TRIGGERnometry - July 14, 2021


＂I Don't Believe In Progress＂ - Mary Harrington

Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Guests
Mary Harrington
Mentioned
Mary Harrington Phyllis Schlafly Alpine Credits Jordan Peterson Donald Trump Mum Genes Unheard Marilyn Aella Euler
Are We Being Told the Truth About Climate Change？ Patrick Moore Is America a Racist Country？ - Victor Davis Hanson

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour

Words per minute

187.99

Word count

11,330

Sentence count

317

Harmful content

Misogyny

36

sentences flagged

Toxicity

21

sentences flagged

Hate speech

17

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of Trigonometry, Francis Foster and Constantine Kishin are joined by Mary Harrington, writer for Unheard, to talk about her journey to becoming a writer, how she got started in her career, and why she loves what she does.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 There's this sort of eternal tension, you know, between desiring equality between the sexes
00:00:08.980 and acknowledging the physiological differences between the sexes.
00:00:14.000 And I think that, you know, I mean, that tension is not one that you can abolish,
00:00:17.260 even though, you know, recent activists are definitely trying.
00:00:25.640 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.
00:00:28.360 I'm Francis Foster.
00:00:29.440 I'm Constantine Kishin.
00:00:30.800 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:00:36.260 Our brilliant guest today is a writer for Unheard.
00:00:39.140 Mary Harrington, welcome to Trigonometry.
00:00:40.780 Thank you for having me.
00:00:41.660 Oh, it's great to have you on.
00:00:43.140 Francis and I are both reading many of your articles recently
00:00:45.800 and really enjoying your work from a kind of independent thinking person's perspective,
00:00:50.100 which is really, really cool.
00:00:52.000 For anyone who doesn't know who you are, tell everybody a little bit about your background.
00:00:56.440 What has been your journey through life?
00:00:58.000 how do you find yourself sitting here talking to us? Well I fell into writing completely by accident
00:01:03.300 well not completely by accident but mostly by accident about 18 months ago I mean I left you
00:01:07.960 I read English literature at university and like most English undergrads wanted to become a writer
00:01:12.840 when I grew up and spent my 20s writing completely unreadable garbage and eventually came to the
00:01:18.900 conclusion that actually no I was I was going to park that because I didn't really have anything
00:01:22.460 to say that anybody wanted to hear and I should probably go off and do some stuff because I
00:01:26.280 didn't really know enough to have anything very useful to say so I did I did I did a lot of stuff
00:01:31.440 about 20 years worth of stuff in fact it started with founding founding a web startup or nearly
00:01:36.880 founding a web startup in my 20s which kind of came to an end in 2008 with the great crash
00:01:42.320 then I went off and retrained as a psychotherapist I left London got married had a child
00:01:47.620 um spent a stint as a stay-at-home mum and fell into writing kind of by mistake through that
00:01:55.320 because when she got to about two I just started I mean you spend the first couple of years with
00:02:00.780 a child being very preoccupied just kind of in love with your child and then when about after
00:02:05.460 about two years you start to get some of your own sort of brain functions back I thought you were
00:02:09.700 going to say and you start hating them no no no no I mean the the love never goes away of course
00:02:14.180 um nor does the mum bluetooth really but the bluetooth gets less intense when they get a bit
00:02:19.180 older um so I started to get some of my own brain functions back and I mean I don't you know not to
00:02:26.720 put too fine a point on that I started to get a little bit bored um so I started blogging my
00:02:31.900 daughter's artwork in the style of a contemporary art gallery um it was kind of a running joke
00:02:35.960 really with a friend who is actually she's a writer on art and a digital artist and she who
00:02:41.880 had a who had a baby at the same time as me um just an old friend from university and we started
00:02:46.160 we started sending each other kind of you know two toddler toddler scrolls but with very very
00:02:51.280 serious chin-stroking commentary in the style of a you know an art gallery and I started blogging
00:02:56.420 them just because it was it was just something to do and it kind of accidentally went viral
00:03:00.020 and a friend of mine you know an old friend from my startup days I ran into said oh Mary you should
00:03:06.020 write more because because I really enjoyed it it's really funny I mean she's a mum and also
00:03:10.640 she's a gallery owner and she just found the whole thing hilarious. She said, oh, you should write
00:03:14.560 more. So I did. I started, I thought, well, I've got a bit of time. You know, my daughter's seeing
00:03:18.820 going to a childminder for a few hours a week. I'm going to spend a bit of that time writing
00:03:22.320 because I can. And I've always, I've always enjoyed it. So why not? So I pitched a couple
00:03:27.120 of things to a couple of places. And then I'd literally written two or three things for no
00:03:33.700 money and Unheard got in touch and said, would you like to pitch to us? And I said, okay.
00:03:38.920 And as it happens, I had a pitch half written, which I hadn't dared to send to them.
00:03:42.740 So I said, well, would you like, would you be interested in this?
00:03:45.640 And they said, maybe.
00:03:47.160 And so I wrote that for them.
00:03:48.760 And I think I've written for them pretty much every week since.
00:03:52.380 That was September 2019.
00:03:55.620 And I mean, it's not really a story which is ever supposed to happen, I think.
00:04:00.960 But that's basically.
00:04:01.940 Well, I'm glad it has happened, Mary, because as I say, I think you're writing.
00:04:05.720 And it's very clear to me that you're someone who's lived a life outside of the commentariat.
00:04:12.600 That comes very strongly through your work.
00:04:14.980 I think a lot of people sort of, you know, go to Oxford, go to Cambridge, do this degree, do that degree.
00:04:20.320 And then by the time they're 25, they're writing for the whatever.
00:04:23.280 And look, there's nothing wrong with that.
00:04:24.500 But I think your commentary is informed by that.
00:04:28.040 So let me ask a question that we always try to ask if we can of people as broadly as possible.
00:04:34.780 What is happening in the world, in your opinion, at the moment and why?
00:04:38.860 Well, I think we've several things.
00:04:41.900 We've gone out the other end of never-ending growth.
00:04:45.160 We have left the era of never-ending growth.
00:04:48.460 And a lot of what's happening at the macroeconomic level
00:04:50.740 is people kicking the can down the road with their hands over their ears
00:04:53.700 and saying, la, la, la, as loudly as possible.
00:04:55.840 So that's one thing I think which is happening.
00:04:57.980 We've also come out the other end of,
00:05:00.440 we're already into the era of ecological exhaustion and slow motion ecological collapse
00:05:07.480 we are well and truly into the anthropocene i mean these are all sort of very macro things
00:05:12.200 um we've we've we've left the era of liberal democracy and are now living in something else
00:05:18.460 and i'm not completely sure what to call it yet and we've we've left the industrial age and are
00:05:25.300 now in the digital age and all of these things are interacting in ways which are complicated you
00:05:30.060 know infinitely complicated and i guess my writing is about trying to make sense of all of the
00:05:34.560 different ways everything we believed and everything we thought was good in the previous age is now bad
00:05:40.160 in the new age i mean that's my sort of overarching thesis for where we are everything everything
00:05:45.180 that was good is now bad and working working through the working through how that affects
00:05:50.060 people so just to finish on that uh well not to finish on i don't think we're going to finish on
00:05:54.620 that anytime soon but no no we've literally just started just before francis jumps in because i
00:05:59.400 know he has a lot of questions for you as well everything was good is now bad so what used to be
00:06:04.380 good uh family tradition like give us give us a little flesh on the bones there well i mean i
00:06:12.000 would i would actually turn that around and i would say you know everything all the liberating
00:06:16.980 ourselves from family used to be good it's now bad because we've we've got about as liberated
00:06:23.260 from family as it's possible to get with that i mean on the the conservative think tank onward
