00:00:57.520It just, it came out. It may be because this week I've just done something that I do not
00:01:04.360recommend at all, at all to anyone. You should not do what I just did. But I listened to about
00:01:10.540six hours of the Joe Rogan show straight, straight through. I just put it on as like my
00:01:16.220ambient noise while I was cleaning my house and my toilet and doing other things that I don't
00:01:23.160enjoy doing. Why did I do this? Did I do this to get myself into a massive rage? No, no, I did it.
00:01:32.520I did it for work. I did it out of curiosity. I am intensely curious about why this man is so popular.
00:01:40.660I'm going to admit something kind of embarrassing. I used to be a Joe Rogan fan. Newsradio,
00:01:47.100the sitcom, was one of my favorite shows to watch reruns of in college in like the mid-afternoon0.99
00:01:55.020time after classes, like after economics class, when you're just going to like crack open a Zima0.94
00:02:00.180and watch some dumb TV. That was my jam. And Joe Rogan was right there. He was the hot dumb guy.0.93
00:02:06.360He's definitely not hot anymore. And now he has a lot of influence. So things are different.1.00
00:02:10.720But listening to the show and, you know, then absorbing the whole ecosystem of the Joe Rogan
00:02:18.920universe, which, again, terrifying, terrifying, it made me think a lot about something I've been
00:02:25.780been talking about lately, which is what is masculinity? What is masculinity? What is
00:02:33.180femininity? And how are certain people co-opting those things? Because at its heart, masculinity0.98
00:02:40.260just means pertaining to the characteristics of a man. That's it. That's it. But our culture has
00:02:50.120created a very particular way of being masculine. It ascribes things like dominant, strong,
00:02:58.560powerful, fierce to the masculine. And I'm so curious if we could flip that narrative. I think
00:03:05.300about it all the time as the mom of a boy, what if we assigned other characteristics to masculine?
00:03:11.820Things like caring and nurturing, warm, kind, supportive, and respectful. All good things.
00:03:18.800All wonderful things. Joyful, playful, emotional. What if we thought of these as male traits?
00:03:29.840And maybe you already do, but I don't think that most of our culture does. In fact,
00:03:34.240after listening to so much Joe Rogan, I know that most of our culture does not. I know things now.
00:03:41.420I know things that I will never unknow. Here to talk to me about all of it today is someone else
00:03:47.620who has been thinking about masculinity and femininity for a very, very long time.
00:03:55.740Catherine Connors is the former head of content for Disney Interactive, and she used to call0.99
00:04:00.600herself a princess hacker. Because part of her job was figuring out what characteristics a Disney0.99
00:04:08.400princess should have. What characteristics are distinctly princess-like? Are those feminine?0.99
00:04:15.860Are those masculine? And does any of this matter at all? Catherine's also the creator of the blog
00:04:22.700herbadmother.com. And like I said, she thinks a lot about all of these things. One of the reasons
00:04:31.340is that she is the mom of a girl who used to love princesses and fairy tales, but now loves dirt
00:04:36.680bikes, cheerleading and hockey. And she also has a boy who loves princesses and fairy tales. And
00:04:42.760Catherine believes in the power of fairy tales. She believes in the power of storytelling to flip
00:04:49.280the narratives that we've traditionally been told about what is masculine and what is feminine.
00:04:54.780This conversation is so fun. It's so much more fun than Joe Rogan. I mean, it was a real palate
00:05:00.300cleanser for me. Like I said, don't do it. I do these things so you don't have to. Here's Catherine.
00:05:07.380Can you tell me who you are and what you do? Oh my gosh, who am I? You're starting with the
00:05:14.520existential question. I am a writer and an entrepreneur. I do want to ask you a couple
00:05:22.960questions about femininity to start because, you know, one of the things that we see so much on
00:05:30.140social media now these days is the idea of what is feminine and what is masculine. And I feel
00:05:39.180Those words are being co-opted in a very specific way, really, to keep women in a role out of the workforce and to say that feminine equals soft and submissive and masculine equals strong and powerful.
