Based Camp - Based Camp： Spoonies, Female Puberty, and Are Women Doomed

00:00:00.520 Hello, this is Malcolm and Simone again with Octavian at this time because he's home from

00:00:05.900 school today. And we are excited to be talking to you. What's the topic today, Simone?

00:00:11.460 Actually, this a lot has to do with our kids, but not Octavian. It has to do with our daughters.

00:00:17.200 I'm asking, are women doomed? Yeah. We're actually kind of concerned about our daughters 0.99

00:00:24.480 raising them. And ever since one autumn day last year, as we were driving to a friend's wedding

00:00:32.220 in Texas, reading a really amazing piece by Susie Weiss called Hurts So Good about the Spoonies

00:00:39.080 movement. We've been talking a lot about young women, how they experience puberty differently,

00:00:46.480 how they experience the world differently, and how we could raise our own daughters in a way where

00:00:52.000 they don't face plant in the face of modernity, which is...

00:00:57.440 So let's talk about this Spoonies piece because I found it really, really fascinating.

00:01:02.640 It's this sort of mind virus that's been spreading among young girls. And we've seen mind viruses like

00:01:08.440 it's spread before. So can you describe it a bit? Yeah. So in her piece, Susie Weiss describes the

00:01:14.200 plight of a couple of young women that she profiles who start off basically experiencing some kind of

00:01:21.800 very difficult to diagnose condition, turning to social media for comfort, solace, and company as they

00:01:28.200 suffer with this position, and then kind of are incentivized by social media and by the other infirm

00:01:34.920 people that they follow and socialize and are kind of positioning themselves with. They get motivated

00:01:41.620 essentially to get sicker and sicker. And so they sort of, it's like a modern wave of hypochondria

00:01:47.560 that often is founded in and inspired by real and serious conditions that just end up getting

00:01:54.080 blown out of proportion. And I want to emphasize that like the suffering that these people in this

00:02:00.040 movement have, we don't think by any means is it not real? I mean, one, I think many of their

00:02:06.600 foundational conditions are real. Like maybe it starts with long COVID. Maybe it starts with

00:02:10.580 fibromyalgia. Maybe it starts with an autoimmune disorder.

00:02:12.940 Long COVID is probably not real.

00:02:14.960 Well, but I mean, but it maybe starts with COVID then.

00:02:17.860 Actually, let's get side and talk about the studies on long COVID because I find that really

00:02:21.420 interesting.

00:02:22.020 Okay, let's dive into it. Yeah. I mean, so I guess one thing that we found when we read a little bit

00:02:30.400 more about long COVID, because we were both very concerned about it and concerned about our kids

00:02:34.660 getting it, is when we looked into the research-

00:02:36.940 We were not actually concerned about it. We were laughing at people who said they had it, but continue.

00:02:40.920 Well, you never know, right?

00:02:43.980 I appreciate the way you present things in the nicest possible life.

00:02:47.120 There was a time when we were concerned about it.

00:02:49.240 You were such a kind person.

00:02:50.680 There seems to be a high correlation between issues like anxiety and mental illness and the

00:02:55.380 development of long COVID, which is to say that maybe this is a hypochondria thing or people are

00:03:01.440 taking symptoms that they first experienced.

00:03:03.140 The best study was the one that looked at people who had been diagnosed with COVID and not told that they

00:03:07.920 were diagnosed with COVID. Turns out you had zero long COVID symptoms in that group, but lots of

00:03:16.480 long COVID symptoms in the group that was told they had COVID, which to me heavily implies it's

00:03:22.480 completely, what's the word here? Anyway, continue with the-

00:03:31.420 Well, you could say it's a nocebo, I guess, or that getting COVID, you think you had COVID is a

00:03:38.940 nocebo that caused you to have effects that are negative. So yeah. So you were triggered by this

00:03:46.560 thing. You start to believe that it causes negative effects. And I think this is also the case with

00:03:51.180 long COVID, Malcolm, that very much you are experiencing this. You're experiencing brain fog.

00:03:56.440 You're experiencing real pain. It just happens to be real pain, brain fog, et cetera, exhaustion.

00:04:05.240 Yeah. That like you have generated because of your beliefs, which I think is really interesting.

