Modern Wisdom - #596 - Mary Harrington - Feminism Is No Longer Helping Women

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd and an author. Women have been subject to a lot of changes over the past 200 years. Liberated first from the land, then from the house, then from the womb, and finally even from their own nature. But has it actually helped? Has modern feminism been for the best or has it made women's lives more confusing than ever? Expect to learn why feminism might not have delivered on the promises it made to the world, why there is a war on relationships between the sexes, Mary's guess on why there are so few families getting together, how women's liberation has only worked for a small number of women at the expense of many others, why abortion and birth control actually led to more single parent households and much more... Sponsors: Get $100 off plus an extra 15% discount on Qualia Mind at https://neurohacker.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy Feminism Against Progress - https://amzn.to/3YUNkfY  Subscribe to Mary's Substack - https://reactionaryfeminist.substack.com/  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 this show. My guest today is Mary Harrington. She's a contributing editor at Unheard and an author. Women have been subject to a lot of changes over the past 200 years, liberated first from the land, then from the house, then from the womb, and finally even from their own nature. But has it actually helped? Has modern feminism been for the best, or has it made women's lives more confusing than ever? Expect to learn why feminism might not have delivered on the promises it made to the world. Why there is a war on relationships between the sexes? Marys guests on why there are so few families getting together, how women's liberation has only worked for a small number of women at the expense of many others. Why abortion and birth control actually led to more single-parent households and much more?

Mary is an incredibly smart human. I very much appreciate all of the work and background that she's done and she is a card carrying used to have the short hair and do postmodernism before postmodernism was cool credentials to look at this through the lens of someone who has been through the ringer and come out the other side. Very, very, very cool insight today. I really hope that you enjoy it. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mary Harrington. Tell me, how do you arrive at giving a critique of feminism? Why do you have any credentials to do this?

Well, I mean, I'm a woman, which is a start. I was fairly, rapidly, fully paid up. Second wave feminist in my teens, and then third wave slash woke, well early adopter of the whole kind of woke postmodern world view in my 20s, you know, did my level best to live it, I'd say until I was about 28, and then for a whole load of very complicated reasons kind of lost my faith in that way of living, and in the process of kind of reassembling a worldview which made sense, which I reckon took about seven years, having

kind of hit that quarter life crisis. I came out the other end thinking, well, I don't believe in progress anymore. And then I thought, well, I've always sort of myself as a feminist, but if feminism is held up as one of the kind of central clanks in the sort of evidence stack that says where we're on a sort of never-ending, upward path of progress, right? And people say, the first thing people say when you say, well, prove it, like, what,

when you say I don't believe in progress, and they'll be like, well, how can you say that? You're a woman, like, you know, things are much better for women now than they were before. You know, that's just kind of treated itself evident. And I thought, okay, well, this, is it still possible to be a feminist if you don't believe in progress? And I thought, well, I still care about women's interests,

and I still think those are often sidelineed. But that sort of started me down a whole rabbit hole of the relationship between feminism and progress. And that, in the course of which I got married, I had a baby, and having a baby made me think a great deal more about what feminism thinks considers progress to mean, most of which seems kind of structurally predicated on not being a mother, or you know, being a mother, put it this way, like being a mum and being emancipated in the terms that are normally set out by what I think of as magazine feminism, the kind of Jezebel

and of cosmopolitan variant. They just don't stack, they don't square very comfortably. And so I spent personally quite a bit of, trying to make sense of that problem, pushing a buggy around the empty daytime streets of a small town in England. Um, you know, it's not like your mind stops working just because you've had a baby. Um, so there are, and sort of pushing the buggy around thinking about, thinking about second wave feminism, thinking about being a stay at home mum and thinking about how different it was actually to the impression that I'd always absorbed or internalized of it from feminists, from the sort of liberal feminist orthodoxy which says there's nothing more infidig basically and this is you being oppressed and this is terrible and I'm like well actually I'm in practice for me. It's quite a nice life

It's quite a nice life, but the major downsides of being a start-up mum are loneliness. Well, it's a nice life provided. The main downside is loneliness. It's quite a nice life provided. You have enough funds and provided you get on with your husband. If either of those things is not there, you know, you've got problems. And I mean, that led me down a whole rabbit hole of looking at how we got to thinking of how we got to thinking of women's of the good for women as being something which was just anything but that. Yeah, there's a quote from Helen Roy that I keep on coming up against, which is today women, especially a sincerely frightened by the idea of becoming just a wife and a mother. American women willingly run from the home, from the specter of becoming a prisoner or a parasite, or even was a domestic prostitute

into the arms of a corporate employer, laughably we call this process freedom. Right. And it remains an open question for me absolutely as to you know just how I mean Wendell Berry put it really nicely wrote a superb essay feminism the body and the machine where he talks about his wife who doesn't have a she doesn't have a paid employer she's his wife and he's got to be with like well she's her own boss and it's he's like I struggle to see how sending her off to work for an employer who gets to tell what to do all day is makes her in any way meaningfully more free than she currently is.

And he makes the point more generally about the transition from agrarian life where people are kind of economically productive within a home to, and particularly the role of women in a household like that, where you might be looking after a small holding and raising kids and making processing raw materials into goods for the family and doing all sorts of other subsistence work, all of which is economically productive. And comparing that to, you know, in what meaningful sense is a woman like that, liberated by being sent to punch the same four holes on an assembly line all day. You know, it's it's it's it's hard to it's hard to square. But I mean this is this was all this is all what led me to to write to writing the book which I've which I've just finished writing feminism against progress.

I spent the first third of it looking at setting out the rabbit hole that I went down and setting out, you know, this is sort of deep, it ended up with me doing a sort of deep reread of the whole history of feminism since the Industrial Revolution, which is a lot less dry than it sounds, because I mean, it's the history of how men and women live together in just normal life. And, you know, obviously, you can't do that in incredibly granular detail, because it varies depending on where you are and who you're talking to. But the sort of broad outlines of it are consistent enough that you can make some sort of general claims. And really it's the story of men and women of work leaving the home. That's the story of

industrial revolution is, you know, from the point of view of family life, it's the story of work leaving the home. Sure, some people have know, from the point of view of family life, it's the story of work leaving the home. Sure, some people have always worked outside the home. I mean, soldiers, obviously, are not, being a soldier is not a work from home occupation. But, you know, in a, you know, in a, in a, in a, in a economy, a sort of pre-modern economy that's mostly artisan or agrarian work, the, the basic unit of production isn't an individual, you know, with a sort of economic relationship to an employer on the state. The basic unit of production is a household. And actually the legal structures which women in the industrial era were

and started to find incredibly oppressive were oppressive because they were the economic, they were the legal structures which were designed to accommodate a productive household. And so there was one single legal head which was in the pre-modern world, the man who had the official title of the property and had the sort of formal power. But whether or not women were radically disempowered in that context, in every case, I think is much more up for debate. And it's generally treated as axiomatic the women were just sort of effectively kind of chattel slaves and property up and to that up to that point. And I think the literature doesn't really support that.

If you look at characters like the wife of Bath in Chaucer, he's writing in the middle ages. And he has these incredibly larger than life female characters. And I mean, yeah, you can point to things like the Skulls' bridal and so on. But there's this sort of device that was placed on the head of a woman who was deemed to be talking too much. But there's a fair amount of evidence from the literature

and also from anthropological studies of small village life, that makes a fairly compelling case that in a lot of these settings, not all of them, but in a lot of them. Women generally don't wield formal power. They're not the decision makers and the property owners, but they wield considerable informal power in ways which is much more difficult to put your finger on, because it doesn't come with title deeds and so on But they but but women in a village in a sort of you know pre pre-modern style village will will wield power by controlling access to reputation or controlling controlling their husbands access to information or you know the power of gossip and the power of public shame

And there are also it's a very subtle very subtle community-based forms of power, which I think are not, are often not accounted for in... This is why I've been so interested in female intersexual competition recently, because it's way more interesting than male intersexual competition. Male compete in these kind of very brazen, up-front, loud, garish ways, whereas the sword that women wield is significantly more subtle and nuanced.

So to go back to your 20s story to now, it kind of feels a little bit to me, almost like a PTSD rehabilitation that you needed to work out philosophically, morally, ethically, existentially what had happened to you during that period. And then you have this whatever, seven-year reflection, which is capped off with having husband, child, dog. And then that is a vector. It's like a synthesis of all of this stuff coming to the front. Maybe you had some questionings beforehand,

and you go, what does it mean? What does it mean? And then finally, you've got this experience. What does it mean, given the fact that rights for women have changed over the last 100 years during the industrial revolution or the last 200 years through the industrial revolution, does that not suggest that there has been

some sort of progress? Well, things change, obviously. I don't think it necessarily follows, I don't think it follows from that that everything has got better in some sort of absolute sense. You know, I think you can make, you can make a very, you know, it's obviously the case that some things, on some metrics life is a lot better than it used to be. I just don't think it's possible to prove in any convincing way that the absolute sum of human felicity or virtue or happiness or well-being or any metric you care to name is better now than it was a couple of thousand years ago. You know, it's not the same token, I don't think it's possible to prove that it's worse. You know, I'm not a

declineist or one of those, the world is going to hell in the hand basket, people. I just don't think it's like the moment, the moment you say, well, well, we're making progress, you're like, sure, but, you know, on what metric and the moment you've decided, you've, you've, the moment you pointed a metric, you've already assumed the truth of what you set out to prove. Do you see what I mean? You've begged a question a little bit. Yeah, you've begged the question exactly. Okay. In what ways, in what ways is would you consider, or what are the main ways in which you consider progress to have been downwardly projected for women over the last period?

