The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 466. Reappropriating Feminism, Maternity, and the Woman’s Role

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00:00:57.420 Hello, everybody.

00:01:09.380 I had the chance today to talk to Mary Harrington, author of Feminism Against Progress, which was published in 2023.

00:01:18.480 Mary's analysis is that the feminist body of thought emerged in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution,

00:01:28.520 when men and women were both recalibrating their social roles, and that it had divided into the feminism of care,

00:01:36.060 which is less classically feminist, and the feminism of freedom, which is what most people would identify with feminism now.

00:01:42.440 We talked also about the transhumanist spin, let's say, on the feminism of freedom, discussing the invention of the birth control pill and its radical effects on individuals and society.

00:01:57.880 Radical and in many ways perverse effects, because the pill was touted as the gateway to the hedonistic sexual utopian universe of ultimate equality and gratification of every whim,

00:02:11.480 and actually turned very rapidly into universal abortion at the rate of a million a year in the United States.

00:02:19.200 The radical destabilization of sexual relations between men and women, handing women over to their worst whims,

00:02:26.240 and also to psychopathic men who are much more likely to engage in short-term sexual strategies,

00:02:33.300 and then the general commodification of female sexuality, let's say, on the pornography front,

00:02:40.100 which occupies about 25% of internet traffic.

00:02:43.600 Anyways, we weave our way through all of that, and so join us.

00:02:49.560 So, Mary, you launched your book, Feminism Against Progress, in spring of 2023.

00:02:57.460 So, why don't you start by walking us through the book and the argument that you were making there?

00:03:03.040 Okay, well, it's a story in three parts, I guess.

00:03:08.360 There's a past, a present, and a future.

00:03:11.340 And really what I set out to do was answer a question which had become clear to me after I myself had a child,

00:03:19.720 which was, why is it that motherhood is such a blind spot, it seems, in the women's movement?

00:03:26.900 And as I read into that, pushing my buggy around the streets of small-town England and reading, as you do,

00:03:35.440 I began to realize that it's not exactly that motherhood is a blind spot in the women's movement,

00:03:41.460 and in fact, a great many feminist writers have tackled the question of motherhood one way or another.

00:03:47.000 But somehow, whenever somebody sets out to make the case for mums within feminism,

00:03:51.560 it ends up as the poor relation, it ends up being just left to one side and forgotten.

00:03:57.440 And then somebody has to come up and say, well, what about mothers all over again?

00:04:01.280 And then that gets forgotten again, and it keeps happening.

00:04:03.700 And so I had this question, why?

00:04:07.660 And to cut along, cut a very long story, rather shorter,

00:04:11.760 I came to the, as I just delved into the question,

00:04:16.220 I began to think that we were looking at the question of feminism wrong.

00:04:23.000 I mean, it all started to, and when I,

00:04:25.620 I found myself having to answer the question,

00:04:27.720 is it possible to be a feminist if you don't believe in progress?

00:04:30.340 Really, and this, I mean, I realized I didn't,

00:04:32.580 I stopped believing in progress before I had a kid.

00:04:36.180 And then when I had a kid, I realized I was still a feminist,

00:04:39.320 but I had these questions about the women's movement,

00:04:42.180 and I also still didn't believe, and I also no longer believed in progress.

00:04:46.800 And when I put those pieces together, it didn't seem,

00:04:50.300 it didn't seem obvious to me what the solution should be.

00:04:57.300 Because it's always been the case, whenever I've said to somebody,

00:05:01.480 well, I don't believe in progress, they say,

00:05:02.900 haha, but do you want to go back to being without the vote?

00:05:06.180 Would you like to be the property of your husband, perhaps?

00:05:09.220 You know, what about all of those other ways that life has changed for the better for women?

00:05:13.500 And I thought, well, this is kind of a head-scratcher,

00:05:14.900 because actually, you know, these people kind of have a point.

00:05:17.560 But on the other hand, here I am, you know, feeling pretty lonely and pretty invisible

00:05:22.700 in terms of the women's movement, pushing my buggy around small-town England.

00:05:26.160 And I feel as though, you know, in some respects, things have got a whole lot better,

00:05:29.420 and in other respects, they kind of haven't.

00:05:31.300 And so how do I put together the picture of, you know, progress on the one hand,

00:05:35.280 feminism on the other, and try and make sense of where we are?

00:05:39.080 And eventually, I came to the conclusion that, yes, you can be a feminist if you don't believe

00:05:44.960 in progress, but it depends a bit what you mean by feminism and a bit what you mean by progress.

00:05:48.960 And so I embarked on this extended reread of the history of the women's movement,

00:05:54.360 really in terms of technology, in terms of a phenomenon which began with the Industrial Revolution,

00:06:00.640 and with the transformations that came about in women's lives with the Industrial Revolution.

00:06:05.380 And as a set of usually very legitimate and very justified responses to a wholesale disruption

00:06:16.020 and upending and upheaval of what family life had hitherto more or less been.

00:06:21.780 And I mean, of course, this varies a little bit from geography to geography and culture to culture.

00:06:25.960 But I mean, I'm broadly writing about white bourgeois women in the English-speaking West,

00:06:30.500 because, I mean, that's where I stand.

00:06:32.820 So it seems, and if we're honest, you know, the majority of the history of feminism is really

00:06:38.980 anglophone and bourgeois and white.

00:06:41.280 So it seems a reasonable place to start.

00:06:43.360 Yeah, none of that is to say that there are no other worthwhile perspectives,

00:06:46.820 but this is the one that I have.

00:06:48.020 So I decided to tell that story.

00:06:50.620 And that's a story of women making a transition from broadly an agrarian subsistence life in the Middle Ages

00:07:02.240 where everybody worked, but they worked in the context of productive households.

00:07:07.300 So really, the home was the basic unit of work in the pre-modern world.

00:07:12.460 And women had, there was women's work and there was men's work, but really, you know,

00:07:16.340 outside very aristocratic households, everybody worked.

00:07:19.560 And women's work just happened to take place with children underfoot.

00:07:23.360 And it was generally of a kind which was compatible with having children underfoot.

00:07:28.680 And none of this was really a sort of, none of this was so much a kind of prescriptive thing

00:07:33.660 about who ought to be doing what because of some set of moral characteristics,

00:07:37.780 but more a pragmatic response to men and women's different physiologies

00:07:42.140 and the needs of infant children, which are considerable, as you'll know, as a parent.

00:07:48.600 And so that was the pre-modern world.

00:07:50.820 But then when the Industrial Revolution came along, it first removed men.

00:07:54.560 It first removed fathers from the productive household

00:07:57.280 and drained male workers away into factories, into offices,

00:08:01.680 into other working environments elsewhere increasingly.

00:08:04.540 And then as time wore on, it also began to drain away women's work

00:08:10.720 by producing as consumer products most of the goods

00:08:17.200 which women had previously made at home.

00:08:20.000 So, for example, textile making has, there's some sort of 20, 30, 40,000 years

00:08:25.880 of that being classically women's work.

00:08:28.900 There's an absolutely ancient history of weaving being women's work,

00:08:32.860 which makes sense in the context of an ordinary subsistence home

00:08:37.880 because you can lift a loom off the ground so the baby doesn't get tangled up in it.

00:08:45.040 It's social work, which you can do in company with children underfoot.

00:08:50.440 And anthropologists and historians have done extensive work and research

00:08:55.160 into why it just makes sense from a material and a practical point of view

00:08:58.340 for textile making to have been historically women's work.

00:09:01.280 And yet textile making was one of the first domains to be industrialised,

00:09:07.960 first with the spinning jenny and then later on with mechanical looms.

00:09:12.920 And there's a whole radical history in Britain in the early period

00:09:17.300 of the Industrial Revolution when the textile makers were smashing

00:09:20.260 the mechanical looms because they could see the end

00:09:22.500 of their home-based subsistence life looming up in front of them

00:09:27.300 in the form of these machines, which had just taken the work from them.

00:09:32.860 And the secondary effect of that was that women's work went away

00:09:37.680 because you could just buy cloth, and that was a whole lot easier.

00:09:41.040 And there are countless other examples of a similar dynamic taking place.

00:09:45.580 And the upshot of all of this is that an increasing body of the work

00:09:51.180 that women had previously done in the home simply went away.

00:09:54.300 And their role was, in the course of that, very much reduced.

00:09:58.800 And so until far from being, as in a lot of pre-modern contexts,

00:10:04.820 an equally economically active and socially active participant

00:10:09.480 in the work of a productive home, they've become, as it were,

00:10:13.780 a sort of chief consumer.

00:10:15.720 The bourgeois housewife is a kind of chief consumer in a private home.

00:10:19.120 And I've drawn from Ivan Illich's 1980 book Gender in the book

00:10:23.900 to understand the transition which Illich reads, and I agree with him,

00:10:30.120 as really not a moment of empowerment, but as a significant loss of agency.

00:10:36.060 And the point which, as Illich puts it, women make the transition

00:10:40.600 from being active participants in a kind of ambiguous complementarity with men,

00:10:45.660 where there's men's work and there's women's work, but everybody's working,

00:10:48.780 to what Illich describes as economic sex, which is to say a condition of notional equality,

00:10:54.400 but where in practice, because of our physiology and because of the allotted role

00:10:58.680 given to women within a bourgeois private domestic sphere,

00:11:02.120 women are in practice structurally disadvantaged.

