Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Is Fiction Going Woke?" with Kat Rosenfield

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"Is Fiction Going Woke?" with Kat Rosenfield · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  G'day, humans! On the show this week, a feminist, badass, culture, critic,
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  pie, excellence, extraordinary. Cat Rosenfield, she's a freelance pop culture,
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  writer, political writer, and author. She's written the books Amelia Anne is dead and gone,
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  and inland. The first of those books was nominated for an Edgar award. I don't know what an
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  Edgar award is. You know what an Edgar award is? I would humbly suggest that the the board
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  at the Edgar's consider renaming the Edgar award because it's probably quite prestigious.
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  I mean, she wouldn't include it in her bio if it wasn't quite prestigious. But when you say to someone,
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  oh, I'm, I've been nominated for an Edgar. It just doesn't have the gravitas or the ring that
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  I think a prestigious award deserves. Nonetheless, her might have told the board of the Edgar's
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  how they should run their own award ceremony. Cat is a delightful person to follow on Twitter,
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  delightful person to read in places like Tablet Magazine and Wired and Vulture Entertainment Weekly
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  Playboy. Not that I've read her in Playboy. I haven't. Actually, I have read it because I
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  underread it for the articles. Boom Tish. She's been published in Us Weekly. She basically, her
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  remit has wandered from cultural criticism to what it means to be a woman in the 21st century
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  to cancel culture and those sorts of things. And this is a suitably aptly meandering conversation
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  that she has with me where we touch on all of those things. I won't preface it too much, but I do
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  hope you enjoy and follow and read the one I know the Cat Rosenfield.
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  I'm just leaping through your old articles. And I think I fell in love with you with the article
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  called The Birth of the Cool Guy a couple of years ago about a performative feminism amongst
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  dude bros. Oh gosh, yeah. It's been a while since I wrote that piece, but it's close to my heart
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  still. I don't think that the phenomenon I observed has ceased to be a thing. Cool guys,
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  these men who sort of adopt this performative feminism and will turn up in the mentions of any
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  woman who has like a viral feminist tweet being like, I'm sorry, men are such trash. I'm so sorry,
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  we're like this. I mean, they're ultimately they're not hot. They're not really appealing
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  to women, but that's sort of not what they're there for. I spoke to somebody who had once dated
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  one of these guys. And the thing that she told me that I thought was really interesting was that
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  she saw him as not sexy, but maybe safe because he seemed like he was so with it, right?
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  He seemed like he got it. She wouldn't have to explain feminism to him. And he wouldn't mistreat
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  her the way like a more traditionally jock bro kind of guy might because he was such a
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  devoured feminist. And then he turned out to be actually garbage in the same way as like any
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  other guy who just is garbage. I don't know. I have I have a series of thoughts about men like this.
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  I mean, I think that they are just put some more flesh on the bones of who this person is. So
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  people who are on Twitter will know this person because as you said, they always parachute into
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  any time anyone has any woman has a complaint about misogyny with a justified or unjustified,
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  they will be the first to be proposing about what how terrible men are. And Australia has in the
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  past 12 months had a real reckoning with political harassment in the capital and in in Parliament House.
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  And there have been resignations and outrangers and really awful stories of young female staffers
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  being subjected to sexual harassment and innuendo and abuse and occasionally sexual violence. And
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  so this kind of hot house atmosphere has loomed really large in the Australian consciousness.
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  But that's precisely why I think it needs to be taken seriously rather than performatively.
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  And like responded to with cool heads and stern sort of judicious approaches rather than this
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  this kind of performative flailing like symbiosis that you get between self-flagulating
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  dubros who just want to show everybody what great feminists they are and the wing of extreme
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  feminism that holds that all men are like this and all men behave like this and this is an
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  overwhelming problem of all men rather than being some kind of perverted expression of toxic
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  masculinity that erupts within certain environments from certain individuals. So yeah, other than Twitter
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  who is this guy? Well, you know, it's interesting that you mentioned you know the men who are
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  accused of sexual harassment or sexual assault because the cool guy really functions to sort of
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  distance himself from these people even as you know it's it's there's a sort of implied
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  not me though because I get it, you know, I'm a feminist and at the same time as he's saying yes
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  all men like all men are trash and I'm a man but because I can say that my recognition of my own
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  awfulness is itself an insulation against the off the allegation of awfulness. Yeah, I mean,
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  there is this implied but not me not really and there's also this interesting thing that happens
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  when somebody who is one of these cool guy types is accused himself of having made a woman
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  uncomfortable because there's this thing that happens and I think I cited the example of James
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  Franco in the piece where he basically will say I think it's so important for women to speak out
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  against against sexual harassment and sexual assault that I won't deny these charges. I won't
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  call this woman a liar and in doing so he implicitly calls her a liar.
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  Right, right, yeah exactly. This is her moment to live in her mistaken truth, not my moment to
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  call that truth mistaken so I won't. Yes. How do you think feminism is doing? I think I think
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  contemporary feminism has leaned awfully hard in a way that I still find surprising into the idea
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  that women need to be not empowered but protected, including protected from the consequences of
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  making normal adult decisions which sometimes end in regret and that's obviously something that
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  applies to how we talk about women having sex but it's kind of an across the board thing.
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  As it's become increasingly trendy to claim to be victimized by any bad experience, any traumatic
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  or or you say it's traumatic. The bar for trauma has been set rather low at this point
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  but you had an unpleasant work environment where you weren't actually sexually harassed but you
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  just didn't feel valued. This is seen as traumatic. We accuse people of gaslighting us.
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  People we have no relationship with, it's just become like a synonym for disagreement
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  even though it has this incredibly laden history as a word that implies domestic abuse and
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  psychological abuse. I would love to get back to a brand of feminism that really focuses
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  more on women's empowerment and less on this desire to protect them from the world as though
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  they're too fragile to handle the world and that's basically where I stand on feminism right now.
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  Who's doing the pushing of which idea at the moment? Because what you're saying is it sounds
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  like a kind of a Puritan thing. Traditionally my parents generation would have associated
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  claims about women not having agency and not enjoying sex and needing to be protected with
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  conservatives, maybe even religious conservatives but that's not the cleavage, the cultural cleavage now.
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  No, it's sort of been appropriated by people who think of themselves as quite progressive and
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  that's a strange thing. I was raised by a very fierce second wave feminist who taught me to
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  think of myself as an autonomous person as responsible for my choices and to assert myself.
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  And so there's this interesting thing happening now where not only are women presumed to be
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  sort of unable to handle the normal responsibilities and the normal emotional fallout that comes
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  from being in the world and sometimes making missteps but the idea of asserting yourself has
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  become almost taboo because the woman who asserts herself makes a fuss like who is that?
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  She's a Karen and nobody wants to be a Karen. That's interesting aren't there types of asserting?
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  I think slapping down the dude who says the sexist thing in the moment in the workplace
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  verbally is badass but going to HR is being a Karen. That's the way I would have interpreted it.
