"I think if people like you they cut you a lot of slack" is a great point by Meghan. I think In almost all of these scandal or "fall from grace" cases it's the fact that the person was unlikeable more than what the actual scandal was about. The scandal is usually the excuse to get rid of the unliked person.
I guess it's a question of which people like you. At Harvard at least they seem to quite like Gay, as they aren't actually getting rid of her. She's had to step down from the top position because of the scope and optics of the plagiarism, but she's keeping her faculty position and her nearly $1 million a year presidential salary. (I'm pretty unlikeable and I would love to have someone "get rid" of me to that tune.)
Well I don't mean to say that it's the ONLY aspect that matters, but it may be the most important. With Claudine Gay there's also the fact that Chris Rufo is involved and certainly far more hated than she is... So I think they will do anything to save face as much as possible and try to limit how much he "wins" this exchange.
Also, the fact that it took so long for Gay to step down suggests that she somehow still holds a considerable amount of power within that institution, so that also mitigates the "likeability" aspect.
I too would love to be so unliked to keep my million dollar salary to just go away.
The more sinister inverse is that if people don't like you they will go after you even without reason.
One of the things I always used to tell people who were dealing with sexual assault allegations is that it's not about the truth of what happened. Your character is what's under investigation; if it's determined that you are a "bad person", you're guilty. I think I myself underestimated how dystopian and how true that statement was.
Regarding the bucolic fantasy of the breastfeeding beautiful trad wife on the farm while the "alpha male" is out chopping wood: This is basically the fantasy that drives a lot of men to fight and die in wars... In the hopes they can be lucky enough to come home and get some slice of what that image is selling.
I found the image completely ridiculous, but I worry about poking too much fun at it.
The only thing I know about this Colleen Hoover person is that she is one of the biggest selling authors in the history of the NYT best-seller list. You could probably count her male readers on two hands.
I think the reason it works is the same reason those porn videos with choking that Meghan can't stop talking about work. We men like to see women being happy. If you tell us that wearing a plaid dress and milking cows make women happy, we're obsessed with it. If you tell us that sadomasochistic sex makes women happy, men will try it. If you tell us that BS woke politics make women happy, you'll see male feminists trying to push the boundaries of crazy further. If you told us that all women wanted in the world was to see men hopping around on one foot and singing Gilbert and Sullivan, the streets of major cities would suddenly be full of men doing exactly that.
We are easy propaganda victims where the propaganda concerns women's well-being.
I need to finish this episode but a few thoughts from what I’ve heard thus far. Maybe, to really send everyone into a tailspin, the next president of Harvard should be someone Jewish. 🤔 The irony would be too great for them to bear.
And also, Meghan - your musings about having a penis to put on whenever you felt like it reminded me of the song ‘Detachable Penis’ from the early 90s by King Missile 😂
One more thing - it drives me crazy when people say ‘she’s beautiful for her age.’ Just say a woman is beautiful and leave it at that!
That phrase used to drive me crazy, too. But now I don't know! I think that term is okay when it is being used by much younger people--they are trying to be truthful but still recognize beauty in someone.
Paul Newman was a good-looking man right up until the end, but I would feel a little strange calling him plain old "handsome" in his final days--maybe because it connotes that I might be attracted to him, and I am not?
I agree that its a bullshit phrase to use when the speaker is near or older than the age of the person being referenced, though. Then it is just bizarre.
For the last few months I've been doing some layman's study of selective college trustee boards. (I know I need to get a life).
Harvard Corporation is far from alone in being extremely opaque and secretive, both in the member selection process and in deliberations. Alumni at Yale and Dartmouth have gotten so fed up that they filed lawsuits against the schools.
My own alma mater loves asking for money yet I have no access to Board agendas or minutes. We have an election open to all alumni but to get on the ballot candidates must first pass a screening committee, the criteria of which is unpublished.
This coming from a parent of two young kiddos, I go to work for 10 hours a day and I wouldn’t trade for the stay at home gig. Hats off to Sarah for playing a little of both roles.
Lest you accuse me of plagiarism, Adam Carolla had the same observation and had a regular bit about it. Starts at the 2:06 mark. (Not the best example, but you get the idea.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7giEcTYX28Y
I hadn't listened to the whole podcast, but I have now and I know Sarah wants comments that battle those of the "mean" ones. Since I was one of the "mean" ones on this stream, let me say that I think Sarah and Megan are both outstanding in so many ways. Sarah's analytical abilities are awesome. If she writes a "think piece" it is always first rate. I am in awe of her activism and deeply respect it. She has quite often a different point of view and knowledge base than I do - I am two generations older. But, I trust her mind and heart both of which are very much in evidence every week here. (The only reason I said something "mean" was so she can know what an old lady like me wants her to re-think on one little issue!) Meghan is also great, of course, but I was "mean" to Sarah so I am trying to make it up to her. She may not read this as it is an old comment stream - but I will for sure jump on and say nice things next time, too.
