Brief: Bari Weiss's Sexual Revolution (w/Michelle Lhooq)
Bari Weiss recently held a "debate" about the failure of the sexual revolution. Expensive tickets to the Theater at the Ace Hotel in downtown LA allowed you to see Grimes and Sarah Haider talk about motherhood, porn, and woke culture with Anna Khachiyan and Louise Perry. And the results were...rather boring, says journalist Michelle Lhooq.
Derek gets the lowdown from Lhooq, who wonders how the New Right captured the cool factor of the American counterculture—and how the Left gets it back.
Show Notes
The Grimes / Red Scare debate was a right-wing psy-op
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On one side, Red Scare's host Anna Hatchian and Louise Perry, and on the other is Grimes and Sarah Hader.
And the question of the night, has the sexual revolution failed?
My guest today, Michelle LeHoucq, was there to discuss and to understand why the new right has got the cool factor right now.
Michelle is a former Vice editor, where she covered the electronic music scene.
She's also written for New York Magazine, The Guardian, and Pitchfork.
She also runs the Rave New World substack, which I am a subscriber to and fan of, and you should check it out.
She has a book called Weed.
She's a psychedelics reporter, but she covers a wide range of issues.
As you'll hear very early on, it was her video and reporting that broke the Burning Man protest that we covered last month.
And at the beginning of our conversation, you'll hear that I thought she was one of the protesters.
That's my bad.
She was actually there just in the role of journalist, but she had contacted me shortly thereafter And I had seen some photos of her in the area, so I had assumed that.
That is my bad.
But it was a very interesting conversation talking about why the new right has the cool factor
and possibly how can the left get it back.
Hey Michelle, thanks so much for joining today.
Thanks for having me on.
I'm a huge fan of the pod, actually, and it was really cool to kind of hear Tommy on it and just kind of realize that we're closer in degrees of separation than I thought.
Yes, I should say that you were among the Burning Man protesters as well, and you wrote a piece for The Guardian on that, so you've covered it quite a bit.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I want to clarify that I wasn't one of the protesters, because so many people online have just completely conflated me with the activists.
And what was really happening is, you know, I've been following Extinction Rebellion for a while starting in the pandemic when I kind of pivoted my reporting from, like, just writing about rave culture and drugs into really trying to understand, like, the winds of political protest and left-wing counterculture.
During like the Black Lives Matter protests and yeah, I started going to a lot of protests.
I met some climate activists and one of them kind of tipped me off that this Burning Man protest was about to happen.
I was kind of skeptical.
Well to be honest that it was going to be a success.
I realized that they were very small in numbers and that it was going to be an uphill battle for them to gain traction in terms of mobilizing indigenous people who are fighting in the lands close to Black Rock City where Burning Man has happened against like a lithium mine.
I just thought it's going to be really hard to get those people on board with protesting Burning Man.
I decided to go anyway because I knew that it was going to be a really memetic story.
That was kind of what was interesting is that I realized that even though the protest itself might not be a success on the ground, that it would win the online attention wars.
Yeah, that totally turned out to be true.
You know, the protest itself was really chaotic and messy and I think Tommy probably discussed some of the problems that they faced in terms of just like having actual native people telling them to get off the land because they chose to do it on tribal land.
A lot of the burners were also like really upset that they were being held up from going And then of course, like, there was the cop that drove into the barricade and actually did endanger lives by doing that and pulled out a gun and was, like, threatening to shoot the protesters.
I mean, it was insane.
And my video of it went totally viral.
Super interesting to see the response on what has now become right wing Twitter, like Twitter is, or X, sorry, is like just a complete right wing hellscape.
I can't call it Twitter.
I can't call it X. I'm sorry.
Yeah.
We'll see how much longer it even lasts.
It was a really interesting dichotomy because we did get some feedback about the indigenous protesters of the protest and the problems there, and I think that is something that warrants further discussion.
