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

37:21I suppose so. The only thing I would say, though, is that the impression I get from a lot of women who are very, very invested in refugees welcome kind of stuff is that they really infantilize these men at the same time. And there's a degree to which they're kind of scooping up the vulnerable, you know. You think this is a bit like the American pit bull ladies phenomenon? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's that? He's just misunderstood. I'll just add some. Put it in there. It's okay. This is another one of these discourses, actually probably related obliquely to Le Boubou Man. It was one of these memes that sloshes around in which a certain subtype of usually single American progressive women are accused of adopting actually obviously murderously sociopathically dangerous rescue pitbulls as a kind of proxy for the sort of man they would never dream of admitting to fancying in real life.

38:17Right, okay. So in a sense, you know, officially they're only allowed to date Lububu Man, and that's in fact the only people who are within their social circles immediately. Okay. And so they adopt a pit bull to just kind of compensate his lack of... I see you're Lububu Man, and I raise you the newly nomenclatured Himbo, which has actually come back around. the new dream guy is beefy placid and politically ambiguous amid pitch debates about masculinity the himbo stands stoically above it all 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 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 unconfirmed.

39:07So is this like Ken in Greta Gerwig's? He says towards the end, if I'd realized patriarchy wasn't just about horses, I wouldn't have bothered. Hunk with a heart of gold. Hunk with a heart of gold. I think, who was the dude that did Magic Mike? Who was the guy, the actor that played Magic Mike? Channing Tatum. Channing Tatum is often put forward as like him, but I actually, Channing Tatum follows me on Instagram, so I actually quite like him but hunk with a heart of gold the human equivalent of a smiley face what we've got here is basically i think you're trying to cross the streams between le boo boo man uh in terms of disposition and front cover of a dark romance novel in terms of presentation 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 extreme threat, right?

40:00But you also don't want someone who's going to beat you up and beat up your children. And so that's tricky. The line that you've got to perennially walk. Yeah, yeah. And so the himbo is, I love a himbo, right? And the impression from my female friends is that himbo is a very high status. 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 labubu man who was like excessively intellectual. 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. is not what she wants from a man, right?

40:32Ahimo does kind of tread that tightro. 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 turn on you. Again, I mean, skipping sideways through this sort of untidy territory, there was a piece, I think it was in the New York Times, which is often a sort of barometer for what American middle-class women in their 30s think about stuff in general there was i think it was the new york times but it was it was somewhere in that zone that discursive zone anyway um on on how on a on a fascinating new trend of women marrying down and what they were actually talking about yeah no no but what they were talking about wasn't actually women marrying down it was women marrying below their educational level yeah actually they were made financially they were marrying up because these were 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.

41:25It's like complex hypergamy. Who were marrying construction entrepreneurs or a successful plumber with several employees who was turning over chunks of change. And so in straightforward financial terms, 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, some of these women were experiencing it as kind of marrying down. And I think that speaks to your himbo in the sense that very sensibly, these extremely overeducated women have married some guy who's going to appreciate their brains and also be able to pay the mortgage without trying to compete.

42:08It seems like the himbo is economically prepared and maybe educationally underdeveloped, whereas the labubu man is maybe economically underdeveloped and overeducated. I mean, would you rather have a guy who can talk contemporary literature but can't afford to buy you dinner? Or some guy who can fix the plumbing when it goes wrong and just doesn't care what you think about books? I have a funny story about this. It occurs to me 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. But anyone who knows, PhDs don't translate into big money, right?

42:45So my dad's always earned a lot more. 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, someone's behaving like King Lear in relation to someone. He didn't understand what they were saying. He called my mom very quietly and said, what happens in King Lear? It was a funny example of this. speed there's something there how much do women find that endearing how much do women find needing to intellectually coddle their partner beyond up to a certain point how much do they find that is oh noble savage i personally find that endearing i don't know if he's also 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 what about if it's the opposite though 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 at your house.

43:41I mean, competence. Competence is very hot. 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. I suppose, you know, zooming back a bit, you could probably make the case that we're currently in an age of flux, where this never-ending growth really does feel like it's come to an end. You know, politics is quite uncertain. 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. And it could be that, in fact, some of these very instinctive mating patterns are going to shift or are perhaps already shifting in the light of how people assess their own prospects in that very much more uncertain world.

44:26So women who might have gone for the intellectual guy because he can always buy in a plumber are going to assess you know who their likely who their looks match and economic match is likely to be for a long-term partnership and think you know what actually like the boo-boo man I need somebody who knows how who knows how to use a shotgun or you know or you know there are various levels of deranged preparationists that you can apply to that depending on depending on your filter bubble but there are you understand understand what i'm saying it's like that study that men like fatter women when they're hungry economic security hypothesis yeah so it's like perhaps the equivalent for for women women like more more masculine men when it seems like yeah that's a fucking awesome mac and murphy if you're listening go and do that study for me i mean it seems like if that's empirically researchable but intuitively it feels completely right super easy whatever that whatever the equivalent of the social you know the vix index if you move that volatility within the market whatever the social equivalent of that is okay let's just have what are the uh popular types of uh the preferred types of men would you want one that's more domineering or one that's a little bit more casual whereas the point of being able to discourse about the new review of books is status games right and so and that's very much maslow's hierarchy of needs tippy top so that's the sort of thing that you're going to jettison pretty quickly yeah yeah in these kind of conditions oh so the fact that you have the ability to do that suggests to me that in some ways maybe it's a a luxury position oh 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 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 prior he turned the uh triangle upside down yeah yeah that's what's unattractive uh so the the only final bit on this himbo thing what is it about the kind of it's not someone who's saying i want the renaissance man I want the thinking man, including, because presumably you could say I want to max out his physicality and also max out his mind.

46:32But it seems like it's actually preferable to have the slightly more doughy eyed human smiley face as a partner. the one thing that I would maybe throw into the mix there is that if you have somebody that is both domineering uh 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 he's maybe going to be able to outwit me um is that an element or what do you think's going on with this desire to actually kind of turn down the volume on the intellectual nature?

47:09Simplicity? Or is it maybe a bit... I mean, realistically, guys like that are just relatively rare, so partly it's just a numbers game. Yeah. But also, I feel like it's a bit girly to be too preoccupied with. Yeah, yeah. Thought and emotions. Just 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? Also Lana Del Rey. I love her choice of a husband. She's the kind of right-wing coded equivalent, isn't she? Lana Del Rey has married a crocodile wrangler. It's incredible. From Louisiana, I want to say. He's a completely normal blue-collar guy.

47:51I don't know if blue-collar is the right word if you're a crocodile wrangler. Green-collar. He does it completely. Stainly-collar. Very skilled. Very impressive. Big arms, masculine. Yeah. And has nothing to do. Extremely competent. But then I was thinking, if you're Lana Del Rey or you're Taylor. You don't need the money. You don't need the money. And actually, marrying someone who's in your field of work and who are inevitably less successful than you is a nightmare. Because you're able to do more comparison hierarchically. So what does it mean to date hypergamously if you are going cross? Who's above you if you're Taylor?