The Claudine Gay situation is the sort of thing I think of whenever the conversation heads towards "men are falling behind, women are succeeding". Is Claudine Gay a "success"? She's rich, she has power and prestige, she has the unthinking adoration of a significant number of people, particularly since she became a political football.
And she accomplished it all by copy-pasting some BS social theories.
Who can we compare this to?
A male scholar who has done actual intellectual work and contributed meaningfully to human knowledge but is toiling away at some small college you've never heard of?
A man who didn't get all the extra help that she got and ended up on the street selling drugs and getting shot at 25?
A male accountant whose name nobody knows but who actually does all the administrative tasks and makes things work so people like Claudine Gay can take credit for it?
Even before the current controversy, I see no evidence that Claudine Gay contributed anything whatsoever to academic knowledge or any other social good. Maybe she is in fact a "great administrator", but I doubt it. This is why I say job titles and money are not great proxies for success. And it always amazes me when Sarah and Meghan talk about how broken the various institutions are and then move on to talking about how women are outperforming men...by the standards of those broken institutions.
The model farm maiden breastfeeding mom is a huge thing in the wellness/mom/influencer world. It really reminds me of pre war soviet and nazi propaganda....as anything "return to natuer-y" does. It's interesting to think about it in terms of porn and the question of whose fantasy it is because so much of the language around it is about the woman discovering that her true desire is not be an exhausted urban worker, but a relaxed mother in touch with her self and nature. It is a very alluring concept. There is also a lot of overlap between this aesthetic and an irreverent politics: anti vaccine, homeschool, doesn't believe covid is real, everything is poisoned, all government on any level is out to get us etc, probably doesn't actually vote etc., It's a very paranoid position even if there are of course truths within it. And meanwhile they are making a ton of money by being influencers, utterly invested financially, psychically and aesthetically in the modes of technology that are in fact out to get us, our attention, our money. There's a lot to unpack about this, I would be interested in hearing a whole segment about it!!
He’s dead so sadly he can’t come on the pod, but it’s a classic example of what Guy Debord called “recuperation”. Agrarian romanticism that has the potential to inspire resistance to consumerism is itself assimilated within the influencer economy.
I wanted to be that mom before smartphones and instagram existed! So I would say that general idea has been around for quite a while. I’m glad that there were no influencers back then to make me feel bad about my failure to measure up.
long before social media (and years before I became a mom) I saw a bucolic mother with a baby on her hip at an outdoor wedding. At some point it was her cue to strum a guitar for the bride's entrance, and she was so nonchalant: sitting the baby at her feet, pulling on the guitar and even doing a little tuning. I was mesmerized. THIS was the life I wanted. I nicknamed her 'Serenity Mom' and chased this fantasy for over a decade, right down to the homeschooling :)
I would have assumed it was from the same root as "science" but apparently it is the rare English word that does not have any predicate in Greek or Latin (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scion#Pronunciation).
Only 20 minutes in, but, 2 thoughts: 1) I don't have sympathy for Claudine Gay. I think she's been playing or riding the system for a long time and she finally got caught. I think she knows this. In a proper world, she would be released from her tenured position at Harvard for that plagiarism. 2) Harvard should surprise the heck out of everybody and hire a White Republican Man as their new President!! Wouldn't that get everybody's attention!
Regarding female promiscuity, I wonder if there's actually been any research done into the demographics of it (and doubt it, and suspect that if so it's questionable anyway). One thing I do know is that it;s not uncommon for girls who were sexually abused to grow up to be promiscuous, as they've been "programmed" to believe that the primary (possibly only) route to male approval is sexual activity - and in some cases that a sure route to potentially terrifying male disapproval is declining sexual overtures. Of course, that doesn't mean either that all abuse survivors are promiscuous, or that all promiscuous women are abuse survivors. But this would presumably play out similarly whether the victim grows up to be exceptionally attractive or not.
Where looks might come into play, I expect, is purely as a function of selectivity. That could look like promiscuity in that a highly attractive woman will hold out for what she considers a more attractive male, which limits the pool of sexual availability. But I'm not sure I'd conflate that with promiscuity per se. A less attractive woman might not hold as high a standard for what she considers acceptable in a partner, and that might make it easier for her to find a partner. But that doesn't necessarily entail *multiple* partners, or a higher sex drive. (Though maybe she can churn through more "candidates" over the course of years? I suppose that would be a kind of promiscuity, but probably not what we usually think of when we say the word.)
I *thought* I recalled something about BMI and "risky sexual behavior", but overall, yeah, I don't think its a subject much studied. Weird.
I definitely agree that a "higher body count" doesn't indicate high sex drive--at all. I've known quite a few women who slept with guys before they were ready because they thought they "had to". I presume that's a feeling more likely to occur in less attractive women, all else being equal. :/
Speaking from my own experience, promiscuity was cope for not being beautiful. I could receive a similar sort of short-term validation of my physical self that beautiful women get for existing, by offering that. I had short term sexual relationships purely as a salve for my wounded ugly-girl ego. I can’t speak for others but I would not be surprised if this was common. I think this may be what Sarah was referring to?
