Episode 6: Perverts, Creeps and Priests!

Like the one thing that masculinity always has in common is the oppression of women.

That's like a really consistent theme.

Hello and welcome.

I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we are in bed with the right.

Today is the long-awaited sequel to our pilot episode on masculinity uh to be followed by many more episodes on masculinity you know it's like this relates i would say to um the first one the way aliens relates to alien right there's an s and uh there's a lot more things bursting out of people anyway that's uh that's that's how i see this episode going yeah so in our last episode we talked about you know a recent media panic over the crisis of masculinity and we did sort of a survey of where this concept of masculinity and crisis has come from, what its history looks like, when it becomes an emergency, and when it's not.

And then I think one of the things we sort of touched on was this taxonomy I've been working on with in my own work for a little while now, which is like the three buckets of conservative masculinity, like the three buckets of like gender conservatism that men sort of put themselves into.

And we've called one

the preacher, one the pervert, and one is the creep.

And today we're going to dive into some like

illustrative texts about sort of the intellectual foundations, the biggest assumptions, the major themes of these three kinds of right-wing manhood and see if we can like tease out a little more about what they are.

Yeah, but maybe just to give people a frame of reference before we delve into the nitty-gritty here, like let's sort of talk a little bit about who sort of the avatars of this are.

So who are people asked to picture here?

So the the preacher is basically like, think of Mike Pence.

If you're not wild about women, but you call your wife mother, like you might fall in that bucket.

Who's the creep?

The creep is somebody who

has a sense of sort of like aggrieved self-regard.

So I think of Elon Musk is sort of the main one, somebody who thinks that he is special and different, but a corrupted and unworthy world doesn't recognize him.

This is often people with like a lot of investment in race science or evolutionary psychology.

Yeah.

In some way, it's the sources of legitimation that are different there, right?

One looks to the Bible, the other one is going to look anywhere but the Bible, basically.

It's going to look to some kind of crank book or some research that they barely understood to bolster their claims.

And then our third type?

Our third type is the pervert who demonstrates his masculinity through a kind of like aggressive, dominant, often like forceful and violent sexuality.

Right, kind of a dynisia.

And we'll talk about this quite a bit more when we talk about Nietzsche

in a future episode.

As I tried to explain last time, is that I think that, you know, even though these guys don't like each other, I think they often have cosmetically different versions of what's essentially the same project.

Yeah.

Women end up miraculously not being subjects in all these.

So you're like, huh.

Right.

But what they are is sites of proving masculine power, right?

The control and ownership and domination of women are like theaters for the exercise of masculinity and basically every kind of masculinity that we're going to go over.

Like the one thing that masculinity always has in common is the oppression of women.

That's like a really consistent theme.

I think something that we are going to have to sort of tease out is the extent to which women themselves are supposed to be the audience for these demonstrations of masculinity and the extent to which masculinity is being demonstrated on women

for an audience of other men.

Yeah.

One other thing that maybe on sort of a meta level we could talk about is that when we did think about the pervert, we kind of bounced ideas back and forth.

And that was the bucket where we came up with the most names of women, right?

Like where basically that is by now, like let boys be boys is almost like always a woman telling you that in the public discourse.

Like there's a very interesting thing happening there, where it's like the preacher tends to be a cis white dude still.

Yeah, you know, there are definitely versions of conservative femininity that rely very heavily on biblical authority, on ideas of divine ordination of gender roles, right?

And you'll see women sort of appropriating preacher masculinity on the right

in order to like access public power.

I will say that like where you see more

women advocating for like pervert masculinity is really on the left, where like there has been sort of a mirror image of what like Phyllis Schlafly did with religious conservatism on the right.

You'll see people like, you know, Camille Paglia

doing on the putative left, you know, somebody coming from a left-wing perspective.

And, you know, a lot of these guys in the pervert bucket are on the political left, even though they have very reactionary, very conservative ideas about gender itself and about preserving gender as a hierarchy.

So there's a lot to dig into.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One of the interesting things is, of course, that like anyone who makes these kinds of claims are, and I think you're pointing to that is already kind of positioning themselves in like why they are allowed to talk publicly about this at all right clafley's kind of positionality which i agree kind of is the preacher positionality always was a little bit self-contradictory right like she always claimed like oh if my husband needs me at home to cook i won't give this talk and of course that was bullshit she was an important public intellectual like like yeah i i don't know what her husband did but like surely she made the bucks in that relationship right but it was this self-contradictory kind of of position where you're like, I'm here to tell you that I should not be allowed to tell you anything.

It's like, yeah, that's

an odd one, right?

Whereas, like, the Libertine always gets to make it.

We'll talk about this that basically of the three folks we're going to read today or talk about today, like, the Libertine is the one who sort of can't seem to shut the fuck up about any of this, right?

Like, oh, but I think he's got a lot of his own contradictions as well.

So, I'm excited to dive into them.

I think so, yeah.

Well, should we start?

Maybe, yeah, yeah.

So, I, I mean, I, my example of the creep is sort of the, the one you're thinking of.

So like, my apologies to listeners for like not kind of shocking you.

We have a couple of deep cuts here, and that's fun.

This is not a deep cut.

This is.

Jordan fucking Peterson.

Wait, wait, wait.

Can you taxonomize the creep for me and tell me why Jordan Peterson personifies the elements of the creep?

So, I mean, it's a little tricky, right?

Because he's not an evolutionary psychologist.

He's not like, you know, here's what our genes are telling us to do.

But he makes these very

basic points about supposed gender roles from this authority of the psychiatrist right like he peppers his discourse with like things that allegedly his patients told him which uh you know has a long history right this is how freudians argued right here's the thing i i had happen on the couch to you know people reared on let's say excel spreadsheets for science or whatever with test results might find that it may not sound that scientific but like you know not like sort of pseudoscience like the bell curve is or something like that.

But it comes with that premature of like, this man has done some very serious research, right?

Like he's not just telling you to clean up your room.

He's telling you your room for science.

And we should say that Jordan Peterson is a psychologist.

He's Canadian.

He did teach for a long time at the University of Toronto, I believe.

Yep.

And so

he has the authority of professor.

You know, that is like a title he has.

Yeah.

And I mean, this is what he owes his prominence to, right?

The very first YouTube clip of his, I think, that went viral in something like 2016, 17 was professor against political correctness.

I might get the title wrong, but like the word professor was in there, right?

That was how he sold himself.

He was not, whatever Joe Sixpack is in Canada, Joe Poutine or whatever.

Yeah,

he's not a regular guy.

He's got epistemic authority, he's got institutional authority, and he is wielding that in the service of gender conservatism, which has made him very, very popular online.

Extremely popular.

And he, the other thing that makes him an interesting creep is that he walks an interesting line between,

somewhat judgmentally, between this weird kind of dominance behavior.

Like he, he keeps like his Twitter is just like him wanting to punch people constantly, even though like, you know, people who have not seen me, I'm, I'm the scrawniest man on earth, and I don't think I'd be like that afraid of being in a fist fight with Jordan Peterson.

But then the other thing that happens is that like, the man just like is the waterwork.

He weeps a lot.

He cries a lot.

Yeah.

I mean, there was a, a clip of him crying about Elliot Page for some reason.

Like that, that set him over the age.

All right.

Elliot Page's transition was a great offense to Jordan Peterson, who I guess was

like sexually attracted to a pre-transition Elliot Page.

Maybe a huge Juno fan.

Who knows?

I don't know.

Yeah.

The other thing is that Jordan Peterson is taken seriously.

There was a brief weird moment when he was like sort of taken seriously by, you know, people like David Brooks and, you know, was sort of like in the Atlantic, etc etc that's sort of died down and now i feel like his fame is identical almost with people who are certain affinities with technology and specifically with the tech industry the very online like jordan peterson yes and he posits his gender conservative viewpoint his sort of prescription for a masculine life like really clearly as self-help.

Yeah.

Especially above all in that book.

Well, not initially, but like famously in that book, 12 Rules for Life.

This is this big blockbuster book.

Massive bestseller.

From 2018.

2018.

So yeah, it's been translated into like dozens of languages, extremely successful, and is essentially self-help for men.

I think very explicitly for men.

And maybe I'll just read a passage just to give you a sense of what Jordan Peterson means when he thinks about a crisis of masculinity.

I'm not sure he ever uses that word, but like, here, I'll read it to you.

Boys are suffering in the modern world they are more disobedient negatively or more independent positively than girls they suffer for this throughout their pre-university educational career they are less agreeable agreeableness being a personality trait associated with compassion empathy and avoidance of conflict and less susceptible to anxiety and depression at least after both sexes hit puberty Boys' interests tilt towards things.

Girls' interests tilt towards people.

Strikingly, these differences, strongly influenced by biological factors, are most pronounced in the Scandinavian societies where gender equality has been pushed hardest.

This is the opposite of what would be expected by those who insist ever more loudly that gender is a social construct.

It isn't.

This isn't the debate the data are in.

So that's Jordan Peterson, Rules for Life.

He's like gaveling.

He's like, it is biological determinism, like bam, like a judge.

So he does say

strongly influenced by biological factors.

He says that gender is something in the body that you can't escape, which does sort of hint at an evolutionary psychology.

Yeah, exactly.

Justification, even though he doesn't really make that argument.

No.

And the other thing that he, of course, does is, I mean, he doesn't come out and say here it's feminism's fault, but he says, like, basically, modernity is feminized.

Our modern world is feminized.

It is societalized.

We spend a lot more time around other people, and that is bad for men because men are really good at clubbing things on the head and dragging them back to their cave.

But like, suddenly you're making them type on a computer.

I have fond memories of my own caveman days.

I recall them well of the mid-80s.

But yeah, so like there's something about the deep recesses of male memory that basically modernity is just too fucking femme for, right?

I don't think he would hide this.

Like what's behind this is someone like Carl Jung, right?

Like I think there's on the one hand, I don't know if it's entirely about genes, like biology of genes.

It's about this kind of collective memory that is sort of passed down from from us, like this collective unconscious that's sort of like passed down from generation to generation.

That's definitely here, which is sort of like the thing that Freud and Jung really kind of split over.

Freud has a conception of this too, but his is way more complicated than Jung's.

Jung really thought that like people, we'll talk about this in our episode, but people sort of carry like almost genetically sort of remnants of memories from their their ancestors, right?

And Freud thought, well, that's not quite true.

We do pass on something to our distant offspring, but not like that.

So I think it's amazing stuff.

I find this passage interesting also because it's so clear what conclusion he's trying to run away from, right?

Like a lot of what he's saying here is probably not wrong.

I wanted to define his terms.

I don't know what any of this is supposed to exactly mean.

It feels in the beginning, like he might say, and this is something that you can hear feminists say, this is something you can hear leftists say, right?

That like our modern world is less differential to a certain traditional construction of masculinity, right?

Which is an interpretation that we could still argue with because it assumes that there is one traditional conception of masculinity, right?

But we could say, like, yeah, people have been socialized in these outdated forms of masculinity that then the modern world kind of punishes them for, right?

That's an argument that people have made on the left, and it's interesting as far as it goes.

But that's not what he's saying here, right?

Those aspects of masculinity that the modern world is inhospitable to are, as he says, and as he pointed out, strongly influenced by biological factors, right?

