#1021 - Louise Perry & Mary Harrington - The Performative Male Epidemic

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Speaker 1 For fuck's sake.

Speaker 1 Americans are having a record low amount of sex, even less than they did during COVID. Just 37% of American adults have sex weekly, down from 55% in 1990.

Speaker 1 Does this counter the view that sex is becoming more casually accepted than ever before?

Speaker 2 Who goes first?

Speaker 3 Do you want to go first? I think I glanced at these statistics and

Speaker 3 what I thought was interesting and sort of haven't really had a chance to burrow into is how does it split between the long-term partnered and the casually and the unpartnered.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 Because that's been generally

Speaker 3 that's where the commentary gets interesting. And people have often,

Speaker 3 the conservative side will say, no, actually,

Speaker 3 the not getting any

Speaker 3 is very much the people who are not married. And actually, the married are getting any.
And if I remember rightly, the recent headlines are actually the people who are married are also

Speaker 3 becoming more panda-like.

Speaker 1 Sex recessions happening across the world.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's happening across the country.

Speaker 1 It's relationship

Speaker 1 agnostic.

Speaker 2 So So I think that the paradox where people are simultaneously having less sex and apparently being at least more submissive towards casual sex, whether or not they're having lots of it, I think is solved by that marriage issue.

Speaker 2 So if people are less likely to be in long-term partnerships and people in long-term partnerships have more sex. So I think there's a model that works where, say, Gen Z

Speaker 2 are having

Speaker 2 casual sex, but they're only having casual sex. So like one hookup a year, for instance, works out as very little sex, but it's also not

Speaker 2 to say that casual sex culture doesn't exist.

Speaker 1 So you're able to have both of these things.

Speaker 2 I think that those things work.

Speaker 1 And they might actually be causing each other.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I also think it's plausible that even married people might be having less sex.

Speaker 2 And that might be to do with things like obesity, things like, I don't know, xenoestrogens, like there could be biological things going on. Or people just looking at their phones too much.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 3 people looking at their phones is at least as plausible at a practical level

Speaker 3 as xenoestrogens or any of the sort of exotic biological explanations. I mean, if you're,

Speaker 3 it's very,

Speaker 3 it's very absorbing. And, you know, at the end of the day, you know, a certain amount of the a certain amount of action happens just, you know,

Speaker 3 nothing to do, nothing on TV. Spontaneously.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 3 you're here, I'm here.

Speaker 2 You know, Alice Evans, who's an academic at KCL London, she blames smartphones for the birth rate crisis.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 the line starts going down

Speaker 3 some time before smartphones. Well, it depends on the current system.

Speaker 1 It really depends on the country you're looking at, design.

Speaker 2 It depends on which country you're looking at.

Speaker 2 But she notices, and I think this is true, that all the parts of the world that are seeing, have seen and are seeing the greatest drops in fertility, this does track with smartphone usage.

Speaker 2 And the places where fertility is clinging on, in say sub-Saharan Africa, is where people are least likely to have smartphones.

Speaker 2 I think she's probably, I think probably the third factor that those things correlate with is actually modernity and affluence and is more and that's more complex but it's interesting I mean her theory is that people are just so

Speaker 2 besotted with the joys of limbic capitalism delivered via their phones that they just forget to behave like normal normal human beings and reproduce

Speaker 1 do you think Taylor Swift's trad wife arc will be enough to reverse birth rate decline but she's not having a trad wife arc is she she's engaged come on let her do it one step at a time come on

Speaker 1 what is she 35

Speaker 1 Maybe.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's not especially child wifeies.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean, though? I mean, there was a poem by someone called Kaylin Weird. It's got tens of millions of views.
Have you seen this? It's been floating around.

Speaker 1 The day Taylor Swift got engaged, little girls screamed, grown women cried, and the awkward child we all carry inside finally felt chosen.

Speaker 1 My point, lots of women follow Taylor Swift. She's got engaged.
Is this going to be a boon?

Speaker 1 It's a non-zero impact on coupling, right? But how big is it going to be?

Speaker 2 So these things are mimetic. I'm with you there.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I don't know. I mean, that isn't.
Okay, that is an interesting question. Like, we know that with fertility,

Speaker 2 if your sister, say, has a baby, you're more likely to have a baby in the year following and best friend, et cetera. Does it work when it's Taylor Swift? Well, maybe.

Speaker 2 I mean, I was thinking maybe if it, maybe parasocial relationships can have the same effect and probably actually if people spend more I mean it occurred to me the other day that I see Donald Trump's face so much more often than I see like my neighbors faces

Speaker 2 for instance this fight and that's probably true for you as well because your neighbors are wearing Donald Trump masks

Speaker 2 to wind me up yeah yeah um but the parasocial relationships I mean they do everyone who's any kind of digital device is susceptible to them. So yeah, maybe.

Speaker 2 I mean, maybe Taylor might be able to trick her biggest fans into thinking my sister's just had a baby or when she does eventually have a baby, hopefully.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, I think it's not negligible.

Speaker 1 Birth rate decline might be a slightly bigger challenge than can be fixed by Taylor Swift. Maybe a little bit.

Speaker 3 I mean, you could also make the case, I'm going to be provocative here, that birth rate decline is not so much a problem as just nature taking its course, you know, in the sense of a culture self-correcting from a kind of a terminal spiral into a kind of a structural state of sterility.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 if the logical end point of limbic capitalism, this superb phrase that Louise just raised, this, I mean, I don't know if you've come across this phrase before, it was coined by a writer called David Courtwright, who wrote a book titled Limbic Capitalism,

Speaker 3 which is a critique of all the ways that,

Speaker 3 especially in more recent years,

Speaker 3 the way people make money, the most profitable source of new innovation is hacking people's basic primitive drives and redirecting them from what they're actually healthily meant to do towards making money for companies.

Speaker 3 So, you know, selling junk food, selling pornography,

Speaker 3 hacking people's dopamine systems so that they stay hypnotized by social media instead of getting it on or having a forming relationships or even frankly going outside.

Speaker 3 You know, all of those things are instances of what Courtwright calls limbic capitalism.

Speaker 3 And I think you could make the case that if we're if the direction of the general overall cultural direction direction of travel is such that that's the end point that we're currently destined towards.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 if it's resulting in people just not having babies, you could argue that if you take a step back, that's just evolution taking its course. You know, we are being selected against by

Speaker 3 our own commercial infrastructure.

Speaker 3 That's interesting.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the end point of that will be that the current... the current culture

Speaker 3 will very literally not be reproduced and will be replaced in two or three generations by some other culture which has somehow managed to unplug from the skinner machine. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 3 I mean, so in the long term, it's kind of optimistic, but in the short term, for the people who are committed to the limbic capitalist architecture, it looks like a disaster.

Speaker 1 The conversation I had with Brad Wilcox, he was talking about why South Korea has got such a low birth rate, and one of his big theories is around K-pop stars. Have you heard this one? No.

Speaker 1 Fucking brilliant. So

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 K-pop revolution is very constructed. These people sort of apply.
They go through Navy SEAL Selection Week and then they're done. And they're locked into these ironclad 360

Speaker 1 24-7 contracts. And in them, they can't date.
They're to be completely celibate for the entire time, which means that...

Speaker 3 How long does it last? The contract?

Speaker 1 Well, for as long as they're in the band. And if they want to go and if they were to begin dating, they would be out, right? Maybe, I don't know.

Speaker 2 What's the reasoning?

Speaker 1 I think he didn't say that, but I'm going to guess something like,

Speaker 1 we want you completely committed to this huge project, and anything which is off that might muddy the water.

Speaker 3 It's also a cleaner parasocial relationship, isn't it? As well, I suppose.

Speaker 3 You know, when you think about the relationship between Taylor Swift's fans, Taylor Swift's boyfriends, and Taylor Swift, you know,

Speaker 3 you know, what was it, Matty Healy? And when she was dating him, they all went, her entire fan base of, you know, squillion, bajillions of women went absolutely bananas. They hated him.

Speaker 1 And they bet, like his, his her fan base basically split up the relationship that's a that's a way to put it that if you have a personal relationship there is a part of you that is outside of the band yeah right so there is no personal yeah right and his point is that because you have the most popular most aspirational role models within a country are all uncoupled and childless that created an in a huge generational impact of you shouldn't be trying to have kids.

Speaker 1 And if that's true, there was a great example. I think it's the country of Georgia, very religious, and they have this like superstar rock star pastor.

Speaker 1 And he's the most popular guy in the entire country. And

Speaker 1 he tried to fix birth rate decline by saying, I will personally baptize the third child of any family. Oh, I remember that.
Yeah. And

Speaker 1 these

Speaker 1 families are speed running through children in a desperate attempt to get the third.

Speaker 1 And so you can see people who are of high status are able to create incentives that encourage people who respect them in order to follow them.

Speaker 1 So the obvious thing, at least for Korea, that you could fix overnight is the only way you can become a K-pop star is if you're already a mother or father.

Speaker 1 Like that's the how you get in. And that means that every K-pop star now is a

Speaker 1 example.

Speaker 3 But again, the entire architecture of limbic capitalism militates against that because

Speaker 3 the excitement, clearly, I mean,

Speaker 3 this is not a world I'm massively familiar with, but there's obviously like huge volumes of gossip content and huge amount of exposure, and like the the every aspect of these people's lives, you know, down to their inner lives is made available for strip mining by the media machine.

Speaker 3 And under those circumstances, it's just not possible to be a parent because, you know, to be to be there, to be for your child or to be for your family

Speaker 3 is to keep some of that material, some of that intimate stuff protected from being strip mined and commercialized in that way. I I mean, this is something you and I talk about, isn't it, Louise? Like,

Speaker 3 how and in what, how, how you go, how one can go about existing in public while intentionally preserving a space of intimacy where family life happens and where that's which is not subject to the digital modesty thing.

Speaker 3 Yeah, digital modesty, exactly. And I mean, I'm very intentional about what I post and when and how I share any information at all about my family.
You know, they're there and I love them.

Speaker 3 And if I don't talk about them, it's not because actually I secretly wish I wasn't part of that family. It's precisely because I respect their privacy and their stories are not mine to tell.

Speaker 3 But, you know, to be a K-pop star under, you know, to say you have to be a parent to be a K-pop star would be to say you also have to be willing to strip mine your strip mine your family.

Speaker 1 That's true. I suppose

Speaker 1 you're stripmining your ability to have a family in the first iteration of it, though, right? Like you're refusing to have...

Speaker 1 Okay, so on one side, you are being puppeted by lack and on the other side, you are being puppeted by transparency.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think, you know, at of the risk of getting very anti-capitalist very early in this conversation you know perhaps the problem is the strip mining.

Speaker 1 But it's I mean the position that we're all in is

Speaker 3 in the literal physical natural world as well as in the emotional caveat.

Speaker 1 But my point is we're all kind of under the impression or the awareness that that is a problem that's too big to be solved.

Speaker 1 So you need interventions that can this is the world that we exist within that's so compelling to people and so seductive that you're not not going to be able to stop that.

Speaker 1 You're not going to get people off smartphones. You're not going to stop social media from hacking the bottom of the brainstem.
Okay, so what are the ways to get Taylor Swift engaged?

Speaker 2 I don't know. I think if there's any,

Speaker 2 so I think it's not the case that South Korea has low fertility because of K-pop, but it probably, if there was one easy intervention that you could at least attempt, it would be in the world of propaganda, right?

Speaker 2 For the birth rates thing. So whether that be intentionally boosting

Speaker 2 mothers and fathers or obliging K-pop stars to

Speaker 2 shag in an appropriate way or whatever the rules are, maybe that would work for trying to make parenthood higher status. The problem with any other type of birth rate intervention is that

Speaker 2 all of the other options are fairly appalling, I think, in terms of our actual ability to tolerate them because the cash transfers don't work is what we've learned.

Speaker 2 And so if the cash transfers don't work, we could try propaganda after that.

Speaker 2 We're just going to have to go

Speaker 1 to stop the Wi-Fi networks and kill data access from your phone.

Speaker 2 We could try that, I suppose.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I just found that the Taylor Swift thing has been, like, in the reaction to that and then the subsequent rereaction has been pretty interesting.

Speaker 2 Well, you try and design a clever study to see if she boosts marriage and birth rates.

Speaker 2 And we'll see.

Speaker 1 Correlate your

Speaker 1 marriage rate with your Spotify listening habits. Yeah, that's true.
Save Taylor Swift.

Speaker 3 I mean, apparently,

Speaker 3 supermarket loyalty programs can already tell when somebody's pregnant, even before sometimes they realize it themselves.

Speaker 1 My budget did that.

Speaker 3 Just by

Speaker 3 their search patterns and purchase patterns.

Speaker 2 I got an ad for pregnancy tests before I knew I was pregnant the most recent time. Amazing.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. The internet's very clever.

Speaker 3 It's uncanny. Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's an app called Aura, a URA, and it's digital safety stuff.

Speaker 1 You put it on everybody's phone, but you can put it on your kids' phone. And it allows parents to have sort of surveillance that's safe without encroaching too much on privacy.

Speaker 1 At least that's the positioning. But it does things like it looks at how hard they're pressing the screen and it correlates that with their level of sort of psychological distress.

Speaker 1 And it looks at the last time that they went to the last time they used it and the first time they used it in the morning.

Speaker 1 And then they correlate correlate that with gps data it's all held securely supposedly and it's like um it can deliver a report to a parent that says when little timmy goes to baseball he sleeps for 45 minutes longer on average and he's this percent less aggressive when he's pressing the screen which suggests that it's very regulating for him his grandmother could have told you that though yeah yeah yeah a lot of this stuff is a lot of this stuff is absolutely a it's a substitute for attentive attuned interpersonal relationships by people from people who love you we're trying to re-engineer through that.

Speaker 3 And there's a sense in which the more you offer a tech alternative to that, the more you create, the more you open the possibility that actually you can just do without doing a relationship.

Speaker 3 Whereas

Speaker 3 it's going, jumping slightly sideways from that to

Speaker 3 the power of older women for pattern recognition. I was talking to a local friend who has a son the same age as my daughter.

Speaker 3 We were talking about schools as we were walking our dogs, you know, very, very, very, very normy, very, very, very normy, very countryside, very...

Speaker 3 And he was telling me, um, his,

Speaker 3 his wife, who's also my friend, his mother, runs a local riding school, you know, it's one of those very classic kind of, you know, English, English kind of tier three riding schools where all the school ponies are very hairy and very muddy.

Speaker 3 And, um, and there's generation after generation after generation of local girls, sort of from tween probably to mid-teens, have come through this riding stables. So,

Speaker 3 so my friend's mother-in-law has observed patterns of behavior in possibly, you know, I think 25 years worth of local girls.

Speaker 3 And he was, and he is based, he and he and his wife are basing their school selection on what she has observed over 25 years about

Speaker 3 the change in disposition as those girls go off to different schools.

Speaker 3 So not Ofsted,

Speaker 3 not even what other parents think, not even what other parents are planning to do, but which schools instantly,

Speaker 3 which schools trans went, which secondary schools instantly, overnight, transformed the girls that my mother-in-law saw from nice little girls into brats and which didn't?

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 3 And that's the kind of stuff which

Speaker 3 you can try and replace with an app, but you can't, basically.

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Speaker 2 If you ever read that classic blog, I think it's by an anonymous blogger from years ago about

Speaker 2 whams versus autists.

Speaker 2 So, whams is a made-up term. So, the argument in the piece, it's great, is

Speaker 2 we spend a lot of time talking about autism and like identifying it in people and seeing it as an obviously bad thing, you know, and we'll list all the ways in which autistic people suffer in the world and we see it as something to be treated.

Speaker 2 I mean, obviously, in extreme non-verbal forms, obviously that's appropriate.

Speaker 2 But to some extent, it is just a personality type, and it's a personality type you're more likely to see in men and is often pathologized.

