In Bed With The Right - Episode 6： Perverts, Creeps and Priests!

00:00:00.000 Like the one thing that masculinity always has in common is the oppression of women.

00:00:04.840 That's like a really consistent theme.

00:00:19.860 Hello and welcome.

00:00:20.980 I'm Adrienne Dobb.

00:00:21.940 And I'm Moira Donegan.

00:00:23.160 And whether we like it or not, we are in bed with the right.

00:00:25.900 today is the long-awaited sequel to our pilot episode on masculinity to be followed by many

00:00:34.880 more episodes on masculinity you know it's like this relates i would say to um the first one the

00:00:41.280 way aliens relates to alien right there's an s and there's a lot more things bursting out of people

00:00:48.560 anyway that's uh that's that's how i see this episode going yeah so in our last episode we

00:00:54.320 talked about you know a recent media panic over the crisis of masculinity and we did sort of a

00:00:59.980 survey of where this concept of masculinity and crisis has come from what its history looks like

00:01:05.940 when it becomes an emergency and when it's not and then I think one of the things we sort of

00:01:12.200 touched on was this taxonomy I've been working on with in my own work for a little while now which

00:01:17.800 is like the three buckets of conservative masculinity like the three buckets of like

00:01:22.640 gender conservatism that men sort of put themselves into and we've called one the preacher one the

00:01:30.320 pervert and one is the creep and today we're going to dive into some like uh illustrative texts about

00:01:38.280 sort of the intellectual foundations the biggest assumptions the major themes of these three kinds

00:01:44.600 of right-wing manhood and see if we can like tease out a little more about what they are

00:01:49.000 Yeah, maybe just to give people a frame of reference before we delve into the nitty gritty here, let's sort of talk a little bit about who sort of the avatars of this are. So who are people asked to picture here? So the preacher is basically like, think of Mike Pence. If you're not wild about women, but you call your wife mother, you might fall in that bucket. Who's the creep?

00:02:08.420 The creep is somebody who has a sense of sort of like a grieved self-regard.

00:02:15.740 So I think of Elon Musk is sort of the main one, somebody who thinks that he is special and different, but a corrupted and unworthy world doesn't recognize him.

00:02:27.620 This is often people with like a lot of investment in race science or evolutionary psychology.

00:02:33.420 Yeah. In some way, it's the sources of legitimation that are different there.

00:02:37.420 One looks to the Bible, the other one is going to look anywhere but the Bible, basically.

00:02:41.340 It's going to look to some kind of crank book or some research that they barely understood to bolster their claims.

00:02:49.120 And then our third type? 0.92

00:02:50.360 Our third type is the pervert who demonstrates his masculinity through a kind of like aggressive, dominant, often like forceful and violent sexuality. 0.97

00:03:00.720 Right, kind of a Dainissian.

00:03:02.040 We'll talk about this quite a bit more when we talk about Nietzsche in a future episode.

00:03:06.060 As I tried to explain last time is that I think that, you know, even though these guys don't like each other, I think they often have cosmetically different versions of what's essentially the same project.

00:03:16.520 Yeah. Women end up miraculously not being subjects in all of these. So you're like, huh.

00:03:21.740 Right. But what they are is sites of proving masculine power, right? The control and ownership and domination of women are like theaters for the exercise of masculinity and basically every kind of masculinity that we're going to go over.

00:03:38.660 Like the one thing that masculinity always has in common is the oppression of women. 0.66

00:03:43.580 That's like a really consistent theme.

00:03:46.020 I think something that we are going to have to sort of tease out is the extent to which women themselves are supposed to be the audience for these demonstrations of masculinity and the extent to which masculinity is being demonstrated on women for an audience of other men.

00:04:05.320 Yeah. One other thing that maybe on sort of a meta level we could talk about is that when we did think about the perverts, we kind of bounced ideas back and forth. And that was the bucket where we came up with the most names of women, right? Like where basically that is by now, like, let boys be boys is almost like always a woman telling you that in the public discourse. Like there's a very interesting thing happening there, whereas like the preacher tends to be a cis white dude still.

00:04:30.020 Yeah, you know, there are definitely versions of conservative femininity that rely very heavily on biblical authority, on ideas of divine ordination of gender roles, right? And you'll see women sort of appropriating preacher masculinity on the right in order to like access public power. 1.00

00:04:49.200 I will say that like where you see more women advocating for like pervert masculinity is really on the left, where like there has been sort of a mirror image of what like Phyllis Schlafly did with religious conservatism on the right. 0.77

00:05:02.860 You'll see people like, you know, Camille Paglia doing on the putative left, you know, somebody coming from a left wing perspective. 0.66

00:05:10.800 And, you know, a lot of these guys in the pervert bucket are on the political left, even though they have very reactionary, very conservative ideas about gender itself and about preserving gender as a hierarchy.

00:05:24.420 There's a lot to dig into.

00:05:25.720 Yeah, yeah.

00:05:26.200 One of the interesting things is, of course, that like anyone who makes these kinds of claims are, and I think you're pointing to that, is already kind of positioning themselves in like why they are allowed to talk publicly about this at all, right?

00:05:36.140 Glafly's kind of positionality, which I agree kind of is the preacher positionality, always

00:05:41.540 was a little bit self-contradictory, right?

00:05:44.720 Like she always claimed like, oh, if my husband needs me at home to cook, I won't give this

00:05:49.020 talk. 1.00

00:05:49.500 And of course, that was bullshit. 0.99

00:05:50.580 She was an important intellectual. 0.99

00:05:52.720 Like, I don't know what her husband did, but like surely she made the bucks in that relationship,

00:05:57.180 right?

00:05:57.440 But it was this self-contradictory kind of position where you're like, I am here to tell

00:06:02.620 you that I should not be allowed to tell you anything.

00:06:04.880 it's like yeah that's a it's a it's an odd one right whereas like the libertine always gets to

00:06:10.420 make it we'll talk about this that basically of the three folks we're going to read today or talk

00:06:14.840 about today like the libertine is the one who can't sort of can't seem to shut the fuck up about

00:06:19.120 any of this right like oh but i think he's got a lot of his own contradictions as well so i'm

00:06:23.640 excited to dive into them i think so yeah well should we start maybe yeah yeah so i mean i my

00:06:29.120 example of the creep is sort of the one you're thinking of so like my apologies to listeners

00:06:34.360 for like not kind of shocking you we have a couple of deep cuts here and that's fun this is not a 0.58

00:06:39.380 deep cut this is jordan fucking peterson uh wait wait can you taxonomize the creep for me and tell

00:06:45.860 me why jordan peterson personifies the elements of the creep so i mean it's a little tricky right 0.93

00:06:51.380 because he's not an evolutionary psychologist he's not like you know here's what our genes are

00:06:55.580 telling us to do but he makes these very basic points about supposed gender roles from this

00:07:04.140 authority of the psychiatrist right like he peppers his discourse with like things that

00:07:09.560 allegedly his patients told him which uh you know has a long history right this is how freudians

00:07:15.520 argued right here's the thing i i had happen on the couch to you know people reared on let's say

00:07:20.940 excel spreadsheets for science or whatever with test results might find that it may not sound

00:07:25.820 that scientific but like you know not like sort of pseudoscience like the bell curve is or something

00:07:30.160 like that but it comes with that premature of like this man has done some very serious research

00:07:35.460 right like he's not just telling you to clean up your room he's telling you your room for science

00:07:40.760 and we should say that jordan peterson is a psychologist he's canadian he did teach for a

00:07:46.580 long time at the university of toronto i believe yep and so he has the he has the authority of

00:07:52.220 professor you know that is like a title he has yeah and i mean this is what he owes his prominence

00:07:59.200 too right the very first youtube clip of his i think that went viral in something like 2016 17

00:08:05.600 was professor against political correctness i might get the title wrong but like the word

00:08:11.280 professor was in there right that was how he sold himself he was not whatever joe six-pack is in

00:08:15.720 canada joe poutine or whatever uh yeah he was not he's not a regular guy he's got this epistemic

00:08:21.400 authority he's got institutional authority and he is wielding that in the service of gender

00:08:26.260 conservatism which has made him very very popular online extremely popular and he the other thing

00:08:31.200 that makes him an interesting creep is that he walks an interesting line between somewhat

00:08:35.860 judgmentally between this weird kind of dominance behavior like he keeps like his twitter it's just

00:08:41.640 like him wanting to punch people constantly even though like you know people have not seen me i'm

00:08:46.700 i'm the scrawniest man on earth and i don't think i'd be like that afraid of being in a fistfight

00:08:51.480 with jordan peterson but then the other thing that happens is that like the man just like is

00:08:56.380 the waterworks he weeps a lot he cries a lot yeah i mean there was a there's a clip of him

00:09:01.140 crying about elliot page for some reason like that that set him over the edge elliot page's

00:09:07.300 transition was a great offense to jordan peterson who i guess was uh like sexually attracted to a

00:09:14.740 pre-transition elliot page maybe a huge juno fan who knows i don't know yeah the other thing is

00:09:20.360 that Jordan Peterson is taken seriously. There was a brief weird moment when he was like sort

00:09:24.740 of taken seriously by, you know, people like David Brooks and, you know, was sort of like in

00:09:28.860 the Atlantic, et cetera, et cetera. That's sort of died down. And now I feel like his fame is

00:09:35.720 identical almost with people who are certain affinities with technology and specifically

00:09:42.020 with the tech industry, the very online like Jordan Peterson. Yes. And he posits his gender

00:09:47.980 conservative viewpoint his sort of prescription for a masculine life like really clearly as self-help

00:09:54.900 yeah especially above all in that book well not initially but like famously in that book 12 rules

00:10:00.420 for life this big blockbuster book massive bestseller from 2018 2018 so yeah it's been

00:10:07.760 translated into like dozens of languages extremely successful and is essentially self-help for men

00:10:15.340 I think very explicitly for men.

00:10:17.500 And maybe I'll just read a passage just to give you a sense of what Jordan Peterson means when he thinks about a crisis of masculinity.

00:10:24.120 I'm not sure he ever uses that word, but like, here, I'll read it to you.

00:10:28.900 Boys are suffering in the modern world. 0.79

00:10:31.820 They are more disobedient negatively or more independent positively than girls.

00:10:36.420 They suffer for this throughout their pre-university educational career. 0.88

00:10:39.640 They are less agreeable, agreeableness being a personality trait associated with compassion, empathy, and avoidance of conflict, and less susceptible to anxiety and depression, at least after both sexes hit puberty. 0.55

00:10:52.500 Boys' interests tilt towards things, girls' interests tilt towards people.

00:10:57.560 Strikingly, these differences, strongly influenced by biological factors, are most pronounced in the Scandinavian societies where gender equality has been pushed hardest.

00:11:06.020 This is the opposite of what would be expected by those who insist ever more loudly that gender is a social construct.

00:11:13.100 It isn't. This isn't the debate the data are in.

00:11:17.500 So that's Jordan Peterson, Rules for Life.

00:11:20.620 He's like gaveling. He's like, it is biological determinism, like bam, like a judge.

00:11:26.540 So he does say strongly influenced by biological factors.

00:11:30.900 He says that gender is something in the body that you can't escape, which does sort of hint at an evolutionary psychology justification, even though he doesn't really make that argument.

00:11:40.420 No. And the other thing that he, of course, does is, I mean, he doesn't come out and say here it's feminism's fault, but he says, like, basically, modernity is feminized. Our modern world is feminized. It is societalized. We spend a lot more time around other people, and that is bad for men because men are really good at clubbing things on the head and dragging them back to their cave.

00:11:57.500 but like suddenly you're making them type on a computer i have fond memories of my own caveman

00:12:03.060 days i recall them well of the mid 80s you know but yeah so like there's something about the deep 0.88

00:12:10.600 recesses of male memory that basically modernity is just too fucking femmy for right i don't think

00:12:16.500 he would hide this like what's behind this is someone like carl jung right like i think there's 0.70

00:12:21.060 on the one hand i don't know if it's entirely about genes like biology of genes it's about

00:12:26.220 this kind of collective memory that is sort of passed down from us like this collective unconscious

00:12:31.700 that's sort of like passed down from generation to generation that's definitely here which is

00:12:37.180 sort of like the thing that freud and jung really kind of split over freud has a conception of this

00:12:42.540 too but his is way more complicated than jung's jung really thought that like people we'll talk

00:12:47.340 about this in our episode but people sort of carry like almost genetically sort of remnants of

00:12:51.980 memories from their ancestors, right? And Freud thought, well, that's not quite true. We do pass

00:12:58.280 on something to our distant offspring, but not like that. So I think it's amazing stuff. I find

00:13:03.360 this passage interesting also because it's so clear what conclusion he's trying to run away

00:13:09.120 from, right? Like a lot of what he's saying here is probably not wrong. I want him to define his

00:13:13.340 terms. I don't know what any of this is supposed to exactly mean. It feels in the beginning,

00:13:17.800 like he might say, and this is something that you can hear feminists say, this is something you can

00:13:21.500 hear leftists say, right? That like our modern world is less differential to a certain traditional 0.99

00:13:26.560 construction of masculinity, right? Which is an interpretation that we could still argue with

00:13:31.960 because it assumes that there's one traditional conception of masculinity, right? But we could

00:13:36.020 say like, yeah, people have been socialized in these outdated forms of masculinity that then

00:13:41.460 the modern world kind of punishes them for, right? That's an argument that people have made on the

00:13:45.280 left and it's interesting as far as it goes, but that's not what he's saying here, right? Those

00:13:50.520 aspects of masculinity that the modern world is inhospitable to are, as he says, and as he pointed

