Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "In Defence Of Boys" with Christina Hoff Sommers

Transcript

"In Defence Of Boys" with Christina Hoff Sommers · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day, humans! Welcome to the show that doesn't deal in absolutes, that doesn't deal in blacks and whites.
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  So many shows, so many politicians, so many commentators, so much of your social media feed,
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  expects either your agreement or disagreement, either your furious love or your furious anger.
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  I do not. I ask only that we give each other the benefit of the doubt, that we wrestle with ideas,
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  we reject, as well as those we think are right. Let's escape the dogmas of conventional wisdom,
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  let's have conversations that straddle the culture or divide, and make us all just a little uncomfortable.
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  Today on the show, the feminist, who feminists love to hate. Well, not all feminists, obviously,
• 0:56
  many feminists love her, including her. I mean, being a feminist herself, I'm sure she loves
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  herself, and I'm something of a feminist, so I would put me in that basket as well. So there are at
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  least two feminists in the world who love Christina Hoffsommers, her and me. She's a philosopher,
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  and she was a pioneering thinker about feminism. She came of age in the 60s and 70s, but really
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  wrote about feminism most powerfully in the 90s, arguing for what she thinks of as a kind of equity
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  feminism, meaning a sort of classical liberal feminism, a libertarian feminism, which might
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  be contrasted against victim feminism or gender feminism. She doesn't want to frame feminism as being
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  something that has an irrational hostility towards men. She wrote a book in 1994 called Who Stole
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  Feminism in 2000, another book called The War Against Boys. Look, she's quite a lightning rod in
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  the United States. You would know her if you're if you're very online, and if you're into Twitter,
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  she's sometimes associated with the kind of intellectual dark web type community, but she's a
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  fascinating thinker about gender and political correctness and workness and academia. Please enjoy
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  this conversation with the one and only Christina Hoffsommers.
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  What to get a new year recently.
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  What took me to New York is that I was vaccinated, and I wanted to party. I have a great time,
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  and my son is there, and my friends were having a party, and it was wonderful. The world was
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  restored. This was about three weeks ago, and I even went to a comedy club and the comedy
• 2:50
  seller in Greenwich Village, and it was a fall of people laughing the worst possible thing for
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  COVID, but we don't have an vaccinated. What was interesting is you couldn't get in unless you
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  had your vaccination card, which I had, and with ones who were in there, I felt safe.
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  Was there social distancing or masks or anything? Nothing. Well, there might be now, but three
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  weeks ago was different. Three weeks ago, we were finished with it. It was over, and then there's
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  still some areas to come back and frighten everyone. What were the comics talking about?
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  For a start, I'm so intrigued by the whole vaccination card thing, because here in Australia,
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  we haven't started differentiating between people who have vaccinated and unvaccinated,
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  because we haven't really had enough vaccines to start blaming people who aren't vaccinated yet,
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  we're only getting up to, I think, we're approaching 50% first dose, so we're running as
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  high as we can towards the finish line, but it doesn't seem fair to discriminate against people
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  who haven't been vaccinated just yet. Have you been vaccinated? Yes, I've gotten both my doses,
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  because I'm over 40, so I was eligible, but because we have universal healthcare, there's a system
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  to it. It's not just like, oh, I'm able to get it, because my private insurer can give it to me.
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  You have to be in a category that is worked out by epidemiologists in advance and provided
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  through Medicare, because we have Medicare for everybody. I've got it, but that doesn't really get me,
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  that doesn't do anything. That doesn't do anything for me in practice, except for giving me the
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  piece of mind that I'm not going to end up dead. As far as I can tell, even if you're exposed to it
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  and get it, once you've been vaccinated, it's a mild case. Yeah, exactly, that's right.
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  I'm interested in the vaccination cards, because here, everyone has the same healthcare portal,
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  in the sense that everyone has a Medicare card, and so everyone can log in to Medicare,
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  and on their phone, they can pull up the same uniform accredited QR code type vaccine thing,
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  like it'll be, I think, almost impossible to forge, but are you saying that you just have a
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  physical card in your wallet? Like, couldn't I just photocopy your card and white out your name
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  and put mine in? I think so. Good old America. I got the vaccine, it's six flags, which is a
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  lot of six flags. I really loved it. It was closed, but the military had taken it over, and
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  hundreds and hundreds of people was the most efficient operation I'd ever see, and I just went there,
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  never had to get out of the car, and then somebody gave me this little card, which doesn't look
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  very official, but there's something on it that... No, I don't think there is. I think that's just
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  the way America rolls, baby. I mean, you've got to believe my disbelief when I got to America,
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  and as a foreigner, America does such a great job of promoting itself to the rest of the world,
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  as the biggest, most cutting edge. I mean, and of course, many parts of it are from Silicon Valley
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  to the entertainment industry and big tech, but when you get there and start interacting with American
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  bureaucracy, you realize this is just the most developed third world country in the world, really.
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  Like, when I got my Social Security card, and it was a piece of cardboard, of lightweight cardboard
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  with a number printed on it, I was like, there's no photo, there's no fingerprint, there's no
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  nothing. No wonder, no wonder people that come across the border illegally can just buy random
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  Social Security cards and then become eligible to work, there's no verification.
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  Yeah, yeah, I have a little dog that has to have proof of rabies, and it's more official,
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  certainly than my vaccine card, but it's more official looking than myself's security card.
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  You don't even use it, you just, it's just a, as you say, it looks like a typical movie theater or something.
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  And like, and like my Australian driver's license, well, it's a state-by-state thing,
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  but my state driver's license here, even when I first moved to the states a dozen years ago,
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  I had a hologram over my photo, like the photo was embedded in the card, and all my American friends
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  were like, wow, that's incredible. And a friend of mine from Midwest pulled her driver's license out
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  of her wallet. It's a piece of paper. She unfolds it. You know, it's the, anyone could hold it.
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  I was once with my friend. Do you know the philosopher, the late philosopher, Roger Scrutin?