Well, some things have got a lot better. I wouldn't frame it quite like that. I wouldn't say something has got better and something has got at worst. But my argument is that what we think of as the story of progress, if we can just bracket progress for a minute, if what we think of as the story of progress is actually the story, it's a story of technology above all. And it's about, it's a story of men and women responding. And women, feminism is women's particular response in aggregate

to the way, the ways the industrial revolution changed family life and women's lives in particular. First, by taking work out of the home, in second, so for bourgeois women, well, for women at the top end of the food chain, and also for women at the bottom of the food chain in a different way, forcing women's work out of their home as well. So, working class women went into factories and then had just had to find a way of looking, figure out what to do with their children. And women,

and women of the sort of clerical class and the upper class, suddenly had much more comfortable lives and wondered what to do with themselves and so agitated for access to public life, you know, in sort of knowledge work. So, we started to demand access to clerical jobs and medical training and access to universities, et cetera, and so on. So, and all of this is really a downstream of the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution, which suddenly, you know, it radically reordered how society worked and changed what were meant, changed where it happened,

and changed how many women lived together. And what I think is really interesting is that over the course of really, from in England, from the 18th century and in America from the 19th century, because that was where how the sort of tidal wave of industrialization moved. You see this intense preoccupation with the role of the sexes, particularly with the role of women. There's a huge amount of discourse that happens about, you know, what how men and women should relate to one another and what the role of women now is. And that rightly

so, because everything was, everything was suddenly different and all of the settled norms that had obtained up and up to that point just weren't there anymore. Yeah, so women were displaced from the home by things like the washing machine in a strange way, because they were liberated from having to do the... I mean, it was hours per day, right? That women would have to wash and dry clothes typically in the past or other.

Right, I mean, white goods, white goods is a 20th century phenomenon. That sort of had a different set of effects. But I mean, if you think about the fact that, you know, your bourgeois housewife in the 19th century is suddenly not required to be a farmer's wife anymore. And in a sense, in a sense, her role has got easier because she doesn't have to spend 16 hours a day

on grinding manual labor while still watching kids. But on the other hand, her role is also shrunk because she's no longer economically productive. In a sense, she's now dependent on her husband. And that at scale, like I said, when I was a step home mum, I had a pretty nice life because we could afford to live on one income, and I had a good relationship with my husband. But for women where that wasn't the case in the 19th century,

it's all very well if you've got a good relationship with your spouse and you've got funds. But what happens if your husband drinks all the money? What happens if he beats you? And you're still living under a legal regime, which is, which is designed for productive households, where women wield a measure of informal power. And they're also economically productive members of the household. And suddenly, you've got these totally economically dependent female role in the 19th century. But women in this situation are not legally allowed to own property. They give up all of their property to their husband when they get married because that was how it worked in the pre-modern

era. You became an economically productive household and women had enough clout in an informal way to, I think, on the whole more or less make that work, but in the industrial era, suddenly they were radically disempowered, relative to the way things had worked before. And for women who found themselves in an unhappy marriage, that was awful. And they were like, if I leave him, I have to leave my children behind. And I have no claim to my children, I can't divorce him. It's almost impossible to divorce him. And I can't have any property.

He can leave me destitute. It's almost impossible to divorce him and I can't, I won't have any property, you can leave me destitute. It's a terrible situation. Obviously, women start, the world's all of this agitation for legal personhood independently of their husbands. There's the married women's property act, which I think is late 19th century in England and there's an equivalent one in similar time in America. Then there's all of these campaigns, the sort of first wave feminists, for legal and cultural remedies to try and offset the disadvantages that women had been left with as a result of this massive kind of social and economic change. So really, I mean, this is just kind of explain what I mean when I say feminism isn't, it's not moral progress in people saying, okay, now we see we were doing it badly before because we were wicked people.

It's down stream of much, much larger material changes. And the way societies have to adapt in aggregate puts particularly the way the relations between the sexes had to adapt in the context of that. And the way and women in particular pushed for changes to the law and to social norms in response to what they understood there and how they saw their interests have changed. And of course that's where it gets really complicated as well because not all women are created the same. You know, posh women and working class women don't necessarily have the same interests. And at that point feminism starts to multiply and become extremely fractious. And that was one of the biggest lessons I think I learned from you the last time that we spoke,

which was that some of the emancipation of women's men from previous expectations, for instance, chivalry amongst men, the fact that men were expected to maybe hold the door open for women or to be protectors, preservers, providers for women. If you get rid of that and you are a woman in a relationship with a man who's maybe had strong male role models in the household and has been through higher education and has done all of these things and has a good moral compass, maybe that does open up a more fluid and colourful, enjoyable way of living. But if you are a woman who is perhaps in the underclass, who is with a partner who didn't have such tight constraints on what he considered to be good behavior and didn't have the same sort of good male role models, what is the justification for your husband not hitting you anymore? Like how much baby bathwater and bath has been thrown out of the window here. And that, I mean, that, that just blows my mind. And again, I'm talking about feminism or women as one big headgemon, right? One big block that you are trying to fit. Okay,

we'll do this thing. It is good for all women. It's like, well, no, it's going to be good for someone on average and bad for other women on average. And because the ones that wield the most power culturally, intellectually tend to be the ones toward the top of that echelon, they are the ones that this sort of system seems to be optimized for. And it forgets the women in the working class. Absolutely. And I can point to examples of that from all going back some time, put it that way. I forget, I forget the exact legal contest, but there was a legislative battle in the early 20th century with feminists on both sides over the

work place regulations in factories. There were feminists on one side who were working class women on factory assembly lines and saying, no, obviously, we need to differentiate workplace regulations by sex because we're looking, we're looking at what it's like working on a factory floor. And obviously, if you're built like you, Chris, you can work a 12-hour day doing something physically quite demanding and it will have one set of, you know, you'll be tired at the end of the day, for you. And so, you know, things like the length of the shift and how long your breaks should be, and you know, how the workplace safety ought to have been configured.

And these women are saying these feminists were saying, you know, obviously we need to have sex. We need to differentiate by sex in the workplace. And then there were other feminists who wanted to be treated as a woman, who wanted to be treated as a woman, who wanted to be treated as a woman, who wanted to be need to have sex, we need to differentiate by sex in the workplace. And then the word, there were other feminists who wanted, who wanted to be treated equally in a clerical workplace.

So for example, as a lawyer, they wanted to go and have and lead professional lives as lawyers or accountants or something. And they were saying, no, no, no, absolutely, we can't have this. You know, there's absolutely no way we can have this because otherwise that opens the door for all sorts of discrimination against us in the workplace. This is a disaster, we can't have this. There's absolutely no way we can have this, because otherwise that opens the door for all sorts of discrimination against us in the workplace. This is a disaster, we can't have this.

I mean, you can see, you can see the kind of class tension right there. And what ended up happening was that the middle class feminists won, and they won with the backing of some male industrialists. And you just think there's a parable there's a parable there that has been- there has been repeated a number of times since and I think is being played out now in the gender ideology debate. I think that's a rerun of essentially the same- the same drama.

It's the same thing with, uh, we'll get onto it later, but male, uh, on the single sex spaces as well, right? The- the concern- the but male only single sex spaces as well, right? The concern around male single sex spaces is because law, graduate number 3,001 lady that's been through her higher education is concerned that there is going to be some gilded door behind which she can't get into. But what it's stopping is a number of men toward the bottom end of the distribution from having a working man's club where they can go and you know have 30 minutes or an hour on an evening to have a quick pint with the lads. Okay, so rolling the clock forward from

1800 into 1900, what is the story of the unpaid debts that start to accrue for feminism throughout that time? Well, I mean, where I think the clock really starts ticking is where you take the sort of paradigm of women's emancipation from all of the things, all of the ways that you know, that life has been gendered and constrained. And you take that campaign that the feminism of freedom, if you like. I mean, I've been, I think what you need to say, like this, this, this process of women demand, you know, calling for adjustments to the way we live together, you know, throughout the industrial era. It was justified. I hope I've sort of made the case for that. There was a lot of it that was completely legitimate and made sense. But what I found interesting was that there

are sort of two poles of it, which I just saw coming through again and again. Very, very crudely, you could call it the feminism of care or interdependence or the feminism of freedom. You know, and these are, I mean, you know, it's a, it's an enormously rich debate. And there was plenty of internal conflict between different groups of women who thought different things mattered most. But broadly speaking, there are, you know, there's, there are the voices who say, no, actually, you know, we need to, we need to accept that, you know, women and mothers and we, you know, we, we live in relationship.

And this, this stuff matters and the work this stuff matters and the work of caring for dependence is important and that's part of being a woman, it's part of being a mother. And then there were other women who said, no, actually what women's interests look like being able to enter the market and enter public life on the same terms as men. And once you start breaking those down in a bit more detail, there's a lot of tension between them. Because, you know, obviously, if you have a public, if you live, you engage in public life to take an extreme example, if you work as an MP, you know, if you're breastfeeding, you know, that obviously, and you have an all-night debate, you know, you've got a problem. You know, at a point it becomes zero, so. And then you get these sort of ridiculous stories about, you know, high-powered executives having, have pumping breast milk and then flaring it flown home so that they're not you can, yeah.