00:13:56.300 out, strongly influenced by biological factors, right? It sounds like a defense of certain

00:14:01.160 cultural codes, but it's actually something different. It's a warning about a pathological

00:14:06.800 distortion of our biological destiny, right? Like this is what we're meant to be and meant to be

00:14:11.000 doing. And we are falling short of it in modernity because we've become unnatural, right? We're no

00:14:20.020 longer doing things the way they're meant to be done. And I mean, for people who are hearing 0.60

00:14:24.460 certain echoes here, this is something that succeeds online quite well. Our friends and

00:14:31.060 colleagues over at the podcast maintenance phase always point out that this idea that something in

00:14:37.840 our present way of living falls away from what we're quote-unquote naturally supposed to do

00:14:43.180 is extremely powerful online, precisely because we encounter that world through something that

00:14:48.520 feels so stridently and openly artificial right we're staring at our computer screens like no one

00:14:54.200 has ever been like ah i am one with nature while staring at my phone right right it reminded me of

00:14:59.700 veganism actually when you were talking about this like uh imagined pure pre-social past and

00:15:07.020 dorian peterson himself very famously went on an all meat diet that sent him into some sort of coma

00:15:13.920 and he was in a russian hospital for a while a very yeah elaborate dark this is not a reach is

00:15:19.980 what i am to say he is very clearly trying to approximate a more pure like pre-historical

00:15:25.880 vision of the self yeah and so i think the and the health influencer in this of this right is

00:15:31.780 big in 12 rules for life too right he is making claims about health which is a concept that we're

00:15:36.840 gonna come up against again and again and that's not an accident right because it allows what you

00:15:43.500 and i might think of as progress right as pathology it says like this is actually diseased

00:15:48.840 you're gonna suffer from this i'm gonna read a passage from a book by anthony ludovici from 0.96

00:15:54.200 1927 man an indictment i love the title they didn't fuck around the 20s like 0.85

00:16:00.840 got a lot of things to say to men uh yeah um so the conclusion that the characteristics quote 0.82

00:16:09.780 arising out of sexual dimorphism so you know the fact that there are men and only men and women

00:16:15.000 right um that's what he's talking about here are very deeply embedded in our natures and cannot

00:16:20.400 therefore be altered in a day in a generation or even in a century apparent modifications of

00:16:26.900 these characteristics which alter the relations of the sexes are therefore more likely to be morbid

00:16:32.520 and transient than normal and permanent right that to me is what peterson is drawing on here right

00:16:39.500 The idea that these shifts where you and I might say, yes, over the last two, three hundred years, several shifts have taken place and we live with the consequences of those shifts.

00:16:49.460 They're like, no, in the long durée of human evolution, that is but a microsecond.

00:16:57.480 And to change things that quickly can only lead to confusion and or to disease.

00:17:03.420 As he says, it's more likely to be morbid and transient.

00:17:07.420 These are our new fads.

00:17:09.940 Here's a question I have that I always have about this sort of evocation of a trans-historical pre-social masculinity, which is that if these categorizations of masculinity and femininity are so overwhelmingly historically powerful and so written into our fates, how did we wind up abandoning them?

00:17:31.460 like where did who gave us this promethean power yeah to like subvert our own natures because i

00:17:37.600 don't think betty friedan was capable of quite that much right there the implication is is always 0.70

00:17:42.640 as you're saying it's like there's a subterranean implication that feminism fucked up nature and

00:17:47.480 that's actually ascribing feminism a ton of power that i don't think it can reasonably be said to 1.00

00:17:53.200 have well yeah it's definitely a pathologization right like a medicalization of well the fact that

00:18:00.360 society just fucking changes from time to time right like it's you know it's like sorry bud like

00:18:05.020 yeah like this is not the world i grew up in it's like yeah you know uh have you met time uh that's 0.94

00:18:09.740 what that's what does it right it also like requires sort of an erasure of the middle parts

00:18:14.420 of history there's just like exactly imagined caveman past which is good and there's modernity

00:18:19.540 which is bad and the like eons of changing and permutation that have happened in between like

00:18:25.720 necessarily have to be erased right because if all of human history is this series of

00:18:31.220 like mutually reinforcing and informing changes then your idea of a static pre-social pure past

00:18:39.200 becomes kind of unstable yeah yeah i mean so there's two points i think i'd make about that

00:18:44.700 so one is this is why i think i mean i don't want to speak for all historians but i think why

00:18:50.500 you don't get you don't hear from historians that often about this right like historians of

00:18:55.180 masculinity do exist that they basically were like well i'm sorry are you talking about the 1570s or 0.92

00:18:59.320 the 1590s right like they're very attuned to the fact that this shit always changes but of course 0.68

00:19:04.240 like a little bit in defense of jordan oh god what am i saying a little bit of jordan peterson

00:19:09.040 go for it yeah like of course like the one place where this is true right like i have knowledge of

00:19:15.340 what the world view and the world of my parents is like and i have a slightly fainter sense of

00:19:20.340 what my grandparents life and world must have been like that becomes extremely hazy when i get to my

00:19:26.500 great-grandparents and my great-great-grandparents i'm like i have no fucking clue what they were

00:19:29.920 even called right so like that is in our own psychology in our own family this does tend to

00:19:34.920 be true right that like things disappear into the haze of the forever like very quickly in either

00:19:41.780 direction right like i have a i know a lot about my own daughter i have a conception of what her

00:19:46.600 children could be like but then it gets very fucking hazy i'm like i'm guessing they'll have

00:19:50.280 transporter beams and uh you know tachyon impulses or whatever i don't know like i've i've not watched 0.50

00:19:56.320 that much star trek right like in some way it kind of makes sense that of all people someone

00:20:01.160 who studied a lot of psychology would find this persuasive but that's maybe giving him too much

00:20:06.140 credit because like there's a bunch of people who did not uh you know go in for their freud who

00:20:09.600 still act as though like until seneca falls basically like humanity had like one way of

00:20:15.180 doing things and then like yeah it was fine until you meddling kids came around yeah the second 0.66

00:20:21.520 point i'd make is just that in some way with someone like peterson i think that feminism to

00:20:26.520 him and this is he's gonna he's taking that from nietzsche to some extent and we'll talk about that

00:20:30.380 in our episode on nietzsche he doesn't think that it's all feminism's fault he thinks that feminism

00:20:34.440 is like a symptom of a bigger problem which is modernity right he thinks that like yeah what

00:20:41.460 has happened is like you know humanity used to be dominated by far more organic and sort of like

00:20:46.180 spontaneously grown structures right it used to be a lot more beholden to tradition and feminism

00:20:52.320 destroyed both of these but so did industrialization so did massification sort of urbanization and i'm

00:20:58.200 pretty sure jordan peterson isn't wild about any of those either right so like they often sort of

00:21:02.320 see it as one more right these are the four horsemen of the apocalypse are basically feminism

00:21:06.880 there's socialism always in there right because it makes everyone the same right like so i don't 0.90

00:21:11.560 think they are giving betty fridan all this power uh that'd be nice it'd be lovely uh but no they're

00:21:17.060 basically saying i don't know how lovely but you know i can think of other people i'd rather give

00:21:21.720 it that you know yeah but i mean like but it's in some way like it's even worse because it's saying 0.69

00:21:25.220 like oh basically it's not that even the agency of women is threatening us it's like the women are

00:21:29.840 grabbing this agency because of this bigger this bigger shift and in western civilization right

00:21:35.360 Or corruption. Yeah. And women are just symptoms or tools, which I think we'll come back to over and over. And I like that you're really encapsulating what I think makes creep the appropriate label for this kind of masculinity, which is that he is advocating really for a total transformation. It's like a very radical vision if you take it to its logical conclusion, right?

00:21:57.360 Yeah. You start asking questions like, well, how does Jordan Peterson feel about like settled agriculture? You know, it's like he's he's like very expansive, very ambitious in his pursuit of a pure of a purity, like a form of masculine purity.

00:22:15.660 yes and no right i mean like on the other hand he doesn't lay that out i think in the book ever

00:22:21.820 and and i don't know if he's ever said publicly like yeah the implications of this that you're

00:22:26.520 drawing out are terrifying but that's the that is the other thing about these sort of anti-modernity

00:22:30.900 thrust of these creeps you get that a little bit also in people like curtis yarwin who's another

00:22:34.740 sort of big tech creep they're basically unhappy with certain aspects of modern society without

00:22:41.220 saying what that would mean it is a deeply it's reactionary politically but it's also reactionary

00:22:45.900 just in its own affect right it's basically pouting it's like i don't like all these things

00:22:50.820 we did i'm just gonna be in the court i'm gonna take my toys and go home right like like it's true 0.60

00:22:55.920 if you draw the political implications of this is fucking terrifying they very rarely well yarwin 0.56

00:23:00.140 does but like largely these people don't do it right they're just like i just want to register 0.60

00:23:04.500 that i'm unhappy with this right like it's it's like those weird like trad accounts on twitter

00:23:08.800 which are always like what's keeping our churches from looking like this and when you're like you're 0.98

00:23:12.220 a fucking fascist like i just like good nice things is that so bad right it's like well yeah 0.99

00:23:16.900 the implication is obvious but it's quite possible you're lying to yourself about it too yeah i'm 0.99

00:23:21.240 wondering if because some of these guys will come out and say like actually i think we should use

00:23:27.080 all of silicon valley's new technology to instill a monarchy and uh you know yeah exactly and some

00:23:35.620 of them just go out right out and say i think that's curtis yarwin does identify as a monarchist

00:23:39.120 and that's you know the sort of peter thiel of it all is that there are people who are sort of

00:23:43.200 avowedly and you know i guess to some degree you have to say honestly taking these ideas to their

00:23:46.960 logical conclusion but with people like peterson do you think that he is concealing his hand or do

00:23:52.940 you think that he hasn't thought that far ahead i think it's i think it's a mixture of the two i

00:23:57.420 think that if you're privileged enough in society you don't have to really answer that question for

00:24:01.660 yourself, right? Might it be that some of these people really would kind of gulp if they woke up

00:24:07.740 one morning and their vision was realized? It's possible, right? It is very noticeable that this

00:24:12.520 kind of conservative dissidence, right? The do it without me, right? Is an extremely pretty easy

00:24:18.960 gesture because you don't have to ever take responsibility for anything. That extends to

00:24:23.080 someone like Peter Thiel, right? Who like, right, big Trump booster and he's like, oh, I'm disappointed

00:24:28.300 about him like i i don't i don't support this anymore it's like this is always how it goes like 0.93

00:24:32.020 i had high hopes and then i got disappointed yeah it's a fucking easy grift in order to like 0.71

00:24:36.880 never have to take responsibility for anything that you know you claim to have want to have 0.57

00:24:41.340 happened and of course like part of this is like epathe le bourgeois right like it's the idea is

00:24:45.760 you want to you want to trigger the libs right and like that that's part of the creep persona

00:24:50.980 too that like they're like how serious am i lol that's for you to find out you know snowflake

00:24:56.280 right and it's like i don't know like i feel like whether or not that claim is being made seriously

00:25:01.940 or not is pretty central and i have a really hard time grappling with thought that's like

00:25:07.540 always like one step away from just like declaring they just did it for the lols right i don't read

00:25:12.420 emmanuel kant and he's like lol you're still reading my first critique it's all a joke and 0.97

00:25:17.340 you're like well fuck you i'm not reading this right like but i think that that's part of the 0.98

00:25:21.600 creep too that like you know you never know like does peter thiel really want to abolish women's 0.99

00:25:26.220 suffrage you never know how sincere they are yeah and that's you know part of what they do is they

00:25:31.520 hide behind deniability i like your point out of like triggering the libs owning the libs because

00:25:36.520 this is going to be a recurring theme it's like each bucket of conservative masculinity has its

00:25:41.860 own style of like deliberately provoking and rejecting and sort of reveling in the rejection

00:25:49.180 of like liberal banners right like the preach preacher says he does it you know out of christian

00:25:55.020 principle the creep will deny whether he means it or not and the perv will do it and claim that you

00:26:00.060 know this is uh his own irrepressible authenticity but they they all require and solicit this like

00:26:08.080 outraged rejection by like a perceived ideological enemies yeah and with peterson like the the fact

00:26:15.160 that it's really hard to tell what he means and how he means it is, I think, far more central than

00:26:21.780 maybe even for the other two people we're going to look at. Because in some way, he has real

00:26:26.160 trouble with the meaning of meaning. For that, I kind of wanted to briefly talk about a different

00:26:29.900 book that's maybe was less of a bestseller. Let's say this is Peterson's first book, Maps of Meaning

00:26:34.580 from 1999. Was this his dissertation? It probably was. Yeah. I mean, it's long as hell. So I can't

00:26:41.240 imagine that it's like 600 pages of basically kind of a pop jungianism i would say and frankly

00:26:49.100 some of the most unreadable pro and i mean you know literature professor speaking here i've seen

00:26:53.340 some unreadable prose in my life and this is fucking grim yeah the excerpt that you put in 0.78

00:26:58.160 our planning doc i was i had to read it like four times i was like trying to diagram these sentences 0.89

00:27:03.360 it's very difficult in some way i might do like the literature professor here thing here and like

00:27:07.980 I'll read the whole passage and I would invite our listeners to kind of

00:27:10.800 think about, like, just let it work on them.

00:27:12.660 Like, even if you're not following, which you very well might not,

00:27:15.940 and it's not your fault, but like, just see how that,

00:27:18.160 what the language is doing. Right.

00:27:20.060 So this is from page 137 of his book.