It sounds like a defense of certain cultural codes, but it's actually something different.

It's a warning about a pathological distortion of our biological destiny, right?

Like this is what we're meant to be and meant to be doing,

and we are falling short of it in modernity because we've become unnatural, right?

We're no longer doing things the way they're meant to be done.

And I mean, for people who are hearing certain echoes here, this is obviously something that like succeeds online quite well.

Our friends and colleagues over at the podcast maintenance phase always point out that like this idea that like something in our present way of living falls away from what we're quote unquote naturally supposed to do is extremely powerful online precisely because we encounter that world through something that feels so stridently and openly artificial right we're staring at our computer screens like no one has ever been like ah i am one with nature while staring at my phone right right it reminded me of veganism veganism, actually, when you were talking about this like imagined, pure,

pre-social past.

And Jordan Peterson himself very famously went on an all-meat diet that sent him into some sort of coma.

And he was in a Russian hospital for a while.

A very

elaborate and dark.

This is not a reach, is what I am to say.

He is very clearly trying to approximate a more pure, like pre-historical vision of the self.

Yeah.

And so I think the health influencer in this of this, right, is big in 12 Rules for Life 2, right?

He is making claims about health, which is a concept that we're going to come up against again and again.

And that's not an accident, right?

Because it allows what you and I might think of as progress, right?

as pathology.

It says, like, this is actually disease.

You're going to suffer from this.

I'm going to read a passage from a book by Anthony Ludovici from 1927, Man, an Indictment.

I love the title.

They didn't fuck around the 20s.

Like,

got a lot of things to say to men.

Yeah.

So the conclusion that the characteristics, quote, arising out of sexual dimorphism, so you know, the fact that there are men and only men and women, right?

That's what he's talking about here, are very deeply embedded in our natures and cannot therefore be altered in a day, in a generation, or even in a century.

Apparent modifications of these characteristics, which alter the relations of the sexes, are therefore more likely to be morbid and transient than normal and permanent, right?

That to me is what Peterson is drawing on here, right?

The idea that like these shifts where you and I might say, yes, over the last two, three hundred years, several shifts have taken place and we live with the consequences of those shifts.

They're like, no, in the long...

durée of human evolution, that is but a microsecond.

And to change things that quickly can only lead to confusion and or to disease, right?

It's as he says, it's it's more likely to be morbid and transient.

These are our new fads.

Here's a question I have that I always have about this sort of evocation of a trans-historical, like pre-social masculinity, which is that like if these

categorizations of masculinity and femininity are so overwhelmingly historically powerful and so like written into our fate,

how did we wind up abandoning them?

Like where did who gave us this Promethean power

to like subvert our own natures?

Because I don't think Betty Friedan was capable of quite that much, right?

The implication is always, as you're saying, it's like there's a subterranean implication that feminism fucked up nature.

And that's actually ascribing feminism a ton of power that I don't think it.

it can reasonably be said to have.

Well, yeah, it's definitely a pathologization, right?

Like a medicalization of, well, the fact that society just fucking changes from time to time, right?

Like, it's, you know, it's like, sorry, bud, like, yeah, like, this is not the world I grew up in.

It's like, yeah, you know, have you met time?

That's what, that's what does it.

Right.

It also like requires sort of an erasure of the middle parts of history.

There's this like imagined caveman past, which is good, and there's modernity, which is bad.

And the like eons of changing and permutation that have happened in between like necessarily have to be erased, right?

Because if all of human history is a series of mutually reinforcing and informing changes,

then your idea of a static pre-social pure past becomes kind of unstable.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, so there's two points I think I'd make about that.

So one is this is why I think,

I mean, I don't want to speak for all historians, but I think why you don't get, you don't hear from historians that often about this, right?

Like historians of masculinity do exist.

They basically were like, well, I'm sorry, are you talking about the 1570s or the 1590s, right like they're very attuned to the fact that this always changes but of course like a little bit in defense of jordan oh god what am i saying a little bit of jordan people go for it yeah like of course like the one place where this is true right like i have knowledge of what the world view and the world of my parents is like and i have a slightly fainter sense of what my grandparents life and world must have been like.

That becomes extremely hazy when I get to my great-grandparents.

And great great grandparents, I'm like, I have no fucking clue what they were even called, right?

So, like, that is in our own psychology, in our own family, this does tend to be true, right?

That, like, things disappear into the haze of the forever, like very quickly in either direction, right?

Like, I have a, I know a lot about my own daughter, I have a conception of what her children could be like, but then it gets very fucking hazy.

I'm like, I'm guessing they all have trans-border beams and uh, you know, tachyon impulses or whatever.

I don't know.

Like, I've, I, I've not watched that much Star Trek, right?

Like, in some way, it kind of makes sense that of all people, someone who studies a lot of psychology would find this persuasive, but that's maybe giving him too much credit.

Cause like, there's a bunch of people who did not, uh, you know, go in for their Freud who still act as though, like, until Seneca falls, basically, like, humanity had, like, one way of doing things.

And then, like, yeah, it was fine until you meddling kids came around.

Yeah.

The second point I'd make is just that in some way, with someone like Peterson, I think that feminism to him, and this is, he's gonna, he's taking that from Nietzsche to some extent, and we'll talk about that in our episode on Nietzsche.

He doesn't think that it's all feminism's fault.

He thinks that feminism is like a

symptom of a bigger problem, which is modernity, right?

He thinks that like, yeah, what has happened is like, you know, humanity used to be dominated by far more organic and sort of like spontaneously grown structures, right?

It used to be a lot more beholden to tradition.

Feminism destroyed both of these, but so did industrialization, so did massification, so did urbanization.

And I'm pretty sure Jordan Peterson isn't wild about any of those either, right?

So, like, they often sort of see it as one more, right?

These are the four horsemen of the apocalypse are basically feminism.

This socialism always in there, right?

Because it makes everyone the same, right?

Like, so I don't think they are giving Betty Froudan all this power.

Uh, that'd be nice, it'd be lovely.

Uh, but no, they're, they're basically saying, Oh, I don't, I don't know how lovely, but you know, I can think of other people.

I'd rather give it to, you know, yeah, but I mean, like, but it's in some way, like, it's even worse because it's saying, like, oh, basically, it's not that even the agency of women is threatening us.

It's like the women are grabbing this agency because of this bigger, this bigger shift in Western civilization, right?

They are corruption.

Yeah.

And women are just symptoms or tools, which I think we'll come back to over and over.

And I like that you're really encapsulating what I think makes Creep the appropriate label for this kind of masculinity, which is that he is advocating really for a total transformation.

It's like a very radical.

vision if you take it to its logical conclusion, right?

Yeah.

You start asking questions like, well, how does Jordan Peterson feel about like settled agriculture?

You know, it's like, he's, he's like very expansive, very ambitious in his pursuit of a pure,

of a purity, like a form of masculine purity.

Yes and no, right?

I mean, like, on the other hand, he doesn't lay that out, I think, in the book ever.

And I don't know if he's ever said publicly, like, yeah, the implications of this that you're drawing out are terrifying.

But that is the other thing about these sort of anti-modernity thrusts of these creeps.

You get that a little bit also in people like Curtis Yarwin, who's another sort of big tech creep.

They're basically unhappy with certain aspects of modern society without saying what that would mean.

It is a deeply, it's reactionary politically, but it's also reactionary just in its own affect, right?

It's basically pouting.

It's like, I don't like all these things we did.

I'm just going to be in the corner.

I'm taking my toys and going home, right?

Like, like, that's true.

If you drew out the political implications of this, it's fucking terrifying.

They very rarely, well, Yarwin does, but like, largely, these people don't do it, right?

They're just like, I just want to register that I'm unhappy with this, right?

Like, it's like those weird, like, trad accounts on Twitter, which are always like, What's keeping our churches from looking like this?

And when you're like, You're a fucking fascist, like, I just like good, nice things.

Is that so bad?

Right?

It's like, well, yeah, the implications are obvious, but it's quite possible you're lying to yourself about it, too.

Yeah, I'm wondering if because some of these guys will come out and say, like,

actually, I think we should use all of Silicon Valley's new technology to instill

a monarchy.

And, you know, exactly.

And some of them just go out right out and say, I think that's Curtis Yarwin does identify as a monarchist.

And that's, you know, the sort of Peter Thiel of it all is that there are people who are sort of avowedly and, you know, I guess to some degree, you have to say, honestly, taking these ideas to their logical conclusion.

But with people like Peterson, do you think that he's

concealing his hand or do you think that he hasn't thought that far ahead?

I think it's a mixture of the two.

I think that if you're privileged enough in society, you don't have to really answer that question for yourself, right?

Like, might it be that some of these people really would kind of gulp if like they woke up one morning and their vision was realized?

Like, it's possible, right?

Like, it is very noticeable that this kind of conservative dissidence, right?

The do it without me, right?

Like, is an extremely pretty easy gesture because you don't like have to ever take responsibility for anything.

And that extends to someone like...

Peter Thiel, right?

Who like, right, big Trump booster.

And he's like, oh, I'm disappointed about him.

And like, I don't, I don't don't support this anymore.

It's like, this is always how it goes.

Like, I had high hopes and then I got disappointed.

Yeah, it's a fucking easy grift in order to like never have to take responsibility for anything that, you know, you claim to have want to have happened.

And of course, like, part of this is like épaté le bourgeois, right?

Like, it's the idea is you want to, you want to trigger the libs, right?

And like, that, that's part of the creep persona too, that like, they're like, how serious am I?

Lol, that's for you to find out, you know, Snowflake, right?

And it's like, eh, I don't know.

Like, I feel like whether whether or not that claim is being made seriously or not is pretty central and i have a really hard time grappling with thought that's like always like one step away from just like declaring they just did it for the lulz right i mean i read immanuel kant and he's like lol you're still reading my first critique that was all a joke right you're like well you i'm not reading this right like but i think that that's part of the creep too that like you know you never know like does peter teal really want to abolish women's suffrage you never know how sincere they are yeah and that's you know part part of what they do is they hide behind deniability.

I like your point out of like triggering the libs, owning the libs, because this is going to be a recurring theme.

It's like each bucket of conservative masculinity has its own style of like deliberately provoking and

rejecting and sort of reveling in the rejection of like liberal partners, right?

Like the preacher says he does it, you know, out of Christian principle.

The creep will deny whether he means it or not.

And the perv will do it and claim that, you you know this is uh his own irrepressible authenticity but they they all require and solicit this like outraged rejection by like uh perceived ideological enemies yeah and with peterson like the the fact that it's really hard to tell what he means and how he means it is i think far more central than maybe even for the other two people we're going to look at because in some way he has real trouble with the meaning of meaning.

For that, I kind of wanted to briefly talk about a different book book that's maybe with less of a bestseller.

Let's say this is Peterson's first book, Maps of Meaning from 1999.

Was this his dissertation?

It probably was, yeah.

I mean, it's long as hell, so I can't imagine that it's like 600 pages of basically kind of a pop-Jungianism, I would say, and frankly, some of the most unreadable prose.

And I mean, you know, literature professor speaking here, I've seen some unreadable prose in my life, and this is fucking grim.

Yeah, the excerpt that you put in our planning doc, I had to read it like four times.

I was like, wait, like trying to diagram these sentences is very difficult.

