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Pilot - The Misogynist Question
41 Plays29 days ago
Our first episode! Just in time for Charlie Kirk remembrance day eve!
Sarah introduces Helen to obscure Canadian luminary Stephen Leacock, and we learn all about how and why women aren't funny.
At some point we mention using the famous "triggered feminist" reaction image for our episode art, but we decided against it. If you didn't recognize it from our description, it's this one: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1872961-triggered-feminist--2
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/odiumsymposium.bsky.social
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Transcript
Introduction to Odium Symposium
00:00:01
Speaker
There's really nothing real. 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. don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live. Is Trump to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader.
00:00:20
Speaker
Do it live! Now listen, you... You're right, calling name....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.
00:00:32
Speaker
level of masochism. Should
00:00:37
Speaker
should we introduce ourselves first? Yeah, so I'm Sarah, you're Helen, and this is Odium Symposium.
Origins of the Podcast Idea
00:00:46
Speaker
So the premise of this podcast is that each episode, one of us will have some historical text, usually marginal enough that you might not have heard of the author, and we'll present it to the other, and we'll talk about it.
00:01:02
Speaker
So kind of the way this podcast came about is i was at a community organizing event in the park and there was a table with three books. And one of the books was ah book of misogynist essays called Man Against Woman by Charles Nieder.
00:01:20
Speaker
And I saw this book on the table and I was just like locked in, like instantly. i knew I had to read this, but I had to like be normal about it, you know? So I took something else too. I don't even remember what it was.
00:01:32
Speaker
I took it home and I started reading these essays and i was really like astonished by the variety of points of view from which misogyny could come and some other common themes that I noticed that maybe we'll get into in future episodes for this one.
00:01:48
Speaker
And also how much fun it would be to like just write something or say something about these essays. So I started writing down little snippets. And i didn't really have a way to put them out there.
00:02:00
Speaker
And so I suggested a podcast where we do this kind of like exploration of random misogynist or otherwise bigoted texts. Helen, you were very enthusiastic about this.
00:02:11
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I basically just got a message. You were like, hey, what do you think of this idea for a podcast? And I was like, yeah, sounds good. Let's do it. ah think what I recognize that I've also had those impulses of like, oh, this is a really messed up book.
00:02:26
Speaker
I have to read this immediately and see what the hell is going on. And more generally, i think, you know, as we've talked more in prepping, it seems like we both have this tendency to watch or read or find out about just like really messed up contemporary examples of this as well.
Conservative Thinkers & Re-evaluation
00:02:46
Speaker
So like I've watched a bunch of really terrible YouTube content that I'm going to inflict on you at some point. I mean, I think also part of this is just, you know, but there were there were definitely times when i was watching like, oh, I need to watch you know this this clip and a friend would be like, Helen, why are you watching that? Like, that's just straightforwardly like self-harm. And I'm like, no, I need to know like what are you people saying, right? There's just certainly like turning over rocks and seeing what like gross thing is growing underneath them.
00:03:12
Speaker
u is sort of one of the main impulses that I immediately was like, yeah, I definitely want to do this podcast. Yeah. and Well, you know, while there's an element of the unhealthy to it for us, like definitely for the listener, this is a totally healthy thing and they should be really into it um Yeah. it's It's good for you. It's informative. We're educational.
00:03:33
Speaker
No, but I really do think um one of the things that going into a lot of the sources always reminds me is that the sort of ideas behind a lot of these are sort of simultaneously like more sophisticated and also stupider than we maybe usually think they are. Right. And so as you really dive into like, okay, I mean, I'm just thinking about some of the clips that I you know used in that intro like intro theme song, right? Like William F. Buckley is regarded as this pillar or was, I guess, regarded as this pillar of
00:04:07
Speaker
conservative intellectualism, right? and And people were like, well, you know, I guess you could say he was doing politics the right way, right? But like, he was someone that people said, okay, you know, conservatism can have a lot of bigotry, it can have a lot of these kinds of like, angry reactionary tendencies in it. um But there is a real intellectual core to this, you know, conservative idea, which, you know, I don't want to say necessarily there's nothing of value in conservatism, right? But people would point to William F. Buckley as like, okay, this is the intellectual guy. This is the guy who's taking things seriously.
00:04:44
Speaker
And then you kind of dig underneath what he's saying. And so much of it was just profoundly racist or something that we would recognize now is like, oh yeah, that's completely incorrect. And so I think it's worth going back and saying like, okay, reevaluate some of these guys that we accept as like, oh yeah, that was just like the time or whatever, I think it's better to understand like what is really in sort of our ideological groundwater, I guess.
Timeless Content Strategy
00:05:10
Speaker
Yeah, these people have roles and they're engaged in a project. And so for example, with Buckley, you you talk about how people reacted to him as as a sign that there was something worthwhile in conservatism and also pretty pretty bluntly like that just was his role to be the person who is there to contrast with the nuts while not actually having such a different message from them.
