Culture Study Podcast - October 15, 2025


How the Manosphere Fuels Climate Change Denial


Episode Stats


Length

56 minutes

Words per minute

163.41

Word count

9,180

Sentence count

266

Harmful content

Misogyny

9

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

14

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. I've got some updates on episodes that we've added to our recording schedule,
00:00:04.480 including one that we're doing on cultural panics with culture study fave Sarah Marshall.
00:00:09.880 She's the host of the amazing podcast You're Wrong About. So you can absolutely ask about
00:00:15.480 specific cultural panics, but you can also get into the origins and motivations of them all.
00:00:21.140 We're also working on an episode that our guests have suggested we call Big Korean Energy. Maybe
00:00:26.760 you're noticing Korean skincare everywhere, or your kids are obsessed with K-pop demon hunters,
00:00:31.260 or your Trader Joe's is always sold out of frozen kimbap. What questions do you have about the
00:00:35.780 popularity at all? This is for people who are Korean Americans, people who are not Korean
00:00:41.200 Americans, people who are Korean Koreans, anyone and everyone. And just to rattle off a few more,
00:00:46.200 I'm just going to read the list on our scheduling doc. Adult hobbies, love is blind, dating culture,
00:00:51.980 criminal profiling, eldest daughter discourse, sociology of names, weird English words,
00:00:58.500 and all things audiobook. And maybe Charming Potato, aka Channing Tatum, if we can get someone
00:01:03.800 to co-host. We've tried Roxane Gay. We've received no response. If you have a hookup with Roxane Gay, 1.00
00:01:08.820 please get her to come on the pod. And if you didn't know, we keep a running list of what
00:01:13.680 we're working on in the show notes, so you can always check there. Submit your questions for
00:01:17.840 any of these subjects or for the Ask In Anything at culturestudypod.substack.com.
00:01:23.040 All right. Thanks, everyone, and enjoy today's show.
00:01:27.320 Daniel, can you describe in detail the art for the podcast, like the cover image that
00:01:34.980 shows up when people look up the podcast?
00:01:37.280 So I've been spending a lot of time in some dank corners of the internet for research,
00:01:45.060 not just for pleasure. And it's really the male grievance world, the manosphere,
00:01:53.000 whatever you want to call it. It's really a culture that exists online and that communicates
00:01:58.440 through memes. And I wanted to embrace that for the purposes of our artwork and kind of do
00:02:06.020 something that brought all of these symbols and messages and in jokes into one hellscape
00:02:15.600 and so yeah what you're seeing is a pickup truck with a chad driving uh chads are kind of the you
00:02:25.480 know an alpha male uh figure it's an incel term but also like kind of widely used and then there's
00:02:31.480 a Pepe with sunglasses and I think like a teardrop tattoo smoking a cigar, which is like
00:02:38.280 billowing out the back. And the truck is festooned with all kinds of little symbols, like 2A for
00:02:46.120 Second Amendment and the Punisher logo. There's a Bitcoin sign there. And there's a big plume of
00:02:51.860 black smoke coming out the back. There are red pills just like raining down from the sky, along
00:02:58.500 with meat and a dumbbell. And there are some oil derricks in the back. And if you zoom in on the
00:03:07.060 oil derricks, I don't know if you've done that, you'll notice that it's not oil coming out of
00:03:10.700 the derricks, but sperm. Hi, everyone. This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne Helen
00:03:22.340 Peterson. And I'm Daniel Penny. I'm a journalist and host of the podcast Non-Toxic and co-host
00:03:29.140 of the podcast Carbon Bros. How did you get interested in this intersection of climate
00:03:35.360 denial and male grievance culture? Because it's something that you've been thinking about for
00:03:38.620 several years, I know. Yes. It was kind of a personal journey, I guess. When I started my
00:03:44.980 career as more of like a cultural critic, I was writing about the far right and the alt-right
00:03:49.240 online. I'd done kind of a big essay on Milo Yiannopoulos back when he was relevant. And
00:03:55.940 then I sort of walked away from it a bit. I was writing more about art and I was writing about
00:04:00.640 fashion, oddly enough. And I became more interested in sustainability as I came to understand the
00:04:07.860 degree of waste that the fashion industry was responsible for. But I was struggling to like,
00:04:13.820 I was writing for GQ and stuff and I just would not really go for like 95% of my sustainability
00:04:20.280 related pitches. And I was starting to think like, surely men do care about this. Like that,
00:04:27.480 that was their angle. Essentially it was like, well, there's just no audience. Sorry. And so
00:04:32.800 I just thought, okay, I'm really sick of hearing now. I'm just going to start my own podcast.
00:04:38.140 and i wanted to use that metaphor of toxicity so it was you know amidst the kind of fallout
00:04:45.320 of the me too movement and the backlash against it yeah and you were hearing you know the right
00:04:51.400 make all of these kind of defenses of against the idea of a toxic male like men aren't toxic like
00:04:57.800 that's you know that's not true at all or what about toxic femininity or you would see all kinds
00:05:03.740 stuff floating on the internet and i felt like okay this is interesting and and then also yeah
00:05:09.380 i was i was seeing you know on joe rogan on other podcasts of that ilk the prevalence of all of
00:05:15.880 these climate denial talking points and i thought that's kind of weird what is uniting these two