00:04:11.320 And so the Spoonies movement got its name essentially from this concept of someone in the movement used a

00:04:19.540 metaphor around spoons. Like, you know, everyone else has a fairly boundless or unlimited energy.

00:04:25.720 You can get out of bed, do whatever it is that you want. You know, you, your cup is full. Whereas

00:04:31.180 if you are suffering from one of these chronic illnesses, you only have energy in tiny allotments

00:04:38.560 and spoonfuls. You only have three or four spoonfuls of energy. So maybe you spent one to get out of bed,

00:04:44.080 you spent one to take a shower and you spent one to eat breakfast and now it's, you have one left and

00:04:47.620 that's it. And then you can't do anything else. You're in bed for the rest of the day.

00:04:50.360 And that was, that was, uh, you know, a comparison used to help people understand, um, how it felt

00:04:57.300 to experience these conditions. And that's why they're called Spoonies. Um, so Malcolm, and I read

00:05:02.420 this article while in this long car drive and it kind of blew our minds because it really changed the

00:05:08.340 way that we looked at, at female adolescents, because most of the people suffering from these

00:05:15.640 conditions, most Spoonies are female. Um, there were young females, females around the age of puberty.

00:05:22.620 Yeah. Well, it's at least started in puberty and in many cases extended into adulthood. Um,

00:05:27.700 and then we also started talking about this more broadly. Um, if for example, you read a lot of

00:05:32.520 Regency era novels, there are lots of, um, women, either young or adult women who are hypochondriacs,

00:05:40.140 who, you know, sort of retire to their, their rooms and, uh, you know, may have completely imagined

00:05:46.800 illnesses. Um, and so I, I also feel like this isn't necessarily just something that young women

00:05:53.320 are coming up with now. Um, and so we started talking about, well, why, why are women developing 0.98

00:06:00.540 these, these chronic illnesses and causing themselves genuine and real pain? Um, thanks Octavian,

00:06:08.160 what a cool school bus. Um, why are they developing this real pain when men are not at the same 0.88

00:06:16.100 proportion? What's going on here? Um, yeah. So I think first let's talk about what is psychologically

00:06:21.220 happening with these communities. So it appears that a portion of women, uh, have an innate desire

00:06:28.980 because we see this all the way back to the Regency period, uh, with like, what was it like Jane

00:06:33.020 Austin books or something? She would complain about this. Uh, she'd be like these women, 1.00

00:06:36.800 there would be characters who like were clearly making it up. Yeah. Um, and so clearly some women 1.00

00:06:43.220 have always had a desire to sort of pretend to be sicker than they are, but how does it get so extreme

00:06:47.880 in these communities? And it's what you are seeing is a snowball effect in these communities where because

00:06:56.420 community identity is based around the thing that differentiates you from mainstream society

00:07:01.740 is this infirmity, the social hierarchy of the community is of course going to in part be determined

00:07:09.680 by your level of infirmity. In fact, in Susie's article, she talks, she interviews, uh, a young

00:07:17.400 woman talking about how she would take pictures of the pills that she took every day. Um, and she would 0.91

00:07:22.900 pad them a little bit with vitamins to look like she had to take more pills to look more like the extra 0.89

00:07:28.540 sick young women who had much bigger piles of pills. And it's just insane to think about the envy 1.00

00:07:34.140 they felt for women who were sicker than them. Yeah. And there were different statuses like the

00:07:38.900 courties or something, which meant that you were like connected to a thing all day. And like there was

00:07:43.380 aspiration to try to get one of those tubes connected to you or one of the, the, the things.

00:07:48.480 So you, you would raise in status within the community by how visibly infirmed you were. And of course,

00:07:56.060 if you create a community like that, you are going to exacerbate anyone who has any sort of

00:08:02.000 psychosomatic tendency towards illness to begin to build those illnesses and, and compound upon this.

