The Performative Male Epidemic - Louise Perry & Mary Harrington - #1021

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Americans are having a record low amount of sex, even less than they did during COVID. Just 37% of American adults have sex weekly, down from 55% in 1990. Does this counter the view that sex is becoming more casually accepted than ever before? Who goes first? Do you want to go first? I glanced at these statistics and what I thought was interesting and sort of haven't really had a chance to burrow into is how does it split between the long-term partnered and the casually and the unpartnered?

Because that's been, generally, that's where the commentary gets interesting. And people have often, the conservative side will say, no, actually, the... The not getting any is very much the people who are not married. And actually, the married are getting any. And if I remember rightly, the recent headlines were actually the people who are married are also.

becoming more panda like sex recessions happening across yeah yeah it's happening across the relationship uh agnostic so i think that the paradox where people are simultaneously having less sex and apparently

being at least more permissive towards casual sex, whether or not they're having lots of it, I think is solved by that marriage issue. So if people are less likely to be in long-term partnerships and people in long-term partnerships have more sex. So I think there's a model that works where... say Gen Z, are having casual sex, but they're only having casual sex. So like one hookup a year, for instance, works out as very little sex, but it's also not.

to say that casual sex culture doesn't exist. So you're able to have both of these things happen at the same time. I think that those things work. And they might actually be causing each other. Yeah. But I also think it's plausible that even married people might be having less sex. And that might be to do with things like obesity.

Things like, I don't know, xenoestrogens. There could be biological things going on. Or people just looking at their phones too much. I think people looking at their phones is at least as plausible on a practical level. as xenoestrogens or any of the sort of exotic biological explanations. It's very absorbing. And at the end of the day, a certain amount of action happens. There's nothing to do, nothing on TV. Spontaneously, out of boredom. You're here, I'm here.

You know, Alice Evans, who's an academic at KCL London, she blames smartphones for the birthright crisis. I mean, the... The line starts going down sometime before smartphones. Well, it depends on what country you're looking at. It depends on which country you're looking at. But she notices, and I think this is true, that all the parts of the world that are seeing, have seen and are seeing the greatest drops in fertility.

This does track with smartphone usage and the places where fertility is clinging on in, say, sub-Saharan Africa. is where people are least likely to have smartphones i think she's probably i think probably the third factor that those things correlate with is actually modernity and affluence

And that's more complex. But it's interesting. I mean, her theory is that people are just so besotted with the joys of limbic capitalism delivered by their phones that they just forget to behave like normal human beings and reproduce.

Do you think Taylor Swift's trad wife arc will be enough to reverse birth rate decline? But she's not having a trad wife arc. She's engaged. Let her do it one step at a time. What is she, 35? Maybe, yeah. Yeah, it's not especially proud wifey. You know what I mean, though? I mean, there was a poem by someone called Kaylin Weird. It's got tens of millions of views. Have you seen this? It's been floating around. The day Taylor Swift.

Got engaged. Little girls screamed. Grown women cried. And the awkward child we all carry inside finally felt chosen. My point. Lots of women follow Taylor Swift. She's got engaged. Is this going to be a boon? It's a non-zero impact on coupling, right? But how big is it going to be? So these things are mimetic. I'm with you there.

But I don't know. I mean, that is an interesting question. We know that with fertility, if your sister, say, has a baby, you're more likely to have a baby in the year following. And best friend, etc. But does it work when it's Taylor Swift? Well, maybe. I mean, I was thinking maybe parasocial relationships can have the same effect. And probably actually people spend more. I mean, it occurred to me the other day that I see Donald... Trump's face so much more often than I see my neighbours' faces.

For instance, and that's probably true for you as well. Because your neighbors are wearing Donald Trump masks as they walk. To wind me up, yeah. But the parasocial relationships, I mean, they do everyone who's any kind of digital device. is susceptible to them so yeah maybe i mean maybe taylor might be able to trick her biggest fans into thinking my sister's just had a baby or when she does eventually have a baby hopefully um so yeah i think it's not negligible

Birth rate decline might be a slightly bigger challenge than can be fixed by Taylor Swift. Maybe a little bit. I mean, you could also make the case, I'm going to be provocative here, that birth rate decline is not so much a problem as just nature taking its course.

In the sense of a culture self-correcting from a kind of a terminal spiral into... kind of a structural state of sterility i mean if if if the if the logical end point of limbic capitalism uh this superb phrase that louise just raised this i mean i don't know if you've come across this phrase before it was coined by a writer called david courtright who wrote a book

titled Limbic Capitalism, which is a critique of all the ways that, especially in more recent years, the way people... the way people make money, the most profitable source of new innovation is hacking people's basic. primitive drives and redirecting them from what they're actually healthily meant to do towards making money for companies. So, you know, selling junk food, selling pornography.

hacking people's dopamine systems so that they stay hypnotized by social media instead of getting it on, or forming relationships, or even, frankly, going outside. You know, all of those things are instances of what Courtright calls limbic capitalism. And I think you could make the case that if the direction of the general overall cultural direction of travel is such that that's the end point that we're currently destined towards.

If it's resulting in people just not having babies, you could argue that if you take a step back, that's just evolution taking its course. We are being selected against by our own commercial infrastructure. And the end point of that will be that the current culture will very literally not be reproduced and will be replaced in...

you know, two or three generations by some other culture which has somehow managed to unplug from the Skinner machine. Yeah, okay. I mean, so in the long term, it's kind of optimistic, but in the short term, for the people who are committed to the limbic capitalist architecture, it looks like a disaster.

The conversation I had with Brad Wilcox, he was talking about why South Korea has got such a low birth rate. And one of his big theories is around K-pop stars. Have you heard this one? No. Fucking brilliant. k-pop revolution is very constructed these people sort of apply they go through navy seal selection week and then they're done and they're locked into these ironclad 360 24 7 contracts and in them

they can't date. They're to be completely celibate for the entire time, which means... How long does it last, the contract? Well, for as long as they're in the band. And if they want to go and... If they were to begin dating, they would be out, right? Maybe, I don't know. What's the reasoning?

I think he didn't say that, but I'm going to guess something like, we want you completely committed to this huge project and anything which is off that might muddy the water. There's also a cleaner parasocial relationship, isn't it?

as well i suppose you know when you think about the relationship between taylor swift's fans taylor swift's boyfriends and taylor swift yeah you know story you know what was it matty healy and when she was dating him they all went they her entire fan base of you know squillion bazillions of

women went absolutely bananas they hated him and they but like his her fan base basically split up the relationship that's a that's a way to put it that if you have a personal relationship there is a part of you that is outside of the band yeah So there is no personal. And his point is that because you have the most popular, most aspirational role models within a country are all uncoupled and childless. That created an...

a huge generational impact of you shouldn't be trying to have kids. And if that's true, there was a great example, I think it's the country of Georgia, very religious, and they have this like superstar rock star pastor.

And he's the most popular guy in the entire country. And he tried to fix birth rate decline by saying, I will personally baptize the third child of any. Oh, I remember that, yeah. And these families are speed running through children in a desperate attempt to get the third. And so you can see...

People who are of high status are able to create incentives that encourage people who respect them in order to follow them. So the obvious thing, at least for Korea, that you could fix overnight is the only way you can become a K-pop star is if you're already a mother or father. Like that's the how you get in. And that means that every K-pop star now is a example. But again, the entire architecture of limbic capitalism militates against that because...

The excitement, clearly. I mean, this is not a world I'm massively familiar with, but there's obviously huge volumes of gossip content and huge amount of exposure and every aspect of these people's lives down to their... inner lives is made available for strip mining by the media machine. And under those circumstances, it's just not possible to be a parent because to be there, to be for your child or to be for your family is to keep some of that.

material some of that intimate stuff protected from from being strip mined and commercialized in that way i mean this is something you and i talk about isn't it louise like how how and in what how one can go about existing in public while intentionally preserving a space of intimacy where family life happens, which is not subject to that. The digital modesty thing. Yeah, digital modesty, exactly. And I mean, I'm very intentional about what I...

post and when and how I share any information at all about my family. They're there and I love them. And if I don't talk about them, it's not because actually I secretly wish I wasn't part of that family. It's precisely because I respect their privacy and their stories are not mine to tell. Um,

But to be a K-pop star, to say you have to be a parent to be a K-pop star, would be to say you also have to be willing to strip mine your family. That's true. I suppose you're strip mining your ability to have a family in the first time. iteration of it though.

right like you're you're refusing to have okay so on one side you are being puppeted by lack and on the other side you are being puppeted by transparency i mean i think you know at the risk of at the risk of getting very anti-capitalist very early in this conversation you know perhaps the problem is the strip mining it's i mean the position that we're all in you know in the in the literal physical natural world as well as in the emotional caveat um but my point is

we're all kind of under the impression or the awareness that that is a problem that's too big to be solved. So you need interventions that can, this is the... world that we exist within that's so compelling to people and so seductive that you're not going to be able to stop that. You're not going to get people off smartphones. You're not going to stop social media from hacking the bottom of the brainstem. Okay, so what are the ways to get Taylor Swift engaged?

I think it's not the case that South Korea has low fertility because of K-pop, but if there was one easy intervention that you could at least attempt, it would be in the world of propaganda.

right for the birth rates thing so whether that be intentionally boosting mothers and fathers or yeah obliging k-pop stars to to shag in an appropriate way or like whatever the rules are maybe that would work for trying to make parenthood higher status the problem with any other type of birthright intervention is that um

All of the other options are fairly appalling, I think, in terms of our actual ability to tolerate them. Because the cash transfers don't work. It's what we've learned. And so if the cash transfers don't work, we could try propaganda after that.

We're just going to have to go. Evolution takes its course. Stop the Wi-Fi networks and kill data access from your phone. We could try that, I suppose. Yeah. I just found the Taylor Swift thing has been like in the... reaction to that and then the subsequent re-reaction has been pretty interesting well you try and design a clever study to see if she boosts marriage and birth rates um and we'll see correlate your uh

marriage rate with your spotify listening habits yeah yeah that's true i mean apparently a supermarket um a supermarket uh loyalty programs can already tell when somebody's pregnant even before they sometimes they realize it themselves. My algorithm did that. Just by their search patterns and purchase patterns. I got an ad for pregnancy tests before I...

You know, I was pregnant the most recent time. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah, the internet's very clever. It's uncanny. There's an app called Aura, A-U-R-A, and it's digital safety stuff. You put it on everybody's phone, but you can put it on your kid's phone. And it allows parents to have surveillance that's safe without encroaching too much on privacy. At least that's the positioning. But it does things like it looks at how hard they're pressing the screen.

And it correlates that with their level of psychological distress. And it looks at the last time that they went to…

the last time they used it and the first time they used it in the morning. And then they correlate that with GPS data. It's all held securely, supposedly. And it can deliver a report to a parent that says, when little Timmy goes to baseball, he sleeps for… 45 minutes longer on average and he's this percent less aggressive when he's pressing the screen which suggests that it's very regulating for him.

His grandmother could have told you that though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of this stuff is absolutely, it's a substitute for attentive, attuned, interpersonal relationships from people who love you. We're trying to re-engineer through. And there's a sense in which the more you offer a tech alternative to that, the more you create, the more you open the possibility that actually you can just do without the relationship. Whereas.

And it's jumping slightly sideways from that to the power of older women for pattern recognition. I was talking to a local friend who has a son the same age as my daughter. We were talking about schools as we were walking our dogs.

Very normie, very countryside. And he was telling me, his wife, who's also my friend's mother, runs a local riding school you know it's one of those very classic kind of you know english english kind of tier three riding schools where all the school ponies are very hairy and very muddy and And generation after generation after generation of local girls, sort of from tween probably to mid-teens, have come through this riding stables.

So my friend's mother-in-law has observed patterns of behaviour in possibly, I think, 25 years' worth of local girls. And he and his wife are basing their school selection. on what she has observed over 25 years about the change in disposition as those girls go off to different schools. So not Ofsted, not...

Not even what other parents think, not even what other parents are planning to do, but which secondary schools instantly overnight transformed the girls that my mother-in-law saw from nice little girls. into Bratz and which didn't. Wow. And that's the kind of stuff which you can try and replace with an app, but you can't, basically. A quick aside, you've probably heard experts like Dr. Rhonda Patrick talk about the benefits of...

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Have you ever read that classic blog, I think it's by an anonymous blogger from years ago, about whams versus autists?

so wands is a made-up term so the argument in the piece is great is um we spend a lot of time talking about autism and like identifying it in people and seeing it as an obviously bad thing you know and we'll list all the ways in which autistic people suffer in the world and we see it as something to be treated I mean obviously in extreme non-verbal forms obviously that's appropriate but

To some extent, it is just a personality type and it's a personality type you're more likely to see in men and is often pathologized. And the piece argues that, no, look, like autism is just one end of a spectrum in terms of a disposition, in terms of being more interested in things than people and being very interested in systems and being quite socially withdrawn and whatever.