00:05:23.280 forces and i think it all really got kicked off when um i don't know if you remember andrew tate
00:05:28.800 and Greta Thunberg they were like beefing on Twitter and Andrew Tate was like look at my
00:05:35.200 collection of gas guzzling vehicles Greta like aren't you triggered and you know she told him 0.89
00:05:42.340 to like send an email at like small dick energy I have small dick energy at gmail.com or something
00:05:48.020 like that and I just thought like it's all here like all of this is is just in in this moment and
00:05:55.160 like I need to kind of bring it together. Yeah. And yeah, Carbon Bros came about because Amy
00:06:00.580 Westervelt, who runs Drilled, had wanted to do something on masculinity. And some guests who 1.00
00:06:05.460 were on my show said, hey, there's this guy doing this obscure podcast non-toxic. They didn't call
00:06:12.380 it obscure. And thus, you know, we joined forces. So just so we're all on the same page, because I
00:06:19.900 I think a lot of people understand the like cluster of conversations that we're having
00:06:25.340 when we say male grievance culture, but how do you define it?
00:06:29.460 Well, I mean, it is a cluster.
00:06:31.660 There aren't hard edges, I would say, at least in its current incarnation.
00:06:37.380 You have a lot of distinct groups, subcultures, and then you could say more like talking points
00:06:44.080 or ideologies that seem to be a bit more free floating.
00:06:46.780 So there are, you know, online subcultures like incels who are obsessed with the idea of the fact that like they can't have sex and that the world is actually run by women and that there are all these unfair advantages that certain more attractive wealthy men have, etc.
00:07:03.760 That's like a kind of a closed group within the much larger manosphere.
00:07:08.820 Then you have people like Andrew Tate who are kind of rise and grind, hustle, culture, alpha types.
00:07:19.660 And they're just kind of like, well, they're obsessed with protein and like alpha maleness just generally and optimization in my experience.
00:07:27.060 Well, that brings me to like Brian Johnson or even Andrew Huberman, like the outer limits of this. There's a whole kind of like Silicon Valley self-optimization corner of the manosphere who aren't explicitly anti-feminist necessarily, at least like that's not the main thrust of their argument.
00:07:46.820 It's more that they just appeal to men and focus on how they individually can make themselves like the best version that they can be, often at the expense of others or the environment.
00:07:59.780 And I would say like my feel is that there's an implicit or explicit understanding that like we've gone too far in policing what we're allowed to say and think and how we're allowed to be kind of thing.
00:08:13.520 That is, I think, the biggest force in all of this is sort of the male comedians who didn't really have a particular set of politics going into like Me Too and COVID.
00:08:27.880 They were, you know, someone like Joe Rogan, very heterogeneous, like what it is that he actually believes.
00:08:33.480 He sort of just like repeats whatever the person next to him says for the duration of the episode.
00:08:38.420 And then he could have a guest who has a complete opposite view and he'll be like, oh, yeah, that's a good point.
00:08:42.440 um yeah but a lot of those guys are like andrew schultz flagrant or theo vaughn they really
00:08:51.000 kind of made saying what you're not allowed to say into like a political identity yes and
00:08:59.040 i think a lot of men found that very attractive that they were owning the libs and drinking lib
00:09:07.200 tears and even if they don't really have a coherent set of policy ideas it's more like an
00:09:16.440 attitude and a rejection of all of the kind of liberal centrist quote-unquote woke it doesn't
00:09:25.340 really matter like who the enemy is exactly it's just like all of these things were against them
00:09:31.460 and you can come and hang out with the boys and you can say slurs and like laugh at jokes
00:09:38.300 which we all know are funny and we don't really need to think too hard about what we're saying
00:09:44.580 or doing like it's all just in good fun I think that's probably the funnel so to speak like you
00:09:50.820 start with Joe Rogan and you might never go down the funnel but from Joe Rogan it's like Jordan
00:09:57.220 Peterson, who's been a frequent guest. And then from like Jordan Peterson, maybe it's like Charlie
00:10:02.720 Kirk. And then from Charlie Kirk, maybe you're reading Peter Thiel's talks. And the next thing
00:10:10.840 you know, you're like, trying to start a colony on Mars. And yeah, like you said, like, I think
00:10:17.900 it gets more explicitly political as it goes down, because people get, I think, more engaged in it.
00:10:21.940 But kind of the welcome point is often someone like Joe Rogan or like you said as well, like someone like Andrew Huberman.
00:10:29.360 And the way that algorithms work and the way the recommendations work, like often lead you to other people in the so-called manosphere.
00:10:36.740 So you become part of this larger constellation.
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00:14:54.540 So we have all of these great questions today.
00:14:56.980 they all come from women great um i think we should start out with this one from megan it's
00:15:03.580 fantastic i'd like to explore the idea of nature as feminized i'm an avid outdoors person and
00:15:09.800 recreationist and often find myself in male-dominated groups that are obsessed with
00:15:14.560 conquering a climb grinding out a backpacking trip or otherwise checking off a gnarly to-do list
00:15:21.100 when i am in femme or them dominated groups the discussion is often more centered around
00:15:26.540 our connection to nature, the cool little details we've noticed, and yes, big achievements we've