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  I don't think Karen's strong women who put bigger people in their place. I regard the usage of
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  Karen culturally as being about people who are extremely persnickety and obsessed with
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  minor rule infringements or like you know the fine print of exactly what they didn't get or
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  they're their hall monitors. They're Tracy Flick from the movie election who are like highly ambitious
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  and self-entitled and will trample over anyone to enforce what they regard as being the correct
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  response to a particular situation rather than self-empowered people who are asserting their
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  legitimate place in a space. I don't know. I don't think that people who use the term at this point
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  are really drawing such bright lines between good assertiveness and bad assertiveness and what I'm
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  thinking of right now is let's see I'm thinking of a woman who was fired from her job as a literary
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  agent and this was last year and sort of the heat of the protest movement that was happening here
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  in the States because people were looting and I think attempting to set a gas station down the
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  street from her on fire and she called the police and this was this was Karen behavior this was
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  unacceptable. Right right yeah that's interesting I mean that's also interesting because there's a
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  you and you've written about this as well I was just going back through some of your articles
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  about the way that the different way that we sort of treat youth and youthful mistakes that we've
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  got that we live in this weird era where people who for example during the last summer of protests
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  in the United States would be in their late 20s or early 30s and their professionals and they're
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  setting gas stations on fire throwing Molotov cocktails at police cars and so on and then kind of
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  being exonerated because they were sort of on the right side of history so to speak and they were
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  just youthful expressions of commitment to causes that deserve their solidarity but then at the
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  same time you've got a kind of the same people who are exonerating them are all for cancelling
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  people who when they were 12 years old said the n-word in a TikTok video four years ago.
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  Yeah it's wild I feel like women occupy this strange place where we're sort of like
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  Schrodinger's victim where you know it depends on it depends on the direction out of like
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  you know are you you know who are you aggressing against or who is aggressing against you and
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  depending on everyone's various identity categories you could be like the you know the victim
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  with the genuine grievance and the one who is mistreated and the one who deserves sympathy
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  or you could be the aggressor and you know in many cases it need not be there need not be any
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  differences in the the circumstances of like what you yourself have done it just depends on
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  the identity of the person that you're interacting with. What were you making of the protests as
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  they unfolded last summer? Oh gosh I mean at the time I was mostly worried that people were going
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  to all get infected with COVID and they were going to become super spreading events. Yeah and
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  you know that was to me the most memorable thing about that was what I think in hindsight
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  catastrophic loss of trust it resulted in when it came to our public health officials who were
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  you know very actively condemning other protest movements and also any gathering you know any
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  large gathering including large gatherings that took place outside but they you know not only
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  could not bring themselves to say this is dangerous these you know these mass protests are
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  dangerous but they came out and they think they said something there was this open letter where
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  a bunch of people signed it and they said like protesting racism is more important because racism
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  is a public health concern too and I think there are you know there are ways in which that can be
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  a true statement but it also struck a lot of people especially those of us who had like lost
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  family members and could not bury them and could not have funerals it just seemed a little bit
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  absurd. Yeah I remember that statement I remember them saying that like the the way that white
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  supremacy crushes the bodies of people of color I mean that may not have been quite that literate
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  but that's the way that I interpreted it was worse than the risk of a raging viral pandemic
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  and like that might be true it might be true that the the big picture of racism kills more people
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  than COVID I don't know how you'd quantify that but even if that were true like the cause
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  of link between having this big rembunctious crowded protest right now and having fewer deaths as
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  a result of structural racism you'd need to show me better data about that link than than we've got
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  in order to actually tally up some utilitarian body count that put the the risk of infection from
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  a pandemic at less than the number of people who would the number of people of color who would
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  otherwise be killed if we don't stage this big rally right now on this particular day.
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  Yeah yeah you know it seemed like an attempt to make concrete something that was just not
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  quantifiable at a time when there was you know something very quantifiable and very concrete going
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  on which was an airborne virus and you know I think in hindsight like we now know that it didn't
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  really spread out of doors and so you know we got lucky in that sense but it's yeah it was just
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  it was tough to watch I think a lot of people took note of that and sort of adjusted their
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  opinions of the people who were directing traffic you know when it came to like the public health
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  response accordingly. It certainly hasn't helped people's trust in yeah in health advice.
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  What do you attribute it to? I mean I understand that a medical professional doesn't want to
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  be on the wrong side of history and doesn't want to seem like they're part of an organ of state
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  oppression of people of color by saying really you shouldn't come out and protest police violence
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  against against African Americans but is that it? Is that all it is? I mean I'm just wondering like
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  are the incentives all aligned? Is it a problem of the incentives being misaligned for people in
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  positions of power so that the penalty for them seeming to be I guess racist is so high that
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  they have to avoid any suggestion of that or any threat of a suggestion of that at all cost even
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  if it means betraying the hypocritic oath? That's a good question. I tend to think that what was
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  actually happening there is that the people who were you know on board with the protests either
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  knew or at least could make an educated guess that they weren't actually going to result in
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  you know a great deal of spread. We did have a certain amount of information by then about how
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  the virus spread and you talk about incentives. I think that on the one hand there were moments
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  in which it was a lot of moments in which it was desirable to be as pessimistic as possible to
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  kind of call calamity all the time and say like you know you you sat next to your friend in a
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  park bench you're killing grandma you know because the one thing about the pandemic was that
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  anybody who had an impulse to kind of scold and punish and police people found an outlet for
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  that and found it very satisfying and was not going to give that up when you know when they felt
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  like they had free reign to do it. But then you know when it came to something that they approved
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  of morally like these protests which you know I agree were morally important if ill-timed I think
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  that you know the the other incentive sort of prevailed you know to to be more measured
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  about you know assessing the risks and to say well you know this seems like this seems tolerable
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  it's probably fine you know you saw a lot of people saying but they're outside and they're
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  wearing masks and you know that was true and the outside thing probably you know made a lot of
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  difference there. It's just you know I think what's remarkable is how that was not considered
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  compelling you know when it was another kind of gathering where you know then the impulse to
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  scold and police won out because it was the wrong kind of people who were trying to get together.
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  What were those kinds of gatherings? I mean basically anything that wasn't an anti-racist
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  like were there I'm trying to remember because I wasn't maybe I mean I wasn't in the country
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  so in the state so I wasn't paying incredibly close attention to it but were there were there
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  like Trumpy rallies that were being told to shut down for coronavirus reasons?