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  Yes, of course. The wonderful Roger Scrutin. I was once driving with him in Washington,
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  DC, and we got pulled over, he was driving my car, but I think I had forgotten to
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  update the registration or something. Anyway, we were pulled over, and the policemen at Sirc
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  may I please say your driver's license, you know, Rod, you know, certainly officer. And then he
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  pulls out, it looked like a map. He's an ancient document. It's something from, you know, out of
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  Charles Dickens. It opens it up from his burrow, where he assured the policeman that this was
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  legitimate in the district of Columbia. And this shocked policeman looked at this, this, this,
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  this papyrus about the term, this is not acceptable in the district of Columbia. And then
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  Rodgers kept saying, no, I was assured it was. And then the policeman, this hard DC cop just looked
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  kind of shocked. I don't want to do it. Just go on. Yeah, we don't accept, we don't accept papyrus
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  documents from 1837. But just before we get back to you, I want, I still want to hear about this,
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  this comedy sell-up gig, because so I know so many comics in New York who've been
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  nervous to say smashed by the pandemic. And here in Australia as well, but to a lesser extent,
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  there's, it hasn't been quite as bad here. What, what were they talking about and was there
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  much material about coronavirus or was it all escapism? No, we were, we're past that. Maybe we,
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  you know, we've been vaccinated. Nobody's talking about that. Well, now maybe again, we're talking about,
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  but what I, I was a little worried that they'd all be afraid to make jokes because they might face
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  annihilation on social media and never get, you know, never get to Saturday night live or whatever
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  all right. You mean that they might get canceled? Yes, but here's what happened.
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  Not only did you have to show my vaccination card, but you have to take your phone and then
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  they give you an envelope, they seal it and then you have to keep it in, you know, in front of you
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  the whole time, the sealed envelope. How great. They make your phone. And if you're seen with a phone,
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  I mean, you never come back to the cell. That's fantastic. That makes me, I mean,
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  the reason why I think that's so important if people don't work in comedy and don't understand
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  is that there's a very big difference between a polished set that a person is putting out,
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  which is their one hour special that they want to do for Netflix. And the kinds of things that
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  they might talk about at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night at the comedy cell, and you only get to the
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  former by trying out a lot of shit in the world. And that's what what comedians do. You know,
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  they sort of push the envelope and sometimes they go too far. So they learn that didn't work.
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  That was just too harsh. And they did what I found interesting was that initially you might think,
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  oh my goodness, this is even the comedy club who's gone woke because the comedians were
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  diverse. And there was an Asian young woman, a Muslim young woman, a gay guy, two black guys,
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  and then a depressed dain, a depressed guy from Denmark. And they were there. And however,
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  once they were telling their jokes, these were the most incorrect jokes you could imagine.
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  So it's almost as if the comedy central is having a bit of laugh because they are representational.
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  But the comedians are hysterically funny and incorrect. And each one was great. I love them.
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  It's such a good place. I can't wait to go back. I hope that Delta doesn't derail things.
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  And it's still that the seller and all of the live comedy and even just live eating and live
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  everything in New York is able to return. So you're living on the outskirts of DC. Do you just
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  give people a sense of what you do? And I'm also interested in what you sort of wanted to do when
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  you were a young girl. Well, I am a resident scholar at a think tank, the American Enterprise Institute.
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  But before that, I taught philosophy for many years in Massachusetts. I got my PhD at Brandeis
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  and then taught at Clark University. But in 1996, I started, but once I had tenure,
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  I'm not sure I would have done this before tenure, but things were different then. So I wasn't
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  really worried about disapproval. So I would sometimes challenge sacred teachings of some of my
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  colleagues in philosophy, some feminist philosophers. But I had tenure and I started challenging them.
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  They didn't go so well with them, but people in my field liked it. And the magazine The Atlantic,
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  a editor had read something I'd written and asked me to write about the state of women's studies
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  and feminism, write about it for the Atlantic. Because I wasn't writing as a conservative critic,
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  I was writing as a feminist and a liberal, but who was disappointed in the increasing irrationality
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  that I saw in feminist theory. But once I started writing articles for more popular magazines,
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  and not just professional philosophy journals, that's when I just got a lot more attention
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  as a writer and then was invited to DC to be part of this think tank, which was wonderful because
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  by then I'd been teaching for almost 20 years. And this think tank, yeah, it's a university without
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  students. So there are a lot of young people. So it's not that you're detached from the younger
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  generation, but you don't have to grade papers, no meetings, just you can just write wonderful
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  colleagues and I've just loved it. I love that. I love that you'd be idea of a university without
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  students. It's like, isn't there an old gag about doctors saying like it would be so fantastic
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  to be a doctor if it wasn't for all of these fucking patients. You get to go to a think tank and
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  there are no students to annoy you. I mean, A.E.I. is a conservative think tank. Have you been a
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  conservative throughout your life? Or is this just a fit that has happened by accident?
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  I was, I'm a three generations of liberal socialist, possibly communist,
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  parents and grandparents, and no, very, very liberal. And still, I think of myself as a,
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  I was sort of a hippie, flower child. I was, when I was younger and thought of myself as very
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  liberal, things were just different. Like the people that wanted to practice censorship,
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  they were on the right, the people that wanted to control and shame, you know, conservatives.
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  And I was astonished to find these vices move into the left wing circles.