00:06:02.160I love this question. And I know you've done a lot of investigation into trad wives and that whole dynamic and, you know, and a lot of conventional sort of stereotypes of women, you know, and, you know, how their character tends to be represented.
00:06:20.900Look, femininity and masculinity are made up things, right? They just are. They're social constructs. That's not to say that they are conventional understandings of masculinity and femininity, which are very squishy. They can encompass a lot of things.
00:06:39.160You know, they they've tended to track to social rules and ways of really sort of constructing experience, you know, for for different groups in society, women and girls on the one hand and boys and men on the other.
00:06:55.620But but but they are they're just stories. Right.
00:06:58.820You know, they've been convenient stories for us and, you know, they've been convenient stories across, you know, many, if not most cultures and most of history.
00:07:09.160in order to, you know, to really, you know, ensure, you know, a kind of predictable social
00:07:15.300order that serves certain, you know, political, social and economic ends, like the, you know,
00:07:20.260the family and the household. So there's nothing, there's nothing really in anything biological,
00:07:28.080you know, that tells us that women need to be soft and compliant. I've had conversations with
00:07:34.480people, you know, usually with men on the other side of this discussion of like, aren't these,
00:07:39.160aren't we just conforming to natural roles? And it's like, well, female violence is an extremely1.00
00:07:46.640natural thing in the natural world. If we want to get really, really, really into it, it's stuff0.99
00:07:51.540we don't like to think about. But there's nothing in the natural world that pushes us into any kind
00:07:58.020of natural softness. And there's also the fact that so many of the postures and performances
00:08:06.820that we code as feminine. This is one of the things that my co-author Amy Stanton and I talk
00:08:11.580about in The Feminine Revolution. Many of those things are just twists of the lens, right? There0.95
00:08:17.620are some things that we characterize or code as feminine that if you just twist the lens slightly,
00:08:21.780you can see the masculine version and see how it's celebrated in masculinity. They're just
00:08:27.380frameworks that we put upon the world. And they're frameworks that, to your question,
00:08:33.000for the most part, really serve to limit us. And what are some of those things that if we
00:08:38.640twist the lens, we can see it the other way? Well, you know, vanity, for one, right? You know,
00:08:44.900there is the, you know, the trope of vain women, and certainly this is a trope that gets applied0.99
00:08:49.080to teenage girls all the time, right? You know, just really obsessed with appearances and that1.00
00:08:54.620sort of thing. But it's like, you know, look at the peacock, right? The peacock is male.
00:08:58.500And, you know, and we see that trope played out, you know, in masculinity. I mean, it's like with like weightlifting and bodybuilding and posturing and, you know, like the cars and all of the aspects of masculine performance that are celebrated and supported, you know, in the culture, right?
00:09:20.080We love our culture, love seeing men peacock, right? And show off. Another is forms of social
00:09:27.860communication. We have stereotypes of women being gossips, right? But gossip is just a form of1.00
00:09:35.920social communication. It's a form of information sharing. And we don't call it gossip when men
00:09:40.540share intel with each other and talk with each other. No, we call it networking.
00:09:45.920We call it networking. Exactly. You know, we've just we've put language and stereotypes onto
00:09:52.260things. And we code them as feminine or masculine determined, you know, usually on the basis of do
00:09:59.380we see do we want to portray something as weak or silly or ineffectual on the one hand? Or do we0.64
00:10:04.820want to see it as strong or powerful on the other? Right, right. And yeah, the, you know, the former
00:10:10.800is what we tend to code as feminine in our culture. And we're continuing to do it on social0.99
00:10:16.600media. That's the thing, you know, I look at social media, and my hope is that it can be
00:10:21.200a next generation of reframing what it means to be feminine, what it means to be masculine. And
00:10:28.160it's just more and more, it seems to be falling back on these old tropes. And that sucks.0.99
00:10:34.400It does. I mean, I think it's a backlash, frankly, against the, you know, the shifts of the kind that0.98
00:10:40.640you're describing having been working their magic over what is in the, over the course of human
00:10:47.160history, this is a really short amount of time, right? The consumer has not been around for very
00:10:52.320long at all. And it was in fact, the thing that, that, that drew me out of academia. And the reason
00:10:57.100I started writing about motherhood was because I became really, really interested. This is like
00:11:01.620late 2005, early 2006. And the, you know, influencer was not a term yet. Blogging was
00:11:09.640barely acknowledged. But this is this is sort of the first instance that you could see of what we
00:11:15.320would now call sort of lifestyle content creation. It was in the form of weren't even they weren't
00:11:20.900even called mom blogs at the time, right? There wasn't even a name for them. But it was it was
00:11:26.580an early instance of women and some men writing very, very honestly about private life. And,
00:11:33.360you know, I had been a scholar of storytelling in the context of political philosophy. And I had
00:11:38.420been, you know, my thesis over my academic career had been that, you know, that the stories that we
00:11:43.420tell sort of are what put women and girls into the private sphere. And, you know, it's the stories
00:11:49.440we tell that determine who gets to participate in the public sphere. And, you know, guess what,
00:11:54.140You know, women and girls have largely been excluded across most of history and in most cultures. And my argument was that storytelling had everything to do with that. When that first wave of online private storytelling emerged, I became really, really interested in how that was potentially going to challenge the way that we thought about motherhood.
