Factually! with Adam Conover - How to Think Like A Feminist with Carol Hay

Episode Date: October 14, 2020

Philosopher and author, Carol Hay, joins Adam to discuss the intellectual history of feminism, its challenges (including what she calls its historic “PR problem”), and how it’s evolved as a system of thought in the 21st century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. And, you know, a couple of weeks ago, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away. I know you thought this election couldn't possibly be crazier than the one we had in 2016. Well, here we are a month out from Election Day. One of the most impactful justices in Supreme Court history dies. You know, Scalia at least gave us, you know, 10 months or so. This time, things are a little bit more hectic. Well, you know, one of the things that really stood out to me when Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed was the way she was described in the press. They kept describing her over and

over again as the court's feminist icon. And it begs the question for me, what exactly do we mean by that? Because the way that slogan was used, it felt a little flattening, didn't it? It just like puts her in this little box. It sounds like rah, rah, I am woman, hear me roar, you know, you go girl. It has all those associations for us. But the truth is that feminism is a much deeper idea than that, with a much longer intellectual history. And it's one that for most of my life, I frankly have been ignorant of. And I want to own that. You know, I want to be clear.

I'm a man here talking with my man voice about feminism. It makes you a little uncomfortable. Maybe it certainly makes me a little bit uncomfortable. And I want to drill into why that is, because I was brought up with no education about feminism, about what it is or what it meant. Feminism was always presented to me in pop culture and even in my education as something that other people were, people other than myself. You know, feminists were the strange women who yelled at Al Bundy on Married with Children. That is the image that America gave me of what a feminist is. And, you know, again, I learned very little about it in school. All we were really taught was that there were ladies in sashes who got the vote way back in the black and white photo era.

And then a half a century later, a bunch of women started burning their bras. That's basically the long and the short of it. burning their bras. That's basically the long and the short of it. But the truth is that between the suffragists in the 70s and even before them and after them, there is an enormous body of thought that constitutes feminism and which continues to grow to this day. It is an intellectual tradition with thinkers, philosophers, sociologists, smart people of all stripes asking questions like, what are gender roles? How does society enforce them? And how can we make society more equitable for people of all genders? And that tradition is what culminated in Justice Ginsburg's career. Justice Ginsburg's career was not just a slogan or a hashtag. It was the culmination of this profound intellectual

movement. She took this understanding and filtered it through our legal system and made it the force of law. And to be clear, that's a job that has not yet completed, but it came out of that intellectual movement, a movement that, again, I want to be clear. I have been shockingly ignorant of embarrassingly ignorant of my entire life. And I want that to end. You know, I want to understand this movement. I want to understand feminism better than I have. And I would guess if you're listening to this podcast, you also would like to understand it better. So on the show today, we have the ideal guest to help us begin this conversation and dive into this topic and find out just how rich and interesting it is. Carol Hay is a philosopher and she is the author just recently of a book called Think Like a Feminist, The Philosophy Behind the Revolution.

This is a wonderful introductory guide to feminism, its history, its thought, its practice, and all the topics there under. And she's also a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Now, I want to be clear, we recorded this interview a few weeks back. It actually was just a day or two before Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away. So we do not discuss her life and legacy directly in the interview. And I'm sure we would have had we recorded it just a few days later. But Ruth Bader Ginsburg's presence looms large over this conversation for me and for you, I'm sure. So look, let's get to the interview. I am sure you are going to get a lot out of this conversation.

I know I certainly did. Please welcome Carol Hay. Carol, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Let's talk about feminism on this podcast. Let's do that. Okay, great. So normally, you know, when we encounter the word feminism, it's presented to us or we encounter it as a social movement, as something that people care about in the world. But it's also a philosophy or an academic discipline to an extent uh it's not one that i had a lot

of training and i want to be frank it was like kind of like a lacuna in my own studies and so i'd love to get up to speed on like what the what the history of it is and and the the intellectual history what are the what are the basic tenets of feminism or how do you how do you define it if you're trying to do that quickly a really easy question to start define feminism please yeah sure sure absolutely go um so the way i again i think i like to joke that if you ask 10 feminists to define feminism you're going to get 11 different answers um but i think and again that just i mean it really just represents the the diversity within the movement itself right there's a lot of different um takes on feminism is, and I don't think we should be too fascistic about, you know, border policing. But I think there are a couple of sort of basic tenets that we all share. And basically what you have is a, you agree with science, you agree with the social scientists, the historians,

science. You agree with the social scientists, the historians who point out that basically by every single metric that we have to measure quality of life, right, whether that's, you know, reports of subjective happiness, whether that's, you know, political representation, whether that's money, right, whether that's health, whatever it is, basically, every single measure we have to measure quality of life, cross-culturally, men do better than women. So, you're a feminist if you agree. Again, this isn't a normative claim. This is a scientific, this is an empirical claim. So, you're a feminist if you agree with that empirical claim, which, again, is I'm a philosopher. It's not my job to, you know, navigate that. It's just I defer to the experts there. So, you're a feminist if you agree with those experts that women's quality of life is historically and presently not what men's is. Um, and then the second premise is that you're a feminist if you think that that's a bad thing that can and should be changed.

like inferior beings are just designed to suffer. And that might sound flip, but there have been a bunch of people historically and even probably some people currently who won't agree with that, right? So that second claim is a little more robust, right? And then the third plank that I like to add in to feminism is the idea that feminists recognize that the problems that women face aren't isolated, right?

That they're actually interconnected to other forms of oppression, including racism, classism, these sorts of things, and, you know, ableism, homophobia, transphobia. And feminists and all of these other anti-oppression theorists agree that these aren't problems that we can tackle piecemeal, right? So if we're going to get rid of sexism, we're also simultaneously going to have to try to get rid of classism, get rid of racism. And again, if you look at the history of the feminist movement, in some ways, you can see this as history of feminists getting this wrong and thinking that, oh, if we just make things better for rich white women, there's like justice is going to trickle down or something. And it doesn't work like that, right? So the thought

is, to be a feminist, you really kind of have to recognize that justice doesn't trickle down, right? If we really want to get to the root of these problems, we have to start at the root and we have to sort of tackle them all together, right? So that's why feminists are committed to the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, or should be. So those are the three tenets, right? You've got this descriptive claim about how women do in the world. You've got this normative claim about that being a bad thing.

And you've got this kind of like methodological piece about how exactly we're going to start tackling this problem. That's it. has been the case, so that, you know, the way that this has been understood has changed over time. Can you walk us through a little bit of the history of, you know, how those thoughts evolved, where they evolved, etc.? Yeah, absolutely. So most feminists understand the history of feminism as progressing in three waves. And before I even tell you what the waves are, let me just sort of give you an asterisk here and say that this wave metaphor, everyone kind of agrees with it, but everyone sort of sees it as problematic because it has a tendency to sort of make it seem as if there's just one feminist movement and feminism is just happening in one way all over the world. And of course, we know that's not true.

It's also Ska came in waves is the other thing that's odd about it to me. Feminism and Ska. Feminism and Ska, yeah. Why are those the two things that came in waves is the other thing that's odd about it to me. Feminism and ska. Feminism and ska. Why are those the two things that happen in waves? I feel like there are probably others. It's true. Fair enough. So, yeah, so there's everyone sort of agrees that the wave metaphor is problematic, but it's useful as far as it goes, as long as you sort of realize that it's an oversimplification of the history. OK, so with that caveat in mind,

first wave feminism, generally, people point to it as the sort of happening right around the time of the Enlightenment, right? We had a bunch of women, and some men, men like John Stuart Mill, from our perspective, very mainstream philosophers, who recognize that women have what men have that make them sort of full equal citizens, right? So in the enlightenment, everyone was all about reason, right, the thought that, you know, men had a rational capacity and that's what made him, you know, this is why we should get rid of feudalism

and these sorts of things, right? We should have, you know, democratic equality, right? And the thing that people have that make them the appropriate subjects of democracy and democratic liberal equality was reason reason was the rational capacities. And so the early feminists around this time, probably a lot of people point to Mary Wollstonecraft as being one of the first liberal feminists. They point to the fact that women have these capacities just as much as men. Right. And again, of course, they're pushing against the common sense of the day, which is no, women aren't fully rational, right? They're sort of these emotional embodied creatures. But feminists like, you know, Wollstonecraft, and then later,

John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, right, they push against this, and they say, no, women have what men have, and they deserve to be full, equal citizens of society. And so then what, and what that looks like concretely is the right to vote, right, the right to own property, right, because women, women under the laws of coverture, women were literally the properties of their father. And then once they got married, their husbands, right? So we see that now in these, these practices that trickle over, right? So when a father walks, walks his daughter down the aisle, when she's getting married and gives her to her husband, that's actually representing that old legal practice where he really was functionally giving away his property to another man, right?

