Episode 107 -- Did Women Ruin Everything?

Speaker 1 The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.

Speaker 1 Well, you'll be happy to hear, Helen, that we are currently waging open conflict, and Maura is not interested in covertly undermining or ostracizing you.

Speaker 2 You suck. I will, you know, in my feminine nature, suggest an attempt to persuade Helen Andrews to go fuck herself.

Speaker 2 Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb. And I'm Moira Donnegan.

Speaker 1 Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

Speaker 2 So, Adrian, first things first, our listeners have to come hang out with us in San Francisco. This episode is going to come out on Tuesday, November 18th.

Speaker 2 Our live show is Thursday, November 20th at the Swedish American Hall on Market Street at San Francisco. There's still a few tickets left.
Come hang out. It's going to be really fun.

Speaker 1 So literally run, don't walk. If you walk, it's going to be too late.

Speaker 2 Yeah. If you walk, it'll be Thursday.
Come hang out with us. We're going to have a really good time because we're going to be talking about something

Speaker 2 a little like what we're talking about today,

Speaker 2 which is... drove me so fucking nuts, Adrian.

Speaker 1 Like I had, as I think I was supposed to, a little bit of a meltdown and we weren't totally sure what we were going to do for this week's episode and then whoops I wrote 11 pages in this document so you're coming with me on this six sad journey yeah when this headline dropped my first thought was like is this bait I think just baiting Moira at this point uh and when we told our producer Margaret Suzumi what we were recording on he immediately clocked what this was going to be about too he's like oh yeah that article or that that podcast episode I guess it was meant for people like us to respond to and and fuck it, here we go, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, here's your slop, piggies.

Speaker 2 This is me speaking to Helen Andrews, who I am going to be talking about in like ad hominem terms that undermine my own professionalism, just to give you guys a little trigger warning, because today...

Speaker 2 We are talking about the reality that I know has been bothering all of us for a long time. The fact that women have ruined the world.

Speaker 1 You heard it here first. Well, you did not hear it here first.

Speaker 1 You read it in the New York Times. You heard it on the New York Times.
You read it in the American Conservative. You read it in Compact Magazine.
You've probably heard it from J.D.

Speaker 1 Vance on various podcast appearances. You've heard it from Peter Thiel.

Speaker 2 Yes, Women Ruined the World. This is the thesis of a lecture and essay that have gone viral on the far right and now increasingly in the American mainstream.

Speaker 2 And it states plainly what a lot of right-wing political commentators have been alluding to sort of strategically or trying to say without saying, this is the piece that goes for it, which is the growing conservative sentiment, particularly acute in those like post-liberal and anti-democracy circles that now have considerable sway over members of the Trump inner circle, that women's presence in public life is responsible for ruining American institutions and poses an existential threat to Western civilization.

Speaker 2 That's right, folks. Today we're talking about Helen Andrews, the great feminization.

Speaker 1 AKA, women be ruining things.

Speaker 2 So Adrian, what do you know about the great feminization?

Speaker 1 Yeah, full disclosure, I'm not a huge compact magazine reader. Oh, I'm sure.

Speaker 2 Because I value my sanity and eyeballs.

Speaker 1 So it came first to my attention the way it comes to any Normie Libs attention. An episode of Interesting Times, where Ross Douthad interviewed two guests, Helen Andrews and Leah Libresco Sargent.

Speaker 1 This whole thing was designed as just catnip for people like us. They first went viral for the headline, which was quite striking, and which then in its

Speaker 1 habitual pusillanimous fashion, the New York Times changed bit by bit to really more distort the meaning. Remind me what the initial one said.
Did women ruin the workplace, right?

Speaker 2 Question mark? Yeah. Question mark.
It was a question mark.

Speaker 2 And then they changed it to, did liberal feminism ruin the workplace? Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a telling substitution. In some way, the cover-up is almost worse than the crime, but the crime also worse than the cover-up.
So I don't really know.

Speaker 2 This podcast episode was pitched as a debate between

Speaker 2 Helen Andrews and Leah Labresco Sargent, who pitches herself as a conservative feminist.

Speaker 2 You know, I keep thinking of that line in Princess Bride where Mandy Patinkin Patinkin is like, you keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Speaker 2 It speaks to the like sort of evacuation of all meaning from the term feminism that Labresco Sargent refers to herself as a feminist, because what she really is, is kind of a

Speaker 2 condescending and paternalistic style of misogynist, right?

Speaker 2 She's advocating for a like kinder, gentler misogyny that treats women as children, as opposed to Helen Andrews' sort of like volatile, violent, contemptuous misogyny that treats them as sort of like a human disease.

Speaker 2 You know, those are about the two poles of the spectrum at the New York Times.

Speaker 1 The new headline was really slathering lipstick on the proverbial pig because Andrews essentially argued, as I understood it, that the presence of women in the workplace had caused, quote, all the ways that our institutions seem very clearly and self-evidently broken and not working.

Speaker 1 So you might also think, like, well, I know some institutions that aren't working. What does she mean?

Speaker 2 Well, wait till you find out what those ways are it's wokeness it's just wokeness but whatever and then Sargent arguing that basically being dependent on men is good actually Sargent is also shilling a book called the dignity of dependence I hope we can link in the show notes to what I thought was a very smart and devastating review by Becca Rothfeld of the Washington Post which skewers Sargent's claims about women as sort of uniquely dependent and uniquely primed to what Sargent considers the virtues of dependence.

Speaker 2 I think Rothfeld, who is quite a bit smarter than Sargent is, not that that's a high bar, deals with this very adeptly.

Speaker 2 These are two far-right conservatives, but today we're really mostly dealing with Andrews because it's Andrews whose piece has gone viral, I think, because it's sort of expressing a right-wing id.

Speaker 2 She has her finger on the pulse much more of the American right than Sargent does.

Speaker 1 Can I ask you about Compact Magazine very briefly? Because I sort of am aware of it as kind of a left, far-right, weird diagonalist magazine.

Speaker 1 But this piece, which admittedly is the first I've read of theirs in quite a while,

Speaker 1 not particularly diagonalist. It's about as diagonalist as like Jerry Falwell.
So I'm like,

Speaker 1 Are they just openly a right-wing magazine now? Or is this just like, oh, we print all kinds of people?

Speaker 1 We are free speech absolutists and we only just happen to always platform people who want women to be broodmares or whatever. Or is this also sign of a shift within Compact magazine?

Speaker 2 Compact is a little bit of a sticky widget. You know, I actually went to graduate school with one of the founders.
Oh, which one? A guy named Edwin Aponte, who is the nominal leftist. Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 He was insufferable. He like.

Speaker 2 He was the worst guy in grad school, which is a high bar, right? Like, you don't get an MFA unless you are a personally insufferable person. I can say this as somebody who has one, right?

Speaker 2 It's like, it's not an activity pursued by the non-annoying, but he would like

Speaker 2 divert every workshop to be a discussion of his own psychosexual hang-ups in this relentlessly consistent way.

Speaker 2 And it wasn't really shocking to me that he, a few years after our cohort finished and got our little graduate degrees, that he went on to form this magazine along with like two far-right conservatives.

Speaker 2 It was an online magazine that had a big sort of press rollout when it launched in which they were, you know, very cagey about who was bankrolling it.

Speaker 2 They said they had a like large scale but anonymous funder.