But obviously at some point, at some point being a mother and, you know, very high-powered public life is zero sum contest. But roughly speaking, you've got these two poles, the feminism of care and the feminism of freedom. And where I think the robber really starts to hit the road in terms of tensions is where I've sit where I think the feminism of freedom definitively won. You know, that was a battle that ran from the mid-18th century in Britain up to the mid 1960s and then in the 60s in both Britain and America, what changed it was another technology transition

to new developments, namely the contraceptive revolution and the digital revolution. And after that, just nothing is the same. It's a new era. We no longer live in the industrial era. You know, elsewhere, I've not in the book, but elsewhere, I've argued that now we live in the transhuman era, which is to say, well, the cyborg era, I think I've called it in the book but elsewhere I've argued that now we live in the transhuman era, which is to say they're all the cyborg era. I think I've called it in the book. You know, which is the same thing really. You know, to a degree, once women embraced the contraceptive pill as a sort of basic precondition for personhood on the same terms as men, you know, that effectively makes you a cyborg in the sense that your personhood is inseparable from a technology. You say as well, the reason that that's transhumanism is that instead of medical care being

predicated on trying to fix a problem, it's predicated on trying to fix something which is natural. Right, exactly. It's premised on upgrading normal, rather than just restoring you to normal. Okay, so the legislation of abortion, introduction of the pill, fundamental hinge moment, and I think the degree to which that just changed everything is still underpriced. My great friend, Louise Perry, has done a fairly solid analysis on just how many ways. From a really quite sort of left feminist perspective of some of the undercounted costs of the sexual revolution that followed, particularly for women. Did you see the clip that went, it's currently still going semi-viral between her and Peterson and it's about men that are forcing

themselves on women and a bunch of very far-left YouTubers have responded to this. Have you seen this? You don't spend as much time on the internet as me. No, I actually haven't viewed it, although there's been some discussion of it in my circle. The base British women's group chat has been going off, hasn't there's been there's been some discussion of it, but circle. The bass British women's group chat has been there's been there's been some discussion of it, but I actually haven't seen the clip. It's half-term and so I've been less extremely online. Got you. Okay, well, it's Sam Seder is the main person that's done this and then it got like signal boosted by Ethan Klein from H3, H3 and blah, blah, blah. It's all they're all internet people that you don't need to worry yourself with you can keep writing nice things.

yourself with you can keep writing nice things. But given Louise's background and your background as well as like the most card carrying I've served my time in the trenches doing the reading, living in the places, having the haircut, you know, like doing the full thing, full thing. cut, you know, like doing the full thing, full thing. It really does, it almost feels like horseshoe theory to me a little bit, that the people who now are supposed to be the most four women, right? The ones that are ostensibly helping women on the internet, especially male left-leaning contributors, are the ones that when a woman from the left who has been through the ringer, so to speak, with regards to this ideology and come out the other side and is now perhaps a mother or, you know, Nina Power is one of your friends like who still has this approach but isn't coming at it from quite so much of a family

side, they still get dragged. And Ethan Klein, one of the reasons that I think he's, he made a video responding to that lady who had her digital, deep fake porn video leaked on the internet and then cried on stream. She's one of the biggest female streamers in the world. Cried about it and then Ethan, uh, ally to women, laughed for like 30 seconds, or a full minute with his entire crew and then played some theme song, and he got dude, like you don't get to play both sides, you don't get to be the edgy comedian and also the ally to women, and then when Louise and Jordan are trying to play around with ideas that are a little bit difficult as soon as you're talking about four sex

and stuff, but Jordan was saying maybe we need to make it even more, the repercussions of a man doing this even worse. And for you to pop up as if you're like white-nighting for all of the oppressed women out there, it's like, bro, I remember only two weeks ago, you were laughing at a girl who cried because her moods, deep fake moods are on the internet. Like, you don't get to do that. I'll just say one thing about this, Chris. A little while ago, I wrote something about a problem that's been puzzling me for a while, which is why it is that so many self-styled male feminists

end up having a sex pest scandal. I wrote the article, I wrote the article, I'm heard, made me take out all of the links to rumors of this of this nature because there was so many of them and some of them were really quite famous names but really it's a very very very very very consistent pattern. Now obviously I'm not making any imputations at all about any of the names that you've mentioned here because I've no idea who these people are. But it's a very consistent pattern, and it's just interesting.

That's all I'll say. There's a curious paradox there, and I think it's probably one that needs further exploration. I, in as much as I have a hypothesis about it, it's that it's just, you know, they're, if they're mistaken, it's because they've been led astray by the idea that men and women's sexuality is fundamentally the same, which is just obviously not true. And, you know, I can see how somebody would end up accidentally, could end up being accidentally as expressed if they just assumed that women have the same

approach to sex as men. And it's all, you know, the more the more cynical interpretation of it would be that there is a subset of men for whom it works as a kind of a little bit like a duck. It's like you focus syndrome. Yeah, it's a way it's a way of making yourself seem more benign and harmless when perhaps there are other things going on as well. I don't know. Anyway, but that's all I'll really say about the white knight as a class. So abortion, contraceptive pill. Yeah, we'll switch from white knight to abortion. Exactly. Moving on from insulting an entire demographic.

Let's go on to something straight forward. Killing babies. It's not funny. Killing babies really isn't funny. It's not funny. We're trying not to laugh about it. Legislation, abortion gets introduced. Pill gets introduced, pill gets introduced, emancipates women from

having babies upon having sex, then the sexual revolution comes along as cultural technology to try and emancipate women from having feelings when they have sex and fully bifurcate everything so that they can be the disembodied sex hole that all women's freedom has always wanted them to be. I'm not sure that's quite how I'd frame it, but in practice, that's sort of what ended up happening, I suppose. I think that's more of the sort of crisp in on what's been going on, but you know, something like that has kind of in practice ended up happening. I mean, the feminists of the second wave all sincerely thought that the

sexual revolution was going to be wonderful in emancipatory. There's loads in Jameen Greer and plenty of other writers of that generation who just sort of took a very optimistic and libertarian approach to the sexual revolution and believed that it was now that we could emancipate ourselves from the consequences of sex, and treated as a sort of leisure activity rather than as a very consequential thing that needed careful management to social level, lest it produce sort of long-term social challenges at scale. produce sort of long term social challenges at scale. That that that that would mean, you know, sex could just be emancipated in in its entirety. And we we'd all end up in this sort of marvelous kind of polymorphous zone of erogenous joy.

And everybody, you know, and the thousand flowers of bloom and it would be great. And in practice, it hasn't really worked out like that. Because it turns out that it's harder to polish human nature than what? It's the polymorphous, erogenous zone of orgy joy or whatever it was that you came up with, brilliant. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, it's kind of what we have, but I think, but the point that I wanted to make in feminism against progress is that we have that the mistake that those guys made was imagining that we could have that, but we could have that but without the market. They all thought that we could have the Polymorphous, the Roger Ness zone of Orgy Joy or whatever it was that I just said.

And that somehow this, you know, rubber commerce wouldn't get its fingers in. But in fact, what do you mean commerce? What do you mean market? What I mean by that is that it's become increasingly clear to me that I've looked into the history of well, into the history of well-reli the history of technology, without sort of going on to lengthier detail. But in as much as the modern world has become friar, normally it's because something that used to be just a thing that we were stuck with has been replaced by biotechnology. So, you know, most people used to be stuck with walking everywhere and so,

like getting anywhere took a certain amount of time. You know, you introduce a bunch of technologies into the picture, like that, you know, people are suddenly free to get from A to B more quickly. I'm taking a very, very simple example. But, but that it doesn't come cost free and one of and one of the costs is quite literally the market moves into... I think what I'm trying to say, freedom and trade are impossible to separate. The more freedom you have, the more trade you have. Because the moment something is liberated from the social norms that govern it for and

becomes something that you can buy or sell, people will buy and sell it. What's an example of how that worked with regards to sex or relationships? Well, I mean, if the first Playboy Club opened the year the Pills was legalised. I think it actually, if we're going to be really pedantic, I think the first Playboy Club actually opened about six months before the Pills was legalised. But I mean, it was pretty much there already at that point. And by the 1970s, radical feminists were running demonstrations against the level of violence and degradation that was now increasingly endemic in the porn industry. And the the porn industry existing, I mean, there has always been pornography, you know, to an extent,

but the porn industry being able to present itself in libertarian terms is predicated on the idea that sex is consequence free and therefore is a private matter. And the idea of sex being a private matter is predicated on the technology existing that makes it possible for it to be a private matter, which is to say a contraception. Because if there's no contraception, sex isn't a private matter, which is to say a contraception. Because if there's no contraception sex isn't a private matter, you know, the rest of your village really does have skin in the game about who you sleep with, right? And particularly if you're female,

and you could end up with an unwanted baby, and which people have got to figure out what to do with. So, you know, if sex is a consequential thing, like, you know, it's not a private matter, it just isn't. Do you think, rolling the clock forward from that, do you think rolling the clock forward from that? Do you think that there was a particular hinge or a unique hinge point with the introduction of only fans with the fact that you had a particularly frictionless D to C normal person to audience member

platform for things? I don't know. I think I mean, I think only fans is a long way down the slippery slope to be honest. I mean, the the hinge moment is probably is probably online dating as such. Because I mean, once you've once you've got used to the idea of, you know, packaging yourself as a kind of product in an online marketplace, which is essentially what you're doing when you create a dating profile. You know, it's not, you know, I've run, I've done like digital commerce for clients back in the days when I worked in marketing, you know, and doing that and creating a dating profile are, they're not that different really, you know, the end of the day, you're marketing

something, you know, you're creating an appealing package, which is designed to call somebody to click. And you know, what happens at the checkout, after the checkout process, is supposed to be different. But actually, you know, once you've got the idea that you're pressing your browsing a set of products and then you're clicking on one that you like the look off, and then in a sense, you're sort of checking out the product. It's just not a very big step from that to online dating as parosocial relationship. And then it's not a very big step from that to online dating as parasocial relationship. And then it's not a great big step from that as a subscription product.

