Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / PREMIUM: Triumph of the Karens with Meghan Daum

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PREMIUM: Triumph of the Karens with Meghan Daum · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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G'day humans, welcome to Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas, here's a dangerous idea for you,
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that the main force in the rise of censorousness and hysteria and finger pointing and arm-waving
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and public shaming has been women.
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Now for a man to say such a thing would be terribly impolite and improper and perhaps
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even somewhat biased and sexist, but for a woman to say it is, well, what exactly?
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It certainly brave, as is today's guest, Megan Downe.
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Megan's been on the show before, she is the host of the podcast The Unspeakable, she's
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the journalist, she was an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times for over a decade
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until she gradually became more and more of a dissident, felt more and more excluded
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by her female peer group for questioning the progressive orthodoxies that they held
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so dear, and she has now started a new initiative and enterprise for women who feel somewhat
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intellectually homeless, who feel like their peers are too finger waggy, dare I use even
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the word, they're too much like a Karen, they're hunting the internet, hunting their peer
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groups for evidence of misdeeds and that the whole place has just become too conformist
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and too toxic.
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Megan is an interesting thinker, she and I get into it a bit on a few issues here on
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which we disagree, specifically a toxic issue that always makes everybody go crazy, that
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rhymes with blends gender blights, I hope you enjoy this conversation, oh, I should also
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add, we recorded this like a day or two before Megan lost her house in the Los Angeles fires.
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So if you like what you're about to hear, it is not just a good deed for you to do to
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yourself selfishly, to try to consume more of Megan's stuff and to subscribe on her
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sub-stack to the unspeakable, but also you would be doing her enormous favour, she's
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going to have to plow a lot of money, I'm sure, into replacing her podcasting equipment
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and getting herself back on her feet and finding a new place to live and all of that kind
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of hoo-ha, needless to say we don't talk about Los Angeles and the fires in this, we were
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literally recording just as they were ramping up because I'm currently on my summer vacation,
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but it's a fascinating conversation, please support Megan, I hope you enjoy as always
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the one and only Megan down.
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So all right, talk to us about what you're doing, you've got your pitch here, the elevator
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pitch for Megan begins in three, two, one, go.
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I think women control cancel culture, and only women can stop it, and I'm here to help
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them to adjust that.
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Okay, well let's just unpack the beginning section of that, women control cancel culture,
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women are the cancels, what about all the worthy dudes who like her like, oh you know,
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I'm so on the side, I'm an ally, they're the allies, let's think about this, think about
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the major incidences of cancellations and social media pylons and, you know, people getting
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thrown out of their book club or their Facebook group or something happening at work, not
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it was in a book club, so I know so, please, I live in Los Angeles, all the men are in
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book clubs.
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That's true, silver like guys that have book clubs, right, allies only, yeah.
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So well, no, basically, so as you know, I've been writing about culture war stuff for
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a long time, and a couple of years ago, I started noticing that I was hearing from a lot
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of women in particular who were like dying to talk about certain issues and really not
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able to do so with their friends.
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They were self silencing in a way that men were not necessarily, and I started noticing
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it in terms of the way people were responding to my podcast, to my books, and I started
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to think about it, and that's occurred to me that I needed to create what I call a women's
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shelter for the politically homeless, and that's what I made.
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Okay, fabulous.
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Let me park the question of sex and gender and whether this is more prevalent among women
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for a moment and just talk about cancellation, because like there's a whole industry of
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super-agreved males banging on about how they got cancelled, and sometimes people think
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that I'm one of them, but I'm really not, but there's this whole industry of like cancel
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cultures gone mad, the work has gone crazy, and most of the targets of that are men complaining
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about other, you know, social phenomena that are not exclusive to women, but you know,
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which men are complicit.