00:11:06.480 For Illich, sexism begins with the arrival of modernity.

00:11:11.060 So, this is really my history of the past.

00:11:14.440 And women responded to this in two characteristic ways.

00:11:17.520 So, there were those which, in turn, gives rise to the two poles

00:11:22.340 of what I think of as feminism proper up to the middle of the 20th century.

00:11:29.640 And the first of those poles was the feminism of freedom.

00:11:33.320 And, well, the first of those poles was the feminism of care, which was,

00:11:36.900 and here I've slightly counterintuitively read a body of work, a body of writing and a body of

00:11:43.000 cultural work, which is not typically read by women's historians as feminism, precisely.

00:11:50.340 And I've drawn on the various women's social reform movements, which were legion

00:11:55.300 across both sides of the Atlantic, actually, in the 19th century.

00:12:00.380 There were countless social reform movements.

00:12:02.280 There were work to rescue prostituted women.

00:12:06.080 There was social reform work.

00:12:07.600 There was outreach to the poor.

00:12:08.720 There were civil societies.

00:12:10.120 Women ran civil society.

00:12:12.000 You know, it wasn't as though these bourgeois housewives sat at home doing nothing all day

00:12:16.060 or just spent all their time shopping.

00:12:17.960 They went out, they organized, and they formed the backbone of civil society.

00:12:23.040 And they also wrote copiously.

00:12:25.080 They wrote journals and publications and letters and, you know,

00:12:28.060 and articles and huge amount, there's a huge body of writing.

00:12:31.740 And a great, and one of the central themes in it is the intrinsic value of the home.

00:12:37.380 So women may have been, women may now no longer work directly, but instead, these women sought

00:12:45.460 to make the case for women's continued value and the really fundamental moral and social and

00:12:53.520 cultural importance of the private sphere as a space outside the market, a space of respite.

00:12:58.600 And it was sort of idealized as a space of moral elevation, which, and a haven away from the

00:13:06.000 pressures of the competitive market society.

00:13:09.600 So that was, so that's, and in that space, women, in that space, women could educate children,

00:13:14.820 children could be nurtured, and everybody could, as it were, find refuge from the harsher

00:13:20.520 pressures of the world outside.

00:13:21.580 So that's the ideal, and this is, this is really what I think of as the feminism of care.

00:13:25.820 And it's a bunch of women whose, much of whose economic agency is, has been radically reduced

00:13:31.240 relative to their grandmothers, perhaps, because they're no longer economically active.

00:13:35.540 And so they're setting out to make a case for the ongoing value of those parts of, of women's

00:13:40.120 work, quote unquote, which, which are, which they still see as important and which, which

00:13:44.200 are still irreducible, and particularly, particularly around the care of children.

00:13:48.320 And so that's feminism care.

00:13:49.620 But then on the other side, there was a whole bunch of other women who were like, well,

00:13:52.180 hang on a minute, this is all very well, but this only works if your husband does is, if

00:13:56.320 your husband is a good guy.

00:13:58.020 You know, what if, what if your husband drinks all the money?

00:14:00.100 What if your husband beats you?

00:14:01.380 What if your husband leaves you?

00:14:02.980 What if he rapes you?

00:14:04.300 You know, you, you have no redress, you have no leverage.

00:14:06.820 And then, and so they set out to make the case for women's entry, as it were, into market

00:14:12.860 society on the same terms as men.

00:14:14.600 So the right to own property on the same terms as men, which, which was not, which was not

00:14:18.600 available within a legal and a legal and a social system, which was structured for around

00:14:24.180 productive households.

00:14:25.140 So, and so with the point where two adults married, the women's person was subsumed into

00:14:31.020 that of the man, because that was what made sense juridically in the larger context of

00:14:34.720 productive households.

00:14:35.660 And this no longer made, this no longer made nearly as much sense in the context of, in

00:14:40.420 the, in the industrial context, where the, an economic, an economic actor is increasingly

00:14:45.720 an individual rather than a household.

00:14:47.300 And so you've got this, you've got this, this legal and political tension, um, in play

00:14:52.980 between women who still don't really, still don't have separate personhood from men and

00:14:56.900 who are finding increasingly as, as, as a, as a growing number of, uh, the feminists of

00:15:01.840 freedom began to argue that, that they were, they were, they were severely vulnerable in

00:15:06.440 that context.

00:15:07.100 And so increasingly you start, you start seeing campaigns for women's, women's right to own

00:15:11.720 property, for women's right to enter the market as, as workers on the same terms as

00:15:16.220 men and increasingly for women to be treated effectively, uh, the same as men in all contexts.

00:15:23.720 And, and, and I think of this as the beginning of the feminism of freedom.

00:15:26.560 And there's a really rich interplay.

00:15:28.280 If you look at the history of the 19th century women's movement between these two poles, because

00:15:32.640 they're, they're by no means that far apart.

00:15:34.500 Most of these women knew each other and it wasn't, it wasn't a sort of crazy back and

00:15:38.040 forth culture war the way it feels sometimes now.

00:15:40.900 This is, it was a very, you know, most of the, the, the, the supposed feminists and anti-feminists

00:15:46.140 actually knew each other, um, and often disagreed, often, often agreed on, on more than they

00:15:50.700 disagreed on.

00:15:51.620 Most of them were active in the same social reform movements.

00:15:54.200 Most of them agreed, for example, on the question of temperance.

00:15:57.960 Most of them agreed on issues like sexual morality and, and the, and the importance of

00:16:03.940 tackling the sex trade.

00:16:04.960 And there were a great many issues where, and, and, and most, and most of them were very

00:16:08.600 devoted, very devout women of faith.

00:16:11.160 And so there was a great, a great deal on, on which most, the, even the feminists of freedom

00:16:16.460 and the feminists of care broadly agreed, um, and, and, and collaborated on.

00:16:20.860 And, and in the, in the middle, there are these two poles between the women who, who see their

00:16:25.360 interests as lying in, um, a political project of sameness with men and of the right to enter

00:16:31.040 the market on the same terms as men.

00:16:32.660 And those women who seek to ring fence a distinct sexed space for women within the context, in

00:16:39.140 the, which, which makes space for motherhood, which makes space for nurture and which makes

00:16:43.360 space for, for those, those dimensions of women's lives, which are, uh, irreducibly

00:16:49.700 distinctively sexed.

00:16:51.480 And so, and, and this is a, this is a dialectic which goes on in, through various iterations

00:16:56.040 all the way up really until the beginning of the 20th century, in the middle of the 20th

00:17:00.340 century, sorry, where the feminism of freedom definitively won over the feminism of care

00:17:06.100 at the point where, where a new technology came, came into the, came into the picture,

00:17:12.540 which allowed us medically to flatten those, those irreducible differences between the sexes

00:17:18.300 or so it seemed to the point where really there was no reason not to argue for a feminism

00:17:22.880 of freedom.

00:17:23.940 And that technology was, uh, hormonal birth control, which, which led inexorably, um, towards

00:17:29.980 a ratchet towards the legalization of abortion, which most 19th century feminisms, feminists

00:17:35.660 would have viewed as not, not dissimilar as, as, as broad, broadly the same thing as infanticide

00:17:41.280 and, and would have recoiled from.

00:17:43.800 It was very, it was, it was extremely unusual for, for a feminist to support abortion in

00:17:48.200 the 19th century.

00:17:49.040 But by the middle of the 20th century, the popularization of hormonal birth control had,

00:17:54.100 had in, had paradoxically increased the number of unplanned pregnancies simply because there

00:17:58.500 was more sex happening, that it, it became a matter of social justice and, and women began

00:18:03.740 increasingly to see, to see it as a matter of social justice, that, you know, young women

00:18:08.260 were no longer compelled to, you know, run off to another country or, you know, take their

00:18:13.100 life in their hands with a backstreet abortion or various other horrors that were, that, that,

00:18:16.880 that, that, that, that, that proliferated downstream of, of this radical transformation

00:18:22.800 in sexual warries. And the upshot of that was, on, on, again, on both sides of the Atlantic,

00:18:27.880 within, I, within, I believe, a decade of one another, the, the legalization of abortion

00:18:32.700 across both sides of, of the Atlantic. Now, I mean, I, I'm, I'm deeply ambivalent on the

00:18:38.820 question of abortion. And I have friends who are, who are pro, and I have friends, who are pro-life,

00:18:43.160 and I have friends who are pro-choice. And really the, the stance I've taken on that question

00:18:47.880 in the book is to say, well, where, wherever you, wherever you sit on the absolute, uh, moral

00:18:53.920 question, um, it's difficult to dispute that if, if what you're arguing for is a right to assert,

00:19:03.920 is for women, women to have the right to assert their bodily autonomy, even at the expense of

00:19:08.960 another potential human life, then that's, that's about as definitive a case, a stance as you could

00:19:15.220 possibly take in favor of the feminism of freedom over the feminism of care, which would make,

00:19:21.300 which would make a greater amount of space for, for, for, for the needs of the, really the most

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00:21:12.740 And so wherever you stand on the absolute moral question, the moment where abortion is legalized,

00:21:21.700 and that then within the 20th century women's movement becomes inexorably hitched to the question

00:21:28.320 of women's political personage as such, to the point where, I mean, particularly in America,

00:21:34.240 the debate is now so toxic I'm cautious to say anything more on it. But it's arrived at the

00:21:39.860 point now where there are people who genuinely wholeheartedly believe that for that right to

00:21:46.900 be taken away would mean women are no longer able to access personhood as such. And really what you're

00:21:52.160 saying at this point, and the statement that you're implicitly making there, is to say that

00:21:58.080 freedom is so much more important than anything else that it's worth sacrificing a potential human

00:22:04.260 life for if it comes down to what feels like a zero-sum contest. About the most defenseless human

00:22:12.480 life there is, which is to say one which is still in utero and can't survive outside a woman's body,

00:22:18.580 even that life is forfeit if the price of sustaining that life is the curtailment of a woman's freedom.

