Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "What Is Womanhood?" with Meghan Daum

Transcript

"What Is Womanhood?" with Meghan Daum · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Welcome to a new year, a new world, a post-Trump, nearly almost maybe post-Pandemic reawakening,
• 0:09
  an opportunity to lift our gaze from the flickering lights of our phones and our Netflix
• 0:16
  marathons to crawl out of the squalid morass of online arguments with their algorithmic
• 0:23
  distractions and their comforting outrages. And to sloth off the fake news and take a deep breath
• 0:31
  of the real world, of real, zoomless hangouts with flesh and blood friends who you can talk to
• 0:38
  and reason with, that long last have faced to face conversations with, that are generous and
• 0:44
  unruly and loving and spirited and maybe hopeful and a little uncomfortable.
• 1:01
  Welcome to the first show of the new season of uncomfortable conversations with me, Josh Zips.
• 1:05
  This is the safe space for unsafe ideas. And the good news is that after a short hiatus,
• 1:11
  which you will notice we've had, this is something with which my long-time podcast fans will
• 1:16
  will now be somewhat familiar. You patient little darlings, you. The show has been picked up by a
• 1:22
  podcast network, a cast, which was actually the first network that ever picked up with the people
• 1:28
  live back in the day. So I'm coming back home, baby, chicken's coming home to roost and I'm delighted
• 1:34
  to be part of a cast again. What that's going to mean for you is more regular episodes,
• 1:39
  occasional ads and ultimately the opportunity to avoid those ads and get even more great content
• 1:45
  by supporting the show as so many of you did with We The People Life. So lots of great stuff coming
• 1:50
  up in 2021. I deleted the Twitter app and the Facebook app off my phone this week. It felt like
• 2:03
  a mini triumph. I wonder if you've done it. I wonder if you had the same feeling I did of weary
• 2:10
  satisfaction, grudging terror. In my case, it was because Australia has been going through
• 2:19
  something of a reckoning about sexual assault in Parliament House and amongst senior government
• 2:26
  ministers allegedly. And the conversation on social media has been as unedifying as you would
• 2:33
  expect it to be on social media with everyone scoring the easiest of shots. And it's such a sad
• 2:44
  issue. It's so violating and it so shakes me to my core when I hear the stories of some of the young
• 2:53
  women who have apparently been through this that I just wanted to have no more part of that conversation.
• 3:05
  So today we're going to have a more interesting and nuanced conversation in honour essentially of
• 3:12
  international women's day at a time of great irony for that moment in Australia since it seems
• 3:18
  like so little has changed in Australian politics at least. It's quite bizarre. What I mean by the
• 3:24
  the social media debate being so stupid is that for background if you're not Australian or if you
• 3:31
  haven't been paying any attention to the news, the Attorney General of Australia was accused a few
• 3:38
  weeks ago of a historical rape by a woman who took her own life and so there's nothing that
• 3:48
  cops can do about this. This was more than 30 years ago when he was a teenager. And there's no
• 3:54
  way of proving that beyond reasonable doubt. So what should happen? He has stepped aside temporarily.
• 4:04
  We don't know how long it's going to last for. He's still a parliamentarian. The Prime Minister
• 4:08
  seems to have his back. And this comes in the wake of there having been some kind of fairs
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  reports and some investigative journalism last year that raised questions about his propriety with
• 4:19
  other members of his staff and not just him, but many senior people in the ruling Liberal Party.
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  Sort of hitting on staff, having extra marital affairs. The fact that their politics is very pro-family
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  values and that many of them were anti-game marriages of course raised as a legitimate source of
• 4:39
  hypocrisy. But until the past few weeks when this allegation arose of actual violent rape,
• 4:47
  that was all just sort of unseemly nonsense, not potentially criminal behaviour.
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  And what ended up happening was that my social media feed was full of two equally stupid,
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  equally strident opinions. On the one hand, the backers of the Attorney General,
• 5:07
  saying, if you're not convicted in a court of law and you can't prove something beyond
• 5:12
  reasonable doubt, then everyone is entitled to the presumption of innocence and there should be
• 5:17
  absolutely no consequences or even really investigations since it's impossible to conduct such an
• 5:23
  investigation. Therefore, every man should get off scot-free even if there are plausible claims
• 5:29
  made. I mean, it seems that this alleged victim did have some contemporaneous accounts
• 5:34
  writing in her diary more than 30 years ago about what happened and telling friends some
• 5:38
  years ago about what happened. There's no reason to think there's absolutely no there there
• 5:43
  just because it doesn't meet the test of a legal standard in a court of law.
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  And then on the other side, you have people saying, well, all women have to always be
• 5:52
  believed essentially so he needs to resign because the accusation has been made.
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  And anyone against whom such an accusation gets made has to be treated as if they guilty.
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  I mean, this is not this is inside this is this is turning us all deranged.
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  Peter Van Oncelen, who's a maid of mine, who's a great journal and a good bloke, who also
• 6:17
  happened to be friends with the Attorney General from back in the day. This is all part of the
• 6:22
  problem as well, isn't that there are these boys clubs from private school where so many of the
• 6:28
  rich and powerful all sort of new each other. So there is a bit of a clique going on here,
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  but let's assume that there's perfect that they're able to put that aside and be perfectly impartial
• 6:36
  in upholding their own journalistic point of view. Even if that were the case, Peter Van Oncelen
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  wrote a piece saying that this was a chilling and disgraceful denial of basic rights.
• 6:47
  He's talking about the Attorney General's rights. He's talking about the right
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  of an accused rapist to not face any consequence in the public square, unless or until
• 7:00
  he's found guilty by a judge or jury. I'm sorry, Pete. I love you, mate, but that's just silly.
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  The whole lesson of the past few years of reckoning with gender politics was to try to figure
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  out a way of talking about this stuff without saying that the only forum in which to do so
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  is in front of a jury. And then on the other side, David Crowe, who's the Chief Political Correspondent
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  at the other, so Peter Van Oncelen works for the Australian Works for Rupert Murdoch,
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  and the other big newspaper company in Australia is Nine or Fairfax, where David Crowe, who's
• 7:41
  also a brilliant guy who I have enormous respect for, wrote an opinion piece, entitled Prime Minister
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  if you believe Porter, say so if not ask him to resign. Hang on, whatever happened to upholding
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  the principle of assuming that someone's innocent, even if you don't believe they're innocent.
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  Now I'm flipping back to Peter Van Oncelen's side and saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,
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  I can say that I don't think that we should, it's completely consistent for the Prime Minister
• 8:12
  of Australia to say, I don't know whether or not my Attorney General did it. Therefore,
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  I'm going to presume innocence rather than presuming guilt. This is one thing that gets me so frustrated.
• 8:24
  It's like nobody understands principles anymore. It's the same with free speech. It's like if I defend
• 8:29
  the right of a Nazi to say something, people accuse me of being pro-Nazi. No, I'm not. I'm pro
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  the principle that people should be allowed to speak their minds and then I can smash that Nazi
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  using logic. It doesn't mean that I like the speech and it doesn't mean that I believe that
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  the person didn't do it if I want them to be entitled to the presumption of innocence.
• 8:53
  God, this is all messy, isn't it? Well, today we've got a wonderful conversation with a brilliant
• 8:58
  person who can help us think through, not this specifically. We're not going to talk about
• 9:03
  sexual assault. I want to use this as an opportunity as a moment to have a bigger conversation
• 9:09
  about feminism, about gender equity, about what it means to be a woman, about what powerful
• 9:17
  womanhood looks like in the 21st century and Megan Downe is the perfect person to have that
• 9:25
  conversation with. We actually recorded this before, I think it was before the US election,
• 9:31
  it was a while ago. Now, before we started, before I put the podcast on pause to transition it
• 9:36
  over to Acast, the new network, and I've had this one in the bag just looking forward,
• 9:41
  rubbing my hands together with Glee in releasing it for you, because Megan is a badass feminist.
• 9:48
  That's some joke that you'll get. She doesn't like being called badass. She thinks that's one of
• 9:53
  those cheesy slogans that that millennial girls use, but she is a badass feminist and she doesn't
• 10:01
  conform necessarily to the conventional ideas about what feminist empowerment looks like.
• 10:10
  This is a slightly perhaps bad taste episode to release in honor of International Women's Day.
• 10:17
  If you think that all women have to think alike, if you think that the only version of feminism
• 10:22
  that should exist is the Orthodox one. Megan doesn't. I don't. This podcast doesn't. This podcast
• 10:30
  is supposed to be a place where we can talk about things from a slightly more left field perspective
• 10:36
  where we actually get our hands dirty and the intellectual weeds instead of conforming to some
• 10:40
  preset bunch of notions that have been handed down by the elites. So enjoy Megan's take on not just
• 10:49
  feminism and womanhood, but really the whole culture wars. This, I've read her book and
• 10:52
  absolutely loved it. It's called The Problem with Everything, my journey through the new culture
• 10:56
  to wars. The New York Times named it a notable book when it came out in 2019. It got rave
• 11:02
  reviews from places that you might, there might have been a bit surprising like The New York Times
• 11:05
  book review and The New York Post and Vogue and so on. Megan writes for The Los Angeles Times. Well,
• 11:12
  she doesn't anymore. She was an opinion columnist there for over a decade. She's written in The New
• 11:16
  Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic. She's in that junct associate professor in the
• 11:21
  graduate writing program at Columbia University, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that sort of stuff, but she
• 11:25
  also has a podcast, which you should subscribe to, which I was against. And which we have a very
• 11:30
  different conversation than this one. Her podcast is called The Unspeakable. Enjoy my conversation
• 11:38
  with Megan Downe.
• 11:49
  What is it? It's done by here. Now, it is going to be my problem. It's my dog barks. I have done
• 11:54
  every single, I have taken every precaution to ensure that he's quiet, but he's also eight months
• 11:59
  old. So, oh, that's so cute. We can do the whole thing about him. What kind of dog is he?
• 12:06
  He's a newfoundland. I can't picture a newfoundland. He's gigantic. They're, they look like big bears.
• 12:12
  Have they like simple nods? Well, I had a Saint Bernard before. I have a dog type. They're like
• 12:18
  in the same, they're similar type, but they're black. They're usually all black. They look like
• 12:22
  bears. They seem live, Megan. I live in an apartment in Manhattan. Yeah, that's horrible person.
• 12:29
  I'm a horrible person. Although they probably don't need a lot of exercises. Is that right?
• 12:34
  Not when they're old, not when they're older, right? No, but we're talking about an eight month old puppy.
