Episode 91 -- The Mailbag Episode, Part 1

Hello, I'm Adrienne Daub.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

Whether we like it or not, we're In Bed with the Right.

So, Adrian, today we're doing something a little bit different.

We've never done this before.

This is our very first inaugural In Bed with the Right mailbag episode.

It has come to this.

We're coming up on our 100th episode, which is like like crazy to me.

And I think one of the coolest things about this, and this is going to sound bizarre, but like it is still strange to me that people actually listen to our podcast, that like we have a community of listeners who are engaged and who often send us some really like thoughtful questions and commentary and give us cool ideas.

So one of the things we wanted to do for this episode was give it back to you guys, the listeners, the people who make this like what it is.

We get to answer some of your questions and get a little bit more of a feel for like who our listeners are and what's interesting to them and try to tailor this specifically to your requests.

Like a DJ at a bar mitzvah, just like playing everything everybody wants to hear.

Playing Living on a Prayer five times in a row.

So the way we did this was we asked our Patreon subscribers, and there are by now quite a few of you and thank you for that, to send in or comment with questions on our Patreon.

So if this is the first you're hearing of it, that might be because you're not on our Patreon, and this is something you could address.

Just saying.

If you can't financially, like totally no shame.

But honestly, you can probably subscribe, listen to a couple episodes, and then unsubscribe at very low cost.

So, you know, we're not mad if you do that.

We should say that as we read these, some listeners requested that we did not use their names.

So honestly, because we couldn't keep track of it, we're just gonna read these without attribution unless someone said they wanted to be identified.

I hope you guys don't mind that.

Some of you wrote some truly impressive questions that were also essays and we kind of have to edit a little bit.

And then finally, we should say that a bunch of you said, hey, you guys should do this topic.

And we were like, oh yeah, we should probably do this topic.

And then we're like, this is an episode.

We cannot do this in a mailbag episode.

You are correct.

We need to record this and we need two weeks of research and two hours to record it.

So that's not going to be in here.

It's not a sign that it was a bad question.

Was that a question that was so good that it basically we're like, oh shit, this is a two-parter generously.

A couple wrote in saying, you guys should do an episode on X, wherein X was something we have actually been meaning to do an episode on for a long time.

Like

great minds think alike.

Like you guys are

learning to see us so well that you can anticipate our own fixations, which is just lovely to be known.

Like, well, yes, I do need to talk for two and a half hours at Adrian about how much I dislike Camille Paglia.

And I will very soon.

I promise it's coming.

Yeah.

We should do one on right-wing women.

I was like, yeah, you know, we really should.

That's been kicking around for a long time.

I did an event for the reissue of Andrea Dworkin's Right-Wing Women a few months ago because I wrote a foreword for the new reissue.

And we've just been like, oh yeah, we need to make a podcast.

I feel like they are our little super ego sometimes, the listener.

Sometimes they're our impish id, just going like me.

Follow your worst impulses, Moira and Adrienne.

But like some of them are just you guys requesting things that we know we need to dutifully return to.

And I promise it will happen.

Yeah.

So with that said.

Maybe let's start with some softballs.

Some of you clearly anticipated the inundation of really recondite

lore of right-wing masculinity questions that we're going to get.

And we're like, like, oh, I'm going to throw them asafty.

And thank you for that.

And so I thought maybe we'd do a little bit of warm-up.

The first one I thought we could look at was this one.

I would love to know how you discovered your passion for this area of study or line of work.

Is it something you've always done or have you moved into it?

This is a really big question because it's like, how did you

come

to the work that now shapes your worldview and life?

Yeah.

I mean, I think the honest question for me is just that like, I failed at

being

a woman and a girl, right?

Like, I did not have an outlandishly bad experience of the violence of misogyny compared to a lot of other women, but I have never been good at it.

I always felt womanhood or girlhood or like the scriptures of femininity.

It was like I missed that day at school or something.

Like, I just, I just, it was a code that I never understood.

And I felt like I was trying to retroactively understand the parameters of my own failure and dysfunction and difference, which I would now identify as like, you know, feminism or queerness, but at the time it felt like personal failure.

And these are a way into interest about the world for me has also been about like my own difference and experience.

I think that's just very common.

I was never very good at it and I wanted to understand

why.

And then I saw it hurting me and people I loved and I wanted to understand why.

So I think the honest answer is I just had a very intense personal investment in these questions.

You know, the more I understand gender, the more I realize how deeply everybody's personal investment is in it, whether you're studying it or not.

It's very deep into every aspect of all of our lives.

It's fascinating stuff.

It's interesting.

I think I come at it slightly differently, right?

Being a cis gay guy.

There was always the option of participating and playing along and being okay.

I'm fairly straight presenting.

I mean, people picked up on it, but like it was easy to tamp that down.

When I did my PhD, when I applied for jobs, I was out personally, but like my work was traditional enough that you sort of had to squint to sort of be like, oh, this is a gay person who's working from an explicitly LGBT perspective.

And right, my, my first book was on marriage discourses at the end of the 18th and 19th century in Germany.

Writing that in 2008, you didn't have to be a weatherman to be like, huh, I wonder if the wind is blowing from a particular direction.

That having been said, a lot of people asked me about my wife when I first showed up for job interviews, right?

So I'm like, oh, okay, so all the queer theory in my, in my dissertation, which was fairly attenuated, to be honest, didn't tip you off, I guess, right?

And then, you know, within the academy, I've been able to be in the room where decisions are made, I think, is generally my story.

And I think that has really shaped my outlook on these kinds of questions, that I have seen both.

I've been on the receiving end of, frankly, homophobic.

attacks.

I know I've been blackballed and discriminated against for being a gay man, but I've also seen it happen to others, right?

Because people didn't understand where I fell on their particular hierarchy, right?

Where I was like, oh shit, you're talking like we're not here because you don't know we're here, right?

What is called a concealable stigma.

Exactly.

Interesting aspect of one of the questions I hope we get a chance to dig into on this episode.

Yeah.

But so that has always shaped my interest in gender questions that I've seen more so than maybe people, as you say, who have always found themselves kind of at odds with the system and sort of not quite fitting in, like what it looks like when it functions as intended.

And I think there's a certain kind of rage that comes from being on the outside looking in, and there's a white hot fucking rage that comes from watching it work and no one saying boo and be like, this is disgusting.

And so I think my work has sort of gone more and more in that direction over time because of this.

You know, I try not to let my moral outrage shape my work too much, but it stands behind the questions I ask all the time.

It's all about what kind of life, what kind of person is not at the table, is not being included, is not worth narrating, does not count as a person ultimately.

And I think that's entirely shaped by the fact that, as you say, in this situation where I'm ambiguous, I can belong if I choose to, and I don't belong if I accentuate the wrong things.

Wait, Adrienne, can I tell you something?

Sure.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have had not one but two women, like cisgender millennial women, tell me, I love the podcast so much.

And I'm like, oh my God, thank you.

