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April 22, 2023 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
01:34:49
Feminism Against Progress: Bret Weinstein Speaks with Mary Harrington on the Darkhorse Podcast
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Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast.
I have the distinct pleasure of sitting this morning with Mary Harrington, who is contributing editor at UnHerd, a fantastic publication.
She is also the author of a new book that is soon to emerge called Feminism Against Progress.
Mary, welcome to Dark Horse.
Thank you for having me.
Well, I'm very excited to have this conversation with you.
I have been reading your work for several years now, and we are in an interesting position.
I don't know how aware you are of my thinking, as discussed with Heather on our podcast, for example, and in our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, but you and I agree on
A wide range of topics surrounding the modern predicament of humans, women in particular, the implications of feminism, a lot of topics that many people would consider difficult to reach agreement on.
You and I are there already.
But, I think we take nearly opposite lessons from what it is that I believe we agree on, and I'm very much looking forward to exploring that with you here.
As my longtime viewers and listeners know, I don't do interviews.
I really have discussions with people, and so that's what we're about to have.
I hope you're as excited to explore this territory as I am.
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All right, good.
So do you want to briefly lay out your position with respect to feminism and what it has and has not done for women?
Well, in Feminism Against Progress, well, there are three parts really to the book.
There's the how we got there.
I mean, it's pretty standard, really, how we got there, where I see us being now, and how I think we might respond to that.
And it's a fairly large, it's a fairly big picture, how we got here, because I wanted to reread the history of feminism from outside the progress frame.
Which is habitually applied to it.
I mean, this all came about because I lost my faith in progress.
I stopped believing in it and came to think that it's a belief structure, you know, with similarities to a theology.
In the book I've called it progress theology and I see it straightforwardly as a form of secularized, A secularised outgrowth of a still broadly very Christian culture.
It's taken some of the Christian eschatology and it's just removed the heaven and hell bit from it, but otherwise remains structurally very similar.
It's my view that this is a belief, not a fact.
I don't believe that we're progressing towards some kind of infinite better.
I don't think we move forward or move backwards as such.
It's not obvious to me that there's any way you can prove that the aggregate sum of good or felicity or however you want to measure it is necessarily better now than it was 2,000 years ago, say.
And the moment you set out to argue that it is, you have to define your terms, at which point you've assumed the truth of what you set out to prove, i.e.
you've begged the question.
So that's the very big picture frame for where I'm coming from in the book.
I don't believe in progress.
This left me with some difficulties as a nerd who has to think things all the way through, because I've long thought of myself as a feminist, ever since I was in my early teens really, and came to think that there were some significant ways in which women's position left something to be desired.
There were things which didn't feel fair to me.
This is still true.
And so I immersed myself in feminist theory and to an extent, you know, did my best to embrace feminist practice.
So when I realised I didn't believe in progress, it left me with something of a challenge, because feminism, or rather the advances made by what we normally think of as the feminist movement, are generally the first thing anybody will hold up as evidence that we are in fact progressing and we can progress.
If I say, well, I don't believe in progress, somebody will say, well, you have the vote now, Mary.
You can own property, you can work.
Surely this is progress.
Which, yes, on its own terms, this is a change from what we had before.
So if I don't believe in progress, I spent something like 10 years trying to answer the question for myself, really not knowing the answer to the question, is it still possible to be a feminist if you don't believe in progress?
And I think it took me the best part of 10 years to square that circle.
And the point I've got to with it, I guess, is yes, you can, but it depends a bit what you mean by feminism, and it depends a bit what you mean by progress.
And so essentially I set out to redefine, or rather to reread, the women's movement in a way that would make it make sense without the progress theology goggles on.
And where I got to with that was an understanding of the women's movement in much more materialist terms, as an effect of the very real and thoroughgoing changes which spilled out of the Industrial Revolution and into family life.
And particularly with the departure of work from the home, which was a radical change from the largely agrarian and artisanal Middle Ages, where both partners, both men and women worked, albeit with distinctive roles, but in a primary economic unit of a productive household.
And some variant of this holds for most medieval Western cultures.
The main economic unit was not an individual as it is today, it was a productive household.
And within those terms, men and women both worked.
And of course, when the Industrial Revolution came along and a great deal of that work left the home and went for factories, women were faced with new conundrums about how to navigate their caring obligations to children in conjunction with or in zero-sum opposition to work, which now happens somewhere else.
And out of this falls a huge number of subsidiary issues to do with to do with the physical protection of women in industrial workplaces, to do with a huge number of class-inflected issues, how to manage childcare, you know, and from this emerged the entirety of the women's movement, along two distinctive tracks which I've set out in the first part of the book, which I've characterised as the feminism of freedom and the feminism of care.
But which interacted fruitfully with one another in seeking to balance women's desire for autonomy and participation in public life against women's realistic and pragmatic recognition of women's distinctive reproductive role and also desire to care for children under deep conviction in a great many cases that this is important and significant.
and needed political and legal recognition in a way which had been compromised by the changes of the Industrial Revolution.
So this is my understanding of feminism throughout the majority of its history.
And it's my contention that that feminism is now over and has been dead and gone for 50 years. - Well, you've laid out enough issues there that we could easily spend the rest of the podcast and three more like it unpacking them.
I will say there's one place already where I think our disagreement is going to center.
And I would ask you to step into my perspective for a moment.
I'm an evolutionary biologist, and that
Creates a certain perspective from which I view things and while I would agree as an evolutionary biologist that progress is very very unlikely what evolution and in particular selection is is a mechanism that filters the huge range of changes that are not positive and sorts from them the tiny percentage of changes that are and so while
you and I would not disagree over the unlikeliness of progress.
We would potentially disagree over whether or not progress is a recognizable theme in change, whether that's the morphological change within creatures, let's say our ancestors, or whether it is the cultural change that has taken over our adaptive architecture or whether it is the cultural change that has taken over our adaptive architecture in the last few million So, do you really mean that you don't believe in progress, as in progress does not happen?
Or do you mean that you are skeptical of claims of progress?
Well, actually what you've just described, whether we're talking about an evolution of culture or an evolution of organisms, of course I don't dispute that this happens.
I mean, my academic study was in English literature and at the point where I was most immersed in it, I remember having this phenomenal moment of insight into the immense sweep of evolution of an entire culture.
And the way that ideas have morphed into other ideas over the course of something like a thousand years and just having that crystal clear grasp of that entire picture and that entire process of evolution.
So all of this really just to say that I absolutely would not dispute, I couldn't be further from disagreeing with, The idea that cultures, consciousnesses and organisms evolve.
This is absolutely, indisputably the case.
I think you'd have to be wildly ahistorical and ignorant to disagree with that.
However, what I question is the idea of attributing a moral value to this.
This idea that there was something intrinsically better about how we are now than, say, a thousand years ago.
That I do question.
I think that's That I dispute.
Good.
I will say I did not mean to imply that any part of me wondered whether you doubted the reality of evolution, be it morphological or cultural.
Interesting that you heard my comment that way, but in any case, okay, so it sounds like Your concern about progress comes in two forms.
You are skeptical of claims of progress and you are doubtful that to the extent that progress does happen, both morphologically and culturally, that one can ground it both morphologically and culturally, that one can ground it as moral in nature.
