00:00:48.880I think we started off when we were like, this is going to be an every other week show.
00:00:54.120And then we realized that we just had too much to say and didn't want to shut up.
00:00:57.680So we started doing it weekly and then we started a Patreon.
00:01:01.280So there's like tons of in-bed with the right for you guys to dig into if you like what we're doing.
00:01:07.480And if you do like what we're doing, I really hope you'll support us over on the Patreon, which allows us to keep doing this because it is taking up kind of a lot of our time.
00:01:50.600I wanted to do an episode on some depictions of lesbians in cultural media in the Trump era, something I've been digging into with one of my editors, and I thought it would make a good opportunity for us to have some, you know, paywalled content for some hot takes where I can be very spicy.
00:02:08.740Yeah. Then we're going to have an episode on the creeps, the Silicon Valley creeps, which is something I've been researching for a book that's coming out next year. And we're also talking about doing, speaking of lesbians, doing an episode that we will definitely hide behind the paywall. New head of CBS News and definite person who would not take this the right way, Bari Weiss.
00:03:40.340So even if you can't make it, hopefully you can hear it later.
00:03:43.620Yes, I think that this week would be when they go on sale.
00:03:46.520The week of, for people who are listening to this later, of October 13th, 2025.
00:03:52.600Yeah, and we should also mention maybe our guests, which is going to be the wonderful Sarah Marshall of You're Wrong About and Matt Bernstein of A Bit Fruity.
00:04:01.720And we're so excited to have both of them join us.0.94
00:04:04.520It's fairly new to us, but like those are two old hands at live shows and I think it'll be fun as shit.0.90
00:04:11.320Friends of the pod all hanging out and you can come join us.0.89
00:04:15.120All right. Well, with that, let's dive back into the mailbagging. So I mentioned this last time,
00:04:23.480there was a surfeit of brilliant questions. Some of them are a little hard to distill. So
00:04:28.020my apologies if I end up kind of posing a version of the question you asked. Part of that is just
00:04:33.900that I can't read some of the more involved and more interesting questions where there's sort of
00:04:38.880a lead up to them. I hope that still our answers will sort of be in the spirit of in which you
00:04:44.360asked the question, but I also grouped them according to some basic formula. The first is
00:04:51.740questions about media. So this is often about like things we've teased or alluded to on the show or
00:04:57.420things that people have watched, et cetera, et cetera. Second is questions about bodies. There
00:05:01.880were some really fascinating questions about bodies that we didn't get to last time. And the
00:05:06.520third is this podcast has, due to the political situation in the United States, become somewhat
00:05:13.560you as focused as of late. And there have been wonderful questions raised by our listeners sort
00:05:19.660of being like, hey, I'm seeing what you're doing. I'm now wanting to see what you can do with that,
00:05:26.020looking at the UK or looking at Japan or looking at somewhere else. And we do want to get to those
00:05:31.540too. Those, you know, please don't hold us to any of our answers. You know, we are in the end
00:05:37.080just a couple of Americans, but I think we can challenge our ideas and our parochialism a little
00:05:42.620bit by dealing with some of these questions in a more broadly international lens.
00:05:48.480I mean, at the risk of being a like aggressively simplistic American, one of the sort of upshots
00:05:56.040of globalization and of, you know, the aggressiveness of American hegemony abroad
00:06:02.380is that a lot of the patterns of authoritarian reaction and particularly like gender conservatism
00:06:10.180that have emerged in the U.S. have some like kind of decently recognizable analogs in other
00:06:16.320countries. I'm thinking of like the men's rights politics of South Korea, for instance, which are
00:06:20.700obviously locally informed, but do sort of rhyme in some important ways with what's happening in
00:06:27.080the U.S. So I think there's, you know, there's rooms for a sort of like comparative political
00:06:31.520investigation into these perverts, preachers and creeps, which are an international phenomenon.
00:06:37.980Yeah, and maybe we can close out the show
00:07:24.020So for listeners who are like, what are they talking about?
00:07:26.580Is this the road covering or what is this?
00:07:28.420Do you want to catch up our listeners on what TAR is, who it is about, and why we might be talking about it on this podcast?
00:07:37.160TAR is a quite epic, like three-hour feature film.
00:07:41.620I believe it came out in 2022 after the dust had settled on Me Too.
00:07:46.400And it was a film about a very highly accomplished, very self-serious and very revered classical music conductor named Lydia Tarr, who has sexual abuse allegations made against her.
00:08:05.860And who sort of descends into a kind of acute madness and a sense of paranoia as she, you know, proceeds to lose her marriage, her job, her home.
00:08:22.620And the film ends, I hope this isn't a spoiler, with her sort of like exiled to a very undesirable music marketplace.
