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Woman, Thy Name is Russia
22 Plays10 days ago
Helen walks Sarah through the works of frontier doctor and dispenser of folksy wisdom, Joseph H. Peck, MD, whose writing is best described as "Mark Twain if he sucked."
Transcript
Postmodern Mentality and Humor
00:00:01
Speaker
There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
00:00:16
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! Now listen, you. The right calling name. Let's get. Let's stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
00:00:32
Speaker
level of masochism. I
00:00:38
Speaker
i don't want to get too up our own ass, but that theme song, it's a banger. Yeah. Do you know where that Zizek quote comes from? no i don't.
Controversial Humor as Community Building
00:00:47
Speaker
Or it's a segment that has been clipped on YouTube, and the title of the YouTube video is Zizek gets the N-word pass.
00:00:59
Speaker
Now, I think you might kind of know where this is going, but he starts telling this story about being at a book signing and, you know, two black guys come up to get a book signed and he's like signing their book.
00:01:11
Speaker
And he's like, you know, and I saw them and I couldn't resist that. the worst racist remark. And I said, Oh, i don't know which one is for which, you know, you, you black people like the yellows. You all look the same.
00:01:24
Speaker
He could have resisted by the way. I think he could have resisted saying that. And then of course, you know, and then he's like, and then the two of them laughed and they, you know, they shook my hand and they said, you can call me. And then the video cuts out.
00:01:35
Speaker
Right. Because like he says N word. Oh my fuck. Or I don't actually, I think there's probably a video out there where he doesn't say the word. I'm not going to say the N word on this podcast. Thank you, Alan. You're making my editing chops slightly easier.
00:01:48
Speaker
Yeah. Don't say slurs on the podcast.
Social Functions of Humor
00:01:50
Speaker
But um yeah, it's part of this very Zizek idea, which is like this kind of humorous transgression as a thing that like builds community. Yeah.
00:02:00
Speaker
And that they welcomed him in because he was you know he respected them to show this like transgressive impulse. But it's just like, come on, man. like ah boyfriend my mom used to have.
00:02:15
Speaker
claimed he had the n-word
The N-word Pass and Societal Implications
00:02:18
Speaker
pass and used it because he worked in the peace corps in africa my favorite genre but like i'm i'm thinking of i think multiple posts now of like or there's one in particular where someone talks about how they like have the n-word pass but they refuse to use it even though it's so really inconvenient because they like to like sing along to rap a lot That's so chivalrous. That's like not jumping the turnstiles even though you could, you know? it's like Exactly. It's just so funny because it's like, I kind of don't know how to process this impulse of like wanting the N-word pass, right? like I know, and so so many people want it. They want it so badly. It's one of the things that makes them most mad about society, I sometimes think, that they don't have the N-word pass.
00:03:06
Speaker
Yeah, I think this has ah a resonance here because i you know we talked a lot about humor last week and like Leacock's... like oh, this is humorous, right? And I think we're going to see that again today. And i think we're going to see it a lot in the people we look at, right?
Exploring Joseph H. Peck's Views on Men
00:03:23
Speaker
Like this idea of like humor as something which licenses something which would otherwise be inappropriate if it weren't a joke.
00:03:30
Speaker
But then it's never quite clear what the joke is or or what actually functionally the claim is that's different. So last episode, you know, you you brought this this man talking about women. And i want to want i want to get away from, you know, gynocentrism on this podcast. I want to, you know, I want to i want to have ah balanced discussion. So today, we're going to have a man talking about men. I need to kind of call you in a little bit for your gynocentrism here.
00:03:54
Speaker
I accept the criticism and I will not improve. good The author of the stuff we're going to look at today, his name is Joseph H. Peck.
00:04:05
Speaker
I struggled a little bit to find too much biographical detail about him. Born in 1885, he studied medicine. He was born in Missouri, but he studied medicine and then practiced in Utah.
00:04:17
Speaker
I found at some point he refers to himself as the first doctor in Pioneer, Utah. I couldn't find any corroborating source for this. And the timeline kind of doesn't match up for me because I feel like there were people in Utah, like people were doing Pioneer stuff in Utah before 1885 when he wasn't even born.
00:04:34
Speaker
I also briefly thought, okay, maybe he's Mormon. He does talk about the Bible a lot and he references Mormons a lot, but he he personally was not Mormon. And in fact, at one point he says, he refers to him as he's like, I was, you know, asked by such and such Mormon group to talk, but I was a Gentile. But definitely just situating where he's writing. So he worked as a doctor and then and when he turned 60, he retired.
00:04:57
Speaker
He and his wife moved to California and he started writing opinion column and the opinion columns gained some traction. And it seems like he was sort of well known and sort of successful and he got a couple of book deals.
00:05:10
Speaker
So his first major book, and it's the one we're going look at today, called All About Men, and it's published in 1958.
00:05:19
Speaker
So this is everything that we knew about men 1958. and nineteen fifty Okay, I'm so excited. ah kind of want to start off with just some scene setting about kind of what his perspective is and what he thinks he's bringing to the table.
00:05:31
Speaker
All men are equal in a physician's office. Remove the big shot's fancy clothes and drape him in an examining gown, and he is just another pot-bellied or thin-shanked old wreck quite similar to the skid row bum who has just had a bath and shave.
00:05:46
Speaker
I hope that after 72 years of living, many of them spent in the ringside seat of a doctor's office, I am able to give advice which may help future wayfarers bargain a bit more favorably with fate and circumstance.
00:05:57
Speaker
But my counsel is offered in humility. Okay, making a time war on point here. Sort of a Emperor's New Clothes style thing, or I've seen Twain write similarly in this period. Yeah, it's interesting because I think he's really trying to be Twain.
00:06:15
Speaker
Twain is a huge influence for him. And actually some of the reviews talk about him as like, oh, if Twain were a doctor, like this is who he would be. And I think to actually amp that up a little bit more, so he talks a little bit about the style he's going to use and his approach.
00:06:30
Speaker
And he tells this anecdote about sitting in on a lecture for engineers and being told and like not understanding any of it and being like, wow, that really like totally went over my head.
00:06:44
Speaker
And the person sitting next to him being like, well, now you know how like we feel we try to understand doctor. And so he he has this excerpt, which I cut out a little bit of because he goes on for, he's very verbose.
00:06:55
Speaker
I pledged myself never to let a patient leave my office until I had discussed his troubles in a language a child could understand. That is, there will be no medical claptrap in this book.
00:07:06
Speaker
And because I am writing for lazy readers who hate dictionaries as much as I do, I will use more metaphors and analogies than are considered good practice in literary circles. This book will read the way I talk, and if the editors don't like it, they know what they can do.
00:07:21
Speaker
Okay, he's a straight shooter. I appreciate that. He shoots from the hip. He uses a lot of
Structure and Insights of Peck's Book
00:07:27
Speaker
analogies. Now, hang on. He's going to be using a lot of analogies in his reasoning as well as his prose, isn't
00:07:37
Speaker
he? What? Yeah, so this book is like, it's in parts and the parts are kind of like each part of a man's life. And it very much is a man's life um that he's talking about here.
00:07:52
Speaker
Okay, so we've got him crawling on four legs in the morning, and and then two legs left Quite literally, right? Like part one is called From Pram to Hot Rod. Part two is From Halter to Alter.
00:08:05
Speaker
Part three is from time clock to ticker tape. Now, I'm not really sure. i think the ticker tape is like a stock investment reference because he starts to talk a little bit more about like the importance of like getting your money up and earning potential.
00:08:24
Speaker
In this section, from old age of youth to youth of old age... Part five, the youth of old age. I think he just ran out of stuff. I Part the time for adventure.
00:08:37
Speaker
This chapter, this part, we're not going to really going to get into it too much, but this part has a chapter called It's Never Too Late to Begin, which I was really excited to see his perspective on hormone therapy, but that's not what the chapter is about.
00:08:50
Speaker
Disappointing right disappointing a lot of people in the medical establishment. They're under informed on this exactly That's what I'm always saying and then part 7 twilight year 75 plus So are you excited to learn about men?
00:09:04
Speaker
Um, yeah, absolutely 100% Okay, so we're gonna get like a folksy but knowledgeable doctor using the best of his kind of reasoning reasoning and analogy is and Poor man's Mark Twain.
00:09:19
Speaker
Mark Twain wearing a barrel in the street. Exactly. And this is where I was like trying to get more info about him. It seems like he was pretty successful because he did make a fair amount of money as a doctor, it seems.
00:09:30
Speaker
You know, he got a couple book deals. So, you know, but okay. So part one from Pram to Hot Rod, right? So of course, this is all going to be all about advice, advice, relating to children and later in the book he's gonna he's gonna kind of pivot his advice to be to men at this time in their lives but of course it doesn't really make sense to give advice to a baby so this is really parenting advice okay chapter one he's kind of like okay babies birth like this is the time for me to sort of opine about anatomy
00:10:05
Speaker
So he opens things up with this lovely little scene of the design of the human body and imagining these angels, or as he refers to them, the celestial draftsmen designing man.
00:10:21
Speaker
Now I'm gonna spare you most of this, but one part in particular I think you might get a kick out of. When the plumbing shop yelled because no outlet for bladder waste was provided, it was told to latch onto the line the sex crew had installed for transmission of semen.
00:10:39
Speaker
It was concluded that one external organ would get the creature into enough trouble. If he had two, he would have no time to think about anything else. When this compromise was made and they finished covering his most important appendage, a segment of skin was left over.
00:10:56
Speaker
oh no, please don't. Instead of disposing of it right then, they gave it a twist and left it there for the obstetrician to snip off soon after his... Oh, he's talking about the foreskin?
00:11:07
Speaker
After arrival in this veil of tears, an insult which would forever make him shy about his sex organ and most unhappy at the beginning of his journey. The celestial draftsmen were right about the trouble this little appendage would cause.
00:11:21
Speaker
Any attachment required to function in two separate ways is subject to breakdowns in both respects, and a breakdown of one function prevents the other from performing its prescribed duties." Oh.
00:11:35
Speaker
okay, I don't enjoy this folksiness. I don't like, um this is not folksy. This is repellent. Oh yeah. I mean, this is part of folksiness. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I just wanted to clip this.
00:11:48
Speaker
I'm also fascinated by the suggestion that if you had a urethral opening and a sex organ and they were different things, then somehow the amount of attention you would have to pay would just be like,
00:12:00
Speaker
doubled or multiplied in some way it would just like dominate your whole psyche does he know that's how it works for half the species presumably he does because he is a doctor treated women so he knows this whole thing is an analogy i hope right like there wasn't actually a moment when a bunch of like angels punched into the design-a-person factory and like had this argument.
00:12:32
Speaker
But it's not really clear what's going on here. And in fact, he does follow this up with a pretty... extended description first of women as an improved model.
00:12:46
Speaker
But then of course, with like a whole caveat in there about the narrowness of the birth canal and how this causes problems. Hmm. Okay, I'm just gonna ask right now, do you think he has a teleological view of biology?
00:13:01
Speaker
Oh, absolutely, I think he does. And I think we're gonna see that more and more already in this section, but especially as things go on. I think he certainly has a view of like what men and women are for, and it's only up for conversation like exactly what that view is.
