The Eric Metaxas Show - Mary Harrington

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

A Discussion on Transhumanism, Feminism, and Human Nature

Welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show. They say it's a thin line between love and hate, but we're working every day to thicken that line, or at least make it a double or triple line. But now here's your line-jumping host, Eric Mattaxas. This is Socrates in the studio. We are in Oxford, England, and I am thrilled to have, as my guest, Mary Harrington.

She's a UK-based writer. contributing editor at Unheard, where she has a weekly column. She also runs the reactionary feminist substack, which we will be discussing. Her book, Feminism Against Progress, focuses on women's rights in the biotech age. Her work's been published in First Things, American Affairs, New York Post, The Spectator, The New Statesman, The London Times, and the Mail on Sunday. She graduated from Oxford University in 2002 with a furrow. in English literature.

Mary Harrington, welcome. Thank you for having me, Eric. I hope I've embarrassed you at least a little bit. That's very important. There's a lot to talk about with you, which is a compliment. The title we gave to this conversation is a discussion on transhumanism,

feminism, and human nature, which gets us a little bit into the subject of AI. But why don't we start with your book, Feminism Against Progress, and what you mean by reactionary feminism? I'm guessing that most people in our audience aren't familiar with that idea. The idea of reactionary feminism actually started as a joke. I had a very long-running argument with a friend, all via Twitter DM. All via Twitter DM.

Actually, before we, well, he's a friend now, but at that point, it was somebody who appeared in my Twitter direct messages to say, you don't want to be a post-liberal feminist, you want to be a reactionary. And I said, what? Who are you? And then we had this extremely long-running argument that went on for months and months and months where he said, being post-liberal was meaningless. And I said, no, no, this is nonsense. And it was a very long argument. And in the end, I conceded his point. I was like, okay, fine, reactionary makes more sense. But I wasn't going to tell him that. So instead I just changed my Twitter bio to say reactionary feminist, where previously it said post-liberal feminist. And that was how reactionary feminists came to be coined. And then Matt Schmitz wrote to me from first things to say, this is an arresting phrase. Would you like to write an article with us and explain what it means? At which point I had to figure out what you meant.

That is actually very funny. So I had to, it was reverse engineered. But I mean, one of my maxims is, is that you should mean first and ask questions later. Because it's usually the case that if something sounds good in mean form, it will unpack into about 10,000 words of normal person language. And it will make sense in that as well, but it just takes many more words to get there.

I mean, that's nature of truth, isn't it? It's very early in the conversation to be there already. But yeah, I'll roll with that. Well, I mean, truth, beauty, there's something, I don't know, I would argue, I mean, if we're not... Yeah, it is early in the conversation. But, you know, when you're talking about human nature, I would argue that we have an innate affinity for the good, the beautiful, and the true.

And so somehow, you know, in a good meme, you recognize something. And you're not, you don't need to be sure yet what it is. Yeah, I think that's true. And you can unpack it as you do, as you did, if you've done, in retrospect. I think that's right. I think that's right. You look at something and you think, yes, and you don't know why yet. And it's usually because you're, you sense, you sense.

sense the way it makes sense in a non-linear way, in a non-rational way, on the axis of patent recognition or something, something, anyway. So that was how that happened. And then I tried to write the article for first things, and that was really difficult because then I had to figure out what I meant, and it's much more difficult to write something out at length in normal person than it is to do it in meme form. But I got there in the end, and actually that was that article, which is called reactionary feminism, and it's still up at first things, turned in, probably became the back.

backbone of the book. When did that article appear, roughly? It was 2021, maybe. Yeah. Somewhere, or 2020 or 2021, thereabouts. It was some time ago. And then, over the course, in the course of that, you know, I'd been talking to publishers about maybe writing something, and I wanted to write something about feminism after freedom. And when I started... Excuse me, feminism after freedom. After freedom. I had this, I had this idea not knocking around in my mind that actually maybe we're all liberated enough. that we're all liberated enough. Yeah, we're all about as liberated as we need to be.

