The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 351. The Demise of the Left: from Liberalism to Marxism | Naomi Wolf

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Naomi Wolf discuss her original ambitions, the derailment of her scholarly career at the hands of misogyny, her rise to the forefront of third wave feminism as a best-selling author, and how the mainstream turned on her once she wrote on a topic the Left had blacklisted: COVID-19. Naomi Wolf is an American author and journalist. Her first book, “The Beauty Myth,” would challenge notions of attraction, arguing they are societally fabricated. This publication became an international bestseller and cemented Wolf as one of the leading spokeswomen for the third wave feminist movement. She has published many books since then, such as “The End of America, and Vagina: A New Biography.” In recent years, she has come under fire for being an “anti-vaxer” and a “conspiracy theorist,” which led Wolf to write her most recent book, “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human.”  - Links - For Dr. Naomi Wolf The Bodies of Others (Book): https://www.amazon.com/Bodies-Others-Authoritarians-COVID-19-Against/dp/1737478560 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/naomirwolf/?hl=en Twitter: https://twitter.com/naomirwolf?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor 

Hello everyone, I'm pleased today to talk to a thinker on the progressive front. For many decades, Dr. Naomi Wolf, an American author and journalist, her first book, The Beauty Myth, Challenged Notions of Attraction, arguing that they are societally fabricated. This publication became an international bestseller, and cemented Wolf as one of the leading spokeswomen for the so-called third-wave feminist movement. In recent years, interestingly enough, she's come under fire, especially on the left for becoming an anti-vaxxer and a conspiracy theorist, a strange destination for a progressive thinker, which led Wolf

to write her most recent book, The Bodies of Others, The New Authoritarians, COVID-19, and the war against the human. Looking forward very much to talking to Dr. Wolfe today to delve into the possession of the left, reprehensible possession in her estimation by the Marxist doctrines that were popularized throughout the 20th century to understand how that's come about and to analyze the role played by organizations such as the Chinese Communist Party. I guess the first question I have for you, Dr. Wolfe, is why did you why did you agree to talk to me? Why wouldn't I?

Oh, well, lots of people don't. I've asked all sorts of people on the left for years to appear on my podcast and the standard answer is, now I don't know precisely by the way, if you, you can be placed politically on the left, I know your views have changed somewhat dramatically over time and we're going to investigate that, but no, I've invited people, especially political figures on the left, to speak with me repeatedly, dozens of times with no success, let's say. So it's not a foregone conclusion. Most of the scientists and so forth that I ask to talk are with very few exceptions, say yes.

But that's definitely not true on the more social commentary, political side, especially in the political realm. But it wasn't an issue as far as you were concerned. Well, I guess first I would say I'll talk to anyone, especially about liberty and the Constitution, human rights and freedom. I think that's my job. And it would be a very boring world if we only spoke to people with whom we know already we're going to agree. And more importantly, maybe talk to you because, well, for that reason, but also because, you know, I see that you describe yourself as a liberal and well from the outside, it

may seem as if my views have changed over the last couple of years, I really feel that they, I've stayed exactly the same and that the world has changed. And I also see myself as a classical liberal. So even if I didn't, I want to talk to you because I like learning things and I like talking to people with whom I may not agree, I might learn something, but either way, since you're using to be concerned about human freedom and I'm concerned about human freedom, additionally it wouldn't occur to me not to talk to you.

That said, I recognize your experience. Sadly, I'm now in a situation in which I keep asking the left to counter the views that I'm publishing by other people on my news site. I'm asking the left to engage with the issues that I'm bringing up and I literally cannot get anyone to talk to me. I used to be until like two and a half years ago firmly as scanced in the left as a cultural figure. Right, well, so I definitely want to delve into that because one of the things I really have observed, I think I'm reasonably neutral

as a psychological observer of political behavior, I believe, and certainly one of the things I have noticed is that proclivity to cancel is most fundamentally a left-wing phenomenon. I've had very few people on the right refuse to talk to me. That's for sure. And I've had many, even my friends on the left, and I've seen this in a relatively shocking way.

I would say fairly frequently, would refuse to talk to people that weren't in their daily work. I think one of the punishments, actually, this is odd though, one of the punishments for refusing to talk to people that weren't in their bellywick. I think one of the punishments, actually, this is odd though, one of the punishments for refusing to talk to people whose opinions differ from yours is you end up squabbling with the people who disagree with you on your side over smaller and smaller things, even equally and tentally. So it's not like you rid yourself of the necessity of disagreement. You just find yourself what it's right called out, the narcissism of small differences. The battles get, they rage more and more intently over smaller and smaller differences of opinion,

which is sort of comical in a metaphysical way. So let's start with your childhood. So tell me a little bit about your parents and about what it was like for you growing up. And I'm interested in how your intellectual interests developed. Sure. I will just note before I do that, that's a change,

I think, Dr. Peterson on the left. It didn't use to be the case just five years ago that I mean, this cancelling, we can talk about that later if you like, it's really important. I think that these are non-Western norms that have been kind of implanted in Western cultural discourse. It would have been shameful to cancel an opponent rather than engage with him or her,

you know, in very recent memory. So I was born in San Francisco. I mean, I think I'm exactly the same age you are. And I grew up in a, I guess in the academic household, my dad was a professor of English literature at San Francisco State University. My mom was a graduate student in anthropology

when I was growing up. Francisco State University. My mom was a graduate student in anthropology when I was growing up. Qish, middle class household, very creative environment. My father is also a poet and a teacher of creative writing. So it was a very talky, greedy, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century,

the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18th century, the 18's movement, you know, immigrants rights. It was all kind of a lot of social justice movements around me as I was growing up. And it seemed like the world was gonna be fixed, really.

I mean, it was very optimistic, very beautiful place to grow up. And then I went to Yale, and that was a shock, because I'd never, you know, I'm a California girl. So I'd never experienced East Coast elitism, hierarchies, anti-Semitism, you know, before the peculiar racism of the Northeast. I mean, if you grew up in California, it's a very diverse culture. You know, the, I mean, if you grew up in California, it's a very diverse culture. It's not that we don't have racism in California, but it's different. It's a more inclusive society.

It's less class bound. So that was a shock. So that was when did you and you did an undergraduate at Yale? I was an undergraduate at Yale in English literature. And what year? 1980 to 1984. 80 to 84. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So yeah.

So we do overlap almost perfectly in terms of birth date, age, and education time. And so what exactly did you experience at Yale? Like how did that prejudicial environment make itself manifest to you as far as you were concerned. And was that something that other people were experiencing too, or was there something do you think about your background apart from the Semitic element of it? Was there something about your background?

Do you think that tilted your experience more in that direction? How much of that was situational and how much personal in retrospect? Well, it was pretty, you know, Yale at that time, it had only recently allowed women in. I think it in 1976. And so it's still a super sexist place. And, you know, and a lot of casual kind of date rape and what we would today call sexual harassment.

That wasn't, I think that was only recently codified or not yet fully codified at that time. I'll have to check. But so you sort of felt, you know, I was not the only woman who felt beleaguered. I mean, you know, the parties that Yale in my time were described in Brett Kavanaugh's hearings and they were very familiar to me.

You know, people did get kind of raped and molested at parties, you know, very, very casually at Yale. And there was... What do you think the attitude of the typical male undergraduate at that point? I don't know if we would talk about the typical male undergraduate or if we would talk about the more dangerous typical male undergraduate. What do you think the attitude towards women was at that time? I mean I'm also interested in the sexual misbehavior problem from a variety of psychological viewpoints,

mean a huge part of what fuels sexual misbehavior on campus is alcohol. Alcohol is it? Right. I mean, your language I think is an interesting difference between us, I would call it criminal activity on campus. Oh, okay, okay. Well, I'm not, I suppose, trying to make the point

that that's not the case. I've thought a lot about how those sorts of activities might be addressed and regulated by universities and their alcohol fuel to a degree that's almost unimaginable. So alcohol itself is responsible for about 50% of violent crimes and it's the only drug we know that actually makes people violent. And so I'm wondering the parties that you're describing, I mean we know perfectly well that there's a party culture at American universities and that that is alcohol fueled and

there's an alcohol is a very dis-enhibiting drug. And so if you have a proclivity in a particular direction, the alcohol is going to take all the stops off that. So if there's an underlying misogyny or resentment, say, towards women, then that's going to be amplified by an alcohol fueled event. I'm not trying to make a case for or against the presence of misogyny at Yale. I'm just wondering in retrospect, when you look at that,

what contributing factors do you see to what you experienced? Yeah, so you're, I mean, we're diving right into an incredibly vexed and difficult subject, but I'm happy to address it. So, you know, I, and I'm glad to be addressing it because that's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. I know about your interest in gender dynamics. And, you know, this is probably one of those areas on which we might have a lot of interesting

disagreements. So I would say categorically alcohol, you can't blame the culture of sexual accepted sexual violence and sexual harassment, a Yale at that time on alcohol or drugs, at all. What you can blame it on is institutional toleration of sexual harassment and sexual violence. In other words, there was a culture of impunity. The people who knew that nothing would happen to them acted as if nothing would happen to them. And I too have studied gender dynamic sexual assault sexual harassment on campus for many decades and for sure when there's a culture of impunity

in any institution, rapists rape, molesters molest, and when there's a culture of consequences, that restricts the tendencies that those people might have to rape or harass, for sure. But what the young men around us at Yale and the faculty around us at Yale knew is that nothing bad would happen to them if they raped or molested women. And categorically, if you look at the cases at that time, to this day, to some extent, the institution colluded in covering up rapes on campus, protecting athletes, especially who assaulted women on campus, protecting faculty. So I personally was molested by a famous professor,