So, first-wave feminists are very critical of this, right? Yeah. Yeah, I like to joke with my students that I tend to sort of make their weddings a little bit less romantic than they used to be. Yeah, I do the same thing. So, I've been there. You got to kill some secret cows, you know, right? It's why women change their name when they get married, right? Because they move from being their father's property to their husband's property and these sorts of things, right? So first-wave feminists are critical of all that, right? And they actually got some concrete results, right? Women can vote in most places on the planet now, right?

Women can own property in most places on the planet and these sorts of things, right? That was the first wave of feminism. And again, those advances, those goals were hard won. They didn't happen overnight. They took a long time, right? I mean, women have been voting in this country for exactly 100 years at this point, right? This is not ancient history, not by a long shot, right?

There are women alive right now who, when they were born, people like them weren't allowed to vote. So yeah, so that's the first wave of feminism. And it sort of plugged along, and we saw this slow progress. And then feminist philosophers often point to Simone de Beauvoir, who's the French existentialist philosopher. And in 1949, she published a book called The Second Sex, which became very big in France, And then it was translated here. It was very influential as well.

And so Beauvoir, one of the things that she says in that book that's most famous, she says, one is not born, but becomes woman, right? And so Beauvoir is basically taking existentialist philosophy, right, this idea that, you know, what it is to be distinctively human is to have this existential freedom, right? We decide for ourselves what kind of people we are going to be right existentialists say that existence precedes essence basically what that means is that we decide for ourselves what kind of person what

kind of person that we're going to be what kind of being we're going to be and that's what that's distinctively human is that we actually don't have an essence right a rat has an essence a dog has an essence right well we don't have an essence we create our own essence existentialist thought and so Beauvoir uses existentialist philosophy for feminist purposes. And she says, hey, listen, women do this as well, right? Women decide for themselves what sorts of creatures they are. But, and then Beauvoir, like a lot of other existentialists, pushes against this tendency to think that women, no, again, when women are embodied, women don't have this ability to sort of transcend their immediate circumstances the way men do so she's so she was actually pushing against a lot of other her fellow existentialists

in saying that women have this freedom that men do um and so people and in retrospect we often point back to Beauvoir as sort of inaugurating the the second wave of feminism and what differentiates the second wave of feminism from the first wave is the recognition that you can have all the formal legal equality in the world like all of the things that the first wave is the recognition that you can have all the formal legal equality in the world, like all of the things that the first wave feminists were fighting for, and women still aren't going to do as well as men. And so again, either that's because women are just inferior beings, or it's because women have something, there's something about, there's something that's still holding women back. And so Beauvoir then points to social structures, right? It's society.

It's these informal norms, habits, the stuff that you can't write laws about, but still can really affect what kind of life you're going to have. Culture, exactly. Yep. So it's culture that's responsible for socialization, that's responsible for women's diminished life prospects. And that's second wave feminism.

And again, that sort of, and again, one problem with the wave metaphor is it makes it seem as if, okay, the first wave is done. Now we're moving on to the second wave. But no, of course, like the first wave is still being fought, right? And so too for the second wave, the battles of the second wave are still being fought, right? But then the third wave started and the third wave started, generally people think in the sort of in the eighties. And the third wave of feminism is when basically white feminists started listening to feminists of color. Because what you had in the second wave is you had a lot of, basically, most of the women who were sort of steering the ship in the second wave of feminism were women who were otherwise very socially privileged, right? So they were often wealthy or middle class,

they were educated, they were almost exclusively white, right? And so, basically, they had the social capital to get men to listen to them, right? Which is, you know, good, right? And so then, but the problem was that too many of these second wave feminists then made it seem as if what feminism was, was just fixing the world for women like them, who were already incredibly privileged socially, right? And so the important, the insight of third-rate feminism is that if you, unless you start paying attention to women who are actually at the margins of society, women of color, disabled women,

lesbian women, these sorts of things, you're really going to miss out on making the world a better place for all women. And again, if feminism claims to be a movement that wants to help all women, and really it's only ever helping white women, well, basically, it's just another instrument of the patriarchy, right? It's not making the world better for women in general, it's making the world better for privileged women and often making the world worse for other women. Dan, who's a sort of classic second waver, Betty Friedan published a book called The Feminine Mystique, where she points to what you call the problem that has no name. And the problem that has no name, according to Friedan, was basically this sort of ennui, this boredom that leisure

class housewives were experiencing in the 50s, 60s, and how society was telling them, like, post-World War II, right, we won, it's this massive time of prosperity for America and the West. And women were supposed to be happy in their roles in the home. And Friedan points out that we're not happy, we're miserable. And so we get this feminist slogan, the personal is political. And so what they meant by that was that all of these things that just seem like they're just your personal experiences, actually, if you talk to other women in consciousness- consciousness raising groups that often popped up in the 70s, right? You'll realize that other women have these problems as well.

And it's because there's a social explanation for it. It's not just you and your failings that explains your misery right now. And again, that's a concrete social problem that Friedan's putting her finger on, right? But it took the third wave of feminism to point out that this is not the biggest problem that women across the world are facing. You know who has it a whole lot worse than you betty friedan how about the underpaid uh woman of color that you're um that you're hiring to do all of this domestic work that you find boring right and if you're a feminist really you should you should be caring you should be caring about all women not just privileged women so that's the sort of the basic insight of third wave feminism right that we actually have to start

listening and paying attention to all women and and again, second wavers took a really long time to get the message. And in some ways, we're still getting the message even now, right? So the third wave is this sort of corrective within the feminist movement where we really actually live up to our said claim that we claim to care about all women. or said claim that we care to be, that we care to, that we claim to care about all women. And what you're describing is, you know, really a field or a body of thought that is, I mean, you've covered hundreds of years here that have like intersected with all the other different movements and philosophy, John Stuart Mill, existentialism, philosophy, John Stuart Mill, existentialism, social science, I assume, that is like making its, you know, making progress itself, like evolving. The interesting, this is maybe an odd question, but like it's intersecting with all of those other fields, right? But what do you,

how do you categorize feminism itself as a movement? Right. Is it a it's is it social science as a philosophy? Is it does that make sense? I think it's all of those things. Yeah. So I guess, first of all, I would say there probably isn't one feminism. There's feminisms. Right. There's a lot of different feminist approaches. Right. So you can have like a liberal feminist who thinks that really what we should be doing is getting women full participation in the public sphere. Right. You can have a Marxist or a socialist feminist who thinks that really what we should be doing is getting women sort of full participation in the public sphere, right? You can have a Marxist or a socialist feminist who thinks that no, really what we should be doing is tearing everything down and we need class revolution, right? So there are a lot of different feminist answers to these problems. And again, feminism

as a movement spans all of these different sort of canons or theoretical approaches, right? So you can have feminist anthropologists, you can have feminist sociologists, you can have feminist philosophers. Interestingly, I think a lot of the other academic disciplines have been a lot quicker to take feminism on than philosophy has. Philosophy is definitely an old boy's holdout

in a lot of ways. So it doesn't surprise me when you say that, you have this background in philosophy and feminism is just not something you ever were exposed to. That's really the case. think it'll that's that's it's too common it's less common than it than it was even when i was in graduate school 20 years ago or 15 years ago um but it's still pretty common philosophy really is the old white boys hold out in many ways we're we're making progress well it's it's funny it's funny you know i went to

uh i went to a liberal arts school that had a had a women's studies department and you know uh there was certainly a lot of that going on right it just was like the curricula did not quite intersect it could have had i made it you know what i mean but it wasn't like hey i had to take a course on kant i didn't have to take a course on a feminist thinker because it was sort of like okay that's a multidisciplinary field that's a little bit off to the side. Hey, that's in a different building kind of thing. Which is, yeah, it's interestingly

situated in that way. And yeah, I absolutely feel that it's a gap. And by the way, to anyone who's listening to this who knows all this shit already and is like, okay, Adam needs to learn some basic stuff, I apologize for that. But, you know, we're trying to get up to speed as best I can. Yeah.

So here's a question I've always had. And this is an extraordinarily basic question, but it's something that struck me. I read the book by, you've all know Harari, the book Sapiens, obviously a huge bestseller. It's like, it's one of these books that, you know, every, every page has a couple of great paragraphs, you know, it's like extremely wide, not very deep, but, you know, has a, has a bunch of ideas that are very entertaining. And it's,

one of them is that, you know, he's trying to give an overview of all of human history and he makes the same observation that you do, where he says that it's around the world. Women are in a less privileged position, are subjugated, are, you know, in almost every society. There are very few examples of true matriarchies in particular, you know, in any region in the world. Or even egalitarian societies. No one has. Or egalitarian societies. Or egalitarian societies, yeah. And the way he puts it, and I don't know if I agree with this, and I've always been curious to know what someone who maybe has more grounding in it would say to it.

