00:01:08.960and try to tailor this specifically to your requests,
00:01:11.960like a DJ at a bar mitzvah just, like, playing everything everybody wants to hear.
00:01:16.260Playing living on a prayer five times in a row.
00:01:20.940So the way we did this was we asked our Patreon subscribers, and there are by now quite a few of you, and thank you for that, to send in or comment with questions on our Patreon.
00:01:34.000So if this is the first you're hearing of it, that might be because you're not on our Patreon and this is something you could address.
00:01:40.400Just saying, if you can't financially, like totally no shame, but honestly, you can probably
00:01:46.320subscribe, listen to a couple of episodes and then unsubscribe at very low cost.
00:01:50.900So, you know, we're not mad if you do that.
00:01:53.500We should say that as we read these, some listeners requested that we did not use their
00:02:08.960some of you wrote some truly impressive questions that were also essays and we we kind of have to
00:02:15.660edit a little bit and then finally we should say that a bunch of you said hey you guys should do
00:02:21.320this topic and we were like oh yeah we should probably do this topic and then we're like this
00:02:25.160is an episode we cannot do this in a mailbag episode you are correct we need to record this
00:02:31.220and we need two weeks of research and two hours to record it um so that's not going to be in here
00:02:37.040It's not a sign that it was a bad question.0.92
00:02:38.460Was that a question that was so good that it basically, we're like, oh, shit, this is a two-parter generously.
00:02:43.680A couple wrote in saying, you guys should do an episode on X, wherein X was something we have actually been meaning to do an episode on for a long time.
00:04:33.240Like, I did not have an outlandishly bad experience of the violence of misogyny compared to a
00:04:38.460lot of other women, but I have never been good at it.
00:04:43.540I always felt womanhood or girlhood or, like, the scriptures of femininity.
00:04:48.000It was like I missed that day at school or something.
00:04:50.900Like, I just, it was a code that I never understood, and I felt like I was trying to
00:04:54.760retroactively understand the parameters of my own failure and dysfunction and difference,
00:05:01.600which I would now identify as like, you know, feminism or queerness, but at the time it felt
00:05:05.680like personal failure. And these are a way into interest about the world for me has also been
00:05:10.580about like my own difference and experience. I think that's just very common. I was never very
00:05:15.360good at it and I wanted to understand why. And then I saw it hurting me and people I loved and
00:05:22.220I wanted to understand why. So I think the honest answer is I just had a very intense
00:05:26.560personal investment in these questions. You know, the more I understand gender,
00:05:30.740the more I realize how deeply everybody's personal investment is in it, whether you're
00:05:35.200studying it or not. It's very deep into every aspect of all of our lives. It's fascinating stuff.
00:05:41.020It's interesting. I think I come at it slightly differently, right? Being a cis gay guy,
00:05:45.680there was always the option of participating and playing along and being okay i'm fairly
00:05:52.500straight presenting i mean people picked up on it but like it was easy to tamp that down when i did
00:05:57.980my phd when i applied for jobs i was out personally but like my work was traditional enough that you
00:06:04.880sort of had to squint to be like oh this is a this is a gay person who's working from a explicitly
00:06:10.460LGBT perspective. And right, my first book was on marriage discourses at the end of the 18th
00:06:17.320and 19th century in Germany. Writing that in 2008, you didn't have to be a weatherman to be like,
00:06:21.820huh, I wonder if the wind is blowing from a particular direction. That having been said,
00:06:25.960a lot of people asked me about my wife when I first showed up for job interviews, right? So I'm
00:06:31.140like, oh, okay. All the queer theory in my dissertation, which was fairly attenuated,0.95
00:06:35.460to be honest, didn't tip you off, I guess, right? And then, you know, within the academy,
00:06:40.840I've been able to be in the room where decisions are made, I think is generally my story.
00:06:44.720And I think that has really shaped my outlook on these kinds of questions that I have seen both.
00:06:49.060I've been on the receiving end of frankly homophobic attacks. I know I've been blackballed
00:06:55.060and discriminated against for being a gay man, but I've also seen it happen to others, right?
00:06:59.600Because like people didn't understand where I fell on their particular hierarchy, right?0.98
00:07:04.140Where I was like, oh, shit, you're talking like we're not here because you don't know we're here, right?
00:07:08.800What is called a concealable stigma, an interesting aspect of one of the questions I hope we get a chance to dig into on this episode.0.93
00:07:16.080Yeah. But so that has always shaped my interest in gender questions that I've seen more so than maybe people, as you say, who have always found themselves kind of at odds with the system and sort of not quite fitting in.
00:07:27.940like what it looks like when it functions as intended.
00:07:31.440And I think there's a certain kind of rage
00:07:33.740that comes from being on the outside looking in0.99
00:07:36.240and there's a white hot fucking rage0.99
00:07:54.700but it stands behind the questions I ask all the time.
00:07:57.040It's all about what kind of life, what kind of person is not at the table, is not being included, is not worth narrating, does not count as a person ultimately.