We don't have a term for the other end of the spectrum. We just don't talk about the other end of the spectrum. But there is such a thing as someone being more interested in people than things, not really being interested in systems, being very extroverted, and being very intuitive about everything and very like... hypersensitive to emotion or whatever. Why don't we have a name for that? Because in extreme forms, that's also a problem. And so the writer, who I think is male, calls them whams.

Which stands for? Nothing. It stands for nothing. It's just a word that you made up. So whamishness is like the opposite of being autistic. Fantastic example of whamishness, just pure like intuiting from the girls' emotional states. I don't know. I mean, it seems like a robust example of patent recognition and the most kind of grounded and localistic kind.

I mean, I know this guy's mother-in-law. I've met her on a number of occasions. She's the least kind of emotionally labile individual you can imagine. She's like small, small, square, thick set, extremely practical English horsewoman. You're relying very heavily on your...

Neighbours not watching this movie. Sorry? You're relying very heavily on your neighbours not watching. Well, I mean, I'm not going to name names and these are all people whom I love and respect. I cite this as examples of what... a functioning social fabric looks like. This is classic British village life. Yeah, and the reason I talk about affectionately and respectfully, really deeply affectionately and respectfully about my neighbours and my local community.

this way is because living living like this is only is what you have before you start trying to reverse engineer a technological replacement for it. And I mean, these are not people who are all up in each other's grills the whole time. Small town England is mostly people mind their own business. But there's a sense in which you're known.

cumulatively over time just because you all show up in the same places and you go to the same playgroups and whatever. And that's a very different way of being known and seen and observed than, for example, creating a profile online or even having your data tracked. and monetized by a supermarket shopping app or an algorithm that wants to sell you pregnancy tests. Very different. It's certainly a missing archetype, I think, for the wise, non-grandmother.

influence in some young person's life. I think we... We call those the aunties, really. That's why the group chat I made between us is aunties. That was not as flippant as you might have thought. Yeah, like those auntie influences. I don't live in the town or the country that I was born in. I've been displaced by my own choice, but... most of my communication now is mediated through all of that where is the opportunity for some

older matriarch woman to you know why aren't you married yet chris that's i'm aware that's a that's a big question i'm aware that well i mean i'm not expecting you to answer it now but but this is this is what all of the aunties will beast you with on every possible occasion i did highlight that at every dread now going to weddings because a 37-year-old unmarried man, every time that the vows are completed, the fucking eyes of Sauron all turn to the people. Who...

Christopher, when are we... For fuck's sake, I feel like I need to, you know, do some Fugazi. Are those hors d'oeuvres over there? I must escape the situation. But that's what aunties do. A lot of poking. On the one hand, you long for the aunties and you want to create auntie groups. On the other hand, you want to run away from them when they beast you at weddings. I think this is the auntie dynamic.

I mean, probably whatsoever thus. Yeah, correct. You know what I mean? All right. I want to talk about a kind of... downstream from the taylor swift thing i want to talk about pick me's and performative males because these are two memes that are taking off a little bit at the moment performative males this is not one i've heard please have you heard about performative males no what is a performative male You need to get back on Twitter. You need to get back on Twitter. I'm cut out of discourse.

If Mary doesn't send me a tweet, I just don't see it. Okay. I've also been deliberately not very online all through the summer. I took my holiday from the internet in England's last remaining phone black spot. I've decided to pick your fucking sabbatical from online life.

And today is the day that the kids go back to school. So I had to have asked you this in four weeks' time. Allow me to tell you about performative males. So you're going to have to fill us in. Let me do that. Okay, so performative males are... It's a call out. It's been very interesting. The trend emerged and almost immediately became kind of castigated. You know, like woke. He's got a tote bag. He's reading some sort of literary fiction.

He's got a matcha. He's not quite like a cinnamon roll boyfriend, husband thing. Is this not just the new soy boy? Maybe. It might be kind of like an elevated hipster. like a soft boy archetype perhaps from sort of the late 2010s.

it might be the equivalent of women wearing like football shirts or pink Floyd t-shirts or like kind of like the male, imagine the male equivalent of a pick me, but it's stripped of most of the, um, raw aggressive kind of more masculine more domineering so so let me like if i were to speculate i would say this is the kind of guy who might employ the sneaky fucker

mating strategy so this is why this is why it's becoming i think immediately satirized i think it's it's like of course knows what i mean it's poorly hidden poorly hidden pliable male mating tactics being called out very quickly. Actually, interestingly, I'm not sure how well this maps to performative males, but I remember very interestingly discovering just how high the proportion is of male feminists who are... who subsequently end up being MeToo'd as sex pests.

I remember you writing this piece. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the lawyers took four paragraphs. Because they weren't sufficiently well because they were just rumours and it was just, yeah. Well, allegedly, allegedly. We must remember that allegedly. They gutted the article.

but really the pattern is strong enough that even if you don't name names, it's a thing. So these guys are, they're sort of droopy and feminized in presentation. Flaccid, flaccid men. At least in presentation. They're heterosexual. Heterosexual. But heterosexual. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the performative males being this. I think it's...

Is it the one guy who comes to Pilates with you and then just like tries to hit on you? We're getting close there. We're getting perilously close to like what would have been the sneaky fucker male feminist. The performative male, I think it's as much an aesthetic as anything else. Okay. So it might be the aesthetic. Basically, it might just be a rework of the aesthetic of the sneaky fucker. What does he read? I'm not too sure. I'm not too sure what he would be reading. Yasmin.

She left. She's my source of sneaky fucker info because she's in LA. But it would be him sort of... He's the male embodiment of a matcha drink. Does he read Sarah J Maas? I think this is what I'm trying to... maybe figure out what it reminds me of is the 70s when you had the the men simultaneously embracing long hair and free love and whatever and being quite feminine and and you know dodging the draft and stuff so on the one hand

being anti-masculine, but then fully embracing the post-sexual revolution opportunity to get women into beds. And feminists at the time complained about this. What it sounds like though is that the performative male adds a layer of consumerism. which is quite distinctively 2025. Is that right? I think you've nailed it. Yeah, with the tote bag, with the dress, with the hair. And the boo-boo on his bag.

Almost certainly Lububu. Actually, that's a better way to put it. If you could find a Lububu with a matcha, it's Lububu males. Yes, that's exactly what it is. Amazing. I mean, one of the sort of depressive... depressing thoughts that crossed my mind the other day. You know, when you think about this sort of noodle-armed male phenotype, you know, with a labubu on his bag and a matcha in his hand, and maybe he actually literally does read Sarah J Maas.

And I think about them and you think about, you know... Do I need to wait a minute? Oh, it's okay. The way that you construct sentences, I can't keep a straight face. It's fucking brilliant. Okay, go on. I mean, you know, these kind of... Stop it. Sorry, sorry.

It's catchy. Yeah, the booboo man. So, the booboo guys, what if, in fact, they're more evolutionarily fit in the context of what the working environment... Oh, they're fucking adapted to the new environment. That's what I mean. Because it's like when you think...

about when you think about the kind of work that everyone actually does now and when you think about the kind of social environments that particularly knowledge class people of either sex have to operate within actually being the kind of high tea You're not sitting still in class.

You know, those guys get medicalized and pathologized basically because they don't work in open plan offices. Question on this, is this as close as a man can get to being female whilst still being reproductively viable for females to find attractive?

And given that females have got this advantage socio-economically in the education and in the workplace, this is like the new... And also... I want to talk about Me Too at some point today. I wonder if this is the sort of post-Me Too acceptable, what men think, even though incorrectly, I've been told, do not be domineering, do not be too forthcoming, do not be somebody that... could make women feel threatened in any way. What's the least threatening libubu, tote bag, floppy hair?

matcha drink. It's very HR friendly. And I do get the impression there's a lot of guys particularly those who are sort of you know socialised into a more sort of progressive kind of thought world who genuinely feel very distressed by the sort of heighty, aggressive male disposition. I just finished reading a book. I mean, it's a good book, very interesting piece of work by an ecological economist.

on care and the sort of Cinderella economy, as he puts it, of care and maintenance and systemic health and environmental sustainability and so on, which he sees. as being, again, strip-mined, exploited and ultimately exhausted by the quote-unquote real economy that we now have. And in it, he has a whole chapter about the patriarchy. which I just found a really interesting read from a guy who's a successful guy and he's got adult children.

You know, he's obviously, you know, sporty and fit and intelligent, well read and so on. So like, you know, perfectly manly man within the terms of, you know, modern. respectable liberal society. But he's furious about the patriarchy. And the passage I found most interesting is he has a little discussion about Daphne du Maurier's novels.

and Jamaica Inn particularly and Rebecca and he talks you know his reading of Daphne du Maurier is as a feminist you know that it's a critique of gender relations between the sexes you know and particularly of you know the chronic kind of susceptible vulnerability of women to male violence.

But at one point, he observed that du Maurier's female characters are both vulnerable to male violence and also kind of turned on by it. He doesn't quite put it up. He doesn't quite put it like that. But there's obviously a real ambivalence in the way she writes. how to process it. I find that really interesting just in the context of thinking about how the labubu man presents. I'm not suggesting that the author of this book is a labubu man.

He's not quite that, but there's something really interesting going on there about, you know, guys who've internalised the idea that to be a straightforwardly aggressive man in a style, in a perhaps quote-unquote old-fashioned. style or more overtly patriarchal is bad. And that puts you in continuity with Andrew Tate and other people who are bad, obviously by definition.

And therefore, we must be something which is softer and more consensual and more kind of the booboo-ish. I don't know, something. Good news, AG1. just released their next gen formula. It is a more advanced clinically backed version of the product that I've been drinking every day for years. So you still get the same one scoop ritual, but now with an even more thoughtful formulation flavor and four clinical trials behind it. AG1 has been...

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But seriously, like maybe we do need more. I mean, it's crossed my mind sometimes too. Yeah, we need more polarity. Well, look, this is... To me, this just seems like the progeny of Me Too in many ways. That... The message that a lot of men, the vast majority of well-behaved, sexually disciplined, not pushy men took was, I shouldn't be pushy.

It's like, well, yeah, you already weren't that pushy and maybe you actually weren't pushy enough. So the issue with the message, don't be too pushy, is that the men who really need to hear it will ignore it. And the men who are already predisposed to believe it will take it to heart. So what you end up with is this weird selection effect where the bad actors still act badly and the ones who actually probably needed a little bit of a helping hand to go forward are like, oh, holy fuck.

And maybe the labuba man is just the final form of that. He's taking it too seriously. At the risk of just pouring petrol on this conversation and then flinging a match in. It strikes me that, you know, if your thesis is right, and in fact, somewhere buried in all of this is actually a low level of sort of low level revulsion at Le Bou Bou Man.

and a yearning for a more direct and unmediated form of masculine sexual aggression. It has been suggested by people on the internet, whose names I now forget, that this is in fact a fact. factor in the extremely politically sensitive subject of migration into the country across the English Channel. As in, there are progressive women. Who kind of enjoy the appearance of young men who haven't been labubified yet. Wow. This is not my thesis. Because labubu hasn't reached Syria.

Lububu has not reached Syria. These guys are not noodle armed. These guys, in fact, have demonstrated considerable gumption in making it from wherever it is that they originated to England. I mean, it's a genuinely impressive level of gumption.

Yeah. And I don't know, maybe. That's spicy. Hmm? What did you say? That is so spicy. Yeah, you really. Okay, two things. One is... So having just... I'm just going to... I'm going to hand you the petrol can. So I do actually agree with you. I was speaking to a journalist friend recently. No, you're not agreeing with me. You're agreeing with people on the internet. Sorry. His names I don't know.

I was speaking to a journalist friend recently who had been in Calais and speaking to these guys who are trying to come over the channel. And he said, like, what is really amazing is you'll talk to these guys about their life stories and it will be like, oh, yeah, so I came from Sudan and I walked.

across half of Africa and then I got to Libya and then I got enslaved and so I was taken to another country where I was a slave and then I was gangroped and then I somehow escaped from that and then I swam across the channel whatever it's like they tell this story

And it's the most appalling thing you've ever heard. And they're physically, it's evident that they've been through this. And these are like 20 year old guys or something. And then you ask them, why did you do it? And they're like, just like Manchester United.

