Speaker 1: Meaning a live man like this, man letting butterfly flattening
Speaker 1: wing big down in the forest.
Speaker 2: Man, it gonna cause the tree fall, letting five thousand
Speaker 2: miles away. Man, nobody's seen nobody else. I see. You
Speaker 2: don't need to know. Man, they like you another story
Speaker 2: and you got bacted like that. That's the way. Man.
Speaker 2: Don't blackly dag on the panel. Man, Man, you matter. Man.
Speaker 1: It's pretty common to hear the phrase they could never
Speaker 1: make that today talking about a book, a video game,
Speaker 1: a movie from the before times, from before the kind
Speaker 1: of woke era, before the era where you needed a
Speaker 1: certain percentage of demographic characteristics in order to be considered
Speaker 1: for the oscars.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Look, this doesn't mean that these films are hours. They
Speaker 1: have our values, but it is an interesting sort of
Speaker 1: before and after comparison, particularly if, like me, you've really
Speaker 1: only known the woke era, that is what you came
Speaker 1: of age and and so on today's movie conversation, I've
Speaker 1: got Dave Green, the distributist, talking about the twenty fourteen
Speaker 1: film Gone Girl, something I watched fairly recently and really enjoyed.
Speaker 1: The question, well, why couldn't it be made now? Is
Speaker 1: because it's a pretty uncompromising, pretty savage take on female narcissism. Right,
Speaker 1: The kind of female combined consciousness that forms up couldn't
Speaker 1: be made now After Me Too. The whole sort of
Speaker 1: plot of the movie is a woman faking a series
Speaker 1: of crimes against her She is the victim well as
Speaker 1: a play for victimhood, as a play for social status.
Speaker 1: Really interesting. Highly recommend it. If you watch it with
Speaker 1: wives or girlfriends, they'll probably get a kick out of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a unique.
Speaker 1: Film, don't get me wrong. Like I've said, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of progressive morality in it. You don't have to
Speaker 1: be particularly adroit to pick up on it. But because
Speaker 1: it is running an older version of the software, the
Speaker 1: sort of pre woke version of it, it's an incredibly
Speaker 1: interesting compare and contrast. It shows you how far we've
Speaker 1: moved in only twelve years. And also, this conversation is
Speaker 1: about the movie. We talk about it for most of
Speaker 1: the time, but really it's about feminine psychology, right, the
Speaker 1: gender war, the war between the sex is whatever you
Speaker 1: want to talk about. How do we get out of
Speaker 1: this incredibly destructive cycle? And one of the conclusions that
Speaker 1: Dave and I come to that I think is entirely
Speaker 1: accurate is that there isn't going to be a great
Speaker 1: realization where the curtain is torn away, where women are
Speaker 1: forced to accept their responsibility, are forced to face their crimes.
Speaker 1: Female Nuremberg. If you will, it won't happen. But there
Speaker 1: is a way out. There is a way towards a
Speaker 1: satisfactory conclusion, a way that we can get out of
Speaker 1: this sort of horrible prisoner's dilemma between men and women
Speaker 1: as separate classes. In fact, I think that situation where
Speaker 1: men and women have become voting blocks, particularly in younger generations,
Speaker 1: in opposition to one another, is profoundly unhealthy. One of
Speaker 1: the things that Dave and I talk about, this is
Speaker 1: apparent even in relatively distant history, is that women do
Speaker 1: act as a collective, or at least they can. They
Speaker 1: see themselves as being part of a whole in a
Speaker 1: way that men until very very recently have it. We
Speaker 1: don't operate that way naturally. We have sort of been
Speaker 1: forced to in response, although even then only partially to
Speaker 1: kind of current political realities, but nonetheless the prisoner's dilemma
Speaker 1: where both people are going to get screwed unless they
Speaker 1: find some sort of mutually beneficial compromise. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: kind of what we're stuck in. I mean, look at
Speaker 1: the ever declining number of people who are simply having sex,
Speaker 1: let alone pairing off foring families. That has become a
Speaker 1: more exclusive thing, much less common than it used to
Speaker 1: be reserved for. To be honest, for the most part,
Speaker 1: religious extremists, you know, the kind of people on the
Speaker 1: outsides of culture. But it is clearly not working. Female
Speaker 1: rates of unhappiness, suicide, self harm are through the roof
Speaker 1: young men are obviously not doing well. That's basically what
Speaker 1: a third of my episodes are about. And so I
Speaker 1: think that this is a very productive conversation, like how
Speaker 1: do we get out of this? What is the functional
Speaker 1: way we can deal with the feminine mass, right, the
Speaker 1: sort of female hive brain. And this film, while not
Speaker 1: technically about that, is a very interesting explanation or I
Speaker 1: guess you could say exploration. Excuse me of exactly that idea? Right,
Speaker 1: well worth your time. The film is easy enough to
Speaker 1: find anywhere you know, you can look for it. If
Speaker 1: you sail the high seas, you can find it in
Speaker 1: two minutes. Right, probably better quality than you can on Amazon,
Speaker 1: but nonetheless really happy to have Dave here to discuss it.
Speaker 1: I think it's a good episode. Even if you're not
Speaker 1: interested in the film, you should check it out because
Speaker 1: we do spend a long time talking about other kind
Speaker 1: of grander, more philosophical topics. But that said, you can
Speaker 1: find me on anywhere you listen to podcasts, Apple, Spotify, YouTube.
Speaker 1: You can also check out the episodes early in ad
Speaker 1: free on Patreon, Substack or gum Road supports. The channel
Speaker 1: supports me. I appreciate it. This is what I do,
Speaker 1: and I depend on your guys' support. And also you
Speaker 1: don't have to listen to ads for casinos or pharmaceuticals,
Speaker 1: which is apparently the only people who decide I'm worth
Speaker 1: advertising for. So without further ado, here's Dave Green, distributist.
Speaker 1: Thank you all right, Dave, welcome back to Jay Burdens Show.
Speaker 3: How you doing? Man?
Speaker 2: Great glad to be back on here and not so
Speaker 2: sure when the last time was, but a big fan
Speaker 2: of the show.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you man, I'm I'm glad to have you on.
Speaker 3: It's funny.
Speaker 1: I've joked before that the whole reason that I had
Speaker 1: a podcast is so I could talk to interesting people
Speaker 1: and have some sort of justification for it. And I'll
Speaker 1: be honest, man, I'm excited we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: Gone Girl. An interesting movie, but I'll be honest, I
Speaker 1: just enjoy a chance to hang out with you on
Speaker 1: the internet. So you know what, this is the excuse
Speaker 1: we've come to. So yeah, obviously get into the film
Speaker 1: in more detail, but if you're comfortable sharing it, you
Speaker 1: have a fairly interesting first experience with this movie.
Speaker 2: Correct, Yeah, So, I mean this is one of the
Speaker 2: like the four horsemen of the pre woke Apocalypse. It
Speaker 2: was like kick Ass Scott Pilgrim versus the world Gone Girl,
Speaker 2: and I'm blanking I'm the fourth one. But there were
Speaker 2: there were there are four movies I remember being the
Speaker 2: you could see the great Wokening happening in their prefiguration.
Speaker 2: I got maybe Gone Girl's not the best one. I
Speaker 2: feel like Juno, you know Mighty you could. But Juno
Speaker 2: is from a different era because you know, predated the
Speaker 2: global financial crisis by about a year, and so Juno
Speaker 2: comes from the Bush era, from the Four Times. This
Speaker 2: is the what you see in these movies from this era,
Speaker 2: which is the two thousand and fourteen twenty thirteen, was
Speaker 2: you know kick Ass? And was it? Scott Pilgrim came
Speaker 2: out in twenty eleven, twenty twelve. And what happens during
Speaker 2: this period is you see American culture becoming kind of
Speaker 2: radically tired with itself. The weird thing about Gone Girl is,
Speaker 2: you know, first of all, the interesting story is that
Speaker 2: I had a first day watching this movie. You know,
Speaker 2: I probably shouldn't talk about this too much since I'm
Speaker 2: not the first to have my wife. I watched a
Speaker 2: much worse movie on the first date with my wife
Speaker 2: than this one. I think. I think that the the
Speaker 2: movie for the first date is inversely proportional to how
Speaker 2: successful the relationship is going to be.
Speaker 1: Uh to that point, Dave Green, my first movie date
Speaker 1: with my wife was to see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Speaker 1: So your inverse quality, uh to date quality. We have
Speaker 1: at least two solid data points here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, your your your your marriage will be in destructible
Speaker 2: after that one. I'm just in the movie though, but
Speaker 2: any rate, I mean, it was it was weird because
Speaker 2: you know, it's it's a strange some people are talking about. Uh.
Speaker 2: Before the Greater Wokening hit in earnest Hollywood was still
Speaker 2: producing movies that were kind of objective observations of reality
Speaker 2: such that you could kind of not be so sure
Speaker 2: what the eventual conclusion would be, whereas obviously, if this
Speaker 2: movie were made today, there is no they could have
Speaker 2: come to the conclusion they had come to and just bizarre.
Speaker 2: It is kind of funny people were posting like the
Speaker 2: Incredibles and Wally and all this stuff, and you know,
Speaker 2: it's depressing that all these base messages were included in
Speaker 2: mainstream movies because to pick probably the worst movie of
Speaker 2: the entire two thousands, Battlefield Earth, which was one of
Speaker 2: the there's a scene where the scientology alien takes the
Speaker 2: hero into the Museum of Earth History and says, here's
Speaker 2: all the weapons Earth used to have, and you can
Speaker 2: have all of them you want, because none of these
Speaker 2: weapons lasted five seconds in the face of our onslaught.
Speaker 2: And that's you know, that's what I feel about a
Speaker 2: lot of these old movies from the before times that
Speaker 2: had based messages. You had all these based messages, but
Speaker 2: none of these lessons you learn from Wali or The
Speaker 2: Incredibles are Gone Girl lasted for five seconds. Once the
Speaker 2: Greater Wokening started, you forgot all of them instantly. So
Speaker 2: it's weird to think about that this movie came from
Speaker 2: really the before times. I mean, I guess the Great
Speaker 2: Wilkening had just started up when this movie hit the theaters.
Speaker 2: I mean it started in twenty twelve, and so it
Speaker 2: was already starting in earnest with things like gamer Gate
Speaker 2: and stuff like that. But you know, it hadn't really
Speaker 2: carried over to Hollywood. There's no way that this movie
Speaker 2: could have been made in the Hollywood to twenty eighteen
Speaker 2: or post me Too. There's no way it post me
Speaker 2: to Hollywood would have created this movie. Maybe we should
Speaker 2: give a background about what this movie is about. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you want me.
Speaker 1: So the broad strokes of this is that this movie
Speaker 1: and the way it's shot. You don't understand this till
Speaker 1: about halfway through the film, but effectively it starts off.
Speaker 1: We have Ben Affleck is celebrating his fifth anniversary with
Speaker 1: his wife. It's clear the marriage isn't going well. When
Speaker 1: he goes home, there is a break in scene. She's gone,
Speaker 1: hence the Gone girl, and what on folds is a
Speaker 1: situation where it seems as if he is being framed
Speaker 1: for the disappearance of his wife. That the sentiment of
Speaker 1: the town turns against him more and more sort of
Speaker 1: unflattering things or revealed about him. He's a community college
Speaker 1: professor who's having an affair with a student. And then
Speaker 1: halfway through the film we realize his wife has set
Speaker 1: all of this up. She has, out of spite, deliberately
Speaker 1: engineered and immaculately planned this situation to basically frame him
Speaker 1: for her murder.
