Episode 100 -- Mailbag, Part 2

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Way Rodonigan.

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

So, Adrienne, today we are here with another mailbag episode with some questions from our beloved listener community.

Thank you all so much for writing in.

And we've got some like good ones, I think, today.

I think we do.

Before we get to those, though, a couple of announcements.

First of all you may have noticed in the title of this episode, this is our hundredth episode.

Woohoo!

It feels crazy.

It feels crazy.

I had no idea we would ever make it there and I definitely didn't think we were going to make it there this quickly.

We've really been cranking out that content, Donegan.

I hope you realize.

We have been doing this a lot.

I think we started off when we were like, this is going to be an every other week.

show and then we realized that we just had too much to say and didn't want to shut up so we started doing it weekly and then we started a Patreon.

So there's like tons of embed with the right for you guys to dig into if you like what we're doing.

And if you do like what we're doing, I really hope you'll support us over on the Patreon, which allows us to keep doing this because it is taking up kind of a lot of our time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So each month we have two extra episodes on the Patreon.

at least, sometimes more, if fancy strikes us, because full disclosure, we have in the past used the Patreon paywall to, let's say, hide spicier takes from easy Google ability.

To talk shit is what Adrian is trying to say, delicately.

Yeah.

We talk shit on the Patreon, and it's fun.

Yeah.

And so, for instance, for October, we have on deck, according to the production document, we have lesbians.

Is that right?

Not all of them.

Oh, okay.

Good, good, good.

I wanted to do an episode on some depictions of lesbians in cultural media in the Trump era, something I've been digging into with one of my editors.

and I thought it would make a good opportunity for us to have some, you know, paywalled content for some hot takes where I can be very spicy.

Yeah.

Then we're going to have an episode on the creeps, the Silicon Valley creeps, which is something I've been researching for a book that's coming out next year.

And we're also talking about doing, speaking of lesbians, doing an episode that we will definitely hide behind the paywall.

New head of CBS News and definite person who would not take this the right way, Barry Weiss.

Excuse me, she's bisexual.

See, this is why we're moving behind the paywall.

We should also mention, this is relevant really only for folks in the Greater Bay Area, the 100th episode really crept up on us.

You know, we produce about six of these a month.

That means by the time we were like, oh shit, we're going to get to 100 soon.

It was way too late to do anything for the 100th, hence this.

But we were like, we do want to do something special.

So we're going to do like a 108th-ish episode spectacular, which is going to be In Bed with the Right presents Moral Panic Bingo.

We're doing a special live show in San Francisco at Cafe du Nord at the Swedish American Hall.

It's going to be really special.

It's on November 20th.

So I think you can buy your tickets now, or you can when this comes out.

Maybe, maybe not.

Adrian's looking in the camera.

Yeah.

With like panicked

expression.

We're not event planners, but we really hope you'll come come if you're around because this is going to be really, really fun.

We're going to try and show you guys good night.

We're going to be silly and we're going to be recording everything for a hopeful future release.

So even if you can't make it, hopefully you can hear it later.

Yes, I think that this week would be when they go on sale, the week of, for people who are listening to this later, of October 13th, 2025.

Yeah, and we should also mention maybe our guests, which is going to be the wonderful Sarah Marshall of Yurongabout

and Matt Bernstein of A Bit Fruity.

And we're so excited to have both of them join us.

It's fairly new to us, but like those are two old hands at live shows, and I think it'll be fun as shit.

Friends of the pod, all hanging out, and you can come join us.

All right.

Well, with that, let's dive back in to the mailbagging.

So I mentioned this last time.

There was a surfeit of brilliant questions.

Some of them are a little hard to distill.

So my apologies if I end up kind of posing a version of the question you asked.

Part of that is just that I can't read some of the more involved and more interesting questions where there's sort of a lead up to them.

I hope that still our answers will sort of be in the spirit of in which you asked the question.

But I also grouped them according to some basic formula.

The first is questions about media.

So this is often about like things we've teased or alluded to on the show or things that people have watched, et cetera, et cetera.

Second is questions about bodies.

There were some really fascinating questions about bodies that we didn't get to last time.

And the third is

this podcast has, due to the political situation in the United States, become somewhat US focused as of late.

And there have been wonderful questions raised by our listeners, sort of being like, hey, I'm seeing what you're doing.

I'm now...

wanting to see what you can do with that looking at the UK or looking at Japan or looking at somewhere else.

And we do want to get to those two.

Those, you know, please don't hold us to any of our answers.

You know, we are, in the end, just a couple of Americans, but I think we can challenge our ideas and our parochialism a little bit by dealing with some of these questions in a more broadly international lens.

I mean, at the risk of being a aggressively simplistic American, one of the sort of upshots of globalization and of the aggressiveness aggressiveness of american hegemony abroad is that a lot of the patterns of authoritarian reaction and particularly like gender conservatism that have emerged in the u.s have some like kind of decently recognizable analogs in other countries.

I'm thinking of like the men's rights politics of South Korea, for instance, which are obviously locally informed, but do sort of rhyme in some important ways with what's happening in the U.S.

So I think there's, you know, there's rooms for a a sort of like comparative political investigation into these perverts, preachers, and creeps, which are an international phenomenon.

Yeah, and maybe we can close out the show with the pledge later on that like for the next 100 episode, we will look abroad more.

I think that there are still a lot of American topics we really want to cover, but I do think some of these questions are important as questions, but they're also important as reminders that it's good for us to think about what's different about, you know, something like the Pele Coe trial in France versus how Me Too gets metabolized in the United States.

And I think we've done some of that work, but we want to do more of it.

So that's very exciting.

Anyway, the media questions.

The first media question we got was several people wrote in and really wanted a tar episode.

We're probably not going to do a tar episode, but this could be

our mini tar episode.

Mini tar episode, yeah.

Our tar hot take hour.

Yeah.

So for listeners who are like, what are they talking about?

Is this the road covering or what is this?

Do you want to catch up our listeners on what Tar is, who it is about, and why we might be talking about it on this podcast?

Tar is a quite epic, like three-hour feature film.

I believe it came out in 2022 after the dust had settled on Me Too.

And it was a film about a very highly accomplished, very self-serious, and very revered classical music conductor named Lydia Tarr, who has

sexual abuse allegations made against her and who sort of descends into

a kind of acute madness

and a sense of paranoia as she, you know, proceeds to lose her marriage, her job, her home.

And the film ends, I hope this isn't a spoiler, with her sort of like exiled to a very undesirable music marketplace.

She's not in the United States or in Europe anymore.

She's, I think, it may be the Philippines.

She's supposed to be in the Philippines, yeah.

