Why You Shouldn’t Share Your Private Life Online - Mary Harrington (4K)

what do you mean by digital modesty oh yeah that's that's an idea I've been playing with a lot recently which is really just about where we've got to with the exposure of everything on the internet um this is something I found myself thinking about a lot more and the more the more I found myself writing in public and speaking in public and really sort of being present online whether it's on Twitter or wherever which is is is there anything that we shouldn't be posting um and the more I think about that the more the more I can conclude that yes there are absolutely things that we shouldn't be posting or rather um if there are things which if if we if we do share them we should expect negative consequences to follow from that I mean I've and the more I thought I've read I've derived a set I guess of basic principles for what I won't post I won't post selfies online I mean I'll I'll post my face is all over the internet right but in the context of a conversation you know you and I are here you and I are here not we're not here to talk about my face I mean my face is just my face we're here to we're here to exchange ideas and to have a conversation but I won't post I won't post selfies yeah I can I actually I remember the point where I realized that you I shouldn't I didn't want to post selfies was was just after I I ran over the finish line of a marathon a couple of years ago and i' trained for it and I'd trained for it and I'd trained for it and I'd worked so hard at it and at that point I think I had maybe 10,000 followers on Twitter and I and I took a photo of myself having crossed the Finish Line looking like hell um completely exhausted I high as a kite on endorphin and I nearly I nearly pressed send and then I was like whoa don't do that do not do that and I and I deleted it and I didn't I I did not post the selfie of myself having just crossed the Finish Line why because I realized if I did like probably 75% of the people who follow me would say great well done congratulations and I get lots of love the other 25% would be the people who hate F because they they exist once you get past a certain point you get you have haters on the internet because like people can find people can hate anything you know that's just the law of the internet people will find something insane to hate even if it's just people doing like middle-aged women doing marathons um and and then and and it would there would have been one mean comment which would have just crushed me and it would have ruined my day and I thought what's the easiest way of not experiencing that one mean comment it's just not just don't post the picture but it's more than that it's also that it it exposes something intimate and personal which I realized was just not something which was it wasn't for all everybody else it was my my my that that moment was for me and it was for my for my family and for the people who supported me it wasn't for and and for the people who' who who' who' supported me to fundraise it wasn't for General consumption and and I realized that actually there is a boundary um and and I've I've spent more time online I've I've I've appeared in public more since then and the more the more I do it the more I've come to think that actually we need you the the more exposed you are potentially online the more the more intentional you have to be about thinking thinking thinking clearly on of where you draw the line like a digital hijab yeah well I I wouldn't that's that would be a problematic way of putting it in public because I think you there are borrowing from other people from a faith which I don't personally espouse um as as a metaphor did modest Ste do okay so no selfies so no selfies no pictures of my home no pictures of my child no pictures of my husband no discussing my husband my child or my home um except in the most general terms um and and really no no no discussing intimate Matters from my social life and my my family life and my home life um unless it's in in the most general terms or with the consent of anybody else involved cu timately like these are my these by virtue of being relationships they things which don't just belong to me and because it doesn't just belong to me I can't mind I have no right to mind that for Content justify for the non content creator people why a degree of digital modesty is also a good idea okay so the the more I thought about digital modesty the more I realized that what we're actually talking about is is is is setting boundaries on the culture of transparency and this is really something which I think we've inherited from the 1960s and the sort of utopianism and this idea that you know if we all let it all hang out if we're just open about everything if we all just share and we're we're honest and we're authentic then somehow everything is going to be better and that might have been true maybe that was true to an extent before the internet because there was a limit on what you could share but now we have the internet we could theoretically be documenting literally every moment of our lives and on those you know those people who've tried documenting literally every aspect of their lives online have generally ended up in some pretty horrible places I me I can't remember the name of the guy but there was there was a famous there was a famous subculture there was some guy online who who who documented literally every aspect of his life and he ended up getting trolled and he he basically went to some very dark places and ended up you yeah and in in in profound kind of yeah really Sinister kinds of audience capture um it wasn't nicardo avocado was it he's a more recent case in point actually I mean you know people who end up sort of you know crying and breaking up with with and and getting back together again with his boyfriend enous plates of f basically for internet CL you there there's a sort oface to the bottom aspect there but but more generally even for people who are not uh professional internet uh presence havs um the the culture of the the culture of transparency and the sort of tyranny of transparency has negative effects I I was thinking about this like in the context of dating I mean you you know periodically you see these Tik toks which which young men or women put out where they're like oh you know I I've just I I I point of view you're on a date and they're literally filming the date um while they're on the date and then they're criticizing the the the their counterpart on the date while they're actually doing it or they've gone to the L to make a Tik Tok about how how their date is going wrong while they're actually having the date and I'm thinking well if you if you never draw a line and say if if you if you arrive in a sort of potentially intimate situation you've always got that imagined audience in your head which is potentially everybody on the internet how are you ever supposed to create a shared intimacy with anybody and I think so it's like transparency it's not just the enemy of Desire transparency is the enemy of intimacy it's the enemy of relationships and you if if there's nothing if there's no Gap at all between what you'd say on Main and what you'd say in private there those intimacy is just meaningless it's not a thing one of my friends who I came up doing Club promo with he was in Southampton and I was in Newcastle running the same event Carnage which was an event where you bought a t-shirt as your ticket and there was tasks on the back like uh pulled a pig got off with three randoms swapped shoes with somebody etc etc right very sort of mid naughties Larry British rinking culture stuff um and I was asking him where he thought that the Larry culture which although maybe not exactly like emotionally healthy is a kind of uh liberated Lous uh which kind of speaks of a degree of transparency and honesty and Truth like I'm just going to do what I want right I'm not going to perform uh and where that had gone where like the Larry like you know pulled randoms in Club type thing cuz that's not what happens we see doesn't happen anymore no and he said it's because of this sort of imaginary audience starszy surveillance state run by glial volunteers which is everybody with a phone in their pocket y y exactly that you know there's no there's no you can't do pranks you can't you can't have a a crazy night out with your friends anymore I mean we we threw some completely bonus parties when I was when I was you late teens early 20s I remember the the absence and laughing gas party which I can only remember kind of in in bursts and that there was a magical evening which are you Unforgettable and also unremember um but there's absolutely no way that could have happened any of it um if if if camera phones had been a thing at the time and I'm thinking you know there are there are a huge number of benefits that come there there are new kinds of communication the new forms of relationship I mean you and I wouldn't be sitting here talking to one another if it wasn't for this phenomenal technology that we have that brings people together in some ways but if we if we're not able and willing to set boundaries um on what we and won't share then it it it will eventually scoop out everything that's inside us and leave us no scope for intimacy or interpersonal connection at all ultimately everything becomes performant everything's content so I had a conversation with George my friend earlier on and we were saying I had an aversion to taking photos for a while because given my love Island alumnist status I had seen a lot of people who did photos and I Associated every time you take a photo of yourself or what you're doing or whatever that is you Shilling yourself a content on the internet but that's not true people took photos way longer before social media existed so I had Associated the only reason for taking a photo is to post it online therefore I won't take a photo because I don't want to be one of those wanky L violent people that post all of their life online but that caused me to not post my life online which I wasn't going to do anyway but also not take any photos of the fun stuff that I was doing so I've got these huge dirs of of my life where I don't have photos of me and my friends doing stuff I went for lunch with Douglas the other day I wanted to C like I was like I want to remember this I want to remember the pink shirt that he was wearing And the fact I had Crocs on and like you know just like stuff I'm like okay let's take a photo but I have to get over my own fear that I'm doing it for Content even though I know I'm not going to post it it's like a I got like like [ __ ] projecting myself into the future that I'm not a part of but is the stuff that you would just categorically never photograph no no I would I would it