And then they go, Adrian has such a sexy voice.

I have a crush on him now.

Oh my God.

And in fact, one of them said, I think we have another Peter Shamshuri on our hands.

What?

I know.

That is a good idea.

So, like, if you're talking about like straight passing, oh my God.

You have qualities that are enabling this frictionless integration, should you choose to have it in the heterosexual society.

If we were born like, you know, 70 years earlier, you could have a preposterous wife and children by now.

He's like, he just goes out a lot.

He's like hanging with his buds all the time.

So much bowling.

And all the guy's like, sure, yeah, he was with us.

Does she seem kind of sad to you?

Well, she's not into that martini.

I mean, this is going before the paywall, but I don't give a shit.

Like, Peter Shamshari has a...

Very sexy voice.

I think he's been told this.

I think he did.

It's getting to his head a little bit.

Something to the effect of just everyone is falling in love with me and it's very difficult.

So so shout out to if books could kill and five four excel podcasts hosted by friend of the show peter and if you want to hear both of their voices at once you can go listen to our pamela paul episode which peter and michael were nice enough to join us for during the recording of which i definitely was more than once that voice though

i'm sorry you were saying

hottest voice in podcasting i really hope he doesn't listen to this we're never going to get him back on the show somebody's going to send it to him peter yeah big fans huge fans We do not mean to objectify your voice.

All right.

This is a nice question.

I like this question because I actually think this is a very cute story.

So the story of how you met and became podcasting partners.

Was there a meet-cute moment?

Did you know of each other before?

Did either of you have any first impressions slash preconceived ideas of the other that were proven right or wrong as you started to work together?

Anything that surprised you?

That is a great question.

Should I start?

Yes, you you start.

Because I think I became aware of you first.

What with certain lists of media men you may have launched or not launched in 2017.

So

I think I first reached out to you for an event we did at Stanford about the feminist power of rumor, which featured you and Yvette Dion.

And it was one of the first events I did when I got to Clayman because it was at the height of me too.

And I just was really interested in like how we think about information and how we discount information.

We, meaning, you know,

straight male dominated society kind of relegate certain information to hearsay, even though, right?

Like, I was interested in the kind of thing where like Harvey Weinstein could count as a revelation.

when everyone had been making jokes about it for the last 10, 20 years.

And you're like, well, so it's not revealing in the sense that like

no one knew.

It's revealing in the sense that no one said.

And that seems really interesting.

And so I thought you would make a perfect person to talk to about this.

And I remember first meeting you, you arrived at Stanford.

And I think there was a preconceived notion, which was like you were in the middle of like getting clobbered for this list.

And I was like, like, I didn't think like, oh my God, here comes the feminist firebrand.

But I was like, this is going to be someone who's like maybe a little bit liable to hold back.

Like, I thought you might turn us down and just say, look, this sounds super interesting, but like, I don't want to talk while I'm getting sued.

So what you're saying is you overestimated my intelligence.

You thought I was going to be a lot more circumspect and cautious and, you know, worldly, perhaps, than I wound up being, because I did come and we had a great time on that.

A great time.

And that's the thing.

You arrived the way you always arrived, like bubbly, excited, ready to tell stories, analyze, absolutely fearless.

And again, like, I completely thought, you know, people handle these kinds of onslaughts in different ways.

For instance, we've both met Christine Blasey Ford, and that's someone who I feel like you can tell she's carrying certain scars from what happened to her with the Kavanaugh hearings.

Like she, she is careful.

Like there's a moment when like you can tell that naturally she wants to say one thing and she's like, all right, let's take a step back and not do this.

And I was just very, very impressed with just how, for the benefit of that audience, you didn't hold back.

And, you know, it had shaped your thinking, but it hadn't hemmed it in in any way.

And I thought that was really, really impressive.

I am incapable of having having a thought that I do not speak out loud.

Uh, and that is something that has indeed gotten me into trouble, and into podcasting.

I was really grateful to be thought of for that.

I think the experience of the list, which again is like it's something that happened to me or something that I

made happen in 2017 that really did shape my life basically until I came and joined you at Stanford.

From 2017 until like early 2023, the list was

the only thing I really got to think about or do.

And it was a experience that really pushed me towards thinking about epistemological politics, right?

The

power that is implied in how we know what we know and who gets to be an authority and who gets to be credentialed and who gets to be understood as competent and honest.

And these are things that I hadn't had an opportunity to think about in a formal public setting before.

So I was really delighted to meet Adrian.

Adrian is also just like really delightful.

I don't know how much of his charm comes through on the audio, but he is, first of all, he's about twice my height.

Adrian is a string bean who is well over six feet tall.

And he's like, I'm excited,

he looks taller from down there.

From down here, everybody seems to be like 6'4, 6'5 ⁇ .

So I think of him as this underweight giant, and he's got this like curly red hair that sticks up from his head and these glasses that magnify his eyes.

And he is adorable.

And he's just really approachable.

He is a guy with an incredible amount of like accomplishment and learning and absolutely no pretentiousness or unwillingness to meet you where you are, which is very striking.

And I think sometimes uncommon for academics to be so generous and approachable.

So I found in this new guy who I just known, like you had been like a Twitter mutual.

Yeah.

And then you became my real friend.

And I did another event with the Clayman Center in 2019.

You guys brought me in to moderate a panel of abortion providers.

That's right.

Just when Dobbs was coming down the pike, it was about to get different and harder to be an abortion provider.

And you had a panel of them.

And I was really honored to be a part of that.

And it gave me another opportunity to come out to Stanford and meet the community at the Clayman Center, which is like really a think tank attached to Stanford that does, you know, feminist, gender, and sexuality work.

And I discovered that there were a lot of people there I really liked and that Adrian had built something in his time as a director there that I really admired.

And so like years later, like two years later or something, I get a text from Laura Goode, who is a Clayman affiliated scholar at Stanford.

And she's like, listen, this writer-in-residence gig at Clavin is going to be open and you should apply for it.

And then I did apply and I didn't hear back for like nine months.

And I was like, well,

I guess that didn't work out.

And I sort of like went on to, you know, live my life.

But then I get a text message from Adrian, or maybe it was an email or a DM.

I got some sort of message from you.

When I was at my job, I had a day job as a receptionist at a law firm, which I actually loved.

I'm a big fan of day jobs, which we can talk about perhaps on another podcast.

But I was there and I had to ask to step outside to call you.

And you were like, Do you want to move to California and do this?

And I think I was trying to act like I was actually considering saying no.

I was trying to be like, I should be in a better position to negotiate a higher salary.

And I was like, well, I have to think about it, Adrian.

And then I went and like hung up and then punched the air with like triumph.

I didn't know that.

So sometime during that post-offer acceptance,

preparing to move out there, I had spent a day working at the Brooklyn Public Library main branch, which is in Grand Army Plaza, right sort of near the mouth of Prospect Park.

Yeah.

And I was going to get a bus home, but you had like texted and was like, hey, do you have time to talk?

