Democrats whole pitch is that they are "protecting democracy." But it feels like they have said to us as if we were children, "I'm going to take your democracy and put it up here on this high shelf, so it doesn't get broken and I will give it back as soon as you can take care of it properly." We aren't allowed to do any democracy right now, because it might harm our democracy. 🙄
Sarah, Sarah, Sarah... thank you for putting my internal struggle into words. I am a lifelong Democrat and a former radical lefty activist. My unwokening began almost exactly three years ago, during the last Gaza/Israel flare up. I was swiftly iced out of all of my activist circles because suddenly the weekly BLM and refuse fascism protests that I attended were littered with "zionism is racism" signs. I was absolutely heartbroken. Then I got angry, because they were slandering me as secretly right wing -- the biggest insult I could have imagined. How unfair! Israel was the only thing we disagreed about -- how could I be right wing?! So, I started listening to and reading right wingers to see what all the fuss was about. I started watching intelligence squared debates about controversial topics and realized... a) these conservatives are smart, thoughtful people and b) holy shit I have never actually considered any of these arguments before. For the last three years I've said the left left me. I desperately clung onto the left wing label. But if I'm honest, like you said, I did actually move to the right. I registered as an independent a few months ago and I call myself a centrist. But really, at this point, I'm on the right. Why does that feel so hard to admit -- even to ourselves?
The right has its own purity tests as well. I can remember being in high school and telling someone that I’m not a fan of abortion but I think it should be legal. I got told by a girl in my class that I was a democrat based off that sentence alone. I told that girl in no uncertain terms how stupid her thought process was based on one issue, she didn’t handle that well, and I honestly think we haven’t spoken since 😂😂. So here I am, a libertarian leaning centrist that hates hearing stupid arguments from idiotic politicians, which are everywhere and in every party.
Thank you for an honest discussion of Admiral Rachel Levine, who used the power of a government appointment to trick the medical establishment and adversely affect the health and care of many vulnerable young Americans. After building a career and family as a man, with a wife to bear his children and help raise them, Levine claims to have transitioned into a woman in late middle age. You can almost imagine the glee of the politicians who appointed Levine—finally, a qualified “woman” for these roles!
I was recently told of a gender non-conforming boy who joined the girls’ softball team at an elite private school claiming to prefer the playing with the girls because they were friendlier and less competitive.
Doesn’t this sound like Levine? As men age and lose their vigor, they may find themselves unable to compete with younger men. Why not put on a dress and play in a friendlier and less competitive space? Levine’s career success is analogous to the male puberty that makes transwomen competing in women’s sports such a farce.
There are literally billions of ways to be a woman. Have children or don’t. Have a career or don’t. Love men, or women, or both, or neither. But Rachel Levine isn’t a woman in any of those ways, because you cannot grow up a boy and a man and then also claim to be, understand, and represent women.
If Levine had transitioned sooner and had experienced the challenges of being a relatively unattractive infertile young woman trying to get ahead in a career while navigating the complications of balancing all the caring responsibilities that are expected of women—and smiling, to look prettier—then maybe Levine would have some claim to understand.
Muscling into women’s spaces and bullying them—and all of us—with a twisted ideology just as it becomes inconvenient to be a man is anything but courageous. And the idea that any portion of society would celebrate such terrible immoral behavior is horrifying.
You talk about older men being unable to compete with younger men, but they can’t compete with women under normal circumstances either. Normally social machinations favor women, so it is quite bizarre that on this one issue most women seem so totally willing to go along this. If they just said no, it wouldn’t be happening.
This is a bigger issue—certainly schooling now seems to favor girls but that wasn’t at all the case when Rachel Levine was young—and bearing and caring for children is still largely the responsibility of women (not women who were born male). Women and men of reason should be working together against insanity instead of blaming each other.
I agree with what Meghan says probably 95% of the time, but I strongly disagreed with her choice of words when she said straight men didn’t want their partners to have sex with other women due to a sense of ownership. The idea being that men feel like they own their female partners. I don’t think that’s the case at all, as far as I can tell. It’s certainly not the case with me. I, like most heterosexual men, find the idea of my partner having sex with another man horrific. However, the reason for this seems to be because it’s a direct threat to paternity certainty. No one wants to be defrauded into making the biggest investment of his life as it often entails supporting the woman in addition to the child.
I dunno, how many times are we going to talk about how the alphabet sludge movement hurts women and gay people, when it’s pretty obvious a large portion, if not majority, of women and gay people are on board? I feel like the TERF movement hasn’t come up with a sufficient working theory as to why that is, and will often retreat to facile talking points about false consciousness and internalized oppression. I think Mary Harrington is on the right track when she says the gender stuff benefits the class interests of bourgeois women and, to a lesser extent, gay men who want surrogates.
