Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Jessie Stephens joins the Comfy Couch

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Jessie Stephens joins the Comfy Couch · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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G'day, humans! It's a comfy couch convo today, where instead of having a huge uncomfortable
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conversation with an intellect size of Jupiter, I sit down with a friend of mine who may
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also have an intellect, the size of a large, gaseous planet. I'm not saying they don't,
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but I'm just saying it's a forum in which we can explore all kinds of random ideas and
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dive down little rabbit holes that we might normally explore if the episode had a particular theme.
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Today, one of my favorite humans, I wish I could say she was one of my best friends,
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she's not, I'd like it to be, Jessie, can you be a best friend of mine? Okay, good. We'll do that,
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put it in the diary. She is a writer, she's a podcaster, she's the assistant head of content at Mama
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Mia, which if you're not Australian, is a media empire in Australia. She co-hosts Mama Mia Out Loud,
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which is a podcast, she hosts Mama Mia's True Crime Conversations, she hosts Mama Mia's
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book club podcasts. She has written a book called Heart Sick, which is a narrative non-fiction
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book about heartbreak, which we don't talk about, and I suppose we probably should have,
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if I was being a courteous and generous host, which occasionally I'm not. Jessie is a wonderful,
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a wonderful thinker, you'll hear her a couple of times coming up over the next few months as she
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joins us on the comfy couch. Today, we want to talk about Twitter, about cancel culture,
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about Alison Rowland, who apparently Jessie likes, about cultural appropriation, which apparently
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Jessie is rather partial, to look, I'm not going to explain what Jessie likes, she can tell you,
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first self, please enjoy Jessie's team.
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It was a pre-made rap, and then it got toasted, but then it had landed. It got toasted,
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in the passive voice. You had nothing to do with the toasting. No, it was delivered to me
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from the kind of man who works in the cafe downstairs, and I said, ma'am, I have that toasted,
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but I knew that the lettuce looked fresh, and then it was going to go in the toaster, and then
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the lettuce was going to be yucky. You know what's really yucky in a toaster, in a toasted sandwich?
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What? Avocado. It is, it's disgusting. It goes weird. It goes bitter. Yes, into almost like some sort
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of bitter sauce. A bitter sauce. A bitter avocado sauce. Honestly, the things that we deal with.
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Jessie Stevens is here on the comfort couch this week, whining, really complaining. You might
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even say, bitching about lettuce, about wilted lettuce on toasted wraps. Is that the worst thing
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that's going on in your life at the moment? Because that's pretty good. Yeah, it is. It's really,
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it's really upsetting, and that first mouthful can ruin a day, I'd say.
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Hmm, week. Yeah, exactly right. Let's talk about, let's talk about other sources of
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bitching, namely social media. You know, let's expand the conversation from just
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food related lunch stuffs to the online digital technology. Yep.
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Were you tempted to start bitching about your lettuce wrap on some social media platform?
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If I was one of those people who tweets my day-to-day life as though it is at all interesting,
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I'm sure I would have, and I would have tried to come up with a witty one liner about
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it's as bad as a blar or something ridiculous. I'm glad you didn't, because that wasn't the
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very witty one. That's why I'm not on Twitter. I can't come up with witty one liners and that's
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why I'm not popular on Twitter. So are you, are you upset that people are upset on Twitter?
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I hate Twitter so much, I spend so much time thinking about how much I hate it, and I allow myself
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15 minutes in bed every night to hate scroll through people's complaints and feelings.
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You're following the wrong people I think. Oh, I am, and I follow them intentionally.
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Are they people who are owning other people on Twitter? That's the purpose of, and are they
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retweeting things and then, like, sassing them? Exactly, and they think they're really clever,
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and I watch these Twitter wars go on that to anyone else. Sometimes I try and explain it to my mom
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or a friend, and I'm like, do you understand the, like the Alice and Roman thing? I think she was
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racist because she cooked a curry or something, and I try and explain it to someone.
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Explain what that was, because not everyone is as on-liners.
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Well, look, it's always the case that if you look closely, it is a little bit racist, but Alice and
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Roman is a very famous food columnist in the US, and she has a famous curry. And then she made
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all this money off the curry, and then these people got on and went, hang on, you're not Indian,
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you haven't consulted with people who this is, exactly, this is cultural appropriation, and then
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other people were like, but I really like the curry, and then they were like, well, white women
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profiting of black labor, it became about that, and I was watching it going, wait, who's the
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where's the black labor? The black labor has come from years of, like, centuries, in fact,
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millennia, of black women's work not being respected. But who's the black woman here?
