Making Sense - Sam Harris - #180

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:56.540 right into it today i'm speaking with megan daum megan is the author of five books and she writes

00:01:04.240 a bi-weekly column about culture and politics for medium she was an opinion columnist for the los

00:01:10.580 angeles times for over a decade and she's also written for the new yorker the atlantic the new

00:01:17.460 york times magazine vogue and other journals and her most recent book is the problem with everything

00:01:25.060 my journey through the new culture wars and in this conversation we talk about the book

00:01:30.660 which focuses mostly on feminism we talk about violence against women campus sexual assault

00:01:39.360 the new norms of conversation intersectionality the 2020 presidential campaign and related matters

00:01:49.480 anyway i've had many women on the podcast of late who have distinguished themselves

00:01:55.420 both for their honesty and their willingness to touch politically charged topics i'm thinking of

00:02:02.920 megan phelps roper yasmin muhammad caitlin flanagan barry weiss and megan daum definitely continues

00:02:11.800 that trend and if those of us on the left are going to be anything more than completely ineffectual

00:02:20.140 and masochistic as the 2020 presidential election approaches it will be because we have more

00:02:27.680 conversations like this so without further delay i bring you megan daum

00:02:33.160 i am here with megan daum megan thanks for joining me thank you sam

00:02:41.800 i just finished your book this morning i uh read every page i would never pretend otherwise

00:02:48.660 and loved it it's really it's great this is your most recent book the problem with everything

00:02:53.080 my journey through the new culture wars it's very very funny and very well written and uh as

00:02:59.220 is your other writing thank you and i i guess we'll talk about your focus in this book you know i've

00:03:05.680 read some of your other work mostly articles but and maybe touch on some of those but maybe just

00:03:12.060 to start summarize your career thus far as a writer what have you tended to focus on and how do you view

00:03:18.920 your work as a writer i have always viewed myself as somebody who sort of looks at the culture and

00:03:26.420 looks at the places where there's kind of a gap between what people think they're supposed to

00:03:31.620 think and feel about something and what they actually think and feel so i'm interested in

00:03:36.440 hypocrisies i'm interested in ways we kind of try to convince ourselves of things so you know and i'm

00:03:43.160 an essayist i really i love that form this is not an essay collection these are chapters it's a chapter

00:03:49.120 book but um i have always big kids yes it doesn't have illustrations but maybe the paperback so yeah i've

00:03:56.620 always been an essayist and i've liked to take a personal approach to big ideas so i started off

00:04:03.840 in the 90s i had a couple big pieces in the new yorker for instance one of them was about going into

00:04:09.900 debt trying to be a freelance writer in new york and and it was about my own experience but really

00:04:15.880 much more about the sort of economy of the city and and the romance of the creative life and and really

00:04:22.460 looking at a whole bunch of stuff so i continued on in that vein throughout my career and i've been

00:04:27.840 a magazine journalist i was an opinion columnist for the los angeles times for more than a decade

00:04:32.880 and so yeah i've really i i wrote one novel but i've i really see myself as an observer and a sort of

00:04:42.260 anthropologist of sorts i'm not a not a political wonk and i'm not a straight memoirist generally but

00:04:48.660 sort of a combination of all those things yeah well this new book is really of the moment

00:04:55.660 politically and socially and uh i think i'm just i'm a couple of years older than you and the book

00:05:02.500 has you know resonates with i would say all of us who are just edging into our 50s there's a lot

00:05:09.640 around aging and i guess one question on that point is how much do you think you know of the problems

00:05:17.280 we're going to talk about that the problems around political discourse and moral panics or or what

00:05:23.080 may be perceived as moral panics and just the kind of the impossibility of finding durable new norms

00:05:30.420 around conversation that seem sane how much of do you think is just a generational divide that is

00:05:37.840 just making everything difficult to parse where does communication become the hardest does it just

00:05:45.460 yeah is it is it animated in a linear way as you get as the other people get younger and younger or is

00:05:51.260 it that not really the problem well you know it's funny if you would ask me this six weeks ago i think

00:05:56.780 the you know when the book first came out and when i was really starting to talk about the book i would

00:06:01.660 have said that it's very much a generational issue and i certainly talk about that a lot in the book and

00:06:08.460 especially around issues of feminism and you know the the lives of women i talk a lot about

00:06:15.460 growing up as a girl in the 70s and the 80s and and how that might have been different than

00:06:19.800 growing up in in you know later decades but i have to say as i've gone around and talked about this book

00:06:25.740 the last month or so i think it's really it it transcends generations i've had people of all ages

00:06:32.680 coming up to me and saying thank you for putting this out there this really goes beyond

00:06:39.020 any sort of you know age issue or or generational sensibility and and talks more broadly about the

00:06:46.440 sort of cultural conversational chokehold that we're in and so you know i i really thought that

00:06:52.500 the the the sort of you know i hate to use the term culture wars and i really there's all these sorts

00:06:57.400 of words like triggered and social justice warrior that i am not ever using in earnest and i don't

00:07:02.680 don't do so in the book but i i really think that it's it's beyond that i think that there are people