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But can we just talk, because some people wonder what you're even talking about when you
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talk about cancel culture, and think the whole thing is overblown, so like some people
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got angry at you on Twitter, boo-hoo, you know, or someone had to leave CNN, and now they've
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got a massive podcast or something, or, you know, like, what are you talking about when
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you're talking about it?
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Well, I mean, I've been talking about this for a while, just this kind of news and storeousness.
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I mean, it used to be that the right was always kind of cancelling everybody, and back
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in the 80s and the 90s, and I think into the early 2000s, it was the political right that
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was the purity police and shaking their, you know, scolding everybody and all that.
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And so as you've discussed many times on this show, I think around 2013, 14 or so, you
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had this phenomenon where people on the left, especially in more elite circles, in cultural
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institutions and academia, in the media, were sort of finding ways to pick each other
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off by pointing out the ways in which somebody was not being really sort of virtuous or on
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the right side of history, that kind of thing.
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And so we got into this thing where people were going after each other on social media
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for being sexist or racist or whatever it was, and that it, you know, it mushroomed into
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what we have had over the last 10 years.
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Now, this question of whether it's on the Wayne, I think that's debatable, but-
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And can we shut your trajectory prior to the great awokening so that we understand
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your relationship to sensoriousness when during that period that you were talking about
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when the right was the most sensorious.
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I mean, you said the 80s and 90s, but really you could probably go back to the crusades.
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I was writing, I had a podcast during the crusades.
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It was amazing.
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It got the best guests.
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I mean, the warring wins, when Silver Lake and Los Felos went to war during the middle
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ages at incredible time and you were-
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The substacks were on fire.
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You were the, you were the snow queen of the east side of Los Angeles in the 1400s.
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No, so, but if you go back to like McCarthyism, you go back to like the moral majority,
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you go back to, I mean, you can go back, you know, which burnings, like it's a very
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right wing thing to do, to hound people for not having the correct ideas about things.
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And so when you were in early in your career in the kind of 80s and 90s, what was your
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role?
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How would you have defined yourself politically and in terms of feminists?
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I was a liberal.
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I was a feminist.
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I mean, I, you know, in the 80s, I was a, I was a teenager, but I, you know, I started
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my career in the early 90s and I was a writer and I was, I worked in journalism and I wrote
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books and I wrote essays and, and it was an exciting place to be.
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I mean, this was the place where people had ideas and people had a sense of humor and
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you were kind of pushing the envelope and you were curious and you wanted to take a counter
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intuitive approach to things.
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I mean, I would write these big splashy essays where I looked at some phenomenon through,
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you know, the lens of my own experience and kind of, it's a little provocative and challenged
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people and, you know, we were the people who, who were ostensibly, you know, very open.
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We, you know, we, we loved gay people and we loved people of all different races and walks
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of life, not conservatives, by the way, no, not, not them.
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Those were, those were non-grata, but, you know, I hated George Dolby Bush like everyone
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else and I had all the right opinion.
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Only like 53% of the country did not agree with this because he got elected twice.
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Well, he got elected once.
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Once.
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Yeah.
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Right.
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Yeah.
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But no, I mean, I, I was a sort of literary essayist, journalist author in, in good standing.
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I had a column in the Los Angeles Times for over 12 years on the opinion page and, you
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know, again, I was sometimes it was hard for people to tell if I was on the left or the
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right.
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I don't think anybody thought I was on the right.
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But like, you know, sometimes I was, I was a little centrist.
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But yeah.
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I just want to.
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What mostly caught your attention for in your LA Times op-eds?
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I was, you know, I was always interested in the ways in which what we were saying, what
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people were saying, you know, the, the golf between what they were saying and what they
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actually thought, you know, I mean, I wrote a lot about the rise of Hillary Clinton and,
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you know, in the race against Obama and just the sort of changing nature of women's roles
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and, you know, it's been fascinating to me to grow up in a time where women have made
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enormous strides across every metric and to sort of still have this conventional wisdom
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that women were like, you know, a protected class because we were oppressed in somewhere.
