The Extreme Crisis of Young Women - Freya India - #1090

33:57And so you have, I had to go on this forum in the book of Gen Z adults talking about when they first were exposed to porn. And some of them are like eight, six, and they're talking about accidentally seeing it on these platforms and way before they've even attempted dating anyone or can put that in context. So I think we talk a lot about the impact of porn on young men but not so much on young women even if they're not watching it I think there's constant sort of exposure to it on social media so a lot of the statistics in the book were accidental exposure so it's not young people going on to Pornhub it's very often on Twitter or Instagram and it's accidentally come up and it started an addiction um and so I think that plays into the same thing it creates a fear around sex and it creates crazy expectations i think there's porn brained women sometimes where the way they speak about women about themselves is so heartbreaking even listening to call her daddy and some of the guests on there the way they talk about themselves it sounds like it's straight out of a porn site and that's they're viewing themselves as nothing but an object a product there's another weird paradox going on here, which is porn is both something totally meaningless, transactional, that you can do freely with whoever you want, whenever you want.

35:30Yeah. And also the root of potentially the most traumatic thing in your life if it's done incorrectly. That, I don't. No, I don't understand the consistent defense of porn from progressives. So this is part of the controversial part of my book is that I don't caveat. I don't give any disclaimers with that because I was so tired of reading books that constantly caveat. And so with things like porn - The throat clearing land acknowledgement. Yeah. Well, we must remember that porn does empower women to be able to, if they're disadvantaged, they've got an iPhone and a dildo and they can make the money that they would have.

36:15And I do that throughout the book. So another controversial part of the book is I talk about the mental health industry. And I don't do the constant, you know, some medication really helps people and it saves their lives. And therapy is, of course, life-saving for some people. I do a brief acknowledgement of that at the beginning. and then I go into what I think are the real dangers because I think we've heard that other side of the story there are so many books telling you the benefits of mental health awareness and opening up and taking medication and the point of the book is it's the things that we didn't grow up hearing and so I give the skeptical side of it and I think that is very alarming to a lot of progressives they want the constant disclaimers because they think it's dangerous to not have them A quick aside, there is a stat that genuinely surprised me when I first heard it.

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38:06That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. How do girls think about their emotional lives and struggles? Well, in the book, I actually talk about, it starts with this sort of cliche of posting your perfect life online so highlight reel of everything you're doing and then i trace the start of influencers being vulnerable online so i put it i begin with zoella who was huge in the uk you know the beauty influencer no should i you don't know her sorry what the the beauty influencers zoella yeah i should be familiar with her okay maybe men and women do have different The different echo chambers here.

38:53You know what I mean? Yeah. Does she lift? No. Ah, if she lifts, then if she starts lifting, if she does a vlog with Chris Bumstead, I'll watch that. Okay. Okay. But she basically, she was huge for young British women. Okay. British? And yeah. And she was sort of perfect looking and really sort of inspirational if you were 13 and she was in her twenties and she was one of the first beauty influencers. And she did this video where it was so dramatic. She was like, I'm going to reveal a really dark side to myself. You guys might not think about me the same, but I've just got to say it. And it was literally just she has anxiety.

39:30But at the time, it felt so personal and private that she was revealing this. And so she spoke about having panic attacks. And it got millions of views because 13-year-olds like me at the time were like, gosh, there's this perfect woman admitting to having a struggle. so that to me seems a healthy thing and then i talk about how that basically became incentivized a whole industry got built around that and other influencers began to see that opening up would be beneficial in terms of clicks how's it beneficial because it's it's releasing sort of a private secret so it's very clickable so if you say i have to tell you how damaged i am about my personal trauma it's like gossip and so those videos do really well because they're intimate and vulnerable and and basically that was the start of girls like me seeing influencers offer up their deepest feelings to the market to algorithms and i think some of it was directly copying influencers so we're so sick and tired of the filtered perfect lives that we're all going to start showing the vulnerable side of ourselves.

40:46But it's still a kind of performance. And yeah. And so my argument in the book is it became its own performance just as damaging as seeing the perfect lives. Now you scroll through people live streaming their panic attacks, showing their messy depression. At least the perfect lives are aspirational. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's - Objectively, even if they're untrue, objectively if we're able to truthfully get there that seems like not a bad life to have aspired to it's harmful to scroll through and i think it's actually harmful for the young girls themselves to to tell the internet everything they're feeling and reveal their deepest emotions and i actually say in the book that companies were explicitly encouraging that all through my childhood so instagram facebook snapchat they're all telling you open up share your story we want you to tell tell people how you're feeling um and i think it was more about sharing your data with companies than actually opening up if you think about the progress for let's use instagram you go from just being able to post images to being able to post images and videos to being able to post images videos and then stories and the reason for the story i remember at the time the guy that was running instagram he said sometimes i do something or take something that i don't think is good enough for my feed yeah but i do want to share it so that can go on my story and then you have close friends yeah so there's even a you know members only and there's a literal members only it's like an only fans section of instagram for people who want to have paid for gate walls members content on there too but yeah the only the close friends instagram stories thing can be exactly where you would put this sort of stuff and then you know i've refined my having a breakdown content maybe it's fit for public consumption now and i think you have one thing i always argue is you don't know who you're going to be at 20 or 30 and you have young girls sharing really vulnerable parts of themselves and sort of then categorizing themselves as that thing so if you're really struggling with social anxiety disorder at 13 you might not be struggling with it at 20 but you're giving the internet everything about that struggle and so another part of this is the social media platforms and how permanent they are, but then it's the mental health industry that you will get categorized, sold to, and then be encouraged to diagnose yourself with a disorder and take it more seriously, whereas you might grow out of it.

43:15And if you have to do a U-turn on that in future, there is this cemented, fossilized record of where you were previously. Hey, hey, hey, you used to believe this thing. Yeah. And now you are saying this thing. Why? so often in the book i'll talk about influences and sort of how they've had they've been called out for something or they've had a breakdown or something has backfired and it's so interesting that young girls were basically mimicking on a smaller scale everything that they were doing and so for example i talk about 2020 and all of the influences getting cancelled for not posting the right black square and getting called out and the same thing is playing out among ordinary girls turning on each other for not posting the right thing.

43:57And it's a similar theme throughout the book is whatever's happening to influencers on a big scale, ordinary girls are mimicking because they also have an audience. It might not be a huge audience that influencers have, but they are performing for their followers and their subscribers. And the argument is that our role models were influencers more than anything else. So normal feelings are being reframed as disorders now? Yes. And so that's a big controversial part of the book. Nearly 30 % of teenage American girls aged 14 to 18 seriously considered attempting suicide in 2021. 30 % of teenage American girls 18 to 14 seriously considered attempting suicide in 2021.