00:27:22.540 Mythic symbols of the chaos of the beginning are imaginative pictures

00:27:25.840 whose purpose is representation of a paradoxical totality, a state,

00:27:30.720 which is already to say something too determinate, self-contained,

00:27:33.940 uniform and complete, where everything now distinct resides in union.

00:27:37.980 A state where being and non-being, beginning and end, matter and energy, spirit and body,

00:27:42.720 consciousness and unconsciousness, femininity and masculinity, night and day, remain compounded

00:27:47.560 prior to their discrimination into the separable elements of experience.

00:27:50.960 In this state, quotation marks, all conceivable pairs of opposites and contradictory forces

00:27:56.600 exist together within the all-encompassing embrace of an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent,

00:28:02.780 and altogether mysterious god.

00:28:05.280 So, wow.

00:28:07.980 it's deep man yeah we could say a lot about this we could do we could do a lot to parse it but i

00:28:12.680 think that the first thing that i hope people are noticing is he revels in these like it's this it's

00:28:18.880 this it's this right like like we got to get to god we get to right being a non-being beginning

00:28:24.880 and end matter and energy spirit and body consciousness and unconscious and then also

00:28:28.160 of course masculine and femininity with peterson often get these kind of lists what he i think

00:28:32.900 he's thinking about here you know just to give you a little bit of a gloss on this passage i don't

00:28:36.840 want to just sort of like make fun of it because it's like ultimately not not probably not wrong

00:28:41.760 as a point it's just i don't think it proves what he thinks it proves this is basically are you

00:28:45.840 familiar with tohu wabohu no i hope i'm not butchering that but that is the original of

00:28:50.780 when a genesis book one chapter two is rendered as without form and void right in the beginning

00:28:56.340 the world was without form and void and spirit of god floated upon the face of the deep and then

00:29:01.780 basically right god says let there be light and he divided the light from darkness right like he's

00:29:05.980 saying like there is this image, this idea, he's right to say that it's not a state. There's this

00:29:10.700 idea of a something that precedes the divisions that we make. I think he's right to say that this 0.96

00:29:18.640 idea exists, but you'll see as he goes on that basically he thinks this idea must exist and that

00:29:25.700 in fact it characterizes reality, right? Like you might say like, oh yeah, from a mythological

00:29:30.760 standpoint, like human beings do often come up with these stories about where like things that

00:29:35.060 we take to be absolutely opposed to each other, we're not opposed once upon a time, right? And

00:29:38.820 then something happened to split them apart, right? Like, that's an interesting enough point,

00:29:43.480 right? For a comparative mythologist, for instance. But he will end up saying that like,

00:29:48.360 oh, no, the making of distinction is actually the thing that we have to do this. And it really

00:29:53.500 actually describes reality, right? So this is important, because like, you know, another way

00:29:59.120 to put tohu wa bohu is just chaos, right? And with chaos, it happens all the time in Peterson,

00:30:04.140 and it shows up all the time in the 12 rules of life it's easy to think like he thinks oh without

00:30:09.060 this we will have chaos he's not necessarily thinking oh like people are gonna like throw

00:30:13.440 trash cans through shop windows or something like that right like oh this is chaos in here

00:30:17.160 he's probably thinking of this he's thinking of indistinction right though spoiler alert it very

00:30:22.820 quickly becomes the social description right like he's also thinking of of garbage cans put through

00:30:27.900 shop windows so it's this grand speculation about the origins of what human beings do when they make

00:30:33.880 the world mean something right when they sort of try to make sense of the world and basically it's

00:30:39.320 a theodicy of the binary it's saying not not necessarily of the of the gender binary but of

00:30:43.520 like any binaries what human meaning making is dependent on is us to say it's a not b right like

00:30:50.360 that's that's all we do and that's i think what he means by maps of meaning i as best i can tell

00:30:54.700 from the 180 pages of this in fairness he is listing the gender binary as one of the most

00:31:00.020 foundational of these divisions exactly and but i think this whole thing gets at what's so odd

00:31:05.160 about peterson and it feels perfect for our historic moment right like he doesn't say that

00:31:09.300 these are conceptual divisions of our world that are true and accurate they're rather the ones we

00:31:15.960 need to cling to in order to live even if they are totally bunk right even if they're complete

00:31:20.560 bullshit we have to stick to them why well because we've always clung to them basically they're in 0.94

00:31:26.020 our inheritance. They are our patrimony, our conceptual patrimony, right? This is actually 0.99

00:31:31.360 a fairly old project in its own right. And it's ironically a modern one, right? Like the romantics,

00:31:37.340 especially in Germany, but also in the UK, right? Like I think of someone like Friedrich Wilhelm

00:31:42.040 Josef Schelling, like we're interested in this project of a new mythology, right? Moderns, 0.55

00:31:46.760 they thought had broken away from myths and that had destroyed a certain coherence in our way of

00:31:52.760 being in the world right and we have to fix it but of course the romantics thought that meant that

00:31:58.140 you had to create a new mythology and we'll see that when we talk about Nietzsche like this is

00:32:02.860 supposed to be like you got to come up with new stories they don't have to be true but they have

00:32:06.400 to be they have to be meaning making they knew that you couldn't just go back right so they

00:32:12.140 wanted to find mythic forms that were adequate to the modern age and that you know weren't the old

00:32:17.840 ones right and peterson instead wants to just turn back the clock right he's like in order to

00:32:23.740 keep chaos at bay in order to make meaning make sense of our world in order to reassert our place 1.00

00:32:29.580 in it we have to will yourself to believe in absolute bullshit knowing that it is bullshit 1.00

00:32:35.980 and once you've convinced yourself that this bullshit is real the world will magically become 0.99

00:32:41.460 a better place that's pretty insane to me is this also from maps of meaning this other excerpt you 0.54

00:32:49.500 put in the doc here yeah exactly so here's one more if people want to hear more in maps meanings

00:32:53.120 this is from page 292 and again this has femininity in it it gives you a sense of how

00:32:56.860 basically the the gender binary works into this right all right i read it uh light and darkness 0.85

00:33:02.380 constitute mythic totality order and chaos and paradoxical union provide primordial elements

00:33:07.660 of the entire experiential universe.

00:33:10.240 Light is illumination, inspiration,

00:33:12.320 darkness, ignorance, and degeneration.

00:33:14.480 Light is the newly risen sun,

00:33:16.080 the eternal victor of the endless cyclical battle

00:33:18.640 with the serpent of the night.

00:33:19.940 It is the savior, the mythic hero,

00:33:21.700 the deliverer of humanity.

00:33:23.320 Light is gold, the king of metals,

00:33:25.420 pure and incorruptible,

00:33:26.520 a symbol for civilized value itself.

00:33:28.580 Light is Apollo, the sun king,

00:33:30.640 god of enlightenment, clarity, and focus, 0.99

00:33:32.800 spirit opposed to black matter,

00:33:34.760 bright masculinity opposed to the dark 0.67

00:33:36.620 and unconscious feminine.

00:33:37.660 light is marduk the babylonian hero god of the morning and spring day who struggles against

00:33:42.560 tiamat monstrous goddess of death i can't go yeah it goes on into egypt but like yeah you get the

00:33:48.300 he's accumulating all of these which also gives his own litany is this like transhistoric grandeur

00:33:54.980 yeah and it's basically just saying like this goes in column a and this goes in column b this

00:33:59.700 also goes in column a and this goes in column b you're like oh my god he evokes everything and

00:34:05.340 also imposes a very simplistic classification on it all and you can see why this honestly i mean

00:34:11.740 i say this now as someone who's written a book about the tech industry why this catches on with

00:34:15.440 tech people who like didn't take a whole lot of humanities classes but actually love kind of the

00:34:21.460 depth of thinking that deep humanistic learning can whether fairly or unfairly convey this is a

00:34:28.020 dumb person's idea of a smart text right it's like yeah congratulations but like that was on

00:34:34.560 hell of a ride on wikipedia wouldn't it put in the bennies and just click on open wikipedia and 0.96

00:34:38.740 just let it fucking rip but like it's it's ultimately saying like things fall into column 0.87

00:34:43.640 a or column b one having to do with order and enlightenment the other having to do with its 0.99

00:34:47.740 opposite like congrats you fucking lations bud like that that could have been that could have 0.69

00:34:52.080 been a footnote i'm interested in jordan's or i'm sorry jordan peterson's characterization of 0.98

00:34:56.720 femininity as chaos yeah because this is like whether masculinity is order or whether it's

00:35:02.980 it's like imposed discipline order or whether it is authentic generative like vivifying chaos is

00:35:10.460 something that we're going to come back to again because masculinity theorists can't really or

00:35:15.100 like masculinity advocates on the right can't really decide what they want it to be and they

00:35:19.980 switch between whether they want it to be super ego or id yeah kind of a lot uh and and jordan

00:35:27.140 seems or peterson god i keep calling him by his first name like we went to high school together

00:35:31.280 But Jordan Peterson seems very invested, at least here, in this idea of masculinity as an order to which there must be a kind of like a dutiful submission, right? 0.95

00:35:43.260 The idea that we know this meaning making is bullshit, but we are going to adhere to it anyway. 0.92

00:35:49.140 That's kind of self-advocating, right? 0.98

00:35:51.860 It's a little bit of a like get on your knees, which I think could bring us nicely to our part two.

00:35:56.680 i think that that's exactly right and it also i think it makes so obviously there's like 19 years

00:36:02.560 separating maps of meaning and 12 rules of life but like the idea that like this isn't just mean

00:36:08.720 like yes women are definitely not being treated very very nicely here but it's also above all an

00:36:14.580 admonition to young men right as you say like it's it's about your masculinity cannot be chaos

00:36:20.200 what you need to write like why do you need to clean your room because like well because marduk

00:36:24.280 brings order into feminine darkness like horus who fights against evil and redeems the father

00:36:33.660 i mean whatever yeah yeah this isn't this isn't saying like oh do let dudes be dudes it's like no 0.98

00:36:40.400 no dudes have to like as you say believe in this bullshit in order to discipline their own 0.92

00:36:45.100 masculinity so like both versions of that masculinity are in there but he's saying you 0.97

00:36:48.860 gotta like you gotta learn this basically but of course as you're pointing out like it's really

00:36:53.780 hard to tell why we should believe this right like why is this true right like if he means that

00:36:59.080 our symbolic and metaphoric system right what we in the biz call semiotics tend to categorize things

00:37:04.300 this way right like yes like there is a sense that like among the greeks masculine principles

00:37:10.460 were the ordering principles right if you think about someone like aristotle about what sperm

00:37:14.720 and egg do he thought like the sperm orders the material around that's like what that's it's the

00:37:20.040 form right not what actually happens in case any of our listeners missed uh fifth grade

00:37:25.080 aristotle was in fact incorrect again and again but that basically means like that's that's how

00:37:30.520 societies have sometimes made meaning but then again he uses it uses the term means to say like

00:37:37.300 he uses it basically in the transitive sense you know right it causes something it's really

00:37:41.920 interesting because that's that slip is basically the difference between a descriptive and a

00:37:45.520 normative claim right is this for better or for worse how humans of certain cultures have

00:37:51.020 understood people's place in the universe or is it an accurate understanding of our place in that

00:37:56.040 universe and like it's a very interesting kind of thing like he gets in his defense of these

00:38:00.900 old binaries he goes back and forth between like like we must believe this or else we'll all

00:38:08.560 dissolve into puddles of like dionysian like fuckery and at other times he's like oh no this

00:38:15.260 is actually true and you're like jordan that can't be right yeah let's let's leave them there we'll

00:38:22.620 be back with dr peterson at some point i'm interested that there is this slippage between

00:38:29.020 i'm telling the truth and i am providing you a quasi-arbitrary structure for yeah for ordering

00:38:36.900 your life or it's either an immutable like forceful truth about the world or it's a convenient tool

00:38:44.680 among other tools and there's like these are irreconcilable positions that he nevertheless 1.00

00:38:48.820 slips back and forth between yeah why why those myths there's also the myth of the matriarchate 0.74

00:38:53.720 why not just like reorder society to be a matriarchate because like that's also not true

00:38:58.420 like that also come on come on adrian you know why he doesn't choose the matriarch i know that

00:39:03.360 yeah and that gets us i think to our second example the preacher because he's still like

00:39:08.800 he believes in one true religion that's the only way if you're like we have to believe 0.98

00:39:13.400 a bullshit myth and it's this one well congratulations you just invented religion 0.89

00:39:18.460 right like like you basically came up with like what elevates this myths above all others is 0.99

00:39:24.860 that it's been revealed to you right it's revelation yeah he has that still in the

00:39:29.900 background without it seems to me well i guess he's taken a kind of christian turn but it seems

00:39:34.920 like even well before yeah i think so there's a video of him crying about it i didn't i didn't

00:39:38.880 what i can't well the creep the creep is usually not christian the creep is i think like an

00:39:43.860 interesting factor sometimes he tries to revive like euro paganism as part of like a white

00:39:49.960 supremacist effort more often he turns to the sort of dry rationalism he sees in science being like

00:39:57.680 dispassionate and christianity of course involves quite a bit of passion passion that some some uh

00:40:03.740 masculinist preacher men men in our second bucket of conservative masculinity have like actually

00:40:09.240 deemed a little bit effeminate and have tried to sort of wrestle back for these masculine virtues

00:40:14.420 so you want to talk about uh bucket two who's behind door number two bachelor number two behind

00:40:20.620 door number two we have a different kind of and i have to say that like maybe you read the same

00:40:25.480 book i did i don't know much about this guy um it's kind of an old book by now it came out the

00:40:30.140 same year as Maps of Meaning. This is Leon J. Pottles, The Church Impotent. The whole book is

00:40:35.400 online on his website if people want to read it. Who is Pottles? What do we know about him?

