00:06:33.000You know, I think that's sort of hyper-feminism, if you want to call it that.
00:06:37.000I don't think it's feminism at all, actually sort of breeds distrust between the sexes, which has a very sort of negative outcome.
00:06:44.000But if a man is being persistent, if they're following you, if they're trying to touch you, if there's an element of sort of intimidation there,
00:06:54.000then all of a sudden a situation that's an innocent conversation suddenly becomes extremely anxiety-inducing for a start.
00:07:04.000And then, look, we know, don't we, from the grooming gangs that we have had across the United Kingdom,
00:07:11.000that these are culturally dominated by men from the sort of countries and backgrounds with the same mores that I'm talking about.
00:07:19.000So this isn't some sort of brand-new information.
00:07:22.000It's something we all know, still feel afraid to talk about, and are still loathe to address.
00:07:27.000But in the last week, the last week alone, okay, so I've had my friend call me up talking to me about how men who she believed to be Arabic men
00:07:38.000were intimidating her, blocking her, pushing her towards the wall, you know, preventing her from passing.
00:07:46.000She actually reported it to the police, and when the policeman came, she said to me that she had a sense that it wasn't being taken seriously,
00:07:55.000and the policeman kept saying, do you know I'm a Muslim? I'm a Muslim.
00:07:58.000And that kind of made her feel even sort of less able to talk about what had happened.
00:08:03.000And just yesterday, I was told by a girl that I'm working with at present that she got off the tube to walk home after the show,
00:08:13.000and she lives in the same neighbourhood as me, and there was a half-dressed man who was sort of kneeling, doing prayers on the side of the street,
00:08:21.000with a Quran next to him, and people sort of walking past. This must have been about, let's say, half 10, 11 at night, people walking past.
00:08:29.000And she walked and sort of, you know, looked across the other side, and he sort of caught her, I saw her,
00:08:35.000and started running after her, brandishing a knife. And I was like, oh my gosh, that's terrifying.
00:08:42.000And I said, what did you do? He said, well, you know, I reported to the police, and the police turned up,
00:08:45.000and they said, you know, he's got mental health issues. And I was like, are you feeling fine?
00:08:49.000And she was like, yeah, normal now, isn't it? I mean, how crazy is that, that these things have become so normalised?
00:08:56.000I mean, I personally have had, sometimes, you know, just, it happens regularly.
00:09:01.000I'd say almost every day that I walk down the street that I live, there will be groups of men who leer.
00:09:08.000And there's a difference, I think, between men who sort of go, oi, oi, check her out.
00:09:14.000And that feeling that you are being quietly and silently and sort of persistently tracked with eyes.
00:09:22.000I've had people come up to me in the supermarket, you know, actually it's not the accent that they have.
00:09:28.000But they're like, you know, I like you, you're beautiful, you're beautiful.
00:09:32.000What is your name? I want to get to know you. Will you be my friend? What is your name?
00:09:36.000I've been followed, this is in broad daylight, down to the front door of my house.
00:09:41.000And I had to pretend that wasn't my street and sort of do a little U-turn.
00:09:45.000And my next door neighbour's son happened to be walking down the road, thank goodness,
00:09:48.000because I just sort of gave an imploring look and followed him into the house and hid in there.
00:09:53.000And he went and checked and this guy was outside for like half an hour or something
00:09:57.000before I felt safe to go into my home.
00:10:00.000And he had sort of followed me down the street, this guy, very close quarters, chuntering away.
00:10:05.000And he had, I think it's a coal pot, those ones from Afghanistan that fold up.
00:10:09.000And I remember talking to someone about this and they said, well, he sounds like a nutter.
00:10:14.000And I'm like, well, great, because, you know, the people most likely to act on impulses without any sort of, you know,
00:10:20.000filter or any sort of blocking mechanism are likely to have mental health conditions.
00:10:25.000I was walking up the street the other day and I had, oh, smile, love.
00:10:29.000You know, that to me is a bit different.
00:10:33.000So there is a, you know, the difference between our smile, love, as you walk past someone,
00:10:38.000and then the following you to your front door, it's, you know, it's chilling.
00:14:49.000But when you look at the industry, right, that's come out of that brand, okay, all the pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, the lip fillers, the boob jobs, all the rest of it.
00:14:56.000And when you look again at some of the other things connected to Silicon Valley that have come out of that one family, filters and all the rest of it.
00:15:04.000When you look at how ubiquitous this is internationally, you know, you can go to an Arab nation and women have lip fillers.
00:15:11.000You can go to, you know, they have a sort of almost racially ambiguousness about them, ambiguity.
00:15:17.000But I'm like, what is this phenomenon?
00:15:21.000You know, are they a phenomenon or is there something going on here?