In other words, that wasn't said very clearly on my part, but it sounds like you see the two questions as separate, right?
We can make gains on a particular, you know, we can, for example, alter our cultural practices.
We can start rotating our crops and we can prove that there's been a greater yield by rotating them than keeping them in the same fields year after year.
But that is not the same thing as saying that this has bettered us.
That bettered is a fundamentally different sort of claim.
Is that what you're saying?
Essentially, yes.
I mean, civilizations grow, complexify, and then they rise and they rise.
And typically, if history is any kind of a guide, they fall again, eventually, as well.
If there's an immense teleological arc to the whole thing, it's beyond my grasp.
And I think at that point we really are into the realm of theology.
And certainly it's not something I think we could reasonably attribute to the day-to-day political events of one specific culture, as in the one that we're in right now.
Interesting.
Alright, so if I were to make the counter-argument, I would say That to the extent, I agree with you that we cannot ultimately ground any of these claims in a Fundamentally moral calculus.
In other words, I don't even think we can defend the idea that being alive is better than being dead.
It is only that we are the descendants of creatures that have an unbroken line of living and reproducing that stretches back three and a half billion years that caused causes us to be Very substantially cognitively biased in the direction of thinking that being alive is better than being dead, but there's no ultimate argument for that position.
That is a value judgment that we impose on a kind of order, and we prioritize it over disorder, over entropy.
But, nonetheless, if we grant ourselves that first move, if we say that from the perspective of creatures that find it better to be alive than to be dead, or to be non-living,
We understand that our, you know, that we are in some way, by the same sort of logic, better off to be humans with choice and the capacity to reflect, the capacity to produce novel works, that these things have a similar sort of value.
Then surely it is incumbent on us to deliver that opportunity, that is to say, a meaningfully liberated life to as many people as we can over the future.
Right?
So anyway, my claim is that there is something That from within our human framework, we could say would constitute progress if we if we could measure the number of humans that were living a meaningfully liberated life.
And that number were to go up in over the indefinite future, that that would constitute a kind of progress, which does not mean that that's the trajectory we are we are on.
Does that is that sensible from your framework?
I understand the argument you're making.
I don't find it compelling, though, I've got to be honest.
This is not to say I'm a complete nihilist, but you dropped meaningfully liberated in there.
It felt kind of out of the blue a little bit.
I want you to be a bit more specific about what that means before I can say whether I agree or not.
Because I question In the book also, the centrality of liberation as pretty much the one and only value that we have left to order what it is that we understand as progress.
I've spent quite a bit of time questioning why just that and suggesting that perhaps we need to ground that in some more embodied So, I guess I would say, please say more about meaningfully liberated and are there any limits to that?
And if so, why?
And if not, then I have a few other questions.
Great.
Well, I think you are already forcing me to refine my own position.
So thank you for that.
What I'm getting at is some sort of a principle where, you know, you could compare, for example, the success of ants To the success of humans and we could make an argument that the number of ants on Earth dwarfs the number of humans and that they are therefore in some ways more successful.
I want to avoid that.
I would regard that as an argument.
It's sophistry in some sense, but what I'm what I'm reserving the right to do and I'm not sure it is philosophically justified, but my intuition is that it is.
Is to say, from the point of view of having landed in our human form, right?
With no belief that the human form is in itself fundamentally better than any other form.
But what it is, is capable of a few things that no other creature can do.
And so, I regard human specialness as precious.
And therefore, I suppose I would argue that things that protect and augment the specially human capabilities that we have, that is to say the ability to reflect, to deliberately pursue objectives rather than automatically pursue them,
And to in fact impose values on an otherwise cold universe, that those things, it's not surprising that I as a human being would find those things valuable and that I would see them as desirable to foster in the future in the same way that I find my own homeostasis into the next hour
A desirable thing to foster even though I can't really make an argument that it is desirable in any ultimate sense So I mean do you I guess that's the question.
Do you believe from within your perspective as a human being that the, you know, special types of insight and compassion and other things that we find limited to humans, or maybe in some cases humans and a few other very special creatures, do you find something worth preserving about those characteristics?
Yes, absolutely.
We're some distance now from meaningful liberation in the sense that if we're talking about protecting and augmenting human capabilities which are distinct to us as people, I would challenge the idea that liberation is the only move that will That's necessary in order to do that.
I mean, really, what we're talking about here is the entire, the gestalt of human nature, which my sense is that, you know, which I suspect is probably a concept that you'd want to drill down into a little bit.
And we can probably have some fun doing that.
But let's say there is such a thing, you know, the distinctive capabilities of a human, you know, that is something I think we could probably agree on that.
Great.
And there is a gestalt of those attributes.
And these have emerged over a great deal of time via evolutionary processes and cultural processes and material processes and so on and we are where we are in a sense with those and I would absolutely agree with you that those are things that we should treasure.
And protect.
I suppose I would question the idea that liberation is the only move we need to make in order to do so.
And in fact, in the book I've set out to make the case that if we hyper-focus on liberation, underwritten by technology, we will end up making choices which are inimical to the gestalt of those precious qualities of a human, which it's incumbent on us to protect.
Beautiful.
Because these are good things.
I think I now, yeah, this is, I hope people are able to follow this conversation because I think we've actually gotten somewhere pretty interesting.
The connection between my argument for human specialness and Meaningful liberation is that you can take a human who has all of the characteristics that make people special and you can constrain them either because of privation or because of authoritarianism.
You know, they could be born into slavery and unable to meaningfully act on any of those special human characteristics.
And I would regard that as a squandering of human potential.
And so the reason I put meaningful liberation in there is not that meaningful liberation is sufficient to bring about the human specialness, But I do believe it is probably necessary that you be, to some extent, liberated in order for your compassion, your insight, your ingenuity to produce anything that we could then call progress.
So I think that's important.
But then where I think you and I have landed in agreement, assuming that you would agree with what I just said, is that It tells us that there is at least a kind of human progress that is possible that we could potentially even measure whether we are making gains on it or losing ground.
And that would have something to do with whether or not people were meaningfully liberated in the future or whether they were constrained by the new human innovations in some way that made them actually less free.
I suppose what I would add to that, I broadly agree, what I would add to that is that it's certainly possible to squander what's best about us by constraining us and impeding us from acting From being our best selves, to put it crudely.
I would contend it's also possible to squander that human, the best of what we can be, by an excess of liberation.
That it's possible to go the other way as well.
And that there are better and worse ways to live, bluntly, in accordance with what With how we can best flourish as human organisms in the context of the entire gestalt of where we are in our evolutionary, cultural, etc trajectories.
So I would contend that it's not just liberation, but it's also the beneficial constraints which enable us to live well, that bring us to a good place and where we can flourish.
I 100% agree with you on this, that liberty can actually be toxic.
This is why I use a nebulous term like meaningful liberation, right?
Because it is absolutely possible.
And in fact, we may be drowning in trivial liberation.
We are so overrun with choice that we don't even recognize that it's a matter of scale in some sense.
And I believe this is actually a theme That is in your book, that in some sense, where you see feminism having gone awry, it has in some sense become obsessed with the liberty of individual females and has effectively abandoned responsibility for anything durable and continuing.
I mean, right down to its subordination of children to the liberty of their would-be mothers.
Yes, yes indeed.