00:06:28.900 published a report just today reporting on the epidemic of loneliness among young people you
00:06:34.020 know many of whom report just literally having no friends though i mean at best they just have a set
00:06:38.440 of parasocial relationships but they have no friends i mean i think i don't i don't think
00:06:43.140 i don't think people need to be any more liberated from emotional commitments than they already are
00:06:48.020 and yet we still have this sort of legacy narrative about how we should just be free to be free to be
00:06:53.680 who we want man and i don't think that i don't think that's interacting in a healthy way with
00:06:58.680 actually where we are that that would be just one example there are lots and you said there
00:07:03.720 are lots of examples when you were started to tell to talk to us about where we are i just found
00:07:09.160 myself sinking into a deep depression mary i'm gonna be honest with you know i'm a comedian
00:07:14.780 that is a natural state is it as depressing as it sounds well i mean when i say when i all of i
00:07:20.640 give you all of these pretty kind of miserable headliners but i mean all of these are very
00:07:24.460 long-term slow motion things so you know ecological collapse collapse isn't something which is likely
00:07:29.920 to happen tomorrow it will happen in slow motion over the course of decades and probably you know
00:07:35.360 and it might just look like radical climate change and a completely different geopolitical setup i
00:07:40.320 mean it's not going to look like complete obliteration of the human species i don't think
00:07:43.500 or like you know sort of the matrix like rise of the machines scenario that all seems a bit
00:07:48.760 far-fetched but you know we i mean weather patterns becoming unpredictable is something which has been
00:07:54.340 remarked on a lot this year um it's not the first year that weather patterns have seemed strange
00:07:58.860 um you know weather has has pretty enormous downstream effects again in slow motion you
00:08:08.020 know migrations of whole peoples you know there are there are there are arguments that the little
00:08:13.340 ice age had colossal geopolitical effects over the course of um well the the beginning of the
00:08:20.180 enlightenment um and the the whole sort of late medieval period um you know we we might just be
00:08:26.620 in for that but you know this is all you know this could be a narrative arc of a hundred years
00:08:30.140 you know most of which you you and i won't be alive for so you know there's there's plenty of
00:08:34.800 room for beauty and endeavor and heroism and you know all of the kind of you know granular human 0.95
00:08:38.760 stuff in all of that right and plus soon you'll be dead mate yeah and and we're all going to die 0.72
00:08:42.920 anyway so so whatever you know there's plenty of plenty of room to have have birthday parties and
00:08:47.280 kids and you know live heroic lives good times thank you completely pear-shaped right yeah and
00:08:53.720 it might not go pear-shaped i mean you know we could be we could be on the cusp of something
00:08:57.160 amazing as well but i think there are it's it's definitely a mixed bag but you say like we're
00:09:02.340 moving from the industrial age to the digital age to me i very much see covid as a catalyst for that
00:09:07.440 yes would you delve into that a little bit more for us how covid has essentially speeded up
00:09:12.520 everything it has it has i mean i think there was a lot of those trends were were pretty well
00:09:16.600 established already i mean i think the the the headliners there are virtualization and and
00:09:23.760 centralization you know centralization and dematerialization well there's a bit of a
00:09:30.360 mouthful but you know the the ideas there being that for example where local newspapers were once
00:09:37.660 the sort of you know mediators of news you know the functions that used to be taken by local
00:09:42.600 newspapers have just got eaten up by facebook which is this centralized platform that talks
00:09:47.200 about disintermediating and you know just freeing everybody up to just kind of do their amateur thing
00:09:52.700 and to an extent that's true i mean you know independent media is a marvelous thing i'm here
00:09:57.300 enjoying it and participating in it but but there's also but the the smashing the knocking
00:10:04.140 away of all of those intermediate institutions for example in journalism has created a space where
00:10:09.720 you know suddenly a very few players have an enormous amount of power as as for example we
00:10:15.120 see when big tech can decide en masse to deplatform the president of the united states
00:10:19.700 which happened not so long ago so the dematerialization so you know all of those
00:10:25.400 all of those local newspapers are physically no longer there you know a lot of them have just
00:10:29.120 gone um and centralization big tech now controls an enormous amount of uh what's of the available
00:10:36.300 bandwidth for what is or is not sayable. And I mean, that's one instance, but the trends are
00:10:42.300 observable in all kinds of places. I mean, you can even see it in the Church of England, which is
00:10:46.160 kind of a bonkers example to give, you'd think. But, you know, there's been a hoo-ha this week
00:10:51.780 about the Church of England releasing a report where they're saying, well, actually, we don't
00:10:56.880 need churches or even priests. We can just have lay people evangelising and growing the Church
00:11:02.980 of England they can all just meet up in people's houses and it'll be great and that will free up
00:11:06.960 unnecessary resources from to I don't know quite what they're planning to to maybe they just want
00:11:13.020 to free up free up more bishop time to produce powerpoints or lobby the government on on foreign
00:11:17.820 aid spending or I don't know quite quite what it is that they propose to replace uh ministry with
00:11:22.720 but I mean but but you see what I mean it's the same pattern there's a sort of there's a measure
00:11:27.100 of centralisation among a smaller group of managerial elite types
00:11:31.920 coupled with things dematerialising, this idea that, in fact,
00:11:37.960 we can do without church buildings.
00:11:39.360 And it's roughly the same template as the dematerialisation
00:11:44.180 and centralisation of news media.
00:11:47.120 And what do you think, what do you think this is having on society?
00:11:50.620 Well, I think one impact it's having is that it's annihilating
00:11:54.240 all the people in the middle.
00:11:55.800 In a sense, you know, it's obliterating the middle class. 0.98
00:12:01.120 And by obliterating, do you genuinely mean obliterating,
00:12:05.540 as in there will be no middle class,
00:12:07.860 and that is the inevitable consequences of what we're seeing?
00:12:10.260 I don't think it's inevitable, but it has already hollowed out
00:12:13.400 an enormous stretch of the middle class.
00:12:16.140 I mean, if you consider all of those jobs that used to be there,
00:12:20.480 for example, in journalism or in manufacturing
00:12:22.520 or in any of these sort of physically-based occupations
00:12:26.100 and industries, which have either been physically outsourced
00:12:31.280 to other countries or they've been virtualised
00:12:35.060 and rendered more efficient.
00:12:36.560 I mean, I suppose we could take the law, for example,
00:12:38.760 which is a classical middle-class profession,
00:12:42.280 with clerical jobs increasingly going to AIs,
00:12:47.080 such as once upon a time there was a guy whose job it was
00:12:49.980 just to go and find things in the archive.
00:12:52.240 You know, the moment you can replace that with a search engine,
00:12:54.640 you know, the law firms can save themselves a lot of money, right?
00:12:58.380 And the consequence of that is that, you know,
00:13:00.840 an awful lot of people who once had reasonably well-paid clerical jobs
00:13:05.300 now don't anymore.
00:13:07.420 So I don't know, I mean, completely obliterating
00:13:11.260 is probably putting it rather strongly.
00:13:13.900 You know, there's still plenty of middle-class people left.
00:13:16.800 But, you know, if you look at that,
00:13:18.240 I mean, one of the things I wrote about not long ago was what I call Aella's law, which is to say the internet power law is now being rolled out in real life.
00:13:30.780 And the power law of how things work on the internet has been observable since the early days of social media.
00:13:38.320 The 1990 law, which is to say in any given social internet space, 1% of the users will generate most of the content.
00:13:50.680 The next 9% will generate quite a lot and 90% will mostly just hang out a bit.
00:13:55.860 But that also goes for earnings on the internet.