00:40:39.400 Very little. He seems to be a kind of a conservative intellectual. I don't think

00:40:43.080 he has an institutional affiliation. He has a PhD in English that emerges pretty clearly in the book.

00:40:48.520 He was raised Catholic, but as one reviewer of his book back in the day noted, quote,

00:40:53.140 now seems to be one of his own statistics of male Christian disaffection. So he's like,

00:40:57.220 where peterson is a putatively anti-religious thinker who is slowly finding religion and

00:41:01.840 probably is way more religious than he admits this is someone who starts from a religious standpoint

00:41:07.440 but might be more of a of a heretic than he gives himself credit for and i think it's this book uh

00:41:14.660 the church impotent which i didn't have on my radar at all before like is interesting i have

00:41:18.900 to say like i had never heard of this book before so i came across this and this is why i think it's

00:41:24.760 it's okay to talk about this,

00:41:27.040 even though it kind of,

00:41:27.900 it hasn't been sort of in the conversation

00:41:29.960 the same way that like Peterson has.

00:41:32.720 Rod Dreher is a really big fan of Hottles.

00:41:35.200 And I do think that Dreher is one of the-

00:41:37.580 Rod Dreher, a Catholic right-wing influencer.

00:41:39.800 Exactly.

00:41:40.700 Big Victor Orban fan,

00:41:42.440 big sort of trad masculinity guy,

00:41:44.360 recently got canceled by the right 0.99

00:41:45.980 for extensive writings on African-American penises. 0.97

00:41:51.020 Oh my God, I missed that. 0.96

00:41:52.520 Oh yeah.

00:41:52.800 Jesus, what?

00:41:53.320 yeah no it's um it turns out his sugar daddy cut him off because of um yeah it's worse than that

00:41:59.460 he was one of these guys fun with a funded right-wing blog and then he got into a uh like 0.98

00:42:05.360 dick eugenics kind of yeah yeah he's a dick he's a dick eugenics guy um but anyway so so he's someone

00:42:12.920 who sort of championed puddles frequently there are a couple of other sort of less well-known 0.99

00:42:17.660 right-wingers who sort of have kept the faith i don't know much about this author but like i did

00:42:22.080 also notice that he wrote a book about sexual abuse in the catholic church so i haven't read

00:42:26.760 it so i'm like kind of half worried that that he's going to decide it's gay people's fault or

00:42:30.360 whatever like so i don't want to like i guarantee you that i don't want to recommend that but like

00:42:34.220 i have to say anyone who wrote like i forget when he wrote it but like he wrote it early

00:42:37.740 like not jane o'connor early but like at a time when like no matter what your conclusion is if

00:42:42.360 you draw attention to this problem like you know a little bit of a tip of the hat to to you and

00:42:47.380 probably a little wag of the finger for what you blame for it because it's either betty for dan

00:42:50.660 or gay people so like it's one of those two things but still like he sounded the alarm on

00:42:54.940 this fairly early on you know so he's clearly an interesting guy and willing to be critical

00:42:58.820 of the church hierarchy as he is in the church he is that's right so this is his big book it

00:43:04.720 comes out 1999 yeah and it gets physically savaged by other sort of super conservative catholic

00:43:12.100 venues which i think is a nice indicator right that like these groups even within these groups

00:43:16.960 right they don't mean the only one thing by masculinity right like so i read one review

00:43:22.220 in crisis which is a conservative catholic lay magazine uh by charlotte allen what a name for

00:43:27.500 a magazine it's great right and that's yeah yeah charlotte allen is uh stanford class of 65 baby

00:43:33.080 and she absolutely ripped pottle's book apart right so i should mention allen is as far as i 0.98

00:43:39.600 can tell a super conservative catholic writer today mostly sort of busy in the transphobia 0.90

00:43:44.560 racket oh great here she is taking the the piss out of puddles right she's basically thinks this 0.99

00:43:50.080 is absolute bunk and then in first things which is like you know for those who don't know it 0.83

00:43:54.420 a christian magazine sole right wing uh it it openly contemplated armed rebellion over romer

00:44:01.020 v evans uh in 1996 that was a supreme court decision that said that the state of colorado

00:44:05.920 could not prohibit municipalities from putting sexual orientation provisions protections into

00:44:12.100 their local civil rights laws right yeah exactly when larry could no longer be fired for being with 0.90

00:44:16.180 steve they were like fuck it we're we're going we're going full january 6th over here i should

00:44:20.860 say that they they later i think retracted this this op-ed or this story or whatever but like 0.97

00:44:24.960 still it takes a little something to to print to hit print on that particular thing anyway

00:44:29.160 and then even in this you know pretty right-wing outfit uh the then associate editor daniel p

00:44:34.500 maloney called the book quote pretty silly stuff it's people who are very far to the right thinking

00:44:39.800 that this particularly very far to the right on gender thinking this stuff is a little wacky yeah

00:44:44.220 so here's the overall thesis which i think like i'm just gonna read you the beginning of the book

00:44:47.980 because it's i i don't know i think this is so fascinating because it says so much about

00:44:51.560 masculinity and christianity in the united states you and i as critics of the patriarchy are always

00:44:56.280 like oh it's this white christian patriarchy and like pottle's question is like wait how

00:45:00.840 christian is the patriarchy and how patriarchal is christianity and he's like not enough yeah

00:45:05.840 here's the beginning despite the constant complaints of feminists a.o about the patriarchal

00:45:12.640 tendencies of christianity men are largely absent from the christian churches of the modern western

00:45:17.420 world women go to church men go to football games lame men attend church activities because a wife

00:45:24.040 mother or girlfriend has pressured them so on the one hand like i like this opening because on the

00:45:29.120 one hand you're like i can think of like a million counter examples i'm like have you been to the

00:45:33.000 vatican like it's a bit of a sausage fest over there yeah he's he's talking about a an institution

00:45:37.640 that worships a god made of up of three persons all of whom we are instructed to think of as male

00:45:43.760 even the holy ghost who doesn't the holy ghost doesn't have a corporeal form but he's still a

00:45:49.540 guy is it a male male bird ghost yeah uh and then it's also an all-male clergy uh that specifically 0.88

00:45:57.560 prohibits women from preaching yeah based on a story about how women fucked it up for all of us

00:46:02.600 and how it brought sin into the world right like and are bearing the mark because of that but on

00:46:07.700 the other hand like i like it because like as a sociological observation like it definitely 0.89

00:46:12.080 resonates with something right like the church lady is like is definitely a thing right like 0.99

00:46:17.320 religiousness historically has been very a very feminized trait yeah early christianity spread

00:46:23.640 among women in the roman empire uh much more quickly than it spread among men and you know

00:46:28.760 That's right. A lot of people were converted by their mothers or wives, including Emperor Constantine, if I'm not mistaken.

00:46:34.540 Yes, converted by mom. And yeah, the flock is always majority women or most ardently women.

00:46:40.500 Yeah, which is an idea, by the way, that we will return to in Nietzsche.

00:46:43.880 That's one of his critiques of Christianity. It's a women's religion. 1.00

00:46:47.360 But then the other thing is, so Pottles here is pretty closely aligned with Nietzsche's picture of early Christianity.

00:46:52.820 But what's fascinating is he Americanized it in, I think, a very beautiful way,

00:46:56.200 which is to say, he's like, but the clergy are kind of nerds and aren't nerds kind of

00:47:00.940 Femi here, quote, the clergy have long had the reputation of not being very masculine.

00:47:05.120 The mainline liberal Protestant minister in the early 20th century had a reputation for

00:47:09.380 being soft and working best with women. 1.00

00:47:12.080 It's true, right? 0.94

00:47:12.800 Like you're reading, you're spending your day reading and coloring books in your monastery. 0.98

00:47:17.740 What are you, some kind of sissy, right? 0.88

00:47:19.660 Like we went out there and we smoked people and you went there, you were like, oh, I colored 0.99

00:47:24.220 a manuscript in purple.

00:47:25.340 Right. They're not getting eaten by lions the way they used to. He's definitely painting Christian clerics as insufficiently masculine. They're not performing physical labor. They are interacting with women too much. I also think it's important to note, even though he mentions Protestants here, I think it's important to note that he's a Catholic. He's criticizing Catholicism and Catholic priests have for a long time been sort of snickered at as gay men, even sort of apart from and beyond the

00:47:55.220 homophobic panic that resulted from within the church that resulted from the child abuse 0.76

00:47:59.540 revelations. This is a figure about the priest that predates that. It's like, what are they

00:48:04.840 all doing together in those seminaries where it's just a bunch of young men in one dorm room,

00:48:10.020 et cetera? Yeah. Full disclosure, I'm not Catholic. So I only see this from the outside,

00:48:14.100 but yeah, this sounds right to me. I grew up Catholic and I go to church maybe twice a year

00:48:18.760 now. It's one of the reasons I still go to church is because I'm trying to find a fun gay priest 0.75

00:48:23.140 who doesn't seem like a reactionary yeah nice i i know a couple nice ones yeah the other thing to

00:48:28.640 point out here maybe is that he's also not a fan of methodism like he thinks this is actually

00:48:32.320 infected a bunch of protestant denominations too usually the story about christianity that gets

00:48:37.060 told is like it was too feminine it was too feminized it got like the catholics got way

00:48:42.220 too into mary usually the reformation is the part of that story where christianity is redeemed for 0.95

00:48:48.720 manhood but that's not what he's doing history's greatest dick swinging or like someone breaks out 0.95

00:48:52.960 a hammer and it's like here are 95 theses that you're all going to hear about right like get rid 0.99

00:48:56.980 of the virgin and we let ministers become married men who get to fuck etc yeah but yeah i mean like 0.98

00:49:03.060 right like the idea of the reformation as kind of a remasculinization is not an uncommon reading and 0.97

00:49:08.160 pottles is not in bad company here i think that's how luther thought of it too but he sees like

00:49:12.500 methodism also as contaminated yeah yeah yeah certain kinds of protestantism are also too

00:49:16.960 feminine i want to just briefly show you something like i think very nicely something that you were

00:49:20.440 talking about earlier which is to say like where is the fork on the road where did we go wrong

00:49:23.920 according to Jordan Peterson like it's also fun to see like where did we go wrong according to 0.90

00:49:28.300 Mr. Pottles like it's kind of fun so first idea right like industrialization took women out of

00:49:33.100 the home right that'd be sort of the modernity argument that'd be probably what Peterson would

00:49:36.580 saying took women out of the home put them in the factory made dating possible etc etc put everyone

00:49:41.280 in giant tenement houses and big cities boom right tradition's dead okay no that's not it

00:49:47.040 Because even in the 19th century, the church was a largely female institution.

00:49:50.840 Throughout the 19th century, women outnumbered men in churches by about two to one, which

00:49:53.860 seems to have been the ratio even during the Second Great Awakening.

00:49:57.280 Okay, so could it be, you might say, the American Revolution, right?

00:50:02.580 Nope, wasn't that either.

00:50:03.880 Perhaps the American Revolution caused a decline in interest in religion among men because

00:50:07.780 republicanism meant the freedom not to defer to traditional hierarchical authority, whether

00:50:12.140 in the form of king, community, scion, or church.

00:50:14.340 He doesn't think that's true.

00:50:15.520 Interest in religion had been weak among men

00:50:17.560 almost from the beginnings of the English settlements.

00:50:20.480 Oh, man.

00:50:20.900 So we've got to keep going earlier.

00:50:22.340 We're going further back in time.

00:50:24.060 So maybe it was coming to America, 0.97

00:50:26.120 getting to meet a whole bunch of people who are not Christian.

00:50:28.240 Is that what did it? 0.99

00:50:29.340 Nope.

00:50:30.200 Quote,

00:50:30.700 the Britain from which the American colonists came

00:50:32.880 has long shown a similar lack of male interest in religion.

00:50:35.640 End quote.

00:50:36.020 We're going to keep on rewinding the VHS.

00:50:38.040 It's like,

00:50:38.180 where are we at this point?

00:50:41.340 Earlier, earlier, earlier.