Speaker 2 And it was meant to be this kind of like left brown alliance magazine, an intellectual rag for this like anti-elite sentiment that that was supposed to merge sort of right-wing social views with more

Speaker 2 generous or like welfare forward economic, like a welfare chauvinist or like welfare white racism kind of vision, kind of like what's being peddled by Josh Hawley.

Speaker 2 What happened was that Aponte like left pretty quickly. He was their one nominal leftist and he bounced like immediately.

Speaker 2 And, you know, they from the outset were mostly publishing arguments for ways to like roll back the social movements of the 20th century.

Speaker 2 In particular, they've always been really kind of leaning into anti-gay and anti-feminist kind of slop, right?

Speaker 1 Maybe we'll mention a couple of people who've written for them over the years.

Speaker 1 One of their nominal leftists is Slavo Žižek, who will write for anyone basically if you provide him with the requisite mountain of

Speaker 1 Peruvian marching powder. But they also have people like, I think people like Adrian Vermuel, right? Glenn Greenwald, totally anomaly on the left still.
Michael Tracy, the guy who got clocked by who?

Speaker 2 Oh, wasn't it Maxine Waters?

Speaker 1 Maxine Waters, yeah.

Speaker 2 Who's like a million years old? Yeah, like a tiny old lady.

Speaker 1 Patrick Denin. The leftism of it really feels pretty attenuated at this point, I have to say.
I guess that's what I was asking.

Speaker 2 I think if you like look for leftism in Compact,

Speaker 2 you have to do a lot of intellectual work to sort of stretch their content over a frame of leftist principles.

Speaker 2 If you assume that they are like culture war misogynists and homophobes, a lot of what they're doing will make a lot more sense. It's just a shorter trip to get to that conclusion.

Speaker 2 You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 I was going to say, either it's the intellectual labor of trying to figure out how, just because it's anti-liberal makes it somehow leftism, the other option is just to put a plastic bag over your head and right before you black out, it'll briefly make sense in some wonderful flash of like, oh, Mabel.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so, you know, Andrews' piece ran in Compact in mid-October. I think they published it October 16th.

Speaker 2 That was something Compact did to ride a wave of virality that Andrews was already like cresting on. Because before her piece was published in Compact,

Speaker 2 she delivered it as an address at the National Conservatism Conference.

Speaker 1 I didn't know this part.

Speaker 2 Yes, in early September of this year, it was in D.C. this year.
Yeah, yeah. She delivered this as a speech at the National Conservatism Conference.

Speaker 2 Do you want to give our listeners a gloss on this gathering of odious nerds and racist losers that happens every year?

Speaker 1 Well, you stole my description. It's a gathering of odious nerds and racist losers that happens every year.
It's sometimes abbreviated as NatCon, if you're a complete douchebag.

Speaker 1 I think it was sort of started by Yoram Hazoni, the Israeli-American thinker. And it's basically a far-right sort of conclave with, you know, intellectual aspirations.

Speaker 1 And it very regularly features some of the worst thinkers you've ever heard of and some of the most odious politicians you've ever heard of. I mean, I know Farage has spoken there.

Speaker 1 Eric Zimur, the guy who was further to the right from Maureen Le Pen.

Speaker 2 Honestly, like the National Conservatism Conference used to be this fringe-right gathering of like nationalists, anti-feminists, like anti-anti-racist,

Speaker 2 politely putting it, sort of anti-gay, anti-immigration like thinkers.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 those were more fringe before, but now they have become more mainstream just because American politics and international politics have shifted so far to the right.

Speaker 2 This conference is not a little deal, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And Helen Andrews' speech on the great feminization, which did not get top billing, but it was was far and away the most popular presentation at the conference.

Speaker 2 It was a tremendous hit among the audience there, and it went lightly viral on the right-wing internet.

Speaker 2 It now has, at time of recording, it's got over a quarter million views on YouTube, which is a pretty big deal for like a political speech.

Speaker 2 And it has been memed and recommended and written about in this like viral way on the online far right. And so I think that should bring us to our next question.
Yeah. Who is Helen Andrews?

Speaker 2 Who the hell?

Speaker 2 Have you ever heard of this woman before? No. Okay.
I actually had,

Speaker 2 but only because I am

Speaker 2 a sicko. Yeah, I'm online in a way that damages my sanity and my character, right?

Speaker 1 Well, I spent 3,500 words with Ms. Andrews and my sanity was definitely like imperiled about halfway.
And I'm like, am I not getting enough oxygen? What is happening right now?

Speaker 2 It's not that long a piece and it manages to do shockingly little, even for its relatively low word count.

Speaker 2 So Helen Andrews, she is basically like a pretty low rent, like middle of the pack right-wing hack.

Speaker 2 She is now with this great feminization, meeting what is far and away her greatest success and kind of her first success as an outrage monger, right?

Speaker 2 This lean into gutter misogyny has done amazing things for her career over the past couple months. So she's about 40.
I think she's like 39 or 40.

Speaker 2 She graduated with a BA in religion from Yale in 2008. She has spent, you know, like an undistinguished career as a middling staffer in editorial departments of right-wing media outlets, right?

Speaker 2 So she was briefly at the National Review. She was even more briefly at the Washington Examiner.
And she's been now at the American Conservative, where she's a senior editor since 2020, right?

Speaker 2 So she's put out one book in the course of this career, which was a 2021 volume arguing that the baby boomers are bad because they were all liberals during the new left era.

Speaker 2 And that book flopped, right?

Speaker 1 But still, congratulations to Ms. Andrews for what I'm sure will be a book forthcoming in 2027 from either Sentinel or Basic Liberty called The Great Feminization, right?

Speaker 2 Oh, I think they'll get it out faster than that. They're going to try and ride this wave pretty quick.

Speaker 2 Andrew's misogynist turn has been an absolute sea change for her career over the past two months, right?

Speaker 2 For like 10 years, more than 10 years, she's been languishing as this minor, professionally underdistinguished kind of character. And now she's doing the interview circuit.

Speaker 2 And now she's appearing on all these panels and podcasts and YouTube shows. And finally, Roth Duthet's show at the New York Times to promote her idea that the world has been ruined by women.

Speaker 2 This has been an amazing meal ticket for her. And it's the greatest success her career has ever had.

Speaker 2 So, what is the great feminization? What is Helen Andrews' argument? She likes can't be said to have one. As prep for this

Speaker 2 recording, like sometimes one of us will do all the research, but I was like, Adrian, I'm sorry. I need you to fucking read this thing.
And I did. And you did.
And it sucked.

Speaker 2 It's shocking how little the right has to have an argument, how low the intellectual standards are for right-wing thought in general. And I think really anti-feminism in particular.

Speaker 2 It's like, it's astounding.

Speaker 1 The whole thing just felt almost ostentatiously, I don't know, diffident, right?

Speaker 1 The whole mode of argumentation, as far as I can tell, is just like, I read this thing and it made me think of this other thing. And isn't it also really this third thing, right?

Speaker 1 It's interesting to me that this started at a conference, although not an academic conference, because it really has the feeling of like, I wrote this on the plane, you know?

Speaker 2 I mean, it's, yeah, it's a vibe-based piece. She Dever defines her terms.
She argues throughout the entire piece in like these big generalities,

Speaker 2 in inferences, in assumptions that she doesn't justify. She makes these like sweeping pronouncements about the character and behavior of fully half the human race.

