several years ago in reading about one of the thrillers. this teaches you a lot about ejection -- a thriller. -- egyptian -- a thriller. i have to read the book about trump's america. james patterson is one of my favorite authors. i finished bill clinton's book today it came out. i finished another book the data came out. i read everything, including light romance to escape the world. >> send us your summer reading ktv, or at instagram, or pasted to ouour facebook page. tv" on c-span2 --

television for serious readers. announcer: this week on q&a, syndicated columnist mona charen. she talked about her book sex matters, how modern feminism lost touch with science, love, and common sense. ♪ brian: mona charen, your new book, "sex matters," define what that word means for your book. mona: the phrase "sex matters"? i wish i could say i came up with the title myself. it is actually my friend and colleague who had this flash of inspiration. it is a double entendre. it means that sex in the sense of gender matters, that we are different, men and women, and it is ok to acknowledge that. the other aspect is sexual behavior matters. and it has effects on people. it cannot be taken too casually.

brian: where did you get this idea and when? mona: i have been thinking about the issues in this book probably for my entire adult life. as a woman who came of age when feminism was really at its peak in the 1970's and early 1980's, i was very of course influenced. i went to a woman's college where the feminist message was prominent. and i was always a little skeptical of it. not entirely. and we can get into how you define feminism, but i have lived it for so many decades, my judgment, feminism, while of course we are all equity feminists. we all believe in equal rights for women and equal human dignity, the tendency in our society, propelled in part by the feminist movement, has been toward androgyny instead of toward a rich appreciation of our differences and an embrace

of the complementarity of the sexes. brian: why do we learn in your book that you used to be called timmy? mona: oh, yes. so in the section where i talk about gender identity, very sensitive subject, and i try to treat it as carefully as i could. i think people who have gender dysphoria, they keep changing the names of what is conditions are, but children in particular who are unhappy about their sex need tremendous compassion and sensitivity about the way they are treated. but what i am cautioning about in the book is that we are in the midst of this rage in our society to decide when kids are as young as two or three years old, and the child says, i want to be the other sex, the parents are instructed that if they don't like fulfill this wish on the part of their children and start dressing them in the clothes and cut their hair in the way of the other sex, they will be damaging them psychologically.

so i pointed out that when i was a little girl, really little, i was kind of a tomboy. climbing trees and playing with trucks and doing the sort of boy things -- i had older brothers and those were the toys that were around. but anyway -- and there was a phase i went through where i wanted to be called timmy. i wanted to be a little boy. and i wanted all my friends to call me timmy. i say in the book i shudder to think what would have happened to me in this era.

you know, because of course, it was a phase. i outgrew it. i am very, very delighted to be female. and i point out that, you know, 85% or 90% of children who express the desire to be the other sex at some time in their childhood outgrow it after they go through puberty. and so i worried a lot about this rush to gratify what a child says. you know, children go through phases. brian: how old are your three boys? mona: 26, 24, and 22 now. brian: how much did you rely on them for kind of an up close and personal account of what's going on in the sex lives of young men? mona: to a degree. i mean, i certainly, i certainly asked them about what goes on and how they see things. and they are all millennials, so they have that perspective. but i also spoke to an enormous number of other young people both in college and recent graduates, to just get a feel for the climate out there. brian: where? mona: i spoke to students at a number of colleges, several in washington, d.c., some via skype in other places. brian: what did you learn from them? mona: it is sad. there is a lot of unhappiness among young people. a lot of discomfort about dating and about relationships and about the tension between men

and women and there are no rules. and so there is a lot of room for confusion. one young man i spoke to said, you know, we are -- we are wounded. our hearts have been broken. and so when we approach the other sex, we do so with guardedness. and i notice that in a lot of young people, that there is a fear of being vulnerable and a desire for rules, rules about how you are supposed to act with the other sex. also one more thing, an understanding, which is part of what i believe -- i plead for, in this book, that we return to a comfort with the fact there are differences between men and women that are natural, and that we should understand them better. obviously, there is also great variety among sexes, but we should understand them and not therefore assume that your boyfriend or your husband is somehow defective if he is not

meeting all of your emotional needs. brian: on the political side, i have a -- probably the longest piece of video we have shown on this program. it is about five minutes long. you are going to see 30 different clips. it will be self-explanatory. and it starts back in the 1960's and comes all the way to the present. and i want you to -- you haven't seen this, i know. i want you to tell us your reaction after you see it. mona: ok. [video clip] >> president kennedy took me on a tour of the rooms of the white house and it ended up in a bedroom. and that is where our first encounter happened, and where i lost my virginity. >> he had sex with a secretary. johnson came in her office one day. the story goes, he pulled down the shades, locked the door, and they had sex on a desk at the white house.

