00:01:12.880I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabel, would be the first to say that her life truly
00:01:17.720started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother.
00:01:22.700I'm on this stage today and able to be the man I am
00:01:25.560because I have a wife who leans into her vocation.
00:01:30.100I'm beyond blessed with the many talents God has given me,
00:01:33.360but it cannot be overstated that all of my success is made possible
00:01:38.260because a girl I met in band class back in middle school
00:01:41.560would convert to the faith, become my wife,
00:01:48.540and embrace one of the most important titles of all,
00:01:51.920poll maker. All right. Wow. What a pussy bitch. I have never seen that section of the speech.
00:01:59.140That is the emotional labor he is demanding of us is fucking bananas. Are you joking me?
00:02:06.800Are you telling me that you never actually watched the full source material for this podcast? I
00:02:12.180didn't need to. Oh my God. I wrote a fucking song about this man. I took to the arts.
00:02:16.880Okay, yes. So confirming that this speech was what inspired us for the name of this podcast. And I was vaguely offended when I saw that speech. Obviously, I guess it was now a year and a half ago.
00:02:29.660But watching in retrospect, it stretches the human imagination that he thought it was appropriate to give that speech at a college graduation.
00:02:38.360And for him to have the audacity to tear up while he's talking about his wife's decision to submit to him as a metaphor for what all of these college graduates could do.
00:10:05.260Marriage in the right context is so beautiful because your husband will give up anything and everything for you in a healthy manner, but they will literally love you and honor you and cherish you above all and put all the noise aside and focus on wife, children, family.
00:10:26.280Daisy says there were quite a number of questions on submission, so dive more into that.
00:10:31.260Okay. For me as a wife, my biblical role is to be the helpmate to my husband. That does not mean I'm less than you. That does not mean that I am above you. Thank goodness. I love that you lead our home.
00:10:50.080I love that you are such a, you are so intentional with your faith, and you are so intentional with just how you are as a father and a husband, but as a wife, I am to quote-unquote submit to you, which is a beautiful word, by the way, because that's the order of how it's supposed to go, and God will bless that.
00:11:15.080I am not to try and rival you. We're on the same team. We complement each other. The body,
00:11:26.220an eye is supposed to be an eye to see. You can't expect an ear to see. There's certain
00:11:31.420things within the body that operate how it's supposed to be, similar to marriage. I am the
00:11:36.320wife. I am in charge of certain things. Guardian of the home, helping with the children. That is
00:11:42.060so I can make it easy for my husband to do what he needs to do, there's a balance there.
00:11:47.100And then you get into the people who are saying, well, my husband's abusive. That's not what we're
00:11:50.980talking about. We're talking about the beautiful, beautiful, sacred marriage of when you are at the
00:11:57.440altar, you become one with your spouse. And the problem is, is that I feel as if some women,
00:12:03.860after they have children, they lose that fire that they got at the altar, that fiery spirit of
00:12:11.440this is the man I've been praying for. And they get burned out because of the kids or because
00:12:17.700of circumstances. And then it's like, submitting to my husband, that sounds exhausting. It's
00:12:22.380supposed to be liberating. It's supposed to be freeing. You are in charge of what you're in
00:12:26.500charge of. Your husband's in charge of what he's in charge of. And it's supposed to be a beautiful
00:12:30.080marriage of a teamwork and symbolic within biblical marriage and symbolic within
00:12:35.600And how God and Jesus and everything, just your whole faith is supposed to operate.
00:16:35.140I don't want to say it's not that hard, but if you work hard and apply yourself and obsess, you can make more money and you will be more attractive.
00:16:41.080But like you say, stop spending money on alcohol, stop playing video games.
00:16:45.420Invest in yourself, learn more, be scrappier.
00:16:49.720I don't want to say it's easy because it's not necessarily easy, but it's easy to not be poor if you were a man.
00:20:55.480Every two or three months, someone adds Elon Musk's email to our subscriber list, so I have to remove it because this is a comedy podcast, not a leftist one.
00:21:05.080If you're listening from the CIA, use your Gmail if you want to stay subscribed because we're going to keep removing you.
00:21:12.120Okay, our final third and final clip that we are going to watch.
00:21:16.840How much did you guys discuss religion, finances, politics, how to raise children before getting engaged?
00:21:22.240If I could just chime in on one of them.
00:21:24.540Men, you should be completely in charge of finances.
00:21:27.980And your wife should have nothing to do with it.
00:21:29.920I mean, they can have input, but you should release that burden from your wife and just take care of all the money.
00:21:36.440I have to say, having to provide for my, just as myself as a woman, having to provide for yourself, especially because when I was living in New York City, it all fell on me, it's exhausting. I love the fact that I can relinquish that role to my husband because he's so good at it, but relinquish it to him and say, I trust you so much. I know you're going to help provide for our family.
00:22:01.960That is one less thing I have to not deal with.
00:22:05.320I've watched my mom have to deal with that while she had her own business, and she was my mom and dad in one package because my parents got divorced when I was really young.
00:22:14.400But to be able to relinquish that to you is so liberating.
00:22:19.320And I can focus on other things that are way more important because that's your domain, and I don't have to worry about it.
00:22:25.840And if you are marrying a man that is not capable of completely and totally handing the finances,
00:22:47.140I mean, then all of a sudden you're talking about a reverse.
00:22:49.080I think then you're talking about very confused gender rules.
00:22:52.660Then are you going to be a stay-at-home dad?
00:22:55.080is that basically what that is okay but then what about the women that are the ones that write the
00:22:59.680checks and do the bills and good luck yeah i mean it can work i'm sure it has but i see those
00:23:07.660marriages careening for divorce quicker than anything it's like fuck all y'all here's why
00:23:11.820we as men are hardwired to produce for the family we find meaning we find purpose
00:23:17.220pucker would talk about this all the time he would like i'd have the worst day ever but i'd know that
00:23:22.940today I'm paying for tuition like today my kids tuition are being paid for I can't pay and for
00:23:29.300men we find great purpose in being able to come back home being like we provided for all of this
00:23:34.440and hold on I do not want to knock the stay-at-home dads I do not there are some who had
00:23:42.300to have to temporary have to switch that role that happened to my parents a long time ago granted
00:23:49.020again they got a divorce so that probably falls into your bucket but i am an anthropologist
00:23:54.100but my dad was a stay-at-home dad for a few years and i gotta say it was really sweet and
00:24:01.720really special i was four but that was of course it's not an indictment of the morality no but if
00:24:08.440you're saying from the get-go i want to be a stay-at-home it is a imbalance it's an imbalance
00:24:14.120of nature and some people are able to balance are able to right juggle imbalances of nature
00:24:20.000but your husband has to be the one that goes out into the world and builds and battles and comes
00:24:26.860home conquers comes home and it's like this is my nest egg this is what i worked so hard for
00:24:32.320conquers the college students your husband has to be the one that goes out and argues with 19
00:24:37.620year olds it's in just nature guys and the wife is like welcome home babe whatever you need
00:24:43.620financial burdens should not be brought into the concern of the wife it just i i just it should
00:24:51.400well then it bleeds into the kids and the kids are like oh i can't afford to do why am i being so
00:24:56.200firm on this because kids become trans the number one reason why people cheat on their wives and
00:25:02.500why divorce happens is financial it is number one it is the number one thing it's it collapses and
00:25:08.860breaks apart marriages more than anything else and so if you have a husband that leads in it
00:25:14.060and it's it's not that i can it comes easy to me but he's like because my dick is so big guys
00:25:20.960don't borrow money you just start with that principle you're not going to have any credit
00:25:25.420card debt now you can use credit cards just pay them off every month and the only other debt that's
00:25:30.140acceptable is a mortgage payment if you just start with that principle you're you're going to be in a
00:25:34.480much better spot but how what if the guy comes from nothing and doesn't know where to start
00:25:41.140then he shouldn't be getting married what then he's a boy boys should not get married
00:25:48.140i love you i love you too but it's true i mean oh my god you are not capable of providing she
00:25:53.700turned on right now wasn't that so horny
00:25:56.760thoughts caroline i think that they probably had a pretty rockin sex life i think that these two
00:26:04.600hateful freaks were really into each other was it hard for you to watch that as like with your
00:26:09.460money with katie hat on all the bullshit they were spewing caroline it's crazy when he said men you
00:26:15.920should be completely in charge of the finances and wives should have nothing to do with it i
00:26:19.940I paused the video and I said this is my next episode this is what I what really jumped out
00:26:26.860to me about this is like they characterize or more specifically he characterizes a woman's
00:26:32.860involvement in money as an imbalance of nature of a man who is a nurturer as you know a perversion
00:26:39.620of biological gender roles he jokes like I'm an anthropologist Charlie says you should not
00:26:45.220get married until you can be a financial provider to somebody. And I'm hearing this in the economic
00:26:52.340context of 2025, and I'm going, hmm, this is a pretty fascinating element of his philosophy
00:26:59.760that I have not heard anyone talk about. And when you consider the so-called male loneliness crisis,
00:27:06.580I'm like, dude, the call is coming from inside the house. Even on the right-wing manosphere-type
00:27:12.020shows they're being told they're worthless if they can't provide for women. This is actually
00:27:16.400really fascinating that in one 30-minute conversation, he brought it up, what, four
00:27:21.040times? He just kept bringing the conversation back to money and providing.
