#732 - Mary Harrington - Why You Shouldn’t Share Your Private Life Online

25:57I mean, you may be not the feeding treats, but in other countries, like people respond to a random child completely differently. You get warm looks, you get interactions from strangers. It's only in Britain that people are like, oh, I must not look at your child. And I don't know that I don't fully understand the psychology behind not looking at somebody else's child, I'm not wanting to even acknowledge that there's a little person in the vicinity. Do you want to do it? But there's something very distinctive about it. Do you underfits like the non -sreder thing that people are so concerned of being seen as like some latent sexual predator.

26:25There is for men that's definitely a factor and I know that because I've spoken about it with male friends and peers who confirm to me that they'll be very cautious about interacting with with mothers and children in a public setting because they're terrified of being labeled in that way. I think there's something really toxic about that and something. I think I've told you this that over the last few years my paternal instinct started to kick in and children have gone from being super annoying and lame to kind of cute. So I see a child now, like let's say it's like some little girls being walk along by her mother or father or whatever in the park near where I live.

27:05And I'm like, I'm like a grin at whoever the over the top go over the top. I'm like, I'm doing this work. And I'm like, this is huge. Yeah, well, it's enough water. You're highly performance athlete. And then like, have a grin at the child, if they walk past, and then think, oh, fucking hell, I'm the strange, I'm like the 30's year old man. They're the pocket full of worth as originals. Precisely correct. And they swear it's really dark. It's really dark. It's really dark. And I want, I mean, either the total number of non -sings today is no higher actually than it was 50, 30, 30, 30, 50 years ago, if anything.

27:43But the level of panic is so much greater. Right, so the anti -child accepting and pleasantry culture isn't helping to reduce the nonsing rate. It's just making life longer than the rest of the day. It's just making life longer than the rest of the day. Mothers and kids, like kind of more lame. I mean, it's very, it's difficult. I don't know that I'd be cautious about drawing clear causal lines between those things. and whether they, the stranger danger and all of that panic is a cause or an effect, I'd be hesitant to speculate with that bit more data. But none of it helps you to feel any more part of a community when you're existing in public with a child, let alone multiple children.

28:27Right, does it feel alienating a little bit? Well, I mean, it's particularly palpable when you've got very small children, Because I mean, before, once your kid is in school, you're sort of in this, you're kind of part of an ecosystem at that point. You're part of the school mom's WhatsApp group and you're part of a community and there are events you go to and you see the same kids around at brownies or whatever. So after you start to fit in with a fabric of other people and you do realise that actually some, I mean, if you live in a small town as I do at least, if you're fortunate enough to live somewhere like that, then that something of that fabric is still there, even if you do have to go looking for it a little bit.

29:13But when you're a very new mum, particularly when it's your first, or in my case, my only, it feels like you've just fallen off the edge of the world into somewhere completely different. Old women will smile at you on the street, but pretty much nobody, it's very hard to establish where you fit at all, apart from that. There's a lot, you know, going back to kind of, I guess, Barbie's cultural commentary. There's a lot of talk about the crisis of masculinity at the moment. If I was to make a prediction for the next sort of five to ten years, I think that I would project out that there will be a big crisis of femininity coming down the pike at least a little bit.

29:55I think that it can't be the case that women continue to grow up because there is a the birth of good male role models, but the female role models are no better, the only difference is that they're allowed to be on TV more, that they get more airtime and that when women have problems there is a little bit more mainstream sympathy. I think that's probably true. I mean, I suppose I would frame it very slightly differently. Like the problem as I see it isn't, it's not necessarily just a crisis of masculinity or a crisis of femininity. It's a total crisis of embodied humaneness, which hits the sex is differently, and which is downstream of having developed a culture in which almost nothing about our physical body makes very much difference at all.

30:36At least if you live in, if you do a knowledge -based, if your occupation is in the world of information, I mean, if you're an oil rig work or obviously your physical body matters a lot, you know, to an extent, if you do something physical. But those, those, that as a proportion of the economy has been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking with the first with the deep rural depopulation as agriculture industrialized and then with the industrial with with the industrialization as the second tier of that, you know, the number of people who do manual work has been shrinking with every generation and the number of people who do who work in the world of information has been growing.

31:15And I mean, if you work in the world of information, it doesn't matter what shape your body is neutral occupation. Yeah, exactly. That they're all gender neutral occupations in theory. Any of us could be driving a spreadsheet, doesn't matter. You know, and... Driving a spreadsheet. And arguably, I mean, the same goes arguably to a great extent for the being a professional opinion, however, it doesn't matter what sex you are. Yeah, the keyboard, wheel does can be the same sex. Right. It doesn't matter. And there's a real, there's a concrete question which faces the confronts all of us in that context, which is to what extent does do our bodies even matter.

31:43And I think really this is what the gender ideologues are pushing out from the opposite direction. They're making a very strong statement that, you know, what shape my body is doesn't matter so much so in fact that I'm entitled to remodel mine as I see fit and they and making building a whole political platform on the basis of that premise and and else but but everybody is confronted with the same quite even people who are not signed up to the whole sort of meat Lego worldview everyone's confronted with the same question if I'm driving a spreadsheet or being a professional opinion however like what difference does it even matter you know who cares who cares what shape my body is you know is masculinity or What does it mean to be a man or to be a woman when we're all just disembodied heads on the internet?

