The Things Women Aren't Allowed to Talk About in Public (With Meghan Daum)
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
195.72836
Summary
Megan Dahm is a prolific author who has written six books, or written or edited six books. She is also a prolific journalist, very respected by many of our friends. She now is on Substack Plus, where she hosts A Special Place in Hell with Sarah Hader, also a friend of the podcast. And before that, she had the Unspeakable Podcast, which I listened to with really great interviews with heterodox thinkers. She's kind of like the Alex Kishuda of the internet, and more recently, Megan has launched a series of retreats which I kind of wanted to dig into now. It's called The Speakeasy, and it is a place where all women finally get to discuss what they want, whatever they want.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello, everyone. I am so excited today because we're joined by Megan Dahm, someone who I
00:00:03.980
admire on so many different fronts. She is a prolific author. She has written six books,
00:00:08.440
or written or edited six books. She has been also a prolific journalist, very respected by
00:00:13.200
many of our friends. She now is on Substack. Plus, she hosts A Special Place in Hell with
00:00:18.960
Sarah Hader, also a friend of the podcast. And before that, she had the Unspeakeasy podcast,
00:00:23.080
which I listened to with really great interviews with heterodox thinkers. She's kind of like the
00:00:27.460
Alex Kishuda of like a different sort of segment of the internet. And more recently, Megan has
00:00:33.200
launched a series of retreats, which I kind of wanted to dig into now. It's called The Unspeakeasy,
00:00:38.220
kind of inspired by one of her books, which is titled Unspeakable. And it is a place, they're
00:00:42.840
mostly, sometimes they're mixed gender, but they're mostly female-only retreats. Pretty small, like
00:00:48.420
very, like sort of, you can have a real conversation with everyone who goes. Maybe 16 people or fewer,
00:00:53.760
maybe sometimes 20, right? Yeah. And behind closed doors, these, you know, mostly all women
00:01:01.360
finally get to sort of discuss what they want, whatever. That's what we want to get to is what
00:01:07.180
do professional, educated, you know, probably more affluent women in the United States think and say
00:01:14.880
and worry about and discuss behind closed doors? Because I think there's this perception
00:01:20.440
perception that the educated women of America are largely this progressive monolith. They all kind
00:01:26.540
of think the same thing. Like they're not very interesting. You know, then you have some like
00:01:29.640
far right, you know, crazy women and like, you know, whatever, like cam girls and cat girls or
00:01:35.240
whatever. Like, but then there's like just this, there's nothing, a big question mark. So we wanted
00:01:40.960
to, you know, we might, we might get into a little bit of a, an antinatalist discussion at the end of
00:01:44.780
this, but we wanted to get into what's going on behind closed doors with all these women.
00:01:50.620
Well, if I, I couldn't tell you, right. If it was really behind closed doors, I wouldn't be able to
00:01:54.360
tell you. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I love talking about all these topics. And I will
00:01:58.860
just say, I I've got my hand in so many things that it gets confusing what I'm doing. So I still
00:02:04.400
host the unspeakable podcast. So I actually have two podcasts. I do a special place in hell with Sarah
00:02:09.140
Hayter. And I know you've, you've been on our podcast and she's been here. I do the unspeakable
00:02:14.220
podcast, which is sort of my flagship podcast. And that's an interview. It's a weekly interview show
00:02:18.820
started it four years ago, summer of 2020 when all, when every podcast started. And so, right.
00:02:25.080
So I've been doing that. And yeah, so the speakeasy is it's an enterprise that has sort of,
00:02:30.560
you know, arisen out of a lot of my work, the podcast, my books, my teaching as well. I've been a
00:02:37.080
teacher of writing for a really long time. So yeah, I guess, well, I guess the easiest way to
00:02:42.140
kind of launch into what the unspeakeasy is about is to tell you the origins of it. And, you know,
00:02:48.160
that is, I've been, I've been a journalist for a long time. I was a Los Angeles Times columnist for
00:02:52.840
12 years on the opinion page, written a bunch of books, written for every magazine was like,
00:02:58.560
you know, an acceptable, celebrated, arguably celebrated member of the literary community.
00:03:04.960
I looked at the number of reviews your books have gotten. Yeah.
00:03:08.280
Yeah. And they used to be really positive. Yeah. And you know, I've always been allergic to
00:03:14.260
bullshit. Like that's my thing. I've never been really particularly political. I mean,
00:03:19.800
obviously as a journalist, you have to write about what's going on in the news and the culture,
00:03:23.300
but I just never liked virtue signaling. Even before there was a term for that, I just got it
00:03:30.640
everywhere. And I was very sensitive to it. And I was very interested in why it was happening. So
00:03:37.760
that's always been a theme of my work. And I've always tried to sort of look at the places, you
00:03:42.260
know, in the culture or in politics where like what people saying, what people were saying about the
00:03:47.320
world or themselves was not matching up with what was actually true about the world and themselves.
00:03:53.160
So, so people, you know, knew that about my work and I started doing the podcast and I would have
00:03:59.160
people like Sam Harris and, you know, all the sort of the hetero docs, you know, I've had hundreds and
00:04:04.480
hundreds of guests by now, but people sort of trying to pick apart these issues, nuanced discussions,
00:04:10.200
right? So nuanced AF is what the merch says. I love it. Here's the, yes. Nuanced AF. Okay.