Maybe you had that idea because it's true. And because raging against the lack of freedom when one is free is foolish. Yeah, I mean, that would be, I would agree, that would be my sense as well. I mean, to be clear, this isn't the case everywhere in the world, but in the developed world, in the post-industrial, high-tech, developed world, especially among the wealthy, I think it's almost certainly true. And that in fact, any more liberated, and we're sort of, I don't know, we're just going to become a puddle

or something we don't really want to be. So why do you think it is so chic to play the oppressed victim when, as most of us know, we're most of us in this part of the world we are genuinely free. I don't know. Honestly, Eric, I think that's mostly just office politics in the female key. Office politics in the female key. So I was explaining this to somebody.

This is slightly off the topic of the book, because I didn't really get into this so much in the book. But I read a very interesting, some very interesting work by the social scientist Joyce Benenson on the difference between male and female typical aggression. Because I think it's not true. that women are less aggressive than men. I mean, it's certainly true that women are less physically violent than men, and that's just measurably the case pretty much cross-cultural.

Well, I mean, you know, I can't speak to the propensity of men to do what they do, but, you know, there is a measurable difference, and it's cross-cultural apparent between the average levels of physical violence in men and in women. And you can make a fairly plausible case that this is evolutionally adaptive and, you know, has its roots in mate competition, or any other. Anyway, that's a thing. But this isn't to say that women are never aggressive. They just do it in a different way. And again, evolutionary psychologists and people who study, people who are cleverer than me and study these things, argue that because it's generally the case that women are more,

it's more beneficial for women to cooperate with one another in groups, you know, to protect the young, to safeguard the totality of the group. There are incentives against fighting within the group, for example. But this is not to say that people never fall out or people never disagree. So what tends to happen and what has evolved is a much greater tendency to fight covertly. So according to Ben's and female typical forms of aggression might be character assassination, mobilizing a whisper campaign, excluding, ostracizing people. This is all very sexist.

I'm offended on behalf of all the women in my life. This is not me making generalized statements out of nowhere. I'm not pulling this out of thin air. This is the work of Joyce Benenson on female typical aggression. So character assassination, ostracism, whisper campaigns, you know, mobilizing. Nagging? I mean, I'm not getting involved in your relationship here, Eric. I'll be in trouble with me.

Oh, if I have a relationship left after a second. Talking about nagging. No. But just to close the loop on what you were asking me, about office politics in the female key. So it stands to reason that the more women there are in public life, the more we will see female typical forms of aggression in public life. This seems logical, right? Yeah. You know, where there are more women, we're going to see more female typical aggression. Therefore, it makes sense that we will begin to see more character assassination,

whisper campaigns, social ostracism in the workplace, for example. And you will tend to, and that really, And when you think about what happens when somebody gets very loudly and publicly cancelled, for example, in journalism, what you will notice when you look at the cases involved that there are plenty of instances where somebody can do very much the same thing and get away with it. And then you look at them and you think, well, what's the difference between this case and that case? And I'm willing to bet, although I can't prove it, that generally speaking the difference is office politics. You know, that this guy was somebody they wanted to get rid of. That guy was somebody they wanted to keep around. And this was much, this was about, this was fundamentally about office politics.

Okay, so, but I mean, it's a larger point I think you're making is that there's nothing, we're not dealing with objective morality. We're dealing with, you know, it's like when Stalin said, find me the man and I'll, and I'll, show me the man and I'll find you the crime. Right. In other words, it's utterly subjective. Right. So victimhood is just a useful weapon.

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But that's not all. They're extending their 60-day money back guarantee till March 1st, plus all orders. $75 or more. ship absolutely free mypillow.com use code Eric. No recollection of how we got on to this subject. I think I got enough sleep, but what got us into this? You were talking about, I can't remember what it was that prompted you to talk about this idea. How did I end up becoming the reactionary feminist?

sort of by accident, as it turned out. But then, I mean, it's a meme. It's a thing now. It's a thing now. I've seen reactionary feminists in the wild. I've seen it on all the people's Twitter buyers. This is just, it's beyond my control now. It belongs to the world.

I'm, you know, fly free. Yeah, yeah. Well, because what you've done, really, is you've given words or a term to something that people have observed. And that's... But let me explain what I've come to think by this very long round, roundabout route to believe I mean by it. To be a reactionary feminist is to, is really the answer to the question which I grappled with for a number of years, which is, is it possible to be a feminist if you don't believe

in progress? If you don't believe in progress. I do not believe in progress. What do you mean by that? I believe, progress, progress is not an objective thing. I mean, if the moment... Well, that's a fact, but one rarely hears it. So please keep going.

in that vein. So progress is more of a metaphysical frame for understanding the world than it is an objective set of measurable facts. If you, once you start pulling it apart, you realize that in order to prove that progress is happening, you have to define your terms.