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The black woman is the woman who has made a thousand curries and never made a cent of it,
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and then Alice and Roman comes in with her white skin and her...
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So the woman is hypothetical.
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Yes, in fact, it's all women.
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It is all black women ever.
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Right.
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And Alice and Roman...
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Imaginary ones are real ones.
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Um, look, both, but she is the amalgamation of all of those women and all of their hard years of
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labor. And Alice and Roman has come in with her white skin and made a curry.
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She's stealing.
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She's stealing from these millions of...
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Exactly.
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...majory women.
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Yes, theft is what it is, and exploitation.
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But wasn't there also something...
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For a start, it's, I think, it's hilarious to talk about cultural appropriation
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with countries as complicated as India.
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We have have a huge success, actually, of appropriating everything around them.
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Exactly.
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Indian culture is a huge, wonderful, glorious, colorful,
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mishmash of so many different things from so many different tribes within South Asia anyway.
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Exactly.
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Including English.
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I mean, like, Indian English is its own unique delight.
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When people, when people have occasionally coming back to, like, people being ourselves on Twitter.
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Yeah.
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When people have occasionally accused someone of cultural appropriation for some sort of Indian thing,
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I have sent them an article which just delights in how wonderfully mashed up Indian English is.
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Because there's a whole, essentially dialect, or you might even call it language,
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of cobbled together English words in, I wish I had a list of it now,
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I'll probably drop it in after the fact.
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But wonderfully delightful kind of Indian turns of phrases that don't quite make sense in English,
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but almost make enough sense, which evolved during colonialism.
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I love that.
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And then co-opted that, and that's not cultural appropriation.
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That's, I mean, it is, but it's fine.
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Yeah, exactly.
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And culture is really complicated and the ways in which it comes together
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and what's the difference between appropriation and appreciation, and it is a real mess.
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Didn't Allison Rome, was, didn't she say something though?
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Wasn't she, didn't, wasn't she addicted?
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Yes, then there was the article.
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She said something about someone.
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Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen.
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Right.
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Why do I remember these things?
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This is not...
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And we didn't even plan to talk about this.
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No.
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You wanted to talk about Twitter in the aggregate,
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and social media in general.
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But I remember this so specifically.
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She had an article where she criticized Marie Kondo,
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essentially for selling out.
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And I think she criticized Chrissy Teigen for the same reason.
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And she was like, I'm not going to sell out.
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Which is a typical young person thing to say.
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Everyone under the age of 30 says, I'm not going to sell out.
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You turn 30 in your life.
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I'm going to be true to my craft.
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Exactly.
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You look at all these people who have kind of become big corporate entities
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and themselves.
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But the problem was that the two examples she picked were both women of color.
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Exactly, exactly.
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And it was an idealistic thing,
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perhaps rather than a racist thing.
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And then the curry thing came up again.
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And again, it's her versus all women of color.
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And she was under this enormous pile on deals being pulled.
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And you can argue that she can cry into her money.
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But rich people have problems too.
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And I think it would have been a tough week to be Alice in Roman.
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And it's like watching a soap opera on your phone.
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And everyone's takes and they're so outlandish.
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And you just think, what are we really talking about here?
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And a slip of the tongue.
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Like a little bit of an era.
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Is she really...
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Yeah, but it's a slip of the tongue that reveals the deeper structural power
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of the white patriarchy and the white supremacist superstructure
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in which we all live, Jesse.
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Exactly.
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And the first person to say that will get the most retweets.
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And so you've got to be the first.
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And you've got to say it with the biggest words.
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And then you're going to get lots of retweets.
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And I think that there are people whose full-time job has almost become
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bitching on Twitter.
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Well, they're a definitely are.
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Oh.
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And how do they make money?
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They don't make money off that.
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They just have a lot of spare time.
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I guess they would otherwise be playing video games.
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And now they're owning people or poning people.
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Do you own people anymore?
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Is that so seven years ago?
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It's so seven years ago.
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You're owning people.
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But I reckon the worst culprits.
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I work in media.
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You get the horrible tweet from some, you know, um, troll.
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That doesn't bother you.
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The thing that bothers you are your peers.
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And the media, there is this kind of, it's the people with a little bit attraction
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who are commentators that are the worst and that can be the most cutting
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because they've got real power.
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If they jump on someone, you can ruin a career or you can, you know,
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undermine a really young journalist or whatever it is.
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And that's where it gets a bit scary.
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Well, yeah, I thought it was funny that you said that you don't have to care about it.
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I mean, that like Alison, it was probably a bad week for Alison Roman.
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Because like, I don't actually care about Alison Roman.
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I didn't even know who she was until this whole thing happened.