Because I have an idea I want to run by you.

And I decided I would just like walk while we were talking.

And on the phone with Adrian,

he starts describing this idea he has for a podcast.

He's like, maybe when you're out here, you've moved and everything, I kind of want to talk about like conservative ideas of sex and gender.

Like, I think you did reference Friends of the Pot, Know Your Enemy.

It was like, what if we did what they're doing, but really in deep about gender and sexuality, which is our field of study and expertise, to talk about how the right wing's ideas about gender are really starting to shape our world.

And this is...

Post Dobbs.

It's sort of like the middle of the beginning of this like anti-trans panic that we're in right now.

Me too backlash.

Me too backlash.

And all of this was sort of unfolding around us.

And it was something I had been thinking about a ton because I was working then as I am still working now on a book manuscript about anti-feminism and backlash in the 21st century.

And I found myself thinking about all these episodes I wanted to do.

basically before he finished his elevator pitch.

And Adrian and I wound up going back and forth talking about episodes we wanted to do and how we wanted to do the the podcast.

And I found that I had walked all the way from Grand Army Plaza to the northeast corner of Bedstey, where I lived at the time, which is like a several mile, like 90-minute to two-hour walk.

And it felt like I had just started talking.

And I feel like we've basically been talking ever since.

Yeah.

We just have not gotten off of the Zoom call since.

And then I was like, whoa, but what are we going to call this thing?

And I think In Bed with the Right was the first and only suggestion suggestion that you made and that anyone made.

Like, well, I guess that's it.

No one's going to tap that.

And the reason why it occurred to me had to do with the fact that I had started embarking on my book on cancer culture, my first book on cancer culture, because I rewrote it in English like two years later, like a psycho.

But in doing this, I sort of wanted to write about like, well, how does this kind of discourse about political correctness?

How does it transform, et cetera, et cetera?

Why is it coming back up now?

About half a year into the research, I'm like, wait, this is just me too backlash all the way down.

Like it's gender all the way down.

Like when they say it's so easy to cancel people, they mean my buddy who got accused credibly of rape in three cases, right?

And then it also became clear to me that the PC panic had been that, right?

The very first article.

in New York magazine that sort of first established the vocabulary of political correctness had as one of its pictures the infamous bathroom stall wall at Brown University, not pointing out that like maybe something's fucked up at colleges if women have to use toilet room stalls to warn each other about rapists.

No, isn't this cancellation to be identified in the men's room at the, I don't know, fucking anthropology department at Brown University?

He's like, yeah, that does seem really like the victimhood question we should take away from this fucking story.

It was the women's room in the library, Adrian.

How dare you?

Yeah.

So the rights of men not to have the things that they did written out at a bathroom stall outweighs like, hey, that's really messed up that women feel like they have to do this.

Right.

And so I was just like, well, the way we don't even perceive certain right-wing tropes as being about gender when they clearly are seemed to me really strong and really important.

Of course, in the meantime, I feel like the right-wing has done us the favor of just like, what is that famous tweet?

Like, you researched this story for one year and then they just tweet it out.

Like,

we're like, could there be gender behind this?

And they're like, it's all about gender.

Yeah, it's getting a little over the top.

Like when they call Donald Trump daddy, I'm like, this is like there's no sport in it, you know?

Yeah, why are we all over the plate?

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a scene in the movie Ghost World that I really like where Thora Birch, I think, is complaining about how all the guys in their town are lame.

And Scarlett Johansson, who's her scene partner, is like, well, not everyone.

And then these like...

dudes and like sort of who look like they just got out of a hacky sack match like walk by and they're like, hey dudes, want to do some reggae tonight?

And she just like points.

Gives me like a total boner.

He's like the biggest idiot of all time.

Guys off for some reggae tonight?

Okay, you're right.

And that's us.

We just point.

We're like, that's it.

Yeah, sometimes there's no more subtext.

It's all just text.

Yeah.

Which, on the one hand, makes our jobs kind of easy.

Yeah.

On the other hand, does make me despair.

Yeah.

Like several times a day.

Yeah, if our job is easy, times are rough, y'all.

All right.

So moving on, low low stakes question for Adrian.

What's your favorite part about being a dad?

Oh, man.

My favorite thing is, frankly, pretty trite, which is that I love watching another human being develop ideas and a personality and a worldview all their own.

One that I obviously have a hand in shaping.

but that from the very first exceeded what I was able to impart to her.

I was like, oh, you don't have to worry about Elsa.

And she's like, I worry about Elsa.

I'm like, God damn it.

You know,

and then I think also have her arrive at attitudes towards the world kind of independently that I also share.

And I'm like, oh, that's so lovely that we ended up on the same page, but I didn't tell you to do it.

I'm sure it's not going to always happen.

I live in secret fear that she'll be like

a Republican cheerleader in the future or something like that.

But so far, River's a cool person.

I don't hang out with River.

She's funny.

She's like a little sassy sometimes, which I like.

I'm like, she gets that from Hong.

She is like kind.

Her impulse is to be generous.

Yeah.

And yeah, she's curious too.

I remember I once came to meet you at the playground near where I live where you had brought her to play.

And you were like, yeah, we were on the way over here and she had a question about the planets that I couldn't answer.

And now I have to like go to the library and get a book about the planets to figure out this thing that my kid is curious about.

And I was like, oh yeah, that's, it's a way that she's challenging you guys as well.

Oh yeah.

She's the coolest.

She's got always the best outfits.

She always looks incredible.

Well, they're all hand-me-downs, but she does have great outfits.

But, oh, and then we have a serious question for a big question for Moira.

How do I become as cool as you?

This is, many have asked.

I have asked this question too.

That's very sweet.

I feel incompetent and socially out of place 100% of the time.

So I am gratified by this flattering question.

Thank you so much.

But we got to answer it.

I don't know, like maximize your neurosis.

Try and make it into a job if you can.

That does seem good.

Yeah.

That's just good advice.

Enjoy your symptom.

Yes.

Yeah.

That's the kind of stuff you don't ordinarily come to this podcast for, but to ordinary unhappiness.

And then we have a question here.

How has Project 1933 affected how you think, feel, act about the present moment?

I actually have an answer for this.

Nice.

Because since we started doing the Project 1933 series, my own,

maybe this is just like a narcissistic little enterprise.

It definitely is, but like my own journal entries have started to become more expressly political with an eye to being as historically useful as Viktor Kamper.

I'm like, well, I now know what future historians really are going to want to know about the era, which is like the affective experience of living living through the collapse of a democratic regime and the rise of an authoritarian one.

And so I have to make sure I get that down on paper in my little moleskin notebooks for them to know, which is, I think, reflecting a tremendous amount of optimism on my part that there will be historians in the future.

Yeah.

And I think it's the same for me, honestly.

Like, I feel like there was a moment when keeping a journal or keeping close tabs on the day-to-day events felt like the internet was replacing it.

And I can find all this stuff later.

It's fine.