Playing a

live score for a like sort of zombie-themed Monster Hunter.

Video game, yes.

And the name is Monster Hunter, right?

The idea being that she is the monster who has been hunted.

Yeah.

Uh, and that it destroyed her.

Yeah, it's a real game, as far as I know.

Played by a fascinating Kate Blanchette, who is, of course, a very good performer.

And this movie

reminds me of the fact that she named one of her children after Roman Polanski.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Oh, yeah, she did.

You know, my hot take about this movie is that it does not know the actual message that it's sending, right?

Which is that this is a movie that tries to be...

a straightforwardly anti-Me Too, anti-cancel culture, sort of like reactionary movie, and almost accidentally winds up being sort of a mockery of that position that's my take on tar

yeah so um i should mention that i we had planned on doing an episode on this at some point and so i re-watched it i'd watched it in 2022 when it first came out it's kind of catnip for me given that like i love classical music people can check out my wagner uh episodes for this podcast which went on and on and on tar is supposed to be the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, although I believe the orchestra performing in the movie is not in fact the Berlin Philharmonic, which is an orchestra that I've spent a lot of time listening to over the last 25 years.

This fictional composer, Lydia Tarr, is trying to complete her Mahler cycle.

And as Moira knows, I love Gustav Mahler.

Moira does not.

I find him too martial, but I think that's a good fit for Lydia Tarr.

You know, I for a while had this dream of like having a surprise guest for our 100th episode, which will be your wife, who's also a Mahler fan.

And we would just harangue you for two and a half hours and like brainwash you live on the podcast into like liking Gustav Mahler.

And so what I ended up doing was kind of writing about my complicated feelings about this film on my sub stack, adriandob.substack.com.

You've read this piece more, I believe, because I asked you to look it over before I hit publish.

I am a subscriber to your sub stack.

I read your substack.

Oh, well, there's your first mistake, but thank you.

But as you can remember, like I ended up being kind of ambivalent in this exact same way that you were in the sense that

there is a version of this movie that is just straightforwardly what I call the cinema of cancellation, which is a movie that has, I think, three characteristics.

One, it is about the professional destruction of an artist or a professor or someone like that, where the general thrust of the story has to be that this person doesn't quite deserve it or doesn't quite deserve everything that comes to them, right?

Often these are people who are difficult.

They are people who are brilliant.

These are people who don't get along well with others, but they don't deserve this.

The classic case for this is Oleana, where like reviews at the time when the David Mammet movie and the play first appeared in the early 90s, there was basically the, there would be all these reviews that say like, well, it really looks at the issue from both sides.

No, it doesn't really.

What it does is it presents a person who has quite a few faults and then sort of lays on a punishment that those faults in no way justify.

We talked about Oleana on the Patreon, if anybody wants to go listen to our Oleana episode as part of our very fun Cinema of Cancellation series.

Yeah.

And then the second important aspect, I think, of the Cinema of Cancellation is that

these films tend to be really selective in how they distribute ambiguity.

That is to say, well, we don't quite know what happened around Lydia Tarr and these young women.

It's possible that she's a sexual predator, but maybe not, right?

Meanwhile, the hounding that these figures tend to receive in these movies is rendered, and I mean, film has a sort of baseline facticity, right?

Like, if the camera shows us something, we are going to assume that that is indeed what happens.

We're going to have to do the new Luca Guadanino movie, which is his tar rip-off.

Oh.

Where Julia Roberts is a philosophy professor whose protégé is accused of sexual assault by their shared graduate student.

Interesting.

And Julia Roberts is wearing all the suits.

And it's his sort of like anti, like lightly anti-Me Too film that is supposed to like distribute ambiguity with all these sort of moments where the viewers are supposed to be very challenged, right?

It's like, oh, this is your assumption, but what if it's not like that?

I will say what these films tend to do, and I think this extends to literature because it's a problem of narrative more than a problem of a specific medium, is that they find so much more interest and so much more like narrative tension and and like compelling attraction in the perpetrators than they do in the victims, right?

It's like Milton going for Lucifer like all over again, right?

The

accusers are either like completely absent like they are in tar,

or they are rendered in this sort of like cartoonish way in which they are either fully evil or fully stupid and like naive in a tragic way.

That's about as complex as they get, right?

You're so tragic that you don't realize you've done something horrible, you accuser.

Like you're so stupid, you're so naive, you're so easily manipulated.

And there's not really the same sort of like depth of experience or like complexity of character allowed on the other side.

But I think, I think that's, again, a problem of narrative, right?

Because the

accuser's story doesn't really have any twist in it.

It's like she gets victimized.

And then if you're doing like anything like Verisimilitude, like

her coming forward will just lead to her being victimized again and again and again in various different ways, right?

There's no like turn of fate around, which you do have with the accused who starts off very high and then has a fall and might get vindicated, at least in the eyes of the audience, if you're taking their side narratively, right?

There's more movement on the accused side, is I guess what I'm trying to say.

Yeah.

And I mean, part of this is just, it's almost dunderheaded in its obviousness but like the kind of person who has a novel published the kind of person who manages to get kate blanchet to star in their three-hour movie and gets that movie distributed is gonna identify more with the person who's up here and can get taken down a peg and not with the person who's gotten ground up excuse me adrienne uh male novelists are underrepresented and oppressed how yeah i forget about that i read that i read that in the new york times thanks

we should have becca rothfield of the Washington Post on because she's fascinating on this controversy about like supposedly there aren't any male novelists anymore.

Yeah, I know.

John Banville told me all about it.

I mean, I'm sorry.

It's like, do you not know?

Like, there's Jeffrey Eugenes.

There's Jonathan Franzen.

There's like, you know, and then there's the guy who teaches at Brooklyn College, who I heard those unflattering rumors about, who published a ton of novels.

He's like a misogynist and he hates himself for it.

And it's all wrapped up in his mother being a psychoanalyst, leaving the Atocha station.

Who is this guy?

Oh, Ben Lerner.

Bren Lerner.

There are male novelists.

Is that to say?

I think you're also putting a finer point on sort of the like affective

proclivities

and biases of the people who are in a material position.

to produce mass work and also to criticize it, right?

Like

who is getting their movie review published in the New York Times is also the person who identifies much more as a perpetrator.

And in fact, probably a bunch of his friends

are also a perpetrator.

You know what I mean?

It's like the powerful creating art about themselves and about their own sense of victimization by the people who, you know, dared to tell the truth about them.

The third aspect of the cinema of cancellation I wanted to bring up briefly has also to do with this kind of narrative confusion.

And I think you're right that literary works kind of fit into this as well.

They escape into the metaphysical, right?

Like ultimately, I think, and we'll get to that with Tar in a second.

