You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast.
Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on Hello and Welcome to Mama Mia out Loud. It's what women are actually talking about on Monday, the eighth of July.
I'm Holly Wainwright, I'm Mia Friedman.
And I'm Jesse Stevens.
And on the show today, Mia gave me the challenge of making the UK election results interesting and relevant to Australia. Watch Me Die Trying. Also, there's a new Nicole Kidman movie out, and as usual, everyone's talking about what's been done to a face, but it's not her face. And what is a high value woman clue? It's a dog whistle. Let us explain.
But first, Jesse, I'm a recovering victim of eyebrow blindness.
In case you missed it, Apparently we're all experiencing eyebrow blindness, coined by TikTok creators as everything is eyebrow blindness for to our habit of shaping our eyebrows according to the latest trends rather than what actually suits us, meaning that we inevitably look back in horror. Essentially even now we are blind to whether our eyebrows look good or not every now and then. I don't know if you guys
have experienced this. I feel as though I get a moment of clarity where I look in the mirror and I go, no, you do look ridiculous. You look ridiculous. And I've gone this far because of an Instagram reel I watched that told me to fill in my eyebrows a lot. I think I'm still a little bit stuck on the Kara Delavine moment when we had the really bold eyebrows and you brush them up and try and give more and more volume. And I remember thinking this too.
With the eyebrow lamination trend. I saw an influencer do it once and I just went, it's two months. We'll look back and go, you look ridiculous because you look a little bit like you've been electrocuted, because it's all up up and like stuck to your face. And it happens very very quickly. Do you guys have eyebrow blindness?
I'm in a full blown eyebrow crisis. So eyebrows are not usually something that I notice, but my eyebrows have become really sparse and I don't pluck them. I haven't pluck them for years, except for you know, the stray ones that are going down towards my.
Eyelashes for a party.
But I am just finding that they're getting really sparse, and so I've been thinking about microblading.
I'm finding that they.
Require microblading feels through permanent tattooing.
It's like semi permanent tattooing, so it basically just draws on your eyebrows.
So you don't have to do everything.
Cause I don't have eyebrows because I'm fair naturally, my eyebrows are invisible, and yet they are the bushiest body hair I have. And now that I'm bolding like you Mia in my eyebrow department, I'm like one of those men who combs over the bolding bits. So I take the really long curly ones and I get the eyebrow gel and I try to stick it over the bits, and then I tend them and I die.
The lot.
There's a whole lot of eyebrow comb over.
A comb over that.
Is me is a microblading thing. I feel like you'll do whatever's trendy now and then in five years when no eyebrowses are the cool thing, Holly. I mean, all she has to do is not die hers for a minute, and she's going to be the coolest person at the party. It's true.
It's why I say to all young women, don't laser off all your pubes because when the bush comes back.
Do you think we have bush blindness?
Well? No, I think everyone's fairly aware of their bush. If I asked you to describe your bush now, like I imagine you could do it.
But are we blind to what actually looks good on our particular bush? And are we instead just going with the trends?
Maybe?
Isn't it with your bush? It bore suits your personality than your body a little less personality forward, bushes are very specific.
Landing strip still a thing because I think a landing strip looking back was very a mustache for your bits like you look back, and that was never cool. But we did it because I think sex and the City told us to.
Well, the bush won't be able to make a comeback when all the gin Z's and millennials have lasered everything to oblivion. Then when they all need mercans, maybe I need an eyebrown merkin.
Yes, I definitely do so if you stammer there thanking and greeting the supporters, the beaming smile as he shakes hands.
I have just returned from Buckingham Palace, where I accepted an invitation from His Majesty the King to form the next government of this great nation.
The UK has a new Prime minister and nobody cares at all. At least that's what Mia told me in our funning meeting this morning. But it's so relevant and so interesting and so canarian a coal mine. I said, we're going to have an election here next year.
I said, Look, and I said, I am so deep in panic and rage the US election. I don't have time to care about the elections in other countries that I also don't live in.
But this is why you need to write. Because we're having an election next year. France is having one right now, America's having one. Politics is sexy at the moment.
Well, I would say politics is drunk and it needs to go hard.
That is also true, and that's why when I was telling you this, she just started taking pictures of the cuff of Jesse's jeans and jangling her shoe jewelry. I was so good here are my three attempts to get mea to care about international politics and by extension, everybody else.