• 12:39
  But he goes to, we're not recording, are we? He goes to trail camp. He goes to trail camp on the
• 12:46
  mornings. He gets picked up in a van and taken with a pack of dogs to run on trails up state and swim.
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  So, how long does that take? Not long enough. I think he's, I think he's first on the drop off
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  route. So he comes back too early. But this is only, we were, I was on a farm with him. I went away
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  during the pandemic. So I was on a farm with him down south for almost six months. Do you ever,
• 13:10
  do you ever consider asking them to change the route of the van so that he spends more time on the road?
• 13:14
  I did, but I don't want to give myself away. Yeah. Well, that's nice. I remember when I moved to
• 13:20
  Manhattan seeing people walking down the street with like great Danes and thinking, is that,
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  is that, are they trying to project like big dick energy that they've got a large place in a,
• 13:30
  in a, in a, in like the most expensive real estate in the world? Or is it that great Danes actually
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  don't need a lot of, then I found out later, the great Danes actually don't need a lot of space
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  because they just sit there like a lump. So you can be actually pretty good in a small apartment.
• 13:43
  Well, that's true of big dogs generally, but have you noticed the people who have great Danes
• 13:47
  often have two? Yeah. They have a matching pair. Yeah. And also their faces look like great Danes.
• 13:55
  The people's faces. Yes, that's right. So there are three. That's right. In total. Yeah, it's one of those
• 14:00
  like, yeah, sort of like great Danes are like end tables. Yeah. And the person with the bed. Yeah.
• 14:07
  That's exactly right. I think we've solved everything. Well, thank you for being with us. I'm
• 14:11
  interested in talking to you about basically conformism and non-conformism in life across
• 14:17
  a number of metrics. Kids are not having kids, spouses and not having spouses, sex and not having
• 14:24
  sex, gender pride and not having gender pride. And specifically the ways that all of these
• 14:30
  intersect with, with being a woman and what I should know about feminism and womanhood as the
• 14:35
  father of a three year old girl in the same sex relationship with another guy who understands
• 14:40
  nothing of your kind. So explain women to me, Megan. Well, you really prepare for your interviews.
• 14:46
  Really thought that through. Some across metrics. What did you say across metrics? Across various,
• 14:55
  I may have said metrics. I may have used some other jargon. I think you want to say at the
• 15:00
  intersections of at the intersection of various phenomena. That's the jargon now. Yeah, intersectionality
• 15:06
  is very big. We can get into intersectionality if you have, because you're not just a woman,
• 15:11
  Megan. You're a female American. You're a disabled person or sorry person living with disabilities.
• 15:17
  That goes without the thing. Yeah. One of them's here right next to me chewing on a bone. So
• 15:22
  there you go. One of your disabilities? My disability is my dog. Right. Okay. You have the dog itself
• 15:28
  is a disability. So if you need the service dog to help you with it. Have they changed the rules
• 15:34
  about service dogs on planes in the United States? I must say that's one thing that a non-American
• 15:38
  notices when flying domestically. Well, apart from the fact that the whole thing is just like being
• 15:42
  in Auschwitz, but that people are bringing many, many pets on, unnecessary numbers of pets on
• 15:48
  planes. I think they keep threatening to change the rules. The thing is they're not legally
• 15:53
  allowed to ask what your disability is because of the Americans with disabilities act. I believe it's
• 15:58
  under that or one of those kinds of statutes. So they can't ask you. So if you show up and say this
• 16:02
  is my service dog, they're actually not allowed to question you. Yeah. I know. I was on a flight.
• 16:07
  I think it was like around last Thanksgiving. There were probably 12 dogs on a plane. Yeah.
• 16:12
  Yeah. The varying sizes and odors. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, this is another interesting
• 16:19
  thing that I've noticed about America and you know, just as an aside, this will just be a rambling
• 16:23
  conversation. I'm trying to I'm actually trying to think about how to answer your question.
• 16:27
  Okay. You can stew on that. It's like I've thrown all of the celery and potatoes into the big stew
• 16:33
  and it's just bubbling away. They're simmering and you're going to come out with a fantastical
• 16:38
  ejaculation of genius at some point. Oh wow. A bit for now. Let's just let's just focus on the
• 16:45
  this particular peculiarity of America, which is it's it claims to be a very free and sort of
• 16:52
  there is this sort of strand of kind of frontier libertarianism that runs through America.
• 16:58
  But the respect in which America has opted for bureaucratic style of sort of status
• 17:06
  socialist fascism are among the most bureaucratic and imposing of any place that I've
• 17:14
  of any country that I've ever lived in by which I mean something like the Americans with
• 17:18
  disabilities act. We don't normally think of the United States as being a paragon of support
• 17:24
  for minorities and for people living with disabilities. It tends to pride itself more on a
• 17:29
  free market orientation, a little bit more sink or swim, a little bit more capitalist, a little
• 17:34
  bit more. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, but we're not going to hold you by
• 17:37
  the hand. We're not Denmark. And yet something like the example that you just gave of you know,
• 17:43
  you literally not allowed to ask a person who's getting on a plane with a ferret. What
• 17:48
  why they need a ferret because it says here under rule 173 B subsection K that you have to do
• 17:55
  that. It's like that at like the the post office is seems like you're in the Soviet Union.
• 18:02
  Everything that had you know that I don't understand why to get a driver's license.
• 18:05
  Yeah, when I moved to the States, I was like why does everyone keep joking about the department
• 18:10
  of motor vehicles? Because in my state in Australia, you need your license, you go in, you take a
• 18:15
  number, you wait for seven minutes, someone calls you and then you're out and it's 20 minutes
• 18:18
  later and you've done your thing. And everyone was like, oh my god, it's a nightmare. And I kept
• 18:22
  saying, but why? Like why? Why don't they just hire more people? Like if everyone knows that this
• 18:26
  is a problem and it's been this way for decades, you can see stand up comics in the 1980s talking
• 18:31
  about how terrible it is to get a license. Like hasn't anyone thought, well maybe we should just
• 18:36
  either fire everyone who works at the DMV and just hire a whole bunch of new people or retrain
• 18:41
  them or hire more people. Right. Anyway, that's just my, my little, I don't know. I don't know.
• 18:45
  I don't know because there's this constant push and pull between big government and small government.
• 18:50
  So there are big government in place. Well, that's, you sound like a Republican now.
• 18:56
  Yeah, I do, don't I? But I don't want, but I, but I just want government that works. I mean,
• 19:02
  it reminds me of Al Franken's line that Republicans say that government doesn't work and then they
• 19:06
  get into power and prove it. Right. I mean, you know what I, yeah, actually this does fold
• 19:12
  into your, your, your, your enormous opening question. Like I am somebody who is, I feel I'm
• 19:19
  really a big supporter of the idea of universal daycare, right? Even though I don't have kids,
• 19:24
  I think that's really, really important. But then you imagine like if there was government,
• 19:29
  sort of sponsored or subsidized daycare, like it would be like taking your kid to the post office
• 19:34
  or the DMV every day and dropping them off and leaving it. This is why I think a lot of Americans
• 19:39
  are worried about like providing health care to everybody as well. Because if you did it the
• 19:43
  British way where the government literally runs hospitals and like it's actually a government
• 19:47
  department, I mean, it's bad enough in the UK. Can you imagine how bad it would be if the United
• 19:52
  States government tried to run, actually run health care. But that's a, a false choice because most,
• 19:57
  most mixed economies that have high standards of living like Australia and Germany and places
• 20:02
  like that have the private sector actually run the stuff and the government just picks up the
• 20:06
  tab. Is that how it would work here? I don't know. I really don't know. Okay.
• 20:12
  Anyway, now, now I've spoken enough. What are your, what are your exact locations of insights, Megan?
• 20:18
  What is it like to be a woman? You want me to ejaculate some insights about being a woman?
• 20:23
  Is that what you're asking? Maybe, maybe I misspoke earlier. I should cut that bit out of the
• 20:27
  podcast. Just talk about great Danes and St. Bernard's the whole time. Well, yeah, but then you
• 20:33
  still can't get that one of the things that's interesting. Just forget about that. We're not
• 20:40
  going to be where there's, there's nothing that was a metaphor. I misspoke. In 15 years, I'll
• 20:47
  probably be canceled for it for that. Maybe, maybe. Also, this whole conversation is
• 20:54
  suffused with the assumption that only men have penises because that's the, we're gendering
• 20:59
  ejaculation here, but maybe there are trans women who are ejaculating all over the place,
• 21:05
  just listening to this conversation. I apologize for that, that mental image. You get only hope.
• 21:11
  You can only hope. That's the number one iTunes rating that I review that I want. Love the show
• 21:17
  so much. Came all over my trans boobs. Megan, one of the interesting things about your writing is
• 21:24
  your conflictedness about feminism. No, I'm conflicted about everything. Let's start with feminism,
• 21:32
  because I think it's an interesting take and it's one that I can't really access, at least from
• 21:38
  a personal, from the point of view of personal experience, where should we begin? Well, I guess we
• 21:44
  can begin in the 1970s. Part of the way I think about this stuff, I grew up in the, I was born
• 21:54
  in 1970, so I was a little girl in the 70s. I was a teenager in the 80s, and I had a second wave
• 22:00
  feminist mother. I remember her being devastated when the equal rights amendment was dead in the water
• 22:08
  finally was 1982, but I never had a sense of myself as a girl as anything, but equal to boys,
• 22:16
  actually, like the girls were doing better than the boys. The boys were disruptive in class,
• 22:20
  and by the time I was in college, there were more women going to college and getting secondary
• 22:26
  educations than men. It's even more so that way now. I guess I had this experience of sort of
• 22:33
  going through life, and again, caveat, this is from a privileged perspective, but I think this is
• 22:38
  pretty, you know, much across the board. If you were a woman during that time, you never really
• 22:45
  had any reason to think of yourself as lower than men or of a oppressed class in any way.
• 22:53
  And then fast forward a couple of decades, around 2014 or so, I started noticing that the default
• 23:00
  conversation online, especially about women and feminism, was that we were under the thumb of
• 23:06
  this constantly oppressive patriarchy and just being a woman in the world, you know, paying your
• 23:11
  rent on time and going out the door and getting on the bus and going to work was so difficult that
• 23:17
  you were a badass if you could just achieve this. And there was this whole vocabulary that emerged
• 23:22
  around this ostensible experience of hardship as a woman and triumphant of adversity, you know,
• 23:31
  every step you take down the street. And I just thought it was really at odds with my quote,
• 23:36
  lived experience and actually any sort of reality. So that's when I started to wonder if I was
• 23:42
  missing something or if the world had changed in ways that I hadn't noticed or I wasn't really
• 23:48
  sure what was going on. Did you find it disempowering? I found it, uh, no, I, I mean, I found it confusing.
