Modern Wisdom - #732 - Mary Harrington - Why You Shouldn’t Share Your Private Life Online

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

Mary Harrington is writer, columnist and author. Everyone has the temptation to share their life on the internet, but where does the line of sharing stop and oversharing begin? How has our performance for the crowd crept into our morals and changed the way we see the role of privacy around our personal lives? Expect to learn what Digital Modesty is, why liberals would more likely date an Only Fans worker than an OnlyFans subscriber, if there is a crisis with both masculinity and femininity in our culture, Mary’s thoughts on the surrogacy industry, why women need to develop a strategy for not getting what they want and much more... Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get $150 discount on Plunge’s amazing sauna or cold plunge at https://plunge.com (use code MW150) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - 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

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show what my guest today is Mary Harrington, she's writer, columnist and an author. Everyone has the temptation to share their life on the internet. But where does the line of sharing stop and oversharing begin? How has our performance for the crowd crept into our morals and changed the way that we see the role of privacy around our personal lives? Expect to learn what digital modesty is, why liberals would be more likely to date an only fan's worker than an only fan's subscriber. If there is a crisis with both masculinity and femininity in our culture, Mary's thoughts on the surrogacy industry, why women need to develop a strategy for not getting what

they want. And much more. Mary is so fun. I love her writing. Her book feminism against progress was really great. And she is part of the based British women squad, along with Louise Perry and Nina Power and stuff. So if you fans of them, you'll love this one today.

Other things I am going to LA to not know, I'm going to Vegas tonight. And I have got a very big episode tomorrow. And then I'm in LA, Friday and Saturday recording even more big ones with some massive returning guests and some huge first times. I can't wait for this. It's nice to be back in the rhythm of doing the modern wisdom cinema episodes

and I can't wait to release them. I'm really super, super fired up for this year. I wish I could tell you all the different guests that we've got that are coming on. But until they're recorded and on the hard drive, I don't want to count my chickens before they've goosed or whatever it's called. But yes, make sure that you're subscribed.

It's the only way that you can never miss an episode and the next few months are going to be massive. Plus, it helps to support the show. So go and do it. Ah, thank you. This episode is brought to you by AG1. You are not eating and are fruit and vegetables in your diet and you know it and this is going to help.

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But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mary Harrington. What do you mean by digital modesty? Oh yeah, that's an idea I've been playing with a lot recently, which is really just about where we've got to with the exposure of everything on the internet. This is something I've found myself thinking about a lot more, and the more I've found myself writing in public and speaking in public and really sort of being present online, whether it's on Twitter or wherever, which is, is there anything that we shouldn't be posting? And the more I think about that, the more I conclude that yes, there are absolutely things that we shouldn't be posting, or rather, if there are things which,

if we do share them, we should expect negative consequences to follow from that. I mean I've and the more I thought I've derived a set I guess of basic principles for what I won't post. I won't post selfies online. I mean I'll I'll post my faces all over the internet right but in the context of a conversation you know you and I hear you and I hear not we're not here to talk about my face I mean mean, my face is just my face. We're here to, we're here to exchange ideas and have a conversation. But I won't post, I won't post selfies. Yeah, I can, actually, I remember the point where I realized that you, I shouldn't, I didn't want to post selfies was, was just after I, I ran over the finish line of a marathon a couple of years ago. And I trained for it, and I trained

for it, and I trained for it, and I'd worked so hard at it. And at that point, I think I had maybe 10,000 followers on Twitter, and I, and I'd train for it, and I'd train for it, and I'd worked so hard at it. And at that point, I think I had maybe 10,000 followers on Twitter, and I took a photo of myself having crossed the finish line, looking like hell, completely exhausted, and I had a kite on endorphins, and I nearly pressed send, and then I was like, well, don't do that. Do not do that.

And I deleted it, and I did not post the selfie of myself having just crossed the finish line. Why? Because I realized, if I did not post the selfie of myself having just crossed the finish line. Why? Because I realized, if I did, like probably 75% of the people who follow me would say, great, well done, congratulations, and I get lots of love. The other 25% will be the people who hate follow, because they exist. Once you get past a certain point, you have haters on the internet because like, people can find, people can hate anything, you know, that's just the law of the internet.

People will find something insane to hate, even if it's just people doing, like, middle age women doing marathons. And then, and it would, there would have been one mean comment, which would have just crushed me, and it would have ruined my day. And I thought, what's the easiest way of not experiencing that one mean comment?

It's just not, just don't post a picture. But it's more than that. It's also that it, it exposes something intimate and personal, which I realized was just not something which wasn't for everybody else. That moment was for me and it was for my family and for the people who'd supported me. It wasn't for. And for the people who'd supported me to fundraise, it wasn't for general consumption. And I realized that there is actually a boundary.

I've spent more time online. I've appeared in public more since then. And the more I do it, the more I've come to think that actually the more exposed you are potentially online, the more intentionally you have to be about thinking clearly on where you draw the line. Like a digital hijab. Yeah.

Well, I wouldn't use, that would be a problematic way of putting it in public, because I think the, you know, there are, borrowing from other people from a faith which I don't personally espouse as a metaphor. Did you modestyle doing it? No selfies. So, no selfies, no pictures of my home, no pictures of my child, no pictures of my husband, no discussing my husband, my child, or my home, husband, no discussing my husband, my child or my home, except in the most general terms, and really no discussing intimate matters from my social life and my

family life and my home life, unless it's in the most general terms or with the consent of anybody else involved. Because ultimately, these are my, by virtue of being relationships, they're things which don't just belong to me. And because it doesn't just belong to me, I have no right to mine that for content. Justify for the non-content creator people why a degree of digital modesty is also a good idea. Okay, so the more I thought about digital modesty, the more I realized that what we're actually talking about

is setting boundaries on the culture of transparency. And this is really something which I think we've inherited from the 1960s and the sort of hippie utopianism. And this idea that if we all let it all hang out, if we're just open about everything, if we all just share and where we're honest and we're authentic, then somehow everything is going to be better. And that might have been true, but maybe that was true to an extent before the internet because there was a limit on what you could share. But now we have the internet, we could theoretically be documenting literally every moment of our lives. And on those people who've tried documenting literally every aspect of their lives online have generally ended up in some pretty horrible places. I can't remember the name of the guy, but there was a famous subculture. There

was some guy online who documented literally every aspect of his life and he ended up getting trolled and he basically went to some very dark places and ended up, you know, in profound kind of, yeah, really sinister kinds of audience capture. There wasn't Nick Akado, Avocado, was it? I mean, he's a more recent case in point, actually. I mean, you know, people who end up actually. People who end up crying and breaking up with and getting back together again with his boyfriend whilst eating enormous plates of food basically for internet clad. There's a race to the bottom aspect there. But more generally, even for people

who are not professional internet presence have us. The culture of the cultural transparency and the sort of tyranny of transparency has negative effects. I was thinking about this in the context of dating. You periodically see these TikToks which young men or women put out where they're like, oh, I've just I've point of view you're on a date and they're literally filming the date while they're on the date and then they're criticizing the counterpart on the date while they're on the date and then they're criticizing the the counter part on the date while they're actually doing it or they've gone to the Lou to make a tick-tock about how how their date is going wrong while they're actually having the date and I'm thinking well if you if you never draw a line and say if you're if you're if you arrive in a sort of potentially

intimate situation you always got that imagined audience in your head which is potentially everybody on the internet how are you ever supposed to create a shared intimacy with anybody? And I also think so, it's like transparency. It's not just the enemy of desire. Transparency is the enemy of intimacy, it's the enemy of relationships. And if there's nothing, if there's no gap at all

between what you'd say on main and what you'd say in private, there's, intimacy is just meaningless. It's not a thing. One of my friends who I came up doing club Promo with, he was in Southampton, and I was in Newcastle running the same event Carnage, which was an event where you bought a t-shirt as your ticket, and there was tasks on the back like, pulled a pig, got off with three randoms, swat shoes with somebody, etc, etc. Right? Very sort of mid-naughty, lary-britty shrinking culture stuff. And I was asking him where he thought that the Larry culture,

which, although maybe not exactly like emotionally healthy, is a kind of liberated licensiousness, which kind of speaks of a degree of transparency and honesty, and truth, like, I'm just going to do what I want, right? I'm not going to perform. And where that had gone, where like the Larry, like you know, pulled randoms in a club type thing, because that's not what happens.