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  Yeah I mean there were some well there were protests against the lockdowns here in the states
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  that right yeah that's right yeah sure I'm not sure when and where those took place they
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  might have been more towards the beginning and then you know there would be
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  there was like a motorcycle rally there were Trump rallies where people were walking around unmasked
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  there were but I mean there was also just like it was like anything anything that was perceived
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  as as not for a good cause if people were just having fun like I still remember that there was this
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  um I mean the playgrounds were all we're all taped up you know and there was this moment where
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  I think it was you know it had gotten to be summertime it was nice finally on the east coast
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  and I believe it was Bill de Blasio in New York City who told New Yorkers that if they tried to
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  go to the beach they would be pulled out of the water by the cops. I want to see that I want to see
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  some dumpling of a jersey cop trying to struggle with some jersey boy some tatted up jersey boy
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  in the water trying to wrestle him to the ground in the sand yeah I also remember cat there was
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  like there were images on Twitter of in California bulldozers coming into skate parks on the beach
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  and bulldozing this and pouring like just pushing sand on all over the skate parks like
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  it's a skate park it's not very densely populated you know it's just skater bros skating around
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  there are only a few of them they're out in the open and they were literally bulldozing sand onto
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  it and I said at the time on Twitter and I was very early like screaming from the rooftops about
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  the pandemic um you know I was taking it extremely seriously but I was like this is not the way
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  and then people on Twitter were like well if they're not going to stop endangering other people
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  then they have to be forced to and I'm like but what is a sustainable approach here because you're
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  only going to piss off 95% of people like there aren't very many people who are going to look at a
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  state-funded bulldozer pushing sand in front of like teenagers who are just trying to get out of the
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  house and get some exercise and ruining their day and go this is excellent this is precisely the
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  kind of state that we want to live in this is the perfect balance between authoritarianism and freedom
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  like obviously that's going to trigger libertarian backlash especially in a place like the US where
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  those sentiments run run so deep maybe not so much in Australia where I think we're a bit more
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  obedient but definitely in the states and I think we've seen that it's and it's interesting to
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  imagine what the parallel sliding doors alternate um history is in the states where there was a more
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  consistent more reasoned more science-based approach to lockdowns uh and people didn't feel like
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  they were just being fucked around for no reason mm-hmm yeah I mean it's interesting I think that
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  the one thing the pandemic revealed is that a lot of Americans don't care that much about liberty
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  or at least are very happy to give up their own if it means that they get to police other people's
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  lives that's very satisfying too I am you know I'm distressed to say like many more people in this
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  country than I thought apparently that's like a a real source of joy to them um so yeah that was
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  a little disperting yeah that's interesting I hadn't really thought about it that way I want
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  just is that a social media um artifact though like would that be happening if it weren't for
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  people finger wagging on social media oh I don't know I mean there's a performative aspect to it
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  but I'm just thinking of things like this guy this lawyer who went to the beach dressed as the
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  grim reaper you know um to shame people for going to the beach in Florida and that was insane
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  thing to do there was no danger there and yet you know not only did he get like a lot of
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  positive feedback from people who were like what you're doing is so important you're saving lives
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  but he got an enormous amount of media coverage like traditional media coverage he was on cable
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  news you know talking about how like brave and good he was so I'm not sure that it's I'm sure
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  social media doesn't help but I think there's also just kind of a basic human instinct at play there
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  yeah and people just aren't very good at understanding nuance or like let alone algorithmic
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  exponential statistics and things like that like I remember quite early on there was also a
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  photo going around I guess it was when the weather started getting nice so it was probably
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  in May or June last you know the after the couple months after the pandemic had begun and everyone
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  was still locked down and there was a pool party that went viral with everybody very very very
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  closely crammed together in pools and buying beer nobody was masked and yes it was outside but as
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  you mentioned earlier we didn't know at that stage that it was so hard to catch when you're out
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  outdoors and so I had tweeted something saying like this is wildly reckless this is irresponsible
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  or whatever I'd chimed in and then a whole bunch of my followers wanted to agree with me but in
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  the most stupid and extreme finger wagging nanny stateway possible so like someone took the photo
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  of all these people and wrote the word died in three weeks and put an arrow to one of them and
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  like dead and put an arrow to another one and then like killed her killed his grandmother for
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  to another one and like like as if the whole pool was gonna die and I was like guys you're not
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  helping the problem the reason why I don't think it's advisable to have huge pool parties in the
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  middle of a pandemic is not because everyone there's gonna end up dead it's because you're trying
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  to control and minimize the spread so that the pandemic isn't quite as widespread and isn't
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  infecting quite as many old people and people whose immune systems can't cope most of these young
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  people even if they all caught it would survive and would be fine like we're not nobody you're
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  not convincing anybody by putting a big skull and crossbones over the face of every single person
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  who's behaving inappropriately or irresponsible you know what's interesting about that photo is
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  that it was taken at Lake of the Ozarks which is in a part of the US that it's like in Missouri
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  and I think parts of Arkansas it's just not by the way how incredibly too online we must be that
