In this episode, Dr. Naomi Wolf joins Dr. Jordan B. Peterson to discuss her new series on depression and anxiety. Dr. Wolf has been a progressive thinker for decades, but recently has come under fire as an anti-Vaxxer and a conspiracy theorist. In her new book, The Beauty Myth, she challenges notions of attraction, arguing that they are societally fabricated. In recent years, she has been under fire, especially on the left, for becoming a "conspiracy theorist" and "anti-vaxxers." Dr. B.P. offers a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Dr. P.B. Peterson is a world-renowned psychiatrist, author, and public speaker with decades of experience helping patients struggling with anxiety and depression. He has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling Depression and Depression. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling, and offer a moment of support. . Today's guest is a woman who has a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and offers a unique approach to helping you find a way to feel better. She's perspective on why you deserve a brighter future that you deserve it. Today s guest is someone who can help you feel better, not only better than you, but is willing to listen to you, and help you get there, no matter what you need it. Thank you for listening to your voice, too! Thank you Dr. W.W. Wolf, for coming forward with her perspective and sharing her story, and for being a voice to help you find your voice and support you, so you can have a voice, and a chance to be heard, and to speak your truth, and your truth and a place to speak out loud, and you can be your truth in a little bit more of your voice in the world that matters more than you can help someone else's voice, so that you can feel it, too. - Thank you, Naomi Wolf.
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420Hello everyone. I'm pleased today to talk to a thinker on the progressive front for many decades, Dr. Naomi Wolf, an American author and journalist.
00:01:16.820Her first book, The Beauty Myth, challenged notions of attraction, arguing that they are societally fabricated.
00:01:23.380This publication became an international bestseller and cemented Wolf as one of the leading spokeswomen for the so-called third-wave feminist movement.
00:01:32.440In recent years, interestingly enough, she's come under fire, especially on the left, for becoming an anti-vaxxer and a conspiracy theorist.
00:01:41.920A strange destination for a progressive thinker, which led Wolf to write her most recent book,
00:01:47.620The Bodies of Others, the New Authoritarians, COVID-19, and the War Against the Human.
00:01:54.680Looking forward very much to talking to Dr. Wolf today to delve into the possession of the left,
00:02:02.020reprehensible possession in her estimation by the Marxist doctrines that were popularized throughout the 20th century
00:02:09.480to understand how that's come about and to analyze the role played by organizations such as the Chinese Communist Party.
00:02:16.620I guess the first question I have for you, Dr. Wolf, is why did you agree to talk to me?
00:03:00.860Most of the scientists and so forth that I ask to talk are, with very few exceptions, say yes.
00:03:06.980But that's definitely not true on the more social commentary, political side, especially in the political realm.
00:03:15.720But it wasn't an issue as far as you were concerned.
00:03:20.320Well, I guess first I would say I'll talk to anyone, especially about liberty and the Constitution, human rights and freedom.
00:03:29.300I think that's my job, and it would be a very boring world if we only spoke to people with whom we know already we're going to agree.
00:03:38.620And more importantly, maybe, talk to you because, well, for that reason, but also because, you know, I see that you describe yourself as a liberal.
00:03:51.800And while from the outside, it may seem as if my views have changed over the last couple of years, I really feel that I've stayed exactly the same and that the world has changed.
00:04:05.040And I also see myself as a classical liberal.
00:04:07.700So even if I didn't want to talk to you because I like learning things and I like talking to people with whom I may not agree, I might learn something.
00:04:17.480But either way, you know, since you seem to be concerned about human freedom and I'm concerned about human freedom, additionally, it wouldn't occur to me not to talk to you.
00:04:28.840But that said, I recognize your experience.
00:04:34.260Sadly, I'm now in a situation in which I keep asking the left to counter, you know, the views that I'm publishing by other people on my news site.
00:04:43.580You know, I'm asking the left to engage with the issues that I'm bringing up, and I literally cannot get anyone to talk to me.
00:04:49.720And I used to be, you know, until like two and a half years ago, firmly ensconced in the left as a cultural figure.
00:04:56.020Right. Well, so I definitely want to delve into that because one of the things I really have observed, I think I'm reasonably neutral as a psychological observer of political behavior, I believe.
00:05:09.040And certainly one of the things I have noticed is that proclivity to cancel is most fundamentally a left-wing phenomenon.
00:05:17.500I've had very few people on the right refuse to talk to me, that's for sure.
00:05:22.720And I've had many, even my friends on the left, and I've seen this in a relatively shocking way, I would say fairly frequently, would refuse to talk to people that weren't in their bailiwick.
00:05:36.480I think one of the punishments, actually, this is odd though, one of the punishments for refusing to talk to people whose opinions differ from yours is you end up squabbling with the people who disagree with you on your side over smaller and smaller things, even equally intently.
00:05:54.220So it's not like you rid yourself of the necessity of disagreement, you just find yourself, what did Freud call that, the narcissism of small differences.
00:06:03.100The battles get, they rage more and more intently over smaller and smaller differences of opinion, which is sort of comical in a metaphysical way.
00:06:11.900Okay, so let's start with your, let's start with your childhood.
00:06:16.700So tell me about, tell me a little bit about your parents and about what it was like for you growing up, and I'm interested in how your intellectual interests developed.
00:06:26.880Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:06:32.300Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:06:39.840In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury, it's a fundamental right.
00:06:45.260Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:06:54.580And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:06:57.780With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:07:05.160Now, you might think, what's the big deal? Who'd want my data anyway?
00:07:08.540Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.
00:07:13.440That's right, there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.
00:09:04.900My father was also a poet and a teacher of creative writing.
00:09:10.360So, it was a very talky, reedy, imagination-heavy environment.
00:09:18.960And, you know, I was surrounded by the cultural ferment of the 60s and 70s in San Francisco.
00:09:24.280So, by the time I was a teenager, you know, the gay, LGBTQ, right, at that time, it was called the Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement, the Women's Movement, you know, Immigrants' Rights.
00:09:37.100It was all kind of a lot of social justice movements around me as I was growing up.
00:09:44.000And it seemed like the world was going to be fixed, really.
00:09:53.320And that was a shock because I'd never, you know, I'm a California girl, so I'd never experienced East Coast elitism, hierarchies, anti-Semitism, you know, before the peculiar racism of the Northeast.
00:10:12.180I mean, if you grew up in California, it's a very diverse culture, you know, the, it's not that we don't have racism in California, but it's, it's different.
00:11:44.260But, so you sort of felt, you know, I was not the only woman who felt beleaguered.
00:11:50.980I mean, you know, the parties at Yale in my time were described in Brett Kavanaugh's hearings, and they were very familiar to me.
00:11:58.380You know, people did get kind of raped and molested at parties, you know, very, very casually at Yale.
00:12:06.520What do you think the attitude of the typical male undergraduate at that point, I don't know if we would talk about the typical male undergraduate or if we would talk about the more dangerous typical male undergraduate.
00:12:22.500What do you think the attitude towards women was at that time?
00:12:27.300And, I mean, I'm also interested in the sexual misbehavior problem from a variety of psychological viewpoints.
00:12:37.580I mean, a huge part of what fuels sexual misbehavior on campus is alcohol.
00:12:58.600Well, I'm not, I suppose, trying to make the point that that's not the case.
00:13:05.160I've thought a lot about how those sorts of activities might be addressed and regulated by universities, and they're alcohol-fueled to a degree that's almost unimaginable.
00:13:17.320So, alcohol itself is responsible for about 50% of violent crimes, and it's the only drug we know that actually makes people violent.
00:13:26.060And so, I'm wondering, the parties that you're describing, I mean, we know perfectly well that there's a party culture at American universities and that that is alcohol-fueled.
00:13:36.520And alcohol is a very disinhibiting drug.
00:13:40.060And so, if you have a proclivity in a particular direction, alcohol is going to take all the stops off that.