32:24I don't know the answer to that, but I grapple with it every day. Well, it's definitely something I think that people grapple with, and ultimately, given that work is maybe one of the most important things that you do, that might contribute. But there will be times where your biology and your predisposition smash up against your nature and the experiences that you have in life. I completely agree. And I think this is what we... this is what it would benefit all of us to be more to be talking more about and to be leaning more into. And I mean sometimes it, I see people making early attempts at that or sort of trying to find ways into that.

32:58And you get these sort of ridiculous kind of trans subcultures for example, who are trying to find ways to be men and women in a sort of post -human age, which is really kind of what we're talking about here. And it kind of doesn't work and it's kind of cringe and often, I mean - What would be an example? Well, I mean, okay, so backing up a bit. So there was a there was a real like among the alt -right in particular. This is something which I've been reading into a bit recently. Among the alt -right, you know, in between sort of 2016 and maybe 2020, there was a real there was a real boom in influencers of both sexist but actually quite a lot of young women who were who were calling for, you know, pushing back against the kind of modern degeneracy and saying, you know, we should all we should all re -embrace traditional gender roles and we should have more as all traditional set up relationships and that when we could fight back against the collapse of everything in that way.

33:46As it turned out, a lot of the women who actually tried doing that just absolutely hated it. The relationships were really messed up and a lot of the relationships were abusive. And there are women who are coming out of that now having survived an alt -right attempt at a trad relationship who are just massively beaten up and traumatized by the experience. And who are now these sort of unhinged kind of subset of like post or right radical feminists? What was their experience over the relationship? Well, I mean, I... If you want an example of somebody who went all the way through one variant of this, you should look up Lauren Southern's story.

34:26Okay. You know, without wanting to make any comment on her opinions or her political trajectory, but I mean, she went through something along these lines and ended up living in a trailer park with a toddler, having married somebody who was possibly a fared. It was all full -falsh. That's full -falsh, yeah. Right, I mean, it was a absolutely crazy arc. And having leaned all the way into being a kind of alt -right, trad anti -feminist influencer. She ended up as a single mother living in a trailer park. And is now, I don't know what she's doing now. But yeah, I mean, there are a great many people who sincerely tried to kind of re -synthesize something like the old wave of men and women interacting.

35:01And I found that it just blew up underneath them. I don't know, for all I know there were relationships who formed and which are still flourishing, but there are a lot of others that went extremely wrong. What is it that's blowing it up? I don't know. Honestly, I think trying to reverse engineer a set of social sex differences without the material underpinnings which created those different social norms is just, it's a full -zaroned, honestly. What like, can you get specific? like vague, but specific. I have to come at this from the other direction. So one of the themes, one of the themes I've written about in feminism against progress is those ways in which men and women have both always worked, at least up until the beginning of the industrial era, men and women always worked, both sexist did, and they did so complementarily.

35:54Ivan Elitcharite is beautifully about this in gender, which I strongly recommend as a book if you're interested in the deep history of the relationship, between the sexes. And he writes about how in pre -modern, pre -modern agrarian, largely agrarian life, you know, men's work and women's work were always different and what constitutes men's work or women's work were very depending on the context. But they're always different and they're always defined in relation to one another and they're always ambiguously complementary. He describes as like the relationship between your right hand and your left hand.

36:25They always know where they are in relation to one another and they're not the same but they mirror one another and they work together and that's and the nature of men's work and women's work in a bit of a harvesting and processing. Right, exactly. Exactly. And there are even down to the language used down to the kind of the social spaces occupied, even down to the kinds of tools which are considered acceptable for one sex to use rather than the other. And he describes villages where it would be considered deeply humiliating for a man to touch the tools that would be normally used by a woman. It was just completely unthinkable.

36:56It's just fucking rolling pin. Exactly. You know, it would be utterly, utterly unthinkable. Get off my castle and mortar. For one sex to touch the tools which are reserved for the other. How interesting. And so this is, and that emerges out of a material context in which everybody needs to work in order for survival in order for life to happen. And what happened, you know, as the world is industrialized and we've entered, I mean, what he calls the transition from vernacular gender, which is the ambiguously complimentary world of men's work and women's work into the world of economic sex, which he describes as more sexist than the world of vernacular gender.

37:36Because although life is less gendered in practice, by pretending that everything is unisex, you end up with women being structurally disadvantaged because tacitly the default becomes the masculine one. And this is what Caroline Creado Perez talks about, which is another great book, Invisible women, where she writes about how so much of the built environment and the physical environment and tools and norms and default medical defaults and crash test dummies and all kind of surgical instruments and so on are all constructed for a male default and the women's distinct physiology and which is subtly different and something in some biomedical context extremely different is just quietly rendered invisible.

38:19And this is really what Lillich is talking about when he talks about the more sexist nature of economic sex, because it by refusing, by pretending that men and women are interchangeable, it renders effectively renders women of this. You've got a male default. Interestingly, I guess when you move across into the world of mental health, you're looking at a female default. I think that's very true. But there are many interventions. Just bringing this back to the question of why trying to reverse engineer ambiguous complementarity in the world of economic sex. Now that we've got that vocabulary in place, I can maybe explain what I mean when I say it's a bit of a full zaran.

38:59Because in a sense, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. We can't go back to the world before modernity, we're stuck with it now. We're stuck with this world in which everybody's pretending that men and women are interchangeable and to a significant extent in the world of bits and bytes we kind of are. And under those circumstances to say, well, we're just going to decree that we're going to have a pre -modern division of sex labor within our private home. I mean, it can work, like for some people it kind of does, but I think you just need to be a little bit less doctrinaire about it.

