Meaning a live man like this, man letting butterfly flattening wing big down in the forest.
Man, it gonna cause the tree fall, letting five thousand miles away. Man, nobody's seen nobody else. I see. You don't need to know. Man, they like you another story and you got bacted like that. That's the way. Man. Don't blackly dag on the panel. Man, Man, you matter. Man.
It's pretty common to hear the phrase they could never make that today talking about a book, a video game, a movie from the before times, from before the kind of woke era, before the era where you needed a certain percentage of demographic characteristics in order to be considered for the oscars.
Now.
Look, this doesn't mean that these films are hours. They have our values, but it is an interesting sort of before and after comparison, particularly if, like me, you've really only known the woke era, that is what you came of age and and so on today's movie conversation, I've got Dave Green, the distributist, talking about the twenty fourteen film Gone Girl, something I watched fairly recently and really enjoyed. The question, well, why couldn't it be made now? Is
because it's a pretty uncompromising, pretty savage take on female narcissism. Right, The kind of female combined consciousness that forms up couldn't be made now After Me Too. The whole sort of plot of the movie is a woman faking a series of crimes against her She is the victim well as a play for victimhood, as a play for social status. Really interesting. Highly recommend it. If you watch it with wives or girlfriends, they'll probably get a kick out of it.
Yeah, it's a unique.
Film, don't get me wrong. Like I've said, there's a lot of progressive morality in it. You don't have to be particularly adroit to pick up on it. But because it is running an older version of the software, the sort of pre woke version of it, it's an incredibly interesting compare and contrast. It shows you how far we've moved in only twelve years. And also, this conversation is
about the movie. We talk about it for most of the time, but really it's about feminine psychology, right, the gender war, the war between the sex is whatever you want to talk about. How do we get out of this incredibly destructive cycle? And one of the conclusions that Dave and I come to that I think is entirely accurate is that there isn't going to be a great realization where the curtain is torn away, where women are forced to accept their responsibility, are forced to face their crimes.
Female Nuremberg. If you will, it won't happen. But there is a way out. There is a way towards a satisfactory conclusion, a way that we can get out of this sort of horrible prisoner's dilemma between men and women as separate classes. In fact, I think that situation where men and women have become voting blocks, particularly in younger generations,
in opposition to one another, is profoundly unhealthy. One of the things that Dave and I talk about, this is apparent even in relatively distant history, is that women do act as a collective, or at least they can. They see themselves as being part of a whole in a way that men until very very recently have it. We
don't operate that way naturally. We have sort of been forced to in response, although even then only partially to kind of current political realities, but nonetheless the prisoner's dilemma where both people are going to get screwed unless they find some sort of mutually beneficial compromise. I mean, that's kind of what we're stuck in. I mean, look at the ever declining number of people who are simply having sex,
let alone pairing off foring families. That has become a more exclusive thing, much less common than it used to be reserved for. To be honest, for the most part, religious extremists, you know, the kind of people on the outsides of culture. But it is clearly not working. Female rates of unhappiness, suicide, self harm are through the roof young men are obviously not doing well. That's basically what
a third of my episodes are about. And so I think that this is a very productive conversation, like how do we get out of this? What is the functional way we can deal with the feminine mass, right, the sort of female hive brain. And this film, while not technically about that, is a very interesting explanation or I guess you could say exploration. Excuse me of exactly that idea? Right, well worth your time. The film is easy enough to
find anywhere you know, you can look for it. If you sail the high seas, you can find it in two minutes. Right, probably better quality than you can on Amazon, but nonetheless really happy to have Dave here to discuss it. I think it's a good episode. Even if you're not interested in the film, you should check it out because we do spend a long time talking about other kind
of grander, more philosophical topics. But that said, you can find me on anywhere you listen to podcasts, Apple, Spotify, YouTube. You can also check out the episodes early in ad free on Patreon, Substack or gum Road supports. The channel supports me. I appreciate it. This is what I do, and I depend on your guys' support. And also you don't have to listen to ads for casinos or pharmaceuticals, which is apparently the only people who decide I'm worth
advertising for. So without further ado, here's Dave Green, distributist. Thank you all right, Dave, welcome back to Jay Burdens Show.
How you doing? Man?
Great glad to be back on here and not so sure when the last time was, but a big fan of the show.
Well, thank you man, I'm I'm glad to have you on.
It's funny.
I've joked before that the whole reason that I had a podcast is so I could talk to interesting people and have some sort of justification for it. And I'll be honest, man, I'm excited we're going to talk about Gone Girl. An interesting movie, but I'll be honest, I just enjoy a chance to hang out with you on the internet. So you know what, this is the excuse
we've come to. So yeah, obviously get into the film in more detail, but if you're comfortable sharing it, you have a fairly interesting first experience with this movie.
Correct, Yeah, So, I mean this is one of the like the four horsemen of the pre woke Apocalypse. It was like kick Ass Scott Pilgrim versus the world Gone Girl, and I'm blanking I'm the fourth one. But there were there were there are four movies I remember being the you could see the great Wokening happening in their prefiguration. I got maybe Gone Girl's not the best one. I
feel like Juno, you know Mighty you could. But Juno is from a different era because you know, predated the global financial crisis by about a year, and so Juno comes from the Bush era, from the Four Times. This is the what you see in these movies from this era, which is the two thousand and fourteen twenty thirteen, was you know kick Ass? And was it? Scott Pilgrim came out in twenty eleven, twenty twelve. And what happens during this period is you see American culture becoming kind of
radically tired with itself. The weird thing about Gone Girl is, you know, first of all, the interesting story is that I had a first day watching this movie. You know, I probably shouldn't talk about this too much since I'm not the first to have my wife. I watched a much worse movie on the first date with my wife than this one. I think. I think that the the movie for the first date is inversely proportional to how successful the relationship is going to be.
Uh to that point, Dave Green, my first movie date with my wife was to see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. So your inverse quality, uh to date quality. We have at least two solid data points here.
Yeah, your your your your marriage will be in destructible after that one. I'm just in the movie though, but any rate, I mean, it was it was weird because
you know, it's it's a strange some people are talking about. Uh. Before the Greater Wokening hit in earnest Hollywood was still producing movies that were kind of objective observations of reality such that you could kind of not be so sure what the eventual conclusion would be, whereas obviously, if this movie were made today, there is no they could have come to the conclusion they had come to and just bizarre.
It is kind of funny people were posting like the Incredibles and Wally and all this stuff, and you know, it's depressing that all these base messages were included in mainstream movies because to pick probably the worst movie of the entire two thousands, Battlefield Earth, which was one of the there's a scene where the scientology alien takes the hero into the Museum of Earth History and says, here's all the weapons Earth used to have, and you can have all of them you want, because none of these
weapons lasted five seconds in the face of our onslaught. And that's you know, that's what I feel about a lot of these old movies from the before times that had based messages. You had all these based messages, but none of these lessons you learn from Wali or The Incredibles are Gone Girl lasted for five seconds. Once the Greater Wokening started, you forgot all of them instantly. So it's weird to think about that this movie came from
really the before times. I mean, I guess the Great Wilkening had just started up when this movie hit the theaters. I mean it started in twenty twelve, and so it was already starting in earnest with things like gamer Gate and stuff like that. But you know, it hadn't really carried over to Hollywood. There's no way that this movie could have been made in the Hollywood to twenty eighteen or post me Too. There's no way it post me to Hollywood would have created this movie. Maybe we should
give a background about what this movie is about. Yeah, you want me.
