Bret Weinstein Speaks with Bridget Phetasy on the Darkhorse Podcast
Bret speaks with Bridget Phetasy on the Darkhorse podcast. They discuss the impact of the internet on the relationship landscape, motherhood, and a biological perspective on what a healthy environment might look like among the many facets they address in this conversation.Find Bridget on Twitter: @BridgetPhetasy (https://twitter.com/BridgetPhetasy)Find Bridget on Substack: https://bridgetphetasy.substack.com/Find Bridget on her website: https://phetasy.com/*****Find Bret Weinstein on Twitter:...
I know more good women, like brilliant, amazing women who know that they can't have sex just like a man.
They can't just have meaningless sex.
They know that about themselves and they are not even competing in the dating market because they can't.
And these are the best women, like the best women, nurturing, loving, intelligent, like the the best women that I know.
And they're sitting on the sidelines single because it's how do you even go on Tinder or compete?
And people will say, well, they should go look for, you know, somebody Like on match or somewhere like that.
It's not impossible, but I just think it does, like you said, it's a clusterfuck.
Hey, folks.
Welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, and I have the distinct pleasure of sitting this morning with Bridget Phetasy, who is an all-around marvelous person, polymath, a little bit hard to describe, but most of you probably know her from her Substack and her Twitter account.
And where else might they know you from?
I guess you had a column in... YouTube.
YouTube, right.
Her podcast.
Yes, do you want to plug your podcast?
You'll get another chance.
Yeah.
I have Dumpster Fire The Show on YouTube, which makes fun of just the news cycle in the world.
And then Walk-Ins Welcome, which you've been on and Heather's been on and is a little bit more intellectual.
That's long form interviews with interesting people about whatever we want to talk about.
And then I just started one with my husband called Factory Settings, and we are just evaluating the world through our own biases.
So yeah, I have a lot of material.
Yeah, I will say you're great at naming things.
I like all three of the names of your podcasts.
Oh, no.
All right.
We're going to have to silence that.
You can take it.
No, I can't take it.
I just can't take it.
Alright, so I should say there's a lot of stuff that we might talk about.
You are a new mother, which is fantastic, and I think I've told you this privately, but publicly, congratulations.
That is the most momentous news it could possibly be.
It is.
How is motherhood treating you?
I love it.
I love it more than I thought I would.
If that makes any sense.
No, you're wired to love it more than is rational, which is great.
It is fascinating how you forget everything.
I'm already like, let's have another one!
Immediately.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
No, and my husband has to remind me, like, uh, you remember how miserable you were in month nine?
You remember all the things?
And it's like, nope, don't remember any of it.
Don't, yeah, I would, I was just commenting to a friend, um, that there are certain things in life that are so important and so painful that you are wired to forget the pain.
And even if you intellectually know that it was there, um, and you know, uh, I, Can't really speak to either pregnancy or childbirth itself, but certainly both of these things are incredibly awkward for humans and painful and all the rest.
And boy, is it important that you not remain directly connected to that pain so that you can reproduce more.
Yeah, I mean, the hormones definitely flood in and do their job to try and just make you feel all warm and fuzzy in those early months.
not for everyone, but in my experience, it was very much the just bubble that newborn bubble is so special.
And it's funny too.
I just never really had that much interest in newborns.
And now I love, love them like all newborns.
I want the little fresh babies.
But before I had one, I was like, Oh, they seem so boring.
They just, they don't do much, but there's something so special about that first 30 to 60 days when they're just so new.
Yeah, I agree.
I, I, I had rather the same reaction.
I was enthusiastic about becoming a dad but I sort of felt like the initial phase just didn't have that much to it and of course it does.
But I will also say it gets more and more fascinating and rewarding and The, uh, you know, people say that it goes by so quickly, which I have always thought was truly hilarious because it's slower in our species than literally any other.
But it, it is amazing that there's this point where if you raise them correctly, They become more help than they are a burden, and that point comes so early.
It was a complete shock.
So anyway, yeah, I'd savor every moment because it doesn't last.
Yeah, that's what everyone says.
Don't blink.
That's just what we hear constantly.
And the days are long and the years are short, which is what my experience has been so far.
There are days where it's just long and she's so little and needs constant attention.
And I want to write or do other things.
And, you know, we joke that, like, she's the showrunner now.
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I've never heard the days are long and the years are short, but that is so, so accurate.
Accurate.
Yeah.
It's so, so true.
So it's been so, I mean, it's a, it's just a learning experience.
I'm writing about that.
Just like all the information you get when no one and all the different things people tell you to do that worked for them.
Like one lady was like, I read Lady of Shalott, you know, like, well, bouncing on a yoga by it's it's there's nothing More frustrating than feeling like you can't help your kid very early on, but I also think it's a good, it's like a hazing into parenthood also very early where I just realized certain things I'm powerless over and she's got her own path and
I have to let go to a certain degree of being able to soothe every hurt that she has.
With colic, you can't.
And so it's an early education and the helplessness of parenting at some points.
Well, let me give you some advice that you definitely didn't ask for.
It is impossible to parent well in this era, right?
You have to calibrate for the intractable nature of the puzzle you've been handed.
And that's actually okay.
What it means is there's going to be a certain amount of damage to your kid that might not have occurred and actually probably wouldn't have occurred in a past environment, but a little damage, which, you know, we all have.
Our parents didn't have an acceptable problem either.
And, you know, a little bit of damage and trauma and all of that actually is part of the necessary education for navigating this hyper confusing world.
Yeah.
I will also say that kids are wired.
To be raised and they are wired, you know, you do want to get the signal to noise ratio as high as you can get it as much consistency as you can give it, but you're going to be inconsistent.
You're going to make lots of errors and the kid is absolutely wired to figure out what the meaningful stuff was and to throw out the things you did wrong.
Yeah.
So.
Anyway, it's a tough puzzle, but don't get the sense of like, oh, this matters so much and there's, you know, it can't be done and oh my God, I just made an error and it's going to create damage forever.
It's kind of not how it works, even in this era.
Yeah, this does seem like a particularly interesting time to be having a child.
It was the worst of times and it was the worst of times.
I mean, it's really the, let's put it this way.
It's always, I'm sure been a difficult puzzle, but The number of antagonists that you have, right?
If you're trying to send a message to your offspring so that they understand the world, the number of people who are trying to prevent that message from landing and send a different message that enriches them, you're not supposed to have antagonists in raising your child.
And we have tons of them.
Right.
Yeah, that's one thing that's unsettling.
And then I try to look at the positive.
You know, we have a lot of medicine and there's a lot of things that we don't have to deal with and that other generations before us did.
So I hope that it all, every generation has their challenges, I guess.
But then, yeah, it is very strange.
You know, she was like, how many weeks old?
She was probably, Not even four weeks old when Yuvaldi happened, which is a really messed up time in postpartum to be like my husband, Jaron, didn't even tell me about it because he knows that I get so affected by school shootings in general.
I mean, I literally left America after the Sandy Hook shooting.
I was like, I'm leaving.
I can't I can't even face this.
And I went to Sri Lanka and just like checked out for months.
And I was in the postpartum bubble and that happened and it was like a thousand, it hit a thousand times harder than those school shootings already hit.
And that's just like something that even my parents didn't have to deal with.
You know, my parents weren't worried about sending their kids to school and never seeing us again.
Right.
I mean, I walked to school alone.
It was a whole different world.
And I do have to say, on your comment about all of the medicines we have, they are truly marvelous as long as you don't ingest them.
I have to say, the My evolutionary work led me, quite by accident, into the realm of modern medicine.
The trick with these things, which are very potent, is to almost never use them and know when you have to.
And even the most mundane, well-tested stuff carries long-term implications that we actually literally can't know.
Right.
I mean if you think about, for example, let's say that some drug that you were on for five years in your 30s turned out to have life-shortening or life-degrading implications in your 50s.
Would anybody know that you were on it?
Is it in your chart in some way that people Uh, would know that you had ingested something that had these implications and if it's not in your chart and it's not in anybody else's chart, how are we to notice the pattern, right?
If you start seeing some group of people walk in with this pathology, but they have no way of looking back and seeing, oh, they were all on that drug, right?
The pattern doesn't get noticed.
This is like the baby powder thing.
I mean, even just as something as simple as the baby powder, but if you really go down that rabbit hole, it's bananas.
It's bananas.
I mean, how many times was I put on antibiotics as a kid for some little thing and then it turns out, you know, Talk to your doctor about the heart risk that erythromycin creates.
They don't even know, right?
They don't know.
There's just too much of this stuff.
So anyway, yes, there are moments when you have to use these drugs and they really are amazing, but it's another one of these cases where you have antagonists because, you know, your doctor may have an interest in you being healthy, but the people selling the drugs to your doctor don't.
In fact, they might even have an interest in you not being healthy because it means that you'll buy more product.
So sick.
Yeah, it sucks.
Yeah, the incentives are not great.