00:05:41
Speaker
um It's a quality of his person, but it's also a quality of a project that he was a part of. Yeah. So I guess, you know, we don't want to do the theory for the podcast, you know, right out the gate, the first episode. So I'll leave some, we can leave that there because we don't want to tell everyone everything they're going to hear already. But yeah, i only get like one brain cell collision every week. So we do need to meter these out a little bit.
00:06:09
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah, I guess the other thing is we're assuming editing this goes smoothly enough and we release this. It will be released around
Essay Introduction: 'Are Witty Women Attractive?'
00:06:18
Speaker
or hopefully on the birthday of friend of the pod, Charlie Kirk.
00:06:25
Speaker
But yeah, you know, we we talked about we don't want these to feel too like topical. So that somebody listening to it a couple months later is going to be like, oh, I don't remember what the news cycle was that day. So I'm not going to engage with the podcast. So we don't need to get too much into all the specifics, but I think it's worth pointing out like Charlie Kirk was also this guy that William F. Buckley was right. Like he also was this figure. And I think that he was more divisive. And I think it's telling that in all of these, um, all these clips where people are commemorating him and talking about what a wonderful, you know, thoughtful guy he was like, they're never quoting him. Right.
00:07:04
Speaker
Um, But yeah, I think we need to you know we need to take a moment to honor our fallen comrade, Charlie Kirk, right who definitely is going to provide some content for us in future episodes, if not today. Absolutely. So yeah, what are your plans for Charlie Kirk Remembrance Day?
00:07:19
Speaker
Well, tomorrow I'm going to knock back a few a few beers with a fellow member of Antifa or two, um explicitly in celebration of Charlie Kirk's life.
00:07:32
Speaker
Nice. Yeah, I was going to hang out with the founder of Antifa, in fact, but now his girlfriend is in jail, so there's a whole thing with that Yeah, I think he's a little busy at the moment. There I go, making extremely topical jokes that somebody in six months is not going to know what the heck I'm talking about.
00:07:45
Speaker
Six hours. Six hours. Exactly. Okay, there's actually some resonance here with today's essays, so maybe we should get into that. Okay, let's jump into the essays. We've rambled for long enough.
00:07:57
Speaker
So we've got two essays today by Stephen Leacock. Okay, I've never heard of this guy.
Critique of Leacock's Humor
00:08:04
Speaker
Yeah, he's ah he's not so well known now, which is, you know, kind of part of the tie-in.
00:08:10
Speaker
So I want to save like more biographical details for when we're in between the two pieces. But I'll tell you right now that he was a Canadian economist, political theorist, and humorist.
00:08:24
Speaker
And the first of these two essays is from 1945. this is the title. so this is the title Are witty women attractive to men?
00:08:35
Speaker
This is an interesting, difficult one, right? Because we both know that like women aren't funny. So this is kind of like imagine this crazy world where women are funny. Right. And here's his answer. Having been asked to answer the question, are witty women attractive to men? I answered decisively, no.
00:08:53
Speaker
Okay, so that's so sort of interesting theoretical knowledge, right? in the In the world where a woman might be funny, it would actually be unattractive to men. So that's good. Right, right, right. that we're not, right? It's good that we're not funny. This is one of his humorous essays.
00:09:05
Speaker
Oh, I wasn't picking up on that at all. Yeah, yeah. Well, it might be a little clearer when we look at the first paragraph. Okay, strong opening. So here we go. Slaves murmur to one another in their chains. They whisper what they think of their masters. In the same way, the generality of men being enslaved by women whisper when in safety what they think.
00:09:30
Speaker
Slave number one in his club murmurs to slave number two that women have no sense of humor. Slave number two agrees, and slave number three, overhearing from his armchair, says quite boldly, they certainly have not, after which quite a colloquy ensues among the slaves.
00:09:49
Speaker
But when the wife of slave number one asks at dinner what was the talk at the club, he answers, oh, nothing much. Yet his inmost feeling is that women have no sense of humor, and if a woman is witty, she has somehow come by it wrongly.
00:10:04
Speaker
He daren speak right out, but I will speak for him. A big
Misogyny in Humor
00:10:09
Speaker
thing with, like... reactionary centrists these days is just expressing your own sense of like victimhood and persecution in a way that could not be more at odds with reality.
00:10:24
Speaker
And I guess that's also a huge part of the right. It's just you know we we pay a little more attention to the reactionary centrists' arguments because they're supposed to be taken seriously.
00:10:35
Speaker
I think we're going to have this a lot where it's hard to even know sort of where to tackle this because both the assumptions are wrong and the conclusions are wrong and the argumentation is bad. Right. But there's so much here. Maybe I didn't catch the humor because as a woman reading it. Right.