00:08:08.200 So again, to, as what Simone said earlier, these people are almost certainly feeling real things,

00:08:12.820 but I think another way you can really tell that this community is probably is, is the zebra thing

00:08:16.820 that the community is, is, is around, which is doctors always say, if you're here hooves, think

00:08:21.780 horses, not zebras, because you know, zebras are rarer. And so they all have the zebras,

00:08:25.880 like the community logo, because they're like, I have the rare thing. I have the unique thing. I have

00:08:31.000 the special thing, but that feeling of wanting to be special and not understood by adults is something

00:08:38.660 that people, men and women understand as they go through puberty. However, women experience puberty 0.96

00:08:44.580 really uniquely compared to the way they are told they are going to experience it. And I think this is a

00:08:50.580 great dissatisfaction. We basically raise women expecting to have male puberty to like get really 0.56

00:08:56.140 horny. And, and, and of course some women do experience puberty that way, but it is the minority

00:09:02.000 of women. So talk about how the average woman experiences puberty. Yeah. So yeah, Malcolm and I

00:09:08.260 started talking about this when we read the article, the average woman, I mean, at least from my

00:09:12.440 experience, there's a lot of self-hatred. There is a lot of self-doubt. There's a desire to be beautiful

00:09:20.360 and desired and precious. Um, and that's really difficult because that requires basically the

00:09:27.320 modeling and involvement, uh, and feelings of other people, which you can't control. Um, whereas I

00:09:33.440 think, you know, with, with adolescent males, when they experience puberty, that it's a lot of, it's

00:09:38.440 more like, you know, who can I hook up with, which it still involves someone else doing something. But I

00:09:42.980 think it's, it's, it's a little bit different when part of it's like a feeling, uh, like a, a feeling

00:09:51.120 you want people to have about you instead of like, did I literally get someone to bang me? Cause that

00:09:56.020 that's a more binary yes or no. Like, did someone bang me? Yes. Am I having sex? Yes or no. Can I get

00:10:01.900 sex? Yes or no. Whereas I think for many women, even the most desired, attractive, coveted, precious 0.99

00:10:07.480 women in any particular social ecosystem may not feel like it's enough. Um, and I feel like that's 1.00

00:10:15.140 a very dangerous and toxic position to be in as an adolescent female. Um, and I, it's something that

00:10:21.920 I think we worry about with our daughters. So I really agree with what you're saying, Simone. And I

00:10:28.100 think what we're actually seeing here is while in men, the core desire that sort of elevates during

00:10:35.000 puberty is the desire to have sex in women, the core desire that elevates is the desire to be desired 0.70

00:10:43.960 and cherished. Um, and that is much harder as you say, because it's not a binary thing. It's not

00:10:50.780 something you can easily say that this is definitely being fulfilled or any, uh, uh, love or admiration

00:10:58.300 I'm getting from my community is genuine affection. And so, you know, even if a girl is popular,

00:11:03.960 she can still convince herself, well, I'm not really, uh, desired or cherished enough.

00:11:09.960 Or not the right person desires me. For example, like only gross people desire me, not the person

00:11:15.080 I want, et cetera. Yes. Yes. And it's a much harder, uh, sort of mental thing to masturbate.

00:11:22.860 Um, but what's really interesting when I say masturbate, I don't mean like in a literal sense, 0.66

00:11:27.440 I mean, just like for, I don't know that like actually, you know, as an, as an adolescent boy, 0.78

00:11:31.620 like. You can't just masturbate. Yeah. That's what I'm thinking is like, I can't think of something 0.90

00:11:37.560 that I could do. I guess like I could read romance novels. I guess that's kind of the female equivalent 1.00

00:11:43.320 of masturbating is inserting yourself into a Mary Jane character and like a romantic manga or like 0.99

00:11:49.700 historical romance novel or something like that. But I, I don't know. I feel like that's, that's, 0.99

00:11:56.160 um, yeah, maybe it's moderately effective, but it's not great.

00:12:01.500 Yeah, no, I, I agree. Um, and so it is really, when you have a community like this, the message

00:12:08.960 that they can appeal to girls with is you will become delicate. You will become something that society 0.82

00:12:17.040 wants to protect. You will be unique. You will. It's an incredibly appealing message that does,

00:12:27.440 I mean, if we're talking about how hard it is to masturbate that this is probably the best way 0.99

00:12:32.080 you could conceivably masturbate. Well, especially cause yeah, you have to be taken out of school. 0.98

00:12:35.700 You have to go to doctor's appointments. You have to see specialists. A lot of money is being spent on