00:07:08.940 with sort of you know really want to sort of think about all this stuff beyond their own sort of

00:07:14.560 experience and so as i have gone around i've seen this much much less of an issue of my being the age

00:07:21.140 that i am and more of an issue of my having the sensibility that i do and i and i think a lot of people

00:07:27.320 share it regardless of their age i've heard some speculation around there being ill-appreciated

00:07:35.500 economic variables here that the gen z and and millennials are in the most precarious position in

00:07:42.860 in you know any recent generation financially and i recently read your piece the essay you referred to

00:07:50.580 in the new yorker my misspent youth which i think was published in 1999 yes but it reads you know

00:07:57.100 it could almost read true of any age certainly this age except for the rents i complain about how

00:08:02.780 high the rent is and it's like a thousand dollars yes right yeah you just got to change a few of the

00:08:09.140 numbers but you know obviously new york was expensive then and it's expensive now but you know people in

00:08:15.860 their 20s and 30s have less of a share of you know accrued wealth than people have tended to have at

00:08:24.000 those ages in generations past and again i'm kind of looking for a you know big picture variables here

00:08:31.380 before we wade into the details it how much do you think economics is at work here yeah i you know

00:08:37.880 douglas murray has talked about that a lot and i i uh i gather that's what you're referring to a little

00:08:43.200 bit um yeah it's interesting to to hear that theory i i think there's something there i have to admit

00:08:48.260 it's not something i had thought a lot about just because i you know i tend to like see millennials

00:08:53.940 as the people you know making a lot of money in dot-com ventures and in silicon valley so

00:08:59.820 but obviously that's just a tiny slice and a lot of them are gen xers so that's not quite accurate but

00:09:05.020 yeah i think there's something to that this this notion of blow it all up or you know this isn't

00:09:10.480 this isn't working for us on any level so we need to radically change the system yeah i think i think

00:09:18.400 there's some there's some validity to that to that theory i mean just the fact that socialism

00:09:23.940 seems to be uh enjoying a a new dawn and that capitalism is a word of invective now that seems to have

00:09:32.960 taken root in recent years in a way that i don't remember it being true of the the aughts or

00:09:38.880 yeah although right i mean you know but when i i graduated college in 1992 and there was a

00:09:45.600 recession at that time and and i remember you know everybody saying oh we're the first generation that

00:09:50.940 is not gonna be as wealthy as our parents we will never have the standard of living

00:09:55.520 that we grew up i mean it sounds quaint now but you know that was a really big part of of our identity

00:10:01.460 and i don't mean to diminish what's going on now i'm not comparing these two experiences but i think you

00:10:06.980 know kind of every everyone in their 20s has the idea that that their experience is is particularly

00:10:12.800 perilous and uh exasperating and unfair well i guess let's start with feminism which is in many

00:10:20.800 ways the focus of the book at one point you write this is quoting you you're troubled by the ways that

00:10:26.240 contemporary feminism has turned womanhood into another kind of childhood and then there's a you at

00:10:31.920 a certain point you discuss what is termed badass feminism and uh you say that badass feminism feels

00:10:39.500 paradoxically like the pink aisle at the toy store how did how do you view feminism at this moment and

00:10:46.460 how much trouble are you getting into for viewing it that oh i've been getting into trouble over this

00:10:50.960 for several years it's it was this predates the book so yeah i just to back up a little bit i started

00:10:57.420 thinking about all of this stuff probably around 2015 maybe late 2014 i was still a columnist at the

00:11:04.820 la times at that time you know looking for a topic every week and i started to notice especially on

00:11:11.500 twitter that there was a lot of discussion around women's issues that seemed really almost in direct

00:11:18.380 opposition to the actual state of women you know we had in reality the women doing better than ever

00:11:25.020 there were more women graduating from college there were more girls who were high school valedictorians

00:11:29.760 on and on and on and yet this and more more than men i mean they're doing better than men in those

00:11:35.620 that's what i mean yeah they were that's yes they were doing better than men and men were actually

00:11:39.100 falling behind in a lot of ways obviously not in the highest corridors of power but in the aggregate

00:11:44.300 girls and women were sort of soaring soaring way above men and boys so that was going on but at the

00:11:51.220 same time there was like this discourse on social media that that was really rooted in this premise

00:11:56.260 that that we were under the thumb of of the patriarchy and we started hearing terms like toxic

00:12:01.780 masculinity and there were these hashtags like you know kill all men and i bathe in male tears and this

00:12:08.780 phenomenon of ironic misandry came into into being you know this idea that oh you know we can we can

00:12:15.240 make fun of men and we're just being ironic and you know it's it's okay and like i i understood that

00:12:20.840 it's not like i was taking hashtag ban men literally but i just thought it was kind of curious that that

00:12:27.820 the the the the conversation around the state of women was was you know really had very little to do

00:12:33.760 with the actual state of women and so i was going to write um a sort of uh sort of manifesto called

00:12:40.140 you are not a badass and it was just going to be sort of poking fun at this and and trying to you

00:12:45.900 know get a handle on it and say you know let's let's get our get our acts together here and uh this