I will give you one point to start with, which is that I keep reading this stat that almost half of the world's population is going to the polls this year twenty twenty four. Watershed moment will change the course of history. Because of how many elections are happening, we should be keeping a closer It.
Makes me terrify a close eye. Okay, first thing, although Kirstarmer and Labor did win a massive landslide victory, the shit skirt, which is the analogy we invented when Theresa May got that job a long time ago, and basically means that yes, you win, but you end up wearing a whole lot of stinky mess that the other people left behind is definitely what Kia is going to be modeling this season, because Britain is still in a right mess and the Tories might have a very long way back.
But he's got a lot to do for me.
Here.
Kiir Sarma, they said he ran a ming var's campaign, meaning like fragile, don't touch it, like it just low target, small target, don't look at me. Let's just stand here and let the others just lose it.
And then we discussed last week that he has Friday nights off.
And he has Friday nights off, etc. Anyway, he and his party, the Labor Party, won a historic four hundred and twelve seats, which is a lot more than they needed. So greedy. But also when you consider that the Tories, who were the party who had been in power and they're the next major party, only won one hundred and twenty one seats.
Why were people so angry with them? Apart from you know, Boris Johnson.
Which was because they'd had fourteen years in power and Britain is in a terrible state, remember that whole Brexit situation. M He's in the toilet, a whole lot of stuff, public services are failing. So on the surface it looks like wow, amazing, right, Keir Starmer and the Labor Party killed it. But only fifty nine percent of the people
eligible to vote voted, so it's not compulsory. Almost half of the people who could vote in Britain just went neither of these two thanks, and of those people who did, only thirty four percent of them actually voted for Labor. It's just that the way that the electoral system vote works there, which I won't tell you about because please don't stab me with her cake knife necklace. There's just a general apathy summed up by this.
Dude serious invob I mean you put another pickhead in charge with a great smiley space when he's one life wrilliant. But for a year we're back to pits por agan I mean serious hipov And honestly it's a joke. It's a fing joke. So like I said, you see ai Lot, Yeah, who would have win the votes get the Ai Lot to run the country.
This ardly points to the point that we've got it right with forcing people to vote here, because you end up with a more representative result. Let's free will. That's the takeaway. Number two. Holly Valance had a good night?
Did she?
She did?
I would have thought she was the poster girl for the he had a good night.
So we talked a while ago about how one of the biggest movers and shakers in UK right wing politics used to be a literal mover and shaker from the
two thousand and two banger Kiss Kiss also Melbane's own Flicksculli. Anyway, she gave the Reform UK Party a massive check and then helped them to raise another one point five million pounds to bring Nigel Farage back from America where he was running around like picking up after Donald Trump because he was the Brexit guy I remember, although he's never actually been a member of parliament in Britain. They got him to come back. We talked about this on the
show a while ago. Come back oust the leader of the Reform Party, which is the sort of ozim getting bored far right party.
No I care about this because I've heard his name.
A lot and stand so Holly is a massive fan of Nigel's and she raised all the money to get them to do it. So Reform UK are like a Brexit party, but now that they can't blame Europe for everything anymore, they're a bit unsure of who to blame. But it's definitely the immigrants, so that she'd right, they're hard right. She also held a big fancy fundraiser for Donald Trump in London last week and raised lots of
money for him too, which is nice anyway. The point being, with Holly's help, Reform only won four seats, but the reason that you're seeing them everywhere is because Farage got voted into Parliament for the first time, which means that in there he can hassle and effect change. And because of the aforementioned voting system that I'm not going to go into. Are about four million people voted for them.
That's a lot by people, right, So now that they're free to organize influence from the inside, the big fear is, well, it depends on way. It might not be a fear. It's not a fear for Holly.
We're not going to have to do deals like Labor's not going to have to do deals with them if they've got a massive.
Not what they're worried about. What people are worried about is that Farag's point and Reform UK's point is that they're going to infiltrate the Tories and take it over so they will become like.
Donald Trump has with the Republic of Party.
So basically Labor would have to do deals with anyone. As you say, they've got massive majority, but it validates them, It brings them into Parliament where they weren't before, and it means that they can start influencing the Tories because the Tories, who are all going we've all just lost our seats.
I see, what are we going to do?
Where's the future?
It's over here, apparently it's over here on the hard right.
