How the Internet Turned Illness Into Status for Privileged Women with Suzy Weiss
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
192.86353
Summary
Writer Susie Weiss joins Betsy and Amanda this week to talk about her new piece, "A Spoonie is a Chronic Illness Sufferer," and why she thinks the internet is full of "sick bros" and "porn sick bros."
Transcript
00:00:00.000
A spoonie is a member of a community of chronic illness sufferers, what some people have described
00:00:06.020
as Munchausen by internet. What happens when your identity becomes illness? Because how are you ever
00:00:11.240
incentivized to get well? If your community identification is defined by how ill you are,
00:00:18.280
then a status hierarchy is going to begin to form based on illness. And people being people,
00:00:25.360
they are going to have a motivation to exaggerate their illness. Would you like to know more?
00:00:31.680
Okay. I am so, so, so excited for our special guest here today. Easily our favorite writer. It's on the
00:00:41.800
show today. This is Susie Weiss. We mentioned her in a number of episodes as just a writer who we
00:00:49.020
really respect and does really, really interesting, deep based pieces that explore subcultures that
00:00:57.440
are weird, which is like our favorite thing. Today, we are going to do the first piece of hers that we
00:01:05.360
really got into where I was like, oh, this changes my thinking on a number of things about how like
00:01:10.580
memetic viruses can form within current online environments. And how we're going to raise our
00:01:14.980
teenage daughters. Like it completely, like it gave us a new model for female adolescents. This
00:01:19.660
was, it was a game changer. Oh, and where we should send people. So the Snoozy Weiss, it's her Twitter
00:01:24.280
account. So go subscribe there. Although that never really converts this YouTube to Twitter. But what I
00:01:29.720
can say is the free press, her sister, Barry Weiss runs it and she is a writer there. And that's where
00:01:36.520
you can find her stuff. So you should definitely go and subscribe to that. Yeah. Thank you guys so much
00:01:41.100
for having me. I feel like when we discovered each other, it was like, there are others. I'm so
00:01:45.560
happy. And then of course I included you on a story I did about tech messiahs who wanted to live
00:01:50.460
forever, which I love your contribution. Cause you were like anti live forever, which I think is
00:01:55.720
like a weird, whatever we can get into that later, but I love that. Did you end up talking to that other
00:02:00.380
girl we introduced you to for that story? She, I never talked to her cause she just, yeah, she was
00:02:05.500
intense. She recently did a post where she bragged about how she convinced a woman to break up with
00:02:12.040
her husband for another woman and get an abortion on her three months term fetus. And this was like
00:02:19.120
a huge win for her is talking someone into an abortion. That's pretty late stage, right?
00:02:25.060
Or that early. It's on the older side of fairly. Yeah. Horrifying. We were trying to get the
00:02:33.000
perspective of an extremist antinatalist. Oh yeah. She was, yeah, she's a major antinatalist. Yeah.
00:02:37.360
I guess that's a win where you can get them. So the, the full post she wrote went one of the
00:02:42.760
grossest and most paleocentric types of misogyny to me is males who are fine with, or even encourage
00:02:50.200
their wives or girlfriends having sex with other women. Porn sick bros was harem fetishes. It's an
00:02:55.840
ugly and very clear mask off on how they see women. They feel so superior that a girl fucking their
00:03:02.400
wife doesn't even count as sex. And thus cheating lesbians are just quote unquote girls having fun
00:03:08.660
that we do to please their stinky cheese cocks. And few things are as satisfying as seeing their
00:03:15.100
wives realize they can do better divorcing them for their girlfriends and living happily ever after
00:03:20.300
without a sexist leech in their life. Two months ago, I convinced a girl who just married and was
00:03:26.440
actually three months pregnant to get an abortion and divorce and continue dating her girlfriend who
00:03:32.100
the male picked for her, but who she fell in love with. They are engaged and I am so for it.
00:03:38.660
Heart. In case you can't tell, she is a lesbian, maybe even a political lesbian and an extremist
00:03:45.160
feminist as well as an antinatalist. Yeah. She's in favor, I think of even post-term abortions as she
00:03:51.020
puts it. So murder. Yeah. So murder. Yes. Yes. But baby murder. So it's baby. It's a tiny murder.
00:03:58.940
It's murder. It's murder. It's murder. Yes. Oh God. Anyway, so. Spoonies. Spoonies. Spoonies.