Speaker 2 And she doesn't feel the need to offer any evidence or any anecdote, even. It's kind of shocking how intently and insistently she remains in this sort of vague posturing in the general.

Speaker 2 And she doesn't have to like have any sort of backing of data because she just keeps saying we all know this. Yeah.

Speaker 2 This is another characteristic of anti-feminist and right-wing writing is the sense of like smug certainty that is so self-assured that it pretends to not even like require recourse to evidence or to like

Speaker 2 more reasoned forms of argument that I don't think a feminist would ever get away with simply discarding, right?

Speaker 2 So she's just evoking these vague, capacious terms for like values and social phenomena like wokeness, which she refused to define on the Ross Duthat show. She never defines her terms.

Speaker 2 It's actually nuts.

Speaker 1 So like she doesn't define her terms. But then isn't the entire argument essentially a correlation versus causation problem?

Speaker 1 Her argument seems to be: look at what's happening to our institutions, namely wokeness. Let's say we grant that for a second.

Speaker 1 Let's say, like, I think it's wrong, but like, let's say the diagnosis of American institutions was right and what ails them.

Speaker 1 Her argument is to tag her arbitrary measures of decline to women attaining a majority in certain fields and institutions.

Speaker 1 Like, even if that were true, which again, I don't think it is, that would be a correlation. That would be a potentially suggestive correlation, although one of many, right?

Speaker 1 Cell phone use has also increased during that time. Is it about the cell phones? There's no theory of the case here as to what causally connects this.
There's no attempt to do it.

Speaker 1 It's just like, these two things I don't like exist.

Speaker 1 Wouldn't it stand to reason that they cause each other? It's like, no, man. Philosophers warn against that fallacy for a reason.
That's a pretty basic mistake to make.

Speaker 2 See, we're already like doing Andrews so many favors because I do want to like walk our listeners through her nominal argument so that they don't have to inflict this essay on themselves.

Speaker 2 But like in order to argue against her, you have to reconstruct an argument on her behalf and then argue against that, right?

Speaker 2 Because she evokes vibes instead of data and channels this like imprecise sense of grievance instead of articulating any actual harms inflicted by women's presence in public life.

Speaker 2 What I had to do in writing the notes for this episode is go in and insert law, history, and science into her argument in order to give me something coherent that I can argue against.

Speaker 2 Helen Andrews just wrote like a vibes manifesto. There is, there's no there there, right? So, what we are doing today is a project of steel manning.

Speaker 2 But I think what you're getting at, Adrian, is that like Helen Andrews is relying really heavily on a long-standing and increasingly pervasive rhetorical association of liberalism with femininity and conservatism with masculinity.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 And if that assumption, which is like, again, not really borne out,

Speaker 2 if that assumption weren't in place, people would be asking questions like, is this correlation or is this causation? What is your source for this claim?

Speaker 2 And because it is there, she can just lean back on this vibe and not have to make an actual argument.

Speaker 1 This is where for me in reading this, I guess I should have clocked that this was given at NatCon.

Speaker 1 It makes sense as a text when someone comes in with all these priors, which, yeah, if you'd sat through all the other panels that day, you probably would readily stipulate to because these people all are busy, sorry, but sucking each other's dicks.

Speaker 1 So it does make some sense that this text is ultimately not trying to draw anyone in. in.
And, you know, as lawyers would say, presume facts, not in evidence.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, I mean, it's not really trying to persuade.

Speaker 2 What it's trying to do is rally the troops by saying the thing that has been sort of an inchoate feature underlying a lot of right-wing grievances, right?

Speaker 1 My guess is the fact that then Dowthat picks it up probably suggests what they really want is for the outrage occasioned by these kinds of theses to become a kind of justification for promulgating these theses all the more because we're being canceled, we're being silenced, this isn't being debated.

Speaker 1 Why can't I go to a college campus and talk to people about this? Why can't I?

Speaker 2 I'm being silenced, you say, right into the microphone, you know, of the New York Times. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But the New York Times has a long-ass history of being like, oh, interesting. Say more about that.
It's like, would you want a MAR booking? We'll get you a MAR booking.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Like, is this white nationalist dapper?

Speaker 2 So, if the great feminization can be said to have a thesis, it's this, that women have taken over the world and ruined it inevitably as they always were going to

Speaker 2 with wokeness.

Speaker 2 So Andrews supposes that women have now achieved parity or supremacy in numbers in many prestigious fields, which is a claim I would like a fucking fact check on.

Speaker 2 She claims that men and women are naturally biologically different in their habits, their tendencies, and their behaviors, and that women are concerned with cooperation and compassion, but that we are also somehow like really vindictive and unforgiving and catty.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, men are somehow both jocular and rambunctious, but also more focused on like the substantive accomplishment of tasks. So she summarizes it this way.
Do you want to read this, Adrian?

Speaker 1 Sure, sure, why not?

Speaker 2 So this is quoting.

Speaker 1 I'm quoting here from the great feminization. Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation.
Citation needed. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments.

Speaker 1 The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. Oh, we got the participation trophy in there.
Great.

Speaker 1 The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine undermine or ostracize their enemies.

Speaker 1 Well, you'll be happy to hear, Helen, that we are currently waging open conflict and Maura is not interested in covertly undermining or ostracizing you.

Speaker 2 You suck. I will, you know, in my feminine nature, suggest an attempt to persuade Helen Andrews to go fuck herself.
To jump up her own ass.

Speaker 2 So how does Andrew justify this claim, you might ask? Why she does not?

Speaker 2 She later makes a brief and like kind of embarrassed reference to primatology.

Speaker 1 The refuge of everyone who's not a total intellectual scoundrel.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 She like speculates in a citation-free manner about evolutionary psychology. Of course.
But mostly she just asserts this shit.

Speaker 2 Like she just kind of blithely assumes that her audience will necessarily agree and believe her when she makes these sweeping claims about all the behavior of all of humanity.

Speaker 2 So she doesn't have to offer evidence.

Speaker 2 And I think this is a moment to pause for a minute and zoom out to think about right-wing attitudes towards what we might say are like observed differences between the behavior of men and women, right?

Speaker 2 Because, you know, me, I'm a, I'm from a radical feminist tradition with like a pretty aggressive like social constructionist lens, right?

Speaker 2 So I am thinking about differences in men and women's aggregate behavior with an eye towards like history,

Speaker 2 with a sense that these differences might be, you know, people responding to different sets of incentives that they are presented with. Like if women are

Speaker 2 on the whole, if we're talking vibes, if we're zooming out to the whole human race, if you want to say women are on the whole more conciliatory and less willing to engage in conflict, even if I grant you that, which I'm not sure I would,

Speaker 2 it's likely because they have experienced more acute consequences for straying from a narrow range of prescribed gender behaviors, right?

Speaker 2 So like, if women don't want to scream at somebody who pisses them off, it's probably because they have a little less social permission to be angry without incurring consequences that are significant, right?

Speaker 2 And if men behave a little bit differently, it might be because they are offered a different, perhaps wider range of acceptable responses to, say, anger, right?

Speaker 2 And they have a different set of incentives.

Speaker 2 So this social constructionist view is one that like presumes that people can be changed in their habits and their preferences and their behaviors, like by their environment, by their historical context, right?

Speaker 2 It's something that says, you know,

Speaker 2 human nature is not fixed. It's not this set thing where your body becomes a destiny of your character, right? Biology is not moral destiny.