Speaker 2 And the piece argues that, no, look, like autism is just one end of a spectrum in terms of a disposition, in terms of being more interested in things than people and being very interested in systems and being quite socially withdrawn or whatever.

Speaker 2 We don't have a term for the other end of the spectrum. We just don't talk about the other end of the spectrum.

Speaker 2 But there is such a thing as someone being more interested in people than things, not really being interested in systems, being very extroverted and being very intuitive about everything and very like hypersensitive to emotion or whatever.

Speaker 1 Why don't we have a name for that?

Speaker 2 Because in extreme forms, that's also a problem. And so the writer, who I think is male, calls them whams.
Which stands for? Nothing. It stands for nothing.
It's just a word that you made up.

Speaker 2 So whammishness is like the opposite of being autistic. And that's a fantastic example of whammishness, just pure like intuiting from the girl's emotional states.
I don't know.

Speaker 3 I mean, it seems like a robust example of pattern recognition and the most kind of branded and localistic localistic kind.

Speaker 1 But I mean, I mean,

Speaker 2 it's people focused.

Speaker 3 I mean, I know this guy's mother-in-law, as you know, I've met her on a number of occasions. She's the least kind of emotionally labile individual you can imagine.

Speaker 3 She's like small, small, square, thick-set,

Speaker 3 extremely practical English horsewoman.

Speaker 2 You're relying very heavily on your neighbours not watching you.

Speaker 1 Sorry?

Speaker 1 You're relying very heavily on your neighbours not watching.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, I'm not going to name names, and these are all people whom I love and respect. You know, I cite this as examples of what

Speaker 3 a functioning social fabric looks like. Yeah.
Absent.

Speaker 1 This is classic British village life. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 3 the reason I talk about, you know, affectionately and respectfully, really deeply affectionately and respectfully about my neighbours and my local community in this way is because living like this is only is what you have before you start trying to reverse engineer a technological replacement for it.

Speaker 3 And I mean, you know, these are not people who are all up in each other's grills the the whole time. You know, small town, small town England is mostly people mind their own business.

Speaker 3 But there's a sense in which you're known cumulatively over time just because you all show up in the same places and you go to the same playgroups and whatever.

Speaker 3 And that's a very different way of being known and seen and observed than, for example, creating a profile online or even having your data tracked and monetized by a supermarket shopping app or an algorithm that wants to sell you pregnancy tests.

Speaker 3 It's very different.

Speaker 1 It's certainly a missing archetype, I think, for the

Speaker 1 wise non-grandmother influence in some young person's life. I think we

Speaker 3 call those the aunties, really.

Speaker 1 That's why the group chat

Speaker 1 between us is aunties.

Speaker 1 That was not as flippant as you might have thought.

Speaker 1 And yeah, like those auntie influences,

Speaker 1 I don't live in the town or the country that I was born in. I've been displaced by my own choice, but

Speaker 1 most of my communication now is mediated through all of that. Where is the opportunity for some older matriarch woman to, you know,

Speaker 1 pursue me the wisdom? That's, I'm aware that's a quite that's a big question. I'm aware that.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, I'm not expecting you to answer it now, but this is what all of the aunties will beast you with on every possible occasion.

Speaker 1 I did highlight that at every I actually dread now going to weddings because as a 37-year-old unmarried man, every time that the vows are completed, the fucking eyes of Sauron all turn

Speaker 1 to the people who

Speaker 1 wrist a far when are we fucks. I feel like I need to, you know, do some Fugesi.

Speaker 1 Are those old derves over there? I must, I must, you know, escape the situation. But this is what aunties are for.
But

Speaker 3 that's what aunties do. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, you're related to a lot of poking. I mean, you're, absolutely.

Speaker 3 You know, on the one hand, you long for the aunties and you want to create auntie groups. On the other hand, you want to run away from them when they beast you at weddings.
That's true.

Speaker 1 I think this is the

Speaker 1 auntie dynamic.

Speaker 3 I mean, probably it was ever thus.

Speaker 1 Yeah, correct. You know what I mean? All right.
I want to talk about a kind of downstream from the Taylor Swift thing.

Speaker 1 I want to talk about pick me's and performative males because these are two memes that are taking off a little bit at the moment.

Speaker 3 Performative males.

Speaker 1 This is not one I've heard. Please say.
Have you heard about performative males? No.

Speaker 3 What is a performative male?

Speaker 1 You need to get back on Twitter.

Speaker 1 You need to get back on Twitter.

Speaker 2 Mayor hasn't hasn't sent me a tweet. I just don't see it.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 3 I've also been deliberately not very online all through the summer.

Speaker 3 I took my holiday from the internet in England's last remaining form.

Speaker 1 I've decided to pick your fucking sabbatical from online life. We've just reached the end of the day.
And today is the day that the kids go back to school.

Speaker 1 So, had I asked you this in four weeks' time, you'd be like, oh, allow me to tell you about performative mail.

Speaker 3 So you're going to have to fill us in. Let me do that.

Speaker 1 Okay, so performative mails are,

Speaker 1 it's a call-out. It's been very interesting.
The trend emerged and almost immediately became kind of castigated.

Speaker 1 You know, like woke had an opportunity to be a legitimate term before it was a satirical term. Performative males have almost immediately become satirized.

Speaker 1 Performative male is a guy with floppy hair, sort of oversized, flared jeans.

Speaker 1 He's got a tote bag, he's reading some sort of literary fiction, he's got a matcher, he's not quite like a cinnamon roll boyfriend, husband.

Speaker 3 Is this not just the new soy boy?

Speaker 1 Maybe it might be kind of like an elevated hipster,

Speaker 1 like a softboy archetype, perhaps from sort of the late 2010s.

Speaker 1 It might be the equivalent of women wearing like football shirts or pink Floyd t-shirts or like kind of like the male. Imagine the male equivalent of a pick-me,

Speaker 1 but it's stripped of most of the

Speaker 1 raw, aggressive, kind of more masculine, more domineering.

Speaker 3 So let me, like, if I were to speculate, I would say

Speaker 3 this is the kind of guy who might employ the sneaky fucker mating strategy. So,

Speaker 1 this is why it's becoming, I think, immediately satirized. I think it's,

Speaker 2 of course, knows what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 It's

Speaker 1 poorly hidden, pliable male mating tactics being called out very quickly.

Speaker 3 Actually, interestingly, I'm not sure how well this maps to performative males, but I remember discovering how very

Speaker 3 interestedly discovering just how high the proportion is of male feminists

Speaker 3 who subsequently end up being me too'd as sex pests.

Speaker 2 I've been rewriting this before.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, I think the liars were. I was just four paragraphs, yes.

Speaker 1 Because they weren't sufficiently well, because they were just rumours, and it was just,

Speaker 3 yeah, I think.

Speaker 1 Well, allegedly, allegedly, we must remember that allegedly.

Speaker 3 They gutted the article, but really the pattern is strong enough that even if you don't name names, it's a thing.

Speaker 3 So these guys are

Speaker 3 sort of droopy and feminized in presentation.

Speaker 1 Flaid, flaccid man.

Speaker 3 At least in presentation. But heterosexual.

Speaker 1 Heterosexual. But heterosexual.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the performative males being this.
I think it's.

Speaker 3 Is it the one guy who comes to Pilates with you and then just like tries, tries to hit him?

Speaker 1 We're getting close there. We're getting perilously close to what would have been the sneaky fucker male feminist.
The performative male. I think it's it's as much an aesthetic as anything else.
Okay.

Speaker 1 So it's it might be the aesthetic. Basically, it might just be a rework of the aesthetic of the sneaky fucker.

Speaker 3 What does he what does he read?

Speaker 1 I'm not too sure what he would be what he'd be reading. Yasmin.

Speaker 1 She laughs.

Speaker 1 She's my source of sneaky fucker info because she's in LA.

Speaker 1 But it would be him sort of

Speaker 1 matcher in hand. He's the male embodiment of a matcher drink.

Speaker 3 Does he want to get Sarah J. Mas? I think this is what I'm trying to

Speaker 2 figure out. What it reminds me of is the 70s when you had the men simultaneously embracing long hair and free love and whatever, and being quite feminine and

Speaker 2 dodging the draft and stuff. So, on the one hand, being anti-masculine, but then fully embracing the post-sexual revolution opportunity to get women into beds.

Speaker 2 And feminists at the time complained about this. What it sounds like, though, is that the performative male adds a layer of like consumerism,

Speaker 2 which is quite distinctively 2025. Is that right?

Speaker 1 I think you've nailed it. Yeah, with the tote bag, with the dress, with the hair.
Yeah. I mean, what is

Speaker 1 on his bag?

Speaker 1 Almost certainly laboo boo. Actually, that's a better way to put it.
If you could find a laboo boo with a matcher, it's labooboo males. Yes, that's exactly what it is.
Amazing.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 one of the sort of depressing thoughts that crossed my mind the other day, you know, when you think about

Speaker 3 this sort of noodle-armed male phenotype, you know, with a laboo boo on his bag and a matcher in his hand, and maybe he actually literally does read Sarah J. Maus.

Speaker 3 And I think about them, and you think about, you know,

Speaker 1 do I need to wait on that? No, no, no, it's okay. I just,

Speaker 1 the way that you construct sentences, I can't keep a straight face, is fucking brilliant. Okay, go on.

Speaker 3 But I mean, you know, these, these kind of,

Speaker 3 this, this is a stopping.

Speaker 1 Sorry, sorry.

Speaker 1 Sorry. Okay,

Speaker 1 Laboobu guys.

Speaker 3 So, so, laboo boo guys.

Speaker 3 What if, in fact, they're more evolutionarily fit in terms in the context of what they're doing.

Speaker 1 Oh, they're fucking adapted to the new environment. That's what I mean.

Speaker 3 Because it's like when you think about, when you think about the kind of work that everyone actually does now, and when you think about the kind of social environments that particularly knowledge class people of either sex have to operate within actually being the kind of high t aggressive um

Speaker 1 you're not sitting still in class not sitting you know those guys get medicalized and pathologized basically because they're they they don't work in open plan offices question on this is this as close as a man can get to being female whilst still being reproductively viable for females to find attractive yeah but and given that females have got this advantage so socioeconomically in the education and in the workplace, this is like

Speaker 1 the new it's it's and also

Speaker 1 I want to talk about me too at some point today. I wonder if this is the sort of post-Me Too acceptable, what men think, even though incorrectly.

Speaker 1 I've been told, do not be domineering, do not be too forthcoming, do not be somebody that could make women feel threatened in any way. What's the least threatening laboo boo, tote bag, floppy hair,

Speaker 1 matcha drink?

Speaker 3 HR friendly. Yeah, and I do I do get the impression.

Speaker 3 There's a a lot of guys, particularly those who are sort of, you know, socialized into a more sort of progressive kind of thought world, who genuinely feel

Speaker 3 very distressed by the sort of heighty aggressive male

Speaker 3 disposition.

Speaker 3 I just finished reading a book. I mean, it's a good book, very interesting piece of work by an ecological economist

Speaker 3 on care and the sort of Cinderella economy, as he puts it, of care and maintenance and systemic health and

Speaker 3 environmental sustainability and so on, which he sees as being, again, strip mined, exploited and ultimately exhausted by

Speaker 3 the quote-unquote real economy that we now have. And in it, he has a whole chapter about the patriarchy, which I just found a really interesting read from a guy who's, you know,

Speaker 3 he's a successful guy and he's got adult children. And, you know, he's obviously, you know, sporty and fit and and intelligent, well-read, and so on.

Speaker 3 So, like, you know, perfectly manly man within the terms of, you know, modern,

Speaker 3 respectable, liberal society. But he's furious about the patriarchy.

Speaker 3 You know, and he's, and what, and the passage I found most interesting is he has a little discussion about Daphne Du Maurier's novels, and Jamaica Inn, particularly, and Rebecca.

Speaker 3 And he talks, you know, his reading of Daphne Du Maurier is as a feminist, you know, that it's a critique of gender relations between the sexes, you know, and and particularly of, you know, the chronic kind of susceptible vulnerability of women to male violence.

Speaker 3 But at one point,

Speaker 3 he observes that DiMaurier's female characters are both vulnerable to male violence and also kind of turned on by it. He doesn't quite put it up, he doesn't quite put it like that.

Speaker 3 But there's obviously a real ambivalence in the way she writes, and he doesn't know how to process it. And I find that really interesting, just in the context of thinking about how

Speaker 3 the labo-boo man presents it. You know, I'm not suggesting that the author of this book is a labooboo man.

Speaker 3 He's not quite that, but there's something really interesting going on there about

Speaker 3 guys who've internalized the idea that to be a straightforwardly aggressive man in a style, in a perhaps quote-unquote old-fashioned style or more overtly patriarchal is bad.

Speaker 3 And that puts you in continuity with Andrew Tate and other people who are bad, obviously by definition.

Speaker 3 And therefore, we must be something which is softer and more

Speaker 3 consensual and more kind of

Speaker 3 the booberish, or I don't know, something.

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Speaker 2 Circling back to Chris's opening question: is it possible that everyone's having less sex because of the labo boo men?

Speaker 3 But seriously, like I mean, it's crossed my mind sometimes.

Speaker 2 We need more polarity.

Speaker 1 Well, look, this is

Speaker 1 to me, this just seems like the progeny of me, too, in many ways. That the message that a lot of men, the vast majority of well-behaved, sexually disciplined, not pushy men took

Speaker 1 was, I shouldn't be pushy. It's like, well, yeah, you already weren't that pushy, and maybe you actually weren't pushy enough.

Speaker 1 So the issue with the message, don't be too pushy, is that the men who really need to hear it will ignore it. And the men who are already predisposed to believe it will take it to heart.

Speaker 1 So what you end up with is this weird selection effect where the bad actors still act badly.

Speaker 1 And the ones who actually probably needed a little bit of a helping hand to go forward are like, oh, holy fuck. And maybe the labo boom man is just the final

Speaker 1 form of that.

Speaker 2 He's taking it too seriously.

Speaker 3 The risk of just pouring

Speaker 3 petrol on this conversation and then flinging a match in.

Speaker 3 It strikes me that

Speaker 3 if your thesis is right, and in fact, somewhere buried in all of this is actually a low level of sort of low-level revulsion at Laboo Booman and a yearning for a more direct and unmediated form of masculine sexual aggression.

Speaker 3 It has been suggested by people on the internet whose names I now forget that

Speaker 3 this is, in fact, a factor in the extremely politically sensitive subject of migration into the country across the English Channel.

Speaker 3 As in, there are

Speaker 3 that there are progressive women who

Speaker 3 kind of enjoy the appearance of young men who haven't been

Speaker 3 labubified yet.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 3 This is not.

Speaker 1 Because Labubu hasn't reached Syria.

Speaker 3 Labuboo has not reached Syria.

Speaker 3 These guys are not noodle-armed. These guys, in fact, have demonstrated considerable gumption in making it from wherever it is that they

Speaker 3 originated to England. I mean, it's a genuinely impressive level of gumption involved.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And I don't know.

Speaker 1 What did you say?

Speaker 1 Yeah, you really.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 3 okay, two things. One is.
So, so, having, having just, I'm just going to, Louis, I'm going to hand you the petrol can.

Speaker 2 So, I do actually agree with you. I was speaking to a journalist friend recently.

Speaker 3 No, you're not agreeing with me. You're agreeing with people on the internet whose names I don't know.

Speaker 2 I was speaking to a friend, a journalist friend recently who had been in Calais and speaking to these guys who'd joined over the channel.

Speaker 2 And he said, like, what is really amazing is you'll talk to these guys about their life stories and it will be like, oh yeah, so I came from Sudan and I walked across half of Africa and then I got to Libya and then I got enslaved.

Speaker 2 And so I was taken to another country where I was a slave. And then I was gang raped.
And then I somehow escaped from that. And then I swam across the channel, whatever.

Speaker 2 It's like they tell this story and it's the most appalling thing you've ever heard. And they're physically, it's evident that they've been through this.