00:08:31.920She's not in the United States or in Europe anymore.
00:08:35.740She's, I think, maybe in the Philippines.
00:08:37.420She's supposed to be in the Philippines, yeah.
00:08:38.980Playing a live score for a, like, sort of zombie-themed...
00:09:32.820Yeah, so I should mention that we had planned on doing an episode on this at some point, and so I rewatched it.
00:09:39.960I watched it in 2022 when it first came out.
00:09:42.460It's kind of catnip for me, given that I love classical music.
00:09:45.540People can check out my Wagner episodes for this podcast, which went on and on and on.
00:09:52.540Tarr is supposed to be the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, although I believe the orchestra performing in the movie is not, in fact, the Berlin Philharmonic, which is an orchestra that I've spent a lot of time listening to over the last 25 years.
00:10:05.880This fictional composer, Lydia Tarr, is trying to complete her Mahler cycle.
00:10:09.940And as Moira knows, I love Gustav Mahler.
00:10:14.540I find him too marshal, but I think that's a good fit for Lydia Tarr.
00:10:19.040You know, I for a while had this dream of like having a surprise guest for our 100th episode, which would be your wife, who's also a Mahler fan.
00:10:27.120And we would just harangue you for two and a half hours and like brainwash you live on the podcast into like liking Gustav Mahler.
00:10:34.540And so what I ended up doing was kind of writing about my complicated feelings about this film on my Substack, AdrienneDobb.substack.com.
00:11:12.220One, it is about the professional destruction of an artist or a professor or someone like that, where the general thrust of the story has to be that this person doesn't quite deserve it or doesn't quite deserve everything that comes to them, right?
00:11:26.640Often these are people who are difficult.
00:11:30.520These are people who don't get along well with others, but they don't deserve this.
00:11:34.320The classic case for this is Oleana, where reviews at the time when the David Mamet movie and the play first appeared in the early 90s, there would be all these reviews that say, well, it really looks at the issue from both sides.
00:11:49.260What it does is it presents a person who has quite a few faults and then sort of lays on a punishment that those faults in no way justify.
00:11:58.960We talked about Oleana on the Patreon, if anybody wants to go listen to our Oleana episode as part of our very fun Cinema of Cancellation series.
00:12:06.300Yeah. And then the second important aspect, I think, of the Cinema of Cancellation is that these films tend to be really selective in how they distribute ambiguity.
00:12:18.120That is to say, oh, we don't quite know what happened around Lydia Tarr and these young women.
00:12:24.540It's possible that she's a sexual predator, but maybe not, right?
00:12:28.060Meanwhile, the hounding that these figures tend to receive in these movies is rendered, and I mean, film has a sort of baseline facticity, right?
00:12:37.120Like, if the camera shows us something, we are going to assume that that is indeed what happens.
00:12:42.780We're going to have to do the new Luca Guadagnino movie, which is his Tar ripoff.0.75
00:12:56.240And Julia Roberts is wearing all the suits. And it's his sort of like anti, like lightly anti-Me Too film that is supposed to like distribute ambiguity with all these sort of moments where the viewers are supposed to be very challenged, right? It's like, oh, this is your assumption, but what if it's not like that?
00:13:16.640I will say what what these films tend to do, and I think this extends to literature because it's a problem of narrative more than a problem of a specific medium, is that they find so much more interest and so much more like narrative tension and and like compelling attraction in the perpetrators than they do in the victims.
00:13:38.200Right. It's like Milton going for Lucifer, like all over again. Right. The accusers are either like completely absent, like they are in Tar, or they are rendered in this sort of like cartoonish way in which they are either fully evil or fully stupid and like naive in a tragic way.
00:14:00.240That's about as complex as they get, right? You're so tragic that you don't realize you've done something horrible, you accuser. Like, you're so stupid. You're so naive. You're so easily manipulated. And there's not really the same sort of, like, depth of experience or, like, complexity of character allowed on the other side.0.98
00:14:19.660But I think I think that's, again, a problem of narrative. Right. Because the accusers story doesn't really have any twist in it. It's like she gets victimized. And then if you're doing like anything like verisimilitude, like her coming forward will just like lead to her being victimized again and again and again in various different ways. Right.
00:14:38.200There's no, like, turn of fate around, which you do have with the accused who starts off very high and then has a fall and might get vindicated, at least in the eyes of the audience, if you're taking their side narratively, right?
00:14:52.600There's more movement on the accused's side, is I guess what I'm trying to say.
00:14:56.380Yeah, and I mean, part of this is just, it's almost dunderheaded in its obviousness, but like, the kind of person who has a novel published, the kind of person who manages to get Cate Blanchett to star in their three-hour movie and gets that movie distributed, is going to identify more with the person who's up here and can get taken down a peg, and not with the person who's gotten ground up.