00:10:49
Speaker
I don't have the I don't have the sense of humor to really, you know, capture it and in the reading. But to me, this is just like it's total nonsense. Right. Like. okay, Slave 1 and Slave 2 are like hanging out at the club, right? What are the wives of Slave 1 and Slave 2 doing? Like they're at home making them dinner, right?
00:11:08
Speaker
right Right. When the wife of Slave 1 asks at dinner, like who made that dinner, right? So like you're imagining this tableau in which like the slaves are all hanging out and smoking cigars and complaining about their bitch masters. Meanwhile, the masters are hard at work at home, keeping the house.
00:11:27
Speaker
ah hu Undoubtedly, if you presented this guy with like, Hey, this like slave thing is really messed up. Like his answer would be like, chill out lady. It's just a joke. This is exactly what I'm talking about. Right. But it's like,
00:11:40
Speaker
so So it's not even that I want to say like, oh, this is profoundly racist, although it is, you know, not to not to in any way excuse how like horrifically racist this is, but it's also just so lamb Like, yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty weak stuff.
00:11:57
Speaker
Yeah. Also, i want to highlight these slaves are talking in their clubs. So in this era, well, clubs exist. And also they're specifically male spaces.
00:12:10
Speaker
The women that are supposedly their masters are literally not allowed to come in here. Yeah. So I guess I wanted to ask also, what year was this
Essentialist Views on Gender
00:12:18
Speaker
written? This is from 1945. Okay. at least in the U.S.,
00:12:22
Speaker
we're sort of post-abolition in the u worldwide we still have slavery and we still have um we're still talking about an era of like Jim Crow laws in the south and well remember he is in Canada and his Canadian-ness is is actually important to him okay I don't know that that actually shows up in this essay but it's true yeah I guess uh you know I'm gonna end up being a little American-centric sometimes maybe but part of what I want to just point out here is like, you know, we're talking about kind of the, in the global supply chain and in the way that, right. He has access to all of the material goods that, you know, sustain his daily life, right. Involves quite a fair amount of slave labor still would today, but more so in the forties than it does today.
00:13:14
Speaker
yeah Especially in that context to then be like, Oh, we're the real slaves. Yeah. yeah It's just not funny. i just I just don't get where the humor is, Sarah. Like I really am struggling to see.
00:13:26
Speaker
Well, I think the humor is precisely the inversion of reality because it's going to be totally clear later on that he does not think women are actually the masters.
00:13:39
Speaker
Okay. Okay. That's good. Okay. Let's see. Let's see the next clip then. He goes on to discuss this question of, are witty women attractive? And he kind of he throws some sops to women here that I mostly haven't excerpted. For example, he says that, okay, well, it's true that witty women aren't attractive, but witty people in general aren't attractive. Yeah.
00:14:02
Speaker
Or, you know, sometimes men just find witty women unattractive because of their own egotism, like that sort of thing. And here is here's a little clip from that sequence with SOPS.
00:14:14
Speaker
They're talking about a kind of man who actually might be into witty woman. Okay. There is a particularly decent type of man who finds it restful not to have to talk.
00:14:26
Speaker
When in his youth he meets a girl who talks all the time, that exactly suits him. He doesn't have to say anything. 10 years later, You'll see them enter a drawing room together. The host says to the man, looks like an early winter.
00:14:40
Speaker
and he answers, certainly does. The host says, have a cocktail. And he answers, certainly will. By that time, his wife has started in on the conversation. He doesn't have to talk anymore.
00:14:50
Speaker
People commonly call this type an adoring husband. He isn't. His wife is just a sort of fire screen. The real adoring husband over talks his wife, over dominates her, pays with unexpected presents for easy forgiveness of his ill temper.
00:15:06
Speaker
And he never knows and never knows that he adored her till it is too late because now she cannot hear it. I am completely unable to tell what level of irony that passage is operating on. This is on such a level of irony that it's just, yeah, it's hard to know what to make of this because like,
00:15:26
Speaker
you know, if we're if we're thinking about this as, like, a classic example of the, like, grievance essay, right, where it's, like, there's just this, like, overwhelming sense of grievance that's being sort aired by the author, you need to have the section where it's, like, okay, some people might tell you that, like,
00:15:47
Speaker
they don't have this grievance, but actually there's something wrong with them. Right. Because like, this also happens whenever you have these sorts of like articles where it's like cancel culture has gone too far, blah, blah, blah. Right. You need to include like all of the people who are like, well, actually it's just not that big of a deal.
00:16:04
Speaker
You need to include like a little thing about why, like actually those people have a problem. Right. And so here it's like, okay, you know, women are not funny. no one wants to hear women talking. And it's like, okay, what about the like plentiful examples of relationships where the woman talks?
00:16:19
Speaker
Oh, well, those are beta cucks. Exactly, right? You need to like have the... like Yeah, but that's it's not that not that he loves his wife, right? If he loved his wife, he would be...
00:16:32
Speaker
domineering and he would have an ill temper that he would need to pay back with presents, right? Right. right Well, I mean, it's so funny to me. like He's saying like the real loving husband treats his wife like shit and then feels bad about it when she dies.