00:13:19
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Also, I really want to call out the random swerve and anti-circumcision activism. Yeah, well, it's it's hard to it's hard to say because on the one hand, it is sort of intactivist.
00:13:34
Speaker
But it's not like it's bad to circumcise men. It's like it's bad that men have to be circumcised, right? Like this is exactly where this like analogy kind of like obscures what he's actually saying. And it's not clear if he's saying circumcision is a traumatic event or That shouldn't happen, although I think saying like it forever makes someone ashamed of their sex organ is like maybe carrying things a bit too far. On the other hand, i don't i don't think he like he it seems like he's accepted that it has to happen, and it has to happen as a result of like divine decree.
00:14:13
Speaker
Okay. Very strange. it's it's It's weird. um so this is what he has to say about the design of women. Her thigh bones were so attached to her pelvis that her knees knocked together when she walked, and she was forced to slide them by each other with a swivel motion, which was transmitted to the upper part of this long bone and to the muscles attached to it.
00:14:35
Speaker
This gave a peculiar motion to her derriere, which the male never tires of observing and admiring even more than other such natural phenomena as sunsets or Niagara Falls.
00:14:46
Speaker
Oof. I do remember I was walking down the street one time, and ah person i was acquainted with, who considered as himself my friend, ran up to me and was like, hey, you walk like Frankenstein.
00:14:59
Speaker
And it's good to hear that in this... I was embodying the spirit of womanhood. Okay, so that was terrifying. a Man was endowed with all the sweet features of a Jersey bull's temperament.
00:15:13
Speaker
He charged everything in his path, head down, pawing, snorting, and bellowing. But woman was given the guile of a bird-hunting cat, plus the cat's ability to keep out of awkward situations.
00:15:26
Speaker
He was meant to dream, and she was designed to dismiss his visions as hooey, being more interested in neighborhood chit-chat and in what man called on what frau than in who lit the stars at night and extinguished them in the morning.
00:15:40
Speaker
Nature, not too proud of its first model, made an excess of him to allow for breakage and delivery. Girls welcome their launching into a new world, but boys object to being so rudely ejected from the warm and comfortable nest of pregnancy.
00:15:54
Speaker
Girls are quickly adorned with beautiful pink ribbons and blankets, while the male child has to suffer a pruning operation on it there it is again on his most important organ before he can have his nakedness covered from the amused eyes of bystanders.
00:16:09
Speaker
Once cradled in his mother's arms, the male finds his idea of heaven, and for the rest of his life, he will try to get back to that womb-like protection. He enjoys her jealous possessiveness until the time when he wants a younger arms around him.
00:16:23
Speaker
This yearning causes all kinds of trouble. There's a lot to talk about here. Oh, there's so much to talk about, Sarah. Okay, first off, yeah, we're swerving back to the circumcision thing.
00:16:36
Speaker
And yeah, the circumcision is like, he doesn't talk about it too much more in this book, but I wanted to point out that like, we were in the first 10 pages of this book. And he's already, I mean, he's not going to talk about it once we move out of the baby section.
00:16:53
Speaker
Like, I guess it is appropriately placed, but it's a preoccupation for him. It's not just like a little throwaway joke he thought of. It's something that clearly he thinks about.
00:17:03
Speaker
It's on his mind. It's very strange. Okay, moving on moving on from circumcision, which i again and like keeps showing up. I think your question of like does this guy have a teleological vision of biology?
00:17:14
Speaker
Yeah, like but it's not clear. like This is pretty bleak, right? Well, women are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. from the very moment that they begin to exit the womb.
00:17:26
Speaker
And also, they were meant to be interested in gossip instead of you know all those hard science things that the men are getting into. you know Men are thinking about catapults and the stars and what extinguishes them.
00:17:43
Speaker
And women are like, she talked to who? Yeah, it's very like, it's like several things layered on top of each other, right? It's like this women are built biologically to be alluring.
00:17:56
Speaker
but also they're built to like ground men in a particular way. But the grounding is of the form of like stopping them from having bigger dreams. And also they're excited about being in the world. And also men, like he's like bringing in Freudianism here is like a given, right? Like men like obviously have this kind of like psychosexual attraction to their mothers, but it's like not explicitly, it's sort of a reverse Freud thing in a way. Cause Freud's thing is like men have sexual attraction to their mothers.
00:18:24
Speaker
Whereas what he is kind of saying, and we'll see this more as we go, but men actually just want to be like cradled and it's not really sexual. And actually the thing with men want from women is also not really sexual.
00:18:36
Speaker
And it's maybe not so clear here, but I think we're going to start to see that. Wait, okay. Now I'm a little confused because, because men definitely are sexual in this, in this myth making.
00:18:47
Speaker
We know because they have those little organs that would, give them so much trouble if they were separated from the urinary apparatus. And yet, what you're saying is that actually when he seeks out younger arms, he really is just looking for younger arms to hold him and be mommy to him.
00:19:07
Speaker
And the sexual aspect isn't really a thing. I guess what I'm saying is like in this he enjoys her possessiveness until he wants younger arms around him and he's got this yearning.
00:19:18
Speaker
That yearning is like not necessarily explicitly sexual. And I think we are going to see this tension between how do you address the sort of obvious fact of men's sex drive with this other claim which is that at root of it is just men want to be cradled. i also really like the suggestion here He enjoys her jealous possessiveness until the time when he wants younger arms around him.
00:19:43
Speaker
That the reason he gets sick of being cradled by his mom is just that she gets really old. Yeah, I would say, yeah, that's definitely interesting. Let's- Wait, wait, wait, wait, okay.
00:19:55
Speaker
Hang on. This sentence. Nature, not too proud of its first model, made an excess of him to allow for breakage and for breakage and delivery. Uh, what does that mean? I think- I think he just means men are bigger. Oh, okay. Gotcha.
00:20:10
Speaker
I see. I thought he was maybe saying that like more boys are born so that they can die off. But okay. Yeah. I kind of thought that too. I think it's just like men are bigger. So it's harder to get them out of the narrow birth canal.
00:20:23
Speaker
Okay, let's proceed. Yeah. So chapter two is called The War of the Sexes Begins. And this is the part where I admit that my opening joke about how I'm going to force you to talk about men is totally a lie. This whole thing is about women. God damn it, Alan.
00:20:40
Speaker
You know I hate talking about women. I thought he was going talking about men, but like every fucking page, he's like, okay, so women. Okay, so how do we deal with women? Okay.
00:20:51
Speaker
Right. And this is where he like really amps up this tension between these things are teleological versus they are socialized and just absolutely refuses to even admit that that's a tension going on.
00:21:11
Speaker
So let's proceed with this this wonderful little chunk. Somewhere between the ages of two and three, the child begins to realize that he is of the male sex and to look on men as superior beings. Oh, this is very Freudian.
00:21:24
Speaker
At this point, his father takes on the most important duty of his entire life. The child's new awareness is due not only to his male inheritance, but also to the attitude adults have toward him. As a baby, he had learned to expect every woman to make a great fuss over him, and by the time he was a year old, had found all this baby talk boring.
00:21:43
Speaker
As months passed, his reactions toward this treatment became more become more hostile, and by the time he is two years old, he avoids strange women by hiding behind his mother's skirts.
00:21:53
Speaker
And the strange women often avoid him, as though he were a leper. He comes right out and says, like, children learn from the way they are treated. that men are superior.
00:22:04
Speaker
And yet the obvious conclusion of this, which is like the biological construction of, you know, like the biological category of man is kind of a fiction and it's a social fiction.
00:22:17
Speaker
is like no like it's like not addressed at all right like there's there's something that needs to be addressed here that he's just like refusing to acknowledge well even the much more basic conclusion that men are not in fact superior i strongly suspect is not going to be acknowledged except in perhaps an ironic way yeah I'm not actually sure what he's referring to when he talks about strange women avoiding children as so as though they were lepers.
00:22:45
Speaker
He makes all these claims about how women actively dislike any child that isn't dependent on them. but women The reason women like babies is because they revel in the fact that babies need their help. But then when child children become more independent, like women can't handle that.
00:23:02
Speaker
specifically male children. I see. So he tells this long rambling anecdote that I really wanted to share, but it's like three pages long about his son on a train and socializing with the men and being off-put by women. And it really doesn't go anywhere. This is this is a line of thinking that would be...
00:23:20
Speaker
Very normal to see in, say, today's manosphere. Absolutely. And I think also, like, these stories would be something you could see in, like, a feminist analysis. Or, like, if somebody were to say, hey, what do you actually mean by gender is socialized?
00:23:39
Speaker
You could take anecdotes from this book and be like, this is what we mean, right? It's just that you would have to be honest about the conclusions of the thing you're saying. Like, it's sort of maddening to read this for exactly this reason.
00:23:53
Speaker
He does say part of the child's new awareness is due to his male inheritance, which right doesn't... write actually make any sense to me unless I read it as saying that this two or three-year-old has a kind of egotism, if you see what I mean.
00:24:08
Speaker
Right. So, okay, so chapter three is called The Child Side, Your Side, and The Back Side. Okay. And it's basically about the necessity of physical violence when raising children. No... It is about the... and it's got it It hits all the main points, right? Spanking your kids is something you have to do.
00:24:27
Speaker
Otherwise, they'll grow up to be disrespectful little shits. They don't really care about pain. It's really just the show, but you still have to do it. But you shouldn't feel bad about inflicting pain because they can't really... like They don't really care about the pain. they just like It's really about the like the power play and showing respect.
00:24:44
Speaker
Wait, wait. What does that mean? They don't really care about the pain. Like the child is not actually bothered by being in pain? Is that what you mean? Yeah, ah that's basically the claim. Okay.
00:24:56
Speaker
Yeah, that it's really like it's the embarrassment of the show of force and the and the forced respect for the father, right? Like, it's really more like you need to, like, enforce that you are in charge.
00:25:08
Speaker
I can only speak from my experience as a once small child who was not spanked. But I found being in pain to be very unpleasant when I was a child. In fact... Oh, me too. Every living thing that experiences pain seems to find pain unpleasant. It's...
00:25:24
Speaker
almost part of the definition of pain, surely. I would agree with that. I think, um... It really seems like that's just a rephrasing of this hurts me more than it hurts you. Yeah, it really is.
00:25:35
Speaker
There's a lovely little cartoon here to accompany an anecdote about a woman who brought an unruly child to the doctor's office that he decided it was his job to administer discipline. Okay, I can't make out the text, but the graphic I'm seeing is absolutely horrifying. Yeah, the graphic is the only important part. The text is like, I decided to administer a dose of what he had been missing. Oh, file.
00:25:57
Speaker
Yeah. And there's a whole thing in here about how like, women are naturally weak, and they have natural sympathy, and so they don't want to like spank their kids. And so if your wife, like if your nagging wife tries to get you not to spank your kid, because like, you shouldn't be abusing children, just like send her into another room where she can't hear it. but you You have to do it.
00:26:16
Speaker
It's so strange that there's a connection between this belief in the subordination of others in the teleological nature of a hierarchy in society and the abuse of children. I wonder if anyone's ever noticed that before. you know, I think you might be the first person to ever notice that.