00:27:25.620It makes me wonder, there are only a few options there where either, number one,
00:27:29.420he's kind of Lucille Bluth-ing it and has no idea that the average American has no money,
00:27:34.500and that therefore he is telling the vast majority of his subscribers, if not all of them,
00:27:38.700that they should not get married or number two he does know that and like doesn't care and knows
00:27:43.320that they're just going to watch it as some sort of like flagellating activity but something i'm
00:27:48.160also thinking about is we've already discussed she had multiple companies she had a clothing line
00:27:52.960she had like a bible app and so they're either completely lying about the fact that she is
00:27:57.860involved in their finances or the only other option is that she actually wasn't involved in
00:28:01.700those companies because you cannot run your own company and not be aware of finances like
00:28:05.940that is something I've realized doing this with you. Oh, have you? Have you realized that you
00:28:10.780have to be involved in finances? Yes. Here's an example. You are in our marriage. You are the
00:28:17.840man. You are the one who like tracks our stuff in spreadsheets. An example I would give is like,
00:28:22.520number one, I mean, obviously we're both on like the LLC. You texting me and going,
00:28:26.280can we have a disbursement from the business checking account? Can I have my allowance for
00:28:30.580this month and me going, wait till I talk to the accountant. Sorry, little girl. Daddy's working.
00:28:38.000I also think that it's much, much easier to say things like this when you're worth $12 million
00:28:44.380and you live in a $5 million mansion. Maybe she didn't have anything to do with the day-to-day
00:28:51.560finances. My guess is that she was never worried about where money is coming from.
00:28:55.660This functions on a very different level when you talk about the average person's financial
00:29:00.060experience. This shouldn't even have to be said, but financial abuse is so under-discussed. And
00:29:06.380the number of women, even now, who in their 40s and 50s and 60s either get divorced or their
00:29:11.120husband dies, and they realize they're in debt or they have no money or that their husband has
00:29:15.000been embezzling or lying about their funds, it is a tale as old as time. It is a cliche. It feels
00:29:19.320like a cliche coming out of my mouth. But it's so important to state that this is utter, utter
00:29:24.760misogynistic bullshit. Yeah. Hashtag rich girl nation. So that's all pretty extreme and dogmatic.
00:29:30.640I wanted to include one other example of how this tends to show up in the conservative media
00:29:38.200ecosystem. Are you familiar with Allie Beth Stuckey? Yes. She interviewed Lucy Biggers for
00:29:47.300the Free Press. And I listened to that episode for our girl, our social media manager. Lucy
00:29:52.840Biggers, bigger. Former climate activist, Lucy Biggers, who just wants everyone to get along.
00:30:00.740Oh my God. What episode was that? Barry Weiss again somehow. Man, if you are not a paid
00:30:07.340subscriber of Diabolical Lies, you are missing the fuck out. That callback just went over your head.
00:30:14.540So we have talked about right-wing media figures like Brett Cooper before, Alex Clark.
00:30:20.580Another person who I would group into this category is a woman named Allie Beth Stuckey.
00:30:25.420Now, Stuckey is a Christian conservative from Texas who is an author, a podcaster,
00:30:31.140and a social media influencer. Her podcast is called Relatable. She was raised Southern Baptist,
00:30:37.340and her dad co-founded a wealth management firm and then went into Texas state politics. So that's
00:30:42.400your little biopic on Allie Beth Stuckey. First, I just want to show you her website, okay? I want
00:30:49.480you to get a flavor, and I just want your first impression of what it is that you're looking at.
00:31:03.120The maniacal giggling. Please share with the class what your impression is.
00:31:07.160Oh, no. It's like a Squarespace website for the jack of all trades. I will come
00:31:16.060speak and talk about stuff, but I also wrote a book that 400 people read, and I also have
00:31:22.560social media. It's like a classic, like, self-help. I do everything, and you don't actually know
00:31:27.100what's going on here. We see that she wrote a book called Toxic Empathy, How Progressives
00:31:33.000Exploit Christian Compassion, which, banger. We see that her most recent podcast episode is called
00:31:39.060three men and a baby, polyamory is infiltrating families. Yeah, so this is essentially like the
00:31:46.220website for a solopreneur media operation. Now, this is a person who I've been sort of watching
00:31:53.820for the past year and have started to build into episode outlines before, but always for whatever
00:32:00.020reason ended up leaving her on the cutting room floor. But this time, a particular quote that she
00:32:05.340gave to the New York Times in an article about Katie Miller's new podcast, which we're going to
00:32:11.280talk about shortly, set off a light bulb for me. If you wouldn't mind reading this.
00:32:18.340It could be difficult to be sold this bill of goods that if you pursue your career and singleness
00:32:22.580and girl bossness until you're 35 years old, then you'll be able to find your fairytale romance and
00:32:27.780satisfaction. And then to realize it's actually more difficult than that. Miss Stuckey said of
00:32:32.780her conservatism curious audience in a phone interview on Tuesday with the Times. Okay,
00:32:37.280the idea of her audience being conservatism curious is hilarious. It's not necessarily
00:32:41.520that they're looking into Donald Trump or that they're looking into conservative policy to fill
00:32:45.300that void, Ms. Stuckey said, but they might start wondering about their philosophy and their
00:32:49.720ideology. Yeah, their philosophy and their ideology. I just was like, huh, yeah, she's
00:32:56.120actually kind of spot on here. People are looking for answers and they're not really necessarily
00:33:02.360concerned about, like, Ted Cruz. They want to know that they're living their lives the right
00:33:07.100way. I think it's really actually super intuitive that you—this feels like a self-help website.
00:33:15.080So after the last few weeks, I wanted to revisit Allie Bestucki because I think that she
00:33:20.640exemplifies this biblical womanhood to MAGA girlboss pipeline pretty well. So we are going
00:33:26.660to watch a speech that she gave at the turning point usa women's event a couple years ago i
00:33:33.680will never ever compromise on the definition of marriage that is an unpopular stance even
00:33:41.140on the right we've got members of congress redefining the millennia old definition of
00:33:46.100marriage between a man and a woman doesn't have the power to do it because god created marriage
00:33:51.020not the government. It is pre-civilizational. It's based on the biological complementarianism
00:33:58.360of a man and a woman. It is the only child-producing institution that exists and is the best child
00:34:04.500protecting entity that exists. And therefore, a country will never survive and certainly not
00:34:10.340thrive without it. There will be plenty of people here, plenty of people in general who agree with
00:34:15.220me, who will say that conservatism is simply live and let live, that it's low taxes, that it's
00:34:18.880anti-wokeness. I respect these people a lot, but I disagree. That kind of movement may be successful
00:34:24.800in temporarily pushing back against some forms of modern absurdity, but it has no power to build
00:34:30.200anything good. No society has ever been successfully built on anything except for God
00:34:37.540and the natural family. Cue Romans sucking and fucking their way to fame. Redefine marriage,
00:34:45.440and you can redefine anything including what a woman is so i don't care where the movement goes
00:34:53.740where the political parties don't i will continue to be a threat to what i see as our country's
00:34:59.360moral decay i will continue to be a threat to confusion to chaos to degeneracy to the
00:35:04.740exploitation of children to tyrannical regimes to corruption release i continue to say and do
00:35:09.040what god calls me to and i'm confident that you will too abraham lincoln said this wow
00:35:14.780invoking abraham lincoln my concern is not whether god is on our side
00:35:19.080my greatest concern is to be on god's side for god is always right
00:35:23.860god is always right therefore the wisest and most effective thing that you can do in the fight
00:35:31.680for our country is to be on god's side and to be a threat to evil okay the idea of marriage being
00:35:41.420pre-civilizational just really fucking sent me. That's incredible.