would be like times with friends you like I'm on a hike with some friends or whatever but I'm innate and I feel like I'm supposed to be like I'm primitive man here and I shouldn't have my phone out because it feels G somehow to do it or whatever you know what I mean it's like here I am at the top of the mountain but it's not it's here I am with my friend that I've just taken a hike with and I really want to remember this or maybe I'll frame it and put it on my wall at some point or something like that seems like all of that stuff's good idea that's a good use of Technology up until the point at which you everything becomes an only fans for yourself I don't know I'm possibly slightly more radical than that in the sense that well I mean I mean I think about when I'm I I run a lot um so I'll I'll run red flag you you you lift I run it's just you know so so I run a lot and and one of the reasons I run is because I can't do that whil simultaneously scrolling like I I the the reason but you can lift actually you can do it in between sets the reason the reason I obsess about all of this stuff is because ultim like I'm I'm so so hardwired to to the the the rage machine like I'm so plugged into the internet which is why I I find myself kind of wrestling with the outer limits of it at all and one of the reasons I run and one of the reasons I I treat that as absolutely sacran space in my life is because it's physically impossible to do that while simultaneously scrolling and I have a an absolutely cast IR rule for myself that it doesn't matter how beautiful the scene doesn't matter how gorgeous the sunrise when I've gone for like a 2-hour Dawn run and I'm out in the middle of nowhere I will not stop and photograph it I will not I will not stop and record that because I don't want to allow space for that imaginary audience but I see there again there's no reason I understand why you do that I think that's a noble like set of rules to set for yourself the reason that that has happened is because of the social media side not because of the photo side let's say that you had a beautiful photo album of all of the beautiful sunsets that you'd ever seen it is again this sort of crossing over of the barrier of not just this is for me but that there is something inbuilt into technology that kind of like infect it gets into me and if I open my phone oh my God what if I see a [ __ ] notification from Twitter and then I'm sucked into a scroll hole in my entire run is is ruined and stuff like that I say it's a shame that something which can be you know my videographers got this like real special sort of point and click camera that is very low friction and he bought it specifically even though he had all of the kit in the world but he bought this very specific camera which is just point and shoot and all it does is that and he bought that to remove the friction and remove the performative nature of this so I just think it's it's an interesting blend but we we were talking before about how um people who put a lot of themselves online they can have unforeseen repercussions I guess if a lot of people are clustering together over their political opinions and if you even pseudonymously post hardcore political opinions on the internet eventually the person that you're potentially looking to date is presumably going to get exposed to whatever it is that you do online and if you are a hardcore if you're [ __ ] Bronze Age pervert or something it's like oh all right like and now I have this entire other side of you that needs to be folded into our dating pool and I learned from Scott Galloway in 1960 one in 25 parents had concerns about their child marrying someone from the opposite political party by 2018 almost half of democrat parents and a third of Republican parents had such concerns and a third of each party sees the other party as an enemy so given this sort of clustering around political opinions more than many other things and a lot of people doing the pseudonymous anonymous [ __ ] posting online thing you are potentially creating a future in which your uh entire mating pool has been restricted by opinions that you had 6 months ago and you've got the choice between either lying to somebody about your [ __ ] posting online thing or trying to somehow fold that into a conversation that they can be accepting of I'm not even sure how you how you resolve that I mean I I'm fortunate I'm immensely blessed in that my husband and I met some time ago and this was just this has just never really been you know before before even really before you were an opinion sprayer before I was a professional opinion h a long time before I was a professional opinion H um and really long before political polarization was anywhere near its current level of completely about [ __ ] crazy so I mean it was it was completely academic and and the honestly honestly Chris the the advice I give to anybody anybody who's single and extremely online is date somebody who's just not very online you know you can only have one very online person in a relationship you know except in the most unusual circumstances because and and anecdotally from younger friends I know who are also opinion havs whether anonymously or or or on the under their own faces um anecdotally it's a real problem because well I mean you quot one one one right-winger non who I chat to periodically who shall remain nameless um told me that I mean I'm paraphrasing a little bit but but but essentially um he he he has he has a real problem because he if he like he says if your choices your choic is between an ego a rightwing eego girl and they're generally un like a little they can be on the unstable side um or somebody who doesn't know anything about your opinions in which case how on Earth you going to explain what you do what you spend all day doing online and furthermore what what's going to happen when she finds out about your opinions on the internet you know it's not going to be great like it's a real problem so like how how how are you supposed to form any kind of a any any kind of a a genuine mutually satisfying relationship under those circumstances I don't know the answer I mean I I suppose I come back again to to digital modesty and the idea that we have to reserve some some space for intimacy which is protected from from the imaginary audience that we have on the internet and actually I think in some ways what the anons do is is wise in that sense because by virtue of being a non they've already drawn a very clear boundary you know they' said there are but by you know if you want to stay if you're a non and you want to stay Aon um you there are there are there's a whole sede of stuff that you just can't share you can't really post anything about where you are or what you do for a living or you know or anything that's too close to what what your what Your day-to-day activity is and so and so that that creates just by it's a very a very blanket way of setting some boundaries on what you're willing to share but for the rest of us uh it's it's a real challenge knowing knowing where to draw those lines and where and where to protect your where where to protect what's just yours and what belongs to you and the people you love Yeah Douglas taught me a couple of years ago uh keep your private life private and um I think you know one of the things that people can see is that relationships and makeups and breakups and the vicissitudes of your personal life can be a very effective wedge to begin Levering uh to be able to create an audience right it's the same as it's the same as every person who decides to call out some other internet commentator and have an argument with them that's a very effective way to Garner eyeballs yeah attention and eyeballs but at what cost what does it say about you what sorts of conversations does it open machine always wants more yeah correct doesn't doesn't matter what how much you feed at the machine always want if you think that having a relationship is hard try having a relationship with a couple of million people who are also invested in the outcomes of your relationship right you know every so often I see you I see a nons with a bit of a platform you know report that it it somehow it somehow comes out that the two two people who have a bit of a platform of having a relationship with one another and all of a sudden everybody cares everybody want and I'm like why am I even invested in this I have no idea who these people are but it's I I don't know maybe it's just a byproduct of being otherwise relatively atomized and feel like basic human need to sort of feel like you have a wider Community I wonder if a little bit of it is kind of like um who wins in a fight between Batman and Superman like who gets into a relationship please say more I don't know what you mean well that like you've got two people both of whom you know individually and they are now in a relationship together and you go oh what happens if these Two Worlds Collide or something you know Brett Cooper got engaged the other day and she announced on the internet that it was like the back of her fiance's head maybe the side of his arm and his shoe or something and it's like this is the first and last time that the internet's going to see a part of like my husband's body he's fiance's body he's not interested in being famous and I really like him for that and that's what you've got there it's like a one-sided internet relationship uh and she did a little bit of time talking about it and now she's just going to move on but yeah you You' got to be careful and again to kind of sing the song for the people who don't have a a following or a desire to monetize it or any of the other things it is a genie that does not go back in the Box toothpaste does not go back in the tube because once there are photos of things that you have on the internet the place that you live the kids that you have like little stuff like you know if you take a photo of your kid in the school uniform on the first day of school guess what that school uniform identifies which [ __ ] school they go to so yeah very very interesting talking about this I found a study that I think is is kind of associated a survey was sent out breaking down whether participants of different political ideologies would refuse to date a current only fans worker and an only fans subscriber percentages of participants who would not date a current only fans worker left leaning 43 moderate 63 right leaning 84 percentages of women who would not date a current only fan subscriber left leaning 70 moderate 78 right 84 so right is 84 for both but there are way more left leaning people who would date an only fans worker than would date an only fans subscriber and I think that that says kind of quite a lot about some of the signaling that people on the left are looking to do at the moment that like