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  And so I just objected to the sensoriousness and the rigidity. I don't know what happened,
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  but I think the liberalism changed. But I still think of myself as the way I was, but the world
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  changed. I mean, I think of that critique, Christina as being something that I've seen really ramp up
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  in the past four or five years or so, I guess. I mean, I was at Huff Post live in 2012 to 2016,
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  as one of the founding hosts of that outfit. And I saw the transition from a playground in which
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  everybody was able to articulate their opinions regardless of their identity to becoming, to just the
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  first shoots sprouting of my being pilloried for having conversations with people of minority
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  ethnicities or women simply by virtue of the fact that I'm a white man. Like that attack,
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  the attack that you don't have standing to talk intellectually about something because of your
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  sex agenda or sexuality or race or religion was an accusation that I was able to sort of rule out
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  of conversation immediately when I started it in the early 20 teens. And nowadays, of course,
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  it's an accusation that carries an enormous amount of weight. And I almost have to preface everything
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  I say by saying, of course, I understand my privilege as a white man, but X, Y, Z. But you've been on
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  this bandwagon. I mean, you wrote, who stole feminism in 1995. You wrote the war against boys in
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  2001. This is a long standing thing for you. Was it what were you seeing back then that was already
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  bad? I was seeing what everyone else is seeing right now, but it was a side show. It was limited to
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  sort of obscure corners of the academy. But when I started writing articles about what was going
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  on in women's studies, I began to go to conferences. And I began to attend their workshops and read
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  the journals in feminist theory. And what I wanted to laugh, it was so extreme. And it's the way
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  many people respond right now when they find, you know, just I think yesterday someone was complaining
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  that a white woman had written a book about noodles and rice. What was she thinking with this kind
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  of cultural appropriations? And in the face of something like that, you just think this can't be
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  true. Who owns rice, Christina? Who owns the noodle? Let's investigate. It needs further investigation
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  at your think tank. But at the time, was it that absurd? Yeah, pretty much. Was it like, let's think
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  about, because I wasn't cognizant of these issues when I was in like school, I just I was taught
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  by, I guess, small or liberal principles. Treat, you know, girls are just as good as boys,
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  you know, racism and sexism are the worst things in the world. I had a, as a little kid, that's what I
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  was thinking. And that, that was the era in which you were writing who stole feminism. So at the time,
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  I don't. Oh, no, no, what I'm saying is it was not in the society at large. It was only in the,
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  these very, very rarefied circles. Oh, I see. You were writing as a philosopher to
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  philosophers. And I was writing to philosophers, as a philosopher to philosophers. And these were,
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  I just couldn't find a moderate voice. I couldn't find the voice of common sense. It was,
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  I would say at the time, it was, Marxism was too concerned. In fact, Marxism was criticized
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  for being sexist, but that didn't mean they rejected the basic approach. They very much used that
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  approach, but just crossed out race and put gender. And it was this language of this series about
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  women, the war against women, and that we were captive to a sex gender system in which women
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  were relentlessly preyed upon by men. And it was bolstered by these sort of dramatic statistics
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  of how many women are dying from eating disorders. If they're not already dead from being beaten
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  by their husband or battered by their boyfriend, and then they're cheated out of their salaries,
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  and it was just unremitting grimness. And I began to check the sources, like where did they find
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  these statistics, and who stole feminism was largely an effort to confirm the claims that undermine
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  these radical theories. And these claims just didn't hold up. It's not to say that there are
• 20:25
  problems, and there are areas where there are pathologies and horrible crimes and so forth,
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  but in the United States, probably in Australia, it's the exception, not the rule, and that overall
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  liberal feminism, which I very much defended all along, it wasn't great success story. One of the
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  great chapters in the history of the human quest for freedom and equality, and I wanted to
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  celebrate that tradition and point out that it was working, but I faced people who believed
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  their own propaganda, and it was harder to break through than I thought. I mean, I thought all I
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  had to do was point out that their arguments were lacked soundness, and that would be sufficient
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  to persuade them. Now, they probably think the same thing about me. They probably think that I'm
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  just, I've internalized the patriarchy or suffer from some kind of a conceptual disorder, but
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  or you enjoy the benefits of white privilege and wealth, and so you see the world through a lens
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  that doesn't have adequate consideration for the struggles of most women. Well, I would say that,
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  yeah, but most of the people I was debating enjoyed those privileges. So it wasn't
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  that. So, can you place me on a chronology here? If we think about second wave, feminism stretching
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  from the 60s through to the period where you start writing, who stole feminism, and you start
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  thinking about all this stuff, or at least putting it on paper, was was your sense that
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  was your sense kind of like, okay, we've done this, like feminism sort of worked, we've kind of
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  made it, we don't need to go further, or was your sense that like, let's keep moving further
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  bit in a different way than the way that my colleagues are advocating for? Of the second, I
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  would always try to be open to the possibility that there were serious inequities, and I even
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  today I believe there are for women in certain places, in certain fields, for example, but
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  what I didn't see was systemic sexism in the United States. It just didn't seem like the best
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  explanation for the configuration of men and women in the society. It seems like... But what other
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  explanation could there be for, for example, the lack of representation in Congress, the absence of
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  any female president, the lack of women on boards of Fortune 500 companies and so on, other than
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  there being a structural sort of boys club that looks down its nose at hiring women as colleagues.
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  The explanation that I gave was that the liberal analysis of incremental change in pericism
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  was working, and that it was basically up to women to take advantage of the opportunities,
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  if they wanted to make as much money as a man, it probably makes sense to enter the same field
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  and to work the same number of hours. And then I would look to see how our men and women
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  distributed in the workplace, and it would turn out that if you look at the lowest paying jobs,
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  you will find things like social worker or your early childhood educator and the highest paying
• 24:13
  job to say for a college graduate. A high-age paying job would be a petroleum engineer,
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  and it would turn out that the vast majority of petroleum engineers were men, and the social
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  workers and early childhood educators were women. So then you say, okay, we're women coerced
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  into their choice. And I studied the literature on vocation and choice and preferences,
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  and for my book I interviewed great numbers of people, and mostly when I would talk to young women
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  who might be majoring in education or psychology or social work, they considered insulting to be told
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  that they were just sort of victims of a system that where they had no choice, they were just
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  led to make this because of a legacy of patriarchy. They didn't feel that they weren't free if they
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  had wanted to study petroleum engineering, that they couldn't do it. And so I just didn't think that
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  that was the idea that it was discrimination, that that was why women were held back.
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  Do I think that it might be one reason? There might be something to explore here. I'm always open
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  to that, but then there just were so many other explanations. Well, I mean the critique of
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  the structural feminists who you oppose might also involve questions about why some professions
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  are better paid than others and might say, well, excuse me, isn't it convenient that the jobs
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  that women do tend to be worse paid than the jobs that men tend to do so that engineers end up
• 26:01
  getting paid more than early childhood educators? What's your response to that structural criticism?
• 26:07
  Again, that's something I was always open to, but I just had a hard time finding a solution,
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  because a lot of it is so market-driven. And I remember I was once debating a feminist economist
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  and she said how shocking it was that someone, a zookeeper, someone at a zoo, which is at the time,
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  anyway, mostly men, earns more than a child care worker. And she said, in our children, you know,
• 26:36
  don't they count more than animals? Depends on the child. I don't know if you've met my twins.
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  But I will concede that children count more than animals, but, you know, to give a giraffe a bath
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  or something, it's just an essential skill set. Again, you haven't tried to bathe my twins.
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  No, early childhood education or something a lot of women know how to do.
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  You have a huge supply of women who can do it. And petroleum engineer, it's just a different set
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  of people, and it's a lot harder, and you can't make that comparison. And I remember some,
• 27:29
  I was speaking at Oberlin College, and the student wrote, I sort of said what I just said to you,
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  a student was just so in sense that how her major in, I think they forget what she was
• 27:43
  majoring in, you know, feminist dance therapy or something, up a theory. I don't know. Something,
• 27:50
  how what kind of a society didn't allow her to pursue her interest? Well, you know what,
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  our society allows you to pursue your interest. And especially if you're upper middle class
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  young woman at Oberlin, you have probably more opportunity to do that than anyone on the planet.
