On Wednesday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles talks about Emma Watson’s recent announcement that she has chosen to be in a relationship with herself. Video and partial transcript below:
Emma Watson is partnered to herself — in other words, she’s single. This is delusional language, and I understand why people are using this language, but you really shouldn’t because it’s going to lead to misery.
First of all, I’m not saying marriage is for everyone. Some of the happiest people on earth are unmarried. There was a survey that that went around of the “happiest jobs” thing, I think this was in 2007 out of the University of Chicago, the happiest people in the world, the most job-satisfied and fulfilled people are actually celibate Catholic priests. So marriage is not for everybody. Plenty of religious people who are unmarried … are very happy. And for people who just happen to be single, they happen to be unmarried, there are ways to promote long-term happiness.
There was another study out of Harvard. It’s one of the longest studies of adult life ever conducted, it showed that relationships with your family, relationships with friends, relationships with the local community, can seriously promote long-term happiness, even if you’re unmarried, or you’ve never been married, or you’re divorced, or you’re a widow.
The difference between all of those things and being self-partnered is the object of your relationships. Because priests are not self-partnered; priests are in a relationship with God. People who have long-term happiness and are unmarried are not self-partnered. They have strong bonds to their communities, their family, to friends to go to church, to going to the local PTA, going to the local Lions Club, whatever.
Marrying yourself, self-partnership, all different. I mean, we’ve seen self-marriage crop up in recent years, not just Dennis Rodman. I mean, Dennis Rodman probably started this trend in the 1990s when he declared himself bisexual, put on a wedding dress, and said he was going to marry himself. When Dennis Rodman did that, we all laughed about it. We all joked, right, I mean this was kind of a ridiculous stunt. Now, years later, it’s actually happening.
Two years ago, in 2017, a woman named Adriana Lima married herself. Other women have done this; their stories about this crop up all the time. They call it sologamy. Thirteen years ago, so after Rodman but before Adriana Lima, a woman named [Alexandra] Gill wed herself. And she said, quote, “You’re the one constant.”
“Your parents will die, your children will grow up and your friends will move, but you’re always there.”
“I’m not looking for The One. I am The One.”
This is a recipe for misery. It’s not just in self-partnership … AI has permitted sex robot technology to get really, really advanced. So there are now sex robot brothels, there are now sex robots that don’t just move their arms and do whatever sort of things you want a sex robot to do, they actually have chest cavities that can breathe. They’re actually simulating human beings. They’re really close. I mean, Mashable did a report on this the other day. They said that the robots are just as good as people. But they’re not people, they’re just hunks of metal and plastic.
But people are, I think, mistakenly doing all of these things. These women who are marrying themselves, or people who were buying sex robots, or people who were saying, I’m partnered with myself, I don’t need anybody. Forget the feminist line from the 70s, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” We can now say, “I need anybody else like a fish needs a bicycle. I don’t need anybody. I need me. All I need is myself. I am perfectly sufficient.”
Emma Watson had that feminist campaign a few years ago, called “HeForShe,” [but] it’s now becoming me for me. I understand the idea, there is a loneliness epidemic that’s going around this country and around the West generally. Loneliness is way, way up. There was a study came out of ViceLand, it surveyed young people, it found out that Millennials are more afraid of being lonely than they are of losing a job or losing a house. That survey showed that 42% of millennial women are more afraid of loneliness than they are of cancer. Stress, anxiety, depression — all up in recent years. Antidepressant pills, all up, people feeling very isolated, and so they turn to these these comforts, what they think are going to be comforts, sex robots, or the idea of self-sufficiency, or internet porn, which is just the same thing as sex robots, it’s just, you can’t touch it. It’s not as tangible, but it’s the same idea.
Then ironically, when people turn to these things to alleviate their loneliness, they become more isolated. They become more withdrawn. Why? The reason is this culture of self-love — which you see all the time in leftist publications, you see it in Emma Watson talking to Vogue magazine — the cult of self-love has deluded people into confusing the virtue of endurance with the sin of pride. Everybody is going to be lonely — that happens to every single person multiple times throughout their lives for sometimes extended periods of time.
It is a virtue to be able to endure that loneliness, and what we try to do is mitigate the effects of that loneliness by engaging with our community, and by praying to God, and by involving ourselves in the whole world. Very different from the sin of pride, which tells us that we are sufficient unto ourselves, “I don’t need a partner. I don’t need it.”
But … human beings are not self-sufficient. It’s even, I think, sometimes conservatives want to lean a little too much in this direction of self-reliance. “I don’t need anybody else, I’ll just go it alone,” but you actually can’t. Human beings are meant to be in society together; there is no such thing as the state of nature where I’m a single individual atom just floating out in the universe. I’m born into a family, in a town, in a society with customs and traditions. Human beings are social animals, we are meant to be together.
We’re the political animal. And what is the political animal? Politics is living together with other people and determining how you’re going to live and how you’re going to govern yourself. We feel that, and so we try to replace those social bonds with virtual social bonds — digital, virtual partnering with myself, or marrying myself, or looking at internet porn, or buying a sex robot. I understand the suffering that comes with it. I think the people who are saying these things are really trying hard to make the best of a bad situation. But denial is not going to help anything.
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