Yeah, they're upside down and backwards almost universally.
Yeah.
I mean, all across the board, it's just there seems to be a society where we're incentivized to be sick and weak, and it's so weird to, again, be raising a kid where you're trying to teach them, like, grit and resilience, and those very words are seen as, like, you know, dog whistles to, like, white supremacy or something crazy.
Well, which brings us to a topic that I must say I'm very excited to talk to you about, and I'm also a bit hesitant to talk to you about, especially in light of the new chapter in your life.
In fact, I would feel morally obligated not to even raise it, except that you have recently raised it, and so I know you have a degree of comfort with talking about this.
But anyway, the connection here is that you say the incentives are really screwed up.
And they are.
And there's one realm in which the incentives are particularly screwed up.
And you wrote about it in an essay.
I regret being a slut.
I regret being a slut was the title of the essay.
And I must say the title of the essay broke my heart a little bit.
Um, you know, I just, it's terrible to discover that you have been lied to about this topic and that it has affected the way you've lived your life and led to regret.
And, um, let me say that you, um, You play a very special role in the universe, and it stems from an absolutely preternatural commitment to candor and openness, which I really applaud.
And so I think lots of people Lots of women in particular have discovered the same thing that you found.
And mostly the instinct is to move on and not focus on it, right?
And just quietly harbor the pain.
And that wasn't your instinct.
Your instinct was to explore it publicly.
Which I think is great.
You're doing a service for young women who are trying to understand what to think in a world where they are being told.
Fictions, both by people who know that they're wrong and people who have misled themselves and industries that are interested in portraying the world in some way other than it is.
But in any case, your essay struck me because I've heard private conversations that tread in this topic.
I've seen very few public explorations of it, and I thought I thought it was courageous and admirable.
Thank you.
It's a piece I've been trying to write, honestly, since 2017.
A lot of people really thought, they were like, oh yeah, marriage and kids will do this to you.
And I'm like, I was feeling this way before I was in a relationship or even had kids.
And in fact, I actually think the weird In a sad yet understandable way, when I read the draft that I wrote originally, I was talking about how I was looking for a good relationship and I was realizing that I might want kids and that is a much sadder version than I'm in a healthy relationship and I have a child.
It almost makes it a little bit more palatable.
The, the being able to, for, for the reader themselves, there isn't so much, there is a little bit of a happy ending to my story.
I don't know that that's the case for everyone, which is sad.
And hopefully someone will read this and, and, and they can maybe allow me to be their cautionary tale.
But that I think that piece would have been a lot harder to read in the original version that I had written back in 2017.
When I was really facing a lot of this stuff, mind you, I was about three or four years sober and, And that is partially what led to even being able to uncover and discover a lot of the feelings that I had.
I just wasn't numbing out anymore.
The essay really gets to the heart of the matter and it's very...
Understandable, comprehensible, doesn't surprise me that it took you a while struggling with the topic to get to such a clear presentation.
I think the world has also, I know because I've been trying to raise this question for many years, and I know what comes back when you do, The world is now changing.
It is waking up to the fact that it has made errors about sex and sexuality and that it isn't as simple as, you know, basically If we demystify sex and treat it as just another kind of interaction that things get better and people are more satisfied, that turns out to be nonsense.
And it isn't as simple as people who disagree with that perspective are somehow prudes, right?
And so anyway, what is the question you ask when you say you've been asking, trying to ask this question?
What's the question you ask and what's the answer that you normally receive?
My point has been that sex is fantastic, but it is a precious commodity.
And that if what you do is you make it commonplace in all of the ways that you might do that, That you rob it of its power.
And then I guess my second point is that the thing that it does in human beings is so unique that to unhook that power is incredibly dangerous, not just to relationship building, but also to the way civilization works.
And the problem is that sounds, I think, so far, like a traditional position, right?
Like, like Trad.
My position isn't traditional.
Well, I think too, just even the, one of the early, and I say this in the essay, one of the early things that I bucked against about sex was that it was presented to me as if it was a commodity.
And so already there's this inter, you know, there's some kind of, um,
Like the interaction always seems like it's you're bargaining or bartering or it gives this idea of like my daughter who has this you know her virginity and we have to keep this commodity as as precious as we possibly can and I think and being raised Catholic there's a lot of guilt and weirdness around sex
As well, even though they have a million kids, which is kind of funny, but there was this sense of guilt around having sex outside of marriage and whatnot.
So I feel like that was one of the early things I kind of pushed back against or felt like I was reacting to.
Yeah, I don't know.
Maybe it is just a commodity and that's the way it is.
But I think it gave me the sense that it was always transactional.
The whole dealing around my sexuality or my sex became a transaction.
And I think part of me initially becoming somewhat promiscuous aside from reacting to being sexually assaulted, it was also just reacting to a culture where I felt like it was this sex was a transaction and women had to like protect their commodity or they were worthless.
So it became something that was attached to my value in a way that I don't think was great.
And I know people who were raised with like healthy messages about sex where they did not feel that way about sex and they didn't have that.
So, um, yeah, I think unpacking that is, is, has been challenging for me as well.
Well, there's a, there's a lot in there and I would say one thing, You know, Heather and I explore this a little bit in our book, and we certainly talk about it on Dark Horse and, you know, off camera.
But the fact is, the asymmetry between humans, the sexual asymmetry, is utterly profound.
And it is somewhat broken down by modern realities.
Right?
The ability to control when you produce offspring has reduced the asymmetry a little bit.
And, you know, paternity tests have reduced the asymmetry in the other direction, right?
Men used to be I have every reason to be concerned about the possibility of being lied to about whether an offspring was really theirs.
That's reduced by paternity testing.
Women's ability to control when they produce offspring means that having sex doesn't inherently carry the kinds of incredibly high stakes that it once did.
Yeah.
That said, none of the underlying wiring was changed by these technological facts, and so the biggest problem with having this discussion is that that wiring isn't obvious, and the idea that effectively The distinction in the expectations for men and women are the result of the powerful people, men, oppressing women.
And that we can therefore measure whether women have attained equality or what fraction of equality they might have attained by how much of that asymmetry has evaporated.
And the problem is, no, that asymmetry was biological to begin with.
It is written in deeply and the expectation that it will evaporate when we are equal is nonsense.
And so we're sort of caught in this bind where to the extent that there are still asymmetries evident in the expectations of females, people are like, oh yes, that's because we're not, we haven't achieved the goal.
We're still not equal.
I was like, nope, that's just not how it works.
Real feminism hasn't been tried.
Well said.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah, that's something, too, that it's really fascinating.
One of the things that I reacted to was the asymmetry that men can sleep with whoever they want and they generally get applauded, as many people, women do, and they're considered a slut.
I don't think getting naked and, you know, having sex with a lot of men has changed any of that, and perhaps When I evaluate how I'm going to talk to my daughter about this.
And as my therapist always says to me, she's like, I just raised my kids to be like, that's just the way it is.
And I don't know that I've come to any more of a conclusion other than which might be disheartening.
Yes, it's a double standard.
Yes, it sucks.
But that ultimately the only place I've landed at this moment that we're talking, this might evolve is like, yeah, that's just the way it is.
That's unfortunately the way it is, and I don't really know.
I'd like your thoughts on that.
Yeah, well I think the truth is both more horrible and a lot better than that suggests.
Let's just be honest about this.
The game theory surrounding the distinction between the sexes is pretty well understood in the realm of ethology and ethnology.
That is, the study of animal behavior and the study of Human cultures.
This isn't that complex.
It's incredibly strange and counterintuitive, which is why it's not well known in public.
But why the asymmetry is there is pretty obvious, and how it can play out is mostly obvious too, if you know kind of where to stand.
But here's one of the things that people, I think, don't really grasp.
This system in which sex is commonplace and commodified isn't good for men either.
Now there's one caveat I have to give you, which is that for very powerful men, right, like really wealthy men, It's arguably evolutionarily positive.
Doesn't mean they're happy, but it does mean that for those at the very top of the male mating hierarchy, there's an argument that this system is functional.
For almost everybody else, it's bad.
And so even though... Oh, go ahead.
No, it just reminds me of, for some reason, it reminded me of these polygamous societies where there would be one kind of man who had lots of women.
And then I was reading somewhere that, you know, fidelity and being with one person kind of evolved just because, and I don't, I could be totally wrong about this, but these men who had these, all these women were realizing that there were all these men who but these men who had these, all these women were realizing that there were all these men who were unhappy and jealous and they had to basically share the So I don't know if this is true or not.
There was something that I was reading about this and people always think that they'll be the guy with all the women, you know, in a situation like that when more often than not, they'll be the guy who is not with any of the women.
They'll be one of the ones on the outskirts.
Yeah, that's that's interesting.
When I extrapolate that to now and you have these incredibly powerful, wealthy men and there's a lot of men.
I mean, this is playing out, I think, in China and in even more advanced ways than it is here in the United States.