sex work is real work and we you know you can like monetize yourself as you wish but there is still an inherent ick from women to the men who are a part of that ecosystem I I would be curious to to hear like what the what the methodology was and whether there was any effort to control for preference falsification how's up well I mean when you think about when when you think about what Orthodoxy is on the left um around you know sex work is work and y y yada um I'd be willing to bet that there would be a subset of people who asked you know would you be willing to date an only fans worker would lie and even if they weren't actually even if actually honestly if you ask them in the pub privately off the Record they they'd be like yeah yeah know that gives me the ick um if if you ask them in that sort of a context they would give they would give the morally approved answer for for their political tribe which is oh yeah that's fine sex work is work or I I don't know maybe some of them genuinely don't care but I I'm willing to bet that it's a higher proportion actually of of of men on on both sides of the political Spectrum who who don't actually find that appealing what do you learn about the wouldn't date a current only fan subscriber thing okay so so the difference between well like a guy who's addicted to porn is BAS is fundamentally low low status you know and I think it's it's Pol it's moral it's considered morally acceptable across the entire political Spectrum to dunk on to to to dunk on lonely like masturbatory horn dogs that's like no nobody nobody cares about them you know that that's that's you know incels are low status yeah perts and the born addicts yeah the the simps the simps the perverts and the and the porn sick like losers like no nobody cares about them everyone's happy to to dunk on them so there's less of less of Oppression to preference falsification whereas whereas women women in the sex industry have a much big much heftier architecture of sort of moral hectoring around them at least on the left so so that would be that would be my read on what's going on there the preference falsification what did you learn after the release of the Barbie movie did you reflect on sort of what that did culturally did it do anything culturally I think it was an awful lot of conversations around what true feminist power feminine power means and whether or not there is still this sort of rampant patriarchy that is kind of keeping women down and so on and so forth and then there was the right-wing reaction and there was the left wing leftwing re- reaction to the right-wing reaction and all the rest of it so I I thought it was interesting you know if anything that Ben Shapiro needs to do a 45 minute video about like after he's watched dressed as Ken I thought was an interesting uh yeah I thought it was an interesting opportunity my favorite read on the Barbie movie was was that that it was a straightforward reactionary text and that it was might and that it was it was arguing fundamentally against feminism and arguing fundamentally for women as the for for for the embodied differences between men and women and that that there was there was nothing there was nothing Progressive or feminist about it at all how so how what would you say to the people who are like how could you say this there was it obviously was pushing back against men and men were on the receiving end of all of the jokes and they laughed at them and all the rest of the things but they but pregnant Barbie was expelled from the Barbie verse I mean there's no darker commentary on the on the on the boundaries of liberal feminism I mean this is this is what I spend my entire professional career Haring on about Chris is the is the fact that liberal feminism has a mother- shaped blind spot and it's right there in the film it's you it's as though it's as though the I mean even if it was meant as a liberal feminist text it's a liberal feminist text that's telling on itself in a in a sort of compulsive verbal diarrhea way and and and and this is the this is the reactionary read of of the Barbie movie I mean you know from I suppose you could say that it's it's in the N like a good piece of art is never is never a straightforward polit piece of political propaganda you know it doesn't work like good stories are never are never straightforward moral lectures you know good stories always always contain the the the the other perspective and good stories are always just more complicated than that but I mean even if even if it was intended as a piece of of feminist propaganda it told on itself in some powerful ways including by that detail of expelling pregnant Barbie from the Barbie verse in other news this episode is brought to you by element element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't it's a healthy alternative to sugary electrolyte drinks and it is the best way that I have started my morning every single day for over three years now it contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium with no sugar no coloring no artificial ingredients or any other junk 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will help you up and down the steps on the tube with your push chair sometimes people do something some some sometimes people don't um but like nobody will really give you the time of day nobody looks at your kid um can't really I'm not sure that I could explain why I've also traveled into London with a dog um everybody wants to talk to your dog right I mean is it not just that dogs are better than humans cross the board like you your your daughter's beautiful and and very lovely but it's impossible to be better than a dog I think that's the way it works you you only say that because you don't have kids true fair enough look here's the thing that I I've also realized dog walks past you you're everybody a dog is kind of like it's the world's pet it's not your pet because you are allowed to go over and tap it on the head and what's your name and blah blah blah blah blah if someone presumably it might be nicer if more people acknowledge your daughter as she walked by but if they started coming over and patting her on the head and in other countri that happens I mean maybe not the feeding Treats but in other countries like people respond to a to a random child completely differently you get warm looks you get interactions from strangers it's only in Britain that people are like oh I must not look at your child and I don't I don't know that I I don't fully understand the psychology behind not looking at somebody else's child or not wanting to even acknowledge that there's a little person in thein there's something very distinctive about it do you wonder if it's like the non radar thing that people are so concerned of being seen as like some latent sexual predator there is for men that's definitely a factor and I I know that because i' I've spoken about it with with male friends and peers who you know who who confirmed to me that they they'll they'll be very cautious about interacting with with mothers and children in in in a public setting um because they're terrified of being labeled in that way and I think there's something really toxic about that and something well I've found I think I've told you this that over the last few years my paternal instinct is started to kick in and children have gone from being super annoying and lame to like kind of cute so but I I see a child now like let's say it's like some little girls being walked Along by her mother or father or whatever in the park near where I live and I'm like I like I grin at whoever the over the top go over the top I'm I'm going this way um and I'm like this is huge yeah well it's enough water you're high you're highly performance athlete um and I like have a grin at the child as they walk past and I'm thinking oh [ __ ] hell like I'm the strange man I'm like the the 30s year old man we's Originals precisely correct it's really dark it's really dark it's really dark and and I want I mean you the the the total number of noning today is not no no higher actually than it was 50 20 30 50 years ago if anything so but but the the level of panic is so much greater right so the anti- child accepting and pleasantry culture isn't helping to reduce the noning rate it's just making life for it's just making life lonely and kids like kind of more lame I mean it's very it's it's difficult I I don't know that i' would be I'd be cautious about drawing clear causal lines between those things and and whether whether the the stranger danger and all of that Panic is is a cause or an effect I I'd be hesitant to speculate with bit more data but um none of it none of it helps you to feel any more part of a community when you're existing in public with a child let alone multiple children right does it feel alienating a little bit well I mean it's it's it's particularly palpable when you've got very small children because I mean when before before once your kid is in school you're sort of in this in in in a you're kind of part of an ecosystem at that point you know you're you're you're part of the of the school mom's WhatsApp group and you're part of you're part of a community and you know there are events you go to and you see the same kids around at um brownies or whatever um and so so after you you sort of start to fit in with with a of other people and and you do realize that actually some I mean if you live in a small town as I do at least you know that if if you're if you're fortunate enough to live somewhere like that then that something of that fabric is still there even if you do have to go looking for it a little bit um but but when when you when you're a very new mom particularly when it's your first or in my case my only um it's it feels like you just you've just fallen off the edge of the world into somewhere completely different and you know old old women will smile at you on the street but pretty much pretty much nobody you it's very hard to establish where you fit at all apart from that there's a lot you know going back to kind of I guess Barbie's cultural commentary uh there's a lot of talk about the crisis of masculinity at the moment if I was to make a prediction for the next sort of 5 to 10 years I think that I would project out that there will be a big crisis of femininity coming down the pike at least a little bit I I think that it it it can't be the case that women continue to grow up because there is a Dar of good male role models but the female role models are no better the only differences that they're allowed to be on TV more that they get more R time and that when women have problems there is a little bit more mainstream sympathy I think that's probably true I mean I suppose I would frame it very slightly differently um like the the problem as I see it isn't it's not it's not