00:12:50.240 was around 2016 i assumed that hillary clinton would be the president and that everybody would be able to

00:12:56.920 sort of take a ribbing there and obviously that did not happen and so you know once i sort of collected

00:13:04.360 myself the shock of the election i really started thinking more broadly about what was going on

00:13:11.180 culturally and and i was much more interested in in these sort of larger problems of of speech and

00:13:17.360 being able to talk about things and so on now that said i'm like a white chick so what can i write

00:13:24.120 about i can write about the experience of women so i started the book really talking about my own

00:13:30.640 experience growing up uh in the in the 70s and the 80s and we can get more into that in you know if

00:13:36.200 you'd like but really i do think that there was a it was a remarkable time to be a little girl in the

00:13:42.240 1970s for for various reasons and i started to sort of look at what was it about my experience that was

00:13:48.860 making me perhaps not relate to this sort of twitter conversation around women and where the generational

00:13:54.860 divides might be yeah so you were saying that it wasn't as gendered a childhood as you observe it

00:14:01.480 to be now and that actually kind of surprised me i mean that that was my decade of childhood as well

00:14:07.120 and um i didn't have sisters i didn't have a um clear view of it as a certainly in elementary school

00:14:14.880 but it does seem right to me but i was surprised to not have a clear memory of how i thought gender was

00:14:22.120 being amplified or selected against you know in childhood but it's some of the examples you gave

00:14:28.460 it did seem impressively gender neutral in in many ways i mean just the fact that your boys and girls

00:14:34.860 would watch a film like the bad news bears rather than you know some disney fairy centered or princess

00:14:41.640 centered confection and that yeah i hadn't taken the time to recall what it was like to be a kid

00:14:47.120 see i wonder if the fact that it hadn't occurred to you actually suggests that it was so so neutral

00:14:54.020 it wouldn't even imprint on your on your your memory so yeah i mean there's actually data on this there

00:14:59.920 you know you would go into a toy store in the 1970s and there were not there would be like not a pink

00:15:06.500 toy aisle for girls and blue for boys there was just a sort of androgynous aesthetic about that time

00:15:12.620 not in all corners obviously you had like hyper hyper masculinity and and you know hyper femininity

00:15:19.120 doll's cowboy cheerleaders and charlie's angels and you know i don't mean to like totally oversell

00:15:23.960 this point but i do think that there was something about being a kid in that time that was really

00:15:28.520 freeing in terms of of gender expression it was it was totally cool to be a tomboy if you were a girl

00:15:36.140 you know being a girly girl was was not what you wanted to be you know i i don't think it's any

00:15:41.900 accident that the the two biggest child movie stars of the 1970s were jodie foster in the movies and

00:15:49.420 christy mcnichol in in television and they you know both are you know very out lesbians not were not

00:15:57.260 girly girls and are are not uh girly women so so i started thinking about that and you know when i when i

00:16:04.380 really when i think about the ways that sometimes younger women get irritated with me because they

00:16:10.380 say that i'm i'm diminishing the difficulty of being a woman or i'm not you know i i i'm i'm sort of

00:16:18.040 not appreciating how how hard it is for them in certain ways i i i really had to go back and and reckon with

00:16:26.100 the fact that that you know there was this great gift of of growing up in this time when it really

00:16:32.440 wasn't i it never once occurred to me that that i was anything but you know as good as boys if not

00:16:39.100 better and it wasn't until later i think we got into this you know girls gone wild sort of raunch

00:16:46.060 culture ethos in in the early aughts and you know for kids like you said the disney princess thing came

00:16:52.860 along and i think that that sort of shaped shaped some sort of attitudes around women and certainly

00:16:59.020 contributed to their to their frustration and and uh you know this book is very much a self-interrogation

00:17:05.540 it is not a polemic it's the process of me trying to make sense of of why i'm not necessarily aligned

00:17:12.680 with some of the the more prominent features of the cultural discussion and that was that was one thing

00:17:19.120 that i i really looked at yeah i mean this is not to deny our history or even our recent history of

00:17:27.660 kind of mad men level misogyny and the political disempowerment for women i just watched a bond movie

00:17:37.240 with my my oldest daughter who's turning 11 she didn't know who james bond was and so with some

00:17:43.140 some feeling of trepidation i put on goldfinger which i hadn't seen in 20 years or more and um

00:17:50.680 i think it was released in 64 so somewhere it's a mid-60s film and the level of sexism in it is just

00:17:58.520 jaw-dropping i mean it's hilarious i mean she she just did not even know how to interpret what she was

00:18:04.480 seeing you know and we had a good laugh over it although there is in fact nothing more surprising

00:18:09.480 in in that film or perhaps any film than the most emasculating garment i think ever put on a

00:18:16.280 a leading man people can google this image but sean connery puts on a uh terry cloth i don't know

00:18:24.420 what you call it a romper or something by the pool uh just not a bathrobe like something no no it's it's

00:18:30.620 like a short short bath you know short shorts integrated you know it's like a body suit that's