So the broad strokes of this is that this movie and the way it's shot. You don't understand this till about halfway through the film, but effectively it starts off. We have Ben Affleck is celebrating his fifth anniversary with his wife. It's clear the marriage isn't going well. When he goes home, there is a break in scene. She's gone, hence the Gone girl, and what on folds is a situation where it seems as if he is being framed
for the disappearance of his wife. That the sentiment of the town turns against him more and more sort of unflattering things or revealed about him. He's a community college professor who's having an affair with a student. And then halfway through the film we realize his wife has set all of this up. She has, out of spite, deliberately engineered and immaculately planned this situation to basically frame him for her murder.
And then.
Her plan starts to fall apart. She plans on killing herself as kind of a final act of defiance, and she's forced to pivot. She ends up reconnecting with an X that doesn't go particularly well, so she pivots again. In a very dramatic scene. Again, if you're upset about spoilers, just watch this movie. It's a pretty good one. She basically kills him and then recast the whole situation as
her being kidnapped and abused by this ex. Her husband knows the truth, and then they are forced to basically live together as now she is this sort of media figure, right, she is the girl who escaped from her attacker, And so the chilling conclusion to the movie is basically ben
Affleck deciding because his wife is pregnant. I've got to continue living this lie so massively alighted over the plot, but obviously the core conceit of a woman manufacturing a crime against her for her own social advancement is highly controversial, to put it mildly, even just a few years after this film came out.
So it is fun of the throughout the nineties, there were I'm blanking on their names, but sort of a hallmark of the late nineties and early two thousands. You're too young to remember this, but if you were watching network television before the Internet came out, their favorite story was stories of like marginally successful affluent husbands usually white, actually almost always white killing This is after the O. J.
Simpson trail. This is really what kicked it off. And there's so many of them I can't quite enumerate them, but there are a few, very very high profile ones in the Bush administration. And when that happened, that was near my hometown. So I remember that one killing their wives and then or their wife disappears in their front of the body, and then there's this big kind of public hate campaign, and it was this thing that was it was kind of a way for the country to
come together. I hate to say it, because everyone couldn't agree on politics, or on feminism, or the War on Terror or any of this other stuff, any except out
for the Bill Clinton O. J. Simpson trial. And this is like Bill Clinton O J. Simpson really kicked this off, right, And you know O. J. Simpson and Bill Clinton both have this property where it's it's bad men hurting women or you know, in Bill Clinton's case, just being a douchebag, and the Liberals don't really want to go after them, even though the feminism they were pushing in the nineties. Again you're too young to remember this, but they were
pushing feminism. This is the first eruption of focism. Right up until the O. J. Simpson and Bill Clinton scandals. The stuff they were pushing there, it would say that they should go after these guys, but they didn't want to. So we spent on network television kind of coming together as a country around these scandals over acceptable people to hate. And these were always kind of like white husbands who had murdered their wives. And conservatives liked it because conservative
Christians still like the woman victim man bad story. You know, they just liked to have played well on Fox News. It had kind of a feminist slant to it as well, you know, and the mainstream media just loved it because they had kind of like this very very convenient person to hate that match all their stereotypes of who the bad people were, Like semi affluent, kind of koolock coated white male does a horrible thing, and is this yerrors
person that you should hate. And what's so brilliant about this is that the plot is kind of inverted, and I mean, this is sort of a pattern that we realize and the social media age just became all too obvious that the women who manufactures the situation of her own victimhood and then uses that for a way to manufacture a cloud. One of the important things about the Plotlind of this individual movie the Wife, which is named Amy.
I think Ben Affolck's characterist Nick Amy, comes from an incredibly affluent wasp family that, addition to hav An old Money, has become famous worldwide for creating a set of children's books with Amy as the subject, and the books are called like the Amazing Amy Series. So she's already a childhood celebrity. She spent her entire childhood being celebrated internationally
for being this awesome person. And that's kind of an interesting dimension to it because it it creates this environment, or it creates this suggestion that that she's not I mean, she obviously the move suggests that she's a not bipolar, a borderline sociopath, but her you know, the fact that she doesn't seemed to care about pain, her incredible dark
triad personality traits. Uh you know, her breaking breaking was a breaking white, breaking back on black on people, aka shifting them from a friend enemy with no middle ground in between. And you know, but it suggests that the the movie suggests, with that backstory for Amy, that this kind of extreme sociopathy is born from this kind of childhood narcissism, which is another kind of dark implication for the social media age. I know how accurate that is, but it's an interesting.
Well, I mean, we're this is a very stupid social media scandal, but we are in the midst of the is her name Ashley Saint Clair?
Right? Oh yeah, perfect, liney, I should Saint Clair baby almost, But I mean, like we have a very similar dynamic, right, someone who in a previous era was quite famous and is now trying to reinject themselves into internet relevance via you know, a story of being.
Taken advantage of by a man. Don't particularly care to get into the details of that, but like you see that same sort of motif echoed. There are a couple of things that I think are particularly interesting because there is also a heavy ilication that she is sort of the echo of her own mother. Her parents are not exactly they're secondary characters in this, but there are a
number of very kind of interesting scenes contrasting this. So, for instance, we kind of have this back and forth between Ben Affleck trying to prove his innocence obviously as the walls sort of close in, while he is also fighting a media battle. So there's a lot of kind of back and forth on you know, the news and daytime television. And there's also a pretty heavy element of class I guess you could say snobbery or analysis to this.
Because he and his wife met in New York City, they were in kind of a you know, an affluent circle of creatives, and then the financial crisis hits, so they end up, you know, moving back to his hometown in middle of nowhere, Missouri.
Now they are.
Exactly they are the kind of you know, city mouse come home to small town America, and so this kind of force of suburban mothers right mobilized by daytime television in the local news. So he's constantly fighting this battle. And early in the film there's a very interesting scene where you know, he's done the official police response. They've got a photo printed out of his wife, you know, talking to the camera, please come home, Amy, And of course he looks weird and awkward. You know, he's just
a normal guy. He gets sort of pilloried in the media, and he's leading this effort to try and find her body, and her parents have flown in, and there's this really interesting contrast between Amy's mother don't remember her name, you know, crying on camera saying, oh, we just want Amy back, and then it sort of cuts to them walking along the Mississippi River in the middle of summer, and she's complaining about how bad everyone stinks. Why are they in
this town? I just want to get out of there, And you see that same sort of extremely manipulative dark triad behavior exemplified in her mother, which is not a core central part of the plot, but sort of an interesting I didn't.
Notice that the point that that is interesting. Other interesting thing is you know that there are the two characters we didn't mention. I don't know how relevant these are, but there is the who is the black doctor of plays media? Isn't the guy who plays.
The Tyler Perry. Yeah, Tyler Perry is a lawyer.
In the O. J. Simpson lawyer that is hired to there.
Are there are two characters in this who are When I say miscast, I don't necessarily mean that they do a bad job in the role, but their prominence as media figures makes it hard to take them seriously. Tyler Perry is one. And then also Amy's ex is played by Neil Patrick Harris. Oh yes, so clearly a gay man pretending to be a straight man.
It really does not work.
But to your point, yes, they were trying to, well, this is I'm super imposing the politics of twenty twenty six onto this movie. But they were kind of trying to make the Neil Patrick Harris character kind of in sell coded, like sexually obsessed man. But he does not come off that way. They should have had somebody, I don't know, someone a little bit more is sexually desperate play that I can't think of a good actor off the top of my head, but.
Someone who doesn't immediately scream I am a extremely educated, liberal gay.
