How the Internet is Changing Gender and Sexuality with Katherine Dee (Default Friend)
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Summary
Catherine D. aka Default Friend is a writer, journalist, internet historian, and cultural commentator. In this episode, she joins us to discuss the rise of the so-called "sissy hypno" movement and how it intersects with the transphobia movement.
Transcript
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I think maybe we overrate how much awareness people had of their gender identity in prior
00:00:05.900
periods, when just so much of it was related to things that we were doing and the way we
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And now that those things are gone, and those people are much more isolated, it's also going
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Hello, we have a very special guest joining us today.
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Catherine D, aka Default Friend, who is one of my personal favorite writers, journalists,
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She has some of the best insights on different cultural movements, current events, people,
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She's incredibly thoughtful, incredibly clever.
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And Malcolm, you were saying there was something you actually wanted to ask her.
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But the way I would frame her is she is like the, from an anthropological perspective, sort
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of internet historian, in the more academic context, not the internet historian, but just
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a really good studier of internet cultures and how they evolve.
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And I had heard you say a recent interest of yours that you delved into was a sissification
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hypnome, which actually dovetails with topics that we've talked about on the show recently,
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We actually had the creator of the Transmax movement.
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We interviewed him, and it was so boring, we've never aired it, because I don't want
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So I'd love to dig deep on where you think, you know, how the movement originated, how it
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developed, and how it plays with something that we've talked about in a very recent episode,
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the idea of human gender sort of transforming, potentially even at the biological level, in
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terms of how they're engaging with sexuality and gender.
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Yeah, so origins, that's, that's sort of a hard question.
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Oh, let's start with definition, because people may not know.
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So a sissy hypno is, are there hypnosis videos or audio that is supposed, it's, they're usually
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for a male audience, but sometimes can be like unisex or for women.
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And, and it's supposed to sissify you, right, like make you increasingly more feminized.
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And there's different genres of it, it can be, you know, more or less violent or forced.
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Yeah, there's, and there's many different expressions of it.
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And it's interesting, because recently, NBC News did a piece on race change to another,
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which are like a sort of video, which is very similar to sissy hypno, but it's like racial
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changes, right, like, yeah, sort of a different conceit.
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The first question I have about it, given the way that you've presented it, is about what
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percent of sissy hypno would you say that the, the, the hypno itself is the pornographic
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material versus what percent would you say is consumed or created specifically in order
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I don't, I don't know, I haven't done like an exhaustive, I haven't done exhaustive research
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I, but if I had to, to guess, I'd say the, the, the act of listening and convincing yourself
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that you are being like forcibly changed into something you're not is the erotic component.
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There's a lot of people who want to see themselves as either a woman or a bimbified woman, an ultra
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feminine woman and, you know, cis women can experience this as well.
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It's not, it's not confined to natal, natal males, but yeah, I think there's something about
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the change and the force of the forcing that is like an erotic.
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So before we go deeper, something that I've noticed was in, like, when I briefly looked
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into the sissy hypno movement is that historically it seemed related to, as you're saying, like
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bimbofication or sissification, which was the idea that, you know, through being forcibly
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changed into something else, maybe even transformation pornography types, that is what is turning you
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I mean, chief among them being the trans maxers, but they're hardly the only group.
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Do you know what I'm talking about when I'm talking about the trans maxers?
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Where they are engaging with this content, not primarily because it turns them on, but
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because they actually want to permanently change their sexuality into something new that they
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feel will be easier to get access to is specifically this belief that if it's really hard to gain
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access to attractive women as a man, well, then I need to change what I want instead of I need
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And that's been a, to me, at least that's the most interesting new phenomenon within this,
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And I can see maybe a, someone who's transitioning for, for whatever reason, using sissy hypno in
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a non-sexualized way as sort of an act of desperation or placebo.
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But I tend not to believe what's actually doing anything per se.
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I've, I've listened to a whole bunch of audio and watched some of the videos and it does,
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I mean, it might just be because I wasn't open to it or whatever.