• 23:56
  I found it alienating because I really always, I had my friends and my peers and we were always
• 24:03
  pretty much on the same page. I mean, I suspect you found this too just in thinking about these
• 24:08
  culture war issues generally. Like we kind of went through life for decades, you know, feeling like
• 24:14
  we all generally saw the same reality and, you know, we might have had small differences about things,
• 24:20
  but I could pretty much assume that my classmates or my colleagues or, you know, my peers,
• 24:27
  you know, overall that we pretty much agreed about most things. And on the stuff that we didn't agree
• 24:33
  on, it really didn't matter. But suddenly, it was like everyone was on board with this idea that
• 24:39
  there was toxic masculinity and that we, you know, that it was okay to constantly beat up on men
• 24:45
  and make fun of men. And it just seemed to me, um, what was disempowering was, was assuming that
• 24:52
  men had so much power over you. Right. That you could, that you could make fun of them, uh, you know,
• 24:57
  with, with, with impunity. Um, and that to me is actually quite disempowering and that makes me
• 25:03
  kind of angry. Yeah, I think that, I think that's a good point because the, the men in my life who
• 25:08
  have been so emasculated that they would find what you're saying offensive, uh, who will constantly
• 25:13
  make jokes themselves about their own male privilege and, you know, we'll be, we'll be cowered
• 25:19
  into not talking over someone in a boy's dress conversation. If that person is a woman because
• 25:24
  that for fear of being accused of mansplaining, where they would speak exactly the same way to a man
• 25:29
  and they'd have this sort of double standard people who are playing that game of sort of feeling
• 25:34
  guilty for their masculinity will, will often cast it as, well, you know, we've had our turn for
• 25:39
  thousands of years. And so now it's the girls turn to, you know, to be able to lord it over us
• 25:44
  as if the only downside to this idea of female fragility is one that's imposed on men that now men
• 25:51
  are going to have to endure not having to talk over everybody. But that's not the downside. I see,
• 25:55
  I'm fine with not talking over anyone if they don't want me to. The downside is I, I want the women
• 26:01
  in my life and the girls in my life to feel like they're just as capable of telling a guy to
• 26:06
  shut up as a guy is of telling a guy to shut up and that they don't need to be concerted and
• 26:10
  protected and patronized to and and pandered to. That's what bothers me about it, not the impact on men.
• 26:17
  Yeah, it's actually dehumanizing. So one of the things I think about a lot and I write about this
• 26:21
  in my book is, you know, there's this premise of punching up versus punching down. So this comes
• 26:26
  from comedy, right? I'm sure you notice. So like you're allowed to make fun of somebody or tell
• 26:31
  jokes about somebody if they have more power than you do. If they're a celebrity, if they're a
• 26:36
  political figure, if they're a rich person, whatever it is, then you can, you can, you know,
• 26:42
  you can razz them and beat up on them and make fun of them. Okay. So we have now this sort of,
• 26:48
  this kind of pretense in popular and cultural discourse that it's okay for women to complain
• 26:56
  about men or make fun of them or say that they're fragile or talk about male tears and just have
• 27:03
  this kind of, you know, these memes that are just like constantly sustaining this joke of what
• 27:10
  losers men are. And to me, that would then imply that you are punching up. Like it's okay to do
• 27:18
  this because you're punching up and that therefore you're assuming that men have more power. Like
• 27:22
  you're putting them on a pedestal. You're handing them power that they didn't necessarily have.
• 27:27
  And frankly, they probably don't have because other than the, you know, certain
• 27:32
  captains of industry and a very small, you know, sliver of people running Silicon Valley and
• 27:38
  running Fortune 500 companies, you know, put those guys aside, the vast majority of men in the world,
• 27:47
  in the US, certainly, in the US, in the West, let's say, the vast majority of men are not doing
• 27:56
  nearly as well as most women. They're not attaining the same education level. They're not,
• 28:02
  for instance, like buying their own real estate. I always think that the home ownership is an
• 28:07
  interesting metric. I know you like that word. If you don't find a way to insert metric into the
• 28:15
  conversation, at least every 90 seconds, the interview is over. No, it's good. It's immediately
• 28:20
  elevates the discussion. Thank you. It's like the bus in a speed. You have to keep up a certain
• 28:24
  pace of dropping intellectual pseudo jargon into the conversation. Otherwise, we don't know it's
• 28:31
  good. I also like to say flashpoint. Oh, that's good. You're a good one too. Yeah. But yeah,
• 28:37
  like, I just, it seems to me so counterintuitive. Like, why would the more women make fun of men,
• 28:43
  the more they are just, you know, sending the message that we assume that men are more powerful
• 28:48
  than we are. What would happen if we laughed at them? What would happen if we ignored them?
• 28:52
  What if we rolled our eyes? And, you know, that's sort of what we did in the 80s and the 90s.
• 28:59
  And I don't know what happened to that. I think social media came in and changed things.
• 29:03
  Well, I mean, what about the argument that I can imagine some, some women's activists making
• 29:10
  in my head along that metric that they would say, well, yeah, in the 70s and 80s, maybe rhetorically,
• 29:17
  we weren't quite so upset. And I'm sorry that our upsetness is upsetting you, Megan. But we also
• 29:22
  still don't have the political representation that men have. We still don't have the representation
• 29:27
  on Fortune 500 boards and so on that men have. So there's a lot to be angry about. It didn't work
• 29:32
  to just roll our eyes. Yeah, there's a lot to be angry about. But my question is, okay, what do you
• 29:38
  do with the anger? What do you do after that? It just, I feel like there needs to be, you know,
• 29:45
  if you want to be, if you want to run a Fortune 500 company, then we need to have some serious
• 29:50
  conversations about why there aren't more women in those roles and what could be done to have more
• 29:58
  women coming up through the pipeline. I mean, at the end of the day, now this is where people start
• 30:02
  to get mad at me. Female biology is really hindering. It hampers us. The fact that women
• 30:12
  have are the ones that have to gestate and lactate and raise small children, that by definition is
• 30:19
  going to make it difficult for them to rise in a capitalist system. But it may not be nearly as
• 30:26
  difficult as it is, for example, if the, if the care for young children was shared between the sexes,
• 30:32
  or is that not desirable? Well, it's desirable, but is it really, is it really possible? I mean,
• 30:38
  the woman can, can a father, I mean, this is, I'm just posing this as a thought experiment. Obviously,
• 30:44
  there are, there are parent partnerships that are about as equal as you can get. But at the end of
• 30:51
  the day, the father can't stay home and breastfeed. And so the woman is going to lose time in the
• 30:59
  workforce. As long as we have a workforce structure the way it is, women, and they're going to have
• 31:04
  to do it. But if you have two kids, you're going to have to take time out twice, three kids, it goes on
• 31:09
  and on. So I just, and I'm not saying this is okay, but I'm saying in order to try to fix it,
• 31:14
  and I don't think it will ever be totally made equal, but in order to try to get there, we need to
• 31:20
  actually admit, okay, women are held back in this way. There are difference between the sexes.
• 31:25
  And there are, and women tend to make choices about their careers that, that reflect their desire
• 31:33
  or their need to have a more flexible work schedule. Right, but like the five years or eight
• 31:40
  years that women on average lose out of the workforce doesn't need to be, I mean, it needs to be,
• 31:44
  it needs to be the final three months of the pregnancy or two months or whatever it is, or maybe one
• 31:48
  month, I don't even know. I guess you can work right up until the week of if you want to. Yeah,
• 31:52
  that the pregnancy is not the issue afterwards. I mean, you can pump milk and refrigerate it,
• 31:56
  and the husband can heat it up. I mean, I've raised, I'm raising twin toddlers with another guy,
• 32:02
  and we managed, I mean, we get, you know, that they probably got on to formula before they
• 32:06
  should have, but we were able to, we did it. It's conceivable. Like you could have women going back
• 32:12
  to work after one month or something, and only taking a couple months off instead of five years,
• 32:17
  isn't there something structural about the assumptions of who does housework and who does looking
• 32:24
  after the baby that it is structural, but why is it that women, you know, who go to
• 32:32
  go to law school, they're a law partner for certain amount of time, and then they have kids,
• 32:38
  and they leave that level. They, they go and do other kinds of litigation. They're not going to be
• 32:44
  working 80 hour weeks. And is that because somebody is saying, absolutely no, you can't do this,
• 32:50
  no, it's, they're choosing. Now, the questions are they choosing because they, they really have no
• 32:56
  choice. A lot of them actually don't want to work 80 hours a week. And it's a tough thing to admit.
• 33:01
  I mean, this is like, you know, the fact is most people don't want to work 80 hours a week.
• 33:06
  That's right. I mean, all of my friends who, you know, who went into high-flying, high-powered
• 33:11
  jobs because they wanted to be rich are now incredibly miserable, much more miserable than the ones of us
• 33:17
  who chose riskier sort of creative pursuits and thought that we were going to be poor.
• 33:22
  And now the, the rich ones, they still have a lot of money to blow on cocaine and fast cars,
• 33:27
  but they don't have any, they enjoy in life. Yeah. They work too hard.
• 33:32
  The gender wage gap vanishes when you take children out of the equation. Childless women,
• 33:39
  I don't think there's any wage gap at all. I think in fact, they might make a little bit more
• 33:43
  on the dollar than men in the US anyway. Let's talk about that wage gap. I mean, it strikes
• 33:49
  me that, before we get it, it strikes me that you're actually saying two things and you claim to
• 33:54
  be saying that, you claim to be saying that it's controversial to say the uncontroversial one
• 34:00
  actually, but what you're nodding at is the more controversial one. The uncontroversial one that
• 34:04
  you're saying is controversial is that having children impacts on women's ability to attain
• 34:09
  equality, professional equality. But the thing that you're pointing to, which is more controversial,
• 34:16
  is that it's not just a, that's not just a physiological biological problem, that that's
• 34:20
  actually a difference in preferences. And this is a touchier subject, but it is true that
• 34:27
  if you get a thousand females in a room and you tell them that they can choose to spend
• 34:33
  their morning one of two ways, they can either take a part a complicated machine full of widgets
• 34:38
  and then they can put it all back together again, or they can help mediate a conversation
• 34:42
  between several people from a family, from an estranged family who need to reconcile them,
• 34:48
  so, you know, each other, then a majority of women choose the latter. And if you get a thousand
• 34:53
  men in a room, then a majority of them choose the former. So, like, whether that's cultural or not,
• 34:58
  there are differences in the kinds of things we want to do. And this is where I start thinking about,
• 35:02
  well, what does that mean for female participants? Like, do as many women want to be
• 35:07
  Fortune 500 CEOs, do as many women want to be engineers? Maybe they're happy being over
• 35:12
  representatives, nurses and teachers. I don't know. Well, okay, so there's a couple, there's
• 35:18
  several different things going on here. First, the phenomena you just described is a separate
• 35:23
  category from the reproduction child bearing, found bearing category. Yeah, I know, you know that.