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  You can't do that, but you can't then say the society is going to reward it exactly the same,
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  that will depend on the, I don't know, simple things like supply and demand. However, there's
• 28:25
  a more serious thing. It is, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's been pushing this
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  for years, and I'm not completely averse to it. There could be, they, they just discounted
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  the value of caregiving, and so we've, you know, we're not paying people what they were,
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  but then the question is what do you do? And the most practical solution was something called
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  comparable worth, where people wouldn't be paid according to their specific job, but just
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  the kind of job, and they were going to try to work it out so that, you know, you wouldn't end up
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  with, say, a cafeteria worker earning less, which were many women, earning less than a janitor.
• 29:08
  But it turned out to be impossible to apply it to the real world.
• 29:13
  Well, I mean, how would you even do that unless you're going to have a centrally planned
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  Soviet style economy? I mean, you might be able to do it inside one institution, a university
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  might be able to make a policy internally that it's going to pay people that way, but you can't
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  do it across an economy. Yeah, then they end up not, you know, then it turns out that the janitors
• 29:29
  have to work different hours and, you know, so, Christina, let's just get into some of the data
• 29:35
  about this because I don't want it to be too vague for people. Basically, when, when, when,
• 29:40
  when people are making this critique about women only earn 77 cents on the dollar or whatever,
• 29:46
  you alluded earlier, we're talking now about the different jobs that women and men do and whether
• 29:52
  or not there's a kind of a structural bias that compensates men better, but that's not the,
• 29:57
  the nub of most people's criticism. Most people's criticism is what you mentioned earlier,
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  which is that if a woman goes for gets the same job as a man and works the same hours as a man,
• 30:06
  she doesn't get compensated the same way that the man would. Is that true?
• 30:11
  I haven't been able to find evidence of that being true and let me explain. It turns out that,
• 30:20
  yes, if you look at engineers and people who send this to me and they'll show me the data,
• 30:24
  engineers, women, engineers earn less, but it turns out that there are certain specialties that
• 30:31
  pay more. So if you go into electrical engineering, you earn more than an environmental engineer.
• 30:37
  But then women are overrepresented among environmental engineers and men
• 30:46
  donate the electrical, nuclear, petroleum engineers, you find far more men. So you have to then
• 30:55
  look at the specialties, but then you can't stop there. You have to look how many hours
• 31:00
  week do they work? How many hours, how far are they willing to travel to the job? It turns out
• 31:07
  men are willing to travel a lot farther. Are they willing to work weird hours? This turns out for
• 31:13
  high paying professions and law and media and so forth. There's employers give a real premium to
• 31:20
  people who are on demand, who can be there all the time. This turns out to be one of the
• 31:30
  explanations for the wage gap. I saw a study of Uber drivers. Nobody is discriminating. It's
• 31:41
  an algorithm how you get paid. You drive, you take passengers and you're paid and it turned out
• 31:47
  there was, forget the exact number, but you know, 18% difference, favoring men. And
• 31:56
  some economists took it, looked at it very carefully. And once they did the controls and yes,
• 32:05
  maybe it was that men worked more dangerous hours early in the morning or something.
• 32:12
  And that explained it a little bit, but then it turned out women were willing to work hours
• 32:16
  men didn't like them. I don't know, Sunday mornings, whatever. That wasn't the explanation.
• 32:22
  Ultimately, they found out it was that men drove faster. That was, they were just getting more,
• 32:30
  more job. So what do you do with that? Well, I would tell women, you know, or make sure the men
• 32:38
  are speeding or I don't know whatever you do. It wasn't ever that they were breaking a lot,
• 32:43
  they were just more aggressive drivers. So is that discrimination or is it now? I guess
• 32:51
  someone who's always looking to find fault with the system would say, well, it because, okay,
• 32:58
  so women are brought up to be more cautious and risk averse. And so there was a tremendous
• 33:07
  amount of research and effort to change the way we raise kids and to turn, you know, change the way
• 33:15
  children play. And a lot of pressure on parents, you know, not just to give your daughter a doll and
• 33:23
  give your boy, you know, the train set. That's been going on for as long as I can remember since
• 33:32
  the late 60s, free to be you and me, like this best-selling record for parents and young,
• 33:38
  among parents of young children and why can't William have a doll and all that. And stipulate,
• 33:43
  there are some boys, certainly a minority boys who will play constructively with a doll and
• 33:50
  want to play the way girls typically play, but not very many. And any expert on sort of childhood
• 34:00
  play or playground dynamics will tell you that the typical play of little boys is called
• 34:06
  rough and tumble play. And there's a lot of mock fighting and cheering and, you know, boom, back,
• 34:12
  sound effects. Girls do a certain amount of rough and tumble play, but they mostly don't. They
• 34:20
  prefer imaginative theatrical games, playing house, playing school. There's also a lot of turn
• 34:28
  taking games for exchanging confidences with a best friend. See a lot of little girls doing that.
• 34:35
  Most boys, they're not doing that. They want the rough and tumble play. As one teacher said,
• 34:40
  she would put the kids in this room where they could just run and write it. And the girls would
• 34:45
  always get bored and want to go, okay, let's go to the art corner. Let's go to the doll corner.
• 34:49
  She said, no boy ever wanted to leave this romper room. You know, when they were with the
• 34:54
  friend, no boy ever wanted to. And that's just, now it's not a hundred percent of kids that are
• 35:01
  always children who defy the stereotypes of their sex. But the majority did not. And people have
• 35:06
  been trying to change the way kids play and get the girls to be more like the boys. And so far,
• 35:14
  it hasn't worked. Now you're touching on something that is really controversial and would not have
• 35:21
  been foreseen as being controversial a generation ago when you were writing about the stuff that
• 35:27
  was controversial then about the difference in pay and so on. Because now you're talking about
• 35:31
  essentially biology and gender and the relationship between gender and sex. It is almost
• 35:40
  taboo. I mean, you will certainly risk being called a bigger-tor-a-transfobe if you start
• 35:47
  speaking about ways in which biological sex maps directly onto preferences and gender.
• 35:55
  Well, no, no, I would say it maps directly. People are, human beings are very complicated and all
• 36:01
  of us have things about us that are probably more typical of the opposite sex. However,
• 36:07
  when you study human beings and you study their children, you study adolescents, adults,
• 36:14
  and you look at their choices, their expressed preferences, most of us, more or less,
• 36:22
  embody the stereotypes of our sex. And I would say of trans people, to me,
• 36:28
  still haven't had a good explanation of this, but it seems to me that it's kind of proof
• 36:32
  that the biology is destiny because there may be something biologically different about them
• 36:39
  in which they strongly identify as female and half female preferences. I mean, we are creatures
• 36:47
  of nature. And, you know, in our evolution there was certain value to a mother being nurturing
• 36:58
  and a father, you know, protecting from predators and so forth. So it seems to me would be surprising
• 37:06
  if we were exempt entirely from, you know, human evolution. I mean, from natural evolution.