00:15:31.860 notched. These differences extend to discussions of the changing climate and the climate crisis.
00:15:37.500 Male-dominated groups tend to avoid the topic or change the subject, whereas femme and them-dominated
00:15:43.500 groups are more eager and willing to discuss fear, grief, and resilience associated with the crisis. 0.78
00:15:50.200 I can't help but think one is an extension of the other. If nature is feminized and thus conquerable 0.79
00:15:55.820 to a subset of men, then why should they care about the climate crisis? Is this a matter of 0.73
00:16:00.940 hyper-masculine individualism, broader misogyny around nature as a feminine entity, or something
00:16:07.120 else entirely? I love our listeners. Fantastic question. What is your first reaction to this?
00:16:14.160 Sure. I mean, I will say spending time outdoors is not inherently gendered, right? But there is
00:16:20.940 certainly a heroic masculine ideal around the idea of like conquering the frontier or showing
00:16:30.920 your strength and toughness through the achievement of some kind of major climb or expedition or
00:16:40.340 whatever and i mean that's certainly been a dominant theme in american culture since the
00:16:45.800 19th century and it continues to fuel our collective imagination around the idea of
00:16:54.000 the outdoors it's why like thousands of people line up to climb Everest because
00:17:00.260 most of whom are men uh because they want to yeah right like the tallest mountain right or like the
00:17:08.440 the most arduous climb like they want to do those things that are a display of mastery
00:17:15.220 Yeah, I don't think that it's inherently a bad thing to want to mark those achievements. But I do think that what your listener pointed out the obsession with the achievement over all else that like, you know, it's not the destination.
00:17:36.380 it's the church like that because i'm getting that kind of vibe that she's saying and i think
00:17:42.120 it's true like um i think also from the point of view of the climate crisis i mean people who care
00:17:47.800 about the outdoors do tend to well some of them believe in the importance of of the climate crisis
00:17:56.240 i don't want to um at least the people who are recreating in the way that she's describing
00:18:00.300 who are who are doing the kind of like lib-coded outdoor activities like hiking and climbing.
00:18:08.660 See, this is so interesting to me. Like I used to live in Montana and the biggest
00:18:12.700 advocates for the outdoors, broadly speaking, are not necessarily what we would call
00:18:19.820 conservationists. Like they are people who are advocates for public lands. So they like that
00:18:25.920 is their entry point is i want to use the land as a public land owner right like backcountry hunters
00:18:32.420 and anglers the back of their shirts say public land owner and they use it to recreate and that
00:18:38.800 means so many things that can mean hunting of course but also going on snowmobiles or four
00:18:45.900 wheeling like all of these different things and part of their selling point and why they are like
00:18:50.140 such a I think bipartisan coalition in a lot of ways is because they're like being a public land
00:18:58.640 owner means being able to do what you want on public lands and interestingly there was a very
00:19:05.340 much like non-partisan push to strip the recent in the big beautiful bill there was a provision
00:19:13.000 that was going to sell off a bunch of public lands and I was following a lot of conservative
00:19:18.760 influencers and manosphere types who actually came out against it and um you know we're saying
00:19:26.200 like politics doesn't matter like this isn't a good idea like call your representative call your
00:19:32.140 senator and it did get stripped um from the final legislation so i i found that to be heartening
00:19:40.620 and and an indication that like there are ways in which um environmental politics can cross
00:19:47.700 partisan divides and like gender identity and like all of this stuff like there there is
00:19:54.620 some common ground to build on um you know what your listener said about like the acknowledgement
00:20:01.660 of the feelings around climate and her male companion's apparent refusal to talk about that
00:20:09.180 yeah i mean i think that that gets at one of the central problems that we discuss in in carbon
00:20:16.100 bros is is kind of what you do with that anxiety and fear and the way it gets channeled into a
00:20:24.260 denial or or even like a death drive rather than um into kind of solidarity or uh work towards a
00:20:34.960 better future can you say more about that because i would love to like i don't know kind of just
00:20:40.240 process that a little bit more that idea that like you don't want to sit with the grief it's
00:20:44.200 like feminized to like deal with your feelings in that way yeah there's a fair amount of evidence
00:20:51.580 about like how men and women um are socialized to express their feelings and that the social
00:21:01.180 pressure to not express becomes a kind of like internal incapacity to even like acknowledge or
00:21:10.000 feel those feelings like the less you're allowed to like show an emotion the more it even becomes
00:21:15.680 difficult to like process and understand what that emotion is that's going on inside of you
00:21:20.900 yeah and that then like the only acceptable like emotion becomes anger yeah and which is then
00:21:28.680 expressed through violence and it's this kind of like inchoate animal force that has been ignored
00:21:38.180 or suppressed or and you know often through things like you know mass shooting events or
00:21:43.940 people driving their cars through protesters or you know these these kinds of like eruptions of
00:21:49.640 of rage is it sometimes like that also the tendency to glom onto conspiracy theories too
