Making Sense with Sam Harris - #180 — Sex & Power

Episode Date: December 30, 2019

Sam Harris speaks with Meghan Daum about her book “The Problem with Everything.” They discuss contemporary feminism, violence against women, campus sexual assault, moral panics, new norms of conversation, the 2020 Presidential campaign, and other topics.  If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content.

And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option at SamHarris.org to request a free account. And we grant 100% of those requests. No questions asked. Okay, jumping right into it. Today I'm speaking with Megan Daum. Megan is the author of five books, and she writes a bi-weekly column about culture and politics for Medium. She was an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times for over a decade, and she's also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and other journals. And her most recent book is The Problem with Everything,

My Journey Through the New Culture Wars. And in this conversation, we talk about the book, which focuses mostly on feminism. We talk about violence against women, campus sexual assault, the new norms of conversation, intersectionality, the 2020 presidential campaign, and related matters. Anyway, I've had many women on the podcast of late who have distinguished themselves both for their honesty and their willingness to touch politically charged topics. I'm thinking of Megan Phelps Roper, Yasmin Mohamed, Caitlin Flanagan, Barry Weiss, and Megan Dahm definitely continues that trend. And if those of us on the left are going to be anything more than completely ineffectual and masochistic as the 2020

presidential election approaches, it will be because we have more conversations like this. So without further delay, I bring you Megan Dahm. I am here with Megan Dahm. Megan, thanks for joining me. Thank you, Sam. I just finished your book this morning. I read every page. I would never pretend otherwise Thank you. And I guess we'll talk about your focus in this book. I've read some of your other work, mostly articles, and maybe touch on some of those. But maybe just to start, summarize your career thus far as a writer. What have you tended to focus on and how do you view your work as a writer? I have always viewed myself as somebody who sort of looks at the culture and looks at

the places where there's kind of a gap between what people think they're supposed to think and feel about something and what they actually think and feel. So I'm interested in hypocrisies. I'm interested in ways we kind of try to convince ourselves of things. So, you know, and I'm an essayist. I really, I love that form. This is not an essay collection. These are chapters. It's a chapter book. But I have always... For the big kids? Yes. It doesn't have illustrations, but maybe the paperback. So yeah, I've always been an essayist and I've liked to take a personal approach to big ideas. So I started off in the 90s.

I had a couple big pieces in The New Yorker, for instance. One of them was about going into debt, trying to be a freelance writer in New York. And it was about my own experience, but really much more about the sort of economy of the city and the romance of the creative life and really looking at a whole bunch of stuff. So I continued on in that vein throughout my career. And I've been a magazine journalist. I was an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times for more than a decade. And so, yeah, I wrote one novel, but I really see myself as an observer and a sort of anthropologist of sorts. I'm not a political wonk, and I'm not a straight memoirist generally, but sort of a combination of all those things. Yeah. Well, this new book is really of the moment politically and socially. And I think I'm just a

couple of years older than you, and the book resonates with, I would say, all of us who are just edging into our 50s. There's a lot around aging, and I guess one question on that point is, how much do you think of the problems we're going to talk about, the problems around political discourse and moral panics, or what may be perceived as moral panics and just kind of the impossibility of finding durable new norms around conversation that seem sane. How much do you think is just a generational divide that is just making everything difficult to parse? Where does communication become the hardest?

Does it just get bad in a linear way as the other people get younger and younger? Or is that not really the problem? Well, you know, it's funny. If you would ask me this six weeks ago, I think when the book first came out and when I was really starting to talk about the book, I would have said that it's very much a generational issue. And I certainly talk about that a lot in the book, I would have said that it's very much a generational issue. And I certainly talk about that a lot in the book and especially around issues of feminism and, you know, the lives of women. I talk a lot about growing up as a girl in the 70s and the 80s and how that might have been different than growing up in, you know, later decades. But I have to say, as I've gone around and talked about this book