00:18:35.620 made of blue terry cloth so i'm pretty sure is the cloth of that era i think too yes i'm pretty

00:18:41.200 sure a google search of sean connery and terry cloth will turn up this this horror show but it

00:18:45.560 it's so strange it really is like a glitch in the matrix like this just can't have ever happened

00:18:50.600 really anyway so but just you know seeing you know him slap women on the ass i mean it's not even

00:18:57.300 ironic i was trying to figure out how it was supposed to play to the audience in 1964 i think it just

00:19:04.460 is him being dashing in yet another way so it's obviously we have to acknowledge that there's a

00:19:12.920 serious motivation for feminism but what's actually the front line now do you think yeah you know so

00:19:21.580 there's a there's a scene in the book where i talk about being in my um early to mid-20s and i was

00:19:27.560 living in an apartment in new york city a couple of roommates there were three roommates at any given

00:19:33.140 time so you know if somebody would move out and we would have to look for a new roommate so

00:19:37.540 you know on one of these you know we would have a day where people would come in and sort of

00:19:41.860 audition to be our roommate and it was me and another woman we're the same age we were looking

00:19:46.800 for our third roommate and this guy came in he was like probably in his or he's probably in his

00:19:52.840 mid to late 30s like we assumed he was like in his 50s but probably not that old and an old man in

00:19:59.340 his mid 30s exactly exactly which you know when you're when you're 25 that's that's everybody yeah

00:20:03.920 and he said something like oh you know well here's an idea what if what if i bought the food

00:20:09.920 and you girls did the cooking and he kind of came at us with this idea and we were unable to look at

00:20:18.320 each other because we were gonna burst out laughing we thought this was so absurd as to be hilarious and

00:20:24.880 we were like embarrassed for him that was how we how we took that moment and um you know as soon as

00:20:32.740 he left we sort of fell all over ourselves and you know i talk about this in the book this was probably

00:20:37.540 1995 okay so you know i think that you know probably 20 years earlier if our mothers had been in a

00:20:46.620 situation like that our mothers who were adults through the madmen era who were working in offices where

00:20:53.020 slaps on the ass were just what you had to deal with i think they would have been offended by this

00:21:00.800 guy in a way that we were not and fast forward 20 years later if if that had happened uh you know

00:21:08.320 today with young women i think that they would have probably like gotten really angry and run to their

00:21:15.440 computers and gone on their on their tumblr accounts or or you know gone to twitter to to rant about this

00:21:21.600 guy and and the misogyny and the sexism and and how nothing has changed etc etc so i'm really interested

00:21:27.540 in like what it is about that particular moment that made my roommate and i actually just laugh and feel

00:21:34.900 sorry for this guy when our mother's generations would not have done that and the current young

00:21:40.640 generation wouldn't have done that and i'm still figuring out the answer to that i really i'm not quite

00:21:45.580 sure but it's definitely a phenomenon yeah well it would definitely be perceived as a microaggression

00:21:51.360 now if not a macroaggression right has such a sexist assumption but what you're pointing out there is

00:21:58.120 that these are circumstances which now are routinely described as kind of yet more evidence of the power

00:22:08.540 that men have over women or just assume they have over women you know this is like the vestiges of

00:22:16.160 patriarchy but you as a woman now again in the mid-90s perceived these situations not through that lens i

00:22:26.060 mean you did not feel disempowered in fact you were actually empowered oh we had all the power in that

00:22:31.700 situation for one thing we had the lease on a on a manhattan apartment okay so that that puts anybody in

00:22:37.300 power but yeah he you know as far as we were concerned he was like a complete loser and it's it

00:22:45.220 wasn't even he could have been like you know any kind of guy uh you know he could he could have been

00:22:49.920 our own age and somebody we found attractive and if he had said something like that we would have also

00:22:54.700 burst out laughing and that's you know one of the things again that i talk about in the book is this

00:22:59.300 notion that you know what we have now is this sort of punching up approach to talking about men like

00:23:05.260 you know in comedy you can punch up or you punch down right so the idea being that you can make fun

00:23:10.840 of people who have more power than you you can tell jokes about celebrities or politicians or rich people

00:23:16.280 or whatever not cool to make fun of people who have less power so by making a sort of sport of making fun of

00:23:25.420 white men of men in general of talking about all the ways that they are you know complete you know

00:23:34.180 completely putting you down and and are you know ruining the world that seems to me a version of

00:23:40.260 punching up and it seems to me completely misguided because what you're actually doing in that situation

00:23:45.100 is handing them power that they don't necessarily have the minute you start piling on somebody you are

00:23:50.480 saying this person has more power than i do because i have license to pile on them and that really

00:23:57.180 really troubles me as somebody who you know never thought that any given man had more power than i did

00:24:02.940 yeah i guess i think one power differential that it doesn't go away and or it doesn't go away

00:24:10.240 without technology on some level it's just in the sphere of physical violence and it's concerned i mean

00:24:17.700 it's just it is a fact that women have lived for hundreds of thousands of years you know as homo sapiens in

00:24:25.120 the company of men who generally outweigh them you know generally a head taller or thereabouts