00:26:30
Speaker
You know, I really want to dive into this. We've been recording for a while already. We're only in the first chunk of this book. Okay, um let's move on then. So I really want to keep us on track with women, right? Because this is really all about women.
00:26:43
Speaker
Even though it's about men. Yeah. We get to chapter five, and at this point, he's like, I think abandoned the pretense that this isn't just a book about women.
00:26:54
Speaker
Here's the opening of chapter five. During adolescence, the female sex engrosses most of the waking moments and some of the sleeping moments of your son. Pleasant dreams as well as nightmares are connected with the problem. So yeah, so now it's talking about teenagers, right? And the whole thing is like, oh, how to deal with teenagers and, and you know, your teenage son.
00:27:12
Speaker
And we're still kind of in the phase of like, even though it's about teenagers, it's really advice for parents of teenagers because we're still not at the part where he's addressing the the reader at that point in the life cycle. Here's what he has to say about teenagers when it comes to the female sex.
00:27:28
Speaker
In dealing with juvenile problems, I formed a wholesome respect for the natural chastity of the young male. Believe me, adolescent boys seldom are the intentional aggressors in the game of sex at this time. They tend to relieve their animal tensions by self-abuse.
00:27:44
Speaker
Editorial note, that means masturbation. and in doing so downgrade themselves and come to look upon all females as pure and as holy as mothers of the race are supposed to be. Boys are shy as rabbits because any sex jam is sure to be blamed on them.
00:27:58
Speaker
Oh, and man's code demands that he will not defend himself when a woman's honor is concerned. Instinct teaches boys to be the aggressors, but most of them draw a line beyond which they will think long and hard before passing over.
00:28:12
Speaker
Even though they find it more and more difficult to postpone sexual satisfaction, feelings of guilt and fear come into play. They worry about the possibility of being discovered or of contracting a venereal disease, and the thought of getting a chick pregnant is enough to drive them daffy.
00:28:28
Speaker
But if circumstances be beyond their control and make them cross the Rubicon, they try to be nonchalant about it. Oh, this is killing me. yeah Okay. so So this is really where I think this tension i was trying to raise earlier, I think starts to really show up right? There's this like huge issue, which is like, okay, but men aren't really the aggressors.
00:28:48
Speaker
Men kind of don't really want to have sex. They do have a sex impulse, but they kind of handle that by masturbating. It's really women. But also maybe this is counter to their biology because maybe it's actually because of society? Yeah, it seems I'm not sure that he's he's blaming society precisely, but circumstances, the reality of the situations they're in make them tamp down this deep instinctual drive they have to be the aggressors.
00:29:17
Speaker
And so they end up shy as rabbits. And do you know why they end up shy as rabbits specifically? It's because you can't even give a woman a compliment anymore. You can't even give a woman a compliment anymore.
00:29:31
Speaker
That's right. Any sex gem is sure to be blamed on men. Let's give him a chance. Let's hear him out, right? He's making this claim. Surely an extraordinary claim like this should require extraordinary evidence.
00:29:42
Speaker
So let's see what he has to say for himself on the matter. When 17, I visited a pal whose girl got a date from me, and we went out for the evening. We soon paired off, and since it was a beautiful moonlit summer night, my girl and I took a walk.
00:29:56
Speaker
I didn't know the town and let her pick the way. Moments later, we were strolling down a deserted country lane. After walking about a mile, she suggested that we rest under a tree where the grass was nice and clean.
00:30:08
Speaker
I, thinking about grass stains and chiggers, nasty little insects that live in the grass of the Midwest and burn like fury when they burrow under the skin. Oh, that sounds awful. hunted up a couple of rocks to sit on.
00:30:20
Speaker
Ignoring hers, she flopped full length on the grass and suggested that I do likewise. But being a stranger and on my good behavior, I sat on the rock. Besides, I hated chiggers.
00:30:31
Speaker
I wasn't exactly a rube, but I didn't want to get involved in anything too serious, so I acted as though I thought her truly tired and let her rest. She quickly recovered and we headed back,
00:30:42
Speaker
At her front door, I figured that perhaps I'd better assert myself and steal a good knight kiss as was expected from knight's errand in such circumstances. Instead of the friendly wrestle I expected, she swung one from the hip and blacked my eye good and proper?
00:30:57
Speaker
Ha I didn't blame her too much? After all, it was a long walk to waste on a guy who was so blind to his opportunities, but the evidence next day, which I couldn't hide, branded me as a wolf and her as a brave little girl who could protect her honor. Okay, before I go on, i just want to say I do not believe his account of events.
00:31:17
Speaker
Oh, not at all? I said nothing to defend myself, but I did get even with her sex during ensuing years. Whenever boy-girl problems came to my office, I judged the gal guilty until it was clearly proved otherwise.
00:31:33
Speaker
A boy is really behind the eight ball in these affairs. And if any anyone should stand by him and try to understand his predicament, it is his father. oh Helen. Yeah. Okay, first off, they went out into the woods and had a nice walk and he tried to assault this girl and she punched him and he came back and he had to come up with an excuse.
00:31:52
Speaker
And his excuse was, you know she really wanted me to fuck her. But I was too chivalrous and too chaste. You know how as a woman, I'm sure, i don't know how many times you've had this experience. Certainly, I've had this experience as a woman where men are too chivalrous to me. And I just like constantly want to punch them in the face. Absolutely.
00:32:13
Speaker
Absolutely. you know how that's always happening, Sarah? Yeah. I actually, it's funny you should mention that because my knuckles are bloody to date from beating the shit out of Emmanuel. The door opened for me.
00:32:25
Speaker
Oh God, I hate that. ah The worst. But okay, I mean, you're absolutely right. And I think it's sort of bizarre because it's like, okay, you didn't need to share that story. Let's take a moment here where we do a massive suspension of disbelief and say, okay, his account is a version of the truth.
00:32:44
Speaker
Okay. Even if we accept this, i want to draw your attention to, at her front door, I figured that perhaps I better assert myself and steal a good knight kiss, as was expected from Knight's arrogance of circumstances, instead of the friendly wrestle I expected.
00:33:01
Speaker
What does that mean? Like, even in your version of the story that you came up with to explain why you have a black eye after going out into the woods with this girl, you are talking about how you expected physical resistance to your advance of intimacy.
00:33:20
Speaker
Okay, we're only two episodes in, but we've both done a lot of background reading for various potential texts to use for the shows for the show. And so far, in my experience, this is by far the most Me Too text that I have seen. This is this is Andrew Cuomo traveling back in time.
00:33:40
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. It's Andrew Cuomo. And it's like, i mean, it's Andrew Tate as well. I mean, as you said, like, it's very manosphere. It's very like, women actually want all this.
00:33:52
Speaker
Women actually are the sexual aggressors. And actually, the idea that we believe women is going to put innocent men behind bars. And so really, actually, we should never believe women.
00:34:04
Speaker
Right. And I mean, I'm um any minute expecting to say like this whole believing women thing has gone too far, except we haven't even entered the era of believe women. But it's like the conclusion of this story is therefore I decided every time a woman complained that a man had done her wrong.
00:34:22
Speaker
i just believe the guy. Absolutely. And he's saying that you should always believe your son over any woman. yeah, Yeah.
00:34:36
Speaker
yeah and i think it's so i mean it's bleak in that way right because it's like yeah this is it's here where i really think about okay but you actually do have a responsibility to your son and your responsibility to your son should be to make him not a rapist Just a thought. Yeah. And I mean, I didn't, I also didn't include this part, but, but in the whole section about how it's important to like hit your kids, there is a little discussion of like, you have to hit your kids to teach them to respect women, but it's, it's so bleak.
00:35:03
Speaker
And I think to your other point about like, we've all, we've, we've both been reading about different texts. I think. you know, why did I pick this text for this episode? you know, we both talked about how we don't want to launch directly into just talking about contemporary texts, right? Because we don't want to be like one of these podcasts that's just like talking about what's happening today.
00:35:20
Speaker
um I think it gives us a little bit of perspective if we go back to, you know, this was published in 1958 and see like, right, it's it's important. This is the thing that a lot of the people today are saying we need to return to, right? Like this is the rhetoric that is forming this kind of like golden age that the me too the anti me too people today are talking about yeah like you were saying this is this is before believe women and it's anticipating that in some sense and so it's it's the perfect thing to return to for a moment in the
00:35:55
Speaker
for people in the present day who really hate women because it feels connected to the present day yeah okay so part two now we really start um gearing our advice like there's a little bit of advice to parents but now is really when he starts addressing the reader at this point in his life so so this is chapter seven pursue learning don't learn pursuing So basically, focus on school and don't chase after broads.
00:36:24
Speaker
So let's... Okay. Between 18 and 25, the average young man completes his education and gets married. Both jobs require a lot of hard work and money. The wise parent makes his son finance at least part of his education, for it is natural for one to appreciate more what he pays for.
00:36:42
Speaker
Your son while in college may envy boys with convertibles and dolls to ride in them, but the study of female anatomy never helped anyone pass an examination in calculus. There is a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, said Solomon. Girls are fine, but only as a recreation at this stage. Be moderate, son, or else girls, like shooting crap and playing pool, will take up too much of your time and will cost you money. With any kind of luck, you'll have at least 40 years to conduct serious research on women.
00:37:11
Speaker
And there will be plenty of specimens about when you are ready for the noose. This man desperately needed to be born in an era where the term passive income was in use. He does at various times like explicitly talk about like your earning potential.
00:37:26
Speaker
The next chunk is like, okay, 25 and 35. By the end of this one, like these are going to be the most productive years of your life. But you're still not going to reach your full earning potential. Like, as we pick apart all these different threads of what's in here, one of them that is absolutely more present than the space I was able to give it is this income and this like grind set culture.
00:37:48
Speaker
Exactly. In its incubated form here. And I think, you know, part of me is like, okay, maybe I should have, I wish I had pulled more of that maybe, but, but, you know, can't cover everything. But I think like, yeah, absolutely. I think more Andrew Tate, right? Like get your money up. like That's right.
00:38:04
Speaker
Don't focus on bitches. Focus on your passive income and then yeah everything will come to you. Now I got to say one thing he's correct about. i am always trying to find a doll to ride in my convertible.
00:38:18
Speaker
but I mean, it's a two-step process, right? Because I don't actually know this, but I'm certain you don't have a convertible. You're wrong. ah have a convertible. You have a convertible? Helen. Wow. Okay.
00:38:29
Speaker
I got to come off to Toronto. Yeah, you can ride in my convertible. But yeah, I mean, okay, focus on money. And we're starting to see this admission that men are interested in girls, that this whole thing about how it's girls who are the sexual aggressors, and that's going to change, right? Men should focus on their studies, but clearly they're going to want to spend money or they're going to want to spend their effort on on girls, right? And they shouldn't.
00:38:53
Speaker
They should focus on their studies. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it really only seems to me at this point that the women as sexual aggressors thing only existed as an excuse for him to harass women and not be at fault.