Speaking from personal experience, Pride stuff is still pretty dominated by gay men. And no, most of them don’t feel pushed to identify as trans or non-binary, and yes, a lot of them sort of passively go along with the gender stuff. I think a lot of people just sort of ignore the contradictions because a) they’re social conformists and don’t want to be seen as Republicans, b) the gender stuff still isn’t big enough to impact society as a whole (yet) and c) the left loves abstraction — as evidenced by their rejection of concrete terms like “homosexual” and “gay” for “queer,” “LGBTQ,” etc.
And finally, yes, kink has become an annoyingly inescapable part of gay culture. It’s one thing for it to be a niche, something you maybe dabble in from time to time. But to have it shoved in your face constantly, and be treated like an outsider because you’re not particularly into it sucks
But cheating on your partner when you’re in different cities, that’s all fine and good. Nothing to see there :)
TERF isn’t a movement. It’s a slur used to silence mainly middle aged women with concerns about the gender issues and their effect on women, girls, safety, fairness, etc. A lot of affected people being on board with it—or maybe captured and confused about it—doesn’t mean shouldn’t try as reasonable people to understand the tradeoffs involved and find a more reasonable modus vivendi for all.
To be clear, I was using "TERF" in a facetious manner. I'm not trying to blame women and gay people as a whole per se, nor do I think "patriarchy" is a completely invalid concept. I think about a lot of gender-critical discourse in the same way I think of the all-male Mattel board in the Barbie movie. It's describing something real, but at the same time it's failing to take into account the ways in which society, and gender dynamics in particular, have shifted since the start of 3rd wave feminism (kind of what Sarah was talking about with the Rebecca Traister piece on MAGA women)
TERF is actually both a movement and a slur. The movement is a very finite number of mostly British old school feminists who have coalesced around this issue. The online usage of “TERF” in general does not refer to this movement and is simply used to sneer any anyone who disagrees. Most people who are called this are certainly not radical feminists.
Using the term in the original constrained meaning, the OP’s point makes sense. They’re feminists so instead of TERF their nonsense slur is “patriarchy”, and they call the trans movement the new patriarchy because they literally lack the ideological vocabulary to say anything else. But it is ridiculous to say that there is some mass movement of men pushing for Lia Thomas to swim against women. There is not. By and large, we do not care.
Men and women almost always have overlapping distributions on any measure we talk about. So there are a few very “woke” men, yes, but the whole phenomenon of society going crazy since the 2010’s or so (Daum likes to say 2012 I think) is overwhelmingly a woman problem. The question is whether women can fix themselves (my preferred solution) or whether at some point men will get sick of this shit (which may eventually happen).
Are the men who “fixed themselves” by becoming women and claiming to speak for women included in your analysis of men v women? Are the algorithms created and employed by tech companies (of predominantly men) that feed lunatic theories to impressionable girls? This is a whole society problem with some heroes and villains and many victims of both sexes. Reasonable people would do better to come together than bifurcate along sex lines.
The infinitesimally small number of men who have done this are included, proportionally, in my thinking.
The point is not to talk about heroes and villains. That’s moralizing in a way that I think is inappropriate. I prefer to think of social justice ideology, like any religion, as a psychological infection, not a DSM diagnosis but a true infectious disease (Gad Saad uses this view). So my point is that there is a large cohort of young women who are sick (and a much smaller, but yes nonzero male cohort). Being ill is not evil, but there is no point in treating people who are not sick.
And it is certainly true that even though social justice ideology supposedly champions women or black people or trans people, they can actually be its main victims. In other news, people living in Muslim countries are the main victims of the harms of Islam. This is not new.
So in my framing this is a problem that is experienced by certain people, but yes it is certainly a problem for the whole society. And we face this with any illness. Is it better to take a huge amount of money out of the average person’s paycheck to pay for expensive diabetes care, or do some people just need to eat less? Individual versus social responsibility is a live question. With regards to feminism/social justice/BLM/trans ideology/wokeness/whatever the next permutation is, it’s the same question. I think there’s a real case to be made that the cohort of young women with social media inflicted mental health issues (the Jon Haidt thesis) have been let down by broader society. I also think it’s important to define the problem accurately, and I would be very careful about making sure that any proposed solution is not worse than the problem.