They'll offer some really weird, inadequate answer. It's not even like I want access to the welfare state because you could have got that in other European countries. It's quite strange. And I do kind of get your point that there's an element of like...

crazy macho-ness about it. Wow. If you're prepared to go through all of that for Manchester United, imagine what you do for your family and your partner. I suppose so. The only thing I would say, though, is the impression that I get from a lot of women who are very, very invested in refugees welcome kind of stuff.

is that they really infantilize these men at the same time. And there's a degree to which they're kind of scooping up the vulnerable, you know. You think this is a bit like the American pit bull ladies phenomenon? Yeah, he's just misunderstood. I'll just add something. This is another one of these discourses, actually probably related obliquely to Le Boo Boo Man.

It was one of these memes that sloshes around in which... A certain subtype of usually single American progressive women are accused of adopting actually obviously murderously sociopathically dangerous rescue pit bulls as a kind of proxy. for the sort of man they would never dream of admitting to fancying in real life. Right, okay.

So in a sense, you know, officially they're only allowed to date Lububu Man and that's in fact the only people who are within their social circles immediately. Okay. And so they adopt a pit bull to just kind of compensate. So I see. His lack of. I see you're Lububu Man.

And I raise you the newly nomenclatured himbo, which has actually come back around. The new dream guy is beefy, placid, and politically ambiguous. Amid pitch debates about masculinity, the himbo stands stoically above it all. As an alternative to the thinking man, the renaissance man or the family man, today's himbo offers just... man, a blurry image, a blunt political instrument, or just a caricature, the human equivalent of a smiley face.

The himbo is, in many senses, unreal, a wish-fulfillment fantasy. His true self is concealed behind a set of doe-like eyes, the content of his inferiority forever unconfirmed. So is this like Ken in Greta Gerwig's movie? He says towards the end, if I'd realize... realized patriarchy wasn't wasn't just about horses i wouldn't have bothered hunk with a heart of gold hunk with a heart of gold i think um who was the dude that did magic mike who was the guy the actor that played magic mike

Channing Tatum. Channing Tatum is often put forward as like himbo. I actually, Channing Tatum follows me on Instagram, so I actually quite like him. But hunk with a heart of gold, the human equivalent of a smiley face. What we've got here is... Basically, I think you're trying to cross the streams between Le Boubou Man in terms of disposition and front cover of a dark romance novel in terms of presentation.

I mean, it's a tricky tightrope for women because on the one hand you want, and this is an eternal conundrum, you want a man who is going to protect you and protect your children and provide for you in times of... extreme threat, right? But you also don't want someone who's going to beat you up and beat up your children. And so that's tricky. The line that you've got to

Yeah, yeah. And so the himbo is, I love a himbo, right? And the impression from my female friends is that himbo is a very high status. I remember a friend talking to me about how attractive a himbo was, and she said she really, really didn't want, I guess, a labubu man who was like,

excessively intellectual. She said, if I came home and he was like, I just read something in the New York Review of Books, I would kill myself. It's not what she wants to admit, right? A himbo does kind of tread that tightrope. Like, he's physically capable, clearly, of doing what's needed if you're at risk. But he's so sweet-hearted that he would never...

So again, I mean, skipping sideways through this sort of untidy territory, there was a piece, I think it was in the New York Times, which is often a sort of barometer for what American... middle-class women in their 30s think about stuff in general. I think it was the New York Times, but it was somewhere in that zone, that discursive zone anyway, on a fascinating new trend of women marrying down.

And what they were actually talking about, but what they were talking about wasn't actually women marrying down. It was women marrying below their educational level. Actually, financially, they were marrying up because these were women with maybe a degree and a master's or a degree and a PhD. or something, but no money and a mountain of death. It's like complex hypergamy.

who were marrying construction entrepreneurs or a successful plumber with several employees who was turning over, you know, chunks of change. And so, you know, in straightforward financial terms, you know, it's... least a match if not marrying up, but in intellectual and in terms of a particular type of caste as distinct from straightforward economic.

levels. Some of these women were experiencing it as kind of marrying Dan. I think that speaks to your himbo in the sense that very sensibly, these extremely over-educated women have married some guy who's going to... appreciate their brains and also be able to pay the mortgage without trying to compete. It seems like the himbo is economically...

prepared and maybe educationally underdeveloped, whereas the labubu man is maybe economically underdeveloped and overeducated. I mean, would you rather have a guy who can talk contemporary literature but can't afford to buy you dinner? Or some guy who... who can fix the plumbing when it goes wrong and just doesn't care what you think about books. I have a funny story about this. It occurs to me that my parents technically have that dynamic because my mum has a PhD and my dad has...

an undergraduate degree and then became a lawyer um but anyone who knows PhDs don't translate into big money right so my dad's always earning more but there was this funny story about a time when he was at work this is the age for the internet and someone referred to King Lear in talking about

office politics. He was like, oh, someone's behaving like King Lear in relation to someone. He didn't understand what they were saying until he called my mom very quietly and said, what happens in King Lear? It was a funny example of this. There's something there. How much do women find that endearing? How much do women find needing to intellectually coddle their partner up to a certain point? How much do they find that as, oh, noble savage?

I personally find that endearing. I don't know if I'm representative. If he's also sort of generally red-blooded in his bearing behaviour and is also capable of fixing stuff around the house that goes wrong, I don't really see the problem. Read life fiction is very girly. What about if it's the opposite, though? What about if it's...

somebody who can tell you what has been happening in the New York Review of Books, but needs to call his dad if there's something broken in the toilet at your house. I mean, competence. Competence is very hot.

Right, but this is competence within a particular domain, because you could say the noble savage is incompetent when it comes to his intellectual development. I suppose, zooming back a bit, you could probably make the case that we're currently in an age of flux.

where this never-ending growth really does feel like it's come to an end. Politics is quite uncertain. We've got war in Europe for the first time in a very long time. And all kinds of things don't feel as certain and safe and stable as they used to. And it could be that...

In fact, some of these very instinctive mating patterns are going to shift or are perhaps already shifting in the light of how people assess their own prospects in that very much more uncertain world. So women who might have... who might have gone for the intellectual guy because he can always buy in a plumber.

um are going to assess you know who they're likely who their looks match and economic match is likely to be for a long-term partnership and think you know what actually like the boo-boo man i need somebody who knows how who knows how to use a shotgun or you know

Or, you know, there are various levels of deranged preparation that you can apply to that, depending on your filter bubble. But there are... You understand what I'm saying? It's like that study that men like fatter women when they're hungry.

Right. I'm sure you have an economic security hypothesis. Yeah. So it's perhaps the equivalent for women. Women like more... Masculine men when it seems like there's chaos going on. That's a fucking awesome... Mack and Murphy, if you're listening, go and do it.

that study for me. I mean, it seems like that's empirically researchable, but intuitively it feels completely right. Super easy. Whatever the equivalent of the social, you know, the VIX index, that volatility within the market, whatever the social equivalent of that is, okay, let's just have... what are the popular types of, the preferred types of men? Would you want one that's more domineering or one that's a little bit more casual? Whereas-

the point of being able to discourse about the New York Review of Books is its status games, right? And that's very much Maslow's hierarchy of needs tippy top. So that's the sort of thing that you're going to jettison pretty quickly. Yeah, yeah. in these kind of conditions. Oh, so the fact that you have the ability to do that suggests to me...

that in some ways, maybe it's a luxury position. Oh, you've got the bottom levels looked after, or maybe you're unable to look after the bottom levels and you've kind of outsourced them or skipped over them in some sort of way. Yes, I think that my friend who threatened suicide if her boyfriend read the new review of books.

I think what she was referencing was someone who couldn't do the other stuff. He turned the triangle upside down. Yeah, that's what's unattractive. So the only final bit on this himbo thing… What is it about the kind of... It's not someone who's saying, I want the Renaissance man. I want the thinking man.

Because presumably you could say, I want to max out his physicality and also max out his mind. But it seems like it's actually preferable to have the slightly more doughy-eyed human smiley face as a partner. The one thing that I would maybe throw into the mix there is that if you have somebody that is both domineering, prestigious, sort of able to make things happen in the physical world, and also has the intellect to be a little bit more conniving.

you run a much higher risk there of this guy's maybe going to be quite sought after in many ways. He's maybe going to be able to outwit me. Is that an element or what do you think is going on with this desire to actually kind of... turn down the volume on the intellectual nature. Simplicity? Or is it maybe a bit… I mean, realistically, guys like that are just relatively rare, so partly it's just a numbers game. Yeah. But also, I feel like it's a bit girly to be too preoccupied with. Yeah, yeah.

Thought and emotions. Just looping all of this back to the Taylor Swift theme, would you not say that actually Taylor's choice of a husband... perfectly encapsulates the himbo. Also Lana Del Rey. I love her choice. She's the kind of right-wing coded equivalent, isn't she? Lana Del Rey has married a... Isn't he like a crocodile wrangler? Yeah. It's incredible. From Louisiana, I want to say. Yeah, that's right. He's a completely normal.

blue-collar guy I don't know if blue-collar is the right word if you're a crocodile wrangler but he does a completely like very skilled very like impressive big arms masculine yeah and has nothing to do but then I was thinking if you're if you're Lana Del Rey or you're Taylor You don't need the money. And actually marrying someone who's in your field of work and it will inevitably be less successful than you.

is a nightmare. Because you're able to do more comparison hierarchically. So what does it mean to date hypergamously if you are going cross? Who is above you if you're Taylor?

I picked someone from another industry. There is no way of doing hypergamy if you're Taylor Swift because she's just right on top of her own hierarchy. She's the apex of so many different hierarchies. Have you read The Status Game? There's Kelsey, you know, he's enormous. Yeah. You know, he's a successful... He'll outlift her. He's able to outrun her. He can pick her up and he can probably juggle her. But he's got prestige. And he's got standing in his own field. And specifically in a...

cohort that she does not so if you walk into a different room there are tons of people that couldn't give a fuck about taylor swift but will sprint toward travis kelsey right yeah exactly and this is if you've read will store's a status game you've probably interviewed him at some point His really, really good piece of life advice is that everyone is completely blessed with status. You can't pretend that you're not. It's just the natural human condition to be preoccupied with status.

But you can choose which status game you compete in to some extent. And you can say, I realize that that one is bad for me or that I'm not going to. flourish in it but you can just choose another one and so yeah choosing having a spouse who's competing in a different status game from yourself i think is very sensible a young friend who also has something of an internet platform told me recently that he he had tried

dating women who also were internet figures of some sort. And it was just hideous. It feels too similar. Yeah, it was too much of a visual. Comparison's too direct. And I guess, I don't think, like this wasn't his point, but it struck me that if you both have a platform, you both have an audience, the temptation to turn your relationship into content would be almost, would be totally overwhelming. This is Freya India's thing, right? That all relationships...

are just brand collaborations right and and it doesn't have to be like that but you really if you're very online you have to choose you know you're going to survive much longer and stay much saner if your partner is not online at all or is or is it just not very interested in that have you heard the theory that

aliens are just the end of human evolution that they're completely yeah i'm bringing it back i promise um they're sort of uh huge heads human heads have got bigger over time although they actually got smaller at one point as well but human heads are big um we seem to be getting lower testosterone, less muscle, less sort of, you know, domineering physically, and that aliens, the classic sort of big head, big eyes thing, is the completely atrophied in the body, but...

overdeveloped cognitively. What they are to us is we are to chimps. And yeah, because we are weaker, bigger brains. Yeah. And then you just keep running that forward. Even less hair on aliens as well. Good point. I never really assessed the hair of an alien, but it's just interesting to hear where your mind goes. I wonder whether La Boo Boo Man is... kind of the same sort of I've adapted to my local environment.

My local environment is one where if I'm quite flaccid as a human, like a very flaccid human, I can sit in an office chair for longer, basically. Right. So the interesting, you know, civilizations can go down as well as up. How long? would it take after the shit hit the fan, hypothetically speaking, in civilizationally, before Le Boo Boo Man got his act together? And was either selected aggressively out of the picture altogether or actually just learned to shoot?

Yeah. Well, I mean, how many people say if our country went to war, there's no way that I would fight for them. I've got asthma. Sorry. No, my athlete's foot precludes me from being able to go into the, you know, there's like all manner of different excuses.

And yeah, without selection pressure, people fold around whatever that situation is. They kind of get molded and shaped by it. I think it's a really serious problem right now. If we did have some kind of serious strife in this country... I mean, it strikes me that one of the structural problems is that two or three generations of young people have now been taught very methodically by the education system, by the sort of ambient...

public conversation that nation states are just not really they're not the real political community and actually the real political community is everyone is every human on the planet you know we're all just a continuous one big happy family And under those circumstances, the idea that you could just snap people...

overnight back into thinking of themselves as an us just in the context of the nation-state, particularly in an age of high demographic change. Oh, that's good. You're trying to redraw territory. So having said, no, no, actually universal humanity, yada, yada, yada, and explicitly...

teaching that and explicitly teaching children that nationalism is bad and that it caused Hitler and the Second World War and carnage and death and disaster for decades and generation after generation. And then you turn around the next day and you're like, oh, by the way, we're going to reinstate the draft because Putin... Do you blame the kids for saying no? Fuck off. That's such a good point. Holy shit.