And very like what happened at the Australian election when a lot of the more sort of centrist and liberal Liberals lost their seats to teals, that's kind of what's happened at the UK election, which brings me to the third point, which is remember when we used to only have like three TV channels or four TV channels and now we have a bitch of million. Yeah, that's what
politics like. I reckon, there's going to be a time when we were going to go Can you remember how we just used to have to choose from these two big parties. Because what happened in Britain, even though it looks on the surface again like a landslide, the independence and the smaller parties cleaned up, so the Libdems who are like their third party, So think of like the Democrats. Right when the Democrats were a thing in Australia, they won seventy one seats as in seventy one more than
they had in the last election. They cleaned up in the South of England, like all the Tory voters who couldn't bring themselves to vote conservative anymore. They're not the far right people who wanted to vote for Farach, so they got all of those people.
So what you're.
Saying is that the old two party system is sort of collapsing everywhere in the world. I mean, we're seeing over the weekend in France as well. People thought that it was going to go far right, but now there's been a coalition among the Greens and the left and it looks like maybe.
They'll take power. People don't want that binary choice anymore.
Just like we want more tvgions.
What will personalization curate everything curation?
I was reading that the same thing is a threat to Biden in the US in terms of the people who might vote for him are instead looking at other parties the more represent their interests.
That's not the way the US election works so much in that third party candidates have always split the vote depending on where we get left right. I think the biggest problem in the US is what old Mates said in the beginning, which is just that disaffected politics is broken. If we've got two elderly men, one is a liar and one is not fit for office, anymore clearly, how is our system so broken?
And why should I vote for either of them?
So that speaks to two trends that I've kind of noticed a lot of analysis about lately. The first is Ezra Kline, who is one of my favorite political commentators, says that the big divide isn't between left and right, it's between people who are interested in politics and people who aren't. So what we heard in that clip is that there is this disaffected majority who won't vote, who don't feel represented by anyone, who were just tapping out.
And then almost the laughter of the journalist represented the other class, which is this you know, often portrayed as almost an intellectual elite who were kind of fighting at the top, where it's like the average person doesn't give a shit about this because they don't have their capacity. Their lives are full and complicated and this is just not at the top of their priorities.
Also explains why the average person who doesn't give a shit about politics, isn't watching insiders, isn't reading the political analysis and all that stuff on the ABC will generally tune into politics about two weeks before they have to vote, maybe a month generously, and then they're just looking around
for like what's what right. And one of the things that was interesting after the UK election, which you know had been hailed as this big historic shift, is that the most memorable moments from the campaign were all gaffes, like memes, the moment of Rishi Sunak, you know, announcing the election in the rain that we talked about on the show. The Lib Dems, thellier decided to be like
Boris Johnson and just do lots of crazy stunts. So it's like bungee jumping off shit and you know, sort of paddle boarding on the Thames and anything that gets
the cameras gets the memification going. Because most people, as you say, Jesse, who are just kind of like whatever, These people are all idiots as far as I can see, are just tuning in at the last minute and looking for color and movement, and that is the game you got to play now that I think had also this real fragmentation which we're also seeing here in Australia of like the broad churches so called of the left and
the right aren't broad enough now. We want them more fragmented, more small and more personalized.
We saw that with Fatima Payman in Australia last week, where she was part of the Labor government. She didn't agree with their policy on Gaza and on Israel, so she left the party and is now an independent.
So it's interesting because.
Political parties used to always be, as you say, wholly a broad church, and there would be things that you would agree with in things that you wouldn't. For example, when Penny Wong was part of the ALP and the official was against marriage equality and at the time, and as a gay woman, that was obviously very difficult for her personally, but she understood that as part of the party you have to back the party's position. Now it's not like that in every political party. Some parties in
Australia let you cross the floor. The Liberals are more relaxed about it. In the ALP they're not. And there's a lot of talk about whether with this more fragmented niche approach of both voters and MPs, is politics splintering and.
A focus on true representation and diversity in politics actually having people who represent the electorate, whereas you know, not that long ago it was only white men, so it might have been easier to reach a consensus because they weren't even attempting to represent the entire election.
This is why people get so disaffected though, Right, is that in order to reach a consensus, that's often why you're doing deals. Right, So you're saying, if you will back us on this, then I'll give you a little bit of that. And you know, we see that in American politics all the time when actually Congress kinds of gets locked and can't move anymore, gets paralyzed by its deal making and it's giving too much and taking too much.