The idea that “community” and “meaningful social interaction” can be recovered through a rote conversation with a Trader Joe’s cashier who is forced to ask you how you’re doing as a condition of employment seems a little silly to me. We should welcome time-saving technologies like grocery delivery and working from home. They give us more time to spend with our friends and loved ones - relationships that are actually meaningful.
If you don’t, it gives you more time to form such relationships. If you don’t want to do that, there’s still no reason you would get anything worthwhile from the experience where, as David Foster Wallace put it, “you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death”.
To be clear, I agree with you that there’s something dystopian about the increasingly forced interactions that people have in business contexts. I’ve had those interactions at Trader Joe’s and elsewhere. I occasionally find meaningful interactions arise when I talk to restaurant owners and tour guides and such, but that is not the median customer service experience.
However, for the increasingly lonely American populace, I do not think the barrier to forming relationships is time.
Sure, and I'm not saying time should be 0%, but realistically, before labor unions and various work hour restrictions, people worked much longer hours. And the tech issue sure, but I wouldn't describe that as being primarily about time.
Indeed, my framing has been, and remains, that declining marriage/fertility/etc. reflects that actual women are fighting a battle for male attention against porn and are losing. Anyone who has time to scroll around anything on the internet has time to form real life relationships, the issue is that they have elected to use that time for something else.
Regarding 3, people forget how much of contemporary debate about the social impact of smartphones, video games, etc. was anticipated in the 90s and earlier by concerns around television. Meghan probably remembers it.
Lest I lose track of this thought, I'm reminded of a time when I was staying at an Airbnb and the host was out of town, but nonetheless sent me a message saying she wished she'd had the chance to meet me (presumably based on my profile). There were some subsequent messages, and I sent some replies but I was in an awkward position. Who knows what the rules are in these new situations that technology has put us in? I certainly don't.
This individual, at least based on what limited information I had, appeared to be a potentially attractive and interesting woman in my age bracket, and she even suggested I hang around on the day of my departure as she was flying back into town.
And I would hate to just categorically rule out that people could meet and form relationships as a side effect of business transactions, but I find these situations fraught with uncertainty, and uncertainty to me means unsafety. I've had too many terrible experiences.
The resultant dynamic means that with people having fewer chance encounters and so many social factors stacked against talking to strangers, trying to meet someone is more and more threading the eye of a needle.
Re: Meghan's deepest bodily desires, I refer her to one-hit wonder King Missile's hard-to-forget song "Detachable Penis." (I, for one, long for a cloaca. And at least one penis.)
First, Sarah - you have no gaydar whatsoever, thus you really must stop it as it is always fairly offensive and always unnecessary. You are, in fact, beginning to really piss me off, as this is one of, now, many incidences. Second, Gay wasn't "cancelled" - she was forced to resign due to incompetence and sloppy scholarship and, no, she wasn't a good administrator. Third, I disagree with Sarah - if a white guy did exactly what Gay did - essentially pushing the DEI agenda and participating in actual cancelling of qualified people - Rufo and company would have gone after him, too. Fourth, I don't feel sorry for her in the slightest. She deserved her fate.
You are being deeply unfair. I am not the only one who thought she was a lesbian (Meghan agreed, if I recall), and I saw many people talking about it on Twitter early on. I also don't know what could be offensive about it, even if I was the only one to think so. Did I say something negative about her dress / lesbians? Or is the problem simply noticing that lesbians are more likely to dress a certain way?
If I was *right* about her orientation, would this still be offensive?
And I have no idea what other gaydar failure you could be talking about, I can't remember any other instance like this.
And as for the rest, I think you missed the point. Rufo would be far less likely to go after a white guy's resume, because he would (correctly) guess that the white guy got there *because* of his resume, and that it would have likely been vetted on a dozen separate occasions before he got to such a high office.
Sarah, I don't want to be unfair but I do want you to think about it. (And, yes, you have said similar things in the past about lesbian culture in a way I found offensive - though not horribly so. I don't think that you are a homophobe in the least, but I do think you are cavalier in this area.) So, I will give more context to help you to understand my reaction.
If you had just talked about Gay, I would have been, perhaps, annoyed but it would not have provoked any response. It was the Elizabeth Warren comment that put me over the edge into pissed. So, let me give some context.
Jodie Foster. Kristy McNicol. Sheila Kuehl. Nancy Kulp. (Look those last three up, Sarah.) It wasn't about their clothing. I was just a kid and certainly not yet out (and the first three weren't either). When I first saw Jodie, she was 7. Kristy, when she was 14, Sheila when she was 22, and Nancy when she was 49. I knew that all of them were like me. It was deeply personal and deeply important to me that there were girls and women out there "like me" because there weren't any in my school or life otherwise. That is gaydar. That is what you do not possess.
For decades my clothing was a point of harassment. To not dress "like a girl" led to lots of pain. I am certainly still not over it. The scar is much faded but it will always remain.
I was pissed because you were flippant, talking in an area that you do not have experience, and you did not realize - even a little bit - that this could cause pain to a lot of lesbians (and straight women who don't like feminine clothing.) It's a very fraught area. Like black women's hair (and you ended up stepping into that one too!). Maybe - I don't know - it's like colorism is to you?
