Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Tragedy of Heterosexuality: In Conversation with Dr Jane Ward
115 Plays7 months ago
The Queens sit down with the brilliant Dr. Jane Ward, author of The Tragedy of Heterosexuality to discuss why modern day heterosexual relationships often leave women feeling shortchanged.
Check out Dr Jane's book here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tragedy-Heterosexuality-56-Sexual-Cultures/dp/1479851558
Download the FDS Handbook for free here: https://pdfcoffee.com/fds-handbook-v135-pdf-free.html
Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/femdatstrat
Follow us!
Weekly Bonus Content on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheFemaleDatingStrategy
Website: https://www.thefemaledatingstrategy.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/femdatstrat
@femdatstrat
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_thefemaledatingstrategy/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction of Dr. Jane Ward
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome back to the Female Dating Strategy, the meanest female-only podcast on the internet.
00:00:05
Speaker
I'm your host, Diana.
00:00:07
Speaker
And I'm Rose, and I am overcome today with excitement and glee as we welcome our estimable guest, Dr. Jane Ward.
00:00:16
Speaker
Dr. Jane Ward, welcome!
Embracing 'Meanness' in Feminist Discourse
00:00:18
Speaker
Something about this podcast makes me want to cheer.
00:00:23
Speaker
I have a cheerleader's love for wooing.
00:00:25
Speaker
Yay!
00:00:26
Speaker
I think it's that I'm excited to be mean.
00:00:29
Speaker
I'm excited to be mean.
00:00:32
Speaker
Never an invitation for that.
00:00:34
Speaker
You are invited to be as mean as you like.
00:00:37
Speaker
We encourage it out here.
00:00:38
Speaker
We didn't earn that reputation of being the meanest podcast for nothing.
00:00:42
Speaker
So go ahead.
00:00:43
Speaker
Cathartic.
Shedding 'Minnesota Nice'
00:00:44
Speaker
And if there was ever a time to be mean, it's right now.
00:00:49
Speaker
Thank you.
00:00:49
Speaker
I'm trying to get rid of my Minnesota nice.
00:00:51
Speaker
It's pretty hard, actually.
00:00:53
Speaker
It's pretty deeply bred in.
00:00:55
Speaker
But this podcast really does encourage me to let go of that and to embrace a bit of my, you know, my snarky side.
00:01:00
Speaker
I think snark is probably the meanest Minnesotans can get.
00:01:04
Speaker
Like you saw how like, who is the vice presidential candidate?
00:01:07
Speaker
Tim?
00:01:08
Speaker
No, Waltz.
00:01:09
Speaker
Waltz, Tim Waltz, like, you know, when Tim Waltz was, you know, being mean, was he really that mean?
00:01:14
Speaker
No, because we can't be.
00:01:15
Speaker
But that's what this episode is about.
00:01:17
Speaker
It's like letting us really get to the heart and the sincerity of what's going on with heterosexuality.
00:01:23
Speaker
And before we get into that conversation, I just like to give a brief biography overview for our listeners.
00:01:29
Speaker
So Dr. Jane Ward, sit tight while I tell them all about your amazing background.
00:01:32
Speaker
Okay.
00:01:33
Speaker
Here we
Critique of Heterosexuality and Gender Norms
00:01:34
Speaker
go.
00:01:34
Speaker
Dr. Jane Ward is a powerhouse feminist scholar and author whose work drags the institution of heterosexuality into the spotlight and holds it accountable.
00:01:44
Speaker
As professor and chair of feminist studies at UC Santa Barbara, she unpacks how straight culture, whiteness, and gender norms are socially constructed to keep women compliant and men centered.
00:01:56
Speaker
Her award-winning book, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, challenges the assumption that straight relationships are the natural or superior path for women, instead exposing just how much emotional labor, self-abandonment, and gaslighting it often demands.
00:02:12
Speaker
Whether she's dissecting bro-on-bro sexuality in Not Gay or calling out the cult of compulsory heterosexuality, Dr. Ward's work is a masterclass in why opting out of male-centered romance isn't radical, it's survival.
00:02:28
Speaker
Diana wrote that.
00:02:29
Speaker
Isn't that wonderful?
00:02:31
Speaker
Thank you.
00:02:32
Speaker
Thank you so much.
00:02:34
Speaker
I have to say, feel free to be as mean as you want today, ladies, because you know what?
00:02:38
Speaker
The Pope is in charge and Minnesota is on the map.
00:02:42
Speaker
Actually, where is he from?
00:02:43
Speaker
He's not from Minnesota, is he?
00:02:44
Speaker
He's from Michigan.
00:02:45
Speaker
He's from Chicago.
00:02:46
Speaker
My bad.
00:02:47
Speaker
He's from Chicago.
00:02:48
Speaker
And yeah, we've got the Midwest out here representing us in the Holy Land.
00:02:53
Speaker
And maybe, you know, that gives us license to be as mean as we want now.
00:02:57
Speaker
I mean, if the Pope says it's okay, I guess it's okay, right?
00:02:59
Speaker
Okay.
00:03:00
Speaker
Right.
00:03:00
Speaker
It's an important corrective.
00:03:02
Speaker
I just want to say that my, you know, hopefully this is on brand, that you may be hearing my chickens in the background, my hens.
