Modern Wisdom - #444 - Mary Harrington - Modern Society Is Failing Men & Women

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

Mary Harrington is a writer and contributing editor at UnHerd. It's hard to say that either men or women have a firm place to stand right now. The age-old wisdom which both groups traditionally relied on is out of the window and we're now TikTok dancing our way through an existential apocalypse where Girlbosses and Men Going Their Own Way battle it out for nihilistic supremacy. I wanted Mary to help me conduct a post-mortem. Expect to learn why the porn you start out watching is going to lead you down a dark rabbit hole, how the introduction of the pill lead to fewer weddings and more awkward situations for women, why men need their own spaces back, what Mary thinks about the pornification of everything, why young girls are developing tourettes from TikTok and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get $150 on everything from The Cold Plunge at https://thecoldplunge.com/ (use code MW150) (international shipping enquiries - [e-mail]) Learn how to skip college and get Praxis’ free book on the success mindset at https://discoverpraxis.com/modernwisdom/ (discount automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Follow Mary on Substack - https://reactionaryfeminist.substack.com/ Follow Mary on Twitter - https://twitter.com/moveincircles  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Mary Harrington, she's a writer and contributing editor at Unheard. It's hard to say that either men or women have a firm place to stand right now. The age-old wisdom, which both groups traditionally relied on, is out of the window, and we're tick-tock dancing our way through an existential apocalypse, where girl bosses and men going their own way battle it out for nihilistic supremacy. I wanted Mary to help me conduct a post-mortem. Expect to learn why the porn you start out watching is going to lead you down a dark rabbit hole.

How the introduction of the pill led to fewer weddings and more awkward situations for women, why men need their own spaces back, what Mary thinks about the pornification of everything? Why young girls are developing Tourette's from TikTok and much more? Mary's writing is some of the best stuff that I've found on the internet over the last couple of months So you should go and check that out if you enjoy what you hear today Also you should go and get the Modern Wisdom reading list Which is free and there is 100 books that you need to read before you die It's my favorite books from the last few years and you can get it right now by going to chriswix.com slash books. It will sign you up to my three-minute Monday newsletter

as well. That's chriswix.com slash books. But now please welcome Mary Harrington. Mary Harrington, look at the show. Thank you for having me. I spent a couple of days in New York with a friend. I'm not around young children. I don't have any children, at least ones that I'm aware of. And I got to see the tyranny that is bedtime. And from my perspective, you can tell me if this is true, right? To me, it seems like a daily game theoretic, litigative negotiation with a tiny drunk tyrant

that happens every single day on an evening at pretty much the same time. How accurate of a representation is that? Yes, maybe. It depends a lot on your child's personality, and it depends a little bit on how your role as a parent as well. What I mean by that is, if you treat small children as rational beings who need to be negotiated with, then you're letting yourself in for a world of pain.

But if you treat them as something a little bit more like dogs that need to be trained. And I say that with love as a mother who really very profoundly loves her daughter. And you start doing that very lovingly and very firmly from a young age with luck and patience. You'll have a child who likes a bedtime routine, who's familiar with it, and who's, when they get to a point of tiredness, just goes,

oh, OK, now I'm in the group. Now I know what's coming next. And they'll just chill out. And then bedtime becomes a relaxing thing. So it depends on a number of different factors. I mean, also how many kids you have, you know, if you've got three, then, you know, that harmonious sort of twinkly, twinkly twinkly kind of thing isn't quite so straightforward because they all have different things. You know, my dear friend who has three under five, you know, it's a three under five, it is a little bit more like crowd control. You've got one screaming for milk while the other one is throwing putt or whatever. It's a different ball go. But I think the idea, the goal is to have a routine that everybody just kind of falls into and you know where you are with things and and actually it's more like it's more like it's it's about training the unconscious mind so that you can you can think less about the stuff that

doesn't matter you know and that way it's like doing a cat in martial arts you know as this teaching teaching the body to react instinctively and I think that's very much that's very much the approach that I'm in favor of when it comes to reasonable children. I saw the group of three that you were talking about. I think that definitely contributed. There was a point, we were sat down having dinner and I think the oldest two had gone to bed

and then there was a point at which a naked three-year-old just came sprinting through the dining room and then dived, dived bombed onto the couch and there's a mother sort of frantically chasing after going, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. It's so good, but yeah, I'm glad that negotiating or whatever it is, the training, I think, that needs to happen before, there should be some sort of onboarding prep school for that. I think that needs to happen before there should be some sort of onboarding prep school for that. Yeah, I mean, I guess in that sense, I'm quite old-fashioned.

There are parents who take the view that children and children will naturally spontaneously know what's good for them in all possible respects, and you should just be guided by them. I'm not really a believer in that. I'm very much more classical in the view that children have to be habituated to the good and that's actually part of your responsibility as a parent. And they'll still do their best to thought you in every possible way and some are more thoughtier than others. That's very much.

More thoughtier. That's something that all children can aspire to be to be thoughtier. They all have the ways of being 40. But, um, yeah, I think it's, it's your responsibility to try and habituate them to the good, even if they don't appreciate it at the time, and even if they don't realize it until like 25 years later, you still have to try. Yeah. That's all you'd really can do. Given the fact that you spend a good bit of time on Twitter, and

this has probably been one of the most intense weeks on Twitter ever. What's your, what's your sense? Give me the aura that's in the air. How apocalyptic has this week been? What's the shittiest stuff that you've seen on Twitter? I've been, honestly, I've been trying to dial a noise down on the whole Ukraine thing on the basis that it's not really my wheelhouse, it's not my area of expertise. None of us knows what's happening on the ground because

it's just a wall to wall propaganda from, at least five different, I mean, I can think of two obvious interest groups, and probably another three, who've less obvious interest groups, who've all got a stake in scaring the story one way or another. And then you've got this absolutely insane freeful of people quietly into different fandoms, so just nice treating it as a massively multiplayer online role playing game. And the whole thing is honestly just doing my head in, because it's like the signal to noise ratio is terrible. And I have no use of contribution to make, so I just be trying to keep the noise down. Someone told me, someone sent me a big email with a bunch of stuff about Ukraine that was

really interesting. One of them was the current Wikipedia article about the Ukraine Russia crisis in February 2020, too, has over 20,000 words written in it and more than 500 contributors. Now, so you are literally live streaming a modern war. You know, I'm seeing videos on Twitter like TikTok. TikTok, dip. Apparently, the Ukrainian troops were using grinder to locate where the Russian troops were at. Did you see this?

