¶ Podcast Updates and Future Topics
Hey, everyone. I've got some updates on episodes that we've added to our recording schedule, including one that we're doing on cultural panics with culture study fave Sarah Marshall. She's the host of the amazing podcast You're Wrong About. So you can absolutely ask about specific cultural panics, but you can also get into the origins and motivations of them all. We're also working on an episode that our guests have suggested we call...
big Korean energy? Maybe you're noticing Korean skincare everywhere, or your kids are obsessed with K-pop demon hunters, or your Trader Joe's is always sold out of frozen kimbap. What questions do you have about the popularity at all? This is for people who are
Korean Americans, people who are not Korean Americans, people who are Korean Koreans, anyone and everyone. And just to rattle off a few more, I'm just going to read the list on our scheduling doc. Adult hobbies, love is blind, dating culture. criminal profiling, eldest daughter discourse, sociology of names, weird English words, and all things audiobook. And maybe Charming Potato, aka Channing Tatum, if we can get someone to co-host. We've tried Roxane Gay.
We've received no response. If you have a hookup with Roxane Gay, please get her to come on the pod. And if you didn't know, we keep a running list of what we're working on in the show notes. So you can always check there. Submit your questions for any of these subjects or for the Ask In Anything at culturestudypod.substack.com. All right. Thanks, everyone, and enjoy today's show. Daniel, can you describe in detail?
¶ Manosphere Podcast Art Symbolism
The art for the podcast, like the cover image that shows up when people look up the podcast. So I've been spending a lot of time in some dank corners of the internet. for research, not just for pleasure. And it's really the male grievance world, the manosphere, whatever you want to call it. It's really... a culture that exists online and that communicates through memes and I wanted to embrace that for the purposes of our artwork and kind of do something
that brought all of these symbols and messages and in jokes into one hellscape. And so, yeah, what you're seeing is a pickup truck. with a Chad driving. Chad's are kind of the, you know, an alpha male figure. It's an incel term, but also like kind of widely used. And then there's a Pepe with sunglasses and I think like a teardrop tattoo smoking a cigar, which is like billowing out the back. And the truck is festooned with all kinds of little symbols.
2A for Second Amendment and the Punisher logo. There's a Bitcoin sign there and there's a big plume of black smoke coming out the back there are red pills just like raining down from the sky along with meat and um a dumbbell and there are some oil derricks in the back. And if you zoom in on the oil derricks, I don't know if you've done that, you'll notice that it's not oil coming out of the derricks, but sperm.
Hi, everyone. This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson. And I'm Daniel Penny. I'm a journalist and host of the podcast Non-Toxic and co-host of the podcast Carbon Bros.
¶ Origin of Climate Denial Focus
How did you get interested in this intersection of climate denial and male grievance culture? Because it's something that you've been thinking about for several years, I know. Yes. It was kind of a personal journey, I guess.
When I started my career as more of like a cultural critic, I was writing about the far right and the alt-right online. I'd done kind of a big essay on Milo Yiannopoulos back when he was relevant. And then I... sort of walked away from it a bit i was writing more about art and i was writing about fashion oddly enough and i became more interested in sustainability as i came to understand the
degree of waste that the fashion industry was responsible for but i was struggling to like i was writing for gq and stuff and I just would not really go for like 95% of my sustainability related pitches. And I was starting to think like, surely... men do care about this like that that was their angle essentially it was like well there's just no audience um sorry and so i just thought okay i'm really sick of hearing now i'm just gonna start my own podcast and
I wanted to use that metaphor of toxicity. So it was amidst the kind of fallout of the Me Too movement and the backlash against it. And you were hearing the right make all of these kind of defenses of... against the idea of a toxic male like men aren't toxic like that's you know that's not true at all or what about toxic femininity or you would see all kinds of stuff floating on the internet and i felt like okay this is
interesting and and then also yeah i was i was seeing you know on joe rogan on other podcasts of that ilk the prevalence of all of these climate denial talking points and i thought that's kind of weird what is uniting these two forces and i think it all really got kicked off when um i don't know if you remember andrew tate and greta thunberg they were like beefing on twitter and andrew tate was like
look at my collection of gas-guzzling vehicles, Greta, aren't you triggered? And she told him to send an email at smalldickenergy, I have smalldickenergy at gmail.com or something like that. and i just thought like it's all here like all of this is is just in in this moment and like i need to kind of bring it together yeah and um yeah carbon bros came about because amy westervelt uh who runs drilled
had wanted to do something on masculinity, and some guests who were on my show said, hey, there's this guy doing this obscure podcast, non-toxic. They didn't call it obscure. And thus, you know, we joined forces. So just so we're all on the same page, because I think a lot of people understand the like cluster of conversations that we're having when we say male grievance culture. But how do you define it?