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And I was looking at it more as research and not, you know, without, not with the intention
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But I, I just feel like there has to be, you have, there's something so crazy and desperate
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about like using it as a tool, if, especially outside of a sexual context and not using it
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So I want to give people benefit of the doubt that there is some percentage of people who
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They, it's like real desperation and like a real place of maybe like despair that they're
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Cause there's so many better, even, even if they are trying to like do some sort of like
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conversion therapy on themselves, there's obviously so many better avenues to, to do
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Well, and I think you're totally onto something here because Ayla just released another like
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visualization of her fetish data and hypnotism is right there in the center on a graph of reported
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So it has like decent interest actually from both sides of the gender spectrum, but also
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like it's, it's halfway there, like halfway to the most extreme stuff in terms of taboo
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ness and like very close to that is also dubious consent and mind break.
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And these are all sort of like, you know, similar clusters, I think.
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So it could just be that this is something that really gets people excited.
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And we have seen people argue that the trans maxing movement is, doesn't really represent
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a meaningful number of people that feels like, Hey, I'm just going to trans maxing movement
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is a movement of people that largely came out of the incel movement that is transitioning,
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not because they felt they had gender dysphoria, but because they felt that women had it easier
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in our society and that they were never going to win given the hand that they were dealt.
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My guess at that is like, there are probably people who sort of subconsciously believe that,
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And there, and there's maybe like subconsciously influenced, but the actual movement that would
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identify with that label is probably pretty confined.
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And I think there's lots of, lots of things like that, right.
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There's the, there's tons of people who believe X, but the people who would, you know, use Y
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label is probably much smaller and much, much more eccentric.
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Cause I interrupted you when you were talking about that.
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So, like I said, I haven't done an exhaustive project on this.
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I did an interview and I was sort of looking, you know, looking through it a few, few months
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ago, but other, other projects caught my attention.
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Finding the origin was difficult because it's, it's like what, you know, what the origin of
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what, like a sissification or like sissy hypno, you know, like a discreet, that discreet phenomenon.
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And both were actually like pretty hard to pin down like a first instance of it.
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I, again, like I could only speculate, but like sissy, sissy, sissification and bimbification
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seem to go back pretty far back to like 1790s far.
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I mean, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't look exactly the same way that it would look today.
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But like some version of like feminizing a man as a, you know, a sexual expression as
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It seems to have always been a piece of, of BDSM.
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Not that that term has always been used, but just sort of that type of sexual expression.
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But the hypno videos, there's no one's written a history of it.
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And it's, it's actually like pretty hard to find where it originated.
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And the closest thing is like this Andrea Longchoo essay about it.
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And it, Andrea Longchoo suggests that maybe it originates on Tumblr.
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That feels, that feels wrong, but I don't actually know where it comes from.
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I did one interview with someone who first encountered it on 4chan.
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And I think, I think in 2008, if I'm remembering correctly.
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So I can, I can maybe give an answer to this because so sissification has clearly been part
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of the, like the general sadism, masochism and dominance and submission displays for a
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Likely going back to the English fights, as you said, easily 1700s.
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1700s bimbofication, I would argue, or at least from what I've seen, because, you know,
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We've actually given speeches on the history of different types of pornography at one point
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that seems to have not arose until the women's liberation movement and, and didn't really
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And you can correct me if I'm wrong about any of this, but I have not heard of any bimbofication
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And I think the reason being is there was, it was not considered normal for women to not be
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hyper-sexualized to the extent that they, you know, you needed to, to counter this.
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The, the sissification hypno, I think came after audio porn got popular, which didn't really
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happen until Argonne Wild Audio, which Simone has dug deep into because it somewhat requires
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And so I would guess that it probably got started on the major hubs of audio only porn, which
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again, I didn't get big until the mid two thousands.
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I mean that, I'm not a, I'm not an expert on pornography by any, by any state of the imagination.
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I, I feel like I, I could imagine it starting at different points or like different expressions
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But I mean, it sounds like, you know, much, much better than I do.
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So I'm, I'm wondering what you think it means for, and I'd love you to pontificate within
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the realm of sissification hypno and broader, how you think the ways that the internet, because
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it, to some extent de-genders people, how, do you think it's like changing the way we
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Um, yeah, I don't know if it de-genders people as much as the way gender expression, you know,
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like our relationship to our gender expression changes.