44:41See, I think there's two things going on, which is that there is genuine distress. and so I'm not someone who argues that young women are just diagnosing themselves but they feel fine I don't actually think they feel fine I think they feel intense psychological distress for all sorts of reasons but then part of that distress is a mental health industry that is encouraging them to ruminate to go more inwards to focus on it to diagnose themselves and so it's a part of it um but i think yeah if young girls say they have an anxiety disorder they have social anxiety i think what they're really feeling is actual distress from the world that they're growing up in and so they have had less practice they have had less face-to-face interaction and so they do have this outsized reaction to socializing but it's not a disorder and so the problem is you have a lot of young women who typically by their nature will go inwards when they feel distressed, but you have industries encouraging them and telling them the problem is you.

45:49Yeah. They're not making it up, but they are being manipulated. Yeah. Yeah. And the point of the book is basically there's nothing wrong with you. Your reactions are human reactions to the world and to a world that's trying to turn you into a product, the fact that you feel unhappy. What's the product bit? Well, I think that all of these things in some way are linked to girls viewing themselves as some kind of object or trying to be perfect. So trying to look perfect, feel perfect, labeling themselves if they feel anything human or any sort of distress or human reaction to something, they will need to package it up and understand it.

46:27I think so much of girls' lives is about, again, presenting things to the market and understanding, labeling, and displaying themselves for other people. What's happening politically? To young women. Well, so this is the interesting thing in that New Statesman piece is they actually admitted that it's young women who have been radicalized. radicalized. So from the 2010s, it was young women who lurched dramatically to the left. It wasn't that young men lurched to the right. Young men pretty much stayed where they were. It was women. Yeah. The new statement said, the prevailing narrative is that young men under the influence of the Manosphere and Andrew Tate being politically radicalized faster and in greater numbers than young women.

47:12The result is a gulf in political sensibility between British women and men who are now dramatically inclined to the populist right compared with other parts of the population. it's a compelling story but it isn't completely accurate instead it is young women moving to the radical left that is widening the political gender gap among the under 30s yeah and i would put that down to social media because um obviously there's all different spheres of content on social media and every trend basically you can get dragged toward the most deranged and extreme endpoint of that trend. And so I've been trying to argue for ages that young women are going down their own rabbit holes, whether it's mental health trends, they hover over some content and then end up diagnosing themselves and it becomes their full identity because they're dragged constantly toward more content.

48:03And it's the same with progressive politics. You start at a pretty normal place where maybe previous generations of women were, but then you get moved by the algorithm constantly, further and further to the left. Why to the left and not to the right? I think because progressive politics naturally plays into women's characteristics, especially the new sort of social justice culture of politics, because it's very much about compassion, empathy, also plays into our vices. So indirect aggression, cancel culture, risk aversion, safetyism a lot of the vices of young women are sort of indulged by the new social justice movement so i think that's happening but then also you combine that with social media platforms and young women are just sucked into it in a way that young men aren't there was a segment in that new statesman article i asked if the women would consider dating a man with different politics they all immediately said no i don't think i'd even be friends with one said one girl they don't see you as human.

49:07Only one woman, Evelyn, admitted to having male friends, though she was worried this made her a pick-me trying too hard for male attention. Evelyn was concerned about the men that she knew were watching online. The stuff that's being said about women is crazy. They're getting all of these reels talking about bad stuff about women. And I get reels of women saying bad stuff about men. I try to think not all men are like this. But it's interesting that men get reels talking bad stuff about women. Yeah. And she knows that she gets reels of women talking bad stuff about men. Yeah. But that the women talking bad stuff about men is warning her about what the men are watching.

49:43And that's true. But that the reels that are telling the men the bad stuff about women, that's actually where the danger is. Yeah. And I think that's where what the new statesman would draw from all this is that women have negative views of men because men are bad rather than why do they have negative views of men what rabbit holes are they going down? When it's young men, it's always a rabbit hole that they've gone down. But young women are reacting to a real issue. Whereas I've seen so many parallels between the sort of extreme manosphere guys and Call Her Daddy. It's the same language. It's the same like thumbnails and titles.

50:20So it would be like, we don't need men and we don't need women. Exactly the same. And the way, again, they speak about women is identical. was 2020 a turning point for girls online i think it was the first time that i remember being called out for not posting something and so something really changed in terms of you have to join in the pressure and the fear of your reputation being smeared especially if you were a teenage girl at the time um so i remember being i think i was 19 when black lives matter protests were happening and the sort of again you had celebrities and influencers being called out but then you had ordinary girls coming after each other for not posting stuff and i give the context in the book that we were basically posting everything online by that point so every relationship memory holiday was updated and you know compulsively shared with people and so if you're doing that and then you don't post a black square it looks really suspect because everything else is shared and so I think what changed in 2020 is morality became measurable and instantly judged by your Instagram profile and I think when you're a teenage girl your life is basically just constant reputation management And so that really hit young girls, this idea that you're not a good person if you're not joining in and you're not displaying ways to hand on things.

52:00What was that silence is consent tagline? Yeah, that was Cara Delevingne. So she had an Instagram story saying silence is consent, which is the worst. It's not great to tell women, is it? Yeah, yeah. But yeah, so it was young women pressuring each other and then going after each other for not doing it because it became another form of reputation destruction, that you have inoffensive and outdated views. And so I think it was even separate from what was happening politically. It just became another form of competition. A quick aside, most people think that they're dehydrated because they don't drink enough water.

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54:18but again the competition the amount of influencers over the years that that now have to compete for clicks and money mean that each beauty influencer also has to up their game and say something slightly more extreme or show something more extreme so for example you go from normal beauty tutorials to casual vlogs where you just show you getting a brazilian butt lift in the middle of the vlog and that becomes part of a standard beauty routine and you see it with stuff like anti-aging where it's just a simple anti-aging routine then becomes like a 50-step anti-aging routine and you need to do it younger and younger because the thumbnail that says you know you need Botox at 17 does way better because people click it and want to know more about it and so it's in all aspects of life for young women it's the mental health trends it's the political trends it's the beauty trends basically social media will drag everything to its inevitable extreme and then if you're spending most of your waking hours on social media then that is no longer the extreme that is where you're getting your information it's where you're learning about beauty and relationships and politics has instagram and tiktok changed what we find attractive Yeah, I think so.

55:39I think it's more of a sort of avatar now where you… There's a terror of aging among young women. And so I wrote a piece ages ago about 12-year-olds worrying about wrinkles on Reddit forums and obsessively ruminating over pictures, whether they aged, writing out all of the sun exposure they've had and checking, you know, is this something that could make me look worse in the future? comparing all of their anti-aging routines and their children um you need an aging routine you need you need to actively be aging at that point yeah yeah well this is sometimes it's girls worrying about wrinkles before they've got through puberty because they've grown up with watching influencers who are worrying about that and who are having to sort of exaggerate their neuroticism up their neuroticism to get clicks but then you have young girls that's the first they encounter first sort of young women role models they encounter who are warning them about this um and i think social media in general just makes you ruminate and so girls already ruminate more than boys but then they're on all these platforms like reddit where you all co-ruminate together the point is you talk about your problems and there's an escalation on there as well yeah there's always a sense of one-upmanship i always see this with my friends that are conspiracy minded.