00:22:27.600 Now, and again, wherever you stand on the absolute moral question, that's a very strong stance in

00:22:31.560 favour of freedom. And really, and so the, I see that as a real Cisera moment, a real,

00:22:37.200 a profound inflection point in the women's movement, which it embraced as the baseline of women's

00:22:45.880 political personhood as such, a technologisation of women's bodies in the name of individual

00:22:51.100 freedom. And really, I see that the 10-year arrival of, from the legalisation of the pill,

00:23:00.160 approximately 10 years, to the legalisation of abortion as our entry into the transhumanist era,

00:23:06.260 because that's the point where women's existence as such comes to seem inextricable from a set of

00:23:14.420 medical technologies. And remember, what's, what's fundamental, what's, what's so radical about

00:23:19.060 these technological innovations is that unlike more or less every other medical practice up to

00:23:23.700 that point, certainly every licit medical, medical practice up to that point, and these,

00:23:28.780 these don't set out to fix what's broken. So, I mean, if I have a broken arm, I go to the doctor

00:23:33.760 and I say, hey, doctor, can you fix my arm, please? And the doctor has a, has a, has a, you know,

00:23:38.380 you, you go to medical school for years to learn what normal, normal human health looks like,

00:23:43.460 and, and to learn what to do with people's bodies in order to fix what's broken and make it, make it

00:23:48.740 normal and healthy again. And what's radical, what's radical and transformative about birth

00:23:53.240 control and later about abortion is that they don't fix what's broken in the name of normal human

00:23:57.960 health. They break what's working normally, which is to say women's, women's fertility or,

00:24:03.320 or a normal pregnancy in, in the name of individual freedom. And I think we still

00:24:09.120 underestimate what a radical transformation that was. And I think we're still, we're still

00:24:13.620 working through the downstream consequences of that. And really the second part of the book

00:24:17.780 explores some of the, because some of the downstream consequences of, of having entered into the

00:24:24.820 transhumanist moment in the middle of the 20th century. Because I mean, we're, we're more than

00:24:29.900 a half a century further into it now. And I think we're beginning to see some of the contours

00:24:35.600 of, of that new reality, uh, more clearly as time has gone on.

00:24:42.900 So Mary, the argument you've made, um, I'm going to summarize it and tell me if I've got it right. So

00:24:50.860 you went back far enough in time to assess the role that men and women played in

00:24:57.580 home centered agrarian societies. And you made a case that that was a stable solution of relative

00:25:05.960 economic equality, let's say. And then the industrial revolution kicked in and it pulled

00:25:11.680 men away from the home first, but then it, it, um, replaced women's work. And that meant that women

00:25:19.440 were up in the air about what their role was, but it also turned them into something approximating

00:25:24.720 comparatively wealthy individualist consumers. Then you said there were two responses to that.

00:25:32.000 One was the emergence of a feminism of care that detailed out the realm of women's responsibilities

00:25:39.200 and opportunities in the, really in the domestic sphere with regard to say relationships with their

00:25:45.980 husbands, their immediate family, and more importantly, their children. And then you detailed out another

00:25:50.920 stream of feminism, which was the feminism of freedom. You associated that to some degree with

00:25:56.580 women's concern about being tangled up with men who weren't really good for anything. And so that's

00:26:02.400 an interesting little twist on that. But your fundamental point was that once women become,

00:26:06.840 became independent actors in the free market, in the industrialized free market,

00:26:13.700 there was every reason to move towards the transformation of law so that women as independent

00:26:20.420 economic actors would have the same economic rights as men. But then, but then there's that

00:26:25.820 problem with bad men lurking in the background there that contaminates things. And then you talked a

00:26:30.840 little bit about the transhumanist movement, identifying that at least in part with the rise of the birth

00:26:38.040 control pill, which is a radical innovation, basically equivalent to a genetic, a major genetic mutation,

00:26:44.820 a species altering mutation. And then you pointed out that oddly enough, in concert with the rise of the

00:26:51.700 pill, we got the rise of legalized abortion and its widespread prevalence. Okay, so that's where I want

00:26:57.200 to drill into. I want to tell you something biological. And I want you to tell me what you think about it,

00:27:03.240 because I think it's key in some mysterious way to this entire problem. The problem you've laid out

00:27:10.080 is that women and men, for that matter, have been recalibrating their identity since the dawn of the

00:27:16.420 industrial revolution. It made us into more atomized individuals who were more consumer oriented,

00:27:23.300 let's say. And that's a major social disruption. But then on the pill and the abortion side,

00:27:29.980 here's something that is worth considering, I believe. So, you know, the evolutionary biologists

00:27:36.240 have identified two fundamental reproductive strategies. So imagine there's a continua,

00:27:42.240 okay? On the one end, you have, they're called R-selected or R-strategists. And the R stands for

00:27:50.920 reproduction, essentially rapid reproduction, let's say. And so mosquitoes and puffballs and fish

00:27:57.260 are R-strategists. And so the R-strategists is fairly straightforward.

00:28:04.100 Many, many, many potential offspring, millions or even billions of them, zero post-sex investment.

00:28:11.520 So that's the R-investment strategy. Okay, and so most of your fertilized offspring,

00:28:18.680 gametes, are going to perish. Enough will last for them to replace you or maybe even for the

00:28:25.480 population to thrive. But it has nothing to do with you after the sexual act. Okay, on the other

00:28:31.080 side are so-called K-investment, K-strategists. And those are creatures, mammals would be a reasonable

00:28:39.040 example, that have very few offspring, but pour a lot of resources into them. And the ultimate K-strategists

00:28:47.580 are human beings. So our investment strategy is long-term, high-cost investment, even spanning multiple

00:28:56.300 generations. Okay, so there's a real distribution and humans are on the extreme end of one of those

00:29:03.760 directions, let's say. One of those poles of the distribution. Okay, now there's a subsidiary

00:29:11.720 observation that goes along with that. And this is where the point is really germane.

00:29:18.320 So now imagine that among human beings, there are R-strategists and K-strategists. Okay, so the

00:29:26.120 R-strategists are ones who have many sexual partners and low investment. Now that's a lot easier for

00:29:36.500 men than it is for men than it is for women, because of course, if women get pregnant, they're high

00:29:41.180 investment strategists immediately, unless they circumvent that. But the men can get away with it, let's

00:29:48.720 say, being R-strategists. Now, a further question is, just who the hell are these R-strategist males? So these

00:29:57.340 would be the men who are interested in multiple sexual partners, low emotional investment, and low post

00:30:05.560 sexual investment, say, in any resultant children. And we know the answer to that.

00:30:12.360 Our strategist males are narcissistic, Machiavellian, psychopathic, and sadistic.

00:30:22.680 And so what that means, I think, as far as I can tell, is that when you free up women

00:30:29.940 to be sexually available with a technological transformation, you both deliver them into the

00:30:37.660 hands of R-strategist males, who have all the lovely personality features that I just described,

00:30:44.580 or maybe something even worse is that you train men who might otherwise be high investment

00:30:51.500 meters to adopt a R-strategist, with all of the psychopathy and Machiavellianism and

00:30:58.260 narcissism and sadism that goes along with that. And so this is a very perverse outcome, because

00:31:07.920 and I guess I don't really know what people expected to begin with. You said that, for example,

00:31:13.960 you implied that women are pursuing their freedom, let's say, with regards to untrammeled sexual

00:31:22.000 access on the reproductive front. But that's not exactly a freedom. It's more like a subjugation to

00:31:27.280 sexuality as the prime motivator in life, right? I mean, you could identify yourself with your

00:31:34.040 sexuality, which is, of course, what people are doing in spades now. But the idea that the opportunity,

00:31:40.640 the ability to pursue untrammeled sexual expression is actually a manifestation of freedom is an error

00:31:48.740 if you believe that subjugation to biological, untrammeled subjugation to biological whim

00:31:54.480 doesn't constitute freedom. This is especially true if it turns out that it's delivering women into the

00:32:00.400 hands of psychopathic men, which seems to be the case. There's a great deal of truth in that. And

00:32:05.260 really, that speaks to the one of the, it speaks to the epigraph, actually, which I gave the second

00:32:09.840 half of the second part of the book, which comes from Horace. I'm not going to try and quote the

00:32:14.640 Latin at you, but the translation is, you can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but still she comes

00:32:19.180 back. It's a very famous quote. I think I've taken it slightly mischievously out of context,

00:32:25.480 but it's a very important piece, because the governing theme of the transhumanist era is using

00:32:30.120 technology to try and abolish our nature. And really, that's the governing theme,

00:32:37.200 the governing project of the transhumanist era, which is the point where we embrace the,

00:32:44.180 or as we hope, the power of technologies to transform ourselves. So we're no longer industrializing the

00:32:50.000 world. We're no longer using machines to, say, make weaving easier. Instead, we're using technologies

00:32:54.820 to remodel ourselves, to make us more like we think we ought to be. At least also, or that's the idea.