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We still had all these obstacles to overcome.
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Like, I was always kind of poking holes in that kind of thing.
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But that was actually fine.
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Like, that was acceptable until about 2012, I would say.
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And what happened then?
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I think Tumblr happened.
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I didn't realize it at the time because I was too old by then.
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But people were talking about Tumblr in 2014 and I was like, oh, are you, are you,
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you're joined a gymnastics team?
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Like what, I don't, I don't know what that means.
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Great.
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Yeah.
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I thought Tumblr was just, you know, for a casual porn.
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What was Tumblr being used for in your world?
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I mean, that's, that says more about you.
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Probably.
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If, if, if reading the, the rantings of 21 year old social justice activists is casual
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porn for you, then you're, yeah, I'm not going to kink shame you.
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Don't kink shame.
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No.
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No, I think they were on there.
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There was a photo sharing.
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No, no, no.
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It was like, it was like something where like, you know, it was for like a lot of young
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kids, a lot of young girls, there was a lot of like safe space, this kind of vernacular
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around like we're going to talk about body image stuff or we're going to talk about mental
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health struggles and it really this kind of vocabulary of self care sort of arose out
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of that.
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And this was, this was not my world at all.
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So I don't want to, you know, I don't want to, this, this is my impression of Tumblr
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anyway.
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So this is how it's been explained to me.
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But in any case, you had this rise of online feminist media space, Jezebel and feministing
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and these kinds of feminist blogs were suddenly the idea was that, you know, it was so hard
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to be a woman that even getting out of bed in the morning and, you know, brushing your
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teeth and going to work made you like a badass like you were, you were an absolute like
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you were killing it and you were radical because you were fighting the patriarchy at every
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turn.
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Like women were graduating from college at much higher numbers than we were, we were,
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we were outpacing them.
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And there was this inability or this unwillingness to recognize that and just sort of glee
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and continuing this kind of narrative.
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And that drove me crazy and I started writing about that.
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And that's when I got, I ran a foul of many of my peers.
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And what did that look like?
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The running of foul.
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No, I'm just sort of why is she saying this?
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Why does she constantly have to poke holes in this?
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Why?
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Why do you have to make it?
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Why?
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Aren't there other things?
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Aren't there other things you could talk about?
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Why do you, you know, if these women feel good talking about this stuff and ranting online,
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why is it your problem?
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And I still ask myself this every day.
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I don't know why.
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So do I.
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I mean, I asked myself the same question.
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But I do think, well, there's both a laudable and a less self-serving answer to that question.
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Right?
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I mean, the most generous interpretation of why it bothers you is because you care about
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people making sense and connecting with reality and being proportional in their reactions
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to hardship and, you know, accurate in their representations of what constitutes privileged.
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It just seems wrong to you that everybody would be in like a bullshit thought bubble
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of where, you know, inhabiting and promoting a narrative that clearly doesn't map onto
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reality anymore.
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And then the less generous interpretation is it's just fucking annoying and you just want
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to act out your annoyance.
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Right.
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It's delicious to chew on them.
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Well, I mean, that's the thing, too, is look, I care about women and I want women to
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be treated as adults.
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I mean, we fought, you know, to be perceived and treated as equals.
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And so then to kind of start a movement that is rooted in this idea of women aren't safe
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that on a college campus, you've got a one in five or one in four chance of being raped.
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You're going to redefine sexual assault.
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You're going to just kind of like really shift the boundaries and move the goalposts around
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in a way that you're infantilizing people all over again and making a whole bunch of
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assumptions about men and their power.
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I just really hated it.
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I mean, to be quite honest, like I found it very offensive as a woman, the way that the
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woman's movement or feminism had reconfigured itself.
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It really made me mad.
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And that's why I started talking about it.
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Right.
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Yeah.