39:35And anybody who sets out to be rigidly ideological about it is setting themselves up for a toxic dynamic and potentially domestic abuse. Yeah, the... I mean, in practice, if you ask most married heterosexual married couples, they will... If you pretty much any of them will tell you that there are jobs that he does and the job there are jobs that she does, because that's just how it falls out and because you both prefer it that way. I mean, I can... Yeah, it's like, what's that? Were it not for digital modesty? I could give you examples from my own family, but I'm not going to. It's like the specialization of labor almost, right?

40:10But domestic specialization of labor. But there are instances in my own family where the division of labor is counterintuitive. If you were coming at it from a rigid doctrine air point of view, it wouldn't be the way it is. But it works that way because we both like it that way. So moving forward in that case, we should return to a tradcon history in the future. is that that's just a dead end as far as you're concerned? Well, I think we need to be, we just need to be a bit more attentive to where we are. And I think we can afford to be a little bit more respectful of the dynamics within individual couples.

40:48I mean, it's generally like there are patterns which emerge, you know, in any given heterosexual couple, you know, that's been together long -term, there'll be things which are more typical of the male partner and things which are more typical of the female partner. And I think, and that's fine, you know, we shouldn't be trying to fight against those stereotypes if they're what works for people But I but I don't see much point in imposing imposing kind of you should be doing this or you shouldn't be doing that Yeah, because ultimately people people do need guidelines people do need guidelines, but people You know people work people people can figure out what works best for them.

41:21I mean his here's one example So that talking in very general terms I mean, I've made the argument that the problem with tradwives as such is that they're just not tried enough in the sense that the What they're harking back to is a sort of mid -twentieth century template Which was actually only true for a very small subset of the middle class and which is distinct in itself Distinctively modern because in in pre -modern times all women worked pretty apart from the the very very richest Right, so you're saying so the idea like you send it further back agrarian grab your pestle and mortar and hoe and get working and So the question I want to ask is what does a 21st century version of the pre -modern productive household look like?

42:03You know, the house where the basic economic unit is your household. And so you've agreed, you're all in it together, you're there for the long term, you know, everything that you do, you do for the team. And then it's just a matter of agreeing, of figuring out how we have to get the best out of everybody. And like, I can't, I'm not interested in legislating for any given couple what that looks like. And in a modern context, where most of us work in the world of bits and bytes anyway, I don't know, I can't say, I can't make that determination for you. But there will be a way, when you form your household and you make your decision about how you can get the best out of your productive household, there will be a patent.

42:44And I think there's no shame in accepting that sometimes that can fit into a more traditional mold. What was that insight that you had about women needing to develop a strategy for not having it all? Well, I guess that's just a variation on talking about productive households. Again, in feminism against progress, the analogy I've given is weaving, which I think is a very powerful illustration of what happened to women's work at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. in that for some sort of 10, 20, 30 ,000 years prior to the Industrial Revolution, weaving was always women's work. And there are very solid practical reasons for that.

43:24You can weaving is something, I mean, the household needs textiles, right? You don't have textiles actually, somebody needs to make textiles. You need them clothes and for all sorts of different things. So somebody's got to do the weaving. And somebody's also got to look after the kids happily weaving and looking after kids are fairly compatible because you can raise a loom off the floor. You can put down your repetitive, you can do it while keeping an eye on toddlers or small people running around. And it's interruptible and it's social. So it's ideal work to be getting on with while you've also got some children underfoot.

43:57And so for millennia, after millennia, weaving has been women's work. But weaving was also one of the first industries to move out of the home, into factories. And at that point, it was much more difficult for it to continue to be women's work. And those working class women who went to work in the textile mills had real dilemmas on their hands, because what do you meant to do with your breastfed baby? And there were horror stories about how women tried their best to cope with that, babies drugged with opium or left to starve or left in adequate care of awful stuff. And then there are those women who respond by saying, OK, fine, we're not going to make the textiles anymore.

44:38So we're just going to focus on different stuff. But the point is that if you're... Yeah, weaving is a fine example of the kind of work which in pre -modern times took place within a productive household. And I suppose the question I have is, you know, what kinds of work? Let's say you want to be a mum, and let's say you've got small children around underfoot. What's the equivalent work that's a bit interruptible, that's a bit social, that's a bit, you can pick it up and put it down again. That's not what people think about when they think about having it all though, right? You can't have it all, can't.

45:19Everybody knows that. Well, they ought to. Like enough feminists prior to me have leveled with the world. You know, you can't have it all. You know, you can have a lot. And you can have a great time doing it, but you can't have it all all of the time all at once. You have to do something's one after another. Louise said that she worked it out and she was doing 40 hours a week of breastfeeding. Like a more than full -time job of just that part, just that one vertical underneath the child having process. Yes, and that's not that's not something you can outsource because it's not it's not just food You know, there's there's a whole the the foundational layers of your child mother making child making a foundational aspect of your child's capacity for self -regulation and your child's capacity for being an integrated person a laid down in those early early interactions It's not something which can be subcontracted Do you think that profound important?

46:17This was something that Mary ever starts said to me She thinks that motherhood's a mimetic desire, at least in some regard, that one of her answers to the birth rate decline is that fewer mothers beget fewer mothers. I think there's some truth in that. Yeah. I mean, if you think, I'm trying to think, how many babies did I ever hold before my own? Not very many, to be honest. If any, it's possible that the first baby I ever held was my own. or if not the first, very certainly very close to the first. And I was in my late 30s, you just think this is crazy. You know, there was not even that long ago.