the last month or so, I think it transcends generations. I've had people of all ages coming up to me and saying, thank you for putting this out there. This really goes beyond any sort of age issue or generational sensibility and talks more broadly about the sort of, you know, age issue or generational sensibility and talks more broadly about the sort of cultural conversational chokehold that we're in. And so, you know, I really thought that the sort of, you know, I hate to use the term culture wars, and I really, there's all these sorts of words like triggered and social justice warrior that I am not ever using in earnest, and I don't do so in the book. But I really think that it's beyond that. I think that there are people with sort of, you know, really want to sort of

think about all this stuff beyond their own sort of experience. And so as I have gone around, I've seen this much, much less of an issue of my being the age that I am and more of an issue of my having the sensibility that I do. And I think a lot of people share it regardless of their age. I've heard some speculation around there being ill-appreciated economic variables here that Gen Z and millennials are in the most precarious position in any recent generation financially. And I recently read your piece, the essay you referred to in The New Yorker, My Misspent Youth, which I think was published in 1999. But it could almost read true of any age, certainly this age.

Except for the rents. I complain about how high the rent is and it's like $1,000. $1,200. Yes. Right. Yeah. You just got to change a few of the numbers. But obviously New York was expensive then and it's expensive now. But people in their 20s and 30s have less of a share of accrued wealth than people have tended to have at those ages in generations past. And again, I'm kind of looking for big picture variables here before we wade into the details. How much do you think economics is at work here? Yeah. Douglas Murray has talked about that a lot. And I gather that's what you're referring to a little bit. Yeah. it's interesting to hear that theory. I think there's something there.

I have to admit, it's not something I had thought a lot about just because, you know, I tend to like see millennials as the people, you know, making a lot of money in dotcom ventures and in Silicon Valley. So but obviously that's just a tiny slice and a lot of them are Gen Xers. So that's not quite accurate. But, yeah, I think there's something to that. This notion of blow it all up or, you know, this isn't working for us on any level. So we need to radically change the system. Yeah, I think there's some validity to that theory. I mean, just the fact that socialism seems to be enjoying a new dawn and that capitalism is a word of invective now, that seems to have taken root in recent years in a way that I don't remember it being true of the aughts or- Yeah, although, right. I mean, you know, but when I graduated college in 1992 and there was a recession at that time and I remember, you know, everybody saying, oh, we're the first generation that is not going to be as wealthy as our parents. We will never have the standard of living that we grew up. I mean, it sounds quaint now, but, you know, that was a really big part of our identity. And I don't mean to diminish what's going on now. I'm not comparing these two experiences. But I think, you know, kind of everyone in their 20s has the idea that their experience is particularly perilous and exasperating and unfair.

Well, I guess let's start with feminism, which is in many ways the focus of the book. At one point you write, and this is quoting you, you're troubled by the ways that contemporary feminism has turned womanhood into another kind of childhood. And then there's a certain point you discuss what is termed badass feminism. And you say that badass feminism feels paradoxically like the pink aisle at the toy store. How do you view feminism at this moment? And how much trouble are you getting into for viewing it that way? Oh, I've been getting into trouble over this for several years. It predates the book. So yeah, just to back up a little bit,

I started thinking about all of this stuff probably around 2015, maybe late 2014. I was still a columnist at the LA Times at that time, you know, looking for a topic every week. And I started to notice, especially on Twitter, that there was a lot of discussion around women's issues that seemed really almost in direct opposition to the actual state of women. You know, we had, in reality, women doing better than ever. There were more women graduating from college. There were more girls who were high school valedictorians, on and on and on. And yet this... And more than men. I mean, they're doing better than men in those respects. That's what I mean. Yeah, they were, that's, yes, they were doing better than

men and men were actually falling behind in a lot of ways. Obviously not in the highest corridors of power, but in the aggregate, girls and women were sort of soaring, soaring way above men and boys. So that was going on. But at the same time, there was like this discourse on social media that was really rooted in this premise that we were under the thumb of the patriarchy. And we started hearing terms like toxic masculinity. And there were these hashtags like, you know, kill all men and I bathe in male tears. And this phenomenon of ironic misandry came into into being, you know, this idea that, oh, you know, we can we can make fun of men and we're just being ironic and, you know, it's it's OK. And like I understood that it's not like I was taking hashtag ban men literally, but I just thought it was kind of curious that the conversation around the state of women was, you know,