00:13:45.800So, if there's an underlying misogyny or resentment, say, towards women, then that's going to be amplified by an alcohol-fueled event.
00:13:55.940But, I'm not trying to make a case for or against the presence of misogyny at Yale.
00:14:00.820I'm just wondering, in retrospect, when you look at that, what contributing factors do you see to what you experienced?
00:14:10.820Yeah, so, you're, I mean, we're diving right into an incredibly, you know, vexed and difficult subject, but I'm happy to address it.
00:14:21.320So, you know, I, and I'm glad to be addressing it, because that's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you.
00:14:26.320I know about your interest in gender dynamics.
00:14:29.520And, you know, this is probably one of those areas on which we might have a lot of interesting disagreements.
00:14:37.260So, I would say, categorically, alcohol, you can't blame the culture of sexual, accepted sexual violence and sexual harassment at Yale at that time on alcohol or drugs.
00:14:54.180What you can blame it on is institutional toleration of sexual harassment and sexual violence.
00:15:00.260In other words, there was a culture of impunity.
00:15:02.380The people who knew that nothing would happen to them acted as if nothing would happen to them.
00:15:08.100And I, too, have studied, you know, gender dynamics, sexual assault, sexual harassment on campus for many decades.
00:15:15.900And for sure, when there's a culture of impunity in any institution, rapists rape, molesters molest.
00:15:22.760And when there's a culture of consequences, that restricts the tendencies that those people might have to rape or harass, you know, for sure.
00:15:34.660But what the young men around us at Yale and the faculty around us at Yale knew is that nothing bad would happen to them if they raped or molested women.
00:15:45.220And categorically, if you look at the cases at that time, you know, to this day, to some extent, the institution colluded in covering up rapes on campus, protecting athletes, especially who assaulted women on campus, protecting faculty.
00:16:00.360So I personally was molested by a famous professor, Dr. Harold Bloom, when I was a junior.
00:16:07.720And that was in a context in which he was completely not drinking alcohol.
00:16:11.440It was a context in which he had a lengthy reputation, which I didn't know till afterwards, of doing this to undergraduate women and to actually graduate students.
00:16:21.660And I tried to get accountability from the institution decades later, and it was just covered up, covered up.
00:16:37.880And what effect did that have on you metaphysically?
00:16:42.280Well, I think it had a lifelong effect on me metaphysically.
00:16:46.320It was quite terrifying at the time because it was in a, like, in no way can this situation be, you know, blamed on, you know, anyone not knowing exactly what he was doing.
00:17:03.100It was a situation in which he was my advisor.
00:17:09.260He was my professor for an independent study course that my academic advisor had recommended, a close colleague of his, another famous academic, John Hollander.
00:19:06.780But the, I mean, first of all, I had been, you know, raped as a child 11 years before.
00:19:12.700So, which, you know, when I try to talk about assault on campus and, you know, professors creating an environment of sexual assault on campus,
00:19:21.660a third of minor women have been raped or assaulted or abused by trusted male role models or parent figures or parents by the time they're 18.
00:19:34.300And so, you know, I was already traumatized and I was already terrified.
00:19:43.340Well, it's a double hit, eh, in a situation like that, too, because I imagine that you're, so you're a good poet at that point.
00:19:52.000And undoubtedly, you're extremely excited about the fact that someone who's an eminent scholar is taking an interest in and is going to evaluate your work.
00:20:02.760And so, you're looking forward to that on that front.
00:20:05.200And then you find yourself in a situation where, well, exactly the opposite of what is supposed to happen is happening, to put it mildly.
00:20:15.580And you said also that that was reminiscent of treatment that you had received at the hands of another man much earlier in your life.
00:20:23.500So, this is kind of this important moment where we're a little bit talking not in the same experiential plane because all of those considerations certainly, you know, would arise, you know, months or years later, right?
00:20:45.800But what I was concerned about at that moment was survival because I did not know who would kill me, you know, because when women are raped or molested, especially very young women, you know, you don't know that this person is not going to kill you, right?
00:21:02.120You don't know that you're going to get out of this situation alive.
00:21:05.580And I wish, you know, everyone who runs a university, I wish that they would understand that that is what is the experience of someone who is in a situation of being molested or raped that they literally, you know, don't know if they're going to get out of it alive because it is such a terrifying, surreal, shocking, you know, assault.
00:21:54.800I mean, it's absolutely a terror that I can't even describe to you.
00:21:59.940And it probably would have been even if I hadn't been raped as a child, right?
00:22:04.180But, you know, there's no way to minimize how existentially terrifying it is to be molested by anyone bigger than you are who's standing between you and an exit in a house that's far away from any kind of help.
00:22:20.640No one would have heard me if I had screamed.
00:22:22.320Yeah, well, I wasn't trying to reduce what you had told me to the mere psychological consequence of betrayal.
00:22:32.180I was just attempting, I suppose, in some sense to amplify it by pointing out that not only did this happen to you, but it happened to you at the hands of someone who was trusted and who was entrusted with fostering your development.
00:22:47.560And it's the gap, part of what constitutes psychological trauma is the gap between expected behavior and actual behavior.
00:22:55.660And in a situation where you're at the hands of someone who has a stellar reputation and you're at an institution that's supposed to guide and develop you, then the depth of, I mean, if someone attacks you in a dark alley in a rough part of town, that's a terrible thing.
00:23:11.660But there isn't that additional element of betrayal of an entire institution and an entire developmental pathway that goes along with it.
00:24:11.020But thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is easier than ever.
00:24:15.380Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business.
00:24:19.880From the launch your online shop stage, all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage, Shopify is here to help you grow.
00:24:26.240Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise, and we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products, and track conversions.
00:24:34.720With Shopify, customize your online store to your style with flexible templates and powerful tools, alongside an endless list of integrations and third-party apps like on-demand printing, accounting, and chatbots.
00:24:46.180Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout, up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms.
00:24:54.020No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level.
00:25:01.020Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase.
00:25:06.980Go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in.
00:25:48.240Okay, so tell me, tell me, tell me exactly why it wasn't an option for you.
00:25:53.040Like what, what were the mechanics of the impositions that were put in front of you as a consequence of the sequence of events?
00:26:01.120So, I mean, I know he was very influential and I can understand vaguely why that would have had a cascading consequence.
00:26:07.900But had you continued pursuing your education in the literature domain, why exactly would it have been that you wouldn't have been able to find the kind of academic job, for example, that your background might have otherwise provided for you?
00:26:31.160I guess he casts such a gigantic shadow over the whole field.
00:26:37.500I mean, he was the great authority in Victorian studies, you know, for decades after that, you know, and it was just communicated to me that I couldn't get a letter of recommendation.
00:26:54.900I couldn't get, obviously, I wasn't going to even be in the same room with him to solicit a letter of recommendation.
00:26:59.860But it was communicated to me that the way into graduate school, like if I applied to any graduate school and they saw that he had been on my transcript, they would have said, why don't you have a letter from Dr. Bloom?
00:27:21.880And then it would have been up for a question whether you were the troublemaker or he was the troublemaker.
00:27:26.540Exactly, they go to him and whatever he wants to say, he'll say.
00:27:30.440And that was also communicated to me clearly by people who cared about me, who were warning me, he, you know, he had done that before, right?
00:27:38.640It didn't even take women coming forward for him to ruin their careers.
00:27:43.140If he had molested them or approached them and they'd rejected him, which I had done, I guess, in his view, he closed every door academically.
00:27:55.500So it was clear to me that I had no future in my chosen field as long as he was alive.
00:28:01.200So I had to, you know, do something that was not my plan.
00:28:05.720I didn't plan to be a, you know, feminist activist, nonfiction writer in a popular nonfiction genre for decades.
00:28:14.300I'm happy to have had eight international bestsellers, but that wasn't what I wanted.
00:28:18.460I wanted to be a university professor.