I think the beginning of the slippery slope is online dating as such. That's an interesting point that it's probably a difference of degree, a difference of kind. I mean, yes, there is a point at which you're saying, no, actually, I'm going to press, I'm going to press by rather than I'm just going to press like, Hey, Hey, baby, Hey, baby, how's it going? You know, message this person. Yes, that's that that's a qualitative difference. But it's not, it's not a very big one, you know, but not I think can come, you know, once the rest of the paradigm is in place, it's not a very big one.

Before we start talking about cyborg theocracy, is there anything else that we need to understand about the foundation of how we got here? I mean, I think the critical points are that feminism isn't about moral progress as such, it's a response to material conditions. The industrial era was a set of massive transformations in material conditions, and first and second wave feminism really was a response to those material conditions, but everything changed with the digital and contraceptive revolutions. And second wave feminism was I suppose a response to that, but everything which has come since I think is qualitatively different, because it no longer really has very much space at all for the feminism of care. It's almost all of it is about the feminism of freedom, which is to say.

And it's all fundamentally in, it has this premise of freedom underwritten by technology, baked into it, which is to say it's all underwritten by contraception and the final backstop of that has to be abortion. And really what you're saying when you legalize abortion is that a woman's freedom is that important when a woman's personhood. It's sufficiently important to women's political participation that they be free and unencumbered, that they can pursue that even to the extent of ending the life of an unborn child. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

And really, you know, however you stand in relation to that, you know, I think we could all accept that that's a very strong statement to make in favor of freedom, you know, where that comes into direct conflict with the needs of a dependent other. So I really like that that summary that feminism wasn't about progress. It was about the response to changes in technology and sort of society at large. What what has been the fuel that has continued to push feminist progress, but through the 60s, right through to now, you know, still going stronger than ever, is this just like a mimetic echo of a time when we were forging forth? Is it performative empathy that is being driven by online?

Well, I ask myself that. And I think this is probably not a single answer to that. I mean, one factor is surely that having all agreed sort of collectively, and this is a meme that's much bigger than feminism, having all agreed collectively that more freedom is generally better. We've just gone on pursuing that. Blue sky vision, yeah.

Yeah, that more liberation is just better by definition. And also that more technology will, and more economic growth, more technology, more innovation will deliver us more freedom, which is obviously good. You know, that's a kind of un-stated premise of, you know, most of the 20th century going into the 21st century, I would argue. It's there in the water. It's so well dissolved that you don't even really think about it. It's just there in the water. And just the other point that I will underline is that every time you use technology to afford yourself more freedom or more innovation or more growth, you don't, you can't, you don't as a consequence of that, end up abolishing

whatever it was that you were trying to emancipate yourself from before. So, so if, for example, you are using a technology to flatten the differences between men and women in reproductive terms, that doesn't end up abolishing, that doesn't end up abolishing human nature. You know, men and women remain different, even if we've used a technology to flatten some of those differences. And all we've ended up doing is reordering those differences to the market, so they become supply and demand problems, or they become strategic vulnerabilities. And I suppose that really sort of leads on to what I've called cyborg theocracy. What is cyborg theocracy, come on then. I mean, it's not actually by meme.

I really need to reiterate this. I owe the meme to a magnificent Albanian called Ardientola, who you probably know, for whom, yeah, who just kind of threw it out there and I'm like, this is such a great description. And when I wanna talk about cyborg theocracy, I mean, how do I, how do I put this? I mean the moral order which legitimizes the worldview, which I've been trying to describe, in which the, the good is just understood to be the pursuit of ever more freedom underwritten

by technology. That sounds very dry and very abstract put in those terms, but it has a lot more teeth than that. Well, you've got the war on relationships between men and women as one big component of this. So what would be an example of how that's manifested? Yeah, it's okay. So I've looked at in the book, I've looked at three aspects of human nature as I see it, which we're now waging war on. Having got to the end of the easy wins in terms of where industrial technology can get us to. The way I see the

cyborg turn is that we've sort of finished industrialising the world and we've pretty much run out of places to colonise and natural resources to exploit and rivers to pollute and so on and so forth. But that sort of relentless onward march and that relentless kind of exploratory energy hasn't stopped and what it's done instead is it's turned inwards. So it's turned inward towards colonizing the human body and turned inward towards colonizing

and exploiting the human soul. And so through variously biomedical advances and digital technology, and the former is really, really about commodifying the human body and the latter is about commodifying the human soul, so the domain of ideas and the domain of sociality. And because the fundamental premises that we can use more technology to deliver more freedom, and this is going to result in more money and also more, more felicity somehow. What's felicity?

I mean, joy, happiness, well-being, goodness, you know. The good stuff. Having delivered all of our easy wins, we're now setting about abolishing slightly trickier aspects of human nature. So we've done our best to abolish the difference between the sexes. So now we're waging war on the relationship between the sexes, how people, the dance of courtship, if you like, the domain of sexual desire. Show me how this manifested. How's that happened? So really that what that looks like is the sort of slow breakdown since the

contraceptive revolution of of any sort of grandedness to why we why we fuck, you know, why we experienced this, you know, there's a sort of slow slow disintegration of the idea that it's ordered to anything, let alone fertility, you know, let alone sort of, you know, relationship formation and having children. And, you know, increasingly this idea that it's a sort of, it's a property of whoever it is who, you know, what I do with my sexuality is my own business. And therefore, you know, what I choose to point it at is also my own business. And while you could say, well, of course it's something, what somebody chooses to be off to

in the privacy of their own home is their own business. But I've done my best to show how actually at scale the larger consequences of that in terms of how it how it affects the way people form relationships even when people really long to form relationships and even when people long for a long-term partner is actually it's it's enormous and if you if if if you propagate this idea that really people can just you know do people just do whatever they want and people really will do whatever they want and particularly when will do whatever they want.

And particularly when you reinforce this with an endemic sort of endemic online pornography and you know pervasive cultural message that says commodifying yourself even to the point of making yourself a subscription product on only fans is not only legitimate but it's also empowering. It leaves people in the situation where you've got this incredibly kind of adversarial, incredibly hostile and incredibly exploitative dynamic between the sexes, such that it's now almost impossible to extend enough trust and enough vulnerability, I think, to another person, to be willing to take the risk of loving someone. And I think that's catastrophic over the long term for people just being able to find happiness

or kids or anything really. Do you think that this is contributing to one of the reasons that fewer young people than ever are having sex? Very likely, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it just seems chaotic, disorganized and frightening. Honestly, if I were 22 now and all of the guys I could be potentially dating had been marinated in porn since they were 11, I'd probably just take up my crama instead. Because at the end of the day, you're probably not going to have a nice time. If the presumption is just going to be a casual hookup,

you only have a 10% chance of orgasm anyway. So I mean why wouldn't you just stay at home and do McCrame? Or I don't know, start an only fan. You know, in a way, I don't blame them, I don't blame them for just opting out, voting with their feet. It seems hellish. So the sacredness around not only sex, not only what it meant physically in terms of making babies, not only what it meant emotionally in terms of a connection, but then even before you get to marriage, the holder, the placeholder, the space within which sex was typically happening, which was relationships, that was also put

under war, and then downstream from that, the relationship between mothers and babies was also sent to war. Yeah, I mean, that's a very, that starts from a slightly different place. But I mean, let me see, how do I talk about the war on relationship between mothers and babies? I mean, that's a... That's... Well, I mean, put it this way. I mean, I used to have recurring nightmares about accident pregnancy.

I can still remember it in my 20s. I just wake up in a cold sweat. I don't think I'm alone in that. And it's not just the prospect of sort of being left literally holding the baby. If you've what I've tried to show is this increasingly strong sense I've had that a lot of the pro-choice activism, which is around now, much more so than was the case even, even 15 or 20 years ago. But a lot of the women who are, who are campaigning for the right to abort babies now are doing so because they're viscerally frightened by the prospect of pregnancy.

There's something so horrifying about the idea of letting that happen to your body for a lot of women. And I see it. I mean, I couldn't point you to a particular tweet. But I see them a lot. There's a growing constituency of young women for whom the idea of being pregnant is, the response is body horror.

It's like the sort of HR Geiger kind of X you know, xenomorph that, you know, bursts its way out of your chair. You know, the response is in that sort of order. It's not, kind of, it's not perceived as a wonderful thing at all. Why do you think it is? I've been trying to understand it. I've been trying to get my head around what's going on there. And I think it has to do with just how radically everyone is expected to be self-contained now. Just how radically everyone is, you know, the good, the right, you know, the fight, the good upstanding person is supposed to be completely atomized. You know, you're not, it's shameful to depend on somebody else. It's shameful to be vulnerable. It's shameful to be weak. It's shameful to...

You have to be in command of all of your own shittles the time. That just seems to be a sort of basic expectation. And if you're not willing to... If you need other people, you failed. That seems to be the sort of basic presumption. Fundamentally, you can't be pregnant and not need other people. That just doesn't work. Oh, so the getting pregnant is an amplifying of fragility around your own personal sovereignty. of fragility around your own personal sovereignty?