00:04:06.720
Spoonies. Go. I am so excited to dig into this. Yeah. Well, first off, what made you decide
00:04:12.600
to explore this world? How did you even learn? I'm sorry. The audience needs to know what they are
00:04:17.080
first. So I'm letting her describe that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Questions like this. Okay. So what is
00:04:21.440
a spoonie? A spoonie is a member of a community of chronic illness sufferers. They're mostly women
00:04:28.640
from what I could observe. They're mostly white women. The term comes from, I believe it was like
00:04:33.440
a 2013 or 2014 blog post by this lupus blogger. And she had a well friend who asked her, what is it
00:04:40.120
like to be sick? And she took all the spoons. I just reread the post last night because I wanted to be
00:04:44.420
reminded of it. And it's strangely cinematic. She's like, with tears in my eyes, I held the
00:04:50.000
bouquet of spoons. And I don't not believe her, but it's just interestingly written. And she describes
00:04:55.300
that normal people have unlimited spoons. People who are sick have a fixed number of spoons. So
00:05:00.480
let's say you or I, we could get up and shower and make ourselves breakfast and go to work and we
00:05:05.180
don't have to think about it. Someone with, let's say six spoons has to portion them out. So two spoons
00:05:10.400
to wake up and get dressed, one spoon to make lunch. Do you have enough spoons to work? And I think it is
00:05:15.940
like an effective way for people to think about other people who have limited resources. But since
00:05:21.400
then it's been co-opted into a cottage industry, a world, a community of people who suffer from these
00:05:29.120
sort of amorphous and hard to pin down illnesses. So Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, POTS, autoimmune diseases,
00:05:36.120
ulcerative colitis, you name it. And they're called- POTS is included in that? I have POTS.
00:05:40.720
That's crazy. You have POTS? Yeah. You could be a Spoonie. Yeah. You could be a Spoonie. And you
00:05:44.700
would find a lot of like-minded Spoonies out there and you could buy different products with your
00:05:49.680
Spoonie codes and learn how to lie to a doctor, which is apparently like a moral thing in this world.
00:05:55.660
So yeah, I was interested in what some people have described as Munchausen by internet,
00:06:00.220
like where the psychosomatic, I guess what I was really interested in is what happens when
00:06:06.080
your identity becomes illness because how are you ever incentivized to get well? And I spoke to a
00:06:11.160
lot of people and doctors and that's the story that you're- So I want to talk about that,
00:06:15.100
but before we go further, I'm going to take and just word this a little differently.
00:06:18.960
Yeah. Essentially what happened and what created the Spoonies is that if you have a, either a chronic
00:06:25.860
illness condition or a short-term illness condition where you are frequently going into a medical
00:06:30.220
setting, of course, you are going to tweet about this and find other like-minded people.
00:06:36.080
Now, like any social community, hierarchy within a community is often determined by things that
00:06:43.460
differentiate you from mainstream society and make you more aligned with that community.
00:06:49.560
Within a goth circle, if I'm meeting a goth I haven't met, the more gothy they dress, the higher
00:06:53.700
status I assume they are because they are othering themselves from mainstream society in a way that
00:06:57.460
shows dedication to a community. Well, if your community identification is defined by
00:07:02.920
how ill you are, like if that's what correlates the community, then a status hierarchy is going
00:07:12.640
to begin to form based on illness and people being people, they are going to have a motivation
00:07:19.600
to exaggerate their illness, find ways to get on more visible forms of treatment.
00:07:25.960
A lot of it is about externalizing because a lot of these illnesses that I listed, they're
00:07:29.480
invisible illnesses. You can't see them. So a lot of these women will use crutches, casts,
00:07:35.100
tourniquets, not tourniquets, but like you got like ways to show, to pick lines, like food,
00:07:40.300
feeding tubes to show that they're sick. So I think it's really interesting. And it, yeah, sorry.
00:07:45.380
Yeah. Well, and then doctors will say, well, you don't actually have these illnesses. And so
00:07:48.880
then they need to make the doctors for the community, the villains. Right. And wasn't there
00:07:55.260
like a word that they used like zebra or something? Yes. So that's an old medical adage. If you hear
00:08:00.740
hooves, think horses, not zebras. So if someone's coming, it's like the real world, it's not an
00:08:06.100
episode of house. Not everyone has the like deep cut, weird disease that you can own, that no one's
00:08:11.420
seen a case of in a hundred years, but the spoonie mantra might be, I am the zebra. I am this rare
00:08:17.060
thing. And it has to do, I think, and you brought up teenage girls, like kind of this need to be
00:08:21.980
special. I was thinking about it this morning, eight or nine years ago, there were these movies
00:08:26.240
like Me, Earl and the Dying Girl, Fault in Our Stars, like that sort of romanticized illness and
00:08:32.920
being sick and dying. So there's a lot that goes into it. And what you were saying about like
00:08:37.800
hierarchies and structures, I think a lot of the spoonie world dovetailed with the Me Too movement
00:08:42.000
that kind of became really suspicious of, let's say, male-dominated hierarchies and created a
00:08:48.280
world in which patients were being victimized by doctors. It's left-wing QAnon and they're trying
00:08:54.500
to take away your agency and power. I see a lot of overlap. Yeah. Well, and it makes sense that
00:08:59.220
something like this would organically form within young female communities that are looking for
00:09:03.900
affirmation. And I think in a sense of community and they get affirmed by the community, but then they
00:09:08.640
begin to do things like you talk about in the article, like pillport, like mixing pills. And
00:09:12.880
there's like special status if you need tubes and there's- And if they up your feed, that's like a bad
00:09:18.120
thing because it means you're getting better and that you might one day get off the tube. And like,
00:09:22.360
I want to be clear, like, and this was a really hard subject to write about. I think these girls are
00:09:27.900
actually feeling pain. I don't think they go into their bedrooms and shut the door and jump out of
00:09:33.440
their wheelchair and say, hi, I tricked another doctor today. I do. I'm not sure that their pain
00:09:38.140
is a symptom of what they think it's a symptom of. I think that's the best way to put it. But
00:09:44.020
yeah, what you said is correct of the need to externalize and differentiate and make unique
00:09:48.620
according to your illness. Also, when you're looking at this from the context of young girls
00:09:52.760
who are coming at this, they're beginning to try to find themselves. They're going through puberty a lot
00:09:57.080
of the times. And I think that female sexuality is broadly misunderstood in our society. And I think
00:10:02.680
part of what we're seeing here when women first go through puberty is a need to be cherished or
00:10:08.500
treated like something special and fragile that is cared for, which this self-framing elevates.
