Latest / The Junto Podcast / E84: Outrage vs. Reality - Misplaced Priorities on 1st World "Problems"

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E84: Outrage vs. Reality - Misplaced Priorities on 1st World "Problems" · The Junto Podcast

0:07
Hello, America. Welcome to the Junto podcast, where we promote the practical
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applications of critical thinking and bold creativity.
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I'm your host, Edgar Mills. Thanks for joining us.
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All right. Hey, America. Welcome back. This is episode 84.
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And I always say that I do not like to talk about the topic of the day,
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whatever the hot topic is, but this one was pervasive.
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Last week, social media was abuzz and hyper-elevated state of concern over the
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Shane Gillis Saturday Night Live monologue.
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Specifically the bit where he used the word whore in reference to some women's gym wear.
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And what's the big deal, everybody thinks? The same observation has been circulating
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in comedy clubs and on comedy specials on Netflix and whatnot for decades.
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But this time, it produced an immediate and urgent backlash and a very concentrated
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effort to denounce Shane Gillis from a very,
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very dedicated demographic. Okay?
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Former cast members and women all over the internet were posting gym selfies
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of them wearing their, whatever their clothes were.
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But with the captions that they were, they were attaching to these selfies were,
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were like suggesting that the joke had somehow personally endangered them,
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was provoking violence, sexual violence, against them.
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And how very heroic of them to post those pictures, given that the only risk,
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was to their carefully curated online personas.
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And commentators all over the internet framed this as literally adjacent to rape culture.
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Shane Gill saying that some women dressed like whores in the gym is equivalent to rape culture.
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And roughly around the same past few weeks, an actual high-profile sexual assault
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allegation is circulating around about Cornell, which we talked about last week.
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And it moved through the usual, you know, public certainty without any facts.
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And it produced outrage, but not as much outrage as Shane Gillis did.
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And both of these things were treated basically as equal.
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So I guess if the right people were offended, a crude joke and an actual rape
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allegation carry the same weight, I guess. That's the world we're living in.
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All right. Well, slightly different, but the same. I was listening to a podcast
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a few weeks ago of a woman. It was a woman host and she was in her forties.
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I'd gathered and she was very clearly an affluent woman.
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She, she mentioned her Mercedes and whatnot.
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And I'm pretty sure this was based in Scottsdale, Arizona, this, this, this podcast.
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And she was talking about growing out her armpit hair.
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And she framed it up as, as like an experiment in questioning beauty standards
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and norms that were imposed upon her as it, as her youth are throughout her life, just as a woman.
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And and i thought it was very interesting in her young adulthood and there was
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some very interesting points she made in here in her young adulthood,
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she recalled like some early boyfriends and even young,
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like teen boyfriends and stuff like that who said some very unflattering and
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very critical things about, you know, body hair on women.
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And one of the stories was that she just hadn't shaved her legs that morning.
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And her boyfriend got in the car and put his hand on her leg and like cringed.
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Oh my God, you didn't shave your legs.
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Well, look, this stuck with her, man. This stuck with her.
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And it shaped her behavior after that. She became obsessive about shaving before leaving the house.
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She shaved her pits and legs, like, religiously.
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And I think she shaved other bits, too.
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She wasn't very explicit about this.
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But she began to lose me. This conversation began to lose me because she started
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using language like bravery and oppression and literally shedding of chains.
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Well, I took what was a very personal thing that she was saying,
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and I gathered initially that she was just working that out for herself.
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But then she started using this big language, this heavy language.
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And I started to, then I started to get a little critical, not of body hair
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of her, where she was placing this on the importance of life.
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But she stated,
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that she was only reclaiming her own authenticity. And that's legitimate,
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and I liked it. I thought it was good.
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But the language struck me as very conspicuous.
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Now, I'm going to take a side road here for a minute. I want to share.
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I like sharing because this is therapeutic for me as well, this podcast,
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which is probably for her too.
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I came of my sexual awareness very, very young in life, way too young,
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way too young, in the late 70s into the early 80s and mid-80s.
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But in those years, for me, it was still common enough to see women who left
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their pits and their pubes unshaven.
