RE: sluts who become prudes. This is one of my most despised complaints from (certain) men. It's like asking why you behave differently on vacation: for whatever reason jumping into bed with someone felt like a good idea at the time, and maybe it ended badly so you learned your lesson. I know so many women who would wait to have sex only to be dumped as soon as it happens anyway, getting gunshy isn't strange, and the attitude that men are entitled to it because others have been granted the privilege of fucking you (sarcasm) is so off-putting. Sex happens on a case by case basis, it's not something someone you're dating is owed, it's supposed to be a mutually satisfying experience, not a privilege granted to the male.
I was a failed slut and nowadays wouldn't rush into bed with a man because I've changed, just like how I used to avoid carbs and now I don't, or how someone else might've been a heavy drinker/drug user and aren't anymore, or used to eat meat and now are vegan. Another analogy that might work is how you behave on vacation vs when you're at home. You might want to take risks and try things when there's no pressure for it to work out, for that to be held against you by potential serious partners is so gross.
If someone is a bad fit for you, waiting to have sex with them until later in the relationship will not turn them into a good fit for you. Likewise, if someone is a good fit for you, it’s hard to see how having sex with them early in the relationship would turn them into a bad fit for you. Somebody who would leave you over this sort of thing is probably not someone you would want anyway. People should probably just do as they feel comfortable, not pressure anyone else to do anything they’re not comfortable with, avoid overthinking things or “strategizing”, and not worry too much.
This sort of thing would only work if the pressure is societal rather than just individual. Individually it’s just likely to make people mad.
It should be noted that even with societal pressure the failure to remain abstinent is very common. The difference being that if you want to openly live with and sleep with your partner, marriage becomes the norm. It’s not like all these religious communities were purely abstinent, natures pull is far too strong for that.
One irony to note is that deep-blue states like California with more liberal sexual norms actually have lower rates of divorce and fewer out-of-wedlock births than deep-red states where the social pressure to remain abstinent before marriage is more persistent. And as Meghan noted in the episode, pre-sexual revolution norms really did lead to a lot of unhappy marriages, which is why there was a big surge in divorce in the 1970s when people became more free to exit those unions.
That’s true as far as I know. It makes me wonder if the combination of a larger society that is highly accepting of divorce with the religious pressures create an unstable environment for that.
Certainly there were quite a few not good marriages due to this but there are also not good marriages that happen in the culture we have now.
It makes me think that we might just be thinking of marriage in the wrong way as a society. Unfortunately there are so many anecdotes in any direction on this subject that it makes everything messy.
Bad marriages will always be with us, but I’m skeptical of the notion that more restrictive sexual norms will make anything better. People who really want to marry each other are perfectly free to do so even under the most permissive norms - nobody is advocating for stigmatizing commitment. So all restrictive norms will do is push people who don’t really want to commit to do so anyway to meet social expectations. The outcome is that people have to spend their lives with people they don’t love. Seems like a recipe for disaster to me. On the margin, the additional marriages contracted as a result of restrictive sexual norms are highly unlikely to be happy. If they would be happy, the people involved would marry of their own accord without society needing to push them into it.
Hmmm, logically there’s not much to argue there. I agree with most of that statement.
The issue I see is that I think you’re dramatically overestimating the effect of the social pressure I’m implying. People flat out ignore social pressure in all sorts of ways and have done so since the dawn of time. No one is advocating dystopian control over this issue. The cut and dry logic of your previous statement implies that the only reason people get together is sex. That’s just not true. This whole debate is framed on a premise that’s just a false. Marriage is not just about sex. So putting a pressure on sex, which is important but certainly not the whole basis of a relationship helps you be more selective of the people you would theoretically sleep with(and by extension date)in the first place. There’s a lot of chicken and egg possibilities here.
I definitely don’t think marriage is just about sex in general. My view is that marriage should be about love. My concern is that the *additional marriages created* by restrictive sexual norms would be about sex (marriage as a means to sex), which I don’t think is a good foundation for a loving bond. I’m thinking on the margin. People who love each other can marry under both permissive and restrictive norms. So the marginal marriages created by restrictive norms will be between people who don’t love each other and would be reluctant to marry in the absence of society using norms around sex to nudge them in to it. Even gentler, non-dystopian norms of the sort we see in actually-existing conservative cultures will trend this way. Whereas in a permissive culture in which people have little reason to marry other than love, we will have fewer unloving marriages, which is a thoroughly good thing in my opinion.
I’m not sure I follow your point about how “putting a pressure on sex…helps you be more selective of the people you would theoretically sleep with”. Under a permissive model that respects consent, people have freedom to be as selective as they want. Why would they need help from social pressure?
How the same generation of educated people who fully embraced MeToo now evidently embrace "sex positivity" is beyond me. They must make very subtle cognitive distinctions (like "if we do it, it's okay").