00:10:15.940
So you almost get this perfect storm of hierarchy, affirmation, victimhood, this, and I'm unique
00:10:24.420
to such an extent where when I was reading your piece, I was like, how do I protect my own kids
00:10:29.940
from this? Right. It seems like such an effective package. So I'd love it if you could talk a bit
00:10:34.480
about the people you interviewed, people who got out of it and what you will be doing for your own
00:10:38.980
kids. Yeah. It's interesting. You bring up teen girls and this is like a theme I come back to in
00:10:43.300
my writing all the time. Like I actually think teen girls might be like the most potent, like if you
00:10:47.720
could harness the energy and like the intensity, you could power like cities. Like that is like the power
00:10:54.320
of the collective of teen girls. And I've done a lot of, I'm not a lot. I mean, I've done reporting
00:10:59.540
on eating disorders, on cutting, you'll see the different waves of what that is. I think the
00:11:04.080
conversation about gender dysphoria actually fits into this in a certain way. I think it fits into
00:11:09.660
it in every way. I think we're looking at two very similar phenomenon. And it's one of the things I
00:11:16.100
point out, I'm like, okay, kids are going through puberty and there's a community out there that says,
00:11:20.340
if you just do this, you will be comfortable with your body. And that affirms you obsessively
00:11:26.420
whenever you're around them. Like in the same way that the fact that some spoonies are being
00:11:31.460
talked into this or don't have these conditions, that doesn't mean these conditions don't exist.
00:11:36.680
It doesn't mean that POTS isn't a real condition, that there aren't really young girls who have chronic
00:11:41.380
medical conditions. But when you create a community that affirms them around this, you have the
00:11:46.120
potentiality of the psychological exasperation of prodromal or low level tendencies in these
00:11:54.220
individuals, which I think you see within different youth communities with gender dysphoria. And I
00:12:00.600
should point out, not just on the far left, but also on the far right. These Andrew Tate following
00:12:05.020
guys, a lot of them seem to have a form of gender dysphoria where they want to define who they are
00:12:10.620
based on their gender identity. I also think there's like kind of a reflex to categorize
00:12:16.060
everything. Like you can't just be tired. You have to have chronic fatigue syndrome. And like to answer
00:12:20.860
your earlier question about how you protect against this, I'm one of four girls and like female
00:12:28.100
puberty is brutal and your body betrays you and it's really confusing. And I think, and you see this
00:12:37.020
with anorexia and maybe there's like an aspect of this with the spoonies, it's the want not to grow
00:12:41.380
up, to have your mother take care of you, to go to zero, to not be so wide. And I think as much as
00:12:47.480
you, we can encourage people and accept when someone says, you know what, I'm really, I'm feeling lazy,
00:12:53.740
I'm feeling down, I'm feeling tired and not be like, you should go to the doctor and get a pill for
00:12:58.120
that. That is something that must be categorized and medicated and more deeply understood because it's a
00:13:04.160
pathology of some sort. I think that's one thing to do, but teenage girls, the internet did not invent
00:13:09.740
like teenage girls cracking up around the age of 14 or 15. That, that is going to be forever, but
00:13:15.320
the internet does do, it amplifies it and it incentivizes it in ways that I find interesting.
00:13:21.240
Well, to your earlier point too, the suffering that many of these young women feel is real,
00:13:28.520
even if they don't technically have the actual condition they may think that they have,
00:13:33.280
that a lot of it, then they psychosomatically give themselves that condition. And the same can
00:13:37.720
happen with therapy culture, or this is controversial, but we would argue with gender
00:13:41.880
dysphoria as well, where you may not actually be trans, or you may not actually have post-traumatic
00:13:46.780
stress, or sorry, post-traumatic... Trauma just generally. Yeah, trauma in general.
