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June 2, 2022 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:31:04

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #406

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	Hi folks, welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for the 2nd of June 2022.
	My name's Carl and I'm joined by Megha Varna.
	Verma?
	Verma.
	Verma, sorry.
	She is a classical art educator and she's joined me to talk about, well, the continuing tragedy and slow-moving collapse of Western civilization.
	How is it like to be here in the office?
	It's very nice.
	Thank you for inviting me.
	I appreciate that.
	No, thanks for coming on.
	So before we start, after this we'll be doing a book club.
	I'll be hosting it on Dr.
	G. J. Rennier's The English Are They Human?
	This is a book that was written in 1932, or published in 1932, by a Dutchman who came to live in England for a decade or so after World War I and found English civilization very different.
	And this is his exploration of why.
	And it's going to be a lot of fun.
	So come and join us for that at 3.30 today.
	But anyway, let's get into what has been happening.
	So, Amber Heard has lost her lawsuit against Johnny Depp, and Johnny Depp has been successful in his lawsuit against Amber Heard.
	And so there are many, many feminist tears flowing all over the internet.
	Megha, have you been following this?
	Only when the memes show up on my timeline, but other than that, not really, so you can just fill me in.
	I will do.
	Right, but before we start, this, I think, is important because I don't think it's inaccurate to say that feminism has been launching a kind of assault on the justice system of Western countries.
	And this is what Me Too and Believe All Women have been focused around.
	The idea that if a woman makes an allegation against a man, we are obliged to accept it regardless of the merits of it.
	And that problem, I think that's an immoral position.
	And that underpins the entire feminist movement at this point.
	Would you agree with that statement?
	I think that the reason for that is the dehumanization of women, that somehow human nature doesn't apply to both men and women equally.
	Of course men and women are different and have different proclivities and every individual has their own idiosyncrasies, but things like Deceit, lying, stealing, all of these vices of human beings, they exist equally in both men and women.
	I like the phrase they used, dehumanization, because this is something that Dr.
	Warren Farrell has been talking about.
	This is a new interview we have on lowseas.com.
	It's not actually a premium one, so you can go and watch it at your own leisure if you're watching.
	Link will be in the description.
	Where he is talking about his latest book called The Boy Crisis, and this seems to be the flip side of the feminist narrative on gender relations.
	Women have done nothing wrong and can do nothing wrong, whereas men and boys are always wrong and are always malevolent, are always doing something harmful to women.
	And so he's describing how young men and boys have essentially been systematically attacked by feminism in a way that is trying to stack the deck entirely in favour of one gender, regardless of what justice would actually demand.
	Well, it's not even in favor of women because technically it makes, when you look at the outcomes of feminism, it doesn't actually help women either.
	No, we'll be getting to some of those a bit later on in the podcast, if you don't mind.
	Sorry, I don't want to spoil it.
	But the point is, there is, I think, a systematic attack.
	Me Too is just one of the most prominent aspects of that.
	So if you'd like to know more about Warren Farrell, go and look at that.
	So let's get on to what Johnny Depp won.
	So apparently he won more than, well, he won $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages in the trial.
	However, Amber Heard also won $2 million in compensatory damages after his attorney, Adam Waldman, had apparently defamed her.
	And so it's back and forth one.
	I don't even know what he did, but I've seen so many hilarious memes and reels of Amber Heard being made fun of.
	And she deserves it.
	Yeah, it's like you can't really put that back in the bottle once it's come out.
	No, I've been following this trial quite closely.
	Because it seems so obvious.
	There are so many, we won't go through them here, but there are so many clips of leaked audio recordings and various statements that both of them have made that show that, and you can tell by the tone of voice, she's in control of the situation.
	She's directing the flow of things.
	And there's one particular clip in which she says, well, just go and tell the world that you, Johnny Depp, a man, have been the victim of abuse.
	No one's going to believe you.
	It's like, When someone says that, they're the abuser.
	Yes.
	That's what an abuser says.
	And so it just became blatantly obvious that she was leveraging Me Too and the cultural capital of feminism and using the guise of women as a way of obviously just trying to extract money from Johnny Depp after having been in what looks like an abusive relationship.
	And the trial was quite...
	Well broadcast.
	It was explicit.
	There was a lot of information that came out, and none of it made Amber look good.
	She looks like she's lying.
	She was caught in a few lies during the whole thing.
	And so the jury was like, you know, she's lying on all counts.
	She needs to give him $15 million.
	This is capped at $350,000 for the punitive damages, and so minus his $2 million, he is set to get $8,350,000.
	So she abused him?
	Yes.
	Well, it's kind of like coming full circle on the Me Too movement because it's always very disturbing.
	I mean, this should be obvious, but I suppose it isn't for some people that the line, believe all women, doesn't make any sense.
	Yeah.
	Due process exists for all human beings.
	The law applies equally to men and women.
	And so if you accuse someone of doing something heinous, you need to have evidence.
	Because, you know, people can abuse that otherwise and ruin lives just on suspicion.
	It's not only that they can, it's that you've opened the door to anyone who will.
	Yeah.
	You've said, well, look, anyone who wants to tell a lie has now got a free pass, a blank check, to just tell this lie and destroy the life of someone else if they have a personal animus against them.
	Exactly.
	It destroys the purpose of having a justice system in the first place, having due process.
	I remember when this movement first began, like, across university campuses, there were so many allegations of rape or sexual assault from young women.
	And it was...
	I didn't really know what to think of it because maybe it happened, maybe it didn't.
	But either way, if you have a brother or a son or a young man that you care about and you put him in that place if somebody lied to defame him and ruin his life, that would be so horrendous.
	I mean, it's empowering bad people, fundamentally.
	I imagine, like, these women who are making these statements, you know, believe all women, I wonder that they don't have young men in their lives that they love, and they imagine them in that place?
	I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but it seems that only die-hard feminist ideologues are supporting Amber Heard in this, and I think it's not unreasonable to call them man-haters.
	Yes.
	So...
	Anyway, Johnny Depp put out a statement after this.
	He said, Now that's totally true.
	He got his career taken away from him.
	Disney cancelled Jack Sparrow.
	Well, that's just the thing with cancel culture is that it's another attack on the justice system.
	And we've put so much pressure on the justice system in so many different ways to be the moral arbiter of our society.
	Because, you know, as the decline of religion and the decline of lots of other social structures that we would have used otherwise.
	Propriety.
	It's like the last...
	Bastion of morality is the court system, it seems.
	And so with this trial and with the Me Too movement and with cancel culture, it seems as though the public feels they're entitled to make a decision about what really happened without having all of the facts.
	And it's kind of like they have a lot of pride in doing that because how can you make a decision about someone's character without It's
	just...
	There's no way I would, you know, just so many different things.
	And she admitted to hitting him, she admitted to inciting violence, she lied about him pushing ex-girlfriends down the stairs and things like this, and it was just like none of it was true.
	And these allegations, and they got worse over time as well.
	Initially it began with, oh he hit me, he hit me, now he raped me, and things like this, and it just got worse and worse and worse.
	And this, you know, like...
	I don't really care about Johnny Depp, but it's so obvious this has done such massive emotional damage to him.
	It's done massive career damage to him.
	And it's obvious that she wasn't being honest about it.
	I think the reason so many people are so invested in this trial, like both men and women, especially men, is because it's like a representation of things that might be happening all over the world to ordinary men who don't always get justice.
	So I think that's why they're so invested in it, because they're seeing an issue that had always been thrown under the rug, being brought out into the light and exposed to everybody.
	And it's just a vehicle for them to see their own injustices played out on the world stage.
	I think you're right.
	It's become sort of totemic in a way, hasn't it?
	Yes, it's an icon kind of because normally you don't care about Johnny Depp.
	I don't spend a second of my day thinking about Johnny Depp.
	Right, but what's happening to him does matter because it happens to lots of ordinary people.
	I think I've noticed that there are a lot of women who are very invested in this as well.
	Not because...
	I mean, I'm sure lots of women do like Johnny Depp, obviously, but it doesn't seem that they're talking about Johnny Depp, per se.
	They're more focused on hating Amber Heard.
	And it's very interesting because it seems to me that there is a propensity, in English-speaking countries at least, to take women's allegations against men seriously.
	And this can only be done as long as women in general, or a subset of women such as feminists, aren't crying wolf all the time.
	And if you have someone who is obviously lying, obviously crying wolf, then it seems that this social institution, which I think should exist, Um, it's being taken advantage of and it damages it for all women.
	And so I've seen a lot of women saying, well, look, if I was being abused and I came forward and said something, someone like Amber Heard is actually damaging my credibility on the fact that I'm a woman.
	And just because she's leveraging that.
	But, uh, but anyway, let's, let's carry on.
	So, uh, this, this seems to have fully hit the mainstream.
	So Amber Heard is now worth minus $8 million, uh, which is amusing to see.
	She, she was worth two and a half million, but now she's not.
