Episode 13: The Cursties with Michael Hobbes

Like, this was a discourse that made me think, like, we're never getting out of the patriarchy.

I should abandon feminism right now.

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donnegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in Bid with the Right.

So, Adrian, what have we got today?

So, today, we're doing, well, what are we calling these shit?

Like, we should have, this is the kind of thing you clarify before you hit record.

We're going to do an awards show.

It's an end of the year wrap-up show.

Is it the worsties or the cursies or what are we calling these?

I think Kirsties.

For the cursed discourses of 2023.

Yeah.

The most cursed discourses of 2023.

Kirsties just sounds like Karen's or something.

It's like we're changing it to Kirstie, like Kirstie Allen.

Oh, yeah.

And that mellifluous voice is our guest today, who we could not do this awards show without.

The one and only Michael Hobbes.

I'm glad I could be here for your little banter, your little, your little cold open banter.

It's a special scholar of cursed discourses.

Exactly.

I was going to say, if there's anyone who spent more time in the tensions of cursed discourses, I was picturing you in like some subterranean, like, you know,

archaeologists that you're like, oh, this is unusually cursed.

In the mines with Pamela Paul and Dean.

Yeah, exactly.

You're like, oh, man, this is even by, even by their standards, this is dire.

And one of your co-hosts, you know, either Peter or or Aubrey has to like yank you up by like some kind of uh fail-save mechanism as you're like, Yeah, we gotta cut out these cursage levels are off the charts, dude.

I'm recording three of these this week, nice, like the most cursed, like variations of the most cursed discourse of the year.

So, I'm glad I could kick it off with you guys.

This is my little practice room, lovely, lovely.

Well, um, you know, we were sort of thinking

one second, sorry, yeah, you took off your underwear.

I'll pull it off.

You're like, we can just okay, that I mean, that's that's this is on this is

gold.

This is comedy gold people.

You don't speak German with your kid, Adrienne?

I thought you guys weren't.

I tried, and then she really took to English.

English is what she's being exposed to.

Maybe it's just objectively better.

It's got to be it.

Well, we'll get her exposed at some point.

Yeah.

I mean, I'll return to Germany at some point for more than a week.

It will not be this year

or next, but you know, maybe they'll get over it at some point.

People who speak German as their first language love it so much.

It's like people who are from chicago you know they just like they go really hard

for german for chicago and it's just like i feel like what do you what are you basing this on diehard movie people love german well i'm basing you're sub tweeting germany and chicago no i'm talking about like the sincere reverence that people have for the german language or maybe i'm thinking of like hannah arendt like in that one interview where she's like yeah i do miss i don't miss germany but i miss german it's objectively like a more expressive language than english it has way more words, which is actually surprising to me.

Oh, is that true?

Yeah.

I didn't know that.

Oh, wow.

German has like significantly more words than English.

Oh, wow.

Which is weird because I was like, we have so many loan words in English taking from this and that.

And then I looked it up, and it's like, I think twice as many in German.

But it's not just like compound nouns because you get to smash together any two nouns, right?

Which is vaguely cheating.

My understanding is that it's bigger.

Although, like, most people's functional vocabulary is something like 5,000 words, so it's not clear how much it matters.

But there are like specific terms in it.

None of which I learned because my German is really shitty.

I'm sure that's not true.

I've heard you order falafel in German, and it was very impressive.

The one thing I'm able to do in German, yeah.

I mean, it went off beautifully.

So, and ours, of course, our curse discourses will have something to do with gender and sexuality, I guess.

Although I have some

more general complaints, too.

Okay.

Just gripes or people not putting a blinker on before they get together.

You know, I'm eventually hoping to parlay this whole thing into a sort of a, what is his name?

Andy Rooney.

Is that his name?

Yeah, kids are on their phones these days.

different words are actually vocal fry

you're actually spoiling some of my curses so like oh shit

yeah you have a vocal fry okay how do we want to do this i i came up with three same cursed discourses that i like i have some honorable mentions same but i'm i'm happy to just go straight into the good

and i also

Look, if there's going to be no overlap between me and Michael, I will be very shocked.

I think I have one that you you guys won't overlap with and one that all three of us will have.

Nice.

Okay, excellent.

Nice, nice.

Or like different versions of the same, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

So

how do we want to do this?

Does someone want to just, do we take turns nominating something?

Yeah.

And eventually maybe we can, towards the end of the episode, we can come to our honorable height of the most cursed.

Oh, yeah.

Name a winner.

Name the most cursed scores.

Yes.

Yes.

All right.

You guys need something that people can add to your Wikipedia page.

People love that.

Every year is the cursedies.

Oh, yeah, that's true.

I don't have a Wikipedia page.

You don't?

Adrian, do you have a Wikipedia?

I have a Wikipedia page.

I don't know who made it.

And I'm the only thing I noticed when it went up is I looked at the, you know, you can always see the discussion between all the moderators.

Yeah.

There's someone who really wanted to delete mine.

And he's like, this person does not seem significant.

And I'm like, you're telling me.

Like, I

100%.

Yeah, mine.

Someone made one for me and then someone else deleted it because they were like, this guy's not famous enough.

I was like, wholeheartedly

saying, yes, keep me the fuck off of there.

Thank you.

Thanks, mom.

Okay, all right.

I will do the first curse discourse.

And this one, I will say, I was trying to choose my three nominees, my three honored nominees.

And it was kind of hard because I realized that a lot of what I think of as individual curse discourses were all actually kind of one broader curse.

That's what I have too.

I have cursed themes.

Yes, of which we have already done a couple of episodes.

So it's like the things that have already pissed me off enough in the discourse that I subjected Adrian to 90 minutes of my monologuing about them, such as like our episode on male loneliness, which was a discourse that I found especially cursed.

And I subjected Adrian to some time talking about it.

And me on a bike ride, as I recall.

I did not ride a bike with you, but you did ride your bike to brunch and arrive.

Yeah, I listened to it on my bike ride.

You guys were with me in a parasocial, in a parasocial way.

Oh, okay.

I thought you had misremembered a bike ride you went on with somebody else.

And we're like, that was Moira.

I go on bike rides with you you guys all the time.

It's really lovely.

Oh, that's so nice.

But then I think that that's kind of related to another episode we did with Rebecca Traister about the decline of marriage.

Marriage.

I have also been biking with Ms.

Traister in my ear hole.

A great place to bike with.

And then declining birth rates.

You know, these are all kind of a meta discourse, panicking about the state of the nuclear family and whether it can survive women's liberation, basically.

To which I should, I certainly hope that the answer is no, but a lot of other people feel different

but this led me to one of the recurring curse discourses that I believe started back closer to like 2020 2021 but reached one of its apatheosis this year which is trad wives oh yeah

good one you guys have any thoughts on the trad wives I feel like we have to watch some tick tocks together now my favorite trad wife is kind of like the ER trad wife whose name is Ballerina Farm okay that's not her real name that's not her government name that's her her internet.

I was like, well, she had no choice at that point.

She is a ballerina and former Miss Utah

who runs a like cattle ranch with her husband and makes a lot of TikToks in which she's like wearing an apron, pregnant, pirouetting, and like also baking a pie.

Hell yeah.

They've got like a million Aryan blonde children.

And it turns out that the whole thing is funded by her father-in-law's fortune because he's the founder of JetBlue.

Oh,

okay.

But one of the discourses that arose around trad wives was that being a trad wife was a privilege and that it was objectionable not because it depicted women as belonging to a very narrow set of life uh as only you know providers of children and sex and you know cooking and cleaning, but that it was something aspirational that should not be posited as a positive because it was unrealistic.

Not because it was sexist, but because it was too expensive.

Okay.

So it's like before you post your trad wife content, you should like examine your privilege of like

not everybody.

No, not everybody gets to be a trad wife.

Some of us have to have a more extensive sense of self and a life outside the home.

Maura would be churning butter right now.

She has a job to do.

If only, if, well, like the other side of this was, well,

it is men's fault for not sufficiently providing

so that we can be trad wives.

As if the problem with that, like, gendered,

like the patriarchal bargain, right, is that like men don't hold up their end of it.

And I want to be like,

like, this was a discourse that made me think, like, we're never getting out of the patriarchy.

I should abandon feminism right now and like go, you know, moon colony, live in a, in a bus in the woods or, or, you know, on a homestead with 80,000 white children that I breathe.

Wait, is this one of those like Pac-Man discourses where it's like so far like social justice left that it pops back out on the right?

On the right.

And it's like

all of us would like to be trad wives, but we don't have the ability or something.

I mean, I do have to say that the idea of the daughter of the founder of JetBlue cosplaying Little House on the Prairie does have real Marie Antoinette vibes.

I mean, like, I can see how people got there.

I mean, I guess if people want to take away from that, that tradition is a fiction and that you know it's usually just a coefficient of power like that seems fair but like why are men not providing enough that we could forswear our pesky careers in the legal profession or whatever like or in journalism that is a particular level of curse oh my god i'm on her instagram now this is incredible oh it's such a rich sex where it's like There's like the two, the thing on Instagram where you can upload two photos and you can like swipe between them.

One of them is like her and her husband and they're like five or something, like adorable kids.

And then you swipe and it's her holding like a chicken and she's like cleaning out the chicken.

Like that's her day.

She's hanging out with the kids and she's like doing gizzard stuff.

Yeah, she's got an aga like in an old British country estate, one of those like huge.

stoves.

It's like the size of a wall

and she's doing a lot of her in front of the aga.

I can't believe you guys haven't been exposed to ballerina farm.

This is a real cleave in men's and women's social media content.

Dude, the algorithm knows that I'm a gay man after like two seconds of scrolling and just feeds me like men in tank tops and like gymnasts.

It's just like biceps, biceps, biceps.

Yeah.

Nothing.

My Instagram feed is like all bizarre, like humor posts I've like clicked on and lingered on for too long.

Like there's an Italian man who makes these disgusting food videos.

Have you seen this?

You gotta find him.

Like he's like the person I don't follow who's like constantly in my feed.

And it's it's upsetting content, but it's real fun.