00:04:17.960
That looks good. So, so, you know, people would listen to the podcast. I was talking about things
00:04:24.520
like gender, you know, pretty early on Sasha Iyad, who's, you know, wonderful is now the co-host of
00:04:30.180
Gender Wider Lens was like my fifth guest. And, you know, I had Peter Moskos on really early talking
00:04:35.700
about policing. I had, you know, John McWhorter, all, you know, all, all these sorts of people and
00:04:40.460
also a lot of literary people. Cause that that's my world, but I also teach writing. So I just teach,
00:04:46.740
you know, personal essay, memoir, opinion, writing, that kind of thing. And I've always,
00:04:51.200
I've taught at Columbia and elsewhere, but I teach private workshops. So, you know, around,
00:04:56.760
you know, 2021 or so, I started noticing that the people who were coming into my workshops,
00:05:02.620
many of them, women, not, not all by any means, but a lot of the women in particular were like,
00:05:07.480
not necessarily wanting to write. Like they didn't necessarily want their stuff workshopped. They just
00:05:11.860
wanted a place to talk about things. And they knew that I talked about this stuff on
00:05:16.660
my podcast and I wrote about it. And I had a certain approach that wasn't like particularly
00:05:22.160
partisan and that appealed to them. And they, they just wanted a place to talk about this.
00:05:26.840
And they would come in and say, I can't talk about this with my friends. I've gotten kicked
00:05:32.440
out of my book club. I can't talk about this with, with my, you know, I have lost relationships.
00:05:38.160
Families are being torn apart over politics and over, you know, wokeness, Trumpism, whatever it is.
00:05:46.120
And I feel like I'm losing my mind and I feel so lonely. And they were silencing themselves in a way
00:05:53.040
that was a little bit different from the way men were silencing themselves. I mean, obviously they
00:05:57.460
were having a lot of the same problems at work. Like everybody wants to protect their, you know,
00:06:02.480
their paycheck and their situation at work, but women were really talking about relationships
00:06:07.220
a lot more and talking about how they had a lot to say and they weren't speaking up because they
00:06:15.380
didn't want to get excommunicated by the group and they didn't want to hurt people's feelings.
00:06:20.900
And I, so I was seeing this on like this micro level, like people were talking about how this
00:06:24.880
played out in their personal lives, normal people out in the world. And these were all kinds of women.
00:06:28.680
These were women with big careers. These were stay at home moms. These were women in their twenties
00:06:33.540
into their sixties, seventies, eighties. It was like so many all over the country, all over the world.
00:06:39.040
Yeah. These were not like necessarily girl bosses. These were all kinds of women. And I was seeing
00:06:46.020
this. And then I was also noticing that like in our sort of podcasting content creator space,
00:06:50.400
a lot of the people who are speaking up about culture war issues are men, not all by any means,
00:06:57.380
but it's a very male dominated space. And I started to think, well, why is that? And the
00:07:02.120
listener communities were like all men, like, you know, you feel like I went to a persuasion
00:07:06.560
hangout for instance, and I, there was one other woman there and we were like, whoa, what is going
00:07:11.460
on? And so I said, you know, I really need to start a heterodox women's community. Like somebody
00:07:17.760
needs to do that. And it's hilarious. Cause I'm the last person who ever would start a woman's
00:07:21.880
anything. I hate it, but I thought, you know, something is really wrong here because women are,
00:07:28.540
are, are left out of the conversation in the public arena and in their private lives. And they're,
00:07:33.800
they're leaving themselves out. And I want to try to fix that. And so I want to dive into, you said
00:07:40.060
the women have these conversations that they are afraid to have in public or they've gotten in
00:07:44.780
trouble. What are these conversations? Like what are the topics that you see come up again and again
00:07:49.140
in this environment? Yeah. So gender is a big one. We'll lock down COVID policies is another big
00:07:56.600
one. It's no accident that this started to emerge around COVID. You had a lot of people who were nice,
00:08:03.080
normal liberals and remain. So still identify as liberals. And they were suddenly like dealing
00:08:10.120
with school closures that didn't make any sense in many cases. And then the kids were at home and then
00:08:16.560
they could hear what the kids were learning on the zoom school. Like all of a sudden they knew what
00:08:20.560
was like, they didn't know what was going on in the classroom. And all of a sudden they're hearing
00:08:23.840
it. The huge mental health crisis among kids during these years. And they're like, what is going on
00:08:30.700
here? And a lot of the gender stuff started coming up. And these are a lot of people, a lot of parents,
00:08:35.700
a lot of moms who were, you know, very liberal. If my kid is gay, fine. Fantastic. No problem.
00:08:41.620
Even if my kid is trans, whatever that means. Well, that must just be like gay 2.0. Okay, fine.
00:08:47.920
Like, let's, that's, we're, we're liberal in this house. We believe, you know, et cetera, et cetera,
00:08:52.500
et cetera. And then they, you know, this whole movement started to, you know, kind of mushroom
00:08:58.340
before our eyes. And they're like, what is going on here? And if they questioned, you know, something
00:09:03.920
like gender affirmation or something like that, the neighbors would say, what are you a bigot? What are
00:09:08.600
you a transphobe? You know, you can't, you can't do that. And so, you know, they were,
00:09:12.320
they were really feeling like they were losing their minds. And I'm really careful about the way
00:09:18.980
I talk about this stuff. And I think they, they appreciated it. So, so those are two examples,
00:09:23.560
but we talk about everything in the unspeakeasy, like everything.
00:09:28.640
Well, no, are there others? I mean, so this is really interesting because I think one,
00:09:31.840
you're sort of charting where Republicans can win white educated women. It is on.
00:09:37.000
That's our motto. That is not our motto, but yes, but you're right. Yes.
00:09:42.400
This is what I'm thinking. Like, like where did you win this, this, this demographic? And what I'm
00:09:47.000
peeling here is one, I think is, is, is, is focus on, I think gender transition in children,
00:09:53.880
very easy fight. And for some reason, the liberals always take it. And then two is bureaucratic
00:09:58.940
overreach during COVID. I think Republicans need to live in the past. A little was this,
00:10:03.400
that was a good opportunity. Be like, Dems will try this again. Dems will try this again.