00:13:51.980
The community, a large one that is, I'd say adjacent to the Spoonie community, but still distinct from it,
00:13:58.260
where the hierarchy is based around a trauma or something traumatic that happened to them in
00:14:03.100
their childhood. And they begin to create these communities where there is a huge incentive
00:14:09.100
to imagine trauma that didn't happen. But then that creates real pain, that trauma,
00:14:15.520
like you are making it worse by leaning into it, but then also you end up in these communities where
00:14:20.280
people use that to your point as well, to virtue signal. And they, it's bad because you turn to it
00:14:25.760
naturally as a solution. This is a problem I want to solve. I don't want this. This is bad and I need
00:14:30.860
to get through it. But then you subconsciously, especially if you're a teenage girl, get sucked
00:14:36.060
into the social dynamics. And then you're in this like status hierarchy game fighting for higher
00:14:40.880
status without even knowing it because of the way your brain is wired at the time.
00:14:45.580
Right. And I'm sure you, you were a young girl. I was obsessed with Holocaust books and I didn't
00:14:50.320
understand trauma or horrible things happening. And so there's this want of to go on chat roulette
00:14:56.180
and see someone masturbating, even though you're scared of it. You also want to see it because you
00:14:59.780
want to know what's happening and you're afraid if you don't see it, someone's going to make you watch
00:15:03.280
it. It's so confusing and intense. And to your earlier point of, or I don't, I think a lot of how
00:15:08.580
we got here in terms of the conversation about everyone's traumatized every, I think it has to do with
00:15:13.940
the spectruming of life. So sexuality is on a spectrum, Kinsey scale. I can get behind that.
00:15:19.740
But now aggression is on a spectrum, microaggression, macroaggression, autism's on a
00:15:25.340
spectrum. So it's, if everything's a spectrum and we're all on it, we're all sick because sickness
00:15:30.540
is a spectrum. So I think as right as I think a lot of nuance is in terms of sickness, in terms of
00:15:40.340
sexuality, in terms of a lot of these human experiences, I think for an undeveloped brain,
00:15:45.960
it can also trick you into believing that you've been a victim of something and you're never not
00:15:51.120
going to be a victim of that thing, if that makes sense.
00:15:53.440
Well, and something that we have an episode on that we've filmed and hasn't gone live yet is
00:15:57.460
on the idea of how our grandparents' generation essentially lived in a teen dystopian.
00:16:03.760
Because like their boyfriends went off to war and stuff?
00:16:05.820
Well, no, like I recently read my grandmother's autobiography during the occupation of Paris when
00:16:11.420
she lived there. And she's describing like fleeing Paris while the Nazis are coming in.
00:16:16.360
The roads are being bombed. She is driving her car across bridges that are actively being
00:16:23.980
Yeah. Well, and there's no food, but it gives us the impression there's maybe this need to have
00:16:30.360
difficulty in life that the hardship is also part of a good upbringing and we don't have it now.
00:16:36.420
So we crave it. And we read these teen dystopias and we subject ourselves to these stresses and we
00:16:41.380
try to find something that's wrong because we need something that's wrong.
00:16:44.420
But the point being is that I think people undersell, if you go back to our grandparents'
00:16:48.720
generation or earlier, how insanely, quote unquote, in modern standards, traumatic the average human
00:16:54.780
life was. And that the anaphobum now is people living in environments where there is not genuine
00:17:04.180
scarcity. And because of that, I think it's causing sort of psychological haywire-ness almost to the
00:17:11.500
extent of being like raised in a cage or something like that, where they are seeking out forms of
00:17:19.020
self-victimization and trauma, where that is a thing of status and allure. And they read about
00:17:25.400
it and they fantasize about it, which is just really fascinating. And I don't think that we
00:17:30.760
Right. And then for us to put ourselves in the cages, it's let me sedate myself and let me come
00:17:36.840
up with a justification for watching cartoons all day as like a grown woman. You know what I mean?
00:17:44.580
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It all comes back. It all comes back to Hercule Durkle. But
00:17:48.900
yeah, it's, I, it's such, it's amazing because it's very understandable wands being,
00:17:57.240
I think, manifesting in a sort of, what am I trying to say? It's manifesting in a way that
00:18:04.980
it's self-sabotaging ultimately. And that's what's sad. But I think it's so interesting. Abigail Schreier
00:18:10.620
has like just such a brilliant book out of called, oh God, what's it called? I feel like we have it
00:18:16.560
here. It's about therapy culture and, and it's just really interesting and how therapy is,
00:18:22.940
it's a medical treatment and hundreds and millions of kids are getting this medical treatment through
00:18:27.360
their schools, through online, kind of unbeknownst to the parents. And it's shifting who the parents
00:18:34.100
are. Is it the state? Is it the school? Is it your mom and dad? And you see this, I won't ruin it.