00:03:12
Speaker
We have only hens because, of course, we are eco-feminist lesbians with a little homestead back here.
00:03:20
Speaker
And so they're making sounds.
00:03:22
Speaker
I don't know if you can hear it, but yeah.
00:03:23
Speaker
I can't hear them, but that does sound very on brand and I like it.
00:03:27
Speaker
I love that for you.
00:03:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:28
Speaker
I love that you have a, what do you call a group of heads?
00:03:31
Speaker
A brood?
00:03:32
Speaker
A brood.
00:03:33
Speaker
I think it's a brood.
00:03:34
Speaker
I love that you are living among a brood of hens.
00:03:37
Speaker
Also is the reason you can't have a rooster because of like zoning laws?
00:03:41
Speaker
Well, it happens to be the case that here where I live in Santa Barbara, you cannot have a rooster.
00:03:46
Speaker
But we've kept chickens for years, including when we lived in L.A.
00:03:50
Speaker
And you can have as many roosters as you want, but it turns out that roosters are...
Chicken Gender Dynamics as a Metaphor
00:03:57
Speaker
rapists.
00:03:58
Speaker
They're just the worst.
00:03:59
Speaker
They're horrible.
00:04:00
Speaker
They're really horrible.
00:04:01
Speaker
You mean they're not the provider and protector of hens?
00:04:04
Speaker
Because that's the narrative we see going around.
00:04:06
Speaker
No, exactly.
00:04:08
Speaker
I mean, I've actually wrote a little blog about, you know, using chicken gender relations as a metaphor for human gender relations, because there's so much overlap there, including that
00:04:20
Speaker
Everybody thinks that hens need a rooster, but they don't, and they don't need a rooster to even produce eggs.
00:04:29
Speaker
And in fact, when there's no rooster, one of the hens kind of emerges, we call her butch hen, she sort of emerges as the mask leader of the group.
00:04:42
Speaker
I have to say, I love how you use straightness and queerness also within the biological world.
00:04:49
Speaker
Like Dr. Ward, you have such a wonderful sense of humor.
00:04:52
Speaker
I was rereading your book again, and I was just chuckling throughout.
00:04:56
Speaker
And I was like, wow, it's so refreshing to see an academic write with like verve and zest.
00:05:00
Speaker
You're like from the sparkling champagne region of France.
00:05:04
Speaker
You know, you're not, you're not.
00:05:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:07
Speaker
You're not the spark version.
00:05:09
Speaker
You are the champagne.
00:05:10
Speaker
It's so amazing to see how you do weave humor, you know, with your critique.
Humor in Academic Writing
00:05:15
Speaker
And I just wanted to ask, like, how did you decide that that was going to be your approach?
00:05:19
Speaker
Because, you know, I come from an academic background myself and like having my voice be hammered out from any and all academic writings was really difficult for me.
00:05:28
Speaker
And one of the reasons why I was like, maybe this isn't the path for me.
00:05:32
Speaker
And so I was just really impressed with reading your work, how you managed to keep your own voice while also still being scholarly.
00:05:38
Speaker
Could you tell us a little bit about how you came to that path and how you decided you were going to stick to it?
00:05:44
Speaker
Yes.
00:05:45
Speaker
And I was nodding while you were talking about your experience.
00:05:47
Speaker
I mean, I think it was about coming into my own voice, which I did not have through graduate school, because of course that gets kind of trained out of you.
00:05:57
Speaker
And then even with my first book, I didn't feel like I could really speak in my own voice.
00:06:02
Speaker
But then after I had tenure, I was like, why would I not be myself in my writing?
00:06:12
Speaker
And humor is a big part of the way that I process and survive the world.
00:06:15
Speaker
I mean, I was also like raised on Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons.
00:06:21
Speaker
So this is just, you know, how I move through the world.
00:06:25
Speaker
I actually, even a lot of like,
00:06:27
Speaker
Pretty crass, childish bathroom humor.
00:06:30
Speaker
But especially when we're talking about the pain of homophobia and transphobia, I mean, I think queer people, humor is making fun of straight people is one of our favorite pastimes.
00:06:45
Speaker
There's just such rich fodder for you to make fun of.
00:06:49
Speaker
There's so much there.
00:06:50
Speaker
Right.
00:06:50
Speaker
The jokes write themselves.
00:06:52
Speaker
They really do.
00:06:53
Speaker
And that's why I was really happy to see that you had cited John Waters, who was really my first introduction.
00:06:59
Speaker
I think, would you call that queer cinema?
00:07:02
Speaker
Mm hmm.
00:07:22
Speaker
which is cause for concern, but they're boring, which is like a term of condition, right?
00:07:27
Speaker
Yes.
00:07:28
Speaker
And that actually was.
00:07:29
Speaker
So there's a chapter of Tragedy of Heterosexuality where it's incredibly scientific, where I basically just like interview 58 of my queer friends.
00:07:39
Speaker
And I'm like, tell me about your experience of straight culture.
00:07:45
Speaker
Sorry.
00:07:46
Speaker
You know, like, what does it feel like when you're around only straight people?
00:07:50
Speaker
What does it feel like to be in a straight space?
00:07:52
Speaker
And they said all sorts of things, but the number one most common thing that was said was boring.
00:08:00
Speaker
And, you know, we tend to think of boring as like relatively low stakes, like, well, what's the harm of that?