But now with all the surfeit bullshit and just noise out there, it's hard to remember what even March 2020 felt like, what January of 2016 felt like.

And you're like, oh shit, I really should have written all that stuff down.

And I feel like people around me have really begun doing that work.

Like we are.

Getting better at remembering, getting better at recording for the future, because we're recording for a future where a bunch of weird shitty AI crap has like kind of crowded all that out and be like, point of order, that's not what happened at all.

I want to do an episode soon on the Sydney Sweeney kind of discourse.

But this is of course something that I've traced in the cancel culture panic too.

The fact that like the things that we're told are happening aren't even necessarily happening, right?

Like, oh, people online are saying it's like, well, like three people online are saying, right?

Like it's, it's good to record.

And frankly, as

people,

how much do I want to say here?

So full disclosure, I'm applying applying for U.S.

citizenship.

So, I'll be very careful in how I phrase this next part of the answer.

One of us, one of us, Ooga Booga, we accept her.

Sorry.

Well, we don't know whether we accept her.

We deport her, one of us.

But basically, as people seem to be coming to a position on what is happening in Gaza that resembles our own,

there is a lot of retconning of like the positions people took on both sides.

We're like, well, I would have joined the activists if they hadn't.

And it's like, well, if you look at it, all they did was wear a kefia

and paint their hands red.

And you lost your goddamn mind over it and seemed to suggest that tens of thousands of people did deserve to die over this.

I do think it's really important to keep an accounting of your own expression, of your own takes on things, and frankly, also to hold yourself to account if and when it's inevitable you will have been wrong about something.

And I do think the way in which our lack of memoriousness

and our LOL, nothing matters type politics come together, right, that there's no more accountability for anyone, basically.

It's deeply troubling to me.

And I think that some of that you have to practice on yourself and on your enemies, frankly.

You have to be like, here's what you said.

And this is something that I took away from 1933, which is that Thomas Mann very much kept receipts.

And when everyone was like, well, okay, it's been 15 years, let's move on.

He's like, I'm not going to.

Y'all are welcome to, but I'm just going to keep writing articles about what Fort Wrangler said.

And also to do what we're doing here, right?

Like we're very frequently now pointing out that things that the New York Times of the Atlantic profess to be shocked by the right wing is doing.

It's like, well, if you bother reading them, it's all been there, right?

There's a passage in Mann's diaries from August 1933 that we're going to be talking about in our next 1933 episode, but but I'll preview it here briefly, where Man is like, oh, I read Spengler's new book, Oswald Spengler, right, who we hadn't did an entire episode on.

He's gone fully Nazi.

People are surprised.

I'm not.

Right?

Like, you're just like,

no, like, that was always going to, that's, that felt like it's where it was going to go.

And if people are not surprised, it's worth delving into the lack of surprise.

It's the same as with me too.

Yeah.

If people were surprised by Harvey Weinstein, it is worth delving into the sources of your surprise.

And if people are surprised by former Me Too critics now coming out as pro-Trump pundits or thinkers, I think you should question why that did not seem like a natural pathway to you.

If Barry Weiss somehow seems like a surprising vehicle for a justification for Trump's assault on the universities, again, question the sources of your surprise.

Anyway.

We were right the whole time.

It's basically what you're saying we're taking.

We've been right the whole time.

This is the part that, yeah, like Nietzsche, like, why, why I make such good podcasts?

This is something you encounter a lot reading Freud, too.

He's like, they thought I was wrong for a minute, but it turns out I was right all along.

Yeah, it's like Nietzsche has, in his book, Iche Oomo, has this, the chapter headings are, why I'm so wise, why I'm so clever, and why I write such excellent books.

So we're just doing Nietzsche, you guys.

All right.

The next one is another 1933 episode question.

But sort of spinning off of that, and I thought it was a very, very smart one.

In the July 1933 episode, Adrian's discussion of how the Nazi salute was inspired by Wagner made me start thinking about how fascists and reactionaries may be influenced by fictional narratives.

The other example that immediately came to mind for me was the second Ku Klux Klan adapting white robes and hoods after the film Birth of a Nation, which depicted Klansmen in similar outfits.

Have right-wing reactionary and/or fascist movements always drawn inspiration from fiction?

And are there any works of fiction that you believe have significantly influenced present-day American conservatives?

That last one is huge, but like, let's do the maybe let's do the first part first.

Yeah, you know, I think this speaks to some controversies within literary studies that have been sort of brewing over the past decade or so.

This perception that readers or students or an imagined leftist other

is demanding a kind of moral purity from fiction that fiction is not equipped to give, right?

And there is a lot of truth to that critique.

I think, like Garth Greenwell wrote a pretty decent version of this argument more recently in his review of Miranda July's All Forge, right?

Like, there's one role of fiction that is to be not morally instructive, but like somewhat morally provocative.

And that is, I think, like very useful.

But it is also

a

vision of the role of fiction that perhaps gives some readers a bit too much credit, right?

And perhaps gives some writers a bit too much credit, right?

Like the truth of the matter is that regardless of what we think of the actual merits of the work of the novel, that a lot of people read Vladimir Navokov's Lolita, for example, as an endorsement of their own pedophilic fantasies, right?

And this is a dual reality of literature, sort of regardless of authorial intent.

A lot of literature is used as and in fact functions as

also a kind of propaganda for specific ideologies, right?

This is like attention, I think, in the role of fiction.

And I think our right-wing right now, you know, they're becoming like less and less traditionally literate, right?

They're not necessarily drawing from the classics all the time.

They're not necessarily drawing from like Ovid or from the Bible the way like a lot of mid-century conservatives did, but they are drawing from a lot from like genre fiction.

They're drawing a lot from video games.

Yeah.

And they're drawing a lot from, you know, a specific genre of like self-published white nationalist fiction, things like the Camp of the Saints or Which Way and Western Man, you know, these sort of racist fantasies.

And that's an interesting like shift in where the references are coming from.

But I do think that there's also, you know, the same potential latent in a lot of what we think of as like classical literary fiction.

Aaron Ross Powell, yeah, I think I have two answers to that.

So one is exactly, fascism requires mythology for the very simple reason that the kinds of unity and the kinds of fulfillment and the kinds of supposed victimizations that it thematizes aren't ultimately real.

A lot of the alliances that it proposes, right, between like capital and workers, for instance, are just fantastical.

So you got to have fiction to kind of undergird that.

And, you know, a lot of this is about mythology, but as any scholar of Nazism will tell you, they were not good students of mythology, right?

Their mythology was deeply creative, often admittedly so.

The idea of the Aryan was not supposed to like hold water in terms of human genetics.

It was meant to create an in-group and an out-group, right?

That was its function.

And it did that very well, right?

So I think the role of the classics and all this is a really interesting one.

On the one hand, I think it does create kind of an onboarding structure where sort of cultural conservatives can sort of make common cause with fascists.

And like...

They're like, oh, we have to go back to basics.

We have to go back to the classics.

