Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / Where Feminism Went Wrong: The 342nd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

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Where Feminism Went Wrong: The 342nd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying · DarkHorse Podcast

• 0:00
  (Music) Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast live stream number 343 if I'm not mistaken.
• 0:13
  You are mistaken.
• 0:14
  I am... did you say I am mistaken?
• 0:16
  I think so.
• 0:16
  Isn't it 342?
• 0:18
  No, I don't think so.
• 0:19
  I believe...
• 0:20
  It's two.
• 0:21
  It's episode 342, which means that I was mistaken last time as well when I thought it was 342.
• 0:28
  It was 341 last time as you said.
• 0:32
  This is not important.
• 0:33
  The top level message here is that it is 342.
• 0:38
  I am Dr.
• 0:39
  Bret Weinstein that I'm reasonably certain of.
• 0:41
  You are Dr.
• 0:41
  Heather Heying.
• 0:42
  I'm quite sure of that.
• 0:44
  I wanted to say last episode was obviously pretty intense.
• 0:48
  We talked about the the loss of our dog Maddie and I will say among other things I was very touched as I know you were at the stories and supportive comments that we saw come in across all of our social media platforms or at least the ones you and I are aware that we're on.
• 1:11
  It was very heartening and it fit very well with one of the themes of that broadcast which was that our love of our animals and especially our dogs seems to be the one thing that bridges the increasingly unbridgeable divides in civilization.
• 1:28
  I will say grief is a fascinating process.
• 1:35
  It's obviously a very difficult process but it's one of the more remarkable adaptations and and I'm watching myself go through it and I've left the stage of just pure despair and I'm now in the part of it where I am processing what role Maddie was actually playing in my life and you would think it would be obvious you know it's a dog you know what you do all day but it was not obvious and one of the things I'm learning about myself and that relationship is that I do a lot of my processing a lot of my thinking out loud and so as not to seem like a person I was doing a lot of processing with the dog.
• 2:22
  Now the dog gave her a little feedback.
• 2:26
  Well it wasn't so much the feedback the thing is she was an incredible listener right if I was I know this about her if I was talking to her she was locked in and focused and absolutely ready to to help in any way that she could and she was not especially learned she struggled with dyslexia and I suspect dysgraphia that we can never ever tested because she couldn't hold a pen but but anyway from the point of view of listening she was top-notch and I know I know what people are thinking you're thinking he's lost it they are probably thinking that I've lost it but then a smaller subset that said of them are thinking dude you've got cats I'm betting they're pretty good listeners too and the funny thing is no right the dog you talk to her not only is she paying wrapped attention but you also get the sense that she's supportive she is looking to to strengthen you in your processing of these things the cats you talk to them you're not quite sure they're on your team because at any given moment they might decide not to be and also they do not stay locked in in fact they will flat out walk clean their butts or something in the middle of a sentence that's right that's concerning that's true I think you do cats a disservice with your somewhat tongue-in-cheek suggestion that they might switch teams at any moment they I do not think that a good cat will switch teams at any moment however wrapped they are not no they uh just because you are talking to them does not provoke in them any kind of sense of obligation to be there as you continue to talk to them they figure that you will keep talking whether they're there or not and you may indeed do that and so if something else uh piques their interest or they just have a flight of fancy they will wander off whereas where's dogs at least our dog but I think this is more generalizable to to good dogs which is the vast majority of dogs will if you are speaking to them listen they will stay and they will listen and they will hope for some clarification at some point as to maybe a synopsis uh at the end of what the action points are and like what it is they're expected to do but they will stay listening as long as you are inclined to talk to them they actually listen and they know that you're talking I don't think the cats know exactly what you're doing they know you're making noises yeah but they don't know what that's you maybe you're hungry right but maybe you're asking them to get the can of right the dog knows that you're on about something and she wants you to be right or to discover in you know safe context that you weren't right so you can pivot and get to right dogs on board and I am now struggling with the fact that I am relegated to talking to myself which is a good bit more disconcerting yeah yeah I mean if you if you have a cat that's you know that's willing to have be like the do the football hold thing and you can wander around with a cat and the cat's not going to leave just because the cat's in your arm right right but barring that if you if you're if you're trying to have a conversation with a cat on the floor they will look at you until they decide not to okay here's the problem with that okay um Tesla's a little frail at his age and was never the best cat for being picked up Fairfax is pretty good in in the arm as long as you keep him moving he gets ready he's like some babies yeah he's like some babies so in order to process with Fairfax you have to pick him up and kind of dance around while talking to yourself so were anyone to observe this you'd look even crazier oh just it's it's like and not all babies we had we had one child who who was perfectly content utterly still in the arms and another child who really did often want a bit of a bit of bouncing early on and most parents have either had that experience or know that some babies just need a little movement in order to stay calm in arms yeah to give them a little a little bit of a data feed to keep them occupied rather than their mind wandering and them tuning into their discomforts or whatever it is and with a cat anyway it also gets them adjusted to the shocks they keep their head in place oh yeah it's cool to watch their head and try to hold see the gimbal head yeah the cat yeah that's a cool thing all right all right you want to get to the to the rent paying part yes all right um so I'll say first we're going to talk a bit more I think about cats and dogs cats and dogs and we're going to talk about love in a scientific adaptive context that I think people will find provocative all right and we're also going to talk about another death there have been a lot lately uh and obviously last episode we talked about Maddie our labrador and also about Wendell Berry uh great sort of philosopher for the philosopher of the land we did not end up speaking about Dolly Parton uh or uh tim yeah kerry uh both of whom died the previous week um but uh Gloria Steinem has died uh and we're gonna I'm gonna spend some time talking about her and what I I did not know her I never met her did see her speak uh and I have I have a whole bin of her magazines here that I saved because it seemed important and and we'll talk about that but of course she she's a figure that is fraught uh and much much maligned uh in some circles I think wrongly and uh also is earning of criticism in many places as well I think it's going to be a very interesting discussion and I have not heard what you have to say here so I'm looking forward to it um yeah yeah okay uh let's let's get to the I believe I'm first um so we are sharing of this belief and I would point out that our first sponsor this week is Caraway I don't know if you realize that they make high quality non-toxic cookware and bakeware whether you're spending time at the grill the stove or the oven Caraway has the gear for you roast chicken in Caraway's cookware mix a summery cocktail with their bar set or bake a seasonal berry crisp in their bakeware 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conservatives she and other single women were caricatured as man-hating bra burning lesbians intent on upending the social order and destroying the american family I think the New York Times has done it again they have made a claim that would not stand up to any scrutiny at all and here I am scrutinizing it and saying adored they're not always by liberals okay probably probably true ish I certainly was in that camp myself uh frankly until I saw her speak in 1995 we saw her speak in 1995 um but I'm getting ahead of myself uh demonized always by conservatives I'm sorry I don't think so it's not that uh feminism and its many waves hasn't come under attack both legitimate and illegitimate in from many quarters many of them the majority of them I would say being conservative quarters but the idea that all conservatives uh demonized her always is the same kind of absurd over-the-top uh painting with a broad brush claim that the New York Times which I think at one point did journalism uh is becoming accustomed to doing these days and it doesn't it doesn't serve them so let's just talk a little about who she was she grew up kind of transient interestingly I think she in in later years when she was famous as as a feminist uh was sometimes criticized for not paying as much attention to women from lower classes women of color although she she in her um apparently ongoing disagreements with Betty Friedan was the woman who who who did stand for and with black women more often for instance but she herself did not come from privilege at all although she certainly became someone who was popular in sort of at the at the coastal cocktail parties that you like to refer to and that indeed Wendell Berry referred to in in something I read of of his on our last episode um but she was the daughter of a father who always had a plan but they were always on the move and until she was um I don't remember nine ten or eleven she never um she really wasn't in school much because they they spent time in Ohio and then once the weather started to get cold they would go on the road her father and her mother and her she had an older sister who was much older uh and her mother uh who was born around the turn of the last century was herself a working journalist uh for a while before Gloria was born in the early 30s uh and that of course was very very rare for a woman um a woman of that era um I wanted to flag something yeah uh I used to do a lot of thinking about why it is that um people who accomplish things analytically how how it is that with