¶ Defining Male Grievance Culture
Well, I mean, it is a cluster. There aren't hard edges, I would say. At least in its current incarnation, you have a lot of distinct groups, subcultures, and then you could say more like...
talking points or ideologies that seem to be a bit more free-floating. So there are online subcultures like incels who are... obsessed with the idea of the fact that like they can't have sex and that the world is actually run by women and that there are all these unfair advantages that certain more attractive wealthy men have etc that's like a kind of a closed group within the much larger manosphere. Then you have people like Andrew Tate who are kind of rise and grind, hustle, culture, alpha.
types and they're just kind of like well they're obsessed with protein and like uh alpha maleness just generally and optimization in my experience well that brings me to like brian johnson or even andrew huberman like the outer limits of this there's there's a whole kind of like silicon valley self-optimization corner of the manosphere who aren't explicitly anti-feminist necessarily at least like that's not the main thrust of their argument it's more
that they just appeal to men and focus on how they individually can make themselves like the best version that they can be often at the expense of others or the environment. And I would say like my feel is that there's an implicit or explicit understanding that like we've gone too far in policing what we're allowed to say and think and how we're allowed to be.
kind of thing that is i think the the biggest force in all of this is sort of the male comedians who didn't really have a particular set of politics going into like me too and covid they were you know someone like joe rogan it's very heterogeneous like what it is that he actually believes he sort of just like repeats whatever the person next to him says
for the duration of the episode, and then he could have a guest who has a complete opposite view, and he'll be like, oh, yeah, that's a good point. But a lot of those guys are like Andrew Schultz, Flagrant, or Theo Vaughn. They really... kind of made saying what you're not allowed to say into like a political identity. And I think a lot of men found that very attractive.
They were owning the libs and drinking lib tears. And even if they don't really have a coherent set of... policy ideas it's more like an attitude and a rejection of all of the kind of liberal centrist quote-unquote woke it doesn't really matter like who the enemy is exactly it's just like all of these things were against them and you can come and hang out with the boys and you can say slurs and like laugh at jokes which we all know are funny and we don't really need to think too hard.
about what we're saying or doing like it's all just in good fun I think that's probably the funnel so to speak like you start with Joe Rogan and you might never go down the funnel but From Joe Rogan, it's like Jordan Peterson, who's been a frequent guest. And then from like Jordan Peterson, maybe it's like Charlie Kirk. And then from Charlie Kirk, maybe you're reading... Peter Thiel's talks and you know the next thing you know you're like trying to start a colony on Mars.
And yeah, like you said, I think it gets more explicitly political as it goes down because people get, I think, more engaged in it. But the welcome point is often someone like Joe Rogan. Or like you said as well, like someone like Andrew Huberman and the way that algorithms work and the way the recommendations work like often lead you to other people in the so-called manosphere. become part of this larger constellation. Today's episode is brought to you by Lola. Melody, is it cold there yet?
No, it's 80 degrees today. No, it's not. Yeah, it is. I'm literally sweating right now while we're talking. Oh my gosh, I'm wearing like a vest and a long sleeve shirt. Yeah, I'm mad at you. It was 45 degrees when I woke up this morning. But you know what? I was so warm and toasty. I sleep with the window open because I love to be super cold and then super cozy under my blankets. Specifically, my Lola blanket, which I fight with my dogs over.