really had very little to do with the actual state of women. And so I was going to write a sort of manifesto called You Are Not a Badass. And it was just going to be sort of poking fun at this and trying to, you know, get a handle on it and say, you know, let's get our acts together here. And this was around 2016. I assumed that Hillary Clinton would be the president and that everybody would be able to sort of take a ribbing there. And obviously that did not happen. And so, you know, once I sort of collected myself the shock of the election, I really started thinking more broadly about what was going on culturally. And I was much more interested in these sort of larger problems of speech and being able to talk about things

and so on. Now, that said, I'm like a white chick. So what can I write about? I can write about the experience of women. So I started the book really talking about my own experience growing up in the in the 70s and the 80s. And we can get more into that, you know, if you'd like. But really, I do think that there was it was a remarkable time to be a little girl in the 1970s for various reasons. And I started to sort of look at what was it about my experience that was making me perhaps not relate to this sort of Twitter conversation around women and where the generational divides might be. Yeah. So you were saying that it wasn't as gendered a childhood as you observe it to be now. And that actually kind of surprised me. I mean, that was my decade of childhood as well. And I didn't have sisters. I didn't have a clear view of it, certainly in elementary school. But it does seem right to me.

But I was surprised to not have a clear memory of how I thought gender was being amplified or selected against, you know, in childhood. But some of the examples you gave, it did seem impressively gender neutral in many ways. I mean, just the fact that, you know, boys and girls would watch a film like The Bad News Bears rather than, you know, some Disney fairy-centered or princess-centered confection. And that, yeah, I hadn't taken the time to recall what it was like to be a kid. See, I wonder if the fact that it hadn't occurred to you actually suggests that it was so, so neutral. It wouldn't even imprint on your, on your, your memory. So

yeah, I mean, there's actually data on this there. You know, you would go into a toy store in the 1970s and there were not, there would be like not a pink toy aisle for girls and blue for boys. There was just a sort of androgynous aesthetic about that time. Not in all corners, obviously. You had like hyper hyper masculinity and, you know, hyper femininity, Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders and Charlie's Angels. And, you know, I don't mean to like totally oversell this point. cheerleaders and Charlie's Angels. And, you know, I don't mean to like totally oversell this point, but I do think that there was something about being a kid in that time that was really freeing in terms of gender expression. It was totally cool to be a tomboy if you were a girl. You know,

being a girly girl was not what you wanted to be. You know, I don't think it's any accident that the two biggest child movie stars of the 1970s were Jodie Foster in the movies and Christy McNichol in television. And they, you know, both are, you know, very out lesbians, not were not girly girls and are not girly women. women. So I started thinking about that. And, you know, when I really, when I think about the ways that sometimes younger women get irritated with me because they say that I'm diminishing the difficulty of being a woman or I'm not, you know, I'm sort of not appreciating how hard it is for them in certain ways. I really had to go back and, and reckon with the fact that, that, you know, there was this great gift of, of growing up in this time when it really wasn't, it never once occurred to me that, that I was anything but, you know, as good as boys, if not better. And it wasn't until later, I think we got into this, you know, girls gone wild sort of raunch culture ethos in the early aughts.

And, you know, for kids, like you said, the Disney princess thing came along. And I think that that sort of shaped some sort of attitudes around women and certainly contributed to their frustration. And, you know, this book is very much a self-interrogation. It is not a polemic. It's the process of me trying to make sense of why I'm not necessarily aligned with some of the more prominent features of the cultural discussion. And that was one thing that I really looked at. Yeah. And this is not to deny our history or even our recent history of kind of madmen level misogyny and political disempowerment for women. I just watched a Bond movie with my oldest daughter who's turning 11. She didn't know who James Bond was. And so