Speaker 2 We are, in fact, shaped by the worlds that we encounter and by our experiences in them.

Speaker 2 And Andrews and the right more broadly, like completely reject this. They eschew all theories of social construction as like kind of delusional cope, right?

Speaker 2 And they assert that difference is pre-social, natural, preordained by either God or evolution, depending on who's talking. Their baseline is that things cannot be otherwise.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, except until they are otherwise, and then it's those perverted leftists doing it, right? Right.

Speaker 1 That's the funny thing, that they're like, they're perfectly willing to grant social construction and things they don't like. It's just in hierarchies that they approve of.

Speaker 1 You're giving us a very strong social constructivist account. It's also worth noting that one could even split the difference and say we don't know, right?

Speaker 1 Could it be that these sex differences are socially constructed? Could it be that they are natural?

Speaker 1 Well, the idea that we can't say for sure, this would be the sort of Batlerian argument, whether one thing or the other, suggests that we use policy and interventions to change them, to whatever extent we can mitigate them.

Speaker 1 The conservatives really have to take the strong view and say, no, social construction cannot be true, right?

Speaker 1 And so even if one doesn't want to take Moira's strong position, even if you say it's possibly it's partly socially constructed, well, okay, then still intervention seems like a pretty smart and pretty doable thing.

Speaker 1 The only way those are all, as you say, liberal cope, is if you want to make the maximalist argument that it's all biology all the way down. Our destiny is identical with the biology.

Speaker 1 And I think they can't even believe that.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think that their theory of biology as destiny is sort of undermined by their anti-feminist complaint, right?

Speaker 2 Like if women are naturally stupid and weak and conflict diverse and unable to function, then why are they all graduating from college?

Speaker 2 Why are they getting all these jobs that you don't think that they should have? Why are they succeeding in entering into public life?

Speaker 2 They are complaining about the falseness or the usurpation of an order that they declare to be natural and inevitable.

Speaker 2 But if it was natural and inevitable, they wouldn't have to work so hard to enforce it. You know what I mean? That's right.

Speaker 1 As a German historian, I will point out that this idea that there are natural hierarchies and orders, but certain groups have figured out ways to pervert those orders, you know, substitute women for Jewish people.

Speaker 1 And this is textbook anti-Semitism, right? Right.

Speaker 1 Anti-Semitism has exactly that problem, that for the anti-Semite, the Jew is weak and it can only survive through cunning and mimicry, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 At the same time, the Jew is also in control and manages all our destinies. Like, well, gee, which one is it?

Speaker 1 It's like, well, no, those two do go together in a sense that like there is a conspiracy theory, right? Like you have to offer a conspiracy theory.

Speaker 1 And I don't think we have to look very far from where these people are getting it.

Speaker 2 If you want to like take this natural differences

Speaker 2 idea,

Speaker 2 you will then conclude, I think like pretty inevitably, that gender hierarchy is natural, that it flows inevitably and spontaneously from this difference from our bodies, and that any attempts to change it by raising women's status or securing women's freedom are foolhardy and doomed at best, if not outright like counterproductive and perverse at worst, right?

Speaker 2 But I also wonder why this natural differences argument appeals so much to the right-wing base. And I think to like men kind of broadly, right?

Speaker 2 With a caveat, not all men, if you're like a like old retired professor who wants to yell at me, not all men on the comments of this, like let me fucking save you the time.

Speaker 2 I I think men on the whole are much more interested or much more credulous towards this idea of inherent differences between men and women. And that's for a couple reasons, right?

Speaker 2 Like it flatters male chauvinism, for one thing. The notion that, no, you're at the top of this hierarchy because you're just inherently better

Speaker 2 is flattering. And, you know, egotism.
can be a pretty strong motivator for people to believe in things that they don't actually have evidence for.

Speaker 2 But also, and this kind of breaks my heart, I think men just really seem to believe or want to believe that they are fundamentally different from women, that like women don't think like they do, don't feel the same emotions that they do, don't respond the way they do to incentives, right?

Speaker 2 That women do not on the whole experience humanity. and the frichon of consciousness the way that men do.

Speaker 1 I am told they're from Venus and

Speaker 2 men are from Mars. So like women have to think about men as people, people, right? Women don't have the luxury of imagining men as these like non-player characters.
Trust me, I've tried.

Speaker 2 Because like men have always been presented to women as the default of humanity, right? And they've also typically been in positions of power over us our whole lives.

Speaker 2 In our families, in our marriages, in the institutions where we work and go to school, men are.

Speaker 2 everywhere and they're able to control outcomes for us, right? So we have to understand their thinking. We have to put ourselves in their shoes in order to navigate and survive their power.

Speaker 2 And men don't really experience this with women in the reverse as often, right? They have often not been compelled by circumstance or self-interest to try and empathize with women.

Speaker 2 And so I think this is like really out of fashion now, but I think part of the appeal to men of dumb ideas like the ones that Andrews is putting forward and their persistence can be explained with a recourse to standpoint epistemology, right?

Speaker 2 Men believe dumb shit about gender because their social position at the top of the gender hierarchy has never required them to think very hard about gender.

Speaker 1 I always think about something that Aubrey Gordon always talks about over on maintenance phase, which is that anti-fat bias, for instance, is a lot about taking something that is given to you by genetic accident, what your body is shaped like.

Speaker 1 And part of what fat phobia does is it gives you a sense that that's actually a moral accomplishment.

Speaker 1 And I think that the fact that people get their particular role in the lottery of birth reflected back to them as moral choices, it becomes an ingrained part of your personality.

Speaker 1 And I think being told that, well, you just got lucky, it eats at the substance of how a lot of people conceive of their own lives.

Speaker 2 So Andrews argues that women's...

Speaker 2 large-scale entry into fields from which they were once excluded over sort of like the back half of the 20th century has transformed the culture of those institutions from ones of hard-headed practicality in which men admirably work together to get things done, also something I would like a fact check about,

Speaker 2 into now

Speaker 2 these soothing factories of good feelings in which women compel everyone to sing kumbaya and state their preferred pronouns instead of working, right?

Speaker 2 This is what she seems to refer to as wokeness, this vibe shift towards greater sensitivity.

Speaker 2 She writes, everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine, empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.

Speaker 2 The most famous line from her piece, which is getting like retweeted and memed a lot, is this one. Adrian, can you read this for me?

Speaker 1 And I'm quoting again.

Speaker 1 Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can't sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten written by someone who I'm guessing has not had a job is is that the background here like I mean all of her jobs have been at like conservative rags that are like functionally just like daycare for these idiots where

Speaker 2 you can't get fired right you can't get fired you'll never run out of money it's not a real job we're not fact-checking any of this right i mean like it's just

Speaker 2 it's so dumb so she describes wokeness as a scourge that has arisen from women's, you know, supposedly dominant place in institutions.

Speaker 1 Do you remember that line in The Royal Tenant Bombs? Like, everyone knows that custard added Little Bighorn. What this novel supposes it, what if he didn't?

Speaker 1 And it's just like, everyone knows that men are in charge of 99% of American institutions. What this little essay imagines is, what if it didn't?

Speaker 2 Right. This is part of something I've like noticed more generally is that Part of right-wing populism requires an assumption that like management is women, like management is female, right?

Speaker 2 Like the corporate overlords, the ones who are screwing you, those are all girls. It does really mimic the sort of socialism of fools of anti-Semitism, right?