00:24:32.740 and also you know have even at the same weight have greater upper body strength and so it's just so

00:24:40.540 violent threat of violence is just an issue and i guess we'll talk about sexual violence and in

00:24:47.120 particular the campus sexual assault epidemic or the imagined epidemic depending but i've always very

00:24:54.880 naturally seen this from a woman's point of view i mean this this issue of kind of the dynamics of human

00:25:02.280 violence because i was raised by a single mom you know now i have two daughters i've spent a lot of time

00:25:08.020 thinking about violence and self-defense and training and in martial arts and all the rest so it's like

00:25:14.920 kind of my head is has been in that game for a very long time and the moral core of the problem of

00:25:21.800 violence has been most centrally aligned with the problem of violence against women at least right in

00:25:30.160 my mind so and yes we and you know and children weaker people who are physically weaker yeah yeah yeah

00:25:36.140 and so it's just very natural so like when you go to a slogan you know like a me too slogan like you

00:25:42.160 believe all women right or believe victims my emotional default is certainly there and yet it's

00:25:50.040 you know every time you turn up an example where that proves to be a bad heuristic right where you

00:25:55.960 have a woman who is lying for you know reasons however inscrutable or you have you know someone

00:26:02.260 who's mentally ill or and and just the amount of harm that does to all the legitimate you know grievances

00:26:09.000 out there it's just and that's something we we haven't really focused on as i mean this is now

00:26:15.000 not a women's issue but like you know like whenever there's a moral hoax like the you know the jesse

00:26:19.620 smallette case right that's so awful and it's awfulness is it seems to me unappreciated on the left and

00:26:26.480 it just does so much harm but anyway it's hard not to honor a bias in favor of basically just believing

00:26:32.460 the claims that come at least in that direction well right and i don't think there's you know any

00:26:38.960 i i like to give people the benefit of the doubt so if somebody tells me something i'm gonna listen and

00:26:45.480 assume they're telling me the truth you know until until i find out otherwise but you know i just want

00:26:50.600 to be clear when i say that i've never felt like i have less power than a man that's not saying that

00:26:56.200 i've never felt threatened by a man that i have not felt frightened walking down the street alone

00:27:02.560 at night so let's just be very clear about that and i and i say in the book like you know yes there

00:27:07.380 are there are physical power differentials that you know there's all kinds of ways that and reasons

00:27:12.820 that women have historically had a really raw deal for all kinds of reasons and we can get into that

00:27:18.440 but you know i am interested in in why you know in this current moment there's such an incentive

00:27:24.900 to sort of apply this assumption just across the board you know there was a survey done by thompson

00:27:31.200 reuters about a about a year or so ago about the 10 most dangerous countries in the world for women

00:27:37.500 okay yeah i don't know if you remember that okay so it's now at the top it was like india pakistan

00:27:44.620 i think somalia you know the places that you would imagine and the united states was number 10 on this

00:27:51.160 list of the world's most dangerous countries for women and you know when people said well how did

00:27:56.500 you come to this they'd surveyed about 500 people who were global you know experts in global women's

00:28:02.380 issues or something and they said well you know in the wake of the me too movement it was important

00:28:06.900 to recognize that just because you're in an affluent country you know you're you're not automatically

00:28:11.940 safe and and you know we really need to to acknowledge the experiences of women in the

00:28:17.840 united states and i just thought okay a that is not a data point and b what are you getting out of this

00:28:24.980 this is like amazing to me like what is it does that sell more magazines does that make people feel

00:28:32.280 like included in the world in the conversation in some way that's what just constantly baffles me and

00:28:39.820 i think that's to your point like this that does real damage because if i read that and i lived in

00:28:45.820 india and and how was having to deal with you know the horrific conditions for women in countries like

00:28:52.540 that i would be pretty pissed if i saw the united states just kind of thrown in there on that list

00:28:57.700 yeah well that's that's what makes this look like a moral panic rather than a set of legitimate

00:29:04.840 ethical and political concerns and that i guess we should focus on the claims about the campus

00:29:10.980 sexual assault problem now because you know if if you dumb down the definition of what constitutes

00:29:17.740 an assault enough i mean one you're driving up the perceived risk right because people just assume

00:29:25.380 that you know when you say that you know one in five women get sexually assaulted in their college

00:29:31.120 careers you know i've even heard that put as one in five women get raped yeah which was never true

00:29:36.500 yeah right so but it's just you know the fact that you know sexual assault and rape are practically

00:29:40.820 synonyms in most people's minds and you know depending on how much you dumb down the definition it's

00:29:47.380 you're doing real harm to the actual victims of real sexual you know terrifying and horrible sexual

00:29:55.420 assault right so but the problem okay so i absolutely agree with you but the problem there is that

00:30:01.120 how do you even articulate that point without using a phrase like real victims of real assault like

00:30:08.620 you start to get in as a white man you just get on your own podcast and you do it but was it was it

00:30:13.280 that was it the who was the um politician it was talking about legitimate rape right and somehow

00:30:18.520 you know that you couldn't that the you couldn't get pregnant from legitimate rape because the body

