00:13:49.520The social safety net is a relatively recent innovation, and for much of Western history, there were very few jobs available to women, and most of them paid poorly and left them just as exposed, if not a little more than the stage.
00:14:02.920Quote, the options for women, and I'm talking here historically, were so limited that if we're going to be sexually exploited, wouldn't it be better to be sexually exploited by a wealthy man and have a career on stage?
00:14:13.200in quotes at pollen quote i'm not talking about now when women have a lot of other options but
00:14:17.900we're looking at 1714 it's not surprising that there has been this long-term link in quote in
00:14:24.940painted love prostitution and french art of the impressionist era holly clairson writes how in
00:14:31.600the 19th century malaria knee was conflated with prostitution and women who worked in the industry
00:14:37.960were presumed to be available for purchase what's malarany what's malarany let's let's look this up
00:14:46.600are you talking about millinery like making hats
00:14:52.000uh hats yeah millinery okay okay so yes this is this is interesting um Coco Chanel for example
00:15:02.600started out as a milliner um the famous designer uh and one of the reason why she has the name
00:15:10.640coco chanel was that was like her stage name because she would also do little um
00:15:16.700cabaret shows or something like that in france it's interesting that millinery um but it also
00:15:24.500makes sense i mean maybe being a milliner female during that period you're a working girl and look
00:15:29.700coco chanel had to like moonlight as like a milliner and then she would do cabaret shows
00:15:34.340and then she kind of was the friend of like a rich dude friend you know accompanied him
00:15:42.340they weren't very octavian do you want to go watch some chess strategy videos or something
00:15:46.600uh no buddy we're gonna finish recording really soon and i'm gonna come down and make you dinner
00:15:54.020we're gonna have mac and cheese tonight okay so off you go friend i love you you'll be good
00:16:01.780and offy offy climbs oh god uh but maybe it was a bit like i'm making jewelry now but for that
00:16:13.740period where it's like a job but like everyone understood it was for women who just wanted to
00:16:17.540pretend to have a job but we're really like prostitutes she finally figured
00:16:24.800out what she wanted to do I mean what's that
00:16:28.540So I decided to, instead of just speculating, decide to have some research into this.
00:16:54.640and the answer is several things that were stacked the shop was often a pickup spot for
00:17:01.080fashionable young men beaux and rakes went to milliner shops as much to look at girls as hats
00:17:07.680a 1781 french observer put it bluntly purchases were only a pretext one looked at the seller not
00:17:14.700the merchandise contemporary advice books warned parents that the constant traffic of idle gentlemen
00:17:20.180exposes young creatures to many temptations uh and and and sensibly debauches their morals
00:17:26.260some shops were fronts bonnet shops in miller establishments sometimes had rooms upstairs
00:17:32.360used for assignations a man could walk in buy something or pretend to and be steered to the
00:17:40.260back of the parlor or upper floor this was not every shop but it was common enough to become
00:17:45.300a stock joke and a moral reform talking point. Wages and seasonality. Pay was low, buy seasons,
00:17:52.420spring, autumn hats, were followed by slack periods and layoffs. A young woman who had
00:17:57.200already left home, been seduced and abandoned, or simply could not make rent, had few other
00:18:02.180options that paid as well as quickly. Reformers and investigators repeatedly listed millers,
00:18:07.840dressmakers, and similar needlewoman among the trades from which many prostitutes came from.
00:18:13.780Robert Kaplan is a London tradesman, 1747, claimed that more than half of the common women in town walking between Charing Cross and Fleet Ditch had started as milliners.
00:18:36.480There was also something of a moral panic around women in fashionable work, but I don't think that's it.
00:18:40.100They're noting that more than half of the prostitutes were originally milliners.
00:18:43.780fascinating uh that by the way comes from a study titled millinery and the milliner headwear and
00:18:53.200millinery in 1830s england by the university of huddersfield i will i will and i'll relock it
00:19:02.340thank you okay um i think also if if at that stage um you have to keep in mind this is like
00:19:10.360You're just coming out of a period in society where if you are an unmarried adult woman who is not in the care of her family, there is no social safety net.