00:10:07.600
Very much the way Dems do. It's like January six, keep going back to the COVID stuff. And,
00:10:12.820
and what was happening in schools. And I also think school choice, it's like an also really easy
00:10:17.360
thing, but what else are you seeing like personal life wise? Like how do these, I guess here's a
00:10:22.340
question I have, is there regret about feminism and sort of the way it changed the expectations
00:10:28.800
that were ahead of them? We talk about that a lot. That's really complicated, right? Because
00:10:34.440
what it's like, how, how are we defining feminism? What era of feminism? Are we talking about second
00:10:39.860
wave feminism, third wave, fourth wave, digital feminism, online feminism, me too? Like, what are
00:10:45.680
we talking about? And again, like we have a range of ages. So we had women who were in, in their seventies
00:10:52.000
or eighties and they came of age in the sixties and seventies and benefited enormously from, from
00:10:59.060
second wave feminism. And then we have women who were in their twenties and thirties who were saying,
00:11:03.580
oh my God, like nobody told me that there's such a thing as a biological clock. And I, and I mean,
00:11:09.640
you know, I'm a Gen Xer. So I grew up, you know, with every single women's magazine, constantly being
00:11:15.580
like, tick tock ladies, there's a biological clock. So, you know, at some point along the way that,
00:11:20.500
you know, being told that fertility was limited somehow became like a, you know,
00:11:26.460
misogynist or something. So they stopped talking about it that way.
00:11:30.860
That's so interesting. Yeah. I mean, it reminds me of like, I, when I, I grew up in like the,
00:11:35.500
the, the period of feminism where we denied that there were like unspoken dating norms. Like if,
00:11:41.640
if a guy invited you back to his hotel room that he probably expected something and literally did not
00:11:46.760
believe that. So like, it's interesting to see like, it's like, it's like,
00:11:49.440
dangerous situations. Yeah. It's worse than like biological clocks, not even like being a
00:11:54.280
warning sign. Right. Right. Right. Exactly. Maybe don't go down an alleyway at two in the morning,
00:11:59.360
the dangerous neighborhood defense. Yeah. I mean, you know, right, right. Yeah. I mean,
00:12:03.760
I talk so much about this in my book, the problem with everything. I mean, this, it's like, you know,
00:12:07.860
just because we wish something was true doesn't mean it is true. Yes. We wish you could get blackout
00:12:14.140
drunk and pass out in an alley with your clothes half off and have nothing happen to you. Yeah.
00:12:20.520
True. It'd be so nice. And in a just world, it would be true, but we live in the real world. And
00:12:27.440
if you're not equipping people with, with the facts about reality, then you're doing them a huge
00:12:32.460
disservice. So these are the kinds of distinctions that we, that we talk about a lot and, and yeah,
00:12:37.920
but I mean, the thing with the unspeakeasy is it's so, it's all about the nuanced discussions.
00:12:43.460
It's, it's not partisan. I mean, we have women who are like Bernie Sanders voters and we have women,
00:12:48.880
you know, who are Trump voters. I don't think. You actually have Trump voters show up.
00:12:53.160
What's that? Yeah, we do. But I mean, I would say it's, I mean, it's changing all the time,
00:12:59.780
but I mean, I would say it's mostly people who voted for Obama, people who are really excited about
00:13:04.180
Obama and then are sort of being like, wait a second, something is off here, but, but having
00:13:10.480
a really kind of existential crisis about it. One of the things that you mentioned that I'd
00:13:15.240
love you to dig deeper into, because this is something we've noticed with our own fans of
00:13:18.400
our podcast is the generational change in terms of what's being hidden from people and the
00:13:24.600
expectations people have. One example from our podcast is somebody was like, it's really weird
00:13:28.700
to hear you guys talk about gays as a discriminated group when you were growing up, because at our
00:13:32.720
school, like they're the group that's not allowed to be punished. Like there's a, they were talking
00:13:36.240
about like a gay kid on their campus that like sold weed and he wasn't punished because the school
00:13:40.240
didn't want to be seen punishing a gay kid. And, and all the drug dealers are gay now.
00:13:46.820
I've heard this. Yeah. I've heard that this is because you just get away with it apparently.
00:13:50.500
And I'm, and I'm interested in like other, like, what are the big like shocks to you in terms
00:13:57.140
of generational change? Well, I mean, one of the things that really animated me to get,
00:14:03.440
you know, much more overtly involved in culture war discourse was what I saw around like online
00:14:10.020
feminism. I mean, even before me too. So around 2012, 13, 14, there was all this stuff online that
00:14:17.240
was, you know, it's never been a worse time to be a woman, you know, toxic masculinity, like,
00:14:22.840
you know, obsessing about being cat called on the street. You know, it's, it's so terrible. We live
00:14:27.740
in a rape culture, like all, all these ideas and I was seeing it. And in the meantime, like,
00:14:32.760
it's like actually women are doing better than ever before in the history of human civilization.
00:14:37.840
It's never been a better time to be a woman, you know, in the West anyway. And I, it just wasn't
00:14:44.680
making sense to me. And I was like, where's this coming from? Because I grew up in the seventies. I just
00:14:49.520
thought that was being a girl was great. And being a tomboy was great. Like being a girly girl was
00:14:55.420
not cool. And so I really started to think a lot about maybe why these changes occurred. And I
00:15:02.300
actually, you know, I was, I kind of had my nose at a joint, you know, I was rolling my eyes a lot
00:15:07.460
at like a lot of the, the, the, you know, the, the Jezebel stuff. I mean, Jezebel used to be a
00:15:13.020
brilliant, hilarious. Oh man. Yeah. Remember Jezebel. Wow. It was so great. They would like
00:15:18.580
actually, you know, this was back, you know, they would like take a magazine. Yeah. Yeah. Anna
00:15:23.340
Holmes, the brilliant Anna Holmes started Jezebel and, you know, sort of the early, the mid
00:15:27.880
two thousands, it was like, they would do all these things where they showed the airbrushing
00:15:32.080
and the magazine spreads and they would show like what actually happened. And it was great. And it was
00:15:35.880
very snarky and sarcastic and very empowered and not victim-y at all. And just very funny.