In some way, I might do like the literature professor here thing here, and like, I'll read the whole passage.

And I would invite our listeners to kind of think about, like, just let it work on them.

Like, even if you're not following, which you very well might not, and it's not your fault.

But, like, just see how what the language is doing, right?

So, this is from page 137 of his book.

Mythic symbols of the chaos of the beginning are imaginative pictures whose purpose is representation of a paradoxical totality, a state which is already to say something too determinate, self-contained, uniform, and complete, where everything now distinct resides in union.

A state where being and non-being, beginning and end, matter and energy, spirit and body, consciousness and unconsciousness, femininity and masculinity, night and day remain compounded prior to their discrimination into the separable elements of experience.

In this state, quotation marks, all conceivable pairs of opposites and contradictory forces exist together within the all-encompassing embrace of an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and altogether mysterious God.

So, wow.

That's deep, man.

Yeah.

We could say a lot about this.

We could do a lot to parse it, but I think that the first thing that I hope people are noticing is he revels in these, like, it's this, it's this, it's this, right?

Like, like, we get to God, we get to, right, being and non-being.

beginning and end, matter and energy, spirit and body, consciousness and unconscious.

And then also, of course, masculine and femininity.

With Peter doesn't often get these kind of lists.

What he, I think he's thinking about here, you know, just to give you a little bit of a gloss on this passage, I don't want to just sort of like make fun of it, because it's ultimately not

probably not wrong as a point.

It's just, I don't think it proves what he thinks it proves.

This is basically, are you familiar with Tohu Wabohu?

No.

I hope I'm not butchering that, but that is the original of when Genesis book one, chapter two, is rendered as without form and void, right?

In the beginning, the world was without form and void, and the Spirit of God floated upon the face of the deep.

And then basically, God says, let there be light, and he divided the light from darkness, right?

Like he's saying, like, there is this image, this idea.

He's right to say that it's not a state.

There's this idea of a something that precedes the divisions that we make.

I think he's right to say that this idea exists.

you'll see as he goes on that basically he thinks this idea must exist and that in fact it characterizes reality right like you might say like oh yeah from a mythological standpoint, like human beings do often come up with these stories about where like things that we take to be absolutely opposed to each other were not opposed once upon a time, right?

And then something happened to split them apart, right?

Like that's an interesting enough point, right?

For a comparative mythologist, for instance.

he will end up saying that like oh no the making of distinction is actually the thing that we have to do this and it really actually describes reality right so this is important because like you know another way of putu wa is just chaos, right?

And with chaos, it happens all the time in Peterson and it shows up all the time in the 12 rules of life.

It's easy to sort of think like he thinks, oh, without this, we will have chaos.

He's not necessarily thinking, oh, like people are going to like throw trash cans through shop windows or something like that, right?

Like, oh, this is chaos in here.

He's probably thinking of this.

He's thinking of indistinction.

right?

Though spoiler alert, it very quickly becomes a social description, right?

Like he's also thinking of garbage cans put through shop windows.

So it's this grand speculation about the origins of what human beings do when they make the world mean something, right?

When they sort of try to make sense of the world.

And basically, it's a theodicy of the binary.

It's saying, not necessarily of the gender binary, but of like any binaries.

What human meaning making is dependent on is us to say it's A, not B.

right?

Like that's that's all we do.

And that's, I think, what he means by maps of meaning, as best I can tell from the 180 pages of this.

In fairness, he is listing the gender binary as one of the most most foundational of these divisions.

Exactly.

But I think this whole thing gets at what's so odd about Peterson and it feels perfect for our historic moment, right?

Like he doesn't say that these are conceptual divisions of our world that are true and accurate.

They're rather the ones we need to cling to in order to live, even if they are totally bunk, right?

Even if they're complete bullshit, we have to stick to them.

Why?

Well, because we've always clung to them, basically.

They're in our inheritance.

They are our patrimony, our conceptual patrimony, right?

This is actually a fairly old project in its own right, and it's ironically a modern one, right?

Like the Romantics, especially in Germany, but also in the UK, right?

Like I think of someone like Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, like we're interested in this project of a new mythology, right?

Moderns, they thought, had broken away from myths, and that had destroyed a certain coherence in our way of being in the world.

Right.

And we have to fix it.

But of course, the Romantics thought that meant that you had to create a new mythology.

and we'll see that when we talk about nietzsche like this is supposed to be like you got to come up with new stories they don't have to be true but they have to be coherent they have to maybe meaning making they knew that you couldn't just go back right so they wanted to find mythic forms that were adequate to the modern age and that you know weren't the old ones right and peterson instead wants to just turn back the clock right he's like in order to keep chaos at bay, in order to make meaning, make sense of our world, in order to reassert our place in it, we have to will yourself to believe in absolute bullshit, knowing that it is bullshit.

And once you've convinced yourself that this bullshit is real, the world will magically become a better place.

That's pretty insane to me.

Is this also from

Maps of Meaning, this other excerpt you put in the dock here?

Yeah, exactly.

So here's one more if people want to hear more Maps of Meaning.

This is from page 292.

And again, this has femininity in it.

It gives you a sense of how basically the gender binary works into this, right?

All right, I read it.

Light and darkness constitute mythic totality.

Order and chaos in paradoxical union provide primordial elements of the entire experiential universe.

Light is illumination, inspiration.

Darkness, ignorance, and degeneration.

Light is the newly risen sun, the eternal victor of the endless cyclical battle with the serpent of the night.

It is the savior, the mythic hero, the deliverer of humanity.

Light is gold, the king of metals, pure and incorruptible, a symbol for civilized value itself.

Light is Apollo, the sun king, god of enlightenment, clarity, and focus, spirit opposed to black matter, bright masculinity opposed to the dark and unconscious feminine.

Light is Marduk, the Babylonian hero, god of the morning and spring day who struggles against Tiamat, monstrous goddess of death.

I can't go.

Yeah, that goes on into Egypt, but like, you get the idea.

He's accumulating all of these, which also gives his own litany is this like transhistoric grandeur.

Yeah.

And it's basically just saying, like, this goes in column A, and this goes in column B.

This also goes in column A, and this goes in column B.

You're like, oh, my God.

Like, he evokes everything and also imposes a very simplistic classification on it all.

And you can see why this honestly, I mean, I say this now as someone who's written a book about the tech industry, why this catches on with tech people who like.

didn't take a whole lot of humanities classes, but actually love kind of the depth of thinking that deep humanistic learning can, whether fairly or unfairly, convey.

This is a dumb person's idea of a smart text, right?

It's like, yeah, congratulations, bud.

Like, that was a hell of a ride on Wikipedia, wasn't it?

Put in the Bennies and just click on open Wikipedia and just let it fucking rip.

But like, it's, it's ultimately saying like things fall into column A or column B, one having to do with order and enlightenment, the other having to do with its opposite.

Like, congrats your fucking relations, bud.

Like, that could have been, that could have been a footnote.

I'm interested in Jordan's, or I'm sorry, Jordan Peterson's characterization of femininity as chaos.

Yeah.

Because this is like whether masculinity is order or whether it's, it's like imposed discipline order or whether it is authentic, generative, like vivifying chaos is something that we're going to come back to in a second because masculinity theorists can't really, or like masculinity advocates on the right, can't really decide what they want it to be.

And they switch between whether they want it to be superego or id

kind of a lot.

And Jordan seems, or Peterson, God, I keep calling him by his first name, like we went to high school together, but Jordan Peterson seems very invested, at least here, in this idea of masculinity as an order to which there must be a kind of like a dutiful submission, right?

The idea that like, we know this meaning-making is bullshit, but we are going to adhere to it anyway.

That's kind of

self-advocating, right?

It's a little bit of a like, get on your knees, which I think could bring us nicely to our part two.

I think that that's exactly right.

And it also, I think it makes, so obviously there's like 19 years separating maps of meaning and 12 rules of life, but like the idea that like this isn't just, I mean, like, yes, women are definitely not being treated very, very nicely here, but it's also above all an admonition to young men, right?

As you say, like, it's about your masculinity cannot be chaos.

What you need to, right?

Like, why do you need to clean your room?

Because, like, well, because Marduk brings

order into feminine darkness, like Horus,

who fights against evil and redeems the father.

I mean, whatever.

This isn't, this isn't saying like, oh, let dudes be dudes.

It's like, no, no, no.

Dudes have to like, as you say, believe in this bullshit in order to discipline their own masculinity.

So like both versions of that masculinity are in there, but he's saying you gotta, like, you gotta learn this, basically.

But of course, as you're pointing out, like, it's really hard to tell why we should believe this, right?

Like, why is this true, right?

Like, if he means that our symbolic and metaphoric system, right, what we in the biz call semiotics, tend to categorize things this way, right?

Like,

yes, like, there is a sense that, like, among the Greeks, masculine principles were the ordering principles, right?

If you think about someone like Aristotle about what sperm and egg do, he thought like the sperm orders the material around.

That's like what that's, it's the form, right?

Not what actually happens in case any of our listeners missed fifth grade hopefully.

Aristotle was in fact incorrect.

Again and again, but that basically means like that's that's how societies have sometimes made meaning.

But then again, he uses it, uses the term means to say like, he uses it basically in the transitive sense, right?

It causes something.

It's really interesting because that's that slip is basically the difference between a descriptive and a normative claim, right?

Is this for better or for worse how humans of certain cultures have understood?

people's place in the universe or is it an accurate understanding of our place in that universe and like it's a very interesting kind of thing like he gets in his defense of these old binaries, he goes back and forth between like,

like, we must believe this or else we'll all dissolve into puddles of like Dionysian like fuckery.

And at other times, he's like, oh, no, this is actually true.

And you're like, Jordan, it can't be right.

Yeah, let's leave him there.

We'll be back with Dr.

Peterson at some point.

I'm interested that there is this slippage between

I'm telling the truth and I am providing you a quasi-arbitrary structure for

ordering your life.

Or it's either an immutable, like forceful truth about the world, or it's a convenient tool among other tools.

And there's like, these are irreconcilable positions that he nevertheless slips back and forth between.

Yeah, why those myths?

There's also the myth of the matriarchate.

Why not just like reorder society to be a matriarchate?

Because that's also not true.

Come on, historically come on adrian you know why he doesn't choose the matriarch i know that yeah and that gets us i think to our second example the preacher because he's still like he believes in one true religion that's the only way if you're like we have to believe a bullshit myth and it's this one well congratulations you just invented religion right like like you basically came up with like what elevates this myths above all others is that it's been revealed to you right it's revelation yeah he has that still in the background without, it seems to me.

Well, I guess he's taken a kind of Christian turn.

It seems like even well before.

Yeah, I think so.

There's a video of him crying about it.

I didn't, I didn't watch it.

I can't.

Well, the creep is usually not Christian.

The creep is, I think, like an interesting factor.

Sometimes he tries to revive like Euro-paganism as part of like a white supremacist effort.

More often, he turns to

the sort of dry rationalism he sees in science being like dispassionate.

And Christianity, of course, involves involves quite a bit of passion.

Passion that some

masculinist preacher men, men in our second bucket of conservative masculinity, have like actually deemed a little bit effeminate and have tried to sort of wrestle back for these masculine virtues.

So you want to talk about bucket two?

Who's behind door number two, bachelor number two?