Well, there's a huge mystery surrounding China and the one child policy, which I'll come back to shortly because it's important, but let's put it this way.
The story that the powerful men who were monopolizing the reproductive and sexual lives of multiple women decided to share the wealth That doesn't really sound like men, frankly.
Yeah, it doesn't.
Right.
So I think there's a much more... So why did monogamy evolve?
All right.
Well, maybe you better sit down for this.
This is, I think, not well now.
I got my coffee.
Here's my hypothesis for it, which this is a longstanding hypothesis that so far matches everything that I've seen and read.
So I'm pretty confident about it.
The fact is that monogamy is an adaptation to certain environments.
Those environments are ones in which your population is expanding.
And the reason that monogamy and population expansion go together is that human infants, as you're discovering, are tremendously labor-intensive to raise.
It's crazy!
How did we survive as a species?
I don't understand.
Other than, like, mother's love, I do not... I looked at that baby like, how did we make it this far?
Well, the answer is that the number of offspring that an individual or a population can produce is limited by the amount of adult effort that can be put into feeding and raising the children.
So if you have a system in which one guy has many wives, As long as every woman is married, it doesn't matter how many husbands are involved in terms of how many fetuses can be produced.
But in terms of how many babies can be raised in a year, the thing that's limiting is how many males are brought into the process of child rearing.
And males who are not involved in producing the offspring at a sexual level are not incentivized to contribute to the raising of offspring.
So, If your population is expanding, then the limitation on how rapidly it can expand, and therefore how competitive it can be against another expanding population, is how many adult males are incentivized to help raise offspring.
Monogamy maximizes that.
Interesting.
But here's the problem, and the reason that I said you probably should be sitting down, is that the prediction of that hypothesis is that at the point that your populations are no longer expanding, monogamy breaks down.
And that's where I think we are.
And so the problem, then, is that... Oh, go ahead.
Sorry, is this like the birth rates collapsing in certain places?
Well, let's put it this way.
The birth rates collapsing in certain places is the result of a number of different phenomena lining up.
One is that we have reached a place where the planet, yeah we could technically get it to produce more resource so we could pack more people onto it, but we're outstripping the capacity of the planet to house us well.
And so effectively we've run up against what we call carrying capacity.
And so it's natural that populations will plateau when you reach carrying capacity.
Most populations are there most of the time.
But the other thing that has happened With humans is that we have gained conscious control over when to produce babies and we have separated it from the having of sex.
And so sex is this.
It's the most potent motivator in the universe, at least for men.
It is differently motivating for women, but the point is the ability to gain access to that motivational thing without the consequence of it.
is means that human beings are now in a position to decide, well, I still want the sex, but I don't want the babies.
Right?
Right.
And so those two things, carrying capacity and conscious control over when to produce offspring is resulting in these plateaus.
But then the consequence is, OK, you go from a period in which the majority of human cultures and the majority of people on Earth belonged to cultures that were monogamous.
And that's now coming apart, and we lie to ourselves about it, right?
We say, oh, you know, we have a serially monogamous culture.
Well, serial monogamy is a garbage term.
Serial monogamy is really serial polygyny, right?
It is one man dominating the reproductive output of multiple women in succession, right?
So anyway, we have the breakdown of the system, but the punchline of the story Is that monogamy actually turns out to be the best system for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with population expansion.
It's the, you know, the fairest system.
It is the least violent system.
It is the most productive system.
It is the most incentivizing of innovation.
And so all of these things, you know, and buried in there is it is the least likely to lead to war.
Because a population in which you have a bunch of unmated males is one in which the powerful males who do have mates are incentivized to arm that population and send it over a border to go find some profit somewhere.
And those sexually frustrated, unattached men have an interest in going over a border where they might, you know, who knows, come home with a wife or whatever terrible thing might happen.
I don't mean coming home with a wife is terrible, but lots of terrible stuff happens in war.
And so anyway, my point would be, we humans, if we look at the values that we claim to hold, should want to preserve monogamy.
Right?
We should want monogamy to be the system because it's just better for everybody.
And to have it break down because we're now running up against a plateau and our population isn't expanding, which is the thing that makes monogamy work, Uh, it's a tragedy for all of us.
So anyway, I think that's the answer to the question, right?
Monogamy is for increasing the number of babies successfully raised and the logic of the system is now just breaking apart.
And when you say that, you know, everyone kind of knows the game theory for sex, what is that for those reasons that it's asymmetrical and why is that?
Let me present it this way.
I think this is the most reasonable, logical way to see it.
Women have one reproductive strategy, right?
The intensity of the relationship between mother and offspring and the fact that short of hiring wet nurses and people to raise your children, even a woman who's in a position to do that is still obligated to nine months of sharing a body, you know, with an offspring.
Yeah.
The intensity of that relationship, right?
Nine months of gestation plus however many years of lactation plus all of the helplessness that basically obligates mothers to continue to invest in their offspring.
That is a gigantic expense, right?
In evolutionary fitness terms, the investment that goes into one offspring is through the roof.
Yeah.
Okay, so that's why women have one strategy and that strategy involves you produce an offspring, you invest heavily in it to get it to reproductive age.
Men have two broad categories, okay?
There's one category in which they do exactly what I've just described, or not exactly, but almost exactly.
They invest completely in their offspring, right?
Because that's what makes those offspring likely to reach reproductive age.
Now, when men are in that mindset, where they're investing completely in their offspring, they are not the same as women.
They have different concerns.
They fear sexual infidelity of their spouses more because they have more to lose, etc.
But they are very similar to women, right?
They are similarly choosy.
Similarly committed, right?
All the best things about men are connected to that strategy where they are heavily invested in their offspring and their offspring's well-being and their offspring's protection, et cetera.
But men have another strategy and that involves producing offspring for which they take no responsibility.
Right.
Now, if you compare the cost of strategy one Total investment in your offspring so that they reach reproductive age.
I mean, what does it cost a man to raise a child?
Right.
It's 18 years of being thoroughly dedicated.
Right.
Yeah.
Compare that to, I don't know, 15 minutes of commitment and then, you know, walking away.
Yeah.
15 minutes of commitment and walking away is a huge bargain.
And the point is, this is the bitter pill of all of this.
When a man is sexually attracted to a woman in a way that does not in his mind Include the potential for commitment to her, right?
It's one thing to be madly passionately in love with somebody and want to go to bed with them It's another thing to want to go to bed with them and not want to see them the next day that is a very I mean imagine just as an abstract Situation A man sees a woman.
He finds her very attractive.
He wants to go to bed with her, but he's not really interested in their relationship.
Let's say for whatever reason, she says yes.
And let's say that a baby is the result.
She's stuck.
Okay.
Yeah.
She effectively has to make that same investment that she would make, even if this person had committed to her.
Right.
And she has no help now.
So it's even bigger.
She had now has to cover for him because he vanished.
He just got a similar level of payoff evolutionarily as if he had committed to this woman to produce this offspring and raise it together for effectively no investment at all.
Right.
That bargain is so profound that even though it would have been rare in the past for any woman to allow a man to go to bed with her without evidence of commitment, right?
The point is men are on the lookout for that opportunity because the bargain is so big.
Right.
Now here's the problem.
Now introduce birth control into the situation.
Women start behaving differently.
So sex without commitment becomes increasingly common.
Now men can't think of anything else.
Why would you commit in a world where there's nothing but evolutionary bargains everywhere?
That's how they feel.
Right.
Whether they know they feel that way or not.
Right.
And the problem is that a world in which people spend time where men are, they feel like they're Genghis Khan, right?
Having sex with all of these women and not being expected to commit to them, right?
And women think Women are not even wrong.
They're correct that they have to behave this way in order to get the attention of men because men are so distracted by these, you know, delightful opportunities that expect nothing of them.
Yeah.
The point is it's a clusterfuck.
No, it is.
It is.
Like, I mean, I said this in my video where I read it because I read the piece and put it on YouTube, because so many people were putting it's amazing, like what gets put on something like this as everyone starts projecting their own, like the men's rights activists entered the chat.
And yeah, I mean, it's not fun.
You know, it's it's I knew that that would happen when I put it out there, but it's it's inevitably A lot of people start putting things like, Oh, she's almost there.
You know, maybe if you understand like this is all about God and you have marriage and you're like, there's, there's been a lot.
But one of the things that I talked about and discussing this was that I know more good women, like brilliant, amazing women who know that they can't have sex.
Just like a man, they can't just have meaningless sex.
They know that about themselves and they are not even competing in the dating market because they can't.
And these are the best women, like the best women, nurturing, loving, intelligent, like the best women that I know.
And they're sitting on the sidelines single because
It's how do you even go on tinder or compete and people will say well they should go look for You know somebody Like on match or somewhere like that or it's it's not impossible But I just think it does like you said it's a clusterfuck There's and then you have this whole population of men who are ultimately Angry because they feel like that kind of top 20% are getting
all of the women, which is in fact, probably true.