what is very often uh an analytical mind that has come as a result of some sort of disruption of normal development and one of the patterns that was very clear sometimes it's a trauma that does this but very frequently I would find people who had been uprooted as children um people who had been like military brats that they were constantly being moved around or people whose parents had moved from one culture to another became sort of hyper conscious as a result of that disruption during childhood and it sounds like Steinem would have been uh such a person absolutely I would also point out um to the extent that it's saying that it sounds like I'm saying oh the better people are people who've been disrupted it's not at all what I'm saying consciousness is a tool for unpredictable in obvious circumstances it's not the best way to live and so you know there are moments for which it's the right tool but there's a lot of peril that comes along with consciousness because you can come up with an idea that seems very clever but turns out to have consequences you had no idea about and some of that may come come become clear in in Steinem story yeah and I think um so you know one of the modern uh things that people say about um growing up in one kind of place and finding yourself trying to make a go of it and another is that you code switch right and code switching is I think necessary for all of us to understand it's something we all do to some degree some people are required because of the expectations of the world they now find themselves in to do it if they also expect to be fully accepted in the world from which they came but it is difficult it is a remarkable skill but it is harder to get real depth in either world if you are constantly keeping open the reality that I may have to switch out of this into a different into a different mode than any moment actually now that you raise it I just want to flag this for I think what I'm seeing in modern times is that the gap between what one can say publicly and what one's private conversations with people of whom they are of like mind sound like is a pretty big gap I don't think it's normal yeah I think there's something inhibiting about the public conversation where lots of things that are clearly if not true they're at least plausible that they deserve consideration can't be discussed because of the accusations that come back if you raise it so you know we are all forced into a public private dichotomy that is unnaturally disjunct so there's a kind of code switching you know like we meet people all the time who either have terrible stories of vaccine injury or they know people who've had such things but you wouldn't know it to talk to them until they know that you're safe to talk to at which point it becomes a conversation of like yeah I've seen that same picture yeah a lot more of us became unwitting unwittingly skilled in code switching during covid yeah because for the most part you didn't walk around a wear egg on your sleeves that you didn't buy any of this shit right yep and people will remember I think I was talking about the fact that maybe partially because I'm a public person but also because it's my nature that I am typically quite forward with the stuff that other people will be afraid to say and that it very frequently results in the person on the other side acknowledging that they see way more of that picture than you would have um so you know it's kind of like I'm breaking the code switching uh modality by using the internal code externally and it's amazing how many people are not saying what they know right just seems strange yep um okay so uh Steinem grew up in the 30s and 40s uh her parents her mother had been working journalist until just just before she was born her sister was nine years older than her and her parents split up when she was like 10 her father moved to California and gloria effectively became her mother's caregiver her mother sort of decayed into mental illness and from the age of like 10 or 11 to 17 gloria was effectively it was they were they were stable in place for the first time in gloria's life at that point but very unstable with regard to uh you know what a child should should have to be doing in the world and then she spent the senior year of her high school in dc and then she like her sister before her went to Smith which I'll come back to that because although I didn't last nearly as long at Smith as gloria did I too went to Smith many many years later um so the first thing well the first work that Gloria Steinem did that got her widespread attention and one of the earliest pieces of her work that I became aware of was in 1963 and this is you know well before we were born but in 1963 she published her undercover expose of life as a playboy bunny in two parts uh and uh I reread it I reread the whole thing this morning and it's quite remarkable I'll link to it it's available online I'm not going to read any part of it because it really it just it itself is is long and and tells a remarkable story of it reminded me actually a bit of Barbara Ehrenreich's investigations of of being working class and and taking on jobs as um house cleaners and I think a walmart employee and uh waitress yeah waitress in a diner and I can't remember the name of that amazing book of erin reich's as well from from much later Nickel and Dimed that's right and I think that was from the the 90s um and gloria Steinem was doing this sort of investigative undercover reporting by by managing to get hired as a playboy bunny in the early 60s uh when when what was being promoted to the outside world of what that life was was it was glamorous it was amazing you just got access to you know all the great things and the clients who were of course almost entirely but not entirely men uh and the bunnies who were of course entirely gorgeous young women um were all just having the time of their lives and of course you find that this is not at all what um what gloria Steinem experienced nor what she is reporting on on the conversations that she had with her her fellow bunnies and obviously fellow in that sentence is a strange use of the term but you all know what I mean so that felt uh important it was when I read it I don't know I probably read it as a 12 year old or so sort of early 80s I thought oh okay playboy bunnies still exist I think at that point like certainly playboy still existed and uh this is the kind of thing that uh that the world is is largely moving away from we don't encourage the abject objectification of women in this way anymore even while we can appreciate that young women are beautiful and young women have a sexual power that that is unlike any other power in in the known universe and that there are going to be attractions and and strategies and all of this over over the beauty and hotness of young women you have something to add here no no I we'll get there we'll get there keep going okay um so that was in 1963 she reports that it really wasn't until around then that she was thinking of herself uh that she was thinking about women's at all that she was and that was she was what um just under 30 she she had to lie about her age to get the job because you had to be between 20 and 24 I think uh and uh and she passed well which there's something there's a lot in this story and you know to be honest with you I've never read her but the in order for feminism to work it has to overcome expectations that people have of what a feminist is and to have a woman beautiful enough not only to be a playboy bunny in that era but to be one when she had aged out right and so she apparently looked younger than she was um tells right away this isn't what you think it is this isn't some you know unappealing woman uh railing against men this is a woman who is attractive enough to get the attention of men reporting out on you know yeah the the inner story well and it's um it's a sad commentary on uh the the quality of most of their critique against feminism frankly uh that that is a standard one oh the only women who are interested in um speaking up on feminist matters are ones who have been rejected by men because they're too ugly to get one and it's uh it's disgusting and it's not true uh but it it did help allow Gloria Steinem to make more of a difference in the world and in fact to um to overshadow some of her contemporaries not that she was trying to mostly like she doesn't have that reputation uh but that she she did get more camera time than her black peers than her less attractive peers than her older peers within the feminist movement precisely and she lived a life you know she she did end up getting married once much later um to a man who only remained alive for a few years and it was it was a little bit of an sort of an administrative marriage where she was marrying him for so that he could get a green card um and she never had children but she had a series of sort of high-profile uh heterosexual relationships with attractive men with powerful men she was very she was very attracted to attractive men and she was very uh attractive to both attracted to and attractive to men and that just throws a wrench in that not very clever and frankly not actually what feminism is about critique of feminism well in its defense I will say it bought her credibility in my eyes because the story she was telling was clearly something that she had arrived at she had the choice she could have chosen whatever path she wanted and her saying these things from that position gave it more credibility in my eyes um so I you know I get that it's not a fair critique and it's too easy and it's a low blow on the other hand from the point of view of how much effect she had being able to reach people who wouldn't ordinarily be in audience because the story you tell comes with you know I could have I could have done something different and it could have been um you know easy and glamorous or whatever but I'm telling you something I think you need to know it it's a more powerful story well and she did you know from within the establishment uh in the 60s uh she was told uh there's there's some pretty girl journalist who shows up every year uh and uh that's really what she she's pretty and you're you're this year's it girl and uh yeah I hired you for this job because you had nice legs so you know that was very much a part of the of what was happening in that era and you know presumably other women who didn't get jobs at all weren't hearing that and so it was more difficult to hear from them at all because um they didn't get the jobs that they shouldn't have gotten for the reasons you know that Steinem shouldn't have gotten any jobs because she had nice legs but having gotten those jobs she then had access to seeing a world that was true and that she could speak about so um in the early 70s she started Ms.