00:08:08
Speaker
But the way that they talked about it was...
00:08:12
Speaker
Using the word boring, but also with an implication of something bigger than that, which is kind of like soul killing, stifling, like draining the life force out of you.
00:08:24
Speaker
And it makes sense because if you look at the way, you know, one of the most common homophobic slurs that was used against queer people in the late 20th century is
00:08:39
Speaker
I mean, I don't know if you can even call it a slur, but it was like one of the things that straight people would say is like, why do gay people have to be so flamboyant?
00:08:47
Speaker
Why do gay people have to be so in your face?
00:08:50
Speaker
And so if you look actually at these two cultural experiences, and it makes me think a lot about some of the writing of the late, great, wonderful Jose Munoz, who's a queer scholar.
00:09:03
Speaker
You know, there's a kind of emotional flatness in straight culture and a kind of emotional sort of exuberance in queer culture.
00:09:15
Speaker
And I think people were really, you know, they were trying to get at the way that any kind of norms that we have,
00:09:23
Speaker
Heterosexual norms, sexist norms, gender binary norms, they flatten us.
00:09:30
Speaker
They're like containing and constraining us and queer people feel that very palpably.
00:09:35
Speaker
This chapter, you call it, you say, this chapter should be read as an ethnography of my own social and political milieu, reflecting my feminist queer social network and the kinds of conversations that happen within it, end quote.
00:09:48
Speaker
And I think that is something that, you know, I was reading all of these.
00:09:52
Speaker
I love how you have like you just leave like this is from a femme wasp.
00:09:56
Speaker
This is from a queer Latinx male.
00:09:58
Speaker
Right.
00:09:59
Speaker
And it was so eye opening because, you know, even if you are a straight person, as Diane and I are, who have friends of all kinds of stripes, like a lot of times I'm sure, you know,
00:10:09
Speaker
This is a sort of commentary that's reserved for people who are queer or gay within their own circles.
00:10:16
Speaker
Like they're not coming to their straight friends and being like, it's tragic how boring your life is.
00:10:22
Speaker
And I think there's another aspect of it that, you know, if you look at older portrayals of gay couples in general, it's always seen as something that's tragic.
00:10:30
Speaker
Like the
Media Portrayal vs. Real-Life Experiences
00:10:31
Speaker
popular narrative in media was always like, oh, this is a tragic way to live.
00:10:34
Speaker
And heterosexuality is presented as a very joyful way to live.
00:10:38
Speaker
But then you live in the real world and then you interact with heterosexual couples.
00:10:43
Speaker
And overwhelmingly, there seems to be some, I don't know, like a relishing of how bad it is.
00:10:50
Speaker
Like people commiserate based on how horrible it is.
00:10:53
Speaker
Like, you know, people bond over how terrible it is to date and how terrible it is to be married and how terrible, you know, the old ball and chain.
00:10:59
Speaker
And these narratives of like actually not liking people.
00:11:02
Speaker
heterosexuality that much, which is why, you know, it's really interesting that the title of the book itself is The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, because I don't think it's really presented that way.
00:11:11
Speaker
And that there's so much performance that goes into attracting a mate, having a partner, being in a relationship, marrying them, that actually kills a lot of the joy of enjoying an intimate relationship.
00:11:24
Speaker
And the way that gay relationships are portrayed is like, oh, the entire existence of this relationship is something tragic.
00:11:31
Speaker
But when you actually explore it underneath the surface, it's actually really joyful.
00:11:36
Speaker
I mean, of course, it's got like shit just like the rest of us do.
00:11:39
Speaker
I mean, all of our, you know, our shit stinks.
00:11:41
Speaker
Everybody's shit stinks.
00:11:42
Speaker
But I think that, you know, there is this like natural knee jerk reaction to just showing heterosexual couples as like the norm and the aspiration for what most people should want.
00:11:54
Speaker
And I think that's what leaves a lot of people behind in feeling like, oh, I haven't really gotten there yet.
00:11:59
Speaker
And I think a lot of young
The Repetitive Tragedy of Heterosexual Culture
00:12:00
Speaker
women feel a lot of pressure to be like, I need to pair up not so much because this relationship is adding value to my life, but because it's going to say something to society if I don't.
00:12:10
Speaker
Right.
00:12:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:11
Speaker
I mean, there's so much in what you just said.
00:12:13
Speaker
And, you know, it's not just that heteronormativity kind of compels us or tracks us towards heterosexuality.
00:12:21
Speaker
It's that it also gaslights us in exactly the way that you just described, which is it
00:12:26
Speaker
It promises us that heterosexuality is going to deliver happiness.
00:12:32
Speaker
And one of the ways that it does that is it says, well, you know, you're definitely going to be happier relative to gay people because gay people live sad lives of discrimination, basically.
00:12:45
Speaker
Right.
00:12:46
Speaker
But if you actually talk to queer people, especially if you talk to queer people who've spent any time thinking about this, what you often hear is profound gratitude to not be straight.
00:12:59
Speaker
Like, if anything kind of...
00:13:02
Speaker
pity and worry, concern about straight people.
00:13:06
Speaker
And one of the reasons that queer people feel that way is because so many of their interactions with straight people, primarily women, straight women, are centered on those people's complaints about their lives.
00:13:18
Speaker
And so it's very common for queer people to be like, do those straight people even like each other?
