Based Camp - May 08, 2023


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


Episode Stats

Length

33 minutes

Words per Minute

179.28801

Word Count

5,978

Sentence Count

316

Misogynist Sentences

41

Hate Speech Sentences

25


Summary

In this episode, we talk about a mind virus that's been spreading among young girls, and why we think it's a big deal. We also talk about the Spoonies Movement, a movement that started in response to a piece written by Susie Weiss called Hurts So Good About The Spoonies about the spread of this mind virus.


Transcript

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
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
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
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,
00:06:36.800 there would be characters who like were clearly making it up. Yeah. Um, and so clearly some women
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
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
00:07:28.540 sick young women who had much bigger piles of pills. And it's just insane to think about the envy
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
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
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
00:10:07.480 women in any particular social ecosystem may not feel like it's enough. Um, and I feel like that's
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
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,
00:11:27.440 I mean, just like for, I don't know that like actually, you know, as an, as an adolescent boy,
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
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
00:11:43.320 of masturbating is inserting yourself into a Mary Jane character and like a romantic manga or like
00:11:49.700 historical romance novel or something like that. But I, I don't know. I feel like that's, that's,
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
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
00:12:32.080 you could conceivably masturbate. Well, especially cause yeah, you have to be taken out of school.
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
00:13:46.040 do stupid and unethical things sometimes in an effort to get that drug do when you're all those
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
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
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
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.
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?
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
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
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
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,
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.
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.
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,
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...
00:22:36.500 Oh, yes, yes, yes. So today, women don't have this fear of becoming sex slaves,
00:22:41.700 or having their tribe all killed, or everyone they know murdered.
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,
00:23:04.340 because if you look at the women that fall into these movements, they're typically middle-class or
00:23:09.380 upper-class women. So they are women that don't really need to worry about any threat in their life.
00:23:14.420 You know, these are women who are not worrying about food security. They're not really worried
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.
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.
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
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
00:25:40.420 attention or the love. Well, that was the initial thing. I mean, now the trans community is, is,
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
00:26:20.340 as pretty, I wouldn't clarify this. They are all biological females. Uh, as a, as a woman born,
00:26:27.300 of course, we can all agree that trans women have no advantage in sports saying that would get you
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,
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
00:31:11.060 raising girls to be trad wives. We have a few solutions that are like our family's hypothesis on
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.
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.
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.
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.