Dr. Harold Bloom, when I was a junior, and that was in a context in which he was completely not drinking alcohol. It was a context in which he, and he had a lengthy reputation, which I didn't know till afterwards of doing this to undergraduate women and to actually graduate students.

And I tried to get accountability from the institution decades later. And it was just covered up, covered up. How old were you and not happened? I was 19 years old. And what effect did that have on you metaphysically? Well, I think it had a last lifelong effect on me metaphysically. It was quite terrifying at the time because it was in no way can this situation be, you know, blamed on it on, you know,

anyone not knowing exactly what he was doing. It was a situation in which he was my advisor. He was my professor for an independent study course that, that my academic advisor had recommended, a close colleague of his, another famous academic John Hollander. It was a, I was writing poetry. I was a very talented poet. I was getting lots of awards and recognition for being a poet. And, you know, he encouraged me to take this independent

study with him. He ignored and ignored my submissions all semester. I was looking at the end of the semester with no evaluation. And I didn't come from a wealthy background. I had to get a scholarship to go into graduate school. I was going to apply for a road scholarship. So for many reasons, including just, I was a student apply for a Rhodes scholarship. So for many reasons, including just, you know, I was a student, I needed an evaluation. Finally, he said, I, you know, I will come

to your house where you live, and I will talk about your manuscript of poetry at that time. And that seemed almost normal because he worked with my roommate's boyfriend in a project, an editorial project. So we all had a dinner party at his recommendation and then everyone left. And I thought he was going to evaluate my semester's work as head problems to do. And he assaulted me basically. And we were alone in a house. And you know, there was no one I could there was no one I couldn't get away. He was huge, he was between me and the door.

It was terrifying. I mean, he didn't get far. He put his hand on my thigh and I backed away from him and kind of got as far away from him as I could and then he kind of got between me and the door and I mean eventually he left but the I mean first of all I had been you know raped as a child 11 years before so which you know when I try to talk about assault on campus and, you know, professors creating an environment of sexual assault on campus, a third of minor women have been

raped or assaulted or abused by trusted male role models by the top or parent figures or parents by the time they're 18. So, you know, I was already traumatized and I was already terrified. And so, but I did the best I could. It's a double, it's a double hip-tay in a situation like that too, because I imagine that you're,

so you're a good poet at that point. Undoubtedly, you're extremely excited about the fact that someone who's an eminent scholar is taking an interest in and is going to evaluate your work. And so you're looking forward to that on that front. And then you find yourself in a situation where, well, exactly the opposite of what is supposed to happen is happening to put it mildly. And you said also that that was reminiscent

of treatment that you would receive at the hands of another man much earlier in your life. So this is kind of this important moment where we're a little bit talking not in the same experiential plane because all of those considerations certainly would arise months or years later. But what I was concerned about at that moment was survival because I did not know it would kill me. because when women are raped or molested, especially very young women, you don't know that this person is not gonna kill you, right? You don't know that you're gonna get out of the situation alive. And I wish everyone who runs a university, I wish that they would understand that that is what

is the experience of someone who is in a situation of being molested or raped, that they literally, you know, don't know if they're going to get out of it alive because it is such a terrifying, surreal, shocking, you know, assault. It's an assault. So, you know, after the fact, you know, and this is why judges and juries and administrators always misunderstand rape and sexual assault, after the fact it's like, well, you know, he didn't get very far. Well, you know, you didn't get hurt very much or, you know, whatever it is, but at the time, it's literally like, am I going to die? You know, what it does, you have a knife to see, have a gun. I mean, it's absolutely a terror that I can't even describe to you. a knife to see have a gun. I mean, it's absolutely a terror

that I can't even describe to you. And it probably would have been even if I hadn't been raped as a child, right? But, you know, there's not no way to minimize how existentially terrifying it is to be molested by anyone bigger than you are, who's standing between you and an exit in a house that's far away from any kind of help. No one would have heard me if I had screamed. So... Yeah, well, I wasn't trying to reduce what you had told me to the the mirror psychological consequence of betrayal. I was just attempting, I suppose, in some sense to amplify it by pointing out that not only did this happen to you, but it happened to you at the hands of someone who was trusted

and who was interested with fostering your development, and it's the gap, part of what constitutes psychological trauma is the gap between expected behavior and actual behavior. And in a situation where you're at the hands of someone who has a stellar reputation and you're at an institution that's supposed to guide and develop you, then the depth of, I mean, if someone attacks you in a dark alley in a rough part of town, that's a terrible thing. But there isn't that additional element of betrayal of an entire institution and an entire developmental pathway that goes along with it. It doesn't mean it isn't awful.

It just misses one dimension of awful. Right. So thank you, Dr. Peterson. I, so, quite right. I mean, so, so, the initial trauma was just the physical, you know, terror, terror. The subsequent trauma goes to what we were saying like what allows a rape culture on campus. And that was when I brought this up with people around me,

including my dean, and basically the 360 degree response from the institution was, he's well known for this, don't do anything about it, he'll ruin your career. And other women tried to bring it up, had their careers destroyed. So. Why didn't you have your career destroyed? Well, I think I did have my career destroyed. I wanted to be, I wanted to be an English professor in his same field.

I wanted to teach Victorian literature, English literature. That's all I wanted to do my whole life and be a poet. And I had to take a complete detour for the next three decades because he was still alive. And that wasn't an option for me. And even, you know, like all the way. Okay, so tell me, tell me exactly why it wasn't an option for you. Like, what were the mechanics of the impositions that were put in front of you

as a consequence of the sequence of events? So, I mean, I know he was very influential, and I can understand vaguely why that would have had a cascading consequence, but had you continued pursuing your education in the literature domain? Why exactly would it have been that you wouldn't have been able to find the kind of academic job, for example, that your background might have otherwise provided for you. Well, that's a good question. I guess he casts such a gigantic shadow over the whole field. I mean, he was the great authority in Victorian studies.

You know, for decades after that, you know, and it was just communicated to me that I couldn't get a letter of recommendation. I couldn't get, obviously, I wasn't going to even be in the same room with him to solicit a letter of recommendation. But it was communicated to me that the way to undergraduate school, like if I applied to any graduate school and they saw that he had been on my transcript, they would have said, why don't you have a letter from Dr. Blu? Yeah, okay, okay, okay, I see. Yeah, yeah. And what's my... Because that's a glaring omission.

Totally. And then it would have been up for questions. And then we go to him. You were the troublemaker. He was the troublemaker. He was the troublemaker. And whatever he wants to say, he'll say. And that was also, he did to me clearly

by people who cared about me, who were warning me, he had done that before, right? It didn't even take women coming forward for him to ruin their careers. If he had molested them or approached them and they'd rejected him, which I had done, I guess in his view, he closed every door academically.

So it was clear to me that I had no future in my chosen field as long as he was alive. So I had to do something that was not my plan. I didn't plan to be a feminist activist, nonfiction writer in a popular nonfiction genre for decades. I'm happy to have had eight international bestsellers, but that wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to be a university professor. And then even as late as I went back to school, I'm fast forwarding a little bit.