And I don't know what to do about that either, because my instinct is like, well, man up and, and like, stop whining about it.
But I'm, I'm not, I don't really know.
I feel like there's when there's a very angry population of men in a lot of different countries in the world right now that feel like they got the shaft.
Um, this is absolutely right.
And they're, they're, you know, they're not even wrong.
And that anger weirdly isn't at other men.
It's a, it often gets directed at women.
Right.
Which this is why, uh, I, I, I call myself an equal opportunity slut-shamer, right?
My feeling is, you know, the problem with slut-shaming is that it's asymmetrical, right?
Yeah.
The point is, look, you've got a society that is behaving in a slutty way that's bad for everybody.
Yeah, it's bad for everyone.
It's bad for everyone.
And the solution, unfortunately, look, I have talked back when I was a college professor, this came up a lot.
And I talked to a lot of young women who were despairing of exactly this puzzle, right?
You've got two choices.
You can either ante up and Basically get male attention, but not be able to keep it because the men are distracted and effectively adolescent, right?
Or you can opt out and be alone, right?
Neither of those is good choices.
So I do think there is an answer to this puzzle, but it's not an answer that an individual woman can avail herself of, right?
The answer involves The recognition that this system, not only is it bad for everybody, but it's not making anybody happy, right?
Sex is easier to come by than it has ever been, but sexual satisfaction is actually now a rare commodity, right?
Yeah.
Right?
You've basically got a bunch of addicts who are getting a fix, but it's a very low quality fix.
Yeah.
The solution involves the recognition, hey, if I go down that road, then I'm not going to be happy.
And what I would like to do is opt into a community of people that agrees together not to go down that road.
Right now, I think that actually, not only is that the right game theoretic solution to the puzzle, but it's also self-catalyzing because to the extent that people know that they're unhappy and there's some community of people that has agreed to make rules that are sensible and those people begin to experience a much greater level of satisfaction because, um,
They, you know, are basically opting out together.
Then the point is that's the community you want to be in, right?
So I think it would spread like wildfire if it caught on.
And the real question is, you know, what exactly are the rules that you would want to post at the door?
That would, you know, cause people to behave in a way that, yes, would mean that they got laid a lot less often, at least until they were attached, but that would make those instances vastly more pleasurable and meaningful and would result in the production of relationships that were on a solid foundation.
Well, some of it, I think.
And, you know, I have to give a shout out to Louise Perry, who wrote the book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, which really helped me frame this piece, and I think is such a brave book.
And she has a great chapter about CADs or DADs.
And I know lots of CADs.
I've been friends with lots of them, and obviously I've dated lots of CADs, and they're older now, and I see.
You know, they they were the guys who were like the high value men on these dating sites or wherever.
And they're kind of lonely now.
You know, it's there's something sad about it at this point.
And they didn't have kids.
And I think she makes the case for incentivizing dads being a dad.
And I think also incentivizing motherhood.
You know, it's another thing that's become Something that I remember interviewing, I've been thinking about this for a long time.
When I was doing so many, so many things have helped me form the evolution of a lot of this.
Being a writer, Playboy was one of them.
I was asked to go cover a Free the Nipple rally, which I was kind of like, yeah, this is bullshit.
Why can't women have their nipples out?
I, they do it in France.
They don't, this is a puritanical American thing.
Well, I get to the event and it's a young teenage girl who's like just 18 who's running this event.
I thought it was going to be the woman who was behind it and she was present, but the woman who organized this whole thing was like this young girl on the Santa Monica beach with all of her friends who are like, Just barely 18.
Barely legal.
And they're on the beach freeing their nipple and I was going with I went in with kind of one impression of what I thought but immediately I was like uh and then there was this guy wandering around a fucking creeper clearly like a pedo taking pictures and I was like Excuse me, is anyone going to do anything about this?
And I was like, oh, hell no.
Put your nipples away.
Like I immediately went mama bear.
I was telling the girl who is who is associated with this.
I'm like, you need to do something or I'm going to.
This is like and to her credit, she went up to him and told him to, like, go away with his frickin camera.
It was it was so fascinating.
Went back to my editor and I said, OK, well, I have a completely different feeling about this now that I've gone to this event.
And he's like, Yeah, that's called being a journalist, like a good journalist.
You go into an event and you might have your mind changed about things.
And I ended up becoming friends with the young girl and I interviewed three generations of feminists, her mother and grandmother.
And the grandmother was talking about how she felt like there was something to be said for modesty, but something the mother said really stuck out.
And she was of that generation that came of age around the sexual revolution and all the women were going to work.
And she had her teacher, a professor that she admired, that was the woman who taught her all about feminism.
And they all got together for a dinner and all the women were talking about she chose to be a stay at home mom.
And this professor that she idolized basically was asking all the women what they were doing.
And when they got to her, And she said she chose to be a stay at home mom.
She just skipped right over her and never talked to her about it.
And they said she was treated like a second class citizen.
And I feel like that has only accelerated since, you know, this was probably in the 60s or probably 70s.
And that's really that feeling has only accelerated of like motherhood almost being looked down upon.
And something that you choose if you're like a trad wife or that's something for those religious conservative women or people.
So I think that we've lost the incentive.
Incentivizing motherhood and fatherhood and being a mom and dad is kind of something we can, that would start to encourage this, the rules that you are talking about.
Yes, we have evolutionarily lost the plot.
I mean, quite obviously, right?
If motherhood and fatherhood are now uncool, then what exactly are we doing on this planet?
All right.
And we live in a time where you can't even say mom or dad anymore.
I mean, it's even more bananas than just like, oh, take that.
I mean, it's a whole other conversation.
But take away the fact that we're looking at moms and dads in a different way.
Now you can't even say mom or dad because, like, male and female don't exist.
I don't know.
I wrote this essay and it ends up me in these rabbit hole conversations where you're trying to untangle some kind of knot that has no beginning or end.
Oh, by design, though.
And that's the thing, Bridget, is if you agree That it is your responsibility to explain what males and females are, right?
You've lost at the point that you agree that that's your job.
It's over.
Yeah.
We have to start saying, look, certain things are true.
If mother and fatherhood are now uncool, we fucked up.
We have to go backwards and figure out where they started being uncool.
And we got to take the other, the other path, right?
Male and female exist.
Motherhood and fatherhood are essential.
They have to be done well.
We've made that job very difficult.
That's a problem.
I would also point out at the level you were talking about, um, CADs, I will say, um, I don't think I have a single male friend who is a CAD.
I don't think so.
And I didn't, it's not like I actively chose against them, but I think the problem is that There is something about that approach to life that is so distorting of normal thinking and normal values that those people just didn't end up having much to offer, which I think is a clue to another part of this.
So again, I haven't yet said why my view is not a traditional view.
It's really, it's a radically distinct and new view.
It's not a traditional view, but it has, it recognizes a lot of the traditional elements.
But the point is, imagine the past, right?
where we didn't have reliable birth control.
And therefore, the act of having sex with someone carried a substantial risk of producing an offspring that would then be a burden.
That's a world in which women, for obvious reasons, are extremely choosy about who they go to bed with, right?
For just really obvious reasons, because the point is they have everything to lose in that interaction.
And so that's also where courtship and romance come from.
These things are basically, you know, a CAD can't pass a six month or a year long test of their commitment, right?
They're looking for a bargain and that's not a bargain.
So all of these things that we knew were important and valuable in the past are downstream of that very high stakes world.
But in that world, Women demanded a tremendous amount of men, right?
In order to be worthy of a sexual relationship with a desirable woman, men moved mountains.
Right.
And put other men on the moon, right?
Right.
We achieved amazing things and I don't want to trivialize what that was, but in part Being good men so that women would look favorably upon you and consider spending their life with you, that created a tremendous amount of the best kind of motivation to achieve real things that mattered, to be very decent, to be likable, all of these things.
And by unhooking that system, We basically removed the underlying logic that caused people to achieve and to strive and to hold themselves to high standards.
And so I don't think we will ever know the full harm of what seemed like a sophistication, which is, oh, We got over it.
Sex is just another thing we do.
That change basically altered the landscape of how humans function around each other and not for the better.
In reestablishing reasonable rules, we're really talking about bootstrapping our way to a new world in which things again make sense.
And it will not be the old world, because birth control isn't going anywhere, nor should it.
It has been a tremendous benefit, but it came with costs we didn't see.
Yeah I mean that's that's what I wonder is if there isn't because I hear from so many young women and that younger generation statistically from what everything says is having a lot less sex like for the first time since the sexual revolution.
The sex the younger generation is having is less than the generation before them.
And so I don't know if that's a reaction to what they're seeing or my theory is that everyone is just addicted to their phone and they're getting their dopamine and they're just distracted elsewhere.
I, it does seem like young women are looking around and seeing women like me and a lot of women who, I mean, they grew up in the Me Too era.
There's, there's definitely, I, and also all the consent and the, I mean, there's a lot of men are terrified to say the wrong thing or the right thing.
