1 00:00:17,879 --> 00:00:21,879 We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emil Jasinski, 2 00:00:21,920 --> 00:00:24,679 culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show 3 00:00:24,679 --> 00:00:28,440 at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST. 4 00:00:28,679 --> 00:00:32,679 Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts as well. Today I 5 00:00:32,679 --> 00:00:36,759 could possibly could not possibly be happier than to be joined by Mary Harrington, 6 00:00:36,840 --> 00:00:41,600 the author of the fascinating new book Feminism Against Progress. Mary is joining us 7 00:00:41,600 --> 00:00:45,280 here in person today at Federalist HQ. Thank you so much, Mary, 8 00:00:45,399 --> 00:00:47,439 Thank you so much for having me, having these great to be here. 9 00:00:47,479 --> 00:00:51,399 Of course we were just talking. You're on a tour of the Acela Corridor 10 00:00:51,880 --> 00:00:56,679 right now. I was so tempted to get one of those US stadium rock 11 00:00:56,719 --> 00:01:02,960 Till Tye t shirts printed. You should have actually with with with all of 12 00:01:03,000 --> 00:01:07,280 my tiny stadium dates and then like proper gothic head Metallica type writing. I 13 00:01:07,359 --> 00:01:11,519 was just going to ask, what is the mask out of reaction ary feminism? 14 00:01:11,519 --> 00:01:14,159 Would what would the illustration be? I think that's a question. You 15 00:01:14,200 --> 00:01:18,760 now have to figure out what it's. It's it's Artemis. She is the 16 00:01:18,760 --> 00:01:22,439 original the og Kuma remover. That's somehow perfect it is. And I mean 17 00:01:22,439 --> 00:01:26,319 she she's the og Kuma remover. She she was spotted bathing naked with her 18 00:01:26,400 --> 00:01:29,319 nymphs in the forest, and so she had that she turned the guy into 19 00:01:29,319 --> 00:01:30,799 a stag and had him hunted down by his own hands. I mean, 20 00:01:30,840 --> 00:01:34,560 it doesn't get much more reaction to feminist than that. That's exactly goddess of 21 00:01:34,640 --> 00:01:38,519 chastity, chastity and childbirth. It's artemists. I'd like to know that was 22 00:01:38,599 --> 00:01:44,840 just on the tip of your tongue. I've given this some thought, Emily, 23 00:01:45,280 --> 00:01:48,640 someone's gonna have to make them. Now. I want to talk about, 24 00:01:48,680 --> 00:01:51,239 obviously, the I want to start at the beginning of the book. 25 00:01:51,239 --> 00:01:55,400 Your introduction is a beautiful piece of writing in and of itself. It's a 26 00:01:55,519 --> 00:02:00,239 really fascinating personal history that then gets mixed into the kind of cultural history. 27 00:02:00,319 --> 00:02:05,560 But I wanted to start by how you're right on being kind of intoxicated by 28 00:02:05,799 --> 00:02:09,639 Judith Butler. And I think that's so interesting because it's, as our former 29 00:02:09,680 --> 00:02:15,719 President Trump would say, many such cases, many people have been fallen under 30 00:02:15,719 --> 00:02:19,800 the spell of Judith Butler. For you, not just Butler, but that 31 00:02:19,919 --> 00:02:23,199 sort of school of feminism. What do you think it was, as you're 32 00:02:23,240 --> 00:02:28,719 a young student kind of in that end of history period that jumped or grabbed 33 00:02:28,759 --> 00:02:31,000 you about that kind of writing at the time. I mean, strictly speaking, 34 00:02:31,080 --> 00:02:35,639 only some feminist would say Juth Butler isn't really a feminist, she's she's 35 00:02:35,639 --> 00:02:38,759 a queer theorist, just on a point of pedantry. Although I mean, 36 00:02:38,759 --> 00:02:42,919 it's it's very hard to tell the two if you're if we're talking liberal feminism 37 00:02:43,000 --> 00:02:46,560 is very hard to tell disaggregate quite a theory and libal feminism now, but 38 00:02:46,800 --> 00:02:49,840 I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit there. They would say that's impossible. 39 00:02:49,919 --> 00:02:52,439 They would say, yeah, yeah, And you know, if my 40 00:02:52,479 --> 00:02:54,879 feminism is not an inclusive of X, Y and Z, including men, 41 00:02:54,919 --> 00:03:00,120 then it's not feminism. That's not really my take, as you probably, 42 00:03:02,240 --> 00:03:08,840 But what was it that intoxicated me about it? Um? Very straightforwardly most 43 00:03:08,879 --> 00:03:13,240 of the way, most in most respects, you know, thinking back to 44 00:03:13,560 --> 00:03:16,000 how I was in the world at that point, being female seemed to me 45 00:03:16,080 --> 00:03:22,159 more of an impediment than anything else. I struggled to see the upsides and 46 00:03:22,199 --> 00:03:23,400 I could. I could count very m I could list, I could I 47 00:03:23,400 --> 00:03:28,039 could spend hours listening the down sides. I mean, from being physically weak 48 00:03:28,039 --> 00:03:32,879 as to being perceived as sexually passive and being objectified sexually within the culture as 49 00:03:32,919 --> 00:03:37,680 a whole, to people making assumptions about what my social role is likely to 50 00:03:37,680 --> 00:03:39,159 be, or what my behaviors or you know, life path was going to 51 00:03:39,199 --> 00:03:46,120 look like, through to just straightforwardly being disliked because I have because female. 52 00:03:46,520 --> 00:03:51,000 I couldn't I couldn't see very many, very many obvious upsides to being a 53 00:03:51,039 --> 00:03:55,560 woman, and and the yeah, the penalties seemed many and just arbitrary and 54 00:03:55,639 --> 00:04:00,479 unfair. So, you know, and then I I encountered Judics Butler at 55 00:04:00,560 --> 00:04:05,000 university, who who proposes this world view in which all of this, all 56 00:04:05,000 --> 00:04:09,960 of this stuff, all the way down really to bodily sex is culturally constructed, 57 00:04:10,240 --> 00:04:13,280 you know, that is socially constructed, and it's it's imposed by these 58 00:04:13,280 --> 00:04:15,560 sort of you know, this dark matter of near, these these matrices of 59 00:04:15,600 --> 00:04:20,759 power. But but implicit in that idea is the possibility that we might be 60 00:04:20,800 --> 00:04:24,360 able to escape that, or we might be able to remake it, or 61 00:04:24,399 --> 00:04:27,480 we might be able to just demolish the whole, the whole infrastructure and start 62 00:04:27,480 --> 00:04:29,759 again. As kind of free, self creating individuals. No, no, 63 00:04:29,759 --> 00:04:33,240 no, I found that really appealing. I couldn't see from from a position 64 00:04:33,279 --> 00:04:38,000 where being female had all of his upsides, why shouldn't I create my create 65 00:04:38,040 --> 00:04:41,160 my own self and my own reality. And you've got to remember as well, 66 00:04:41,160 --> 00:04:43,720 that this was this was the era, the era of I mean, 67 00:04:43,920 --> 00:04:46,160 I don't know if you remember the shortly after the rat War, that famous 68 00:04:46,240 --> 00:04:48,600 statement from the White House Aige who says, you know, we're an empire 69 00:04:48,600 --> 00:04:51,800 and we create our own reality. You know, when when we act, 70 00:04:51,959 --> 00:04:55,959 you know, we make history. And that's just what the world is now. 71 00:04:55,959 --> 00:04:58,879 And you guys, you just you just respond to that. And I 72 00:05:00,040 --> 00:05:01,279 sort of feel like that that was just in the air in the naughties. 73 00:05:01,319 --> 00:05:04,600 In a way, it's sort of difficult to develop capture now. And there 74 00:05:04,639 --> 00:05:09,879 was this there was this really heady sense between really between nine to eleven and 75 00:05:10,079 --> 00:05:13,759 the Great Crash. There was this really heavy feeling that came with Web two 76 00:05:13,759 --> 00:05:18,639 point zero and with the this sort of apparently never ending economic boom, and 77 00:05:18,839 --> 00:05:23,279 you know, this this real kind of high point of peak progress and double 78 00:05:23,319 --> 00:05:28,839 liberalism and the idea that progress could go on indefinitely It's as though that there 79 00:05:28,920 --> 00:05:31,240 was this feeling that we really could just create our own realities just x Nielo 80 00:05:31,519 --> 00:05:35,560 and and it would be it would be magnificent. You know, if only 81 00:05:35,560 --> 00:05:40,360 we could throw enough will and enough vision and enough commitment and passion into it, 82 00:05:40,439 --> 00:05:43,160 we could all just create our own realities. And for me, that 83 00:05:43,240 --> 00:05:46,839 just felt like an intoxicating idea, you know, particularly because I'd never seen 84 00:05:46,879 --> 00:05:51,160 anything really to really that was worth it was beneficial or positive about being female. 85 00:05:51,199 --> 00:05:55,920 So I was there for it. And that, you know, we 86 00:05:55,920 --> 00:05:59,480 didn't have this word in circulation as much at the time. But I think 87 00:05:59,519 --> 00:06:03,319 there's a which is the fundamental question of your book, which is feminism kind 88 00:06:03,319 --> 00:06:08,680 of as transhumanism, because you get into surrogacy, you get into transgenderism, 89 00:06:08,759 --> 00:06:12,079 you get into all of these different sort of escaping the female body, which 90 00:06:12,879 --> 00:06:15,879 is much more, I think in this world than maybe you would say in 91 00:06:15,920 --> 00:06:20,120 an industrial capitalist world, going to be much more appealing than escaping the male 92 00:06:20,160 --> 00:06:25,560 body. And that's sort of where you see this happening in particular on the 93 00:06:25,560 --> 00:06:31,240 female side. But is that it was that heady sense something that prevented us 94 00:06:31,600 --> 00:06:35,680 or lulled this in this false sense of comfort about what we are actually doing. 