It's always amusing when you revisit the "Doctor" controversy you created on Twitter. I think you are spot-on in noting a strong correlation between being a first-gen PhD and demanding to be addressed as "Doctor". (And being first-gen often correlates with race). I would bet that a substantial percentage of those demanding "Doctor" have an EdD (as you mentioned, blame Dr. William H. Cosby, Jr., EdD)
Interesting that you approvingly mention MLK, about whom there's an interesting side note. I wish I could remember who made this astute observation about the secularization of society: Sixty years ago, MLK was commonly referred to as "Reverend" or "Reverend Doctor". But over time, Reverend has fallen into disuse, in favor of just "Doctor". The point being that the secular-dominated MSM, academia and the chattering class are apprehensive about referencing the deep religious roots of MLK's philosophy and movement. We often quote his last address the night before his assassination, but seem to memory-hole that it was actually a sermon given in a Pentecostal church.
I'm not saying this perspective is right or wrong, just very interesting, especially in light of the broader controversy over using "Doctor" for non-medical degree holders.
The other distinction is that MLK lived in an era where it was actually hard to get a PhD. I’m not sure that a lot of current PhDs have even completed a suitably rigorous program of training to be considered a doctor in the academic sense.
Biden has been having episodes like this for years. The only reason this discussion is happening now is the debate was live and they couldn’t run cover for him before everyone saw it. People were talking about this literally before he got elected and it was true then.
I would agree on the subject of being called doctor. My sisters who have doctorates are split on the issue, one doesn’t want to hear it outside of very formal introductions, the other wants to have her students call her that in class. I tend to thing it’s a self confidence thing.
It’s always interesting to hear yourself referenced in a conversation. I would like to say, I bottle fed my daughters because my wife was physically incapable of breast feeding. That and a serious case of postpartum depression combined into me taking the baby out to the couch for the first 4-6 months and letting her sleep in the bedroom and recover. Both things were not really her fault, but they did end up with me taking a much, much heavier role in the childcare than was ideal, or safe honestly considering what I do for a living.
I do think that started us off on very uneven ground as far as who is handling most of the responsibilities around the house and with the kiddos. Reasserting a more realistic balance after it’s been reinforced with two child birth cycles is a tough hill to climb, and an impossible subject to broach without sounding like a “get back in the kitchen” misogynist.
Two things can be true at the same time. Joe Biden has suffered through a lot of tragedies in his life, 100% agree. But he is also a very corrupt individual.
It’s really interesting to me that nobody on the left (even center left) is aware of all Joe’s corruption that was documented on Hunter’s laptop. It makes me wonder if it’s because the left media has suppressed all the evidence about Joe’s corruption and successfully convinced everyone that the only thing on the laptop was about Hunter’s drug addiction and porn and only about Hunter? (Of which, I could give 2 shits.)
If you did actually look into what the laptop proves, I think you would have a different opinion about Joe. I’m sure it will eventually come out and send shock waves through the public like Joe’s cognitive decline. But by that time, it will no longer matter.
This is an honest question: can you point me to a source about Biden's corruption? I ask because Biden has been a politician for all his life, and never had a job that doesn't require votes, which for me means that he is very likely to have been involved in situations that involve implicit tit for tat for political favors. There is something different about individuals that make it their business to be in politics all their life, as opposed to individuals who have a life in business. It did not surprise me that his son profited on the Biden name, and Joe Biden was more than happy to comply-- after all, what else does Joe Biden have to give his son?
Would you agree to an arrangement in which Trump and Hunter Biden are each given a private island in the South Pacific, on the condition that they never return to the US?
I’m just trying to wrap my head around the idea that one could “make out” with someone and not have it be the most important thing that ever happened.
I could tell you the name of every single person I’ve even allowed to hug me since I hit legal adulthood (twenty years). I could probably tell you most of the people I turned down too. I can remember the shock of fingers touching when I reached for a beaker at the same time as a girl in chemistry class twenty years ago. I could describe the strange sensation when one of the numerous women who have taken an interest in my sexuality sat next to me on a bus and her leg brushed against mine. I could tell you the name of the girl in second grade to whom I gave the bunny ears (a gesture performed by raising two of your finger’s behind the unknowing suspect’s head) and of the revulsion I felt when someone else in class decided that instead of being used to make fun of someone, the bunny ears on this occasion somehow meant I liked this girl.
Human psychology revolves around this stuff as far as I understand it. The cold, detached way in which so many women describe this subject is alienating, to say the least.
I think it’s less that they view sexuality in a cold, detached way, and more that they sometimes assume male sexuality (that scary other) is cold and detached in a way that isn’t really true.
Oh, but it can be both. And I think one of the unifying themes of the gender divide is the projection of one’s own experience onto the other sex.