• 35:30
  So, just to address what you just said, the fact is that if you look at who comes out of
• 35:37
  engineering programs at MIT, for instance, I think it's like 20% women, 80% men, and so this is why
• 35:44
  Google can't achieve gender equality in terms of their engineer employees, software engineers.
• 35:53
  So, why is that? Is it because women feel discriminated against? Is it because they're, you know,
• 35:59
  they're left out of STEM fields. There have been for decades now initiatives all over
• 36:05
  public education to get girls interested in STEM. And again and again, we're seeing that when given
• 36:12
  the choice, some girls go into STEM and some do engineering and there are absolutely female
• 36:18
  engineers out there, but they tend to be outliers. In the aggregate, most women want to have,
• 36:26
  want to spend their days communicating. They're drawn to people rather than things. And the other
• 36:31
  thing is, you know, Heather Hying talks about this a lot, the evolutionary biologist, women tend to be,
• 36:40
  if they're good at math and science, they also tend to be good at languages, and men who are good
• 36:45
  at math and science on average in the aggregate tend to only be good at math and science. So,
• 36:51
  what happens is women actually have a choice, and they're going to choose one or the other,
• 36:56
  and so there is a likelihood that they're going to choose the humanities or the communication
• 37:02
  piece and not the engineering piece. So, that's why we have this. It's actually because women are
• 37:08
  more competent overall. That's why we have this. Right. And isn't there also some data about the
• 37:13
  extremes being occupied more by men? So, men are overrepresented in, you know, the very,
• 37:21
  very highest and very, very lowest percentiles of IQ and... Intelligent. Yes, there are a lot
• 37:27
  more men in jail, but there are a lot more men winning Nobel prizes. That's right. There are more
• 37:32
  very, very smart men and very, very stupid men, but women actually, I think, on average, are
• 37:38
  slightly have slightly higher IQs than men, sort of in the middle of the tale there. But,
• 37:43
  yeah, men are at the extremes. What do we do with all this? If conversations, if when we start to
• 37:48
  broach it, we sound like we're apologists for the patriarchy. I think we just have to keep saying it.
• 37:56
  Part of the problem is that sometimes the people speaking loudest about this are not speaking about
• 38:04
  it in a very responsible way. Right. I think that smart thoughtful people have to not be afraid to
• 38:09
  talk about it, because these kind of reductionist loud mouths are hijacking the discussion,
• 38:16
  and it's not getting as far away. You mean people who actually do want us to return to a 1950s
• 38:20
  gender role? Some of them do. I don't know. Maybe not maybe not all. I just think, you know,
• 38:27
  again, this, and I often, I often ask myself and others, like, why, when we talk about these
• 38:34
  heterodox thinkers and people willing to have these conversations, these dangerous, uncomfortable
• 38:40
  conversations, why I'm not embracing it. It's a very affectionate tease. It's a metric along
• 38:49
  which I will always defend this show. Why are there so many more men in this space? That's
• 38:57
  another horrible word, right? This, this, this intellectual space. There's, there are a lot
• 39:02
  more men than women, and I think that's because the social penalties for stepping out of your
• 39:10
  peer group or your tribe and talking about things that might upset people, the social penalties are
• 39:15
  high. And again, on average, women are going to be more sensitive and aware of that kind of
• 39:25
  casting out the in-group out-group dynamic that comes into play when people start, you know,
• 39:31
  disagreeing vehemently about these things. Men are more likely to like brush it off or not
• 39:36
  notice it, and women are more likely to kind of take it to heart. You know, it kind of comes down to
• 39:42
  like men are, all men are just like a little bit autistic. It's true. I'm laughing because I am,
• 39:51
  but I am in comparison to other men as well, just a little, a little on the spectrum. I mean,
• 39:55
  I don't mean that to, in a literal way, I've never been diagnosed, but my partner is absolutely
• 40:00
  certain. Like I'm very, I just don't understand why we have to have so many feelings about things.
• 40:05
  Can't we just be a bit more rational? Well, you could just be a libertarian. I think, I think all
• 40:09
  libertarians are autistic. I mean, is that not clear? Right. Yeah, maybe, maybe.
• 40:16
  But sometimes, yeah, no, sometimes I think I'm a little bit autistic. So I, so I'm a sort of,
• 40:24
  I mean, I don't, I don't see myself as like a masculine woman in any way. I don't think anybody
• 40:29
  who knows me would think that even though I do drive a Subaru, but as we know, we've been through
• 40:35
  this on your podcast. As we talked about that, she's, if you want to listen to a long conversation
• 40:41
  about the kinds of vehicles that Megan has chosen to drive in her life, from Volvo's to Subaru's,
• 40:47
  go and listen to my appearance on Megan's show, which is a wonderful podcast called the other
• 40:52
  conversation. Thank you. I was going to say, um, what was I saying? I don't, oh, I don't feel
• 41:00
  masculine. I think I'm a little bit, I think my temperament for whatever reason is such that,
• 41:06
  I'm kind of like, I'm not as into feelings, maybe as some women. Right. But there's something about
• 41:13
  me that's a little bit more, I just can, I'm a little bit, um, a little bit sort of tougher.
• 41:18
  And not, this is not necessarily a good thing. But this is also a majority of Megan in a way
• 41:22
  that I always, I make the same sort of what I think is an era, which is conflating irrational
• 41:29
  feelings with feelings. Like, you do have feelings. You have exactly the same quantity of feelings
• 41:34
  as any other human being, presumably. Like, and I'm sure that I do as well. But what we mean when
• 41:39
  we say that we don't have feelings is that our feelings map, this is a very, very artistic,
• 41:46
  a very artistic thing to say. This is, this is, this is a very mathematical,
• 41:50
  and artistic thing to say, but that they map more accurately onto reality. They map more
• 41:55
  accurately onto my rational understanding of the world. They're not unhinged and untethered
• 42:00
  to the things that matter to me intellectually. So it's not that I have less feelings. It's that I
• 42:06
  don't fly off the handle in directions where the feelings take me far away from what my rational
• 42:12
  brain thinks should be important. Does that make any sense? Or is that nonsense? And you trust that,
• 42:17
  you trust that as, as reality. You, you, you trust that about yourself because it's, I often,
• 42:22
  like, it's like the people who, who don't think they're crazy are the ones that are crazy. Or if,
• 42:27
  if you think you're crazy, then you're not crazy, right? That's the, what the, that's the formula.
• 42:32
  So sometimes I think, like, maybe, okay, am I, am I missing something? Am I not feeling something
• 42:38
  I should feel or, no, I do, I do doubt it, but I think that I think I only doubt it because we're
• 42:43
  being gaslit. You're really knocking them out of the park with the word. We're talking about,
• 42:50
  we're talking about our lived experience right now. That's another horrible cliche if people don't
• 42:56
  get that reference. If you're not online enough to get that reference, it's what, it's what you
• 43:01
  have to say when you're talking about. Well, that's what we used to call anecdotal evidence, by the way.
• 43:04
  Yeah, that's good. You could say that was anecdotal evidence and people say, okay, well, it doesn't
• 43:07
  matter. Let's look at the data. And now if you say, well, that's my lived experience. They go,
• 43:12
  oh, okay, well, yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you said something interesting earlier,
• 43:17
  which was that I can't really, it was something to do with, like, my not being a woman or like,
• 43:25
  you know, I was like, I'm like a little bit like a guy and, you know, because I don't, I can handle
• 43:31
  people, people being mad at me. Like, my entire career, I have had, like, angry letters to the
• 43:37
  editor and people sort of being angry with me and pleased with me in equal measure. And so, I
• 43:44
  just, for some reason, I can stomach it. But it's interesting because I hate when people are
• 43:50
  mad at me in real life. Like, I live for some stuff like not being my fault. And so it's, yeah,
• 43:57
  that's strange. I almost court controversy in my professional life. And I will do anything to
• 44:02
  avoid confrontation in my personal life. Interesting. But let's just, I want to get there as well,
• 44:08
  because I want to talk about family and stuff like that. But let's just stay on lived experience,
• 44:11
  because I was just trying to remember what, so what it was that pinged in my brain when you said
• 44:15
  that was that the only experience I have as to whether or not we are exaggerating the extent to
• 44:21
  which we feel oppressed as minorities is along the metric, along the metric of being gay,
• 44:29
  which is the only minority status that I can, that's the only card I've got in my, and I can say
• 44:38
  that when the LGBTQI STUV, WXYZ community speaks on my behalf, I often don't hear anything that
• 44:47
  I understand. Again, or at all, a caveat about being a privileged white male and so on and living
• 44:53
  in a, in a, a tolerance society. But I don't feel it on a daily basis. There's any impediment.
• 45:00
  If anything, I think there's probably a slight upside because it makes me a little bit more
• 45:04
  interesting. And so, you know, it sort of ticks a diversity, a diversity box in people's,
• 45:09
  people's minds. Yeah. And so when I hear accounts of what it's like to be a person of color or to be
• 45:18
  a woman, I, there is a certain amount of skepticism in my mind when claims are made that it is a daily
• 45:28
  burden. Right. Just by analogy, because I hear people say that it's a daily burden to be gay,
• 45:35
  and it's not. Now, there are ways in which it's uncomfortable, but it's, it does not keep
• 45:42
  popping up. And it certainly doesn't just, it doesn't strike me that my female friends and
• 45:46
  colleagues are enduring a daily burden of being a woman. Now, that, there might be these big
• 45:53
  structural things going on that are impeding them in certain ways. But I, in the circles that
• 45:59
  I swim in, you are much likely to get promoted and to have, have opportunities provided to you
• 46:07
  because everyone is being conscious of diversity at the moment. It's a conversation constantly.