>> all i am trying to do is to launch a career. >> don't you think this looks bad for you personally as a married chairman of the house ways and means committee though? >> my wife is in on it. >> all i can say is she was put on the payroll to work from 9:00 to 5:00 the same as everybody else. she says that she was put on the payroll to be my mistress. it is a total lie. >> his adultery started soon in your marriage? >> right. immediately. [laughter] >> by your first anniversary. >> right. woke up about 4:00 in the morning, went over to the main house and there he was with this woman. >> clearly under present circumstances, this campaign cannot go on. >> may be a frenzy many of us remember today solely this photograph. >> i am aware of the dishonor that has befallen me in the last three years. and i don't want to visit further that dishonor on the senate. >> indeed, i did have a

relationship with ms. lewinsky that was not appropriate. in fact, it was wrong. >> at the same time you were doing exactly the same thing. >> i wasn't. you didn't hear my answer. i did not do the same thing. i have never lied under oath. i have never committed perjury. i have never been involved in a felony. >> i have hurt you all deeply, and i beg your forgiveness. so i must set the example that i hope president clinton will follow. >> like all marriages, ours is not perfect. none of us are. but we choose to work together as a family. >> to my wife and my family, i apologize for what i have caused. >> craig was arrested in june for lewd conduct in a minneapolis airport men's room. >> and tonight a new low, after a north carolina grand jury charged him with six felonies, all related to a campaign affair in which he fathered a child. >> his political career was shattered after it was revealed he sent lurid text messages to male pages.

>> sin is grounded in this notion of what is it i want as opposed to somebody else. in this regard, let me throw one more apology out there, and that is to people of faith. >> to recount what happened -- that cause you to go from governor of new york to resigning. >> i resigned in the context of sex scandal, a phrase i think easily describes it. >> msnbc is now announcing political contributor mark halperin will no longer be appearing after five women have come forward alleging sexual harassment. >> i did not send that tweet. it -- my system was hacked. i was afraid -- i was pranked. it was a fairly common one. people make fun of my name all the time. name weiner, you get that all the time. >> what i did was wrong, and i regret it, he said. the judge suggested that was not enough. nothing is more stunning than having serial child molester and speaker of the house in the same sentence. >> in a newly uncovered settlement, it is the sixth one

involving allegations against o'reilly. according to "the times," they have totaled $45 million. >> longtime today show host matt lauer fired from nbc for alleged inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace. >> late today cbs suspended correspondent charlie rose after "the washington post" reported that eight women associated with his pbs program are accusing him of sexual harassment. >> that is married congressman vance mcallister turning off the lights in his louisiana office. seconds later, he reappears with the woman believed to be on his staff. then this. a kiss nearly 30 seconds long. >> some of the allegations against me are simply not true. others i remember very differently. >> in a statement, frank said he never attempted to have sexual contact with any staffer. never touched anybody in his office or tried to, but he admitted to having "an uncomfortable conversation about surrogacy with two women who worked for him." >> a pro-life champion who encouraged his ex-wife to have

two abortions and talked one of his mistresses into having another. >> multiple women have now accused conyers of misconduct or harassment. conyers denies of the accusations but admits to paying a $120,000 settlement. >> blake farenthold used $84,000 in taxpayer funds to settle a sexual harassment claim and never paid taxpayers back that money. >> this is the shopping mall where some say it was common knowledge and not a big secret that roy moore would flirt with teenage girls when he was in his 30's. >> some women who were romantically involved with him in the past, who have described just repeated episodes of nonconsensual violence. brian: most of those were reporting from the media. but there are two things.

one is about sex out of, however you want to say it, matrimony. but the second thing is lying. we saw significant amount of lying. what are we supposed to make of all that? mona: first of all, i can understand why it is the longest clip you have shown. because there is so much. brian: we did not get to half of them. mona: i am sure. it has been -- this whole #metoo thing has been a very interesting phenomenon. my take on it, in keeping with what the book is about, is that it is a cry of despair and fury on the part of women, even if it is not quite perceived this way by everyone. but it is saying the sexual revolution -- obviously, there has always been bad behavior, right, but the sexual revolution unleashed the gates for a lot more of it. why? in because the sexual revolution said sex is recreation, it's fun, our old hangups need to go by the wayside. marriage, not so important.