The quote that’s been going around these circles lately is that women are pragmatists disguised as romantics, and men are romantics disguised as pragmatists. Which I think is true. Thus, it makes perfect sense that women would project a cold, calculating vision of sexuality onto men (and subsequently be afraid of it), whereas men would project a warm loving nature onto women (and then experience the crushing despair of feeling unloved when confronted with the reality of actual women).
I think sexuality is emotionally fraught for men and women alike, but that very emotionality causes us to worry that the opposite sex is less emotional, more detached, less invested, and more calculating than we are. These anxious projections then get codified and sold back to us as pseudoscientific evo-psych narratives, feeding a cycle of misinformation, alienation, and estrangement.
I don’t think it speaks well of the “heterodox” community that the invocation of evolution has become a negative in some people’s eyes. Wherever we are, it is presumably evolution that got us there.
And I also see a lot of this “six of one, half a dozen of the other” kind of argumentation that has a certain aesthetic appeal in its symmetry but which I think often does not hold up when exposed to reality.
The foundation of our disagreement seems to be that you think people project their own experience onto the other sex, whereas I think people are more prone to projecting their fears and anxieties onto the other sex, and to constructing a mental model of the other’s sexuality that is informed by those fears and anxieties. So instead of assuming sexuality is as emotionally laden for the other as it is for us, we assume they are cold and calculating and because that is what we are afraid of.
My critique is very specifically about evo-psych narratives that confirm these anxious projections and repackage them in the language of science (for example, the theory that men are “hard-wired” by evolution to be less emotionally invested in sexuality than women). These theories lack empirical support, are overly reductive and simplistic, are marginal in the academy, and owe their popular appeal primarily to the psychological dynamics I describe above. I don’t have any criticism of the theory of evolution more generally.
Since I don’t think of men and women as being interchangeable, I actually think that argument holds up rather well for 2000’s era feminism. There was the whole “rape culture” narrative, and a lot of fake science to back it up, and because women are naturally defensive-minded, they bought into it rather easily despite its absurdity.
But men, in general, have much lower rates of anxiety, which is a very mainstream conclusion in academic psychology, so I don’t see where even the susceptibility for some kind of equivalent would exist.
I know quite a few people, both men and women who have a similar view and experience with the opposite sex that you just described. I am not one of them. After the initial stages of youth where you’re experiencing each other for the first time in all sorts of innocent and not so innocent ways, there was a long stretch in my life where(after a few years), many of the women are reduced to a vague memory and a number. This is not out of disrespect for them, but the interactions did not mean much to me. There was so much else going on in my life at the time that women were a fun pastime both in the friendship and romantic sense. The thought process just didn’t go deeper than that.
What is funny to me is that the very first woman I pursued with the intent of possibly marrying, is now my wife. Its always stood as an example to me of how a different mindset can yield very different results haha.
I totally get that. I have a sister and a brother who have very similar experiences to what you described. If I were to have this conversation with them, they would likely express the same opinion. This is why I don’t have this conversation with them haha. I don’t think they would approve.
I think a big part of the difficulty parents face in juggling work and family comes down to wage discrimination against part-time workers. Labor Econ 101 assumes workers can set their own hours and keep the same wage rate, but in practice earnings (and expected future earnings) drop a lot if you deviate from the full-time 40+ hour a week norm. So parents are pushed into the situation Sarah describes where it’s more efficient for one parent to work full time and the other to stay home completely than for both to split the breadwinning and childcare. 40 work hours from one parent and 0 from another is more remunerative than 20 hours from each. But there’s nothing inevitable about this dynamic. It’s an outcome of labor market policy.
One reason (straight) people in traditional / poorer societies have few extramarital affairs / hookups is that privacy is extremely hard to come by. You live with your whole family in crowded quarters, there is no place to go, and if you’re in a village or neighborhood everyone knows your business.
Wasn't expecting the golden shower report at the top. Is this what I'm missing not being on Twitter? And in your previous episode when you said you wanted to talk about Admiral Levine, I thought you said Avril Lavigne. I thought "good god, why? Did she transition? Is she now a sk8er boi?"
Democrats whole pitch is that they are "protecting democracy." But it feels like they have said to us as if we were children, "I'm going to take your democracy and put it up here on this high shelf, so it doesn't get broken and I will give it back as soon as you can take care of it properly." We aren't allowed to do any democracy right now, because it might harm our democracy. 🙄
Sarah, Sarah, Sarah... thank you for putting my internal struggle into words. I am a lifelong Democrat and a former radical lefty activist. My unwokening began almost exactly three years ago, during the last Gaza/Israel flare up. I was swiftly iced out of all of my activist circles because suddenly the weekly BLM and refuse fascism protests that I attended were littered with "zionism is racism" signs. I was absolutely heartbroken. Then I got angry, because they were slandering me as secretly right wing -- the biggest insult I could have imagined. How unfair! Israel was the only thing we disagreed about -- how could I be right wing?! So, I started listening to and reading right wingers to see what all the fuss was about. I started watching intelligence squared debates about controversial topics and realized... a) these conservatives are smart, thoughtful people and b) holy shit I have never actually considered any of these arguments before. For the last three years I've said the left left me. I desperately clung onto the left wing label. But if I'm honest, like you said, I did actually move to the right. I registered as an independent a few months ago and I call myself a centrist. But really, at this point, I'm on the right. Why does that feel so hard to admit -- even to ourselves?