Behind door number two, we have a different kind of, and I have to say that like maybe you read the same book I did.

I don't know much about this guy.

It's kind of an old book by now.

It came out the same year as Maps of Meaning.

This is Leon J.

Pottles, The Church Impotent.

The whole book is online on his website if people want to read it.

Who is Pottles?

What do we know about him?

Very little.

He seems to be a kind of a conservative intellectual.

I don't think he has an institutional affiliation.

He has a PhD in English that emerges pretty clearly in the book.

He was raised Catholic, but as one reviewer of his book back in the day noted, quote, now seems to be one of his own statistics of male Christian disaffection.

So he's like, where Peterson is a putatively anti-religious thinker who is slowly finding religion and probably is way more religious than he admits this is someone who starts from a religious standpoint but might be more of a of a heretic than he he gives himself credit for and i think it's this book uh the church impotent which i didn't have on my radar at all before like is interesting i have to say

i had never heard of this book before so i came across this and this is why i think it's it's okay to talk about this even though it kind of it hasn't been sort of in the conversation the same way that like Peterson has Rod Dreyer is a really big fan of Hoddles and I do think that Dreyer is one of the Rod Dreyer a Catholic right-wing influencer exactly um big Victor Orban fan big sort of trad masculinity guy recently got canceled by the right for extensive writings on yeah African-American penises uh so oh my god I missed that oh yeah what yeah no it's um

it turns out it's sugar daddy cut him off because of um yeah it's worse than that he was one of these guys with a funded right-wing blog, and then he got into a

like dick eugenics kind of thing.

He's a

dick eugenics guy.

But anyway, so he's someone who sort of championed puddles frequently.

There are a couple of other sort of less well-known right-wingers who sort of have kept the faith.

I don't know much about this author, but like I did also notice that he wrote a book about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

So I haven't read it.

So I'm like kind of half worried that he's going to decide it's gay people's fault or whatever.

Like, so I don't want to like, I guarantee you that I don't want to recommend that.

But like, I have to say, anyone who wrote, like, I forget when he wrote it, but like, he wrote it early, like, not Janae O'Connor early, but like at a time when, like, no matter what your conclusion is, if you draw attention to this problem, like, you know, a little bit of a tip of the hat to you and probably a little wag of the finger for what you blame for it, because it's either Betty for Dan or gay people.

So like, it's one of those two things.

But still, like, he, he sounded the alarm on this fairly early on.

So he's clearly an interesting guy.

And willing to be critical of the church hierarchy as he is in the church impetus.

He is, that's right.

So this is his big book.

It comes out in 1999.

Yeah.

And it gets basically savaged by other sort of super conservative Catholic venues, which I think is a nice indicator, right?

That like these groups, even within these groups, right, they don't mean the only one thing by masculinity, right?

Like, so I read one review in Crisis, which is a conservative Catholic lay magazine by Charlotte Allen.

What a name for a magazine.

It's great, right?

And that's, yeah, yeah.

Charlotte Allen is Stanford class of 65, maybe.

Woo-hoo.

And she absolutely ripped Poddles' book apart, right?

So I should mention Alan is, as far as I can tell, a super conservative Catholic writer, today mostly sort of busy in the transphobia racket.

Oh, great.

But here she is taking the piss out of Poddles, right?

She's basically thinks this is absolute bunk.

And then in First Things, which is like, you know, for those who don't know it, a Christian magazine so right-wing,

it openly contemplated armed rebellion over Romer v.

Evans in 1996.

That was a Supreme Court decision that said that the state of Colorado could not prohibit municipalities from putting sexual orientation provisions, protections into their local civil rights laws, right?

Yeah, exactly.

When Larry could no longer be fired for being with Steve, they were like, fuck it,

we're going full January 6th over here.

I should say that they later, I think, retracted this op-ed or this story or whatever.

But like, still, it takes a little something to hit print on that particular thing anyway.

And then, even in this, you know, pretty right-wing outfit, the then-associate editor Daniel P.

Maloney called the book, quote, pretty silly stuff.

It's people who are very far to the right thinking that this, particularly very far to the right on gender, thinking this stuff is a little wacky.

Yeah.

So here's the overall thesis, which I think, like, I'm just going to read you the beginning of the book because it's, I don't know.

I think this is so fascinating because it says so much about masculinity and Christianity in the United States.

You and I, as critics of the patriarchy, are always like, oh, it's this white Christian patriarchy.

And like, Paddle's question is like, wait, how Christian is the patriarchy and how patriarchal is Christianity?

And he's like, not enough.

Yeah.

Here's the beginning.

Despite the constant complaints of feminists, AO, about the patriarchal tendencies of Christianity, men are largely absent from the Christian churches of the modern Western world.

Women go to church, men go to football games, lay men attend church activities because a wife, mother, or girlfriend has pressured them.

So on the one hand, like, I like this opening because on the one hand, you're like, I can think of like a million counterexamples.

I'm like, have you been to the Vatican?

Like, it's a bit of a sausage fest over there.

Yeah, he's, he's talking about an institution that worships a God made up of three persons, all of whom we are instructed to think of as males.

I wanted them as a bird.

Even the Holy Ghost, who doesn't, the Holy Ghost doesn't have a corporeal form, but he's still a guy.

Is it a male bird?

Male ghost, yeah.

And then it's also an all-male clergy that specifically prohibits women from preaching.

Yeah, based on a story about how women fucked it up for all of us and how it brought sin into the world, right?

Like and are bearing the mark because of that.

But on the other hand, like I like it because like as a sociological observation, like it definitely resonates with something, right?

Like the figure of the church lady is like, is definitely a thing, right?

Like religiousness historically has been very, a very feminized trait.

Yeah.

Early Christianity spread among women in the Roman Empire much more quickly than it spread among men.

And, you know, that's right.

A lot of people got converted by their mothers or wives, including Emperor Constantine, if I'm not mistaken.

Yes, converted by mom.

And yeah, the flock is always majority women or most ardently women.

Yeah, which is an idea, by the way, that we will return to in Nietzsche.

That's one of his critiques of Christianity.

It's like it's a women's religion.

But then the other thing is, so Podels here is like pretty closely aligned with Nietzsche's picture of early Christianity.

But what's fascinating is like he Americanizes it in, I think, a very beautiful way, which is to say he's like, but the clergy are kind of nerds.

And are nerds kind of Femi here.

Quote, the clergy have long had the reputation of not being very masculine.

The mainline liberal Protestant minister in the early 20th century had a reputation for being soft and working best with women.

It's true, right?

Like, you're reading, you're spending your day reading and coloring books in your monastery.

What are you, some kind of sissy, right?

Like, we went out there and we smote people, and you went there, you were like, oh, I colored a manuscript in purple.

Right.

Like, they're not getting eaten by lions like the way the way they used to.

Yeah.

He's He's definitely painting Christian clerics as like insufficiently masculine.

They're not performing physical labor.

They are interacting with women too much.

I also think it's important to note, even though he mentions Protestants here, I think it's important to note that he's a Catholic.

He's criticizing Catholicism and Catholic priests have for a long time been sort of snickered at as gay.

men, even sort of apart from and beyond the like homophobic panic that resulted from within the church, that resulted from the child abuse revelations.

This is a figure about the priest that predates that.

It's like, what are they all doing together in those seminaries where it's just a bunch of young men in one dorm room, et cetera.

Yeah.

Full disclosure, I'm not Catholic, so like I only see this from the outside, but yeah, this sounds right to me.

I grew up Catholic and I go to church like maybe twice a year now.

It's one of the reasons I still go to church because I'm trying to find a fun gay priest who doesn't seem like a reactionary.

Yeah.

Nice.

I know a couple nice ones.

Yeah.

The other thing to point out here maybe is that that he's also not a fan of Methodism.

Like he thinks this has actually infected a bunch of Protestant denominations too.

Usually the story about Christianity that gets told is like it was too feminine.

It was too feminized.

It got like the Catholics got way too into marriage.

Usually the Reformation is the part of that story where Christianity is redeemed for manhood, but that's not what he's doing.

History's greatest dick swing.

Yeah, exactly.

Where like someone breaks out a hammer and is like, here are 95 theses that you're all going to hear about, right?

We get rid of the virgin and we let ministers become married men who get to fuck, et cetera.

But yeah, I mean, like, right, like the idea of the Reformation as kind of a remasculinization is not an uncommon reading, and Poddles is not in bad company here.

I think that's how Luther thought of it, too.

But he sees like Methodism also as contaminated.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Certain kinds of Protestantism are also too feminine.

I want to just briefly show you something, like, I think very nicely, something that you were talking about earlier, which is to say, like, where's the fork on the road?

Where did we go wrong?

According to Jordan Peterson.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, it's also fun to see, like, where did we go wrong, according to Mr.

Poddles?

Like, it's kind of fun.

So first idea, right?

Like industrialization took women out of the home, right?

That'd be sort of the modernity argument.

That'd be probably what Peterson would say.

Took women out of the home, put them in the factory, made dating possible, et cetera, et cetera, put everyone in giant tenement houses and big cities.

Boom, right?

Tradition is dead.

Okay.

No, that's not it.

Because even in the 19th century, the church was a largely female institution.

Throughout the 19th century, women outnumbered men in churches by about two to one, which seems to have been the ratio even during the Second Great Awakening.

Okay.

So could it be, you might say, the American Revolution, right?

Nope, wasn't that either.

Perhaps the American Revolution caused a decline in interest in religion among men because republicanism meant the freedom not to defer to traditional hierarchical authority, whether in the form of king, community, scion, or church.

He doesn't think that's true.

Interest in religion had been weak among men almost from the beginnings of the English settlements.

Oh man.

So we've got to keep going earlier.

We're going to be able to learn

earlier.

So maybe it was coming to America, getting to meet a whole bunch of people who are not Christian.

Is that what did it?

Nope.

Quote, the Britain from which the American colonists came has long shown a similar lack of male interest in religion, end quote.

We're going to keep on rewinding the VHS.

It's like, this is the case.

Yeah, yeah.

Where are we at this point?

Earlier, earlier, earlier.

So I think one, one very simple question for like figuring out, I'll tell you where he thinks we went wrong and it's prepare it not to be a big revelation because like it's pretty nerdy stuff.

But it's worth asking, like, where was religion not kind of femme, according to him?

Where is he?

Like, we're like oh that's a that's a dude's religion right like i'm thinking of like medieval mystics like oh my god the anchoress hildegard of bingen yeah like

yeah shoot no i'm thinking of an english anchoress who wrote that christ was similar to a mother that his love was motherly more than fatherly a lot of renaissance depictions of the crucifixion yeah i'm sorry pre-renaissance depictions of the crucifixion make the wound to side into like actually quite literally a vagina from which like you know the soul of humanity is reborn This, like, generative power, as well as like self-sacrificing love, yeah, gets cast as

femi, but like maternal.

It's Jesus' mommy, you know.

And that's the bride of Christ, right?

That there's that too.

The human soul is the bride of Christ.

The church is a bride of Christ.

Yeah.

So, so, I mean, spoiler, this isn't going to mean much to most of our listeners.

The culprit here for him is Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.

Um, because

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, all along.

