00:01:10.920We're going to have a really good time because we're going to be talking about something a little like what we're talking about today, which just drove me so fucking nuts, Adrian.
00:01:23.980Like I had, as I think I was supposed to, a little bit of a meltdown and we weren't totally sure what we were going to do for this week's episode.
00:01:34.340And then, whoops, I wrote 11 pages in this document.
00:01:38.180So you're coming with me on this sick, sad journey.
00:01:41.400Yeah, when this headline dropped, my first thought was like, is this bait?
00:01:45.200Are they just baiting Moira at this point?
00:01:47.500And when we told our producer, Margaret Izumi, what we were recording on, he immediately clocked what this was going to be about too.
00:01:53.560She was like, oh, yeah, that article or that podcast episode, I guess.0.96
00:01:56.640It was meant for people like us to respond to and fuck it, here we go, right?1.00
00:02:03.820This is me speaking to Helen Andrews, who I am going to be talking about in like ad hominem terms that undermine my own professionalism.1.00
00:02:13.460Just to give you guys a little trigger warning.
00:02:15.660Because today we are talking about the reality that I know has been bothering all of us for a long time.1.00
00:02:22.600the fact that women have ruined the world.1.00
00:07:51.740He like, he was the worst guy in grad school, which is a high bar, right?
00:07:57.080Like you don't get an MFA unless you are a personally insufferable person.
00:08:01.600I can say this as somebody who has one, right?
00:08:03.340It's like, it's not an activity pursued by the non-annoying,0.57
00:08:06.780But he would like divert every workshop to be a discussion of his own psychosexual hangups in this relentlessly consistent way.
00:08:18.200And it wasn't really shocking to me that he, a few years after our cohort finished and got our little graduate degree, is that he went on to form this magazine along with like two far-right conservatives.
00:08:31.480It was a online magazine that had a big sort of press rollout when it launched in which they were, you know, very cagey about who was bankrolling it.
00:08:44.520They said they had a like large scale but anonymous funder and it was meant to be this kind of like left brown alliance magazine, an intellectual rag for this like anti elite sentiment that was supposed to merge sort of right wing social views with more generous or like welfare forward economic, like a welfare chauvinist or like welfare white racism kind of vision, kind of like what's being peddled by Josh Hawley.
00:09:14.520What happened was that Aponte, like, left pretty quickly.
00:09:19.220He was their one nominal leftist, and he bounced, like, immediately.
00:09:23.620And, you know, they, from the outset, were mostly publishing arguments for ways to, like, roll back the social movements of the 20th century.
00:09:36.000In particular, they've always been really kind of leaning into anti-gay and anti-feminist, like, kind of slop, right?
00:09:44.460Maybe we'll mention a couple of people who've written for them over the years.0.96
00:09:47.100One of their nominal leftists is Slavoj Zizek, who will write for anyone,
00:09:49.960basically, if you provide him with, you know, the requisite mountain of Peruvian marching powder.
00:09:55.760But they also have people like, I think people like Adrian Vermeule, right?
00:10:00.680Glenn Greenwald, totally nominally on the left still.
00:10:04.200Michael Tracy, the guy who got clocked by who?
00:10:09.260Who's like a million years old? Yeah, like a tiny old lady.1.00
00:10:12.080Patrick Deneen. The leftism of it really feels pretty attenuated at this point, I have to say. I guess that's what I was asking.
00:10:18.680I think if you like look for leftism and compact, you have to do a lot of intellectual work to sort of stretch their content over a frame of leftist principles. If you assume that they are like culture war misogynists and homophobes, a lot of what they're doing will make a lot more sense.
00:10:40.080It's a shorter trip to get to that conclusion.
00:10:43.780I was going to say, either it's the intellectual labor of trying to figure out how just because it's anti-liberal makes it somehow leftism.
00:10:48.740The other option is just to put a plastic bag over your head and right before you black out, it'll briefly make sense in some wonderful flash of like, oh, Mabel.
00:11:45.460It's a gathering of odious nerds and racist losers that happens every year.1.00
00:11:49.320It's sometimes abbreviated as NatCon if you're a complete douchebag.0.99
00:11:54.140I think it was sort of started by Yoram Hazoni, the Israeli-American thinker.
00:11:59.820And it's basically a far-right sort of conclave with, you know, intellectual aspirations.0.85
00:12:08.080And it very regularly features some of the worst thinkers you've ever heard of and some of the most odious politicians you've ever heard of.
