Caitlin Flanagan: Why I Finally Left Los Angeles

29:57Okay, so if you want to just think about the social history, if it's interesting, the sexual revolution came with the birth control bill. But it didn't come to girls for a long time. You know, it was like women were free, but there was still a repressive attitude towards girls until the late 70s, early 80s. and it was still an idea that no matter how much sexual liberation adults had found, the daughters of the household had to be protected. And there was still that old idea. I don't know, you know, it started to crack apart in the 70s, but that the only legitimized way for a girl or a very young woman to have sex was to get married.

30:35You know, that was the legitimizing event. And so many were still having sex, but they were doing it in this somewhat non-legitimate way. And then by the late 70s and early 80s, girls came up with their own legitimizing way. And people respected it, which was instead of marriage, there was love. If my boyfriend loves me and if I love him and if we're, you know, just in this tight relationship, you know, mini marriage for three months or five months or whatever it might be, that that legitimizes my being sexual. and you get later into the 80s and 90s and they're like why should I need anything to legitimize my sexual life and it's my sexual life I'll do with it what I want and society has respected that and and as women's opportunities for real careers you know for they could really now we're talking about upper middle class women with access to this much education, but when they can really have jobs that are the equal of their husbands, you know, they're both doctors or whatever, then the younger generation's like, well, if I can make as much as a doctor and if I have total sexual liberation, what is the man bringing me?

32:00Why would I want to be married? I have my own money. Men seem to have all of this baggage that comes along with them. And yet underneath it, obstinately, stubbornly, contra everything that the young women would want to have, there remains a strong yearning for a romantic life, not just a romance, but a romantic life. And that there's still this idea that no matter how many dates or coffee dates or, you know, they get from the apps. The ick factor, as they always say, is almost immediate because what they're really trying to find isn't like a date. When I was doing a date, like, yeah, that man didn't work out.

32:49I don't want to go out with him again. But it wasn't just because it wasn't interesting. But it wasn't as though from the second I sat down, I was wondering, would I marry this guy? Would this guy be a long-term romance for me? No, that wasn't the idea. And now they're not either in the place of, we just don't need men, we're over it, and we shall live our own lives, and nor are they at the place where they think they need, in any respect, a man. And so that incredible magnetic pull that existed when I was young between men and women, where it was just like you had no control over it, you know, and your mind started spinning, you know, the more intense the relationship used to start to spin.

33:40Well, I'm going to marry this guy. Maybe that seems to be totally gone, you know, so everything's sort of, and you'll hear young people when they're talking about where they're, you know, if they're talking about marriage, they're not talking about, oh, we'll do this and we'll do that. It's just, well, I'm going to be having a residency in Boston. So I know that. So you've got to find your job. They're just talking about their careers. It's very bloodless. So what I just noticed very casually is that the young people, they do want to get married. They see worth in marriage, and they've always thought of that for themselves.

34:17They do seem to be getting married. They do seem to be finding one another. They do seem to be having children. There's an intentionality about it is what they always thought they would do. And, you know, my twins are 28 and it's now like this summer, like weddings are going off like popcorn, but just for some kids that they know, for other kids, not at all. So I think that there's something beyond the manosphere or the privileged women that are so judgmental. I think there's still a stratum of society, men and women who want to do that, who just always thought they wanted to do that. And we're looking for that and quickly found it relatively quickly.

35:06And then there are people who just, why would I do that? But then it turns out, well, I would do it if I could find this and this than that. And because it becomes so hard once you're in that pool, there becomes this incredible bitterness. And I would say the manosphere, however real or unreal it is, that they have a power over the women who are nasty about men because men are scary. You know, when men are angry, that's really scary. But they both, this whole group of men and women, have real, I'll just say, disdain for one another. And women will have sympathy if a friend of theirs is getting married.

35:46Why is she doing that? So as with everything in America, literally everything, something has ended, you know, the way the boomer era is over and the new thing isn't here yet. And we have no idea what it's going to be, but we can all feel the ground shifting beneath our feet in all sorts of ways, whether it's social, political, in every possible way, we're, you know, and you can add on all the technology, et cetera. We don't know who we are. We don't have a common story. There's not a common story of what America is. There's not an understanding of what, no wonder our kids are woefully uneducated.