Okay, we’ve got to clarify the drug situation here. Ecstasy is MDMA, which stands for 3,4 methylenedioxy*methamphetamine*. There is no such thing as ecstasy without an amphetamine, because it is an amphetamine. Of course, illegal drugs are not tested for purity, so street ecstasy may contain MDMA, other amphetamines, both, or neither.
The amphetamines you’re thinking of, including Adderall (which is just regular amphetamine) or methamphetamine are drugs that basically force the body to release all its stores of adrenaline. MDMA is different in that the molecule looks more like serotonin (which is also the neurotransmitter involved in SSRIs used for mental health, or in psychedelics). So with MDMA your body is forced to release some adrenaline and some serotonin, and the effect includes not just the fight or flight adrenaline response, but also the hyperemotional state for which ecstasy is known.
The therapeutic potential of MDMA for people with PTSD who are very emotionally closed off is an active subject of discussion in the field. It’s also been pitched for me personally, since I find intimacy so aversive it’s kind of hard to imagine getting over that hump without some kind of help. I am skeptical in the personal sense but bullish in the broader sense on carefully controlled therapeutic MDMA use.
If I look at the national survey on drug use (https://www.samhsa.gov/data/release/2023-national-survey-drug-use-and-health-nsduh-releases#detailed-tables), it is not the case that everyone is doing ecstasy. Life time rates of trying it are around 0.5%. Use is concentrated among specific cultural groups. I can’t say whether there is some overall trend away from “vanilla” sexual activity towards various other sexualities, but given the overall sex recession, I doubt it. It’s probably just becoming more visible.
I think they are underrating the “porn attack” angle. I remember being in college when Facebook first became a thing, and the first time images came up of a girl I was attracted to I was mesmerized. Glued to the screen. I set limits on the amount of time spent looking at one picture but it quickly became clear to me that this wasn’t going to work so I banned myself from looking at pictures of attractive women I knew. We’re talking about fully clothed pictures mind you, not even bikini-clad thirst trap photos of the sort that are now ubiquitous on instagram. And this was several years before I ever knew anything about online pornography.
You should think about heterosexual men and images of reasonably attractive women in the same way that you would think about putting a line of powder in front of a cocaine addict. The effect is that powerful.
Intellectual fandom is a great way of putting it, and Sarah has given me some food for thought on touring in this context. Especially with the way fandom is cultivated these days, it's hard to see the proliferation of this as a net positive for culture at large.
No, it's not new, but the infrastructure that creates these micro-fandoms and makes them economically viable is new-ish, or at least more widespread. The comparison with concerts that attendees just want to hear the same songs (talking points) also highlights how much more of a fannish engagement it is, with the intellectual being more of a fan object and totem for audiences more than anything.
Especially if we look at the declining revenues for concert tours--being able to replace/supplement that with pundits on tour, the merch game, the online fostering of stan culture... I think the climate is quite different than it used to be. Obsessive fandom isn't new either (hi, Lisztomania) but it has become a big business in a way it wasn't before, which by default perpetuates and spreads it as a cultural model.
I suppose it’s possible that platforms like Substack and Twitter make it easier for pundits to gather dedicated audiences who are increasingly willing to pay to see them in the flesh.
I like to call all these sites fandom greenhouses! I've seen (and written about) the toxic fandom around anti-scientology activists, there's no subject that's safe from being shepherded in that direction when you interact on certain sites.
Likewise Douglas Murray is hardly the first person to draw crowds and garner public attention by scaremongering about immigration. Enoch Powell did it in the 1960s.
I’m not sure why everyone keeps describing Olivia Nuzzi as beautiful. I’ve read her in the past but have only really looked at pictures in aftermath of the RFK Jr. scandal. She looks like her father is Robert Z’Dar.
For what it’s worth, I think Sarah and Meghan are both more conventionally attractive.
This is where I think the difference between what women think men find attractive and what men actually like comes in. Nuzzi is blonde, has chiseled facial features that are certainly eye-catching, if not what I would call beautiful, and she projects sexuality. If you actually listen to her, she does this performative lisp that some women do which I think is meant to be suggestive of oral sex (but she would never actually say she's using her tongue in this way to make you think about the fact that she has a tongue).
A lot of people say RFK is creepy. I found her creepy, even before this whole controversy.
Good episode. Re: seducing a source, in The Game, Neil Strauss talks about he used seduction techniques to get Britney Spears to open up in an interview he did with her for Rolling Stone.
sarah, if you have to hesitate on whether you've been to a sex party, you have been to one :)
RE: sluts who become prudes. This is one of my most despised complaints from (certain) men. It's like asking why you behave differently on vacation: for whatever reason jumping into bed with someone felt like a good idea at the time, and maybe it ended badly so you learned your lesson. I know so many women who would wait to have sex only to be dumped as soon as it happens anyway, getting gunshy isn't strange, and the attitude that men are entitled to it because others have been granted the privilege of fucking you (sarcasm) is so off-putting. Sex happens on a case by case basis, it's not something someone you're dating is owed, it's supposed to be a mutually satisfying experience, not a privilege granted to the male.