00:08:08.040And I think that's entirely shaped by the fact that, as you say, in this situation where I'm ambiguous, I can belong if I choose to and I don't belong if I accentuate the wrong things.
00:08:20.840Wait, Adrian, can I tell you something?
00:10:18.440Did either of you have any first impressions slash preconceived ideas of the other that were proven right or wrong as you started to work together?
00:10:30.200Because I think I became aware of you first, what with certain lists of media men you may have launched or not launched in 2017.
00:10:40.800So I think I first reached out to you for an event we did at Stanford about the feminist power of rumor, which featured you and Yvette Dion.
00:10:51.420And it was one of the first events I did when I got to Klayman because it was at the height of Me Too.
00:12:12.180You arrived the way you always arrive.
00:12:13.980Like bubbly, excited, ready to tell stories, analyze, absolutely fearless.
00:12:20.080And again, I completely thought, you know, people handle these kinds of onslaughts in different ways. For instance, we've both met Christine Blasey Ford, and that's someone who I feel like you can tell she's carrying certain scars from what happened to her with the Kavanaugh hearings.
00:13:09.720I was really grateful to be thought of for that.
00:13:12.620I think the experience of the list, which again, it's like it's something that happened to me or something that I made happen in 2017 that really did shape my life basically until I came and joined you at Stanford.
00:13:27.040From 2017 until like early 2023, the list was the only thing I really got to think about or do.
00:13:37.380And it was a experience that really pushed me towards thinking about epistemological politics, right?
00:13:44.040The power that is implied in how we know what we know and who gets to be an authority and who gets to be credentialed and who gets to be understood as competent and honest.
00:13:55.420And these are things that I hadn't had an opportunity to think about in a formal public setting before.
00:14:02.760So I was really delighted to meet Adrian.
00:14:05.440Adrian is also just like really delightful.
00:14:07.840I don't know how much of his charm comes through on the audio.
00:14:12.200But he is, first of all, he's about twice my height.
00:14:14.800Adrian is a string bean who is well over six feet tall.
00:14:23.260From down here, everybody seems to be, like, 6'4", 6'5".
00:14:26.180So I think of him as this underweight giant, and he's got this, like, curly red hair that sticks up from his head and these glasses that magnify his eyes, and he is adorable.
00:14:40.460He is a guy with an incredible amount of, like, accomplishment and learning and absolutely no pretentiousness or unwillingness to meet you where you are, which is very striking.
00:14:51.940And I think sometimes uncommon for academics to be so generous and approachable.
00:14:57.540So I found in this new guy who I just known, like, you had been like a Twitter mutual.
00:15:24.460And I was really honored to be a part of that.
00:15:27.300And it gave me another opportunity to come out to Stanford and meet the community at the Klayman Center, which is like really a think tank attached to Stanford that does, you know, feminist gender and sexuality work.
00:15:37.980And I discovered that there were a lot of people there I really liked and that Adrian had built something in his time as a director there that I really admired.
00:15:46.100And so like years later, like two years later or something, I get a text from Laura Good, who is a Clayman-affiliated scholar at Stanford.
00:15:56.840And she's like, listen, this writer-in-residence gig at Clayman is going to be open, and you should apply for it.
00:16:03.940And then I did apply, and I didn't hear back for like nine months.
00:16:07.200And I was like, well, I guess that didn't work out.
00:16:10.640And I sort of like went on to, you know, live my life.
00:16:13.560But then I get a text message from Adrian, or maybe it was an email or a DM.
00:16:54.340So sometime during that post-offer acceptance, preparing to move out there, I had spent a day working at the Brooklyn Public Library main branch, which is in Grand Army Plaza, right?
00:17:07.880sort of near the mouth of Prospect Park.
00:17:36.000Like, I think you did reference Friends of the Pot Know Your Enemy. It was like, what if we did what they're doing, but really in deep about gender and sexuality, which is our field of study and expertise, to talk about how the right wing's ideas about gender are really starting to shape our world. And this is post-Dobbs. It's sort of like the middle of the beginning of this, like, anti-trans panic that we're in right now.
00:18:01.740Me Too backlash. And all of this was sort of unfolding around us. And it was something I had been thinking about a ton because I was working then, as I am still working now, on a book manuscript about anti-feminism and backlash in the 21st century.
00:18:15.340and I found myself thinking about all these episodes I wanted to do basically before he
00:18:23.320finished his elevator pitch and Adrian and I wound up going back and forth talking about episodes we
00:18:28.500wanted to do and how we wanted to do the podcast and I found that I had walked all the way from
00:18:33.880Grand Army Plaza to the northeast corner of Bed-Stuy where I lived at the time which is like
00:18:41.760a several mile, like 90 minute to two hour walk.
00:18:45.640And it felt like I had just started talking.
00:18:48.520And I feel like we've basically been talking ever since.
00:18:51.040Yeah, we just have not gotten off of the Zoom call since.
00:18:54.000And then I was like, well, what are we going to call this thing?