So yeah, I think that's probably a good word, putting it. And also, I mean, if you think about the premium, there are some much more sort of basic things as well. You think about the premium that's on looking a certain way. And you also think about the premium of the song controlling your physiology and controlling your appearance. I mean, you know, even just not being fat is a massive flex, you know, in the Instagram world. You know, and then you add, you know, a series of totally involuntary bodily changes into

that. And you can see how people would react with just total body horror. Well, I mean, look at the Kardashians. Look at what they do. They go the full surrogate route. Right. Right. Right. Right. And this is, and this is really where the war on the war on relationship between mothers and babies, the rubber hits the road. Because once you start, once you've accepted that basic premise, you've, you've accepted that the way forward for pursuing women's interests means allowing the market into your body and allowing commercialized medical interventions into your body is the route towards emancipation. And once you've started done that road, then you think, well, why should it stop?

Why should it stop with controlling my fertility, why should it stop with underwriting my autonomy by ending an accidental pregnancy? Why shouldn't I extend that to all of the other ways that biomedical technologies can alleviate the burden of motherhood? Because it is. It's a considerable burden. I mean, I reached a scope velocity from atomized life too late to have more than one child, but I nearly died in the process of viewing birth to her and I'm grateful to

a modern, you know, I spent a lot of time dunking on medicine, but dunking on, you know, modern modern technologies, but honestly, I wouldn't be here with that. The only reason that you're here is because of the eye product of those. Right, right, right. Well, well, yes and, I mean, but I won't bore you with that. That's kind of a side issue. The point is, you know, why stop with controlling fertility? Why stop with underwriting women's freedom through abortion? Why not extend the market further into the reproductive domain? Why not commodify more of it? Why not seek to control more of it? And at that point, you think, well, why should I not? Why shouldn't we have a market in gametes?

Why shouldn't we have IVF? Why shouldn't we have gestational surrogacy? Why shouldn't we cut all of those pieces, cut it all into pieces? And sell each of the pieces individually, like, why not? What would you say to the women listening that say, well, I don't want to have unplanned pregnancies. I want to be able to control my own reproduction with birth control or with abortion or with, maybe I'm, I value my career a lot. And I want to outsource having a child to a surrogate.

Well, there are several points in there. Let's take them one by one. I mean, if you want to control your fertility, there is always the option of not having sex. I'll just put that out there. But if you do want to have sex, you have a choice. You can either be doing it in a committed relationship, or you can do cycle tracking, or you can use one of those other methods. I'm not saying don't do it, but what I've sought to tease out is some of the largest scale undercounted side effects of taking the route that we've taken. And maybe weighing and asking the question, how many of this is really a route that we want to be going down. And by desa, there will be women watching who's like,

well, you know, I don't really care about any of these undercount side effects. And you know, fuck off Mary, I'm not going to read your book. Why would I want to do that? So I'm fine with things as they are, in which case, you know, I guess there's not a great deal more I can say to you, but I mean, the only thing I would say to somebody who's considering gestational surrogacy just because they don't fancy stretch marks or they don't want to interrupt their career is that pregnancy doesn't just create a baby, it also creates a mother. Pregnancy rewires the mother's brain in irreversible ways, that in unprimes her for caretaking in ways which are just not repeatable if you

haven't been through that process. And this is not to say that adoptive parents can't be great caretakers because there's a certain there's evidence that some of the same changes take place or be it more slowly in non non gestational caretakers. But if you want to fast forward that process and optimize yourself for being a mother, you should just be a mother. And that's quite aside from the obviously, well, the exploitative.

And you know, other potentially harmful. I went down a rabbit hole after reading about a gay couple in New York who wanted to get surrogacy on health medical insurance because they said that their sexuality was a form of impotence or infertility. Right. And that, I'd never considered the ethics of surrogacy before, but I seem to remember that someone said

it was the same as financial blackmail, but done in reverse to some of the surrogate mothers for him. It's an amount of money offered to the women, some of the women from some of the couples that is so great that they essentially can't say no to it. And they do have things like it can't be your first child. You have to go through a bunch of tests and they do background checks and they do blah blah blah. But still, I'm really conflicted over the surreducing thing at the moment. I'm kind of like at whatever it is, apogee when I'm like, wait, listen, I just have no idea what's going on. I really haven't done

enough. I certainly know that I'm not like just blue sky totally open for it. And I absolutely love that quote that pregnancy doesn't just create a child, it also creates a mother. Yeah, it's so strange to think about what happens as a byproduct of something that medically could be useful within certain circumstances when culturally it just gets spread out leveraged, scaled at unbelievable speed. Yeah, I mean, certainly my experience of being a new mum was that my baby didn't feel like a separate person to me for at first really sometime afterwards. It was like I'd grown an extra limb or like I had literally grown her inside

my body and it felt like one literally grown her inside my body. And it felt like one of some part of my body was just bizarrely separate from me now, but still I still needed to take care of it as though it was another arm or a leg or something. It was a really, really strange feeling. And you're no longer getting the direct feedback from this, but it's still literally part of it.

It feels like part of your own body. And it's not, it's a separate, it's this baby and suddenly you've got to take care of it and try and figure out what it needs the whole time. But it's like she didn't feel like a separate person to me for a very long time. And I get that there are situations where babies can't be cared for by their gestational mothers. You know, there are, you know, accidents happen and disasters happen and you know, extremely ill or you know, psychicy and disasters happen and, you know, extremely ill or, you know, psychicyclicly distressed mothers happen and so on and so forth. You know, there are like things can go wrong, but to me it's just, it's just obviously immoral to conceive a child with the intent of separating

him or her from that bond. The moment, the moment he or she is born, it just seems profoundly wrong to me. And doing that, doing that in the intro commercially, for profit just feels really quite unversed to me. Yeah, there's something super tricky. Okay, so the final war. Final war, the relationship between women and their bodies. Yeah, the relationship between all of us and our bodies, really, but I think it's particularly acute for young people,

and it's particularly acute for adolescent girls. But yeah, I think once you accept the premise that we can use technology to continue emancipating ourselves indefinitely, then why shouldn't we extend beyond controlling our fertility to flattening all the differences between the sexes, and why shouldn't we extend beyond that again to the idea that we can rem, why shouldn't we extend beyond that again to the idea that we can remodel our bodies as we see fit in any way we choose.

And really the bow-wave of that is the activist movement, the activist groundswell for freedom of gender. I suppose to use a phrase from Marty and Rothblatt, who's a very, who's a very well-known transgender activist, and transhumanist activist. Rothblatt has written a book called, From Transgender to Transhuman, a manifesto for freedom of form, which argues that the, the freedom to be, to present, you know, with whatever secondary sex characteristics we choose, and that most aligns with our sense of self is only the precursor to the, the, the much more radical freedom to just present physiologically powerful we like, you know, if we wanted to grow a pair of horns or a tail or extra limbs, then fine, you know, you should just go for it, or just to upload ourselves digitally into the cloud and be digital persons and that ought to be fine as well.

And you see, and really there isn't, it's if you can have whatever secondary sex characteristics you like, as you choose, then it's sort of difficult to see why you shouldn't just extend that way beyond that. And actually, you're beginning to see that in some of the gender clinics where a far greater variety of surgeries is on offer. That is sat next to dinner.

I mean, don't Google. Don't go. I sat next to dinner about a month and a half ago, the number one transgender surgeon in America. This guy does between 300 and 400 transgender surgeries per year, and he owns a clinic that does over a thousand, a number of clinics actually that are around the country. And I was incredibly surprised by him, like unbelievably surprised, zero ideology. Absolutely, you know, I not ideologically captured at all. I didn't, it was the first time that I'd met

this entire group of people and I was like, like, I don't wantologically captured at all. I was the first time that I'd met this entire group of people and I was like, I don't wanna be the, so how do you feel about the ethics of the, we're having stake, just listen, and maybe the second time that I go back, I'll be able to push a little bit more. But he was mentioning some of the different procedures that he does where some people would like to add a penis, but

also would like to keep their vagina. And a lot of the time these individuals will come in and they'll have researched, I guess the same way as if you want to get a fringe or something, you might have some examples of someone's fringe that you like. And so I'm looking for a fringe like this. And apparently it's borderline obsessive. The, well, I like the shape of, you see how the head of the penis kind of does this thing.

And then toward the base, it sort of got, it gets a little bit thicker. So it's like, I really, really like this. And he was like, with the best will in the world, I'm taking flesh from your forearm and forming it into something that remotely resembles a penis. If it looks anything like a penis,

let's call that a win. Do you know this is insane to talk about the transhumanist stuff. Do you know how trans penises get hard? I have some sort of rude eventually. Let me tell you in depth. It's a sort of inflating device, isn't it? That's correct. So there is a pouch of saline that is inserted into the body behind the bladder. So there's a little pouch at all times in there. And there's testicles, right? Penis, even if it's made from your forearm,

to make it look like a real thing, it would have testicles. One of the testicles is a fake ball. The other testicle is a fake ball. The other testicle is a pump attached to a series of one-way valves that goes from the pouch behind the bladder up into the penis. And you like pump it, do you remember, with a Nike don't kicks or whatever from the 90s? Are you telling me that this guy was talking you through all of this while you were eating steak? This was after we'd finished eating steak, mercilessly.