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After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about it. Please support our show and tell them that we sent you. Wrap yourself in luxury with Lola Blankets. Today's episode is brought to you by Blueland. So at the end of this episode, we're actually doing a special Ask An Anything all about cleaning. And one of the things that Melody and I talk about is like making systems.
that work for you, that serve your purposes. And you know what serves my purpose, Melody? Being able to take a little tablet, putting it into the toilet, and then walking away for, I don't know, several hours. And then coming back doing just like a brief little scrub. and being done and not having to deal with like, oh, like this blue liquid is getting all over the place. You know, like I just love the ease of a tablet using it. And that's what Blueland uses for their toilet cleaning. I love it.
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¶ Nature as Feminized and Conquered
Great. I think we should start out with this one from Megan. It's fantastic. I'd like to explore the idea of nature as feminized. I'm an avid outdoors person and recreationist and often find myself in male dominated groups that are obsessed with conquering a climb, grinding out a backpacking trip, or otherwise checking off a gnarly to-do list.
When I am in femme or them dominated groups, the discussion is often more centered around our connection to nature, the cool little details we've noticed, and yes, big achievements we've notched. These differences extend to discussions of the changing climate and the climate crisis. Male dominated groups tend to avoid the topic or change the subject.
whereas femme and them-dominated groups are more eager and willing to discuss fear, grief, and resilience associated with the crisis. I can't help but think one is an extension of the other. If nature is feminized and thus conquerable to a subset of men, then why should they care about the climate crisis? Is this a matter of hyper-masculine individualism?
broader misogyny around nature as a feminine entity, or something else entirely? I love our listeners. Fantastic question. What is your first reaction to this? Sure. I mean, I will say... Spending time outdoors is not inherently gendered, right? But there is certainly a heroic masculine ideal around the idea of like... conquering the frontier or showing your strength and toughness through the achievement of some kind of major climb or expedition or whatever.
And I mean, that's certainly been a dominant theme in American culture since the 19th century. And it continues to fuel our collective imagination around the idea of... the outdoors it's why like thousands of people line up to climb Everest because it most of whom are men uh because they want to Yeah, right. Like the tallest mountain, right? Or like the most arduous climb. Like they want to do those things that are a display of mastery. Yeah. I don't think that...
It's inherently a bad thing to want to mark those achievements. But I do think that what your listener pointed out, the obsession with the achievement over all else that like. you know, it's not the destination, it's the journey. Because I'm getting that kind of vibe that she's saying, and I think it's true. I think also from the point of view of the climate crisis, I mean, people who care about... The outdoors do tend to... well...
Some of them believe in the importance of the climate crisis. I don't want to, at least the people who are recreating in the way that she's describing, who are doing the kind of like lib-coded outdoor activities, like hiking. And climbing. See, this is so interesting to me. Like I used to live in Montana and the biggest advocates for the outdoors. broadly speaking, are not necessarily what we would call conservationists. They are people who are advocates for public lands.
So they like that is their entry point is I want to use the land as a public land owner, right? Like backcountry hunters and anglers, the back of their shirts say public land owner. And they use it to recreate. And that means so many things. That can mean hunting, of course, but also going on snowmobiles or four-wheeling. All of these different things and part of their selling point and why they are like such a, I think, bipartisan coalition in a lot of ways is because they're like.