No one, dude, no one believes me when I say this, but I genuinely like don't do thirst follows.

I'm not like a

horny Instagram user, but when I go to my For You page on Instagram, 100% shirtless men, like buff shirtless men.

And like, I don't know

where it is getting the data that like this isn't interesting.

Well, Ballerina Farms, I'm seeing no shirtlessness, which is like a first ding already, frankly.

I know.

Although maybe it'll feed me new stuff now.

Maybe this is it.

Exactly.

But then is she problematic or is she just like...

Well, she is not the way way some trad wives in this

world or this like social media ecosystem are avowedly racist.

That is not part of her brand, right?

That is part of some trad wife brands.

Like this creator called Wife with a Purpose is like explicitly white nationalist.

She, Ballerina Farm, that is, does do a lot of pronatalist content.

Things like, you know,

I am pregnant all the time, but the, and it's really hard, but the childbearing years are short and I need to, you know, blah, blah, blah.

So it's got, it's got a Volkish tinge beyond the

like cooking videos, of which there's a lot.

Because I always want to try to be careful of like, some people just like doing this stuff, and it's not particularly problematic.

It's like people have different hobbies.

And for some people, their hobby is like doing stuff around the house, and they're really into like posting pictures of their kids, which is all totally lovely and fine.

But then this stuff does like tilt into like much worse territory.

No, it has an ideological project.

Yeah.

She's not like, and she knows what she's doing.

Okay.

So ballerina farm and the trad wife as not a gendered abnegation of the public sphere, but as a sort of insufficiently humble flaunting of wealth has sort of gotten to me.

You know, and it's true that like if you look at history, the housewife as she emerged in the 1950s was a white middle class phenomenon that was very historically bounded and was not accessible to, you know, famously like African-American families who needed two incomes, right?

And that partly what has led to the end of housewives as a like mass phenomenon is like just wage stagnation and the fact that families now need two incomes to survive.

But the other thing that has led to the downfall of housewives was like basic feminist interventions about women having purpose beyond childbearing and rearing and having talents and inclination to contribute those talents to the public sphere, and that that latter half of the argument against being a housewife has disappeared from the discourse, that is what I nominate as cursed.

Oh, I will say, in her defense, her husband's screen name is The Hog Father, which is actually pretty good.

You know, another life in another world.

He could have been shirtless on your.

If he was shirtless, that would make the hog father mean something very different.

Yeah, I mean, hogfather definitely.

That's taken.

That's taken.

Because his OnlyFans is

doing risk business right now.

What's yours, Adrian?

What's your cursedest one?

So I have to preface this with saying I'm old and I don't ever know when discourse is.

This is a discourse that came across my radar again this year.

I think it's older than that by at least a few years.

And

this is one of those that drives me crazy because I don't even understand what it is.

So this is the one, like, I don't know what the discourse is, but I needed to stop basically.

It's when Gen Z queers have like anti-sex opinions and then millennials and Gen X gays freak out about that opinion, right?

Adrian, this is one of mine.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, why are the kids such prudes these days?

Yeah, kink at pride, right?

Like it's always, so I, you know, I'll just like read one of these like just without context, right?

If you want young queers to associate with elder queers, then maybe the culture shouldn't be so ridiculous and over the top.

I get secondhand embarrassment from drag drag queens and leather daddies and kinksters in pup hoods acting like they represent all gays.

And then like one something like that will like start the entire discourse, right?

Like elder gays kind of like dunking on P on them, et cetera, et cetera.

And here's why this drives me crazy.

And I think Michael can empathize with this.

It has all the hallmarks of being fake, right?

Like, is this real?

I don't know if it is.

Like,

is this just people picking out little bits of online discourse to get mad about, right?

Is this actually like a broadly held opinion or is this like a kid on tumblr who like yeah maybe shouldn't shouldn't have hit send but like it's tumbler we all overshare on these kinds of platforms right i'm actually amazed you found one to read out because every year i see the criticism of the no kink at pride yeah discourse and like in the wild i have never seen a like no kink at pride yes no i may not have found a few but like each of these people has like 50 followers yeah yeah yeah like the ratio is through the roof so you can tell that like basically that person person got dunked on hard.

Yeah.

And like hardly anyone sort of writes back.

Like, and like everyone's just kind of outdoing themselves for clout in the replies.

I'm like, given that this person, like, I mean, let's be real here, probably hasn't had sex yet.

It's fairly young.

Yeah, this is probably a 15, 14-year-old kid.

What are you doing, man?

Like, don't be in that.

Don't be in their replies.

So it has like real kind of getting mad at the young energy, which is usually a dead giveaway to me that like there's some vital context missing.

And of course, the idea that maybe for you know given that this is a currently an all gay panel um i should point out to our straight listeners that like the idea that young people are doing you know gayness wrong is basically as seductive to lgbtq people over a certain age as the idea that the youths are doing youth wrong is for just about anyone else yeah right like so this idea that like the young aren't aren't lgbting correctly like it's very seductive and it like has everything to do with like you know the aging process and its ravages and how it really sucks.

But like that being said, if it is real, I also think it stinks as a discourse.

So it's like the whole thing is just like an Ouroboros of like cursedness.

Whereas like, if this is real, it sucks.

And if it's not real, which I suspect, it sucks that we're getting mad about it.

Maybe.

the adults need a segregated internet where the teens don't have to deal with us.

Because I feel like, you know, young people being

uncertain, trying on opinions and positions that they don't like necessarily want to hold forever, being

half informed and sort of only kind of understanding something and learning through exchanging with their peers and observing adults is something that like they should get to do.

Like kids should get to have dumb opinions

about sex without every adult who comes across it correcting them and reifying their own social position by correcting them.

You know, it's just like

because I'm sure that there are people who hold the no kink at pride opinion in complete sincerity.

And I'm also sure that those people are like 13.

Yeah.

And I think like that's strikes me as like adults overheard child.

Or taking the piss or like making a joke that we're too old to understand, right?

I mean, like quite possible too.

And then the other thing that I think about with this discourse is like very often it's, it seems to be Tumblr posts.

And it's like, you know, we all talk about like how horrible it is that these kids have to kind of do their identity formation online, but then like we don't draw the obvious conclusion that like maybe it's uncharitable to screenshot them doing so and like sharing it to our Twitter followers.

It's like, yeah, then fucking let them do it.

Like you were saying, Maura, like just like be kind.

Like if it's like as if your diary from middle school were suddenly like plastered in the New York fucking Times, like that's, that's, that's rough, man.

Like we're, we're lucky that we didn't have to do that.

But like, you know, like, unless someone's like tweeting at Joe Biden about their kingdom kind of, like right just assume it.

This is kind of like a semi-private thing and just don't fucking don't fucking make it a big deal.

They meant to write that down for themselves and maybe three peers, you know?

My actual earnest opinion is that it is deeply unhealthy for society, for old people to be as exposed to the thoughts of young people as we are.

Like, I shouldn't know what 19-year-olds, like what music they're listening to.

I shouldn't know what discourse, like what they're experimenting with words and thoughts and things.

Like for us, that was like us in our dorm rooms, 19, talking to other 19-year-olds and saying some unbelievably stupid shit.

And old people never found out about it.

And by the time they did, it's like we sort of workshopped it, like beta tested it a little bit more.

Like it was kind of more ready for prime time.

But now we have these internet platforms that are like social media, so everybody's using them.

And then it's anonymous.

So like, you don't even fucking know if somebody's 16.

Right.

And so many of these discourses, like,

I don't know how like deep into gay Twitter you are, Adrian, but this year, I feel like there was less of the no, no kink at pride stuff this year, but there was the polyamory at pride discourse and everyone spent like two fucking weeks fighting about it.

And it was literally one tweet by somebody who was like, why don't polyamorous people get afloat at Pride?

Like we also face discrimination.

And like, it's like,

it wasn't clear if that person was like what age they were, like what their situation was.

It really felt like some sort of unformed, it's like a platform specifically for like thinking out loud.

And it seems like something that you would say when you're thinking out loud and then like 40,000 people told this person that they were wrong and then people also elevated it to like the poly emery at pride discourse and like there was no discourse it was literally a single tweet from someone who might have been like 13.

yeah then you have a meta discourse about the problems within the discourse within people commenting about a non-existent problem.

Yeah.

Yes, which is what we're doing right now.

Within like the echoes of like the waiting pride discourse eight months later.

And the snake has eaten its tail and now we're on a podcast.

Just ignore the youths.

I mean, sure.

I mean,

fair enough.

Podcasts are the most cursed discourse, so I didn't even put that on my list.

Fundamentally, yeah.

But there is an element here also of like, as Michael was saying, it's not just that we shouldn't do it.

It's noticeable that we're doing more and more of it, right?

Like at the equal rate as we should probably be looking away from what 19-year-olds are doing.

Just like avert your fucking eyes, right?

Like the more we actually do the opposite, right?

Like how I'm sure we're going to have some other discourses in this list that are all about like just give them two years right like yeah yeah it's like it's like stop looking at college students yeah right like they are not that influential they are usually pretty marginal by definition they don't represent a gigantic constituency why do you have a reporter whose beat entirely seems to be getting them to like say dumb stuff into microphones like like does that seem to you right like you no longer have a upper midwest correspondent but you have someone who like will go to Brown to be like, so do you feel about safe spaces, right?

Like, that should give you some fucking pause, right?

If you're like, if it is your job

to do the thing that very obviously with the opposite should happen, that where you're like, oh, you know, like,

write me again in two weeks if you still think this, because it feels like you're just kind of spitballing here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

This brings me, and I don't want to like jump the shark, but this is so, Adrian, your no kink at pride curse discourse is so similar to one I have that maybe we should continue the conversation so we don't wind up saying the same thing twice.

Wait, I was going to say mine.

I think this might be the same one.

What's yours?

Do we have the same one?

Is it okay?

Stay on three.

One.

Is it Gen Z hates sex scenes?

Oh no.

That's dumber than mine.

That's so dumb.

Oh my God.