00:50:42.780 So I think one very simple,

00:50:45.160 question for like figuring out i'll tell you where he thinks we went wrong and it's

00:50:48.700 prepare it not to be a big revelation because like it's pretty nerdy stuff but it's worth asking

00:50:54.820 like where was religion not kind of femi according to him where is he like was like oh that's a that's

00:51:01.000 a dude's religion right like i'm thinking of like medieval mystics like oh my god the anchoress

00:51:07.180 hildegard of bingen yeah like yeah shoot no i'm thinking of an english anchoress who wrote that

00:51:12.960 christ was similar to a mother that his love was motherly more than fatherly a lot of renaissance

00:51:18.440 depictions of the crucifixion yeah i'm sorry pre-renaissance depictions of the crucifixion

00:51:22.660 make the wound into like actually quite literally a vagina from which like you know the soul of

00:51:28.520 humanity is reborn this like generative power as well as like self-sacrificing love yeah gets cast

00:51:35.120 as femi but like like maternal it's it's jesus's mommy you know yeah and that's the bride of christ

00:51:42.380 right that there's that too the human soul is the bride of christ the church is a bride of christ

00:51:46.140 yeah so so i mean spoiler this isn't gonna mean much for listeners the the culprit here for him

00:51:51.900 is saint bernard of clairvaux um because he like scratch freeze for you know bernard of clairvaux

00:51:58.040 all along yep that's me saint bernard you're probably wondering how i got here feminizing 0.90

00:52:03.660 the church and so it's really weird like even i who like knows fuck all about church history is

00:52:09.840 like wait i also thought like he established a bunch of rules for like male monks to be like

00:52:13.780 more masculine but whatever like also i think was pro crusade which i feel like is one of the

00:52:18.520 swoller things christianity has done you would think he would be into the crusades it's like

00:52:22.740 you know masculinize like by colonizing and slaughtering a lot of non-believers you uh

00:52:28.380 re-masculinize a religion right so i think he thinks like apparently which i didn't know

00:52:32.980 bernard of clervo helped legitimate the cult of mary a lady for those playing along at home

00:52:38.440 and he was apparently very big into this idea of the human soul as the bride of christ right

00:52:43.200 so this idea that like now this devotion to as you point out three masculine entities had something

00:52:47.860 kind of gay about it you know mary redeems womanhood from ease exactly yeah it's a big

00:52:54.020 big sin no no no you have to keep hating women we can't have this out yeah we can 0.97

00:52:58.240 you know uh like them if they're if they're sufficiently virginal and self-sacrificing we 0.99

00:53:03.080 have to hate them all the time yeah so like after that right christianity is all about like

00:53:06.960 the lord filling you with his love right it's about receptivity it's about sentimentality

00:53:12.660 he's like none of that as you pointed out this gets corrected in the reformation right dude heavy

00:53:16.440 very active also very anti-mary and then gets reversed right back and then i should point out

00:53:21.980 that like all the catholic writers on the right that like respond to this book are like my man

00:53:27.580 you could move back like 200 years before 200 years before that like it's you just can't do it

00:53:33.760 right this doesn't work it's really kind of interesting right on the one hand right like

00:53:37.320 so he thinks he can make this kind of very very arbitrary break and basically the 12th century

00:53:43.020 i think for those of you who are not up on your bernard of clerville trivia his dates are 1090

00:53:48.660 to 1153 that's where things went wrong according to this book but it is worth kind of asking like

00:53:54.940 where does he think like religion is still kind of manly and i think that's it's kind of an

00:54:01.220 interesting question right like one thing that he's clearly got in mind and this is i think where

00:54:04.580 someone like rod dreyer is an interesting kind of disciple of this kind of view of christianity

00:54:10.740 i think one answer must be eastern orthodox right he thinks that that's right like it's got a

00:54:15.940 patriarch in moscow right like it's it's got patriarchy right in the name like that's still

00:54:20.420 a dude's religion he also um judaism for him comes out of the east the idea that the real true

00:54:25.900 religions in the east and basically the west has sort of has fallen away as feminized this

00:54:30.240 institution you know there are interesting kind of echoes of Nietzsche there too but Nietzsche

00:54:34.140 means it very differently and then the interesting thing given that this thing comes out of 1999 I

00:54:38.140 don't think he mentions Islam at all and I do think that is something that like conservative

00:54:42.660 Christians in 1999 would have thought of right that like that's a non-feminized religion that

00:54:48.240 is a religion that like to their mind puts women in their place right like right and like why can't

00:54:52.880 we do that like that's interesting here too but again I don't want to put words in Pottle's mouth

00:54:56.580 he doesn't mention it what exactly are his uh prescriptions for the church my guess is he wants

00:55:02.080 certain liturgy and certain emphases to shift right like peterson is also just trying to like

00:55:06.340 diagnose a a problem right i think that the kind of barb from charlotte allen's review right like

00:55:12.920 that he seems to be one of his own statistics of male christian disaffection she's got his number

00:55:17.580 right like in some way he's saying like that's why i'm no longer an enthusiastic churchgoer can

00:55:24.360 you blame me right like it's it is this kind of it's unclear whether he's trying to reverse this

00:55:29.000 trend or justify it you know and saying no you brought it in yourself by like all this mary 0.94

00:55:32.980 shit too too many ladies uh in church yeah it's interesting that you've mentioned his reverence 0.96

00:55:38.860 for like the more masculinized eastern orthodox church because this is something that you know 0.99

00:55:44.220 as catholic clergy in america splits between the hard right and the super duper hard right

00:55:49.020 There are some very conservative Catholics who are now refusing. They're only going to Latin Mass. They are only taking communion in Eastern Orthodox churches. They're trying to do the Reformation again in a miniature way, trying to reform a corrupt institution to make it more conservative, less decadent, more masculinized.

00:56:11.620 It's something we're recurringly coming back to is masculinity as a kind of purification ritual on the right.

00:56:19.020 I would love to ask a scholar of Orthodox Christianity whether or not this is at all

00:56:39.980 accurate. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this were a pure projection. But on the other hand,

00:56:43.680 this is why a lot of Christian conservatives do look to places like Russia as a model,

00:56:47.640 right like this is the idea that religion and society are interlaced in ways that like

00:56:52.120 to them feel traditional or pre-modern but still christian right is to them extremely extremely

00:56:57.300 powerful so i think there are like three reasons why this book is interesting even though it's a

00:57:02.240 bit of a footnote again no theologian here but i don't think the theology of the church impotent

00:57:07.720 is super convincing but that's because as you were saying it is ultimately a psychological theory of

00:57:13.540 manhood femininity he thinks is all about like envelopment communion you know togetherness

00:57:20.540 you know touchy-feely things right whereas masculinity he says it's about separation

00:57:25.720 the more distant a god is right like the the more he models masculinity for us right and and

00:57:32.200 it's very very noticeable that like that's not not a theology and as theology it's pretty bad

00:57:36.360 it is a theory of like child rearing ultimately right just to give people an example of what how

00:57:41.700 pottle sort of arranges this like he thinks of the crucifixion is just like super butch this is god

00:57:46.600 separating a part of himself out into the person jesus and when that part says like hey i don't

00:57:55.360 really want to get nailed to something can we skip that part right like my father if it is possible

00:57:59.860 let this cup pass from me right matthew 26 39 there's basically no answer right he's like no

00:58:05.040 bud you're gonna have to do it sorry the agony in the garden that prayer is not answered it's like

00:58:10.040 no you cannot be relieved from this difficult task you have to man up and face it yeah exactly

00:58:15.480 and and dad's just not going to be there for it the crucifixion is also the separation of christ

00:58:21.140 from mankind it's like you're tearing away the savior he like he comes back but then he leaves

00:58:27.600 you he leaves you twice yeah right which is like you know honestly always the opposite understanding

00:58:33.900 of you know again no theologian i've never been to catholic school i've barely ever even been to

00:58:39.120 Catholic church but like I think of the crucifixion as the opposite maybe this is because I've read

00:58:42.860 Simone Weil as like the most absurd gift right like that someone could give right like that it's

00:58:50.240 a moment of generosity on such a stupendous and cosmic scale that it kind of mirrors the way that 0.67

00:58:56.980 we get to exist it's like why the fuck do I exist that's so cool right like it's it's this it's this 0.87

00:59:02.520 ultimate gift but that's not that's not how he sees it. Totals would say that that is the 0.93

00:59:07.500 the femmed up weak I know version of Christianity uh Simone Weil famously weak yeah um yeah

00:59:14.540 and that it's it's much more about like the the stern father yeah foregoing mercy refusing and 0.50

00:59:21.880 so exactly you're right that what's interesting is that this is basically a self-help guide for

00:59:25.300 how to be a man disguised as a history of Christianity and I think that's something

00:59:29.980 that's true for a lot of conservative writing about gender these days including someone like

00:59:35.360 Jordan Peterson, and, you know, the Pottles fan, Rod Dreher. I think that, like, a lot of their

00:59:40.500 Christianity is just self-help. You know, they're asking, like, oh, what is the role of the church

00:59:45.940 in the modern world? And really, they're saying, like, I feel myself falling short of certain

00:59:50.540 conceptions of manhood. What can I do about that, right? And I think it's so noticeable, right,

00:59:55.160 that in 1999, right-wing Catholic magazines go out of their way to savage this book, right?

01:00:01.720 they're so offended by this idea they think this is such bunk they're like the history doesn't work 0.88

01:00:06.220 out the theology is bullshit like come on man right and in the intervening you know 22 years 0.78

01:00:13.480 i think this idea has become way more acceptable because of people like peterson like i do think 0.98

01:00:18.580 that someone like maloney right like is offended by the idea that you would try to psychoanalyze

01:00:23.940 your own neuroses through the bible he's like this is the to him this is the revealed word of god 0.55

01:00:29.860 he's like this is not about like how like how to work through shit with your father i'm sorry 0.90

01:00:34.660 right it seems the right has turned around on this like peterson's is the same thing but like 0.75

01:00:38.820 it's completely acceptable dreher is the same thing has become completely completely acceptable

01:00:42.820 there's something very interesting going on here in that regard it sort of inverts peterson's idea

01:00:48.000 about submitting to that's right that's right yeah like power of meaning that is that is greater than

01:00:55.520 herself right and it turns christianity's practice of submission to the salvation of jesus into this

01:01:03.560 much more manly sort of enforcement of divine will yeah yeah where peterson won't acknowledge

01:01:09.720 to himself how much christianity is in his self-help stuff puddles in some way doesn't or

01:01:14.080 at least his catholic critics think he doesn't acknowledge to himself how much self-help is in

01:01:18.280 his catholicism yeah so that's the first reason where i think like this is actually an interesting

01:01:21.780 book because it shows how far we've traveled and it in some ways sets up things that like

01:01:27.460 have become absolutely widespread in the way we think about masculinity from the right today

01:01:32.420 the second reason and this is another one where pottles may well have been kind of ahead of his

01:01:37.240 time right i'm going to quote again from the maloney review in first things quote pottles

01:01:42.200 needs to locate the beginning of feminization in the 12th century with bernard rather than the

01:01:48.080 fourth with Ambrose or the third with Origen because he wants to show that Christianity is

01:01:53.460 not inherently off-putting to men. That's Maloney in First Things. So that means there has to be,

01:01:59.440 we talked about like how hard it is to sort of say where the wrong turn lies.

01:02:02.900 But there always has to be an origin that was pure.

01:02:05.620 Exactly, right? That's exactly it. There has to be a wrong turn because the essence of

01:02:10.620 Christianity must be masculine and must be swole, right? 0.95

01:02:13.740 It cannot be like messiness and complication all the way down. 0.88

01:02:16.540 There has to be an original core that is more true than these subsequent complications.

01:02:23.060 Exactly.

01:02:23.460 The idea that maybe this is true. 0.93

01:02:25.600 Maybe religious devotion has always been coded kind of feminine. 1.00

01:02:30.940 Like that's the thing that you can't allow, right? 0.99

01:02:32.600 You can hear that story where you're like, well, yeah, people reading books and whispering

01:02:37.560 to themselves in quiet corners is not the butchest thing you can do, right?

01:02:44.760 And like, so yeah, maybe any religious observance has something quote unquote feminine about

01:02:49.500 it or whatever.

01:02:50.100 Like if that's your taxonomy, right?

01:02:52.640 That's the thing he won't allow himself.

01:02:54.660 And it's interesting, again, that his reviewers like seem all repelled by this.

01:02:57.880 They're like, no, Christianity is not swole, but I'm sorry, right?

01:03:00.680 Like you're thinking of pumping iron and it's not, this is the Bible, right? 0.98

01:03:06.620 At the same time, I keep thinking here of like, also think of like how Christians reacted

01:03:11.000 to the passion of the christ the mel gibson movie which was also this i wonder if like there is

01:03:15.960 something similar in the background there which was this like reimagining of the crucifixion along

01:03:20.200 pottle's lines right like as like this make it a masculine masculine like yeah like a weightlifting

01:03:26.060 competition except bloodier right like this is it's it's a test of manliness you know test of

01:03:31.180 manhood i think that it might well be true that the you know catholic intelligentsia at the time

01:03:36.220 was like kind of offended by this and thought this was deeply silly it feels like pottle probably

01:03:40.740 tapped into something there right because like i do think that the the mel gibson version of this

01:03:45.560 is far more acceptable today than it than it was even when that movie came out yeah it was a uh

01:03:50.920 it was almost like rubbernecking the pain of the crucifixion it made it into this like gory

01:03:55.900 titillating spectacle because it was so violent yeah uh and it that was a move away from the sort

01:04:03.700 traditional like okay i'm gonna go to church where there's like sanctified eucharist on the

01:04:10.560 altar and i'm gonna go pray and like contemplate christ's love as demonstrated in the crucifixion 0.92

01:04:17.060 that's a very different exercise and sitting down to watch a guy get the shit beat out of him which

01:04:22.700 is what mel gibson's film asked you to do yeah well and i mean that's why it's so interesting

01:04:27.140 that it is a mel gibson film right because like he had gone to that well before right braveheart

01:04:30.980 ends with him being tortured to death what's that one payback or something like that where he gets

01:04:34.980 like just like the shit knocked out of him like mel gibson had a penchant for this before the 0.55

01:04:39.640 passion of the christ which in some way makes the crucifixion scene all the more interesting because 0.80

01:04:43.520 like in some way it's saying like it's a test of masculinity jesus christ action yeah he's like

01:04:49.720 buff for the marvel yeah exactly so that's my second reason where i think like this is actually

01:04:54.120 fairly prescient in that sense that this kind of swole crucifixion or like butch crucifixion like

01:04:59.260 clearly has become more acceptable in certain parts of the right than it was back then then

01:05:05.720 the third reason why i think this book is still interesting and we're thinking about and grappling

01:05:09.460 with so he thinks basically this goes back to the point you were making earlier that the development

01:05:14.040 he's tracing has been bad for christians but he also blames all kinds of societal ills on it