00:13:58.640 So if you look at any given internet platform, say eBay or Amazon or YouTube, indeed, 1% of the contributors will reap most of the gains.
00:14:09.880 9% will do pretty well, and 90% will just get the long tail.
00:14:14.780 Ayala has posted a graph.
00:14:17.860 Ayala, for anybody who isn't aware, is an extremely high-earning performer on the pornography website OnlyFans. 0.97
00:14:24.780 She's in the top 0.6%, I believe, of earners.
00:14:28.640 And in a good month can make several hundred thousand dollars.
00:14:32.460 So so she's she's right up at the top of the curve. 0.96
00:14:34.640 But the majority of the majority of performers on OnlyFans or indeed the majority of sellers on eBay will will make, you know, a few quid here and there.
00:14:43.380 And that that law I see in the digital age, I think, is being rolled out in real life as well.
00:14:47.760 So I mean, one of the things you talk about COVID and lockdown, one of the things that's definitely been happening is the further accumulation of wealth right at the top.
00:14:56.920 and the immiseration of everybody else, pretty much.
00:15:00.780 COVID has rolled out Euler's Law comprehensively
00:15:04.200 throughout all kinds of areas of society which were still resisting it
00:15:07.160 because it effectively banned real-life alternatives
00:15:10.180 to the kind of virtualisation and centralisation that I'm talking about.
00:15:15.200 And what about, Francis, did you have another question about this?
00:15:19.400 Yes. So the question that I want to ask,
00:15:22.260 and again, it's touching on the real-world impacts,
00:15:25.860 What effect does that have on the real world?
00:15:28.540 Now, we've talked about the middle class,
00:15:30.560 but doesn't that just exacerbate the atomisation,
00:15:33.600 the feeling of loneliness?
00:15:34.780 Because we're destroying our communities, aren't we?
00:15:38.520 Great.
00:15:40.100 Happy?
00:15:40.820 Yeah, I am.
00:15:41.360 You got the answer you were looking for. 1.00
00:15:42.680 Everything is fucked. 1.00
00:15:44.060 Congratulations, mate. 1.00
00:15:44.820 You can relax now.
00:15:45.920 Let me ask something else.
00:15:47.540 Mary, we joke, of course, but seriously,
00:15:49.960 in terms of the culture,
00:15:51.840 coming back perhaps to where we started,
00:15:53.440 you were talking about how everything that used to be good is now bad can we get more into that
00:15:58.820 because I guess this is one of the things we've been wrestling with on the show that there seems
00:16:06.020 to be a radical cultural transformation and and you know if you talk to Jordan Peterson he'll say
00:16:10.660 that it's it's primarily driven by technology other people have different points of view about
00:16:16.080 it. But there's a sort of feeling like the pace of cultural change is accelerating and the world
00:16:24.780 is very rapidly becoming unrecognizable. So I'll give you an example. I was just in Ukraine a few
00:16:31.200 weeks ago visiting my grandmother, who's 95, and she said to me, A, what do you do for a living?
00:16:37.180 And B, what's your book about? And I found myself unable to speak because how do you explain these
00:16:42.620 things to a 95 year old in ukraine who lived through stalinism and the german nazi occupation
00:16:49.320 like she does not she's very clued up for a 95 year old but she has absolutely no reference for
00:16:54.800 all this nonsense that the three of us are involved with so what is happening in the culture and why
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00:17:31.340 I think that's a difficult thing to answer comprehensively
00:17:34.560 because it completely depends where you're standing,
00:17:36.520 I mean, as your grandmother illustrates.
00:17:40.140 I mean, what's happening in where we are in East London
00:17:44.720 is very different to what's happening where I am in Bedfordshire,
00:17:49.580 where I live in Bedfordshire.
00:17:51.360 I mean, they're related, obviously,
00:17:53.420 but they're not quite the same thing at all.
00:17:56.140 So, I mean, where I live in Bedfordshire has been,
00:17:58.920 up until now at least, relatively immune to a lot of this radical stuff.
00:18:03.760 you can still say pretty much what you like to people um if there are there are still strong
00:18:09.000 local community bonds you know it's it can it contrasts quite quite sharply with what life is
00:18:18.440 like say in a very high turnover part of the the the country's capital um you know most most people
00:18:28.200 where i live have have jobs locally um that that doesn't really you know it's not it's not so much
00:18:34.180 a zoom classes place but it but it's also but it's also right at the sharp end of um a lot of
00:18:40.420 the sort of economic transformation of the country you know where i live right on the oxford or the
00:18:45.120 oxford cambridge arc which is where they're planning to build the 10 million or whatever
00:18:48.860 it is houses that the country is currently missing so all of the all of the green spaces
00:18:53.780 that i currently run through and enjoy just as footpaths and countryside will probably be gone
00:18:57.780 in the next 10 years and turned into, you know, never-ending urban sprawl.
00:19:01.900 Now, I have very mixed feelings about that because on the one hand,
00:19:04.160 people have got to live somewhere, and on the other hand,
00:19:06.620 I like the countryside where I live and enjoy it
00:19:09.380 and would prefer to live in the countryside.
00:19:11.240 So what is happening in the culture overall in terms of, you know,
00:19:18.700 what everything that we thought was good is bad and everything,
00:19:22.480 it's not something I find easy to answer because it's so contextual.
00:19:28.500 It really is.
00:19:29.700 I mean...
00:19:30.300 But look, I would argue that, of course, for the moment,
00:19:33.140 you can feel somewhat isolated from what's happening
00:19:36.400 in East London in Bedfordshire.
00:19:38.380 You can.
00:19:38.860 For the moment, right?
00:19:40.060 But you are isolated from it in the same way
00:19:42.640 that a manufacturing worker in the 90s was isolated
00:19:46.280 from people who believed in globalisation in London, right?
00:19:50.740 You're isolated from it until it takes your job.
00:19:53.040 Yes.
00:19:53.840 Right?
00:19:54.400 And you're isolated from the culture war and wherever else.
00:19:57.640 until the public education system
00:20:01.000 starts teaching your three-year-old
00:20:02.560 whatever it is, gender ideology
00:20:04.600 or whatever else you want.
00:20:05.800 Just so.
00:20:06.500 So I feel that anyone who thinks that way,
00:20:10.460 and I'm not saying that you do,
00:20:11.520 but anyone who has that illusion
00:20:13.060 is going to get disabused of it very, very quickly.
00:20:16.080 I think that's absolutely true.
00:20:17.100 I mean, I occupy a funny sort of position
00:20:19.940 living where I do
00:20:21.980 in that most of my working life
00:20:24.900 is spent in the discourse,
00:20:27.020 you know with a capital t and a capital d you know i mean the discourse is kind of what i do
00:20:31.260 for a living and i've been i've been very online for 20 years so i enjoy living in the countryside
00:20:36.760 and i run a lot because that's the only way i can stay sane and stop myself from just drifting away
00:20:41.760 altogether into the discourse um so on the one hand i enjoy being grounded in a local community
00:20:47.560 where you know there are i i have local mum friends etc on the other on the on the other i
00:20:52.800 have this sort of parallel existence which is in this strange kind of disembodied world where
00:20:57.000 where people worry about this stuff.
00:20:59.140 And, you know, and it really does give me double vision sometimes.
00:21:01.920 So I wander, you know, I wander around my local area
00:21:04.240 and sometimes it just feels insubstantial,
00:21:06.380 as though it could just sort of blow away like a sandcastle drying out
00:21:09.980 and just become, I don't know, what will be left behind.
00:21:14.040 You say, and it's a very powerful image that you've just used.
00:21:17.640 Do you think that that's what's going to happen inevitably?
00:21:20.820 Or do you think there will be a pushback against what we're seeing?
00:21:24.720 I mean, I...
00:21:27.000 Probably neither. I mean, England's market towns have been around for a long time. Where I live has existed for the last thousand years. I don't think it's likely to disappear overnight.
00:21:41.040 um but but although i don't really believe in progress in any sort of absolute sense i don't
00:21:46.840 think it's a thing um i do you know cultures do evolve and you know places places and
00:21:52.820 communities change their meaning and their inflection over time and there's sort of there's
00:21:57.800 nothing you can really do about that so i'm kind of i'm sort of fairly resigned doomer in that sense