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That wasn't that uncommon to me. Yeah.
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It registered for me as natural and really a non-issue. I did see it.
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It was just a kind of a slowly fading norm.
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I knew that the majority of women did shave, but the women that didn't,
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it didn't strike me as odd.
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And there were some girls in
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my life that I knew in school and stuff like that, it wasn't a big deal.
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And then also movies. Now, I was also, I watched movies at an inappropriate
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age that were inappropriate for my age.
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But a lot of movies, and especially European art house movies,
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body hair was very normal, very normal.
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In fact, in Europe, it was very normal still.
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So it was just a matter of being natural and authentic. It wasn't a statement of any sort.
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And that's the way I still view it. I'll give you an example of a movie from
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when I was young. Not too young.
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There's a movie out there from the late 80s called Angel Heart.
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And it had Mickey Rourke in it.
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Pre-plastic surgery, Mickey Rourke.
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And it had Lisa Bonet in it. And if any of you remember Lisa Bonet,
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she was one of the most beautiful women on the planet.
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And her character in that movie, she had hair under her armpits,
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and it was an absolute non-issue.
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I still thought she was one of the most beautiful women on the planet.
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Yeah, and anyway, several other movies from that era, I mean the 70s and 80s.
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If you remember, Sophia Loren was a wildly famous Italian movie star from the 50s.
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And she,
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up until a late point in her career, had hair under her armpits.
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In Italy, it was normal, completely normal. and she was a knockout.
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She was completely unfazed by it.
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But what stuck with me, though, what stuck with me about this,
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because I said it was a non-issue, and it was, but I still had thoughts on it,
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is that how a woman with armpit hair, leg hair, or,
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pubic hair,
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there was an idea of that it was just body acceptance there they just accepted,
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their own body as it was and that
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that woman didn't feel the need to erase every natural thing about her,
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in order to be accepted,
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and she presented herself as she was not as a carefully curated managed product,
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like the Kardashians, for instance.
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And that's very attractive to me. The natural version still to me feels more genuine.
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It's more confident.
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And the attitude that they can't be bothered is, is attractive to me.
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So, yeah, that's where I'm at on that.
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Yeah. And, yes, of course, when I was younger, I sexualized a little bit.
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I told you I was exposed early in life. I sexualized it a little bit.
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But even to this day, I still, it's a non-issue.
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Many, many men out there, oh, that's gross. Whatever, man.
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It's natural. and I value natural over unnatural. Yeah.
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So anyway, this lady, this podcast, the host, that's the end of the detour.
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That's the end of the side road. I started to share that with you guys.
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Her, the decision itself to do this is innocuous. It's irrelevant to the world around her.
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Yeah, do your thing. Give it a go. but to speak of bravery however is to imply
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that there is some risk involved,
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and maybe in her mind there was some risk but it was her own internal risk it
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was her view of social acceptance no one else's,
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changing your personal shaving habits in a place in a society,
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where you won't be lashed or
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beaten or stoned to death or confined to your home without a male escort,
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well, in practical terms, it's more akin to rearranging your living room furniture
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than it is to resistance against systemic social oppression.
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There was no risk, so there's no bravery in that internal bravery to herself, maybe.
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And maybe I misunderstood the way she was delivering this, but it was started
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to sound very much like a pat on the back that she was able to stand against
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some systemic oppression.
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I don't,
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know. So anyway, this Shane Gillis example and this soccer mom who did the armpit
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experiment juxtapose these two examples,
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with daily conditions of roughly 1.2 billion human beings on this planet who
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are living below poverty line.
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In America as well, who these people who have unmet and overlapping needs like food, water,
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basic health care, basic education.
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For those people and those families, No one's talking about how offensive a joke was.
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No one is conflicted about shaving their armpits.
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The operative question for these humans is literally, how are we going to survive today? So,
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our very public outrage over Shane Gillis' monologue, his very crude observation
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about whorish gemware, has no bearing on these people.
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An affluent woman's decision about her underarm hair has even less bearing on these people.
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I guess it does make for a good podcast content among soccer moms who will never, ever go without a meal.
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The difference here in scale is it's not subtle. It's not nuanced.