Tar may not be a political movie at all in the conception of its own filmmakers.

It ends up being one because of how everyone has to read it.

How do you read a movie like this as apolitical four years after V2, right?

But really it becomes a movie much more about like the nature of reality and of perception and of how people with power don't perceive it, which are all really interesting questions.

But then you know, if you're a filmmaker, that the moment you sit down with someone from Entertainment Tonight or the Wall Street Journal or whatever, right?

Like you're going to go on someone's podcast, you're going to get questions about day-to-day politics.

And I think with Tar, I ended up thinking it was a lot more ambiguous a movie than even the one that Kate Blanchette was describing in her various interviews.

It's funny, right?

Like, does that mean she didn't understand her own movie?

Or is that just about how movie promotion works, right?

Like you've done like 20 interviews in one day and someone throws you something and you can just kind of sound off for a little while you're like yeah that's great i can hoping to maybe get a couple of headlines out of that like it's understandable but like it's this problem where we don't even quite understand what kind of a narrative we're getting or what kind of a point about our reality this thing is trying to make right in the end they're much more interested in questions of like psychology and narcissism, et cetera, et cetera.

But like, yeah, if we hear, oh, this older, highly revered figure was accused by a bunch of younger people with less power of sexual misconduct.

Well, how are we going to read that?

Like, that's in and of itself political in the year 2022, right?

The movie I often think about in that regard, which I thought about doing for the cinema of cancellation, but I saw your face when I mentioned it, is Deconstructing Harry by Woody Allen.

Oh, God, don't make me watch a Woody Allen movie.

For one thing, they're all the exact same fucking movie.

She's making that face again, dear listeners.

But I don't want to give this guy more attention, you know?

I now know what Moira's root canal face is.

No,

I fully agree with you.

They are all the same movies.

Of those same movies, this is one of the better ones.

But ultimately, it's a masterclass in this kind of metaphysical evasion I was talking about in the sense that like it's about an artist coming sort of to the limits of what he can do.

Everyone in his life is kind of mad at him because he keeps sort of mining his own personal life for his art.

It ends up being about the question of what if you turn your narcissism into art, what does that do to yourself, et cetera, et cetera.

But of course, this movie comes out in 1998.

It's like the goose meme.

What is everyone mad at you for, Woody Allen?

What is everyone mad at you for?

It's not like making art out of like your relationship to Mia Pharaoh.

It's something far darker than that.

And like those questions you're raising like may even be modestly interesting, but like it's it feels like an evasion in the moment, right?

Yeah, it's a it's a dodge, right?

I mean, the other thing about Tar's ambiguity is that it allows the filmmakers to possibly not have to take responsibility for the politics of their movie.

If they put in enough ambiguity under the guise of like artistic complexity, right?

Then they have sort of an alibi for the message that they actually

want most intensely to send.

I think the fact that the main character in that movie was a woman did a lot to make it seem more ambivalent than its politics perhaps actually

were.

I actually heard a rumor that the role was written for a man and that Kate Blanchett went out of her way to make her interest in the role known.

I don't know if that's a true rumor or not, but it was one that sort of resonated with my own reading of the film.

It was like, oh, you wanted to make a movie about me too.

And the fact that you're siding with the powerful against the oppressed

is more obvious when you depict that in the arrangement of identities

and positions in relation to violence that it actually manifests itself in like 99% of the time, which is, you know, a male perpetrator and a female target.

And having Lydia Tarr be a woman sort of defangs her a little bit, although I do think Blanchett plays her like to evoke terror, you know?

But it adds, I think, to both the complexity and ambiguity of the story and also of like the plausible deniability of the movie.

Yeah, I think that's right.

It feels like the movie is kind of trying to raise a point there, and in which case I don't understand what the point is, right?

It's like, huh, what if Harvey Weinstein were a woman, were a gay woman?

What then?

It's like, well, I don't know.

Is rape still against the law?

I kind of think it is.

Also, like, it's not especially groundbreaking to depict lesbians as sexual predators I'm sorry like I've I've actually heard that song before well Maura we they stopped doing it for like eight years so you got to give them credit

now it's postmodern now it's with a twist but at the same time right it feels like for a particular person

let's call them idiots

for a particular kind of person this feels like an interesting twist or an interesting kind of like oh what what now it's like what do you mean what now

It's they're trying to do a gotcha.

Yeah.

As a feminist writing in public, often I will be writing or commenting on a situation where women are being victimized as women, right?

Usually by men or by, you know, proxies of men like the state.

And I'll get somebody going, it's like, well, haven't you ever heard of Margaret Thatcher?

It's like, you know, women's capacity for evil, for wrongdoing, for conservatism is seen as as to sort of like undercut

their claims to victimization or their claims to like have their grievances redressed.

And to me, I'm always like, no, women's capacity for the full spectrum of humanity is in fact why they are entitled to the same rights and dignity as men or as anybody else.

You don't have to be a morally perfect

person along with you know every other member of your sex for the violence that is performed against you because of your sex to be wrong, right?

Like you don't need to ascend to this greater moral plane.

But the sort of like evil woman gotcha presumes that women's wrongdoing negates all of women's claims of victimization, which is just not how culpability works.

Well, and in reverse, it sort of says like, well, you're not standing up for this particular woman, right?

Which is like kind of what critics of quote-unquote identity politics always accuse feminists of doing, right?

Like victimology.

You're automatically a victim because you're a woman.

And it's like, well, no, women can be complicit in patriarchy, which does end up victimizing them in some way.

But like, you can get rich as a woman of patriarchy.

No one's arguing that.

It really feels like the contradiction that this movie wants to set up.

Like the moment you're like, oh, interesting, like you've kind of, you've lost.

You're basically playing on this movie's very skewed playing field.

The obvious comparison to that is the central kind of inciting incident in Philip Roth's The Human Stain, right?

Where a professor gets accused of racism, of anti-black racism, and then spoiler for a book that came out in the year 2000, I guess, turns out to be secretly passing that African-American, right?

And you're like,

it's just like only Philip Roth at the waning end of his powers would have been like, I got him now.

Oh my God, in grad school, I was made to read that book by a craft teacher who was like, this is actually the pinnacle of both prose and of political insight.

Do you know who it was?

No.

Mary Gateskill.

Oh, man.

Talk about an anti-MeToo writer.

Like just

bonking you over the head with her politics all the time.

Well, the other thing about that book that's so interesting is that like these movies and books are ultimately all about self-interrogations of art.

Reconstructing Harry is a movie about art, about an artist.

Tar spends probably more time with you watching just an orchestra rehearse and perform than you do with actual Me Too stuff.

But what do they get remembered for?