46:57There was a time when you'd have been left holding younger siblings or other people's kids or you'd have been around little babies. And it wouldn't have been frightening in the same way. But it's, you know, one of the reasons, you know, middle -class older mothers like me sit there, you know, with our late -stage pregnancies is frantically consuming baby books is because we just don't have that practice around us anymore. Because families have got smaller and extended families have got more scattered and extended families have got smaller as well. As Mary so eloquently explains in her, she writes a lot about the shrinking of the family and the atomizing effect that happened and the loss that that imposes on.

47:38Adam Lane Smith's got this thing about how, don't forget that moving out of the house at 18 is a siaop by the mortgage industry to turn one family into two homes. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, you can make the argument, same argument for the divorce industry. You know, there are genuinely opinion pieces out there from divorce lawyers arguing that divorce is good for the GDP, which it is. That's interesting. I mean, me a califa. Me a califa. a very famous porn star said, marriage is nothing sacred. This is a recent video she put up. Marriage is nothing sacred. It's just a piece of paper. If the person that you're with isn't helping you grow, you need to let them go.

48:22Obviously, meekly, for as a paragon of successful relationships. I would respectfully disagree with the sentiment. And I just thought, I had this really, really great guy I'm going to send you the episode when it goes up. It's too called Mads Larson. And he tracked all of the different Western mating ideologies over time and how they were adaptive for the particular cultural time. And he goes through the agrarian, the romantic. And he calls the one that we're in now the confluent era. I mean, the coinage which I've used in the book is, it's not actually my coinage. I forget the sociologists who coined it, but the self -expressive marriage, which I think is a very good, and really what the quote from Califah that you just offered is a perfect expression of the self -expressive marriage.

49:12This idea that your partner is a vector for your self -actualisation and the moment they stop delivering on that front, you can kick them to the curb. There's no sense of mutual solidarity, there's no sense of being in it for the long haul, there's no commitment to anything which is bigger than yourself necessarily. accept as it, in accepting this very transactional sense of it, delivering goods for you. And the moment that starts to falter or you go through a rough patch for any reason, you're wholly entitled to sever the contract and go and look for it somewhere else. It's incredibly consumerist paradigm.

49:48But I argue that the issue with that is that we don't live in the age of, we no longer live in the age of economic abundance which underpinned and gave rise to that marriage ideology. It's just, you know, except for the wealthiest who are just rich enough to survive divorce and to have their children come out, you know, only mildly fucked up rather than deeply. You know, for everybody else who's further down the food chain, you know, I mean, divorce, you know, divorce and single parenthood is an absolute catastrophe for a great many of the women who go through it because it's almost always the women who end up with care of the children.

50:21And I mean, the feminization of poverty, quote unquote, is directly downstream of the breakdown of families. Yeah, I mean, he comes back to it again, the luxury beliefs idea, Rob was here this morning. Yes, yes. And it just bears repeating again, the best thing that I've learned from you and you taught me before your book was even out, the rules that are made by the upper classes are luxury beliefs that don't impact them. They impact the poorest women and the poorest families and the poorest children. So it is one straight line from chivalry is good and you should hold the door open for women that you don't know as you go in and out of a hotel Right down to you shouldn't be your wife like it is a single straight very slippery slope They get slippery at the closer that you get to the bottom Yeah, I mean, and if and what manifests as holding a door open at the top of the food chain is Might if you're lucky as a woman manifest at the bottom of the food chain as intervening when you see a woman being assaulted on a on a tube platform.

51:23And the more you attack, the holding the door open, the less likely you are, as a sole traveler in late at night, you know, with no, who can't afford to get a taxi, to have somebody come to your aid if you find yourself being attacked on a tube platform alone. Yeah, and again, obviously, if you've got a denial of sex differences, well, why does the man need to step in? Just so, just so. And you know, as though the upper body strength and the physical weight and the height and all of those things had had all suddenly been magically flattened by the fact that we're talking to each other on computer screens.

51:51Yeah, I was talking to Douglas about this yesterday, that gentleman who's currently about to be on trial in New York for choking a guy out that was, I think, dragging him. It sounds as though he's going to be acquitted, but that was an insane trial. That was an insane effort to lynch somebody who was obviously doing a public service. But think about how many people now in the interim while this case is still an open loop and maybe even after if he gets acquitted, he's acquitted. Yes, the tutelary effect for any man tempted to intervene in a public situation like that is is scary. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

52:22I don't want to be I don't want to be me to or or or or the next George Floyd. Right. So any of that stuff exactly. It's an absolute disaster. Yeah, it's scary. What's your thoughts on the surrogacy industry? I think it should be banned all of it. Band. Yeah. Across the board. I don't think surrogacy should be a thing. Why? Little bit little babies need their mothers. and mothers are not in, no woman is not a factory. You know, gestation is not a process of manufacturing to produce a product which can then be handed over willy nilly to another carer. Pregnancy doesn't just create a baby, pregnancy creates a mother.

53:05Pregnancy requires your brain. It transforms you through a series of, you know, you get sort of hormone bathes for nine months over the course of that, your body changes, your breasts change. Everything about your changes, and you completely re -orients you towards... Ready to receive... Ready to receive... To receive baby and to prioritise the care of baby. So in a set, this is not just true across human species, it's true across countless animal species. You're primed for attachment and you're primed for attunement to your child. And of course, this is not to say that... This is not to say that adoptive parents don't do a brilliant job and there are countless adoptive parents who have wonderful jobs and care wonderfully for their adopted children.