00:21:55.780 because like I think about when you watch like a massive forest fire ripping through like as
00:22:02.280 a place that is very special to you you can either talk about like okay well this is the
00:22:08.200 result of like a pretty complicated history of like how we have and haven't chosen to manage
00:22:15.300 those forests and all sorts of things right it's like building too close to the forests all sorts
00:22:20.480 of things right or you can be like this is a conspiracy like this is like these are the people
00:22:26.500 yeah totally totally yeah or it's or it's dei um forest fire fighters or yeah i mean and and
00:22:35.560 it's laughable to us or jewish space lasers but it is in a way like more um and and these
00:22:43.920 conspiracies like they don't just exist on the internet you know what you're talking about um
00:22:48.400 i think oregon actually what in 2021 when they were experiencing pretty severe wildfires
00:22:55.300 there were a number of like roving bands of militias that were out there searching for
00:23:02.740 the supposed antifa um arsonists who had started these fires and they had set up checkpoints and
00:23:10.200 they were you know trying to find like so yeah this this kind of paranoia um and and yeah an
00:23:17.560 inability to recognize like what the big real problem is can be channeled into into really
00:23:22.900 violent and scary outcomes. So yeah, I think you're right. It actually kind of, I think you've teed up
00:23:32.960 the second question too really nicely. This one comes from Monica.
00:23:38.700 I read about Naomi Klein's account of those who believe climate change is, quote,
00:23:44.800 a plot to steal American freedom, end quote, and who would rather go down a give me liberty or give
00:23:52.100 me death path, where liberty is unfettered fossil fuel extraction and use, and death is, well, death
00:24:01.300 of the individual, and the ecosystem, and so on due to climate change. And I wonder where the root
00:24:07.720 is. American car culture? Manifest destiny? The shameful legacy of human enslavement and
00:24:15.840 racialization of colonial societies on this continent? To divide people by race and destroy 0.98
00:24:21.360 class solidarity? How did we get to a place where some folks interpret scientific data as a plot
00:24:29.080 to constrain their individual lives without any shared benefit? See also COVID vaccine resistance
00:24:37.540 and denialism. It is like, it's just so real. Like when you spell it out like that, you're like,
00:24:43.020 yeah, that's all part of it. Yeah. I mean, I think we need to sort of put a few of those
00:24:49.080 big ideas in parentheses i will maybe address the beginning and end of the question in this
00:24:56.280 one and and i think we'll end up touching on some of those other themes yeah subsequently
00:25:01.080 but yeah this idea of give me liberty and it's really and death um because yeah yeah yeah you're
00:25:10.200 going to uh you're going to kill the future for your children and and and even potentially for
00:25:16.300 yourself depending on how old you are i think that the the kind of death drive that animates
00:25:22.360 the far right and and the kind of denial of of the climate crisis is perplexing to people who don't
00:25:30.200 want to see the end of the world but there is yeah a very strong apocalyptic strain and a very strong
00:25:37.500 kind of like perverse sovereignty or obsession with yeah the individual that that animates the
00:25:46.440 climate denial it's essentially like it's not just a denial of science which i think many ages
00:25:53.880 many times there have been groups of people who reject scientific evidence because they find that
00:26:01.340 it's creepy or icky or contradicts you know deeply held values or fundamental like challenging a
00:26:09.540 fundamental thing that you believe about the way things work like it's i think if you are not if
00:26:15.380 you have not grown up or been socialized in a world where you're used to like incorporating
00:26:21.520 new information new and challenging information and like not having that threaten your entire
00:26:25.840 sense of self. Like it's hard sometimes to take ourselves out of that and to feel like, oh, well,
00:26:32.040 this would be really scary. It's interesting because climate science wasn't always so
00:26:37.100 politicized and it wasn't always so caught up in identity. Like, you know, this is something we
00:26:42.420 talk about in the show and I've talked about it in non-toxic as well, that if you go back to like
00:26:47.960 the 80s and early 90s, when there was this real growing consensus in the U.S. and globally that
00:26:54.680 governments needed to intervene and do something about the climate crisis, as they had done with
00:27:01.940 the hole in the ozone layer. And most Americans felt this was a problem and thought that we needed
00:27:08.180 to do something about it. And there wasn't, I mean, there was some ideological divide.
00:27:14.200 Conservatives and Republicans were less likely to believe that the government needed to take action
00:27:18.540 because of commitments to small government and, you know, anti-environmentalism and whatever else.
00:27:23.380 But it wasn't like a major faction and it wasn't an article of faith to be a Republican. You had to deny climate. That wasn't a thing yet. And the fossil fuel industry did a really good job of making it an article of faith on the Republican side in a way that's very depressing. Right. We could have averted so much of this catastrophe.
00:27:42.980 but on the other hand it does show that like new technology or like science isn't like innately
00:27:49.500 seen through a partisan lens and it takes like a process of uh discourse and like a lot of
00:27:56.920 incentives on the part of political actors to like make that happen like i think we're seeing