95 00:06:36,000 --> 00:06:39,920 I think so yeah. When we take the birth control pill, when 96 00:06:39,920 --> 00:06:45,839 we take when we industrialize abortion, for instance, I think so yeah. 97 00:06:45,920 --> 00:06:49,480 And of course for a great many people, the upsides still look like they're 98 00:06:49,480 --> 00:06:54,480 outweighing the downsides. And what I've tried to pick apart in the book is 99 00:06:55,120 --> 00:06:58,399 the fact that the shadeoffs land very asymmetrically. And this is one of the 100 00:06:58,439 --> 00:07:01,399 reasons why this this order is still holds because the trade offs mostly collect at 101 00:07:01,399 --> 00:07:04,839 the bottom of the social scare. The negatives, the negative externalities are mostly 102 00:07:04,920 --> 00:07:11,040 landing amongst the poorest, you know, where radical atomization is just horrible and 103 00:07:11,120 --> 00:07:15,439 they and whereas the benefits really they float to the top. And you know 104 00:07:15,519 --> 00:07:20,199 your your high flying girl boss, you know, lean right, Lean and 105 00:07:20,279 --> 00:07:26,480 feminists are doing are doing great. I mean the I read the other day 106 00:07:26,519 --> 00:07:30,120 that Alyssa Haines shied I think that's how you say her name. She has 107 00:07:30,120 --> 00:07:33,199 been in the news somewhat recently, as I'm sure you're aware, who for 108 00:07:33,199 --> 00:07:39,600 four platforming the Tictole influencer Dylan mulvaney as the new face of bud Light, 109 00:07:39,759 --> 00:07:45,399 you know, prompting a certain amount of discourse. We might say it transpired. 110 00:07:45,519 --> 00:07:48,079 I discovered. I discovered the other day that she she she's a mum. 111 00:07:48,160 --> 00:07:51,160 She had her three children by surrogacy. And at the moment I read 112 00:07:51,160 --> 00:07:53,560 that, I was like, right, oh, yeah, of course she 113 00:07:53,600 --> 00:07:57,560 did. It's just an of course moment because from the perspective of somebody who's 114 00:07:57,600 --> 00:08:03,000 outsourced, who's so radically outsourced for maleness that she's even outsourced subcontracted gestation, 115 00:08:03,360 --> 00:08:07,120 it really would seem plausible that Dylan mulvaney is a woman in the same way 116 00:08:07,120 --> 00:08:09,199 as she is, because Dylan mulvaney kind of is a woman to the to 117 00:08:09,240 --> 00:08:13,839 the same extent that she is. And like, it's so far collapsed the 118 00:08:13,879 --> 00:08:22,120 distinction between a male woman and high flying gestation subcontracting female woman that you know, 119 00:08:22,160 --> 00:08:24,199 it's the difference, the difference comes to seem negligible, So yeah, 120 00:08:24,279 --> 00:08:30,560 it tracts. And then where and where and where the negative externalities fall out. 121 00:08:30,560 --> 00:08:33,039 Just to just to round that picture off, is that somebody, somebody's 122 00:08:33,039 --> 00:08:37,480 still doing the gestating and more often than not, you know, these these 123 00:08:37,480 --> 00:08:41,720 are women who are doing so because they need to make rent. This is 124 00:08:41,720 --> 00:08:45,440 a great quote from your Brocky rate if liberation for everyone means the radical separation 125 00:08:45,480 --> 00:08:48,600 of selfhood from embodiment, what does that mean for those who have to stay 126 00:08:48,639 --> 00:08:52,000 embodied? Who cleans the toilets? Two birds as the babies requiring the dilemma 127 00:08:52,000 --> 00:08:56,639 of my adolescence? Who tis the dishes? There's a lack of class awareness 128 00:08:56,799 --> 00:09:01,039 in contemporary feminism, and I guess the minism on the on the radical emancipatory 129 00:09:01,039 --> 00:09:05,440 model is fundamentally a Ponzi scheme. You know, it's it's great if you 130 00:09:05,559 --> 00:09:07,840 got in early and you're right at the top, but but some someone, 131 00:09:07,960 --> 00:09:11,600 someone down at the bottom, is still doing the messy work. It's great 132 00:09:11,600 --> 00:09:13,919 to be Erica, right, It's not that's so nice, not not so 133 00:09:15,039 --> 00:09:18,320 much to be a working class woman in a world where it's not it's presumptively 134 00:09:18,360 --> 00:09:22,759 the case that all all sexual encounters are hookups. You're you're it's difficult to 135 00:09:22,759 --> 00:09:26,759 find a partner will stick around. You know, it's it's it's normative in 136 00:09:26,799 --> 00:09:31,159 your in your communities for people to have multiple children with multiple partners, and 137 00:09:31,240 --> 00:09:35,919 to to to scrape along in in in chaotic environments. It's probably not great 138 00:09:35,960 --> 00:09:39,759 for your kids either, were to have to have a string of a string 139 00:09:39,799 --> 00:09:43,919 of transient men coming through the house. The statistics on that are not great 140 00:09:45,399 --> 00:09:48,240 in terms of the safety of children. Yeah, and well, but but 141 00:09:48,320 --> 00:09:50,480 right right at the other end of the scale, where you know, the 142 00:09:52,080 --> 00:09:56,480 daughters, the descendants of Erica Jonga a flourishing. Some of them are flourishing 143 00:09:56,480 --> 00:10:00,840 anyway, you know, broadly speaking, broadly speaking, all of those, 144 00:10:00,919 --> 00:10:05,399 all of that sexual liberation will still culminate in something something not too similar to 145 00:10:05,399 --> 00:10:09,080 the traditional model. You know, those people are not walking the walk. 146 00:10:09,120 --> 00:10:11,000 They're saying, oh, you know, you do, you do whatever you 147 00:10:11,039 --> 00:10:15,080 want. But they still get married and they still stay together, but while 148 00:10:15,159 --> 00:10:18,720 paying lip service to the idea that actually family, family doesn't matter and commitment 149 00:10:18,759 --> 00:10:24,120 doesn't matter, and that message is only really being lived out at the bottom 150 00:10:24,159 --> 00:10:28,919 of the social scale. And it's because of its entanglement with the left. 151 00:10:28,240 --> 00:10:33,759 Feminism has long purported to be class conscious, class conscious, and I wanted 152 00:10:33,799 --> 00:10:39,720 to ask them how you think it is women kind of got hoodwinked by a 153 00:10:39,799 --> 00:10:45,960 fairly anti woman ideology, despite the fact that they were intentionally trying to have 154 00:10:46,039 --> 00:10:52,080 a class consciousness about their worldview. How does it come for them to end 155 00:10:52,200 --> 00:11:00,120 up being both so anti woman and like anti and probably that's a really just 156 00:11:00,200 --> 00:11:03,240 in question, how how do we how do we end up here? There's 157 00:11:03,240 --> 00:11:05,480 sort of different different ways you could different ways you could take it. Probably 158 00:11:05,519 --> 00:11:11,240 probably the probably the most useful lens here is to is just to broaden the 159 00:11:11,279 --> 00:11:16,000 picture out just beyond women and to think about the class divide which has emerged 160 00:11:16,039 --> 00:11:20,360 since the digital revolution more generally between people who work in the world of ideas 161 00:11:20,360 --> 00:11:24,399 and people who still work in the world of stuff. NS Lyons, who's 162 00:11:24,639 --> 00:11:30,039 who's a sub stacker who I really rate, wrote a fantastic piece about this 163 00:11:30,080 --> 00:11:33,440 not long ago. He characterized these these I think the piece is called reality 164 00:11:33,440 --> 00:11:37,440 honks back, and it was about the Canadian truckers and the conflict which was 165 00:11:37,480 --> 00:11:41,639 which was at play there, and his his thesis is that the class war 166 00:11:41,679 --> 00:11:45,440 which is emerging, you know, across really the developed world, is between 167 00:11:45,559 --> 00:11:48,559 people the physicals, as he calls it, people who work in the world 168 00:11:48,600 --> 00:11:50,799 of stuff, such as truckers, and people who work in the world of 169 00:11:50,840 --> 00:11:54,960 ideas, such as accountants or lawyers or well, yeah, I can think 170 00:11:56,000 --> 00:12:01,639 of a great many other examples. And the class blind within feminism maps onto 171 00:12:01,639 --> 00:12:03,600 a much broader class blindness. I mean, we saw, you know, 172 00:12:03,679 --> 00:12:07,159 a variant of this. This dispute played out over the course of the pandemic 173 00:12:09,000 --> 00:12:13,559 between the hard core lockdown advocates, most of whom were knowledge workers who who 174 00:12:13,879 --> 00:12:16,679 could do just fine working from home, and people who still work in the 175 00:12:16,679 --> 00:12:20,799 world of stuff, some of whom, many of whom lost their livelihoods and 176 00:12:20,480 --> 00:12:26,320 whose interests were largely steamroller or just ignored or produced as as you know, 177 00:12:26,360 --> 00:12:31,080 you want to murder Granny by by people who who didn't really stand to lose 178 00:12:31,440 --> 00:12:37,559 nearly so much. So there's a there's a much bigger picture, a much 179 00:12:37,600 --> 00:12:41,600 bigger cleavage at work there, which is really it's been ecceratically accelerated by the 180 00:12:41,600 --> 00:12:46,360 digital revolution and the fact that we can now work remotely. And I guess 181 00:12:46,360 --> 00:12:48,480 I'm I'm in a sense, I'm a class traitor really even to be thinking 182 00:12:48,519 --> 00:12:50,440 about this stuff, because I mean, I wouldn't be here if it was 183 00:12:50,480 --> 00:12:56,120 I'm a laptop class. I'm a writer, like I do my work at 184 00:12:56,120 --> 00:12:58,879 a laptop. I work from home remotely, and I wouldn't be here talking 185 00:13:00,000 --> 00:13:03,759 to you in DC were it not for the when I live in Britain, 186 00:13:03,360 --> 00:13:05,600 were it not for the fact that all of all of these things are in 187 00:13:05,639 --> 00:13:11,600 place, but it's also it's also very clear to me that those those those 188 00:13:11,639 --> 00:13:16,240 affordances play out very different differently if you're a manual laborer, and to a 189 00:13:16,279 --> 00:13:22,000 great extent they the negative externalities land among among people who work in the physical 190 00:13:22,000 --> 00:13:26,639 world, and I think so so I think we if you map that onto 191 00:13:26,879 --> 00:13:31,720 onto the women's movement, you can see that those