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  from that single anecdote you know the exact photo like what a flattened world we now live in on
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  social media that I can cite that and you know exactly I was in Australia because it was it was so
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  you know people people were so delighted to dunk on it because there was this perception that
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  everybody who you know this was the south so everybody in this photo was probably a Trump supporter
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  and hence they probably deserve to die you know I was I think sort of the reigning sentiment but
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  the thing the reason that I remember that is because it not just because it sort of catalyzed this
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  very I think elitist reaction amongst a lot of the people who kind of inhabit Twitter but because
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  it was referred to in the press as a super spreader event like just while they without without
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  evidence like at the time that it happened and then nobody caught hope there and you know and
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  nobody ever retracted that and I thought that was really interesting that was telling to me about
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  sort of how the discourse was being driven I guess yeah that's interesting that they've got
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  these ideological blinders and they just they use what are actually epidemiological terms to
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  just kind of as a way of throwing it around and reinforcing their own prejudice uh you recently
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  tweeted something that Lara Baselon had written a thread about changes to how sexual harassment and
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  rape complaints are conducted on campus this is something that has also fled up occasionally in
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  Australia with some uh some disagreements about exactly how widespread um sexual assault about
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  universities is and among young people and how those things should be handled but what's different
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  is that here they're still matters for the police they're not matters for the internal university
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  campus cops or whatever can you explain how the American system works and what's wrong with it can
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  I can I swear on your podcast yeah you can this is a shit show and it dates back 10 years at this point um
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  to in 2011 the Obama administration issued this dear colleague letter from the office of civil rights
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  a learning college campuses that they needed to update their sexual assault and sexual harassment
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  policies um to be basically more victim centered um more and more hostile to the accused or they
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  would risk losing federal funding so and you know this was this was all wrapped up in title nine which
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  is the um the statute that prints uh sex based discrimination on college campuses so this was all
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  triggered by um the there was this sort of like I guess if there's really no better word for
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  further not so like a moral panic around rape on campus that stemmed in large part from this study
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  conducted by a man named David Lizak I think that's how you pronounce it um where he found that
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  something like one in four women you know would be raped um at college you know in the
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  it was it was you know one of these terrifying statistics that everybody was like oh my god we
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  must do something about this and this is a statistic that we still we still regard as being a fact
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  I mean even in Australia I hear people talk about how you know one in four or one in five young
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  women uh I don't know if they say right but sexually assaulted yeah you know it's it's such a mess
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  um the statistic is really I mean the the study that produced it is incredibly unreliable there's
• 29:11
  Emily Yaffe has written at length about why this study is so bad and I I really recommend her work
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  on it I think it is I think it's a slate where she did this debunking Emily is fantastic also Lara
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  Basilone who I just mentioned is fantastic and it should be mentioned in case people think that
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  these are like kind of right wingers or like these are you know self-hating women or something these
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  are bona fide feminists like journalists yes all I mean all of us who are who are having this
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  conversation um you know we're all I think on the left we're all liberals um but you know I mean
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  if you are genuinely liberal then you know the the impact on due process of this stuff is
• 29:50
  truly horrifying and truly despicable so um I'm gonna try to you know to fast forward basically you
• 29:58
  know in in reaction to this bullshit statistic you know suggesting that like there was a huge
• 30:06
  epidemic of rape on college campuses let me just pause that the the the statistic is bullshit
• 30:13
  why was it conflating basically a whole bunch of different uh sort of sexually unbecoming
• 30:21
  behaviors or overtures from guys as as being the same as rape how like how did why is the statistic
• 30:26
  bullshit okay so the study by Lizak is specifically like the methodology was incredibly flawed um
• 30:34
  I don't have access to all of us so I'm just trying to recall what was wrong with it um but what I
• 30:40
  remember is that he was doing the study on a commuter campus which is not what most you know
• 30:48
  American four-year universities are people staying dorms so that was already a different
• 30:53
  and then I believe what he did was he he surveyed men about whether they had ever committed an
• 31:00
  assault and then he extrapolated like he just like multiplied by four you know that if a guy had
• 31:08
  said that he committed one assault in a given year that he probably committed one every year
• 31:15
  it was you know it was some some of the stuff that he did some of the math that he did was just
• 31:20
  indefensibly bonkers um and I I definitely encourage people to read up on the many many weirdnesses
• 31:28
  surrounding this study um the other thing is that yeah you know they did
• 31:33
  they they have adopted in general this very overbroad notion of what constitutes sexual assault
• 31:40
  or sexual harassment so on the one end you have actual violent rape and on the other hand you have
• 31:49
  you know a man flirted with me um or a man asked me out and I said no but I felt weird about the
• 31:57
  fact that I had to say no and I felt harassed and I felt uncomfortable um so it's just incredibly
• 32:03
  hard to know really what's happening um but I mean if you just kind of like take a step back and
• 32:10
  look at it with some common sense it stands to reason that you know women on college campuses who
• 32:19
  are generally a relatively privileged set you know they they tend to come from um privileged
• 32:24
  backgrounds they tend to be educated their parents tend to be educated you know
• 32:29
  they're not going to be suffering sexual violence at a rate that's like some drastic amount
• 32:36
  you know two or three or four times greater than women who live in poverty women who are much more
• 32:43
  vulnerable um to you know to violence of all kinds and I mean you would just never send your
• 32:48
  daughter to university if if that was the if it was gonna dramatically you know by you know by
• 32:54
  by a factor of two or threefold increase her risk of getting raped you'd just rather she didn't go
• 33:00
  yeah I mean if anybody genuinely thought that there was a one in four chance that their daughter
• 33:04
  was going to be raped at college they wouldn't actually send their kids there it's it's just you
• 33:08
  know it kind of gives the way to the whole thing um but the result of this panic has been to adopt
• 33:18
  for one thing this very overbroad um you know you've got you've got deans at colleges
• 33:26
  trying to litigate interactions that you know there's just really no reason why
• 33:32
  college administrators should be involved in like college administrators should not be stepping in
• 33:36
  to try to like prevent kids I mean and they're not even kids they're adults they're legal adults
• 33:41
  from playing with each other um or from like kissing each other or trying to kiss each other you