00:12:16.240I mean, I know Farage has spoken there, Eric Zemmour, the guy who was further to the right from Marine Le Pen.
00:12:22.300Honestly, like the National Conservatism Conference used to be this fringe right gathering of like nationalists, anti-feminists, like anti-anti-racist, politely putting it, sort of anti-gay, anti-immigration like thinkers.
00:12:40.020And those were more fringe before, but now they have become more mainstream just because American politics and international politics have shifted so far to the right.
00:12:49.960This conference is not a little deal, right?
00:12:53.340And Helen Andrews' speech on the great feminization, which did not get top billing, but it was far and away the most popular presentation at the conference.
00:13:03.380It was a tremendous hit among the audience there, and it went lightly viral on the right-wing internet.
00:13:45.040that damages my sanity and my character.
00:13:48.740right? Well, I spent 3,500 words with Ms. Andrews and my sanity was definitely like
00:13:55.040imperiled about halfway. And I'm like, am I not getting enough oxygen? What is happening right
00:13:59.520now? It's not that long a piece and it manages to do shockingly little, even for its relatively
00:14:07.340low word count. So Helen Andrews, she is basically like a pretty low rent, like middle of the pack0.79
00:14:15.000right-wing hack. She is now, with this great feminization, meeting what is far and away
00:14:22.860her greatest success and kind of her first success as an outrage monger, right? This lean into good0.86
00:14:29.880or misogyny has done amazing things for her career over the past couple of months. So she's about 40.
00:14:36.000I think she's like 39 or 40. She graduated with a BA in religion from Yale in 2008. She has spent, you know, like an undistinguished career as a middling staffer in editorial departments of right wing media outlets. Right.
00:14:53.060So she was briefly at the National Review.
00:14:56.660She was even more briefly at the Washington Examiner.
00:15:00.360And she's been now at the American Conservative, where she's a senior editor, since 2020, right?
00:15:07.500So she's put out one book in the course of this career, which was a 2021 volume,0.78
00:15:12.680arguing that the baby boomers are bad because they were all liberals during the new left era.
00:15:20.480But still, congratulations to Ms. Andrews for what I'm sure will be a book forthcoming in 2027 from either Sentinel or Basic Liberty called The Great Feminization, right?
00:15:31.180Oh, I think they'll get it out faster than that.
00:15:32.820They're going to try and ride this wave pretty quick.1.00
00:15:35.080Andrews' misogynist turn has been an absolute sea change for her career over the past two months, right?0.98
00:15:40.840For like 10 years, more than 10 years, she's been languishing as this minor, professionally under-distinguished kind of character.
00:15:49.740and now she's doing the interview circuit
00:15:52.440and now she's appearing on all these panels
00:16:32.760It's shocking how little the right has to have an argument, how low the intellectual0.96
00:16:37.780standards are for right-wing thought in general.
00:16:40.220And I think really anti-feminism in particular, it's like, it's astounding.
00:16:43.940The whole thing just felt almost ostentatiously, I don't know, diffident, right? The whole mode of argumentation, as far as I can tell, is just like, I read this thing and it made me think of this other thing. And isn't it also really this third thing, right? It's interesting to me that this started at a conference, although not an academic conference, because it really has the feeling of like, I wrote this on the plane, you know?
00:17:04.620I mean, it's, yeah, it's a vibe-based piece.
00:17:12.400She argues throughout the entire piece in, like, these big generalities, in inferences, in assumptions that she doesn't justify.
00:17:22.900She makes these, like, sweeping pronouncements about the character and behavior of fully half the human race.
00:17:31.020And she doesn't feel the need to offer any evidence or any anecdote even.
00:17:37.880It's kind of shocking how intently and insistently she remains in the sort of vague posturing in the general.
00:17:46.400And she doesn't have to like have any sort of backing of data because she just keeps saying we all know this.
00:17:53.460This is another characteristic of anti-feminist and right-wing writing is the sense of like smug certainty that is so self-assured that it pretends to not even like require recourse to evidence or to like more reasoned forms of argument that I don't think a feminist would ever get away with simply discarding, right?
00:18:15.380So she's just evoking these vague, capacious terms for, like, values and social phenomena like wokeness, which she refused to define on the Ross Douthat show.0.98
00:19:23.500Philosophers warn against that fallacy for a reason.
00:19:25.540That's a pretty basic mistake to make.
00:19:27.140See, we're already doing Andrews so many favors
00:19:30.440because I do want to walk our listeners through her nominal argument
00:19:36.300so that they don't have to inflict this essay on themselves.
