Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "The Fallout of #MeToo" with Kat Rosenfield

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"The Fallout of #MeToo" with Kat Rosenfield · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Oh my goodness, I'm so excited. We're about to launch our big new sub-stack and you're
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  going to get all kinds of amazing new Josh content. You're excited. You're holding onto
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  your hats. You're sitting down. Hat. You're holding onto your hat. Not hats. Because
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  although there might be many hats scattered amongst all of the listeners, you dear listener
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  are an individual and you're probably not wearing more than one hat. If you're even
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  wearing one hat, I think that's pretty good in 2022. Since they don't seem to be as
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  common as they were back in the 1950s. But if you're wearing multiple hats on top of
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  each other, then that's even more impressive. Welcome to Uncomfortable Conversations, the
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  safe space for dangerous ideas. Immunately, like within the next week, we're going to
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  Uncomfyconvowsatgmail.com. And just say subscribe or just put question mark or just put
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  members, you will get a bonus free, amazing benefit in addition to all of the other amazing
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  benefits that people will get if they subscribe after this week. So get in now if you haven't
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  bothered to do it because the doors are closing. This is one of those Raiders of the Lost
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  Ark moments where there's a door, preferably like a rock door closing and you have to roll
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  out through it. Are you older than the age of 30? Then you understand that reference. If
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  you don't, then go to Google and type in go to www.google.com and type in Raiders of Lost
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  Ark, rock door closing, Harrison Ford, roll underneath and there'll probably be a gif of what
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  I'm talking about. Who better than cat Rosenfield to be our last free, it's not the last free episode,
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  you're going to keep getting free episodes every single week. But my point is the last episode
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  before an additional bananza, a delusious tsunami of greatness just ends upon upon us all.
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  Cat has been on the show before. She's a culture writer, she's a novelist, she's a columnist,
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  she has a podcast and she's a great thinker about feminism, femininity, sexuality, consent,
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  what the kids are doing with their wobbly bits these days. You don't really need to know much
• 2:29
  more about this conversation except that it's a kind of interesting and laid back meander through
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  an interesting woman's idea about where womanhood currently is. Send us an email,
• 2:41
  uncomfycombersatgmail.com, tell us you want to subscribe, you will get a big benefit
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  in the meantime, enjoy it. The one and only cat Rosenfield.
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  For some reason, Belgium, yeah, for sure. How defend themselves?
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  Everything that's wrong with a country is wrong with Belgium. I definitely have no idea,
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  actually, I've never been there. I hear that they sell snails on the street like a street food,
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  so I really shouldn't dis-belge them because that's pretty cool.
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  That sounds like the sort of thing the French would do.
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  Right, and yet apparently they don't. Maybe because the Belgian did it first and then the
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  French were all self-conscious and they were like, well, we can't do it now.
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  If we do it, it's going to seem like we're copying the second Belgians.
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  Belgium's weird. Do you know? You don't know anything about Belgium.
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  They don't know to why, but I know one thing, which is that it's not a real country like it,
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  I mean, sorry, to Belgians.
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  Because there's a chunk of it that's ethnically French and speaks French,
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  and then there's a chunk of it that's what Dutch and speaks Dutch.
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  Dutch.
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  Well, you know, it's a chunk that's like, that they just gargle on saliva in the back of their
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  throats. Is that called Flemish? Or is there, there's another one? And then they do,
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  you know, like geopolitically, it's sort of like a lot of countries in Africa.
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  People hundreds of years ago just drew it on a map and were like, yes, that'll do.
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  And then they were like, are we a country? Okay, yeah.
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  What I'm just remembering is that I think that my podcast co-host Phoebe's husband is Belgian.
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  So. Oh, shit. What's Phoebe's husband's name?
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  Joe. If you don't, if you're that uncertain, then it doesn't matter that we're dissing his country.
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  Right. He maybe doesn't even exist. This is the thing.
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  Have you ever seen him? Have you ever seen him meet a snail?
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  Well, I love it. I have you back on the show.
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  I was thinking I've been thinking about about feminism and about the state of women's rights in
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  America. As you do about row. And I just saw a one woman show about RBG.
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  It's on you. Yeah. There's a whole one woman show about RBG.
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  Wow. I mean, she's been the subject now of, I think at least one biopic and now a one woman
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  show. How was the show? I mean, look, it's very celebrated here. It's by the Sydney Theatre
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  Company, which is probably our most prestigious company that Kate Blanchett used to be the creative
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  director of. And it's very well performed. But you know, that thing that some biopics do or
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  that some true stories do where they spend a lot of time telling you how amazing the person is
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  instead of showing you the ways in which that person was amazing. Like there's a lot of sort of
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  monologues of like, and at the time, it was impossible for a woman to conceive that they would do
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  bloody blah, but I said no. And so I did this and I did that. And the reality about Ruth
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  Bader Ginsburg is probably that she was quite sort of humble outwardly and quite internally strong
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  and probably spent, didn't spend a whole lot of time boasting about herself. And so it feels like
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  I'd rather just see the scenarios in which she showed her character than have someone talk
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  talk at me about wouldn't it, what a pioneer and a woman she was, if that makes sense.
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  That makes perfect sense to me. I would also prefer that.
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  Well, as a writer, hopefully you've already cotton onto the show, don't tell.
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  It's true. It's a cardinal rule. Should we start with the Juno Diaz?
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  Yeah, by all means, let's start with Juno Diaz.
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  I was going to follow up on that and explain to people who Juno Diaz is and what's happened,
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  but I saw you tweeting and therefore I thought, why don't you do the explaining since you're the
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  guest and I can just sit back and have a sip of my coffee because it's still early here.
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  Oh gosh, I didn't do my homework early. Okay, let me just let the listener enjoy my.
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  Yeah, sure, sure, Josh, that's all your job for you.
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  How to explain Juno Diaz? So I'm going to get my dates wrong on this because I didn't
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  realize I didn't come prepared with flashcards about it. No, that's all right. I just have
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  you Twitter up in front of me and so I was like, I thought, oh, cats talk about this as well,
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  but you know, I couldn't resist talking about this. I'm probably going to be talking about it
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  on my own podcast later this week. So, okay, Juno Diaz, peel a surprise, winning Dominican-American
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  novelist, just an unbelievably gifted, literary figure, important voice, important in the American
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  canon, important on our current landscape, was I'm going to say maybe in 2018, accused of
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  sexual misconduct by three women, but this already makes it sound more straightforward and more
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  serious than it actually is. So what happened was- That's pretty serious, second misconduct against
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  three women, independently corroborated. Okay, so the three incidents were as follows. The most
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  serious one I'm going to give you first. A writer named, is it Sinsi Clemens? See, this is the
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  problem with having me spout off about stuff that I've only been tweeting about. You just don't say
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  that- You're such a novice cat. This is how you bullshit. See, when you do three hours of radio
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  every single day, you learn how to bullshit people. You just don't say the name. If you don't- If you're
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  doing three hours of radio every single day, I think you've made some mistakes. Like, you made a
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  wrong turn somewhere. Oh, I'm so glad that you can say that. So many people don't. Oh my god,
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  it must be amazing. Congratulations. And I'm like, yeah, but you have to do it every, well, not
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  every day, obviously, but every weekday. Yeah. Even if you don't want it, you still have to do it.
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  That's the thing about jobs that I hadn't realized, because I haven't traditionally had jobs,
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  actual jobs. You have to do it even when you don't want to do it. Did you know that?
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  I have heard that. Yeah, you get up in the morning and they go, yeah, you have to still work.
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  And you go, what if I don't want to? They go, no, that is part of the deal of having a job. You
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  got to come in and do your radio show. Anyway, entry in the, I think the American literary canon
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  about the chaos that ensues, if you tell people that you would prefer not to do your job,
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  they don't really know what to do with that. You could, you could bottle be it. You could be the
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  australian Bartle B. Well, what would happen when the studio goes live at 12.30 every afternoon,
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  and I'm not there? I don't know. Actually, this is beyond my area of expertise and beyond my
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  regional expertise. So I assume that they, like, they take you out, they throw you in the bay where
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  you're eaten by sharks. Right. Okay. And this is fantastic. But anyway, you just don't just leave
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  them. That's my tip. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, okay, this is how Geno Diaz was made to.
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  May of 2018, Zinsy Clemens, I'm reading from Ben Smith's right up on summer floor, by the way.