I thought it was safe, because he was very elderly to go back to college. So I became a Rhodes Scholar in spite of him, and I went to Oxford and I'll fast forward. So it was finally, I was like almost 50, and I thought, okay, it's safe to resume my education and become a professor of English literature. Went back to Oxford in midlife, I finished my D-Fill

in Victorian studies. And when I submitted my D-Fill and I succeeded and I passed my academic advisor at Oxford said, you need to submit this to a journal, a Victorian studies journal, and you've got to submit, and it's edited by Harold Bloom. You've got to submit this. This is really distinguished work.

I said, I can't submit it to that journal, and I had to tell her why. That late, and she agreed. She agreed. That was how many years later. That was like 30 years later. What can be sir. Yeah, no 30 years later. So as far as you're concerned, this event side tracked you into a domain of academic pursuit that was very unlike, okay, how much do you think, look, first of all, I should say, if I'm gonna push you into places that you really don't want to talk

about, you just tell me, okay, because I'll back off, but- Tip yourself, I'll tell you, and the grownup. So, to what degree do you think the psychological consequences of what befell you, as well as the practical consequence, colored your writing and the aims towards which you directed your writing from then on forward? Like, what would have you written about, do you think had this not happened? What would have been your natural inclination of interest? I mean, all I ever wanted to do was teach. I would have been writing about rescuing.

So you would have stuck relatively firmly, you think to something like classical literary criticism. Yeah. So, I should point out for everyone who's watching and listening, because it isn't exactly obvious what the point of literary criticism is if you're not knowledgeable about the field, and it's easy to underestimate its significance in literary critics, analyze productions of fiction, generally speaking, they analyze stories.

And that turns out to be of utmost importance. And we've become more clear about that on the psychological front in recent years because the structures through which we view the world will be described are stories. And so what literary critics do in the deepest sense is to analyze the maps that we use to orient ourselves in the world. And there isn't anything more important in your life than getting your story straight. And people who are astute literary critics don not so up frifles into this category as far as I'm concerned, are extraordinarily helpful at helping people orient themselves in terms of where they devote their attention

and their action. And so it's easy for people who aren't intellectually oriented, let's say, and who don't have a deep educational history to not understand why literary criticism is so important, but it is very important. And so you were going to devote yourself to classic literary scholarship, but you got derailed.

And okay, so now you went from Yale to, was it to Oxford? Not as a Rhodes Scholar. Okay, now you said that your ambitions to pursue a professorship in English literature were derailed, but you did get a Rhodes scholarship, and that's not easy. So how do you reconcile the potentially competing claims that, well, perhaps a career in English literature would have still been open to you, given that your academic background was positive enough so that you got a Rhodes scholarship. That's not a simple thing. Yeah, I can answer that easily. The Rhodes Scholarship Committee was looking for different things.

They weren't narrowly focused on the gateway to credentialing someone for graduate studies in English literature. They were looking for leadership. I mean, obviously, my grades were good overall. I was considered a gifted undergraduate. I had lots of letters from my other professors. So it was a different credential. So the lack of letter from Bloom didn't wasn't a stumbling block in relationship to the Rhodes scholarship. Well, not to relief.

Well, I mean, sure, but imagine Dr. Peterson, if you had to succeed in an area that was entirely not your choice for your life? Yes, well, I can imagine that because that's happened to be in the last seven years. So it's, well, I no longer a professor at the University of Toronto, which wasn't exactly in my plans. We have had similar journeys. I haven't had that happen. Now, I had many decades of pursuing pretty much precisely what I wanted to pursue. So that's a major difference, but I have some experience with being dislocated, let's say, in a matter that wasn't, oh, well, you know, say La Vie, things have worked out

quite well for me, but it wasn't what I had planned, you know. And so, and I suppose that's the definition of life is it isn't what you've planned. All right, so now you went off to pursue the road scholarship and what did you study as a road scholar? Now you're at Oxford. And what was it like being at what was it like being at Oxford compared to being at Yale? Well, it was pretty exhilarating for me because it was pure pure academic. How can I put it? Well, the Oxford experience, as you know doubt no, is completely different from an American university in the sense that you have these tiny seminars, you have tutorials with your professor, your dawn, and you're like two students or three students and the professor, and you kind of dive deeply into the text

in that moment, and it's a very, very pure form of scholarship. So that made me very happy, because I am a true nerd. And again, I was working on Victorian studies, 19th century English literature. I was working on an M fill at that time. And I loved it. It was the 80s in Britain. So it was cold and gloomy and faturgy.

And the graduate students weren't particularly central to the Oxford experience. It was a very undergraduate experience, but so we were kind of exiles together, but it was exhilarating. And the road scholarship course, what a privilege. You know, your expenses are paid two or three years, depending on what you choose to just study, just learn with a group of other really bright people from all over the world. So it was a very blissful intellectual experience. And the seed of my first book was my defil thesis there, or the start of my

defil thesis. The culture that you'd experienced at Yale that we already walked through, how different or similar was your experience on that front at Oxford. Now, you're a little older and you're with a little older people, so in principle, the level of average reprehensible behavior has decreased somewhat just on those grounds alone, but where there are market differences in the social culture, let's say, and in the attitudes of the authorities. That's interesting. Well, it was still, you know, I can't stress enough that I, in part, became a famous feminist, you know, public intellectual because everywhere you went in the 80s women could, we're not safe, you know, physically. I mean, that's just the case. So,

even at Oxford, you know, certainly rape took place with impunity. There was one famous professor who was always trying to seduce his undergraduates, but it was a, you know, Britain is a less violent culture in general. So it didn't feel quite as systematically unsafe and I didn't feel as unsafe partly because it's a, you know,, as unsafe, partly because it's just a less violent culture.

But I'm not going to say that those issues didn't want still very alive on campus they were. And in fact, when I left Oxford and I went to Edinburgh to write my first book, I worked at a rape crisis center. And that too was at that time, the whole city, all of that country was a culture of impunity. Look, Dr. Peterson, to this day, like 6% of rapes in Britain get prosecuted and no one even keeps statistics on how many of those get convicted. I mean, it really rapists have impunity. I can't stress that enough even now, even with all the changes that that there have been in society. Young women are somewhat

safer on college campuses because of hard work of people like, you know, me and my colleagues in the 80s and 90s and early arts, but it is not, you know, it is not that we still live in a culture in which women, most of the women I know have been you know, raped or molested in some way and vanishingly few of them have gotten any kind of justice at all, you know, from the perpetrator. But moving along, I was very happy at Oxford and, you know, generally it was a less violent culture. And so what question were you trying to address, or questions were you trying to address when you were doing your master's work at Oxford?

What was paramount in your mind and why? So I was very interested in the image of women in 19th century novels, this ideal that emerged in the 19th century and well, virtually all of the great novels, certainly written by women, but also in Dickens and in Georgia Lea of this kind of passive, childlike, dolllike, beautiful kind of inert figure. And I was interested in that because this passive inert stereotype of femininity

was emerging at just the time that there was historically the first wave of feminism in any Western society. In other words, women were organizing, they were organizing to defeat laws that were punitive in which women who looked like prostitutes could be taken off the street without due process. And they were organizing to have access to education, to have access to owning their own property so that there was a very vibrant and they were mobilizing for access to primary education as well. So right when women were being empowered and empowering themselves to change society,

this inert kind of backlash figure got constructed in as a cultural ideal. So I was writing about that. So let me ask you a question. Let me ask you a question about that. I mean, the representation of women in Victorian era, literature in other countries, I think, was broader than that. So the women in Tolstoy, for example, Tolstoy is a very good example. I mean, the females in Dostoevsky novels are very complex, psychologically, all his characters are, but in Toistoy's novels in particular,

you get the sense that in the Victorian period and earlier in Imperial Russia, that the women were really running the society behind the seats. Now, the men had the positions of formal nomenclature, but they were in the Tolstoy in world. They were really appendages to what was actually going on. The women were running society and gluing society together behind the scenes.

And Tolstoy is more of a sociologist in that regard, but his female characters certainly aren't playing a secondary role, even though it's a behind the scenes role in some ways. It's not a secondary role at all. In fact, I would argue the opposite is the case in Tolstoy's world. And I have no idea to what degree that was actually the case in Imperial Russia, but I suspect it was probably the case to quite a degree. Yeah.

Well, I'm sure it was the case everywhere that women didn't have full legal rights, but I think what you're saying is exactly right, but it's also respectfully, I think, proving my thesis, which went on to more into the thesis of the beauty myth, which was my first book, which is that Britain was the place in which women were above all European countries advocating for their rights legally and socially and economically. Therefore, this backlash figure emerged, whereas in Imperial Russia, women had virtually no legal rights. And so this backlash figure didn't need to emerge. They could be portrayed in all of their complexity because they weren't a threat to the status quo.