I shit you not. Yeah, and I mean, there's something there's something just so wild about that. And honestly, deep down, I mean, I've sort of I set out to write a review of a woman's written this memoir about raising her transgender child, and I sat down to write the writer review of that book this week, should one later this week. And I ended up writing about the parallel universe that are formed in digital culture, because, well, let me explain, I mean, for me, you're familiar with my writing, I'm sure you've, my views on trans rights are, they're not, it's complicated, it's a difficult issue that needs to be approached sensitively that way.

And reading this book, which was obviously very sincerely written by a person who loves her daughter, loves her child very much indeed, really, really wants to do the right thing. It was like going down, it was just like diving a feet first into a completely parallel universe. A lot of the same talking points that I'm familiar with, the reference, but with completely antagonistic interpretations on them, you know, the same sets of facts but carefully curated to tell a completely contradictory story.

It was completely disoriented, it was like being in the upside down, and I read through this whole thing. I had to sort of stop and just take a few breaths every few pages and just think she believes this as completely and thus sincerely as the people who pit themselves absolutely against her do. Everybody really really believes this. So to chewed on both sides. Yeah, completely and there's no reconciling these two points of view. It's absolutely the contest is absolute zero sum and I don't know where you go from there. And I was thinking, well, you know, this is a serious enough thing when we're talking

about the bodies of children. You know, that's actually what's at stake in that particular set of internet, cultural as the bodies of children, in the bodies of adults as well. But where the rubber really hits the road and where the fights get really better as the bodies of children. And then you scale that up to the bodies of civilians in an entire national conflict.

And then you're really, that escalates the intensity of the fandom and it escalates the bitterness of the culture war to just an unimaginable degree. And I honestly, I don't see how that can be resolved. And I've been watching the temperature go up and up and up this week and thinking, never again am I going to wonder how it was that the entirety of Europe means itself into a world war in 1914? Because that's kind of what happened at that point and it feels like that's, you know, unless we take a few deep breaths and step away, you know, and a lot of people step away from

the people and touch across, that's what we're gonna do, we're gonna meme ourselves into an international nuclear war. And that's fucking terrifying. It's people spending too much time on the internet. So I went to a meetup in Austin this weekend. Do you know who Scott Alexander is from Astral Code X-10? Yeah, so he held a meetup in Austin and he sent that out to his entire mailing list,

which is probably not too far off half a million people. I know obviously a very, very, very small number of those in the states that are in proximity to get to Austin or whatever, but I met a guy who spends eight hours a day in virtual reality. I met people that are moderators of 4chan, moderators of 8chan, moderators on Reddit boards, people like real, real internet people. And yeah, it's so fascinating to think about what happens when you go web first into life

and the externalities and the assumptions that people have about how they're supposed to live. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's a theme that recurs fairly often in my work. It comes up a lot for me because I'm probably the last generation to have grown up in the before times. I'm 42, which puts me right on the cuts of the internet, or really the social media age, which is where it went supernova. You know, I mean, there were nerds who were on the internet for the 20 years before I was. But, you know, we've got our first online connection

when I was in 1997, I think, and I have my first email address at university. So, you know, I can remember actually doing research in libraries, I went all the way through school without even a lot of fun. I ran them four times, it's completely different world. You know, I know there are lots of people who are who are nostalgic for the 1990s because the culture was a thing then, I don't know, I could...

Yeah, I'm, if you think, to say about that, but it was completely different. And there's been this weird sense of, like, some things have just stood still since the Internet arrived. We don't really have teenage subpoxies anymore, for example, as far as I can make out. You know, I mean, if there are teenagers out there, you can correct me on this. What do you mean by that? I'm not sure about it. Well, I was a boss in...

I was an emo. Right, okay. Yeah, you see, you know what I'm talking about. But like, you know, in the four times, you know, like what you need for a teenage subculture is the right alchemy of boredom and sexual frustration and a limited social sphere. And there are various factors like that. And then a lot of spare time and not very much mobility or public money.

And you need all of those things to make it come together. And if you can find your people just like that, just by searching, then you don't ever, you don't ever end up with the sort of, you know, the happens dance collection of misfits that creates a sort of spark you need, you know, subculture to have in a place. Why? Well, I mean, if you think about, like, they're all very bound by place, like the subcultures as they emerge, they start out very bound by place, like the subcultures as they emerge. They start out very sort of place bound.

And geographically. Yeah, geographically. I mean, Manchester, which you may, you probably remember. I mean, the punk thing in the 1970s, was that was all the angry council mistake in the grumpy industrial towns, you know, not really seeing much of the future,

not seeing much of the good life. And seeing the 1960s turn sour on them. They're all very bound by place and location. And then it becomes a necessity, then it becomes commercialized, and then it sells out to the man. And then there's this cycle which I remember, which starts accelerating from the 60s onwards. That, in With Now and I, I'm sure you've seen. You know, with Now and I. No. You've never seen that film. No. Oh, man. Oh, it's, it's

a, it's a, it's a richly grant. And Paul McGat from the mid 1980s is absolutely cult classic. All about these two completely, completely disruptive and failing actors at the end of the 1960s, who spend a weekend in Penn Reth with one of their, one of their pederastic uncle. Oh, I mean, you have to see it, but I mean, it's about, it's about repression,

it's about the end of the 1960s, and it's about yourself, just falling apart apart and it's about whether the meaning of force is selling out to the... It's a grateful... There's this line right at the end where Danny, the drug dealer, says, they're selling hippie wigs in Woolworths now. The greatest decade in history of math has just come to an end. And we have failed to paint it black. Is that the death now? Do you think of a movement if it gets featured in, like, if there's a WH-Smiths end-end-of-eil stall with a cardboard cut out of whatever it is? Well, yeah, but if you think about it, you know, think about, think about what the cycle time is now between something

appearing on the internet and the being merchant, it doesn't even have time to go through a sort of bias of product buying process to get into wallets. There were ghost of KFT shirts on in Etsy within 48 hours. I saw the tea towel of a fucky Russian ship. Exactly. Exactly. You know, when they went when the cycle between meme, the sort of meme to merchandise cycle is like less than 48 hours. There's no, there's no space in which a culture can even a sub culture is, you can even emerge, let alone sell out. Okay. And because as soon as you start to commercialize something,

much of this seductiveness about the movement has been taken away because it's not subversive or cool on niche anymore, is that the reason that it's short-cooking? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I mean, like, cool, like a subculture will start out being a cool group of kids, and then the people will just, people start jumping on the bandwagon and then more and more people will pile in and then eventually they're selling happy wigs and walnuts. At least that's how it used to work in the four times. But the cycle just goes too fast now. Yeah, it's direct from meme to walworths.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, within 48 hours. So they're just, I mean, you know, and I don't know what the point was honestly, I think the closest thing we have to use sub cultures now is ticks, like tick tock induced, uh, terets and, and emoji pronouns and stuff like that. Sorry, did you hear it? Have you heard about this? I know, I know about pronouns on Twitter, but I don't know what you're making me feel, Mary, you're making me feel like the biggest boomer ever. I'm 34 years old, and I've been made to feel like a fucking boomer.