53:50However, everybody accepts that a motherless child is off to a weaker start than a child born into a loving home with their mother and father. There's a reason for that. It's because the attunement that comes, that basic biological level of attunement and attachment that's primed through the process of pregnancy is essential from birth onwards to laying the absolute foundations of what it means to be an integrated person. And to say, I think it's just profoundly morally wrong to say we should create a new life with the express intention of severing that bond at birth because somebody, just for the sake of adult desires, I think that's profoundly inverting the duty of care that we to dependent infants.

54:41We should be prioritising their needs, not ours. Did you see the episode I did with Dr. Animateon about life of dad and about how, yes, this as a sentence, it's so good. So she looked at the role of fathers kind of throughout all of her child's upbringing to, they leave the home and talked about how I think that then she and the child had been taken away after the birth, which was successful and she was okay. And the dad was just left in there, no one even came up to him. And he just thought that like, mum could be dead, daughter, child could be dead. And no one ever spoke to him about it. All of the pre -child classes, I don't know what they're called.

55:31All of them are focused on mum, mum's the one that's gonna give birth. It's her body that goes through the stress, et cetera, et cetera. But she said, fathers can deal with post -child depression, what's it called? Post -poster. Thank you, post -partum depression. Dads can get that. There's this really, really common issue that fathers encounter, which I saw first hand and then she talks about in the book, which is that wife is pregnant. Future dad to be knows that wife is pregnant. Six, seven, eight, nine months deep. Dad doesn't feel like he cares about child. that doesn't have any change in paternal instinct.

56:08That doesn't have any cascade. The pond develops after birth for dads. It develops. And there's plenty of evidence. But they feel guilt and shame. And I was sat in this, I remember we're a sat in Austin with this room, like 100 millionaire, 100 millionaire, billionaire, millionaire, millionaire, 100 millionaire, like big hitters all the way around this room. And it was one of these, you know, guys, if anyone's got anything that they're, you know, they want a bit of advice on, we've got a room of people that are pretty capable in here and you can say what you want. This dude was like, why is eight months pregnant?

56:37Don't think I'm gonna love the kid. What do I do? And dude sat across from him was like, give it six months after the birth, everything will change. But that fear and the guilt and the shame, and can I tell my partner, does this mean I don't love my partner? Does this mean I'm gonna be a terrible father? You know, all of these things, like that one insight from that episode, I haven't had so many tags and messages from guys in a really long time. I thought I was broken, I thought I was defective, or I am going through this right now. My wife is X month pregnant or the child is three months old.

57:09I'm like, I just feel nothing for this kid. And it just takes longer for me. Okay, so now bringing it back to surrogacy. So now imagine that instead of it being the dad who takes that long to develop the bond with the child, now it's both parents, because neither parent has been through the biological priming process of pregnancy. Wow. Now imagine, I can't prove that this is going to impact on the life of a newborn baby, but I would bet you any money that it will. And I think it's just profoundly wrong to take that immediate, immediate love of motherhood away from to intentionally deprive a child of that in the name of adult desire.

57:47I just think that's profoundly more early wrong. We shouldn't be allowing it. I think I saw a video, I just told about a video of one of the Kardashians. One of the Kardashians. He was very open about this. and she's, you know, she procured a child by saragassey. And they do. Secured. Yeah, it's human trafficking, Chris. It's human trafficking. Just using your own genetics. Yeah, it's human trafficking using, using sometimes your own genetics. So she procured a baby by a saragassey. And was very open about the fact that she really struggled to bond with the baby. And I was thinking, you know, so, so okay, like, we can all empathize with you, maybe.

58:19But like, can we just think about what the baby's going through here? This is a newborn baby who needs to be surrounded by love and to respond to with care and you know, nursed whenever it, and picked up and held whenever he or she needs it. And both parents are struggling to bond. And both parents are feeling nothing. And both parents are... There's enough nannies around to, you know, just pick it up. Give it to the nanny, the nanny will continue to pick it up. Yeah, and I just, I'm inside reading that, I just wept for the baby, who was still not being centered in the story. Yeah. Even as Kardashian was talking about how she was, how about her emotional journey, even then the child was not being centered in the story.

58:56And I just think it's profoundly, profoundly upside down. We owe a duty of care to the most dependent of all, the most vulnerable of all, which is our babies. And every time we prioritize our own desires over those of our babies, we're failing in that duty of care. What do you mean by matwalshism? Tell me about matwalshism. I mean, I don't normally pick named fights with people. When I talk about matwalshism, this is a frustration I have sometimes with certain elements on the right, this sort of anti -feminist right, if you like. And this really comes down to where my arguments come from, which is about material conditions and feminism emerging out of the technological transformations, first of the industrial era and later of the cyborg era.

59:47And my argument that really we have to look at where we are in terms of the material and the technological conditions which are producing these challenges that we now face. And sometimes I find myself frustrated with those elements on the right who seem to think that everything about modern life can stay the same except what women do and then everything will be fine. Give me an example. So, for example, let me think of an example.