57:10And in a room, there's always a, it's kind of like an arms race to see who can go deepest down the iceberg. It's like, oh, you think that Epstein was just a guy that had an island? Oh, you think he was just Mossad? Oh, you think he was just a reptile person? Dude, let me tell you, oh, that's cute. Let me tell you the real thing. And it's this, yeah, weird race to the bottom of the iceberg. And it's kind of the same here, that there is this ratcheting up in intensity. Yeah, you see that most with the mental health stuff where it will be, oh, you think it's bad, you've got ADHD. Well, I've got autism and ADHD.

57:47And I've got a gluten intolerance and I've got a club foot and my dad walked out. Yeah, exactly. And I think the platforms, again, they encourage that because you have all influencers are competing for attention. But then you have influencers whose whole brand now is their mental health diagnosis. They are the ADHD influencer. And I think that creates some very bad incentives because then you basically compete over your diagnosis. There has to be a psychological cost of growing up with a front-facing camera 24-7 as well. Yes. What was that? Was it the Zoom face that people had during lockdown?

58:26Snapchat dysmorphia as well. Where people want to get surgery and to look like their filter. They don't like seeing themselves without their filter. yeah so you have girls who are using did you know about facetune because i swear no young men even know what it is you don't know what's facetune see that's great so facetune is like one of the most popular apps where girls would edit themselves to then post on instagram like filters no going in and editing each part of your face so you can slim your jaw you can enlarge your eyes you can change your waist you can tan your skin you can whiten your teeth it's everything but that is what girls were using as teenagers all throughout their all throughout growing up and then they've reached their 20s and people say why are they unhappy with the way they look why do they have body dysmorphia and they're using this app where you you change yourself and then there's like an undo button which if you click it you look horrifying because then it reverts back to who how you actually look.

59:29But you had girls doing that during the most formative years of their life and then trying to adjust to how they actually look. How does the self-love messaging coexist with record levels of body dissatisfaction? Yeah, that's another paradox. I think because it's a marketing strategy. It's much like mental health awareness. a lot of that was a marketing strategy the self-love campaign was basically ways to sell things like editing apps so facetune was marketed as something that can help you feel confident and empowered and i talk about these influencers in the book who are literally they're literally talking about how they don't have any insecurities anymore and they've overcome it and they finally reached a stage of self-love while they're literally reshaping their jaw on facetune, teaching girls how to do it.

1:00:27And none of the comments are calling that out or thinking it's hypocritical. Why? Because I think it's been drilled into us that these things are self-love. And so a lot of the time in the book, I talk about recognizing what are you actually being sold versus what you're being told because you're constantly being told you feel this way and that this app or technology or trend will make you feel this way, even though it's not. So I don't know any young woman that would facetune herself and feel good, feel good doing it rather than feel embarrassed and a bit ashamed and feel worse about themselves after.

1:01:07You know, I think the same thing happened with the pickup artist movement. So what guys that did it learned was just how much they had to contort themselves in order to get laid with a woman. And even if it was effective, what they felt was the delta between who they were normally and who they were when they deployed the game by Neil Strauss. And that gap made the normal version of them feel even more disgusting, even more unwanted. Look at how much I've got to disguise and pervert myself in an attempt to try. Did you see the midget fight outside? Let's go to three other bars so that I can neurolinguistically program, hack the back of your brain into coming to bed with me tonight.

1:01:46You go, I have to jump through all of these hoops. And this is where, so for the guys that it was successful for, if you don't do too much self-investigation, hooray, you did a thing. But if you do a bit more self-investigation, it's pretty, it can be pretty dark. And for the guys that did it and it didn't work, even with the best tactics in the world I still can't make myself into someone that a woman wants yes neither of those are good outcomes yeah it's the same that's so similar to the beauty stuff for women which is that it can maybe get you what you want superficially so you face tune yourself and you get 200 likes on your instagram post but it then it's a momentary bit of dopamine but then after that you're now hooked on the app you need to keep using it you need the constant yeah and then you develop which is what happened to me and a lot of girls i know which was then having an aversion to having your picture taken naturally because you're so used to controlling it so girls in my friendship group would fight over whose phone the picture would be taken on so that they could go in and face they've got the control wow and so then wow that is fucking insane yeah because it feels so out of control and then also that explains a lot of i think social anxiety because being in the real world is out of control you can't control your appearance you can't edit what you're saying or rehearse it and so i think a lot of these apps actually then stunted us in real life because it feels so you know what was interesting i was at i was on long island uh august of last year good weather sunset and there was a group of young teenage girls that were taking photos and i noticed that if it was really perfectly put together i mean they must have taken i'm not kidding it must have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of photos i get it you want a nice new profile picture whatever like is it a bit silly yeah but whatever it's fine yeah the other thing that was interesting was if they were snapping as they walked because they stayed in the same area that was gonna have the best sunset which is where everybody was eating ice cream or whatever and um if someone was sort of snapping away more naturally, more candidly, immediately all of their hands went up to their face.

1:03:59Have you seen this trend where girls sort of do this? So they'll pose with their body, but cover their face with their hand. And again, I'm trying to get it. I'm trying to not curmudgeonly point a finger at someone that's 20 years younger than me and go, these kids, I'm like, okay, so what is it that they're feeling? Why are they doing this thing? what's the best interpretation of this like it's a cutesy little you but it wasn't a marilyn monroe shocked open mouth sort of face it was i just need to do this it was like the scene out of four lions where he's trying to stop the fucking cctv from watching it it's another paradox where we're vain and insecure at the same time but there's context to it because you know i grew up with the dog ear filter on snapchat please tell me you know what that i've I've seen that one.

1:04:50And I remember the, do you remember the face mask that was bees? No. So, you know, like the face mask that you used to have in COVID. Yeah. That very quickly became like an object of oppression or something that didn't work or whatever. Yeah. I swear there was one, and people can tell me in the comments whether or not I'm fucking hallucinating this. I swear that there was one that was yellow and had bees. jared google was there a snapchat filter of a face mask with bees i swear fucking not but i remember the dog one and then if you opened your mouth it did a licking thing right yes but the dog one uh people want to be dogs no but it beautified you as well so it would like um enlarge your eyes and smooth your skin and so you had 13 year olds using it because it was cute but then suddenly hating the normal pictures themselves and not knowing why and it's because it was subtly changing your face why do you think social media has feminized us all oh because i think that it has so because girls use social media more than boys and they say that they find it harder to give up and as i said before it sort of these platforms tap into our vulnerabilities and our vices but then lately I've realized that I think it does that for everyone so I used to think that social media is particularly bad for girls because it makes you feel insecure it makes you ruminate and it encourages this indirect aggression so reputation destruction and going after people online but now I see grown men online acting like teenage girls And I think it's because the platform itself encourages these behavior that teenage girls already typically do.