00:19:38.820But, like, in order to argue against her, you have to reconstruct an argument on her behalf and then argue against that, right?1.00
00:19:50.580Because she evokes vibes instead of data and channels this, like, imprecise sense of grievance instead of articulating any actual harms inflicted by women's presence in public life.0.94
00:20:01.560What I had to do in writing the notes for this episode is go in and insert law history and science into her argument in order to give me something coherent that I can argue against.1.00
00:20:16.420Helen Andrews just wrote like a vibes manifesto.
00:20:19.920There is – there's no there there, right?
00:20:22.040So what we are doing today is a project of steel manning.
00:20:25.740But I think what you're getting at, Adrian, is that like Helen Andrews is relying really heavily on a longstanding and increasingly pervasive rhetorical association of liberalism with femininity and conservatism with masculinity, right?
00:20:45.080Yeah. And if that assumption, which is like, again, not really borne out, if that assumption weren't in place, people would be asking questions like, is this correlation or is this causation? What is your source for this claim? And because it is there, she can just lean back on this vibe and not have to make an actual argument.
00:21:06.380This is where, for me, in reading this, I guess I should have clocked that this was given at NatCon.0.99
00:21:11.680It makes sense as a text when someone comes in with all these priors, which, yeah, if you'd sat through all the other panels that day, you probably would readily stipulate to because these people all are busy, sorry, but sucking each other's dicks.0.92
00:21:23.260So it does make some sense that this text is ultimately not trying to draw anyone in.0.94
00:21:30.300And, you know, as lawyers would say, presume facts, not in evidence.
00:21:33.420I mean, it's not really trying to persuade.
00:21:36.000What it's trying to do is rally the troops by saying the thing that has been sort of an inchoate feature underlying a lot of right-wing grievances, right?
00:21:46.120My guess is the fact that then Douthat picks it up, probably suggests what they really want is for the outrage occasioned by these kinds of theses to become a kind of justification for promulgating these theses all the more because we're being canceled, we're being silenced, this isn't being debated, why can't I go to a college campus and talk to people about this, why can't I, da-da-da-da-da, right?
00:22:08.180I'm being silenced, you say, right into the microphone, you know?
00:22:21.720Yeah, like, is this white nationalist dapper?1.00
00:22:25.000So if the great feminization can be said to have a thesis, it's this, that women have0.96
00:22:31.720taken over the world and ruined it inevitably as they always were going to with wokeness.1.00
00:22:39.160Yeah. So Andrews supposes that women have now achieved parity or supremacy in numbers in many prestigious fields, which is a claim I would like a fucking fact check on.1.00
00:22:50.780She claims that men and women are naturally biologically different in their habits, their tendencies and their behaviors.0.96
00:22:58.680And that women are concerned with cooperation and compassion, but that we are also somehow like really vindictive and unforgiving and catty.
00:23:06.960Meanwhile, men are somehow both jocular and rambunctious, but also more focused on, like, the substantive accomplishment of tasks.
00:24:46.080But mostly she just asserts this shit.0.99
00:24:48.520Like she just kind of blithely assumes that her audience will necessarily agree and believe her when she makes these sweeping claims about all the behavior of all of humanity.0.99
00:25:02.340So she doesn't have to offer evidence. And I think this is a moment to pause for a minute and zoom out to think about right wing attitudes towards what we might say are like observed differences between the behavior of men and women.
00:25:21.100Right. Because, you know, me, I'm a I'm from a radical feminist tradition with like a pretty aggressive like social constructionist lens. Right.
00:25:29.920So I am thinking about differences in men and women's aggregate behavior with an eye towards like history, with a sense that these differences might be, you know, people responding to different sets of incentives that they are presented with.
00:25:49.380Like if women are on the whole, if we're talking vibes, if we're zooming out to the whole human race, if you want to say women are on the whole more conciliatory and less willing to engage in conflict, even if I grant you that, which I'm not sure I would, it's likely because they have experienced more acute consequences for straying from a narrow range of prescribed gender behaviors, right?
00:26:15.400So, like, if women don't want to scream at somebody who pisses them off, it's probably because they have a little less social permission to be angry without incurring consequences that are significant, right?
00:26:27.820And if men behave a little bit differently, it might be because they are offered a different, perhaps wider range of acceptable responses to, say, anger, right?
00:26:38.740And they have a different set of incentives.