Being a public land owner means being able to do what you want on public lands. And interestingly, there was a very much like nonpartisan push to... strip the recent um in the big beautiful bill there was a provision that was going to sell off a bunch of public lands and i was following a lot of conservative
influencers and manosphere types who actually came out against it and um you know we're saying like politics doesn't matter like this isn't a good idea like call your representative call your senator And it did get stripped from the final legislation. So I found that to be heartening and an indication that there are ways in which... environmental politics can cross partisan divides and like gender identity and like all of this stuff like there there is
some common ground to build on. What your listener said about the acknowledgement of the feelings around climate and her male companion's apparent refusal to talk about that. Yeah, I mean, I think that that gets at one of the central problems that we discuss in Carbon Bros is kind of what you do with that anxiety. and fear and the way it gets channeled into a denial or even like a death drive rather than
¶ Climate Grief, Anger, and Conspiracy
into kind of solidarity or work towards a better future. Can you say more about that? Because I would love to like... I don't know, kind of just process that a little bit more. That idea that, like, you don't want to sit with the grief. It's, like, feminized to, like, deal with your feelings in that way. Yeah. There's a fair... amount of evidence about like how men and women are socialized to express their feelings and that the social pressure to not express becomes
a kind of like internal incapacity to even like acknowledge or feel those feelings like the less you're allowed to like show an emotion the more it even becomes difficult to like process and understand what that emotion is that's going on inside of you yeah and that then like the only acceptable like emotion becomes anger yeah and which is then expressed through violence and it's this kind of like inchoate animal force that has been ignored or suppressed or um
And often through things like mass shooting events or people driving their cars through... protesters or these kinds of like eruptions of rage. Is it sometimes like also the tendency to glom onto conspiracy theories too? Because like I think about... When you watch like a massive forest fire ripping through like a place that is very special to you, you can either talk about like, okay, well, this is the result of like a pretty complicated history of like... How we have and haven't.
chosen to manage those forests and all sorts of things right it's like building too close to the forest all sorts of things right or you can be like this is a conspiracy like this is like these are the people who are setting these fire yeah totally
Totally. Or it's DEI forest firefighters. And it's laughable to us. Or Jewish space lasers. But... it is in a way like more um and and these conspiracies like they don't just exist on the internet you know what you're talking about um i think oregon actually In 2021, when they were experiencing pretty severe wildfires, there were a number of roving bands of militias that were out there.
searching for the supposed Antifa um arsonists who had started these fires and they had set up checkpoints and they were you know trying to find like so yeah this this kind of paranoia um And yeah, an inability to recognize like what the big real problem is can be channeled into really violent and scary outcomes. So yeah, I think you're right.
¶ Liberty, Death Drive, and Science Denial
It actually kind of, I think you've teed up question two really nicely. This one comes from Monica. I read about Naomi Klein's account of those who believe climate change is, quote, a plot to steal American freedom, end quote, and who would rather go down a give me liberty or give me death path where liberty is unfettered fossil fuel extraction and use?
And death is, well, death of the individual and the ecosystem and so on due to climate change. And I wonder where the root is. American car culture? Manifest destiny? How...
Did we get to a place where some folks interpret scientific data as a plot to constrain their individual lives without any shared benefit? See also COVID vaccine resistance and... denialism it is like it's just so real like when you spell it out like that you're like yeah that's all part of it um yeah i mean i think we need to sort of um put a few of those big ideas in parentheses i will maybe
address the beginning and end of the question in this one. And I think we'll end up touching on some of those other themes subsequently. But yeah, this idea of give me liberty and it's really and death. Yes. Because you're going to kill the future for your children and even potentially for yourself, depending on how old you are. I think that the kind of... death drive that animates the far right and the kind of denial of the climate crisis is perplexing to people who don't.
want to see the end of the world but there is yeah a very strong apocalyptic strain and a very strong kind of like perverse sovereignty or
obsession with the individual that animates the climate denial. It's essentially, it's not just a denial of science, which I think many ages many times there have been groups of people who reject scientific evidence because they find that it's creepy or icky or contradicts you know deeply held values or fundamental like challenging a fundamental thing that you believe about the way things work like it's i think if you are not
If you have not grown up or been socialized in a world where you're used to incorporating new information, new and challenging information, and not having that threaten your entire sense of self.
¶ The Politicization of Climate Science
It's hard sometimes to take ourselves out of that and to feel like, oh, well, this would be really scary. It's interesting because climate science wasn't always so politicized and it wasn't always so caught up in identity. You know, this is something we talk about in the show, and I've talked about it in Non-Toxic as well, that if you go back to like the 80s and early 90s, when there was this real growing consensus in the US and globally that...
Governments needed to intervene and do something about the climate crisis as they had done with the hole in the ozone layer. And... Most Americans felt this was a problem and thought that we needed to do something about it. And there wasn't I mean, there was some ideological divide. Conservatives and Republicans were less likely to.
believe that the government needed to take action because of commitments to small government and, you know, anti-environmentalism and whatever else. But it wasn't like a major faction and it wasn't an article of faith to be a Republican. You had to deny climate. That wasn't a thing yet.