00:18:38.580
We talk about this a lot in other episodes, the cult of therapy and how it transformed.
00:18:42.580
It's building dependency with his patients and it's training them. One of my favorite
00:18:46.800
lines that I just keep repeating, there was a popular online YouTuber that was like,
00:18:50.880
don't people know about the number of young people with mental health issues? This is because
00:18:56.020
we don't have enough therapists and they're not inexpensive enough.
00:18:59.440
Oh my God. Do you think that our grandparents' generation had therapists? Do you think in the
00:19:04.320
old West there were therapists running around to kids, especially being like, oh, 10 year old,
00:19:10.940
we need to talk about your feelings. Do you think that maybe that could be the problem?
00:19:16.220
This correlation you're seeing here. And they're like, no, you don't understand. I'm traumatized.
00:19:20.980
It's like, no, you don't understand. All of Europe, like all of our grandparents' generation
00:19:25.960
who was in Europe went through a form of trauma that you can't even begin to conceptualize outside
00:19:32.480
of fantasies. And they didn't go to psychologists about it. They didn't. It's wild.
00:19:39.060
Yeah. Which isn't to say they aren't traumatized. And I think the thing with kids is like, as an
00:19:42.720
adult and Abigail talks about this, you can push back on a therapist. You could say, when she says
00:19:47.440
this, Hey, it's enough talking about my mother-in-law. As a child, you want to please the adult that
00:19:52.540
you're in the room with. You don't understand that there's like a service being offered. You
00:19:56.720
think you're in trouble. And I think therapy on adults and therapy on kids are very different
00:20:00.740
propositions. Oh yeah. And especially the state sanctioned, almost ubiquitous thing that's
00:20:06.060
happening now. And I would strongly recommend parents not send their kids to therapy. I've gotten to the
00:20:10.620
point. It's not that therapy is bad. It is very useful for some people, but I think that the vast
00:20:18.640
proportion of therapy that's being practiced on kids these days is not of the safe variety.
00:20:23.980
And so it will likely on average, make things worse rather than better. Or even if it's a
00:20:28.760
minority of cases where it's making things worse, it makes them so much worse that it's not worth
00:20:33.960
really medicalizing the rest of your kid's life over. But I want to talk about some of the
00:20:38.480
interviews you did, some of the spoonies you got to know, what were they like? Describe these
00:20:42.980
experiences. It's interesting. They were so open with me, first of all, which is always something
00:20:48.060
I'm so grateful. I'm a stranger on the internet that I'm reaching out. And I'm like, and you said
00:20:51.980
this ruined your sex life. Can you talk a little bit? It's crazy. But one of them, this quote that
00:20:57.380
really struck me was that someone had asked what this girl who had this really rich life in college
00:21:03.620
is, who she is outside of being sick. And she said, my jaw hit the floor. I didn't know what to say.
00:21:09.780
And that's someone who was able to go to college, was able to leave the house. And then
00:21:14.700
it all goes backwards and everything is in reverse, which I thought was interesting. Oh my
00:21:19.780
God, it was so long ago. Who else did I talk to? Well, the main girl I talked to, Morgan,
00:21:24.640
she described opening up an Instagram page, wanting to be like a spoony influencer. I have a piece
00:21:29.880
coming out that I'm editing about unwellness influencers. Like we all know wellness influencers
00:21:34.640
with their Ayurvedic smoothies and whatever. But what about the unwellness influencers that just
00:21:38.840
encourages you to herkul dirkul and everything else? But this girl, Morgan, she was in a hospital bed.
00:21:43.600
I think she had been there for months. She had to gain weight, but she wasn't gaining weight. She
00:21:47.880
had a pick line. She had mouths. Nothing was working. She had stomach pains every time she
00:21:51.980
ate, which got worse from the feeding tube. And then her mom came in and plucked her cell phone
00:21:56.580
out of her hand. And that became, that was the moment that she started to get better when her mom
00:22:01.040
cut her off from a community of people that she believed to be her friends. And I'm sure they were
00:22:05.540
her friends. It was a Snapchat group that she had like in a thousand day streak with or whatever it was.