Speaker 2: And then.
Speaker 1: Her plan starts to fall apart. She plans on killing
Speaker 1: herself as kind of a final act of defiance, and
Speaker 1: she's forced to pivot. She ends up reconnecting with an
Speaker 1: X that doesn't go particularly well, so she pivots again.
Speaker 1: In a very dramatic scene. Again, if you're upset about spoilers,
Speaker 1: just watch this movie. It's a pretty good one. She
Speaker 1: basically kills him and then recast the whole situation as
Speaker 1: her being kidnapped and abused by this ex. Her husband
Speaker 1: knows the truth, and then they are forced to basically
Speaker 1: live together as now she is this sort of media figure, right,
Speaker 1: she is the girl who escaped from her attacker, And
Speaker 1: so the chilling conclusion to the movie is basically ben
Speaker 1: Affleck deciding because his wife is pregnant. I've got to
Speaker 1: continue living this lie so massively alighted over the plot,
Speaker 1: but obviously the core conceit of a woman manufacturing a
Speaker 1: crime against her for her own social advancement is highly controversial,
Speaker 1: to put it mildly, even just a few years after
Speaker 1: this film came out.
Speaker 2: So it is fun of the throughout the nineties, there
Speaker 2: were I'm blanking on their names, but sort of a
Speaker 2: hallmark of the late nineties and early two thousands. You're
Speaker 2: too young to remember this, but if you were watching
Speaker 2: network television before the Internet came out, their favorite story
Speaker 2: was stories of like marginally successful affluent husbands usually white,
Speaker 2: actually almost always white killing This is after the O. J.
Speaker 2: Simpson trail. This is really what kicked it off. And
Speaker 2: there's so many of them I can't quite enumerate them,
Speaker 2: but there are a few, very very high profile ones
Speaker 2: in the Bush administration. And when that happened, that was
Speaker 2: near my hometown. So I remember that one killing their
Speaker 2: wives and then or their wife disappears in their front
Speaker 2: of the body, and then there's this big kind of
Speaker 2: public hate campaign, and it was this thing that was
Speaker 2: it was kind of a way for the country to
Speaker 2: come together. I hate to say it, because everyone couldn't
Speaker 2: agree on politics, or on feminism, or the War on
Speaker 2: Terror or any of this other stuff, any except out
Speaker 2: for the Bill Clinton O. J. Simpson trial. And this
Speaker 2: is like Bill Clinton O J. Simpson really kicked this off, right,
Speaker 2: And you know O. J. Simpson and Bill Clinton both
Speaker 2: have this property where it's it's bad men hurting women
Speaker 2: or you know, in Bill Clinton's case, just being a douchebag,
Speaker 2: and the Liberals don't really want to go after them,
Speaker 2: even though the feminism they were pushing in the nineties.
Speaker 2: Again you're too young to remember this, but they were
Speaker 2: pushing feminism. This is the first eruption of focism. Right
Speaker 2: up until the O. J. Simpson and Bill Clinton scandals.
Speaker 2: The stuff they were pushing there, it would say that
Speaker 2: they should go after these guys, but they didn't want to.
Speaker 2: So we spent on network television kind of coming together
Speaker 2: as a country around these scandals over acceptable people to hate.
Speaker 2: And these were always kind of like white husbands who
Speaker 2: had murdered their wives. And conservatives liked it because conservative
Speaker 2: Christians still like the woman victim man bad story. You know,
Speaker 2: they just liked to have played well on Fox News.
Speaker 2: It had kind of a feminist slant to it as well,
Speaker 2: you know, and the mainstream media just loved it because
Speaker 2: they had kind of like this very very convenient person
Speaker 2: to hate that match all their stereotypes of who the
Speaker 2: bad people were, Like semi affluent, kind of koolock coated
Speaker 2: white male does a horrible thing, and is this yerrors
Speaker 2: person that you should hate. And what's so brilliant about
Speaker 2: this is that the plot is kind of inverted, and
Speaker 2: I mean, this is sort of a pattern that we
Speaker 2: realize and the social media age just became all too
Speaker 2: obvious that the women who manufactures the situation of her
Speaker 2: own victimhood and then uses that for a way to
Speaker 2: manufacture a cloud. One of the important things about the
Speaker 2: Plotlind of this individual movie the Wife, which is named Amy.
Speaker 2: I think Ben Affolck's characterist Nick Amy, comes from an
Speaker 2: incredibly affluent wasp family that, addition to hav An old Money,
Speaker 2: has become famous worldwide for creating a set of children's
Speaker 2: books with Amy as the subject, and the books are
Speaker 2: called like the Amazing Amy Series. So she's already a
Speaker 2: childhood celebrity. She spent her entire childhood being celebrated internationally
Speaker 2: for being this awesome person. And that's kind of an
Speaker 2: interesting dimension to it because it it creates this environment,
Speaker 2: or it creates this suggestion that that she's not I mean,
Speaker 2: she obviously the move suggests that she's a not bipolar,
Speaker 2: a borderline sociopath, but her you know, the fact that
Speaker 2: she doesn't seemed to care about pain, her incredible dark
Speaker 2: triad personality traits. Uh you know, her breaking breaking was
Speaker 2: a breaking white, breaking back on black on people, aka
Speaker 2: shifting them from a friend enemy with no middle ground
Speaker 2: in between. And you know, but it suggests that the
Speaker 2: the movie suggests, with that backstory for Amy, that this
Speaker 2: kind of extreme sociopathy is born from this kind of
Speaker 2: childhood narcissism, which is another kind of dark implication for
Speaker 2: the social media age. I know how accurate that is,
Speaker 2: but it's an interesting.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, we're this is a very stupid social
Speaker 1: media scandal, but we are in the midst of the
Speaker 1: is her name Ashley Saint Clair?
Speaker 2: Right? Oh yeah, perfect, liney, I should Saint Clair baby almost,
Speaker 2: But I mean, like we have a very similar dynamic, right,
Speaker 2: someone who in a previous era was quite famous and
Speaker 2: is now trying to reinject themselves into internet relevance via
Speaker 2: you know, a story of being.
Speaker 1: Taken advantage of by a man. Don't particularly care to
Speaker 1: get into the details of that, but like you see
Speaker 1: that same sort of motif echoed. There are a couple
Speaker 1: of things that I think are particularly interesting because there
Speaker 1: is also a heavy ilication that she is sort of
Speaker 1: the echo of her own mother. Her parents are not
Speaker 1: exactly they're secondary characters in this, but there are a
Speaker 1: number of very kind of interesting scenes contrasting this. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, we kind of have this back and forth
Speaker 1: between Ben Affleck trying to prove his innocence obviously as
Speaker 1: the walls sort of close in, while he is also
Speaker 1: fighting a media battle. So there's a lot of kind
Speaker 1: of back and forth on you know, the news and
Speaker 1: daytime television. And there's also a pretty heavy element of
Speaker 1: class I guess you could say snobbery or analysis to this.
Speaker 1: Because he and his wife met in New York City,
Speaker 1: they were in kind of a you know, an affluent
Speaker 1: circle of creatives, and then the financial crisis hits, so
Speaker 1: they end up, you know, moving back to his hometown
Speaker 1: in middle of nowhere, Missouri.
Speaker 2: Now they are.
Speaker 1: Exactly they are the kind of you know, city mouse
Speaker 1: come home to small town America, and so this kind
Speaker 1: of force of suburban mothers right mobilized by daytime television
Speaker 1: in the local news. So he's constantly fighting this battle.
Speaker 1: And early in the film there's a very interesting scene
Speaker 1: where you know, he's done the official police response. They've
Speaker 1: got a photo printed out of his wife, you know,
Speaker 1: talking to the camera, please come home, Amy, And of
Speaker 1: course he looks weird and awkward. You know, he's just
Speaker 1: a normal guy. He gets sort of pilloried in the media,
Speaker 1: and he's leading this effort to try and find her body,
Speaker 1: and her parents have flown in, and there's this really
Speaker 1: interesting contrast between Amy's mother don't remember her name, you know,
Speaker 1: crying on camera saying, oh, we just want Amy back,
Speaker 1: and then it sort of cuts to them walking along
Speaker 1: the Mississippi River in the middle of summer, and she's
Speaker 1: complaining about how bad everyone stinks. Why are they in
Speaker 1: this town? I just want to get out of there,
Speaker 1: And you see that same sort of extremely manipulative dark
Speaker 1: triad behavior exemplified in her mother, which is not a
Speaker 1: core central part of the plot, but sort of an
Speaker 1: interesting I didn't.
Speaker 2: Notice that the point that that is interesting. Other interesting
Speaker 2: thing is you know that there are the two characters
Speaker 2: we didn't mention. I don't know how relevant these are,
Speaker 2: but there is the who is the black doctor of
Speaker 2: plays media? Isn't the guy who plays.
Speaker 3: The Tyler Perry. Yeah, Tyler Perry is a lawyer.
Speaker 2: In the O. J. Simpson lawyer that is hired to there.
Speaker 1: Are there are two characters in this who are When
Speaker 1: I say miscast, I don't necessarily mean that they do
Speaker 1: a bad job in the role, but their prominence as
Speaker 1: media figures makes it hard to take them seriously. Tyler
Speaker 1: Perry is one. And then also Amy's ex is played
Speaker 1: by Neil Patrick Harris. Oh yes, so clearly a gay
Speaker 1: man pretending to be a straight man.
Speaker 3: It really does not work.
Speaker 2: But to your point, yes, they were trying to, well,
Speaker 2: this is I'm super imposing the politics of twenty twenty
Speaker 2: six onto this movie. But they were kind of trying
Speaker 2: to make the Neil Patrick Harris character kind of in
Speaker 2: sell coded, like sexually obsessed man. But he does not
Speaker 2: come off that way. They should have had somebody, I
Speaker 2: don't know, someone a little bit more is sexually desperate
Speaker 2: play that I can't think of a good actor off
Speaker 2: the top of my head, but.
Speaker 1: Someone who doesn't immediately scream I am a extremely educated,
Speaker 1: liberal gay.
Speaker 2: Actor, right exactly something, do something all all the actors.
Speaker 2: I think it would be good in that roller way
Speaker 2: too old to play it, but uh, either way. The
Speaker 2: the other character is his sister, who's kind of a
Speaker 2: you know, a character that's a very sympathetic character to
Speaker 2: the main Nick character. From from that, the the the
Speaker 2: main tension, at least for the first part of the
Speaker 2: plot is uh, you know. From Knick's point of view,
Speaker 2: is the interests of fighting his legal defense against a
Speaker 2: murder accusation or directly in opposition to his attempt to
Speaker 2: fight the media battle. And what saves him is that
Speaker 2: he makes a decision that is incredibly stupid from the
Speaker 2: perspective of a murder trial. He goes on a talk
Speaker 2: show and essentially pleads his case in a very confessional way,
Speaker 2: which is, you never want to do that, right, because
Speaker 2: you're giving the defense all these pre trial statements that
Speaker 2: they can go off of, and you know, you're showing
Speaker 2: your hand for what's certainly going to be a murder
Speaker 2: trial against you. You're you're you're You're you're leaving yourself
Speaker 2: open to getting into an argument with the houst and
Speaker 2: having your confession to be part of public record, which
Speaker 2: I think can abused as evidence. Right he Cruckliss surmises
Speaker 2: that the legal question of the murder is almost secondary.