00:26:41.280so this social constructionist view is one that like presumes that people can be changed
00:26:49.100in their habits and their preferences and their behaviors like by their environment by their
00:26:54.220historical context right it's uh something that says you know human nature is not fixed it's not
00:27:01.900this set thing where your body becomes a destiny of your character right biology is not moral
00:27:08.140destiny we are in fact shaped by the worlds that we encounter and by our experiences in them
00:27:14.200and andrews and the right more broadly like completely reject this they eschew all theories
00:27:21.960of social construction as like kind of delusional cope right and they assert that difference is
00:27:28.520pre-social natural pre-ordained by either god or evolution depending on who's talking
00:27:35.360Their baseline is that things cannot be otherwise.
00:28:08.100Well, the idea that we can't say for sure, this would be the sort of Butlerian argument,
00:28:13.640whether one thing or the other, suggests that we use policy and interventions to change them
00:28:19.660to whatever extent we can mitigate them.
00:28:21.780The conservatives really have to take the strong view and say, no, social construction cannot be true, right?
00:28:27.540And so even if one doesn't want to take Moira's strong position, even if you say it's possibly it's partly socially constructed, well, okay, then still intervention seems like a pretty smart and pretty doable thing.
00:28:40.240The only way those are all, as you say, liberal cope is if you want to make the maximalist argument that it's all biology all the way down or destiny is identical with the biology.
00:28:50.360And I think they can't even believe that.
00:28:52.400I mean, I think that their theory of biology as destiny is sort of undermined by their anti-feminist complaint, right? Like if women are naturally stupid and weak and conflict averse and unable to function, then why are they all graduating from college?1.00
00:29:11.140Why are they getting all these jobs that you don't think that they should have?1.00
00:29:14.680Why are they succeeding in entering into public life?
00:29:18.580They are complaining about the falseness or the usurpation of an order that they declare to be natural and inevitable.
00:29:26.340But if it was natural and inevitable, they wouldn't have to work so hard to enforce it.
00:29:30.440As a German historian, I will point out that this idea that there are natural hierarchies and orders, but certain groups have figured out ways to pervert those orders.
00:29:40.640you know, substitute women for Jewish people.0.82
00:29:43.360And this is textbook antisemitism, right?0.78
00:29:45.760Antisemitism has exactly that problem,0.98
00:29:47.520that for the antisemite, the Jew is weak0.99
00:29:49.580and can only survive through cunning and mimicry,0.99
00:30:27.460that any attempts to change it by raising women's status
00:30:30.220or securing women's freedom are foolhardy and doomed at best,
00:30:34.120if not outright, like, counterproductive and perverse at worst, right?0.99
00:30:37.380Right. But I also wonder why this natural differences argument appeals so much to the right wing base.
00:30:47.640And I think to like men kind of broadly. Right. With the caveat, not all men, if you're like a like old retired professor who wants to yell at me and not all men on the comments of this, like, let me fucking save you the time.
00:30:59.440I think men on the whole are much more interested or much more credulous towards this idea of inherent differences between men and women.
00:31:09.740And that's for a couple of reasons, right?
00:31:11.560Like it flatters male chauvinism, for one thing.
00:31:13.900The notion that, no, you're at the top of this hierarchy because you're just inherently better is flattering.
00:31:20.400And, you know, egotism can be a pretty strong motivator for people to believe in things that they don't actually have evidence for.
00:31:27.980But also, and this kind of breaks my heart,
00:31:30.340I think men just really seem to believe
00:31:35.020that they are fundamentally different from women.1.00
00:31:38.100That like women don't think like they do,0.83
00:31:39.860don't feel the same emotions that they do,1.00
00:31:42.220don't respond the way they do to incentives, right?1.00
00:31:44.760That women do not on the whole experience humanity0.93
00:31:49.200and the first line of consciousness the way that men do.0.89
00:31:51.980I am told they're from Venus and men are from Mars.0.77
00:31:56.820So like women have to think about men as people, right? Women don't have the luxury of imagining men as these like non-player characters. Trust me, I've tried.