That's me, Saint bernard of clairvaux and you're probably wondering how i got here feminizing the church and so it it's really weird like even i who like knows fuck all about church history was like wait i also thought like he established a bunch of rules for like male monks to be like more masculine but whatever like also i think was pro-crusade which i feel like is one of the swoller things christianity has done you would think he would be into the crusades it's like you know masculinize like by colonizing and slaughtering a lot of non-believers you uh remasculinize the religion right?

So I think he thinks, like, apparently, which I didn't know, Bernard of Clairvaux helped legitimate the cult of Mary, a lady, for those playing along at home.

And he was apparently very big into this idea of the human soul as the bride of Christ, right?

So this idea that, like, now this devotion to, as you point out, three masculine entities had something kind of gay about it, you know?

Mary redeems womanhood from evil.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Which is a big sin.

No, no, no.

You have to keep hating women.

We can't have this out where we can, you know, like them if they're, if they're sufficiently virginal and self-sacrificing, we have to hate them all the time.

Yeah.

So like after that, right, Christianity is all about like the Lord filling you with his love, right?

It's about

receptivity, it's about sentimentality, it's like none of that.

As you pointed out, this gets corrected in the Reformation, right?

Dude heavy, very active, also very anti-Mary, and then gets reversed right back.

And then I should point out that like all the Catholic writers on the right that like responded to this book are like, my man, you could move back like

200 years before, 200 years before that.

Like, it's, you just can't do it, right?

This doesn't work.

It's really kind of interesting, right?

On the one hand, right, like, so he thinks you can make this kind of very, very arbitrary break in basically the 12th century, I think.

For those of you who are not up on your Bernard of Clervo trivia, his dates are 1090 to 1153.

That's where things went wrong according to this book.

But it is worth kind of asking, like, where does he think like religion is still kind of manly?

And I think that's, it's kind of an interesting question, right?

Like one thing that he's clearly got in mind, and this is, I think, where someone like Rod Dreyer is an interesting kind of disciple of this kind of view of Christianity.

I think one answer must be Eastern Orthodox, right?

He thinks that that's right, like it's got a patriarch in Moscow, right?

Like it's got patriarchy right in the name.

Like that's still a dude's religion.

He also, Judaism for him, comes out of the East, the idea that the real true religions in the East, and basically the West has sort of has fallen away and has feminized this institution.

You know, there are interesting kind of echoes of Nietzsche there too, but Nietzsche means it very differently.

And then the interesting thing, given that this thing comes out in 1999, I don't think he mentions Islam at all.

And I do think that is something that like conservative Christians in 1999 would have thought of, right?

That like that's a non-feminized religion.

That is a religion that like, to their mind, puts women in their place, right?

Like, right.

And like, why can't we do that?

Like, that's interesting here too.

But again, I don't want to put words in Pottle's mouth and he doesn't mention it.

What exactly are his prescriptions for the church?

My guess is he wants certain liturgy and certain emphases to shift, right?

Like Peterson is also just trying to like diagnose a problem, right?

I think that the kind of barb from Charlotte Allen's review, right?

Like that he seems to be one of his own statistics of male Christian disaffection.

She's got his number, right?

Like in some way he's saying like, that's why.

I'm no longer an enthusiastic churchgoer.

Can you blame me?

Right.

Like it is this kind of, it's unclear whether he's trying to reverse this trend or justify it, you know, and saying, no, you brought it in yourself by like all this Mary shit.

To too many ladies in church.

Yeah.

It's interesting that you mention his reverence for like the more masculinized Eastern Orthodox church, because this is something that,

you know, as Catholic clergy in America splits between the hard right and the super duper hard right,

there are some very conservative Catholics who are now like, yeah.

refusing they're only going to latin mass they are only taking communion in eastern orthodox churches.

They're trying to do the Reformation again in a miniature way, you know, trying to reform a corrupt institution to make it more conservative, less decadent, more masculinized.

It's something we're recurringly coming back to: masculinity as a kind of purification ritual on the right.

I would love to ask a scholar of Orthodox Christianity whether or not this is at all accurate.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if this were a pure projection.

But on the other hand, this is why a lot of Christian conservatives do look to places like Russia as a model, right?

Like this is the idea that religion and society are interlaced in ways that to them feel traditional or pre-modern, but still Christian, right?

Is to them extremely, extremely powerful.

So I think there are like three reasons why this book is interesting, even though it's a bit of a footnote.

Again, no theologian here, but I don't think the theology of the church impotent is super convincing.

But that's because, as you were saying, it is ultimately a psychological theory of manhood.

Femininity, he thinks, is all about like envelopment, communion, you know, togetherness, you know, touchy-feely things, right?

Whereas masculinity, he says, it's about separation.

The more distant a God is, right, like the more he models masculinity for us, right?

And that's very, very noticeable that that's not a theology.

And as theology, it's pretty bad.

It is a theory of child-rearing, ultimately, right?

Just to give people an example of how Podel sort of arranges this, he thinks of the crucifixion as just like super butch.

This is God separating a part of himself out into the person Jesus.

And when that part says like,

hey, I don't really want to get nailed to something.

Couldn't we skip that part?

Right.

Like, my father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me, right?

Matthew 26, 39.

There's basically no answer, right?

He's like, no, but you're going to have to do it.

Sorry.

The agony in the garden.

That prayer is not answered.

It's like, no, you cannot be relieved from this difficult task.

You have to man up and face it.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And dad's just not going to be there for it.

The crucifixion is also the separation of Christ from

mankind.

It's like you're tearing away.

Exactly.

He like, he comes back, but then he leaves you.

He leaves you twice.

Yeah.

Right.

Which is like, you know, honestly, with always the opposite understanding of,

you know, again, no theologian.

I've never been to Catholic school.

I've barely ever even been to Catholic church.

But like, I think of the crucifixion as the opposite.

Maybe this is because I've read a lot of Simone Vey as like the most absurd gift.

right like that someone could give right like that it's a moment of generosity on such a stupendous and cosmic scale that it kind of mirrors the way that we get to exist it's like why the do i exist that's so cool.

Right.

Like, like, it's, it's this, it's this ultimate gift, but that's not, that's not how he sees it.

Totals would say that that is the, the femmed up, weak

version of Christianity.

Simone Vey, famously weak.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that it's, it's much more about like the stern father

foregoing mercy, refusing.

And so exactly, you're right.

That what's interesting is that this is basically a self-help guide for how to be a man, disguised as a history of Christianity.

And I think that's something that's true for a lot of conservative writing about gender these days, including someone like Jordan Peterson and, you know, the Poddles fan Rod Dreyer.

I think that like a lot of their Christianity is just self-help.

You know, they're asking like, oh, what is the role of the church in the modern world?

And really they're saying like, I feel myself falling short of certain conceptions of manhood.

What can I do about that?

Right.

And I think it's so noticeable, right, that in 1999, right-wing Catholic magazines go out of their way to to savage this book, right?

They're so offended by this idea.

They think this is such bunk.

They're like, the history doesn't work out.

The theology is bullshit.

Like, come on, man.

Right.

And in the intervening 22 years, I think this idea has become way more acceptable because of people like Peterson.

Like, I do think that someone like Maloney, right, like...

is offended by the idea that you would try to psychoanalyze your own neuroses through the Bible.

He's like, this is the, to him, this is the revealed word of God.

He's like, this is not about like how, like, how to work through shit with your father.

I'm sorry.

Right?

It seems the right has turned around on this.

Like, Peterson's is the same thing, but like, it's completely acceptable.

Adre is the same thing.

It's become completely acceptable.

There's something very interesting going on here in that regard.

It sort of inverts Peterson's idea about submitting to

a like power of meaning that is that is greater than yourself, right?

And it turns Christianity's practice of submission to the salvation of jesus into this much more manly sort of enforcement of divine will yeah yeah where peterson won't acknowledge to himself how much christianity is in his self-help stuff pottles in some way doesn't or at least the his catholic critics think he doesn't acknowledge to himself how much self-help is in his catholicism yeah so that's the first reason where i think like this is actually an interesting book um because it shows how far we've traveled and it in some ways sets up things that like have become absolutely widespread in the way we think about masculinity from the right today.

The second reason, and this is another one where Paddles may well have been kind of ahead of his time, right?

I'm going to quote again from the Maloney Review in First Things, quote, Paddles needs to locate the beginning of feminization in the 12th century with Bernard rather than in the fourth with Ambrose or the third with Origen, because he wants to show that Christianity is not inherently off-putting to men.

That's Maloney in First Things.

So that means there has to be, we talked about like how hard it is to sort of say where the wrong turn lies.

But there always has to be an origin that was pure.

Exactly, right?

That's exactly it.

There has to be a wrong turn because the essence of Christianity must be masculine and must be swole, right?

It cannot be like messiness and complication all the way down.

There has to be an original core that is more true than these subsequent complications.

Exactly.

The idea that maybe this is true, maybe religious devotion has always been coded kind of feminine.

Like, that's the thing that he can't allow, right?

You can hear that story, like, where you're like, well, yeah, people reading books and whispering to themselves in quiet corners has not been, is not the like

butcher's thing you can do, right?

And like, so yeah, maybe any religious observance has something quote unquote feminine about it or whatever, like if that's your taxonomy, right?

That's the thing he won't allow himself.

And it's interesting, again, that his reviewers like seem all repelled by this.

They're like, no, Christianity is not swole, but I'm sorry, right?

Like,

you're thinking of pumping iron.

It's not, this is the Bible.

Right.

At the same time, like, I keep thinking here of like, also think of like how Christians reacted to the Passion of the Christ, the Mel Gibson movie, which was also this.

I wonder if there is something similar in the background there, which was this like reimagining of the crucifixion along Pottle's lines, right?

Like, as like this-make it a masculine thing, masculine, like, yeah, like a weightlifting competition, except bloodier, right?

Like, this is, it's, it's a test of manliness, manliness, you know, a test of manhood.

I think that it might well be true that the, you know, Catholic intelligentsia at the time was like kind of offended by this and thought this was deeply silly.

It feels like Patto probably tapped into something there, right?

Because like, I do think that the, the Mel Gibson version of this is, is far more acceptable today than it, than it was even when that movie came out.

Yeah, it was a, it was almost like rubbernecking the pain of the crucifixion.

It made it into this like gory,

titillating spectacle because it was so violent.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it, that was a move away from the sort of traditional like, okay, I'm going to go to church where there's like sanctified Eucharist on the altar and I'm going to go pray and like contemplate Christ's love as demonstrated in the crucifixion.

That's a very different exercise than sitting down to watch a guy get the shit beat out of him, which is what Mel Gibson's film asked you to do.

Yeah.

Well, and I mean, that's why it's so interesting that it is a Mel Gibson film, right?

Because like he had gone to that well before, right?

Braveheart ends with him being tortured to death.

What does that want payback or something like that, where he gets like just like the shit knocked out of him?

Like Mel Gibson had a penchant for this before the passion of the Christ, which in some way makes the crucifixion scene all the more interesting.

Cause like in some way it's saying, like it's a test of masculinity.

Jesus Christ's action.

Yeah.

He's like buff for the Marvel franchise.

Yeah, exactly.

So that's my second reason where I think like this is actually fairly prescient in that sense that this kind of swole crucifixion or like butch crucifixion like clearly has become more acceptable in certain parts of the right than it was back then.