He says, nobody knows why this is. Like, it's a mystery. If it were, it doesn't appear, you know, you could say, all right, it's, you know, men have more physical strength. But, well, the people with the most physical strength don't always rule every culture. Right. It's not we don't have a society where the strongest person is in charge. So why would that mean that men are in charge? And he poses this as like a great mystery of human civilization. And then he just moves on in this book. Yeah. And I found that intriguing, but also unsatisfying. I was like, there's no explanation for this dude, like seriously. And I've always

been curious to ask a feminist philosopher what the answer to that is, or if you feel that there is one. Well, I mean, I think he's right about one thing, which is that we don't know, right? And we can't know in a sense, because it's all just like anthropological speculation, right? Whatever would answer this question is, you know, predates history by a long shot, right? So we're in the realm of speculation no matter what. So there's a sense in which we can't know a certainty, but we can speculate, right? And some speculations are better than others, right? So I think that, and again, one very common speculation is, as you said, the idea that might makes right, right? That the people

with the power to impose their will on others just went ahead and did that. It started off in the caveman days, right? When the average man, caveman, had more physical strength than the average, you know, female caveman. And that's why, you know, they sort of systematically subjugated them. And again, that's, there's some, so that's actually what John Stuart Mill thought. That's what he thought that there was this sort of basic might makes right. Right. But I think a lot of feminists are a little bit skeptical about that. Right.

So Hobbes, for example, points out that in the state of nature, right. Before, you know, like in this time that we're imagining before civil society sort of kicks in. Right. Hobbes actually says that women and men are equal in the state of nature. Right. Before we have society and rules and laws forcing people to act in certain ways. He says there's actually a kind of brute equality in the state of nature. Because basically, you can be as strong as you want.

You can be the strongest caveman you want. But you've got to sleep at some point. And the second you go to sleep, you strong caveman, I, you know, this tiny woman can come and kill you. Right. So this actually gives us that kind of root equality in the state of nature that Hobbes has. So, yeah. So, and it really is a vicious guy. I love Hobbes. A good friend of mine is actually a feminist Hobbes scholar. And there's some interesting stuff in there that you wouldn't expect. scholar and there's there's some interesting stuff in there that you wouldn't expect um but anyway so um a lot of people have speculated that it's the answer to this is something like might makes right but again there are other things that you can point to right so for example um you have the um she lived with firestone says who's a sort of 1970s feminist says that she

points to men and women's different um biological roles in childbearing and childrearing, right? So she points to sort of historically, right, up until very recently, women were the ones who raised children, who bore children, and women were the ones who had to feed them while they were still young and vulnerable. And this sort of put men and women in a very different place in society, right? And again, it made women sort of like vulnerable because they had, they were responsible for taking care of the children in a way, in a way that men weren't. So Firestone again points to these, these biological differences. Again, as you point out, so just as, you know, might no longer makes right, because like most of the people who have power in our society

aren't the really big beefy ones, right? That's actually people who don't have very much social power anymore, right? So too for this, right? Science technology has made all of these differences completely irrelevant. Like we have infant formula now, right? And things like that where women actually aren't biologically required to be so attached to their children in ways that

would prevent them from fully participating in society. So again, we can speculate, right? I mean, evolutionary psychologists are, again, incredibly and often annoyingly good at speculating about why men and women are situated so differently. And I, like a lot of other feminists, tend to be pretty suspicious of the ev-psych explanations for these differences, just because, again, right, because evolutionary psychologists tend to be sort of a little too quick to just sort of trot out these really tired, tired stereotypes about what men and women are like.

Right. So you've got this idea that men, you know, just want to sort of spread their seed to as many available females as possible, whereas women want to trap a man. Right. And they have these sort of biological or quasi biological explanations for this. Right. these sort of biological or quasi biological explanations for this right um but then what it ends up looking is basically just like you're defending very traditionalist or regressive social structure in the name of science and feminists tend to be pretty pretty skeptical about it's extremely easy to look at history and say or to look at the present and say oh there's a historical reason for why the present must be this way like that is such a seductive line of reasoning whether or not you're talking about evolution evolutionary psychology or really any other feature of human culture people love to do that and say oh yeah the way things are is the way

that god ordained it or the way that biologic biology designed us to be or etc and it's so seductive that as a result you kind of in my view need to be skeptical of any explanation that fits that pattern because it feels right a lot more often than it than it is right like we often underestimate what so much of my work uh i've discovered like through doing this podcast and through doing you know research for my show my own reading is that like so much of the time what we see as perpetual in our own culture is actually very contingent and is very right now and very uh you know just just of the moment and we don't recognize how much the case that's the case and actually i wonder if um you know in response to the the question from harari if perhaps part of it is we actually have as you say very little information on so much of human

history and so much of human culture that, you know, we have history of, you know, civilizations once they became agricultural and started keeping written records, you know, and yeah, we have all those histories to compare. But how many, you know, hunter gatherers, how many folks, you know, who were, you know, not leaving those written records do we not know know about how many different ways were there for humans to live that we aren't aware of anthropologically? Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And so I think for me, again, these speculations are fun, but for me as a feminist philosopher, I think, and again, as a moral and a political philosopher, for me, the far more interesting question isn't how we got here, but the question is,

do we want to be here and can we change? And the answer to that is no, we don't want to be here. And yes, we want to change and it's possible to change. Right. So that's really, I think, the direction that I think is much more fruitful. Well, so getting back to the intellectual history that you walked us through, I mean, the underpinnings are very straightforward, as you say, that like, yes, if we look at human society, we can see that there's something here that we don't like that we have to change. There's a long intellectual history that is, you know, weaves its way through extremely intellectually mainstream thinkers. Yet

there's, you know, feminism as a word, as a a concept as a body of thought has always like aroused controversy and uh i'm almost loathe to bring that up because i don't even i don't want to feed into that dynamic necessarily no it's a word that arouses strong feelings in people and uh why do you think that is um i think there's a couple of answers. One is that I think feminism has a PR problem, right? And I think its PR problem is a tiny bit its fault and mostly society's fault, right? Feminism is a body of work that is incredibly critical of the status quo. And so, of course, that's threatening to anyone who currently benefits from the status quo, right? Why would anyone who's doing pretty well under the status quo want to hear a lot of people telling them about how the situation is unfair

and that, you know, the situation that you're in is, the privileges are probably, you know, like partly or wholly unearned, right? And so feminism, I think, like raises a lot of people's hackles because they rightly recognize that if feminists got their way, things would change a lot and a lot of the people who have a lot of power in society didn't earn it fair and square and should be willing to give it up. And of course, like that's threatening as hell. So I, in my book, I actually, I start the book by talking about these two different stereotypes of feminism that that's derived from its PR problem, that I think that they're often the first thing that pop into people's heads when they, when they hear the word feminist,

I think there's there's sort of two options. And again, those are sort of rooted in partial truths about feminism, but they also play the role of defanging feminism of its radical potential. They make feminism something that we're legitimately skeptical of, or even that we just think is a fucking joke, honestly. And so the two stereotypes that I point to are one, the angry feminist, and two is the girl power feminist. So an angry feminist, we all know the caricature, right? She does body hair all wrong, right? She's got the short, dinky haircut, and

she's got too much leg hair. And she's very abrasive and judgmental and off putting and really makes people feel bad about themselves. And so people just sort of write her off as this angry woman who needs to get laid. Right. And then the girl power feminist is a feminist. It's fair. Right. I'm not going to pretend that that's not what's in people's heads. I know it is. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's a good I mean, I laughed cause it's a good comedy stereotype. It's, I mean, there's a, there's humor to it. Like, and which is, yeah, very good for defanging as you put it. Right. Exactly. Right. And so if we, if we can look at that stereotype and think, oh, that's just how feminists are, um, are these nasty women who can't take a joke,

then we don't have to take them seriously. We don't have to ask whether their anger might actually be well-founded, right. Whether they have a reason to be pissed off. And they do, right? We do have reasons to be pissed off because the world is really, really, really fundamentally unfair for women, right? But if we can just, if we write that anger off, then we don't have to take feminists seriously, right? And again, feminists point out how this often has a racial element, right? So, especially women of color, we find them especially abrasive if they display anger. Again, all this is just ways of not having to listen to things that we don't want to hear, right? We're just like little kids sticking your fingers in our ears and going, no, no, no,

right? So, yeah, so the angry feminist, it's true that feminists often are angry, but if we just write, if we write their anger off as a joke, we don't have to take it seriously. And that's, I think that's why that stereotype has the legs that it has, right? The second stereotype is what I call the girl power feminist. And the girl power feminist is basically just corporate, the corporate world's co-opting of feminism for its own purposes, right? So, you know, like when you're trying to sell body wash by celebrating women's diversity, right? That's girl power feminism, right? Or, you know, corporate women's leadership events. Those are girl power feminism, right? And again, girl power feminism tends to look like the worst of the second wave in some ways, right? Where

you've got very privileged women, like having a kind of girl power moment, having a sisterhood moment where the sisterhood is only women who are already very privileged. And again, making things, basically the thought is that you're trying to make things, you're trying to get for the rich white women, the things that rich white men have. And it's a very kind of popular version of feminism because again, because it doesn't actually threaten the status quo in any real way, right? There's room for a couple of white women at the top too, right? There's not room for all women at the top because then suddenly there is no top, then it's actual equality, right? But we can let a few white women through the top because then suddenly there is no top then it's actual equality right but we you can let a few white women through the gate um and that's why it's not really it's not fundamentally that threatening and again that's why that's another that's a version of feminism