00:28:20.760And then even as late as I went back to school, I'm fast forwarding a little bit, I thought it was safe because he was very elderly to go back to college.
00:28:31.780So I became a Rhodes Scholar in spite of him and I went to Oxford and I'll, you know, fast forward.
00:28:37.680So it was finally, I was like almost 50 and I thought, okay, it's safe to resume my education and become a professor of English literature.
00:28:47.340I finished my DPhil in Victorian studies.
00:28:51.980And when I submitted my DPhil and I succeeded and I passed my academic advisor at Oxford said, you need to submit this to a journal, you know, Victorian studies journal.
00:29:08.080And you've got to submit, you know, it's edited by Harold Bloom.
00:29:32.180So as far as you're concerned, this event sidetracked you into a domain of academic pursuit that was very unlike, okay, how much, how much do you think, look, first of all, I should say, if I'm going to push you into places that you really don't want to talk about, you just tell me, okay, because I'll back off.
00:29:56.920Dr. Peterson, I'll talk about anything, I'll tell you.
00:30:01.700So, to what degree do you think the psychological consequences of what befell you, as well as the practical consequence, colored your writing and the aims towards which you directed your writing from then on forward?
00:30:23.560Like, what would have you written about, do you think, had this not happened?
00:30:28.120What would have been your natural inclination of interest?
00:30:31.660I mean, all I ever wanted to do was teach, you know, I would have been writing about Ruskin.
00:30:40.900So you would have stuck relatively firmly, you think, to something like classical literary criticism.
00:30:47.760So, I should point out for everyone who's watching and listening, because it isn't exactly obvious what the point of literary criticism is, if you're not knowledgeable about the field, and it's easy to underestimate its significance.
00:31:04.420Literary critics analyze productions of fiction, generally speaking.
00:31:10.840They analyze stories, and that turns out to be of utmost importance, and we've become more clear about that on the psychological front in recent years, because the structures through which we view the world, when described, are stories.
00:31:27.200And so, what literary critics do, in the deepest sense, is to analyze the maps that we use to orient ourselves in the world.
00:31:36.060And there isn't anything more important in your life than getting your story straight, and people who are astute literary critics, Northrop Fry falls into this category, as far as I'm concerned, are extraordinarily helpful at helping people orient themselves in terms of where they devote their attention and their action.
00:31:55.640And so, it's easy for people who aren't intellectually oriented, let's say, and who don't have a deep educational history, to not understand why literary criticism is so important.
00:32:07.220But it is very important, and so, you are going to devote yourself to classic literary scholarship, but you got derailed.
00:32:15.400And, okay, so now you went from Yale to, was it to Oxford next, as a Rhodes Scholar?
00:32:25.640Ambitions to pursue a professorship in English literature were derailed, but you did get a Rhodes Scholarship, and that's not easy.
00:32:34.100So, how do you reconcile the potentially competing claims that, well, perhaps a career in English literature would have still been open to you,
00:32:43.760given that your academic background was positive enough so that you got a Rhodes Scholarship?
00:33:01.020They weren't narrowly focused on, you know, the gateway to credentialing someone for graduate studies in English literature.
00:33:12.200They were looking for leadership, and, you know, I mean, obviously, my grades were good overall, and I was considered, you know, a gifted undergraduate.
00:33:24.380I had lots of letters from my other professors, so it was a different set of credentials.
00:33:29.440So, the lack of letter from Bloom didn't, wasn't a stumbling block in relationship to the Rhodes Scholarship.
00:34:01.500Now, I had many decades of pursuing pretty much precisely what I wanted to pursue, so that's a major difference.
00:34:09.480But I have some experience with being dislocated, let's say, in a manner that wasn't, oh, well, you know, c'est la vie, things have worked out quite well for me.
00:34:18.940But it wasn't what I had planned, you know, and so...
00:34:22.860And I suppose that's the definition of life, is it isn't what you've planned.
00:34:26.540And, all right, so now you went off to pursue the Rhodes Scholarship, and what did you study as a Rhodes Scholar?
00:34:51.700Well, the Oxford experience, as you no doubt know, is completely different from an American university in the sense that you have these tiny seminars.
00:35:03.380You have tutorials with your professor, your Don, and you're like two students or three students and the professor.
00:35:09.420And you kind of dive deeply into the text in that moment.
00:35:16.600And it's a very, very pure form of scholarship.
00:35:20.240So that made me very happy because I am a true nerd.
00:35:24.120And, again, I, you know, was working on Victorian studies, 19th century English literature.
00:35:29.160I was working on an MPhil at that time, and, you know, I loved it.
00:35:35.280It was the 80s in Britain, so it was cold and gloomy and Thatcher-y.
00:35:41.960And the graduate students weren't particularly central to the Oxford experience.
00:35:50.120It was a very undergraduate experience.
00:35:51.800But so we were kind of exiles together, but it was exhilarating.
00:35:55.840And the Rhodes Scholarship, of course, what a privilege.
00:35:58.680You know, your expenses are paid for two or three years, depending on what you choose to just do it, you know, just study, just learn with a group of other really bright people from all over the world.
00:36:14.540So it was a very, you know, blissful, intellectual experience.
00:36:22.180And the seed of my first book was my DPhil thesis there, or the start of my DPhil thesis.
00:36:31.100The culture that you'd experienced at Yale that we already walked through, how different or similar was your experience on that front at Oxford?
00:36:43.180Now, you're a little older, and you're with a little older people, so in principle, the level of average reprehensible behavior has decreased somewhat just on those grounds alone.
00:36:54.080But were there marked differences in the social culture, let's say, and in the attitudes of the authorities?
00:37:02.680Well, it was still, you know, it was still, you know, I can't stress enough that I, in part, became a famous feminist, you know, public intellectual, because everywhere you went in the 80s, women were not safe, you know, physically.
00:38:26.880Even now, even with all the changes that there have been in society, young women are somewhat safer on college campuses because of hard work of people like, you know, me and my colleagues in the 80s and 90s and early aughts.
00:38:39.800But it is not, you know, it is not that we still live in a culture in which women, most of the women I know have been, you know, raped or molested in some way.
00:38:50.220And vanishingly few of them have gotten any kind of justice at all, you know, from the perpetrator.
00:38:55.680But moving along, I was very happy at Oxford and, you know, generally it was a less violent culture.
00:39:04.820And so what question were you trying to address or questions were you trying to address when you were doing your master's work at Oxford?
00:39:12.180What was paramount in your mind and why?
00:39:15.940So I was very interested in the image of women in 19th century novels.
00:39:25.000This ideal that emerged in the 19th century in, well, in virtually all of the great novels, you know, certainly written by women, but also in Dickens and in George Eliot of this kind of passive, childlike, doll-like, beautiful kind of inert figure.
00:39:48.780And I was interested in that because this passive, inert stereotype of femininity was emerging at just the time that there was historically the first wave of feminism in any Western society.
00:40:01.720In other words, women were organizing.
00:40:03.500They were organizing to defeat laws that were punitive in which women who looked like prostitutes could be taken off the street, you know, without due process.
00:40:13.820And they were organizing to, you know, have access to education, to have access to owning their own property so that there was a very vibrant and they were mobilizing for access to primary education as well.
00:40:29.960So right when women were being empowered and empowering themselves to change society, this inert kind of backlash figure got constructed in as a cultural ideal.
00:40:47.740I mean, the representation of women in Victorian era literature in other countries, I think, was broader than that.
00:41:00.080So the women in Tolstoy, for example, Tolstoy is a very good example.
00:41:04.260I mean, the females in Dostoevsky novels are very complex psychologically.
00:41:07.820All his characters are, but in Tolstoy's novels in particular, you get the sense that in the Victorian period and earlier in Imperial Russia, that the women were really running the society behind the scenes.
00:41:21.780Now, the men had the positions of formal nomenclature, but they were, in the Tolstoyan world, they were really appendages to what was actually going on.