00:33:01.560 And that really begins with the contraceptive pill, which is a medical technology, which the

00:33:07.000 original utopians, the first wave of feminist responses to the pill, were hugely optimistic

00:33:12.820 about what it would do. I mean, we're some decades further down that track now, and we can see that

00:33:17.320 it hasn't really worked out like that. And our mutual friend, Louise Perry, recently wrote a very

00:33:21.700 persuasive book detailing all of the ways it hasn't really worked out like that, and all of the ways

00:33:26.660 which, as you've just outlined, the sexual revolution was considerably more to the benefit

00:33:30.920 of our selected, all these narcissistic, psychopathic, highly sexed, and not particularly

00:33:39.260 fatherly men, seem to have been the net beneficiaries of this technological transformation.

00:33:43.940 Contra the utopians who imagined that we might, that it would open out a kind of sexual utopia in

00:33:50.700 which everybody could be free to be themselves, women could finally express themselves free from the

00:33:55.980 the gossiping old ladies in the street and free from the risk of pregnancy. And it would make

00:34:01.460 everything sort of sunshine and rainbows and kittens, and it would all be lovely. Now, we know at this

00:34:06.120 point that that's not exactly what happened. But really, this just goes, this serves to illustrate

00:34:10.740 the utopian spirit that people have brought to the project of technologizing ourselves using

00:34:17.620 essentially biotech, beginning with the chemical intervention of the contraceptive pill.

00:34:23.440 But we're considerably further down that path now. And at every stage, we've set about embracing new

00:34:31.460 innovations in biotech in the hope, really, of remedying perceived flaws in our nature.

00:34:37.560 You know, whether that's a pill to stop us being sad, or whether it's a technology which will

00:34:43.920 mean women's fertility no longer has to fall off a cliff at the age of 40, because now there are

00:34:49.380 technologies which will enable her to go on having kids into her 50s or her 60s, or whatever. I mean,

00:34:54.660 we could be here all evening enumerating the technologies, the opportunities and the

00:35:02.540 biomedical advances. And at every stage, what happens is there's a utopian promise of being

00:35:07.940 able to escape a previous embodied limit. There is a new set of constraints on us,

00:35:16.340 if you like, aspects of our nature, which were previously managed by social means in the way

00:35:21.380 that the difference between women's and men's reproductive role was previously managed by

00:35:26.040 what now gets dismissively referred to as the sexual double standard, which was in the area prior

00:35:31.540 to reliable contraception, an extremely pragmatic measure oriented at avoiding a proliferation of

00:35:37.880 unwanted children within a community. And so that's one example of a way, you know, an asymmetry or

00:35:45.320 some awkward aspect of our nature was managed socially, in a way which just went away more

00:35:51.160 or less overnight, the moment technology came along that seemed as though it would fix the problem for

00:35:55.140 us. And there have been countless other examples since then. And what invariably happens is you get

00:35:59.900 a dividend of freedom, and then whatever it is that's been technologized in that way is then

00:36:04.380 reordered to the market. And you see this very clearly with the sexual revolution, which promised a

00:36:09.440 great utopian dividend of self-expression and free love and, you know, everybody having orgies and it'll be

00:36:14.360 fine. And actually what it gave birth to was the porn industry. And it gave birth to a ballooning

00:36:19.880 sex industry. And now, you know, 50 years on from that, we have Pornhub, which is one of the biggest

00:36:24.240 website, one of the most high-grossing websites in the world, and which is already notorious for sex

00:36:30.240 trafficking, for abuse, for countless other atrocities, and for coarsening the appetites

00:36:36.000 of children, frankly, who are the majority of its consumers and much else besides. But really what I want

00:36:43.260 to emphasize there is the dynamic at work. We think technologizing ourselves will liberate us

00:36:48.680 from some aspect of our nature. What in fact happens is that that aspect of our nature becomes

00:36:54.000 opened up to commerce. And in the meantime, our nature is unchanged. So the differences, as you

00:36:58.960 pointed out, the differences between men and women in terms of mating strategies and courtship

00:37:03.120 preferences and so on are still there. Our mutual friend Louise Perry sets this out very clearly in

00:37:07.980 the case against the sexual revolution. Men still want slightly different things out of a date to women,

00:37:12.520 on average. You know, of course, there are outliers, but women still broadly want an affectionate

00:37:18.140 relationship. You know, a subset of men, at least, are very happy with a quick sexual encounter and

00:37:24.360 then no ongoing encumbrances. You know, all the ancient dynamics are still very visibly there.

00:37:31.800 Nothing has changed. All that's happened is that the social mechanisms we had for trying to manage

00:37:36.840 those asymmetries between the sexes have disappeared. They've bled away. They've been

00:37:42.060 dissolved. And instead, what we have is a seemingly limitless commercialization of the environment

00:37:48.420 around them. You know, we have whole industries, whether it's the dating app industry or whether

00:37:52.280 it's the porn industry or whether it's the romance industry or you name it, whole industries which have

00:37:57.120 grown up off the back of the dissolution of our social codes around sex and courtship.

00:38:04.180 And if you look further, closer to the present, at, for example, the reproductive industry,

00:38:11.260 big fertility, you'll see that the technologization of ever further aspects of our nature

00:38:17.800 in an effort to liberate us from its constraints. So, to allow two men to liberate us, quote-unquote,

00:38:24.180 just so. For example, to allow two men to have a baby or to enable a man to resemble a woman or

00:38:31.700 any one of the other innumerable ways that we've set out to abolish our own nature or to render it

00:38:37.900 plastic and subject to our control. It never works. Humans still can't change sex. Two men still can't

00:38:44.800 have a baby. Men still can't get pregnant. The fundamentals have not changed. Our nature is

00:38:49.700 still there. All that happens is that it's made a whole lot of people rich because it's opened up new

00:38:54.440 domains of our embodied selves to the market. And so, really, that's the story I set out to tell

00:39:00.180 in part two of the book. And I also set out to show how this relationship to our own bodies,

00:39:07.280 this pursuit of medical mastery of our own bodies, has been radically accelerated by the internet.

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00:40:19.200 And particularly by the very disembodied childhoods that a lot of young people now experience,

00:40:26.220 where they grow up socializing fundamentally through digital avatars, and then take as a matter of basic

00:40:31.640 social justice the possibility of the idea that they should be able to reskin their meat avatar at will,

00:40:36.060 and which is, you know, combined with a number of, combined with social contagion and common

00:40:42.440 emotional pathologies, which have been typical in adolescent girls since time immemorial.

00:40:47.820 The upshot has been, as we know, the social contagion of trans identities, which has had

00:40:54.120 catastrophic and irreversibly harmful effects on thousands of girls now, you know, and the

00:40:59.120 detransitioner movement is growing. And I mean, you know, these are familiar topics to you.

00:41:02.860 So, but this is all, this is downstream of a kind of escalating fantasy of total mastery of our

00:41:13.220 physical selves, and this fantasy of a physical self which is separable from our inner sense of

00:41:21.000 ourselves, as though our bodies and ourselves are two separate things, which can seem believable if

00:41:26.880 you spend a lot of time on the internet, but it isn't believable for a moment if you spend nine

00:41:32.360 months pregnant, for example, or, you know, fall over and break your leg, or really spend any time in

00:41:38.760 the actual physical world at all.

00:41:39.840 Right.

00:41:40.580 And so that's the set of, that's the story I set out to tell in the second part of the book.

00:41:45.480 And in the third, I set out to offer some, offer some reflections on where we are now and where we

00:41:50.160 might go next, on the basis that we've already passed peak progress, and the, and the, the, the heady

00:41:55.720 1990s years of, um, having solved boom and bust and ended, ended world conflict and so on.

00:42:02.120 And all of those other things we were promised we'd achieved are not coming back.

00:42:05.460 And that in fact, life is likely to get worse.

00:42:07.920 Let me ask you some questions about the second part, and then we'll move into the third part.

00:42:15.480 So I'm going to summarize what you said again.