And the thing is is that it's very hard to reach consensus if you're not going to stand behind a party line and say I'm always going to be true to my values, which is absolutely admirable, and we all know we live in a more personal, brand, values driven world. How do you get big movements happening and get change across the line?
I read this analysis that it's not the job of the politician to generate favorability anymore, but to cast the other in a negative light, which goes to Joe Biden and Trump. I wonder if that is Biden's only strategy. Give Donald Trump enough room and he'll kind of be responsible for enough gaffs that he won't even have to be favorably.
It's actually the opposite. That's exactly what Donald Trump's doing. He's actually been very quiet since the debate, and now all everybody's talking about is not all the lies that Donald Trump told, the fact that he's a convicted fell and a lunatic. They're talking about Biden and this is the problem. And as we record this, he's still the
candidate and refuses to step down. Now the rest of the campaign, all the oxygen is going to be about whether Biden's fit for office, which is hilarious given that he's running against the truck.
He knows how to use a news cycle. And the prolonged result of this, I suppose digital media has been fifteen twenty years clickbait, headlines, anger, all of those things happens with an algorithm, means that this negative political environment. The result of that is that we've just lost faith in the political process and no one wants to vote.
That's how we end up, which is quite sad. Our News podcast The Quickie is going to talk more about the French election on Wednesday, after the polls have closed and we have all the results. Claire Murphy will explain how all of this will tie into the Olympics, which is being held in Paris starts this month.
This is madness.
Hey, yeah, this is your mom and your boss.
Who you hate.
It's weird mom. Over the weekend, I found myself having several arguments about one man's face. You might have seen a new movie on Netflix called A Family Affair, starring Nicole Kidman, Joey King, and Zac Efron. And while women's faces are often the subject of much speculation and chatter, and I must say, in this film, Nicole Kidman's face has come up, but we're going to leave that to the side this time. It's thirty six year old Efron's
appearance that has attracted a great deal of commentary. Here's what the Internet is saying. Netflix fans all have the same complaint about the new Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron movie. Fans alarmed by zac Efron's face, zac Efron fans confused by dramatic transformation, and so on. So if you haven't seen Efron lately, we've posted a picture on the mummea out loud in Instagram. But the shape of his jaw has changed considerably and his lips his.
Whole face and his forehead and his eyes.
He looks like David Hazelhoff.
Now.
While fans were asking what Efron did to his beautiful face, a story resurfaced about an accident Efron had more than ten years ago. In twenty thirteen. Efron says he was running through his house in socks and he slipped, hitting his chin on a granite fountain.
There's so much to unpack just about the statement.
Why you've never tripped on her granite house?
Celebrity house problem.
He was rendered unconscious and when he woke up, his chin was, to quote Efron, hanging off his face. Following the incident, his massacres, which are the muscles located on each side of your jaw, just grew. He was meant to be having like Phisio to sort it out, but then he had to go and shoot something and it got interrupted and he said, they got really, really big.
I don't think that's a thing.
He told Men's Health magazines.
Apparently I'm a doctor, and I think that's a lie.
Injury was really serious, and he nearly died afterwards. He also had no idea that people were talking about his face until his mother alerted him to it.
He had said, no idea, like a completely different person.
If I valued what other people thought of me to the extent that they may think I do, I definitely wouldn't be able to do this.
Why do people gasolate us like you do?
You want to your face, but don't make up silly stories or tell us it's not what we sell I do.
So he has had an accident, you can see he was in I've got a.
Little scar under my chin and from what I had fell off my trike when I was five.
So I have friends who you know, have been in an accident or have a scar, or have had health issues that mean that they look different.
Completely reconstructed facial surgery.
I know one person who did, and I remember she'd been in a car accident and she'd had quite serious, like reconstructive surgery, And the comments were one of the hardest things, because you actually do need plastic surgery because of what happened. It just felt like everyone had the right to comment on how her face had And this is exactly the same rhetoric we've seen around Efron is like you've messed up your face, as though you own it.
Like I understand that he's a movie star and that we watch him for two hours, so you're gonna have some thoughts. But if we take his word for it for a moment and go, you had an injury where you nearly died ten years ago. The story is that he wasn't seen in public for a really long time because he was really upset.