Seeing that both against the burners, who were just pissed off that they didn't get there fast enough, and then the eventual rainstorms, which held them up there while it was a climate change protest.
I mean, there's so many intersections in this one 20-minute spectacle, really, that warrants further conversation.
And I think that's really important.
I do know that Tommy said they had tried to mobilize The people who live there, I don't know how that went or what success.
Obviously, it wasn't successful.
And it really brings into mind, where can you protest climate change in a way that'll make an effect compared to the issues of being on tribal land?
There's no easy answer from my estimation to that.
Yeah I think that there is a valid critique here that like coming on tribal land and just assuming that indigenous groups as a monolithic entity are going to side with you because it's related to the environment is like really overly simplified and probably has like a degree of you know entitlement or privilege or whatever you want to call it embedded into that perspective.
But at the same time, like I talked to Tommy afterwards and was very sort of transparent about some of the critiques
that I've heard that I wondered if he was kind of interested in engaging with, and he kind of denied it.
He said that, you know, that he did try to talk to indigenous people who are stewards of that land,
that they did try to communicate with them beforehand.
They obviously couldn't reveal everything because that would have just removed the efficacy of the protest itself if there were cops there waiting for them.
It was basically like you said like one of the most complex and I think interesting case studies of all of the different Well, that actually leads into why we're talking.
in terms of political resistance.
And I keep thinking of this meme that came up, the Burning Man Facebook group or something,
where it had a picture of one of the protesters on the ground with a cop who's gone towards her head.
And it said, hey burners, this is what real counterculture looks like.
Well, that actually leads into why we're talking.
I mean, first off, that incident did get us in touch, which I'm very grateful for.
And I've been looking at your work.
We both intersect with electronic music.
I'm a former music journalist as well.
Oh shit!
I didn't know that!
I spent 10 years as an international music journalist and 15 years as a touring DJ.
No way!
So I am very much embedded in that world as well.
But you wrote a piece.
You attended Barry Weiss's debate at the Ace Hotel.
It was called, Has the Sexual Revolution Failed?
In your post on Instagram, you wrote something that I've thought of for a while.
You say, lately I've been munching on this question of where American counterculture
is located and landing on the queasy conclusion that it's most potent on the new right.
How did that happen?
So I actually need to go back to Burning Man again.
I'm sorry, I just keep talking about Burning Man!
This idea has obviously been stewing in my mind for a while, but it kind of solidified at Burning Man when I was at the burn watching the man burn.
And this was after five days of mud and just kind of wandering around the festival, talking to folks, observing things and feeling disillusioned by Burning Man as a countercultural meeting point.
I felt the same way about Burning Man as I do about a lot of other raves and festivals and sorts of social gatherings that happen on the progressive left or so-called progressive left.
I mean, Burning Man is more libertarian than anything.
But just kind of feeling this strange sense of simulation and soullessness going on where it seems like these paragons of counterculture have been memefied to death and everybody is just sort of performing the aesthetics of what they are supposed to look like, but there's no vibe.
Burning Man, you know, obviously is not a monolith.
There are so many different Aspects and arms of this organism.
But for the most part, I felt like it had been co-opted by the yuppie class.
And that has a lot to do with the inaccessibility of how economically unviable it is for most people to get there.
And I could go on, but just to kind of bring it back to what we're talking about, I was watching the man burn and I was talking to a stranger next to me about all of the things that were kind of coming up for me, all of the difficulties and the resistance that I was feeling in my inability to really connect to what Burning Man has become today.
And he asked me, he said, OK, well, if you don't think that Burning Man is countercultural, then where is counterculture?
And I said, you know what?
I think it's on the right.
And I was referring to this collective political or cultural collective that people refer to as the New Right, which is, you know, sort of a combination of edgelord podcasters and anti-cancel culture, trolls or super internet people, as well as like tradcasts or traditional Catholics and you know just kind of this diverse group of so-called dissidents even things like psychedelics which were once seen as like anti-hegemonic have been totally
Corporatized and gentrified, not to mention embraced by the right.