Gen Z hates sex scenes was a discourse that I got so much of over the past year.

Did you guys not get this?

Was this real discourse or was it like a single fucking fucking tweet?

No, this was a real discourse.

Well, here's the thing: it was a single fucking tweet.

Okay, so both.

And then

it was a single fucking tweet towards the beginning of the year, right?

That like a few, like, I think it was like somebody tweeted, like, oh, all these sex scenes are unnecessary.

They're not necessary to the plot.

And that incited discourse.

And then the discourse inspired a survey by UCLA,

which found, you know, it was like a 1500-person survey, not huge.

Respondents were 10 to 24.

And it found that what Gen Z

say they want in movies and television are more stories that do not focus on romantic coupling as

the primary like mode of character development or plot resolution.

And more furries.

Which, you know,

yeah, boy, more furrows.

But it became this like allegation that like Gen Z is so prudish, that they are so anti-sex.

Wait, but the whole question isn't even about sex, though.

It's about romance, right?

So it's like we've morphed from one thing to the other.

Oh, yeah.

No, it's like not actually exact at all.

But there was like some dumb tweet that was like, I don't like sex scenes.

But then all these things get wrapped into each other because then it's like the evidence that Gen Z doesn't like sex scenes is that they feel like movies should branch out and not be so like monolithically about romance, which is a totally different opinion.

Right.

So it's just like the kids hate sex scenes.

Yes.

But that's one person and it's not even clear they do.

Also, like to the extent that the kids do hate sex scenes, how much is this informed by the fact that they are often watching movies with their parents?

Right.

Yeah.

Like, that's

a question I have.

I watched Disclosure with my mom,

which has

like us, the centerpiece of the film is like a six-minute long, like, blow-jump scene.

And I was, I was sitting there in the theater next to my fucking mom.

So, like, yes, I'm also against sex scenes.

Yeah.

In that scenario, everyone is against sex scenes.

Everybody is like Puritan hat, buckle shoe.

100% shut it down.

Yeah.

Constock laws for bagging scene movies with my parents at age 14.

Absolutely.

Also, like, do any of these discourses like bother to historicize this?

Because I mean, like, it is true that, like, I can see why someone who is grown up with, you know, freely available pornography might be like, look, this is going, this is eating a lot into the runtime here.

Can we get back to the story?

If I really wanted to watch people boning, I could see a lot more if I just put people boning in like literally any search engine.

Dude, this is roughly my view on sex scenes too.

Not that I ideologically oppose them, but mostly they're boring.

They don't advance the plot.

They're sort of fake.

They have this like weird, like there's the sort of like soft focus thing.

Like they just, I'm just like killing time until like something with actual character development happens.

And so I don't think that Gen Z actually opposes sex scenes.

Has either of you ever seen The Room, the Tommy Wiseau movie?

Oh my God.

No.

The most cursed sex scene of all time.

It's like, really?

It's like, oh, yeah.

How so?

Oh, yeah, it's rough.

It's rough.

Just like it's the least sexy thing you've ever seen.

And like, it's terribly lit.

Is exactly what Michael is saying.

It's like, like, you're not sure why it's happening.

You can hear the plot kind of moving backwards as you're as they're doing it.

It's just the whole thing is very strange.

I've seen sex scenes that are played for like comedic effect.

Yeah.

I've seen some that do a decent job of

highlighting vulnerability or uncertainty by the characters.

Like what they're not good at is the sort of like, you know, maybe there's a violin playing and there's some like gauzy sentimentality around it and there's like, you know, a foot in a sheet kind of a thing.

Like most sex scenes in narrative cinema do not

use those interactions to like show you anything about the characters or their relationship.

They just kind of like, you know, like glitteringly show you that it happens

in this way that's like, well, that's very nice, you know, and then cut.

And I, I, I understand the idea of them as superfluous in that regard.

Like, I can have a degree of empathy for the straw man Gen Z figure in

that.

But like, you know, I think I'm interested in Adrian's point about readily available porn because I wonder if there's a degree to which people are like expressing distaste with the content of sex scenes that's like actually a misplaced discourse about pornography.

People also aren't expressing any dissatisfaction with sex scenes.

No, too.

Yeah, like I don't like this.

Not in large scale, no.

I guess what's different between pornography and sex scenes, as Michael and his mother discovered, is that one is consumed usually alone and one is usually you're in a community.

I watched Blue is the warmest color with my husband and a lesbian couple we're friends with, very good friends with.

And the sex scene went over just terribly in both camps in the sense that we were just like, whoa, that's a that's a that's a lot of vagina.

And they were just laughing their asses off.

And we're like, we don't understand why this is funny.

And they're like, we don't understand why you look so pale.

And we're like, we're just all having a bad time.

Bad time was had by all.

That sex scene.

That sex scene is like 15 minutes.

It's super long.

That's one of those where I think like the distinction between sex scene and pornography actually does sort of veer into that like

ambiguous territory.

Like that is clearly meant, that's a sex scene that's clearly meant to arouse and it's comedy that said it failed yeah yeah but wasn't there good discourse a couple years ago when there was an essay in i think like gawker or something about all the marvel movies and about how like everyone is hot but like no one is fucking in those movies

and there's this weird oh yeah we're surrounded by these images of these like two percent body fat like ripped dudes all the time but there's a weird sexlessness yeah to these movies and there's so little kind of desire or like realistic depictions of like how this actually would play out, like all these like super hot people in like stressful situations.

And like, I know that was actually kind of interesting discourse.

I will say, as somebody who has seen a lot of the Marvel movies, because my wife loves the comic books, it is impossible to imagine sex occurring in that world.

It is so.

What, just like logistically, like they'd hurt each other because they're like

shooting webs by accident and shit?

People are not capable of any kind of like desire or pleasure.

It's like, it's a, it's a senseless world.

Yeah, it's like these weird denuded characters where they don't have any like real flaws.

They have like cute movie flaws that get like resolved in their little three-act character arc.

But like, yeah, in real life, they would like all be fucking each other and it would be like super messy.

But like, we're not seeing anything.

But like, also, like, those kinds of bodies are the result of so much like discipline and denial of pleasure, right?

Yeah, yeah.

It's almost like an asexual body by virtue of being so like sexually sexually idealized.

Except for one moment in, I believe, the third Avengers, right, or something like that, where Captain America, the most sort of square of the bunch, sees himself.

He gets teleported back in time.

Yes.

And he sees himself and he says, that's America's ass.

That's a great line.

I like the idea that

the thing he can take visual pleasure in is his own ass is very funny and very good.

But it's the only one I can think of where someone's like, really, really, like, that's nice.

That's nice.

It's his own ass.

There was one sex scene between the Hulk, who's Mark Ruffalo, and I think the Scarlett Johansson character.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they're like very beautiful people.

And it's just like, it's the least sexy thing I've ever seen.

It's like,

these people do not have genitals.

You know, that's what it felt like.

It was like they're just totally outside of that world.

Yeah, there's, there's another interesting thing with like these people who like, if you're that ripped, that's basically your full-time job.

Like that's the only way you can look like that.

And like, it is a lifestyle of like, that's basically all you're thinking about the entire time.

But they want to project this as like this effortlessness.

And like, I always think about James McAvoy was in some dumb movie with Angelina Jolie a billion years ago where he had to get like super buff for because they all have to get buffed for these movies now.

And he talked about how like the weird supplements that he was on just made him fart constantly and like nobody wanted to be around him.

And it was like gross.

Like people like draw straws to be like, oh shit, who's going to get a new sandwich today?

And there's something so kind of perfect about that.

It's like to get these bodies, it's like you kind of have to be like a deeply like off-putting person or like give up, like make these other huge sacrifices.

I believe the movie was called Wanted.

What a title.

But yeah, that's like the lifestyle that creates these bodies is so incongruous with everything we like about sex, right?

You know, where everything is supposedly like life-affirming about sex.

It's undisciplinedness, it's messiness, it's like sort of affectionate grossness, which is like not, I don't know, it just feels like they don't equate to me.

Yeah, it's not fun having sex with someone who's like lightheaded with hunger.

Yeah.

Like, I'm thirsty.

Okay.

Michael.

I think it might be time for your cursed discourse.

Wait, okay.

I might have misunderstood the brief.

So I have like my discourses are like specific articles.

And

there are some themes that I found.

Oh, beautiful.

I started with that and then I couldn't.

Yeah.

Okay.

And then it became like a broader thing.

So this is like the easiest one.

And this is basically like one article.

So the one that I have thought about the most this year is the gender clinic whistleblower in St.

Louis.

Who's this alleged

the headline in February, obviously on fucking Barry Weiss's website, was, I thought I was saving trans kids, now I'm blowing the whistle.

And it's this lady, Jamie Reed, who says, like, I was a sort of admin person at this gender clinic in St.

Louis, and like, we were like pushing the kids through care, and like, no one gave a shit, and they were all like mentally ill, and we gave them like surgery and hormones with no assessment.

They identified as attack helicopters.

Exactly.

And then immediately, people read her like legal affidavit and were like, there's like a series of like very implausible claims in this she said they were giving hormones to kids who identified as a rock and identified as a helicopter which isn't even a real thing and that you wouldn't get hormones for being a helicopter yeah and like internet meme which is a very well-known like right-wing meme like i identify as a helicopter so that was a red flag and then the biggest red flag to me was that she said that kids were like she said like numerous times this is not just a one-off thing but kids were routinely transitioning without the consent of their parents not plausible which would expose the the clinic to huge legal risk.

This is not happening.

And then, you know, people have to pay insurance bills.

And in America, you have to fucking negotiate with your insurance company all the fucking time.

So like they would notice like a $30,000 like mastectomy that their 15-year-old daughter had gotten.

Like, no.

Well, Michael, they did it for free because of whoa.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, this is the thing is, like, there's then like the lack of evidence has to be evidence at some point.

And then in the month since, there have been like the local newspaper interviewed a bunch of parents from the clinic and they're like, no, we had a great experience and like our, our kid was assessed like very thoroughly.

And like no one has come forward to corroborate her account.