You described the Victorian English representation of women in the literary domain as a backlash. And I guess I'm curious about which authors in particular, you think that was characteristic of. And then why you think that was characteristic of and then why you think that there would be a backlash of that sort like what's your literary critic interpretation of the fact that that phenomena emerged phenomenon emerged yeah so i guess i focused most on

dickens doll-like characters. But also, if you look at middle March, there's a very common kind of pairing in fiction, in the middle of the 19th century, especially written by women, in which there's Dorothea Kasabin, who's complex and has it rich in our life and is quite a revolutionary in her own right trying to change society and then her kind of antagonist, her antagonist, who's this kind of, pretty usually blonde, passive, manipulative, superficial character. And you see that kind of dialectic in other novels at that time, but also just in popular culture.

I mean, it was the dawn of, the dawn of popular, you know, pop culture in the sense of lithography and pretty soon photography by the 1840s, 1850s. And so you're also getting these beauty ideals which were impossible of 17 inch wastes, corsets in which women couldn't breathe. Literally the fashion of the middle of the 19th century

in contrast to just like the 1820s, 18 teens, where, you know, a genostean's time, women could move around, right? They could breathe, they could walk, they could argue, they could, you know, express their full personalities, even though they had no legal rights, by the 1850s, with coup skirts that were kind of five feet in diameter and posed a threat of, you know, sending you up in flames, you've got to near the fire. Layers of petty codes. As I mentioned, whale-done corsets that really didn't let you take a deep breath of, you know, clothing that weighed several pounds just, you know, in terms of the weight of what you had to wear, changes of clothes multiple times a day of your middle class, the fact that you're dragging

your skirts through kind of manure and mud. All of this, interestingly, this kind of hampering fashion came about at just those decades in which women were or not. Let me ask you a question about that. A couple of questions about that. So the first, I have two very different questions. The first is that syphilis really became a widespread public health concern amongst the Victorians.

And it was a very dreadful disease and took a very large number of forms and also was transmissible from mother to child. And interestingly enough, the Europeans, when they hit the Western hemisphere, brought a whole host of extremely serious transmissible diseases with them, measles in mumps and smallpox. And that devastated the native community, maybe up to 95% of the native community. And the native community returned the favor in very minor ways, one of which apparently was syphilis. And so there was a real twist in sexual morays that characterized the Victorian period,

in part because syphilis was such a terror. I think the age scare was nothing compared to the syphilis scare. And so it's hard to know exactly what the emergent fact of syphilis did to the conceptualization of the relationships between men and women on the sexual front. It certainly made prostitution, for example, a much greater public health danger. And so, and so that's one question. Another question is, the Victorian era was characterized by the generation of a substantive amount of wealth.

And one could argue that part of what was happening on the Victorian beauty front was the advertisement by aristocrats that they could tolerate this incumbrance in the name of beauty because they had the financial resources to sustain it. You know, there's an example of that, biologically, it would be, in principle, it would be the Peacock's tale, which is extraordinarily beautiful, but also quite the incumbrance. And apparently part of what it signifies, especially if it's perfectly symmetrical and well-formed and heavy, is that the male who sports that plumage has sufficient health

and resources to pull that off without dying. And so now, and it seems to me that some of those Victorian excesses are reasonably understood on the biological front as manifestations of that kind of, what would you say? Well, it's an exuberance of display on the sexual front. Now there might be all sorts of negative consequences of that in relationship to other elements of women's, well men and women's lives, but so, well, so those are two parallel questions. How do you think the emergence of syphilis transformed the relationships between men and women politically and socially in Victorian England in particular. And what do you think about the excess resource hypothesis

on the Victorian outfitting front? People were getting quite rich at that point, and that was certainly one way of displaying it. Right. Yeah, I understand your questions. So certainly, you're absolutely right about the spread of Cyipolis and gonorrhea as very fundamental to social concerns around sexuality in Britain in the 19th century. Absolutely. The source of the contagious diseases acts

was this argument by the state. I I think, I think it, my most recent book, Outrage, is which addresses this before my last one, is about how 19th century viral epidemics, including contagious diseases like gonorrhea, but also typhus and cholera, were used by the state as a kind of pretext for controlling people and subverting their civil liberties. So definitely the argument of the state was, you know, these prostitutes or women who look like prostitutes or vectors of disease, they have to be managed and controlled

and the state's role to step into what had been very personal spaces and and mediate this for the public good, right? We see that. There's an emergent literature on the political, biological front indicating that one of the best predictors of authoritarian political beliefs in any given geographical locale so you can do this state by state or county by county or country by country

it scales is the prevalence of infectious disease. The higher the prevalence of infectious disease the higher the probability of authoritarian political attitudes and the correlation isn't like point one or point two. Correlations like point six. It's an unbelievably powerful relationship and it seems like an extension of what's what's called the behavioral immune system and it can really get going. Well, we saw that during COVID, right? We instantaneous transformation into something approximating authoritarianism and the motivational justification. What's so interesting and horrible about this, by the way, is that that's not a fear-based motivation. It's a disgust-based motivation. And disgust is a lot more aggressive than fear, because if you're afraid of something, you tend to avoid it. Whereas if you're disgusted by something, your fundamental motivation is to eradicate it by any means necessary. If you look, for example,

at the language that Hitler and his minions used when they were ramping up their public health pathology, prevention pathology, to extend out of the mental asylum in the hospitals into more broad ethnic cleansing, all the language they used to as paracetism, disgust, contamination, all disease associated. Right. Yeah, so it's a very powerful motivational system when it gets activated. Absolutely no question. You know, it's so interesting to hear your analysis from a psychological point of view. And I know there's been important psychological work done on disgust.

I would actually say it from a geopolitical perspective, what happened in the 19th century, not just with contagious diseases, but with the typhus and cholera epidemics of the 1840s and early 1850s, which were devastating. Just wiped out. People would be kind of sick on Sunday and dead on Wednesday. That created a model in Western history that allowed later regimes to emulate the model of kind of narrating the danger of infectious diseases, certainly using that element of disgust and contamination existential threat as a pretext for what author or chairens always want to do,

which is eradicate liberties and consolidate control. So I think it is happening on two fronts, right? It happens organically on the psychological front, but then the state jumps in and says, well, we can save you from this existential threat, just hand over all your rights. And I think that looking back, psychological front, but then the state jumps in and says, well, we can save you from this existential threat, just hand over all your rights. And I think that looking back, certainly Hitler,

and then later other exploiters of this discourse, either consciously or not, referenced or remembered the effectiveness of the state stepping in in the 19th century, because what the state did, which is so fascinating, is that they created, they solved the infectious diseases threat by creating a network of sewers,

Basil Gatz network of sewers under London. And the first municipal sewage system solved the problem largely. It saved people. And so that was a fantastic argument for the state to say, look, individuals can't do this. You know, the individual home with its with its cesspit with its, you know, my asthma is the source of contamination. One person's private contamination affects the commons. Therefore, you need the state to mediate the commons. And the metaphor that I look at then

is the like the internet, right? You know, it established this idea that there's a commons between us that can be contaminated from one person's private space to another person's private space and therefore the state needs to patrol and police the commons. Yeah, well, there's a real analog between the spread of information and the spread of viruses, which is obviously why we say such things as it went viral. It went viral. So, right, right. Well, and there's a real tension in human discourse that seems to be key to the distinction between conservatives and liberals, is the conservatives tend to be more discussed sensitive and they're more prone to react negatively to the potentially contaminating effects of interpersonal interaction.

And that could be sexual or intellectual. The liberal types are, it's as if the liberals bet that the advantage to free exchange will outperform the disadvantage of contamination, whereas the conservatives tend to make the opposite bet. And the technical complexity of that is that sometimes the conservatives are right, and sometimes the liberals are right, right? It depends, because the conservatives tend to be more correct, let's say, when multiple epidemics are raging out of control. Whereas the liberals tend to be more correct when, for whatever reason, the probability of genuine contagion is relatively low and you can take advantage of cross-border freedom and movement of information and people. But it's a continual

battle because, and, you know, this also complicates the sexual realm to an immense degree because, and, you know, this also complicates the sexual realm to an immense degree, because, of course, sexual intercourse is an excellent vector for disease transmission, and that throws people into an existential quandary constantly, because obviously the drive towards reproduction and the drive towards sexual pleasure opens up the danger on the epidemic front. We certainly saw that with the rise of AIDS, for example. I mean, there's no doubt, biologically speaking, that the AIDS virus mutated to take advantage of certain forms of promiscuity. And so that's our absolute bloody catastrophe and could have been, in, well, an apocalyptic catastrophe, although we seem to have got more or less on top of it.