00:42:19.160 So you characterize the pill as the first major technology in what you describe more broadly as the

00:42:27.020 transhuman movement, which is an attempt to free us or to escape from, let's say, the hypothetical

00:42:34.240 limitations of our embodied selves. And so this was sold as a movement to freedom. Now, that was freedom

00:42:42.480 described as instinctual licentiousness, right? Because what free sexual access means that you can, is that

00:42:50.080 you can have your wants and needs gratified at any moment. And maybe that's beyond the mere sexual right

00:42:56.140 into the consumer domain itself. So that's a very peculiar view of freedom. But as you pointed out, it was

00:43:02.720 also accompanied by something that was naive, immature, and possibly even malevolent, which was

00:43:09.060 this notion that we would bring about a sexual utopia where men and women were somehow equal, and that

00:43:15.240 that would be an improvement in all regards, including on the male side. Now, we've already talked about the

00:43:22.820 difference between R and K strategies and the fact that when we switch to an R strategy, which is exactly

00:43:28.720 what happens with the pill, we facilitate the psychopathic men. So that seems like a bad idea

00:43:34.260 for the men and for the women. And I think it's actually irrefutable. There's good research evidence

00:43:41.540 for this already, but it also makes technical sense at a much deeper biological level. So, and it's

00:43:48.640 obviously the case that men who want short-term sexual relationships aren't the same men who want a

00:43:53.600 long-term stable monogamous partner that requires responsibility, obviously. So, okay. So now,

00:44:02.400 and now we have this movement to freedom too, which you could be more skeptical about and call it a

00:44:08.600 flight from responsibility. And then you might say, well, why the hell not fly from responsibility if

00:44:14.260 it's so burdensome, nine months of pregnancy, the fact that you have a dependent infant for multiple

00:44:19.040 years, like 40, and why not fly from that? And I would say at least part of the answer to that is

00:44:25.140 when you escape from responsibility in that matter, you also demolish the meaning of your life.

00:44:30.420 It's like a lot of the meaning in people's lives is obtained as a consequence of sacrifice, right?

00:44:36.400 You sacrifice for your siblings, you sacrifice for your parents, you sacrifice for your friends,

00:44:41.520 for your wife, for your children. And there's dignity and purpose in that sacrifice. And if you

00:44:47.420 lift that burden from people, then they're left wondering just what the hell they are and what

00:44:53.780 they're supposed to be doing. And that doesn't seem like much fun given the radical increase in

00:44:59.720 mental health problems, particularly among women aged 18 to 34. So you move to freedom in this narrow,

00:45:07.960 naive, immature, and even pathological sense. You escape from responsibility, you demolish meaning

00:45:14.500 and consequence, and you facilitate the psychopaths. And then you put another twist on that, which is

00:45:19.880 real fun, because there's the psychopaths and the narcissists and the Machiavellians that you're going

00:45:25.240 to meet with a dating app and in the sexual marketplace, let's say. But that isn't the limit to the

00:45:32.880 commodification of female sexuality. I mean, we know that about 25% of internet traffic and a

00:45:39.400 tremendous amount of the motivation for its initial construction, by the way, was the commodification

00:45:45.340 of female sexuality. So the engineers, for example, who couldn't get a date could at least

00:45:50.360 exchange pictures of nude women or videos, so much the better, and obtain their gratification that way.

00:45:59.680 And so that's 25% of net traffic. And you talked about Pornhub, for example, and the commercial

00:46:06.620 commodification of female sexuality. And so then what do we say? We say on the negative side,

00:46:14.140 the pill emerges, that's part of the demolition of humanity in the name of transhumanism. It

00:46:20.040 facilitates the psychopaths and the Machiavellians and the narcissists. It turns women over to precisely

00:46:26.340 those men. It produces a massive commodification of female sexuality in the marketplace. And it

00:46:32.360 engenders abortion at a rate that would have horrified the early feminists and anyone else

00:46:37.640 who's actually thinking about it. It's like safe, legal, and rare. Well, we pretty much failed on the

00:46:42.680 rare side, a million abortions a year in the United States at the moment. So that, I don't care who you

00:46:49.220 are, what your stance is, but if you don't see that as a moral catastrophe, there's something wrong with

00:46:53.420 your soul. Now, that's independent of how we sort this out legally. So, okay, so there's a question

00:47:02.820 I want to ask you then that'll lead us into the third part of your book, I think. So, you know,

00:47:08.220 I spent a lot of time teaching at the University of Toronto and at Harvard, and then more publicly,

00:47:15.900 looking at the core stories that motivate humanity. The core story is a hero myth. And the hero goes off

00:47:24.820 into the adventure of his or her life and confronts the dragon and garners the treasure and brings it

00:47:30.440 back to the community and distributes it. Okay, but in classic mythology, the heroes are virtually

00:47:37.440 always men. And so, the women in my classes always had a problem with that. If the hero myth is the

00:47:43.940 central story of humanity, well, what does that mean for women? Well, in Christianity, Christ is the

00:47:51.260 savior of women and men. And Christ's passion story is a extreme variant of the hero myth. And so,

00:47:58.340 there's a notion at the bottom of our culture that the pathway to redemption for women is the adoption

00:48:05.220 of a heroic mode of being, you know, in the face of life's difficulties and problems. But there's more,

00:48:11.880 because the thing about women is that their mythological orientation, I think, it's multidimensional

00:48:19.120 and complex. So, there's a couple of other mythological variants that stack up beside the

00:48:26.000 hero myth for women. There's Beauty and the Beast, where a woman finds a man who might otherwise be

00:48:31.640 somewhat monstrous and predatory, but maybe is oriented positively in his fundamental nature.

00:48:38.060 And she tames him. And that's a story of how women find a man who's sexually attractive and also

00:48:44.720 productive, responsible, and useful. That is the most common female pornographic fantasy

00:48:49.940 by orders of magnitude, Beauty and the Beast variant. And then there's also the image of women that's put

00:48:57.440 forward, let's say, in Christianity, where you don't have an individual woman. You have woman and

00:49:02.540 infant as a unit, right? And so, now, I would perhaps hesitate to suggest that part of the

00:49:15.500 reason that you felt isolated when you were pushing your pram around small English town is because in

00:49:20.760 our society, I saw the same thing with my wife, by the way, when she had little kids, our society does

00:49:25.600 not hold sacred the image of woman and infant as the fundamental unit of female, as a fundamental

00:49:36.360 unit of female identity. Now, you know, women's nervous systems, too, as far as I can tell,

00:49:42.120 women's nervous systems are calibrated not for their own happiness, but for the joint success of

00:49:47.740 woman plus infant. So, women are more agreeable, which means they're more empathic and more interested

00:49:54.340 in people, and they're higher in negative emotion, which means they're a pretty good alarm system.

00:49:59.820 Now, that increase in negative emotion makes them susceptible to depression and anxiety,

00:50:05.140 and that increase in agreeableness makes them susceptible to exploitation by psychopathic men.

00:50:10.620 But it's very much benefit to their infants, because you have to be agreeable to take care of an infant,

00:50:16.620 and you have to be an alarm system to be sensitive enough to detect all the threats in the

00:50:23.180 environment that might be said a vulnerable infant. So, okay. So, that should move us into the

00:50:29.140 discussion of the third part of your book. It's like, this is a way of conceptualizing something

00:50:35.300 approximating female identity that'll actually work for females.

00:50:41.660 Possibly. Taking a very short detour from the book, I mean, on the question of why I felt isolated,

00:50:47.440 pushing a baby around small-town Britain, actually, the explanation for that was very simple.

00:50:51.040 Most of my peers had a year's maternity leave, which, by the way, is pretty good compared to

00:50:56.680 how things are for most American women in Britain. You have a statutory six-month maternity leave,

00:51:02.680 everybody gets that paid maternity leave, and then you can take in a further six months unpaid,

00:51:06.640 and most women take the full year, which is a staggering amount of maternity leave compared

00:51:11.040 to the situation in America, where I believe something like one in three mothers is back at work,

00:51:16.840 more or less, before she's even stopped bleeding after having a baby, which to me is,

00:51:20.440 frankly, just barbarous. But leaving that aside, I mean, how we got to a point where most women

00:51:28.200 with dependent children work, and it's around 75% in the United Kingdom, is a long story

00:51:32.660 in which the feminism of freedom is intricately bound up, as I'm sure you're aware. But really,

00:51:39.800 the reason I felt lonely pushing a baby around small-town England was very straightforwardly,

00:51:43.280 there was no one to talk to, because most women were at work. And really, I think that was the

00:51:49.020 first article I ever wrote when I first started to write in public, was a reflection on the slow

00:52:00.020 draining away and the slow whittling away of civil society, which had taken place as a consequence

00:52:05.460 of most women embracing paid work, which, to be clear, has a great many positive consequences,

00:52:10.360 but also has had this effect that really it's only retirees and a dwindling proportion of those public

00:52:17.040 spirited boomers who are left, who are really holding my small town up in terms of having a

00:52:21.960 functioning social fabric, full stop. And, you know, I clung to those older women who organised

00:52:27.260 baby groups and what have you. And gradually, I found a social life and life began to feel more

00:52:34.160 normal again. But yeah, I mean, very, very straightforwardly, the reason I felt lonely

00:52:38.120 was because there was no one to talk to. And this is a coordination problem, as I'm sure you can see.

00:52:45.240 You know, if there's nobody to talk to, the only way for there to be more people to talk to is for

00:52:48.980 there to be more people and nobody wants to be a stay-at-home mum because there's nobody to talk to.

00:52:53.880 So it's kind of a vicious circle. But just secondly...

00:52:56.440 Yeah, definitely.

00:52:57.700 But just secondly, on the question of hero's journeys for women, I actually wrote,

00:53:01.540 not in the book, but elsewhere, I wrote a short essay about this a couple of years ago,

00:53:06.400 because in my observation, there is a hero's journey for women. It just doesn't follow the

00:53:10.460 same track as the male one. And in fact, it has three parts which correspond to a very ancient

00:53:15.780 archetype for a very ancient female archetype, which is the maiden, the mother and the matriarch,

00:53:22.720 the triple goddess, who's a figure out of some pagan traditions, in which these are the three

00:53:31.860 faces of the same goddess, as it were. But they take on different aspects at different parts of

00:53:38.900 a woman's life. And anecdotally, to me, it stacks pretty closely with what actually a majority of

00:53:44.940 normally women's lives look like. You know, as the maiden, you're free, you have a sort of warrior

00:53:49.360 aspect. Perhaps that's the point where you're pursuing ambitious professional projects.