Like I always see him. No, there wasn't in Australia for a hundred years and I saw him every day with his nice girl friend from Byron.
Different and that was only a few years ago, and he looks different again since then.
Well, the story though with physio, if he didn't do that properly, and if he's saying that the muscles grow and grew, then the idea would be that he's.
Muscles don't just grow and grow like they don't just go, hey, you know what, my biceps and my triceps and my pecs. Because have you seen Zacha Fron lately? He used to be like a not like a rodent boyfriend, but like a you know, a light guy in high school, musical sweet looking guy, but not like muscly leading man, alpha, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, George Clooney kind of not that vibe and now he is that vibe.
And he appeared in The Iron Claw, so that was another thing. It's not marveled on a lot of he looks like he's wearing a Marvel movie. He's like, now, Chris, hem'sworth that kind of body. So that can also change the way that your face appears, right, Like your muscle mass, your weight, all of that can change how your face appears. But what I want to know is do we all need to leave the man alone. He's got his story, He's told us his story. What doesn't matter what we think about his story.
Here's the tricky bit, right because I am a bleeding heart. I'm like pau Zac. Whether it's true or not about the jaw, I don't really care. There is no question that his face has changed. And the thing is is Mia said last week, because we're talking about watching this film and I was like, can't wait to watch it, and she said, he looks like he's been created by
AI and is exactly what he looks like. It's entirely up to him what he wants to do to his face, and it's entirely up to him what story he wants to tell us about it. The reason everyone's talking about it is because it's very distracting, and it's not good for movies, for acting, for careers to not be able to see a human when you're looking at the screen. I think it's really.
Difficult because of course men are also subject to beauty standards, and anyone in Hollywood, my heart goes out to them in terms of how hard it must be to be scrutinized in that way and have your face and body talked about.
That's a shame. That's difficult.
There's other difficult things that other people have to deal with in other professions. But what I think this is and what I push back on, is when we are being gas lit and told there's nothing to see here. It's a little bit like Joe Biden's saying, God, she is so up, a little bit like Joe Biden's saying I've just had a bad night.
I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. It's actually it's not fine.
Zac Efron isn't saying there's nothing to see here. He's saying there is something to see here.
This comes back to we're not comfortable with people being honest and saying I had all this surgery because I didn't like the way I looked, or I wanted to get different roles, or I was trying to look more.
Like especially from a man, Christ's no way I'm mad for anyone.
Like women can't say it either, Like every Kardashian has had to go I did nothing to my face, and other actresses have said I just used sunscreen, and j Lo says, I just use olive oil, and it's like, come on, and the reason that we push back and I think that we get angry, and it's a shame that that anger is at that individual. It's more stop treating us like we're idiots, because it's not just his
jawline that's different. It's his lips, it's his eyes, it's his forehead, it's his hairline, it's his body, it's everything, like it didn't all crash into the fountain.
I think we can criticize a performance and ultimately, you know where the consumers and the reviewers and we can say whether we liked that film or whether we thought the performance was believable. But trolling people and saying what's.
The difference between troll and saying.
Abstrawed Parkward and saying like that's cruel.
I agree with that's incredibly cruel. That's incredibly cruel.
I agree, But how much of this is a recalibration where it's a bit the m prisoner closed where we're going, Hey, we can see this.
I don't think it's me.
Doing that lately. We've been doing this. We did it to Amy Schumer. I say that we as in like the culture, because this is what all the websites do. Fans say Amy Schumer looks different, and then they just post a whole lot of horrible stuff. And she came out and said, actually, I have a health issue which
has changed the shape of my face. We did it to Christina Applegate who came out and said, actually, I have MS and it has changed the shape of my face and I have put on weight and things have changed. Like how many times does that need to happen? Do we need a medical certificate?
No?
Or can they just put up a flag and go, hey, stop commenting on my appearance. I've got a story.
We will always comment on the appearance of people who were paid for what they look like. I mean, and I think we also call bullshit on this idea that remember when Jennifer Aniston or I can't remember what celebrity was. I think it was her, But a lot of celebrities who've clearly got different noses say I had to have
it corrected for a deviated septum. I know people who had deviated septums, yes, Or Tory Spelling who said that she had a different nose because she got attacked on the nose by her pet parrot.
Like, guys, come on.