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But I think we shouldn't require ourselves to care about the individuals involved
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in order to care about the principle.
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Yes.
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Right. In the same way that I don't really care about whether or not like a neo-Nazi is happy.
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I do actually care about neo-Nazi's having the right to exist in a free democratic
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pluralistic society.
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Exactly.
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Without being jailed for their beliefs, regardless of how repugnant their beliefs might be.
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So like the principle of like not destroying a person's reputation and claiming that they are
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deeply racist because they cooked a curry and were critical of people who happened to be a
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different race, but not, but they weren't critical in any way that is racially motivated.
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Yeah, that should worry as regardless of whether or not Alison is crying into her curry.
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That's the thing.
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And that's why I reckon I'm really, I'm not just scrolling Twitter.
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I'm like, you're scrolling life.
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I'm scrolling humanity.
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Exactly to get a sense of this.
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And you look at it and it's so transparent that it's someone proclaiming their own morality
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to thousands of people and they're just going, if that costs me, you know, X or Y person,
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if this, if that person is destroyed because of it, oh well, I've made a really funny tweet.
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And that commentary and that throwing crap on people all the time does have currency
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because it makes you a commentator.
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It makes you an advocate.
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It makes you a social, yeah, a social justice advocate or something.
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How much of it do you think is instance here?
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I reckon most of it, but I don't think the people doing it even know it's instance here
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because there's such currency in it.
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There is real positive reinforcement and then people are like,
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wait, is something still insincere if you don't know it's instance here?
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Doesn't that make it sincere?
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Well, I guess it's, maybe it's a sincere.
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A sincere and the reason I think that is because how much are you doing,
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Mr. Twitter, to support the plight of women of colour in India?
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Oh, nothing.
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Nothing.
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Absolutely.
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So how much do you truly care versus how much do you want to say that you care?
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And so people want to pretend like they're these virtuous,
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you know, they have these incredible values, but they throw things that are created,
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whether it's a TV show or a book or an article or
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works of art or whatever it is, when they themselves aren't creating anything because it's
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too terrifying.
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They're creating tweets.
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A lot of tweets.
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Yeah, a lot of tweets.
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A lot of tweets.
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And that's, I saw something the other week that was a study that someone had done a very
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valid study and someone came out and then a tweet completely tore it down, suggested it hadn't
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been peer reviewed, made assumptions about the person's politics that were completely incorrect.
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And I thought that study would have taken years of work.
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And this person can click their fingers on a bad Monday morning and decide that their opinion is
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worth broadcasting about that.
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And that's a worry.
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I mean, people have always thought that, but up until now they didn't have a platform in which
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they could be taken seriously.
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They just ranted in their living room at the TV.
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Exactly.
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They sort of have an equal footing with people who are actually authoritative.
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And I think this is part of what fuels conspiracy theories and stuff like that as well.
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Like the fact that we're all on the same plane.
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So that person who is just spouting their bullshit against the peer reviewed study looks
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superficially when you're looking at your Twitter feed like they have the same sort of status
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as the peer reviewed study.
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And they don't.
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And I guess that's exactly it that there are just so many voices.
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But then it is the fault of the media as well in that Twitter tweets themselves have become
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the new story.
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So for example, someone tweets a criticism and then someone tweets another and then the
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new story is that two women are going at each other or whatever it is.
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And that has validated.
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In fact, having your tweet embedded in a news.com article is also a sign of status.
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So then you feel like you're informing the news.
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I just got a tweet published in an American publication.
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Was it a good one?
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It was a good one.
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It was the magazine of Reason.com.
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Yeah.
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It's a big magazine over there for libertarians and rational thinkers and so on.
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And it's only because I had a Google alert set up on my name.
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Of course you did.
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Apparently you have to do.
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This is something that was news to me.
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I didn't know that I could be alerted every time someone published an article with my name in it.
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And then I popped up.
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I was like, why is an American publication writing about me?
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And it was because I'd, but shamefully, I had actually done this essentially in which I'd
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own to see an end reporter forgetting vaccine statistics wrong.
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Oh.
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And it was, I was trying to, I mean, I was trying to be constructive.
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Yeah.
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They had said that if vaccines and they would, they were talking about the risk of people flying
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over summer on planes and they were saying the vaccines are only 90% effective,
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which means that if a million people fly, then 100,000 could still catch coronavirus.
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Which is not true.
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No, that's not how I'm sorry.
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So I did a little Twitter thread just saying 90% effective doesn't mean that 90% of vaccinated
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people are immunized and 10% aren't.