01:05:19.360 right and i kind of alluded to this like at times his book can read like sort of robert putnam's

01:05:24.420 bowling alone right like are men okay are they they're not going to church they're going to

01:05:28.840 football and then they like won't talk about their feelings and then they kill themselves

01:05:33.960 or something i don't know like you know you can imagine like a kind of you know a version of that

01:05:37.300 but at others he's going much farther blaming essentially nationalism and nazism on the

01:05:43.440 unmoored men that were no longer served by or attracted to the church right this is great

01:05:48.900 because in our episode on sontag we had adrian rich talking about how patriarchy was central to

01:05:57.420 the rise of nazism and a core part of of nazi ideology and now here we have just a portal

01:06:03.240 saying that feminization is the cause of nazism uh and you know nazis always come up eventually

01:06:11.000 all you girls were taking up the confessional so i just walked off

01:06:15.160 it's your fault yeah i just goose stepped mom you were never home because you were always in church

01:06:22.520 and so i i i i've got and joined the nazi party uh on the other hand so like in this defense so 0.86

01:06:29.780 it's like a little little silly on the other hand it's interesting right it's very clearly

01:06:33.520 a kind of church supremacist view he's like he's not right unlike rod dreyer for instance

01:06:38.600 he's not actually comfortable with like a state being oh we'll help you fill the pews right like

01:06:43.000 he's like oh no no no he does seem to think that like render on to caesar what is caesar's and god

01:06:47.260 what is god's right and then i want to briefly sort of say something a little bit controversial

01:06:52.160 possibly which is like it strikes me that like we on the left tell the story about unions all the

01:06:57.800 time right like men used to hang out in union halls and then like when we like around like not

01:07:02.220 around nazism necessarily but around like right-wing populism right like like and then when

01:07:06.500 the unions declined like people went off and like went maga right right like the sense that there

01:07:12.460 were virtuous institutions that were receptacles for masculinity right and that these had to remain

01:07:18.800 appropriately masculine and appropriately powerful to attract yeah exactly but there was a decline

01:07:24.440 and now the men are off using that masculine energy for violence and degradation that's a

01:07:29.860 very common story yeah men without a hobby the man without a hobby theory of fascism

01:07:35.020 well there's also like this also comes up every now and then after a mass shooting there's like

01:07:42.680 this guy had nothing to do and the suggestion it's like always a barely unspoken suggestion

01:07:50.140 is that this is that women's advancement women's pursuit of you know self-actualization women's

01:07:57.940 integration to uh things like you know everything from the church to the education to the industry

01:08:02.820 has like a displaced men yeah and left them without purpose now that men cannot dominate 0.83

01:08:09.480 those institutions they will secure their domination with violence it will be a mass 0.84

01:08:13.940 shooting it will be nazism it will be something and that's not that's like always a hostage

01:08:17.600 situation you know a little bit it's like let us dominate the world or we will take that

01:08:22.920 domination by force yeah and there's this is like the sense in a lot of these crisis of masculinity

01:08:29.060 pieces that we discussed on our last episode you know the sense i think underneath a lot of these

01:08:34.520 like masculinity genre texts we're reading today is like men are somehow dangerous yeah and need

01:08:42.000 to be redeemed from their danger yeah and especially when they're alone right like we

01:08:46.500 might think that pottles is a bit of a crank for the bernard of clairvaux stuff but like in his

01:08:51.420 defense we tell the story of like how unmoored masculine energy not tethered to some kind of

01:08:57.940 community building project is actually really dangerous like and we tell that story all the

01:09:02.460 time right they're like you could have taken him out on a date to the hop right it was either date

01:09:08.540 at the hop milkshakes at the hop or school shooting and you know i i guess i guess you were too good

01:09:13.860 to date him or something like that right like like we we do this all the time like yeah so it's all

01:09:17.740 your fault yeah the idea that like this kind of radical energy of of especially young masculinity

01:09:23.640 like needs binding like he's not alone in that and needs management by these management often by

01:09:31.260 women or like some kind of sacrifice on women's part in order to contain its danger yeah so maybe

01:09:37.620 that's enough to say about church impotent i i must admit i i had a lot of fun with this book

01:09:41.780 i always love books that just kind of like have big theses and like are willing to swing for the

01:09:46.320 fences when a person who's never been to sunday school in his life can debunk your book you know

01:09:51.760 maybe you should have done some more reading on the other hand it is very well written unlike

01:09:55.620 peterson i knew exactly what he was saying it's beautifully organized so if people find this an

01:10:00.160 interesting set of ideas to grapple with. I can only recommend it. It's actually, it's a quick

01:10:04.560 and fun read. And I don't know if Mr. Pottles is still alive, but like I come on the pod. We thought

01:10:10.180 it was pretty neat. Yeah. We'll have fun with you, Mr. Pottles. Yeah. All right. So that's number

01:10:16.060 two. Who's our perv? Our pervert is a unique character, very different from Pottles, but maybe

01:10:23.760 not so different from jordan peterson he's a uh 20th century novelist and a pioneer of new

01:10:30.980 journalism adrian what do you know about this guy named norman mailer i know a little bit i've read

01:10:36.120 a few novels i i don't i don't think i ever fully like you know i'm not from the united states and

01:10:42.740 like he's always loomed so large for like people studying american literature and i've i i've

01:10:49.900 always only encountered him as like someone a few of whose books i've read but like i know he like

01:10:53.960 looms just like way beyond that i've read the naked and the dead i've read i think the executioner's

01:10:59.340 song read some of the new journalism stuff though i don't think i've read as much of him as i've

01:11:05.420 read of like didion or thompson or wolf i remember at some point reading that the essay the white

01:11:11.300 negro which like i couldn't make heads or tails of at all yeah it's like one of the most baffling

01:11:16.740 things i've ever read to be honest and then i uh i remember a few years ago noticing that uh at 0.73

01:11:22.180 least at that time on his wikipedia page the fact that he stabbed his wife uh was under personal

01:11:28.060 life which i thought was like pretty telling in terms of how this man's public persona and his

01:11:34.060 evident problems with women were sort of um you know brought into alignment in certain ways yeah

01:11:39.800 it's interesting that you say that he sort of seems to lean loom large for americans because

01:11:43.940 Norman Mailer was a writer who assigned himself the task of, you know, capturing the mid-century American soul.

01:11:54.500 Right.

01:11:55.000 His most famous novel, The Naked and the Dead, is his first novel, which is a chronicle of World War II.

01:12:00.600 He did serve in World War II.

01:12:01.800 And he then sort of went on to become a new journalism, sort of like narrative, novelistic journalism figure alongside the likes of Joan Didion.

01:12:13.660 And he gets compared to Truman Capote a lot in the style of his nonfiction.

01:12:18.620 But his books sort of got weirder and they got worse as he progressed in his career.

01:12:26.180 And particularly he got more and more fixated on sexuality.

01:12:32.060 His sex scenes are many and lurid. 0.61

01:12:35.260 And that's the other thing I know about him. 0.66

01:12:36.900 He's won the bad sex writing award a bunch of times.

01:12:39.600 Yeah, yeah.

01:12:40.080 And he's kind of grouped in with this group of guys, group of novelists who are sort of cheekily referred to as the mid-century misogynists.

01:12:48.240 Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Philip Roth, and John Updike are the sort of big four mid-century misogynists.

01:12:55.820 And what sort of really seen, Norman Mailer is like Jordan Peterson in that he is a guy of very intense passions and very poorly regulated emotions who seems like not always entirely in touch with reality.

01:13:08.320 So he, part of his persona that like also became part of his sort of legend around 1960s and 70s New York is that he was kind of like, like clearly unraveling really terrible issues with addiction, involuntary commitments, things like that.

01:13:21.260 he eventually decamped to Provincetown, Massachusetts. And he is most famous, probably

01:13:27.920 to our listeners, for this piece called The Prisoner of Sex, which is a book-length essay

01:13:35.520 he wrote in the third person defending himself from the literary critic Kate Millett, who was

01:13:43.020 sort of one of the big intellectual titans of the second wave feminist movement, who wrote a book

01:13:48.960 on misogyny in American literature called Sexual Politics that was divided between three authors, 0.62

01:13:55.760 one of whom was Norman Mailer. So he was a very avowed anti-feminist. He was also a figure of

01:14:01.800 the political left. He was very staunchly anti-Vietnam War. He ran for the mayor of New

01:14:09.240 York City twice. His first campaign was derailed after he attempted to murder his second wife,

01:14:15.880 adele morales who was a painter and a writer he stabbed her in the chest and then in the back

01:14:23.540 uh late at night at a party for his mayoral campaign and when partygoers tried to help 1.00

01:14:29.860 adele morales he pushed them off of her and screamed let the bitch die he did not go to 0.98

01:14:35.820 prison he got three years of probation wow by mailer's own account this was something that 0.99

01:14:41.220 everybody in the literary world kind of shrugged off yeah that's an interesting little bit right

01:14:45.300 Like I, at some point during Me Too, I remember rereading his account of this and like, it's

01:14:51.560 very interesting.

01:14:52.240 Cause like, I mean, it's, it's the opposite of one of those, like our canceled stories

01:14:55.060 in the sense that he's like.

01:14:56.140 No, he's like, it didn't matter.

01:14:57.680 Nobody didn't matter.

01:14:58.440 In fact, there's like some really kind of chilling quotes from famous members of his

01:15:05.120 literary community.

01:15:07.520 James Baldwin described it as sort of a psychologically necessary episode for Mailer.

01:15:13.720 diana and lionel trilling both justified the stabbing as an artistic exercise and mailer

01:15:21.140 said of himself the reactions were subtle as hell mailer told new york magazine of his literary

01:15:27.580 community's response to his attempted murder of his wife adele morales five degrees less warmth

01:15:32.660 than i was accustomed to not 15 degrees less five i mean which is you know kind of refreshingly

01:15:39.420 honest yeah refreshing observation uh like that does seem to be the way my friends were largely

01:15:44.560 chill about the about my attempted murder of a woman yeah adele morales survived she divorced

01:15:50.220 him and died in poverty they had two children together um and he went on to have that she was

01:15:55.580 his second wife he went on to marry four more times uh after that and the prisoner of sex which

01:16:01.820 i think we're going to be talking about one of his novels right which i haven't read but the

01:16:04.900 prisoner of sex really has when morris says like oh he was right to to defend himself against kid

01:16:10.700 billet like he's just attacking her for like 50 pages yeah no i'm being generous he is like 0.92

01:16:17.020 virulently misogynist unhinged goes off into these long-winded hypotheticals uh yeah it's not a it's

01:16:24.960 not a document made by a stable no man this is something i also like i also find kind of

01:16:29.600 uncomfortable about talking about with mailer as well as with peterson is that these are right

01:16:33.920 men who are very evidently in the throes of horrific addiction and who are not sane and who

01:16:39.400 are yeah and whose masculinity is clearly bound up with substance abuse too right i mean like right

01:16:43.860 yeah so i don't think that like this is not something i'm saying to excuse norman mailer

01:16:48.600 i'm glad he's dead i wish he died sooner and more painfully uh but um you know this is

01:16:55.920 somebody who is given a tremendous amount of authority in spite of being very clearly unwell 0.82

01:17:03.640 And I think something that has recurred in my study of conservative masculinity, the more I write about it, is that I find that a message whose content advances male supremacy and justifies misogyny and anti-feminism will be elevated to credibility even when the actual messenger is clearly not a person anybody should be listening to.

01:17:26.120 right no one uh cites the scum manifesto as like you know straightforward theory we're always like

01:17:32.440 yeah and she also you know shot andy warhol so there's that yeah and was living on the street

01:17:37.080 and ranting to herself you know this is not somebody who's like a role model you know this

01:17:40.880 is somebody who's suffering i'm seeing why this why this guy like is a good avatar for this because

01:17:45.960 a the rest of the world kind of saw him as that and saw it as like saw a serious intervention

01:17:52.100 something like prisoner of sex which like as you say like could just be like oh like we should

01:17:58.720 really get this guy help right and then this idea i remember he like called millet right like 0.87

01:18:03.580 barren and mediocre right this is the charge right feminism is barren and mediocre and like 1.00

01:18:09.920 my violent kind of misogyny is generative and creative right that's the perv in kind of 0.97

01:18:16.600 quintessence isn't it and if we're going to dignify the perv with an intellectual history

01:18:20.900 which I do think he has, he is really this kind of 20th century version of the perv embodied by

01:18:27.620 guys like Mailer is really, they are really sort of riffing on early Freud, right? They are thinking

01:18:32.900 of masculinity as, this is a contrast to Peterson, they're thinking of masculine virility and

01:18:38.360 particularly masculine sexuality as chaotic, as uncontrollable, as containing a darkness,

01:18:46.860 but also necessarily as sort of like generative, enticing and authentic, right?

01:18:52.140 It's like, it's like Satan in Paradise Lost, you know, it's like, it's like the fun thing

01:18:57.600 that is like a little more interesting and a lot more interesting and is like kind of

01:19:03.800 more authentic and in some ways more worthy, but which is suppressed by these civilizational

01:19:08.960 factors.

01:19:09.380 So this is like masculinity as id and femininity as super ego in the, in the perverse conception

01:19:15.920 of the world.

01:19:16.860 The thing about Mailer, his masculinity was very much about like a sort of vulgar but authentic imposition on feminized liberal pro-politess, right?

01:19:29.220 Yeah.

01:19:29.440 And this is where he reminds me a lot of Donald Trump, right?