When I titled the book Feminism Against Progress, the progress which I'm talking about is specifically that vision of
The good which proposes to liberate us from ever more of the constraints that surround us, including, where necessary, the beneficial ones, and which does so, generally speaking, via technologies which replace previously embodied limits or social limits with a technological freedom.
You know, whether that's Whether that's the entire trajectory of industrialisation, which liberated humans from all manner of probably pretty arduous subsistence life, in favour of the great panoply of different things that people do with themselves now.
But what I've set out to argue is that when you liberate people, when you use a technology to free people or cultures from constraints, what invariably comes with that, what invariably comes with freedom is also trade, which is to say when you remove something from, and I've argued this really from Karl Polanyi, who's a political economist, he wrote, I don't know if you're familiar with The Great Transformation,
Which is a 1947, I think, book he wrote about the origins of market society.
He set out to challenge the idea that homo economicus was anything universal or eternal about homo economicus and set out to show how this figure was constructed and the society in which this figure existed had been constructed principally through the enclosure of the commons in the United Kingdom.
So I've drawn heavily from Karl Polanyi and also from Ivan Illich's work on pre-modern sex roles, where he talks about the Industrial Revolution bringing with it a transition from what he calls vernacular gender to economic sex, in which he sees women as not more empowered but less empowered, because they're structurally disadvantaged in a world which claims that everybody is broadly interchangeable.
Where our reproductive role and our often desired caring obligations leave us structurally disadvantaged.
I mean, this is an extremely reductive summary of an immensely, immensely rich book, which if you've not read, I strongly, strongly recommend dipping into.
Ivan Illich, Gender.
He was very cancelled for it in the 1990s.
So anyway, this is all to say I think that where we've got to with the women's movement, which emerged rightly and justly in response to a number of ways that women genuinely were faced with new predicaments as material circumstances changed.
What it's brought, it has tracked, two things were going on.
On the one hand, we've got the broader trajectory of freedom underwritten by technology, which then enables the market to move into places which have been previously governed by social codes.
The paradigmatic example there is the pre-modern guilds, which were replaced by a free market.
Again, this is very crudely drawn from Polanyi.
What I've set out to argue is that from the sexual revolution onwards, that movement to liberate us using technology, which we have tacitly accepted invariably comes with a side order of increased commerce, has moved from being something which happens outside in the world with the enclosure of the commons and then
The enclosure of various natural resources and this extractive approach to the natural world, which has powered our immense growth in In technology, in wealth, in abundance, in material goods, and so on.
And that turned inwards with the sexual revolution and took as its focus and took as its resource to be enclosed and commodified the human body.
And that this was an absolutely pivotal cultural moment, which has been hugely underpriced, hugely under We haven't reckoned with, at all, just how radical that transformation was.
The point at which we stopped strip mining the world and we started strip mining ourselves.
And I've situated that in the digital and the sexual revolutions.
You know, which formed twin facets of essentially the same cultural change, which are characterized as a cyborg era.
And the part two of the book I've set out to unpack some of the ways that we've emancipated ourselves using digital and reproductive technologies.
And inexorably with that, although it's brought a great dividend of freedom and many changes which have been positive, at least for some people, it's also brought with it a side order of commerce and the entry of trade into areas where previously it was very strictly managed or just outright forbidden.
It's noticeable, for example, in the concurrent flourishing of sexual emancipation and pornography and the porn industry.
The two come into being simultaneously, and it's fairly obvious why.
And that's only accelerated in the years since.
And I've set out to suggest that there are some undercounted costs of that emancipation, particularly in In where it leaves our very long, essentially our evolved patterns in mate choice.
And it's created some increasingly painful tensions, which are having now noticeably negative downstream consequences for young people who would otherwise long to form families, but find themselves culturally set up to do pretty much anything but now.
Yes, I can't help but hear a sort of classic British understatement of the catastrophe.
You know, without leaping to conclusions here, I wouldn't say that progress is impossible, but I would say that there is something quite stunning about the degree to which we do not
Look at our obvious freedoms and make the calculation about what their apparent cost has been because I think I share with you a sense that we have taken things that are effectively beyond price and we have commodified them.
And while the upshot of that is not the same for every person, there are people who are obviously spectacularly liberated and do something meaningful with it.
But for most people, there appears to be no awareness of what has been taken from them.
And, you know, nowhere is this more obvious to me than the spectacular decline in the bargaining position that most women find themselves in, right?
They have been commodified and do not seem to recognize it.
And, you know, I'm obviously not in a great place to say that as a man.
But, you know, I mean, I guess we could make the same argument for you.
You know, there's an irony in your making this case because you're obviously a woman taking advantage of an era in which a woman finds herself in a position to make this case on a world stage.
Right.
That does seem to be I would I would regard that as a kind of progress.
But nonetheless, it gives you a position from which to make the case that maybe the net effect of all of what we regard as progress has not been positive.
Absolutely.
And it's certainly when you look at the nuts, when you look at what we've traded off, particularly in the era, in specifically in the terrain of women's bodies in exchange for the.
The considerable gains in emancipation.
I find the ledger very difficult.
I find it very difficult to say that it's been a net gain.
I mean, from where I'm sitting, I should hold my hands up and say, you're absolutely right, that as an educated, middle class, white, Western woman, it's probably been net positive for me.
In fact, it's almost indisputably been net positive for me.
I mean, as you rightly say, there are many eras in which I wouldn't have been given the opportunity to make this case.
That's beyond dispute.
And it's clear, when you look at the numbers, when you look at how life changed for bourgeois women like me in Britain and America alike with the arrival of the pill, it's very clear that for women of my class and education, It was an absolutely radical transformation.
Women piled into the universities in huge numbers, women piled into the workplace in huge numbers, because it was possible, you could plan, and it just wasn't possible to plan before, because you either had to have the self-discipline of a nun, or just accept that you were
Your career could be interrupted by a child at any point, which just makes it, well, put it this way, you're not going to be looking in the same way at a five or ten year professional development plan if you could fall pregnant at any time and have your work trajectory interrupted.
So it made a huge, to ambitious academic nerdy women like me, it made an immense difference.
So we have to weigh that on one side of the ledger and say, yes, there were a huge number of women who benefited immensely from being able to control our fertility in this way.
But inexorably, with freedom comes trade.
The point where sexuality, women's sexuality, women's bodies in particular, stopped being managed via social norms and social codes.
The sexual double standard is real and it emerged for a reason.
I mean, for very practical reasons.
Historically, it's been pretty brutal and the shaming of women who fall foul of Sexual norms has historically been pretty brutal, but it was done for a very pragmatic reason.
Absent reliable contraception, everybody around you really does have skin in the game in terms of what you do with your body and who you have sex with.
This is obvious.
And so you can complain all you like about how it's patriarchal and unfair, but from the point of view of everybody else in your village who's otherwise going to have to figure out what to do with the baby, you know, you can sort of see where people got there and how these social norms emerged.
And then at a stroke, along comes this technology that says, actually, you just don't need any of that anymore.
You know, all of a sudden it became thinkable for the first time ever.
That women's bodies, you know, really nobody did have any say or any stake in who I chose to have sex with.