1:06:38And so you see people online of all genders, of all different sides of the political spectrum, all different types of content, thinking like teenage girls. so becoming more ruminative spending hours and hours on platforms where they have to share how they feel how their day is their opinion encouraged to sort of catastrophize and ruminate over that then you have men and all different types of people becoming more insecure so looking at themselves through a front-facing camera which is bad for girls but even worse i think for boys It's just very unnatural to sort of forensically analyze and inspect your face.

1:07:20And so you have looks maxing and guys getting really obsessed with how they come across and how they appear and also thinking they have to be this perfect product. And then you also have guys using sort of the typical aggressive tactics of teenage girls online. and so louise perry and mary harrington have spoken about this that the internet forecloses physical aggression you can't punch someone on twitter and so you have to do things like spread reputation damage yeah gossip and um yeah just just destroy their reputation through posting like an unflattering picture of them or there's a lot of catty behavior yeah men on the internet you know i go on x and i just see because i only log on maybe once every other day yeah so i see it you know when you go to a nightclub and strobe lights flash and you don't see someone move you see them at frames they're here then they're here then they're here it's kind of like that so i'll log on and see this breakdown between two people and then a couple of days later where that war has sort of evolved into and it it is so especially for the most masculine academic intellectually everybody has regressed to the mean of high school dinner table but it's interesting because ideologically men and women might be further apart but i think behaviorally that is one place that we're converging is that we're all regressing back to being teenage girls and i i've also argued that it's not that it's the thing about being a teenage girl is it's miserable like a lot of women would say they do not want to go back to being 13 it's it's one of the worst stages of life for a lot of women and so not only are we acting more catty online but i think it's bad for our mental health because it traps you in this sort of particularly destructive developmental time.

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1:10:29That's rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom at modernwisdom at checkout. Do you see influencers as just salespeople pretending to be friends then? yeah so that's that's a big part of all kinds of influences so beauty influences mental health influences is that they present themselves as a friend and i think this happened quite naturally at first so the original influences were just hi girls here we are today but now it's a tactic now they know that they have to appeal to young girls and make them feel like a friend and so i talk about these tactics in the book where they will literally say something like that their YouTube title will be, let's get ready like we're on FaceTime.

1:11:16And they'll do their makeup and talk to you like you're on a FaceTime call and literally simulate friendship with girls. And I think that is a huge issue because it stops girls from getting lonely enough to actually go out and make friends and do something about it because they can simulate all of these things online. That's so good. You've heard my male sedation hypothesis thing, right? Maybe. Which one? Young male syndrome throughout history, when there's a lot of sexless young men, they tend to cause uprisings and push over granny and set shit on fire. Yeah. We've got the highest rates of sexlessness among young men that we've ever had.

1:11:53Why is there not the concordant antisocial behavior? Yeah. It's my belief that it's porn screens and video games yeah porn giving a titrated dose of sexual satisfaction screens distracting and video games giving a simulacrum of goal seeking yeah so they're being sedated male sedation hypothesis they're being sedated that's why like a study done by william is where are all the incel killings at like why are there not more there should be if you were to run it by the numbers that's not a fucking request to the dj but yeah where are they and what's interesting about this is what are some of the young female pathways what are the nutrients that they want for guys it might be progress mastery a sense of um teamwork as they move toward a goal yeah for girls uh belonging advice uh emotional understanding and it's interesting i'm gonna to guess jerry can you chat gpt uh what the teenage gender split is for playing video games uh because i'm gonna guess that it's way more on the male side yeah but if you were to look at day in the life vlogs yeah i bet get ready with me who the fuck get ready with me is take three seconds you know it's like it would be called put your pants on with me and it would literally be a 15 second video for a guy uh oh wow 90 99 of boys play video games 94 what are the games there among teens 39 of boys describe themselves as daily gamers 22 of girls do just search um do you know what the relative amounts like a daily play time is because it's got to be more there's no way yeah 93 of teenage girls playing video games yeah but is it like sims and animal crossing yeah maybe i guess so this is where the gender difference becomes more boys 1.5 to 2.5 hours per day on average girls half an hour to one and a half hours so boys are one and a half to two times as much first person shooters sports games action combat games strategy and other competitive multiplayer games boys social sandbox games roblox minecraft simulation sims animal crossing think you nailed it candy crush subway surface puzzle games short sessions low commitment cozy games stardew yeah cozy games um yeah i saw this quote the other day i'd be interested to know what you think about it the average woman's misandry comes from online radicalization not experience what do you think about that um i think they may have bad experiences

1:14:35so when i was writing the book a lot of the complaints from young women were things like situationships where there's no clear commitment and so i do think there are less incentives for men to um formalize a relationship and also girls have to be super cool with that yes because yeah sex is supposed to be no strings attached you should have sex like your brother and work like your father it's super chill yeah so a lot of the forums are full of women asking each other whether something's okay like he i'm not actually his girlfriend yet he is dating someone but we are exclusive you know it's like it gets really muddled and asking each other that is this normal should i put up a fucking christopher nolan movie plot yeah yeah yeah and so i think there will be cases where young women are coming across more men who do act like that depending on the type of young women and who she's going for but a lot of the time I do think online radicalization is at least stopping them from treating those as specific examples so they then generalize to all men so I think they might have had a bad experience but then they go online and people say, this is all men, this is happening to me, this is happening everywhere.

1:15:56And I think similar with women. So sometimes I read comments that will say things like, you know, like one in two girls are OnlyFans stars or they're all promiscuous and that's just not true. That's just generalized from the internet. And so I think it happens to both sexes, which we're just, again, encouraged to catastrophize and generalize online. Well, the most egregious stories are the ones that go viral. Yeah. So you end up, I call this a recursive red pill learning, which is the most ridiculous stories that you can find on the internet. This guy leaves the house for two hours, but he lost his job the day before.

1:16:35And he comes back and his wife's in bed with the milkman and the milkman's dog. And then she leaves him and he's broke and he gets addicted to fentanyl. And whether that's true or not, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. That is the story because it's so extreme. Yes. That's the one that gets pushed online the most, which means the most people see it, which means the most people learn from it. And that then just feeds this cycle of if you were a training data set for Chachabiti, you would be being trained by exposure because you don't see everything because you're not omnipotent. You would be trained on the most extreme stories.