with some feeling of trepidation, I put on Goldfinger, which I hadn't seen in 20 years or more. And I think it was released in 64, so somewhere, it's a mid-60s film. And the level of sexism in it is just jaw-dropping. I mean, it's hilarious. I mean, she just did not even know how to interpret what she was seeing, you know, and we had a good laugh over it. Although there is, in fact, nothing more surprising in that film or perhaps any film than the most emasculating garment, I think, ever puts on a terrycloth, I don't know what you call it, a romper or something by the pool. Not a bathrobe? No, no, it's like a short, short bath, you know, short shorts integrated. You know, it's like a bodysuit that's made of blue terrycloth. Terrycloth is the cloth of that era, I think, too. I'm pretty sure a Google search of Sean Connery and Terry Cloth will turn up this horror show. But it's so strange. It really is like a glitch in the matrix.

Like this just can't have ever happened, really. Anyway, but just seeing him slap women on the ass, it's not even ironic. I was trying to figure out how it was supposed to play to the audience in 1964. I think it just is him being dashing in yet another way. So it's obviously, we have to acknowledge that there's a serious motivation for feminism, but what's actually the frontline now, do you think? Yeah, you know, so there's a scene in the book where I talk about being in my early to mid 20s. And I was living in an apartment in New York City, a couple of roommates.

There were three roommates at any given time. So, you know, somebody would move out and we would have to look for a new roommate. So, you know, on one of these, you know, we would have a day where people would come in and sort of audition to be our roommate. And it was me and another woman with the same age. We were looking for our third roommate. And this guy came in, he was like probably in his or he was probably in his mid to late 30s. We assumed he was like in his 50s, but probably not that old. An old man in his mid 30s. Exactly. Which, you know, when you're 25, that's that's everybody. Yeah. And he said something like, oh, you know, when you're 25, that's everybody. And he said something like, oh, you know, well, here's an idea. What if I bought the food and you girls did the cooking? And he kind of came at us with this idea. And we were unable to look at each other because we were going to burst out laughing. We thought this was so absurd as to be hilarious. And we were like embarrassed for him. That was how we how we took that moment. And, you know, as soon as he

left, we sort of fell all over ourselves. And, you know, I talk about this in the book. This was probably 1995. OK, so, you know, I think that, you know, probably 20 years later, if that had happened, you know, today with young women, I think that they would have probably like gotten really angry and run to their computers and gone on their Tumblr accounts or, you know, gone to Twitter to rant about this guy and the misogyny and the sexism and how nothing has changed, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm really interested in what it is about that particular moment that made my roommate and I actually just laugh and feel sorry for this guy when our mother's generations would not have done that and the current young generation wouldn't have done that.

And I'm still figuring out the answer to that. I really I'm not quite sure, but it's definitely a phenomenon. circumstances which now are routinely described as kind of yet more evidence of the power that men have over women or just assumed they have over women. You know, this is like the vestiges of patriarchy. But you as a woman, now again in the mid-90s, perceived these situations not through that lens. I mean, you did not feel disempowered. In fact, you were actually empowered. Oh, we had all the power in that situation. For one thing, we had the lease on a Manhattan apartment. Okay. So that puts anybody in power. But yeah, he, you know, as far as we were concerned, he was like a complete loser. And it wasn't even, he could have been like, you know, any kind of guy. You know, he could have been our own age and somebody we found attractive. And if

he had said something like that, we would have also burst out laughing. And that's, you know, one of the things, again, that I talk about in the book is this notion that, you know, what we have now is this sort of punching up approach to talking about men. Like, you know, in comedy, you can punch up or you punch down. Right. So the idea being that you can make fun of people who have more power than you. You can tell jokes about celebrities or politicians or rich people or whatever. Not cool to making fun of white men, of men in general, of talking about all the ways that they are, you know, complete, you know, completely putting you down and are ruining the world. That seems to me a version of punching up. And it seems to me completely misguided because what you're actually doing in that situation is handing them power that they don't necessarily have. The minute you start piling on somebody, you are saying this person has more power than I do because I have license to pile on them. And that really, really troubles me as somebody who, you know, never thought that any given man had more power than I did. Yeah, I guess I think one power differential