They get remembered as making trenchant, important interventions into questions of sexual and gender relations, right?

But I'm sorry, but it's the same intervention every time.

Oh, yeah.

That's the other thing.

It's like it's remembered as surprising

because what it actually gives to the audience is like the relief of a return to like the hegemonic status quo auntie.

You know what I mean?

Like it's like, oh, this feels good.

This feels exciting.

This feels gratifying to me.

It's like, yeah, it's the relief of compliance.

Like, that's why it feels cool to root for Lydia Tarr or Harry or whichever it is.

You know, that's, that's why it feels nice.

It's not asking anything of you except to, you know, slip back into your prejudices.

Yeah.

And for the cancer culture book, I was shocked by the number of times that the human stain still comes up in 2023, 24, 25 to talk about supposed recent events in American history.

And you're like, this is fucking psychotic.

Like, it's a novel, first of all, man made it up.

If you were to retell that story, he could sue you because he made it up.

Isn't it also cited as like an actual campus controversy, even though it is a work of fiction?

They're like, look what happened to the guy in the human stain.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, sometimes you get people who really don't seem to be able to tell the difference or who don't think it seems to matter, which is really quite striking.

Tar eventually gets around to this question, like, should we be separating the artist from the art?

Right.

And I have to say, like, to me as a literature professor, it's always such a silly kind of question because me too, or what then later got called cancel culture, was not so much about, like, can we separate the artist from the art?

The question, as I understood it, was, do I want to help this person buy a beach house?

Do I need to help Wizard Lady buy a second Scottish castle?

Like, I can still chuckle at a Louis C.K.

joke.

I will not pay to see Louis C.K.

because I don't want to help that guy get more power over young female comics, right?

And then, like, and Tar keeps being brought up, like, well, Bach had fucked up gender politics.

Like, okay, like, 17th century Bach is probably going to get a pass here, my friend.

Also, like, I'm not sure he's dining out on me, like, playing his partitas, right?

Like, right.

Well, there's, there's a couple of things you've, you've raised here, right?

Like, the Bach example in Tar is somebody who cannot be held accountable because he is dead, right?

He is also somebody who is no longer implicated materially in the consumption of his art, once again, because he is dead, right?

The structures in which we encounter this work is disentanglable from support for the artist because of their material investments, because of their royalties, because they get a check for our consumption of this work.

I will say the more interesting questions to me are questions of

the ways that the assumptions and values that are inhabited in art influence the way we think and the way that the assumptions and values and aspirations of the people who make those art

sort of get sent to us via their work.

I don't think that's a straightforward process.

I don't think it's like a monkey see, monkey do kind of aping situation, but I also don't think it's an irrelevant question to ask

about what we do when we're consuming movie after movie after movie with fucking Louis C.K.

in it.

Yeah.

You know, I'm thinking of like Lauren Stein, who resigned as editor for the Paris Review after some like pretty egregious sexual assault allegations.

You know, he championed a lot of fiction, not his own, but other writers, in which there was like sexual violence, right?

Yeah.

Against women.

And there is a sense in me as a reader that his gravitation towards this material was not exclusively about

his faith in the like craft and talent of these writers and of their work.

It was partly about his titillating investment in the subject matter, right?

Yeah.

When Incest Diary is only brought into the world for you by Lauren Stein, I think that's a worthwhile question to be like, okay, well, what are the values that put this piece of art in front of me here?

And what are the values it's presenting to me and working in part to inculcate in me when I consume it?

Like this is Ami S.

Rayivasan's line about porn, right?

Porn does not argue, it does not educate, it does not sort of rationalize, it trains, right?

And art, I think broadly also has the capacity to train.

I think if it, nobody really believed that it did that, way fewer people would be making it.

You know, like people are putting this stuff out into the world because they think it can change other people's ideas and behavior and worldview.

And I think it's an interesting question.

I don't think like the answer to that question necessarily need must like lead us to abstinence from every problematic person's art in part because that would just lead us very idle, right?

But also in part because we have more agency than such a vision

of like the persuasive power of art consumption leaves us.

I don't know.

That's my, that's my soapbox.

I'm getting off of it.

We've been on tar for a long time.

We should have done an episode on tar.

Yeah, maybe.

I keep thinking back to that line from Mark Twain's The Innocence Abroad.

I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace as I did yesterday when I learned that Michelangelo was dead.

May we all feel that way one day.

Yeah.

Should we leave it there with tar?

I think we have established that we could do this all day.

Yeah.

So we should probably discipline ourselves and move on.

But I do encourage listeners to read Adrian's Substack essay on Tar because I do think it's like really thorough and thoughtful.

And he does take sort of a long view of this genre.

So we should link it in the show notes.

People should check it out.

We'll do that.

Sounds good.

Now, let's move on maybe from media to questions about bodies.

We had a couple of them.

Uh, one was long, but I thought super interesting.

This is from oh my god, the trans guy's question.

I love this question.

It's incredible, right?

It was so good.

That was so thoughtful and cool.

Um, thank you.

I don't think I got his name.

Yeah, I think we're also not saying names.

So, um, we're also not saying names, but yeah, you collected these and then put them in a document anonymized.

Exactly.

But this was a guy who's like, listen, I'm trans.

I've been passing for a long time.

He also said he's a bodybuilder.

And I'm like, drop the workout routine.

Cause I really, I want to get, I was telling Adrian off mic, I want to get jacked this year.

I want to get like gigantic.

But he's like, I have been passing for a long time.

And I don't always tell people that I'm trans.

But when I do come out,

they are often like.

shocked and kind of angry that they couldn't tell.

And then they start retroactively going through things about my body or about my behavior or about like their interactions with me that should have tipped them off.

I think he was asking, if I'm remembering this question correctly, I hope I'm not butchering it.

He was asking like, what's, what's up with that?

Like, what's the deal with that discomfort around these categories and around like detection?

And Adrian, you and I have talked a lot about like transvestigators who are these like transphobic people.

on the internet who now will take photos of like celebrities or people who've pissed them off on the internet or like random nobodies and try to scan these images of their bodies, like seeking out physical like signs or like little betrayals of transgender status.

They'll be like, look at, I don't know, Dakota Johnson.

She has an Adams apple.

That's an Adam's apple, I swear to God.

And it's just so,

there's like an almost hysteria in it, not to use the H word, but there's a frenzy of

this like paranoid surveillance that I think speaks to how destabilizing the awareness of like trans bodies and trans existence can be for some people.

I think that's exactly right.

I think what our questioner gets at is this bizarre thing where like on the one hand, transphobes tend to insist that the body is eminently readable and obvious, right?

We know.

what a woman is, we know what a man is when we see one.