And you're using apps to try and navigate awkward sexual interactions.
I think that there's so many things that are influencing, you know, people's sex drive just going down or they're not having it anymore.
But part of it too, is there's not that.
Titillation, you know, there isn't that for all you want to say.
I mean, I threw around like the kind of puritanical roots of our country, but say what you will about the Puritans.
They were having a lot of sex, right?
Well, and a lot of children.
The irony isn't it's not even that hard to see that when sex is difficult to to attain It is fantastically rewarding.
And what we've done is we've turned it into it's junk sex, the equivalent of junk food.
It's just not that good, right?
And so no, it's not a surprise that that is interfering with people's motivation.
I will also say that porn is playing a role here that I think we need to highlight because it is distorting what people think sex is in a way that is most harmful.
Yeah, definitely.
And again, this is something porn, and I'm not like some huge anti-porn person, I don't think, yet, but it is something that I've heard from men when I was working at Playboy.
They struggle with it.
It affected their marriages, it affected their relationships, it affected their relationship to their own sexuality, and it's obviously affecting women.
Women are having Terrifying sexual interactions where they're getting choked or spanked or all these things that guys think are normal because they've been watching porn and it's or women are doing these things because they would feel like they need to which is even more upsetting because that's what's expected and it's yeah, I mean talk about in another clusterfuck, but it does seem like
What's interesting to me though about porn is that, you know, you talk about sex kind of being this motivator for human progress, and the internet itself evolved around sex.
Yeah, sex and cat videos.
All right, I'm going to take a crack at trying to turn you into a vehemently anti-porn person.
And I heard you loud and clear, and I know, I think, why you are reluctant to go there.
But I also think this is one of these cases where the solution is Staring us more or less in the face, and we just don't see it because we've been traumatized by what happens when you begin to explore the question of whether porn might not be all right, right?
You, of course, get accused of all kinds of things.
Well, you know, censoriousness and prudishness and all of the usual attacks.
Let me just say for my own part, You know I've had to figure out how to navigate this topic with my my two sons who of course encounter this stuff in the world and they are of course 16 and 18 and so you know they're also trying to figure out sexuality and you know this worries me a ton in fact I think it is fair to say that were my I would be
Less troubled, I would be thoroughly troubled, but I would be less troubled if my kids ended up in trouble with heavy drugs than addicted to porn.
I think it's that dangerous.
But here's what I think we're missing, is that we have been We have, because we've been told that pornography is not definable, you know, I don't know what pornography is, but I know when I see it, that when we say there's something wrong with porn, we are actually saying it's not okay to have erotic content.
Right.
Which I don't think is true at all.
So I draw the following distinction.
I think erotica is an ancient, valid, and important form, and I don't want to see anything block the erotic exploration.
That said, some of it may be in bad taste, some of it may be destructive, but it is a valid form.
The thing that makes pornography different The way that we should mentally define it, even if it's difficult in practice to utilize this definition, is that when profit is the motive that has caused the particular piece of content to be produced, that's porn.
Right?
So in other words, erotica is art.
Right.
Pornography is an economic phenomenon.
I mean I definitely have struggled and run into this on my own as I'm being called out by men's rights activists even just today before we got on.
Somebody posted a picture that I had posted of me and like not naked it was like in lingerie being like you saying something to someone about how they didn't get to define me.
I, as if they're like, this is the same person who wrote this slut piece, but I, I'm like, I don't, that's a separate thing entirely for me.
That wasn't the, my behavior of sleeping with men is different than my like tasteful nudes that I put out into the world and wasn't even, you know, it was just like my own exploration of my sexuality, et cetera.
Another awkward conversation I'll have to have in the future, but I don't feel the same way when I see that picture.
I don't feel ashamed.
I was like, damn, I looked amazing.
Well, so I would say, you know, what you've just suggested about your motivation for producing it suggests it falls very clearly on the erotic side and not the pornography side.
There's a space, there has to be a space for, you know, sensuality and the erotic and we can't just, like, Cut that out.
And I think this is what gets hard when you start talking about porn is, like you said, you want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, which means all eroticism and sensuality and femininity even gets just tossed out with the idea of porn.
Well, so let me describe why I think the economic fact, you know, why does it matter whether it was produced for money or as an artistic exploration?
Well, here's why.
You've got, I know very little about the porn industry, in fact almost nothing, but you've got however many companies competing for the sexual attention of however many consumers.
And they're all selling the same thing, right?
They're selling I mean, I know nothing about this landscape.
I know very little.
I know what a cam girl is.
or live interactions?
Yep.
I mean, I know nothing about this landscape.
I know very little.
I know what a cam girl is.
But I will say maybe let's put that aside because there's, although I still think the same definition applies, there's obviously something distinct when you have a person selling their own video directly to a consumer, there's obviously something distinct when you have a person selling their In other words, there's a gray area surrounding the amateur stuff.
I'm aware of it.
Okay.
Well, good.
Maybe you'll tell me about it at some point.
But anyway, my point would be this.
Let's say that we just, let's step back into a slightly earlier era where we're talking about pornographic videos being made by some number of companies and being sold in whatever mechanism, whether it's downloads or video stores or however it was done.
Well, they're all selling the same thing, right?
Attractive people having some kind of sex.
That's a difficult market to win in.
The way you win in that market is with something extreme.
Right.
Or edgy.
Right.
And so the point is you've got an arms race between producers of pornography for extreme weird stuff.
Now here's the really bad consequence of that.
Human beings.
Ancient human beings.
Learned about sex because privacy wasn't all that effective, right?
In other words, kids typically, we know from ethnological research, kids learned about sex because they were living in the same hut as their parents.
And so the kid is kind of asleep, maybe pretending to be asleep.
The parents think the kid is asleep.
They have sex.
Well, You could say what you want about that, but at the very least, it gives quite an honest portrayal of what sex actually is, right?
Right.
It is what people do.
Right.
Porn, in which the producers have gotten involved in this arms race where they're producing edgier, weirder, crazier, more niche stuff, then feeds into that system, where humans are naturally curious about what other people are doing in bed.
Right?
And then, pornographers are putting really bad, wrong information into that system, saying, oh, here's what people are doing in bed.
And it's all this extreme stuff.
And the point is, then, a generation that before they had sex was seeing that content, thinks it's normal.
Right?
And this gets, it explains this world that you're describing.
I've heard the same thing from young women who I know that in part, people are having less sex because they're afraid to go to bed with people.
They don't know what kind of monsters will be revealed if they take somebody home.
And I don't think that's surprising.
I don't think people realize, you know, the idea that choking is normal, that that's a normal part of sex.
Wow, how did this generation get that idea?
Or hitting or any of the other stuff.
Yeah.
So, we're distorting what human sexuality is with pornography because there's an economic problem that pornographers solve with extreme portrayals that then become normalized, right?
That is a disaster, right?
That is not people looking for sexual content and finding, you know, something honest.
That is a dishonest portrayal of sex that is now becoming normal.
Has porn always been, I mean hasn't it always been around there to some degree?
Or would you call all things that existed pornographically erotica until it was commodified?
A lot of that, but not perfectly that.
No doubt people have been selling.
So the problem with my definition, I think my definition is actually the correct definition until you try to instantiate it into a law.
And then the question is, well, if money changed hands, is it pornography?
And my answer is not necessarily.
It could be that you produced something sexual and then got paid for it.
I mean, art gets purchased, right?
It's not art because somebody paid for it.
But the question is, would you have made it?
Absent that motivation, that's really the question.
And so yeah, pornography has undoubtedly always been around.
My guess is erotica has always been vastly more interesting and more durable than pornography.
Pornography is appealing to people's appetites in the moment.
But the distortion of sexuality, I mean, Can I try a concept on you?
I'm pretty sure it's somewhere in the neighborhood of right.
But anyway, it's a tough one.
And the idea is we actually have been sold a A wrong concept that sex is something that people can have, right?
Like the idea that a person can go out and have sex before we even get to the question of, well, who exactly are they having sex with?
That is a distortion of the normal human sexual mode, right?
Imagine a world in which you didn't have access to, uh, porn where erotica was painted or drawn pictures right and they were snapshots they weren't moving right so a much earlier technological world your insight you would know that sex was a thing you would know what you had heard about it which would be
Noisy and unreliable, right?
What people say about sex has not been particularly literal or, you know, it's a confusing realm, right?
So imagine then, That let's put ourselves in the male mindset for a second.
Okay.
There's somebody that for whatever reason is driving you crazy with passionate desire.
Right.
And you work up the courage to, um, To invite them to something and they respond positively.
And okay, things develop to the point that whatever point it makes sense to start experimenting sexually with this person.
Right?
Right.
You're alone.
There's nobody there.
You don't know a ton about what people do.
Right?
You're just exploring.
And the point is you've now Let's say that this is before there's a permanent relationship, right?
And so the woman is very excited by this, but also does not want to produce an offspring until there's a permanent commitment, right?