48:23Yeah, exactly. I picked someone from another industry. I picked someone that's not. There is no way of doing hypergamy if you're Taylor Swift because she's just right above. Atop of her own hierarchy. She's the apex of so many different hierarchies. this is will have you read the status game by but but travis kelsey you know he's enormous yeah um he you know he's a successful he'll outlift her he's able to outrun her he's got pick her up and chuck he can probably juggle her but he's got prestige and he's got standing in his own field in and specifically in a cohort that she does not 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 right yeah exactly and this is if you've read will store's a status game you've probably interviewed him at some point his really really good piece of life advice is that everyone is completely blessed with status you can't pretend that you're not it's this just the natural human condition to be preoccupied with status but you can choose which status game you compete in to some extent 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 and so yeah choosing having a spouse who's competing in a different status game from yourself i think is very sensible a young friend who also has something of an internet platform told me recently that he he had tried dating women who who also were internet uh figures of some sort and it was just hideous it feels too similar yeah it was just it was too much of a comparison's too direct um and and there's a i and i guess i i don't think like this wasn't his point but it struck me that if you were if you're both um people if you both have a platform you both have an audience the temptation to turn your relationship into content would be almost would be totally this is freya india's thing right that all relationships are just brand collaborations right and and it doesn't have to be like that but you really if you're very online you have to choose you know you're you're going to survive much longer and stay much saner if your partner is not online at all or is or is it just not very interested in that have you heard the theory that aliens are just the end of human evolution that they're what complete yeah i'm bringing it back i promise um they're sort of uh huge heads human heads have got bigger over time although they actually got smaller at one point as well but human heads are big um we seem to be getting lower testosterone less muscled less sort of you know domineering physically and that aliens the classic sort of big head big eyes thing is the completely atrophied in the body but uh overdeveloped uh cognitively well they are to us as we are to chimps uh and yeah because we are weaker bigger brains yeah and then you just keep running that forward i want less hair on aliens as well good point i never really assessed the hair of an alien but it's just it's just interesting to hear where your mind goes um i wonder whether la boo boo man is kind of the same sort of i've adapted to my local environment 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 so so the interesting quote you know what the you know civilizations can go down as well as up how long would it take after the shit hit the fan hypothetically speaking in civilizationally before the boo-boo man got his got his act together and was either it was either selected aggressively out of the picture altogether or actually just learned to shoot yeah well i mean 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 my athlete's foot precludes me from being able to go into the you know there's like all manner of different excuses and uh yeah without selection pressure people fold around whatever that situation is they kind of get molded and shaped by it i think it's a really serious problem right now if we did have some kind of serious strife in this country 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 they're not the real political community 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 and yeah under those circumstances the idea that you you should 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 demographic change you're trying to redraw territory so so having having said 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 and then you turn around the next day and you're like oh by the way we're going to reinstate the draft because putin no no you could you do you blame the kids for saying no fuck off that's Such a good point.

53:09Holy 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 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 ask people, would you go to war for your country? And they all say no. What normally happens is that anyone who's a member of an ethnic minority will say, oh, but I'm Jamaican.

53:40Or no, because I'm not from here or something. And actually, you scratch the surface and everyone has a degree of ethnocentrism. 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, but they're just going to draw the tribe around people who look like them. and once you scale that up to the level of you know you 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 yeah because of course nation states are modern inventions and they are a bit fake they are they are and i mean and if you look at if you look at the the flag phenomenon that we've been seeing a lot recently you know it that feels to me like a precursor to a kind of ulsterization happening within within the united kingdom which is deeply deeply concerning 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 our a bridge near our house has now had i think four iterations of people putting up flags taking them down putting them and they leave the cable ties every time so that there's just like a porcupine kind of thing on the graveyard of where patriotism used to be yeah and people putting up counter things and whatever it's like whole thing and there's quite a lot of tiktok videos of people having these confrontations 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 and it's really obvious yeah yeah and why is it obvious or why is this happening why is it happening because i think the whole thing is a class rule always has been i think that's basically right yeah um i mean i was sort of obliquely thinking about the writing about the normal conquest uh earlier this week you know this is this is this is where that particular class war began um because the english class system was originally not just a caste system but also a racialized caste system in the the ruling class uh the normans arrived and just replaced the whole anglo-saxon ruling class with their own and they were a different they were a different ethnic and i guess didn't interbreed that much well i mean to to an extent after a while um but people with norman surnames are still to this day more likely to be wealthy than those with saxon no way People with names like Smith and Cooper are less likely to be rich than people with names like Glanville or, you know.

56:01Dennis. Or Grosvenor, indeed. The current Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, can trace his ancestry all the way back to 1066. Yeah. And is still a billionaire, still one of the richest people in the country. I think he's number 15. Gregory Clark is punching the air right now. So, I mean, you know, never mind critical race theory. England has had a racialized caste system all for a thousand years. And I think actually, really, genuinely, that's a significant factor in what Louise is describing about this class war. There is a subset of more well-off, culturally middle or upper class English people who identify much more with the Norman disposition.

56:46and then there are a group of people who think of themselves I mean it's even right there in the conflict between English and British you know British values English flags they mostly alternate them but I've noticed that if you go to touristy places they have Union Jacks up anyway because it's a bit twee that's not flagging flagging has to necessitate St George's crosses at least some of them and it's an anti-government gesture yeah um and again the comments you'll get all the time on social media it's such a classic like midwit normie take is um are they don't have any gcce's and they don't have any teeth like basically something very very classless directed at nativists 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 if you do the sort of job that is vulnerable to the importation of cheap labor obviously you're going to hate it so much more than if you're doing completely working completely different industry like yes you correctly identify this class fissure 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 i mean it drove brexit and they learn nothing yeah it's a similar dynamic to what happened in america but it's got uniquely british flavor because of how because of the class system correct precisely correct bluntly because of the normans yeah well look i i 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 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 it's probably from the northeast aren't you newcastle well stockton so so you probably don't exactly have skin in either sides of these game because you're probably viking in heritage i have no idea i need to do my 23 i need to do my ancestry well don't because data security they're about to sell the whole database oh god and all of the murders i've done all come up yeah they sell my data um yeah no don't do that but i mean people from the northeast are ancestrally much more likely to be uh danish scandinavian inheritance i sit outside of the hierarchy um so so you can you can you can throw tomatoes at the northerns and i do i'm sure if you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like getting your blood work done is the best place to start which is why i partnered with function they run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers.