And then this, as you say, this kind of hysteria at any moment when that breaks down which spoiler alert it always does because gender is a fucking construct yutzes right or because like gender is also like super culturally conditioned and because like right like it's it's all just so and bodies are variable i'm sorry like there's eight billion of us on the planet is gonna you're gonna get just about anything right like i mean like two cisgender people of the same sex right

can have bodies that are different enough from each other, including in their secondary sexual characteristics, right?

That they don't look more like each other than one of them would look like a member of the opposite sex, right?

Like it's just hard to know,

but that hard to know-ness

creates a lot of anxiety, I think, when people are confronted with it because we have so built our conceptions of human life and how to treat one another around the sort of like binarization of people, right?

And categorize people.

Like, well, which box do I put you in?

Because otherwise I don't know how to treat you.

Although our questioner, of course, is pointing something out something else.

It's not that they're ambiguous.

It's that people sort of are exposed factor upset that they were unable to place him in the box that they wanted to place him in, which evidently was like man, but man.

with an asterisk or something like that.

Yeah, like either like failed woman or diet man or whatever the transphobic conception of trans men is this week.

There's a sense that they've been like duped or deceived, right?

And now that there's been this like revelation, it's like the magician pulling the rabbit out of the hat and you're like supposed to try and figure out how he did it on the on the car ride home.

Exactly, right?

Like I think that deception is a really important one.

And for our younger listeners, I thought I'd mention the fact that like

this is a really old trope.

And part of why I find it fascinating, darkly fascinating, how it sort of is coming back up with regards to trans people is that this was a lot of stuff around gay panic in the 80s and 90s.

Like, oh, this man tricked this other man into a sexual encounter.

Gay people, like, there was a moment when gay men specifically were like thought to be tricking straight men constantly.

I'm sorry.

Because y'all are such catches.

That sounds...

I'm trying to think of a less casual word than cope, but that sounds like, it sounds like a post hawk rationalization

of a dude sucking your dick and you kind of liking it.

Yeah, yeah,

really does.

And then I think the trope of the tricky gay man sort of disappeared.

And I also think that it's really interesting that we got this question from a trans man because I think that like part of why trans investigators tend to fixate, as you say, on female celebrities and tend to leave kind of men out of it.

I mean, TERFs too try to largely ignore trans men

because

they somehow tell themselves that trans women are for them easier to spot.

The quote-unquote defects they think they can find, they think they can find in women, right?

Which is partly because like they have this pornographic gaze and they mostly stare at women, right?

Yeah.

Well, it's also like it's part of the broad transphobic effort to like sort of infantilize trans men and demonize trans women.

Like one is made sort of childlike, innocent, often my friend Talia, who's a very interesting like

radical feminist trans writer calls it a process of re-gendering of trans men like they're put back into this category of womanhood right from which they have like exited in their actual lives and in their embodiment yeah like don't worry you're pretty super jacked head about it

but then like with the the transphobic gaze at trans women it reminds me a little bit of the way they look at like black teenage girls there right like you're just adultifying them really quickly, including when they're actual kids, but then they're like also understanding them as like hypersexual, like prone to violence, always like scheming.

Like with trans men, they're like, oh, you're too stupid to realize that you're a woman, right?

Like you've been like brainwashed or something like that.

With trans women, they're like, you're lying.

There's like something about like the trans person's actual motivations are

never what the trans person is attesting to, right?

Either because they're dishonest in the case of trans women or incompetent in the trace of trans men.

It's funny how like the deception question kind of eddies through various genders and gender presentations, because I feel like in the mid-century, mid-20th century, you get a lot of tricky lesbians, right?

And often the gay men you see in Hollywood are like, were like turned into that by their moms, right?

Right.

And so basically it's them who are like sort of never grow up.

Also, like if you think about something like Hitchcock's film Rope, like Hitchcock's gay character are often like under the thumb of women and are sort of like immature.

Whereas like the lesbian school marm who like introduces you to the temptations of the lesbian flesh.

Madame Trunchbull in Matilda.

Yeah.

It is a children's movie with like

a dyke leather daddy at the center of it.

Yeah.

Very formative film for a lot of women of my generation.

But you know, it is like the lesbian is evil and adult.

And then I i i understand you like the effeminate gay men is sort of childlike it's a reversal of that yeah position for like from between the trans masculine and the trans feminine well and then it gets switched again in the 80s where i think

i i think that the killer lesbian of the 80s and 90s is a killer lesbian because you could also fuck straight men and then kill them with an ice pick.

But gay men are seen because of the sort of stuff like gay panic defenses as deceivers, essentially.

So I think that like the question of deception sort of changes sides in the 80s.

and now it seems to have changed sides again in the sense that like probably very few people would try and invoke kind of a, you know, this person tricked me into homosexual acts kind of stuff in front of a judge.

But like you can invoke.

As you say, the manipulative, sneaky trans woman in just about any newspaper in the country or the world, and someone will print your fucking shit.

And people will bring that up in criminal courts after murdering or assaulting trans women.

They'll be like, well, you know, I was justified in doing that because she deceived me about her trans status and therefore I get to enact all this violence.

Becomes like a the claim to victimization by way of being deceived can become like a license for people to do kinds of crazy shit to trans people.

Yeah.

And we should say, on the one hand, like we were saying, like, yeah, this sort of switches sides from time to time.

But as gender scholars, we should say it is a trope of femininity that is switching sides here, right?

The person who is deceptive and therefore not as out of power as they seem to be, that is the way people have feminized other people in order to do violence to them, right?

Right.

I think you're

pretending to vulnerability.

I mean, this was a big critique of me too, right?

Like these women are just pretending to be helpless and vulnerable and victimized when actually what they want is sadistic power over these men, or they are not copying to their ability to, in fact, just say no to sexual harassment and are sort of underplaying their own power.

Yeah.

I mean,

in a way, Gwyneth Paltrow was into it when she watched Harvey Weinstein ejaculate into a house plant.

Ah, Jesus Christ.

I had forgotten about the house plant.

That is definitely a very recognizable kink to have that happen to you.

Jesus Christ.

Well, I mean, that is also the, this is what defense attorneys tell men accused of sexual assault all the time.

Like, don't say it didn't happen.

Say it was consensual.

Right.

Wow.

Well, because that's, it's way easier to prove in court or way easier to assert in court that this woman was actually, you know, knowing and participating and willing and is now just conniving and either like being irresponsible or being evil.

And that is, as you say, a trope of femininity, right?

Deception, concealment, pretended vulnerability that allows people to sort of exclude their actual vulnerability.

And I think you do see this with the treatment of trans women all the time.

Yeah.

I'm really glad we got that question.

I hope.

Yeah.