00:22:02.500 you know i don't i don't see my i don't i don't see bedfordshire and its community is just kind
00:22:07.320 of blowing away like a sandcastle in the wind. But I do think, as you say, things are changing
00:22:13.480 very rapidly. And a lot of the things that we thought were just dead certs forever are really
00:22:20.560 not. When you say you don't believe in progress, what do you mean by that? Because, I mean,
00:22:26.660 objectively speaking, if we compare ourselves to humanity 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 500 years
00:22:33.620 ago a thousand years ago i think you'd be very you'd be very easy to argue humanity has made a
00:22:38.780 lot of progress well i mean i would actually disagree i mean because i think at the moment
00:22:44.160 if you say well you know we've we've progressed over the last thousand years you've got to define
00:22:49.300 what you mean by progress longer longer life expectancy right but at that point you've already
00:22:54.480 begged the question i've already you're begging the question as in you've you know in in the in
00:23:00.120 the way you phrased the question you've already you've already predetermined your answer uh okay
00:23:06.140 so but would you would you argue that it's unfair to say that people living longer healthier lives
00:23:11.600 uh i mean i see what you're saying in a way my point is that there are always trade-offs
00:23:16.660 yeah yeah i see what you're saying so for example you might argue that the fact that we live longer
00:23:20.560 is a is a product of a society that also means we live in atomized groups and therefore we're
00:23:26.100 not connected with family we have fewer children and and blah blah blah and we end up dying in
00:23:30.680 care homes as opposed to being looked after by immediate family just so yeah just so you know
00:23:34.840 what i'm saying is not that you know so that nothing ever gets better or that we're getting
00:23:38.860 worse my point is simply you know the reason i don't believe in progress in some sort of an
00:23:43.000 absolute sense is that i think all the all the things that we measure as progress are just
00:23:46.840 measured as such by bracketing all of the ways that they constitute trade-offs so you know the
00:23:51.900 moment you've framed such and such as as pro as as your your your metric for progress you've already
00:23:57.640 you've already um answered your own question okay what about penicillin well i mean but penicillin
00:24:03.780 is great um but but yeah what about superbugs touche touche i mean you know my my point is
00:24:12.440 simply that you know it's it's not obvious to me that humanity you know taken in its total
00:24:19.100 is in some way morally improved from over 1,000 or 2,000 years ago.
00:24:25.480 Let me keep trying.
00:24:26.580 What about a lack of Stalinism and purges and gulags?
00:24:32.160 Well, sure, but we didn't have Stalinism before Stalinism either.
00:24:35.840 Yeah, I mean, we kind of did, though, didn't we?
00:24:38.540 Like, you know, we had the Inquisitions and the...
00:24:41.420 What about Xinjiang, then?
00:24:43.820 Yeah.
00:24:44.880 You know, we don't not have Stalinism anymore.
00:24:47.320 It's true.
00:24:48.240 That is true.
00:24:49.100 I don't believe in progress.
00:24:50.520 All right, well, I'm going to get depressed as well. 0.99
00:24:52.280 Fucking hell. 0.99
00:24:53.480 It's great to have you on, Mary. 0.99
00:24:55.340 We thought, you know, we'd get someone interested in.
00:24:57.440 But no, you know, just, you know.
00:25:00.180 This is the ultimate Black Pill episode.
00:25:02.240 Yeah, absolutely.
00:25:03.600 The thing is, like, it's not that I'm...
00:25:07.200 You're not depressed about it.
00:25:08.580 No, I'm not.
00:25:09.320 I'm really not depressed about any of this.
00:25:11.440 Yeah, because it's so bad.
00:25:12.300 Why bother?
00:25:12.920 Yeah.
00:25:13.460 Do you take a certain nihilistic glee in it?
00:25:15.780 Absolutely not.
00:25:16.620 No, I think there's immense scope in human life for beautiful, heroic, wonderful, transcendental experiences.
00:25:25.960 I just don't think things are necessarily never-endingly getting better.
00:25:31.160 You know, humanity evolves and cultures and ideas and people and places and everything evolves.
00:25:38.680 And just tracing that is itself astonishingly beautiful.
00:25:42.920 It's just not constantly getting better.
00:25:45.500 It's just changing.
00:25:46.620 I think I think there's a lot of truth to that. I mean, if you look at the last decade to suggest that things are getting better, I'm not sure I'd buy that argument.
00:25:57.400 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it depends where you're standing. You know, I mean, if you're if you're an upper middle class white person who inherited wealth sometime in the late 1990s and got on the London housing ladder before the before the colossal boom, then you'd be forgiven for thinking that things things have been continuously getting better.
00:26:16.740 But, you know, for somebody not very far down the road from that person, it really might not feel like that at all. Or for, you know, not that many years younger than that person, it might not feel like that at all.
00:26:24.800 you know if you're no it's it's it's an excellent point i mean let's touch on a subject that has
00:26:31.240 never upset or offended anybody who gets anybody angry feminism you write a lot you write a lot
00:26:37.140 about feminism i particularly enjoy your articles would you describe yourself as a feminist mary 0.95
00:26:41.480 and if you do what does that mean to you well my twitter bio says reactionary feminist okay what 0.79
00:26:46.520 does that mean let's start with that it's it it started as some banter it was literally just a
00:26:51.980 running joke between me and one of my friends. I had a long-standing argument with a friend about
00:26:57.260 the term post-liberal, which people attach to me. I don't attach it to myself, but people attach the
00:27:02.680 term post-liberal to me. And I had a long-standing argument with a friend who's of the opinion that
00:27:09.300 I was not a post-liberal, I was a reactionary. And I said, no, I am not a reactionary. Reactionaries
00:27:14.780 are bad people. And his take was essentially that post-liberals are just reactionaries who don't
00:27:21.540 inhale um and you know it was a it was a very long-running very sort of it was a a long-standing
00:27:27.240 banter back and forth about about post-liberals and reactionaries and in the course of which i
00:27:31.860 changed my twitter bio just to see how long it would take him to notice but i sort of i came to
00:27:36.120 think that actually it's it it's a fun placeholder i like reactionary because people are going to
00:27:40.900 call me that anyway they're bound to because i i acknowledge for example that humans can't change
00:27:45.980 sex, which is already a serious enough heresy to have you dumped among the bad people. And also 0.58
00:27:53.960 because I don't believe in progress. And one of the questions that has preoccupied me for a long
00:28:00.020 time is, how is it even possible to argue for women's interests if you don't believe in progress? 0.97
00:28:08.820 Because feminism, as we understand it, is pretty inseparable from the whole sort of liberal progress 1.00
00:28:13.540 narrative this idea that you know we are where we're going from a bad place where everything
00:28:17.700 everything was terrible and benighted to a good place where everybody is enlightened and it's all
00:28:21.980 good and we have rights and so on and why is that not true i mean you can vote now you you know your
00:28:27.960 husband can't beat you with a stick it's which is all great you know i'm i'm very much in favor of
00:28:32.780 what are the trade-offs that you are concerned about well in that situation i mean what is worth
00:28:41.600 being beaten with a stick for i guess is what i'm getting at i mean that's a bold question
00:28:47.340 i'm just following the logical line here um and giving mary the opportunity to elucidate give me
00:28:56.260 give me a nice long length of rope that i can hang myself with let me be let me be perfectly clear i
00:29:01.380 am fully fully fully in favor of um very grateful to my foremothers for securing for me um the right
00:29:08.960 to exist as a person, you know, in contemporary post-industrial, contemporary sort of liberal era
00:29:14.860 terms. There's a very, very, very long answer to your question, which we probably don't have time
00:29:19.800 for today, to do with the, I mean, it's essentially my thesis that what we understand as feminism
00:29:25.800 is one iteration in the context of industrial modernity of a much of just an eternal debate,
00:29:31.340 which is to say how men and women can reconcile their not always perfectly aligned interests,
00:29:36.240 which are fundamentally rooted in our different reproductive roles you know what men what men