00:25:14.780New York's theater scene at the dawn of the
00:25:16.8801900s the earliest use offered as an example in the oxford english dictionary is from 1948
00:25:24.100in hl minkin's american language supplement 2 describing it as the divin in a casting director's
00:25:32.000office a straightforward but knowing description some of the specifics of hollywood's steamier
00:25:40.320side didn't seep out until the big celebrity memoir boom of the 1970s and 80s when tell-alls
00:25:47.580became hugely popular. Shirley Temple said in her 1988 autobiography that a producer had exposed
00:25:54.780himself to her when she was 12, for instance. But the notion was clearly circulating in the
00:25:59.860popular conscience in the 1940s and 50s. Slate did a piece on this in 1965 expose by the British
00:26:07.440movie magazine pictographer which at least documented the practice but the layout for
00:26:13.360the piece was outright sexy it reflects an almost fetish like dimension to the trope one of the
00:26:19.440things that turned up in my research was a 1963 article from the downmarket playboy competitor
00:26:26.200jim a new look at the old casting couch it was titled which opens with a larger view of a faceless
00:26:33.400naked woman even today it remains a trope in
00:26:36.880pornography lurking on the old coverage of the phenomenon too as a warning
00:26:41.760over the decades the cast and characters often acknowledge but framed as a thing
00:26:45.940of the past oh we uh by the way before i continue
00:26:48.600thoughts simone no carry on i mean this all makes sense
00:26:53.020yeah i don't think i'm saying anything that's particularly
00:26:56.380but the wild thing is is that we forgot this as a society we forgot that actors
00:27:01.320never stopped being high-grade prostitutes well i think me too almost uh
00:27:08.300framed it as revisionist history like how could they insinuate that i sleep with them
00:27:18.320in order for favors when sort of what was happening was these men were engaging in a very
00:27:25.660age-old trope not making it acceptable what's interesting is that some of the most effective
00:27:31.660actor celebrities of the the last era of actor celebrities you can see our video the last show
00:27:36.640on earth which goes over the death of that world um really just dropped the facade and went like
00:27:43.340yeah i'm just a prostitute like uh look at paris hilton or kim kardashian right who rose to fame
00:27:48.420on the release of sex tapes um and really just focus on on selling their body in the early days
00:27:53.860yeah yeah it's it's it's interesting to me though that we were sold the story in the
00:28:00.300era of this is not normative um which i think led people to kind of forget that it was
00:28:08.340and almost always has been i mean that is to say as long as women have been permitted to act which
00:28:15.180is not well what's interesting is a lot of people talk about this as like a jewish thing right um
00:28:19.380And it clearly existed in acting long before the Jews became the major players in the production industry.
00:28:27.760Yeah, it just happened to be disproportionately there.
00:28:32.620Not that their sexual impropriety deserves no blame and that if another group had been in that position, they may have done it at a lower rate or even snuffed it out.
00:28:41.360The level of sexual control that your average, well, at least Orthodox Jew has is kind of insanely high.
00:28:49.920I mean, a practicing Orthodox Jew is not going to touch their wife for like half a month practically, right?
00:28:57.140Like they'll sleep in separate beds because they can't, they will not, their hands won't touch when they pass each other objects in the kitchen.