00:28:01.140 it right now with ai that ai like doesn't neatly fit like what your attitude towards it is doesn't
00:28:07.940 neatly fit into like one political category or another but i think it will in the next four years
00:28:14.600 um as we saw with climate and as we saw with covid and to go back to like the liberty part
00:28:21.280 yeah i think there is this idea that you don't owe anyone anything like we don't live in a society
00:28:29.240 you know it's to quote margaret thatcher um society doesn't exist and that that's the kind
00:28:35.960 of apotheosis of that idea because both climate and covid were real illustrations like actually
00:28:45.880 we do live in a society and your actions directly affect other people and if we take like certain
00:28:53.960 measures for public health or for like planetary health we can save a lot of people but it requires
00:29:00.760 is some moderate sacrifice on your part and a lot of people felt that that sacrifice was an
00:29:07.420 imposition that it was a kind of yeah tyranny that they needed to overthrow um obviously i don't agree
00:29:17.640 with i mean it just like we have this incredibly strong strain of american individualism that runs
00:29:24.120 through like american ideologies and that's just been the case and we've gone through periods where
00:29:29.220 we've had much more like much more solidarity much more like communitarian thinking like
00:29:36.140 especially around various wars and that sort of thing but it's still there and that idea part of
00:29:43.500 me thinks too like as we confront increasing globalization like there's this feeling almost
00:29:50.600 of impotence like well it not only doesn't matter what I do but like whatever our nation decides to
00:29:55.580 do like it doesn't matter if the other nations aren't doing it like i've heard that actually a
00:29:59.160 lot and a lot from men they're like yes well china like why does it matter what we do if we can't 0.84
00:30:05.660 control china so might as well do whatever we want in order to beat china or whatever right 0.98
00:30:10.300 yeah which of course is like totally blinkered even on its own terms because china is now like 0.98
00:30:16.480 leading the global economy in all of their kind of sustainability solutions they're the largest 0.68
00:30:20.880 electric car makers they're crushing tesla they make all the solar panels they like own battery 0.71
00:30:27.380 technology so the future of the green economy is like owned by china essentially because we 0.95
00:30:32.720 we abdicated that and this idea that we're gonna like drill our way out of that situation is is
00:30:39.900 completely absurd like the whole world is moving to renewables and the question is like whether
00:30:46.520 we're going to do it fast enough or not and the idea that we can just pump more oil and gas and
00:30:52.240 that's going to like give us a competitive edge is is a complete fantasy i'm just noticing some
00:30:57.840 of the language that we're using here like i just said impotence and you're talking about like
00:31:02.780 drilling and like pumping oil right like even the language itself like we use this vernacular of
00:31:09.700 like virility and american virility and panic over virility and i think a lot of like that fear of
00:31:16.360 impotence undergirds so much of the reaction right yeah and a lot of it is a kind of economic
00:31:22.980 anxiety this comes up a lot in the show that gets transferred into a rejection of of kind of social
00:31:29.680 issues or culture war issues so when when men feel like they have no way to meet their basic
00:31:37.560 needs for themselves and their families or they feel like they have no future because they're
00:31:41.800 never going to be able to buy a house they're never going to be able to get married they look
00:31:47.500 to people who have answers and the answers from the democratic party have been extremely mid and
00:31:55.260 to say the least i agree and um whereas the right has had a really compelling story to tell and one
00:32:05.560 of the things they do is they tie together feminism as a kind of restriction on your like
00:32:10.700 individual choices and how you get to live your life and what you can say and you know being just
00:32:15.960 being a man and this you know and it's also and things like the climate protesters who are like
00:32:21.300 getting in the way of you getting a job right they're the ones who are preventing us from
00:32:27.080 having the robust economy that would grant you all of the masculine kind of milestones that you need 0.64
00:32:34.680 in order to achieve a successful life as an American man.
00:32:39.100 And that is a very compelling story.
00:32:41.920 Like, guys believe that, or not all of them, obviously,
00:32:45.260 but many say, you know, that sounds true to me.
00:32:49.260 And we need to deprogram them.
00:32:52.040 This connects so strongly.
00:32:53.560 And, like, to me, this emphasizes how these stories just emerge and emerge.
00:32:56.740 These strategies emerge again and again and again.
00:32:59.540 So I grew up in North Idaho, and in the late 80s, early 90s,
00:33:03.940 the big political wedge was the spotted owl and the way like i've done a lot of reporting on that
00:33:11.240 moment in idaho politics and looking back on what happened because idaho was a purple state
00:33:15.780 really voted strongly democrat on the local level in a lot of places was very strongly pro-union
00:33:21.360 and like people in hindsight now well that's crazy for me to imagine pro-union but very see
00:33:27.700 very clearly the way that the owners of a lot of these mills a lot of these paper factories
00:33:33.400 they saw an opportunity to align conservation and environmentalism with the democrats and thus get
00:33:43.480 all of the people in these rural areas who worked for the timber industry to vote against democrats