that doesn't go away and doesn't go away without technology on some level is just in the sphere of physical violence and its concerns. I mean, it is a fact that women have lived for hundreds of thousands of years, you know, as homo sapiens in the company of men who generally outweigh them, you know, generally a head taller or thereabouts, and also, you know, have, even at the same weight, have greater upper body strength. And so it's just, so the threat of violence is just an issue. And I guess we'll talk about sexual violence and in particular the campus sexual assault epidemic or the imagined epidemic, depending. But I've always very naturally seen this from a woman's point of view, this issue of kind of the dynamics of human violence, because I was raised by a single mom. You know, now I have two daughters. I've spent a lot of time thinking about violence and self-defense and training in martial arts and all the rest. So it's like kind of my head has been in that game

for a very long time. And the moral core of the problem of violence has been most centrally aligned with the problem of violence against women, at least in my mind. And children, weaker, people who are physically weaker. Yeah. And so it's just very natural. So when you go to a slogan, like a Me Too slogan, believe all women, right, or believe victims, my emotional default is certainly there. And yet it's every time you turn up an example where that proves to be a bad heuristic, right, where you have a woman who is lying for reasons however inscrutable, or you have someone who's mentally ill, and just the amount of harm that does to all the legitimate grievances out there.

And that's something we haven't really focused on. I mean, this is now not a women's issue, but whenever there's a moral hoax, like the Jussie Smollett case, right? That's so awful, and its awfulness, it seems to me, unappreciated on the left. I mean, it just does so much harm. But anyway, it's hard not to honor a bias in favor of basically just believing the claims that come, at least in that direction.

Well, right. And I don't think there's, you know, any, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. So if somebody tells me something, I'm going to listen and assume they're telling me the truth, you know, until I find out otherwise. But, you know, I just want to be clear. When I say that I've never felt like I have less power than a man, that's not saying that I've never felt threatened by a man, that I have not felt frightened walking down the street alone at night. So let's just be very clear about that. And I say in the book, like, you know, yes, there are physical power differentials that, you know, there's all kinds of ways that and reasons that women have historically had a really raw deal for

all kinds of reasons. And we can get into that. But, you know, I am interested in why, you know, in this current moment, there's such an incentive to sort of apply this assumption just across the board. You know, there was a survey done by Thomson Reuters about a year or so ago about the 10 most dangerous countries in the world for women. Okay. I don't know if you remember that. So it's now at the top, it was like India, Pakistan, I think Somalia, you know, the places that you would imagine. And the United States was number 10 on this list of the world's most dangerous countries for women. And, you know, when people said, well, how did you come to this? They had surveyed about 500 people who were global experts in global women's issues or something.

you know, experts in global women's issues or something. And they said, well, you know, in the wake of the Me Too movement, it was important to recognize that just because you're in an affluent country, you know, you're not automatically safe. And, you know, we really need to acknowledge the experiences of women in the United States. And I just thought, OK, A, that is not a data point. And B, what are you getting out of this? This is like amazing to me. Like, what is it? Does that sell more magazines? Does that make people feel like included in the world and the conversation in some way? That's what just constantly baffles me. And I think that's to your point, like this, that does real damage. Because if I read that, and I lived in India and was having to deal with, you know, the horrific conditions for women in countries like that, I would be pretty pissed if I saw the United States just kind of thrown in there on that

list. Yeah, well, that's, that's what makes this look like a moral panic rather than a set of legitimate ethical and political concerns. And I guess we should focus on the claims about the campus sexual assault problem now, because if you dumb down the definition of what constitutes an assault enough, I mean, one, you're driving up the perceived risk, right? Because people just assume that when you say that one in five women get sexually assaulted in their college careers, I've even heard that put as one in five women get raped in college. Yeah, which was never true. rape are practically synonyms in most people's minds. And, you know, depending on how much you dumb down the definition, it's you're doing real harm to the actual victims of real sexual, you know, terrifying and horrible sexual assault. Right. So.