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I mean, I feel I have exactly the same sort of relationship or a very similar one to the
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LGBTQIA plus community, you know, like we're victims who are always struggling against
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like a constant barrage of, you know, homophobia.
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And it's like, really, we kind of run everything.
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We're richer than straight people.
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We're like, we've got every single right that straight people have.
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I'm talking about, you become kinds of cities that we're talking that we live in, Sydney
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and Los Angeles, New York and London.
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And so it feels not only like unearned credit or like a, like I don't want to be
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part of a grubby clamoring for, for special status on the basis of something that I don't
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have any real control over anyway, but also just like disempowering and phantomizing exactly
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the way you were just putting it.
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Well, it's actually homophobic, I would argue.
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And I think, I mean, isn't it a form of it?
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Like I think that this, what the way that, you know, women got kind of reimagined was,
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you know, fundamentally sexist.
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In what, just unpack that why?
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Well, because you're, you're basically saying that women still need protection, that we,
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we really, we can't believe all women or, you know, this idea that women are by default
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morally superior or kind of virtuous.
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That to me just seems very sexist because you're, you're denying people their humanity.
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Right, right.
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It, yes, it ascribes to people on the basis of their genitals or, you know, they cry
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in their chromosomes, certain characteristics that go way too far.
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Yeah, I mean, also if, if, like, if civil rights are about empowerment, the issue I have
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with this kind of narrative of oppression is that it, it feels disempowering.
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It's like, I want, if I, to the extent that I want there to be gay pride at all, I want
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it to be, you know, a powerful, empowering universalist conception of, you know, magnanimity
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and generosity and playfulness and courage, not this kind of cowering bitter finger pointing,
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you know, snarky, sad, oppressed vision of, like, the world all being against us.
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It's just so dull and ugly.
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Yeah, I know.
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And I mean, you've talked about this too, I mean, correct me if I'm misremembering this.
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But like, the people at this point who are homophobic, who are outwardly homophobic,
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outwardly bigoted, like, they have no power.
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They really have very little power.
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They're, they're marginalized.
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They're not part of the sort of, you know, social fabric that we would care about anyway.
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And it's kind of the same thing with overt sexism.
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Like, it's just not cool to be that way.
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And so to sort of imagine this boogie man for the sake of, like, your own, you know,
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political gain or some kind of, like, power grab just, it just makes no sense to me.
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I mean, you're actually, right, so the social justice response to that, which I don't
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think is entirely without merit is there can be, you know, not overt ways for prejudice
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to instantiate itself and you could live in a world in which it was to boo for everybody
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to say anything.
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Is it a bit like artificial intelligence, right?
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Like there was an interesting study that was done by, I thought I was just hearing an
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AI, you know, harm researcher talk about where they were saying that, you know, an
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artificial intelligence, you're never going to get Gemini or ChatGPT to say anything overtly
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sexist.
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But when you give them scenarios about who might be right or wrong in a household, just
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do it, for example, and you switch the genders of the people, but hold everything else
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the same.
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They give you back gender biased interpretations based on the assumption that the woman should
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be the one who's in the home doing their housework and the cooking and stuff.
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So like it is conceivable, you know, you can imagine a feminist of today saying all very
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well, Megan, that you live in a Los Angeles where people calling you to it and slapping
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you on the ass, you know, in a supermarket is forbidden.
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But we still haven't had a female president and we still, you know, women still earn 70 cents
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on the dollar.
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And you know, as you said, like one in four women or a sexist, or yeah, all these other
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ways that the patriarchy manages to, right, well, it resets things up that suit itself.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, they'll say that.
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And then we can talk about whether or not that AI was kind of right about what was going
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on in that house for what reason.
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And you know, the reason that there's a wage gap is it's a motherhood penalty.
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And as I always say, mother nature is the ultimate misogynist.
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So can take it up with her not fair.
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Life is not fair.
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We have, we all have different challenges.