We see. Doesn't happen anymore. No. And he said it's because of this sort of. Imaginary audience. Stasi, surveillance state run by gullible volunteers, which is everybody with a phone in their pocket. Yep.

Yeah. Exactly that. You know, there's no, there's no, you can't do pranks. You can't, you can't have a crazy night out with your friends anymore. I mean, we threw some completely bonkers parties when I was, late teens, early 20s, I remember the absence and laughing gas party, which I can only remember kind of in bursts.

And that was a magical evening, which are unforgettable and also unrememberable. But there's absolutely no way that could have happened. Any of it, if camera phones had been a thing at the time. And I'm thinking, there are a huge number of benefits that come there. There are new kinds of communication, the new forms of relationship.

I mean, you and I wouldn't be sitting here talking to one another if it wasn't for this phenomenal technology that we have that brings people together in some ways. But if we're not able and willing to set boundaries on what we will and won't share, then it will eventually scoop out everything that's inside us and leave us no scope for intimacy or interpersonal connection at all. Ultimately everything becomes performed, everything's content. So I had a conversation with George, my friend, earlier on, and we were saying I had an aversion to taking photos for a while because given my love Islander lameness status, I had

seen a lot of people who did photos and I'd associated every time you take a photo of yourself or what you're doing or whatever, that is you shilling yourself a content on the internet. But that's not true. People took photos way longer before social media existed. So I had associated the only reason for taking a photo as opposed to online. Therefore, I won't take a photo because I don't want to be one of those wine-key love island people that post all of their life online. But that caused me to not post my life online, which I wasn't going to do anyway, but also not taking a photo as

the fun stuff that I was doing. So I've got these huge deaths of my life where I don't have photos of me and my friends doing stuff. I went for lunch with Douglas the other day. I wanted to, like, I was like, I wanna remember this. I wanna remember the pink shirt that he was wearing and the fact I had crocks on and like, you know, just like stuff. I'm like, okay, let's take a photo, but I have to get over my own fear

that I'm doing it for content, even though I know I'm not gonna post it. You know, it's like, I've got like, like, fucking projecting myself into the future that I'm not it for content, even though I know I'm not gonna post it. It's like, I'm like, fucking projecting myself into the future that I'm not a part of. But is the stuff that you would just categorically never photore of? No, no, I would,

it would be like times with friends, I come on a hike with some friends or whatever, but I'm in nature and I feel like I'm supposed to be, I'm primitive man here and I shouldn't have my phone out because it feels gush, somehow to do it or whatever. You know what I mean? It's like, here I am at the top of the map, but it's not. It's here I am with my friend that I've just taken a hike with and I really want to remember this. So maybe I'll frame it and put it on my wall at some point or something. Like, that seems like all of that stuff's a good idea. That's

a good use of technology up until the point at which you, everything becomes an only fans for yourself. I don't know. I'm possibly slightly more radical than that in the sense that, well, I think about when I run a lot, so I'll run. Red flag. You left, I run, it's just, you know, every, so I run a lot. And one of the reasons I run is because I can't do that, and whilst simultaneously scrolling. Like I, the reason-

But you can left, actually, you can do it in between sets. The reason I obsess about all of this stuff is because I'm so, so, so hard-wired to the rage machine. Like I'm so plugged into the internet, which is why I find myself kind of wrestling with the outer limits of it at all. And one of the reasons I run and one of the reasons I treat that as absolutely sacrosanct space in my life is because it's physically impossible to do that while simultaneously scrolling. And I have an absolutely cast on rule for myself that it doesn't matter how beautiful the scene, doesn't matter how gorgeous the sun

rise when I've gone for like a two hour dawn run and I'm out in the middle of nowhere, I will not stop and photograph it. I will not stop and record that because I don't want to allow space for that imaginary audience. See there, again, there's no reason. I understand why you do that. I think that's a noble set of rules to set for yourself. The reason that that has happened is because of the social media side, not because of the photoside. Let's say that you had a beautiful photo album of all of the beautiful sunsets that you'd ever seen. It is a is again this sort of crossing over of the barrier of not just this is for me, but that there is something inbuilt into technology that kind of like infect gets into me.

And if I open my phone, oh my god, what if I see a fucking notification from Twitter and that I'm sucked into a scroll of all of my entire run is ruined and stuff like that. I say it's a shame that something which can be, you know, my videographer's got this, like real special sort of point and click camera that is very low friction, and he bought it specifically, even though he had all of the kit in the world, but he bought this very specific camera,

which is just point and shoot, and all it does is that. And he bought that to remove the friction and remove the performative nature of this. So I just think it's an interesting blend, but we were talking before about how people who put a lot of themselves online, they can have unforeseen repercussions. I guess if a lot of people are clustering together over their political opinions, and if you even pseudonymously post hard-cop political opinions on the internet, eventually the person that you're potentially looking to date

is, presumably, we're gonna get exposed to whatever it is that you do online. And if you are a hardcore, if you're fucking sprung-age pervert or something, it's like, oh, all right, like, and now I have this entire other side of you that needs to be folded into our dating pool. And I learned from Scott Galloway, in 1960, one in 25 parents had concerns about their child

marrying someone from the opposite political party. By 2018, almost half of Democrat parents and a third of Republican parents had such concerns and a third of each party sees the other party as an enemy. So given this sort of clustering around political opinions, more than many other things, and a lot of people doing the pseudonymous, anonymous, shit posting online thing, you are potentially creating a future in which your entire mating pool has been restricted by opinions that you had six months ago, and you've got the choice between either lying to somebody about your

shit posting online thing or trying to somehow fold that into a conversation that they can be accepting of. I'm not even sure how you resolve that. I mean, I'm fortunate. I'm immensely blessed in that my husband and I met some time ago. And this has just never really been, you know, before even really before you were an opinion spray. Before I was a professional opinion

have a long time before I was a professional opinion have. And really long before political polarization was anywhere near its current level of completely abatchic crazy. So, I before political polarization was anywhere near its current level of completely about it crazy. So, I mean, it was completely academic. And honestly, honestly, Chris, the advice I give to anybody who's single and extremely online is, date somebody who's just not very online. You can only have one very online person in a relationship, you know, except in the most unusual circumstances. Yeah, not two. Because anecdotally, from younger friends, I know who are also opinion-havours, whether

anonymously or under their own faces. anecdotally, it's a real problem. Well, I mean, one right-winger non who I chat to periodically, who shall remain nameless, told me that, I mean, I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but essentially, he has a real problem because if he, like, he says, your choices between an ego, a right-wing ego, and they're generally, like, a little,

they can be on the unstable side, or somebody who doesn't know anything about your opinions, in which case, how on earth are you going to explain what you do, what you spend all day doing online? And furthermore, what's gonna happen when she finds out about your opinions on the internet? It's not gonna be great, it's a real problem. So how are you supposed to form any kind of a genuine,

mutually satisfying relationship under those circumstances? I don't know the answer. I mean, I suppose I come back again to digital modesty and the idea that we have to reserve some space for intimacy, which is protected from the imaginary audience that we have on the internet. And actually, I think in some ways, what the Anons do is wise, in that sense, because by virtue of being a non, they've already drawn a very clear boundary. They said, if you want to stay, if you're a non and you want to stay a non, there's a

whole swath of stuff that you just can't share. You can't really post anything about where you are or what you do for a living or anything that's too close to what your day-to-day activity is. And so that creates just by, it's a very blanket way of setting some boundaries on what you're willing to share. But for the rest of us, it's a real challenge, knowing where to draw those lines and where to protect what's just yours and what belongs to you and the people you love. Yeah, Douglas taught me a couple of years ago, keep your private life private. And I think, you know, one of the things that people can see is that relationships and make-ups and break-ups and the vicissitudes of your personal

life can be a very effective wedge to begin levering, to be able to create an audience, right? It's the same as, it's the same as every person who decides to call out to begin levering, to be able to create an audience, right? It's the same as, it's the same as every person who decides to call out some other internet commentator and have an argument with them. That's a very effective way to garner attention and eyeballs. But at what cost, what does it say about you,

what sorts of conversations does it open up? The machine always wants more. Yeah, correct. Doesn't matter what, how it open up? The machine always wants more. Yeah, correct. Doesn't matter what how much you feed at the machine always wants more. If you think that having a relationship is hard, try having a relationship with a couple of million people who are also invested in the outcomes of your relationship. Right. Every so often I see a non-s with a bit of a platform.