And like, this is the discourse that is like driving me absolutely fucking crazy all year.

It's sort of died down in the popular press in the last couple of months, but also like that's because all these fucking laws.

banning affirming care for like also now adults are just quietly fucking being passed all over the place.

But it's like this discourse of like the debate around gender affirming care and like the debate about like, should kids be assessed?

As in like finding one fucking tweet that is like about like kink at pride, it's like once you sort of go all the way down to the bottom of like, wait, what are we actually talking about here?

There's no evidence that this is happening.

There's no evidence that kids are receiving surgeries and medications with no assessment at all.

Like there's not even like a confirmed case of it.

Like it's much closer to the sort of razor blade in the apples myth.

Yeah.

That is like, there's cases of it almost happening.

There's cases of things that maybe look like it happened at first, and then you dig into the details and you're like, oh, this person transitioned at like 23.

So it really has nothing to do with like children at all.

Everything is sort of tangential to the main point.

And there's been this weird reluctance on the part of like actual journalists to clearly convey this to people.

That it's like, it's fine to debate stuff.

It's fine to ask questions, I guess, in like a fucking vacuum.

But what we're really talking about here is that there's plenty of evidence that kids are being assessed and no evidence that they're not being assessed.

And like that has not been conveyed to people.

And it's like, this is the thing that I've been tearing my hair out the most about all year long.

Yeah, this is a, this is a strong contender.

You came with your first domination.

And just like that.

No, that's only, that's only one.

I got two more.

My two or my other two are maybe even worse.

Oh, my God.

It's so fascinating, right?

Like, I noticed that too, that like, it's always like, what about people who regret it and detransition?

And it's always like people in their 20s who like transitioned in their 20s.

And it's like, that sucks.

Great.

I don't know how that works.

Yeah, like, like, that is a different thing.

You're like, yeah, yeah, there are razor blades and apples.

Here, I found a worm in a tomato.

It's like, yeah, well, you know, I don't know if that's proof for the other three

different things.

Trans children is one of those things where the imperative upon journalists and people sort of like commenting on this issue for the public consumption is to be as nuanced as possible, right?

Whereas the reality, both of the science and of what's happening, does not call for the nuance that the journalists are being called on to perform, right?

There's this incentive to be like, listen, I'm going to give a lot of leeway and airtime to these, you know, people who are worried about this because that will allow me to appear unbiased and serious.

Right.

But then, you know, these are not like sides that are equal in their reasonableness, right?

Like one side has a lot of empirical research and medicine on its side, and the other side has a lady in St.

Louis who's making shit up and like clearly not backed by any evidence at all.

And there's nothing intellectually serious about covering a debate or discussing a debate without any investigation of the underlying facts.

That like this is something as like whatever, all of us are sort of pundits on some level.

We give our opinions, et cetera.

Sometimes it's like, it's hard to know what you think about something.

But then what I've found is that oftentimes once you get like the basic facts in front of you and like really get into the specifics, it's much easier to know what you think about something.

Because you're like, okay, well, here's the evidence for this side, here's the evidence for that side.

It's actually very clear what's going on here.

And this is something where like we've whipped up this debate out of nowhere.

But like if you actually describe to people like how few kids are transitioning, the experiences of like even these kind of political detransitioners that show up at these like city council hearings in random cities all over the country, most of them were years in assessment, right?

They were socially transitioned for like two years and were on hormones for two years and they got a mastectomy.

It's like, I'm sorry if you can't find me a case of this this happening, much less large numbers of cases of this happening.

I just don't think there's anything to debate.

And it's like, then you get into these like tedious meta things of like, oh, well, you think it's not okay to debate?

I'm like, no, of course I think it's fine to fucking debate, but it's like, we should have the facts in front of us if we're going to debate something.

And it's like, we're, we're debating vapor versus like the entire medical establishment.

And so this has just been like as a methodology.

You heard it here first, folks.

Michael Hobbes thinks you shouldn't debate.

Yeah, I do.

I'm going to clip this out of context.

Oh, anti-free speech.

I think this is perfect.

I mean, you've created sort of a turducken of cursedness here because, like, first of all, let's briefly pause on that headline style.

Like, Barry Weiss, if nothing else, for 2024, do a different style of headline than, like, oh my God, I know.

Here's a sentence.

And here's another sentence that relativizes that sentence or asks the question.

It's like, oh, like,

just get new material, girl.

I thought I loved sex scenes.

And then I looked at Captain America's ass.

Yeah.

And then the other thing, which was almost on my list, but it's, but then I realized, shit, this actually happened in 2022, except very narrowly, which was the Stanford banned the word American thing.

Oh, dude, we did a whole bonus episode on this.

This is one of my faves.

I know.

Although our bonus episode was based on your blog post about it.

So this is, this is discourse on discourse on discourse.

It was very fun because I get to actually call people and be like, what happened here?

And they're like,

I'm sorry.

They were all really nice, but I was like, you're probably tired.

And they're like, oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

But anyway,

the broader point, I think, connected to this is like information asymmetry.

These people who like spin these stories and then frankly also journalists that write these stories and don't consider that one side seems to be entirely unrestrained and can just say whatever they want, right?

This lady in St.

Louis is nothing holding her back.

And like the fact that I'm guessing that these clinics can't just be like, well, call, you know, Johnny's

parents.

They'll tell you, right?

Like there's like HIPAA and all this shit.

Like you can't just do that.

Same with universities.

Like we are restricted in what we can say, right?

It's the same way that, like, a professor is like, I got fired for my opinions.

Like, and the school really wants to say, like, yes, and your tendency to grab women's asses, right?

But you can't because like you're exposing yourself to a lawsuit, right?

So, like, it's this interesting thing where like a journalist doing a they said, they said kind of thing.

clearly needs to think about like, okay, who in this scenario can speak freely, right?

The fact that a parent of a transitioning 14-year-old may not want to talk to you given what's going on in the country Makes perfect sense.

Especially, let's say, if they Google Pamela Paul, trans.

They're like, nope, we're not taking that lady's call.

Jesus Christ.

Right.

Like, it's frankly the thing that any responsible parent would do.

Meaning, you're not dealing with two co-equal sources of information.

And anyone with a brain between their ears should know that.

And then instead, you're like, well, this person's been so nice and forthcoming with, you know, this utter torrent of bullshit.

Right.

How could I possibly listen to the drip, drip, drip that comes from the professionals who are like, oh, I don't think we can comment on that.

I'm so sorry.

Patient confidentiality, right?

It's like, yeah, because that's their job and it should be.

Yeah.

And they have like, these stories include this little parenthetical that's like the gender clinic did not respond to requests for comment.

And like, that might mean they're engaged in a giant fucking cover-up, but it could mean that they can't reveal anything about their patients as a first principle.

So it doesn't actually mean anything.

Yeah.

So you can't just print this stuff without any investigation of like what may or may not have happened behind the scenes.

And like we now know that like all indications are that there's nothing there.

Like there's been an internal investigation.

There's been the AG is now involved.

The clinic has now been shut down, which is really fucking sad.

Like all the information indicates that like nothing happened.

And like what this person thinks is this like massive medical malpractice appears to be like her misinterpreting events or not having complete information or acting in bad faith.

We don't really know.

But it's like, there just isn't any evidence at this individual clinic or on a much broader scale that this is happening.

It's really unlikely that doctors will be like, oh my God, you saw a YouTube video yesterday and now you think you're trans.

All right, let's get you into surgery.

15 minutes, get ready, we'll give you the anesthetic.

I mean, there just isn't, like, none of this entire panic like makes sense once you actually get down to the logistics.

Yeah, anyone who's ever tried to get any surgery scheduled in the United States knows that like...

Yeah, Jesus Christ.

It's like, yeah, let's get you in there is not a, is not really a phrase you hear very often for any procedure.

Yeah, especially kids too, especially irreversible procedures on kids.

The idea that everybody just like gives up all of their critical faculties and is just like, let's get you onto the operating table, kiddo, at like age 15.

It's just like, again, it's not plausible.

And like to believe something like that, you need to provide really good evidence.

And we haven't had anything close to that.

Right.

So I feel like I brought us down.

We were talking about sex and now we're talking about sad stuff.

I'm sorry.

Yeah.

No, but this is, I mean, as I say, this is a real, I led with like a little precurse and you, you just

went like full thermonuclear cursing.

The precursor.

Precursors.

Exactly.

So, my next one is one I might be sharing with Michael, possibly, which again is one that has been around for quite a while.

And what is cursed about it is just the way that, you know, like Bernie in my weekend at Bernie's, it like keeps getting like dressed up and like driven around town again.

And this is identity politics.

Oh, yeah.

It's like, we're just like, oh, is this monk?

Is this monk adjacent?

Is this monk adjacent to Frank Yasha?

I'm sorry, I put that down before I heard that you had spent seven hours recording.

So maybe we'll skip this one, but what's astonishing to me is just that, you know, both in Europe and in the US, I feel like there's been another round of discourse about the evils of identity politics.

And what's really remarkable is that like

no one bothers to really define or explain what the fuck they even mean by this, right?

Like it's like, how can this discourse keep going on without any increase in sort of sharpness and delineation, right?

I mean, I feel like there have been books in the past that have been, I think, a little bit clearer.

Like there's that book by, what's that called?

Elite Capture by Ufemi Taiwo.

But he's talking about a very specific subset, right?

And he's very clear on that.

But largely, it really is just like, it's a discourse that still runs on vibes after all these years.

And the same cases.

I mean, I just read Yasha Monk's book, which I think you're like sub-tweeting there.

And like, you know, this book came out last month and he has these cases of like, this person got fired for their speech.

And it's cases from like 2014.

And it's like, these have been litigated to fucking death.

Like this guy, David Shore, who got fired for like posting a study online, blah, blah, blah.

It's like, we're going to do this again?

If you're going to these old cases that have been talked to death, there should be more examples of this by now, right?

This was like.

now three years ago.

And like, this is a widespread problem, but you can't give me one other fucking example of it than this.

Yeah.

And then the fact that like what gets exempted and what gets rolled in is just absolutely cursed, I think, right?