00:35:46.000I mean, you hear these common themes over and over and over again, that a stable society
00:35:50.920is based on heterosexual, cisgender, personhood, and monogamy, and that this is about the safety
00:35:57.940of children. This is about the future of civilization. The Atlantic did a profile
00:36:03.900story on her back in August of last year called Conservative Women Have a New Phyllis Schlafly.
00:36:09.560Oh, wow. I didn't realize she had that game in her.
00:36:12.500Yeah. I'm going to have you read an excerpt. I listened to a podcast where she talked about
00:36:19.180this article and she was like, I was so excited about it. They got a few jabs in, but I was like,
00:36:26.100all right, just kind of like rule of thumb. If you are profiling a white Christian nationalist
00:36:31.720and their only complaint is they got a few jabs in, you did not go hard enough.
00:36:36.820Right. All right. This retro brand of womanhood is feminine, not feminist. Stucky told me that
00:36:43.960of course she wants women to have equal rights and protection under the law. Oh, fuck off. Of
00:36:49.540course you do. But the notion that women, quote, need to be liberated and, quote, go into the
00:36:54.560workforce rather than stay at home and have kids has actually led to a lot more misery than freedom.
00:37:00.600Her push toward traditional womanhood is an attempt to, quote, reassess some of the girl
00:37:05.800boss culture that has permeated even some conservative spaces, the girl boss said.
00:37:10.360Of course, as a female employer, she is the definition of a girl boss. Thank you, The
00:37:14.140Atlantic. But this doesn't strike her as hypocritical. When I think of a girl boss,
00:37:18.440I think of this kind of domineering woman who puts her career first, who is independent at
00:37:23.080all costs, who doesn't need no man. Women should put family first, as she does with her three
00:37:28.940young children, Stucky told me. Whether you have an Etsy shop, whether you have a crocheting
00:37:33.900business, whether you have a podcast or you're a writer, famously the five most common professions
00:37:38.820in America. I don't think those things are bad, she said. But especially in these little years,
00:37:43.920I just think that they need to come after raising your children. When I asked Stucky,
00:37:48.560who watches her children while she's in the studio, she declined to offer details,
00:37:52.280but added that her husband is not a stay-at-home dad. That would be embarrassing.
00:37:58.540I'm already giggling. Where I really had fun was watching an episode that she did
00:38:03.680on her podcast with her husband a la charlie and erica these people just fucking love giving
00:38:09.460relationship advice on their podcasts their dynamics are never not funny so we are going
00:38:15.340to watch them discuss what femininity should look like in dating i think there is even in today's
00:38:22.780girl boss culture and obviously i am a like strong opinionated person and yeah i would say
00:38:28.900You can tell me from a guy's perspective that there is a softness that men are looking for in the girls they want to marry.
00:38:37.740It doesn't mean that they have to be pushovers.
00:38:39.460The girls have to be like, you know, just wallflowers or a doormat.
00:38:44.660But they're looking for a bit of gentleness, a bit of softness, a bit of just like femininity.
00:38:52.700Softness is not in the top 10 adjectives I would use for this woman.
00:38:56.040That is, I would say, like, I think that, like, girl boss harsh, I don't need no man, but secretly I do want a guy to be chivalrous and pursue me, that could possibly put guys in, like, a really difficult position.
00:39:10.600He might be, like, physically attracted to a girl and want to pursue her, but she's put off this persona of, like, I don't need you that is intimidating, and he doesn't know how to navigate.
00:42:12.980Exactly. And they'll make jokes, but I think that these women are too smart to say the quiet part out loud, which is true also, which is that like, yeah, most people prize looks when they're looking for a partner or at least when they're initially seeking out their partner. And it's so interesting to hear them rephrase it in a million other ways because nothing about their personalities are soft or feminine or delicate or submissive. But they're really, I think, just dog whistling to men and to women, which is to say, marry a woman who buys into the beauty standard.
00:42:40.560Right. You know, it's funny because, definitionally, you are never going to hear a truly submissive, meek woman telling you how to be submissive and meek on a podcast.
00:45:30.780So Katie Miller, formerly Katie Walden, married Stephen Miller in 2020. She is 33 years old, and she held top communications jobs during Trump's first term. So she was spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security under Kirstjen Nielsen, who infamously justified separating children from their parents at the border as part of the zero tolerance immigration policy.
00:45:54.600Now, Stephen Miller at the time was a major proponent of this policy. And in retrospect, it actually sounds like Katie's work in DHS is partially how he achieved it because they were both intensely xenophobic and like bonded over this and worked together to bring his anti-immigration vision to life.
00:46:16.020Now, at one point, she bragged that seeing the separations for herself, which was something that the Department of Homeland Security took her to the border to see as an attempt at, quote, making her more compassionate, she bragged that, quote, that didn't work.
00:46:34.520One former college classmate told Vanity Fair, quote, I genuinely believe there is something wrong with her.
00:46:40.400She lacks a moral compass and demonstrates elements of a sociopath.
00:46:47.060That's so funny to me because they wouldn't have even been considered white like 60 years ago.
00:46:52.240Did you read in your Stephen Miller research about how part of his family has disowned him publicly and basically said under his ideals for this country, he wouldn't even be here?
00:47:03.840So Katie was a Doge spokesperson for a while and in May went to work for Elon Musk privately.
00:51:46.600The line that, like, sent me into orbit was,
00:51:48.660by women for women and some men too about the issues that matter to women because they're not
00:51:55.480just women's issues i don't know what a woman's issue is i was like can we get a copy editor
00:52:00.800please what are you talking about yeah she's like trying to make jokes it's so bad it's impossible
00:52:08.800to know what it's impossible to know what she's joking about because she has such a flat affect
00:52:13.600well i mean this is this is the woman who was willing to have sex with steven miller i mean
00:52:17.800Right. Take a good hard look, everyone. Yeah, so who knows, like, if she'll end up towing the gender role line in this one and, like, hitting the same talking points. It certainly seems a little less overt, but you will notice that she's always hosting these conversations barefoot in blue jeans with her legs crossed. Like, they're really trying to cultivate this air of casual relatability.
00:53:31.560And then she found success in right-wing media and tripled down on the extreme language.
00:53:37.320But it almost doesn't matter if these women believe what they're saying or not.
00:53:40.820What you find in these spaces are very specific, very stringent economic prescriptions that accompany this cultural vision for the family and more directly for women.
00:53:50.940And part of the reason that all this seems so notable to me right now, beyond just wanting to find an excuse to play you with a Katie Miller podcast launch material in an episode,
00:53:59.000is because there's been more reporting than usual lately about marriage becoming a status symbol.
00:54:06.260So, Carol, if you will just read this headline and sub-headline for me from The Wall Street Journal.
00:54:12.960The economic contract of marriage has shifted,
00:54:16.020and now young people are looking for financial stability before the wedding.
00:54:20.300So, in this article, someone who works as the assistant director of something called
00:54:25.380the National Center for Marriage and Family Research
00:54:28.100described marriage as a status symbol. And what do you know, but an old friend of ours
00:54:34.400is quoted as a source in this piece, if you will do me the honors.
00:54:42.520You achieve a measure of success educationally and professionally before you put a ring on it,
00:54:47.380said Brad Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia and fellow at the
00:54:52.820Conservative Institute for Family Studies. Wow, two in one sentence. This mindset shift,
00:54:58.280Wilcox and other researchers say, is a large part of what's driving up the age at which people are
00:55:03.200first getting married, or making them less likely to do it at all. The estimated median age for a
00:55:08.560first marriage as of last year was 30 for men and 29 for women, according to the most recent census
00:55:14.180data, up from 28 for men and 26 for women in 2008. The recent engagement of Taylor Swift and Travis
00:55:20.520Kelsey, both in their mid-30s and perhaps at the apex of their careers, is the ultimate capstone
00:55:25.980model. The problem, researchers say, is that a capstone view of marriage raises the bar for what
00:55:31.240people think their lives need to look like before they wed. That's an interesting conclusion for
00:55:36.060them to draw. Right. Do you find it interesting that right off the bat, they are framing this
00:55:41.600shift as a problem? Not just a problem, but an individual problem is really interesting to me.
00:55:47.540Yeah. And later in the article, they write that there's other research that shows people waiting longer to get married and being more selective has led to more stable marriages and a reduction in the divorce rate.
00:56:01.720So there's not a real attempt at bridging the gap or establishing why it would be bad to delay marriage. It's kind of just taken for granted. There's another really interesting interview in this article with a young woman named Catherine, if you will read this for me.