Actor, right exactly something, do something all all the actors. I think it would be good in that roller way too old to play it, but uh, either way. The the other character is his sister, who's kind of a you know, a character that's a very sympathetic character to the main Nick character. From from that, the the the main tension, at least for the first part of the
plot is uh, you know. From Knick's point of view, is the interests of fighting his legal defense against a murder accusation or directly in opposition to his attempt to fight the media battle. And what saves him is that he makes a decision that is incredibly stupid from the
perspective of a murder trial. He goes on a talk show and essentially pleads his case in a very confessional way, which is, you never want to do that, right, because you're giving the defense all these pre trial statements that they can go off of, and you know, you're showing your hand for what's certainly going to be a murder
trial against you. You're you're you're You're you're leaving yourself open to getting into an argument with the houst and having your confession to be part of public record, which I think can abused as evidence. Right he Cruckliss surmises that the legal question of the murder is almost secondary. Was really playing out as a contest of public perception, which is what makes this truly a movie for the
online age. You know, the the contest of murder is and people do get killed, but the contest of murder and of bodily harm is secondary concern to the social perception of being evil or bad. A great example of this, you know, and I don't know exactly how true life is like she's actually planning to kill herself to make her point, Like that's on her schedule. It's like, I'm going to kill myself to ensure that my husband goes
to jail for the rest of his life or whatever. Right, this is like insane, Right, It's an insane thing, even for a sociopath to do. Is But it's like it's almost like because her husband's going to be humiligated, but you'll never see it because be dead. So uh and and but but that's the perception of the whole game
being played. Is that the the the the contest of impressions and of clout and of perception of who's good and bad matters more than these people's individual lives, these individuals in these people's individual existences as flash and blood people, which is, you know, kind of a an interesting dimension that comes up again and again in the movie, like acosted for clout, you know this is you know well.
And that's what makes the conclusion to this so dark is because by about the two thirds Mark Nick has successfully convinced both his sister and his sister Margo is at least for the first part of the movie, in the back of her mind sort of wondering if her brother did this, because at least initially it looks like an open and shutcase. He's able to win her around.
He's also able to win the support of and if you're wondering, yes, I do have IMDb pulled up because I cannot remember names this well, the kind of small town detective detective Bony who has finally realized like okay, like this is concocted, this isn't real. And there's this very chilling moment where Amy has returned. You know, she's concocted this story about her ex, you know, becoming obsessed with her, abducting her. That is the source of the disappearance.
She has, in fairly graphic fashion, killed this x right and presented it as a self defense case. And this one small town detective is sort of grilling her. She's she's in the hospital, surrounded by the FBI, the media, giving a statement, and the whole time the detective is basically saying like it's pushing her, trying to grill her, basically pointing out how this story doesn't add up, this doesn't make sense, and so she you know, faints back on the couch show, I'm so tired, I have to go.
And when she talked to Nick, her and Margo both they're basically, you need to get a divorce. You need to be done with this. You need to disconnect from this woman. But if he does that, he's completely and totally socially assassinated. This woman has returned pregnant wife. If he's the you know, the the cad that not only cheated on her once but also left her after she's returned,
his life is over. And so that's what makes the conclusion of the film so dark is that he sort of has to willingly go back onto the reservation to go to subsume himself, back to the narrative or back into this kind of manufactured narrative for his own kind of I guess social standing.
Yeah, her threats are simultaneously that she'll go to the press and make him the bad guy, but also that shall make him the bad guy in the eyes of their presumptive child, right, And you know this, I own exactly know. It's there's a little bit of our media landscape has changed so much and the last how many has been twelve years since that movie came out, hasn't it. Our media landscape has changed so much in the last
twelve years. And you know this is really based on the type of stories that would be this how this is really a period piece from about two thousand and five, that's roughly when you know, I don't think people have iPhones and maybe they don't, I forget, but I.
Think they have blackberries. Like that's that's really where the movie seems to take place.
It seems to take place before the social and network like cable television is still huge. Like he's going on cable television. He's not going on a podcast or something like that, right, And.
Also the type of background characters we see in this are of the Bush era, not of the Obama era, the kind of like you know, peroxide blonde, you know, small town aging mother, like that character certainly still exists, but this is about the mid two thousands. Even if the movie didn't come out.
Then yeah, exactly. So you know, it's it's hard to sort of superimpose what the narrative would have been, but the impression is that like she could destroy his reputation, she might be able to destroy his career prospects because the media wants to roll the story a certain way that feels good for them, and she is the default victim, uh, you know, and this this creates the kind of you know, this kind of the lesson of this thing is is you know the fact that the physical is enslaved to
the hyper real in a lot of ways. It's like a hyperreality trap he's caught in, and there's there's some interesting things and they're like they break the wife when she's doing this amazingly executed plot, she leaves like this fu note for him, which is like that that kind of broke the plausibility of the plot. You know, she leaves this kind of like oh, I got you note in the shed that's like supposed to be like, oh, now you're going to go to jail for my murder,
and that that I think. You know, I agree that made a great scene in the movie, but it's not it wouldn't have. It kind of breaks the believability of the plot for a second, so I'll criticize the movie for that. And it also less him to get his sister on board with him early on, which is sort of where the tide starts turning. Another interesting thing I thought was the fact that you know, it's weird, like
why does she decide not to kill herself. Well, she goes to this hotel and she's this dropping money everywhere, right,
because she's this huge water cash. She's going to spend it, and she's in a party I do drugs until she dies, and then these rednecks commine's robber of her money, right, And so she can still kill herself, but she's going to have to go through the intervening weeks like as a nobody, right, So it's not the prospect of death that dissuades her from suicide, and that's when she reaches
out to the Neil Patrick Carras character. It's not the prospect of death that dissuades her from suicide, is obviously, that's what she's bolding up to. It's the prospect of living a week as somebody who's not the center of everyone's attention, right, yeah, which is like it's bizarre, right ahead, I mean to.
That point again, things that would make this movie impossible to make even just a few short years later. Fundamentally is a study on female narcissism. Yeah, right, the idea that at all moments I must be at the center of attention. There are two separate stretches where she is glued to the TV watching her own media coverage. One you know, you mentioned this kind of like rundown motel
in the middle of nowhere, Missouri. And then later when she's reconnected with this very affluent X and she's in his you know, kind of palatial lake house obsessively watching the television right tuned into the coverage, and we see it really trusting moment, uh, where she is before where she hasn't quite been robbed yet, where she is creating dozens of accounts on the comment section for the local newspaper, exactly places when this would happen, right pre social.
Media because no, no, even more right, because they got rid of comment section. News sites used to have comment sections. Do you remember this, The BBC's CNN, they used to have comment sections and the original or I killed it. That all the news sites out once that it They must have dropped their engagement entirely. They killed the common sections. But until that moment after, you know, I think the
comment section kind of died during the Obama era. But in the Bush era, people actually used to hang out in the common section of mainstream news sites. And I mean that is really located. But yeah, I mean it's it's it's it's strange, right because there's a there's a
lot of kind of companion pieces to this movie. I saw this movie right before I believe this is no It might have been a year before, but I had this movie in mind when I restarted watching the re release of the new Twin Peaks, which is about another kind of one of these murdered blonde women from the eighties, Right, that kind of becomes this defining feature, and that's another perspective to take this from but it's it's interesting because
you know, we were talking about this before we went live, about just this this subset of American women, or really all Western women that are obsessed with gender drama and holding up their fight in this battle. And the thing is is what makes the gender slop? And I've written two articles on the stupid thing. So I don't know why I'm calling this discourse futal, But what makes it so futile is the two sides aren't even arguing over
the same thing. The people on the kind of like the natilist side of the argument are arguing about what do we want our society to actually look like? Whereas the people from I hate to say it, more of the female block perspective are how do I get to be on the good side of this argument? And so a lot of perspectives are just common sense. But it's very, very difficult for modern millennial women to get on the good side of that argument. They have too much of
a history. They can't switch over. Such a perspective would put them in the position of being the bad guy. So it does doesn't matter. It's like you said, it's like, well, I guess our civilization is going to have to die. I guess our civilization is going to have to die because things weren't exactly fair. And I think that it's this is not because modern women are a sociopaths like Amy from Gone Girl, but like Amy from Gone Girl, most or many American women have this deep fear of invisibility.