00:53:55.280 The mother is more oriented towards home and the domestic sphere and, you know,

00:53:59.080 probably just doesn't, bluntly doesn't care about work as much. I mean, I know a great many

00:54:03.920 very high-powered maidens who reached motherhood, perhaps in their early 30s, and then just found

00:54:08.840 they just didn't care about the deadlines and the spreadsheets anymore, couldn't give a stuff.

00:54:12.400 I mean, this anecdote, I'm sure, yeah, anecdotally, that's pretty common. But then later on, and this

00:54:19.000 was something that I found very interesting when I did a psychotherapy training in the late

00:54:23.000 aughts and early tens, was just how many of the trainees on that course were women in their late,

00:54:31.820 in their 50s and 60s. So these were women who, for the most part, already had young adult children.

00:54:37.380 Their kids had gone off to university or were soon to leave for university. So they'd pretty much done

00:54:43.020 the motherhood arc. They'd done the mother part of that. And they were moving into a new phase of

00:54:47.200 life. They were moving into what I think of as the matriarch space. I mean, I think the classic

00:54:52.840 three-part goddess term for this is crone. But I mean, you know, they were some way from cronehood.

00:54:58.260 These were lively, vital, energetic, public-spirited women who had some life experience. They had a lot of

00:55:03.740 connections. They had a rich social life. They'd met lots of people and they were ready to give

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00:56:18.040 And in my observation, there are a huge number of women who reach the end of the mother

00:56:24.080 arc, the mother part of that hero's journey. And then embrace some, perhaps, and will then retrain.

00:56:31.780 So they'll have three careers. They might have a, so they'll be very professional in their 20s. They'll

00:56:36.820 be a bit more, somewhat more part-time, maybe 30 to 50. And then they'll retrain and they'll do

00:56:44.780 something like psychotherapy or they'll do ministry or they'll do spiritual cancelling or they'll do

00:56:49.900 some or in some other way become involved in the community and they'll want to do something public

00:56:55.820 spirited and give back. And those women are a hugely rich force for deepening reflection in the

00:57:05.020 culture, for public service, for all manner of incredibly positive, usually quite self-effacing,

00:57:12.700 but incredibly positive, constructive, and, you know, life-giving contribution to the social

00:57:19.020 fabric. And they're incredibly marginalized. They're almost completely invisible in terms of

00:57:25.800 the liberal feminist narrative, which really centers the maiden. And it wants to foreground the maiden and

00:57:31.140 to tell women that the hero's journey means essentially being the maiden for their entire life.

00:57:36.300 And everything else is just, you know, the mother is pretty much, you know, at best,

00:57:40.040 if the mother is noticed, it's as a problem to be solved. And, and the, and the matriarch doesn't

00:57:45.180 really get a look in at all. And if she does, it's only so that she can be denounced for being a

00:57:49.260 TERF or, you know, in some other way, you know, spat on for being, you know, a dinosaur or obsolete or,

00:57:55.900 you know, old-fashioned or, you know, out of touch or, or, or in some other way, irrelevant or ridiculous.

00:58:02.680 And in fact, these women are the backbone of the social fabric. I mean, those are the women who are

00:58:06.540 making, who are making cups of, making weak cups of tea for slightly traumatized new mothers like

00:58:11.360 I was in small-town England and telling me I'm doing fine. And really that mattered a lot at the

00:58:16.660 time. You know, those are, those are the women who are running, who are running brownies groups for

00:58:20.580 no money every, every Wednesday because they can and because they want to give back. Those are the

00:58:24.760 women who are, who are retraining as counsellors and helping, helping traumatize people for free.

00:58:29.360 You know, those are the women who keep things going.

00:58:31.520 And, and, and yet somehow the, the liberal feminist version of the hero's journey just

00:58:37.380 doesn't see them at all. And I think I, I, and I, so I've been very keen to make a case for,

00:58:43.400 for, for a richer, if you like, a three-part to, to opening a space for thinking about women's

00:58:51.180 hero's journeys in, in, in a more spacious way, which actually just observes what life looks like

00:58:56.400 for, for, for mothers and for, in, in, in the, in, in the arc of what, what, what the average

00:59:02.560 woman's life looks like when, when she does have a, when, when she does become a mother.

00:59:07.760 Well, so that de-emphasize, that de-emphasis on mother and matriarch, let's say, if you look at it

00:59:16.840 through the same lens that we assess short-term mating strategies, that we use to assess short-term

00:59:23.820 mating strategies in men, you can make the same case for, for women. So if you assume that not

00:59:32.940 all ideology is motivated by positive and upward striving, you know, what would you say, love of

00:59:39.960 humanity. So why downplay the role of mother and matriarch? Well, because you want to maintain

00:59:46.500 your freedom, not to be who you choose, but to maintain your freedom for an excess of, let's say,

00:59:55.260 immediate gratification on the sexual and consumer front. And so what that would imply, and I don't

01:00:01.560 know of any research done on this because mostly it's been done with men on the psychopath side with

01:00:06.840 regards to sexual behavior. My suspicions are that a fair number of these feminists who are pushing

01:00:13.960 the freedom idea, when freedom is the same as licentiousness, are naive, immature, and somewhat

01:00:26.120 dark triad or tetrad-oriented women, psychopathic, cluster B, borderline, etc., who are looking to justify

01:00:35.820 their refusal to grow up and accept responsibility by clothing it in ideological guise and offering a

01:00:42.620 utopian story. You know, it reminds me of Pleasure Island in the Pinocchio movie, you know, where all

01:00:48.800 the delinquents go to have a very fine party all of the time and to trample over everything underfoot

01:00:55.040 and who end up, you know, sold to the invisible slave masters that are toiling far below. So, you know,

01:01:02.400 it's very dangerous for us to underestimate the role that the R-strategist psychopathology plays in

01:01:12.540 the construction of ideologies, right? It's a major problem and we're not good at dealing with it.

01:01:19.720 I think when it comes to the motivations of feminists, I'd be a little bit cautious about, I personally would be

01:01:28.860 cautious about writing them all off as immature inhabitants of Pleasure Island. There are certainly some among

01:01:34.860 what I would characterize as magazine feminism, which is to say, not serious feminist theorists,

01:01:41.940 but the feminism which falls out of Helen Gurley-Brown's Sex and the Single Girl in the 1960s,

01:01:49.360 which is really the girlboss feminism. It's the feminism of cosmopolitan magazine-ness.

01:01:53.700 And it's really, it's a thin ideological veneer over what is fundamentally, as you say,

01:01:59.160 hedonistic project. It has very little to do with feminist political theory in any sort of meaningful,

01:02:05.280 thoughtful, well-worked out sense. I mean, there's a huge body of very serious, very passionate and

01:02:10.260 very worthy, legitimate feminist work, which still goes on, which I would wholeheartedly defend.

01:02:16.560 There are those women who are active on behalf of incarcerated women, for example, although the

01:02:23.980 great many women who are standing up to protest the incursion of men into women's sports or women's

01:02:28.480 prisons, for example. Those I would also characterize as feminists. And so, really,

01:02:33.440 I just want to offer a moment or two of really positive sentiment on behalf of the great many

01:02:41.280 women who stand up, as I would like to think I do as well, and say, no, actually, sometimes women's

01:02:46.720 interests really do differ from those of men. And sometimes they need to be, and we need to defend

01:02:52.300 ourselves on our own terms and our sexed interests in their own right, because sometimes those things can

01:02:57.920 be marginalized. I believe that remains a legitimate project, because men and women still exist,

01:03:02.560 and we still differ from one another in some politically salient ways. So, I would not lend

01:03:08.540 my support to a project to dismiss all of feminism as a childish, hedonistic project. However,

01:03:14.880 I'm 100% with you on the kind of magazine feminism, and particularly where that has reached a point where

01:03:22.780 it's not even willing to accept that sex differences as such exist even meaningful anymore,

01:03:30.460 and has instead moved into a project of pretending that we can all just be formless and identify as

01:03:37.160 we choose in the interests, I don't know, of further self-actualization, or further hedonism,

01:03:42.420 or whatever it is that those guys want. To me, that's not feminism. It's something,

01:03:47.560 I mean, it's barely skin transhumanism or some other kind of ism, but it has very little to do

01:03:53.400 with the serious political work, which is still ongoing, which I believe has a right to a place

01:03:58.260 at the table. Okay, so let me ask you then why you would consider that more serious work

01:04:06.760 feminism and political, because perhaps you could make a counter-argument that good men and good

01:04:14.440 women aren't opposed in their fundamental orientation, and that the project to demonstrate

01:04:19.320 that needs a nomenclature that's other than feminism. I mean, I don't know. This is a genuine

01:04:25.680 question, right? Because the problem with feminism is that, well, you pointed out one of the problems

01:04:30.780 is the cosmopolitan version of feminism, but that's actually also not the worst version.