00:56:18.000In Pittman, New Jersey, 32-year-old Katherine Marshall has always known she wanted to be
00:56:23.520financially independent before potentially choosing to share her life and her money with
00:56:27.940someone else. The older she's gotten, however, the more trouble she has had for seeing ever
00:56:32.500getting married at all. The older I get, the harder it is to think about having someone in
00:56:36.740my house, having to share my space, she said. She's also less than enamored with her romantic
00:56:41.660options. Obviously, dating these days absolutely sucks, said Marshall, who works as a bartender,
00:56:47.720adding that the men she has dated in the past often earned less than she does
00:56:51.440and felt like more of a liability than a help.
00:56:54.220Economists say the diverging economic trajectories of men and women
00:56:57.860are making the capstone model of marriage harder to pull off.
00:57:04.480It's so tiring. I'm like, this is where we get into,
00:57:08.620I feel like we're looking at a spider web and it's like everything we talk about on this podcast.
00:57:13.580It's like the deference we give to white male quote researchers who just like will throw quote studies at us and no one questions them. And then the way that we frame it in the media without any critical thinking and the male loneliness epidemic and she can't find the right man.
00:57:32.280And like the expectations and the way that all of what I'm really thinking about is that the way that all of this is always framed as individuals making individual choices and changes of how individuals perceive marriage, as opposed to a conversation about housing prices and educational prices and debt and health care costs.
00:57:51.680Everything is always framed as like, well, now women don't want to or now men don't want to.
00:57:56.560Mm-hmm. Honestly, that was not even where I was taking this, but I think what you're getting at
00:58:01.740here is the tendency for us to assume that all of this is just based on preference.
01:06:36.780You can hear this little Pavlovian training bell jingling throughout the trailer at critical
01:06:43.340moments. And this movie, from what I saw, I read like five reviews of this movie in major newspapers
01:06:49.400and magazines. It was pretty universally lauded as a daring exploration of feminist sex positivity.
01:06:57.600I only found one review in a serious outlet that was not favorable to the movie. So one
01:07:04.320interpretation, I say the popular interpretation, is basically what the review said, that this is a
01:07:08.800sex-positive feminist tale of the way in which desire is completely separate from one's public
01:07:14.280facing personality or life, and that taboo power dynamics are complicated, they can actually be
01:07:19.720very erotic. And I don't think that that interpretation is necessarily wrong, but I don't
01:07:26.320think that this movie explored kink in a way that really made that or intended to make that the
01:07:33.020focus of the narrative. They did imply some sort of sexual childhood trauma. You can tell she's
01:07:38.100doing EMDR therapy. There are some very brief flashbacks. But that element of her past is
01:07:44.380extremely underbaked. They don't really explore that at all. It's really just, I think, a narrative
01:07:49.980device that's supposed to fill in some blanks about, like, why she has these desires now. But
01:07:54.720I actually think it would have been more interesting if that were the goal of the film,
01:07:59.120to explore sexual desire as separate from a public-facing or gender role persona if it were
01:08:05.580a male CEO and a female intern and the man wanted to be sexually dominated? So another interpretation,
01:08:13.680and the one that I find most compelling given the frame of mind and the throes of this research that
01:08:18.500I was in for this episode when I was watching this movie, is that it, I think, speaks to this fantasy
01:08:24.400that powerful women secretly want to be subjugated and dominated, and that having power is antithetical
01:08:30.540to a woman's true nature or desires, and that submission is where they're going to find the most
01:08:35.820true fulfillment, the most real fulfillment. And I think if you look at the way that this
01:08:41.240protagonist's life is structured, she's a woman who achieves virtually all of the power, wealth,
01:08:47.080and status that capitalism has to offer, including what seems to be a pretty loving egalitarian
01:08:52.660marriage to universal sex symbol Antonio Banderas. But she can't orgasm with him. And that's kind of
01:08:59.360the linchpin of the movie, right? Yes. And the implication is like, yes, all this power, all this
01:09:05.720success, this loving husband who doesn't want to shove her face in a pillow literally made her a
01:09:11.300sexual deviant that a woman's desire for submission is going to come out in untoward ways if she
01:09:18.520pursues these unnatural positions, quote, unnatural positions of dominance elsewhere in her life.
01:09:24.800And so in that sense, when I watched this movie, I was like, I don't know if it's just because I'm
01:09:29.080like watching Ali Beth Stuckey and fucking reading Stephanie Koontz right now, but I actually feel
01:09:34.160like this fits very constantly with these broader themes in our culture right now of psychosexual
01:09:39.300submission, renegotiation of gender politics, and economic instability. Yeah, it also, I don't know,
01:09:46.580this is probably indicative of where my mind has been recently,
01:09:49.400but I've been thinking so much about the limits of communicating
01:09:52.900any sort of feminist theory via film or novel.
01:09:56.640Like, I have so many paranoias about my novel, I will just say,
01:10:00.320of like, well, is it this or is it this?
01:10:02.600Did I do this or did I unknowingly do this?
01:10:04.980And I think that that is a challenge because I find that review very interesting.
01:10:10.040I didn't think the movie was perfect, but I did find it to be really interesting.
01:10:13.000And I did like the way that they were navigating these power dynamics. And I thought that the male actor in particular was a phenomenal actor, and he really stood up to Nicole Kidman, who was obviously a phenomenal actress.
01:10:23.120But yeah, I think it also just shows there is no winning with women achieving power because the reality is that everyone wants to submit. Everyone finds power dynamics in sex to be, that is definitionally kink. And so it's like, it is this difficult thing where it's like, men want to submit and women, everyone likes it.
01:10:44.100Like, whether you're going to admit it or not, or, like, what level of the scale you're on, whether submitting is just, like, meow and, like, sipping some milk and, like, making it feel hot, or whether it's, like, putting a fucking ball gag in your mouth.
01:10:59.980And I think that that does show the limits, I think, of conversations that are gender-forward, because you inevitably are just, like, you're talking about, talking about power.
01:11:07.600I think that's a really interesting point, because I enjoyed the movie.
01:11:13.460And I enjoyed the push and pull of the power dynamic between them and this idea that despite his relative low stature compared to her, he actually had the power because he could have ruined her life.
01:11:28.660I'm raising this and bringing it into this conversation not to land on some side of a
01:11:35.300binary of like this, you know, is MasterCard a queer ally? Is this movie my friend? Not to say
01:11:41.300like this is feminist or this isn't feminist. Just to raise the observation that the broader themes
01:11:47.500and this interpretation of the film as being about women's innate desire for submission
01:11:52.300specifically, rather than feeling countercultural to me, that just felt cultural. I was like,
01:11:57.900yep that's yep and that's that's pretty much what everyone thinks anyway right like that's
01:12:02.120that is essentially what the popular fantasy about powerful women is that they secretly don't like it
01:12:08.380very much and would rather be women don't like power yeah crawling around on all fours and just
01:12:13.820to add to that like wedding cake style layer of like you could never really talk about anything
01:12:17.840in kink the person who is submitting is the one who has the power and so that's often a thing that
01:12:24.520we miss through like the layers of like what level of awareness you're at the big conversation as i
01:12:29.880understand it is like you are the one with the most power you are deciding the rules of this game and
01:12:34.860you have like the safe word or the whatever and the other person is tending to you and so again
01:12:40.440you're going down this like rabbit hole of submission and control and it's honestly as
01:12:45.560incoherent sometimes as charlie kirk and erica kirk talking about who is in submission is who
01:12:50.040who is in control because it's fucking turtles all the way down if there are any listeners
01:12:53.940who are i'm like not asking you to to out yourself but if you're if you know anything
01:13:00.340about like the literature around this topic i would be really interested in reading more because
01:13:04.420i think as someone that is not familiar or like involved in like a bds and m subculture
01:13:09.680my read of it was like hmm this is interesting so we've talked a lot about how this stuff is
01:13:16.140being discussed in media, both alt-right media and your kind of mainstream press. We've also
01:13:24.340talked a little bit about a film. I do think that it's important not to overstate the broader
01:13:29.060public's role or like acquiescence to any of this. And Caro, you shared an NBC poll with me
01:13:36.220that I think Allie Beth Stuckey would find quite surprising. Would you like to summarize this poll
01:14:08.660And they were asked to basically select
01:14:10.920the top three priorities they have out of a list of 12. And it was a range of like financial
01:14:16.360independence, getting married, having kids, mental stability. And much ado was made of the fact that
01:14:22.840Gen Z men who voted for Trump wanted more than anything to get married and have kids.
01:14:28.800And even Gen Z women who voted for Trump, that was not their top priority. Their top three
01:14:33.520priorities were financial independence along with Gen Z women and Gen Z men who voted for Harris.