And then the third reason why I think this book is still interesting and worth thinking about and grappling with.

So he thinks basically, and this goes back to the point you were making earlier, that the development he's tracing has been bad for Christians.

But he also blames all kinds of societal ills on it, right?

And I kind of alluded to this.

Like at times, his book can read like sort of Robert Putnam's bowling alone, right?

Like, are men okay?

Are they not going to church?

They're going to football.

And then they like

won't talk about their feelings, and then they kill themselves or something.

I don't know, like, you know, you can imagine like a kind of you know, a version of that.

But at others, he's going much farther, blaming essentially nationalism and Nazism on the unmoored men that were no longer served by or attracted to the church, right?

This is great because in our episode on Sontag,

we had Adrian Rich talking about how patriarchy was central to the rise of Nazism and a core part of Nazi ideology.

And now here we have Joseph Potil saying that feminization is the cause of Nazism.

And, you know, Nazis always come up eventually.

All you girls were taking up the confessional.

So I just walked off of it.

It's your fault.

Yeah, I just goose-stepped right now.

Mom, you were never home because you were always in church.

And so

I've gone and joined the Nazi party.

On the other hand, so like in this defense, so it's like a little little silly on the other hand it's interesting right it's very clearly a kind of church supremacist view he's like he's not right unlike rod draier for instance he's not actually comfortable with like a state being oh we'll help you fill the pews right like he's like oh no no no no he does seem to think the like render on to caesar what is caesar's and god what is what is god's right and then i want to briefly sort of say something a little bit controversial possibly which is like It strikes me that like we on the left tell the story about unions all the time, right?

Like men used to hang out in union halls and then then like when we like around like not around Nazism necessarily, but around like right-wing populism, right?

Like like, and then when the unions declined, like people went off and like went MAGA, right?

Right.

Like the sense that there were virtuous institutions that were receptacles for masculinity, right?

And that these had to remain appropriately masculine and appropriately powerful to attract.

But there was a decline and now the men are off using that masculine energy for violence and degradation.

That's a very common story.

Yeah.

Men without a hobby, the men without a hobby theory of fascism.

Well, there's also like, this also comes up every now and then after a mass shooting.

There's like this guy had nothing to do.

And the suggestion, it's like always a barely unspoken suggestion is that this is that women's advancement, women's pursuit of, you know, self-actualization, women's integration to things like you know, everything from the church to the education to the industry has like displaced men and left them without purpose.

Now that men cannot dominate those institutions, they will secure their domination with violence.

It will be a mass shooting, it will be Nazism, it will be something.

And that's not, that's like always a hostage situation, you know, a little bit.

It's like, let us dominate the world or we will take that domination by force.

Yeah.

And there's, this is like

this sense in a lot of these crisis of masculinity pieces that we discussed on our last episode.

And the sense I think underneath a lot of these like masculinity genre texts we were reading today is like men are somehow dangerous

and need to be redeemed from their danger.

Yeah.

And especially when they're alone, right?

Like we might think that Paddles is a bit of a crank for the Bernard of Clairvaux stuff, but like in his defense, we tell the story of like, how unmoored masculine energy not tethered to some kind of community building project is actually really dangerous.

Like, and we tell that story all the time, right?

They're like, you could have taken him out on a date to the hop, right?

It was either date at the hop, milk chase at the hop, or school shooting.

And, you know, I guess, I guess you were too good to date him or something like that, right?

Like, like, we, we do this all the time.

Yeah.

So it's all your fault.

Yeah.

The idea that like this kind of radical energy of especially young masculinity like needs binding, like he's not alone in that.

It needs management by,

needs management often by women or like some kind of sacrifice on women's part in order to contain its danger.

Yeah.

So maybe that's enough to say about church impotent.

I must admit, I had a lot of fun with this book.

I always love books that just kind of like have big theses and like are willing to swing for the fences.

When a person who's never been to Sunday school in his life can debunk your book, you know, maybe you should have done some more reading.

On the other hand, it is very well written.

Unlike Peterson, I knew exactly what he was saying.

It's beautifully organized.

So if people find this an an interesting set of ideas to grapple with, I can only recommend it.

It's actually, it's a quick and fun read.

And I don't know if Mr.

Poddles is still alive, but like, I come on the pod.

We thought that was pretty neat.

Yeah, we'll have fun with you, Mr.

Poddles.

Yeah.

All right.

So that's number two.

Who's our perv?

Our pervert is...

a unique character, very different from Podles, but maybe not so different from Jordan Peterson.

He is a 20th century novelist and a pioneer of new journalism.

Adrian, what do you know about this guy named Norman Mailer?

I know a little bit.

I've read a few novels.

I don't think I ever fully, like, you know, I'm not from the United States and like he's always loomed so large for like people studying American literature.

And I've I've always only encountered him as like someone a few of whose books I've read, but like I know he like looms just like way beyond that.

I've read The Naked and the Dead.

I've read, I think, The Executioner's song.

I've read some of the new journalism stuff, though I don't think I've read as much of him as I've read of like Diddian or Thompson or Wolf.

I remember at some point reading that the essay, The White Negro, which like I couldn't make heads or tails of at all.

Yeah.

It's like one of the most baffling things I've ever read, to be honest.

And then I remember a few years ago noticing that, at least at that time, on his Wikipedia page, the fact that he stabbed his wife was under personal life, which I thought was like pretty telling in terms of how this man's public persona and his evident problems with women were sort of,

you know, brought into alignment in certain ways.

Yeah, it's interesting that you say that he sort of seems to

loom large for Americans, because Norman Mailer was a writer who

assigned himself the task of

you know, capturing the mid-century American soul.

Right.

His most famous novel, The Naked and the Dead, is his first novel, which is a chronicle of World War II.

He did serve in World War II.

And he then sort of went on to become a new journalism, sort of like narrative, novelistic journalism figure, alongside the likes of John Didian.

He gets compared to Truman Capote a lot in the style of his nonfiction.

But his

books sort of got

weirder and they got worse as he progressed in his career.

And particularly, he got more and more fixated on sexuality.

His sex scenes are many and lurid.

And that's the other thing I know about him.

He's won the Bad Sex Writing Award a bunch of times.

Yeah, yeah.

And he's kind of grouped in with this group of guys, group of novelists who are sort of cheekily referred to as the mid-century misogynists.

So Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Philip Roth, and John Updike are the sort of big four mid-century misogynists.

And what sort of really seen Norman Mailer is like Jordan Peterson in that he is a guy of very intense passions and very poorly regulated emotions who seems like not always entirely in touch with reality.

So he part of his persona that like also became part of his sort of legend around 1960s and 70s New York is that he was kind of like clearly unraveling really terrible issues with addiction, involuntary commitments, things like that.

He eventually decamped to Provincetown, Massachusetts.

And he is most famous probably to our listeners for this piece called The Prisoner of Sex, which is a book-length essay he wrote in the third person defending himself

from

the literary critic Kate Millett, who was sort of one of the intellectual, big intellectual titans of the second wave.

feminist movement who wrote a book on misogyny in American literature called Sexual Politics that was divided between three authors, one of whom was Norman Mailer.

So he was a very avowed anti-feminist.

He was also a figure of the political left.

He was very staunchly anti-Vietnam War.

He ran for the mayor of New York City twice.

His first campaign was derailed after he attempted to murder his second wife, Adele Morales, who was a painter and a writer.

He stabbed her in the chest and then in the back late at night at a party for his mayoral campaign.

And when partygoers tried to help Adele Adele Morales, he pushed them off of her and screamed, let the bitch die.

He did not go to prison.

He got three years of probation.

Wow.

By Mailer's own account, this was something that everybody in the literary world kind of shrugged off.

Yeah, that's an interesting little bit, right?

Like at some point during Me Too, I remember rereading his account of this.

And like, it's very interesting because, like, I mean, it's the opposite of one of those canceled stories in the sense that he's like, no, he's like, it didn't matter.

Nobody didn't matter.

In fact, there's like some really kind of chilling quotes from famous members of his literary community james baldwin described it as sort of a psychologically necessary episode for mailer diana and lionel trilling both justified the stabbing as an artistic exercise and mailer

said of himself the reactions were subtle as hell mailer told new york magazine of his literary community's response to his attempted murder of his wife adele Morales.

Five degrees less warmth than I was accustomed to, not 15 degrees less five.

I mean, which is, you know, kind of refreshingly honest.

That's

from observation, uh, like that does seem to be the way it was.

My friends were largely chill about this.

About my attempted murder of a woman.

Yeah.

Adele Morales survived.

She divorced him and died in poverty.

They had two children together.

And he went on to have that.

She was his second wife.

He went on to marry four more times after that.

and the and the prisoner of sex which i think we're going to be talking about one of his novels right which i haven't read but the prisoner of sex really has when mora says like oh he was writing to to defend himself against kid billet like he's just attacking her for like 50 pages yeah no i'm being generous he is like virulently misogynist unhinged goes off into these long-winded hypotheticals uh yeah it's not a it's not a document made by a stable no bam this is something i also like i also find kind of uncomfortable about talking about with Mailer as well as with Peterson: is that these are men who are very evidently in the throes of horrific addiction and who are not sane and who are, yeah, and whose masculinity is clearly bound up with substance abuse, too, right?

I mean, like, right, yeah.

So, I don't think that like this is not something I'm saying to excuse Norman Mailer.

Uh, I'm glad he's dead, I wish he died sooner and more painfully.

Uh, but um, you know, this is

somebody who is given a tremendous amount of authority in spite of being very clearly unwell.

And I think something that

has recurred in my study of conservative masculinity, the more I write about it, is that I find that a message whose content advances male supremacy and justifies misogyny and anti-feminism will be elevated to credibility, even when the actual messenger is like clearly not a person anybody should be listening to.

Right.

No one cites the scum manifesto as like, you know, straightforward theory.

We're always like, yeah, and she also, you know, shot Andy Warhol.

So there's that.

Yeah.

And was living on the street and ranting to herself, you know, this is not somebody who's like a role model.

You know, this is somebody who's suffering.

I'm seeing why this, why this guy like is a good avatar for this, because A, the rest of the world kind of saw him as that and saw it as like, saw a serious intervention, something like prisoner of sex, which like, as you say, like, could just be like, ooh, like, we should really get this guy help, right?

And then this idea, I remember he like called Millett, right, like, um, barren and mediocre, right?

This is the charge, right?

Feminism is barren and mediocre.

And like, my violin kind of misogyny is generative and creative, right?

Right.

That's the perv in kind of quintessence, isn't it?

And if we're going to dignify the perv with an intellectual history, which I do think he has, he is.

Really, this kind of 20th century version of the perv embodied by guys like Mailer is really, they are really sort of riffing on early Freud, right?

They are thinking of masculinity as, this is in contrast to Peterson, they're thinking of masculine virility and particularly masculine sexuality as chaotic,

as

uncontrollable, as containing a darkness, but also necessarily as sort of like generative, enticing, and authentic, right?

It's like, it's like Satan in Paradise Lost, you know, it's like this is like the fun thing that is like a little more interesting and a lot more interesting and is like kind of more authentic and in some ways more worthy, but which is suppressed by these civilizational factors.

So this is like masculinity as id and femininity as superego in the in the perverse conception of the world.