I was going to say. Yeah, because it was pretty red and steak as well, so I would have been quite uncomfortable. But yeah, and you pump it up, and then there's a valve that you can release it, and you can even fit ways to make fluids come out of it at the opportune moment as well. So the bodily modification is unbounded now and pretty terrifying. Yeah, and I suppose that's the conclusion I found myself coming to, that I found myself essentially coming to the same conclusion as Martian Rothblatt that this is as in Rothblatt's words the on-ramp to

transhumanism. And you may think, well fine, let's all go transhumanist. And arguably, by my own logic, given that we've been in the transhumanist era for over half a century now, having embraced it with the contraceptive pill, why shouldn't we just lean all the Transhumanist era for over half a century now, you know, having embraced it with the contraceptive pill. Why shouldn't we just lean all the way into it? And I think, well, I suppose that's one response, sure. But I look at the Transhumanist revolution and I think, well, you know, the lefty in me says, well, hang on a minute. You know, this is probably going to be fine for people like the Kardashians or Grimes who's just had another Elon Musk baby, Viserrogacy because she didn't like, have giving birth the first time. There's this fine for people like that, but people further

down the food chain. What generally happens when a whole new domain of human social life is enclosed and markedised is that people at the top do really nicely and then people further down, you know, find it's, they get all of the disruption and considerably less of the benefit. And I'm thinking, well, where are all these body parts going to come from? You know, who's going to donate all of the uteruses to be to be transplanted into male bodies? You're thinking and then I stumbled sort of unsemiun Relatedly on a story about farm workers like female farm workers in my restaurant, which is a district in India Who often voluntarily opt for hysterectomies?

Because it makes them more employable if they if they don't suffer from monthly menstrual cycles, they're just more employable, and they're more likely, they're more likely to be able to get a job in the agricultural gig economy in Maharashtra, if they can prove that they've had a hysterectomy. And I'm thinking, if we're starting to treat human bodies as things as resources, which can be disassembled and reassembled and transplanted and treated like

the freshy bits of Lego that can be assembled as we see fit. Then there's going to be a market and some people are going to be, you know, one class of people is going to be buying and another class of people is going to be selling. And once you start looking seriously at the prospect of creating a free market in human body parts, it's going to be the women in Maharashtra who are selling. And I don't know who, somebody that's some male with money who's going to be buying. And I just don't like the look of that.

The lefty in me stands up and says, no, no, we have to do something about this. The lefty in me says, this is a grotesque, a bomb, this is an abominable form of exploitation. And if there's any way we can stand a thought history and yell stop, then we've probably should. That's pretty terrifying. That's really, really concerning. Yeah, and I mean, actually, I'll just give you a more recent United States headline

along the same lines. I will leave you so more of the stuff of nightmares. Bill was recently introduced in a US state, I think it was Massachusetts to offer convicted convicts in prison incarcerated felons, a reduction in their jail sentence if they donate organs or bone marrow. And if that isn't the wombless farm workers of my rash, being essentially turned into resources, I don't really know what else, but I don't know what it is. And again, you know, the lefty in me says that if there's any way we can be standing a thought history, yelling stop, facing this, this kind of, this, this sort of stuff being just normalized into

our economies and normalized into the way we see human bodies, then we should. I've heard you say previously with regards to the lefty thing that occupied Wall Street failed as we tried to take back control of our finances from people that were in control of the market. And right now, we have the opportunity to take back sovereignty of our bodies from people that are trying to marketize them as well. Yeah, I think we need to occupy ourselves. Yeah. Movement. But why is it the case that other people from the left who are ostensibly are so anti-capitalist, haven't clocked on to the downstream implications of what

this philosophy taken to its extreme would mean for our bodies, like the capitalization of the self. I think some of them have, in a lot of the time, there's a real cognitive dissonance around, to be honest, there's an immense cognitive dissonance on both the left and the right where it comes to technology. The right is every bit as confused

about technology as the left. So I'm sort of tossing bombs in an equal opportunities way that the right can't decide whether it's for kind of retreat into sort of trad distributism or tealite space fascism. And you know, I think it's very difficult to have both, although maybe my friend, my non-friends would disagree with me. But I think there are some tensions there. And similarly, there are real tensions on the left between the desire to use technology to create abundance in order to emancipate everybody across the world. And the obvious negative side effects that all of that industrialization and emancipation and technologization is having, particularly where it comes to these asymmetric exploitation of overseas groups

and colonized people and exploited subsets of the population and so on. And then, but the left can't quite give up on the emancipatory power of technology and the way it can be used as a battering ram against authority. And the right can't quite give up on the economic promise of technology, and the way it can be used as a battering ram against,

used as a battering ram against the promise that we really have to have any limits at all. Everybody wants to use technology to escape our own limits on both the right and the left as come at it differently. And so it's so strange to think what the externalities are of lots of freedom. I've like too much freedom and it's something it's a question. I really, really don't do the sort of sociopolitical cultural intersection particularly while human nature good like individuals, small groups, yes, but as soon as I scale it up, I'm essentially useless. But I do know that there is an interesting question about too much freedom. What does it mean to

have too much freedom? What does it mean for the degrees of play within a system to be infinite or zero basically. And I do know that that's dangerous. Yeah. In my view is that we, the conservatives who think that everything that's wrong with the way we are now, it could be fixed by just changing what women do and leaving everything else the same. They're wrong. They're just not thinking about it, right? Because, right? Because we're not, there is no going back. There is no return. It's just isn't happening.

And just saying, well, we can just keep everything the same except what women do isn't going to produce the result that they want at all. But everybody, but we need, we all need a freedom haircut, men and women both. And that's going take. That's gonna take you to do. I've already done mine. I've already, I've gone full V for Vandetta. Okay, so, big romance, your other large behemoth that you want to try and tackle. A polished big romance.

Yes, what is big romance? Why do you want to abolish it? I think this is where your interests and mind sort of collide, don't they, Chris, because you're very preoccupied with the mating crisis. And really, this is a big romance, is I suppose, my take on how we got to the mating crisis. I mean, I don't want to do a whole other social history lesson because I feel like I've bothered on about that enough already. But my argument is that we, how people understood marriage, what people understood marriage to mean has changed a number of times over the course of civilization. You know, the way people

approach marriage now isn't set in stone. You know, what people understand it to mean has changed a great deal over the course of time. And in the middle ages, it was a much more pragmatic business for most people. Marriages were very often arranged. Or marriages were contracted relatively, relatively brusquely.

And then enough to that were just basically impossible to dissolve, or nearly impossible to dissolve. And most people treated it as a fairly pragmatic arrangement because you were economically interdependent as part of a productive household. And that's just a very different relationship to one where you're expected to be all sort of lovey-dovey all the time.

At the end of the day, the pigs need feeding. And somebody's got to get the wheat in the ground before it rains. And that's a very different set of priorities than, you know, did he remember to pick his socks up? And, you know, has he left a little note on the kitchen table for me before he left the day? And then, but what changed with the industrial era? So partly because women found themselves with a great deal less economic agency than they had done previously. The preoccupation with love in a relationship became proportionally stronger as women lost agency and it became, you know, for pragmatic reasons,

much more important to have a husband who loved you. You know, you can have a husband you just get on with reasonably well as a sort of business partner if you're both co-producers in a productive household. But if you're an economic dependent and you're unable to own property, you're unable to divorce and you have no legal personhood really independent from your husband and no way of earning money, it's considerably more in your interest to make sure that you marry somebody who loves you and respects you. So at the beginning, with the rise of the economically inactive bourgeois housewife,

you get the idea of companion romance, which I mean, I don't know if you've ever read any of the Jane Austen novels or seen them. I've been told by a bunch of people to read them. And if you're the third person in the space of a couple of months to tell me, I feel like I probably should do. Apparently she was way ahead of every evolutionary psychologist's time in understanding. She's a superb writer. And she's probably the number one, the number

one profit of companion marriage, because she was the one who really set the bar for what that was meant to look like. You know, I mean, the relationship between Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Pedritis is it kind of sets the bar for what one of the, what a relationship like that should look like and what it's in women's interest to pursue under those circumstances.

You know, Elizabeth Bennett is, she's too much of a gentle woman to ever to earn her own living. So she needs to marry up. But she also doesn't want to marry somebody who doesn't like her or respect her. And she ends up married to like the guy. She's actually, it's the perfect relationship within the terms of what's available to her politically and economically under those circumstances. But with the arrival of the Pell, and he's entering into the workplace and so on, you know, those economic pressures and those economic constraints have sort of gone away, you know, sisters are doing it for themselves now as the song

goes, you know, in a sense, you don't you don't need a husband who loves you. In fact, you don't need a husband at all, you know, you can you can kind of you can do it all in theory on your own. And so, you know, marriage is evolved from this sort of the Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy ideal to something much more sort of consumerist, you know, marriages evolve from this sort of the Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy ideal to something much more sort of consumerist, you know, in the sense that, you know, you're supposed to be self-actualizing each other all of the time and you're, your partner is supposed to be a vector for your kind of self-actualization. And if they're not delivering on that front, you're wholly entitled to just walk away

at any time for any reason. And that's the sort of, and that's really where big romance has got, has got us, it's evolved into, it's not my term, but the self-expressive marriage. So somebody else coined the term, but I think it's a good one. This idea that, you know, it's a, you know, my, my, my relationship expresses and, and helps me to optimize who I am as a person. And if it, if it stops doing that, then I that, then I have no obligation to try and sustain it. And this is predicated on the idea that men and women are just not economically interdependent at all, which is just true, I think, in a lot of cases. What do you mean when you say that? Well, I mean, if I have a job and my husband also has a job, and we could both theoretically

survive independently of one another, then we're not really into the environment. The marriage of convenience. Well, we're not interdependent to the point where it's just unthinkable to end the relationship. It's thinkable from a sort of material level to end, to end relationships. Yeah, and so this is maybe another byproduct of a lot of freedom, but this time it's financial freedom. Yeah, and all of that again is, is Dan's dream of social and material changes, which make it, make it much more, much more level-paging in terms of who, who can flourish professionally.