00:22:10.080
And it gives you this sense of being understood, but you don't realize that you're, you're, there
00:22:15.440
are like weights on your ankles while this is happening. It's like when you freeze to death,
00:22:19.900
you feel warm at the last second or something. But yeah, she was really interesting. And she
00:22:24.140
described, she didn't say, Oh, I made it up. And I don't think she did, but she was able to have
00:22:28.380
awareness about how this community has a really dark side and a side that, that doesn't encourage you
00:22:35.040
to get better. Well, one thing also that I think is really interesting, and I was mentioning this
00:22:39.220
before we started recording is how pervasive Spoonie language is. Even if people don't know
00:22:44.880
what the community is, I had heard before I read your article about spoons. And then we were like,
00:22:49.860
Oh, this friend is a Spoonie and this friend is a Spoonie. And some of them have even used these
00:22:54.580
analogies with us and we just didn't realize it. And then once we read your article, we started
00:22:59.560
seeing this culture and bits of it everywhere. What scares me is that I think a lot of people
00:23:06.220
fall into it without knowing what it is. And I think most Spoonies fall into it without knowing
00:23:10.300
what it is. When you discovered it, because you really write about it as a cohesive thing. And
00:23:17.440
from this very sober minded perspective of an outsider, how did you manage to not just immediately fall
00:23:25.480
right into it and fall for it? Like I think most people do even people who are like, otherwise
00:23:29.800
we'll say very critical of maybe we'll say like therapy culture or trans culture or anything.
00:23:34.420
I think a lot of people still totally fall for this. Right. Is there anything that? Yeah.
00:23:39.320
Cause it's such a taboo thing to doubt someone's experience of their illness. Yeah. That,
00:23:44.400
that horrible thing that I had to do. It's a good question. I think everyone always says,
00:23:50.180
follow the money. And when you have someone saying, Hey, if you wear compression socks and you
00:23:55.460
have to drink salt water all the time and your doctor says, do you faint? Even if you haven't
00:23:59.540
fainted, maybe just tell them you fainted. And also buy these $40 blue light glasses. I really
00:24:04.360
have no problem getting into it when I feel that there is like quackery and people wasting their
00:24:10.640
money on things that are ultimately harmful to them. Not to say that every person who identifies
00:24:15.580
as a Spoonie is trying to sell you like weird electrolyte tinctures, but I think that's part of it.
00:24:19.940
And then I think throughout the whole internet, there is this like trauma porn or horror porn
00:24:24.520
masquerading as raising awareness, the two most abused words in the English language.
00:24:29.260
And I don't know, I call bullshit. I love, because I'm thinking about this in a historic
00:24:33.820
context. Like this historically just would have been described as hysteria. Like why is it that
00:24:38.760
these women have this affirmed in them? And what you said at the beginning is why this has been allowed
00:24:44.600
to get out of control like this is doubting someone's lived experience is a sin within the shadow
00:24:50.900
religion or whatever you want to call it. This alternative religious and theological system
00:24:54.860
that exists within our society, because there's no reason for that to be an intrinsically wrong
00:24:59.200
thing. I call BS on what you're telling me. It sounds self-indulgent, but you're not allowed to say
00:25:04.200
that, but that's like a totally reasonable thing in a historic context to say to a teenage girl.
00:25:12.140
Go back to Jane Austen novels and like a common feature in them, like a common trope. It like the
00:25:17.660
gay best friend of its time was the sickly mother or something who was just always had taken to her
00:25:23.880
beds and swoonies. And that was a thing. They were totally spoonies. There was a spoonie flare up
00:25:29.640
during Regency era England among wealthy people. And again, it was wealthy white women doing it too,
00:25:37.620
But I want to elevate something else you said that I thought was really interesting,
00:25:42.140
which was the thing that broke her out of it is what is your identity outside of being sick?
00:25:46.880
And I think that this is where what you discovered in the story, I think is so useful to people,
00:25:52.740
even who would never be at risk of becoming a spoonie, because as our society has moved to
00:25:58.600
a secular place or a post-religious place, when people think about who they are, we are not given
00:26:06.240
a good framework for determining that within our educational system. And so some individuals like
00:26:11.900
Simone, I yourself probably thought a lot about who am I, what do I want to be in the world? Like,
00:26:16.800
how do I define which actions I take versus which actions I don't take? Like I built some sort of
00:26:21.500
like core moral framework that I'm living around. But some people, if they're just walk into this
00:26:27.440
without thinking, it's very easy to accidentally say, who am I? Like, how do I define good action?
00:26:32.940
I guess I'm this illness, because this is what I get affirmed for in my community. Or I guess I'm
00:26:38.920
But this Andrew Tate thing, like you were pointing out earlier, right? I'm just a manly man.
00:26:43.040
I'm a manly man. And I be myself by being a manly man. But this can also be political parties. A
00:26:49.380
person decides, I am a conservative. And therefore, all the opinions I hold, everything I do during the
00:26:54.560
day. And while not all of these communities are intrinsically as damaging to an individual as the
00:27:00.940
Spoonie community, they fall into very similar psychological loops, which we are all susceptible
00:27:07.940
to if we don't take time to have a firm understanding of what heuristics we are using to make decisions in
00:27:15.740
our lives and choose a self-identity. Well, this is why I love you guys so much and love talking to you
00:27:21.980
so much because you're one of the few people who actually believe things. And I know it sounds silly
00:27:27.920
and are willing to say what you believe. And it's like, we believe in having lots of kids. You may
00:27:32.440
not, but that is the thing we, and it's, you're not trying to say you're both. And I think a lot
00:27:37.640
of these communities, like the Andrew Tate manly men, they're defining themselves based on what they
00:27:41.800
believe the culture has done to them. It's a grievance culture. And same thing with Spoonies. And you
00:27:47.640
brought up like that this is whatever, filling the God-shaped hole in all of our hearts. I do think
00:27:52.960
there's a spiritual aspect of there is badness. It has migrated to within me. I am dirty. I am sick.