women who are virtuals are 192 00:13:31,759 --> 00:13:35,480 still broadly net beneficiaries of what what what I see and I argue as a 193 00:13:35,559 --> 00:13:41,080 radically anti women model of female emancipation, which is really is much more of 194 00:13:41,120 --> 00:13:46,399 a kind of libertarianism of the body. And if you're a knowledge class woman, 195 00:13:46,440 --> 00:13:50,559 you know, libertarians and the body sounds great. But if you're you 196 00:13:50,559 --> 00:13:52,639 know, if you're if you work in the real world, you know there 197 00:13:52,639 --> 00:14:01,039 are there are ways that sex really still matters. The Watched On Wall Street 198 00:14:01,039 --> 00:14:05,480 podcast with Chris Markowski Every day, Chris helps unpack the connection between politics and 199 00:14:05,519 --> 00:14:09,120 the economy and how it affects your wallet. How much is the mainstream media 200 00:14:09,200 --> 00:14:13,279 incohoots with the Biden administration? Since when did the media care so much about 201 00:14:13,279 --> 00:14:16,720 catching leakers? Is that their job? Should they be asking more questions instead 202 00:14:16,759 --> 00:14:20,840 of being another wing of the White House. Whether it's happening in DC or 203 00:14:20,879 --> 00:14:22,799 down on Wall Street, it's affecting you financially. Be informed. Check out 204 00:14:22,799 --> 00:14:26,320 the Watched Out on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski on Apple, Spotify or 205 00:14:26,320 --> 00:14:33,960 wherever you get your podcast. It sounds great, and then you know, 206 00:14:33,000 --> 00:14:37,000 you get situations like there was a BuzzFeed article published a couple of years ago, 207 00:14:37,000 --> 00:14:41,440 probably two and a half years ago now about how gen Z is turning 208 00:14:41,480 --> 00:14:45,000 on sex positivity. That was the headline, and I think BuzzFeed ultimately watered 209 00:14:45,000 --> 00:14:48,200 the headline down. They must have gotten backlash for it. But you have 210 00:14:48,320 --> 00:14:50,559 these women who said, you know, sex in the City girls, these 211 00:14:50,639 --> 00:14:54,720 shows really did a number on me. HBO really did a number on me. 212 00:14:54,720 --> 00:14:58,360 As the quote of a twenty three year old rape victim in the article. 213 00:14:58,080 --> 00:15:05,039 And that's another question I think this book raises. Are there going to 214 00:15:05,080 --> 00:15:11,080 be more Mary Harrington's outside of just you know the world of media and writing 215 00:15:11,200 --> 00:15:16,559 and all of that. Are there more Mary Harrington's in those marketing jobs in 216 00:15:16,639 --> 00:15:20,679 you know, is this becoming i think visible to people as the experiment sort 217 00:15:20,679 --> 00:15:24,960 of plays out in real time because we lose perspective. We think of like 218 00:15:24,000 --> 00:15:28,200 Gloria Steinham and the second Wave is being old. It's happened over the course 219 00:15:28,200 --> 00:15:31,639 of people's lifetimes. I mean, people are still living in the arc of 220 00:15:31,120 --> 00:15:35,399 all of that. And so do you sense that something is really shifting? 221 00:15:35,399 --> 00:15:39,879 And if so, absolutely absolutely. I mean, my great friend Louise Perry 222 00:15:41,279 --> 00:15:45,600 fantastic, yes, yeah, the case against the sexual Revolution and the response, 223 00:15:46,039 --> 00:15:48,399 I mean, she gets four or five letters a day from young men 224 00:15:48,480 --> 00:15:52,480 and women. Some of them are intensely personal, incredibly, some of them 225 00:15:52,480 --> 00:15:56,759 are really heartbreaking, but but more of the feedback she gets a lot as 226 00:15:56,799 --> 00:15:58,840 you changed my life. I didn't, you know, I felt like something 227 00:16:00,159 --> 00:16:03,320 off and I've made I've made the following changes to my life and things are 228 00:16:03,320 --> 00:16:06,960 just better, you know, thank you for writing it. And her, 229 00:16:07,039 --> 00:16:10,679 I mean, her argument is that the sexual revolution has been negative for women, 230 00:16:10,879 --> 00:16:14,720 and that, in fact, a great deal of what your granny would 231 00:16:14,720 --> 00:16:18,159 have told you to do was actually pretty good advice. Listen to your Yeah, 232 00:16:18,559 --> 00:16:22,000 listen to your mom, listen to your grannie. You know they weren't 233 00:16:22,039 --> 00:16:26,200 wrong, um so so, but yeah, it's it's clear enough and it's 234 00:16:26,200 --> 00:16:30,440 clear as well from the feedback that that that I've had already from the book, 235 00:16:30,600 --> 00:16:33,679 that there are plenty of young men and women who feel very strongly that 236 00:16:33,720 --> 00:16:37,960 there's something off and that they've been lied to. And I think i've I 237 00:16:37,000 --> 00:16:38,840 said at one point in the book, you know, I got here the 238 00:16:38,879 --> 00:16:45,200 hard way by liberaling as hard as possible, and I, you know, 239 00:16:45,440 --> 00:16:48,480 and I reached escape velocity just in time. You know, I was. 240 00:16:48,559 --> 00:16:52,799 I was in my early thirties from when we got married. I was thirty 241 00:16:52,799 --> 00:16:56,039 six when we had our daughter. I doubt I'll manage another one now, 242 00:16:56,360 --> 00:17:00,080 you know, I'll be. I'm grateful for the one I have. And 243 00:17:00,080 --> 00:17:03,119 there are a great many women who reached my age and alot forties and didn't 244 00:17:03,119 --> 00:17:07,200 reach escape velocity. And I think there's a there's a great deal of pain 245 00:17:07,319 --> 00:17:11,359 there, which is yeah, or at least it's not that it's under discussed, 246 00:17:11,400 --> 00:17:15,200 but it's discussed with very little compassion. It's amazing, even when you 247 00:17:15,279 --> 00:17:21,359 read Fear of Flying, Um, how much pain there is in the book 248 00:17:21,400 --> 00:17:25,559 itself, how much pain there is in those decisions. And I hadn't really 249 00:17:25,599 --> 00:17:30,440 thought about this until just now, but it's amazing how people deluded themselves or 250 00:17:30,839 --> 00:17:36,200 sort of squash those voices inside of themselves even to the point where they wrote 251 00:17:36,200 --> 00:17:41,400 them and published them. M but wade that sort of sense of freedom over 252 00:17:41,680 --> 00:17:45,759 that sense of personal U I don't know, personal happiness, personal fulfillment. 253 00:17:45,799 --> 00:17:48,799 It's strange to think back on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, 254 00:17:48,839 --> 00:17:53,039 I remember I was. It's fascinating to to think about those writers, 255 00:17:53,079 --> 00:17:57,559 you know, the Erica Young's and the Germaine Griers, as the those women 256 00:17:57,599 --> 00:18:03,799 who are who are trying to apply by the Beat generation's vision of liberty to 257 00:18:03,000 --> 00:18:07,000 women, and just what a what an absurd idea really? I mean, 258 00:18:07,000 --> 00:18:10,799 if you know, if I remember I Loved on the Road when I was 259 00:18:10,839 --> 00:18:12,799 a teenager, I read it as a teenagers, as is often the way, 260 00:18:12,920 --> 00:18:15,839 and I thought he was really cool. And then I read it again 261 00:18:15,880 --> 00:18:19,960 recently I was like, he's a terrible person. He's such an awful person. 262 00:18:21,400 --> 00:18:23,720 You know, he's sort of he's this kind of feckless, alcoholic cereal 263 00:18:23,799 --> 00:18:29,079 shagger who just you know, roans across the country, you know, impregnating 264 00:18:29,079 --> 00:18:32,319 and abandoning women and just generally you know, acting like a complete tool. 265 00:18:32,559 --> 00:18:34,200 He's a terrible person. What sort of a role model is this. But 266 00:18:34,319 --> 00:18:37,759 you know, but at the time and in its content, it must have 267 00:18:37,799 --> 00:18:41,160 read just like the most wild, insane, intoxicating breath of freedom. And 268 00:18:41,400 --> 00:18:44,680 you know, and I'm sure there are a great many women who read it 269 00:18:44,720 --> 00:18:48,039 were like, we want that too. But it wasn't really until the birth 270 00:18:48,039 --> 00:18:52,920 control pill came along that there was It was been in any sense meaningfully thinkable 271 00:18:52,960 --> 00:18:56,039 that women could have that, And when that came along, it must have 272 00:18:56,079 --> 00:18:59,319 been like, yes, it must have must have just been the most thrilling 273 00:18:59,359 --> 00:19:06,119 thing. Right, you can imagine being writing as Simone Abovir and that sort 274 00:19:06,119 --> 00:19:10,880 of the ideas that you're landing on genuinely feeling liberating and not sort of maybe 275 00:19:10,920 --> 00:19:15,079 it's maybe it was just my opic to not or shortsighted in a very reasonable 276 00:19:15,200 --> 00:19:19,759 understandable way to understand where that would go, right right, I mean, 277 00:19:19,759 --> 00:19:25,279 the theme that I kept finding myself coming back to when I was I was 278 00:19:25,319 --> 00:19:29,839 researching all of this is that, again and again and again, when we 279 00:19:29,839 --> 00:19:33,599 have we have these technological we have a new technology comes along that frees us 280 00:19:33,599 --> 00:19:37,559 from what previously seemed like an unavoidable limit, and it always brings a whole 281 00:19:37,559 --> 00:19:42,880 lot of good things with it. Concentration camp, comfortable concentration camp, and 282 00:19:42,920 --> 00:19:48,680 the pilance of Yeah, I mean, you know, there's always a dividend 283 00:19:48,720 --> 00:19:52,440 of freedom, you know, the pill. The pill was great for ambitious 284 00:19:52,480 --> 00:19:55,240 women who wanted to pursue careers and to you know, they flocked to the 285 00:19:55,279 --> 00:19:57,680 universities. It was not it was not very easy to do that before because 286 00:19:57,720 --> 00:20:00,720 you know, unless you really did have a phenomenal amount of self discipline, 287 00:20:00,799 --> 00:20:03,160 there was always a possibility you were going to have to abandon your plans at 288 00:20:03,160 --> 00:20:07,279 the drop of a hat and be a mom um. And then all of 289 00:20:07,319 --> 00:20:10,759 a sudden, this technology comes along. It means you can plan, you 290 00:20:10,759 --> 00:20:15,119 know, for ambitious women. You know, amazing, amazing and the but 291 00:20:15,119 --> 00:20:18,880 but but the thing, the thing about you know, it becomes thinkable for 292 00:20:18,880 --> 00:20:22,480 the first time that my body just belongs to me and nobody else has a 293 00:20:22,480 --> 00:20:25,839 stake in what I do, all with whom. But but the moment something 294 00:20:25,839 --> 00:20:29,200 belongs to me, I can do what I want with it, and so 295 00:20:29,359 --> 00:20:30,880 and at that point I can buy and sell it if I want to. 296 00:20:32,240 --> 00:20:36,359 And what I came to realize is that it doesn't matter what the utopians imagined 297 00:20:36,720 --> 00:20:40,799 about about this this great dividend of freedom because with freedom always comes trade. 