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59:41So just go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. I don't know whether this is precisely true. 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. However, this feels like a uniquely new british brand of something akin to woke flagging yes and and the response to it and it's the reason that i want to that i haven't got a different word for it broke wouldn't work as britain well um 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 u.s that people that were left of center that were very pro-immigration but the reason that they were doing it and the sort of accusations that they would make weren't the same 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 although isn't that what hillary was saying with the basket of deplorables like it was basically a class statement it was more veiled whereas i guess here it tends to be more explicit which was probably because we've had a thousand years of not being invaded right so you can you can build up they can ossify exactly the situation in america is is much more complicated because they've because everybody there where do i stand in this hierarchy i'm not sure i've only been here for five minutes there is technically an immigrant yeah um at one point or another yeah um so so it's very much harder to have to do the nativist thing because you know the the most recent anglophone arrivals weren't that long ago and it's also a problem of course it because 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 that is factually incorrect like britain was 99 plus white british in the it does strike me out at times that casually conflating invasion and immigration is possibly not the wind that the middle class advocates imagine it is anyway yeah yeah they're like what about the vikings i can see some ways that that could back remember linda's farm did we not embrace the i know um but because they're so yankee brained they they don't realize that actually no like people here are indigenous to these islands going back a very long way i did not the same as in america i did wonder about what a land acknowledgement in the uk would look like 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 it was very funny it's a classic douglas uh although No, really.

1:02:11I mean, strictly speaking, the Duke of Westminster also counts as a colonizer. Because that's Hugh Grosvenor who arrived with the Normans. Oh, there we go. So, I mean, Hugh Grosvenor ought to be doing a land acknowledgement to the Saxons. Your surname has scuppered you. Looping it back to the perennial discussion about stupid things to the relationships on the internet. Have you heard of princess treatment? What? No. Oh, allow me. I mean, you are spending a lot of time on TikTok. I would have expected this to come across. Okay, princess treatment refers to various supposedly fairytale-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.

1:02:48Nearly 130 ,000 Instagram posts congregate under it. However, this is immediately being taken to reductio ad absurdum. courtney palmer self-proclaimed housewife princess 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 you are not going to be laughing loudly speaking loudly or demanding the attention of the restaurant so princess treatment uh is this not sort of lifestyle bdsm with it i was gonna say it's a sex thing it's a sex thing it's a sex thing how have you both arrived at this this is like that This is like that fucking anti-wisdom thing where I haven't seen it.

1:03:26You're looking at this optical illusion. I'm like, what? I mean, this is kind of a Mary Louise group chat. It's a Mary Louise group chat running joke about the tradwife. I mean, there's the tradwife or autogynophile, but that's not this. What the tradwife? Autogynophile. Or, but there's also the continuity between right-wing complementarian tradwife discourse and lifestyle BDSM, which it seems to me is just it's it's really just a question of inflection but it's basically the same conversation you're gonna have to bring it down to earth a little bit okay do you do which of us is going imagine that i didn't read the first three harry potter books and i've come in at the fourth please so so on the one hand you have you know it's often very protestant code sometimes quite american there's a certain there's a sort of religiously inflected discourse about how men do one set of tasks and play one set of roles within a within a long-term relationship and women play the other and and everyone comes together as ordained by god in this in this dual dance of complementary uh unity and then everything is good um and then in an entirely different political filter bubble you have the people who embrace lifestyle bdsm which is um a it's a way of living in a long-term relationship where one person is always um 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 there's a degree of entitlement though here which doesn't sound superbly submissive well i mean this is this is where it gets this is actually both both um complementarian um right-wing trad types and also lifestyle bdsmers will tell you that in fact um the the wife slash submissive depending on how depending on how you're framing it you know has plenty of say because in fact it's...

1:05:13She's the one putting it online. It's never the man who's filming content about this, is it? That's true. It's always the woman. That's true. Well, this is too much of a rabbit hole. No, do it. Let's run it. I'm fascinated. I'm already fucking Alice in Wonderland here. Women do this simultaneous. Like, I'm so submissive. And there's a lot of humblebrag going on as well. Like, by the way, my husband could afford to buy me all this stuff. It's the long nails along her high heels. Yeah, exactly. right but also she's calling the shots in terms of their social media presence yeah and also which is really what matters in in these sorts of very deliberately stylized polarized relationships you know assuming it's a long-term affectionate relationship that ever that both both parties want to continue and sustain and maintain then actually the person who's a 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 that's interesting if you see 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 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 it doesn't like your decisions eventually you know the so the nominally submissive one well the nominally submissive one will vote with their feet you know assuming that it's a consensual loving relationship otherwise um you have to make decisions that both people both of you want to abide by um so so actually it's not as it's not as common it's not as commanding as all of that you know but it just sort of reflects yeah i think i mean we both feel like there's nothing wrong with complementary gender roles like with within reason they make sense it's fine like no no complaint 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 this makes sense of our financial lies etc it's this turns me on and i'm also doing it for an online audience that's weird yeah that's good but i mean you know this the the difference i i don't really see a huge amount of difference in kind between that and princess treatment if she's like i i'm just going to sit there sit there at the 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 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 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 it's a great point yeah wow okay i i really have seen through the matrix here fuck 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 is a there is also a continuum between that and domestic abuse because if the one Financial imprisonment.

1:07:58Yeah, 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 unpleasant dynamics. Does this not play into another one of those lines that needs to be walked that it would be nice to be looked after? Yeah. 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 overdo the dose, the response curve gets really squirrely when you get toward the point, well, I can't leave.

1:08:27anymore because I don't have my own phone. I don't have my own bank account. I don't have my own access to anything. It's the big, big trade-off of traditional gender roles that the woman has no financial independence. 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, the cost for anybody of leaving is so high and so common sorry it's 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 the back door i mean it strikes me that maybe maybe a possible explanation for why complement these complement 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 it might it might make sense in terms of that failure mode the sort of abusive failure mode um in that if you're if you're posting online about what a surrendered wife you are actually you're probably making bank and so you're not all that surrendered after all because there's this other dimension to it yeah you know do you remember the whole discourse about ballerina farm and that no oh okay no she's instagram star married to the air of jet blue don't you didn't even know about himbos fucking hell you have how many bajillion followers on instagram you've never come across ballerina farm okay okay entirely entirely distinct influencer universe look at the echo chambers are very echoey here yeah the internet the internet is a big place okay so ballerina farm very beautiful very accomplished sort of trad life in hannah neelman hannah married to married to the scion of the jet blue family and inherited a load of money and they they have a farm where she does trad things and has lots of beautiful children okay and makes yogurt and it's all very crunchy i mean right exactly it's lovely content they she it's also like the content engine which powers actually a very profitable business for them selling like kitchen aliens yogurt whatever yeah like 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 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 women primarily on the internet thought were alarming like how exhausted she got i'm not surprised she gets exhausted because she has so many kids close together yeah um but things like they don't have a nanny they don't have any domestic help despite obviously being able to afford it and they were like oh this is a sign that he's oppressing and i thought no you know what i actually get it i think that she there's a weird kind of anglo thing going on including anglo-american of like no i'm going to do the hard thing on my own i'm going to do the deliberately but also you know having having recorded a few podcasts and seeing 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 that i 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 she's she's running the show she's driving yeah but it makes sense to me that the the the trad meme gets propagated either from within religious communities where there is actually a much thicker relationship, there is a thicker community of people surrounding the couple.