I was a failed slut and nowadays wouldn't rush into bed with a man because I've changed, just like how I used to avoid carbs and now I don't, or how someone else might've been a heavy drinker/drug user and aren't anymore, or used to eat meat and now are vegan. Another analogy that might work is how you behave on vacation vs when you're at home. You might want to take risks and try things when there's no pressure for it to work out, for that to be held against you by potential serious partners is so gross.
If someone is a bad fit for you, waiting to have sex with them until later in the relationship will not turn them into a good fit for you. Likewise, if someone is a good fit for you, it’s hard to see how having sex with them early in the relationship would turn them into a bad fit for you. Somebody who would leave you over this sort of thing is probably not someone you would want anyway. People should probably just do as they feel comfortable, not pressure anyone else to do anything they’re not comfortable with, avoid overthinking things or “strategizing”, and not worry too much.
This sort of thing would only work if the pressure is societal rather than just individual. Individually it’s just likely to make people mad.
It should be noted that even with societal pressure the failure to remain abstinent is very common. The difference being that if you want to openly live with and sleep with your partner, marriage becomes the norm. It’s not like all these religious communities were purely abstinent, natures pull is far too strong for that.
One irony to note is that deep-blue states like California with more liberal sexual norms actually have lower rates of divorce and fewer out-of-wedlock births than deep-red states where the social pressure to remain abstinent before marriage is more persistent. And as Meghan noted in the episode, pre-sexual revolution norms really did lead to a lot of unhappy marriages, which is why there was a big surge in divorce in the 1970s when people became more free to exit those unions.
That’s true as far as I know. It makes me wonder if the combination of a larger society that is highly accepting of divorce with the religious pressures create an unstable environment for that.
Certainly there were quite a few not good marriages due to this but there are also not good marriages that happen in the culture we have now.
It makes me think that we might just be thinking of marriage in the wrong way as a society. Unfortunately there are so many anecdotes in any direction on this subject that it makes everything messy.
Bad marriages will always be with us, but I’m skeptical of the notion that more restrictive sexual norms will make anything better. People who really want to marry each other are perfectly free to do so even under the most permissive norms - nobody is advocating for stigmatizing commitment. So all restrictive norms will do is push people who don’t really want to commit to do so anyway to meet social expectations. The outcome is that people have to spend their lives with people they don’t love. Seems like a recipe for disaster to me. On the margin, the additional marriages contracted as a result of restrictive sexual norms are highly unlikely to be happy. If they would be happy, the people involved would marry of their own accord without society needing to push them into it.
Hmmm, logically there’s not much to argue there. I agree with most of that statement.
The issue I see is that I think you’re dramatically overestimating the effect of the social pressure I’m implying. People flat out ignore social pressure in all sorts of ways and have done so since the dawn of time. No one is advocating dystopian control over this issue. The cut and dry logic of your previous statement implies that the only reason people get together is sex. That’s just not true. This whole debate is framed on a premise that’s just a false. Marriage is not just about sex. So putting a pressure on sex, which is important but certainly not the whole basis of a relationship helps you be more selective of the people you would theoretically sleep with(and by extension date)in the first place. There’s a lot of chicken and egg possibilities here.
I definitely don’t think marriage is just about sex in general. My view is that marriage should be about love. My concern is that the *additional marriages created* by restrictive sexual norms would be about sex (marriage as a means to sex), which I don’t think is a good foundation for a loving bond. I’m thinking on the margin. People who love each other can marry under both permissive and restrictive norms. So the marginal marriages created by restrictive norms will be between people who don’t love each other and would be reluctant to marry in the absence of society using norms around sex to nudge them in to it. Even gentler, non-dystopian norms of the sort we see in actually-existing conservative cultures will trend this way. Whereas in a permissive culture in which people have little reason to marry other than love, we will have fewer unloving marriages, which is a thoroughly good thing in my opinion.
I’m not sure I follow your point about how “putting a pressure on sex…helps you be more selective of the people you would theoretically sleep with”. Under a permissive model that respects consent, people have freedom to be as selective as they want. Why would they need help from social pressure?
OMG. "one of your people" lol
How the same generation of educated people who fully embraced MeToo now evidently embrace "sex positivity" is beyond me. They must make very subtle cognitive distinctions (like "if we do it, it's okay").
Probably part of why so many heterosexual people are “coming out” as “queer”. Also, of course, the origin of “transmaxxing”.