36:33We don't have any idea of what we expect after 13 years of public education. Okay, these are the skills every kid should have. These are the things they should know. This is their reading ability. This is where they should be in math, and that's a high school diploma. We have no standard for that. And so we're just drifting right now into a post-educated, post-literate, hypertech era, and people are terribly unsure of themselves within it. yeah um one of the most common questions i've gotten when i do ask me anything episodes is for men that are probably roughly my age maybe a little younger a little older i'm 30 and you're 30 oh come in you're so smart i thought you were a lot older okay good so much life to live but they're asking like how do i manage the problem of you know i want i want to date and meet great women my age and find my wife but i'm having like i don't know how to negotiate the political gap between me and most of the women i'm meeting that are far to the left of me and we know this from the data that there's a there's a big gender divide in politics men or young men in particular tend to be much to the right of young women.

37:58And this becomes a problem because we're, you know, I'm old enough to just, I think, barely remember a time when your politics were not a referendum on who you were as a human being. It's like, yeah, Jim's a Republican and Dave's a Democrat and whatever, and they're friends and nobody wonders how their friendship survives, right? It's just like they vote. They have different views on what the tax rate should be. It wasn't a deep issue. But now it's considered by many young people to be a referendum on whether or not you are a good person. And that then becomes an obstacle. And so young men, to whatever extent this problem is real versus imagined, because if it's real on one date, then it becomes a thing in your head on the second date.

38:51And the psychological, the memory of how bad it went on the last date becomes its own new obstacle in addition to the potential obstacle itself. So I'm curious what advice you would have. But wait, I want to ask you. What do you tell them? My advice thus far has been practical advice, which is try to not bring up politics as long as possible. And in the vacuum of politics, it is possible that you will connect pretty deeply with her for other reasons, whatever that is, maybe humor, maybe you have the same taste in movies, maybe you're super attracted to each other, you just really like get to know each other.

39:33And then by the time politics comes up, she will judge, she will very likely judge those differences in the light of already liking you, which makes the entire difference. Most women will, once they like you, will judge these things far differently than they will judge you if they're meeting you just straight up. That's really good advice. You have to manage the conversation in such a way that you don't hit the tripwires that would reveal a political inclination one way or another. Yeah. That's been my practical advice. I've seen that work. And I say that because I've seen it work for people. That's good.

40:12And the only thing I have said is if you go into that date, I mean, I just say it to women, where you're looking for the disqualifying things, where you're looking for the ick factor, when you're, you know, every possible thing could be, no, not him for sure, then that's what you'll find. And there's no such thing as a first date. That's just like a little job interview for a low-level position. You don't even get to scratch the surface of who someone might be one date, two dates. I mean, it takes a few times to really get to know each other in any way. And I think for women, that whole political, just, I mean, I can see them now, but abortion, which I agree, it's terrible what's happened.

41:04But the idea that any man is just a terrible enemy of all women, if he has a certain political inclination, and as soon as you can find that out, you need to immediately get rid of him and tell all your friends how close you came to sleeping with the enemy. And then that is a perfectly acceptable way to live a life for sure. And I'm not even saying that a life without children or a husband is a lonely life. I've known women, certainly older women who've lived really great creative lives without families or children. For me, it would be a terrible lonely thing that I couldn't bear but um but if if you want to do that then don't don't waste your time or the other person's time by pretending to go on a date that um is full of possibilities you know you're just going so that your bitterness can be legitimate made it like yes i have every reason to be so bitter um it turned out that this person had read jd vance's memoir and because of that I must never, ever be put in the same room with him again.

42:21Why are you wasting your time? You know? And yeah. But the thing is, we all know so many good men and we know so many good young women and there seems to be some problem in the sorting mechanisms to get them together. You know? And I don't know what that is. But it seems to be the younger they find each other, I do see like among middle, upper middle class kids, I see a lot, as I said, of kids getting married younger than they had in the previous years. This sort of sense like we know what we want. We know what we were looking for when we were in college and maybe the early professional school.

43:04And that's what we've done, you know, and their parents are thrilled. And I do think that Not to be horrifying, say anything horrifying, but that the longer you wait, the more the cohort starts breaking apart. You know, when you're young, everybody's kind of still in the same groups and doing the same things and they're still getting together with college friends or whatever. And the more time that spends and more people kind of drift and do other things, you're no longer with a large cohort of peers. I think it gets smaller.