The right has its own purity tests as well. I can remember being in high school and telling someone that I’m not a fan of abortion but I think it should be legal. I got told by a girl in my class that I was a democrat based off that sentence alone. I told that girl in no uncertain terms how stupid her thought process was based on one issue, she didn’t handle that well, and I honestly think we haven’t spoken since 😂😂. So here I am, a libertarian leaning centrist that hates hearing stupid arguments from idiotic politicians, which are everywhere and in every party.
Thank you for an honest discussion of Admiral Rachel Levine, who used the power of a government appointment to trick the medical establishment and adversely affect the health and care of many vulnerable young Americans. After building a career and family as a man, with a wife to bear his children and help raise them, Levine claims to have transitioned into a woman in late middle age. You can almost imagine the glee of the politicians who appointed Levine—finally, a qualified “woman” for these roles!
I was recently told of a gender non-conforming boy who joined the girls’ softball team at an elite private school claiming to prefer the playing with the girls because they were friendlier and less competitive.
Doesn’t this sound like Levine? As men age and lose their vigor, they may find themselves unable to compete with younger men. Why not put on a dress and play in a friendlier and less competitive space? Levine’s career success is analogous to the male puberty that makes transwomen competing in women’s sports such a farce.
There are literally billions of ways to be a woman. Have children or don’t. Have a career or don’t. Love men, or women, or both, or neither. But Rachel Levine isn’t a woman in any of those ways, because you cannot grow up a boy and a man and then also claim to be, understand, and represent women.
If Levine had transitioned sooner and had experienced the challenges of being a relatively unattractive infertile young woman trying to get ahead in a career while navigating the complications of balancing all the caring responsibilities that are expected of women—and smiling, to look prettier—then maybe Levine would have some claim to understand.
Muscling into women’s spaces and bullying them—and all of us—with a twisted ideology just as it becomes inconvenient to be a man is anything but courageous. And the idea that any portion of society would celebrate such terrible immoral behavior is horrifying.
You talk about older men being unable to compete with younger men, but they can’t compete with women under normal circumstances either. Normally social machinations favor women, so it is quite bizarre that on this one issue most women seem so totally willing to go along this. If they just said no, it wouldn’t be happening.
This is a bigger issue—certainly schooling now seems to favor girls but that wasn’t at all the case when Rachel Levine was young—and bearing and caring for children is still largely the responsibility of women (not women who were born male). Women and men of reason should be working together against insanity instead of blaming each other.
I agree with what Meghan says probably 95% of the time, but I strongly disagreed with her choice of words when she said straight men didn’t want their partners to have sex with other women due to a sense of ownership. The idea being that men feel like they own their female partners. I don’t think that’s the case at all, as far as I can tell. It’s certainly not the case with me. I, like most heterosexual men, find the idea of my partner having sex with another man horrific. However, the reason for this seems to be because it’s a direct threat to paternity certainty. No one wants to be defrauded into making the biggest investment of his life as it often entails supporting the woman in addition to the child.
I dunno, how many times are we going to talk about how the alphabet sludge movement hurts women and gay people, when it’s pretty obvious a large portion, if not majority, of women and gay people are on board? I feel like the TERF movement hasn’t come up with a sufficient working theory as to why that is, and will often retreat to facile talking points about false consciousness and internalized oppression. I think Mary Harrington is on the right track when she says the gender stuff benefits the class interests of bourgeois women and, to a lesser extent, gay men who want surrogates.
Speaking from personal experience, Pride stuff is still pretty dominated by gay men. And no, most of them don’t feel pushed to identify as trans or non-binary, and yes, a lot of them sort of passively go along with the gender stuff. I think a lot of people just sort of ignore the contradictions because a) they’re social conformists and don’t want to be seen as Republicans, b) the gender stuff still isn’t big enough to impact society as a whole (yet) and c) the left loves abstraction — as evidenced by their rejection of concrete terms like “homosexual” and “gay” for “queer,” “LGBTQ,” etc.