Okay, we’ve got to clarify the drug situation here. Ecstasy is MDMA, which stands for 3,4 methylenedioxy*methamphetamine*. There is no such thing as ecstasy without an amphetamine, because it is an amphetamine. Of course, illegal drugs are not tested for purity, so street ecstasy may contain MDMA, other amphetamines, both, or neither.
The amphetamines you’re thinking of, including Adderall (which is just regular amphetamine) or methamphetamine are drugs that basically force the body to release all its stores of adrenaline. MDMA is different in that the molecule looks more like serotonin (which is also the neurotransmitter involved in SSRIs used for mental health, or in psychedelics). So with MDMA your body is forced to release some adrenaline and some serotonin, and the effect includes not just the fight or flight adrenaline response, but also the hyperemotional state for which ecstasy is known.
The therapeutic potential of MDMA for people with PTSD who are very emotionally closed off is an active subject of discussion in the field. It’s also been pitched for me personally, since I find intimacy so aversive it’s kind of hard to imagine getting over that hump without some kind of help. I am skeptical in the personal sense but bullish in the broader sense on carefully controlled therapeutic MDMA use.
If I look at the national survey on drug use (https://www.samhsa.gov/data/release/2023-national-survey-drug-use-and-health-nsduh-releases#detailed-tables), it is not the case that everyone is doing ecstasy. Life time rates of trying it are around 0.5%. Use is concentrated among specific cultural groups. I can’t say whether there is some overall trend away from “vanilla” sexual activity towards various other sexualities, but given the overall sex recession, I doubt it. It’s probably just becoming more visible.
I think they are underrating the “porn attack” angle. I remember being in college when Facebook first became a thing, and the first time images came up of a girl I was attracted to I was mesmerized. Glued to the screen. I set limits on the amount of time spent looking at one picture but it quickly became clear to me that this wasn’t going to work so I banned myself from looking at pictures of attractive women I knew. We’re talking about fully clothed pictures mind you, not even bikini-clad thirst trap photos of the sort that are now ubiquitous on instagram. And this was several years before I ever knew anything about online pornography.
You should think about heterosexual men and images of reasonably attractive women in the same way that you would think about putting a line of powder in front of a cocaine addict. The effect is that powerful.
I find Sarah’s cynicism, pessimism and skepticism comforting
Intellectual fandom is a great way of putting it, and Sarah has given me some food for thought on touring in this context. Especially with the way fandom is cultivated these days, it's hard to see the proliferation of this as a net positive for culture at large.
I’m not sure how new it is really. 20 years ago today’s Jordan Peterson fans would have been turning out for Tony Robbins and Robert Bly.
No, it's not new, but the infrastructure that creates these micro-fandoms and makes them economically viable is new-ish, or at least more widespread. The comparison with concerts that attendees just want to hear the same songs (talking points) also highlights how much more of a fannish engagement it is, with the intellectual being more of a fan object and totem for audiences more than anything.
Especially if we look at the declining revenues for concert tours--being able to replace/supplement that with pundits on tour, the merch game, the online fostering of stan culture... I think the climate is quite different than it used to be. Obsessive fandom isn't new either (hi, Lisztomania) but it has become a big business in a way it wasn't before, which by default perpetuates and spreads it as a cultural model.
I suppose it’s possible that platforms like Substack and Twitter make it easier for pundits to gather dedicated audiences who are increasingly willing to pay to see them in the flesh.
I like to call all these sites fandom greenhouses! I've seen (and written about) the toxic fandom around anti-scientology activists, there's no subject that's safe from being shepherded in that direction when you interact on certain sites.
Likewise Douglas Murray is hardly the first person to draw crowds and garner public attention by scaremongering about immigration. Enoch Powell did it in the 1960s.
If you can pronounce PIZZA you can pronounce NUZZI. Meghan, have you forgotten all your eye-talian pronunciations since leaving NYC?
I’m not sure why everyone keeps describing Olivia Nuzzi as beautiful. I’ve read her in the past but have only really looked at pictures in aftermath of the RFK Jr. scandal. She looks like her father is Robert Z’Dar.
For what it’s worth, I think Sarah and Meghan are both more conventionally attractive.
This is where I think the difference between what women think men find attractive and what men actually like comes in. Nuzzi is blonde, has chiseled facial features that are certainly eye-catching, if not what I would call beautiful, and she projects sexuality. If you actually listen to her, she does this performative lisp that some women do which I think is meant to be suggestive of oral sex (but she would never actually say she's using her tongue in this way to make you think about the fact that she has a tongue).
A lot of people say RFK is creepy. I found her creepy, even before this whole controversy.
The subscription price is worth it just to hear Meghan say "feminine wiles".
Good episode. Re: seducing a source, in The Game, Neil Strauss talks about he used seduction techniques to get Britney Spears to open up in an interview he did with her for Rolling Stone.
First?!
second!