But the problem. OK, so I absolutely agree with you. But the problem there is that how do you even articulate that point without using a phrase like real victims of real assault? Like you start to get in. As a white man, you just get on your own podcast and you do it. But was it was it was it the who was the politician who was talking about legitimate rape? Right. And somehow you couldn't you couldn't get pregnant from legitimate rape because the body would shut that down. So, you know, we've run into all these tripwires. Well, that was no. But was that Lindsey Graham? Who was that? No, it was it was I want to say Aiken. It was not not Lindsey Graham.

But yeah, there's all it's like all these all these tripwires because, you know, we want to talk about this very dynamic that you described, that if we if we make everything sexual assault, that that that it does no favor to victims of, quote unquote, real sexual assault. But then how do you even have the conversation without using a phrase like real sexual assault? And then this gets into like, well, we can't have this. We can't have a conversation to begin with because there's no way to do it without blaming victims or making people feel uncomfortable or doing harm to them. So we just we skip the whole thing and we don't even solve this problem of how you talk about it. So, you know, the not talking about it makes it almost impossible for anybody who who tries. So, right. Right. Well, I guess let me differentiate real from fake here in defense of basic sanity. I mean, I don't think there's a... Perhaps there's not a bright line, but this statistic of one in five, I think, was trumpeted from the highest places. I even think President Obama talked about it. Obama, yes. So we have the President of the United States announcing to a worried population that if you send your girls to college, they stand a one in five chance of being, quote, sexually assaulted.

If I thought there was a 20 percent chance that my daughters were going to be raped when they go off to whatever good school they worked hard to get into, I would never send them there. Right. It would be insane. There would be no need for college admission scandals either. Right. Because nobody would be applying to college. It would be so much easier to get in. Yes. So what do you think is rational to believe about the risk that young women run going to college? Well, I mean, the one in five thing, you know, even the people who did that study, that study was based on, I think, two different schools, you know, just two schools, one of which was a commuter school, essentially UMass Boston. Boston. And, you know, the one in sexual assault was being defined as anything from rape to some sort of unwanted touch or groping, that sort of thing. So the range of experiences that could fall

into the assault category is huge. And so, you know, the one in five rape thing was never true. This is like a game of telephone, right? Okay, so one in five sexual assault, you could kind of massage that if you were going to define sexual assault as really basically anything of a sexual nature that is unwanted. precise and come up with things like 1 in 42, 1 in 52, something like that. So I really think that ultimately, though, it doesn't matter what the statistics are. Like 1 in 52 is still too much. OK, like that's that's fine. And, you know, again, what I'm interested in in this book and, you know, I am again, I'm somebody who who looks at at people's behavior and looks at my own experience and tries to, you know, connect the dots and fill in the blanks here. I'm really not as interested in the numbers as I am in like what people are getting out of this. Why is it that if you have a bad experience, it's so much more, it's so much easier, it's so much more appealing to kind of fold it into a victimization experience than into one that where you just say, I shouldn't have I

shouldn't have done that. And that's not to say that that there aren't victims and that victimization experiences happen too often. But I really have noticed that, you know, as opposed to when I was in college, you know, having an icky sexual experience was just kind of the cost of doing business when it came to growing up and figuring out who you are. And this was just sort of, you know, what happens along the way. And I don't mean rape. I mean, just something that you regret doing and that hopefully you won't do again. But for some reason, there's almost like no lane for that kind of feeling about something

that you may have gone through. And I think a lot about why that might be. And again, this is one of these things that I'm still trying to figure out. Yeah, well, that's where it breaks down ethically in a scary way, when you have a culture that is rewarding victim status to a degree that kind of the straightest path to becoming a kind of social superstar is to have a legitimate claim to have survived something awful. And when you have these examples, and there's at least one in your book of essentially bad dates or sexual encounters that people wind up regretting. Again, there's no use of force or implied use of force or coercion,

or it's just that it becomes a he said, she said around something that is just, it's like, we don't want to do that again. But there are these cases that both in your book and in the news now where it seems like young women are being encouraged to dredge their memories for any sign that this experience that they just didn't like in the end can be weaponized to their advantage. And then what follows is you have this very strange policy wrapped up with Title IX where young men on college campuses can get accused of sexual assault or rape over something where the evidence isn't even presented to them. They don't even – I mean, it's this very weird gray area where, okay, if there was a real, quote, real sexual assault or a rape, then call the police, right? I mean – Yes, real rape assault or a rape, then call the police, right? I mean, people should show up with guns when that sort of thing happens, right? But no, we're in this sort of no man's land where this is not anything like a crime that could be reported to police, but it is nevertheless enough to destroy this person's career at a university.