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There's a chasm of space between,
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the two examples And these people who live a daily life of uncertainty,
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And this isn't a false equivalency argument here folks I'm trying to tell you
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there's priorities in this world And in this modern time, in the western world
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Our priorities are all fucked up,
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One side's out there treating a distasteful joke, a.k.a.
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Free speech, by the way, as an act so egregious that it requires some public
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mobilization and institutional condemnation.
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And this side treats some voluntary grooming habits,
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as a legitimate stand against systemic and oppressive social programming.
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Then the other side of all this are rational, critical thinkers,
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trying to figure out ways to solve problems such as people who have no reliable
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water source or food source on a daily basis or shelter,
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or physical daily safety.
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And none of that's guaranteed. That's their environment. That's their life.
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And so what the Jim Selfie rebuttal did, what did the Jim Selfie rebuttal do to the Gillis my life?
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What did it do? What did it solve? What did it accomplish?
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Maybe it demonstrated solidarity among this demographic, amongst people who
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already agree that Shane Gillis is a misogynist, I guess.
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What it did not do was change or affect anyone's actual exposure to violence. It didn't.
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No one is more aware of sexual violence indicators.
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No one is more educated on rape. What causes rape? Rapists cause rape.
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Well, no shit. What causes rapists to rape?
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No one's more educated on these things.
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And the body hair experiment, I'm sure, felt very meaningful to the woman conducting this experiment.
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And maybe she felt personally, like, freer and less burdened, maybe.
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The risk and the stakes of that act were entirely and exclusively internal to her.
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They had no effect on the world, no effect probably on her immediate circle.
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And for the other side to frame either of those as an urgent moral issue sits
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very, very awkwardly against,
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common practices that go on in the world that restrict women's movement without a male escort,
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or places where daily survival just isn't assumed. It's a gamble.
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Priorities are not right. Priorities are mixed up and incorrect.
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And I'm not saying that every crude joke is high art or anything.
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And I'm certainly not denying that beauty norms driven by Hollywood and very
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glossy fashion magazines and makeup companies,
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I'm not denying that they do exert a lot of pressure on young impressionable women and men they do,
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but we have to one teach our children to ourselves to to be above that stuff,
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to be above that pressure it's superficial,
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and people can dislike Shane Gillis's comedy style I like it I think he's hilarious,
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but they can dislike him and say so without claiming that it's violence.
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It doesn't have to be, you can dislike a thing and just casually dislike a thing.
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You don't have to equate it to Hitler or whatnot. It's not violence.
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A dirty joke is not violence. An offensive joke is not violence.
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And I'll say this, even a racist joke is not violence. The left loves to do that.
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And women, all of you women, any woman out there listening right now,
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you can simply stop shaving your armpits and your pubic hair and your legs and
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experience no particular drama or oppression.
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That is all. Yeah, you can do that. Do an experiment. Do your own experiment.
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Ridicule from immature men bothers you, you got bigger issues to solve.
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You got bigger issues to solve.
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And the imbalance here, folks, that I'm highlighting is that the tendency for
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these sort of social justice, you know,
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trolls, really, social justice trolls. I was going to say warriors, But no,
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the tendency is for them to reframe very low stakes speech,
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or very low stakes personal habits as evidence, as factual evidence of some
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widespread systemic violence or some epic act of courage.
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That it just doesn't warrant those words because it's not those things, but,
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they love to redefine words.
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Meanwhile, the conditions that exacerbate real crime, real poverty,
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real violence, real sexual violence, they get much less sustained attention.
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It might pop up once in a while and there'll be a hashtag this or that, and then it fades away.
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Shane Gills will fade away. But the explosion of attention that he got,
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where's that attention from?
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The homeless woman that got raped. Where's that attention?
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You know, just in the news recently, they're, they're releasing a documentary,
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you know, a woman several years ago, I want to say five years ago,
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she was a lesbian woman who was a bartender and she lived in Midtown Atlanta
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and she was out at two or 3 a.m.
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After getting off of work, walking her dog to let her dog go use the, He was the potty,
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and she was brutally murdered in Piedmont Park in a very brutal,
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stabbing slash ritualistic style murder.