And the fossil fuel industry did a really good job of making it an article of faith on the Republican side in a way that's very depressing, right? We could have averted so much of this catastrophe. But on the other hand, it does show that, like... new technology or like science isn't like innately seen through a partisan lens and it takes like a process of
discourse and a lot of incentives on the part of political actors to make that happen. I think we're seeing it right now with AI that AI like doesn't neatly fit like what your attitude towards it is doesn't neatly fit into like one political category or another but I think it will in the next four years as we saw with climate and as we saw with COVID.
And to go back to like the liberty part, yeah, I think there is this idea that you don't owe anyone anything. Like we don't live in a society, you know, to quote Margaret Thatcher.
Society doesn't exist. And that that's the kind of apotheosis of that idea because both climate and COVID were... real illustrations like actually we do live in a society and your actions directly affect other people and if we take like certain measures for public health or for like planetary health we can save a lot of people but it requires some moderate sacrifice on your part and a lot of people felt that that sacrifice was an imposition that it was
¶ American Individualism and Global Impotence
a kind of tyranny that they needed to overthrow. Obviously, I don't agree with that. I mean, we have this incredibly strong strain of American individualism that runs through American ideologies. And that's just been the case. And we've gone through periods where we've had much more... much more solidarity much more like communitarian thinking like especially around various wars and that sort of thing but it's still there and that idea part of me thinks too like as we confront Increasing...
globalization like there's this feeling almost of impotence like well it not only doesn't matter what i do but like whatever our nation decides to do like it doesn't matter if the other nations aren't doing it like i've heard that actually a lot and a lot from men they're like yes well china
China. Like, why does it matter what we do if we can't control China? So might as well do whatever we want in order to beat China or whatever. Right. Yeah. Which, of course, is like totally blinkered, even on its own terms, because.
China is now leading the global economy in all of their sustainability solutions. They're the largest electric car makers. They're crushing Tesla. They make all the solar panels. They own battery technology. So the future of the... green economy is like owned by China essentially because we we abdicated that and this idea that we're gonna like drill our way
out of that situation is is completely absurd like the whole world is moving to renewables and the question is like whether we're going to do it fast enough or not and the idea that we can just pump more oil and gas, and that's going to give us a competitive edge is a complete fantasy. I'm just noticing some of the language that we're using here.
i just said impotence and you're talking about like drilling and like pumping oil right like even the language itself cut like we use this vernacular of like virility and american virility and panic over virility And I think a lot of like that fear of impotence undergirds so much of the reaction, right? Yeah. And a lot of it is a kind of...
¶ Economic Anxiety and Culture Wars
economic anxiety this comes up a lot in the show that gets transferred into a rejection of of kind of social issues or culture war issues so when when men feel like they have no way to meet their basic needs for themselves and their families or they feel like they have no future because they're never going to be able to buy a house. They're never going to be able to get married. They look to people who have answers.
And the answers from the Democratic Party have been extremely mid. And to say the least. I agree. And... Whereas the right has had a really compelling story to tell. And one of the things they do is they tie together feminism as a kind of restriction on your individual choices and how you get to live your life and what you can say.
Just being a man. And things like the climate protesters who are getting in the way of you getting a job. They're the ones who are preventing us from having the robust economy. grant you all of the masculine kind of milestones that you need in order to achieve a successful life as an American man. And that is a very compelling story. guys believe that or not all of them obviously but but many say you know that sounds true to me and
We need to deprogram them. This connects so strongly. And to me, this emphasizes how these stories just emerge and emerge. These strategies emerge again and again and again. So I grew up in North Idaho. And in the late 80s, early 90s, the big... political wedge was the spotted owl and
The way, like I've done a lot of reporting on that moment in Idaho politics and looking back on what happened because Idaho was a purple state, really voted strongly Democrat on the local level in a lot of places, was very strongly pro-union. And like people in hindsight now see very clearly the way that the owners of a lot of these mills, a lot of these paper factories.