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  A writer who he'd met at Columbia University when she was a graduate student, stood up at a literary
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  festival in Sydney to make allegations. She detailed later on Twitter that Geno Diaz had
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  cornered her after a campus event and quote, forcibly kissed her. Okay. So the forcible kiss,
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  which I remember this allegation very well because in the course of describing this forcible kiss,
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  certain details were omitted. But the one thing that Clemens did say, she described herself as a
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  quote wide-eyed 26-year-old, which really struck me a 26-year-old as an adult, like not even a,
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  you know, a barely adult. That's an adult. That's an adult woman. But nevertheless, she,
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  this wide-eyed 26-year-old was very set accusing Diaz of having, you know, assaulted her,
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  basically forcibly kissed her against her will. Okay. From there, there are two further allegations.
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  One is by Carmen Maria Machado or Makado. I don't know how to pronounce it. She said that Diaz
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  went on a misogynistic tirade against her when she asked him a question as part of an event
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  at some literary festival. And then a third woman, whose name I don't remember,
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  said that he had committed, quote, verbal sexual assault against her at a dinner party, at a table
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  surrounded by multiple people, but apparently the conversation got intense in a way that she
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  interpreted as violative. Okay. So that was all in 2018. Diaz was not necessarily
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  defenestrated, but he kind of disappeared. There was a investigation by the Pulitzer Board
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  into the allegations that had been made and whether they held any water. And the Pulitzer
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  Board determined that they did not. An interesting thing here, Kat, that I only learned from Ben's
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  piece is that when the Pulitzer Board looked into the allegations, they didn't only find that
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  the allegations were untrue. They couldn't even verify that there were any allegations of sexual
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  misconduct. Yes. They didn't even think the allegations were allegations of anything.
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  Right. And it was like the supposedly most damning evidence was basically it was like a
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  where there's smoke, there's fire thing where, you know, as is so often the case with these high
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  profile allegations, once one has been made a bunch of other ones start kind of gathering,
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  you know, this stuff has a real glow to it and people are really drawn to it. You know,
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  can I massage or, you know, reconsider or reposition, something that happened to me with this
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  person as being part and parcel of a larger pattern that will result in this incident getting the
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  attention it deserves. So at that time, this woman Monica Burn, who is also a novelist and I think
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  an activist said that she had gathered something like 30 other accounts from women who had been
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  harmed by Diaz, but she couldn't say who or what any of them were because that would be like
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  violating privacy or whatever. The thing is this didn't really earn any scrutiny at the time as
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  much as it should have because people were just like, oh my god, you know, this guy must be a monster.
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  So the really kind of upsetting thing in this piece that Ben Smith wrote is you find out that,
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  you know, this impression that Diaz has just kind of vanished from the landscape of American
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  literature at the height of his career is in fact true. He has not not only not published,
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  not made appearances in the past four years, but he has not written in the past four years.
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  And I don't know if you've read any of his work, but you know, that's just an immense loss. It leaves
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  our cultural landscape so much less rich and it's just really a damn shame.
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  What is it that he had done that led the woman who initially made these allegations to
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  to make them? Oh gosh. Yeah. So the forcible kiss on the cheek. It's her on the cheek.
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  Kissed her on the cheek. So they were meeting and he kissed her on the cheek.
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  Now he is from potentially a culture where it's normal to kiss people on the cheek as a greeting.
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  I don't know what her background is. They met at Columbia University. I hadn't
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  noted actually that she made the allegation first at a literary festival in Sydney. May I apologise
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  on behalf of all Sydney cited for the fact that this took place in my fine town. That was
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  ground zero. We are. I'm sitting in ground zero of the catastrophe. But I don't know whether
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  she was, she's presumably not Australian if they met at Columbia. I don't know. I mean,
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  you don't know. She could be. It could be one of them.
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  Zinzi Clemens. That sounds Australian. I don't know though.
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  Zinzi. Zinzi does sound like the sort of thing that Steve Irwin's daughter would be called.
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  Yeah. You know what I mean? He is Zinzi Irwin. He does snakes, a snake show.
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  So she made the entire edifice of this person being excommunicated from polite society,
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  maybe based around the fact that at this moment in 2018, when everyone was reckoning with how to
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  respond to allegations of sexual harassment, we were just extremely credulous about a misunderstanding
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  over what sort of greeting is appropriate. Yeah. I mean, I do, I'm even less inclined to be
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  charitable to her on this front because I'm just thinking that to describe being kissed on the
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  cheek, even if you didn't want to be kissed on the cheek, as being cornered and forcibly kissed,
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  that is a choice. And it's a choice that had really incredibly deleterious repercussions for
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  another human being that basically destroyed his life. And I don't really understand
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  how any decent person could make that decision to frame it that way.
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  Why do you think he, so he then, so after the Washington Post and New York magazine and these
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  other big publications ran with headlines about allegations of sexual misconduct against him.
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  Why do you think he dropped out of his upcoming events? Like he dropped out of a festival he called
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  the chair of the Pulitzer Board to offer his resignation. Is that just what a good person thought
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  that they had to do in that climate? That and I would guess that he was advised to do so.
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  And this was a time when as soon as an allegation was made against you, it was like, depending on
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  what kind of environment you were in, but you know, as a literary figure, you know, you're very much
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  immersed in like the kind of nexus of all of this activism. It's all taking place.
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  It was understood that like if you were accused, you should go away. And it didn't even really matter
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  if it was a true accusation or not because right now the most important thing was that women be heard,
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  you know. And because for too long, women had been disbelieved and had been disweighted from
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  reporting these kinds of things and had been I guess suppressed by a system that protected
• 17:54
  powerful men. So now the tables had turned. I mean, you saw it a fascinating kind of brand of
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  non-apology or non-denial that would come out. James Franco did one of these when he was accused
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  of having done whatever it was he was accused of doing. He made a public statement that was like
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  this isn't true, but I'm not going to say it's not true because I'm that I'm that much of a
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  supporter of this important cause. So I'm not calling this woman a liar even though like a subtext
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  she's a liar because I'm such a feminist, you know. Right. Well, what else are you going to say?
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  What would you say? If it were me and I'd been accused of something I didn't do. Oh my god,
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  I would. And I mean, you know, I'm saying this with the benefit of five years of hindsight into
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  this movement, you know, having seen what happens, you know, when somebody's accused, I would have
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  gone absolutely scorched earth to defend my reputation. But then doesn't that make people go,
• 19:02
  well, I mean, that's just what like Trump does. You know what I mean? Like that's a that's a
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  tinny tone deaf kind of thing. They don't get it like the abusers are always going to say that.
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  Yeah, I, you know, I can't wrap my head around the idea that you've been falsely accused of a felony.
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  And you should just take one for the team. And I think, you know, we've seen what happens to people who
• 19:31
  out of, you know, some misguided desire to be team players or whatever who did that. It's not as though
• 19:39
  they were rewarded for their loyalty. That's right. I mean, I guess we know that now and we didn't
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  know that in 2018 when stuff like this happened. But it's also just, I mean, you know, like,
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  if you have a strong internal sense of justice, then false allegations are a thing that really
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  gets your backup. And yeah, not false. I mean, what if it's true that you kissed someone on the
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  cheek and you didn't realize that they didn't want to be kissed on the cheek. So like they're now all
• 20:09
  of a sudden you're second guessing yourself. It's almost the Al Franken thing of like it's not false.
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  He took a funny photo of him cupping the breast of a woman who was sleeping on a plane
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  because he thought that was wacky and they were close to each other. But then in light of,
• 20:27
  I don't know, the hysteria around how men should treat women or of a sudden he goes, maybe I
• 20:31
  have been treating women wrong. Well, is that really what happened? I mean, I feel like the Al Franken
• 20:39
  thing was really pretty thoroughly debunked and exposed as a, you know, a sort of a political
• 20:44
  take down or politically motivated take down rather by Jane Maire in New York. The hysteria was,
• 20:51
  I mean, it was it was ginned out by people who wanted to bring Al Franken down. Well, the woman
• 20:57
  who posted the photo to begin with is one of those people. I mean, the ball got rolling at a moment
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  when it was evident to people who were in possession of this photo who wanted to do harm to Al Franken's
• 21:08
  reputation that they could, you know, put it out there frame it in this way and cause a scandal,
• 21:16
  you know, and, you know, actually, it's a good example because Franken, what he should have done
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  was waited for the outcome of an investigation, but he was pressured by people on his own side,
• 21:29
  including Claire McCaskill to step down. And so he did, you know, he did not stick around to say,
• 21:36
  look, you know, I, I deserve due process. I mean, this is the problem with being a mensch,
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  but that like, you know, he thinks he's doing the right thing because all of his colleagues turn
• 21:45
  on him and say, you got to go. And he's like, well, I don't want to be, I don't want to be
• 21:49
  Trump adjacent, I guess. Right. But I mean, how did we get to a point where we, where it's
• 21:54
  Trump adjacent to defend yourself when you've been accused of something you didn't do?