1:11:54You know, again, this is not foolproof because, you know, domestic abuse happens within religious communities as well. But it provides some kind of ideological scaffolding for a couple such that, you know, potentially that could help to keep a relationship in line, you know, and stop abuse creeping in and make sure things are able to remain healthy. Is that kind of an 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? Well, I mean, again, it's not foolproof.

1:12:28I can't name names, but I know from one noted right-wing content-producing woman that she knows of several women within that space who are posting Sunny Tradwife content while their husbands are also not treating them very well. This also happens. 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. You know, I'm not sure there's a guaranteed way of hedging against that. One way that does traditionally sort of work to hedge against being mistreated by your husband is male kin, your own male kin.

1:13:05Like, is it Sonny Corleone in Godfather who beats up his sister's abuser or something like that, right? Like, in really those really traditional societies, your recourse as a woman, if your husband is mistreating you... Your dad goes around and breaks his legs for the gospel. That's the issue of patrilocal and matrilocal. Yeah, I mean, this is probably something, Chris, that you're more able to speak to than either of us, which is about the formation of virtuous men. I'm glad that you look at me and you think formation of virtuous men. As the only guy in this conversation, unfortunately, I think this one's yours to speak.

1:13:38But it seems to me that, you know, where have all the good men gone? Actually, the one part of the answer to that is that, you know, if we want good men, we need to be forming good men. And actually, what forms men is not women, it's other men. And I'm not sure we think nearly hard enough or specifically enough or concretely enough about how we go about forming men. And I mean, this sort of goes to your Lububu figure. You know, if the men that we're forming are sort of noodle-armed Lububu guys, rather than virtuous, capable, competent men, then that's not just a problem for men, that's a problem for everyone.

1:14:14Well, I think a lot of the advice that men are given is about how to behave in a manner that makes women feel more comfortable. But if the, which it seems to continually be reinforced, male competition theory seems to be highly predictive of female attraction as opposed to actually female attraction. so there's a this is the david putz study have you seen this one where they looked oh this is fucking brilliant you're gonna love this so uh photos of men were shown to both men and women the women were asked to rate how attractive these men were 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 12 months later they brought the photo men into the lab and said, how many sexual partners have you had over the last year?

1:15:15The female attractiveness rating was basically non-predictive and the male intimidation rating was highly correlated. Competence is hot. And competence cashes out ultimately as, can this guy protect me in a fist fight? They also have higher sex drives maybe, right? They're higher T. There's some variables in here. They're going to be more forthcoming. They're going to be less agreeable they're going to be you know chasing after it making it happen as opposed to waiting for it to come to them 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 uh the ovulatory shift thing got another decapitation the other day which was uh women don't find men with beards any more or less attractive but they are more sexually uh successful and men find them more intimidating so it's this whatever it is um uh women don't help you win they just wait at the finish line to see who goes first um and it is male competition theory for this but the issue is if guys are trying to labubu reverse engineer their way into what they think women want a lot of the time entirely going about it the wrong way yeah we made labubu into a verb yes they have labubu Oh, you've done gone and laboobooed yourself Oh no, he's laboobooed himself Oh The usuals just climbed Climbed off into my chest and died So I think the issue is And this is what I really want you to get into here Post Me Too Being able to to talk frankly about anything which is not nerfed, rounded off edges, libuboified, flaccid soy man 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.

1:17:18like we just got away from this thing which was entitlement domineering um controlling entitlement even though the labubu men also have their own type of entitlement in a very sort of a conniving malicious yeah yeah sneaky way um i don't think i don't know where you get 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-up artistry 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 fugazi thing to get a woman into bed 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 uh option but it'll probably get them into bed i mean i can't i keep coming back to my conviction that this has to happen offline like online online advice is is no good like whether it's jordan but you could be the most productive well but because they don't because they don't the person doesn't know you um and actually you know actionable advice um actionable model probably comes from trusted uh trusted decent older men in your own community and and you know and really this a lot of the time yeah the uncles yeah but the structural problem is that those those those intergenerational networks are in some cases almost completely gone and that i think that problem is particularly grave for young men growing up in fatherless households what a Especially if you - Which is, you know, it's not a coincidence that those are the guys who end up joining gangs because there they're finding mentorship from older men.

1:19:09And that's literally the only kind form of older male, you know, peer group mentorship. I literally - Older male mentorship that you can get. Sat there with Bugsy Malone, Aaron Davies, who is famous ex-gang member, now turned rapper and actor in Guy Ritchie movies, lives in Dubai, phenomenally wealthy, very, very well read, all the rest of it. 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 i was 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'd been an older sister right there would have been advice that was coming down and if your dad is busy even if he's not 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 yeah and you're like fuck like i i need i'm hungry for more i need more more more and especially if most of your interaction occurs online but online you're worried about saying something which is going to be deemed so toxic or 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.

1:20:37I also think that there's something structurally feminizing or feminine about social media discourse just in general, because it forecloses physical violence, obviously, because it's dematerialized. Your word's selling your way through stuff. Yeah, your word's selling your way. It encourages endless talking and it forecloses physical violence. 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. Like actually most of it is not really about conversation at all. It's about cooperating on getting something done.

1:21:09That's why the Men's Sheds initiative in Australia was so good. Yeah. And I mean, you know, it strikes me that, you know, getting men together to talk about their feelings is precisely the wrong way to go about it. Get them together to fix a lawnmower and they might talk about their feelings alongside it. Or just not in a way which is mutually understood and mutually respectful. But 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 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.

1:21:49That seems to me like a completely insane scenario. 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. You have so many fewer cousins now than even a generation or two ago because of people obviously having fewer children. And also when people are having children later, you end up with these long, thin families where you have very old very young but not that much in between just not that many people and it makes me think of that line from Kurt Vonnegut 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 like it's not realistic to expect your spouse to be everything that you need socially everything 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 you wouldn't need to be as many people because there would be more people there would be more male infrastructure available in particular and again this is also the dilemma because anglos actually don't like having anglos quite like chris doesn't want the aunties you don't want the aunties i made i made the fucking what's that okay look i'm i'm uh you run away from the my what's that thing did i can contradict myself while I'm deep, I contain multitude.

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1:24:13let's do can you do a little post-mortem on me too now we're kind of like what 10 12 years post the the the peak of that we're both married and have been for a while are we were we the best people to do this i don't know 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 and now they don't do that because of me too has them scared that period i think where men would find their spouses by doing cold approaches was really brief i think you're completely right it roughly coincides with and is connected to the very short flash-in-the-pan era of free speech absolutism.