What do we do once they tell us that? Because when I was in primary school, there was a kid, a young boy who had really bushy eyebrows, right, and he came to school one day and he pretty much shaped them off. Everyone gave him a really hard time, right, and he said, I stepped on my razor in the shower and it flipped up. So every kid has a choice in that moment to look at that kid and go, do I keep pushing you and making fun of you, or do I just move on? Because clearly there's some pain.
We move already there and then we move on. And that's my point.
But my concern is, because I agree we move on. If jack Efron jack Efron Zach Cafron wants to tell us about his jaw and his fountain. That's fine with me. My concern is more, we're going to get so used to seeing people only people who look like they have been generated by a mixture of digital retouching surgery AI. I mean, my daughters showed me AI imagery of celebrities all the time that isn't real, like some celebrity doing some TikTok dance and all those things, and you're looking
and looking for the clues. Right, We're going to get so used to it that it entirely desensitizes us to what real faces look like and what real emotions look like. And I know that's like a spectrum of an argument that's been going on since the first needle went into somebody's face. But I'm more concerned about that. I'm all for zac Efron having his privacy, having his own reasons why he wants to look the way he looks and
what he wants to tell us about it. But watching that film and thinking that we were supposed.
To be pretending that he didn't it was so I think you named the word whole, which is distracting. It's really really distracting. And I find this all the time when I'm watching, particularly women of a certain age and the technology.
That's used, plus the surgery that they've had.
I find it really really distracting, and I can't watch these films because it looks like they're not human.
If the movie's got enough, you sort of shel it and you get past it. So the first ten minutes of this movie, I was like, whoa, we're in a new world here. And then I sort of went, Okay, shut up, Polly, Like you're telling yourself to shut up and start investing in the show. If we're not even allowed to call it out a little bit, it just feels that we're as fake as that image on the screen.
Out Louders jump into the Mumma out Louders Facebook group and tell us what you think. Have you watched the movie? Did you notice and do you reckon that we just accept the story and move on. Yes, yes we do.
Out Louders.
If you want to listen to us every day of the week, you can get access to exclusive segments on Tuesdays and Thursdays by becoming a mum mea subscriber. Follow the link in the show notes to subscribe and support us. And a big thank you to all our current subscribers.
A woman that has value is not going to put herself on the Internet for any man to just be able to comment and say, oh, you're beautiful or this year that them compliments don't flatter her, they don't make her. Because she values herself hired than what men think of her. She rates herself high value.
Woman does this, she prioritizes this compatibility over a chemistry. I'm not a woman, but if I was a woman, I'm not paying out a restaurant. I'm not choosing word to go eat.
I'm not making the plans for the evening. If I was a woman, I would.
The man the man that I be treated like a queen.
Earlier this year, a global study found that one generation of men more than any other, thinks that feminism has gone too far. If I asked you to guess, you might think it was boomer men who might be nostalgic for the days when you could pinch your waitress on the bum and ask your female co worker to make you a cup of tea oe for good days. But it's actually not boomer men. It's jen Z men who
are pushing back the hardest. Sixty percent of young men believe that the push for women's equality discriminated against men and that life will be harder for men than women twenty years from now. And it's interesting because these are the guys that are growing up with me Too and Australia's first female Prime minister and the coverage of domestic violence protests. But they are the same guys that are being attracted to misogynists like Andrew Tate, who are getting
this global following among young men and boys. And to counter this interesting a few weeks ago there was a government campaign that showed a young teenage boy on his phone and all the hidden forms of disrespect that he's exposed to on his phone, and it sort of shows all the various forms of misogynistic content that young people see and hear and how it can escalate to violence and negative attitudes about women.
Life is a horror for a status what you be.
Called to control them?
Control?
As a man?
You're a vader?
Who are you texting?
I know you like me on scene.
A man with James James?
All right, yeah, smarting M So you're definitely right.
Well, do you know what's influencing your kids? Learn the hidden trends of disrespect before they lead to violence.