• 22:00
  Well, he did do that the thing. That's the thing. It's all about interpretation. Isn't that? I mean,
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  that's why these areas are so slippery. He probably looks at the photo and goes, yeah,
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  it was a bad, it's a bad look. Maybe that was a different time. And maybe now,
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  that's not acceptable. It's clearly not acceptable to my peers. They're all telling me to resign.
• 22:19
  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we got on this because of Juno Diaz. And I do think that
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  he was objectively falsely accused. You know, this, I mean, one of the interesting things,
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  I like to just step away from the like forcibly kissed incident, which, you know, I would never
• 22:38
  describe being kissed on the cheek and greeting as forcibly kissed. And I think that it's wrong to do
• 22:44
  that. Just as I think it's wrong to describe, you know, a discussion, like even a heated discussion
• 22:51
  as quote verbal sexual assault. You know, these are these are loaded terms. And there's something
• 22:59
  happening when you choose to use them in this way. But let's take a step back from both of those
• 23:03
  and just talk about the incident with Makato, Machado, who there was a recording of it. There's an
• 23:10
  audio recording of this. Is that the woman who with the Al Franken woman? No, this is this is Diaz.
• 23:17
  Diaz is woman. Oh, okay, that was the woman who made the allegation in Sydney.
• 23:22
  No, this is the one who said that he went on a misogynistic tirade against her at a public
• 23:28
  event. This is why you just have to label with her with their survey description. Okay, got it.
• 23:34
  Right. This is this is Diaz accuser number three who said that he had, you know, like lambasted
• 23:41
  her in this incredibly ugly, terrifying way in public. There was an audio recording of that event
• 23:47
  and you can listen to it and you can hear objectively that what she says happened did not happen.
• 23:54
  Right. Yes. And this is all now documented. It's so depressing, isn't it? So the investigators,
• 24:01
  so basically they, the chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, Eugene Robinson, columnist at the
• 24:08
  Washington Post asked Diaz if these three allegations were true. Diaz said no. So the Pulitzer
• 24:14
  Board put together an investigation. They basically hired a law firm to look into all of the
• 24:21
  allegations that were swirling around on social media. And when they came back, as I said earlier,
• 24:28
  they didn't just not verify the allegations. They didn't even see any allegations that reached
• 24:32
  the bar of sexual misconduct. So the verbal sexual assault claim took place at a dinner party and
• 24:39
  nobody else at the dinner party recalls it having happened or not having happened in the way that
• 24:43
  the accused acclaimed. The third allegation, as you say, was at a public event and there's an audio
• 24:50
  recording of it. And the audio recording doesn't show anything there. So then the only remaining
• 24:55
  thing standing was this kiss, this non-consensual kiss, which was the actual allegation. And then that
• 25:03
  allegation turned out to be a kiss on the cheek when they had been described as a kiss. Initially,
• 25:07
  nobody knew that it was a kiss on the cheek, which I think clearly changes things.
• 25:13
  You know, I don't know if you know this about me, Kat, but I'm no defender of rape. But I would
• 25:20
  say that the on tray to rape is infrequently a kiss on the cheek in public. Yeah, I think that's
• 25:29
  basically how it always happens. So then this gets talked about on Twitter. And now,
• 25:38
  now, where's the tweet? There was a tweet saying that Ben Smith for having written about this.
• 25:49
  There was something saying why you defending sexual predators.
• 25:55
  Yeah, yeah. And this was not from a rando. This was from a colleague, a blue checkmark colleague.
• 26:01
  That's right. And I think that just kind of goes to show how entrenched this narrative has become
• 26:07
  to the point where the truth does not matter, you know, to pursue the truth,
• 26:13
  especially if the truth ends up being maybe politically inexperient to the Me Too movement,
• 26:19
  is seen as akin to defending rape. Yeah. Which of course it is.
• 26:30
  So where do you see the fallout of Me Too now? Like because, you know, some people will hear this
• 26:36
  and go, so what are we going to go back to an era when men can do whatever they want to with
• 26:40
  impunity and women aren't believed when they make accusations then? I mean, I don't know. I think
• 26:47
  that the Me Too movement, even before what happened to Geno Diaz happened, I saw it as having lost
• 26:55
  its way. And I think we've talked about this somewhat on your podcast before. But, you know,
• 27:02
  insofar as the Me Too movement accomplished something useful, like Harvey Weinstein is going to
• 27:08
  die in prison. There's a number of men who really legitimately did abuse positions of power in,
• 27:14
  you know, in professional circumstances to mistreat women, you know, to like leverage sexual
• 27:24
  favors from women. That's inappropriate. It shouldn't happen. I mean, I thought one of the earliest
• 27:30
  successes of the movement was that it got us talking about the fact that women do experience
• 27:38
  and suffer from this looming shadow of sexuality in the professional sphere and it's sort of
• 27:45
  inescapable. And it's inescapable in a way that is more than just like the beautiful actress
• 27:53
  Geno being like coerced on a casting couch. It's when this is like an inescapable valence of
• 28:03
  your professional life, it's it becomes just as frustrating and just as unfair if you're not
• 28:11
  receiving that kind of attention. You know, if you are being subject to unwanted advances, it
• 28:17
  works because you're young and, you know, beautiful and attractive and desirable and so on,
• 28:22
  like that's a Me Too problem. But if you are being overlooked at work, if you're being, you know,
• 28:30
  professionally dismissed because you're not sexually interesting to the other people in your
• 28:36
  office, that's also a Me Too problem. Like the solution to this is to, you know, do what we can to
• 28:44
  just take this element out of professional life for women so that we can engage equally in a
• 28:51
  professional sphere without, you know, having to worry that somebody's looking at our tits or
• 28:57
  that somebody's not looking at our tits and, you know, that either way we're being harmed.
• 29:04
  That's because I do worry that someone's not looking at your tits cat every every day.
• 29:09
  I can't even see you right now. So I can't look at your tits or not look at your tits.
• 29:13
  It's devastating to me to think that you might not want to be looking at that. This is
• 29:18
  I want to look at your tits, but I don't have I don't have the means currently to do it, but we
• 29:22
  could we could hit up a zoom or something and you could just flash me a bit of nip, you know,
• 29:27
  if you'd prefer, but make you feel more comfortable. A bit of nip. Just a little nip.
• 29:33
  Just a nip just to see how it feels. I just found the person who said that
• 29:38
  so why are you writing Apologia for a serial abuser of women shame on you? And this blue
• 29:44
  checkmark person, Dr Sandy Parchak is a professor and award winning author with 90,000 followers.
• 29:51
  And then Jesse single parachutes him because of course he does saying, isn't that what's
• 29:56
  in dispute? Whether he has done something bad enough to warrant permanent expulsion from
• 30:00
  public life to which another person responds to Jesse, don't you have trans genocide to plan
• 30:06
  you absolutely useless wet wipe of a human? And another person says, shame on you for not being
• 30:13
  able to read this is to Sarah who had criticized Ben for defending Juno. Shame on you for not
• 30:23
  being able to read this article with honest eyes. People shouldn't be cast out without proof
• 30:27
  of serious offenses. That's the whole point and you chose to miss it to which someone else
• 30:31
  responds, believe women, we don't need forensics to prove a guy has behaved as a creep.
• 30:38
  So is Twitter just a cesspool now? Yeah, yeah, gosh, you know, I'm very fond of Jesse. He's a friend
• 30:45
  but that dude needs to get off that website. Yeah, I think he and Elon should take a retreat,
• 30:52
  a meditation retreat together. And then new Twitter from space.
• 30:58
  Wouldn't that be good? Has it changed? Do you think Twitter? Are you one of these? Everyone,
• 31:04
  the instant Elon board it, everyone on Twitter was saying, I can't believe how much nuts he
• 31:09
  hate there is. And I was like, I don't think he's changed anything yet. Like, I don't even think
• 31:12
  there's any. He hasn't even turned twisted the dials or who's back on or anything.
• 31:17
  Yeah, let me tell you what happened after Elon Musk bought Twitter on my toilets clogged and my
• 31:22
  pantry became infested with food mobs and you know, the cats had started spinning around. I
• 31:28
  sure that none of this actually happened online, but I'm sure that Elon Musk is responsible.
• 31:33
  And yet, I think by now something has happened. I don't know if it's just a tonal shift or if I'm
• 31:39
  just noticing it more, but it does seem to be completely unconstructive. I mean, incapable of
• 31:46
  having any conversation that's worth having. Interesting. I think that's true, but I also had felt
• 31:52
  that way about Twitter for a while. And so I wonder if Elon buying the site
• 32:04
  kind of allowed people to see how bad it is because they had simply started to look for it.