Speaker 2: Was really playing out as a contest of public perception,
Speaker 2: which is what makes this truly a movie for the
Speaker 2: online age. You know, the the contest of murder is
Speaker 2: and people do get killed, but the contest of murder
Speaker 2: and of bodily harm is secondary concern to the social
Speaker 2: perception of being evil or bad. A great example of this,
Speaker 2: you know, and I don't know exactly how true life
Speaker 2: is like she's actually planning to kill herself to make
Speaker 2: her point, Like that's on her schedule. It's like, I'm
Speaker 2: going to kill myself to ensure that my husband goes
Speaker 2: to jail for the rest of his life or whatever. Right,
Speaker 2: this is like insane, Right, It's an insane thing, even
Speaker 2: for a sociopath to do. Is But it's like it's
Speaker 2: almost like because her husband's going to be humiligated, but
Speaker 2: you'll never see it because be dead. So uh and
Speaker 2: and but but that's the perception of the whole game
Speaker 2: being played. Is that the the the the contest of
Speaker 2: impressions and of clout and of perception of who's good
Speaker 2: and bad matters more than these people's individual lives, these
Speaker 2: individuals in these people's individual existences as flash and blood people,
Speaker 2: which is, you know, kind of a an interesting dimension
Speaker 2: that comes up again and again in the movie, like
Speaker 2: acosted for clout, you know this is you know well.
Speaker 1: And that's what makes the conclusion to this so dark
Speaker 1: is because by about the two thirds Mark Nick has
Speaker 1: successfully convinced both his sister and his sister Margo is
Speaker 1: at least for the first part of the movie, in
Speaker 1: the back of her mind sort of wondering if her
Speaker 1: brother did this, because at least initially it looks like
Speaker 1: an open and shutcase. He's able to win her around.
Speaker 1: He's also able to win the support of and if
Speaker 1: you're wondering, yes, I do have IMDb pulled up because
Speaker 1: I cannot remember names this well, the kind of small
Speaker 1: town detective detective Bony who has finally realized like okay,
Speaker 1: like this is concocted, this isn't real. And there's this
Speaker 1: very chilling moment where Amy has returned. You know, she's
Speaker 1: concocted this story about her ex, you know, becoming obsessed
Speaker 1: with her, abducting her. That is the source of the disappearance.
Speaker 1: She has, in fairly graphic fashion, killed this x right
Speaker 1: and presented it as a self defense case. And this
Speaker 1: one small town detective is sort of grilling her. She's
Speaker 1: she's in the hospital, surrounded by the FBI, the media,
Speaker 1: giving a statement, and the whole time the detective is
Speaker 1: basically saying like it's pushing her, trying to grill her,
Speaker 1: basically pointing out how this story doesn't add up, this
Speaker 1: doesn't make sense, and so she you know, faints back
Speaker 1: on the couch show, I'm so tired, I have to go.
Speaker 1: And when she talked to Nick, her and Margo both
Speaker 1: they're basically, you need to get a divorce. You need
Speaker 1: to be done with this. You need to disconnect from
Speaker 1: this woman. But if he does that, he's completely and
Speaker 1: totally socially assassinated. This woman has returned pregnant wife. If
Speaker 1: he's the you know, the the cad that not only
Speaker 1: cheated on her once but also left her after she's returned,
Speaker 1: his life is over. And so that's what makes the
Speaker 1: conclusion of the film so dark is that he sort
Speaker 1: of has to willingly go back onto the reservation to
Speaker 1: go to subsume himself, back to the narrative or back
Speaker 1: into this kind of manufactured narrative for his own kind
Speaker 1: of I guess social standing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, her threats are simultaneously that she'll go to the
Speaker 2: press and make him the bad guy, but also that
Speaker 2: shall make him the bad guy in the eyes of
Speaker 2: their presumptive child, right, And you know this, I own
Speaker 2: exactly know. It's there's a little bit of our media
Speaker 2: landscape has changed so much and the last how many
Speaker 2: has been twelve years since that movie came out, hasn't it.
Speaker 2: Our media landscape has changed so much in the last
Speaker 2: twelve years. And you know this is really based on
Speaker 2: the type of stories that would be this how this
Speaker 2: is really a period piece from about two thousand and five,
Speaker 2: that's roughly when you know, I don't think people have
Speaker 2: iPhones and maybe they don't, I forget, but I.
Speaker 1: Think they have blackberries. Like that's that's really where the
Speaker 1: movie seems to take place.
Speaker 2: It seems to take place before the social and network
Speaker 2: like cable television is still huge. Like he's going on
Speaker 2: cable television. He's not going on a podcast or something
Speaker 2: like that, right, And.
Speaker 1: Also the type of background characters we see in this
Speaker 1: are of the Bush era, not of the Obama era,
Speaker 1: the kind of like you know, peroxide blonde, you know,
Speaker 1: small town aging mother, like that character certainly still exists,
Speaker 1: but this is about the mid two thousands. Even if
Speaker 1: the movie didn't come out.
Speaker 2: Then yeah, exactly. So you know, it's it's hard to
Speaker 2: sort of superimpose what the narrative would have been, but
Speaker 2: the impression is that like she could destroy his reputation,
Speaker 2: she might be able to destroy his career prospects because
Speaker 2: the media wants to roll the story a certain way
Speaker 2: that feels good for them, and she is the default victim, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, and this this creates the kind of you know,
Speaker 2: this kind of the lesson of this thing is is
Speaker 2: you know the fact that the physical is enslaved to
Speaker 2: the hyper real in a lot of ways. It's like
Speaker 2: a hyperreality trap he's caught in, and there's there's some
Speaker 2: interesting things and they're like they break the wife when
Speaker 2: she's doing this amazingly executed plot, she leaves like this
Speaker 2: fu note for him, which is like that that kind
Speaker 2: of broke the plausibility of the plot. You know, she
Speaker 2: leaves this kind of like oh, I got you note
Speaker 2: in the shed that's like supposed to be like, oh,
Speaker 2: now you're going to go to jail for my murder,
Speaker 2: and that that I think. You know, I agree that
Speaker 2: made a great scene in the movie, but it's not
Speaker 2: it wouldn't have. It kind of breaks the believability of
Speaker 2: the plot for a second, so I'll criticize the movie
Speaker 2: for that. And it also less him to get his
Speaker 2: sister on board with him early on, which is sort
Speaker 2: of where the tide starts turning. Another interesting thing I
Speaker 2: thought was the fact that you know, it's weird, like
Speaker 2: why does she decide not to kill herself. Well, she
Speaker 2: goes to this hotel and she's this dropping money everywhere, right,
Speaker 2: because she's this huge water cash. She's going to spend it,
Speaker 2: and she's in a party I do drugs until she dies,
Speaker 2: and then these rednecks commine's robber of her money, right,
Speaker 2: And so she can still kill herself, but she's going
Speaker 2: to have to go through the intervening weeks like as
Speaker 2: a nobody, right, So it's not the prospect of death
Speaker 2: that dissuades her from suicide, and that's when she reaches
Speaker 2: out to the Neil Patrick Carras character. It's not the
Speaker 2: prospect of death that dissuades her from suicide, is obviously,
Speaker 2: that's what she's bolding up to. It's the prospect of
Speaker 2: living a week as somebody who's not the center of
Speaker 2: everyone's attention, right, yeah, which is like it's bizarre, right ahead,
Speaker 2: I mean to.
Speaker 1: That point again, things that would make this movie impossible
Speaker 1: to make even just a few short years later. Fundamentally
Speaker 1: is a study on female narcissism. Yeah, right, the idea
Speaker 1: that at all moments I must be at the center
Speaker 1: of attention. There are two separate stretches where she is
Speaker 1: glued to the TV watching her own media coverage. One
Speaker 1: you know, you mentioned this kind of like rundown motel
Speaker 1: in the middle of nowhere, Missouri. And then later when
Speaker 1: she's reconnected with this very affluent X and she's in
Speaker 1: his you know, kind of palatial lake house obsessively watching
Speaker 1: the television right tuned into the coverage, and we see
Speaker 1: it really trusting moment, uh, where she is before where
Speaker 1: she hasn't quite been robbed yet, where she is creating
Speaker 1: dozens of accounts on the comment section for the local newspaper,
Speaker 1: exactly places when this would happen, right pre social.
Speaker 2: Media because no, no, even more right, because they got
Speaker 2: rid of comment section. News sites used to have comment sections.
Speaker 2: Do you remember this, The BBC's CNN, they used to
Speaker 2: have comment sections and the original or I killed it.
Speaker 2: That all the news sites out once that it They
Speaker 2: must have dropped their engagement entirely. They killed the common sections.
Speaker 2: But until that moment after, you know, I think the
Speaker 2: comment section kind of died during the Obama era. But
Speaker 2: in the Bush era, people actually used to hang out
Speaker 2: in the common section of mainstream news sites. And I
Speaker 2: mean that is really located. But yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 2: it's it's it's strange, right because there's a there's a
Speaker 2: lot of kind of companion pieces to this movie. I
Speaker 2: saw this movie right before I believe this is no
Speaker 2: It might have been a year before, but I had
Speaker 2: this movie in mind when I restarted watching the re
Speaker 2: release of the new Twin Peaks, which is about another
Speaker 2: kind of one of these murdered blonde women from the eighties, Right,
Speaker 2: that kind of becomes this defining feature, and that's another
Speaker 2: perspective to take this from but it's it's interesting because
Speaker 2: you know, we were talking about this before we went live,
Speaker 2: about just this this subset of American women, or really
Speaker 2: all Western women that are obsessed with gender drama and
Speaker 2: holding up their fight in this battle. And the thing
Speaker 2: is is what makes the gender slop? And I've written
Speaker 2: two articles on the stupid thing. So I don't know
Speaker 2: why I'm calling this discourse futal, But what makes it
Speaker 2: so futile is the two sides aren't even arguing over
Speaker 2: the same thing. The people on the kind of like
Speaker 2: the natilist side of the argument are arguing about what
Speaker 2: do we want our society to actually look like? Whereas
Speaker 2: the people from I hate to say it, more of
Speaker 2: the female block perspective are how do I get to
Speaker 2: be on the good side of this argument? And so
Speaker 2: a lot of perspectives are just common sense. But it's very,
Speaker 2: very difficult for modern millennial women to get on the
Speaker 2: good side of that argument. They have too much of
Speaker 2: a history. They can't switch over. Such a perspective would
Speaker 2: put them in the position of being the bad guy.
Speaker 2: So it does doesn't matter. It's like you said, it's like, well,
Speaker 2: I guess our civilization is going to have to die.
Speaker 2: I guess our civilization is going to have to die
Speaker 2: because things weren't exactly fair. And I think that it's
Speaker 2: this is not because modern women are a sociopaths like
Speaker 2: Amy from Gone Girl, but like Amy from Gone Girl,
Speaker 2: most or many American women have this deep fear of invisibility.