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  magazine uh with with others but she is you know usually uh usually indicated as the front woman of Ms. Magazine and um this was understood to be a woman's magazine that was devoted to issues that women actually care about as opposed to issues of women's appearance and uh domestic duties which the I mean still the vast majority of women's magazines women's magazines are either entirely about cosmetics and you know maybe occasionally how to make a nice hamburger or about you know now the sort of the sex positivity which is the opposite of sex positive movement which is about you know attracting a man but also being comfortable whatever whatever size you're at and you know maintaining that you are awesome no matter what you are and then railing against the fact that even though you find yourself attractive no one else does and you know it's just a lot a lot of confusing messages in these so-called women's magazines that were never good for women what they are is good for advertisers and as um I talked about actually in the episode episode 71 of DarkHorse in april of 2021 when there was the first episode where we ran ads which we had been we'd been considering for a while and we were very uncertain that we should do it and we both have um had just like a negative idea about what it might what it could mean for us to run ads and as it turns out our you know our ad broker is amazing and we've been able to absolutely keep our um keep our independence we we had I think two sponsors at various points two potential sponsors say okay yes but you know could you speak about that like nope we don't do that we're done and we rejected I think still more than we have accepted yep that's right um so in that episode when we were explaining to our audience uh why we were um taking on ads uh for the first time I shared some of what uh Steinem wrote in her absolutely scathing expose of how advertisers drive and actually declare that they're not going to be able to get to decide what the content is across media but especially in so-called women's publications women's magazines uh so this too is a great piece and I will um I will post it but um let me just share um and it's the my the pdf is weird so I'm gonna just read it from my from this piece of paper because if I show it to you on my screen it's gonna look like a no reason for that um so this is just one one little anecdote from this 1990 piece that Steinem wrote called sex lies and advertising uh in uh I believe this was um the issue in which miss went ad free so she had been running miss for almost 20 years at this point uh it was failing to pay the bills they were not attracting advertisers like other so-called women's magazines and they were losing money so she says out of chutzpah and desperation I arrange a lunch with Leonard Lauder president of Estée Lauder with the exception of Clinique the brainchild of Carol Phillips none of Lauder's hundreds of products has been advertised in miss a year's schedule of ads for just three or four of them could save us indeed as a scion of a family-owned company whose ad practices are followed by the beauty industry he is one of the few men who would liberate many pages in all women's magazines just by changing his mind about complementary copy complementary copy which he's defined earlier in the piece is if we advertise with you you have to basically publish a puff piece um that further brings readers into our point of view and our products and she she had started to say she had she had said from the beginning we don't do that that's not we do we we retain editorial integrity and journalistic independence over a lunch accessibility cut like the tap key to navigate and press face to toggle an option I would like that stop sorry guys my computer plays games with me that I am not trying to play with it yes out of chutzpah and desperation I Steinem arrange a lunch with Leonard Lauder president of Estée Lauder with the exception of Clinique the brainchild of Carol Phillips none of Lauder's hundreds of products has been advertised a year's schedule of ads for just three or four of them could save us indeed is the sign of a family owned company whose ad practices are followed by the beauty industry he is one of the few men who could liberate many pages in all women's magazines just by changing his mind about complementary copy over a lunch that costs more than we can pay for some articles I explain the need for his leadership I also lay out the record of Ms. more literary and journalistic prizes won more new issues the mainstream new writers discovered an impact on society than any other magazine more articles that became books stories it became movies ideas that became television series and newly advertised products that became profitable and most important for him a place for his ads to reach women who aren't reachable through any other women's magazine seems like a no-brainer right indeed if there is one constant characteristic of the ever-changing Ms.
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  readership it is their impact as leaders whether it's waiting until later to have first babies or pioneering paba as sun protection and cosmetics whatever they are doing today a third do half of american women will be doing three to five years from now it's never failed but he says Ms. readers are not our women they're not interested in things like fragrance and blush on if they were Ms.
• 36:03
  would write articles about them on the contrary I explain surveys show they are more likely to buy such things than the readers of say cosmopolitan or vogue they're good customers because they're out in the world enough to need several sets of things like everything home work purse travel gem and so on they just don't need to read articles about these things would he ask a men's magazine to publish monthly columns on how to shave before he advertised aromas products his line for men he concedes that beauty features are often concocted more for advertisers than readers but Ms. isn't appropriate for his ads anyway he explains why because estee lader is selling quote a kept woman mentality I can't quite believe this 60 of the users of his products are salaried and generally resemble Ms. readers besides his company as the appeal of having been started by a creative and hard-working woman his mother Estée Lauder that doesn't matter he says he knows his customers and they would like to be kept women that's why he will never advertise in Ms.
• 37:00
  so that's from Steinem's piece in Ms.