• 32:14
  If that makes sense, it does. I don't think that Twitter, and you know, I should say like, I had the
• 32:22
  benefit of being completely offline at like a dinner on the night when everyone was like, Twitter
• 32:30
  is dying, Twitter is dead. And it was like everyone was holding a funeral for Twitter. And I missed
• 32:36
  this completely because I was, you know, drinking champagne in an evening gown like a normal person.
• 32:44
  So I did not witness this kind of like cataclysm. I got back on the website the next
• 32:51
  morning, and you know, things did not seem to me fundamentally, particularly changed in any way.
• 32:57
  And I don't think that they've really changed as a result of the takeover, except in so far as
• 33:02
  people are talking all the time about the takeover and what it means for Twitter. But that seems
• 33:07
  to be the biggest difference that is traceable to Elon Musk. That plus the little spate of like
• 33:15
  crazy impersonations that happened as he allowed Bluechecks to be purchased for $8, which I think
• 33:21
  is a decision that he maybe did not think through entirely. There could be a lot of those.
• 33:25
  Are you, do you think he's going to pull it off? Yeah, probably. Men with a space. I mean,
• 33:31
  if you do that, I think he can probably do this. But people of fickle, like, you know,
• 33:37
  physics algorithms aren't fickle. They'll do, they'll, they'll keep coming back
• 33:41
  for more. Like no matter how crazy you are, if you get the equation right, it'll be there for you.
• 33:46
  You can bank on it. People are weird. Like once people decide to stampede out of something or
• 33:50
  enter something, then you can lose control of it. That's true. Although I did see, you know,
• 33:56
  this is just like a couple of one-off anecdotes, but it seems like the social media platform to
• 34:02
  which all of the sort of worst people on Twitter fled when they realized that Twitter might be
• 34:07
  kind of escaping their control. This thing called mastodon. There was like an instant meltdown
• 34:13
  over there for all of the same reasons that meltdowns occur on Twitter all the time. And I have a
• 34:18
  theory that, you know, you've got a group of people who basically take a certain dynamic with them
• 34:24
  wherever they go. And so any issue that plagued Twitter when these people were sort of, like,
• 34:31
  prolific on the platform, it will also plague whatever platform they take their game over to.
• 34:36
  And that's just a people problem and not a Twitter problem.
• 34:39
  Right. You mean that'll be a puritanical finger wagging kind of sensorious work problem?
• 34:46
  Well, you said that not me, but the shoe fits.
• 34:49
  Well, you're the one who keeps getting mistaken for a conservative, according to your piece in
• 34:55
  national review. I read this piece, you know, I want you to explain it to those. But I also
• 35:02
  liked the fallout to the piece, which was lots of people on Twitter saying,
• 35:06
  I can't imagine why you get mistaken for a conservative when, you know, I keep getting mistaken
• 35:10
  for a conservative conservative woman says, are you a conservative? I'm not a conservative.
• 35:16
  And this is why I was I was not invited to be a contributor as a columnist at the national
• 35:23
  review because I'm not a conservative. Why do you keep getting mistaken for a conservative?
• 35:31
  That's an interesting question. I just wrote 4,000 words about this exact question.
• 35:38
  But the long and short of it is that I think that conservative and liberal and left and right
• 35:43
  have become sort of meaningless dichotomies and meaningless labels because right now the way we
• 35:51
  do politics, the way we apply political labels to people has very little to do with what they
• 35:56
  stand for, what their principles are, even who they vote for, and much more to do with who they
• 36:03
  appear to be enemies with. So people look at either who you hate or, you know, absent that,
• 36:09
  who hates you, who's mad at you. And then they assume that, you know, they can reverse engineer
• 36:14
  your identity from there because you are defined by whoever is mad at you, whoever doesn't like you.
• 36:21
  For me, I am a person on the left. I hold views that are probably like to the left of, on the issues
• 36:29
  that I really care about, things like criminal justice and police reform. I would say my issues
• 36:33
  are probably to the left of like 95% of the American public. I'm very, very far left on these things.
• 36:40
  But I'm also one critical of the left when it does things that I think are unprincipled, things like,
• 36:48
  you know, trying to boot, you know, dias out of public life. I'm also irreverent about political
• 36:54
  stuff in general. And in combination, these two things tend to get progressives, like Twitter
• 37:00
  progressives really mad at me. And they spend a lot of time yelling at me and calling me names.
• 37:05
  And I think that both other progressives and also conservative see this happening. And they say,
• 37:11
  well, all those folks are mad at her. So she must be on the other team. And it's as simple as that.
• 37:18
  Irreference is interesting to note, isn't it, that being irreverent about things could
• 37:23
  peg you as a conservative in 2022. Because being irreverent about things, I think throughout most
• 37:28
  of my life would have put you on the left, would have put a person on the left. And conservatives
• 37:32
  would have been dour and bossy. And lefties would have been letting their head down and smoking
• 37:39
  weed and doing free love. Yeah. Yeah. The war on fun has definitely shifted its position. And now,
• 37:46
  I mean, the people who are sort of like clamoring about harm, you know, like the finding kind of
• 37:55
  Satan at the root of everything except it's not Satan. It's usually racism, sexism, whatever.
• 38:00
  But yeah, these are folks on the left, you know, they're clutching their pearls just as hard as any
• 38:05
  of the like Bible thumping ladies who were scandalized by my penchant for listening to Marilyn Manson
• 38:12
  as a teenager in the 90s were back up. How has that happened? I have a couple of theories about
• 38:22
  the tendency of people who've amassed cultural power to then engage in sensorious behaviors,
• 38:31
  attempting to retain their hold on that power. And, you know, I think that in general that
• 38:39
  also explains the hostility to free speech that's arisen on the left. I mean, I think there's two
• 38:43
  things happening. Actually, one is that once power coalesces in a given place, you know, the people
• 38:49
  who have it will inevitably do their best to shut down oppositional speech. It's just,
• 38:54
  it happens in every sphere that you can possibly imagine, you know, you can see this like on a
• 39:00
  political level, global, national, whatever. The other thing is because of Donald Trump, a lot of
• 39:08
  people, especially younger people who haven't been around politics or around culture for as long,
• 39:15
  associate irreverence or offensiveness and being willing to just go off and say whatever
• 39:21
  with the Republican Party. And so, you know, all of a sudden free speech and the freedom to offend
• 39:29
  has become in their eyes a right wing value. And how did you come to be writing about not being
• 39:36
  a conservative, inner conservative publication? Well, I was invited out to lunch,
• 39:41
  by Rich Lowry, who's the executive editor of the National Review. And I have a policy as I know
• 39:47
  in the piece. If you invite me to lunch, I go, you know, I love to eat lunch a lot. And I'm a
• 39:54
  freelance writer, so I don't really get a lot of chances to kind of, you know, do professional
• 40:00
  networking or whatever. So yeah, you know, if you invite me to lunch, especially at a nice restaurant
• 40:05
  that's near where I live, like I'm there. So I accept this lunch invitation. I did not ask
• 40:10
  why I was being invited out. I was like, whatever, sounds fun, Rich Lowry. But after I got there
• 40:16
  and we'd eaten and the plates have been cleared and we'd sort of talked our way through all of the
• 40:21
  polite conversation topics that two writers can cover, I finally said, Rich, what am I doing here?
• 40:27
  And he's very apologetically said, well, I was going to ask you if you were interested in writing
• 40:33
  a column for the National Review, but it turns out you're a liberal. And I left and he left. And I
• 40:40
  said, this is not the first time that this has happened to me because it wasn't. And he suggested
• 40:46
  at the time that maybe this would be an interesting piece. And what I ended up doing was I wrote it
• 40:52
  on commission for them through this thing called the Pacific Fund, which is a means for the
• 41:00
  National Review to fund journalism that's outside its usual wheelhouse, which is how they ended up
• 41:05
  with a bleeding heart-free speech liberal writing a giant feature essay in their pages. And you know
• 41:13
  what? More power to them for offering me that platform. Yeah, yeah, it's hard to imagine a dedicated
• 41:22
  progressive left-wing publication inviting a conservative to write a piece at the moment,
• 41:28
  which comes back to the question about why have we flipped in who's irreverent and fun and
• 41:33
  open to new ideas and who's bossy and schoolmarmish and annoying and sensorious. Yeah, I want to
• 41:39
  say like, you know, the thing about the National Review too is everyone took this piece as though
• 41:44
  it were bashing the left. And I understand why people who didn't read it might feel that way
• 41:49
  because they did append a really stupid sub headline to it that said something like the left no longer
• 41:54
  tolerates dissent, which, you know, not the framing I would have chosen because it's not accurate
• 41:58
  to the piece. But in the piece itself, I actually spent a lot of time being pretty insulting to
• 42:05
  conservatives, especially the conservatives that, you know, I grew up with the folks who were
• 42:10
  sort of dominant in the 90s and early 2000s. I think there's a point in the piece where I call them
• 42:16
  heartless, joyless, sexless, except for the fact that they're obsessed with the sex everybody
• 42:21
  else is having in the privacy of their own homes. And they were good sports about that, you know,
• 42:26
  they didn't insist on taking it out. So yeah. And you could probably make a lot of money by being
• 42:33
  like, you're still young and hot and you could be the kind of like sassy conservative
• 42:39
  chick that ruffles feathers. I mean, you could be enculted 2.0. Has that ever appealed?