• 46:12
  In every production meeting, we're always thinking about diversity. We're always thinking about
• 46:17
  sex. I mean, at the organization I work in, there are literally charts and spreadsheets that you
• 46:21
  have to fill out charting every single guest who's on every single show, making sure that there is,
• 46:26
  that you're meeting diversity quotas. But that's only in the last few years. Of course. Of course.
• 46:31
  In fairness, people are talking about structural discrimination that's been going on for, for decades.
• 46:37
  So, you know, we're normal. There's, there's an over correction. Yeah, there's an over correction
• 46:43
  right now. But I don't, I sometimes like, okay, I say being a woman, yes, to be, it's an, it's an
• 46:49
  advantage. Like I was, I was an opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times for over a decade. And I
• 46:56
  know that I was able, they gave me that column in part because they needed a chick columnist, you know.
• 47:04
  And I, I was happy to do that. So, uh, so I guess it, it, it works for me. But I also like,
• 47:15
  I've never had, I'm really lucky. I've never had anything terrible happened to me. I've never
• 47:20
  been assaulted. I've never been like physically harmed in any way because I was a woman. So,
• 47:28
  you know, I am coming from a place of, uh, I've had good luck and I've had, you know, I've had
• 47:35
  the, I was able to make good choices and, and all that stuff. So, uh, I can see like, if you are a
• 47:41
  girl and you grew up in a family where you have a tyrannical showvinistic sexist father who says,
• 47:47
  you can't go to college and your brother's going to go to college. Yes. You, you would feel that way.
• 47:52
  Yes. And the same would be true of a tyrannical father who said, you know, who was nasty along any
• 47:57
  weight for it metric. Uh, regardless of whether or not you were a gay kid who was trying to come out,
• 48:03
  or whether or not you weren't as good at sports as he wanted you to be, or maybe he was, you know,
• 48:07
  he was a showvinist towards his own culture because he's a first generation migrant and wants you to
• 48:12
  be religious and you don't want to be religious. There are kinds of ways in which people can be ourselves.
• 48:16
  Right. But, you know, so, but what we have now is the most privileged women in the history of
• 48:23
  civilization, uh, deciding that it's never been a worst time to be a woman. I mean, I couldn't
• 48:30
  believe it. Like, JK Rowling, you know, she made, she wrote her statement, uh, about, you know, she
• 48:37
  was defending herself after being canceled, like, you know, this last time. And I, you know,
• 48:41
  I don't want to, it's what I'm about to say has nothing to do with her. Can you just give people
• 48:45
  a background to that if they somehow miss it? JK Rowling is, I think she's the author of the Harry Potter
• 48:51
  books. Is that what she, yes, the author of Harry Potter. And I love that there was even uncertainty
• 48:56
  about that. She's the most famous and successful woman in the world, Megan. Yes. Okay. You mean,
• 49:01
  it's not Dan Brown. It's not Dan Brown anymore. Oh, he's so 2011. Look, I'm so 2011. You know,
• 49:09
  what I am so 1997. It's so is Dan Brown actually probably. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So, okay. So,
• 49:15
  so JK Rowling has become a controversial because she's like, uh, a feminist and she criticizes
• 49:24
  the trans, you know, certain kind of trans activism that sees, uh, biological sex as a construct
• 49:32
  and she wants to protect women's spaces. Anyway, she's become an enemy of the trans community.
• 49:39
  And she wrote a statement really all I'm saying is she wrote a statement addressing this,
• 49:44
  sort of fairly recently. And she talked about the difficulty of being a woman and she said,
• 49:50
  I have never in my life, I have never seen, uh, a worst time for women or a more terrible time
• 49:57
  for women. And I'm thinking what? But I, I, what she meant was that in her lifetime,
• 50:04
  which is probably roughly the same as my lifetime in terms of years, maybe a little more. She,
• 50:11
  it's, we've never seen such ubiquitous pornography. We've never seen women's bodies, uh, being
• 50:21
  sort of exploited and constantly, uh, on view in this particular way because of social media.
• 50:27
  That is true. That is definitely true. Um, but that is not the same as it's never been a worst time
• 50:34
  for women. That's a separate issue. Right. It's, it's never been a better time to be a woman,
• 50:39
  honestly. Like, would you like to go back to, uh, any, any point, you know, 78 or like, you know,
• 50:48
  1971, like, you, uh, it's really, um, let's, let's put this in perspective. So, you know,
• 50:55
  obviously, yes, there's, there's work to be done, but you can't, um, even get to it if you don't
• 51:02
  accept reality. And there just seems, it's, it's really turned into this like fashion to, to complain
• 51:07
  about, about men. And it's a joke, but it's like, not a joke. I think it's really, I think it
• 51:11
  ships away at, at, at our credibility and our dignity as women, frankly, Louis CK used to have
• 51:17
  a bit where he would turn this on its head by saying, uh, you know, he, he, he feels really bad
• 51:23
  about it, but it is awesome being a white guy because if he got it in a time machine, he could go
• 51:28
  literally anywhere at any time and he would be, they would love him. He'd be, it'd be great.
• 51:33
  But like, if you're a black guy or a woman, you can't, like, you can't even go back, you know,
• 51:38
  more than 30 years. Yeah, there's a cutoff point for all of us. Yeah, that's true. Yeah.
• 51:45
  Before we leave that question about pornography and sexual violence, um, it would be easy not to
• 51:51
  wait into these waters, but it is called uncomfortable conversations. So allow me to get a little
• 51:56
  bit uncomfortable. Um, this is, this is one of those things that I find really difficult because
• 52:03
  it's something that potentially affects all women. And so it gets framed as a gender thing,
• 52:10
  which on one level obviously it is, but it's something that is entirely perpetrated by a very
• 52:17
  small minority of men. Predators. Basically, like the overwhelming, overwhelming majority of
• 52:24
  sexual violence is undertaken by a small group of men who, as far as I can tell, are completely
• 52:32
  ostracized by, again, maybe I'm living in a very progressive, like sensitive new age guy kind
• 52:37
  of community, but every single guy I know, roundly, I mean, would never even think of doing
• 52:44
  something like this, unless they're psychopaths and they're doing it secretly behind the scenes.
• 52:48
  But I mean, I talk to them in private, I talk to them in unguarded moments. We, we, you know,
• 52:52
  share ourselves and we're all committed to respecting all people regardless of their sex. I mean,
• 53:00
  and this is one of the weird things that when, like, when Trump's pussy tape came out,
• 53:04
  and there was all this conversation about, oh, it's just sort of locker room talk. This is the way
• 53:08
  guys took it. I've never heard it. Like, I've never heard that's not how men, honestly, that's not
• 53:13
  how we talk. Like, I've never, I've never spoken that way. I know there are some people who talk that
• 53:18
  way. I've never heard a friend talk that way. That's a very, very particular thing. And here's the
• 53:24
  thing with that. It's not locker room talk. It's shock, jock talk. If you listen to Howard Stern,
• 53:31
  if you listen to certain kind of morning radio, that's, that's the vernacular. Like, that's where
• 53:39
  that is coming from. I thought that pussy thing was such a red herring. I didn't care about that.
• 53:45
  Like, I was happy about it because I thought it would be like the thing that got Trump to go away.
• 53:50
  Of course, like, every new thing that comes out like, this is going to be it, you know.
• 53:55
  He's like a zombie who just keeps coming towards you as you fire the gun.
• 53:59
  Yeah, the, the reaction to that. And you see this again and again, it just, it feels off to me.
• 54:04
  Like, it feels, I'm not even going to say intellectually dishonest because I think that the people
• 54:09
  who were reacting to it were doing so sincerely. And see, this again, then this takes me back to
• 54:15
  I might just like not thinking like a regular woman. Like, why am I, why am I hearing this differently?
• 54:21
  Is it because like I was a big Howard Stern listener for a long time? And I just sort of know where
• 54:27
  that this was not set on the Howard Stern show just to be clear. But just that sort of
• 54:33
  that that mode, it is its own thing. And I don't particularly like it. It's not very interesting
• 54:42
  at all, but it's not, I just think it's not, it's, it doesn't affect us. It's not reality. Like,
• 54:51
  let's get upset about real things and not pretend that the outrage felt a little manufacture.
• 54:58
  Yeah. A little. Yeah. Yeah. And it's always couched in, I mean, we even hear it now before the
• 55:05
  the election. Like, what will we tell our daughters? What will we tell our daughters if we elect
• 55:11
  this man to be? And like, I mean, it reminds me a little bit, it reminds me a little bit of like,
• 55:16
  when I've been traveling in conservative countries, like I had a friend in Cuba when we were traveling
• 55:21
  around there who didn't realize that I was married to a guy. And we were talking about
• 55:26
  gays and he was like, he was being really homophobic and talking about how disgusting it was. He was
• 55:30
  like, you know, mentioned being able to kiss in the street because he's like, what do I tell my son?
• 55:34
  And I was like, Oh, I've heard this before. I've heard this before. Actually, the homophobes
• 55:39
  refrain is the same as the feminist refrain in a different form here. It's this kind of overly precious
• 55:46
  puritanical attitude towards it. It's paternalists. It's paternalists. Yeah. What do you mean?
• 55:51
  What do you tell your son or your daughter? Like you just say the world is complicated and some
• 55:55
  people are ourselves and some people love different people. I don't know. Right. Now they hate it when
• 56:00
  the conservatives say things like we should cherish our daughters. I'm the father of daughters
• 56:06
  as the father of daughters. They hate that. But then it's always like, what will I tell my daughter
• 56:11
  about Hillary's defeat? It's like, so it's the horseshoe theory. It's a perfect example of that.
• 56:17
  Like, you know, these extremes, they just, they come around and they, they meet at the ends. So,
• 56:24
  yeah, I don't know. This, you know, I also, like, I think a lot about this idea of if there's
• 56:28
  going to be toxic masculinity, then we have to acknowledge that there's toxic femininity.
• 56:33
  Like, everyone can be an asshole where all it's equal opportunity to be a complete jerk,
• 56:38
  to conduct yourself in a manipulative, emotionally abusive way, if that's your thing. And frankly,
• 56:46
  women are much better at emotional abuse than men are. I mean, we're much better gas lighters,
• 56:50
  if you want to go back to that. Well, you must. Yes, I do think women tend to be much smarter about
• 56:54
  how to manipulate people emotionally than men do. Men just come barging straight in the front door.
• 56:59
  Right. And they're very easy to handle because of that. Yeah. Not physically, obviously,
• 57:03
  to be sure that's a different thing. But yeah, men are just very simple. See, this is the thing.