00:33:49.640 and thus turn idaho into a right to work state so essentially like achieving their aims their
00:33:56.120 larger aims for the industry by saying look at these environmentalists who want to take away
00:34:00.900 your way of living right they want to take away your jobs they care more about this tiny little
00:34:05.580 owl than they care about your livelihood and it worked it worked incredibly well and so now we
00:34:12.660 see it in different iterations but the same sort of thing like these democrats don't care about
00:34:17.340 your life right or about your jobs they're like go take on some student loans to go to college
00:34:22.420 it's not going to do anything for you yeah and of course the reality is actually that
00:34:27.420 even as america is the number one exporter of natural gas and number one producer of oil in
00:34:34.280 the world uh we are shrinking our workforce for the oil and gas industry and we're shrinking our
00:34:42.260 mining in workforce every year it gets smaller so and it's not because of regulations right we can't
00:34:51.360 claim that anymore trump's in power and he's deregulated everything it's because of automation
00:34:56.780 Like, the companies just don't need workers the way they used to.
00:35:02.480 With, like, pickaxes.
00:35:04.260 Yeah, every boom and bust cycle, like, they cut the workforce more and more, and they don't rehire those people back.
00:35:11.400 Yeah.
00:35:11.580 So, yeah, there's this kind of, like, zombie image of the poor, embattled oil worker or coal miner that the Republicans love to invoke as a worker that they're defending.
00:35:25.480 Trump's always talking about minors I don't think he's ever met a minor in his life but it's very
00:35:30.060 effective as this kind of like weird nostalgia that we used to have for you know these these
00:35:36.520 tough jobs and the people who did them and their honorable work and their contributions and like
00:35:42.320 all of that is true like it is a really hard job like I can't imagine being a coal miner but there
00:35:49.760 aren't really that many of them because we don't actually burn much coal anymore and it doesn't
00:35:54.580 have to do with democrats and it certainly has nothing to do with feminism but um somehow like
00:36:03.020 that's the web they've woven and um and yeah i think if we can say like it's not the like climate 0.99
00:36:12.680 protesters it's not feminists who are taking away your jobs or telling you how to live like it's 1.00
00:36:17.380 your boss who's taking away your job it's the republicans who are taking away your job because 1.00
00:36:23.260 they're just automating everything and they're happy to build a data center and that's gonna
00:36:30.300 you know make you redundant and they don't care what happens to you there's not going to be a
00:36:34.540 social welfare net there's not going to be anything and they don't want to pay for like
00:36:37.900 reskilling programs and that sort of thing necessarily i think some actually some red
00:36:42.200 states are doing this in different ways or have done this but it won't happen on a federal level
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00:41:06.700 Let's pivot to another question going deeper on the specific type of masculinity that is 0.93
00:41:12.660 manifesting here. We're going to play two questions here. The first one comes from Suzanne. 0.89
00:41:17.580 I'm obsessed with the idea of petromasculinity, how burning fossil fuels in big, often empty
00:41:22.720 pickup trucks is an identity, not just a means of transportation. I think we've made some strides
00:41:28.180 towards depoliticizing electric vehicles for these guys, such as the Cybertruck and the Ford F-150
00:41:33.420 Lightning, but are taking steps backward with the Trump administration's policies and the growing
00:41:38.240 emergence of online masculine authoritarianism. How do you see this evolving and where do we go
00:41:43.020 from here? And the second one comes from Elizabeth. There are so many markers of masculinity that
00:41:48.940 damage the environment in practice, eating red meat, driving big fast cars, mansplaining.
00:41:56.240 I'm curious about the intersection of this with patriarchal so-called muscular Christianity,
00:42:01.940 as beautifully dissected by Kristen Cobes-Dumet in Jesus and John Wayne.
00:42:06.560 When did evangelicals divest themselves from an ethic of creation care? Why? And is it possible
00:42:13.460 to reverse that? So I know that there's a lot in both of these questions, but let's start with
00:42:18.620 trucks first um actually in non-toxic we did an episode about an ad for an electric truck it was
00:42:27.240 in the super bowl maybe like three years ago yes or two or two years ago i can't remember um which
00:42:33.340 was all about uh premature electrification yes and the anxiety that drivers had that you know
00:42:41.200 they're they wouldn't have the range or the power that they wanted and there were all of these guys
00:42:47.160 and it was filmed like a pharmaceutical commercial for viagra and it was it was funny but also it was
00:42:52.860 like i think you're actually like reinforcing the message that you're trying to counter and um
00:42:59.580 yeah i think sure it's good to it's always good to move away from gas to a renewable like that is
00:43:08.440 yes that is better but um yeah i think as like uh from a strategy or like a from a sustainability
00:43:17.040 point of view like making more giant electric trucks is not the answer um and that it it's
00:43:26.300 incredibly wasteful and stupid use of resources that doesn't actually like meet our demands right
00:43:33.200 so it's still kind of keeping this idea of like you're you know the sovereign individual you're the 0.98
00:43:39.680 uh king in your in your castle and uh yeah sure like the castle is electric but it's still like