00:15:45.000But it is to me, there's something sort of strangely cynical about this family.
00:15:49.000There's something odd to me that, and sort of a lot of the cultural things that concern us now, whether it be pornification, as I call it, hypersexualization,
00:16:00.000the various dysphorias that are going on.
00:16:04.000Don't forget, of course, you know, on top of what you've got is the general sort of body and facial dysphoria coming from the avatarization of young girls wanting to look a certain way online.
00:16:22.000And then, oh, that's now a new cultural thing that is sort of, you know, riddling the world with mental illness.
00:16:27.000So, you know, the Kardashian family conveniently seemed to start all sorts of trends that we're now finding, in retrospect, quite problematic.
00:16:37.000I'm curious why you think it's the male gaze, though, that's driving some of this, because this is a conversation I've always wanted to have.
00:16:44.000Because a lot of people say that, but then I'm going, well, who buys, like, I don't know many men who are saying to their missus, I think you should get some lip fillers.
00:16:54.000It's not the male gaze that's driving it.
00:16:56.000What I said is these people are made on a surgical table for the male gaze.
00:17:00.000I'm not saying men are actually asking for that, because I think you're right.
00:17:03.000Interestingly, a great number of men don't want a woman who looks like Picasso's made her in a fit of rage.
00:17:11.000You know, but it's weird that with this is almost coming this sort of indoctrination that men should want that, that these are the sorts of things that they should desire in the opposite sex.
00:17:21.000And actually standards of beauty are often driven by commercial elements.
00:17:26.000So, you know, it wasn't fashionable to have a suntan because that means you worked in a farm and were, you know, part of the agricultural lower classes until Coco Chanel, you know, went on holiday and stepped off a yacht with a tan.
00:17:39.000And all of a sudden that was a sign of wealth.
00:17:41.000So, you know, the standards of beauty and aesthetics and sort of indoctrination culturally of what that should mean is often driven commercially.
00:17:50.000So, no, I'm not saying men have gone like, we want big lips.
00:18:26.000You know, like I said, the sort of relationship between commerce and cultural aesthetics is really closely bound.
00:18:35.000And in both directions, you know, there's a causal factor in both directions, I'd imagine.
00:18:40.000But in the 21st century, the Kardashians are the pinnacle of this relationship.
00:18:45.000And I think that's being incredibly destructive to women's mental health and frankly to just, you know, it feeds into as well the concept of reducing people down to the components of their body rather than having a whole relationship on an emotional basis or valuing people by the content of their character.
00:19:06.000Which again, it's sort of stripping people of humanity and adds to that avatarisation we're finding in society.
00:19:13.000Is that where the big ass spirits are? Sorry, Frances. I've been talking about this for a long time. Where did these big asses come from? When did that become a thing?
00:19:20.000The Kardashians. And also, like I said, you know, the interesting thing about this and a commercial, if you were someone commercial going, OK, we need to make an aesthetic that's going to appeal to as many people as possible.
00:19:31.000We've now got a far more obese society for a start. So a lot more white women have bigger bums than they might have done a while ago.
00:19:36.000But also, like I said, there's a sort of racial ambiguity. It's sort of flattening out what are the most attractive aesthetic elements that anyone from any race can say, I've got some of that.
00:19:48.460I've got, you know, a particular shape of body, a particular frame of body, or I don't have that, but I can have some boobs put on and some, you know, lips done.
00:19:56.620And it is sort of homogenizing, let's say, across all races. The sort of what used to be aesthetic variation when it came to beauty is now sort of being churned into something that can be a one size fits all.
00:20:10.400And again, that's represented by the Kardashians.
00:20:12.680Yeah, it's because if you look at, for instance, hip-hop culture, the girls who appeared in those kind of hip-hop magazines and hip-hop videos look very different to the girls who appeared or the women that appeared in Vogue in the 90s and the same with Latin magazines.
00:20:27.380Whereas now, because all of these cultures have come together, and you actually see it really interestingly in models, there is a thing for all models now.
00:20:37.340Like you just see, the ones that are really successful look racially ambiguous.
00:20:41.720Yeah, of course. Well, no, actually, what's increasingly happened is the ones that are really successful look gender ambiguous, don't they?
00:20:49.580And like I said, it's sort of driving us forward increasingly into a world which is strips of identity and humanity.
00:20:56.700We're made to recognize ourselves through the prisms of identity, not through what we are in reality.
00:21:04.240And it's sort of creating this sort of virtual plane upon which everyone's being increasingly driven.
00:21:09.860And that's having so many effects on people's psychology across the board, particularly young people.
00:21:16.040But it's affecting all of humanity right now.