00:39:06
Speaker
Yeah, and there will be plenty of specimens when you're ready for the noose. I mean, I think we're seeing the the really, like, we already see a little bit like, oh, women are after men. And there's even in the in the kids stuff, there's like, oh, women are women are constantly like,
00:39:20
Speaker
taunting men and blah blah blah whatever but now it's really this like folksy like oh the old ball and chain right the noose right like oh is the noose reference to marriage i thought it was just oh yeah oh i see i thought it was just a cutesy way of saying like when you die you know and you're such a rapscallion you'll be hung no it's about marriage okay gotcha Okay, chapter eight is called Go Slow When You A-Woo-ing Go. And I've been skipping most of them because just they're not worth it. But every chapter has its own epigraph.
00:39:49
Speaker
And many of them are actually about women. Of course. Like folksy wisdom through the ages about fucking bitches, right? Remember that this book is called All About Men. Right. Right.
00:40:01
Speaker
So the epigraph for chapter eight is a man admires the woman who makes him think, but he keeps away from her. He likes the woman who makes him laugh, loves the girl who hurts him and marries the woman who flatters him.
00:40:14
Speaker
Anonymous. It's kind of a male influence or live, laugh, love thing. Yeah. It's got the same. but It actually struck me as like, very leacock like it says anonymous like i wouldn't be that so i mean i'd be incredibly surprised at the coincidence but like i wouldn't be that surprised if this was like yeah i could totally you know this fits right in with leacock stuff about like oh the the thinking woman and she's actually like oh you know she's happy and she cackles with her friends about their their sense of humor but really like but she's childless and so that
00:40:46
Speaker
And so what about that? Right? Like there's something like this acknowledgement that there's different kinds of women, but a lot of them are worthless. Anyway. Okay. So here he starts talking about like the importance of maintaining good relationships. And here's where really see the specter of divorce start to come into play.
00:41:06
Speaker
Then there is the couple with two or three children and no money, and father is struggling to get an education. The years have left few marks on his appearance or personality, but his wife shows the strain of raising kids, keeping his passions satisfied, and working at something to help out the budget.
00:41:23
Speaker
He is as young and gay as ever, and as susceptible to other women's charms. If he is an insurer or medical student, he is probably slipping off with some student nurse every time he gets the chance.
00:41:35
Speaker
I've known such fellows. A boy with a man's job, he used to be pitied as well as blamed. But it adds up to a rough deal for the girl he promised to love and honor. Another chap has a wife who seemed perfect a few years ago, but now, he thinks, she is tobogganed.
00:41:51
Speaker
She is probably the same woman she always was, but the boy has changed into a man, and they no longer have much in common besides the wedding certificate. Divorce may be the only remedy for some of these situations.
00:42:03
Speaker
But as I have said, when there are children, parents should be made to live together in wedlock as long as the children require the security of a home. The one who breaks the contract should be thrown into jail and left there a while to meditate on his sins.
00:42:17
Speaker
Well, he does seem to have come up with a flawless issue to the family breakdown problem. ah Sorry, he does seem to have come up with a flawless solution to the family breakdown problem. Yeah. And just throw one of the parents in jail.
00:42:30
Speaker
Yeah. If the family's not working out, whoever leaves should get imprisoned. Right. And like, so, okay, there's this whole thing where conservatives and reactionaries engage in these ah fanciful projects of social engineering, usually based around the family unit.
00:42:50
Speaker
And we're all expected to treat it as if it's normal, as if it's not just like a psychotically cruel and extreme ambition. And this is a perfect example of that.
00:43:02
Speaker
His view is that if you and your spouse have children and one of you tries to divorce, the person who wants a divorce should be thrown in fucking jail. That is insane.
00:43:13
Speaker
what Like, first of all, being in jail, like that's not going to keep the family together. Like surely that won't actually, right? I mean, I guess, okay, he's saying thrown in jail a while to meditate on his sins, presumably then to be let back out and then forced to continue in this loveless marriage. But ahead of his time a little with the carceral mindset of here, I think.
00:43:31
Speaker
Yeah. And and and this this story of the family where like the husband is miserable and then he's venting his misery by like, ignoring his wife and cheating on her and leaving her to like do everything in the home right because because he's admitting like okay she's also working at a job because they need the money and she's also raising the kids because the the father's role in raising kids is like to hit them if they misbehave and then to let the wife do everything else and also keep his passion satisfied like her wifely duties
00:44:09
Speaker
Yeah. Well known to include having sex with him. And right. And and so he's going to leave her to do all of that. And then he's going to go cheat on her. And yeah, he should be blamed, but you he should also be pitied.
00:44:21
Speaker
And you know what? Like absent the context of the rest of this, like I would kind of agree with that. Like I feel bad for people who are trapped in these like, and you know, dead end marriages. I think the answer is divorce. Your life sucks. I am.
00:44:34
Speaker
I am sympathetic. Yeah. I'm sympathetic to someone whose life sucks. Yeah. And he does at least admit, like, it adds up to a rough deal for the girl he promised to love and honor. Like, it is not a guy. This is not an example of a man who is actually fulfilling his promise to love and honor a woman. But does he explain why the parents should be made to live together in wedlock as long as the children require the security of a home? Like, I guess in the security of a home is the operative phrase here. Does he imagine a divorced household?
00:45:06
Speaker
to be dangerous somehow? I think it's not entirely clear. And I think this is an example of ideology showing itself by having a sort of obvious lacuna that we nevertheless are not allowed to look at, right? it Like this obvious response, which is like, you can have a home with one parent, or you can have a home- Look, there's so many ways a home with one parent isn't secure that it would be a waste of time to list them. Exactly.
00:45:36
Speaker
could have a home with three parents, right? Like you could have a home, like there's an infinite variety of configurations for what a unit that is raising kids can look like that isn't the heterosexual nuclear marriage.
00:45:53
Speaker
And we're just never going to even consider what that might mean in this book. Yeah, Helen, those other arrangements might seem fun, but have you considered jail? Exactly, right? like And so I want to contrast that passage with like a little bit later in the same chapter. There are other kinds of marriages and other types of mates.
00:46:16
Speaker
There is one dame who will scare you away from the altar faster than a shotgun can bring you there, but some men succumb even to the scary breed. You visit a friend and meet a wife who knows she's a lot smarter than her spouse, and she is most willing to remind him of that fact in the presence of strangers.
00:46:34
Speaker
She interrupts his stories, corrects his English, slanders his ancestry, and contradicts every other statement he makes. Brother, don't jump off the dock if you are married to the likes of her.
00:46:46
Speaker
Push her off instead. In the ideal marriage, husband and wife, while remaining individuals, have learned a skill which seems forever beyond nations. The art of compromise. Respect your wife's rights as a human being.
00:46:59
Speaker
Behave like a gentleman with her at all times and see that most of the compromises are in your favor and you will have a successful marriage. Okay. Yeah. So. You're not allowed...
00:47:12
Speaker
to leave your wife if you have kids. But there are some options. There are other options. Keep your mind open. Yeah. Keep your pushing hands strong.
00:47:23
Speaker
except It's so deranged to be like, if you have kids and you want a divorce, right? Because presumably you could also just not allow divorce.
00:47:33
Speaker
So it's like, it's not clear what breaking the contract is. Like, if you have kids and you want a divorce, go to jail. If you want to kill your wife, sometimes that's okay.
00:47:44
Speaker
Have you considered maybe be the wife has bad vibes? Ha ha ha! I think you get this notion of compromise, right?
00:47:54
Speaker
That's not a compromise. Like, behave like a gentleman and make sure the compromises are always in your favor. That's not a compromise. No, it isn't. Especially when we know what his understanding of chivalric or gentlemanly behavior is. it involves a wrestling match. Yeah.
00:48:11
Speaker
It involves a wrestling match where she's going to pretend that she doesn't want you to kiss her after she laid out on the grass. Really, she's mad at you because you didn't jump on her at that moment. like Really, at this point, I'm not even joking.
00:48:29
Speaker
I, I'm impressed that he acknowledged that his wife is a human being. Yeah. So, okay. Skipping forward again, right. In the section, in the next section, time clock to ti ticker tape. So now we're talking, you know, 18 to 25, like that last chapter was clearly about like, how do you pick a wife?
00:48:45
Speaker
But now we're really into like, you're 25 in his vision of the life cycle of the male, you're married, you've got your college degree, you figured out what your career is going to be and you're pursuing that career. We're only at 25.
00:48:58
Speaker
We've already had the discussion about having two or three children and a divorce, and the expected age is 25. I mean, there's a little bit of like a fuzziness here, because he's talking like the the point of 18 to 25 and like what he's talking about is like be careful when you woo a woman, because you're going to be married to her for a long time, because when you have two kids...
00:49:18
Speaker
And if you don't live near a dock, like your options are pretty limited. Exactly. I mean, it you know we have to consider, like he's talking about Pioneer Utah. There's not a lot of docks. like If you're in salt if your near Salt Lake, that's one thing.
00:49:30
Speaker
But yeah, i'm I'm curious that he didn't say like push her off of Mesa or something. I guess he wanted to... broad appeal he's trying to sell this book coast to coast exactly so but but now we're firmly out of the like okay you had to pick your wife well now you're 25 you're married of course now we really have to worry about more general issues of relations between the sexes so chapter 11 fictitious domination of the male 30 years ago, divorce was uncommon, desertion was purely a male prerogative, ah oh, okay, and homosexuality was something readit we read about in French novels.
00:50:11
Speaker
Today, women collect more divorces than Indians collected scalps. Wives run off and leave their husbands to care for the kids, and every hamlet has its queers.
00:50:25
Speaker
Oh, Okay, this is going off the rails. Oh yeah, we're really going off the rails, Sarah. All because the old buck lost his horns.
00:50:36
Speaker
He shies away from dominant women, and some of these women become so masculine in their approach. This happens every time. This happens every time. Become so masculine in their approach that they attract other women who want to be bossed and whose husbands have failed to exercise that birth rate.
00:50:53
Speaker
Men turn to other men because they cannot have a feeling of mastery and their sexual contacts with women. Having become impotent, they turn to other men of like frustrations because they feel at least equal to them.
00:51:06
Speaker
I am sure that women are more horrified by what has happened than are men, and they are trying in many ways to retreat from the position of dominance. Some 40 years ago, Dr. Herzler advanced a hypothesis which young women of today seem bent on proving correct.
00:51:22
Speaker
The only way to keep a woman happy, he said, is to keep her barefoot and pregnant. Try not to scream into the mic here. and think a little screaming might be warranted. first off.
00:51:34
Speaker
Helen, what the fuck? Okay, when I said this happens every time, um they just reach a point where their desire to yell everything is getting fucked up because men are turning into women and women are turning into men and it's all the fucking faggots faults. Yep.
00:51:57
Speaker
They reach a point where this is just boils over into the text. It seems to be inevitable. And finally we got here with this guy. yeah I mean, I think we saw the seeds of it with women are the real aggressors.
00:52:14
Speaker
Men have been made to be shy as rabbits and, women are always lying about what men are doing. we need to believe men. Like there's a crisis of masculinity in this country.
00:52:28
Speaker
I, to be honest, I thought of him as too naive, too complacent to really even be thinking along these lines. And I was such a fool.
00:52:41
Speaker
Of course he got there. I think that's something that makes this an interesting read is that whatever else he's got going on, he was a doctor and he was like basically one of the only doctors, like he was basically a traveling doctor in an area he describes as like the size of Connecticut, like this big chunk of Utah.