00:41:32.880The women were running society and gluing society together behind the scenes.
00:41:38.840And, I mean, Tolstoy is more of a sociologist in that regard, but his female characters certainly aren't playing a secondary role, even though it's a behind-the-scenes role in some ways.
00:41:52.260In fact, I would argue the opposite is the case in Tolstoy's world.
00:41:56.340I have no idea to what degree that was actually the case in Imperial Russia, but I suspect it was probably the case to quite a degree.
00:42:04.600Yeah, well, I'm sure it was the case, you know, everywhere that women didn't have full legal rights.
00:42:11.240But I think what you're saying is exactly right, but it's also respectfully, I think, you know, proving my thesis, which went on to kind of morph into the thesis of the beauty myth, which was my first book, which is that Britain was the place in which women were, above all European countries, advocating for their rights legally and socially and economically.
00:42:35.160Therefore, this backlash figure emerged, whereas in Imperial Russia, women had virtually no legal rights, and so this backlash figure didn't need to emerge.
00:42:45.940They could be portrayed in all of their complexity because they weren't a threat to the status quo.
00:42:51.140You described the Victorian English representation of women in the literary domain as a backlash, and I guess I'm curious about which authors in particular you think that was characteristic of, and then why you think that there would be a backlash of that sort.
00:43:11.600Like, what's your literary critic interpretation of the fact that that phenomena emerged, phenomena emerged?
00:43:22.360Yeah, so I guess I focused most on Dickens' doll-like characters.
00:43:30.240But also, if you look at Middlemarch, there's a very common kind of pairing in fiction in the middle of the 19th century, especially written by women, in which there's, you know, Dorothea Kasabin, who's complex and has it rich in her life, and is, you know, quite a revolutionary in her own right, trying to change society.
00:43:55.800And then her kind of antagonist, her antagonist, who's this kind of, you know, pretty, usually blonde, passive, manipulative, superficial character.
00:44:07.360And you see that kind of dialectic in other novels at that time, but also just in popular culture.
00:44:14.660I mean, it was the dawn of popular, you know, pop culture in the sense of lithography, and pretty soon photography by the 1840s, 1850s.
00:44:29.720And so you're also getting these beauty ideals, which were impossible, of, you know, 17-inch waists, corsets in which women couldn't breathe, literally the fashion of the middle of the 19th century, in contrast to just like the 1820s, 18-teens, where, you know, in Jane Austen's time, women could move around, right?
00:44:51.540They could breathe, they could walk, they could argue, they could, you know, express their full personalities, even though they had no legal rights, by the 1850s, with hoop skirts that were kind of five feet in diameter, and posed a threat of, you know, setting you up in flames if you've got too near the fire.
00:45:09.280Layers of petticoats, as I mentioned, whalebone corsets that really didn't let you take a deep breath, you know, clothing that weighed several pounds, just, you know, in terms of the weight of what you had to wear, changes of clothes multiple times a day if you're middle class, the fact that you're dragging your skirts through kind of manure and mud.
00:45:32.400And all of this, interestingly, this kind of hampering fashion came about at just those decades in which women were working on.
00:45:43.760Let me ask you a question about that, a couple of questions about that.
00:45:48.660So, the first, I have two very different questions.
00:45:52.920The first is, is that syphilis really became a widespread public health concern amongst the Victorians.
00:46:02.180And it was a very dreadful disease and took a very large number of forms and also was transmissible from mother to child.
00:46:12.120And interestingly enough, the Europeans, when they hit the Western Hemisphere, brought a whole host of extremely serious transmissible diseases with them, measles and mumps and smallpox.
00:46:25.380And that devastated the native community, maybe up to 95% of the native community.
00:46:31.580And the native community returned the favor in very minor ways, one of which apparently was syphilis.
00:46:37.820And so there was a real twist in sexual mores that characterized the Victorian period, in part because syphilis was such a terror.
00:46:46.980I think the AIDS scare was nothing compared to the syphilis scare.
00:46:51.580And so it's hard to know exactly what the emergent fact of syphilis did to the conceptualization of the relationships between men and women on the sexual front.
00:47:03.420It certainly made prostitution, for example, a much greater public health danger.
00:47:10.880Another question is the Victorian era was characterized by the generation of a substantive amount of wealth.
00:47:18.820And one could argue that part of what was happening on the Victorian beauty front was the advertisement by aristocrats that they could tolerate this encumbrance in the name of beauty because they had the financial resources to sustain it.
00:47:39.520There's an example of that biologically would be, in principle, would be the peacock's tail, which is extraordinarily beautiful, but also quite the encumbrance.
00:47:48.820And apparently part of what it signifies, especially if it's perfectly symmetrical and well-formed and heavy, is that the male who sports that plumage has sufficient health and resources to pull that off without dying.
00:48:04.860And so now, it seems to me that some of those Victorian excesses are reasonably understood on the biological front as manifestations of that kind of, what would you say?
00:48:18.820Well, it's an exuberance of display on the sexual front.
00:48:24.900Now, there might be all sorts of negative consequences of that in relationship to other elements of women's, well, men and women's lives.
00:48:31.220But, so, well, so those are two parallel questions.
00:48:34.520How do you think the emergence of syphilis transformed the relationships between men and women politically and socially in Victorian England in particular?
00:48:46.100And what do you think about the excess resource hypothesis on the Victorian outfitting front?
00:48:53.020People were getting quite rich at that point, and that was certainly one way of displaying it.
00:49:00.100So, certainly, you're absolutely right about the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea as very fundamental to social concerns around sexuality in Britain in the 19th century.
00:49:17.960And that was, you know, the source of the Contagious Diseases Act was this argument by the state.
00:49:23.080And I think, you know, I think, I think it's my most recent book, Outrages, which addresses this, the book before my last one, is about how 19th century viral epidemics, including contagious diseases like gonorrhea, but also typhus and cholera, were used by the state as a kind of pretext for controlling people and subverting their civil liberties.
00:49:48.680So, definitely, the argument of the state was, you know, these prostitutes or women who look like prostitutes are vectors of disease.
00:49:56.740They have to be managed and controlled, and it's the state's role to step into what had been very personal spaces and mediate this for the public good, right?
00:50:09.080There's an emergent literature on the political biological front indicating that one of the best predictors of authoritarian political beliefs in any given geographical locale, so you can do this state by state or county by county or country by country, it scales, is the prevalence of infectious disease.
00:50:32.080The higher the prevalence of infectious disease, the higher the probability of authoritarian political attitudes, and the correlation isn't like 0.1 or 0.2, the correlation is like 0.6.
00:50:43.980It's an unbelievably powerful relationship, and it seems like an extension of what's called the behavioral immune system, and it can really get going.
00:50:53.020Well, we saw that during COVID, right?
00:50:55.660Instantaneous transformation into something approximating authoritarianism and the motivational justification.
00:51:03.180What's so interesting and horrible about this, by the way, is that that's not a fear-based motivation.
00:51:09.200It's a disgust-based motivation, and disgust is a lot more aggressive than fear, because if you're afraid of something, you tend to avoid it.
00:51:18.880Whereas if you're disgusted by something, your fundamental motivation is to eradicate it by any means necessary.
00:51:25.780If you look, for example, at the language that Hitler and his minions used when they were ramping up their public health pathology, prevention pathology, to extend out of the mental asylums and the hospitals into more broad ethnic cleansing,
00:51:43.520all the language they used, all the language they used was parasitism, disgust, contamination, all disease-associated.
00:51:58.940You know, it's so interesting to hear your analysis from a psychological point of view, and I know there's been important psychological work done on disgust.
00:52:07.180I would actually say it from a geopolitical perspective, what happened in the 19th century, not just with contagious diseases, but with the typhus and cholera epidemics of the 1840s and early 1850s, which were devastating, just wiped out.
00:52:25.080So, you know, people would be kind of sick on Sunday and dead on Wednesday.