One guy is thinking of Ovid, the other one's thinking of the Turner Diaries, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you're like, okay.

But yeah, it allows them to kind of speak the same language of return with a V.

The other thing I would point out, though, is that like, I don't know if the mid-century conservatives were that much better at the classics than our present day ones.

There's a line I'm very fond of in an article of mine that I haven't even published yet, where I sort of, I look at the data and I try to figure out, like, are the quote-unquote classics taught less in colleges today than they are?

than they were 20, 30 years ago.

There's some very good work by my Stanford colleague, Sarah Levine, who teaches in our School of Education, does education history.

That work suggests that, what does the classic changes, right?

New literature gets written all the time.

People update syllabi or canon exams or, you know, in New York State, the governor's exam,

and the Red Badge of Courage is out, and All Quiet on the Western Front is in, or, you know, the Scarlet Letter is out and Hemingway is in, or whatever, right?

Like these things evolve.

Now, what a lot of the return to the classics discourse is really doing is kind of trying to freeze that process and to say, like, there are just these transcendent classics, and what we have done is moved away from them.

And the line, again, that I'm kind of fond of is that I say, everything looks like abandonment to the classics to someone who's only read three books.

That's what it is.

And also, like, a lot of the things that we think of as like classics of American literature were in fact rehabilitated in much more recent ways.

Like, think of Moby Dick, right?

Like, nobody read Moby Dick until like the 1960s.

Yeah.

And then it became this great classic.

Yeah, and these things change.

In Germany, in the 19th century, Schiller was the much greater classic than Goethe.

And then that shifted in the 20th century when I was like, this guy's kind of embarrassing.

Like, this is not great.

And so, people shifted to Goethe, where you can, it's also about the practice of pedagogy.

Goethe texts allow you a lot more leeway in terms of thinking about literary devices, about irony, etc., etc., about

different levels of signification.

Depending on what you want to teach kids, you pick a different text, right?

But no, it's like, oh, they've abandoned this, right?

There's an infamous claim by some right-wing academic about like, this is from the 1980s, how the work of Alice Walker is being taught in more classrooms than the work of William Shakespeare.

And you're like, sure, Jan, that's definitely a thing that has happened and is happening.

But, I mean, like, as an example, when Peter Thiel and David Sachs wrote their book about the decline of education at Stanford in 95, I believe, they complained about all these classes that allegedly abandoned the classical liberal ideal of teaching the best that's been taught.

One example is a class by my friend and colleague, Terry Castle, about Sappho.

And I'm like, I'm sorry.

Sappho is not a classic.

She's old as shit.

Yeah, like literally the inventor of lyric poetry.

But

by classics, they mean something very specific, right?

They do not mean woman.

They do not mean a black person, right?

Like this is also like an incredibly Western Europe like device.

Yeah.

And it is a device of racial racial exclusion.

The question is basically, does Peter Thiel want your blood?

If not, not a classic.

The notion of the classics, this is a classic critique of like the canon, right?

As it is, in fact, a way to rarify the work of dead white men to the exclusion of other forms of literary accomplishment, right?

But then also like

Probably every kid getting an education worth their salt in the U.S.

is now reading Toni Morrison.

And Toni Morrison has, I would argue, been like incorporated into sort of like a new revised American canon, right?

Like if somebody gives you a bachelor's degree in any humanities field and you've never been made to read like Beloved or the Bluest Eye, like you should ask for your fucking money back because you're not equipped to discuss American literature.

But that is a process of this.

changing canon that you were talking about, Adrian, right?

But they don't want to do that.

You know, they want the the canon to be a device that only ever reaffirms white supremacy.

But it also reaffirms their own parochialism.

There is a racist and sexist part to it, and that's offensive, but it's also just deeply incurious.

There's something kind of provincial about it, right?

There's this notion of like, you know, I read Nathaniel Hawthorne, and that's what I was told was great literature.

And I will be a Hawthorne defender.

I think the Scarlet Litter is actually a really fascinating text.

I'm not a person with a particular anti-canon agenda, right?

But like, there's a sense that like that should be the end, right?

You shouldn't require additional curiosity or additional exposure or additional competence to be conversant and to be educated with a capital E, you know?

Exactly.

It's the permission structure for intellectual laziness two times over, right?

One thing is, like, let's be honest, any literature professor is heartbroken that we can't make you read more books in college.

But what this, oh, the classics are no longer taught discourse does is A, it says people ought to be taught the exact like 15 books that I was taught, right?

And it's like, well, no, like your professors back then or teachers in high school picked them from a gigantic list and we're like, oh man, I hate to lose this, but we only have 10 weeks.

So yeah, we're going to get rid of Scarlet Letter and we're going to do House of the Seven Gables instead because it's shorter, right?

That kind of thing.

Every canon list, every...

class syllabus ever has been constructed by that logic.

Michael Ives had to cut Augustine's confessions from my first year seminar syllabus and waved it at the class and told us we all had to read it before we died.

And then the next semester,

my professor, Deirdre English, did the same thing with Mrs.

Dalloway.

You know, it's like, this is the reality of getting an education is that kids don't read and there's only so many weeks in a semester.

Yeah.

But that's the thing, right?

It enables intellectual laziness in that it basically says the classics have to be what I was taught.

But it often goes along with this other idea, which is that colleges lost.

I mean, like we got that in that weird Manhattan statement that Chris Ruffo sort of put out.

Like we all know that the quality of education is like on the decline.

And I think what that's supposed to say is like, well, when you took all these classes, you got a genuine education.

Today, the kids are not getting that anymore.

And I think what it's saying is like, hey, not only should the kids not get to read anything you didn't read, but it's saying you also don't have to be reading anymore.

You were taught everything you needed to during your four years as an undergraduate.

And I'm telling you, I'm sorry, but that's not the case.

It's if you

find yourself never being able to move on from like the one cool text you read as an undergraduate, you're Peter Thiel, and that text is René Girard's violence and the sacred.

I mean, congrats to you, but you're not a thinker, man.

It's extreme laziness.

As you say, like, there are plenty of ideological reasons to oppose this.

There are reasons to worry about what it means for our politics and for the way average citizens look at higher education.

But there's also just like, stop making me validate your lack of growth, right?

Society changes, you should change, you know, I worry about, and this is where I'm going to sound like a cultural conservative, but I worry about a world in which even self-defined conservatives somehow give themselves permission to just like

not engage with the contradictory, multifarious, complicated text that is our past, because they'd rather live with their own half-remembered bullshit version of it that they got during their freshman history lecture.

This is a very specific one, but I think it's a great question.

I could swear that Moira mentioned something about the origin of HR being due to some reactionary culture war issue in an episode.

If that's an episode, please do that.

But if it's bite-sized, can she expand upon it in the mailbag?

And yes, I too sort of noted down on my notepad that I always have open when we record, like,

oh yeah, should we say more about that?

Your ears peaked up about my like invention of HR.

This is actually like

the kind of thing that makes me sound insane when you just describe what happened.

