I also think that Chesterton is right that this isn’t entirely a new thing. The women naturally have found themselves perpetually at odds with what he called the perpetual pleasure seeking of masculine companionship, particularly since as he observed elsewhere, the most masculine pleasures have a quality of the ephemeral. In other words, if you buy expensive jewelry, at least you’ve got the jewelry for life, but if you go to the pub, the only place you’re gonna have the beer now is your gut.
So it’s normal for women not to relate to how men like to relax and even to find it more than a bit wasteful. And obviously the point here is bigger than a literal pub. Maybe it’s the boys getting together to work on a project or to play a sport or to play a game against each other online. Whatever the case, I think Chesterton is right that the woman’s objection to the public house is definite and rational. It is that the public house wastes the energies that could be used on the private house. In other words, spending on all the hours you’re spending with the boys, you could be spending those hours with your wife and kids. So it’s easy for men and women to view the other person as just wasting time when they’re hanging out with members of their own sex. Why are you not spending that time with us, with your own family?
Why are you going out with the girls or why are you going out with the bros? But Chesterton argued that wise women allow for the thing, whereas foolish women try to crush it. And there’s two ways of crushing it. The first is the direct way. You shame or scold or otherwise convince men that they’re wasting time, you guilt them so even if they do go, they don’t have fun, they then get called back or feel like they need to hurry home. But the other way is the way that the traditional pub was destroyed by insisting on coming along with your husband, make these male only spaces co-ed spaces and watch them kind of shrivel up. But either way, I think the net result of all of this is that traditional ways that men have bonded with other men have deteriorated rapidly over the past few decades with the result being that men are now more stressed and lonely and isolated than in the past.
And I think this is terrible for both men and women. This is what we really mean when we talk about a male loneliness epidemic, and this is a real and well-documented problem. So here’s a YouTuber, D’Angelo, the same guy we heard from earlier, claiming that the male loneliness epidemic doesn’t exist while he reads to us stats showing that it does exist.
CLIP:
I really want you to kind of look at how these numbers are flipped to turn a societal issue into a gender issue. Key findings compared to 1990. Share of men with no close friends rose from 3% to 15%, which is a fivefold increase. Share of men with six or more close friends fell from 55% to 27%. Women also saw declines, but they were less steep. For example, 10% of women reported no close friends in 2021. They used a lot of numbers, a lot of mumbo jumbo, but there’s only two numbers in here that are actually comparable. 15% of men say that they have no close friends and 10% of women say
Joe:
That
CLIP:
They had no close friends. This
Joe:
Is
CLIP:
Not a gender specific epidemic. That is literally a 5% difference.
Joe:
So this is just a basic inability to do math because going from 10 to 15% isn’t a 5% relative increase, it is a 50% increase. So let’s say, for example, that there are roughly 100 million adult men and 100 million adult women in the US. Now in reality, the numbers are a bit higher in both cases, but let’s just use those nice round numbers. At those rates, there’d be something like 10 million women with no close friends, but there’d be 15 million men with no close friends. That’s 50% more. So I wanna be clear about a couple things. It’s true that there’s a terrible loneliness epidemic facing Americans in general, but it’s also true the problem is worse, in fact, much worse for men in that it is getting just shockingly and dramatically worse, the fivefold increase you heard about from D’Angelo. Men in particular are finding themselves adrift and alone with nobody to open up to, to unwind with.
And that’s bad for a lot of reasons, for a lot of ways. And it’s bad not just for them, but for society as a whole. And when they’re not simply denying that this problem exists, unfortunately the reaction of some women is to mock men for it and to say that in fact, men aren’t lonely enough.
CLIP:
Let’s read another response here. Men aren’t lonely enough. Short shorts at the gym equals whore. What about athletes that wear short shorts as part of their uniform, like volleyball?
CLIP:
In today’s video, we’re gonna talk about why men aren’t lonely enough.
CLIP:
There are some men out there that indeed are clearly not lonely enough.
Joe:
Now that’s not just an evil thing to say. It’s a silly and stupid thing to say because the whole point of the research isn’t that women need to fix the loneliness epidemic by dating lonely men. They’re not lonely because they don’t have you, ma’am. They’re lonely because they don’t have close friends. So it is fine for a woman to say, “It is not my job to fix your loneliness.” That’s perfectly true, but that’s literally the whole point. Women should instead be supporting men spending time with other guys to hang out with the boys. It’s good for us, but in turn, it helps us to be more present as boyfriends, husbands, fathers. And not just that. So my wife actually clued me into some of the most fascinating work in this area. There’s a group called Men Shed. They started in Australia and then spread to Ireland and the UK and I think they’re around the world.
Their motto is men don’t talk face to face, we talk shoulder to shoulder. And so the sheds create a space for men to socialize, work on projects, share goals and develop new skills. And they particularly target retirees, but they’re open to all ages, but the results that we find are pretty massive. The men who participated in these sheds had significantly better outcomes in terms of these subjective wellbeing, mental wellbeing, physical activity, social capital, and healthy eating. So if you want the guy to not be a lonely loser, encourage him hanging out with his male friends because that helps get guys out of that rut. So that’s my case. Men need time away from women sometimes. We need time to be with other men just hanging out or working out or working on a project or shooting the breeze. And you know what? Women need time away from men sometimes too, and that’s okay.
The sooner we recognize that God has created us as different creatures, the happier we’re going to be. Speaking of which, I think getting this question right is key to being able to speak honestly and lovingly on gender issues when it comes to topics like transgenderism. So if you want to see my own attempt to do just that, you can check it out right here. And for Shimus Popri, I’m Joe Heshmeyer. God bless you.