Bonus Episode: Listener Q+A and The Home Alone Analysis You Didn't Know You Needed
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Brad and Dan engage with listener questions from Discord and live events, diving into topics ranging from gender dynamics in conservative Christianity to the cultural normalization of male sexual predation. Later, Brad and his brother Brian Onishi discuss holiday movies, focusing on 'Home Alone' and its deeper themes of capitalism and family values as portrayed in the John Hughes classic. They also touch on 'Christmas Vacation' and how these movies reflect broader societal issues like income inequality and shifting gender roles.
00:00 Introduction and Holiday Greetings
00:21 Listener Questions and Insights
03:05 Understanding Women's Support for Trump
07:17 Sexuality and High Control Religion
17:38 Reflections on Natural Law and Human Nature
25:10 Home Alone: A Midlife Crisis Movie?
35:20 John Hughes' Cinematic Legacy
36:02 The Midwest as the True America
36:56 Capitalism and Family in John Hughes' Films
39:17 Home Alone: A Critique of Reagan's America
41:50 Gender Roles in Home Alone
49:18 The Gig Economy and Modern Parallels
55:43 Final Thoughts on John Hughes and Home Alone
01:00:23 Upcoming Projects and Farewell
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What's up, y'all?
Brad here and we are just a few days before Christmas and the first day of Hanukkah.
I know a lot of you are traveling.
I know a lot of you are doing things like wrapping presents or getting food ready.
We didn't forget about you.
We have about an hour today for subscribers and we wanted to spend the first couple of minutes responding to listener questions and so Dan is up and responding to Q&A from folks in the Discord and email and from our live events.
After that, we have me and my brother, Brian Onishi, who you've heard before on a few episodes, talking about holiday movies.
We're talking about Home Alone specifically, but also Christmas Vacation and a bunch of other stuff.
Basically, using those movies to think about the state of the United States, income equality, gender dynamics, and what it means to be a kid during the holidays.
It's fun, it's light, but it's also stuff me and my brother like to talk about, which is always kind of philosophical and, at least to us, interesting.
So we hope you enjoy it.
Dan and I are going to be back in early January with a full-length bonus episode, so we promise we're going to get together and jump on the mic for our bonus.
But for now, we hope you'll enjoy hearing us and Dan's response to questions and my revisionist analysis, my beyond the Overton window analysis of Home Alone.
Thanks for being here, y'all.
We hope you enjoy this week.
For those of you for whom the holidays are hard, we hope you find some sense of joy and rest, and we will see you all soon.
Hey, everyone.
As you all know, I don't get a chance to respond to all the comments and feedback and things like that I get.
So I wanted to respond to a few insights, questions, points of feedback that people have given in relation to specifically some of the episodes of It's in the Code recently, things that don't really fit into an episode on their own.
I don't get to respond to them in other ways.
Sometimes they're just insights that are so good and so worth talking about that I don't want to just respond in an email to the people who shared them.
So I wanted to run through some of these.
And the first thing was something that came up in San Diego.
So in November, we had our events in L.A. and San Diego.
The great thing about that is getting to meet with listeners and friends and colleagues in connection to those and have some great discussions.
And I was talking with a friend and colleague, and they brought up some really, really great points about something that Brad and I had discussed in the roundup immediately following the election, this most recent election.
And it was the question, and a lot of people reached out to us, a question that we were talking about of why So many women voted for Trump.
Why those numbers went up.
Why this person who is an affirmed sexual predator at this point, he's been found liable for that.
He's boasted about sexual assault.
We've known that for a long time.
But he also positioned himself as the protector of women and said that he was going to protect women whether they wanted him to or not.
And a lot of women voted for him.
They voted for that.
They voted for that vision.
And I was talking with this colleague after one of our events, and they made a great point and said this, that millions of American women have experienced sexual predation as a normal dimension of heterosexuality.
In other words, what strikes people like, you know, Brad and I on the podcast or so many of you who respond to us or so many of our guests as predatory and dangerous and frightening for millions of American women, Brad and I on the podcast or so many of you who respond to us or so And it was just it was a great insight that they had.
And I wanted to talk about this and explain what I think sort of unpack that a little bit.
What do I think that that means?
What does it not mean?
And basically, the point is this, just that male sexual predation is so normalized within our society.
And I think society at large, I think that's changing, but I don't think it has changed.
It is normalized within society at large, and it is absolutely normalized within high-control conservative Christianity.
It is so normalized that many women who experience it, who are on the receiving end of sexual predation by men, they don't experience it as predation.
It's just a part of what men do.
And if you're into men...
I think that's the experience of it, that this is just part of what sexuality is, is to experience male sexuality in this way.
And as I say, I want to unpack that, but I want to be clear on what I mean and what I don't mean by this.
And people, feel free, email me, throw me the questions and things like that.
But there's going to be somebody that says, well, what, are you opposed to protecting people?
Of course I'm not opposed to protecting people.
I want to protect people.
I have a family.
I want to protect them.
I want to protect my kids.
I want to protect my partner.
I also want to protect my friends, regardless of their gender.
This is not about not wanting to protect people.
It's not a criticism of the desire to feel safe.
I think everybody should feel safe.
I think we should work to strive for a society in which everybody is safe and can recognize that safety.
It's also not a criticism of men or masculinity.
And that's something that has come up a lot.
It came up a lot in the lead-up to the elections, discussions of the so-called bro vote and so forth.
I've had discussions with people since the election.
I've had discussions with students who argue that people on the left or Kamala Harris and others, that they're opposed to masculinity.
And it's not about opposing masculinity, right?
It is about opposing a particular construction of masculinity.
A particular articulation of what masculinity is, of what it means to be masculine or male, a particular construction that is so pervasive that, again, in the minds and the experience of many, it's the only expression of real quote-unquote masculinity.
And it goes under various names.
We could call it toxic masculinity, but that term, I think, is so overused that I'm not sure it's of much use anymore.
Some might call it hyper-masculinity.
Kristen DuMais, I think, captures it well in Jesus and John Wayne, her book, under the category of sort of militant masculinity.
That's what we're talking about.
And there are two dimensions to this that I think feed into and can help us to understand why so many women supported Donald Trump.
The first one is sexual in nature.
And I've been discussing this, and it's in the code.
I don't want to rehash all of this, but if you want to go back a few episodes back where I talked about conceptions of male sexuality and female sexuality within high-control American Christianity, you could take a deeper dive in this.
But one of the features here is that the masculinity on this construction, again, There can be different kinds of masculinity, but masculinity as understood and experienced within this kind of cultural framework, masculinity, and therefore, you know, real men, are sexually aggressive by nature.
Now, good men, upright men, are those who harness that sexual energy and they channel it into things like marriage and monogamy, monogamous sexual relations.
They channel it into family.
They channel it into protection and productivity.
It feeds into a sort of a capitalist mindset.
Part of why Christendomé calls it militant masculinity, it feeds into conceptions of militancy and literally people serving in the military and this connection of military service and masculinity and so forth.
But even for good men, predatory sexuality always lies just below the surface on this conception of masculinity.
And I think it's reflected in so many cultural and Christian tropes that we could just sort of list them forever.
And I think it structures both masculine and feminine sexuality.
And here are some of them.
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