And the moment you define your terms, you've begged the question, which is to say you've assumed the truth of what you set out to prove. Kuzendai. Yeah. So... So progress is not... I mean, there's always

some progress, but then there are always trade-offs. And what's actually going on there, when you look at progress in its totality, is that what it actually is a, it's a secularised version of the Christian story, of the Christian version of history. That's really what we're looking at. You know, which, fine, you know, we've secularised a whole bunch of other aspects of Christianity as well. You know, you've just spent some wonderful time with Tom Holland.

I imagine you touched on some of those, some of those. he's done hugely, hugely important and persuasive work on all the millions, all the countless ways that Christianity has just bled into the fabric of everything. Yeah. And progress is a case in point. You know, I'm just going to point at Tom Holland, who you were with just now and say what he said. So I don't believe in progress. Well, you say that.

I don't know that you mean it exactly. That one I want to probe it a little bit. you don't believe in progress the way maybe progressives believe in progress. In other words, this idea that we are, I mean, underlying that idea, to my mind, is this idea of evolution that we're all evolving toward something better. And you think, well, why, what is it about human nature or about reality that would make you say that? But it is an underlying assumption that. I think it's mistaken.

So I'm with you on that. I don't believe in that kind of progress. But you... Okay, so things change. That much is obvious. You know, we don't live in the same world as the ancient Romans did. But, you know, is that world better or worse

in an absolute sense, taking everything into consideration? I don't know. I mean, that's just not really... It's not really... You know, you can make that assertion. I would say if you go back to the Roman Empire, you could say, yeah, things are better.

But if you go back to the Victorian or the Edwardian, you could say, I don't know. In other words, I'd be happier saying, I don't know if we want to look at the Edwardian era, then at the... Just... I mean, you know, we could be here all, you know, debating whether or not the Roman Empire was better or worse than what we have now. You know, there were some pretty sketchy things about the Roman Empire, but... Oh, you think?

Yeah. Slavery and crucifixion. Right. What other things can we ding them with? Let's see. Infanticide. Yeah. Yeah.

That was pretty gross. Well, so... Okay, so... You know, they had some pretty hideous ways of putting people to death. Right. So if you're going to... If you're going to bring that up, why wouldn't you believe in progress? Are you saying, I think I know what you're saying, but clarify for me, why wouldn't you believe in progress?

Is it because we can easily go backwards as well as forwards? Well, I mean, I would argue, you know, we have some pretty horrendous things now. Yeah. I mean, you know, you look at the totality of factory farming, which is an atrocity. You know, you look at the atom bomb, that's an atrocity. You know, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Nagasaki, the Romans never marmalized entire cities on that scale. Is that a verb, Mary?

Yes, well, it's slightly a Harrington. I mean, it's a family. It's a family word. But I mean, you understand, you understand what I'm saying. You know, I don't know how these things cash out. And the point, really, is that the only way you could make some kind of assessment in the grand scale would be from the perspective of some sort of omniscient divine being, which I think gives us a clue to what we're actually talking about when we're talking about progress, which is a kind of. of covert, it's a disguised form of metaphysics. Well, there's, yeah.

Usually not at all, not all that disguised. You're absolutely right. It's a secularized eschatology. Absolutely. And you can say gazuntite again at that point. No, no, no. That's a term that I wouldn't sneeze at. Well, so secularized eschatology, the idea of, I don't know who said it, but it was popularized

by William F. Buckley, to immanentize the eschaton. Yes. Don't immunize the eschaton. In other words, that's to me, that's the French Revolution. That's the current crop of progressives. We want heaven on earth, and if we have to kill a few people to get there, that's not a problem. And this actually brings me very nicely to the thesis of my book, because once you start looking at what happens, from the French Revolution onwards, really, with people trying to immunitize the eschaton,

is that if you're trying to realize heaven on earth, the only means you have at your disposal to do so are technological ones. because if you're going to set about trying to improve the world and re-engineer the world, you know, in line with your utopian vision, all you have to hand is what you have to hand. You can't just punt it all into the next life. You've got to fix it here, and that means using whatever means you have at your disposal, and that means probably engineering. And that's really what began to happen with the arrival of modernity.

which starts in England a little bit earlier than it starts in France, but it really gets into gear with the French Revolution, and it gets into gear across Europe and then spreading into the United States with industrialization. And my starting thesis for feminism against progress is that you can read the entire history of the women's movement as an aggregate response to the disruptions and the changes and the transformations this brought about in family life.