There is this there is this impression, and this is I think a deeply seated female impression that as long as everybody is crying, if you're not crying as loud as the other people, then you in some sense cease to exist. And you know, you cease to exist as long as the cameras aren't on you. And this is this is what's sort of driving Amy in Gone Girl.
And it's much of the same thought process that seems to have really infected a lot of people who are women or think like women in twenty and twenties era. And I don't know exactly the right way out of it. I mean, I speculated, I mean you just have to
kind of maintain frame and walk through it. But I deeply sympathize with it because if you're somebody who operates in a female social space and there is this tool called the Internet and this tool or or a group chat, and group chats or the internet reward the people who cry the loudest. If you're not on board in that process, somewhere you kind of get cast to the side and become this invisible element of no consequence. And this is,
you know, this is a problem. I don't exactly know how we integrate that psychology into an environment where there's just so much perverse incentives to abuse it.
Well, And that's that's sort of the interesting thing in this movie because we see obviously, you know, there's the main character of Amy as kind of the head female narcissist in this We've also mentioned, you know, her mother playing a very similar game. But they're all of these sort of secondary and tertiary characters which we see clawing for media attention in a very kind of disgusting way. There's a I can't remember the name, Casey Wilson, thank
you to IMDb. Is this sort of suburban mother who lives in the same neighborhood, and it sort of implied that she's not particularly intelligent. You sort of get this vision of the kind of you know, low iq suburban mother, kids crawling all over her.
Friend in the movie, Yes, who we.
Find out later, of course, deliberately cultivated to be, you know, a sympathetic character. But we see this woman over and over and over again trying to inject herself into the story. So, you know, going to the media, this moment where you know, Ben Affleck is walking into his home and she sort of defiantly stands out in front of the crowd and
accuses him in full view of the cameras. Of course, continually trying to interject herself into this right to make herself a sort of supportive, sympathetic heroine and all of this.
And what's funny about this too, I'll listener, Jacks. This woman is very much insofar as Amy is kind of like Brahm and Bluestay coded, this other woman who's our friend is like Coolock red Steak coded, like to the core. She's just the kind of picture of like the stay
at home mom from the Bush era. And uh and and it's it's funny is that she she's kind of she kind of looks for affirmation to Amy in a lot of ways, right, and so when the drama emerges from that perspective, it's just it's too it's too good not to take this position to kind of be the avenger in the abstensia of of this of her big sister or whatever.
No, definitely, and I mean it's sort of this, this interesting dynamic, and the character of Margo the sister is sort of this. And forgive me for making broad generational generalizations, but Margo is sort of the millennial self insert character, right. She is, you know, she is above everything. She's very snirky and dry and witty.
And I'm sorry, I just had this revelation. There is the most famous we didn't mention, the most famous monologue from this entire movie, Like this is playing non stop on my feed, the cool girl speech and in a voice over in this movie if you haven't seen it recently, Oh yes, there is this scene where I don't know, it's not even spoken in a particular place. It's just like they just stopped the movie and the voice of Amy gives this speech about how she doesn't like being
perceived as the cool girl. This was the snippet of dialogue that was played was taken from this movie and played again and again and again and again on social media. From two thousand and thirty or fourteen when this movie came out. Up until COVID, this was the complaint. It was like, this is a core feminist complain about this movie. And when they this dialogue happened, I think Margo was at the center of like what this cool girl persona was, and it was it was this frustration that women were
expressing with two thousands era womanhood. So in the two thousands and the Bush administration, in between the Clinton era and the beginnings of the growth wokening, there was this great sort of sexual like this great casualization of culture, like anything goes. And this is born basically from the Clinton administration and the fact that now the left had to pretend not to care about sexual impropriety because they
told everyone they didn't when Clinton did it. And this is like this is the Hooter's era, as I like to call it, right, Like it's okay to bring your date to Hooters would be like an attitude that would come from this era that could never exist anywhere else, right, And this was the era of the cool girl, and girls were like there it was like it's feminist to be one of the guys, and to be one of
the guys is to be cool. With all of these guy things that you're a man does, even though they piss off most other women, they don't piss off you because you're the cool girl. And women were pissed at this. It seems archaic in this day and age, because now there's a whole new set of complaints that have nothing to do with this. But back in the day, this idea that women were expected to be to be one of the guys, as Amy complains about in this movie, was a huge thing, and like it was one of
the main cultural contributions of this movie. Well, and what.
Happens here is sort of the it's sort of a deliberate inverse of the triumphant breakup scene you see in many other films, because she's driving out of town, right, she's pulled this off. She's you know, we're sort of seeing cut back and forth over this monologue the footage of her doing this right so for instance, you know, pulling blood out of her arm with a you know, an IV and scattering around the house cleaning it up in a deliberately shoddy way in order to make it
look like it was a murder. But as we're seeing this footage and she's sort of triumphantly driving, you know, eating candy she got from a gas station. She's just laying out all of her complaints like, oh, you know, I hate that you made me do this in order to make you like me, right, this sort of complete absence of any responsibility, which.
Is as zero fault for ruining my life.
Yeah, why did you make me act like this so that you would like me anyway? But she goes through all of these things that she did to get, you know, to get Nick to fall in love with her, and how she hates him for it. But there's a term, and I might have this wrong. There's a podcast my my wife listens to called nymphed Alumni, which primarily does sort of social analysis through fashion and music, so finding
a certain aesthetic or era and talking about it. This is all secondhand, but at least in the UK, there is this sort of thing called sort of like Chavette fashion, which is the UK version of exactly this, which is the female fashion of you know, wearing the sports jerseys, going down to the pub, sharing some pints, being basically
one of the guys. And it happened across the pond at exactly the same time it was that same sort of movement of being, Oh, in order to be you know, kind of relaxed and you know, high status, I sort of have to ape stereotypical male behavior from that same era. And it's interesting to see the artifact because it's the opposite.
Yeah, I'm sorry I interrupted you, but.
No, I was just going to say, because it was there for a definite period and is well and truly dead. And it's almost like, you know, been stricken from the records.
The idea that women would defer to male hobbies at all in a non dominating way is I mean that, I think that must have died during the gamercade era. It must have, because post me to post COVID, it's the entire idea that you defer to a man and anything would instantly label you as a pick me. And that's the I mean pick me. I mean, the word didn't really exist in this movie. But when she does her rants against cool girls, what she's ranting at is
pick mees. That's what that's if you had replaced pick me with cool girl, and I think it's cool girl in that rant from this movie that accurately captures the accusation as it existed post twenty eighteen, and what it essentially means cool girl or pick me is somebody that that plays that is trying to court male approval or playing inside a male approval game, and which is odd
because women have always played inside male approval games. But I think that you can really see this, and this is sort of the unspoken thing about the late twentieth century in the early twenty first century, is you can kind of see I mean, before this, before the cultural revolution of the sixties, the patriarchal rules were the patriarchs of our ancestors and of our religion, like they were imposed. They weren't the imposition of the individual men in the
women's lives. But when it goes to like the nineties and the two thousands, the norms of kind of sanity or of just getting along there are not extensions of some kind of external will that comes from tradition or patriarch or ancestors or from God. They're just the impositions of the individual boyfriend that you're with. And so like submitting to them, either as the new girl or as the pick me, it seems like a fundamentally humiliating act
because you're simitting to the tyranny of men. These rules are just arbitrary. They're just created by the individual men who super impose them upon our desires. And you know that's that well, and.
That's what's so deeply ironic about that moment. She is lambasting right, this her husband, who she hates, who she's grown to hate, right for making her into this. And yet at every other moment in the movie, she is playing a character to manipulate a male audience. She is playing either in absentia, right, the murdered pregnant wife, or you know, when she's returned, she is playing the you know, the abducted woman. The irony, of course of that scene
is she's still doing it. Yea, the behavior has never changed, it's just her relation to the man.