I mean, you know, even leaving, you know, there are various kind of uglier and more bitter versions of that story to do with politics and so on. But fundamentally, I think that's the that's the crux of it, because it goes across the board. It's not just the right wing zoomers. It's also the left wing ones.

don't buy it because they've been taught not to buy it except that generally i mean if you watch these endless vox pops that you're referring to where you ask people would you go to war for your country and they all say no what normally happens is that anyone who's member of an ethnic minority will say, oh, but I'm Jamaican or no, because I'm not from here or something. And actually you scratch the surface and everyone has.

a degree of ethnocentrism. And this is actually what worries me, that having abolished or done their best to educate young children... and young people out of thinking in terms of nation states, that people are not going to abandon having a tribe, but they're just going to draw the tribe around people who look like them.

And once you scale that up to the level of, you start looking at lines of conflict internal to the country, along possibly different tribes, but a kind of Ulster situation, potentially even within the country itself, which is disturbing. prospect yeah because of course nation states are modern inventions and they are a bit fake they are

They are. And I mean, if you look at the flag phenomenon that we've been seeing a lot recently, that feels to me like a precursor to a kind of ulcerization happening within the United Kingdom, which is deeply... deeply concerning. I've been watching loads of TikTok videos of people having

increasingly commonly having confrontations between people putting up flags and people trying to take them down. A bridge near our house has now had, I think, four iterations of people putting up flags, taking them down, putting them up. And they leave the cable ties every time. there's just like a porcupine kind of thing on the graveyard of where patriotism used to be yeah and people putting up counter things and whatever it's like a whole thing and there's quite a lot of tiktok videos of

people having these confrontations, the main thing that jumps out at me as a Brit who's very sensitive to these things is the class difference. So the flaggers are always working class and the deflaggers are always middle class and it's really obvious. Why is it obvious or why is this happening? Why is it happening? Because I think the whole thing is a class war. Always has been. I think that's basically right. I was sort of obliquely thinking about writing about the Norman Conquest.

earlier this week you know this is where that particular class war began because the English class system was originally not just a caste system but also a racialized caste system in that the ruling class the Normans arrived and just replaced the whole Anglo-Saxon.

and ruling class with their own. And they were a different ethnic group. And I guess didn't interbreed that much. Well, I mean, to an extent after a while. But people with Norman surnames are still, to this day, more likely to be wealthy. than those with Saxons. No way. Overrepresented at Oxbridge. People with names like Smith and Cooper are less likely to be rich than people with names like Glanville or, you know. Dennis. Or Grosvenor, indeed.

The current Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, can trace his ancestry all the way back to 1066. Yeah. And is still a billionaire, still one of the richest people in the country. I think he's number 15. Gregory Clark is... Punching the air right now. So, I mean, you know, never mind critical race theory. England has had a racialized caste system all for a thousand years. And I think actually, really, genuinely, that's a significant factor in what Louise is describing about this.

this class war, there is a subset of more well-off culturally middle or upper class English people who identify much more with the Norman disposition. And then there are a group of people who think of themselves, I mean, it's even right there in the conflict between English and British.

You know, British values, quote unquote. And English flags versus Union Jacks. Yeah, English flags, right? Yeah, mostly. They mostly alternate them. But I've noticed that if you go to touristy places, they have Union Jacks up anyway because it's a bit twee. That's not flagging. The St. George thing is... Yeah, flagging has to necessitate St. George's crosses at least some of them, and it's an anti-government gesture.

And again, the comments you'll get all the time on social media, it's such a classic like midwit normie take is, oh, they don't have any GCSEs and they don't have any teeth. Like basically something very, very classless directed at nativists. And I'm like... I mean, yes, you are right to identify that rift and it's a consequence of the relationship with the globalised economy if you do the sort of job that is vulnerable to the importation of cheap labour.

obviously you're going to hate it so much more than if you're doing completely working completely different industry like yes you've correctly identified this class fissure and what we've seen for decades now has been upper middle classes

inviting demographic change, which doesn't hurt them and does hurt the working classes. It drove Brexit and they learned nothing. Yeah. It's a similar… dynamic to what happened in america but it's got uniquely british flavor because of how because of the class system correct precisely correct bluntly because of the normans yeah well look i i i use the word posh and get laughed at in america because it feels like me

I don't know, talking about herringbone or something. It's just an odd term to use because even though most Americans understand what I mean, it's such an odd, archaic, like you don't talk about that. You would talk about race or education or wealth. You're from the northeast, aren't you? Newcastle. Well, Stockton. So you probably don't exactly have skin in either sides of these games because you're probably Viking.

I have no idea. I need to do my Ancestry.com. Well, don't, because data security, they're about to sell the whole database. Oh, God, and all of the murders I've done will come up. Yeah, they sell my data. No, don't do that. But I mean, people from the Northeast are ancestrally much more likely to be...

Danish Scandinavian inheritance. I sit outside of the hierarchy. So you can throw tomatoes at the Normans' atmosphere. And I do, I'm sure. If you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the...

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slash modern wisdom. I don't know whether this is precisely true and i hate the word going back to something that it feels like we just dispensed with because the word woke is so sort of tried and and done and kind of lame um however this feels like a uniquely new british brand of something akin to woke flagging yes and and the response to it and it's the reason that i want to i haven't got a different word for it broke wouldn't work as britain well um it

has a dynamic that is exclusively present or mostly present in the UK, which is this sort of classist approach. Because it exists a little bit in the US, that people that were left of centre that were very pro-immigration. But the reason that they were doing it and the sort of...

accusations that they would make weren't the same. They weren't about in the same way about being uneducated, in the same way about the way that people sort of presented the no teeth thing. Although isn't that what Hillary was saying with the basket of deplorables? like it was basically a class statement it was more veiled whereas I guess here it tends to be more explicit which was probably because we've had a thousand years

of not being invaded, right? So you can build up. They can ossify. Exactly. The situation in America is much more complicated because they've... Because everybody there. Where do I stand in this hierarchy? I'm not sure. I've only been here for five minutes. Almost everybody there is technically an immigrant at one point or another.

So it's very much harder to do the nativist thing because the most recent Anglophone arrivals weren't that long ago. And it's also a problem, of course, because here our elites are so incredibly Yankee-brained that they assume... You'll hear people talk about Britain being a nation of immigrants. No, it isn't. That is factually incorrect. Britain was 99% plus white British in the 1950s. It does strike me out at times that casually conflating invasion and immigration is possibly not the win.

that the middle-class advocates imagine it is anyway. Yeah, they're like, but what about the Vikings? I can see some ways that that could backfire. Not remember Linda's farm. Did we not embrace the Vikings? I know. But because they're so Yankee-brained, they... don't realize that actually, no, like people here are indigenous to these islands going back a very long way. It's not the same as in America. I did wonder about what a land acknowledgement in the UK would look like.

Douglas Murray did this once actually at giving a speech and he did a land acknowledgement to the Duke of Westminster who owned the land. It was very funny. Classic Douglas. Although really, I mean, strictly speaking, the Duke of Westminster also counts as a coloniser. Well, because that's Hugh Grosvenor who arrived with the Normans. Oh, there we go. So, I mean, Hugh Grosvenor ought to be doing a land acknowledgement to the Saxons. Your surname has scuppered you.

Looping it back to the perennial discussion about stupid things to the relationships on the internet. Have you heard of princess treatment? What? No. Oh, allow me. I mean, you are spending a lot of time on TikTok. I would have expected this to come across. Okay. Princess treatment refers to various supposedly fairytale-worthy gestures made by women's partners, including, but never limited to, lattes in bed, flowers every Friday, partner-funded pedicure.

and doors being opened for you. Nearly 130,000 Instagram posts congregate under it. However, this is immediately being taken to reductio ad absurdum. Courtney Palmer, self-proclaimed housewife princess. I do not interact with the waitress. I do not open any doors and I do not order my own food. You do not need to talk unless you are spoken to. You are not going to be laughing loudly, speaking loudly or demanding the attention of the restaurant. So princess treatment.

Is this not sort of lifestyle BDSM with it? I was going to say, it's a sex thing. It's totally a sex thing. It's a sex thing. How have you both arrived at this? This is like that fucking anti-wisdom thing where I haven't seen it. You're looking at this optical illusion. I mean, this is kind of a Mary Louise group chat. It's a Mary Louise group chat running joke about the trad wife. I mean, there's the trad wife or autogonophile, but that's not this. What the f***?

Tradwife, autogynophile. But there's also the continuity between right-wing complementarian tradwife discourse and lifestyle BDSM, which it seems to me is just... It's really just a question of inflection, but it's basically the same conversation.

You're going to have to bring it down to earth a little bit for me. Which of us is going to? Imagine that I didn't read the first three Harry Potter books and I've come in at the fourth, please. So on the one hand, you have, you know, it's often very Protestant coded, sometimes quite American. There's a sort of religiously inflected.

discourse about how men do one set of tasks and play one set of roles within a long-term relationship and women play the other and everyone comes together as ordained by God in this dual dance of complementary unity. and then everything is good. And then in an entirely different political filter bubble, you have the people who embrace lifestyle BDSM, which is a way of living in a long-term relationship.

one person is always explicitly the dominant one who just gets to decide everything and the other person is also always the submissive one who just says yes master. There's a degree of entitlement though here which doesn't sound superbly submissive. Well, I mean, this is where it gets... Actually, both complementarian...

right-wing trad types and also lifestyle BDSMers will tell you that, in fact, the wife slash submissive, depending on how you're framing it, has plenty of say because, in fact, it's... She's the one putting it online. It's never the man who's filming content about us, is it? That's true. That's true. Well...

This is too much of a rabbit hole. No, do it. Let's run it. I'm fascinated. I'm already fucking Alice in Wonderland here. Women do this simultaneous, like I'm so submissive and there's a lot of humblebrag going on as well. Like, by the way, my husband could have... afford to buy me all this stuff. It's the long nails, long hair, high heels. Yeah, exactly, right. But also she's calling the shots in terms of their social media presence. Yeah, and also... Which is really what matters.

In these sorts of very deliberately stylized, polarized relationships, you know, assuming it's a long-term affectionate relationship that both parties want to continue and sustain and maintain, then actually the person who... who's formally giving way all the time.

has a lot of say because the other person has to second guess what they want all the time. That's interesting. Because, I mean, you can't just order somebody around and say, no, you're going to go and lick the floor clean or do the dishes or whatever. Because if you make decisions for... both of you for long enough and actually the other person doesn't like your decisions eventually. You become trained by them. Well, the nominally submissive one will vote with their feet.

assuming that it's a consensual loving relationship otherwise, you have to make decisions that both of you want to abide by.

So actually it's not as commanding as all of that, but it just sort of reflects. I think, I mean, we both feel like there's nothing wrong with complementary gender roles. like with within reason they make sense it's fine like no no complaint what is weird about the lifestyle bdsm is when it's clearly done in an exaggerated way as a sex thing like the motivation is not this makes the household run more smoothly this makes sense of our financial lives etc it's

This turns me on and I'm also doing it for an online audience. That's weird, yeah. That's weird. But I mean, you know, the difference, I don't really see a huge amount of difference in kind between that and princess treatment. If she's like, I'm just going to sit there, sit there at the restaurant, and you have to guess, you know, you as my date slash partner have to guess what it is that I want.

want to eat and get it right and you have to do all the legwork of interacting with the underlings you have to pay and i'm just going to sit there and nominally yes you know you get to decide everything and you have the power but also you have to guess and you have to get it right so who so who actually has the power in that situation. That's a great point. Yeah. Wow. Okay. I really have seen through the matrix here. Fuck me. Women are so much more sophisticated than men are with this bullshit.

But yeah, I mean, all of this, of course, you know, with the caveat that it assumes that it's a mutually affectionate and consensual relationship. There is also a continuum between that and domestic abuse. Financial imprisonment. Yeah, financial imprisonment, domestic abuse, and so on, where somebody is calling the shots and actually the other person isn't free to leave through whatever combination of coercive control or other kind of...

play into this is not play into another one of those lines that needs to be walked that it would be nice to be looked after yeah it would be nice for my partner to know me so well that i actually can sort of take my foot off the gas a little bit wouldn't that be lovely and then if you uh

overdo the dose the response curve gets really squirrely when you get toward the point well i can't leave anymore because i don't have my own phone i don't have my own bank account i don't have my own access to anything It's the big, big trade-off of traditional gender roles that the woman has no financial independence. And as soon as you...

derogate loyalty as soon as you end up with divorce becoming more societally accepted and people being able to move from partner to partner more freely. That means that the cost for the man, the cost for anybody of leaving is so low and it's so common that you need to have the insurance policy at all times because the likelihood of this just being marriage one as opposed to the marriage means that you've got to have the backdoor.