Speaker 2: There is this there is this impression, and this is
Speaker 2: I think a deeply seated female impression that as long
Speaker 2: as everybody is crying, if you're not crying as loud
Speaker 2: as the other people, then you in some sense cease
Speaker 2: to exist. And you know, you cease to exist as
Speaker 2: long as the cameras aren't on you. And this is
Speaker 2: this is what's sort of driving Amy in Gone Girl.
Speaker 2: And it's much of the same thought process that seems
Speaker 2: to have really infected a lot of people who are
Speaker 2: women or think like women in twenty and twenties era.
Speaker 2: And I don't know exactly the right way out of it.
Speaker 2: I mean, I speculated, I mean you just have to
Speaker 2: kind of maintain frame and walk through it. But I
Speaker 2: deeply sympathize with it because if you're somebody who operates
Speaker 2: in a female social space and there is this tool
Speaker 2: called the Internet and this tool or or a group chat,
Speaker 2: and group chats or the internet reward the people who
Speaker 2: cry the loudest. If you're not on board in that process,
Speaker 2: somewhere you kind of get cast to the side and
Speaker 2: become this invisible element of no consequence. And this is,
Speaker 2: you know, this is a problem. I don't exactly know
Speaker 2: how we integrate that psychology into an environment where there's
Speaker 2: just so much perverse incentives to abuse it.
Speaker 1: Well, And that's that's sort of the interesting thing in
Speaker 1: this movie because we see obviously, you know, there's the
Speaker 1: main character of Amy as kind of the head female
Speaker 1: narcissist in this We've also mentioned, you know, her mother
Speaker 1: playing a very similar game. But they're all of these
Speaker 1: sort of secondary and tertiary characters which we see clawing
Speaker 1: for media attention in a very kind of disgusting way.
Speaker 1: There's a I can't remember the name, Casey Wilson, thank
Speaker 1: you to IMDb. Is this sort of suburban mother who
Speaker 1: lives in the same neighborhood, and it sort of implied
Speaker 1: that she's not particularly intelligent. You sort of get this
Speaker 1: vision of the kind of you know, low iq suburban mother,
Speaker 1: kids crawling all over her.
Speaker 2: Friend in the movie, Yes, who we.
Speaker 1: Find out later, of course, deliberately cultivated to be, you know,
Speaker 1: a sympathetic character. But we see this woman over and
Speaker 1: over and over again trying to inject herself into the story. So,
Speaker 1: you know, going to the media, this moment where you know,
Speaker 1: Ben Affleck is walking into his home and she sort
Speaker 1: of defiantly stands out in front of the crowd and
Speaker 1: accuses him in full view of the cameras. Of course,
Speaker 1: continually trying to interject herself into this right to make
Speaker 1: herself a sort of supportive, sympathetic heroine and all of this.
Speaker 2: And what's funny about this too, I'll listener, Jacks. This
Speaker 2: woman is very much insofar as Amy is kind of
Speaker 2: like Brahm and Bluestay coded, this other woman who's our
Speaker 2: friend is like Coolock red Steak coded, like to the core.
Speaker 2: She's just the kind of picture of like the stay
Speaker 2: at home mom from the Bush era. And uh and
Speaker 2: and it's it's funny is that she she's kind of
Speaker 2: she kind of looks for affirmation to Amy in a
Speaker 2: lot of ways, right, and so when the drama emerges
Speaker 2: from that perspective, it's just it's too it's too good
Speaker 2: not to take this position to kind of be the
Speaker 2: avenger in the abstensia of of this of her big
Speaker 2: sister or whatever.
Speaker 1: No, definitely, and I mean it's sort of this, this
Speaker 1: interesting dynamic, and the character of Margo the sister is
Speaker 1: sort of this. And forgive me for making broad generational generalizations,
Speaker 1: but Margo is sort of the millennial self insert character, right.
Speaker 1: She is, you know, she is above everything. She's very
Speaker 1: snirky and dry and witty.
Speaker 2: And I'm sorry, I just had this revelation. There is
Speaker 2: the most famous we didn't mention, the most famous monologue
Speaker 2: from this entire movie, Like this is playing non stop
Speaker 2: on my feed, the cool girl speech and in a
Speaker 2: voice over in this movie if you haven't seen it recently,
Speaker 2: Oh yes, there is this scene where I don't know,
Speaker 2: it's not even spoken in a particular place. It's just
Speaker 2: like they just stopped the movie and the voice of
Speaker 2: Amy gives this speech about how she doesn't like being
Speaker 2: perceived as the cool girl. This was the snippet of
Speaker 2: dialogue that was played was taken from this movie and
Speaker 2: played again and again and again and again on social media.
Speaker 2: From two thousand and thirty or fourteen when this movie
Speaker 2: came out. Up until COVID, this was the complaint. It
Speaker 2: was like, this is a core feminist complain about this movie.
Speaker 2: And when they this dialogue happened, I think Margo was
Speaker 2: at the center of like what this cool girl persona was,
Speaker 2: and it was it was this frustration that women were
Speaker 2: expressing with two thousands era womanhood. So in the two
Speaker 2: thousands and the Bush administration, in between the Clinton era
Speaker 2: and the beginnings of the growth wokening, there was this
Speaker 2: great sort of sexual like this great casualization of culture,
Speaker 2: like anything goes. And this is born basically from the
Speaker 2: Clinton administration and the fact that now the left had
Speaker 2: to pretend not to care about sexual impropriety because they
Speaker 2: told everyone they didn't when Clinton did it. And this
Speaker 2: is like this is the Hooter's era, as I like
Speaker 2: to call it, right, Like it's okay to bring your
Speaker 2: date to Hooters would be like an attitude that would
Speaker 2: come from this era that could never exist anywhere else, right,
Speaker 2: And this was the era of the cool girl, and
Speaker 2: girls were like there it was like it's feminist to
Speaker 2: be one of the guys, and to be one of
Speaker 2: the guys is to be cool. With all of these
Speaker 2: guy things that you're a man does, even though they
Speaker 2: piss off most other women, they don't piss off you
Speaker 2: because you're the cool girl. And women were pissed at this.
Speaker 2: It seems archaic in this day and age, because now
Speaker 2: there's a whole new set of complaints that have nothing
Speaker 2: to do with this. But back in the day, this
Speaker 2: idea that women were expected to be to be one
Speaker 2: of the guys, as Amy complains about in this movie,
Speaker 2: was a huge thing, and like it was one of
Speaker 2: the main cultural contributions of this movie. Well, and what.
Speaker 1: Happens here is sort of the it's sort of a
Speaker 1: deliberate inverse of the triumphant breakup scene you see in
Speaker 1: many other films, because she's driving out of town, right,
Speaker 1: she's pulled this off. She's you know, we're sort of
Speaker 1: seeing cut back and forth over this monologue the footage
Speaker 1: of her doing this right so for instance, you know,
Speaker 1: pulling blood out of her arm with a you know,
Speaker 1: an IV and scattering around the house cleaning it up
Speaker 1: in a deliberately shoddy way in order to make it
Speaker 1: look like it was a murder. But as we're seeing
Speaker 1: this footage and she's sort of triumphantly driving, you know,
Speaker 1: eating candy she got from a gas station. She's just
Speaker 1: laying out all of her complaints like, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: I hate that you made me do this in order
Speaker 1: to make you like me, right, this sort of complete
Speaker 1: absence of any responsibility, which.
Speaker 2: Is as zero fault for ruining my life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, why did you make me act like this so
Speaker 1: that you would like me anyway? But she goes through
Speaker 1: all of these things that she did to get, you know,
Speaker 1: to get Nick to fall in love with her, and
Speaker 1: how she hates him for it. But there's a term,
Speaker 1: and I might have this wrong. There's a podcast my
Speaker 1: my wife listens to called nymphed Alumni, which primarily does
Speaker 1: sort of social analysis through fashion and music, so finding
Speaker 1: a certain aesthetic or era and talking about it. This
Speaker 1: is all secondhand, but at least in the UK, there
Speaker 1: is this sort of thing called sort of like Chavette fashion,
Speaker 1: which is the UK version of exactly this, which is
Speaker 1: the female fashion of you know, wearing the sports jerseys,
Speaker 1: going down to the pub, sharing some pints, being basically
Speaker 1: one of the guys. And it happened across the pond
Speaker 1: at exactly the same time it was that same sort
Speaker 1: of movement of being, Oh, in order to be you know,
Speaker 1: kind of relaxed and you know, high status, I sort
Speaker 1: of have to ape stereotypical male behavior from that same era.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting to see the artifact because it's the opposite.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm sorry I interrupted you, but.
Speaker 1: No, I was just going to say, because it was
Speaker 1: there for a definite period and is well and truly dead.
Speaker 1: And it's almost like, you know, been stricken from the records.
Speaker 2: The idea that women would defer to male hobbies at
Speaker 2: all in a non dominating way is I mean that,
Speaker 2: I think that must have died during the gamercade era.
Speaker 2: It must have, because post me to post COVID, it's
Speaker 2: the entire idea that you defer to a man and
Speaker 2: anything would instantly label you as a pick me. And
Speaker 2: that's the I mean pick me. I mean, the word
Speaker 2: didn't really exist in this movie. But when she does
Speaker 2: her rants against cool girls, what she's ranting at is
Speaker 2: pick mees. That's what that's if you had replaced pick
Speaker 2: me with cool girl, and I think it's cool girl
Speaker 2: in that rant from this movie that accurately captures the
Speaker 2: accusation as it existed post twenty eighteen, and what it
Speaker 2: essentially means cool girl or pick me is somebody that
Speaker 2: that plays that is trying to court male approval or
Speaker 2: playing inside a male approval game, and which is odd
Speaker 2: because women have always played inside male approval games. But
Speaker 2: I think that you can really see this, and this
Speaker 2: is sort of the unspoken thing about the late twentieth
Speaker 2: century in the early twenty first century, is you can
Speaker 2: kind of see I mean, before this, before the cultural
Speaker 2: revolution of the sixties, the patriarchal rules were the patriarchs
Speaker 2: of our ancestors and of our religion, like they were imposed.
Speaker 2: They weren't the imposition of the individual men in the
Speaker 2: women's lives. But when it goes to like the nineties
Speaker 2: and the two thousands, the norms of kind of sanity
Speaker 2: or of just getting along there are not extensions of
Speaker 2: some kind of external will that comes from tradition or
Speaker 2: patriarch or ancestors or from God. They're just the impositions
Speaker 2: of the individual boyfriend that you're with. And so like
Speaker 2: submitting to them, either as the new girl or as
Speaker 2: the pick me, it seems like a fundamentally humiliating act
Speaker 2: because you're simitting to the tyranny of men. These rules
Speaker 2: are just arbitrary. They're just created by the individual men
Speaker 2: who super impose them upon our desires. And you know
Speaker 2: that's that well, and.
Speaker 1: That's what's so deeply ironic about that moment. She is
Speaker 1: lambasting right, this her husband, who she hates, who she's
Speaker 1: grown to hate, right for making her into this. And
Speaker 1: yet at every other moment in the movie, she is
Speaker 1: playing a character to manipulate a male audience. She is
Speaker 1: playing either in absentia, right, the murdered pregnant wife, or
Speaker 1: you know, when she's returned, she is playing the you know,
Speaker 1: the abducted woman. The irony, of course of that scene
Speaker 1: is she's still doing it. Yea, the behavior has never changed,
Speaker 1: it's just her relation to the man.