They saw an opportunity to align conservation and environmentalism with the Democrats and thus get all of the people in these rural areas who worked for the timber industry. to vote against Democrats and thus turn Idaho into a right to work state. So essentially like achieving their aims, their larger aims for the industry by saying, look at these environmentalists who want to take away your way of living.
right? They want to take away your jobs. They care more about this tiny little owl than they care about your livelihood. And it worked. It worked incredibly well. And so now we see it in different iterations, but the same sort of thing, like these Democrats don't care about your life, right, or about your jobs. They're like, go take on some student loans to go to college. It's not going to do anything for you.
Yeah. And of course, the reality is actually that even as America is the number one exporter of natural gas and number one producer of oil in the world, we are shrinking our workforce. for the oil and gas industry. And we're shrinking our mining workforce. Every year it gets smaller. And it's not because of regulations, right? We can't.
claim that anymore trump's in power and he's deregulated everything it's because of automation yeah the companies just don't need workers the way they used to yeah with like pickaxes yeah every boom and bust cycle like they cut the workforce more and more and they don't rehire those people back yeah so yeah there's this kind of like zombie image of the poor, embattled oil worker or coal miner that Republicans love to invoke.
as a worker that they're defending. Trump's always talking about minors. I don't think he's ever met a minor in his life. But it's very effective as this kind of like weird nostalgia that we used to have for, you know, these tough jobs. And the people who did them and their honorable work and their contributions. And like all of that is true. Like it is a really hard job. I can't imagine being a coal miner, but.
There aren't really that many of them because we don't actually burn much coal anymore. And it doesn't have to do with Democrats and it certainly has nothing to do with feminism. somehow like that's the web they've woven and um and yeah i think if we can say like it's not the like climate protesters it's not feminists who are taking away your jobs or telling you how to live like it's your boss who's taking away your job it's the republicans who are taking away your job because they're just
automating everything and they're happy to build a data center and that's gonna you know make you redundant and they don't care what happens to you there's not going to be a social welfare net there's not going to be anything And they don't want to pay for like reskilling programs and that sort of thing necessarily. I think some actually some red states are doing this in different ways or have done this. But it won't happen on a federal level.
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¶ Petro-Masculinity and Truck Culture
Let's pivot to another question going deeper on the specific type of masculinity that is manifesting here. We're going to play two questions here. The first one comes from Suzanne. I'm obsessed with the idea of petromasculinity, how burning fossil fuels in big, often empty pickup trucks is an identity, not just a means of transportation. I think we've made some strides towards depoliticizing electric vehicles for these guys, such as the cyrus. And the second one comes from Elizabeth.
There are so many markers of masculinity that damage the environment in practice. Eating red meat, driving big fast cars, mansplaining. I'm curious about the intersection of this with patriarchal so-called Christianity, as beautifully dissected by Kristen Coves-Dumay in Jesus and John Wayne. When did evangelicals divest themselves from an ethic of creation care? Why? And is it possible to reverse that?
So I know that there's a lot in both of these questions, but let's start with trucks first. Actually, in Non-Toxic, we did an episode about an ad for an electric truck that was in the Super Bowl, maybe like... three years ago yes or two or two years ago i can't remember um which was all about uh premature electrification yes
And the anxiety that drivers had that they wouldn't have the range or the power that they wanted. And there were all of these guys, and it was filmed like a pharmaceutical commercial for Viagra. funny but also it was like i think you're actually like reinforcing the message that you're trying to counter and um yeah i think sure it's good to it's always good to move away from gas to a renewable. Like that is, yes, that is better. But yeah, I think as like...
From a strategy or like from a sustainability point of view, like making more giant electric trucks is not the answer. And that it it's incredibly wasteful and stupid. use of resources that doesn't actually like meet our demands. Right. So it's still kind of keeping this idea of like, you're, you know, the sovereign individual, you're the king in your, in your castle.