Speaker 2 And these are like 20-year-old guys or something. And then that you ask them, why did you do it? And they're like,

Speaker 2 just like Manchester United

Speaker 2 they'll offer some like really weird inadequate answer it's not even like I want answers to the welfare state because you could have got that in other European countries it's it's it's quite like strange and I do kind of get your point that there's an element of like

Speaker 2 crazy matchowness about it.

Speaker 1 Wow, if you're prepared to go through all of that for Manchester United, imagine what you do for your family and your partner. I suppose so.

Speaker 2 The only thing I would say though is that the impression that I get from a lot of women who are very, very invested in refugees welcome kind of stuff is that they really infantilize infantilize these men at the same time.

Speaker 2 And there's a degree to which they're kind of scooping up the vulnerable, you know.

Speaker 1 You think so?

Speaker 3 This is a bit like the American pitball ladies phenomenon.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, but he's just misunderstood.

Speaker 3 I'll just add some more.

Speaker 1 Put it in there. It's okay.

Speaker 3 This is another one of these discourses, actually, probably related

Speaker 3 obliquely to Laboo Booman.

Speaker 3 It was one of these memes that sloshes around in which

Speaker 3 a certain subtype of

Speaker 3 usually single American progressive women are accused of adopting actually obviously, murderously, sociopathically dangerous rescue pit bulls as a kind of proxy for the sort of man they would never dream of admitting to fancying in real life.

Speaker 1 Right, okay.

Speaker 3 So in a sense, you know, officially they're only allowed to date laboo boo man, and that's in fact the only people who are within

Speaker 3 their social circles immediately. Okay.
And so they adopt a pit bull to just kind of compensate. So I see his lack of

Speaker 1 man. Yeah.
And I raise you the newly nomenclatured himbo, which has actually come back around.

Speaker 1 The new dream guy is beefy, placid, and politically ambiguous. Amid pitched debates about masculinity, the himbo stands stoically above it all.

Speaker 1 As an alternative to the thinking man, the renaissance man, or the family man, today's himbo offers just man, a blurry image, a blunt political instrument, or just a caricature, the human equivalent of a smiley face.

Speaker 1 The himbo is, in many senses, unreal, a wish fulfillment fantasy his true self is concealed behind a set of doe like eyes the content of his inferiority forever on and unconfirmed so is this like ken in greta goigsby he says he says towards the end if i'd realized patriarchy wasn't wasn't just about horses i wouldn't have bothered hunk with a heart of gold hunk with a heart of gold i think um who was the dude that did magic mic who was the guy the actor that played magic mic oh channing tatum channing tatum is often put forward as like himbo i actually channing tatum follows me on instagram so i i actually quite like him But hunk with a heart of gold, the human equivalent of a smiley face.

Speaker 1 What we've got here is basically, I think, you're trying to cross the streams between Laboo Boo Man in terms of disposition and front cover of a dark romance novel in terms of presentation.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's a tricky tightrope for women because on the one hand, you want, and this is an eternal conundrum, you want a man who is going to protect you and protect your children and provide for you in times of

Speaker 2 extreme threat, right? But you also don't want someone who's going to beat you up and beat up your children. And so that's that's tricky.

Speaker 1 The line that you've got to paranoid. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so the himbo is, it is, I love a himbo, right? And the impression from my female friends is that himbo is a very high status.

Speaker 2 I remember a friend talking to me about how attractive a himbo was, and she said she really, really didn't want, I guess, a laboobu man who was like excessively intellectual.

Speaker 2 She said, if I came home and he was like, I just read something in the New York Review of Books, I would kill myself.

Speaker 1 It's not what she wants

Speaker 1 right?

Speaker 2 Um, Ahimo does kind of tread that tie road, like he's physically capable, clearly, of doing what's needed if you're at risk, but he's so sweet-hearted that he would never

Speaker 1 turn on you.

Speaker 3 Well, again, I mean, skipping sideways through this sort of untidy territory. There was a there was a piece, I think it was in the New York Times, which is often a sort of barometer for what

Speaker 3 American

Speaker 3 middle-class women in their 30s think about stuff in general. There was, I think it was the New York Times, but it was somewhere in that zone, that discursive zone anyway,

Speaker 3 on how, on

Speaker 3 a fascinating new trend of women marrying down.

Speaker 2 And what they were actually talking about.

Speaker 3 But what they were talking about wasn't actually women marrying down. It was women marrying below their educational level.
Actually,

Speaker 3 financially, they were marrying up because these were women with maybe a degree and a master's or a degree and a PhD or something, but no money and a mountain of debt.

Speaker 1 It's like complex hypergamy.

Speaker 3 Who were marrying

Speaker 3 construction entrepreneurs or

Speaker 3 a successful plumber with several employees who was turning over chunks of change. And so

Speaker 3 in straightforward financial terms,

Speaker 3 it's at least a match, if not marrying up. But in intellectual and in terms of a particular type of caste as distinct from straightforward economic levels,

Speaker 3 some of these women were experiencing it as kind of marrying down.

Speaker 3 And I think there's something, you know, I think that speaks to your himbo in the sense that very sensibly sensibly these extremely overeducated women have married some guy who's going to appreciate their brains and also be able to pay the mortgage

Speaker 3 without trying to compete.

Speaker 1 It seems like

Speaker 1 the Himbo is economically

Speaker 1 prepared and maybe educationally underdeveloped, whereas the Laboo Boo man is maybe economically underdeveloped and overeducated.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 would you rather have a guy who can talk contemporary literature but can't afford to buy you dinner? Or some guy

Speaker 3 who can fix the plumbing when it goes wrong

Speaker 3 He just doesn't care what you think about books.

Speaker 2 I have a funny story about this.

Speaker 3 It occurs to me

Speaker 2 that my parents technically have that dynamic because my mum has a PhD and my dad has an undergraduate degree and then became a lawyer.

Speaker 2 But anyone who knows PhDs don't translate into big money, right? So my dad's always owned more.

Speaker 2 But there was this funny story about a time when he was at work, this is the age for the internet, and someone referred to King Lear in talking about office politics. He was like, oh,

Speaker 2 someone's behaving like King Lear in relation to someone. And he didn't understand what they were saying.
And so he called called my mum like very quietly and said, What happens in King Lear?

Speaker 1 You know, it's a funny example of this. But there's something there.

Speaker 1 How much do women find that endearing? How much do women find needing to intellectually coddle their partner beyond up to a certain point?

Speaker 1 How much do they find that is, oh, noble savage?

Speaker 2 I personally find that endearing. I don't know if I'm really sorry.

Speaker 3 If he's also sort of generally red-blooded in his bearing behavior and is also capable of fixing stuff around the house that goes wrong, I don't really see the problem.

Speaker 1 What about the girly?

Speaker 1 What about if it's the opposite, though?

Speaker 1 What about if it's somebody who can tell you what has been happening in the New York Review of Books, but needs to call his dad if there's something broken in the toilet that you're having?

Speaker 1 I mean, competence.

Speaker 3 Competence is very hot.

Speaker 1 Or should, you know, right, but this is competence within a particular domain. Because you could say the noble savage is incompetent when it comes to his intellectual development.

Speaker 3 I mean, I suppose, you know, zooming back a bit, you could probably make the case that

Speaker 3 we're currently in an age of flux where the sort of never-ending growth really does feel like it's come to an end. You know, politics is quite uncertain.

Speaker 3 You know, we've got war in Europe for the first time in a very long time. And all kinds of things don't feel as certain and safe and stable as they used to.

Speaker 3 And it could be that, in fact, some of these very instinctive mating patterns are shifting, are going to shift or are perhaps even already shifting in the light of how people assess their own prospects.

Speaker 3 in that very much more uncertain world. So women who might have automatically who might have gone for the intellectual guy because he can always buy in a plumber

Speaker 3 are going to assess

Speaker 3 who their looks match and economic match is likely to be for a long-term partnership and think, you know what, actually, like, laboo boo man, meh,

Speaker 3 I need somebody who knows how, who, who knows how to use a shotgun.

Speaker 1 Or, you know,

Speaker 3 there are various levels of deranged preparations that you can apply to that, depending on, depending on your filter bubble.

Speaker 3 But there are,

Speaker 3 you understand what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 It's like that study that men like fatter women when they're hungry.

Speaker 3 Right. So I'm not sure if you're not afraid of the money.

Speaker 1 It's not a you economic security hypothesis.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so it's like perhaps the equivalent for women. Women like more

Speaker 1 masculine men when it seems like

Speaker 1 that's that's a fucking awesome Mac and Murphy. If you're listening, go and do that study for me.

Speaker 3 I mean, it seems like that's empirically researchable, but intuitively, it feels completely right.

Speaker 1 Super easy.

Speaker 1 Whatever the equivalent of the social, you know, the VIX index, if you remember, the volatility within the market, whatever the social equivalent of that is, okay, let's just have what are the popular types of the preferred types of men?

Speaker 1 Would you want one that's more domineering or one that's a little bit more casual?

Speaker 2 Whereas the point of being able to discourse about the New York Review of books is status games, right? And so, and that's very much Maslow's hierarchy of needs, tippy-top.

Speaker 2 So, that's the sort of thing that you're going to jettison pretty quickly

Speaker 2 in these kind of conditions.

Speaker 1 Oh, so the fact that you have the ability to do that suggests to me that in some ways, maybe it's a luxury position, or you've got the bottom levels looked after, or maybe you're unable to look after the bottom levels and you've kind of outsourced them or skipped over them in some sort of way.

Speaker 2 Yes, I think that my friend who threatened suicide if her boyfriend read the new review of books, I think what she was referencing was someone who couldn't do the other stuff, who was

Speaker 1 turned the

Speaker 1 triangle upside down.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's what's unattractive.

Speaker 1 So the only final bit on this himbo thing, what is it about the kind of

Speaker 1 It's not someone who's saying, I want the Renaissance man, I want the thinking man, including, because presumably you could could say, I want to max out his physicality and also max out his mind, but it seems like it's actually preferable to have the slightly more doughy-eyed human smiley face as a partner.

Speaker 1 The one thing that I would sort of maybe throw into the mix there is that if you have somebody that is both domineering,

Speaker 1 prestigious, sort of able to make things happen in the physical world, and also has the intellect to be a little bit more conniving, you run a much higher risk there of this guy's maybe going to be quite sought after in many ways.

Speaker 1 He's maybe going to be able to outwit me.

Speaker 1 Is that an element? Or what do you think is going on with this desire to actually kind of turn down the volume on the intellectual nature? Simplicity?

Speaker 2 Or is it maybe a bit.

Speaker 3 I mean, realistically, guys like that are just relatively rare. So partly it's just a numbers game.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 But also I feel like it's a bit

Speaker 2 girly to be too preoccupied with.

Speaker 3 Just looping all of this, looping all of this back to the Taylor Swift theme, would you not say that actually Taylor's choice of a husband perfectly encapsulates the himbo?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 She's the kind of right-wing-coded equivalent, isn't she?

Speaker 2 Lana Del Rey has married a

Speaker 1 crocodile wrangler.

Speaker 3 It's incredible being a man.

Speaker 2 From Louisiana, I'm going to say something like

Speaker 2 normal blue-collar guy. I don't know if blue-collar is the right word if you're a crocodile wrangler, but

Speaker 2 he does it completely like

Speaker 2 very skilled, very like impressive.

Speaker 1 Big arms, masculine.

Speaker 2 yeah and has a nice compliment and i was thinking if you're if you're lana del ray or you don't need the money you don't need the money and actually marrying someone who's in your field of work and people inevitably less successful than you is a nightmare because you're able to do you're able to do more comparison hierarchically yeah so what what what does it mean to date hypergamously if you are going crazy above you if you're taylor exactly yeah yeah yeah

Speaker 3 i picked someone from another industry i picked someone there is no way of doing hypergamy if you're taylor swift because she's just she's just just right. On top of her own.

Speaker 1 She's the apex.

Speaker 3 She's the apex of so many different hierarchies.

Speaker 2 Have you read The Status Game by

Speaker 1 Travis Kelsey?

Speaker 3 You know, he's enormous. Yeah.

Speaker 3 You know, he's a successful person.

Speaker 1 Well, he'll outlift her. He's able to outrun her.

Speaker 3 He can pick her up and chuck her. He can probably jubble her.

Speaker 1 But he's got prestige

Speaker 3 and he's got standing in his own field.

Speaker 1 And specifically in a cohort that she does not. That's right.

Speaker 1 So if you walk into a different room, there are tons of people that couldn't give a fuck about Taylor Swift, but will sprint toward Travis Kelsey.

Speaker 2 Right, yeah, exactly. And this is, if you've read Will Storrs' A Status Game, you've probably interviewed him at some point.

Speaker 2 His really, really good piece of life advice is that everyone is completely obsessed with status. You can't pretend that you're not.

Speaker 2 It's this just the natural human condition to be preoccupied with status. But you can choose which status gain you compete in to some extent.

Speaker 2 And you can say, I realize that that one is bad for me or that I'm not going to flourish in it. But you can just choose another one.

Speaker 2 And so, yeah, choosing, having a spouse who's competing in a different status game from yourself, I think is very sensible.

Speaker 3 A young friend who also has something of an internet platform told me recently that he had tried dating women who also were internet figures of some sort, and it was just hideous.

Speaker 1 It feels too similar.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it was just too much of a.

Speaker 1 Comparison's too direct.

Speaker 3 And I guess I don't think, like, this wasn't his point, but it struck me that

Speaker 3 if you both have a platform, you both have an audience, the temptation to turn your relationship into content would be almost like a trend.

Speaker 1 It's Australia India's thing, right? That all relationships are just brand collaborations.

Speaker 3 Right. And it doesn't have to be like that.

Speaker 3 But you really, if you're very online, you have to choose, you know, you're going to survive much longer and stay much saner if your partner is not online at all or is or is not very interested in that.

Speaker 1 Have you heard the theory that aliens are just the end of human evolution, that they're completely, yeah, I'm bringing it back, I promise.

Speaker 1 They're sort of huge heads. Human heads have got bigger over time, although they actually got smaller at one point as well.
But human heads are big.

Speaker 1 We seem to be getting lower testosterone, less muscles, less sort of you know, domineering physically.

Speaker 1 And that aliens, the classic sort of big head, big eyes thing, is the completely atrophied in the body, but

Speaker 1 overdeveloped cognitively.

Speaker 2 Well, they are to us as we are to chimps.

Speaker 1 And yeah, because we are weaker, bigger brains. Yeah.
And then you just keep running that forward.

Speaker 2 You want less hair on aliens as well.

Speaker 1 Good point. I never really assessed the hair of an alien, but

Speaker 1 it's just interesting to hear where your mind goes.

Speaker 1 I wonder whether Laboo Boo Man

Speaker 1 is kind of the same sort of I've adapted to my local environment.

Speaker 1 My local environment is one where if I'm quite flaccid as a human, and like a very flaccid human, I can sit in an office chair for longer, basically. Right.

Speaker 3 So the interesting question, you know, what, you know,

Speaker 3 civilizations can go down as well as up. How long

Speaker 3 would it take after the shit hit the fan, hypothetically speaking, in civilizationally, before Labo-Boo Man got his act together.

Speaker 3 And it was either selected aggressively out of the picture altogether or actually just learned to shoot.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, I mean,

Speaker 1 how many people say, if our country went to war, there's no way that I would fight for them. I've got asthma.
Sorry. No, my athlete's foot precludes me from being able to go into the...

Speaker 1 You know, there's like all manner of different excuses. And yeah, without selection pressure, people

Speaker 1 fold around whatever that situation is. They kind of get molded and shaped by

Speaker 2 I mean, I think it's a really serious problem right now. If we did have some kind of serious strife in this country,

Speaker 3 I mean, it strikes me that one of the structural problems is that two or three generations of young people have now been now been taught, you know, very methodically by the education system, by the sort of ambient public conversation, that nation states are just not really th they're not the real political community.

Speaker 3 And actually, the real political community is everyone, is every human on the planet. You know, we're all just a continuous one big happy family.