00:15:18.200Excuse me, Adrienne, male novelists are underrepresented and oppressed now.
00:15:28.320Actually, we should have Becca Rothfield of the Washington Post on because she's fascinating on this controversy about, like, supposedly they're not an email novelist anymore.
00:15:42.380It's like, do you not know, like, there's Jeffrey Eugenides, there's Jonathan Franzen, there's, like, you know, and then there's the guy who teaches at Brooklyn College, who I heard those unflattering rumors about.
00:19:45.060what is everyone mad at you for Woody Allen what is everyone mad at you for it's not like making
00:19:51.320art out of like your relationship to Mia Farrow it's something far darker than that and like
00:19:57.540those questions you're raising like may even be modestly interesting but like it's it feels like0.80
00:20:04.020an evasion in the moment right yeah it's a it's a dodge right I mean the other thing about TAR's
00:20:11.120ambiguity is that it allows the filmmakers to possibly not have to take responsibility for
00:20:19.040the politics of their movie. If they put in enough ambiguity under the guise of like artistic
00:20:24.120complexity, right, then they have sort of an alibi for the message that they actually
00:20:28.780want most intensely to send. I think the fact that the main character in that movie was a woman
00:20:36.020did a lot to make it seem more ambivalent than its politics perhaps actually were.
00:20:42.660I actually heard a rumor that the role was written for a man
00:20:45.440and that Cate Blanchett went out of her way to make her interest in the role known.
00:20:50.480I don't know if that's a true rumor or not,
00:20:51.880but it was one that sort of resonated with my own reading of the film.
00:20:56.340It's like, oh, you wanted to make a movie about me too.
00:20:59.480And the fact that you're siding with the powerful against the oppressed is more obvious when you depict that in the arrangement of identities and positions in relation to violence that it actually manifests itself in like 99% of the time, which is, you know, a male perpetrator and a female target.
00:21:22.780And having Lydia Tarr be a woman sort of defangs her a little bit, although I do think Blanchett plays her, like, to evoke terror, you know.
00:21:33.080But it adds, I think, to both the complexity and ambiguity of the story and also of, like, the plausible deniability of the movie.0.78
00:22:13.520But at the same time, right, it feels like for a particular person, let's call them idiots, for a particular kind of person, this feels like an interesting twist or an interesting kind of like, oh, what now?0.97
00:22:28.240It's like, what do you mean what now?0.99
00:22:32.600As a feminist writing in public, often I will be writing or commenting on a situation where women are being victimized as women, right?
00:22:42.240Usually by men or by, you know, proxies of men like the state. And I'll get somebody going. It's like, well, haven't you ever heard of Margaret Thatcher? It's like, you know, women's capacity for evil, for wrongdoing, for conservatism is seen as to sort of like undercut their claims to victimization or their claims to like have their grievances redressed.
00:23:07.400And to me, I'm always like, no, women's capacity for the full spectrum of humanity is in fact why they are entitled to the same rights and dignity as men or as anybody else.
00:23:18.880You don't have to be a morally perfect person along with, you know, every other member of your sex for the violence that is performed against you because of your sex to be wrong, right?
00:23:30.260Like you don't need to ascend to this greater moral plane, but the sort of like evil woman gotcha presumes that women's wrongdoing negates all of women's claims of victimization, which is just not how culpability works.0.57
00:23:44.540Well, in reverse, it sort of says like, well, you're not standing up for this particular woman, right?
00:23:48.320Which is like kind of what critics of quote unquote identity politics always accuse feminists of doing, right?0.97
00:23:54.380Like victimology, you're automatically a victim because you're a woman.1.00
00:23:57.860And it's like, well, no, women can be complicit in patriarchy, which does end up victimizing them in some way.0.98
00:24:04.120But like, you can get rich as a woman of patriarchy.
00:25:44.400It's like it's remembered as surprising because what it actually gives to the audience is like the relief of a return to like the hegemonic status quo auntie.
00:26:51.660I mean, sometimes you get people who really don't seem to be able to tell the difference or who don't think it seems to matter, which is really quite striking.
00:26:58.460Tar eventually gets around to this question, like, should we be separating the artist from the art, right?
00:27:04.860And I have to say, like, to me as a literature professor, it's always such a silly kind of question.
00:27:10.500Because Me Too, or what then later got called cancel culture, was not so much about, like, can we separate the artist from the art?
00:27:18.680The question, as I understood it, was, do I want to help this person buy a beach house?
00:27:24.200Do I need to help Wizard Lady buy a second Scottish castle?