00:29:42.140 want and need out of out of the opposite sex and out of society is not doesn't completely overlap
00:29:47.520 with what women need and you know a lot of you know and it's an eternal source of kind of cultural 1.00
00:29:53.000 negotiation let's say um how how we go about squaring these two sets of interests and in
00:29:59.120 different material contexts and different you know socio-cultural contexts that plays out very
00:30:03.300 differently. And it is my view that in the context of industrial modernity, well, when
00:30:11.520 society is industrialised, that left women quite disadvantaged in some ways which are
00:30:17.560 specific to the material conditions of industrial modernity, particularly to do with how work
00:30:22.840 was reorganised. You know, there's suddenly this very stark split between work and home,
00:30:27.200 which left women very on the back foot. And, you know, so to an extent still subject 1.00
00:30:33.300 to an older set of patriarchal social codes,
00:30:36.080 but without any of the social and cultural power
00:30:40.020 that they had previously wielded, you know, in a medieval setup.
00:30:43.940 In other words, you're expected to go to work
00:30:46.020 and you don't have the sort of...
00:30:49.080 the protections that are afforded to women 0.96
00:30:52.820 in a more patriarchal traditional society, let's say.
00:30:55.560 Well, you're getting ahead of...
00:30:56.860 I'm thinking really of the 19th century here,
00:30:59.060 where all of a sudden women were expected to be the angel by the hearth. 0.98
00:31:03.300 yeah um and but they and and completely economically inactive yes but then they had no
00:31:09.780 they had no personhood independent from their husbands as a legacy of them of an older patriarchal 0.66
00:31:15.620 way of doing things in the medieval era which was semi i mean you know not without problems and not
00:31:20.380 without abuses and there are plenty of you can cite plenty of abuses of women from the from the 0.99
00:31:26.300 Middle Ages. I mean, obviously, you know, witch burnings to name but one. However, you know, 0.58
00:31:33.160 there were, it was a setup that was more or less functional in a context where both adults in a
00:31:40.360 household worked, you know, within a household. I mean, if you think about, you know, sort of
00:31:44.780 typical kind of artisan or, you know, reasonably well-off kind of yeoman household in the Middle 0.98
00:31:50.240 Ages, you know, women worked as well as men, because everybody was engaged in some sort of 0.98
00:31:54.860 subsistence activity but that changed in the industrial era because all of a sudden work
00:31:59.240 happened you know out there in a factory or whatever and I mean I'm talking here about the
00:32:03.720 middle classes again you know this is it's very difficult to pin this stuff down because it's so
00:32:07.300 contextual but for the for the bourgeoisie suddenly women were supposed to be this kind of this very 0.99
00:32:12.020 sort of very constrained kind of still no still no independent person had still no right to own
00:32:18.480 property and suddenly you don't really have any role outside just raising children and so so that
00:32:24.700 that prompted you know women who are obviously people just like men um to say well hang on a 0.96
00:32:29.560 minute this is a bit boring and nobody really this this is just a bit shit so we we we would 0.90
00:32:35.580 like we would like to be deemed persons you know under the new well you know we we exist in a we 0.65
00:32:41.100 live in a democracy just like you can we vote please can we own property can we work and you
00:32:46.540 know the the the but but it was it was the it was the economic shift that drove the um that drove
00:32:53.400 the political shift and then again you know with the advancement of technology you know all of a
00:32:58.120 sudden you know all of the sort of housewife drudgery started to fade away because you just
00:33:03.500 you don't have to do your washing by hand anymore and so all of a sudden that frees up a whole lot
00:33:07.460 of time and suddenly women are looking out and thinking you know they seem to be having a more
00:33:10.760 interesting time of it you know why can't we go and you know we'd quite like to work as well you
00:33:15.980 know we're just sitting around twiddling our thumbs and this is I mean this is immensely
00:33:20.120 complicated territory and i'm really not doing it justice here no i actually hear a lot of what
00:33:24.660 you're saying i mean it's even more dangerous for me to articulate some of these things than it is
00:33:28.840 but i suppose uh if you look at women's mental well-being over the last
00:33:34.500 i don't know a few decades let's say or more than that maybe last six seven eight decades you don't
00:33:41.100 necessarily see much progress in fact you see a decline seemingly at least right um so i see
00:33:48.280 your your point about trade-offs yeah yeah yeah i mean we what we've what we've ended up in is a
00:33:55.260 situation i mean there's this sort of uh eternal tension you know between um one between desiring
00:34:03.200 equality between the sexes and accept and and acknowledging the difference the physiological
00:34:08.760 differences between the sexes and i think that you know i mean that tension is not one that you
00:34:12.300 can abolish even though you know recent activists are definitely trying but you know it's irreducible
00:34:17.480 well, it's how we make new humans, right?
00:34:19.580 You know, unless we're going to stop doing that,
00:34:22.140 you know, there are certain irreducible facts
00:34:24.340 about how you make new humans,
00:34:25.860 which are very difficult to get away from completely.
00:34:28.900 And that's, you know, the fact that, you know,
00:34:31.100 only one sex gestates and only one sex can breastfeed. 1.00
00:34:34.420 We're getting to very controversial territory.
00:34:36.640 Indeed we are.
00:34:37.900 And I'm skirting around some really quite radioactive territory.
00:34:40.560 You don't need to skirt around it.
00:34:42.060 No, indeed.
00:34:42.940 But, you know, I'm very careful about what I say on this subject.
00:34:46.260 No, no, no, I mean, I'm going to get cancelled probably sooner or later,
00:34:51.100 but, you know, perhaps it won't be today.
00:34:53.320 Mary, why are we so worried about skirting around this territory?
00:34:59.800 When I think, you know, as human beings, as intelligent adults,
00:35:03.580 we all know what the truths are.
00:35:04.980 Why are we skirting around these territories?
00:35:08.140 Well, there's a...
00:35:10.640 I'm not afraid of being cancelled for saying that humans can't change sex.
00:35:15.560 I have no concern about that. I mean, I'm out and proud and have been for some time about my views on that.
00:35:21.700 So, you know, I'm not concerned about being cancelled for that, because were that to take place, it would already have happened.
00:35:28.140 However, I tread cautiously when it comes to how people feel about their identities,
00:35:37.360 because I came to the subject of trans politics
00:35:41.120 via personal involvement in the trans scene as it was,
00:35:46.880 you know, very nascently in the noughties.
00:35:49.720 You know, I know a lot of people who began...
00:35:53.740 I mean, all the women I dated in the noughties 0.96
00:35:59.500 have since become men.
00:36:01.260 This is something I...
00:36:02.360 So it's your fault.
00:36:04.140 Well, I did wonder for a bit.
00:36:06.020 I did wonder for a bit, but no, actually, I mean, you joke,
00:36:10.100 but I did think, is it me?
00:36:11.840 But no, no, no, I really don't think it is.
00:36:13.960 I think it's just straightforwardly that I was, you know, 0.74
00:36:16.800 in as much as I'm attracted to women, I was always attracted to butch women 1.00
00:36:19.300 and not unreasonably. 0.97
00:36:21.820 A lot of butch women have opted for life as a transgender man 1.00
00:36:25.740 because why wouldn't you, considering trans men get stunning and brave 0.98
00:36:29.780 and butch women get not very kind or understanding treatment? 1.00
00:36:34.540 I mean, why would you not?
00:36:36.020 you know especially if you've been always felt uncomfortable with you know the expectations
00:36:41.720 placed on women and prefer to adopt more masculine style and presentation and dress and so on 0.96
00:36:47.100 i completely understand why why a lot of a lot of female body why a lot of female body people would 1.00
00:36:53.100 would opt for opt for that pathway and just sort of go go all the way there and and find and find
00:36:59.000 it genuinely more comfortable and so you know i i say this just to just to explain why you know
00:37:05.840 I'm very, I'm careful in what I say on the subject,
00:37:11.420 not because I want to skirt around the fact
00:37:14.560 that humans can't literally change sex,