• 42:46
  It's occurred. It does not appeal. It's occurred. Yes, like I've thought of it. It's occurred.
• 42:53
  Like it's not as a real life that this would happen. No, no, it's occurred to me. You know,
• 43:03
  it's been a thought like I could do this. I'm aware of it as a career opportunity. But it does not
• 43:09
  appeal to me. Why not? Well, I mean, for one thing, I'm not right wing. And so I think I would
• 43:17
  inevitably disappoint people, you know, when I got on there and started talking about how I'd
• 43:22
  like to abolish the sex offender registry and capital punishment and enact, you know, sweeping
• 43:27
  prison reforms to do that these days. You just downplay the areas on which you disagree and
• 43:34
  you to dial up the areas on which you agree. And then you come in as if you're like,
• 43:39
  oh, I'm this great kind of wolf in sheep's clothing type person who can speak to both sides.
• 43:44
  I mean, it's the Dave Rubin trick, right? It's just like, hey, you can like me because I'm the
• 43:50
  inoffensive version of the other side. But in actual fact, I'm just going to constantly talk
• 43:55
  about the things that I agree with you on. Yeah, that for some reason just doesn't really
• 44:01
  appeal to me. Does it appeal to you? Not at all. No, I mean, I think you have to be a shameless
• 44:07
  hack for it to appeal. But, you know, there's money in it. Yeah, there is. And, you know,
• 44:15
  and money is a nice thing to have. But I'm going to try to make it without selling my soul in the
• 44:21
  process. Okay, good luck. Good luck. Only both. This is why I teach yoga part time.
• 44:27
  So speaking of sexuality, then you wrote an advice column, right?
• 44:37
  Quite a while ago, I did, yeah, like a decade. Teenagers, yeah, for teenagers. And I saw that one
• 44:44
  of the things that came across your radar long before mine and everybody else's was demisexual.
• 44:51
  Now, I'm constantly bombarded as many of us are with new sexuality identities and new gender
• 44:58
  identities. And I don't like it when we all just play the crusty, all conservative and we're like,
• 45:03
  what? How can a person be called a they? They're not a plural. Like, I'm fine with people being
• 45:09
  called they, if they want to, like, just, like, just language changes. Nonetheless, the language
• 45:15
  should reflect something that's actually out there that's real and gradually where we're
• 45:21
  accruing a number of identities that don't seem to actually be the same to cause more confusion
• 45:27
  than clarity. What's a demisexual and why did you write about one? Why didn't write about one,
• 45:34
  in particular, you make it sound like I targeted one particular demisexual. Yeah, Bob, the demisexual
• 45:41
  fuck you. No, no, demisexuals as a group are people who don't and cannot experience
• 45:56
  sexual attraction without forming an emotional bond beforehand. They, the folks who identify
• 46:05
  as demisexuals describe this as a sexual orientation. It's not a sexual orientation. At least not
• 46:13
  in so far as like, we understand that term to mean anything because, you know, for one thing,
• 46:20
  it doesn't describe who you're oriented to and it also doesn't describe like the circumstances
• 46:26
  under which you experience desire. It basically describes a lack of desire except under very
• 46:30
  particular circumstances. Would nice rituals also be subject to that charge? Yeah, yeah. I
• 46:37
  mean, you know, I would say asexuality, you know, if you're going to describe it as anything,
• 46:40
  you would describe it as like the lack of a sexual orientation. But demisexuality is interesting
• 46:45
  because it is sort of, I think for a decent number of people, it is a sort of an exit strategy
• 46:54
  from asexuality because a lot of the people who start out identifying as asexuals,
• 47:00
  they go along to that label when they're like 14 or 15 years old and as they grow up and develop
• 47:06
  a more sophisticated kind of an intuitive understanding of sexuality and of their sexuality
• 47:11
  particularly, they realize that maybe writing off the entire enterprise is not something they
• 47:15
  actually want to do. But they're very attached to the idea and the community and the sense of
• 47:22
  belonging and meaning that they obtained from this label. So saying I'm demisexual is basically
• 47:26
  like I'm asexual plus, you know, I'm asexual except under these very particular circumstances.
• 47:33
  So I think in some ways it offers a sort of a gateway out of issuing sexuality entirely into
• 47:41
  you know, embracing it like on very narrow terms, but in a way that still allows people to feel
• 47:48
  in control, which again, like we're talking about very, very young people in most of these cases and
• 47:52
  so that's, you know, something that they want and need and is comforting to them.
• 47:56
  Right. I mean, the claim has also been made that a demisexual is just a woman basically,
• 48:05
  but I don't know if that's reductive about female sexuality. Yeah, I think it is.
• 48:09
  But cliche that men will get turned on by anything and women will want some kind of connection
• 48:16
  with the individual who they're sleeping with before they get in the sack.
• 48:22
  Maybe it's not a male female thing, but there are certainly types of people who seem to be
• 48:27
  less judicious in caring about the character of the person they're sleeping with and others more so.
• 48:33
  Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of reasons why women don't necessarily gravitate naturally towards
• 48:38
  casual sex and partly maybe that has to do with being wired to seek emotional connection,
• 48:44
  but I think it has probably at least as much to do with the fact that, you know,
• 48:49
  women tend not to get off with somebody when they sleep with them just like on a one-off basis.
• 48:54
  It's just not like enjoyable physically in the way that it is for men for various physiological
• 49:01
  reasons. But I'm just trying to think like, so I lost my train of thought a little bit. We're talking
• 49:09
  about demisexuality and whether it's specifically women. Well, so I think the thing is too that
• 49:17
  demisexuality has a place, and this I think is more true for older people who identify with the
• 49:22
  label, in the sort of backlash to sex-positive feminism and sort of like porn-ified feminism
• 49:29
  and hook-up culture that has been dominant in the past few years, because what demisexuality
• 49:37
  is, what it describes is having a very traditional, very conservative approach to physical intimacy
• 49:47
  and to your sexual relationships, right? But it dresses it up as something progressive. It
• 49:54
  dresses it up as a sexual minority identity. And I think it accomplishes two things by doing this.
• 50:00
  One, it makes having a conservative set of desires more palatable to progressives, you know,
• 50:07
  what otherwise be like, I'm not a conservative, like that's not me. The other thing is it
• 50:14
  basically makes it so that you don't have to talk about or think about or negotiate your boundaries.
• 50:22
  And at a time when you're supposed to like, you know, like the conventional culture is like
• 50:29
  that you're supposed to be kind of maximally sexually available and up for anything
• 50:33
  and ready to go at all times. If you're a woman, you don't want any part of that,
• 50:36
  then saying, well, no, my identity precludes that from being in the case,
• 50:42
  allows you to kind of opt out of things in the sexual realm that are maybe
• 50:47
  undesirable to you or, you know, just on appealing. And, um, and, you know, a person can't like
• 50:54
  ask you to explain it or be critical of it because that's your identity. It's just who you are.
• 50:58
  Right. Yeah. That's interesting. It's a bit like if you were at a party and you didn't,
• 51:04
  didn't want to have to engage with people constantly offering you a drink and you just said,
• 51:08
  I'm in recovery or I'm an alcoholic or something like that. Then that's just a conversation stopper
• 51:12
  and then you don't have to have the conversation about why you're not having a third drink or
• 51:17
  whatever it might be. Yeah. Being a demisexual is like a get out of jail free card for being
• 51:23
  approved. Gosh, that analogy to somebody who's in recovery declining a drink is so good that
• 51:30
  I'm mad that I didn't think of it myself. Yeah. That's exactly it. You just have to credit me every
• 51:35
  single time you say it ever. Okay. But you can use it full name and my, uh, and my Twitter handle.