So this is the eternal The eternal irony of the female sochia path is that they're eternally raging against the male gaze, but they only really exist inside of it. So, you know, take any So, we've been playing out the gone girl pattern in repetition for the last decade since this movie came out. You now, female manufactures some victimhood
narrative with her at the center. Know, whether it's Rebecca Watson and remember Elevator Gate, right, or Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkisian or any of the me too stuff, right, any any of that stuff or the fallout from the Kathleen Kennedy Star Wars movies, right, or any of the any of the stuff that they complain about on any of these NERD channels or whatever. Right. The formula is, you know, female becomes victim. Oh my god, help me.
I'm just trying to do x Y or Z gets super clout as the victim, right, And the story is, I'm just trying to live my life. I'm just trying to be an actor. I'm just trying to create video games. I'm just trying to, you know, be a writer. And then, you know, you, the scandal happens. This woman gets a lot of sympathy, She becomes a celebrity. Ashley saying, Claire and Laurence Outhern are like this too. Actually we should
talk about Laurence Outhern. This is the perfect Gone Girl character. Uh, but then the after but but then after she MICHAELA.
Peterson maybe a solid second, but sure.
But all these things, like after the controversy dies out and everyone agrees that she is the victim, and she gets the expos in the New York Times or wherever Laurence Suthern did her thing. I can't keep track of which prestige publication covered which egirl victim, but you know,
they do the circuit. Right after that dies down, you're like, Okay, so now that you've been vindicated, now you're going to go back to writing about video games or writing about politics, or doing like the initial thing that you said you want to do. And they don't, like, they just kind of stop. They just kind of like they just it's like they don't have any After the outrighte of being victimized dies down, it's almost meaningless to go back to
their initial thing that they wanted to do. Rebecca Watson's initial thing was supposed to be promoting atheism. After Elevator Gate, she just went on to the women are Victims circuits. That's all she commented on. And the same thing with all of these things. The female sociopath has a problem, and that is that the male attention that she complains about getting is the only thing that she lives for,
and so as soon as that fades away. They do not make abstract content on things of general interest, or on works of art, or on politics, were on the world that exists outside of the people's perception of them. They just kind of run out of energy and get offline or take a break and then try to re engage them. Like I said, Lauren's other and I know I'm not giving a chance to speak, but Laurence southerns is the ultimate gone girl type character. I've always hated
this person. All to do is create controversial explosions and then kind of make them about herself, make a giant scandal, and then issue a confession, and then after the confession is done, she disappears until it's time for the next scandal. So in twenty twenty four, I mean, you know, she was she was a liberal, and then she was a white nationalist, and then she was a trad Catholic and
then she she she said traditional marriage is dead. And now she's back here, you know, a month ago creating videos about how you know, Joel Webbon or what was it that guy Wilson Andrew Wilson are not sufficiently Christian? Out of nowhere? I mean it was did does she does this other make Christian content? Did she want to make Christian content? I mean, she toyed with that title back when she was doing the whole traditional marriage thing back in twenty nineteen. But it just this is just
the newest explosion. This is the newest drama. And because the that these kind of people, they don't exist outside of drama. They don't exist as people who are interested in the world. They only are interested in the world through the mirror. Right, the world only exists when it goes into the mirror and comes back from it. That's there's that famous uh you know, the meme with the wojax and that why do women always get POV mixed up?
Why do women always get like they said, po V, you're a kind of woman whose boyfriend is mean to them, and the POV has them in the frame. And that's because they see everything through the mirror. So from these women's point of view, Uh, they are literally an object in their own point of view, They're watching their lives through the mirror that is their phones, that is a literal mirror, that is whatever. And from that perspective, they only exist when the male case is put on them.
Well, and that's the deep irony you mentioned that. You know, Amy has this sort of and We get this through a series of flashbacks of when Amy and Nick met. Right there, they're in you know, Manhattan together, they've fallen madly in love, and you know, we're sort of getting the kind of the meat cute, and we understand, of course that later this marriage will fall apart in kind of the present timeline, but we're seeing these snippets from
their amazing whirlwind early relationship. And there's one that takes place, I think in a book signing or something like that. You know, these books are still being made even though she's a twenty five year old woman. Yeah, and so she's complaining to Nick about like, oh, you know, there's this character in the book that's always better than me. It's not really me, but this like media creation that is more me than me. And the deep irony is at the end of this right when she is in
the ascendant, she's doing the same thing. She's talking about, how I've created this this whole media persona. Now I'm on the daytime television circuit, I have books, we have all these things together, and it's the exact same thing, right, the thing that in a previous and stay ciation had victimized her, had ruined her, She's doing that exact same behavior pattern again, existing as sort of this reflection of a kind of hyper real persona if you see what I'm getting at their dating.
Oh absolutely, And this is a problem for a lot of women. It is complicated. And this is sort of why, I mean, I don't know if this is the right movie to explore this. Well, we're both describing as a property of sociopaths and a property of all women. And the problem obviously with Amy is that she obviously is a textbook sociopath. You no great example of this is her is her uncaringness. This is a property people say,
this is an indication of sociopathy. They don't care very much about physical harm that happens to their actual body. They kind of just kind of shrug it off. They're much more focused on people's perception of them. And you see this multiple times with Amy, how she's very nonchalant about inflicting physical pain upon her person as long she can be perceived as being on the right side of things.
Well, and yeah, when she is sort of covering up her murder of the very straight Neil Patrick Harris, he induces injuries to herself that would be consistent with a rape.
I will lead it that.
But again, it's deliberately very grotesque and unsettling because we're watching someone commit violence to themselves and she is. You get these sort of comparison shots of her doing these very drastic things that she's stony faced through all right now again to the point of servicing that narrative.
But Carrie on Dave, uh yeah, And you know, I think that that shouldn't be confused with the more general problem that afflicts all women, which is flos men too. Women are more vulnerable to this mode, is that they have a very bad tendency of kind of being devoured by their own doppelganger that they see in the mirror.
And you know, Amy is a person, but Amy as a person is secondary to Amy as shit exists in the minds of the people who read the books, or who watch her drama on cable television, or who are following her as the celebrity after the drama. And you just know that this can't be the end of it, right, This can't be the end of the And that's what's
so dark about the movie, is okay? Sure, Now, the cable movie, the cable TV cameras are going to move away, and what's this, what's the next stime this person's going to pull off to make sure that she's America's favorite girl, and you know what's coming, and the probability that Nick is going to be on the right side of it seems to be almost none. And but all you can hopefully is social media. She's gonna get Instagram account and then you know, blow up there and then move on
to something else when covid hits. If this is following the ord timeline, but this is sort of the problem we face with a lot of female vought in the online era. Is that not only and this is sort of the other nefarious element to it as well. This is the female group chat culture. Not only the women have a tendency to be devoured by their own doppel gangers in kind of became a couple, but like Amy themselves, if they're in a group chat, the women start orbiting
around the sociopathic women or in the chat. I'm sure you've seen this in Facebook group chats where you know, one or two divorced women get onto a forum with you know, twenty happily married women and then the forum becomes let's complain about husbands work large and that is because these women are all they're worried about is how they're going to be managing their perception with the other women.
Whereas the other happily married wives they have a physical life that they're leading out side of the group chat, and so they kind of lose to this sociopathy. And this is this is just a real danger on the social media age. I do not know how to affect the female group chat spiral. I'm other than the kind of limited and to limit the time and to should
be cloud outside of the group chat. It's very very hard to control because it gets taken over by sociopathic bad actors, if not just taken over by the sociopathy and encourages in non sociopathic women. And yeah, that's the allure of the black mirror, I guess well.