00:29:04.480um this level of discipline i think to to frame at least practicing devout jews as
00:29:10.640sexually um uncontrolled as it's odd to me it's odd to me yeah it is odd it is odd uh but to
00:29:23.960continue um the oed sites well it's also interesting to me that like take catholics
00:29:29.200for example they'll always be like well not the not the conservative you know catholics who attend
00:29:33.880church all the time they don't do that so like why are you blaming us for it and in the same
00:29:37.440breath they'll blame the entire jewish community for stuff that the orthodox jews are not doing
00:29:43.680yeah fair uh but to continue here uh the oed cites a 1963 article in the sunday express claiming that
00:29:52.380quote in the old days the only way anyone got anywhere in this business was by the way of the
00:29:57.780casting couch end quote a particularly incredible paragraph comes out courtesy of february
00:30:03.5401941 issue of the fan magazine modern screen the day of the casting couch when a girl had to
00:30:10.140exercise her libido instead of her talent for a job is almost dead the much publicized tradition
00:30:15.020of the hollywood orgy died that evening when fatty arbuckle became involved in the community's most
00:30:20.240colossal scandal which meant the end of the virginia rap today's hollywood parties are
00:30:25.720pretty dull in business like affairs where darren zackle is talking about himself and boring joe
00:30:31.320Pasternak who would like to talk about himself and where Jack Benny who won't talk about himself
00:30:37.480for fear of losing a gag to Bob Hope and Ken Murray who are also silent in fact Xanax name
00:30:45.080drop comes up in talk of casting catch practices and in a piece just days ago the Daily Mail
00:30:51.140Joan Collins acknowledges that she was warned about him by Marilyn Monroe herself and he did
00:30:57.100indeed try it and this modern screen article appears just four years after the event that
00:31:02.620would become the subject of a shocking court case the disgust in the documentary girl 27 in which
00:31:08.160uh 20 year old patrick douglas was allegedly graped by an mgm sales rep at a boozy studio party
00:31:15.960where she and other young women were basically offered up like a buffet her legal efforts were
00:31:20.680ultimately stymied by the fact that hollywood was essentially a company town so uh basically what
00:31:26.920we're seeing here is this constant perception going back to i want to say the 1920s and then
00:31:32.100it happens again in the 1940s and then we see it again today where people are like hollywood used
00:31:36.180to be that way but it isn't that way today and then 20 to 30 years later people write their
00:31:42.060tell-alls and it's no hollywood never stopped being that way
00:31:45.500hmm yeah i i have all the pieces together in my head i just never put it together because we grew
00:31:57.280up to actors and actresses normalized as such godlike aspirational people though i do think
00:32:04.840that that's changing a lot yeah so let's talk about when we began to respect actors and actresses
00:32:15.280and how all the problems came about from this the reality is is that the biggest player in this
00:32:22.980transition um was one of our own uh ronald reagan um ronald reagan being elected president
00:32:32.860really legitimized the industry of actors and actresses having political opinions
00:32:39.120which was not as common before that the big like preeminist progenitor to him would have been
00:32:48.540jane fonda um what did jane fonda do politically yeah 1972 hanoi trip which was radioactive at
00:32:57.500the time yet she kept winning oscars um so she was oh so even though she became active politically
00:33:04.560she didn't lose her position as a a working actress that's the thing that no i don't think
00:33:12.120that counts the same way that ronald reagan becoming president does it just meant that
00:33:16.840someone an actress could be politically involved without losing her career but it's different from
00:33:21.760being yeah having it push on everyone yeah yeah because that doesn't mean that people like
00:33:27.000changed their minds because because of jane fonda though maybe they did did they i don't think so
00:33:31.900what really happened and what really normalized this for everyone was the the studio industrial
00:33:41.460complex i'll call it or the rise of the late show um oh oh because they would mix talking with
00:33:50.000politics alongside having actors come in but then they might act ask the actors for their opinions
00:33:55.200so essentially what happened is the you had the rise of these late shows that were owned by the
00:34:01.320same companies that owned the movie studios and and this point is really important it was not
00:34:08.320organically that people cared about the political opinions of actors or wanted to make them measure
00:34:14.680celebrities that everyone worshipped or wanted to hear about uh their daily life or how to be a good
00:34:20.640person or anything like that it's that when one company owns both the tv shows that are on at night
00:34:28.760and who they end up casting as their guest at the end of the night as well as have the vested