necessarily just a crisis of masculinity or a crisis of femininity it's a total crisis of embodied humanness which hits the sex's different ly um and which is Downstream of having developed a culture in which almost nothing about our physical bodies makes very much difference at all um at least if you if you live in if you do a knowledge based if your if your occupation is in the world of information I mean if you I mean if you're an oil rig worker obviously like you your physical Body Matters a lot you know to an if you do something physical um but those those that that as a proportion of the economy has been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking with with indust the industrial first first with the the the the de rural depopulation as agriculture industrialized and then with the industrial re with with de industrial de-industrialization as the second tier of that you know the number of people who do manual work has been shrinking with every generation and and the number of people who do who who work in the world of information has been growing and I mean if you work in the world of information it doesn't matter what shape your body is gender neutral occupation yeah exactly they're all gender neutral occupations in theory any of us could be driving a spreadsheet doesn't matter you know and driving a spreadsheet and arguably I mean the same the same goes arguably to a great extent for the for the being a professional opinion H it doesn't matter what sex you are yeah the keyboard wielders can be the same sex it it doesn't matter and and and there's a real there's a concrete question which face confronts all of us in that context which is to what extent does do our bodies even matter and I think really this is what the gender ideologues are pushing at from the opposite direction you that they're they're making a very strong statement that you know what shape my body is doesn't matter so much so in fact that I'm entitled to remodel mine as I see fit and and then and and making building a whole per political platform on the basis of that premise and and else but but everybody is confronted with the same qu even people who are not signed up to the whole sort of meet Lego worldview everyone's confronted with the same question if if I'm driving a spreadsheet or being a professional opinion however like what what difference does it even matter you know who cares who cares what shape my body is you know is is masculinity or you know what does it mean to be a man or to be a woman when when we're all just you know disembodied heads on the internet I I don't know the answer to that but I grapple with it every day well it's definitely something I think that people grapple with and ultimately you know given that work is maybe one of the most important things that you do that might contribute but there will be times where your biology and your predisposition smash up against your nature and the experiences that you have in life I completely agree and I think this is this is what we this is what it would benefit all of us to to be more to be talking more about and to be learning more into and I mean sometimes it you you I see people making early attempts at that or sort of trying to trying to find ways into that and you get these sort of ridiculous kind of Trad subcultures for example who are trying to find ways to be men and women in a sort of post-human age which is really kind of what we're talking about here you and and it kind of doesn't work and it's kind of cringe and often I mean what would be an example well I mean okay so backing up a bit so there was a there was a real like among the altright in particular this is something which I've been reading into a bit recently um among the old right you know in between sort of 2016 and maybe 2020 there was a real there was a real boom in influences of both sexist but actually quite a lot of young women um who were who were calling for you know pushing back against the kind of modern degeneracy and saying you know we should all we should all re-embrace traditional gender roles and we should have more all traditional setup relationships and that we could fight back against the collapse of everything in that way um as it turned out a lot of those a lot of the women who actually tried doing that um just absolutely hated it or or the relationships were really messed up and it turned you know a lot of the relationships were abusive and the are women who are coming out of that now having survived an an alt-right attempt at a Trad relationship who are just massively beaten up and traumatized by the experience and who are now this sort of unhinged kind of subset of uh like post alright radical feminists what was their what was their experience of the relationship well I mean I I if you if if you want an example of somebody who went who went all the way through one one variant of this you should look up Lauren Southern's Story I mean you know without wanting to to make any comment on her opinions or her political trajectory but I mean she she went through something along these lines and ended up living in a trailer park with a with a toddler um you know having having married somebody who was possibly a Fed it was it was all yeah right I mean it was a absolutely crazy Arc and you know having having leaned all the way into being a kind of alt-right you know Trad anti-feminist influencer she yeah she ended up as a single mother living in a trailer park and is now I I don't know what she's doing now but yeah I mean there there are a great many people who did who sincerely tried to kind of reynes ize something like the old the old way of men and women interacting and I found that it just just blew up underneath them and I don't know for all I know there were there were relationships who formed and the which are still flourishing but there are a lot there are a lot of others that went extremely wrong what is it that's blowing it up I don't know I I honestly I think like trying to trying to reverse engineer a set of a set of social sex differences without the material underpinnings which created those sex diff those differ social norms is just it's it's a Fool's errand honestly what like can you get specific like V but specific uh I I'll have to come at this from the other direction um so so one of the themes one of the themes in I've written about in feminism against progress is the the those ways in which like men and women have both always worked you know at least up until the beginning of the industrial year where men and women always worked but both sexist did and they did so complimentarily now ivanich writes beautifully about this in gender which I strongly recommend men as a book if you're interested in in the the Deep history of of the relations between the Sexes and he writes he writes about how in premodern premodern agrarian largely agrarian life you know men's work and women's work were always always different and and what constitutes men's work or women's work will vary depending on the context um but they're always different and they're always defined in relation to one another and they're always Ambiguously complimentary um he describes it as like the relationship between your right hand and your left hand they always know where they are in relation to one another and they're always they're not the same but they but they mirror one another and they work together and and that's and the nature of men's work and women's work in a harvesting in processing exactly exactly and there are even down to the language used down to the kind of the social spaces occupied even even down to the the kinds of tools which are considered acceptable for one sex to use rather than the other and the you know he describes Villages where it would be considered deeply humiliating for a man to touch the tools that would be normally used by a woman it was just completely rolling pin exactly you know it would be utterly utterly Unthinkable get off my CLE and mortar for for one sex to touch the tools which are reserved for the other this is and and so this is and and that that emerges out of a material context in which everybody needs to work in order for survival to in order in order for for life to happen um and and and what happened you know as as we as the world is industrialized and we've entered I mean what what he what he calls the the transition from vernacular gender which is The Ambiguously complimentary world of men's work and women's work work into the world the world of economic sex which is which he he describes he describes as more sexist than than the world of vernacular gender because although although life is less gendered in practice um by pretending that everything is unisex you end up with women being structurally disadvantaged because tacitly the default becomes the masculine one and this is the world this is what Caroline CR Perez talks about when she in the great another great book invisible women where she writes about how um how so much of the built-in environment and the physical environment and tools and and norms and default medical defaults and you know Crash Test Dummies and you know all kind you know surgical instruments and so on are all are all constructed for a male default and and the and the women's distinct physiology and which is subtly different and some in some biomedical contexts extremely different is just is just quietly rendered invisible and and this is this is really what L is talking about when he talks about the the the more sexist nature of economic sex because it it by by refusing by by pretending that men and women are interchangeable it renders it effectively renders women you've got a male default you interestingly I guess when you move across into uh me the world of mental health you're looking at a female default you know uh I think that's very truey inter just bringing this back to the question of why why trying to reverse engineer um ambiguous complimentarity in Fr in the world of economic sex now now that we've got those that now we've got that vocabulary in place I I can maybe explain what I mean when I say it's a bit of a Fool's erand because I mean because in a sense you know you can't like you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube um you can't we can't go back to to the world to the world before modernity we're stuck with it now um we're stuck with this world in which everybody's pretending that men and women are interchangeable and and to a significant extent in the world of bits and bites we kind of are and and under those circumstances to say well we're just going to decree that we're going to have a pre-modern division of sex labor within our private home um I mean it's a it can work like for some for some people it kind of does but I think you just need to be a little bit less doctrinaire about it and anybody who