00:37:17.040 but because I think it's really important
00:37:18.460 not to dehumanize the individuals involved
00:37:21.320 who often genuinely struggle and, you know,
00:37:24.360 really suffer and, you know, really struggle
00:37:26.680 with, you know, just a sort of existential state
00:37:30.200 of discomfort, you know, in the dissonance
00:37:32.620 between their physiology and identity.
00:37:34.680 and I think it's really important not to be dehumanising
00:37:37.740 in how we talk about this because it's very painful for a lot of people.
00:37:41.280 I quite agree with you and actually I found that comment that you made 0.56
00:37:44.420 really remarkable that there's a lot of butch women, 1.00
00:37:48.440 particularly butch lesbians, who would prefer to transition 1.00
00:37:51.480 and live their life permanently medicalised, 0.99
00:37:55.460 as inverted commas, as a man, than they would do
00:37:58.600 as a woman living a perfectly normal natural life.
00:38:02.840 That to me seems awful.
00:38:04.680 yeah is it really that bad for them yeah i i think being being gender non-conforming is
00:38:12.100 extremely difficult you know and if if anything it's more difficult now than it was um 20 years
00:38:19.000 ago i mean i think about i mean my husband's a little bit older than me he's sort of proper gen
00:38:23.720 x whereas i'm kind of borderline borderline gen x millennial and you know his his musical and sort
00:38:30.500 of aesthetic era is the new romantics. I mean, if you think about some of the sort of celebrity
00:38:37.360 figures from that era, the late 80s and up to the early 1990s, they were all gender bending
00:38:42.800 merrily left, right and centre. And you think about Marilyn and, well, I mean, you name it,
00:38:47.820 any of the new romantics. Right, exactly. I mean, the whole of pop culture there was filled with
00:38:52.920 people who were just really playing very creatively with the boundaries of gender
00:38:56.900 presentation and that all just seems to have gone i mean i was but if you watch top of the pops from
00:39:02.140 from that era and you know from from the 70s through to through to i suppose perhaps the late
00:39:08.780 1980s i mean you think you watch that and you see the women perform you think my god they're wearing
00:39:13.680 a lot of clothes yeah but it's but it's really striking and it's not just but it's not just a
00:39:19.720 decency thing you know patty smith would get up on stage wearing a pair of sort of brown corduroy 1.00
00:39:23.680 flares and nobody tried to put her in little fucking britney spears sort of warrior battle 1.00
00:39:28.640 bikini like they like they do battle bikini i mean you know exactly the sort of outfit i'm 0.95
00:39:33.440 talking about rhinestone spangled battle bikini seems to be kind of the order of the day if you
00:39:37.800 want to be a female performer the only way you can be at all you know anything kind of curvier 0.52
00:39:43.140 than anorexic is if you're if you started life as a stripper um you know those are those are the
00:39:48.120 options available you know the the set the pornification of women in in the culture now
00:39:55.220 and the you know the sort of extremeness and the i mean you think about the contestants on love
00:40:00.640 island you know they all the girls are kind of you know with their boobs hitched up to here and 1.00
00:40:05.120 their botox and their fillers and the highlights and what have you and all the guys are uh it's
00:40:10.240 sort of pumped up pumped up kind of uh ken dolls covered in with their arms covered in biro you 0.97
00:40:16.080 You know, it's this sort of incredibly kind of cartoonish, you know, hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine stereotypical aesthetic, which, yeah, it doesn't leave very much scope for gender creative expression.
00:40:32.640 So I can really understand how people who just don't comfortably fit those sorts of extreme stereotypes could find themselves thinking, well, actually, maybe I should just join the other team and just literally become the other team, because that's just going to be less of a miserable paradox to try and occupy.
00:40:50.920 i get that and i can see why people would think no actually the uh the trade-offs in terms of you
00:40:57.240 know osteoporosis and you know 25 years off my life or whatever it whatever it is you know
00:41:03.660 it's that seems that seems like a reasonable trade i can see how people get there that that
00:41:10.460 is so sad when you consider what the narrative that has been fed to us that you know we're more
00:41:14.520 free liberal than ever before we're more accepting than ever before but actually you know the
00:41:20.360 narrative that the media is showing us the images and also let's be fair social media as well
00:41:24.900 it's very much the opposite of that isn't it yeah i mean one of the i i did a i wrote something about
00:41:31.520 um how i i wanted to i wanted to explore you know the what what's understood about you know
00:41:39.980 how much you know what what basis is there for thinking about you know they're actually you
00:41:45.700 psychological normative differences between the sexes. I looked into it and I found a really
00:41:51.660 interesting study which showed that the people are more likely to think of themselves as very
00:42:02.540 masculine or very feminine in societies where materially people are more egalitarian.
00:42:09.360 So people cling more strongly to masculine and feminine sex roles the more egalitarian life is
00:42:14.620 in reality. Women are less likely to go off and study science and engineering and maths 1.00
00:42:21.140 where the culture is. Women are more likely to study egalitarian subjects or to take an interest 0.51
00:42:29.400 in science where the culture itself is more sexist and more sex role differentiated, which seems
00:42:34.640 really odd until you think about it. You think, well, people intuitively sense that there is
00:42:41.740 you know there is something different between men and women we're not quite sure what it is
00:42:46.120 but you know if if everyone's saying oh you know men and women can both do everything and you know
00:42:50.700 men men can be stay-at-home parents and women can be you know you know ball-busting CEOs and yada
00:42:55.860 yada yada and there are in fact no material differences between us at all then but but
00:43:00.200 people still feel instinctively that there is something there is something different and so
00:43:03.840 instead they kind of construct this sort of exaggerated masculinity or femininity as a way
00:43:08.940 of making up for the sort of the sense that we're all just kind of disintegrating into a sort of
00:43:13.740 gray goo i mean i mean that's that's my that's my reading of what's going on there whether it's
00:43:17.720 whether it's true or not i don't know but but but my sense is that people people want there to be a
00:43:23.180 difference of some kind between men and women people people kind of people feel it matters
00:43:27.840 and you think it's that they want or do you think that they're tired of being told there isn't even
00:43:32.620 though all their objective life experience is telling them that there is and they're just tired
00:43:37.640 of living a lie like with so many other issues it could just be it could be that it could be that
00:43:42.660 i mean i don't know um i mean so certainly what what has what has felt very true to me
00:43:50.720 is that it's very you can pretend that there are no differences between men and women until
00:43:56.820 you have children and the fact that more people are putting off children until ever later and
00:44:01.600 later or just not having children at all um is is increasing the constituency of people
00:44:06.780 who pretend that there are no differences between the sexes.
00:44:10.360 But the rubber really hits the road when you have children
00:44:13.240 because at the end of the day, you know, it's only me.
00:44:19.500 It was only me who was able to nurse a baby.
00:44:22.600 You know, it was me who grew her in my literal entrails.
00:44:26.460 And actually, you know, physiologically that came with a whole load of changes.
00:44:29.360 I'm reading this amazing book at the moment that's just about,
00:44:32.180 it's coming out shortly, called Mum Genes,
00:44:34.300 which is all about the physiological changes that come with changing from being a woman to 0.99
00:44:39.460 being a mother because it literally it literally rewires your brain i mean i'm still kind of
00:44:43.900 hopefully mostly sort of functional cognitively i think i do okay um but but it completely rewires
00:44:51.480 your brain you know and and actually you know even every child that you carry as a woman as a mother
00:44:58.560 leaves traces of their dna inside your body permanently and there's absolutely wild i didn't