	She put out a statement on Instagram, and I wanted to go through the political nature of her statement, because it is an entirely, if you can just bring that up, John, it is an entirely, just expressly political statement.
	She says this, The disappointment I feel today is beyond words.
	I'm heartbroken that the mountain of evidence still was not enough to stand up to the disproportionate power, influence, and sway of my ex-husband.
	That's her first statement.
	So what she's saying there is that the patriarchy is protecting Johnny D. She's saying that the court is corrupt, basically.
	Yes.
	And that because he's a man and he's powerful and influential...
	I'm not even sure.
	Looking at Johnny Depp, I don't know if that's even true.
	He seems like a disorganized drunk and drug addict.
	If he was Harvey Weinstein or something, I'm like, sure, but he seems to just have a kind of popular appeal rather than having genuine power.
	But she's ignoring the fact that there's a sort of Social institution in feminism and Me Too that has been propping this up for years now, and that Johnny Depp is actually the victim of what she's done?
	This is completely swept under the rug right.
	She goes with the next bit.
	I'm even more disappointed with what this verdict means for other women.
	It is a setback.
	It sets back the clock to a time when women who spoke up and spoke out could be publicly shamed and humiliated.
	It sets back the idea that violence against women is to be taken seriously.
	Do you think that's...
	I think she's the one who's doing the setting back because there are still today a lot of places in the world where young women do not tell their parents when sexual abuse or even men that are not good men and they make young women feel uncomfortable in their own city taking the bus, walking by themselves.
	That still happens.
	And they are afraid to tell their parents because it's dishonorable or it would bring shame on the girl.
	And those are the women that we need to be listening to and believing and not, you know, like, I don't know her whole story, but it seems like she was the abuser and she's the one doing the setting back.
	Very much.
	And we'll get to it, but there are lots of women who share that position.
	She says, I believe that Johnny's attorney succeeding in getting the jury to overlook the key issue of freedom of speech and ignore evidence that was so conclusive that we won in the UK. So just very briefly on this, Johnny Depp was accused by the Sun newspaper over here of being a wife-beater, so he took them to court.
	But there wasn't a kind of exposure of evidence like there was in this trial.
	Over here.
	And so the UK decision was based on a series of pieces of evidence that were just absent.
	They're incomplete.
	Exactly.
	So that's why you have an appeal.
	Yes.
	So if you had a trial that was done in one level of the court system and then it was appealed to another level and the decision was different, it's the second decision that matters.
	Yes.
	I mean, it's different countries, but the trial in America was much more thorough.
	And I think much more fair.
	I mean, it's just terrible how the UK papers are calling Johnny Depp a wife-beater, even though there is no actual evidence that he's ever hit her.
	But anyway, she says, I'm sad I lost this case, but I'm sadder still that I seem to have lost the right I thought I had as an American to speak freely and openly.
	Which is, I don't know, you don't strike me as a sort of person who watches South Park?
	I have watched South Park.
	Have you seen the film Team America?
	No, I haven't.
	The guys who do this, basically, there's one episode of South Park where Randy Marsh gets in a fight, gets arrested, and he's just like, I thought this was America.
	And this is her defense.
	You know, I would have respected her opinion and taken it more seriously if she had presented a piece of evidence that she thought the court misinterpreted or didn't analyze properly.
	And she posted her opinion about how that evidence unequivocally pushes the decision in her favor were it to be interpreted properly.
	And, you know, this is why I can't take it seriously.
	I'm open to people disagreeing, but it's like...
	You know, you should present actual evidence.
	Yeah, but I mean, I thought this was America's defense.
	It's remarkable because she's not being censored.
	She's not being persecuted by the government.
	She literally spoke freely in the court of law.
	And this was a civil suit as well.
	She's still speaking freely on this Instagram.
	Just like, speak more freely and show us the evidence that you think is missing.
	And she's basically saying, look, can a woman not falsely accuse a man in the Washington Post of raping and beating her for political gain?
	I thought this was America.
	It's like, why is that?
	That's not very nice.
	And we'll go through what she had posted.
	So tragic because she's so beautiful.
	I think that's one of the reasons she feels that she can get away with this, actually.
	Interesting.
	Yeah, I know.
	It's a very retrograde opinion, but I do think that she thinks her looks are part of the reason that she thought she'd get away with this.
	Well, there's a very wonderful painting that relates to this situation.
	Go on.
	It's a painting called Cherry Ripe by Millet.
	Right.
	And I think it's Millet.
	It'd be embarrassing if that's wrong.
	But the painting was very popular because it was done on a lithograph and distributed around the world.
	And the painting was criticized by many people as well.
	It's of a little girl, probably like eight years old, wearing a really frilly Victorian dress, but her pose, her hands and her feet and her eyes are looking at the viewer In the way that all little girls figure out at some age that if they look at their dad with those eyes, they can get anything they want.
	I think all beautiful women figure this out at some stage in their life that the way that they look and present themselves can get them advantages in life that other people can't have.
	And that painting is like, you know, as a man to recognize that, that's very genius.
	But I think Amber Heard I think she's playing on that.
	Exactly.
	And I think that is a truth about human nature and the interactions between men and women.
	And I think that's what Amber Heard has been playing on this whole time.
	I'll pull out a few bits of this.
	This was in 2018.
	She doesn't directly name Johnny Depp in this, but there were previous drafts of this in which she did, and it was taken out before it went to publication.
	And so this is one of the things that was in Depp's favour.
	So look, this is directed at me and it's just to be defamatory.
	But you can see this is just mired in feminist rhetoric.
	This is feminist political language.
	And they bill her as an actress and ambassador on women's rights at the American Civil Liberties Union.
	So you can't say she's not acting as a political actor when she does this as well.
	But she says, "We're in a transformative political moment.
	The president of our country has been accused by more than a dozen women of sexual misconduct, including assault and harassment.
	Outrage over his statements and behavior has energized a female-led opposition.
	Me Too has started a conversation about just how profoundly sexual violence affects women in every area of our lives.
	And last month, more women were elected to Congress than ever in our history.
	With a mandate to take women's issues seriously, women's rage and determination to end sexual violence are turning into a political force.
	And so you can't say this isn't political, and this wasn't an attempt to essentially use Johnny Depp as a kind of footstool up into the ranks of politically active, sort of political women, you know, as women.
	I think she's just, she's trying to get power in a way that, in any way that she can.
	Yes.
	Like a greediness for power.
	Mm-hmm.
	Because I'm trying to figure out where this comes from because clearly she doesn't care about women.
	Clearly she doesn't care about sexual assault or any of these words she's using.
	It's just she wants to have power.
	Honestly, that's very much how this comes about.
	But the fact that she's politicizing this, anything political is a demand for power, ultimately, that underlies all political action.
	So you can't say that this is devoid in her thinking.
	But anyway, let's carry on quickly, because I want to get to the funny bits.
	So she plans to appeal what's the decision, but it was pretty categoric unless she's got some evidence that she for some reason isn't showing us.
	I don't think it's going to happen.
	Frankly, I think she's the kind of woman who's probably going to call him up after this and say you want to get back together.
	We've all met women like that.
	You should have just married Winona Ryder.
	Who knows?
	I don't know.
	But I do think it's remarkable that loads of his ex-girlfriends just came out in his defense.
	But isn't that remarkable?
	Yeah.
	It strikes me as being like, if four different women come out and say, look, he's not a violent man.
	He's never been violent.
	Why don't we believe those women?
	Exactly.
	And the thing is, Amber Heard was accusing him of such...
	Unbelievable levels of violence.
	Like, you know, you don't go your whole life being a completely gentle man with lots of ex-girlfriends being character witnesses.
	They know he's a perfectly gentle man every time.
	And then the next one is...
	And one of Amber Heard's accusations was that he shoved a bottle in her vagina and it broke.
	And it's just like, that is a staggering accusation.
	That her fantasy.
	I didn't say it.
	I didn't say that.
	That's like really disturbing.
	She should write books or something.
	I don't know.
	Yeah.
	She should channel that creativity somewhere else.
	Yeah.
	I mean, she didn't go to the doctor about that.
	Well, she's not a very good liar.
	No.
	Because she didn't even try to make it consistent with his personality.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, but none of these people are very good liars.
	And so obviously Amber Heard's fans have been condemning the sexist jury.
	The jury hates women, did you know?
	If we can get to the next one.
	Oh, here we go.
	This was not justice.
	It's just some angry people on Twitter, but it is funny.
	This jury is a racist, sexist fan group and nothing more.
	I've been called those things.
	But racist?
	They're both white.
	Well, they're racist against Amber Heard.
	She identifies as a woman of colour.
	I guess she must.
	Another said, My heart goes out to Amber.
	F that sexist jury and F this sexist country.
	And comedian Amy Schumer posted a glorious Steinem quote.
	Oh, the thinker of our times.
	Yes, the CIA thinker of our times.