00:12:13.700Now, of course, I fell down the rabbit hole and just became a mom blogger myself and just loved doing it. And so I, you know, sort of ate my own dog food to an extreme degree, such that, you know, I ended up leaving academia and just writing. But at the time, it seemed obvious to me that, oh, like, this is going to change how we think about the tropes and stereotypes of motherhood. And it did, right? You know, there was a period of time in which a lot of the content was what we would now consider sort of countercultural.
00:12:40.040I mean, my own blog was Her Bad Mother. You know, there was, you know, Deuce, obviously, Heather Armstrong, and Rebecca Wolfe, Girls Gone Child, and Liz Gumbiner, Mom 101, and Kristen Chase, Motherhood Uncensored, all of which were focused on like counter narratives. And we started to see this in other forms of lifestyle content, right? You know, in fashion, influencing gender identity, and the ways in which we talk about all sorts of things, sexuality, and mental illness, and mental wellness, and all these things.
00:13:08.700So what I think that we're seeing now is a cultural pushback to that, right?
00:13:15.960It's been, you know, for the first time in human history, we had this like widely accessible
00:13:21.080communications technology that allowed anybody to like fly their freak flag and assert their
00:13:29.420And a big piece of what I think is happening now is that we're just, we're starting to
00:13:33.880see the cultural discomfort with that really rear its ugly head and try to reassert, you know,
00:13:40.440more traditional narratives to restore order. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean,
00:13:46.160I was talking about how, how I want to define masculinity the other day with my son, you know,
00:13:55.440I'm raising a boy human, and I want him to see male role models that are positive and supportive.
00:14:05.700And the words that I would love to attach to masculine are supportive, loving, caring, also strong, because I want to attach strong to everyone and powerful to everyone.
00:14:23.320um and then some someone messaged me and said also playful i would love to attach the word
00:14:28.700playful because i i would i would like to see men having more joy in their lives and that was a
00:14:36.720really fun one for me um i'd love to hear your thoughts about like what can we what can we be
00:14:44.000attaching to masculine how can we play with redefining these ideas um because they are being
00:14:51.520redefined for us in a cohort on the internet that is very powerful, that is getting a lot of
00:14:57.960attention. Okay, let's take a quick break here. And then we're going to talk about how to take
00:15:03.520back the words masculine and feminine, the same way that Donna Martin took back graduation
00:20:16.160I was editor-in-chief of a media company
00:20:18.560called Babbel, which was acquired by Disney, and we became the digital arm. So I became head of
00:20:24.480content for Disney Interactive and had responsibility over its digital platforms and portfolios and
00:20:32.160that sort of thing. What I also, though, endeavored to do from my first minute on the lot in the
00:20:42.040of campus was ask what we were going to do about Princess. It was, you know, sort of one of the
00:20:49.440things that was an interesting point in the, you know, in the Babel acquisition, I think we're far
00:20:55.060enough along past it, you know, that I can say this, I'm well beyond my NDAs. You know, and we're
00:21:01.020also, we're all in a safe space here. It's a safe space. Just, just everyone in the world is listening
00:21:07.000right now. Everyone in the world is listening. It was 13 years ago now. But one of the points
00:21:12.360of conversation we had was, you know, because there are a number of storytellers in the Babel
00:21:16.580ecosystem that wrote critically about Princess. I had written critically about Princess. I delivered
00:21:21.860lectures as an academic on the Princess Industrial Complex. So we wanted to make sure that we were
00:21:27.760coming into an environment that was going to be friendly to constructive criticism, you know,
00:21:31.980healthy discourse, you know, we were after all the discourse, we were in charge of the company's,
00:21:38.600you know, women and family strategy for the internet, right? Like you couldn't,
00:21:42.940Peggy Ornstein had just written Cinderella ate my daughter, right?