It somehow comes out that two people who have a bit of a platform of having a relationship with one another. And all of a sudden everybody cares and everybody wants, and I'm like, why am I even invested in this? I have no idea who these people are. But I don't know, maybe it's just a byproduct of being otherwise relatively atomized and there's a basic human need to sort of feel like you have a wider community.

I wonder if a little bit of it is kind of like, who wins in a fight between Batman and Superman. Like who gets into a relationship? They just please say more, I don't know what you mean. Well, like you've got two people, both of whom you know individually, and they are now in a relationship together. Right, right, right.

And you go, oh, what happens if these two worlds collide or something? And you know, Brett Cooper got engaged the other day, and she announced on the internet that it was like the back of her fiance's head Maybe the side of his arm and his shoe or something and it's like this the first and last time that the internet's gonna See a part of like my husband's body. He's an obfiance his body He's not interested in being famous and I really like him for that and that's what you've got that like a one-sided internet relationship

And she did a little bit of time talking about it, and now she's just gonna move on. But yeah, you gotta be careful. And again, to kind of sing the song for the people who don't have a following or a desire to monetize it or any of the other things, it is a genie that does not go back in the box. Toothpaste does not go back in the tube

because once there are photos of things that you have on the internet, the place that you live, the kids that you have, like little stuff like, you know, if you take a photo of your kid in the school uniform on the first day of school, guess what? That school uniform identifies which fucking school they go to. So yeah, very, very interesting. Talking about this, I found a study that I think is kind of associated. A survey was sent out breaking down whether participants of different political ideologies

would refuse to date a current only fans worker and an only fans subscriber. Percentages of participants who would not date a current only fans worker. Left leaning 43, moderate 63, right leaning 84. Percentages of women who would not date a current only fan subscriber, left leaning 70, moderate 78, right 84. So right is 84 for both, but there are way more left leaning people who would date an only fan's worker than would date an only fan's subscriber. And I think that that says kind of quite a lot about some of the signaling that people on the left are looking to do at the moment,

that like sex work is real work, and you know, you can monetize yourself as you wish. But there is still an inherent ICC from women to the men who are a part of that ecosystem. I would be curious to hear like what the methodology was and whether there was any effort to control for preference falsification. How so?

Well, I mean, when you think about what orthodoxy is on the left, particularly around sex workers work and yadda yadda, I'd be willing to bet that there would be a subset of people who asked, would you be willing to date an onlyf's work, would lie? And even if they weren't actually, even if, actually, honestly, if you ask them in the pub, privately off the record, they'd be like, yeah, no, no, that gives me theic. If you ask them in that sort of a context, they would give, they would give them morally approved answer for their political tribe, which is, oh yeah, that's fine, sex work as well. Or, I don't know, maybe some of them genuinely don't care, but I'm willing to bet that it's a higher proportion actually of men on both sides of the political spectrum. And what do you learn about the wouldn't date a current only fan subscriber thing?

Okay, so the difference between, well, a guy who's addicted to porn is fundamentally low status. I think it's morally acceptable across the entire political spectrum to dunk on lonely masturbatory horndogs. That's like nobody cares about them. That's, that's, you know, in cells are low status. So, so, so, yeah. The births and the porn addicts. Yeah, the simps, the perverts and the porn sick, like losers, like nobody cares about them,

everyone's happy to dunk on them. So there's less of a pressure to preference falsification, whereas women in the sex industry have a much heftier architecture of sort of moral hectoring around them, at least on the left. So that would be my read on what's going on there with preference falsification. What did you learn after the release of the Barbie movie?

Did you reflect on sort of what that did culturally? Did it do anything culturally? I think there was an awful lot of conversations around what true feminist power, feminine power means and whether or not there is still this sort of rampant patriarchy that is kind of keeping women down and so on and so forth. And then there was the right-wing reaction and there was the left-wing reaction to the right-wing reaction and all the rest of it. So I thought it was interesting. Anything that Ben Shapiro needs

to do a 45-minute video about after he's watched Dressed as Ken, I thought was an interesting yeah, I thought it was an interesting opportunity. My favorite read on the Barbie movie was that it was a straightforwardly reactionary text that it was arguing fundamentally against feminism and arguing fundamentally for women as for the embodied differences between men and women. There was nothing progressive or feminist about it at all. How so? What would you say to the people who are like, how could you say this? Obviously, it was pushing back against men and men were on the receiving end of all of

the jokes and they laughed at them and all the rest of the things. But pregnant Barbie was expelled from the Barbieverse. I mean, there's no darker commentary on the boundaries of liberal feminism. I mean, this is what I spend my entire professional career harping on a black Christian. It's the fact that liberal feminism has a mother shaped blind spot. And it's right there in the film.

It's as though, I mean, if it was meant as a liberal feminist text, it's a liberal feminist text that's telling on itself in a sort of compulsive verbal diary, rich way. And this is the reactionary read of the Barbie movie. I mean, you know, from, I suppose you could say that it's in the night like a good piece of art is never a straightforward, a piece of political propaganda. You know, it doesn't work. Like, good stories are never straightforward moral lectures. Good stories always contain the other perspective and good stories are always just more complicated than that. But even if it was intended as a piece of feminist propaganda, it told on itself

in some powerful ways. I'm including by that detail of expelling pregnant Barbie from the Barbieverse. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. It's a healthy alternative to sugary electrolyte drinks, and it is the best way that I have started my morning every single day for over three years now. It contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients or any other junk. Your adenosine system that caffeine acts on isn't active

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I didn't get round to actually finding out, I just harped on myself. What would you say some of the ways that people might not realize that culture could be anti-family? Well, I can give you a very straightforward anecdote. So I don't live in London. I live out in the Boonies. I have traveled into London with a toddler in a push chair, and occasionally somebody will help you up and down the steps on the tube with your push chair. Sometimes people do this on the top of the line, sometimes people don't. But like nobody will really give you the time of day.

Nobody looks at your kid. I'm not sure that I could explain why. I've also traveled into London with a dog. Everybody wants to talk to your dog. Right. Is it not just that dogs are better than humans cross the board? No, your dog is beautiful and very lovely, but it's impossible to be better than a dog, I think.

That's the way it works. You only say that because you don't have kids. True, fair enough. Look, here's the thing that I've also realized. Dog walks past you don't have kids. True, fair enough. Look, here's the thing that I've also realized. Dog walks past you, everybody. A dog is kind of like, it's the world's pet. It's not your pet because you were allowed to go over and tap it on the head and what's your name

and blah, blah, blah, blah. If somewhat presumably, it might be nicer if more people acknowledge your daughter as she walked by. But if they start coming over and patting her on the head and- Think of it in other countries, that actually happens. I mean, you may be not the feeding treats, knowledge your daughter as you walk by. But if they start coming over and patting her on the head and then- Think of it in other countries, that actually happens. I mean, you may be not the feeding treats, but in other countries, like people respond

to a random child completely differently. You get warm looks, you get interactions from strangers. It's only in Britain that people are like, oh, I must not look at your child. And I don't know that I don't fully understand the psychology behind not looking at somebody else's child, I'm not wanting to even acknowledge that there's a little person in the cinema.

Do you want to do something very distinctive about it? Do you under if it's like the non-sredar thing that people are so concerned of being seen as like some latent sexual predator? There is, for men, that's definitely a factor. And I know that because I've spoken about it with male friends and peers who confirm to me that they'll be very cautious about interacting with mothers and children in a public setting because they're terrified of being labeled in that way.

And I think there's something really toxic about that and something. Well, I've found, I think I've told you this that over the last few years, my paternal instinct to start to kick in and children have gone from being super annoying and lame to kind of cute. So I see a child now, like let's say it's like some little girls being walked along by her mother or father or whatever in the park near where I live. And I'm like, I'm like a grin at whoever the over the top go over the top. I'm like, I'm

doing this work. And I It's just this is huge. Yeah, well, it's enough water. You're highly performance athlete. And then like have a grin at the child as they walk past and then think, oh, fucking hell, I'm the strange, I'm like the 30's year old man. They're the pocket full of worth as originals. Precisely correct. It's really dark.

It's really dark. It's really dark. And I want, I mean, either total number of non-syncs today is no higher actually than it was 50, 30, 30, 50 years ago, if anything. But the level of panic is so much greater. Right, so the anti-child accepting and pleasantry culture isn't helping to reduce the non-sing rate.