01:04:36.000 The worst version is a extraordinarily bitter and devouring, what would you say, antipathy to the

01:04:45.740 patriarchy as such, conjoined with a fundamental hatred of men. And now you touched on why that

01:04:53.140 might be. I mean, one of the things I've seen about the screechy blue-haired mob types is that,

01:04:59.240 and this is actually an expression of sympathy, is that there are no shortage of women out there

01:05:04.520 who've never had anything even approximating a positive relationship with any male, right?

01:05:10.100 Their fathers were absent or alcoholic or criminal, and all of the boys that they ever spent any time

01:05:15.540 with were, well, the R-types who are out for immediate gratification and who are basically good

01:05:20.220 for nothing. And so I can understand why it's another one of these vicious circles that you described.

01:05:26.100 But it isn't obvious to me that all of these social movements that you describe, like is Riley

01:05:31.740 Gaines, you know, Riley Gaines is the swimmer who's fighting hard in the United States against

01:05:36.080 the entry of, like, idiot men. Will Thomas, to use the dead name, which I think we should all start

01:05:42.220 doing all the time, by the way, is trying to chase him. And he's clearly, well, he's not a,

01:05:49.080 what would you say? He's not a faithful actor, let's put it that way, you know? And so,

01:05:54.560 but is what Riley Gaines doing reasonably classified as feminism or is, I mean, I don't know.

01:05:59.680 And that's the question that I'd like to put to you. It's a very interesting question. And I mean,

01:06:03.280 I suppose a few points to make on that front. Firstly, you know, having offered a perverse read

01:06:08.960 of what feminist historians call the quote-unquote cult of domesticity in the 19th century, as in my

01:06:14.320 view, very straightforwardly a feminist project, as in making the case for women's continued value

01:06:19.960 within the home. I read that as feminist, even though actually in, at the time, I'm not sure they

01:06:24.840 would have characterized themselves as such. And certainly those women who did call themselves

01:06:28.460 feminists at the time wouldn't have characterized them as such. And yet, I choose to read them that

01:06:32.860 way. So, I suppose the first thing I'd say is that my understanding of what feminism constitutes

01:06:38.240 is fairly expansive to begin with. You know, to me, it's really about speaking to and for those ways

01:06:45.020 in which, as a sex, we have distinct interests. And if that's what you're doing, then I think

01:06:51.900 there's a reasonable case for employing the term. The second point I'd make is, why shouldn't we

01:06:57.400 have the term? I made the same point to Spencer Claven, to Andrew Claven, when he asked me that

01:07:03.760 as well. He said, well, why would you call yourself a feminist, Mary? It doesn't sound like that's

01:07:07.000 really what you're doing. And I was like, well, why shouldn't we take our ball and go home? Why

01:07:10.040 should they have the term? They're not doing anything which is in women's interests, as far as

01:07:13.860 I'm concerned. You're a feminist if you're sticking up for women's interests as a sex

01:07:18.140 class. And if actually your project is about abolishing biological sex in law and culture,

01:07:25.680 then I've no idea what it is that you think you're doing. But it doesn't read like feminism

01:07:30.400 to me. So, I'm taking my ball and I'm going home. And I guess the third point I would make,

01:07:39.060 just on the question of patriarchy, having made a full-throated defence of the very great many,

01:07:45.040 great many worthy feminist activists out there who are sticking up for women as a sex class,

01:07:49.560 I'm now going to say that having said all of that, in my view, patriarchy doesn't exist

01:07:54.240 in the modern world. It's not real. It's not a thing. Once upon a time, I think you can make a

01:08:02.580 fairly reasonable historical case that men and women both lived under a kind of a patriarchy,

01:08:07.840 where men owned the property, men were in charge, men had all the leadership roles,

01:08:13.080 men had all the formal power, etc. and so on. That's patriarchy, right? That's just not the

01:08:19.320 world we live in. Today, patriarchy doesn't exist. And in as much as women will point to this, that,

01:08:24.820 or the other and say, well, that's the patriarchy, that's still there, I have yet to come across one

01:08:30.520 of those cases which doesn't cash out as immutable sex differences I don't like, which, fine. You

01:08:38.020 know, I mean, you know, humans can't change sex, we can't change our basic nature, and then there

01:08:42.360 are some aspects of that that I don't particularly like. Tough, you know, we still have to live with

01:08:47.320 it. And pointing to some kind of invisible big bad that's out there and saying, well, this is

01:08:53.700 all evidence of a grand conspiracy to oppress me. I think people are just looking at it wrong.

01:09:00.680 They're looking for an external explanation of something which is just fundamentally an aspect

01:09:05.940 of the human condition. It's a revolt against the tragic nature of the human condition,

01:09:12.520 is probably how I would interpret it. And I share your antipathy to it.

01:09:19.480 But it's also a revolt against the opportunities of the human condition. Because the burdens that we

01:09:26.300 bear, let's say, in our mortal frames, unique as they are to some degree to men and women

01:09:32.120 separately, are also the greatest opportunities of our life. And there's a tremendous emphasis

01:09:37.180 in classic religious tradition. You see this particularly in the book of Job, that you're to

01:09:42.920 be grateful for your fate no matter what it is. Because being grateful for your fate no matter what it

01:09:47.860 is, is actually the best way of approaching your fate. And so if you believe that the mother and

01:09:54.120 the matriarch are nothing but impediments to the maiden, then you're resentful and bitter about your

01:09:59.220 eventual destiny. And that sounds like a really good recipe for mental distress. So I want to

01:10:05.080 further question you with regards to this feminism issue of nomenclature. I mean, you made a case for

01:10:12.340 wanting to take back the domain. And I can understand that, whether that will be successful or not, that's a

01:10:18.380 different question. But I can understand your point. But then I'm also curious, you know, it's not obvious to me

01:10:24.480 that men and women have different interests, except when they're not cooperating properly, and except when

01:10:33.120 they're not taking on their mature responsibility. And so that's another reason why I'm wondering if the project is

01:10:41.160 best construed as feminist. I mean, women are going to be more likely to make a case for certain kinds of

01:10:48.020 moral prescriptions. They're going to be more likely to suffer, let's say, the consequences of

01:10:54.380 sexual licentiousness because they bear the fundamental responsibility for pregnancy and child care.

01:11:01.960 But I would say that an ethos that's devoted to the sustaining and nurturing of women and children

01:11:13.360 by men is also something that's radically in the best interest of men, especially of good men. And so

01:11:20.700 I guess if you're construing feminism as the need, it's tough, right? And like I said, I'm not sure I'm

01:11:27.640 right about this, but if you're construing feminism as the need for women to stand up and make their

01:11:32.640 case, what is it? To make their case with men or to make their case against men? Or is it to make their

01:11:38.240 case against bad and exploitative men? So I'm not exactly sure why it's a feminist project rather than

01:11:45.240 a moral project per se, or even a traditionalist project. It's a good question. I mean, if you prefer to

01:11:52.820 see it that way, help yourself. My project is, to be clear, it's not a universalist one. I don't have

01:12:01.840 a prescription for what everybody should do because I think what works is beyond the broadly

01:12:11.220 consistent patterns of our nature. What works is so inflected by cultural and material specifics

01:12:18.880 that a good solution in one household isn't necessarily going to be a good solution in the

01:12:24.400 next household. So I'm thus far a liberal, that I'm very reluctant to offer universal prescriptions

01:12:31.500 beyond saying that our embodied nature has not changed. And a look back at the last few hundred

01:12:39.580 years of history will give us a fairly clear sense of those ways in which our embodied nature remains

01:12:46.520 fairly consistent. And to make the case that actually, yes, I agree with you, we're liberated

01:12:53.120 enough, all of us, men and women. And actually, what I think at this point we need is probably

01:12:59.080 more solidarity. And I think that's something that both of us have called for in different ways at

01:13:04.180 different times. And in the book, in the third part of the book, one of the aspects of that that I've

01:13:11.440 argued for is a different attitude towards marriage, which is less oriented on treating marriage as the

01:13:17.720 keystone achievement in a life and more as an enabling condition for solidarity, and is less

01:13:23.000 oriented on happy ever after big romance, and more oriented towards radical loyalty. Now, I think

01:13:29.960 that's a difficult case to make to somebody who's rich enough to be able to survive a divorce

01:13:34.480 relatively unscathed. But it's a no-brainer if you're a young woman who would like to become a

01:13:40.920 mother in a world which seems to be getting less stable, less certain, and perhaps also less wealthy.

01:13:50.120 I think under those circumstances, taking a more pragmatic approach and, for example, filtering from

01:13:56.680 a relatively young age for a man who will make a loyal, devoted, and virtuous partner is probably

01:14:03.960 a good, it's probably a better starting point than spending your 20s and early 30s having an

01:14:09.440 exciting time with bad boys. And then, and then, and then, and then living, living hand to my head.

01:14:14.640 What did you call it? Radical what?

01:14:16.400 Radical loyalty and radical solidarity.