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But no, I always just thought the whole sort of, you know, toxic masculinity and beating
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up on men and I drink male tears.
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That bothered me.
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And I think we probably talked about this last time I was on your show several years ago,
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like.
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Yeah.
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And also, I should note, if this feels repetitious, it's only because my audience is probably
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a hundred X what it was last time you were, I was going to say, well, or not everybody
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has heard you on this.
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People have been hanging around and people have been listening to your show for five years
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or something.
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That means that's amazing.
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If there are people listening who remember our last conversation, congratulations, you
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are one of the true.
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It was the middle ages.
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You were one of the first guests on my podcast.
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There you go.
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So nice.
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The love fest continues.
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But again, well, this idea, see the way that people in the kind of social justice world
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justify this is they will were punching up, right?
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We're punching up to power.
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It's okay to make fun of men or it's okay to make fun of white people, whatever it is
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because they, by default, have more power so we're punching up.
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But my thing has always been like, well, let's actually think about this because at this
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point, women, you know, in a lot of spaces have more power, more agency than men.
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And so if you're going to just assume that anytime you say anything about a man, you're
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punching up, you're actually just putting him on a pedestal that he wasn't on before.
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You're handing him power that he didn't have.
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Just explain that, you know, defend that claim that in many respects, women have more power
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than men.
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Wow.
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I mean, you look at levels of education.
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You just look at the way that schools are set up.
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I mean, they are, you know, again, and this goes to biological differences and we can
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talk about that too, when girls do better in school, they, you know, I think that in
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the US anyway, I don't, it's the vast majority of high school valedictorians are girls.
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You have rates of college attendance and graduation that are, you know, girls do much better.
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I think they're actually, they, women, I think at this point, out earn men before they
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start having children in a lot of professions, women are buying houses, living on their
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own and young men are living with their parents.
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I mean, there's all kinds of ways in which this is happening and I just find it amazing
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the way you get this kind of hipster snarky, like kind of feminist, girl gang that just
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insists that this isn't happening.
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And that's the kind of thing that drives me crazy, like it's, it's a kind of, I hate
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to use the word gaslighting, but this is a form of sort of cultural gaslighting that's
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been going on for a long time now.
21:29
Yeah, interesting.
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I mean, yes, I think college admissions are, you know, more, more females go to college,
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more females graduate from college, more females finish high school, more females are,
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you know, vastly overrepresented in many of the industries of the future with the exception
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of like software engineering and that sort of thing.
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Right.
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Things of health care in terms of being pharmacists and physicians and surgeons and things
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like that.
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Um, certainly nurses, women, about number, men.
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So then the question is, what, I guess what shifted in the second round of, of your concern
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that then triggered a backlash?
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If the first round is the kind of early 2010s with Tumblr and like girl power and you,
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and your peers becoming uncomfortable with your dissenting from, or your betrayal of
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the team, so to speak, then what happens in the late teens or, you know, turn of this
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decade?
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Well, so let's see, I wrote a book called The Problem with Everything, came out in 2019,
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you and I talked about it was, it was going to be called woke me when it's over when
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I was writing it, but I, should I look at that?
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That was very prescient.
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I mean, I don't think that was.
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I think it was.
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What is over.
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No, I know.
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I felt like it was, I know it was funny because my agent thought it should be called woke
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me when it's over and the publisher was like, no, no, no, we can't call it that because
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it's like, it's so, it was very, it's very troll.
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It's a very troll, like, kind of title, I think at that time that was a better title.
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I think now that would be, oh, no, I would never call it that.
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Yeah, I don't, I don't like to use the, I don't even use the word woke, but anyway,
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in any case.
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So that book came out in 2019, I started the unspeakable podcast in 2020 when all podcasts
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were started.
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Yes.
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Yes, including this one.
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Even though I've been doing it since the dark ages, yes, exactly.
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We did have a plague.
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You know, it's, I think you're on to something with this Middle Ages analogy because all
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