298 00:20:41,160 --> 00:20:44,279 Invariably, freedom and trade just go together, you know, like like like 299 00:20:44,400 --> 00:20:48,279 cheese and apple. You know that they're two sides of the same coin. 300 00:20:48,920 --> 00:20:55,680 And the moment that, the moment something is liberated from an apparently given set 301 00:20:55,720 --> 00:21:00,279 of limits, it becomes the market moves in to that space because the moment, 302 00:21:00,599 --> 00:21:04,839 because at that point it becomes it becomes a private it becomes the private 303 00:21:04,839 --> 00:21:10,519 possession of individuals. And this seems abstract when I talk about but it's it's 304 00:21:10,599 --> 00:21:14,119 very clearly evident in what happened with the sexual revolution. You know, on 305 00:21:14,160 --> 00:21:15,839 the one hand, on the one hand, amazing women can go to university. 306 00:21:15,920 --> 00:21:18,960 On the other hand, it's you suddenly have a libertarian defense of the 307 00:21:19,000 --> 00:21:22,920 porn industry, and and and the two the two are just at different aspects 308 00:21:22,920 --> 00:21:30,079 of the same thing. Yeah, it's it's a flaw in my favorite theorist's 309 00:21:30,480 --> 00:21:33,319 work, which would be Camille Palia, who is very much a libertarian sex 310 00:21:33,839 --> 00:21:38,079 feminist. But now I was actually going to ask you, and it might 311 00:21:38,119 --> 00:21:41,000 have believed that Andrew Dorkin was right all along. I mean, now it 312 00:21:41,039 --> 00:21:47,400 looks that you look back on that criticisms of dorkin in this porn saturated culture 313 00:21:47,440 --> 00:21:49,559 that we're in, and Louise Perry is so good on that question, particularly 314 00:21:49,599 --> 00:21:57,279 of how high tech porn is destroying our relationships with each other. But I 315 00:21:57,319 --> 00:22:03,640 mean it was interred working. She was right about some things, definitely. 316 00:22:03,680 --> 00:22:11,680 I mean, she was the kind of patriarchy as dark matter radical feminists. 317 00:22:11,720 --> 00:22:15,000 I don't. I don't believe in patriarchy really, at least I have yet 318 00:22:15,039 --> 00:22:18,519 to find. I have yet to meet a modern context where somebody uses the 319 00:22:18,519 --> 00:22:22,519 word patriarchy that wouldn't make more sense if they said immutable sex differences I don't 320 00:22:22,559 --> 00:22:26,880 like. I mean, I've tried this as a thought experiment on a number 321 00:22:26,880 --> 00:22:30,920 of occasions, and immutable sex differences I don't like it always makes more sense 322 00:22:30,920 --> 00:22:36,720 in that context. That's great. This is one of the most interesting parts 323 00:22:36,759 --> 00:22:41,359 of your book as critiques of Conservatism, and I wanted to conservative critiques of 324 00:22:41,359 --> 00:22:45,960 conservative critiques of feminism to be kind of meta there. This is a great 325 00:22:47,000 --> 00:22:48,880 part of the book where you say where the conservative analysis often fall short, 326 00:22:49,200 --> 00:22:52,519 isn't looking no further back than the mid twentieth century, rather than tracing the 327 00:22:52,559 --> 00:22:56,960 logic of character few by freedom all the way back to its inception in the 328 00:22:56,000 --> 00:23:00,680 material conditions of market society. As such, when conservative call for a return 329 00:23:00,720 --> 00:23:03,400 to traditional family life but mean by this a return to some variant of separate 330 00:23:03,440 --> 00:23:07,920 spheres, whether in its nineteenth or twentieth century forms, this smiss is the 331 00:23:07,960 --> 00:23:11,599 fact that such forms of family life are not traditional at all, but distinctively 332 00:23:11,759 --> 00:23:18,240 modern. And distinctively modern, you would probably says industrial, right industrial or 333 00:23:18,279 --> 00:23:23,359 post industrial post industrial capitalism. They are distinctly capitalistic in the modern sense. 334 00:23:23,519 --> 00:23:26,599 Yeah, can you talk about because you actually spend a good trunk of the 335 00:23:26,599 --> 00:23:30,680 book discussing separate spheres and previous iterations and what that looked like. Can you 336 00:23:30,720 --> 00:23:33,680 just do some background on the separate spheres idea? Sure, I mean, 337 00:23:33,720 --> 00:23:37,119 but I spend the first third of the book I wanted to do a deep 338 00:23:37,160 --> 00:23:42,279 dive into my thesis, which is that feminism as such is not evidence of 339 00:23:42,359 --> 00:23:48,920 moral progress but an effect of industrialization, or rather it's The Women's Movement was 340 00:23:48,960 --> 00:23:56,119 women's aggregate response to the ways that industrialization change family life, particularly by by 341 00:23:56,119 --> 00:24:00,440 moving work out of the home, which created a whole new set of lemmas 342 00:24:00,440 --> 00:24:04,519 and challenges for women, which just hadn't really obtained previously. For example, 343 00:24:04,599 --> 00:24:10,480 the question of balancing work and family life wasn't really a thing when when work 344 00:24:10,599 --> 00:24:15,079 was just what you did to create or or process subsistence goods within an agrarian 345 00:24:15,119 --> 00:24:18,559 household, you know, there is no balancing family and work and family life 346 00:24:18,559 --> 00:24:22,160 because it's all just the same thing. And it's not until work becomes something 347 00:24:22,160 --> 00:24:26,920 that you do somewhere else that you even have to consider the question of what 348 00:24:26,960 --> 00:24:30,960 happened what you do with the kids. So at that point, you know, 349 00:24:30,000 --> 00:24:36,799 those women who could afford to exited the economic sphere, but that had 350 00:24:36,839 --> 00:24:40,960 further downstream consequences because of that. Once you've exited the economic sphere, you 351 00:24:41,000 --> 00:24:45,599 actually lose leverage. So and it's counterintuitive to think that under industrial in industrial 352 00:24:45,759 --> 00:24:52,039 under industrialization, women actually lost leverage relative to their medieval form others, but 353 00:24:52,119 --> 00:24:55,720 that that was effectively what happened because they were no longer co producers within a 354 00:24:55,720 --> 00:25:00,200 productive household. They were they were chief consumer in a private household. And 355 00:25:00,240 --> 00:25:03,839 this and this through up a whole load of intimate challenges to do with you 356 00:25:03,839 --> 00:25:07,440 know, how how do you how do you ensure that your your contribution to 357 00:25:07,480 --> 00:25:10,559 the household is still respected. You know that. Hence the whole, the 358 00:25:10,680 --> 00:25:14,079 entire so called cult of domesticity, which is a huge body of women's writing, 359 00:25:14,759 --> 00:25:18,519 all of which is you know, is committed to making the case for 360 00:25:18,559 --> 00:25:22,839 the fact that women's work is still valuable, you know, under circumstances where 361 00:25:22,839 --> 00:25:25,519 women actually don't have very much leverage. But then on the other side of 362 00:25:25,519 --> 00:25:26,440 that, you have a bunch of women who say, well, you know, 363 00:25:26,440 --> 00:25:30,000 what happens if what happens if my husband This is all fine as long 364 00:25:30,039 --> 00:25:32,960 as I have a husband who loves and respect me, But what happens if 365 00:25:33,000 --> 00:25:36,079 he doesn't. So there you get the temperance movement, which isn't due to 366 00:25:36,119 --> 00:25:38,119 me, reads straightforwardly as feminism. This is, I mean it was. 367 00:25:38,160 --> 00:25:41,400 It was powered by women, and it was oriented towards getting men to drink 368 00:25:41,480 --> 00:25:45,640 less so they wouldn't beat they beat their wives, or drink away the family 369 00:25:45,640 --> 00:25:48,279 wage. You know, it's it's it's it's a form of feminism. And 370 00:25:48,400 --> 00:25:52,799 in response to the and then and then also but then also you have the 371 00:25:52,799 --> 00:25:56,759 feminism of freedom, which makes the case that you know, if if women 372 00:25:56,799 --> 00:26:00,079 are this radically structurally disadvantaged under this new order than in fact, the best 373 00:26:00,079 --> 00:26:03,480 solution is for women, for women to enter the market on the same terms 374 00:26:03,480 --> 00:26:07,599 as men. And that really, I mean that that's the feminism of freedom 375 00:26:07,599 --> 00:26:11,640 which now just dominates everything, and that's usually that, and it's the feminism 376 00:26:11,720 --> 00:26:18,079 of freedom typically that conservatives are angry about because they and I can see why 377 00:26:18,960 --> 00:26:23,200 conservatives would just think that's all of feminism, because the feminists of freedom have 378 00:26:23,200 --> 00:26:26,920 pretty much memory hold everything else. Yeah, you know, they since since 379 00:26:26,960 --> 00:26:30,519 the feminism of freedom definitively one, which was the point of the sexual revolution. 