I think we just kind of rambled at this poor man.

I don't think we actually answered what's going on with him.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry that he's having these interactions.

It sounds like also just kind of like painful.

Well, I think he didn't sound so bothered.

He seemed to think it was strange, which I agree with.

The basic situation seemed to be that people that were totally chill about him mentioning that he's trans or figuring it out after some time, then had to go back and sort of re-evaluate interactions or encounters or the way he bodily presents.

And I have to say, as a gay man who is fairly straight presenting at some times, I did in the 90s and early aughts have people who are like, oh, I never would have known from, you know, you're this and this and that.

I'm like, yeah, man, I don't know what to tell you.

We come in all shapes.

Like, and it's real fucking weird to me that like, you're now clearly rewinding the tape.

The last three years we've known each other, it's just kind of silly.

See, if you're a lesbian who looks straight, they're just like, oh, it's adorable that you're telling yourself that little lie.

Like they don't, they're not, they don't think that you've deceived them.

They think that you've deceived yourself.

It's like the infantilization again.

Well, or they think they might match with you on Tinder and then just have you be their third.

I know.

Too real, dude.

That's actually,

that's too real.

I mean, this, this is like the scourge of the lesbian community, right?

Online dating is a lot of people who are like, you know, my boyfriend's 40th birthday is coming up.

And like, after I take him to Burning Man, we want to do this.

You know, it's, it's, uh, it's a lot of,

it's a lot of swiping less.

It's a lot of like, okay, there's like 10 pictures of one woman alone who looks personally reasonable.

And then like the ninth or eleventh picture is like, oh, and there's a man in this situation.

Like, oh man.

Dun done.

You know, it was really trying to deceive is straight women on Tinder looking for a third for their shitty boyfriend's birthday.

Harlots.

Yeah, so the second question about bodies that I thought was really interesting was a question about menstrual cycle tracking and especially the way technology has sort of made that both quite a lot easier, but it has also put a lot of that data out in the public domains.

There's a lot of questions here.

There's a kind of a Silicon Valley question here.

There's a post-Jobs kind of legal landscape question here.

But there is also, I think, a question here about hormones, right?

About what it says about women's agency or the...

public conception of their agency that there is this insistence that like hey ladies don't you maybe want to keep track of this in case you go freaking crazy on us or whatever right yeah it's like is this the one week of the month in which you are capable of reason?

Because I don't think it is.

And therefore, I'm just going to disregard everything you have to say.

Yeah.

I think about this a lot with regard to tech.

Like birth control misinformation is something I've really wanted to do an episode on

for a long time.

It's in our planning doc.

So it should be coming.

I just have to get my shit together.

But it's something that's like only kind of beginning to be studied and researched as how birth control disinformation, hormonal birth control disinformation in particular, is spreading among women of childbearing age on social media.

I do think that this phenomenon, the cycle tracking phenomenon, is closely related to that.

And part of what I think is happening, not just in this subject in particular, but sort of in our culture more broadly, is that we have a ton of data about ourselves available to us now that does not necessarily lead to positive conclusions about ourselves or narratives about ourselves, which we are retrofitting into narratives about ourselves or using to try and make it reveal things that it maybe doesn't actually justify.

So, I think about this a lot with like 23andMe.

Like, okay, what you get when you spit into a two, a 23andMe,

or what I got when I did this a few years ago, was the information that everybody else whose DNA, or many of the people whose DNA looked like mine, had reported to 23andMe

that their ancestors were from Ireland, right?

That's not information I can actually do a lot with, but the impulse is to then sort of reverse-engineer a story about who you are, about who your family is, about where you come from, about what are the moral lessons of those people's like struggles and triumphs, right?

That then you can sort of use to shape your own conception of yourself and how you go forward.

And I think the cycle tracking data encourages something like that, too, right?

It gets you a lot of like, okay, well, on 40%

of the third week of your cycle, you reported feeling a little bit tired, right?

Or on 50% of the days when we're pretty sure you were ovulating,

you reported having more energy, you know?

Like, first of all, like cycle tracking is

very imprecise.

Like the only data you're putting in that comes from your body, unless you're really like measuring your vaginal temperature and viscosity like every single day is like when your period starts right like maybe like if you have cramps and from that data people have tried to extrapolate things like you know when they're ovulating exactly that are actually like not as reliably precise right and this is like a classic tale of people who are using the rhythm method both to like conceive and to not conceive is that like uh is actually like not that reliable but when we have all this data that we're putting into these cycle tracking apps, you know, apps are very reliable.

It's a binary code of zeros and ones that wants to make definite conclusions.

Right.

And so it will take the information you're logging in and giving to it and create a causal narrative that is not necessarily like actually scientifically supported by the information that it has.

Right.

And I think that this kind of story that data can tell us is always most convincing or most appealing when it feeds into some things we kind of already believe, right?

Like the idea that hormones are determinative of women's mental and emotional states in ways that override their capacity for reason or the validity of their feelings is both a very old story and also one that's like very, you know, convenient for a lot of boyfriends and husbands who want to say, it's not that I've been neglecting you and not doing the dishes and like, you know, not paying you back for that money I owe you.

It's that, you know, you're always a little crazier in your low teal phase, baby.

You know, it's just like, is it that time of the month?

Are you on the fucking rag?

Yeah.

Repackaged to have this gleam of

quantifiable, like empirical authenticity that it doesn't actually have.

And then it also becomes a way that women sort of self-infantilize.

It's also like an easy way out, which is something that you see,

I think, a lot of people reaching for and that women have already like a bunch of sexist scripts for in the first place.

Like, I don't want to be responsible for the way the world is falling apart.

So I'm going to say, I'm just a girl.

I'm PMSing.

I can't be held responsible for my own actions, right?

It's supposed to be to keep you down and stop women from ascending to, you know, their rightful place as equal adults in society.

And it's also a way for women to sort of escape that if it seems scary or hard and they don't want to do it.

Well, although I suppose that at least the individual person who's saying, well,

this is what I'm like when I'm having my period, like is kind of taking ownership and says, like, this is what I'm specifically like.

The are you on the rag thing is basically also saying you're behaving as a member of the species at this moment, right?

The species being women.

I think I'm just like this on my period is reaching to biology to excuse something that's functionally personal responsibility, right?

Like if you were like, like, oh, you know, testosterone peaks in the morning, so I get to be an asshole to people in the morning.

Like I think we would rightfully identify that as bullshit.

Like I think, I think women saying that they're victims of their hormones is

bad.

Yeah, I think it's bad.

I think it's not really true for most people.

If you really can't control yourself because your PMS is so bad, like go to a doctor.

Like consider the pill because it works for that, right?