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Like one thing I think about a lot is like certain people in text appear more masculine
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or feminine and people will get like really into this with you.
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Like if, if, if you sort of say that it is like you are like doing some level like of
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interpretation, they're like, no, there's like, you know, an essential way that men communicate
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and sort of an essential way that like women communicate and you know, you're, you're down
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There's ways to present femininely through text.
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Like it's, it's like when you, the thing I compare it to a lot is like when you're reading
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something and there's a character and there's not a physical description of the character,
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but you start, you start imagining based on other things in the text.
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I think that happens through text-based communication.
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And that is that, that is not just something that's being like read by a third party, but
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Like the, you know, the colors we use or the type of art we might put on a profile, what
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websites we use, what apps we use, all of these are gendered in a way that we don't
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And I think that has actually impacted our, it has impacted our gender identity a lot.
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This new disembodied, very, very new way of expressing yourself that we really haven't
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I'm curious to know if you feel like, because obviously there's so much, gender is now playing
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such a key role in how people are freaking out culturally or even like coalescing into
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different groups culturally, do you feel like there is a significant change to the way that
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people relate to gender or even like sexuality through gender?
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I mean, we can see that rates of reported sex are plummeting.
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We can see that gender is getting weird and different.
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Do you feel like it's overhyped and like the average person is just the same as they always
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Or do you think we're coming to a new evolution in human culture, at least in developed nations
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or like super internet connected nations, where gender means something fundamentally
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I think there's parts of it that are really underappreciated.
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I think, you know, that a lot of our work is disembodied or mediated by a screen, I think
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There's, it, the, gender has always been so related to what we do, right?
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And a lot, and a lot of the places where that was like delineated have been like completely,
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There's, there's all these, there's all these things that have changed in that way that I
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think are impacting the way people think of gender.
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I don't think it was, I think maybe we overrate how much awareness people had of their gender
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identity in prior periods when just so much of it was related to things that we were doing
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and the way we were engaging in our communities.
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And now that those things are gone and there's, people are much more isolated, it's also going
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I wonder, would we, would we have the same sort of gender questions if people were like more
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connected in their immediate environments or if jobs were, you know, most people's work
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wasn't, not that most people's work, but if the, the most vocal sort of gender anarchists,
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so to speak, weren't probably using a laptop for their work, right?
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There's all these other little things, but I think.
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That's a really fascinating point that historically gender expression wasn't so much a choice that
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people were actively making because they were just so engaged with people in their daily
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lives, whereas today you get this level of choice.
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And one of the statistics that I always found really interesting in our book on sexuality
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was that about 20% of people, when they are given a choice with zero repercussions for
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making the choice of which gender to express as, will actually choose the opposite gender.
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So by here, what I mean is you see this when people are choosing furry costumes, but you
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also see it when people are choosing online at character avatars.
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I, I think part of, part of that with like furries and, and avatars is it's a very easy way to
00:16:06.640
Well, I also feel like part of what you're saying though, is let's say you live in some
00:16:10.560
village in rural France or something, and maybe given the circumstances of your life, you
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are born female, but you're doing more male style roles, kind of like both given your
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skill, but also, I don't know, like maybe you're married, but your husband went off to
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So now you're like doing all the man stuff and you're acting more manly, but it also
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doesn't care because you don't have an audience and there isn't like this online world.
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Like in the past, gender would also be fluid, but it didn't matter because there was no big
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I think it just had different, it was just used in different ways, right?
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And it had different, different utility at some, you know, a woman who's doing manual
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labor might actually be like more feminine because she is doing manual labor and that's
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So she might have to compensate in other ways in different contexts.
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Maybe it's how, you know, just so she could signal that she's interested in a mate or
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I mean, there's like, there's all sorts of different, different reasons for it.
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I also think, you know, part of gender is finding people with similar experiences.
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And that is something that we, I mean, I think has been like completely sort of like underrated
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or like even suppressed in especially like American culture.
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One sort of drawback, I think of the, you know, the discussion around transition and transgender
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identity is that part of saying I'm a woman is a way of saying, I have a certain set of
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And that is something that's been very stigmatized.
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And I, you know, if finding other part of finding other women is like talking about things
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that I experience in my body, my health, fertility thing, you know, that's something that someone
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who is male bodied wouldn't have any insight or experience with.