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Her and the dog were both murdered.
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That went unsolved, by the way.
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Who knows about that? How many people know about that? If you live in Atlanta,
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you know about it, but was there the same national attention that Shane Gillis just got? No, no.
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When the media and the social media and the online conversation treat.
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These superficial things as some pressing moral question,
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it just diverts attention and energy,
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toward managing language and self-image as opposed to managing failed policy constraints or failed,
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well, why did the lady get murdered in Piedmont Park?
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Well, she got murdered and she would have anyway, maybe.
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Today, you can't walk the streets without a flock camera tracking you everywhere you go.
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Piedmont Park didn't even have functional cameras inside the park at the time.
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Failed policy. That was failed policy.
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But that's not addressed. Nobody cares about that. It's not,
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it's easy to talk about superficial things, make your opinion loud and loud
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and known, and then move on.
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But, but the attention and the effort gets shifted away from the things that
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matter, the things that suppress hundreds of millions of lives still today.
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And it gets shifted to some bullshit superficial thing. That's what it does.
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That's the bigger problem. That's the bigger problem.
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Now, there's another lesser traveled avenue we can all go down. Go down it with me.
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We can treat adults, all adults, as capable of hearing things that they dislike,
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without a public meltdown,
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without claiming that the speech itself has caused violence to them or anyone else.
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They require some kind of collective sanction or canceling.
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And I'll say this, and I'm going to go on to what the feminists, for instance, have won.
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Okay. The feminists have won. Now, because feminists have fractured off into
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several different splinter cells,
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that's not any fault of mine or anyone else's or any man or any system.
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But the feminists did, in fact, win, especially based on their stated and original,
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stated mission statement.
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Women are legally equal in every regard to men. They are.
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And I paraphrase Camille Paglia.
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Feminism has inherited those contradictions of modern liberalism.
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It sees every hierarchy as repressive, a social fiction.
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Every negative about a woman is a male lie designed to keep her in place.
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Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women,
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and has ended by rejecting contingency.
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That is human limitations set by nature or by fate.
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She was a very notable feminist camille paglia and she says that they have have
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taken what was legitimate,
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and essentially abused it when she says by rejecting contingency that means
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there are things that happen out there that are not designed to keep women down,
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they're just things that happen.
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And then it's convenient to frame them as some male oppression.
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Because that's a convenient answer. It's a convenient scapegoat.
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I happen to agree with Camille Paglia on a great many things, by the way.
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And I say that, And I reinforce that by saying this, who among you censors your
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speech to avoid offending a man?
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No one that I know of. Audiences out there, folks, men and women alike,
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have the option to simply ignore or criticize or leave. You don't, yeah.
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The arrangement that we have in our free society, when I say free,
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I'm referring, generally speaking, to westernized civilized nations, most notably America.
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The arrangement that we have It doesn't need platforms Social platforms Or it doesn't need employers,
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Or it doesn't need the state Acting as damn referees,
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Of acceptable taste Or acceptable language And regarding the real problems in the world Back to that,
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Policies and priorities,
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that expand production,
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skills, teach skills,
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and promote voluntary cooperation, lower poverty,
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far more reliably than any superficial efforts to highlight then police.
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Some symbolic, imagined offenses to humanity.
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Again, women being raped in Niger.
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Their armpit hair is no more a thought,
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than why is the sky blue.
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They're worried about being raped and mutilated. Homeless women walking the streets of America.
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Hell, I don't know. I haven't done a poll. I don't know if they shave their pits or not.
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I guess if they're truly homeless and you're out there, I guess,
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now another item that you have to scavenge for is a razor, I guess.
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And instead of using that water to drink, you're now going to use it to shave
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your pits and your legs, I guess. I don't know, man.
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It seems like I'd be a low priority.
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If food is a priority, it seems like shaving the pits probably takes second
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at least or third to that. I would imagine.
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I don't when i um there's this one little park by one of the rivers right in downtown the room,
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it's and it's on the other side of like the levee there and and the homeless
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people like to hang out there,
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i have i've run by there several you know run by there a lot and i want you know I'm listening.