Speaker 2 And that is completely unfactual. Actually, men are something like 82%

Speaker 2 of all like corporate board members or executives. I'm pulling this statistic out of my ass and we should fact check it.

Speaker 2 Now I can put that in the show notes, but it's disproportionately men in corporate leadership, right?

Speaker 2 So the terrible job job you have that is exploiting you and making you feel impotent in your ability to like get into the middle class.

Speaker 2 Those decisions are probably being made by a man, but you're supposed to understand

Speaker 2 that role of domination and exploitation over you as being sort of feminized or being controlled by women, or if not women directly, by a feminine ethos, right?

Speaker 2 So it's like the feminization of capital. So she says awokeness is a scourge that has arisen from women's supposedly dominant place in institutions.

Speaker 2 And then she argues that wokeness is nothing but female or feminine. Again, define your terms, traits at scale, right?

Speaker 1 I thought wokeness was also super aggressive and in your face and like scary. And we have to like shoot them or whatever.
Like, should we just pick a lane here? Or are we just...

Speaker 1 I mean, again, like, it. the, oh, they're so feminine, but also so masculine.
They're so scary and also so weak. This is just like gutter anti-Semitism all the way down, isn't it?

Speaker 2 And you know, I really wanted to talk to you about this because

Speaker 2 wokeness is not defined, it can take on all these different forms, as you say. And that also means that it's like not a bounded term, right?

Speaker 2 It's not something that has like discrete definitions or applications. And therefore, like wokeness as this indeterminate, unbounded, like all-powerfully malign force that can mean anything,

Speaker 2 you know, then when you make wokeness into a synonym for women, basically anything in the world can be women's fault, right?

Speaker 2 There's no social problem under these terms that can't be blamed on like the failure to oppress women sufficiently, right?

Speaker 2 I really want to emphasize to our listeners who haven't read this piece.

Speaker 2 We are doing so much work to try and construct something coherent and excavate her point for her because this is a really sloppy sloppy slash dash piece.

Speaker 1 I think I can sort of see where the confusion comes from. I'm guessing that the audience at the National Conservative Conference probably put two things together, right?

Speaker 1 There's this idea of wokeness as being newly dominant and particularly entrenched through HR practices, right?

Speaker 1 So you have things like land acknowledgement shit or the diversity statements or the pronouns and bio, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 Then you have this argument that is ostensibly left-wing about woke capitalism, right? That's very popular sort of on the French right.

Speaker 1 It's very popular, I think, among sort of compact magazine writers as well, which tends to argue not that capitalism itself has gotten woke, but that like wokeness and capital have sort of entered into certain alliances.

Speaker 1 There's a left-wing version of that that Alufemi Taiwo sort of argues, but the point there is like, well, it's really distortion, of course, of what social justice causes are.

Speaker 1 But if you basically assume that those two things are absolutely identical, that there's an object called wokeness in the world that you can point to and that migrates around and just finds like different host bodies to invade or whatever, that's how this argument comes about.

Speaker 1 It just doesn't make any friggin' sense once you hold it up to, yeah, empirical reality. Who dominates these industries?

Speaker 1 Why is a language of wokeness deployed by HR departments within some of those companies?

Speaker 1 And has the entrance of women into those workplaces in any way coincided with the development of these different practices? No, it has not, I think, is the answer to all these questions.

Speaker 2 She's using a lot of bad thinking and reflexive misogyny to try and unite some different grievances, right? The sort of like knee-jerk misogyny and grievance against women that a lot of people have

Speaker 2 with this sort of like nascent populist anti-elite sentiment that she has now managed to like recast as, you know, the feminized elites who are bringing you down.

Speaker 2 And that way you don't have to to fight against capital. You can just oppress women, right? It's a, it's a very like neat little bait and switch.

Speaker 2 But the other thing to note is that according to Helen Andrews herself, this isn't even her idea.

Speaker 2 The great feminization was originally coined in 2019 by an anonymous right-wing blogger going by the pseudonym J. Stone.

Speaker 2 It's not even the first time this idea has been expanded into a greater piece because Stone, in fact, later self-published a book, and it's really a pamphlet, it's like 100 pages, with this thesis, The Great Feminization, The Women as Drivers of Modern Social Change.

Speaker 2 I put a picture of it in the dock. The cover is pink.

Speaker 1 It says highly self-published.

Speaker 2 Yes, you can like see the Microsoft Word proprietary font.

Speaker 2 And it's just got this like image of Marilyn Monroe, the most womanly woman that there has ever been. Nobody's ever been more a woman than Marilyn Monroe.
Or more woke.

Speaker 2 Actually, kind of. She had like discernibly left-wing politics.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 2 We're not here to talk about Marilyn Monroe. Yeah, we got it.

Speaker 2 But all of which is to say that to be totally fair to Helen Andrews, this stupid idea isn't even her stupid fucking idea. By her own account, it's a stupid idea that she stole from somebody else.

Speaker 1 And just as a little Easter egg for people who've been with this podcast from like episode five or something like that.

Speaker 1 This feminization argument is also one that is raised around religion a whole lot.

Speaker 1 We talked about this very early on the podcast about the feminization of Christianity and this idea of like, where did we go wrong?

Speaker 1 It's a very pervasive argument in Christian spaces, Catholic and Protestant alike. And there too, a lot of church historians, a lot of theologians are like, oh my God, none of this data holds up.

Speaker 1 It's all vibes. It's all vibes.
Churches contain multitudes and this kind of, we need to re-swollify the church argument.

Speaker 1 It seems like something that is practiced first in religious spaces and now sort of being applied to society at large, doesn't it?

Speaker 2 Yeah, this is really reminiscent of what Christian Cobb-Dumet has articulated in her book, Jesus and John Wayne, which I think is excellent, on strains of male supremacy in American Christianity.

Speaker 2 And she talks about, you know, historically in the sort of the first half of the 20th century, the beginnings of this effort to masculinize Christianity and the sense that Christianity had become too feminine because Jesus wasn't doing enough push-ups or whatever.

Speaker 2 I will say, though, to Andrew's credit, I think she has kind of put her finger on the right-wing zeitgeist

Speaker 2 because male supremacy and misogyny have a renewed political usefulness for conservatives.

Speaker 2 This November's elections that happened just like a week and a half ago, they've changed the calculus on this a little bit.

Speaker 2 But there was a big swing of young men towards the Republican Party in the November 2024 elections. That was real.

Speaker 2 And the gains that Republicans were making with basically all non-white groups were confined to men in those groups.

Speaker 2 And add that to what you have over the past few years as like the really stratospheric rise of the manosphere media ecosystem and all these like public opinion surveys showing these like big degrees of hostile sexism among young men and wildly divergent and widening political views between men and women, especially relating to gender issues and like sex and family issues.

Speaker 2 These have all led a lot of conservatives to believe, like, you know what? We can build a multiracial coalition around male supremacy, around woman hating, right?

Speaker 2 You see this kind of all over the right-wing discursive space. It's in growing calls supported by the likes of Pete Hegseth to repeal the 19th Amendment.
You see it in the pronatalism push.

Speaker 2 You see it in all of J.D. Vance's like weird, repeated disparagement of childless cat ladies, right?

Speaker 2 What Andrews is doing is furthering this line of inchoate grievance and sort of like distilling it into a specific demand, right? There are too many women in public life and there need to be fewer.