• 33:48
  and and and getting rebuffed when it turns out that they read the signals wrong um they you
• 33:53
  know they shouldn't be stepping into police consensual sex um you know or ugly breakups between
• 34:01
  you know between two adults and this is the thing that's resulted from these very aggressive
• 34:08
  overhalls of the the sexual assault and and title non-regulations on campus where administrators
• 34:15
  are terrified of losing funding and so they've installed these you know really unfair processes
• 34:22
  that you know it's like a kangaroo court basically where um the accused and it's almost always a man
• 34:30
  of course is you know frequently the not expelled but told to leave campus um the moment in accusation
• 34:40
  is made is not necessarily allowed to know what the accusation is or who made it it's not allowed
• 34:46
  to see the you know the charges against them or just to review the files um there's there's
• 34:51
  just so much bad stuff happening with regard to this um and there's been a lot of really unfair
• 34:58
  outcomes that again I mean some of the some of the individual stories about this stuff will just
• 35:03
  curl your hair um and I you know I recommend that people read Emily Yoffie's coverage of it
• 35:09
  uh just to clarify for people if you do want to google it Yoffie is Y-O-F-F-E Emily Yoffie and I've
• 35:14
  just looked at the two main pieces there's one in slate from 2014 called the college rape over
• 35:20
  correction sexual assault on campus is a serious problem but if it's to protect women from a
• 35:24
  putative epidemic of violence have led to misguided policies that infringe on the civil rights of men
• 35:29
  and another one from 2017 in the Atlantic uh entitled the uncomfortable truth about campus rape
• 35:35
  policy but that slate one is probably the the uh the original one you mentioned cat that this
• 35:40
  is often men who are getting accused but actually the the piece that I saw because you retweeted
• 35:45
  it from Lara Baselon is about a a woman who Lara who's a lawyer represents a Jane Doe and she
• 35:52
  was falsely accused of masturbating in class tweets Lara during a mandatory interpretive dance exercise
• 35:59
  she herself is a rape survivor and Lara says that the allegations were made by malicious class
• 36:05
  mates are absurd on their face they could have been dispelled with a one-day investigation but
• 36:08
  instead the university without giving this girl any process prevented her from coming to class
• 36:14
  for 14 months they effectively expelled her on the basis of her he said she said with no trial
• 36:21
  what amazes me as an non-american is why is this stuff getting adjudicated by the
• 36:28
  university like if like let's take the example of a rape what it like are people getting away with
• 36:36
  is the punishment for rape on campus just that you get expelled like why don't they just
• 36:41
  get the police involved and then you face a criminal trial yeah that's a mess um and I
• 36:48
  I think there's a few different things going on but one of the things unfortunately is a
• 36:54
  pervasive sense amongst young women and it's it's not really based in reality that there's no
• 37:03
  point in going to the police that the police will just retraumatize you if you've been raped because
• 37:08
  they won't take you seriously and they'll imply that you were asking for and they won't bother to
• 37:12
  investigate and and so on and so forth um a lot of this you know uh the stuff that's getting
• 37:21
  litigated on college campuses of course is is not rape it's sex that you know meets the criteria
• 37:28
  for consensual by any you know legal stretch um but you know but they still feel bad about it
• 37:34
  and and there's this sense that like why feel bad I shouldn't have to feel bad um you know
• 37:41
  somebody should have to answer for this um so yeah I mean there's you know there's a combination
• 37:46
  of things and I mean of course going to the police is it's not easy um it's not simple and you're not
• 37:55
  guaranteed a smooth and relatively speedy outcome that's favorable to you that results in the
• 38:03
  person that you're aggrieved against being sort of removed from from campus and remove from contact
• 38:08
  with you um whereas campuses will you know they do that they just uh they just kick the person off
• 38:15
  campus so that you don't have to see them I mean though they're there are incentives to not go to
• 38:20
  the police and to to go through this process instead it sort of strikes me as the worst of both
• 38:24
  worlds though because I mean and I completely accept that historically police departments have
• 38:28
  probably been really tiniered and clueless when it comes to how to handle uh rape allegations when
• 38:35
  it's just a he said she said situation and they probably were really insensitive towards victims
• 38:40
  who needed who deserve to be believed more than they they were but that doesn't mean that you
• 38:45
  circumvent the justice system it means that you fix the justice system ideally right I mean
• 38:49
  you like if so if this was any other class of crime if someone was someone was systematically or
• 38:54
  even just on a one-off stall you know a prized very valuable I don't know trophy athletic trophy
• 39:01
  from another student like would that get adjudicated inside the the campus I mean if someone
• 39:08
  someone was violent in a non-sexual way and you know stabbed another student would you go well
• 39:16
  the police are terrible about prosecuting stabbing we're just not going to involve criminal
• 39:20
  law enforcement at all we're just going to sort of out in here and we'll just suspend him without
• 39:25
  a trial on the basis of the the victim's claim that what happened was true yeah you know it's
• 39:31
  everything obviously that you know that wouldn't happen specific you know especially with violent
• 39:34
  crime with theft I don't know you know I don't know if I mean there might be an additional
• 39:41
  campus investigation but you know certainly you could go to the police with that I think that
• 39:48
  so you know it's it's true that like the police have historically in many cases really really messed up
• 39:55
  rape investigations or you know or not believed women who said something had happened to them
• 40:00
  with something had there are some truly horrifying stories including one that I think was covered
• 40:06
  by Liz Brune when she was still working in Texas about a serial rapist who was like sneaking into
• 40:15
  women's homes at night and assaulting them and the first person who reported him was just told
• 40:24
  that she was making it up it was just egregious and you know it's the kind of thing that should never
• 40:28
  happen I think that there's maybe a little bit of an over correction happening now where there's
• 40:38
  a sense that you know rape victims women particularly you know who who suffered it's not even
• 40:46
  necessarily rape it could just be you know sexual assault or you know an unwelcome comment or whatever
• 40:51
  but that they've been traumatized enough that they deserve a better system than the criminal justice
• 41:00
  system which is because you know it's made to be as fair as possible to be accused is not especially
• 41:09
  fun to go through if you've been a victim you are going to be asked a lot of intrusive questions
• 41:14
  you are going to have to you know go back over and over to the thing that happened to you
• 41:21
  it's going to take a really long time and you know there's a good chance again because our system
• 41:27
  is set up to you know to make it as hard as possible to convict innocent people of crimes
• 41:34
  there's a good chance that the person who hurt you is not going to end up being necessarily
• 41:40
  prosecuted or if he is that he's not going to be convicted so it's not it's not set up to be
• 41:45
  satisfying to victims the college system is set up to be presently especially satisfying to victims
• 41:54
  and that can be good in some ways but it can also attract people who you know who are feeling
• 42:01
  vengeful who you know who want the satisfaction of seeing consequences extracted from the person
• 42:10
  that they feel aggrieved against but without having to really experience much in the way of a cost
• 42:15
  themselves it's interesting I mean it's so hard isn't it to know where do you process
• 42:21
  ends and because it not everything should have the standard the standard of proof of a courtroom
• 42:29
  like that this is something that Australia has grappled with as well this year where the attorney
• 42:34
  general had to resign because of historical rape allegations against him from when he was a teenager
• 42:41
  and there were allegations of a certain amount of impropriety in his office and those allegations had
• 42:49
  sort of started swirling around before this bombshell landed and the country basically split
• 42:54
  into with one half of the country saying good riddance he should have to resign because believe
• 43:03
  all women and the other half of the country saying whatever happened to you process until he's
• 43:07
  convicted in court of law there's nothing to see here and that just struck me as deeply unsatisfying
• 43:15
  on both sides because there might be something to see there just because there's not enough evidence
• 43:18
  to prosecute a 30 year old allegation on behalf of the criminal justice system and the police does
• 43:25
  not mean that you shouldn't raise your eyebrows and like interrogate the character of a person who
• 43:32
  holds one of the highest officers in the land who is trailing these allegations behind him and it
• 43:38
  does worry me that there isn't a grey zone here that anyone is terribly comfortable at inhabiting