1:17:11So you have the least representative stories because they're the ones that get the most attention online. this guy and his wife had a minor argument and after a couple of hours they came together and had a cup of tea and everything was okay yeah like that is hopefully what most people should be experiencing yeah but that's not going to generate any clicks online which means that you're less likely to see it which means also people are less likely to post it so it's this bi-directional tri-directional incentive system well if you look at reddit in particular you've seen that study about you know the advice can you uh can you google um reddit relationship advice graph yeah it'll come up and i think compromise is the least popular that's gone down yeah was it like just talk it out got a therapy ticked up a little bit yeah but it's you should just break up yeah and the interesting thing is chat gbt i think some huge proportion of its training data is on reddit is on reddit yeah so that being said i haven't heard many people say i haven't heard many people say that chat gpt has told them to break up true uh here it is so 15 years of relationship advice on reddit 1 ,166 ,592 comments end relationship or cut contact has gone from 30 to 50 communicate has dropped by like a quarter give space and time has dropped by even more seek therapy and counseling ticked up a little bit what's that yellow one set and respect boundaries so kind of the I guess weaponizing of therapy language a little bit there and then compromise also dropped by probably half yeah I was gonna say because some of the examples in the book I take from reddit forums where actually I wonder what that advice is for I'd love to see a breakdown because sometimes it's a young woman presenting a completely valid opinion about her relationship.

1:19:15So she's saying, I feel, let's say her partner's addicted to porn. And there was one example in the book where her partner had said to her that he was addicted to porn and he watches girls that look like her to try and reassure her. So don't worry. It's all right, darling. I only go for blondes. It's fine. It's fine. It's basically me watching you. I think he was saying even worse that I watch people with average bodies like yours. I also watch normal women. But anyway, she wrote this heartbreaking post on Reddit to say, how do I deal with this? And she kept saying in it constantly, I know that I need to get over this, but it's upsetting me.

1:19:59I can't stop crying about it. I can't have a conversation with him. Literally every single comment was, you are the problem. I think you have an anxiety disorder. I think you have an attachment issue because this is completely normal. And so I think there's sort of two things going on. I do think there's also when there's legitimate problems, the sort of inward spiral of Reddit can make you overthink it and go too far inwards. I keep seeing this everywhere. And this is another example of it. For instance, mental health problems are both underdiagnosed and overdiagnosed. So there is a bucket of people who have serious mental health issues that aren't seeking medical attention or advice or treatment for it.

1:20:40And then there's a huge number of people who don't have mental health problems, but have convinced themselves or been convinced by the internet or gaslit themselves into believing that they do. So they're both underdiagnosed and overdiagnosed. It's like relationship advice is both too fragile and too forgiving at the same time. It's too accusatory and too blameless. Well, as you've said before, the people who don't need that advice will take it. Hyper responders. Yeah. And so you have, if you're a girl that's self-critical and likely to go inward and someone tells you you are the problem, you're going to take that seriously.

1:21:18And you'll also gravitate toward a community of people who believe that too. Yeah. So you will echo chamber that. I mean, this is the, it's great. I think that guys who take responsibility and girls that take responsibility, dudes that lock in and fucking get shit done, great. There is a limit. Yeah. You are not supposed to grit your teeth through your intimate relationship. Yes. You're not supposed to subdue your needs or push simply because that's what's been successful elsewhere in your life. Like your relationship is a place that you're supposed to feel safe and regulated, not another challenge for you to go to war inside of.

1:21:57But I actually think sometimes the therapy language in relationships can obscure the real problem. And so if you're constantly encouraged to communicate and talk it through and see their point of view and understand their boundaries and it's their personal taste and preference, you have a generation who's so articulate in therapy speak but then find it very hard to see what is the actual problem and react to the actual problem there's a great alander bot on video where he says that after a while you need to realize that the late night journaling sessions and the couples counseling and the four-hour phone calls are just an indication that this isn't working Yeah.

1:22:39The fact that we now have the tools to be able to do rupture and repair and to work out our attachment styles and learn our love languages doesn't mean that there isn't a limit to incompatibility. Well, this is what I've spoken about, about girls thinking they're anxiously attached when they're just with a really bad partner. And again, doing that thing where they feel like they can't ever be jealous or insecure. And so instead, they think that being securely attached is never being insecure or unhappy or reacting to things. And I think a lot of that is because they're reading relationship advice on TikTok, which has no context and basically is as dramatic and extreme as possible and tells them that they have a problem.

1:23:27Megan Cooper, a British trauma-informed holistic therapist, has a podcast called Higher Love in which she discusses violence against women, hyper-masculinity, and the ecosystem of manufactured male victimhood. On Instagram, Cooper posted about conflicts in Iran, Palestine, Beirut, and Sudan. I don't know about you, but for the past few months, my bones have ached, she wrote in March, the viscerality of the feminine wound. There's an interesting injection of sort of female coded language into global wars and conflict that I don't fully see the link there. No, I don't understand that. The only thing I can think is that it becomes, again, another form of signaling you are a good person.

1:24:17Look at how much I care. Yeah, and these would be the same women who've, again, grown up with believing that what counts as being a good person is what they post. um and also empathy you know to steelman that this person is if that's the truth this person really cares about what's going on in the middle east and is genuinely pained by it and that that's a kind of investment that's really impressive yeah i don't i don't know whether like one of the concerns is that the incentives align on social media for empathy in particular a very sort of public a very obvious kind of look at how much i care this is my these are my tears for the people of the sudan these this is my concern i went but i that's a kind of it can be uh deranging and it can actually stop you from doing something that could help or focusing on something that you can have an impact on.

1:25:21It's interesting to me that in the New Statesman article, October 7th was a huge turning point for lots of these women. But not the 7-7 bombing, but not issues that are much closer to home, not the grooming gangs crisis that we've got, which is directly affecting women. The concern here, the viscerality of the feminine wound, I'm going to guess when we're talking about the Middle East, most of the casualties are probably going to be men because they're the people that are military actors on both sides. Same thing goes for the Ukraine. The same thing goes for Gaza. Like, yes, women and children are not enemy combatants or combatants at all.

1:26:03That's a huge fucking tragedy. But like, it's more men that die in war. And the viscerality of the feminine wound seems like a kind of weird injection of gender into something that's just a tragedy. And the same thing around October 7th, like there are much closer to home issues that could trigger that, but for some reason haven't and didn't. And I wonder whether it's maybe because the grooming gangs in the UK is right coded. Yeah, it's not politically correct. But also it's interesting in that New Statesman piece, did you read what that young woman spoke, what she said about her boyfriend being a Labrador?