Yeah, I should, I clearly need to touch for us. I'm clearly getting to work. It's you that you're speaking to here. So what's a TikTok tick and And what's an emoji pro? No, this is an article that had a Lewis wrote recently at the Atlantic. And I think she certainly did, I think she's written an article about it.

And there's been the Tourette's clinics all over, all over the place, are seeing an epidemic of a new variant of Tourette, which doesn't seem to have the same ideology as classical Tourette, which can be't seem to have the same etiology as classical Tourette's, which can be treated with anti-psychotics, but there seems to be being caused by the internet. People are coming in like kids. They're usually teenage girls, and they're coming in with often with exactly or more or less exactly the same ticks as influencers with Tourette's

on social media. So, they're basically... Have you ever seen what the... or has it ever been described, what this sort of tick is? Because I can't imagine what that would be. Well, they'll, you know, they think like saying, saying particular, a particular word. I can't, I can't remember an example, but they've sort of random stuff like, you know, saying cucumber, spotainist, even a bit of a sentence or, you know, falling to their knees and waving their hands,

sort of gestures or spasmodic text. And girls appear to be, especially teenage girls, appear to be catching this off influencers who display their symptoms on TikTok. Fuck me. So this is like some sort of mimetic modeling of high status social behavior at least within one particular niche

that's been delivered through. So you said for media. Oh my god. Yeah, and I think, I mean, this is probably, this is probably the closest we have now to use sub-purchase. What's a sort of parasitic psychological contagion that gets girls on TikTok to do,

like, and their duck is spontaneously out of nowhere. I mean, it's not massively different to the ice bucket challenge really, is it? The ice bucket challenge was conscious. This appears to be subconscious. Anyone that tips a bucket of ice over their head subconsciously, that's a serious take. Right. But what my point is, my point is it's still a meme, and it's still, and it's transmitting through the same vectors, and to a degree with the same, to the same ends. I don't know, I mean, there's sort of weird esoteric corners of the internet where people

matter about the fact that these memes are in a sense alive and independent of us, but you know, I don't really want to speculate about that. People don't have ideas, ideas have people. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be the first person to contemplate that. You know, you watch something like this ripped through impressionable populations, and you think, well, you know, maybe there's something to it.

And then you watch an entire, an entire international population of social media edits, you know, seemingly meaning themselves into, you know, thinking that maybe nuclear war would be such a bad idea. And you think, well, actually, it's not just ice-poppy challenges, and it's not just to them to them, to them, the externalities of talking about this stuff is basically the same. Talking about, I mean, I think they're just not really thinking about it. You know, those are whole class of people. They were like, yeah, yeah, we should lock down.

And it didn't actually make very much difference to them. You know, and I'm sure you know, somewhere in the lizard brains, they're assuming that a pilot was still going to be delivering groceries after you appear on Getham. And then they haven't really thought it through. Shit, I'm fed. What? Shit, the bed. What? Shit the bed.

Yeah, I mean, that's about where I am this week. You know, you said, what's the vibe in my life? Apocalyptic. It's not good, man. It's not good. It's not good. It's a blend of sort of nihilism, sort of apocalyptic Cassandra complex and apathy, which is nice, which is a nice place to be, actually, I think.

Let's talk about, I want to talk about this war on relationships that you've been thinking about. The last few months for me, I've been completely submerged in evolutionary psychology and looking at trends in dating dynamics. You might be familiar with Vincent Haranam, who has done some stuff for Quilette alongside Rob Henderson, who, again, like, here's my, here's my fucking advert for Rob Henderson. Everyone needs to go and follow him on Twitter, because he's one of the best people on Twitter. Talk to me about this war on relationships.

What's that? I mean, my MO has always me first asked questions later. And I started saying war on relationships before I really come to an decision about what I meant by it. And when I talk about a war and relationships before I really come to the decision about what I meant by it. And when I talk about the war and relationships, I'd like to be clear, I'm not just talking about the breakdown of relationships between men and women. I mean, my working hypothesis is that's kind of, that's about where we are with it right

now, but it opens that to a much more wholesale war on our ability to, on spontaneous interpersonal social reactions which are not mediated by the market. I mean, that's quite a long thesis which I'm going to be writing up as a book chapter at the moment, but which hopefully will come out towards the end of the year. If I can shame this, we've had that, yeah, it's called Females and Against Progress. You'll be back on to talk about that. So we'll share it multiple times. I'm really excited about it. So it's absolutely, it's a wild ride riding it.

But yeah, I mean, the current chapter I'm working on is a lot about the wrong relationships, which to my mind is about, it's about destroying organic interpersonal relationships between people, except those which can be mediated through the market and commercialized. What's an example of that? Well, I mean, actually,

and that's really where the relations between men and women serve as a very powerful example. Because it seems to me that there's a fairly concerted effort to discourage men and women from just meeting and falling in love. When women could be encouraged, for example, to offer their services on only fans instead and monetize men's desire, or everybody could be persuaded to sign up to dating apps, which, you know, encourage a sense of endless optionality

and stop people and you know, discourage anybody from ever actually falling in love and getting off the dating apps because the rights for always be greener on the other side. You know, it's sort of, it de- it unplugs the human longing for connection from other humans and all does it instead to limit capitalism, the rewiring of all of our basic desires in the interests of profit. That probably makes me sound like a completely unhinged anti-capitalist, Alex Jones, like Looney. Once you start seeing the war and relationships, you can't unsee it.

But pretty much every facet of COVID policy effectively served to support the war and relationships. Because everything which was banned came under the heading of spontaneous interpersonal interaction and everything which was somehow made exception for, came under the heading of human interaction which in some ways served the market. So, going to church was banned. Go free fucking children's playgrounds were closed. Singing together was banned. Visiting your family in groups of more than a small number was banned.

But somehow you were still allowed to go to the office. And somehow you were still allowed to go to the office, and somehow you were still allowed to go to shops, and somehow, you know, for a long, for, you know, on and off, you were still allowed to go to pubs. You know, the only, the only context in which you were allowed to continue interacting with people is where money was worth, where money was a credit card, in some form or another, and everything else was shoved online, which again, you know, serves, you know, serves to monetize it in one form or another, whether it's Zoom making the money or, I don't know, or only fans or whatever. Zoom replaces family get together, some only fans replaces, you know, whatever it is that say you aren't seeing what

people do on Friday night. And suddenly you're in a situation where all kinds of domains of spontaneous interpersonal relationships have been methodically destroyed and reordered to the market. Like, it probably makes me sound like a ten-fold hat, but that was, that for me was the, that's the story of what the pandemic did. I don't think of it as a big, deliberate conspiracy, but in practice, that's what happened. So that really has a macro scale as well, I'm talking about, I'm talking about the war on relationships. What's this Korean untact policy thing?