380 00:26:30,880 --> 00:26:34,400 I mean that that was the that was the point where feminism of freedom 381 00:26:34,440 --> 00:26:37,640 just became feminism, and that the rest of it just got memory hold. 382 00:26:37,720 --> 00:26:41,640 You know. The first wave is barely even taught in women's studies courses now 383 00:26:41,640 --> 00:26:47,000 because it's or it's it's it's heavily footnoted as just being problematic in a whole 384 00:26:47,240 --> 00:26:49,279 thousand and one different ways. It's far too white, it's it's far too 385 00:26:49,279 --> 00:26:52,279 white, it's probably racist. I have no idea, I have no idea, 386 00:26:52,279 --> 00:26:56,599 but it's heavily you know, it's problematic at best, uncovered in trigger 387 00:26:56,640 --> 00:26:59,559 warnings and most of it, and most of it just it doesn't even you 388 00:26:59,559 --> 00:27:02,680 know, the culture domesticity doesn't even read as feminism. Yeah, because it 389 00:27:02,839 --> 00:27:07,000 because it's it's only feminism within within a paradigm, which is which is writing 390 00:27:07,000 --> 00:27:10,559 to your style, to the feminism and freedom. It's almost nietzsche In in 391 00:27:10,599 --> 00:27:15,079 this sense that materialism and hedonism. We live in a just a fully materialistic 392 00:27:15,200 --> 00:27:19,480 rule. Thus the only thing worth seeking is hedonism. So be seek self 393 00:27:19,480 --> 00:27:22,960 fulfillment, seek seek greatness. And a lot of this is emerging at the 394 00:27:22,960 --> 00:27:27,079 same time. And you write so interestingly that you're not trying to stuff feminism 395 00:27:27,119 --> 00:27:32,599 back into its box, if such a thing was even possible. But how 396 00:27:32,640 --> 00:27:41,440 do we moderate temper some of these really bad changes you shifts without not just 397 00:27:41,480 --> 00:27:45,680 stuffing feminism back in its box. But as you say, industrialization back in 398 00:27:45,680 --> 00:27:48,400 its box, globalism back in its box, Well, I mean that that 399 00:27:48,519 --> 00:27:52,200 might just happen of its own accurt you know, so we can't We probably 400 00:27:52,240 --> 00:27:55,880 can't have infinite growth on a finite planet. So eventually the balloon is going 401 00:27:55,920 --> 00:27:56,960 to come down. And I mean, it's all bets are off as to 402 00:27:57,000 --> 00:28:02,319 what happens to family life at that point point. But I kind of kin 403 00:28:02,400 --> 00:28:04,440 a week, Yeah, so that's so, that's the very that's the very 404 00:28:04,480 --> 00:28:11,880 Ted Kachinsky kind of response on one reviewer. One reviewer did say, I 405 00:28:11,880 --> 00:28:15,440 would love to see a conversation between Mary Harrington and Turkchinsky, and I thought, 406 00:28:15,440 --> 00:28:17,440 I'm probably not going to take you up on that, but thank you. 407 00:28:17,519 --> 00:28:22,319 I think definitely a gamplement because how fascinating would that be? Right? 408 00:28:23,119 --> 00:28:26,519 So that's yeah, that that that's the very bleak answer. Like at a 409 00:28:26,559 --> 00:28:33,079 slightly more workable everyday level, I would propose that given given that the transhumanist 410 00:28:33,119 --> 00:28:37,839 effort to to just smash through every single limit of human nature and to abolish 411 00:28:37,839 --> 00:28:42,759 it all in the name of freedom, and probably also trade and comod to 412 00:28:42,759 --> 00:28:45,799 turn turn every facet of our human nature into a supply and demand problem, 413 00:28:45,839 --> 00:28:49,039 then cash in. There's as marketplace, right, it's my favorite fruit. 414 00:28:49,079 --> 00:28:53,200 So the which the ziplus marketplace, right exactly? You know, if if 415 00:28:53,240 --> 00:28:56,079 if in fact, as I contend, this is not very good for women, 416 00:28:56,119 --> 00:29:00,440 and to me, it seems manifestly bad actually for everybody, not just 417 00:29:00,519 --> 00:29:03,480 women, but certainly bad for most normally, you know, everyone except of 418 00:29:03,599 --> 00:29:07,839 a shrinking proportion of the elite who are able to cash in and you know, 419 00:29:07,839 --> 00:29:12,000 subcontract, legestation, et cetera. Then what what we what a feminist 420 00:29:12,240 --> 00:29:17,039 movement, what a pro women, pro human really look movement looks like under 421 00:29:17,039 --> 00:29:26,759 those circumstances, is is insisting on realism about about our embodied nature and the 422 00:29:26,799 --> 00:29:32,559 most the most spirited possible defense of our the fact that we can't be disaggregated 423 00:29:32,599 --> 00:29:36,920 from our bodies. We can't we can't be chopped up into into meat lego 424 00:29:36,960 --> 00:29:40,680 and reassembled at will. That in fact, when you try it doesn't work. 425 00:29:40,880 --> 00:29:42,839 All that happens is that is that you manage to commodify yourself further, 426 00:29:44,200 --> 00:29:48,480 and that so and so what that means leaning into sex realism, you know, 427 00:29:48,480 --> 00:29:52,839 whether you do that whimsically by just you know, whimsical extra sexism just 428 00:29:52,880 --> 00:29:57,680 because it's fun, or I'm not seriously, I'm not seriously advocating that take 429 00:29:57,720 --> 00:30:00,680 kids do and try this at home unless want to, in which case, 430 00:30:00,759 --> 00:30:07,200 good friend. But but but but also a greater measure of realism about the 431 00:30:07,359 --> 00:30:11,799 about the actual limits to making everything co ed, you know, which includes 432 00:30:12,000 --> 00:30:18,880 trespassing into some provocative areas. I mean that there are there are areas of 433 00:30:18,880 --> 00:30:25,319 public service where physical strength still matters. I mean. I did a fascinating 434 00:30:25,359 --> 00:30:32,519 interview for the book with a former a former a former soldier on what happened 435 00:30:32,559 --> 00:30:34,960 to his unit when it went co ed. M It was, Yeah, 436 00:30:36,480 --> 00:30:38,440 it brought a lot of stuff into perspective for me because what really what struck 437 00:30:38,480 --> 00:30:41,799 me about that was that every single one of the every every single one of 438 00:30:41,799 --> 00:30:47,880 the things he described, every single one of the arguments against allowing male women 439 00:30:48,039 --> 00:30:52,759 into female prisons also applies to allowing female soldiers into formerly all male units. 440 00:30:52,880 --> 00:30:56,920 Every single one of the article, every single one of those arguments also applies 441 00:30:56,960 --> 00:30:59,599 in that context. And that that let me thinking. You know, I'm 442 00:30:59,640 --> 00:31:03,079 not saying we should just go back to radical you know, I'm I'm not 443 00:31:03,119 --> 00:31:06,039 the Taliban. You know, I don't think I don't think many women should 444 00:31:06,039 --> 00:31:11,119 just be I'm not I'm not the Taliban, but I think there are we 445 00:31:11,200 --> 00:31:15,680 could. We could usefully be a little bit more realist, realist about the 446 00:31:15,759 --> 00:31:19,759 about the limits to making everything covered. We could also be willing to grant 447 00:31:19,920 --> 00:31:26,160 men more social spaces just for just men because they like it, not not 448 00:31:26,240 --> 00:31:29,759 feel incensed at the possibility that sometimes men want to hang out with each other. 449 00:31:30,119 --> 00:31:30,880 You know, I have no idea what it is they do when they're 450 00:31:30,880 --> 00:31:33,720 all just hanging out with each other. But I'm willing to you know, 451 00:31:33,920 --> 00:31:37,400 I think I'm happy just to be somewhere else when that's happening. The semesteries 452 00:31:37,400 --> 00:31:41,599 are best life well well, but I mean there are there are frequencies which 453 00:31:41,640 --> 00:31:44,839 are just inaccessible to me. I mean an example I've given a couple of 454 00:31:44,839 --> 00:31:48,680 times before. I run a lot and it's you like trails around where I 455 00:31:48,680 --> 00:31:51,960 live, which is quite rural, and sometimes I see the metal detective dudes 456 00:31:52,000 --> 00:31:56,240 out, you know, they all of Britain is full of weird relics and 457 00:31:56,279 --> 00:31:59,400 stuff buried in fields because it's we've been there for a long time. And 458 00:31:59,440 --> 00:32:02,400 these guys out with their metal detectors and they just go across the field doing 459 00:32:02,440 --> 00:32:06,559 the thing. And I remember I saw sort of five or six of these 460 00:32:06,559 --> 00:32:08,319 guys scatter. They're all like, you know, several hundred yards apart, 461 00:32:08,759 --> 00:32:12,440 and I ran, I ran through them, and they're all just doing their 462 00:32:12,440 --> 00:32:15,799 thing. And it struck me suddenly as as I was running through the field 463 00:32:15,799 --> 00:32:21,200 that these guys were socializing. They are they're socializing, and they're doing it 464 00:32:21,200 --> 00:32:22,160 on a frequency which makes no sense. To me at all, And they 465 00:32:22,240 --> 00:32:25,480 probably won't talk to each other much afterwards either, but they'll go home and 466 00:32:25,519 --> 00:32:29,960 they'll have like then that that's that's some nice social time. Like guys sitting 467 00:32:29,960 --> 00:32:31,880 in a row fishing, it's kind of the same thing. Yeah, these 468 00:32:31,880 --> 00:32:37,920 are not frequencies which are accessible to me. There maybe women who feel comfortable 469 00:32:37,920 --> 00:32:40,680 in that setting. I'm not one of them. But I feel like if 470 00:32:40,680 --> 00:32:45,599 we if we try to make everything co ed, something indefinable gets lost, 471 00:32:46,039 --> 00:32:53,839 that that has a cost. And if if we want to rebuild a positive, 472 00:32:53,920 --> 00:33:00,119 human centered solidarity between the sexes, which to me seems woefully missed from 473 00:33:00,119 --> 00:33:06,400 from this this sort of post sex transhumanist quote unquote human, the sort of 474 00:33:06,440 --> 00:33:09,920 d sex meet lego humans. You know, the possibility of solidarity between the 475 00:33:09,960 --> 00:33:15,920 sexes just seems ever more remote, and relationship formation seems ever more under threatened. 