that people often flock to and think of themselves as feminists but they don't realize that again they're if you're not making the world better for all women then you're not a feminist i mean again do you if you want to have a corporate leadership event, fine. Right. But don't call that feminism because you're not making the world better for women. You're making the world better for privileged women. But so now that's really interesting. The two stereotypes you list really clarify something for me, because the first one is, you know, the older stereotype of feminism that I know that, you know, when I hear someone evoke that stereotype, I'm like, all right, that's reductive. Like, I know that's, I understand what you're doing. This is, that's an old fashioned stereotype to me that I find boring and untrue. Right. The second stereotype,

when you evoke that one, I'm like, my first reaction is like, yeah, like there's some, you know, there's some truth to that. And, and I think when think when people, a lot of the reaction that even people, liberals or people on the left or people who are perhaps more open to feminism, when they when what the word brings up for them is that image. Right. And it has more of a ring of truth to it. I'm not saying that it is true necessarily because I don't know how to evaluate that. But that is, you know, when I think sometimes when people are loathe to call themselves a feminist, it's because they imagine this association with a privileged white woman. Right. That's like the that's like an image that leaps to mind. And for me, as someone who's not dismissive of the movement, it's that still leaps to my mind. Right. And so is there more truth to that stereotype? Is that a real or problem that's

been grappling with? Or have I been infected by a negative stereotype that I didn't even realize got into me that I need to fight back against? Does that make sense as a question? Yeah. Yeah. I think probably both. I think that. So in so in my book, I try not to, um, I try not to shit on girl power feminism too much because in some ways I think that it can be the kind of like the thin edge of the wedge, right? Like if this is, if this is the, you know, the starter drug that gets you hooked, okay, good. Right. If this is the thing that makes you, you know, like, like for, you know, little white girls, you know, talking about girl power, like, I don't want to, I don't want to criticize that necessarily, but there's

nothing wrong with it, like inherently, right? What's wrong is if that takes up all of the air in, and it takes up all of the feminist energies, right? Right. So Rawls, right, the political philosopher famously says, right, that if we want to know what's just, we need to look at things from the perspective of the least well-off in society, right? He's got what he calls the difference principle, right? Which he says, this is the rule of justice that we're going to come to if we imagine ourselves behind a veil of ignorance, right? So, the way I like to teach roles when I'm teaching it to my students is,

I go Star Trek because, you know, it's university, we can admit that we're nerds, right? So, if you go Star Trek, and I have my students imagine that we're all going to go to a separate, we're going to start a new society. We're going to start a new culture. But before we go, we need to figure out the rules of distribution. We're going to figure out how we're going to distribute all the coconuts on this desert island, right? And we need the rules that are going to tell us how we're going to distribute that. And so I get to throw out different ideas of rules that they might use to distribute the resources.

And sometimes we always get a version of like might makes right. Like you get however many coconuts you can gather for yourself. Sometimes you get some sort of redistributive principles where you say, OK, so everyone puts all of their all the coconuts into one pile and we split the coconuts up equally. So you get these different versions. And I let the kids play with that for a while. And then I say, oh, I forgot to tell you, we're not getting to this desert island where we're starting a new society. We're not getting there by boat or plane. We've got a different technology. We've actually got like a Star Trek transporter that we're going to use to beam us onto this desert island. And it works just like the Star Trek transporter in the TV show with one slight exception. Our technology

is not quite as good as, you know, Scotty when he's beaming you up. Our technology is going to take you here and reconstitute you there. And you're going to be the same, like you're still you, right? You still have all the same thoughts, all the same values, these sorts of things. But some things about you might be different, right? So here, if you're a blonde, maybe there you're going to be a brunette.

Okay. You're still you, but you just have different hair color. Okay. But you're still you, right? Okay. Sure. And then so maybe, maybe here you have brown eyes, there you're going to have blue eyes, right? Okay. Maybe here you're a man, there you might be a woman, right? Maybe here you might be tall, there you might be short. Here you might be slow, there you might be fast. Here you might be smart, there you might be dumb. And you can sort of go on, right? Basically everything on this list of characteristics is noteworthy in that it's not supposed to be the sort of thing that makes you a better person from the point of view of justice, right? Like you are no more entitled to equality because you're a tall person, for example, right?

And so our transporter is going to reconstitute you in a way that where you might not have the same combination of talents, of privileges, of these sorts of things that you have here, but you're still you. And then you ask yourself, okay, do you still want to agree to the same rules that you've agreed to before? And suddenly the big beefy guy who was like, yeah, I just might make rights. Everyone gets to keep their own coconut is wondering, huh, maybe I shouldn't, maybe that shouldn't be the rule of justice that I agreed to because it's not going to bet. But he was claiming, no, this is just fair. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not being self-interested. I'm just, I'm just talking about fairness. But the veil of ignorance shows us that it's not necessarily fair. Right.

So it's basically that self-interest has a really, really good way of sneaking into our reasoning and in a way that we don't realize. Right. And the veil of ignorance corrects for that. Right. It makes us realize that when we're figuring out what a just society looks like, we have to guard against self-interest. So Rawls is a really good for it. I love that. I've, I've, I just want to say, I've always loved that metaphor. It also reminds me of like,

well, the, the, the simplest version I've ever heard, I've ever heard of it is the, the, the most even way to divide up a cake is you have one person cut and the other person get to choose the first piece and you yeah that you um have somebody yeah you don't know which role you're going to be in when you're when you're dividing things up i love it anyway i'm sorry please please go on that's right yes good so you correct for self-interest right and if you do that you you might end up with very different rules of justice right okay roll said that if you Rawls said that if this is the position you're choosing from, it's in your rational self-interest, like being as selfish as you could possibly be. It's in your rational self-interest to choose the rules of justice that make things best for those

who are worst off. So you might still have differences in resources, right? Some people might still have more coconuts than others, right? But those differences are only going to exist if permitting those existence, rather permitting those differences, make things better for those at the bottom. And again, because it's your best interest to choose those rules, because you might be that person at the bottom, right? So it's in your best interest to make things the best for those people, right? So that was a really, really long-winded way of pointing out why it's so important for us when we're thinking about what's fair to not just think about what's fair for me or for people like me, but to think about

what's fair for people for whom society is really failing them, right? The people in the margins of society, right? The people who aren't winning right now, right? Those are the people who should be, that we should be basing our calculations around. And again, not for any margins of society, right? The people who aren't winning right now, right? Those are the people who should be, that we should be basing our calculations around. And again, not for any sort of like, you know, like kumbaya, like, you know, like warm hug feeling necessarily, right? But rather just because this is what makes sense from the point of view of justice.

If we're actually going to, if we're going to say that we're being impartial and fair, then you actually have to be impartial and fair and not let self-interest motivate your reasoning, right? And so Rawls gives a nice way to do that. And it turns out that if you do that, you don't care about privileged people as much. You care about the people who aren't, who don't have that privilege. Yeah. That's such an incredible point. And I have a really big question about it, but we have to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Carol Hay. be right back with more carol hay okay we're back with carol hay um so you were saying i want to

paraphrase it i want to paraphrase everything that you said about rolls which i've got to fucking read some rolls because he's constantly coming up on this show the theory of justice is coming up on it and i love i love it every time it's described to me and i want to fucking read some Rawls because he's constantly coming up on this show. The theory of justice is coming up on it. And I love, I love it every time it's described to me and I want to go read the original, but basically it's that, you know, if you design a society,

you want to design it so that I want to make sure I got it right. That the, uh, uh, you, you would be happy with how you'd be treated in the society, no matter what type of person you were born as, right?

Like you could be anyone. Um, and you want to make sure that that person is treated the way as, right? Like you could be anyone. Um, and you want to make sure that that person is treated the way that you would want to be treated, right? Um, uh, which takes self-interest out of it. And the way you put it was you want to design it that way because you don't know who you're going to be in the society. Right. Um, but my question is that works really well as a thought experiment. Uh, we can say, okay, if you are, if you have the Star Trek transporter, right. But in the real world here, I'm a white man and I am not suddenly going to not be a white man, right. I'm not going to wake up tomorrow in a different body. I would love to, frankly, I think that would be amazing

if I were to wake up tomorrow in a different, I would love to have that experience, uh, genuinely, but it's not going to happen. And so how do we bring about that, uh, that just society when that is not the case, right? When the, the big strong guy who in self-interest will say might makes right is going to be a big strong guy tomorrow and is never going to have the experience in actuality of waking up in the body of a frail woman of color. Um, so in part, I think that the answer to that question is there was a meme that was going on sort of early in the pandemic that I really liked. And it just said, I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people. Right. And there's something like there's a sense in which if someone refuses to give up their social power, if someone just says, yep, things are working great for me.