I mean, it strikes me that maybe a... possible explanation for why these complementary gender roles tend to appear either where somebody is extremely online and posting about it a lot or else in the context of religious communities. It might make sense in terms of... that failure mode is sort of abusive failure mode.

In that if you're posting online about what a surrendered wife you are, actually you're probably making bank. And so you're not all that surrendered after all because there's this other dimension to it. Do you remember the whole discourse about Ballerina Farm and that? No. Oh, okay.

Instagram star married to the heir of JetBlue. You don't know about Ballerina Farm, Chris? Don't turn and look at me. You didn't even know about himbos. Fucking hell. You have how many bajillion followers on Instagram? You've never come across Ballerina Farm? Okay. Okay. Entirely, entirely.

distinct influencer universe. The echo chambers are very echoey here. The internet is a big place. Okay. So Ballerina Farm, very beautiful, very accomplished sort of trad life. Hannah Neelamann. Hannah Neelamann. Married to the scion of the JetBlue family.

inherited a load of money and they have a farm where she does trad things and has lots of beautiful children and makes yogurt and it's all very crunchy. I mean, right, exactly. It's lovely content. It's also like the content engine which powers actually a very profitable business.

business for them selling like kitchen aliens yogurt whatever yeah like i think her sourdough starter kits cost like hundred dollars um yeah you know she's she's doing she's doing all right at it and yet you know there's this whole discourse about whether or not she's actually oppressed and i'm like what One of the things that people, because she was profiled in the Times of London a while ago, and it was...

mentioned um there were various details mentioned which um a lot of women primarily on the internet thought were alarming like how exhausted she i mean i'm not surprised she gets exhausted because she has so many kids close together yeah um but things like they don't have

a nanny they don't have any domestic help despite obviously being able to afford it and they were like oh this is a sign that he's oppressing and I thought no you know what I actually get it I think that she there's a weird kind of Anglo thing going on including Anglo-American of like

no, I'm going to do the hard thing on my own. I'm going to do the deliberately difficult thing. But also, you know, having recorded a few podcasts and seen how the sausage gets made, you know, you look at how well produced her content is. There's a ton of people in that house all the time. Oh, yeah, just not a nanny specifically.

That makes sense to me. I think that makes sense of her personality. And of course, it is Hannah who is making all the content. She's running the show. She's driving. Yeah. But it makes sense to me that the trad meme gets propagated either from within religious communities where there is actually a much thicker relationship.

there is a thicker community of people surrounding the couple you know again this is not foolproof because you know domestic abuse happens within religious communities as well um but It provides some kind of ideological scaffolding for a couple such that, you know, potentially...

potentially that could help to keep a relationship in line, you know, and stop abuse creeping in and make sure things stink, make sure things are able to remain healthy. Is that kind of an insurance policy that if I'm the one that's in control of the Instagram account?

That ultimately, if I am mistreated, it might be a financial victory for you, but it's a branding victory for me. Well, I mean, again, again, it's not foolproof. You know, I mean, this is I can't name names, but I know from I know from one noted right wing. content producing woman that she knows of and several women within that space who are posting Sunny Tradwife content while their husbands are also not

treating them very well. This also happens. So it's definitely not foolproof as an insurance policy. I mean, at the end of the day, it's a fallen world, right? People screw up and do horrible things. I'm not sure there's a guaranteed way of...

hedging against that. One way that does traditionally sort of work to hedge against being mistreated by your husband is male kin, your own male kin. Like, is it Sonny Corleone in Godfather who beats up his sister's abuser or something like that, right? Like in really those really traditional societies.

If your recourse as a woman, if your husband is mistreating you... Your dad goes around and breaks his legs... That's the issue of patrilocal and matrilocal. Yeah, I mean, this is probably something, Chris, that you're more able to speak to than either of us, which is about the formation of virtuous men.

I'm glad that you look at me and you think formation of virtuous men. Well, I mean, as the only... guy in this conversation you know unfortunately i think this this one's yours to speak but but it seems to me that you know there's where have all the good men gone actually the one part of the answer to that is that you know if we want good men we need to we need to be forming good men and actually what forms men is not women it's other men

And so, and I'm not sure we think nearly hard enough or specifically enough or concretely enough about how we go about forming men. And I mean, this sort of goes to your Lububu. figure you know if the men that we're forming are sort of noodle armed labubu guys rather than virtuous capable competent men then that's not just a problem for men that's a problem for everyone well i think A lot of the advice that men are given is about how to behave in a manner that makes women feel more comfortable.

which it seems to continually be reinforced. Male competition theory seems to be highly predictive of female attraction as opposed to actually female attraction. So this is the David Putz study. Have you seen this one where they looked? Oh, this is fucking brilliant. You're going to love this.

photos of men were shown to both men and women. The women were asked to rate how attractive these men were. The men were asked to rate how likely they thought it was that this man would be able to beat them in a fight. The photos of the men were real people and they were tracked. 12 months later, they brought the photo men into the lab and said, how many sexual partners have you had over the last year? The female attractiveness.

was basically non-predictive, and the male intimidation rating was highly correlated. Competence is hot. And competence cashes out ultimately as, can this guy protect me in a fist fight? They also have higher sex drives, maybe, right? They're higher T. There's some variables in here. They're going to be more forthcoming. They're going to be less agreeable. They're going to be chasing after it, making it happen as opposed to wait.

it for it to come to them but still you would think at least given that women are the gatekeepers and this is a direct i find this guy more attractive than that one you would have assumed it would have had like maybe equal amounts of predictive power but it didn't uh The ovulatory shift thing got another decapitation the other day which was women don't find men with beards any more or less attractive but they are more sexually successful and men find them more intimidating.

So it's this, whatever it is, women don't help you win. They just wait to the finish line to see who goes first. And it is male competition theory for this. But the issue is if guys are trying to le boo boo reverse engineer their way.

into what they think women want, a lot of the time... They're entirely going about it the wrong way. Yeah, because... Have we made le boo-boo into a verb? Yes, they have le boo-booed. Oh, you've done gone le boo-booed yourself.

Oh no, he's limited himself. Oh, he just climbed up into my chest and died. So... I think the issue is, and this is what I really want you to get into here, post Me Too being able to talk frankly about anything which is not... nerfed, rounded off edges, libuboified, flaccid soy man, seems to be encouraging a type of guy that is...

perilously close to this world that we only just managed to reach escape velocity from. Like we just got away from this thing, which was entitlement, domineering, controlling. entitlement even though the labubu men also have their own type of entitlement in a very sort of a conniving malicious yeah yeah sneaky way um i don't think i i don't know where you get male-to-male advice on what it is that women truly want for long term.

success because what you end up with there is just going back to pickup artistry like almost all of the advice that comes out of the red pill world is for short-term mating It's almost all about how to do the fugazi thing to get a woman into bed. That's not necessarily what is good for you as a man.

to signal for long-term intention to her or to be effective for her as a long-term partner or for yourself to actually form yourself into the kind of partner that can be a good long-term option, but it'll probably get them into bed. I mean, I can't. I keep coming back to my conviction that this has to happen offline. Online advice is no good. Whether it's Jordan P.E., it could be the most brilliant. Because it's reductive? Well, because the person doesn't know you. And actually, you know...

actionable advice, actionable modeling, probably comes from trusted, decent older men in your own community. The uncles, not the aunties. Yeah, the uncles. The structural problem is that those intergenerational networks are in some cases almost completely gone. And I think that problem is particularly grave for young men growing up in fatherless households.

not a coincidence that those are the guys who end up joining gangs because there they're finding mentorship from older men and that's literally the only kind form of older male you know peer group mentorship i literally sat there with bugsy malone aaron davies

who is famous ex-gang member, now turned rapper and actor in Guy Ritchie movies, lives in Dubai, phenomenally wealthy, very, very well read, all the rest of it. And he was telling me about what it's like to be in a fatherless home. And then...

you have this gang, which is the surrogate of that. I think even for me, because I didn't have many older friends or no older brothers or sisters or younger brothers or sisters, I was... hungry or thirsty for role models in a way that I don't think I would have been if I'd had a more connected nuclear family.

if there was more hooks for me to get in, even if it had been an older sister, right? There would have been advice that was coming down. And if your dad is busy, even if he's not absent, as in not in the household, if he's absent, as in there's one person working.

to try and fund on a not a salubrious wage in an attempt to try and fund three people's lives like that's something that you yeah and you're like fuck like i i need i'm hungry for more i need more more more and especially if Most of your interaction occurs online, but online you're worried about saying something which is going to be deemed so toxic or...

old from, you know, this was only allowed in 2012 and we've got past this and you can't talk that way about women anymore. I also think that there's something structurally feminizing or feminine about social media discourse just in general, because it

physical violence, obviously, because it's dematerialized. Your word's selling your way through stuff. Yeah, your word's selling your way. It encourages endless talking and it forecloses physical violence. Whereas, in my observation, I mean, maybe you can, I mean, I'm not really, in my observation, like the society

of men absent the relation to women sort of works the other way around like actually most of it is not really about conversation at all it's about cooperating on getting something done

That's why the Men's Sheds initiative in Australia was so good. Yeah. And, you know, it strikes me that, you know, getting men together to talk about their feelings is precisely the wrong way to go about it. Get them together to fix a lawnmower and they might talk about their feelings alongside it. Or just not in a way which is mutually... understood and mutually respectful. But it seems to me civilisationally suicidal.

to create a situation where there are ever fewer opportunities for men to be together constructively offline, learning from older men about how to work together. and get stuff done except gang situations where actually the only thing you're learning to get done is stabbing, raping, murdering or the drug trade. That just seems to me like a completely insane scenario.

I wonder if low birth rates is part of it as well, in the sense that there was this great article in Atlantic recently about the decline of cousins. You have so many fewer cousins now than even a generation or two ago because of people obviously having fewer children.

And also when people are having children later, you end up with these long, thin families where you have very old, very young, but not much, just not that many people. And it makes me think of that line from Kurt Vonnegut where he says... When a man and a woman have an argument nowadays, I'm just paraphrasing, they might think that they're arguing about sex or work or whatever, but what they're actually shouting at each other over and over again is you are not enough people.

Like it's not realistic to expect your spouse to be everything that you need socially, everything. And maybe if there were more brothers and cousins and uncles, because obviously uncles have to be brothers to begin with, right? then there would be more... You wouldn't need to be as many people because there would be more people. There would be more male infrastructure available in particular. And again, this is also the dilemma because Anglos actually don't like having... Anglos quite like...

It's tricky. Chris doesn't want the aunties. You don't want the aunties. I made the fucking WhatsApp chat. Okay, look. I'm a... I know, but you run away from them. You run away from them. What's that thing? Did I contradict myself? Well, I'm deep. I contain multitudes.

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Let's do, can you do a little post-mortem on me too? Now we're kind of like what, 10, 12 years post the peak of that. We're both married and have been for a while. Were we the best people to do this? I don't know. One thing I'll say about Me Too, which I think people often get wrong, this idea...

So that there's a common idea, maybe it's true, that men used to approach women in bars or at work or whatever and do kind of cold approaches. And now they don't do that because of Me Too has made them scared. That period, I think, where men would find their spouses by doing cold approaches was really brief. I think you're completely right. It roughly coincides with and is connected to the very short, flash-in-the-pan era of free speech absolutism.

Free speech absolutism and cold approach dating are basically the same phenomenon where you abolish a whole load of old-fashioned mores and everybody just does what they want. But the afterburner of those mores is still strong enough that nobody... nobody gets up to anything too disgusting they're huffing on the fumes yeah yeah they're basically huffing on the fumes of conservative sort of pre-sexual revolution yeah um behavioral norms why is that important why is the uh inclusion of

that period of guys cold approaching women in bars or at work. even having women in the workplace whilst men were able to date them, also relatively narrow window. Well, it also, because it's cold approach presupposes a whole load of basic behavioral norms in order not just to be absolutely terrifying, call the police stuff. You know, being chatted up in the street by some...

guy assumes that they're going to be able to judge it so that you don't just scream and run away. Right. And so that there's an edge of fun, excitement and danger. It requires a high trust society. And frisson.

It requires a high trust society fundamentally. And so actually does free speech absolutism because you're never really free to say anything you want. There are always lines that it's possible to cross. That's just never not been the case and it never will be the case. But it seemed as though... it was the case. The people who are still really annoyed about the disappearance of free speech absolutism are maybe 10 years older than me. I'm in my 40s now.