• 37:05
  which she had founded about 20 years earlier in 1990 in which she announced we're going ad free we're going ad free and I was already a subscriber at that point to Ms. and I was now really kind of proud actually um and excited to be supporting an institution a magazine that was going to be completely independent of paid influence and um for reasons that I wasn't sure of at the time but um but I've done I've saved I saved all the ad free issues of Ms. and I mean I'm not going to show them but here's you know here's here's just a few we've got um any defranco on the cover at one point she will shock you Ani DiFranco ignites the passions of young feminists pornography stop it use it ignore it and it's these these are not simple-minded pieces they don't they don't argue the simple-minded often pseudo-feminist or third-wave feminists I think of pseudo-feminism um in in in terms that you might imagine beauty and the breast silicone implants we're still being kept in the dark Ms. exposes the cover-up we're back wake up and smell the estrogen I do I do some women choose to marry some refuse some aren't allowed and everyone has an opinion breast versus bottle a new twist on the global struggle charmed I'm sure in praise of ritual women's wisdom sacred spaces and everyday magic that's just a tiny handful of this ridiculously heavy bin of magazines that I've been moving from place to place ever since because um they they demarcate a moment uh that I certainly did not see coming that was a transition from second-wave feminism which many people bemoan as well but I feel like second-wave feminism was to undergird my mother's feminism and I grew up with it and it was the thing that brought opportunity and allowed girls to just do whatever they wanted to do and be while never pretending that they weren't girls and similarly because trans has taken over both of both of these sides boys then could also um be whatever they wanted to be and do without ever imagining that even if they weren't interested in typical boy things and instead wanted to be a poet or a nurse or a teacher or whatever that didn't mean that they weren't boys so these magazines these ad-free magazines of Ms. from the 90s reflect um reflect a moment when it really was possible as a young woman uh to aspire to be just about anything while not mostly lying about what you were or being being tricked into um thinking that you were something so hold on yeah first wave feminism is suffragettes yeah okay second wave feminism is what you're describing basically freedom to aspire to anything and it's I mean it really has its place in the 60s and 70s yeah so by the time we hit the 90s this is third wave feminism and these Ms. magazines are sort of bridging this gap are struggling between the second wave and the third wave yeah and the second wave there's some story to be told and I don't know the the dates or the details well enough to say but there's some story to be told about reliable birth control and second wave feminism there's a tie there that second wave feminism becomes sort of plausible as a position at the point that women are in a position to regulate their own reproduction without regulating sex yeah the the division of those two things from each other makes worlds that we didn't exist in possible for the first time so the pill in very very high doses compared to what it is today and legal abortion both happen within a few years of one another and the the two of them uncouple reproductive activity from reproductive outcomes for women in a way that they've never been uncoupled before for better and for worse for better and for worse you know and to the extent that there is a trad backlash very little of the trad backlash focuses on undoing family planning within families right so it isn't really trad and it isn't the case that there wasn't birth control before the pill and abortion but what the pill and abortion did was lower the stakes enough that between the two of them it was 100 reliable for anybody willing to go that route yeah which then basically unshackles women from constraints of biology that literally stretch back at least tens of millions of years so that's a profound evolutionary moment and to the extent that what emerges out of it is an absurdity at the very least if we look at the modern perspective and you know at some level a hellscape if we actually did the fair comparison the modern west is a mess it is very broken that sort of falls from this you know a technological breakthrough that breaks a biological pattern that enables a kind of conscious thought of which glorious dynam was emblematic in the you know early 70s and thereafter okay well you jumped the gun so I I wanted to end on a high note about about miss and what she had brought brought to the table and what her work exposing what was happening in the in the playboy clubs was and her work forming miss and fighting against the editorial content that the advertisers were were were enforcing cryptically behind the scenes and all of the ways in which women could become legitimately empowered without losing the fact that they were went through this time but what I did was I went back specifically in 2002 they ran a so this is a little more than 10 years after they went ad free the best of 30 years reporting rebelling and truth telling basically a retrospective in which they published several pieces from their early magazines and I went back and read a bunch of those today and I shudder at much of what I find I want to show just a couple of pieces from from the early piece from the early miss magazines from well before you know when I was just a baby practically here we have if you can see my screen a republished in 2002 a piece from 1972 by Cynthia Ozick uh that claims to be a meditation on anatomy and destiny but includes representative paragraphs like this one but I'm at the starting at the bottom here but imagine a lucky and healthful land where a human being is likely to live peaceably until 80 imagine one who has experienced childbirth only twice with the event lasting each time about six hours for the sake of 12 hours out of a life 700,800 hours long this person is called woman for the sake of 12 hours out of a life 700,800 hours long this person is thrust into an ethos which enjoins rigid duties on her almost none of them rationally related to the two six hour events of childbirth wow so that is a misunderstanding and I didn't even I'm not even reading the parts that are pretty grotesque in this in which the equivalence makes the equivalent of woman to the whole out of which come this this kind of reductionist sort of reprehensible take on what woman is and also what the reproductive parts of woman are imagining that childbirth is the thing that makes woman woman like that opens up the world for the trans madness to come in that it is a remarkably insane take honestly all right hold on a second I'm brought back to a moment in your my history you and I were in Adrienne Zihlman's course which I think was titled something like a debate on human evolution or something modern human origins a 20th century debate yeah I believe okay and the story of the course is not so important heather and I were in this seminar in which this it was right around 1990 actually right around when miss went ad free and yeah so it's being taught by a strident feminist anthropologist a physical anthropologist so not a cultural anthropology somebody who actually knew about bones and the change of structure over evolutionary time and all that but she was she didn't like men just that's the literal factor and she didn't like me at all um I ended up failing her course by the way story for another time but I remember a particular interaction in which I was making the obvious argument I mean heather and I were friends with and students of Bob Trivers and so we knew the basic evolutionary picture pretty darn well and I remember saying something in the seminar about the fact that yes there may very well be unfairness towards women but a lot of that comes from the biology it's not coming from men that there are asymmetries that come from the biology and she lashed out at me and said that I was making this up what what on earth was I talking about and I pointed out that mammary glands are functional mammary glands are asymmetrically distributed such that the child has a much closer and in fact nutritionally necessary connection to its mother in a way that it does not to its father and this of course was inflammatory which I couldn't believe because it was so obvious and so factual what was I saying that was in any way open to controversy it didn't make any sense when I hear that paragraph I'm returned to the very same place and it's like six hours what about the nine months and then I mean it's like it feels to me like an anti-feminist yes um screed as well actually like really you're going to reduce uh motherhood to the six hours of the active birth process hello it's it's not even anti-feminist it's anti-woman yeah it's feminism taking up arms against femaleness which is mind-blowing that anybody could be confused enough to even make the argument sophistry on behalf of a political aspiration at the expense of contact with reality yeah so that was published uh in the first year of miz magazine back in 1972 um here we have a piece called testosterone poisoning by alan alda in 1975 oh of course I hope it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek but it's not entirely tongue-in-cheek okay uh so I mean I'll I'll just I'll read part of it here uh let me make it a little bit bigger uh have the men you know take the simple test he advises do you have an intense need to win when having sex do you take pride in always finishing before your partner two does violence play a big part in your life before you answer count up how many hours you watched football ice hockey and children's cartoons this year on television when someone crosses you do you wish you could stuff his face fully your fist if so you're in big trouble fella