01:14:18.340 Okay. Okay. So let me, so my sense with that, you tell me what you think about this, is that

01:14:25.420 I think life is well conceptualized as a romantic adventure if it's lived properly. And part of that

01:14:34.480 romantic adventure, obviously, is romance. And then you might ask, well, what are the preconditions

01:14:39.080 for romance? Now, you're making a case that pursuing short-term attraction as a maiden

01:14:46.320 is not advisable, that that should be replaced by a more mature orientation that would have to do

01:14:53.320 with radical loyalty. But then I might also point out that, you know, you could have your cake and

01:14:57.800 eat it too on that front because my suspicions are that the more radical the loyalty, the more romance

01:15:05.000 there is in the relationship. So for example, we know now 60 years after the dawn of the transhumanist

01:15:12.140 sexual revolution, that the people who have the most sex are religious married couples.

01:15:17.320 So it could easily be, and I believe this to be the case because I don't think that a man and woman

01:15:23.760 can give themselves to each other, like say fully on the sexual side. And I think this is probably

01:15:29.680 particularly true of women. If that encounter isn't occurring within the confines of something

01:15:35.660 like a relationship characterized by radical loyalty, because the offering on the woman's

01:15:40.880 side is much greater. Yeah, this is very difficult terrain because so many young people are growing up

01:15:47.260 now without healthy models of relationships themselves. They may have grown up in a broken

01:15:53.300 home or a toxic family environment themselves. They may have very few relationship models to draw

01:16:02.200 inspiration from other than what they find on the internet, you know, whether that's some guru or

01:16:09.060 the group chat or wherever it is that they're drawing inspiration from. And I suspect that we're

01:16:16.900 going to go, you know, even if we see a backswing towards people trying to form more enduring

01:16:22.340 relationships, there are going to be some very painful teething troubles as people really fundamentally

01:16:29.180 find themselves in the situation of having to reverse engineer healthy social solidarity from

01:16:34.780 scratch with absolutely no pointers and very little in the way of inner resilience to build

01:16:42.980 from. And I know personally of some people who've had intensely difficult times with that

01:16:48.180 and sometimes been through quite harrowing experiences as a consequence of really, you know,

01:16:53.000 taking a very reductive marriage ideology from the internet and then trying to apply that in the real

01:16:58.320 world only to discover that actually, in practice, life is just more complicated than that. And this

01:17:03.620 is a sort of tragic situation that young people find themselves, a great many young people find

01:17:08.700 themselves in now, you know, having had very little in the way of wider social fabric to draw from,

01:17:15.320 often very little in the way of a support structure, and then, you know, find themselves trying to have

01:17:19.720 kids and then live together in the long term with almost no scaffolding around them at all.

01:17:28.020 But they're trying, and I salute them for it. And I, you know, I just, I suppose at this point,

01:17:34.720 it's a bare hope on my part that we can find our way out the other side, you know, to the point where

01:17:39.740 there are some older survivors of that first generation of pioneers who can, who will then be

01:17:45.800 able to share their wisdom with, with younger men and women and say, you know, here are some things

01:17:50.440 I learned from trying and screwing up in a bunch of different ways. And, you know, maybe, maybe,

01:17:54.340 maybe here are some, maybe here are some things to bear in mind. But yeah, I mean, we can only hope

01:17:58.940 human, human cultures and human, the human social fabric is resilient over the long term. And even if

01:18:05.400 we've reached a point of fairly extreme social liquefaction at this point, you know, I remain optimistic

01:18:12.060 that we could come out the other side and find ourselves somewhere perhaps healthier and more

01:18:15.280 constructive over the long term. All right, Mary, look, I think that's probably a good place to

01:18:20.640 draw this to a close. We got through the three sections of your book and had a fairly intense

01:18:25.800 discussion about all three of those, certainly introduced everybody to the ideas that you're

01:18:29.860 developing. And so I would very much recommend that people pay attention to your work. There's a

01:18:37.240 number of, you mentioned Louise Perry, there's a number of scholars in this more expansive feminist

01:18:46.140 tradition who've emerged on the public stage as of late. And so that's all to the good as far as I'm

01:18:51.620 concerned, rethinking our commitment to such things as, well, biochemical interventions to alter the way

01:19:00.260 that we handle our, the deepest levels of our nature. Maybe we can close with this if you'd like.

01:19:07.520 What do you, you classified yourself earlier in the podcast as a classic liberal, and so you're tilting

01:19:13.920 to the side of minimally regulated individual freedom as the best strategy for psychological development,

01:19:25.080 long-term social stability? The open question there, of course, is how much that can actually

01:19:29.960 function in the absence of an underlying uniting ethos. Let me ask you a question related to that.

01:19:37.240 Where do you stand with regards to such things as the liberalization of the divorce laws and also with

01:19:42.920 regards to contraception? So what is all your thinking about this? Just to clarify, when I said I'm thus far

01:19:50.100 a liberal, that was in the context of my generally describing myself to anybody who asks as a

01:19:54.880 reactionary. So I'm some distance from being characterized, generally speaking, as a classical

01:20:04.380 liberal. Although I possibly started out there at some point or another. But, you know, as a reactionary,

01:20:11.220 I mean, a reactionary feminist, as I like to style myself, my stance on no fault divorce is that it's

01:20:19.300 disastrous. And my stance on contraception is that there's a robust feminist case against the pill.

01:20:25.440 And in fact, so much so that I devoted a chapter to it in Feminism Against Progress. So the feminist

01:20:31.240 case against the contraceptive pill. What about other forms of contraception? I mean, there's a part

01:20:38.200 of me that keeps thinking that maybe the damn Catholics were correct, you know. Now, that's a thought

01:20:44.280 that I haven't been willing to entertain fully. Well, you know, you can make a case that

01:20:48.000 it might be possible for sensible people to use some intelligence when it comes to family planning.

01:20:56.180 But, you know, the evidence that that's the way things have turned out is pretty damn shaky. So

01:21:01.240 I'm curious about your stance on contraception in general.

01:21:05.020 I'm very ambivalent on this, to be honest. I think my central objection to the contraceptive pill is its

01:21:09.900 transhumanist characteristics. And so I have a blanket objection to hormonal contraception across the

01:21:17.420 board on that basis. It screws up. It screws women up at the biochemical level. It screws up

01:21:22.920 relations between the sexes. It affects mate choice. I mean, we're familiar with the contemporary

01:21:27.100 research on this. It's catastrophic. It's ecologically catastrophic. It's having a disastrous

01:21:34.900 effect on aquatic life. It's bad across the board. And so there's also an ecological case against the

01:21:40.300 pill as well as a feminist one. And other forms of hormonal contraception as well. With the rest of them,

01:21:47.140 I'm more ambivalent about this. I think where you're not breaking something which is working

01:21:55.560 normally, I'm less uncomfortable about contraception than I am with hormonal interventions in our

01:22:05.760 physiology. So I think I'd probably, for now, I think I'll take a squashy centrist stance on that

01:22:11.980 and say, what to me seems the approach most conducive to employing technologies in a way

01:22:24.320 which is ordered to our nature rather than in revolt against our nature would probably be some form of

01:22:32.280 fertility tracking in conjunction with a spot, with a barrier method, for example, which I think is

01:22:37.820 fairly common practice amongst not especially radical Roman Catholics, for example, who will use

01:22:45.180 some kind of barrier method or just abstain at the danger points. So I think, but to me, really,

01:22:52.240 I think the way forward is not to try and not to pretend that we can put all of our technologies back

01:22:56.600 in the box, but it's to try and find constructive ways of reordering those technologies that we have

01:23:02.400 to the realities of our nature, which have not changed. And so I suppose the governing approach

01:23:11.660 that I would advocate on that basis for fertility planning, which is something that women have

01:23:17.880 always sought to do, you know, long before we came up with something like the contraceptive pill,

01:23:22.040 families have always sought to manage fertility at various times and for different reasons,

01:23:27.800 would be to try and employ those technologies that we have in a way which is ordered to our nature

01:23:33.660 and supports our flourishing in accordance with our nature rather than setting out to wage war on

01:23:38.580 that nature. So I think that would be my centrist approach to contraceptive, to contraception.

01:23:43.780 I guess the question there is, how do you distinguish between what's central and what's peripheral? But

01:23:50.260 that's a perfectly reasonable thing to attempt to think through. And I can certainly understand your

01:23:54.700 point. I mean, the pill, the hormonal effects of the pill are much more pervasive than anybody had

01:24:02.440 dared to imagine. They might've disrupted the relationships between men and women, young men

01:24:08.160 and women on a permanent and political basis, quasi-permanent political basis in ways that we

01:24:13.940 can barely begin to understand. So, I mean, I know, for example, that women on the pill like masculine men

01:24:19.440 less. And, you know, that's actually a major problem. You know, we have no idea what the political

01:24:24.240 ramifications of that are. All right, Mary. So thank you very much for talking to me today and

01:24:29.780 for providing your knowledge for the benefit of everybody who's watching and listening. Thank you

01:24:36.540 to all of those of you who are actually watching and listening as well and to The Daily Wire for

01:24:41.440 making this possible. I'm going to continue to talk to Mary on The Daily Wire side. I'm going to delve

01:24:47.720 into the origins of her interests in such topics. And so we'll do something more autobiographical,

01:24:53.820 which is generally the case on The Daily Wire side. And if you want to join us there,

01:24:57.460 please feel encouraged to do so and also welcome. Thank you very much, Mary. Much appreciated.

01:25:04.260 Thank you.

01:25:04.900 Thank you.

01:25:04.920 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - July 25, 2024

466. Reappropriating Feminism, Maternity, and the Woman’s Role ｜ Mary Harrington

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