I just don't think it is something you should speculate about or comment on unless it has material importance. (With Gay, it might have - so that is one reason the Warren comment pissed me off much more.) Or, at least, fully understand what us non-femmes have gone through and, in fact, still go through - though to a much lesser degree. Does that help you understand my reaction?
And, just for the record, no Meghan didn't agree with you.
On the other issue I understood your point; I didn't agree with it. My contention: That someone who got that job was going to be woke. That's what the Harvard Corporation wanted. Back in the day, sure it would be Larry Summers - fully qualified. But at that point, it was going to be a SJW. You assume that any white guy would have those credentials. Why? I certainly don't. Though, I admit, it would probably be a white gay guy. I don't trust Harvard to fully vet anybody of that ilk. And neither would Rufo.
My gaydar is uncanny and frankly I was shocked to learn that Gay is not a lesbian. (Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if there's more to the story, but I don't actually care about her sexuality).
Gay was indeed forced to resign (sort of) for previous bad behavior (I say "sort of" because she's still on staff and still collecting her $900,000 a year salary in perpetuity, so I'm not entirely sure what "resigned" actually means here).
Having just listened to that segment, I believe both Meghan and Sarah expressed that they believed a white male admin would've suffered the same fate, only sooner. So not sure if Rufo would've had a reason. However, neither would he have had a reason in Gay's case if she hadn't stuck her head up and equivocated - apparently with deceitful intent - on campus antisemetism before Congress. Yes, if a white male had done the same, he would probably have been dug into by the same people.
No sympathy here, either. She's essentially a monster who esposes and embodies an evil and incorrect ideology, the endgame of which we've already seen played out in genocidal nightmares from Ukraine to China to Cambodia, who holds herself to a different set of standards than she does other, "lesser" humans. And despite all the theater around her, she's not actually paying a price for being exposed as the thing that she is.
I am not going to listen again but Sarah did say that there was some racism in that they wouldn't investigate a white man as they did Gay. My contention is that would if the white man had the same politics.
Why, though? Gay's politics are not all that remarkable in academia.
Rufu's hunch (which is technically racist, but reasonable, even likely) was that Gay got there primarily because of her race/sex, which could not happen to a white man, no matter his politics.
It could happen to a white man. Probably gay or "trans" - true! But even if straight, if he came in us a SJW - and had the woke politics that Gay did - Rufo absolutely would have come at him at this particular institution. The fact that her politics aren't remarkable is exactly what drives him.
Sure, his hatred of those politics are a motivator. But why would Rufo waste his efforts on someone who is much less likely to have that kind of weakness?
Besides, he probably received the tip from someone else in the know. It is not even unlikely that her plagiarism was known by many people long before this scandal, but that no one was motivated to act / investigate deeper because of her race/sex.
Largely agreed. I'm sure there are plenty of white men out there in places of prestige with the same toxic outlook. And if they were to appear to before congress and blatantly lie that they have a liberal outlook on speech issues, the would probably get some attention they'd prefer not to, also.
I guess I'm guilty of stereotyping because I long assumed Claudine Gay was a lesbian because of her occupation combined with her appearance. Found out about 10 days ago she has a husband and kid. (Not that the husband and kid preclude one from being a lesbian, i.e. Bill DeBlasio's wife, but it's certainly strong evidence.)
Anyhow, people are completely forgetting that the straight white male President of Stanford was recently booted for allegations of academic misconduct (he's a STEM guy accused of falsifying and/or manipulating data). Like Gay, the misconduct had occurred literally decades earlier but apparently he pissed off somebody at Stanford. (To be fair, Stanford was not embroiled in a national political controversy at the time).
I agree (about the plagiarism, my gaydar is also weak at best); that many instances of plagiarism isn't a fluke. It's cheating. I'm sure you'd call out your students if you noticed they'd cribbed from a well known essay.
I think the university presidents thought they were going to make history against their Republican interlocutors, ushering in a new era of intersectional logic, and it fell flat.
"I think if people like you they cut you a lot of slack" is a great point by Meghan. I think In almost all of these scandal or "fall from grace" cases it's the fact that the person was unlikeable more than what the actual scandal was about. The scandal is usually the excuse to get rid of the unliked person.
This is why I’m going to get kicked off the pod.
Claudine showed you the way: Just consolidate your power enough so that Meghan pays you $1m just to go away. Simple.
I guess it's a question of which people like you. At Harvard at least they seem to quite like Gay, as they aren't actually getting rid of her. She's had to step down from the top position because of the scope and optics of the plagiarism, but she's keeping her faculty position and her nearly $1 million a year presidential salary. (I'm pretty unlikeable and I would love to have someone "get rid" of me to that tune.)
Well I don't mean to say that it's the ONLY aspect that matters, but it may be the most important. With Claudine Gay there's also the fact that Chris Rufo is involved and certainly far more hated than she is... So I think they will do anything to save face as much as possible and try to limit how much he "wins" this exchange.