There's always that specter of large-scale contamination lurking in the background on the ideation land the physical front, and people certainly differ widely in their instinctive reactions to that too. And so IQ is actually associated with disgust sensitivity as it turns out, So the lower your IQ, the more disgust sensitive you are. Now, the effect isn't walloping, but it's not negative. Well, you can also understand that, because imagine this is that the smarter you are,

the more useful the free exchange of information is because you can take advantage of it. Well, if you can't take advantage of it, you're differentially exposed to the threat of contamination. And so that makes things, as if things aren't complicated enough already, that adds an additional dimension of complexity. One of the things that I learned that was truly horrifying, by the way, was the degree to which the progressive campaign towards ethnic extermination in Germany was driven by public health concerns and a hypothetical compassion that underlay that. If you examine that developmentally, it's actually quite terrifying because the Nazis actually

started what eventually became their extermination campaigns with public health campaigns that were quite effective at eliminating tuberculosis. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, I, a thousand percent, so to, to move up to the 20th century, and, and this brings us kind of to my more recent work, absolutely. There's a fantastic book called Racial Hygiene and of course the classic The Nazi Doctors

that makes just this point that before the Nazis were even in power, there was this very effective public health campaign that enlisted just like in the last few years, medical professional associations enlisted doctors, played on their desire for status and recognition, and they were kind of corralled into being the moderators of racial hygiene, and that took the shape of course of rounding up teenagers who were impaired and sending them off for treatment, and then their families never saw them again. And that was years before the extermination camps. Yeah, well, the whole doctrine of racial purity and blood purity, which is a hallmark of Hitler's populist attractiveness, let's say, was all contamination language. Absolutely. And I read Hitler's table talk, for example, it's a very interesting book, so it's a collection

of his spontaneous discourse at dinner time over about a four-year period. And it's absolutely 100% saturated, it's disgusted oriented language. He bathed four or five times a day. Oh my goodness. That's quite interesting. Yeah, yeah. Well, and also he was a worshipper of will power. And there's a really tight relationship between that

proclivity for authoritarian control and the exercise of what you might describe as power and will. And that seems intagrally associated with the discussed axis and the activation of what's been described as the extended immune system. And so a discussed response is part of the behavioral immune system. So if you see something disgusting and you gag, that's a physiological response, obviously, to some degree, but it's also a psychological response. And that sense that you want to flee from or clean yourself, if you've

been contaminated, is also an element of the behavioral immune system. And if it gets politicized in a particularly pathological way, you don't want to be in the category of contaminant. Put it that way. Yes, I've learned that. I've learned that. No mercy. No mercy. Right. No mercy. Yes, I learned that. Weirdly enough, too. When the disgust literature started to roll out, the proclivity for disgust-associated

contamination seemed to be more typical of people who had a conservative bent. It's associated with conscientiousness, for example. And I don't understand this at all. Something has changed in the last four or five years because you've seen the left possessed by this contamination frenzy, both on the ideational front in the form of cancel culture, but also in the, and I have no idea what to make of this.

I mean, to me, it's an absolute mystery miracle in some sense that the left allied themselves with the pharmaceutical companies, because I couldn't imagine that ever happening in my entire life. It's like, I thought you people put the pharmaceutical companies up there with the energy companies, let's say, in terms of intrinsically reprehensible, and then all of a sudden under the COVID pressure, I mean, it's not like conservatives reacted much better because they really didn't. But it's still very surprising to see the left doing that.

And I don't really understand what's changed in the culture so that the left has picked up this contamination frenzy and has introduced it into extended immune adjacent behaviors like cancel culture, which is a form of disgust-related shunning. Totally. Yeah, you anticipated what I was going to say. I think in recent memory before 2020, indeed, it was the right that was more reactive to not wanting to be. And they used language like this in the 80s, and it wasn't pretty, you know, I remember in the AIDS epidemic, it was conservatives talking

about infectious, the fear of infection from homosexuals, or, you know, and it was ideological infection, cultural infection, as well as a fear of which was irrational, of physical infection. But indeed, the polls had completely flipped. And it used to be, as you say, that liberals in America, and I'm using the American usage of liberals, people on the left, were more open to cross-pollinating ideas, more open to immigrants, more open to the strange, the other, the alien, you know, more open to freedom, right?

Civil free speech, the free speech movement. And it was conservatives who were, you know, concerned about porousness, if you like, you know, ideologically, and on a community level, maybe even on a personal level, purity. And absolutely, in the last three years, I agree with you like a mania, like tulip media, like I keep going back to extraordinary popular delusions in the madness of crowds. A delusion has come up on the left in the last three years since COVID that leads them to be more maskey, more irrational about infection from COVID,

more shunning, more shunning, more shunning in a kind of tribal Old Testament sort of way than anyone could have ever believed. And to have forgotten all of their critical thinking about things like. I wonder if, you know, well, you see, one of the ways that Trump appealed to his populist conservative base was by using imagery of the wall,

and that's pretty effective imagery when we're appealing to people who are intrinsically conservative, but I wonder, maybe what's happened is something like this, is that the rate of change has accelerated to such a degree that it's even exceeded the psychological capacity of those who are more open and creative to assimilate. Right? Because we've never been in a situation like that in the history of the world. I mean, I was ill for about two years and I was out of the technological world. And so all my computers got outdated, for example. And, you know, it took me about six months to put all my electronics back together

so I could understand them after only a two-year hiatus. And we're in a situation now where there's unbelievable, unbelievably radical change in virtually every dimension of human endeavor that you can possibly imagine. And we don't really know what even creative people, how even creative people were react when even their capacity for transformation has been exceeded. So maybe you're seeing the emergence of a strange kind of conservatism on the more open left that wouldn't have been likely in a time when things were changing somewhat slower. I don't, because I have no idea what to make of it.

I don't know. I'm not persuaded because the changes happening to everyone and yet the people who are remaining open-minded in my experience and who are willing to engage with the facts that are being brought forward by credible people that contradict the dominant narrative are conservatives and libertarians right now. Yeah, I know. It's very strange. And also, you see a lot of rise of humor on the conservative and libertarian side as well. And this is something I also can't make heads or tails up. I mean, emergence of organizations

like the Babylon B, I mean, Renée first emerged into the public consciousness. It was quite a shock to me because I thought, well, how the hell did the conservatives get the comedians? That's just not how things work. It is how things work at the moment. Certainly, the funniest comedy shows I've seen in the last three or four years have all had a conservative libertarian tilt to them, partly because those are the people who will say whatever it is that they have to say. You see that in popular culture, too, on on forums like Netflix it is the more libertarian and conservative

comedians who are certainly a the funniest and also be pulling in the largest audiences. And so I don't know what the heck of that. I mean I think we can make that and I feel kind of empowered to say this is having spent my life on the left you know the, hopefully temporarily has lost its mind. So there's a lot more to make fun of. There are more rigid and people who are rigid, I mean, going back to Charlie Chaplin and you know, the great dictator, you know, the rigidity is always funny, you know, it needs to have fun, poke to add it.

And the left is more irrational right now. I mean, they're believing things that are not true, or they're not willing to admit that they've been wrong, or in, you know, in terms of my most recent work, they're not willing to admit that they've been part of a, you know, condoning or facilitating the greatest crime against humanity ever, which we haven't gotten into yet. But, you know, that's my view of the role out of these mandates, the mRNA injections, which my team of experts has found to be so very deadly and so very damaging. So in a situation like that, grownups say, okay, we've got to reexamine the facts, and I'm sorry, and they're not able to do that.

They're being more and more stuck in delusion, more and more committed to delusion, and they're not able to do that. They're being more and more stuck in delusion, more and more committed to delusion. And they've welcomed a two-tier society in erected in the space of less than two years that ostracized a whole sector of people and got them kicked out of their jobs, prevented kids who didn't have this injection from going to school in some states,

mandated people to their detriment. And you know, make people... Like, they're traveling to Manzli in Canada. Manzli in state in a staggering manner. It's shocking. I can't go to Canada. Canada used to be the most reasonable Western country in the world.