00:52:29.220That created a model in Western history that allowed later regimes to emulate the model of kind of narrating the danger of infectious diseases, certainly using that element of disgust and contamination, existential threat, as a pretext for what authoritarians always want to do, which is eradicate liberties and consolidate control.
00:52:56.020So I think it's happening on two fronts, right?
00:52:58.400It happens organically on the psychological front, but then the state jumps in and says, well, we can save you from this existential threat, just hand over all your rights.
00:53:08.460And I think that looking back, you know, certainly Hitler and, you know, then later other exploiters of this discourse, either consciously or not referenced or remembered the effectiveness of the state stepping in in the 19th century.
00:53:25.880Because what the state did, which is so fascinating, is that they created, they solved the infectious diseases threat by creating a network of sewers, Basil Getz's network of sewers under London.
00:53:37.600And the first municipal sewage system solved the problem, largely.
00:53:43.760And so that was a fantastic argument for the state to say, look, individuals can't do this.
00:53:49.420You know, the individual home with its cesspit, with its, you know, miasmas is the source of contamination.
00:53:55.800One person's private contamination affects the commons.
00:53:59.440Therefore, you need the state to mediate the commons.
00:54:02.160And the metaphor that I look at then is the, like the internet, right?
00:54:06.520You know, it established this idea that there's a commons between us that can be contaminated from one person's private space to another person's private space.
00:54:14.960And therefore, the state needs to patrol and police the commons.
00:54:18.740Yeah, well, there's a real analog between the spread of information and the spread of viruses, which is obviously why we say such things as it went viral.
00:54:30.340Well, and there's a real tension in human discourse that seems to be key to the distinction between conservatives and liberals is the conservatives tend to be more disgust sensitive.
00:54:40.200And they're more prone to react negatively to the potentially contaminating effects of interpersonal interaction.
00:54:49.840And that could be sexual or intellectual.
00:54:51.740The liberal types are, it's as if the liberals bet that the advantage to free exchange will outperform the disadvantage of contamination, whereas the conservatives tend to make the opposite bet.
00:55:07.240And the technical complexity of that is that sometimes the conservatives are right and sometimes the liberals are right, right?
00:55:17.000It depends because the conservatives tend to be more correct, let's say, when multiple epidemics are raging out of control.
00:55:24.780Whereas the liberals tend to be more correct when, for whatever reason, the probability of genuine contagion is relatively low and you can take advantage of cross-border freedom and movement of information and people.
00:55:39.600But it's a continual battle because, you know, this also complicates the sexual realm to an immense degree because, of course, sexual intercourse is an excellent vector for disease transmission.
00:55:55.000And that throws people into an existential quandary constantly because, obviously, the drive towards reproduction and the drive towards sexual pleasure opens up the danger on the epidemic front.
00:56:08.220We certainly saw that with the rise of AIDS, for example.
00:56:10.480I mean, there's no doubt, biologically speaking, that the AIDS virus mutated to take advantage of certain forms of promiscuity.
00:56:18.320And so that's an absolute bloody catastrophe and could have been, well, an apocalyptic catastrophe, although we seem to have got more or less on top of it.
00:56:27.920There's always that specter of large-scale contamination lurking in the background on the ideational and the physical front.
00:56:35.880And people certainly differ widely in their instinctive reactions to that, too.
00:56:40.660And so IQ is actually associated with disgust sensitivity, as it turns out.
00:56:46.380So the lower your IQ, the more disgust sensitive you are.
00:56:51.740Now, the effect isn't walloping, but it's not negative.
00:56:54.660Well, you can also understand that, eh?
00:56:56.340Because imagine this, is that the smarter you are, the more useful the free exchange of information is because you can take advantage of it.
00:57:04.440Well, if you can't take advantage of it, you're differentially exposed to the threat of contamination.
00:57:09.540And so that makes things, as if things aren't complicated enough already, that adds an additional dimension of complexity.
00:57:17.240One of the things that I learned that was truly horrifying, by the way, was the degree to which the progressive campaign towards ethnic extermination in Germany was driven by public health concerns and a hypothetical compassion that underlay that.
00:57:33.620And if you examine that developmentally, it's actually quite terrifying because the Nazis actually started their, what eventually became their extermination campaigns with public health campaigns that were quite effective at eliminating tuberculosis.
00:57:49.280Yeah, so I, a thousand percent, so to move up to the 20th century, and this brings us kind of to my more recent work, absolutely, there's a fantastic book called Racial Hygiene, and of course the classic, The Nazi Doctors, that makes just this point that before there were, before the Nazis were even in power, there was this very effective public health campaign that enlisted, just like in the last few years,
00:58:18.840medical professional associations, enlisted doctors, you know, played on their desire for status and recognition, and they were kind of corralled into being the moderators of racial hygiene, and that took the shape, of course, of rounding up teenagers who were impaired and sending them off for treatment, and then their families never saw them again.
00:58:45.420And that was years before, and that was years before the extermination camps.
00:58:49.480Yeah, well, the whole doctrine of racial purity and blood purity, which was a hallmark of Hitler's populist attractiveness, let's say, was all contamination language.
00:59:02.280And I read Hitler's table talk, for example, it's a very interesting book, so it's a collection of his spontaneous discourse at dinnertime over about a four-year period, and it's absolutely 100% saturated, it's disgust-oriented language, and he bathed four or five times a day.
00:59:22.620Yeah, yeah, well, and also, he was a worshiper of will, power, and there's a really tight relationship between that proclivity for authoritarian control and the exercise of what you might describe as power and will, and that seems integrally associated with the disgust axis and the activation of what's being described as the extended immune system.
00:59:47.740And so, a disgust response is part of the behavioral immune system, right?
00:59:52.260So, if you see something disgusting and you gag, that's a physiological response, obviously, to some degree, but it's also a psychological response.
01:00:00.820And that sense that you want to flee from or clean yourself if you've been contaminated is also an element of the behavioral immune system.
01:00:08.000I mean, if it gets politicized in a particularly pathological way, you don't want to be in the category of contaminant, put it that way.
01:00:17.960Because there's no mercy, there's no mercy, right?
01:00:20.460There's no mercy, yes, I've heard that.
01:00:21.980Weirdly enough, too, you know, when the disgust literature started to roll out, the proclivity for disgust-associated contamination seemed to be more typical of people who had a conservative bent.
01:00:38.580It's associated with conscientiousness, for example, and I don't understand this at all.
01:00:43.520Well, something has changed in the last four or five years because you've seen the left possessed by this contamination frenzy, both on the ideational front in the form of cancel culture, but also in the—and I have no idea what to make of this.
01:00:57.860I mean, to me, it's an absolute mystery, miracle in some sense, that the left allied themselves with the pharmaceutical companies because I couldn't imagine that ever happening in my entire life.
01:01:08.080It's like, I thought you people put the pharmaceutical companies up there with the energy companies, let's say, in terms of intrinsically reprehensible, and then all of a sudden, under the COVID pressure, I mean, it's not like conservatives reacted much better because they really didn't, but it's still very surprising to see the left doing that.
01:01:28.560And I don't really understand what's changed in the culture so that the left has picked up this contamination frenzy and has introduced it into extended immune-adjacent behaviors like cancel culture, which is a form of disgust-related shunning.
01:01:46.800Yeah, you anticipated what I was going to say.
01:01:48.760I think, I think, in recent memory, before 2020, indeed, it was the right that was more reactive to not wanting to be—and they used language like this in the 80s, and it wasn't pretty.
01:02:02.700You know, I remember in the 80s, you know, I remember in the 80s epidemic, it was conservatives talking about infectious, the fear of infection from homosexuals, or, you know, and it was ideological infection, cultural infection, as well as a fear, which was irrational, of physical infection.
01:02:22.800But, but indeed, the polls had completely flipped, and it used to be, as you say, that liberals in America, and I'm using the American usage of liberals, people on the left, were more open to cross-pollinating ideas, more open to immigrants, more open to the strange, the other, the alien, you know, more open to freedom, right?