The thing about Mailer, his masculinity was very much about like a sort of vulgar but authentic imposition on feminized liberal polites, right?

And this is where he reminds me a lot of Donald Trump, right?

Like,

the, I am going to use slurs.

I'm going to say what everybody's really thinking.

I'm going to disregard bourgeois conventions.

And that's how you're going to know that I am virile and true and more real than this flimsy bullshit you're getting from the left, or in Mailer's case, from feminism.

Barren and mediocre stuff, exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

So, like, today I want to talk about Tough Guys Don't Dance, which is a 1984 novel

from Norman Mailer.

It is minor Mailer.

It is from later in his career.

It is something that he wrote in two months.

It's like a murder mystery thriller threat in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Mailer was living at the time.

And it is

all about fucking.

It is a book about sexual politics.

Wait, I'm sorry.

It's set in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and it's all about fucking.

It's all about fucking.

Well, I might like this.

What?

What?

There is.

There is no such thing.

How dare you schmutz up Provincetown with your heterosexual sex?

I know.

It's such a tragedy.

But like, what I like pairing this with the podals because what the church impotent discusses in terms of metaphor, which is like masculinity as this solitary, adventuresome, disciplined force, and femininity as like passive, receptive, languid.

That is, it's a a it's all metaphor and sort of a stylistic concern for podals and the church impotent.

And for Norman Mailer in Tough Guys Don't Dance, it is just like completely literalized as sex itself.

And that's like, I think kind of true broadly for the PERV model, right?

Yeah.

Like I have to apologize.

There's kind of no way to talk about the ideas that Mailer is advancing about what masculinity is in this book without being really crude because it's a vision of masculinity that proceeds from the assumption that masculinity and femininity are like metaphors or even destinies that are derived from like the actual mechanics of sexual intercourse, right?

So therefore, like intercourse is their central site of meaning making and achievement around masculinity.

So this is going to be the grossest section of our show today.

So like that means for Mailer that like if sex is the metaphor from which masculinity and feminine derive, which I think is actually a pretty foundational claim for a lot of right-wing gender politics, then the way that sex happens is of like massive symbolic importance.

And like that is realized in the PERV model as this vision of masculinity as something that needs to be proven again and again through sex as like a domination exercise.

Like sex is the point.

Fucking is the, is what makes you a man is where you prove that you're a man.

Tough Guys Don't Dance follows this guy, Tim Madden, who is like a mailer stand-in.

He's this like hard-drinking, tough guy.

And he's trying to make it as a writer in Provincetown.

Mean streets of Provincetown.

I know.

And his background is that he had gone to prison for three years for drug trafficking.

And remember that Miller was sentenced to probation for three years for the stabbing.

And Madden like wakes up one morning in Provincetown after a night out drinking.

He has no memory of the evening before, but he has a new tattoo.

The front seat of his car is covered in blood.

And he has this ominous sense that something went wrong.

So what he does is he drives out to the boonies to this like hole in the ground in the woods where he keeps his pot.

He like grows pot in the woods, harvests it, keeps it all in this hole, which is, I guess, something people did at the time.

So far, it's probably just like a Monday for Norman Mailer.

Yeah.

And in the hole in the woods, he discovers the severed head of a hot blonde.

Okay.

So this is where the departure comes in, yes.

So Madden believes he's being framed for a murder, and he begins this like quest to solve the murder, piece together the night before, and prove his innocence.

And in this sort of quest, he discovers a whole bunch more bodies.

I think there's like seven or eight dead people by the end.

He, and he.

How does he, how does he know he didn't do it?

Yeah, good fucking question.

But he's just like,

he, he understands that everybody is going to assume his guilt, but he has this like conviction that he is not responsible for this woman's death.

Yeah.

Interesting.

And that's sort of the, like, honestly, look, like, that's kind of the approach he took to the stabbing of Morales.

Right, right.

He's like, why, he kept being like, why are you bringing this up?

Whenever anybody would mention it in subsequent years, you would get like so offended.

I just found her head in the forest.

Yeah, exactly.

So, like, part.

Why would you make, why would you, why would that connect me to her in any way?

A big part of the plot is like the vulgarity and the crudeness, right?

Like, a major plot turning point is that there are all of these photos of the dead woman's corpse in like sexual positions that

he discovers, you know, it's um, it like

I didn't have to read this.

It really goes.

I had actually already read this uh many years ago, but like the crudeness of the book itself and Madden's interpersonal crudeness, he's also like constantly cursing.

Like, one of the ways I found relevant passages that I wanted to talk about on the podcast was that I just like looked at the PDF of the book and I controlled F for like cunt.

Uh, and i found like all of the the things 400 found yeah exactly um but like the crudeness the vulgarity this is like a demonstration of the superiority to convention and it's a way that like

that the perv

shows he is like invulnerable and indifferent to like the opinions of those he offends right it's like it is itself a kind of domination exercise yeah and what accomplishes this like even more often is just like actual literal sex, right?

So take, for instance, like one scene when something that happens is that Madden sort of pieces together the night before and he remembers being with the dead woman and hanging out with her and her gay male best friend, speaking of fag hacks.

So he's like spending some time

with this woman and her gay best friend and he winds up, I'm just going to read this.

I'm sorry, I am subjecting you guys to this.

Then it seems we were all in my Porsche again and on a crazy trip to Well Fleet.

Once I stopped the car in the woods just before we got to Harpo's house and made love to her on the front fender, yes, because on this morning, awakening in the third floor study chair, recalling it all, I could still feel the grasp of the walls of her vagina on my monster on an erection.

How I had to fuck her.

Down with Patty Lorene.

Patty Lorene is the main character's ex-wife who has just left him a few weeks before.

It was as if Jessica and I had been designed in some heavenly shop, part for part.

Our privates were inseparable.

And where was Lonnie but watching?

He was crying, if I remember.

And I never felt more of a brute.

His misery was as good as blood to my erectile tissue.

That was the state of my affections near to four weeks after being deserted by my wife, right?

So, like, masculinity here, it contains of this like irrepressible sexual force, right?

Sort of referencing back to the nature.

He talks about design and sort of like fulfilling a destiny in that sense.

But then it also has to have an audience of somebody who is inadequate,

or who is like less masculine.

And like the

gay best friend, I think is what really makes this scene.

Right.

Like the gay, but the gay man crying

because he can't be masculine in the same way that Tim Madden is.

Right.

So like masculinity here is performed like on women's bodies.

performed by fucking them and the performance has a meaning that is meant to be conveyed to others

in the sense like both like his ex-wife and like the whole novel like Miller did write this after the dissolution of his forced marriage that had sort of like long been on again, off again with his actress.

And they finally divorce in 1980.

And he's writing this like a year or two after that.

And the whole novel is kind of like this pornographic revenge fantasy about his fourth wife.

He's like, oh, I got it easy.

Yeah.

It's like Henry VIII's wife who like didn't get her head cut off.

So I think like Patty Lorene is one audience.

Jessica, the woman he's fucking is one audience.

But I really think the most important audience to

masculinity the other man, the defective man.

So Lonnie, the gay best friend, he witnesses Madden having sex and is reduced to tears because we are made to understand he is so ashamed that his homosexuality means he will never be a real man like Madden, like Norman Miller.

And Lonnie actually shoots himself in the head thereafter.

He's so wrecked by his comparative inadequacy.

Right.

He's so blown away by his masculinity that he's like.

I gotta blow my brains out.

He shoots himself in the head.

Yeah.

And that means like both of the actual in-person witnesses to madden's like sexual accomplishment here they both wind up dead by the end of the night um like that's how powerful his dick is

so a continuation of this idea of and its audiences as like sort of necessary to create masculinity comes in this other passage uh i wanted to read you like

particularly because like the sense of the per of masculinity is always requiring an audience and always being in competition with other men, but having this like field and sort of like sight of competition as being on women's bodies, right?

Yeah.

So Madden is like pretty clearly, as I've said, just a stand-in for Norman Mailer.

And one of the ways that you can tell this is because

Madden, the character, will just like monologue in ways that give voice to Mailer's personal grievances.

So it's like the suburb population of Provincetown is annoying.

Provincetown is only nice in the winter when nobody's there.

Feminists are ugly.

They don't paint their nails.

That's when he comes back to stuff like that.

And my favorite, I think the most illustrated

I know, yeah, it's really important.

I'm so glad he got paid for this book.

But I think like the one is where like you can see just Mailer just being like professionally jealous of John Updike

and like complaining about John Updike.

So like Madden is nominally supposed to be a writer, which allows him to give voice to this little monologue.

Updike is one of the few writers who can enhance his work with adjectives rather than abuse it.

He has a rare talent, yet he irks me.

Even his description of a pussy, it could as easily be a a tree.

And parentheses, the velvetine of moss in the ingathered crotch of my limbs, the investiture of algae on the terraces of my bark, etc.

Just once I would like to have him guide me through the inside of a cunt.

Right now, for instance, my mind is pondering the difference between Updike's description of a pussy and a real cunt.

That is, the one I am thinking of at this instant.

It belongs to Madeline Falco, and since she is sitting next to me, I need only reach over with my right hand to feel the objective correlative on my fingertips.

Still, I would rather remain in the simpler state of a writer in reverie, being nothing if not competitive, as which unheralded writer is not.

I am trying to put the manifest of her cunt into well-chosen words and so implant a small standard of prose on the great beachhead of literature.

Therefore, I will not dwell on her pussy hair.

He actually does dwell on her pissy hair for spoiler alert.

Yeah.

Ron Howard narrator voice.

He did dwell on her pussy hair.

But that's not important.

What's actually important, I think, is that Mailer is showing us here

that like his competition with uptake is a competition for manly status.

And it's happening like, you know, he gives this metaphor of like, I'm implanting a standard of prose on the great beachhead of literature.

It's like a masculine, colonial metaphor.

But the place where this like colonial, like masculine military competition is taking place is like literally inside of Agina, right?

So, masculinity here is like it's a competition.

It's Mailer versus Updike that it's fought out on the terrain of a woman's body.

So, women are like the metaphor you'll hear feminists use about this is that like men are playing a game against each other and women are the ball getting kicked back and forth.

Like women's bodies are sites where men demonstrate their masculinity to an audience of one another, right?

It's the beachhead where the standard of manliness gets implanted, right?

Right.

And I want to dwell for a second, not just on like how dehumanizing this vision of masculinity is to women, right?

Like you're literally objectified, you're made into like a place or a ball.

And that's like, I don't want to like act like that's not the central problem of the perversion of masculinity, because that's definitely like the main thing that's wrong with it is that it requires women to be objectified and instrumentalized and used.

by men for the gratification of their own egos, for the witness of other men in this like narcissistic self-defining project.

Like that's the main thing that's wrong with it.

That's very gross.

But I also like think it's really interesting, like how

needful and dependent this vision of masculinity is.

You need other people's bodies to achieve it, and you need other men to see you doing it.

It's always like, look at me, look at me, look at me, are you?

Dyke, where are you?

Yeah, like, look at me, like, finger this lady at a bar, you know?

And it's just like, it's so, it's like kind of

horseshoe, apparently.

I mean, Jesus.

Yeah.

It's like, it's decidedly a relation of anxious dependency.

It's not an inner resource.

It's like something you're doing outside of yourself.

We have, again, sort of this difference between what does he really mean, right?