00:13:23
Speaker
Like, why do they keep
00:13:25
Speaker
going back for more.
00:13:26
Speaker
And so that's why the book is called The Tragedy of Heterosexuality.
00:13:31
Speaker
Because, you know, when you think about a classic tragedy, it's something bad that's happening.
00:13:38
Speaker
But it's also like you can't get out of it.
00:13:40
Speaker
You might even see it coming.
00:13:43
Speaker
And there is no alternative.
00:13:45
Speaker
And it's that repetition of this with every generation where every generation of women, you know, has a whole slew of self-help books about like what's wrong with men and how do we fix this?
00:14:02
Speaker
And every generation of women has, you know, some feminist hopefulness that things are going to get better.
00:14:07
Speaker
And every generation of women has their icon in a movie who like sets her ex-husband's
00:14:13
Speaker
cheating ex-husband's car on fire or whatever.
00:14:15
Speaker
It just happens over and over and over again.
00:14:18
Speaker
And I think now we're in a moment of really grappling with that because there was, I think, a feeling that, well, at least men are getting a little bit better with each generation.
00:14:31
Speaker
And then, at least in the U.S., with all the data we have about how young men in particular voted and then the rise of young men's participation in hyper-misogynistic
00:14:45
Speaker
areas of the dark web, yeah, of the manosphere.
00:14:48
Speaker
I think that has been quite a wake-up call for a lot of women.
00:14:52
Speaker
Like, we're actually not guaranteed progress here.
00:14:58
Speaker
Do you feel like the growth of online misogynistic media like the Red Pill and, you know, Andrew Tate and all these other, the manosphere in general,
00:15:09
Speaker
Do you think that there's like an example of that from the past?
00:15:11
Speaker
Do you think we're just repeating?
00:15:12
Speaker
Because I mean, one of the things I got from reading your book was just we're repeating the mistakes of the past.
00:15:16
Speaker
We can't even really see it because we're doing the same thing and expecting different results.
00:15:21
Speaker
And so, you know, I don't know who said that, but somebody said that was insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.
00:15:27
Speaker
But do you feel like we're actually regressing and going into new uncharted territory that's much worse in many ways?
00:15:35
Speaker
Well, we couldn't probably get worse than where we have been because we have been in times in which women were by law property of their husbands.
00:15:49
Speaker
And most of human history has been a time of sanctioned patriarchal violence.
00:15:56
Speaker
And, you know, women could be legally raped by husbands.
00:16:01
Speaker
So I wouldn't say we've gone back so far that we're in a time that's of unprecedented patriarchal oppression.
00:16:10
Speaker
But I definitely would say we're going backwards from where we have been in just the last 50 years.
00:16:16
Speaker
You know, in some ways, the alt-right gender discourse reminds me of...
00:16:25
Speaker
something that we saw in the 1950s and in the 1960s and 1970s when Playboy magazine became very popular.
00:16:35
Speaker
And so there have been a few scholars who've written about that whole culture of Playboy and, you know, what was the ideology of that magazine.
00:16:45
Speaker
And it really was that
00:16:47
Speaker
you know, men did not like their wives.
00:16:51
Speaker
That magazine was so popular because it just kind of acknowledged that, that men don't like their wives.
00:16:56
Speaker
They find the domestic space to be a site of like control and of their, and, and diminishing their freedom.
00:17:06
Speaker
And so they want a space where they can,
00:17:10
Speaker
really be men and connect with other men.
00:17:13
Speaker
And that means staring at young nude women younger than their wives, being able to read like super sexist jokes about how women are morons and stuff like that.
00:17:25
Speaker
And I think the manosphere does a kind of similar thing.
00:17:29
Speaker
One of the most common...
00:17:31
Speaker
kind of it's sort of a meme but it's also an argument or a logic maybe you could even say it's like one of the paradigms of the manosphere is that women have too much control and that the kind of metaphor they use is the Iroquois longhouse I don't know if you have followed tracks I'm not familiar with that can you explain it
00:17:54
Speaker
Sure, yeah.
00:17:55
Speaker
I mean, the Iroquois Longhouse, it's a kind of structure that would be the communal gathering space in Iroquois community.
00:18:04
Speaker
And it's also where maybe there would be the hearth, women would be working.
00:18:12
Speaker
And these men on the kind of the intellectuals of the alt-right have used that as a metaphor to say that
00:18:22
Speaker
the den mother, the archetypal den mother of the longhouse who sort of gathered the community and directed the community has become our nation, that our nation has deferred to Uru.
00:18:36
Speaker
women's feelings and we need to return to men's feelings.
00:18:41
Speaker
And the evidence that they give of this is that, you know, they say that women's power is the soft power of shaming and canceling men and that men need to respond with the hard power that they have, which is aggression and violence.
00:19:02
Speaker
And so anyway, I could go on and on about the logic of all of this.
00:19:06
Speaker
But, you know, it's same, same.
00:19:09
Speaker
Basically, what men were also saying in the 60s, like women are dominating me and I don't like it and I don't like women and I need to be set free.
00:19:19
Speaker
But it's interesting you mentioned that, you know, men don't like their wives, but men also choose their wives.
Men's Changing Attitudes Post-Marriage
00:19:25
Speaker
So you would think that they would choose someone they could like.