00:12:39.440 you. Um, and like, it has to be spent on, like, maybe you can't get your parents to like spend a lot

00:12:44.320 of money on buying you purses or something, but if they think that you're dying, like they're probably

00:12:49.000 going to pay for that CT scan out of pocket, even if they have to. Um, and this is not implying that

00:12:53.860 anyone is doing this on purpose again, like this is. No, it's really interesting. I think it's just

00:12:59.240 a complete mind virus. It is something where most people involved in the community, even if they might

00:13:06.280 be, uh, some bad actors might be elevating the amount that they're actually sick. Most people are

00:13:11.780 genuinely suffering. Um, and I think that it cannot be overstated how much if you are psychologically

00:13:18.000 motivated to be in a state of suffering, or you believe you're suffering, you will begin to suffer

00:13:22.400 in this way. Yeah. And so, I mean, when we talked about this, how do we protect our daughters from

00:13:29.740 this? How do we protect them from sort of the, the craziness that comes with guys? You know, I often

00:13:37.060 say it's, it's, it's kind of like somebody, uh, snuck up to you in the night when you're going

00:13:41.300 through puberty and like injected with you with like a, an addiction to a hard drug and you will 0.94

00:13:46.040 do stupid and unethical things sometimes in an effort to get that drug do when you're all those 0.99

00:13:52.700 systems. But you are like, we've talked a video, like male, you're like, it would be great to have 0.99

00:13:59.060 sex 12 times a day with all different women. And like, as an adult man, you would be like, oh my 0.99

00:14:05.440 God, that sounds so gross. Um, so you, your brain just does enter this crazy state, but it is a

00:14:14.220 controllable state. How, I mean, were you able to control this when you were growing up and how would

00:14:20.400 you recommend we may avoid, you know, if you did run into pitfalls, some of those for our own

00:14:25.460 daughters? Yeah. Um, so, I mean, I think one of the things that we planned on doing when we first

00:14:33.440 discussed this was we are going to discuss this dynamic with our daughters because it's very

00:14:38.420 helpful to at least know what you're undergoing. Right. So at least they can say, I'm feeling this

00:14:44.540 for probably these evolutionary reasons. And, you know, here are some ways, here are some outlets

00:14:50.520 that I can turn to, um, that will help me feel better. And also to maybe recognize problematic

00:14:56.420 behavior for what it is rather than giving it fuel. Because the thing that I'm most worried about

00:15:01.060 is that anyone we care about, or frankly, anyone at all starts to develop real pain, real symptoms

00:15:07.340 because of this, I would much rather have them just feel insufficiently loved, which I think pretty

00:15:13.180 much, you know, or coveted or what, you know, desired, whatever it is, because I don't think this is

00:15:17.060 something you can satiate as a teen or even as an adult. But when it's like turned up to 11 in the

00:15:22.500 same way that was guys, it gets turned up to 11. Yeah, but I'm, yes, and it's so turned up high,

00:15:26.960 but I would rather have them just feel that pain, um, and understand that the solution isn't to turn

00:15:31.840 to, you know, uh, hypochondria, um, then to just not be aware. So I feel like awareness is a really big

00:15:39.340 part of this, but, you know, I also think that to the broader story of like how we raise our

00:15:47.700 daughters, I don't think it's just that. I mean, this is a trending issue now in the past few months,

00:15:53.980 a lot of discussion and intellectual spheres, um, revolved around how female adolescents 0.98

00:15:59.900 disproportionately appear to be suffering from a mental health crisis. Like everyone's suffering

00:16:04.160 from a mental health crisis. No one's doing well right now, but it seems like those who are doing the

00:16:07.780 worst are female adolescents, um, that social media appears to make things worse by some measures. 1.00

00:16:15.460 Um, obviously I think Spoonies provide one example of how that can be made worse. Maybe it's like

00:16:20.220 dominance hierarchies that just make things impossible, impossible standards created by filters.