Speaker 2 We need to push them out.

Speaker 2 So we kind of alluded to this earlier, but I really think that the key to Andrews pulling this off is to merge this like growing commitment to ideological misogyny and the post-liberal right with the MAGA movement's like populist pretenses, right?

Speaker 2 So they have to make hating women seem like it's synonymous with hating the elite. They have to make it seem like it's punching up.
Right.

Speaker 2 And in this, Andrews and a lot of her fellow travelers have found a scapegoat. They found HR.

Speaker 2 They found this female-dominated sector affiliated formally with management in basically every workplace that nobody likes. Nobody is willing to defend HR.

Speaker 2 And it's like it's hated by civil rights advocates specifically for its role in actually minimizing what companies have to do to comply with civil rights law and to avoid liability.

Speaker 2 But it's become in the right-wing rhetoric, like Andrews, the embodiments of those civil rights activisms movements and of those civil rights laws, right?

Speaker 2 So she's been able to make women in management this like sort of boogeyman that she is able to then collapse into

Speaker 2 the identical association with civil rights protections themselves and with anti-discrimination law itself.

Speaker 1 But that's pretty much what Chris Ruffo did with CRT, what Richard Hernania did in his book about this stuff, right?

Speaker 1 The idea of getting at the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through that HR training you really hated is a pretty standard move now on the Republican right.

Speaker 2 Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Yeah, it's not really innovative, but it's, I think, a necessity of their grievance machine, is they have to look like

Speaker 2 when they are like reaffirming their own status and punching downward on a hierarchy, that what they're actually doing is defying the corrupt elites and sort of vindicating workers against management.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 So this is also kind of one of those moments where I'm steel manning Andrews because she never explicitly links wokeness in civil rights law.

Speaker 2 And that's either because she's evil and knows that saying what she really means, which is we must repeal the 1964 Civil Rights Act, would make a lot of Americans like distrust her, or it's because she's so fucking historically illiterate and such a Cretan that she's never read a book in her life.

Speaker 2 Either way,

Speaker 2 she prefers to speak in these like vague terms about a cultural climate that induces this like quasi-spiritual dissatisfaction among men, right?

Speaker 2 She never names a statute. She never names a policy change.
She merely states anti-discrimination law requires that every workplace be feminized.

Speaker 1 I think she's not saying you have the workplace been feminized because you're dealing with women. The traffic between men has likewise been feminized by civil rights law.
I mean, it's in there.

Speaker 1 You're right. That she's saying, oh, you can't call your secretary Toots anymore or whatever.

Speaker 1 But there is also this element that like, no, the relationships between men have been feminized unduly by HR departments.

Speaker 1 And there I would say like, while yes, I would hate to be a woman in an American company in 1910, I also think it's really interesting to think that like she thinks that before HR showed up, that men related to each other in these workplaces in properly masculine ways.

Speaker 1 Like there is just something disciplining about showing up to a workplace, which kind of limits what you can do to and say to each other, right?

Speaker 2 Well, like this speaks to her like wild generalizations about masculine and feminine character it's not just that she considers women sort of incompetent and childlike but at the same time like scheming and malicious yeah she also considers men sort of like blithely comfortable with conflict.

Speaker 2 She's like they're able to just like, you know, accept that they didn't win an argument and then go back to work. And I'm like, I'm sorry, have you encountered anybody?

Speaker 2 And she also assumes that men are comfortable being treated badly,

Speaker 2 which is not the case.

Speaker 2 Why do we have unions? If we can name what Helen Andrews won't name, I think specifically she's talking about Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Seems right.

Speaker 2 Which, among other things, prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of sex. So, Adrian, do you want to give us like a primary on Title VII?

Speaker 1 Aaron Ross Powell, the titles are amendments technically to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Speaker 1 So, Title VII prohibits discrimination by any employers on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

Speaker 2 Almost as a joke, a right-wing congressman slipped the sex qualification in among those race, national origin, religion-protected statuses, in part because he thought that doing so would help sink the 1964 Civil Rights Act, right?

Speaker 2 That everybody would think it was ridiculous to say you couldn't discriminate on the basis of sex in who you're hiring to work for you and how you treat your employees.

Speaker 2 But it got taken up by women in Congress at the time and became a big pillar of the second wave legal battles trying to extend women's access to the public sphere.

Speaker 2 So in interviews with people like the conservative sort of like ex-feminist Megan Dahlm, Andrews has said that the wokeness she is fighting is nothing at all like the second wave feminism that people imagine she opposes.

Speaker 2 And that is a lie, because in fact, what Andrews is arguing against is precisely the result of the legal victories of that second wave like liberal movement, like namely the enactment of anti-discrimination legislation that prohibits employers from discriminating against women because they are women.

Speaker 2 And she is in particular arguing against this succession of legal victories that were won personally by Catherine McKinnon, who first developed and then got recognized into federal law, the theory that sexual harassment is sex discrimination and hence illegal, right?

Speaker 2 So the substance, such as it is, of Andrew's claim is that the legal ban on sexual harassment is an unjust and intolerable infringement of men's very nature and must be undone.

Speaker 2 So she writes that women entering the workforce has subjected men to the inability to sexually harass them and driven them out of fields. Adrian, could you read this for me?

Speaker 1 So I'm again quoting.

Speaker 1 That does not look like women outperforming men. It looks like women driving men away by imposing feminine norms on previously male institutions.

Speaker 1 What man wants to work in a field where his traits are not welcome?

Speaker 1 What self-respecting male graduate student would pursue a career in academia when his peers will ostracize him for stating his disagreements too bluntly or espousing a controversial opinion?

Speaker 1 I hate to tell you this, Helen, but most of my colleagues are men. Academia is heavily male-dominated.
We may all be soy boys to you, but trust me, there's a lot of toxic masculinity in academia.

Speaker 1 And it's remarkable that she doesn't seem to think that that's a problem here, right? Like, what self-respecting male graduate student would pursue a career in academia?

Speaker 1 Like, well, they still get most of the jobs. Why wouldn't they?

Speaker 2 I don't know about self-respect, but certainly narcissistic ones do it all the time. Yeah, also, it's true.

Speaker 1 Self-respecting male graduate students, there are no self-respecting graduate students. So like, you lost me there, but let's take that out of it.
What male graduate students?

Speaker 1 Like, yeah, plenty of them.

Speaker 2 Plenty. I had this conversation with Andy Zeisler, who writes for Salon the other day.

Speaker 2 And she pointed out that, you know, not only is this vision of men being incapable of not sexually harassing people very distressing to men, but she was also like, you know, nobody ever says that about men but women.

Speaker 2 Men are never like the ones coming out here being like, actually, I find this kind of degrading to me to say that I am this like borish animal with no intellect or self-control who is like, if I can't grope, that's like an affront to my soul.

Speaker 2 Like I do think that that's kind of insulting to men, but that seems to be an argument mostly women make.

Speaker 1 It's interesting also that line about how men won't be able to work in feminized environments without losing their self-respect.

Speaker 1 She's clearly thinking of stuff like the landmark civil rights case from 1991, in which a woman sued because the men at her job were putting up pictures from porn magazines on the walls.

Speaker 1 The idea being like having a workplace where that is standard and accepted behavior is a better and more effective workplace at a more functional institution.