It's just making life for. It's just making life low in the country. It's just making life low in the country, and kids, like kind of more lame. I mean, it's very, it's difficult. I don't know that I'd be cautious about drawing clear cause and lines between those things, and whether the stranger danger and all of that panic is a cause or an effect, I'd be hesitant to speculate without a bit more data. But none of it helps you to feel any more part of a community when you're existing in public with a child, let alone multiple children. Right, does it feel alienating a little bit?

Well, I mean, it's particularly palpable when you've got very small children, because I mean, before, once your kid is in school, you're sort of in this, you're kind of part of an ecosystem at that point. You know, you're part of the school mom's WhatsApp group and you're part of a community and you know, there are events you go to and you see the same kids around at brownies or whatever. And so, after you sort of start to fit in with a fabric of other people and you do realise that actually some, I mean if you live in a small town as I do at least, you know, that

if you're fortunate enough to live somewhere like that, then that something of that fabric is still there even if you do have to go looking for it a little bit. But when you're a very new mum, particularly when it's your first, or in my case, my only, it feels like you've just fallen off the edge of the world into somewhere completely different. Old women will smile at you on the street, but pretty much nobody, it's very hard to establish where you fit at all, apart from that. There's a lot, you know, going back to kind of, I guess, Barbie's cultural commentary. There's a lot of talk about the crisis of masculinity at the moment.

If I was to make a prediction for the next sort of five to 10 years, I think that I would project out that there will be a big crisis of femininity coming down the pike, at least a little bit. I think that it can't be the case that women continue to grow up because there is a dearth of good male role models, but the female role models are no better, the only difference is that they're allowed

to be on TV more, that they get more airtime and that when women have problems there is a little bit more mainstream sympathy. I think that's probably true. I mean, I suppose I would frame it very slightly differently. Like the problem, as I see it, isn't it's not necessarily just a crisis of masculinity or a crisis of femininity. It's a total crisis of embodied humaneness, which hits the sexes differently, and which is downstream of having developed a culture

in which almost nothing about our physical bodies makes very much difference at all. At least if you live in, if you do a knowledge-based, if your occupation is in the world of information, I mean, if you're an oil rig work or obviously your physical body matters a lot, to an extent, if you do something physical. But those, as a proportion of the economy has been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, with, with industrial, de-industrial, first, first, with the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, rural depopulation as agriculture industrialized and then with the industrial, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, and the number of people who work in the world of information who's been growing. And I mean, if you work in the world of information, it doesn't matter what shape your body.

Gender neutral occupation. Yeah, exactly. That they're all gender neutral occupations in theory, any of us could be driving a spreadsheet. It doesn't matter. You know, and... Driving a spreadsheet. And arguably, I mean, the same goes arguably to a great extent for being a professional opinion, however, it doesn't matter what sex you are. The keyboard wielders can be the same sex.

Right. It doesn't matter. And there's a real, there's a concrete question which faces confronts all of us in that context, which is to what extent does do our bodies even matter. And I think really this is what the gender ideologues are pushing out from the opposite direction. They're making a very strong statement that what shape my body is doesn't matter so much so in fact that I'm entitled to remodel mine as I see fit and then and then making building a whole perfect political platform on the basis of that premise and and what else but but everybody is confronted with the same question even people who are not signed up to the whole sort of meat lego world view everyone's confronted with the same question if I'm driving a spreadsheet or being a professional opinion however like what difference does it even matter you know cares? Who cares what shape my body is?

Is masculinity, or what does it mean to be a man or to be a woman when we're all just disembodied heads on the internet? I don't know the answer to that, but I grapple with it every day. Well, it's definitely something I think that people grapple with, and ultimately, given that work is maybe one of the most important things that you do, that might contribute. But there will be times where your biology and your predisposition smash up against your nature and the experiences that you have in life.

I completely agree. And I think this is what we, this is what it would benefit all of us to, to be more, to be talking more about and to be leaning more into. And I mean, sometimes it, you, I see people making early attempts at that, or sort of trying to find ways into that. And you get these sort of ridiculous kind of trans subcultures, for example, who are trying to find ways to be men and women in a sort of post human age, which is really kind of what we're talking about here. And it kind of doesn't work. And it's kind of cringe. And often, I mean, what would be an example? Well, I mean, okay, so backing up a bit. So there was a real, like among the alt-right in particular,

this is something which I've been reading into a bit recently, among the alt-right, you know, in between sort of 2016 and maybe 2020, there was a real boom in influences of both sexist, but actually quite a lot of young women who were calling for, you know, pushing back against the kind the modern degeneracy and saying we should all re-embrace traditional gender roles and we should have more traditional set-up relationships and that we could fight back against the collapse of everything in that way. As it turned out, a lot of the women who actually tried doing that just absolutely hated it

or the relationships were really messed up and a lot of the relationships were abusive. And there are women who are coming out of that now having survived an alt-right attempt at a tried relationship who are just massively beaten up and traumatized by the experience. And who are now the unhinged subset of post-alt-right radical feminists. What was their experience of the relationship?

Well, I mean, I... If you want an example of somebody who went all the way through one variant of this, you should look up Lauren Southern's story. Okay. I mean, you know, without wanting to make any comment on her opinions or her political trajectory, but I mean, she went through something along these lines and ended up living in a trailer park with a toddler, having married somebody who was possibly a fared. It was all full-worship. That's full-washy.

Right, it was a absolutely crazy arc. And having leaned all the way into being a kind of alt-right, anti-feminist influencer. Yeah, she ended up as a single mother living in a trailer park. And is now, I don't know what she's doing now. But yeah, there are a great many people who sincerely tried to kind of re-synthesise something like the old, the old wave of men and women interacting and have found that it just just blew up underneath them. And I don't know for all I know there were there are relationships who formed and the which are still flourishing, but there are a lot,

there are a lot of others that went extremely wrong. What is it that's blowing it up? I don't know. I honestly, I think like, I think trying to reverse engineer a set of social sex differences without the material underpinnings, which created those different, those different sex social norms, is just, it's a full-zarrant, honestly. What like, can you get specific? Like vague, vague specific? I I'll have to come at this from the other direction So so one of the themes one of the themes in I've written about in feminism against progress is the those ways in which like men and women have both always worked Yeah, at least up until the beginning of the industrial era men and women always worked

But both sexist did and they did so complementarily. Ivan Elitsch writes beautifully about this in gender, which I strongly recommend as a book if you're interested in the deep history of the relations between the sexes. And he writes about how in pre-modern, pre-modern, agrarian, largely agrarian life, you know, men's work and women's work were always different, and what constitutes men's work or women's work will vary depending on the context. But they're always different and they're always defined in relation to one another and they're always ambiguously complementary. He describes us like the relationship between your right hand and your left hand. They always know where they are in relation to one another and they're not the same

but they but they mirror one another and they work together and that's and the nature of men's work and women's work in a kind of's been like a harvesting and processing procedure. Right, exactly. Exactly. And there are even down to the language used, down to the social spaces occupied, even down to the kinds of tools which are considered acceptable for one sex to use rather than the other. And he describes villages where it would be considered deeply humiliating

for a man to touch the tools that would be normally used by a woman. It was just completely unthinkable. It's just fucking rolling pin. the tools that would be normally used by a woman. It was just completely unthinkable. It was just fucking rolling pen. Exactly. It would be utterly, utterly unthinkable. Get off my pencil and mortar. For one sex to touch the tools which are reserved for the other.

How interesting. And so this is, and that emerges out of a material context in which everybody needs to work in order for survival to, in order for life to happen. And what happened, you know, as the world has industrialized, and we've entered, I mean, what he calls the transition from vernacular gender, which is the ambiguously complementary world of men's work and women's work, into the world of economic sex, which he describes as more sexist than the world of vernacular gender. Because although life is less gendered in practice, by pretending that everything is unisex,

you end up with women being structurally disadvantaged because tacitly the default becomes the masculine one. And this is what Karolina and Kriado Perez talk about, which is another great book, Invisible Women, where she writes about how so much of the built environment and the physical environment and tools and norms and default medical defaults and crash test dummies and all kind of surgical instruments and so on are all constructed for a male default.

And the women's distinct physiology, which is subtly different and something in some biomedical context, extremely different, and something in some biomedical context, extremely different, is just quietly rendered invisible. And this is really what Nellichis is talking about when he talks about the more sexist nature of economics acts, by refusing, by pretending that men and women are interchangeable, it effectively renders women.