00:43:47.640 this death tank that is like meant to you know plow through people bulletproof glass like all
00:43:55.120 the stuff around the cyber truck um most of which ended up being not true um but it was still playing
00:44:01.400 into like those same themes and and ideals you know they even sell like electric truck nuts
00:44:09.860 you can buy oh yeah yeah yeah that just look like like kind of like bolts essentially that like you
00:44:16.000 haven't really escaped the trap of toxic masculinity just by swapping the gas car or the diesel truck
00:44:23.040 for an electric one i live in washington state where like on the western side of the state where
00:44:29.140 there are tons of rivians and i think that what the rivian does is really interesting because it
00:44:34.940 allows guys who have been according to like the the parlance of this world guys who are otherwise
00:44:43.300 pretty cocked to have a truck they're like i have a truck now it's just it's a rivian truck so um
00:44:49.880 like i don't have to feel bad and like maybe my wife's on board or whatever uh i do have a truck
00:44:55.900 and I love my truck and like I oftentimes resist the the sweeping generalizations not from you but
00:45:05.260 like from other people that are like no one needs a truck and I'm like I live on an island we have
00:45:09.780 no yard waste disposal I do need a truck for many other things too um and there are other people who
00:45:16.280 do like when you are working on a farm you need a truck like there are just things that you need a
00:45:20.860 truck for and sometimes you even need a dually like you need that horsepower there are people
00:45:25.840 many many many people who do not need trucks though and I think that a lot of this anxiety
00:45:31.760 is like I have been cucked by living in the suburbs so how do I display my virility and
00:45:38.000 my masculinity and it is through a truck or yeah yeah and it's interesting I mean the the specific
00:45:44.000 status symbol has changed over time at first it was a sports car yes then it was an SUV
00:45:49.540 now it's a truck um so yeah we've gone from something that was like kind of stylish and
00:45:55.980 beautiful and kind of pointless right which is like that's a sports car um to something that
00:46:04.200 is like all about like the myth of utility but actually like is never used totally for its
00:46:09.400 intended purpose and you know i think if you actually look at the size of trucks and how
00:46:15.820 they've changed over the years like i think the f-150 has gotten like twice as heavy since the
00:46:21.420 70s so i mean surely farmers in the 1970s like needed the same amount of storage and horsepower
00:46:29.520 and all the rest and they did they seem to do just fine with the ford that they had back then
00:46:35.600 so this idea that like trucks need to like keep getting bigger and i think that just doesn't hold
00:46:41.400 you need an open back end of your vehicle whatever that looks like and i think what we see now is
00:46:48.140 like all of these mid-sized trucks so like a ford ranger a toyota tacoma they their beds have
00:46:54.800 actually gotten significantly smaller to make room for the second seat for this that for the
00:47:00.520 spacious second seat because what this actually is is like the replacement for your sedan or like
00:47:06.940 you know what i mean and then it just happens to have this like open air thing on the back
00:47:11.300 so that you could say that you're driving a truck.
00:47:13.340 Whereas like when you needed a truck before,
00:47:16.080 like its job was truck.
00:47:18.080 Its job was not like family vehicle.
00:47:21.460 It's so interesting.
00:47:22.780 I could talk about it for so long.
00:47:24.580 For me, I wanted a truck
00:47:26.180 that I'm going to drive into the ground
00:47:27.640 and this is gonna be my last gas vehicle ever.
00:47:30.000 I found it intriguing,
00:47:30.860 this new electric truck company
00:47:32.260 that got started called Slate based in California.
00:47:36.160 And the whole idea is it's like a blank slate
00:47:37.960 and they're super cheap.
00:47:38.980 and you just kind of modify it as you want but it's it's electric and it's meant to look kind
00:47:47.280 of like you know like an old jeep wrangler or uh like defender yeah in that it's like very bare
00:47:54.160 bones there's not even like a stereo in there and you just like stick your own speaker like
00:47:59.280 you roll the window up manually yeah um huh i find that kind of intriguing like as an alternative to
00:48:06.260 like the souped up like insane cyber truck concept the other thing that it like the kind of dissonance
00:48:13.860 for me with a truck is that it isn't very optimized a truck is not an optimized vehicle
00:48:18.760 and so it runs counter to all of this other discourse about like how can you optimize your
00:48:23.220 life and your body and all of these other things at the cost of others at the cost of so many
00:48:29.300 different things but like that i guess i'm just trying to underline how none of this like it's
00:48:36.260 Coherent. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's not about creating like a perfect system where each thing logically snaps into place. It's about like doing what makes people feel good in the moment and like reassures them and like having a truck.
00:48:53.360 Yeah, it gives them a story to tell about their lives and like who they are. It doesn't have to really add up because most people have like the memory of goldfish and like the same level of like interest in self-reflection. And so, yeah, I think you can like the right doesn't have a problem telling you a lot of different lies and things that like contradict one another and kind of just throwing it all at the wall and seeing what sticks.
00:49:19.520 like the left is obsessed with like well you know got to make sure like you pass this purity test