01:02:47.000It's civil, free speech, the free speech movement, and it was conservatives who were, you know, concerned about porousness, if you like, you know, ideologically, and on a community level, maybe even on a personal level, purity.
01:03:00.500And, and absolutely, in the last three years, I agree with you, like a mania, like tulip mania, like, you know, I keep going back to extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds.
01:03:14.940You know, a delusion has come upon the left in the last three years since COVID that leads them to be more masky, more irrational about infection from COVID, more shunning, you know, more shunning in a kind of tribal Old Testament sort of way than anyone could have ever believed, and to have forgotten all of their critical thinking about things like.
01:03:38.420I wonder if, well, you see, one of the ways that Trump appealed to his populist conservative base was by using imagery of the wall, and that's pretty effective imagery when you're appealing to people who are intrinsically conservative, but I wonder, maybe what's happened is something like this, is that the rate of change has accelerated to such a degree that it's even exceeded the psychological capacity of those who are more open and creative to assimilate, right?
01:04:07.900Because we've never been in a situation like that in the history of the world, I mean, I was ill for about two years, and I was out of the technological world, and so all my computers got outdated, for example, and, you know, it took me about six months to put all my electronics back together so I could understand them after only a two-year hiatus.
01:04:29.900And we're in a situation now where there is unbelievably radical change in virtually every dimension of human endeavor that you can possibly imagine, and we don't really know what even creative people, how even creative people will react when even their capacity for transformation has been exceeded.
01:04:49.220So maybe you're seeing the emergence of a strange kind of conservatism on the more open left that wouldn't have been likely in a time when things were changing somewhat slower, because I have no idea what to make of it.
01:05:02.860I don't know. I don't know. I'm not persuaded, because, you know, the change is happening to everyone, and yet the people who are remaining open-minded, in my experience, and who are willing to engage with the facts that are being brought forward by credible people that contradict the dominant narrative, are conservatives and libertarians right now.
01:05:24.840Yeah, I know. It's very strange. And also, you see a lot of rise of humor on the conservative and libertarian side as well. And this is something I also can't make heads or tails of. I mean, emergence of organizations like the Babylon Bee, I mean, when they first emerged into the public consciousness, it was quite a shock to me, because I thought, well, how the hell did the conservatives get the comedians? Like, that's just not how things work.
01:05:49.580But it is how things work at the moment. Certainly, the funniest comedy shows I've seen in the last three or four years have all had a, I would say, a conservative or libertarian tilt to them, partly because those are the people who will say whatever it is that they have to say.
01:06:05.400And you see that in popular culture, too, on forums like Netflix. It is the more libertarian and conservative comedians who are certainly, A, the funniest, and also, B, pulling in the largest audiences. And so I don't know what to make of that.
01:06:19.580I mean, I think we can make of it. And I feel kind of empowered to say this as having spent my life on the left. You know, the left, hopefully temporarily, has lost its mind. So there's a lot more to make fun of. They're more rigid. And people who are rigid, I mean, going back to Charlie Chaplin and, you know, the great dictator, you know, rigidity is always funny. You know, it needs to have fun poked at it. And the left is more irrational right now.
01:06:47.240I mean, they're believing things that are not true, or they're not willing to admit that they've been wrong. Or, you know, in terms of my most recent work, they're not willing to admit that they've been part of a, you know, condoning or facilitating the greatest crime against humanity ever, which we haven't gotten into yet.
01:07:02.220But, you know, that's my view of the rollout of these mandates, the mRNA injections, which my team of experts has found to be so very deadly and so very damaging.
01:07:12.560So, you know, in a situation like that, grownups say, okay, you know, we've got to re-examine the facts. And I'm sorry. And they're not able to do that. They're being more and more stuck in delusion, more and more committed to delusion.
01:07:28.840And they created, they welcomed a two-tier society in, you know, erected in the space of less than two years that ostracized a whole sector of people and got them kicked out of their jobs, prevented kids who, you know, didn't have this injection from going to school in some states, you know, mandated people to their detriment.
01:07:51.980Restricted their travel rights immensely in Canada. Immensely. In a staggering manner.
01:08:00.020It's shocking. I can't go to Canada. Canada used to be the most reasonable Western country in the world. And I can't go to Canada for reasons that have nothing to do with science, right? Nothing to do with science.
01:08:10.880So the left betrayed all of its most cherished ideals and won't even face that. So there's a gaping moral hole in the center of culture on the left. And until they recognize it and reckon with it and say, oh my God, you know, we became oppressors.
01:08:31.880We became the equivalent of racist. You know, we abandoned our best ideals. We became dogmatists and fundamentalists. And we abandoned science. We abandoned compassion. Until they're able to do that, they can't come to terms with reality.
01:08:51.560Okay, so there's a lot to delve into there. I wanted to do that. I want to go back to your book, The Beauty Myth. And I want to say a few things on the beauty front and gather your reactions to those.
01:09:09.300And I also am interested in, I would say, the motivations behind writing that book in relationship to the experiences that we already described.
01:09:23.500So I spend a lot of time studying people like David Buss. And Buss is a very good example, an evolutionary psychologist.
01:09:30.420And I like David's work a lot. I think he's a very solid scientist. And there's been a lot of interesting work generated out of the evolutionary psychology literature on the gender relations front.
01:09:43.000So, for example, one of the more compelling findings from the evolutionary psychologists is the relationship between perceived sexual attractiveness, particularly in the long-term mating context, and socioeconomic status.
01:10:02.220Now, it's probably not socioeconomic status as indexed by wealth. It's probably wealth as an index of productive competence.
01:10:12.520But in any case, the correlation between perceived mate attractiveness with regards to women perceiving men, the correlation between socioeconomic status and perceived attractiveness is about 0.6,
01:10:27.720which is a higher correlation between general cognitive ability and grades, and I use that as an example because that's one of the most robust and powerful findings in the social sciences,
01:10:38.520whereas the correlation between socioeconomic status and perceived mate attractiveness for women by men is 0 or slightly negative.
01:10:46.480So, it's a walloping difference, and that's associated with the proclivity of women to preferentially mate across hierarchies and up, and men to mate across hierarchies and down.
01:10:58.680That's relatively well-established cross-culturally, and the proclivity doesn't ameliorate much in, say, the Scandinavian countries.
01:12:57.480It may actually have been 91, came out first in Britain and then in the United States.
01:13:01.680So respectfully, I'm familiar with these arguments and respectfully, I'm very familiar with David Buss's work.
01:13:09.180And I, I think that it's fundamentally flawed and I'll, I'll get to why.
01:13:14.920So first let me concede, you know, of course it's, it's thoroughly documented that there are markers of health and attractiveness, health and fertility that are often cross-cultural.
01:13:30.260Um, and certainly symmetrical features, um, you know, rosy skin showing good circulation, you know, youth, uh, all, all of those are kind of transcendental, um, markers for attractiveness.
01:13:47.540However, one giant intellectual flaw, respectfully in, um, pretty much all of the studies that I've seen of the evolutionary biologists is that they focus on these markers in women and they don't, um, test for what women find attractive in men.
01:14:03.420They, they project or they construct kind of experiments or surveys that prove tendentiously in my view that women find wealth, uh, or professional accomplishment attractive and that that kind of, uh, substitutes for physical beauty.
01:14:19.480But they don't ask women who are heterosexual, um, what are the markers for you of beauty in men or attractiveness in men?
01:14:27.300And if they did, and they don't, they would find broad shoulders.
01:14:50.080Like, they, they have, they have investigated that.
01:14:52.700I mean, there is a fair bit of overlap in the biomarkers, let's say, for what men and women find mutually physically attractive.
01:15:01.640Although the way that's manifested varies to some degree, as you pointed out, shoulder to waist ratio, for example, is a marker, as you can see in superhero portrayals of men, for example.