00:16:24.700 Um, however, I do remember you came up with a strategy that I thought was a pretty good way to

00:16:31.120 deal with this and to mitigate this in terms of internal family culture. And it's to,

00:16:38.740 never respect or elevate somebody for suffering. And this may seem like an obvious thing,

00:16:48.260 but in our society today, it's something we do all the time. I mean, this is what people talk about

00:16:53.060 when they talk about like the oppression Olympics. We have this narrative in our society, uh, where you

00:16:59.300 are higher status. If you are a victim in some way, or if you are suffering or beleaguered in some way,

00:17:07.540 when you elevate that, you make you, you create an incentive to, to feel that way about yourself,

00:17:17.460 which causes suffering that might not need to be there otherwise. And this is a hard thing to do in a

00:17:23.780 family, in a society where this is just predominant, you know, how do you raise kids without, and I

00:17:31.220 think the only thing you can do is just constantly repeat to them, you know, in this family, you do not

00:17:35.460 earn respect and, and nor should you respect yourself for, uh, needless suffering or beleagueredness or

00:17:45.060 being a victim in a situation, just work to get out of that situation and move on to the next thing.

00:17:49.540 And I think that that does to some extent mitigate this because I think where you see this the most

00:17:56.260 is in families that initially react to the suffering with a level of fuss and with a level of respect and

00:18:05.700 special treatment. Hmm. Yeah. So there's this, um, initial reinforcement as well. Like people,

00:18:12.660 a lot of these people probably wouldn't be leaning into it if it didn't have some kind of reward loop at

00:18:17.860 play. Um, I mean, social media obviously doesn't help because maybe they're, they can just exclusively

00:18:24.260 be getting that online. So that also matters, but yeah, I think it's, I think it's really interesting

00:18:31.140 that we live in an age where that that's at play. Do you think that there are other dynamics that make

00:18:38.260 women uniquely susceptible to poor mental health in the face of modernity and social media? 0.72

00:18:44.180 Well, this is really interesting. You know, I don't think a lot of these, um, I mean, I think that

00:18:50.900 women optimized biologically for conditions that were even more different from modern conditions 0.99

00:18:59.300 than the ones that men are optimized for. So in the book, The Fragment Disguided Sexuality,

00:19:04.420 one of the things we go into in great detail is what was the actual evolutionary environment of human

00:19:09.540 beings. Um, and we think that the evidence points that it was probably pretty similar to chimpanzee

00:19:16.340 environments and, and not bonobo environments where you did have frequent raids on, uh, tribes,

00:19:23.780 where the males would be killed and the infants would be killed to get the women fertile again as 0.87

00:19:28.420 quickly as possible. Um, and then the women would be integrated into the new tribe. Uh, and there's a lot 0.99

00:19:34.420 of things that, that, that suggested this behavior with likely one is, uh, you know, if you look at

00:19:39.460 porn statistics for women, uh, they're much more likely than men to be interested in ultra violent

00:19:46.020 porn. Um, which would suggest that there was at some point, some sort of selective or evolutionary

00:19:50.740 pressure for that, uh, because it is not societally coded. And there is evidence for that. We ran a big

00:19:56.020 study to try to find out if like spanking or other things that happened to a person in their childhood

00:20:01.700 or things they experienced in terms of the culture they grew up in, uh, affects the frequency with

00:20:06.900 certain fetish appearance. And we found almost nothing. There was, there were very few ties.

00:20:12.340 Uh, and what that indicated to us is most of this is probably hard coded. Uh, and, and also what

00:20:16.580 indicates this is you sort of see it cross-culturally. Um, but, uh, in addition to that, you also have

00:20:22.580 this infanticide instinct. So if you look at children who grow up with step parents in our modern society,

00:20:29.300 uh, their death rates are stupidly higher, like they have like 500 or 5,000% higher. Like it's, 0.88

00:20:34.900 it's like scary higher. Um, and I don't think that people are killing their stepchildren. I just think

00:20:40.020 that there is a, a huge lack of care going on there that you would have for your own child.