476 00:33:15,000 --> 00:33:19,200 Yeah, I don't see I don't see the direction of travel there as 477 00:33:19,240 --> 00:33:22,240 having very much to recommend it at all. And if we're if we're going 478 00:33:22,240 --> 00:33:24,839 to if we're going to row back from that, we need to we need 479 00:33:24,880 --> 00:33:28,839 to grant more space for the possibility that, in fact, sometimes we do 480 00:33:28,920 --> 00:33:32,799 socialize in different ways, and that saying so is not well. If saying 481 00:33:32,799 --> 00:33:37,119 so it's sexist, that's not always a bad thing in the On that point, 482 00:33:37,240 --> 00:33:45,400 the double edged sword of capitalism or republicanism smart smart republicanism or liberalism is 483 00:33:45,440 --> 00:33:47,599 that it's supposed to be self correcting. That's the sort of beauty of the 484 00:33:47,680 --> 00:33:53,160 system is that it may, you know, allow for some bad human um 485 00:33:53,640 --> 00:34:00,359 impulses, but then also the good human impulses will eventually went out and self 486 00:34:00,359 --> 00:34:06,400 correcting. So is there kind of a capitalist solution to you? Can you 487 00:34:06,440 --> 00:34:10,079 find a solution to this problem in a capitalist world or do you think economic 488 00:34:10,199 --> 00:34:16,199 changes as they are primal in this telling have to happen first? I don't 489 00:34:16,199 --> 00:34:22,719 know. I guess I have some questions about that framing. I just mean 490 00:34:22,760 --> 00:34:25,920 in the sense that you know, capitalism claims to be self correcting, but 491 00:34:27,000 --> 00:34:30,639 to me it seems it seems more like a shark in the sense that it 492 00:34:30,760 --> 00:34:34,719 swims it has to keep eating. Yeah, I think it's an open question. 493 00:34:34,760 --> 00:34:37,599 Actually, Yeah, to me, this is not that this is it's 494 00:34:37,639 --> 00:34:43,159 not self evident to me that this is a system which is which who's and 495 00:34:43,519 --> 00:34:47,079 that's primarily ordered towards human flourishing rather than just the perpetuation of its own internal 496 00:34:47,119 --> 00:34:52,960 logic. To me, to me, that internal logic doesn't It's not obvious 497 00:34:53,039 --> 00:35:01,400 to me that things that the liquefaction of social norms or or given limits in 498 00:35:01,440 --> 00:35:06,639 the name of freedom and of trade is self correcting, even when that liquifaction 499 00:35:06,719 --> 00:35:08,679 turns out to be that negative. It's not obvious to me that there is 500 00:35:08,719 --> 00:35:13,079 anything self self correcting about it. To me, to me, the that 501 00:35:13,239 --> 00:35:17,760 the the internal logic of never ending, never ending economic growth seems seems very 502 00:35:17,840 --> 00:35:21,840 much more like like a creature that swims blindly and has to keep eating. 503 00:35:22,400 --> 00:35:25,000 And to me, like, what the sexual revolution, you know, it's 504 00:35:25,079 --> 00:35:29,000 it's presented, you know, it flies under the banner of feminism as this 505 00:35:29,079 --> 00:35:30,800 sort of very emancipatory thing, and there are are very many, a whole 506 00:35:30,840 --> 00:35:36,400 a whole load of emancipatory things about it. But it was also the point 507 00:35:36,440 --> 00:35:39,599 where that logic of liquefaction and commodification turned inward to the human body, Like 508 00:35:39,679 --> 00:35:43,840 we ran out of resources out there in the world to strip mine, and 509 00:35:43,880 --> 00:35:46,679 we started strip mining ourselves, you know, and we've we've been burning through 510 00:35:46,719 --> 00:35:51,519 the cultural reserves, you know, like like we've been burning through the oil 511 00:35:51,559 --> 00:35:55,280 reserves. We've we've where yeah, we're but we're burning the cultural furniture to 512 00:35:55,360 --> 00:36:01,480 keep ourselves warm and were and we've started dismantling our own bodies, or rather 513 00:36:01,519 --> 00:36:06,239 the bodies of people who don't have enough cultural political leverage to say no, 514 00:36:06,880 --> 00:36:09,679 and we started turning them into workplaces and products and raw resources. Right, 515 00:36:09,920 --> 00:36:15,119 And yes, that's such a good point. And something interesting, I mean 516 00:36:15,159 --> 00:36:19,639 I thought that I had while I was reading this book is that feminism seems 517 00:36:19,639 --> 00:36:24,960 to be a byproduct of this journey we're on from capitalism, the transhumanism, 518 00:36:25,000 --> 00:36:29,000 and feminism is sort of a stop on the way that it's it's part, 519 00:36:29,079 --> 00:36:34,400 it's an inevitable part, an inevitable part of that journey because with capitalism you 520 00:36:34,440 --> 00:36:39,400 get industrialization, you get high tech society, and as that ball keeps rolling, 521 00:36:39,440 --> 00:36:43,760 the snowball gets bigger and bigger, rolling down the hill. M Yeah, 522 00:36:43,800 --> 00:36:47,679 you end up with some like high tech solutions to what women perceive as 523 00:36:47,679 --> 00:36:52,239 as really very real problems. But then there are moments where you know, 524 00:36:52,280 --> 00:36:57,280 for instance, the new Harry Potter video game is like doing Gangbusters, even 525 00:36:57,320 --> 00:37:00,440 though the entire media and like especially the aiming media said it's you know, 526 00:37:00,719 --> 00:37:05,280 don't buy this. It's associated with this awful person JK. Rowling. It 527 00:37:05,400 --> 00:37:08,360 was a terrible bigot, which is absurd, of course, but it does 528 00:37:08,400 --> 00:37:14,840 seem into your point about Louise hearing from um folks who have been really affected 529 00:37:14,880 --> 00:37:19,519 by her book and the reception that worked, like yours is getting, it 530 00:37:19,559 --> 00:37:22,760 does seem like there is something afoot. It does seem like a pendulum swing 531 00:37:22,960 --> 00:37:27,239 might be in motion in some ways because of the open conversation, to the 532 00:37:27,280 --> 00:37:30,159 extent that it's actually as open as it should be, it does seem like 533 00:37:30,239 --> 00:37:35,079 something's happening. So is it the case that you know, there can be 534 00:37:35,199 --> 00:37:40,039 a solution to this problem in that arena of capitalism that the West finds itself 535 00:37:40,079 --> 00:37:45,400 in. Or do we need like real economic correctives to find you know that 536 00:37:45,519 --> 00:37:50,000 maybe another definition of freedom? I don't know. I mean, yeah, 537 00:37:50,000 --> 00:37:52,000 I guess there's only always to find out which is you know, wait and 538 00:37:52,119 --> 00:37:54,920 see. I mean, if if I was a complete if I was a 539 00:37:55,039 --> 00:38:00,719 total materialist about it, and then totally if I was totally leanhc to the 540 00:38:00,800 --> 00:38:04,440 idea that you know, the it's all about it's all about the macro structures 541 00:38:04,440 --> 00:38:07,079 and we have no agency, then I guess I wouldn't have bothered writing the 542 00:38:07,119 --> 00:38:08,800 book. What even would be the point? You know, it's it's not 543 00:38:08,920 --> 00:38:13,800 I'm not a tech determinist, and I'm not a I'm not a determinist generally. 544 00:38:14,480 --> 00:38:16,559 It's I do think we have some agency, and I do. I 545 00:38:16,639 --> 00:38:21,280 do think, you know, standing up and saying your bit does make a 546 00:38:21,320 --> 00:38:24,159 difference. I mean, I think if we if there is a course correction, 547 00:38:24,360 --> 00:38:29,320 it's it will take. It's not going to happen quickly. You know. 548 00:38:29,400 --> 00:38:34,719 The My template for thinking about this is a superb history book I read 549 00:38:34,719 --> 00:38:38,360 a little while ago about the It's called The Utopians. It's by a British 550 00:38:38,400 --> 00:38:44,039 historian, Anonyma, and she writes about a set of utopian communes which sprang 551 00:38:44,119 --> 00:38:45,840 up between the two World wars. Internationally. There was one in the US, 552 00:38:45,880 --> 00:38:49,159 and there was one in Japan, and one in India, and a 553 00:38:49,239 --> 00:38:52,039 few other player one in Britain and a few other places, and they were 554 00:38:52,079 --> 00:38:57,199 all they were all dedicated to trying to find new ways of living in response 555 00:38:57,280 --> 00:39:00,000 to just how horrific World War One had been. And they all failed except 556 00:39:00,039 --> 00:39:07,239 the Bruderhof which is still going. But but their legacy pretty much wrote the 557 00:39:07,280 --> 00:39:12,079 script for for post war life. You know, the the entirety, pretty 558 00:39:12,159 --> 00:39:15,000 much the entirety of modern culture emerge, emerges. And they all knew each 559 00:39:15,000 --> 00:39:17,480 other, and they traveled to each other's communities, and they were they were 560 00:39:17,519 --> 00:39:22,840 these extraordinary visionaries of yeah, really sort of high modernist life. You know, 561 00:39:22,880 --> 00:39:24,480 it's pretty much a who's who of high modernism, the people who passed 562 00:39:24,519 --> 00:39:30,639 through these communities, and they and they created the modern world, or least 563 00:39:30,639 --> 00:39:32,719 their vision is now the world we live in. And so so I'm thinking 564 00:39:34,000 --> 00:39:37,559 maybe maybe I'm a utopian in some respect. I mean I'm not I'm not 565 00:39:37,639 --> 00:39:38,960 a utopian in the sense that I like, Yeah, I don't believe in 566 00:39:39,119 --> 00:39:43,119 utopias anymore than I believe in progress. But I do think that if you 567 00:39:43,199 --> 00:39:45,960 have a vision for the good, that you should try. And it might 568 00:39:46,159 --> 00:39:49,679 you might not, it might not be realized in your lifetime or in quite 569 00:39:49,679 --> 00:39:52,239 the way you imagined it would be, but you have to try. Yeah. 570 00:39:52,840 --> 00:39:58,639 Yeah, and actually I wanted to see you. Here's so many celebrities 571 00:39:58,719 --> 00:40:02,320 now parking about celebrities and young women talking about how they're really terrified of childbirth. 