• 43:44
  yeah i mean it's very difficult the thing about due process that you know i always i always come
• 43:51
  back to is you know it can be very inconvenient if you are the victim but if you are ever accused
• 43:58
  of a crime or if somebody you love is accused of a crime you're gonna want that like you're gonna
• 44:03
  want due process even if you did it you're gonna want due process you know you're gonna want not
• 44:08
  only the chance to respond to the allegations against you but to argue for an appropriate
• 44:13
  level of punishment and you know every time we jettison due process because it's not satisfying
• 44:23
  because it's frustrating i pan in the ass and we chip away at it you know at a moment when you
• 44:29
  might really really want it but what should require due process cat i mean being locked up in a
• 44:34
  jail should require maximal due process but should like being uncomfortable with woody alan
• 44:41
  require due process you know like what about those grey zones well i mean woody alan is an
• 44:47
  interesting case because he received due process the allegations against him were investigated
• 44:53
  extensively by two different bodies at the time and they you know concluded that there was no
• 45:00
  there and yeah i mean you know it's an interesting example of people just being like well
• 45:08
  the due process didn't find the result that we would have preferred and so we're just going to go
• 45:13
  ahead and still be really mad about this and still you know try to kind of rewrite this man's
• 45:18
  legacy so that when he dies his obituary reads woody alan alleged child molester not woody alan
• 45:24
  director but aren't they stringing together a bunch of breadcrumbs there isn't that a little
• 45:30
  i mean you might be being a little bit cute with with like that being the only allegation against him
• 45:36
  when he again is trailing behind him so many and i i mean i absolutely love his movies and i'm
• 45:42
  a huge fan but i do note that that many of them involve extremely young women falling in love with
• 45:47
  old nebashy men and he did have a this questionable relationship that evolved with Sunyeh i mean
• 45:54
  i guess it was questionable at the time it's not questionable anymore because they've been married
• 45:57
  for decades and she's a grown woman she's allowed to do what she wants she clearly clearly loves
• 46:01
  him to bits but you know i think people get their discot discomfort from the fact that regardless
• 46:07
  of whether or not the specific allegation about child molestation is true there's an there's an
• 46:13
  aura that would arouse a level of suspicion that doesn't rise to criminal conviction that nonetheless
• 46:18
  people feel justified in making them feel uneasy like are they unjustified in their unease
• 46:25
  i think they're unjustified in trying to extract penance from him for their unease i mean the
• 46:31
  thing about Sunyeh is that is you notice they've been together for something like 30 years and
• 46:37
  you know the the feminist take i think is to believe that woman when she says that nothing
• 46:46
  untoward was going on there and that she's really really sick of people painting that
• 46:52
  relationship as though it was in any way non-consensual or in any way a bad thing for her
• 46:58
  um you know that that's where i land on that but i'm also um as a writer of fiction i really really
• 47:09
  do not want to normalize the idea that we should be scrutinizing uh you know the content of the
• 47:16
  director's films or a script writer's screenplay is or a novelist books to find out what kind of
• 47:23
  person they're really like yeah yeah yeah that's a good point did you know did you see recently by
• 47:29
  the way that a couple of novels have have changed something that happened in them this had to do
• 47:35
  with with characters saying something about Israel i think and now people people jumping on the
• 47:40
  authors as if the authors were articulating their own beliefs in the mouths of fictitious
• 47:47
  characters so rather than deal with the headache of being cancelled and having to justify
• 47:52
  what their fictitious fictional characters are saying they've changed the words
• 47:57
  yeah yeah i mean that's that's where we land when you start saying that you know an author is
• 48:02
  responsible or you know or you're just somehow like an insert um for the problematic,
• 48:10
  insensitive whatever things that a character says i mean that that entire story is pretty ludicrous
• 48:17
  and uh it's depressing to me that that's becoming a norm that sort of brings us to the other thing
• 48:23
  that i wanted to hear your thoughts on which was one of the other great articles of yours that
• 48:28
  i loved when you were first coming to my attention which was your extrapolation of the young adult
• 48:34
  fiction uh crisis i suppose you might call it of when was that i i wanted to say of 2019 it could
• 48:41
  have been of 2017 yeah and i was looking early on the scene wow you were and and this i hadn't
• 48:49
  realized until i just opened our text messages to each other that i've gotten that i interviewed
• 48:54
  about you about this for my radio national show what two years ago or something uh to explain
• 49:01
  the the YA drama that i was doing so much at the time that my apologies for it slipping my mind
• 49:07
  that that's what we were talking about but can you rearticulate what happened there because this
• 49:12
  blending of identity with fiction with reality with bigotry all kind of came together in a perfect
• 49:20
  storm yeah this i mean it's interesting that the YA community is as it's as is often the case
• 49:28
  a sort of an early warning sign for things that are coming down the cultural pike that eventually
• 49:35
  bleed into the broader culture when you're going to have a moral panic over our it frequently starts
• 49:40
  in stuff that's aimed at young people because people can be like think of the children you know
• 49:45
  and just to clarify YA is the industry jargon is the publishing industry jargon for young adult
• 49:50
  novels so things like twilight and the hungry games and stuff like that
• 49:55
  yep anything aimed at readers who are like 12 13 up through you know 19 20 the thing about YA
• 50:06
  especially when it was in its like real peak heyday was that a lot of adults read it too so
• 50:13
  you could sort of push the boundaries of what was going to be included there and i was a young
• 50:17
  adult novelist i published two books one in 2012 and one in 2014 so i happened to be positioned
• 50:24
  in the community in a very good place to notice that things were starting to get a little weird
• 50:31
  and what happened was that these campaigns started to percolate
• 50:40
  against books that were deemed problematic that was the sort of the buzz word of the day which
• 50:45
  you know meant that they didn't cue to the proper political values and the evidence for the
• 50:51
  book being problematic was rarely all that straightforward often it was there's a bad character
• 50:59
  in this book who says bad things and there was a very effective machine in place spearheaded
• 51:10
  by a group of authors in that space who had a lot of influence who had big followings on twitter
• 51:17
  who could really if they chose whip up a lot of anger against a book that they had decided
• 51:24
  to target and there was frequently an element of competition there it's kind of a cutthroat
• 51:31
  world it's been contracting for a while so it's not getting any better on this front and you know
• 51:37
  the the goal would be to just destroy these books you know to get them ideally pulled from publication
• 51:43
  or if you couldn't do that to force the writer to edit them and apologize and if you couldn't do that
• 51:49
  to torpedo the ratings of the book before it came out by getting people to go and like downvote
• 51:59
  it or give it a zero star review on Goodreads you know just for you know basically like I haven't
• 52:05
  read this book but I heard it's bad I'll never read it zero stars and this had happened to a bunch
• 52:12
  of different titles but the one that I decided to focus on because it was just an amazing saga was
• 52:18
  this book called The Black Witch by an author named Lori Forest and you know I I observed the
• 52:25
  campaign against this book getting off the ground you know it got that boosted by some of the
• 52:32
  people in the community who were capable of of making a thing of a campaign like this and
• 52:40
  the it didn't ultimately succeed but at the time that it was sort of at its peak one of the
• 52:46
  really interesting things about it was the teen readers you know the these vulnerable young people
• 52:52
  were being pressured in like really atrocious and really cruel ways by adults in the community
• 52:58
  to not even read a book themselves you know that had been deemed problematic and the idea
• 53:04
  was that like if you read it to see for yourself then then you're racist you know you're you're just
• 53:09
  as bad so yeah that was that was a moment and that's probably the most viral thing I've ever
• 53:18
  written well it started a whole yeah it helped to trigger a whole sort of national reckoning in
• 53:25
  the publishing industry about this tendency right to to demonise books on the basis of they're
• 53:31
  being what you might just loosely call politically incorrect even before they're published and the
• 53:37
  funny thing about Black Witch as I understood I haven't read the book but I've read a bazillion
• 53:41
  analyses of it is that it was simply portraying individuals in this fantasy universe who were
• 53:48
  bigots but weren't they the bad people? Yeah I mean one of the things about it was that the