00:21:18.640So let's go back to the feminism point, because I actually think this is really important.
00:21:22.880And I think it talks about hypocrisy from that particular movement where they would want to talk about things like rape culture, for instance.
00:21:32.580And they say, you know, society, you know, a male society is a society that has rape culture within it, etc., etc., etc.
00:21:39.940But then you think that they would be the ones talking about this.
00:21:45.020Why do you think that they haven't and they won't?
00:21:50.760If you just look at the sort of language taboos surrounding our culture and the prisms through which we're supposed to see things, there is a hierarchy.
00:21:58.460There is a hierarchy when it comes to victimhood.
00:22:01.720There's a hierarchy when it comes to protected characteristics.
00:22:06.220And at the top of all of this is somebody's race.
00:22:12.580And then second is the concept of oppressor, oppressee.
00:22:19.060And when you put that into a religious context over in the West, it's religious minorities, but at the moment, particularly Islam, I think, because it would be the religion which would suffer the most backlash from the native population just due to events that have taken place over the course of, well, not just even recent history, but history in general.
00:22:42.860And so, you know, what do you do when you have a middle class white girl who has been sexually assaulted by a 14 year old male refugee from a Middle Eastern country that the West had happened to invade?
00:23:02.300You know, this is it's so cynical and it's so distorting.
00:23:07.460And increasingly, like I said, my feeling is that when you look at all these cultural phenomenons taken as one, that the end user who is at the highest risk of all of them, of all of them, are girls.
00:23:23.560Even if you look at gender dysphoria, that was a largely a very rare male psychological condition, which is why when you see most of the trans activists out there of a certain generation, it's men who want to wear dresses.
00:23:36.000Actually, what you've seen now is complete flip reverse of that.
00:23:40.400And 75% of people presenting at gender clinics are girls.
00:23:46.400OK, there's the hypersexualization element where they feel like they cannot live up to standards and therefore they feel ostracized and depressed.
00:23:53.400They are also more likely biologically, the way they're wired, to have a sort of mass hysteria, to be influenced by peer groups.
00:24:04.380And they are increasingly the ones, I think, being targeted with algorithms saying, have mastectomies, get breast binders.
00:24:13.120You know, so, like I said, it's not a condition that's ever been prevalent in women.
00:24:20.300You know, tomboys, by all means, not saying women can't sort of enjoy masculine things or connecting with a sort of what might be defined as a masculine side to themselves.
00:24:31.560But the idea that women suffer from the actual psychological condition of gender dysphoria in history, it's been almost non-existent.
00:24:45.200Yeah. And it's what some of the points you're making are very interesting because if I think we can all agree in 2017, when the Me Too movement first started,
00:24:54.260a lot of the people who they target at the beginning were wrong-uns, the Weinsteins, etc.
00:25:00.960And then it reached a point of overreach where it said, believe all women, and then the movement became discredited, and then there was a backlash.
00:25:09.240And now it just feels that the things that we actually should talk about when it comes to women, we're not having these conversations.
00:25:18.200And it's created a vacuum which needs to be filled, really.
00:25:24.200And you look at these, like, you know, big-name feminists, and there just doesn't seem the willingness to tackle very thorny issues anymore.
00:25:34.760Is it a lack of willingness? Are they scared?
00:25:37.320I think something else that has happened in society.
00:25:40.840I don't like singling out individuals when I talk about things, but I think in the context of Jess Phillips, it's quite an interesting one.
00:25:47.040Because she actually, right now, holds that portfolio in cabinet, okay?
00:25:52.120And she has suffered enormously during her election campaign of, you know, threatening behaviour, intimidation, to the point it looks at on election night that she looks harrowed by it all.
00:26:05.880And I think everyone has an idea of who would probably have been behind that, given a lot of Labour MPs suffered, and Conservative MPs, suffered a backlash about, or baseline Gaza.
00:26:37.200And you ask yourself, well, why are people like her, who have campaigned so hard when it comes to domestic violence, why are they not really grabbing this issue?
00:26:45.240Because we know that, you know, within certain communities, there are things like child marriages and FGM and Sharia law preventing people getting divorces and so on and so forth.
00:26:54.000There are radical clerics out there who will be preaching to the people who turn up in the mosque that a man can have concubines and multiple wives, and a woman must always give her body to the man and so on and so forth.
00:27:05.620So, why is she lily livid about talking to it?
00:27:09.500Well, one can only assume it is for political expediency, because she'd worry about losing her seat.
00:27:16.600The other element is that, you know, a genuine concern about a backlash, right?
00:27:21.640That, you know, there is this problem we have in society, but if we talk about it, it's actually going to make it worse.
00:27:26.820Or the other thing, which I'm beginning to realise with certain people, and I don't know, I don't want to sort of say about Jess, I don't know.