00:20:46.500 Um, and then in addition to that, uh, you have, um, the earliest sources. So we do know

00:20:54.020 our ancestors, you know, before humans, infanticide is practiced in chimps, it's practiced in gorillas. 1.00

00:20:58.580 So we know where, wherever we split off infanticide was likely sort of an instinctual practice

00:21:03.940 upon these raids. And then we know our earliest historic source, the Bible, or one of the earliest

00:21:09.060 really detailed historic sources. Uh, there's a bit, I could find the line, or you could just

00:21:13.380 Google it where it's like, you know, when you conquer a city, what you're supposed to do is

00:21:16.820 take the babies and smash them on rocks or throw them off walls. Um, and that's like a weird thing to

00:21:22.420 say. Like nobody's just like casually that evil, unless that was considered a common practice at the

00:21:28.340 time. So we do know at the beginning of the period, at the beginning of human evolution,

00:21:31.700 this was a common practice. And we do know at the end of the period, you know, when the Bible was

00:21:34.580 written, this was a common practice. So I'm assuming it was probably a common practice throughout,

00:21:37.940 but you only would need this practice if you were frequently having these raids where all

00:21:41.860 the men were killed and the women were adopted into the new tribe. And then there's further evidence

00:21:46.660 that shows when women switch sides and when men switch sides in games of competition,

00:21:52.340 um, which is men typically their bond with their faction increases. The more that faction is losing,

00:22:01.380 whereas women's bond to their faction actually switches to the winning faction. 1.00

00:22:07.060 If it looks like their faction is losing, and this would have made perfect evolutionary,

00:22:10.660 uh, uh, uh, reason. So if you're in a tribe that's being raided, if you know that the men are all going to

00:22:16.260 be killed, then you really need to double down. If it looks like they're losing, if you're a man,

00:22:20.180 but if you're a woman, it makes sense to switch sides, potentially. Um, so where this gets, 0.88

00:22:27.460 um, I forgot why we went on this tangent.

00:22:30.660 You were saying, and I'm actually really intrigued by this, that the women today are living in... 0.97

00:22:36.500 Oh, yes, yes, yes. So today, women don't have this fear of becoming sex slaves, 1.00

00:22:41.700 or having their tribe all killed, or everyone they know murdered. 0.82

00:22:45.060 Presumably that would be a good thing.

00:22:47.700 Well, typically it would be a good thing, but I think that we are, to some extent, so biologically

00:22:53.700 coded, uh, for these earlier tribal structures, um, that especially when women don't have to worry, 0.99

00:23:04.340 because if you look at the women that fall into these movements, they're typically middle-class or 1.00

00:23:09.380 upper-class women. So they are women that don't really need to worry about any threat in their life. 1.00

00:23:14.420 You know, these are women who are not worrying about food security. They're not really worried 0.98

00:23:17.940 about being murdered. They are not really worried about anything. And I don't think that their brains

00:23:23.780 are wired to handle that because of the absolutely terrible state that early women lived in. 1.00

00:23:29.140 So they began to invent threats and fears and reasons to worry because their environment doesn't have them.

00:23:38.500 And I, and I actually think that, uh, this is something that the male brain doesn't do

00:23:43.860 quite as readily, uh, when it's in this, this puberty state. Um, and so I think this is another

00:23:50.980 thing is how do you introduce sort of safe hardship to children's lives where it's not

00:23:55.860 genuine hardship that could cause them, you know, irreparable damage or psychological issues,

00:24:00.500 but enough hardship. So they do actually have something to struggle with or worry about on

00:24:06.340 occasion. Cause I think when you just completely remove that, that's when you get this sort of

00:24:10.660 psychological spiral. Yeah. I forgot that that was a major theme that we'd picked up on that. Like

00:24:16.180 these seem to be for the most part, privileged, well-off young women who, yeah, we're not

00:24:21.860 struggling to like take care of other siblings or deal with a difficult householder.

00:24:26.100 Oh yeah. They're much more often single women as well. That was another thing. 0.90

00:24:29.780 Yeah. They didn't seem to be in large families very often.

00:24:32.420 Yeah. This didn't seem to be a crowded family environment kind of thing. Um, which is super

00:24:37.060 interesting. Yeah. Um, I mean, it's, that's fascinating. I, and I, you know, it's,

00:24:42.420 it's, it's weird because usually when you and I are talking internally, we're talking about all

00:24:48.180 the advantages that women have to the extent that like, even it would make sense for many people 1.00

00:24:54.660 to want to, even if they're not for other reasons, technically trans to transition male to female,

00:25:02.900 because women are honestly like treated nicer in many contexts and, and given, given more advantages

00:25:09.620 in many contexts, because I won't, I mean, one of the communities that we've discovered most recently