So, there's like in Europe, right, like very frequently when they complain about identity politics, they're thinking about trans people, right?

They think about things like queer theory, they think about Judith Butler, right?

Like, Judith Butler's entire thing in gender trouble is that they're like, oh, I don't think that the identity category woman is actually something we can effectively organize around.

Like, it's not in an essentialist way, right?

Like, so it's in some way, like, their point at the time was like anti-identity politics, right?

Meanwhile, the critics of so-called identity politics very often are TERFs, which, like, I'm sorry, like, if anything deserves that label, it would be that, right?

They're like, oh, you know, women are naturally one way, and that's what we should base our politics on.

Like, I'm sorry, that feels like it really, it certainly quacks and looks like a duck.

Yeah.

Right.

And that, but that's somehow exempt, right?

So it's basically just like, do minorities do it?

Yep.

Well, then, awesome.

Then it goes on the pile, basically.

Right, right, right.

The fact that, like, the longer you use this, the shoddier this term really gets.

And it always includes this kind of narrative, like the left used to care about like real issues, whatever they are, and now it's like all about identity.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, universal values, yeah.

And like bullshit, like this is a thing that, like, in this 1970s, like people like Christopher Lash critiqued about the new left, right?

Uh, what's his name?

Todd Gitlin, is that his name?

Like, said that in the 70s.

Like, there are people making that argument about the 1970s, and they made it in the 1980s and the 1990s.

It's always like, hey, remember when you were politically active?

Like, that was okay.

That didn't count.

But the thing that the kids are doing now, that's identity politics.

Every fucking five years, it's like, read a goddamn history book.

Sorry, this is like, this is like my

reading for this, I read a bunch of old Pamela Paul columns, obviously.

Nice.

And she has one about like political correctness like used to be funny.

And the whole kind of premise of it is that like in the 90s, people, you know, complained about political correctness, but like there was a sort of jokiness or like a non-seriousness because the stakes were low of like the things people were asking for in the 90s.

But now, and then blah, blah, blah.

But it's like, well, at the time in the 1990s, they said exactly the same thing as now.

They said that like this is an anti-democratic movement that is like going to, you know, take us over the cliff.

And it was like a bunch of college sophomores.

And it's like, we're still doing college sophomore discourse now.

So all that's happening is you're looking back at the exact same fucking panic because it never ends, right?

We've been doing this for like 40 years.

You're looking back at previous iterations of it and going, eh, it's not that big of a deal.

Pamela, maybe it's not that big of a deal now.

Like, what is the fucking point then?

The previous 14 times we cried wolf, the wolf wasn't there.

But I've got a real good feeling about the wolf this time.

Totally.

I mean, right, like, was Pamela Paul tell me whether Newsweek was joking when it put the big words thought police on their cover?

Oh, I'm sorry.

Did I, did I miss the wink fucking emoji in 1992?

Yeah, it's a much more academic debate and like every feelings were not too inflamed.

Like, no, it's the same thing as it fucking was now.

We're just doing the same thing.

And Yasha Monk is in his book very explicit about the fact that he's just doing identity politics.

He's like, you know, they call it woke, they call it identity politics.

It's gone under different names, but like we should all just agree on a term and discuss it.

So he's basically admitting that like this is just the same thing we've been doing for at least 30 years now and giving no new insights or information to it at all.

He's just like, no, no, we're just continuing it.

It's incredible to me to acknowledge that and just do it anyway.

It's not like it's been, you know, a particularly robust.

intellectual discourse.

Like as you said, Michael, it's

superficial complaints based on imaginary threats, repeated ad nauseum for going on now, like 30 years.

Oh, wait, can I do one of my discourses?

This leads to my, what was going to be my third discourse, because this is basically the same as yours, Adrian.

But like the year in word wars.

Like if you look back at like the most cursed bullshit all year, there was an entire Pamela Paul column in the New York Times about like.

why it's bad to call prostitutes sex workers.

Oh, yeah.

It's like what we lose when we say sex workers.

I don't fucking care, Pamela.

What does this really matter, right?

And then the most cursed Adrian, I don't know if you even saw this, but David Sederis did like a little video thing, like a little video commentary, Andy Rooney style for CBS News, where he's like, I don't want to call myself queer.

His, the kind of alleged joke that's built around is like, I identify as straight because I used to identify as a homosexual and then I was gay and then I was LGBT and now I'm queer and I'm so sick of rebranding, I'm just going to call myself straight because anybody can be anything these days and it's like shut the fuck shut the fuck up it's so boring just like and and his whole thing I wrote quotes because I was so mad this morning oh yeah he says I don't know why I have to be rebranded for the fourth time in my life and like David nobody is making you call yourself queer if you want to identify as gay yeah I forgot you existed until just now and I was

real

in the prelapsal time of five seconds ago, when I forgot that David Zederis was ever a thing.

And then he also, in this video, he says, I had a conversation with a woman who identifies as queer because she's tall.

Like she's never been with a woman, but she identifies as queer because she's tall.

And it's like,

this is another great grand tradition of the fucking identity politics thing is just making shit up.

I met a woman who I made up.

Yeah, that sounds like not a thing that happens.

Yeah, by met, I mean made up.

Or like maybe he misheard something or something.

It's like so many of these anecdotes.

You've had this experience, Adrian.

You're like, oh, yeah.

Oh, I know it's fucking fake, but like, now I got to go look into it.

Like, this is so dumb.

A lot of the language wars,

and I'm thinking specifically, like, this is basically Pamela Paul's whole beat.

Well, and this whole thing.

I mean, this, like, they're trying to change the way we talk is like one of the main arguments against identity politics, which drives me absolutely fucking crazy.

Right, but like the, the, they, the they that's being referred to is actually a hyper-specific set of like slightly younger than me, liberal and leftist, whose worldviews I understand from seeing them online and being annoyed, right?

It's like actually a very, very small section of people.

And the pressure that's being identified is just like the visibility of other approaches to the language or to the way of life, you know, like today I got drawn into a discourse today about this.

article that you know blamed partly blamed a decline in birth rates on like an excess of women on social media talking about how hard it is to be a mother.

Nice.

And it's like, this article on the box is like, this is what's making it hard for, you know, millennial women like me to like take the plunge and admit that we want to have children because there's so much social media about how having children is hard.

And I'm like, no, what you've actually identified is that you want or like kind of need everybody around you to be affirming your way of life and your choices 100% of the time.

It's one of these classic like accusation is a confession things

from the like anti-identity politics, right?

Or like sort of the Pamela Paul freak out set is that they point

to the people they dislike as being so sensitive and of needing so much accommodation from others.

And then the actual substance of their complaint is, I am not getting constant accommodation and cheerleading from others.

for every worldview and opinion I ever have.

It's like, it's quite like cowardly and fragile in a way.

It's like you need the whole rest of your visible world to be constantly cheerleading for your worldview and not advocating or even expressing another one.

That's sort of what my book's about on cancer culture, right?

That like that contradiction is the secret principle of the thing, right?

That like it's a discourse that tells you that your own hypersensitivities have a different status than those of others, right?

That like the person who like is sensitive in their language, but triggers you, like that's their problem.

That's not your problem, right?

Like it allows you to feel like some kind of bold truth teller because like a a person that you either misunderstood or made up like said something to you that like really seems to fuck you up, even though, frankly, like, I don't quite see why you can't just deal, you know?

Yeah, the thing that I always think about is like, sort of in urban debates, people lose their fucking minds about parking.

Like, there's no parking spots near my house or whatever.

And then, when you actually get back to it, what people are actually mad about is having to walk like three minutes from their car.

It's actually like very low stakes.

And I feel like with 99.9% of the language stuff, it's like, we're talking about you getting a couple emails.

Right.

Right.

If Pamela Paul does not want to say pregnant people in her columns, like I think that's pretty mean and silly of her.

But every time she refuses to say that in a column, she's going to get a couple emails being like, hey, this feels bad to me.

That's the whole thing.

There's no like free speech, anything.

Like there's other things in language.

If you don't want to say like flight attendants and you want to say stewardesses, and that's the hill you want to die on, you're like, no, I'm not going to change my language.

You can.

No one's going to send you to jail.

You're just going to to get some fucking emails from people being like, yeah, it's really weird that you continue to insist on saying stewardesses.

And like, with all the language stuff, that's all we're talking about, right?

It's like, if David Sederis, I don't actually even think he'd get a single email, but it's like, if people were mad at him for not saying queer, maybe he'd get some emails.

Okay.

And it's one of those things that feels, yeah, we called it sort of anti-rooney-ish, but like we should be clear that like on the European far right, which has a lot more gay people than the American one, I would say, This idea that I'm not queer, I'm in a committed same-sex relationship is like extremely prevalent.

So, like, that's the other thing.

Like, these discourses, sort of like, this, this is sort of the tendrils of some pretty far-right things that, like, this, the anti-queer, anti-gender stuff, like, come in this kind of all shucks guise and be like, oh, kids these days are saying the darndest things, right?

Like, but in the end, like, the reason you're picking on those words is because like some pretty hellacious political actors, some pretty scary people have decided to make those culture war issues.

Like, obviously, it doesn't bear responsibility for that, but like it's noticeable, right?

Like in the 90s, one thing that we did have in the 90s that I think we have less of today are these made-up PC terms, right?

Like botanically challenged, ho, ho, ho, right.

Like now, like we tend to pick actual terms or terms relating to actually beleaguered minorities.

And very frequently, it kind of comes with this thing in the background where it's like, and maybe they deserve some of what's coming to them.

Like, it's like, like the whole pronouns thing, we all can use pronouns, right?

We all use pronouns, but they're mostly thinking about trans people, right?

Like, that's the scary, that's the nasty part there, that like you don't get mad about language change in general.

Right.

You're expressing this approval of language change in a way that will signal to certain minorities, like, yeah, if I, if I get my way, uh, I'm going to kill you, right?

Like, I'm coming for you.

And then when people are like, it kind of feels like you're coming for me, you're like, oh, you easily triggered Snowflake.