Speaker 3 And yeah, under those circumstances, the idea that you could just snap people overnight back into thinking of themselves as an us just in the context of the nation state, particularly in an age of high democracy.

Speaker 1 You're trying to redraw territory back.

Speaker 3 So having said, no, no, no, actually, universal humanity, yada, yada, yada, and explicitly teaching that, and explicitly teaching children that nationalism is bad and that it caused Hitler and the Second World War and carnage and death and disaster for decades and generation after generation.

Speaker 3 And then you turn around the next day and you're like oh by the way we're going to reinstate reinstate the draft because putin' no you would you do you blame the kids for saying no fuck off that's such a good problem holy shit i mean you know even leaving you know there are various kind of uglier and more bitter versions of that story to do with ethnopolitics and so on but fundamentally i think you that that's the that's the crux of it because it goes across the board it's not just the right-wing zoomers it's also the left-wing ones they just don't buy it because they've been taught not to buy it except that generally i mean if you watch these endless vox pops that you're referring to where you you ask people, would you go to war for your country?

Speaker 2 And they all say no, what

Speaker 2 normally happens is that anyone who's a member of an ethnic minority will say, oh, but I'm Jamaican

Speaker 2 or no, because I'm not from here or something. And actually, you scratch the surface and everyone has a degree of ethnocentrism.

Speaker 3 And this is actually what worries me, that having abolished or done their best to educate young children and young people out of thinking in terms of nation states, that people are not going to abandon having a tribe.

Speaker 3 But they're just going to draw the tribe around people who look like them.

Speaker 3 Because once you scale that up to the level of, you know, you start looking at lines of conflict internal to the country, you know, along possibly different tribes, but a kind of ulster situation, you know, potentially even within the country itself, which is a disturbing prospect.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Because of course, nation states are modern inventions and they are a bit faint. They are.

Speaker 3 They are. And I mean, and

Speaker 3 if you look at the flag phenomenon that we've been seeing a lot recently, you know, that feels to me like the precursor to a kind of ulsterization happening within the United Kingdom.

Speaker 3 It is deeply, deeply concerning.

Speaker 2 I've been watching loads of TikTok videos of people having, increasingly commonly, having confrontations between people putting up flags and people trying to take them down.

Speaker 2 A bridge near our house has now had, I think, four iterations of people putting up flags, taking them down, putting them up. And they leave the cable ties every time.

Speaker 2 So there's just like a cupine kind of thing on the

Speaker 1 graveyard of where patriotism used to be.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and people putting up counter things and whatever. It's like a whole thing.
And there's quite a lot of TikTok videos of people having these confrontations.

Speaker 2 The main thing that jumps out at me as a Brit who's very sensitive to these things is the class difference. So the flaggers are always working class and the D-flaggers are always middle class.

Speaker 2 And it's really obvious. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 And why is it obvious or why is this happening?

Speaker 1 Why is it happening?

Speaker 2 Because I think the whole thing is a class war.

Speaker 2 Always has been.

Speaker 3 I think that's basically right. Yeah.
I mean, I was sort of obliquely thinking about the, you know, writing about the Norman Conquest earlier this week. You know,

Speaker 3 this is where that particular class war began because Because the English class system was originally not just a caste system, but also a racialized caste system in that the ruling class,

Speaker 3 the Normans arrived and just replaced the whole Anglo-Saxon ruling class with their own. And

Speaker 3 they were a different ethnic group.

Speaker 2 And I guess didn't interbreed that much.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean,

Speaker 3 to an extent after a while, but people with Norman surnames are still, to this day, more likely to be wealthy than those with Saxony.

Speaker 1 Overrepresented at Oxbridge.

Speaker 3 People with names like Smith and Cooper are less likely to be rich than people with names like Glanville or you know Dennis or Grosvenor. Yeah, indeed.
You know,

Speaker 3 he's the current, the current Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, can trace his ancestry all the way back to 1066. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And is still a billionaire, still one of the richest people in the country. I think he's number 15.

Speaker 1 Gregory Clark is punching the air right now.

Speaker 3 So, I mean, you know, you can, you know, never mind critical race theory. England has had a racialized caste system all for a thousand years.

Speaker 3 And I think, actually, really, genuinely, that's a significant factor in what Louise is describing about this class war.

Speaker 3 There is a subset of

Speaker 3 more well-off, culturally middle or upper-class English people

Speaker 3 who identify much more with

Speaker 3 the Norman

Speaker 3 disposition.

Speaker 3 And then there are a group of people who think of themselves, I mean,

Speaker 3 it's even right there in the conflict between English and British, you know, British values, quote unquote, and English flags, those

Speaker 1 English flags, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, mostly. They They mostly alternate them.
But I've noticed that, like, if you go to touristy places, they have union jacks up anyway, because it's a bit twee. That's not

Speaker 1 flagging. The St.
George thing is.

Speaker 2 Flagging has to necessitate St. George's crosses at least some of them.
And it's an anti-government gesture.

Speaker 2 And again, the comments you'll get all the time on social media, such a classic, like midwit norm we take is, oh, they don't have any GCCs and they don't have any teeth.

Speaker 2 Like basically something very, very classless directed at nativists.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, I mean, yes, you are right to identify that rift and it's a consequence of the relationship with the globalized economy.

Speaker 2 If you do the sort of job that is vulnerable to the importation of cheap labor,

Speaker 2 obviously you're going to hate it so much more than if you're doing a completely working, completely different industry. Like, yes, you've correctly identified this class fissure.

Speaker 2 And what we've seen for decades now has been upper middle classes inviting demographic change, which doesn't hurt them and does hurt the working classes.

Speaker 3 I mean, it drove Brexit and they learned nothing.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's a similar dynamic to what happened in America, but it's got a uniquely British flavor because of how because of the class system.

Speaker 3 Correct.

Speaker 1 Precisely correct.

Speaker 3 Guntley, because of the Normans. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, look,

Speaker 1 I use the word posh and get laughed at in America because it feels like me, I don't know, talking about herringbone or something.

Speaker 1 It's just an odd term to use because even though most Americans understand what I mean, it's such an odd, archaic, like you don't talk about that. You would talk about race or education or wealth.

Speaker 3 It's probably from the northeast, aren't you? Newcastle.

Speaker 1 Well, Stockton.

Speaker 3 So you probably don't exactly have skin in in either sides of these game because you're probably Viking in heritage. I have no idea.

Speaker 1 I need to do my 23 meet. I need to do my ancestry.

Speaker 3 Well, don't, because data security, they're about to sell a whole database.

Speaker 1 Oh, God, and all of the murders I've done will come up. Yeah, they sell my data.

Speaker 1 No, don't do that.

Speaker 3 But I mean, people from the northeast are ancestrally much more likely to be Danish, Scandinavian inheritance.

Speaker 1 I sit outside of the hierarchy.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 you can throw tomatoes at both the Notre Dame's out there.

Speaker 1 And I do. And I do.
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I don't know whether this is precisely true.

Speaker 1 And I hate the word going back to something that it feels like we just dispensed with because the word woke is so sort of tried and done and kind of lame.

Speaker 1 However, this feels like a uniquely new British brand of something akin to woke. Flagging.
Yes, and the response to it. And it's the reason that I want to, I haven't got a different word for it.

Speaker 1 Broke wouldn't work as Britain woke.

Speaker 1 It has a dynamic that is exclusively present or mostly present in the UK, which is this sort of classist approach, because it exists a little bit in the US, that people that were left of center, that were very pro-immigration.

Speaker 1 But the reason that they were doing it and the sort of accusations that they would make weren't the same.

Speaker 1 They weren't about in the same way about being uneducated, in the same way about the way that people sort of presented the no-teeth thing.

Speaker 2 Although, isn't that what Hillary was saying with the basket of deplorables?

Speaker 2 Like it was basically a class statement. It was more veiled.
Whereas I guess here it tends to be more explicit.

Speaker 2 Which was probably because we've had a thousand years of not being invaded, right? So you can build up

Speaker 2 exactly.

Speaker 3 The situation in America is much more complicated because they've because everybody there where do I stand in this hierarchy?

Speaker 1 I'm not sure. I've only been here.

Speaker 3 Everybody there is technically an immigrant

Speaker 3 at one point or another.

Speaker 3 So it's very much harder to do the nativist thing because

Speaker 3 the most recent Anglophone arrivals weren't that long ago.

Speaker 2 And it's also a problem, of course, because here our elites are so incredibly Yankee-brained that they assume you'll hear people talk about Britain being a nation of immigrants. No, it isn't.

Speaker 2 That is factually incorrect. Like, Britain was 99% plus white British in the 1990s.

Speaker 3 It does strike me at times that casually conflating invasion and immigration is possibly not the wind.

Speaker 1 It's middle-class advocates.

Speaker 1 Imagine it is anyway. Yeah, they're like, but what about the Vikings?

Speaker 3 I can see some ways that that could back.

Speaker 1 Remember Lindisfarne.

Speaker 2 Did we not embrace the Vikings? I know.

Speaker 2 But because they're so Yankee-brained, they don't realize that actually...

Speaker 2 No, like people here are indigenous to these islands, going back a very long way.

Speaker 1 I didn't think it's the same as in America. I did wonder about what a land acknowledgement in the UK would look like.

Speaker 2 Douglas Murray did this once, actually, at giving a speech, and he did a land acknowledgement to the Duke of Westminster, who owned the land.

Speaker 1 It was very funny. He was a classic Douglas.

Speaker 3 But though, really, I mean, strictly speaking, the Duke of Westminster also counts as a coloniser.

Speaker 3 Because that's Hugh Grosvenor, who arrived with the Normans. No, there we go.
So, so, so, I mean, Hugh Grosvenor ought to be doing a land acknowledgement to the Saxons.

Speaker 1 Your surname has scuppered you.

Speaker 1 Looping it back to the perennial discussion about stupid things to do with relationships on the internet. Have you heard of princess treatment? What?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 Oh, allow me. I mean, you are spending a lot of time on TikTok.
I would have expected this to come across. Okay.

Speaker 1 Princess treatment refers to various supposedly fairy tale-worthy gestures made by women's partners, including, but never limited to, lattes in bed, flowers every Friday, partner-funded pedicures, and doors being opened for you.

Speaker 1 Nearly 130,000 Instagram posts congregate under it. However, this is...
immediately being taken to reductio ad absurdum. Courtney Palmer, self-proclaimed housewife princess.

Speaker 1 I do not interact with the waitress. I do not open any doors and I do not order my own food.
You do not need to talk unless you are spoken to.

Speaker 1 You are not going to be laughing loudly, speaking loudly, or demanding the attention of the restaurant. So, princess treatment.

Speaker 3 Is this not sort of lifestyle BDSM where they're just going to say it's a sex thing?

Speaker 1 It's just totally a sex thing. It's a sex thing.

Speaker 2 How have you both arrived at this?

Speaker 1 This is like that.

Speaker 1 This is like that fucking anti-wisdom thing where I haven't seen it. Like, you're looking at this optical illusion.
I'm like, what?

Speaker 3 To me, I mean, this is kind of a message.

Speaker 1 explain to the smuggler in the middle channel.

Speaker 3 It's a Mary Louise group chat running joke about the trad wife. I mean, there's the trad wife or autogynophile, but that's not this.

Speaker 3 There's also

Speaker 1 trad wife, autogynophile.

Speaker 3 Or, but

Speaker 3 there's also the continuity between

Speaker 3 right-wing complementarian trad wife discourse and lifestyle BDSM, which it seems to me is just,

Speaker 3 it's really just a question of inflection, but it's basically the same conversation.

Speaker 1 You're going to have to bring it down to earth a little bit. Okay,

Speaker 3 which of us is going to be a good question?

Speaker 1 Imagine that I didn't read the first three Harry Potter books, and I've come in at the fourth, please.

Speaker 3 So, on the one hand, you have, you know, it's often very Protestant code, sometimes quite American.

Speaker 3 There's a sort of religiously inflected discourse about how men do one set of tasks and play one set of roles within a long-term relationship, and women play the other, and everyone comes together as ordained by God in this dual dance of complementary unity, and then everything is good.

Speaker 3 And then,

Speaker 3 in an entirely different political filter bubble, you have the people who embrace lifestyle BDSM, which is

Speaker 3 a way of living in a long-term relationship where one person is always

Speaker 3 explicitly the dominant one who just gets to decide everything, and the other person is also always the submissive one who just says, yes, yes, master.

Speaker 1 There's a degree of entitlement, though, here, which doesn't sound superbly submissive.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, this is where it gets this is actually both both complementarian

Speaker 3 right-wing trad types and also lifestyle BDSMers will tell you that in fact the wife slash submissive,

Speaker 3 depending on how you're framing it, you know, has plenty of say because in fact

Speaker 2 she's the one putting it online.

Speaker 1 It's never the man who's filming content about this, is it?

Speaker 3 That's always the one that's that's true as that, well

Speaker 3 there's just too much of a rabbit hole.

Speaker 1 No, do it. Let's run it.
I'm fascinated. I'm already I'm already fucking Alice in Wonderland here.

Speaker 2 Women do this simultaneous, like, I'm so submissive, and there's a lot of humble brag going on as well. Like, by the way, my husband can afford to buy a lot of things.

Speaker 1 It's the long nails of their highest. Yeah, exactly, right?

Speaker 2 But also, she's calling the shots in terms of their social media presence. Yeah, and also.

Speaker 1 Which is really what matters.

Speaker 3 In these sorts of very deliberately stylized, polarized relationships, you know, assuming it's a long-term, affectionate relationship that

Speaker 3 both parties want to continue and sustain and maintain, then actually the person

Speaker 3 who's formally giving way all the time has a lot of say because the other person has to second guess what they want all the time.

Speaker 1 That's interesting.

Speaker 3 Because I mean you can't you can't just order somebody around and say no you're gonna you're gonna go and lick the floor clean or do the dishes or whatever.

Speaker 3 Because if you if you just if you make if if you make decisions for both of you for long enough and actually the other person doesn't like that doesn't like your decisions eventually, you know, the so the nominally submissive one.

Speaker 3 Well the the nominally submissive one will vote with their feet, you know, assuming that it's a consensual loving relationship otherwise.

Speaker 3 You have to make decisions that both of you want to abide by.

Speaker 3 So actually,

Speaker 3 it's not as commanding as all of that, you know, but it just sort of reflects. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think, I mean, we both feel like there's nothing wrong with complimentary gender roles. Like with within reason, they make sense.
It's fine. Like no, no complaint.

Speaker 2 What is weird about the lifestyle BDSM is when it's clearly done in an exaggerated way as a sex thing. Like the motivation is not this makes the household run more smoothly.

Speaker 2 This makes sense of our financial lives, et

Speaker 2 It's this turns me on and I'm also doing it for an online audience. That's weird, yeah.
That's good.

Speaker 3 But I mean, you know, this the difference, I don't really see a huge amount of difference in kind between that and princess treatment.

Speaker 3 If she's like, I'm just going to sit there, sit there at a restaurant, and you have to guess, you know, you as my date/slash partner have to guess what it is that I want to eat and get it right.

Speaker 3 And you have to do all the legwork of interacting with the underlings. You have to pay, and I'm just going to sit there.

Speaker 3 And nominally, yes, you know, you get to decide everything and you have the power but also you have to guess and you have to get it right so who so who actually has the power in that situation that's a great point yeah wow okay I really have seen through the matrix here me women are so much more sophisticated than men are with this bullshit but yeah I mean you know all of this of course you know with the caveat that it's it assumes that it's a mutually affectionate and consensual relationship you know under you know there are there are dev

Speaker 3 there is all there is also a continuum between that and domestic abuse because if the one financial prisoner yeah financial imprisonment domestic abuse, and so on, where somebody is calling the shots and actually the other person isn't free to leave through whatever combination of coercive control or other kind of things.

Speaker 1 Does this not play into another one of those lines that needs to be walked? That it would be nice to be looked after.