01:14:38.900So a lot of Republicans cherry-picked the data and focused only on the Democrat. Gen Zers who didn't want kids, but Gen Z women as well who voted for Trump wanted financial independence first.
01:14:50.060So this was the NBC News decision desk poll. It surveyed 2,970 adults ages 18 to 29 nationwide. It's one survey, right? I'm not suggesting this is like gospel truth, but the results were interesting.
01:15:03.980and to your point, the question that we're talking about asked people which of the following is
01:15:11.460important to your personal definition of success. And each respondent was told to pick three
01:15:19.000out of 13 possible priorities. So when you looked at the data overall and you just segment by women
01:15:26.220and men. Both women and men ranked having a job or career you find filling number one.
01:15:34.120Both women and men ranked having enough money to do the things you want to do as number two.
01:15:41.100And finally, both women and men ranked achieving financial independence as number three. There was
01:15:48.480no gender split in the top three priorities. But to your point, it gets more interesting when you
01:15:55.380segment by who someone voted for in the 2024 election. And as a reminder, the question was,
01:16:00.320which of the following is important to your personal definition of success?
01:16:05.300Women and men who voted for Harris had very similar answers to the overall results. And
01:16:10.600when you segment for women who voted for Trump, number one is achieving financial independence.
01:16:15.240Number two is having a job or career you find fulfilling. And number three was owning your own
01:16:19.620home. Children ranked sixth. Marriage ranked ninth. And men who voted for Trump. Having children was
01:16:26.720number one. Achieving financial independence was number two. And having a job or career you find
01:16:31.820fulfilling was number three. Marriage was four. I will just say that the phrasing here is interesting
01:16:37.860to me. I actually wonder if things might have changed a little bit if the survey had phrased
01:16:41.780it not as having children, a process that technically involves almost no effort on the
01:16:47.160man's part and the nine months of physical labor on someone else's, but as being a parent or
01:16:53.200parenting. Because I think these are very different things. But regardless, this survey
01:17:01.340would indicate that a lot of this conservative chatter about what women really want and what
01:17:10.060people are prioritizing and, you know, this backslide in feminism, that it's not really
01:17:16.580true. At least it's not coming out in this particular survey. This would not support
01:17:21.380that conclusion. We have touched on this before, the idea that there is, I think, a little bit of
01:17:27.460a false alarm with young women, in particular the idea that they want to regress. I don't think we
01:17:31.960see any evidence of that. I think the fact that they didn't vote for a Democrat or that they're
01:17:36.780not okay with the vibe of the general idea of the word feminism does not mean that they are doing
01:17:42.400anything that negates feminist agenda it just makes me think so much about charlie kirk and
01:17:48.220you know the ezra klein of it all and everyone being like he was so successful these people are
01:17:52.540so successful in winning young adults and i just with each day that passes the more i'm like i see
01:17:59.020no evidence of this i see no evidence whatsoever that young people are actually buying into what
01:18:05.780they're watching like i don't see that with men either i think that all they are they are being
01:18:09.660told again and again and again and again, get married, have kids. All of these people are
01:18:14.480saying that across the board, and they are not. And so it's like, yeah, maybe they're disillusioned.
01:18:19.620Maybe they don't like each other. Maybe they have negative perceptions of one another,
01:18:22.560but like they are not doing the one thing that they have been told to do for the last 10 years.
01:18:27.800Yeah. And we hear a lot about tradition. Yeah. And the Kirk's vision for the family. We hear
01:18:32.900about it in Allie Beth's profile in The Atlantic. We hear about it in Harrison Butker's speech.
01:18:38.620And I think it's easy to accidentally cede that framing and basically operate from that position
01:18:45.120of like, well, who cares what tradition was? We don't give a fuck about tradition. We want
01:18:48.360something better than tradition. But that actually overstates the strength of that position because
01:18:53.720the very concept of tradition in this context was born of 19th century industrial capitalism.
01:19:00.360And this is where I think the work of Stephanie Kuntz and Melinda Cooper becomes absolutely
01:19:05.760critical. So Melinda Cooper expands an argument in her book Family Values that was raised in a
01:19:12.1002006 essay by Wendy Brown called American Nightmare, that neoliberal capitalism and
01:19:18.380conservatism's obsession with the nuclear family are actually completely inseparable from one
01:19:24.640another, that they must be thought of together if you want to understand the political reality
01:19:30.060of the United States today. So first things first, it feels important to point out that
01:19:35.040during this time period that we're talking about, the 19th century, the Victorian era of the family
01:19:40.680in the 1800s, motherhood was not sentimentalized the way that it is now. It was very functional
01:19:49.620and perfunctory. In The Way That We Never Were, Koontz writes about how the sentimentalization
01:19:55.540of family life and the idea of female nurturing or women as altruistic actors emerged historically
01:20:04.900alongside competitive individualism because women were seen as the necessary offset to the so-called
01:20:12.680natural individualism and self-interest of how men were supposed to be behaving in the market.
01:20:18.400So there was this real delineation between the public sphere and private life because basically
01:20:24.560you can't have everyone in a society acting like money-hungry sociopaths. Society needs some
01:20:30.920civilizing instinct. And so to accommodate all of these newfangled beliefs about rational
01:20:36.900self-interest and independent self-reliance, there basically needed to be some explanation
01:20:42.580for why people who cared about one another would often behave in irrational ways. And so really
01:20:49.640the human instinct for cooperation or care was gendered and made feminine. And in 18th century
01:20:58.520Europe and 19th century America, this created a real rearrangement of gender identity and
01:21:04.000stereotypes and created these stereotypes that we have now accepted as just like the way things are
01:21:10.300or like what's natural. And it was really the development of wage labor and this work that
01:21:16.460was paid for in cash outside the home that really changed the dynamics of household production.
01:21:22.920And it did not force this on women. It just suggested that they would be much happier in
01:21:27.560this arrangement of dependence because it was supposedly their true nature and that they would
01:21:32.060have a better chance of finding true love if they embraced this quote-unquote truth.
01:21:36.900What also interests me about this is that you really get into the different strains of
01:21:40.360Christianity with this. And when we think about the fact that we were a Puritan nation, like
01:21:45.2201600s, 1700s, we're very Puritan in nature. And so the whole idea of motherhood and childbearing
01:21:50.800was about pain. Like you were not supposed to experience pleasure. Pleasure was actually
01:21:55.840explicitly condemned. You look in the Bible, God says, I give you child labor. I made it painful
01:22:01.400because I am punishing you. And so I think that that's also something that I'm realizing the end
01:22:06.280of Puritanism as a driving force, or at least the competing of it with capitalism, which needs to
01:22:11.500make you want things and feel good. Because otherwise, why would you buy so much? Puritanism
01:22:15.840is about denying yourself earthly pleasures. And capitalism needs you to forego that restriction
01:30:23.960They're so fucking ungrateful for socialism. Boomers are so ungrateful to socialism. It's
01:30:30.660unbelievable. And all of this was paid for by everyone's taxes, but the primary beneficiaries
01:30:37.420were white Americans who abided by the heterosexual normative family standards of the day. Now, of
01:30:44.720course, in the 1960s, 1970s, and even 1980s, we see the emergence of activists who are pushing
01:30:52.900against this normativity. If you will please read this excerpt from Family Values.
01:31:00.980At various moments between the 1960s and 1980s, poverty activists, welfare militants, feminists,
01:31:09.040AIDS activists, and public interest lawyers articulated a novel politics of redistribution
01:31:14.180that delinked risk protection from the sexual division of labor and social insurance from
01:31:19.540sexual normativity. These movements were historically unique in that they continued
01:31:23.900to fight for greater wealth and income redistribution while refusing the normative
01:31:27.860constraints of the Fordist family wage. So they were basically just trying to
01:31:31.760break that connection that I just described of like, well, you get to benefit from all this
01:31:37.340public spending and like deployment of collective wealth if you follow these specific guidelines for
01:31:45.960your private life. And it was the questioning of sexual normativity of the family wage that
01:31:52.800Cooper argues was when the alliance between the neoliberals and the neoconservatives came into
01:31:58.780being in response to the dual problems of inflation and unemployment. And learning about
01:32:07.000this, particularly the inflation part, sort of broke my brain. So here's what happened.
01:32:11.760By the mid-1970s, America was importing one-third of its oil, so the thing that, like, creates all the energy in the country that, like, makes everything run, compared to just one-fifth in 1960.
01:32:25.180So this left the economy really vulnerable to the oil embargoes that were imposed by OPEC in 1973 and 1979, which, in retrospect, are thought to be the largest driver of the consumer price inflation of the 1970s.