00:45:03.800 know this um you know my sense that this sense i had of being kind of symbiotically connected to
00:45:08.580 my baby actually has a material basis in the sense that you know every child you carry you
00:45:13.900 leaves traces of dna that just sloshes around inside you and will will actually will actually
00:45:19.080 repair injuries that you have so if you if you cut yourself you know the the i think that they
00:45:24.820 call it microchimerism which is to say you know sort of genetic you you you become sort of chimerically 0.92
00:45:31.600 interconnected with your child literally at a cellular level and you know the and the the cell
00:45:37.420 the trace cells the trace dna which is left behind by your child will will repair injuries to your
00:45:42.480 body you know my i have a c-section scar that was probably repaired by my daughter's dna even though
00:45:46.940 she was she was physically gone from my body by then it's just nuts when you think about it
00:45:51.080 and within this sort of atomized paradigm we have of you know what humans are and how humans
00:45:57.580 relate to one another it makes no sense it just doesn't compute this idea that we're interconnected
00:46:03.540 and can be interconnected you know even at a cellular level and that's particularly true for
00:46:07.900 women in a way which is just it can't be true for men you know that that's sort of in in violation
00:46:13.980 of a number of pretty kind of fundamental beliefs that we have about well for one thing about the
00:46:21.580 the sameness between men and women and and also about the the fact that we're all separate and
00:46:27.240 atomized and sort of propelling ourselves around like like like billiard balls around a table
00:46:33.280 and in fact the reality is is much messier and stickier and more sort of interconnected than
00:46:38.280 that and that's that's more pronounced for women than it is for men it's a really great point and
00:46:43.140 it's fascinating and one of the things that you touched on that I particularly wanted to talk to
00:46:46.900 about, because it was something that concerned me when I was a teacher, is what you talked about,
00:46:51.960 which was the pornification of women. What impact do you think pornography is having on our society
00:46:58.060 and particularly on its impact on women? Well, I mean, I'm not really at the coalface of this
00:47:03.540 because I've been married for nearly 10 years. So I'm not really at the sharp end of dating
00:47:09.500 and relationships so much um but from younger friends um of both sexes actually my my sense is
00:47:18.660 that it's it's having a very radical impact um women i think there have been numerous studies
00:47:24.580 done of this that indicate that women in particular are experiencing much higher levels of
00:47:30.360 sexual violence violence during sex i think there was a study done last year that showed that over
00:47:35.520 that something like three quarters of men have slapped or choked or spat on a woman,
00:47:41.940 their partner during sex, men under 40, three quarters of them.
00:47:45.660 Now, it may well be that some of those women were really into it, 1.00
00:47:48.360 but all of them? I doubt it. I very much doubt it.
00:47:52.360 And this is coming directly from pornography.
00:47:55.140 And the difficulty there is that I think of pornography,
00:47:58.020 it has direction as well as force, right?
00:48:03.480 um but by by which i mean you know you what you watch something that you you watch two people just
00:48:10.060 having a shag right and that's that's really exciting and maybe you and but then you watch
00:48:13.720 it a couple of times and it's just not so exciting anymore so you go looking for something a bit more
00:48:17.220 intense and that and that that takes you that takes any regular prolific consumer of pornography
00:48:24.540 inexorably towards the really dark the really violent the really exploitative and then all the
00:48:29.640 way out there beyond the pale into I don't know children on animals and what have you you know
00:48:34.320 pornography has has it has force and it also has direction and and it also replaces intimacy 0.85
00:48:41.960 and I think this is this is a problem that a lot of as as I understand it a lot of young men are
00:48:48.100 struggling with some of them increasingly consciously I think there are there are
00:48:51.760 hundreds of thousands of members now of the nofap boards you know where you know you usually usually
00:48:58.060 adolescent, but, you know, men from all walks of life are really struggling with pornography 0.59
00:49:03.800 addiction, you know, compulsive masturbation. Um, and I think, you know, people laugh and go,
00:49:10.040 ah, losers, you know, you can't keep it in your pants. But I, I don't think, I don't think it's,
00:49:13.860 I really don't think it's something to laugh at. I think what they're doing is genuinely heroic
00:49:17.580 because the, the porn industry, the online porn industry is, is the most, the most kind of
00:49:23.500 nakedly, nakedly venal and just completely out there in the open version of the whole of the
00:49:31.660 internet dopamine machine, you know, full stop, you know, this whole, you know, that wants to
00:49:37.880 commodify people's desires and turn them into profit centres. I mean, most of the internet is
00:49:43.880 about that, right? You know, whether it's, you know, whether it's wanting to, you know,
00:49:48.340 hack the hack the desire for you know social applause by encouraging us to get really addicted
00:49:54.940 to social media platforms and the likes and the retweets and what have you and i fully confess i
00:49:59.360 have a i have a fairly fairly serious and chronic twitter addiction so you know i'm speaking from
00:50:03.940 experience there we've got no idea what you're talking about absolutely absolutely not of course
00:50:09.120 i mean you know i mean we're all we're all um we'll we'll all perhaps be in recovery together
00:50:14.180 one day um right i mean this is this is the water we all swim in right but the but the pornography
00:50:19.140 industry takes that absolutely to its its most squalid and venal conclusion you know because
00:50:24.200 it's every every every hit you get there um it's not just a little dopamine hit like you get from a
00:50:31.900 from a from a like or a retweet um it's an orgasm so you know the the rewiring is more is is is more 0.58
00:50:38.980 direct and it's more it's more comprehensive and i think for a lot of people it's it's very very
00:50:44.700 very addictive and and the whole the whole pornography industry is just set up directly to
00:50:49.420 hack um to to hack people's people's you know absolutely basic sort of lizard brain um mechanisms
00:50:58.880 for reproduction um and the fact that there are there's this growing subculture of young men out
00:51:06.620 there who are saying no actually I'm going to I'm going to disentangle the the vampire squid from
00:51:11.940 my brain I think that's genuinely heroic and there's something really really quite sort of
00:51:16.960 you know radical and yeah it's genuinely heroic and I don't I don't spend a huge amount of time
00:51:24.500 on the no fat boards but I've I've I've scooted through them once or twice you know not not sort
00:51:29.840 of voyeuristically but just out of curiosity to see what the discourse there is like and it's you
00:51:33.780 know a lot of people are really suffering you know and they talk about falling off the wagon
00:51:37.020 and they support each other trying to get back on it and yeah I mean there are there are corners of
00:51:40.100 that discourse which are a bit weird you know the whole kind of semen retention thing is kind of a
00:51:45.240 bit mad but and there are there are bits of it get quite misogynistic perhaps as well um but but
00:51:51.220 these are people who are trying to unplug themselves from the dopamine machine and that's
00:51:55.460 that's almost impossible to do you know as as witnessed by my own twitter addiction when I
00:51:59.460 think about trying to quit twitter i just think how am i going to do that you know it's it's it's
00:52:04.900 every bit as addictive as the smoking as which i which i finally quit 10 years ago and in some
00:52:11.200 ways i think it's a direct replacement for it and but you know these this this is the this is where
00:52:17.040 this is where we are as a culture it's it's interesting we're rapidly running out of time
00:52:21.960 because i think we're we're trying to scratch the surface of so much that we could talk about but
00:52:26.740 before we get to the end, we brought up feminism, never really got into it. But this is an interesting
00:52:34.020 perhaps point on which to wrap that conversation up for now until we get you back and talk for
00:52:38.540 seven hours instead of one, which is what do you make then of strands of feminism who seem to be 1.00