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I think what's really interesting, and this is something we often talk about within the
00:18:11.000
progressive movement in the United States right now is while they claim to value diversity,
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And there seems to be this resistance to admitting along any metric that humans are systemically
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different from other humans in any sort of an average context, you know, whether it's
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men or women are systemically different or, or, or different cultural groups are systemically
00:18:36.320
Do you think that that's sort of always been the case or is this a new thing with the internet?
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I don't know that the internet is necessarily the reason for that.
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I think that you're right, but like in general boundaries are very, I think there's like a real
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allergy to boundaries and that includes like boundaries between different groups, right?
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And that could be something like in the workplace, you see like the idea of a boss or a manager
00:18:59.540
is maybe in certain, especially in white collar roles or certain types of white collar roles,
00:19:06.440
And it's not as hierarchical as it might've been even 10 years ago, but then that also applies
00:19:12.040
men and men and the boundary between men and women or the boundary between individuals and
00:19:20.200
And a lot of people speculate that the popularization of like polygamory is because, is actually because
00:19:29.780
So instead of, you know, saying, okay, I'm putting too much stress on my romantic partner,
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you, you rationalize, say, oh, I should have multiple romantic partners.
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But when really what we're doing is making our, our romantic partner, like our whole community,
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the person we get advice from, the person we spend all our time with, and it puts too much
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I'd love you to pontificate more on this point.
00:19:56.180
I think it's, I think it's a lot of reasons, like expectations.
00:20:00.760
Also, I mean, I think it's interesting to look, where is it big, right?
00:20:03.580
Like it's, it's, I think there are a lot of places in the United States and I can really
00:20:07.840
only speak to the United States where maybe people are more isolated, but like generally,
00:20:12.280
like the, the way people socialize doesn't look that different from 10, 20 years ago,
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where I would assume the biggest changes are like very educated groups or, you know, up the
00:20:25.800
upper class, upper middle class people in cities and probably the very poor, but I would guess
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the middle class is probably, you know, the shrinking middle class is probably not so different
00:20:40.160
than, you know, what people, people miss, right?
00:20:45.620
So that, so that being said, I think the lifestyles of these groups sort of lend themselves to,
00:20:53.840
Part of that is people who are in, again, like creative or tech fields may not want to
00:21:02.000
So that that's destabilizing people move away from their families.
00:21:07.760
I know a lot of people who like move cities a lot, or they live in cities that are not
00:21:12.860
very community friendly and the way they make friends is through dating apps.
00:21:18.920
Oh, no, I was just going to say that was definitely a phenomenon that I experienced really heavily
00:21:23.840
when I first really became, you know, sort of long-term monogamous with Simone was not
00:21:29.440
being on dating apps made it a lot harder to find friends.
00:21:32.980
But I've never heard that articulated before that maybe it's because one, when we argue,
00:21:37.100
because we're really big in education reform, that a really big problem with traditional
00:21:40.200
schooling is that it really only teaches you how to make friends with people you're literally
00:21:45.600
So if you don't make friends through university or school or through your business, you sort
00:21:51.320
And then after you graduate from school, outside of people you interact with in your office,
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the only way that you're probably interacting with new strangers is you are dating.
00:22:00.140
Like that is the one time people bother to learn how to meet new people or make friends.
00:22:04.760
And it just never really occurred to me that like people might be interested in polyamory
00:22:09.480
because they also just want more friends, but they don't know how to make friends that
00:22:14.200
Offering social institutions to make friends, like they might not have a church or something
00:22:20.620
Cause when we think about poly communities that we've gotten into touch with or been
00:22:24.780
exposed to, or poly people that we've met, like a lot of them, it's, it seems like it's
00:22:29.560
more of a friendship thing and a more like of a social thing that it necessarily, it's
00:22:33.060
like, well, this is how I want to be romantically involved.
00:22:36.560
It's weird that it's very hard for people to conceptualize like intimacy without sex, which
00:22:41.300
is, which is funny because like sex without intimacy is obviously very common.