Screw the rest of you. There's a sense that you actually can't argue with that, right? There's no, like, that really, if might makes right is your philosophy, then the only response to that is more might. So you can start fighting with that person, but you can't reason with them, right? But if someone is claiming to care about justice, claiming to care about equality, claiming to be an empathetic human being, that's when you have a toehold, right? That's when you can start to say, listen, okay, so like you can, you know, like at some point you have to put your money where your mouth is and actually start, like actually caring about other people. And again, and then you can just appeal to whatever worldview that person has, right? So if you're a Christian, you can point to the biblical elements that tell them that they're supposed to do that sort of thing, right?

Again, there are different ways to appeal to that, depending on where the person is, right? But if they really just do fundamentally admit, yeah, the world's not fair, but I'm getting mine, then you can't argue with them. There's no, like, I can't tell you you should care about other people if you don't. I can't tell you that you should care about equality if you don't, right? I mean, I think most people actually do. Right. Which is why we have we have a toehold there. But that's like as a philosopher. Right. My tools are reason. Right. And if someone refuses to use reason, then I got nothing. Right. There are. Let's just say because I think many people would argue that the folks who run our society are those folks who maybe don't care about others or are not willing to see reason. Or let's just say we can't we can't get through to them. We've given it a try and it hasn't happened. What do we do next? We vote. We vote in November. Great. Right. Right. We get our ass. We get our butts in the street and we protest.

I don't know about you, but I spent a lot of time in the streets this summer protesting, right? So you're right. There are these extra reasons, tools we have, right? We vote with our wallets, right? We give people financial incentives to listen to us, right? But, I mean, that's... And again, I'm not counseling violence, right? But if that's people's like i'm not counseling violence right but if you know

if that's if that's people's jam violence works too yeah well i want to return to this idea uh because so much of the so much of the resistance that people have um i think is based as you say in feminism's uh pr problem um that people misunderstand or they have a stereotype uh is your is your book like an attempt to uh resolve that to address yes it is so basically i wrote the book for um everyday average people this is not this is not a book for other academics i did that i got tenure and i decided i wanted to write for more than eight people who care about Kant. And so yeah, so this book is, this book is really, it's like, I'm hoping it hits people's, you know, reading groups, I hope it hits their book clubs. I'm hoping that people give it to their 16 year old daughters, and their, you know, their 75 year old grandmothers, right? This really

is a book for, and grandfathers, right? This is a book that gives you all the ammunition you need, so that when the drunk hole is driving you nuts at the Thanksgiving dinner table, you've got talking points for telling him, you know, why the sexism is bad, right? And I wrote it in the way I did because I wanted it to be accessible, right? This stuff is not inherently hard to understand. It's not impossible to understand, right? I think philosophers have a tendency to sort of act as if the harder something is to understand, the smarter it is. And I think actually, at least in many cases, right, making stuff, something sound really hard is actually a sign that you actually don't think it's that smart, because you can make it sound smart as opposed to just being smart. So in part, this might be my

background. I was a first generation university student. I didn't come from this academic or intellectual background. And I have still, I have a lot of blue collar people in my life who I know are interested in these questions and care about them and can understand them if you just use English, use your words to explain them. And so it was really important to me to write a book that people actually wanted to read. This could be beach reading. I fought tooth and nail with my publisher, Norton, to let me swear just a little bit, but I felt like some of the stuff you really can't explain unless you let me say fuck. And it matters, right? And I hope it's going to work, right? I hope that because I think that feminism, I think we're newly curious about feminism in the wake of the Me Too movement.

And I think this is a really opportune time for people to really start looking into this incredibly rich history of ways of thinking about things. I mean, I think that the pandemic, for one thing, is making a lot of men realize, oh my God, kids are so much work. Because they can't outsource that work anymore, right? They can't outsource it to their wives. They can't outsource it to nannies or cleaners or these sorts of things. And suddenly, a lot of people are realizing, Oh my God, this stuff,

like this stuff, this work wasn't being, being performed by invisible gnomes, right? Like someone was actually doing all of this, right? Yeah. So I think we're in a, we're in a position.

A lot of men in my life have had that realization. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's, I think that the timing is in some ways really good for, for a book like this, because I think people are maybe hopefully newly open to this stuff, right? Newly open to having their stereotypes shattered, to thinking about things in a new way.

And I'm hoping that this book can help start a lot of those conversations. I love the genre of the everything you need to know about book of this style. And so I really appreciate you for writing it. I want to talk about some of the recent changes in feminism as a system of thought and as a movement. Let's talk about the Me Too movement since you mentioned it. It's been going on for, strange way to put it, the Me Too movement's been going on for a couple of years now. How do you situate it within the history of feminism? What is different about it than previous moments? I like to view the Me Too movement as the stuff feminists have been talking about for centuries trickling out into public consciousness in a way that I think

we haven't seen in at least a generation or two, right? So like, a lot of the stuff that people are talking about in the Me Too movement, like this isn't news to feminists, right? But what we're seeing now is this is now news to regular people, right? There's been a lot of bad behavior on the part of a lot of men, and women have always known this, right? We've always talked about it behind closed doors, but now suddenly, like the dirty laundry is flapping in the breeze, right? And so I see the Me Too movement as the work that feminists have been putting in

for a couple of centuries, finally getting some long overdue uptake in the public consciousness. And it makes me really excited. And do you feel that that is bearing fruit? I mean, there's obviously a lot more talk about, you know, bad behavior in the workplace and I mean, criminal behavior in the workplace. Frankly, we've had some high profile people be convicted of sex crimes and we've seen lots of people lose their jobs and et cetera. And it certainly felt like, OK, we're in a singular moment after Harvey Weinstein, quote unquote, went down.

It was felt like, oh, my God, anything is possible. And that's how it felt for a few months. We're now a few years past that. Do you feel that that's lasting change or do you feel that that was a temporary conflagration that, you know, might peter out. That's my concern, and I'm curious how you view it. I mean, I think all social change happens in fits and starts, right? And it's two steps forward, one step back, right? And I am optimistic. I'm optimistic that I think that the gains of the Me Too movement, there's a slow march toward progress here, right? And I think that things that wouldn't have, things that would have been, wouldn't have raised an eyebrow

five or 10 years ago. I think, I think like there's, there's some bad behavior that, that is going to continue to be called out as bad behavior. And I, and I take that as progress. And let's talk about, look, we're also certainly in the last five years or so, I've learned so much about gender. The way I think about gender has changed so much because of, you know, I've had people lucky. I've been lucky enough in my life to have people bring the topic to me and to have encountered it and to think about it in new ways. And that's certainly another social shift that I see happening. And yeah, I wonder how that intersects in your view with the history of feminism. I'm talking about trans identity, non-binary identity, our social construction of gender and those issues as well.

Absolutely. So I actually spend a big chunk of the book talking about the social construction of gender and the social construction of sex. And basically, I see this as, if you see the beginning of the third wave feminism as people finally starting to listen to feminists of color, and then that really sort of moved us forward in our thinking about justice, right, when you actually start listening to women of color, I think we're in another moment like akin to that now, we're finally starting to realize if we listen to queer people, if we listen to trans people, if we listen to non-binary people, our thinking about the world is going to improve because these people have things to teach us. I have a dog in this fight because my partner is trans, but I actually wrote that stuff in the

book before I met them. But yeah, I think some of the most cutting edge work in feminist philosophy right now is happening around these issues of trans identity, who counts as women, how we're actually supposed to think about what gender is, the relationship between sex and gender. And I think it's really, really fascinating stuff. And I think that we're actually making a lot of progress within the feminist theorizing by listening to the work of trans theorists. I love the way you put that, that they have something to teach us. That's an experience or something, something to teach us.

And, you know, expanding my own understanding has been when I finally took the time to listen to another person saying, here's what the world is like for me. You know, and I've had that experience again and again. It was listening to people who have encountered the criminal justice system, who've been incarcerated or who have interacted with it and listening to their accounts and saying, oh, my God, this is this is a real person with a life like mine. And they have had experiences that are shocking to me, but are real. And by listening to them, I am learning something about the world. Right. And the same is true of my encounters with feminism of like, oh, really, truly understanding what the women in my life or the women who I've whose work I've read, what their experiences have been. And same thing with people of color and the same thing with with queer folks is like enlarging that circle. Enlarging is not a word, but enlarging the circle of of experiences that I have access to, at least, you know, secondhand. I think that's a really fundamental part of learning about the world and studying the world. I think that's absolutely right. And I think also from the point of view of justice, right, if you fancy yourself a progressive person, if you fancy yourself someone who's interested in

issues of social justice, you have extra incentive to listen to the people on the margins of society, because the people in the margins of society have no reason to lie to themselves. They have no reason to think the status quo is fine, because the status quo is systematically screwing them over, right? So if you're a progressive, if you're someone who's interested in social justice, you should think that the people who are best situated to really know what's wrong with the world and who have the best ideas about how we should go about fixing it are not going to be the people who benefit from things the way they are, right? They're going to be those peoples on the margins, right? So, the bit of jargon for this is called standpoint epistemology, right? The idea that our standpoint affects what we can know and that