There are limits and there is, you know, there's tension and all of that, right?
And the point is, okay, so you are discovering This realm in which only the two of you exist, right?
You are entering some secret space that you two have someplace that you go together and then you are discovering how to thrill this other person, right?
And then you're not talking about it with anybody, right?
That is a private, um, It's a private adventure.
It's not the same thing as, oh, person X has sex in this way.
You know, this is the thing that gets them off.
They like this thing.
And that will be true no matter who they're in bed with, right?
The other person is basically a prop.
Right.
That is not a very sexy way for this to unfold.
The idea that you and some other person discover your own private sexual landscape, right?
That is a very powerful thing.
A sexually powerful thing.
Weren't there always, like, courtesans?
And isn't it true that prostitutes is the oldest profession in the world, as they say?
So where does that factor into this equation about what people knew about sex?
Well, A, I think you're right that this is very ancient, but there's a question about how far back it goes, right?
In a hunter-gatherer band, the idea that there would be a prostitute, that's pretty unlikely.
Right.
Right?
The point is everybody is a member of this band and they all have Reputations and futures.
And so the point is, to the extent that you're saying, well, hasn't prostitution always been a thing?
I think it becomes a thing at some moment, right?
There's some change in the way human beings, maybe it's agriculture that creates large enough societies in which somebody can start making money selling sex, right?
It becomes possible, but that's actually fairly, you know, agriculture is 10,000 years old.
It's not a long time.
Right, that would be interesting to, that's interesting, the history of prostitution.
I would like to know, know that, when that came into the mix.
Yep, absolutely.
And I mean, I think your instinct is exactly right.
This is not a new phenomenon.
This is the most recent chapter in something that has been marching along for millennia.
But we've gotten to a point where, I mean, let's face facts, people are finding all kinds of ways to avoid sex.
Right.
That's weird.
Right?
The idea that sex would have gone from the most enticing commodity in the universe.
Commodity is a terrible word, but the most enticing objective or phenomenon in the universe to something so weird and off-putting that frankly, I think we can even say that part of the
Trans activist fervor is born of the fact that people don't see themselves as giving up something amazing in altering their sexuality because sexuality is a very mixed bag at the moment, right?
Yeah.
And so doing something weird and signally may be frankly more exciting than the prospect of holding on to your, your parts and figuring out in what context you might be able to use them, uh, to, you know, to explore this exquisite, very private landscape.
Yeah, that's the thing that I've really been thinking a lot about.
It's so good to talk to you, by the way, just in the kind of wave that has been this piece.
went huge and it's received an enormous response as I mentioned all kinds of but it's also just the response is making me think about a lot of these things that we're talking about so it's so nice to be able to kind of process and download a lot of this stuff with you
because even I one of the people coming after me is the trans activists are people saying that I'm a transphobe for the part in the piece where I say I can understand why people looking around at this landscape of the violent sex all the things that Louise Perry outlines in her book and they say like I I would rather be a man or even more importantly I don't want to be a woman because it is women who are uh Uh, suffering.
And, you know, the other, the other response that I've received from this piece, other than you're a transphobe, or a slut's always a slut, or go find God, um, is that there is a real body count.
Like, people have been telling me their stories of their mother, or somebody in their life who might have gotten lost, and they said that, you know, got into drugs, was doing It could have been me.
I get emotional in the piece talking about it because there is something that happens and this is something that I've been thinking about on a soul level as a woman.
There's something that is It's not shame, it's not religion, this is something on a cellular level that I have had to reconcile with feeling about giving myself away and not valuing sex the way I believe that it properly deserves to be valued.
And giving it the proper place on a pedestal that it deserves to be put on, not me, just The like you said the power the even having a baby what has changed so much since I've had a child is and I said this when I was on Megyn Kelly recently is realizing like this body isn't just a vanity project.
It's not just about looking hot.
That's like actually secondary to all the fucking miraculous things that my female body is capable of which is out.
Standing and miraculous and that alone is something that I wished I had a better understanding of and had really valued more when this topic of sex comes up because it does become about religion or all these other things when it's really like no you can create I created life I made a human like A whole fucking human.
That is so crazy, and that is what sex is for, and that's why it's special, and that's why you should value it.
It's a life-producing force, and somehow, when you don't value that, and as a woman, if it is my primary goal, if I'm not valuing this, there is something that happens on a cellular level that feels like, you know, you're damaging yourself.
Not to say that I feel like I'm damaged goods and all this other shit that people also want to put on me.
There is some kind of, some kind of damage that I don't even know how to articulate, you know, that I've, that I think I've been trying to work out and I, and I know And in response to that damage, I kept doubling down on it and also numbing myself out and never able to face it.
And when I really think about that body count as a reaction to that damage, It's really upsetting and I've been hearing so many people and that's something that I don't think you'll ever be able to calculate.
What is the body count to the sexual revolution for women in particular, you know, particularly?
Oh, there's so many themes I want to address from what you just said.
One of them is I do think that there is a kind of damage and I think we can talk about what it is.
I also see you as courageously confronting it.
So I have a model that basically psychological trauma is very much like physical trauma, right?
That we are not wrong to use that term, but that that leads us to something that we don't talk about, which is when you are psychologically traumatized, you have a wound, right?
That wound can stay open and it can remain a vulnerability or you can scar over, right?
Scarring over is not as good as not having ever been damaged, but it's a million miles better than remaining with an open wound.
So what I see you doing is exploring, well, all right, what did happen to me, right?
What would I do?
What do I now understand about myself?
And that is, I think, the process of you figuring out how to scar over.
And more importantly, what you are doing is, I think, going through the difficult process of figuring out what you should have known, Not that you should have known it, but what you would have been better off to know, so that women in the future don't have to go through this process, so that they can know.
Yeah, no.
So I think that's a tremendously noble objective, and I admire you for doing it.
But can we talk for a second about the damage itself?
Yeah, I mean, In what respect?
There's so much.
Where do we begin?
Well, you know my bent.
Let's start with the strange biological realities and why they would result in some kind of damage associated with this.
Why it's not just something you can decide you've changed your mind and move on, that there is something lasting here.
Yeah, I think that, I mean, I'm grateful that I have had amazing therapists that I talk to about this stuff, and any woman who's listening to this and is maybe crying because they are relating, I would advise you to go seek out some kind of professional to talk to about this stuff because a lot of it is often trauma.
You know, there's I think a lot of the damage started when I was young, and even my first sexual encounter, it was with an older man.
Technically, it was statutory rape.
Technically.
I was 17 and he was 32.
So things didn't start out.
And mind you, I don't see myself as necessarily a victim in that situation because I was young and I was aggressively trying to seduce this man, even at my 17 year old age.
And I think he inevitably like cracked because he wasn't really a great guy, but he's also just a man.
And but it wasn't like what I would have wanted.
I think what I would have wanted, what I would want for my daughter, what I saw with even like the high schoolers around me who felt, you know, they were with their like high school sweetheart, and it seemed like there was intimacy.
And my first encounter was very much about power.
This is something I'm trying to work out too, is the man-eater side to my nature, that I always recognized how powerful I was as a woman.
Sex kind of always had this, I always understood that there was a like, man, this is something I'm trying to work out too, is the man eater side to my nature that I always recognized like how powerful I was as is the man eater side to my nature that I always recognized like how powerful I was as a woman, how much Because of her sexuality.
Alright, so I've got, of the many notes I made of things I wanted to talk to you about, one of them has to do with the two kinds of female power.
Right?
And I would point out, so, you may or may not have encountered, at some point I put something into the world about the difference between beauty and hotness.
Oh yeah, yeah.
And my point was more or less that these are uncorrelated phenomena.
That you can be extremely hot and not the least bit beautiful.
And you can be very beautiful and not hot.
And you can be both.
And you can be neither.
And that basically this correlates to the two male strategies for reproduction I was talking about.
If you're appealing to the side of a man that is looking to not invest, right, that's a question of hotness, right?
If you're appealing to a man for him to be loyal to you for life, That's a question of beauty.
And this is confusing, of course, because it's not like the beauty thing isn't about sex, too.
It very much is, right?
But the point is, it's not about the immediacy of right now and not tomorrow, right?
That's the hotness thing.
Yeah, I think... Go on.
Well, I was just going to point out that It is an unfortunate trick that the universe has played on women.
That their sexual power, for reasons that are, again, not that hard to deduce, their sexual power is at its peak on the cusp of their maturity.
Right?
Right.
So you're talking about women who have a tremendous amount of power of a certain kind.
I mean, a gorgeous woman can tangle a room full of people right by sending sexual signals to different people in that room and causing them to come to blows or whatever right that's a lot of power and whose hands is it in it's on the hands of somebody that frankly is too young to know what to do with power yeah no 18 year old should have tremendous power
No, I mean that's the thing that I joked about for years is that I could not wear the color red because I did not know I would wear red and I always inevitably ended up like hammered and crying.