and so i think it gave permission for bad men to be even worse. by the way, there are still plenty of decent men out there who don't behave this way. all of these guys who were in your clip were powerful in entertainment or in politics, where they have the ability to exert that kind of control over others. by the way, no women. it is interesting, right? i mean, if men and women were exactly the same and had the same proclivities for bad behavior, wouldn't you expect to see about half of the people accused of sexual harassment, sexual bad behavior be women? but you do not see it. women engage in other kinds of bad behavior, but this happens to be a particularly male thing. brian: you don't write much about this, but the lying part of this, when you now see a politician or a media figure after they have been accused and they say it's not true, what is your reaction to it? mona: it is a staggering.

for me, the lying is the greatest sin, maybe. i mean, if somebody were to come forward and say, i did it -- well, one of the people, livingston, said you caught me, i did it, and i am resigning because that's the right thing to do. he urged bill clinton to do the same. that is better than the outright denial. bill clinton wagging his finger, all the rest of them, denying it. weiner, all of them. i don't want to leave out the republicans, bill o'reilly. and so they -- first of all, they behave atrociously toward women. and then they behave atrociously towards everyone by insulting our intelligence and lying about it. brian: why do wives stay with them? mona: that is a complicated thing. in many cases they have children. to divorce is to break up a family and cause tremendous pain

to a lot of people. and i would not ever presume to judge anybody who finds themselves in that situation. brian: in your book -- if i can find it here -- you write this -- far too many young men behave like pigs. mona: yes, they do. one of the things i have noticed is that, as with so many things in our culture, questions about the campus, so-called campus rape crisis, has sort of divided people. you have people on the right say it's all a hoax, it does not exist. not a problem. and you have people on the left say we have a misogynistic society that raises men to be rapists. and so what i tried to say is that i don't think we raise men to be rapists, but i do think it's wrong for conservatives to deny that there is a problem.

because with all the statistics i have looked at and the students i spoke to, it's undeniable that there are -- the gates have swung open for a lot of terrible behavior on the part of a lot of men. and some of them get caught and many do not. brian: you write in your book about the liberals' reaction to their side getting caught with these sexual diversions and the conservatives'. how do both sides react to it and why? mona: so in the past i would have said that, and i do take some of the major feminists to task for their excuse making for bill clinton after they had come down so hard on clarence thomas and senator bob packwood. i said that was hypocrisy because they felt clinton was too valuable to them. so they gave him a pass on his behavior with lewinsky and others.

but funny thing has happened in the interim. so you now have a republican in the white house who is also accused of terrible behavior, so you now have a republican in the white house who is also accused of terrible behavior, and you have a lot of republicans, including religious leaders, making excuses for him for political reasons. and the other thing that i would say is that in the past -- i once wrote a column comparing the way barney frank and -- oh god, i forgot his name -- studds, jerry studds, these congressmen were both found to have committed improper acts with pages on capital hill. and jerry studds was a democrat from massachusetts, gay, openly gay. he was returned to office even after this misdemeanor, his constituents obviously saw it, whereas -- did i get the name wrong? [speaking simultaneously] brian: was a republican. mona: and dan crane was with a

young lady, and he did not, he was drummed out of office by his constituents. so at the time i said, there you go. somebody, the conservative voters are holding their politicians to a higher standard. i have to say, right now, the democrats are doing a pretty good job of trying to hold their side accountable. i don't know exactly what switched, but it has been noticeable that they have been willing to go after, you know, schneiderman and others. brian: around this issue that we are talking about, you had a moment at the recent cpac event. i'm sure a lot of you watching have seen it. i want to run that again and ask you to explain how that happened and what is the fallout from it. you are at cpac. margie ross is -- mona: the moderator. brian: she is the moderator from great publications.

let's watch. [video clip] mona: i am disappointed in people on our side for being hypocrites about sexual harassers and abusers of women who are in our party, who are sitting in the white house, who brag about their extramarital affairs, who brag about mistreating women. and because he happens to have an r after his name, we look the other way. we don't complain. this is, this is a party that was ready to endorse the republican party, endorse roy moore for the senate in the state of alabama, even though he was a credibly accused child molester. you cannot claim that you stand for women. >> not true. mona: and put up with that. >> not true, not true. mona: well, you know, this is a really interesting point. because there has been this -- >> [indiscernible]

brian: the woman in the back yelling "it's not true. it's not true." could you hear that? mona: i could. i could see the people. i should say my rough guess is 35% to 40% of the audience was with me and was applauding. and so forth. but there were a good number of people who were just livid and very, very angry, saying it was a witch hunt, that he'd been framed, that it wasn't true. and they seemed to passionately believe that. brian: how much did you think about that before you did it? mona: well, i didn't think of what words i was going to use, but i was extremely concerned that we not be seen to be making excuses for our side. so i was determined to say that. and the other thing that was upsetting about who cpac invited was that they had invited marine le pen, who is a member of the