1:26:42Yeah, he's a fucking Labrador. He's never endured any discomfort in his life. It's hard for someone who's never faced adversity and has been privately educated to understand this, dot, dot, dot. I actually think I'm the adversity in his life. So where's the empathy for people directly in front of you? That is what concerns me. That's why I'm suspicious of it being - Empathy for being in a relationship with you. Yeah. Suspicious of it being actual empathy because it doesn't seem to translate to even more closer to home than the grooming gangs and the 7-7 bombing is your actual family or partner.

1:27:17What's been the response to this by the press? To the New Statesman piece? No, to yours. Oh. To your book. Well, dangerous, I think, is one of the sort of key themes has been that, actually i think more from the press it's been that it's not genuine empathy ironically so that should have talked about the sudan yeah um so the guardian said it was like a bit of a grift to talk about what's happening to girls um the new statesman said you know i can't possibly save anyone because their argument was because i'm selling the book and so because i talk about consumerism i can't actually sell the book i just need to write it and just leave it on the floor.

1:28:06It's interesting for someone who's got a publication that's behind a paywall. Yeah, well, you have to sell. Who has so much integrity that they didn't even sell their anti-capitalist book? They just gave it to people. I just don't think that's an argument. It's also not an anti-capitalist book. Yeah, but I think what's happening is there's been all kinds of criticism from all different directions and some of them cancel each other out. And so I think the real thing is that I'm just not the politically correct person to say it. And I don't have all the disclaimers. I don't talk about political issues in the Middle East.

1:28:42I don't talk about the patriarchy. I talk about what I genuinely think affected me and is affecting young women that I know. And so I think they come up with all other angles of criticism rather than saying it's because she reaches conservative conclusions. I don't understand why this isn't seen as progressive. Like surely saying that these tech companies are abusing and commodifying children for profit should be the thing that's being called out and pushed back against. No, because they think that we live in a patriarchy and the problem is men and I'm sort of deflecting it onto social media platforms.

1:29:21Also that social media platforms are where girls can learn about feminist ideas and express themselves and those are good for women. But they also hate billionaires. Yeah, well, that's an irony with all of these industries. I mean, a lot of these young women define their lives by DSM diagnoses that were basically voted by rich white men. No, the actual pharmaceutical labels. So all of these industries have the influence of rich white men that they hate. But because I draw different conclusions from them, And because I have the cultural stuff in there about divorce and porn, all of these sort of conservative coded concerns.

1:30:09And then the whole book has to be dangerous. And so a lot of it, yeah, is young women warning each other. How is being anti-divorce conservative? Or how is being pro-divorce progressive? because it divorce is now how women self-actualize and so um i talk in the book actually about going from the normalization of divorce to the glamorization of divorce and then divorce being a means to self-fulfillment and self-expression people have divorce parties yeah and And basically, I think that women interpret that as me saying women should stay with the absolute worst husbands at all costs. But really, I think that the normalization and glamorization of divorce hurts women as well, hurts wives, and it hurts children.

1:31:08um well we're already hearing a lot although it seems to be not fully backed up by the data about the double shift women coming home from work and then having to clean up around the house when you add in other types of especially emotional labor and emotional containment that men do uh the numbers start to fall away yeah but if you're worried about the double shift imagine the fucking double shift but without the helper because that's what it is especially if it's young kids If it's young kids, Erica Commissar was - She's amazing. That was a great episode. Thank you. Her saying custody shouldn't be 50-50 at all because baby doesn't need dad as much as it needs mom.

1:31:47Maybe it needs dad more in later life, but people seem to break up between the ages of like six months and three years because it's really hard. And the cracks that were in the relationship before have been really exposed by this additional level of stress. if you break up during that time you you are going to be as a mom you're going to be the one that's going to bear more of this burden and you don't have a dual income household anymore so it's like quadruple burden yeah i i i don't know it this this sort of theme the trend that we've i'm kind of fascinated by and it's good to see us kicking all of the tripwires of the sort of paradoxes of these hypersexualized, but also having less sex.

1:32:32Sex is something which is really sacred, but also something that if it's done incorrectly, can be incredibly traumatic to you. The world is more connected than ever before, and yet people feel more isolated. We have independence is what you should strive for, and your career is your highest calling, and also maternity leave needs to be increased. Billionaires are bad, but working for a company can be where you find your greatest meaning in life. Like freedom is really important, but also it's just, it's a really interesting, when you see these paradoxes and a kind of like cultural hypocrisy in a way, it's usually a suggestion that it's not fully thought out because it should be smoother than that.

1:33:18It should be more easy to deconstruct logically. You know, you've got a number, you do the division of this and the number's 45 characters. There's a ton of decimal points after as you try to sort out what this equation means. Yeah, I think the way I view it is I think some, again, it's overthinking a natural instinct a lot of the time. Like if you think about divorce, a child's parents splitting apart and not living in the same household with the child, that's going to harm the child. I don't really need data sets and research for that to seem true that feels true and you see it playing out with people who've had divorced parents where they carry that into relationships and that's what's interesting is progressives love attachment theory and they love talking about abandonment issues but they never talk about what's causing those abandonment issues so it's only ever looking backward never looking forward yeah so if you say all of these young women feel abandoned because they were more likely to have divorced parents that's not politically correct but you can talk about all of these young women need to be in therapy and they need to be healing their inner child and they need to be giving money to these industries because they feel a certain way like we should be figuring out why they feel a certain way why they're so dependent on the mental health industry they're prepared to kind of under the bus the previous generation and say well you know our parents didn't have the therapeutic tools yeah they didn't understand attachment theory they weren't able to hold me when i needed it yeah they weren't able to look and all of these things are true and i agree and And I think that a lot of an attachment-informed child-rearing strategy would make kids' lives and then the adults' lives better.

1:35:00Yeah. But saying they weren't able to hold me as a kid, which is why I need to go to therapy now, but also if me and my partner break up, that's something to be celebrated. How little do you think you're going to be able to hold your kid if it's at your father's, your ex-husband's house? but they think that i think they think the reason they have an attachment disorder is that they are disordered they have an illness it seems to stop at the label which is that i have a problem whereas what i've tried to do is give some of the context of that because some of the context of that has ended up conservative coded that's when it becomes an issue i still can't understand you know there's this uh there's a bunch of different movements at the moment unsubscribe resist and unsubscribe scott galloway's thing oh yeah i think maybe netflix is on there there's a bunch of companies that are on there um i don't know whether there's any social media platforms that are on there but if you want to look at who are the companies making the most money that have the most influence politically powerful every left-leaning gen z goal should be deleting their instagram account they should be deleting their instagram account they should be deleting tiktok because of the abuses to workers in China.