00:27:28.520Like, I can still chuckle at a Louis C.K. joke.
00:27:31.420I will not pay to see Louis C.K. because I don't want to help that guy get more power over young female comics, right?0.86
00:27:41.260And then, like, and Tarr keeps being brought up, like, well, Bach had fucked up gender policies.
00:27:45.400Like, okay, like, 17th century Bach is probably going to get a pass here, my friend.
00:27:49.880Also, like, I'm not sure he's dining out on me, like, playing his partitas, right?
00:27:54.440Right. Well, there's a couple of things you've raised here, right?
00:27:57.740Like the Bach example in Tar is somebody who cannot be held accountable because he is dead, right?
00:28:04.740He is also somebody who is no longer implicated materially in the consumption of his art, once again, because he is dead, right?
00:28:11.220The structures in which we encounter this work is disentanglable from support for the artist because of their, you know, material investments, because of their royalties, because they get a check for our consumption of this work.
00:28:25.620I will say the more interesting questions to me are questions of the ways that the assumptions and values that are inhabited in art influence the way we think and the way that the assumptions and values and aspirations of the people who make those arts sort of get sent to us via their work.
00:28:49.240I don't think that's a straightforward process.
00:28:51.200I don't think it's like a monkey see, monkey do kind of aping situation.
00:28:54.680but I also don't think it's an irrelevant question to ask about what we do when we're consuming0.98
00:29:00.340movie after movie after movie with fucking Louis C.K. in it.0.99
00:29:05.320You know, I'm thinking of like Lauren Stein, who resigned as editor for the Paris Review after0.50
00:29:08.760some like pretty egregious sexual assault allegations. You know, he championed a lot
00:29:13.080of fiction, not his own, but other writers in which there was like sexual violence, right?
00:30:51.640I keep thinking back to that line from Mark Twain's The Innocence Abroad.
00:30:56.420I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace as I did yesterday when I learned that Michelangelo was dead.
00:31:06.900May we all feel that way one day, yeah.
00:32:10.860But he's like, I have been passing for a long time.
00:32:14.540And I don't always tell people that I'm trans, but when I do come out, they are often like shocked and kind of angry that they couldn't tell.
00:32:24.840And then they start retroactively going through things about my body or about my behavior or about like their interactions with me that should have tipped them off.
00:32:34.160I think he was asking, if I'm remembering this question correctly, I hope I'm not butchering it.
00:32:38.100He was asking like, what's up with that? Like, what's the deal with that discomfort around these categories and around like detection? And Adrian, you and I have talked a lot about like transvestigators who are these transphobic people on the Internet who now will take photos of like celebrities or people who've pissed them off on the Internet or like random nobodies and try to scan these images of their bodies, like seeking out.
00:33:08.100physical like signs or like little betrayals of of transgender status they'll be like look at
00:33:15.040i don't know dakota johnson she has an adam's apple that's an adam's apple i swear to god
00:33:19.980and it's just so um there's like an almost hysteria in it not to use the the h word but
00:33:26.540there's a there's a frenzy of this like paranoid surveillance that i think speaks to how destabilizing
00:34:16.880you're going to get just about anything, right?0.65
00:34:19.880I mean, like, two cisgender people of the same sex, right,0.73
00:34:23.800can have bodies that are different enough from each other,
00:34:27.920including in their secondary sexual characteristics, right?0.98
00:34:30.280Like that they don't look more like each other than one of them would look like a member of the opposite sex, right?
00:34:36.700It's just hard to know, but that hard to know-ness creates a lot of anxiety, I think, when people are confronted with it because we have so built our conceptions of human life and how to treat one another around the sort of like binarization of people, right, and categorize people.0.99
00:35:03.040Like, well, which box do I put you in? Because otherwise I don't know how to treat you.
00:35:07.820Although our questioner, of course, is pointing something out something else. It's not that they're ambiguous. It's that people sort of are exposed to upset that they were unable to place him in the box that they wanted to place him in, which evidently was like man, but man with an asterisk or something like that.
00:35:25.060Yeah, like either like failed woman or diet man or whatever the transphobic conception of trans men is this week.
00:35:31.660There's a sense that they've been like duped or deceived, right?
00:35:35.160And now that there's been this like revelation, it's like the magician pulling the rabbit out of the hat and you're like supposed to try and figure out how he did it on the car ride home.
00:35:45.300Like, I think that deception is a really important one.
00:35:47.900And for our younger listeners, I thought I'd mention the fact that, like, this is a really old trope.1.00
00:35:53.720And part of why I find it fascinating, darkly fascinating, how it sort of is coming back up with regards to trans people is that this was a lot of stuff around gay panic in the 80s and 90s.