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What it means is that of the people who would otherwise have gotten sick from COVID,
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or have gotten symptomatic COVID, I should say, to be more precise, 90% fewer of that number
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will get it, if the cohort's been vaccinated.
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In other words, if a million people were flying unvaccinated and almost nobody was getting it,
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then the 90% applies to the almost nobody, not to the million.
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Yes, exactly right.
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And that's genuinely really helpful.
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And it sounds like what you did there.
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I was trying to be helpful.
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I'm quite proud of myself, even though that explanation that I just gave was
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incomprehensible.
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No, I, completely get it.
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And what you played was the idea not the person.
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Did you call him an idiot?
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No, I called the person a cunt.
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Yeah, but I, but other than that, it was the idea.
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No, I didn't, yeah, it was just the idea.
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I didn't even, I didn't even name check.
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I didn't even at them.
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Yes, because it was just like, oh, okay, there's a factual inaccuracy, allow me to correct it.
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I've had this with my own work.
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I've had people comment, message, tweet, and go on.
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Actually, this, because maths isn't my strong point.
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And I did something once that was statistically inaccurate and it was important.
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And I got someone say, actually, that's wrong.
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I mended the article, said, thank you.
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That stuff is a really helpful.
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That's what Twitter is great for is, is holding people to account.
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I think that it's when it becomes about your erasist or your sexist or your
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an anti-vaxxer or whatever, because you got that wrong.
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That's when you start assuming someone's politics and it gets...
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What if they actually are racist or sexist?
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Well, I'm not sure that throwing those terms around when you know very little about someone
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is, is useful because what we're going to end up doing
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is the terms themselves are going to lose all meaning.
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And when someone calls you a racist, you're not going to bristle.
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Well, I mean, they already have sort of more than meaning, have it there.
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Exactly.
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Even in the admission of the people who are most aggressive about throwing them around.
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I mean, people who, the very same people who are insisting that racism is endemic and is a
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scourge and that white supremacy is everywhere, are the ones who are redefining racism
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to mean just existing in a lot of supremacist society makes you racist, in which case...
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We're all racist, no one's racist.
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Yeah, well then it's sort of not that bad, isn't it?
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Yeah.
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You've devalued what should be the worst thing to be.
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Apart from like a genocidal murderer being racist should be about as bad a thing as you can be.
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And now if we're all it, then it's not, turns out it wasn't so bad after all.
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And there's no nuance involved in that.
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And someone can assume your intent if it wasn't your intent.
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And it's the same with a misogynist, a misogynist hates women.
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That's a really big call, transphobic.
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There's something that most of us would be horrified to be called.
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But it means that we can't have these nuanced, interesting discussions.
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There are some certain facts or interesting things that come out that you want to discuss,
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but even going there, talking to some people, even talking about blood clots makes you an anti-vaxer.
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And you're not an anti-vaxer, you're trying to balance facts and politics.
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And if you let your politics be the prison by which you see the world,
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then you're not being very objective or impartial, which is a worry.
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Yeah, I mean that's so true about vaccines.
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It's like when Trump came out in favor of hydroxychloroquine,
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this, you know, treatment, quote unquote, for COVID,
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thereafter, you could never say anything positive about hydroxychloroquine,
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even when it seemed it turned out not to be true,
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but it seemed for a while that there was some utility,
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therapeutically, and using hydroxychloroquine.
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But to say so was to side with Trump and to put yourself on that side of the political aisle,
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which is very silly. Phobics funny.
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You just mentioned transphobic and like transphobic and like homophobic.
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Why are there some things that we just decided with phobias?
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Rather than is it?
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Well, yeah, or like, I mean anti-semitic,
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you just anti-semitic.
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You're like you're a Jew hater.
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You're anti-Jewish.
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Yes, you're anti-Jewish.
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Shouldn't we just say anti-homo instead of homophobic?
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But you know why?
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You're anti-trans.
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Because I reckon that language.
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See, I think we should cancel each other for even using the word homophobic,
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because it is probably steeped in homophobia,
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which is that for a while people believed it was,
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it's like the gay panic defense,
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like for a while people actually thought that a fear of someone
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who was gay was somewhat legitimate.
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You know, and that is in living memory in a way that perhaps
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other language isn't like...
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I feel like I see.
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But isn't it also kind of a dick move to say that anyone who disapproves of homosexuality,
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even if it's for their religious reasons,
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is secretly terrified of gays?
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Isn't that a way of taking what you're talking about,
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which is the true fact that for a long time people have feared gay people
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as being predators or as being, you know,
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someone who's going to try to hit on them or something,
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and then to conflate that as being the only reason why a person might object to gayness?