Something that we wanted to drill into today is a concept in a lot of these Andrew Tait style videos, because it's not just him who's out there sprouting this stuff. It's lots of other influencers who are reaching young men and boys, and it's the concept of the high value woman. There was an article written for the site The Adult Man by a man called Joshua Sigaphus that was called the fifteen traits of a high Value Woman and why
you shouldn't settle. So today we were just going to go through some of those traits because it's not as simple as just sort of if a woman is a slush and has ever had sex, then she's a lot value woman. It's not just that it sort of starts in this way. If you've ever been on a date or shared a bedroom with a contentious, argumentative, lazy, or hateful woman, then you probably know exactly what I'm talking about when I describe a high and a low value woman,
says this writer. Now, I'm just going to read you a couple and I'm going to ask you guys to read a couple more whole. One of them is she cares about her appearance. What are the points under that?
So they say youth, beauty, and fertility are primary attractive metrics for women. So depressing. I'm so depressed already. High value women care about their appearents, take pride in being beautiful, and put effort into their fertility cues.
What does that mean.
I think it means showing you that she is young and plump of ovary for you as a man looking for a high value woman. This really comes down to one simple principle. Only entertain women who care about their appearance and put work into making themselves as beautiful as possible. When I think about this, I think about you know, when you look at all the women in the public eye and all kinds of different ways, right, and I'm
thinking about politics since we're just talking about that. All the women who live in like Trump world have to look a certain way. They have to be very groomed, they have to be very like It's like Kelly from the DCC's School of Womandom. Always have your makeupon, always be groomed, Always be wearing type fitting closet, Show your lovely figure that you work hard to maintain. Always be pleasing to the eye of a male. Do not be turning up to practice in your sweatpants with no makeupon
and you haven't brushed your hair? What are use lovenly? Yeah.
Number three is that she's agreeable. So high value women understand that being an agreeable, pleasant partner makes them more attractive and valuable. They understand that if they want to walk with a high value man, they need to relinquish control of the frame of the relationship and trust him to be the leader. So basically, agreeable is code for submissive.
The first one here is actually she embraces femininity, which is one of the ones I find most interesting because I am seeing that a lot on social where people say embrace or lean into your femininity. A lot of women that I know who have been dating for ages and haven't found a person get bunneled into this world of you've lost your femininity, you've leaned too far into your masculine, and you need to lean back into your
feminine and all those you're wearing. Yes, I keep trying to work out exactly what it means, and I went on a deep dive, and it means like you listen to your intuition rather than using logic. So I guess you don't use your brain, is what I'm reading there, Things like.
That you should lean into your intuition and not logic.
Yeah, empathy and generosity and kindness and basically were very passive, very very passive. Yeah, like you might go and be a leader in your workplace, but you have to leave that at work because a man is not going to want that because it's not leaning into your feminine.
What's fascinating about this whole idea of the high value women is a lot of the people who are espousing this are also women, right, And this is where it's so clever because it co opts women into the patriarchy because who doesn't want to be a high value woman?
Right?
Like I want to be a high value woman because that sounds great. I'm not a low value woman. I'm a high value woman. So when I look at what it takes to be a high value woman, all of those things are about submission and about reinforcing patriarchal standard. So another one is she cares about her reputation? Does
she post nude or semi nude photos on Instagram? Or is she the type of woman who takes her reputation more seriously than that, as if equating how you present yourself to the world cheapens your value.
Now, that is a tale as old as time.
So they've got she's always improving herself. She's a peacemaker, she's not a victim. She saves her sexual power for one man. I'm gonna push back, right, obviously there is something incredibly sexist about this. But while I was away, I listened to an episode of Mummy out Loud where you talked about six or five blue eyes. Yeah, guy who works in finance, tell me what the difference is.
There isn't one at all.
And that's the thing. There are certain circles of women who would write a list of a high value man and it would be just as reductive and just as harmful and draw a box around Masculinity's just as suffocating.
Entirely true, but the parameters would be different. Because the whole point about six ' five Finance Trust Fund is buying into these ancient ideas that men it's about ambition and money and status, and women it's about beauty, fertility, submissive like. So the reason I pushed back on this whole like, who's making the decisions.
About what the value is right, because the whole.
Point of this is you only get to choose if you're in the position of power. And what we're being told over and over again about young men in particular, is that they're no longer in the position of power. Women are graduating high school with better marks, taking up more places at university, beginning to close the gap, taking jobs from them, blah blah blah. So in theory, they're now moving up into the power seat and they get
to choose. And I've listened to a million podcasts and read things from guys telling guys how to also be high status so that women want them rather than the sort of schlubby loser.
But isn't that just purely about being rich.