Now, before you get into that, because I want you to get into that, but why feminism at all? In other words, why are you a feminist? What do you mean by feminist? I just mean, it remains true, you know, even if I don't believe in progress. And I really grappled with this. You know, I grappled with it for a long time because it wasn't clear to me at all for a long time whether it's possible to be a feminist if you don't believe in progress,

because the history of, you know, progressivism as such is so bound up with, with feminism as an ideology and it's and it then the stories i mean in any time i said oh i don't believe in progress somebody would say to me oh do you want to go back to being the property of your husband and having no vote and not being allowed to own property you know you know stick that in your pipe and smoke yeah yeah yeah and i'd say well okay but you know there have been some trade-offs as well and can we can we maybe but being honest about that is very brave uh and uh i'm sure has earned you a few enemies um however i've come to think over time that why why shouldn't why shouldn't I have the word? Why should the progressives have it? Why can't I take my ball and go

home? You know, ultimately, even if you don't believe in progress, it ought to be obvious that the interests of men and the interests of women broadly, you know, benefit from supporting one another, but they don't always add up. And sometimes, and it's often the case that the interests of women are a sidelined, you know, not least, not least, because it's not uncommonly the case that, women are not there to stick up for themselves because somebody's got to look after the kits. I mean, actually, to give you an example to illustrate, I've got a fantastic anthology of radical feminist writings from the 70s and 80s. And in one of those pieces, there's this incredibly telling anecdote about a vote that was taken in a feminist, in a feminist community center

of some kind over whether or not they should open a creche. And the women who were there voted against it. And do you know how that vote passed? It was because the women who would have voted for the crash were at home looking after the kids. That's telling. It's telling. This even happened in the midst of a feminist community. So of course it happens at the bigger scale as well. You know, so who's going to speak up for the mums if they're busy? So it's a problem. Yeah. And that's not just going to be a problem amongst feminists. That's going to be a problem for everybody. So somebody's got to. And I mean, why shouldn't we call that feminism? Isn't that what it is? I don't know.

So I've just decided I'm going to say, that's feminism too. Yeah. I'm not going to keep my ball. I'm not giving that one away. Yeah. Hey, folks, listeners to my show know I'm passionate about the work of Christian Solidarity International because they protect and free those who are being persecuted and enslaved for their faith. Thanks to you to date, CSI has freed more than 100,000 people from slavery in Sudan,

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go to metaxis talk.com, metaxistock.com, click on the Christian solidarity banner, metaxisotachstalk.com or 888-2533522. God bless you. I do want to ask you, I'll ask you now, how did you get to be who you are now? In other words, were you always thinking along these lines? Was there something in your life that suddenly made you take some of the positions you've taken? There's a very long answer to that and a slightly shorter one. So I'll stick to the slightly shorter one. The story I told in the book about how I began thinking about women's issues was a dilemma which I began to realize I faced as the only daughter, the only girl of three siblings in my family.

So I have a younger brother and an older brother. My parents had fairly, I'd say fairly quote-unquote, traditional sex roles in the 20th century sense. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. My dad went out to work. And I remember reaching a point, I guess I must have been maybe 13 or thereabouts, where I realized. I thought you said 10. No, no, who? I thought I read this. It's ringing a bell with me. It doesn't matter. I mean, somewhere around puberty. I began to notice that my dad would get up at the end of dinner and he'd leave the table and he'd leave his dishes on the table. And my mom would have made the dinner and she'd have set up. the table, she'd have got everything ready, we'd all sit down and eat, my dad would get up and leave, and leave the dishes for somebody, a question mark, to clear up. And then I began to notice that