You've got a male default. Interestingly, I guess when you move across into the world of mental health, you're looking at a female default. I think that's very true. But the intervention. Just bringing this back to the question of why trying to reverse engineer ambiguous complementarity

in the world of economic sex. Now that we've got that vocabulary in place, I can maybe explain what I mean when I say it's a bit of a full zaran. Because in a sense, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. We can't go back to the world to the world before modernity. We're stuck with it now. We're stuck with this world in which everybody is pretending

that men and women are interchangeable. And to a significant extent in the world of bits and bytes, we kind of are. And under those circumstances to say, well, we're just going to decree that we're going to have a pre-modern division of sex labour within our private home. I mean, it can work, like for some for some people it kind of does, but I think you just need to be a little bit less doctrinaire about it. And anybody who sets out to be rigidly ideological about it is setting themselves up for a toxic dynamic and potentially domestic abuse. I mean, in practice, if you ask most married heterosexual married couples,

they will, they'll, if you pretty much any of them will tell you that there are jobs that he does and the job, there are jobs that she does, because that's just how it falls out and because you both prefer it that way. I mean, I can, I can give you, yeah, take a, what's that? Were it not for digital modesty, I could give you examples from my own family, but I'm not going to. It's like the specialization of labor almost, right, but domestic specialization of labor. But there are, I mean, there are instances in my own my own family where the division of labor is counterintuitive. If you were coming at it from a rigid doctrine at a point of view, it wouldn't be the way it is.

But it works that way because we both like it that way. So moving forward in that case, the we should return to a tradcon history in the future is that that's just a dead end as far as your concern? Well, I think we need to be, we just need to be a bit more attentive to where we are. And I think we can afford to be a little bit more respectful of the dynamics within individual couples.

I mean, it's generally like there are patterns which emerge in any given heterosexual couple that's been together long-term, there'll be things which are more typical of the male partner and things which are more typical of the female partner. And that's fine. We shouldn't be trying to fight against those stereotypes if they're what works for people.

But I don't see much point in imposing kind of, you should be doing this or you shouldn't be doing that. Because ultimately, people need guidelines. People do need guidelines. People can figure out what works best for them. I mean, here's one example. Talking in very general terms, I mean, I've made the argument that the problem with tradwives as such is that they're just not trad enough in the sense that what they're harking

back to is a sort of mid-20th century template, which was actually only true for a very small subset of the middle class, which is distinct in itself distinctively modern, because in pre-modern times all women worked, apart from the very, very richest. Right, so you're saying, I can send it further back agrarian,

grab your pestle and mortar and hoe and get working. So the question I want to ask is what does a 21st century version of the pre-modern in productive household look like? The basic economic unit is your household. And so you've agreed, you're all in it together, you're there for the long term, everything that you do, you do for the team. And then it's just a matter of agreeing, of figuring out how to get the best out of everybody. And I'm not interested in legislating for any given couple what that looks like. And in a modern context,

where most of us work in the world of bits and bytes anyway. I don't know, I can't say, I can't make that determination for you. But there will be a way. When you form your household and you make your decision about how you can get the best out of your productive household, there'll be a patent. And I think there's no shame in accepting that sometimes that can fit into a more traditional mold. What was that insight that you had about women needing to develop a strategy for not having it all?

Well, I guess that's just a variation on talking about productive households. Because, again, in feminism against progress, the analogy I've given is weaving, which I think is a very powerful illustration of what happened to women's work at the beginning of the industrial revolution. In that for some sort of 10, 20, 30,000 years prior to the industrial revolution, weaving was always women's work. And there are very, there are solid practical reasons for that. You can weaving is something, I mean, the, how sol need's textiles, right? You know, you don't have textiles actually. Somebody needs to make textiles.

You know, you need them clothes and for all sorts of different things. So, so somebody's got to do the weaving. And somebody's also got to look after the kids happily, weaving and looking after kids are fairly compatible, because you can raise a loom off the floor. You can put down your repetitive, you can do it whilst keeping an eye on toddlers or small people running around. And it's interruptible and it's social.

So it's ideal work to be getting on with while you've also got some children underfoot. And so for millennia, millennia after millennia, weaving has been women's work. But weaving was also one of the first industries to move out of the home into factories. And at that point, at that point, it was very, it was much more difficult for it to continue to be women's work. And Those working class women who went to work in the textile mills had real dilemmas on their hands, because what you meant to do with your breastfed baby,

there were horror stories about how women tried their best to cope with that, babies drugged with opium or left to starve or left in adequate care of awful stuff. And then there are those women who respond by just saying, OK, fine, we're not going to make the textiles anymore. So we're just going to focus on different stuff. But the point is that if you're weaving

is a fine example of the kind of work which in pre-modern times took place within a productive household. is a fine example of the kind of work which can, which in the, in pre-modern times, took place within a productive household. And I suppose the question I have is, you know, what kinds of work, like let's say you want to be a mum, and let's say you've got small children around underfoot.

What's the equivalent work that's a bit interruptible, that's a bit social, that's a bit, you can pick it up and put it down again. That's not what people think about when they think about have it all though, right? It's... Well, you can't have it all, can't. Everybody knows that.

Well, they ought to. Like enough feminists prior to me have leveled with the world, you can't have it all. You know, you can have a lot. And you can have a great time doing it. But you can't have it all all the time all at once. You have to do something's one after another. Louise said that she worked it out and she was doing 40 hours a week of breastfeeding,

like a full, a more than full time job of just that part, just that one vertical underneath the child having process. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's not, that's not something you can outsource because it's not just food. You know, there's a whole, there's a foundational layers of your child. Sweet mother making, child making. A foundational aspect of your child's capacity for self-regulation and your child's capacity for being being an integrated person

are laid down in those early interactions. It's not something which can be subcontracted. Do you think that? It's a profoundly important one. This was something that Mary Eberstadt said to me. She thinks that motherhood's a mnemetic desire, at least in some regard, that, you know, one of her answers to the birth rate decline is that fewer mothers, beget fewer mothers. I think there's some truth in that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you think, I'm trying to think,

how many babies did I ever hold before my own? Not very many, to be honest. If any, it's possible that the first baby I ever held was my own. Or if not, if not the first, it'd be very certainly very close to the first. And I was in my late 30s. You just think this is crazy. You know, there was not even that long ago. There was a time when you'd have been left holding younger siblings or

other people's kids or you'd have been around little babies. And it wouldn't have been frightening in the same way. But it's, you know, one of the reasons, you know, middle-class older mothers like me sit and sit there, you know, with our late stage pregnancies, frantically consuming baby books, is because we just don't have that practice around us anymore. Because families have got smaller and extended families have got more scattered and extended families have got smaller as well. So as Mary so eloquently explains in her, you know, she writes a lot about the shrinking of the family and the atomizing effect that that happened and the loss that that imposes on.

Adam Lane Smith's got this thing about how, don't forget that moving out of the house at 18 is a siaop by the mortgage industry to turn one family into two homes. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, you can make the argument, same argument for the divorce industry. You know, there are, there are genuinely opinion pieces out there from divorce lawyers arguing that divorce is good for the GDP, which is it? That's interesting. I mean, me a little bit. It's kind of dark. Me a califa, a very famous porn star, said, um, a marriage is nothing sacred. It's a recent

video she put it. Marriage is nothing sacred. It's just a piece of paper if the person that you're with isn't helping you grow you need to let them go. Obviously, meekly, for as a Paragon of successful relationships. And I would respectfully disagree with the sentiment. And I just thought I I had this really, really great guy and I'm gonna send you the episode when it goes up, this dude called Mads Larson. And he tracked all of the different Western mating ideologies over time

and how they were adaptive for the particular cultural time and he goes through, the agrarian, the romantic, and he calls the one that we're in now, the confluent era. I mean, the coinage which I've used in the book is, it's not actually my coinage, I forget the sociologist who coined it, but the self-expressive marriage, which I think is a very good and really what the quote, the quote from Khalifa that you just, you just often is a perfect expression of the self-expressive marriage.

This idea that, you know, your partner is a vector for your self-actualisation and the moment they stop delivering on that front, you can kick them to the curb. You know, there's no sense of mutual solidarity, there's no sense of being in it for the long haul, there's no commitment to anything which is bigger than yourself, necessarily. Except in this very transactional sense of delivering goods for you. And the moment that starts to falter or you go through a rough patch for any reason, you're wholly entitled to sever the contract and go and look for it somewhere else. It's incredibly consumerist paradigm.