Also, the fact that it took so long for Gay to step down suggests that she somehow still holds a considerable amount of power within that institution, so that also mitigates the "likeability" aspect.
I too would love to be so unliked to keep my million dollar salary to just go away.
The more sinister inverse is that if people don't like you they will go after you even without reason.
One of the things I always used to tell people who were dealing with sexual assault allegations is that it's not about the truth of what happened. Your character is what's under investigation; if it's determined that you are a "bad person", you're guilty. I think I myself underestimated how dystopian and how true that statement was.
Regarding the bucolic fantasy of the breastfeeding beautiful trad wife on the farm while the "alpha male" is out chopping wood: This is basically the fantasy that drives a lot of men to fight and die in wars... In the hopes they can be lucky enough to come home and get some slice of what that image is selling.
I found the image completely ridiculous, but I worry about poking too much fun at it.
I think a lot of women harbor that one, too. See the many romance novel shelves at BN.
The only thing I know about this Colleen Hoover person is that she is one of the biggest selling authors in the history of the NYT best-seller list. You could probably count her male readers on two hands.
Jerry O'Connell loves "Coho" books. https://www.tiktok.com/@elvisduranshow/video/7208338646636743982
Respect to anyone with multiple bestsellers on the list concurrently!
I think the reason it works is the same reason those porn videos with choking that Meghan can't stop talking about work. We men like to see women being happy. If you tell us that wearing a plaid dress and milking cows make women happy, we're obsessed with it. If you tell us that sadomasochistic sex makes women happy, men will try it. If you tell us that BS woke politics make women happy, you'll see male feminists trying to push the boundaries of crazy further. If you told us that all women wanted in the world was to see men hopping around on one foot and singing Gilbert and Sullivan, the streets of major cities would suddenly be full of men doing exactly that.
We are easy propaganda victims where the propaganda concerns women's well-being.
I need to finish this episode but a few thoughts from what I’ve heard thus far. Maybe, to really send everyone into a tailspin, the next president of Harvard should be someone Jewish. 🤔 The irony would be too great for them to bear.
And also, Meghan - your musings about having a penis to put on whenever you felt like it reminded me of the song ‘Detachable Penis’ from the early 90s by King Missile 😂
One more thing - it drives me crazy when people say ‘she’s beautiful for her age.’ Just say a woman is beautiful and leave it at that!
That phrase used to drive me crazy, too. But now I don't know! I think that term is okay when it is being used by much younger people--they are trying to be truthful but still recognize beauty in someone.
Paul Newman was a good-looking man right up until the end, but I would feel a little strange calling him plain old "handsome" in his final days--maybe because it connotes that I might be attracted to him, and I am not?
I agree that its a bullshit phrase to use when the speaker is near or older than the age of the person being referenced, though. Then it is just bizarre.
For the last few months I've been doing some layman's study of selective college trustee boards. (I know I need to get a life).
Harvard Corporation is far from alone in being extremely opaque and secretive, both in the member selection process and in deliberations. Alumni at Yale and Dartmouth have gotten so fed up that they filed lawsuits against the schools.
My own alma mater loves asking for money yet I have no access to Board agendas or minutes. We have an election open to all alumni but to get on the ballot candidates must first pass a screening committee, the criteria of which is unpublished.
Goddamn, three episodes in four days.
Sarah finally hired a babysitter.
Hahahaha. Things are making much more sense now.
This coming from a parent of two young kiddos, I go to work for 10 hours a day and I wouldn’t trade for the stay at home gig. Hats off to Sarah for playing a little of both roles.
OMG the pan pipes reference! It's so true, flute solo= wisdom. Kill Bill comes to mind.
Lest you accuse me of plagiarism, Adam Carolla had the same observation and had a regular bit about it. Starts at the 2:06 mark. (Not the best example, but you get the idea.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7giEcTYX28Y
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
Please submit your resignation to Sarah ASAP. Lizzo will be the new cohost.
I don't know if Ian Anderson exactly says "wisdom" to me, but he says something...
Kind of fun video of a classical flautist commentating on a live performance solo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKSrq_qjB_Y
FIRST!
FIFTH!
I hadn't listened to the whole podcast, but I have now and I know Sarah wants comments that battle those of the "mean" ones. Since I was one of the "mean" ones on this stream, let me say that I think Sarah and Megan are both outstanding in so many ways. Sarah's analytical abilities are awesome. If she writes a "think piece" it is always first rate. I am in awe of her activism and deeply respect it. She has quite often a different point of view and knowledge base than I do - I am two generations older. But, I trust her mind and heart both of which are very much in evidence every week here. (The only reason I said something "mean" was so she can know what an old lady like me wants her to re-think on one little issue!) Meghan is also great, of course, but I was "mean" to Sarah so I am trying to make it up to her. She may not read this as it is an old comment stream - but I will for sure jump on and say nice things next time, too.
The Claudine Gay situation is the sort of thing I think of whenever the conversation heads towards "men are falling behind, women are succeeding". Is Claudine Gay a "success"? She's rich, she has power and prestige, she has the unthinking adoration of a significant number of people, particularly since she became a political football.