• 37:15
  I mean, what's interesting, what I find interesting, and I want to dig into this a lot more
• 37:20
  with non-binary people and with trans, with binary trans people, is I was interviewing a trans woman.
• 37:28
  She's a Fiji in Australia and she's terrific, but she really, and it wasn't on this podcast,
• 37:35
  but I'll come back to her if the listeners are interested. She was almost quite offended by the gender
• 37:41
  fluid sort of non-binary fad or fashion at the moment with young people who feel like they're on
• 37:48
  a spectrum of gender. And I'm not denying that. I think many of us are on a spectrum of gender,
• 37:55
  just as we're on a spectrum of sexuality in some way. But her sense of herself was that when she
• 38:01
  was a little boy, she was still very much a woman inside, a girl inside, and had always felt that way.
• 38:07
  And this is characteristic of transgender people stretching back, you know, for thousands of years,
• 38:13
  we have evidence of people who have just always felt a self-expression that maps onto the biology
• 38:20
  of the sex that they weren't assigned at birth. And that, I wonder what you make of whether or not
• 38:27
  there's a fit between that and gender non-binaryness. Because if there are characteristics
• 38:35
  that are normally associated with one sex, like as you were saying earlier, an interest in taking
• 38:42
  things apart and putting them back together again, like if you get a thousand, if you get a thousand
• 38:46
  males of the species into a room together and you say, I'm going to give you a choice, you can either
• 38:51
  spend the next hour taking this widget apart and putting it back together again, or you can spend
• 38:57
  the next hour talking to a family about how they can better improve their communication.
• 39:03
  Then the men go for the former, and if you get a thousand females in a room, they tend to go more
• 39:08
  for the latter. So if there is some connection between our biology and our preferences, then
• 39:17
  that works in the world in which transgender people exist but within fixed binaries,
• 39:25
  but it doesn't necessarily work in a world in which non-binary fluidity is supposed to co-exist
• 39:32
  with the rigid gender binary of the transgender man or woman.
• 39:36
  Yeah, well let's just talk about a trans person who is a little boy but who feels like he's a girl
• 39:45
  and wants to play like a girl. And I understand that because I wanted to play like a girl.
• 39:50
  I was a girly girl and you know wanted the bride dolls and the, you know, Laura Ashley
• 39:58
  surrounding and I understand that it's something very, very potent in a human being.
• 40:08
  And then I had, I have two sons, a step-son, Tamer, who I think you know,
• 40:14
  rock about him later and David. And it was just different, you know, I had to suddenly
• 40:23
  be in a world of sport succession, even the way they relate to boys, talk to each other,
• 40:31
  both my sons, but all, many men that I know, they show friendship by joking with each other and
• 40:39
  sort of caustic put downs, but that are really friendly, it's a way men show affection,
• 40:47
  this kind of, kind of rousing on each other. And it's very different than the way
• 40:53
  most women relate to each other. And I've just watched it up close, but then I look at the data
• 41:01
  and see for example that, what, I'll just give you one example that's, that's quite fascinating
• 41:07
  and you may have heard about, young, there's a group of girls who are born with a genetic disorder,
• 41:16
  congenital adrenal hyperplasia, C-A-H girls, and they were exposed to high levels of
• 41:24
  antrogen, male hormones in the mother's womb. And they
• 41:30
  events the preferences of typical boys. They are roughened tumblers and they
• 41:40
  behave very much like boys, typical boys, or what we call typical male behavior.
• 41:47
  And that would tell you that there's something in our biology, in our hormones,
• 41:53
  and perhaps brain, and maybe not yet fully understood, that is a play. And here's the important
• 42:02
  thing. So what? And here's the problem, the feminist groups, the activists will just focus on
• 42:10
  everything that's bad about what they call the gender system. But what about the things that
• 42:17
  are good? What about people that just enjoy being what they feel they are, and little girls
• 42:25
  playing the way they want to play? And by the way, little girls games are, people say, well,
• 42:31
  boys play, you know, these, these, these superheroes, and girls don't have them. Yes, they do.
• 42:37
  Girls have, you know, princesses, and who gets to be mommy when you play house, and they're all
• 42:43
  sorts of power struggles. They're a little more, hard to see, boys, just are more, you know,
• 42:52
  altogether rem, sort of, boisterous about it. But girls play is immensely rich and complicated,
• 43:00
  and so is the boys, and it's, it's just healthy for them. It's the way they become, you know,
• 43:07
  they, they're, they're like the boys that are engaging in rough and tumble play. It is the opposite
• 43:12
  of violence, because in violence kids, parties, enemies, they're, we're unhappy, they're tears,
• 43:18
  they're, the boys who are violent in a social environment are not popular. Boys who are good
• 43:23
  rough and tumbleers are very popular. There is, they can hardly suppress laughter when they're
• 43:29
  playing, and what worries me is increasingly there are many teachers and mothers, maybe, who
• 43:37
  regard rough and tumble play as a form of violence, and they want to control it or suppress it.
• 43:45
  And this is why I wrote, and one of the issues I addressed in the war against boys is that
• 43:50
  we have to meet children where they are, and on average, boys are not girls, and we can't set
• 43:59
  the behavior of girls as the gold standard and view boys as lacking. I just, and I see a lot of
• 44:09
  systemic prejudice against boys in schools. I, so I have twins, Christine, as I mentioned, one of
• 44:16
  them is a boy and one of them is a girl. They're almost four. And a perfect, a perfect lab,
• 44:23
  exactly. And because I'm married to a guy, we don't have a female role model in the household.
• 44:28
  So this question of gender and how much or how little we try to encourage or discourage
• 44:35
  expressions of gender, it's like stereotypical gender expressions, how much we should be discouraging
• 44:43
  the warlike instincts of our son when he's, you know, he wants to shoot to play,
• 44:49
  shooting at people and stabbing people and things like that. Like, firstly, it's absolutely
• 44:57
  obvious that there are sex-based gender differences to me just from this lab experiment. I mean,
• 45:02
  we have been as hands-off as you could possibly be in encouraging them both to be as interested in
• 45:09
  in things from all genders. We haven't imposed colors or, you know, anything, pinks and blues,
• 45:15
  none of that. And the reality is that whether it's through cultural osmosis or something else,
• 45:22
  they are str- the- our son is a boy and our daughter is our girl. There's absolutely no two ways
• 45:27
  about that. But what do you think that a boy who's almost four needs that the general zeitgeist
• 45:37
  is not likely to give him? Well, I would say that I'm very worried because they're, I think,
• 45:45
  in their schools and in some places families, they exist in this environment of disapproval.