people who are on the outside can know things differently and often, not always, but often better precisely because of their marginalized status. And some of that seems to stand opposed to a lot of the history of mainstream philosophy, because so much of the history of epistemology, the study of what we can know is based on a priori truths, things you can understand just by thinking about them alone in a dark room. You can just do math in your head or otherwise based on these sort of principles of rationality. Hey, if I lay this out for anybody, they should be able to understand it. There's one body of knowledge that we all have equal access to. But, yeah, I mean, the longer I live, the more I feel like that is that's actually a limited way of looking at the world that like, what, what body your reasoning, yes, you're a reasoning creature, but what body your reasoning

is instantiated in, gives you access to certain things that are limited in a certain way. And the only way to expand that is to understand that other brains in other bodies have access to other parts of the universe that you never will like just what it feels like to experience certain things or uh that's got to be there's a it's not subjectivity but it's sort of uh this is intersubjectivity or something like that right yeah yeah intersubjectivity right so the thought is that like knowledge human knowledge is a collective endeavor, right? And that it's arrogance to think that one person by themselves is ever going to figure everything out, right? We're all just sort of chugging away doing our part. And if we recognize that, and if we're willing to defer to expertise and authority when we see it, and if we're willing to admit the ways that it can go wrong and that our judgment can be clouded by non-rational factors, then, yeah, then we really will get somewhere. And this is still philosophy, right? It's still philosophical thinking, right? It's an embodied, embedded kind of thinking. Yeah. Well, can you just tell me a little bit about

the thinking in feminism now that it has begun to engage with the trans experience, for instance, and the social construction of gender and sex and how that connects to that. Like how how has feminism changed and what are the new ideas that are that you're so excited about? Sure. So basically, what we saw in the 70s and the 80s, well, sometimes feminists now call that a sort of coat rack view of gender, right? So the idea is that gender is the social stuff, it's the psychological stuff, right? It's how people are treated in society and how people identify in virtue of that treatment, whereas sex was just supposed to be biological. Sex is just this sort of pre-social stuff, right? So, we call this a coat rack view. We think about it as like the body is just this given, right? And then it's adorned with different cultural garments with figuratively and literally, right? That is gender, right? And that way of thinking about gender as a social construct was really useful in the moment, right? It really gave feminists a lot of really useful ways to think about why women were, or the ways in which women were really being subjugated, right? Because you can look at all of these cultural practices, you can look at the ways that women are socialized into inferior roles with less power, right? You can really put a lot of the blame on the forces of socialization for explaining why women aren't doing as well. So that was really useful, right?

But then it took Judith Butler, right. It took queer theorists coming along and saying, okay, so this is all well and good, but how we understand the body is as just as much a political normative decision as how we understand the gender, right? Because basically that we carve, carve the human species up into these two sexes, and we pretend as if sex is this binary thing where either male or female, and those are the

only two options. That's an oversimplification of a biological reality that's vastly more complex, right? Human beings don't come in just male and female varieties. We just don't, right? Of course, we're socialized to pretend that we do, right? And there's a lot of work of socialization that goes into forcing people, shoehorning these people into these overly narrow boxes and a lot of pain for people who can't or won't live their life in those boxes, right? But we're just getting the science wrong

when we pretend that this is what the human being is boxes, right? But we're just getting the science wrong when we pretend that this is what the human being is like, right? And this mistake- Intersex people exist on a basic level, and that's just the beginning. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so queer theorists like Butler and others point out that once you realize that carving the human species up into these two dichotomous sexes is itself a kind of political act. You can start to speak as you can, you can start to sort of realize that it's not just gender as a performance as Butler's famous for saying, but there's a,

there's a sense in which sex is a performance too. Right. And that the world is just more, more complex than two sexes and two genders that map onto one another in a one-to-one correlation. Right. We know that's not true. Right. Cause it only takes one disconfirming instance to, right? We know that's not true, right? Because it only takes one disconfirming instance to show us that that's not true, right? So we understand now that biology and culture interact in really, really complex ways.

And that both of them are sort of shot through with our culture's ideas and our culture's values. And once we see that, we can start to see the injustices that are rained down on people who don't play the gender game properly, right? Trans people, intersex people, these sorts of things. And we can start to imagine how amazing the world would be if we actually loosened up on that stuff. And again, this is one of the, one of the things that makes me so optimistic is that I think that we have made so much progress on this so quickly, right? So Butler was saying, you know, back in

the 80s and 90s, hey, listen, drag queens know that gender is a performance, right? So that's like, they know that, like, so what we have to learn from them is that our sort of conventional cis performances of gender are also just performances, right? And there's nothing beyond the performance, beyond what the audience thinks of the show right so butler says drag queens teach us that right and now i mean like we've got you know there's yeah there's drag race right there's you know there's we're here there's um so i think queer culture is just again teaching us about like oh my god life is so much cooler the sex is so much better all of it when you when you start to actually realize the variety that that was always there but it was being crammed into these really narrow, restrictive boxes that don't really fit most people.

Cutting edge philosophy, philosophy that is being done is really working its way into the public sphere. I mean, what you are saying is, you know, you're attributing to Judith Butler is also rhymes with what's RuPaul's famous line. We're blanking on the line. We're we're born something and the rest is drag. I forget what you're talking about. I do. Ah, this is terrible. I'm gonna look it up. Hold on a second. Okay. I gotta I gotta get it. Oh, we're bored. We're all born naked. And the rest is drag, right? That's, that's that philosophy in a line. And, you know, I'm not saying that RuPaul owes that to Judith Butler or Judith Butler owes that to RuPaul. I'm saying that that this is a, you know, there's a connection there and that these new ways of thinking are actually, you know, there's an actual dialogue that's happening where, you know, we see that changing in the public sphere. Like like masses of people are starting to think differently about these issues in ways that mirror the philosophy that is being done.

And they're they're they're in dialogue with each other. And that's not the case for a lot of academia. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, it really is one of those cases where I feel like the kids these days are all right. Right. They get it. They get non-binary identity. They get trans identity. This is not a thing for them. Right. So it's, it's hard for old people to wrap their head around, but like for, for, for the youth, like they're on it and their lives are going to be so much better for it. Right. Their sex lives are going to be better for it. Their their their their their opportunities for creative expression of who they are, who they want to be. They've just got so many more options, at least at least in many circles.

Right. Then we've ever seen historically. And I think it's a wonderful thing. Yeah, you feel that I often wonder that because, again, this has been a change that has happened over the time that I've been alive. And and it's been astonishing to see it happen. I mean, I went from, you know, when I was in high school, I had one gay friend who was an out lesbian in the entire. one in the entire school, an incredibly brave woman who I'm really grateful to have known because she endured a lot of discrimination to be overtly out. And then a little over a decade later, gay marriage was legal in America. And that was like, I felt an astonishingly fast movement. And then right on the heels of that, I feel that my, you know,

my notion of gender has really been enlightened because of the, the social changes that have, that have happened. Like this, this is like it does feel like a wave. And it sounds like you share my optimistic view of it, that, that this is, this is like the first crest of something in society that's maybe shifting in a really positive way.

Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, I think it's too early to break out the champagne and crackers quite yet. There's a lot of progress that still needs to be made. And I think especially if you live in liberal bubbles like I do, it can be easy to fool yourself into thinking, oh, it's awesome for everyone. And of course, we know that's not true. Right. But I do think that, yeah, that this is something that we've made massive amounts of progress on. And there is reason for optimism as long as we keep moving in that direction. Well, I'm almost loathe to get into it, but I want to talk again about about reaction to these ideas, though, and the reaction to feminism. I mean, like any time that there's a social movement, there's often a large snapback. And, yeah, I wonder if do you have that concern as well, that we're experiencing that or that we're going to experience it more seriously, that reaction to these changes? Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it feels like this for you, but for me, it really feels like we're standing on a precipice right now and think the world is going to look very different after November. And we don't know what it's going to be. Right. And it really just seems like we're at a crossroads of one of two very different directions. Right.

different directions. Right. And I think it's not, it's not a coincidence, for example, that the Trump campaign is actually using anti-trans sentiments to sort of fuel its, its fires. Right. Yeah. The Bush campaign, you know, did that used gay marriage as a wedge issue. And, and of course, why wouldn't it be used again today? Yeah, exactly. So now we're seeing these bathroom wars and we're seeing JK Rowling, like destroying like this amazing body of work that she's done by like i don't know if you if you heard this or she apparently has a novel coming out where she has her um the protagonist is a cis male who is a serial killer who commits his crimes by dressing up as a woman like this is hate no jesus it's horror i mean it's like all right so like i have an eight-year-old daughter i'm like you know what i don't think we can do harry potter anymore i'm sorry right like like. I'm like, you know what? I don't think we can do Harry Potter anymore.

I'm sorry, right? Like whatever brain came up with Harry Potter, I don't know how that brain came up with this, but like we're done, right? So we, and so, yeah, I think like the Trump administration is using transphobia as a wedge issue. And I think that there's reason

to be really, really, really scared about what will happen if people's ignorance can be used against them in these ways. But just to that point, you were speaking of, hey, there's not just one feminism, there's feminisms, right? There are also folks who describe themselves as feminists who are as steeped in the literature as I assume anyone who are rejecting of trans identities and others and that, you know, this is a bridge that they're not interested in crossing or that they feel is divergent from what they feel feminism is.