Speaker 2: So this is the eternal The eternal irony of the
Speaker 2: female sochia path is that they're eternally raging against the
Speaker 2: male gaze, but they only really exist inside of it. So,
Speaker 2: you know, take any So, we've been playing out the
Speaker 2: gone girl pattern in repetition for the last decade since
Speaker 2: this movie came out. You now, female manufactures some victimhood
Speaker 2: narrative with her at the center. Know, whether it's Rebecca
Speaker 2: Watson and remember Elevator Gate, right, or Zoe Quinn or
Speaker 2: Anita Sarkisian or any of the me too stuff, right,
Speaker 2: any any of that stuff or the fallout from the
Speaker 2: Kathleen Kennedy Star Wars movies, right, or any of the
Speaker 2: any of the stuff that they complain about on any
Speaker 2: of these NERD channels or whatever. Right. The formula is,
Speaker 2: you know, female becomes victim. Oh my god, help me.
Speaker 2: I'm just trying to do x Y or Z gets
Speaker 2: super clout as the victim, right, And the story is,
Speaker 2: I'm just trying to live my life. I'm just trying
Speaker 2: to be an actor. I'm just trying to create video games.
Speaker 2: I'm just trying to, you know, be a writer. And then,
Speaker 2: you know, you, the scandal happens. This woman gets a
Speaker 2: lot of sympathy, She becomes a celebrity. Ashley saying, Claire
Speaker 2: and Laurence Outhern are like this too. Actually we should
Speaker 2: talk about Laurence Outhern. This is the perfect Gone Girl character. Uh,
Speaker 2: but then the after but but then after she MICHAELA.
Speaker 3: Peterson maybe a solid second, but sure.
Speaker 2: But all these things, like after the controversy dies out
Speaker 2: and everyone agrees that she is the victim, and she
Speaker 2: gets the expos in the New York Times or wherever
Speaker 2: Laurence Suthern did her thing. I can't keep track of
Speaker 2: which prestige publication covered which egirl victim, but you know,
Speaker 2: they do the circuit. Right after that dies down, you're like, Okay,
Speaker 2: so now that you've been vindicated, now you're going to
Speaker 2: go back to writing about video games or writing about politics,
Speaker 2: or doing like the initial thing that you said you
Speaker 2: want to do. And they don't, like, they just kind
Speaker 2: of stop. They just kind of like they just it's
Speaker 2: like they don't have any After the outrighte of being
Speaker 2: victimized dies down, it's almost meaningless to go back to
Speaker 2: their initial thing that they wanted to do. Rebecca Watson's
Speaker 2: initial thing was supposed to be promoting atheism. After Elevator Gate,
Speaker 2: she just went on to the women are Victims circuits.
Speaker 2: That's all she commented on. And the same thing with
Speaker 2: all of these things. The female sociopath has a problem,
Speaker 2: and that is that the male attention that she complains
Speaker 2: about getting is the only thing that she lives for,
Speaker 2: and so as soon as that fades away. They do
Speaker 2: not make abstract content on things of general interest, or
Speaker 2: on works of art, or on politics, were on the
Speaker 2: world that exists outside of the people's perception of them.
Speaker 2: They just kind of run out of energy and get
Speaker 2: offline or take a break and then try to re
Speaker 2: engage them. Like I said, Lauren's other and I know
Speaker 2: I'm not giving a chance to speak, but Laurence southerns
Speaker 2: is the ultimate gone girl type character. I've always hated
Speaker 2: this person. All to do is create controversial explosions and
Speaker 2: then kind of make them about herself, make a giant scandal,
Speaker 2: and then issue a confession, and then after the confession
Speaker 2: is done, she disappears until it's time for the next scandal.
Speaker 2: So in twenty twenty four, I mean, you know, she
Speaker 2: was she was a liberal, and then she was a
Speaker 2: white nationalist, and then she was a trad Catholic and
Speaker 2: then she she she said traditional marriage is dead. And
Speaker 2: now she's back here, you know, a month ago creating
Speaker 2: videos about how you know, Joel Webbon or what was
Speaker 2: it that guy Wilson Andrew Wilson are not sufficiently Christian?
Speaker 2: Out of nowhere? I mean it was did does she
Speaker 2: does this other make Christian content? Did she want to
Speaker 2: make Christian content? I mean, she toyed with that title
Speaker 2: back when she was doing the whole traditional marriage thing
Speaker 2: back in twenty nineteen. But it just this is just
Speaker 2: the newest explosion. This is the newest drama. And because
Speaker 2: the that these kind of people, they don't exist outside
Speaker 2: of drama. They don't exist as people who are interested
Speaker 2: in the world. They only are interested in the world
Speaker 2: through the mirror. Right, the world only exists when it
Speaker 2: goes into the mirror and comes back from it. That's
Speaker 2: there's that famous uh you know, the meme with the
Speaker 2: wojax and that why do women always get POV mixed up?
Speaker 2: Why do women always get like they said, po V,
Speaker 2: you're a kind of woman whose boyfriend is mean to them,
Speaker 2: and the POV has them in the frame. And that's
Speaker 2: because they see everything through the mirror. So from these
Speaker 2: women's point of view, Uh, they are literally an object
Speaker 2: in their own point of view, They're watching their lives
Speaker 2: through the mirror that is their phones, that is a
Speaker 2: literal mirror, that is whatever. And from that perspective, they
Speaker 2: only exist when the male case is put on them.
Speaker 1: Well, and that's the deep irony you mentioned that. You know,
Speaker 1: Amy has this sort of and We get this through
Speaker 1: a series of flashbacks of when Amy and Nick met.
Speaker 1: Right there, they're in you know, Manhattan together, they've fallen
Speaker 1: madly in love, and you know, we're sort of getting
Speaker 1: the kind of the meat cute, and we understand, of
Speaker 1: course that later this marriage will fall apart in kind
Speaker 1: of the present timeline, but we're seeing these snippets from
Speaker 1: their amazing whirlwind early relationship. And there's one that takes place,
Speaker 1: I think in a book signing or something like that.
Speaker 1: You know, these books are still being made even though
Speaker 1: she's a twenty five year old woman. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: she's complaining to Nick about like, oh, you know, there's
Speaker 1: this character in the book that's always better than me.
Speaker 1: It's not really me, but this like media creation that
Speaker 1: is more me than me. And the deep irony is
Speaker 1: at the end of this right when she is in
Speaker 1: the ascendant, she's doing the same thing. She's talking about,
Speaker 1: how I've created this this whole media persona. Now I'm
Speaker 1: on the daytime television circuit, I have books, we have
Speaker 1: all these things together, and it's the exact same thing, right,
Speaker 1: the thing that in a previous and stay ciation had
Speaker 1: victimized her, had ruined her, She's doing that exact same
Speaker 1: behavior pattern again, existing as sort of this reflection of
Speaker 1: a kind of hyper real persona if you see what
Speaker 1: I'm getting at their dating.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, And this is a problem for a lot
Speaker 2: of women. It is complicated. And this is sort of why,
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know if this is the right
Speaker 2: movie to explore this. Well, we're both describing as a
Speaker 2: property of sociopaths and a property of all women. And
Speaker 2: the problem obviously with Amy is that she obviously is
Speaker 2: a textbook sociopath. You no great example of this is
Speaker 2: her is her uncaringness. This is a property people say,
Speaker 2: this is an indication of sociopathy. They don't care very
Speaker 2: much about physical harm that happens to their actual body.
Speaker 2: They kind of just kind of shrug it off. They're
Speaker 2: much more focused on people's perception of them. And you
Speaker 2: see this multiple times with Amy, how she's very nonchalant
Speaker 2: about inflicting physical pain upon her person as long she
Speaker 2: can be perceived as being on the right side of things.
Speaker 1: Well, and yeah, when she is sort of covering up
Speaker 1: her murder of the very straight Neil Patrick Harris, he
Speaker 1: induces injuries to herself that would be consistent with a rape.
Speaker 3: I will lead it that.
Speaker 1: But again, it's deliberately very grotesque and unsettling because we're
Speaker 1: watching someone commit violence to themselves and she is. You
Speaker 1: get these sort of comparison shots of her doing these
Speaker 1: very drastic things that she's stony faced through all right
Speaker 1: now again to the point of servicing that narrative.
Speaker 2: But Carrie on Dave, uh yeah, And you know, I
Speaker 2: think that that shouldn't be confused with the more general
Speaker 2: problem that afflicts all women, which is flos men too.
Speaker 2: Women are more vulnerable to this mode, is that they
Speaker 2: have a very bad tendency of kind of being devoured
Speaker 2: by their own doppelganger that they see in the mirror.
Speaker 2: And you know, Amy is a person, but Amy as
Speaker 2: a person is secondary to Amy as shit exists in
Speaker 2: the minds of the people who read the books, or
Speaker 2: who watch her drama on cable television, or who are
Speaker 2: following her as the celebrity after the drama. And you
Speaker 2: just know that this can't be the end of it, right,
Speaker 2: This can't be the end of the And that's what's
Speaker 2: so dark about the movie, is okay? Sure, Now, the
Speaker 2: cable movie, the cable TV cameras are going to move away,
Speaker 2: and what's this, what's the next stime this person's going
Speaker 2: to pull off to make sure that she's America's favorite girl,
Speaker 2: and you know what's coming, and the probability that Nick
Speaker 2: is going to be on the right side of it
Speaker 2: seems to be almost none. And but all you can
Speaker 2: hopefully is social media. She's gonna get Instagram account and
Speaker 2: then you know, blow up there and then move on
Speaker 2: to something else when covid hits. If this is following
Speaker 2: the ord timeline, but this is sort of the problem
Speaker 2: we face with a lot of female vought in the
Speaker 2: online era. Is that not only and this is sort
Speaker 2: of the other nefarious element to it as well. This
Speaker 2: is the female group chat culture. Not only the women
Speaker 2: have a tendency to be devoured by their own doppel
Speaker 2: gangers in kind of became a couple, but like Amy themselves,
Speaker 2: if they're in a group chat, the women start orbiting
Speaker 2: around the sociopathic women or in the chat. I'm sure
Speaker 2: you've seen this in Facebook group chats where you know,
Speaker 2: one or two divorced women get onto a forum with
Speaker 2: you know, twenty happily married women and then the forum
Speaker 2: becomes let's complain about husbands work large and that is
Speaker 2: because these women are all they're worried about is how
Speaker 2: they're going to be managing their perception with the other women.
Speaker 2: Whereas the other happily married wives they have a physical
Speaker 2: life that they're leading out side of the group chat,
Speaker 2: and so they kind of lose to this sociopathy. And
Speaker 2: this is this is just a real danger on the
Speaker 2: social media age. I do not know how to affect
Speaker 2: the female group chat spiral. I'm other than the kind
Speaker 2: of limited and to limit the time and to should
Speaker 2: be cloud outside of the group chat. It's very very
Speaker 2: hard to control because it gets taken over by sociopathic
Speaker 2: bad actors, if not just taken over by the sociopathy
Speaker 2: and encourages in non sociopathic women. And yeah, that's the
Speaker 2: allure of the black mirror, I guess well.