And I can't go to Canada for reasons that have nothing to do with science, right? Nothing to do with science. So, the left betrayed all of its most cherished ideals and won't even face that. So, there's a gaping moral hole in the center of culture on the left. And until they recognize it and reckon with it and say, oh my god, we became oppressors. We became the equivalent of racist. We abandoned our best ideals.

We became dogmatists and fundamentalists. And we abandoned science. We abandoned compassion until they're able to do that. They can't come to terms with reality. Okay, so there's a lot of, there's a lot to delve into there. I wanted to do that. I want to go back to your book, The Beauty Myth, and I want to say a few things on the beauty front and gather your reactions to those. And I also am interested in,

I would say the motivations behind writing that book in relationship to the experiences that we already described. So I spent a lot of time studying people like David Bus and Bus is a very good example of evolutionary psychologist. And I like David's work a lot. I think he's a very solid scientist. And there's been a lot of interesting work

generated out of the evolutionary psychology literature on the gender relations front. So for example, one of the more compelling findings from the evolutionary psychologists is the relationship between perceived sexual attractiveness, particularly in the long-term mating context and socioeconomic status. Now, it's probably not socioeconomic status as indexed by wealth. It's probably wealth as an index of productive competence. But in any case, the correlation between perceived mate attractiveness with regards to women perceiving men, the correlation between socioeconomic status and perceived attractiveness is about .6, which is a higher correlation than the correlation between general cognitive

ability and grades. And I use that as an example, because that's one of the most robust and powerful findings in the social sciences. Whereas the correlation between socioeconomic status and perceived made attractiveness for women by man is zero or slightly negative. So it's a walloping difference and that's associated with the proclivity of women to preferentially made across hierarchies and up and men to make across hierarchies and down. That's relatively well-established cross culturally and the proclivity doesn't

ameliorate much in, say, the Scandinavian countries. It ameliorates slightly. And then there are other hallmarks of attractiveness on the female side, and this is where I want to go with the beauty myth. We know that babies, for example, will gaze much longer, even as newborns, at symmetrical faces. And there is this doll-like aspect that you described. So, one of the hallmarks of sexual attractiveness is neotenic faces. And so, there's a proclivity for organisms to evolve towards their juvenile forms. That's neotny. And it's such a pervasive tendency that it even characterizes animated characters as Stephen J. Gould was at pains to establish.

It's quite comical, but one of the hallmarks of heatness is a babyishness of face. And you can see that in the like plush toys and the sorts of things that are often bought as dolls for kids or for sentimental adults have very large eyes, very small noses, very symmetrical faces. There's all sorts of hallmarks of beauty from a biological perspective. Many of them seem to be associated with fecundity, particularly on the female side. And that is very harsh. It's a very, very harsh standard. And when I read The Beauty Myth, which was a long time ago, by the way, because it was published in what, 91? 93, 93, yeah.

93, 93, 93. I was curious about what you made of the biological markers of beauty and how you think that plays into what did you describe the iron maiden straight jacket that's placed on women in terms of the what the ideal of their sexual self presentation. Right so thank you for asking you may be right may actually have been 91 came out first in Britain and then in the United States so respectfully I'm familiar with these arguments, and respectfully, I'm very familiar with David Bess's work, and I think that it's fundamentally flawed, and I'll get to why. So first, let me concede, of course, it's thoroughly documented that there are markers of health and attractiveness, health and fertility that are often

cross-cultural. And certainly symmetrical features, rosy skin showing good circulation, youth, all of those are transcendental markers for attractiveness. However, one giant intellectual flaw, respectfully in many, much, all of the studies that I've seen of the evolutionary biologists is that they focus on these markers in women

and they don't test for what women find attractive in men. They project or they construct experiments or surveys that prove tendentially in my view that women find wealth or professional accomplishment attractive and that that kind of substitutes for physical beauty. But they don't ask women who are heterosexual, what are the markers for you of beauty in men or attractiveness in men? And if they did and they don't, they would find broad shoulders, they would find, you know, symmetry, they would find maybe, you know, sorry, penis size, you know, they would

find maybe a muscle tone that shows that they can kind of effectively, you know, impregnate a woman. They would probably find a fight as a marker, right? And it's notable. They have investigated that. There is a fair bit of overlap in the biomarkers, let's say, for what men and women find mutually physically attractive, although the way that's manifested varies to some degree. As you pointed out, shoulder

to waist ratio, for example, is a marker, as you can see in superhero portrayals of men, for example. And the cardinal difference seems to be, too, though, it's also not the sophisticated evolutionary psychologists. Don't assume that women are after wealth. What they assume is that women will use markers of wealth as indicators of productive competence. Right, but let me get these because to me that's also a conceptual flaw. I'll get to why in just a minute.

But I know, I have to note for the record, as a feminist analyst, that I have literally never seen a study that asks women if they find penis size a marker for sexual attractiveness. And I think scientists don't want to run that study, male scientists don't want to run that study because it would be unpopular conclusions. So I guess to me the whole field of evolutionary biological studies that conclude

that sexual attractiveness is a kind of gendered female and that for males there are other proxies for sexual attractiveness is really convenient for men because they don't have to come up against the raw brute fact that there are you know physical things women evaluate men for if they're heterosexual, just like they're physical things men. So, let me ask you about that a little bit too, because you say that it's convenient for men. And so, I mean, I'm never certain what form of differential perception on the part of each sex is convenient for which sex.

I mean, the entire sexual battlefield, let's say, is fraught with catastrophe and opportunity to go to sexes. I mean, one of the things you do see, for example, is that women are much harsher in the evaluations of attractiveness of men than men are of women. So men rate women, 50% of women as below attract, a below average in attractiveness, and women rate 80% of men as below average in physical attractiveness. And, well, and, and like, I want to be absolutely 100% crystal clear here that I am not blaming women for this. I

understand why this is, I believe. Now, it's in the interest of a woman biologically and practically to find a partner who is as competent, as competent as she is, or more competent, because fundamentally what she's trying to do is redress the differential burden that reproduction places on women. And so, the reason that women totally disagree with you, I think that's out of date respectfully,

but I'll wait for you to finish. Okay, well, okay. Well, so I'm curious about why you would consider that because consider that out of date, because first of all, one of the definitions of what constitutes female biologically is the female sex, biologically speaking, is almost invariably the sex that devotes more biological time and

energy to reproduction than the alternative sex. So you see that even at the level of sperm and egg, because the egg has a volume that is multiple thousands of times larger than the sperm. And even at that level, there's more resources being devoted to the difficult job of reproduction at the female level. And of course, women have a nine-month gestation period, which is very onerous. And then they do, they are charged with primary responsibility for infant caregiving, especially during the first year. And we know perfectly well that the differential burden of reproduction on women is such that

single women who have a child are much more likely to descend into poverty. And the reason for that, at least in part, is, well, it's actually very difficult to have a child. And it's a 40-hour-a-week job at minimum and to add the necessity of working and providing on top of that means an 80-hour work week. And so it isn't obvious to me why the hypothesis that women would be motivated to redress that fundamental biological differential. I don't understand why that would be an objectionable hypothesis even from the feminist perspective. Well, let me just recognize that women are more at risk on the sexual and reproductive front.

I mean, I recognize what you're saying there. I guess what I would say is there are as many, like, get, first let me say, I think the whole field of evolutionary biology being presented to explain contemporary 21st century gender roles or expectations or norms is respectfully, I think it has almost no intellectual merit. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude, because you can, I mean, I've read the whole range of evolutionary biologists who are usually invoked, right?

And they're always tendentious and they're always talking about circumstances that no longer exist historically. So, you know, you could just as easily draw on, I believe it's Helen Fisher, who, or other feminist evolutionary biologists, who make the case that women are best served by adultery, because they're getting a good range of sperm,

you know, and the best-suited sperm is the sperm skill. Well, that does account for cheating behavior. And most of the evolutionary psychologists who have their act together take that into account is that what the optimal strategy, if you're being cold-hearted about it biologically, especially for a woman who hasn't optimized her mate choice, might be to find someone stable at second rate and then cheat sporadically

to produce that biological diversity. And that does seem to be something approximating a stable et biological solution, even though I don't think it's an optimal one. Right. Well, I think the sophisticated evolutionary psychologists have taken that into account. Gotcha. But let me just speak to why that kind of very beloved, and I have to notice that it's beloved of the whole kind of, you know, Dawkins crowd, the whole selfish gene crowd is, kind of loves this idea of the young fertile female who needs to find that unattractive, older, wealthy man, who have me, to be a scientist.