Oh my fucking God, pardon my language, but oh my God, this is a South Korean policy, which has accelerated over a course of the pandemic, which seeks to remove, eliminate all human contact in the interests of increasing productivity. So automating shops, automating libraries, just removing any messy, frictional situations where people are involved in interactions with one another. In just turning everything into a sort of hyper mechanized set of vending machines in the interests of also, they say, increasing productivity. You know, I mean, it strikes me that they haven't really thought it through because humans

have some basic needs, which include other humans. But I suspect that a lot of a lot of people who come up with this stuff believe very firmly, as do a lot of progressives that there is no such thing as human nature, and that in fact they can just be remodeled, you know, either to serve the greater good or to serve the interests of profit, or perhaps there's two things at the same thing, or whatever, you know, that's all the show that turns out for the best. Rory Sutherland says that Silicon Valley sees everything as an optimization problem.

And he said this to me three years ago, and I can't stop thinking about it, and it's not just Silicon Valley, it's that rather than looking at it from a human-centric perspective, it's presumed to be some sort of engineering problem where if we can just get the right set of parameters and deploy them into the world, then all of the problems that we've got can be fixed.

When you realize that the human brain is wholly irrational and the more that I learn about it, the less and less that I feel like I have conscious control over anything, free wheel discussions aside, the fact that I'm just whatever rider with blindfolds on on the back of an elephant makes me think that when you are talking about this, if you're talking about increasing productivity and yet making someone go into this completely sterile, petri dish of a supermarket and maybe not have their one conversation per day that they might have with somebody which would be the person behind the checkout, then leads to this person killing themselves in two years' time because they've never had any intimate contact or any human contact with anybody.

You go, it's far too reductive to think that this is an effective policy and yet because we're in this world where we no longer pray at the altar of human nature or of religious ideology. The technological revolution has presented us with a new God that can fix all of the problems that we have in our lives. And if we follow that forward, you just think, well, it's just a technological problem. It's simply an optimization issue where if we get the right logistics and the right parameters set, everything's going to be sorted.

And it's not true. It's not true. People can't just be re-wired like that. I mean, I'm full, I don't know. Maybe if you set about conditioning people over the course of several years, I'm not And it's not true. It's not true. People can't just be reword like that. I mean, I'm full, I don't know, maybe, maybe if you set about conditioning people over the course of several generations, perhaps you could have some effect,

but what sort of monster would go? What sort of monster would do that? I don't know. Maybe we're in the process of finding out. The Koreans, apparently. I've got this quote. I absolutely adored this quote from you in one of the articles. The consequence of liquefying all courtship rituals and sexual norms wasn't a feminist paradise of

non-exploitative sex, but endemic intimate violence and a multi-billion dollar porn industry. But the utopians believe so firmly that human nature doesn't exist, that the same thing keeps being tried. What did you mean by that? Just that really. I mean, a recurring theme in the idealistic efforts to break down existing norms, which I mean, one way of looking at existing norms might be the simplified stories we tell our children in order to make sure that humans don't keep making the same mistakes over and over again. You get the nice simple heiristics. You teach your child to go to bed regularly because you've learned from experience as I have. You go to bed at the same time every night, you just say to your local household, you get enough sleep, you feel good. It's not rocket science, but you can't explain that to a one-year-old. So you just train them like a dog to go to bed at the same time every night, it just saves you a lot of hassle. You get enough sleep, you feel good, it's not rocket science, but you can't explain that to a one

year old, so you just train them like a dog to go to bed regularly, and then hopefully they'll carry on and I mean, you know, that's in microcosm, that's just what all traditions are, really. And sometimes they need to be don't just, they just don't fit the conditions anymore. You know, if you've got traditions that apply to be don't just, they just don't fit the conditions anymore. If you've got traditions for the applied to living in the desert, you know, 3,000 miles away that just don't really make sense in the temperate climate, then maybe you need to rethink them. But traditions are going to bed regularly, going to bed at the same time every night. They still work, what's in the store?

Why was it that the feminists, the paradise that they were looking for, why did that not come about? Honestly, I think they just had the... Well, that's a very big question. Fundamentally, I think there are some irreducible differences between the sexes, which are just not taken into account. I mean, you've talked to Louise Perry about this. She's had books coming out. I don't know, have you had Louise on? No, who is she? She's a great friend of mine, another another reactionary feminist, so she'll hate me for describing her that way. Or or adjacent anyway, she's got a book coming out called The Case Against the

Sexual Revolution, which is a feminist book and it's the feminist taked out. It's a feminist critique of the sexual revolution, which in her she argues very cogently from evolutionary psychology and once other things has been a disaster for women. Fundamentally, a lot of women at scale want slightly different things. And they always they prioritize certain different things. That might not always be the case. As you put it to me the other day, her view is that, you know, on the individual level, the differences between many women and not that great, there's a scale. They're big enough that actually you need to, you need to, you need to treat many women

slightly differently. Can you give me an example? Well, let's think. It's a good example. Men are more violent. Let's go. I'm married to a very lovely man. He is not a violent man.

I dare say you are not a violent man. Most men interact with one of their new bases, so they are not violent men. But at scale, men are more violent than men. Something like 97% and 99% of all the sexual crimes are committed by men. You know, most of the murderers in prison most of well, most of the prisoners will stop a men. And you know, I'm sure you're familiar with all of these statistics, you know,

and it's not an accusation against you or any other individual man to point out that men are no violent. So, and because of that, it makes sense, for example, streetmail and view of physical information is different. You know, and that opens out into a whole, you know, there are a whole whole series of minefields we could walk into there. Well, you are.

But just to keep the thing on why sexual revolution didn't is because it was premised on the idea that men and women are basically the same, apart from some sort of trivial kind of graphical differences. But it's just not true. And you're definitely not true when it comes to sex. You said in a different article, similarly, chivalrous social codes may feel condescending, but men are still statistically physically stronger

and more violent than women, and assault on codes that encourages men to restrain their physical dominance may feel condescending, but men are still statistically physically stronger and more violent than women. An assault on codes that encourages men to restrain their physical dominance may not wholly be to women's advantage. So that's the fact that we can say, I don't need a man to open the door for me. We don't need to have this sort of power dynamic in a relationship, typically. However, when you roll the clock forward and say, okay, what happens if you were rode these and you get rid of these, you realize,

well, maybe the second and third order effect of this was that it was constraining some of the more malignant parts of men's life. Is that what you're saying? Exactly, exactly. I mean, in my, I'll put it much more strongly since I'm like, well, I have a guy getting canceled this week. I've had two or three, two or three attempts already.

