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Buckle Up for “the Manosphere 2.0” - Helen Lewis · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. One of my favorite guests returns to the show today for an incredible conversation. Chatting with Helen Lewis is like drinking from a cool intellectual stream that is also very fun and tasty and spicy and also sweet. The question today is, what is up with boys?
• 0:23
  Well, more importantly, what is it with the grown men who are using the question of what is up with boys to smuggle in a very retrograde agenda towards women, one that sort of is better suited to the Dark Ages than the 21st century? If you've heard about Andrew Tate and you've fretted about what kind of sexist young male Instagram influences might be in your kid's feed, you are only seeing half the story. Yeah.
• 0:48
  there is a growing influential movement of Christian nationalists, mainly in the United States, who are using this moment, using this opportunity, this kind of conversation around what's wrong with boys and the rise of the manosphere, to...
• 1:04
  introduce ideas about gender roles that are incredibly retrograde, ideas about ultimately depriving women of the vote, getting them out of the workforce and putting them back into their rightful Christian place as handmaidens in the home. If that all sounds a bit far-fetched, perhaps it is, but at least Helen's investigation into it is absolutely fascinating as it intersects with the culture wars and wokeness.
• 1:27
  and whether or not people in the 21st century really care about liberalism all that much, or whether liberalism is just something that elites have enjoyed since the end of World War II, and we're about to enter another phase of Western civilization. You may remember Helen Lewis from her Bombshell 2018 interview with Jordan Peterson, where she sort of bested Jordan in a debate about gender roles. That was for British GQ.
• 1:52
  She went viral. She's now a staff writer at The Atlantic, where a recent cover story of hers was entitled The New Gender War. Helen joined me to unpack the evolving backlash to feminism and liberalism, the Andrew Tates of the world, the people who are using the Andrew Tates of the world to smuggle in a much more audacious agenda, surrogacy, transgender rights, and what, of course, the World Cup had to do with it all. I hope you enjoy, as much as I did, the one, the only, Helen Lewis.
• 2:23
  There's this whole sort of mainstream orthodox system of pastors and thought leaders who are legitimizing the idea that not only should we rebalance things to be a little bit less feminist-y and a little bit more man-y,
• 2:46
  but that we should actually deprive women of the vote and reinstitute gender pay differences at an official government level to ensure that men earn more than women and women don't have to work. What's going on?
• 3:03
  Well, the shortest answer to what's going on is America is going on, which is whenever you hear some incredibly extreme answers, it might be useful to see whether or not America's involved. And so, yeah, some of the people that I interviewed mostly come from a religious tradition who are talking about repealing the 19th Amendment. And their justification for it is the teaching of St. Paul. St. Paul, who said that, you know, women, godly women should be quiet.
• 3:25
  And they interpret this to mean not only that you can't have female preachers, but actually really all the way up that the structure of the society should be a man at the head of a household and a wife who is subordinate to him and kids who are subordinate to him. And, you know, that's obviously got lots of implications. It means there's no room for gay families. It means there's no room for single-parent families. They are very comfortable with the idea of wanting a nuclear family, essentially. But, you know, I was kind of fascinated talking to them that...
• 3:53
  They have thought very strategically about what are the policy requests that you would have in order to achieve their preferred version of society. Which I think when you watch somebody like an Andrew Tate, you don't necessarily think, this is a man with a well-developed, you know, five-year plan. I mean, there are a lot of things, a lot of words you could put after, this is not a man with a well-developed dot, dot, dot. It's a long list with Tate. Yeah.
• 4:16
  Well, the well-developed trousers being the latest one. If you saw his arrest in Miami, he was wearing little capri pants. How lovely. Yeah, well, it's nice to see someone trying to bring back the three-quarter length pant for men. But, you know, I wanted to talk to them because I think...
• 4:32
  although they might be kind of massively extreme, they're tapping into something that I think lots of people feel, which is that feminism has gone a bit too far. And actually men and women are different in fundamental ways. And I think that the left maybe got a bit over its skis in the sense of going beyond the idea that you have basic fundamental human rights and that actually women and men are functionally identical in ways that I think most people don't intuitively feel are true.
• 5:00
  I don't think we'll ever probably have parity in some professional occupations, ones that rely on strength. There's been a very vivid meme going around about the fact that after the Supreme Court judgment in America on sports, about the idea that female sports were only created because men were worried women would beat them.
• 5:18
  And you just kind of go... Wait, who says this? I mean, these people like sport even less than you, if they think that's true, right? Exactly, yes. Usain Bolt isn't worried that some woman's going to turn up and run a bit faster than him, and that's why they've segregated the 100 meters. But you know what I mean? There's a very lively strand of left-wing thought that says in order to have equal rights, we need to pretend everybody is the same. And so that's, I think, been a part of something that these guys have tapped into.