00:53:02
Speaker
He interacted with all sorts of people. And so the one thing that he kind of can't get away with is ignorance about the variety of people that are out there.
00:53:14
Speaker
And so I think he's sort of forced into explicitly sharing his deranged opinion about where gay people come from, because he obviously had to like interact with gay people, right? like Yeah, he's making an observation here. He is noticing that there are more mask gay women and there are more femme gay women.
00:53:39
Speaker
like this divide in the in the lesbian community yeah um he doesn't really understand it obviously no but and he's noticed that's what's so fascinating is that you really can see both like the force that reality has to like force him to confront obvious facts and but also the like ability of his ideology to just totally blind him to what's going on Like he can see gay couples and he kind of can't get away from that because undoubtedly like two men went into his office at some point and were like asking for some kind of medical care.
00:54:19
Speaker
And so he had to deal with that or like, he was like, i don't know who to side with here. There's no bond exactly. Right. So he probably asked like, which one of you was the bottom, right? Like,
00:54:31
Speaker
right But it's so fascinating to read because you you get his opinion on all these things, right? There's there's sort of not a dimension that he's able to kind of ignore.
00:54:44
Speaker
and so he's kind of, he ends up like, don't know, there's something interesting going on. And so here I got really curious about his marriage. Quite literally, the only thing I found out about his marriage is that he has a wife.
00:54:56
Speaker
She encouraged him to write. And her name was Ruth. Big mistake. Big mistake. Ruth, you have done all of humanity a disservice.
00:55:07
Speaker
In the search for information about his marriage, I actually found that I think at some point he realized what his true calling was writing.
00:55:20
Speaker
And he you know there's there's the rest of this book all about men, but I'm actually going to pivot at this point to another book I found that he wrote four years later. and this is the cover of that book. Life with Women and How to Survive It.
00:55:33
Speaker
An absolutely indispensable survival kit for harried males everywhere who know that they cannot possibly win. And okay, the illustration here is ah man, i think in his pajamas, running like an animal toward a tree and peeping out from behind the tree is someone I presume to be Eve. She's got her tit out and she's making a little come hither gesture with her finger. And up in the tree is a python snaking around the branch.
00:56:06
Speaker
And the title of the book is is framed within an apple in a very 60s way. yeah So I cut a lot of his biblical references.
00:56:18
Speaker
I mean, other than obviously the The whole story about angels designing designing people. And there's also the the quote from Solomon. There's this quote on the back cover, which I'm trying to... Woman will probably be the last animal civilized by man.
00:56:33
Speaker
So states Dr. Peck in this hilarious and devastating exposure of the whims and wiles of this curious creature. Here is woman. in all her infinite variety, wisely and shrewdly evaluated with salty good humor, delicately dissected with a razor-sharp scalpel, her naughty caprices laid bare.
00:56:51
Speaker
But, warns the good doctor at the conclusion of this enlightening study, she remains an entirely dangerous specimen, to be petted and fed and controlled and given massive doses of tender loving care.
00:57:03
Speaker
You'll never completely conquer her, but you might, just might, hasten her domestication. The tendency of our misogynists to describe women as just like little pets or animals or kittens yeah or otherwise beasts is one of their most repulsive habits.
00:57:23
Speaker
Yeah. So when I found this book was when I messaged you like a couple days ago, like, oh my God, I just found something even worse. Yeah. And so this is where like, if this guy were not kind of a nobody, i would be like, okay, we need to do a multi-episode arc on this because there's so much going on in this book.
00:57:43
Speaker
Also the vivisection metaphor in the second paragraph here is shocking. dissected with a razor sharp scalpel holy shit i think that his analogies in the first book i mean we didn't really rate his analogizing ability because i think they're actually quite weak despite his claim that being his own personal pride i think his power of analogy has grown in its vividness because this is published four years later And I think that this is a, this makes the book more upsetting. We're going to see some big analogies coming up okay that ready he's definitely proud of.
00:58:21
Speaker
And that made me feel like I was losing my mind. So the last one we saw was the last book we saw was like, okay, I'm going to tell you about men. tell you about your life. I know a lot about it because I'm a doctor and I've learned that we need to explain with analogies, right? So I'm going to set the scene of this one a little bit.
00:58:36
Speaker
So here's kind of the the opening of the preface to this book. This book is written for the average man who has neither the time nor the inclination to read the women's magazines or the findings of noted psychiatrists, anthropologists, and the like on the subject of the female and the vagaries of her mentality and deportment.
00:58:54
Speaker
I have not read all this literature. Otherwise, i would be nuttier than I am. yeah But in the preparation of this handy guide to ruin, in addition to the experience of 75 years' association with women, I have waded through some mighty queer books by lady experts. I have even ventured into... He's doing us. He's doing us. we goes I have even ventured into cocktail bars, properly chaperoned by my wife, of course, to watch these curious animals as they relaxed.
00:59:19
Speaker
It is said that one will do anything for his art, and so I am not ashamed to confess that I have also gone so far as to speak to groups of women, trying to excite some comment on the present problems of the female.
00:59:31
Speaker
In short, I have done everything I could to prepare myself to interpret the female problem from her angle, as well as from my own, for the benefit of the casual male reader who would not be caught dead in such research.
00:59:43
Speaker
I hope to bring him up to date on this pending crisis which is hovering over us. along with so many lesser problems, like getting along with Russia integration and the relative values of various cigarette filters.
00:59:55
Speaker
ter There's so much here. Rich text. Yeah. And like, this is the preface. This is the first words of this book. I opened this book and I was like, oh my God.
01:00:09
Speaker
Because integration. Right. That really stuck out to me. That's what I paused. Yeah. yeah in my reading because I was concerned. This, as I said, comes out in 1962. has opinions.
01:00:23
Speaker
I think I know them. And it's clear what they are from... Like the framing of it, right? Integration as like a problem that we have to deal with. There's only one thing he could mean.
01:00:34
Speaker
You know, it's really remarkable. I think i think right after the story about about the woman lying down on the lawn, I could have given you my opinion of his beliefs about integration.
01:00:47
Speaker
And they would be exactly what I think his beliefs about integration are right now. It's kind of, it's remarkable how all these ideological components bundle together. It's so fascinating how much of a package all of this is.
01:01:01
Speaker
And like, you know, it's like I said with Lee Cock last episode, right? I said, we're going to have to remind ourselves that when people are talking about women, they're like, especially from this period, they're talking about White women.
01:01:13
Speaker
White women and especially middle to upper class white women, right? We're talking about like women of the kind that he would find himself open to socializing with.
01:01:24
Speaker
And that in addition to this idea of like, he thinks woman is an animal that needs to be civilized. We know what he thinks about other races, right? Like when he says like woman is an animal that's going to be civilized, he means white women.
01:01:39
Speaker
and I would hazard a guess that he thinks... other races are animals which will never be civilized, right? Like, it's so enmeshed together. Yeah, most likely. He certainly hasn't shown any inclination towards sort of period progressivism in which you think of other nations as people who are further behind on a timeline.
01:02:02
Speaker
toward civilization. It seems pretty clear to me that this is the kind of guy who will think of other races just permanently in the darkness. And of course the text itself is written for white men.
01:02:15
Speaker
It's impossible for me to imagine this guy like writing for a black audience. Yeah. And I think we also, we glazed over in the last chunk, because we were so taken aback by the thesis on the origin of homosexuality, the the whole thing about like Indians collecting scalps, right? And like he at various times talks about his sort of adventurous experiences being called out to be a doctor on various like reservations and like mingling with the indians and it's it's not good but yeah i mean okay so so with with that out of the way like yeah what do we think of this this anthropological approach right like oh haha i i surrounded myself with this feminist ideas and and i and i would lose my mind if i read more and well i think when we do it it's good and it's cool and it's fun
01:03:06
Speaker
And when he does it, it's cynical. Unironically, on the one hand, I think, yeah, there's something funny about that. But on the other hand, like, yes, because we're correct, right? Like, I have enough confidence in my belief that women are humans deserving of respect. And people who think that women aren't humans deserving of respect are stupid and wrong. But I don't feel bad that our methods may align at times. I don't know. But yeah, i also wanted to point out this like properly chaperoned by my wife line.
01:03:34
Speaker
It brings to mind like Mike Pence never having a meeting with a woman without his wife present and also calling his wife mother. i mean, I'm not familiar with...
01:03:46
Speaker
early 1960s cocktail bar culture, but it seems pretty clear from this excerpt that that's where you go to fuck. So i kind of I kind of get him saying, like, by the way, I'm not cheating on my wife. But when Mike Pence is being chaperoned by his wife, it's in a meeting to discuss the flow of coal from one county to another some shit like that i don't know it's it's a different vibe than a cocktail bar yeah i mean it's it is it is a different vibe it is a different vibe i did also get this really clear vision of him going up to a group of women in a bar and saying like what's the deal with women right like
01:04:29
Speaker
I am not ashamed to confess that I have gone so far as to speak to groups of women. Like no casual male would be caught dead doing this. Women are so dangerous that even talking to them...
01:04:43
Speaker
is a hazard. I wonder if he's talking about book club meetings, that kind of thing. Do you know what I'm saying? wonder. like Maybe he means yeah maybe he means like he went to like a feminist like consciousness raising group.
01:04:57
Speaker
Oh my god. It would be so fucking funny to see this guy interact with a group of just bra-burning feminists. Yeah. I also want to point out another thing that he really, really, it's really like a a key thing in his mind. so So this is also from the preface.
01:05:15
Speaker
We doctors know that as a sex, they are not angels, though as a rule, they are a cut better than their male associates. They have most of the same problems that confuse the male, plus a multitude of new ones which have arisen as a result of man's abandonment of the famous, he's going to quote him again, of the famous dictum of Dr. Hertzler, to keep them happy, keep them barefoot and pregnant.
01:05:38
Speaker
Giving women shoes and contraceptives has also given them time to think, and thinking women, like Shakespeare's Cassius, are dangerous because they think too much.
01:05:50
Speaker
In addition to shoes and contraceptives, we have given women gadgets galore to lighten their workload and transportation and telephones that they may communicate more readily with each other. All of this has added extra time for thinking.
01:06:03
Speaker
And as a result, the modern woman is in a state of constant funk and frustration about her economic, emotional, romantic, and social status.
01:06:13
Speaker
Women today don't know how to cook. All they know is be bisexual, charge their phone, ah eat hot chip, and lie.
01:06:28
Speaker
oh my god. Okay, we skated over the Dr. Herzler quote the first time. So yes this makes me a bad feminist. But I had no idea that the phrase keep them barefoot and pregnant was actually like quote due to one specific person.
01:06:48
Speaker
um I thought it was just a general phrase to refer to patriarchy. From Wikipedia, the phrase barefoot and pregnant seems to have been introduced in the early 20th century by the American doctor Arthur E. Hertzler, who said, some vulgar person has said that when the wife is kept barefoot and pregnant, there are no divorces.
01:07:10
Speaker
Okay, so here's the here's the broader quote. Some vulgar person has said that when a wife kept barefoot pregnant, there are no divorces. Bad as this sounds, it is so because it is so near the truth, but it does not fit into our growing notion of what constitutes civilized society.