I think attacking chivalry as a set of social codes has been the biggest cell phone that feminism is one of the most savage cell phones that feminism would be possible to come up with. It's been absolutely catastrophic, it was incredibly fucking stupid idea. And it was brought about by a bunch of women who felt safe enough doing it because they were fairly civilized, fairly privileged, and they were confident that they could demand that the men in their lives would treat them well. And they didn't think about men and women in different social contexts who maybe needed us a clearer and more simplified set of barbedroats. And they specifically didn't think about how much more vulnerable would make a woman in, you know, perhaps, you know, among people who need a simpler set of guidelines.

Are you talking about maybe the difference between a middle and upper class versus a typical working class environment? Well, I mean, it's not, it's obviously other simplistic to break down, you know, educational achievement, you achievement, to say that map always invariably maps onto cognitive ability and educational achievement and impulse control and so on and so forth.

But there are some correlations. And when you're talking, the sort of free for all and everybody should just be themselves, edit, which is great amongst a bunch of young university graduates who have been broadly brought up with decent manners and talk to go to bed regularly on the same time every night. It's a completely different ball day into people who, for example, have poor impulse control and not very much educational, grown up in a violent, automatic or impoverished family, who have a history of interpersonal violence already. Saying to somebody like that, you should just follow your heart, it's going to produce different results. And you don't

need chivalry, you don't need codes of chivalry, which say don't hit women. He, you know, longer need does, and in fact, it's it's feminist to get rid of the codes, which say, men shouldn't hit women. Then it's not going to produce the it's not going to produce a result. Well, presumably they didn't mean to get rid of explicitly get rid of don't hit women. It would have been don't hold the door open. But are you saying that downstream from that, that was the inevitable conclusion that you got to? Well, I mean, I'll dodge that very slightly by pointing out that joking and intimate violence is now normalized during sex.

Was that by feminists? Well, so certainly the sex positivity has, so sex positivity has been, has been mainstream feminism since the 1980s. So actually, yeah, you know, and there are, there are bitter ongoing turf walls with you, not only within, within feminism today about whether or not, you know, whether or to what extent interpersonal violence and, you know, how that maps on to consent, you know, whether don't get my yarm as really enough to find it out. Whether that's really enough to account for, you know, the ways that an instrument can

be abusive without being non-consensual. It's very volatile to reign. And I think a lot of the reasons it's become so volatile is that they're just aren't any rules anymore. And to a significant extent, there aren't any consequences. In the sense that you can have the most degrading sexual encounter, but as long as you use birth control chances are nothing permanent or as a result of it. So that was...

Oh, okay. So you're saying that part of the sexual revolution, you had physiologically the decoupling of having sex from making children, and then culturally also you had this decoupling of the sacredness around sex, the lack of... But for Jinnia, on the side, is a journalist, a long-standing journalist, was in her 20s in the 1960s, and she wrote a few years ago about what that was like. And she said that, prior to the pill,

it had been possible to say no to somebody coming on to you because there was always a risk of pregnancy But you know, I'm trying to trip. I can't remember the exact quote You said what armed with the pill? It was basically it was easier sometimes to just have sex with a man out of politeness To make him go away Because they knew they knew you are on the pill and so I mean what other reason did you really have to say no? And so you oh Wow, so the implication or the male ego had one fewer

self-justifiable or excusable reason for why men could have to swallow their own pride around this woman doesn't want to have sex with me because, wow, I never even thought of it. You were... It made it orders of magnitude more difficult to say no to loveless or degrading sex because it could now potentially be consequence three.

So there was no longer a material reason for all men to hold out for a loving long-term relationship. And I'm with Louise on questioning when of the long-term consequences of this have been over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over It's a counter-intuitive relationship, but it's fairly well documented. That in fact, immediately after contraception became a male abortion, we've legalized. The number of abortions went up, and you would expect, with contraception now widely available,

you'd expect the number of abortions to go down. But in fact, that wasn't quite what happened because you sort of have to think of it as a difficulty of scale. There was just more sex happening because it was theoretically consequence three. And so even though the number of sexual encounters that resulted in accident and pregnancy was lower, there were so many more of them that the absolute number of accident and pregnancy went up. You thought, you followed? Yeah, yeah. And then there was an implication for the man's requirement to stay around because it was seen as... Yes. Like, can you explain that? Exactly. And also because it was now possible to go and get an abortion if you were accidentally pregnant, the social pressure on men to then step up went away. So there was no longer an obligation on, there

was no longer an expectation that if a man got all men locked up, he'd be expected to marry her. Because the pregnancy was much more, or the birth, sorry, was much more her choice. Exactly, exactly. So because it, because ending the pregnancy was now an option, it was, it was similarly meant it wasn't, it was much more of an option for men to walk away. These two things blow my mind. They absolutely blow my mind. This is like Rory Sutherland's level stuff

where he's talking about, oh, well, here's the first order effect. And maybe you can see half of the second order effect, but roll the clock forward five to 10 to 25 years. And you have this externality that you had no idea was coming. And it's completely terrible. Absolutely.

And I mean, what we do with these conclusions, I don't really have a firm view on that. You know, I have friends who are very firmly pro-life. You know, I wrestle with it. I think it's an incredibly complex and incredibly fraught issue. I'm also the view that once the material changes there, we need to put this back in its box, it's very rarely enough, because once technology is there, people don going to want to use it. And I think, yeah, I think just saying, well, we should put this back in its box, may

or may not actually have a desired effect. But I do think it's absolutely incumbent on us to think through what the actual second and third order effects have been of these absolutely monumental technological changes. Because in my view, the sexual revolution is on a pile of the industrial revolution. And in a sense, actually, when the very, the American writer describes the consequences of the sexual revolution as being a kind of industrialization of sex,

a reordering of sexual intimacy to the same parent, to the same industrial paradigm. Suddenly, it was open to the market. I found a very telling detail. And the same year that Hayek was arguing about the spontaneous about the markets, just the spontaneous order of markets. I think that's the phrase spontaneous order. What was the first, was also the first anti-pornography markets, the spontaneous order of markets, I think that's the phrase spontaneous order.