00:21:46.420Love me some Peggy. We had it. Yeah, we had her on a couple months ago.
00:21:50.000Yeah, Peggy's amazing. That book was amazing. It was just at the moment that GoldieBlox was
00:21:54.840emerging. And so like, this was a real question. And so you know, when I, you know, one of the
00:22:00.500things I, you know, I took upon was like asking, so what are we going to do? Like, can we, can we
00:22:04.800talk about princess, right? Can we have a conversation about how we're engaging women
00:22:08.660and girls around these stories, you know? And so, you know, I, you know, I, I led co-led, I had
00:22:16.380conspirators and collaborators, you know, and an initiative within the company to, you know,
00:22:20.680to, to think critically about, you know, women and girls strategy broadly, you know, and in
00:22:26.540particular, how to think about, you know, what's the best way to be framing princess for a new
00:22:30.580generation of girls and women. And it was amazing work. It was frustrating work. It was fascinating
00:22:38.520work. It was challenging work for me in part because, you know, I, you know, as I said,
00:22:44.560I had spent a long time as a scholar and then as a mom blogger being super critical, right,
00:22:51.000of the princess industrial complex and a lot of the stuff. And I found myself in a situation where
00:22:55.700the the right strategy wasn't to continue to be critical it was to be like okay like let's like
00:23:01.580let's take serious our role at Disney as the stewards of fairy tale and think about what it
00:23:05.960means to like to really embrace where the culture is going and do it in a way that is constructive
00:23:12.260and and that honors the legacy of fairy tale and again as I said you know the the personal side of
00:23:19.140that for me was having a you know a young daughter and especially a young son who were just in that
00:23:24.700moment of really, really, really, really falling in love with princesses and superheroes and space
00:23:31.840cowboys and all those things. And having that influence of how their imaginations, you know,
00:23:38.640were engaged by these stories became a became a core part of the work.
00:23:42.740Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I just look, there's a lot that I like about princess
00:23:49.320princess play for, for, for my girls. Um, they love, I love, I love anything where kids put on
00:23:55.760costumes. I'm just like, right. I love anything where kids put on costumes and makeup stories
00:24:02.920and expand their imagination and their worlds. Like that's awesome. Uh, and I also like that
00:24:10.020for boys. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And that becomes like, that really
00:24:16.700becomes the hinge right is that yes there's you know we can we can be critical about many
00:24:23.420many elements of how historically in pop culture sort of princesses have been framed for girls
00:24:29.800but that core element of the expansive horizon that's provided by imaginative play you know the
00:24:36.960magic of dress up the magic of like having just being like responding to like glitter and sparkle
00:24:44.680and magic wands and all of these amazing, fantastical fairyland things, when you open
00:24:52.160up that sphere and welcome boys into it, that's, I think, when you get the sort of radical
00:24:57.640opportunity for change because boys do love it. I mean, our own research at Disney showed that
00:25:02.020boys like that kind of play, right? My son loved that kind of play. And, you know, when you open
00:25:08.400up the narrative opportunities in those stories, the social emotional learning opportunities in
00:25:13.640the stories and say, look, these are really stories about kindness. These are stories about
00:25:19.200sort of leaning on your fellow creature, you know, woodland animal or dwarf or, you know,
00:25:24.600anything. Yeah. Donkey. There's Donkey. No, that's Pixar. That's a different, right?