• 57:07
  I think that, you know, we talk about power and men have all this power and yes, physically,
• 57:12
  and structurally, historically, and, you know, within the economic system. Yes. But within any given
• 57:19
  relationship, the power is constantly going back and forth. So to just assume that
• 57:26
  in any kind of exchange, if it's a sexual encounter, whatever it is, that the man has all the power
• 57:31
  by default, that is just really simplistic and sexist, right? What do you make of power
• 57:38
  differentials between, you know, at the old rich guy and the young woman dangling off his,
• 57:45
  I sometimes sort of, I like, I don't quite know what to make about whether I should think that
• 57:50
  that is sexist. Uh, I know. I think about this more and more, the older I get, because I noticed that
• 57:56
  could you become a coup? No, no, but I, you know, I noticed that like,
• 58:02
  men, my own age, they, they get older and their girlfriends get younger sometimes. Yeah.
• 58:06
  Um, but that's a little bit different than what you're referring to, the sort of gold digger
• 58:10
  dynamic. I mean, I just think I'm, so I like, I have on one morning, I could get up and I could
• 58:16
  think, you know what, there's nothing wrong with fat old rich men dating like 25-year-old beautiful
• 58:25
  girls, if they, if they're both getting something out of it, because you bring to the relationship
• 58:30
  whatever cards you have in your, you have to play. And if what you have to play is I'm rich and
• 58:36
  powerful, then you play that card. And if on the other hand, as a 25-year-old woman, you get to play
• 58:42
  the, I'm sexy and I want to have lots of fancy nights out at fancy clubs and bottle service and yachts
• 58:49
  and this guy can do it for me, then I play that card. And it's sort of condescending to regard
• 58:53
  anyone as better or worse. But then I could wake up on another day and think that's foolishly sort
• 58:58
  of libertarian and in reality, we live in a world where power and wealth are accumulated
• 59:03
  among fat men. So of course, younger women have to degrade themselves in order to acquire some
• 59:10
  of it. And I don't know which to believe. Well, I think both can be true. With really anything
• 59:17
  like this, there, you know, there's not two sides to the story. There's like three or four or
• 59:21
  five. There's, there's lots of different ways into this. So a 25-year-old woman in a certain way
• 59:29
  has more power than say a 55-year-old man, because she has, she's has youth. I mean, for women,
• 59:37
  youth is the ultimate currency, right? And I guess for men, money and status would be. I'm talking
• 59:43
  in the most basic, just primal terms here. So people don't, don't write in and yell at me. But you
• 59:50
  know, one of the things I think about like, you know, so when I was, I was actually just talking
• 59:54
  about this with a guest on my podcast, the sort of mentor, mentee relationship, right? So when I was
• 1:00:00
  in my 20s, I sometimes had older, more established men kind of take me under their wing,
• 1:00:08
  give me career advice, whatever. And it wasn't nothing ever crossed the line. There was nothing
• 1:00:14
  inappropriate. I mean, probably if I had let there be, that might have come into the picture. But
• 1:00:19
  just to be clear, it was, you know, pretty, pretty straightforward. But I often wondered like,
• 1:00:25
  so are the 25-year-old men that I know who are aspiring in this field,
• 1:00:31
  getting the same sort of mentorship? Like, are they having an older guy, you know, sort of like,
• 1:00:35
  oh, come along, I'll, you know, I'm gonna, you know, you're the, you're the son I never had. Like,
• 1:00:40
  is that the dynamic? Because I don't think they're necessarily being mentored by like, you know,
• 1:00:45
  Mrs. Robinson or something like that, you don't see. So is it like women have this advantage when
• 1:00:51
  they're young of being able to kind of reap the benefits of an older man, whether it be wisdom
• 1:00:58
  or opportunities or money or whatever it is? And then sort of when they get older, they've spent
• 1:01:05
  their currency and then men, you know, they, when they get older, they have it. I don't know,
• 1:01:09
  because young, you know, a 25-year-old man really doesn't have a lack going for him. And a 25-year-old
• 1:01:14
  woman has certain advantages that she won't have in 20 years. So interestingly, you say that
• 1:01:22
  about, yeah, about the mentorship role that can, because there are two people who I know,
• 1:01:29
  who I know to have mentored a lot of young men, one of whom was a mentor to me who was my first
• 1:01:37
  boss in radio. And that was because, that was half because he had the hots for me. I mean,
• 1:01:42
  mostly intellectually, I think, but, you know, also elsewhere. And another one is Kevin Spacey,
• 1:01:50
  who was renowned as being a half predator and half really useful mentor who took a lot of
• 1:01:57
  care and attention on young aspiring actors, careers, and lives when he was running, was it the
• 1:02:02
  old vehicle or whatever theater he run in, ran in London? He would surround himself with beautiful
• 1:02:08
  actors and coach them and, you know, stay up late at night drinking wine with them and so on.
• 1:02:13
  And so it's interesting that you say that because they've got two examples of gay mentors who
• 1:02:18
  probably overstepped boundaries, well certainly in the case of Kevin Spacey, but who may also have
• 1:02:24
  done some sort of good in the conventional mold of the of the mentor. But we're also saying that
• 1:02:30
  it's men who do this. In both cases, you know, women are not going to kind of use sexual,
• 1:02:41
  I don't want to say coercion, but kind of they're not going to use that as a leverage. I mean,
• 1:02:49
  there obviously are exceptions, but like I think generally this is a move that you see men do.
• 1:02:56
  Well, I wonder if it's is there a sort of status thing going on as well where I mean, this might
• 1:03:01
  not apply in the gay scenarios that I just articulated, but maybe in the straight ones that there's
• 1:03:07
  is that that the young woman is a kind of currency. So, you know, for that that doesn't exist for
• 1:03:14
  for a young man with an older woman that bit just being seen at the fancy restaurants in Manhattan.
• 1:03:19
  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's absolutely. Yes, you can, yeah, it's a way of,
• 1:03:25
  it's a, I mean, they don't call it trophy wives for nothing. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that's true.
• 1:03:32
  Megan, you said a few moments ago, youth is the ultimate currency. If youth is the ultimate currency,
• 1:03:37
  how do you? It can be. I mean, let's in the most basic sense. Yeah. How do you feel about aging?
• 1:03:46
  I think about it a lot. I don't like it. I was all I was like one of these
• 1:03:51
  precocious people, like when I was starting out, I mean, I had sort of success in my writing career
• 1:03:58
  pretty early and I was always like the youngest person in the room and you know, people be like,
• 1:04:04
  oh, I can't believe how young you are. And so I always, and I would have like older boyfriends,
• 1:04:08
  like not like super older, but you know, like I was in my 20s, I would, you know, I didn't go out
• 1:04:15
  with all that many guys who were also in their 20s. I mean, you know, we're talking, I dated people
• 1:04:22
  in their 30s. That's not just to be clear. But, you know, I, so I always, like my, my image of
• 1:04:30
  myself is still of a young person. Like I, I'm, I'm kind of like sort of like, oh, I'm just like,
• 1:04:37
  you know, I'm just a scrappy. I'm just gonna make it. Like I'm still trying to make it. And,
• 1:04:42
  you know, it's funny. Like I used to, it dawned on me the other day. I had to beg for help from,
• 1:04:48
  like a 35 year old, for like some tech, like some technical help, some like social media web stuff.
• 1:04:53
  I was trying to do. And I thought, God, you know, when was the, when was the turning point? It used
• 1:04:59
  to be that when I was seeking advice, like 10 times out of 10, it was from somebody older, right?
• 1:05:06
  Somebody older and wiser. And now it's almost always from somebody younger. Like how would,
• 1:05:11
  even even a kind of career thing, like, like setting up the podcast. Like I, you know, I got this
• 1:05:17
  podcast going seriously. I mean, I sought so much advice because I'm doing it totally on my own.
• 1:05:21
  And I was really at sea. And I asked people just, you know, everyone I could think of. And I'd
• 1:05:26
  say most of them were younger than me. Yeah. And then the, even the, even the ones who are younger
• 1:05:30
  than you who are 35, they're like, oh, I know this great 19 year old.
• 1:05:34
  Well, that's what you need. I mean, yes, I would a 19 year old, like in-house technical support
• 1:05:42
  person would be great. We were talking earlier about lived experience and how like you were saying,
• 1:05:48
  like that used to just be called like anecdotes that you could ignore. And it got a little evidence.
• 1:05:52
  Yes, anecdotal evidence. Lems the at best. Yeah. And, and being a bit sort of autistic. And it
• 1:05:58
  reminded me of arguments that I get into with my partner who is very woke. And, uh, you know,
• 1:06:05
  I'll, I'll just sort of, you know, we'll have, we'll just have be having what I think is an
• 1:06:10
  intellectual conversation about, you know, the, the, the terrible statistics on policing in the
• 1:06:16
  United States and how many people get injured and accidentally killed by police officers in the
• 1:06:21
  US. And I'll in passing make the, the point when he says that, you know, and, you know, it's
• 1:06:25
  disproportionately people of color. Well, actually, it's not, um, actually proportionally,
• 1:06:29
  it's about that's always greater than dinner parties. You know, if you can just drop that in,
• 1:06:33
  like they'll be talking, they're like, Oh, no, actually, guys, no, no. And even I have, like,
• 1:06:38
  the statistics right here, a lot of people who are listening to this right now will be like,
• 1:06:41
  no, no, why has Josh even saying that they'll be rushing to Google to tap, tap, tap. Um,
• 1:06:45
  but it is true that it's, you know, within the past 10 years or so, they've been able to stabilize
• 1:06:50
  any racial disparities. So it's basically what you would expect now on the basis of what,
• 1:06:56
  of the way that crime is distributed. Um, and he will find that to be not merely a factual
• 1:07:04
  claim, but an emotional attack on here, on people he knows and values that he cherishes. Yeah.
• 1:07:12
  Like there's no way for him to not see it as being a racist, uh, blind side.
• 1:07:18
  And that's sort of what I meant by, like, being a bit autistic where I'm able to compartmentalize
• 1:07:24
  and go, what we're talking about here are data and whether or not it is acquirer or not.