this is only question number two three are you thing oriented do you value the parts of a woman's body more than the woman herself are you turned on by things that even remind you of those parts have you ever fallen in love with a really great doorknob four do you have an intense need to reduce every difficult situation to charts and figures if you were present at a riot would you tend to count the crowd if your wife is despondent over a deeply felt setback that has left her feeling helpless do you take her temperature five do you tend to measure things that are really qualitative are you more impressed with how high a male ballet dancer can leap them with what he does while he's up there and six are you a little too mechanically minded would you like to watch a sunset with a friend and feel at one with nature and each other or would you rather take apart a clock so it it's a little tongue in cheek but it's not entirely tongue in cheek because he does he is actually conflating two things here right I can't even figure out what he's talking about frankly well you know in the very end of it he says for women only only after he begins to get his condition under control and has actually begun to enjoy his life should you let the man in your life know that there is no such thing as testosterone poisoning we have in the modern era begun to talk too much about toxic masculinity right and not about toxic femininity a term that I wrote about back in 2017 um there are toxic forms of the typical ways of being for anything but especially for men and for women and the typical ways are not the always ways and they are not that everyone is who's a member of that group behaves that way and certainly not every member of a group behaves toxically presumably a very small majority although things are changing so the idea that you know violence is a big part of a man's life would suggest that uh there was uh there was something going on there that wasn't right and maybe his situation uh needs to be escaped from and maybe there's something wrong with him right but there are other things here with regard to an interest in things an interest in mechanical which are understood and I believe we're even understood at a more basic level than they are now but understood then definitely understood now to be typical of how men are more likely to have interest in the world than women are that men are simply on average more likely to be interested in things than they are in people and animals and is that true across the board of course not that's what other populations are that's what averages mean so he is he is simultaneously mocking men across the board simply for being men and adding in little jabs about you know the problems that some men actually engage in which makes it really really hard to tease apart what's going on and it's it's it's beyond messy it's counterproductive to actually allowing people to communicate well I mean it feels to me like this you know we were six when this was published um this would have contributed mightily to the war between the sexes yeah and it's also interesting that it's coming from Alan Alda because in some sense Alan Alda is like women project onto Alan Alda what they imagine that a man that they would like would be without the reality of Alan Alda really living up to it um and you know I don't need to take anything away from him I'm certainly mash was formative for both you and me as as a way of processing a lot of stuff you know comedy set in a grotesque war zone pretty interesting way to deal with that stuff but the I guess the point is there is an obvious reality to the fact that men and women have important differences as you point out these are populations there's almost no characteristic that uh is typical of men that is never found in women or vice versa and the you know I'm often struck by the fact that women do not consciously seem to be aware of what women prefer in men women often have an idea of what they a conscious idea of what they prefer in men you know and in fact a lot of the nonsense of nth wave feminism has been about women telling men that they want them to be weak and subservient and women hate weak and subservient men they don't respect them nor should they nor should they and so they won't sign up for it and you know it's just the strangest game um so there you know there's always a question about are these women lying or are they lying to themselves or what but but in any case to hear Alan Alda writing in a women's magazine kind of chastising men for manly things that actual women generally you know appreciate or at least tolerate you know because it comes with the package that they actually do like this reads like he's flirting with the um with the readership of this yeah he's he's he's doing he's doing the dude thing um but he's pretending that he's not the male feminist thing where you say that you make the right noises to appeal to women who consciously think x irrespective of what they more deeply believe or value yes a woman being this kind of yeah my husband does do that man Alan Alda wouldn't do that you know I did once meet Alan Alda and had a kind of sense of like oh that's that's disappointing he he came to to bci and bci was the research island that I was on to do my graduate work and the basic story of Alan Alda a lot of famous people came through that island but you could kind of tell who they were by whether or not they took the scientists essentially none of whom were well known at all yeah seriously or treated them as you know props or npc's or you know staff or whatever whatever it is that they saw and Alan Alda didn't interact with us yeah um merrill hemingway did for example so um yeah it was interesting that his character didn't really live up to what people projected onto him yeah okay one more um disappointing piece of evidence from this uh 30-year retrospective of Ms. Magazine published in 2002 uh this which had been published just the year before no this has been published the year before they went ad free it's not nice to mess with mother nature published in 1989 titled ecofib ecofeminism 101 by someone named Lindsy Van Gelder who I don't otherwise know uh ecofeminism she writes is a philosophy that takes on not just jot mmm I'm gonna try english yeah yeah ecofeminism this is uh van gelder writing in the 1989 january february issue of Ms.
• 56:51
  magazine ecofeminism is a philosophy that takes on not just the domination of the earth by polluters but domination itself in all its forms whites over people of color men over women adults over children rich nations over the third world humans over animals and nature ecofeminists want an entirely new ethic in an ecofeminist society and no one would have power over anyone else because there would be an understanding that we're all part of the interconnected web of life such a worldview requires some radical changes in perspective not to mention behavior since the whole world becomes part of oneself not something other to win conquer exploit or get ahead of in the hierarchy that is some pretty naive thinking that is exactly what I was gonna say it's the kind of thought you can imagine having why isn't this world possible we should have that world and then it should take you about a minute's contemplation to figure out oh that world isn't possible and then it might take you a few hours to figure out why it's not possible and what would happen if you just tried to hard code that thing into existence but somehow there is something and it's a more general flaw of the left as it exists the sorry state of the left at the moment that there is no ability to lodge a contrary point and there is no ability to learn from experience that what you thought was going to happen it everything just involves doubling down if you make a counter argument then my argument is even truer than I thought it was if you point out the consequence of the thing I thought was going to do x and it did the opposite that's because you didn't do x hard enough and it's like well you you're thinking like a child you're not even thinking as well as a child you've become you know you've you've become you think you're entitled to be right in a universe that you're either right or wrong about lots of stuff but you're not entitled to anything in order to be right you have to do the hard work well and the entitlement extends to belief that you're entitled to the reality that you want yes and it is weirdly postmodern oh it's it's extremely postmodern I mean I think this was this was the era in which postmodernism was very popular the first time around or at least in american universities becoming very popular when we were there that's part of what we were contending with in that class on modern human origins was was postmodernism it was explicitly post it was explicitly postmodern we had readings in postmodernism that were supposed to inform all of what we thought about archaic humans which luckily for us it did not mostly but I mean not only was this was this insipid obviously deeply flawed uh pretty for a moment but you can't possibly believe this can you eco feminist stuff published in Ms. in 1989 ad free Ms. but it was deemed one of the more important pieces such that when they did their 30 year retrospective they included it and that that to me that's part of the problem it's it's not that someone had the thought and didn't immediately dismiss it or even that they had the thought and didn't immediately dismiss it and they sent it to a magazine where the editors really should have known better and they published it but that 13 years later the editors of that magazine which had by then become an incredibly important piece of feminism we were on into basically nth wave feminism ish by then by 2002 but the editors then including Gloria Steinem thought that that bit of pap about getting rid of a hierarchy because domination is a problem with the patriarchy was you know iconic of the best thinking that Ms. Magazine had done over the years it wasn't like I I had been reading Ms.