00:20:18.680So the rights of men not to have the things that they did written out at a bathroom stall outweighs like, hey, that's really messed up that women feel like they have to do this.0.78
00:20:28.480Right. And so I was just like, well, the way we don't even perceive certain right wing tropes as being about gender when they clearly are seemed to me really strong and really important.
00:20:37.900And of course, in the meantime, I feel like the right wing has done us the favor of just, like, what is that famous tweet?
00:20:45.720Like, you researched this story for one year and then they just tweet it out.
00:20:50.580We're like, could there be gender behind this?0.61
00:20:52.740And they're like, it's all about gender!0.75
00:20:55.840Yeah, it's getting a little over the top.
00:20:59.060Like, when they call Donald Trump daddy, I'm like, this is, like, there's no sport in it, you know?
00:21:05.480It's just, like, low over the plate, yeah.
00:21:06.360Yeah, there's a scene in the movie Ghost World that I really like where Thora Birch, I think, is complaining about how all the guys in their town are lame.
00:21:16.580And Scarlett Johansson, who's her scene partner, is like, well, not everyone.
00:21:19.680And then these dudes who look like they just got out of a hacky sack match walk by and they're like, hey, dudes, want to do some reggae tonight?
00:24:32.400Because since we started doing the Project 1933 series, my own, maybe this is just like a narcissistic little enterprise. It definitely is.
00:24:41.340But like my own journal entries have started to become more expressly political with an eye to being as historically useful as Victor Klemper.
00:24:52.980I'm like, well, I now know what future historians really are going to want to know about the era, which is like the affective experience of living through the collapse of a democratic regime and the rise of authoritarian one.
00:25:04.080And so I have to make sure I get that down on paper in my little moleskin notebooks for them to know, which is, I think, reflecting a tremendous amount of optimism on my part that there will be historians in the future.
00:25:15.560Yeah, I think it's the same for me, honestly. Like, I feel like there was a moment when keeping a journal or keeping close tabs on the day-to-day events felt like the internet was replacing it. And I can find all this stuff later. It's fine. But now with all this surfeit bullshit and just noise out there, it's hard to remember what even March 2020 felt like, what January of 2016 felt like. And you're like, oh shit, I really should have written all that stuff down.
00:25:43.840And I feel like people around me have really begun doing that work.0.97
00:25:47.740Like we are getting better at remembering, getting better at recording for the future because we're recording for a future where a bunch of weird, shitty AI crap has like kind of crowded all that out and be like, point of order, that's not what happened at all.
00:26:03.440I want to do an episode soon on the Sidney Sweeney kind of discourse.
00:26:07.100But this is, of course, something that I've traced in the cancel culture panic too.
00:26:12.660The fact that, like, the things that we're told are happening aren't even necessarily happening, right?
00:26:17.800It's like, oh, people online are saying, like, well, like three people online are saying, right?
00:26:45.980But basically, as people seem to be coming to a position on what is happening in Gaza that resembles our own, there is a lot of retconning of the positions people took on both sides.
00:27:02.380We're like, well, I would have joined the activists if they hadn't.
00:27:05.020It's like, well, if you look at it, all they did was wear a keffiyeh and paint their hands red.0.99
00:27:10.380And you lost your goddamn mind over it and seemed to suggest that tens of thousands of people did deserve to die over this.0.94
00:27:17.680I do think it's really important to keep an accounting of your own expression, of your own takes on things.1.00
00:27:24.880And frankly, also to hold yourself to account if and when it's inevitable you will have been wrong about something.
00:27:31.760And I do think the way in which our lack of memoriousness and our LOL, nothing matters type politics come together, right, that there's no more accountability for anyone, basically, it's deeply troubling to me.
00:27:48.680And I think that some of that you have to practice on yourself and on your enemies, frankly.
00:27:52.700You have to be like, here's what you said.
00:27:54.500And this is something that I took away from 1933, which is that Thomas Mann very much kept receipts.
00:28:57.500If people were surprised by Harvey Weinstein, it is worth delving into the sources of your surprise.
00:29:03.340And if people are surprised by former Me Too critics now coming out as pro-Trump pundits or thinkers, I think you should question why that did not seem like a natural pathway to you.
00:29:15.360If Barry Weiss somehow seems like a surprising vehicle for a justification for Trump's assault on the universities, again, question the sources of your surprise.
00:31:29.820And that is, I think, like, very useful.
00:31:32.860But it is also a vision of the role of fiction
00:31:38.180that perhaps gives some readers a bit too much credit, right?
00:31:43.180And perhaps gives some writers a bit too much credit, right?
00:31:46.220Like, the truth of the matter is that regardless of what we think of the actual merits of the work of the novel, that a lot of people read Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, for example, as an endorsement of their own pedophilic fantasies, right?
00:32:02.180And this is a dual reality of literature. Sort of regardless of authorial intent, a lot of literature is used as and in fact functions as also a kind of propaganda for specific ideologies, right? This is like a tension, I think, in the role of fiction.
00:32:23.620And I think our right wing right now, you know, they're becoming like less and less traditionally literate, right?
00:32:29.720They're not necessarily drawing from the classics all the time.