And finally, yes, kink has become an annoyingly inescapable part of gay culture. It’s one thing for it to be a niche, something you maybe dabble in from time to time. But to have it shoved in your face constantly, and be treated like an outsider because you’re not particularly into it sucks
But cheating on your partner when you’re in different cities, that’s all fine and good. Nothing to see there :)
TERF isn’t a movement. It’s a slur used to silence mainly middle aged women with concerns about the gender issues and their effect on women, girls, safety, fairness, etc. A lot of affected people being on board with it—or maybe captured and confused about it—doesn’t mean shouldn’t try as reasonable people to understand the tradeoffs involved and find a more reasonable modus vivendi for all.
To be clear, I was using "TERF" in a facetious manner. I'm not trying to blame women and gay people as a whole per se, nor do I think "patriarchy" is a completely invalid concept. I think about a lot of gender-critical discourse in the same way I think of the all-male Mattel board in the Barbie movie. It's describing something real, but at the same time it's failing to take into account the ways in which society, and gender dynamics in particular, have shifted since the start of 3rd wave feminism (kind of what Sarah was talking about with the Rebecca Traister piece on MAGA women)
TERF is actually both a movement and a slur. The movement is a very finite number of mostly British old school feminists who have coalesced around this issue. The online usage of “TERF” in general does not refer to this movement and is simply used to sneer any anyone who disagrees. Most people who are called this are certainly not radical feminists.
Using the term in the original constrained meaning, the OP’s point makes sense. They’re feminists so instead of TERF their nonsense slur is “patriarchy”, and they call the trans movement the new patriarchy because they literally lack the ideological vocabulary to say anything else. But it is ridiculous to say that there is some mass movement of men pushing for Lia Thomas to swim against women. There is not. By and large, we do not care.
Men and women almost always have overlapping distributions on any measure we talk about. So there are a few very “woke” men, yes, but the whole phenomenon of society going crazy since the 2010’s or so (Daum likes to say 2012 I think) is overwhelmingly a woman problem. The question is whether women can fix themselves (my preferred solution) or whether at some point men will get sick of this shit (which may eventually happen).
Are the men who “fixed themselves” by becoming women and claiming to speak for women included in your analysis of men v women? Are the algorithms created and employed by tech companies (of predominantly men) that feed lunatic theories to impressionable girls? This is a whole society problem with some heroes and villains and many victims of both sexes. Reasonable people would do better to come together than bifurcate along sex lines.
The infinitesimally small number of men who have done this are included, proportionally, in my thinking.
The point is not to talk about heroes and villains. That’s moralizing in a way that I think is inappropriate. I prefer to think of social justice ideology, like any religion, as a psychological infection, not a DSM diagnosis but a true infectious disease (Gad Saad uses this view). So my point is that there is a large cohort of young women who are sick (and a much smaller, but yes nonzero male cohort). Being ill is not evil, but there is no point in treating people who are not sick.
And it is certainly true that even though social justice ideology supposedly champions women or black people or trans people, they can actually be its main victims. In other news, people living in Muslim countries are the main victims of the harms of Islam. This is not new.
So in my framing this is a problem that is experienced by certain people, but yes it is certainly a problem for the whole society. And we face this with any illness. Is it better to take a huge amount of money out of the average person’s paycheck to pay for expensive diabetes care, or do some people just need to eat less? Individual versus social responsibility is a live question. With regards to feminism/social justice/BLM/trans ideology/wokeness/whatever the next permutation is, it’s the same question. I think there’s a real case to be made that the cohort of young women with social media inflicted mental health issues (the Jon Haidt thesis) have been let down by broader society. I also think it’s important to define the problem accurately, and I would be very careful about making sure that any proposed solution is not worse than the problem.
Thanks for acknowledging that it is a problem for the whole society, which was my main point.
I am not rooting for women to fail. It does me no good.
Dearest Meghan,
It's always amusing when you revisit the "Doctor" controversy you created on Twitter. I think you are spot-on in noting a strong correlation between being a first-gen PhD and demanding to be addressed as "Doctor". (And being first-gen often correlates with race). I would bet that a substantial percentage of those demanding "Doctor" have an EdD (as you mentioned, blame Dr. William H. Cosby, Jr., EdD)
Interesting that you approvingly mention MLK, about whom there's an interesting side note. I wish I could remember who made this astute observation about the secularization of society: Sixty years ago, MLK was commonly referred to as "Reverend" or "Reverend Doctor". But over time, Reverend has fallen into disuse, in favor of just "Doctor". The point being that the secular-dominated MSM, academia and the chattering class are apprehensive about referencing the deep religious roots of MLK's philosophy and movement. We often quote his last address the night before his assassination, but seem to memory-hole that it was actually a sermon given in a Pentecostal church.