And also, a counts for or always gives nails a kind of, well, you're just polygamist, or you just need lots of sexual partners. And it's good for the reproduction of the race of the species. So the reason I find these tendentious, and especially this notion of women optimizing the material value of their partner to make up for their reproductive deficits is that, respectfully, it's out of date. And what I mean by that is I totally can see

that, you know, women is hard to be pregnant, it's hard to have a baby, it puts you at a disadvantage, certainly it's not accounted for in contemporary work, expectations more so since the pandemic when everyone's at home, but when you had to go to work, obviously it's put women at a disadvantage and they needed a provider for those two years. But I will say that now, I think that young men, for instance, like a whole phenomenon that I find fascinating,

I might find it fascinating as an older woman who's married a much younger man, but I find it fascinating that when I was writing the beauty myth, older women were considered done reproductively or sexually. And now that's no longer the case. And that there's this whole kind of expectation now of young men finding older women who are materially successful and who can provide them with with a good lifestyle really attractive. So I think that the evolutionary

biologists haven't accounted for that. You women pass reproductive age who are financially successful or considered really attractive to young men now. So that's a 21st century phenomenon. It never used to exist. And the other thing that didn't use to exist is if women have enough material resources now, they can hire someone. And I'm not saying this is optimal. It's very sad. I'm with you

on the value of the nuclear family. But, you know, if they haven't married someone who can look after them for that grief window when a baby, and you know, a nursing baby, is, is, is, is, is impeding your ability to kind of go it on your own. Totally agree with that. They can hire someone to help with those two years. So really the penalties for being a single mom, it's not easy. If you don't have resources that completely concede, you're going to kind of go down the socioeconomic scale. But if you do have resources, that's no longer the case. And that's why you're seeing so much of what you criticize, 21st century economic opportunities have made it possible to be an affluent single mom, hire a caregiver,

hire someone to help you raise the baby, basically, when the baby's tiny. And then starting from three years old, there are childcare centers, day care centers that will take the baby. And so I think the evolutionary biologist haven't accounted for what is going to result from that. It's what we've seen result from it, which is I'm sorry to be rude, but the value of

men has gone down. And I think that respectfully, that's one of the things I think is most useful about your work. Respectfully, I've been thinking about this. I think that's why you've been so targeted by the establishment is that you talk about the value of men and you talk about how men can really relevant and consider themselves to be relevant and have a role

in 21st century society. So I think the great unspoken or under-analyzed phenomenon of 21st century is the deconstruction of the value of men, which completely abandons the evolutionary biologists' kind of narrative about men and women, and respectfully to end on a happy note, I do think the value of your work is that you're trying to give men and succeeding in a lot of ways a role in 21st Century society in which they do have value. But it's not gonna be the same thing

that we had for women to go to love. It's an interesting, that's an interesting sub topic because no, I've insisted to my viewers and listeners who are disproportionately male on the YouTube front, mostly because YouTube is disproportionately male. It's about 75, 25. And so I don't differ from that much by the way. In fact, I think I have more female viewers

than average by that baseline standard. I've suggested to my young male viewers continually that if they're rejected by all women out of hand, that they have to take that burden onto themselves and not assume that all the women are wrong and that what they should strive to do, well, the probability that you're right in four billion people are wrong is one in four billion. It's rather low. And so you have to take that as a brute fact in some sense. And it might be unfair in that women like men use a set of criteria

that you could describe as arbitrary in some sense to make their judgments, but there's some things you're not going to win an argument against, and that's definitely one of them. But one of the things I've suggested to young men is that if they concentrated on making themselves productive is that if they concentrated on making themselves productive and generous, that the probability that that will increase their ability to find a mate is extraordinarily high. And I do think that's the case, and that advantage accrues as men mature. So what do you think of that as a tack? I mean, I want to thank you for my marriage because you are my husband's, he said,

tell him he's my spirit animal. You are one of my husband's kind of, you know, role models and he listened to you. And so unlike other men of his generation, he was all about like picking up the check and being a provider and it was, it's really attractive. So 100%. I agree with you.

Why was it attractive? Why was it attractive? Why was it attractive? Well, so now I'm going to throw a little bit of a wrench in your argument. It was attractive to me because everyone likes someone who is competent enough to make money, I guess, at whatever level they're making money,

it shows that they're not a feckless immature dependent person. And everyone likes someone who can look after them, but what I'm gonna add there is that I think men like women who can look after them too, and I think men like women who are competent too, and I think just like it's sexy when a man picks up a check, it's sexy when a woman picks up a check in due course. And I've heard plenty of men say,

well, I took her out three or four or five or six times and she never made a gesture to pick up the check. And that's not attractive because women... I think that's the attractiveness of reciprocity. You know, is one of the things you really do want in a partner over the long run, and there's probably nothing more important than this in a business relationship or a friendship or an intimate relationship, is that fundamentally the relationship to be self-sustaining has to be reciprocal. And that doesn't mean that everybody gets obsessive about making sure that the distributions are 50,

50, because they really should be 75, 75, right? If you're in a productive relationship, both of you are what you both receive is more than the sum total of what you both contribute, right? If you optimize the relationship, and I think part of the reason that man will appreciate women who pick up a check is not necessarily because it's an indication of their competence,

although I think that's part of it, I think it is definitely an indication of their willingness and ability to reciprocate, which is fundamentally. Now, I don't know, and I don't know of any research that pertains specifically to that issue. Right. But I guess what I'm saying to jump in is that I think your analysis and the evolutionary biologist analysis is productively updated by this reality which which is fairly new, that both genders are surveilling the landscape for people who are not only sexually and reproductively attractive, but who will reciprocate,

who will take care of them, who can provide, who are not dependent. And I do think that the kind of woman who was considered very sexy in the 60 you know, 60s when I was a child is no longer considered sexy because she's not able to contribute to the household. You know, that doll like, you mean, men who are competent may kind of give it a pat, is her, a passing admiring glance or have a one-night stand with her, but I don't think that that has a high value any longer as a... Do you think that's a historical transformation or do you think it's more a return to something approximating internal norm? Because here's something interesting, for example, the name Euth, the Hebrew original Hebrew

term for the name Euth, which unfortunately I can't remember at the moment, means beneficial adversary. Really? So, yeah, yes, it does. It does. And there's a notion there that the person who's the most well-matched to you as a potential partner is not someone who passively submits to your demands partly because your demands might be unreasonable and pathological and that's not good for you or them, but someone who's capable of engaging you in something like a provocative and challenging,

reciprocal play. If you pick a play partner in a game, one-on-one basketball, for example, you're not going to pick someone that you can easily dominate if you have any sense, because it's not any fun. What you really want is someone who can spar with you at the limit of your ability.

And that's a strange way of conceptualizing a relationship, but it's not strange if you know anything about how people engage in the processes that lead to further learning, for example, or the expansion of skill. Is you're looking for the edge of optimal competition. And I think there were periods of time, and the Victorian period in England that you described might have been one of them, where the female ideal is tilted more towards one of passivity, and that might have been a reaction, as you pointed out, to the increased agitation

on the female front for a broader role in the public polity, but it isn't obvious to me that historically speaking, the feminine ideal has been passive. That's happened from time to time. And so I'm so glad you said that we're completely in alignment about that. It is what I'm describing is a return to a pre-industrial ideal. And it is

only in the last 150 years or 200 years that the Industrial Revolution even made it possible to have what you described earlier, which is Thorsten Beblin's description of a kind of doll-like, you know, middle-class or middle-class woman whose only role is to be dressed and displayed and to display the wealth of her spouse. That is recent and before the Industrial Revolution and in America, just why America is so interesting and American women are all around the world until recently admired as sexy and dependent women, right? Is you needed a partner who could, you know, if you're going west, who could use a rifle if the Native Americans came to the homestead when the man was out hunting or if you were, you know, in a feudal society could

we versus or manage the crops or the kitchen garden or, know all the like like literally a household before the industrial revolution had as active as a female sphere as a male sphere productively and that only changed or people died. Pardon me or people died exactly. So absolutely women and this goes back to the Old Testament you know that the value of Eshat Khaile, a woman of valor, her prices above rubies. And then it iterates all the things she does. She weaves cloth, she sells things to bring, you know, in income for the household. She's got so many areas of economic activity as well as moral activity. And that's been true for most of human history. So those things were always part of the marital equation before the 19th century.