00:52:45.920 totally okay with this? Totally okay with sex work, totally okay with pornography, totally okay
00:52:51.280 with the erosion of women's spaces in some cases how does that work i don't think it does well i 0.74
00:52:57.860 don't either but i'm guessing what i'm trying to say is how has that happened how has it happened
00:53:01.740 well i'm this is i suppose central central to my reactionary feminist thesis is that we've come to
00:53:08.680 the end of the gains that we can be can be made for women by centering freedom and you know those
00:53:16.440 strands of feminism which are now you know all about applauding prostitution and um transgenderism 1.00
00:53:23.800 and yada yada yada you know the whole sort of meat lego matrix this idea that we can just sort
00:53:28.820 of monetize and commodify our bodies and that constitutes empowerment i think that that's a
00:53:33.740 that's a set of people who are still committed to the idea that it's possible to square feminism
00:53:37.740 with uh liberation in the digital age and i i just disagree with that i think i think they're
00:53:42.620 looking at it wrong and we need we need to we need a root and branch re-examination of the
00:53:48.620 material conditions we're in now not rather than just fighting yesterday's battles i mean if you
00:53:53.800 if you look at the digital age you know within and if you're stuck in the if you're stuck in
00:53:58.140 the industrial paradigm and you still think more liberation is self-evidently better then i can
00:54:02.820 see how you could end up in that you know arguing for sex work or arguing for um you know uploading
00:54:08.500 our consciousness is to the cloud or, you know, abolishing, liberating women, even from the
00:54:13.380 constraints of biological sex via, I don't know, extra uterine gestation or just being men or
00:54:18.880 whatever. I can see how if you're still chasing the high of liberation, you could still imagine
00:54:24.940 those things might be feminist, but I'm not chasing the high of liberation. I think we're
00:54:28.600 all of us, men and women alike, liberated enough. And what we need is more and better obligations.
00:54:33.820 boom and alpine credits bring you payroll payout win a hundred dollars an hour weekdays at nine
00:54:39.440 one and five sign up now at boom 97 free.com approved by alpine credits own your own home
00:54:45.060 and eat alone alpine credits can help visit alpinecredits.ca like what well i think we need
00:54:52.180 that that depends on who you are and who you're committed to and who your obligations are to
00:54:56.240 i mean in my case it's straightforwardly my obligations to my family particularly to my
00:55:01.180 daughter but also to my extended family and to to the people who i'm actually connected to and
00:55:06.220 whom i love in real life and you know beyond that to to my working my working relationships and my
00:55:12.400 friends i mean they're i mean grounded commitments in actual relationships um you know parasocial
00:55:17.800 relationships are great and fun and interesting and exciting but they but but they're insustantial
00:55:23.520 when it comes down to it you know internet friends come and go some of them turn into real life
00:55:27.120 friends. You know, I've been online long enough to have, to have in real life friends who started
00:55:32.420 out just as, you know, a DM chat. Um, but that's, but, but, but it's, I think it's important to
00:55:37.320 develop an ability to discern the difference and to be, to be able to think very pragmatically
00:55:42.480 about what actually matters. Um, so, you know, there, there isn't a universal answer to what
00:55:47.260 more and more and better obligations means, but it's, it's, it's grounded in real relationships
00:55:51.340 and not in ideology.
00:55:53.700 Mary, I've absolutely loved this interview.
00:55:56.120 It's been challenging.
00:55:58.480 We've discussed a variety of topics.
00:56:01.040 Slightly.
00:56:02.740 Which for him is a dopamine, to be honest.
00:56:04.800 Yeah, that is my pornography, so thank you.
00:56:08.880 But before we do our questions for our local supporters,
00:56:12.980 we always have one final question, which is,
00:56:15.380 what is the one thing we're not talking about,
00:56:17.360 but we really should be?
00:56:18.300 In my opinion, it's the very obvious conflict between liberal feminism and climate change, ecological collapse. 1.00
00:56:32.180 I agree with Phyllis Schlafly, and this may well be the point where I get cancelled for quoting Phyllis Schlafly,
00:56:38.120 who's an American conservative who died about three months before Donald Trump was elected.
00:56:43.200 but it was her opinion that women's liberation was not a result of moral progress but of modern
00:56:48.300 technology and although there are plenty that I disagree with Phyllis Schlafly on I do agree with
00:56:52.380 her about that I think a great deal of what we think of as liberation through progress is in
00:56:57.720 fact liberation from drudgery through machines that just do the jobs for us and I hope it's I
00:57:05.000 hope it doesn't happen in our lifetimes but I can envisage a future in which most of those
00:57:08.900 technological gifts are no longer with us or no longer widely available um whether whether we're
00:57:14.920 talking about washing machines or whether we're talking about um contraception um i think without
00:57:20.040 there is a huge amount of a huge amount of the ways in which women are liberated now are effects
00:57:25.260 of uh of advanced of an advanced technological civilization and should that civilization collapse
00:57:30.780 which we should all which we must all hope it doesn't um we we may we might find ourselves in
00:57:35.820 a situation where actually the the underlying underlying conditions that enabled feminism 1.00
00:57:40.920 are just gone and i think the environmental movement in particular is yet to get its head
00:57:46.420 around that with possible exception of roger hallam at extinction rebellion who's who's
00:57:51.740 considerably more switched on about this stuff than most of his supporters really former guest
00:57:56.120 on the show roger good good um yeah he's he's he he gets he gets a lot more i think than he lets
00:58:02.940 so on. But I mean, just to take one specific example, hormonal contraception is ecologically
00:58:10.500 catastrophic. And this is just something, this is an elephant in the room, as far as, you know,
00:58:15.520 I mean, most environmentalists would also consider themselves to be feminists. So all of them are
00:58:20.020 keen that, you know, women should have reproductive autonomy, as am I, I should say. But when that
00:58:27.140 comes to the mass rollout of the contraceptive pill worldwide, we should probably bear in mind
00:58:31.860 the fact that it's having disastrous effects on aquatic life um it's turning literally to
00:58:36.280 it it yeah it's having disastrous effects on were you about to say it's turning the frogs gay
00:58:42.140 well i mean that it's true it's turning the frogs gay you know you know i have i have no kind of i
00:58:48.800 have no moral view on that but you know it's obviously a problem as far as frogs have frogs
00:58:53.200 making you're not homophobic against frogs no no i'm not i'm not frog homophobic but you know
00:58:57.320 It's obviously a problem when it comes to frogs making more frogs.
00:59:00.800 So, I mean, these are probably things that we should engage with.
00:59:05.460 But this is a conflict which I think is just people
00:59:08.960 are just not willing to engage with at the moment.
00:59:10.880 They're like, well, hopefully it's all going to be fine,
00:59:12.540 so let's just not talk about that.
00:59:15.820 Well, what a note to end the interview on.
00:59:19.420 Thank you very much for coming on the show, Mary.
00:59:21.720 If people want to find you online, ironically,
00:59:24.100 where is the best place to do that?
00:59:25.680 My sub stack is Reactionary Feminist
00:59:27.460 and I tweet at MoveInCircles.
00:59:30.560 Fabulous.
00:59:31.100 Fantastic.
00:59:31.560 And make sure also to check out Mary's work on Unheard,
00:59:34.500 which is absolutely brilliant, Mary.
00:59:35.960 Thank you for coming on.
00:59:36.620 Thank you for having me.
00:59:37.540 It's been a real pleasure.
00:59:38.720 And thank you for watching at home or listening.
00:59:41.180 Thank you for being here.
00:59:42.440 We will see you very soon
00:59:43.780 with another brilliant interview like this one
00:59:45.700 or a Raw show.
00:59:46.940 All of them go out at 7 p.m. UK time.
00:59:49.160 Or 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
00:59:51.080 Which is the same time.
00:59:52.220 It is the same time, but for our American guests.
00:59:54.540 guys thank you so much and we'll see you soon we hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview
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