00:32:33.820They're not necessarily drawing from like Ovid or from the Bible, the way like a lot of mid-century conservatives did.
00:32:41.420But they are drawing from a lot from like genre fiction.
00:32:45.720They're drawing a lot from video games.
00:32:48.040Yeah. And they're drawing a lot from, you know, a specific genre of like self-published white nationalist fiction, things like The Camp of the Saints or Which Way of Western Man, you know, these sort of racist fantasies. And that's an interesting like shift in where the references are coming from. But I do think that there's also, you know, the same potential late in a lot of what we think of as like classical literary fiction.
00:33:14.260Yeah, I think I have two answers to that. So one is exactly fascism requires mythology for the very simple reason that the kinds of unity and the kinds of fulfillment and the kinds of supposed victimizations that it thematizes aren't ultimately real.
00:33:30.740A lot of the alliances that it proposes right between like capital and workers, for instance, are just fantastical.
00:33:36.280So you got to have fiction to kind of undergird that.
00:33:39.560And, you know, a lot of this is about mythology, but as any scholar of Nazism will tell you, they were not good students of mythology, right?
00:33:48.380Their mythology was deeply creative, often admittedly so.
00:33:52.420The idea of the Aryan was not supposed to, like, hold water in terms of human genetics.0.85
00:33:58.600It was meant to create an in-group and an out-group, right?1.00
00:34:02.360That was its function, and it did that very well.
00:34:06.280So I think the role of the classics and all this is a really interesting one. On the one hand, I think it does create kind of an onboarding structure where sort of cultural conservatives can sort of make common cause with fascists. And like, they're like, oh, we have to go back to basics. We have to go back to the classics. One guy is thinking of Ovid, the other one's thinking of the Turner Diaries, right?
00:36:20.560But no, it's like, oh, they've abandoned this, right? There's an infamous claim by some right-wing academic about like, this is from the 1980s, how the work of Alice Walker is being taught in more classrooms than the work of William Shakespeare. And you're like, sure, Jan, that's definitely a thing that has happened and is happening.
00:36:39.940But, I mean, as an example, when Peter Thiel and David Sachs wrote their book about the decline of education at Stanford in 95, I believe, they complained about all these classes that allegedly abandoned the classical liberal ideal of teaching the best that's been thought.
00:36:57.300One example is a class by my friend and colleague, Terry Castle, about Sappho.
00:37:04.040And I'm like, I'm sorry, Sappho is not a classic?0.99
00:37:08.420Yeah, like literally the inventor of lyric poetry. But by classics, they mean something very specific, right? They do not mean woman. They do not mean a black person, right? Like this is also like an incredibly Western Europe like device. And it is a device of racial exclusion.1.00
00:37:30.900The question is basically, does Peter Thiel want your blood? If not, not a classic.
00:37:35.020The notion of the classics, this is a classic critique of, like, the canon, right, is that it is, in fact, a way to rarify the work of dead white men to the exclusion of other forms of literary accomplishment, right?0.50
00:37:52.520But then also, like, probably every kid getting an education worth their salt in the U.S. is now reading Toni Morrison, and Toni Morrison has, I would argue, been, like, incorporated into sort of, like, a new revised American canon, right?0.91
00:38:09.780Like, if somebody gives you a bachelor's degree in any humanities field and you've never been made to read, like, Beloved or The Bluest Eye, like, you should ask for your fucking money back because you're not equipped to discuss American literature.
00:38:21.640But that is a process of this changing canon that you were talking about, Adrian, right?
00:38:52.920I think the Scarlet Letter is actually a really fascinating text.
00:38:55.780I'm not a person with a particular anti-canon agenda, right?
00:38:59.640But like, there's a sense that like that should be the end, right?
00:39:04.160You shouldn't require additional curiosity or additional exposure or additional competence to be conversant and to be educated with a capital E, you know?
00:39:14.140Exactly. It's a permission structure for intellectual laziness two times over, right?
00:39:18.620One thing is, like, let's be honest, any literature professor is heartbroken that we can't make you read more books in college.
00:39:24.300but what this oh the classics are no longer taught discourse does is a it says people ought to be
00:39:31.100taught the exact like 15 books that i was taught right and it's like well no like your professors
00:39:36.740back then or teachers in high school pick them from a gigantic list and we're like oh man i hate
00:39:42.000to lose this but we only have 10 weeks so yeah we're gonna get rid of scarlet letter and we're
00:39:47.220gonna do houses of seven gables instead because it's shorter right that kind of thing every canon
00:39:51.920lists every class syllabus ever has been constructed by that logic.
00:39:56.760Michael Ives had to cut Augustine's Confessions from my first year seminar syllabus and waved
00:40:03.880it at the class and told us we all had to read it before we died.
00:40:06.380And then the next semester, my professor, Deirdre English, did the same thing with Mrs.
00:40:21.560It enables intellectual laziness in that it basically says the classics have to be what I was taught.
00:40:26.740But it often goes along with this other idea, which is that college has lost.
00:40:31.980I mean, we got that in that weird Manhattan statement that Chris Rufo sort of put out.