It became thinkable for the first time ever and an entire infrastructure of social codes and courtship rights and, you know, the immensely complicated business of older, usually some purse-lipped older matrons like I am now, doing their best to stop horny young people from getting to getting overexcited, at least until they were married, all just disappeared and it became possible to think of my body just belongs to me.
And before that just wasn't a meaningful statement to make because it just because in the case of women, it wasn't really true.
And then, but the dancer and so this is great if you're like me and you're academically ambitious and you want to do X, Y and Z with your life.
If you're poor and uneducated and all of a sudden your body belongs to you, you still fall within the larger moral field that's been transformed, but you maybe don't necessarily have the same set of things that you might want to do with yourself.
with your suddenly newfound freedom.
However, you still have the same freedom to do what you like with your own body.
Now, let's say you're very impoverished.
Let's say you don't have very many prospects.
Let's say you're under great financial pressure.
You have this thing that belongs to you and something that belongs to you, you can dispose of as you see fit.
So all of a sudden, along with the huge opportunities for capable, ambitious women at the top of the social hierarchy, it also opened, it also, what came with that was the libertarian defense of the sex industry, which in practice ended up being a libertarian defense of the sexual exploitation which in practice ended up being a libertarian defense of the sexual exploitation So,
In a way which had been, yes, has gone on since time immemorial, but could suddenly be justified with using the same rubric as was used to emancipate women to go off to get PhDs and join the medical profession or whatever.
So yeah, along with freedom comes trade and what it is that gets traded isn't necessarily just going to be women's immense professional potential in the market.
It turned out in practice to sometimes also just be women's bodies.
I agree with almost everything you just said, starting with the fact that people appear to have no idea what the logic of sexuality was even about, right?
I'm frequently struck by the fact that people seem surprised to discover that Sex is itself a fundamentally reproductive thing, which in humans has been elaborated so that it does some other jobs.
But if you don't understand the rudiments of sex as reproductive, then you don't understand why all of the asymmetries arose around it.
And it is those asymmetries To which modern folks are in general in rebellion, but it is very different to be in rebellion against them if you know what they're for and you, you know, it's a Chesterton's fence problem, right?
Those things existed for a reason.
I very much agree with your point that birth control is the first step of transhumanism.
I did not realize that until you said it, but it immediately struck a chord.
That transhumanism begins with the ability to control when and how frequently you reproduce, and that that is, in my opinion, Powerfully good thing to have control over.
But what did not come with it was any sense of how many things were downstream from it.
So there was no ability to generate a new kind of wisdom about, OK, given that a woman is now free to choose when to reproduce, what else that was once part of a coherent way of organizing a society is now suddenly going to be cut adrift.
And where we find ourselves now is in a kind of painful, counterproductive chaos in which people have gained sexual liberation, but they do not appear to have gained sexual satisfaction out of it.
They just have a kind of technical.
On the contrary, in fact.
Right.
They appear to be addicted and dissatisfied en masse, which suggests that there's something.
And, you know, again, I would point to the question of is it inherently a mistake to engage in technological family planning?
I don't really believe so, but I do think that the, you know, what we did downstream of that change has been, I won't say an unmitigated disaster, but it's been a mitigated disaster.
There have been many positive things, but wow, have the consequences for human flourishing been mixed.
I think that's absolutely right.
I really want to emphasise again that this is not about me just saying we have to turn the clock back and we have to put all of these technologies back in their box because a. that's not possible and b. the social mores that we had before are now so completely gone.
And have evaporated with really the generation before my mother's generation.
Perhaps my mother's generation was the last to hold really two pre-sexual revolution Maurys in any numbers.
And we're a long way along from that now.
And things have changed so radically even since I was young and at the sharp end of the quote-unquote sexual marketplace, which is an idea which I dispute, you know, as a frame for what sexuality is and how it functions and how it ought to function.
I think the fact that it's become normalized to refer to The process of mate choice and mate formation as a sexual marketplace.
I mean, we could spend another hour unpacking what that term means and why it's such a category error when it comes to what sexuality is for and how we should be thinking about it.
But I think it speaks volumes about what exactly we're getting wrong and how it is that we're thinking mistakenly about it, to think of it as a marketplace, to think of it as something which is individualistic and transactional and in which everybody must of necessity be pursuing their own interest.
That's just a fundamentally mistaken way to think about what sexuality is and what it's for and how it can be a healthy and beneficial part of who we are as humans.
Well, I would push back very slightly.
I think I agree with the sentiment, but I would argue that this is a case where what sex breaks down into, if you disrupt the higher version of it, is a marketplace.
Right?
It's a lower state of existence and it's very hard to make the case, especially to people who are addicted to some product produced in that marketplace, that they have given up something, the name of which they don't even know.
Well, yes, this is exactly it.
Sex shouldn't be a marketplace, but it is.
Yes.
This is where we are now.
Very well said.
Yeah.
Sex shouldn't be a marketplace, but it is.
And it is interesting, I don't know, my social group is of course idiosyncratic, but It is interesting how frequently I am now running into the pattern of women, let's say in their mid-30s and onward, waking up to their own philosophical error, discovering that things that they were convinced of, they now believe were not in their interest,
and making a radical change in their trajectory, which I think is very positive, but it's also a bit tragic that it comes late.
In other words, that something about the messaging that society is delivering to these women when they're very young is irresistible.
And how much better off, well, I will make two arguments.
One, it would be great if you had that wisdom early on so that you could avoid the pitfalls earlier in your life because it's not that those costs go away entirely when you wake up, right?
Some of those costs are just simply permanent.
But that it is also the case that in order to understand why this sexual marketplace that things have broken down into is so pervasive, one need only look at the plight of an one need only look at the plight of an individual woman especially who attempts to opt out.
In a world where people have become very transactional about sex and effectively have started swapping in quantity for quality, not realizing that they've given something up, a woman who decides not to make that error a woman who decides not to make that error has very little access to anyone's attention.
And I believe it is that tragedy that makes it impossible for, or not impossible, but very unlikely for the culture to substantially correct its course.
Right.
It just it's a it's a vicious cycle.
I'm cautiously optimistic on that front, but I think I think it will take a it will take a wholesale mutiny by by the next generation of hot girls.
Yes.
Yeah.
A huge amount of culture is downstream of what the hot girls want.
I 100% agree with you.
That is exactly right.
And the problem for that opportunity is that those hot girls now have um, access, they can, the hottest girls can monetize that hotness in a way that is disproportionate.
And therefore they are disincentivized to do so because effectively they may have given up something in terms of, uh, human satisfaction and wellbeing.
but they've gained a tremendous amount of earning capacity, which is misleading to women who don't have those opportunities.
It's like NBA stars leading people to think that, you know, if they play the game really well, that they're going to end up rich when the answer is no, that's only true for people in the very tail of a distribution.
It's not true in general.
So I worry about that.
Time will tell, to be honest.
I mean, the worst case scenario is as you describe it.
The hot girls go on setting a terrible example for everybody else.
The more optimistic scenario sees enough of a backlash that also has a trickle-down effect.
And I see, to be honest, I see evidence of both.
And I don't know which way it's going to go yet.
But I'm cautious because I choose to have hope for For humans, generally.
I prefer to think that enough women are going to wake up and decide that this is just not working.
Well, I guess I would put my hope somewhere slightly different.