01:19:32.200 Like, yeah, the I am going to use slurs, I'm going to say what everybody's really thinking, I'm going to disregard bourgeois conventions. And that's how you're going to know that I am virile and true and more real than this flimsy bullshit you're getting from the left, or in Mailer's case from feminism, barren and mediocre stuff. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So like, today, I want to talk about tough guys don't dance, which is a 1984 novel don't know from Norman Mailer. 0.97

01:20:02.200 it is it is minor mailer it is from later in his career it is something that he wrote

01:20:08.380 in two months it's like a murder mystery thriller threat in provincetown massachusetts 0.97

01:20:14.720 where mailer was living as a time and it is all about fucking it is a book about sexual politics 0.99

01:20:23.060 wait i'm sorry is it it's it's set in provincetown massachusetts and it's all about fucking it's all 1.00

01:20:28.340 about heterosexual fuck what what there is no such thing how dare you schmutz a province town 1.00

01:20:37.080 with your heterosexual sex i know it's such a tragedy but like what i like pairing this with 1.00

01:20:43.560 the podals because what the church impotent discusses in terms of metaphor which is like 0.83

01:20:48.580 masculinity as this solitary adventuresome disciplined force and femininity it's like

01:20:55.020 passive receptive languid that uh it's a it's a it's all metaphor and sort of a stylistic concern

01:21:03.200 for podals in the church impotent and for norman mailer in tough guys don't dance it is just like

01:21:09.180 completely literalized right as sex itself and that's like i think kind of true broadly for the

01:21:14.700 perv model right yeah like i have to apologize there's a kind of no way to talk about the ideas

01:21:19.460 that Mailer is advancing about what masculinity is in this book without being really crude because

01:21:25.980 it's a vision of masculinity that proceeds from the assumption that masculinity and femininity

01:21:31.200 are like metaphors or even destinies that are derived from like the actual mechanics

01:21:35.220 of sexual intercourse right so therefore like intercourse is their central site of meaning

01:21:40.340 making and achievement around masculinity so this is going to be the grossest section 0.52

01:21:45.000 of our show today so like that means for mailer that like if sex is the metaphor from which

01:21:50.120 masculinity and feminine derive which i think is actually a pretty foundational claim for a lot of

01:21:54.480 right-wing gender politics then the way that sex happens is of like massive symbolic importance

01:21:59.520 yeah and like that is realized in the perv model as this vision of masculinity is something that

01:22:05.320 needs to be proven again and again through sex as like a domination exercise right like sex is the 0.99

01:22:11.880 point fucking is the is what makes you a man is where you prove that you're a man tough guys don't 0.99

01:22:17.040 dance follows this guy tim madden who is like a mailer stand-in he's this like hard drinking tough 0.99

01:22:23.580 guy and he's trying to make it as a writer in provincetown mean streets of provincetown i know

01:22:29.200 uh and his background is that he had gone to prison for three years for drug trafficking and

01:22:35.200 remember that miller was sentenced to probation for three years for the stabbing and madden like

01:22:40.580 wakes up one morning in provincetown after a night out drinking he has no memory of the evening

01:22:45.980 before but he has a new tattoo the front seat of his car is covered in blood and he has this

01:22:52.100 ominous sense that something went wrong so what he does is he drives out to the boonies to this

01:22:57.740 like hole in the ground in the woods where he keeps his pot he like grows pot in the woods

01:23:02.580 harvests it keeps it all in this hole which is i guess something people did at the time so far

01:23:08.220 is probably just like a Monday for Norman Mailer.

01:23:10.940 Yeah, and in

01:23:12.320 The Hole in the Woods, he discovers the severed 0.85

01:23:14.260 head of a hot blonde. 0.57

01:23:16.300 Okay, so this is where the departure 1.00

01:23:18.260 comes in, yes. So Madden

01:23:20.300 believes he's being framed for a murder

01:23:22.100 and he begins this, like, quest

01:23:24.500 to solve the murder,

01:23:26.980 piece together the night before,

01:23:28.520 and prove his innocence. And in this

01:23:30.340 sort of quest, he

01:23:32.260 discovers a whole bunch more bodies.

01:23:34.400 I think there's like seven or eight dead people 0.98

01:23:36.060 by the end he and he how does he how does he know he didn't do it yeah good fucking question um but 0.96

01:23:42.860 he's like he he understands that everybody is going to assume his guilt but he has this like 0.96

01:23:48.240 conviction that he is not responsible for this woman's death yeah interesting and that's sort of

01:23:55.740 the like honestly look like that's kind of the approach he took to the stabbing of morales right

01:24:00.920 right he's like why he kept being like why are you bringing this up whenever anybody would mention it

01:24:05.620 subsequent years you would get like so offended i just found her head in the forest yeah exactly

01:24:10.360 um so like part why would you make why would that connect me to her in any way a big part of the

01:24:17.200 plot is like the vulgarity and the crudeness right like a major plot turning point is that

01:24:23.980 there are all of these photos of the dead woman's corpse in like sexual positions that

01:24:31.820 he discovers you know it's um it like so glad i didn't have to read this it really goes there

01:24:37.580 i had actually already read this many years ago but like the crudeness of the book itself

01:24:45.080 and madden's interpersonal crudeness he's also like constantly cursing like one of the ways i

01:24:49.140 found relevant passages that i wanted to talk about on the podcast was that i just like looked 0.65

01:24:54.960 at the pdf of the book and i control f for like cunt uh and i found like all of the things 400 0.59

01:25:02.300 found yeah exactly um but like the crudeness the vulgarity this is like a demonstration of 0.86

01:25:08.780 the superiority to convention and it's a way that like that the perv shows he is like invulnerable

01:25:18.100 and indifferent to like the opinions of those he offends right it's like it is itself a kind

01:25:24.100 of domination exercise yeah and what accomplishes this like even more often is just like actual

01:25:29.760 literal sex right so take for instance like one scene when something had had it happens is that

01:25:36.620 Madden sort of pieces together the night before and he remembers being with the dead woman 0.99

01:25:41.400 and hanging out with her and her gay male best friend speaking of fag hacks so he's like spending 0.97

01:25:47.760 some time with this woman and her gay best friend and he winds up I'm just gonna read this 0.97

01:25:54.080 i'm sorry i am subjecting you guys to this then it seems we were all in my porsche again and on

01:25:59.260 a crazy trip to well fleet once i stopped the car in the woods just before we got to harpo's house

01:26:04.620 and made love to her on the front fender yes because on this morning awakening in the third 0.99

01:26:09.700 floor study chair recalling it all i could still feel the grass with the walls of her vagina on my 1.00

01:26:13.900 monster on an erection how i had to fuck her down with patty loreen patty loreen is the main 0.99

01:26:19.640 character's ex-wife who has just left him a few weeks before it was as if jessica and i had been 1.00

01:26:25.520 designed in some heavenly shop part for part our privates were inseparable and where was lonnie but

01:26:31.400 watching he was crying if i remember and i never felt more of a brute his misery was as good as

01:26:37.120 blood to my erectile tissue that was the state of my affections near to four weeks after being

01:26:42.440 deserted by my wife right so like masculinity here it contains of this like irrepressible

01:26:48.580 sexual force right sort of referencing back to the nature he talks about design and sort of like

01:26:54.060 fulfilling a destiny in that sense but then it also has to have an audience of somebody who is

01:26:59.560 inadequate right or who is like less masculine and like the the gay best friend i think is what

01:27:06.080 really makes this scene right like the gay but the gay man crying because he can't be masculine in

01:27:13.620 the same way that tim madden is right so like masculinity here is performed like on women's 0.99

01:27:19.120 bodies performed by fucking them and the performance has a meeting that is meant to 0.99

01:27:23.980 be conveyed to others ex-wife in a sense like both like his ex-wife and like the whole novel 0.99

01:27:29.080 like miller did write this after the dissolution of his forced marriage that had sort of like long

01:27:33.740 been on again off again with his actress and they finally divorce in 1980 and he's writing this like

01:27:39.720 a year or two after that and the whole novel is kind of like this pornographic revenge fantasy

01:27:44.020 about his fourth wife she's like oh i got it easy get stabbed so i guess she won yeah it's like

01:27:48.860 henry the eighth uh wife who like didn't get her head cut off so i think like patty laureen is one 0.94

01:27:53.780 audience jessica the woman he's fucking is one audience but i really think the most important 0.99

01:27:57.960 audience is the defective man masculinity is the other man the defective man so lonnie the gay best 0.99

01:28:03.800 friend he witnesses madden having sex and is reduced to tears because we are made to understand 0.97

01:28:09.460 He is so ashamed that his homosexuality means he will never be a real man like Madden, like Norman Mailer. 0.95

01:28:15.540 And Lottie actually shoots himself in the head thereafter. 0.95

01:28:18.380 He's so wrecked by his comparative inadequacy.

01:28:20.580 Right. He's so blown away by his masculinity that he's like.

01:28:23.620 I got to blow my brains out. He shoots himself in the head. 1.00

01:28:26.340 Yeah. And that means like both of the actual in-person witnesses to Madden's like sexual accomplishment here. 0.82

01:28:33.140 They both wind up dead by the end of the night. 1.00

01:28:35.200 Like that's how powerful his dick is. 1.00

01:28:37.200 so a continuation of this idea of fucking and its audiences as like sort of necessary to create 0.99

01:28:43.360 masculinity comes in this other passage uh i want to read you like particularly because like the 0.69

01:28:50.180 sense of the perv masculinity is always requiring an audience and always being in competition with

01:28:54.880 other men but having this like field and sort of like site of competition is being on women's

01:29:01.020 bodies right yeah so madden is like pretty clearly as i've said just a stand-in for norman miller

01:29:05.960 and one of the ways that you can tell this is because madden the character will just like

01:29:10.580 monologue in ways that give voice to mailer's personal grievances so it's like the summer

01:29:16.660 population of provincetown is annoying provincetown is only nice in the winter when nobody's there 0.88

01:29:22.260 feminists are ugly they don't paint their nails that's when he comes back to it's stuff like that 0.98

01:29:27.920 um and my favorite i think the most illustrative found shit i know yeah it's really important i'm 0.99

01:29:33.360 so glad he got paid for this book but i think like the one is where like you can see just mailer

01:29:37.420 just being like professionally jealous of john updike and like complaining about john updike

01:29:43.420 so like madden is nominally supposed to be a writer which allows him to give voice to this

01:29:47.460 little monologue updike is one of the few writers who can enhance his work with adjectives rather 0.98

01:29:52.680 than abuse it he has a rare talent yet he irks me even his description of a pussy it could as easily 0.95

01:29:59.620 be a tree and then parentheses the velvetine of moss in the ingathered crotch of my limbs the 0.96

01:30:07.060 investiture of algae on the terraces of my bark etc just once i would like to have him guide me 0.99

01:30:12.940 through the inside of a cunt right now for instance my mind is pondering the difference 0.99

01:30:17.260 between updike's description of a pussy and a real cunt that is the one i am thinking of at this 1.00

01:30:21.380 instant it belongs to madeline falco and since she is sitting next to me i need only reach over 0.99

01:30:26.740 with my right hand to feel the objective correlative on my fingertips still i would

01:30:31.240 rather remain in the simpler state of a writer in reverie being nothing if not competitive as 0.98

01:30:36.320 which unheralded writer is not i am trying to put the manifest of her cunt into well-chosen words 0.73

01:30:41.740 and so implant a small standard of prose on the great beachhead of literature therefore i will 0.99

01:30:47.760 not dwell on her pussy hair he actually does dwell on her pussy hair uh for spoiler alert 0.99

01:30:52.640 paragraph yeah um run run howard narrator voice he did 1.00

01:30:57.180 uh but that's not important what is actually important i think is that

01:31:02.780 mailer is showing us here that like his competition with uptike is a competition

01:31:09.220 for manly status and it's happening like you know he gives this metaphor of like i'm implanting a

01:31:17.180 standard of prose on the great beachhead of literature it's like a masculine colonial

01:31:21.280 metaphor but the place where this like colonial like masculine military competition is taking 0.97

01:31:26.060 place is like literally inside a vagina right um so masculinity here is like it's a competition 1.00

01:31:32.560 it's mailer versus updike that it's fought out on the terrain of a woman's body so women are like 1.00

01:31:38.000 the the metaphor you'll hear feminists use about this is that like men are playing a game against 1.00

01:31:43.380 each other and women are the ball getting kicked back and forth like women's bodies are sites where 1.00

01:31:48.620 men demonstrate their masculinity to an audience of one another right it's the beachhead where the 0.78

01:31:53.420 standard of manliness gets implanted right right and i want to dwell for a second not just on like

01:31:58.820 how dehumanizing this vision of masculinity is to women right like you're literally objectified

01:32:04.620 you're made into like a place or a ball and that's like i i don't want to like act like that's not the

01:32:10.200 central problem of the perversion of masculinity uh because that's definitely like the main thing 1.00

01:32:15.160 that's wrong with it is that it requires women to be objectified and instrumentalized and used

01:32:20.740 by men for the gratification of their own egos for the witness of other men in this like

01:32:25.880 narcissistic self-defining project like that's the main thing that's wrong with it um that's

01:32:30.920 very gross but i also like think it's really interesting like how needful and dependent

01:32:36.560 this vision of masculinity is uh you need other people's bodies to achieve it and you need other

01:32:43.000 men to see you doing it it's always like look at me look at me look at me are you where are you

01:32:47.200 yeah like look at me like finger this lady at a bar you know um and it's just like it's so

01:32:53.060 it's like kind of or in my blood spattered porsche apparently i mean jesus yeah it's like

01:32:58.060 it's decidedly a relation of anxious dependency it's not an inner resource um it's like something