00:25:28.860Right, right, right. Whatever. Whatever. They all blend to me these days.
00:25:33.900I mean, for children, they all form a landscape. I mean, my daughter, you know, in the years that I
00:25:43.640who she called Dr. Mrs. Space Ranger Princess, and she blended a Buzz Lightyear costume with
00:25:51.160a Cinderella costume, and she would go out, we lived in New York at the time, and she would go
00:25:56.540out onto the roof deck, and she would jump from the tables in the Buzz Lightyear wings and the
00:26:03.280Cinderella dress and rain boots, and declare herself a Space Ranger Princess, who was also
00:26:08.720scientist, right? Who was also a mom and had a family, right? And it was that mashup that was
00:26:15.660just spectacular, right? It's like, you know, take these stories and live in them and inhabit them
00:26:21.600and let your imagination be expanded. Like, grownups should be doing more of that, right?
00:26:27.480Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And I really like including boys in this. Again, this goes back to
00:26:36.100the definition of what is masculine, what is feminine. And in terms of, I want you to have
00:26:44.660the roles, to be able to enjoy the kinds of things that girls get to enjoy in that role
00:26:50.080playing and the play and the whimsy, you know, for so long in many of these, we talk a lot about
00:26:59.300how the princesses were, you know, I find like their roles are challenging, right? In the
00:27:04.820the submission and things like that. But for the men, I think they're equally as toxic. I mean,
00:27:11.180my God, Prince Eric is dumb as bricks. And I don't think Prince Charming speaks.1.00
00:27:19.180And then we have these male roles, but then they're also expected to be the savior. And
00:27:24.080that is a lot of pressure. And so, yes, transforming these things and also just
00:27:30.120having these conversations when we're watching these movies um i do i do like the frozen franchise
00:27:38.800because it is the the girls saving themselves and each other and protecting each other uh and
00:27:44.880there's also a great dude in it who is just along for the adventure but i think that we can do more
00:27:50.980now we've done we've done a lot for girls i think we can be doing more for boys to create these role
00:27:57.300models for them that are the supportive, whimsical, delightful, fun-to-inhabit characters.
00:28:04.540I think that's exactly right, right? And the fun-to-inhabit characters and also the characters
00:28:09.840that get to be, I hate using this word because it's so loaded in our culture, heroic in different
00:28:18.060ways, right? We have such a narrow understanding of what a hero is. And arguably, I actually did
00:28:25.700this exercise when i was at disney when it was a as a sort of it was a rhetorical exercise but it
00:28:29.920was really fun for me as a writer i took a handful of the fairy tales and i gender flipped them
00:28:35.000completely right so i've got i actually have like my favorite is a gender flip version of snow white
00:28:41.020that i called pale jack and literally just took like the the um the the gram version of the stare
00:28:47.680the the brothers gram version of the fairy tales and just swapped out the gender and i was trying
00:28:52.660to make a point about how there's nothing in these stories that that we have to be obsessive
00:28:59.120about the sort of femininity or masculinity about and what's interesting when you do that is that
00:29:03.600you start to see oh that becomes a really a boy Snow White is a really interesting character to
00:29:08.040play with a boy Cinderella is an interesting character to play with if you don't try to turn
00:29:12.980them into a fairy tale Luke Skywalker right or Iron Man when you actually like really honor
00:29:20.660And you can really see some of the like really interesting threads in older versions of these stories. And these stories go back way beyond the brothers Graham and Hans Christian Andersen. And there are Chinese versions and African versions and ancient Greek versions.
00:29:34.620But you can start to see how what some of these many of these stories are doing is saying, oh, the superpowers of a Snow White or a Cinderella were being brave. Right. We're being kind. We're being, you know, both Snow White and Cinderella build community for themselves with creatures and beings that everybody else is ignoring. Right.