sets out to be rigidly ideological about it is setting themselves up for a toxic Dynamic and potentially domestic abuse yeah the I mean in practice if you ask most married heterosexual married couples um you they will they'll if pretty much any of them will tell you that there are jobs that he does and the job there are jobs that she does CU that's just how it falls out and because you prefer it that way I mean I can I could give you what's that were it not for digital modesty I could give you examples from my own family but I'm not going to um there's a it's like the specialization of Labor almost right but domestic specialization of labor but there are I mean there are instances in my own family where the the division of labor is counterintuitive if you were if you were coming at it from a rigid doctrinaire point of view it wouldn't it wouldn't be the the way it is but but it it works that way because we both like it that way so moving forward in that case the we should return to a tradcon history in the future is that that's just a a dead end as far as you're concerned well I I I think we need to be we just need to be a bit more attentive to where we are and I think we can we can afford to be a little bit more respectful of indiv the the Dynamics within individual couples I mean it's it it's generally like there are patterns which emerge you know in any in any given heterosexual couple you know that's been together long term there'll be there'll be things which are more typical of the male partner and things which are more typical of the female partner and I and that's fine you know we shouldn't be trying to fight against those stereotypes if if they're what works for people but I but but I don't see much point in imposing imposing kind of you should be doing this or you shouldn't be doing that you know because because ultimately you people guidelines people do need guidelines but people you know people work people people can figure out what works best for them I mean here's here's one example um talking in very general terms I mean I've made the argument that the problem with Trad wives as such is that they're just not Trad enough um in the sense that the what they're harking back to is a sort of mid mid 20th century template which was actually only true for a very small subset of the middle class and which is distinct in itself distinctively modern because in in premodern times all women worked pretty apart from the the very very richest right so you're saying the idea send it further back agrarian grab your pessel and mortar and hoe and get working in so so so the question I want to ask is what what does a 21st century version of the premodern in productive household look like you know the the the house where the the basic economic unit is your household and so you you've agreed you're all in it together you're there for the long term you know everything that you do you do for the team um and then it's then it's just a matter of agreeing of of of figuring out how how how to get the best out of everybody and I and like I can't I'm not interested in legislating for any given couple what that looks like um and in in a in a modern context where most of us work in the world of in the world of bits and bites anyway I don't know I can't I can't I can't make that determination for you yeah um but but you but there will be a way you know when you when you form your household and you and you and you make your decision about how you can get the best out of your productive household there'll be there'll be a there'll be a pattern and I think there's there's no shame in in accepting that sometimes that can fit into a more traditional mold what was that Insight that you had about women needing to develop a strategy not having it all well I guess that's just a variation on talking about productive households because I mean when again in feminism against progress the the the analogy I've given is weaving which I think is it's a very it's a very powerful illustration of what happened to to women's work at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in that for for some sort of 10 20 30,000 years prior to the Industrial Revolution weaving was always women's work and there are very there are solid practical reasons for that um you can weaving is something I mean the a household needs textiles right you know you don't have textile factories somebody needs to make textiles you know you need them for clothes and you need them for all sorts of different things so so somebody's got to do the weaving um and and somebody's also got to look after the kids happily weaving and looking after kids are fairly compatible because you can raise a loom off the floor um you can you can put down you can put down your repetitive you can do it whilst keeping an eye on you know toddlers or small people running around and it's interruptable and it's social so so it's it's ideal work to be to be getting on with while you've also got small children under foot and so for for Millennia Millennia after Millennia weaving has been women's work and but but weaving was also one of the first Industries to move out of the home um into factories and at that point uh at that point it was very it was much more difficult for it to continue to be women's work and you know those those workingclass women who went to work in the textile mills had real dilemmas on their hands because I mean what do you meant to do with your breastfed baby you know and there was there was there were horror stories about you know how how women tried tried their best to cope with that you know babies drugged with opium or you know left a or you know you know left in the inadequate care of yeah awful stuff and then and then there are those women who there are those women who who respond by just saying okay fine we're not going to make the textiles anymore so we're just going to focus on on different stuff um but but but the point is that um if you're if weave yeah weaving is a is a fine example of of the kind of work which which can which in the in in in premodern times took place within a productive household and and I suppose the question I have is you know what kinds of work let's say you want to be a mom and let's say you've got small children around Under Foot what's what what's the equivalent work that's a bit interruptable that's a bit social that's a bit um you can pick it up and put it down again that's not what people think about when they think about have it all though right it's I you can't have it all come on everybody knows that well they ought to like enough feminists prior to me have have have have leveled with the world you know you can't have it all you know you can have a lot um and you can you can have a great time doing it but you can't have it all all of the time all at once you know you have to do so something things one after another Louise said that she she worked it out and she was doing 40 hours a week of breastfeeding like a full a more than full-time job of just that part just that one vertical yep underneath the child having process yeah yeah yeah and that's not that's not something you can Outsource because it's not it's not just food you know there there's a whole the foundational layers of your child mother making child making the foundational aspects of your child's capacity for self-regulation and your child's capacity for being being an integrated person are laid down in those early early interactions um it's not something which can be subcontracted think profoundly important one this was something that Mary eat said to me she thinks that motherhood's a mtic desire at least in some in some regard that um you know one of her answers to the birth great decline is that fewer mothers beget fewer mothers I think there's some truth in that yeah yeah I mean if you think I'm trying to think how many how many babies did I ever hold before my own not very many to be honest if any it's possible it's possible that the first baby I ever held was my own or if not if not the first very certainly very close to the first and I was in my late 30s you just think this is crazy you know there was a not not even that long ago there was a time when you you'd have been you'd have been left holding younger siblings or um other people's kids or you'd have been around little babies and and it wouldn't have been frightening in the same way but it's you know the one of the reasons you know middle middle class older mothers like me sit and sit there you know with our with our our our late stage pregnancies frantically consuming baby books is because we just don't we don't have that we don't have that practice around us anymore um because families have got smaller and extended families have got more scattered and extended families have got smaller as well so so the the as as Mary so eloquently explains um in her you she writes a lot about the the shrinking of the family and the the atomizing effect that that that had the loss that that imposes on Adam Lane Smith's got this thing about how um don't forget that moving out of the house at 18 is a SC up by the mortgage industry to turn one family into two homes yeah it makes sense I mean you could you can make the argument same argument for the divorce industry you know there are there are genuinely opinion pieces out there from divorce lawyers um arguing that divorce is good for the GDP which it is that's interesting I mean me it's kind of dark Mia Khalifa uh very famous porn star said um marriage is nothing sacred this is a recent video she put up marriage is nothing sacred it's just a piece of paper if the person that you're with isn't helping you grow you need to let them go obviously M Khalifa is a paragon of successful relationships um and I would respectfully disagree with the sentiment and I just thought I had this really really great gu I'm going to send you the episode when it goes up this dude called mad Z LaRon and he tracked all of the different Western mating ideologies over time and how they were adaptive for the particular cultural uh time and he goes through you know the like agrarian the romantic and he calls the one that we're in now the confluent era you know I mean the the coin which I've used in the book is it's not actually my coinage I forget the the sociologists who coined it but the self-expressive marriage which I think is a very good and really what the quote the quote from Khalifa that you just you just offered is a perfect expression of the the self-expressive marriage this idea that you know your your partner is is is a vector for your self-actualization and the moment they stop delivering on that front you can kick them to the curb you know there's no there's no sense of mutual solidarity there's no sense of being in it for the long haul there's no commitment to anything which is bigger than yourself U