And she accomplished it all by copy-pasting some BS social theories.
Who can we compare this to?
A male scholar who has done actual intellectual work and contributed meaningfully to human knowledge but is toiling away at some small college you've never heard of?
A man who didn't get all the extra help that she got and ended up on the street selling drugs and getting shot at 25?
A male accountant whose name nobody knows but who actually does all the administrative tasks and makes things work so people like Claudine Gay can take credit for it?
Even before the current controversy, I see no evidence that Claudine Gay contributed anything whatsoever to academic knowledge or any other social good. Maybe she is in fact a "great administrator", but I doubt it. This is why I say job titles and money are not great proxies for success. And it always amazes me when Sarah and Meghan talk about how broken the various institutions are and then move on to talking about how women are outperforming men...by the standards of those broken institutions.
The model farm maiden breastfeeding mom is a huge thing in the wellness/mom/influencer world. It really reminds me of pre war soviet and nazi propaganda....as anything "return to natuer-y" does. It's interesting to think about it in terms of porn and the question of whose fantasy it is because so much of the language around it is about the woman discovering that her true desire is not be an exhausted urban worker, but a relaxed mother in touch with her self and nature. It is a very alluring concept. There is also a lot of overlap between this aesthetic and an irreverent politics: anti vaccine, homeschool, doesn't believe covid is real, everything is poisoned, all government on any level is out to get us etc, probably doesn't actually vote etc., It's a very paranoid position even if there are of course truths within it. And meanwhile they are making a ton of money by being influencers, utterly invested financially, psychically and aesthetically in the modes of technology that are in fact out to get us, our attention, our money. There's a lot to unpack about this, I would be interested in hearing a whole segment about it!!
That is a perfect summation. Thank you. Is there anyone who's written about or done work on this subject that would be good for us to talk with?
He’s dead so sadly he can’t come on the pod, but it’s a classic example of what Guy Debord called “recuperation”. Agrarian romanticism that has the potential to inspire resistance to consumerism is itself assimilated within the influencer economy.
The Conspirituality Podcast has done lots of episodes about these Retvrn influencer types.
I look out for it, but I haven't found anything substantial, or anyone writing through the larger cultural perspective. I will let you know if I do.
I wanted to be that mom before smartphones and instagram existed! So I would say that general idea has been around for quite a while. I’m glad that there were no influencers back then to make me feel bad about my failure to measure up.
long before social media (and years before I became a mom) I saw a bucolic mother with a baby on her hip at an outdoor wedding. At some point it was her cue to strum a guitar for the bride's entrance, and she was so nonchalant: sitting the baby at her feet, pulling on the guitar and even doing a little tuning. I was mesmerized. THIS was the life I wanted. I nicknamed her 'Serenity Mom' and chased this fantasy for over a decade, right down to the homeschooling :)
Oh man, I thought for sure it was pronounced "sky-on" not "sy-on". Humbled.
I would have assumed it was from the same root as "science" but apparently it is the rare English word that does not have any predicate in Greek or Latin (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scion#Pronunciation).
Only 20 minutes in, but, 2 thoughts: 1) I don't have sympathy for Claudine Gay. I think she's been playing or riding the system for a long time and she finally got caught. I think she knows this. In a proper world, she would be released from her tenured position at Harvard for that plagiarism. 2) Harvard should surprise the heck out of everybody and hire a White Republican Man as their new President!! Wouldn't that get everybody's attention!
Regarding female promiscuity, I wonder if there's actually been any research done into the demographics of it (and doubt it, and suspect that if so it's questionable anyway). One thing I do know is that it;s not uncommon for girls who were sexually abused to grow up to be promiscuous, as they've been "programmed" to believe that the primary (possibly only) route to male approval is sexual activity - and in some cases that a sure route to potentially terrifying male disapproval is declining sexual overtures. Of course, that doesn't mean either that all abuse survivors are promiscuous, or that all promiscuous women are abuse survivors. But this would presumably play out similarly whether the victim grows up to be exceptionally attractive or not.
Where looks might come into play, I expect, is purely as a function of selectivity. That could look like promiscuity in that a highly attractive woman will hold out for what she considers a more attractive male, which limits the pool of sexual availability. But I'm not sure I'd conflate that with promiscuity per se. A less attractive woman might not hold as high a standard for what she considers acceptable in a partner, and that might make it easier for her to find a partner. But that doesn't necessarily entail *multiple* partners, or a higher sex drive. (Though maybe she can churn through more "candidates" over the course of years? I suppose that would be a kind of promiscuity, but probably not what we usually think of when we say the word.)
I *thought* I recalled something about BMI and "risky sexual behavior", but overall, yeah, I don't think its a subject much studied. Weird.
I definitely agree that a "higher body count" doesn't indicate high sex drive--at all. I've known quite a few women who slept with guys before they were ready because they thought they "had to". I presume that's a feeling more likely to occur in less attractive women, all else being equal. :/
There may be a common cause. The big five trait conscientiousness is associated with less risky sexual behavior and lower bmi for both men and women.