43:43Right. What about the choice whether or not to have kids? Because obviously we're living in a world where just fewer and fewer people are having kids and people who are having kids are having fewer kids. And I've known that I want to have kids with 100 % certainty since I was probably 18 or 19, which I think definitely put me in the minority. But for women, at least when I was in college, I heard from women who said there was, at that point, the feminist valorization of having the big career as a CEO or whatever it is had gotten to such an extent that to express a desire to be a mother was subtly frowned upon, which never really made sense to me.

44:36Because think of my vantage point as someone that knew he wanted to be a father, absolutely, and that whatever my career was, probably there was nothing I would... There's nothing I would regret in my career that could even come close for me to the regret of not having kids. That's just me. So I always... I always felt, well, something must have gone overboard if a 20-year-old young woman feels diminished status because she strongly wants to be a mother and has that as a conscious goal. Something has gone wrong. I mean, there's nothing you'll ever do that's as consequential, as meaningful, and important as having children, but that's not even the reason to have them.

45:28It's that there is no kind of joy in life, nothing like when they hand you that baby and it's a person, you know, you've been thinking all nine months and seeing the images on the screen and reading all the books. and then there's this person, a separate hall person, and you just feel like the delivery room for like one minute is just bathed in this kind of golden light in the sense that you are in the middle of a miracle and you are so immediately bonded to that child. It's beyond anything you could imagine. And you're like, oh, my old life, whatever it contained, all those things. They're far, far, far down the list.

46:17My whole life is doing right by this child. And, you know, I hear young women say, well, I want to do something with a purpose. I want to do something that's meaningful. There's nothing more meaningful than this. And there's nothing, just the pleasure of holding that sleeping baby when he's little and he's just snuggled up into your arms. There's a reason for all of humanity, art has shown us images of mother and child. Everybody has known this is a really important thing and that this kind of love is a separate and particular love that reoccurs everywhere. And to miss out on it would be a terrible thing, a terrible thing.

47:07And to have to pretend or to espouse these ideas that I don't want a kid and I won't get to party and I won't get to do this or do that. Yeah, that's the least of what you're not going to be able to do. You're not in the same life in a lot of ways. But finally, finally, finally, your life is no longer totally dedicated to self. As much as you go to yoga, you go to mass, you go to everywhere, try to get out of your own head, you're still like, what's my next job? What's this? What's that? And the minute you get that baby, you're like, oh no, this is the new life that's come into the world. And I'm the one blessed to shape it and protect it and raise it and then someday let it go on by himself.

47:55and that's what life that is what life is yeah so i don't know that's that's my commercial not a popular one but i try to i try to promote it uh i i'm a big fan of brian kaplan and his book selfish reasons to have more kids where he makes the counterintuitive argument that if you really accept the research which says that parents have less power to shape their kids than we all think. In other words, the biggest influence that you have on your kids is the individual genetic package that you give them. And so long as you avoid the major no-nos of parental abuse and extreme parenting, you don't have a huge impact on their life outcomes.

48:44At some level, that is like an unacceptable truth. If it's true, it's kind of psychologically unacceptable to most parents because the amount of love you have for the child, the idea that you have so little control over the child's outcomes, there's just something unacceptable about that. It's ridiculous. But on the other hand, he argues that if you accept that this is true, then you can take some of the felt burden off of parenting with the knowledge that you know, not every tiny choice you make, you know, whether do they need to take an extra class? Do they need to run around to an extra round of dance practice?

49:33Or else, you know, God forbid, we don't keep up with the Joneses or God forbid, we don't get them that extra hour of tutoring, whatever it is. You can relax a bit as a parent with the understanding that these micro choices don't matter as much as you think they did. And he ultimately argues that that's a reason that people should have more kids and be more relaxed about their parenting styles, right? Definitely. What do you make of that argument? Definitely being more relaxed. And I see a lot of young parents who are a lot more relaxed than I was, maybe because I'm such a high-strung person. But obviously, how you set a child up in life economically is probably equal to the genetic package.

50:14And those two are probably bigger than the parenting, so to speak. But yeah, if you have a good home, I mean, the best thing you could ever do for your child is to love your partner. If they look in that stable, the gift of that, beyond anything that you can imagine, is profound. Their sense of security in the world is profound. And their sense that whatever goes on, these two I can count on, whether I'm mad at them, whether they're weird, whatever. They have, they will always be there. They are the backstop for everything. And if they see that and they feel that, you know, and people always say when they've had a recent divorce, you say, well, how are the kids doing?