And yeah, sure, like the castle is electric, but it's still like this death tank that is like meant to, you know, plow through bulletproof glass, like all the stuff around the cyber truck.
most of which ended up being not true, but it was still playing into those same themes and ideals. They even sell like... electric truck nuts you can buy oh yeah yeah yeah that just look like like kind of like bolts essentially that like you haven't really escaped the trap of toxic masculinity just by swapping the gas car
or the diesel truck for an electric one. I live in Washington State where, like, on the western side of the state where there are tons of Rivians. And I think that what the Rivian does is really interesting because it allows... guys who have been according to like the the parlance of this world guys who are otherwise pretty cocked to have a truck they're like i have a truck now it's just it's a rivian truck so um like
I don't have to feel bad. And like maybe my wife's on board or whatever. I do have a truck and I love my truck. And like I oftentimes resist the. the sweeping generalizations, not from you, but like from other people that are like, no one needs a truck. And I'm like, I live on an island. We have no yard waste disposal. I do need a truck for many other things too. And there are other people who do like when you are working on a farm, you need a truck.
Like there are just things that you need a truck for. And sometimes you even need a dually. Like you need that horsepower. There are people, many, many, many, many people who do not need trucks though. And I think that a lot of this anxiety is like. I have been cucked by living in the suburbs. So how do I display my virility and my masculinity? And it is through a truck or, yeah.
And it's interesting. I mean, the specific status symbol has changed over time. At first, it was a sports car. Yes. Then it was an SUV. Now it's a truck. um so yeah we've gone from something that was like kind of stylish and beautiful and kind of pointless right which is like that's a sports car um to something that is like all about like the myth of utility but actually like is never used totally for its intended purpose and
You know, I think if you actually look at the size of trucks and how they've changed over the years, like I think the F-150 has gotten like twice as heavy since the 70s. So, I mean... surely farmers in the 1970s like needed the same amount of storage and horsepower and all the rest and they did they seem to do just fine with the ford that they had back then so this idea that like Trucks need to keep getting bigger. And I think that just doesn't hold water. You need an open back.
end of your vehicle whatever that looks like and i think what we see now is like all of these mid-sized trucks so like a ford ranger a toyota tacoma they they're beds have actually gotten significantly smaller to make room for the second to make for this that for the spacious second seat because what this actually is
is like the replacement for your sedan or like, you know what I mean? And then it just happens to have this like open air thing on the back so that you can say that you're driving a truck. Whereas like when you needed a truck before, like its job was truck. Its job was not like family vehicle. It's so interesting. I could talk about it for so long. For me, I wanted a truck that I'm going to drive into the ground, and this is going to be my last gas vehicle ever.
I found it intriguing, this new electric truck company that got started called Slate, based in California. And the whole idea is it's like a blank slate and they're super cheap. And you just kind of... modify it as you want but it's it's electric and it's meant to look kind of like you know like an old jeep wrangler or uh like defender yeah in that it's like very bare bones there's not even like a stereo in there
And you just like stick your own speaker, like you roll the window up manually. Yeah. I find that kind of intriguing, like as an alternative to like the souped up, like insane cyber truck.
¶ The Illogic of Optimized Masculinity
concept the other thing that it like the kind of dissonance for me with a truck is that it isn't very optimized a truck is not an optimized vehicle and so it runs counter to all of this other discourse about like how can you optimize your life and your body and all of these other things at the cost of others at the cost of so many different things but like that I guess I'm just trying to underline how none of this like
Ideologies don't make sense. Yeah. It's not about creating like a perfect system where each thing logically snaps into place. It's about like... doing what makes people feel good in the moment and like reassures them and like having a truck Yeah, it gives them a story to tell about their lives and who they are. It doesn't have to really add up because most people have the memory of goldfish and like...
the same level of like interest in self-reflection. And so, yeah, I think you can like the right doesn't have a problem. telling you a lot of different lies and things that like contradict one another and kind of just throwing it all at the wall and seeing what sticks like the left is obsessed with like well you know got to make sure like you pass this purity test and then
And like, we got to see how like these two things line up. And if they're not sufficiently intersectional, then... Well, and it's that feeling of constriction that this like... embrace of like liberty at all costs is is pushing up against right like okay well what about white nationalist christianity like how does that fit into how does that fit into the climate denial um
¶ Christian Nationalism and Dominion Theology
I mean, I'm not an expert in the far right in Christianity. I'll just say that. We did interview Sophie Burke-James, who's a researcher at Vanderbilt, and she really studies this pretty exclusively. In that conversation, I did think it was interesting. The evangelical community, I don't think, had a particular opinion about climate change. Initially, but as it became like a political force in the 70s and 80s in the backlash to Roe v. Wade.