01:15:13.320And the, the, the, the, the cardinal difference seems to be, too, though, you know, it's also not the sophisticated evolutionary psychologists don't assume that women are after wealth.
01:15:25.400What they assume is that women will use markers of wealth as indicators of productive competence.
01:15:32.100Right, but let me get these, because to me, that's also a conceptual flaw.
01:15:36.720Um, I'll, I'll, I'll get to why in just a minute, but I know, I have to note for the record, as a feminist analyst, that I have literally never seen a study that asks women if they find penis size a marker for sexual attractiveness.
01:15:51.380And I think scientists don't want to run that study, male scientists don't want to run that study because it would be unpopular conclusions.
01:15:58.840Um, so I, I guess to me, the whole field of evolutionary biological studies that conclude that, um, sexual attractiveness is a, is, is kind of, um, gendered female and, uh, and that for males, there are other proxies for sexual attractiveness is really convenient for men.
01:16:17.540Um, because they don't have to come up against the raw brute fact that there are, you know, physical things women evaluate men for if they're heterosexual, just like there are physical things men evaluate for if they're heterosexual.
01:16:27.900Okay, so let me ask you about that a little bit, too, because you say that it's convenient for men.
01:16:33.400And so, I mean, I'm, I'm never certain what form of differential perception on the part of each sex is convenient for which sex.
01:16:45.720I mean, the entire sexual battlefield, let's say, is fraught with catastrophe and opportunity for both sexes.
01:16:52.680I mean, one of the things you do see, for example, is that women are much harsher in the evaluations of attractiveness of men than men are of women.
01:17:03.940So, women, men rate women, 50% of women as below attractive, below average in attractiveness.
01:17:11.060And women rate 80% of men as below average in physical attractiveness.
01:17:16.320And, well, and, and, like, I am, I want to be absolutely 100% crystal clear here that I am not blaming women for this.
01:17:26.160Now, it's in the interest of a woman, biologically and practically, to find a partner who is as competent, as competent as she is, or more competent.
01:17:39.340Because, fundamentally, what she's trying to do is redress the differential burden that reproduction places on women.
01:17:50.460I think that's out of date, respectfully, but I'll wait for you to finish.
01:17:53.480Okay, well, okay, well, so I'm curious about why you would, why you would consider that, because, consider that out of date.
01:18:00.580Because, first of all, one of the definitions of what constitutes female, biologically, is the female sex, biologically speaking, is almost invariably the sex that devotes more biological time and energy to reproduction than the alternative sex.
01:18:17.380So, you see that even at the level of sperm and egg, because the egg has a volume that is multiple thousands of times larger than the sperm.
01:18:27.280And even at that level, there's more resources being devoted to the difficult job of reproduction at the female level.
01:18:34.880And, of course, women have a nine-month gestation period, which is very onerous.
01:18:40.480And then, they do, they are charged with primary responsibility for infant caregiving, especially during the first year.
01:18:48.620And we know perfectly well that the differential burden of reproduction on women is such that single women who have a child are much more likely to descend into poverty.
01:19:02.620And the reason for that, at least in part, is, well, it's actually very difficult to have a child.
01:19:08.440And it's a 40-hour-a-week job at minimum.
01:19:11.800And to add the necessity of working and providing on top of that means an 80-hour work week.
01:19:19.180And so, it isn't obvious to me why the hypothesis that women would be motivated to redress that fundamental biological differential,
01:19:29.180I don't understand why that would be an objectionable hypothesis, even from the feminist perspective.
01:19:35.760Doesn't it just recognize that women are more at risk on the sexual and reproductive front?
01:19:41.740I mean, I recognize what you're saying there.
01:19:46.500I guess what I would say is there are as many.
01:19:49.940First, let me say, I think the whole field of evolutionary biology being presented to explain contemporary 21st century gender roles or expectations or norms is respectfully, I think it has almost no intellectual merit.
01:20:19.780And they're always talking about circumstances that no longer exist historically.
01:20:24.060So, you know, you could just as easily draw on, I believe it's Helen Fisher or other feminist evolutionary biologists who make the case that women are best served by adultery because they're getting a good range of sperm, you know, and the best suited sperm is the sperm that's going to win.
01:20:44.200That does account for cheating behavior and most of the evolutionary psychologists who have their act together take that into account is that what the optimal strategy, if you're being cold hearted about it biologically, especially for a woman who hasn't optimized her mate choice, might be to find someone stable and second rate and then cheat sporadically to produce that biological diversity.
01:21:10.500And that does seem to be something approximating a stable biological solution, even though I don't think it's an optimal one.
01:21:17.680So I think the sophisticated evolutionary psychologists have taken that into account.
01:21:22.660But let me just speak to why that kind of very beloved, and I have to notice that it's beloved, of the whole kind of, you know, Dawkins crowd, the whole selfish gene crowd is, kind of loves this idea of the young, fertile female.
01:21:40.500Who needs to find that unattractive, older, wealthy man, who happened to be a scientist, and also, you know, accounts for, or always gives males a kind of, well, you're just polygamist, or you just need lots of sexual partners, and it's good for, you know, it's good for the reproduction of the race, of the species.
01:22:01.880So the reason I find these tendentious, and especially, you know, this notion of women optimizing the material value of their partner to make up for their reproductive deficits, is that, respectfully, it's out of date.
01:22:20.060And what I mean by that is, I totally concede that, you know, women, it's hard to be pregnant, it's hard to have a baby, it puts you at a disadvantage, certainly, it's not accounted for in, you know, contemporary work expectations, more so since the pandemic, when everyone's at home.
01:22:36.460But, you know, when you had to go to work, obviously, it's put women at a disadvantage, and they needed a provider for those two years.
01:22:43.860But I will say that now, I think that young men, for instance, like a whole phenomenon that I find fascinating, I might find, I might find it fascinating as an older woman who's married a much younger man, but I find it fascinating that when I was writing the beauty myth, older women were considered done reproductively or sexually.
01:23:03.700And now, that's no longer the case. And that there's this whole kind of expectation now of young men finding older women who are materially successful, and who can, you know, provide them with a good lifestyle, really attractive.
01:23:20.860So I think that the evolutionary biologists haven't accounted for that, you know, even women past reproductive age, who are financially successful, are considered really attractive to young men now.
01:23:32.620So that's a 21st century phenomenon. It never used to exist. And the other thing that didn't used to exist is, if women have enough material resources now, they can hire someone. And I'm not saying this is optimal. It's very sad. I'm with you on the value of the nuclear family.
01:23:49.600But, you know, if they haven't married someone who can look after them for that brief window, when a baby and, you know, a nursing baby is impeding your ability to kind of go it on your own. Totally agree with that.
01:24:04.520They can hire someone to help with those two years. So really, the penalties for being a single mom, it's not easy. If you don't have resources, I completely concede you're going to kind of go down the socioeconomic scale.
01:24:18.480But if you do have resources, that's no longer the case. And that's why you're seeing, you know, so much of what you criticize, 21st century economic opportunities have made it possible to be an affluent single mom, hire a caregiver, hire, you know, someone to help you raise the baby, basically, when the baby's tiny.
01:24:37.840And then starting from three years old, you know, there are, there are childcare centers, daycare centers that will take the baby. And so I think the evolutionary biologists haven't accounted for what is going to result from that. It's what we've seen result from it, which is, I'm sorry to be rude, but the value of men has gone down.
01:24:56.080And I think that, respectfully, that's one of the things I think is most useful about your work. Respectfully, I've been thinking about this. I think that's why you've been so targeted by the establishment,
01:25:06.280is that you talk about the value of men, and you talk about, you know, how men can be relevant in, and consider themselves to be relevant and have a role in 21st century society.
01:25:16.300So I think the great unspoken or under analyzed phenomenon of 21st century is the deconstruction of the value of men, which completely upends the evolutionary biologists kind of narrative about men and women.