	Did you know that she was a CIA asset?
	Now, that's news to me.
	What could she contribute to the CIA? Torture.
	That's a great question.
	But I think it was in 68 or 69, she became like an asset as in someone they were working with.
	I have no idea why.
	But anyway, we'll carry on because more feminists are coming out of the woodwork.
	One of my favorites, I think, is this one.
	The Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial was an orgy of misogyny.
	Sounds like a busy weekend, doesn't it?
	Sorry, Moira.
	I didn't realize this was so offensive to you.
	She doesn't look like a Moira.
	Is that the author?
	That is.
	What does she look like?
	I don't know.
	She looks like not a Moira.
	Moira's like a sweet old British lady.
	Not in this country.
	Moira, there was a woman called Moira Hindley who was famous for murdering children.
	Oh.
	Yeah.
	In this country, Moira isn't a very appealing name to most people.
	So maybe she does look like a Moira to you.
	Yeah, look at her face.
	That is someone who's probably had a few abortions.
	Oh.
	I know, I shouldn't have said that.
	But anyway, she's complaining because the backlash to Me Too is here.
	And this is, I think, fair.
	Because, I mean, Me Too seems like an unjust movement.
	At this point, she says, over the past six weeks, as the trial was live-streamed online, many of those who tuned in to watch Amber Heard treated with the same contempt Johnny Depp did in his texts.
	So, yeah, but she lied lots.
	I mean, lots and lots.
	There was one hilarious one where she said, I always carried around this particular makeup thing in my bag to cover up the bruises.
	And the allegation of the bruises happening in 2014.
	And the makeup company came up and said, we didn't produce that until 2017.
	And so she's like, this that I'm holding here.
	Isn't this so ridiculous that a makeup company is getting involved in a...
	Yeah, come out and absolutely destroy your argument that you were covering up bruises with this.
	This was the makeup thing.
	So that wasn't produced until three years after the bruise occurred.
	Well, now what, Amber?
	You know, what do you do then?
	But anyway...
	A broad consensus has emerged online that Heard must be lying about her abuse.
	She has been accused of faking photos of her injuries from Depp's alleged beatings, painting bruises on with makeup.
	She has been accused of convincing the multiple witnesses who say Depp abused her to lie repeatedly and under oath for years.
	These conspiracy theories are unsupported by the facts of the case, but that's not stopped them from spreading.
	It's like, well then, why couldn't they be proved wrong?
	Right.
	If you think something, if false information was spread...
	Like, you know, correct it.
	Provide the accurate information and, you know, that's all.
	It's really not very difficult to do.
	But that's, of course, the problem is the facts don't seem to support her claims.
	If you're telling the truth, there's always evidence.
	Yes.
	And the next one I think is amusing is the Daily Beast complaining about the deafening silence of Hollywood feminists on this.
	And so I just want to, again, this fascinates me because this is framed around saying this.
	The lack of support from Heard's industry peers in particular is telling, given that it was only five years ago when Hollywood rallied around survivors of sexual assault and harassment.
	That's because that was real.
	Yes.
	Yes, that's exactly it.
	Rallied around survivors of sexual assault and harassment following accusations against producer Harvey Weinstein.
	Yeah, I support that because it was real.
	Yes.
	And this is why I've said in the past, there was a legitimacy to the Me Too movement.
	There's no doubt that in Hollywood there is a power structure of gross producers like Harvey Weinstein, that sort of pyramid of power, where women are offered the opportunity to go up the ladder in exchange for sexual favors and various other forms.
	And men.
	And men with Kevin Spacey and people like that.
	I don't doubt that it's both.
	What's the guy who played the president in Idiocracy, John?
	Do you remember?
	He's a really cool guy.
	I can't remember his name, but he said he was assaulted by some Hollywood producer who grabbed his crotch and things like this.
	You are right.
	You know, I was watching a Bill Burr stand-up the other day, and he was obviously making a joke about it, but he was saying if a man's sexually assaulted, it's almost more difficult for him to tell anyone because it's embarrassing, and no one takes it seriously.
	But it does happen.
	Yeah, yeah.
	In this, they give the example of Roman Polanski and Harvey Weinstein.
	So yeah, people who probably actually did do the thing they've been accused of.
	Terry Crews said he'd been assaulted.
	There are so many allegations about the institutions and the culture of Hollywood that it's disgusting.
	That's why I think feminists have been like, well, we can't really support Amber Heard.
	Why?
	Because she seems to be lying.
	Well, they're like, you know, real feminists, you know, in the proper sense, they would be very angry at Amber Heard.
	Oh, yeah, I think so.
	And I think they should be.
	But did you know that Amber Heard's verdict has sent a message to black women everywhere?
	Oh, interesting.
	So are they going to have a black woman playing Amber Heard in the movie about this?
	I don't think they have a choice at this point.
	The Netflix adaptation is doubtless coming.
	But what the hell...
	Okay, well, what's the message?
	Don't be a liar?
	She's got, like, the bone structure of, like, Grace Kelly.
	She could have done so much.
	Yeah.
	But she needed to go and lie.
	And you know what's the funny thing about feminists is they want power, but they don't realize how much more power they can get just by leaning into their femininity.
	And in a pure way, you can have everything you want in life just by leaning into that aspect of your personality.
	And also by telling the truth, I think.
	Can you imagine if she had actually loved a man properly?
	Like, okay, now she's negative $8 million.
	If she had won the case, how much money would she win?
	$10 million?
	She was asking for $100 million.
	Or $100 million, right?
	Compare $100 million to a lifetime of being loved by a man and taken care of and, like, you know, having a family.
	How do you compare those two things?
	$100 million is nothing.
	And she didn't even get that.
	And she didn't even get that.
	No.
	I love the framing of this.
	It's a very intersectional framing.
	If the mistreatment of a wealthy, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white actress is ridiculed by the world, what does it mean for black women?
	Nothing?
	Uh...
	I don't think the fact that she's blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and white or wealthy had anything to do about it.
	They should be really happy because it means that being blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and beautiful, you still don't get special treatment.
	You still get treated properly under the law.
	They should be very excited by that.
	That's right.
	That's what equality is.
	Exactly.
	It's actually a meritocratic process you're watching.
	Yeah.
	If this were actually a racist system, then she might have actually gotten more favors.
	Mm-hmm.
	And that's exactly the framing on this, right?
	For black women who do not have whiteness or fame or money to protect them.
	They have the Maury show?
	Heard's word of the verdict as a setback.
	Ring especially true.
	So I don't see how this sets back black women.
	Like, this has got nothing to do with black women.
	Well, they just wanted to put that as a buzzword in so they would get clicks on their articles.
	Yes.
	And especially clicks from, like, right-wing people who get angry about this when they see the headlines and then share it with their opinions and then they get traffic to their website.
	I think I feel personally attacked by that statement.
	Thank you, Megha.
	This is not a safe space.
	This is not a safe space.
	Yeah, I mean, the whole article is basically, how can I make this about me?
	And you are right, it is bait for right-wingers that we took.
	But anyway, so just to conclude this one, there are people on Twitter, women on Twitter, who are like, yeah, look, I mean, 23,000 likes is quite a well-trafficked tweet.
	Someone's like, look, I'm sorry, but F, believe all women.
	Not all women are honest, not all women are pure and good.
	Some women are abusers, and some men are the victim.
	She didn't have real evidence.
	She had staged opportunities.
	But feminism, of course, is trying to rig the very legal system itself against it.
	And there are lots of these.
	The next one, this woman saying, I'm a female survivor, but I do not believe all women.
	People abuse other people.
	Women can be abusers too.
	This is factual.
	I'm over me too in the ACLU. Again, these are the morally correct statements, in my opinion.
	Yeah.
	It's not even contentious.
	Yeah.
	And it's mad that we've got to this point.
	It's not really even that deep.
	No, it's not.
	In fact, this sums it up.
	Again, 80,000 likes.
	So you can see this resonated with a lot of people.
	People turned against Amber Heard, not because Johnny Depp is a powerful man or famous actor, but because we watched the trial and saw who was telling the truth and who wasn't.
	It's literally that simple.
	You know, it's kind of lame that this is our famous popular trial.
	Like, you know, the generation before us had the OJ trial, which was way more interesting and dramatic and serious.
	Like there was an actual murder.
	This is like so cringe and lame that this is our generation's trial.
	But I do think it is important to have that kind of iconic example of Yes.
	Yes.
	That would be a miscarriage of justice.
	And I think a lot of people have been looking at it.
	But you are right.
	It is kind of lame.
	That's from an aesthetic point of view.
	Yes, yes.
	It lacks the seriousness that generally underpins high drama.
	That's the problem.
	But anyway, let's move on.
	Because women have been panicking since Texas.
	Since forever.
	Since forever.
	That's a good point.
	But especially after Texas disabled Instagram's filters.
	Oh no.
	Do you ever use Instagram filters?
	I used to.