You know, how could you, right?

Yeah, no one is melting down over like people not understanding the difference between like disinterested and uninterested, right?

Or like these other like ways that the language just sort of shifts over time, or like something that was incorrect eventually becomes correct.

People don't like lose their minds about that shit, it's only the identity works.

This might bring us nicely to my third and final cursed discourse.

Birth rates.

Which was

actually not about birth rates.

I bundled that in.

I think birth rates, birth rates, marriage, male loneliness, that's one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I could talk about it for days, but I've already made Adrienne do two episodes and probably another one in the future.

So I actually wanted to talk about something I reached back to, I had sort of forgotten about this.

It was in February of 2023 that the CDC released its data on a large survey it does every couple of years on teenage mental health.

Does anybody remember this?

Oh, this was one of mine.

Really?

Yeah.

The teen mental health crisis.

The teen girl crisis.

Yeah.

There's just been a lot of discourse about teen girls and like what ails teen girls all you know.

My bugaboo was that like actually a lot of the differences in the data got obscured right was because what it showed

what the data showed was that mental health outcomes were dramatically worse for girls than for boys and that was across measures of things like reported depression and anxiety suicidal ideation suicide attempts like a large range of like pretty serious mental health factors and girls were faring dramatically worse than boys were that data was even more distinguished for things like, you know, transgender, gender non-conforming, LGBT youth.

They were doing worse.

And then a real dramatic outlier was teenage girls who belonged to Indigenous Native American groups.

They were doing like particularly bad.

And this got sort of digested by the pundit class in ways that A, erased much of the gender difference, B, uniformly erased what I thought was some of the most important part of the data, which showed a dramatic increase in rates of sexual violence experienced by teenage girls.

But then it just became like, you know, the headline, teens are in crisis.

What do we do about it?

And every pundit in America decided that the reasons teens were in crisis was because of whatever they were already mad about.

Oh my God, that's exactly what I was going to say.

It's so boring.

And it mostly, it was a lot of stuff like kids and their damn phones.

It was a lot of people blaming

social media, even though the data had gotten worse since its last taking.

I think it's an every two-year survey.

So the previous data from which this like dramatic decrease in teens' mental health had been documented was from an era in which teens were already using social media kind of habitually.

It was like only a two-year difference.

So that's not really like an accurate measure of the impact of social media because social media was there already.

There was not really a ton of grappling with the pandemic, which had been the big intervention since the previous data collection.

And there wasn't like really any acknowledgement of the sexual violence crisis facing teen girls.

It's like, you know, if you've got like one in three teenage girls reporting that they've experienced some version of sexual assault, yeah, I would think that would provoke some mental health difficulties.

And if you've got, you know, dramatic outliers of mental health crises among populations like Indigenous teens who are also facing, you know, like a lot of circumscribed possibilities, who are like more likely to be in poverty, who probably have, you know, more racial marginalization and like fewer opportunities in their future as they like move towards leaving high school.

Like, yeah, that would, I imagine, engender some mental health crises.

You know, there was like not a willingness to like look at the data in context.

It was just an assignment of.

It's the fucking phones.

Right.

It's always the fucking phones, anything with teens.

It was really like, get off my lawn.

You know, it's like, this is the thing that wasn't there when I was a teenager.

And therefore, therefore, it's got to be the new scary thing that's endangering our country.

I was faintly aware of this discourse.

Was there anyone who was like, is it because of woke?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes, I was just going to say this, that the thing that struck me about also the marriage birth rates bullshit and also this was the extent to which the conversation was led by conservatives, right?

That like a lot of these alleged.

kind of like the new data is out and here's what it says about teen health crisis.

They'll interview Jean Twenge, who's this like, it's the kids in their phones person.

Like that's her one shtick.

She came out with like her third book this year saying exactly this.

And she's like presented as this kind of neutral arbiter, but like her work is not considered very valuable by like actual academics in the field.

But like she's able to lead this.

And Jonathan Haidt, who's also presented as a expert on this, has a whole like thing about like why liberal kids, why like why it's so much worse among like left-leaning girls.

And his whole thing is like, well, because of the trigger warnings like they've been they've been coddled and like that's why like they're so much more depressed they can't handle all the challenges but it's like oh so the thing you wrote a book about yeah yeah the coddling of the american mind their minds are too fucking coddled so like here we are it's like okay like this is just like you like hammering the same fucking drum you've been hammering for like a decade but it's like these people are presented as just like neutral arbiters of like what does the data say and all of these like if you google it's everywhere these two people talking about this well and also i mean if as morris pointing out if this changes from within the last two years, Coddling of the American Mind came out, what, in 2017, 2018, the data they were drawing on is earlier.

Those kids are like your dentist now, right?

Like,

they're old, right?

Like, the coddling of the American periodontist, yeah.

Yeah, this is like, you know,

wouldn't potentially a recent pandemic be a much, you know, I'm not saying that is the explanation, but like it is a thing that manifestly happened in the last two years, as opposed to, you know, the coddling of the American mind, which is supposed to have happened over generations and it's not reflected in this change of the data.

Well, what drove me nuts is like as a broader critique of just like even the concept of discourse for this issue specifically is like everyone sort of has this one little data point, right?

This one report comes out from the CDC and then everyone fucking leaps to like their take on it, right?

And like the pundit economy is based on like this new news thing happened.

There's like a news hook and we're all talking about something and you have all these people who are like half informed or uninformed about the topic weighing in.

And like this is a huge field and like goes back for more than a decade.

And like the rise in like teen anxiety, depression, suicidality among teens is a vast literature.

And you have all these people who don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

And like my like entire thing with this was that like, it's really fucking weird to say that it's all the phones.

It's really weird to say it's not the phones.

Like it's just really hard to measure because everything's just correlation, right?

It's like kids that use their phones are more depressed.

Okay, well, are they depressed because they're using their phones?

Are they using their phones because they're oppressed?

We can't really say that much.

And then everything is fucking self-reported.

We have a culture that is like, we're much more open.

There's much less stigma about talking about things like anxiety, depression, suicidality than there used to be.

So like there's some level of like people are now getting diagnosed with things that they had.

It's like, it's so complicated to even know at the most basic level what is the phenomenon that we are talking about.

And like, as you mentioned with like the racial stratification and like education and poverty and stuff, it's like the data is usually garbage.

Different surveys find different things.

And like everyone, instead of conveying like the super fundamental murkiness of like, what is the phenomenon in front of us?

How is it changed over time?

The data in the 90s is even fucking worse.

Like no one is conveying this to people that like we just don't actually have a great picture of even what's going on.

But rather than conveying that, we then get to these interpretations and everybody sort of lands on an interpretation and like, this is why all the kids are sad now.

But like, we don't actually know that the kids are sad now.

Maybe the kids were sad all the time, but they weren't reporting it in the 1990s.

And there's like, there was, I think there was like a big spike in the late 90s and then it went down and now it's up again.

So you also kind of have to explain that.

It's like, it's just really complicated.

And like, I've actually spent a decent amount of time reading about this, but also I don't feel comfortable saying fucking anything because it's so complex and everybody's opinions are so like coagulated on just like what they already think the problem is.

Michael, do you mean to tell me that there might not be one particular explanation for the emotional state of millions of people?

It's just like really hard.

I still think that like the actual phenomenon is what we need a clearer picture on because my understanding is that some of the rise in suicides, like actual completed suicides or attempted suicides in young people, is partly because they changed the coding.

for emergency rooms that they're now more likely to write down like suicide attempt.

And so that looks like an increase in suicide attempts, but it might not be.

It also might be an increase of suicide attempts at the same time as the methodology changed.

But like there's shit like that.

That like you don't know if we're actually talking about a real thing.

And this has happened before, that something that looked like a huge increase in suicides among youth were actually just MEs being more likely to write down suicide because the stigma against it went down.

I believe this was in the 60s and 70s.

So again, it's like, you have to start with the basis of what the fuck we're talking about.

And then we can do our pontificating.

But the entire culture just rushes to pontificate.

And then a bunch of people who like half read an article or like half read a headline or whatever.

It's like kids are sad because they're on their phones.

Like people get these kinds of impressions without a clear picture of the actual phenomenon underneath it.

Well, it does feel like we're having that conversation in order not to have some others.

And I don't even mean that like, it's not like with guns, like where we all know what the end would be and we just try to like not talk about that.

Yeah.

It's that the questions are really difficult.

There's a colleague at Stanford who's been doing native mental health for years.

And like to look at her studies, it's like, it is noisy data.

She's just like, you know, she's, it's longitudinal studies.

It takes forever.

And like, I think what she's finding out is super interesting, but like, that is her life's work.

It's like, you know, like, you're not getting a really cool sound bite out of that researcher.

You're getting, oh, it's complicated.

Here are a bunch of things playing together.

Here are some things that definitely should happen.

But can I promise you that that'll fix it?

No, right?

Like, that's the kind of, that's what expertise looks like.

And like, yeah, of course, like, why go for that if you can like have Jonathan Haidt like shoot his mouth off about it's the trigger warning the trigger warnings yeah yeah yeah yeah they're not resilient enough right and also that was a big that was a big explanation yeah like I don't know if you've looked into this more recently Moira but what I remember from then is that like suicides among teens actually went down during the pandemic which like I don't know if that means that kids are less sad or if that means that they're just more closely monitored by their parents and they had fewer opportunities.

But even stuff like that, and then the rise of guns too, it's like, is it easier to kill yourself now?

Is it harder?

Like, I feel like all this stuff is so granular.

And there's things, like, I think there's a tendency of people to sort of resort to things like, the kids are sad because of climate change.

And like, that also seems a little one-dimensional, to me, honestly.

But like,

it might not be like as ideological as we think it is.

It might be like more logistical.

And like, it's so hard to find like someone who's like a good faith interlocutor, like looking into this because everyone seems to have all this pre-existing stuff.

And like, I would like someone to just walk me through the fucking research, but I haven't found somebody that I like basically like trust to do that yet because everyone's just like leaping to like their pre-existing thing or the thing they wrote a book about 10 years ago.