01:33:03.320 you're doing outside of yourself we have again sort of this difference between what does he

01:33:07.180 really mean right like with peterson it was like metaphor versus what he really thinks and here it's

01:33:13.820 basically right like it's easy to imagine like i you know being in the business of literary criticism

01:33:19.380 i can tell you what someone's defense of this is going to look like right i can guess but if people

01:33:23.500 reviewed this like as not like just utter garbage what they would say is right like oh you know you

01:33:28.800 have to point to all the differences between mailer the author and the figure that he's created

01:33:33.560 for himself and he's actually reflecting self-ironically on his own masculinist obsessions

01:33:38.640 right like am i am i guessing right that this is that there are people defending it this way

01:33:42.540 that's more or less a mailer defense yeah except i mean he doesn't really allow you to do that

01:33:46.660 because he's out there in real life stabbing his wife right he says like right but he says something

01:33:51.680 like where is it um being nothing if not competitive as which as which unheralded writer

01:33:57.240 is not right like i was like oh i'm not norman mailer i'm unheralded writer quote you know

01:34:02.420 mormon mailer all right like he builds in some plausible deniability but of course as you're

01:34:10.700 pointing out i always hate when people make that argument because like you're not saying oh this

01:34:16.220 character is held up as like being awesome and therefore no more like and therefore it's like

01:34:20.520 rebarbative that no mailer is putting this out there is to say the overall claim which is that

01:34:25.120 john updike's knowledge of female anatomy makes them inadequate and he should just watch someone 0.97

01:34:31.760 another man fuck a woman in order to like get better educated about it like is basically like 0.98

01:34:38.780 that's played first that's played straight that's the book doing that that's not actually like so i 0.95

01:34:43.840 think that's really interesting too that like you know it has this kind of like i mean i guess i'm

01:34:49.920 thinking here someone like brett easton ellis uh who like you know who always sort of brings in

01:34:54.240 this like well people didn't get that it was satire it's like yeah but there are those readers

01:34:59.960 that's true but there are also like a satire still transports values and you're absolutely

01:35:06.480 right that the that the values transported by this book are independent of how whether or not

01:35:10.960 it regards you know this maddened guy as like particularly positive or negative right right

01:35:16.220 you know it reminds me of this sort of like relationship of the work to irony always reminds

01:35:24.480 me a little bit of the stanford prison experiment which was nominally a bit of research into the

01:35:29.160 psychology of people who commit cruelty right but in the process of conducting that research

01:35:35.260 the researchers actually committed torture like torture happens right it's a little bit of like

01:35:41.240 it's like well you know if i have enough ironic detachment does that absolve me from the action

01:35:48.000 or from the professed value and i'm like i'm not sure that it does i i don't think that that's like

01:35:53.920 the loophole out that uh people like miller and his defenders would maybe like it to be yeah so

01:35:59.580 like this kind of masculinity as enacted through like sexual domination also leads men to be

01:36:06.720 vulnerable to be being like demasculinized through sex right and in one of the novels like really

01:36:12.100 most like on the nose like what did your daddy not love you enough scenes madden is reunited with

01:36:18.860 his emotionally distant father who he sees this as like a paragon of masculinity right like this

01:36:23.260 is the guy that madden madden is like more of a man than john updike but madden is less of a man

01:36:28.920 than madden's own father right and he proves his own manhood by informing his dad that while he was

01:36:33.640 in prison he was never sexually penetrated by another man i worried about you maybe you didn't

01:36:39.120 have to i took my three years in the slammer without a fall they called me iron jaw i wouldn't 0.72

01:36:43.860 take cock good for you i always wondered like yikes mailer who like he never actually went to

01:36:49.580 prison right uh he never actually got any prison time for his attempted murder of adele morales 0.94

01:36:56.000 that was in 1960 so it's like about 20 years ago by the time he's writing tough guys don't dance

01:37:00.380 but he had been fixated on this notion of prison sex and its possible threat to his own masculinity

01:37:05.180 for a long time we're probably going to do a whole episode on the prisoner of sex at some point but

01:37:09.300 yeah that that's also that's another one we're like yeah yeah it makes explicit this idea that

01:37:13.600 penetrating others is the act that constitutes the creation of masculinity and that being

01:37:18.560 penetrated constitutes femininity i looked over my notes on the armies of the night which is

01:37:23.200 another one of mailers that i've read in preparation for this and there's another passage

01:37:27.000 like that i'll read this too for people don't be weirded out by the fact that mailer shows up in

01:37:31.740 the third person he writes about himself he does that a lot in the third person all the time all

01:37:36.860 right onanism and homosexuality were not to mailer light vices to him it sometimes seemed that much

01:37:43.240 of life and most of society were designed precisely to drive men deep into onanism and

01:37:48.340 homosexuality one defied such a fate by sweeping up the psychic prophet which derived from the 0.94

01:37:54.340 existential assertion of yourself which was a way of saying that nobody was born a man 0.89

01:37:58.660 you earned manhood provided you were good enough and bold enough so like first of nice reference 0.96

01:38:05.340 to simon depot weirdly enough but also um yeah it's like this idea that like masturbation and 0.96

01:38:13.680 homosexuality are sort of like they're the wrong turns you can take and and basically that's how 0.88

01:38:18.880 you you you earn manhood by steering clear that is clearly all over his yeah and by focusing that 0.99

01:38:26.300 particularly like not just it's not a it's not a masculinity of abstention or of like discipline

01:38:34.040 it's a masculinity of sort of explosive impulse right um yeah like put too fine a point on it

01:38:41.260 And I think that actually might be a better quote to use than the one I was going to use from Prisoner of Sex because it sort of gestures us towards something you see throughout the porn masculinity genre, which is this latent mournfulness or this suggestion of grief.

01:38:59.340 So Madden, at one point, notes that his father, this masculine ideal, had a lot of sex with a lot of different women, and that it was a point of pride for him to actually never kiss these women, is that I don't have to show them any tenderness at all.

01:39:14.040 So like, at first glance, this just seems like straightforward, boorish sadism. But then Mailer goes on to like cast it as this like, self imposed deprivation, right? So Madden speculates that this is because this father was a child, never was never kissed. The severe Irish mother never kissed him.

01:39:34.240 Of course, he was famous among his friends for such an ascetic view. 0.60

01:39:38.000 In longshoremen days, he had earned another legend for the number of women he could attract and the powerful number of times he could do it in a night.

01:39:44.820 All the same, it was his manly pride that he was never obliged to kiss the girl.

01:39:49.140 Who knows what ice room of the heart my skinny Irish grandmother raised him in?

01:39:52.780 He never kissed.

01:39:54.380 And so this is a lot of the other note in a lot of these perv masculinity narratives that I think links it a little bit to the preacher.

01:40:02.000 like yeah yeah there's actually something abstemious about it masculinity yeah kissing girls 0.57

01:40:07.600 isn't that kind of gay fellas right you're not allowed to do that uh because you're depriving 0.97

01:40:12.340 yourself of that right so it's like this domination and degradation inflicted by the 0.99

01:40:17.020 perv masculinity like really it's just like sexual violence as the pinnacle of manhood right 0.80

01:40:21.300 yeah and that is in fact depicted as a kind of sacrifice right it's something that the perv

01:40:26.720 A guy like Mailer will claim that they feel they must do on some level in spite of themselves to prove that they are men.

01:40:34.960 When they suggest a more indulgent, more feminine ethos would involve comfort and tenderness that they are abstaining from.

01:40:45.000 And frankly, I don't buy it.

01:40:46.520 I want to underline that I don't buy it.

01:40:49.020 I don't see rapists as victims of masculinity or suffering from a lack of love or just needing a hug.

01:40:55.500 But I think it's interesting that Mailer and a lot of his Perv Masculinity fellows, like this is also kind of a major theme in Portnoy's Complaint, which is the other big like urtext of the Perv Masculinity. 0.82

01:41:06.760 Although a lot more masturbation in that one, right? 0.88

01:41:09.000 Yeah, he's like sort of more reveling around in his degradation. 0.99

01:41:12.820 Yeah.

01:41:13.380 But like kind of enjoying being degraded.

01:41:16.500 Yeah, yeah.

01:41:17.360 But in Tough Guys Don't Dance, it's seen as like kind of more pure.

01:41:21.720 But, like, it's interesting that these guys see it this way. They feel that they have to portray their, like, incessant, pervy, like, rapacious, violent sexuality as, in fact, like, this kind of sacrifice.

01:41:39.760 And this is, like, something that's, I think, common to all these styles of masculinity, right?

01:41:43.780 I was going to say, right, yeah.

01:41:45.320 They depend on, like, depicting the masculine subject as somebody who sacrifices and deprives himself.

01:41:49.900 so even if to all intents and purposes like the perv is on this like endlessly self-gratifying

01:41:56.960 quest to like prove himself through sex and violence we are made to understand that this

01:42:02.600 is actually a kind of self-denial and that he's a martyr of some form yeah and all three of ours

01:42:07.960 and maybe this is sort of where we can start concluding but like um all three of these styles

01:42:13.080 seem for all the kind of strength they assign to masculinity are so fussy about policing the 0.76

01:42:19.460 fucking boundaries right like oh they're so anxious i'm going to church does that mean i'm 0.95

01:42:23.820 i'm too much of a lady i am you know uh like oh i i enjoyed the darkness is that bad like i didn't 0.99

01:42:30.680 clean my room oh no am i not enough of a man right like i like you have to guard you know your your 1.00

01:42:37.380 your women your vaginal knowledge apparently your your asshole right all this stuff you have to like 1.00

01:42:43.000 guard the hell out of it i mean like it just feels like a fuck ton of work to be any kind of 1.00

01:42:48.300 on this model and it's so insecure it's like everybody has to see me being a man i have to 0.93

01:42:57.040 do it perfectly you know it's just like it's um it's really whiny and like a bitchy uh and and

01:43:04.200 it requires so much right exactly right i mean like i i hadn't caught that before but like right

01:43:10.720 the fact if he said like look i i did not become a victim of sexual violence and in prison like

01:43:16.300 whatever like that's that i i could see why someone would say that but like he's like oh

01:43:20.900 no i was so famous for they had a name for me it's like oh my god like you always need a

01:43:26.000 fucking audience for like yeah exactly right i thought about that jesus it's like yeah i'm gonna 0.66

01:43:31.840 call a c-span call-in show next and explain it right because i need everyone to know right it's 0.97

01:43:37.180 like i loved his dad going i always wondered it's like you did like jesus uh like i always wondered

01:43:44.580 if you disgraced me and my manhood because that's also implicated in your you know sex life oh i

01:43:50.800 see i i i guess this is where i'm just uh you know i'm just not in that type of masculinity

01:43:55.780 i thought it was genuine worry yeah no it's um it's like so it sounds like no wonder these guys

01:44:02.860 feel so aggrieved and victimized because this sounds like a lot of hard fucking work uh for

01:44:08.320 not it's not clear like exactly what payoff and i mean to to harken back to a line from our 0.76

01:44:13.440 friend mitch dechter right like they have made every conceivable way an enormous issue out of

01:44:18.920 it they're just like oh boy i mean like look if if you have some neuroses about gender roles like 0.89

01:44:24.920 it's a complicated fucking subject like i understand that people do it all kinds of 0.90

01:44:28.740 different ways but like holy shnikes do these people sort of yeah why do they always need an 0.98

01:44:34.620 audience why does this need to like you know why does it have to be dragged out into these massive

01:44:40.160 things like it's just you know the fact that like you can't live it you got to be seen living it and

01:44:45.280 by like the biggest possible audience like it seems so yeah so noticeable the preacher needs

01:44:52.300 his like dominion his family his wife his you know religious community he needs them to see him

01:45:01.420 being righteous and to submit to his righteous authority right right a creep needs to be you

01:45:07.480 know vindicated in his sense of like a grief wounded superiority and like have other people

01:45:13.000 applaud his discipline or his like demonstrated like genetic superiority or whatever the chosen

01:45:19.360 like vehicle is you know like everybody needs a gold star and the creep needs to quote that

01:45:25.420 brilliant tweet about elon musk like what are there like hundreds of millions of followers who 0.99

01:45:29.680 if you you know slam your slam your dick into a car door they're like well played sir 0.98

01:45:33.980 yeah i wish i wish all of these guys would relax a little bit and like maybe lay off the bend though 0.99

01:45:42.320 yeah you know if if these two hours have been good for nothing guys guys relax you're okay

01:45:51.180 you're okay relax you don't need to do any of this yeah if we if we had to sum up what we just said

01:45:57.360 it was oh sweetie no all right well i think we've been through it is this a good place to wrap up

01:46:07.820 this is a good place to wrap up we have a journey we have exceeded uh our usual time limit which is

01:46:13.760 already ample uh and we uh and yeah we've been on a journey i mean where haven't we been

01:46:18.580 we've been in to wellfleet massachusetts we've been to clairvaux uh we've we've seen marduk

01:46:24.420 apparently brings light shit we've been to toronto we uh followed rod dreyer into 0.96

01:46:31.000 penis measuring territory i mean we've taken you on a journey we've taken each other on a journey 0.99

01:46:35.660 and now i need a long fucking shower and uh with that uh we are in bed with a right 0.97

01:46:41.280 in bed with a right we'd like to thank the michelle r claimant institute for gender research 0.97

01:46:46.640 for generous support jennifer portillo for setting up our studio our theme music is by

01:46:51.320 Katie Lau. Our producer is Megan Kalthus.

In Bed With The Right - September 11, 2023

Episode 6： Perverts, Creeps and Priests!

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