572 00:40:02,320 --> 00:40:06,920 They're terrified of pregnancy. And I don't know if folks haven't heard that 573 00:40:07,639 --> 00:40:10,440 look closer, because it's everywhere. There's so many women talking about that, 574 00:40:12,079 --> 00:40:15,880 and it's it's really in straight body horror, right, yeah, right, 575 00:40:15,239 --> 00:40:17,599 And I want to ask if you could talk a little bit about your experience 576 00:40:17,639 --> 00:40:22,559 with motherhood and how it was transformational for you in that space, because I 577 00:40:22,639 --> 00:40:25,119 think it probably would resonate with a lot of other women, and you probably 578 00:40:25,159 --> 00:40:29,000 have already found that it does. Yeah. I used to have recurring nightmares 579 00:40:29,000 --> 00:40:31,679 about accidental pregnancy when I was in my teens, in my twenties. Literally 580 00:40:31,719 --> 00:40:37,679 it was a recurring nightmare like the and it was it was specifically the idea 581 00:40:37,719 --> 00:40:42,239 of this thing just taking inexorably taking taking my body over and just going going 582 00:40:42,280 --> 00:40:45,360 on, and there was nothing I could do about it. There was something 583 00:40:45,480 --> 00:40:50,559 deeply, just incredibly unsettling about it. Yeah, I think it's I don't 584 00:40:50,599 --> 00:40:53,920 think it's a coincidence that the the hr Geiger sort of chest bursting alien has 585 00:40:54,000 --> 00:40:59,840 such cultural impact because because in a sense, it's a picture of the kind 586 00:40:59,840 --> 00:41:02,239 of nightmare, nightmare scenario over pregnant. You know, it's a kind of 587 00:41:02,679 --> 00:41:06,760 hideous antonym of pregnancy, isn't it. You know, there's sort of you 588 00:41:06,840 --> 00:41:09,800 know, the parasite that takes you over and you know, and enforces its 589 00:41:09,840 --> 00:41:13,360 way into you and then you know, just states inside you and kills you 590 00:41:13,440 --> 00:41:15,599 by emerging. You know, it's it's a sort of nightmare, nightmare kind 591 00:41:15,599 --> 00:41:21,360 of you know, parody inversion of what pregnancy actually is. And actually, 592 00:41:21,360 --> 00:41:22,480 you know, I mean, my daughter was born by emergency C section, 593 00:41:23,360 --> 00:41:29,039 so you know, not a million miles from the hr GUI scenario, except 594 00:41:29,039 --> 00:41:34,440 that you know about you know, a bit further south. And I didn't 595 00:41:34,519 --> 00:41:37,159 die luckily, although although actually I came close. You know, it was 596 00:41:37,239 --> 00:41:39,880 not straightforward, and I had complications afterwards, and it was it was kind 597 00:41:39,880 --> 00:41:44,159 of messy, but you know, thank thank god, I'm here. I'm 598 00:41:44,159 --> 00:41:45,840 still here, and so is she. So I'm very grateful to the doctors 599 00:41:45,880 --> 00:41:51,599 who saved both of our lives. But I sort of under like I wanted 600 00:41:51,679 --> 00:41:52,840 it all because I wanted her, and I you know, I was I 601 00:41:52,960 --> 00:41:55,639 was in a situation where I was ready and I was longing for a baby. 602 00:41:55,679 --> 00:42:00,400 I'd been through one miscarriage already, and it was that was the most 603 00:42:00,440 --> 00:42:02,719 brutal experience of one of the most horrible things that's ever happened to me, 604 00:42:04,800 --> 00:42:07,760 And so I was I was like, you know, hit me, I 605 00:42:07,800 --> 00:42:09,280 don't care what I have to go through. This is you know, I'll 606 00:42:09,320 --> 00:42:15,159 take it. But for but for women who haven't quite made that, you 607 00:42:15,239 --> 00:42:19,800 know, or haven't quite just or for for whatever reason, this this feels 608 00:42:19,840 --> 00:42:24,239 like too frightening or responsibility to take on, or too unthinkable for some other 609 00:42:24,280 --> 00:42:29,000 reason, I can see how finding yourself in a position where all of these 610 00:42:29,039 --> 00:42:32,320 are possibilities could just be straight up terrifying. And though, yeah, it 611 00:42:32,440 --> 00:42:37,679 completely rewires your brain, it totally transforms your body, it takes you Yeah. 612 00:42:37,920 --> 00:42:40,639 I've quoted Sophie Lewis, who is a yeah. She she thinks she 613 00:42:40,719 --> 00:42:45,239 thinks we should all treat all pregnancies as surrogacies, and quoted her in the 614 00:42:45,280 --> 00:42:47,920 book You describing it in pretty much straight up body horror terms. You know, 615 00:42:47,960 --> 00:42:52,480 it's sort of takes over your body, hijacks your blood supply, hijacks 616 00:42:52,480 --> 00:42:54,480 your sugar supply, and you know, slowly explodes your internal organs from the 617 00:42:54,519 --> 00:43:00,320 inside. At is it's it's a miracle that people I'm paraphrasing slightly it's a 618 00:43:00,400 --> 00:43:06,880 miracle that and that that we allow this to happen to to people at all. 619 00:43:07,320 --> 00:43:09,360 She finds this an outrageous imposition, and it's like, well, this 620 00:43:09,480 --> 00:43:15,360 is a very strange way of looking at what is just how how people multiply? 621 00:43:15,159 --> 00:43:17,719 This is a this is a you know, because you seem to be 622 00:43:17,800 --> 00:43:22,840 starting from the from from the premise that this might some one day become optional. 623 00:43:22,360 --> 00:43:25,280 You know, is this a sort of structurally you know, her starting 624 00:43:25,360 --> 00:43:30,119 point is as a fundamentally transhumanist one. Yeah, yeah, sheally sort of. 625 00:43:30,199 --> 00:43:32,400 But and I mean this this again, it goes back to the it 626 00:43:32,480 --> 00:43:37,280 goes back to the sexual revolution. Shel Mith Firestone was envisaging the ultimate emancipation 627 00:43:37,320 --> 00:43:40,360 of women is coming via artificial wounds, which would which would liberate women from 628 00:43:40,480 --> 00:43:47,280 from this grotesque invasive business altogether. Um, and when when you and seen 629 00:43:47,400 --> 00:43:52,440 from the perspective of biolibertarian feminism, it makes sense that that that this should 630 00:43:52,480 --> 00:43:57,360 be treated as an outrageous imposition because if you if you see, if you 631 00:43:57,440 --> 00:44:00,239 see the the end the end game, as as all of us being being 632 00:44:00,800 --> 00:44:06,920 totally unconstrained by any limitation of our physiology, then the idea that one sex 633 00:44:07,119 --> 00:44:10,760 and not the other should be subject to this outrageous invasion. Should is just 634 00:44:12,119 --> 00:44:15,239 is just horrifying. And I suppose I completely went through the looking glass when 635 00:44:15,239 --> 00:44:17,920 I when I had my daughter, because I you know, at one point 636 00:44:19,000 --> 00:44:22,599 I would have I would have you know, I'd completely agreed with that perspective. 637 00:44:22,639 --> 00:44:27,039 But then, as it turned out, by the by the time I 638 00:44:27,119 --> 00:44:30,280 did become pregnant, I wanted that, you know, I longed, I 639 00:44:30,440 --> 00:44:36,599 longed for her, and the experience of forming a relationship with her slowly over 640 00:44:36,719 --> 00:44:39,519 nine months before she was even there was it was amazing. I mean, 641 00:44:42,159 --> 00:44:44,719 you know, I went nuts for the hormones, and you know, it 642 00:44:44,960 --> 00:44:47,199 took me a little while to come back from all of that. But but 643 00:44:47,320 --> 00:44:51,760 what really blew my mind was the way I didn't like she was part of 644 00:44:51,880 --> 00:44:55,719 me while while she was while she was just stating, But then the feeling 645 00:44:55,800 --> 00:44:59,840 of not being quite separate from her didn't go away for a very long time 646 00:45:00,000 --> 00:45:04,239 afterwards. It only really I mean, it's the it's the weirdest feeling. 647 00:45:04,280 --> 00:45:07,800 And I've I've heard other other mums described this as well. It's like you've 648 00:45:07,800 --> 00:45:12,599 grown an extra limb or another another part of your body that's somehow surreally separate 649 00:45:12,679 --> 00:45:16,719 from you. Um. You know this it's literally as as much a part 650 00:45:16,760 --> 00:45:20,880 of you as your hand, or your or your knee. But but it's 651 00:45:20,920 --> 00:45:23,360 not part, it's not physically connected to you anymore. And but but this, 652 00:45:23,559 --> 00:45:27,119 this this you know, in much the same way as you you you 653 00:45:27,360 --> 00:45:30,360 go to some lengths to to stop your to stop something terrible happening to your 654 00:45:30,400 --> 00:45:35,280 hand. You go to really very considerable lengths to stop something terrible happening happening 655 00:45:35,320 --> 00:45:38,400 to this this separate individual who feels like part of your body. Um. 656 00:45:38,519 --> 00:45:44,079 And that's it's it's it's so hard to describe on unless it's happened to you, 657 00:45:45,320 --> 00:45:47,920 just how just how visceral that is, and how how brain brain altering 658 00:45:49,000 --> 00:45:52,760 that is, and just how much that's wonderful comes with it, and what 659 00:45:52,960 --> 00:45:54,920 what what looks from the so much of what looks like or from the outside 660 00:45:55,000 --> 00:46:01,599 like encumbrance is is not encumbrance. It's it. It's connection. And you 661 00:46:01,679 --> 00:46:05,800 know, when whenever one's so much about the world just feels incredibly lonely, 662 00:46:06,760 --> 00:46:10,119 you know, and it and perhaps seems seems that much free or or that 663 00:46:10,239 --> 00:46:15,119 much more emancipated for being so radically separate and atomized, and yet there's there's 664 00:46:15,159 --> 00:46:21,559 there's this payload of loneliness that comes with it. Yeah, I want to 665 00:46:21,599 --> 00:46:22,639 make the case for more