00:15:41.640
Yeah. And somewhere along the lines, it really changed. And it was like absolute preoccupation
00:15:45.880
with, you know, male tears and. It got angry. It got, it got angry and it got just very,
00:15:51.720
just stripped of, of its agency somehow. And I used to roll my eyes at it a lot and I still do,
00:15:58.540
but I think that, you know, we cannot forget that the nineties came along, you know, there was still
00:16:06.100
this like riot girl kind of grunge aesthetic for, for women. But then you get into like the late
00:16:12.140
nineties, early, you know, two thousands. First of all, you've got the Disney princess culture.
00:16:16.860
You've got this hyper girliness that little girls are exposed to. Everybody's a princess,
00:16:22.780
princess dress, glitter, fairy wings everywhere, which is fun and fine, but like very different from
00:16:28.160
the seventies when everybody was really just like gender neutral. And then you've got this
00:16:33.160
raunch culture. You've got girls gone wild. You've got spring break bikini, you know, just
00:16:38.480
absolute debauchery. And, and you've got, you know, pornography goes online, porn hub comes along.
00:16:46.420
We're just absolutely inundated with these hyper-sexualized, very degrading images around
00:16:53.400
sex and around womanhood. And it makes sense, doesn't it? That like women would resist that and
00:16:59.560
be very angry about it. And, and I never thought of like maybe a correlation being between honestly,
00:17:05.680
internet porn and, and women getting like feminism, becoming angry, taking totally, I mean, I would,
00:17:11.160
I would be, and I mean, cause I missed that stuff, right? Like in my time, yeah, I don't, I, and also
00:17:16.500
like, you know, the way that men think about sex and what they expect from a date or a sexual
00:17:22.500
encounter. I mean, you know, you know, like women younger than me talk, I mean, Sarah and I talk
00:17:27.500
about this all the time. People were obsessed. People say we're obsessed with like choking.
00:17:30.940
Okay. Like the, like the choking thing and in sex. Okay. No, this is something where I have to go
00:17:36.180
on a tangent. Cause we actually wanted to do like a, like Mary Harrington also complains about this
00:17:42.340
all the time. Yes. I wanted to do like Mary Harrington versus reality, because if you look at the
00:17:47.080
statistics on choking, the guys are choking the girls because all of the other girls are asking for
00:17:54.240
it. Right. Choking is much preferable. Girls are more turned on by being choked than guys are by
00:18:00.260
choking girls. Cause it's a big turn on. At a rate of like two to one. But is it a turn on or do they
00:18:05.280
think it's supposed to be a turn on? No, it's, it's, it's enough of a turn on where like auto
00:18:10.220
asphyxiation is a really major problem, like a safety problem. Like this came up in our sexuality
00:18:15.000
research when we, when, when Malcolm wrote the pragmatist guide to sexuality and we had to put in all
00:18:19.140
these warnings, we're like, okay, this is a big turn on for people guys. Don't do this.
00:18:24.820
We need to get into our sexual theory because I think I know why you might find this weird. So
00:18:30.200
we actually argue that there are the people that act like the kinks and the things that turn somebody
00:18:35.540
on are random. And I don't think that they are totally random. I think that there's specific
00:18:41.060
polygenic sexual patterns that emerge based on the social environment. Evolutionarily, our biology
00:18:48.160
thinks that we're in. Now, if a woman in a historic context was sleeping with tons of men,
00:18:56.440
that historically basically only happened if your tribe had been raided and you were a sex slave
00:19:02.440
and you were doing everything you can to stay alive. I think that there is a correlation between
00:19:08.880
women liking this incredibly demeaning sex and women who sleep around a ton. I think that what's
00:19:15.360
happening here is their bodies have shifted to a, oh, I'm a sex slave desperately trying to prevent my
00:19:22.340
captors from killing me. And I will like anything that keeps them from killing me. And so when I think
00:19:28.100
a woman, maybe like you or a woman who is more chaste or more like sexually reasonable engages with
00:19:33.700
this, they're like, what? I would never want that. And, and, and, or Mary Harrington or something like
00:19:38.640
that. And I think that that's where there's this, this unintentional is we don't tell girls that
00:19:43.880
sleeping was tons of people is going to change the type of things they find arousing. Yeah. Like
00:19:49.920
in other words, Malcolm saying that he thinks that, that our behaviors sexually, like, especially a
00:19:54.560
number of different partners will trigger different like arousal pathways as a sort of adaptive
00:20:00.680
evolved mechanism. I think there could be some truth to that. I mean, I don't, yeah, I know.