Like that's pathological.

That is not a healthy menstrual cycle because women are actually rational beings capable of self-respect and self-control.

And that's just true.

It's true every week of the month.

I think if you give an inch on this shit, people will take a mile.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's just like not concedable ground.

And it's also just like not true.

I'm sorry.

Like, it's just not true that women are.

completely out of control of themselves when they're on their period.

Otherwise, trust me, there would be so many more homicides.

You know, like I'm like, men commit 80% of violent crimes, but supposedly it's women who are incapable of rationality 25% of their month.

I don't think so.

It's a particular frame of mind that looks at a person and is like, oh, could this be what's going on?

Right.

I always think of the joke about Kenneth the Page

on Dirty Rock, like when he briefly takes over, immediately tracking everyone's cycle.

It's creepy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You mentioned surveillance, right?

Like I will say these apps do generally sell your data.

It's in most of their terms and conditions that like they're allowed to.

They will hand it over to law enforcement.

For the most part, like if you are, say, trying to conceal an illegal abortion, that's not going to be how you get caught.

You're going to get caught when your boyfriend tells his mom who tells the cops.

You know what I mean?

But it's a post hoc way for them to build a case against you.

Well, I was going to say, the big worry, I think, aren't yet the cops.

The worry is, I think you're right, the boyfriend in the sense that could this data be requested in a documents request if you live in a blue state for some kind of divorce proceeding or for some kind of custody hearing?

Could it be used in a red state such as Texas to basically create the impression that you may have gotten an illegal abortion or something like that?

It's not about giving like Elon Musk's tools over you.

It gives the little Elons everywhere tools over you in your everyday lives.

I mean, I think the more likely scenario, even then like this stuff being subpoenaed as part of like the discovery of some lawsuit, is that your shitty abusive boyfriend just like looks at your phone when you're in the bathroom or something and is like, okay, what are the days where I can like be most likely to entrap her with a pregnancy?

Or when do I get to do this shitty thing that I've really been wanting to do that I know is going to upset her, but I want to be able to like blame it on her period that she's mad.

You know,

I think that kind of like low-level manipulation becomes a lot more likely when people are like talking this way about their cycles as like determinative of their behavior.

And also, when this data is just like lying around on a little computer in everybody's pocket, yeah.

Always take your phone to the bathroom, ladies.

Then again, like, if your period's bothering you, go to the doctor.

Like, please don't.

Like, like, don't rely on doctor app.

Like, rely on a nice female gynecologist,

like under the age of 50, because she'll be much more competent to help you.

And you don't deserve to have a debilitating, painful menstrual cycle.

Nobody does.

All right.

So another question that we got, and I'll read this one in full.

When Maura guested on Adrian's other podcast, she mentioned that if you want to be a serious feminist, you should do the reading.

Well, I want to be a serious feminist.

I've been working through many of the books y'all have mentioned on both shows and read books specifically about mental illness, disability, and race, but I still feel I lack the basic education that someone might have gotten through a gender studies class.

What books would you recommend?

So I thought we could do a lightning round.

Do you just want to go back and forth and like name books that we think someone should do?

I mean, I think I'm doing what this person is doing, right?

I don't think that they're undereducated.

I think that this is exactly how people get feminist educations is you do a self-directed syllabus.

And maybe I shouldn't discourage people from taking my actual class, but like what I, but I didn't get this education formally when I was in college.

I got it through

recommendations from friends.

I got it through like self-motivated interest.

I've gotten it through like signing up for some other classes while I've like not been like enrolled as a student.

I think this sounds like a very typical

feminist autodidacticism that I think is pretty common.

Yeah, I mean, it's identical really with the history of, you know, at least the second wave of feminism, right?

Like in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, a lot of feminist reading groups sprang up that were doing exactly this.

Like, these were people who couldn't take these kind of classes because they didn't exist yet.

And they together sort of tried to arrive at what a canon was across which they could communicate and debate in order to push this project forward, right?

Yeah, you know, there was a lot of people just being like, okay, let's read together or let's write something together.

Yeah.

I wound up in like a radical feminist reading group in 2014 in Brooklyn where there was a reissue.

This is actually probably why I became a radical feminist.

There was a reissue of Shulamith Firestones, The Dialect of Sex.

Alexis, Sex.

That's that was a big initiator for me, too.

Yes.

As a crazy book.

Yes.

And all the women around me were like, we all want to read this crazy book together.

And we did.

And then we kept reading.

We read a lot of Nancy Frazier, who's a cool like Marxist feminist, who wound up reading some bell hooks that way.

And then, you know, other things that are kind of like less honorable, like a woman I was trying to date

was also seeing a man.

And like he and I wound up, because she said she wanted to read The Second Sex.

And so then he and I both wound up reading all, that was how I read The Second Sex

to impress a woman and to like try and compete with this other guy.

I read it.

faster and I think I was a little smarter about it.

But that is like how I finally got around to reading, yeah, that doorstop of a fundamental feminist text.

And now I'm not dating her anymore, but I do refer back to that reading all the time.

And then I also like, I took one gender studies course in undergrad with a really cool feminist sociologist, actually, who I still admire named Allison McKim.

She studies like, I think especially like addiction treatment and the way that those wind up becoming merry-gendered spaces, which is, I think, fascinating stuff.

But she was like, listen, nobody reads the dominance feminists anymore.

They're not really relevant to what's happening in the academy right now.

You can just skip it.

It's like, it's really problematic, kind of demonized stuff.

And she's right, right?

It's like the academy has completely moved on.

But I was like, well, wait, like, what's this controversy?

Like, what are these books I'm not supposed to read?

And that's when I read Catherine McKinnon's Feminism Unmodified, which is also kind of a doorstopper of a book.

Which I only read like two years ago at your instigation.

Oh, yeah.

It's really useful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's like a feminist legal tradition, right?

And Catherine McKinnon led me to like Polly Murray, who then led me to Betty Friedan.

But then Catherine McKinnon also led me to like Reva Siegel and like some more contemporary like feminist legal.

You know, like it's a

network or like a rhizomatic kind of experience where like one thing will lead you to another.

I got really into like feminist treatments of the category of madness.

So I read a lot of Elaine Schowalter and then Phyllis Chester.

Show Walter is great.

So just like it's it's kind of ad hoc for me, honestly.

I don't know if I can be like really give you a programmatic.

I can tell you some things I like, but I can't tell you like,

and that's what I mean by do the reading.

I'm like, like, don't neglect these long traditions.

Don't throw out a thinker because she's probably wrong about some stuff, or

is writing from a perspective that you don't agree with or can't understand, or you think is too different from your own for you to grasp at.