• 5:44
  And it wasn't just the claim that in order to have equal rights, everybody has to be the same. I mean, there was also this strain of to redress historical injustices, it's necessary for us to elevate historically marginalized minorities of whom women are one and...
• 6:02
  And, you know, there was a sense, especially among young males, that at what point do we get to think of ourselves as a group as well? Every single other group gets to elevate their interests except for us. And so it was probably foreseeable that there would be some kind of a nasty backlash to that.
• 6:19
  Yeah, and I think the similar thing happened with white identity. That was capitalised on, to say, particularly in America, to say, well, hang on a minute, are you now not getting a job because you're white, because they're preferring a minority candidate to you? Isn't that a form of discrimination? And the interesting thing is, I don't know what the stats are like for Australia, but...
• 6:36
  So affirmative action, which is the idea that preferential hiring for minorities, is really unpopular to the extent that they had a ballot measure in California, like very left-wing California, reliably Democrat voting. And it didn't, you know, it was repealed. They didn't want affirmative action. And the similar thing has happened here with backlash against, say, quotas about women on boards.
• 6:55
  So there's a really interesting thing where it's difficult for people who've identified a genuine past historic injustice, right? We know that men dominate utterly the top levels of corporate life and traditionally have done. We know that white Americans have dominated the universities, for example, historically. If you want to redress that, how do you do it without introducing something that people now feel is a new form of discrimination? And one that might target them so they're a bit more cross about it than they were about the previous one. Yes, sorry, finish that thought.
• 7:25
  Well, or one that they have got no, you know, they are not predisposed to see as common sense. So I think with gender, that applies much more. People think very deeply, and in some cases it's probably true, that women are underrepresented in some fields because they don't want to be. I don't think anybody is particularly worried about the fact that more, you know, refuse collectors are men than women.
• 7:48
  And I think there's probably a thing where actually, you know, A, that's a very physical, dirty, demanding job. It's probably most places unionized in a way that actually people have tried to keep the wages up by essentially, you know, forming tight labor practices on it. And those things do act against women. But I think most people will be comfortable saying that those jobs that rely on traditional physical strength are not unfairly dominated by men. That's probably a reflection of the fact that more men want to do them and more men are physically capable of doing them.
• 8:15
  Yes. And I think there was also a sense that it was a bit selective about the kinds of jobs that should have parity. All the good high paying engineering and C-suite jobs should have parity, but being a, you know, as you say, a garbage collector or working on a North Sea oil rig or something, nobody, no, there are no feminists clamoring for gender parity in those professions. But the flip side of that is that there are very few men clamoring to get into care work and nursing work, which is...
• 8:43
  not very well-paid historically, and very female-dominated, and very physical and demanding, in a different way from being a refuse collector. But like shifting people, like physically picking people up to clean them is hard work. So there's also a thing about the fact that men in difficult and dangerous jobs often prefer those to be male-dominated environments, because the presence of women implicitly lowers the value of the work.
• 9:06
  This is Claudia Goldin's kind of contamination theory, that male-dominated fields have a kind of innate prestige to them, a kind of brotherhood-ness about them, and women ruin that too. So there's a kind of class-based element too, which is if you're working a difficult and dangerous and underpaid job, but at least it's a male-dominated one, then there is a kind of in itself an honour to that.
• 9:26
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• 9:54
  catalogue of mind-expanding, bullshit-free, uncomfortable conversations. Back to the show. Yes, I mean, that is interesting. I mean, I think there's also a phenomenon in terms of opportunity when you look at the, when you say, you know, the highest echelons of society are still dominated by males. I remember having a, I was interviewing a feminist who was talking about how
• 10:15
  we should not treat the sexes equally until an equal number of women are high court judges, Supreme Court justices, and in C-suites and in parliament and prime ministers and things. But there is a pipeline phenomenon for younger people where young males will look at the fact that women outnumber them in universities and graduate better in high school and do better in
• 10:43
  they're sort of outperforming men under 25 on every single metric that you care to count. And so obviously that's going to feed through. I mean, in order to become a Supreme Court justice, you have to, like the Supreme Court justices of today are the product of the unequal universities of 30 or 40 years ago, and presumably in 30 or 40 years' time,
• 11:09
  the overperformance of women will be reflected in Supreme Court justices. But the feminist who I was talking to was like, what, so you're saying we just have to sit down and wait? It's a bit hard to sort of retort to that. But in a way, yes, unless you want to so interfere with things that you are going to create.
• 11:30
  backlash and distort things in all kinds of other ways by forcing the next, you know, selection of Supreme Court justices to be exclusively female, I guess, until parity is reached.