	Yeah?
	I used to, and then I had a point in my life when I was just like, oh, no, I don't want to.
	And then I just stopped, and now all the pictures I post have no filters.
	I have no idea what a filter does, really.
	It just like adds, well different filters do different things.
	Some are like aesthetic, like they'll change the colour palette of the picture.
	The only ones I'm familiar with is when my son gets hold of my wife's phone and he puts like the strange ones that squish your face and he sits there.
	Oh yeah, some of them are really funny.
	Right.
	Like they'll put like ears on you or change your hair colour, like make you an alien.
	Give you a beard.
	Or like turn you into a baby or turn you old.
	Like they're really fun actually.
	But some are like, so actually I have a friend who always uses a filter and it's like plastic surgery.
	Like shaves you, makes your jaw look nice, changes your nose, like puts makeup on your eyes and makes your lips bigger.
	So it basically turns you into Kim Kardashian.
	Right.
	And she always would take pictures with that.
	And then recently she asked me like, should I get lip fillers?
	And I told her, no, your lips are perfect.
	Stop using the filters.
	She's very beautiful.
	And her face is like, she's Macedonian.
	She's like, has a beautiful face.
	So I told her like, your face is perfect.
	Just stop taking pictures with the filter and you'll see what I see.
	Like, I want you to see your face the way I see it.
	That is really interesting.
	And the reason I'm bringing this up now, this actually happened at the beginning of last month, but it seemed to have flown under the radar.
	Most people on the internet didn't notice that this had happened, because obviously it's quite a localized phenomenon.
	But the reason I brought this up with you on, because I wanted a woman's opinion on Instagram filters, because I'm a man, and as Josh has pointed out in his latest contemplations, sex is binary, and this cuts me off from an entire world of experience.
	Yeah.
	Well, the thing with filters, first of all, I don't agree that the government should interfere with this kind of thing.
	Well, I'll explain why they had to in a bit.
	So that'll be like a different conversation.
	But with filters in general, like, so the main users of social media are younger women who are still developing and developing especially their self-esteem and confidence.
	And so if you're very used to, like, you know, a teenage girl, average teenage girl is very insecure.
	And so if she puts on a filter and looks amazing with the filter on, she'll be very ashamed or scared to show her real face.
	And she'll never have the imperative to develop self-esteem to show her real face everywhere and appreciate its own beauty.
	But also she'll get a distorted view of herself as well.
	Exactly.
	And it's kind of like makeup where I don't have anything against makeup except, you know, it's like toxic ingredients.
	But with, you know, women who use makeup every single day to the point that it transforms their face and they feel physically, emotionally incapable of showing their real face, even just to go to the store, I think that's unhealthy.
	I agree.
	Just to finish why I'm bringing this up.
	There really is, as Josh has gone through in possibly unnecessary detail, but you know the times that we're living in now, so maybe it is, why there are dramatic consequences of being male or female on adult men and women.
	And one of those things is that women are judged by their looks, whereas men tend not to have that problem, which is why we can get away with being ugly.
	Can you?
	Yes.
	Oh yeah.
	Oh yeah.
	I've been getting away with them my whole life.
	This is just not a problem for us, really.
	We've got other problems.
	But if you'd like to support us and find out what those details are, as if you don't know, probably, but you go to the website and check it out.
	But anyway, so I thought there were some interesting points about women's self-perception.
	Because I do think that...
	Makeup and social media are actually changing that in a way that's not healthy.
	When I was researching this, I found this fascinating.
	62% of women apparently think they're prettier than their best friend.
	Isn't it interesting?
	Most women think they're prettier than their friends.
	I wonder how they did that study or what question did they ask to get that survey answer?
	I don't know.
	Who did they ask?
	Well, they just polled a random selection of people, I understand.
	But it's just interesting.
	Cuter than thou.
	Yeah.
	Isn't that fascinating?
	But the question, though, and like you were saying about your friend from Macedonia, right?
	You see her normally, but maybe she only sees herself through the reflection on Instagram, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	And so it could be that a lot of women are saying, well, I've seen my Instagram and I've seen you in real life.
	Actually, I am cuter than you.
	I think it's also brainwashing because of Instagram face.
	Yeah.
	Because Instagram face is...
	Do you mind if we put a pin in that?
	Because I've actually got that in this segment.
	Oh, okay.
	Sorry, because you're a man.
	You don't know what Instagram face is, do you?
	No, of course you don't.
	And I didn't either...
	Yeah.
	But so this is – what was interesting about this is that the psychologist doing this, the same survey found that only 52% of men thought they were better looking than their friends.
	And they say, quote, this suggests their feelings on this might be more in line with reality.
	That's not my quote, that's their quote.
	Interesting.
	Isn't that fascinating?
	Yeah.
	I wonder – What does a man think of when he's judging?
	Because women always judge beauty like, okay, this looks cute on you, this doesn't.
	But I wonder how often men think, oh, my friend looks attractive today.
	I don't know how often you think of that.
	John, do you ever think that?
	No, me neither.
	Probably the question they were asked in this, it was more like out of the blue and something new for them to think about that they never thought about before.
	Quite possibly.
	But anyway, the point is it's no secret that social media is damaging the way women think about themselves.
	If you go to the next one, there's just been numerous studies.
	There's just one I pulled up from 2018 where women who actively engage with social media images of friends who think they are more attractive than themselves report feeling worse about their own appearance.
	Afterwards, any study shows...
	I'm shocked.
	Yeah, I know.
	Who could have imagined?
	And I totally empathize, to be honest.
	I spend a lot of time painting geeky little miniatures on my Instagram, and I follow loads of art accounts that do this amazing job.
	They are amazing, amazing artists.
	And I'm looking at what I've painted, and I'm looking at what they've painted, and I just want to go and kill myself.
	And I'm thinking, that's just with my little miniatures.
	If I was like a teenage girl, and I'm looking at these unbelievably beautiful women.
	Yeah, models.
	And they've got all these filters.
	Photoshop.
	Yeah, and they spend like four hours lining up the shot, and then they get it.
	And it's that one thing that took, it's not natural, it's not real.
	And yet these teenage girls are looking at it going, I could never look like that.
	So, well, basically no one looks like that.
	So I can actually totally empathize.
	Yeah, it's like, you know, it's a balance because on the one side you also have the body positivity movement, which, you know, it's trying to show normal women, but it's like, okay, well, this is also another extreme.
	It's, okay, here's the thing with Instagram face, and it's so relevant now because I can't talk.
	Okay, let's skip over the next two links to the Instagram face.
	So this is something, if you can scroll down just a bit so you can see the...
	The title of this.
	So this is an article in The New Yorker talking about it.
	Do you mind if I just read the description of what they give for Instagram face?
	This is fascinating, right?
	So there seems to be, they say, one of the oddest legacies of our rapidly expiring decade, the gradual emergence among professionally beautiful women of a single cyborgian face.
	It's a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump high cheekbones.
	It has cat-like eyes and long cartoonish lashes.
	It has a small neat nose and full lush lips.
	This is what they describe as Instagram.
	Like Ariana Grande, basically.
	They all have the same face.
	Yeah.
	And weirdly, when I talk to guy friends and men that I know, none of them actually prefer this face.
	So that's really interesting.
	So this is what I call the democratization or the Marxism of beauty.
	Right, okay.
	Because...
	Instagram face can be bought with money, and so it's more democratic, whereas real beauty is very elitist.
	You're either born with amazing bone structure and great hair and nice legs and all these things, or you're not.
	Even that is kind of false because it's more related to your health and things like your oral posture and your development.
	Most people, if they just fix their nutrition, they can access the best-looking version of themselves.
	You are right.
	There is an undemocratic distribution.
	And in the past, you would spend most of your day looking at ordinary people in your life, like that you meet in real life.
	You wouldn't spend all day looking at people who had won the genetic lottery.
	Right.
	And not only won the genetic lottery, they've got the world's best propaganda department, which is their own social media feed.
	And, you know, that would still be better if all the women we saw on Instagram were naturally beautiful, gorgeous, and you just saw that all day.
	That would still be better because that at least shows real features that are not robots, like plastically implanted.
	Even if it was in favorable angles at every time, it would still be better then.
	When I was younger, I used to watch Miss World with my grandma.
	In the Miss World pageant, you'd have girls from all over the world.
	From Africa, India, China, America, Sweden.
	And they all looked very different from each other.
	But they were all...
	I equally stunning in their own way.
	And there was no easy way for you to say like, oh, Miss Sweden looks, does she look better or worse than Miss Japan?
	It's so difficult to say that because their features were so different, but equally stunning.
	And I think today we don't really have that where, you know, people are trying to homogenize their ethnicity to match Ariana Grande.
	Yeah, and that's one of the things they point out about this, actually.
	They say it's white, but it's not really...
	It's not white at all.
	Ariana Grande turned herself half black.
	Yeah, it's a kind of beige sort of...