00:19:28
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the thing is that wives get older and many men seem to not like that.
00:19:36
Speaker
They also have children and many men don't want to do an equal part of the parenting labor.
00:19:45
Speaker
So we know that women initiate the vast majority of divorces.
00:19:50
Speaker
They initiate about 70% of divorces.
00:19:53
Speaker
And it's often around these very kinds of conflicts that, you know, they liked each other when they first got married.
00:20:02
Speaker
And then the reality of a marriage, which is it's both a relationship and it's a side of labor.
00:20:10
Speaker
And so if only one of you is doing the majority of that labor, obviously that's people are going to be really resentful unless you
00:20:21
Speaker
you romanticize it, which is what's happening with trad wives and stuff.
00:20:25
Speaker
But for most women, it's not romantic that your husband can't wash his own dish, you know?
00:20:31
Speaker
I guess not.
00:20:32
Speaker
I actually thought you were going to say it's not romantic that he can't wash his own dick, which I also think is apropos.
00:20:38
Speaker
Yeah, that's definitely not romantic.
00:20:39
Speaker
That's just gross.
00:20:42
Speaker
Could I quote from your book, quoting Valerie Solanus?
00:20:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:48
Speaker
Yes.
00:20:48
Speaker
Let's bring her in.
00:20:49
Speaker
We need her in this space.
00:20:51
Speaker
We do.
00:20:51
Speaker
We do.
00:20:52
Speaker
And I still remember the first time I read her and I was like, what?
00:20:54
Speaker
This is amazing.
00:20:55
Speaker
And then I read somebody say it was like, well, it was supposed to be satirical.
00:20:58
Speaker
And I was like, but was it though?
00:20:59
Speaker
Because I was feeling all the feels.
00:21:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:02
Speaker
Is this from this gum manifesto?
00:21:04
Speaker
Yes, ma'am.
00:21:06
Speaker
Okay.
00:21:07
Speaker
And this is from the chapter on like, you know, about heterosexuality be boring, being sick and boring.
00:21:12
Speaker
And I like how you bring up that like things that bore us are not just uninteresting.
00:21:16
Speaker
You say, quote, to bore something is also to make a hole in it, to hollow something out.
00:21:21
Speaker
Hence, sometimes being bored feels like being completely empty.
00:21:25
Speaker
I'm going to continue this quote from your book.
00:21:27
Speaker
Significantly, Valerie Solanus began Scum Manifesto, her 1967 wild feminist screed against the patriarchy, by reminding readers that oppression and boredom are interconnected.
00:21:40
Speaker
Quote, life in this society being at best an utter bore, and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women...
00:21:48
Speaker
There remains to civic minded, responsible, thrill seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex, end quote.
00:22:00
Speaker
And I love how you bring up that oppression is inextricably linked to boredom.
00:22:06
Speaker
This is something that I think gets overlooked, but I think this is basically like the playbook for fascism.
00:22:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:12
Speaker
I mean, what happens is that the people in power get to decide what we talk about, how we spend our time.
00:22:20
Speaker
They can make irrelevant everyone else's concerns.
00:22:25
Speaker
And so one of the experiences of that, I mean, I think there are a lot of emotional registers for that experience of being on the other end of that.
00:22:34
Speaker
One of them is boredom, that, you know, you...
00:22:38
Speaker
turn on the news and you have to listen to Donald Trump.
00:22:43
Speaker
And it's somehow both enraging and terribly boring at the same time.
00:22:49
Speaker
And in part because you realize, oh my God, all the other things we could be talking about, dreaming about, making happen, we don't get to do that.
00:23:01
Speaker
Which is ironic considering that romance and heterosexuality is posited as the zenith of life's fulfillment.
00:23:08
Speaker
So basically, is it just one gigantic psyop at this point?
00:23:11
Speaker
Because that's what it sounds like to me.
00:23:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:16
Speaker
Well, it's interesting you say psyop because that actually comes up in another chapter of the book where I, this is the one ethnographic chapter, is that this time, so this wasn't the height of pickup artists.
00:23:30
Speaker
It was when I was writing this, it was after that.
00:23:33
Speaker
There were after the pickup artists had gotten, you know, really scrutinized and slammed for how sexist they were.
00:23:41
Speaker
They went through a period of kind of rebranding themselves as just dating coaches for men.
00:23:48
Speaker
Self-help for men.
00:23:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:50
Speaker
And so it was in that time that I reached out to them and I attended their trainings, their boot camps with two different companies.
00:24:02
Speaker
And even as they were in the middle of this nicer, friendlier, gentler pickup artist rebrand, they still were drawing on all sorts of data about exactly how many times you have to touch a woman and wear in order to prepare her for your transitioning her into your car so you can take her home to fuck, you know, this kind of stuff.
00:24:29
Speaker
And they do draw on FBI, a couple of like FBI psyops studies about, you know, the psychology of manipulation and so forth.
00:24:43
Speaker
You know, based on you attending these sessions, do you have any advice for our audience on what to look out for with these kinds of men?
00:24:48
Speaker
Because I think that'll be really helpful for what you observe, like, just because this sounds insane.
00:24:53
Speaker
I mean, there's just no other way to say it is that there's no amount of times that you can text someone.
00:24:57
Speaker
I think they even call it like breaking the touch barrier or something.