00:40:35.980Like, we all know that the quality of education is like on the decline.
00:40:40.080And I think what that's supposed to say is like, well, when you took all these classes, you got a genuine education.
00:40:45.880Today, the kids are not getting that anymore.
00:40:47.540And I think what it's saying is like, hey, not only should the kids not get to read anything you didn't read, but it's saying you also don't have to be reading anymore.
00:40:56.420You were taught everything you needed to during your four years as an undergraduate.
00:41:00.040And I'm telling you, I'm sorry, but that's not the case.
00:41:03.520It's if you find yourself never being able to move on from like the one cool text you read as an undergraduate, you're Peter Thiel.
00:41:20.100As you say, there are plenty of ideological reasons to oppose this.
00:41:23.440There are reasons to worry about what it means for our politics
00:41:26.420and for the way average citizens look at higher education.
00:41:30.540But there's also just like, stop making me validate your lack of growth, right?
00:41:37.160Society changes, you should change.0.58
00:41:39.460You know, I worry about, and this is where I'm going to sound like a cultural conservative, but I worry about a world in which even self-defined conservatives somehow give themselves permission to just like not engage with the contradictory, multifarious, complicated text that is our past, because they'd rather live with their own half-remembered bullshit version of it that they got during their freshman history lecture.
00:42:09.460This is a very specific one, but I think it's a great question.
00:42:59.180The invention of HR, the woman we can maybe say invented HR was a woman named Alice Hernandez.
00:43:04.980And Alice Hernandez was the second ever president of the National Organization for Women. First president was Betty Friedan. Second president was Alice Hernandez.
00:43:16.300Alice Hernandez was a San Francisco-based, shout out San Francisco, black woman who wound up sort of having this big, unwieldy, sort of confused, like federalized bureaucracy of the National Organization for Women sort of dumped on her because she had been very active in the National Organizations for Women's project in the early 1980s, late 70s and early 80s.
00:43:45.260And she was one of the only black women who had been sort of committed, very much involved in the leadership of the National Organization for Women, right?
00:43:54.660So when Friedan left, they really wanted a black woman to come in and they said, Alice, can you do it?
00:44:01.040And she said, fine, this is an unpaid position, right?0.99
00:44:05.100Which is one thing to do when you're Betty Friedan.
00:44:07.680It's another thing to do when you're Alice Hernandez, who comes from a working class background.0.52
00:44:11.480I believe her parents were West Indian immigrants. And, you know, working for free is a very different proposition, right?
00:44:19.280Now was a really big organization. She was the head of National Now, Hernandez was, but there were different subgroups with different politics, right?
00:44:27.340New York Now was very different from San Francisco Now, was very different from the particular, the most radical activist group was Chicago Now,
00:44:36.420which had been involved in and overlapping with a lot of the more radical feminists who had been based around Chicago.
00:44:44.140I did a podcast episode for Podcast Heads on the Jane Collective, which was based out of Chicago a few years before this.
00:44:51.060It was really fun. I did that with You're Wrong About and Sarah Marshall.
00:44:54.540So if you want to hear a little bit more about feminism in Chicago, that's a good place to start.1.00
00:44:59.920I think Chicago women's rights is fascinating even today because they're getting tons of people from out of state.0.99
00:45:06.420into Chicago to get abortions now, post-Obs.0.99
00:45:10.160So like actually abortion, women's rights, feminism in Chicago,
00:45:13.900it's like weirdly kind of the heartbeat of the whole place
00:45:16.500at a bunch of different moments of American history.
00:45:19.760Chicago now was led by some women with close ties to the labor movement, right?
00:45:25.260And those women were looking at Sears.
00:45:28.380Sears at the time, like the department store,0.56
00:45:30.860it was like the second or third largest employer in the United States, right?
00:45:34.040department stores really declined after the rise of the internet. But at the time,
00:45:38.420there were these like mega like bastion of the American economy, something like comparable to
00:45:44.120maybe Amazon now. Like it's a large, large number of the American workforce is working specifically
00:45:49.480for Sears. And Sears has this two-tiered hiring system where there are jobs that you cannot get
00:45:59.380at all if you're a woman. There are jobs that you cannot get at all if you're not white, right? So1.00
00:46:05.380they actually have like separate employment structures and like sort of fields of hiring
00:46:10.760and promotion for white men, white women, black men, black women, right? So it's actually tiered
00:46:16.480both on race and gender, right? Now decides to target them and try to organize all the women1.00
00:46:23.160who are working for Sears for a giant lawsuit and unionization drive, right?1.00
00:46:33.160There's a lot of, like, internal dissent about how they were going to work around the law
00:46:37.160because you kind of had to pick under civil rights law.
00:46:40.100The 1964 Civil Rights Act made it illegal to do what Sears was doing
00:46:44.080and discriminate in hiring on the basis of race or sex, and Sears was doing both.
00:46:49.140And so you had this class of potential plaintiffs in like Black women Sears employees who were prohibited from different roles based on both their race or their sex.