I put my hope in people like you and Louise Perry and Bridget Phetasy and my wife, Heather Hying, who are presenting a very powerful case that is not, I mean, even in your framework, which does argue for a rejection of modernity,
Uh, and I think no uncertain terms even in your case, you are, you are not really laying out the case for a return to somewhere in the past.
You are laying out the case that many of the things we have abandoned from the past, uh, we did so at our peril and that we should think about how they might be recovered, which I think is the right, is the right way to look at the puzzle.
I think that's right.
I found a wonderful quotation from the Colombian aphorist, Nicolás Gómez Dávila, who says, the true reactionary is not a seeker after abolished pasts, but a hunter of sacred shades on the eternal hills.
Those are words to write by for me.
We can't go back.
Yeah, we can't.
There's never a going back.
We can't go back.
This is one of Heather and my principles.
We cannot go back.
There is, in fact, nowhere to go back to.
Exactly.
There's nothing left to conserve.
There's no going back anyway.
One of the points that I made in Feminism Against Progress is exactly this, that people love to daydream about what they call traditional gender roles.
And I say, well, the trouble, what people generally are referring to there is something in the arc from about 1850 to 1950.
Where sex roles were very, there was a male breadwinner and notionally a female private domestic bourgeois housewife.
And this is a pattern which looms very large in both the right and the left imaginary for different reasons, although they disagree about what it means.
But that's what people mean when they talk about traditional gender roles.
And my critique of that is not that it's traditional, but it's not traditional enough.
And I think we should go back to something.
I think if we want a template to model what we could do more healthily from where we are now.
Rather than where we were between 1850 and 1950, we might look considerably further back at productive households and consider whether any of the affordances of the 21st century might bring us closer to that kind of a model and offer new ways of working together.
Such as to create more space for family and different ways of working and more creative solutions to the problem of who does what and where and when and more flexible solutions to that than a fantasized return to a past where whose material conditions are just dead and gone now anyway.
Yes, I believe what has happened is we have made a classic error of progressives faced with a complex problem, and I don't mean complicated, I mean complex in the technical sense, which is One cannot anticipate the consequences of a change in a truly complex adaptive environment.
And instead of behaving with caution, when we upend something major, like for example, we introduce technological birth control that is sufficient for meaningful family planning,
We do not then carefully monitor the impact on things that we have separately decided are valuable so that we can discover if we've made an error, if there's a refinement that is necessary, right?
If there's some way to balance the costs and benefits.
Instead, what we have done is we've entered an era of what Heather and I call hyper-novelty, where the rate of change is so fast that not only are you not trained for the world in which you become an adult because that world literally didn't exist when you were young.
But the rate of change is so high that it is not even in principle within the capacity of selection to keep up.
You don't run a scientific experiment by changing 100 things at once and then trying to figure out which thing affected what.
You change one thing at a time.
And in our culture, it's not even 100 things at once.
It's everything is being altered all the time around us, which means these utterly profound changes, their impacts can't be tracked because they're buried in statistical noise of all sorts of other changes that had impacts, many of which will be trivial.
but can't be isolated.
Yeah.
In my gloomier moments, Brett, I look at the collapsing birth rate across the developed and increasingly also the developing world.
And I think, well, you could, if you were feeling pessimistic, you could just see this as a form of evolutionary feedback.
It just says, you know, this is this is just not a way of living, which is conducive to its perpetuating itself.
Yeah.
And something is going to have to shift, or it just isn't going to.
Well, but here's the ultimate problem here.
On the one hand, I'm tempted to draw that same connection, and I resist doing it because I believe that if that is what's going on, it's really, you know, that almost sounds like a kind of evolutionary wisdom, which I'm convinced it isn't.
I'm convinced it's more like a system that is incoherent, does not send the right messages to the body that cause it to be in a physiologically reproductive mode.
And so it would be almost happenstance that our chaos is triggering that mechanism rather than wisdom.
But what is ordinarily true in human evolution is that at any one moment, some lineage may experiment with something radically different.
And that radically different thing may provide a benefit more than that.
More often than not, it will be negative.
And that lineage can either reverse course when it realizes that what it's doing has not been a net benefit, or it can go extinct and be replaced by others that didn't take that path.
And unfortunately, our hyper novel world that we moderns live in has linked us all together.
So instead of the culture having an outburst of feminism to which many people opted out, it sort of took over the whole culture, which did not leave it sort of took over the whole culture, which did not A population to which to compare, right?
And that is increasingly a global problem where because the internet takes every idea and spreads it almost everywhere instantaneously, we're sort of all dragged into the same experiment over and over again.
And there's no capability to say, well, here's what you imagined was going to happen downstream of that change.
And here's what actually happened.
and maybe it wasn't as good an idea as you thought.
Liberating the world's information has had some unexpected side effects.
I definitely agree with that.
I don't know.
I look at the way the internet is evolving, which is also happening just incredibly mind-bogglingly fast.
And, you know, there are all sorts of doomer scenarios floating around at the moment with artificial intelligence and so on.
But I think it's not impossible that people will regain a measure of Well, the Internet will become semi-deliberately much more siloed over time, because people realise that just everybody being networked in that way just isn't good.
In fact, I would argue that it's probably already happening.
I mean, there was a point, I think, probably from the late noughties up to about Trump's election year, give or take, maybe a bit beyond that, where everybody really did have all of their conversations in public on the Internet, and I just don't think that's the case anymore.
There are too many hallway monitors and there are too many ways that you can face negative consequences for things that you say to the wrong audience on the internet.
And most serious conversations now happen in gatekept communities.
And I think that will just go on happening and subcultures will find ways of diverging again.
In my observation, that's already taking place to an extent.
So again, I'm not without hope that people and cultures will adapt beyond that sort of pathological state of openness.
And I sincerely hope that we do, because if not, then we face the problem that you've described.
Yes, although, you know, look, I desperately want to sign on to the hope that you keep returning to.
And, you know, I have my own reasons for hope, I guess.
But what I'm concerned about is that that siloing, while you could imagine a productive version of it, and in fact, What I would advocate for any young person who hears a conversation like this one and thinks, oh, well, what am I to do?
My suggestion would be.
To find a community of people to opt out of the modern sensibilities together, right?
One would need to figure out what the new rules of sex and sexuality ought to be in a community that intends to function, that does value family, that also values meaningful liberation, not just trivial liberation.
And, you know, opt out together is really what I would hope to see, which is another way of describing siloing.
My concern is you do a pretty good job of articulating the...
the misleading of young people that is taking place as, the example you used was a libertarian approach to the sex industry. - It's genuinely shocking the example you used was a libertarian approach to the sex industry. - It's genuinely shocking to me that there are now courses for freshmen students at university on starting an OnlyFans or engaging
I find that just mind-bogglingly appalling.
Right.
Beyond wrong.
I do too, and I also find the connection to libertarianism both wrong-headed and deeply unfortunate, because what it does is it turns that into a pseudo-sophistication.
The problem, and I'm sure you have found the same, is when you try to make the counter-argument, it is understood to be born of prudishness.
Now, in my case, I don't feel that that is an accurate evaluation at all.
In fact, I would argue that the problem, and I know you feel similarly, the problem is that we are not treating sex as extremely special, that it is an extremely special thing and we have trivialized it.
And it is the trivialization of sex that results in us commodifying it.
So it isn't prudishness.