• 51:43
  You have to give it out every time you use it. You say that. Okay. All right. Apart from that,
• 51:47
  you can use it as much as you want. I mean, identity as Josh's apps, Twitter handle,
• 51:53
  whatever it is. And then maybe add like a squire in sale. Yeah. That'd be good. Yeah.
• 51:59
  The right honorable. Yeah. That's interesting. Isn't it? So, and what do you make of if we've
• 52:06
  got this kind of modern sexual landscape in which at one end you've got the tinderification of
• 52:13
  everything where it's just swipe left, swipe right, get it on. And then at the other end you've
• 52:20
  got people having to invent new categories of progressive sexual minority just so that they can
• 52:26
  instantiate in their lives and attitude towards sexual intimacy that would have been completely
• 52:32
  widespread amongst cultural conservatives 20 years ago. Where what do you make of where young people
• 52:41
  nowadays? Well, not just young people where all of us kind of fit on the on navigating the
• 52:45
  our sexual boundaries. That's a good question. I mean, I know that Gen Z is basically not
• 52:53
  doing it. They're not having sex. They're not dating. And is that true? Yeah. They're like the least
• 53:01
  sexually active generation ever. Millennials, I think, were surely our great grandparents.
• 53:09
  Well, no, actually, they were probably boning each other all over the place one day when they were
• 53:12
  young. I mean, our great grandparents, we're talking now about like pre-birth control, which always
• 53:19
  complicates things, you know, when it was not possible to have sexual intercourse without running
• 53:23
  the risk of a pregnancy, you know, things were a little little different. Although I would imagine
• 53:29
  that they spent a lot of time like necking, you know? The necking, I mean, there's a lot of,
• 53:36
  there's a lot of like necking, quote, as you put it, that one can do without impregnating
• 53:42
  each other. Yeah. That can get pretty serious if you follow my drift list. Yeah. I mean, you know,
• 53:49
  some of the very religious folks that I went to high school with would, you know, do everything
• 53:55
  but vaginal intercourse, including anal, you know, because like, yeah. Well, the sweet baby Jesus
• 54:03
  is cool with anal. Yeah. Oh, Jesus loves it. I can't even, I'm going to, I'm just going to let you.
• 54:11
  Yeah. Because the sweet baby Jesus doesn't count and disseminate an egg and create a life.
• 54:17
  And that's what the sweet baby Jesus cares about. Yeah. And you don't do that.
• 54:23
  Right. Right. Exactly. I'm pretty sure that as he was dying, that was his, that was his last
• 54:27
  words, right? It was, every, you know, every including anal just tell the children, tell the
• 54:34
  children. He said, as he was dying on the crucifix, do anal. Are you going to get fired?
• 54:42
  It's a question I ask myself every day. It's, it's clear enough that the sort of movement
• 54:49
  online of like all intimacy and all courtship and dating has not necessarily been a boon to humanity.
• 54:59
  People seem to be lonelier and spending more time alone than they were before we decided that
• 55:06
  it wasn't okay for people to like meet and flirt and public anymore. So I, and I do see a certain
• 55:11
  amount of backlash, the kind of rise of like the trad movement where people are trying to sort of
• 55:19
  recreate contemporaneously these very traditional relationships, you know, often they're kind of
• 55:24
  religiously inflected. But I think that that's a response in some ways to, you know, not wanting to
• 55:30
  be part of this hookup culture. So maybe what's going to happen is we're going to kind of back out
• 55:39
  of this corner where everything is supposed to happen online and you're supposed to only ever
• 55:45
  interact with or, you know, or meet somebody through the intermediary of a screen and treat it
• 55:49
  like it's kind of a form of shopping and get back to like basics, you know, the, you know,
• 55:56
  what does it mean to be in close proximity to somebody who who smells in a way that is like
• 56:01
  exciting to, you know, fair and monologically or, you know, what is it like to be at a bar,
• 56:09
  you know, on your third beer like midnight with somebody who you've met and there's like
• 56:13
  sparks flying and your arm brushes against theirs and that's exciting in a way that, you know,
• 56:18
  a text just isn't. I think people are probably going to rediscover this stuff out of a hunger
• 56:26
  for what's missing from the online dating sphere and hopefully kind of take us back in the
• 56:33
  direction of at least making it permissible again to meet people the old fashioned way. But I guess
• 56:39
  we'll see. I hope so. Yeah. I mean, it's all the same to be like, I've been married for a million
• 56:49
  years, but like my greatest fear at this point is my husband dying and like when I'm, when I'm still
• 56:54
  young enough that I'll be expected to find somebody else and that I'll have to get on the apps.
• 56:58
  So basically he has to live forever. Well, you mean you want to be, no, you want to make sure that
• 57:02
  he dies while you're still hot enough to get someone good. You don't want to be shopping around
• 57:06
  when you're, when you're old and flabby. You want to be on the market now, Kat. You want to,
• 57:13
  if he's going to, he either has to outlive you or tell him to just pack it in now so that you
• 57:18
  can hit the scene while you're still cute. Okay, he has to outlive me then because I can't do it.
• 57:25
  But I mean, however hard it would be now, it would be a lot harder in 40 years.
• 57:31
  I'll be 80 in 40 years. That's my point. I don't think, I don't think at that point that I would
• 57:37
  bother with it. 30 years? What, 30 years is 70? Okay, yeah, maybe. You might want a little bit of,
• 57:46
  you know, a little bit of action. I'm not saying you'd go full Jesus, but you know, you might just
• 57:51
  want a bit, you might want a bit of old school necking. Right, right, yeah. 70. You want to,
• 57:58
  you want to play first date questions? This is, you have the honor, Kat, of being the last
• 58:04
  guest before my substack launches. Oh, how exciting. You didn't know that. No, and I don't know,
• 58:12
  like people, by the way, if people haven't gotten on board, then they don't even know what they
• 58:17
  get for being early subscribers yet, but you get something really, really cool for subscribing
• 58:22
  before the substack launches and being a founding member. So if you haven't done it, then you have
• 58:25
  to send an email now to uncomfyconvose.gmail.com, you and C-O-M-F-Y, C-O-N-V-O-S, and just say
• 58:33
  subscribe or something like that and my producer will put you on the pre list. But anyway, that's
• 58:36
  all a preface cat to saying that that means that I'm going to, so normally we're going to do first
• 58:41
  date questions at the end of a show where I just find some questions out, you know, it's like a
• 58:44
  rule shark kind of thing. And only subscribers get that, but because you're with us before the cutoff,
• 58:50
  everyone's going to get this, unless they're listening to it after the fact. I feel a little used.
• 58:55
  Really? Yeah, yeah. You're just giving me a way to your listeners for free. Is it a good kind of
• 59:01
  used? Is it like, no, I feel this is like, this is at least as bad as being forcebly kissed on the
• 59:09
  cheek by Juno Diaz. It is, I would grant you that. I would definitely grant you that. It's at
• 59:15
  least that bad. And then I spend the next three years in exile. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think
• 59:23
  you've to give me your podcast. That's the rules. I'm just kidding. I don't want it. Okay,
• 59:32
  fire away. Hit me with your first eight questions. First eight questions. What's happening now
• 59:37
  that in 20 years, people will look back on and laugh about. And laugh about? Mm-hmm.
• 59:51
  I don't know. Nothing about what's happening now seems funny to me. That's why it's a tricky question
• 59:58
  because it's not like what will people get angry about. I think we all we can all see that.
• 1:00:04
  What will they think is ridiculous about us? I wonder if the push for
• 1:00:11
  electric vehicles and like solar energy is actually going to be the thing that people look
• 1:00:17
  back at and are like, what were they thinking? Really? Why? So I've noticed that there's a lot of
• 1:00:25
  kind of policies being enacted in a hurry, especially in the US to try to like get people to
• 1:00:32
  buy electric cars or install non-fossil fuel-burning forms of energy. And the thing is that we
• 1:00:41
  don't really have the infrastructure to support these things. So a lot of people are trying to buy
• 1:00:46
  a Tesla, but they don't have any place to plug it in. And there's a little bit of a cart before
• 1:00:50
  the horse thing happening here that I would be amazing if we got really innovative in a big
• 1:00:56
  hurry and made all of the necessary stuff to support this like transition that seems to be
• 1:01:02
  in the process of attempting to happen. But I think what's more likely is that it's just not,
• 1:01:08
  you know, we're not going to be able to innovate that fast. And then we're just going to be left
• 1:01:12
  with like a lot of landfills full of solar panels, be like firing them into space to get rid of them.
• 1:01:17
  And people are just going to... I'll take your bet on that one. I don't think that's going to happen.