my brothers would imitate him. They would get up and leave as well, and leave their dishes on the table. And I was thinking, okay, so now, now I have a choice. So I've always been given to understand by my dad, as well as by my mum, that I have equal standing with my brothers in the family. There's no sense in which I'm some kind of second-class citizen in the context of our family. However, I'm now faced with a situation where I either, either I assert my equal right to leave the dishes for question mark to clean up

and walk away from the table with my brothers and my father, or I express some kind of solidarity with my mother as the only other female in the household and thereby concede my second-class, sit at the status as somebody who has to serve everybody else. This seemed to me an unfair and impossible dilemma. that started, what I guess must be more than three decades of thinking about the women's movement and thinking about women and thinking about women and men.

And it's gone through many iterations and many cycles and many different forms to reach the point I'm at with it now. But that was what started it off. Shortly after that, I discovered Simone de Beauvoir, who melted my brain. You know, and, yeah. Well, you've come a long way from Simone de Beauvoir. You could say that, yes. And I did.

I kind of understand where she was coming from. Where are you now? What are you now? What do you make up? For a much more radical, a much more radical mutiny against femaleness than even she would have thought was wise. Against femaleness. Yes.

She, she, she, she, her whole stance was that it was in a sense, you know, a kind of critical handicap to attaining personhood to be female. Yeah, she seems to have hated being a woman. She seemed to have hated being a woman. She seemed to be able to somehow a gross insult against her striving for existential personhood to be female and to be constructed in this way and to have the handicap of the female reproductive system. It's as though it's as though to be sexed was an affront to her dignity and her personhood.

And she never really got around this. I don't think so. And I mean, she had hugely complicated relationships, and I don't think she had children. With sort. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, go figure.

I don't want to think about it. Yeah, right. Yeah. Right. So I've, I wouldn't say, I wouldn't say I'm on board with the, with the Simone de Beauvoir project. No. But it was, it was just, it was, it was eye opening to me age 13 or whatever I was,

to discover that somebody had given quite that much angry and resuscary and resentful thought to some of the same problems as I was grappling with at sort of micro scale in my own life. I guess that started a lifelong, a lifelong interest and inquiry. But that's been the problem, it seems to me, with feminism, is the idea that there's so much of that in it, the idea that it doesn't really, it doesn't seem to have, maybe until you understood where it wanted to go. Well, I don't think, I don't know, I would dispute that just because it's a much, a much longer and more fractious history than you would think if you only ever read the magazine feminism that gets sort of popular, gets propagated in a popular sense. And it's also not helped by the fact that since the second wave, there's been a very methodical effort by some feminists themselves to memory whole earlier iterations of feminism.

Like Mary Wollstonecraft. I mean, Mary, well, the legacy of Mary Olsencraft is very, is very contested. But there's a, there's a sort of collective amnesia. It's beginning to come apart. But for a long time, there's been this real collective amnesia about the 19th century. Yeah. And that entire history, which is very much more complex and very much more, very much more ambivalent, very much more interesting to me than just the story of the vote. You know, there was a women's, incredibly well-networked and powerful and mobilized women's movement long before the suffraiseries.

They were the suffragettes and they had, and this women's movement actually had very mixed feelings about the suffragettes. You know, even the suffragettes had mixed feelings about the suffragettes. It's a hugely complicated and very fractious history. And the second wave story of liberation from sexist stereotypes really doesn't do it justice. That's a story which is, the winners write the history books. That's what we're talking about, right? That's exactly what you're saying, to memory hole. It's to insist on a certain narrative.

Yes. And I'll explain why and what happened there. Or at least, my thesis for what happened with that. Yeah. Out of industrialization came a very necessary and justified need for women to respond to the way the industrial revolution had transatlantician. family life, and particularly by draining work out of the home, which obviously created new problems for women who had previously, you know, in various sort of agrarian and artisan settings, worked in conjunction with minding little children. I mean, clearly you can breastfeed

whilst simultaneously weaving textiles for the family at home. You know, and that had been the case for tens of thousands of years in one form or another, some kind of a life along those lines. But then with the Industrial Revolution, textile making leaves the home. Male employment, male labour leaves the home. And then women are left, and particularly in working in poorer settings, women are suddenly in a position where they need to go out somewhere else to work. I mean, if you've got a breastfed baby and you're supposed to be working in a factory, I mean, what do you do? You know, it creates a whole new set of, a whole new set of dilemmas that women just simply hadn't had to deal with at scale before.