And I feel like that illustrates something we see in this film. That's that's an interesting dynamic, is that men view themselves as individuals and don't necessarily view there as being a male team per se their competitors one to another, whereas there is a sort of female fugue state where they view themselves as being part of one whole. And
this is almost from a certain perspective. A character in the film, right, the kind of like feminine maps, like they're one of the kind of recurring background characters, is this kind of local newscaster.
Right.
There's a daytime television host who's more majorly focused on but this woman is primarily just on in the background. You know, she's the local you know, the local news host. And over and over and over again we get this sort of like Fox News tableau where it's obviously kind of poking fun at the bottle blonde Fox News host, right, yeah, and she is going on these monologues just full of invective against the talking about like old timey too.
It's like old times like Judge Judy laying down the law, yes exactly if she knew them, Like she's talking about them like you might have made what someone talking about someone that they knew in their community. And she has no information.
Right, none at all, and is pulling everything into And this is funny because we've seen this exact same phrase adopted by both women in the gender slop discourse and also shall we say synthetic women, which is this idea of the war on women. You know that men as a class are out to get us as a class, and this is just another outcropping of you know, this long kind of you know, mountain range of domestic violence against the most vulnerable women. Like there's this monologue where
she talks about exactly that. She says, you know, why why do men, you know, try and get us even when we're at our most vulnerable, when we're pregnant, you know, and they just can't bear to have a woman unaffected by violence. And you and I before we started rolling, we're kind of commiserating about our unfortunate interest in feminist essays on substacks. Oh yeah, yeah, I'll send to you
one after this, Dave. That might be the most perfectly crafted feminist essay I've ever read, because it sort of hits everything. But it's it is again this interpretation of just kind of relations as existing between different political classes. And if you're talking about why this discourse, why this conversation breaks down, I think that's a big part of it.
Because albeit this is slightly shifting, men are becoming a political class, which is not a good thing, But it is this reading of individual male action as being representative of men writ large and a specific but unrelated man in front of me. And so I think that's another interesting dynamic of this because over and over and over again, we see exactly that group chat dynamic before the technology
of the group chat, you know. Again, you know, when he's at this sort of press, when he's at this event, you know, walking accord and looking for his any clue for his wife, we get these constant scenes of kind of twittering women, you know, looking down their noses at him, deliberately trying to like scan him for weaknesses. Obviously the television, you know, multiple scenes where there's a riot practically outside
his house, over and over again. Yeah, and it is exactly that same kind of team sports group chat dynamic in a pre social media age.
I guess.
Yeah, Yeah, it is kind of funny. You know, we're talking about the phenomenon. You're you're you're a merry guy, right, so am I We have all heard about Ballerina Farms over the last three years. I've never seen that thing, and it's like out of know where. It's like I
heard about Ballerina Farms in twenty twenty two. It's like, oh, here is a cool Instagram account that I found, And then it's like it's like they're having a relationship with this person and you don't know anything about it, and so they go, I'm really liking it to kind of like not liking it to then everyone agreeing that now balleria Farms is what we hate. So then in twenty and bey four, it's like, Ballerina Farms is an attack
on all women and we need to get them. And you're just thinking, like, who, what the hell is a Ballerina Farm. I don't know this thing.
I think she's wormon. I guess I don't know.
I heard something about jet Blue. I don't know.
I think this is hilarious. David, you and I have never talked about this. We've had exactly the same experience.
So many husbands about the same experience. It's just like they're talking about Ballerina Farms in a good way. You do nothing and then like it just it just like it's like the moon moves into a different position in the sky and all of a sudden, it's anti Ballerina farms, right, and this is and now there's a new movie out it's called like Yesteryear. There's this it's like a suddenly
a New York Times bestseller. And all it is is like revenge from against Ballerina Farms, like like a track is influence her get sent back in time to the nineteenth century souse. She can be abused by men as revenge for her being an Instagram traad influencer. And I wrote this. There's a scathing review of this on First Thing's website by Julia Yost. The author can't even figure out what denomination of Christianity this character is, like she's Mormon,
traditional Catholic, fundamentalist Bible Christian. Well that's the.
Point, right.
The person writing that doesn't care. It's completely indetermined. They probably don't even know. It's just those people are icky and gross, make them go away.
It's it's it's all Mormons and Processts and Orthodox are all in this, this group of women who are people who are posting on Instagram that are making me feel bad right now, and uh, and they need to go back and be punished and then admit that we are right.
And you know, there's another book I can't remember who wrote it that has essentially the exact same premise to it, but it's Roman. And I think this woman was like a high powered girl Boss. This is from like the nineties. The only reason I know this is the good Old Boys have been doing a long form review of HBO Rome, which is by far the best podcasting on the internet. It's incredibly entertaining. Yeah, yeah, And so it is basically four hours of content talking about a one hour episode
of television. And when I say talking about that episode of television, it's in there somewhere. I haven't seen the show, and I haven't really got anything. No, which makes it even more entertaining.
That point is I tried to rewatch it. It didn't. It blew me away when it first came out, But then I tried to rewatch it. I was kind of unimpressed about it. Like I was like, oh, well, you know, they're just yeah, they're gone through the period that like everyone talks about, like Blutarch since then, Right, it's like the most commoned you know, thirty years of Roman history ever, right, and so you since when I first saw it, in know any of the characters. So I was just like
getting it for the first time. And now I've read all these other books about it. Now it's kind of like more focused on the actors and there was more a story about HBO than it was about Rome. But I'm sorry, I'm digressing.
Go ahead, Dave, this is a digression on a digression. I feel like neither of us has the moral high ground here.
As for your consistency, this is about a woman being sent back in time.
Yes, But point is it is the same story, exactly the same story, just written thirty years earlier, in the mid nineties, attacking again the kind of traditional woman like, oh, you think you want it like this, Well, why don't you try going back to you know, first century Rome.
Or there's another book.
And one of my other unfortunate obsessions is prestige American Christian institutions, you know, the like David French style, like good Conservatives. There's a book that was very popular in that sphere. I cannot remember what it was called, but it is very deliberately poking fun at the kind of non specific amalgamation of Mormon's Orthodox Bible prods and hardcore
traditional Catholics. And it's this, you know, kind of NPR woman who decides, you know what, all these people talking about how we have to take scripture seriously, Well, I'm going to live according to levitical law for a whole year and write about is it this ridiculous? Clearly these people who say they take the Bible seriously, they don't actually take it seriously because look, they have insert modern convenience. And the reason I bring that up is because it's
the exact same sort of revenge against nobody mechanism. You know, this kind of abstract idea of traditional femininity that I have never encountered enough to say anything specific about it. So it's sort of this like amount of like Pope John Paul, And it's like, I.
Mean, the the trad label is weird because it stands for like actual Amish people or people in religiously fundamental communities, Bob the people who are Bob Jones, b DSM lifestyle fetishists, and then like fourth, like people who are just being normal by the standards of any time in hum Minister before nineteen seventy two, Like all of those people are trad and like it's so it's like a meaning Like it's like, so you're grouped in with like Amish people
and like BDSM fetishists that are like you know, live action role playing their little shtick, and you know, and then then you have these other people who are like super angry at this. They've decided that this is the thing that they're gonna hate this week, and uh, it's it's it's kind of like weird to watch it go.
I guess, yeah, well, and again it's it feels very much like and not to go to tinful hat, but it feels very much like narrative control that if we can create the spell around the word trad and for a certain segment of the population, particularly I would say predominantly British, although also American female liberals in the fifty
plus crowd, this stuff is like catnet. They're genuinely worried about the rise of the trad wife, which again to your point, describes so many different things that it's almost an incoherent definition, but basically has become to mean any woman that is not that is not existing as a sort of woke version of lean in feminism. Is this sort of great hate figure.
Like I'm sure you saw.