• 53:55
  the main character starts out you know with problematic views because she hasn't been awakened yet
• 54:01
  to the you know the reality of the world that she lives in and then over the course of the first book
• 54:07
  you know she basically gets woke and she ultimately sorry spoiler alert she joins the revolution
• 54:15
  at the end of the book and then there are like three or four more books in the series where she's
• 54:19
  fighting with the rebellion against this bigoted society that she lives in and it's a
• 54:25
  final society this there are wolf men and stuff like that right I mean these are the these are the
• 54:29
  other racers who are being subjugated who on whose behalf she then takes up arms yeah fairies wolf
• 54:36
  men selfies which is like people who turn into seals you know none of none of these I want to be
• 54:41
  yourself you know none of these yet are you sure I love my look I have three-year-old twins and
• 54:48
  they love the sealion show at the Sydney Taronga Zoo so I will become a seal when I grow up you
• 54:54
  could delight your children by doing this exactly and I've got a quote here that from the black
• 55:00
  witch so the the person who the bookstore employee and blogger who writes about young adult fiction
• 55:05
  who who started derailing this book's trajectory of positive critical acclaim a couple of months
• 55:11
  before it was even published said the black witch is the most dangerous offensive book I've ever read
• 55:17
  and she sits there she hasn't read mine come for something like she must not be very well read
• 55:25
  yeah there we go we'll take that yeah she's apparently only ever read sunshine and puppy books
• 55:30
  and she she quotes from it and says from page 163 a character says the kelps are not a pure race like
• 55:38
  us they're more accepting of intermarriage and because of this they're hopelessly mixed
• 55:43
  and then she editorializes yes you just read that with your own two eyes this is one of the times
• 55:49
  my jaw dropped in horror and I had to walk away from this book and I was like what who says that
• 55:56
  in the book like it depends what character says it like why you assuming that this is something that
• 56:00
  the author believes I'd be very surprised if the author believes that intermarriage is a way to
• 56:05
  taint pure racers surely that's that's something that's happening to a fictional that's being said
• 56:10
  by a fictional character in a fictional fantasy universe full of wolf men and seal people yeah so
• 56:17
  that is a line I believe uttered by the main character before she you know before she has her
• 56:23
  political awakening and you know the thing about it is that if you if you can't have
• 56:30
  main characters who are complex people who maybe start out in one place even if that place is in
• 56:35
  place we find is tasteful and then evolve over the course of a story to become better um you
• 56:40
  just gonna have a lot of quite boring books I mean to be honest you're not even gonna have any
• 56:45
  stories in like the traditional kind of Greek mythological sense of the word story a story is
• 56:52
  basically someone has to grapple with something and then they have to overcome demons preferably
• 56:58
  internal ones in order to achieve some sort of enlightenment like what are they struggling against
• 57:03
  if you can't articulate the darkness that is the opposition that they have to vanquish right I mean
• 57:07
  it's all quite muddied is this over now the whole young adult thing will be back to sanity um no
• 57:13
  I mean as you as you noted all that's happened is that a lot of the I don't really know how else to
• 57:23
  describe it except illiterate but a lot of these illiterate readings of books are just kind of
• 57:30
  creeping into the mainstream where it's become something of a thing and it's really I think a power
• 57:38
  trip for the people who do it to you know find something in a book that you've decided you're
• 57:44
  offended by you know character said this I'm repulsed like that's so offensive and then brigade
• 57:51
  the author until they acknowledge you and apologize and promise to do better um I there's a tweet
• 58:00
  about this whole YA fiasco uh by a blue check marked uh journalist and she says I don't
• 58:08
  care if someone else said the book is problematic I'm gonna read it and she has a a graphic image
• 58:14
  of Batman smacking someone in the face with a big kind of old-fashioned Batman show smacks wax
• 58:21
  sort of thing as if I mean this is this like chills me as like the grandson of Holocaust survivors
• 58:28
  when you know who lived during bookburnings and stuff the idea that you would casually demonize
• 58:36
  people who who want to seek out the original text itself in order to judge for themselves
• 58:42
  whether or not it's yeah that what was so egregious about that is that that was a sentiment being
• 58:47
  tweeted by an adult author in response to teenagers saying that they wanted to read the book to form
• 58:54
  their own opinion about it she's a rider she was she herself was cancelled later after that
• 59:02
  oh that's beautiful what happened to her oh that's a long story she turned into a seal and jumped
• 59:08
  in the sea and swam away I'm really like to talk about it because it's it's something that I
• 59:12
  I still have it kind of in my in the back of my mind to maybe eventually try to report on
• 59:17
  I'll go on give us a hint okay she was one of the parties named in the the me two reckoning
• 59:26
  that happened in YA where there was a post on the school library journal website that
• 59:31
  devolved into just this like morass in the comments of people wielding accusations usually
• 59:36
  anonymously of sexual assault and harassment against all of these different authors and one of
• 59:41
  them was this woman Tristina right I believe she was the only woman to get caught in this and I
• 59:48
  suspect that this allegation was completely fabricated and made maliciously by somebody else in
• 59:53
  the community who had a grudge against her um but yeah you know her book was unpublished I
• 59:59
  feel like she was dropped by her publisher and her agent and she disappeared off of the internet
• 1:00:06
  wow I don't want to talk about reaping what you saw but it's yeah it's a it's a sensitive I mean
• 1:00:12
  you touch it anyone can touch the hot stove here can't they and just get annihilated it's funny
• 1:00:18
  that we started out talking about the cool guy and the way that the cool guys performance of feminism
• 1:00:26
  is supposed to inoculate him from charges of sexism but that actually frequently you'll find that
• 1:00:32
  those bros are the most sexist and misogynistic guys and that the traditionally masculine you know
• 1:00:41
  superficially sexist guy has more chivalry than the cool bro feminist does and I wonder whether or
• 1:00:47
  not do you think that people who spend a lot of time presenting an image of ideological purity
• 1:00:53
  in the cancel culture wars tend to be harboring something else that they're hiding or is that a
• 1:00:57
  stretch I don't know I think about this a lot I think there's certainly this it's almost like a meme
• 1:01:05
  you see people you see people say this a lot where they suggest that anybody who is quite outspoken
• 1:01:13
  in favor of things like free speech and due process is probably just trying to preempt you know
• 1:01:20
  their own cancellation because surely they have skeletons in the closet and I've always thought
• 1:01:27
  that that rank extremely false because if you have skeletons in your closet the last thing you
• 1:01:34
  would do is start speaking publicly in a way that you know is going to incentivize a lot of very
• 1:01:44
  vengeful angry people to go looking for them to try and hurt you I think that what does actually
• 1:01:51
  happen more often is that people you know get very hungry to identify somebody who's you know done
• 1:01:59
  done a bad I have done a bad thing or you know or said something problematic as a way of
• 1:02:07
  hurting attention from their own bad acts I think that you know done as said that they've done
• 1:02:12
  anything but they fear that they could be canceled and so you know they misdirect they say hey look
• 1:02:18
  at that guy over there look at that asshole like he's bad he did something bad let's get him and
• 1:02:24
  you know the more you can deflect attention away from yourself and onto somebody else the less
• 1:02:29
  people will pay attention to you and whatever you might have lurking in your past it's incredible
• 1:02:35
  yeah yeah that I mean the extent to which people are blind to the possibility of this trend coming
• 1:02:42
  back to bite them in the ass is what amazes me that people are so confident in their own right I
• 1:02:48
  suppose to annihilate other people's reputations without thinking that they're kicking up they're
• 1:02:54
  stirring up a hornet's nest I mean it reminds me a little bit of you know not to wait into race here
• 1:02:59
  but a little bit of the the perils that I think about that we face in our current moment in our
• 1:03:05
  conception of race that there seems to be a movement which is encouraging us to not think about
• 1:03:12
  equality and colorblindness to not think about our traditional liberal aspirations as being the sort
• 1:03:18
  of Martin Luther King light on the hill of like we should just you know try to make race as irrelevant
• 1:03:24
  as possible and try to elevate everybody according to their ability and their character and instead
• 1:03:32
  we should double down on thinking about ourselves as races and we should think about ourselves as
• 1:03:36
  ethnicities and we should strive not for equality but for complete equity so that there's a fairly