1:24:57Free speech absolutism and cold approach dating are basically the same phenomenon where you abolish a whole load of old-fashioned moreies and everybody just does what they want, but the afterburner of those moreies is still strong enough that nobody gets up to anything too disgusting. They're huffing on the fumes of the previous era. Yeah, they're basically huffing on the fumes of conservative sort of pre-sexual revolution behavioral norms. Why is that important? Why is the inclusion of that period of guys cold approaching women in bars or at work, even having women in the workplace whilst men were able to date them, also relatively narrow window?

1:25:36Because cold approach presupposes a whole load of basic behavioral norms in order not just to be absolutely terrifying, call the police stuff. 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. And so that there's an edge of fun, excitement and danger and frisson. It requires a high trust society, fundamentally. And so actually does free speech absolutism because you're never really free to say anything you want. 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.

1:26:09But it seemed as though it was the case. The people who are still really annoyed about the disappearance of free speech absolutism are maybe 10 years older than me. I'm in my 40s now. 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 nobody really crossed the line too far now we're just too diverse um for free speech absolutism because there you there is there are so many different perspectives it's possible to have that you know you could actually genuinely end up frightening or offending or you know inciting violence from uh any number of different subgroups you've crossed some random you didn't know yeah um so you know it so so so it's it's just no longer possible and it's the same with cold approach because i mean you know you know going back to the sort of petrol flames conversation we were having before you know a lot of a lot of those scenarios are really you know genuinely about mutual cultural incomprehension you know there are guys 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, you know, Instagram or whatever.

1:27:16So they have this very odd picture of what social norms here are like. And then they do their best to put them into practice, at which point some 14-year-old girl just screams and runs away, calls the police. He gets arrested. And then, you know, there's a crowd outside your microphone. And there's a crowd outside the hotel where you've been put up. And, you know, 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 it's cold approach it's pua stuff that they're trying literally that's what they're trying to do um but the but the but the cultural differences are such that it's just not possible the game got translated into syrian and now we've got cold yeah and now and now we've got protests outside the bell hotel in epping yeah yeah i didn't i just 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 um short you know until until we have some kind of a homogenous culture again.

1:28:08And even then, I'm not even sure it should. But also historically, like, even in a super homogenous society, that's not how you meet your spouse, especially. You meet through people who know you. There's like reputations and interlocking social networks and stuff. You don't just go up to some lady in a bar and marry. No, no, no. I mean, that's why people used to have dinner parties. You know, people don't really have dinner parties anymore, do they? But that was how you set people up with your friends. It's certainly not a collegiate one where you've got both genders coming in. 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.

1:28:45It's their partner. Yeah, but I mean, as recently as Bridget Jones's diary in the early aughts, you know, she writes 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 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. Like 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.

1:29:21Token of singles. Well, the eligible singles would be in a sincere effort. They're doing auntie behavior. Yeah, they're auntieing. Yeah. That's literally what it is. It's auntieing. Both virtuous and awkward. Yeah, virtuous and also often incredibly cringe. Absolutely. 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 does that for you explain the demise of this particular path for people meeting fewer parties fewer friends also people are poorer and their houses are smaller yeah i'm trying to the parties are shitter so you don't want it there's just i mean you know if you're 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 i'm trying to think about why i haven't done more of these dinner parties 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 that's just scaled that's just scaled child care that's just smarter child care with the best yeah just hang out with your friends with kids on a saturday your saturday is immediately improve um but it's also it's also a massive it's also a massive effort um everybody works full time um and the the time the time and mental energy you you might deploy towards that is pointed at other things um and i i don't i'm not sure how needing dual income here means that there's just less time perhaps for the wife to think oh you how should we get we'll get the joneses over we'll get the for me personally it's more to do with the fact that we live at the very edge of the city of 10 million other people and our friends live at every point on the clock face right and realistically getting everyone in the same place at the same time is quite difficult that's probably what it is i don't know if that's true you'd probably just meet meet somewhere also we can only seat six people at our dinner table yeah it's what i mean about you know small furniture that's interesting bridget jones was living in what islington right exactly she's living on a journalist salary age like 30 i know yes on her own so i mean it's obviously fiction um so i have been i was thinking for a little while about uh me too to me tea with the tea app and that you did see the tea app right okay this is a little older come on louise the tea t-app it was that unsubstantiated gossip circulator yeah it's a reputation ruining app yes but so it was women gossiping about men men who screwed them over in their view okay yeah and then there was a big data breach there was sequences of big data breaches yeah 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 look at the name on the top of it then message them on instagram and say, I'm so sorry that I stole your sound in a desperate attempt to try and overcome approach anxiety from men to women.

1:32:00There'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-twenties, very voluptuous. There's another one of a woman walking through Central Park, big naturals, low top. 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. 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, with the data breach from the T-app, that was not the same cohort when it comes to female mate value.

1:32:34It was much more short hair piercings, 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. So it could be kind of this inverse luxury belief thing, which is like Isaiah Berlin's in a citadel. If I can't get what I want, I must teach myself to want what I can get and then bind together. Like the female equivalent of sort of inceldom, I suppose.

1:33:10Well, doing symmetrical competition there, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the problem for the hot woman in Central Park, 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, that is the difficulty. Like you don't want to be approached all day. I want to be cold approached, but not by you. Not by him. Yeah, exactly. And every guy sees themselves as the not by you guy. Well. Apart from the ones that are too pushy, because I don't think that guys have a good understanding of their own. I don't think guys have a good understanding of their own mate value.

1:33:42They have a good understanding of their own confidence or their disregard for female rejection but that is not the same thing as a success rating 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 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 a luxury challenge it's a challenge 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 but men do not have a good understanding of their mate value i mean yeah just i'm gonna stick my hand up and say you know i i remember cold approach like i was there um you know i'm i lived it and survived just about yeah um i'm old enough to remember when that was actually a thing and you know being what was the word they use now chirps um being chatted up we called it yeah i remember that being a thing and it was understood you know starts happening to you when you're about 12 um and it was understood by you know you on your 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 cold cold approach might have been a thing and sometimes maybe for those guys.

1:35:11Because it's evident that you're one of a number. 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 that are going to become your boyfriend for a whole host of reasons. But they're just not. They are strategy men. Yeah. Okay, you're going to have to unpack that, Louise, because this is more your wheelhouse than mine. Surely every modern wisdom listener knows about this. Our case selection, right? So our strategy, this is true in evolution biology in general, not just humans, that some species are more strategists in that they will have lots of sex, lots of babies, except that most of those babies are going to die, live fast, die, young kind of strategy.

1:35:51Whereas K selection is like elephants or blue whales. Elephants versus rabbits, maybe. Yeah, so they'll have one baby that they'll really invest in. And humans are kind of both, depending on context. We're more K strategists, but there are individual variations and you can kind of nudge in one way or the other. And yeah, I think the guys who come and chat to you in the bar. This is a big theme in your book, isn't it? There's the guys who, there's the chatter uppers who are probably, they're about sowing the seed as widely as possible. And then there's the husband material. We're trying to find this balance, right?