necessarily um except as it except in this very transactional sense of it it delivering goods for you and and the M the moment that starts to that that starts to falter or you it goes through a rough patch for any reason you're wholly entitled to sever the contract and go and look for it somewhere else it's incredibly consumerist Paradigm but I would I I've I argue that the the issue with that um is that we we don't live in the age of we no longer live in the a age of economic abundance which which underpinned and gave rise to that marriage ideology it's just you know except for except for the wealthiest who are just Rich enough to survive divorce and to have their children come out you know only mildly [ __ ] up rather than deeply um you know for everybody else who's further down the food chain you know I mean divorce you know divorce and single Parenthood is an absolute catastrophe for a great many of the women who go through it because it's almost always the women who end up with with with care of the children and I mean the and the feminization of poverty quote unquote is directly Downstream of the breakdown of of families yeah I mean it comes back to it again the luxury beliefs idea Rob was here this morning yes um and it just Bears repeating again the best thing that I've learned from you and you taught me it before your book was even out the rules that are made by the upper classes are luxury beliefs that don't impact them they impact the poorest women and the poorest families and the poorest children so it is one straight line from shival is good and you should hold the door open for women that you don't know as you go in and out of a hotel right down to you shouldn't beat your wife like it is a single straight very slippery slope that gets slipperier the closer that you get to the bottom yeah I mean and if and what manifests as holding a door open at the top of the food chain is might if you're lucky as a woman manifest at the bottom of the food chain as intervening when you see a woman being assaulted on a on a tube platform and and the more the more you attack the holding the door open the less likely you are as a as a soul traveler in late at night you know with no who can't afford to get a taxi to have somebody come to your Aid if you find yourself being attacked on a tube platform alone yeah well and again obviously if you've got a denial of sex differences well why does the man need to step in just so just so you know as though as though the upper body strength and the physical weight and the height and all of those things had had all suddenly been magically flattened by the fact that we're talking to each other on computer screens yeah I was talking to Douglas about this yesterday that gentleman who's currently about to be on Tri in New York for choking a guy out that was I think drag it sounds as though he's going to be acquitted but that was an insane trial that a that insane effort to Lynch somebody who was obviously doing doing a public service but think about how many people now in the interim while this case is still an open loop and maybe even after if he gets acquitted Heary effect for any man tempted to intervene in a public situation like that is a dis scary yeah yeah yeah I don't want to be I don't want to be Meed or or or the next Geor Floyd case or any of that stuff exctly exactly it's an absolute disaster yeah it's scary what's your thoughts on the surrogacy industry I think it should be banned all of it banned yeah across the board I don't think sarusi should be a thing why little B little babies need their mothers um and and mothers are not in no no woman a woman is not a factory you know gestation is not a process of manufacturing to the to produce a product which can then be handed over willy-nilly to to another another carer um pregnancy doesn't just create a baby pregnancy creates a mother um it pregnancy rewies your brain it it transforms you through a series of you know you know you you get sort of hormone bathed for for nine months over the you know over the course of that your body changes your your your breasts change everything about you changes in and and you it completely reorients you towards to receive ready to receive and and to to receive baby and to prioritize the care of baby so in in a you're and this is this is not just true across human species it's true across countless animal species you're primed for attachment and you're primed for attent Attunement to your child um and of course this is not to say that this is not to say that adoptive parents don't do a brilliant job and there are countless adoptive parents who wonderful jobs and and do and care for and Care wonderfully for their adopted children however um everybody everybody accepts that a motherless child is in a is off to a weaker start than than than the than a child born into a loving home where with with their mother and father and there's a reason for that and it's because the the at Attunement that that come the that that basic biological level of Attunement and attachment that's primed through the process of pregnancy um is is essential from birth onwards to to laying the absolute foundations of what it means to be an integrated person um and and to say and and I think it's just profoundly morally wrong to say we should we should create a a new life with the with the express intention of severing that Bond at Birth because somebody just for the sake of adult desires I think that's profoundly inverting the duty of care that we owe to dependent infants you know we should be prioritizing their needs not ours did you see the episode I did with Dr animin about life of dad and about how yes this alend it's so good so she looked at the role of mothers kind of throughout all of her child's upbringing to they leave the home and talked about how I think that one of her pregnancies was uh particularly difficult and um then she and the child had been taken away after the birth which was successful and and she was okay uh and the dad was just left in there no one even came up to him and he just thought that like Mom could be dead daughter child could be dead uh no one ever spoke to him about it you know all of the pre-child classes I don't know what they're called um all of them are focused on Mom Mom's the one that's going to give birth it's her body that goes through the stress etc etc but she said fathers can deal with uh a like post child depression what's it called postpartum thank you postpartum depression dads can get that um there's this really really common issue that fathers encounter which I saw firsthand and then she talks about in the book which is that uh wife is pregnant future dad to be knows that wife is pregnant six seven eight nine months deep dad doesn't feel like he cares about child dad doesn't have any change in paternal Instinct dad doesn't have any the bond develops after birth for dads it develops and and there's plenty of evidence but they feel guilt and shame and I was sat in this I remember where I sat in Austin with this room like 100 millionaire 100 millionaire billionaire millionaire millionaire 100 millionaire like big hitters all the way around this room and it was one of these you know guys if anyone's got anything that they you know they wanted a bit of advice on we've got a room of people that are pretty capable in here and you can say what you want this dude was like wife's eight months pregnant don't think I'm going to love the kid what do I do and dude sat across from him was like give it 6 months after the birth Everything Will Change but that fear and the guilt and the shame and can I tell my partner does this mean I don't love my partner does this mean I'm going to be a terrible father you know all of these things like that one Insight from that episode I haven't had had so many tags and messages from guys in a really long time I thought I thought I was broken I thought I was defective or I am going through this right now my wife is X months pregnant or the child is 3 months old I'm like I just feel nothing for this kid and and and it just takes longer for men okay so now bringing it back to surrogacy so now imagine that um instead of instead of it being the dad who takes who takes that long to develop the bond with a child now it's both parents because neither parent has been through the biological Prim process of pregnancy wow um now and now imagine now let's we I can't prove that this is going to do this is going to impact on the on the life of a newborn baby but I would bet you any money that it will and I think it's just profoundly wrong to take that immediate immediate love of of of motherhood away from to intentionally deprive a child of that in the name of adult desire I just think that's profoundly morally wrong and we shouldn't be allowing it I think I saw a video I was told about a video of one of the Kardashians that one of the Kardashians who was very open about this and she you know she she procured a child by surrogacy um and procured yeah it's it's human trafficking Chris it's human trafficking just using your own genetics yeah it's human trafficking using using sometimes your own genetics so she she procured a baby via sosy and was very open about the fact that she really struggled to bond with with the baby and I was thinking you know so so okay like we can all we can all empathize with you maybe but like can we can we just think about what the baby's going through here this is a newborn baby who needs to be surrounded by love and responded to with care and you know nursed whenever it need and picked up and held whenever he or she needs it and and and both parents are struggling to bond and both parents are are feeling nothing and both parents there enough nannies around to you know just pick it up give it to the nanny The Nanny will continue to yeah and I I just I inside reading that I just wept for the baby who was still not being centered in the story even even as Kardashian was talking about how she was how about her emotional Journey even then the child was not being centered in the story and I I just think it's profoundly profoundly upside down we owe a duty of care to to the most dependent of all and the most vulnerable of all which is our babies and and every time we prioritize our own desires over those of our babies we're failing in that duty of care what do you mean by Matt Walsh ISM what's that tell me about Matt Walsh ISM this this my I mean I don't I don't normally I don't normally pick named fights with with people and but when I when I talk about Matt wshm this is this is a frustration I have sometimes with the with certain elements on the on on the right the sort of anti-feminist right if you like you know and this this this really comes down to where where my arguments come from which is about you know material conditions and feminism