And they were like, they came of age in an era where, you know, the social norms were still robust enough that people could make edgy jokes, but basically got away with it. Nobody really crossed the line too far. Now we're just too diverse. for free speech absolutism because there are so many different perspectives it's possible to have that you could actually genuinely end up frightening or offending or inciting violence from. You crossed some random norm that you didn't know.

So it's just no longer possible. And it's the same with cold approach. Because, I mean, going back to the sort of petrol flames conversation we were having before, a lot of those scenarios are really genuinely about... about mutual cultural incomprehension.

You know, there are guys who've shown up in the country from wherever and maybe the only information they have about what British girls are like comes from, I don't know, Pornhub or Instagram or whatever. So they have this very odd picture of what social norms here are like.

And then they do their best to put them into practice, at which point some 14-year-old girl just screams and runs away, calls the police, he gets arrested. And then, you know, there's a crowd outside the hotel where you've been put up. And, you know, I'm not trying to excuse any of this, but I'm saying, you know, to a degree, you know, this is a problem generated by, you know, it's cold approach. It's PUA stuff that they're trying.

Literally, that's what they're trying to do. But the cultural differences are such that it's just not possible. The game got translated into Syrian and now we've got... Yeah, and now we've got protests outside the Bell Hotel in Epping. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know. I just... I don't really know how you... Yeah, I'm not even going to try and speculate on how you solve that. But, you know, certainly the age of PUA is not coming back. No. Short, you know, until we have some kind of homogenous culture again. And even then, I'm not even sure it should. But also historically, like...

Even in a super homogenous society, that's not how you meet your spouse. You meet through people who know you. There's reputations and interlocking social networks and stuff. You don't just go up to some lady in a bar. No, no, no. I mean, that's why people used to have dinner parties.

People don't really have dinner parties anymore, do they? But that was how you set people up with your friends. It's certainly not a collegiate one where you've got both genders coming in. When I think about the dinners that I have in Austin...

maybe someone brings a woman but that woman is not there to try and meet one of you it's their partner yeah but i mean as recently as the as bridget jones's diary in the early aughts She writes very amusingly for the time about being invited along by her smug married friends.

to dinner parties where she's been set up with some unbelievably awkward sort of supposedly eligible lawyer. And this keeps her because all of her friends are trying to find someone for her to pair off with. This is just a completely normal way of doing things pre-internet dating.

The smug marrieds would have dinners where they'd invite one or two other smug married couples and then a smattering of the eligible singles that they knew. Well, the eligible singles would be in a sincere effort. They're doing auntie behavior. Yeah, they're auntieing. Yeah. literally what it is is aren't you both virtuous and it would be yeah virtuous and also often incredibly cringe absolutely yeah okay so if you've got dissolving social networks in irl

because everybody is living their life mediated through the internet, they've got fewer friends, and they're spending less time outside. Does that, for you, explain the demise of this particular path for people meeting?

Fewer parties, fewer friends. Also, people are poorer and their houses are smaller. Yeah, I'm trying to think about... Also, the parties are shitter, so you don't want to... There's just... I mean, you know, if you're living in a house share until you're 35, you can't really invite...

eight of your friends ran for dinner very easily without annoying your housemates. I'm trying to think about why I haven't done more of these dinner parties. We often do lunches and dinners with like another couple, particularly if they've got kids and then the kids play and that's great. But I don't know if I've ever done one when I've invited singles. That's just scaled childcare.

That's just smarter childcare with scones. Yeah, just hang out with your friends with kids on a Saturday. Your Saturday is immediately improved. But I've not done this for singles. It's also a massive effort. Everybody works full time.

And the time and mental energy you might deploy towards that is pointed at other things. And I'm not really sure how that happens. Needing dual income here means that there's just less time perhaps for the wife to think, oh, how should we get, we'll get the Joneses over, we'll get the...

For me personally, it's more to do with the fact that we live at the very edge of a city of 10 million other people and our friends live at every point on the clock face. And realistically getting everyone in the same place at the same time is quite difficult. If you're all going to get together, you'd probably just meet somewhere. Also, we can only seat six people at our dinner table.

It's what I mean about, you know. Small furniture, small furniture. That's interesting. Bridget Jones was living in what, Islington? Right, exactly. She's living in Central London. On a journalist's salary, age like 30. I know, yes. On her own. So, I mean, it's obviously fiction. So I have been, I was thinking for a little while about Me Too to Me Tea with the tea app. And you did see the tea app, right? Okay, this is a little older. Come on, Louise.

The tea app. Tea app. It was that unsubstantiated gossip circulator. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a reputation ruining app. Yes, but so it was women gossiping about. Men. Men who screwed them over in their view. Yeah. And then there was a big data breach. There was sequences of big data breaches. Yeah. And there was a bunch of people on the internet who made a comparison between these videos of women in Manhattan who steal men.

salads look at the name on the top of it then message them on instagram and say i'm so sorry that i stole your salad in a desperate attempt to try and overcome approach anxiety from men to women there's these videos of girls in maxi dresses with their hair done just going i just want one guy to buy me a drink 20s, very voluptuous. There's another one of a woman walking through Central Park, big naturals, low top.

And she's saying, look at me, the skin's flowing, the boobs are out, and not a single guy is going to approach me today. Some people made comparisons between the videos made by women saying they wished men approached them more, who seemed quite eligible and like the sort of women that you would imagine it happens to. With the data breach from the T-app, that was not the same cohort when it comes to female mate value. It was much more short hair piercings, a little bit heavier set.

And it was just an interesting world where you have the women that you think this might happen to a lot. wanting it more and it not happening. Women who you might think it was a bit more scarce for being a part of a community who warn women off of men and actually are actively disincentivizing this. So it could be kind of this inverse luxury belief thing, which is like,

Saya Boleyn's inner citadel. If I can't get what I want, I must teach myself to want what I can get and then bind together. Like the female equivalent of sort of inceldom, I suppose. Well, doing symmetrical composition there, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the problem for the hot woman in Central Park, it's the classic cartoon where the hot guy approaches and she's delighted and then the ugly guy approaches and she calls HR. I mean...

That is the difficulty. You don't want to be approached all day. I want to be cold approached, but not by you. Not by him. Yeah, exactly. And every guy sees themselves as the not by you guy. Apart from the ones that are too pushy. Because I don't think that guys have a good understanding of their own mate value. They have a good understanding of their own... confidence or their disregard for female rejection, but that is not the same thing as a success rating.

Like I am friends with some of the fucking most eligible men in America that are single. And these guys are, you'd be like, you must actually swim through women in order to get to your front door.

They're just drenched in self-doubt and uncertainty and this sense of not knowing. And maybe this is a little bit of a... luxury challenge it's a challenge of abundance not one of scarcity where they actually need to weave through things in a different sort of way and there's problems when you get to the higher altitudes as opposed to the lower ones but

Men do not have a good understanding of their own mate value. I'm going to stick my hand up and say, you know, I remember cold approach. Like I was there. I lived it and survived. Just about, yeah. I'm old enough to remember when that was actually. actually a thing and you know being what was the word they use now chirps um being chatted up we called it yeah

I remember that being a thing. And it was understood, you know, it starts happening to you when you're about 12. And it was understood by, you know, you and your girlfriends compare notes, that the kind of guys who do that are probably not the ones who are going to become your boys.

That's just... you know cold approach might have been a thing and sometimes maybe for those guys because it's evident that you're one of a number those guys would be fun you know you might let them buy you a drink and sort of chat to them and let them float with you for a bit but it was understood that those are probably not the guys that you that are going to become your

boyfriend for a whole host of reasons. They are strategy men. Okay, you're going to have to unpack that, Louise, because this is more your wheelhouse than mine. Surely every Modern Wisdom listener knows about this. Our case election, right? So our strategy.

this is true in evolution biology in general, not just humans, that some species are more... are strategists in that they will have lots of sex lots of babies except that most of those babies are going to die the fast die young kind of strategy whereas k selection is like elephants or blue whales elephants versus rabbits maybe yeah so i have one baby

that they'll really invest in and you know and humans are kind of both depending on context like we're more case strategists but there are individual variations and you can kind of nudge in one way or the other and yeah I think the guys who come in This is a big theme in your book, isn't it? There's the chatter uppers who are probably, they're about sowing the seed as widely as possible. But again, we're trying to find this balance, right? It's some, I think, 80...

50% of women say that they want a man to make the first move. But how is that supposed to be done in a manner? And this is how you labubu yourself, right? In a desperate attempt to try and couch.

your forthcomingness in a sufficiently cinnamon roll exterior but actually what you need is not to lububify yourself it's it's what you need is the social scaffolding yeah you know even whether that's sort of you know but given that you don't have you don't have that you've got to bootstrap it yourself The way that I did this with my husband, as a sneaky get round, is I heard that he was single, and so I told a friend, who was a mutual friend, like...

tell him to hit on me and if he does, I'll say yes. And so we basically did that loop round. But that requires social scaffolding. This is what I mean about the social scaffolding. You sowed some seeds that this would be like a high return strategy. The odds might look a little bit difficult, but it's assurance. You drop the silk glove, basically. And so there's an element of that. Women have to be willing to drop the silk glove if they want the man to make the first move.

I mean, I'm sure you know the metaphor, you know, and then he can graciously hand it back. Why are all these eligible men you know still not finding wives? It depends. It's for different reasons. Some of them have got themselves to the stage where they've got so much exposure that they see any interaction as a potential downfall of their career.

right and they're worried about gold diggers presumably uh more so about reputational destruction like post me too i didn't consent to that he is this or that or the other yeah especially if you've got a relatively squeaky clean public image or you're in an industry that is not as forgiving as podcasting. Andrew Huberman's survival rate should be positive reinforcement for anybody on my side of the internet. Was he completely fine after all of that? Better, I think, actually.

He just posted through it. He was fine. That's always the advice, isn't it? Just post through it. Yeah, just keep looking at sun in the morning and everything is fine. And he lived by that strategy. There's other reasons for it. I think that in the same way as women who are emotionally developed. and want to find a partner who is able to hold their own in a conversation and understands their emotions and can be honest and truthful and wants to build a family and do all the rest of this stuff.

That's a pretty refined taste for the most part. And a lot of the guys, your lamp analogy around... If you haven't yet bought a house, trying to find a lamp that you like and put it in a house is pretty easy. Whereas if you've spent two decades building a very, very carefully crafted interior, trying to find the perfect lamp to fit in that is much more difficult. That's also... a challenge and your ability to discern good from bad lamps.

or your standard for lamps has also increased along with the complexity of the room that you're trying to put it in. It's probably complicated further by the fact that people are not lamps. And people come with their own agency.

preferences the answer to the first problem about can i trust this woman not to wreck my reputation is probably it's to do with long-standing social reputation you basically need to know her friends who will tell you if she's a good person yeah is she trustworthy is she crazy whatever um but that's not going to work with cold approach at all so much of this is if you're not enmeshed in social fabric where you know

their friends and them and maybe their family and they know the same because it also disincentivizes people from doing fuckery, right? Because the blast radius of that is going to impact so much more. That's the charitable interpretation of what the tea app was trying. to do isn't it is to try and surrogate it's trying to compensate for the lack of social architecture that's the best steelman case for the t-app that i've ever heard

that it is a surrogate local community. Yeah. Because everybody is... Because, I mean, that's how women used to keep in a sort of village scenario. That's how women used to keep men and men. Is he trustworthy? Can I... Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have a... You heard what he did with such and such. Exactly, exactly. And it's a...

It's an attempt to provide a tech fix for the absence of that. It's just that because it's only a tech fix, it doesn't work in quite the same way. And in fact, it has all sorts of other... Also, there's no repercussions if you make false accusations. If you say, oh, you heard what he did and someone says...

Whereas in a real world, in a grounded, real world, relatively stable community, if you spread false rumors about somebody, eventually you'll get the blowback. So T app is an artificial solution to an artificial problem. It's the GLP ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a Zen pick for reputation management. Yeah, low trust reputation, low trust relationship formation. Yeah.

65% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 think that guys can have their reputations destroyed for just speaking their mind. And 85% of young men who voted for Trump agree with that statement. See, one thing, just going back to our sort of leitmotif of the Lububu guy, what I find interesting, and this occurred to me earlier, is that... The obviously not very appealing nature of Lububu Guy doesn't seem to have produced a kind of backswing towards...

this very much more right-wing identified male phenotype. No, you know what it is. It's what our friend Catherine D calls the male-to-male transsexual. That's the flip side to the Le Boovey Man. What is the male-to-male transsexual? Guess. What do you think based on the name? It is a guy basically LARPing as a much more masculine version of himself. Yep. Right.