1:36:23It's some, I think, 80 % of women say that they want a man to make the first move. But how is that supposed to be done in a manner? And this is how you labubu yourself. in a desperate attempt to try and couch your forthcomingness in a sufficiently cinnamon roll exterior. But actually what you need is not to lububify yourself. It's what you need is the social scaffolding. You know, whether that's sort of, you know, But you don't have that. You've got to bootstrap it yourself, right? 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 was a mutual friend, like, tell him to hit on me.

1:37:04and if he does, I'll say yes. And so we basically did that loop around. Okay, this is good. But that requires social scaffolding. This is what I mean about the social scaffolding. You sowed some seeds that this would be like a high return strategy. This holds the odds. The odds might look a little bit difficult, but it's a sure end. You dropped the silk glove, basically. Exactly, yeah. And so, you know, 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. I mean, I'm sure you know the metaphor, you know then he graciously hand it back and then why are all these eligible men you know still not finding wives it depends it's for different reasons um some of them some of them have got yeah i know uh 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 right and they're worried about gold diggers presumably uh more so about reputational destruction like post me too i didn't consent to that he is this or that or the other yeah 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 like the andrew huberman's survival rate should be a positive reinforcement for anybody in my side of the internet um but if you're inside was he completely fine after all of that i better i think actually he just posted through it he was fine yeah just That's always the advice, isn't it?

1:38:29Just post through it. Yeah, just keep looking at sun in the morning and everything is fine. And he lived by that strategy. There's other reasons for it. I think that 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 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 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 yeah um 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 probably complicated further by the fact that people are not lamps and people come with their own agency and preferences 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 you basically need to know her friends who will tell you if she's a good person yeah is she trustworthy is she crazy whatever um but that's not going to work with cold approach at all 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 that's right the the blast radius of that is going to impact so much more 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 steelman case for the t-app that i've ever heard that it is a surrogate local community.

1:40:19Yeah. Because everybody is... Because, I mean, that's how women used to keep in a sort of village scenario. That's how women used to keep men and men. Is he trustworthy? Can I... Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have a... You heard what he did with such and such. Exactly, exactly. And it's an attempt to provide a tech fix for the absence of that. 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... Also, there's no repercussions if you make false accusations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you say, oh, you heard what he did. Yeah. Someone says, what do you say that i did with such and such whereas in a in a real world in a grounded real world relatively stable community if you spread false rumors about somebody eventually you'll get the blowback so t-app is an artificial solution to an artificial problem it's the glp ones yeah yeah exactly it's a zempic for uh reputation management yeah low trust reputation low trust relationship formation yeah 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 percent of young men who voted for trump agree with that statement see one thing just going back to going back to our our sort of leitmotif of the labubu guy what i find interesting um and this occurred to me earlier um is that he would be the the kind the obviously you know not very appealing nature of labubu guy doesn't seem to have produced a kind of backswing towards this very much more right-wing identified male stereotype.

1:41:47No, you know what it is. It's what our friend Catherine D calls the male-to-male transsexual. That's the flip side to the Le Boobie man. What is the male-to-male transsexual? Guess. What do you think based on the name? It is a guy basically LARPing as a much more masculine version of himself. Yep. Right. And really devoting his life to that transformation. as well which is actually quite a feminine thing to do it is it is these are the guys who who are predominantly interested in lifting so they can post physique which is just the girliest girliest girliest thing to do you know i firmly believe that guys should lift i don't think they should post physique i think that's disgusting 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 taken it they would have both taken it really well they would have both gone you know what it is you're probably right i do take too many photos moving my top box it's it's just really girly don't do it yeah you know be strong be competent that's really hot don't post physique it's really good i mean it's interesting your your point about social media being inherently feminine is so true and you see this come out of the the dissident right kind of manosphere is the wrong term but they're kind of hyper masculine a sudden 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 never seen purity spirals like it oh my god 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 there are exceptions you know some of my best friends etc but what you say what you say is is on point and some some of this is just produced by the sort of selection effects of the internet yeah yeah it's the internet you know the that milieu sort of draws draws a well diverse the internet kind of optimizes for a very uh one-dimensional perspective of a person yeah if so chris bumstead uh what's that thing that yasmin was talking about looks that can kill but heart of gold or something what is it

1:44:03okay 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 and chris bumstead guy that sat here met he's a six-time mr olympia is the basically the modern world arnold schwarzenegger 25 million followers on instagram met his now wife because she fell in love with a video of him crying on the internet um so that's looks that could kill you comma is a cinnamon roll and 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 uh reads a lot of books and talks about, um, like not, I don't believe in cry it out for raising our daughter, Bradley.

1:44:50We're actually trying, you know, I want to teach her that it's okay to feel, feel, you know, like deep in therapy culture at the same time, whilst being 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 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 brash. Like if you presented in that way and had the personality of Andrew Tate, it's like, there we go.

1:45:29Like I've got that cliche. I've already got that archetype locked off. And 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. And 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. Yeah, I think I was absolutely right. The attention economy dynamic forces everyone to become a very reductive meme version. It's low resolution. 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 like the bizarre versions of you that people have living rent-free in their heads.

1:46:13Just like don't waste your time doing that. 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. Hard to do because you want to correct the misunderstanding. You say, no, no, no, you don't see. I remember the saddest version of that I ever saw was when Mary Beard got cancelled for saying something really innocuous. And she posted a video of herself on Twitter crying. and she was obviously trying to get people to understand that you know in fact she contained multitudes there's a real person there's a real person here and it but but all it did all that did was it was incur more hate yeah because that's just not how the internet works yeah and you just have to you have to post through it like andrew huberman be more huberman that is that is a phenomenal hashtag be more huberman less less labubu 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 the me too was the death of schlub feminism no okay so this was that um the thesis is 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.

1:47:39This is for yourself. 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. The Bridget Jones, the 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 us 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 really remember the s is stacy is depressed it was on i remember reading that yeah what was that a 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 bitch lobby and so what um and that somehow somehow this hyper competitive online dynamic of you know chads and stacy's and so on has just made it increasingly difficult like the guys are relegated to sort of neckbeard computer gaming basement dwellerdom and stacy meanwhile is just she's either she's either a sort of disposable play thing 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.

1:49:01And Stacey is just miserable as a consequence. That feels sort of cognate with your - Have we killed Bridget Jones? Have we killed 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, she organises Christian mingling things to try and get Christians to meet in real life. and she said that um they always have an oversupply of women 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 her husband and they can't find them and i i mean it's always i think often you can't really tell without really really knowing someone exactly what's going on there because whenever you hear doom and gloom about people are finding it impossible to find partners now etc i think of all the people i know who are stacy-esque in so is it stacy's depressed stacy yeah in that they're completely normal people and they have happy flourishing family lives does that make you more skeptical around the perennially single and you think maybe everything's not as rosy on the outside as it might seem it makes me assume something is going on yeah i had a i had a vigorous debate with a friend the other day who was like it was a kind of a throwaway joke he was like oh you know maybe we should just send all of the incels to ukraine where there's a massive shortage of men i was like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa what makes you think that ukrainian women want anything to do with those guys oh what sorry to fight and no no no to get married to ukrainian women no to to make up the shortage of ratio to recompensate the sex ratio right um i was like whoa you know yeah there might be like we're talking about actual people here and you know sometimes these things can be complicated i mean 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 getting up to the moment of committing and backing off every time or something like that there's something so committed to a professional career that actually there's just no bandwidth 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.