There's just this sense that left-wing counterculture really doesn't have anywhere to go, and what we seem to be resisting seems so amorphous.
There's just so much To feel oppressed by these days, that there's no consensus of what the target of animosity should be.
And so it just feels chaotic and ambiguous.
Whereas I feel like the right has really seized on a really clear and focused target.
which is what they call woke or cancel culture.
And the way that that sort of culture has become hegemonic in its embrace by corporations and government, all of these sorts of academic institutions that they think are preaching this ideology.
And so the right has really savvily picked up that opposing woke culture and cancel culture is now edgy.
And it gives them a sort of countercultural clout.
So I see this as being still pretty niche, actually.
I think the media, and especially social media, often makes edgelord anti-woke culture seem like a much bigger and more powerful force than it actually is.
I think for the most part, like especially younger generations, are overwhelmingly leftists and progressive still. But if you exist online, which I
think a lot of people who came to the Barry Weiss debate are these sorts of extremely online
people. Yeah, it does seem like the cool thing to do if you're like a young Gen Z like nihilist is
to be anti woke.
One thing that I've long noticed is on the left, because it's a diverse coalition, there's a lot more need for debate and complexity and nuance because people are coming from very different places.
And in my estimation, sometimes that actually holds up the coalition building because the trees kind of get lost when you're thinking about the forest.
And that's not a perfect analogy, but it does happen.
Whereas one thing I noticed There are some legitimate critiques about cancel cultures, but I feel that they pale in comparison to the fact that a lot of the people that I think we're both talking about will find edge cases of one person on TikTok, and they will blow that up through their media ecosystem as if this represents everyone who's left.
I'm wondering what the vibe of the audience at the Weiss event was like and if some of the topics that they talked about, if they were actually credible for critique or if they were more looking at edge cases and pretending that that's indicative of the entire systems that they're trying to deconstruct.
I think it's important to realize that a lot of people who attended this debate are not even necessarily Barry Weiss fans, but were there ironically.
A lot of people were there because they thought it was funny.
Because they thought it was funny to debate this question, because it was funny to put Grimes on stage next to Anna from Red Scare and next to Barry Weiss.
Like, it just seems so random.
To a lot of people, and they were really there for the spectacle and the entertainment more than because they agreed with Barry Weiss's views or because they were supporters of her platform.
I mean, there were, of course, people who were Barry Weiss fans there as well.
Those people, to me, seem to skew a little bit older and whiter and more conservative.
But a lot of people were there just for the celebrity of seeing Grimes in person.
There were a lot of like cute, hot, young downtown people who were just like, I'm just here because I love Grimes.
And also because I think overwhelmingly, you know, walking around and talking to people in the audience before the debate, the majority of people said that they were there because they actually did believe that we need more public debate.
And, you know, this kind of dovetails with Barry Weiss's whole thing about she's a huge free speech champion.
She uses that phrase a lot.
And I think that, again, like it is part of this right wing agenda of portraying the left as censorious, as portraying cancel culture, as people who want to stifle free speech and keep debate to work only amongst people who agree with them.
And that if you say the wrong thing or if you fend the libs, you're going to get canceled.
And so, you know, I think that this is like a very sort of Yeah, you note that Weiss said, tonight you care about free speech.
We believe that you can actually survive being a little bit offended.
And that's actually a really good thing for all of us.
But I wonder, does someone like Barry really like being criticized?
Because I know that it seems like a lot of these figures are the most likely to immediately lash out at any criticism.
Did you get that vibe at all?
What was really being debated here that night?
I think Barry is deeply traumatized.
From being really viciously mocked on Twitter by her colleagues.
And I think that a lot of people who end up anti-woke are people who have been flagellated online for expressing things that maybe didn't strike the right tone.