It's actually, you know, if sex positivity wasn't already a polluted term, you might describe this view that sex is very special as sex positivity.
But But this is a long way of saying, I think, unfortunately, young people, people who have not lived long enough to develop wisdom, easily tricked and that they're, whether it is, you know, the industry doing the tricking or wealthy men on the take or whatever it is, or on the make, I should say, whatever it is,
there's an awful lot of bandwidth being spent there's an awful lot of bandwidth being spent tricking young people into a false sophistication around sex and sexuality that then unfortunately requires recovery later rather than as you are hoping that there's a silo where people who wish to opt out of that nonsense can go from the beginning.
Okay.
Yeah, I think what's particularly fascinating about what you call the sort of false sense of sophistication about sex and sexuality is that it's arrived, as far as I can make out from the data, in tandem with an absolute drop in people having sex in real life.
On the face of it, it's a really interesting paradox.
Because on the one hand, you've got all of these people who are identifying as demisexual, bisexual, ace, arrow, or whatever they've come up with this week.
You're coming up with increasingly baroque and fine-grained terms to define their own sexualities.
But on the other hand, they've probably never had sex with anybody.
And the age of loss of virginity is going up.
Plenty of kids just...
You know, the kids are not doing it.
They're not getting it on.
And it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that what they're actually describing when they identify as this or that sexuality is just their acquired porn preferences.
Because it's very difficult to see where else they might have been getting this information from, such as to be able to come up with these hyper-specific ideas of who and what they are and what their orientation is.
And as you rightly say, it's a deeply troubling foundation for Any sort of realistic prospect of forming a long-term relationship, if in fact you're setting out to create a social and a cultural or even a political identity from sexual preferences, which haven't emerged out of nothing.
They haven't emerged, as it were, from a blank slate.
They've been inculcated You know, more often than not via porn consumption or via the sort of mimetic influence of their peers.
And you think, this stuff is all sloshing around and it's increasing, and it's ever less grounded in any actual physical desires.
It's not grounded in Eros, it's not grounded in any sort of an eye-vowel encounter with an actual physical desiring other.
This is all happening purely in the realm of idea.
And you think, well, how do you even get From doing that at the age of 15 to forming a long-term relationship at some unspecified point in the future.
How do you make that transition?
I mean, sure, I had crushes as a teenager and it was all extremely abstract, but there wasn't this additional layer of social and political meaning-making that was able to accrue around that and then persist into adult life.
And yeah, I mean, I've been honestly amused, Brett, to find myself being the more optimistic side of our conversation, because I'm usually the doomer and I leave people feeling deeply miserable.
So I'm kind of enjoying being the Pollyanna on this occasion.
But yeah, on this, I'm as troubled as you.
I'm deeply worried about About what it is that we're doing.
What it is that we're doing to the kids who grow up on the internet and to the kids who grow up in the pervasively pornified universe.
I mean, you hear horror stories about 15-year-old girls who are so badly injured after seeking to imitate acts that they'd seen in porn footage that they'll now need a colostomy bag for life.
I mean, you know, truly horrific.
Injuries are coming downstream of this, because people just don't make the connection.
They're trying to enact something which is never meant to be enacted, and they're trying to enact something which is only ever meant to be an idea.
And somewhere in the middle of all of this, as you say, what it's for, what we evolved it for, has become completely lost.
And the challenge, which I suspect is pretty near the root of this, is that the moment you push back and you say, well, can we talk about what it's actually for?
Which is to say, you know, heterosexual reproduction, you know, desire is there fundamentally to make more humans.
Then people, the pushback that you'll get from the progressive side on that is you'll be called heterosexist, you'll be called patriarchal, you'll be called, Well, we call that any number of other boo words, all of which really boil down to a horror at being reminded of our embodied reality and the immutable nature of our embodied reality.
To me, violently, an unhinged aversion to being reminded that we can't in fact escape our embodied nature.
Well, there are a number of themes that I want to be sure to pick up on.
One of them, you point to this world in which people are spending a lot of time identifying with some newly invented category of sexual orientation.
And unfortunately, I think the explanation for this is pretty clear that this is in effect what happened with physical activity, right?
Where at one time children would have played a sport and they would have been very passionate about it.
And what has happened is that has been transmuted into an active consumerism, where what you do is you support a team, or you're very avid about a particular sport that you watch on your television.
And so you are, you know, instead of playing baseball, you're consuming baseball.
And instead of actually pursuing sex, which is, of course, in a natural circumstance, a very difficult puzzle to solve, because the consequences Before birth control for women having sex with somebody were so spectacularly high that women in general would not consider having sex with anybody who did not show very strong evidence of a willingness to commit.
So that was the sort of fundamental underlying logic of sex.
It was very, very scarce and one had to achieve substantial things in order to become worthy of it.
And that gave a kind of logic to the system.
But once you remove that, then it becomes You know, you almost have people aligning with some specialized version of sex in the same way that they, you know, root for Manchester United or whatever it is.
It's a radical transition in one's relationship to sexuality.
The other thing I wanted to introduce here, and this is again a place where I just have a very hard time conveying to people what I'm talking about, but I think the problem in some sense comes down to the idea that sex is a recreational activity.
And if you say, oh, it's not recreational, then people assume that what you're saying is that it's utilitarian.
Yeah, that it's utilitarian, when in fact it is supposed to be extremely private and unthinkably powerful.
And that combination of things is part of the logic that we've lost, and so we've substituted in this very low-quality, oh, sex is something you can do with anybody, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I made a very similar case, actually, in the last chapter of the book, where I've made the case for rewilding, as I called it, rewilding sex, which is the pro-sex case against birth control.
On the basis that, you know, in much the same way as to rewild an area, to rewild an ecosystem, sometimes you have to reintroduce the apex predator, because otherwise the ecosystem just doesn't work.
You know, my argument is that we won't be able to move sex out of this empty, sterile, recreational terrain and back into its proper seriousness and take it seriously, with the pleasures that come with that, unless we're willing to reintroduce the danger.
And although I can't prove it, Although I can't prove it, it is my hunch that a great deal of the so-called BDSM culture would disappear overnight if we allowed the true seriousness and the true danger of what sex is actually for back into the picture again.
You know, all of these young women who are being choked or slapped or otherwise physically abused.
A lot of them genuinely want it.
This is a controversial thing to say.
My great friend Louise Perry, we argue back and forth about BDSM.
It's clear enough to me from women I speak to that a great many of them, they ask, and I hear this from young men as well, that girls who they're with, they're asking to be choked or slapped or whatever.
Honestly, Brett, I think it's because they just want to feel something.
That's what's going on.
I mean, being slightly more flippant about it, contraceptive sex is like vegan bacon.
It's kind of the same, but is it any wonder that people are adding a lot of hot sauce?
Because the flavour just isn't quite there.
And I think if you add the danger back in, then a lot of the violence, the degradation and the extreme and the sexual tribalism that you've been characterising would disappear.
I think there are two ways that we could view your argument.
One of them I think is almost certainly true, which is if you did reintroduce the high stakes nature That you would see a clarification of people's sexual selves.
I won't say instantly because many people, you know, will never get over being downstream of all the porn they've watched, but quickly you would see that transition.
The question is, is that the only way?