00:16:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:49
Speaker
I can't help wondering if he's just like projecting himself in there as the positive example. like He's somehow aware that this is his personality. Yeah, rough. I'm ready for the next clip, I think.
00:17:00
Speaker
Okay, okay. this is This is the last bit that I clipped from the SOP section. There is also the most obvious qualification to be made in regard to women's sense of humor in general and women's wit in particular, that of course individual exceptions, however conspicuous, do not set aside the general rule.
00:17:21
Speaker
There is no doubt that at least one of the most brilliant humorists of the hour in America is a woman. Many would say the most brilliant. Such a faculty for reproducing by simple transcription the humor of social dialogue has, it seems to me, never been surpassed. But one swallow doesn't make a summer, though one drop of ink may make all humor kin.
00:17:43
Speaker
So I don't know what humorist... he's actually referring to or why despite being Canadian he's talking about humorous in America I have to guess that's Dorothy Parker i would also guess it's Dorothy Parker i was gonna he's kind of doing exactly what you're talking about with the previous one where he has to point to like wonderful exceptions and be like okay but don't forget those don't count
00:18:11
Speaker
Because just don't want them to. The last one, at least, there was like a theory of why it doesn't count, right? Because he's saying like, actually, it's not an exception, right? Like, ah the last one was like, actually, men who don't interrupt their wife, you know, men who aren't, you know, constantly complaining about their bitch wife all the time. It's not that they actually love their wives.
00:18:31
Speaker
Because the guy who like, yells at his wife, and calls her a bitch, and then brings her flowers, and then yells at her again, like, Actually, he just doesn't know how much he loves his wife. But when she dies, he'll feel sad about it, right?
00:18:44
Speaker
Uh-huh. Here, there's not even, like... There's nothing there, right? Like, oh, you have to remember that one swallow doesn't make a summer. I mean, he's just saying, like, one...
Static Gender Roles and Social Change
00:18:56
Speaker
Right?
00:18:56
Speaker
One swallow doesn't make a summer, though one drop of ink may make all humor kin. It's just completely irrelevant. It is. like It is. He's just saying, like, oh, well... Remember, if you drop ink on text, you can't read it.
00:19:12
Speaker
It's an idiom that sounds nice, but it's actually like doesn't mean anything in relation to the thing he's saying. And this is like such a classic move for this kind of guy. Like you're out of things to say. So you just like reach for like bon mo instead of actually having anything to say.
00:19:28
Speaker
So he goes on to introduce some arguments that he he wants to counterpose himself to about ah modern liberated women who smoke and curse.
00:19:39
Speaker
And there's a question like, is it possible that these women can actually be funny because they're so different from the previous generations? There are no new girls, no new women.
00:19:52
Speaker
Your grandmother was a devil of a clip half a century before you were born. You telemark on skis. She cut ice in a cutter.
00:20:03
Speaker
You only knew her when she was wrinkled and hobbling, reading the epistle to the Thessalonians. Well, he's wrong here because my grandmother is Jewish. You only knew her when she was wrinkled and hobbling, reading the epistle to the Thessalonians in a lace cap and saying she didn't know what the world was coming to.
00:20:21
Speaker
The young have always been young, and the old always old. Men and women don't change. It took thousands, uncounted thousands of years to make them what they are. The changes that you think you see lie just on the surface. You could wash them away with soap and hot water. Okay, so just some basic...
00:20:39
Speaker
gender essentialism here, and also just kind of denying the possibility of change in society. This guy lived through, for example, the introduction of women's suffrage.
00:20:52
Speaker
And what he's claiming here is that none of that mattered. This part to me is like, there's something interesting here, because I think there is a point to be said about the illusory sense of young people being more radical.
00:21:13
Speaker
and i agree. I think this is definitely the closest he gets to like making a really good or interesting point in this essay. I've definitely known people who kind of fit this pattern of when they're young, they're like, oh yeah, like Everything's new and, and, but it's sort of always understood that like, okay, that's something you do when you're young. And then when you get old, it's time to like put away childish things, right? This is like, this is a real idea that that happens, right? But it's such a leap to go from that to no social change can happen.
00:21:47
Speaker
You know, any change you could see for the role of men and women in society is completely superficial Because also, like, it took thousands, uncounted thousands of years to make them what they are, even 1000 years ago. And we're going to look at some examples of this eventually.
00:22:04
Speaker
But like, even 1000 years ago, the role of men and women in society, and like, even if we're narrowing to you know, the sort of Western European society that think most closely evolved into the society that this guy's writing in,
00:22:19
Speaker
profoundly different ideas about the ways that men and women behave. This is a part where it's like dangerous. as You start reading and you're like, okay, yeah, there's a point here, but you kind of, it's just wrong.