And I can identify with that, Derek.
I've been cancelled multiple times throughout my career as a journalist and I kind of understand the tug of becoming, of relishing in the fact that you've been cancelled and saying things like, you know, if you haven't been cancelled, like, do you even have clout?
Are you even, are you even worthy of attention?
I think what's scary is that so many people have now burned at the stake of social media mobs.
They've managed to kind of band together and create this alternate culture where they can kind of relish In their trauma and turn it against their so-called oppressors and say, no, it's actually cool to be canceled.
And they do this by sort of weaponizing the language of cancel culture.
There were so many jokes about people with uteruses.
I don't know, just just other sort of like woke words and phrases that the left likes to use.
And and they're kind of like making those phrases the butt of jokes.
And do they even understand that they're punching down?
I mean, that's one of the things about the anti-trans discourse that's really troublesome is it's such an easy laugh.
I'm thinking of Constantine Kissin's throwing in an anti-trans joke at his Oxford Union speech when nothing else of the conversation of his seven or eight minute clip actually warranted that.
It was just like, I'm going to get this laugh in.
And so when I hear things like that, I'm wondering, does it even register in some capacity that whether or not you think that, whether or not you understand biology and you understand sexual fluidity and the phenomenon that gender is not a binary, that those are actual people that you're just making a laugh at the expense of.
So it seems like the free speech argument to me really fails when you're just so inconsiderate and when you can just brush people aside in such a manner.
So, was there any recognition of that, or were they just using these words just to try to drive home a point that they're on the side of, you keep saying free speech, and I guess that's where we really have to land with this assessment.
Well, yeah, the event was literally sponsored by FIRE, right, which is this free speech organization.
I think that the people making these jokes are kind of channeling this age old countercultural mentality of wanting to shock the bourgeoisie.
They don't feel like they're punching down because they feel like they're trying to subvert other elite, well-educated classes of people who take offense at these kinds of jokes.
And that's kind of the only way to have shock value in 2023.
You know, I think that, like, for example, in the 90s, like being Really autre and being really vulgar and playing this sort of role of objection was the way to portray some kind of countercultural clout.
But you know if you look at the internet it's like full of objection and obscenity and vulgarity like none of that is shocking anymore.
So the only way to like actually get a thrill out of offending someone is to make an anti-trans joke or a joke about Parents gifting their children cocks and pussies for their birthdays because, you know, that's the kind of world that we live in now.
That was an actual joke that the opening comedian made that the audience loved.
Now, on the other side of that, something that has always been used, especially by new technologies, is pornography.
I thought it interesting that you brought up that I guess pornography was something they talked about and no one would actually defend it.
You said that they all kind of agreed that it's something that no woman would ever really want.
I know you also said Grimes said there should just be better porn and then she starts going into the music, so she at least appears to have been a fan or is a fan at some point.
But there's a lot of literature of people who actually talk to sex workers and yes, it is extremely misogynistic as an industry.
It tends to focus purely on male desires.
There's a lot of abuse in that industry.
But there are also sex workers who enjoy that sort of work.
So can you kind of frame how they talked about this topic and if they even recognize the fact that it is actually a vocation for some amount of people who actually enjoy being in that industry?
Yeah, I think the whole porn thing was one of the biggest flops of the debate.
I mean, it was just so boring.
To critique porn as like anti-feminist or a sign that the feminist revolution has failed.
I think even from the opening speech, porn was being held up as one of the examples of why women are so unhappy.
And that was used as an example of why feminist revolution was ineffective.
And they were blaming the feminist revolution for everything from, you know, the state of The Tinder Hellscape dating culture, to porn, to, you know, antinatalist, like, viewpoints.
And I think that the side in favor of the feminist revolution, which was Grimes and Sarah Hader, they very quickly pointed out that, like, a lot of structural issues were being blamed on the feminist revolution when you need to kind of zoom out and see that, like, Porn is obviously something that has existed for a much longer time than feminism.