And I don't know if you want to talk more about it, but these are really Kafkaesque episodes in the lives of men, which unfortunately make this what should seem like a good aphorism, you know, believe all women or believe victims, fairly unworkable on a college campus. Yeah, and this is one of those things that because it came from the Obama administration, everyone sort of on our side, on the left, just assumed, oh, well was going to be, they needed to follow a certain procedure if there was a case of a woman making a complaint of sexual assault. And there was a whole series of things you had to, you had to, you know, let the, you know, let the woman, you know, she was entitled to,

I think, having somebody, you know, be with her when she made this testimony. The man, on the other hand, was not allowed to have an attorney. I don't quote me verbatim here. This is a very sort of cursory summary. I don't you know, I go into it in a lot of detail in the book. But, you know, essentially these were kangaroo courts and you had cases where boys were accused of things they didn't know what they were accused of. And and the woman was just allowed to sort of proceed with a case that really was very, very muddy. And the worst thing about this was that even if the woman decided that she didn't want to proceed with it, by the time it was reported to the Title IX office, the Title IX office was obliged to go through with it. So and, you know, what had come down from the Obama administration was that,

you know, if the schools did not adhere to this, they risked losing their federal funding. And, you know, one of the great ironies of the Trump administration was that it took Betsy Du Vos to reverse many of these policies. You know, she was the one who finally stepped in and said, you know, this is wrong. We're going to roll this back. And now, you know, I like Obama a whole lot more than I like DeVos, to put it mildly. But who's the more reasonable party here? But, you know, again, to even hint that you may be on the side of Betsy DeVos will get you thrown out of liberal circles and in this this case, called a rape apologist.

But, you know. Yeah. Well, again, unhelpfully, there are cases of the opposite sort, where you have what seem to be legitimate accusations of rape from a student swept under the rug because, you know, say this person's a star football player or whatever, and the college just doesn't want to look into it for obvious reasons. And so, again, it's just the details in every instance matter. And the problem with any moral panic is that it makes it impossible to focus on the details.

Because the moment something fits a certain type, there's just a default emotional hijacking, which makes rational deliberation impossible because, you know, people are defenestrated for even taking the necessary moment to figure out what happened, right? Right. Well, so we seem to have this logic that asking questions, trying to actually get at the facts equals skepticism and then skepticism somehow equals harm. And so there's like this continuum of really diminishing returns. You know, so there's a there's a scene in the book where I go to a take back the night rally at the University of Iowa. There's a lot of the book that takes place at the University of Iowa because I was teaching there for a semester. And, you know, I'm sitting on the grass in the quad and there's a microphone and, you know,

a mic stand and a whole bunch of mostly undergraduates, some older kids, and I think even some staff, maybe adult staff, were getting up and telling stories about being sexually assaulted, about having really bad experiences. And, you know, Take Back the Night has been around for a long time. It's actually been around since the 70s. But it's this sort of initiative to get, you know, particularly college students to talk about these experiences and sort of bring them out in the open. And I remember from my own college days, and I know people who were really healed by the experience of being able to share these. So, you know, I was sitting there listening to some of these kids and some of their stories were really harrowing.

A lot of them took place in childhood. A lot of them, the things they were talking about had nothing to do with college. They were talking about sexual abuse in the family, at home. And then some of them were talking about encounters that happened more recently in college. And, you know, it wasn't, I believed them. The issue wasn't really about believing or not believing them, but more that I was noticing that there was almost this, like, I don't even want to say solidarity. There was this catharsis in telling their stories that went beyond catharsis and really was like some kind of deliverance.