1:00:16That everything that's wrong in the dating culture will be fixed if women were just stopped being hauls. That's a very crude example, but it's a sentiment that I hear. Women just need to stop being hauls and everything would find. I'm like, well, okay, but does that mean you're going to stop shagging around? Does that mean you're going to stop having contraceptive sex with random women? Does that mean you're going to stop watching porn? Does that mean so many of these quote unquote, unquote, sad men have semi -public porn habits? Well, we're completely indiscriminate about liking sort of ethos accounts on Instagram.

1:00:53Whilst simultaneously surveying against, against, you know, tried women displaying more than a few square inches of skin on the internet. And I'm thinking, you know, when you look at yourselves for a minute, you know, I mean, if we're going to have Chastity, can we have fucking Chastity across the board? You know, I'm all four more Chastity, but let's all be in the party, please. You know, and if it really is just about everything staying the same except what women do, then, oh yeah, to me, it's the right wing equivalent of thumb sucking. It's just failing to look at any of the deeper structural drivers of some of the difficulties that we face.

1:01:26And just retreating back into, oh, it's just the fault of those nasty women. And sometimes it is the fault of those nasty women, but not always and it's never just us. Yeah, that's interesting. To think about that, you've got some rule of thumb about how every political movement, when it becomes mainstream is reduced to its most idiotic possible version. Yes, the most imbicillic possible version of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's guaranteed to be the one that goes mainstream. Well, it's just the path of the resistance of memes, right? Yeah, the more reductive something becomes, the more reductive it becomes.

1:02:04Again, I had a conversation for two hours today about memes. In the number of times that we quoted meme first explained later, the stickiness arms race of a lot of this stuff causes people to be able to get ineffectual ideas across with good branding and good advertising and good marketing. and I think that definitely a lot of the stuff that's coming out with regards to mating and dating advice is a lot of the time that it's things that on the surface sounds, triggers all manner of different biases, whether it be your sort of tribalism against the other party, the other sex, whether it's the path of least resistance you're looking for.

1:02:48Like there's a whole host of different reasons why people end up arising at arriving at the particular conclusions that they do. But the more it gets boiled down to a set of just doctrinal talking points, the more useless it becomes. I mean, I don't really want to get into in -sell discourse because it's not, it's actually not a terrain I'm massively familiar with. But every so often I hear these talking points which are trotted out pretty much kind of without any context or without any sense of qualification, like the one about, you know, 10, 20 % of the men are getting 80 % of the women. Stop saying that.

1:03:20Right. I said that for two years. No, no, no, I'm not saying you. I'm not saying you, but people. I'm just putting it out there. But people trot it out as though it's just gospel truth. And I look around or like, you know, women won't date somebody who's less than six feet tall. And I'm like, hello, do you have eyes? Do you ever go outside? You know, I mean, yeah. This is a terminally online issue, right? And again, both of us are, and this isn't me lambasting the people that are terminally online. It's me saying that if you are kind of the same way. Hello, I'm terminally online. Yeah, but the way that the sniper tries is to adjust, okay, so the wind is blowing 15 knots east to west, okay, so I adjust how I perceive what the target is.

1:03:58Like, if you spend this much time online, so Louis has this theory about yourself, right, that'll give you, which is that you've got a barbell strategy, which is like extremism online and extremism touching grass. And like never the twain shall make, and the gray area is where you go to die, right? This dark playground where you kind of like, Like, I think her husband calls it good screen, bad screen. It's like, I've spent enough time on bad screen today, which is working emails. I get some good screen time tonight, which is watching Netflix or whatever. But ultimately, you're still within the confines of the game.

1:04:32And I, you know, said this a ton of times, the most egregious stories online are the ones that garnered the most attention. And people who don't ever spend any time not being online use those as an indication of what the real world is like. but they forget that those stories are selected for precisely because they're insane. Man leaves the house, comes back and the wife's slept with the postman and the postman's dog, and now he's left to die and rubridge with diabetic foot and gluten intolerance or something. That story's insane, which is why it's gone so much opinion and so much attention. And you don't know if it's true.

1:05:08And even if it is true, it's probably unrepresentative. Here's a case, a fine example of that from actually not the dating discourse, but just to illustrate the point. There was a video that did the rounds the other day. Somebody compiled some Zoomers wearing ridiculous clothes and made a little video compilation of Zoomers wearing absurd outfits and put it out on the internet saying, you know, the Zoomers are beyond redemption or some caption like that, you probably saw the video. And they look stupid. Sure, I mean, I looked stupid when I was 19 as well. I wore ridiculous clothes. And I looked at this and I thought.

1:05:39And then later I watched this video and then later that day I drove I drove through Cambridge which is extremely full of young people like it's very very zoomed in environment Cambridge because I had to go there for something or other. And I was looking along the streets thinking is this, you know, 20 something, early 18 -year -old, 19 -year -old, 20 -year -old, after one after another walks past me wearing just normal clothes? I was thinking of them thinking, no, you're not, you're not, Sartor really, beyond redemption. You're just wearing normal clothes. Yeah, whereas the catty is fucking...

1:06:14Yeah, exactly, whereas the catty is and the absurd kind of, you know, non -binary get up and the stills... Technical dream code. And the 18 -inch platforms and whatever the hell else was in this stupid video. And I was thinking, no, literally, somebody's just gone and compiled the most extreme and egregious stupid, stupid clothing that some 18 -year -olds were wearing. And I've tried to generalize that to everybody. And that's just what the internet does, as you say. But when you apply that to the relationship discourse, then you end up in a situation where people, especially people who are not making much of an effort, for whatever reason to reality test this against what's actually happening out there, you know, are really struggling and are finding themselves, you're sort of circling the drain a bit with in terms of their assumptions and expectations.