Was also the first anti-pornography conference organized by Andrew Dwork in New York. And I just think it's fascinating that while this guy is holding up this idealized picture of markets, this spontaneous self-organizing force, the other somewhere else in the picture, somebody else is waving a placard and saying, no, somewhere else in the picture, somebody else is waving a placard and saying, no, actually, there's this market, which seems to be happening spontaneously. We really don't like the order, which it's bringing in. Talking about the sexual revolution, then, you speak about, I don't know whether it's an anti-sexual revolution or it's a sex negative position that was finding ourselves falling

into. Can you explain that? Well, I don't really think of myself as... I don't really see the arguments that I make as being sex negative at all. I mean, I made a process argument against being public about your kinks on the basis that you just enjoy them more of their private and the moment, you know, the moment you start parading your your disgusting profilities through time, you know, they start, they start seeing in flat and boring and you have to find something even more disgusting to get the same thrill So I mean, if you're going to, I mean some people are going to have some people people like what they like But and I think you know that the the wage keep that free song of the forbidden is a health and does of oppression.

So that's the only wage keep it feeling for the forbidden. That's one of your... Is that one of the dynamic, the porn or dynamics laws? Yes, that's three laws of porn or dynamics, yes. Yeah, what was it, the law of fat entropy? Yeah, the law of fat entropy. Can you explain what the law of fat entropy is for people? That's really, that's the law that says, you know, whatever it is that you start out

wanking to is going to start seeing what's even boring and you'll have to find something yet more disgusting to get the same thrill, which is why it doesn't, you know, people can make all the arguments they want to about ethical porn, but you have to see if porn is a vector. It's a direction, not a series of not a static thing. And you can start an ethical porn, but you'll be down there in the sewers watching blueberry porn before you know it. It's a thing, don't even ask, don't go to the limit, really don't go to the limit. Okay, okay, okay. So yeah, anti-sexual revolution, I think that you mentioned about your seeing increasing numbers of 17, 18, 19-year-old people, girls, especially who are kind of withdrawing

from a hyper-sexualized world. You have a friend, I think, who took all of her bikini photos down from Instagram and wouldn't post photos where she's got her shoulders out and stuff like that. And that seems like almost puritanical, you know, compared with what's typically being put forward in popular culture for young people. Absolutely.

And I mean, I should underline the fact that this is very subcultural at the moment. But my good friend, Catherine D, also known on the internet more as default friends, been tracking this for a few years. She writes a lot on internet fandoms and sex and relationships. And she's been tracking this for a few years. She writes a lot on internet fandoms and sex and relationships. And she's been tracking the rise of sex negativity,

particularly in young women for years. And it's in a nutshell, young women have just had enough, especially the girls who went through the tumbling years where it was all don't keep shame me. And then just found themselves in these violent and abusive encounters, which was supposed to be found just one. And there was no discursive space in which to say, no, actually this was disgusting and upsetting. And I don't ever want to do it again because it was like, oh, I don't think so. And you know,

if you're going through, you know, there was one, I mean, it's been, it's been deleted since, but all the horrific, horrific series of tweets that some, some young woman put up, and let me choose only in her early 20s, and this had happened to, you know, some time before. Like she was saying, you know, I had a relationship with the sky and like, you know, he was a dumb, you know, I woke up one day to find him, you know, I sort of came back to consciousness one night to find him, we should have been crushed out

at her all into my cup, you know, and this is supposed to be sort of, you know, kinky stuff, but just what is that? But exactly, exactly. You know, or, you know, he wanted to experiment with breath plays, so he got steaming drunk and put me in a re-enabled chokehold my past out. You know, that's not fun for anyone.

You know, I don't know what's going on there, but that's not fun. And that's somebody who's gone a long way down, they've pointed the limits, rabbit hole, and is just needs to get his kicks somehow. And there's perhaps kind of lost sight of the fact that that's a real human person that he's doing it to. Because, I mean, you hear horror, you know,

but again, don't do all this. But if you ever want to see what the suffering this forces to men, you don't have to spend very long on the no-fat forms to see, to see that some of these guys are really struggling with it. I salute every single one of them for trying because they've had their dopamine receptors hacked by this stuff sometimes for years, and they're trying to keep the habit, and it's an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. You know, when your brain is being rewired by it to the point where, you know, you can't get off accepting a very, you know, in a particular angle whilst thinking about something incredibly

for rock. Yeah, that you've got to do some sort of mental jujitsu mindfulness exercise in a desperate attempt to put yourself in a roused state. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and this is this is well documented, you know, this is a Justin, this is an anecdote that this this seems to happen a lot. And these and these go and and once you're once you sort of you know once you sort of wank yourself into that kind of a paralysis, you know, you can't have an intimate relationship with somebody, not really, until you've got yourself, until you've rewired your brain again, because I mean, how are you ever supposed to be intimate with another human being? If you can only get off while standing on your head and thinking about blueberries or whatever. I think it's

horrendous. I think it's absolutely monstrous. So rolling the clock forward from there, do you think that we're going to see more of this? I don't know what you would call it, like an anti-sexual revolution or a re-sacredizing of the intimate relationship, or is that what you would prescribe if you were to try and fix it?

I sincerely hope so, but it's not a simple problem to fix. And I think, you know, in as much as, I mean, it's already happening. I see it already happening, but it's subcultural and it's generally coming from what I would call young cancer elites. Who's that? Kids who are in their 20s, probably, young millennials or Gen Z, and who don't buy into the whole mainstream thing. Who don't fully signed up to the integrating less of what Wesley Ann calls the integrated the vertically integrated messaging apparatus You know and who who read whatever it is who who sort of I don't want to call on conservative because they're not exactly conservative

I don't know quite what they are They're the wrong thing but but those those kids some of them are thinking this stuff through very completely You know some of the conclusions that come up with a French terrifying. What like? I'm not going to go there. I'll write about it. I'm not doing that on the podcast. I've got a strong...

Okay, okay. But again, I'm not on their shoes. So, you know, what can I say? I've got what can I say really. If I was there, maybe I'd be performing the same video. But yeah, I see younger sort of countercultural people, you know, taking very firm views on this and being, and a lot, I don't know, it's sort of among that cohort, I see it sort of going in two directions, you know, people either go radically, you know, they either go

full nuclear war on relationships, you know, they either go full nuclear war on relationships, you know, and there are various different ways you can do that. You can go full on humanistic, you can go all out for the, you know, victory of one sex over another, you know, you know, sort of girl boss only fans or alternative, you know, the pickup artist thing is another, there's another variant on that, it's just about, you know, instrumentalising, defeating, and symbolically humiliating the opposite sex. To me, that seems to be the principle mood. You're more interested in keeping the sport with respect to your male friends and you're interacting

with the human. I think there are male coded between our code versions of this in my observation. The, the, the girl boss, only fans thing is, is, is in a sense, you know, just a mere energy. It's adversarial, right? It's taking the primary, typically the primary source of value that the opposite sex had, and then weaponising your ability to manipulate that. So then weaponising their ability to get women's bodies and women weaponising their ability to get men's resources. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm finding it really, really striking that there are, you can find almost exactly the same comparison, exactly the same attacks on marriage in feminist writing,