00:25:00
Speaker
Because I think, what was the pickup artist book?
00:25:02
Speaker
I think it was by some guy called Neil Strauss or something.
00:25:05
Speaker
The Game.
00:25:06
Speaker
The Game.
00:25:07
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:25:08
Speaker
And I think that was like the Bible for a lot of these men.
00:25:11
Speaker
And I don't think it's really evolved.
00:25:13
Speaker
past that too much in terms of how they approach women with this kind of mechanical sort of script that's really easy to see if you're properly socialized.
00:25:22
Speaker
But I was just wondering, do you have any advice or anything that you thought might be helpful to our audience from what you've seen in those sessions to avoid these kinds of men?
00:25:32
Speaker
I mean, I really hope most women are kind of alert to these tactics now.
00:25:39
Speaker
But in case they're not, I'll just say, you know, the whole thing runs on the idea that you're trying to distinguish yourself from other men because it's a competitive game to get women into bed.
00:25:54
Speaker
Other men might be more attractive than you.
00:25:57
Speaker
They might have more money than you.
00:25:59
Speaker
And so you're going to use these like psychological strategies to give yourself the competitive edge.
00:26:05
Speaker
And they look like often using like self-deprecating humor that these coaches believe that kind of puts women at ease.
00:26:16
Speaker
You might make jokes about like being gay and that makes this woman feel like, okay, well, you're not a threatening creep.
00:26:23
Speaker
You're like a playful guy who's willing to make a joke about your own masculinity.
00:26:29
Speaker
You know, they're instructed or taught by these coaches like,
00:26:33
Speaker
try to align yourself with women in the bar against the creepy guy.
00:26:39
Speaker
Like maybe you point out that some guy, he seems too drunk or he's too aggressive or whatever.
00:26:44
Speaker
So you're building a kind of almost like pseudo-feminist solidarity with her, you know, so that then you can take her home and fuck her.
00:26:51
Speaker
I mean, they really are coming at this from every possible manipulative angle.
00:26:57
Speaker
I think most women in reality, they can trust their intuition and know that, you know, when something is a manipulation...
00:27:08
Speaker
I guess what I want to say for straight women who are in bars engaging with these kind of dudes is like, there's no way to win other than just decide, why are you there and what do you want?
00:27:22
Speaker
Do you want to fuck a dude that you meet that night?
00:27:24
Speaker
Well, great, then you pick him out and take him home.
00:27:26
Speaker
Because the whole thing runs on this idea that women are kind of gatekeeping themselves and they're like, they're the prize and men are competing for the prize.
00:27:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:37
Speaker
And that's what, you know, from a queer perspective, it's like, what?
00:27:42
Speaker
Like either you want to have sex or you don't.
00:27:44
Speaker
And if you do, then why aren't women leading this?
00:27:50
Speaker
So I would say more than like recognizing what is a creepy line versus an authentic line.
00:27:57
Speaker
It's really about women having a more, I think, maybe a clearer and more agentic relationship to their own sexuality.
00:28:06
Speaker
Mm hmm.
00:28:07
Speaker
You know, you mentioned in your email about how there's been a reaction to the alt right and the manosphere from, you know, hetero pessimism
Women Withdrawing from Heterosexual Relationships
00:28:15
Speaker
and Forby.
00:28:15
Speaker
Rose and I had actually done an episode about Forby a while ago.
00:28:19
Speaker
I mean, I also saw something called Boy Sober.
00:28:21
Speaker
I think that's quite new to me.
00:28:22
Speaker
I have I don't think I've heard of that before, but I think they all kind of come under this blanket of women essentially checking out from heterosexual relationships.
00:28:29
Speaker
And I wonder, has there been a historical precedent for that as well?
00:28:32
Speaker
Or is this something that we're seeing that's a new reaction?
00:28:35
Speaker
You know, I actually think this is kind of more like a strike in a way.
00:28:40
Speaker
It's like a sex strike.
00:28:42
Speaker
Like a listen-through product kind of thing?
00:28:45
Speaker
Well, a lot of people have compared it to political lesbianism, and I don't think it's really the same.
00:28:52
Speaker
It's more like a boycott.
00:28:54
Speaker
But it is interesting to compare the two.
00:28:57
Speaker
So in the 1970s, you know, there was an understanding that...
00:29:02
Speaker
patriarchy was the problem and lesbianism was the solution.
00:29:06
Speaker
And because not every woman was a lesbian, it was theorized that women could become political lesbians, which meant that they recognized that having sexual relationships, romantic relationships with men was
00:29:23
Speaker
kind of being complicit with the patriarchy.
00:29:25
Speaker
So they just would refrain from doing that and aligned themselves with a lesbian politics.
00:29:32
Speaker
But what was different about that is that I think a lot of the women who did that, I think, felt pressure to do it.
00:29:41
Speaker
It was kind of...
00:29:43
Speaker
a movement rallying cry that women ultimately kind of gave into.
00:29:48
Speaker
And because many women, I think, felt some political pressure or guilt that made them do it, it ultimately, it was not successful and it caused a lot of bad feelings, I think.
00:30:02
Speaker
Whereas this 4B and heteropessimism and boy sober is really more about straight women themselves, not in any kind of conversation with lesbians, recognizing that the things that they were promised from heterosexuality are not being delivered and that it might make sense that
00:30:26
Speaker
to withhold, that it might make sense to either take a break from sex with men or to use withholding of sex as a kind of bargaining chip in what is ultimately, you know, a power-based conflict between straight men and women.