And really devoting his life to that transformation as well. Which is actually quite a feminine thing to do. It is. It is. These are the guys who are predominantly interested in lifting so they can post physique, which is just the girliest. girliest girliest thing to do you know i firmly believe that guys should lift i don't think they should post physique i think that's disgusting

Two days ago, I had some guys that were both over 250 pounds. I would have loved to have seen you say that too. They would have both taken it. They would have both taken it really well. They would have both gone, you know what it is? You're probably right. I do take too many photos. It's just really good.

don't do it you know be strong be competent that's really hot don't post physique it's really good i mean it's interesting your your point about social media being inherently feminine is so true and you see this come out of the the dissident right kind of manosphere is the wrong term but they're kind of hyper masculine dissident right

which, yes, really valorizes masculinity, can be really negative about women, etc., but also includes a lot of selfies, a lot of gossiping on the internet, a lot of, like, girly bickering. Never seen purity spirals like it. Oh, my word. this meme no i coined that meme that kind of thing i have never seen a girlie a bunch of men on the internet you know there are about everything there are exceptions you know some of my best friends etc

But what you say is on point. And some of this is just produced by the sort of selection effects of the internet. Yeah, it's the internet. You know, that milieu sort of draws a diverse... Also, the internet...

kind of optimizes for a very uh one-dimensional perspective of a person yeah if so chris bumstead uh what's that thing that yasmin was talking about looks that can kill but heart of gold or something what is it Okay. Oh, right. That's it. Looks that could kill you, comma, could kill you. And looks that could kill you, comma, is a cinnamon roll, right? And Chris Bumstead, guy that sat here, met. He's a six-time Mr. Olympia. He's basically the modern world Arnold Schwarzenegger.

25 million followers on Instagram met his now wife because she fell in love with a video of him crying on the internet. So that looks like a kill you, is a cinnamon roll. that Chris is one of a very small number of guys who have managed to thread the needle of highly masculine, highly feminine at the same time, or at least highly masculine and embodied, bothered about emotions.

reads a lot of books and talks about, I don't believe in cry it out for raising our daughter Bradley. We're actually trying, I want to teach her that it's okay to feel it. deep in therapy culture at the same time whilst being like Adonis is Adonis as a guy and super strong and big and all the rest of the stuff. I don't think that there is a particularly good place for that.

There isn't much room for many people to be able to thread that needle because it takes a long time to explain the nuance of what you are as a guy. Like you look and it would be much easier for him to just be... brash. If you presented in that way and had the personality of Andrew Tate, it's like, there we go. I've got that cliche. I've already got that archetype locked off. If you're trying to accumulate attention online,

You need to make it quick. You don't want it to be effortful. And I think it's just bad for brand. Just do it explains what Nike is trying to get you to believe in as an ethos. It's not just do it and here's a 5,000 word footnote. explaining you precisely what that means. Yeah, I think I was absolutely right.

Attention economy dynamic forces everyone to become a very reductive meme version of themselves. It's low resolution, yeah. And you have to accept that. I mean, I've long since learned that existing in public online means just not feeling obliged to correct the bizarre versions of...

you that people have living rent-free in their heads just like don't waste your time doing that no one's got time for the best quote that i've heard around that is i do not concern myself with the opinions of people who misunderstand me i think that's so fucking good hard to do because you want to correct the It's like, no, no, no, you don't see.

I remember the saddest version of that I ever saw was when Mary Beard got cancelled for saying something really innocuous. And she posted a video of herself on Twitter crying. And she was obviously trying to get people to understand that, you know, in fact, she contained multitudes. There's a real person here. There's a real person here.

here and it but but all it did all that did was it was incur more hate yeah because that's just not how the internet works yeah and you just have to you have to post through it like andrew huberman Be more Huberman. That is a fucking phenomenal hashtag. Be more Huberman, less labubu.

So what about the other side of this? I'm interested. I read this article on Substack, which both of you probably will have read about schlub feminism. The Me Too was the death of schlub feminism. No. Okay. So this was that... The thesis is Me Too protected women who were maybe a little more neurotic than is optimal and got much more attention from men than they would like.

And what that meant was women who actually would have liked a bit more attention from men and were... quite keen to try and find a partner were immediately told oh my sweet summer child you're not doing that because you want the attention of men this is this is for yourself you're doing you're wearing the makeup you're doing the beautification you're doing all the rest of the things because this is part of your empowerment and it didn't allow any room for the schlub female.

The Bridget Jones, the hopeless romantic, immediately became derogated because in you are doing something for men, put power in men, and also inevitably meant that, well, you're... encouraging some of the, you're making us not subservient, but kind of at the mercy. It's like, basically, Me Too killed the Bridget Jones archetype in women, and there's no place for that really. Do you remember the essay, Stacey is depressed? It was on her.

I remember reading that. Yeah, what was that? A bit of a similar theme, really, that there are lots of just quite ordinary looking... people of both sexes, really, who would be very happy to find an ordinary-looking person of the opposite sex to love, and they're probably both a bitch-lobby, and so what?

And that somehow, somehow this hyper-competitive online dynamic of, you know, Chad's and Stacy's and so on has just made it increasingly difficult. Like the guys are relegated to sort of neckbeard computer gaming basement dwellerdom. And Stacey, meanwhile, is just, she's either a sort of disposable plaything for some chat, having been kind of psyoped into all of that by various kind of terrible internet.

discourses or else she's just terminally single as well and also desperate for love um and stacy is just

miserable as a consequence. That feels sort of cognate with your... Have we killed Bridget Jones? Have we killed that archetype? Sometimes there is just this great mystery about why some people are single. I was talking to someone yesterday who does a lot of like... She organises Christian mingling things to try and get Christians to meet in real life. And she said that they always have an oversupply of women.

And it's a classic thing in churches to have loads of really like earnest, often lovely, really eligible, attractive, et cetera, women showing up desperate for her husband and they can't find them. And I think often you can't really tell without really, really knowing someone exactly what's going on there.

Because whenever you hear doom and gloom about people are finding it impossible to find partners now, et cetera, I think of all the people I know who are Stacey-esque in, so is it Stacey's Depressed? Stacey, yeah. in that they're completely normal people and they have happy, flourishing family lives. Does that make you more skeptical around the perennially single and you think, maybe everything's not as rosy on the outside as it might seem? It makes me assume something is going on.

Yeah, I had a vigorous debate with a friend the other day who was like, it was a kind of a throwaway joke. He was like, oh, you know, maybe we should just send all of the incels to Ukraine where there's a massive shortage of men. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What makes you think that Ukrainian women want anything to do with it?

those guys oh what sorry to fight and die or to get married to ukrainian women no to to make up the shortage of sex ratio to recompensate the sex ratio right um i was like whoa you know yeah there might be We're talking about actual people here, and sometimes these things can be complicated. It doesn't necessarily mean that there's something terribly wrong with people who are single.

like i say comfortingly right it doesn't mean that it's just that there's probably something going on that is might be hard to see like excessive pickiness or getting up to the moment of committing and backing off every time or something like that. So committed to a professional career that actually there's just no bandwidth. Because actually if you look around at the people you actually know in real life, not on the internet.

There isn't a correlation really between how attractive you are and how likely you are to be married. No. There isn't. I did have this idea that maybe the birth rate and coupling... uh is associated with obesity but not because of some hormonal thing but just that there is a minimum bar that humans will find other humans attractive at and if you fall below it by eating yourself out of that window everyone's just less hot

and now there's less desire across the board. You know, people tend to mate in terms of physical mate value and overall mate value broadly, assortatively, right? They're within their range.

Maybe you can eat yourself below that. It also plausibly becomes a hormonal thing in that weight gain corresponds to higher levels of estrogen. I agree. I don't think you even need that dynamic. I think it's just that... if we assume that a well put together body is something that people will find sexually attractive and as you get further and further away from that actually on either side but typically at the moment there's just less ogling going on generally yeah you just think

You're less ogle worthy. Like Donald Winnicott's idea of the good enough mother. I'm not familiar with that. So he said that Mary will probably know this better than me, but he was a child psychotherapist. Yeah, he was a doctor and child psychotherapist.

you don't need mothers to be perfect by any means like in order for children to be properly attached and develop happily you just need the good enough mother the mother who does that who meets the standard in terms of providing care for her baby and yeah maybe it's the good enough partner Body.

Yeah, they just hit that standard. Although I saw some anonymous man recently comment, which I thought was insightful, that women of the last... I mean, a Zempick is going to reverse this, by the way. We've surely hit peak obesity already. But women having recent decades... Not if they keep putting the prices up, presumably.

Well, then it becomes even more desirable, right? I don't think weight is ever going to stop being a status signal in an obesogenic culture. You know, if a Zempick looks like it might fix that, they'll just put up the price of a Zempick. And he just kicks the can down the road. I mean, it's already happened. Eli Lilly just tripled the price, didn't they, in the UK? So immediately, thinness will remain a status signal in an obesogenic culture. Just the cost.

stops being one of self-discipline and becomes literally just a cost. It's a different sort of signal then, though. Yeah, it's a signal. That's true. The meaning of the signal changes. Yeah, massively. But the class, it's class-inflected nature, doesn't it? True, but I don't know whether class is associated with, or previously was associated with weight.

Yes, absolutely. Weight, obesity is strongly correlated with poverty on both sides of the pond. Okay. And it may still be that, but for different reasons. Yes, just the reasons for that might change. You can't afford this solution as opposed to… You can't afford the tech thing.

Rather than exactly you can't afford to shop at Whole Foods, you're too busy working three low-paid jobs to go to the gym or whatever. It becomes you can't afford the jab. pre-exempic and still probably now, I think women have simultaneously become fatter and prettier because there's a lot more money and intervention. Are those two separate?

Well, in the face, right? And also things like hair. There's so much more sophisticated beauty tech available and using things like... whatever, retinols or getting your eyebrows microbladed or stuff, that stuff has become very routine and very accessible.

And social media is full of hacks on how to do all this expensive salon treatment on yourself. So I really think that the bar has moved a lot in terms of what women do to their faces and their hair. It has. Even if they've also got better. But maybe the technology for making men more attractive.

hasn't kept up in kind men don't really try as well right but and also what makes men attractive isn't really it's only secondarily or even tertiary appearances secondary or tertiary but when we're talking fake turn is not going to make much difference going to the gym Perhaps. You know, being physically competent remains the gold standard for being attractive. And earning a breadwinner's wage. It goes with having a reasonable physique.

I don't know. This is a hill I will die on. Scaffolder physique wins over gym physique any day of the week. It's not even close. Was it Olly Murs? who did that transformation and William Costello tweeted about it. That's right. Yeah. And then Sacha Baron Cohen did the same thing. Do you see who was on the front cover of Men's Fitness? I thought Olly Merz looked better shredded.

Well, you would be in the minority, even if you do think that you would be in the minority. And I had an idea around this, which was... He posted physique, though. It was posting physique. Instant turnoff. Sorry. On that basis alone. Objectively, like he looked good in the second picture, but he was posting physique. Okay, but what if it had been a candid physique photo? That would have been a completely different ballgame. Totally different ballgame. Hard to say at that point, but it was.

So there was basically, Sacha Baron Cohen did the same thing. I think he's in a superhero movie. He is the lead actor in some superhero movie, and he also got divorced. at the same time. So it was breakup physique, superhero physique, and then you compare him with Borat. So when guys get shredded, is that the equivalent of getting a new haircut?

It's the pixie cut, but the dudes. Yeah, exactly. Going on a heavy course of testosterone is going and saying to your hairdresser, we're going to do it today. We're finally going to get it off. I'm going to get the pixie cut. Yeah. There was definitely an interesting question, I think, that Olly Murs is fat in one photo, shredded in another photo. He wasn't fat, though. He's just a nub. Relatively fat. He was maybe, I would guess...

15 to 18 percent body fat for the bro lifters in the audience and then he probably got himself down to towards single figures he wasn't like striated delts but he was visible uh six-pack abs which is that's not nothing like that's fucking and it was not in an unbelievably uh long amount of time either so you know he'd he'd speed run it which is you know it's impressive however

lots of women said this isn't attractive and lots of men said you don't know what you find attractive what i think is happening there is that guys have they place so much pride and weight on If I can get jacked, women will find me attractive. That is a big poltergeist to kill. And if you do, you go, oh, fuck. Maybe I don't have as much control over my mate value. by going to the gym as I thought, fuck, the illusion has been smashed. This was my one recourse.

to yeah i mean i sort of feel like actually i mean gym gym body is not a meaningless signal in the sense that it points to a measure of self-discipline yes consistent self-discipline and individual willpower and so on which is is you know that's a good signal but it's it's not the only one and if you're also a massive weirdo it's not going to cancel that out to be a little bit cynical about the women who said that they don't like the shredded physique i think that like

most women in the west are like a bit fat right i mean the average american woman is like a size 18 or even 20 in American sizing. No, that's not right. No, that can't be right. It's a 16 in the UK, so it's a 12 in the US. But basically, the average American woman is like overweight.

