Transcript

Nancy: Now, when I say “battle of the sexes,” what comes to your mind?

Carolyn McCulley: I think of that song, “Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you.”

Erin Davis: “No you can’t. Yes I can.” You know that song—they’re duking it out. It's men vs. women.

Mary Kassian: Men vs. women. “Let’s duke it out.”

Danna Gresh: It happens in my house sometimes (gasp).

Nancy: Tell us how.

Dannah: Do I have to?

Nancy: Yes.

Dannah: I don’t know, I feel like the culture has just created this competition, sometimes. “That’s a guy job; that’s a girl job.” We feel that tension sometimes in our relationship when we’re not anchored in God. This happens in the best of marriages, and it shows up in the smallest of things—who’s going to take out the trash and who’s going to do the dishes. It’s every day in my house. It’s an everyday battle against the flesh for us to submit to God’s plan.

Nancy: But I think it’s really popular—and okay—in the culture for women to tell men-bashing jokes. (But men can’t tell women jokes, at least when women are around.) Don’t you find that’s pretty common? “Oh yeah, he’s a guy.” “That’s just the way men are.”

Dannah: “Men don’t have feelings.”

Carolyn: We’ve talked often how every single commercial shows a man who deserves to be mocked—just the way that it’s cast. So it’s being played out. It’s being piped into our living rooms in every single reality show. It’s guy versus girl, or a bunch of girls versus one guy . . .

Mary: . . . or she shows him up. She’ll just get in there and show that girls can do it better.

Dannah: It’s a sad thing, because it actually shows up in the way that girls and boys are growing up. One of the pieces of research that I came across recently was, the great difference in the number of the boys that are in college in relation to the number of boys that exist.

Mary: It’s astonishing. The population is predominantly male. It’s not a huge difference, but statistically there are more males in North America. But there are exponentially more females entering college right now, because for years we’ve been telling boys that they’re dumb, they’re the reason for all our problems.

You can actually trace that back to about the eighties—and the seventies—when they really started to sink into that almost self-fulfilling prophecy of the feminist movement. The prophecy that everything good is created by women, and every problem is created by men.

You can see that in the educational systems.

Dannah: You can see it, too, in our view of teen boys. Do you remember back in the nineties when we were all afraid of the super-predator, because there was this little bulge of teen boys who were coming out that hadn’t been domesticated. So the violence was spiking and people were really afraid of these boys that were running in gangs.

There were big predictions about what would happen, and then the population kind of dropped off a little, and then we didn’t have the super-predator crime that they were expecting. But we were so afraid of teen boys.

This reminds me of a story. My son is a young adult now, but he was maybe in ninth grade—in fact, I know it was ninth grade . . . His assignment in his Christian high school was to do a random act of kindness. So he got together with three of his friends in his class—three guys—and they baked cookies at my house.

I got the boxes, they put the cookies in boxes, and they were just going to knock on doors, give these boxes of cookies and rake leaves for …