00:27:59.840
I must be cleansed, but none of it's my fault. It's like a little confused, but yeah, I think
00:28:05.320
defining yourself based on lack, based on the fact that it's harder for you to run a mile because of
00:28:11.040
your condition is not a recipe for a good life. Well, it's interesting that you mentioned the
00:28:17.580
spiritual part, because one of the things that I often say is like these evolved religious traditions,
00:28:22.220
like they came with a lot of malware, but they were the only memetic antivirus we as a species had.
00:28:28.780
They were a bad antivirus. They were a heavy antivirus. They were like old school McAfee
00:28:34.120
Norton, where it slowed down your computer by 60%, but it still fought the viruses. And when you
00:28:40.080
completely remove it, you get these very simplistic memetic viruses that certain people are just
00:28:46.240
incredibly susceptible to. Right. And certain people who I would argue are very sensitive
00:28:52.300
and open. I don't think they're like necessarily maladjusted. I just think we've taken all the
00:28:57.640
guardrails off and here's what happens. I think a lot of these women might've been in a committed
00:29:02.360
relationship if men could get it together. So there are a lot of factors that make it spin out of
00:29:07.760
control. Yeah. Well, if men could get it together. And this is interesting is that in a post-scarcity
00:29:12.240
world, finding your purpose. And I want to go back to this state because most of the developed world,
00:29:18.540
and especially the people who become spoonies are living post-scarcity lives, middle-class white
00:29:23.020
women. That is a post-scarcity lifestyle. You're not really going to starve or anything like that.
00:29:28.340
There are things you want that you can't have, but those things are primarily status symbols
00:29:33.120
that you primarily want because they have generated value based on the fact that a lot of people want
00:29:39.940
them and therefore you can't have them. A nice car? What's an example? Like a nice car or designer
00:29:44.860
clothes. Like nothing intrinsic about them. You can get clothes if you want clothes. The reason why
00:29:50.280
nice clothes are something you can't get is the very reason you want them. Like they wouldn't be a
00:29:55.840
status symbol if you could trivially get them. If you want a computer, you can get a computer from two
00:30:00.600
years ago that costs like 200 bucks. Things are always accessible to people. Smartphones are
00:30:07.040
accessible to everyone. I think, what is it? Like 89% of homeless people have a smartphone now?
00:30:11.380
We are in an extremely, housing is probably the only thing of real scarcity in our society.
00:30:17.540
But we suspected as we transitioned to a post-scarcity ecosystem that people would begin
00:30:22.140
to indulge in hedonism. And instead what they indulged in was self-victimization,
00:30:27.280
which allowed the removal of personal responsibility, which is in a way one avenue
00:30:33.160
is spoonism. But indulging in self-victimization doesn't feel like indulging in self-victimization
00:30:39.000
to the individual. It feels like highlighting the parts of themselves that differentiate them from
00:30:47.380
society and thus make them special. And I think that you see this even within communities
00:30:53.840
that I consider myself, like I'm a pretty big supporter of the gay community, for example.
00:30:59.680
And what was really interesting is one of the things we mentioned is gay men, we've mentioned
00:31:02.760
this before, 45% of gay men voted for Trump in the last election. Like the gay male community has
00:31:09.220
45%, yeah. So much since I was a kid. When I was a kid, you had this hierarchy within the gay male
00:31:17.120
community where you would act like more of a gay male to move up within this hierarchy.
00:31:22.100
And so you had these very flamboyant gay men that have disappeared as part of our culture.
00:31:27.980
Because being a gay male, especially a gay white male, no longer really others you in our society
00:31:33.260
in the way it used to. So there is no longer a reason to build your identity around it in the way
00:31:41.660
Right. I think about this all the time. Like I'm the first woman in my generation,
00:31:45.480
or I'm the first generation of my family as a woman who got to move to New York City,
00:31:51.660
got my own apartment, got my own job, had my own money. Not because the women before me,
00:31:56.360
they were smarter than me. They were totally capable, but it just wasn't done. They got
00:32:00.580
married early. They had kids. They had probably a better life than me. But I like the liberation
00:32:05.200
happened so quickly. And I think with gay male culture, everyone was dying 35 years ago.