• 45:52
  And one study that really shocked me was, there was a couple of researchers that, I think,
• 46:00
  because the University of Maine, and they studied- they were observing classrooms. And how often did
• 46:08
  the teacher interfere, intervene and redirect their play? And it turned out it rarely happens
• 46:15
  to little girls. People like the way- the teachers like the way they play. Boys, on the other hand,
• 46:20
  were constantly getting redirected towards another kind of play because the teachers didn't
• 46:27
  like the superhero play. And they certainly didn't like, you know, the sword fights and the
• 46:33
  fantasies of, you know, monsters eating a city and that kind of thing. And so the boys were
• 46:39
  encouraged, well, just the monster have to eat the city. I mean, can't the monster like
• 46:43
  deliver food to the city? And the boys didn't understand. And I remember one father,
• 46:50
  I remember about this father in California who had a very well-behaved little boy,
• 46:56
  no, never had any problems, but he was brought into the school because the teachers who were very
• 47:02
  worried about Billy, Billy had written a story. And then the teachers and the counselors showed
• 47:08
  the parents the shocking pictures. And they were people on a boat having a sword fight and there
• 47:13
  were heads and bloody swords. And the father was there, but he likes pirate stories.
• 47:20
  And they said, well, we're worried about, you know, what he's learning at home and this sort of thing.
• 47:25
  And the father was just so kind of heartbroken because he said, if these teachers have so little
• 47:31
  sympathy with my son's imagination, how are they going to teach him? And these these researchers at
• 47:37
  the University of Maine wondered if that might be part of the reason why boys are so far behind
• 47:45
  in reading and writing. And I know it's true in Australia as well as the United States. I mean,
• 47:50
  girls are a little behind in math and science, but catching up quickly, if not closing the gap
• 47:56
  altogether, it was never as large as the reading gap. The reading and writing, writing gap is a
• 48:01
  chasm. But the thing about reading and writing is that when children are the earliest age,
• 48:09
  they want to write about what they're what excites them. And for a lot of little boys, it might be
• 48:15
  their video game where, you know, pirates, their drawings or their stories might be that pirates
• 48:22
  with swords and, and, you know, cutting off heads. I mean, it might be happening. And the other
• 48:29
  thing is we seem to have forgotten that these fantasies of little boys is super hero play. It's not
• 48:34
  about violence. And we just seem to have forgotten a whole tradition of child psychology about
• 48:42
  it's the way that they are developing their young manhood. They are also ways of conquering fear
• 48:50
  and controlling the world through their stories. But what do you mean, Christina, when you say it's
• 48:54
  not about violence? Because a fantasy of being a pirate who chops people's heads off is a fantasy
• 48:59
  of violence, isn't it? It would appear to be, but it's like fairy tales and things. Why don't they
• 49:06
  terrify children? Because they're really about something else. It's like a dream or something,
• 49:11
  you know, you can't go in and start policing the dreams. And in these cases, these are their,
• 49:15
  this is their fantasy life. Now, do we have evidence that these kids, little, all, you know,
• 49:21
  typical little boys become violent because they've had fantasies about pirates?
• 49:27
  Nothing of the kind. There is no evidence of that. I think part of people's concern here
• 49:35
  probably dovetails with the background reality of, you know, at the beginning of the conversation,
• 49:41
  you mentioned domestic violence, you know, high rates of male violence against women,
• 49:47
  a kind of a, you know, we're living through this moment of toxic masculinity versus not all men
• 49:54
  excuses. And I wonder what if people are trying to find what the source of that is? I mean,
• 50:01
  I worry about, I worry about the sort of crisis of masculinity in the sense that the, the healthy
• 50:08
  expression of a robust but respectful masculinity is nowhere to be seen really. You either,
• 50:17
  it strikes me that maybe people like President Obama exhibited that sort of masculinity,
• 50:24
  but, and you know, figures like Jordan Peterson are popular because they're encouraging a
• 50:33
  reconnection to an earlier version of masculinity. But at the moment, it feels quite polarized
• 50:38
  between a vision of masculinity, which inhabits this sort of toxic, Trump-y, alt-right,
• 50:46
  in-cell, perverted, sexually harassy, grabby, quomo-y sort of masculinity that we definitely
• 50:54
  don't want our sons to grow into. But on the other hand, kind of an emasculated, a feat,
• 51:01
  feminine masculinity that also probably doesn't honor what's good about men.
• 51:07
  Well, the first thing to say is that sociologists have long made a distinction between
• 51:15
  healthy masculinity, normative masculinity and pathological masculinity or protest. Now, a young man
• 51:24
  who is advancing protest masculinity or pathological masculinity shows his manliness by praying on
• 51:34
  weaker people by destroying things, wreaking havoc. A boy who events positive masculinity or an
• 51:41
  amant is just the opposite. They protect weaker people. They build. They don't destroy. They are
• 51:49
  constructive protectors. They're not destroyers. And I believe the majority of men in
• 51:58
  probably Australia, the United States, events of constructive masculinity. They're not pathological.
• 52:06
  And to take an example, to take a, I don't know, a Harvey Weinstein or some kind of predator and
• 52:15
  set that up is the, you know, that's the example. That's that's standard for all men. That would,
• 52:22
  it's like taking, that's the classic move of a bigot where you will take, you know, one bad example
• 52:30
  and say that represents the whole. And now, do I think boys need to be brought up to be
• 52:36
  for lack of a better word, gentlemen? Yes. We have to civilize young men. And young women too,
• 52:43
  young women, there's also, we can talk about this later, there's also something I would call
• 52:47
  toxic femininity. So girls need to be civilized too. But most societies do put a lot of
• 52:54
  effort into redirecting the natural sort of high-spiritedness, sometimes aggression of young men.
• 53:05
  You want to channel that to positive end. And I think we have a problem in society of doing that.
• 53:12
  I think a lot of young men are very confused and feel disapproved up.