connection, and I want to make the case for 666 00:46:22,719 --> 00:46:25,960 an interdependence, and I want to be in and for for that visceral, 667 00:46:27,039 --> 00:46:31,800 embodied experience of interdependence. And I can just imagine the rebuttal that you've probably 668 00:46:32,159 --> 00:46:37,880 handled before of contemporary feminists saying, if women don't want to do this, 669 00:46:38,039 --> 00:46:44,559 if there are women who are horrified by the prospect of pregnancy, or applying 670 00:46:44,639 --> 00:46:47,440 that to young girls who are horrified by their bodies, if they're upset about 671 00:46:47,480 --> 00:46:53,119 this, why shouldn't they take medication? Why shouldn't they use an artificial womb? 672 00:46:53,440 --> 00:46:57,440 And that brings us to maybe the most basic question here, which is, 673 00:46:58,239 --> 00:47:04,480 frankly, you know, why is Eddie hearing to those sort of biological 674 00:47:05,599 --> 00:47:10,840 instincts inherently good as opposed to being inherently limiting? Or you know what, 675 00:47:10,960 --> 00:47:15,480 why shouldn't we limit some of those things At the end of the day, 676 00:47:15,519 --> 00:47:17,519 You know, if it's I mean, you do you I guess you know 677 00:47:19,159 --> 00:47:21,880 you know, I'm sorry. I'm sorry to give you such a terrible live 678 00:47:21,920 --> 00:47:22,679 answer. You know, at the end of the day, I mean, 679 00:47:22,719 --> 00:47:28,480 if that's if that's working for people, then okay, But like it didn't 680 00:47:28,480 --> 00:47:30,760 work for me, So I can only at the end of the day, 681 00:47:30,840 --> 00:47:32,039 I only have if I only have my own testimony to go on. But 682 00:47:32,239 --> 00:47:37,280 from from my observation, there are plenty of other people who've who've dronk the 683 00:47:37,320 --> 00:47:39,360 kool aid on this, and for whom it is very obviously not working. 684 00:47:40,000 --> 00:47:45,000 You know who who've who've embraced this this vision of emancipation as radical atomization, 685 00:47:45,400 --> 00:47:52,280 and who are obviously lonely, and who are obviously there's something missing, and 686 00:47:52,679 --> 00:47:58,559 and that's something to me looks a whole lot like radical bodied association. And 687 00:47:58,960 --> 00:48:02,719 I think, if you're well to me, it's particularly in the Internet age, 688 00:48:02,760 --> 00:48:08,719 when everything like that's all the structural incentives are a more dissociation. For 689 00:48:09,079 --> 00:48:13,159 all I can say is that from my personal experience, the more associated you 690 00:48:13,239 --> 00:48:17,360 get, the more miserable you are. And like everybody, I've been extremely 691 00:48:17,400 --> 00:48:22,039 online for twenty years, right, congratulations, I know it's I don't do 692 00:48:22,119 --> 00:48:24,840 I get a medal, but no, But everybody I know who's been extremely 693 00:48:24,880 --> 00:48:30,400 online for any length of time and isn't totally insane. It also has a 694 00:48:30,519 --> 00:48:34,599 very has an equally extreme physical practice. And I think, I imagine, 695 00:48:34,639 --> 00:48:37,960 I imagine you see this as well. People lift, or or they they 696 00:48:37,199 --> 00:48:40,320 garden intensively, or they run, or that they do something, they do 697 00:48:40,480 --> 00:48:44,719 something, you know, they touch grass in a way which is as intense 698 00:48:44,880 --> 00:48:49,159 as their onlineness. And it's the only way to not go insane, you 699 00:48:49,239 --> 00:48:52,800 know, is to be very intentional about grounding yourself back into embodied reality, 700 00:48:52,920 --> 00:48:57,559 into your physicality, and into the limits and the affordances that come with that. 701 00:48:57,920 --> 00:49:00,920 And the only people I know who are online in a sane and healthy 702 00:49:00,960 --> 00:49:04,239 way are the people who are doing that very deliberately and so and so, 703 00:49:04,360 --> 00:49:07,519 really, what all of all I'm making the case for is is being more 704 00:49:07,559 --> 00:49:10,599 intentional about about remaining embodied just as a as a hedge against the sort of 705 00:49:10,679 --> 00:49:19,119 dissociative the centrifugal force of digital first culture, and that inescapably. That has 706 00:49:19,199 --> 00:49:22,719 to include a realism about our sex embodied nature, not just the fact that 707 00:49:22,760 --> 00:49:28,239 we're made of meat. My last question, then, is um I think 708 00:49:28,280 --> 00:49:32,960 about the Christopher Coldweld book on agem entitlement and how that sort of legal distinction 709 00:49:34,000 --> 00:49:37,119 that we made, you know, protecting things to borrow from Title nine language 710 00:49:37,119 --> 00:49:38,599 in the States, the on the basis of sex, and that we've we've 711 00:49:38,679 --> 00:49:44,679 banned sex discrimination and on that question of stuffing feminism back into the box. 712 00:49:45,239 --> 00:49:51,960 Um it raises the challenge of saying, what is the appropriate level of freedom? 713 00:49:52,280 --> 00:49:57,559 At what point are women free and not then limited by freedoms or not 714 00:49:57,719 --> 00:50:00,760 then you know, free to be absolutely misera because men will exploit them and 715 00:50:01,360 --> 00:50:07,039 they will be commodified in all of these different ways. Because you said, 716 00:50:07,039 --> 00:50:09,639 you know, nobody wants to take away women's suffrage. Some people might want 717 00:50:09,639 --> 00:50:13,159 to take away women's suffrage, but some people really do want to take away 718 00:50:13,280 --> 00:50:16,880 suffrage. Right, But what is that? Did we hit you know, 719 00:50:16,960 --> 00:50:22,440 our stride? Was there a peak in terms of like liberalism when we started 720 00:50:22,480 --> 00:50:28,119 protecting people we made sex a protected category? Is that what it looks like 721 00:50:28,280 --> 00:50:32,400 to have a healthy feminism. I don't think there's a universal answer to this 722 00:50:32,559 --> 00:50:36,760 question, you know, In fact, I go as far as to say 723 00:50:36,840 --> 00:50:40,119 I emphatically cancel against trying to come up with a universal answer to this question. 724 00:50:40,320 --> 00:50:44,519 It has to be a prudential one, because you know, if if 725 00:50:44,639 --> 00:50:49,280 My thesis holds that that women's women's interests are contextual and they're informed by material 726 00:50:49,320 --> 00:50:54,960 and cultural factors, then what what constitutes a positive beneficial balance of the interests 727 00:50:54,960 --> 00:50:59,119 of both sexes is going to vary immensely by context, and it will, 728 00:50:59,199 --> 00:51:04,360 for example, that very different in Afghanistan or or sub Saharan Africa to the 729 00:51:04,440 --> 00:51:07,480 to the to the way it looks in Washington, DC. You know this, 730 00:51:07,880 --> 00:51:09,480 this this ought to be obvious. Apparently it isn't We learned them as 731 00:51:09,599 --> 00:51:15,440 lesson right. Also also you might think, I'm not sure that everybody absolutely 732 00:51:15,519 --> 00:51:19,800 did. But but you understand the point that I'm making. It has to 733 00:51:19,880 --> 00:51:22,280 be a prudential question, and it has to be one which is negotiated really 734 00:51:22,360 --> 00:51:28,880 at ground level between the sexes. How you map how you map the larger 735 00:51:28,920 --> 00:51:34,000 infrastructures of policy and institutional power onto that. Again, it's a prudential question. 736 00:51:34,679 --> 00:51:37,840 But I think there's a I think there's a great deal more that could 737 00:51:37,880 --> 00:51:45,760 be done on the where it comes to an institutional support or creating, creating 738 00:51:45,840 --> 00:51:52,239 new institutions or repurposing existing institutions in defense of an embodied realist approach to flourishing 739 00:51:52,760 --> 00:51:57,079 relations between the sexes, because I think that's woefully missing. You know, 740 00:51:57,159 --> 00:52:02,039 the the transhumanist side or institution really pretty well set, and the sex realist 741 00:52:02,119 --> 00:52:05,920 side not so much. I think there's there's a great deal more that could 742 00:52:05,920 --> 00:52:07,760 be done, and of course it's bigger than just being about relations between the 743 00:52:07,840 --> 00:52:12,320 sexes. But I mean, when you have when you have something like title 744 00:52:12,440 --> 00:52:15,400 nine being hijacked from being really about sex to being about gender identity, you 745 00:52:15,480 --> 00:52:21,039 know, you're you're somewhere new and and at that point, at that point, 746 00:52:21,159 --> 00:52:25,559 women who are who are who are advocates for a realist, embodied understanding 747 00:52:25,639 --> 00:52:29,599 of the interests of men and women, you know, may may have some 748 00:52:29,760 --> 00:52:32,119 questions about whether or whether or not this legislation even is still in their interests. 749 00:52:32,119 --> 00:52:35,480 I don't know. I mean, I'm not I'm not an American, 750 00:52:35,519 --> 00:52:37,440 and I'm not very familiar with that debate, so I'm hesitant to say very 751 00:52:37,559 --> 00:52:42,039 much more. But I think it has to be it has to be grounded 752 00:52:42,159 --> 00:52:46,880 in in real real world relations and to be a prudential question. So interesting 753 00:52:46,960 --> 00:52:52,519 the book is feminism against Progress. Everybody is talking about it. Mary Harrington, 754 00:52:52,599 --> 00:52:54,559 thank you for giving us a slice of your time. Really so much 755 00:52:54,639 --> 00:52:58,199 for having me. It's been great. Of course. The book is fantastic. 756 00:52:58,280 --> 00:53:00,519 Seriously, please check it out. You're going to be hearing a lot 757 00:53:00,559 --> 00:53:02,320 about it, I'm sure. I'm em Elijahnski, culture editor here at The 758 00:53:02,320 --> 00:53:06,559 Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of 759 00:53:06,639 --> 00:53:15,320 freedom and anxious for the fray. All right, where are you wrong?