• 11:42
  Yeah, I'm not sure that seems any more fair than the other way around. The one thing I would say is that I think there is a danger in the complacency of the pipeline argument. One thing that really struck me is that when Brenda Hale, who was one of the first female Supreme Court justices here in the UK, when she joined, she found out that every other justice apart from her was a member of the, I think I want to say the Garrick Club, a private members club that only admitted men.
• 12:05
  And this was, you know, this was annoying to her, as it would have been annoying to me, that essentially they all had an opportunity to socialize together with each other and with other high-powered men from which she was utterly excluded. And that is, I think they finally had voted to admit women on the basis they thought they'd only have to admit Judi Dench, and they figured that was super reasonable. Genuinely. She's manly enough.
• 12:25
  She'll do. She'll do. But, you know, that kind of... I think we are sometimes reluctant to talk about the persistence of soft and indirect forms of discrimination. And this is the era that feminism has got into that I think is harder to deal with. When there were just explicit laws that said, you can't go to this university because you're Jewish, you can't go to this club because you're black, you can't do this because you're a woman...
• 12:47
  then there was a sort of solid object to point at. Now we end up with a very interesting mush of genuine interests, maybe sexual harassment driving women out, maybe these kind of other soft kind of nepotism type things that men prefer working with other men. Those are so much harder to pin down and identify and will always be so much more subjective and arguable.
• 13:08
  Yes. And it reminds me a little bit to pivot back to the analogy you made earlier to race to the kind of the culture fit of an organization, which just sort of privileges up and coming young white men, because, you know, they're good lads and they're the kids of the guy who you go and play golf with. And it's a bit weird if there's a trans woman of color, she doesn't really fit in quite, does she? So you sort of do need some proactive way of saying we as an institution, as an organization are going to proactively try to diversify the
• 13:36
  our hiring in order to counteract that soft. But I mean, do you not think that that message has well and truly landed in the past five to 10 years in big corporations? I think that message has well and truly been delivered. I think it exists in a very loud way in the conversation people have heard it. It's whether or not people have internalized it.
• 13:55
  There's a great thing that David Cameron, who was a British Conservative Prime Minister, when he became leader of the Conservative Party, he wanted, he had his A-list of candidates. And what they did was they, because they knew that the kind of quotas would be an anathema to the Conservative spirit, they went and did a sort of training course and picked what they thought were really good minority and women candidates.
• 14:15
  and then said, look, here they are, they're all waiting for you. We've gone out and done the work and research and found these people. Put one of these on your shortlist. And he had this great line which he said that constituency associations who choose the prospective members of parliament are mostly in the Conservative Party in their 70s and 80s. And he said, I think they're trying to choose someone they'd like to be their son-in-law rather than their MP.
• 14:38
  And I think that's probably true. I mean, I'm sure female bosses do it as well. I'm sure female bosses go, well, I got on very well with her. And it just turns out that you've bonded over the fact that you both, you know, I don't know, love the work of Jane Austen or, I don't know, made the same Lego set or whatever it might be. And so I think you're right. The danger is that the message has been so loud in the culture that people have reacted against it without it actually being internalized by the people who could change things.
• 15:04
  Yes. I mean, even if it is internalized by those people, you've just sort of raised another elephant in the room, which is class, and you can diversify all you want along superficial lines. I mean, I call them superficial not to belittle them, but just to say that they're things that you don't have any control over and don't necessarily determine your aptitude, like your sex or your race.
• 15:25
  But it's equally important, one would assume, not to only be selecting people of color and women who comport to your particular idea of who you would like to have as a son-in-law, but also people who might be your sex and your race who come from wildly different backgrounds, who have a whole bunch of different ideas and who bring a diversity of ideology and economic backgrounds too.
• 15:47
  I think that's incredibly important. And, you know, that was the idea behind controversial as they are things like grammar schools in the UK. The idea that you would take working class exceptional children and give them the same education, you know, give them an elevated education. Always been intensely controversial. The thing I think, because I spend too much time on X, the everything app, is...
• 16:08
  is that some of the online right now subscribe. Because, you know, I wrote a book about genius. You can probably see it on my shelves. And I wrote a bit about Francis Galton, who was the Victorian half-cousin of Charles Darwin, wrote a very influential book called Hereditary Genius, in which he traced these very great families. Also, the guy who coined the word eugenics.
• 16:28
  And I think that there has been, and this is how far the backlash has gone, that in quite a lot of right-wing spaces, you will find people who think that they have a Victorian view of social class, essentially, which is they think that everything is divinely ordered. And if somebody is in one of the lower social classes now, that's because they're a lesser human, right? That actually everybody in the great 20th century of social mobility stratified everything and the kind of good people got out.
• 16:58
  and much more of an ease with the idea that actually, you know, that everybody gets their just desserts, essentially.
• 17:05
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