You know, not just is she beautiful, conventionally physically, but what are her skill sets? How does she embroider? How does she cook? How can she keep people alive? And so I'm disagreeing with you about that. or how does she cook, can she keep people alive? So I'm just agreeing with you about that. So then I'm just updating it for a contemporary moment in which people live longer than ever.

Arguably healthy women past their childbearing years have the ability, we were all kind of decrepit crones at the same time, by now, yeah, women, past their childbearing years, and that's no longer the case because of changes in health and, I don't know, what else. And then also the economic, you know, potential of women, as I mentioned earlier, has changed so much at least women who are middle or upper middle class, that that, I think, effectively updates your analysis.

But I love the place you're landing on, which is good meeting habits, extend, challenge that skill sets of both genders. And there I would say, this is not new at all from a woman's perspective or women's literary history because look at Jane Austen, that's what all the dream men did. They challenged the heroin to the limit.

Like it was all about the play, the verbal play, right? The provocation, the back and forth. You know, no one wanted to marry that sober, industrious guy who just provided. You always wanted to marry the dashing hero who, I mean, that classic scene of any romance movie based on these Austin novels, based on that whole literary tradition of women writing of the couple getting into an argument. first time they meet, you know, that is absolutely what you want. And a maid is someone who will challenge you.

It's so you grow and you're always learning. Yeah, well, it's also very, it's also very useful to note. I would say biologically, by the way, that the marker for that optimized combat is the spirit of play. So if the repartee that is emerging is playful, that's a biological marker that the information flow is being optimized. And that is a marker in and of itself that psychological transformation is occurring at the optimized rate. And it's very useful to know that there's an instinct for that,

and it is the instinct for play. It's a good thing to keep at hand, because you know then when you're engaged in any activity, if you could elevate the level at which you're engaged in that activity, who the level of free play, that really means that you're manifesting a real expertise in that domain. That would be certainly true at intellectual discourse. And I think we've managed that

to some degree in our conversation so far today. Sure. And as you're describing this, I also note, I think you should read my book on the vagina, which is a sequel to my book, The Beauty Myth, because if you haven't yet, that is so much a part of women's arousal. Like women will describe, if you ask a woman what is sexy, a man being funny is way at the top of this. And why is it sexy for a man to be funny? Because women's kind of dopamine circuit is directly connected to their sexual response, right? And so if someone's like exciting, and this is why the heroes are always kind of taking women on adventures, and like

your whole kind of dopamine circuit, which is so connected in a women's sexual response, is not activated by the boring guy who's on the couch, who's channel surfing, who never goes anywhere, right? It's activated by the man who wants to take you on couch, who's channel surfing, who never goes anywhere, right? It's activated by the man who wants to take you on adventures, who wants to appreciate your adventures, and who can make you laugh, because of those pleasure centers being activated. So, it's really interesting, right? But that's different than just taking out, like the boring guy with a big part. The last three issues are really interesting one, because the thing about comedians is that they they strike to the heart of the matter. They say what's not sayable in a manner that's socially acceptable but slightly transgressive,

right? And so they're demonstrating when they do that that they're really attentive to the what would you call it to the to the nic of time and place because you're your humor can't go too far it has to be exactly on the edge and if it's on the edge it'll produce that spontaneous outburst of laughter which is also interestingly enough a company by muscular weakness right people can't fight when they're laughing because you can't sustain any prolonged physical endeavor when you're laughing. And so laughter puts you in a state of play right away. And so, extremely interesting, these things are extremely deep, right? I mean, that instinct for play is so deep that it actually deactivates the musculature. And so it's not something, it's not something merely cognitive. No more than you think about whether something is funny before you laugh, because you don't. You laugh long before you think about it, because you get the joke and you're in the spirit

of play. So let me ask you, we're going to run out of time, unfortunately, and that's too bad, because there's so many things we can talk about. I think what we should talk about on the daily wire plus side is how you think the left cornered itself in the last decade. I'd really be interested to hear what you think about that. What I would like to do maybe to close up our conversation because we are almost out of time is I'm curious about, I'm always interested in people's motivations being a rabid clinical psychologist. And so I'm always digging under the surface, I suppose, to try to clarify things. And for me, and maybe for whoever I'm talking about, now you said

that when you went to Yale and you had the unfortunate and terrifying experiences that you had disheartening experiences that you had there, that that derailed your central intellectual interest. And then you spent decades in the hinterlands in some ways exploring topics that weren't your primary category of interest. And so I'm wondering, when you look back at the beauty myth, do you think that part of what you were doing perhaps was analyzing the perceptual preconditions for you having been categorized,

let's say, by Harold Bloom as an attackable target. I mean, were you investigating the, you see what I mean? Were you investigating the structure of prejudice, of perceptual prejudice, that increased the probability of objectification of the sort that you experienced in this very dramatic form? Yeah, that's a great question. Dr. Peter. I mean, certainly consciously, I was aware as a very young woman because I was a very young woman when I wrote the beauty myth. I was in my 20s, like early 20s. I was aware that I considered myself smart and an intellectual and I was constantly being objectified. You know, but in that, I'm completely having exactly similar experiences to millions of other very young women who are smart and capable and ambitious and constantly being objectified.

So absolutely, the beauty myth was an effort to understand that in order to get through it and, you know, master it and integrate it to some extent. So it was an analysis of objectification, let's say. Yeah, I don't think it was an analysis of sexual assault because I don't think objectification and sexual assault are the same thing. But I do think if you're looking for unconscious motivations, my work dating from the end of America, in which I was focused on torture and surveillance and my more recent work in which I recognized how violent and a coercive society can become

definitely arose from my experience of being raped as a child and then molested as a young adult because they're on a continuum and the body responds to these things the way the body responds to torture or to war and lots of good sciences emerged about that one really wonderful book is the body keeps score about trauma. That's so vital.

Right exactly. So, and then about kind of the hinterlands, I mean, I can't complain about my career having, I mean, it got derailed, you know, like you, it got derailed productively. I guess I did choose my subjects, obviously, I became more of an activist. And I guess partly my experience of injustice and obstacles to a merit-acredic outcome for me led to my engagement in more activist writing. And I can't complain about that. It was necessary. It was helpful.

I had to eat best sellers, as I mentioned. I got to be a famous public intellectual. It wasn't my first choice, right? So I guess that's just what God had in store for me. But it certainly, I mean, I guess what I'm trying to say is it was a derailment of what I wanted to do. But I think it was a protective use of the last, you know, 35 years nonetheless. Yeah, well, I think, you know, part of the hallmark of a successful life is the ability to turn stumbling blocks into opportunities.

I mean, you know that the best laid plans of mice and men and women obviously as well go astray and your, the ability to be successful is to some degree the ability to dance with some of the arbitrary constrictions of fate. And so you know who knows how that works out in the final analysis. It doesn't work out the way you envision things would to begin with but I think that's true of many people's lives life to take all sorts of twists and turns. All right so for everyone who's listening and watching, it is going to be obvious to all of you that this conversation could go many more places and it would have been good had we had the time to do that. But I am going to switch over to the Daily Wire Plus front and I think we're going to

focus the conversation there on what's happened on the political front, on the left in recent years. I know Dr. Wolfe has concentrated on that to a large degree, particularly in her reaction to the, well, we call it the COVID epidemic, but it really wasn't. It was, you know, the Swedish data show, for example, if you do a two-year smoothing of mortality that there was no epidemic at all. That's a price-leading. It's quite remarkable. And so really what we had was an epidemic of imitating Chinese authoritarians.

That's actually what we had. Yes, absolutely. It was an psychogenic epidemic of totalitarian impulse. And the COVID virus was the excuse for it, but not the reason. In fact, it isn't obvious at all that there was a reason at all. And so that's really quite terrifying. And so we can delve into that to some degree on the Daily Wire Plus side of things too. And so for all of you watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention. Dr. Nyley Wolf, thank you for agreeing to talk to me today.

And to the Daily Wire Plus organization, thanks for facilitating the conversation. The film crew here, I'm in Oxford today, so that's always entertaining. And I got actually invited to the Oxford Literary Festival, strangeness of strange things, yes. So I'm not so much, I guess I'm not so much persona non-grata as I once was. So that's an interesting thing to see. So anyways,

we're going to flip over to the Daily Wire Plus side and thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. Thank you so much Dr. Pearson. I appreciate it. Hello everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.