Because it was my early teens, or late teens, early 20s, and it really wasn't until I was like 30, in my 30s, that I could wear a red dress and properly know how to handle myself with that much power.
Yeah, it's too much power.
It's like, you know, you wouldn't want somebody just learning to drive To have a Formula One car.
Right.
Because there's no way that they make it out intact, right?
And yet, and yet, that's exactly what happens with women.
Right.
It's like, I mean, you look at like the girls.
Through no fault of their own.
No, and so many, I mean, I grew up during the Girls Gone Wild years.
Those were, and that was, talk about like hot women with too much power being taken advantage of.
And not knowing.
Absolutely.
And taken advantage of by whom?
That was men inducing women to spend that power frivolously, right?
Yeah.
So again, women have this incredible sexual power that amounts to nothing, right?
It doesn't You can't usefully use that power of urgent sexuality as a young woman.
You can wreck stuff.
But, you know, at least until very modern times in which a small number of women have turned this into a fortune.
Right?
They've actually successfully capitalized on it.
Basically, the point is because the power that comes from hotness is not about commitment, right?
It has limited capacity.
But a young woman who discovers that she has this incredible power to captivate men and cause them to alter their behavior and whatever it is that they do, that's irresistible for a woman who discovers she has it.
And especially for a woman who has experienced sexual trauma or has molestation or anything like that and does not want to confront intimacy or have any kind of intimacy.
For me, becoming like a man-eater was the perfect way.
It was like the perfect salve for all of those wounds that were already kind of festering.
I mean I I joked that like intimacy was creepy and I just I you know I didn't it took me do you realize that I don't I didn't even know I was dissociating when I was having sex until I was like 37 years old.
And I don't even know how long I had been doing it, but I had I went and talked to my therapist and I was like, you know, I was having sex and I like left my body.
And she's like, yeah, that's called dissociation.
And I was like, oh, I do that all the time.
She was like, OK, can we like this is what you're dropping on me five minutes before the session ends.
Like we're going to have to pick this one back up.
But I didn't even know.
I didn't know that.
I have no idea.
You're supposed to be very there.
Yeah, and I was like, never there.
Right, which makes so much sense.
I mean, for one thing, just think of the tragedy of this story you're describing.
Do you describe it as assaulted?
You were assaulted.
Well, I was drugged and raped when I was 18.
So yeah, assaulted.
Assaulted is the shallow end of that description.
You were raped.
Your power, your sexual power as a woman was taken from you by somebody.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
I wanted to take it back.
You wanted to take it back.
Exactly.
So what you, you know, the way you behaved in some sense fed the story that maybe sex wasn't all that important, which of course means that what was done to you was less important.
So that's again, you kind of taking back that power and this man eater phenomenon that you're describing, you know, has a degree of, of payback in it, which, And it's fun.
I mean, I will say like I it is fun.
It is fun to once you like I wanted to be like Gwyneth Paltrow was in Greatest Expectations or like that my favorite movie was Dangerous Beauty and she was a courtesan and there was this quote like love love don't love the man when you love the man you lose and I just like
I just attach, I didn't have anything to hold on to really, so I just attached to these, you know, images in the media of women who were strong, powerful man-eaters, basically, because like you said, it was, you know, I responded to being raped with hyper-promiscuity, which is a very common response, and I definitely
Wanted in the initial time after that happened.
I felt dirty and broken and ashamed and like something had been taken from me and was traumatized and didn't have I ended up in rehab with a heroin addiction a year later.
So it wasn't like I had a whole lot of time to process this because now I'm dealing with a drug addiction.
So It's like you just start putting trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma and this is so much the story that I've heard from so many of the women who have written me where you just start burying yourself under trauma and I developed a whole persona in order to cope with what was essentially a garbage pile of trauma that I was trying to avoid.
All right, which takes me back to a point I wanted to get to and it's now even more delicate, but you know, um, the idea you were mentioning, um, 10 or so minutes ago about what you were giving away, right?
About the marvelousness of what you were just undervaluing and giving away.
And I think that most women, Especially just, you know, the unfortunate fact of the way time marches on that the full value of what a woman In this one regard, I'm not arguing that they're, you know, I mean, think of who I'm married to.
This is a highly accomplished person.
So it's not that I see a woman's sexual value as synonymous with her value, but the sexual side of what a woman has to offer is so potent in a normal context.
That it's hard to imagine and modern women don't get it because it has been rendered so trivial in its value, right?
The I think there's something about the I think a woman has no idea what kind of I don't want to say gift.
It's the wrong, the wrong metaphor, but what she is, um, right.
Something, yeah.
Under any normal circumstances, um, the, you know, a, A woman, a willing woman is, again,
this is just so far beyond any other incentive that the universe has provided for men that women don't realize that the story of sexual liberation has taken a kind this is just so far beyond any other incentive that the universe has provided for men that women don't realize that the story of sexual liberation has taken a kind of power that is potentially
And trivializing of, as you say, this, you know, a body that is capable of what is effectively a miracle, but for the fact that we understand scientifically more or less how it functions, right?
You're talking about something that miracle is an appropriate term to at least be thinking of and that That sexual contact
Geez, I'm struggling for words here to even describe the tragedy of the demotion of sex from this incredibly important relationship-focused mode into a commodified, cheapened, increasingly violent
I mean, in a way, I loved what Louise said at the beginning of her opening book about how, of course, Hugh Hefner was pro-abortion and pro-birth control pill, and of course he pushed these You know, is supportive of these things because they these were the men who would benefit from it.
And it's something for some reason I just hadn't really even considered.
But of course, men were going to be pro pro feminist sexual revolution, you know, to a certain extent.
There's there's, of course, not all men, but many men have been like, yeah, you know, male male feminists.
And there's a lot.
Mixed up in feminism, too.
Again, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I like being able to own a home, make my own money.
This is always the entanglement you get into.
But I do think the minimizing of sex, you can't There's I always I always have to say like reality remains undefeated.
You can say whatever you want.
I ran into things with biology when I had a baby where I was like, oh, OK, well, I can intellectualize these things all you want.
But this is the there's a reason rape is used as a weapon of war.
You know, it's like it's that it's and still used that way.
It's not like, because we demoted sex to something that isn't that precious, that isn't something that is still used as a powerful tool to dehumanize and demoralize a population.
And it's so There's so much trauma.
And I hate the overuse of that word, but I do actually think there's just collective cultural trauma around sex.
And now you're seeing this.
I'm not sure if this is part of what's going on where people are like, I don't know if I'm a man or a woman.
It's just everyone being like, I can't even look at what this all means and so we're just gonna eject right out of the sexual binary.
No, I think that is, it's absolutely a piece of it, is that we've handed them, we've taken How can I say it?
This is really a story of an incredible source of power.
And the question is, how are you going to use it?
And I would analogize it to the power of, to explosive power, right?
If I say explosive power, right?
Is that good?
Is it bad?
Well, it depends.
If you're talking about explosives, if you're talking about warfare, You know, there are obviously instances in which you don't have a choice, but it's bad, right?
It's destructive.
On the other hand, if you talk about explosive power in the cylinder of an engine, right, it is an incredibly potent mechanism for accomplishing things beyond the force that we can exert normally, right?
So, you know, explosions aren't good or bad.
Explosions are a question of how you utilize that power.
Sex is the same way, and we have... I don't even think we chose it.
I don't even think, frankly, those powerful men who, of course, would be in favor of making sex easily available because they would have access to lots of it.
I don't even think they chose it, right?
I think the point is You know, just as you know, that a man who is in pursuit of sex and thinks he's likely to get there is not the most reasonable man in the world, right?
He's not the most truthful man in the world.
And so the point is, I think that those men who, yes, decided that all of these things were unalloyed goods, did so because Frankly, it was going to get them laid, but I don't think they even thought this is good for society or this is a good way for things to be.
They were just... Yeah.
I don't know.
Liars.
It's technology, really, that brought us here.
And as is the case with so much technology, we're not asking whether or not, it's like that quote from Jurassic Park, where it's like, instead of asking whether or not they could, they should be asking if they should, or whatever that quote, I'm butchering it.
But yeah, we're it's just a technological advance.
Everyone gets on board.
And then you're like, oh, it's the same thing we're seeing with social media, like, hey, maybe this is destroying democracy all over the world and people are literally losing their minds.
But cool gadget in our phone, I guess.
I mean, how do you stop progress?
Well, it's actually- Progress, in quotes, you know?
Yeah.
It's the classic failure of progressivism, right?
And I say this as a progressive, right?
A lifelong progressive.
But progressives see the problem that they're trying to solve.
They do not properly appreciate the degree to which every solution comes with unintended consequences.
And so, you know, yes, is birth control a good thing?
Of course!
The fact is, biology handed women A terrible predicament in which their ability to produce babies caused them to not be able to contribute to the most interesting and important parts of human progress, right?
That was an unfair trick that biology played on women.
Right.
Birth control and the ability to choose when to produce offspring gave women the ability to participate in the full range of human endeavor.