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And as though it's a pathological fear, like being afraid of a spider,
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like that's a really strange way of phrasing it.
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Well that's right, and I don't think it's true.
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Like I don't think that people who are worried about, you know,
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about their child becoming turning out to be gay or their child turning out to be trans,
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I don't think that the only explanation why they might be worried
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is because they're afraid of gay people and trans people.
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Yeah, there's nuances within that.
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They might just not like it, or they might be particularly religious,
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or they might be, you know, fundamentalist Muslims,
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or whatever, that doesn't meant they have to be scared of it.
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I think we need new words, Jesse.
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I think we do.
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I don't even like anti-Semitic.
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Now that I think about it, just call them Jew haters,
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like that's good.
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It's a punchy, you know, it doesn't say he's an anti-Semite,
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so he's a Jew hater.
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Anti-Semitic is really hard to spell,
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because there's an eye where there should be an E,
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which just makes things really hard.
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Also, the Semites are all the people of that of that neck of the woods,
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so the Arabs are Semites as well.
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That's so true.
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We need to change that.
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I think we've got a really look at the definition of misogyny as well.
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I think we're throwing that around a little bit much.
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Now I hear people talking about misandry,
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which doesn't work for me,
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because the syllables don't line up properly.
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I don't know where to put the emphasis.
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And it doesn't ring.
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It doesn't sound very nice in my mind,
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which is probably because we don't use it very often,
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because it doesn't really exist.
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But I never know whether to say misandry.
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Misandry.
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Misandry.
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Misand, like it doesn't do that.
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It does exist.
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Some women must hate men.
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Doesn't it just mean hating men, a hatred of men?
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I know women who hate men.
23:06
I know women who hate men.
23:08
That is very, very true actually.
23:10
I think if you're opposite of misogyny, misandry.
23:12
I was thinking more as like a cultural structure,
23:15
but you're exactly right.
23:16
It's individual.
23:17
It's the women who are saying,
23:18
leaving husbands or men or evil.
23:19
Well, that's the other silly thing about, yeah, exactly.
23:21
I mean, the people who are the quickest to throw around
23:23
a wood like misogynist,
23:24
are probably the likely as to be misandrists.
23:27
Exactly, which is also just as unhelpful.
23:30
And that is, and I see that a lot,
23:33
and yet that seems to be more culturally excusable,
23:37
even like threats of violence,
23:39
or like suggestions.
23:40
Kill all men.
23:41
Kill all men.
23:42
A very popular Australian commentator,
23:44
who I won't name.
23:45
Yes.
23:45
You know, a whole Twitter thread about killing women.
23:48
Exactly.
23:48
And I'm like,
23:49
that is, I...
23:52
That is not how I see feminism.
23:55
That is not how I see...
23:57
And feminism was always meant to be about liberating both genders.
24:01
And in fact, this is what gets me.
24:04
And you're not really meant to say this,
24:05
but gender at the same time
24:09
that we're trying to erase gender
24:11
and make all of it disappear.
24:13
We've never been more obsessed with it.
24:15
And it really is confusing me.
24:18
Because even...
24:19
And I obviously agree with, you know, pronouns
24:21
and everything like that.
24:22
But there are moments where you go,
24:25
so we're doing away with gender,
24:26
which is what feminism and the Jermaine Griez
24:28
were just basically like...
24:30
It's a structure.
24:31
It prisons men as much as it does women.
24:34
And I was all full of that.
24:35
I was like, yeah, boys can wear blue.
24:38
But now it's like we've never been more obsessed
24:41
with classifying people,
24:43
which also doesn't work.
24:46
And so if you hate all white men,
24:47
then in fact, you're doing the exact thing
24:50
that you didn't want men to do to you,
24:52
which is a real paradox.
24:53
Yes, it is a paradox.
24:55
And I think...
24:56
I feel a bit sorry for people who are trying to
24:59
be activists in the trans community specifically,
25:02
because the community has so many sub-sectors
25:04
that all actually disagree with each other.
25:06
And sort of disagree with that's right.
25:09
And sort of disagree with feminism in some ways.
25:12
Because if you're non-binary,
25:14
then you don't believe in gender,
25:16
right?
25:17
You think it's all just sort of made up and who cares.
25:21
But if you're a binary trans woman,
25:24
you believe deeply in the reality of gender,
25:27
and you believe that you were born into the wrong body.
25:29
And so how does that mesh with your non-binary quote-unquote allies?
25:34
And I was actually interviewing a wonderful trans woman,
25:37
who's a Fiji, an Australian...
25:40
And she transitioned like 30 years ago
25:42
when it was a lot more difficult than it is today.