1:36:19Yeah. And they shouldn't ever be using that. Also, you shouldn't be on X because Elon Musk's got loads of money and they don't like his politics and how he influenced the American election. I mean, I don't know who fucking owns Blue Sky. Maybe that is, as a company is run, that's like as socialist of a capitalist company as you're going to get. But that's where it seems self-serving or at least it feels a little bit hypocritical where you say, well, if you're going to kick up a stink about these companies, but give a pass to the one that you think is cool and that you want to gain status on, because everybody else holds it in high esteem, that suggests to me that you're not talking about this in order to move the conversation forward.

1:37:02You're doing it because you want clout, which is why you're not prepared to neuter yourself on the platform where you want the clout to be. Yes. I genuinely get confused by some of the criticism because it does seem to me so progressive to be skeptical at least of these companies and to figure out the need. It's sort of a Marxist idea. What is the need that we have that is then being exploited and sold back to us? So something like BetterHelp. Why do so many young people think they need to be in therapy, young women especially? And why are these companies, these online therapy companies, marketing themselves in a certain way?

1:37:47So, for example, the therapy companies have now shifted to filling the role of almost parents, where they'll say, you know, if you need to talk about dating or how you feel or your crush or exams, you can come to us. It's just a fucking friend. Yeah, it's a friend. It's just renting a friend or a parent. Yeah, and a lot of it is like guidance that your parent would give you growing up. This is like, have you seen those stories of people that pay for cuddlers? Yeah, it is like that. It's the emotional, social emotional equivalent of paying someone to come around and hug you. Because you don't have anyone to do it.

1:38:23Yeah, they have, so BetterHelp specifically have these adverts where they have, they'll have like a young woman and her dad and the dad will say something like you should just go for a walk in the sun or something and it will just come up that's unhelpful and then the better help code and it does it with friends as well it's replacing i'll i'll fucking advocate for a walk in the sun all day long there's i'm not saying that going for a walk in the sun is going to cure all of your problems no but there are very few problems that a walk in the sun won't make better yeah but but just i'm so suspicious of a company telling you to be less attached to the people that love you and more attached to them like anxiously attached to experts it is i don't know i mean it is very deranging i do feel a little bit sometimes like am i am i losing my mind yeah when i when i go on the internet and especially if you're in the middle of a eye of a storm you are now i was a couple of months ago you're like am i the dickhead you remember that scene in um michelin webb where they're dressed as nazis yeah are we the baddies am i the dickhead maybe i am i might i actually might be because everybody else on the internet seems to have consensus yes about this thing actually being right and i'm really trying to work it out and I just can't get there.

1:39:51So maybe I'm just, maybe I am a bad person. I just can't understand. I can't understand how saying the sentence, just a mother is raising up women. Yes. That just a mother thing. It's like, I don't think that working for a company that doesn't care about you and would replace you in a fucking heartbeat if you got hit by a bus is your highest calling. I don't think that independent women are the only ones that are useful and that mothers are being conned by the patriarchy into becoming domestic prostitutes yeah and think that any woman that supports men is being a pick me i also don't think that any man that decides to go after his career is being a tyrant or that any man that talks about his emotions is a useless soy boy how dare you i know i know i know i know no it's true i i it's really deranging i my mom read the book recently and she called me and she was she said oh you know i'm so proud of you and she said it's it was so loving toward girls and and then i'm looking online and it's like this is a hateful book you know she's a misogynist she hates women one of the reviews the title was freya india would prefer a world without women's rights can we look at can you just google freya india girls goodreads please jared i want to i want to do i want to do some highlights of uh of our favorite ones um it it is really fucking deranging and i think it's important it's important for you to have people in your life that you can message I've got my group chat 3.2 3.16 here we go let's go down let's go in some of the one stars Handmaid's Tale beautiful what starts off as disappointing through its lack of nuance and depth may contradictory points and statistics that feel cherry picked in order to back up points the author is desperately trying to make quickly descends into conservative pearl clutching before ultimately concluding as a manifesto for girls getting back to family values and baby making that could be written by Serena Joy of The Handmaid's Tale herself.

1:41:52The premise of this book is interesting and important. The reason I picked it up in the first place, yet somehow it manages to miss the mark entirely. Side note, I have never read the term age old so many times in my life. Does no one edit it? Oh, that's painful. Cannot recommend. Absolutely not nuanced in any way. I'm so bad I went on a... Oh, this person's... Click the rant. There we go. Oh, it's a blog post. Without social media, trans rights or women's rights or therapy. Freya India would prefer life without social media or trans rights or women's rights or therapy. Yeah. Wow. I'm glad that it's got no comments.

1:42:27Yeah. It's hard growing up. I, I, yeah. Transphobia and TERF rhetoric. TERF rhetoric. I mean, look, you're in incredibly good company here. But it is, it is strange. And that's not to say that we're right about everything. You're right about everything that I am. but I have this theory around how you can tell if a content creator has your best interests at heart and it's whether or not the group that they belong to and say that you belong to too are bound together over the mutual love of an in-group or the mutual hatred of an out-group. That is one of the earliest warning signs. Another one is when was the last time they admitted that they were wrong.

1:43:10Another one is, when was the last time that they surprised you with one of their takes? Or when did they bring somebody on that they disagree with, not to mock them, but to genuinely try and learn from them? So that's four. Someone once asked me, what do I do to my content diet? And obviously, I do this horrendously, and I follow loads of people that I shouldn't do, and it wrecks my nervous system. But when was the last time that you were surprised by this person's take. If they're just a cookie cutter, you know one of their perspectives and from it, you can accurately predict everything else.

1:43:43They're obviously not a serious thinker. I also think with my book in particular, because I don't know how to phrase it, but because I have some unpredictable takes as well. So for example, it's mostly about commodification of women, which conservatives don't often talk about. I think that I get more hate as a result of that. Because you're seen as an unreliable ally as opposed to an outright conservative. Yeah. If I was just a right-wing political influencer, I don't think I would get this amount of targeted hate. It's because I sort of operate in the middle and I am genuinely figuring things out.

1:44:19And so I think that becomes almost more threatening. But I'm fine. I don't mind people criticizing the book, but there's a sort of tone of criticism that is, I am evil. Snarky, dismissive, judgmental. Yeah. And also, you know, I read loads of books I disagree with. I read loads of books with liberal assumptions that are sort of weaved into the book. Every book I read about social media is pretty much like that. But I never feel the urge to go on a 2 ,000-word rant destroying someone else's book. I just put that energy into my own. I think you could kind of see it as a criticism creation balance sheet.

1:45:03And if you're criticizing more than you're creating, you're sort of withdrawing from the system more than you're adding. And that's probably it. I mean, even if you get close, it should be 10 to 1, right? Some people are critics, right? Whatever. But for the most part, you should be contributing way more than you are. You know what's a great way to do this? Go on somebody's Twitter and look at how much is original content and how much are quote tweets. Yes. If it's tons of quote tweets and presuming that it's not just, this is awesome and I really like this, which no one is doing, you're extracting from the system more than you're adding to it.