I think the kind of science around abortion, like and the question of like how you relate to science as a religious person. was important in shaping evolution too right yeah and and earlier back yeah sure we can we can go to evolution though i don't think that like the religious right was as like mobilized as a political block during like the kind of scopes era as they, as they would be subsequently. But yeah, I do think this question of like, how did.
evangelicals abandon the natural world in favor of like apocalypse is interesting because i mean they do like apocalypse is necessary for the second coming of christ so like that that makes sense i do think like You know, the white nationalism, because you have this like these strains of masculinity that are so vibrant within Christian nationalism and then a rejection of science. And then I also think that like.
Part of it too, because within like Jesuit Catholicism, they believe in, I think it's called the whole cloth. theory of the world so it's like there's a reverence for life in all of its ways right so it's like they are pro-life and they are against like assisted suicide but they are environmentalists like they are they do have where this person discussed as like an ethic of creation care right like that is very much coming from that tradition so
A lot of evangelical Christians subscribe to the idea of dominion, which really links the relationship between men and women, that women are subservient to men and that they... are under their protection and control and likewise that like all the creatures on earth and the earth itself are also under man's dominion and that
Dominion means you can really do whatever you want, and there's not the same idea that you need to care for the world in order to leave it to the next generation. That's really abandoned. It's just about, like, you're in charge and it's up to you as a man to decide what you want to do with women.
with the natural world with your children like everyone kind of is going through you um and and you alone decide and that's not the case for catholics and not the case for like even like black liberation theologians, like, don't subscribe to that. So yeah, it is also very much a racialized idea in the sense that, yeah, there are many Black evangelicals who reject this.
Dominion. And going back to this, the very beginning question, like the idea of like that God given like manifest destiny, like the, if you believe in dominion, you believe that this is what God is telling you, right? Is that you have. You have the wisdom and discernment to know how God would want you to rule these things. And that, again, is the masculinized control of the feminized.
¶ Episode Wrap-Up and Resources
That's a great and horrible place for us to stop today. If people want to find the podcast and more of your work, where can they find it? So, I mean, you can find Carbon Bros wherever podcasts are sold. Nontoxic, which is my half of the two podcasts that are collaborating. We've got a substack, the Nontoxic newsletter.
And you can find previous seasons of Non-Toxic also anywhere where you would listen to a podcast. And then I will plug Drilled as well. So my collaborator, Amy Westervelt, she runs Drilled, which is kind of the original. podcast about climate crisis. Highly recommend it. And she's been doing this work for years.
They just had a new season called Slapped about the lawsuit between energy transfer and Greenpeace over the protests around the Dakota Access Pipeline. And that's a great season. I definitely would recommend it to any listeners. Amazing. Thank you again. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to the Culture Study Podcast. Today, Pate Subscriber has got an Ask and Anything segment about how people keep their houses clean.
or whether they do it all. If you want to support the show and get that bonus content, head to culturestudypod.substack.com. It's five bucks a month or $50 a year, and you'll get ad-free episodes, an exclusive advice time segment, and weekly discussion threads. for each episode. Subscribe to the Culture Study Podcast wherever you listen because we have so many great episodes in the works and I promise you don't want to miss any of them.
And if you want to suggest a topic, ask a question about the culture that surrounds you, or submit a question for our subscriber-only advice time segment, go to our Google forum at tinyurl.com slash culturecitypod or check the show notes for a link. The Culture Study Podcast is produced by me, Anne Helen Peterson, and Melody Rowell. Our music is by Poddington Bear. You can find me on Instagram at Anne Helen Peterson, Melody at Melodious47, and the show at Culture Study Pod.