25:45
And I could sense a certain
25:47
tursiness and like a brookness in her manner
25:50
when I started talking about gender fluidity
25:52
and non-binary and all this stuff,
25:54
because I feel like she feels...
25:56
Well, I've fought a really, really long-time battle
25:59
to be a woman, to be a woman.
26:01
Now tell me that that clattery doesn't exist.
26:04
And similarly with feminism,
26:06
like you mentioned Jermaine Greer,
26:08
I mean, part of that era of,
26:11
was it second-wave feminism, I guess, in the 1960s?
26:14
That's so, yeah.
26:15
You know, her and Camille Paglia
26:16
and all those types of people
26:17
was like, there is something in Trenzek
26:19
about the experience of growing up as a girl
26:22
in modern patriarchal societies.
26:25
Yes.
26:25
That is a source of formative experiences
26:28
and a source of solidarity for all women.
26:32
And to now be required to pretend
26:36
that that's not true, you know,
26:38
because you might offend trans women
26:42
because they didn't have the experience
26:44
of growing up as a woman.
26:46
Is a little bit of a slap in the face,
26:48
maybe, to the second-wave feminist?
26:49
Exactly.
26:51
And then if you're a trans person,
26:52
you can get on Twitter
26:54
and tweet something that is true to you,
26:56
that is offensive to the trans community
26:58
and then be cancelled by the trans community.
27:00
And it's like, oh yeah.
27:01
So if you don't get an opinion,
27:02
and I see the same thing with the, you know,
27:06
community around people with disabilities,
27:07
and I was speaking to someone recently
27:09
who said, there's no such thing as a disability community
27:13
and there's no such thing as a trans community
27:15
because there are so many different
27:18
individuals within it.
27:19
With disability, you have one advocate
27:21
who is speaking on, and this isn't their fault,
27:23
this is, you know, the way culture works.
27:26
But on behalf of deaf people
27:28
and blind people and intellectually disabled people
27:30
and physically disabled people,
27:33
they are such different experiences
27:35
that you can't decide how everyone in that community
27:38
must think and then police it.
27:40
And that's what you see.
27:41
Is that policing of thought and conversation
27:45
regardless of identity?
27:46
And never mind if you don't even belong
27:48
to that identity and you have an opinion
27:50
because then you're silenced.
27:52
Well, I mean, in some ways,
27:53
it's easier for people to be critical of people
27:56
like us who assist people talking about the trans community
27:59
because then they can just say,
28:00
well, you don't have any standing to talk about this,
28:02
which I think is actually a bullshit move anyway
28:05
because we all, it's like when people say that,
28:08
you know, I once got into a huge online spat
28:11
talking about people being nasty online
28:13
and making mountains out of molehills
28:15
when I was on Joe Rogan's podcast
28:17
and he was on Joe Rogan's podcast.
28:20
Six times, baby.
28:20
Oh, I know what I'm doing tonight.
28:23
Oh, my God.
28:24
Oh, my God.
28:26
And he was saying, this is actually the last time
28:28
that I went on.
28:29
So it made me fall out of something.
28:31
But he was saying that, you know,
28:33
we shouldn't talk about abortion
28:35
because that's a woman's health issue
28:37
and I was like, well, hang on, hang on.
28:39
To the people who, and I'm pro-choice
28:41
but to the people who think that abortion is murder,
28:44
it's not just a woman's health issue
28:46
because the whole question is whether or not
28:50
a baby and a mummy's tummy has any standing at all
28:53
or any rights or any deserves any of our concern
28:56
or is it just an appendage like a piece of flesh
28:59
if it has, even if it has a brain and neural activity
29:01
and it's a part that's pumping and stuff like that.
29:03
Like that's the question.
29:04
You don't just dodge that by saying it's a woman's health issue
29:06
and he was like, yeah, but you're never,
29:08
you don't stand the risk of ever being pregnant
29:09
so you don't have a right to talk about it.
29:11
And I was like, that's not actually true.
29:13
We're all in a quorum of society here.
29:16
We're all in the, you know, in the demos
29:20
where we're all part of constructing
29:23
what kind of moral universe we want to live in
29:26
and therefore we all have standing
29:28
to talk about whether or not we think that, you know,
29:32
eight-month-old babies can be killed in the womb
29:36
or whether two-month-old babies could be killed in the womb
29:38
or whether indeed, after birth, maybe infants should,
29:40
maybe there should be some philosophers say
29:42
there should be a three-month period.
29:43
Yeah, well, you can terminate the life of a newborn infant.