Speaker 1: And I feel like that illustrates something we see in
Speaker 1: this film. That's that's an interesting dynamic, is that men
Speaker 1: view themselves as individuals and don't necessarily view there as
Speaker 1: being a male team per se their competitors one to another,
Speaker 1: whereas there is a sort of female fugue state where
Speaker 1: they view themselves as being part of one whole. And
Speaker 1: this is almost from a certain perspective. A character in
Speaker 1: the film, right, the kind of like feminine maps, like
Speaker 1: they're one of the kind of recurring background characters, is
Speaker 1: this kind of local newscaster.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: There's a daytime television host who's more majorly focused on
Speaker 1: but this woman is primarily just on in the background.
Speaker 1: You know, she's the local you know, the local news host.
Speaker 1: And over and over and over again we get this
Speaker 1: sort of like Fox News tableau where it's obviously kind
Speaker 1: of poking fun at the bottle blonde Fox News host, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: and she is going on these monologues just full of
Speaker 1: invective against the talking about like old timey too.
Speaker 2: It's like old times like Judge Judy laying down the law,
Speaker 2: yes exactly if she knew them, Like she's talking about
Speaker 2: them like you might have made what someone talking about
Speaker 2: someone that they knew in their community. And she has
Speaker 2: no information.
Speaker 1: Right, none at all, and is pulling everything into And
Speaker 1: this is funny because we've seen this exact same phrase
Speaker 1: adopted by both women in the gender slop discourse and
Speaker 1: also shall we say synthetic women, which is this idea
Speaker 1: of the war on women. You know that men as
Speaker 1: a class are out to get us as a class,
Speaker 1: and this is just another outcropping of you know, this
Speaker 1: long kind of you know, mountain range of domestic violence
Speaker 1: against the most vulnerable women. Like there's this monologue where
Speaker 1: she talks about exactly that. She says, you know, why
Speaker 1: why do men, you know, try and get us even
Speaker 1: when we're at our most vulnerable, when we're pregnant, you know,
Speaker 1: and they just can't bear to have a woman unaffected
Speaker 1: by violence. And you and I before we started rolling,
Speaker 1: we're kind of commiserating about our unfortunate interest in feminist
Speaker 1: essays on substacks. Oh yeah, yeah, I'll send to you
Speaker 1: one after this, Dave. That might be the most perfectly
Speaker 1: crafted feminist essay I've ever read, because it sort of
Speaker 1: hits everything. But it's it is again this interpretation of
Speaker 1: just kind of relations as existing between different political classes.
Speaker 1: And if you're talking about why this discourse, why this
Speaker 1: conversation breaks down, I think that's a big part of it.
Speaker 1: Because albeit this is slightly shifting, men are becoming a
Speaker 1: political class, which is not a good thing, But it
Speaker 1: is this reading of individual male action as being representative
Speaker 1: of men writ large and a specific but unrelated man
Speaker 1: in front of me. And so I think that's another
Speaker 1: interesting dynamic of this because over and over and over again,
Speaker 1: we see exactly that group chat dynamic before the technology
Speaker 1: of the group chat, you know. Again, you know, when
Speaker 1: he's at this sort of press, when he's at this event,
Speaker 1: you know, walking accord and looking for his any clue
Speaker 1: for his wife, we get these constant scenes of kind
Speaker 1: of twittering women, you know, looking down their noses at him,
Speaker 1: deliberately trying to like scan him for weaknesses. Obviously the television,
Speaker 1: you know, multiple scenes where there's a riot practically outside
Speaker 1: his house, over and over again. Yeah, and it is
Speaker 1: exactly that same kind of team sports group chat dynamic
Speaker 1: in a pre social media age.
Speaker 3: I guess.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, it is kind of funny. You know, we're
Speaker 2: talking about the phenomenon. You're you're you're a merry guy, right,
Speaker 2: so am I We have all heard about Ballerina Farms
Speaker 2: over the last three years. I've never seen that thing,
Speaker 2: and it's like out of know where. It's like I
Speaker 2: heard about Ballerina Farms in twenty twenty two. It's like, oh,
Speaker 2: here is a cool Instagram account that I found, And
Speaker 2: then it's like it's like they're having a relationship with
Speaker 2: this person and you don't know anything about it, and
Speaker 2: so they go, I'm really liking it to kind of
Speaker 2: like not liking it to then everyone agreeing that now
Speaker 2: balleria Farms is what we hate. So then in twenty
Speaker 2: and bey four, it's like, Ballerina Farms is an attack
Speaker 2: on all women and we need to get them. And
Speaker 2: you're just thinking, like, who, what the hell is a
Speaker 2: Ballerina Farm. I don't know this thing.
Speaker 3: I think she's wormon. I guess I don't know.
Speaker 2: I heard something about jet Blue. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I think this is hilarious. David, you and I have
Speaker 3: never talked about this. We've had exactly the same experience.
Speaker 2: So many husbands about the same experience. It's just like
Speaker 2: they're talking about Ballerina Farms in a good way. You
Speaker 2: do nothing and then like it just it just like
Speaker 2: it's like the moon moves into a different position in
Speaker 2: the sky and all of a sudden, it's anti Ballerina farms, right,
Speaker 2: and this is and now there's a new movie out
Speaker 2: it's called like Yesteryear. There's this it's like a suddenly
Speaker 2: a New York Times bestseller. And all it is is
Speaker 2: like revenge from against Ballerina Farms, like like a track
Speaker 2: is influence her get sent back in time to the
Speaker 2: nineteenth century souse. She can be abused by men as
Speaker 2: revenge for her being an Instagram traad influencer. And I
Speaker 2: wrote this. There's a scathing review of this on First
Speaker 2: Thing's website by Julia Yost. The author can't even figure
Speaker 2: out what denomination of Christianity this character is, like she's Mormon,
Speaker 2: traditional Catholic, fundamentalist Bible Christian. Well that's the.
Speaker 3: Point, right.
Speaker 1: The person writing that doesn't care. It's completely indetermined. They
Speaker 1: probably don't even know. It's just those people are icky
Speaker 1: and gross, make them go away.
Speaker 2: It's it's it's all Mormons and Processts and Orthodox are
Speaker 2: all in this, this group of women who are people
Speaker 2: who are posting on Instagram that are making me feel
Speaker 2: bad right now, and uh, and they need to go
Speaker 2: back and be punished and then admit that we are right.
Speaker 1: And you know, there's another book I can't remember who
Speaker 1: wrote it that has essentially the exact same premise to it,
Speaker 1: but it's Roman. And I think this woman was like
Speaker 1: a high powered girl Boss. This is from like the nineties.
Speaker 1: The only reason I know this is the good Old
Speaker 1: Boys have been doing a long form review of HBO Rome,
Speaker 1: which is by far the best podcasting on the internet.
Speaker 1: It's incredibly entertaining. Yeah, yeah, And so it is basically
Speaker 1: four hours of content talking about a one hour episode
Speaker 1: of television. And when I say talking about that episode
Speaker 1: of television, it's in there somewhere. I haven't seen the show,
Speaker 1: and I haven't really got anything. No, which makes it
Speaker 1: even more entertaining.
Speaker 2: That point is I tried to rewatch it. It didn't.
Speaker 2: It blew me away when it first came out, But
Speaker 2: then I tried to rewatch it. I was kind of
Speaker 2: unimpressed about it. Like I was like, oh, well, you know,
Speaker 2: they're just yeah, they're gone through the period that like
Speaker 2: everyone talks about, like Blutarch since then, Right, it's like
Speaker 2: the most commoned you know, thirty years of Roman history ever, right,
Speaker 2: and so you since when I first saw it, in
Speaker 2: know any of the characters. So I was just like
Speaker 2: getting it for the first time. And now I've read
Speaker 2: all these other books about it. Now it's kind of
Speaker 2: like more focused on the actors and there was more
Speaker 2: a story about HBO than it was about Rome. But
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, I'm digressing.
Speaker 1: Go ahead, Dave, this is a digression on a digression.
Speaker 1: I feel like neither of us has the moral high
Speaker 1: ground here.
Speaker 2: As for your consistency, this is about a woman being
Speaker 2: sent back in time.
Speaker 1: Yes, But point is it is the same story, exactly
Speaker 1: the same story, just written thirty years earlier, in the
Speaker 1: mid nineties, attacking again the kind of traditional woman like, oh,
Speaker 1: you think you want it like this, Well, why don't
Speaker 1: you try going back to you know, first century Rome.
Speaker 3: Or there's another book.
Speaker 1: And one of my other unfortunate obsessions is prestige American
Speaker 1: Christian institutions, you know, the like David French style, like
Speaker 1: good Conservatives. There's a book that was very popular in
Speaker 1: that sphere. I cannot remember what it was called, but
Speaker 1: it is very deliberately poking fun at the kind of
Speaker 1: non specific amalgamation of Mormon's Orthodox Bible prods and hardcore
Speaker 1: traditional Catholics. And it's this, you know, kind of NPR
Speaker 1: woman who decides, you know what, all these people talking
Speaker 1: about how we have to take scripture seriously, Well, I'm
Speaker 1: going to live according to levitical law for a whole
Speaker 1: year and write about is it this ridiculous? Clearly these
Speaker 1: people who say they take the Bible seriously, they don't
Speaker 1: actually take it seriously because look, they have insert modern convenience.
Speaker 1: And the reason I bring that up is because it's
Speaker 1: the exact same sort of revenge against nobody mechanism. You know,
Speaker 1: this kind of abstract idea of traditional femininity that I
Speaker 1: have never encountered enough to say anything specific about it.
Speaker 1: So it's sort of this like amount of like Pope
Speaker 1: John Paul, And it's like, I.
Speaker 2: Mean, the the trad label is weird because it stands
Speaker 2: for like actual Amish people or people in religiously fundamental communities,
Speaker 2: Bob the people who are Bob Jones, b DSM lifestyle fetishists,
Speaker 2: and then like fourth, like people who are just being
Speaker 2: normal by the standards of any time in hum Minister
Speaker 2: before nineteen seventy two, Like all of those people are
Speaker 2: trad and like it's so it's like a meaning Like
Speaker 2: it's like, so you're grouped in with like Amish people
Speaker 2: and like BDSM fetishists that are like you know, live
Speaker 2: action role playing their little shtick, and you know, and
Speaker 2: then then you have these other people who are like
Speaker 2: super angry at this. They've decided that this is the
Speaker 2: thing that they're gonna hate this week, and uh, it's
Speaker 2: it's it's kind of like weird to watch it go.
Speaker 1: I guess, yeah, well, and again it's it feels very
Speaker 1: much like and not to go to tinful hat, but
Speaker 1: it feels very much like narrative control that if we
Speaker 1: can create the spell around the word trad and for
Speaker 1: a certain segment of the population, particularly I would say
Speaker 1: predominantly British, although also American female liberals in the fifty
Speaker 1: plus crowd, this stuff is like catnet. They're genuinely worried
Speaker 1: about the rise of the trad wife, which again to
Speaker 1: your point, describes so many different things that it's almost
Speaker 1: an incoherent definition, but basically has become to mean any
Speaker 1: woman that is not that is not existing as a
Speaker 1: sort of woke version of lean in feminism. Is this
Speaker 1: sort of great hate figure.
Speaker 3: Like I'm sure you saw.