And wherever, and the way I've understood it, this, there were two characteristic responses to this, really mostly depending on social class. Those women who could afford to stayed home in actually what was a much reduced role, where they were no longer economically active as members of a productive household, but they were, as it were, the chief consumer in a private household. And a lot of those women formed the backbone of what became 19th century industrial era of civil society. You know, they founded church groups and social reform groups and ladies' luncheon groups and all the entire thick social fabric of 19th century Britain and America was run by middle-class, stay-at-home ladies.

They were not the isolated housewives of the sort of Betty Friedan story. They were something very much more potent and very much more public-facing. So that was, and they wrote, and they wrote vigorously and prolifically, and they published their own magazines. And a lot of these magazines were very much dedicated to this, what they called the women's sphere. which is now, it's now dismissed by a lot of feminist historiography as sort of fifth columnists for the patriarchy. But I read that straightforwardly as a kind of feminism.

And what they're doing is they're making a case for the importance of women's work. Even though women's sphere has shrunk and is no longer an economically active sphere, they're saying, well, this stuff still matters. Kids still matter. The education of children still matters. Having a nice home still matters. All of this stuff is really important. And so we're going to sing the praise of this.

So they didn't denigrate it, right. Right. So this is one half of the response, but then there are also women who said, well, no, actually, all of this is fine, but it's only fine as long as your husband is a good guy. What happens if he's not? It's only fine. It only works if your husband doesn't drink the money away, and it's only fine if he doesn't beat you. And it's only fine if he, you know, isn't a terrible person in all the other ways because he effectively, they were utterly at the mercy of their husbands. You know, when you can't divorce, you can't own property in your own right, you can't really work.

And if you separate, your husband has absolute control over what happens to the children, you're in a pretty tough, you know, if he's not a good guy, you're in a tough spot. And there are lots of pretty heartbreaking stories from women who found themselves at the sharp end of that. And so then, of course, then you start to see movements for legal reform, for movements challenging 19th century marriage laws, coverture marriage, and calling for women's legal and political personhood in their own right, which effectively amounts to an egalitarian call for women's right to enter the market on the same terms as men.

So these are really the two poles of 19th century feminism, which I think of as feminism proper. On the one hand, you've got this sort of domestic feminism of care and feminism of motherhood, which leans into women's difference from men and says, no, actually, we need to make the case for maternality. and maternal feminism was hugely huge in the 19th century in a way that it just isn't now. I'll get to why in a moment. And then on the other side, you've got the feminism of freedom,

which says, no, actually, we can't be banned to one another in this way because women are going to be chronically on the back foot and look at these horror stories. And what we actually need is the right to work and the right to vote and the right to own property and the right to be people in this new market society that we're all now living in. And they were kind of both right, but some often what they wanted was mutually exclusive. And so there's this

fascinatingly rich back and forth between the maternal feminists and the freedom feminists that goes on all the way up to the nine, pretty much the 1960s, you know, in very sort of locally and historically specific ways. But then what happened in the 1960s was a new technology,

which ended the battle. The pill? Yeah, definitively in the favor of the freedom feminists. Right, because you don't hear anything about the maternal sphere the female steer. It's been memory hold, as you put it. It has. And I'll tell you what memory hold it, really. It was the ratchet from normalization of, was it the ratchet from the sexual

revolution, which came with the pill, and from there to legal abortion. Because, I mean, wherever you stand on legal abortion, and I'm not an absolutist, I'm very, it's a, it's one of those things where there really are no good solutions sometimes. and it's a very grave and serious thing and very emotive one. But wherever you stand on it, it's difficult to dispute that, I mean, you can't really make a stronger statement in favor of freedom over dependency and over care than to say my personal freedom is so important that I can uphold it even at the expense of a life which depends on my actual body. And if it comes down to a question of hospitality to this potential person or my personal personal. free, all my individual freedom, my freedom wins, and I have that right. And once, once that begins to be understood as a foundational precondition for women's existence, as people in their own right,

which is really, which is, which became, it became, it has come to seem self-evidence since the 1960s, that women's personhood as such is inseparable from our right to end a pregnancy. It has come to seem that way. It has come to seem that way. It didn't always seem that way. There are great many 19th century feminists who would have seen abortion as indistinguishable from infanticide, you know, as infanticide, in fact, just at a different developmental point. And as many women who would describe themselves as feminists do today, but they're no longer really, they really don't have control of the narrative anymore. They seem to be in the minority.