Speaker 1 It would be nice for my partner to know me so well that I actually can sort of take my foot off the gas a little bit. Wouldn't that be lovely? And then if you

Speaker 1 overdo the dose, the response curve gets really squirrely when you get toward the point, well, I can't leave anymore because I don't have my own own phone. I don't have my own bank account.

Speaker 1 I don't have my own access to anything.

Speaker 2 It's the big, big trade-off in its traditional gender roles that the woman has no financial independence.

Speaker 1 And as soon as you derogate loyalty, as soon as you end up with divorce becoming more societally accepted and people being able to move from partner to partner more freely, that means that the cost for the man

Speaker 1 the cost for anybody of leaving is so high and so common.

Speaker 1 Sorry, is so low and it's so common that you need to have the insurance policy at all times because the likelihood of you, this just being marriage one as opposed to the marriage means that you've got to have the back door.

Speaker 3 I mean, it strikes me that maybe

Speaker 3 a possible explanation for why these complementary gender roles tend to appear either where somebody is extremely online and posting about it a lot, or else in the context of religious communities,

Speaker 3 it might make sense in terms of that failure mode, the sort of abusive failure mode, in that if you're posting online about what a surrendered wife you are, actually, you're probably making bank.

Speaker 3 And so you're not all that surrendered after all, because there's this other dimension to it.

Speaker 3 Do you remember the whole discourse about Ballerina Farm and that?

Speaker 1 No. Oh, okay.

Speaker 3 She's an Instagram star, married to the heir of Jetback.

Speaker 1 Ballerina Farm.

Speaker 1 Well, you didn't even know about him.

Speaker 1 Fucking hell.

Speaker 3 You have how many bajillion followers on Instagram?

Speaker 1 Have you never come across Ballerina Farm? Okay. This is

Speaker 3 entirely distinct influencer universe.

Speaker 1 Look at the echo chambers, they're very echoey here.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the internet, the internet is a big place. Okay, so Ballerina Farm, very beautiful, very accomplished sort of trad wife.

Speaker 2 Hannah Neelaman.

Speaker 3 Hannah Neelaman.

Speaker 3 Married to this scion of the JetBlue family and inherited a load of money.

Speaker 3 And they have a farm where she does trad things and has lots of beautiful children and makes yogurt and it's all very crunchy. And for bannons.

Speaker 1 I mean, right, exactly.

Speaker 3 It's lovely content.

Speaker 3 It's also like the content engine which powers actually a very profitable business for them, selling like kitchen aliens and yogurt and whatever.

Speaker 3 yeah uh like her i think her sourdough starter kits cost like a hundred dollars um yeah you know she's she's doing she's doing all right at it and yet you know there's this whole discourse about whether or not she's actually oppressed and i'm like what have you

Speaker 2 she's one of the things that people because she was profiled in the times that the times of london a while ago and it was mentioned um there were various details mentioned which um a lot of um women primarily on the internet thought were alarming like how exhausted she got i mean i'm not surprised she gets exhausted because she has her big kids close together yeah but things like they don't have a nanny they don't have any domestic help but despite obviously being able to afford it and they were like oh this is a sign that he's oppressing on I thought no you know what I actually get it I think that she

Speaker 3 there's a weird kind of Anglo thing going on including Anglo-American of like no I'm gonna do the hard thing on my own I'm gonna do the deliberately different also you know having having recorded a few podcasts and seen how the sausage gets made you know you look at how well produced her content is there's a ton of people in that house all the time oh yeah just not a nanny specifically but like like

Speaker 2 that makes sense to me. I think that makes sense of her personality.
And of course, it is Hannah who is making all the content.

Speaker 2 She's running the show.

Speaker 2 She's driving.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But it makes sense to me that the trad meme gets propagated either from within religious communities where

Speaker 3 there is actually a much thicker relationship, there is a thicker community of people surrounding the couple.

Speaker 3 You know, again, this is not foolproof because, you know, domestic abuse happens within religious communities as well.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 it provides some kind of ideological scaffolding for a couple such that

Speaker 3 potentially that could help to keep a relationship in line and stop abuse creeping in and

Speaker 3 make sure things are able to remain healthy.

Speaker 1 Is that kind of a...

Speaker 1 insurance policy that if I'm the one that's in control of the Instagram account, that ultimately if I am mistreated, it might be a financial victory for you, but it's a branding victory for me.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, again, again, it's not foolproof. You know, I mean, this is, I can't name names, but

Speaker 3 I know from one noted right-wing

Speaker 3 content-producing woman that

Speaker 3 she knows of several women within that space who are posting sunny trad wife content while their husbands are also not treating them very well. You know, this also happens.

Speaker 3 So it's definitely not foolproof as an insurance policy. I mean, at the end of the day, it's a fallen world, right? You know, people screw up and do horrible things.

Speaker 3 You know, I'm not sure there's a there's a guaranteed way of hedging against that.

Speaker 2 One way that does traditionally sort of work to hedge against being mistreated by your husband is male kin, your own male kin.

Speaker 2 Like, is it Sonny Corleone and Godfather who beats up his sister's abuser or something like that, right? Like that in really those really traditional societies,

Speaker 2 your recourse as a woman, if your husband is mistreating you, your dad goes around and breaks his mouth.

Speaker 1 The issue of patrilocal and matrilocal.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, this is probably something, Chris, that you're more able to speak to than either of us, which is about

Speaker 3 the formation of virtuous men.

Speaker 1 I'm glad that you look at me and you think formation of virtuous men.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 as the only guy in this conversation,

Speaker 3 unfortunately, I think this one's yours to speak. But it seems to me that

Speaker 3 where have all the good men gone? Actually, one part of the answer to that is that if we want good men,

Speaker 3 we need to be forming good men. And actually, what forms men is not women, it's other men.

Speaker 3 And so, and I'm not sure we think nearly hard enough or specifically enough or concretely enough about how we go about about forming men. And I mean, this sort of goes to

Speaker 3 your laboo boo figure.

Speaker 3 You know, if the men that we're forming are sort of noodle-armed labo-oo guys rather than virtuous, capable, competent men, then that's not just a problem for men, that's a problem for everyone.

Speaker 1 Well, I think

Speaker 1 a lot of the advice that men are given is about

Speaker 1 how

Speaker 1 to behave in a manner that makes women feel more comfortable. But if

Speaker 1 the which it seems to continually be

Speaker 1 reinforced, male competition theory seems to be highly predictive of female attraction as opposed to actually female attraction. So this is the David Putz study.

Speaker 1 Have you seen this one where they looked, oh, this is fucking brilliant. You're going to love this.
So

Speaker 1 photos of men were shown to both men and women. The women were asked to rate how attractive these men were.

Speaker 1 The men were asked to rate how likely they thought it was that this man would be able to beat them in a fight. The photos of the men were real people and they were tracked.

Speaker 1 12 months later, they brought the photo men into the lab and said, how many sexual partners have you had over the last year?

Speaker 1 The female attractiveness rating was basically non-predictive and the male intimidation rating was highly correlated.

Speaker 3 Competence is hot. And competence cashes out ultimately as can this guy, can this guy protect me in in a fist fight.

Speaker 2 But they also have higher sex drives, maybe, right? They're higher T.

Speaker 1 There's some variables in here. They're going to be more forthcoming.
They're going to be less agreeable.

Speaker 1 They're going to be chasing after it, making it happen as opposed to waiting it for it to come to them.

Speaker 1 But still, you would think, at least, given that women are the gatekeepers and this is a direct, I find this guy more attractive than that one, you would have assumed it would have had like maybe equal amounts of predictive power, but it didn't.

Speaker 1 The ovulatory shift thing got another decapitation the other day, which was women don't find men with beards any more or less attractive, but they are more sexually successful and men find them more intimidating.

Speaker 1 So it's this, whatever it is,

Speaker 1 women don't help you win, they just wait at the finish line to see who goes first.

Speaker 1 And it is male competition theory for this.

Speaker 1 But the issue is if guys are trying to laboo boo reverse engineer their way into what they think women want, a lot of the time they're entirely going about it the wrong way.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but we may laboo into a verb.

Speaker 1 Yes, they have laboo.

Speaker 1 Oh, you've done gone laboo booed yourself.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, he's laboo booed himself.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 3 you should just climb, climbed up into my chest and died.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 I think the issue is, and this is what I really want you to get into here:

Speaker 1 post-me too,

Speaker 1 being able to

Speaker 1 talk frankly about anything which is not nerfed, rounded off edges, labubooified,

Speaker 1 flaccid soy men

Speaker 1 seems to be encouraging a type of guy that is perilously close to this world that we only just managed to reach escape velocity from. Like we just got away from this thing,

Speaker 1 which was entitlement, domineering,

Speaker 1 controlling entitlement, even though the labo-u men also have their own type of entitlement in a very sort of conniving, malicious, yeah, yeah, sneaky way. Um,

Speaker 1 I don't think

Speaker 1 I don't know where you get

Speaker 1 male-to-male advice on what it is that women truly want for long-term success, because what you end up with there is just going back to pick-apart history.

Speaker 1 Like, almost all of the advice that comes out of the red pill world is for short-term mating, right? It's almost all about how to sort of do the Fugesi thing to get a woman into bed.

Speaker 1 That's not necessarily what is good for you as a man to signal for long-term intention to her or to be effective for her as a long-term partner or for yourself to actually form yourself into the kind of partner that can be a good long-term

Speaker 1 option, but it'll probably get them into bed.

Speaker 3 I mean, I can't, I keep coming back to my conviction that this has to happen offline. Like online, online advice is no good.
Like whether it's Jordan Peter, you could be the most...

Speaker 3 Because it's Well, but because they don't, because the person doesn't know you.

Speaker 3 And actually, you know, actionable advice,

Speaker 3 actionable model probably comes from

Speaker 3 trusted, decent older men in your own community.

Speaker 3 And, you know, and really

Speaker 1 to the uncles, not the aunties.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the uncles. Yeah, but the structural problem is that

Speaker 3 those intergenerational networks are in some cases almost completely gone.

Speaker 3 And I think that problem is particularly grave for young men growing up in fatherless households. Especially if

Speaker 3 it's not a coincidence that those are the guys who end up joining gangs because they're they're finding mentorship from older men.

Speaker 3 And that's literally the only kind of form of older male peer group mentorship.

Speaker 3 Older male mentorship that you can get.

Speaker 1 Sat there with Bugsy Malone, Aaron Davies, who is famous ex-gang member, now turned rapper and actor in Guy Richie Movies, lives in Dubai, phenomenally wealthy, very, very well read, all the rest of it.

Speaker 1 And he was telling me about what it's like to be in a fatherless home and then you have this gang which is the surrogate of that yeah the the i think even for me because i didn't have many older friends or no older brothers or sisters or younger brothers or sisters uh

Speaker 1 i was

Speaker 1 hungry or thirsty for role models in a way that i don't think i would have been if i'd had a more connected uh nuclear family if there was more hooks for me to get in even if it had been an older sister right there would have been advice that was coming down.

Speaker 1 And if your dad is busy, even if he's not

Speaker 1 absent as in not in the household, if he's absent as in there's one person working to try and fund on a not a salubrious wage in an attempt to try and fund three people's lives, like that's something that you

Speaker 1 yeah, and you're like, fuck, like,

Speaker 1 I'm hungry for more. I need more, more, more.
And especially if

Speaker 1 most of your interaction occurs online, but online, you're worried about saying something which is going to be deemed so toxic or

Speaker 1 old from, you know, this was only allowed in 2012 and we've got past this and you can't talk that way about women anymore.

Speaker 3 I also think that there's something structurally feminizing or feminine about social media discourse just in general, because

Speaker 3 it forecloses physical violence, obviously, because it's worth selling your way through stuff. Yeah, you're words selling away, like it encourages

Speaker 3 endless talking and it forecloses physical violence.

Speaker 3 Whereas in my observation, I mean, maybe you can, I mean, I'm not really, in my observation, like the society of men, absent the relation to women, sort of works the other way around.

Speaker 3 Like, actually, most of it is not really about conversation at all. It's about cooperating on getting something done.

Speaker 1 That's why the Men's Sheds Initiative in Australia was so good.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and I mean, you know,

Speaker 3 it strikes me that, you know, getting men together to talk about their feelings is precisely the wrong way to go about it.

Speaker 1 Getting them together to fix a lawnmower, and they might talk about their feelings alongside them.

Speaker 3 Or just not in a way which is mutually understood and mutually respectful. You know, but

Speaker 3 it seems to me civilizationally suicidal to create a situation where there are ever fewer opportunities for men to be together constructively offline, learning from older men about how to

Speaker 3 work together and get stuff done, except gang situations where actually the only thing you're learning to get done is stabbing, raping, murdering, or the drug trade.

Speaker 3 That seems to me like a completely insane scenario.

Speaker 2 I wonder if low birth rates is part of it as well, in the sense that there was this great article in the Atlantic recently about the decline of cousins.

Speaker 2 You have so many fewer cousins now than even a generation or two ago because of people obviously having fewer children.

Speaker 2 And also when people are having children later, you end up with these long, thin families

Speaker 2 where you have very old, very young, but not that much in between, just not that many people.

Speaker 2 And it makes me think of that line from Kurt von Agot where he says, When a man and a woman have an argument nowadays, I'm just paraphrasing, they might think that they're arguing about sex or work or whatever, but what they're actually shouting at each other over and over again is you are not enough people.

Speaker 2 Like, it's not realistic to expect your spouse to be everything that you need socially, everything.

Speaker 2 And maybe if there were more brothers and cousins and uncles, because obviously uncles have to be brothers to begin with, right? Then there would be more.

Speaker 1 You wouldn't need to be as many people because there would be more people.

Speaker 2 There would be more male infrastructure available in particular.

Speaker 3 And again, this is also the dilemma because Anglos actually don't like having Anglos quite like

Speaker 2 Chris doesn't want the aunties.

Speaker 3 You don't want to do that.

Speaker 1 I made the fucking WhatsApp chat. Okay, look, I'm a little bit more.
I know that

Speaker 3 you run away from the MyRO.

Speaker 1 What's that thing? Did I contradict myself? Well, I'm deep. I contain multitudes.

Speaker 1 Chris multiplex-est. Yeah.
Yeah, that's me.

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Speaker 1 I'm like Neo in the Matrix, dude. You're not going to win.
That's drinklmnt.com/slash

Speaker 1 modern wisdom.

Speaker 1 Let's do, can you do a little post-mortem on me too? Now, we're kind of like, what, 10, 12 years post

Speaker 1 the peak of that?

Speaker 3 We're both married and have been for a while.

Speaker 2 Were we the best people to do this?

Speaker 3 I don't know.

Speaker 2 One thing I'll say about Me Too, which I think people often get wrong, this idea, so that there's a common idea, maybe it's true, that men used to approach women in bars or at work or whatever and do kind of cold approaches.

Speaker 2 And now they don't do that because of Me Too has made them scared. That period, I think, where men would find their spouses by doing cold approaches was really brief.

Speaker 3 I think you're completely right.

Speaker 3 It roughly coincides with and is connected to the very short flash in the pan era of free speech absolutism.

Speaker 3 Like free speech absolutism and cold approach dating are basically the same phenomenon, where you abolish a whole load of old-fashioned Moris and everybody just does what they want,

Speaker 3 but the afterburner of those Moris is still strong enough that nobody gets up to anything too disgusting.

Speaker 2 They're huffing on the fumes at the beginning of the day.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, they're basically huffing on the fumes of conservative sort of pre-sexual revolution

Speaker 3 behavioural norms.

Speaker 1 Why is that important? Why is the inclusion of that period of guys cold approaching women in bars or at work,

Speaker 1 even having women in the workplace whilst men were able to date them, also relatively narrow window.

Speaker 3 But it also, because it's cold approach presupposes a whole load of basic behavioral norms in order not just to be absolutely terrifying, call the police stuff.

Speaker 3 You know, being chatted up in the street by some guy assumes that they're going to be able to judge it so that you don't just scream and run away, right?