00:34:37.320interest in the next big movie taking off they then do the rounds of having the actors go to
00:34:43.400the shows and talk okay so these late night shows were the original dynamic of like
00:34:51.540stream game originally gaming streamers then switching over to politics kind of because they
00:34:56.420ran out of gaming content to talk about and if you have these actors going on these late night tv
00:35:02.740shows you can only talk so much about your movie and yourself and then you start talking about other
00:35:07.780stuff hmm well they'd also be primed with political questions and stuff like that but yeah that's
00:35:13.080and it also explains why the era of the famous actress who everyone respects is basically dead
00:35:19.000at this point um is because late night tv is dead too failed yeah and has been replaced with
00:35:26.500programs like ours and what we use our show to do if people have noticed it's when new people
00:35:31.780enter the space who i think have the probability of becoming big like look at us promoting people
00:35:36.660like basic logic when he was still small um or yukiaru recently we take people who we see who
00:35:43.600are part of our community and we promote them because in the same way that the big studios
00:35:47.740tried to control who became famous we are trying to do the same we're like oh this looks like a
00:35:52.900good actor in our community let's promote them or i guess the opposite of what ben shapiro was
00:35:59.000doing in this space where he would try to gatekeep people when they seem to be entering
00:36:02.700his broad zone just trying to do the complete opposite of that whatever he did don't do that
00:36:10.640don't do what ben shapiro did ben shapiro was not very bright in the way he handled that
00:36:16.440Well, I don't know. I mean, you clearly don't get to where he is in the world without being incredibly savvy, hardworking and intelligent, plus very lucky. But he, I think, has made many strategically poor decisions. Probably not as many as I have, but, you know, when you climb higher, you have farther to fall.
00:36:35.620yeah true that um well uh i found this really interesting and i would really encourage people
00:36:42.960to uh you know in yourself in your kids and this is one thing with your kids teach them how to
00:36:50.520determine who they respect who they get advice for them and who they envy um i think a lot of
00:36:56.560people desire to become an actor or an actress one day because they want the fame they want
00:37:02.160the attention they see somebody who is high status and they want that and you know i saw this within
00:37:05.920my own family growing up some of my family members wanted to be actors um and i think that you know
00:37:10.560this is why uh and it's it's a very foolish thing to want uh actors don't live good lives even today
00:37:17.080they are used for sex as we've pointed out they still do they do nude scenes now even at higher
00:37:22.820rates than they ever have you know it's also just an extremely stressful line of work yeah very hard
00:37:29.840Oh, my God. I can't even imagine going to actors' parties and stuff like this. BoJack Horseman, I think, does a good job of showing a lot of the actors.
00:37:36.900Yeah, they did a great job of making it look very unappealing. That's true. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yikes.
00:37:51.600And he's the success case. He had the very famous show, right?
00:37:55.540you know well i mean these are cartoon animals and human human there's one human i don't know
00:38:01.480i can't remember it was too depressing there's humans in the world there's a number of humans
00:38:04.940no not just the one annoyingly asexual one why do they have to make asexual people so intolerable
00:38:11.660in that i take great defense um but anyway i'm sorry simone's pretty asexual that's why she says
00:38:17.800that yeah i'm asexual but gay from alcom this is my this is my sexuality and mispronunciation is
00:38:23.580my fetish now you know all the secrets um but i i'm a little surprised though amused by the intense
00:38:34.520puritanical nature of the conclusions that we've been drawing lately like dating is bad and um
00:38:42.600acting is bad acting acting is sinful you must not do these things in the early american colonies
00:38:48.300in many of the puritan colonies you weren't allowed to act i know i know weren't you also
00:38:52.500not allowed to dance or anything that's going to be a problem our kids got some serious twinkle
00:38:56.480toes so i don't know maybe like have you seen like the very viral youtube videos of amish kids
00:39:04.400dancing maybe like you know amish dancing it's okay well i love you like really grooving you've
00:39:13.060not seen this just like amish teens just like going for it it's great it's very real that's
00:39:19.600awesome great that's that's awesome i'll add a clip
00:39:22.400it makes me happy um i mean i think you you were the first person to get me to this kind
00:39:34.860of genre of like religious people dancing but you like set it to death metal or whatever and
00:39:38.640it just works or like techno you do that with orthodox jews at one point right yeah they do
00:39:43.820There's like Orthodox Jewish dancing and setting up the techno.