Speaking from my own experience, promiscuity was cope for not being beautiful. I could receive a similar sort of short-term validation of my physical self that beautiful women get for existing, by offering that. I had short term sexual relationships purely as a salve for my wounded ugly-girl ego. I can’t speak for others but I would not be surprised if this was common. I think this may be what Sarah was referring to?
The idea that “community” and “meaningful social interaction” can be recovered through a rote conversation with a Trader Joe’s cashier who is forced to ask you how you’re doing as a condition of employment seems a little silly to me. We should welcome time-saving technologies like grocery delivery and working from home. They give us more time to spend with our friends and loved ones - relationships that are actually meaningful.
If you have any.
If you don’t, it gives you more time to form such relationships. If you don’t want to do that, there’s still no reason you would get anything worthwhile from the experience where, as David Foster Wallace put it, “you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death”.
To be clear, I agree with you that there’s something dystopian about the increasingly forced interactions that people have in business contexts. I’ve had those interactions at Trader Joe’s and elsewhere. I occasionally find meaningful interactions arise when I talk to restaurant owners and tour guides and such, but that is not the median customer service experience.
However, for the increasingly lonely American populace, I do not think the barrier to forming relationships is time.
Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone explained it as:
10% due to pressure of work and double-career families
10% to suburbanization, commuting, and urban sprawl
25% percent to the expansion of electronic entertainment
50% to generational change
15 to 20% remained unexplained
1, 2, and arguably 3 all seem connected to time.
Sure, and I'm not saying time should be 0%, but realistically, before labor unions and various work hour restrictions, people worked much longer hours. And the tech issue sure, but I wouldn't describe that as being primarily about time.
Indeed, my framing has been, and remains, that declining marriage/fertility/etc. reflects that actual women are fighting a battle for male attention against porn and are losing. Anyone who has time to scroll around anything on the internet has time to form real life relationships, the issue is that they have elected to use that time for something else.
Regarding 3, people forget how much of contemporary debate about the social impact of smartphones, video games, etc. was anticipated in the 90s and earlier by concerns around television. Meghan probably remembers it.
Lest I lose track of this thought, I'm reminded of a time when I was staying at an Airbnb and the host was out of town, but nonetheless sent me a message saying she wished she'd had the chance to meet me (presumably based on my profile). There were some subsequent messages, and I sent some replies but I was in an awkward position. Who knows what the rules are in these new situations that technology has put us in? I certainly don't.
This individual, at least based on what limited information I had, appeared to be a potentially attractive and interesting woman in my age bracket, and she even suggested I hang around on the day of my departure as she was flying back into town.
And I would hate to just categorically rule out that people could meet and form relationships as a side effect of business transactions, but I find these situations fraught with uncertainty, and uncertainty to me means unsafety. I've had too many terrible experiences.
The resultant dynamic means that with people having fewer chance encounters and so many social factors stacked against talking to strangers, trying to meet someone is more and more threading the eye of a needle.
Re: Meghan's deepest bodily desires, I refer her to one-hit wonder King Missile's hard-to-forget song "Detachable Penis." (I, for one, long for a cloaca. And at least one penis.)
First, Sarah - you have no gaydar whatsoever, thus you really must stop it as it is always fairly offensive and always unnecessary. You are, in fact, beginning to really piss me off, as this is one of, now, many incidences. Second, Gay wasn't "cancelled" - she was forced to resign due to incompetence and sloppy scholarship and, no, she wasn't a good administrator. Third, I disagree with Sarah - if a white guy did exactly what Gay did - essentially pushing the DEI agenda and participating in actual cancelling of qualified people - Rufo and company would have gone after him, too. Fourth, I don't feel sorry for her in the slightest. She deserved her fate.
You are being deeply unfair. I am not the only one who thought she was a lesbian (Meghan agreed, if I recall), and I saw many people talking about it on Twitter early on. I also don't know what could be offensive about it, even if I was the only one to think so. Did I say something negative about her dress / lesbians? Or is the problem simply noticing that lesbians are more likely to dress a certain way?
If I was *right* about her orientation, would this still be offensive?
And I have no idea what other gaydar failure you could be talking about, I can't remember any other instance like this.
And as for the rest, I think you missed the point. Rufo would be far less likely to go after a white guy's resume, because he would (correctly) guess that the white guy got there *because* of his resume, and that it would have likely been vetted on a dozen separate occasions before he got to such a high office.
Sarah, I don't want to be unfair but I do want you to think about it. (And, yes, you have said similar things in the past about lesbian culture in a way I found offensive - though not horribly so. I don't think that you are a homophobe in the least, but I do think you are cavalier in this area.) So, I will give more context to help you to understand my reaction.
If you had just talked about Gay, I would have been, perhaps, annoyed but it would not have provoked any response. It was the Elizabeth Warren comment that put me over the edge into pissed. So, let me give some context.