• 1:00:46
  for a long time by then I'd been reading I'd been subscribed to Ms. since 1989 when this piece was first published and was a was a continuous subscriber until 2002 and I don't remember at some point soon thereafter I dropped it maybe maybe it was because of this up this this issue I don't remember but there had been deep careful observation and thinking and analysis of issues that actually pertain to women as people and women as women and not just about you know what shade lipstick you should wear and not just about why we should all hate men right it was it was at its best certainly never that that vogue cosmo thing and usually not this you know feminism as man-hating diatribe thing but there was some of that in there and this naive post-modern pap was also what was becoming part of the the messaging and here's actually um I'm going to skip over my time at Smith here but most personally for me because this this fits with what we're talking about right now we along with several of our grad school friends went and saw Gloria Steinem uh in Ann Arbor when we were grad students there the University of Michigan in 1995 I actually I figured out exactly when it was and I went back and looked at my journal entry because I I had thought I didn't I had not remember the ebert there I thought it was three of our female grad friends and I went because we had all you know we had all been sort of raised on similar ideas of like yeah we can we can just if we want to be scientists we can be scientists and if we don't want to be scientists we don't have to be scientists and none of that has anything to say about like not being women or not being feminine enough like that's that's different right and so we've been excited at the idea of seeing Gloria Steinem well it turns out I remembered wrong like it was you and me and uh several female friends a couple male friends as well um we're excited that she was coming to campus uh we got tickets we went and we were all disappointed we were all disappointed in my memory before I found my notes from the time because it took me a while to figure out exactly when it was and find find my notes my memory she was anti-science she viewed science as a domain of men and therefore something that had too much power and was not something she was interested in considering my journal entry from the next day said this she's mostly a good speaker with strong ideas but she bashed the scientific method blaming it on the patriarchy she literally you know my contemporary account of what she had done in that theater in Ann Arbor in October of 1995 which was that she had no interest in the scientific method because she saw it as a product of the patriarchy and of course she was making similar areas that people have been making throughout the 20th century uh imagining that um the presumably the sort of reductionist small-minded uh only interested in the quantitative mostly interested in metrics kind of science that can be done well but is hardly the only type of science is the only type of science that's the that's the error that people make and then if they see that that kind of science can lead you astray especially if you just start trusting it and I'm like I'm going to be canonized I'm just going to follow the people who do that kind of science you end up making a lot of errors and it's not the thing that you should be following you shouldn't you cannot follow these science as we have said over and over and over again but the idea that that is what had replaced that that is what stood in for science in her mind as opposed to like the focus on authority and technology instead of insight and analysis like I knew miss magazine to be a magazine that inspired insight and analysis it never claimed to be a scientific magazine but it encouraged some of the key virtues and values of a scientific mindset insight analysis it did not encourage reliance on authority and reliance on technology but here she was completing the two and throwing the baby out with the bath water um I'm gonna end up putting you on the spot here apologies for it okay I want to revive a conversation that we've developed times that is clearly relevant here it is in an era where women can control they can plan their families it is marvelous that they can participate in things that would otherwise be disrupted by them among them science yes and women have done great science and contributed tremendously to increasingly as they have found parody and in fact exceeded parody in the academy but there's a a tragedy in the way it happened and the tragedy is this there is something for reasons maybe we'll cover another day there's a difference between the way men who genuinely like each other treat each other and the way women who genuinely like each other treat each other men who genuinely like each other prod and jab and tear each other down playfully all day long right it's like a big part of what it is to be a man and it is not hostile they are not trying to weaken you they are actually strengthening you your buddies will pick on you if you put on a shirt that looks dumb women are the inverse women will generally be reflexively supportive which has a benefit you are stronger if you believe yourself to be putting forward something strong so there's a little mini benefit to it but it is a complete mismatch for things that are traditionally male you do not this is exactly oh it is sorry no no go on didn't mean to step on your punch line but all right so but you said you're gonna put me on the spot well here here's how I'm gonna put you on the spot I have a complicated relationship with my own view of feminism there was a time when I called myself a feminist and I wasn't one of those guys who was trying to get laid by doing it but I was one of those guys who sort of felt like yes well the kinds of women I'm interested in talking to will of course be interested in equality so it's a slam dunk to be supportive and if I may yeah at considerable risk of outing you yeah you received the golden gazelle award from the national organization of women for what you did on the campus at Penn when you were a freshman by speaking out against frankly racist and sexist practices that were taking place in a in a fraternity a jewish frat that was abusing black prostitutes at a rush event yeah true um okay so anyway I have that background I don't feel like my reaction to what I thought feminism was was wrong but I it's been a long time since I would have any positive feeling about that term in light of where it has gone I would like to make the case you trad people unless you're amish you're not really trad right either I get that there are traditional values that you're reviving I support it I think we have to honor the stuff that actually worked to get civilization where it is but realizing realize that you're picking and choosing right so trad isn't trad though there's lots of positive in that direction but then there's also what might have been in the land of feminism that it didn't have to be crazy and the problem is that my example is you because you did do the thing you did award-winning science in the field not only in the field but under the worst conceivable conditions I mean working in Madagascar without support without a field station I mean you did have a waterfall this have a waterfall but the point is okay you did you much more than met the standard of a man doing field work in biology and not only did you prove that you could do the work under those very difficult and frankly somewhat dangerous circumstances but the work you did in that context was excellent scientific work you were also excellent at taking and delivering critique just exactly the way men who are good at science do and you had two marvelous children and still do yes you do um and you know you're still married to your first husband so the point is and I intend to stay so I am so relieved to hear that um but my point is you proved that it's possible and you also you know your dad was a guy he was kind of a guy of few words it was a little hard to figure out where he was where or why he was where he was because he didn't say but you could infer a lot from what was true of him and you could infer a lot after he died the stories we got about what his work life had been were very but the fact is he was clearly a kind of old school farm boy turned computer scientist he called himself a little country programmer little country programmer um but the point is he was apparently fantastic mentor and it didn't matter if you were male or female as long as you could do the work he wasn't going to make any excuses for you he wasn't going to hold your hand but if you were capable of doing the work it didn't matter to him if you were male or female which is and I think um actually my all of my academic mentors were the same I was just gonna say the other men who played an important role in your life Dick Alexander my phd advisor member of your committee and Arnold Kluge and bob trivers and Bob Trivers they were all this way right and so the point is you wouldn't call these guys feminists but in some ways they were if feminism was a reasonable thing because their basic point was look if you can do the work why would I discriminate against you right welcome right but if you can't do the work I'm not going to coddle you so it's interesting that there is kind of like this alternative world you proved that it's possible to do as a woman and you know you're extraordinary not everybody could do it just because they wanted to it took really unusual stuff packaged in the same person same person born as you point out at the exact right moment where it's like they're telling you hey guess what you can be what you want to be and you're like oh cool cool let's see about that born at the right moment culturally and born to the right family both of my parents uh were eager and interested to see what was possible um even if uh what I ended up doing wasn't what either of them expected necessarily or would have predicted but they were open to it and supportive always so I think I think really uh in order to for anyone to reach their full potential they need to have the cultural situation that is open to them succeeding and a familial situation that facilitates them succeeding and it's rare that people have both so I was very lucky in that way um let me just wrap this up because you've got you were skirting around some stuff that I specifically wanted to get to with regard to science and the way that science is done uh and that you know again Gloria Steinem explicitly said in this talk that we saw her give in 1995 in Ann Arbor uh that the scientific method was a project of the patriarchy which is just such a it was such a let down and I never I never thought the same of her after hearing her say that um because you know my our our friends our female friends in graduate school and I were not we were we were Michigan at that point was one of the very top biology programs in the country this was this was an elite program and we were not there because we were women we were not there to demonstrate something about being women like I don't know a single person who was there like I'm yeah like I kind of care about the science but really I'm just gonna show I'm gonna show the man yeah there was none of that you're a bunch of strong women and we were and we were not even we were not there despite being women like we were there just as people right we were we were not actually I don't think any of at least our friends my