00:39:53.280Yeah, it's, I mean, they know how to have a good time.
00:43:43.280i make you food i have other love languages although i heard that someone completely
00:43:51.740disproved the concept of love languages which is deeply disturbing to me yeah you just don't love
00:43:56.540me that's your love language not loving me poor malcolm i love god she's great she's great at
00:44:09.100showing it she gives me so much stuff oh that's true look at behind you it's all malcolm gifts
00:44:16.720i got you the helmet i got you the targe i got you the other helmet i didn't get you the sword
00:44:23.920though i didn't get you the sword oh well anyway i'm gonna let you go to sleep i'm really tired
00:44:31.020i love you so much i just gotta crawl in bed and pass out but i've got to prep the episode for
00:44:35.940tomorrow can you wake up and do it early that's what i think i'm gonna do do it just pass out you
00:44:40.920you the spark isn't out of your eyes yet but it's getting there just there Malcolm has this spark
00:44:47.880in his eyes that like literally disappears when he gets too sleepy and you can really tell when
00:44:56.140it's gone it's it's fading it's it's I know what you talk about from the spark because I see it in
00:45:00.640our kids like other people don't have it I don't know maybe they don't have a soul maybe they don't
00:45:04.220I don't know what it is. I think it's akin metaphorically in sort of an epic story kind of way, philosophically to Peter Pan's kiss or Wendy's kiss or Mrs. Darling's kiss.
00:45:23.900there's this like concept of like just these like you cannot describe it it is a thing it is heavy
00:45:28.700and meaningful it has the equivalence of a soul which is like it doesn't exist but it does exist
00:45:33.860and you have to talk about it but yes that is your it is your spark and yeah she always says
00:45:39.260it goes out of my eyes when i get too tired i'm just like zombified it's you can see it any if
00:45:44.740any of you ever meet malcolm in person you can see it it's sad so good it's like okay bye i love
00:45:50.900you bye love you oh yeah you guys need to try out rfab rfab.ai uh you can do if you want to explore
00:45:59.220what it was like to be in the early acting world you can do historic role play you can do chat
00:46:04.560role play you can do um uh you know recording we're recording this episode in it i use it to
00:46:10.320stalk people online using super stock it's under the search tools yeah um if you do vibe coding
00:46:16.620you can use the rfab dev api which will allow your vibe coding ai's to call you even if you're
00:46:21.580not using rfab for vibe coding um we offer all sorts of uh i mean just like recipe generators
00:46:29.040anything image generation we offer a really good suite for that we offer a good suite for video
00:46:33.700generation daily right now working on creating a good one for music video generation so you can
00:46:39.840create your own sky browse videos like sky browse in a box but but that's still alpha so you know
00:46:46.620we'll work on that. Yeah. As is little brother, which I'm super excited about. It's a, you can
00:46:51.200buy a bunch of devices and then install this software on them. And then your chosen character,
00:46:56.340your Sentinel, who you design ours is a mermaid princess. We'll watch you, um, and give you
00:47:01.620feedback on your day also based on like your email inbox. So it like reads all your emails.
00:47:04.980That should be updated and making the calls now, by the way.