00:27:32.940And I don't want to criticise her particularly personally, but she is a sort of an interesting subject matter in this instance.
00:27:40.560I think something else that's happened within the middle classes is because they have known the rules of the game to get to where they wanted to get to, right?
00:27:48.320If you wanted to go to editorial level at the BBC, if you want to become the, you know, on the executive board of a particular company,
00:27:57.360and actually those thresholds have come lower where these expectations are in place, you've had to do your mandatory unconscious bias training.
00:28:06.720Whatever you do, don't tell anyone you voted for Brexit, because they're not going to talk to you in the staff room.
00:28:11.620You know, all of these things have been drummed into people so much to get to where they've gotten to,
00:28:17.520that I think that they've actually got to the point that they gaslight themselves, that they genuinely believe that they can't take those glasses off now.
00:28:27.520And it's funny, because the middle, the lower classes, the working classes have far less exposure to that sort of nonsense that's built into corporations,
00:28:36.040and they're less likely to read, you know, things like the Guardian newspaper.
00:28:41.040They've been far less exposed to that sort of the dominant cultural narratives, which I think really need to be unpicked and thrown in the bin.
00:28:50.300They have this sort of, they've been inoculated against it because they've not really had to encounter that much of that.
00:28:56.760And at the same time, they're also more likely to be living in the communities at the sharp end of the impacts of all the things we're not allowed to talk about.
00:29:03.860So, I guess the question is, where do we go from here?
00:46:42.400And I think people, especially, look, frankly, I think one of the biggest letdowns of the 21st century in this country is our journalism industry.
00:46:49.380To me, they're of the worst when it comes to actually investigating the things that need to be investigated, speaking to the people that really do know what they're talking about and addressing the issues that are being forgotten.
00:47:01.900That is what journalism is supposed to be about.
00:47:03.840That was the light we were supposed to shine into the darkness.
00:47:07.100And journalism doesn't do that at all.
00:47:09.060Journalism actually is the shroud around reality these days.
00:47:26.080But you can tell they believe what they're saying.
00:47:28.340And there's nothing more, well, disgusting, frankly, is when you talk to someone and you know that they think something other than what they're saying.
00:48:03.520Again, I don't agree with many of the things that she says.
00:48:05.820But I guess what I'm saying is I would, the question is, if the choice we have is to live in a society where everyone tells comforting lies or everybody says what they actually believe and we disagree about the things we actually believe, I feel like that would be a lot better place for us to live in.
00:48:41.860And it's all starting to crumble because people's voices are now becoming stronger.
00:48:47.260And you've seen that, for instance, with the rise of the independent candidates, whether it's independent candidates who are overtly Muslim and their main issue is Gaza.
00:48:57.680And they broke away from the Labour Party for that reason is reform broke away from the Conservative Party because they felt, and I agree with them, the Conservative Party aren't conservative and they failed in their duty.
00:49:10.640And I think what we're looking at with the Labour Party, especially getting to power, they've gotten to how many people actually voted for Labour?
00:49:19.020And how interesting, actually, that one of his first acts as Prime Minister is that Sir Keir Starmer has decided to define what he considers to be the extremes by saying far right.
00:49:30.160After basically saying, I've gotten rid of the far left and the party, I'm now going to deal with all of this, this stuff is far right.
00:49:36.660He's thrown a grenade into right-wingery because the Conservatives are having a leadership debate and they've been fighting over how conservative they should be for the past two decades.
00:49:44.120And this is like peak fights for them right now when they have to define themselves.
00:49:47.800And the right wing, if it's going to democratically beat the left wing, needs to sort itself out and get back together.
00:49:54.800And so by going like, I'm going to bowl this term far right into the middle of all of you, that's going to be very difficult to do.
00:50:02.500And what he did, it was a spectacular misstep because what you did is you just antagonised a lot of people.
00:50:10.720It wasn't a misstep. I think he knows that. Was it a misstep or was it genius?
00:50:13.820I totally agree with you. He's a complete genius. Starmer has handled this incredibly well.
00:50:18.460Oh, yeah. He's actually basically said that, you know, the riots are happening in Labour constituencies.
00:50:23.620Does he care? No, he's got a massive majority in four years.
00:50:26.460OK, and those people are never going to go back and vote for him.
00:50:28.640He knows that. They've gone. He lost and they didn't vote for him anyway.
00:50:31.840So he doesn't care if they're antagonised.
00:50:34.760He doesn't. What he's done is called them all far right and made them feel even worse about themselves,
00:50:38.680but also made it less likely that they are going to go and do anything about it.
00:50:41.680I completely disagree with both of you. It is the stupid.