• 1:07:29
  This fact is factually true about the number of fatal encounters that people have with police
• 1:07:34
  offices in the United States. It has nothing to do with my commitment to social justice and
• 1:07:40
  racial equality. Uh, but it does have something to do with that when it's all tangled up. And I,
• 1:07:44
  I worry that this rhetoric about the lived experience, my lived experience as a gay man,
• 1:07:50
  you all lived experience as a woman, the lived, you know, have you actually been a victim of
• 1:07:53
  sexual violence? That's wonderful that you haven't, but in that case, you wouldn't possibly
• 1:07:56
  understand the lived experience of someone who has and I can't understand the lived experience
• 1:08:00
  of an indigenous Australian and I can't that we're just borrowing ourselves down into containers
• 1:08:06
  of our own sort of creation where we're incapable of finding a common ground that we can all
• 1:08:10
  stand on to assess reality and what we need to do about it. Um, so I don't know where that was
• 1:08:15
  going, but I wonder if you want to opine on it. Well, it's the where it's the what we want to do
• 1:08:20
  about it question. I mean, I, because yeah, I hear people say, well, okay, maybe you can show me
• 1:08:26
  the statistics that say that black men are not shot and killed by police, uh, at a significantly
• 1:08:34
  higher rate than white men. Okay, well, maybe you can show that to me, but even if it's that, even
• 1:08:38
  if that's true, why bother? Why bring that up? Why, why is it important to talk about that? It's
• 1:08:44
  obvious that we have such profound structural racism. It's obvious that the experiences of black
• 1:08:50
  people are, you know, like just difficult on a daily moment by moment basis. Why? Why do you have
• 1:08:59
  to like, you know, change the conversation? And that's like, well, let me think about that.
• 1:09:04
  And I guess it's because if you want to try to figure out how to make changes, you need to
• 1:09:14
  establish what is true. So you need to understand what the problem is. I mean, the problem,
• 1:09:19
  well, that's what yeah, yeah, if the if it's a big difference, if the problem is racial bias
• 1:09:25
  amongst American police officers or if the problem is, uh, under training and a propensity
• 1:09:31
  to violence more broadly among police officers. Right. And the war on drugs, I mean,
• 1:09:35
  ignoring the latter if you diagnose it as the former. The idea that you could be asleep in your
• 1:09:41
  bed and a cop would come in and shoot you because of the color of your skin, horrific, horrifying.
• 1:09:47
  If you believe that that's something that happens on anything resembling a regular basis,
• 1:09:52
  of course, you're going to think there's never been a worst time in history. Of course,
• 1:09:55
  you're going to think that that we've, it's never been a more racist time. It's never been a more
• 1:09:59
  violent time. The reality is that it's, there's never been less crime. I mean, maybe less,
• 1:10:04
  less six months, the crime is going up. But, you know, we've never been a healthier society,
• 1:10:10
  we've never been safer. There's never been less violence. But, uh, this is just completely
• 1:10:16
  counter to what a lot of people have established in their minds. You mentioned that you were successful
• 1:10:21
  quite early and you had a wild youth in New York City as a successful writer. Have you ever been
• 1:10:28
  tempted? And so you had good reason to be proud of that. What do you make of that? Oh, I wasn't
• 1:10:32
  proud. I'm not proud of anything. No, I'm constantly self-judgmental. Yeah, I'm very self-loan
• 1:10:38
  things. But anyway, go ahead. I'm just wondering what, what, what makes you, I was going to ask what
• 1:10:42
  makes you proud. But perhaps nothing. But I'm interested in the idea of being proud of things that
• 1:10:47
  you didn't accomplish. This, this came to me, obviously, in relation to gay pride, which I've never
• 1:10:53
  had. I don't really understand what that's supposed to mean. Like, I didn't really choose it. I
• 1:10:58
  mean, and to the extent that I did kind of choose it, because I could have married a woman and sort
• 1:11:04
  of let her reasonably happy life that way. But I happen to find a guy who I really liked to the
• 1:11:09
  extent that I did choose it. Why would that be something to be proud of? Like, I don't think that
• 1:11:12
  it's a better or worse thing than it's sort of like being proud of the like the, the color shoes.
• 1:11:17
  Like, it doesn't even matter whether I chose the shoes or not. It's just sort of irrelevant.
• 1:11:21
  And increasingly, I think we're proud of, like, there's this defiance of like sort of solidarity
• 1:11:28
  along racial lines, along gender lines. And I don't want my daughter to not be proud of being a girl.
• 1:11:36
  But I also don't want to be proud of being a girl. Are you proud of being a woman?
• 1:11:41
  No, I like being a woman. Am I proud of it? Can you really, but it again, this gets to your point.
• 1:11:52
  Is it possible or even reasonable to be proud of an immutable characteristic, an immutable trait?
• 1:11:59
  Right. So, no, the thing is I see myself as a person first. I really, I kind of move through the
• 1:12:08
  world. Like, I'm a person. And, you know, the extent, I'm a woman. And, you know, I think your,
• 1:12:17
  I think your femaleness or your maleness is sort of like, you know, it surges in certain moments.
• 1:12:22
  And then it dissipates. And then you're going back to being a person. You know, when I never,
• 1:12:28
  I rarely feel like, oh, I feel like sort of nude or almost gender neutral when I'm like
• 1:12:33
  speaking in public, like when I'm in front of a microphone or I get in front of an audience and
• 1:12:38
  I can kind of like tell jokes. I mean, I'm not a stand up comedian by any means. But like that,
• 1:12:43
  that moment where you have the audience and they're laughing and you're kind of like there,
• 1:12:48
  that feels very not female. I mean, I've actually written about this. Like, there was the
• 1:12:55
  whole thing when Christopher Hitchens said women aren't funny. And, and you know, here's why I always
• 1:13:01
  thought that that was, I mean, he's totally castigated for that. But I always thought that was sort
• 1:13:06
  of interesting because I do think that women are sometimes reluctant to be funny because there's
• 1:13:12
  something unfeminant about it. Like this idea, like, oh, if you're funny, it must be because
• 1:13:16
  you're ugly or you're making up for not being hot or something like that. And because
• 1:13:23
  of men will use humor, you know, to sort of make up for being nerdy or whatever. Like, have you
• 1:13:28
  noticed that, I mean, like, the, the, the, the, the prom king and queen were not exactly like
• 1:13:34
  the funniest people in the school, right? Like the, like, the popular jock was probably not
• 1:13:40
  a comedian. And so what was I getting yet? Yeah, I think there's something about just sort of
• 1:13:47
  speaking your mind. And again, getting back to this, like, well, I'm not going to get that
• 1:13:52
  upset if people hate me on Twitter. Um, there is something sort of unfeminant about that, I guess.
• 1:14:00
  So I'd be nice if it wasn't though, isn't it? I mean, now we're sort of going back into sort of
• 1:14:04
  stereotypes of female fragility, which I thought the whole point of feminism was, was to reject.
• 1:14:09
  I'm a bit, I'm a bit confused about what, like, modern feminism wants. Like, I'm a huge admirer
• 1:14:16
  of sort of second wave badass feminism. Don't say badass. Don't say bad ass. You know what I'm saying?
• 1:14:21
  Well, no, I hate, I hate that. I was going to call my book, well, my book had many working titles.
• 1:14:27
  One of them was woke me when it's over. But, um, you are not a badass. Actually, you've got a whole
• 1:14:33
  thing in the problem with everything about badassery, don't you? Yeah. That's right. Yeah. It's a
• 1:14:38
  great book. People should, everyone should read the problem with everything, uh, a journey through
• 1:14:42
  the new culture wars and your other books. But that's your mind recently. Thank you. Thank you,
• 1:14:45
  Josh. Yeah. Okay. So not bad. You're right. There's a, but that's weird because the new badass,
• 1:14:53
  like girl power, you go girl kind of thing, is tied. It's corollary is, is a sort of female fragility.
• 1:15:01
  Yeah, because it's about surviving. Right. So it's about surviving your own
• 1:15:05
  femaleness that makes you a badass. I know. It's, it's weird. I guess, um, I, I think that the, the
• 1:15:16
  sort of notion would be, well, the second wave feminists, they were so tough and everything. But
• 1:15:21
  they, they didn't have any choice or they just sort of, you know, they didn't realize how bad it
• 1:15:27
  was or they just had to, you know, they rolled their eyes at these guys because that's what they
• 1:15:30
  had to do. And yeah, there is some of that. There's, there's definitely, you know, I'm definitely
• 1:15:35
  aware of this is something very female about me having to smooth over a situation. If some guys
• 1:15:41
  just being awkward or, you know, embarrassing himself or like, you know, just creepy or
• 1:15:47
  borish in some way, like you're gonna go, ha, ha, ha, like I'm gonna, I'm gonna get out of this
• 1:15:52
  in a graceful way. Like that's, that's very, that's what we should all do, isn't it? Yeah. I don't,
• 1:15:57
  I don't understand this new thing of like, don't they? Don't you just, I mean, if someone,
• 1:16:02
  you're gay, maybe gay guys, maybe, I don't know. If someone makes an inappropriate joke,
• 1:16:10
  don't just roll your eyes and move on, whereas now I feel like we're encouraged to like,
• 1:16:14
  we have to take a stand about everything and we have to go to human resources. If somebody says
• 1:16:18
  something inappropriate and, you know, we have to be given a warning and there's just, there's a lot
• 1:16:24
  of, there's just a lot of umbrage taking. I know, but yeah, I think that that's so much about
• 1:16:30
  social media though. Like there was one, you know, I write about in my book, there was this moment
• 1:16:34
  when I was in my 20s, I lived in an apartment in New York and there were, we always had three
• 1:16:39
  roommates in the apartment and somebody would move out and then we would have to like advertise
• 1:16:43
  for a third roommate. Like we put the, we put a, you know, sign on a telephone pole or something.
• 1:16:49
  And we would have a day where we would, people would come in, like they would come in and we
• 1:16:53
  would sort of audition them to be the roommate. And this guy came in, you know, we would,
• 1:16:58
  he had some men or some women, it didn't matter. And he was, I don't know, he was probably in his
• 1:17:04
  30s. So my, the other roommate and I were probably like 25 or something. And this guy was like,
• 1:17:10
  this kind of kind of loser guy, like older, like he was, you know, the fact that he needed a
• 1:17:15
  rental room and, you know, the apartment, it was like, the rent was like $500. And he said
• 1:17:22
  something like, okay, well, how about, how, would you be open to this? Like, if, you know, if I
• 1:17:29
  lived here, I would, I would buy the food if you girls did the cooking, something like that.
• 1:17:34
  And, and I remember that we couldn't, my roommate and I, we couldn't even make eye contact
• 1:17:41
  because we would have burst out laughing. Like we would have just, we were so embarrassed for him.