01:07:25
Speaker
So he's like, it's true, but you shouldn't say it. You shouldn't say it. But it is him attributing it to somebody else. And I think also, I want to point out, Joseph Peck's crib of this is to keep them happy, keep them barefoot and pregnant.
01:07:45
Speaker
Arthur Herzler is not talking about happiness. He's saying to stop divorce divorces, right? This is an area, I mean, we're going to, we're going to talk later about our new rating system for these guys, but this is an area where I think we really start to see Peck's gullibility a little bit. Like he's kind of falling for it. He, you know, Leacock had the ability to say, look, women's happiness doesn't matter, right?
01:08:12
Speaker
Like I am a misogynist. I don't care if women are happy. Peck is a little bit falling for it here and saying like, oh, actually like nature should work this way because actually also women will be happier this way.
01:08:25
Speaker
And the rest of this is just vile misogynist, like giving them like it's not even birth control. Like he's anti shoes. Pack is kind of buying into what you might think of in Nietzschean terms is like slave morality, like the kind of morality that we are used to thinking in terms of today, where the person who is oppressed is has righteousness on their side to be the aggressor, to be the dominator, to be cruel, to be aristocratic is a negative thing.
01:09:00
Speaker
Um, Leacock, I feel like didn't endorse that point of view as much. Peck feels a need to make all kinds of excuses that Leacock doesn't.
01:09:12
Speaker
Yeah, i would agree with that. Also, the way that in peck's view the subjugation of women needs to proceed through mental subjugation is extremely clear he's talking about how women have too much time to think and when he says that causes her constant frustration about her economic emotional romantic and social status what he really means is that it allows her to recognize the deficiency of her economic status, of her emotional status, of her romantic status, and of her social status.
01:09:46
Speaker
Absolutely. I mean, we really see like the, I mean, I think here is where it's maybe clearest that he was a doctor and we can really think about like, okay, he's writing this in 1962, but he's writing, you know, he, he retired.
01:10:01
Speaker
I think 45. He was born in 1885. He was, he retired from being a doctor at 60. So he was really a doctor like for the first half of the 20th century. And so when he's talking about like, oh, I know from my experience treating women, I mean, undoubtedly he's talking about to some extent treating hysteria. i don't know if he, he ever got into like, you know, he doesn't talk too much about much about that. But I guess what i'm getting at this was a common medical understanding of women at the time is like,
01:10:31
Speaker
if you don't occupy women with the stuff they're supposed to be occupied by, their uteruses will shrivel up because all their blood is in their brain or whatever. And maybe that explanation is a little bit outdated already at this point. But like, this is how doctors thought you need to treat women. Like this was an attitude about women. He was probably also like largely taught in medical school, I guess is part of what I'm saying here.
01:10:54
Speaker
Yeah, I was kind of wondering how him being a doctor was going to play into him as a purveyor of oppression. It's something that trans people, I think, in particular are used to thinking about, because from our point of view, ah doctor is almost like our natural predator, yeah if you see what i mean. Yeah, I think that that's a vision that that some trans people would...
01:11:21
Speaker
maybe disagree with. And I think some people who aren't as familiar with trans issues would also be like, oh, i don't understand that. like but But it's definitely real, think. Doctors are a kind of a funnel of power. Basically what you're getting at is like, and this is something that I think much more broadly, i think trans people experience this and I think also especially people who deal with like various mental health things as well deal with this and I think that there's like a really ten or like a really fraught connection here between trying to theorize about about transness and about like different queer identities as well as talking about like
01:11:57
Speaker
disability and like madness studies and like all these things kind of like overlap here because basically the way that in a lot of places still and you know some places in the US and around the world, like we're kind of moving away from this, but transness is understood as like a medical condition. right we've turned where we're Really, when we're talking about transness, like people think of it as like oh gender dysphoria. right It's like a medical condition and then you have to go to a doctor and get it diagnosed and the doctor is able to withhold care and so many people, that's still how they think about like how things should go. And the idea that actually, no, we shouldn't force a kind of medicalized vision of what's happening. We should we should foreground bodily autonomy. like That's very new, but that's not really how it works in a lot of the world.
01:12:39
Speaker
Yes. And that status as gatekeepers, as holders of power over trans people is something that has been jealously guarded by doctors. Yeah.
01:12:50
Speaker
in the past and sometimes is presently. A lot of people who are expositors of scientific transphobia these days are doctors who are unhappy with their decreasing role in their patients' lives.
01:13:09
Speaker
And I think this is the kind of angle that we're most familiar with because we're trans. But the same dynamic plays out through all kinds of forms of marginalization. We see very explicitly here, he's talking about shoes and contraceptives given to women. He doesn't have a lot of power over shoes being given to women, but as a doctor in this period, especially, he has a lot of power over contraceptives being given to women.
01:13:35
Speaker
And he's saying, i don't like that I and other doctors are giving contraceptives to women because it loosens our power over them. It's the exact same dynamic. And he's saying, actually, this is the source of women's medical problems, right?
01:13:50
Speaker
They have the same problems that they confuse the male plus a multitude of new ones which have arisen as a result of this, right? So he's saying, like, in fact, you know, I think the subtext is... I don't like losing this power. But the sort of the textual thing that he's saying is also like, women have problems and a lot of them will be solved if we stopped giving them contraceptives.
01:14:10
Speaker
But yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this is where you really start to see kind of his medical, yeah, his his medical expertise, putting in air quotes, although realizing that this is not a visual medium is coming through.
01:14:21
Speaker
Okay, so that's kind of the like, here's what this book is going to be about. Here is my overall thesis, right? Now we're really going to get into the chapter. So chapter one. I give you woman and may God have mercy on your souls.
01:14:37
Speaker
The year was 1912, my junior year in medical school. The place, the delivery room amphitheater of a Midwest teaching hospital. The time, 2 two a m It is a most appropriate setting for a lecture upon the bagaries of the female sex.
01:14:51
Speaker
Here, as in no other place, the atmosphere is saturated with femininity? Here is a woman stripped of all artificiality, busily engaged in her primal function.
01:15:03
Speaker
Here the captain's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under the skin, and sisters too of the hairy ape-like creature of prehistoric time, squatting in the darkness of her cave, giving birth to man's more distant grandpas.
01:15:19
Speaker
At the start of that paragraph, I was about to say, you know, I think his writing has improved. He's doing some place setting here. It's not so bad. By the end of the paragraph, I was really glad I hadn't said that out loud.
01:15:35
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think you're starting to see the beginnings of like, or not be beginning, yeah I think you're really seeing the development of his style. And I think largely his style is not good. And I think that as his ability to, I think there's a certain level of of technical improvement in the sense that it feels like he's more able to clearly state something.
01:15:55
Speaker
right? In the previous book, I think I was often like, okay, there's an analogy here, but what is he saying? And we were constantly struggling with like, okay, he's talking about circumcision. is he pro circumcision?
01:16:06
Speaker
What is he actually saying? Here, it's very clear what he's saying. I think his clarity has improved. And I think this has given us like a better view into just this abyss of the things that he thinks, right? Like,
01:16:20
Speaker
And I wanted to bring this out, especially obviously because, you know, we kind of called in the in the last episode, like we're going to see women are baby makers be like one of the main things. And obviously that's been something he's talked about. And we we just got done talking about the this Dr. Hertzler quote. But yeah, the most natural place to talk about femininity is the amphitheater of a teaching hospital where women give birth. Because that's at the end of the day, what a woman is. It's...
01:16:50
Speaker
a creature that gives birth, right? It's quite funny. I think most people associate femininity with stereotypical femininity, perhaps a bow in there, that sort of thing.
01:17:02
Speaker
And yeah really what he's saying here is all that is artificial. What femininity really is, is being a hairy ape-like creature or something like it, squatting in the darkness of the cave giving birth.
01:17:13
Speaker
I thought about clipping his lecture here because there's some funny stuff, but I think it's summarized pretty well by what maybe would make a good episode art, this comic. Oh, that's definitely the episode art.
01:17:24
Speaker
That's incredible. yeah It's so good, right? Okay, so the comic is a woman in a dress holding...
01:17:36
Speaker
in one hand, a cookbook, which is labeled cookbook, that's the title, and holding in the other hand a square rectangle with a dollar sign on it, which I take to be a dollar.
01:17:49
Speaker
And her head has a halo atop it. And she also has a kind of shadow head, which is leaning out to the side, and which has sinister eyes and devil horns and is holding a long cigarette in its mouth.
01:18:11
Speaker
And the cigarette is poking out. The dollar is being used to light the cigarette? Yeah, it kind of rules. And the caption is gentlemen, I give you woman. I think that she ought to have a third head, which is also a devil head. And it's also using a cigarette. And this cigarette is being used to light the cookbook on fire.
What Makes a Woman?
01:18:33
Speaker
Yeah, I think this image... rules it's so good and it's like but this is like you can you can imagine the content of his lecture about women on the basis of this um it gives me a strong hint let's move on yeah so the title of this book suggests advice is coming but well a lot of the beginning of it at least a lot of the first like huge amount of it is stuff like this life with women and how to survive it okay so you think like there's going to be some advice about to survive it but he he really has to tell you like what the problems are first okay the old doctor tried to answer the question what is woman
01:19:13
Speaker
An earlier version of that same problem, what are little girls made of, begins to bother a boy at the age of four, and the answer continues to elude him for the rest of his natural life. I gotta say, what is a woman?
01:19:25
Speaker
Age-old question, apparently. Between the ages of 16 and 25, he may subscribe to the sugar and spice answer, or even to that of Father Adam's rib, as recorded in the second chapter of Genesis.
01:19:37
Speaker
But by the time he is 30 years of age, though he may still believe that she is bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, he has begun to wonder just what kind of brains the good lord stuffed her cranium with in the first place.
01:19:50
Speaker
Anatomists tell us that there is no structural difference between the brains of the two sexes, but it would be hard to find a husband who wasn't convinced that his wife's brain was made of different stuff from his and had been installed upside down or crossways.
01:20:03
Speaker
There must be some mix-up in the wiring, because the answer to any problem, trifling though it may be, always comes out differently when presented to the two sexes. Yet we are taught that both man and woman aren't ships from the same old block of wood.
01:20:18
Speaker
he He has progressed from like, oh, getting along with women is difficult. Women are puzzling to young men to this like absolute nihilism about the possibility of ever understanding the constitutive nature of women. What are women made of? Like, it's just such a weird and yet weirdly ubiquitous perspective.
01:20:38
Speaker
He's not taking a stance here, which suggests that He has no idea what women's brains are made of. That's that's his point of view on this. He finds that the whole matter just terribly confusing.
01:20:52
Speaker
He talks about like career women, but doesn't really have anything to say about career women other than women shouldn't have careers.
Gender Roles in International Relations
01:20:58
Speaker
he He does have this line about women wanting jobs because of, or women getting into trouble because of the thing that is in the place where their conscience would be.
01:21:08
Speaker
He's really- Oh, we're going back to women are less moral. Yeah. And that whole section is like not really worth picking apart more, but they're just that one phrase. Now you might've thought that that line about getting along with Russia was just kind of a throwaway in the preface.