It's a religious revival in a way. column, you know, back, you know, probably around, you know, several years earlier, making this very point and in a sort of clumsy way and saying, you know, the reason these women are making these accusations is that the minute you're a sexual assault survivor, you automatically get entry into this club and it's a special club. And, you know, as an opinion columnist myself, I remember reading that and thinking, oh, gosh, like you don't have enough words to try to make this point. And this is like really dangerous territory here. And he got in huge trouble for it. But I was sitting there on the grass listening to these students. And I thought, well, that's exactly what George Will was talking about. And that's kind of what's happening here. I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it a club, but it is definitely the real experience I felt wasn't what had happened during this thing that they that felt like an assault.

The real experience was this moment where they were telling the story. And so there's like this whole other level around it. And that's what's animating a lot of this, I think. Well, yeah, I think it's at the extreme. It's worse than a club. I think it's a cult. And the reason why you can see that it has a cultic dimension to it is, again, the moralizing of everything that just prevents a rational conversation about details or facts, be they facts of human biology or actual history or just being journalistically careful.

It also, there's internal contradictions to it that even when you point them out, just cannot be acknowledged by otherwise intelligent people. I mean, one that came to mind reading your book is you describe this controversy or pseudo-controversy that I had missed. I guess I was off Twitter enough so as to have been spared, but it's referred to as the United Airlines leggings gate. Leggings gate. Yes. I can't believe, how did you possibly miss that? Maybe refresh our memories about what that was and I'll tell you what it made me think of. Well, so this was a situation, that was a United Airlines gate at the Denver airport. And there's a family traveling on employee buddy passes, which is something that if

you if you're related to airline personnel or you're just sort of friends with the airline personnel, you can get a get a pass to fly either free or at a very deep discount. But there's always been a dress code for this. So, you know, this is like back in the day used to see, you know, pilots and flight attendants. They would fly on buddy passes if they're trying to get somewhere, but they'd be wearing a suit. There used to be coat and tie was part of the dress code for this. It is no longer that strict. So but this family with I think they had three young girls and two of them were wearing leggings, you know, as one does. And the gate agent was saying, well, you're not allowed to get on this plane with leggings. You know, you got to put something on over this. And the family was all too happy to comply. They

sort of improvised and found a way to put skirts on the girls or whatever. And this woman, not even in the same line, she was in line for a different flight, was sort of watching this from afar and just sort of invented a whole story around this and started tweeting that the gate agent was policing the dress of young girls and sexualizing young girls by saying they couldn't wear leggings. And this thing just blew up. This woman had a lot of followers. Celebrities started tweeting about this, you know, oh,'t wear leggings. And this thing just blew up. This woman had a lot of followers. Celebrities started tweeting about this. You know, oh, I wear leggings. This is disgusting. United Airlines is misogynist, on and on and on. And this this went on for like a solid day. And I guess I didn't have much to do that day because I was like entranced by this. And it's just such

a perfect example of like, you know, yelling fire in a crowded theater. And this had nothing to do with anything. But there was such glee in attaching yourself to this cause and the incentives for doing so if you were a public figure or you wanted to be a public figure were so great and so outweighed any incentive for getting the story straight, that it just felt to me like it encapsulated this phenomenon perfectly. Like we just we are we are just disincentivized from actually looking at the facts and trying to get at something complicated, because frankly, complication is out the window with social media. You just can't do it. Right. So the complicating factor here was that these were not just random passengers. These were employee buddies flying free and they had a rule in place and they were simply trying to enforce that rule. woke person on Twitter who was outraged by United Airlines enforcing some standard of dress on young women, these same people are going to celebrate the hijab as a sign of female empowerment under Islam. These are the same people who will count it as a sign of bigotry against Muslims when you complain about the patriarchal

and theocratic imposition on women's freedom that happens in the Muslim community. Dress being the front lines of that. And so this is a perfect contradiction. There's no way to square these intuitions, right? And yet pointing this out will convince no one. It's like a short circuit of ethical rationality. So we're not in the territory of a rational conversation about human well-being anymore when we're unable to simply talk about these things. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. You'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast

and to other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.