Speaker 1: It was all over maybe a month or two ago,
Speaker 1: the demographic information about basically women's response to the idea
Speaker 1: that women should always obey their husbands.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It was a question asked to a large segment of
Speaker 1: the population. The juicy headline is that for Gen Z women,
Speaker 1: they think that women should always obey their husband's roughly
Speaker 1: three x the rate that millennials and baby boomers do. So,
Speaker 1: of course we're talking about the difference between six percent
Speaker 1: and eighteen percent, which is far from a majority. But
Speaker 1: you can imagine exactly what op eds were written into
Speaker 1: the Guardian freaking out about this. And of course the
Speaker 1: whole thing is laid at the feet of both men.
Speaker 1: Is a class and also that exact same pick me,
Speaker 1: cool girl dynamic that you're talking about, that is the reason, right,
Speaker 1: It is men's fault for wanting this in such a
Speaker 1: way that women will oblige.
Speaker 2: And of course, I mean this is the thing behind
Speaker 2: the handmaiden's tail, And I mean it's fine all these things.
Speaker 2: These people aren't worried about being put in burkas. They're
Speaker 2: worried about being mobs. They're worried then someone's gonna show
Speaker 2: up and they're going to be fifty and the women
Speaker 2: who have children or families are going to be a
Speaker 2: lot more interesting. And that's fine, right as long as
Speaker 2: the feminists, as long as so the was threatening about
Speaker 2: the trad wife is not that she has kids. A
Speaker 2: lot of these women don't even want kids, or they
Speaker 2: have sigh out themselves something. They don't want kids. They're
Speaker 2: not like feeling like the andy. Probably some of them
Speaker 2: is like feeling the emptiness of you know, the cradle
Speaker 2: or whatever. But that's not really it. If these women
Speaker 2: had children and they were died in the wold feminists,
Speaker 2: then that would be a different story. And because then
Speaker 2: like they're they you know Janice here, who sacrificed her
Speaker 2: life to advance feminism. She's kind of like part of
Speaker 2: our team, right, we've both one together, right, What they
Speaker 2: really worry about is this woman who's obviously living a
Speaker 2: better life, going yeah, I did this, and you know,
Speaker 2: screw feminism. This is due to the political enemies of feminism.
Speaker 2: And you know, this is another result that I just
Speaker 2: wrote this article by Julia Goos. That's why I'm citing
Speaker 2: it so much, that the endemic fear behind all of
Speaker 2: these things is the rise of traditionalism. It's like, this
Speaker 2: is a statistically insignificant thing. I need to emphasize this.
Speaker 2: There's this stupid controversy that is getting on my nerves
Speaker 2: as a statistician, Like the rise of traditional Christianity among
Speaker 2: the zoomers. Yes, there is an effect where you can
Speaker 2: see a certain cohort rise, and this represents it's unusual
Speaker 2: because of the kind of people who are coming back
Speaker 2: to church, but it is not significant in terms of
Speaker 2: overall numbers. And every time we claim that, we end
Speaker 2: up making ourselves kind of look stupid, like the overall
Speaker 2: trying to still downward. But something weird is going on
Speaker 2: in the inflection point. And so but why why are
Speaker 2: all of these feminist women going absolutely nuts and going
Speaker 2: crazy over this really rather small group of women who
Speaker 2: are rejecting you know, feminis And like I said, like
Speaker 2: you said before, it's like three percent to eighteen percent.
Speaker 2: I mean, sure, that's a pretty large statistical rise, but
Speaker 2: it's not overwhelming that massive increases in feminism over the
Speaker 2: same period of time. So no one's gonna put them
Speaker 2: in a handmaid's tail costume. The reason why they're worried
Speaker 2: about it is they don't want to have people next
Speaker 2: to them living a better life and then turning around
Speaker 2: and going, well, why didn't you do that? And you're
Speaker 2: not on my team, We're on a separate What you
Speaker 2: say about what I should be doing as a woman
Speaker 2: has no what a feminist have to if they say
Speaker 2: that I didn't do right by feminism, that has no
Speaker 2: impact on my life. I'm glad I didn't do right
Speaker 2: by feminism. I hate to keep on going on about this. Jay, Well, uh,
Speaker 2: this is a dynamic that is really impossible not to notice.
Speaker 2: At least if you lived in a blue area, it
Speaker 2: might have played out the same in red areas. You're
Speaker 2: the expert on this, but.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, as someone who has lived in a
Speaker 1: blue area, as someone who was decidedly not living according
Speaker 1: to blue state values visibly so, and had progressive friends,
Speaker 1: I know exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker 2: This is a boomer phenomenon, though, the boomer women who
Speaker 2: had families and had kids. When they sat down with
Speaker 2: the career women who was apologizing to who it was like, oh,
Speaker 2: you know, you're so accomplished in your career, as like
Speaker 2: a gender studies professor, you know, I really should have
Speaker 2: I wish I could have gone further. And Mike, the
Speaker 2: moral ordering of who had the better life was more
Speaker 2: on the career woman had the better life than the
Speaker 2: stay at home mom. The stay at home moms were
Speaker 2: apologizing to the career women. I guess I hypothetically the
Speaker 2: woman who won out was the one who was able
Speaker 2: to do both at the same time. But even then,
Speaker 2: even then, the woman who did both at the same
Speaker 2: time felt like she should have gone further in her career,
Speaker 2: that her children were kind of headiment upon what she
Speaker 2: owed to the grand struggle that was feminism. That dynamic
Speaker 2: that played out among the boomers is not going to
Speaker 2: play out among them. Well, it's question about how we'll
Speaker 2: play out among the millennials. But I guarantee you, unless
Speaker 2: there's some apocalyptic event, that synonymic will not play out
Speaker 2: among the zoomers. Uh, we're going to have Yeah, they're
Speaker 2: not gonna look up at the feminists and go, oh,
Speaker 2: thank you for you know, thank you for making a
Speaker 2: way for women in the field of I don't know,
Speaker 2: writing shitty Star Wars movies or whatever. Right, it's just
Speaker 2: not going to happen.
Speaker 1: Well, and to just truly explode this conversation and add
Speaker 1: in one of the other kind of like eternal burning
Speaker 1: dumpster fires of the internet to bring in the kind
Speaker 1: of generational aspect of it. There's also a dynamic I've
Speaker 1: seen many many times with my friends and peers, which
Speaker 1: is that same liberal boomer hefe who on paper lived
Speaker 1: a very traditional life. Yes, they at home, or they had,
Speaker 1: you know, a nominal job, you know, while the kids
Speaker 1: were in school or whatever, turning to those younger than
Speaker 1: them and saying, no, you should have you should be
Speaker 1: that female girl boss. You're not allowed to do what
Speaker 1: I did. And that creates a lot of weird friction
Speaker 1: because it's that you are betraying women as a class
Speaker 1: for doing what I did, even though you were making
Speaker 1: much more significant sacrifices to accomplish that goal than I did.
Speaker 2: They wouldn't have put it exactly that way, Like I'm
Speaker 2: trying to figure out exactly how this was the Dyenemicer
Speaker 2: describing as a spot on the women who made sacrifices
Speaker 2: for their family, presented it as if those sacrifices were
Speaker 2: like they had gotten the worst end of it, Like
Speaker 2: if they had not had children and they had become
Speaker 2: marginally more professionally successful, that would have been better for
Speaker 2: society at large. And the idea of a lot of
Speaker 2: these women who were stay at home moms was don't
Speaker 2: follow in my footsteps, go and have your girls. Don't
Speaker 2: follow my footsteps, go and live the feminist dream that
Speaker 2: I was not able to obtain. And this is a
Speaker 2: really bizarre thing. They did not turn on the feminists
Speaker 2: and go, well, I have a way better life than you.
Speaker 2: I have a bay better life than you as a mother.
Speaker 2: That dynamic never took place. It was always looking the
Speaker 2: opposite way. For some reason, the childless career women and
Speaker 2: the boomer generation were able to judge the women who
Speaker 2: had families. I don't think that dynamic is going to
Speaker 2: play out, at least for the younger millennials on down.
Speaker 2: And that is what people That's why people are afraid
Speaker 2: of trad wives like this very that's why they're terrified
Speaker 2: of this incredibly small percentage of women who are opting
Speaker 2: out of the feminist moral narrative, worried about catching the
Speaker 2: new moral narrative on the way back.
Speaker 1: Well, and Dave, what I think we're also witnessing is
Speaker 1: having children, and having more children is becoming a rarer
Speaker 1: and more outside trait. So, for instance, if you look
Speaker 1: at even just on the broad liberal conservative breakdown, conservative
Speaker 1: birth rates are roughly double progressive ones, and so there
Speaker 1: are by extension, and I'm sure you've seen this among
Speaker 1: your peer group, it is much more common to be childless,
Speaker 1: relatively speaking, and it is becoming more of a it's becoming,
Speaker 1: to be honest, more of a choice, and more of
Speaker 1: a marker of being outside of the hive in a
Speaker 1: certain way. And maybe I noticed this just because you know,
Speaker 1: I say this as someone who is married young in
Speaker 1: Generation Z and so has that experience of being very
Speaker 1: much on the outside, like going to my last year
Speaker 1: of college and sort of realizing I was very much
Speaker 1: on the outside by that life. Yeah, but like I
Speaker 1: think that there is also that dynamic where as fewer
Speaker 1: people point is it is becoming harder and harder to
Speaker 1: be a normal, mainline liberal and have children or have
Speaker 1: that be a part of your life, and so you're
Speaker 1: sort of selecting, You're sort of selecting for a more
Speaker 1: outside group. I'm not sure if I'm expressing that correctly,
Speaker 1: But what was previously normal where you could kind of
Speaker 1: straddle the line of both being a sort of mass
Speaker 1: market NPR liberal and also living as a housewife is
Speaker 1: becoming more and more difficult. That is becoming an active
Speaker 1: choice you have to make. You were making sacrifices in
Speaker 1: order to do that, and generally, it seems as if
Speaker 1: if you were opting into that, you were also opting
Speaker 1: out of, either deliberately or by extension, the kind of
Speaker 1: social respect ability of playing to corporate feminism. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure if I've expressed this exactly why I want to.
Speaker 2: I get what you're saying. It's I guess it's interesting
Speaker 2: to see when this actually falls off. It is very
Speaker 2: clear that women don't like getting into internal battles against
Speaker 2: other women that would otherwise be useful in their social groups.
Speaker 2: And in many ways, the gender war between men and
Speaker 2: women makes feminism more powerful. They need it more than
Speaker 2: we do. They need this battle between the sexes to
Speaker 2: go on way more than we do. If the battle
Speaker 2: be when the sexes were to obliterate itself, and you know,
Speaker 2: the case for families in this day and age would
Speaker 2: be just unanswerable in a lot of regards. And the
Speaker 2: accusation of pick me will always hurt women like women
Speaker 2: hate be ordinary, non sociopathic, well moraled women and never
Speaker 2: want to be pigmies or cool girls or whatever we're
Speaker 2: deciding on now. They do not want to be people
Speaker 2: who betray their friends for the arbitrary, tyrannical approval of men.