00:49:25.480 and then like we gotta see how like these two things line up and if they're not sufficiently
00:49:30.200 intersectional then well and it's that that feeling of constriction that this like embrace
00:49:36.860 of like liberty at all costs is is pushing up against right like okay well what about
00:49:42.560 white nationalist christianity like how does that fit into how does that fit into the climate denial
00:49:49.120 um i mean i'm not an expert in like the far right in christianity i'll just say that we did
00:49:54.900 interview sophie burke james who's a researcher at vanderbilt and she really studies this pretty
00:50:01.120 exclusively um in that conversation i did think it was interesting the evangelical community
00:50:09.960 i don't think had you know a particular opinion about climate change um initially but as they
00:50:19.300 became like a political force in the 70s and 80s in the backlash to roe v wade um i think the kind
00:50:27.720 of science around abortion like and the question of like how you relate to science as a religious
00:50:35.180 person was important in shaping evolution too right yeah and and earlier back yeah sure we
00:50:41.020 could we can go to evolution though i don't think that like the religious right was as like mobilized
00:50:47.160 as a political block during like the kind of scopes era as they as they would be subsequently
00:50:53.740 um but yeah i do think this question of like how did evangelicals abandon the natural world in favor
00:51:02.000 of like apocalypse is interesting because i mean they do like apocalypse is necessary for the
00:51:09.140 coming of christ so like that that makes sense i do think like you know the the white nationalism
00:51:15.220 like you have this like these strains of masculinity that are so vibrant within
00:51:19.940 christian nationalism and then a rejection of science and then i also think that like
00:51:26.940 part of it too because you act within um like jesuit catholicism they believe in i think it's
00:51:34.540 called the whole cloth uh theory of the world so it's like there's a reverence for life in all of
00:51:40.320 its ways right so it's like they are pro-life and they are against like assisted suicide
00:51:45.100 but they are environmentalists like they are they do have what this person discussed as like an
00:51:51.720 ethic of creation care right like that is very much coming from that tradition so a lot of
00:51:56.220 evangelical christians subscribe to the idea of dominion which you know really links um the
00:52:01.580 relationship between men and women that like women are subservient to men and that they um are under
00:52:09.060 their protection and control and likewise that like all the creatures on earth and the earth
00:52:14.320 itself are also under man's dominion and that um dominion means like you can really do whatever
00:52:20.500 you want and there's not the same idea that like you need to care for the world in order to leave
00:52:27.720 it to the next generation or like like that's really abandoned um it's just about like you're 0.79
00:52:34.340 in charge and it's and it's up to you as a man to decide what you want to do with women with the
00:52:41.660 natural world with your children like everyone kind of is going through you um and and you alone 0.99
00:52:47.560 decide and that's yeah not the case for catholics and not the case for like even like black
00:52:53.320 liberation theologians like don't subscribe to that um so yeah it is also very much a racialized
00:53:00.960 idea um in the sense that yeah there are many black evangelicals who reject this dominion and
00:53:08.680 going back to this the very beginning question like the idea of like that god given like manifest
00:53:14.860 destiny like the if you believe in dominion you believe that this is what god is telling you
00:53:20.280 right is that you have you have the wisdom and discernment to know how god would want you to 0.57
00:53:29.380 rule these things and that again is you know the masculinized control of the feminized world
00:53:37.140 that's a great and horrible place for us to stop today if people want to find the podcast
00:53:44.680 and more of your work, where can they find it? So, I mean, you can find Carbon Bros wherever
00:53:49.620 podcasts are sold. Non-Toxic, which is my half of the two podcasts that are collaborating.
00:53:58.660 We've got a sub stack, the Non-Toxic newsletter, and you can find previous seasons of Non-Toxic
00:54:05.980 also anywhere where you would listen to a podcast. And then I will plug Drilled as well. So my
00:54:11.600 collaborator, Amy Westervelt. She runs Drilled, which is kind of the original podcast about
00:54:18.680 climate crisis. Highly recommend. And she's been doing this work for years. And they just had a
00:54:25.000 new season called Slapped about the lawsuit between energy transfer and Greenpeace over the
00:54:31.100 protests around the Dakota Access Pipeline. And that's a great season. I definitely would
00:54:36.220 recommend it to any listeners. Amazing. Thank you again. Thanks for having me.
00:54:41.600 Thanks for listening to the Culture Study Podcast.
00:54:45.480 Today, paid subscribers got an Ask Anne Anything segment about how people keep their houses
00:54:49.940 clean or whether they do it all.
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00:55:06.660 Subscribe to the Culture Study Podcast wherever you listen, because we have so many great
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00:55:25.680 or check the show notes for a link. The Culture Study Podcast is produced by me,
00:55:30.140 Anne Helen Peterson, and Melody Rowell. Our music is by Poddington Bear. You can find me
00:55:34.520 on Instagram at Anne Helen Peterson, Melody at Melodias47, and the show at Culture Study Pod.
00:55:40.640 Thank you.