• 1:03:45
  precise representation of all different races and ethnicities and genders in all areas of public
• 1:03:52
  and my primary worry about that is that once you start encouraging everybody think about themselves
• 1:03:56
  as racial tribes things have not historically gone well when white people think about themselves
• 1:04:02
  as racial tribes and as a gay Jew I don't want straight white people thinking about themselves as
• 1:04:08
  straight white people I want them thinking about themselves as humans and have a humanistic
• 1:04:12
  approach to this and that strikes me as the same kind of blindness that minorities would be pushing
• 1:04:17
  everybody to think about their races more at the same you know that there's a parallel between
• 1:04:23
  that and and cancel culture finger waggers encouraging everybody to pile on to people who have
• 1:04:30
  who have erred without realizing that if they create that climate of a whirlwind in which everybody
• 1:04:36
  is getting pilloried for the tiniest indiscretions they too will at some point succumb to that yeah
• 1:04:41
  I think that the problem too is that we are treating the ruination of people's lives and
• 1:04:47
  reputations like a spectator sport and there's this enormous impulse to punish there's this enormous
• 1:04:55
  impulse to find targets and destroy them and to extract apologies but but that's just part of
• 1:05:02
  the show you know there's never any forgiveness on offer which is a disturbing element of the culture
• 1:05:08
  that we live in right now um one of the uh one of my favorite podcasters the fifth column
• 1:05:15
  Camille Foster yeah talks a lot about how you know we end up focusing a lot on individual
• 1:05:20
  cancellations and don't don't talk about the culture that gives rise to them and I think that
• 1:05:25
  you know the this culture of delighting in the destruction of other people delighting in their
• 1:05:30
  distress that's that's really where things are becoming poisonous and toxic and we're hopefully
• 1:05:36
  you know eventually maybe I don't know we'll we'll address it and and go back from that
• 1:05:43
  what would that look like cat you know it's really simple just stop just everybody's stop yeah
• 1:05:51
  but there's a collective action problem this is what frustrates me I mean if we haven't been
• 1:05:54
  able to do anything about the climate crisis in the past 30 years that we've known about it I
• 1:05:59
  worry about our ability to do something about this because the incentives are all aligned towards
• 1:06:04
  well notwithstanding the point that I just made about be careful what you sow because you're
• 1:06:09
  gonna have to reap it as well the incentives are all aligned for individuals to be as self-righteous
• 1:06:14
  and sensorious as possible but when everybody behaves that way then collectively we all end up in
• 1:06:19
  a in a in a quagmire but I don't see any disincentive for people who are who are gaining notoriety and
• 1:06:25
  a sense of self-importance from being the uh the most virtuous people online I don't see any
• 1:06:32
  incentive for them to pull back so okay maybe so here's the alternate theory um and this kind
• 1:06:38
  of goes along with um I don't know if you remember back in like 2010 uh when smartphones were
• 1:06:48
  you know had just become ubiquitous and a lot of people were sending naked pictures of themselves
• 1:06:54
  around um I may have done a few of those myself it's true I mean never I would never I would simply
• 1:07:03
  never take naked pictures of myself using a cell phone I don't know what you're talking about
• 1:07:08
  but you know there was this sexting panic especially as it you know as it applied to teenagers it
• 1:07:12
  was like everybody was freaking out like teens are taking pictures of themselves in the nude and
• 1:07:18
  it's you know it's so bad and like the thing that occurred to me at the time was that we're
• 1:07:23
  going to reach um I don't know like the event horizon where suddenly everybody had a naked picture
• 1:07:31
  of themselves floating around somewhere and like inevitably naked pictures of you were probably
• 1:07:37
  going to emerge online but it just wasn't going to be a big deal anymore because it you know it
• 1:07:42
  was something that could happen to everybody your Nana your Nana already had hers online as well
• 1:07:46
  yes exactly yeah and it just became like a you know a right of passage and maybe that'll be the
• 1:07:51
  thing too you know in the future everyone will be cancelled for 15 minutes and then we'll just
• 1:07:56
  move on with our lives yeah the problem is there are always yeah I hope that's true my only concern
• 1:08:01
  is that there are always things that are going to be worthy of cancellation and if you believe in the
• 1:08:08
  like long arc of justice then you hope that more and more things become grounds for cancellation
• 1:08:16
  I mean do you well not using a baseline the current cancel cancel culture hysteria as it stands
• 1:08:24
  on on Twitter and in public shaming mobs but using the baseline of the actual kind of advancing
• 1:08:31
  vanguard of cultural norms that human beings in real life engage in so the fact that in the 1980s
• 1:08:39
  you could still probably get away with slapping a female coworker on the arse and saying nice tits
• 1:08:45
  like the fact that that is not good anymore I think is good right so I mean you know and gradually
• 1:08:51
  over time we look back on our parents and grandparents generations and we go oh my god I can't believe
• 1:08:56
  how retrograde they were and presumably that's going to continue but hopefully in ways that aren't
• 1:09:03
  trivial and motivated by grandstanding like I can see I can sort of see new realms of taboos
• 1:09:13
  that will open up that I think will be probably good to open up and I've been trying to sort of put
• 1:09:19
  myself in the shoes of like my kids or grandkids and think like what are they going to look back on
• 1:09:26
  the same way that we look back on the casual racism of the 1950s and of course it'll probably be
• 1:09:32
  things that we're not focusing on at all because by definition the big things that future generations
• 1:09:40
  will see as being blind spots are blind spots so I think maybe the way we treat animals for example
• 1:09:51
  maybe climate like it's I could imagine that in the 2050s they'll they could look at movies of this
• 1:09:57
  era like crazy rich Asians or something like that where people are getting on planes and where
• 1:10:02
  it's aspirational to be flying everywhere and to be really blingy and be like I can't believe that
• 1:10:08
  there was no like the people didn't clock what a calamity they were sort of seeding in the fact that
• 1:10:16
  there was no attention paid to the emissions that they were producing like I don't know I'm just
• 1:10:20
  guessing or like that people were eating banquets and there was never a question like you never
• 1:10:24
  even see the question come up about whether or not the meat is from a tortured animal that was
• 1:10:28
  treated in ways that where the only consideration was getting each kilo of its flesh down to the
• 1:10:35
  cheapest possible price like things like that you know like I think could become more taboo and I
• 1:10:41
  would sort of welcome that and there will presumably be future eras that are more enlightened
• 1:10:45
  than our own so that's what I mean by I hope that one hopes that the the the sphere of taboo's
• 1:10:51
  increases but I share your reluctance to hope for a doubling down on the particular transgressions
• 1:10:59
  that we're currently obsessed by yeah I think that that's the difference between saying you know I
• 1:11:03
  hope our norms evolve you know to to make us you know in the direction of justice in the direction
• 1:11:08
  of kindness and saying I hope more things become cancelable offenses right right right yeah I mean
• 1:11:13
  certainly you know I really don't want 20 years down the line to be in front of a tribunal of like
• 1:11:20
  teenagers wearing pointy hats yelling at me over a picture of me eating a hamburger from like
• 1:11:26
  2014 like they're dragging me away and I'm like it was a different time it was always wrong
• 1:11:35
  which is what you're supposed to also say like even the Disney I can't I was logged in cat the
• 1:11:40
  other day to Disney and I couldn't find the jungle book which is one of my son's favorite
• 1:11:46
  movies the old cartoon I could only find the jungle book two and I realized that I was logged in
• 1:11:53
  under the kids we have two logins there's the grown up and the kids and the and the kids are one
• 1:11:59
  doesn't show offensive content and so the jungle book doesn't show up so I had to log out and
• 1:12:05
  log in as an adult to get access to the jungle book because it contains colonialist imagery or
• 1:12:11
  something and there's a warning you know you have to sit through a five second warning saying
• 1:12:15
  the depictions of traditional cultures as I don't know I mean it's not even I mean they're animals
• 1:12:20
  it's I don't even know I don't quite understand it but it says like the depictions are wrong now
• 1:12:25
  and always have been wrong so when you're hauled before the teenagers in pointing hats
• 1:12:29
  for your hamburger it won't be an excuse to say it was okay back then it was always wrong cat
• 1:12:33
  right right I mean this reminds me of a spat that I got in on on Twitter of course when
• 1:12:41
  there was a there was a book review of like a biography of I believe PT Barnum
• 1:12:48
  that wanted to rake him over the coals because he wasn't very nice to his wife and I was like
• 1:12:54
  so all of these all of these men who like if they saw your