Speaker 1 It's like, I don't know, even if, let's say, we removed the entire question of sexual harassment from this conversation, most of these harassment cases are about people retaliating or trying to bully each other.

Speaker 1 These are toxic workplaces where nothing much gets done, right?

Speaker 1 Like if you show me a workplace with porn magazines taped to the cubicles and one without, I'm going to go ahead and say that I think the one without probably is a more effective workplace. Right.

Speaker 2 Do you want to get work done or do you want to preserve a realm of exclusive male inhabitants where women are not welcome, right?

Speaker 2 I think that depends on what you're being effective at, is another question.

Speaker 1 Right. That's a good point.
Like, it's the same way that people like excuse like work interaction as locker room talk.

Speaker 1 Really, your metaphor is a place where famously nothing gets done except people's like asses hit with jock straps. Like, that's your like, this insurance company should be run more like a locker room.

Speaker 2 This is ridiculous, right?

Speaker 1 Like, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want to get my appendix out in a hospital that is run like a locker room.
These people should not be smacking each other's butts.

Speaker 1 They should be busy on my fucking appendix.

Speaker 2 No, no, no. They have to, they have to express their uh masculine natures, Adrian.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're like, I'm sorry you bled out, Professor Dodd, but uh, we really had to do a chest-bumping contest. And I'm like, I would, I really would like the transfusion now, guys.

Speaker 2 It might be worth noting here that sexual harassment has actually only been illegal under federal law since 1986. That's right.

Speaker 2 So more or less all of Andrew's life, but a relatively short duration in actual historical terms.

Speaker 1 And the incursion of women into workplaces that she's describing happens before that. The historical sequence here is way off.

Speaker 2 But she like really takes a lot of offense to civil rights law that protects against sexual harassment.

Speaker 2 And the closest she gets to articulating an actual change in workplaces that has occurred as a result of like women's entry into them, this quote-unquote feminization, is the sense that, like, okay, well, now sexual harassment is illegal.

Speaker 2 And in her essay, Andrews uses two examples of quote-unquote wokeness run-amuck under women's influence that are both basically about Title VII complaints. Yeah.

Speaker 2 The first example is a story I think you might be best able to tell, Adrian,

Speaker 2 about a wee little economist, former Treasury Secretary, and a frequent Jeffrey Epstein pen pal.

Speaker 1 You stepped on my punchline.

Speaker 2 A gentleman who used to be the president of Harvard, Mr. Larry Summers.
Yes. What happened to Larry Summers at Helen Andrews finds so atrocious?

Speaker 1 You may remember Larry Summers from such things as when he told a bunch of donors and Harvard faculty that women were less suited to do science and math biologically with a bunch of world-class Harvard women doing science and math in the room who were like, say what now?

Speaker 1 And you may also remember him from such headlines as Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Summers' exchange depict relationship as confidants, emails reveal, has appeared in the Guardian today.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 1 you know, again, apparently we're no longer doing correlation and causation. So like, there you have it.

Speaker 2 So Larry Summers got fired as the president of Harvard in 2005. Yeah, because he said women are naturally worth that science.
So this is a, I have to emphasize, 20-year-old controversy

Speaker 2 that occurred when Andrews herself would have been about 20 years old.

Speaker 1 That's the thing, Moira, about these anti-woke pundits. Time is a flat circle for them.

Speaker 1 Yasha Munk, Thomas Chatterton-Williams love things that happened like 20 years ago and were like, there's now this change in the air and it's real bad, you guys.

Speaker 1 Does it matter that like Will and Grace was on the air when this happened? Does it matter that people were also freaking about Janet Jackson's nipple while this was going on?

Speaker 2 I mean, maybe their preoccupation with the past is why they just keep writing the same column over and over and over again. They're stuck in Groundhog Day.

Speaker 2 They just keep on turning out the same Atlantic piece.

Speaker 2 So the notion in Andrew's piece, in her characterization of the Larry Summers incident, is that it is so self-evident that women are men's natural inferiors, that this is such an obvious truth that Summers getting fired for espousing it represents, in fact, a frightening new order in which women's feelings are given greater weight than men's practical access to fact.

Speaker 1 And then what's the second example?

Speaker 2 The second example is from that famous sexual harassment case.

Speaker 2 She doesn't name it, but I will. It is called Robinson versus Jacksonville Shipyards from 1991.

Speaker 2 And this is a case that established that sexual harassment could take the form not just of a quid pro quo demand for sex in exchange for employment, but also the form of a hostile work environment, wherein like pervasive, gender-based, you know, humiliation or antagonism is seen to violate women's full access to employment and hence to violate the law.

Speaker 2 So in this lawsuit, the underlying facts are like really, really gross. So Lois Robinson, I think she was a steel worker.
I think she was like a welder. She was a woman in the trades, right?

Speaker 2 And she gets a job at this almost totally male shipyard, Jacksonville Shipyards in Florida.

Speaker 2 And when she starts, she is subjected to lewd graffiti, to porn posted up around her workstation and throughout the workplace, and to excessive like verbal harassment and jeers and sexual comments from her colleagues, including members of management.

Speaker 2 So she was never asked for sex, but she was subjected to pornography in the workplace, which was intended and understood by her coworkers to demean and humiliate her on the basis of her being a woman, right?

Speaker 2 A court found this illegal. And now...
to Helen Andrew's great distress, you can't pin porn up over your desk at work anymore.

Speaker 2 Adrienne, I am so sorry that this oppressive feminine nature pervading public life cannot handle the expression of your manly nature in this way.

Speaker 1 I know. Me and Clarence Thomas are going to have a call about that later.

Speaker 2 So the defendants in Jacksonville shipyards, the shipyards itself, they made the case that their conduct was protected by the First Amendment and that making them stop putting porn up around at work would unfairly suppress their freedom of expression.

Speaker 2 Andrews kind of agrees, right? She calls the ruling an unjust principle that has come to suppress many forms of masculine conduct.

Speaker 2 But like, let's talk about what she is describing as essential to the male nature, right?

Speaker 2 Because this is how Catherine McKinnon described the case and the conduct that Andrews feels is essential to men's characters.

Speaker 1 I'll read it again. And this time I'm happy to be quoting.
For once,

Speaker 1 in a case involving pornography as sexual harassment, the employer argued that pornography at work was protected expression, something the workers at Jacksonville Shipyards wanted to say to first-class welder Lois Robinson.

Speaker 1 Their opinions about women and sex. Their views included naked women supposedly having sex with each other, a woman masturbating herself with a towel.

Speaker 1 Now I'm kind of unhappy that I agreed to read this.

Speaker 1 A nude woman on a heater control box with fluid coming out of her vaginal area, a woman with long blonde hair, like Lois, wearing only high heels and holding a whip, and countless women in full labial display.

Speaker 1 When Lois Robinson protested, the men engaged in more of what the ACLU brief against her termed speech by posting a sign stating men only.

Speaker 1 Suddenly, because Lois Robinson's sexual harassment complaint centered on pornography, her sexual harassment claim invoked the First Amendment, at least so far as relief was concerned.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we can talk about the ACLU's defenses of sexual harassment and things like, you know, revenge and child pornography on another episode.

Speaker 2 That is not a topic for today, although it is something that Kitty McKinnon absolutely will work into everything she ever writes. Right.
It is like, fuck the ACLU, by the way, for this. So, you know,

Speaker 2 I don't think that putting porn up at work is a natural expression of some metaphysical manly essence. I'm going to go out of fucking limb here.