emerging out of the the technological Transformations first of the industrial era and later of the cyborg era um and my my argument that really we have to we have to look at where we are in terms of the the material and the technological conditions which are producing the these these challenges that we now face and sometimes I I find find myself frustrated with those elements on the right who seem to think that everything about Modern Life can stay the same except what women do and then everything will be fine give me an example so so for example you know it's let me let me think of an example that everything everything that's wrong in the dating culture will be wrong if will be fixed if women would just stop being [ __ ] to take I mean that's a very crude example but it's a sentiment that I hear you know women just need to stop being [ __ ] and everything will be fine and I'm like well okay but you know you does that mean you're gonna stop shagging around does that mean you're going to stop having contraceptive sex with with random women does that mean you're going to stop watching porn does that mean I mean so many I mean some somebody yeah so so so many of these quote unquote tra men have semi-public porn habits you know completely indiscriminate about liking like you sort of ethought accounts on on Instagram you know whilst simultaneously ining against against Trad women you know displaying more than a few square inches of skin on the internet and I'm thinking you know will you look at yourselves for a minute you know I mean if we're going to have Chastity can we have [ __ ] Chastity across the board you know I'm I'm all for more Chastity but let's all let's all be in in the party please you know and if and if it really is just about everything staying the same except what women do then oh yeah to to me it's the right-wing equivalent of thumb sucking it's just failing to look at any of the deeper structural drivers of some of the difficulties that we face and just just retreating back into oh it's all oh it's just the fault of those nasty women and sometimes sometimes it is the fault of those nasty women but not always and it's never just us yeah that's interesting and to think about um that you got some rule of thumb about how every political movement when it becomes mainstream is reduced to its most idiot possible idiotic possible version yes the most imbecilic possible version of it well is guaranteed to be the one that goes mainstream well it's just the path of leas resistance of memes right yeah yeah yeah yeah the more the more reductive something becomes the more Yeah the more reductive ites I again I had a conversation for two hours today about memes you know and the number of times that we quoted meme first explain later like the stickiness arms race of a lot of this stuff uh causes people to be able to get ineffectual ideas across with good branding and good advertising and good marketing and I think that uh definitely a lot of the stuff that's coming out with regards to mating and dating advice is a lot of the time that it's things that on the surface sounds triggers all manner of different biases whether it be uh your sort of tribalism against the other party the other sex um whether it's the path of least resistance that you're looking for like there's a whole host of different reasons why people end up arising at arriving at the particular conclusions that they do but the more it gets boiled down to a set of just doctrinal talking points the more useless it becomes I mean I don't really want to get into Insel discourse because it's not it's actually not a Terrain I'm massively familiar with but every so often I hear these talking points which have trotted out pretty much kind of without without any context or without any sense of qualification um you like like the one about you know 10 20% of the men are getting 80% of the women stop saying that I haven't said that for I haven't said that for two years no no no I'm not I'm not saying you I'm not saying you putting it out there people Trot it out as though it's just as though it's just gospel truth and I look around or like you know women women won't date somebody who's less than six feet tall and I'm like hello do you have eyes do you ever go outside you know this this is a terminally online issue right and again both of us are and this isn't me lambasting the people that are terminally online it's me saying that if you are kind of the same way terminally online yeah but the way that the sniper tries to adjust okay so the wind is blowing 15 knots east to west okay so I adjust how I perceive what the target is like if you spend this much time online so Lou has this theory about yourself right that I'll give you which is that you've got a barbell strategy which is like extremism online and extremism touching grass and like never the twain sh'll Meek and and the gray area is where you go to die right this dark playground where you kind of like uh I think her husband calls it good screen bad screen it's like I've spent enough time on bad screen today which is working demon so I get some good screen time tonight which is watching Netflix or whatever but ultimately you're still within the confines of the game and I you know said this a ton of times the most egregious stories online are the ones that gared the most attention and people who don't ever spend any time not being online use those as an indication of what the real world is like but they forget that those stories are selected for precisely because they're insane the man leaves the house comes back and the wife's slept with the postman and and the postman's dog and now he's you know left to die under a bridge with diabetic foot and gluten intolerance or something like that's that story is insane which is why it Gars so much opinion and also so much attention and you don't know if it's true and even if it is true it's probably unrepresentative here's a case a fine example of that from actually not the dating discourse but just to just to illustrate the point yeah there was a video that did the rounds the other day somebody compiled some zumers wearing ridiculous clothes and made a little video compilation of zum was wearing absurd outfits and put it out on the internet saying you know my the the Zoomers are Beyond redemption or some some caption like that you probably saw the video that like and they look stupid sure I mean I looked stupid when I was 19 as well I wore ridiculous clothes and and I was I looked at this and I thought and and I and then later I watched this video and then later that day I drove I drove through Cambridge which is extremely full of young people like it's it's very very Zuma dense environment Cambridge um because I I had to go there for some something or other um and I was I was looking looking along the streets I was thinking this is this you know 20 something you know early 18y old 19y old 20-year-old W after one after another walks past me wearing just normal clothes I was looking at them thinking no you're you're not Sor really Beyond Redemption you're just wearing normal clothes where's the cat ears exactly where's the cat ears and the Absurd kind of you know non-binary get up and the and the S Tech dream and the the the 18inch platforms and what whatever the hell else was in this stupid video no no literally somebody's just gone and compiled the most extreme and egregious um stupid stupid clothing that some 18-year-olds are wearing and and have tried to generalize that to everybody and that's that's just what the internet does as you say and and but when you apply that to the relationship discourse um then you end up in a situation where people are gen especially people who are not making much of an effort for whatever reason to reality test this against what's actually happening out there you know are really struggling and are finding themselves sort of circling the drain a bit with with in terms of their assumptions and expectations one of my friends referred to it as uh Shadow Boxing in imaginary hedgemon [ __ ] beautiful right that you have this thing that doesn't exist that you're somehow compensating for and interacting with despite the fact again it isn't there and it exists like in this ineffable place that everyone kind of perceives and no one ever sees except for in this sort of virtual world which then impacts the way that you show up and then you get you know culture and counterculture occurs to okay well [ __ ] it like I'm going to become a furry or whatever because I've seen it on the internet and I know that it pisses off the right wing or I'm going to become a gun toting magga Republican because I know that it pissed off you know all the way down so yeah it's um I I give thanks every day for the fact that I have to show up at the same time every afternoon on the to for the school run pickup queue why I mean if it's not physically touching grass but it it does it does that socially touching grass you know I I spend I spend all day like you know bluetoothed into the rage machine and then I go and pick up my daughter from school and I'm like yes and breathe out yeah you know none none of it is real everyone in M&S you know Twitter is not Twitter actually is real life but it's also not real life and it's it's important to remind yourself of the ways in which it's not true I think there should be for every one hour that you spend on the internet you should have to spend 60 seconds in the George at Asda clothing department like just to be like he the [ __ ] normal people again you you say I was really interested you know to notice in Sainsbury's as in George as in Marx and Spencer's that that that Maxi long sleeved maxi dresses have been all the AG for some time now okay and I've been I mean I don't know I don't know if I can is that one of the Four Horsemen of the sorial Apocalypse I don't know this is the thing but I i' I've been noticing it and I'm thinking are we going to have a is this just a sign of economic downturn um is it just that you know because this this is well documented the hemlines go up when the when when the when as the economy grows and is it just a fact is it just the fact that the women that women are sensing sensing the the the coming economic crisis I don't know or or is it or is it the sexual counter Revolution or is it Nei is it actually just a fashion I don't know certainly know that but I've really noticed the trend self-objectification from women is correlated with wealth inequality in the local ecology so that's an interesting one women seem to self-objectify and and and sexually objectify themselves so it was Candice Blake's study on the posting of sexy selfies um and her justification for it in terms of a mechanism was that um it shows women not only how high they could climb but how far they could fall with a partner and when