00:29:57.180you know they create safe havens for themselves Snow White in particular creates a whole community0.78
00:30:01.640with dwarves right in order to kind of affect her own self-rescue initially the prince as to your0.79
00:30:07.700point just sort of comes in at the end and is an afterthought right oh my god I never thought that
00:30:12.740Snow White's village is her dwarves like we're all searching for a village and community and she gets
00:30:17.400her dwarves yeah she gets her village they make a home together right it's like they make a home0.99
00:30:23.400together home together and she builds this beautiful happy life for a while in the forest
00:30:29.140with these like funky little dwarves funky little supportive dudes yeah and she's kind to them and
00:30:37.420they're kind to her and she wins them over and it's like you know if you think about like what
00:30:41.940happens if a boy goes into that environment a boy has to rescue himself from a toxic family
00:30:46.300right or a toxic yes and he finds this little community of magical beings and um it's like
00:30:54.140you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna help you you help me right and not on the level of i'm gonna
00:30:59.040defend you and i'm gonna carry a sword but a level of like i'm gonna care for you and you're gonna
00:31:03.380care for me right and let's look at how powerful that is about how that's what rescues you from
00:31:08.900the dark forest, right? Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Time for a quick break. Be right back.
00:31:20.480You want to impress them on a first date, but also play it cool. So what do you do? I'm Rufy Thorpe,
00:31:28.280and I wrote and read a real love story about a hinge couple that navigated exactly that.
00:32:02.980is made to help. Download it now. What am I missing? What else should I be asking you about
00:32:12.120the masculine and the feminine? Oh, gosh. Well, one of the things that is on my mind a lot,
00:32:18.060because I went through, last year was a super tough year for me. I kind of like
00:32:21.580lost everything. I lost my mom. My mom died on Mother's Day last year. My cat died six hours
00:32:29.040before my mom did. I wasn't, I was in the hospital in Canada with her. So I missed that. I lost my
00:32:34.440job. I lost my house. I lost my sister in a different sense. She didn't die, but she like
00:32:40.620absented herself into the world. I lost my stepfather. I lost a lot of, like it was a lot
00:32:47.080of things. It was an earthquake of a year and, and there was a lot of grief and there was a lot
00:32:54.000of emotional processing. And one of this, I'm, I'm looping this back to masculinity promise.
00:32:58.060Yeah, you are. Yeah, of course you are. There are two elements of it, right? One was that it was, I was very, very grateful for the space as a woman, as a mother, as a daughter, as a putative caregiver, the space that I was afforded for my loss and for my grief, right? That I feel like men don't get as much.
00:33:20.080And I was very aware in conversations that I had with male friends about how these were trickier conversations for them, complicated relationships with their own mothers, complicated relationships to grief, living in a culture where men still, you know, aren't supposed to outwardly show emotion.
00:33:38.720i was really really really grateful for the you know that you know the meme the feminine urge
00:33:44.100right to xyz i i felt very grateful for the feminine permission to indulge the feminine urge
00:33:50.980to cry a lot to mourn a lot to engage in ritual and this is where you know i you know i mentioned
00:33:56.800one of the things i'm working on you know narratively right now is uh is an intersection
00:34:01.160of loss and grief and magic and woo one of the things that was a big saving thing for me was
00:34:05.860that open space to like, spiritually explore ways of getting comfortable, right, with the emotional
00:34:13.540storm that I was weathering that it's like, it's, it's okay, especially for like a middle aged
00:34:18.940woman living in Los Angeles. It's like, grab your crystals, girl, right? That's fine. Right? It's
00:34:24.560like, do your moon rituals, like embrace woo. And that was really, really, really, really,
00:34:29.580really a big part has been continues to be a big part of my healing process. But it's something
00:34:34.660that is this is one of the things that's certainly super coded feminine right now in certainly an1.00
00:34:39.960internet culture and one of the things that's made fun of and that sort of thing it's like the ladies1.00
00:34:44.760with their crystals and their astrology and you know there's you know the witch witch fluencers0.93
00:34:50.280and witch talk and all this which waiter witch fluencers a thing totally oh shut your mouth
00:34:56.380totally maybe a longer conversation um yeah like it's you know it's a whole thing but it's super1.00
00:35:03.840feminine. And there are really, really interesting male, masculine, you know, presences in that
00:35:11.860space. And what's interesting to me about them is that they like they're conflating masculine or
00:35:16.500they're exploding, disrupting, let's say masculinity in a different way, a way that's
00:35:20.760really interesting by embracing this like hyper feminized space. And I've thought a lot about how
00:35:28.800it's like, look, you know, this is one of the things this goes to what we were saying about
00:35:31.680boys and fairy tales men get locked out of magic right men get excluded from that now they have
00:35:39.440there's various like there's obviously iron john and heroes journeys and all that sort of thing
00:35:44.940men you know men have their own paths and joe rogan will go on and on about you know all the
00:35:49.820insights from psychedelic journeys but that like but but they're cut off from magic magic i think
00:35:54.560Right. Right. Kind of folkloric, whimsical, fairyland magic. Right. You know, the, you know, real interesting, powerful magic that helps us navigate emotional storms. It's, it's so hyper feminized. And there's a part of me that wants to construct, like deconstruct that critically.