29:48
These are all big questions than just to say
29:50
that because they don't apply to you,
29:52
you don't have standing to talk about them,
29:53
I think misses the point of what it means to be a citizen
29:56
and what it means to be a citizen in a, you know,
29:58
in an advanced democracy where everyone has their say.
30:01
And it's the same with the trans question.
30:03
Like we can be accused of not having any standing
30:06
and obviously our conversations should always be done
30:10
with care and sympathy and empathy and love,
30:15
but it doesn't mean that we have to just accept anything
30:17
that a spokesperson from that community says we should accept,
30:20
especially when people within that community themselves
30:23
disagree.
30:24
Yes.
30:25
And they are kicking their own people.
30:27
I mean, like Buck Angel,
30:28
that you know Buck Angel of porn star.
30:30
Yes.
30:31
I know that name.
30:32
Yeah, I mean, I've interviewed him as well
30:34
and he's a complete, like he does not buy into any,
30:38
I mean, he's been trans for, you know, 40 years or something
30:41
and he doesn't buy into the hysteria at the moment
30:44
and Caitlyn Jenner doesn't either.
30:45
And they are persona non grata.
30:48
Now, there are savages, the latest person
30:49
to be kicked out of the LGBTQ life club
30:52
because he said something in support of Jesse Single
30:54
who had written about detransition as it's like,
30:57
it's crazy, it's like a purge.
30:59
And you can't ask questions.
31:02
And I suppose then and then this is the question
31:05
even with I see it with fiction and with writing
31:07
and characters and what you can't write.
31:10
But I have a friend who's a PhD researcher
31:14
and has studied her whole, you know,
31:16
career now on deafness.
31:18
And that's because both her grandparents were deaf
31:20
and fascinating story.
31:21
And she did an incredible journal article
31:23
about the deaf community.
31:25
And she submitted it to a journal and the journal said,
31:28
thank you very much.
31:29
We do not accept articles from people
31:32
who are not themselves deaf.
31:33
This is PhD academic level research done by an academy,
31:40
years and years of data and statistics
31:42
and interviews and everything in it.
31:45
And that really isn't fair on communities themselves
31:48
that just because you're a person who happens to be deaf,
31:52
you need to dedicate your life to advocacy.
31:55
And I think it's the same with lots of different,
31:57
I'm not a refugee but I can look at the refugee plight
31:59
and go that's something I'd like to advocate on behalf of
32:02
or have a cousin with an intellectual disability.
32:05
And I'm like, that's something I care about.
32:07
He can't speak about it because he doesn't have the language.
32:11
I do and then I do and there is criticism
32:14
because I'm not someone with a disability.
32:16
And you just don't know how these discussions
32:19
are ever going to get anywhere
32:20
if we can't respectfully disagree for starters
32:24
and then start getting really personal
32:27
about you and your politics and what I secretly think
32:33
as a person.
32:34
It's so tokenistic to say that you have to wheel out
32:36
the deaf person to make a good point.
32:41
Like you've already got the study done.
32:44
You've got all of the data collected.
32:45
You've written an up and it's been peer reviewed.
32:48
But in order to get it read,
32:51
we've got to bring in a tokenistic deaf person
32:53
to hand it over.
32:54
Like there's some puppet.
32:56
Is there anything more objectifying to suggest
33:00
that someone should change their subjectivity
33:02
or that somehow, of course it influences
33:05
your perspective on things,
33:06
but it's objectifying and it's tokenistic to people
33:09
who might be deaf or disabled or whatever.
33:14
It's also an interesting question
33:15
about who is really the moral,
33:17
the most moral actor in advocacy.
33:21
Because when you said, you suppose you want to advocate
33:24
on behalf of refugees or on behalf of people
33:25
who are living with disabilities
33:26
who can't advocate on behalf of themselves.
33:29
I mean, that would be the most moral thing to do
33:33
to advocate for something where you have no personal
33:37
possibility of gaining.
33:39
Yes, but then...
33:40
In a strange way, like it's inverted to say
33:43
that you shouldn't be part of the struggle
33:45
because only people who are gonna benefit from progress
33:49
in the struggle should be part of it.
33:51
Because if you're talking purely ethically,
33:53
well of course they're gonna wanna struggle against it
33:55
because they're the ones who benefit if they succeed.
33:57
Exactly.
33:58
I mean, it's a bit weird, but...
33:59
And then you get called on...
34:00
Of course a gay person is gonna wanna favor gay rights.
34:04
But what really matters is when the non-gay person
34:07
favors gay rights.
34:08
Exactly.
34:09
And then you get called a white savior
34:11
or a, you're hijacking someone else's political cause.
34:15
You're taking, I've heard this one a lot,
34:17
you're taking up the spot of someone.