00:32:06.040because like men have always been presented to women as the default of humanity right and they've
00:32:14.980also typically been in positions of power over us our whole lives in our families in our marriages
00:32:21.060in the institutions where we work and go to school men are everywhere and they're able to control
00:32:26.360outcomes for us right so we have to understand their thinking we have to put ourselves in their
00:32:31.340shoes in order to navigate and survive their power. And men don't really experience this
00:32:37.820with women in the reverse as often, right? They have often not been compelled by circumstance
00:32:44.320or self-interest to try and empathize with women. And so I think this is like really out of fashion
00:32:50.280now, but I think part of the appeal to men of dumb ideas, like the ones that Andrews is putting0.88
00:32:55.760forward and their persistence can be explained with a recourse to standpoint epistemology,0.97
00:33:01.760Men believe dumb shit about gender because their social position at the top of the gender1.00
00:33:06.460hierarchy has never required them to think very hard about gender.1.00
00:33:11.520I always think about something that Aubrey Gordon always talks about over on maintenance
00:33:14.920phase, which is that anti-fat bias, for instance, is a lot about taking something that is given
00:33:20.580to you by genetic accident, what your body is shaped like.
00:33:24.740And part of what fatphobia does is it gives you a sense that that's actually a moral accomplishment.
00:33:30.340And I think that the fact that people get their particular role in the lottery of birth reflected back to them as moral choices,
00:33:39.200it becomes an ingrained part of your personality.
00:33:41.000And I think being told that, well, you just got lucky, it eats at the substance of how a lot of people conceive of their own lives.
00:33:47.880So Andrews argues that women's large scale entry into fields from which they were once excluded over sort of like the back half of the 20th century has transformed the culture of those institutions from ones of hardheaded practicality in which men admirably work together to get things done.
00:34:07.900also something I would like a fact check about, into now these soothing factories of good feelings
00:34:15.460in which women compel everyone to sing kumbaya and state their preferred pronouns instead of0.99
00:34:21.800working, right? This is what she seems to refer to as wokeness, this vibe shift towards greater0.95
00:34:29.060sensitivity. She writes, everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine
00:34:35.920over the masculine, empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.
00:34:43.780The most famous line from her piece, which is getting like retweeted and memed a lot,
00:34:49.780is this one. Adrian, can you read this for me? And I'm quoting again. Women can sue their bosses
00:34:55.400for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can't sue when their0.74
00:34:59.320workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten. Written by someone who I'm guessing has not had
00:35:04.920a job is is that the background here like i mean all of her jobs have been at like conservative1.00
00:35:10.060rags that are like functionally just like daycare for these idiots where that you think you can't0.98
00:35:15.500get fired right you can't get fired you'll never run out of money it's not a real job we're not0.99
00:35:20.040fact-checking any of this right i mean it gets just it's so dumb so she describes wokeness as0.98
00:35:26.960a scourge that has arisen from women's you know supposedly dominant place in institutions do you0.94
00:35:33.620Remember that line in The Royal Tenenbaums?1.00
00:35:35.520Like, everyone knows that Custer died at Little Bighorn.
00:35:37.840What this novel supposes it, what if he didn't?
00:35:49.400This is part of something I've, like, noticed more generally is that part of right-wing populism requires an assumption that, like, management is women.0.56
00:36:13.660Actually, men are something like 82% of all like corporate board members or executives.0.99
00:36:21.440I'm pulling this statistic out of my ass and we should fact check it.0.98
00:36:23.720Now I can put that in the show notes.0.99
00:36:25.140But it's disproportionately men in corporate leadership, right?
00:36:28.480So the terrible job you have that is exploiting you and making you feel impotent in your ability to like get into the middle class, those decisions are probably being made by a man, but you're supposed to understand that role of domination and exploitation over you as being sort of feminized or being controlled by women or if not women directly by a feminine ethos, right?
00:36:55.760So it's like the feminization of capital.
00:36:58.280So she says a wokeness is a scourge that has arisen from women's supposedly dominant place in institutions.0.99
00:37:04.080And then she argues that wokeness is nothing but female or feminine.0.99
00:37:09.700Again, define your terms, traits at scale, right?1.00
00:37:13.940I thought wokeness was also super aggressive and in your face and like scary.0.99
00:37:18.420And we have to like shoot them or whatever.1.00
00:37:21.180Like, should we just pick a lane here or we just, I mean, again, like the, oh, they're so feminine.1.00
00:37:25.700but also so masculine, they're so scary and also so weak.
00:37:28.880This is just like gutter antisemitism all the way down, isn't it?