Speaker 2: It's different if it's for like an eternal patriarchal, traditional
Speaker 2: divine principle. You know, that's why grounding this interpersonal relationships
Speaker 2: does not work. But the only reason why that dynamic
Speaker 2: would ever come up is because of the gender war,
Speaker 2: which is why you know, this is why I think
Speaker 2: gender slop is it's like eternal. It's eternally recursive, and
Speaker 2: in many ways, even though I kind of play into
Speaker 2: it by writing articles about it hopefully helpful ones, the
Speaker 2: dialectic itself or the discourse itself, drives the more perverse
Speaker 2: elements in it more than if the discourse were to
Speaker 2: somehow be resolved well.
Speaker 1: And I think that that is an interesting kind of
Speaker 1: modern as in kind of post French Revolution dynamic, is
Speaker 1: that the forces of entropy, right, progress, whatever you want
Speaker 1: to say, require social destruction to spin their political engine.
Speaker 1: You know, they require those atoms being pulled apart to
Speaker 1: release energy, and any time where that isn't happening, they are,
Speaker 1: by extension losing. So they sort of need the eternal,
Speaker 1: like the eternal conflict in that way. And to like
Speaker 1: this kind of point about gender discourse, it's like it
Speaker 1: sort of is like this eternal like chemical reaction, just
Speaker 1: constantly spinning in order to justify that whole system of
Speaker 1: being right, it requires that constant media reinforcement in order
Speaker 1: to be real and alive and kind of I guess votive. Votive,
Speaker 1: that's not the term I want.
Speaker 2: Whatever they need, they need. They need a cycle of
Speaker 2: mail approval and mail disapproval for the thing to have
Speaker 2: vitality in it, and and uh and it has to
Speaker 2: happen in a very specific way. And the second of
Speaker 2: that is removed, the energy is kind of lost. And
Speaker 2: these systems kind of drift, which I mean, I guess
Speaker 2: is kind of a good thing. It means that it
Speaker 2: naturally has a burnout point. It naturally has a point
Speaker 2: where if this man hating thing gets so bad that
Speaker 2: these women literally sequester themselves into like you know, feminist
Speaker 2: nunneries and they invented.
Speaker 3: Monasteries pretty first states.
Speaker 2: That was harrowing, right, Like the New State's been an
Speaker 2: article about the men, the women who just hate men.
Speaker 2: If that ever happens, it will be easily shattered because
Speaker 2: the communities they build are just gonna they're going to burst.
Speaker 2: The instant that they're going to go to a very
Speaker 2: very low energy state, and then they're going to kind
Speaker 2: of witness the high energy state that is pure masculine spaces,
Speaker 2: and they're gonna start orbiting around that, and that will
Speaker 2: kind of be a reset of the cycle. What is
Speaker 2: certainly not going to happen is society is not gonna
Speaker 2: This is another thing too. You know, there's not gonna
Speaker 2: be some kind of collective moment of realization where we
Speaker 2: start holding women accountable. That's not gonna that's not gonna happen. Ever,
Speaker 2: it will never, ever, ever happen. We will write out
Speaker 2: this portion of history. I mean, this podcast will be
Speaker 2: here forever in the ether. But in the event that
Speaker 2: we ever solve the problem of many women, the people
Speaker 2: ten or twenty years down the line going back and
Speaker 2: watching in this and archive will not be able to
Speaker 2: tap into the modes that we're talking about, because that
Speaker 2: will all be covered up.
Speaker 3: Right, Why did we make them do that?
Speaker 2: Exactly?
Speaker 3: You know, why did we make them do that? Why
Speaker 3: did you make me be the cool girl?
Speaker 2: No? No, no, no, but see that's not the thing, right,
Speaker 2: it can't be. It can't be. So let's say hypothetically
Speaker 2: we were like fulfilling the feminist desires and putting them
Speaker 2: all back in the handmaids end of forum, right this
Speaker 2: or it cannot be. We tried women's liberation, women went
Speaker 2: insane and turned themselves into functional sociopaths collectively and decided
Speaker 2: to hate all men, and the species was almost ended.
Speaker 2: And then we had to reassert control. That can't be
Speaker 2: the narrative because women are the villains that the narrative
Speaker 2: will be. You know, chaos out of nowhere, Like there
Speaker 2: is a period of chaos and destruction, and then you know,
Speaker 2: a revelation hit that suddenly, this is a more beautiful
Speaker 2: way to live. And then as we brought that more
Speaker 2: beautiful way to live, you know, heroic women stood up
Speaker 2: and decided to be beautiful and heroic and submit to
Speaker 2: this much more better way of doing things. The idea
Speaker 2: there is never going to be a period where agency
Speaker 2: is attributed in a negative way to a female object.
Speaker 2: I don't think that as humans, as men, we naturally
Speaker 2: resist that, as women definitely naturally resist. This is migtao
Speaker 2: desire to have a collective recognition.
Speaker 3: Over you know, like woman Urenberg.
Speaker 2: You know, yeah, exactly like women. That's what they really imagine.
Speaker 2: That's ever gonna happen. What's gonna happen is that people
Speaker 2: are going to like, people are gonna do this, They're
Speaker 2: going to try man hating for five years. The society
Speaker 2: is gonna become in society is already kind of falling apart,
Speaker 2: and people are just going to realize that this is horrible.
Speaker 2: It feels bad, and more than it feels bad or
Speaker 2: it's horrible, or that it makes society chaotic, it's boring too.
Speaker 2: It's boring, and almost anything is more life giving than
Speaker 2: than circling around this strain of how much you hate men.
Speaker 2: And then you know, people are going to decide to
Speaker 2: just think different, I mean, and then we're gonna all
Speaker 2: forget that has ever happened, because that's going to be
Speaker 2: part of the deal. And you know, luckily, luckily for us.
Speaker 2: You know, most women are not like Amy. They're not
Speaker 2: habitually inclined by their nature to do this kind of stuff,
Speaker 2: to create drama, to become victims. They're just there because
Speaker 2: they feel like they have to because everyone else is
Speaker 2: doing it. And so once that narrative is descentered, you know,
Speaker 2: sanity can resume. But but it's not going to happen
Speaker 2: by by collectively realizing that women are at faults. Women
Speaker 2: being at fault is not something that can it's not
Speaker 2: a proper odd to logical thing that can happen inside
Speaker 2: human almost apiens map of the moral map of the universe.
Speaker 1: For better and for worse, there's gonna be no moment where,
Speaker 1: you know, the un judge hands down a sentence, you know,
Speaker 1: five to ten years for being unable to pick a
Speaker 1: movie on Netflix.
Speaker 2: You know exactly, you are touch incapable of picking picking
Speaker 2: out the food that we're going to eat for the restaurant.
Speaker 2: You know, it's it's it's ever going to.
Speaker 3: Happen, right, fifteen years hard labor.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the fair play I remember. That's like like
Speaker 2: they're doing this thing now if you watch cartoons Hate Her,
Speaker 2: where they're like you you do a card game where
Speaker 2: you play a card game like who does the dishes?
Speaker 2: And then if you do the dishes, you take that card.
Speaker 2: It's like a trick taking game for fair play feminists.
Speaker 3: Uh, you know, it just sounds miserable. It's just miserable.
Speaker 2: But there will never be an equivalent to male thing
Speaker 2: for that, nor should therapy. You know. The the end
Speaker 2: of this dialectic is or the dialectic conftemen and women
Speaker 2: itself to be dissolved into something larger. And it is
Speaker 2: actually the lack of some larger mission that prevents us
Speaker 2: from defeating this dialectic by dissolving into an appeal to
Speaker 2: that larger thing. And as long as it's focused on
Speaker 2: man versus women collectively, then then no moral order can
Speaker 2: be imposed on the circumstances. It will always be appeals
Speaker 2: to pigmies or cool girls because that's what you said.
Speaker 2: You said like the alternative to women, like the collective
Speaker 2: woman brain deciding what is right and wrong is the
Speaker 2: collective man brain is something what is right or wrong.
Speaker 2: Women will never accept that book. That is male tyranny.
Speaker 2: What women want is they want the collective goodness that
Speaker 2: stands above man to make the rules right, either through
Speaker 2: an appeal to an eternal patriarchy of ancestors or to tradition,
Speaker 2: or through literal appeal to deity. Only operating under the
Speaker 2: command of those greater asterial things does the male opinion
Speaker 2: become actual authority and not just tyranny. And like women
Speaker 2: are complaining about a real thing when they're complaining about pigmies,
Speaker 2: they're complaining about a real thing when they complain about
Speaker 2: cool girls. And what they're complaining about is male tyranny.
Speaker 2: And what is tyranny. Tyranny is unaccountable authority. Tyranny is
Speaker 2: appealing only to the individual egotistical will to make decisions
Speaker 2: as an authority. And while the male authority is properly granted,
Speaker 2: male authority is granted to the male by appeal to
Speaker 2: a higher good. And and and while there is no
Speaker 2: appeal to the higher good, then all male authority has
Speaker 2: to be tyrannical. And the women who go along with
Speaker 2: milityranny are going to be picknies or cool girls. Or
Speaker 2: I'm sure that if you go back to three thousand
Speaker 2: BC when there was a religious crisis, women had their
Speaker 2: own word for women who submitted to arbitrary male authority.
Speaker 2: But no human being wants to submit to arbitrary authority,
Speaker 2: and no woman is going to submit to arbitrary male authority.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, no woman herself is going
Speaker 2: to be authority. So it's either divine authority or chaos,
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, or some appeal to Those are traditional mechanisms
Speaker 2: by which we can bootstrap male authority. But those are
Speaker 2: our options, guys. I hate to say it.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's it's a it's a bit it's a bit
Speaker 1: grim when you phrase it like that. But also, what
Speaker 1: is the other option? We just keep doing this forever
Speaker 1: and everyone's completely and totally miserable and at each other's throats.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, but Dave, don't yeah, don't don't bite female
Speaker 2: author don't bite female complaints. Just change the environment. Trust
Speaker 2: me for your marriage. Never frame it as a fight
Speaker 2: between men and women. Just change the environment. Change the frame,
Speaker 2: and an assert authority through the frame. Do not engage
Speaker 2: in the argument directly. I'll say that.
Speaker 3: Words of experience.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Well, Dave, I think this is this has been a
Speaker 1: really fun technical like by the broadest technical strokes. I
Speaker 1: think we reviewed Gone Girl.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we did from a lot of angles.
Speaker 1: Well, man, this has been a ton of fun. I
Speaker 1: know you mentioned that you recently wrote an article about
Speaker 1: gender discourse. I'll be sure to link that. But where
Speaker 1: can people find you?
Speaker 2: Man? Uh? They can so. I I used to be
Speaker 2: famous for my YouTube channel called the Ashupertist, which now
Speaker 2: mainly just hosts monologue live streams. There is a back
Speaker 2: law of videos my essay writing has moved from YouTube
Speaker 2: to substack and you can find that at Fiddlersgreen dot com.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I have two essays about gender discourse and
Speaker 2: the conclusion is you shouldn't do it spoiler alert. But
Speaker 2: I think they're interesting anyway, and you can always tell that.
Speaker 2: I'm in the process of working on other projects, one
Speaker 2: of which is a speech for a conference we might
Speaker 2: both be at soon. And yeah, find it on substack.
Speaker 2: So thanks for having me, Jane, definitely, this is a
Speaker 2: ton of fun and everyone at home, keep your head
Speaker 2: up good night.
Speaker 1: Then there problem