	It's indeterminate.
	It's not human.
	Yeah.
	Well, that's exactly the sort of cyborg face.
	And it ironically makes them age far faster.
	Does it?
	Because what happens when you inject a filler, even if they say like, oh, it's all natural.
	It's not natural because it's not supposed to be there.
	And then when you inject a filler into your skin, your skin stretches.
	And then eventually that filler supposedly dissolves.
	Then that skin is left over.
	It doesn't snap back.
	And then most of these women are on these stupid vegan diets on top of it.
	So they're not getting the collagen, not replacing the saturated fats and the B12 and biotin, etc.
	You can't take these things in supplements.
	It's fake.
	So what they're doing is they're depleting their nutrients.
	And then so when the filler dissolves, they actually look 10 years older than they actually are.
	And so you have this phenomenon of 23-year-old girls getting filler so that they end up looking like 40-year-old women trying to look 20.
	How can a 23-year-old think they need cosmetic surgery?
	Well, there's this propaganda going around that if you start early, you can prevent aging because it's easier to prevent it than to try to correct it afterwards, which is a complete lie.
	Is that from the plastic surgeons themselves?
	Yes.
	They hire beautiful women to go on social media and create these reels and TikToks and become influencers to tell young women That you should get these fillers now because it's easier to prevent aging than to correct it.
	That's completely false.
	But surely you prevent aging by having a good diet, getting lots of sleep and not smoking.
	Yes, that's the part that they won't tell you.
	Because if you really are interested in prolonging your beauty as far as it will go, the best way to do it is to just make sure you're properly nourished.
	And a lot of these women are like starving themselves.
	They're drinking coffee for breakfast.
	They're eating like salads or they're eating, you know, very little protein.
	They think they're getting protein from chickpeas or something.
	And the best example is Paulina Porzikov.
	She used to be a supermodel, and she had absolutely perfect bone structure.
	She went vegan, and now she's like my mom's age, but she looks like she could be my mom's mom.
	Oh, really?
	And my mom's had no work done.
	She barely even wears makeup.
	So are we saying eat the animal fats?
	Yes.
	Good.
	Encourage all girls to eat the animal fats.
	But anyway, yeah, I'm totally on board.
	I'm generally sort of personally, I've been doing the keto diet for like a year and a half, and honestly, I just feel great.
	I just feel great.
	I eat loads of meat, you know, a small portion of like, you know, Low-carb veg and stuff like that, and I just feel really good.
	Anyway, so what I find interesting about this, though, is that they're actually trying, like the plastic surgeons, they say here, the celebrity doctor came in and said if they were interested in looking better and wanted to know what an expert would recommend, they would get a Snapchat photo with a filter, call something called Facetune, and take a photo of it.
	And then they would try and sculpt their face to match the filter.
	So they've got this Instagram face in real life.
	You know, it's so tragic.
	If most of these women just looked into correcting their oral posture, that would probably fix a lot of bone structure issues as well.
	But, you know, Dr.
	Jonathan Mew, he's not famous.
	Not enough people know about him.
	I don't know about him.
	Oh, you don't know.
	No, no, I don't.
	Tell me.
	So orthotropics is the field that studies how the shape of the face is affected by your oral posture.
	Sorry, is that the way you set your jaw or something?
	Well, what happens is a baby, when it's breastfeeding, the breastfeeding trains the baby to place its tongue firmly on the palate of the roof of its mouth, and that guides the bones of the face to develop in the proper symmetrical way.
	Oh.
	But what's happened is more and more babies are not being breastfed.
	They're being bottle fed because women go to work.
	They don't have enough time or they don't have proper lactation training or they don't think it's important or they give the babies a dummy.
	And all of these things, bottle feeding and dummies, they cause the baby to not develop that proper posture.
	And then that leads to poor teeth development, poor facial development.
	I've let my son use a dummy.
	And then another thing that happens is a lot of young children, like babies and toddlers, they get allergies.
	You know, some of these are side effects of vaccines.
	They get severe allergies and they can't sleep with their mouth closed because they can't breathe through their nose.
	So when you're sleeping with your mouth open, your tongue is not putting that pressure on the roof of your mouth.
	And so what ends up happening is you get an underdeveloped jaw and your nose is like the wrong shape or something or like your...
	Your cheeks don't develop properly.
	So I was reading this by Jonathan Mew, and I was reading how orthotropics around the world, how they've helped a lot of people to correct not only their breathing, but also their face shape.
	I hate to cut you off because this is very interesting.
	I had no idea about any of this.
	If anyone wants to look it up.
	Yeah, I had no idea.
	But anyway, so on the 11th of May, Texas was forced to tell Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, to disable their Instagram filters due to facial recognition laws and the collection of biometric data.
	It wasn't anything to do with women's perception of themselves.
	It It was because it was being alleged that this data was being collected illegitimately without the consent of the people who were using them.
	Now, Meta said that that's not what they did, but they had to disable it for the duration of the lawsuit.
	And Facebook said, well, look, we don't do that, but that's what we'll do.
	And influencers generally took this quite badly.
	It was remarkable, actually.
	You can get to the next one.
	You've got lots of influencers who are complaining and saying, well, look, some of us are okay with our faces being mapped and our data being shared that way.
	And if you get to the next one, again, you've got this lady ended up privating her account.
	So I had to get an archive of this tweet.
	But as you can see at the time, I had nearly six times.
	That's kind of funny.
	Yeah.
	Texas really said, no abortion, no plan B, and no Instagram filters.
	F you and your hot girl, Summer.
	Yeah, but that's the thing, isn't it?
	Young women are saying, well, we don't feel attractive unless we can use Instagram filters.
	Yeah, that's really sad.
	Yeah.
	And so when a legal issue that's not related to how you feel comes along, and if you get to the next one, again, it's just the copes.
	We're just smoothing out blemishes.
	It's like, well, why?
	Why are you so bothered about the blemishes on you?
	Well, here's the thing.
	It's not normal for you to always be in the public eye.
	Before social media, your face wouldn't constantly be in front of everyone every single day.
	Yeah, that's a great point.
	Yeah, so if you had a pimple or if you're not having a great skin day or great hair day, it doesn't matter.
	You're just going to work or you're just going to do your daily errands.
	You're coming home.
	You're not broadcasting your face to 10,000 people.
	Can we get to the next one, John?
	This is exactly what women were saying.
	If you can get that picture up.
	This is just comments on Instagram where it's like, that's it, boy.
	You notice that some films were missing?
	Guess we're all ugly again.
	It's like, well...
	Not really.
	Not all of us.
	But it's not that you were not ugly in the first place.
	It's that you were lying.
	I hate to say, you know, if you're...
	Yeah.
	And it's mad.
	And if you can get to the, not the next one, but the one after, in fact, because we're running out of time.
	I mean, can you grab these pictures up just so you can see the difference?
	Oh my gosh.
	Look, you get to the previous one, sorry, the other one.
	I mean, just, and then go back.
	Come on!
	Come on, you are lying!
	This is deception.
	This is like me printing out my bank statement and adding a few extra zeros at the end and then going to the bar and saying, look, I'm a multi-millionaire.
	Well, it's like what happens when you turn yourself into an influencer based on beauty, right?
	You feel that you have to match a certain look and it's really tragic that this woman felt the need to change her entire appearance because...
	She probably felt that she's probably not very confident in herself and doesn't appreciate her own natural beauty, like, whatever her size.
	Yeah, but also, like, there's something to it that's like, I don't know, there's some emperors got no clothes, you know.
	Well, she doesn't look good in either of these pictures, to be honest.
	Yeah.
	No, but you can tell that the filters have done it.
	Yeah, it's like...
	The woman on the left is, I think, the most instructive one, actually, because she's not very pretty on the right.
	She's not unattractive, but she's just normal.
	But on the left, she's turned into a supermodel because of the filters, and it's like, you know...
	Yeah, but neither of the pictures...
	At least on the right, she looks like a human being.
	You know?
	Yeah, yeah.
	So, it's just very...
	I think these...
	So many young women want to be influencers, but our desires and our ambitions are not created in a vacuum.
	And there's this concept of mimesis that you want to do what other people around you are doing.
	So I have a little sister and I like to paint, so suddenly she likes to paint.
	Where does that desire come from?
	It's not a mystery.
	She wants her approval.
	It's not a mystery.
	So, you know, and she's actually a really good painter.
	So these girls, they don't have good role models, so they're looking onto social media and they're seeing this beautiful girl who's an influencer.
	They said, well, maybe I should also become an influencer.
	And then, you know, they're copying each other constantly.
	It's like a meme.
	But it's the self-deception that I have a problem with because if they're constantly looking at themselves through these filters, And as you saw with the other ones, they're like, oh, I can't stand to look at myself anymore.
	I mean, one of them was like, well, I notice you're not taking any selfies anymore.
	I was like, well, you were just lying to yourself.
	You were living in a kind of fantasy world that was being artificially created.