00:30:45
Speaker
But I do think some people aren't just withholding sex.
00:30:47
Speaker
I think they're withholding any kind of relationship with men as well.
00:30:50
Speaker
Because the 4B women in Korea are definitely boycotting a lot of things that aren't just sex.
00:30:56
Speaker
Yes.
00:30:57
Speaker
Dating, marriage, babe.
00:31:00
Speaker
I mean, some of them are boycotting the beauty industry.
00:31:02
Speaker
They're not watching misogynistic media.
00:31:04
Speaker
Like, it's been pretty all-encompassing in certain countries, I think.
00:31:08
Speaker
I love it.
00:31:09
Speaker
I love it.
00:31:10
Speaker
I do too.
00:31:11
Speaker
I am like, I am an absolute high alt with the fact that, you know, women are beginning to sort of, I call it the gender unionization.
00:31:20
Speaker
I'm like, listen, lesbians have shown us the way for decades now, if not, you know, centuries.
00:31:26
Speaker
And it's been on us for refusing to listen.
00:31:29
Speaker
So,
00:31:30
Speaker
Now that things have gotten to the point where like, oh, no, no, no, this can't continue on.
00:31:34
Speaker
Like, why don't we look at what's been already established and laid out for alternative paths to future happiness?
Introducing 'Deep Heterosexuality'
00:31:40
Speaker
And this is why I love that you end your book, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality on Deep Heterosexuality, Dr. Ward.
00:31:47
Speaker
And I want us to introduce this.
00:31:48
Speaker
I think this is a concept that is this is to me like a fantastically academic concept that needs to become mainstream.
00:31:55
Speaker
So would you help now to help disseminate it to our listeners so they can start to understand and grapple with these questions you bring?
00:32:02
Speaker
Yes.
00:32:02
Speaker
Thank you.
00:32:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:03
Speaker
I hope it takes off.
00:32:05
Speaker
I really do.
00:32:06
Speaker
If I were a straight man, I would be really relieved to encounter this concept.
00:32:10
Speaker
Yeah, so, you know, one of the arguments that I make in the book is that there's something weird, something kind of half-baked, something incomplete about the way that straight men love and desire women.
00:32:28
Speaker
Because the way lesbians love and desire women is that when you're a lesbian, you're not just interested in...
00:32:38
Speaker
the women you want to have sex with or date, you want what's best for all women.
00:32:43
Speaker
Your love of women is inseparable from your hope for girls and women to be free.
00:32:52
Speaker
And
00:32:53
Speaker
So that to me feels like something that does not need to be specific or unique to lesbians.
00:33:02
Speaker
It's something that I think men could cultivate.
00:33:05
Speaker
And it's something that straight men don't yet, I think, possess as a group of people.
00:33:13
Speaker
And so one of the questions I ask is, is it possible that straight men could love women differently?
00:33:20
Speaker
could like women so much that they actually like women.
00:33:25
Speaker
And anything short of that, you know, I don't mean to like weaponize homophobia against straight men, but there's something a little bit gay about the way straight men seem to care more about what other men think than they do about women.
00:33:41
Speaker
And oftentimes, even their desire for women is
00:33:45
Speaker
their sexual relationships with women seems like it's more about impressing other men or winning at the game of heteromasculinity than it is actually about women.
00:33:57
Speaker
And this is so twisted.
00:33:59
Speaker
It's so contradictory that it's hard to even kind of wrap your head around it, but we actually have tremendous evidence of it.
00:34:05
Speaker
And one of those is that when men, especially young men,
00:34:11
Speaker
Like even boys in high school, when they're too into their girlfriend, according to their friends, they're called a fag.
00:34:19
Speaker
You know, if they care too much about women, if they watch films, if they watch a chick click and enjoy it, you know, anything that's kind of woman centric, then they're gay.
00:34:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:32
Speaker
yeah, can I actually mark a man as gay?
00:34:35
Speaker
What a twisted logic that is.
00:34:37
Speaker
Like, what if we actually said to straight men, look, show us the receipts.
00:34:41
Speaker
You're not fully straight unless you can show that you actually really are interested in women.
00:34:47
Speaker
I was having this conversation with someone the other day, I forget who it was.
00:34:51
Speaker
And she was like, yeah, we should say to straight men, like, name five women.
00:34:56
Speaker
Name five women.
00:34:59
Speaker
That's so funny because back in the day when I was on the dating apps, like this was a long time ago, one of the questions I had for men was, name five women you respect that's not a member of your family.
00:35:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:12
Speaker
Oh, my God.
00:35:13
Speaker
And you'd be surprised how many of them struggled.
00:35:15
Speaker
OK.
00:35:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:17
Speaker
And then you want to just be like, you know what?
00:35:19
Speaker
I think maybe you're not straight.
00:35:21
Speaker
That doesn't sound very straight to me.
00:35:22
Speaker
Fellas, is it gay to love your wife?
00:35:25
Speaker
Right.
00:35:27
Speaker
Well, this reminds me, too, Dr. Ward, of like, you know, I'm somebody who comes from both the arts and like the literature.
00:35:32
Speaker
So full humanities, right, represent right here.