00:20:05.800
I'm not going to, because otherwise it is really weird, especially, I mean, we don't know, I mean,
00:20:09.600
sexuality is so mysterious, right? We don't know like where these things come from. I mean,
00:20:13.140
where does like autogynephilia come from? Like there's, you know, so many fetishes and, and
00:20:17.700
I have a hypothesis where autogynephilia comes from. I haven't done the episode yet, so I'm going to drop
00:20:23.100
it right here. Okay. And we'll do a full episode on it, but I actually think autogynephilia comes from a
00:20:27.780
misunderstanding of human sexuality. So in our book of human sexuality, we point out that sexuality
00:20:32.160
should actually be sort of a spectrum of arousal to disgust and not stopping at zero. A lot of
00:20:38.060
people are like sex is arousal or you're not aroused. It's like, no, it's, it's arousal to
00:20:42.560
disgust anything. Yeah. 10 to negative 10. If you, when you're aroused, what happens? Your people
00:20:47.760
dilate, you breathe in, you look at something longer. When you're disgust, what do you do? You look away,
00:20:52.320
your eyes contract and you hold your nose. They're likely using the same system. And we even see
00:20:57.220
evidence of this from the fact that anything that arouses the large portion of the population
00:21:00.400
is going to disgust a small portion. Anything that disgusts a small portion is going to arouse
00:21:04.340
the portion. People can be like, well, no, that's just everything. It's like, no, you don't see this
00:21:07.440
random effect in everything else. So you can look at something like fire. Fire does not like randomly
00:21:11.560
arouse a portion of the population, but like insects do. Pooh does. Like, why is that? Okay. It's a
00:21:16.660
misarousal to disgust system. Well, autogynephilia, I think it's actually a misinterpretation from a lot of
00:21:23.700
men, which is to say that a lot of men have a very strong, much stronger than women have to female
00:21:29.280
genitalia, disgust response to primary male sex characteristics. So specifically other male
00:21:36.220
penises, other male forms, et cetera. It causes like a visceral reaction in them. I'm one of
00:21:42.620
these men. I like find this disgusting. But do you think that's socially constructed or do you think
00:21:48.000
that's like inherent? It's probably more of a, I think it's an evolved, like try to screw the thing
00:21:53.140
that will produce kids. Right. Exactly. No, it's an adaptive trait. Yeah. If you're a woman,
00:21:58.960
historically, you know, there were periods in history, you look at around the agricultural
00:22:02.600
revolution for every 17 women having kids, only one male was having kids. So that means that you
00:22:08.520
had long evolutionarily relevant periods where women were expected to be in relationships with
00:22:13.040
lots of other women. So it is not surprising to me that women tolerance of other female sexuality
00:22:18.640
was something that was selected for. However, historically speaking, if a man let other men
00:22:23.300
sleep with a woman who he was pair bonded with, or just any other woman in the community, that's a
00:22:27.760
net loss to him because, you know, that's the other guy. No, I get that. No, I get that. I get that.
00:22:31.780
My guess is that what's happening with these guys is they're like, oh, well, when I like playing video
00:22:38.760
games, I really like playing as female characters because any other male character or avatar causes a
00:22:44.700
disgust reaction in them. When I like dressing up as other characters, I like
00:22:48.220
always being a female. And they don't realize what's driving this. It's not an arousal reaction,
00:22:53.200
but a disgust reaction to other males. And then they begin to identify. They're like, well,
00:22:58.320
if I always like whenever I'm in a role-playing game or whenever I'm in a video game or whenever
00:23:02.260
I'm a furry playing a female character, that must be because I secretly want to be a female,
00:23:07.000
but it's not. Anyway, that's my... Okay. No, I'm in no position to argue that.
00:23:13.600
Getting back to the way of feminism and what the generational differences. Yeah, I do think that
00:23:22.300
people, men and women, have plenty of reason to be angry and frustrated these days. I think that
00:23:29.380
women have reason and I think men have reason. I mean, you know, a lot of the ironic misandry
00:23:35.460
of that digital age, you know, making fun of men, you know, and I have a whole theory as to why that
00:23:41.460
was sort of, you know, sanctioned as an okay thing to do. Like, you know, all that sort of like,
00:23:46.500
you know, men are hard, men are toxic. What we now see with this like red-pilled right-wing
00:23:52.140
misogyny online, like that is a mimetic inversion, right? It is the same thing. I mean,
00:23:57.140
it's absolutely mirroring it. So as much as I hate to see that stuff online, it's like, well, guess what,
00:24:04.300
fourth wave feminist, you created this, you made this and now you're stuck with it or it's going
00:24:10.620
to have to correct itself. What's your theory? Well, I mean, if you go around telling men that
00:24:17.180
they're garbage, but you said, I have a theory as to why this. Oh, well, so, I mean, the thing is
00:24:22.580
around that time you started seeing this, you know, 2014 or so, like they would, they would be
00:24:29.920
horrible to men. And I think the idea was that because men have power, you're punching up. It's
00:24:36.120
okay to say terrible things to men, no matter, no matter what, no matter what like class level you
00:24:42.020
are, or they are no matter like any kind of power differential, it doesn't matter because by definition
00:24:47.580
of by virtue of being men, it was assumed that they automatically have more power. So it's okay to
00:24:52.540
be terrible to them. And my thing was like, why are you assuming that like, that is so unfeminist
00:24:57.440
to just like you, by, by assuming that you are effectively handing men power that they
00:25:01.820
don't necessarily have, you are putting them on a pedestal in order to punch them. Well,
00:25:06.200
how about realizing that women are doing so much better than men? Chances are any given
00:25:12.480
man and any given woman, that woman is going to have a higher level of education, have more
00:25:17.100
friends, better connections. Just her wellbeing is going to be at a higher level across any number
00:25:22.820
of metrics than any given man. So like, be careful who you're, you know, calling a piece
00:25:28.140
of garbage, you know, it's, it's really lame. And anyway, so this is what started this. And,
00:25:33.160
and I, I was very outspoken about these things around, you know, my, my book, the problem with
00:25:39.080
everything came out in 2019, which was all about this. And, and it was really about, you know,
00:25:44.580
being, it was, it was a self-interrogation, like looking at the different generations, like,
00:25:49.060
how come me, how come I, as a Gen X-er felt empowered in a way that these millennials and
00:25:53.980
Gen Z-ers apparently don't like, what is this about? And why am I so frustrated? And why do
00:25:58.300
I hate this stuff? And why am I rolling my eyes? And why are they mad at me and calling me an
00:26:02.700
anti-feminist? And, you know, it's all this kind of vortex of stuff. And people got really mad at
00:26:08.100
people for it. Like, they just thought, oh no, she's just a, she's gone to the right. She swung over to
00:26:13.040
the right. Megan. And, and the funny thing is like, this is nothing different than I had said.
00:26:18.420
I've been talking this way for my whole career. Yeah. The Overton window has shifted.
00:26:23.600
Yeah. Suddenly it was not allowed. And so here we all are in the, whatever,
00:26:28.100
alternative space, clown world, where we have be clowned ourselves.