	So you had a totally artificial view of yourself that is, like we were saying about tracking to reality, is miles away from reality.
	And so looking at your actual face is making you depressed.
	That's really sad.
	It's tremendously sad.
	That's the tragic part.
	Yeah, it's tremendously sad.
	It's deeply unhealthy.
	But anyway, let's just fast forward a bit because by the 24th of May, the filters had returned.
	So, you know, good for them.
	They can go back to their world of self-delusion.
	But there were women who were saying things like, look, I would support a ban of beauty filters and Instagram filters.
	And I use them religiously, but not in this one, John.
	It was one of the previous tweets.
	my own face without a filter on and that's not okay yeah if they were taken away permanently i would honestly be very happy and i think it would encourage everyone to have some proper self-love where they learn to adore their natural faces again yeah there's there's definitely something to this There's definitely something to this.
	It's terrible.
	But anyway, let's move on to the final thing that I wanted to talk about, which is why do you think the feminists are doing this to women?
	Hmm.
	I wonder if it's the feminists doing it or like if they're just doing it to themselves.
	Like what are the feminists doing?
	Well, some gross stuff, actually.
	I think that the feminist movement is on a mission at the moment to destroy the concept of sort of the sanctity of womanhood.
	And they appear to be kind of debauching women into oblivion to the point where they are not appealing to men.
	And it's not appealing to women to be women anymore.
	And so a lot of them, especially ones that have autism, apparently a trans...
	Transgendering themselves?
	That's not the right word.
	Becoming trans, although transgendering themselves sounds like it should be right.
	But a lot of them are choosing...
	Transitioning.
	Transitioning, that's the correct word.
	Thank you.
	A lot of them are choosing to become men.
	We did a book club on this recently on Lotase.com.
	Oh, I've heard a podcast with Abigail Schreier.
	Yeah, she's...
	Like, Harry went through this, and I did this with her.
	It was just harrowing, some of the things that have been happening.
	And the way I'm looking at this, look, this wouldn't be possible if it was desirable to be a woman.
	You know, you wouldn't have young girls literally getting their breasts cut off at, like, 16 years old if it was not being disrespected to be a woman.
	You know, if there was...
	Yes.
	We need positive female role models in the public light.
	And I think that is one of the ways to solve this.
	Because, so for example, I love Kate Middleton.
	She's a fantastic role model for young women.
	I love the way she dresses.
	I'm not going to think about the politics part.
	I barely ever follow any politics.
	I just see her on Instagram.
	And I love the way she dresses.
	I love the way she carries herself.
	I love watching old movies.
	So one of my favorites is Sound of Music.
	And I love Julie Andrews in that movie.
	Like her spirit and how she behaves and her manners.
	And so...
	Like, if you are watching these women, you kind of sort of adopt some of their mannerisms because you admire them so much.
	And I think if we had more female role models that were not trying to be men to be respected, so if you think about it, like, Whenever they put a woman on a cover to celebrate her, they're never celebrating her for doing something feminine.
	They're always celebrating her for being a CEO or making money or buying something magnificent.
	Which are worthy of celebrating, don't get me wrong, but there's also other things that are worthy of celebrating.
	Like, you know, one time I shared, like, this is a successful woman.
	I didn't say she's the only one of, like, a woman who had seven children and she looked great.
	I mean, she's not just a successful woman, but she's a successful woman as a woman.
	Right.
	So, a lot of people got very angry at me for tweeting that.
	Why?
	How dare you be impressed that she's had seven kids?
	I was really impressed.
	Or there's a woman I follow on Instagram who has 10 children, but she's homeschooling them and she's making sure they're all eating healthy.
	She's got an organized house and I was just really impressed.
	That's an impressive feat to accomplish for anyone.
	And I think if we just celebrate more women doing like feminine things as well as masculine things, then we can have more positive role models that'll make young girls feel comfortable with their desires, then we can have more positive role models that'll make young girls feel comfortable with their desires, whatever, because not all women And mostly, they're shamed for that.
	And I personally have experienced this, not just online, but in my own personal life, where I dropped out of a PhD program and I told everyone I didn't want to be a doctor and I don't really much care for...
	I like teaching art.
	What was your PhD in?
	Neuroscience.
	So what did that involve on a daily basis?
	Well, I would just, you know, plan experiments.
	I would do analysis.
	I had to learn lots of different types of coding languages to do data analysis, going to seminars, reading papers.
	Sounds really boring.
	Well, it would have been really fun if it was real science, but this is a multifactorial decision.
	Right, okay.
	If you don't mind, just for time's sake, we'll move on a little bit from that.
	Wouldn't it make you feel better, though, if you had uterus-shaped cereal?
	No.
	Are you sure?
	No.
	If you can get a picture of it, I mean...
	I don't know why they're so obsessed with, like, feminists seem to be obsessed with their reproductive organs.
	Actually, I do know why, because it's the last thing they can hold on to as being uniquely woman-related.
	And even then, there's a movement to abolish that.
	Exactly.
	They're, like, holding on with their fingernails to something that just belongs to women.
	Are you sure you don't want...
	There's this feminine care brand called Intimina.
	It's a Swedish one.
	But they've developed raspberry flavoured period crunch to encourage families to discuss menstruation more openly at breakfast.
	No.
	Really?
	Is that just a hard no, is it?
	You'll have toast.
	I don't even have words.
	I'm just so shocked.
	But I should not be shocked.
	I should expect this.
	Well, they claim it's not normal to discuss periods at the breakfast table.
	What?
	Well, I mean, I think they're right.
	I don't think it is normal to discuss periods at the breakfast table.
	Why are they so obsessed with this?
	Great question.
	Great question.
	They don't tell us.
	But how about going to a vagina festival?
	That's good for women, isn't it?
	An inclusive vagina fest.
	You know, it's once again the dehumanizing of women.
	Yes.
	Because it's like, isn't there anything more to a woman than her reproductive organs?
	You would think that some misogynistic chauvinist from the 40s would come up with this.
	Yes, you would.
	But this is modern feminism.
	You know, you would say like, oh, I'm not just my reproductive organs.
	There's a lot more to me than that.
	What's interesting is a lot of thought went into flattening the concept of women into just a reproductive system instantly.
	The Vagina Festival is the brainchild of Ella May Fullalove, a writer advocate for those with MRKH syndrome, Mm-hmm.
	You know, there are certain societies in the world.
	I remember learning about India and some houses.
	You're not allowed to even go in the kitchen when you are on your period.
	This doesn't happen anymore, I think, but maybe it does in some rural areas.
	You're not allowed to sleep inside the house.
	I didn't expect that.
	You're not allowed to go to a bridal shower.
	There's a lot of really random restrictions.
	That is random.
	Yeah, and it's really, like, unfortunate that you're being made to feel that you're unclean when you're going through a normal bodily process.
	So, it's like, how did we get from, okay, let's just treat them like a human being, to uterus cereal, like...
	Vagina festivals?
	I mean, like, I don't...
	I just can't imagine...
	Why don't you just get a hobby?
	Yeah, well, that's the question, isn't it?
	Why don't you get a hobby and create a festival around your hobby...
	But the thing is, vulva aesthetics is her hobby.
	And it's her profession as well.
	And the thing is, no one read her paper on vulva aesthetics.
	She says, quote, wow, I've done such a good job for Feminist Kind.
	I can just sit back and relax.
	Then a few months went by and I realized people weren't reading it.
	I wonder why.
	Yeah, I can't even imagine.
	Probably not a page turner.
	Well, that's why she had to translate it into spoken word poetry, and this led to the Vagina Festival.
	Will you be attending?
	Of course.
	How could I not...
	The thing about this, I don't know whether you saw Stella Creasy, a Labour MP, the other day, say women can have penises.
	This being the modern intersectional view of what a woman is.
	At the Vagina Festival, inclusion on all levels is absolutely essential.
	This is a feminist event, and for us, feminism is not feminism unless it's intersectional.
	Diversity is nothing without inclusion, and that's including people, all humans, people of all genders, when we're talking about vaginas.
	So, there'll be men.
	Wasn't there, like, a shoe company that did an advertisement where they put a bunch of, like, vaginas as their advertisement, like, cartoons?
	Like, so unnecessary.
	I don't know why.
	I don't know.
	I can't believe I didn't see it.
	I think it's, like, a shock factor thing, maybe?
	That they're not getting attention otherwise?
	I can't imagine why.
	I can't imagine, as a man, going, right, John, we're going to go to the penis festival this week.
	Set up a big penis festival.
	I wrote my dissertation.
	Oh, you mean the hockey team?
	Yeah.
	I wrote a dissertation on penis aesthetics, but no one read it, and now I need to promote it with spoken word.
	It's just so bizarre, and I just feel sorry for these people.
	But anyway, let's move on quickly.
	So let's go to Feral Girls Summer.
	Got any idea what this might be?
	This might be a place where the trollop patrol needs to go.