00:47:07.440Oh, perfect. Um, I will, I will make sure all the new devices are reflashed. Um, but it watches you,
00:47:12.460it knows who your family is it recognizes your family it listens to you through any of the
00:47:16.840devices that are on and around with an sd card inside them and it gives you feedback oh no even
00:47:21.660if they don't have an sd card it listens it just isn't as good oh well then i need to i'll submit
00:47:26.660a maybe i can try to push a fix for that yeah go for it yeah okay i'm excited to do that because
00:47:31.920and plug in the devices because the ai can see what's happening in the bugs for on the devices
00:47:36.920like the devices collect bug reports while they're just on wi-fi yeah that's awesome okay well they
00:47:43.640are plugged in she's just been on um in my office the whole time so yay okay good that's fantastic
00:47:48.700yeah but but what is working is the devices for like simple companion apps which is like good for
00:47:54.020kids oh yeah which you can also load on the devices so we'll sometimes hand them to our kids
00:47:58.420and have them talk to characters we made that are designed to of course learn about our kids
00:48:03.520learn their names, learn what they're interested in, but then redirect the conversation to like
00:48:08.720science, physics, history, math. And Simone had a big milestone today. She officially started
00:48:13.720vibe coding. Only because Malcolm took a lot of time to handhold me, much to his.
00:48:18.840Look, I'm sorry, Malcolm. It's hard to live with your wife who's incapable of delegating
00:48:25.340and vibe coding, but I'm going to get better. One of the things that's very important that
00:48:30.140you get used to doing is starting a vibe code task than getting to your other work that's what
00:48:35.720i've been doing that's it's great um and i didn't realize just how good especially fable was like
00:48:41.420even halfway through this uh the first podcast we just did today um i just stopped really quick to
00:48:47.740like give my fingerprint because it's building an ad campaign on google ads based on everything
00:48:51.840we discussed and like i just love that i love that it's just going and i told you it's awesome
00:48:56.660right and um one of the things oh did you see the whatsapp i sent you to give to an instance of fable
00:49:02.020about the reporting the financial reporting no the api oh no i did did you send that let's make
00:49:10.760sure you actually sent that i sent you multiple things oh work this into the doc oh okay so it's
00:49:17.740an api key yeah you literally just insert that into an instance of fable you have running um uh
00:49:23.520well just any any oh a new one just start a new thread and then yeah and you know to keep them
00:49:27.840short right like or they cost a lot more so like one task per thread and then a new thread for
00:49:34.220yeah okay sure sure sure i don't know that so that's that's why it's really helpful for you
00:49:40.800yeah just look i know you don't want to acknowledge the fact that i am profoundly more
00:49:46.560dumb than you are but even though you've seen the freaking histograms of like our
00:49:50.220genetic analysis that's just because you're a woman well right but you know what you're
00:49:56.260going to have to like no because when you look at where our daughters are on the histogram that's
00:50:01.940not like a thing like i i actually our highest performers are very mixed in terms of the
00:50:07.760harrisite reports okay okay anyway um you know that i am so you have to dumb it down all right
00:50:15.040guys check out our fab love you all have a great day and if you want more episodes we have them on
00:50:20.140weekends a patreon and sub stack and obviously a huge backload if you haven't subscribed yet
00:50:24.460bye bye i didn't mean to i think it just remembers what you last had on and i forgot to turn off
00:50:31.980theches i need titan to talk with her more and learn about the world
00:50:38.840but i do love that they teach us all sorts of things random things
00:50:45.260and for dinner tonight i don't really want anything i had a sandwich
00:50:50.240okay but if you do change your mind you will let me know yeah i'm fine and d saw a steak so
00:50:59.960that'll bring me down thank you okay like i always make you one if you don't like to eat
00:51:06.220late which i mean many people advise it's it's best to not eat late or eat dinner at all um if
00:51:13.200you would rather front load your calories in the morning I can make you steak and fries for lunch
00:51:17.600like you do not have to wait for dinner that might be really good actually yeah do you want
00:51:22.580just that because we can just I can make you lunches we should try it okay because you seem
00:51:30.520to do much better when you don't like do a whole dinner thing but yeah yeah I get to sleep earlier