Like with Peterson, it was like metaphor versus what he really thinks.

And here it's basically, right, like it's easy to imagine, like, you know, being in the business of literary criticism, I can tell you what someone's defense of this is going to look like, right?

I can guess.

But if people reviewed this like, as not like just utter garbage, what they would say is, right, like, oh, you know, you have to point to all the differences between Mailer, the author, and the figure that he's created for himself.

And he's actually reflecting self-ironically on his own masculinist obsessions, right?

Like,

am I guessing right that there are people defending it this way?

That's more or less a Mailer defense.

Yeah, except, I mean, he doesn't really allow you to do that because he's out there in real life stabbing his wife.

Right.

He says, like, right, but he says something like, where is it?

Being nothing if not competitive as which as which unheralded writer is not, right?

Like, I was like, oh, I'm not Norman Mailer.

I'm an unheralded writer,

Mormon Mailer, right?

Like,

he builds in some plausible deniability.

But of course, as you're pointing out, I always hate when people make that argument because

you're not saying, oh, this character is held up as being awesome and

therefore it's like rebarbative that Norman Mailer is putting this out there.

It's to say the overall claim, which is that John Updike's knowledge of female anatomy makes him inadequate and he should just watch someone, another man fuck a woman in order to like get better educated about it like is basically like that's played for that's played straight.

That's the book doing that.

That's not actually like, so I think that's really interesting too that like, you know, it has this kind of like

I mean, I guess I'm thinking here of someone like Brett Easton Ellis, who like, you know, who always sort of brings in this like, well, people didn't get that it was satire.

It's like,

yeah,

but there are those readers, that's true.

But there are also

like a satire still transports values.

And you're absolutely right that the values transported by this book are independent of how, whether or not it regards, you know, this Madden guy as like particularly positive or negative, right?

Right.

You know, it reminds me of this sort of like relationship of

the work to

irony always reminds me a little bit of the Stanford prison experiment, which was nominally a bit of research into the psychology of people who commit cruelty, right?

But in the process of conducting that research, the researchers actually committed torture.

Like torture happened.

Right.

It's a little bit of like, it's like, well, you know, if I have enough ironic detachment, does that absolve me from the action or from the professed value?

And I'm like, I'm not sure that it does.

I don't think that that's like the loophole out that people like Mailer and his defenders would maybe like it to be.

So like this kind of masculinity as enacted through like sexual domination also leads men to be vulnerable to be being like demasculinized through sex, right?

And in one of the novels like really most like on the nose, like what did your daddy not love you enough scenes, Madden

is reunited with his emotionally distant father, who he sees this as like a paragon of masculinity, right?

Like this is the guy that Madden, Madden is like more of a man than John Updike, but Madden is less of a man than Madden's own father, right?

And he proves his own manhood by informing his dad that while he was in prison, he was never sexually penetrated by another man.

I worried about you.

Maybe you didn't have to.

I took my three years in the slammer without a fall.

They called me Iron Jaw.

I wouldn't take cock.

Good for you.

I always wondered.

Like

Mailer, who like he never actually went to prison, right?

He never actually got any prison time for his attempted murder of Adele Morales.

That was in 1960.

So it's like about 20 years ago by the time he's writing Tough Guys Don't Don't Dance.

But he had been fixated on this notion of prison sex and its possible threat to his own masculinity for a long time.

We're probably going to do a whole episode on the prisoner of sex at some point.

But yeah, that's also another one where, like, yeah.

Yeah, it makes explicit this idea that penetrating others is the act that constitutes the creation of masculinity and that being penetrated constitutes femininity.

I looked over my notes on The Armies of the Night, which is another one of Mailer's that I've read in preparation for this.

And there's another passage like that.

I'll read this too for people.

Don't be weirded out by the fact that mailer shows up in the third person he writes about himself he does that a lot yeah in the third person all the time all right onanism and homosexuality were not to mailer light vices to him it sometimes seemed that much of life and most of society were designed precisely to drive men deep into onanism and homosexuality One defied such a fate by sweeping up the psychic profit which derived from the existential assertion of yourself, which was a way of saying that nobody was born a man.

You earned manhood provided you were good enough and bold enough.

So, like, first of all, nice reference to Simone de Pofo,

nearly enough, but also,

yeah, it's like this idea that like masturbation and homosexuality are sort of like they're the wrong turns you can take.

And basically, that's how

you earn manhood by steering clear of that is clearly all over his.

Yeah, and by focusing that, particularly, like, not just, it's not a, it's not a masculinity of abstention or

like discipline.

It's a masculinity of sort of explosive impulse, right?

Not to like put too fine a point on it.

And I think that actually might be a better quote to use because it, than, than the one I was going to use from Prisoner of Sex, because it sort of gestures us towards something you see like throughout the porn masculinity genre, which is this like latent mournfulness or this like suggestion of like grief.

So Mailer at one point, or Madden rather at one point, notes that his father, this like masculine ideal, had a lot of sex with a lot of different women and that it was a point of pride for him to actually never kiss these women.

I don't have to show them any tenderness at all.

So like at first glance, this just seems like straightforward borish sadism.

But then Mailer goes on to like cast it as this like self-imposed deprivation, right?

So Madden speculates that this is because this father was a child,

was never kissed.

The severe Irish mother never kissed him.

Of course, he was famous among his friends for such an ascetic view.

In Longshoreman days, he had earned another legend for the number of women he could attract and the powerful number of times he could do it in a night.

All the same, it was his manly pride that he was never obliged to kiss the girl.

Who knows what ice room of the heart my skinny Irish grandmother raised him in?

He never kissed.

And so, like, this is a lot of like the other note in a lot of these pro-masculinity narratives that I think links it a little bit to the preacher, like,

there's actually something abstemious about that.

Yeah, kissing girls, isn't that kind of gay, fellas?

Right, you're not allowed to do that because you're depriving yourself of that, right?

So, it's like this domination and degradation inflicted by the perv masculinity, like, really, it's basically just as like sexual violence as the pinnacle of manhood, right?

Yeah, and that is, in fact, depicted as a kind of sacrifice, right?

It's something that the perv guy like Mailer will claim that they feel they must do on some level in spite of themselves to prove that they are men when they suggest a more indulgent, more feminine ethos would involve like comfort and tenderness that they are like abstaining from.

Yeah.

And like, frankly, I don't buy it.

I want to like underline that I don't buy it.

I don't see rapists as like victims of masculinity or suffering from a lack of love or just needing a hug.

But I think it's interesting that Mailer

and a lot of his perv masculinity fellows, like this is also kind of a major theme in Port Noise Complaint, which is the other big like ur text of the perv masculinity.

Although a lot more masturbation in that one, right?

Yeah, he's like sort of more reveling around in his degradation,

but like kind of enjoying being degraded.

But in Tough Guys, Don't Dance, it's seen as like kind of more pure.

But like, it's interesting that these guys see it this way.

They feel that they have to portray

their like incessant, pervy,

like rapacious, violent sexuality as, in fact, like this kind of sacrifice.

And this is like something that's, I think, common to all these styles of masculinity, right?

I was going to say, right?

They depend on like depicting the masculine subject as somebody who sacrifices and deprives himself.

So even if, to all intents and purposes, like the perv

is on this like endlessly self-gratifying quest

to like prove himself through sex and violence.

We are made to understand that this is actually a kind of self-denial and that he's a martyr of some form.

Yeah, and all three of ours, and maybe this is sort of where we can start concluding, but like, um, all three of these styles seem, for all the kind of strength they assign to masculinity, are so fussy about policing the fucking boundaries, right?

Like, oh, there's so anxious.

I'm going to church.

Does that mean

I'm too much of a lady?

I am, you know, like, oh, I enjoyed the darkness.

Is that bad?

Like, I didn't clean my room.

Oh, no, am I not enough of a man?

Right.

Like, I like, you have to guard, you know, your

women, your vaginal knowledge, apparently, your, your asshole, right?

All this stuff you have to like guard the hell out of.

It, I mean, like, it just feels like a fuck ton of work to be any kind of man on this on this model.

And it's so insecure.

It's like, everybody has to see me being a man.

I have to do it perfectly.

You know, it's just like, it's, um, it's really whiny and like bitchy.

Uh,

and, and it requires so much

constantly.

Exactly, right?

I mean, like, I hadn't caught that before, but like, right, the fact if he said, like, look, I, I did not become a victim of sexual violence in prison, like, whatever, like, that's that, I, I, I, I could see why someone would say that, but, like, he's like, oh, no, I was so famous for it.

They had a name for me.

It's like, oh my God, like, you always need to find out.

And now I also need to tell myself.

Yeah, exactly, right?

I thought about that.

Jesus.

It's like, yeah,

I'm going to call a C-SFAN Colin Show next to explain it.

Right.

Because I need everyone to know.

Right.

It's like,

I loved his dad going, I always wondered.

It's like, you did?

Like, Jesus.

Like, I always wondered if you disgraced me in my manhood because that's also implicated.

in your you know sex life.

Oh, I see.

I guess this is where I'm just, you know, I'm just not in that type of masculinity.

I thought it was genuine worry.

Yeah, no, it's um, it's like so

it sounds like no wonder these guys feel so aggrieved and victimized because this sounds like a lot of hard fucking work uh for not it's not clear like exactly what payoff and i mean to to harken back to a line from our friend mitch dichter right like they have made in every conceivable way an enormous issue out of it they're just like oh boy i mean like look if if you have some neuroses about gender roles like it's a complicated fucking subject like i understand that people do it all kinds of different ways but like holy shnikes, do these people sort of, yeah, why do they always need an audience?

Why does this need to, like, you know,

why does it have to be dragged out into these massive things?

Like, it's just, you know, the fact that like, you can't live it.

You got to be seen living it and by like the biggest possible audience.

Like, it seems so

noticeable here.

Needs

his like dominion, his family, his wife, his, you know, religious community.

He needs them to see him being righteous and to submit to his righteous authority.

The creep needs to be vindicated in his sense of a grieved, wounded superiority and have other people applaud his discipline or his demonstrated genetic superiority or whatever the chosen vehicle is.

Everybody needs a gold star.

And the creep needs, to quote that brilliant tweet about Elon Musk, like what are there, like hundreds of millions of followers who, if if you, you know, slam your, slam your dick into a car door, they're like, well played, sir.

Yeah, I wish, I wish all of these guys would relax a little bit and like maybe lay off the bend.

Yeah.

You know, if, if, if these two hours have been good for nothing, it's like,

guys,

guys.

Relax.

You're okay.

You're okay.

Relax.

You don't need to do this.

You don't need to do any of this.

Yeah.

If we, if we had to sum up what we just said, it was, oh, sweetie, no.

All right.

Well, I think we've been through it.

Is this a good place to wrap up?

This is a good place to wrap up.

We have exceeded our usual time limit, which is already ample.

And we, and yeah, we've been on a journey.

I mean, where haven't we been?

We've been in to Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

We've been to Clairvaux.

We've seen Marduk, apparently.

Brings light and shit.

We've been to Toronto.

We

followed Rod Dreyer into penis measuring territory.

I mean, we've taken you on a journey.

We've taken each other on a journey.

And now I need a long fucking shower.

And with that, we are in Bed with a Right.

In Bed with a 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 Kalthas.