That's fantastic, but the question is who thought that we were going to have that level of change of the relationship of the sexes to each other and to to work and uh, innovation without it having major downstream consequences.
In other words, at the point that you decide you're going to embrace a technology like that, the question should be who, whose job is it to monitor all of the consequences that flow from this, figure out which ones are negative, figure out how to minimize those consequences as they emerge.
Not many decades later when you've got chaos, right?
You should figure them out as they happen.
And, you know, basically there should be an adverse events reporting system for major technological changes.
And as you say, At the point you have social media or cell phones and democracy starts to disintegrate around you, you think, holy crap, how can we prevent that from happening?
I mean, it reminds me of that Thomas Sowell quote, there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs.
And I think if you evaluate everything, and it's been so informative to me in my life in every decision, just on a personal level, I'm like, okay, we're not solving things, this isn't a decision, this is evaluating trade-offs, because it's all just trade-offs.
And that is where I feel progressivism often fails is they're looking for a solution without considering any of the trade-offs ever until it's far too late.
It's just, you know, we're, I don't exactly know how we kind of pull out No pun intended, considering our conversation from the downward spiral that feels like is going on around us.
And I think of how innocent you in evergreen and that like back in the day it's just like shit has gotten you were saying like this is coming everywhere and everyone's like ah you're just a crazy old professor it's only staying on the campuses and now it's like it's everywhere yeah no i i didn't turn out to be right unfortunately for all of us but the those seem like innocent days now
you know it's i and i'm not sure how you you know it If there's anything I've learned from growing up in a household of crazy, it's that Until everyone decides to pull themselves out of that system and work on themselves and not engage in the crazy, you can't really get better.
And it just, everybody's just projecting all their own insecurities and fears into these doom boxes and interacting with each other.
And then we have big tech monitoring all of it.
I mean, we're already like way past Way past the and then not to mention like this battle of the sexes that we have going on where we've been kind of pitted against one another instead of I think Chris Williamson and I were talking about this yesterday when he was on my podcast just how he feels like we need to evolve past this like male-female against one another and see one another as allies again.
100%, 100%.
And I did want to go back to your point about Thomas Sowell, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
No reason you would know this, but my dissertation in biology was on evolutionary trade-offs.
And what I figured out was that effectively we had been studying, this is my opinion, but I worked for it, We've been studying evolution as a problem-solving mechanism, which it is, right?
Which is kind of the way progressives look at the world, right?
What problems can we solve?
And what I realized was that selection very quickly exhausts the cheap solutions.
So we have them.
They're just written in.
What it ends up with is then all of the trade-offs that it discovers where, yeah, you can have more of this, but it will cost you a bunch of that.
And that all of the problems that we think are difficult evolutionarily, once you realize that selection isn't solving problems, it's balancing trade-offs, those problems become solvable too.
So, not a surprise that in a fit of progressivism, we embraced a whole bunch of technological solutions to problems we could see, and then discovered the cost much later, and in many cases, too late to do anything about them.
So, yes, the right solution is for us to go in in the trade-off mindset and think, yep, it would be great if women were liberated from having biology dictate what they can do with their lives, but that's going to upend a lot of stuff that works and we have to be mindful of what those disruptions are and figure out how to fix them.
So, you know, Let's say, you know, five decades later, we don't end up with males and females being antagonists, which is exactly what's happened.
You're absolutely right about that.
And the reason it's happened is again, not that unclear, right?
If we go back to the two male modes of reproduction, when men are in the mindset of partnering with women sexually, They're not antagonists.
When men are in the mindset of impregnating women and walking away, which is what casual sex mimics, that is an antagonistic relationship, right?
They're trying to stick a woman with a baby that they do not want responsibility for.
It's not a nice thing.
Go ahead.
I mean, I think it's why, as a response to that, I became a man-eater.
Like, that's the correct response as a woman.
Not correct, but the one solution to that in an antagonistic relationship where you realize that they have the power.
How do you take the power back as a woman in this system?
I mean, I know I'm not alone in that either, of women kind of Weaponizing their own sexuality and then you see kind of in particularly in like the manosphere the resentment towards women for doing exactly that but it's this is a system that they're reacting to this climate of men of casual sex basically.
This is exactly what would happen.
This is exactly what would happen and it comes with another biological consequence for women that I think is the thing that wakes women up, right?
A lot of women do ultimately wake up to the fact that the system doesn't work for them and the thing that I believe does it Is that men and women are wired inversely with respect to their reaction to sex if it comes early in a relationship, right?
Because women have the one reproductive strategy, invest, they tend to fall in love with guys that they go to bed with, whether that's intent or not, right?
I had a rule around this, by the way.
It's interesting that you had to have a rule around it.
Yeah, I had a seven orgasm rule.
I was like, after seven orgasms, I fall in love.
Like, the oxytocin is too... I just, like, knew when it was with the person, so I was like, if it goes beyond that, I know I get, like, catch the feels, or however the kids these days call it.
Sure, but for lots of women it isn't seven.
And so the discovery that a woman has the power to go to bed with somebody and that she may feel that this may be positive in light of the bad choices she's been handed, but that darn it, then she ends up having feelings for the guy where
Because the guy, you know, if she's delayed this interaction because she's interested in a relationship and it turns out he's interested enough in a relationship that he'll stick around for a woman that doesn't want to go with him right away.
Then he'll fall in love with her too, and I'll like that.
But, if she goes to bed with him too early to keep his attention, it actually creates exactly the inverse phenomenon, right?
That men are wired not to fall in love with women who go to bed with them too early, right?
Why is that?
Well, if you think about it, a woman who goes to bed too early might not be a person to reproduce with.
A, is she going to go to bed with somebody else quickly?
Right?
Is it, you know, are you really that special that she goes to bed with you early where she would, you know, fend everyone else off?
Or are you, you know, are you signing up with somebody who, you know, might stick you with an offspring that isn't yours?
I do know a lot of men and women who have had sex on their first date and are still happily married decades later, though.
Well, but the question is, did they overcome something or not?
But the other thing, the better answer to your question, Bridget, is that if a man finds that a woman will go to bed with him, remember, we were wired in a pre-birth control environment, right?
A man who finds that a woman will go to bed with him right away She's an opportunity to produce offspring that he doesn't have to care for, right?
So from the point of view of game theory, his best option is probably to impregnate her and move on and invest in somebody who requires it, right?
Then he's got two women reproducing on his behalf.
So anyway, I'm not, of course, defending any of this.
I'm just saying biology stuck us with some asymmetries, and if you play the game such that you're not mindful of those asymmetries, you're just going to keep injuring yourself.
If you're mindful of these things, you can use them so that everybody wins.
Yeah, I was thinking of Louise Perry when you were talking.
She's like, if anyone's guilty of being the patriarchy, it's mother nature.
Well, that's funny.
I was like, yeah.
I've said similar things and I've also said that patriarchy is something that men are very unlikely to have gotten around to inventing.
It's too much work, you know?
Yeah, it seems like a lot of work.
It's a lot of work.
It's a lot of work.
Yeah.
Well, we've covered a lot of territory here.
I have.
There are plenty of things on my list that I wanted to get to, but maybe we should hold them off for a future conversation.
Yeah, I mean, unless there's anything that's gonna bug you when we hang up, if there's something that's gonna be like, ah, I wish I had asked her about this, then go for it.
I mean, A, that's not, you know, I do, I do sometimes have that sense.
You know, the French have a phrase for it, esprit d'escalades.
I'm no doubt butchering the French pronunciation, but the spirit of the stairs and the idea was, I think French flats used to be second floor and you would descend the stairs to get out to the street.
And there was always the thought, the thing you should have said that occurs to you on the stairs on the way back.
Yeah.
But, anyway, I think it's all the better that it provides fodder for a future conversation, which I think there's plenty of room for.
Yeah, I know that my biology is letting me know that the baby is hungry.
Interesting, huh?
Yes.
So, tell Dark Horse listeners where they can find you.
You can find me anywhere on social media at Bridget Phetasy.
You can find me on Substack.
I have Beyond Parody with Bridget Phetasy, where that piece that we talk about lives.
And we also are releasing a weekly letter from the Politically Homeless, which I think actually you would really love.
This is very much in your wheelhouse.
I get so many letters from these people who feel lost in the center, and we've been publishing them with their permission on a weekly basis on Substack, as well as where my husband and I's Podcast Factory settings is.
You can find that anywhere podcasts are available.
You can find Walk-Ins Welcome anywhere podcasts are available.
And you can find Dumpster Fire on YouTube.
I suggest you watch it.
It's very much a show, but you can also find it in podcast form.
And I have a subscriber community at Phetasy.com, and that's where everybody kind of gathers, and it's like a safe space behind the paywall where people can... I actually work out with The women in my community in 10 minutes will have a little workout and we do, we post pictures of our dogs and it's all, it's all nice.
And what the internet, you know, the promise of the internet still lives.