1:06:55One of my friends referred to it as shadow boxing in imaginary headgemon, fucking beautiful, right, that you have this thing that doesn't exist, that you're somehow compensating for and interacting with, despite the fact that gain it isn't there. And it exists in this ineffable place that everyone kind of perceives and no one ever sees, except for in this sort of virtual world, which then impacts the way that you show up. And then you get, you know, culture and counterculture occurs to, okay, well, fuck it, like, I'm gonna become a furry or whatever, because I've seen it on the internet, and I know that it pisses off the right wing or I'm gonna become a gun -toting maghera public and because I know that it pissed off the, you know, all the way down.

1:07:40So yeah, it's um... I give thanks every day for the fact that I have to show up at the same time every afternoon on the school run pick up queue. Why? I mean, it's not physically touching grass, but it does that. Socially touching grass. You know, I spend all day like, you know, Bluetooth into the rage machine and then I go and pick up my daughter from school I'm like, yes, actually, I can breathe out. You know, it's not everyone. Not everyone in M &S. You know, Twitter is not, Twitter actually is real life, but it's also not real life. And it's important to remind yourself of the ways in which it's not true.

1:08:13I think there should be for every one hour that you spend on the internet, you should have to spend 60 seconds in the George at Azda clothing department, like just to be like, he's the fucking normal people again. You say that I was really interested, you know, to notice, in Sainsbury's, as in George, as in Marx and Spencer's, that long -sleeved, maxi dresses have been all the rage for some time now. OK. I mean, I don't know if I can explain. Is that one of the forehorses of the Satorial Apocalypse? I don't know. This is the thing. But I've been noticing it, and I'm thinking, are we going to have a...

1:08:47Is this just a sign of economic downturn? Is it just that... Because this is well documented, the hemlines go up when the economy grows. And is it just a fact, is it just the fact that the women are sensing the coming economic crisis? Well, I don't know. Or is it the sexual counter -revolution? Or is it, no, is it actually just a fashion? I certainly know that. But I've really noticed the trend. Self -objectification from women is correlated with wealth inequality in the local ecology. So that's an interesting one. Women seem to self -objectify and sexually objectify themselves. So it was kind of Blake's study on the posting of sexy selfies and her justification for it in terms of the mechanism was that It shows women not only how high they could climb but how far they could fall with a partner and when you see those two things side by side It's run away from a life you don't want and run to water life that you do And that causes just Something comes online and it's like I will wrangle myself a husband like activate breasts and and you do that through the sort of selfies that you do.

1:09:53And it was some insane volume, like millions of posts that they looked at to find these correlations on the internet and yeah, that wealth inequality. So I definitely don't disagree that, you know, especially female behavior, but also male behavior too, can be impacted by local ecology, especially wealth inequality, GDP. I mean, we saw even no one ever really spoke about this. I was waiting for a study to come out and someone may still do it. But I thought that casual sex was going to drop after COVID due to a pathogen fear from women, right? Women have got much lower threshold for disgust sensitivity quite rightly because they're more at risk of bearing some sort of burden.

1:10:34And given that we had just talk of disease and infection and virus and so on and so forth for a very long time, I thought that we were going to find a big after effect of that. that just turns out that all of the then three year olds now, six year olds are like, can't read and have absolutely zero social skills. They've had a mask over the face for the last three years. Well, speaking of the mother of a seven year old, that's actually not observed. That's not the case amongst my daughter's cohort. That's good. You'll be pleased tonight. That's good. They all seem actually to be fairly normal and well adjusted kids.

1:11:08The reading age, the reading levels for sure, I think across the, if you look at some of the studies that have been done, and don't bud particularly well, it seems. What is deaf, what is absolutely clear is that there's a stark economic divide. And the further down the food chain you are economically, the harder the harder hit your children were. For understandable reason, whether or not whether it's because you had limited social capital to or were struggling or were in a chaotic family or simply had to work irrespective of lockdown, there are your kids at home and there's just nobody to watch them.

1:11:44For a thousand and one different reasons, it's been absolutely disastrous for poorer children. To a degree which I think is unforgivable and shouldn't be forgiven. What are you most obsessed by as subcultures go or what are you going to be focused on over the next couple of months? Is there anything that's particularly caught your eye? Actually, I'm reviewing a leftist sociological academic text at the moment, which is It's kind of awful. It's called the Women of the Far Right. And I'm very interested in it as a text written by the left about the right. But I'm also interested in the, I mean, it documents, it's a sort of, it's a kind of progressive sociological study of some alt -right female vloggers from the late, from sort of 2016 to 2019, including Lauren Southern.

1:12:35And it's kind of badly written and it's kind of dated, but it's also interesting as a phenomenon. So I'm kind of, but really this is just a preamble. So one of the things I'm interested in and thinking about and really sort of grappling with is the ambivalent position of women within the larger conservative or right wing decision movement. Because it is ambivalent because there are there are a great many right wing right wing men out there who really are virulent and misogynistic, you know, and who genuinely just think women are not people. And yet there are a great many women out there who look at the emerging kind of doctrine air orthodoxy of the kind of the mad left, if you need not, I mean by the mad left.