Speaker 2 She says that men are more rational than women, but she's curiously denying them the capacity for reason here, right?

Speaker 2 These men were not compelled to put porn up on the walls of their workplace by something essential and true in the very core of their being.

Speaker 2 Those men at Japsonville Shipyards put port up on the walls deliberately because they did not like working with a woman and they wanted to humiliate her into quitting.

Speaker 1 It's as protected as having a burning cross picture on the desk of a black employee, right? It's trying to say, someone like you is not welcome here and we want you to leave.

Speaker 2 Sexual harassment is not this like whoopsie. It's not this like accident or overflow of masculine vitality that women just aren't tough enough to handle.
It's harassment.

Speaker 2 It is deliberate, conscious intimidation.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's an attempt to exclude someone from the normal functioning of a particular workplace or educational institution, right?

Speaker 1 To make it impossible for them to partake as is their right of citizens in this job they've chosen or this university they've accepted an offer from, et cetera, et cetera, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's about access to the public sphere. It's about the ability to support yourself.

Speaker 2 And this is something that Helen Andrews thinks that men should be entitled, and in fact require the entitlement to like violently intimidate women out of being able to do.

Speaker 2 And I want to zoom out here for a minute. And Adrian, you might cut this.

Speaker 2 I looked ahead and I might.

Speaker 2 Helen Andrews has her very specific approach to her own gender, right?

Speaker 2 She looks like somebody made a fragile rock Muppet out of leather.

Speaker 2 She's underweight, but she's also like weirdly fleshy. Her face is very pale, but she has these like rolls of excess skin on her head.

Speaker 2 She has a massive forehead, beady little eyes, kind of transparent skin, and the flaccid, like thinning hair of people who aren't eating enough.

Speaker 2 Like she looks unhealthy, and she also looks like, frankly, a little bit inbred. She's got this like Habsburg chin.

Speaker 2 And I don't say this just to demean and insult Helen Andrews, although to be clear, she does deserve it.

Speaker 2 I say this because I think her appearance shows us a lot about how she relates to her own gender.

Speaker 2 So it is conspicuous now on the American right to see a woman rise to prominence in those circles who has not invested a lot of time and money and physical discomfort into elaborate, often disfiguring, like cosmetic interventions, right?

Speaker 2 We did, I think, a really good episode on this

Speaker 2 that I'm really proud of. Yeah, with the beauty critic, Justifino.

Speaker 2 We called it Republican makeup, but like, honestly, makeup is kind of a misnomer for what these interventions really are, which are a series of like highly invasive, full-figure body modifications and style choices, which are especially conspicuous on women, but also becoming more common on men.

Speaker 2 Andrews is not doing that, right?

Speaker 2 She is positioning herself as differently gendered, and she's positioning herself as more serious by not making these physically demanding accommodations to sexuality, right?

Speaker 2 She is somebody who doesn't wear makeup, I think like maybe ever. She's also very clearly never had any work done.
I actually respect this about her, to be clear.

Speaker 2 She's ugly in public, which is always hard for women, and I think particularly hard for a woman conservative. But I don't think she's doing that as like...

Speaker 2 a principled statement about how those interventions degrade women's dignity.

Speaker 2 I think she's doing it as a statement about her own personal individual dignity and indeed about her gendered exceptionalism.

Speaker 2 It's a statement about the kind of woman she is and how she understands herself in relation to other women and particularly other women in her movement.

Speaker 2 Because what you really need to know about the great feminization is that it is a long windup to an ending that explains how Helen Andrews is not like other girls.

Speaker 1 I love this part.

Speaker 2 Like the piece is not that long. It's less than 3,500 words.
And it spends the first 3,000 words with this long explanation of how awful women are. She says that they're ruining society.

Speaker 2 She says that women working is a threat to the rule of law. But why does Andrews care so much? Because really, she's more like a man.
Adrian, would you read this last? I think this is our last quote.

Speaker 1 And again, I'm quoting here. Because after all, I am not just a woman.

Speaker 1 I'm also someone with a lot of disagreeable opinions who will find it hard to flourish if society becomes more conflict-diverse and consensus-driven.

Speaker 1 I'm the mother of sons who will never reach their full potential if they have to grow up in a feminized world.

Speaker 2 Boy, mom.

Speaker 2 I am.

Speaker 1 We all are dependent on institutions like the legal system, scientific research, and democratic politics that support the American way of life, and will all suffer if they cease to perform the tasks they were designed to do.

Speaker 2 You hear to her first, folks. She's one of the good women, the one who should be granted an exception from misogyny because of how special, different, and exceptional she is.

Speaker 2 She only hates other women because she can see how much she is unlike them. And now, surely, you'll let her into your club of mutual male recognition and respect.
Definitely going to happen.

Speaker 2 It always works. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Paging auto-vininger.

Speaker 2 So, you know, it's common to call misogynist women hypocrites, but I don't think Andrews is. I think her argument is based around her own exceptionalism.

Speaker 2 So the notion that she is personally different from and superior to other women is not a moment of hypocrisy. It is foundational to her project.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I mean, we might think of other conservative groups where this is true, namely black conservatives, right?

Speaker 2 Gay conservatives. Yeah.
I'm sure like you could find a trans woman doing this, maybe Caitlin Jenner.

Speaker 2 Probably. I don't listen when she talks.
I'm not like those other ones.

Speaker 2 I'm a good one. And I'm, in fact, so good.
I'm going to demonstrate how I'm good by being the most perfect bigot against my own in-group, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 So this might bring us nicely, I think, to Helen Andrews' prescription, right?

Speaker 1 I always love the prescription parts on these pieces that are like, the sky is falling.

Speaker 2 And then dissolution is like, maybe we should have a seminar.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, like, she does call to end what she says is the workplace's discrimination against men's nature, right? Right.

Speaker 2 And I think, again, we have to read more into this because she is so vague, but I think we can read that as a call to end sexual harassment protections. I think that's a reasonable conclusion.

Speaker 2 And that's not actually a modest proposal, to be clear. It would undo decades of legal precedent.
It would push large numbers of women out of the workforce and into dependency.

Speaker 2 And it would, you know, subject those who stayed in the workforce to massive hostility, violence, and humiliation that will absolutely curtail their ability to earn and provide for themselves.

Speaker 1 But at the same time, it is also noticeable how comparatively modest that solution is when you consider what Andrews has claimed the purported stakes of this thing are, right?

Speaker 2 Right. Like, Andrew claims that women's entry into public life is a threat to Western civilization.

Speaker 2 She says the rule of law will not survive.

Speaker 2 And if she really believes that, then what her claim mandates is a wholesale immediate removal of women from work, from education, from public office, like a Taliban-style gender segregation

Speaker 2 that would involve necessarily tremendous amounts of violence to put in place, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah. She's basically calling for a certain Hulu show to happen in real life.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And that what she formally calls for, what she'll cop to calling for, is merely a change to civil rights law shows that she doesn't have the courage of her convictions.

Speaker 2 She makes a maximalist case and then offers this like pissant little solution. I think it's cowardly, it's dishonest, and candidly, it's kind of transparent.

Speaker 2 So, I'm going to talk directly to Helen and say, sweetheart, if you want to be a man so badly, then you should grow a pair of balls and say what you mean.

Speaker 1 In Bib 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.