Speaker 3 And so that it, like, there's an edge of fun, excitement, and danger.

Speaker 1 It requires a high trust society.

Speaker 3 And frisson.

Speaker 3 It requires a high trust society, fundamentally.

Speaker 3 And so, so actually does free speech absolutism because you're never really free to say every anything you want there are there are always lines that it's possible to cross that's just never not been the case and it never will be the case but it seemed as though it was the case like the the period the people who are still really annoyed about the disappearance of free speech absolutism are maybe 10 years older than me you know i'm in my 40s now um and they were like they came of age in an era where you know the social norms were still robust enough that people could make edgy jokes but basically got away with it and nobody really crossed the line too far.

Speaker 3 Now we're just too diverse for free speech absolutism because

Speaker 3 there are so many different perspectives it's possible to have that you could actually genuinely end up frightening or offending or inciting violence from

Speaker 3 any number of different subgroups.

Speaker 1 You cross some random

Speaker 1 something you didn't know. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 it's just no longer possible to, and it's the same with cold approach because, I mean, you know,

Speaker 3 going back to the sort of petrol flames conversation we were having before, you know, a lot of those scenarios are really you know genuinely about

Speaker 3 mutual cultural incomprehension you know there are guys who've who've who've shown up in the country from from wherever and maybe the only the only information they have about what british girls are like comes from i don't know pornhub or um you know instagram or whatever so they have this very odd picture of what social norms here are like um and then they do do their best to put them into practice at which point some some 14 year old girl just screams and runs away calls the police he gets arrested and then

Speaker 3 you know. And there's a crowd outside your microphone.
And there's a crowd outside the hotel where you've been put up.

Speaker 3 And, you know, and I'm not trying to excuse any of this, but I'm saying, you know, to a degree, you know, this is a problem generated by, you know, it's cold approach.

Speaker 3 It's PUA stuff that they're trying. Literally, that's what they're trying to do.

Speaker 3 But the cultural differences are such that it's just not possible.

Speaker 1 The game got translated into Syrian, and now we've got cold approach.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and now we've got protests outside the Bell Hotel in Epping. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I just.

Speaker 3 I don't really know how you, yeah. I'm not even going to try and speculate on how you solve that.
But, you know, certainly, like, the age of PUA is not coming back. No.

Speaker 3 Short, you know, until we have some kind of homogenous culture again. And even then, I'm not even sure it should.

Speaker 2 But also, historically, like,

Speaker 2 even in a super homogenous society, that's not how you meet your spouse. Certainly, you meet through people who know you.
There's like reputations and interlocking social networks and stuff.

Speaker 2 You don't just go up to some lady in a bar and no, no, no.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's why people used to have dinner parties. You know,

Speaker 3 people don't really have dinner parties anymore, do they? But that was how you set people up with your friends.

Speaker 1 Certainly not a collegiate one where you've got both genders coming in.

Speaker 1 You know, when I think about the dinners that I have in Austin, maybe someone brings a woman, but that woman is not there to try and meet one of you. It's their partner.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but I mean, as recently as Bridget Jones' diary in the early aughts,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 she writes very, very amusingly for the time about being invited along by her smug married friends to dinner parties where she's been set up with some unbelievably awkward sort of

Speaker 3 supposedly eligible lawyer. And this keeps her because all of her friends are trying to find someone for her to pair off with.
This is just a completely normal way of doing things pre-internet dating.

Speaker 3 The smug marrieds would have dinners where they'd invite one or two other smug married couples and then a smattering of the eligible singles that they made.

Speaker 3 Well, the eligible singles and would be, you know, in a sincere effort. They're doing answering.
Yeah, they're auntieing. Yeah.
Because that's literally what it is, it's auntieing.

Speaker 3 Both virtuous and incredible. Yeah, virtuous and also often incredibly cringe.

Speaker 1 Okay, so if you've got dissolving social networks in IRL because everybody is living their life mediated through the internet, they've got fewer friends and they're spending less time outside.

Speaker 1 Does that, for you, explain the demise of this particular path for people meeting? Fewer parties, fewer friends.

Speaker 3 Also, people are poorer and their houses are smaller.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm trying to get a lot of people.

Speaker 1 Also, the parties are shitter, so you don't want to.

Speaker 3 I mean, you know, if you're living in a house share until you're 35, you can't really invite eight of your friends around for dinner very easily without annoying your housemates.

Speaker 2 I'm trying to think about why I haven't done more of these dinner parties.

Speaker 2 We often do lunches and dinners with like another couple, particularly if they've got kids and then the kids play, and that's great. But I don't know if I've ever done one when I just invited

Speaker 1 scaled childcare. That's just smarter childcare with the best scale.

Speaker 2 Yeah, just hang out with your friends with kids on a Saturday. Your saturdays immediately improve.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 3 it's also a massive effort.

Speaker 3 Everybody works full-time.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the time and mental energy you might deploy towards that is pointed at other things.

Speaker 1 And I don't, I'm not really sure how

Speaker 1 needing dual income here means that there's just less time perhaps for the wife to think, oh, how should we get, we'll get the Joneses over, we'll get the...

Speaker 2 For me personally, it's more to do with the fact that we live at the very edge of a city of 10 million other people and our friends live at every point on the clock face. Right.

Speaker 2 And realistically, getting everyone in the same place at the same time is quite difficult. But if you're in a room, get together, you'd probably just meet somewhere.

Speaker 2 Well, so we can only seat six people at our dinner table. Yeah.

Speaker 3 That's what I mean about, you know, small furniture, small houses.

Speaker 1 That's interesting.

Speaker 2 Bridget Jones was living in what, Islington?

Speaker 3 Right, exactly.

Speaker 2 She's living on a journal salary, age like 30.

Speaker 1 Oh, I know, yes.

Speaker 1 On her own.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, it's obviously fiction.

Speaker 1 So, I have been, I was thinking for a little while about Me Too to Me Tea with the T app,

Speaker 1 and that you did see the T app. Right, okay, this is a little older.
Come on, Louise. The T app, really? The T-App, it was that app.

Speaker 3 Unsubstantiated gossip circulator. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a reputation-ruining app.

Speaker 2 Yes, but so it was women gossiping about

Speaker 1 men who screwed them over in their view.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and then there was a big data breach. There was sequences of big data breaches.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And there was a bunch of people on the internet who made a comparison between these videos of women in Manhattan who steal men's salads.

Speaker 1 Look at the name on the top of it, then message them on Instagram and say, I'm so sorry that I stole your salad.

Speaker 1 In a desperate attempt to try and overcome approach anxiety from men to women, There's these videos of girls in maxi dresses with their hair done, just going, I just want one guy to buy me a drink, mid-20s, very voluptuous.

Speaker 1 There's another one of a woman walking through Central Park, big naturals, low top.

Speaker 1 And she's saying, look at me, the skin's flowing, the boobs are out, and not a single guy is going to approach me today.

Speaker 1 Some people made comparisons between the videos made by women saying they wished men approached them more, who seemed quite eligible and like the sort of women that you would imagine it happens to,

Speaker 1 with the data breach from the T-App, that was not the same cohort when it comes to female mate value. It was much more

Speaker 1 short hair, piercings,

Speaker 1 a little bit heavier set, and it was just an interesting world where you have the women that you think this might happen to a lot wanting it more and it not happening, women who you might think it was a bit more scarce for being a part of a community who warn women off of men and actually are actively disincentivizing this.

Speaker 1 So it could be kind of this inverse luxury belief thing, which is like I saw a Berlin's in a citadel. If I can't get what I want, I must teach myself to want what I can get.

Speaker 1 And then bind together, like the female equivalent of sort of inseldom, I suppose.

Speaker 2 We're doing symmetrical sexual competition there, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, the problem for the hot woman in Central Park,

Speaker 2 it's the classic cartoon where the hot guy approaches and she's delighted and then the ugly guy approaches and she calls HR. I mean,

Speaker 2 that is the difficulty. Like, you don't want to be approached all day.

Speaker 3 I want to be called approach, but not by you.

Speaker 1 Not by him,

Speaker 1 yeah, exactly. And every guy sees themselves as the not by you guy.
Well, well, apart from the ones that are too pushy, because I don't think that guys have a good understanding of their own,

Speaker 1 I don't think guys have a good understanding of their own mate value, they have a good understanding of their own uh confidence or their uh disregard for female rejection.

Speaker 1 But that is not the same thing as a success rating.

Speaker 1 Like, I am friends with some of the fucking most eligible men in America that are single, And these guys are, you'd be like, you must actually swim through women in order to get to your front door.

Speaker 1 And they're just like drenched in self-doubt and uncertainty and this sense of not knowing. And maybe this is a little bit of a like

Speaker 1 a luxury challenge. It's a challenge

Speaker 1 of abundance, not one of scarcity, where they actually need to weave through things in a different sort of way. And there's problems when you get to the higher altitudes as opposed to the lower ones.

Speaker 1 But men do not have a good understanding of their omega value.

Speaker 3 I mean, yeah, just I'm going to stick my hand up and say, you know, I remember cold approach. Like, I was there.

Speaker 3 You know, I'm older.

Speaker 1 I lived it and survived.

Speaker 3 Just about, yeah.

Speaker 3 I'm old enough to remember when that was actually a thing. And, you know, being, what was it, what the word they use now, chirpst? Being chatted up, we called it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I remember that being a thing. And it was understood, you know, it starts happening to you when you're about 12.

Speaker 3 And it was understood by, you know,

Speaker 3 you and your girlfriends compare notes that the kind of guys who do that are probably not the ones who are going to become your boyfriend. That's just, you know,

Speaker 3 cold approach might have been a thing. And sometimes maybe for those guys.

Speaker 1 Because it's evident that you're one of a number.

Speaker 3 Those guys would be fun. You know, you might let them buy you a drink and sort of chat to them and let them float with you for a bit.
But it was understood that those are probably not the guys

Speaker 3 that are going to become your boyfriend for a whole host of reasons. But they're just strategy men.
Yeah. It's you're so okay.

Speaker 3 You're going to have to unpack that, Louise, because this is more your wheelhouse than mine.

Speaker 2 Surely every modern wisdom listener knows about this. RK selection, right? So our strategy, this is in, this is true in evolution biology in general, not just humans, that some species are more

Speaker 2 R strategists in that they will have lots of sex, lots of babies, except that most of those babies are going to die in the fast, die, young kind of strategy.

Speaker 2 Whereas K selection is like elephants or blue whales.

Speaker 3 Elephants versus rabbits, maybe.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so they'll have one baby that they'll really invest in.

Speaker 2 and humans are kind of both, depending on context. Like, we're more case strategists, but there are individual variations, and you can kind of nudge in one way or the other.

Speaker 2 And yeah, I think the guys who come and

Speaker 3 this is a big theme in your book, isn't it?

Speaker 3 There's the guys who, there's the chatter-uppers who are probably there about sowing the seed as widely as possible. And then there's the

Speaker 1 material. We're trying to find this balance, right? It's some, I think, 80%

Speaker 1 of women say that they want a man to make the first move.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 how is that supposed to be done in a manner? And this is how you labuboo yourself

Speaker 1 in a desperate attempt to try and couch your forthcomingness in a sufficiently cinnamon roll exterior.

Speaker 3 But actually what you need is not to labubify yourself.

Speaker 3 What you need is the social scaffolding. You know, even whether that's sort of, you know,

Speaker 1 you've got to bootstrap it yourself.

Speaker 2 The way that I did this with my husband as a sneaky get-round is I heard that he was single. And so I told a friend who's a mutual friend like

Speaker 2 tell him to hit on me and

Speaker 1 if he does I'll say yes and so we we basically did that loop round okay this is that requires social scaffolding this is what I mean about the social scaffolding you know there are authorities sowed some seeds that this would be a like a high return strategy like this horse

Speaker 3 the odds the odds might look a little bit like difficult but it's assured the silk glove exactly basically exactly yeah and so you know there's there's an element of that you know that women have to be willing to drop the silk glove if they want the man to make the first move.

Speaker 3 I mean, I'm sure you know the metaphor, you know, and then he can graciously hand it back.

Speaker 2 Why are all these eligible men, you know, still not finding wives?

Speaker 1 It depends. It's for different reasons.

Speaker 1 Some of them have got.

Speaker 1 Some of them have got themselves to the stage where they've got so much exposure that they are basically, they see any interaction as a potential downfall of their career.

Speaker 2 Right. And they're worried about gold diggers, presumably.

Speaker 1 More so about reputational destruction, like post-me too, I didn't consent to that. He is this or that or the other.
Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 Especially if you've got a relatively squeaky, clean public image or you're in an industry that is not as forgiving as, say, podcasting.

Speaker 1 Like Andrew Huberman's survival rate should be a positive reinforcement for anybody in my side of the internet. But if you're in slightly more...

Speaker 3 Was he completely fine after all of that?

Speaker 1 Better, I think, actually.

Speaker 1 He just posted through it. He was fine.

Speaker 3 That's always the advice, isn't it? Just post through it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, just keep looking at sun in the morning and everything is fine. And he has lived, he lived by that strategy.

Speaker 1 There's other reasons for it. I think that

Speaker 1 in the same way as women who are emotionally developed and want to find a partner who is able to hold their own in a conversation and understands their emotions and can be honest and truthful and wants to build a family and do all the rest of this stuff, that's a pretty refined taste for the most part.

Speaker 1 And a lot of the guys, your lamp analogy around if you haven't yet bought a house, trying to find a lamp that you like and put it in a house is pretty easy.

Speaker 1 Whereas if you've spent two decades building a very, very carefully crafted interior, trying to find the perfect lamp to fit in that is much more difficult.

Speaker 1 That's also a challenge. And your ability to discern good from bad lamps or your standard for lamps has also increased along with the complexity of the room that you're trying to put it in.

Speaker 3 Probably complicated further by the fact that people are not lamps. And so people come with their own agency and preferences.
Of course.

Speaker 2 The answer to the first problem about can I trust this woman not to wreck my reputation is probably it's to do with long-standing social reputation.

Speaker 2 You basically need to know her friends who will tell you

Speaker 2 she's like yeah is she trustworthy? Is she crazy? Whatever. But that's not going to work with cold approach at all.

Speaker 1 So much of this is if you're not enmeshed in social fabric where you know their friends and them and maybe their family and they know the same because it also disincentivizes people from doing fuckery right because the the blast radius of that is going to impact and i mean that's the that's the charitable interpretation of what the t-app was trying to do isn't it is to try and surrogate it's trying to compensate for the lack of social architecture that's the best steel man case for the t-app that i've ever heard that it is a surrogate local community yeah because everybody is because i mean that's how women used to keep in in a sort of village scenario that's how women used to keep is he uh is he is he trustworthy can i yeah yeah yeah yeah you have a you heard what he did with such and such Exactly, exactly.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it's an attempt to provide a tech fix for the absence of that.

Speaker 3 It's just that because it's only a tech fix, it doesn't work in quite the same way. And in fact, it has all sorts of other horrific things.

Speaker 1 So there's no repercussions if you make false accusations.

Speaker 1 If you say, oh, you heard what he did, and someone says, well,

Speaker 3 say that I did with such and such.

Speaker 3 Whereas in a real world, in a grounded, real world, relatively stable community, if you spread false rumours about somebody, eventually you'll get the blowback.

Speaker 1 So T app is an artificial solution to an artificial problem. It's the GLP ones.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a Zempic for reputation management,

Speaker 3 low trust relationship formation.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 65% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 think that guys can have their reputations destroyed for just speaking their mind. And 85% of young men who voted for Trump agree with that statement.

Speaker 3 See, one thing, just

Speaker 3 going back to

Speaker 3 our sort of leit motif of the Laboo Boo guy, what I find interesting,

Speaker 3 and this occurred to me earlier,

Speaker 3 is that

Speaker 3 the obviously not very appealing nature of Labuboo Guy doesn't seem to have produced a kind of backswing towards

Speaker 3 this very much more right-wing identified male female.