00:22:31
Speaker
Like, he He takes this point, there's like a nugget of something real, and then he just like turns it into like, therefore, it's crazy to think anyone can change ever. And everyone is the same.
00:22:42
Speaker
Even this notion of like, your grandmother was like this. I think he's just projecting what his grandmother was like. There are certain ways in which my grandmother, in fact, does say like, oh, I don't know what the world is coming to.
00:22:55
Speaker
But there's a lot of ways in which she was doing things differently than her mother. And actually, but I mean, I'm thinking about why one of my grandmothers has passed away. But both of them like lived very different lives than their parents' lives and set out in the world to actually like shape their own life in a way that was like not really possible for their parents.
00:23:18
Speaker
So this is like, even if he's projecting his own grandmother onto this, like, I doubt this is true of his grandmother. Like I feel bad for his grandmother now that like, he just thinks she's some woman who like all she did was like read the Bible and complain about where the world is going to.
00:23:32
Speaker
okay Well, all of this intellectual stance is going to be completely consistent as we go on. So, um, Don't worry about that. That's the only thing I care about, right? I can excuse any kind of bigotry as long as there's intellectual consistency. Yeah, I'm lying. He's going to contradict himself like every other paragraph.
00:23:51
Speaker
The next clips here, I want to emphasize to you that this is directly after the previous one. Okay? there's like no There's no space in between these. But now I'll tell you another thing.
00:24:03
Speaker
All this new era of hours of emancipated women and women in offices and women the same as men is just a passing phase and the end of it is already in sight. A great social disaster fell on the world.
00:24:16
Speaker
I feel like I need to be reading this in Jordan Peterson voice because a comedian. A great social disaster fell in the world. The industrial age built up great cities where people lived, crowded into little boxes, where there was no room for children, where women's work vanished because they were
Xenophobia and Nationalism
00:24:30
Speaker
dispossessed, where national population was kept going by additions from God knows where, and national safety was jeopardized by the increasing scarcity of our own people.
00:24:40
Speaker
We had a close shave of it. Okay, so he's got a new topic now. Yeah, this is just total, like, we're not even talking about whether women are funny or not. Which is funny, because he starts by saying, like, are funny women attractive?
00:24:52
Speaker
And then immediately it's not actually... How have we gotten here? What happened? Like, I just remembered, like, that's the thesis. Okay, thesis statement. Funny women are not attractive.
00:25:04
Speaker
And now we're arguing... like the emancipation of women, like this is Jordan Peterson shit. The emancipation of women is the dragon of chaos that's going to swallow Western society. And we need to like go back to our union myths about, right? Like,
00:25:20
Speaker
Well, it's not just that. He got distracted in the middle of the paragraph and he summoned a different dragon. Yeah. like what Like what is this business about the national population being kept going by additions from God knows where our own people? What are we talking about here?
00:25:37
Speaker
i'm I'm just like very confused how how we got to this point because first it's women aren't like funny women aren't attractive, but that's actually even just the thesis statement because immediately,
00:25:50
Speaker
He goes into women aren't funny, right? Which is different than saying funny women aren't attractive. And then he's saying... women who talk, whether it's funny or not, are not attractive.
00:26:03
Speaker
And men who like listening to women talk, it's because they don't like talking themselves. And so it's it's a flaw. See, this is my this is why I wanted to emphasize that this excerpt, that there's no like space or separation between this and the previous one.
00:26:19
Speaker
I wanted the suddenness of the swerve, to be clear. Yeah, I mean, it's it's just like...
00:26:26
Speaker
this is this is starting to break my brain. And it's only episode one. I can't have a psychotic break episode one, Sarah. Like, I can't. Okay, wait. let me Let me give you a pop quiz here. Okay. What could we had a close shave of it possibly mean?
00:26:42
Speaker
Draw on all your knowledge of Stephen Leacock thus far acquired. Okay. Okay. So he's Canadian misogynist. um National safety was jeopardized by the increasing scarcity of our own people.
00:26:56
Speaker
So if this is written in 1945, it's hard to read. Like the, the, I mean, the obvious sort of political historical event.
00:27:07
Speaker
ah Was there something going on at the time? is the end of World War two but it's so hard to, like, I just can't figure out. oh my God. Okay. I'm so excited for you to find out the answer.
00:27:21
Speaker
Here it is. Here's the next answer. Then came the war in the air. It has bombed the industrial city out of future existence. They know that already in England, the bomb is decentralizing industry, spreading the population out. They will never go back.
00:27:37
Speaker
This will mean different kinds of homes, homes, half town, half country with every man his acre. Everyone's dream for a little place in the country, a place to call one's own will come true.
00:27:50
Speaker
Socialized up to the neck, the individual will have its own again under his feet." So this is the anti-urbanism nonsense that we're still seeing today. i mean, this is completely nonsense making and completely a historical.
00:28:08
Speaker
vision of everyone, every man his acre, that has been the vision of European settlers in America. Mm-hmm.