you see those two things side by side it's run away from a life you don't want and run toward a life that you do um and that causes just something comes online and it's like I will Wrangle myself a husband like activate breasts and uh you do that through the sort of selfies that you to and it was some ins Ane volume like millions of posts that they looked at to find these correlations on the internet and yeah that that wealth and equality so I I definitely don't disagree that you know especially female Behavior but also male Behavior too can be impacted by local ecology especially wealth and equality GDP I mean we saw even no one ever really spoke about this I was waiting for a study to come out and someone may still do it I thought that casual sex was going to drop after covid due to a pathogen fear from women right women have got much uh lower threshold for disgusted sensitivity quite rightly because they're more uh at risk of of bearing some sort of Burden uh and given that we had just talk of disease and and and infection and virus and so on and so forth for a very long time I thought that we were going to find a big after effect of that it just turns out that all of the then three-year-olds now six-year-olds are like can't read and have absolutely zero social skills they' had a mask the face for the last three years well speaking as the mother of a seven-year-old that's actually not observed that's not the case amongst my daughter's cohort you you'll be pleased to know that's good they all seem actually to be fairly normal and well adjusted kids the reading age uh or the the reading levels for sure I think across the um if you look at some of the studies that have been done don't bod particularly well it seems what's what what is Def what is absolutely clear is that there's a there's a stark economic divide um there's a there's and the the further the the food chain you are economically the harder the harder hit your children were um you know for for understandable reason you know whether or not whether it's because you had limited Social Capital to or were were struggling or were in a chaotic family or or or simply had to had to work um irrespective of lockdown and there your kids are home and there's just nobody to watch them um for for for a thousand and one different reasons um it's been absolutely disastrous for for for for poorer children um to to a degree which I think is unforgivable and shouldn't be forgiven yeah what are you most obsessed by as subcultures go or what are you going to be focused on over the next couple of months is there anything that's that's particularly caught your eye actually what I'm I'm I'm reviewing I'm reviewing a a leftist sociological academic text at the moment which is kind of awful it's called the women of the far right um and I'm I'm very interested in it as a text written by written by the left about the right but I'm also interested in the the it documents it's sort of it's a kind of progressive sociological study of some alt-right female vloggers from the late from the late from sort of 2016 to 2019 including Lauren Southern and it's kind of badly written and it's kind of it's It's kind of dated but it's also it's also interesting as a as a phenomenon so I'm kind of but really this is just a preamble so one of the things I'm interested in and thinking about and really sort of grappling with is the ambivalent position of Women Within the larger conservative or right-wing dissident movement because it is ambivalent because there are there are a great many rightwing right-wing men out there who really are violently misogynistic you know and who genuinely just think women are not people um and yet um there are a great many women out there who look at who look at the sort of the the emerging kind of doctrinaire Orthodoxy of the kind of the kind of the Mad left if you you you know what I mean by The Mad left um and who just say this is not for me and so there's a great many women who are kind of between those two polls and who are genuinely quite politically homeless and I it's a it's something I think about a lot you know I don't really have any firm conclusions or strong Reflections on that um ex except to say this is a real this is a real phenomenon and I don't know and it's like I don't know I mean the it sort of fits into a larger kind of reflection I suppose on on digital cultures and where we are in the discourse because it feels as though a great many of the trends which sort of erupted in the sort of 2015 2016 you know with kind of you know the Trump ageddon and all the rest of it have kind of run their course now you know a lot of a lot of those sort of quote unquote dissident subcultures have now pretty much percolated into the mainstream you know there's a whole new set of Talking Heads who are now pretty much I mean even Bronze Age pervert has been doxed and is now you know he's now on his foodie Arc which is just hilarious would you so so so like where do we go from here because all it seems like all all that's left in the subculture is just this increasingly unhinged discourse about dating and I just I mean I'm 44 and I've been married for 10 years so like I've got nothing to add to that so like I mean maybe I should just hang up my boots and go and do something else and I mean I make maybe I'll start a bakery or maybe you and Bron Bronze Age pervert can start the Bronze Age B Bakery yeah I don't know I think one of the reasons why Everyone is always so interested in talking about the dating world is that it permits everybody to have an opinion both those who participate and those who do not like if you don't know how [ __ ] the NFL league goes like what have you got to tell me about how Travis Kelce should like change his like QB game or something like that it doesn't matter whereas for dating people do people do have an idea of that and because I remember when I was working in Nightlife one of my jobs was to do I'm okay at copywriting so I would write the copy for a lot of the social media posts my business partner would do a lot more of the accounts and kind of back office stuff no one went up to him looked over his shoulder and gave him [ __ ] about the way that his spreadsheets logged but everyone has a social media account so everyone's a [ __ ] expert so everybody had oh mate I wouldn't have posted that at that time well that's not the hashtag that I would have used I thought I would definitely think that you could have done it this way I'm like all right well like like if you're going to scrutinize me scrutinize the [ __ ] SC yeah exactly and it just it never happened and I think that you know there's a few things that people all it's why diet is such a a breeding ground for people to argue because everyone's got to eat right everybody has an idea about how and it's death denialism as well like no my I'm going to live longer than you my veganism is going to beat your carnivorism and blah blah blah and ultimately it just [ __ ] comes down to people wanting to be able to espouse their opinions whilst being insulated from the one sort of one optimistic read we could put on that might be that you know if if we're all still still fixated on the relations between men and women um that I think that that's that's a testament of sorts to the fact that the the war on relationships is not going to is never going to Triumph completely you know men and women do still want to be together and they're going to try and continue to andash out this even even if even if they're kind of you know mud wrestling horribly at the moment you know at least on the internet I and and again you know Twitter is not real life even though it kind of is real life and I I just have to trust that somewhere somewhere out of this messed up discourse [ __ ] useful and also that there are lots of perfectly nice and well adjusted you young young men and women who are finding one another and and forming nice relationships that just that just don't go anywhere near Twitter you know when I I just have to assume that that's also true one of the most like sanity reinforcing periods of my year is when I go home for Christmas and I'm at Mom and Dad's house and the The Gruffalo comes on right and I watch the gruff and I think who's this made for this is made for families that are sat together around the fire whether you be shopping at waitrose or shopping at little like that's what it's built for and it works across the board great story I know it pretty much by heart I think Gruff Gruff is a solid story or you know like the boy the mole The Fox and the just and it always makes me maybe it's just because Christmas is a kindful Whimsical time of year that makes everyone happy but um that always that's like my medeor equivalent of touching grass I think that's one of the most grass-like uh watching experiences so what is this built to Ender right it's like just very calming very what's that one with the drag what's that one with the dragon Z yes thank you always Rhymes um which must be a nightmare to script but um yeah all of those things and I'm like I 35-year-old childless man watches children's TV this is another warning this is smiling at todders on a walk isn't it um but yeah I happily watched that and it gives me that's the stuff that my post content Clarity of that is like like everything's a bit everything's all right I think I think I I honestly do think we're going to be right you know I I sincerely believe that it doesn't matter how hard we try and demolish our nature it will always find a way back I I genuinely believe that even if even if as Louise sometimes worries you know our culture is so structurally anti-natalist that we're just going to end up self selecting against ourselves to the point that we just render ourselves extinct um but but that it doesn't follow from that that all humans are going to go extinct it'll just be the ones from this culture effect yeah and so so Some Humans somewhere Will Survive and it'll be the ones who figured out how to unplug from the skin machine and go back to having kids um and but but we we like one way or another like that subset of the culture which survives will be the one that figures out how to how to get past this kind of messed up point that we're in but but some part of it will survive you know I think we're going to be all right that's the white pill that I want to finish on Mary Harrington ladies and gentlemen where should people go they want to keep up to date with all the things that you're doing and what can they expect off you over the next few months I WR regularly at unheard um my my substack is reactionary feminist um you can find me on Twitter at mov in circles hell yeah thank you Mary thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode with Mary you will love my full length conversation with Louise Perry go on give it a press