00:26:33.460
Okay. I'm dying to see how you approach this, because this is something you mentioned in the
00:26:37.960
origins of these retreats. And now it's, it's kind of at the core of what I'm thinking about.
00:26:43.000
The, what we call like woke culture, progressive culture, we call it the urban monoculture. And we,
00:26:48.380
we argue that it's main value proposition is I will remove in the moment suffering or pain.
00:26:54.400
That's kind of like the big, like you cannot break that rule. And it sort of connects to everything
00:26:58.860
that can be very damaging about the movement because, you know, it causes a lot of bad downturn,
00:27:03.700
like downstream effects. You mentioned that many of the women who are joining on speakeasy retreats
00:27:09.320
are doing it because they don't want to hurt their friends' feelings. And they're, they're very much
00:27:13.460
part of this. And I think it's, it's a very female on average, it skews female, that general
00:27:18.900
desire to not cause conflict, to not hurt feelings. And yet I think for a lot of these women to deal
00:27:24.560
with the cognitive dissonance they're facing or to work through these problems, especially because
00:27:28.220
you have so many differing opinions showing up at these retreats, you know, you've got the Trump
00:27:31.620
voter, you've got the Bernie voter, you've got, you know, this, this varying range, they're going to
00:27:36.320
be feelings that are hurt. How do you manage that? Especially among like groups of women,
00:27:40.760
because I'm used to doing this and like retreats that are like primarily men, but how do you manage
00:27:45.780
it for women who are going there because they know it's a problem, but they also are of that culture
00:27:50.860
of like, I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. Yeah. I mean, I, I am always aware of it. And I mean,
00:27:56.840
I think we've been pretty lucky so far. So I started doing the retreats in 2022. We've probably done 12
00:28:04.760
by now or something. I mean, we did so many, we have done eight this year. Wow. So I try to keep
00:28:13.320
it very ideas based and concept based. So it's like, we don't have it. So, so the way the structure
00:28:19.180
of the retreats, it varies. I mean, most of them, you know, they're overnights. We go out to a
00:28:24.360
beautiful place and spend like three nights overnight. Sometimes they're just like for a
00:28:28.640
weekend, daytime only, but you know, we'll have like, I will make a schedule and we're going to
00:28:34.540
talk, you know, for 90 minutes about like, you know, why can't we talk about gender without losing
00:28:39.800
our minds? Like that will be the framing of the talk as opposed to these people are horrible and
00:28:46.020
crazy. It's more like, why do we feel crazy? How, why do I feel crazy? What led to it? And I'm going
00:28:53.360
to talk about my experience. I mean, I cannot say that there haven't been hurt feelings. I'm sure
00:28:58.940
that there have been. And we also have an online community. I mean, you know, we have a really
00:29:03.640
thriving private membership based online community that is, you know, very affordable. And, and we have
00:29:10.360
all kinds of things that they're like book clubs and guest speakers and all kinds of things. And I
00:29:15.740
know that there've been blowups. I mean, there've been, there are little satellite groups and people
00:29:20.300
are actually forming, they're also, they're also forming, no, not satellite groups, like
00:29:23.760
people, you know, there's a politics, you know, there's a sort of left-leaning politics discussion
00:29:28.940
group and a more center-right discussion group. And there's a, there's a snitch and bitch one that's
00:29:34.500
they, they knit and they talk about politics. The knitting world is very, very fraught.
00:29:40.540
Oh my gosh. Yeah. And I've watched it reported has done some great, yeah. Knitting world.
00:29:44.820
I can't control that. But so I, I, you know, most of the conflict I have just stayed out of,
00:29:51.160
but I think that they're really, really good, especially on the retreats. I think everybody
00:29:56.360
knows we're out somewhere. We want to have a good time. They've, you know, they have invested
00:30:01.760
a certain amount of resources and time to come and do this. They have, we have enough downtime that
00:30:09.040
they form friendships. I mean, they have come to these places because they are lonely and they want
00:30:14.560
connection. So the last thing you're going to do is, you know, deliberately get into a bad,
00:30:21.980
a bad dynamic with somebody. It's, it's just not, it's not worth it. I'm not saying it never happens,
00:30:27.740
but we've been really lucky. And frankly, the fact that we're all women really makes it so that any
00:30:33.180
kind of political differences that we have are just transcended by the fact that we all have this
00:30:37.880
thing in common. Like it really is an, it's an incredibly effective container for all kinds of
00:30:44.240
points of view and, and, and walks of life and backgrounds and experiences. I mean, it's,
00:30:48.600
it's pretty magical actually. That sounds awesome. And I, I'm also sort of getting the impression that
00:30:54.440
like going in with it being normative to disagree and like, it's okay to disagree is just like the,
00:31:01.260
the mere fact that that's a premise of the events probably helps is there's alcohol.
00:31:04.840
Yeah, of course. I mean, not in the morning or anything.
00:31:15.140
Antinatalism. So why shouldn't women be obligated to have children?
00:31:19.240
Well, some people are terrible parents and make terrible parents. So if you're going to be a
00:31:22.920
terrible parent, please do not force that person to be, to become one.
00:31:30.560
I mean, can you learn to be, yes. I mean, the thing is, it is normative to try to learn to be
00:31:35.340
a better parent. They're everything in the culture. I mean, maybe you see this differently,
00:31:39.520
but again, this might be a generational thing. I mean, I, you know, grew up, I assumed I would
00:31:45.300
have kids. It was assumed that everybody was going to have kids that everybody wanted them and that
00:31:50.540
everybody would be a good parent, that it would just come naturally to you. Even if you thought you
00:31:54.140
didn't want kids, the minute it's your own, everything will be different. And the fact is that most
00:31:58.340
people do want kids. I like people who don't want them are outliers and I'm an outlier,
00:32:02.860
but I just, it's just never something that I, I wanted to do. Oh my God. I really love that her
00:32:12.200
age of a baby. I have to say, like if I could just have that age.