00:28:21
Speaker
Like, not since Columbus, because the first vision was like, oh, we're just going to go over there and take their spices and gold and go back to Europe. but But everyone who, like, wanted to set up... Like, this is what they wanted to do with the land, right? This this has always been this kind of, like, reactionary dream. Mm-hmm.
00:28:39
Speaker
And so, at this point, like, he doesn't even want the other men in the club. Like, he doesn't want to have to deal with anybody. He's just, like, actually, like...
00:28:50
Speaker
he just hates everyone. I mean, especially women. I'm not saying like, it's not also misogynist, but I hate these guys who are just like, cities are terrible.
00:29:01
Speaker
We need to get rid of cities. like Yeah. And let me just point out, the Blitz ended in 1941. And it is not in fact true that the cities of England like were just depopulated and that the and that the demographics of the country irreversibly shifted away from the kinds of people that I don't think he likes.
00:29:22
Speaker
Like that just didn't happen. It's no relationship to reality.
Nostalgic Idealism
00:29:26
Speaker
No. And I mean, that's, that's a whole other thing is that like, in fact, what happened is yes, there was bombing campaigns on London and bombing campaigns on various cities in Germany.
00:29:38
Speaker
And this led to a decision to the extent that this is still followed. And I think, you know, especially as we look at current political the current political moment, but we we decided like, okay, we need to have these like rules of international war where we don't bomb civilian areas, right? I mean, this is this has been part of this this conversation, but we have not seen like people leaving cities because it is too dangerous to live in a city. 2020, and year two after,
00:30:06
Speaker
and for a year or two after there was this consensus opinion among you know the sort of people who write for The Atlantic that cities were going to be depopulated by COVID.
00:30:19
Speaker
that this was almost like the end of the urban model for culture and society. And it was just a fantasy. And I think it was the exact same fantasy.
00:30:30
Speaker
Right. And I think in both cases, you don't see a depopulation of cities. What you do see is, especially like after the 40s and into the 50s and 60s, you have white flight, right? you have You do have moderately well-off white people deciding that there's too many ethnics or whatever racial group moving into cities. And they're seeing, and I think you you saw this with with COVID as well. Like people talked about COVID depopulating cities, but it also had to do with the protests against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd's murder.
00:31:12
Speaker
You saw people rising up and saying, hey this system where the cops are used to basically make white property owners comfortable by visiting random brutal violence on anyone who isn't a white property owner to keep them all in line, right? Like this isn't going to fly anymore. And so you see these people, you know, protesting against this.
00:31:36
Speaker
And so some people are like, oh, these cities are dangerous now, right? and it it is the same exact thing, right? It is this kind of like, and I mean, and he's even kind of giving the game away here where he's like, it's not really clear what he means as the real source of the depopulation, right? Because he brings up our national population is kept going by additions from God knows where. Mm-hmm.
00:31:56
Speaker
Also the bomb. And so, of course, people left cities. And it's kind of like, well, you kind of want to de-stress that first argument, maybe, because like even here, you know that like certain things have to be said a little more quietly.
00:32:12
Speaker
But I think we definitely still see this kind of thing today. I mean, and
00:32:17
Speaker
it just makes no sense. It doesn't stand up to any scrutiny. In fact, even if before i read the next excerpt, like, he's talking about, oh, we had this war and the war is challenging cities, but actually the war was a big driver of, like, women entering the workforce, right? Like, actually, ahha sort of the opposite of what he's saying is true. It's not that, like...
00:32:40
Speaker
the post-war period, he's saying, like, we're going to see this return to this more idyllic lifestyle where men are the king of their own acre or whatever, right? We saw the opposite, right? We saw this move into, i don't Oh, my God, it's just terrible. All right.
00:32:57
Speaker
Oh, we're talking about children now. Mm-hmm. And we're counting them. And the children. There must be four or five for every marriage.
00:33:08
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Every marriage. so so So not every family because he he knows some some guys have two or three wives. well Oh, that's not the direction I was expecting you to go with that.
00:33:20
Speaker
It is the only path of national safety, safety by the strength and power of our kin and kind, bred in our common thought and speech and ideal. Without our own children, oh my god, without our own children, the wave of outside brutes from an unredeemed world will count.
00:33:43
Speaker
Just question. What is the topic of this essay? The topic of this essay is whether funny women are attractive to men. Sarah,
00:33:54
Speaker
what is happening? Later, we can redeem the world, but we must save ourselves first. Everybody will know that in reorganized society.
00:34:09
Speaker
The need, the main expense of government. Women who see to that need see to nothing else. That will be done in the home, for there will be no paid domestic service except contract labor by the hour from the outside.
00:34:23
Speaker
Labor as good as ladyship, wearing a gold wristwatch and a domestic college degree. Okay. but the main thing will be the home and behind it, the long garden and trim grass and flower and vegetable beds and father trying to plant a cherry tree from book.