00:36:18.540But there's a part of me that just feels wild gratitude that to have all this cultural space to explore emotions and spirituality in that way.
00:36:30.480Now, I can also go on very critically about the divine feminine, but there's something very, very powerful about the cultural moment that we're in that is creating so much space for different forms of emotional and spiritual exploration that I feel sad for men to be cut off from.
00:36:49.160And where I would wish to see, like, really some sort of gentler integration of masculine and feminine around that of having it be less gendered than it is. I say that at the same time as I'm like, you know, one of the things I'm grateful for, it's like, you know, it's like grown up princess play in some respects, right?
00:37:10.360You know, I'm grateful for the feminization of it in some respects, but I also am like really, really aware of how the gender coding with magic in the current cultural moment makes it kind of exclusive.
00:37:25.440Right, right. Well, I think that gender coding makes too many things exclusive, right?0.56
00:37:30.060Yes, totally, totally, totally, totally. Especially things that have to do with how we move emotionally in our world, right? It's, you know, the, you know, the masculine public sphere has so often, especially in the West, especially, you know, in the, you know, the, the capitalist patriarchal West.
00:37:50.340is framed as the space of reason and order, right? It's framed as the space of, and we know that it's
00:38:00.800not that, right? We know that that's a lie, but it does put a cultural expectation on anyone who
00:38:06.960is embracing that sort of masculine space that it's like, that is the space of reason and science
00:38:12.560and order. And it's not a space in which you get messy and cry, right? It's not a space in which
00:38:19.560you pursue whimsical joy, right? It is not a space in which you are soft, right? It is not a space
00:38:26.740in which you hug trees, right? It's a more closed space to the landscape of our emotions and our
00:38:36.640imagination. And that's where I think the oppressive character of gender stereotypes
00:38:43.700just really does us all a disservice, but it's one of the ways in which it really does harm men and
00:38:48.320boys. Absolutely. Absolutely. That is all we've got for today, mostly because I have to go to the
00:38:54.340gym. I loved this conversation. We're going to have you on again because you are a Renaissance
00:39:00.900human. I don't like to say Renaissance woman or man, a Renaissance human. We can talk about all
00:39:05.440of the things. And next up, we're going to talk about AI, which is going to be delightful and
00:39:09.820also terrifying in a way for me. I'm scared. I'm scared of AI. Yeah. I mean, we'll save it for the
00:39:17.000next conversation. But it's a terrifying, exhilarating, beautiful and horrible moment
00:39:23.220that we're in. And it's a fascinating one to explore. Yeah, we are. Tell everyone where
00:39:29.120they can find you and support you on the interwebs. On the interwebs, I am on Instagram
00:39:37.160and threads as at her bad mother, H-E-R-B-A-D mother. I am, where else am I? I'm no longer on1.00
00:39:47.440X, thankfully. Oh, me neither. I haven't been on X in forever. I had my identity stolen on X and
00:39:53.880then I gave up. I thought you did. Yeah. It's a terrible place. It's a terrible name. Everything
00:39:58.280about it is awful. Yeah. And I was just like, I'm not, this is not important enough to me to fight.
00:40:03.640So I'm just going to abandon it, delete it, and go away.
00:40:06.400And I just launched a sub stack, which is Holy Doodle Bug.