And there's, you know, certainly I don't know how I don't want to overinflate it, but, you know, is there a schism and how do you rectify that? How do you treat that in your book? How do you talk about that? Yeah it, but is there a schism? And how do you rectify that? How do you treat that in your book? How do you talk about those issues? Yeah, I think there is a schism. And I'm sort of of two minds of it, about it because on the one hand, I think that the left and progressives are frighteningly good at cannibalizing ourselves. We're really good at the infighting and the purity politics.

And we spend too much time fighting each other and not enough time banding together to fight the real enemy, right? Which is the conservatives and the regressives and people who want to drag us back, right? But, and so I worry that in some ways, the turf wars are an instance of this, of this sort of progressive infighting. But that said, I do think that I feel strongly enough that people who are trans exclusionary radical feminists are, they're, they're fueled by a kind of vitriol and again a kind of misunderstanding of of the feminist movement right i mean i i in some ways i understand where the view comes from right so if you're germaine greer who's this

classic second waver right um and you've spent all of your career all of your time um fighting against these regressive stereotypes about what femininity is as just this being, so this is this man-pleasing endeavor, right? Women exist to please men, right? So if you're Jermaine Greer, and this is, you know, this is what motivates you. And then Caitlyn Jenner comes along and gets honored by Glamour Magazine as the woman of the year.

And she's being interviewed and she says, oh, the hardest part about being a woman is figuring out what to wear, right? I get why Jermaine Greer is pissed off, right? Right? Caitlyn Jenner is an incredibly unfortunate spokeswoman for the trans movement, right? Because she's a conservative, right?

And so I get why Jermaine Greer is pissed that suddenly Caitlyn Jenner is saying this is what it is to be a woman, and what it is to be a woman is everything that Jermaine Greer has spent her career fighting against. I understand the concern, right? But Jermaine Greer has an obligation to listen against. I understand the concern, right? But Jermaine Greer has an obligation to listen to trans women who aren't Caitlyn Jenner, right?

And if you do that, you realize that most trans people can't stand Caitlyn Jenner. They wish she'd stopped talking, right? Because she is not representative of trans experience. She's a trans experience, go nuts, but she's one trans experience, right? There are a lot of trans experiences that are far more progressive, right? That they're not just,

their experience of gender isn't just affirming this really kind of regressive conception of femininity as man pleasing. Right. And also furthermore, like Jermaine Greer might be mad at Caitlyn Jenner for, you know, sort of falling in line with this really regressive conception of femininity. But why isn't Dwayne Greer mad at me, a cis femme? Right. I walk down the street. No one can tell I'm queer. I pass as straight. I pass as a feminine woman. Right. So why? And again, and I know that and I do. I don't do it intentionally, but I also this is just who I am. This is how I present myself.

And so then when I do that, I show up these her up these, these, these, um, these, these stereotypes of what women are supposed to be like, um, in, in exactly the same way that Caitlyn Jenner does. Right. So, um, why isn't Jermaine Greer going after me as well? Right. Um, so yeah, so this is, um, I do think that, um, if TERFs actually, I guess one thing I don't understand is why TERFs see trans women as a threat the way they do, right? Because just statistically, the threat isn't there, right? Like, people so often focus on the bathroom wars, right? The idea that, you know, women's right to, you know, pee independently of men, right? And if trans women are allowed into cis women's bathrooms, then somehow this actually poses a threat to cis to, to cis women, right.

JK Rowling has actually used this, right. So she says, as a survivor of domestic assault, right. I'm very jumpy around men. And that's why trans women shouldn't be allowed to use my bathroom. And you're like, Oh my God, what is going on with your reasoning that you think that makes sense? It's horrifying, right? Well, what that, what that always seems to be those arguments to me always seem like uh sort of faint or you know side thing built on the fundamental disagreement which is

whether trans women are women um and i i uh i wonder if as a philosopher you can you can unpack that for us like uh because i, because I, I assume that you would say the argument that trans women are not women from a feminist perspective is a misunderstanding of feminism or to put it to sort of chew up some of the words that you used earlier. If you could break that down for us, that would be really helpful to me because I would love to know how to talk about this better. Right. Right. So someone who's really good on this is a philosopher named Talia Mae Boettcher. Um, And Talia's got some great arguments where she talks about, she says we should think of gender as a sort of existential identity, right? So there's, there are different parts of our identity. And she says gender is in some ways, like, so to say, like, I'm a man, I'm a woman, right? This is, this is you expressing your identity. This is saying this is the kind of person I am. This is, this is, you know, who I feel like. And if, to question that, to question people's right to be able to assert that identity is basically a

dick move in the same way that if I were to say, I want to go home and your response is, do you really know? Are you sure you want to go home? Like, yeah, it's true. Like, I guess you could, you could make that question, but it's absurd. Right. And it's, it's rude, right? It's, it's, it's, it's rude in the same way that, like, that it is, that it would be rude to try to convince someone to change their religion. Right. So if, right. So if I say I want to go home and you say, do you, but do you really like, no, that's like, like we see that as like a category mistake in a conversation. Right. So too, if someone says I'm a woman and our response is, oh, but what's in your pants, right? Like that's a category mistake, right? That's, it's, it's, it's none of our business. There's a kind of prurient obsession with people's genitals.

And again, and again, it just, it misunderstands the fact that all of us are performing gender, right? Cis people just perform the gender that matches onto the sex that was assigned to them at birth. And so we don't understand that we're performing. We just feel like this is who we are, but it's performance, right? And so trans people are the ones who teach us that it is a performance, right? And it's not our place as individuals to question other people's performances. And it's not our place as individuals to question other people's performances.

Now, why? So I agree that it's a performance. I can look into my own life as a man and say, yes, I perform masculinity to a greater or lesser extent. And some of my uneasiness sometimes with being a man is based on my lack of comfort with that performance. You know, sometimes I feel comfortable performing it. Hey, I feel good in a pair of like, you know, brown leather boots. Right. And sometimes I don't feel I go to the gym and I'm like, I don't belong with these guys, you know, and I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to play this game. I don't know how to be in this play, you know. But some people really have a reaction to that notion. If you say if you go to

some people say, hey, you're you're actually performing at being a man. Right. And that's what your identity is. You're asserting that you're a man. You're not fundamentally a man. There isn't some you're not an essential. Yeah, you're not essentially a man on some deep ontological level. You're there's a, it's, it's an identity that you're performing. Why do you think people have such a strong reaction to that? Uh, cause when I think of like the, the strong, strong reaction against trans identities, um, it often seems to be based in that to me, based in some sort of vulnerability that the person having the strong anti-reaction has, I'm speaking mostly of men here, to that suggestion. And I've kind of parsed out why that is. Okay. So I think in part, what I would want

to do is actually resist a distinction that you were making there between gender as a performance and then gender isn't real. Please. I think both of those things are actually true. I think gender is a performance and gender is real, right? Social categories are real. Sally Hasslinger is a feminist metaphysician who has a lot of really interesting work on this, right? Like social categories, just because they're, just because they're human constructions doesn't make them not real, right? I mean, like the law is a social construction.

Does that mean I can go and like start robbing banks and not face consequences? No. Right. You know, but it's all just a human construction. Right. So too with gender, right? These things are real, right? Just because they're social destructions doesn't mean they're not real, right? And doesn't mean, we can't just change our mind about them, we can't just be like, oh, you know, like, today I feel like, you know, the law applies

to me, tomorrow it doesn't. No, like, we're bound by these things, even though they are human constructions. And so it's more useful to think about gender as something like that. To your question about why people find this so threatening, I honestly, as a thinker, as a philosopher, I try to sort of be able to sort of imagine myself

empathetically into as many different positions as possible. This one I have a hard time with. I think that, I don't know, I can point to things that I think might be playing an explanatory role, right? So I think if someone, like, a lot of TERFs will, you know, so they, so they had a bad experience with a trans person once. And therefore then they generalize from that experience to this is what trans people are like, right. Without having any more information. Um, and that's a pretty common, um, cognitive habit that I think we all have, but you realize that like, um, so like as a white, as a white guy, right. You can have a bad day, right. You can have an off day. You can be in a shitty mood, right. You like, and, um, you can be in a shitty mood, right? And you can screw up, right? And you can screw up and people don't think, oh, you know, that's what white guys do. They just screw up. They're just not reliable.

No, they think, oh, Adam is having a bad day or even, oh, maybe Adam's a loser, right? But they don't generalize from your missteps to white men in general, right? Whereas women of color, people of color, women, right? These sorts of color, people of color, women, right? These sorts of things, like the farther away you step from this normative ideal of what a human is, which is a cis white man, basically, the more frequently we tend to sort of chalk up failures to a failure of the race, a failure of the sex, right? And I think something similar is going on with this, right? So trans people can't screw up without being taken as a representative of this is what trans people are like, right? So when Caitlyn Jenner screws up, people say, all right, that's what trans women are, and trans women are awful, right?