01:21:23
Speaker
Wow. I certainly did. But he really means it. This is the opening to chapter eight, your own personal Gettysburg.
01:21:35
Speaker
Later to be superseded by Donald Trump's personal Vietnam. There are a lot of similarities between the battle of the sexes and the cold war we have been enjoying with the Russians.
01:21:46
Speaker
Russia has adopted the female technique for keeping her adversary off balance down to the last comma. And uncle Sam has shown a perfect picture of the bewildered male and his reactions.
01:22:01
Speaker
The courtship went on during the last world war. Uncle Sam showered gifts upon this new found partner, and received kind and gentle words of love from Russia, but she showed no disposition to bestow any gifts of love in return.
01:22:17
Speaker
The beautiful romance was pictured at Yalta by Russia, and our old uncle lapped it up, despite the warnings of that elder brother England, At Potsdam, the suitor fell for the age-old trick of deeding over half his property to his lady love before he got her name on the dotted line.
01:22:35
Speaker
Since that time, it's been the usual course of married love, the wife blowing hot and cold by turns, and the husband totally confused by her changes of mood. Sometimes she is in the, how dare you stage, a woman wronged.
01:22:50
Speaker
How could you treat me so, you brute? But when she wants to work this mixed up husband for a new mink coat, along will come the forgiving smile and tears. And once more, he will awake in the morning, nicely situated in the doghouse with his pockets picked again. Helen.
01:23:08
Speaker
but this is fucking killing me have you ever thought about how russia is like a woman i had not thought about that yeah hadn't thought about it at all either and i will continue to not think about it because it doesn't make any goddamn sense what are you talking about like this vision of what happened in world war ii what the u.s and russia got married and then they didn't do shit for us like russia was a gold digger the whole time
01:23:38
Speaker
And England tried to warn us. What does that mean? Oh my god, i always find these projections of gender onto global politics so fucking funny. like Yeah, it's fascinating. Do you remember Dugan saying that Ukrainians are spiritually transgender?
01:23:53
Speaker
Oh my god, I had forgotten about that. That's so funny.
Stereotypes and Relationship Tactics
01:23:57
Speaker
The whole thing about are they them army. is also like anyway yeah he doesn't really he doesn't have anything more to say about it like what does he think russia is getting out of the u.s through her feminine wiles exactly like what is the analogy for the mink coat here i don't really know i guess he thinks like operation gladio is like we drank too much and beat our wife like i
01:24:26
Speaker
like i don't really know what to make of this at all It's so ahistorical. It's also deranged about gender. And it's also... It's so embarrassing to think that this totally could be like a high level analysis in our current administration.
01:24:43
Speaker
This could happen. There might be some guy in the White House right now who's like, listen, We really need a prenup before we sign any treaties.
01:24:53
Speaker
Okay. So um he's got some advice later on, which he like has a list of principles for like a happy marriage, but it's very repetitive. It's a lot of stuff we've seen before. so it's not really worth spending any time on really. he's pretty light on advice all around.
01:25:09
Speaker
mean, this book, which is pitched as like, okay, going to teach you about women and how to survive living with the women. It's mostly just women are weird, just like Russia. I've really been getting the sense that possibly his relationship with his wife deteriorated between these two books.
01:25:25
Speaker
It's very possible. I also definitely get the sense he started the book all about men. And then maybe that like somebody had to point out to him, like, it seems like you really just want to talk about women.
01:25:37
Speaker
And he just just was like... you're right. Let me, uh, let me write a book about women instead. I also even skipped, like, there's a whole, there's a whole chapter in there about how to deal with your bitch wife the first time she gets pregnant and is so annoying.
01:25:53
Speaker
Oh my god. Which I didn't even get into. um But I was like, okay, this other book, like he's going to have advice. He doesn't really have any advice. This is his advice.
01:26:03
Speaker
Why write a chapter about how to get along with women? One sentence is enough. Do as they tell you to do. Such a statement would have been ridiculous in our father's times. Men got along with women by being supremely masculine.
01:26:15
Speaker
And women love them for that attribute. Now that we have lost our sex characteristics, oh, there it is again, women are not satisfied with either us or themselves in the driver's seat.
01:26:27
Speaker
If the rest of the world will just wait a decent interval, we will fall down in a heap of frustration and wipe ourselves from the map. However, there are still ways in which a man can come out the victor in this momentous struggle, but he has to use female guile to accomplish the result.
01:26:42
Speaker
Instead of following our father's example of, you do this or else, we must appear to give in to her every notion. Even though this entails a great loss of face, we have about reached the point where we haven't any face left to lose.
01:26:54
Speaker
When some great problem comes up in your domestic relations, such as what color to paint the living room or the makeup of the new icebox, just think it through and then state your opinion. Pay no attention to her arguments except to dodge the flying kitchen utensils and walk out when she begins to cry.
01:27:11
Speaker
Such tactics are worse than spying through the bathroom window, but the alternative is to spank her, and these athletic girls are hard to turn over your knee. So just state your opinions and shut up, delaying the call to the painter for a few days to let things develop.
01:27:26
Speaker
And they will. She is unsure of her own opinion, and only stuck up for it to humiliate you. Once you have withdrawn from the field of battle, doubts spring up in her naughty little head, that's with a K, and within a week she returns to the attack, having stolen your arguments completely and just daring you to object to her logic.
01:27:46
Speaker
Don't ever mention that the idea originated with you in the first place, just yield gracefully and let her have her way. She knows that she is lost, but such action saves her face, and she can pretend to be the victor.
01:27:58
Speaker
This technique
01:28:02
Speaker
this technique is not a very honorable or masculine procedure, but remember that she, like the Russians, will use any trick or misrepresentation that comes into her brain to beat you.
01:28:14
Speaker
After all, if you win, you got your way, which is a dear thing to a man. Yeah.
01:28:21
Speaker
Oh, man, I did not see the Russians' callback coming. No. Have you ever thought about how Russia is like a woman? And have you ever thought about how women are like Russia? the triumphant return of Oh, men are turning into women and women are turning into men. Also, another theme that we have seen repeatedly in this conversation and which I think we're going to see so, so, so much more of, which is the determination to say that women's liberation is making women unhappy.
01:28:57
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. i think this idea that women, right, like, Leacock was just like, it makes, it leads to the decay of society. And it doesn't matter that actually women might be happier.
01:29:09
Speaker
Who gives a shit, right? Happiness, women's happiness doesn't matter. But absolutely, we're gonna see, actually, it makes women unhappy, right? I mean we're seeing that a lot in contemporary conversations about feminism.
01:29:22
Speaker
Yeah, as soon as you pay a lip service to slave morality, and you're deeply against feminism, it's almost incumbent upon you to make the argument that feminism makes women unhappy.
01:29:34
Speaker
You really don't have many alternatives. And I think, like, again, we're seeing this obsession with this idea that men are being dethroned from their natural role.
01:29:45
Speaker
And so actually, whether it's believing men in any dispute between men and women when it comes to, hey, what happened when you went into the forest and why does he have a black eye?
01:29:57
Speaker
okay Or when it comes to your relationships, anything is valid because actually women have destroyed, right? We've we've destroyed the natural order of things. And because he's saying like you have to do this and you have to do this repeatedly. And so he has undoubtedly done this to his wife. Yeah. Here's my reading of the reality of the situation that he just fictionalized.
01:30:19
Speaker
I imagine him saying to his wife, he really wants the gas stove to be a particular model. And his wife says, i don't really want that one. He leaves and his wife says, holy shit, I don't want this to blow up into a huge thing because he's such an abusive piece of shit.
01:30:39
Speaker
And so she comes to him and says, let's go with this particular gas stove, which is the one he pointed out. And then he's like, oh, my subtle machinations. my puppet strings are pulling her this way and that as I will.
01:30:54
Speaker
Yeah. So, i mean, the rest of this book is really, it's kind of just all rehashing all the stuff we've already seen. And so the question here is just like, how do you wrap this up? You've gone on this weirdly political, right? Like racist, anti-Russia and misogynist rant for 300 pages.
01:31:13
Speaker
So yeah. so how do we wrap this all up? This is the last, this is the last chunk of the book. No one enjoys the feeling of inferiority, but in order to make man function as his creator intended he should, woman has accepted second place.
01:31:27
Speaker
Back to the teleology. Granted that she is not too happy with the situation, but she is willing to put up with it to gain a degree of peace and harmony in the marriage relationship and to ensure her offspring a pleasant environment.
01:31:40
Speaker
Such an unequal relationship is not ideal, but people were not put on earth to achieve the ideal. only to pursue it. So I would advise you, my gentlemen friends, study woman as does an anthropologist, part by part, action by action, mood by mood.
01:31:57
Speaker
And perhaps you will eventually come up with some idea about just what makes your wife react the way she does. And never, no, never take her for granted and expect her to see things from your viewpoint.
01:32:10
Speaker
You can live most happily with her for a lifetime if you will always remember that she is a different sort of animal, created specially for a certain purpose, and that the easy companionship that may exist between males is forever impossible between you two.
01:32:23
Speaker
She is superior to you in most every way except brute force and long-range thinking, more tender and yet more cruel, more yielding yet more determined, more innocent and yet more filled with guile, and firm in her belief that anything you can do, she can do better.
01:32:40
Speaker
And damn it, too often she is right. But when all is said and done, man can echo the epitaph Mark Twain attributed to Adam after Eve's passing. Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.
01:32:54
Speaker
This is completely contradictory to everything he previously said. This drove me absolutely crazy. This swerve into this pseudo-sentimentality where it's like, but actually we love each other.
01:33:10
Speaker
It underpins so much misogyny that we see. And it is underneath so much like boomer humor comics, right? Like underneath so much of this kind of like... Oh, God, it is so not just... Underneath all of these like sitcoms about the man who hates his nagging wife and all these things, there's always this like tender moment where it's like, oh, but really he loves her. And we saw with Leacock, right?
01:33:38
Speaker
The real man who like really loves his wife isn't the one who listens to her when she talks. It's the one who feels bad when she dies after he treats her like shit.
01:33:50
Speaker
Treats her like shit all of her life and then realizes he loved her because he feels bad when she died. There's this like one moment of sentimentality that is supposed to like underwrite this horrible view of this the woman's place in society and at home and in relations with men like he's swerving into cliches of sexism that are deployed to make sexism more acceptable in gentle light-hearted social contexts yeah so for example the uh you know women they may be a ball and chain but you gotta to admit
01:34:31
Speaker
kind of better than men in some ways. That itself is like a very common misogynist tactic. your entire text, your argument is based on the thesis that we need to press women down with a broad and flat hand.
01:34:48
Speaker
And then you throw in those little caveats, you know, and just a dash of sugar on top to make the whole thing go down. What a fucking hack. Fuck the fuck. I mean, such a hack.
Societal Gender Expectations and Author Contradictions
01:34:59
Speaker
This lazy, just so story about the way that society is, is somehow equal parts mixture of the way God made us and also the like, okay, God made us to pursue an ideal, but not reach an ideal, but equality is an ideal. But we have to also act this way because masculinity is degraded. and And also men are socialized to be this way. And also the way women are to men forces men to be this way.