as in in-sell and pick-up artist writing. They all hate marriage. They all see it as no better than a constitution. I think it should be replaced with a more with a frankard and more market-based, in fact, those in exchange. They all are back at the war on relationships. And in a sense, that sort of the zephyt to break down any possibility of solidarity between them and replace it,

there's something that's transactional and instrumental and can be ordered to the logic of wages or commerce or... You see it as you say, come and come both sides, it's older than social media. It's probably older than the sexual revolution or it definitely accelerated with the sexual revolution. I feel like we're reaching some kind of an end. I honestly don't know how much worse it can get without the human race just losing the ability, but that was all the losing of anything to talk to one another or form families full stock. That was the end point. The last time that I was stood here in Austin, I was having

a conversation with a guy called Vincent Haranam who I mentioned twice today. I'm going to continue to force feed traffic to him in the way that he precisely doesn't want to have happen. He is the most pseudonomous man I've ever met and yet I'm going to continue to get people to go and look at his stuff. And the end point that we came to, he's done a big, deep data dive, he's a data scientist that's looked at the relative attraction rates, what's happening on dating apps, so on and so forth. And the outcome really is pretty terrifying, especially when you look at the population projections, not just in the West now as well, like Chinese in a pretty good place, a pretty bad place with this as well too, but there's not a very positive,

rosy outlook, the apocalyptic way that we started talking about Twitter at the beginning looks paradisal in comparison with the future for relationships, I think. And I remember reading this article from Cat Rosenfeld, I think she's called, and I think you've spoken about this too, which is in order to make something attractive and for there to be excitement in a relationship, there needs to be a little bit of uncertainty and a small amount of danger might be the wrong word, but at least a little bit of uncertainty and some sort of play between the two people.

And there's two things that are going on at the same time. One is this complete liberalization of Don't Kingshame me. And at the same time, this sort of equivalent of helicopter or snowplow, not parenting, but sexual norming to the point where you get this consent porn. And I learned recently that there is a push for a blockchain of consent, which would be able to track every single degree of consent that you would be able to tumble down. So you have these two sort of diametrically opposed,

but parallel dynamics moving at the same time. In order for me to get, most people to get excited, you're going to need some degree of uncertainty and excitement and play between the relationship. And yet at the same time, you have this helicopter situation where any slight discomfort needs to be pushed out of the way. And you mix that in with the pornification of everything and access to only fans and women

being able to commodify men and men being able to sexualize women. And it's not good. It's not good. What do you think we should do, Chris? The only solution that I've come up with is putting marriage back up on a pedestal. I think that you're going to struggle to pull women back from the very recently acquired position of equity in society. By 2030, you're going to have two women for every one man at a four-year US college on average at the moment between the ages of 21 and 29 women earn 1,111 pounds more per year than a man. All of these sorts of things, and you have this hypergamous

nature, which is obviously kind of like the thing that the manosphere gets its kicks off. It's increasingly difficult for women that are raising up through their own competence hierarchy to find a man that is equally or more competent than them, because young women are outperforming men in a bunch of different domains at the moment. So, and also saying, girls, you should settle for less. Like that meme is not going to take hold,

telling girls that you, like Joe Schmoe is the guy for you, but if you make it less about the partner and less about the commodification of that, less about, oh, what's the Instagram follower count or what sort of card do they drive? And you make it more about, well, I want somebody that is able to provide that's going to be a good father,

that's going to be a good member of my extended family too, that my parents are going to like, that's going to be reliable. That institution of marriage was what wrapped that up and made it something beyond just the quantifiable metrics of success. That's the first part. The first part is to negate some of the high-pogamous nature that women have, and rightly so, they want to find the right man for them, by making it slightly less about the man's quantifiable metrics of success, and much more about the institution of family, relationships, so on and so forth. And then Jeffrey... Or biggest big romance. Big romance, precisely.

A bonus big romance. Yes, exactly. We need to get rid of it. Just you keep. And then Jeffrey Miller, the evolutionary psychologist, one of the guys that did all of this stuff in dating dynamics, he told me that you can hack hypergamy in a really smart way in the bedroom and also around the house

by just doing role play. He said that the human brain, and this is something that makes complete sense. You don't need to have an actual power differential in a relationship all the time, because you can fake yourself into believing that there's one there. You know, if you've got the high powered boss bitch,

PhD half a million year woman, with a man who is the lower earner in the household, and yet you flip that polarity in the bedroom. The human brain doesn't really know, it's not like, oh, this is just a game that we're playing. It doesn't really know. So you can use those tricks. So those would be my two.

More power play in the bedroom to flip high pergamy and then the re- pedestrianization of marriage as an institution. Those are my solutions. What do you think? Yeah, I agree. I mean, I have a whole, probably completely unprintable thesis about why why BDSM has been so, it becomes so popular. I mean, I think it's a sort of, it's an involuntary, it's an involuntary backlash against the being too much quality between the sexes. In fact, people just like a power dynamic, and you can't, and you're not gonna be able to get rid of that,

and the more you repress it, the more appealing it becomes. I mean, this is one of the laws of porn and an dynamic, isn't it? You know, every taboo has an equal opposite category of porn. And, and the moment you make power dynamics, the moment you put equality on a pedestal, what do you think is going to happen if they can be sexualized power and balance it?

It's going to feel taboo and sovidden, yeah. The more egalitarian society becomes, the more pink people sex lives are going to be and i think we just need to embrace the fact that you know power power dynamic people just like power dynamic so they ought to lean into the more and we should just make them real and we should do it without safe words but lovingly properly what's your solution and no no i will not in that way i mean i think we should

abolish big romance i also think we need more single sex spaces for both sexes. I'd actually, in harder into that for men, for women. Why? I think one of the most disastrous things that's happened to men in the last three or four decades is that the number of phenomena spaces where men can be men together without the company of women has got, has really shrunk. Now, I mean, I can't speak to that from the first person, since obviously because I'm a front-hole person. But it's very clear to me thinking about my male friends and just from observation and from listening to men speak. It's just obvious, there aren't very many,

unless you're on a football team or unless you play a sport or there are some limited other contexts which will most probably still be mostly male or male. There aren't very many places where men can talk amongst themselves without women. And that seems like it could be a problem to me. Because I mean I have no idea what men talk about amongst themselves, but it seems right to me that that should be a thing. And it's possible, you know, it seems, it also seems likely to me that there are, there are kinds of social encounter and kinds of communication which are going to happen in that context, which I have no idea about, but which are probably quite important to men. And if you don't

do, you know, first things aren't there, then, you know, men are going to be sad. You know, this all, this, none of this seems to me like it's rocket science. And my observation, just looking at the numbers, is that men are sad at the moment. The suicide rate is never being great and it's getting worse. Men are not doing great at the moment. And if we want good husbands, that's an issue for women as well. It's an issue for everybody. It's a human issue.