• 53:19
  Majority of them, are they going to be violent? I think, if we're going to talk about
• 53:22
  violence, violent men, we're probably going to have to talk about the one thing, very
• 53:27
  few feminists want to talk about, which is fatherlessness. And boys that grow up without fathers,
• 53:37
  particularly boys who are in very poor families, where maybe the mother can't, there's very
• 53:46
  little social capital and maybe isolated. Where does that boy learn his manhood? Not from a father,
• 53:53
  he loves and respects, but from friends, from peers. And then he may meet and that could be a gang.
• 54:02
  A lot of boys replace the father with a gang. Now it's not good for girls. There are other set of
• 54:08
  harms that can be fault girls and young women who grew up without fathers. But for boys,
• 54:14
  this is so well-known. And we have had conference at my Think Tank AEI. We get together with
• 54:21
  liberal think tanks and libertarian think tanks and far left think tanks. There is widespread
• 54:27
  agreement that fatherlessness is, it puts a boy at risk for all sorts of pathologies. And
• 54:41
  it's, it's, we let them put it this way. If this becomes, if this becomes the norm for a society
• 54:49
  of boys raised without fathers, again, middle class families are, you know, the mother can make
• 54:55
  all sorts of admirable compensation and so forth. But mothers that don't have those opportunities
• 55:01
  and the boy just grows up. Now the girls that are from the same family, from a broken home and a
• 55:07
  poor family, she has a role model, usually a heroic mother who's working two jobs and taking care
• 55:12
  of the kids. The boy doesn't identify with that. He feels lost. And this seems to be just fairly
• 55:23
  well established explanation, except that, well, even if it's obviously the case or quite likely
• 55:31
  a good explanation for what's gone wrong, it's now politically difficult to talk about. We've
• 55:39
  just moved on. People aren't talking about trying to stabilize families. So here we are.
• 55:46
  Do you understand young feminists today, Christina?
• 55:52
  Oh, I'm going to sound so old. It's a bit of a leading question. You can, you can enter the
• 55:58
  briar patch if you want. No, you know, I didn't worry because I was a loud mouth. Thank God
• 56:04
  there were no video, there was no YouTube or anything when I was in college because I was a
• 56:09
  protester and I remember what's screaming at a dean, calling him a fascist and thank goodness
• 56:14
  there's no recording. And so sure of myself. And then I remember going home and I had this older
• 56:22
  uncle guy. And he was in favor of the Vietnam War and supported Nixon. I was just horrified.
• 56:32
  Uncle Guy, you know, so like conservative and uncool. And now I think, am I Uncle Guy?
• 56:40
  You know, I'm like, I'm so old. I'm Uncle Guy and I'm defending Richard Nixon. But I'm not,
• 56:46
  I'm not defending Richard Nixon. I'm defending freedom and being nice to people. There's so much
• 56:52
  cruelty in this new feminism of calling out men and wanting to destroy them. Now, if they are,
• 57:00
  you know, praying on women and they're disgusting, you know, harassers, then fine. But what I find
• 57:08
  is men are getting in trouble just for them for, you know, almost nothing. Telling a, you know, a joke
• 57:16
  that's overheard by some, you know, police woman in the corner and then wanting to destroy them.
• 57:21
  I've seen a lot of meanness and just gratuitous malevolence. But isn't the, I mean, isn't the
• 57:27
  counterpoint to that, Christine, that women have had to live in environments that were casually
• 57:33
  demeaning to them for so long that they need to draw lines in the sand that seem a little bit
• 57:38
  petty. But without those petty lines being drawn and some men being harshly slapped down,
• 57:45
  you're never going to evolve to a situation where there's a sense of where workplaces, for example,
• 57:52
  are equally welcoming to men and women. Yeah, I get that. And I sometimes felt that that, okay,
• 58:01
  you really have to go overboard to make the point. So it gets through to people and even the most
• 58:08
  clueless man has got to realize, you know, this, you know, I mean, I was in favor of the
• 58:14
  Me Too movement when it first started because I did think that even though most men weren't behaving
• 58:20
  like, well, Harry Weinstein, I was, you know, very specific kind of situation. But overall,
• 58:26
  the workplace had to be brought up to 21st century standards and we needed to,
• 58:32
  to make, you know, sort of redraw the social contract between men and women and towards civility
• 58:41
  and mutuality and respect. So I was all in favor of that. But what I worry is that when I see
• 58:50
  the shaming and the, sometimes the gleeful destruction of people and even someone like,
• 58:58
  let's say, Louis CK, we were talking about comedians and stipulate, you know, it wasn't
• 59:05
  cool what he did was cool, not acceptable and crazy. But how much does he have to be punished?
• 59:14
  And do you want him never to appear again? Do you want him, you know, eliminate, and it seems like
• 59:20
  many women just think he should be a permanent exile from society. Well, I don't. I believe in
• 59:26
  forgiveness and I see too little forgiveness in this movement. And I also see going after people,
• 59:35
  like we saw with Aziz Ansari, the other, the comedian that was shamed because of a bad date
• 59:41
  with this, I don't know, who, if she was an actress or whatever she was, but it was just horrible,
• 59:47
  it was, it was cruel. I still remember at the Emmys, he was, when he was nominated for his show
• 59:55
  and nobody applauded and they all sat there. He was the only nominee who didn't get around
• 1:00:00
  of applause because he was a persona non-grata. And I knew Aziz a bit before he was famous in
• 1:00:06
  New York. And like the idea that this person would have, as you say, a bad, I mean, it was
• 1:00:13
  a bit more than a bad date in the sense that this woman felt kind of awkward and a little bit
• 1:00:19
  violated by the fact that he seemed to have gone down her in a bad way or something. I
• 1:00:22
  quite understand that I don't recall exactly exactly. Well, I don't think you're excited that
• 1:00:26
  he, of course, he's not allowed to tell it, but she didn't sound that easy to be with as a date
• 1:00:32
  either. I mean, there are a lot of bad dates. Yeah. And she didn't say anything at the time,
• 1:00:36
  but she just sort of left and then felt like it didn't pan out the way that she'd wanted it to
• 1:00:40
  and that she wrote a big article about it. And he said, he remember, he sort of white wine instead
• 1:00:45
  of red and she wanted red. Oh, I forgot that. Yeah, that, and that, that I think was a high point
• 1:00:53
  of disproportion. I mean, there's also a question of not only are you forgiving, but also is a person's
• 1:01:01
  creative work necessarily the domain of their personal moral life. I mean, this takes us back to,
• 1:01:07
  like, you know, we're not going to listen to any rotten wrong music because all of the things
• 1:01:10
  that people were doing when they were writing those songs in the 1960s were pretty personally
• 1:01:17
  abysmal as well. So to what extent do we have to be accountable for their moral code in their
• 1:01:22
  way? The New York Times had an article by a respected artist or can we enjoy Titian?