00:37:31.800And, you know, I really wanted to talk to you about this
00:39:10.400not that capitalism itself has gone woke,
00:39:12.880but that like wokeness and capital have sort of entered into certain alliances there's a left
00:39:17.260wing version of that that alufemi taiwo sort of argues but the point there is is like well it's
00:39:22.280really distortion of course of what social justice causes are but if you basically assume that those
00:39:26.600two things are absolutely identical that there's an object called wokeness in the world that you
00:39:30.400can point to and that migrates around and just finds like different host bodies to invade or
00:39:34.900whatever that's how this argument comes about it just it doesn't make any freaking sense once you
00:39:39.280hold it up to, yeah, empirical reality. Who dominates these industries? Why is a language
00:39:46.960of wokeness deployed by HR departments within some of those companies? And has the entrance
00:39:53.480of women into those workplaces in any way coincided with the development of these different0.71
00:39:57.600practices? No, it has not, I think is the answer to all these questions.
00:40:01.260She's using a lot of bad thinking and reflexive misogyny to try and unite some different grievances, right?0.92
00:40:11.700The sort of like knee jerk misogyny and grievance against women that a lot of people have with this sort of like nascent populist anti-elite sentiment that she has now managed to like recast as, you know, the feminized elites who are bringing you down.
00:40:28.740And that way you don't have to fight against capital.0.88
00:40:30.960You can just oppress women, right?0.60
00:40:32.660It's a very like neat little bait and switch.
00:40:36.060But the other thing to note is that according to Helen Andrews herself, this isn't even her idea.
00:40:44.340The Great Feminization was originally coined in 2019 by an anonymous right-wing blogger going by the pseudonym J. Stone.
00:40:53.480It's not even the first time this idea has been expanded into a greater piece.
00:40:58.740Because Stone, in fact, later self-published a book, and it's really a pamphlet, it's like 100 pages, with this thesis, The Great Feminization, The Women as Drivers of Modern Social Change.
00:41:10.740I put a picture of it in the doc, the cover is pink.
00:45:37.260And it's like it's hated by civil rights advocates specifically for its role in actually minimizing what companies have to do to comply with civil rights law and to avoid liability.
00:45:49.560But it's become in the right wing rhetoric like Andrews, the embodiments of those civil rights activism movements and of those civil rights laws.
00:45:59.300Right. So she's been able to make women in management this like sort of boogeyman that she is able to then collapse into the identical association with civil rights protections themselves and with anti-discrimination law itself.0.99
00:46:17.040But that's pretty much what Chris Ruffo did with CRT, what Richard Hernania did in his book about this stuff, right? The idea of getting at the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through that HR training you really hated is a pretty standard move now on the Republican right.
00:46:34.420Yeah, it's not really innovative, but it's, I think, a necessity of their grievance machine is they have to look like when they are, like, reaffirming their own status and punching downward on a hierarchy that what they're actually doing is defying the corrupt elites and sort of vindicating workers against management.
00:46:55.980So this is also kind of one of those moments where I'm steelmanning Andrews because she never explicitly links wokeness in civil rights law.
00:47:05.160And that's either because she's evil and knows that saying what she really means, which is we must repeal the 1964 Civil Rights Act, would make a lot of Americans like distrust her.0.97
00:47:15.520Or it's because she's so fucking historically illiterate and such a cretin that she has never read a book in her life.0.96
00:47:21.240Either way, she prefers to speak in these like vague terms about a cultural climate that induces this like quasi-spiritual dissatisfaction among men, right?0.99
00:49:15.260Which, among other things, prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of sex.
00:49:20.600So, Adrian, do you want to give us like a primer on Title VII?
00:49:23.640The titles are amendments technically to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
00:49:27.840So, Title VII prohibits discrimination by any employers on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
00:49:36.560Almost as a joke, a right-wing congressman slipped the sex qualification in among those race, national origin, religion, protected statuses, in part because he thought that doing so would help sink the 1964 Civil Rights Act, right?
00:49:52.840That everybody would think it was ridiculous to say you couldn't discriminate on the basis of sex in who you're hiring to work for you and how you treat your employees.
00:50:01.200But it got taken up by women in Congress at the time and became a big pillar of the second wave legal battles trying to extend women's access to the public sphere.
00:50:15.720So in interviews with people like the conservative sort of like ex-feminist Megan Dahm, Andrews has said that the wokeness she is fighting is nothing at all like the second wave feminism that people imagine she opposes.
00:50:28.660And that is a lie because, in fact, what Andrews is arguing against is precisely the result of the legal victories of that second wave liberal movement, namely the enactment of anti-discrimination legislation that prohibits employers from discriminating against women because they are women.
00:50:48.840And she is in particular arguing against this succession of legal victories that were won personally by Catherine McKinnon, who first developed and then got recognized into federal law, the theory that sexual harassment is sex discrimination and hence illegal, right?