But I argue that the issue with that is that we don't live in the age of... We no longer live in the age of economic abundance, which underpinned and gave rise to that marriage ideology. It's just, except for the wealthiest who are just rich enough to survive divorce and to have their children come out, only mildly fucked up rather than deep. For everybody else who's further down the food chain, divorce and single parenthood is an absolute catastrophe for a great many of the women who go through it, because

that's almost always the women who end up with with with care of the children. And I mean, the feminization of poverty, quote, unquote, is directly downstream of the breakdown of families. Yeah, I mean, it comes back to it again. The luxury beliefs idea, Rob, with you this morning. And it just bears repeating again, the best thing that I've learned from you and you taught me it before your book was even out. The rules that are made by the upper classes are luxury beliefs that don't impact them. They impact the poorest women and the poorest families and the poorest children. So it is one straight line from chivalry is good

and you should hold the door open for women that you don't know as you go in and out of a hotel, right down to you shouldn't be your wife. Like it is a single, straight, very slippery slope that gets slippery at the close that you get to the bottom. Yeah. I mean, and what manifests as holding a door open at the top of the food chain is might, if you're lucky as a woman manifest at the top of the food chain is might, if you're lucky as a woman manifest at the bottom of the food chain, as intervening when you see a woman being assaulted on a tube platform. And the more you attack, the holding the door open, the less likely you are as a sole

traveler in late at night, you know, with no, who can't afford to get a taxi, to have somebody come to your aid if you find yourself being attacked on a tube platform alone. Yeah, well, and again, obviously, if you've got a denial of sex differences, well, why does the man need to step in? Just so, just so. And, you know, as though the upper body strength and the physical weight and the height and all of those things had all suddenly been magically flattened by the fact that we're talking to each other on computer screens.

Yeah, I was talking to Douglas about this yesterday, that gentleman who's currently about to be on trial in New York for choking a guy out that was, I think, dragging him. It sounds as though he's going to be acquitted, but that was an insane trial. That was an insane effort to lynch somebody who was obviously doing a public service. But think about how many people now in the interim while this case is still an open loop, and maybe even after if he gets acquitted, he's acquitted. Yes, the tutelary effect for any man tempted to intervene in a public situation like that is a fucking scary. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't want to be me too, or the next George Floyd case or any of that stuff. Exactly, it's an absolute disaster. Yeah, it's scary.

What's your thoughts on the surrogacy industry? I think it should be banned all of it. Band? Yeah, across the board. I don't think surrogacy should be a thing. Why? Little babies need their mothers. And mothers are not in...

No woman is not a factory. Gestation is not a process of manufacturing to produce a product which can then be handed over willy nilly to another carer pregnancy doesn't just create a baby pregnancy creates a mother It pregnancy rewires your brain. It transforms you through a series of you know, you know You get sort of hormone bathes for nine months over the you know over the course of that your body changes Your your breasts change. Everything about your changes and it completely re-orients you towards... Ready to receive...

Ready to receive baby and to prioritise the care of baby. So in a set, this is not just true across human species, it's true across countless animal species. You're primed for attachment and you're primed for attunement to your child. And of course this is not to say that, this is not to say that adoptive parents don't do a brilliant job and they're a countless adoptive parents who have wonderful jobs and care for, and care wonderfully for their adoptive children. However, everybody accepts that a motherless child is off to a weaker start than a child born into a loving home with their mother and father. And there's a reason for that.

And it's because the attunement that come, that basic biological level of attunement and attachment that's primed through the process of pregnancy is essential from birth onwards to laying the absolute foundations of what it means to be an integrated person. And to say, I think it's just profoundly morally wrong to say we should create a new life with the express intention of severing that bond at birth, because somebody, just for the sake of adult desires, I think that's profoundly inverting the duty of care that we owe to dependent infants. You know, we should be prioritizing their needs, not ours. Did you see the episode I did with Dr. Animateon

about life of dad and about how, yes, this is how the sentence is so good. So she looked at the role of fathers kind of throughout all of her child's upbringing to, they leave the home and talked about how I think that one of her pregnancies was particularly difficult. And then she and the child had been taken away after the birth, which was successful and she was okay. And the dad was just left in there. No one even came up to him. And he just thought that

like, mum could be dead, a child could be dead. And no one ever spoke to him about it. You know, all of the pre-child classes, I don't know what they're called. All of them are focused on mum, mum's the one that's going to give birth. It's her body that goes through the stress, etc., etc. But she said, fathers can deal with post-child depression, what's it called? Post-poster. Thank you, post-partum depression. Dads can get that. There's this really, really common issue that fathers encounter, which I saw first hand,

and then she talks about in the book, which is that wife is pregnant, future dad to be knows that wife is pregnant, six, seven, eight, nine months deep. Dad doesn't feel like he cares about child. Dad doesn't have any change in paternal instinct. Dad doesn't have any cascades. The bond develops after birth for dads. It develops.

There's plenty of evidence. But they feel guilt and shame. And I was sat in this, I remember where I sat in Austin with this room, like 100 millionaire, 100 millionaire, billionaire, millionaire, millionaire, 100 millionaire, like big hitters all the way around this room. And it was one of these, you know,

guys, if anyone's got anything that they're, you know, they want a bit of advice on, we've got a room of people that are pretty capable in here and you can say what you want. This dude was like, wipe safe months pregnant, don't think I'm going to love the kid. What do I do? And dude sat across from him was like, give it six months after the birth, everything will change.

But that fear and the guilt and the shame, and can I tell my partner, does this mean I don't love my partner, does this mean I'm going to be a terrible father? You know, all of these things, like that one insight from that episode, I haven't had so many tags and messages from guys in a really long time. I thought I was broken, I thought I was defective, or I am going through this right now. My wife is X month pregnant or the child is three months old. I am like, I just feel nothing for this kid. And it just takes longer for me.

Okay, so now bringing it back to surrogacy. So now imagine that instead of it being the dad who takes that long to develop the bond with the child, now it's both parents, because neither parent has been through the biological priming process of pregnancy. Now imagine, I can't prove that this is going to impact on the life of a newborn baby, but I would bet you any money that it will. And I think it's just profoundly wrong to take that immediate, immediate love of motherhood away from to intentionally deprive a child of that in the name of adult desire.

I just think that's profoundly more early wrong. We shouldn't be allowing it. I think I saw a video, I was told about a video of one of the Kardashians. Yes. One of the Kardashians, who was very open about this. And she procured a child by Saragasy. And they did it. Secured.

Yep, it's human trafficking, Chris. It's human trafficking. Just using your own genetics. Yeah, it's human trafficking using sometimes your own genetics. So she procured a baby by Saragasy. And was very open about the fact that she really struggled to bond with the baby. And I was thinking, you know, so okay, like, we can all empathize with you, maybe. But can we just think about what the baby's going through here?

This is a newborn baby who needs to be surrounded by love and to respond to with care and you know, nursed when everything in, had picked up and held whenever he or she needs it. And both parents are struggling to bond. Both parents are feeling nothing and both parents are struggling to bond. Both parents are feeling nothing and both parents are... There's enough nannies around to, you know, just pick it up, give it to the nanny, the nanny will continue to be there. Yeah, and I just, inside reading that, I just wept for the baby, who was still not being

centered in the story. Yeah. Even as Kardashian was talking about how she was, how, how about her emotional journey, even then the child was not being centered in the story. And I just think it's profoundly upside down. We owe a duty of care to the most dependent of all, the most vulnerable of all, which is our babies. And every time we prioritize our own desires

over those of our babies, we're failing in that duty of care. What do you mean by matwalshism? What's that? Tell me about matwalshism. This is my, I mean, I don't normally... I don't normally pick named fights with people. But when I talk about matwalshism,

this is a frustration I have sometimes with certain elements on the right. Now, this sort of anti-feminist right, if you like. And this really comes down to where my arguments come from, which is about material conditions and feminism emerging out of the technological transformations first of the industrial era and later of the cyborg era. And my argument that really we have to look at where we are in terms of the material and the technological conditions which are producing these challenges that we now face. And sometimes I find myself frustrated with those elements on the right who seem to think

that everything about modern life can stay the same except what women do and then everything will be fine. Give me an example. So for example, let me think of an example. That everything that's wrong in the dating culture will be fixed if women were just stopped being hauls. That's a very crude example, but it's a sentiment that I hear. Women just need to stop being hauls and everything will be fine.