And that what's really happened is just that it's become more accessible and more visible through technology.
This is what happens when you put four women who are straight and mothers and part of this sort of more educated, artistic, writerly, intellectual class on that debate stage.
It was not really a diverse range of perspectives.
And what ended up happening is that the so-called debate just ended up collapsing onto itself.
Like they all pretty much started agreeing with each other that motherhood, for example, was the epitome of true womanhood and everybody should become a mother and society should respect mothers more.
I mean, that was kind of the takeaway from this limp debate.
Yeah, and you you write that a culture good for mothers is a quote true feminist project.
That was the vibe being given.
Did they take into consideration at all that not every woman?
Couple friends tend to congregate around either having children or not, because that's just how life happens.
And when you have them, you.
Be with the children.
So that usually puts you with couples who have them.
And then there is a whole range of people who do not want them.
And then as you age, you tend to gravitate toward them, at least for a lot of your social time, because they don't have the same sort of responsibilities, which makes sense.
But point being is the women that I know who don't have them don't actually want them and they're pretty feminist in their thinking as well.
So was that even entertained or was like motherhood just being championed as the epitome of what feminism is supposed to be in their eyes?
Yeah, it was definitely the latter.
And I think that this is what made the debate kind of boring.
I even had a friend who refused to come to the debate because she was like, they're just going to all talk about being mothers.
And she was right!
You know, but I think this is what happens when you have a sort of strawman proposition to begin with as a debate topic.
It was meant to be like sort of an incendiary question.
Has the sexual revolution failed?
And if you actually just look at the facts, of what has happened since the sexual revolution.
There's just no real way to to argue that it has failed because real progress has been made.
It's probably more interesting to talk about where it's fallen short or what work needs to be remains to be done which is what the the debate actually did kind of eventually focus on.
If you just look at the way that the debate was structured with a question that's not really a question and for women who come from Pretty identical social classes and backgrounds.
It was not engineered to be an actually interesting clash of the female titans as it was marketed.
It was more just meant to be a viral stunt.
I find it fascinating that a lot of the people were there for either the star factor or being ironic, as you said, and yet tickets were pretty expensive.
Yeah, they started at $65, I want to say, and went up to over $100.
And they supposedly sold out, but word on the street is that, you know, Barry's team was giving out tons of free tickets to kind of engineer that impression.
Yeah, you got to paper an event sometimes if you want to get the good press.
You quote Anna from Red Scare saying, if the sexual revolution has failed, it failed because it won.
Can you unpack?
Was she being ironic?
Like, can you unpack that?
Or is that really where she's coming from?
Yeah.
I mean, I think that Anna picks up that, like, there was no way she could really argue that the sexual revolution has actually failed.
So she kind of had to take this double speak position in order not to seem ridiculous or in order not to seem like an actually ultra conservative A person like Louise Perry, who was her co-debater, who was actually extremely near reactionary.
No one would argue in favor of banning abortion outright, right?
But Anna recognized that a lot of her base could not take her seriously if she actually tried to debate.
That feminism failed.
And so she had to kind of take the circular logic around it to say that, yeah, it failed because it was so successful.
And what's actually happened now is that we are treating women as victims.
What we actually need is for women to take more agency and authority over their choices.
And I think she was kind of obliquely referring to me too.
I'm going to link in the show notes to your article.
It's excellent, as is your substack, and I recommend that people subscribe to it.
I have to ask, though, how does the left get cool back?
Hmm.
I don't know.
I think this is a question that I'm really stuck on because I see a lot of the tools that used to belong to the left, countercultural, progressive.
You know, movement as being completely co-opted.
For me, just kind of looking at my life and wondering, where do I have to go from here?
What is giving me political vitality these days?
I'm engaging with eco-climate, eco-protest.
I guess that's one direction that I see as becoming more and more part of like, the countercultural or Gen Z mentality.