Yeah, I mean, it's tricky, right?

Because on the one hand, you always want to avoid kind of talking about mental health.

in a purely therapeutic way where you're like acting as though the world is fine and like you're like what are these people making a fuss it's like no the world is objectively pretty fucked up and like it one could see why someone would come to the conclusion that it's depressing yeah right on the other hand we all know from our own mental health that like it's not all about like reactivity to the world outside right like and you know anyone who's been around folks with mental health crises like knows that it can be entirely independent of that so like both of those things are true and we all know them to be true it's weird how like when we once we're talking about like young people we somehow think that there's like this like direct causality or this direct expression to things that we experience in our everyday lives to be pretty fucking complicated right?

You're like, the world's going to shit and I'm feeling fine actually right now, right?

Like, absolutely.

Like, I feel like that's, that's kind of all of our modes, or like, or it's beautiful out and I still feel like, like fucking shit, you know, like it's like, we know this to be true.

Why are we not giving young people that level of murkiness and complexity?

My mood is at least 90% weather dependent.

So I welcome climate change.

Bring it on.

More sunny days.

A happier mic.

Can't help but notice you're living in Seattle.

That's the mistake.

Why would you live in Seattle if you're weather dependent in terms of moods?

Because my parents are here and they depress me even more than the rain.

Oh, excellent.

I just want to be as miserable as possible.

Wait, didn't you have another one, Adrian?

Do we do your third one?

I do have another one.

This one might be cheating.

It's about gender, but in an immediate way.

And it gets to something that we've already alluded to that Michael likes to do, which is biking, which is about car discourse.

I feel like this, one of the cursed discourses of this year, and I noticed this because I monitor the discourse both in the United States and in Europe, is that like the full-on cultural warification of car discourse.

Yeah, I think that there's some kind of Rubicon.

Like, it's not like it wasn't before.

People were rolling coal before, but like something it went full-on, right?

Like, oh, dude, yeah, there's like we mentioned the sort of no kink at pride, like having the same fight every fucking year, even though it's fake.

Dude, the bike versus the car people, it's like it's the same debate every fucking day.

Nothing changes.

Are bikers good?

Do bikers run red lights?

Is there a war on cars?

It's the same fucking thing all the time.

And so like a couple of data points here, just for people who have been somehow blessedly spared this, if you exist, you sweet summer children.

It would be, you know, stuff like the US kind of having a minor freak out about e-bikes because like kids are riding e-bikes and are getting killed.

And then you're like, it's like that, that like, what opinions, motherfuckers?

Like, how are they getting killed, motherfucker?

Yeah.

Like,

it was always a clip by a truck that like didn't signal on a right turn and like yeah i kind of like not to say that like kids shouldn't like cool it with the e-bikes but like kind of feels like this is a car problem like in a sense as a driver not a biker right like it's weird if we're like oh how did this kid end up on an e-bikes like how did that truck end up making a right turn on the red light

or the scooter discourse where it's like oh they're out of control and like we need to limit them to 15 miles an hour and like the entire internet is like wait till I tell you about cars motherfucker why are we not limiting them

yeah yeah including in a country here where like there is a legal limit right like at least in Germany right like they don't have one so like it's like in principle yeah I guess you can go 200 kilometers per hour you know but like whatever so there's that then there's like Berlin was recently voted in which is a city i know Michael has biked in quite a bit uh recently voted in a what it's called you know a coalition led by the conservative cdu and their first thing was like to get rid of all basically all corona era like carless streets scarlitzerstrasse yeah yeah uh friedrichstrasse right so like all these fucking places that like i've driven in berlin i would never fucking go there that's insane like why would you it's it's a busy shopping street like there it's a grid there too like you could just just take a parallel street that whole section of the city should be closed to cars it's on the i mean like it's just like an excuse to like stand in traffic.

Like, why would you no one would go there?

Come on.

So, there's that.

And then there was an article I meant to send to you, Michael, but it's very, very funny.

This is a German editor who, if he's a listener, Hei Wolf, who like is like my absolute béte noir.

He's like, he's the fucking worst.

He knows it too.

He's the fucking worst.

Writing a whole column about how like anyone can build electric cars, but gas cars are, quote, high culture.

Right?

Not everyone can build it.

I know.

Whatever, man.

I'm like, I'm like, you're just like working out some shit here, man.

Like, I'm just like.

Just a tube of diesel that he's just laughing at.

Yeah, like a, like a little,

like a little hamster being like,

it's just like, so like the fact that like, I feel like there was an implicit gender politics behind this kind of car and bike discourse until this year.

And now they're like, what's subtext?

We took subtext if we ran it over with our fucking gas burning car, right?

My cyber truck, which is immune to penetration by

cyber truck.

Oh, God.

Yeah, I mean, and also, like, less facetiously, there's also a huge rise in fatalities among cyclists and pedestrians in the United States, like an unprecedented rise, which that's another one that everybody blames on phones, which I think is obviously a factor, but they have phones in European countries and they're not seeing rises in pedestrian bike fatalities.

So, like, there's something, I think the phones are part of it, but like there's something else going on that makes America uniquely bad on like pedestrians and cyclists getting killed.

And it's like, I think it's like a 30% increase.

It's like really bad.

It's also quite reasonable.

It's like mostly kids, a lot of low-income kids.

It's like, it's a huge crisis, but it's not sort of like cast as the same kind of crisis.

as other things that are more acute because people think of it as kind of background noise.

Well, and I mean, those two things I think are not mutually exclusive, right?

Like on the one hand, traffic deaths have always been background noise in the U.S.

At the same time, like they've always been a way of telegraphing whose lives were worth something, right?

I always think about the fact that, like, if you've driven in San Francisco or biked in San Francisco, right, stop signs at every fucking intersection all the time, right?

And then there's these areas with only traffic lights where the lights are, I mean, they're getting rid of that now, thank goodness.

But like, when I first moved to the city, and until I think about two or three years ago, when a good, good-hearted supervisor finally got involved, like in the tenderloin, right, which are like, as I think the most kids in the entire city, but they tend not to be white, right?

It's like all one-way streets.

Everyone's going fucking fast.

Everyone's telling these stories about like, oh, you get carjacked if you stop there.

So people just like fucking step on it.

It's not true, but like whatever.

You guys can listen to several episodes of Michaels and Peter's podcast.

You had a nice sort of San Francisco trilogy there, which

was very much about this.

Right.

And like, it's all about like, well, kids growing up there don't really deserve like their deaths are kind of priced in.

Right.

right and i think that it's not an accident that we're seeing this rise in a moment right after we've all sort of accommodated ourselves to mass death in covid right where like right the people who who um are dying deserved it anyway right like that's kind of like what half the country seem to be thinking anyway why should i be mildly inconvenienced by this mask or whatever right like like fuck granny right like and this is basically fuck granny but like

with a bigger engine, I guess.

Dude, I, yeah, I got in like a fairly minor bike accident recently.

I like fell down on some like trolley tracks.

Like

once every couple years, if you bike in a city, but like the weirdest thing was like, this was like 4 p.m.

on a Thursday or something and nobody stopped.

Oh, like the trolley went by.

Cars just like went around me.

And I think I'm totally projecting here, but I guess the idea is like, well, it's his fault.

You know, he fell.

Like, I don't need to pull over and like ask if he's fine.

But it was like so radicalizing that like I wasn't super injured, but like I was like visibly bleeding.

wow and like no one checked to see if i was okay

and like that was so like scary that it's your if you're sort of i guess a societal out group or like people think it's like gay or feminine or whatever to bike and like i shouldn't be biking here anyway it's like oh well then he like deserves to fall down and be like bleeding in the street it was so weird plus maybe you were trafficking right you were you were just pretending to bleed so that you could traffic someone

they thought i had my i had my zip ties with me yeah

they spotted me from a mile away

It's hard not to project, right?

And to think about like cars are obviously how we, it's the easiest way to telegraph whose safety and security and comfort we value in a society, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I also can't help but think, again, going back to one of your podcasts, of an amazing scene in a book by a friend of the pod, David Brooks, in one of his books, right, where he's like, this person didn't run me over with their car.

Pussy.

Oh, yeah.

It's like these Vermont liberals

stop for you at an an intersection.

Yeah, they're like latte sipping, like they wouldn't even run me over, right?

Like, to bring it, bro.

I also have qualms with whoever did not run David over.

So I'm going to get the car.

Come on, Liz, get it together.

Let's do this.

Yeah.

But I think there's also, I mean, not to be like super mean to dudes, but there's also like this weird kind of male entitlement thing in like driving politics where like it's very difficult i've found to get people to see beyond their own individual experience right if you're like hey we should have like more bike lanes protected and you're like well i don't want to bike and like great you don't have to bike like even in the netherlands the famous netherlands it's only like 50 of trips are by bike like people drive there people do other people there's other ways of getting around there and so just because you individually don't want to bike or can't or you live on a hill or whatever the fact that we have like safe ways for kids to bike to school like just is a societal good right And the more like biking does not pollute and driving does.

And so, we should probably try to shift people from the polluting way of getting around to the non-polluting way of getting around.

But it's like people, you hit this wall with people where they're like, Well, I can't bike because it's cold.

Okay,

I'm not going to make you bike.

But there are many people in the city who can't afford a car, or like they don't mind the cold as much, or like they have shorter trips and they want to bike.

And right now, they can't really do that because it's unsafe.

But like that break between individual and societal good, I feel like there's just something so kind of like sort of conservative about it, where it's like you're just trying to get somebody to see things from another person's perspective.

And they're seeing it as this like imposition.

Like you're going to come door to door and like take their car away from them.

Right.

And like it's not an attack on you.

It's really just so other people can do something they want to do.

If you don't want to do it, you don't have to.

That's step two, but like, let's not put that in there.

That reminds me a little bit of the language wars, right?

The idea that other people are living a different way and are visible to you and might even, you know, have some public policy or resources designed to accommodate their different life, that this is an imposition on your way of life is, you know, a common thread.