	Yes, that's exactly it.
	And incidentally, this is a feminist writing an independent saying, well, look, I'm actually going to have to trollop patrol them because this is a trend that's on TikTok apparently, encouraging women to embrace their authentic selves.
	I found that very interesting because, of course, what this is is women being promiscuous.
	And the view of this is that that is a woman's authentic self.
	Interesting.
	It's quite degrading, isn't it?
	Yes.
	I mean, women are being inauthentic unless they're railing five guys in a night.
	That's an awful way of describing women, isn't it?
	Yeah, I wonder if they're trying to project their own personalities onto others to make it feel more normal.
	Well, incidentally, this is a feminist writer who's like, look, this is actually not good and we shouldn't do this.
	So it's very, very interesting how, like, that even there is something that has gone too far, you know, to call a woman's authentic self, it's essentially, you know, A trollop, which is a great word, by the way.
	Well plucked from the depths of history.
	No, I went to the Oxford Library yesterday and I found this random book written by a priest.
	Right.
	And he used it.
	I was like, this is a great word.
	It is a great word.
	And they had a vulva vagina day at the Parliament in Canada yesterday.
	You're Canadian, aren't you?
	How far does this go?
	I don't even...
	Will we be invited to speak?
	What's the qualification?
	You must have a vulva and vagina.
	That's exclusion of trans women.
	I was gonna say, it's not very inclusive.
	Why?
	You know, I don't watch the news, and so you showing me all this is like, oh, this is why I don't watch the news.
	I mean, I just don't know why this has to be what women are.
	It's like, look, I have vagina.
	It's like, yeah, I know.
	We could talk about something else.
	Moving on.
	Yeah, exactly.
	But anyway, so this whole thing was criticized by a feminist, incidentally, for, quote, perpetuating archaic ideologies around womanhood that are neither nuanced nor helpful.
	The irony is that despite being marketed as the antidote to Hot Girl Summer, it's done exactly the same thing.
	Put pressure on women to be someone that doesn't even exist.
	And that's good.
	That's good.
	The feminists have finally come around to social conservatism.
	Like, actually, maybe turning women into trollops wasn't the purpose of feminism.
	Yeah, it's, you should be, you know, the pendulum shouldn't swing either way.
	Like, you should have a balanced idea of relationships and encourage actual emotional intimacy.
	A wholesome life.
	A wholesome life, building real connections with people.
	Like, this just isn't it.
	Yeah, we'll go back to the uterus cereal.
	That sounds more likely.
	But the final thing on this one that I want to talk about is that other aspect of women that is connected to their reproductive system.
	Tamagotchi child.
	Yeah.
	So you, as a feminist, might get a kind of reactionary biological desire to be a mother, but of course the earth is dying.
	People are overpopulating it.
	The environment is going to be ruined by you having children, so what you need to do is have a virtual child in the metaverse.
	I'm like bottling up all my rage right now.
	Why are they doing this to women?
	They hate them.
	Yeah, right.
	Well, Marxists hate women.
	Well, the thing about it, let's take a step back to the metaphysics of all this.
	A mother is the most real thing, the reminder of real nature that exists in the world.
	Oh, that's a totally true statement.
	I've been present at the birth of two children.
	Man, there is nothing intellectual going on there.
	What happens to a woman when she's pregnant is completely out of her control, and it's taken over by some kind of magic.
	You can science-fy this however much you want, but it is out of your control how this child develops, the bond that forms between the mother and child when it's born.
	It's completely magical and divine, and it's the truth.
	truth, you can't deny it, like everything that's happening.
	And I think that all of these movements, because they are, what they're trying to do is they're trying to create an illusion world and the existence of a mother is a direct threat to this illusion.
	It's like, you know, when you're showing a special effect, you don't want to see the green screen lines, right?
	If they show through, it breaks the illusion.
	And so any existence of real truth in the world is a threat to the illusion.
	And this is why they hate real art, because real art is kind of like the densest concentration of truth in one place that emotionally penetrates everyone who looks at it.
	And you can't walk away from it without feeling that you saw something real.
	So that's why they don't like real art.
	They don't like women.
	They don't like motherhood.
	I think you're on something here because there's just no overlaying the kind of hyper-reality of ideology over something like a woman giving birth.
	There's just no doing it.
	You can't intellectualize it.
	You can't replace it.
	It's just the thing that is out of your control.
	Modern feminism comes from the idea that women are uncomfortable being women.
	They want to be men.
	The reason they want to be men actually comes from the Enlightenment.
	The Enlightenment is to blame, as much as we love it, because the Enlightenment glorified the masculine over and against the feminine, kind of disrespected it.
	Women who are coming out of this time period, as it philosophically developed, they felt anxious that they couldn't be like men.
	They couldn't go to war.
	They couldn't conquer.
	They couldn't be stoic.
	They had emotions that just were pesky things that kept coming up.
	They couldn't have strict control over their bodies to build sculpted muscles.
	And motherhood is like the apex of these differences because men just don't have something like that to worry about.
	If you think about a teenage boy, if he wants to look like a man, all he has to do is go to the gym, eat right.
	It's not easy, but it's simple.
	And he builds the body that he wants.
	It's within his control.
	It's completely within your control.
	For a woman to develop...
	Yes, she can go to the gym.
	That definitely helps and eat right.
	But beyond a certain point, it is out of her control.
	And you have to kind of let go to embrace your femininity.
	And letting go is very difficult for type A people and for people who glorify the masculine.
	You have to surrender to your nature.
	You have to let go.
	You have to go with the flow.
	These things can be very challenging for modern people in general to do.
	I think that's a really interesting way of putting it, because it's all about the belief in choice and self-agency that underpins the Enlightenment.
	And you are right, it is very masculinized, and the feminists are attempting to essentially turn women into this masculine article.
	They're trying to fit in with that ideology themselves, but women do not fit in easily into the ideology of the Enlightenment, and that's where a lot of the self-loathing came from.
	And so when you have a Tamagotchi child, you can control it completely.
	It goes to sleep when you want, wakes up when you want, it looks how you want.
	And that's exactly the selling point of it as well.
	And is that a real child?
	No.
	You're a father, you know.
	No!
	Completely.
	But it will always miss the genuine pleasure of being a father.
	It's when your child does something unprovoked by you that is magnificent in some way.
	Like the first time they say your name, it's amazing.
	The first time they say daddy or something, it's amazing.
	Or the first time they take their first toddling steps towards you and you can see it in their face.
	They're excited.
	Oh, look, I'm doing something.
	And you're encouraging them all.
	And it's like the idea that you could simulate that is just disgusting.
	Demonic.
	Yeah.
	Well, you know, I experienced this firsthand like in a very micro scale.
	When I began my trip to England, I was so excited.
	I had my itinerary and I was going to go to this museum on this day and then I'm going to go there.
	It was completely planned out.
	And then I broke my foot and I couldn't do all these things according to my plan.
	And I was forced to just go with the flow and accept what happened to me and make the best of it.
	And honestly, I think that it's like a lesson that it's not easy to accept.
	I'm a product of the enlightenment.
	I live in this world, so of course I would be exposed to its...
	Downsides.
	And so I'm also working very hard to not work hard, to just relax and go with the flow.
	It's easier said than done.
	Yeah.
	Okay, so I think we'll stop this one there and we'll go to some of the comments.
	We've got lots of interesting comments about all of this.
	So Christian says, My girlfriend believed Amber until this trial began.
	She has been watching it religiously and has been very interesting seeing her make a complete U-turn.
	She loathes Amber Heard now and was so glad she lost the trial.
	I think there's been a lot of people who have had that opinion, actually.
	Yeah.
	Omar says, The Kyle Rittenhouse of domestic abuse.
	That's very interesting.
	So, the internet.
	Yes.
	Well, you know, all of our viewers are on the internet, and we're glad that they are.
	George says, Very surprised that the gynocentric courts ruled in Depp's favour.
	All it took was millions of dollars, all the video evidence in his favour, and him being one of the most universally loved men.
	Cynicism aside, I hope this moment will be a chink in the feminist armour and people will start unquestionably believing women a little less.
	Yeah, that was the thing.
	The whole trial, it was just...
	The preponderance of evidence is just all on Johnny's side.
	Amber just looked so dishonest.
	She sounded dishonest.
	She's not a very good actress, is what I would say.
	Which is fair, I think.
	Murray says, what made this trial so delicious was that in the case of Jussie Smollett, Amber clearly thought that she would get away with this.
	That's another thing.
	Again, I know you haven't been following it, but she's got this haughty manner about herself.
	Where it's like she's acting like the aristocrat who's being confronted by the peasants.
	And it's just like, look, that's, you know, that's not on.
	Alex says, I'm very happy with Johnny Depp to get justice.
	However, I find it quite disheartening that just the day before Clinton's lawyer was acquitted in an obviously rigged trial, the U.S. justice system is rigged and for every Depp and written house there is a Sussman and Chowman.