00:36:06.240Like, oh, this man tricked this other man into a sexual encounter.0.60
00:36:10.760Gay people, like there was a moment when gay men specifically were like0.99
00:36:14.300sought to be tricking straight men constantly.0.99
00:36:21.720That sounds, I'm trying to think of a less casual word than cope,
00:36:26.560but that sounds like, it sounds like a post hoc rationalization.1.00
00:36:31.340Of a dude sucking your dick and you kind of like, yeah, yeah, it really does.1.00
00:36:36.180And then I think the trope of the tricky gay man sort of disappeared.0.99
00:36:39.560And I also think that it's really interesting that we got this question from a trans man because I think that like part of why trans investigators tend to fixate, as you say, on female celebrities and tend to leave kind of men out of it.
00:36:53.860I mean, TERFs too try to largely ignore trans men because they somehow tell themselves that trans women are for them easier to spot.
00:37:04.880the quote-unquote defects they think they can find in women, right?
00:37:10.660Which is partly because they have this pornographic gaze
00:37:13.700and they mostly stare at women, right?
00:38:52.740And so basically, it's them who are, like, sort of never grow up.
00:38:55.860Also, like, if you think about something like Hitchcock's film Rope, like, Hitchcock's0.99
00:38:59.560gay character are often like under the thumb of women and are sort of like immature. Whereas like0.99
00:39:05.120the lesbian schoolmarm who like introduces you to the temptations of the lesbian flesh.1.00
00:39:11.100Madame Trunchbull in Matilda. Yeah. It is a children's movie with like a dyke leather daddy1.00
00:39:18.900at the center of it. Yeah. Very formative film for a lot of women of my generation. But you know,1.00
00:39:24.820No, it is like the lesbian is evil and adult.1.00
00:39:29.280And then I understand you like the effeminate gay men is sort of childlike.0.99
00:39:32.500It's a reversal of that position for like from between the transmasculine and the transfeminine.1.00
00:39:37.300Well, and then it gets switched again in the 80s where I think that the killer lesbian of the 80s and 90s is a killer lesbian because you could also fuck straight men and then kill them with an ice pick.0.99
00:39:48.540But gay men are seen because of the sort of stuff like gay panic defenses as deceivers, essentially.0.98
00:39:55.660So I think that like the question of deceptions of changes sides in the 80s, and now it seems to have changed sides again in the sense that like probably very few people would try and invoke kind of a, you know, this person tricked me into homosexual acts kind of stuff in front of a judge.1.00
00:40:12.600But, like, you can invoke, as you say, the manipulative, sneaky trans woman in just about any newspaper in the country or the world and someone will print your fucking shit.0.99
00:40:24.040And people will bring that up in criminal courts after murdering or assaulting trans women.1.00
00:40:29.560They'll be like, well, you know, I was justified in doing that because she deceived me about her trans status and therefore I get to enact all this violence.0.99
00:40:36.840It becomes like the claim to victimization by way of being deceived can become like a license for people to do kinds of crazy shit to trans people.0.86
00:40:46.800Yeah, and we should say, on the one hand, like we were saying, like, yeah, this sort of switches sides from time to time.0.79
00:40:51.000But as gender scholars, we should say it is a trope of femininity that is switching sides here, right?
00:40:55.740The person who is deceptive and therefore not as out of power as they seem to be, that is the way people have feminized other people in order to do violence to them, right?
00:41:05.900Right. It's like you're you're pretending to vulnerability. I mean, this was a big critique of Me Too, right? Like these women are just pretending to be helpless and vulnerable and victimized when actually what they want is sadistic power over these men or they are not copping to their ability to, in fact, just say no to sexual harassment and are sort of underplaying their own power.
00:41:28.940Yeah, I mean, in a way, Gwyneth Paltrow was into it when she watched Harvey Weinstein ejaculate into a houseplant.0.94
00:41:37.680Oh, Jesus Christ. I had forgotten about the houseplant.0.94
00:41:40.520That is definitely a very recognizable kink to have that happen to you. Jesus Christ.
00:41:44.560Well, I mean, that is also the, this is what defense attorneys tell men accused of sexual assault all the time.
00:41:51.420Like, don't say it didn't happen. Say it was consensual, right?
00:41:55.440Well, because that's it's way easier to prove in court or way easier to assert in court that this woman was actually, you know, knowing and participating and willing and is now just conniving and either like being irresponsible or being evil.0.99
00:42:09.820And that is, as you say, a trope of femininity, right? Deception, concealment, pretended vulnerability that allows people to sort of exclude their actual vulnerability.
00:42:19.720And I think you do see this with the treatment of trans women all the time.
00:42:24.380I think we just kind of rambled at this poor man.