I mean, the, you know, de-industrialization in the West and the rise of knowledge work has, has, has radically changed the balance of power between the sexist where it comes to who's earning, particularly for when you go further down the economic scale. Let me give you a quote that I got from Joyce Beninson a little while ago. Society is man made and in the modern world men have put themselves out of a job. Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate. Ben as a very sharp observer of men and women. I think there's a lot of truth in it. I've made a similar argument. I've made

a similar, yeah, in a sense, men have put themselves out of a job. So you have this, whether it's a marriage of convenience, or at least not one which is forced to be together, what would you say to the people that say, well, hang on a second, shouldn't I love my partner? Shouldn't we make each other better people? Are you telling me that I'm supposed to settle for some suboptimal, just like plausibly passable guy that I'll spend the rest of my life with? Well, I would say to that, you know, I wouldn't just, you know, don't just marry somebody

off the street, that's a stupid idea. But by the same token, choosing one person is by definition settling. Because everybody annoys their partner after a while. You know, you live together for long enough. Eventually you'll find something about the other person that gets up your notes. It's just inevitable. Yeah. And to an extent, yeah, choosing one other person is settling by definition.

And if you're so hung up on the idea of infinite optionality that you're just, you're never ever going to settle. Eventually, you'll, you'll be left just with, just with yourself. And that was, did I send you that Steven Shaw episode about the birth rate crisis stuff? Yeah. episode about the birth rate crisis stuff. Yeah, so I mean, he has this, I really want to dig into this more, but four out of five childless women didn't intend to not have kids. So around about 10% of women physically are incapable, around about 10% of women, it seems intended to not have children, which leaves 80% of women that didn't have kids not intending to not be

mothers. And this is a meta-analysis by Professor Renska Kyser. It's a huge, huge, huge study replicated across multiple demographics, across multiple countries, territories, etc. And there's these support groups for women that grieve over families that they never had. That was the term that he used. And it just makes me like that grieve over the family that they never had really, really sent shivers down my spine. And yeah, it's the optionality. It's next thing, right? It's peering over the current person's shoulder to see what's coming next just in case. Yeah, yeah. And it's, you know, when you're surrounded the whole time by by some swiping right and swiping left, and you know, the world seems to be, you know,

awashin, you know, a new person you could check out from the from the from the internet shop of potential sexual partners and though they seem to be infinite. I can see why but sexual partners and they seem to be infinite. I can see why the idea of settling would just seem unimaginable and unthinkable, particularly once you get to a point where swiping right and swiping left is so normal that the idea of settling full stop has started to seem a bit strange. I talk to people younger than me who tell me that if you're dating now, there's just no, nobody ever talks about exclusivity. It's not done to assume that if you're seeing somebody on a regular basis, it used to be sort of taken as red that if you've seen somebody a few times, then you're probably

not shagging other people, and that's kind of rude to do that. Like, that was a norm even, you know, in the notches, and it isn't now. It's just, and there's no, there's a whole new set of anxieties about even having the conversation with somebody you've been sleeping with for like six months. And then, you know, after six months,

it's an incredibly delicate and awkward conversation to try and broach, you know, could we maybe just not be seeing other people? And that seems like an extremely back foot to be on where it comes to, like that's very, very, very on the back foot where it comes to trying to sort of form a permanent relationship in the first place, let alone get to a point where actually you could be between you making long-term plans of any kind of talk. And you're so far in that situation from being able to imagine the sort of radical loyalty, which I think is the basis for a kind of post-romantic marriage. Yeah, I really feel for the kids, because it just seems like a nightmare.

It just seems like an absolute nightmare. Balance the scales. Square the circle for me around. Don't marry someone off the street, no. But also know that post romance marriage might be something that would be good to go for. Well, I think there's obviously some due diligence to be done in terms of you know Does somebody have more of does somebody share your values to somebody share your life goals?

You know, just are they are they present looking are they are they nice to their mum? That's you know if you're a woman. That's that's a good. That's a useful indicator You know, do they treat them unwell? Then all of these things, you know these things are good and important basic due diligence to do. Don't marry somebody off the street. I probably don't marry somebody who's addicted to porn if you can possibly avoid it. All of those sort of common sense things. Fundamentally, But fundamentally, are you... My view is that... The economic changes, material changes, are once again going to force the issue.

And for everybody except the top, the top tier, who can carry on having these self expressive marriages if they want to, because they're rich enough to just fuck around. But for everybody else who's a bit closer to the sharp end economically, it's just not going to be possible to end your marriage, it's just not going to be sensible to end your marriage as the drop of a hat, because we're just going to need each other more. And if the world goes on getting more dangerous and more unstable and more expensive, being interdependent

is just a better way to be. It's just obviously, and particularly, and particularly if you want to have children, for women who are mothers, a more stable society is just better, obviously, if you want to raise children, I shouldn't need to explain why that is. If everything is chaos, and you've got small children,

this is obviously a problem. One of the interesting things there, that atomization of society that you've said, everybody treating themselves as an individual that is separate from the rest, that owes nothing to the rest of the world, what you end up with here is a bit of a tragedy of the commons effect, which is you're telling me that I'm supposed to settle down in order to contribute to societal stability, but if I let everybody else settle down and I can continue to cycle through my next thing until I find somebody that is of the optimal Mr

Darcy shape size person that I'm looking for, that means that I get to benefit at the cost of everybody else. Well, unless they've already got all the nice ones and you're just left with the weirdos and the porn addicts, you know, there's an opportunity cost there as well. I mean, you do at the end of the day, it's your, I don't mean your personally, but you know, it's, it's, I do go for porn addicts, actually, that's my primary demographic. Well, I didn't like to ask. You know me well. Let men be men. Why should you let men be men? Let men be. Well, I mean, my, there's a very simple thesis. You know, if you, it's all very well telling women they should get married, but that's not very, you know, you're not going to get very far with that unless there's somebody half decent to marry. And I think one of the problems with, you know, there are a lot of men who are really struggling.

And the, you know, I probably don't need to rehearse the metrics on that. I'd essay if I've plenty of our plenty of guests on your show who've rehearsed the metrics on that. So I won't rehash them here. But there are a lot of men who are struggling and that gets more obvious the further you go down the social scale. And it's, although it's not a solution, there is no magic solution to this. But I think one of the things that we have women here really have to lead by example on is letting men form one another. If we want good men,

then we're like shouting at men is not going to make men into better men because it's just observationally clear to me that women don't make good men, men, good men make each other. Only, I mean men, men, I'm really sort of hesitant to generalize in this way and all to kind of, but it's, yeah, where it comes to learning how to behave and learning how to be, it's just obvious to me that men just don't listen to women. You know, beyond a certain point, you know, it just sounds like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and they'll listen to their friends and they'll listen to their dads if they have dads and they'll listen to older men who they respect, you know, who say, you know, and if they, if somebody like that says,

you know, you should, you know, if you want to be respected as a guy, you need to do the following things, they'll listen. But the exact same message coming from their mum or their girlfriend is just going to sound like, and this is just observationally clear to me. And therefore, if we want, if we want, even the fighting chance of half decent men who are worth marrying, we probably need to back the fuck off a bit and let them let younger men form older men. And that means allowing more space for single sex sociality for men. And it's also clear to me that we're going to have, you know, the, those of us who are concerned about the invasion

of gender neutral, you know, the, the, the incursion of gender neutral spaces in even interplaces, where that's obviously absurd or dangerous or cruel, you know, such as women's prisons. Then we're going to get a lot more support from men if we're not so hell-bent on banning men from socializing just amongst themselves. Yes, okay, I see, because you want to have your spaces kept protected and you want us to be on board with that, meanwhile saying that we can't have any of our spaces left over. Well, I think the paradigmatic instance of that is the Scouts. Right. Yeah. I mean, Scouting went, went co-ed, you know, some decades ago and girlguides didn't until until the gender who came along and said, well, no, actually, you know,

you have to have, you have to have girlguides with penises if they say that, if they say the girls. Yeah. Yeah. And, and you know, the the girl guide, you know, memsum, subset of girl guiding has been outraged by this. But of course, I mean, it kind of happened to the scouts some time ago. You know, that went co-ed and I don't,

I mean, I can't really speak to what was lost at that point because I'm a boy. But I wouldn't be surprised if there were opportunities for male socialization in specifically male terms that didn't happen as a consequence of that. And I think it's very difficult to prove a link between the obvious escalating levels of psychic distress that men are experiencing and the fact that

there are now very limited socially legitimate all-male spaces that aren't either introduced as far right or under attack from politically under attack from people who would prefer to see them opened up in the interest of egalitarianism. But the numbers are in that show men are men alone only, in aggregate, and increasingly so, and that's getting worse. And I think as a matter of compassion and as a matter of justice, and also in women's interests, in the interests of there being good men who've been formed by other good men. We should take a step back. Fold this into that discussion around how men shape men as well. So from Roy Baumeister last year when I spoke to him, men will do what women demand of them in order to get laid,

women set the standard for sex and men meet them. Quote, although this may be considered an unflattering characterization, we have found no evidence to contradict the basic general principle that men will do whatever is required in order to obtain sex and perhaps not a grail deal more. One of us characterized this in a previous work as if women would stop sleeping with jerks, men would stop being jerks. If in order to obtain sex, men must become pillars of the community, or lie, or amass riches by fair means or foul, be romantic or funny, then many men will do precisely that. If men need to simply be in the right place at the right time at 3am and a nightclub, then they will meet these standards appropriately. Women are not at fault for listlessness in

men, but they're not totally unrelated to it either. How would you fold that into this discussion? I mean, it's a different way of saying what I've just said. You know, too. I suppose I could fold it into the Joyce Beninson quote you lobbed out earlier as well, in the sense that you could view the entire history of technological innovations. You know, a lot of which were driven by men's immense inventiveness, as a sincere effort to make things nicer for everybody, including for women, or perhaps some of it was motivated by wanting to impress women,

so perhaps some of it was motivated by... I mean, you're sure there's a subset of nerds who just like finding stuff up because they can. But you know, so some of it is also motivated by a desire for honor and also desire to want to get laid. Yeah, for, yeah, for, for meant exactly. And, and if, if in the process, they've, they've put themselves out of a job and now they're being told that. And, and in the meantime, they've invented a technology which means that there's no longer any sort of serious consequences to sex and women and are all economically independent and yet and yet and yet and yet and therefore all they really need to do is to be in the right place at

the right time and there are no standards anymore. Then yeah, I mean it's essentially saying it's essentially saying the same thing. I mean how how we push back against that, you know, where we start with pushing back against that. I think there's a, there's a big picture, you know, there's a big picture political discussion, which I've only touched on very briefly in the book. But at the small scale, I think it starts with, with refusing the pill. Now, the feminist fight with refusing the pill. Now the feminist fight back against the pill. And I don't think the feminist case for not being pro-Homonal birth control.