But I think it kind of makes sense.

The invention of HR, HR, the woman we can maybe say invented HR, was a woman named Alice Hernandez.

And Alice Hernandez was the second ever president of the National Organization for Women.

First president was Betty Friedan.

Second president was Alice Hernandez.

Alice Hernandez was a San Francisco-based, shout out San Francisco,

black woman who wound up sort of having this

big,

unwieldy, sort of confused, like federalized bureaucracy of the National Organization for Women sort of dumped on her because she had been very active in the National Organizations for Women's Project in the early 1980s, late 70s, and early 80s.

And she was one of the only black women who had been sort of committed, very much involved in the leadership of the National Organization for Women, right?

So when Fridian left, they really wanted a black woman to come in and they said, Alice, can you do it?

And she said, fine, this is an unpaid position, right?

Which is one thing to do when you're Betty Friedan.

It's another thing to do when you're Alice Hernandez, who comes from a working class background.

I believe her parents were West Indian immigrants.

And, you know, working for free is a very different proposition, right?

Now was a really big organization.

She was the head of National Now, Hernandez was, but there were different subgroups with different politics, right?

New York Now was very different from San Francisco Now, was very different from the particular, the most radical activist group was Chicago Now, which had been involved in and overlapping with a lot of the more radical feminists who had been based around Chicago.

I did a podcast episode for podcast heads on the Jane Collective, which was based out of Chicago a few years before this.

It was really fun.

I did that with You're Wrong About and Sarah Marshall.

So, if you want to hear a little bit more about feminism in Chicago, that's a good place to start.

I think Chicago women's rights is fascinating even today because they're getting tons of people from out of state into Chicago to get abortions now, post-dobs.

So, like, actually, abortion, women's rights, feminism in Chicago, it's like weirdly kind of the heartbeat of the whole place at a different, a bunch of different moments of American history.

Chicago now was led by some women with close ties to the labor movement, right?

And those women were looking at Sears.

Sears at the time, like the department store, it was like the second or third largest employer in the United States, right?

Department stores really declined after the rise of the internet.

But at the time, there were these like mega like bastion of the American economy, something like comparable to maybe Amazon now.

Like it's a large, large number of the American workforce is working specifically for Sears.

And Sears

has this two-tiered hiring system where there are jobs that you cannot get at all all if you're a woman.

There are jobs that you cannot get at all if you're not white, right?

So they actually have like separate employment structures and like sort of fields of hiring and promotion for white men, white women, black men, black women, right?

So it's actually tiered both on race and gender, right?

Now decides to target them and try to organize all the women who are working for Sears for a giant lawsuit and unionization drive, right?

This is a huge campaign.

There's a lot of like internal dissent about how they were going to work around the law because you kind of had to pick under civil rights law.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act made it illegal to do what Sears was doing and discriminate in hiring on the basis of race or sex.

And Sears was doing both.

And so you had this class of potential plaintiffs.

in like black women Sears employees who were prohibited from different roles based on both their race or their sex.

So there was like a little fighting in now, but they decided to organize based on sex and try to get this massive workforce to enforce the civil rights law and try to get equal access to employment for women at all of these Sears stores.

And this was like kind of brewing for a while.

And they got quite a bit of like organizing work done.

They had Sears employees buying in.

They had people who were like willing to come and pitch into this organizing effort.

And it would have been a massive, massive enforcement effort for the new Civil Rights Act and for employment non-discrimination law.

And Alice Hernandez goes to work for Sears

and starts negotiating on Sears's behalf against NOW.

This is kind of horror story moment where some of the Chicago NOW women go in for a meeting with Sears and they think they're about to like negotiate the terms of Sears' surrender and compliance with this like feminist-led labor organizing effort, right?

And Alice shows up and they're like, oh my God, we're so glad you could make it.

And then they see her sit down at the other side of the table.

Wow.

And so HR is born as a way for companies to mitigate.

the threats to their profits posed by civil rights law, specifically through like the betrayal of the feminist labor organizing effort, right?

And that's how you get what, you know, like Ola Femi Tai Wo has identified as like the weaponization of the interests of capital against the interests of labor using this like fake leaf of like feminist or anti-racist principle, right?

And that's the birth of HR.

And the now-led Sears organizing effort completely fell apart because they had, it turned out like a mole in their effort.

And Alice Fernandez was lightly sort of like cursed within now for a while thereafter.

But now sort of like lost its teeth.

They had put a lot of their sort of of institutional credibility behind the Sears push, and they were never as potent a force again.

Yeah.

And that's the story.

That's the basic gist of it.

There was a Benedict Arnold of the liberal women's feminist movement, and her name was Alice Hernandez.

And I'm mad at her, but I also think that she had been sort of screwed by now.

So I'm not totally shocked that she wound up disregarding their interests for somebody who could actually pay her.

That is the thing.

The bad guys always pay so much better.

Yeah.

All right.

So here's another one that might be sort of almost episode length, but I think someone's kind of giving us an out here.

It's a question about the idea of a girl code and being a girl's girl.

I see this in the Zeitgeist a lot, writes our listener.

And I'm curious how it could be unpacked in a gender politics sense.

It seems to me that it's still the same centuries-old policing of women's behavior, but I find it interesting that it's framed in a faux solidarity type of way.

Yeah, what do we think about the girls' code?

Yeah, this is a rhetoric I've been trying to follow and can't because it's clear that like what the antecedent to like being a girl's girl means is like completely different based on whoever is using it, right?

So I could see

the metaphor I think works best for questions of gendered solidarity is like striking workers and scabs, right?

Like there's a pigot line of

behavior that individual women decline to participate in in because it hurts women as a class, right?

And that's something we might call solidarity, that gesture.

And then there are scabs who participate in it anyway for personal benefit, even though they know that doing so harms women as a class.

This is something I tried to write about when I talked about Olivia Noosi.

You know, like you can, if you are young in your career, and I do not know that Olivia Nozzie did this.

I'm not talking about specific people.

I'm talking about like generally, if you are a young woman in your industry, you often do have the opportunity to get a job by sleeping with somebody who has the ability to give you that job, right?

And doing so will benefit you in the short term and will also degrade women as a class because that means that women who are not willing or able to, you know, have sex in exchange for a job do not get those jobs, right?

That's scab behavior to me, which is fraught as well, right?

Because it involves imposing a kind of sexual morality.

So when the terms of feminist solidarity are undermined through sexuality, one of the most potent tools of misogynist oppression, what are the ethics there of both engaging in such behavior and in judging it in others?

I think that's like a really interesting question.

I don't know if that's the question that's being answered in these discourses of being a girl's girl or girl code.

I might just be like a little too old to like be sufficiently immersed in this rhetoric to like understand it, but I often see it being like, oh, she's a pick me because she doesn't wear makeup.

And I'm like, I don't think that's what that means.

Yeah.

I'm like, like in Princess Bride, it's like you keep using that word.