1:13:15And who just say this is not for me. And so there's a great many women who are kind of between those two poles and who are genuinely quite politically homeless. And it's something I think about a lot. I don't really have any firm conclusions or strong reflections on that. Except to say this is a real phenomenon. and I don't know, and it's like, I don't know, I mean, this sort of fits into a larger kind of reflection, I suppose, on digital cultures and where we are in the discourse, because it feels as though a great many of the trends which sort of erupted in the sort of 2015, 2016, you know, with kind of, you know, the Trumpagadon and all the rest of it, have kind of run their course now.

1:13:52You know, a lot of those sort of quote unquote dissident subcultures have now pretty much percolated into the mainstream. You know, there's a whole new set of talking heads who are now pretty much, I mean, even Bronze Age pervert has been doxed and is now on his foodie arc, which is just... Yeah. Would you... So, like, where do we go from here? Because it seems like all that's left in the subculture is just this increasingly unhinged discourse about dating. And I just... I mean, I'm 44 and I've been married for 10 years, so like, I've got nothing to add to that. So, like, I mean, maybe I should just hang out my boots and go into something else and I mean, I make...

1:14:23Maybe I'll start a bakery. Or maybe... And you would... And you would... And you would... Bronze Age pervert can start the Bronze Age bakery. Yeah. I don't know. I think one of the reasons why everyone is always so interested in talking about the dating world is that it permits everybody to have an opinion, both those who participate and those who do not. Like if you don't know how fucking

1:14:48NFL league goes, like what have you got to tell me about how Travis Kelsey should like change his like QB game or something like that? It doesn't matter. Whereas for dating, people do. People do have an idea of that. And because I remember when I was working in nightlife, one of my jobs was to do, I'm okay at copywriting. So I would write the copy for a lot of the social media posts. My business partner would do a lot more of the accounts and kind of back office stuff. No one went up to him, looked over his shoulder and gave him shit about the way that his spreadsheet's looked. But everyone has a social media account.

1:15:24So everyone's a fucking expert. So everybody had, oh, mate, I wouldn't have posted that time. Well, that's not the hashtag that I would have used. I thought I would definitely think that you could have done it this way. I'm like, all right, well, like, if you're going to scrutinize me, scrutinize the fucking... It's a good question. Yeah, exactly. And it never happened. And I think that, you know, there's a few things that people all... It's why diet is such a breeding ground for people to argue, because everyone's got to eat. Right? Everybody has an idea about how... And it's death denialism as well.

1:15:51Like, no, I'm going to live longer than you. you might veganism is going to beat your carnivoreism and blah blah blah. And ultimately, it just fucking comes down to people wanting to be able to espouse their opinions while being insulated from the impact of them. One sort of one optimistic read we could put on that might be that, you know, if we're all still still fixated on the relations between men and women, that I think that that's a testament of sorts to the fact that the war on relationships is not going to, is never going to triumph completely. Men and women do still want to be together.

1:16:23And they're going to try and continue to... And to reach out this. Even if they're mud -restling horribly at the moment, at least on the internet. And again, Twitter is not real life, even though it kind of is real life. And I just have to trust that somewhere out of this messed up discourse, there are lots of perfect... They get answer that's fucking useful. And also, there are lots of perfectly nice and well -adjusted young men and women who are finding one another and forming nice relationships. They're just don't go anywhere near Twitter. You know when I, I just have to assume that that's all so true.

1:16:52One of the most like sanity reinforcing periods of my year is when I go home for Christmas. And I'm at Mom and Dad's house, and the gruffalo comes on, right? And I watch the gruffalo, and I think who's this made for? This is made for families that are sat together, round the fire, whether you be shopping at waitress, or shopping at little, like that's what it's built for, and it works across the board. That's a great story. I know it pretty much by heart, I think. Gruffles a solid story. Or, you know, like the boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse, right? Like, just stuff like that, and it always makes me...

1:17:27Maybe it's just because Christmas is a kind of wistful, whimsical time of year that makes everyone happy. But that always, that's like my media equivalent of touching grass. I think that's one of the most grass -like watching experiences. So what is this built to engender, right? It's like this very calming, very, what's that one with the dragon? What's that one with the dragon? Zog? Yes, thank you. It always rhymes. Yeah. Which must be a nightmare to script. But yeah, all of those things. And I'm like, I, 35 year old, childless man watches children's TV. This is another warning. So this is smiling at toddlers on a walk, isn't it?

1:18:13But yeah, I happily watch that and it gives me that's the stuff that my post content clarity of that is like Like everything's a bit everything's all right. I think I think I honestly do think we're gonna be all right Yeah, I sincerely believe that it doesn't matter how hard we try and demolish our nature It will always find a way back Genuinely believe that even if even if has Louise sometimes worries, you know our culture is so structurally anti -natalists that we're just going to end up self -selecting against ourselves to the point that we just render ourselves extinct. But it doesn't follow from that that all humans are going to go extinct.

1:18:47It'll just be the ones with this culture. So some humans, some where will survive and it'll be the ones who figured out how to unplug from the skin of a machine and go back to having kids. But one way or another, that subset of the culture which survives will be the one that figures out how to get pass this kind of messed up point that we're in, but some part of it will survive. You know, I think we're going to be all right. That's the white pill that I want to finish on. Mary Harrington, ladies and gentlemen, why should people go? They want to keep up to date with all the things that you're doing.

1:19:16And what can expect off you over the next few minutes? I wrote regularly at Unheard. My sub -starch is reactionary feminist. You can find me on Twitter at Moving Circles. Hell yeah, thank you, Mary.