I'm not saying this perspective is right or wrong, just very interesting, especially in light of the broader controversy over using "Doctor" for non-medical degree holders.
The other distinction is that MLK lived in an era where it was actually hard to get a PhD. I’m not sure that a lot of current PhDs have even completed a suitably rigorous program of training to be considered a doctor in the academic sense.
Biden has been having episodes like this for years. The only reason this discussion is happening now is the debate was live and they couldn’t run cover for him before everyone saw it. People were talking about this literally before he got elected and it was true then.
I would agree on the subject of being called doctor. My sisters who have doctorates are split on the issue, one doesn’t want to hear it outside of very formal introductions, the other wants to have her students call her that in class. I tend to thing it’s a self confidence thing.
It’s always interesting to hear yourself referenced in a conversation. I would like to say, I bottle fed my daughters because my wife was physically incapable of breast feeding. That and a serious case of postpartum depression combined into me taking the baby out to the couch for the first 4-6 months and letting her sleep in the bedroom and recover. Both things were not really her fault, but they did end up with me taking a much, much heavier role in the childcare than was ideal, or safe honestly considering what I do for a living.
I do think that started us off on very uneven ground as far as who is handling most of the responsibilities around the house and with the kiddos. Reasserting a more realistic balance after it’s been reinforced with two child birth cycles is a tough hill to climb, and an impossible subject to broach without sounding like a “get back in the kitchen” misogynist.
Two things can be true at the same time. Joe Biden has suffered through a lot of tragedies in his life, 100% agree. But he is also a very corrupt individual.
It’s really interesting to me that nobody on the left (even center left) is aware of all Joe’s corruption that was documented on Hunter’s laptop. It makes me wonder if it’s because the left media has suppressed all the evidence about Joe’s corruption and successfully convinced everyone that the only thing on the laptop was about Hunter’s drug addiction and porn and only about Hunter? (Of which, I could give 2 shits.)
If you did actually look into what the laptop proves, I think you would have a different opinion about Joe. I’m sure it will eventually come out and send shock waves through the public like Joe’s cognitive decline. But by that time, it will no longer matter.
This is an honest question: can you point me to a source about Biden's corruption? I ask because Biden has been a politician for all his life, and never had a job that doesn't require votes, which for me means that he is very likely to have been involved in situations that involve implicit tit for tat for political favors. There is something different about individuals that make it their business to be in politics all their life, as opposed to individuals who have a life in business. It did not surprise me that his son profited on the Biden name, and Joe Biden was more than happy to comply-- after all, what else does Joe Biden have to give his son?
A lot of it is documented in a book called Laptop from Hell by Miranda Devine.
If there is a rebuttal to her book, I would be interested in reading it.
Would you agree to an arrangement in which Trump and Hunter Biden are each given a private island in the South Pacific, on the condition that they never return to the US?
Only if Joe goes with them.
Sarah captures my jaded world few but thank goodness we have Meghan to cheer us up
I’m just trying to wrap my head around the idea that one could “make out” with someone and not have it be the most important thing that ever happened.
I could tell you the name of every single person I’ve even allowed to hug me since I hit legal adulthood (twenty years). I could probably tell you most of the people I turned down too. I can remember the shock of fingers touching when I reached for a beaker at the same time as a girl in chemistry class twenty years ago. I could describe the strange sensation when one of the numerous women who have taken an interest in my sexuality sat next to me on a bus and her leg brushed against mine. I could tell you the name of the girl in second grade to whom I gave the bunny ears (a gesture performed by raising two of your finger’s behind the unknowing suspect’s head) and of the revulsion I felt when someone else in class decided that instead of being used to make fun of someone, the bunny ears on this occasion somehow meant I liked this girl.
Human psychology revolves around this stuff as far as I understand it. The cold, detached way in which so many women describe this subject is alienating, to say the least.
I think it’s less that they view sexuality in a cold, detached way, and more that they sometimes assume male sexuality (that scary other) is cold and detached in a way that isn’t really true.
Oh, but it can be both. And I think one of the unifying themes of the gender divide is the projection of one’s own experience onto the other sex.
The quote that’s been going around these circles lately is that women are pragmatists disguised as romantics, and men are romantics disguised as pragmatists. Which I think is true. Thus, it makes perfect sense that women would project a cold, calculating vision of sexuality onto men (and subsequently be afraid of it), whereas men would project a warm loving nature onto women (and then experience the crushing despair of feeling unloved when confronted with the reality of actual women).