And I'm like, well, okay, but does that mean you're going to stop shagging around? Does that mean you're going to stop having contracepted sex with random women? Does that mean you're going to stop shagging around? Does that mean you're going to stop having contraceptive sex with random women? Does that mean you're going to stop watching porn? Does that mean so many of these quote unquote, trad men have semi-public porn habits? Well, we're completely indiscriminate about liking like you sort of ethos accounts on Instagram. Whilst simultaneously surveying against, you know,

against, you know, tried women, you know, displaying more than a few square inches of skin on the internet. And I'm thinking, you know, when you look at yourselves for a minute, you know, I mean, if we're gonna have chastity, can we have fucking chastity across the board? You know, I'm all four more chastity,

but let's all be in the party, please. You know, and if it really is just about everything staying the same except what women do, then, oh yeah, to me, it's the right wing equivalent of thumb sucking. It's just failing to look at any of the deepest structural drivers of the difficulties that we face. And just retreating back into, oh, it's just the fault of those nasty women. And sometimes it is the fault of those nasty women, but not always, and it's never just us. Yeah, that's interesting. To think about that, you've got some rule of thumb about how every political movement, when it becomes mainstream, is reduced to its most idiot, possible, idiotic possible version. Yes, the most imbicillic possible version of it.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's guaranteed to be the one that goes mainstream. Well, it's just the path of the resistance of memes, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The more reductive something becomes, the more reductive it becomes. I, again, I had a conversation for two hours today about memes, and the number of times that we quoted meme first explain later, like the stickiness arms race of a lot of this stuff causes people to be able to get

ineffectual ideas across with good branding and good advertising and good marketing. And I think that definitely a lot of the stuff that's coming out with regards to mating and dating advice is a lot of the time that it's things that on the surface sounds, triggers all manner of different biases, whether it be your sort of tribalism against the other party, the other sex, whether it's the path of least resistance, the are looking for, like there's a whole host of different reasons why people end up arising at the particular conclusions

that they do. But the more it gets boiled down to a set of just doctrinal talking points, the more useless it becomes. I mean, I don't really want to get into in-sell discourse because it's not, it's actually not a terrain I'm massively familiar with. But every so often I hear these talking points which are trotted out pretty much kind of without any context or without any sense of qualification. Like the one about, you know, 20% of the men are getting 80% of the women. Stop saying that.

I haven't said that for two years. No, no, no, I'm not saying you. I'm not saying you, but people are putting it out there. But people trot it out as though it's just gospel truth. And I look around or like, you know, women won't date somebody who's less than six feet tall. And I'm like, hello, do you have eyes? Do you ever go outside? Yeah. You know, I mean, date somebody who's less than six feet tall. And I'm like, hello, do you have eyes? Do you ever go outside?

Yeah. You know, I've, I mean, yeah. This is the terminally online issue, right? And again, both of us are, and this isn't me lambasting the people that are terminally online. It's me saying that if you are kind of the same way. Hello, I'm terminally online. Yeah, but the way that the sniper tries to adjust, okay, so the wind is blowing 15 knots

east to west. Okay, so I adjust how I perceive so the wind is blowing 15 knots east to west okay so I had just how I perceive what the target is like if you spend this much time online so Louise has this theory about yourself right that'll give you which is that you've got a barbell strategy which is like extremism online and extremism touching grass and like never the tw shall meet, and the gray area is where you go to die. Right, this dark playground, where you kind of like, I think her husband calls it good screen, bad screen.

It's like, I've spent enough time on bad screen today, which is working emails, so I get some good screen time tonight, which is watching Netflix or whatever. But ultimately, you're still within the confines of the game. And, you know, said this a ton of times, the most egregious stories online are the ones that garnered the most attention

and people who don't ever spend any time not being online use those as an indication of what the real world is like, but they forget that those stories are selected for precisely because they're insane. To man leave the house, comes back, and the wife's slept with the postman and the postman's dog and now he's left to die and rubridge with diabetic foot and gluten intolerance or something.

That story is insane, which is why it's gone so much opinion and so much attention. And you don't know if it's true. And even if it is true, it's probably unrepresented. Here's a nice example of that from actually not the dating discourse, but just to illustrate the point. Yeah, there was a video that did the rounds the other day, somebody compiled some Zoomers wearing ridiculous clothes and made a little video compilation of Zoomers

wearing absurd outfits and put it out on the internet. So I'm, you know, the Zoomers are beyond redemption. Or sub-sum caption like that, you probably saw the video. That like, and they look stupid, sure. I mean, I looked stupid when I was 19 as well. I wore ridiculous clothes. And I was, I looked at this and I thought, and then later, I watched this video,

and then later that day, I drove through Cambridge, which is extremely full of young people. Like, it's very, very zoomed-in environment, Cambridge, because I had to go there for something or other. And I was looking along the streets, so thinking, is this, you know, the 20 something, you know, early 18 year old, 19 year old, 20 year old,

after one after another walks past me, wearing just normal clothes. I was looking at them thinking, no, you're not, you're not, start to really be on redemption, you're just wearing normal clothes. Yeah, where's the cat ears? Yeah, exactly, where's the cat ears

and the absurd kind of non-binary get up and the still suddenly. Technical dream coat. And the 18 inch platforms and whatever the hell else was in this stupid video. And I was thinking, no, literally, somebody's just gone and compiled the most extreme and egregious stupid clothing

that some 18-year-olds were wearing. And I've tried to generalize that to everybody. And that's just what the internet does, as you say. And when you apply that to the relationship discourse, then you end up in a situation where people are gent, especially people who are not making much of an effort for whatever reason to reality test this against what's actually happening out there,

are really struggling and are finding themselves you're sort of circling the drain a bit with in terms of their assumptions and expectations. One of my friends referred to it as a shadow boxing and imaginary headgemon, fucking and beautiful, right, that you have this thing that doesn't exist, that you're somehow compensating for and interacting with, despite the fact that gain it isn't there, and it exists with, despite the fact that gain it isn't there. And it exists in this ineffable place that everyone kind of perceives and no one ever sees, except for in this sort of virtual world, which then impacts the way that you show up. And then you get, you know, culture and counterculture occurs to, okay, well, fuck it.

Like, I'm going to become a furry or whatever, because I've seen it on the internet, and I know that it pisses off the right way, or I'm going to become a gun-toting, maggot republican, because I know that it pissed off the and I know that it pisses off the right way or I'm gonna become a gun-toting mega-republic and because I know that it pissed off the, you know, all the way down. So yeah, it's, um. I give thanks every day for the fact that I have to show up at the same time every afternoon on the school run pick up queue.

Why? I mean, it's not physically touching grass, but it does that. Socially touching grass. You know, I spend all day, like, you know, bluetooth into the rage machine, and then I go and pick up my daughter from school and I'm like, yes, actually, I can breathe that. Yeah. You know, it's not that, not of it is real.

Everyone in M&S. You know, Twitter is not, Twitter actually is real life, but it's also not real life. And it's, it's important to remind yourself of the ways in which it's not true. I think there should be for everyone hour that you spend on the internet, you should have to spend 60 seconds in the George at Aster clothing department. Like, just to be like, is the fucking normal people again? You say that I was really interested, you know, to notice in Sainsbury's, as in George, as in Mox and Spencers, that Maxi, long sleeve, Maxi dresses,

have been all the rage for some time now. Okay. And I've been I mean, I don't know. I don't know if I can. Is that one of the four wholesome of the satoreal apocalypse? I don't know. This is the thing, but I've been noticing it and I'm thinking, are we going to have a,

is this just a sign of economic downturn? Is it just that, you know, because this is well documented, the hemlines go up when they when the, when the up as the economy grows. And is it just the fact that the women are sensing the coming economic crisis? Well, I don't know. Or is it the sexual counter revolution? Or is it not?

Is it actually just a fashion? I don't know. I certainly know that. I've really noticed the trend. Self-objectification from women is correlated with wealth inequality in the local ecology. So that's an interesting one. Women seem to self-objectify and sexually objectified themselves.