And I, this is where, I don't know if you and I differ, but I would argue it is not the only way.
that basically the, if one were to opt out as a couple or as a community and opt into rules that again restored the specialness, and basically that's, I guess, a code word here for the scarcity and basically that's, I guess, a code word here for the scarcity of sex,
In other words, that it is the result of really impressing somebody, I suppose, that that would do it without necessarily having to eliminate birth control from the scenario.
Because as you said earlier in the conversation, whether or not it would be a good idea to eliminate birth control, I do not think it would.
But whether or not it would, it won't happen.
Right, we've already... Right, right.
No, I completely agree with that, but however, it's perfectly within the power of any young woman who... I mean, there are a great many young women all over TikTok and Instagram and wherever else, talking about how they were put on birth control at the age of 14, and then they came off it in their early 20s and had a complete personality transplant, and are now outraged at what happened to them and what was done to them.
Yeah, when they were given this extremely psychoactive substance for a number of years, which completely de-risked sex and left them without any robust reason to say no to any number of acts, which some of them now greatly regret.
And have now come off it and discovered that there's a whole raft of psychological symptoms which they thought was just something that they had to live with, was in fact this medication which they were taking in order to make them consequence-free participants in the quote-unquote sexual marketplace.
And there are a lot of young women who are extremely angry about that.
And, you know, natural family planning is a subculture all of its own among women, a great deal younger than me.
And not even just religious conservatives, not by a long chalk.
And again, I keep coming back to the optimism.
It must just be something about you, but you really bring it out in me.
But one of the really positive stories, potentially, one of the more positive uses of tech that I've heard of recently, is a huge number of advances in tech which supports A more embodied and a more realist approach to family planning.
So there are apps, there are other technologies which have been developed which support being able to work with your natural cycles as a woman and to be able to manage your fertility in that way without having to take a pill which messes up your endocrine system and makes you fat and sexless and mad.
Just in order to take the complexity out of it.
And I think innovations like that, which work with our organismic nature rather than against it, I see as being potentially hugely positive.
But they all take more effort.
And at the end of the day, if change is going to come on this, it will begin with women.
Because the sexual revolution began with women.
It began with women saying yes to this paradigm.
And it will end with women saying we've had enough of this.
Yeah, I agree with you, you know, and again, I will probably be accused of sexism for agreeing with you on this point, but it does come down to women for a number of different reasons.
One, in a commodified culture where commitment is not expected, the burden of raising offspring follows to women for reasons that are not fair, but are deeply biological and have nothing to do with humans oppressing each other.
It just has to do with an asymmetry in our reproductive modes.
But yes, women will have to correct our course if anybody is going to.
And actually, there's an exercise that I want to just put on the table here because it's something that I feel in any discussion of evolution, sex, and sexuality, it is just simply a necessary and sexuality, it is just simply a necessary piece of the puzzle.
So without delaying any further, let me just put it this way.
Whether you are male or female, morphologically, comes down to Effectively a single switch that lives on the Y chromosome in humans.
If that switch is present, you become male.
If the switch is absent because you have two X chromosomes instead of a Y, you become female.
But interestingly, if you have a Y chromosome and that switch is defective, you also become female.
That's the default mode.
And what that means is that it is perfectly conceivable for any human being watching or listening to this podcast that you could have an identical twin.
That is somebody who shares your entire genome but is of the opposite sex based on whether that switch is added in or subtracted.
That means it's not your genome being male which takes a particular approach to sex.
It is your genome being willing to play either role and being triggered into one set of strategies or another based on whether or not that switch triggers a developmental change.
And I find this very powerful because it puts the lie to the idea that what happened to women was that men oppressed them.
And in fact, it is certainly true that we do not choose our sex and that historically speaking, whatever sex we were born into, came with obligations and burdens that were special that would have been absent had we been born the other way, right?
If you're a woman, then reproduction is likely going to be an especially burdensome operation for you.
If you're male, you run the risk of going to war.
You know, these are asymmetries.
It's not clearly better to be one than the other.
But in any case, the idea that every time a zygote is created, there is a lottery that dictates whether it's going to live its life as a male or a female, and that most of the genome knows nothing about how that lottery is going to work out until it's already happened, And then you play your role, just the same way if you're genetically endowed with genes that make you tall, you play that role.
If you have genes that don't make you tall, then that's the life you live.
It's just luck of the draw.
But it isn't the story of, you know, Boy genomes oppressing girl genomes, and it never has been.
It's not to say that men have not impressed women, but it's not a simple story of a genetic, of an evolutionary conflict between the sexes.
Yeah, I don't really believe in patriarchy.
I mean, I think there are phenomena that we can describe as patriarchal, and there are clearly patriarchal cultures.
I think we need to assess those cultures in their own context and under their own material conditions.
And when you do that, it's often fairly clear how, why it is that they came to be the way they are.
And under, it's pretty clear to me that the culture that we live in now is not patriarchal.
And if anything, it's the opposite of patriarchal in the sense that most of the obligations and the expectations and the strictures that were placed on, that are placed on men within a patriarchal culture are not heavily present now.
For a whole host of quite complicated reasons.
And yet, what I find fascinating is that that hasn't stopped people talking about patriarchy and it hasn't stopped women wanting to smash the patriarchy.
And I puzzled over this for a long time thinking, well, there isn't really one left to smash in any sort of, you know, it's not as though, you know, coverture is not a thing anymore.
Women get to vote, you know, in most ordinary contexts, you know, there really is very little difference.
Between the sexes.
So what actually are we even talking about here?
And it came to me at last when I was reading a history of women and medicine.
I mean, in some parts it was quite well researched, but the thing I found frustrating about it was that every time something came along that the author didn't like, she would blame it on patriarchy.
So, for example, let me see, the fact that male doctors didn't want to get involved in childbirth was patriarchal.
But then when male doctors wanted to get involved in childbirth, that was them pushing out the female midwives, and that was also patriarchal.
And there were a whole lot of instances, and I was reading this and I was thinking, well you can't really have it both ways.
You know, these things can't all be patriarchal.
You know, anaesthetising women who are giving birth isn't patriarchal, if not anaesthetising women who are giving birth is also patriarchal.
That doesn't make sense.
So which is it?
And I came to the conclusion that in fact what she meant in aggregate, the inference over the course of the book was that what she meant by patriarchy was immutable sex differences.
And ever since then, every time I come across a modern day usage of patriarchy, I experiment to see if I can substitute it out and have it make more sense if I replace it with immutable sex differences that I don't like.
And I have yet to find a contemporary instance of the word patriarchy, which can't be better replaced and more coherently replaced with immutable sex differences I don't like.
And you know, I mean, there are plenty of situations where I don't like the immutable, physiological, morphological female form that I have.
There are times it's annoying and frustrating, but it's not patriarchy.
Yes, I think you have this one exactly right, and in fact, I have made this exact point that patriarchal is real, patriarchy is a fiction.
You're also correct about the immutable characteristics, right?
Yes, it is oppressive that women are disproportionately called upon to feed infants, but it wasn't men who did that, right?
If it was anything about maleness, it happened so many hundreds of millions of years ago that it had nothing to do with a creature that had any culture at all, right?
It was just simply an imbalance We call it anisogamy, that basically once you have a set of gametes that is disproportionately invested in the survival of offspring, it causes the other set of gametes to cheap out.