Jodie Foster. Kristy McNicol. Sheila Kuehl. Nancy Kulp. (Look those last three up, Sarah.) It wasn't about their clothing. I was just a kid and certainly not yet out (and the first three weren't either). When I first saw Jodie, she was 7. Kristy, when she was 14, Sheila when she was 22, and Nancy when she was 49. I knew that all of them were like me. It was deeply personal and deeply important to me that there were girls and women out there "like me" because there weren't any in my school or life otherwise. That is gaydar. That is what you do not possess.
For decades my clothing was a point of harassment. To not dress "like a girl" led to lots of pain. I am certainly still not over it. The scar is much faded but it will always remain.
I was pissed because you were flippant, talking in an area that you do not have experience, and you did not realize - even a little bit - that this could cause pain to a lot of lesbians (and straight women who don't like feminine clothing.) It's a very fraught area. Like black women's hair (and you ended up stepping into that one too!). Maybe - I don't know - it's like colorism is to you?
I just don't think it is something you should speculate about or comment on unless it has material importance. (With Gay, it might have - so that is one reason the Warren comment pissed me off much more.) Or, at least, fully understand what us non-femmes have gone through and, in fact, still go through - though to a much lesser degree. Does that help you understand my reaction?
And, just for the record, no Meghan didn't agree with you.
On the other issue I understood your point; I didn't agree with it. My contention: That someone who got that job was going to be woke. That's what the Harvard Corporation wanted. Back in the day, sure it would be Larry Summers - fully qualified. But at that point, it was going to be a SJW. You assume that any white guy would have those credentials. Why? I certainly don't. Though, I admit, it would probably be a white gay guy. I don't trust Harvard to fully vet anybody of that ilk. And neither would Rufo.
My gaydar is uncanny and frankly I was shocked to learn that Gay is not a lesbian. (Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if there's more to the story, but I don't actually care about her sexuality).
Gay was indeed forced to resign (sort of) for previous bad behavior (I say "sort of" because she's still on staff and still collecting her $900,000 a year salary in perpetuity, so I'm not entirely sure what "resigned" actually means here).
Having just listened to that segment, I believe both Meghan and Sarah expressed that they believed a white male admin would've suffered the same fate, only sooner. So not sure if Rufo would've had a reason. However, neither would he have had a reason in Gay's case if she hadn't stuck her head up and equivocated - apparently with deceitful intent - on campus antisemetism before Congress. Yes, if a white male had done the same, he would probably have been dug into by the same people.
No sympathy here, either. She's essentially a monster who esposes and embodies an evil and incorrect ideology, the endgame of which we've already seen played out in genocidal nightmares from Ukraine to China to Cambodia, who holds herself to a different set of standards than she does other, "lesser" humans. And despite all the theater around her, she's not actually paying a price for being exposed as the thing that she is.
I am not going to listen again but Sarah did say that there was some racism in that they wouldn't investigate a white man as they did Gay. My contention is that would if the white man had the same politics.
Why, though? Gay's politics are not all that remarkable in academia.
Rufu's hunch (which is technically racist, but reasonable, even likely) was that Gay got there primarily because of her race/sex, which could not happen to a white man, no matter his politics.
I don't know by what definition pointing out obvious truths (or even plausible speculations) could be racist.
It could happen to a white man. Probably gay or "trans" - true! But even if straight, if he came in us a SJW - and had the woke politics that Gay did - Rufo absolutely would have come at him at this particular institution. The fact that her politics aren't remarkable is exactly what drives him.
Sure, his hatred of those politics are a motivator. But why would Rufo waste his efforts on someone who is much less likely to have that kind of weakness?
Besides, he probably received the tip from someone else in the know. It is not even unlikely that her plagiarism was known by many people long before this scandal, but that no one was motivated to act / investigate deeper because of her race/sex.
Largely agreed. I'm sure there are plenty of white men out there in places of prestige with the same toxic outlook. And if they were to appear to before congress and blatantly lie that they have a liberal outlook on speech issues, the would probably get some attention they'd prefer not to, also.
I guess I'm guilty of stereotyping because I long assumed Claudine Gay was a lesbian because of her occupation combined with her appearance. Found out about 10 days ago she has a husband and kid. (Not that the husband and kid preclude one from being a lesbian, i.e. Bill DeBlasio's wife, but it's certainly strong evidence.)
Anyhow, people are completely forgetting that the straight white male President of Stanford was recently booted for allegations of academic misconduct (he's a STEM guy accused of falsifying and/or manipulating data). Like Gay, the misconduct had occurred literally decades earlier but apparently he pissed off somebody at Stanford. (To be fair, Stanford was not embroiled in a national political controversy at the time).
Stanford pres proves my point, though!
His ousting took months of investigation, because it wasn't something easy to catch, and look at this *incredible* resume.
Gay's CV is embarrassing for a tenured professor at basically any good university, much less Presidency!
https://president.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/02/2020.02-Tessier-Lavigne-CV.pdf
I agree (about the plagiarism, my gaydar is also weak at best); that many instances of plagiarism isn't a fluke. It's cheating. I'm sure you'd call out your students if you noticed they'd cribbed from a well known essay.
I think the university presidents thought they were going to make history against their Republican interlocutors, ushering in a new era of intersectional logic, and it fell flat.