00:22:47.340
And I think, I mean, I think that's right to your point, Simone, like they, people just
00:22:50.860
don't know what a friend is or like how deep and intimate a friendship could be without
00:22:57.640
And it, you know, it makes me wonder sometimes like the nature of, of that sex.
00:23:01.680
It, I think there's been sort of like a hobbification of sex almost, or even less than that.
00:23:06.940
It's even hobby is almost too generous because I think a lot of people do it just like to
00:23:10.640
pass the time or as an experience, they do it for a story, you know, and it, it, it's,
00:23:15.760
it, it's almost not about living in that moment.
00:23:18.540
It's about it having, it's something that happened and helped pass time or.
00:23:22.760
Well, I mean, narrative, narrative reinforcement is something we talk about a lot on this podcast.
00:23:27.280
And, and that's what you're describing there is they are trying to tell a story about who
00:23:31.660
they are to themselves and potentially to the world.
00:23:35.320
But another thing you mentioned there that I found very interesting about the poly community
00:23:40.520
You know, when I talk to these people who have like eight partners or though I'm at five
00:23:43.860
partners right now, it's, so this is like your primary hobby because it would have to
00:23:49.140
be, it would have, it would just be an enormous time sink.
00:23:53.720
It's, it's probably a stand-in for, for culture in a lot of ways.
00:23:58.900
And, and, and it comes to, you know, once you have a lot of kids or something like that,
00:24:03.640
you know, this is another thing I've seen is you just don't have as much time for it.
00:24:08.600
I, and something about wanting to bring children into that kind of arrangement is, is very,
00:24:14.780
I try to be like sort of as nonjudgmental as possible, but it just seems like it's opening
00:24:21.640
So when I was in Silicon Valley, you know, one of the things that always sort of weirded me on,
00:24:25.740
and again, we try to be somewhat nonjudgmental on this channel.
00:24:28.060
We're a little judgmental, but there, there's a lot of like poly group houses.
00:24:32.200
If you're familiar with that in the Silicon Valley area, we're like, they're, you know,
00:24:37.840
And, you know, occasionally, you know, as I was getting older, there would be kids like
00:24:47.520
I mean, it could be a stable way to host relationships, but, but polyamory, you know,
00:24:51.440
an A-list study show this really clearly leads to really low fertility rates.
00:24:55.240
So I don't think it's a, a long-term cultural solution.
00:24:58.960
I mean, I would argue growing up broadly in that culture, growing up in Silicon Valley,
00:25:03.000
I was surrounded by it, but also I think because I was surrounded by it, I was blind to it.
00:25:09.040
Literally, I went to Burning Man at age 15 and I saw zero sex and zero drugs.
00:25:16.000
Well, I remember when I went to one party and there was an orgy and I was, I was like,
00:25:19.480
Simone, there's, like, there's an orgy at this party.
00:25:23.280
And so I had to walk you to a door, open it and be like, that's an or, that, that room
00:25:30.760
So I think, I think it's probably less damaging to children than you would think, because I think
00:25:36.640
If kids are growing up surrounded by sex, by like very, like openness, nudity, like
00:25:42.800
all that, they're just like, so that's what old people do, you know, kind of like, you
00:25:46.380
know, sitting on the toilet for a really long time, reading newspapers, paying bills.
00:25:54.840
And you see, you're just like, I don't, I don't do that, whatever.
00:26:02.600
We'll see what ends up happening with these kids.
00:26:06.320
Your parents were in a polyamorous relationship at one point.
00:26:09.000
So maybe they don't all end up, I mean, you're, I think they probably end up a lot more conservative
00:26:15.100
And I actually feel like to a certain extent, Gen Z is showing this through a lot of its
00:26:20.380
conservative interests in that, you know, they were raised in a very permissive time and
00:26:26.600
their choice in perhaps rebellion or just in perhaps reasoned cultural choices after seeing
00:26:32.860
how it's working for the adults is to go, in many cases, more conservative.
00:26:39.000
But thank you so much because you've actively changed my view on a couple of subjects.
00:26:43.500
And this is the kind of, and this is why everyone, if you're watching this, you've got to check
00:26:50.440
She, she, she writes for, for a bunch of different outlets.
00:27:01.420
And I, you know, update people and where I'm writing and what I'm doing.