01:25:31.080And, you know, respectfully, to kind of end on a happy note, I do think the value of your work is that you're trying to give men, and succeeding in a lot of ways, a role in 21st century society in which they, they do have, they do have value, but it's not going to be the same value they had for women to go to love.
01:25:49.660Well, it's an interesting, that's an interesting subtopic, because, you know, I've insisted to my viewers and listeners, who are disproportionately male on the YouTube front, mostly because YouTube is disproportionately male, it's about 75-25, and so I don't differ from that much, by the way.
01:26:10.540In fact, I think I think I have more female viewers than average, by that baseline standard.
01:26:17.140You know, I've suggested to my young male viewers continually that if they're rejected by all women out of hand, that they have to take that burden onto themselves, and not assume that all the women are wrong, and that what they should strive to do, well, the probability that you're right and 4 billion people are wrong is 1 in 4 billion.
01:26:38.140It's rather low, and so you have to take that as a brute fact in some sense, and it might be unfair in that women, like men, use a set of criteria that you could describe as arbitrary in some sense to make their judgments, but there's some things you're not going to win an argument against, and that's definitely one of them.
01:26:59.120But one of the things I've suggested to young men is that if they concentrated on making themselves productive and generous, that the probability that that will increase their ability to find a mate is extraordinarily high, and I do think that's the case, and that advantage accrues as men mature.
01:27:20.080So what do you think of that as a tack?
01:27:23.460I want to thank you for my marriage, because you are my husband's, he said, tell him he's my spirit animal, you are one of my husband's kind of role models, and he listened to you, and so unlike other men of his generation, he was all about picking up the check and being a provider, and it's really attractive.
01:27:54.540Well, so now I'm going to throw a little bit of a wrench in your argument.
01:27:58.400It was attractive to me because everyone likes someone who is competent enough to, you know, make money, I guess, at whatever level they're making money.
01:28:10.080It shows that they're not a feckless, immature, you know, dependent person.
01:28:14.360And everyone likes someone who can look after them.
01:28:18.760But what I'm going to add there is that I think men like women who can look after them, too.
01:28:23.660And I think men like women who are competent, too.
01:28:26.420And I think just like it's sexy when a man picks up a check, it's sexy when a woman picks up a check, you know, in due course.
01:28:33.280And I've heard plenty of men say, you know, well, I took her out three or four or five or six times, and she never made a gesture to pick up the check.
01:28:40.600And that's not attractive because women, you know, now...
01:28:44.260I think that's the attractiveness of reciprocity.
01:28:46.960You know, it's one of the things you really do want in a partner over the long run, and there's probably nothing more important than this in a business relationship or a friendship or an intimate relationship, is that fundamentally the relationship to be self-sustaining has to be reciprocal.
01:29:04.020And that doesn't mean that everybody gets obsessive about making sure that the distributions are 50-50, because they really should be 75-75, right?
01:29:13.860If you're in a productive relationship, both of you are...
01:29:18.860What you both receive is more than the sum total of what you both contribute, right?
01:29:26.140And I think part of the reason that men will appreciate women who pick up a check is not necessarily because it's an indication of their competence, although I think that's part of it.
01:29:36.520I think it is definitely an indication of their willingness and ability to reciprocate, which is fundamentally...
01:29:43.900Now, I don't know, and I don't know of any research that pertains specifically to that issue.
01:29:49.960But I guess what I'm saying to jump in is that I think your analysis and the evolutionary biologist analysis is productively updated by this reality, which is fairly new, that both genders are surveilling the landscape for people who are not only sexually and reproductively attractive,
01:30:15.060but who will reciprocate, who will take care of them, who can provide, who are not dependent.
01:30:21.040And I do think that the kind of woman who was considered very sexy in the, you know, 60s when I was a child is no longer considered sexy because she's not able to contribute to the household.
01:30:35.740You know, that doll-like, you know, what is her name, twiggy-like, you know, inert, voiceless person.
01:30:46.560I mean, men who are competent may kind of give it a passing, admiring glance or have a one-night stand with her, but I don't think that that has a high value any longer as a life partner.
01:30:59.740Do you think that's a historical transformation or do you think it's more a return to something approximating eternal norm?
01:31:08.080Because here's something interesting, for example, the name Eve, the Hebrew, original Hebrew term for the name Eve, which unfortunately I can't remember at the moment, means beneficial adversary.
01:31:23.740So, yeah, yes, it does. It does. And there's a notion there that the person who's the most well-matched to you as a potential partner is not someone who passively submits to your demands, partly because your demands might be unreasonable and pathological and that's not good for you or them,
01:31:43.960but someone who's capable of engaging you in something like a provocative and challenging reciprocal play.
01:31:52.700If you pick a play partner in a game, one-on-one basketball, for example, you're not going to pick someone that you can easily dominate if you have any sense because it's not any fun.
01:32:05.120What you really want is someone who can spar with you at the limit of your ability.
01:32:10.220And that's a strange way of conceptualizing a relationship, but it's not strange if you know anything about how people engage in the processes that lead to further learning, for example, or the expansion of skill,
01:32:24.560is you're looking for the edge of optimal competition.
01:32:27.680And I think there were periods of time, and the Victorian period in England that you described might have been one of them, where the female ideal is tilted more towards one of passivity,
01:32:39.780and that might have been a reaction, as you pointed out, to the increased agitation on the female front for a broader role in the public polity.
01:32:49.900But it isn't obvious to me that, historically speaking, the feminine ideal has been passive.
01:32:58.780No, quite. I'm so glad you said that we're completely in alignment about that.
01:33:02.960What I'm describing is a return to a pre-industrial ideal,
01:33:07.980and it is only in the last 150 years or 200 years that the Industrial Revolution even made it possible to have what you described earlier,
01:33:17.640which is Thorsten Veblen's description of a kind of doll-like middle-class woman whose only role is to be dressed and displayed and to display the wealth of her spouse.
01:33:29.080That is recent, and before the Industrial Revolution, and in America, which is why America is so interesting,
01:33:37.000and American women are all around the world until recently admired as sexy, independent women, right?
01:33:43.960Is you needed a partner who could, if you're going West, who could use a rifle if the Native Americans came to the homestead when the man was out hunting,
01:33:54.680or if you were, you know, in a feudal society, could weave or manage the crops or the kitchen garden or, you know, all the, like,
01:34:05.460like literally a household before the Industrial Revolution had as active a female sphere as a male sphere productively, and that only changed.
01:34:19.780Exactly. So absolutely women, and this goes back to the Old Testament, you know, that the value of eshet chayel, a woman of valor, her price is above rubies,
01:34:29.560and then it iterates all the things she does.
01:34:31.720She, you know, she weaves cloths, she sells things to bring, you know, income for the household.
01:34:37.700She's got so many areas of economic activity as well as moral activity, and that's been true for most of human history.
01:34:45.840So those things were always, you know, part of the marital equation before the 19th century, you know, not just is she beautiful conventionally, physically, but what are her skill sets?
01:35:00.740How does she embroider? How does she cook? You know, can she keep people alive?
01:35:06.260And so I'm disagreeing with you about that.
01:35:09.040So then I'm just, like, updating it for a contemporary moment in which people live longer than ever, arguably healthy women past their childbearing years have the ability, like, you know, we were all kind of decrepit crones, you know, by now, women past their childbearing years.
01:35:31.220And that's no longer the case because of changes in health and, I don't know, what else?
01:35:39.320And then also the economic, you know, potential of women, as I mentioned earlier, has changed so much, at least women who are middle or upper middle class,
01:35:49.140that that, I think, effectively updates your analysis.
01:35:54.160But I love the place you're landing on, which is good mating habits extend, challenge the skill sets of both genders.
01:36:04.820And there I would say this is not new at all from a woman's perspective or women's literary history, because look at Jane Austen.