It was all over maybe a month or two ago, the demographic information about basically women's response to the idea that women should always obey their husbands.
Right.
It was a question asked to a large segment of the population. The juicy headline is that for Gen Z women, they think that women should always obey their husband's roughly three x the rate that millennials and baby boomers do. So, of course we're talking about the difference between six percent and eighteen percent, which is far from a majority. But you can imagine exactly what op eds were written into
the Guardian freaking out about this. And of course the whole thing is laid at the feet of both men. Is a class and also that exact same pick me, cool girl dynamic that you're talking about, that is the reason, right, It is men's fault for wanting this in such a way that women will oblige.
And of course, I mean this is the thing behind the handmaiden's tail, And I mean it's fine all these things. These people aren't worried about being put in burkas. They're worried about being mobs. They're worried then someone's gonna show up and they're going to be fifty and the women who have children or families are going to be a lot more interesting. And that's fine, right as long as the feminists, as long as so the was threatening about
the trad wife is not that she has kids. A lot of these women don't even want kids, or they have sigh out themselves something. They don't want kids. They're not like feeling like the andy. Probably some of them is like feeling the emptiness of you know, the cradle or whatever. But that's not really it. If these women had children and they were died in the wold feminists, then that would be a different story. And because then like they're they you know Janice here, who sacrificed her
life to advance feminism. She's kind of like part of our team, right, we've both one together, right, What they really worry about is this woman who's obviously living a better life, going yeah, I did this, and you know, screw feminism. This is due to the political enemies of feminism. And you know, this is another result that I just wrote this article by Julia Goos. That's why I'm citing it so much, that the endemic fear behind all of these things is the rise of traditionalism. It's like, this
is a statistically insignificant thing. I need to emphasize this. There's this stupid controversy that is getting on my nerves as a statistician, Like the rise of traditional Christianity among the zoomers. Yes, there is an effect where you can see a certain cohort rise, and this represents it's unusual because of the kind of people who are coming back to church, but it is not significant in terms of
overall numbers. And every time we claim that, we end up making ourselves kind of look stupid, like the overall trying to still downward. But something weird is going on in the inflection point. And so but why why are all of these feminist women going absolutely nuts and going crazy over this really rather small group of women who are rejecting you know, feminis And like I said, like you said before, it's like three percent to eighteen percent.
I mean, sure, that's a pretty large statistical rise, but it's not overwhelming that massive increases in feminism over the same period of time. So no one's gonna put them in a handmaid's tail costume. The reason why they're worried about it is they don't want to have people next to them living a better life and then turning around
and going, well, why didn't you do that? And you're not on my team, We're on a separate What you say about what I should be doing as a woman has no what a feminist have to if they say that I didn't do right by feminism, that has no impact on my life. I'm glad I didn't do right by feminism. I hate to keep on going on about this. Jay, Well, uh, this is a dynamic that is really impossible not to notice. At least if you lived in a blue area, it
might have played out the same in red areas. You're the expert on this, but.
Well, I mean, as someone who has lived in a blue area, as someone who was decidedly not living according to blue state values visibly so, and had progressive friends, I know exactly what you're talking about.
This is a boomer phenomenon, though, the boomer women who had families and had kids. When they sat down with the career women who was apologizing to who it was like, oh, you know, you're so accomplished in your career, as like a gender studies professor, you know, I really should have I wish I could have gone further. And Mike, the moral ordering of who had the better life was more on the career woman had the better life than the stay at home mom. The stay at home moms were
apologizing to the career women. I guess I hypothetically the woman who won out was the one who was able to do both at the same time. But even then, even then, the woman who did both at the same time felt like she should have gone further in her career, that her children were kind of headiment upon what she owed to the grand struggle that was feminism. That dynamic that played out among the boomers is not going to play out among them. Well, it's question about how we'll
play out among the millennials. But I guarantee you, unless there's some apocalyptic event, that synonymic will not play out among the zoomers. Uh, we're going to have Yeah, they're not gonna look up at the feminists and go, oh, thank you for you know, thank you for making a way for women in the field of I don't know, writing shitty Star Wars movies or whatever. Right, it's just not going to happen.
Well, and to just truly explode this conversation and add in one of the other kind of like eternal burning dumpster fires of the internet to bring in the kind of generational aspect of it. There's also a dynamic I've seen many many times with my friends and peers, which is that same liberal boomer hefe who on paper lived
a very traditional life. Yes, they at home, or they had, you know, a nominal job, you know, while the kids were in school or whatever, turning to those younger than them and saying, no, you should have you should be that female girl boss. You're not allowed to do what I did. And that creates a lot of weird friction because it's that you are betraying women as a class for doing what I did, even though you were making much more significant sacrifices to accomplish that goal than I did.
They wouldn't have put it exactly that way, Like I'm trying to figure out exactly how this was the Dyenemicer describing as a spot on the women who made sacrifices for their family, presented it as if those sacrifices were like they had gotten the worst end of it, Like if they had not had children and they had become marginally more professionally successful, that would have been better for society at large. And the idea of a lot of these women who were stay at home moms was don't
follow in my footsteps, go and have your girls. Don't follow my footsteps, go and live the feminist dream that I was not able to obtain. And this is a really bizarre thing. They did not turn on the feminists and go, well, I have a way better life than you. I have a bay better life than you as a mother. That dynamic never took place. It was always looking the opposite way. For some reason, the childless career women and the boomer generation were able to judge the women who
had families. I don't think that dynamic is going to play out, at least for the younger millennials on down. And that is what people That's why people are afraid of trad wives like this very that's why they're terrified of this incredibly small percentage of women who are opting out of the feminist moral narrative, worried about catching the new moral narrative on the way back.
Well, and Dave, what I think we're also witnessing is having children, and having more children is becoming a rarer
and more outside trait. So, for instance, if you look at even just on the broad liberal conservative breakdown, conservative birth rates are roughly double progressive ones, and so there are by extension, and I'm sure you've seen this among your peer group, it is much more common to be childless, relatively speaking, and it is becoming more of a it's becoming, to be honest, more of a choice, and more of a marker of being outside of the hive in a
certain way. And maybe I noticed this just because you know, I say this as someone who is married young in Generation Z and so has that experience of being very much on the outside, like going to my last year of college and sort of realizing I was very much
on the outside by that life. Yeah, but like I think that there is also that dynamic where as fewer people point is it is becoming harder and harder to be a normal, mainline liberal and have children or have that be a part of your life, and so you're sort of selecting, You're sort of selecting for a more
outside group. I'm not sure if I'm expressing that correctly, But what was previously normal where you could kind of straddle the line of both being a sort of mass market NPR liberal and also living as a housewife is becoming more and more difficult. That is becoming an active choice you have to make. You were making sacrifices in order to do that, and generally, it seems as if if you were opting into that, you were also opting out of, either deliberately or by extension, the kind of
social respect ability of playing to corporate feminism. I'm not sure if I've expressed this exactly why I want to.
I get what you're saying. It's I guess it's interesting to see when this actually falls off. It is very clear that women don't like getting into internal battles against other women that would otherwise be useful in their social groups. And in many ways, the gender war between men and women makes feminism more powerful. They need it more than we do. They need this battle between the sexes to
go on way more than we do. If the battle be when the sexes were to obliterate itself, and you know, the case for families in this day and age would be just unanswerable in a lot of regards. And the accusation of pick me will always hurt women like women hate be ordinary, non sociopathic, well moraled women and never want to be pigmies or cool girls or whatever we're deciding on now. They do not want to be people who betray their friends for the arbitrary, tyrannical approval of men.