00:51:06.700So the substance, such as it is, of Andrew's claim is that the legal ban on sexual harassment is an unjust and intolerable infringement of men's very nature and must be undone.
00:51:18.840So she writes that women entering the workforce has subjected men to the inability to sexually harass them and driven them out of fields.
00:51:32.740That does not look like women outperforming men.1.00
00:51:35.140It looks like women driving men away by imposing feminine norms on previously male institutions.
00:51:40.620What man wants to work in a field where his traits are not welcome?0.91
00:51:44.300What self-respecting male graduate student would pursue a career in academia when his peers will ostracize him for stating his disagreements too bluntly or espousing a controversial opinion?
00:51:53.760I hate to tell you this, Helen, but most of my colleagues are men.
00:53:27.340The idea being like having a workplace where that is standard and accepted behavior is a better and more effective workplace at a more functional institution.
00:53:38.980Like, I don't know, even if, let's say, we removed the entire question of sexual harassment from this conversation, most of these harassment cases are about people retaliating or trying to bully each other.
00:53:51.360These are toxic workplaces where nothing much gets done, right?
00:53:55.420Like, if you show me a workplace with porn magazines taped to the cubicles and one without, I'm going to go ahead and say that I think the one without probably is a more effective workplace, right?0.96
00:54:06.600Do you want to get work done or do you want to preserve a realm of exclusive male inhabitants where women are not welcome, right?0.75
00:54:15.160I think it depends on what you're being effective at is, I think, another question.1.00
00:55:08.260So more or less all of Andrew's life, but a relatively short duration in actual historical terms.0.62
00:55:14.800And the incursion of women into workplaces that she's describing happens before that.
00:55:19.700The historical sequence here is way off.
00:55:22.020But she like really takes a lot of offense to civil rights law that protects against sexual harassment.
00:55:28.780And the closest she gets to articulating an actual change in workplaces that has occurred as a result of like women's entry into them, this quote unquote feminization, is the sense that like, OK, well, now sexual harassment is illegal.
00:55:44.200And in her essay, Andrews uses two examples of quote-unquote wokeness run amok under women's influence that are both basically about Title VII complaints.
00:55:55.180The first example is a story I think you might be best able to tell, Adrienne, about a wee little economist, former Treasury Secretary, and frequent Jeffrey Epstein pen pal.0.70
00:56:19.560What happened to Larry Summers that Helen Andrews finds so atrocious?
00:56:25.060You may remember Larry Summers from such things as when he told a bunch of donors and Harvard faculty that women were less suited to do science and math biologically.
00:56:36.120With a bunch of world-class Harvard women doing science and math in the room who were like, say what now?
00:56:41.940And you may also remember him from such headlines as Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Summers' exchange
00:56:47.420depict relationship as confidants, emails reveal, as appeared in The Guardian today.
00:56:53.740So, you know, again, apparently we're no longer doing correlation and causation.
01:01:01.920Their opinions about women and sex,0.97
01:01:03.940their views included naked women supposedly having sex with each other,1.00
01:01:08.140a woman masturbating herself with a towel.0.99
01:01:10.340Now I'm kind of unhappy that I agreed to read this.1.00
01:01:13.660A nude woman on a heater control box with fluid coming out of her vaginal area.1.00
01:01:17.880A woman with long blonde hair like Lois, wearing only high heels and holding a whip.0.98
01:01:22.280And countless women in full labial display.0.51
01:01:24.740When Lois Robinson protested, the men engaged in more of what the ACLU briefed against her termed speech by posting a sign stating men only.0.97
01:01:33.480Suddenly, because Lois Robinson's sexual harassment complaint centered on pornography, her sexual harassment claim invoked the First Amendment, at least so far as relief was concerned.
01:01:44.380Yeah, we can talk about the ACLU's defenses of sexual harassment and things like, you know, revenge and child pornography on another episode.1.00
01:01:52.760That is not a topic for today, although it is something that Kitty McKinnon absolutely will work into everything she ever writes.0.99
01:02:00.040It's like, fuck the ACLU, by the way, for this.0.99
01:02:03.480So, you know, I don't think that putting porn up at work is a natural expression of some metaphysical manly essence.1.00
01:02:12.200I'm going to go out of fucking limb here.0.97
01:02:14.100She says that men are more rational than women, but she's curiously denying them the capacity for reason here.0.99
01:02:20.180Right. These men were not compelled to put porn up on the walls of their workplace by something essential and true in the very core of their being.