Speaker 2 I know what it is. It's what our friend Catherine Dee calls the male-to-male transsexual.

Speaker 2 That's the flip side to the Laboobu Man.

Speaker 1 What is the male-to-male transsexual? Oh, yes.

Speaker 2 What do you think based on the name?

Speaker 1 It is a guy basically LARPing as a much more masculine version of himself. Yep.
Right.

Speaker 2 And really devoting his life to that transformation as well.

Speaker 1 Which is actually quite a feminine thing to do. It is.

Speaker 3 It is. These are the guys

Speaker 3 who are predominantly interested in lifting so they can post physique, which is just the girliest, girliest, girliest thing to do.

Speaker 3 You know, I firmly believe that guys should lift. I don't think they should post physique.
I think that's disgusting.

Speaker 1 Two days ago, I had some guys that were both over 250 pounds. I would have loved to have seen you say that too.
They would have both

Speaker 1 taken it. They would have both taken it really well.
They would have both gone, do you know what it is? You're probably right. I do take too many photos of me with my top off.

Speaker 3 It's just really girly. Don't do it.
Yeah, you know, be strong, be competent. That's really hot.
Don't post physique.

Speaker 2 It's really girly. I mean, it's an interesting

Speaker 2 point about social media being inherently feminine is so true. And you see this come out of the

Speaker 2 dissident right kind of manosphere is the wrong term, but they're kind of hyper-masculine hyper-masculine dissident-right, which, yes, really valorizes masculinity, can be really negative about women, etc., but also includes a lot of selfies, a lot of gossiping on the internet, a lot of like girly bickering.

Speaker 1 Never seen purity spiral out like a girl.

Speaker 2 Yeah, who coined this meme? No, I coined that meme, that kind of thing. I have never seen a girly a bunch of men on the internet.

Speaker 1 They're wrong about everything.

Speaker 3 There are exceptions, you know,

Speaker 3 some of my best friends, etc.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 what you say is on point.

Speaker 3 And some of this is just produced by the sort of selection effects of the internet. Yeah,

Speaker 3 it's the internet. You know, that milieu sort of draws a

Speaker 1 internet kind of optimizes for a very one-dimensional perspective of a person. Yeah.
So, Chris Bumstead, what's that thing that Yasmin was talking about?

Speaker 1 Looks that can kill, but heart of gold, or something?

Speaker 1 What is it?

Speaker 1 Okay, oh, right, that's it. Looks that could kill you, comma, could kill you.
And looks that could kill you, comma, is a cinnamon roll, right?

Speaker 1 And Chris Bumstead, guy that sat here, met he's a six-time Mr. Olympia.
He's basically the modern world Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Speaker 1 25 million followers on Instagram met his now wife because she fell in love with a video of him crying on the internet.

Speaker 1 So that's Looks That Could Kill You, comma, is a cinnamon roll. And

Speaker 1 that Chris is one of a very small number of guys who have managed to thread the needle of highly masculine, highly feminine at the same time, or at least highly masculine and embodied, bothered about emotions,

Speaker 1 reads a lot of books and talks about like not, I don't believe in cry it out for raising our daughter Bradley. We're actually trying, you know, I want to teach her that it's okay to feel feel it and

Speaker 1 you know, like deep in therapy culture at the same time, whilst being being the like Adonis is Adonis as a guy um and super strong and big and all the rest of the stuff I don't think that there is a particularly good place for that there isn't much room for many people to be able to thread that needle because it takes a long time to explain the nuance of what you are as a guy like you look and it would be much easier for him to just be

Speaker 1 brash like if you presented in that way and had the personality of Andrew Tate it's like there we go like I've got that

Speaker 1 cliche. I've already got that archetype locked off.
And

Speaker 1 if you're trying to accumulate attention online, you need to make it quick. You don't want it to be effortful.
And I think it's just bad for brand.

Speaker 1 Just do it explains what Nike is trying to get you to believe in as an ethos. It's not just do it.
And here's a 5,000-word footnote explaining precisely what that means.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. The attention economy dynamic forces everyone to become a very reductive meme version.

Speaker 1 Low resolution.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And you have to accept that.
I mean, I've long since learned that existing in public online means just not feeling obliged to correct

Speaker 3 the bizarre versions of you that people have living rent-free in their heads. Just like, don't waste your time doing that.

Speaker 1 No one's got time for that. The best quote that I've heard around that is, I do not concern myself with the opinions of people who misunderstand me.
I think that's so fucking good.

Speaker 1 Hard to do because you want to correct the misunderstanding. No, no, no.
You don't see.

Speaker 3 I remember the saddest version of that I I ever saw was when Mary Beard got cancelled for saying something really innocuous. And she posted a video of herself on Twitter crying.

Speaker 3 And she was obviously trying to get people to understand that, you know, in fact, she contained multitudes of people. There was a real person here.
There was a real person here.

Speaker 3 But all it did, all that did was incur more hate because that's just not how the internet works.

Speaker 3 And you just have to post through it. Like Andrew Huberman.
Be more Huberman.

Speaker 1 That is a fucking phenomenal hashtag. Be more Huberman, less laboo boo.

Speaker 1 So what about the other side of this i'm interested i read this article on substack which both of you probably will have read about schlub feminism that me too was the death of schlub feminism no okay so

Speaker 1 this was that um

Speaker 1 the thesis is

Speaker 1 me too protected women who were maybe a little more neurotic than is optimal and got much more attention from men than they would like And what that meant was women who actually would have liked a bit more attention from men and were quite keen to try and find a partner were immediately told, oh, my sweet summer child, you're not doing that because you want the attention of men.

Speaker 1 This is for yourself.

Speaker 1 You're wearing the makeup. You're doing the beautification.
You're doing all the rest of the things because this is part of your empowerment. And it didn't allow any room for the schlub female.

Speaker 1 The Bridget Jones, the like hopeless romantic, immediately became derogated because in you are doing something for men, put power in men, and also inevitably meant that well you're uh encouraging some of that you're making yourself not subservient but kind of at the mercy it's like basically me too killed the bridget jones archetype in women and there's no place for that remember the essay stacy is depressed that was on a

Speaker 3 i remember reading that yeah what was that a bit similar theme really that there are there are lots of just quite ordinary looking people of both sexes really who would who'd be very happy to find an ordinary looking person of the opposite sex to love, and they're probably both a bit shlubby.

Speaker 3 And so, what?

Speaker 3 And that

Speaker 3 somehow this hyper-competitive online dynamic of Chads and Stacey's and so on has just made it increasingly difficult.

Speaker 3 Like, the guys are relegated to sort of neckbeard computer gaming basement dwellerdom. And Stacey, meanwhile, is just

Speaker 3 she's either a sort of disposable plaything for some Chad, having been kind of psyoped into all of that by various kind of terrible internet discourses, or else she's just terminally single as well, and also desperate for love

Speaker 3 and Stacey is just miserable as a as a consequence

Speaker 1 that feels that feels sort of cognate with your beautiful have we killed Bridget Jones have we killed Bernard that archetype sometimes there is just this great mystery about why some people are single I was talking to someone yesterday who does a lot of like

Speaker 2 she organizes Christian mingling things to try and get Christians to meet in real life and she said that they always have an oversupply of women

Speaker 2 and it's a classic thing in churches to have loads of really like earnest, often lovely, really eligible, attractive, etc. women showing up desperate for a husband and they can't find them.

Speaker 2 And I mean, it's always, I think often you can't really tell without really, really knowing someone exactly what's going on there.

Speaker 2 Because whenever you hear doom and gloom about people finding it impossible to find partners now, etc., I think of all the people I know who are Stacey-esque in, so is it Stacey's depressed?

Speaker 1 Stacey, yeah.

Speaker 2 In that they're completely normal people and they have happy, flourishing family lives.

Speaker 1 Does that make you more sceptical around the perennially single and you think,

Speaker 1 maybe everything's not as rosy on the outside as it might seem?

Speaker 2 It makes me assume something is going on. Yeah,

Speaker 3 I had a vigorous debate with a friend the other day who was like, it was a kind of a throwaway joke.

Speaker 3 He was like, oh, you know, maybe we should just send all of the insoles to Ukraine where there's a massive shortage of men. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Speaker 3 What makes you think that Ukrainian women want anything to do with those guys?

Speaker 3 Oh, what? Sorry, to fight? And

Speaker 3 to married to ukrainian women no to to to make up the shortage of sex ratio yeah to to recompensate the sex ratio right um i was like whoa you know yeah

Speaker 2 there might be like but we're talking about actual people here and you know sometimes these things can be complicated it doesn't necessarily mean that there's something terribly wrong with people who are single like i say comfortingly right it doesn't mean that it's just that there's probably something going on that is might be hard to see like excessive pickiness or

Speaker 2 getting up to the moment of committing and backing off every time or something like that. There's always something that's not.

Speaker 3 So you're committed to a professional career that actually there's just no bandwidth.

Speaker 2 Because actually if you look around at the people you actually know in your life, not on the internet, there isn't a correlation really between how attractive you are and how likely you are to be married.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 1 There isn't. I did have this idea that maybe

Speaker 1 the birth rate and coupling is associated with obesity, but not because of some hormonal thing, but just that there is a minimum bar that humans will find other humans attractive at.

Speaker 1 And if you fall below it by eating yourself out of that window, everyone's just just less hot and now there's less desire across the board you know people tend to mate uh in terms of physical mate value and overall mate value broadly assortatively right they're within their their range uh

Speaker 1 that plausibly you can eat yourself below that it also plausibly becomes a hormonal thing in that uh weight gain is corresponds to higher levels of estrogen i i agree i just i don't think you even need that dynamic i think it's just that if we assume that a well-put together body is something that people will find sexually attractive, and as you get further and further away from that, actually on either side, but typically at the moment.

Speaker 3 Because there's just less oggling going on generally.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you just think you're less oggle-worthy.

Speaker 2 Like Donald Winnicott's idea of the good enough mother.

Speaker 1 I'm not familiar with that.

Speaker 2 So he said that Mary will probably know this better than me, but he was a

Speaker 2 child psychotherapist. Yeah, he was a who argued

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 you don't need mothers to be perfect by any means.

Speaker 2 Like in order for children to be properly attached and develop happily, you just need the good enough mother, the mother who does, that who meets the standard in terms of providing care for her baby.

Speaker 2 And yeah, maybe it's the good enough partner.

Speaker 1 Body.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they just hit that standard.

Speaker 2 Although I saw a man, some anonymous man recently comment, which I thought was insightful, that women of the last, I mean, Ozempic is going to reverse this, by the way.

Speaker 2 We've surely hit peak obesity already, but women having to keep putting the prices up, presumably. Well, then it becomes even more desirable, right?

Speaker 3 As time walks.

Speaker 3 I don't think weight is ever going to stop being a status signal in an obesogenic culture.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 if a Zenpic looks like it might fix that, they'll just put up the price of a Zenpic and it just kicks the can down the road. I mean, it's already happened.

Speaker 3 Eli Lilly just tripled the price, didn't they, in the UK? So immediately, thinness will remain a status signal in an obesogenic culture.

Speaker 3 Just the cost stops being one of self-discipline and becomes literally just a cost.

Speaker 1 It's a different sort of signal then, though.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's a signal of what you... That's true.
The meaning of the signal changes. Yeah, massively.
But the class, it's class-inflected nature does.

Speaker 1 True, but I don't know whether class is associated with, or previously was associated with weight.

Speaker 3 Yes, absolutely. Weight, obesity is strongly, negatively, is strongly correlated with poverty on both sides of the pond.

Speaker 1 Okay. And it may still be that, but for different reasons.

Speaker 3 Yes, just the reasons for that might be a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 You can't afford this solution as opposed to

Speaker 1 healthy.

Speaker 3 Rather than exactly, you can't afford to shock at Whole Foods.

Speaker 3 You're too busy working three low-paid jobs to go to the gym or whatever.

Speaker 3 It becomes

Speaker 3 you can't afford the jab.

Speaker 2 Well, pre-Azempic and still probably

Speaker 2 now,

Speaker 2 I think women have simultaneously become fatter and prettier because there's a lot more money in the future.

Speaker 1 So those are those two separate dynamics.

Speaker 2 Well, in the face, right? Because and also things like hair and whatever, there's so much more

Speaker 2 sophisticated beauty tech available and using things like

Speaker 2 whatever retinals or doing it getting your eyebrows microbladed or stuff that stuff has become very routine and very accessible

Speaker 2 and social media is full of like hacks on how to do all this expensive salon treatment on yourself so I really think that the bar has moved a lot in terms of what women do to their faces and their hair it has even if they've also got but maybe maybe the technology for making men more attractive hasn't kept up in kind men don't really try as well right but and also what makes men attractive isn't really is it's only secondarily or even tertiary appearances secondary or tertiary

Speaker 2 Fake turn is not going to make much difference to me.

Speaker 1 But going to the gym, perhaps.

Speaker 3 You know, being physically competent

Speaker 3 remains the gold standard for being attractive. And earnings.
And earning a breadwinner's wage.

Speaker 3 It goes with having a reasonable physique.

Speaker 3 But I don't know.

Speaker 3 This is a hill I will die on, scaffold of physique. wins over gym physique any day of the week.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, I'm sure that you saw, was it Ollie Murs who did that transformation and William Costello posted it, tweeted about it? That's right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then Sasha Baron Cohen did the same thing. Do you see who's on the front cover of men's fitness?

Speaker 2 I thought Ollie Murs looked better shredded.

Speaker 1 But you would be in the minority, even if you did.

Speaker 1 You would be in the minority. And I had an idea around this, which was.

Speaker 3 He posted physique, though. It was posting physique.
Instant turnoff. Sorry.

Speaker 3 On that basis alone.

Speaker 3 Objectively. Like, he looked good in the second picture, but he was posting physique.

Speaker 1 Okay, but what if it had been a candid physique photo? What What if it was

Speaker 3 a completely different ballgame? Right.

Speaker 1 Totally different ballgame.

Speaker 3 Hard to say at that point, but it wasn't.

Speaker 1 So there was basically Sasha Baron Cohen did the same thing. I think he's in a superhero movie.
He is the lead actor in some superhero movie, and he also got divorced at the same time.

Speaker 1 So it was breakup physique, superhero physique, and then you compare him with Borrow.

Speaker 3 So when guys get shredded, is that the equivalent of getting a new haircut?

Speaker 1 It's the pixie cut, but for dudes. Yeah, exactly.
Going on a heavy course of testosterone is going and saying to your hairdresser, we're going to do do it today. I'm finally going to get it off.

Speaker 3 I'm going to get in the pixie cut.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 there was definitely an interesting question, I think, that Olly Muz is fat in one photo, shredded in another photo. He wasn't fat, though.
He's just not.

Speaker 1 Relatively fat. He was maybe, I would guess,

Speaker 1 15 to 18% body fat for the bro lifters in the audience. And then he probably got himself down to towards single figures.

Speaker 1 He wasn't like striated delts, but he was visible six-pack abs, which is that's not nothing. Like, that's fucking, and it was not in an unbelievably long amount of time either.

Speaker 1 So, you know, he'd speedrun it, which is, you know, it's impressive. However,

Speaker 1 lots of women said, this isn't attractive. And lots of men said, you don't know what you find attractive.
What I think is happening there is that guys

Speaker 1 have, they place so much pride and weight on

Speaker 1 if I can get jacked, women women will find me attractive. That is a big

Speaker 1 poltergeist to kill. And if you do, you go, oh, fuck, maybe I don't have as much control over my mate value by going to the gym as I thought.
Yeah. Fuck, the illusion has been smashed.

Speaker 2 This was my one recourse to, yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean, I sort of feel like actually, I mean, gym, gym body is not a meaningless signal in the sense that it points to a measure of self-discipline.

Speaker 1 Yeah, seriously.

Speaker 3 Consistently, consistent self-discipline and individual willpower and so on, which is, you know, that's a good signal. But it's not the only one.