00:32:19.480
Well, so this is, this is something, were you a single kid yourself?
00:32:22.700
No, I have a brother. He doesn't have kids either.
00:32:24.340
Okay. I mean, yeah, it's definitely, I mean, there's people, people choose not to have kids
00:32:30.720
for all kinds of reasons. Yeah. Well, tell us about this book that you worked on about not having
00:32:35.120
kids. Yeah. Right. So the book is called Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed. 16 writers on the
00:32:41.140
decision not to have kids. So I wanted to do this project for a long time because it's like a
00:32:45.860
pronatalist book, by the way. It's ironic. Yeah. It came out in 2015, back when irony was still alive.
00:32:55.760
Right before everything, everything changed. But I always thought that people, you know,
00:33:01.660
the sort of childless by choice, child-free crowd had really bad PR because instead of just saying
00:33:09.140
like, oh, I just don't want to have kids. It's not for me. They would always be like, oh, I don't
00:33:14.360
have kids because I want to have a fabulous life and take expensive vacations. Or like my child has
00:33:19.420
four legs and drinks out of a bowl on the floor. Ha ha ha. My fur baby. Or my child is that boat in
00:33:27.320
my driveway. And it's like so ridiculous because nobody decided not to have kids so they could have
00:33:35.060
a boat or expensive shoes. Like if they, if, if any, if, if anybody is that, that way, I don't want
00:33:41.880
to know that person. Like, oh my God, I love it. That's absurd. And it was just, it was always amazing
00:33:48.000
to me that there was such a taboo against saying this just isn't for me, that people would like
00:33:55.640
present themselves as selfish assholes because this was somehow better as materialistic, shallow
00:34:03.920
pleasure seekers, because it was just not okay to say, hey, I think parenthood is really important
00:34:10.400
and it should only be done by people who want to do it. I mean, my position is like people who think
00:34:14.940
hard about this and choose not to have kids, they are paying the ultimate respect to parents
00:34:19.460
because they're saying that this job is really hard and it should only be done by people who
00:34:24.660
really want to do it. That's it. I like that. Oh, I, this is, it's so confusing to me though,
00:34:31.040
the, the bad PR and maybe this is, it's a generational thing. I'm not sure. I never plan on having kids
00:34:37.120
and I would tell people that, and they'd always going to be like, good for you. And I don't know
00:34:41.980
if that's like me personally, like they're just like, yeah, she'd be a terrible mother. Like my mom
00:34:47.060
was definitely in that camp. I thought she was saying that about me. No, no, no. She'd look at you
00:34:51.380
and she'd be like, oh, you're going to be such a great dad. And then she'd look at me and she'd be
00:34:54.020
like, and then she'd kind of look back at Malcolm. But yeah, I, I don't know. I know that some people
00:35:01.100
really feel that. And I'm so intrigued by this, that like a lot of people feel that shame and feel like
00:35:05.220
it's, you know, whereas I grew up in like, you know, with the environment, you know, it was the
00:35:09.140
proper decision to not have kids and that, you know, a lot of people were going to be shitty
00:35:14.660
parents like me, of course. Whoops. And then, oh no, what have I done? And yeah, I, I'm curious if
00:35:23.800
you, if you have come across people who celebrated or support it more normatively or, or maybe it's just
00:35:29.800
like, if you don't want to have kids, well, where did you grow up? Yeah. Like, I don't know.
00:35:34.800
I mean, I grew up, I grew up like, you know, my family's a little bit unusual, but I mean,
00:35:39.580
I grew up in, in, you know, outside of New York city, mostly we kind of moved around a lot. I grew
00:35:44.440
up in Texas and in New Jersey, but more traditional than, but yeah, I mean, I mean, look, I grew up in,
00:35:49.160
I was a teenager in the eighties and you know, families were way more normative. Yeah. They were
00:35:54.780
normal. And then, you know, but you were also like, if you were kind of educated classes, then that the
00:35:59.180
whole sort of like yuppie baby boom, like women is going to go, you know, put her power suit in,
00:36:04.460
her running shoes on and go to the office and achieve and then like marry her equal. And then
00:36:09.060
they were going to, you know, then they would have kids and like, do it all, do it all. Like
00:36:12.620
that was the fantasy. Yeah. And I definitely thought that was what I would do. I didn't really
00:36:17.320
question it, but I always was sort of like, well, I don't really want kids, but I will want them.
00:36:21.940
I'm sure like something will happen. One day I'll wake up and, you know, the biological alarm clock
00:36:28.680
will have gone off and it just really could never get there in an authentic way. But no,
00:36:34.840
I think you're right because I think that, you know, for the millennials, the climate stuff
00:36:39.360
did affect people. I mean, I used to say that anybody who said, I mean, I probably said this
00:36:45.640
like 20 years ago that anybody who says that they didn't have kids because of, because of the
00:36:51.120
environment as they used to call it is, is lying because they're just using that as an excuse.
00:36:56.420
But I don't know now, but, but that was before this like absolute hysteria and fear of God
00:37:04.860
was put into a whole generation. So, so I don't know. I mean, it's, it's a religious thing at
00:37:10.520
this point to me, to me, when I look at some people, they do seem to be a little cult-like
00:37:14.940
in regards to like, they don't seem to logically be thinking about the environment in any way
00:37:18.480
that I would, I guess, think about the environment.