• 1:01:31
  The painter, the great, great, great, great, Renaissance painter Titian, we can't enjoy him because,
• 1:01:39
  you know, look at the rape of Europa. So it was, it was, so it was one of those moments where I
• 1:01:46
  just believe that we're going to do this. We're going to go back and engage in this kind of
• 1:01:52
  presentism, take present standards. And by the way, those aren't my standards. I don't, you know,
• 1:01:58
  they talk about the male gaze, you know, Titian was gazing at these women's bodies. Well, does he
• 1:02:03
  know that the women didn't wish to be gazed at? And of anyway, it's, yeah, I mean, the retro activity
• 1:02:11
  is also ridiculous. I mean, I was talking to someone who was claiming, you know, who was talking about
• 1:02:16
  something that had been casually racist in the 1950s. I think it was John Wayne or something,
• 1:02:21
  and they were outraged by this. And I was saying, I mean, the likelihood that if you were alive
• 1:02:27
  in that time that you wouldn't share the, the cultural and moral assumptions of your peers
• 1:02:34
  is zero because you currently share the moral cultural assumptions of your peers. Like, if you,
• 1:02:42
  if you agree with basically everybody who's woke right now, then I can guarantee that you would have
• 1:02:47
  agreed with everybody who was racist in the 1950s because you're an intellectual follower. You're
• 1:02:52
  showing no spine. You know, if you would have to be believing something truly radical, if you can
• 1:02:58
  show me that you believe something wildly unpopular right now and you're vocal about it,
• 1:03:03
  then I'll believe that you might have done the same in the 1950s. Otherwise, we have to assume
• 1:03:08
  that you're a conformist and you would have believed whatever the majority of people believed
• 1:03:12
  then too. Right, and it's not as if people are going to joy. I'm certain that future generations
• 1:03:19
  will look back at the way we treat animals in factory farms continue to eat meat and
• 1:03:25
  exact such a toll in animal suffering. And, you know, I try to be, you know, only eat
• 1:03:35
  meat that's from happy animals. My daughter says that now, Christina, because I've tried to,
• 1:03:42
  you know, she went to a period where she wasn't crazy about eating meat once she realized when she
• 1:03:47
  was three, what it was. And so now she asks if it's a happy sheep or a sad sheep based on whether
• 1:03:52
  or not I bought organic free range meats or not all factory foods. Do you have whole foods in
• 1:03:59
  us? No, but we sort of know what it is. The organic super market. They have scores, one, two,
• 1:04:04
  three, four, just about how, you know, intensely happy. Oh my god. This chicken, ballet classes,
• 1:04:14
  this cow, Learn French. Look, I'll wrap you up, but I just want to, you know, reflect on
• 1:04:20
  something that you said earlier about, are you, your, your Nixon loving uncle? It's something
• 1:04:27
  I think about a lot like, it's very hard when you're opposing a modern self-proclaimed progressive
• 1:04:37
  movement, not to get painted into the corner of feeling like you are the Nixon loving uncle,
• 1:04:43
  and that they are the ears to Jermaine Greer and Camille Paglier, and who I also might be,
• 1:04:49
  Martin Luther King, Jr. And, and I have to keep reality checking myself and going hang on.
• 1:04:56
  I am the person who believes in the same principles that Gandhi and Mandela and Martin Luther King
• 1:05:02
  did. These people are people who are behaving in a way that would not look different from
• 1:05:09
  Joe McCarthy. So don't allow myself to feel bad about the fact that I'm currently unpopular
• 1:05:17
  amongst the most progressive bullies. They're not actually progressives. They're sensorious
• 1:05:24
  witch hunters, so don't copper. Do you have any advice to younger people who are finding it hard to,
• 1:05:33
  I don't know, to regard to remember that they're the good guys?
• 1:05:38
  Well, for one thing, is I always believe in kindness and giving people the benefit of the
• 1:05:46
  doubt, not judging people by their worst moment. And, you know, if someone made some mistake,
• 1:05:55
  that's not the sum total of who they are. So just basic human decency. The second thing is
• 1:06:04
  that I completely agree with you, I don't feel that I am like just becoming grouchy and old and
• 1:06:12
  not understanding the changing, you know, and the grouchy old man.
• 1:06:16
  Well, you're clearly not becoming grouchy and old because you've been grouchy and old since you
• 1:06:20
  were a young woman. You were riding this ruff in the midday night. Get off my lawn.
• 1:06:26
  Because I think that a lot of young people have been, what would be the word? I don't want to say
• 1:06:35
  indoctrinated, but yeah, kind of indoctrinated by relentless catechism of this, these theories
• 1:06:44
  about how oppressed, you know, young women learning how oppressed they are in the society is
• 1:06:49
  rigged against and they've learned it, they've learned the statistics and they believe it.
• 1:06:54
  And so when I talk to them, I'm just trying to point out that, you know, it may not be that bad
• 1:07:01
  and it may be more complicated and things may not be so perfect for men either and maybe we're
• 1:07:06
  just all human and that what we should be striving for is, as I said before, just mutual
• 1:07:18
  affection and understanding. And I think that most women and men want that, they want to be friends
• 1:07:24
  and not enemies. There's a small group that wants a gender war, most of us want gender peace.
• 1:07:30
  And that's, I just refuse to believe that that's reactionary. And I think that history, there's
• 1:07:36
  a one-long lesson, is this combination of people with bad information and moral passion
• 1:07:43
  and you get fanaticism. And I think we're in a period of fanaticism as you compare it to McCarthyism
• 1:07:51
  maybe even prohibition, because prohibition lasted a long time in this country, the United States,
• 1:07:57
  and I think this, we're in for, this is going to take a while. And so many people are passionate
• 1:08:03
  that this is the explanation for all evil and, you know, we just have to ban the demon alcohol.
• 1:08:09
  And in this case, we just have to ban, you know, male and white privilege and then all will be good.
• 1:08:14
  So people are carried away and I just hope to talk them down. But I'm open to the possibility that
• 1:08:20
  they can talk me down. So I'll talk to anybody else about anybody and I did come to Australia.
• 1:08:24
  I know, I wanted to ask you about what that class to fuck was, but that's a conversation.
• 1:08:32
  That's a conversation for another time. Come back on the show anytime. It's great to talk to
• 1:08:37
  you, Christina. Thanks for, I'm glad we could catch up. Great, okay, bye bye. Thank you, take care.