01:35:24
Speaker
even though that's not the way they should be, but it's also the way that men should be because of like, it's so incoherent and it's so, ugh, it's so annoying. I hate this guy so much. It's really driving me off the wall that here at the last minute, he acknowledges that quote, such an unequal relationship is not ideal.
01:35:44
Speaker
but what are you going to do? What are you going do, Sarah? Like, you can't reach an ideal. Pobody's nerfic, Sarah. It's like, yeah, maybe it would be better if I didn't like ah treat my marriage like a battleground of psychological warfare. Maybe it would be better if I didn't think about my relationship with my wife as a tense ideological death struggle for the future of humanity.
01:36:13
Speaker
what are you going to do? Oh my
Rating System for Author Evaluation
01:36:16
Speaker
god. Okay. I think as a way to wrap up, you know, we decided we wanted a rating system because we wanted to be able to compare odiousness.
01:36:26
Speaker
Helen, what are the points of our rating system? So we were thinking about like, okay. we want to rate things, but I was, I didn't want to just do like ah one to five. Like that didn't really make sense. Or like we thought maybe I was thinking about like, okay, could we give them stars or like not, maybe not stars. We'll find some now and like, you know, finding a way to rate them, but that didn't really make sense. We wanted a way, we wanted a little bit more a,
01:36:46
Speaker
a scientific approach right we wanted a little bit more of a allow us to do a little bit of a typology here and really compare them on a couple different axes so we thought okay well one thing is going to be their ferocity towards the oppressed right like we talked about two misogynists but in the future we're going to try to talk about other bigotry and we've also seen racism and anti-russia sentiment come up as a thing thought okay generally ferocity against the oppressed Oh my god, what was the second one? Arrogance. Arrogance, that's right. I think we've seen a lot of different ways that these people can be arrogant, whether it's like...
01:37:20
Speaker
leacock not even bothering to make an argument for why women can't work right like just the arrogance of being like there's so many reasons it's not even worth listing them yeah so and and so this is a way of capturing like you know separate from the ways in which they're actually like bigoted how annoying and arrogant and you know how how like personally distasteful do we find their attitude right And then the last one is going to be their gullibility, right? So how much did they fall for it, right? Like some of these people are going to be just totally cynical.
01:37:50
Speaker
And some of these people we talk about are going to be totally falling for the thing they're saying. They totally believe the thing they're saying. They're just actually too dumb to realize how completely detached from reality the thing they're saying is.
01:38:03
Speaker
So that's our FAG rating system. So yeah, let's rate Joseph Peck, MD. How ferocious do we think he is towards the oppressed? To be honest, I think he scores relatively low on this.
01:38:15
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think this is also something... We're going to start out of five. We're going to have five be kind of a soft cap. if we If we reach someone where we're like... this person is really, really awful.
01:38:28
Speaker
We're going to be open to going up to six, right? going to be open to to opening up this up. So five is not going to be like the absolute high end of what we'll see. But we also want to leave a little room for like, I've definitely read worth's worse stuff, right?
01:38:41
Speaker
This isn't like, there's a lot of ways that I think Andrew Tate is worse than this guy, right? If we talk about Tate, I think I'd rate him higher on ferocity. But I agree with you. Like, I don't think this was honestly, I'd go for like a three here.
01:38:52
Speaker
I think it's pretty middle of the road Distasteful, but not beyond that level. I'm wavering between a two and a three here, and I think I'm actually going to go with a two. Okay.
01:39:04
Speaker
This might be colored by, i was reading a text last night that I would say was a six on the ferociousness scale, and it was so nasty that I would just not be comfortable reading it on the podcast.
01:39:18
Speaker
And so I'm really, i'm comparing it against that level of brutality. To me, when you combine, like, giving women shoes and contraceptives has given them time to think, and thinking women like Shakespeare's Cassius are dangerous because they think too much.
01:39:34
Speaker
Remember, a one here is not like normal person opinions, or at least that's not how I'm thinking of it. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely not normal person opinions. Like all of these are going to be on a certain level of odiousness. But he said if your wife is too mouthy, you should push her off a dock.
01:39:47
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's true. I'm going to stick firm with my two though. Okay. We can also measure each other for like... wokeness right like who's who scores people higher right and in which things right like maybe i find arrogance you know i think it'll be fun to compare anyway arrogance see i'm less i'm less agp than you and that's why i chose to you have the cultural analysis of a past so i'm gonna move on um
01:40:14
Speaker
okay arrogance i think this guy's gonna score higher for me on arrogance than ferocity because he is quite arrogant like he's so proud of his little analogies and yeah you can really feel opens the book by saying like i'm gonna use more analogies than the like than the like the suits at the publishing house want me to and they know where to put their criticism And then dude comes out with the most dog shit analogies.
01:40:45
Speaker
It really does. And it's like, you wrote this huge like check. Watch these sick moves. Russia is like a woman and women are like Russia.
01:40:59
Speaker
I think I'm also going to go with the three for arrogance. I could imagine someone way more arrogant, but... I think he's a solid three. He's really being carried by the analogies thing and the Mark Twain thing for me.
01:41:11
Speaker
Otherwise, he'd probably be at the bottom of the scale. Yeah, I mean, I think I would give him a one in terms of other elements of his analysis. he's He is trying to do this, like, humility thing throughout it, but the humility thing is, like, actually part of his project of thinking he's Mark Twain.
01:41:29
Speaker
It's part of his folksiness project. It's a folksy humili humility that for him is just cover for the extent to which he thinks he's marked.
01:41:41
Speaker
Okay. What about gullibility? Yeah. How much did he fall for it? Probably a five. Yeah, I think... I was thinking maybe four. I don't think we should interpret his swerves and inconsistencies as ah lack of sincerity.
01:41:56
Speaker
I think we should interpret them as him preening. Yeah, I guess I see that. And i am and the fact that he the fact that he's so totalizing, I didn't even include all of the times that he brings up biblical stories or... Yeah, I think he really does fall for it. I think he really thinks...
01:42:13
Speaker
At times it's not even clear if he understands that, like, angels don't design babies. and And definitely, I think, the thing that pushes me up from a four to a five, maybe more than anything else, is that phony sincerity at the end of how to live with women. Because that also seems like he believes it.
01:42:30
Speaker
So, I had given him a total f FAG score of 11, and you've given him a total FAG score of 10. So... so Okay, so now we know exactly how much of an FAG he is.
01:42:45
Speaker
Exactly. And then, of course, you know, we're introducing this new rating system, but this is actually our second episode. And so we have to go back and decide the FAG rating for Leacock.
01:43:00
Speaker
I would say on ferocity, he's probably getting a four for me. A significant jump, and I attribute a big part of that to the way he portrays foreigners.
01:43:14
Speaker
The unredeemed brutes that will kill us all. think I got to agree that he's a four here. I think like between that and, and the, I guess he, I didn't pull out quite so much of, of Peck's like analysis of like the problematic types of women.
01:43:32
Speaker
Cause he does, he does have this weird typology of like haves and have nots. It's not worth getting to his whole kind of theology about how people work, but leacock really had this vision of like the awful woman right and peck never really rises to that level i think he does talk about like sometimes your mouthy wife knows she's smarter than you and flaunts it and then it's okay to kill her but it's a joke yeah he does talk about the specter of like masculine women who are gonna seduce our
01:44:04
Speaker
feminine women because feminine women really want someone masculine there is the beginnings of this kind of thing but i think he doesn't like systematize it as much as leacock so i would definitely agree that leacock is higher there arrogance leacock might be the height of arrogance for me i think i might give him a five actually I think I have to give him a five too.
01:44:25
Speaker
And I think for me, the thing that really, really does it is the the ending of the, our funny women, attractive essay where he brings up the Moliere play. It's such an annoying reference that is like an attempt to be intellectual.
01:44:41
Speaker
And the text of it is just like, because I'm a pseudo intellectual, right? It's so, yeah I think, I think, I think he's getting a fuck. Gullibility. i think he's kind of low on gullibility.
01:44:52
Speaker
I got a real cynicism vibe from him in a way where I really feel like he knows what he's doing. Yeah, I think so. I think I described him in the last episode as having cloud chaser energy.
01:45:04
Speaker
and And I think he's placing it probably a two for me. Okay, I might actually give him a one for gullibility. So I think so I've given him a 10 and this time you've given him an 11. So we've swapped ah f FAG ratings, but both sitting at around 10 or 11.
01:45:20
Speaker
So they're well matched FAGs in a way. Okay, well, it's science. um Yeah, that's that's the scientific method for you. It's difficult for me to imagine Leacock acknowledging the existence of a gay couple in his writings.
01:45:36
Speaker
That's true. Even to condemn them. I think a feminist woman is the most socially deviant creature that he would be willing to acknowledge in his writing.
01:45:47
Speaker
I think that's really the outer limit for him. When he talks about, say, the... his extremely racist vision of a ah woman in Africa or wherever, some vaguely savage woman, that person is like strictly an imaginary construct.
01:46:09
Speaker
And he's willing to depict her in the text because she's an imaginary construct, I think. I think there's a reason that these immigrants, these immigrants,
01:46:20
Speaker
unredeemed brutes in the country don't appear in the text is because he's not willing to describe them. They're too close to being real. They're people that actually exist in the country. You would have to actually depict instead of just referencing a shared cultural figure.
01:46:36
Speaker
Yeah, I could see that. And I think actually, now that you mention it, like he doesn't even really mention feminist women without including in that category, like women who have two or fewer kids right like as you even pointed out in the last one like we don't even get like the spinster we get like women who have up to two kids so yeah he is he's more blinkered in a way and maybe i would bump him up to a two for gullibility if we had spent more time on like how bad of an economist he was like how much of a
01:47:08
Speaker
how much of a protectionist he was, but God. Dude, if I found out my advisor had sent someone a letter that was like, Sarah does not actually know math, I would be like, oh, he figured it out. But I would also just die of shame.
01:47:21
Speaker
Yeah. So yeah, that's our, that's our coverage of, of Joseph H. Peck. And again, by plugging our Patreon, if you enjoyed what you heard, maybe if you think you want to support our efforts to unearth more of these weird guys, go to patreon.com slash odium symposium.
01:47:37
Speaker
That's patreon.com slash odium symposium. Right now, there's not really any benefits extra to subscribing, but we have some ideas for bonus content. And if we get more subscribers and more resources, that would be something we can put out in the future.
01:47:50
Speaker
Yeah, thank you to those of you who have already subscribed. and And to those of you who have not subscribed, I've been compiling your biographical details. I'm in the middle of a massive docs as we speak.
01:48:01
Speaker
And everyone will know your names and what you did. Yeah, so we'll read your name on the pod if you do subscribe as a kind of shout-out, and we'll read your name on the pod if you don't subscribe. As a negative shout-out.
01:48:13
Speaker
As a negative shout-out. um So your name will be read either way, so it's not really a benefit, I guess. Yeah.
Conclusion and Postmodern Reality
01:48:20
Speaker
Okay, bye, y'all. There's really nothing real.
01:48:25
Speaker
There is no real. And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
01:48:39
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! listen, you the right, I'll suck you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
01:48:55
Speaker
level of masochism.