00:34:42
Speaker
Sarah, what is happening? How did we get here?
00:34:51
Speaker
why
00:34:55
Speaker
It's kind of refreshing to see. I feel like what's happened with a lot of these writers today, like people who want to make this point today, is they've learned how to kind of like, how to make these connections harder to draw. They've gotten more subtle in some ways, and they've learned lessons about like how to use dog whistles more effectively.
00:35:14
Speaker
so it's a little refreshing to see how much it really is just all about like racial... Supremacy.
00:35:25
Speaker
and like the project of constructing and ethno state, right? Like, I think, I think there's much more competition today and the racist crank sphere. Yeah.
00:35:41
Speaker
So I think people who rise to the top really are the ones who know how to like say the stuff that's going to appeal to the racists without outright saying things like without our own children, the wave of outside brutes from an unredeemed world will kill us all.
00:35:55
Speaker
Like that's really
00:35:59
Speaker
what...
00:36:01
Speaker
um why like all of turning point is about, right? Like that's really what everything they want to say is about, but they know not to say that explicitly ah because that sounds bad.
00:36:15
Speaker
Because when you say that normal people are like, what the fuck are you talking about? oh my God. How do we get from our women are funny women attractive to without our own children, the wave of outside brutes from an unredeemed world will kill us all Well, okay, here's the thing.
Conclusion of Leacock's Essay
00:36:35
Speaker
So we're we're almost at the end of this essay.
00:36:38
Speaker
We're like winding down. And I really think that he wrote this down in sort of like a racist frenzy or reverie. And he's kind of like, he's slowly realizing here at the end that he needs to like kind of pull this back on topic a little bit.
00:36:56
Speaker
Okay. When England has been bombed into the country, America will follow. Our cities will go too. No one will live in New York any more than miners live in a coal mine.
00:37:12
Speaker
So the world will be all different. One little century will do it. Even half a century will show the full outline of it. Surviving on, surviving on into this altered world will be the queerest old set of leftover creatures.
00:37:28
Speaker
As queer as our leftover Victorians, only queerer. Hell yeah ah yeah. I love to be the queer the queer leftover in the major urban population. This is the future conservatives one.
00:37:42
Speaker
These old women will be happy and alert and self-assertive, but they will still not know how to fry an egg or repeat a nursery rhyme for they only had three quarters of a child each. The boys and girls of 20 will think them very funny, but my, won't they be witty when they get together and cackle?
00:37:59
Speaker
So he's kind of pulling it towards like some women can be funny, but they're not attractive to men. ah And if men are attracted to those women, it's a it's a problem with those men.
00:38:14
Speaker
Because in fact, funny women are a threat to our white future. Mm-hmm. That's right. And we need to be like out fucking the brutes so that we can have more kids than them so that we can live in, like it's just getting more and more of like.
00:38:36
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think there's any getting the train back on the tracks at this point. i just, it's like, it's just, I mean, i I also like noticing this like, oh, you know, and these women don't know how to fry an egg or repeat a nursery rhyme.
00:38:48
Speaker
And. They're also described as happy and alert and self-assertive. And yeah, clearly, he doesn't value that at all. Yeah, but also this idea of like keeping a home.
00:39:01
Speaker
i mean, I think it's worth pointing out that this is also incorrect in the sense that like, I don't know, I can fry an egg, right? Like women living on their own, know how to maintain a house for themselves. The real problem is that like, in his vision, like men don't know how to do this, right? Like,
00:39:16
Speaker
In his kind of idyllic vision of like life, you know when we finally reconstruct good society, is that the the house is running, the woman has gotten everything, the the garden is going well, the food is all taken care of, and the father is out back trying to plant a cherry tree. right like the the the place His vision for men in this is like ruling over their one acre, ineptly trying to do domestic labor.
00:39:42
Speaker
But also, I mean, he says here, right, there will be no paid domestic service except contract labor by the hour from the outside. Like he's not expecting women to actually know, like he's saying, oh, these women don't know fry an egg. But in fact, these are the women who do know how to fry an egg, because in his vision, the woman actually doesn't need to know how to fry an egg, right? All she needs to know how to do is like have six or seven or eight or nine or 10 babies.
00:40:05
Speaker
And we can get, we can hire, also from where, right? Contract labor from outside. Like, where are these outside laborers coming from? Because I thought we all moved away from the city.
00:40:16
Speaker
hu Because there were too many of these outside laborers living there. I don't know. It's just, it's got all the contradictions that you always see in this stuff of like, oh, I hate living in cities.
00:40:27
Speaker
But also... I do want the labor, but I don't want these people to feel like they actually belong here. It's just classic racism and amazing that we got here from our funny women attractive.
00:40:41
Speaker
Can i also just point out the conspicuous absence of a frequent figure in the misogynist literature, which is, I'm actually just noticing now that we don't see the unmarried crone here.