00:25:13.780 that we're just really interested in is the trans Mexican community, which is about transition for

00:25:20.740 gain rather than, I'm happy to stop here because I want to do a whole podcast episode. Yeah. So,

00:25:26.180 but anyway, like, so it's, it's interesting, right. That for, for the most part, you see people wanting to

00:25:33.060 go over in droves to the feminine side because of the, the advantages it gets or the care or the 1.00

00:25:40.420 attention or the love. Well, that was the initial thing. I mean, now the trans community is, is, 0.80

00:25:45.300 is predominantly women transitioning to people transitioning to men. Yeah. No, I mean, maybe

00:25:51.700 that's it. You're on needless offense here. Yeah. Like, but that's interesting. Right. Is, is which,

00:25:59.300 because honestly, I wonder, um, like, is being a female overrated now? Um, and also to a certain

00:26:06.740 extent, if men are becoming women and frankly, they're way better at being women in many cases

00:26:12.980 than women are like, where's my competitive advantage as a biological female. Right. If I'm not 1.00

00:26:20.340 as pretty, I wouldn't clarify this. They are all biological females. Uh, as a, as a woman born, 1.00

00:26:27.300 of course, we can all agree that trans women have no advantage in sports saying that would get you 0.92

00:26:34.660 canceled and it would be a terribly offensive thing to say. So I really don't think that that's

00:26:39.940 what you mean to say, Simone. No, you don't mean to say that. That is not, that is not a fight that we

00:26:48.260 are interested in. It is not a fight. No, it is not a fight. Um, but anyway, it's interesting that people

00:26:55.060 are choosing to change gender for reasons other than, well, this is a trans max community and

00:27:02.900 that's something we'll talk about. Yeah. But I think the larger thesis of what you're talking

00:27:06.260 about here, which I find really interesting is, um, actually, I wish we had said this in the

00:27:14.340 previous video, you know, speaking of the trans community, uh, something that I find really

00:27:18.260 interesting is, you know, we were talking about the swole community and that you see this, this, uh,

00:27:22.660 body dysmorphia on both the far right, the fundamental was how, you know, it can seem like

00:27:34.580 pretty, uh, extreme or expensive or time consuming measures. Um, but what you were saying that,

00:27:40.500 sorry, to the point here, uh, that was an interesting part that I just wanted to get out, uh, is,

00:27:46.260 is it better to be a woman anymore? Um, and I don't know. I mean, I, I think that women are, 1.00

00:27:50.900 there was a period where society overcorrected to an extent. Um, but I also feel that despite that,

00:27:58.820 uh, the, the psychological environment for women, if you look at, uh, white progressive women,

00:28:04.980 what is it under 30 over half of them have a mental health issue right now? Um, yeah, not great.

00:28:10.740 You know, that is not a great thing. And we can, I think trivialize mental health issues,

00:28:17.140 but, uh, you know, it's, it's not a fun thing to have like major depression or to have one of these

00:28:23.460 hypochondriac, you know, issues, even if, even if, uh, they're not, you know, even if you quote unquote,

00:28:29.460 brought it upon yourself, you really didn't society brought it upon you. Your parents brought it upon

00:28:33.380 you for raising you in an environment, uh, where you felt the need to experience these things,

00:28:39.380 to rise up within a certain social hierarchy. Well, and so I feel like there are a couple different

00:28:44.580 approaches that, that women are taking, um, if we're going to be broad. And I think what approaches

00:28:51.060 is approach that we're taking and that also roughly I grew up with, which is to, to raise

00:28:59.540 women in a masculine way, basically to raise them the same way that they would raise a boy. 1.00

00:29:04.100 And I think that's really how my parents raised me to a great extent. You know, there was no like,

00:29:09.060 and now you're going to put on makeup and this is how you view yourself. And this is how you have to

00:29:12.820 do everything differently from boys and things like never. No, I was basically raised as a boy.