00:30:23.440 would shut that down so you know we we've run into all these tripwires well that was no but was that

00:30:28.000 lindsey graham who was that that was no it was it was um i want to say aiken it was not not lindsey

00:30:34.300 graham but yeah there's all it's like all these all these tripwires because you know we want to talk

00:30:41.180 about this very dynamic that you described that if we if we make everything sexual assault that that

00:30:48.760 that it does no favor to victims of quote-unquote real sexual assault but then how do you even have

00:30:55.260 the conversation without using a phrase like real sexual assault and and you know and then this gets

00:31:00.860 into like well we can't have this we can't have the conversation to begin with because there's no

00:31:05.480 way to do it without blaming victims or making feel people feel uncomfortable or doing harm to them so

00:31:10.560 we just we skip the whole thing and we don't even solve this problem of of how you talk about it so

00:31:16.040 you know the not talking about it makes it almost you know impossible for anybody who who tries so

00:31:22.560 right well yeah i guess let me let me uh differentiate you know real from from fake

00:31:27.880 here in defense of basic sanity i mean i don't think there's a perhaps there's not a bright line

00:31:33.700 but this statistic of one in five i think was trumpeted you know from the highest places i even

00:31:40.680 president obama talked about obama yes so we have the president of the united states announcing to a

00:31:47.860 worried population that if you send your girls to college they stand a one in five chance of being

00:31:55.880 quote sexually assaulted now as a dad if i thought there was a 20 chance that my daughters

00:32:03.600 were going to be raped when they go off to whatever good school they worked hard to get into

00:32:08.820 i would never send them there right it would be insane you got you there would be no need for

00:32:13.480 college admission scandals either right because nobody would be applying to college it would be

00:32:17.260 so much easier to get in yes yeah so what do you think is rational to believe about the risk that

00:32:23.880 yeah young women run going to college well i mean the one in five thing you know even the the the

00:32:30.500 people who did that study that study was based on i think two different schools you know just two

00:32:36.740 schools one of which was a commuter school essentially umass boston and you know the one

00:32:42.860 in sexual assault was being defined as anything from rape to some sort of unwanted touch or or groping

00:32:50.940 that sort of thing so the the the range of uh of experiences that could fall into the assault category

00:32:58.400 is is huge and so you know that the one in five rape thing was never true this is like a game of

00:33:04.240 telephone right okay so one in five sexual assault you could kind of massage that if you were going

00:33:10.420 to define sexual assault as really basically anything of a sexual nature that is unwanted but you know

00:33:17.940 other statistics have been more precise and and come up with things like one in 42 one in 52 something

00:33:24.340 like that so i i really think that ultimately though it doesn't matter what the statistics are like

00:33:30.020 one in 52 is still too much okay like that's that's fine and and you know again what i'm interested in

00:33:35.960 in this book and you know i am again i'm somebody who who who looks at at at people's behavior and

00:33:41.760 looks at my own experience and tries to you know connect the dots and fill in the blanks here i'm

00:33:46.240 really not as interested in the numbers as i am and like what people are getting out of this why

00:33:50.800 why is it that if you have a bad experience it's so much more it's so much easier it's so much more

00:33:58.620 appealing to kind of fold it into a victimization experience than into one that where you just say

00:34:04.680 i shouldn't have i shouldn't have done that and that's not to say that that there aren't victims

00:34:10.240 and that victimization experiences happen too often but i i really have noticed that you know as

00:34:17.020 opposed to when i was in college you know you having an icky sexual experience was just kind of

00:34:22.360 the cost of doing business when it came to growing up and figuring out who you are and and this was just

00:34:27.580 sort of you know what what happens along the way and i don't mean rape i mean just something that you

00:34:32.700 regret doing and that hopefully you won't do again but but for some reason there's almost like no lane

00:34:38.500 for that kind of feeling about about something that you may have gone through and and i i think a lot

00:34:44.880 about why that might be and and i'm again i'm just one of these things that i'm still trying to

00:34:49.140 figure out yeah well that that's where it breaks down ethically in a scary way when you have

00:34:56.620 a culture that is rewarding victim status to a degree that kind of the straightest path to

00:35:05.720 becoming a kind of social superstar is to have a legitimate claim to have survived something awful

00:35:15.400 and yeah and when you have these examples and there's at least one in your book of essentially

00:35:21.300 bad dates or you know sexual encounters that people wind up regretting or i mean but again

00:35:27.220 there's just like there's no use of force or implied use of force or coercion or it's just

00:35:32.680 that it becomes a you know a he said she said around something that is just it's like we don't want to do

00:35:40.920 that again but there are these cases that both in your book and in the news now where it seems like

00:35:46.980 young women are being encouraged to dredge their memories for any sign that this experience that

00:35:55.020 they just didn't like in the end can be weaponized yeah to their advantage and then what follows is you

00:36:02.580 have this very strange policy wrapped up with title nine where young men on college campuses can get

00:36:09.560 accused of sexual assault or rape over something where the evidence isn't even presented to them they

00:36:15.780 don't even i mean it's this very weird gray area where okay if there was a real quote real sexual