national front party in france. i am extremely worried about the conservative movement in america, of which cpac is an important part. brian: let's look at the reaction to that. [video clip] mona: speaking of, speaking of bad guys, there was quite an interesting person -- hold on. quite an interesting person who was on this stage the other day. her name is marine le pen. why was she here? why was she here? she is a young, no longer in office politician from france. i think the only reason she was here is because she is named le pen. and the le pen name is a disgrace. her grandfather is a racist and a nazi. she claims that she stands for him. >> [boos] mona: and the fact that cpac invited her is a disgrace. [boos and applause]

brian: so did you plan that? mona: not exactly in those words, but yes, i had something to say. brian: what triggered that though, marine le pen, the granddaughter of jean-marie le pen, the cousin or the niece of -- mona: marine le pen. as soon as i heard cpac had invited her. cpac has not been covering itself with glory in recent years. last year they invited milo yiannopoulos. brian: why did you go then? mona: because i wanted to speak up to them directly. brian: what has happened since then to you? mona: i received a tremendous amount of support from liberals. i received a lot of support from conservatives who say i do speak for them, and that they are sorry there are not more. and i have received some angry, some angry, furious responses. but that happens. brian: anybody cut the column?

mona: not that i know of. brian: when did you personally decide to be anti-trump? mona: it was not a decision. it was just, from the time that i was aware of him in public life, i thought he was a repellent figure. back when i was living in new york, i remember him parading on the tabloids his adventures with his mistress while he was married. i am still pretty old-fashioned about, about behavior. by the way, this is something that i hope to talk with feminists about, to say, we women should all be together about what is the proper way to treat women is. i think we can probably find a that. common ground about but it should begin with married men should be expected to be gentlemen. well, all men should be expected to be gentlemen. but when someone is married, it makes a difference. the reason i keep coming back to this is gloria steinem, in the

"new york times" defending bill clinton, went through this long litany of why his relationship with monica lewinsky was not a problem. and she said it was consensual and so on, and she kind of implied monica lewinsky had been the instigator and so forth. never once did she say, bill clinton was a married man, and that was part of what was so awful. brian: here is a little bit of gloria steinem, a couple years ago. those of you who may not remember her, she is still alive, still around. [video clip] gloria: this, this is the upside of the downside. this is an outpouring of energy and true democracy like i have never seen in my very long life. [cheering] gloria: it is wide in age, it is deep in diversity, and remember the constitution does not begin

with, i, the president. it begins with we the people. [applause] brian: where did that march, and your opinion, and that was -- looking for the date here -- january 21, 2017. where does that march fit in the whole sex matters that you are writing about? mona: as i said earlier, i think the number of women who are feeling furious about the way men have behaved, i am not sure they would diagnose it the same way i do. i know feminists tend to think that men have always been beasts, and that it has been worse in the past, and now it is getting better somehow because they have been more educated by feminism. whereas i have a different take. i think that of course human nature is what it is, and people have bad impulses. part of the task of any civilization is to curb those. but as somebody who was a child in the 1960's, and who grew up with feminism, i have the very

strong sense that feminism actually made all of this really sort of rapacious male behavior more possible. it really made it easier for the bad guys who are out there, and i stress again, most men are not bad, but some are. brian: you say in your book, hollywood became feminism's mouthpiece. why? mona: yeah, because they repeated the ideas the feminists promoted. so one of them was, they de-famed the nuclear family. they were sure that until we destroyed the family, women would never achieve true equality. and so hollywood, you know, made movies about the burning bed, domestic abuse and movies that portrayed family life as essentially pathological. and you know, of course it can be. in most instances, it isn't.

in most instances, it's a treasure. you should be aware of that. brian: did you read "feminine mystique" when it came out back in the 1960's? mona: no, no. i was in first grade. [laughter] brian: have you read it? mona: closely. brian: betty for debt had a family. mona: she is one of the only major second wave feminists who had children. most of them did not. but she did. the other thing that is interesting about that is that later in her life she actually perhaps in part because she was a mother, and that was important to her, she backtracked on a lot of the things she had written in the feminine mystique, and wrote another book called the second stage where she retracted a lot of it and got criticized for that. brian: she has been dead for a number of years, but here she is on this program in 1993. [video clip] >> i was technically a housewife, but i could not get rid of the itch to do something.