You know, if things are, you know, and I'm sure, I'm sure somebody will come along and do that. Oh, you know, she's all like, oh, what about the men, you know, within self as well. Yeah, of course, of course, that's true. But you know, these, so pain isn't a pie. You know, one person does one one group doesn't get less of it. One, one isn't, you know, it. One group isn't deprived of suffering and status just because of the suffering as well. It's not that there isn't a really limited resource in this world. Yeah, there's zero sumeness of suffering. That's exactly what you see when you try and have this discussion online. This is, it's, this is your job, right, to

memify everything. But you would be able to create a flow chart of the way that discourse moves forward when somebody tries to put forward either women suffering or menace suffering. And with the menace suffering one, it's typically something to do with in the mixer would be, I thought you just needed to man up, bro, sort of, um, small dick energy, or you need to, you need to get your act together. Uh, and then this is, uh, just a rehabilitated, so asking for mail-on-new spaces, this is a rehabilitated version of excluding women from powerful conversations that men just want to have again. It's, like, really tropey, and every time that you see somebody do this online, you can predict what's going

to be the pushback and you go, well, this is why we're not actually making any genuine progress towards anything because it's just the same horse shit arguments just spat out every single time. Well, but if a hand, if the price of reducing the suicide rate across working class men is that a small number of female baristas and CEOs

get excluded from the old boys network. I'm okay with that. I think there's a class dimension to this, which often gets left out. And the women who are pushing for entrance entry to all of the old boys networks, are doing very cogenty from their own economic interests. But you know, the subset of women who are barristers

and CEOs and golf bosses is relatively small. And the subset of men who are, you know, just people with jobs and women who are just people with jobs is considerably larger. And if you break down single sex spaces in the interests of the elite and in the process destroy important social spaces for everybody else. Then I'm not sure that's a good trade-off. I think that's one we could use to look at again.

You talk about this to do with the number of women that want to be state-owned moms versus those that want to work and those that are in the middle that want to have a blend between the two as well. Yeah, I mean that's a,, that, that study's actually, it's 20 years old, and I hope somebody will come up with something more recent. But this is Katherine Hakeem, so sociologists did some research into what we've actually

want given the choice when it comes to work. And according to her findings, there are maybe 20% who, who really just want, who really want to be months, they want to be in the home. And maybe 20% who really just want to be months, they want to be in the home. And maybe 20% who really want to be girl bosses and everyone else would like a nice mixture please. I mean, anecdotal, and I think of the very normal middle class months, who kind of my social circle, you know, it's called Pickup with me or whatever, that's true.

You know, there are some who work full time, but most of them would quite like to have a relationship with their children and see them for more than an hour and so we. you know, there are some who work full time, but most of them would quite like to have a relationship with their children, even for more than an hour or so. You know, most people don't have careers, they have jobs, you know, both sexes. You know, there's a small minority who have careers, you know, that underwilling to trade off the amount of time that's been with their kids in pursuit of their career. But most people have jobs, you know, there'swilling to trade off the amount of time that's been with their kids and suited their career. But most people, most people have jobs, you know, the sunbits, some of the farmers, some of the sunbits, a bit suck, and they quite like to spend time

with their kids as well. You know, it's, again, it's not rocket science, it's quite a common sense. I'm not saying anything would you want to be controversial at all? What was the insight that you explained to do with how the UK government pushing their primary women were here for you policy to be more assisted childcare was playing into that.

It was to basically encouraging women that their primary role should be in careers. Yeah, I think it was, I seem to remember the last election, you know, when it came to, when it came to offering something to women, every single one of them, all three of the major political parties, competed for how much more child care they could offer. Nobody offered, for example, to extend the turn to leave, or there was some talk about making the turn to leave more flexible, which support, even with our own think uptake is a bit patchy on that. But perhaps that's a medium-term cultural change, I don't know. But yeah, I mean, the reflex, you know, which is perhaps

understandable from the kind of women who become MPs, you know, if you think about the sort of personality type who's going to end up in elected to parliament anyway, the assumption is generally that what women need is more child care. And it's considerably rare amongst MPs to find somebody who's willing to stand up and say, well, what if mothers actually want more time at home with that? What if some mothers want more time at home with their children when they're young? Pretty much the only person, the only MP I've seen who's willing to stand up and say that or even come close to saying it is Miriam Kates, I forget she's concerned and then he's one of the needs towards I think. But she's really an outlier on that and pretty much everybody else is just all, you know, that's the long-distance. But it sounds primitive, right? That's why.

Why? Well, because that's how it would be interpreted by the press. What are you trying to do? Are you trying to re-enable women's ability or the predisposition to be seen as purely mothers, that their role is just to give birth to women and then make sure that the dinners on the table at 6 p.m. That's the unsophisticated way to look at it. Well, I mean, one pushback, which I doubt, you know, I'm not going to put in the words of lyric in the bad, of lyric and cake, because I don't know what she'd say to this.

But again, you say that like it's a bad thing, you know, what's so bad about doing? I've been a stay at home, it's great life, as long as you have some enough funds and you get on with your spouse, being a stay home one is really nice. It's your own boss, really what's not to life. I struggle to understand why anybody would want to, would think that's terrible. I'm with you. But that's not how it gets framed. I mean, here know, again, I'm here,

I am, here I am working. I sort of started by accident now, here I am. So it's complicated, you know, I sort of finished doing something that I loved enough, and now here I am. But, you know, but it's one thing, it's one thing making sacrifices for a career that you love, and you know, with the help of a supportive partner. And it's another thing altogether, you know, being offered more childcare by the government so you can spend eight hours, rather than six hours a day, putting packets through a scam in a supermarket instead of seeing your children. You know, I just, I just, I just struggle to see how, you know, I'm not convinced that every woman in that situation would see that as doing in the favor.

I guess that's what I'm saying, you know, maybe there are other possibilities too. Very Harrington, ladies and gentlemen, people want to check out your sub stack and follow you on Twitter, which they absolutely need to do. Where should they go? Let me up at reactionaryfeminist.com or you know, search that on substac.com and move circles on Twitter. This has been fun, thank you for having me.

It's been really, really great. I'm looking forward to the book coming out if you can hurry up and write it, please. That would be great. I need to get some sleep and get on with it tomorrow. War on relationships, chapter. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you very much, Mary. Right. Thank you. you