34:19
Like for example, if you wanted to talk,
34:21
I was asked once a question about the national anthem
34:25
and the inclusion of, we are, they'd change the word,
34:29
young, was it?
34:31
And then...
34:31
Right.
34:32
And it was about basically...
34:33
In Australia, the national anthem goes,
34:35
we are young and free.
34:37
And the point was quite rightly made
34:39
we're one of the oldest continent logically
34:43
and we have the oldest continuous civilization.
34:45
Exactly.
34:46
The world in the form of Native Australian.
34:49
And in the context of another conversation,
34:51
I was asked about that and I explained to that
34:53
and I said, yeah, it sounds like a really good first step,
34:56
a lot more to do and from what I've, you know,
34:59
very much listened to the, you know, Australian Indigenous
35:01
community on what they say and I'm taking their lead.
35:05
And this is what they've asked for and more of that, basically.
35:09
And I got...
35:09
Stand down, Jesse.
35:10
A riddek killed because I was...
35:11
It's like taking this spot.
35:12
Exactly.
35:13
I was taking the microphone and I thought,
35:16
should I have said I'm not going to comment
35:19
as a white person, but then am I victimizing myself?
35:23
There wasn't a right way to answer that question.
35:27
And that becomes really difficult
35:29
because if everyone also speaks on their own issues,
35:32
votes on their own issues,
35:34
you end up with bloody Trump's America.
35:36
You end up with some guy who only has interest
35:39
in the completely, sort of, average man rather than...
35:44
Well, we were still, you end up with a tribal,
35:46
we end up with like a civil war.
35:49
Yes.
35:49
You end up like with Rwanda or Somalia.
35:52
Exactly.
35:53
Every single clan acting in its own interest
35:57
and trying to seize as much power as possible.
36:01
There's a lovely quote that a recent guest on the show,
36:04
John Optike reminded me of from James Baldwin,
36:07
the great African-American writer and activist,
36:11
which was about how like an oppressive system
36:15
doesn't just corrode the experience of the people
36:19
it's oppressing, it corrode the humanity
36:22
of everybody who's engaged in it,
36:24
which I think is worth remembering
36:26
when we talk about who's got standing
36:27
and who doesn't have standing
36:28
to agitate on behalf of issues.
36:30
Like the fact that Australia has never had a real reckoning
36:34
with the genocide of its first nations
36:38
is something that actually matters to you
36:41
as an Australian citizen as well.
36:42
Yeah.
36:43
And if you listen in this and if you want to fix it,
36:46
then trying to fix that is something
36:50
that does land on our shoulders.
36:51
So I don't quite understand why we have to feel embarrassed
36:55
about attempting to do the right thing.
36:57
Advocate and it's like they say the threat to justice
37:00
anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
37:02
And I think you can just believe in justice
37:04
and apply that and believe in equality
37:07
and apply that to lots of different issues and politics.
37:10
And I would hope that you recognize something like that.
37:13
You march on the streets and you vote in a certain way.
37:16
And it's not you trying to hijack,
37:18
it's trying to be an ally.
37:22
And then yeah, it's really hard.
37:25
So are we gonna fix bitching on Twitter?
37:28
If we fix bitching on Twitter?
37:29
Look, I as the perfect person,
37:33
the way that I do with it is that I don't tweet,
37:37
I just watch and bitch in real life.
37:39
So I will scroll and I'll see
37:43
someone going someone else trying to be clever.
37:45
And then I'll screenshot it and send it to my twin sister.
37:48
And we'll go, I hate Twitter.
37:49
And she'll say, I hate Twitter too.
37:51
Did you see this one?
37:52
And we'll go back and forward late at night.
37:54
But I don't need any of my horrible thoughts.
37:56
Maybe you shouldn't be on Twitter at all.
37:59
Oh, what a silly idea.
38:00
Is she not looking at Twitter?
38:02
It's it is like scratching an edge.
38:04
It is just it is my addictive.
38:06
Yes.
38:07
Do you use Instagram or any of those ones?
38:09
Yeah, but Instagram's a happy place compared to Twitter.
38:11
Yeah, but it's more vain.
38:13
It is more vain.
38:15
I suppose I feel a little bit more immune to that.
38:20
That doesn't upset me so much.
38:21
Whereas Twitter, I just feel like I'm watching
38:24
from a distance humanity eats itself.
38:28
Yeah, Twitter is infuriating and enraging.
38:30
And Instagram is just I find Instagram a bit depressing.
38:34
Yeah, it is a little bit depressing.
38:36
Thank you, Jesse.
38:37
Thank you.