00:32:15.320
It was the craziest thing in the world. And then it's, you shoot to the top of culture
00:32:18.960
in this way that's almost, it's incredible. It's a miracle, but it also, I think, induces some sort
00:32:25.080
of like cultural vertigo of, okay, where do we stand now? Who are we?
00:32:28.620
Taken over by marginal portions of the LGBT community. And now you are the oppressor.
00:32:33.880
Right. Exactly. But even like a, let's just say like a gay guy 25 years ago, wouldn't really
00:32:40.060
dream of having a husband and kids and a white picket fence. My, the gay dudes of my generation,
00:32:45.360
that's exactly what they want. They're getting married before me. Even the 10 year difference
00:32:49.380
has totally changed what was, what's possible and therefore changed how, what behavior you model.
00:32:56.100
Yeah. Yeah. And it really messes up the way adults are interacting with culture. Like even us,
00:33:01.700
we did an episode where we were talking about, I grew up where, where gay men were genuinely
00:33:04.620
impressed, oppressed, beaten up. If they were found out, like it was very rare that someone
00:33:09.800
would come out. One of our listeners, who was a gen alpha person was like, it's so weird to hear you
00:33:13.880
say that because when I was growing up, being gay was a status symbol. Oh yeah. It was in school and
00:33:21.060
it gave you special protection from teachers. It gave you special access to things.
00:33:25.020
And that just means you're like vicious and fun. Yeah. And that the older population doesn't
00:33:32.140
realize how much the pendulum has swung. And so they think that they are affirming an oppressed
00:33:39.080
group without realizing they are pedestalizing the group that is at the top of the status hierarchy,
00:33:47.260
which is really fascinating. Right. And then of course, with Gen Z who are having way less sex,
00:33:52.420
queer just means like straight with weird hair, like straight with the right politics or whatever
00:33:56.800
it is. Like it's the, the whole decoupling your sexual identity from what kind of sex you have,
00:34:04.620
I think is really interesting because you no longer have to have gay sex to be gay.
00:34:09.240
Yeah. We always point out that we are technically trans by LGBT ideology because we are a gender.
00:34:14.580
I don't care what gender I am. If I woke up a woman tomorrow, it would not genuinely affect my life
00:34:18.820
that much. He'd work it. You're just a, you're just a brain in the head.
00:34:22.600
Right, right. I'm just a brain in the head. And that makes me a gender from the perspective of
00:34:26.820
trans ideology. Well, being a gender is a form of gender queer. Gender queer is a form of trans.
00:34:32.760
So we are not incorrect in saying that we are fully trans within a trans moral architecture. And
00:34:39.780
they'd say, well, no, you're not. And it's, well, then why no, am I not? And it's because your
00:34:43.200
politics aren't trans because we have turned these into political identities.
00:34:48.540
It's interesting too, because this almost goes back to the spoony thing, because it's like,
00:34:52.100
these are invisible illnesses. I don't need to look sick to be sick. I don't need to tell you my
00:34:55.800
diagnosis to be sick. I can self-diagnose and be sick. I don't even need to go to a professional.
00:35:00.620
Similarly with gender ideology, you don't have to present as a woman to be a woman. So it's all
00:35:05.680
internal, but there's still this need to like signal to everyone else, but you don't need to do that
00:35:10.840
because that has nothing to do with it. And it's, it's, I don't know. I think there's some sort of
00:35:14.920
connection there where it's, yes, you, a trans man, a trans person and me like a deathly sick
00:35:20.540
person, even though observably, none of those things are true. You're treated the same with
00:35:25.340
society. In both cases, society doubts your, and the supposed authorities within various professions
00:35:31.540
doubt your lived experiences. And so you can come together under this umbrella of never doubt
00:35:39.220
what I say is true about my experiences of reality. Who coined, we have to find out who coined lived
00:35:45.320
experience. It is like the trick of the century. Well, this has been such an engaging conversation. I
00:35:52.520
almost feel like you could be a third host of the show. You are, I get along with you so well. And for our
00:35:58.560
fans who say that there are not unmarried, like super, super eligible women. Now she, I think she's dating
00:36:07.000
and stuff like that now, but she doesn't have a ring on it yet. And this means you should be sending
00:36:11.920
applications because she is attractive, based, and super intelligent. Okay. Last one, ladies and
00:36:19.800
gentlemen. And so I don't care how that happens. My kids need people to marry. I always say this.
00:36:26.640
So this call has been absolutely fantastic. Please check out her stuff. Create a Google alert with
00:36:35.060
her name. If you want, do you have a Google alert with her name, Simone? No, because I just subscribe
00:36:39.780
to the free press. Yeah. Subscribe to the free press. That's the best thing to do. Go to the
00:36:43.140
fp.com slash subscribe. All the content's really good, but Susie's is the best and you, man, I want to
00:36:50.500
see more at every time I see the free press. I'm like, is it Susie? And not enough. Come on,
00:36:55.740
man. All right. Awesome. Thank you guys so much.