00:46:59.360So there was like a little fighting in now, but they decided to organize based on sex and try to get this massive workforce to enforce the civil rights law and try to get equal access to employment for women at all of these Sears stores.
00:47:12.840And this was like kind of brewing for a while. And they got quite a bit of like organizing work done. They had Sears employees buying in. They had people who were like willing to come and pitch into this organizing effort. And it would have been a massive, massive enforcement effort for the new Civil Rights Act and for employment non-discrimination law.
00:47:35.140And Alice Hernandez goes to work for Sears and starts negotiating on Sears' behalf against NOW.
00:47:46.100There's this kind of horror story moment where some of the Chicago NOW women go in for a meeting with Sears and they think they're about to, like, negotiate the terms of Sears' surrender and compliance with this, like, feminist-led labor organizing effort, right?
00:48:00.180And Alice shows up and they're like, oh, my God, we're so glad you could make it.
00:48:03.340And then they see her sit down at the other side of the table.
00:48:07.200And so HR is born as a way for companies to mitigate the threats to their profits posed by civil rights law, specifically through like the betrayal of the feminist labor organizing effort, right?
00:48:24.840And that's how you get what, you know, like, Ola Femi Taiwo has identified as, like, the weaponization of the interests of capital against the interests of labor using this, like, fake leaf of, like, feminist or anti-racist principle, right?
00:48:41.900And the now-led Sears organizing effort completely fell apart because they had, it turned out, like a mole in their effort.
00:48:50.800And Alice Hernandez was lightly sort of like cursed within now for a while thereafter. But now sort of like lost its teeth. They had put a lot of their sort of institutional credibility behind the Sears push. And they were never as potent a force again.
00:49:39.080It's a question about the idea of a girl code and being a girl's girl.
00:49:44.800I see this in the zeitgeist a lot, writes our listener, and I'm curious how it could
00:49:49.940be unpacked in a gender politics sense.
00:49:52.000It seems to me that it's still the same centuries old policing of women's behavior, but I find
00:49:56.820it interesting that it's framed in a faux solidarity type of way.
00:50:00.560Yeah, what do we think about the girl's code?
00:50:02.680Yeah, this is a rhetoric I've been trying to follow and can't because it's clear that, like, what the antecedent to, like, being a girl's girl means is, like, completely different based on whoever is using it, right?
00:50:13.920So I could see the metaphor I think works best for questions of gendered solidarity is like striking workers and scabs, right?
00:50:23.080Like there's a picket line of, you know, behavior that individual women decline to participate in because it hurts women as a class, right?
00:50:32.340And that's something we might call solidarity, that gesture.0.88
00:50:35.300And then there are scabs who participate in it anyway for personal benefit, even though they know that doing so harms women as a class.0.92
00:50:43.420This is something I tried to write about when I talked about Olivia Nosey.0.86
00:50:46.880You know, like you can, if you are young in your career, and I do not know that Olivia Nosey did this.
00:50:52.540I'm not talking about specific people.
00:50:55.540If you are a young woman in your industry, you often do have the opportunity to get a job by sleeping with somebody who has the ability to give you that job, right?0.77
00:51:04.740And doing so will benefit you in the short term and will also degrade women as a class because that means that women who are not willing or able to, you know, have sex in exchange for a job do not get those jobs, right?0.74
00:51:19.280That's scab behavior to me, which is fraught as well, right?0.78
00:51:24.060Because it involves imposing a kind of sexual morality.
00:51:26.420So when the terms of feminist solidarity are undermined through sexuality, one of the most potent tools of misogynist oppression, what are the ethics there of both engaging in such behavior and in judging it in others?
00:51:42.100I think that's, like, a really interesting question.
00:51:44.900I don't know if that's the question that's being answered in these discourses of being a girl's girl or girl code.
00:51:51.720I might just be, like, a little too old to, like, be sufficiently immersed in this rhetoric to, like, understand it.0.98
00:51:57.260But I often see it being, like, oh, she's a tick me because she doesn't wear makeup.
00:52:01.700And I'm like, I don't think that's what that means.
00:53:06.000She has beautiful eyes, and her hair smells like cinnamon.
00:53:08.380I've also, like you, I'm like, I was like, oh, this is interesting. But like, I have made glancing contact with this discursive phenomenon, I should say. And I'm older than you. So like, I'm probably even more out to lunch on this. But there is this really interesting form of right wing identity politics that I run up against again and again, when I write about these things.
00:53:31.620And I mean, you know, I'm someone who defends identity politics approaches, but this to me seems like exactly what Ulufemi Taiwo is talking about, whom you already mentioned, where people are like, oh, well, that's some feminism criticizing other women.
00:53:44.300It's like, I don't think that's what feminism is.
00:53:46.540Like, oh, you have to like smile and be nice to any other woman, right?
00:53:51.740And I think that this is what the questioner is asking about, that like in some way that becomes a kind of form of social repression, right?
00:53:59.420We are about to record an episode on Thomas Chatterton Williams, and I cannot tell you the number of people on the right who will debate about cancel culture.