It's still all about your values, Because if I was riding my list, it wouldn't be about how much money he earn, how tall he was, what color his eyes were. It wouldn't be this. Do you know what I mean? This is a very particular.
Kind of value system, But what it is is gender roles. So saying gender quality is pushing both men and women to feel nostalgic for gender roles.
Well, I don't think women would.
Be looked after like traadois I reckon. I've change in finance.
I've changed my mind about this because we're talking about it recently with the Julia Gillard thing, and I agree feminism probably needs to do a better job of bringing young men along with us. That's start evidently, but you'll put that on a when there's a lack of social cohesion, which we just saw in the previous segment.
Social cohesion is gone.
Social cohesion is gone.
I think that's algorithm's rule.
Things now, we don't know. When we look at the future five, ten, fifteen years ahead, things are very uncertain and the ground is shifting beneath our feet. And I think at moments at crossroads, we need to grip onto
something that we understand, and that is very simple. And I wonder if that's to do with what we're seeing with a bit of a regression when it comes to traditional gender roles that they make us feel say safe, that it's like, at least I can hold onto this and I can mimic this, because there was a clear distinction between the two, whereas everything else feels like chaos.
But they didn't make women safe. They never did. That's the big lie here, which is the same conversation that we had really about that and about the opposite is the women when they don't have power and they don't have financial autonomy and they're being treated as a possession, they're not safe, They're never safe, so they're being sold
a lie. I think really it's about pushing back on both of these ideas that you know, there's a battle for dominance here between the men and women, and maybe the women are choosing, and what are they going to want if they're the ones who get to make the choices, and if the men are choosing, what are they going
to want? I know it sounds so polyanna, but it's about back to the idea that we're all becoming less human because we are living our lives on our phones and we're watching people on our screens who don't even look like humans anymore. Is don't we all just want a good human? Don't we all just want our partners to be good human?
I think that the bigger, more chilling aspect of all of this is joining the dots between abortion rights being round back in America. You can't have a quality for women when women don't have bodily autonomy, and when women don't have any control over how many children they have or when they have them. So there's this idea on the far right and on the right and conservative, and some of it's religious and some of it's more idealistic based that yes, things have gone too far and that
women need to get back in their place. And some of the most chilling points here and not the expected ones, about she has to look good and save her sexual powerful one man, but things like she's a peacemaker. Now, this goes on to say, is she the type of woman who starts fights, arguments and drama or is she the type of woman who builds, bridges men's relationships and
brings people together. There are plenty of dramatic women in the world, but a truly high value woman will strive to be a peacemaker, even when doing so isn't the easiest thing. This is a trait to treasure highly in a woman, and truth be told, there aren't very many women nowadays who cultivate this skill. This is about sublimating your opinions. It's about being a doormat.
Essentially, Although I would also like a man to be a peacemaker, please, like I think that people who don't deliberately go around antagonizing people to start fights and dramas. Is something that's very appealing, and I on that.
I'm thinking back to when I was dating, say mid twenties, and I would go on dates with men, and I had internalized the idea, which I think was probably true. I think I was responding to the evidence around me that sitting there at dinner and talking about abortion rights or about feminism wasn't very sexy, probably wasn't going to get me a second date.
Remember there was that whole movement about you have to be a low maintenance woman.
It's like, I'm a cool girl. I'm low maintenance.
I'm so like, I don't get fiery about things.
Yeah, no difficult, I don't have opinions, I don't have demands. Because the next one is, she's not a victim. To put it simply, a high value woman will always take responsibility for herself.
Listen to this.
She'll never seek victimhood to gain the upper hand or to make her life easier.
That's very convenient. That is all we've got time for on our Monday. Mama, Mira, out loud, out louders, thank you for being here with us. Thank you for joining us, and thank you to our team for putting today's show together. We'll be back in yours tomorrow and before.
We go if you would like some more of us. Last week, I had a therapy dilemma that I needed to talk through with Mayor and Holly, so I did so in a subscriber episode. Here is a little taste. I wish it was more of my voice, but I hear my psychologist in my head a lot before I make certain decisions about this inner child work, which sounds really woo woo, but basically, like, listen to the deepest part of you that's saying no, I don't want to do that. No, I'm tired, No I'm sick, No I
want to hang out with my daughter. The more you reject that, like, it's quite fracturing. A link to that episode will be in the show notes. Bye bye.
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