1:45:38It's always people who've never written a book that say, this is so badly researched, this is so lazy, this is this way, this is this way. And I've noticed when it's really visceral criticism of the book, they tend to have a profile which is criticism of everyone else's attempt to do anything. The loudest shouts come from the cheapest seats. It's the people that are furthest away from doing something that are the ones that criticize the most. I mean, one other thing that we haven't talked about that I thought was fucking insane was the reframing of the potential to give mothers in the UK a tax benefit in the same way that mums in Hungary got it as an inverse tax penalty on women who want to be child free.

1:46:26Well, that New Statesman piece said there was a young woman worried about reform forcing them to have babies. And that's how they framed it. They think reform will force them to have children. And that's why I laughed at The Handmaid's Tale. Because it's like they have one story that they just extrapolate onto everything. Well, it's the same with history, right? Because nobody knows any history except for a tiny bit of Nazi Germany. Yeah. everybody just defaults to Nazi and Hitler. It's the only piece of history that they know. In the same way as it's the only piece of literature that can be used for this.

1:47:05It's handmade to tell. It's like, well, if you offer, what is it? 25 % off your income tax for the first kid, 50 % for the second one, and 100 % for the rest of your life if you have three or more. I think that's what it is in Hungary, something like that. How can you say that that's penalizing women who don't have kids. Like it's just adding to the system. Now you can say with anchoring bias, no one should ever pay any tax. That's fine. But if you're saying we need to give more money, a lot of the reasons, the justifications that are given for why women aren't having more kids is because of economic conditions.

1:47:43It's cost of living crisis. It's a fear of being abandoned by their partner, divorced, and then they're not going to be able to afford to keep themselves and the kids alive, et cetera. You're okay. Well, let's incentivize that. You go, well, you're persecuting women that don't have kids. Yeah. The women that don't have kids are being disadvantaged. You go, no, that's not the case. That's where everybody is right now. And it's like, we want more money for mothers. You go, okay. Well, hang on. That's excluding women that aren't mothers. You go, okay, so do you just want money? Yes, but for women.

1:48:15You go, yeah. I fucking, dude, what? You can't exclude. So one of the side effects of everybody only knowing Nazi Germany, that one period of history, and then applying it, is that anything remotely exclusionary or suggesting closing things down rather than opening up endlessly becomes suspicious. And so any turn back from an overcorrection becomes a slippery slope to fascism. So you can have a perfectly reasonable tax suggestion, but because it starts toward encouraging women to have children, they just envision it careering off into it. Yeah, that's interesting, I suppose.

1:49:04Let's say that I'm going to give you something that you really want, but it's going to come packaged in a way that you might not be too keen on. You want this new toy, but it's going to be in a box that you don't like. let's say, there is a cost-benefit analysis that you're doing here. How much of the thing that I want do I get versus how much of the thing that I don't want sort of comes along for the ride? Let's assume that you've interpreted it correctly and not incorrectly. This is kind of the same across the board with, well, capitalism, bad, but social media companies, I quite like those because that's the thing that I'm allowed to get my clout through.

1:49:43So, the packaging for this thing is sufficiently okay. I don't really mind what it's sneaking in underneath. Yeah. Yeah. I think as well with a lot of the criticism toward my book and just in general with conservatives who talk about these things is that a lot of these women will not have come across a conservative leaning view ever by accident. So I'm constantly coming across liberal assumptions on things because it is the culture it's the media and books and most of them are leaning that way if they're talking about something broad like social media but i don't think there are many books where the person writing it is just leaning toward being more conservative and so a lot of the time they say there's no warning on the book oh you jump scared them yeah conservative there's no disclaimer and they say that they've said that about my Substack for years which is that I have like a it's like a girly magazine aesthetic the title and that is me tricking them because they're not.

1:50:49You've honey plotted them into reading conservative propaganda. Yeah so I need a big disclaimer saying warning. You remember when those mixtapes used to come out the Marshall Mathers EP the real Slim Shady and stuff and it would have that explicit warning. Yeah. At the bottom the black and white thing you basically need that but you're like the cigarettes of of blogging yeah you need to come with a health warning on it uh do you think that women's preferences have fundamentally changed or is it just the environment that they're in uh i think they're the same but as i said before they're sort of being funneled toward a fake simulation of the thing and so it's kind of a big ponzi scheme yeah it's like even as we were talking about with empathy i feel like a lot of you know sometimes conservatives will say young women are radically left-wing because they're evil and they want to tear down western civilization i think a lot of the time it is well-intentioned as in they want to look compassionate they want to look good in front of their friends, but it's being funneled in a weird direction.

1:52:00So it's strange that you have all of these young women in Britain caring so much about the Middle East and then talking about their boyfriend with zero empathy at all. And I think it's similar with things that are happening online where, again, you have a need for belonging, but you're getting it through YouTube. That's where your family and friends are being simulated somewhat. You have a need to get advice from your parents and you're getting it from a BetterHelp influencer. And so I think a lot of the challenges my generation has are not necessarily new, but we have way more simulations than previous generations did.

1:52:42How do we know when the left's gone too far? When they rate my book one star. Ah, there it is. There it is. I think when it... You know what I mean? Because this is an old Peterson thing that it's obvious when the right goes too far. But we don't have the same sort of rules. The entire New Statesman article is saying the skew of women to the left, the radical left is more aggressive and is, I have to assume, they think is too far, even as something that is left of center. You go, okay, well, how do we know? Because how does it show up? It's like just obscene amounts of empathy that if you turn empathy up to 11 just becomes a different type of judgmental tribalism yeah i don't because care for groups has to be constrained to one group and then it means that you're not that group so you're the oppressor not the oppressed yes i don't actually think it can go too far um because i think about being sometimes people will say oh she's she's had success because she's pandering to the right wingers but you can even if you're slightly conservative on one topic and all of your other opinions were very progressive you're immediately coded as right wing so there's barely any room to um even be moderately conservative or even just curious about the conservative approach so a lot of my interviews have been guilt by association it's just people that I speak to and who will listen to me then you get coded as too far too right wing so there's barely any room on the right but I think there's so much room on the left um you can say you're a communist and write a book about caring for girls and and no one will you know scrutinize your motives but if you write a book about caring for girls and a few of your opinions happen to be conservative then there's no way that you have genuine care for them you have to just be a political operator screw you favorite freya india that's what i say screw you freya india uh you're great i think you're so fantastic books brilliant blogs brilliant where should people go to check out everything you're doing yeah so just my sub stack freya india.co.uk um i'm not on instagram or tiktok i'm excited to see what you do to get in trouble next Thank you, you too Alright, bye everyone Dude, awesome Amazing, thank you

1:55:33fiction 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.