He didn't fall?

Inconceivable.

You keep using that word.

I don't think it means what you think it means.

One of the things that happens a lot online.

is that people will use the same word or phrase or signifier to mean a vastly different array of things.

It's particularly common in like discourses about gender and sexuality, which are so personal and high stakes to like everybody participating.

That sometimes I just sit them out because I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't feel confident that anybody will actually define their terms.

It's like that scene in Anchorman.

He's like, I don't know what we're yelling about.

I love the ladies.

I mean, they read my engine, but they don't belong in the newsroom.

It is Anchorman, not Anchor Lady, and that is a scientific fact.

I don't know what we're yelling about!

You're winning this Ron.

What do you think?

It's terrible!

She has beautiful eyes, and her hair smells like cinnamon!

I've also, like you, I'm like, I was like, oh, this is interesting, but like, I have made glancing contact with this discursive phenomenon, I should say.

And I'm older than you, so like, I'm probably even more out to lunch on this.

But there is this really interesting form of right-wing identity politics that I run up against again and again when I write about these things.

And I mean, you know, I'm someone who defends identity politics approaches, but this to me seems like exactly what Ulafemi Taiwo is talking about, whom you already mentioned, where people are like, oh, well, that's some feminism criticizing other women.

It's like, I don't think that's what feminism is.

Like, oh, you have to like smile and be nice to any other woman, right?

And I think that this is what the questioner is asking about, that like in some way, that becomes a kind of form of social repression, right?

We are are about to record an episode on Thomas Chatterton Williams, and I cannot tell you the number of people on the right who will debate about cancel culture.

And I'll be like, well, it's just a reaction to Black Lives Matter.

And they're like, well, Thomas Chatterton Williams thinks it's real, and he's black.

And I'm like, oh my God, like, it's just like, you claim that the left is obsessed with identity politics.

What the fuck was that that just happened, right?

Like, in this particular instance, I literally don't see race.

I just see a man who is deeply, deeply wrong.

But, you know, there's a way in which identity can become a shield for conduct that is, in fact, detrimental to that class of people, right?

Like, this is why every single sexually abusive man who ever gets sued hires a woman for his attorney.

Yeah.

Right.

Scab behavior.

Scab behavior, ladies, because you're out there being like, well, I think she was a slut who deserved it.

And that's getting you a paycheck.

And you're lending, you know, credibility implied in your identity to a misogynist project.

And I do think that there's like, I do think that there's a moral calculus there.

Yes.

Camille Vasquez, do not call us.

If you don't have the ability

to talk about obligations to group injustice, then you don't have an ability to talk about group injustice, right?

Like there is, I think, genuine unresolved questions about the responsibility of the individual to the collective.

But I don't think those discourses can be like verboten by some sort of understanding of like individual prerogative, right?

Like, yeah, Camille Vasquez has the right to take that job, being a plaintiff attorney for Johnny Depp when he's suing Amber Heard, who I do believe he pretty horrifically abused, right?

She has the Camille Vasquez has that right.

And I have that right to say that's anti-feminist and it's scat behavior and it's bullshit and I don't fucking like it.

But it's not a victory for feminism that she did it.

No.

And, you know, feminism does not mean that we must endorse everything every woman ever does.

And it further does not mean that we have to endorse everything every woman has ever done with her womanhood, with her femininity, with her gendered position, because those are neutral tools in themselves.

And they are tools that can be used to bad ends.

Exactly.

And it's so interesting how what conservatives...

describe in the left is often just a self-portrait, right?

Because like they will literally go out and sort of say like, oh, you were mean to this lying lady that we put on Fox News.

Where is your feminism now, right?

Meanwhile, like, it's exactly that kind of supposedly content neutral kind of affirmation that they completely freak out over when it comes to a slogan like, believe women.

I should believe all women anyway.

It's like, first off, that doesn't mean that.

But also, like...

It seems like the position you impute to the left doesn't in fact exist, but you appear to genuinely hold it when it comes to Fox News hosts.

Like, affirm women.

It's like, even if they're lying, even if they're like calling calling for, you know, people to storm the Capitol, like you yourself are much closer to the caricature of the left that you're getting mad about.

Yep.

All right.

Uh, the oh,

uh, question.

Any advice for the kids these days?

I know you both work with students and talk often to the on the talk often on the pod about the place of young people in the culture.

Wondering if you have any words of wisdom for the 20-somethings who are uncertain about the future but find find comfort in listening to your podcast.

It's a great question.

I mean, since I started teaching undergrads, I've come to stop thinking of the youth as this like monolithic body and come to see them a lot more as like three-dimensional individuals.

And the fact is that like different young people need different advice because they're struggling with different things.

So some of them are people who just really need more confidence, who are like afraid of, you know, getting things wrong to the point where they deprive themselves of experience or learning.

And some people who are young need to open themselves up to more different perspectives.

And some people who are young need more friends their own age.

And some people who are young need more friends who are different than them.

It's a really fascinating, varied, internally contradictory and weird group of people when we talk about like the youth or when we talk about like Gen Z, right?

And I think exposure to them in real life has made me a lot more sympathetic to things that are like coded Gen Z problems and a lot less eager to like make facile generational generalizations, right?

When people are like, Gen Z is like this and millennials are like that.

I'm like, well, I don't know that that's true because you're talking about like really vast groups of people who are separated by what are ultimately like kind of arbitrary divisions.

Yeah.

As someone who's either Gen X or millennial, but like doesn't really culturally belong to either, I've watched both of these generational descriptors sort of emerge in these kind of, yeah, pop sociological kind of diagnoses.

And they've never sort of fit for me.

And I found that the horrible truth of our society is that as it gets older, I think

Generational descriptions matter much less to the people who are in that generation than the people who are outside of it, right?

Like millennials mattered as a bugaboo for boomers and some older Gen Xers in order to justify the

dismantling of or the fraying of certain social safety nets, right?

The idea of the avocado toast being the reason why people can't afford to live in New York City anymore, right?

Like we matter all more as totems, especially the young, because there's fewer of you than even of the two of us, right?

And this is going to get worse and worse and worse.

So in some way, pointing out diversity and non-coincidence is, I think, far more important than sort of like saying, here's what the problem is for your generation.

One thing I will say for younger listeners who have less experience.

The only thing I know about you is that you weren't alive for the stuff that I was alive for.

And there's two things that I always sort of emphasize these days, which is...

9-11 was crazy, actually.

Like we were all so surprised.

Yeah,

But like, there is this thing about like the people who who went through it are worse at navigating the shitty sequel or remix

than you are in general who didn't live through it.

So it's like, don't do that.

Like take history on board.

Remember this shit because it's going to come back up and maybe you can do better with it than generations that were around for it and are now fucking up the same test the second time around.

It's like, it's the same goddamn test.

It's like driving a driving test on the exact same range and like running over the same biker.

You're like, okay.

I mean, like, it feels like you're not a good driver.