00:54:08.160And I'll be like, well, it's just a reaction to Black Lives Matter.0.61
00:54:11.260And they're like, well, Thomas Chatterton Williams thinks it's real, and he's black.0.75
00:54:16.300Like, it's just like you claim that the left is obsessed with identity politics.0.99
00:54:19.660What the fuck was that that just happened, right?0.98
00:54:21.620Like, in this particular instance, I literally don't see race.0.99
00:54:24.180I just see a man who is deeply, deeply wrong.
00:54:29.020But, you know, there's a way in which identity can become a shield for conduct that is, in fact, detrimental to that class of people, right?
00:54:37.820Like, this is why every single sexually abusive man who ever gets sued hires a woman for his attorney, right?0.60
00:55:04.580If you don't have the ability to talk about obligations to group injustice, then you don't have an ability to talk about group injustice, right?
00:55:17.840Like, there is, I think, genuine unresolved questions about the responsibility of the individual to the collective, but I don't think those discourses can be, like, verboten by some sort of understanding of, like, individual prerogative, right?
00:55:33.660Like, yeah, Camille Vasquez has the right to take that job being a plaintiff attorney for Johnny Depp when he's suing Amber Heard, who I do believe he pretty horrifically abused, right?0.99
00:55:44.920But Camille Vasquez has that right, and I have that right to say that's anti-feminist, and it's scat behavior, and it's bullshit, and I don't fucking like it.0.99
00:55:51.700Right. It's not a victory for feminism that she did it.1.00
00:55:55.580And, you know, feminism does not mean that we must endorse everything every woman ever does.0.62
00:55:59.540And it further does not mean that we have to endorse everything every woman has ever done with her womanhood, with her femininity, with her gendered position, because those are neutral tools in themselves, and they are tools that can be used to bad ends.
00:56:14.280Exactly. And it's so interesting how what conservatives describe in the left is often just a self-portrait, right? Because like they will literally go out and sort of say like, oh, you were mean to this lying lady that we put on Fox News. Where is your feminism now, right?
00:56:33.060Meanwhile, like, it's exactly that kind of supposedly content-neutral kind of affirmation
00:56:38.580that they completely freak out over when it comes to a slogan like, believe women.
00:56:42.860They're like, I should believe all women, anyone.
00:56:44.920Like, first of all, that doesn't mean that.
00:56:46.640But also, like, it seems like the position you impute to the left doesn't in fact exist,
00:56:52.000but you appear to genuinely hold it when it comes to Fox News hosts.0.87
00:57:33.520I mean, since I started teaching undergrads, I've come to stop thinking of the youth as this like monolithic body and come to see them a lot more as like three-dimensional individuals.
00:57:44.920And the fact is that like different young people need different advice because they're struggling with different things.
00:57:50.640So some of them are people who just really need more confidence, who are, like, afraid of, you know, getting things wrong to the point where they deprive themselves of experience or learning.
00:58:03.300And some people who are young need to open themselves up to more different perspectives.
00:58:09.340And some people who are young need more friends their own age.
00:58:13.720And some people who are young need more friends who are different than them.
00:58:17.260You know, it's a really fascinating, varied, internally contradictory and weird group of people when we talk about, like, the youth or when we talk about, like, Gen Z, right?
00:58:29.240And I think exposure to them in real life has made me a lot more sympathetic to things that are, like, coded Gen Z problems and a lot less eager to, like, make facile generational generalizations, right?
00:58:46.340When people are like, Gen Z is like this and millennials are like that.
00:58:49.900And I'm like, well, I don't know that that's true because you're talking about like really vast groups of people who are separated by what are ultimately like kind of arbitrary divisions.
00:58:58.480Yeah. As someone who's either Gen X or millennial, but like doesn't really culturally belong to either, I've watched both of these generational descriptors sort of emerge in these kind of, yeah, pop sociological kind of diagnoses, and they've never sort of fit for me.
00:59:17.800And I found that the horrible truth of our society is that as it gets older, I think generational descriptions matter much less to the people who are in that generation than the people who are outside of it, right?
00:59:29.380Like millennials mattered as a bugaboo for boomers and some older Gen Xers in order to justify the dismantling of or the fraying of certain social safety nets, right?
00:59:43.920The idea of the avocado toast being the reason why people can't afford to live in New York City anymore, right?
00:59:49.460Like, we matter all more as totems, especially the young, because there's fewer of you than even of the two of us, right?
00:59:58.220And this is going to get worse and worse and worse.
01:00:00.500So in some way, pointing out diversity and non-coincidence is, I think, far more important than sort of like saying, here's what the problem is for your generation.
01:00:10.540One thing I will say for younger listeners who have less experience, the only thing I know about you is that you weren't alive for the stuff that I was alive for.
01:00:20.340And there's two things that I always sort of emphasize these days, which is...
01:01:55.240Like, is it conceivable that the cops will change the way they've always done business in America?0.98
01:02:01.440Doesn't seem likely, but so did a pandemic.
01:02:04.300So why don't I just roll the dice again?
01:02:06.660And I think that is something that is worth keeping in mind as we enter into an even darker branch of what was already, frankly, one of the darkest imaginable timelines.