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I don't hear them talking about how offended they are by a joke.
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I don't hear it. All right, we're getting close. This is going to be a shorter
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episode, folks. We're getting close.
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Practical metric here is this.
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Does the thing that you claim as violence toward women or bravery in the face of the patriarchy,
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does that change one single person's access to food or water or safety or shelter,
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or their freedom of movement.
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Or whether or not their children have access to basic medicine and basic education.
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Is that answer no? Probably. If your claim makes no impact,
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has no effect on the existing conditions of poverty and war and death,
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that still affect hundreds of millions of people. today.
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Your claim is a luxury version of an imaginary problem.
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And it's a conversation had between people who have never known any real true struggle.
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People living in this bleak reality that I keep going back to,
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they don't have the luxury of focusing on Shane Gillis' jokes or some bored
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soccer mom's Harry Pitts.
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The rest of the world has actual issues to deal with. So let them deal with them.
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That's what I got today, folks.
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That's what I got today.
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Something out of it. I hope it meant something to you. I hope at least you pulled
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like, you're able to maybe reshuffle some priorities.
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And for you, my listeners, the people who regularly listening,
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this is probably not an issue for you.
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I hope you share this with people you know who this is an issue for.
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I think most of my listeners are rational human beings and they have a good
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grasp on reality and they know what's important in life.
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What's important in life. Yeah. And ladies, hey, I do encourage you grow out
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your armpit hair, do it, do it.
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But don't bitch and moan about Shane Gillis jokes. Just don't listen to them.
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Folks. That's what I got for you on that. So what's coming up shooting-wise? Well, let's see.
32:58
This is coming up Saturday, 24 October. We have the Dynamic Everyday Carry Course,
33:04
and that is to get you prepared,
33:07
safe, confident to carry your gun out in the wild every day so that you're not
33:14
only not a liability and not a danger to yourself or others,
33:20
but highly proficient.
33:23
So it's not for new shooters, by the way.
33:26
You have to be already safe and familiar with your firearm and your equipment, your holster.
33:33
There will be a lot of movement and a lot of, well, as the word says, dynamic drills.
33:40
We'll be working fast. We'll be working close out to mid-ranges.
33:45
We'll be working a lot of brake contact and lateral movement and all those things,
33:49
all the things that you don't get out of your typical everyday carry course.
33:53
31 October, we have the Battle of Rome. Yes, that is Halloween day.
33:58
It'll be starting at nine in the morning and it'll probably run for three or four hours.
34:03
So your Halloween is not wasted if you come out and shoot. In fact,
34:07
it's a good primer to get you ready to go out and Halloween with your kids.
34:10
The Battle of Rome, strength, fitness, firepower.
34:14
Pistol only match with CrossFit-oriented fitness tasks intermingled.
34:21
Time. Members of Rome Strength and Fitness, you have a discount available to
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you and the flyer is posted up at the gym.
34:31
So use that discount code when you sign up.
34:34
Okay. 7 November, we have Women Only Pistol Course. Women Only Pistol Course.
34:41
There's going to be a little classroom and then there's going to be a lot of range time.
34:45
You will come into that course with whatever skill level you're at,
34:49
whatever knowledge level you're at, and you will leave that course proficient and confident.
34:55
It's well worth it. It's well worth it. Sign up, ladies. It's ladies only.
34:59
I hesitate to do women-only courses, but then I've had conversations with women
35:05
who thought it would be very beneficial. So that's what's up.
35:09
14 November is the fall of the wall two-gun match.
35:14
So all the regular usual suspects sign up for that.
35:18
But if you're not a usual suspect, it's a good time. Yeah, we run four stages,
35:24
and they're challenging stages.
35:26
We don't have a lot of resources out here. So the skill has to be has to be
35:31
pushed in order to make it challenging. And that's what we do.
35:35
So follow the wall to gun match 14 November.
35:39
All right, folks. And other than that, hey, private sessions are always available.
35:43
Always available affordable and they are geared toward your goals and appropriate
35:52
for whatever skill level you're at.
35:59
Man always do that all right folks that's it i appreciate you listening i do,
36:04
so i see you guys on the range take care.