so i was freelancing for a magazine. many of the women's magazines, like secret drinking in the morning. because none of the other mothers in that suburb were working. one of the magazines i wrote for, one after the other, either turned it down or rewrote it to say the opposite. i knew i would have to write the book, the feminine mystique. brian: what impact did that book have? mona: it was tremendous. i quote some of the people who talked about it in the book, saying it pulled the trigger on history. some women said it changed their lives. it certainly changed our entire society's perception of women's place in society and of what women want. and that is why i do a pretty close analysis of her book, and i go back to show that it was based on a very faulty social science, and anecdotal evidence, and her own prejudices and suppositions. and it would not hold up today.

we would label it junk science. but at the time it was kind of rapturously received. it was a huge bestseller. it was serialized in the very women's magazines she scorned. brian: what are the chances your book, sex matters, will have the same impact? mona: it's going to, brian. [laughter] brian: what would you expect to happen? who do you want to read this book? mona: i want everyone to read it. i would be particularly happy if young men and women read it and get a different take on how we got here and why relations between men and women are so screwed up now. brian: have your boys read it? mona: yes. brian: did they react differently to it? you have three of them. mona: so -- they read it in different stages when it was in process. i think once it is published, they will read the whole thing. straight. brian: do they ever say anything like, hey, mom. you got this wrong? mona: not really. one of them said, that's an

interesting perspective, or, you know, you make a good point, another one said, i can't wait for this book to come out so all my friends can read it. so. but he is prejudiced. [laughter] brian: do they all think alike? mona: no, actually they don't. brian: how does that fit with you when they don't all march to the conservative drum? mona: listen, i must have done something right when i said we were raising children to think for themselves, because they do. brian: did you fight them? anybody that would disagree with you? mona: it's always pleasant when people agree with you. you always think people who agree with you are really smart. i have one son who disagrees with me on many things, and i would never say that about him, because he does make good cases. and i think it has actually -- keeps me sharper because he forces me to confront the other side right in my very home. brian: when you started out as a columnist, how many women were writing columns?

mona: one or two. there was georgie anne geyer, who did a foreign policy column. ellen goodman. there were a few. there were -- there was a woman with "the new york times." whose name i forget right this second, but there were a few, handful. brian: was there any kickback to you because you are a woman, when you started? mona: so there was a little bit of resistance because i was not a liberal woman, and the editors who were going to make room for a woman felt like they were not getting their money's worth if they didn't get a woman who is liberal. there was a little bit of that. i could not really be pigeonholed and fit into a slot. brian: when you turn on the television now and look at the news networks and all that, you see a tremendous number of women reporting the news. what changed that. how did that change? when i started, there were almost none. mona: that's true. there were restrictions on where they could be.

and they had to be in a certain part of the balcony, all kinds of other things. those are the good aspects of feminism that women have now been allowed to spread their wings and go where they wish and do what they want. i am all for that. i think that has been a great boon for women and for our society. mona: your book has a subheading that has to do with marx and freud. what are they doing in your book? mona: the views of feminists -- i went back and read a lot of the big blockbuster feminist tracts of the 1970's. they seem antique at this point, but at the time, our entire culture, intellectual climate was completely dominated -- not completely, but very dominated by freud and marx. they were the godfathers of the intellectuals. when you go back and read them now, it is so out of date.

and yet it was incredibly important in their thinking. and i note the irony that the feminists got a lot of their views from two dead white european males, which is kind of amusing, and also because neither freud nor marx has held up well at all. and both have been pretty discredited. brian: what was freud's point? mona: so freud had an entire schema of how the mind works. he believed that the root of most adult neuroses was a childhood drama that he described as the oedipal drama that happens in early childhood where little boys want to marry their mothers and kill their fathers, and little girls, the vice versa, the electra complex. another side of this is boys, when they see naked little girls, believe that girls have been castrated, and girls believe themselves to have been

castrated, therefore they have penis envy. anyway, all very elaborate. it has been, you know, really dismissed by the field of psychology and psychiatry. i mean, people still acknowledge that, of course, the therapeutic setting is good for people, and the talking cure is still helpful and people still benefit from it, very much so. but the whole freudian schema of how the brain works, all of that has been discredited. there is no such thing as the id, the ego, the superego. all of that stuff is considered to be unscientific. brian: this person said it is totally out of context and you need to tell us why. you will see, page 162. imagine if german chancellor angela merkel posed topless. would it be a positive statement that she is free from "body