And the other thing I would like to point out is there's a, I did an interview with Tressie McMillan Cotton, who we have to have on the podcast at some point.

When?

Where did you get her?

Oh, in 2020.

I was like, why did you take her and not put her on this podcast?

We need Tressie here.

What was on the other podcast?

Oh, okay.

People can check out the feminist present.

And she made this point that she doesn't think that the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020 would have happened without the lockdowns of March 2020.

What she meant was not so much that people were stir-crazy and needed to get out, although I think that was certainly part of it.

If you look at the revolutions in Europe in 1848, a lot of it is just people being like, fuck it, I'm leaving my house, right?

But she meant it in the sense that like people were like, if crazy shit can happen that's bad, why shouldn't crazy shit happen that's good?

Right.

Like, is it conceivable that the cops will change the way they've always done business in America?

Doesn't seem likely, but so did a pandemic.

So why don't I just roll the dice again?

And I think that is something that is worth keeping in mind as we enter into an even darker branch of what was already, frankly, one of the darkest imaginable timelines, that the fact that there are a lot of securities and seeming certainties that are being dismantled.

And that's terrifying.

On the other hand, remember all the things that you were told couldn't happen because blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Like this is just a certainty.

A very smart guy in glasses and a bow tie told you that it was going to be impossible.

Well, that fucking guy also told you that Donald Trump could not become a dictator.

So congrats to him.

He's terrible at predicting the future.

Turns out we can't hold on to these kinds of certainties when it comes to the bad stuff, but it probably also means we shouldn't hold on to those certainties when it comes to the good stuff, right?

So be realistic and demand the impossible.

I think we can all agree that what's really wrong with Gen Z is that they remind me of my own aging and more technology.

I know.

And they should really stop doing that.

So inconsiderate.

But yeah, you know, I think there's something to it.

You know, every discourse about the young kids these days is really a discourse that reveals some truths about aging, right?

And when you age, one thing that does happen is you become more bought into institutions.

You become more reliant on the status quo.

It becomes not just like sort of less habituated, but also more threatening to think of a different future, right?

Because, you know, you've spent all this time working for X university or Y newspaper or under Z assumptions.

And the notion that those might not be operative in the future is a little scarier than it is to the younger people who have not put in those years and who have a little less to lose.

Yeah, I think it just reveals more about the older people who are making these observations than it does about the younger people who are being observed.

All right.

So we have another question sort of in that vein.

I'm curious what you two as university educators think about the Gen Z boys have become irredeemable misogynists rhetoric.

I read the think pieces about the insidious influence of Andrew Tate and how Gen Z girls are dealing with their male MAGA peers, but I have to wonder if this narrative is overblown.

It's not like I didn't navigate a ton of misogyny from my male millennial peers in college.

So what is unique about this?

I'm a female college professor in conservative region, and for the most part, the young men in my classes seem like good kids.

I have not experienced any blatant sexism from them, but I'm also not socializing with them.

So maybe they turn to ghouls the moment they hit the dorms, and I'm just being naive.

I'm beginning to think that this is an outgrowth of the boys in crisis moral panic.

The boys are more misogynist than previous generations, so all of us progressives must get on board with the project of centering male need.

I'd love some of your commentary on this.

Yeah, I think that's a very good question.

I've wondered this myself.

I mean, we've talked with Michael Hobbes on this podcast about how

these kinds of blanket statements about shifting gendered norms among our young, they don't always have to be wrong, but they more often than not contain an element of moral panic.

Part of it, I think, is simply that these shifts

are so vast that like you're always going to be cherry-picking some example.

And then how do you do that?

You're probably going to make some assumptions of who represents a boy right now, right?

So you might go to a certain part of the country.

You might go into a certain socioeconomic tax bracket or whatever.

You might look for conservative sons of liberal families, right?

You might go into a parents group on Reddit or something like that.

So I worry about these kinds of think pieces, not because I think it's necessarily impossible, but because I can sort of see

the work that goes into preconceptualizing a piece like a bunch of Gen Z boys are turning misogynist, right?

It's very hard for adult reporters to really get access to what kids are doing anyway, right?

Like there's just a lot of places where in 20 years, a Sarah Marshall can come in and be like, yeah, that's how that got distorted, by the way, right?

So that's not to say that it isn't happening, but like the person who asked the question, I have the same misgivings and worries about this.

I think that there's a very good chance that this is wrong or distorted.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: You know, I think one thing that legitimately has changed is that now more of adolescent social life is visible to adults.

Yeah.

In fact, because more of it happens online, right?

Yeah.

And so there might be something to the effect of like, oh my God, adults see more of adolescents interacting with one another and are disgusted by it in a way that reflects their own exposure more than a change of the underlying conditions.

You know, technology also enables

different forms of sexual harassment, right?

It used to be that, you know, your boyfriend would take a Polaroid of you naked and show it to his friends, and now he can make AI of you naked after you dump him and put that all over, you know, various forums.

There's a sort of like amplifying effect that the internet has that makes us maybe more aware of or sort of exaggerated in our exposure to phenomena that are ongoing even before the internet, right?

The internet makes everything bigger.

It makes everything more visible.

It spreads everything out a lot further and faster than it used to be able to happen.

Yeah.

I mean, I think the one caution I would sound, the one thing that is definitely happening is that the internet is aging down, right?

Remember how the Facebook started?

Facebook started on college campuses.

So young people dominated Facebook in the beginning, I would say.

They were most visible.

They kind of set the overall tone and culture.

You then start getting Instagram, which I think trends a little bit younger.

And then you get TikTok, which we're like, I'm too old for it.

I think like I know 30-year-olds who feel like they're too old for it.

So it's also like what generation or what age bracket sets the tone of a place.

And that makes these kind of diagnoses of change really difficult because it's not only, as you say, can we see a lot more of what they're doing, we're in their living room right now, right?

We're seeing, we're on their home turf, right?

Where they may be a lot more unguarded, where they have their own way of talking.

All that is just to say, like, there is, there's every chance that there is a real problem here.

But like our listener, I have my worries about it.

I just don't see how we would know for sure one way or the other.

And it does have all the hallmarks of like,

yeah, you have to select some things that people have said.

And how you select that is going to be guided by some working assumptions.

If those turn out to be wrong, well, you might well be distorting something.

Should people like Andrew Tate be ashamed of themselves?

Absolutely.

Do we know the kind of cultural impact they're truly having on the way Gen Z lives their lives?

I don't think we do.

Right.

Very hard to measure.

Yeah.

All right.

That might be a good place to pause.

So

another behind the scenes, there's something wrong with Mora's recording equipment.

Whoops.

So we're going to pause here and we're going to do a second one of these.

Or another or a third one of these in case this crapped out in the recording.

But thank you all for listening and thank you for all these amazing questions.

As you can tell, they really got us cooking.

It's very exciting stuff.

It's just wonderful.

We have the best listeners.

Thank you so much.

And until next time.

Thank you so much.

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Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau.

Our title music is by Katie Lau.