I don't think that she wants a shredded spouse because he shows her up. There was a story I heard from a friend who was a powerlifter. Powerlifters go through big weight fluctuations. They're the fat boy lifters, typically. Squat bench deadlift. He then went and did a bodybuilding show and then he went and did weightlifting. So he went through all of the different strength sports and his girlfriend said to him,

I felt my most comfortable when you were powerlifting, which is when you were fattest. I felt my most insecure when you were weightlifting, when you were bodybuilding, which is when you were leanest. There's certainly an argument to be made from an EP standpoint, which is if... A man is spending lots of effort on his own physique that suggests that he is kind of advertising his beauty

to other people which may the whole dad bod thing is actually true if you've got one extra spare calorie to spend should you be spending it on yourself in terms of self-beautification and enhancement or should you be spending it on your family

And if you are getting more attention from the women around you, who are you doing this for? Well, maybe you're not quite as committed to the family as we thought you were. Where are those extra calories going? They're going on yourself. You're eating the chicken. You're going to the gym. That doesn't seem like the sort of thing that a committed father's doing. Have we not transcended this? Have you not got past this?

this you're actually doing it for but in the interesting female beautification maybe but it's at least a couple more uh second third orders away men don't look at women wives that are beautifying themselves unless it's very provocative and overt in terms of the way that they present as you are doing that in order to advertise your eligibility to potential monkey branch lily pad.

backup mates. I feel like another factor in that is that, I mean, you know, feminists are fond of denouncing the male gaze, but there is unmistakably a difference in how men look at and evaluate other people's physiques.

both sexes and how women do um and there's a sense you know women beauty you know if you're a woman you beautify yourself you might moan about the male gaze but also i think you'd probably miss it and like you know when women a lot of women when they reach middle age do miss it genuinely um

And, you know, there's a sense in which being checked out is part of what helps to form your sense of who you are, you know, rightly or wrongly, but that's part of the ongoing, constant kind of ambient intersexual dynamics. But men... Like a man who's titivating himself.

is implicitly doing it for the male gaze because women don't look at each other like that. This goes to what you were saying about it. I don't think that men know that. They might not realise it, but the point is that from a woman's perspective, when a guy is titivating themselves, implicitly it's for the male gaze.

male gaze and that's just a turn off because that's like you're like dude you're on you're on you're in my it's either gay yeah or ignorant of female preferences yeah yeah and or possibly you know it's it's somewhere in that male-to-male transsexual territory Does it have to be gay? Can it not just be signaling to other men that you have growth in consciousness? I mean, it can be homophilic without necessarily being actively sexually.

Yeah, but it's orientated towards other men. But it's bro stuff in a way which implicitly excludes women from the dialogue. There's also a big failure of cross-sex mind reading because guys are going... I find that intimidating, you must find it attractive. And some things that are intimidating are attractive and women don't know it. And then there's some things that men find intimidating, which maybe women don't find attractive. Women make the same mistakes, like with choosing clothes.

I will often run past, if I'm doing something publicly, I'll run past my outfit, past my husband. Not because he knows anything about fashion, precisely because he doesn't know anything about fashion. And sometimes because it's hard to tell the difference between... Do I like this because it's signaling status to other women and it's signaling that I'm very abreast of current fashions and I'm experimental in my choices and whatever? Or do I like this because it actually looks good?

Men are often actively turned off the high fashion, impressing other women type of clothes. Have you ever seen that video of the girl showing off her new boyfriend fit jeans to her boyfriend? So it's an American woman and the boyfriend is in the kitchen washing up or doing something. He says, honey, I just got these new jeans. And they're sort of super loose fit, loose at the knee, loose at the ankle. What do you think? And he daydreams away.

to 10 years in the past when fitted jeans that you could see a girl's thighs and a girl's ass existed and he sort of like shakes swallows he goes oh they're lovely and then she gets an even more baggy pair of jeans and he's on the floor sort of crying and holding himself and there is certainly this weird lack of understanding in both ways about what it is. And then I guess at least with guys, very few guys are dressing themselves to signal to other men. Almost all guys are doing fashion.

exclusively for women but women are doing fashion for men and for women so they need to cry i mean it's the i do not know the difference between a birkin bag Even though I know the name, I don't actually know anything else about them other than they're expensive and cold Birkin. I guess if it said it on it, I'd know what it was. And something that's from peacocks, right? And 10 pounds. I literally have no idea. So who is that for?

It's for other women, right? It's the, I guess, red bottom Louboutins. I know that just because it's a meme. But beyond that, I don't know the shoes. I don't know. So this signal is, look at all of the luxury time that I have. Look at all of the spare capacity I have. If I'm in a...

relationship with the partner look at how invested he is in me he's you better not try and take my man look at i'm he's fucking 30 bags deep on this bag on this literal bag uh you're not taking him from me because he owes me yeah

So you mentioned before we got started this trend of feminism and women turning to the right. What is that dynamic that we're seeing that's going on? So it's quite a common view on the dissident right that women are innately left wing.

So there are average psychological differences between men and women, which we've all talked about at length. Women tend to be more agreeable than men, more neurotic than men, more... sensitive to social signals than men are there are various differences obviously they vary between individuals but they scale to being quite significant differences between the sexes and one thing that it does seem to be clear is that women tend to be more

egalitarian in their own social groups released in their in their female friendships more overtly egalitarian yeah and sometimes this gets interpreted as that means that women are left-wing and like innately and if you let women vote and participate in public life they will drag everything to the left i tend to think that's not true because there are so many examples of historically of women being very enthusiastic

participants in right-coded political movements. I mean, obviously talking left and right is a bit complicated in the past, but say women participating enthusiastically in temperance and prohibition would be one example. The church ladies phenomenon. where women are actually the ones enforcing conservative social norms locally, or even female participation in Nazism. I mean, it's probably not quite right to say that Nazism is right-wing, it's complicated, but...

women were passionate, passionate participants in the rise of Hitler. And in fact, often had like weird sexual obsessions with Hitler, which you can read about at length and had a kind of Beatlemania when he showed up and things like that. So the idea that women are always and forever, like... woke I think is nuts it clearly is the case though that at the moment young women in particular skew woke a lot and particularly in some countries skew woke a lot and there's a big sex gap

I think it's more that there are some political movements which kind of tap into feminine preferences. And Woke is one of them. It has that... It's not so much the egalitarianism as the... encouragement to scoop up and protect childlike figures so whether that be trans people or refugees or whatever um

encouraging women to channel those maternal energies towards certain groups. I think it's very powerful. There's also infinite opportunities for moral dogpiling, which is just incredibly appealing. How so? I mean, if you can arbitrarily change which words are forbidden every few months and then mobilize your friends to attack.

somebody for getting it wrong. And you can use that as a means of conducting office politics. Attacking people for moral infractions. Yeah, attacking people for moral infractions. In a sense, it's kind of village. It's like... women's village modus operandi on steroids on the internet and divorced from any meaningful application in real life or any sort of meaningful kind of breaking mechanisms. I also think wokeness is quite emotionally...

compelling in the sense of feeling like you have this sense of purpose and crusade and you know i think that young women in particular find that quite enticing um wokeness doesn't really work on men though apart from the labuba men but it doesn't like it doesn't hit those I think it

I like to think of it like Jonathan Haidt's idea of moral flavours, like it doesn't hit the flavours that men have taste receptors for. I'm going to say this carefully because otherwise I will get dogpiled by exactly these guys. But I do think it's correct. though this is i i do actually think it's right that there's a subset of the e right which is the equivalent of woke just

predominantly for men. And by that, you know, I don't mean the woke right in the sort of James Lindsay sense of, you know, being some sort of terrible thing that must be expelled from polite discourse because something's something civil liberties or free speech or...

Civil discourse and objectivity and all of that. What I actually think is going on is that the sort of woke pattern of social interaction and the e-right pattern of social interaction are both... updated versions, very, very strongly gender coded of... two political sides as mediated through the kind of interactions which are just normal on the internet which are very much less rationalistic in both cases actually just visibly the case very much more

unmoored from material realities, unmoored from localized communities, very abstracted, happening in the internet, you know, full of all kinds of perverse financial incentives and geared mostly towards rage baiting. on both sides than really towards substantive politics or even really getting anything done in the real world at all.

They're extremely online. And actually, I found it very interesting watching the emergence of Zoran Mandani in this context in New York. Bad bench press. Yeah, I mean, because he... He strikes me as a sort of post-literate leftist. I don't mean he himself is post-literate, but he mobilizes a certain kind of very native leftism.

And that's the source of his popularity. You know, whether or not he'll ever actually get elected and or deliver any policies is almost secondary to that. And there's a subset of Trumpism and Marga, which is that but for the right. And those two movements code...

they are respectively gendered. You know, there are more women that embrace the Mamdanism and there are more men who embrace Margaretism. And yes, of course, there's some overlap, but they're both strongly gendered. Are we seeing a trajectory pivot?

then at the moment is there some subversive yeah are women turning to the right i think that when they do they'll turn quickly That's my main take. I'm actually going to quote a noted member of the E-right in support of that. A Bronze Age pervert who said, memorably, you remember also the mob is a woman, which I think is an important... What's that mean?

By that, I mean, I'm interpreting here, but the way I understand that is that the mob... as in a group of people, morally aerated, angry, mimetically charged, wanting action now, is... is as plausibly all-female as it is all-male. An angry mob can be of either sex, but the mob as a collective entity... Bronze Age pervert in this context is suggesting is actually a female phenomenon.

Although, of course, if the mob's going to cut off your head, it'll have to involve some men. Yeah. But the emotional energy. The emotional energy is mimetic. It's contagious. It's collective.

so a concrete example of this would be what we've already talked about refugees or you know immigration in general and until now the very strong energy from young women in particular has been to see um ethnic minorities and refugees in particular as childlike figures in need of protection and also to um have this slightly um

to see this cause as a very emotional kind of you get pulled along with the mimetic energy kind of thing you could easily see that flip and actually it becomes and you're already seeing this among working-class women in britain definitely is that the childlike entity in needed protection is like I think one of the really underappreciated scissors here is actually whether or not you have kids.

And I would bet any sum of money you care to name that you'll find more women on the refugees welcome side who don't have kids and more women on the actually we've actually worked on. Very straightforwardly for the reason, Louise. just explained. If you're worried about your kids, that's an entirely different and very much smaller and more particularistic set of affections than if you love, quote unquote, the vulnerable in the abstract. The inverse of this, I think, is a big part of the reason.

why so many guys want to be entrepreneurs right now. This displaced paternal instinct that they've got this project that they're working toward. They've got a purpose and meaning. They've got a single thrust and drive. You know, my team, my staff, my purpose, whatever this thing is. That's interesting. Is, yeah, just supplanted family.

Yeah. But you could easily, easily see, and I think we're already starting to see, a right-wing political movement propelled by women that is using exactly those political flavours that women are receptive to, like fear. women being more neurotic, so fear of threat, wanting to mother childlike or actual children figures, and the kind of mimetic energy. There's no reason- Where is that? Where are we seeing that?

I think we're probably seeing it with the women showing up outside migrant hotels. The pink protests. That's what they're called. They wear pink. Which is an interesting echo of the Trump era pussy hat thing.

they're not wearing but they're not wearing pink pussy hats they're wearing pink t-shirts and they're turning up saying close the hotels and send them home yeah and they're all over social media and at the moment this is very much contained being a working class thing and middle class women are quite hostile to it mostly um

But I think you could easily see that spread, easily. And yeah, women turning to the right could become... Posie Parker is an example of this already happening in that she's, yeah, she's able to... Her movement is distinctively feminine. Yeah. And also not left wing. Not the very least. Yeah. Louise and Mary.

You're both great. I really, really appreciate you. Where should people go to keep up to date with all of the things you're saying and writing? So my podcast is Made Mother Matriarch. all the places that you find podcasts. My first book was The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. I am writing a second book on birth rates.

But having children has kind of got in the way of writing it. But I will finish it eventually. Put your money where your mouth is. Put your fertility where your buck is. I know, I know. Well, it wouldn't have as much credibility, would it, if I wasn't walking the walk?

I have a substack, maryharrington.co.uk is where you'll find it. My regular column is at Unheard. I tweet, although not so much over the summer at Moving Circles. I post these days. School year started. Everyone can go and follow you and you'll be back. And my last book was Feminism Against Progress. I'm writing another one. This one is on politics after literacy. So internet, politics after the singularity, if you like.

We've already merged with our machines. What happens next? Okay. Anties, I appreciate you very much. Thank you. It's been fun. Thank you.

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