00:42:27.380I don't think we actually answered what's going on with him.
00:42:31.080I'm sorry that he's having these interactions.
00:42:33.620It sounds like also just kind of painful.
00:42:37.380Well, I think he didn't sound so bothered.
00:42:39.520He seemed to think it was strange, which I agree with.0.99
00:42:42.100The basic situation seemed to be that people that were totally chill about him mentioning that he's trans or figuring it out after some time,0.99
00:42:50.080He then had to go back and sort of re-evaluate interactions or encounters or the way he bodily presents.
00:42:57.720And I have to say, as a gay man who is fairly straight presenting at some times, I did in the 90s and early aughts have people who were like, oh, I never would have known from, you know, you're this and this and that.
00:43:07.820I'm like, yeah, man, I don't know what to tell you.
00:44:38.200There's a kind of a Silicon Valley question here.
00:44:40.680There's a post-Jobs kind of legal landscape question here.
00:44:43.640But there is also, I think, a question here about hormones, right, about what it says about women's agency or the public conception of their agency, that there is this insistence that like, hey, ladies, don't you maybe want to keep track of this in case you go freaking crazy on us or whatever, right?
00:44:58.500Yeah, it's like, is this the one week of the month in which you are capable of reason?
00:45:02.860Because I don't think it is, and therefore I'm just going to disregard everything you have to say.
00:45:06.620Yeah. I think about this a lot with regard to tech, like birth control misinformation is something I've really wanted to do an episode on. And we will. For a long time. It's in our planning doc. So it should be coming. I just have to get my shit together. But it's something that's like only kind of beginning to be studied and researched as how birth control disinformation, hormonal birth control disinformation in particular, is spreading among women of childbearing age on social media.
00:45:33.140I do think that this phenomenon, the cycle tracking phenomenon, is closely related to that.
00:45:39.480And part of what I think is happening, not just in this subject in particular, but sort of in our culture more broadly, is that we have a ton of data about ourselves available to us now that does not necessarily lead to positive conclusions about ourselves or narratives about ourselves,
00:45:59.100which we are retrofitting into narratives about ourselves
00:46:01.880or using to try and make it reveal things
00:46:05.220that it maybe doesn't actually justify.
00:46:07.920So I think about this a lot with like 23andMe,
00:46:10.360like, okay, what you get when you spit into a tube at 23andMe,
00:46:15.040or what I got when I did this a few years ago,
00:46:18.000was the information that everybody else whose DNA
00:46:20.960or many of the people whose DNA looked like mine
00:46:25.740that their ancestors were from Ireland, right?
00:46:29.100And that's not information I can actually do a lot with.
00:46:33.520But the impulse is to then sort of reverse engineer a story about who you are, about who your family is, about where you come from, about what are the moral lessons of those people's struggles and triumphs, right?
00:46:47.840That then you can sort of use to shape your own conception of yourself and how you go forward.
00:46:52.680And I think the cycle tracking data encourages something like that too, right? It gets you a lot of like, okay, well, on 40% of the third week of your cycle, you reported feeling a little bit tired, right? Or on 50% of the days when we're pretty sure you were ovulating, you reported having more energy, you know?
00:47:18.400First of all, cycle tracking is very imprecise. The only data you're putting in that comes from
00:47:25.280your body, unless you're really measuring your vaginal temperature and viscosity every single
00:47:30.420day, is when your period starts, right? Maybe if you have cramps. And from that data, people have
00:47:38.180tried to extrapolate things like when they're ovulating exactly that are actually not as
00:47:45.040reliably precise right and this is like a classic tale of people who are using the rhythm method
00:47:50.780both to like conceive and to not conceive is that like uh is actually like not that reliable
00:47:56.480but when we have all this data that we're putting into these cycle tracking apps you know apps are
00:48:03.340very reliable it's a it's a binary code of zeros and ones that that wants to make definite
00:48:08.640conclusions, right? And so it will take the information you're logging in and giving to it
00:48:16.300and create a causal narrative that is not necessarily like actually scientifically
00:48:21.380supported by the information that it has, right? And I think that this kind of story that data can
00:48:29.140tell us is always most convincing or most appealing when it feeds into some things we
00:48:34.320kind of already believe, right? Like the idea that hormones are determinative of women's mental and
00:48:41.980emotional states in ways that override their capacity for reason or the validity of their0.53
00:48:50.080feelings is both a very old story and also one that's like very, you know, convenient for a lot
00:48:56.560of boyfriends and husbands who want to say, it's not that I've been neglecting you and not doing
00:49:01.120the dishes and like you know not paying you back for that money i owe you it's that you know you're
00:49:07.400always a little crazier in your luteal phase baby you know it's just like is it that time of the0.97
00:49:11.760month are you on the fucking rag yeah repackaged to have this gleam of quantifiable like empirical1.00
00:49:22.140authenticity that it doesn't actually have and then it also becomes a way that women0.99
00:49:28.200sort of self-infantilize it's also like an easy way out which is something that you see1.00
00:49:33.480i think a lot of people reaching for and that women have already like a bunch of sexist scripts
00:49:39.380for in the first place like i don't want to be responsible for the way the world is falling
00:49:43.240apart so i'm going to say i'm just a girl i am pmsing i can't be held responsible for my own
00:49:49.480actions right it's both a way to keep you down and stop women from ascending to you know their
00:49:55.960rightful place as equal adults in society.0.77
00:49:58.460And it's also a way for women to sort of escape that if it seems scary or hard and0.99
00:50:21.820I think I'm just like this on my period is reaching to biology to excuse something that's functionally personal responsibility. Right. Like if you were like, oh, you know, testosterone peaks in the morning. So I get to be an asshole to people in the morning. Like I think we would rightfully identify that as bullshit. Like I think I think women saying that they're victims of their hormones is is bad.