51:10They're doing great. They're just doing great. They're not doing great. They don't know how to tell you what's wrong. They don't even know what's wrong. But it really hurts. And so I would say if you can get that, you just get that part of the, because everybody's going to love their kids unless you're a psychopath, you know, and care about, you know, where they're in school or whatever. But if they get a sense that it's not just that you and your husband love them, it's that you love each other and that the group, the family is indivisible.

51:45that will always make a strong person, always. I'm curious what you think about the way modern society, in particular in the West, treats sort of the issue of children. What I mean by that is when I visited Israel years ago, it struck me that this was inherently an easier place to raise a child because there's something like self-perpetuating about having children. If everyone else around you also has children, right? Then your kids just walk outside. They go play with the neighbor's kids. They can disappear for two hours and you can be 100 % certain that they're safe and probably having fun and that there are other adults around who welcome children, right?

52:40You can bring, it's just like a culture of you can bring your kids to a restaurant and no adult is going to think you've ruined the vibe by bringing your, you know, your snot-nosed kid. It's just like not, no one's going to have that attitude. And everyone is just more tolerant of the kinds of small nuisances that children bring along to any social space, right? And then, you know, I was just listening to, I think it was Andrew Sullivan and historian H.W. Brand, and they were just both talking about how in their childhood, on a weekend, they would literally disappear at noon and come back at six.

53:21And their parents, you know, mom would have cooked dinner by six, but like, they're just out roving with the neighborhood kids for hours, right? That's how we grew up in the States. Yes. I mean, no one knew where I was. I mean, I had loving parents, but you just, you got, sometimes you come back to get a lunch if it was the weekend. But you were out and about, you had your business to conduct, you know, you had these other friends and you'd sort of wash ashore in one of their houses. And if it was lunchtime, that mother would make you a sandwich. And it was just, now I don't know if the parents were right that nothing would happen to us.

54:01I to be on his or her own in the Berkeley Hills in that era. But no, we had, but I know what you're saying. I haven't been to Israel, but I've been many times to Italy. And that sense that we love the children. We love them. And my sister years ago, she was at a restaurant in Italy. She's American. And her little two-year-old took the plate, it was empty, and he smashed it on the ground. It was that big noise. And they thought, oh, we're going to get thrown out. And the waiters just loved it. you know, Bambino, and they're cleaning it up and they're playing with him. And it was just that children are the delight, you know, and nothing's going to go right when you have a lot of kids around.

54:39It's always going to get messed up. And that's life. Right. And, and I think like the fewer people that have kids in a society, the fewer people kind of are used to that sort of level of nuisance. The fewer people tolerate it in public spaces. I mean, you can just see how in some ways being a parent is less attractive in this environment because you have to be your kids' entertainment, right? More and more people only have one kid as opposed to two or three or four. Okay, that means you're your kids, either you're your kids' entertainment or you're handing them the iPad, right? And that becomes exhausting for the typical adult.

55:24If you don't have that four-hour break on the weekends where they're just running around, you can see how the way culture is evolving has actually made, you know, everything in life is getting easier with technology, like easier and easier and easier. But certain things sort of aren't getting easier. And it might be that parenting is one of those things. I'm curious if you share that view or if that's too pessimistic. Well, at least I could just tell you how things were in America 60 years ago. You spent a lot of time being bored and your parents aren't going to give you anything to stop the boredom.

56:00And you're really angry about that, but you know, nothing's changing. And before you know it, oh, you found these old toys and now you set up this new thing to do with them. and then you get bored again, you're angry, but then you start reading a book that you've already read. And it is that boredom is a very generative state because there's only one way out, which is finding something to do to no longer be bored. But I certainly know, I don't know what's going to happen with this. When I see people and their kids have a screen, I get it if I'd had that. and in fact they just uh game boys i remember we got them each a game boy when we were going to hawaii and they were five and i thought this is going to be the end of them and it wasn't but it was just like it was like we'd set our kids to to pause you know like from just total noise we gave it to them right before we took off but it was also scary to see how quickly they just were totally drained into this little piece of machinery um so i don't think that's going anywhere good.

57:05But no, you're going to find, you'll find the other parents. You always do. You go to the park every day and you meet that other mother. You meet that other father. You meet this other person. Someone says, let's get them all together on a Saturday. It's not a glamorous lifestyle, but you find the other people and you set up the play dates and you're doing this great thing of raising children. And there's just nothing like, there's nothing like it. I mean, And it's just so strange to even have to talk about the appeal of children. That's how much the culture has changed. But like when you look around, like what is the point?