01:02:57.740that women just aren't tough enough to handle.0.99
01:02:59.900It's harassment. It is deliberate, conscious intimidation.1.00
01:03:04.440Yeah, it's an attempt to exclude someone from the normal functioning of a particular workplace or educational institution, right?
01:03:11.620To make it impossible for them to partake as is their right as citizens in this job they've chosen or this university they've accepted an offer from, etc., etc., right?
01:03:22.040Yeah, it's about access to the public sphere. It's about the ability to support yourself.
01:03:25.380and this is something that Helen Andrews thinks that men should be entitled and in fact require
01:03:30.940the entitlement to like violently intimidate women out of being able to do and I want to zoom out
01:03:36.680here for a minute and Adrian you might cut this I looked ahead and I might Helen Andrews has her1.00
01:03:47.780very specific approach to her own gender right she looks like somebody made a fraggle rock1.00
01:03:56.560muppet out of leather she's underweight but she's also like weirdly fleshy her face is very pale1.00
01:04:03.400but she has these like rolls of excess skin on her head she has a massive forehead beady little eyes1.00
01:04:11.760kind of transparent skin and the flaccid like thinning hair of people who aren't eating enough1.00
01:04:18.180like she looks unhealthy and she also looks like frankly a little bit inbred she's got this like1.00
01:04:22.500Habsburg chin and I don't say this just to demean and insult Helen Andrews although to be clear she
01:04:30.100does deserve it I say this because I think her appearance shows us a lot about how she relates1.00
01:04:35.520to her own gender so it is conspicuous now on the american right to see a woman rise to prominence0.94
01:04:43.760in those circles who has not invested a lot of time and money and physical discomfort into1.00
01:04:50.620elaborate often disfiguring like cosmetic interventions right we did i think a really
01:04:55.500good episode on this with just that i'm really proud of yeah with the beauty critic justofino
01:04:59.940we called it republican makeup but like honestly makeup is kind of a misnomer for what these
01:05:04.860interventions really are, which are a series of like highly invasive, full figure body
01:05:10.740modifications and style choices, which are especially conspicuous on women, but also
01:07:51.120So, you know, it's common to call misogynist women hypocrites, but I don't think Andrews is. I think her argument is based around her own exceptionalism. So the notion that she is personally different from and superior to other women is not a moment of hypocrisy. It is foundational to her project.0.80
01:08:10.660Yeah. And I mean, we might think of other conservative groups where this is true, namely black conservatives, right?
01:08:19.640Yeah. I'm sure like you could find a trans woman doing this, maybe Caitlyn Jenner.0.99
01:08:23.560Probably. I don't listen when she talks.1.00
01:08:25.600I'm not like those other ones. I'm a good one. And I'm in fact so good, I'm going to demonstrate how I'm good by being the most perfect bigot against my own in-group, right?
01:08:59.780And I think, again, we have to read more into this because she is so vague, but I think we can read that as a call to end sexual harassment protections.
01:09:07.700I think that's a reasonable conclusion.
01:09:10.220And that's not actually a modest proposal, to be clear.
01:09:12.780It would undo decades of legal precedent.1.00
01:09:15.720It would push large numbers of women out of the workforce and into dependency.0.98
01:09:19.600And it would, you know, subject those who stayed in the workforce to massive hostility, violence, and humiliation that will absolutely curtail their ability to earn and provide for themselves.
01:09:30.900But at the same time, it is also noticeable how comparatively modest that solution is when you consider what Andrews has claimed the purported stakes of this thing are, right?
01:09:40.760Right. Like, Andrews claims that women's entry into public life is a threat to Western civilization.0.56
01:09:51.680And if she really believes that, then what her claim mandates is a wholesale immediate removal of women from work, from education, from public office, like a Taliban-style gender segregation that would involve necessarily tremendous amounts of violence to put in place, right?
01:10:10.040Yeah, she's basically calling for a certain Hulu show to happen in real life.
01:10:13.920Yeah, and that what she formally calls for, what she'll cop to calling for, is merely a changed civil rights law, shows that she doesn't have the courage of her convictions.
01:10:24.600She makes a maximalist case and then offers this like pissant little solution.
01:10:29.540I think it's cowardly, it's dishonest, and candidly it's kind of transparent.0.99
01:10:33.480So I'm going to talk directly to Helen and say, sweetheart, if you want to be a man so badly, then you should grow a pair of balls and say what you mean.0.98
01:10:43.920in bed with the right is made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via patreon.com0.75
01:10:50.240our episodes are produced and edited by mark yoshizumi and katie lao our title music is by katie lao