So it was kind of Blake's study on the posting of sexy selfies and her justification for it in terms of the mechanism was that it shows women not only how high they could climb, but how far they could fall with a partner. And when you see those two things side by side, it's run away from a life you don't want and run to water life that you do. And that causes just something comes online. And it's like, I will wrangle myself a husband's like activate breasts. And you do that through the sort of selfies that you do. And it was some insane volume, like millions of posts that they looked at to find these correlations

on the internet, and yeah, that wealth inequality. So I definitely don't disagree that, you know, especially female behavior, but also male behavior too, can be impacted by local ecology, especially wealth inequality, GDP. I mean, we saw even, no one ever really spoke about this. I was waiting for a study to come out and someone may still do it.

I thought that casual sex was going to drop after COVID due to a pathogen fear from women, right? Women have gotten much lower threshold for disgust sensitivity quite rightly because they're more at risk of bearing some sort of burden and given that we had just talk of disease and infection and virus and so on and so forth for a very long time,

I thought that we were going to find a big after effect of that, it just turns out that all of the, then three year olds now, six year olds that like can't read and have absolutely zero social skills because they've had a mask over the face for the last three years. Well speaking as the mother of a seven-year-old that's actually not observed that's not the case amongst my daughter's cohort. That's good. You'll be pleased to know. That's good. They all seem actually to be fairly normal and well-adjusted kids.

The reading age are the reading levels for sure I think across the if you look at some of the studies that have been done, don't bow particularly well. It seems. What is deaf? What is absolutely clear is that there's a stark economic divide. There's a, and the further down the food chain you are economically, the harder the harder hit your children were. You know, for understandable reason, you know, whether or not whether it's because you

had limited social capital to, or were struggling, or were in a chaotic family, or simply had to work irrespective of lockdown. There your kids are home, and there's just nobody to watch them. For a thousand and one different reasons, it's been absolutely disastrous for poorer children. To a degree which I think is unforgivable and shouldn't be forgiven.

Yeah. What are you most obsessed by as subcultures go? Or what are you going to be focused on over the next couple of months? Is there anything that's particularly caught your eye? Actually, what I'm reviewing, I'm reviewing a leftist sociological academic text at the moment, which is kind of awful. It's called The Women of the Far Right. sociological academic text at the moment, which is kind of awful. It's called the Women of the Far Right. And I'm very interested in it as a text written by the left about the right, but I'm also interested in the, I mean, it documents, it's a sort of, it's a kind of progressive sociological study of some alt-right female vloggers from the late, from sort of 2016 to 2019, including Lauren Southern.

And it's kind of badly written, and it's kind of dated, but it's also interesting as a phenomenon. So I'm kind of, but really this is just a preamble. So one of the things I'm interested in and thinking about and really grappling with is the ambivalent position of women within the larger conservative or right wing decision movement.

Because it is ambivalent, because there are a great many right-wing men out there who really are virulent, nemasogynistic, you know, and who genuinely just think women are not people. And yet, there are a great many women out there who look at the sort of the emerging kind of doctrine or orthodoxy of the kind of the mad left.

If you need, you know what I mean by the mad left. And who just say, this is not for me. And so there's a great many women who are kind of the mad left, if you need not, I mean by the mad left. And who just say this is not for me. And so there's a great many women who are kind of between those two poles and who are genuinely quite politically homeless. And it's something I think about a lot. I don't really have any firm conclusions or strong reflections on that. Except to say this is a real phenomenon. And I don't know.

And it's like, I don't know. I mean, this sort of fits into a larger kind of reflection, I suppose, on digital cultures and where we are in the discourse, because it feels as though a great many of the trends which sort of erupted in the 2015, 2016, you know, with kind of, you know, the Trump again and all the rest of it have kind of run their course now. You know, a lot of those sort of quotequote dissident subcultures have now pretty much percolated into the mainstream. There's a whole new set of talking heads who are now pretty much, I mean even Bronze Age pervert has been doxed and is now on his foodie arc, which

is just... So where do we go from here? Because it seems like all that's left in the subculture is just this increasingly unhinged discourse about dating. I I just, I mean, I'm 44 and I've been married for 10 years, so like I've got nothing to add to that. So like, I mean, maybe I should just hang out my boots and go into something else. And I mean, I make, maybe I'll start a bakery. Or maybe, or maybe that's what I'm talking about.

And you would bronze age pervert can start the bronze age bakery. Yeah, I don't know. I think one of the reasons why everyone is always so interested in talking about the dating world One of the reasons why everyone is always so interested in talking about the dating world is that it permits everybody to have an opinion, both those who participate and those who do not. Like if you don't know how fucking NFL league goes, like what have you got to tell me about how Travis Kelsey should

like change his like QB game or something like that. It doesn't matter. Whereas for dating people do. People do have an idea of that. And because I remember when I was working in nightlife, one of my jobs was to do, I'm, okay, a copywriting. So I would write the copy for a lot of the social media posts. My business partner would do a lot more of the accounts

and kind of back office stuff. No one went up to him, looked over his shoulder and gave him shit about the way that his spreadsheet's looked. But everyone has a social media account, so everyone's a fucking expert. So everybody had, oh, mate, I wouldn't have posted that at that time. Well, that's not the hashtag that I would have used.

I thought I would definitely think that you could have done it this way. I'm like, all right, well, like, if you're gonna scrutinize me, scrutinize the fucking... Just because I'm not... Yeah, exactly. And it just, it never happened. And I think that, you know, there's a few things that people all, it's why diet is such a

breeding ground for people to argue, because everyone's got to eat. Right? Everybody has an idea about how, and it's death denialism as well. Like, no, I'm going to live longer than you. My veganism is going to beat your carnoreism, and blah, blah, blah. And ultimately, it just fucking comes down to people wanting to be able to espouse their opinions while being insulated from the impact of them.

It's best if one sort of one optimistic read we could put on that might be that, if we're all still fixated on the relations between men and women, that's a testament of sorts to the fact that the war on relationships is never going to triumph completely. Men and women do still want to be together. And they're going to try and continue to...

And to reach out this. Even if they're mud-restling, horribly, at the moment, at least on the internet. And again, Twitter is not real life, even though it is real life. And I just have to trust that somewhere, somewhere out of this messed up discourse, there are lots of perfect. And again, answer that's fucking useful. And also that there are lots of perfectly nice

and well-adjusted young men and women who are finding one another and forming nice relationships. They're just don't go anywhere near Twitter. You know when I, I just have to assume that that's also true. One of the most like sanity reinforcing periods of my year is when I go home for Christmas. And I'm at Mom and Dad's house

and the gruffalo comes on, right? And I watch the gruffalo and I think, who's this maid for? This is made for families that are sat together around the fire, whether you be shopping at waitress or shopping at little, like that's what it's built for and it works across the board. Right story. I know it pretty much by heart, I think.

Gruffler, Gruffler's a solid story. Or, you know, like the boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse, right? Like just stuff like that and it always makes me, maybe it's just because Christmas is a kind of wistful, whimsical time of year that makes everyone happy. But that's like my media equivalent of touching grass. I think that's one of the most grass-like watching experiences. So what is this built-to-end gender? It's like this very calming, what's that one with the dragon?

What's that one with the dragon? Zog? Yes, thank you. It was rhymes, which must be a nightmare to script. But yeah, all of those things. And I'm like, I, 35-year-old childless man watches children's TV. This is another warning. This is smiling at toddlers on a walk, isn't it?

But yeah, I happily watch that and it gives me, that's the stuff that my post-content clarity of that is like, ah, like everything's a bit, everything's all right, I think. I think I honestly do think we're gonna be all right. You know, I sincerely believe that it doesn't matter how hard we try and demolish our nature. It will always find a way back. I genuinely believe that even if,

even if as Louise sometimes worries, our culture is so structurally anti-natalists that we're just going to end up selecting against ourselves, that we just render ourselves extinct. But it doesn't follow from that that all humans are going to go extinct. It'll just be the ones from this culture. So some humans, some where we'll survive, and it'll be the ones who figured out how to unplug from the skin of the machine and go back to having kids And but but we we like one way or another like you the Subset of the culture which survives will be the one that figures out how to how to get past this kind of messed up point that we're in

But but some part of it will survive, you know, I think we're gonna be all right That's the white pill that I want to finish on Mary Harrington ladies and gentlemen Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all the things that you're doing. And what can expect off you over the next few minutes? I wrote regularly at Unheard. My sub-starch is reactionary feminist. You can find me on Twitter at Moving Circles. Hell yeah, thank you, Mary.

Yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah I'm fed