00:50:44.080Yeah, I think it's bad. I think it's not really true for most people. If you really can't control yourself because your PMS is so bad, like go to a doctor, like consider the pill because it works for that, right? Like that's pathological. That is not a healthy menstrual cycle because women are actually rational beings capable of self-respect and self-control. And that's just true. It's true every week of the month.
00:51:12.580I think if you give an inch on this shit, people will take a mile.0.99
00:51:59.760Like, I will say these apps do generally sell your data.
00:52:03.860It's in most of their terms and conditions that, like, they're allowed to.
00:52:08.520They will hand it over to law enforcement. For the most part, like if you are, say, trying to conceal an illegal abortion, that's not going to be how you get caught. You're going to get caught when your boyfriend tells his mom who tells the cops. You know what I mean? But it's a post hoc way for them to build a case against you.
00:52:24.180Well, I was going to say, the big worry, I think, aren't yet the cops. The worry is, I think you're right, the boyfriend in the sense that could this data be requested in a documents request? If you live in a blue state for some kind of divorce proceeding or for some kind of custody hearing, could it be used in a red state such as Texas to basically create the impression that you may have gotten an illegal abortion or something like that?
00:52:48.120It's not about giving Elon Musk's tools over you.0.81
00:52:51.180It gives the little Elons everywhere tools over you in your everyday lives.0.88
00:52:55.960I mean, I think the more likely scenario, even then like this stuff being subpoenaed as part of like the discovery of some lawsuit, is that your shitty abusive boyfriend just like looks at your phone when you're in the bathroom or something and is like, OK, what are the days where I can like be most likely to entrap her with a pregnancy?1.00
00:53:15.820Or when do I get to do this shitty thing that I've really been wanting to do that I know is going to upset her, but I want to be able to, like, blame it on her period that she's mad, you know?0.77
00:53:27.460I think that kind of, like, low-level manipulation becomes a lot more likely when people are, like, talking this way about their cycles as, like, determinative of their behavior.
00:53:38.000And also when this data is just, like, lying around on a little computer in everybody's pocket.
00:54:39.820So I thought we could do a lightning round.
00:54:42.320Do you just want to go back and forth and like name books that we think someone should do?
00:54:46.180I mean, I think I'm doing what this person is doing, right?
00:54:49.680I don't think that they're undereducated.1.00
00:54:51.420I think that this is exactly how people get feminist educations, is you do a self-directed syllabus.1.00
00:54:56.740And maybe I shouldn't discourage people from taking my actual class.1.00
00:54:59.580But I didn't get this education formally when I was in college.
00:55:04.260I got it through recommendations from friends.
00:55:07.660I got it through, like, self-motivated interests.
00:55:10.260I've gotten it through, like, signing up for some other classes while I've, like, not been, like, enrolled as a student.
00:55:18.820I think this sounds like a very typical, like, feminist autodidacticism that I think is pretty common.
00:55:26.460Yeah, I mean, it's identical, really, with the history of, you know, at least the second wave of feminism, right?
00:55:32.120Like, in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, a lot of feminist reading groups sprang up that were doing exactly this.
00:55:36.700Like these were people who couldn't take these kind of classes because they didn't exist yet.
00:55:40.820And they together sort of tried to arrive at what a canon was across which they could communicate and debate in order to push this project forward, right?
00:55:49.040Yeah, you know, there was a lot of people just being like, OK, let's read together or let's write something together.
00:56:19.040We read a lot of Nancy Fraser, who's a cool Marxist feminist, who wound up reading some bell hooks that way.