I think this also reminds me a little bit of what we talked about, Adrian, in our gay marriage episode about the argument that gay marriage would devalue straight marriage.

It's like acknowledgement of other ways of life will demean me because I do not just need to be free.

I need to be hegemonic.

I need to be exclusive in my worldview.

And it's like, it's quite fragile, actually.

It's like quite like defensively, like proudly myopic, but also just like afraid of difference in this way that seems like, you know, like kind of morally immature.

I think you're absolutely right.

I think that's exactly spot on, right?

The car is a way to make your own personal choices.

hegemonic for other people, right?

Like you can ignore a biker.

It's a lot harder to ignore someone driving a fucking huge truck.

Yeah.

You change social space around you when you do that, right?

And it's like this way that your choices can radiate outward way more than if someone chooses to walk, right?

Like it's really not

that big a deal.

You restructure space through your particular, your own individual choices about how you decided to get butter right now.

Like that's how you change the character of the urban environment or the suburban environment around you.

And I think that's exactly right.

That like that there's a certain kind of expectation that comes from it.

And the fragility is part of it, right?

Like we have these cars that are like getting quote unquote safer and safer.

And what are they getting safer at?

They're getting safer for the people driving in them.

Imagining increasingly outlandish scenarios, including the cyber truck, which like is apparently like set up to survive Mad Max Fury Road or whatever.

In case Immortant Joe comes for you.

But what they mostly do is endanger other people, right?

They make other people's days manifestly more dangerous by you being involved in any way.

Right.

There's also the like the sort of conservative conception of the car as freedom.

There's a Proger You video about the war cars that I watch sometimes because it's like such a fucking rich text.

And the whole thing is that, like, you know, a car allows you to go sort of door to door from one place to another place directly where it's a train.

You have to go there and you have to wait, whatever.

And so this is like cuck shit to like wait six minutes for the train or whatever.

But like, first of all, that's the door-to-door thing is true of like walking and biking too.

So it's not unique to cars.

But also there's this really interesting thing where they cast cars as sort of fundamental freedom.

But if everybody drives a car, it now takes you three times as long to get to where you're going.

Right.

So it's this kind of great metaphor for how like an individual freedom, like an individual conception of freedom actually makes everybody worse off.

Yeah.

Right.

If you've ever been to like developing world cities, like in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where I went for a project once, it's like the traffic goes at like two miles an hour.

It takes hours to get anywhere because there's not that many roads and like they're all clogged with cars.

And there's like buses with like hundreds of people in them that are sitting in the same traffic as like one lady with like three empty seats in her car.

And it's like, it makes everybody worse off to have this much traffic.

But it's like in this individual conception of freedom of like, well, I get to do what I want.

It's like, well, you kind of don't.

Cause like in a society, we all affect each other.

Yeah.

So it's not a meaningful understanding of freedom in this particular context.

Because when everybody does something, it makes it shittier for everybody.

But it's like there's this weird, again, this kind of like refusal to consider things in that way.

Now I brought us down.

I bummed us all out.

I'm sorry.

No, that's perfect.

Well, I think we can take it back up again by nominating

our Kirstie.

Who wins the Kirstie for 2023?

Yeah.

Oh, you want to do honorable mentions?

Quick honorable mentions?

Do dishonorable mentions.

Did anyone have like things that almost made the cut?

I had an honorable mention.

I was like, I don't know if this is actually cursed because I think it has made me think more deeply about this, but I feel like there have been

some kind of curse discourses around the concept of trauma.

This is not bringing us back up.

I'm sorry.

Failure.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Quite the New York Magazine cover story, and I want to say like September.

Profile of Betsel van der Kolk, kind of takedowny that like investigates the concept of trauma, not only as it has been clinically defined in Van der Kolk's psychiatric school, which is very like somatic oriented, but also as it has become a sort of a locus of epistemic authority within these discourses of quote-unquote identity politics, right?

I think this is sort of like actually a reaction to Me Too that nobody wants to admit is a reaction to me too.

You know, it's like what you're actually saying is that when you say that trauma should not be a locus of,

you know, political authority, what you're actually talking about without saying it is like all these rape victims who you don't particularly want to have to listen to that much or whose, you know, truthfulness you want more authority and leeway to sort of doubt.

So I think that's like one of the threads running through trauma.

But I also think that there's legitimate critiques of this like subject position and it's like sort of political imperatives that have been sort of clicked through it that have arisen, especially over the past few months, that I think have like actually really deserve more critique.

But I just do not trust any of my interlocutors in the public sphere to do that in good faith and in a way that does not act ultimately fuel an anti-feminist project that is you know antithetical to what I have devoted my life to.

So, this is an anxious, kirsty, honorable mention.

It's like a good and bad discourse i have a domination that's very get off my lawn kids kind of thing which is oh yeah white people making weirdly like disgusting like deliberately disgusting tick tock food videos oh the fetish content i think it may have started out that way but it now is mostly like in order to bait mostly creators of color to like duet with it using the tick tock duet function and comment on how gross it all is and it's like i just feel bad for the the amount of mayonnaise that gets wasted.

Like, kids, this is a like, don't, don't do this.

Don't do this at home.

Anyway, that was mine.

Someone's cleaning up their sink.

Like, why did I do this?

What is this virality worth it?

Okay, I have one that I feel like neither one of you guys are going to know anything about because you're both like smart people, like academics who like read shit.

I got like weirdly obsessed with, did you guys follow the Shein influencer junket?

No.

No, where they

was that one like self-love influencer who went to the Shein confidence activist.

Yes.

What the hell does that mean?

And she like went to the sweatshop and like

so.

Yeah, it's this low-cost fashion brand, which I had never heard of before.

Cause again, we have like different internet algorithms.

So like, I don't get fed this shit, but it's like, yeah, fast fashion.

And they've been accused of having like sweatshops and stuff.

And so they found a bunch of influencers to do like a like a North Korea like junket tour of like, we're going to show you our factory, but like obviously they're not really going to show you the factory.

So they found what appear to be like some of this is going to sound mean, but like some of the dumbest people on TikTok to go send out.

And one of them was this woman who like in her like bio thing was like under her, like as her title was like confidence activist, which the whole internet was like, come on, what the fuck is this?

And then I, like every other gay man on the internet, I got like super obsessed with this lady because she's just like, she honestly like seems like a nice person.

I don't want to like go overboard, but also she doesn't like, they're sending people out there who just don't know very much about like apparel or sweatshops.

And like, I kind of sort of did this for a living when I worked in international development.

I did a lot of stuff with apparel companies.

And like none of these people have like even the most basic understanding of like how this, how this works.

Her defense, because obviously she got like super duper criticized for like you're just going on this like fake tour and then you're promoting the brand and saying like i checked they don't have sweatshops you guys her defense against all of this criticism was she's like i know i know they're serious about this you guys because like they paid me like so much like you guys don't even know like they paid me like a lot of money you guys and she's bless you she's just saying this as if like oh if we knew that she was getting paid a lot we'd be like oh in that case, this company's very serious about sweatshops.

And I was just like, oh, I don't think she's like a bad person.

I think it's just like they found people who don't have a lot of like a sort of an in-depth understanding of foreign policy.

And it was like, look, the size of the bribe would indicate that this oil company takes this spill very seriously.

It's just, they're investing in their response.

And like, man, some people on the internet were like too mean to her, I think, but like, it's also just so funny to me to defend this by being like, guys, I got a lot of money for this.

Anyway, she got her bag.

Fair enough.

You know, I don't know.

There's worse people in the world.

I don't know.

I don't think it's fair to get paid

for

being a sweatshop apologist.

I mean, it's very

bad.

She identifies as fat.

She had a lot of fat phobic fucking bullshit as well.

And like, there's the, you know, there's like the mean criticism.

And then I think there's like the good faith criticism.

And I'm like really trying to stay on like the good faith criticism.

and look she she said she was a confidence woman in her in her body

people get me like shorten that give us a shorter definition

so that was I don't know if that's cursed discourse but it was like I

didn't tweet about it I was like this is like my my shallowest like my worst self but I really got obsessed those are I mean wow we we really we have a lot to go on um but I guess now we move to the votes I note my vote my vote of the most cursed discourse is

Michael Hobbes nominee, the language wars.

I think that is cursed.

I think it is stupid.

I think it is especially vacuous.

And that is my, that is my vote for the cursed D of 2023.

Yeah, I like it.

I think I'm going to have to go the same way because it's also the one that's been with us the longest.

And I feel like, right, like when something new comes down the pike, it's kind of understandable.

It's some people whose job it would be to question things.

I can fall down on the job for a couple of years we've been falling asleep on they've been falling asleep on the job for 35 years like this needs to people have like retired having done this right right like that is officially too long like this is right you know indeed no the children are wrong yeah

i'm with more of my actual one is all the marriage discourse all year of like does marriage help people but you know, birth rates, all this fucking nightmare bullshit that we've had all year.

But like you guys said, you've covered it before.

So for, in the interest of brevity, I will, I'll go with the word wars.

That's another one that we're just never going to not have.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess also because it's unlike the marriage thing, we're like gender conservatism could easily find another venue, right?

And when we talked to Rebecca Traister, she made that point that like it goes away and then comes back.

The word wars thing is like, it's also so fucking easy to do.

And so I think that's part of why it just never goes away because someone's like, oh shit, did I have a column due tomorrow?

Ah, fuck fuck it.

Did someone use a use a word and or not use a word in an Instagram tile?

Like, sweet.

Right.

I can shit this out and still get a little bit of sleep in.

And like, I think as long as there's going to be, you know, deadlines, like there are going to be journalists who are like, who go for this?

The real problem is deadlines.

Yeah.

All right.

I think there you have it, folks.

the worst discourse.

You heard it here first.

Yeah.

All right.

Thank you so much to Michael Hobbs.

Thanks, guys.

Our esteemed guests.

Thanks for giving me a practice run on this.

I can't wait for next year's Cursed Discourses, and I hope we get to have you back because there will be worse.

It will only get worse.

Have me back to talk about the Shein influencer for like two hours.

In Bed with the Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Kalthis.