image issues"? is it repressed because she never forgets to don a blouse? why did you bring up angela merkel? mona: so this was in a section where i was describing how we send such confusing messages to young people. and so young women, you know, they are -- i don't envy them. so this was a story i put in the book about a number of women athletes who have posed topless or semi-topless for sports illustrated. one of them i quoted who said, i want -- i am proud of my body, and i want to help young women who might have body image issues. and you know, my feeling is that is a crock. women should be dignified. they should remember that when you disrobe, it is very hard for

people to take you seriously. a man looking at a picture of a topless woman is not going to say, oh, look at that fantastic athlete. isn't it wonderful that she doesn't have any problems with body image? no. he's going to think about sex. he is not going to think about her in a respectful way either. that's why i said angela merkel, who is the chancellor of germany, would not take off her blouse to prove she does not have body image issues. she wants to be respected. if women want to be respected, they have to behave in a way that will illicit that. brian: you kind of sent me on a wild goose chase, but a mission because i read it in your book when you're talking about sexual when you're talking about sexual assault on campus, about the website called notalone.gov. i am going to go there in a second, but i want to ask you first of all, what's your perception of what is going on on college campuses? mona: oh it is complicated. it is a long chapter.

but there is, as i said earlier, there is a lot of bad behavior. but there is also a lot of mixed signals. students are encouraged to engage in hookup culture, which involves getting very drunk, and then hooking up with people when you are very drunk. it is kind of sex first and get to know you later. now many students do not participate in this, and it is not universal. but there is a lot of it. brian: isn't it overwhelmingly a majority? mona: it is unclear from statistics. i would not say it is a majority, but i would say there is a tone of that is how you socialize, especially newly arriving freshman. that is sort of what they do because that's how they break into the campus. and that's when the majority of rape accusations are leveled. it is mostly young women who have just arrived on campus.

and so it is drunken couplings with people they do not know and have no pre-existing relationship with. something like 75% or 80% of these accusations of rape that happened happened after these drunken encounters. that's one part of it. and the other part of it is that men and women have different sex drives and different signals. and i mention in the book, you know that, i remember when i was young, i remember that men can be -- can interpret what we see as being polite, they can interpret as encouragement. men can be persistent. they have testosterone. it makes -- i talk about the psychological effects of testosterone as well as the physical ones. it makes you more risk-taking. it makes you more confident, it makes you certainly more insistent. a lot of women find themselves

in situations where the man is very insistent. they are kind of no longer interested once they get back to the dorm room. the effects of the alcohol have worn off. they do it anyway because he is insistent. the next morning they tell their friends what happened, and their friends say, well, you were raped. that's the way a lot of these go. not all of them. i am very careful to say there are rapes, and there are some severe -- there are some young guys who deserve to be in prison for what they do. eric schneiderman, choking people and so forth. that was a crime. brian: the attorney general new york. mona: yes, those are crimes. but many of these other examples of what leads to these accusations are murky. they are -- it is not clear. and unfortunately, it is the result of a hookup culture that is not healthy and is not something that women would choose. and they say so in the polling, if they had their way.

even men are not so happy with it. they find that they are -- they are, both men and women when you ask, do you wish there were more opportunities to form relationships and date on your campus, they say yes. brian: i will show you -- first of all, notalone.gov, it is the department of justice. and what it -- overall, what it shows once you get in it are how many grants are given out every year. anybody can get on here. you can get on this in your home. you can get on -- you can check -- you can't read that very well online, but if you notice, there are hundreds of thousands of dollars given out all across the country. the total for a year is $450 million are given out to cities, counties, different entities around. i wrote down what doesn't quite make sense, l.a. for instance in one of these i looked at, gave

$900,000 back in 2017. the little town of freeport, illinois got $459,000. fairfax county, virginia, which is one of the richest counties in the united states, got $900,000. you go on and on. there is millions and millions of dollars. most of these grants are about $300,000. they go up to higher than that. there are hundreds and hundreds of them issued by the justice department all to deal with sexual harassment. how did we get there, and what's your opinion of the federal taxpayer paying for these kind of things? mona: first of all, they not only give money, but they give guidelines. ok, so one of the things the justice department discourages its grantees from doing is doing programs that, say, encourage women to limit drinking. and men.

they say, no, no. that is out of scope. we don't agree with that. that is victim blaming. you are not allowed to spend money on that. and the other thing is that they have conflated -- and this is kind of a victory of the feminist point of view -- they have conflated sexual-harassment with sexual assault. and i am keen to make that distinction because it is -- there is a world of difference between being sexually harassed, which is groped or harassed in the workplace or at school, and being assaulted, which is a criminal act. i don't like this melding together because it blurs lines that ought not be blurred. brian: let me ask you this. if you live in decatur, illinois, and you get no money from the government, why'd you want taxpayer money going to dubuque, iowa, for sexual-harassment reasons? where does that come from?