01:32:38.100There was famously high inflation in the 1970s, like, runaway inflation.
01:32:42.940But there was still a fairly strong labor movement during this time, which managed to continue to push wages higher during this period, too.
01:32:52.020And so the result was that profits are being squeezed, and the lever that is usually pulled to suppress wages, unemployment, is not having the desired effect.
01:33:01.320I just want to make sure I understand this.
01:33:02.780So what you're saying is, like, the lever that is pulled during inflation is, like, get rid of workers.
01:33:06.640We don't want to have to pay for people's salaries.
01:33:08.400But if while you're getting rid of workers, you're also seeing the workers you still have increase their wages, then you're kind of, then you, the poor boss, is screwed because you can't find a way to stop paying these assholes money. Is that correct?
01:33:22.040Yeah, sort of. The relationship between unemployment and labor power is that when
01:33:27.060unemployment is high and people really desperately need jobs, they have less leverage in the labor
01:33:33.640market. They have to accept less. And there was unemployment in the 1970s, which typically
01:33:40.040would lead to wage suppression because it's like if you have 10 people and five jobs,
01:33:46.180it's just a race to the bottom. People will accept whatever you're willing to give them.
01:33:49.520But with a strong labor movement keeping wages high, you have high inflation and high wages despite unemployment, and that's unusual.
01:33:56.900So we also have to note that another consequence of inflation is that it makes your debt less expensive because your payment is going to remain fixed, but the money is losing value.
01:34:07.660So, like, this is why a 30-year mortgage that you took out 25 years ago is going to feel really cheap today because it's based on the value of money 25 years ago.
01:34:17.040So the net effect of this is that people who worked for wages and borrowed money, aka the working class, were actually in sort of a powerful position because of this monetary situation.
01:34:31.240Now, inflation is obviously bad. Prices raising is not good for these people, but they were also benefiting from some other factors here. And what's really true is that this was just a problem for capital owners who are now losing on both fronts.
01:34:45.560And the social welfare programs that had been established in the 1930s were seen as subsidizing the strikes that was keeping the labor movement strong and keeping wages high.
01:34:58.140This is when we meet Fed Chair Paul Volcker, who ultimately became a very infamous figure during this time.
01:35:05.220Have you ever heard of Volcker by chance?
01:35:07.860Okay, so Paul Volcker was the chairman of the Federal Reserve at the time, and he did something that came to be known as the Volcker Shock of 1979.
01:35:16.140He aggressively raised interest rates, and the idea was like, we are going to fucking crush inflation by jacking up interest rates.
01:35:25.160And Cooper says that basically this move, the Volcker Shock, must be understood as a concerted political and like monetary response to the rising militancy of the Fordist working class.
01:35:39.880And there was one social welfare program in particular that came under intense heat during this time.
01:35:46.280That was the Aid to Families with Dependent Children or AFDC.
01:35:50.820see. This program came to be associated with what was thought of as the general crisis
01:35:57.640of the American family. So I feel like it really cannot be overstated the extent to which inflation
01:36:03.560really fucked shit up and like changed the vibe that had been growing the activism and the pushing
01:36:10.480against this normativity. Prominent economists of this time came to see inflation as bad in a much
01:36:16.960bigger way than just rising prices. So, quote, in effect, she says, by the late 1970s, commentators
01:36:24.460from across the political spectrum agreed that inflation represented a threat to the moral
01:36:29.580fabric of American society. And so much of this analysis was, like, totally vibes-based,
01:36:36.200but it basically went like this, that by creating uncertainty about the future value of money,
01:36:42.200inflation is having the psychological effect on the population of shortening people's time
01:36:49.000horizons and inducing a desire for like speculative indulgence among the consumer
01:36:54.560public it's creating a spirit of hedonism and immorality and like sexual deviance and women
01:37:01.760who want jobs now and black people think they're people now and they're really pinning a lot of
01:37:06.940this on inflation. And so there were these two public choice economists from the Virginia school
01:37:13.700named James Buchanan and Richard Wagner, who described it like this in 1979.
01:37:20.780We observe a generalized erosion in public and private manners, increasingly liberalized
01:37:26.800attitudes towards sexual activities, a declining vitality of the Puritan work ethic, yep,
01:37:32.500Deterioration in product quality, explosion of the welfare rolls, widespread corruption in both the private and the governmental sector, and, finally, observed increases in the alienation of voters from the political process.
01:37:46.660Who can deny that inflation plays some role in reinforcing several of the observed behavior patterns?
01:37:53.500Inflation destroys expectations and creates uncertainty.
01:37:57.320It increases the sense of felt injustice and causes alienation.
01:38:02.500And so it was the Reagan era response to inflation that really propelled, quote, family values to the forefront of American politics over the next several decades.
01:38:17.360We are now seeing a resurgence of these ideas after 40-year inflation highs.
01:38:23.800And I'm like, huh, that's a really interesting parallel.
01:38:28.260So, have you heard of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program? No, you haven't, because it doesn't exist anymore. It was replaced with something called TAMF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
01:38:41.960Now, up until the 1960s, a bipartisan consensus on the basic premise of redistributive social welfare existed. People were, like, more or less in agreement about it. But then the 1970s happened. Critics on the right and left, interestingly, accused the AFDC of erratically undermining the American family and contributing to this problem of inflation with the idea being that, like, oh, it's creating all these perverse incentives because, like, women can just get money from the state.
01:39:11.140And like, now no one has an obligation or an incentive to work anymore. Nobody wants to work anymore. They just want to fucking sit at home with their kids. And like, obviously, a lot of this is very racialized, too. The welfare queen, as we know, comes into it in the 80s.
01:39:25.420But the thing is, like, the AFTC was less than 1% of the federal budget.
01:39:30.700It was a fucking puny program compared to Social Security.
01:39:34.320So the idea that it had anything to do with inflation was always bullshit.
01:39:38.580But a lot of laws had already been introduced at the state level to police women's sexual behavior
01:39:44.560and monitor the so-called morality of people who were receiving public benefits like these.
01:39:50.200So you had man-in-the-house rules, which allowed states to refuse benefits to women who lived with or were in a sexual relationship with a man because the idea was like, well, she's your problem. You need to be providing for her.
01:40:01.300There were suitable home laws, which allowed welfare caseworkers to deny aid to unmarried or immoral women, quote-unquote immoral.
01:40:10.260There were employable mother laws that designated Black women as indispensable workers outside the home and therefore excluded them from this domestic ideal of white motherhood.
01:40:44.560This was called The Negro Family, The Case for National Action, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
01:40:54.440He was an American politician, member of the Democratic Party.
01:40:57.360And he wrote this report, which basically theorized that you can trace what he characterized as the pathologies of Black Americans to the disintegration of the Black family.
01:41:10.060He wrote, quote, the rising rates of separation, divorce, unwedded childbearing, and female-headed families in which women had assumed an unnaturally dominant and overbearing role was leading to all sorts of social problems.
01:41:26.040And, of course, he, like, completely ignored structural factors like urban segregation.
01:41:30.660I was going to say, Black folks are like, or we could just have a house.
01:41:32.880Yeah, discrimination, educational disadvantages, red line.
01:41:36.480I mean, like, none of that. No, no, no, no, no.
01:41:38.160It was just like, well, you got too many women acting like men, and that's the problem.
01:41:41.820He singled out the AFDC in particular as symptomatic of this process of decline,
01:41:47.100that this was the reason that the Black family was disintegrating in this way.
01:41:51.440And some sociologists took things a step further.
01:41:53.520They argued that this program was actually the leading cause of familial breakdown.
01:41:58.400And some liberals and leftists were angry about where he was apportioning blame.
01:42:03.500They were pointing out that, like, this is completely ignoring, like, a whole host of factors.
01:42:07.240But as historian Marissa Chappell points out, many of them were actually in agreement about needing to restore the Black American family and the man's role within it as the correct path forward.
01:42:19.800And so, disappointingly, Cooper writes about how, like, everyone was actually pretty united in this benevolent sexism.
01:42:27.960This consensus reached across the spectrum of liberal and left participants in the welfare reform movement.
01:42:33.400Reformist civil rights leaders, such as Martin Luther King, were sympathetic to the findings of the Moynihan Report,
01:42:39.060while Black Muslim and Black nationalist leaders were in frank agreement with its suggestions of pathological matriarchy and male castration.
01:42:48.480Am I right? Who needs them? I would love for you to read this from Family Values.