They do not. So this was really the point where the feminism of freedom defeated the feminism of care. And I got to thinking about this, Eric, because having been hopeless at so many different careers over the course of my adult life. I left university with the first and proceeded to be useless everything I tried for the best part of two decades. And I ended up as a stay-at-home mum in small-town England pushing my baby around the streets. How pathetic? No, it was great. So sad.

I mean, it was, it left me a lot of time to think about men and women and sex roles and to question some of the, some of the things I'd always internalized about, you know, what that meant. But anyway, long story short, there I was, thinking, why is it, why is it that being a mum feels so invisible? Why is it that feminists don't seem to have anything to say about being a mum? This feels important. This feels quite common amongst women, right?

So why, why are we not talking about this? You sheltered me from her. Hey there, folks. As promised, I want to get my friend Kevin McCullough back on here to talk about CSI. This is an insane opportunity. I beg you, take advantage of the opportunity to free a slave. There's nothing more significant. Anyone could do.

No better Christmas present. You could give to someone to say that you've done this in their name. You've freed a slave. You go to metaxistocococ.com. Metaxistocococon.com. The banner is right there. So my first question for you, Kevin McCullough, you were recently on here talking about the work CSI does. I thought I'd have you back so you could detail further the impact that is made.

So what do you say? Well, the great thing about what CSI is doing, and I love the fact that our shows do this together. We're both in the process of asking people to join the effort. And what's great about doing it at this time of year is that we are just around the corner from a major liberation with Christian Solidarity International. And what that means is that people are going to be freed and they're going to be allowed to go home. And as you think about the holidays and kind of what this is normally, you know, all about,

going home is a big thing for a lot of us at this time of year. But imagine being someone who was kidnapped from your home when you were maybe six, seven, eight years of age. You're a girl. your parents may have been killed in front of you, your mom may have been raped in front of you, there may have been things that you've seen repeatedly in how people treated you over and over again for dozens of years. And now as an adult, you have the first opportunity this Christmas to be with people that love you, to be with people that have missed you, to be with people that have wondered if you were even still alive.

that's the beauty of CSI at Christmas time. We have a liberation that is just around the corner and we can give them that new life, that return home, that blessing that we all enjoy when we go home for Christmas, we can give that to these hurting hearts that have not felt it in years and in some instances ever. Kevin, where does the $250 go that it frees the slave? I mean, there's more. How are those resources? specifically utilized? The CSI program is pretty straightforward. There are what we refer to as retrievers that are Sudan Arabs that want to have good relationships with South Sudan Christians. And they have been recruited over time, over the number of years the CSI has been doing

this, to go into Sudan and look for slaves that are thought to still be alive, thought to still be there. At one point, there were 100. 185,000 women and children that had been taken as slaves. We believe the number is somewhere around 35,000 now, after years and years and years of CSI, basically being the lone voice in the wilderness saying, we got to do something about this. But these retrievers locate them. They alert CSI.

They engage in negotiation, and they secure the release of the slave. Now, what the slave master will usually release the slave for in exchange is, is a very hard to get cattle vaccine that helps their cattle withstand the extreme temperatures of what they are going through. Many of these slave masters are ranchers. Cattle is their only means of material wealth or income. And so, you know, you can't be having cattle die on you and be successful. So the life of the cow or the bull is more valuable to the slave master than the life of the slave. And CSI is able to effectively say, if you'll release this slave, we will see to it that we get a vaccine for your cattle. I know that everybody's in a different place, but everybody

can do something. Whatever you can do, please, folks, join us in this beautiful, beautiful thing. Go to metaxis talk.com. You'll see the banner there. You click on it. It'll walk you through everything. And right now, we're going to hour two. I guess I just want to leave the phone number with you. 888 2533522, 888-253-3522, or the website metaxistalk.com. Metaxistalk.com. You'll see the banner. This is the right thing to do.

Jump in. God bless you.