00:37:20.200
Look, people run on emotion. It's really hard for people to decouple their personal experience
00:37:27.860
from data. It's really hard for people to decouple their, their feelings from, from facts,
00:37:34.700
sorry, facts versus feelings. And, you know, it takes a certain kind of person to do that. And,
00:37:41.060
you know, you guys are like that and I'm like that and Sarah's like that, but like, we're kind
00:37:45.120
of abnormal, you know, a little, a little outliers. Were there any arguments in the essays in the
00:37:52.840
book that surprised you? Like, you know, this, you know, that's an argument that makes me feel
00:37:59.520
I mean, it really ranged. I mean, a lot of people spoke about their, you know, sort of trauma in
00:38:05.120
their families growing up and how they didn't want to repeat that. But, you know, I have to say that,
00:38:10.200
you know, one response to traumatic upbringing is to not want to have kids, not repeat it, but
00:38:15.560
an even more common response is to have kids so that you can correct it. Like, because of what
00:38:21.700
happened, I want to do this. I want to, I want to do over. Right. So I don't think we can,
00:38:26.600
we can generalize and say like, you know, this particular kind of household causes people to feel
00:38:32.460
one way or the other. I mean, everybody's wired so differently. You know, there was a lot of,
00:38:37.420
so the book came out in 2015 and one of the criticisms, I mean, it did, people were,
00:38:41.500
it did so well. That's a hilarious thing. It was like, I had been pitching this idea for years
00:38:46.000
and everyone in publishing was like, that's a terrible idea. Nobody will buy that. There's
00:38:49.700
no market for this. It was almost five stars, 794 reviews on Amazon.
00:38:53.880
It was on the bestseller list in the, in the childcare and parenting category. Cause I kept saying
00:38:59.980
like, no, parents are going to be fascinated by this. This isn't just like childless people are going
00:39:04.400
to buy this because it's really about, it's about the way we live our lives. It's not even about
00:39:09.760
like this particular decision. Like ultimately it's just sort of about what you want your,
00:39:13.840
your life to be. Yeah. But there was one of the criticisms of the book. And I think it's a fair
00:39:19.040
one was that a lot of the writers were kind of apologizing for the way they felt. There was a lot
00:39:24.520
of, well, I love kids, but I don't hate children or anything. Wrong approach. I hated kids before I had
00:39:32.200
kids. Yeah. Well, I kind of hate kids now, to be honest with you. They're gross. I don't know
00:39:38.160
what to say. I hated being a kid and I, yeah. So, so there was a lot of that. I will say, however,
00:39:44.480
that, that in 2015, that throat clearing was probably necessary in order to make the book palatable.
00:39:52.700
I don't think we would need it now, obviously, but I think that for whatever reason people needed to
00:39:59.600
hear that because there was still a lot of like, Oh, you must, you must just hate children.
00:40:04.280
If you have made this decision. And I think a lot of people were like, no, I really like kids. And
00:40:08.000
in fact, you know, there were people who talked about working with children and they talked about
00:40:11.800
feeling really important as like an aunt or an uncle. There were three men in the book. There
00:40:17.000
were, it was 13 women and three men, because I really wanted to include some male perspectives.
00:40:21.060
Cause I think men get overlooked in this discussion a lot. Totally. Totally. Well, that's really cool.
00:40:25.280
Anyway, I have had a great time talking to you. I hope to, you know, come on your podcast again
00:40:30.160
sometime. I think you guys' work is fantastic. Thanks. And yeah. And everyone, please, you can
00:40:36.860
learn more about everything that Megan does at megandahm.com. That's M E G H A M D A U M.
00:40:44.060
Yeah. And actually a better place to go is to the unspeakeasy.com or my sub stack. Yeah,
00:40:50.340
actually I haven't, I'm, I'm one of those people with too many websites and megandahm.com has not
00:40:55.620
been updated. Go to my sub stack. Oh yeah. Megandahm.substack.com. Yes. Yeah. Or the
00:41:00.700
unspeakable with Megandahm. You can look that up. I will say you are one of the only guests that we've
00:41:05.340
had where I actually recreationally watch your content. Yeah. Not all of it, but, but a lot of the
00:41:13.040
time I don't, you know, I'll have on guests where I'm like, I know we're ideologically aligned,
00:41:16.120
but I don't actually watch their stuff. Yeah. Um, Malcolm's a fan. Malcolm's a fan.
00:41:20.740
Thank you. But yeah. It's a good audience is wondering what to think. It's, it's very good.
00:41:25.240
Like urban monoculture looking at itself. I think it's, it's, it's, no, I mean, it's like, what do,
00:41:31.720
you know, educated, you know, successful women think of their own culture? Yeah. Well,
00:41:37.900
and we have a big age difference. I mean, we're 20 years apart. So I guess you get those different
00:41:41.720
perspectives. Yeah. I love it. Oh, it's so fun. Yeah. Especially when you want like a,
00:41:46.300
like a conversational chatty show, like a lot of podcasts, like just don't have that charisma.
00:41:51.380
You've got, you guys have the, as the kids say, you have the riz. Riz, the riz. I am too old for
00:41:59.340
this. I know. I love it. I've heard of the riz. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for having a
00:42:04.660
spectacular day. Yeah. We have to have you back soon. All right.
00:42:08.060
And that's how Rubik's cubes work. Okay. So what are you going to do with your Rubik's cube? Once
00:42:23.720
it's solved, are you going to break it again? No. Well, I mean, you're just going to solve it.
00:42:32.480
Okay. Well, you just want what buddy? You want a Mickey mouse bicycle is not the bicycle we have.
00:42:48.620
All right. You want one that has Mickey mouse on it? And he wants a Mickey mouse bicycle.
00:42:54.900
We need new bikes for the kids when they're chasing dogs. Oh. I just want to give them our bikes.
00:42:59.560
Because right now they have two bikes. So two of them can ride down the hill. And they were doing
00:43:03.620
that for an hour. But Octavian got married. And Tori got married. Oh, that's fair.
00:43:12.060
So either more fancy. Because right now they're using cheap bikes at their house. So we can get them
00:43:16.760
either more cheap bikes or fancy bikes. Hey, stop talking to each other. What? Are you
00:43:21.940
going to stop talking to Mommy? No. Okay. Fried rice is almost done, buddy. I think we're good
00:43:28.140
to go. Oh, you want to talk to Mommy. You don't want Daddy to talk to Mommy. Oh, I can. Okay.