01:42:55.560So interesting. By pointing to the incompatibility between Keynesian deficit spending and sexual
01:43:01.800liberation, Daniel Bell elucidated what he saw as implicit within the American economics of
01:43:07.080public finance, tellingly dubbed the economics of the, quote, public household by the economist
01:43:11.880Richard Musgrave. The calculus of post-war deficit spending was premised on the normative
01:43:16.780assumption of the family wage and therefore contained within limits that were simultaneously
01:43:21.120sexual and economic. If one could imagine an expansion of welfare state spending to include
01:43:26.620non-white men within the category of breadwinner, one could not question the normative premise of
01:43:31.600the male breadwinner family itself without completely defeating the arithmetic of the
01:43:35.560quote public household and thus generating runaway inflation. Damn, that's super interesting.
01:43:41.140Yeah, even it's a little heady, but it's basically like they started to see the family wage or the idea of just like the male breadwinner model as so fundamental to the functioning of the economy.
01:43:54.900Well, and it lends some like startling credence to Peter Thiel's whole like capitalism and democracy are not compatible with women's suffrage.
01:44:04.000It really highlights the extent to which that's actually not crazy daddy teal. That's like a lot of people believe that and are just using really fancy language to cloak that in something else.
01:44:14.920So it wasn't so much women's dependence on the state as it was their independence from individual men and their freedom from the obligations of private family life that ultimately turned this generation against the welfare state.
01:44:34.540And so feminism really challenged the legal and the institutional forms of this Fordist, you know, family wage idea by encouraging women to go seek an independent wage on par with men and basically taking marriage from this, like, long-term social obligation and turning it into a contract that anyone could dissolve at will at any time.
01:44:56.600And some political economists like this German named Wolfgang Streik said feminists who he envisioned as like uppity middle class rich girls were robbing real women who he viewed as working class of the economic security that came from being married to a man who was being paid a family wage.
01:45:17.800So they did the thing that they do with socialism, too, where they're like, it's only the interest of wealthy people.
01:45:23.200Only rich people care about this kind of stuff.
01:45:26.600It reminds me of this argument that you heard in The Atlantic when they were summarizing Stuckey's position of like, well, all this feminism has actually led not to liberation and freedom, but to pain and misery.
01:45:36.520It's like you are actually losing something because by having more rights, you are now giving up and breaking the very system that supposedly was working really well, where the men got to have the money and the arithmetic of the system worked.
01:45:53.540again cut away to someone at the argument being like capitalism is the most natural thing we have
01:46:00.840and then you cut away to someone like with a million little like leaks just like someone with
01:46:04.980like 500 hands like trying to hold all the leaks just being like no no it's super natural we just
01:46:10.400it's working really good just uh white guys you guys work and then black women we actually also
01:46:15.280need you to white women you stay at home no everybody stay where i want you to stop moving
01:46:18.400around it's like herding cats it's like wow this is really dependent on a really intricate system
01:46:25.600and even then it doesn't work i just thought it was so funny i think it's so incredible that this
01:46:31.080is the logical basis of the talking points that i now hear repeated ad nauseum by women who own
01:46:37.700multi-million dollar media companies and are interviewing their husbands about femininity
01:46:42.140on their podcasts i'm like shut the fuck up shut the fuck up so much of this was driven by a need
01:46:48.380to create a society in which free market capitalism functioned, which requires a fair
01:46:52.860bit of discipline and cooperation from individual actors, if you think about it. A lot of people
01:46:57.140got to agree to go along with this for all this work. And the economists and sociologists who
01:47:02.480were informing policy in this period saw the nuclear family unit as absolutely fucking critical
01:47:08.280to that goal because it was seen as something that kept people in line and made them behave
01:47:13.680responsibly. So anyone who is seen as undermining that in any way, aka Black people, gay people,
01:47:20.600women who wanted jobs, needed to be either carotid or sticked into submission.
01:48:59.200with the understanding, per the inflation,
01:49:02.040the deficit spending and the economic chaos of it all that people's private lives actually do
01:49:07.340affect the public like everyone's going to suffer from inflation if you people don't stop
01:49:11.600sucking and fucking and is uh is therefore the public's business and so if you were going to
01:49:17.920fuck up your life by doing something as stupid and reckless as trying to be a single childless
01:49:22.740woman or gay or black you were not going to get any fucking help from the state and in fact in
01:49:28.700some cases, they were going to actively interfere. I'm just imagining a senator being like, if you're
01:49:33.920going to go ahead and be gay or black or black and gay, I'm going to be really upset.
01:49:42.260Okay, dark turn. We've now reached the AIDS crisis when these attitudes about privately
01:49:48.680bearing risk infiltrated conversations about public health. So there was actually a fairly
01:49:54.460powerful movement for a national health insurance program that emerged in the early 1970s, but the
01:50:01.660inflation and financial crises really derailed that. And then attitudes about public social
01:50:07.080spending changed, as we have seen. They started to see welfare and social programs and spending as
01:50:12.540like, oh, this is fucking everything up, and it's interfering with the natural state of the family
01:50:17.380and the whatever. So there was an interest from the Reagan administration in returning quote-unquote
01:50:23.280health to the realm of personal and familial responsibility. Now, what did this mean?
01:50:30.320Well, part of the implication of this emphasis on, quote, home health care was that the burden
01:50:35.220of care was shifted from employed professionals in hospital settings to a feminized workforce
01:50:41.280of low-wage home health workers, or literally just like people's sisters and moms and daughters.
01:50:48.080So basically, like, oh, you all should all be caring for your own family members. That sounds like a you problem. Stop filing Medicaid claims.
01:50:56.380this represented a real structural return and again a sentimentalization of a household economy
01:51:04.320of service that was rigorously structured along lines of gender and race again recall that black
01:51:10.680women especially were deemed the 20th century version of like the essential workers who were
01:51:15.540expected to help make the nuclear family life possible for white people it was also particularly
01:51:21.720tragic when this crisis began unfolding that there was an affordability crisis happening and so many
01:51:28.080poor hiv patients were actually homeless so like the whole home care thing doesn't work if you
01:51:33.960don't even have a home to go back to i went down a little bit of a rabbit hole with act up in new
01:51:40.260york and i mean it was it's like very moving actually what these people managed to do and
01:51:46.280like the political strategy that they had to use to get people to pay attention to the fact that
01:51:52.780people were dying by the thousands of AIDS and nobody noticed or cared. So the housing committee
01:51:58.920of ACT UP like saw these connections between familial homophobia and people getting kicked
01:52:03.780out of their homes, homelessness and poverty, and then worked as an independent housing service
01:52:09.220provider. But all this meant, and this should sound familiar, like are we getting some deja vu
01:52:15.880here, cuts to Medicaid and placing emphasis on, like, you need to get some fucking private
01:52:20.640insurance. Insurance companies would give lower rates to people with, quote, lower risk behavior,
01:52:26.620aka heterosexual monogamy. So in that sense, you were getting denied public help, yes,
01:52:32.820but they were also making private help more expensive so that if you were engaging in
01:52:37.340behaviors that were deemed untoward, you were being economically penalized for that. And that
01:52:42.880was seen as like, oh, this is how the free market is going to like get rid of this behavior. So
01:52:46.580land of the free, home of the brave. And there was a distinction made between the sympathetic
01:52:52.100and the deserving sick and those whose quote lifestyle was to blame for their circumstances.
01:52:59.420And so they should therefore be like privately bearing the consequences of their actions.
01:53:03.300What you see during this period is that there were a lot of activist groups that were kind of
01:53:10.040catching the brunt of this and preventing people from falling through the cracks.
01:53:14.840By the 1980s, grassroots AIDS organizations were basically the only ones who were fighting
01:53:19.660this epidemic completely on their own, while often actively fighting attacks from the
01:53:24.600administration on their funding sources. So crazy.
01:53:27.860So in 1988, a senator named Jesse Helms convinced Congress to pass an amendment designed to prevent
01:53:36.140the federal government from funding any AIDS education or prevention resources that would
01:53:42.620quote, promote or encourage homosexual activities. By this point, tens of thousands, if not hundreds
01:53:50.120of thousands of people have already died from this disease. And they're like, we don't want
01:53:55.820no homosexual activities. I also just have to plug The Great Believer is Rebecca McKay. And
01:54:01.940In the Gloaming is my favorite short story, one of my favorite short stories of all time. And it's
01:54:06.540about a mother taking care of her son with AIDS. I don't want to say that it was exactly like this
01:54:11.460because in this story, I think that this family is relatively high income, or at least they give
01:54:16.140off that vibe. But when you were talking about family members basically having to take on
01:54:19.900the home care, In the Gloaming, G-L-O-A-M-I-N-G. It's a really, really incredible short story.