mona: you could -- [laughter] we borrow it from china. you could say the same about a million other government grants that are out there. the federal leviathan is an enormous. brian: this comes originally in 1994 from the violence against women act. that, by the way, was supported by both republicans and democrats. and through the years, republican and democratic presidents have signed the bill to spend this kind of money. mona: right. brian: do we have any -- is anybody checking this to see how it's being spent? mona: people don't check any government programs, for the most part. i mean, there is is the congressional accountability office. issues reports, and then they are ignored. can you think of a program that was ever ended because it was ineffective or wasteful? i cannot. brian: i remember they shut down the cab, the civil aeronautics board, years ago -- mona: fair enough. and that was a good move. it lowered airline -- brian: in case any viewers want to know, they can get on notalone.gov.

that will take you into this stuff. mona: these things, representatives and congressman -- senators like to say i voted for a program that will help combat sexual-harassment, sexual assault. they vote for this money and then they tell their constituents, i am for this. my opponent who didn't vote for it, he is against it. most of these things cannot be solved by spending. these are cultural issues that have to be solved by changes in attitudes and changes in behavior. brian: you write about a woman named emma who was a student at columbia university. and you went to -- mona: barnard. brian: barnard college which is right in the same area. we are going to see video of her. it is only 25 seconds. goes back to 2014. she is sitting on columbia's campus with a mattress next to her.

just watch this and you can tell us why you brought this up. >> my name is emma. i am a senior in the college. i am a visual arts major. for my senior thesis, i will be doing a piece called "mattress performance, " or carry that weight, where i will be carrying this dorm room mattress with me everywhere i go for as long as i attend the same school as my rapist. brian: why did you bring this up? mona: well, one of the pieties of the feminist movement is women never lie. and that you have to believe all women. i think that is overly broad. people do lie for lots of reasons. and a percentage, the department of justice estimates 7%, of rape claims are not true. in her case i think there is grave doubt as to whether she was raped.

the university found that -- the officials in new york city, the university, after doing a review of it, found that she had not been raped. the man she accused was able to provide facebook messages she had sent him after the supposed rape that said she loved him, i love you, i miss you, and we need some time to chill together, so on and so forth. brian: but she took this mattress everywhere she went. mona: and that became a cultural meme. and some mattresses showed up on other campuses, too. and the new york times wrote about it, and she was declared to be kind of the joan of arc of campus rape for a while. but you don't hear much about her anymore, and especially because the man she accused won his case against columbia. and columbia issued an apology to him for the way he was treated.

brian: i don't know if it makes sense to ask this question, but why would columbia university, a well-known ivy league school, why would they allow somebody to carry a mattress into all her classes? mona: it was fashionable, i guess. [laughter] they wanted to be, they wanted to be seen as -- they are terrified of being accused of not handling these accusations with enough sensitivity. and so they have lots of counselors. harvard, i think, has 49 title ix counselors. brian: you said 54. mona: thank you. brian: what does that mean? mona: so they are there to adjudicate these cases where somebody has alleged. brian: there are 54 people who work on harvard's campus to adjudicate these matters. mona: yes, and there have been dozens and dozens of lawsuits now by male students who claim their rights have been violated by these courts, and it is a

mess, and kids are not happy. brian: under your chapter family, and the heading baby, carriage, marriage, i want to read this because of the statistics. the kids raised by single mothers, the poverty rate is 37.1%. when harry truman was president, only 5% of all births were to unwed mothers. by the nixon years, the rate doubled to ten percent. then with the sexual revolution, it took off. in 2014, more than 40% of all births were to unmarried women. among mothers under the age of 30, 64% were single. what happened? mona: we decided that marriage was optional when it comes to the ideal environment for raising children. we did more than that. we decided that adults' self-expression and adult happiness was more important than the well-being and the

needs of children. and so we removed the stigma from unwed childbearing. and so now we have a huge problem with it. and it, you know, the children who grow up with single parents are much more likely to have all kinds of problems than children who grow up in two-parent homes. and it is, it is attributing to our huge problem of inequality. which no one talks about. we have heard about the decline of manufacturing jobs, and we have heard about globalization and international competition and immigrants coming and taking our jobs. no one talks about family structure, or not enough people talk about family structure. because when you look at it, there is actually a class division. people who go to college, sort of our upper class, if you will,