• 1:01:25
  Yeah, I mean, that was a really great answer. I appreciate you're you're incredibly foolish
• 1:01:30
  and and pest really pessimistic answer in light of the climate chaos that we're about to endure.
• 1:01:39
  Kat, I'm sure everyone will look back on this and go, why won't they buying more electric cars
• 1:01:43
  and putting solar panels on their roof's roofs faster? Yeah, I think they're going to be more like
• 1:01:50
  why did they shut down all of the nuclear power plants? We really needed those.
• 1:01:54
  I'll say that too. What do you never get tired of?
• 1:02:00
  Oh, um...
• 1:02:05
  These are bad first day questions. They're too uncomfortable. Oh, they're terrible.
• 1:02:09
  Okay, this date, there is not going to be a second date.
• 1:02:13
  What do I never get tired of eating?
• 1:02:19
  Eating. Yeah. Okay, what's your favorite first date question?
• 1:02:24
  Um... Oh, man, I wish I were clever enough to come up with something really, really funny
• 1:02:31
  right now, but unfortunately my brain is working slow. What is my favorite first date question?
• 1:02:36
  Um... How many kidneys do you have?
• 1:02:41
  Kat, how many kidneys do you have?
• 1:02:45
  Uh, well, no, this is my question that I ask to people on a first date because if they have
• 1:02:50
  the normal number, if they have two, then I drug them and I take one and then they wake up in a
• 1:02:55
  bathtub full of ice, um, having had their organs harvested. A note written in blood on the
• 1:03:03
  bathroom wall saying, call 911 immediately.
• 1:03:08
  Yeah, yeah. You've, uh, you've been on a date with me before, I guess.
• 1:03:15
  I was that man. Uh, what's getting worse as you get older and what's getting better as you get older?
• 1:03:23
  Um, worse as I get older. Um...
• 1:03:26
  Um, let's see, like in the world or like on my body.
• 1:03:35
  That's the interesting thing about the question.
• 1:03:38
  Um, if it's on my body, it's everything. Everything is getting worse.
• 1:03:44
  Um, what's getting worse in the world as I get older?
• 1:03:49
  Um...
• 1:03:50
  Um, I don't know, this is, this is probably a little bit dark, but like, um, the amount of
• 1:04:02
  digital ephemera that we're all just kind of leaving behind, it's invisible, right?
• 1:04:08
  But I think about this a lot, um, that, you know, used to be when somebody dies, they leave behind
• 1:04:15
  like a collection of papers or photographs or whatever. And like, everybody who's alive now,
• 1:04:21
  who's an adult now, basically a young adult is going to die and leave behind just like
• 1:04:26
  gigabytes of invisible memories that nobody will ever look at or see again. And, uh, I think that's
• 1:04:35
  not just like, I don't know, maybe that's, maybe that's a little too dark to say,
• 1:04:38
  ah, things are getting kind of worse as I get older, but like, you know, it's a preoccupation.
• 1:04:42
  It's true, isn't it? It's kind of, yeah. Yeah, I sometimes wonder about that. Just this year.
• 1:04:49
  And what happens to them? Do they just degrade on a hard drive somewhere in a server farm in Iceland?
• 1:04:55
  And eventually get rewapped over with some new person's Google drive?
• 1:05:01
  I wonder, you know, I think I really did a number on the guy at the Apple store when I was
• 1:05:06
  getting my new phone recently and I was like transferring my files over. And I was like,
• 1:05:11
  do you ever think about like what's going to happen to all this stuff after you die?
• 1:05:16
  And he kind of looked at me and he said, well, I wasn't before.
• 1:05:23
  He's like, I'm just a 22 year old Apple store employee. Yeah, I think I ruined his day.
• 1:05:30
  What's the worst movie you've seen, Kat? The worst movie I've seen.
• 1:05:37
  Oh, I hate, I hate to, I hate to diss things.
• 1:05:45
  Promising young woman. Oh, yes. I'm so glad you said that. Tell people what promising young woman
• 1:05:55
  is. Promising young woman is a movie about a 30 year old played by Carrie Mulligan.
• 1:06:06
  Who spends her leisure time going out with bad men pretending to get super duper drunk
• 1:06:15
  and then allowing herself to be taken home to their houses, the bad men's houses, where if they
• 1:06:24
  attempt to sexually assault her, she does something unspecified but very bad to them.
• 1:06:31
  I'm not clear if she actually murders them or just like, messes them up.
• 1:06:35
  No, she doesn't. I don't think you, I don't think she murders them. I think in each case,
• 1:06:40
  she does something different to them, shames them in some way or.
• 1:06:44
  Yeah, yeah, or like, I don't know. I feel like, doesn't she, isn't she covered in blood after
• 1:06:48
  one of these incidents? I don't remember. She might beat them up, yeah.
• 1:06:54
  Yeah, I don't know. But anyway, so basically it's a rape revenge movie,
• 1:07:04
  but it's bad. It's a bad movie. It is bad. I had a lot of hope for it. It's a really interesting
• 1:07:11
  conceit, like I kind of liked the idea of like getting back at rapists. It has a sort of a dexter
• 1:07:18
  quality to it. Remember dexter, the show about the serial killer who only kills killers?
• 1:07:23
  Yeah. It just failed terribly because it was such a cartoon cut out cliche, like every male
• 1:07:33
  character in the movie was a villain. There was no, except for a sniveling old self-loathing
• 1:07:40
  professor or something whose house she goes to who ends up sobbing about how terrible men are,
• 1:07:44
  like there was no nuance or subtlety about the different types of, I don't know,
• 1:07:51
  sexual relationships that can exist. It was just man equals bad.
• 1:07:56
  I mean, it's not much, it's not very flattering to women either. One of the things that kind of
• 1:07:59
  drove me crazy about this movie was that she goes on this rampage not because she was raped,
• 1:08:07
  but because her best friend when they were in medical school was, I guess, raped, although even
• 1:08:16
  this is one of these weird, and I understand why they wanted to do it this way, but created a lot
• 1:08:22
  of ambiguity where what's happened is the girls got an extremely drunk at a party and engages in
• 1:08:29
  acts that, you know, she later doesn't remember and would not have consented to.
• 1:08:35
  But, you know, there is some disagreement as to whether this constitutes, like, a sexual assault.
• 1:08:45
  Hey, Winston, I'm just going to get myself a second feedback.
• 1:08:48
  Okay, just make sure that there isn't an intruder in the house and we'll stand by while
• 1:08:54
  Kat goes and takes care of Winston. Wouldn't it be great if you just heard a gunshot and then
• 1:09:00
  some dog whimpering and then Kat came back and she was like, just, I've been meaning to do that for
• 1:09:06
  for so long, damn dog. Okay, I'm back.
• 1:09:11
  I was just saying to the listener how nice it would be if we just heard a gunshot and then some
• 1:09:17
  dog whimpering and then you came back and was just like, been meaning to do that.
• 1:09:21
  Oh, there was a gunshot, but that was me, you know, killing a man and taking his kidney.
• 1:09:25
  Right. Okay. Okay. What was bothering Winston?
• 1:09:30
  I don't know. What kind of breed is Winston? Winston is a golden doodle. He's a big,
• 1:09:38
  big brown fluffy dog and has a real fierce bark, a real protective instinct about the house,
• 1:09:46
  even when what he's protecting the house from is like rogue air molecules. So, yeah.
• 1:09:53
  I would like a guy, I would like a dog like that. Yeah, I look and have one.
• 1:09:57
  No, I can't because unfortunately my partner doesn't want to have to spend all day with a dog.
• 1:10:03
  Then he lives at, I mean, he works at home and I don't. So, all right, well, there you go.
• 1:10:07
  He gets the peto. Gotcha. So, turns out my husband had come home and that was why we were,
• 1:10:14
  we were flipping out. Okay. Okay. Uh, yeah. So, uh, promising young woman. Yes,
• 1:10:20
  she's avenging something that may or may not have happened to her friend. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know,
• 1:10:25
  I was saying before Winston flipped out, maybe trying to prevent me from talking about this.
• 1:10:29
  He was like, no, you'll be canceled. Um, is that, you know, by just choosing to make it,
• 1:10:36
  make the inciting incident. One of these, um, cases where there was like, um,
• 1:10:41
  um, you know, an extreme drunkenness situation. Introduce all these questions of, you know,
• 1:10:49
  how responsible are women for the decisions they make when they've gotten completely intoxicated.