our female friends in grad school felt that we had overcome massive hurdles to get there not that 10 years earlier a generation earlier obviously women had a very hard time making a go of it in science but by the time you know we entered grad school in 93 and uh you know were there some incidents somewhat associated with their department that were sexist sure yes yes absolutely but I never felt that I had been given a step up or been forced to take a step down nor did I hear such stories from any of our female friends in that at the University of Michigan department of biology in the 90s so this was this like sweet spot in terms of not being given things for free and not having things taken from you because of immutable characteristics and you know am I putting a shine on it that it doesn't deserve am I forgetting some things do I not know some things it's possible but really overall it felt like this we should be doing like this is what we should be doing so our program so so I just I have notes here I'm not going to read them but um yeah we were just there working along our male peers like you making inquiries of and hopefully discoveries about the natural world that's what scientists do that's what we were trying to do so our program was pretty cut throat as it turned out we didn't know that when we were both admitted um but the majority of people admitted earning the degree that they were expecting to earn yeah I was going to actually mention this the thing heather is not exactly saying is that one of the reasons that it was one of the top programs is that it had a very high success rate for its graduates which was partially earned by a sinker swim mentality where they brought in too many people and they let natural selection weed the program of all the people who couldn't hack it which left those who could including heather and a small number of other very strong women who figured out how to do science without getting any uh handicap and and you and a small number of other men right like I what I what I don't think happened although I don't have the stats to back me up is that women failed out at greater rates than men or that men failed out at greater rates than women and we didn't really say but like left the program I think um and I don't know for instance if there was any I I I sat on the admissions committee one year and certainly that one year that I was the graduate student representative on the phd admissions committee for department of biology at the University of Michigan there were no expectations about sex ratio in the class that we admitted we that was not one of our considerations for which I was grateful yeah uh and I do not believe that uh given their you know their relative abundance in the program in any given class that women were more or less likely to to drop out of the program so that that is also a good sign about the program with regard and it's a match for my memory my my feeling about it which was that actually there just wasn't sexism in either right we weren't there because we were women we weren't there despite being women the women were there the men were there we were trying to do science and the best ones were doing science that's what we were doing you know I also will just say in the entire time we were there I don't think it occurred to me once oh this person is getting a pass because they're female it just wasn't the way the place wasn't the culture of the place that's right it was like if that person said something dumb you called them out yeah if that person said something clever you recognized it and yeah you know so a very brief window of sanity that yeah seems to be essentially gone yeah so I mean it felt like in that you know we're basically in the 90s 93 through 2001 um 2002 um we were there to hold each other's feet to the fire right we were there to discover errors in our own thinking to help other people discover errors in their own thinking and um and to point it out never with disrespect but with clarity and as quickly as possible because it doesn't serve you or anyone else to walk around with wrong ideas about the world if you know or if someone else knows that they're wrong so is that that thing right there and this is what you alluded to earlier uh being not just willing to but interested in hearing when you're and and this is harder for me pointing out when other people are wrong is that a particularly masculine approach to the world well um I kind of think it is yep actually and um sorry I'm resting my notes on the pile of dung is that inappropriate um that stinks yeah so I've argued uh in this article that I'm going to show you guys um that uh that yeah direct overt challenges are more likely to come from men and indirect covert challenges are more likely to come from women and that's again a population level assessment that does not say that men can't engage in covert and indirect competition or that men or that women cannot engage in direct and overt competition uh but I specifically have argued here and elsewhere uh that it is that science and other places where there is a reality that you are trying to discover actually works so much better and may in fact require the masculine typical way of interacting so here it is this this article covert versus overt toward a more nuanced understanding of sex differences in competition uh I'm I'm quite pleased with this with this piece um it's published in the archives of sexual behavior here's just a couple of hmm where did my okay I don't take take me off screen for a moment my my highlights just disappeared that's fun I don't know why that happened you know where the paper was yeah um I will ish um yeah so you can put it back on screen and I'll I'll read um sorry uh okay here we go male male typical competition is visible overt and finite in its nature female typical competition is more cryptic and covert and has boundaries that are looser overt games have clear borders both in space and time or at least they're supposed to whereas both the games and the rules of the games involved in male typical competition tend to be clear when it comes to female typical competition both the rules in the game itself may be difficult to detect and this difficulty of detection may precisely in turn be part of the game so that's one of the hypotheses I'm presenting in this piece and then uh the other piece I wanted to read from this is here furthermore female competition being typically more covert than male competition I propose it will be more difficult for women to opt out of play with other women that is there is no female equivalent of a guy being asked to join a pickup game of basketball and saying no man I'm good in part because there's generally no overt ask in female competition and little that happens for public consumption a woman who has no easy route to saying to one who does I don't want to play male competition is inherently public that's part of its function by comparison female competition having had distinct selective pressures which have driven it underground is less straightforward indeed perhaps because opting out of a covert game couldn't in itself be another kind of covert game attempts to opt out will often be seen as competitive in and of themselves in part this is perhaps an element of why systems like business and business operate in more male typical than female typical ways overt rules and expectations facilitate accountability and that is what we need we need accountability when we are trying to discover what is true that is not saying therefore men are the ones who should be doing that work that is saying that historically typically across populations the male typical ways of engaging in conversation any kind of conflict are going to be more successful on average at discovering reality than female typical ways which are more likely to be cryptic and indirect and covert yeah I have a response to that's not fully formulated but there's something about the because the male typical way is sort of built to face the world it has to add up it has to have a kind of integrity to it because anything that doesn't is a vulnerability for the entire population in other words if your men are fucking around on the front you're risking being overwhelmed by an enemy so there has to be a kind of structure that prevents that because women have been insulated from that outward facing role what they do does not have to add up at equilibrium level because the outer sphere kind of protects the stuff that doesn't net to zero right and so yes it is more male typical because the environments the division of labor put men in the environments where what you really want is for the competitors to sharpen each other so that the sum total entity is as sharp as possible that has to be the set of rules yeah and that the mistake is really deciding that the coast is clear and you know let's replace the male rules with the female rules or let's divide it 50 50 and the point is no no the central question is coherence we know that those rules are coherent and we know that they work on these things and we don't know that any competing set of rules does work on those things so having not demonstrated it it's one thing to say let us in if we can you know if we have the merit to play in those realms then why bar us it's another thing entirely to come in declaring those rules masculine and therefore invalid because what they were was coherent rules arrived at well through process this may be exactly the wrong analogy and it may get me into trouble but it's a bit like people who don't believe in the west showing up in the west and saying now change the west for me it's a hundred percent that and that suggests that women aren't inherently and are newcomers to science in a way that I don't really love yeah because historically women were actually barred from engaging in scientific exploration in any kind of formal way whereas there were no doubt plenty of women capable of and interested in scientific inquiry in say you know the 1700s who simply didn't didn't have the opportunity so it's you know it's obviously whenever we try to compare sort of populations ethnic population ethnic populations to sex we run into the fact that those are fundamentally not the same thing right but given that the rules of science include a fundamental interest in discovering what is true and discovering when you are not right the mode that is masculine coded because it has historically been engaged in by men more often than by women is going to be the best route and so opening up the doors to science for women is fantastic until and unless women come in and say ah but now we have to do it my way if my way is this covert cryptic I'm not going to tell you when you're wrong but behind your back I'm going to slander you thing that is the hallmark of toxic femininity which doesn't serve us in science and it doesn't serve us in society yes I am reminded of the famous scene from a league of their own there's no crying in baseball it's same thing goes for science it's like you look don't come in and try to change baseball yeah baseball is what it is let's play but there ain't no crying in baseball yeah it's that so um you know that was that was a long aside but prompted by my memory of seeing Gloria Steinem who at that point was a kind of hero for me yeah having been uh you know a subscriber of ad-free miss for many years at this point having read her you know her expose of the of the playboy clubs back when I was like a young teenager or tween and just having this sense