people who go to college tend to be living in the same way most americans were back in the 1960's and 1950's. they wait until they are married to have their first child. they get a job, they get an education. and if you do all those things, your chances of being poor are infinitesimal. on the other hand, for people who have only some college or high school degree, or worse if they are high school dropouts, the rate of illegitimacy is huge. and those families are -- what some of the sociologists call it fragile families. that have a whole skein of pathologies. again not all. some single mothers do a great job, but the lack of a secure grounding in an intact family is affecting every other part of our society, including like the problems in the african-american community, where there are so many young men who are in prison that young women don't have

enough men to choose from if they want to marry an african-american guy. huge, huge issue that affects everything. brian: on another subject, abortion. you refer to a debate that was held on the senate floor a long time ago, back in 1999. but you also say i congresswoman at the time from colorado somehow got, kept pictures of the aborted fetuses often floor -- off the floor of the house. thank you. off the floor of the house. mona: well, she attempted to. i am not sure she was successful. she moved to have them removed because she said it was in terrible taste to show images of aborted fetuses. and naomi wolf, who is a feminist and liberal, after she had her own baby, became very, became -- she had mixed views

about abortion, and she actually wrote a tough piece where she said you can't ignore reality by calling a bad taste. brian: here are 30 seconds of the debate between barbara boxer and rick santorum. [video clip] >> you agree that once the child and separated from the mother, that child is protected by the constitution, it cannot be killed. you agree with that? >> i would make the statement that this constitution, as it currently is, and some of you want to amend it to say life begins at conception, i think that when you bring your baby home, when your baby is born, and there is no such thing as partial-birth. the baby belongs to your family and has all the rights. but i'm not willing to amend the constitution to say a fetus is a person, which i know you would. brian: how did that get your attention? mona: it was, to say that a person is not a person until he

or she comes home from the hospital is not the traditional understanding of human rights in our society. the fact that the mother may not want the child does not mean the child has no right to a life of its own. and in many cases, including in our case, one of our sons is adopted. his mother could not take care of him, but he had a loving home waiting for him. brian: should roe v. wade be overturned? mona: yes. brian: will it be overturned? mona: i have no idea. if it were overturned, that judicial usurpation of decision-making authority which belongs to people and their representatives in the 50 states would be returned. we would argue it state-by-state, as it should be. brian: you tell us in your book that you were a latchkey kid. mona: yes. brian: explain. mona: both of my parents worked. and from a very young age, i

walked myself home from school and let myself in to an empty house, and spent hours between 3:00 and 6:00 on my own. and it was, it was lonely. i mean, i was proud of my mother because she was a psychologist. i also knew i was supposed to say i was happy my mother worked. but it was lonely, and i did not want that for my kids. brian: and so how did you differ? mona: i, of course, was fortunate to be in a field where i could work from home. so that was helpful. and i had a great husband. and, and we just, we managed. with some help and me working from home and so on, we managed

to be able to give our kids what i hoped, we had both hoped they needed when they were young and even as they grew and even today. brian: you refer that your first son, your adopted son, john, you knew you were in trouble when he to be able to give our kids what was more excited to see the nanny than he was to see you. mona: when we first adopted jonathan, and the first few weeks, we were just feeling our way. we did not know how to be parents or what to do, so we hired a gal to come in, five mornings a week so i could work. maybe a few weeks after we adopted him, i went in to wake him up and get him ready, and he was -- he did not seem that thrilled to see me. i was trying to engage with him. i was trying to play with him, and he was impassive. i was scheduled to go out and give a speech that morning. i remember and i had a very full schedule planned. when the nanny arrived, he lit up, and he held out his arms to her. and i thought, oh my god.

i cannot have this. think, i was more sensitive to the need to build that relationship because everything -- i did not give birth to him. everything was based on care. and, so, but then later when i had two more, the old-fashioned way, i realized, you know, it is true of all babies. who takes care of them is who they love. that was important to me. brian: will you write another book? mona: i do not know. [laughter] i might. i cannot have this. i have to be number one with my son. partly because he was adopted i brian: how long did this book take total? mona: oh, well, many, many years. many years of reading and study, and about 18 months of writing. brian: how hard was it to sell the publisher? mona: a little bit. a little bit. there was, there was some pushback. because it's not -- i guess it is a different take.

but the publisher who chose it has been enthusiastic from the beginning. brian: and it is crown. is that a conservative imprint? mona: it is a conservative imprint of penguin. random house. brian: the title of the book is "sex matters: how modern feminism lost touch with science, love, and common sense." our guest has been mona charen. thank you very much. mona: thanks for having me. s [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2018] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] announcer: for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at q&a.org. q&a programs are also available as c-span podcasts.

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