01:02:17.480That the fact that there are a lot of securities and seeming certainties that are being dismantled, and that's terrifying.
01:02:24.500On the other hand, remember all the things that you were told couldn't happen because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:03:09.760But yeah, you know, I think there's something to it.
01:03:12.100You know, every discourse about the young kids these days is really a discourse that reveals some truths about aging, right?
01:03:18.240And when you age, one thing that does happen is you become more bought into institutions. You become more reliant on the status quo. It becomes not just like sort of less habituated, but also more threatening to think of a different future, right?
01:03:35.700because, you know, you've spent all this time
01:03:37.660working for X university or Y newspaper
01:04:00.240So we have another question sort of in that vein.
01:04:03.280I'm curious what you two as university educators0.63
01:04:05.420think about the Gen Z boys have become irredeemable misogynist rhetoric. I read the
01:04:10.540think pieces about the insidious influence of Andrew Tate and how Gen Z girls are dealing with
01:04:14.720their male MAGA peers, but I have to wonder if this narrative is overblown. It's not like I
01:04:19.900didn't navigate a ton of misogyny from my male millennial peers in college, so what is unique
01:04:24.360about this? I'm a female college professor in conservative region, and for the most part,
01:04:29.080the young men in my classes seem like good kids. I have not experienced any blatant sexism from
01:04:33.480them, but I'm also not socializing with them. So maybe they turn to ghouls the moment they hit the
01:04:39.040dorms and I'm just being naive. I'm beginning to think that this is an outgrowth of the boys in
01:04:44.580crisis moral panic. The boys are more misogynist than previous generations, so all of us progressives
01:04:49.380must get on board with the project of centering male need. I'd love some of your commentary on
01:04:54.680this. Yeah, I think that's a very good question. I've wondered this myself. I mean, we've talked
01:05:00.780with Michael Hobbs on this podcast about how these kinds of blanket statements about shifting
01:05:08.340gendered norms among our young, they don't always have to be wrong, but they more often than not
01:05:14.800contain an element of moral panic. Part of it, I think, is simply that these shifts are so vast
01:05:22.580that like you're always going to be cherry picking some example. And then how do you do that?
01:05:27.240you're probably going to make some assumptions of who represents a boy right now, right? So you
01:05:33.560might go to a certain part of the country, you might go into a certain socioeconomic tax bracket
01:05:38.000or whatever, you might look for conservative sons of liberal families, right? You might go into a
01:05:46.000parents group on Reddit or something like that. So I worry about these kinds of think pieces,
01:05:51.940Not because I think it's necessarily impossible, but because I can sort of see the work that goes into pre-conceptualizing a piece like a bunch of Gen Z boys are turning misogynist, right?0.89
01:06:05.780It's very hard for adult reporters to really get access to what kids are doing anyway, right?0.83
01:06:12.480Like, there's just a lot of places where in 20 years a Sarah Marshall can come in and be like, yeah, that's how that got distorted, by the way, right?
01:06:20.060So, that's not to say that it isn't happening, but like the person who asked the question, I have the same misgivings and worries about this.
01:06:29.160I think that there's a very good chance that this is wrong or distorted.
01:06:32.560You know, I think one thing that legitimately has changed is that now more of adolescent social life is visible to adults.
01:06:43.840And so there might be something to the effect of, like, oh, my God, adults see more of adolescents interacting with one another and are disgusted by it in a way that reflects their own exposure more than a change of the underlying conditions.
01:06:58.540You know, technology also enables different forms of sexual harassment, right?
01:07:04.420It used to be that, you know, your boyfriend would take a Polaroid of you naked and show it to his friends, and now he can make AI of you naked after you dump him and put that all over.
01:07:13.840you know, various forums, there's a sort of like amplifying effect that the internet has
01:07:18.680that makes us maybe more aware of or sort of exaggerated in our exposure to
01:07:25.200phenomena that are ongoing even before the internet, right? The internet makes everything
01:07:29.320bigger. It makes everything more visible. It spreads everything out a lot further and faster
01:07:34.760than it used to be able to happen. Yeah. I mean, I think the one caution I would sound,
01:07:39.940The one thing that is definitely happening is that the internet is aging down, right?
01:07:52.520They kind of set the overall tone and culture.
01:07:55.700You then start getting Instagram, which I think trends a little bit younger.
01:07:59.780And then you get TikTok, which we're like, I'm too old for it.
01:08:03.540I think like I know 30-year-olds who feel like they're too old for it.
01:08:06.760So it's also like, what generation or what age bracket sets the tone of a place? And that makes these kind of diagnoses of change really difficult, because it's not only, as you say, can we see a lot more of what they're doing, we're in their living room right now, right? We're seeing, we're on their home turf, right, where they may be a lot more unguarded, where they have their own way of talking.
01:09:18.160So we're going to pause here and we're going to do a second one of these or another third one of these in case this crapped out in the recording.
01:09:26.920But thank you all for listening, and thank you for all these amazing questions.
01:09:30.940As you can tell, they really got us cooking.