Like, I would encourage people to try because these questions really come alive when you realize how much they've been thought about and how much wonderful work has already been done on them.

Yeah.

I mean, my own, I think my first serious reading in feminist theory was French feminism.

And so in a class, in fact, that I took with Abby Kluchin of Ordinary Unhappiness back in college.

When you guys were babies.

Yeah.

The Swarthmore people.

Like, I don't know if this.

is an experience any of the listeners of our podcast will have, but sometimes somebody will be really intellectually intimidating in a way that's like blows me over because they've read everything and then it turns out that they went to Swarthmore.

It's like secretly a much better school than like the other ones.

We're just psychotic.

I mean like the story I always tell is that like

my second year there, I took a class on German idealism and the professor had written down that he would like us to prepare the critique of pure reason for the first class.

Just the whole thing.

Well, no, he then supplied us a week beforehand.

It's like, I selected these 50 pages that I think you should have a look at.

Don't worry if you don't have a full grasp of it yet, but this is what I would like you to look at and at least understand how it's organized.

It's kind of how I would teach that book now as well.

Just kind of do a kind of synoptic reading almost of the table of contents so you understand how the thing is going to work.

Well, several of us had already finished the book.

I mean, not understanding any of it, but we'd like clapped eyes on pretty much all the words in it, which is like a demented exercise, frankly.

There were several.

And he's like, I felt so bad, but I...

I should have known that at Swarthmore.

I can't fucking assume that you guys are just going to like wait until like the week before.

I should have known that you were probably like taking the anxiety medications, like trying to read the first critiques throughout this entire summer, gobbling up Ritalin and like Xanax like it's peanuts.

Yeah, at Bard, you ignore what you were assigned, drop acid, and read dictate again instead.

Like, that's what I did for like three years.

Yeah, that's good.

But yeah, so my first steps really were like Lucy Rigorai and Juliet Christeva and people like that.

Just light reading, you know.

And well, honestly, it made everything else, it made everything else a lot easier.

But at the same time, it also,

these are, these are French feminists who are psychoanalytic.

And so basically they're always contending with a,

well, with a tradition that is what our good friends at other pods might say notwithstanding, kind of contaminated by sexist thinking, right?

And they're kind of anti-political, right?

They're not like writing alongside a political movement for women's liberation like a lot of the second wave feminists in the United States were.

They were like opposed opposed to like movements for abortion rights in France and were sort of like, no, this is, this is not what we're doing.

It's not about improving material conditions.

It's about sort of conceptualizing the female.

Yeah, which at the same time, like, it really, I think it prepared me well.

for sort of watching in other fields where the gendered implications of the methodological frame may not be as obvious.

You mentioned sociology or historians.

It can be kind of hard.

It's like, why is this person struggling so hard against this particular methodological interventions?

Like once you've seen it it sort of work with Freud, you're like, oh, okay, like there's a real worry here about the kind of phylogenetism of this particular method.

You're trying to offset that in some way while still doing your discipline because you got to get turnier in it and got to get published in it and got to speak to other people who know this stuff.

They work around and sort of through Freud's misogyny.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And so that to me was always very helpful.

I don't know if I'd recommend it, recommend it, but I enjoyed it.

I thought it was cool.

I'm reading Powers of Horror now.

It's interesting.

It's fun.

Yeah.

Powers of Horror is exactly one of the ones I was thinking of.

Am I right to remember that Powers of Horror is maybe one of the better things you might want to read if you're left dissatisfied with kind of a pop Butlerian kind of reading?

Yes.

I think Powers of Horror is

more interested in the body than like gender trouble wound up being.

And then like, obviously, Butler sort of revised that in, you know, Bodies That Matter, the classic titles.

Like, what did I leave out of my other book?

Yeah.

But the horror book in Christeva really is one that

it's an existentialist book.

It proceeds straight from Simone de Beauvoir.

We're given this body.

This body is a given, and it influences how the world is opened up to us inescapably, right?

Which is a thing that Butler will take all these writers to task for very, very ably.

But if you sort of want to see the best of what Butler is criticizing, I think Christeva's powers of horror is one of those.

This is fun.

Send us what you're reading.

Let's hope that.

Oh, yeah, please.

Because I think part of what I hope is a feminist method to my podcast is that, like, we really do want you guys talking back to us.

It's definitely not us coming down from the mountain.

I aspire to learn from you guys too, which I do like every single time I interact with our listeners.

So, yeah, send us your reading list.

I want to know what you guys are into and what you've been really excited by in this field.

Awesome.

Well, in closing, let's maybe briefly mention a few questions, sort of honorable mentions that we can't get to, but that we want to think more about.

There was one question from a listener from New Zealand

who lives outside of New Zealand now, but it was a fascinating question.

It went deep and it really got me thinking about like, we tend to be, as more, I think, indicated earlier, interested in right-wing ideas about gender and sexuality that have a recognizable provenance in the cultures and traditions that we're familiar with.

But I think it's worth kind of thinking about gender conservatism that has different sources and that does not exist as a mere kind of carbon copy or export or whatever from the United States.

And so our promise to you dear listeners is that we're going to do more on that.

That person's comments about right-wing politicians in New Zealand sort of weaponizing resentment against the increased visibility of Maori culture really made me think about anti-immigrant sentiment

in the U.S.

differently and like the role of like the indigenous ancestry and a lot of our like Latino immigrants in like cultivating like sometimes quite like murderous rage against them.

I really appreciated that question.

So please keep writing in, all of you.

Yeah.

And then finally, we got a question from Berlin asking whether we're going to do more Wagner episodes.

We're going to do a Wagner episode later in October because Maura and I are going to go see Parsifal.

Which we did not cover on our Wagner Cycle podcast.

We didn't get the Parsifal.

That's it.

But the San Francisco opera is doing it.

And I got us tickets and it's going to be a demented like five-hour five-hour saga for Adrienne and I.

And we'll probably talk about it for like minimum that long afterwards.

You can all imagine the very gentle strains of the main theme of Parseval sort of first wafting over the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco.

And as you hear these transcendent tones sort of rise to the rafters, the conductor will briefly put the baton down.

We're like, I'm sorry, is someone podcasting?

And the camera will swing around to us.

We're like,

I'm sorry, just go on.

Just keep going.

We've got our giant princess Lega headphones on.

Yeah.

And like a tuxedo.

Yeah.

All right.

This was really fun, Adrian.

And thank you again to our listeners for sending in these fabulous thoughts and questions.

I love doing this podcast and I love talking to you and I love hearing from our listeners.

So I'm so grateful that we get to do this with all of you.

Here's to the next hundred.

Yay!

Embib with the Right is made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via patreon.com.

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

Our title music is by Katie Lau.