Well, no, I think that just Caitlyn Jenner is awful, right? And we have to sort of realize that we have this tendency to, you know, like if you're African, and black friends tell me this, right? Like you, like you have to be perfect, right? Like your hair has to be perfect. Your mannerisms have to be perfect. You can't be late for a meeting. You can't have typos in your emails, whatever it is, because then otherwise people won't take you seriously. Right. And it's, and you're sort of chalked, it's chalked up as a failure of the race. Right. Um, whereas, you know, as a white person, I don't have to deal with that. Right. So I think that, um that there's a tendency that I've seen in conversations with individual TERFs, where they'll point to bad behavior by individual

trans people and take that as representative, even though there's obviously a huge thing. And it's just that the people with the more progressive, interesting, feminist-friendly conceptions of gender who are trans, they're just not the ones with their own reality TV shows. But they're there, right? They're not just like performing these characters of gender who are trans they're just not the ones with their own reality tv shows right but they're there right they're not they're not just like performing these characters of gender that jermaine greer hates right um and so i think that yeah i think turfs actually have have an obligation to actually spend some time with some trans people and understand that trans people are people and there are you know smart ones and dumb ones and right ones and wrong ones and just like the rest of us you know know? But just returning though, to that point of, I love the distinction that you draw of a

construction yet real. And of course I think that's absolutely right. But the thing I'm trying to put a finger on for myself is that there are folks for whom saying that something is a social construction gives them a hot stove reaction, right? Especially when it comes to gender, specifically when it comes when people don't feel that way about the law everyone would agree with the statement you would make about the law and say yeah of course that makes sense yeah it's a social construction yet yet it's real okay cool we can have that conversation yet if you say the same thing to someone about gender there's a portion of the society that says like, Whoa, no, I can't handle that. Whoa, fuck you. Right. Like they just,

they have like a, and it's a, it's a, it's a deep down threat that they feel, I think. And I don't know, I've been trying to process why exactly that is. And I know that psychology, that's not philosophy. So it's not your field but i mean i can i i don't know i i yeah please so i mean i i can point to kids right so like you see it in kids right so kids learn so this is fascinating and i actually talk about it in the book um kids um there's this big stage in their development between the ages of like three and five

where they um they they're basically like little judith butlers they think that gender is a performance right they think that what gender you're taken to be will be the gender that you are and they're simultaneously learning at the same time we're giving them all these messages that tell them that this is a cat this is a social category that is really important like we're going to drill you on your colors and we're going to drill you on your farm animals and we're going to drill you on your colors, and we're going to drill you on your farm animals, and we're going to drill you on gender, right? So they get that this is really, really, really important. But there's this big developmental stage where they think if they get it wrong, it'll actually change their identities. So they're in the process of becoming who they are,

right? They're in the process of differentiating themselves from their caregivers, which before the age of two or three, they don't understand themselves as separate beings. They just think they are their caregiver, they're an extension of their caregiver. And so as they mature, they understand themselves as separate individuals. And so this process of identity formation is one where they're figuring out who they are in this world that they're learning, right? And they've learned that gender is a really important category, but they think that if they get it wrong, or if other people get it wrong about them, it'll actually change who they are.

So it's really sort of existentially unsettling for them. And this is why I feel like if you tease a three-year-old boy by calling him a girl, he'll freak out. And he'll freak out because like, I'm just figuring this category out and you're fucking with it. Right. And so it really messes with them. And so I, again, this is just speculation because I'm not a psychologist, I'm a philosopher, but I wonder if the reaction that we see in some adults where people like

really resist the idea of, you know, of gender being this, this, this, this performance. I wonder if there's something similar going on there, right? It just sort of seems like too existentially threatening. But again, like just because something, the performance doesn't, a social construction doesn't mean you can change it tomorrow. It doesn't mean that the rules are up to you personally. Right. And so it shouldn't be threatening, but I, but I, I, I agree that I think many people tend to find it threatening. Yeah. Well, how do we then understand say non-binary identities, right. Which are again, this is part of a, it's come to my awareness in the last few years, right? But

you say that these identities are, there's a degree to which we choose them. There's a degree to which they are real in ways that don't allow us to choose them, right? In which the social construction sort of enforces them. And so, like, I wonder how you view that project. Is it a project of, you know, enlarging the social categories that we have through insistence in order to, like, create categories that accommodate every person who lives within society or what?

Like, how do you understand that? I wanted to make one quick correction because I want to make sure you're not misunderstanding me. I don't know that it makes sense to call any of this a choice. Just as your experience of your gender doesn't feel to you as a choice, nor my experience. I didn't wake up and decide I wanted to be a femme i'm just a femme right um right so too for trans people right there the experience is not one of being a choice but um and so so it's this weird kind of thing right where we're performing this thing but we're not choosing it it's like we've been cast in a play but we didn't get to choose which character we were somehow but we still have to perform

the character that's been given to us right and again we don't know why people are the way we are, why the way they are, right? We don't know why people are straight or gay or, like, psychologists just have not figured it out yet, right? We don't figure out, we don't know why people are trans or cis, right? But we do know that they are, right, or non-binary, right? And so I think enlarging these categories is just us responding to the world the way it is, right? We're trying to describe the way we are. And there are people who are non-binary. And again, there are different ways of being non-binary. Some non-binary people just feel like they don't fit into either gender category, right?

Some non-binary people feel more feminine one day, more masculine another. Again, this might shift from day to day or year to year, right? There are different ways to be non-binary, just like there are different ways to be trans or different ways to be cis, right? And again, one of the things that's so, to my mind, really, really good about this is that it's just expanding the options for human expression, right? So as a feminine woman, right, I now have more ways that I can express myself, more ways that I can be myself than I would have had had I been more even a generation or two ago. And for me, that's a good thing, right? I can be, you know, obnoxious and opinionated and

like the philosopher who tells you why you're wrong all the time, right? But I can also be a femme presenting woman, right? And again, and that wouldn't have been an option even a few generations ago, right? So I take that if we're sort of, if one of the things that we think philosophy is supposed to do is tell us how we are as a society, but also give us ways to think about where we might want to go. I, again, I think this is a really fruitful time. Yeah. Uh, and look, I, uh, uh, as soon as you pointed that out, I was like, yeah, choice is not the word I was searching for. I was searching for, uh, you, you made a connection earlier with identity as, uh, the way that you put it as when someone says, I want to go home

and it's a category error to say, Oh, do you really though? Right. It's like a, it's like a fact about yourself that you know, that is simply true about yourself. Um. Let's end on this note. Thank you so much for all of this. What advice would you give to people who are trying to fight for feminist values in a world where it's often hostile to them? I would say, so it's funny because as much as the book is called think like a feminist, I think that my advice is usually to act like a feminist, right?

To, to just, you know, vote, vote for politicians who are, who are going to do the right thing for women and women's issues. Right. So volunteer for organizations or give money to organizations that are actually going to help women. Right. And again, make sure that the work that you're doing isn't just benefiting already privileged women, but rather women in general. Right. So my, and you know, be willing to listen to women, right. If you're,

and be willing to use your social positions of social authority to amplify the voices of women, right. These sorts of things. So it's, I don't know. It's funny. Like you come up with a title for a book and for a book, and then you realize, okay, so sorts of things. So it's, I don't know, it's funny. Like you come up with a title for a book and then you realize, okay, so we have, I guess it's true what I'm doing in this book is having people think like a feminist, but the goal is ultimately that I want people to start,

I want to be able to sort of empower people to really act like feminists, right? So with an understanding of the history of the movement. And I just want to get back to this again. of the history of the movement. And I just want to get back to this again. So many of the forces against this way of thinking, this way of acting are so pervasive, but you really do have an optimistic view

of where society is moving to. At least it seems like you do. Do you actually? Let me put it to you directly. Yeah, I'm an optimist despite myself. I do think that we're moving in really, I think that, you know, I have a daughter, she's eight, I'm thrilled for the life

that she's going to be able to live, the options that are open to her that weren't open to me and certainly weren't open to women of my grandmother's generation. So, I mean, I think it's important as feminists that we not lose sight of these opportunities being open to all women again,

not just privileged women. But I do think that we're making progress and I'm excited for the future. And the kids are all right. That brings you some positive expectation. Yeah, that's exactly right. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being here, Carol, to talk to us about this. The book is called Think Like a Feminist.

Please check it out, everyone. And thank you, Carol, for being here. Thanks so much for having me. called Think Like a Feminist. Please check it out, everyone. And thank you, Carol, for being here. Thanks so much for having me. Well, thank you once again to Carol Hay for coming on the show. I hope you loved that conversation as much as I did. If you did, please leave us a rating or a review wherever you subscribe. It really does help us out so much. And after you've done that, once you have left that rating and review, if you'd like to send me an email, pitch a topic to be on the show, send an email to

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