• 1:17:47
  And that we just sort of, you know, we're like, oh, you know, okay, whatever. And, um,
• 1:17:51
  and then he left and we just were like, oh my god. And that was hilarious. Now I, okay, that was
• 1:17:56
  probably 1995, 96, something like that. Now, if that had happened 20 years earlier, 30 years
• 1:18:05
  earlier to our mother's second-wave feminists, if that had happened in like 1965 or 2006, I think
• 1:18:13
  that that cohort of women would have not found that so funny because they were closer to real
• 1:18:21
  chauvinism. They were living in the madman world. They were working in those sorts of offices
• 1:18:26
  with guys pinching their asses. That was a real thing to them. So that, they would not have
• 1:18:32
  found that so funny. Fast forward 20 years later, you know, two roommates today having that sort
• 1:18:40
  of situation with a guy. What would they have done? He would have left. They would have run to their
• 1:18:45
  computers and posted something about the experience. And they would have framed it in a certain way.
• 1:18:51
  And oh my gosh, I can't believe this. And like, you know, fuck man and all of this. And they would
• 1:18:57
  have gotten a lot of feedback. And it would have been this dopamine hit and this kind of like echo chamber
• 1:19:04
  of validation and sympathy. And then, and the whole experience would have just become something
• 1:19:10
  much more sort of seemingly terrible than it was. And so I really think that I was sort of in a
• 1:19:17
  sweet spot in terms of my experience of being a woman. Like, we were just able to kind of move
• 1:19:23
  through the world without, you know, with with unprecedented freedoms. And without social media
• 1:19:30
  to distort our experiences. But since social media is becoming the dominant way that most of us
• 1:19:40
  interact with people, is there a way of avoiding an endless slide towards more of that?
• 1:19:48
  I don't know. It's really hard. Because we're just not, our lived experiences are not really
• 1:19:58
  being lived. They're being, they're being sort of typed out or they're being mimified or, you know,
• 1:20:08
  it's like, I just think we're in a pretty, pretty tricky situation. I mean, this comes up with
• 1:20:13
  students all the time. Like, I was like, you know, like, you've got to just take risks. You have to
• 1:20:18
  be honest, you know, you've got to like express original ideas and not be afraid of people hating you
• 1:20:23
  and not be afraid of people piling on you and Twitter. You know, and they say, well, that's easy for
• 1:20:27
  you to say. But, you know, our entire reputation is on the line. If I, somebody says, if I, if my first
• 1:20:33
  published piece ever gets me canceled on Twitter, that's it for me. That I write. I, maybe to some
• 1:20:43
  extent, I guess so. And I just, I just had this great privilege of being able to write controversial
• 1:20:49
  things. And nothing bad happened to me. In fact, like, that got me another assignment. That was the
• 1:20:56
  gig. And the gig now is just telling your audience what they already know and what they want to hear
• 1:21:03
  and doing it again and again. And to me, like, that's not why you become a writer. That's not why you
• 1:21:08
  become a thinker in the world. Like, I didn't get into the business for that. So yeah, it makes me sad.
• 1:21:15
  It's interesting, isn't it? The ruffling feathers used to be an asset. And now it's sort of a
• 1:21:19
  liability. Like, you're only allowed to ruffle feathers in the perfectly prescribed feather ruffling
• 1:21:23
  way at the moment. It's the purpose of ruffling. Yeah. I actually just, I actually just tweeted that
• 1:21:29
  I don't remember a time when we've been so conformist in our idea of what non-conformism is.
• 1:21:36
  Yeah, I know. Well, it's like, yeah, is there even a counterculture anymore, too? Like, is there
• 1:21:44
  is a performative social justice counterculture, which has energized a performative far-right
• 1:21:51
  counterculture, which is sort of, you know, the sort of mildly and opalous kind of, just
• 1:21:56
  shit stirring, Dave Rubin type space, pardon the word space. But there's not a lot of actually
• 1:22:04
  non-conformist people, or actually, because I mean, you'd get canceled. I mean, how do you,
• 1:22:09
  how do you not? Right. Well, and the performative social justice culture has been embraced by
• 1:22:14
  the institution. So therefore, it is not counterculture at all. It's completely mainstream. And then
• 1:22:20
  even people like us, once the biggest tech companies in the world are all firing people for speaking
• 1:22:25
  out against, you know, against their work platforms, you know, that you probably won the
• 1:22:31
  corporate HRs sound like the administration of Oberlin College, I think, I think we know where
• 1:22:37
  we stand. But like, yeah, even people like us who are, you know, wanting to have uncomfortable
• 1:22:41
  conversations, that is also like, we have our silo. I mean, that's the thing. I do worry about
• 1:22:49
  that, and I think about it. And I really, there's no substitute just for kind of being in the world
• 1:22:56
  and talking with people. I mean, it's funny. Like, I live in a very mixed neighborhood. It's not
• 1:23:00
  even that mixed. Like, there's, I live in a Dominican neighborhood. There's all kinds of people,
• 1:23:05
  but the whites are in the minority. There's plenty of black people in my building and my neighbors.
• 1:23:11
  And I talk to people all day, and we have normal interactions and we chat. And like, it's, you
• 1:23:16
  would, it's a totally different world from what's going on on Twitter. Like, it's a different
• 1:23:22
  universe. Yeah. And it's like, why, why have we decided that, that the Twitter universe is reality,
• 1:23:28
  and reality is like, just something that I'm seeing through my lens of privilege. And so,
• 1:23:33
  therefore, I must be missing 95% of it. Sounds like someone should get off Twitter, Megan.
• 1:23:39
  Yeah, but then how am I going to promote my podcast?
• 1:23:41
  Nah, just put it out. Just don't read it back. Just put things out. Just tweet out. Just to do
• 1:23:46
  the Sam Harris and don't look at the replies and the dimensions. I'm glad you mentioned that
• 1:23:50
  we'll wrap up here, but I'm glad you mentioned that mixed that you didn't want to call the
• 1:23:54
  the neighborhood mix because the word diverse has also become, become totally bastardized.
• 1:23:59
  Like, the, I remember reading, I remember the first time I saw it used to mean black.
• 1:24:05
  In that, it was, it was talking about, like, the person is very diverse. They also say that,
• 1:24:10
  like, how can you individually diverse? Well, it was a review of a TV show, which was an
• 1:24:15
  all black cast. And it was said it was what it's wonderful to see a diverse TV show. And I was like,
• 1:24:20
  there has never been a TV show less diverse than this. It's literally the definition of not
• 1:24:24
  being diverse. Every other TV show has at least one token person of color. This has no white
• 1:24:30
  people in it. And you're calling it diverse. What are we even talking about? I know. You know what,
• 1:24:33
  you're also not allowed to say about neighborhoods anymore is that they're safe. So I recently was in
• 1:24:40
  a situation I was describing my neighborhood in some semi-official capacity. And I referred to
• 1:24:47
  it as safe. And I was told, yeah, you know, we don't really use that word anymore in describing
• 1:24:55
  neighborhoods because it's safe is really loaded, you know, for people in marginalized communities.
• 1:25:01
  And also, like, you know, what may feel safe to you is not safe for somebody else. And so we'd
• 1:25:07
  really just like you to rephrase that. What if it's just based on crime statistics? Well,
• 1:25:11
  and actually, but I thought, you know what? Actually, you're right because crime has gone way up in
• 1:25:15
  New York City, you know, in the last six months, thanks to our mayor and others. So in fact,
• 1:25:21
  it's not that safe. Not that safe. Although the people, the people keeping it safe do seem to be
• 1:25:25
  people of color from the Dominican Republic. So maybe, maybe this other person's being racist
• 1:25:30
  by implying that Dominicans can't live in safe neighborhoods. Yeah, I'm sure that I'm sure I'm sure
• 1:25:34
  that the Dominicans and others would really appreciate their neighborhood not being called safe.
• 1:25:39
  Let's wrap up. I want you to give advice to my daughter. If once she's old enough to be able to
• 1:25:45
  think about about being a woman, you've lived through, you've been a powerful, but not bad us,
• 1:25:52
  young creative type in New York City in the, I guess the 80s and 90s. And so you've seen that
• 1:25:58
  evolution. Not the 80s. I was a teenager in the 80s. Okay. Let's be clear about that.
• 1:26:02
  You're still probably conscious and cognizant of the world. As a teenager, I don't know. I was not
• 1:26:08
  very, very conscious, but yeah. Okay. Yes. Anyway. Yes. And you've seen, you've wrestled with the
• 1:26:13
  issue of what it means to be a woman through the, through the prism of, of second wave feminism.
• 1:26:18
  And now you see modern feminism. What would you say to a 12 year old girl today about leading a good
• 1:26:24
  life? Oh my gosh. I guess just try to see yourself as a person. I mean, it's like you're,
• 1:26:35
  I mean, a lot of this gender stuff, I mean, this is a whole other conversation, but it seems to me
• 1:26:39
  like we're constantly constantly sent the message that being female is a liability.
• 1:26:47
  It's a disadvantage. So like it would make sense that then you would like say, well, why,
• 1:26:52
  why should I bother with this? Maybe I can, maybe I can be something else. I guess I would just say,
• 1:26:59
  see yourself on a, have a, have a wide canvas for yourself. Like there's, there's a lot of ways of
• 1:27:06
  being female in the world. You can be a girly girl. You can be a tomboy. You can be like a
• 1:27:12
  bunch lesbian. You can be a Disney princess. Like those are all ways of being female. You can
• 1:27:18
  drive a Subaru and still be like a straight chick. Like you can, you can, there's so many options.
• 1:27:24
  In fact, women have more options. Like we have I think like a wider swath. At least, you know,
• 1:27:30
  when I was growing up, certainly like there were kind of like, you know, three versions of men,
• 1:27:34
  it seemed, and there were like endless versions of being a woman. And so I just felt really lucky
• 1:27:40
  that way. So I guess I would hope that she would see, she would see femaleness as having a very
• 1:27:48
  wide bandwidth. And not such a narrow one as seems to be people's conception of it today.
• 1:27:57
  Megan's award-winning book of original essays is called The Unspeakable and other
• 1:28:01
  subjects of discussion. The Unspeakable is also the title of her wonderful podcast. And your
• 1:28:06
  recent guest was the one on Only Josh Steps wonderful guy. Love that man. The latest book is
• 1:28:11
  the problem with everything. It's excellent. It's an analysis of the new culture wars. Megan,
• 1:28:16
  thanks so much for being on the show. Thank you, Josh. It's my great pleasure.