00:36:21.800 assault or a rape then call the police right i mean yes real rape yes that's right people should show

00:36:27.520 up with guns when that sort of thing happens right but no we're in this sort of no man's land where

00:36:31.600 this is not anything like a crime that could be reported to police but it is nevertheless enough

00:36:38.320 to destroy this person's career at a university and i don't know if you want to talk more about it but

00:36:45.540 these are really kafka-esque episodes in the lives of men which unfortunately make this what should

00:36:52.740 seem like a good aphorism you know believe all women or believe victims fairly unworkable on a college

00:36:59.580 campus yeah and this is one of those things that because it came from the obama administration

00:37:04.440 everyone's sort of um on our side on the left just assumed oh well it must be the right thing to do

00:37:10.900 so yeah in 2011 there was a dear colleague letter the notorious dear colleague letter which was sent

00:37:18.820 out to any university that was receiving federal funding which is just about all of them saying that

00:37:24.840 there was going to be um they needed to follow a certain procedure if there was a case of a woman

00:37:30.640 making a complaint of sexual assault and there was a whole series of things you had to you had to

00:37:37.340 you know let the let you know let the woman you know she was entitled to i think having somebody

00:37:44.280 you know be with her when she made this testimony the man on the other hand was not allowed to have an

00:37:51.520 attorney i don't quote me verbatim here this is a very sort of cursory summary i don't you know i go into

00:37:57.120 it in a lot of detail in the book but you know essentially these were kangaroo courts and you had cases

00:38:02.800 where boys were accused of things they didn't know what they were accused of and and the woman was

00:38:08.020 just allowed to sort of proceed with a case that really was very very muddy and the worst thing about

00:38:16.340 this was that even if the woman decided that she didn't want to proceed with it by the time it was

00:38:21.780 reported to the title nine office the title nine office was obliged to go through with it so and and

00:38:28.320 you know what what had come down from the obama administration was that you know if if the schools

00:38:32.920 did not adhere to this they risked losing their federal funding and you know one of the great

00:38:37.340 ironies of of the trump administration was that it took betsy duvoss to to reverse many of these

00:38:43.820 policies you know she was the one who finally stepped in and said you know this is wrong we're

00:38:47.720 going to roll this back and now you know i i like obama a whole lot more than i like duvoss to put it

00:38:53.260 mildly but who's the more reasonable party here but you know again to even hint that you may be on

00:38:59.320 the side of betsy duvoss will will get you thrown out of liberal circles and in this case called a

00:39:04.560 a rape apologist but yeah you know yeah well again unhelpfully there are the cases of the opposite

00:39:11.940 sort where you have what seem to be legitimate accusations of rape from a student swept under the

00:39:18.340 rug because you know say the this person's a you know a star football player or whatever and and the

00:39:23.080 college that just doesn't want to look into it for obvious reasons and so again it's just the details

00:39:29.240 in every instance matter and the problem with any moral panic is that it makes it impossible to focus on

00:39:36.780 the details because the moment something fits a certain type there's just a default emotional hijacking

00:39:43.940 which makes rational deliberation impossible because you know people are defenestrated for

00:39:49.960 even taking the necessary moment to figure out what happened right right well so we seem to have this

00:39:56.100 logic that asking questions trying to actually get at the facts equals skepticism and then skepticism

00:40:04.420 somehow equals harm and so there's like this continuum of really diminishing returns you know so there's a

00:40:12.820 there's a scene in the book where i go to a take back the night rally at the university of iowa

00:40:18.500 there's a lot of the book that takes place at the university of iowa because i was teaching there for

00:40:22.260 a semester and you know i'm sitting on the grass in the quad and there's a there's a microphone and

00:40:27.520 you know a mic stand and a whole bunch of mostly undergraduates some some older older kids and i think

00:40:33.320 some even some some staff maybe adult staff were getting up and telling stories about being sexually

00:40:41.080 assaulted about having really bad experiences and you know take back the night has been around

00:40:45.980 for a long time it's actually been around since the 70s but it's this sort of initiative to

00:40:50.860 to get you know particularly college students to to talk about these experiences and and sort of bring

00:40:56.900 them out in the open and and i remember from my own college days and i know people who

00:41:00.940 were really healed by by the experience of being able to share these so you know i was sitting there

00:41:06.740 listening to to some of these kids and and some of their stories were were really harrowing a lot

00:41:13.740 of them took place in childhood a lot of them the things they were talking about had nothing to do

00:41:17.440 with college they were talking about sexual abuse in the family at home and then some of them were

00:41:23.640 talking about encounters that that happened more recently in college and you know it it wasn't i i

00:41:30.600 believed them the issue wasn't really about believing or not believing them but more that i i was noticing

00:41:36.520 that there was almost this like i don't even want to say solidarity there was this catharsis in in

00:41:42.840 telling their stories that went beyond catharsis and really was like some kind of deliverance it's a

00:41:49.240 religious revival in a way a club yes and and and i and i had this like horrifying moment of cognitive

00:41:55.560 dissonance because i remember george will of all people writing a column you know back you know