00:35:35
Speaker
And one of the questions or one of the conversational pieces I would always steer dates towards was like, name me some women authors, maybe some women authors of color, maybe some queer authors.
00:35:46
Speaker
And same for musicians.
00:35:47
Speaker
And you know what, not a single one of them could answer they only ever listen to other men.
00:35:52
Speaker
And this is what I think you mean by saying,
00:35:54
Speaker
Yeah, but some of them don't even read.
00:35:56
Speaker
I mean, let's talk about that.
00:35:57
Speaker
Like, I don't think many of them are consuming literature anymore.
00:36:00
Speaker
Like, I haven't met a guy who reads books in a while now.
00:36:05
Speaker
Like, I think that in general, there's a lot of people who just don't want to read anymore.
00:36:09
Speaker
I mean, yes, that's a whole other problem.
00:36:12
Speaker
I do think it's somewhat relevant here because I think that not wanting to consume ideas from other people that have different opinions from you is part of the problem.
00:36:21
Speaker
I think part of the reason they go to these podcasts is because they're going to be validated by those men who feel exactly the way they do and think exactly the way they do.
00:36:29
Speaker
It is like a hive mindset.
00:36:31
Speaker
And they want to be validated in their hatred or their anger towards women, especially if they lack success with them.
00:36:37
Speaker
For me, in general, I always think it's a red flag if someone doesn't like to read or doesn't like to consume things that differ from their own opinion, because I'm like, why would you want to be in an echo chamber, you know?
00:36:46
Speaker
And this is why I have to return to Dr. Ward's understanding of deep heterosexuality, because I think what really struck me in this book was, first of all, I like how you say, what if men could get to the point where liking women actually meant liking women, right?
00:36:59
Speaker
And one of the ways you frame it is you say, well, we can look at it as liking women, or we can look at it as a woman-identified man.
00:37:07
Speaker
And can we go into what that means?
00:37:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:09
Speaker
Yes, and thank you for bringing me back here because I didn't really answer about deep heterosexuality.
00:37:13
Speaker
So one of the things that I was grappling with is that the other queer writers who have addressed this problem or who've just written about straight culture and the dysfunction of straight culture in general have often concluded that we need to clarify
00:37:30
Speaker
queer straight people, that the more straight people kind of engaged in queer ideas and practices, the better it would be.
00:37:39
Speaker
And I ultimately settled on a different position, which is that what if straight people and straight men in particular are
00:37:48
Speaker
actually went deeper into heterosexuality and realized its, like, full potential, which is for straight men to actually deeply invest in women and identify with women.
00:38:02
Speaker
And so, you know, in lesbian feminist, you know, in the lesbian feminist canon, there's a lot of writing and reflecting on women-identified women that
00:38:14
Speaker
And that idea was that, you know, it's through loving another woman that in part you come to love yourself and that there was some, there was a kind of feminist magic in a lesbian relationship because it wasn't just that you were loving another woman, but you were coming to really know what makes women lovable.
00:38:36
Speaker
But I think that
00:38:38
Speaker
Many of those impulses are actually something that men could benefit from, which is that the logic of heterosexuality has for so long been about how opposites attract, that like men and women might not actually like each other.
00:38:55
Speaker
They might not have much in common.
00:38:56
Speaker
They're from two different places.
00:38:57
Speaker
planets, but it's all that oppositeness and maybe even that conflict that keeps the spark alive.
00:39:06
Speaker
But I actually think that's just not true.
00:39:09
Speaker
That's why we have so much evidence that
00:39:13
Speaker
When men and women don't like each other, it actually doesn't make for a good relationship.
00:39:19
Speaker
And so what would it look like for straight men and women to cultivate an actual respect of one another and interest in one another, something grounded in identification rather than oppositeness?
00:39:37
Speaker
And it sounds so simple and obvious, but it actually requires that we reconfigure how we think about gender even.
00:39:45
Speaker
Because you can't have men and women strongly identify with each other if they're invested in the idea that men and women are fundamentally different kinds of people.
00:39:54
Speaker
And so people have to have a more fluid understanding of gender itself in order to really go there.
00:40:03
Speaker
So I think that's the work more than like if, you know, more women would just like peg their husbands, all this will be resolved.
00:40:12
Speaker
You know, like I just don't think that's actually a work.
00:40:16
Speaker
I don't think it's where it's going to go.
00:40:18
Speaker
And this is what I thought.
00:40:19
Speaker
Can I just do some more quoting from your book?
00:40:22
Speaker
Sure.
00:40:23
Speaker
Okay, thank you.
00:40:24
Speaker
Before we get into the quote, I just wanted to make a little announcement.
00:40:27
Speaker
Oh, please.
00:40:28
Speaker
Yep.
00:40:28
Speaker
For all our listeners, we're so excited to have Dr. Jane Ward with us here today.
00:40:33
Speaker
And if you want to listen to the rest of this episode, please go to our bonus content.
00:40:37
Speaker
Make sure to subscribe to our Patreon and continue to support us.
00:40:40
Speaker
And with that, as usual, you know, Jane Ward, live long and prosper, but men die mad.
00:40:46
Speaker
Die mad, scrotes.
00:40:47
Speaker
Die mad.
00:40:49
Speaker
And until next week.
00:40:50
Speaker
Talk to you next week.