It's different if it's for like an eternal patriarchal, traditional divine principle. You know, that's why grounding this interpersonal relationships does not work. But the only reason why that dynamic would ever come up is because of the gender war, which is why you know, this is why I think
gender slop is it's like eternal. It's eternally recursive, and in many ways, even though I kind of play into it by writing articles about it hopefully helpful ones, the dialectic itself or the discourse itself, drives the more perverse elements in it more than if the discourse were to somehow be resolved well.
And I think that that is an interesting kind of modern as in kind of post French Revolution dynamic, is that the forces of entropy, right, progress, whatever you want to say, require social destruction to spin their political engine. You know, they require those atoms being pulled apart to release energy, and any time where that isn't happening, they are, by extension losing. So they sort of need the eternal,
like the eternal conflict in that way. And to like this kind of point about gender discourse, it's like it sort of is like this eternal like chemical reaction, just constantly spinning in order to justify that whole system of being right, it requires that constant media reinforcement in order to be real and alive and kind of I guess votive. Votive, that's not the term I want.
Whatever they need, they need. They need a cycle of mail approval and mail disapproval for the thing to have vitality in it, and and uh and it has to happen in a very specific way. And the second of that is removed, the energy is kind of lost. And these systems kind of drift, which I mean, I guess is kind of a good thing. It means that it
naturally has a burnout point. It naturally has a point where if this man hating thing gets so bad that these women literally sequester themselves into like you know, feminist nunneries and they invented.
Monasteries pretty first states.
That was harrowing, right, Like the New State's been an article about the men, the women who just hate men. If that ever happens, it will be easily shattered because the communities they build are just gonna they're going to burst. The instant that they're going to go to a very very low energy state, and then they're going to kind of witness the high energy state that is pure masculine spaces, and they're gonna start orbiting around that, and that will
kind of be a reset of the cycle. What is certainly not going to happen is society is not gonna This is another thing too. You know, there's not gonna be some kind of collective moment of realization where we start holding women accountable. That's not gonna that's not gonna happen. Ever, it will never, ever, ever happen. We will write out this portion of history. I mean, this podcast will be
here forever in the ether. But in the event that we ever solve the problem of many women, the people ten or twenty years down the line going back and watching in this and archive will not be able to tap into the modes that we're talking about, because that will all be covered up.
Right, Why did we make them do that?
Exactly?
You know, why did we make them do that? Why did you make me be the cool girl?
No? No, no, no, but see that's not the thing, right, it can't be. It can't be. So let's say hypothetically we were like fulfilling the feminist desires and putting them all back in the handmaids end of forum, right this or it cannot be. We tried women's liberation, women went insane and turned themselves into functional sociopaths collectively and decided to hate all men, and the species was almost ended.
And then we had to reassert control. That can't be the narrative because women are the villains that the narrative will be. You know, chaos out of nowhere, Like there is a period of chaos and destruction, and then you know, a revelation hit that suddenly, this is a more beautiful way to live. And then as we brought that more beautiful way to live, you know, heroic women stood up and decided to be beautiful and heroic and submit to
this much more better way of doing things. The idea there is never going to be a period where agency is attributed in a negative way to a female object. I don't think that as humans, as men, we naturally resist that, as women definitely naturally resist. This is migtao desire to have a collective recognition.
Over you know, like woman Urenberg.
You know, yeah, exactly like women. That's what they really imagine. That's ever gonna happen. What's gonna happen is that people are going to like, people are gonna do this, They're going to try man hating for five years. The society is gonna become in society is already kind of falling apart, and people are just going to realize that this is horrible. It feels bad, and more than it feels bad or it's horrible, or that it makes society chaotic, it's boring too.
It's boring, and almost anything is more life giving than than circling around this strain of how much you hate men. And then you know, people are going to decide to just think different, I mean, and then we're gonna all forget that has ever happened, because that's going to be part of the deal. And you know, luckily, luckily for us. You know, most women are not like Amy. They're not habitually inclined by their nature to do this kind of stuff,
to create drama, to become victims. They're just there because they feel like they have to because everyone else is doing it. And so once that narrative is descentered, you know, sanity can resume. But but it's not going to happen by by collectively realizing that women are at faults. Women being at fault is not something that can it's not a proper odd to logical thing that can happen inside human almost apiens map of the moral map of the universe.
For better and for worse, there's gonna be no moment where, you know, the un judge hands down a sentence, you know, five to ten years for being unable to pick a movie on Netflix.
You know exactly, you are touch incapable of picking picking out the food that we're going to eat for the restaurant. You know, it's it's it's ever going to.
Happen, right, fifteen years hard labor.
Oh yeah, the fair play I remember. That's like like they're doing this thing now if you watch cartoons Hate Her, where they're like you you do a card game where you play a card game like who does the dishes? And then if you do the dishes, you take that card. It's like a trick taking game for fair play feminists.
Uh, you know, it just sounds miserable. It's just miserable.
But there will never be an equivalent to male thing for that, nor should therapy. You know. The the end of this dialectic is or the dialectic conftemen and women itself to be dissolved into something larger. And it is actually the lack of some larger mission that prevents us from defeating this dialectic by dissolving into an appeal to that larger thing. And as long as it's focused on man versus women collectively, then then no moral order can
be imposed on the circumstances. It will always be appeals to pigmies or cool girls because that's what you said. You said like the alternative to women, like the collective woman brain deciding what is right and wrong is the collective man brain is something what is right or wrong. Women will never accept that book. That is male tyranny.
What women want is they want the collective goodness that stands above man to make the rules right, either through an appeal to an eternal patriarchy of ancestors or to tradition, or through literal appeal to deity. Only operating under the command of those greater asterial things does the male opinion
become actual authority and not just tyranny. And like women are complaining about a real thing when they're complaining about pigmies, they're complaining about a real thing when they complain about cool girls. And what they're complaining about is male tyranny. And what is tyranny. Tyranny is unaccountable authority. Tyranny is appealing only to the individual egotistical will to make decisions
as an authority. And while the male authority is properly granted, male authority is granted to the male by appeal to a higher good. And and and while there is no appeal to the higher good, then all male authority has to be tyrannical. And the women who go along with milityranny are going to be picknies or cool girls. Or I'm sure that if you go back to three thousand BC when there was a religious crisis, women had their own word for women who submitted to arbitrary male authority.
But no human being wants to submit to arbitrary authority, and no woman is going to submit to arbitrary male authority. But at the same time, no woman herself is going to be authority. So it's either divine authority or chaos, I'm sorry, or some appeal to Those are traditional mechanisms by which we can bootstrap male authority. But those are our options, guys. I hate to say it.
Oh, it's it's a it's a bit it's a bit grim when you phrase it like that. But also, what is the other option? We just keep doing this forever and everyone's completely and totally miserable and at each other's throats.
Right, yeah, but Dave, don't yeah, don't don't bite female author don't bite female complaints. Just change the environment. Trust me for your marriage. Never frame it as a fight between men and women. Just change the environment. Change the frame, and an assert authority through the frame. Do not engage in the argument directly. I'll say that.
Words of experience.
Oh yeah, exactly.
Well, Dave, I think this is this has been a really fun technical like by the broadest technical strokes. I think we reviewed Gone Girl.
Yeah, we did from a lot of angles.
Well, man, this has been a ton of fun. I know you mentioned that you recently wrote an article about gender discourse. I'll be sure to link that. But where can people find you?
Man? Uh? They can so. I I used to be famous for my YouTube channel called the Ashupertist, which now mainly just hosts monologue live streams. There is a back law of videos my essay writing has moved from YouTube to substack and you can find that at Fiddlersgreen dot com. And yeah, I have two essays about gender discourse and the conclusion is you shouldn't do it spoiler alert. But I think they're interesting anyway, and you can always tell that.
I'm in the process of working on other projects, one of which is a speech for a conference we might both be at soon. And yeah, find it on substack. So thanks for having me, Jane, definitely, this is a ton of fun and everyone at home, keep your head up good night.
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