01:54:26.460Highly recommend you can read the PDF online. It looks like it's also a movie.
01:54:30.220It was turned into a movie. I don't... The movie's fine, but the short story is like...
01:54:35.740We both know how I feel about movies that are adapting famous literature.
01:54:45.220I'm like, is there a TV version of this that I can watch? Okay, so where does that take us?
01:54:51.040Reagan could not dismantle the welfare state as comprehensively as he would have liked to.
01:54:55.500That was Bill Clinton. The alliance between the social conservatives and the neoliberals would profoundly shape the direction of social policy over the following decades, culminating in Clinton's 1996 radical welfare reform, the, quote, personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act.
01:55:18.220Otherwise known as what happens when you try to campaign as a Republican and to pull over other Republicans.
01:55:23.580So its opening preamble explicitly defines what public morality means. Quote, marriage is the foundation of a successful society. Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children and promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child rearing and the well-being of children.
01:55:48.400Now, it cited various statistics pointed to correlations between out-of-wedlock births, rising rates of child poverty, poor health outcomes, child abuse, criminality, drug addiction.
01:56:02.280It did not bother to establish any clear causality there because they wouldn't have been able to.
01:56:08.720Even just one of those poorer health outcomes. At first, before I started this podcast, I would be like, that checks out. Like, we want people to all—no, it's because of healthcare. It's because people get healthcare when they're fucking married. Like, all of this stuff is so reverse-engineered to be like, well, you know, they're worse off. And it's like, well, are they worse off because their dad's taking them to their doctor's appointments? Or are they worse off because people can't afford to take their kid to a fucking doctor's appointment if they're not in a dual-income household? Jesus fucking Christ.
01:56:35.640Caroline, a 2015 study found that between 1979 and 2013, income inequality was more than four times as important as family structure in explaining the growth of poverty.
01:56:51.800It's the trans. It's the trans, folks.
01:56:54.200This is what I'm talking about when I say, like, this is a longstanding tradition. The Wall Street Journal article that's like, I don't know, the women's standards are just too high. We're not going to talk at all about the economic structure that we exist within. It's the same thing.
01:57:10.720They're looking at this social, this artificially composed, quote unquote, traditional nuclear, like this is the answer. This is how you get people to behave themselves and for things to go well. And if all these people would just behave, then the state, you wouldn't need universal health care because your fucking mommy would be taking care of you at home.
01:57:32.280and the idea was that it was not enough to protect the public coffers you know the taxpayer oh we
01:57:39.980don't want people on welfare by legally enforcing the economic duty of family support that you
01:57:44.960actually should seek to rehabilitate the family itself in a form that is imagined to be traditional
01:57:51.520tldr is that the imposition of this work fair not welfare work fair had devastating effects
01:57:57.740not only on poor people who often had to rely on other female relatives for child care while
01:58:03.640they worked because, like, they really probably couldn't afford child care, but also on service
01:58:08.440sector workers in general because now you have this state-subsidized supply of free or low-cost
01:58:15.360labor, like, flooding the workforce, which is inevitably going to lower conditions and wages
01:58:21.520for everyone else. Right. It makes me think about, like, obviously we're talking about this as it
01:58:26.740pertains to what's happening right now. And this big push that you see, you see people talking
01:58:31.080about, you know, you know, like I see we were talking the other day about how Candace Owens
01:58:34.720is telling people, if you want to do one thing for Charlie Kirk, take your kids out of the school
01:58:38.780system, homeschool the kids yourself. Like we need women to be taking care of kids. We need them to
01:58:42.740be not just in the house, but homeschooling kids and all that jazz. And it just makes me think
01:58:47.360about like the ripple effects of pulling women out of the workforce aren't just that people no
01:58:52.580longer have money. Because, of course, Republicans would suggest, well, just double the salaries of
01:58:56.640men. Like, we can figure out a way to get there. But when you think about the industries that
01:59:01.460are erected to just keep everything barely creeping forward and how so much of that
01:59:07.300would collapse if you pulled women out, just when you're talking about this and how difficult it is
01:59:11.900to try to hold things together on all ends, from the lawmakers to the industries to the actual
01:59:17.280specific families everyone is trying to like keep themselves afloat in this completely rickety
01:59:23.880system and it's so obviously not gonna work like it's so obviously slow motion falling apart
01:59:30.180maybe the craziest thing about this is that despite all of this despite all of this government effort
01:59:36.460to like get people to uh embrace this ideal the percentage of working mothers continued to rise
01:59:44.800through the 1990s, with the share of stay-at-home mothers hitting an all-time low of 23 percent in
01:59:51.3401999. And this is what Kuntz had to say about that. This led some observers to suggest that
02:00:00.800educated women were, quote, opting out of careers in order to stay home with their children.
02:00:06.020But in fact, most of the increase was driven by a growing number of mothers who could not
02:00:10.000fine jobs. For people overwhelmed by the difficulties of adjusting work and schools
02:00:14.880to the realities of working moms, it has been tempting to discern a return to tradition
02:00:19.680and hope the problems will go away. Thus, in 1991, we saw a flurry of media reports that the
02:00:26.300number of women in that workforce was headed down. More choose to stay home with children,
02:00:31.680proclaimed the headlines. More women opting for chance to watch their children grow. This is
02:00:36.440giving COVID headlines. The cause of all this commotion? The percentage of women aged 25 to
02:00:41.88034 who were employed dropped from 74 to 72.8% between January 1990 to January 1991. Incredible.
02:00:51.160However, there was an exactly equal decline in the percentage of men in the workforce
02:00:55.320during the same period. And for both sexes, the explanation was the same.
02:01:02.840The dip is the recession, explained Judy Waldrop.
02:07:03.660But like, one religious fundamentalist refused to bake a cake and it like reopened the entire debate about gay people's rights. And like, here we are. So like, just I guess what I'm saying is don't underestimate the importance of simply throwing sand in the gears just to slow shit down a little bit.
02:07:22.560And being fucking annoying, like, Karen out with me, if you will, take solace in the fact that, yes, this is all bullshit, but it's always been bullshit.
02:07:37.000They've always been pushing this bullshit, and people have always found the heart to push back.
02:07:41.740I think Ta-Nehisi Coates, I've been thinking a lot about what he said to Ezra Klein in that interview.
02:07:45.720I was going to bring this up! I was literally just going to say this.
02:07:49.220What he said was that he was talking to one of his friends, who is also a Black academic, and the Black academic was like, oh, this is the best whites we've ever had. Like, this is the best we've ever had. We've never had more white people who are interested in helping out the Black community.
02:08:07.020and Ta-Nehisi Goetz was very clear about like the reality of the current moment of like
02:08:12.120yeah this is backlash we're we're very used to reactionary political backlash and it's not
02:08:18.140nihilism it's just like an awareness of what it is listening to that and then doing this research
02:08:22.500I was like oh they fucking always been on this bullshit like they've always been trying to do
02:08:26.840something they've been doing this for a hundred plus years they've been doing this since the
02:08:30.500beginning of this country and like this just isn't new and like on some level I think hearing him be
02:08:36.520like, yeah, I mean, it's back. We just have to expect this. And like, that doesn't mean that
02:08:41.080it's over. That doesn't mean that you're not going to fight back. And it also doesn't mean that like
02:08:44.380you single-handedly need to change the world. Like, what is your equivalent of not baking the
02:08:49.200cake? Just do that. Do you know what's also so funny that I've been thinking about in these
02:08:53.460final few minutes is marriages have also never been happier. Like, there's actually like a lot
02:08:59.060of evidence about this, that we have far less divorce. There are, like, people are more thoughtful
02:09:04.260and litigious about getting into marriages but like I both anecdotally and through research for
02:09:09.560this podcast do often think about that that in the same way I feel very strongly about fighting
02:09:13.840for the idea of family I also feel very strongly about fighting for the idea of marriage I don't
02:09:18.640like I don't think that it has to exist in the notion of like being assigned to health care I
02:09:23.080didn't take my husband's last name but like I cannot tell you how many times I've spoken to
02:09:28.820an older person who is either talking about me or speaking to one of my friends in my presence who
02:09:34.100has said, the way that you guys engage in marriage is unbelievable to us. I have so many friends who
02:09:41.340have marriages that I genuinely admire, where their husbands genuinely respect them and where
02:09:46.880they genuinely have like an incredible partnership. And so I don't want to get too into like the never
02:09:52.740settle thing, but it's also like, dude, marriage is working. People who go into marriage right now
02:09:58.240are happier than they were 20, 30, 40 years ago.
02:10:01.820Like, it's not like marriage is unhappy.