00:29:17.540 And Hey, we, we're giving all of our girls boys names. We're going to basically, they do better

00:29:22.260 in their careers if they have a boy's name. Yeah. And so essentially we're taking that,

00:29:26.340 that strategy, right. As we're saying, you know, you are going to compete in a sphere of men. You're

00:29:30.740 going to compete along masculine standards. And we expect you to do that on the other end of the 0.60

00:29:34.660 spectrum. And we have, we have friends who as parents are looking at this approach, they're saying,

00:29:39.460 no, I'm going, you know, women can't win in a mixed landscape. Like if I am going to have 1.00

00:29:48.260 my, you know, I'm going to undergo surgery and I get to choose between having a male and a female 0.56

00:29:52.900 surgeon, I'm going to choose the male surgeon. I, you know, I, I just don't think that women are 1.00

00:29:56.180 going to be as good. And, you know, I want to raise my, my, my daughters to do, you know,

00:30:00.660 to lean in to other skills that they have, um, which is not our family value set, but it is,

00:30:06.180 it's not. And I understand why people would make that. Well, and you also see a lot of

00:30:10.660 even like Gen Z young women that we know. And I, I don't really see this that much with,

00:30:14.980 with millennial women. Well, with some exception exceptions, but I think more and more Gen Z women 0.96

00:30:20.900 are going the full trad wife direction of, yeah, I'm going to lean totally into femininity. I'm not

00:30:26.740 going to play in male spheres. I'm going to raise kids. I'm going to be a housewife. I'm going to do

00:30:31.220 feminine pursuits. Um, and I have no disrespect for that at all. And like, maybe it's the right 0.83

00:30:36.900 way to go. These are very different strategies though. Um, and I, I wonder which will yield

00:30:43.220 better overall mental health. Like, and it's not that that's what we're optimizing for personally,

00:30:47.860 but you know, if we're talking about this in the context of a mental health crisis,

00:30:51.940 but would you recommend another, another video we have to do is the mental health cult.

00:30:55.300 Oh yeah, totally. I'll make a note of that. And I think this is a good place to wrap up with this

00:31:01.780 one, unless you had something else you wanted to talk about. So basically no conclusion. We have

00:31:05.700 no solution to the female mental health crisis. We, it's not raising girls, masculine. It's not 1.00

00:31:11.060 raising girls to be trad wives. We have a few solutions that are like our family's hypothesis on 0.98

00:31:15.860 this subject. Yeah. However, um, it's just a hypothesis, you know, at the end of the day,

00:31:22.420 different families are going to try different things and we will get data as time goes on.

00:31:27.300 This is one of the reasons why we created the index from the pragmatist guide to crafting religion.

00:31:31.300 We do measure outcomes from different families, different parenting strategies,

00:31:34.900 because there's just no good database of this. Um, and, uh, everything we can say is only a hypothesis.

00:31:42.420 Well, so to the question, are women doomed? I would say that the modern concept of woman is doomed. 0.90

00:31:50.740 I think that we're entering a different kind of world.

00:31:52.980 Well, this idea of women is like this weak or, or needing, you know, care or being overly emotional. 0.85

00:31:59.780 You know, I think if we indulge this concept, even if it does have a biological basis, it puts our

00:32:06.500 daughters at a disadvantage. Well, but I also think just the, the, the concept also of the

00:32:12.420 1980s shoulder pads, I can have it all businesswoman is not, um, it's not correct.

00:32:20.420 That that's not, it's not a sustainable ideal or even something that necessarily women want. 0.99

00:32:25.620 And that seems to be falling apart. But I also think that a go back to, you know,

00:32:31.140 like taken in hand marriages are like, not the solution really quickly.

00:32:36.340 Uh, it's like consensual non-consent, like, oh, well, like, you know,

00:32:39.540 It's like a consensual non-consent lifestyle that is aesthetically modeled after an abusive 1950s marriage.

00:32:47.540 Right to the moon is the, is the motto of the, uh, consensual, is that taken in hand?

00:32:53.300 Uh, yeah. Like, so I don't, I don't think that that's the solution either, you know, that like,

00:32:57.940 Oh, like I, sometimes I just get slapped around by my masculine husband.

00:33:02.100 So yeah, it's interesting. I think this is a thing to watch and maybe something that we'll

00:33:06.660 talk about in the future. Uh, I really liked chatting with you, Malcolm.

00:33:10.180 I love chatting with you too.

Based Camp - May 08, 2023

Based Camp： Spoonies, Female Puberty, and Are Women Doomed

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