1:51:11No. I did have this idea that maybe 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. And if you fall below it by eating yourself out of that window, everyone's just less hot. And now there's less desire across the board. You know, people tend to mate in terms of physical mate value and overall mate value, broadly assortatively right they're within their their range uh maybe 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 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 at the moment we've got problem with obesity.

1:52:07There's just less ogling going on generally. Yeah, you just think you're less ogle-worthy. Like Donald Winnicott's idea of the good enough mother. I'm not familiar with that. So he said that, Mary will probably know this better than me, but he was a child psychotherapist. Yeah, he was a doctor and child psychotherapist. Who argued that you don't need mothers to be perfect by any means. Like in order for children to be properly attached and develop happily, you just need the good enough mother. The mother who meets the standard in terms of providing care for her baby. and yeah maybe it's the good enough partner body yeah they just hit that standard although i saw a man some anonymous man recently comment which i thought was uh insightful that women of the last i mean a zempic is going to reverse this by the way we've surely hit peak obesity already but women having putting the prices up presumably well then it becomes even more desirable right as time i don't think i don't think weight is ever going to stop being a status signal in an If a Zen pic looks like it might fix that, they'll just put up the price of a Zen pic and it just kicks the can down the road.

1:53:10I mean, it's already happened. Eli Lilly just tripled the price, didn't they, in the UK? So immediately, thinness will remain a status signal in an obesogenic culture. Just the cost stops being one of self-discipline and becomes literally just a cost. It's a different sort of signal then, though. Yeah, it's a signal. That's true. The meaning of the signal changes. Yeah, massively. But the class, it's class-inflected nature, doesn't it? True, but I don't know whether class is associated with, or previously was associated with weight. Yes, absolutely. Weight, obesity is strongly correlated with poverty on both sides of the pond.

1:53:46Okay, and it may still be that, but for different reasons. Yes, just the reasons for that might change. You can't afford this solution as opposed to… You can't afford the tech fix. You can't afford the healthy alternative. Rather than exactly, you can't afford shock at Whole Foods. You're too busy working three low-paid jobs to go to the gym or whatever. um it becomes um you can't you can't afford the jab well pre-exempic and still probably now um i think women have simultaneously become fatter and prettier because there's a lot more money and those two separate dynamics well in the face right because and also things like hair there's so much more sophisticated beauty tech available and using things like whatever retinols or getting your eyebrows microbladed or stuff, that stuff has become very routine and very accessible.

1:54:35And social media is full of 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 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... It's only secondarily or even tertiary. Appearance is secondary or tertiary. Fake turn is not going to make much difference to me. But going to the gym, perhaps. You know, being physically competent remains the gold standard for being attractive.

1:55:09And earning a breadwinner's wage. It goes with having a reasonable physique. But I don't know. This is a hill I will die on. Scaffolder physique wins over gym physique any day of the week. I mean, I'm sure that you saw. Was it Olly Murs who did that transformation? and William Costello tweeted about it. That's right. Yeah. And then Sacha Baron Cohen did the same thing. Do you see who was on the front cover of Men's Fitness? I thought Olly Merz looked better shredded. But you would be in the minority. Apparently I was in the minority. You would be in the minority. And I had an idea around this, which was...

1:55:46He posted physique, though. It was posting physique. Instant turn-off, sorry. On that basis alone. Objectively, he looked good in the second picture, but he was posting physique. okay but what if it had been a candid physique photo what if it was that would have been a completely different ballgame right totally different ballgame hard to say at that point but it wasn't 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 so it was breakup physique superhero physique and then you compare him with borat so when guys get shredded is that the equivalent of you of getting a new haircut it's the pixie cut but the dudes yeah exactly going on a heavy course of testosterone is is going and saying to your hairdresser we're going to do it today we're finally going to get it off i'm going to get the pixie cut yeah um so the there was definitely an interesting question i think that ollie muz is fat in one photo shredded in another photo he's just a knob relatively fat he was maybe i would guess 15 to 18 percent body fat for the bro lifters in the audience and then he probably got himself down to towards single figures he wasn't like striated delts but he was visible uh 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 so you know he'd he'd speed ran it which is you know it's impressive however 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 have they place so much pride and weight on if i can get jack women will find me attractive that is a big uh 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, fuck, the illusion has been smashed.

1:57:45This was my one recourse to, yeah. I sort of feel like, actually, I mean, Jim body is not a meaningless signal in the sense that it points to a measure of self-discipline. Yeah, serious. 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. And if you're also a massive weirdo, it's not going to cancel that out. 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 i mean the average american woman is like a size 18 or even 20 in american sizing no that's not right no that can't be right it's 16 in the uk so was i 12 in the us but basically the average american woman is like overweight i don't think that she wants a shredded spouse because he shows her up there was a uh story i heard from a friend who was a power lifter power lifters go through um big weight fluctuations They're the fat boy lifters, typically squat bench deadlift.

1:58:43And 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, my, I felt my most comfortable when you were powerlifting, which is when you were fattest. And I felt my most insecure when you were weight lift, when you were bodybuilding, which is when you were leanest. There's certainly an argument to be made from like an EP standpoint, which is 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.

1:59:19If 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? 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. 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. Have we not transcended this? Have you not got past this?

1:59:43You're actually doing it for. But in the interesting female beautification, maybe, but it's at least a couple more second, third orders away. 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 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 if there is unmistakably a difference in how men look at and evaluate other people's physiques actually i think of both sexes and how women do um and there's a sense you know women beauty you know if you're a woman you beautify yourself you might moan about the male gaze but also i think you'd probably miss it and like you know 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 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.

2:00:58This goes to what you were saying about it. I don't think that men know that. They might not realize it. But the point is that from a woman's perspective, when a guy is titivating themselves, implicitly it's for the male gaze. And that's just a turn off because you're like, dude, you're in my territory. It's either gay or ignorant of female preferences. Yeah, yeah. Or possibly, you know, it's somewhere in that male-to-male transsexual territory. Does it have to be gay? Can it not just be signaling to other men that you have grift and conscientiousness? I mean, it can be homophilic without necessarily being like actively, actively kind of sexually homosexual.