00:42:02.580 probably around you know several years earlier making this very point and and in a sort of clumsy way

00:42:08.480 and saying you know the the reason these women are making these accusations is that the minute you're a

00:42:13.260 you're a sexual assault survivor you automatically get entry into this club and it's a special club

00:42:18.220 and you know as an opinion columnist myself i remember reading that and thinking oh gosh like

00:42:22.380 you don't have enough words to try to make this point and and this is like really dangerous

00:42:26.720 territory here and he got in huge trouble for it but i i was sitting there on the grass listening to

00:42:32.640 these students and i thought well that's exactly what george will was talking about and that's kind

00:42:38.340 of what's happening here i don't know if i'd go so far as to call it a club but it is definitely

00:42:43.360 you know the the real experience i felt wasn't what had happened during this thing that they that felt

00:42:51.160 like an assault the real experience was this moment where they were telling the story and so there's

00:42:55.860 like this whole other level around it and that's what's animating a lot of this i think

00:43:01.100 well yeah i think it's at the extreme it's worse than a club i think it's a cult and the reason why you

00:43:09.140 can see that it has a cultic dimension to it is again the the moralizing of everything that just

00:43:16.140 prevents a rational conversation about details or facts be they facts of human biology or actual

00:43:24.580 history or you know just being journalistically careful it also there there's internal contradictions

00:43:31.020 to it that even when you point them out just cannot be acknowledged by otherwise intelligent people i

00:43:38.340 mean one that came to mind reading your book is you describe this controversy or pseudo controversy

00:43:44.120 that that i had missed i guess i was off twitter enough so as to to have been spared but it's

00:43:49.500 referred to as the united airlines leggings gate leggings gate yes i can't believe how did you

00:43:55.140 possibly maybe maybe uh refresh refresh our memories about what that was and i'll tell you what it what

00:44:00.400 it made me think of um well so this was a situation there was a united airlines gate at the denver

00:44:07.320 airport and there's a family traveling on employee buddy passes which is something that if you if

00:44:14.940 you're related to airline personnel or you're just sort of friends with the airline personnel you can

00:44:19.560 get a get a pass to fly either free or at a very deep discount but there's always been a dress code for

00:44:24.580 this so you know this is like back in the day used to see you know pilots and and flight attendants they

00:44:29.500 would fly on on buddy passes they're trying to get somewhere but they'd be wearing a suit there used to be

00:44:34.880 coat and tie which part of the the dress code for this it is no longer that strict so but this family

00:44:39.940 was i think they had three young girls and two of them were wearing leggings you know as as one does

00:44:47.520 and the gate agent was saying well you're not allowed to get on this plane with leggings uh you

00:44:53.260 you know you got to put something on over this and and the family was all too happy to comply they

00:44:57.280 sort of improvised and found a way to put skirts on the girls or whatever and this woman

00:45:03.700 not even in this same line she was in line for a different flight was sort of watching this from

00:45:08.440 afar and just sort of invented a whole story around this and started tweeting that the gate agent was

00:45:15.240 policing the dress of young girls and and sexualizing young girls by saying they couldn't

00:45:20.480 wear leggings and this thing just blew up this woman had a lot of followers celebrities started

00:45:26.400 tweeting about this you know oh i wear leggings this is disgusting united airlines is misogynist

00:45:31.600 on and on and on and this this went on for like a solid day and and i i guess i didn't have much

00:45:36.720 to do that day because i was like entranced by this and it's just such a perfect example of like

00:45:43.180 you know yelling fire in a crowded theater and and this had nothing to do with anything but there was

00:45:49.240 such glee in attaching yourself to this cause and the incentives for doing so if you were a public

00:45:55.880 figure or you wanted to be a public figure were so great and so outweighed any incentive for getting

00:46:02.400 the story straight that it just felt to me like it encapsulated this this phenomenon perfectly like we

00:46:07.940 just we are we are just disincentivized from actually looking at the facts and trying to get

00:46:14.700 at something complicated because frankly complication is out the window with social media you you just can't

00:46:19.580 do it right so so the complicating factor here was that these were not just random passengers

00:46:24.680 these were employee buddies flying free and they had a rule in place and they were simply trying to

00:46:30.840 enforce that rule yes but what this made me think of is that i mean i can say to a moral certainty that

00:46:37.020 every celebrity every you know woke person on twitter who was outraged by united airlines enforcing some

00:46:46.780 standard of dress on young women these same people are going to celebrate the hijab as a sign of female

00:46:57.080 empowerment under islam these same people who will count it as a sign of bigotry against muslims when

00:47:05.240 you complain about the patriarchal and theocratic imposition on women's freedom that happens in the muslim

00:47:11.940 community right dress being the front lines of that and so this is a perfect contradiction there's no

00:47:19.060 way to square these intuitions right and yet pointing this out will convince no one it's like a short

00:47:26.740 circuit of ethical rationality right so we're not in the territory of a rational conversation about

00:47:33.960 human well-being anymore when we're unable to simply talk about these if you'd like to continue

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - December 30, 2019

#180 — Sex & Power

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