	I assume you haven't been following the trial of Clinton's lawyer.
	Don't worry about it.
	Ignacio says, Even if it's on a whole different cultural sphere, I'm happy this ideology got a fat slap in the face, Amber will wrath in hell.
	So I think this is, to the point you were making, there are a lot of men who, at the beginning, who have seen injustices happen, and this has become symbolic.
	Right.
	And, you know, I don't want the pendulum to swing in the other way.
	I know I've said that idiom so many times, but, you know, we shouldn't go from feminism to, you know, like, oh, women are just supposed to stay in the home and only have babies and they're not permitted to do anything else or read a book.
	It's banned.
	You can never drive.
	And it's just...
	That's become Saudi Arabia.
	Like, you know, we shouldn't go to the extremes.
	I'm in favor of humanizing women, and humanizing them means accepting that they have...
	2022, I'm in favor of humanizing women.
	Women should be treated as human beings.
	But that's a legitimate statement that can be made in the current environment.
	It's not there's anything wrong with what you said, it's just that if you...
	So you agree, women are humans.
	Well, I've held that position occasionally, but it's just strange how that's what needs to be articulated to make the point that you try and make, right?
	Like, 500 years ago, no one would have questioned this.
	Well, women are either idolized or they're despised.
	Like, there seems to be no in-between.
	You're either the Madonna or the whore.
	And when you do that, when you put someone on a pedestal or you despise them to no end...
	You don't see the humanity in them that they have both good and evil.
	They're capable of making choices, having interests and desires.
	And, you know, it's much easier to do that.
	And that's why it's done, because it's easier to idolize someone and categorically believe that everything they do is innocent and good.
	And it's easy to despise someone and think that they're all demons.
	But it's much more difficult to be balanced and view people as human beings.
	I think so.
	General Hai Ping says, looking forward to Carl testing his newfound knowledge of filters when he's painting Warhammer miniatures on Instagram later.
	Yeah, well, I'll be cheating and using my filters.
	Don't worry, it's a bit of an in-joke.
	Peter says, men don't compare their looks to their friends.
	They're far too busy trying to figure out who'd win in a fight.
	Which is true.
	That should have been the survey question.
	Yeah.
	Do you think you could beat your friend in a fight?
	John, do you reckon you can beat me in a fight?
	Yeah.
	He's wrong now.
	He's totally wrong.
	I can totally take him.
	We need to test this.
	Okay.
	JJHW says, it's okay, Carl.
	You get better at the painting.
	I love that this is the thing you all want to talk about.
	James says, some of the problems with confidence on both sides is that some men are unwilling or afraid to pay compliments to female friends or work colleagues for fear of being misinterpreted.
	Is that something you've ever noticed that men are afraid to talk about?
	I think that men need to learn how to pay a compliment, like what kind of compliment is tasteful.
	Are you suggesting there should be some sort of code of chivalry?
	Perhaps there should be some kind of socializing, some social skills being developed.
	Really?
	I think that would really...
	This is brand new!
	It would really advance society for both men and women to develop social skills.
	It would be the progressive thing if men and women had a general code by which they were supposed to understand on how to interact with the other sex.
	Well, someone yelled at me across the street the other day, nice crutch.
	I was just so, like I looked at the man and he was like, I don't know.
	Because I have a crutch right now.
	I don't know what I would say to that.
	I mean, even as a man, you know, it's like, uh, thanks?
	Anyway, Al Sahim says, uh, today is the two-year anniversary of the murder of Captain David Dorn during the BLM insurrections.
	Unlike George Floyd, Democrats won't say his name because they can't grift off his death.
	Truly disgusting.
	They're too depraved to be called garbage humans.
	That's a term much better left for Carl.
	Well, thank you so much.
	I appreciate that.
	Charlie says, Mega, my fiancé that has a PhD in neuroscience and says she doesn't nearly do enough experimentation as she'd like to.
	She's in the middle of a marking season and she says she's stressed to an understatement.
	You might have dodged a bullet there.
	Oh, definitely.
	I'm thankful every day that I quit JJHW says something to help Mega.
	The story of the Chinese farmer.
	Once upon a time, there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away.
	I haven't read this, by the way.
	This might turn out to be really terrible.
	And if it is, I apologize in advance.
	That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate.
	We are so sorry to hear that your horses run away.
	That is most unfortunate.
	The farmer said, maybe.
	The next day, the horse came back, bringing seven wild horses with it.
	And in the evening, everyone came back and said, oh, isn't that lucky?
	What a great turn of events.
	Now you have eight horses.
	The farmer said again, maybe.
	The following day, his son tried to break one of his horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg.
	The neighbours then said, oh dear, that's too bad, and the farmer responded with, maybe.
	The next day, the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg.
	Again, all the neighbours came around and said, isn't that great?
	And again, he said, maybe.
	The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it really is impossible to tell whether anything that happens is good or bad, because you never know what the consequences of misfortune are, or you'll never know what the consequences of good fortune are.
	And that's by a chap called Alan Watts.
	I'd never heard that before.
	Fair point, I think.
	Yeah.
	Well, the trick is you look back at your life and everything that's happened and you pick out all the good things and you pretend that everything happened to enable those good things.
	It doesn't matter if it's right or wrong.
	But it's also one of those things where I think, like you were saying about the agency question, there seems to be underlying a kind of desire to claim agency over the world as good.
	It's like, well, maybe.
	We'll have to find out when it's all done.
	This is one of the things that I think was Solon talking to Croesus, where Croesus is like, well, look, aren't I just the most fortunate man?
	I'm the king of the giant empire and everything's going great.
	And Solon's like, yeah, but you're not dead yet.
	Well, look at Prometheus, right?
	He brought us, the myth of Prometheus is that he brought us fire from Mount Olympus.
	It's a myth now.
	You're Prometheus Truther.
	Yeah, I am actually, thank you.
	So, which is wonderful.
	And I was thinking about it once when I went camping, because camping is the only thing you can do in Canada.
	Isn't it dangerous?
	Camping?
	Yeah.
	No.
	Oh, Bigfoot in the woods.
	No.
	You can just go backwards camping with your friends.
	It's normal.
	Is Bigfoot not dangerous?
	No.
	Okay.
	Too shy.
	Oh, okay.
	He has body image issues.
	Too much time on Instagram.
	People keep calling him Bigfoot.
	He's like, my foot's not that big.
	Seriously, don't you have like bears and like wildcats?
	Yeah, there's bears, but they're like, you know, you just hang your food up properly and they don't come near you.
	Why don't they just eat you?
	Because they're really shy.
	Ooh.
	I had no idea.
	So anyway, we had this amazing fire and all my friends were sitting around the fire and the grounds policy is that you have to put it out by a certain time.
	And so when we put out the fire, this is the first time that I went backwards camping and I looked up and saw all the stars.
	It was so magnificent.
	I can't even put it into words.
	People totally have no idea how bad light pollution is.
	Right.
	And we were like in the middle of nowhere, like three hours away from any city.
	And so I thought about it.
	I was like, so this relates because the fire is something man-made that brings us a lot of joy, but it's only when you let go and let yourself see nature that has its own value in it too.
	Like how things would unfold even when you have no control over them can also be very beautiful.
	It's incredible that if you go somewhere remote enough that you can actually see the Milky Way.
	Yeah, well I spent two weeks in the rainforest in Ecuador.
	Oh really?
	I was studying entomology at a field course and they made us go on night hikes.
	I assume that's insects?
	Yes, insects.
	So I had to go on a night hike and we had to identify the nocturnal insects too.
	And so we had these headlamps to help us walk, but then We were in the middle of a Yanayaku, which is like a national park in the Amazon rainforest.
	And then our teachers told us to turn off our headlamps, which was kind of scary because there's like spiders the size of my face there.
	So I turned off the headlamp and then we waited about 10 seconds.
	Yeah.
	They glow with fluorescent lights of a million different colors.
	And because they've been collecting UV rays all day.
	And it's like you see all the stars.
	Then you see the stars reflected in the river.
	And then you see the million glowing UV lights on all the trees and leaves all around you.
	And it feels like you're standing in the middle of space.
	And if we hadn't turned off our man-made devices, we would have no ability to see that.
	And so I think that's a metaphor for the flaws of the enlightenment, that sometimes you have to Stop acting, stop doing, and life might surprise you with the beauty that it has to offer that you don't control.
	It sounds like something out of a Disney movie, right?
	It was so magnificent.
	It was a life-changing experience to see that.
	That was amazing.
	Right, so we're out of time, I'm afraid.
	So, Megha, where can people find you if they'd like to follow you?
	I'm on Twitter, at megaverma underscore art.
	And I also have a website for my art courses, which is classicalidealsedu.com.
	All right, okay.
	So go follow Mega there.
	Thanks a lot for joining us, folks.
	If you want more from us, you can go to lowsees.com.

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