00:56:24.900And then, you know, other like things that are kind of like less honorable, like a woman I was trying to date was also seeing a man and like he and I wound up because she said she wanted to read The Second Sex.
00:56:40.120And so then he and I both wound up reading all of that was how I read The Second Sex.
00:56:44.420To impress a woman and to like try and compete with this other guy.
00:56:48.440I read it faster and I think I was a little smarter about it.
00:56:52.120But that is like how I finally got around to reading. Yeah, that doorstop of a fundamental feminist text. And now I'm not dating her anymore. But I do refer back to that reading all the time. And then I also like I took one gender studies course in undergrad with a really cool feminist sociologist, actually, who I still admire named Allison McKim.1.00
00:57:11.040she studies like i think especially like addiction treatment and the way that those wind up becoming1.00
00:57:15.260very gendered spaces which is i think fascinating stuff but she was like listen nobody reads the1.00
00:57:21.780dominance feminists anymore um they're not really relevant to what's happening in the academy right1.00
00:57:26.200now you can just skip it it's like it's really problematic kind of demonized stuff and she's
00:57:32.500right right it's like the the academy has completely moved on but i was like well wait
00:59:31.360I mean, like the story I always tell is that like my second year there, I took a class on German idealism and the professor had written down that he would like us to prepare the critique of pure reason for the first class.
00:59:48.480Well, no, he then supplied us a week beforehand.
00:59:51.000I was like, I selected these 50 pages that I think you should have a look at.
00:59:54.580Don't worry if you don't have a full grasp of it yet, but this is what I would like you to look at and at least understand how it's organized.
01:00:00.740It's kind of how I would teach that book now as well.
01:00:03.220Just kind of do a kind of synoptic reading almost of the table of contents
01:00:06.760so you understand how the thing is going to work.
01:00:08.940Well, several of us had already finished the book.
01:00:28.540I should have known that you were probably, like, taking the anxiety medications and, like, trying to read the first critiques throughout this entire summer, gobbling up Ritalin and, like, Xanax like it's peanuts.
01:00:39.500Yeah, at Bard, you ignore what you were assigned, drop acid, and read Dicte again instead.
01:00:47.200Like, that's what I did for, like, three years.
01:00:57.740And well, honestly, it made everything else a lot easier. But at the same time, it also, these are French feminists who are psychoanalytic. And so basically, they're always contending with a, well, with a tradition that is what our good friends at other pods might say notwithstanding, kind of contaminated by sexist thinking, right?1.00
01:01:19.180And they're kind of anti-political, right? They're not like writing alongside a political movement for women's liberation, like a lot of the second wave feminists in the United States, where they were like opposed to like movements for abortion rights in France. And we're sort of like, no, this is this is not what we're doing. It's not about improving material conditions. It's about sort of conceptualizing the female.
01:01:40.000Yeah, which at the same time, like, it really, I think it prepared me well for sort of watching in other fields where the gendered implications of the methodological frame may not be as obvious.
01:01:51.440You mentioned sociology or historians, it can be kind of hard.
01:01:54.400It's like, why is this person struggling so hard against this particular methodological intervention?
01:01:58.740It's like, once you've seen it sort of work with Freud, you're like, oh, okay.
01:02:02.440Like, there's a real worry here about the kind of philogocentrism of this particular method.
01:02:08.120you're trying to offset that in some way
01:03:29.740Because I think part of what I hope is a feminist method to my podcast is that like, we really do want you guys like talking back to us. It's definitely not us coming down from the mountain. I aspire to learn from you guys too, which I do like every single time I interact with our listeners. So yeah, so just your reading list. I want to know what you guys are into and what you've been really excited by in this field.
01:03:52.880Awesome. Well, in closing, let's maybe briefly mention a few questions, sort of honorable mentions that we can't get to, but that we want to think more about.
01:04:04.280There was one question from a listener from New Zealand who lives outside of New Zealand now, but it was a fascinating question.
01:04:09.500And it went deep and it really got me thinking about like, we tend to be as more, I think, indicated earlier, interested in right wing ideas about gender and sexuality that have a recognizable providence in the cultures and traditions that we're familiar with.
01:04:24.160But I think it's worth kind of thinking about gender conservatism that has different sources and that does not exist as a mere kind of carbon copy or export or whatever from the United States.
01:04:36.160And so our promise to you, dear listeners, is that we're going to do more on that.
01:04:41.440That person's comments about right-wing politicians in New Zealand sort of weaponizing resentment against the increased visibility of Maori culture really made me think about anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. differently and like the role of like the indigenous ancestry and a lot of our like Latino immigrants in like cultivating like sometimes quite like murderous rage against them.