57:44They're the point, you know, that's the deep pleasure of life. It's not getting ahead yourself. And life is ruinously expensive, but the poor have had children much poorer than any American poverty can be.

58:03that there's a saying that each child brings his own loaf of bread with him. Somehow you make space. But I think if you don't want them, don't have them. Definitely. Ever. And it's perfectly legitimate to not want them. But be sure that you know what you're giving up on. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, someone commented recently that, you know, one thing that has disappeared for most people like in their late teens and early 20s is that experience of being around children that are not your children, but frequently as like a young adult, right? Because everyone is a child. And then some people, when they're, you know, nowadays, it's like 30, right?

58:48Some people, when they're 30, will choose to have a child. But there's this in-between period where you're no longer a child. You're no longer, as far as modern society is concerned, old enough to have kids. And in an earlier era, there were just so many kids around. People had so many cousins. and just there was it was more of a child full culture that you would experience that almost like that almost like test driving parenting thing of hanging out with someone else's kid as a 20 year old or your cousin right and you would you would get to experience a little bit of what that joy might feel like as a young adult which becomes a test a test drive for whether you want to have a kid in five or ten years and I think increasingly very fewer people have that experience as a as a normal part of the rhythm of their life like okay you might be around a kid once in a while but not enough for that that kid to really begin to love you and trust you and for you to experience that like warmth um and and so this is another way in which there being fewer children around is a self-perpetuating cycle because that the person who quote unquote, quote unquote, doesn't want kids, that's real.

1:00:02And you're right. Like if you don't want kids, you shouldn't have kids. But it also could be in some cases, at least that you, you never really got to experience that, that kind of feeling. And the feeling of that little kid, like if you're the cousin, the older cousin, and they just look at you, like you set the moon because you're the a big older cousin who can do different things. But again, back to America of another era that will never return and probably shouldn't and kept women back. If you were a girl, a middle-class girl, by the time you were 12, you were babysitting for money. That was what you did.

1:00:41And they didn't have any extracurricular. Maybe somebody had to play the oboe once a week on Saturday with a teacher. but it was like that was nobody questioned well is she good enough or whatever and then you started getting like oh kids like her so people really call her early and then when I went to college how weird is this um someone told me oh in the main hall they have a book of people who need babysitters and I was like really because I had a car and so I babysat a lot in college and And it was just, this is what would be seen as a limiting thing is that you're, as a girl, to be good at that, to be seen by others, oh, she's very good with children, didn't mean like, oh, she's kind of slow.

1:01:30It meant like that was a treasured thing in a young woman. And obviously that barred so many young women from advancing in more powerful positions because it was seen that this was the thing they were good at. Right, they got pigeonholed. Yeah, exactly. So it was just such a different era. And we can't and won't and wouldn't want to go back to it for all sorts of reasons. But I do see in big families, you know, my husband's from a really big family in Minneapolis. And there is that generational thing where the oldest of the cousins have taken care of, the youngest of the cousins are now getting married.

1:02:12And there's even a grandchild. children, being around a lot of kids is definitely puts you in that either very much in the family way of mind or never am I doing that frame of mind. But I just see like wedding invitations, no children, don't bring any children. And it's like, but the wedding, the fecundity, you know, the children, the flowers, that everything is just, that's what a point of a wedding is. No, it's just a fancy event and we don't want it sullied by a yelling baby or something. It's so antiseptic and it's so cold and it leaves no inch of just human life and the mess and drama and joy of human life.

1:02:59It's bizarre to me to not want children at a wedding. But I vent to them, you know, being not a child myself, I can go. But I think if we get to this point, we can continue it where fewer and fewer children are born. Well, the robots can take over with no questions, you know, like if we don't even care enough to have children and to be with them and to raise them and have something, have our 25 cents in on the future of humanity. You know, put our 25 cents in on what comes next and how a person should be in life and why it would be important to, before you go to graduate school, spend time working with the homeless, why that would be important.

1:03:47If people don't have any interest in doing that, I guess we're giving up. All right. Well, I don't want to end on that pessimistic note. It's always a pessimistic note with me. There's so much trouble. Caitlin Flanagan. Thank you so much for coming on my show. Thank you for having me. And I would like to be invited to the wedding whenever it happens. Oh, all right.