I think sexuality is emotionally fraught for men and women alike, but that very emotionality causes us to worry that the opposite sex is less emotional, more detached, less invested, and more calculating than we are. These anxious projections then get codified and sold back to us as pseudoscientific evo-psych narratives, feeding a cycle of misinformation, alienation, and estrangement.
I don’t think it speaks well of the “heterodox” community that the invocation of evolution has become a negative in some people’s eyes. Wherever we are, it is presumably evolution that got us there.
And I also see a lot of this “six of one, half a dozen of the other” kind of argumentation that has a certain aesthetic appeal in its symmetry but which I think often does not hold up when exposed to reality.
The foundation of our disagreement seems to be that you think people project their own experience onto the other sex, whereas I think people are more prone to projecting their fears and anxieties onto the other sex, and to constructing a mental model of the other’s sexuality that is informed by those fears and anxieties. So instead of assuming sexuality is as emotionally laden for the other as it is for us, we assume they are cold and calculating and because that is what we are afraid of.
My critique is very specifically about evo-psych narratives that confirm these anxious projections and repackage them in the language of science (for example, the theory that men are “hard-wired” by evolution to be less emotionally invested in sexuality than women). These theories lack empirical support, are overly reductive and simplistic, are marginal in the academy, and owe their popular appeal primarily to the psychological dynamics I describe above. I don’t have any criticism of the theory of evolution more generally.
Since I don’t think of men and women as being interchangeable, I actually think that argument holds up rather well for 2000’s era feminism. There was the whole “rape culture” narrative, and a lot of fake science to back it up, and because women are naturally defensive-minded, they bought into it rather easily despite its absurdity.
But men, in general, have much lower rates of anxiety, which is a very mainstream conclusion in academic psychology, so I don’t see where even the susceptibility for some kind of equivalent would exist.
For all the talk of “sex differences”, I think this pattern is more or less the same for both men and women.
I know quite a few people, both men and women who have a similar view and experience with the opposite sex that you just described. I am not one of them. After the initial stages of youth where you’re experiencing each other for the first time in all sorts of innocent and not so innocent ways, there was a long stretch in my life where(after a few years), many of the women are reduced to a vague memory and a number. This is not out of disrespect for them, but the interactions did not mean much to me. There was so much else going on in my life at the time that women were a fun pastime both in the friendship and romantic sense. The thought process just didn’t go deeper than that.
What is funny to me is that the very first woman I pursued with the intent of possibly marrying, is now my wife. Its always stood as an example to me of how a different mindset can yield very different results haha.
It’s not that I’m doubting your account. It’s just outside the range of things I can even really imagine.
I totally get that. I have a sister and a brother who have very similar experiences to what you described. If I were to have this conversation with them, they would likely express the same opinion. This is why I don’t have this conversation with them haha. I don’t think they would approve.
First
*clap* *clap*
I think a big part of the difficulty parents face in juggling work and family comes down to wage discrimination against part-time workers. Labor Econ 101 assumes workers can set their own hours and keep the same wage rate, but in practice earnings (and expected future earnings) drop a lot if you deviate from the full-time 40+ hour a week norm. So parents are pushed into the situation Sarah describes where it’s more efficient for one parent to work full time and the other to stay home completely than for both to split the breadwinning and childcare. 40 work hours from one parent and 0 from another is more remunerative than 20 hours from each. But there’s nothing inevitable about this dynamic. It’s an outcome of labor market policy.
See also here - “If equally productive workers were paid the same on an hourly basis, [the gender pay gap] would disappear”: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/goldin_equalpay-cap.pdf
More here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/upshot/women-long-hours-greedy-professions.html?smid=tw-upshotnyt&smtyp=cur
Again, public policy could change this. Scandinavian countries make life much easier for working families.
One reason (straight) people in traditional / poorer societies have few extramarital affairs / hookups is that privacy is extremely hard to come by. You live with your whole family in crowded quarters, there is no place to go, and if you’re in a village or neighborhood everyone knows your business.
The whole DOCTOR Jill Biden saga reminds me of one of my favorite bits from the episode “Space Mutiny” of Mystery Science Theater 3000:
Dr. Leah Jansen: “He ejected and he’s alive!”
David Ryder: “Listen, lady!”
Dr. Leah (indignantly): “Doctor!”
Ryder: “Doctor!
Crow T. Robot: “Doctor Lady!”
Meghan, at the top of the show: "Gay Pride Month is over."
Me: "Yeah, "Gay" Pride Month has been over for at least three or four years."
Wasn't expecting the golden shower report at the top. Is this what I'm missing not being on Twitter? And in your previous episode when you said you wanted to talk about Admiral Levine, I thought you said Avril Lavigne. I thought "good god, why? Did she transition? Is she now a sk8er boi?"