of like yes this is it's possible to escape some of the historic bounds and binds that we don't need anymore and then there she was on stage making a claim that is simply wrong but said with her forceful rhetoric I'm sure some people walked away and from from that moment and thought yeah scientific method it's a sign of the patriarchy and it helps no one it's it's not it's not good for us and I so I guess I'll finish by saying I there are a lot of words that have had their meanings changed and I have I have felt it necessary to fight for for some of them I don't include woman on this list because woman is just a reality it's not a social construct adult human female not a social construct okay but words like feminism and science are and they can have some fundamental meaning but they're still created by humans and for a long time I thought okay well these are two words that I'm gonna fight to defend and at some level I don't know that I need to defend feminism anymore it's been so corrupted I was calling it the what's passing for feminism now faux feminism for a long time pseudo feminism and okay maybe it's lost I'm not going to accept the loss of science I'm not accepting this and I remember being on a hilltop in Utah a mountain top in Utah with you in 2017 after after the Google memo came out and this you know this was wrapped up in what is science and what is you know what are women doing and what are men doing and is Google being sexist but not hiring in 50-50 ratio of women engineers to male engineers like no no it's not because female engineers and male engineers were being produced at the same ratio in the university programs where they were learning how to be engineers as they exist in the population oh well that's because sexism no it's not is there a little bit of sexism left probably sure yeah but are men fundamentally likely to be more interested in going into computer programming than women are yes yes they are so why would we conflate underlying differences in interests with evidence of sexism if that's what we're doing as a society I'm prepared to give up feminism as a flag to to fly but not giving up science science we need you can't follow it you can't claim that it is opposed to religion you can't do it most of the hard non-thinking people on both sides right and left are doing and they're doing it in opposite directions but we seem to have forgotten what science is and we need it we need it and and I mean that's a big part of what you and I are doing here is just defending science and demonstrating what scientific thinking looks like yep I have a proposal for you okay I think where I land at the end of all of this is you know I'm thinking of uh Dick Alexander and your dad and and uh Arnold Kluge and um and uh Bob Trivers a little asterisk on that one he was a bit of a different guy but anyway Arnold's the only one of those guys still standing but nonetheless I do think that they they showed us the answer in their response to the strong women who showed up and did good science in their midst and that at some level I'm over feminism completely um what I think is that the substitute is effectively um it it's meritocracy in all things and the point is if people don't show up to something in equal numbers that's fine if they can't because the particular endeavor doesn't a lot you know should we have equal numbers of female firemen I kind of doubt it um so you know let's put it this way meritocracy is like the station that you shouldn't blow through on the way to some feminist utopia and can there be workplaces that are single sex yes yeah and don't if something's essential like science you don't get to change the rules as you walk in the door right the rules are what they are for some reason and the fact that it was some collection of people that was exclusionary doesn't that's not why the rules what were what they were yeah um no and I would say um with regard to let's just take you know my dad and Dick Alexander and Arnold um were any of them expecting some of their uh their mentees their graduate students uh who who did some of their best work to be female probably not nope nope you know at the point they were 20 or 30 was that like if they had an image in their head of like who it was they were going to be um seeing out into the world probably not but they didn't stop them from recognizing us when we showed up yeah I mean that is real meritocracy it's like oh you can do the work yeah welcome and there's nothing wrong with the idea that that's not what they expected that's okay yeah that's not bigotry yeah that's not bigotry and it's the natural progression of things it was a discovery yeah yeah all right one final piece for today it'll be short and sweet I think it's pretty interesting so again following from the loss of Maddie and thinking about what she had meant to us and to me um I'm reminded of a conversation that we've had and partially covered in a hunter-gatherer's guide about the nature of love and you needed a dictionary or a thesaurus of important terms in order to think carefully about stuff and you have to define them more narrowly than they are publicly so what we mean by love is the placing of someone else or something else it can be at a symmetrical level of importance to self not to be perfectly symmetrical but the willingness to profoundly sacrifice for something else in the way that you would sacrifice for yourself is a measure of your love for it and you know you can sacrifice your life for your country that is your patriotism so love starts the place the universe invents it is a mother's love of offspring that she cares for which is not inherently part of motherhood spiders don't care for their offspring for the most part um you know there's a little bit in uh octopi um weirdly the mother dies at the point of the octopi hatch and they consume her but she tends the eggs that that has kind of a love characteristic to it but anyway the point is love is about a willingness to sacrifice for and all of the love relationships are derived from that initial discovery mother's love of offspring there is a weird exception in the pantheon of things where the term actually belongs and the weird exception is children their love of their parents a child is not supposed to it doesn't mean that the child will never sacrifice for their parent children do sacrifice for their parent but it can't be net yes the expectation is that parents net sacrifice for their children that it if you were to calculate it on the individual basis the child wins from the relationship and the parent loses and that feels good to the parent because it is right it is the way the universe functions so when a child thinks about whether they love their parent they may actually have a question because it doesn't feel like the relationship of love that they would have for any of the things for which they would sacrifice because they're not supposed to sacrifice it's a different kind of love and so when when you ask how will I know if I'm in love how will I know what love is like oh that's that's going to be tough if the only person you've loved is your parents because you the love of your parents is deep and rich and true and unlike all other kinds of love it is exceptional the flow goes in the other direction yeah and so that's an important thing to just understand that the the relationship of the child to the parent and the fact that we use that term requires an asterisk because there's a there's an operator in there that isn't in the other love relationships and the reason that this comes up here in the context of Maddie and all of that is that I think actually the relationship of a person to a dog is not like the relationship of a person to their cat the person loves the dog and loves the cat and sacrifices for them that's inherently the nature of the relationship but the dog is built from the 30 000 years of domestication as a partner and the dog actually it may be the most sacrificing of all the dog is basically built to take a bullet for you or whatever the equivalent is in nature the dog sacrifices for you because the purpose of the dog is to tend the people that have taken the dog from nature and brought it into the family and cat is just different cat is different because cats are a much newer to the relationship and b the relationship didn't work the same way they weren't hunting partners they were pest control in granaries where they had a you know it was a mutualism the humans get the advantage of not having their grain stores over run and the animal gets the advantage of not having to live in the harsh world and being in a place where there are rodents and getting a supplement of food when there aren't enough rodents to eat and all of that but it's a very different it's not a fundamental modification and so the question that I think really separates these two is how does the animal feel about its would be parent in the dog's case it's got a partner it's a it's a deep friendship the cat is a way more murky sort of a phenomenon you love the cat and it drains you hopefully not terribly much but the net flow of well-being is in the direction of the cat and what you get back is important but it's amorphous you get back you know companionship and something to think about provoking as they walk around and try to think about what's in their heads but you know the flow of well-being is in the direction of the cat in the same way that it would be for a child and so anyway the sum total of this is there's a reason that uh people that cat people and dog people are different like I think of you know I'm definitely bilingual dog came first and then I you know like literally at the point that you and I were getting together figured I better find out what cats were about because they were important to you which brought me into the world of cats which I love I think they're great but um but nonetheless it was it was that but the idea that cat and dog people are different because the love of a dog and the love of a cat are different those relationships are built differently um is I think important and uh anyway it's I think it's part of why the grief you know we had one cat who brought about when they when they died the same it's been a long time it's been more than 20 years so um it's hard for me to remember exactly what it was like but there was one loss of a cat that brought about the kind of intensity of grief that Maddie's loss has um but in general it hasn't been that way because I think the relationships are different even though obviously nothing more horrifying than the loss of a child but something about the relationship has distinguished these things and they live in different different zones in our minds yeah that's good that's good um okay I expect we'll talk about cats and dogs more so the truth only the truth truth about cats and dogs I think we'll be by that title yeah absolutely um I think I'm gonna talk that at the moment yeah all that yammering about glorious science um and excuse me we actually have a q&a coming up so uh join us on Locals in 15 minutes or so and uh ask your questions and and we'll try to have some answers for you uh and then we're not on next wednesday that's why we're here right now friday but we'll be back uh two wednesdays from now and again join us on Locals also Bret's got Patreon calls this this weekend so join Bret on Patreon it's gonna be great gonna be great as always and until you see us next time you go to the ones you love eat real food and get outside be well everyone so