• 1:10:55
  You know, is if you choose to have second of those circumstances, you know, even if it's a decision,
• 1:11:00
  you would not have made sober. Like, are you being raped? Are you being coerced? Are is a violation
• 1:11:06
  occurring? And if so, like, how much of it is a violation and how much of it is just you making
• 1:11:12
  a decision that you were going to regret. Um, and, you know, I think that it's very difficult
• 1:11:18
  for a movie that's meant to have entertainment value, um, to like engage with these questions,
• 1:11:25
  because they're so thorny and there's really no way to make them fun. Um, well, it could have,
• 1:11:31
  it just didn't try. I mean, like a smart, I think it's possible to do clever art about this,
• 1:11:37
  but that film took it as a given that anything that happens to a woman who's drunk is rape.
• 1:11:45
  Right, right. And so as long as you're on board with that, if you're preaching to the choir,
• 1:11:49
  then you're going to be cheering along, going, you go girl, carry Mulligan for pretending to be drunk,
• 1:11:55
  and then when men take you home, they are rapists. But that's not very, very interesting story
• 1:12:03
  if you have a complex view about human agency. Right. And also, I mean, it's not a very flattering
• 1:12:09
  story to women, you know, just in terms of the idea that you would be like top of your class
• 1:12:15
  at medical school and then something tragic happens to a friend of yours and it derails your
• 1:12:21
  life permanently. I mean, you know, I don't want to be like unkind, but that struck me as
• 1:12:29
  difficult to believe in a little pathetic. Right. What you're saying is it wouldn't bother you at all
• 1:12:34
  if your friends got into terrible trouble. I'm saying I, you know, I would do my murders and then
• 1:12:40
  I would go back to med school and get my degree. I wouldn't like allow it to derail my life for
• 1:12:45
  a period of seven years. Yeah. Yeah. If you have it, you have, I'm giving you a choice,
• 1:12:50
  you can either live full-time in like a motor home or on a sailboat. Tell me more about the murder
• 1:12:58
  home. You get to pick either one can be, let's say either one can be the the motor home or the
• 1:13:08
  sailboat of your dreams. Oh, definitely the murder home. Really? Yeah. I mean, whatever,
• 1:13:15
  like living on a sailboat, I mean, you live on a sailboat long enough and the sailboat becomes
• 1:13:20
  a murder home. Yeah. But what if it's a not a, yeah, okay, I guess the sails are really what make
• 1:13:28
  the sailboat unappealing. What if it was a yacht? All right, maybe, I don't know, like I'm just
• 1:13:34
  thinking about, yeah, when you said sailboats, I immediately went to, okay, like what are the,
• 1:13:41
  what is it like on below decks on a sailboat and specifically what's at the bathroom situation
• 1:13:47
  on that sailboat? It's pretty dire. I once spent two weeks on a sailboat with my family and
• 1:13:55
  that was not okay. Yeah. So when, yeah, if we're talking about a David Geffen super yacht
• 1:14:01
  with a helicopter on top, then you'd take that. Yeah, I mean, the alternative is living in a house
• 1:14:08
  full of ghosts or is it just a house where murder's occurred? No, a motor home, not a murder home.
• 1:14:15
  An RV. Oh, did you think I was saying a murder house? Murder house. Oh, yeah, that's just my accent
• 1:14:26
  being silly. That's not a wanted house. No, it's all your fault. You've got to do something about
• 1:14:31
  that man. It's confusing. First, we got Juno Diaz cancelled in Sydney and now we're now a
• 1:14:38
  misspeaking about what do you call RVs? Is that what you call? Yeah, or a mobile home, mobile home,
• 1:14:48
  right? Okay, here we call them motor homes, but you could do a murder in it if you wanted to.
• 1:14:54
  So the, if the question is between a mobile, a mobile home, a mobile home and sailboat, yeah,
• 1:15:02
  sailboat. But if you could live in a murder home, you were saying, oh, you'd definitely choose a
• 1:15:07
  haunted. Yeah, murder home. Yeah, murder home. I can't believe how long this went on. Yeah, and I
• 1:15:16
  wonder whether any listeners were clear that that that misunderstanding was taking place. I'll
• 1:15:20
  have to listen back to it. You can send us a tweet if you understood the misunderstanding.
• 1:15:27
  I'm so embarrassed. Oh, my gosh. You know, I should be embarrassed. I can't even pronounce
• 1:15:32
  RV or whatever you call it. Yeah, you should be. Learn to speak proper English. Would you? No.
• 1:15:38
  And the last question, why don't we do the time travel question? If you could go anywhere in
• 1:15:42
  the future or in the past, just for a visit and then come back, where would it be?
• 1:15:47
  Oh, my gosh. I would like to go back in time to drink at the Algonquin hotel with Dorothy Parker
• 1:15:58
  and all of her cohort. And I say this knowing full well that Dorothy Parker would think I was
• 1:16:02
  insufferable and probably say really mean things about my hair and my clothes and my personality.
• 1:16:07
  And I would just I would love every minute of it. Because at the end of the night, I would get back
• 1:16:16
  in my time machine and return to the future in which Dorothy Parker is dead.
• 1:16:22
  Right. I've got the last laugh, bitch. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Cat, well, it's lovely to catch up with
• 1:16:29
  you again. I'm glad Winston made a little appearance. I'm really sorry about that. I know it was
• 1:16:34
  intensely loud. No, but it was great though. I doubted a little color.
• 1:16:39
  A little color. And it gave me the potential to imagine you doing horrendous things to your
• 1:16:46
  own dog, which entertain me for a moment. And if people know you should tell people that if they
• 1:16:53
  want full access to all of the content, then they should subscribe to the substack, which will
• 1:16:58
  initially be free. Your substack. Sure. You want me to plug your substack for you on your
• 1:17:05
  podcast. When do I get to plug my own stuff? Well, I mean, I guess if you want to, you can do
• 1:17:11
  that now. Right now. Yeah. You know, I have a podcast of my own. It's called Feminine Chaos.
• 1:17:18
  We are also on substack at Feminine Chaos Quad dot substack dot com. And my next book,
• 1:17:24
  you must remember this. It's a murder mystery, a gothic murder mystery. It comes out in the US
• 1:17:31
  on January 10th, 2023. I don't know about Australia. Maybe you guys don't get it.
• 1:17:36
  After what you did with Juno Diaz, you know, Feminine to stop his cancellation. I would imagine
• 1:17:40
  that I would imagine that you've got an international release. No. I haven't checked. No one will
• 1:17:46
  miss her, which was your last book for it's Australian. Let me see. Do you want me to see here?
• 1:17:51
  I'm going to see in real time whether it's available in Australian stores. I'll bet it is. I'll bet it
• 1:17:56
  is. Yep. Here it is on Amazon dot com dot AU.
• 1:18:09
  May arrive after Christmas. That doesn't sound promising. Does it? That doesn't sound like it's
• 1:18:12
  coming from here. No, probably not unless, you know, there was a run on them in Australia and they
• 1:18:18
  all sold out. That would be a nice thought. That would be great. Wouldn't it? How do you find out
• 1:18:23
  if it's actually published here? Booktopia dot com dot AU. A smart, witty, crackling novel of
• 1:18:31
  psychological suspense. It looks like it's coming from abroad. Oh, well. Granted bummer.
• 1:18:42
  Oh, well. Payless import fees. Yeah, exactly. This is, you know, this is how I make my living
• 1:18:48
  because I decided not to be and culture 2.0. So I just got it by my books. Yeah. Okay. So
• 1:18:55
  carry on anyway. So you've got a new book coming out in January in the United States of America,
• 1:18:59
  which people can, you know, they can get it shipped if they want to. Yeah. And you should.
• 1:19:08
  I feel like that. And what else did you say everything else that you where you want people
• 1:19:11
  to find you? I don't know. I don't want to be greedy. You can also follow me on Twitter,
• 1:19:15
  Instagram, Kat Rosenfield. It's K-A-T-R-O-S-E-N-F-I-E-L-D. Terrific. And I also strongly support
• 1:19:24
  everybody subscribing to Josh's podcast, even though he can't pronounce the word motor correctly.
• 1:19:31
  And I suppose the people who are listening are already subscribed to my podcast, but anyway,
• 1:19:35
  they're about to get lots of additional wonderful bonus content if they are subscribed to the
• 1:19:40
  sub-stake as well. Thank you, Kat. Have a wonderful Christmas and new year. It's lovely to
• 1:19:45
  talk to you again. Likewise, thanks for having me.
• 1:19:50
  Uncomfortable conversations is produced by Stefan Postuma. Follow me, Josh Zeps, on Twitter and
• 1:19:55
  Instagram for all the latest. May your day be fruitful, your mind humble, your enemies generous,
• 1:20:02
  and your conversations perfectly, sparklingly, delectably, uncomfortable.