Well, I mean, it's a pro-sex case at the end of the day. I stopped taking the pill when I was about 21. That's the last time I took the contraceptive pill and I stopped taking it because it made me fat and sexless and insane. I mean, I'm old and wisdom now, so it still seems a bit ridiculous even to be talking about this. Ten years married and just entirely does spectacularly on the shelf. But I mean, this is something I hear more and more and more from young women who are outraged, having come off the pill in their mid-twenties, having been on it for a decade, and who having just been routinely put on this psychoactive medicine at the age of 15 or whatever, and they're just like, what the fuck? What did you do to me?

Suddenly their libido has come roaring back. They fancy a different set of people. Their mind, you know, they're no longer depressed. You know, they've got so much more energy and they've just had a total personality transplant, having stopped taking this thing that everyone told them was a completely cost free risk management thing. I told you about it was after you finished the book that I pushed that Dr. Sarah Hill thing your way right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think it was it really, I mean, you can start to dig into the genuine psychopharmacological

interactions of what's going on, but it doesn't change the fundamental understanding. Like, your end of one experience perfectly explains what she says in the book. So I don't think that it really needed to have that get folded in more, but someone asked me a couple of questions I've had recently, like, what is something that you didn't believe this time last year that you do now? And what is the biggest topic that is not being discussed widely at the moment, but will be studied by historians in future? And for both of those, it's stuff around birth control. Well, my birth control.

Home on the birth control. Yep. I mean, I think the the Pro-Sex case, you know, the feminist Pro-Sex case against the pill goes further than just It messes with your libido and it messes with who you're attracted to and all of which has been You know, I recommend to all of the viewers that if you haven't you should watch Chris's episode with Sarah Hill because it's just Fascinating and you should eat her because well because it's fascinating But it's not just about the way the way it changes the basic chemistry of attraction. It's also about the fact that it radically changes how you form relationships and how you approach sex and sexuality.

But more and more women are complaining that they find hook-up culture degrading. What's the fundamental enabling condition of hook-up culture? grading. What is it? What's the fundamental enabling condition of hookup culture? If you're repeatedly finding yourself in a situation, I'm probably going to get counsel for saying this, but I'm going to say it anyway because I'm about to get spectacularly counseled and the book comes out. So whatever. I read a lot of the Me Too stories and a lot of the sort of, you know, uncomfortable situations with slightly dodgy men stories that got written up in the context of Me Too and that whole, that whole furoray. And it struck me that a lot of them were the sort of awkward sexual encounters where women ended up saying yes, kind of out of politeness and then felt really gross afterwards,

because it just felt too awkward to get out of the situation having gotten themselves into it. And, you know, I don't want to make, I don't want to be heard here as making any statements about what they should or shouldn't have done in those situations, because I just feel for anybody who wakes up the next day feeling icky in a situation like that, because it's because I've done it plenty and it's just really horrible. It's painful and you feel squalid afterwards. But what I will say is that if you've taken birth control off the table, you're very highly motivated not to get into those situations in the first place. And if you don't want to get into those situations, you should consider just setting the bar higher for yourself by just not embracing birth control

as something which is a routine part of your approach to life. You know, you're not going to end up hooking up with some guy who you turn out, you know, who you think is disgusting when you wake up next to him in the morning. If you're just not hooking up with anybody because you're not going You're not getting that close to anybody who you don't trust to look after your interests as well Which is just you know obviously a very much higher bar if there's a meaningful material chance if you're getting pregnant You know, you're just not going there at all. Well, I think I asked a question of Danica Patrick who is a female NASCAR driver, ex female NASCAR driver.

And I said, do you think that women should have sex with men that they wouldn't marry? And she took quite a long time for it to come to like formulate an answer a little while. And she was like, actually, yeah, I think that's not particularly bad heuristic to use. And also from our first conversation, I still remember you teaching me how the introduction of the pill increased the number of single mothers.

It did. It did. It did. It did. It's so radically changed. The absolute the absolute number of casual sexual encounters was so much higher as a consequence of the way it changed. It moved all of the goalposts where it came to who was hooking up with who, that even though the number of accidental pregnancies per hookup was, you know, per total rate of hookups was lower, and the total rate of hookups was so much higher that the absolute number of accidental pregnancies went up. Insane, like so, so, so insane. It's like the biggest third, fourth order effect thing that you can't foresee. Yeah. Yeah. And what's your final suggestion for how we can abolish big romance? Well, it's, it's like we need to, we need to step the fuck back and let, let me be, we need to embrace

post-traumatic marriage and lean into the fact that we're past progress and actually we need to rely on one another and be looking seriously for ways that we can increase solidarity between the sexes. If we want to stand a chance of surviving as a species, we need to find ways of increasing solidarity between the sexes. That means taking a step back from endless optionality and it means embracing marriages and enabling condition for life in common and the sort of radical loyalty that you need even when your partner is annoying the fuck out of you for years at a time if necessary. Obviously, in the absence of serious abuse or major psychological distress, there are some situations where yes,

families are probably ought to separate, but in most cases, you know, where it's just not ecstatic, I think we need to tilt the balance back towards a presumption in favor of stability, rather than a presumption in favor of liquidity. And finally, you know, what underwrites all of this is the feminist pushback against the commodification of our own bodies, which has to start with how we relate to our own fertility. I think there's the absolute heart of this, I think, is my, I think we need to defy as women this idea that we're just defective males. And unless we can flatten our reproductive cycles and our reproductive, and our entire physiology,

so that it mimics a male cycle and physiology, or at least, it isn't obviously female in having menstrual cycles and so on. I reject that as a basic premise, and I think it's profoundly important, you know, feminist argument for rejecting that as a basic premise, and I think it's a profoundly fundamental to pushing back against the technologization and the commodification of everything that women have got to find a way of saying no, you know, where people, but we're also female, you know, and that's, and that's fine too. And, you know, how dare you suggest that I, I only get to access personhood if I just, if I'm willing to

exert, you know, biomedical mastery over the things that make me female, you know, being female doesn't make me less of a person, you know, and how, how dare you suggest that. And furthermore, how dare you suggest that I should just offer up all of those things, there's just commodities on the market. And yeah, I think we need to occupy ourselves. Who are you speaking to with this book? Who would you like to read it most? This is a really interesting question, actually, because different sections of it, I think, are probably ended up with a slightly

different implied readership, depending on which part. The hardest section I found to write was the last one. What is to be done is always much harder than what's wrong. I had four or five full starts where I just wrote thousands and thousands of words of not bollocks, but just unnecessary stuff. Because I realized I was trying to please everybody. In the end, I thought, well, no, actually, I can't please everybody. And who I ended up writing the last section for was young men and women, probably more women than men, but young men and women who haven't yet gone past the point of

no return. Where young men and women who still have a choice past the point of no return, where young men and women who still have a choice about how they enter adult life and how they form families or if they form families, and who are still within that window. So I suppose sort of 20 to 35, where they still have a choice. But particularly young women in their 20s who've been looking around and thinking, there's something off about the message of never-ending freedom, there's something off about civil theology, and you know, who haven't been able to put their finger on exactly what it is and why everything, why it just feels like a massive bait and switch.

And I've got to the amazingly, well, not the, you know, they've reasonably reactionary opinions I've arrived at by liberaling really as hard as it's possible to liberal, or you know, sincerely, you know, I've done my best to liberal as hard as possible. And I've arrived at a fairly reactionary place in the course of that. And I just, I just hope that there's a few people younger than me who just maybe aren't going to waste quite so much time reaching escape velocity, you know, get there a bit quicker and with slightly fewer scars. So I think that this is part of the concurrent trend that we're seeing from a bunch of different angles, whether it's me talking about the mating crisis, whether it's Louise and the sort

of cultural side of things through the sexual revolution, whether it's you looking at the historical, then blending into the technological, the Roads Nina looking at like the existential from men's side of stuff. Like, you know, everybody seems to be converging on this demographics, Stephen Shaw's stuff. In terms of medical advances, Dr Sarah Hill's stuff, like everybody's pointing or a lot of people that I find interesting are pointing at the same thing. And I think that this is an important book to write and I'm really glad that you've got it done. Where should people go if they want to follow you, if they want to keep up to date with your work? Feminism against progress will be linked in the show notes below, go and get that on Amazon right now. What else should they look at?

I'm a regular columnist at Unheard, so you can go and check me out there. I'm Mary Arrington. I tweet, move in circles, and I have a substack as well which you're most welcome to subscribe to which is reactionary feminist. Mary, I really appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It has been great. Thank you.