2:01:33Yeah, but it's orientated towards other men. But it's homophobic. It's bro stuff in a way which implicitly excludes the woman, excludes women from the dialogue. There's also a big failure of cross-sex mind reading because guys are going, I find that intimidating. You must find it attractive. 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. women have to make the same mistakes like with choosing clothes i will often run past out if i 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 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 telling my choices and whatever or do i like this because it actually like looks good 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 uh boyfriend fit jeans to her boyfriend so it's an american woman and the boyfriend is in the kitchen washing up or doing something and says honey i just got these new jeans and they're this sort of super loose fit loose at the knee, loose at the ankle.

2:02:58What do you think? 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 shakes 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 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 cry i mean it's the 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 cold Birkin.

2:03:50I 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? It's the, I guess, red bottom Louboutins. I know that just because it's a meme. But beyond that, I don't know the shoes. I don't know. 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. you better not try and take my man look at him he's fucking 30 bags deep on this bag on this literal bag uh you're not taking him from me because he owes me yeah

2:04:31so you mentioned before we got started the this trend of feminism and women turning to the right what is that dynamic that we're seeing that's going on? so it's quite a common view on the dissident right that um women are innately left wing so there are average psychological differences between men and women which we've all talked about at length um women tend to be more agreeable than men more neurotic than men um more uh 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 And one thing that does seem to be clear is that women tend to be more egalitarian in their own social groups, at least in their female friendships.

2:05:23Avertly. More overtly egalitarian, yeah. And sometimes this gets interpreted as that means that women are left-wing, 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 there are so many examples historically of women being very enthusiastic participants in right-coded political movements. I'm 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. The church ladies phenomenon, where women are actually the ones enforcing conservative social norms locally, or even female participation in Nazism.

2:06:05I mean, it's probably not quite right to say that narcissism is right wing. It's complicated. But women were passionate, passionate participants in the rise of Hitler. And in fact, often had like weird sexual obsessions with Hitler, which you can read about at length and had a kind of Beatlemania when he showed up and things like that. so the idea that women are always and forever like woke i think is nuts um it clearly is the case so that at the moment young women in particular skew woke a lot and particularly in some countries skew work a lot and there's a big sex gap 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 it's not so much the egalitarianism as the encouragement to scoop up and protect protect childlike figures so whether that be trans people or refugees or whatever um encouraging women's channel those maternal energies towards certain groups i think it's very powerful yeah there's also there's also infinite opportunities for moral dogpiling yeah which is just incredibly appealing yeah if you're how so um i mean you you you can if you can arbitrarily 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 that's attacking people from a moral infractions 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 i also think wokeness is quite emotionally compelling in the sense of feeling like you have this sense of purpose and crusade and you know i think that young women in particular find that quite enticing um wokeness doesn't really work on men though apart from the labuba men but it doesn't like it doesn't hit those i think it i like to think of it like jonathan height's idea of moral flavors like it doesn't hit the flavors that men have taste receptors i'm gonna i'm gonna say this carefully because otherwise i will get it's correct, even though this is, 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.

2:08:25And by that, you know, I don't mean the woke right in the sort of James Lindsay sense 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, well, no, no, civil discourse and objectivity and all of that. 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 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 on both sides than really towards substantive politics or even really getting anything done in the real world at all.

2:09:31They're extremely online. And actually, I found it very interesting watching the emergence of Zoran Mandani in this context in New York. Bad bench press. Yeah, I mean, because he strikes me as a sort of, he's a sort of post-literate leftist. I don't mean he himself is post-literate, but he mobilizes a certain kind of very net native leftism. And that's the source of his popularity. You know, whether or not he'll ever actually get elected and or deliver any policies is almost secondary to that. And there's a subset of Trumpism and Marga, which is that, but for the right. And those two movements code, they are respectively gendered.

2:10:09You know, there are more women that embrace the Mamdarnism and there are more men who embrace Margaretism. And yes, of course, there's some overlap, but they're both strongly gendered. Are we seeing a trajectory pivot then at the moment? Is there some subversive... Women turning to the right. Are women turning to the right? I think that when they do, they'll turn quickly. That's my main take. I'm actually going to quote 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. What's that mean?

2:10:39And by that, I mean, I'm interpreting here, but the way I understand that is that the mob, as in a group of people, highly, you know, morally aerated, angry, sort of mimetically charged, you know, wanting action now, is 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. But the mob as a collective entity, Bronze Age pervert in this context, is suggesting is actually a very, is a female phenomenon. Of course, if the mob's going to cut off your head, it'll have to involve some men. Yeah. I mean, but the emotional energy, the emotional energy is mimetic, it's contagious, it's collective.

2:11:26So a concrete example of this would be what we've already talked about, refugees or, you know, immigration in general. And until now, the very strong energy from young women in particular has been to see ethnic minorities and refugees in particular as childlike figures in need of protection. And also to have this slightly, to see this cause as very emotional kind of, you get pulled along with the mimetic energy kind of thing. 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 needed protection is like literal children i think one of the under really underappreciated scissors here is actually whether or not you have kids yeah and i'd be i would bet any any sum of money you care to name that you'll find more women on the refugees welcome side who don't have kids yeah and more women on the actually we've actually worked on.

2:12:26Very straightforwardly, for the reason Louise just explained, if you're worried about your kids, that's an entirely different and very much smaller and more particularistic set of affections than if you love, quote unquote, the vulnerable in the abstract. The inverse of this, I think, is a big part of the reason why so many guys want to be entrepreneurs right now 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. You know, my team, my staff, my purpose whatever this thing is that's interesting is yeah just supplanted yeah family yeah 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 wanting to mother childlike or actual children figures and the kind of mimetic energy.

2:13:24There's no reason Where is that? Where are we seeing that? I think we're probably seeing it with the women showing up outside migrant hotels. The pink protests. Yeah. That's what they're called. Yeah. They wear pink. Right. Which is an interesting echo of the Trump era pussy hat thing. Yeah. 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 yeah and they're all over social media and at the moment this is very much contained to being a working class thing and middle class women are quite hostile to it mostly um but i think you could easily see that spread easily um and yeah women turning to the right could become posy parker is an example of this already happening um in that she's yeah she's able to her movement is distinctively feminine and also not left wing.

2:14:14Not the very least. Yeah. Louise and Mary, 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? So my podcast is Made Mother Matriarch, all the places that you find podcasts. My first book was The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. 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. Put your money where your mouth is. I know, I know. Well, it wouldn't have as much credibility, would it, if I wasn't walking the walk? I have a sub stack.

2:14:50MaryHarrington.co.uk is where you'll find it. My regular column is at Unheard. I tweet, although not so much over the summer at Moving Circles. I post these days. School year started. Everyone can go and follow you and you'll be back up to speed. And you've got a book. And 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 we've already merged with our machines what happens next okay aunties i appreciate you very much thank you it's been fun thank you if you're wanting to read more you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out and that is why i made the modern wisdom reading list a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful, and entertaining that I've ever found.

2:15:41Fiction and non-fiction, and there's real-life stories, and there's a description about why I like it, and there's links to go and buy it, and it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.