And that has consequences that continue to echo into our current form.
Men who had anything to do with it.
There were no men.
It was some biological truth in the universe that is so deep, we even see that asymmetry in plants, which inherited it from someplace different.
So anyway, yes, I wish people would not leap to the conclusion That everything was so human-centric that to the extent that they feel burdened by something that has something to do with sex or gender, that it must be the other sex or gender doing it.
That's just not the case.
So anyway, I agree with your formulation completely.
Go on.
Yeah, I remember.
What came to mind for me there was a moment shortly after my daughter was born.
As I'm sure you know, newborns go through phases of cluster feeding because they want to bring up your milk supply so they can grow, which basically means that you're stuck there under a feeding newborn sometimes for hours at a time.
It hurts.
It's not especially fun.
I mean, it's not the moment of radiant motherhood, which is idealized in the Million and One Images.
And I remember sitting there crying, literally crying under a cluster feeding infant, and my husband bringing me a glass of wine and a cheese sandwich, because that was And just being, you know, brave Mary and, you know, please carry on, you know, I wish I could help, but I can't.
And just, yeah, that was what came to mind.
It wasn't his fault that he couldn't help.
You know, this is, this is just, this is just how, this is just how humans are built.
And this is, this is just what looking after a baby is, that's just part and parcel of it.
If you happen to be this sex rather than that sex.
And I guess I could have, I could have felt angry with him if I'd been feeling extremely postpartum and unreasonable.
But Yeah, it didn't.
I wasn't being oppressed in that way, except just by my own physiology.
And that's certainly not the fault of the patriarchy.
That's just the way, that's just the shape humans are.
Yep.
I remember a moment late in one of Heather's pregnancies, where she looked at me, she had anger in her eyes, but it was clear that it wasn't at me.
And she said, this is a goddamn stupid way to reproduce.
Many, many, many, many, many women have said a version of that at one time or another whilst growing new humans.
Yep, absolutely.
I happen to know that she had marsupials on her mind at the moment, thinking that they had a smarter way of doing it.
They had it all figured out.
Well, I don't know about all figured out, but certainly better figured out.
So, I guess There were a couple last points.
I've forgotten where they fit in the discussion here, but there were a couple things that came up and things that you said that I wanted to make sure were included before we wrap up here.
One of them is about the behavior that you were describing, women being beaten up during sex, and your difficult truth that, in fact, in some cases they are asking for this.
And I wanted to point out, A, yes, okay, I suppose maybe they're asking for this to happen, but in part they're asking for it to happen because it is expected that they will ask, right?
Now, I watch no porn, so I don't really know.
I'm going on reports by other people, but porn has normalized sexual violence to such a degree That I think young people who naturally look to sexual examples around them are finding porn and unfortunately taking it in as if it were informative about what sex is supposed to look like.
And I would also just add to that that This is a great place to see the issue of something that is not supposed to be transactional, right?
It's not to say that there's no aspect of transactional behavior in normal sex, but it has been made utterly transactional, and it has been commodified by an industry that feeds sexual appetites with no
No negative consequence for that industry if people are made unhealthy, unhappy, unsatisfied as a result of consuming this particular product.
But in any case, what I wanted to point out is the thing about porn is you've got a bunch of vendors that have basically Become parasites on human sexuality, that they are selling human sex acts.
And it is very hard to distinguish your particular brand from anybody else's in that market because you're all selling the same thing.
And what that does is it means that in order in the competition for attention and therefore dollars in pornography, you have a natural tendency towards extreme sexual behavior.
As I understand it, regular consumers swiftly become desensitized as well.
So you have to go looking for more extreme content simply to feel anything at all after a certain point.
I mean, Louise writes very compellingly about this.
She calls it cultural death grip.
After the young men who talk about death grip syndrome, which is to say they're unable to experience an orgasm except through manipulating themselves in extreme and painful ways.
And they're just not able to have an orgasm in normal intercourse at all anymore because they've just warped their nerve endings and their mental pathways to the extent that it's just not possible anymore.
Yes, and unfortunately, what they don't understand, you know, I think it's a little bit, no, it's a lot like an addictive product like cigarettes, where the person who smokes a cigarette, they think it may, you know, will give them a high, does not understand that they are changing what normal feels like.
And so this is a developmental process that is, you know, I won't say it's not reversible at all.
I don't know, I'm not an expert, but it's not easily reversed.
And what that means, you know, again, there are things about the evolutionary story of what human sexuality is that are profound, and I think also just not well understood by most humans.
One is that sex in humans doesn't look like other creatures, right?
Sex in humans serves the same role it serves in other creatures, but we have been granted This incredible gift, this is a bonding exercise and that is why it continues after the cessation of reproductive capacity, after menopause.
That's why it happens in humans when females are not fertile, not at a fertile point in their cycle.
This is something that selection has altered in humans for something very important, which is bonding with somebody whom you're going to team up with in the raising of a family.
And so then the upshot of these two arguments put together is if you turn your sexuality over to outsiders who have no interest in your long-term well-being,
if you outsource your sexual fantasizing to pornographers and they embrace if you outsource your sexual fantasizing to pornographers and they embrace an extreme and violent view of sex because that's the only way for them to sell what they're selling and compete with their competitors, then at the point that you take that very powerful gift that you
And you attempt to use it to form a partnership with somebody, a lifelong partnership, then, you know, what do you do with all the despicable stuff that got loaded into your sexual mindset?
Right?
That stuff now interfaces with the person who you should be trying to keep it away from.
Yeah, absolutely.
Once it's in there, it's very hard to get rid of it again.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
All right, well, this has been a great conversation.
I don't know if I should feel triumphant or defeated in having been the darker party in this conversation, but whichever way it is, I accept it.
Is there anything, any final words of wisdom you'd like to impart?
I always think of them later.
So I think I'll just leave it here and say thank you so much for testing me on what I mean by progress.
I mean, thank you for taking this in different directions and encouraging me to think more about the evolutionary aspect, which is something I've already drawn into my work, but it's been a great pleasure to delve into that with somebody as knowledgeable on the subject as you.
Just thank you.
I've greatly enjoyed this conversation, I appreciate it.
Yeah, I've enjoyed it as well, and I sincerely appreciate the seriousness with which you have approached this subject, and I will say, if I can step out of my role of darkness here, I do find something very hopeful in your laying out the case this way, Louise Perry.
Heather, Bridget Phetasy, and many others.
I think we are beginning to see a serious conversation, especially amongst very serious women who have something deeply wise to convey.
So, in any case, thank you for doing that, and I really appreciate you joining me here on Dark Horse.
Your book is out what date?
Wednesday the 25th of April, the publisher in the United States is Regnery Books.
It's available for pre-order now.
Yeah, it drops on the 25th of April.
And it is called Feminism Against Progress.
Feminism Against Progress.
Excellent.
And I know you're not big on social media, but is there some place people can find you online?
I guess UnHerd would be one place.
I tweet at movingcircles, that's my Twitter handle.
I have a substack at reactionaryfeminist, reactionaryfeminist.substack.com.
You can find most of my work at UnHerd, where I'm a weekly columnist.
Wonderful.
All right, Mary Harrington, thank you so much.
I've really enjoyed this.
Thank you, Brett.
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