Speaker 3 And if you're also a massive weirdo, it's not going to cancel that out.

Speaker 2 To be a little bit cynical about the women who said that they don't like the shredded physique, I think that like most women in the West are like a bit fat, right?

Speaker 2 I mean, the average American woman is like a size 18 or... even 20 in American sizing.
No, that's not right because that can't be right. Is there 16 in the UK? So is there 12 in the US?

Speaker 2 But basically, the average American woman is like overweight. I don't think that she wants a shredded spouse because he shows her up.

Speaker 1 There was a story I heard from a friend who was a powerlifter. Powerlifters go through

Speaker 1 big weight fluctuations. They're the fat boy lifters, typically, squat bench deadlift.

Speaker 1 And he then went and did a bodybuilding show, and then he went and did weightlifting. So he went through all of the different strength sports.
And his girlfriend said to him,

Speaker 1 My I felt my most comfortable when you were powerlifting, which is when you were fattest.

Speaker 1 And I felt my most insecure when you were weightlift, when you were bodybuilding, which is when you were leanest. leanest.
There's certainly an argument to be made from like an EP standpoint, which is

Speaker 1 if a man is spending lots of effort on his own physique, that suggests that he is kind of advertising his beauty to other people, which may the whole dad bod thing is actually true.

Speaker 1 If you've got one extra spare calorie to spend, should you be spending it on yourself in terms of self-beautification and enhancement? Or should you be spending it on your family?

Speaker 1 And if you are getting more attention from the women around you, who are you doing this for? Well, maybe you're not quite as committed to the family as we thought you were.

Speaker 1 Where are those extra calories going? They're going on yourself. You're eating the chicken.
You're going to the gym. That doesn't seem like the sort of thing that a committed father's doing.

Speaker 1 Have we not transcended this? Have you not got past this? Who are you actually doing it for? But in the interesting female beautification,

Speaker 1 maybe, but it's at least a couple more second, third orders away.

Speaker 1 Men don't look at women, wives that are beautifying themselves unless it's very provocative and overt in terms of the way that they present as you are doing that in order to advertise your eligibility potential to potential monkey branch lily pad backup mates.

Speaker 3 I feel like another another factor in that is that I mean, you know, feminists are fond of denouncing the male gaze, but there is diff there is unmistakably a difference in how men look at and evaluate um other people's physiques.

Speaker 3 Actually, I think of both sexes and how women do.

Speaker 3 Um and there's a sense, you know, women beaut you know, if you're a woman, you beautify yourself.

Speaker 3 You might moan about the male gaze, but also i think you'd probably miss it and like you know when when women a lot of women when they reach middle age do miss it genuinely um and you know there's a sense in which being checked out is part of what helps to form your sense of who you are um you know rightly or wrongly but that's that's part of the ongoing constant kind of ambient intersexual dynamics um but men

Speaker 3 like a man who's titivating himself is implicitly doing it for the male gaze because women don't look at each other like that. This goes to what you were saying.

Speaker 1 I don't think that men know that.

Speaker 3 They might not realize it, but the point is that from a woman's perspective, when a guy is titivating themselves, you know, implicitly it's for the male gaze, and that's just a turn-off because that's like you're like, dude,

Speaker 1 you're in my it's either

Speaker 1 gay or ignorant of female preferences.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, and or possibly, you know, it's it's somewhere in that male-to-male transsexual territory.

Speaker 2 Does it have to be gay? Can it not just be signaling to other men that

Speaker 3 sex and consciousness? I mean, it can be homophilic without necessarily being like actively actively kind of sexually

Speaker 2 sexually orientated towards other men.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 it's bro stuff

Speaker 3 in a way which implicitly excludes the woman, it excludes women from the dialogue.

Speaker 1 There's also a big failure of cross-sex mind reading because guys are going, I find that intimidating, you must find it attractive.

Speaker 1 And some things that are intimidating are attractive and women don't know it. And then there's some things that men find intimidating, which maybe women don't find attractive.

Speaker 2 Women have to make the same mistakes. Like with choosing clothes, I will often run past out.

Speaker 2 If I'm like, if I'm like doing something publicly, I'll run past my outfit past my husband for not because he knows anything about fashion, precisely because he doesn't know anything about fashion.

Speaker 2 And sometimes because it's hard to tell the difference between, do I like this because it's signaling status to other women and it's signaling that I'm very abreast of current fashions and I'm experimental in my choices and whatever?

Speaker 2 Or do I like this because it actually like looks good

Speaker 1 and men are often actively turned off the high fashion impressing other women type of clothes have you ever seen have you seen that video of the girl showing off her new boyfriend fit jeans to her boyfriend

Speaker 1 so it's an American woman and the boyfriend is in the kitchen washing up or doing something. He says, honey, I just got these new jeans.

Speaker 1 And they're the sort of super loose fit, loose at the knee, loose at the ankle. What do you think?

Speaker 1 And he daydreams away to 10 years in the past when fitted jeans that you could see a girl's thighs and a girl's ass existed. And he sort of like

Speaker 1 shakes

Speaker 1 and swallows, he goes, oh, they're lovely. And then she gets an even more baggy pair of jeans and he's on the floor, sort of crying and holding himself.
And there is certainly this weird

Speaker 1 lack of understanding in both ways about what it is that's and then I guess at least with guys very few guys are dressing themselves to signal to other men almost all guys are doing fashion exclusively for women but women are doing fashion for men and for women so they need to cross i mean it's the

Speaker 1 i do not know the difference between a birkin bag even though i know the name i don't actually know anything else about them other than they're expensive and called birkin i guess if it said it on it i'd know what it was and something that's from peacocks right and 10 pounds i literally have no idea so who is that for It's for other women, right?

Speaker 1 It's the, I guess, red-bottom Labutons. I know that just because it's a meme, but beyond that, I don't know the shoes.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 So, this signal is: look at all of the luxury time that I have, look at all of the spare capacity I have. If I'm in a relationship with a partner, look at how invested he is in me.

Speaker 1 He's you better not try and take my man. Look, I'm he's fucking 30 bags deep on this bat, on this literal bag.
Uh, you're not taking him from me because he owes me, yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 you mentioned before we got started,

Speaker 1 this trend of feminism and women turning to the right.

Speaker 1 What is that dynamic that we're seeing that's going on?

Speaker 2 So it's quite a common view on the dissident right that

Speaker 2 women are innately left-wing. So there are average psychological differences between men and women, which we've all talked about at length.

Speaker 2 Women tend to be more agreeable than men, more neurotic than men,

Speaker 2 more

Speaker 2 sensitive to social signals than men are. There are various differences.
Obviously, they vary between individuals, but they scale to being quite significant differences between the sexes.

Speaker 2 And one thing that does seem to be clear is that women tend to be more egalitarian in their own social groups, or at least in their female friendships. Overtly.
More overtly egalitarian, yeah.

Speaker 2 And sometimes this gets interpreted as that means that women are left-wing,

Speaker 2 like innately. And if you let women vote and participate in public life, they will drag everything to the left.
I tend to think that's not true because

Speaker 2 there are so many examples historically of women being very enthusiastic participants in

Speaker 2 right-coded political movements.

Speaker 2 I mean, obviously talking left and right is a bit complicated in the past, but say women participating enthusiastically in temperance and prohibition would be one example.

Speaker 2 The church ladies phenomenon, where women are actually the ones enforcing conservative social norms locally, or even female participation in Nazism.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's probably not quite right actually to say that Nazism is right-wing. It's complicated.
But women were passionate, passionate participants in the rise of Hitler.

Speaker 2 And in fact, often had like weird sexual obsessions with Hitler, which you can read about at length, and had a kind of Beatle mania when he showed up and things like that.

Speaker 2 So the idea that women are always and forever like

Speaker 2 woke, I think is nuts.

Speaker 2 It clearly is the case, though, that at the moment, young women in particular skew woke a lot, and particularly in some countries, skew woke a lot, and there's a big sex gap.

Speaker 2 I think it's more that there are some political movements which kind of tap into feminine preferences, and woke is one of them. It has that

Speaker 2 it's not so much the egalitarianism as the encouragement to scoop up and protect childlike figures, so whether that be trans people or refugees or whatever.

Speaker 2 encouraging women to channel those maternal energies towards certain groups, I think is very powerful.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 There's also infinite opportunities for moral dogpiling, which is just incredibly appealing.

Speaker 1 How so?

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 if you can

Speaker 3 arbitrarily change which words are forbidden sort of every few months and then mobilize your friends to attack somebody for getting it wrong and you can use that as a means of conducting office politics.

Speaker 2 Attacking people from a moral infractions.

Speaker 3 Yeah, attacking people for moral infractions, you know, in a sense, it's kind of village, it's like women's village modus operandi on steroids on the internet and divorced from any meaningful application in real life or any sort of meaningful kind of breaking mechanisms.

Speaker 2 I also think wokeness is quite emotionally compelling in the sense of feeling like you have this sense of purpose and crusade.

Speaker 2 And, you know, I think that young women in particular find that quite enticing.

Speaker 2 Wokeness doesn't really work on men, though, apart from the labooba men. but it doesn't like it doesn't hit those.

Speaker 2 I think it I like to think of it like Jonathan Haidt's idea of moral flavours, like it doesn't hit the flavours that men have taste receptors for.

Speaker 3 I'm gonna say this carefully because otherwise I will get dogpiled by exactly these guys.

Speaker 3 But I do think it's correct, even though this is I I I do actually think it's right that there's a subset of the E-right which is the equivalent of woke, just predominantly for men.

Speaker 3 And by that, you know, I don't mean the woke right in the sort of James Lindsay sense of, of, you know, being some sort of terrible thing that must be expelled from polite discourse because something, something civil liberties or free speech or

Speaker 3 civil discourse and objectivity and all of that.

Speaker 3 What I actually think is going on is that the sort of woke pattern of social interaction and the e-right pattern of social interaction are both updated versions, very, very strongly gender-coded of two political sides as mediated through the kind of interactions which are just normal on the internet, which are very much less rationalistic in both cases, actually just visibly the case, very much more, they're

Speaker 3 unmoored from material realities, unmoored from localized communities, very abstracted, happening in the internet, you know, full of all kinds of perverse financial incentives and geared mostly towards rage baiting

Speaker 3 on both sides than really towards substantive politics or even really getting anything done in the real world at all.

Speaker 3 They're extremely online. And and actually I've I've found it very interesting watching the emergence of Zoran Mandani in this context in New York.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean y because he he he strikes me as a sort of he he's a sort of post-literate leftist.

Speaker 3 I don't mean he himself is post-literate, but he he mobilizes a certain kind of very net native leftism.

Speaker 3 And that's that's the source of his popularity. You know, whether or not he'll ever actually d you know, get elected and or deliver any policies is almost secondary to that.

Speaker 3 And there's a subset of Trumpism and Marga, which is that but for the right. And those two movements code,

Speaker 3 they are respectively gendered. You know, there are more women that embrace Mamdanism and there are more men who embrace Margaism.

Speaker 3 And yes, of course, there's some overlap, but they're both strongly gendered.

Speaker 1 Are we seeing a trajectory pivot then at the moment? Is there some subversive?

Speaker 3 Are women turning to the right?

Speaker 2 I think that when they do, they'll turn quickly.

Speaker 3 That's my main point. I'm actually going to quote

Speaker 3 a noted member of the E-Right in support of that, Bronze Age pervert, who said memorably, you remember also the mob is a woman, which I think is an important

Speaker 1 sense.

Speaker 3 By that, I mean, I'm interpreting here, but the way I understand that is that the mob, as in a group of people

Speaker 3 highly, you know, morally aerated, angry, sort of mimetically charged, you know, wanting action now,

Speaker 3 is

Speaker 3 actually, you know, is as much, is as plausibly all female as it is all male. You know, an angry mob can be of either sex.

Speaker 3 But the mob as a collective entity,

Speaker 3 Bronze Age pervert in this context, is suggesting is actually a very, is a is a female phenomenon.

Speaker 2 Although, of course, if the mob's going to cut off your head, it'll have to involve some men.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, if any.

Speaker 2 But the emotional energy. Yeah.

Speaker 3 The emotional energy is mimetic, it's contagious, it's collective.

Speaker 2 So a concrete example of this would be what we've already talked about, refugees or immigration in general. And until now, the very strong energy from young women in particular has been to see

Speaker 2 ethnic minorities and refugees in particular as childlike figures in need of protection.

Speaker 2 And also to

Speaker 2 have this slightly

Speaker 2 to see this cause as a very emotional kind of you get pulled along with the memetic energy kind of thing.

Speaker 2 You could easily see that flip and actually it becomes, and you're already seeing this among working class women in Britain, definitely, is that the childlike entity in need of protection is like literal children.

Speaker 3 I think one of the really underappreciated scissors here is actually whether or not you have kids.

Speaker 3 And I would bet any sum of money you care to name that you'll find more women on the refugees' welcome side who don't have kids, and more women on the actually with actually a family.

Speaker 3 No, very straightforwardly, for the reason Louise just explained.

Speaker 3 If If you're worried about your kids, that's an entirely different and very much smaller and more particularistic set of affections than if

Speaker 3 you love quote-unquote the vulnerable in the abstract.

Speaker 1 The inverse of this, I think, is a big part of the reason why so many guys want to be entrepreneurs right now.

Speaker 1 Is displaced paternal instinct that they've got this project that they're working toward, they've got a purpose and meaning, they've got a single thrust and drive.

Speaker 1 You know, my team, my staff, my purpose, whatever this thing is.

Speaker 2 That's interesting.

Speaker 1 Is yeah, just supplanted

Speaker 1 family.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 But you could easily, easily see, and I think we're already starting to see a right-wing political movement propelled by women that is using exactly those political flavors that women are receptive to, like fear, women being more neurotic, so fear of threat,

Speaker 2 wanting to mother

Speaker 2 childlike or actual children figures

Speaker 2 and the kind of memetic energy. There's no reason to see

Speaker 1 where are we seeing that.

Speaker 2 I think we're probably seeing it with the women showing up outside migrant hotels.

Speaker 3 The pink protests. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's what they're called.
Yeah,

Speaker 3 they wear pink.

Speaker 1 Right. Yeah, they wear it.

Speaker 3 Which is an interesting echo of the Trump-era pussy hat thing. Yeah.

Speaker 3 They're not wearing, but they're not wearing pink pussy hats. They're wearing pink t-shirts and they're turning up saying close the hotels and send them home.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and they're all over social media. And at the moment, this is very much contained as being a working class thing.
And middle-class women are quite hostile to it mostly.

Speaker 2 But I think you could easily see that spread, easily.

Speaker 2 And yeah, women turning to the right could become. Posy Parker is an example of this already happening

Speaker 2 in that she's, yeah, she's able to, her movement is distinctively feminine

Speaker 2 and also not left-wing.

Speaker 3 Not in the very least.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Louise and Mary.

Speaker 1 You're both great. I really, really appreciate you.
Where should people go to keep up to date with all of the things you're saying and writing?

Speaker 2 So my podcast is Made Mother Matriarch, all the places that you find Podcasts. Um, my first book was The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

Speaker 2 I am writing a second book on birth rates, but having children has kind of got in the way of writing it. But I will finish it eventually.

Speaker 1 Put your money where your mouth is, put your fertility where your book is.

Speaker 2 I know, I know. Well, it wouldn't quite have as much credibility, would it, if I wasn't walking the walk?

Speaker 3 I have a sub stack. Uh, maryharrington.co.uk is where you'll find it.
My regular column is at Unheard. Um, I tweet, although not so much over the summer, at Move in Circles.

Speaker 3 I know, I posted a lot of people. School you started.

Speaker 1 Everyone can go and follow you and you'll be back up to speed.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 my last book was Feminism Against Progress. I'm writing another one.
This one is on politics after literacy. So internet, politics after the singularity, if you like.

Speaker 3 We've already merged with our machines. What happens next?

Speaker 1 Aunties, I appreciate you very much. Thank you.
This has been fun. Thank you.
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