00:40:57
Speaker
Because these women do have three quarters of a children each, like these these queer leftover Victorian types.
00:41:08
Speaker
ae And so like these women are still getting married, but that's not enough for him. They got to be cranking out the babies. Otherwise, like they're basically feminist trolls.
00:41:20
Speaker
Yeah, like having... Yeah, three quarters of a child each is interesting because it basically means he wants to lump childless unmarried women and women who got married but only had one kid or possibly only had two kids because he thinks we need four or five.
00:41:36
Speaker
All into one bucket, right? Like these are all the same. They're underproducers. ah right here's last Here's the end of the essay. So that you see...
00:41:47
Speaker
is why I don't think witty women are attractive to men. You don't see the connection? Well, perhaps you remember Moliere's play called The Doctor by Accident, Le Minceint M'entraille-Louis, where the supposed doctor called in to diagnose a case gets off a vast rigmarole about nothing in particular and ends at the end, and that is why your daughter has lost her speech.
00:42:15
Speaker
You see, He didn't know anything about it. Possibly it was like that. This is so funny. This is a Ben Garrison move.
00:42:27
Speaker
Like, oh, you don't think this made any sense? Well, actually, I was doing this thing from a Moliere play. So why don't you consider me to be the conning buffoon, right? Like, I don't know if you're familiar with...
00:42:43
Speaker
um the doctor by accident, or sometimes it's it's more directly translated to the doctor in spite of himself. I am not. It's about a guy who basically cons a family by pretending to be a doctor because he just wants to get with the daughter.
00:42:57
Speaker
Now here's some fun Helen lore. In middle school, i was a theater kid. i was in this play. We did a middle school friendly version of it.
00:43:11
Speaker
And one of the things we used to do in my middle school plays was that if you got cast in one of the larger roles, there would be basically two casts and all the smaller roles would overlap. But if you had one of the lead roles,
00:43:23
Speaker
they would switch off who played which lead role so that like you would only play half the shows if you had like a main character and this would get more kids involved, right? oh For this one, instead of having kids switch off, the theater teacher decided actually what he wanted to do was to give the whole thing a frame narrative of like two competing theater troops like doing this play.
00:43:47
Speaker
And so he split up the scenes among the cast. So like different people would be playing the same person, like depending on the scene. And one of the things that makes this a difficult play to do in middle school is that there's a bunch of like this dude falsely pretending to be a doctor in order to aggressively and sexually hit on this young woman.
00:44:10
Speaker
That could look bad for middle schoolers. I see the issue. Yeah. So he had a brilliant solution, which is that in one of the casts, the doctor was going to be played by a girl.
00:44:24
Speaker
And then it would only be a girl forwardly and aggressively hitting on another girl. And then it wouldn't count. That doesn't count.
00:44:35
Speaker
Yeah, I don't like that kind of shit, but when it's two women. Exactly. ah and you know I was cast as one of the doctors, but everyone at that time was under the mistaken misapprehension that I was a boy, and including me. And so you know I was not in the in the flirtatious scenes.
00:44:52
Speaker
But all this is to say, like I know this play quite well, And this is a wild pull here, because basically the character is a con artist um huh who misdirects everyone with like not even good rhetoric, totally towards just cynical, personal ends that have nothing to do with the thing he's saying.
00:45:19
Speaker
So if it's like that, then...
00:45:25
Speaker
ah Like, if he's the doctor, then we, the readers, are the idiots, right? Like, the whole play, it's, like, very much a, like, you know, Moliere was writing kind of in the genre of, like, older sort of commedia things. These have no stock characters.
00:45:44
Speaker
Like, everyone involved is a clown. He's the clown who is just, like, talking a lot, but it doesn't mean anything. And we're the, like, we're the fall guy reading it. Like, if if this is the analogy.
00:45:55
Speaker
Mm hmm. Well, that does tie a nice bow on it, doesn't it? I mean, it does tie a nice bow on it, but it ties a nice bow by saying like, oh, you don't understand why. Like I started talking about witty women and I ended up talking in this like incredibly racist rant about. It's because you're stupid and I'm a pseudo intellectual.
00:46:13
Speaker
Yeah, because I'm being pseudo intellectual in order to trick you and you're stupid enough to fall for it.
00:46:22
Speaker
Well, you see, it's all irony, except to the degree that it isn't. Yeah, we're really seeing, I think, the development of that strategy. Haha, I'm just kidding. Unless.
Leacock's Life and Legacy
00:46:34
Speaker
I'm going to give you a little bit of biography on Stephen Leacock now, okay? Okay. So the source I mostly relied on was a book called Stephen Leacock, a biography by David Legate.
00:46:47
Speaker
So this book is... To my mind, it's pretty sympathetic to him. For example, it describes him as not a misogynist. It was written by a colleague of his, and there's some kind of brutal stuff in here.
00:47:01
Speaker
So he was born 1869 in eighteen sixty nine in england The way he describes his family history is for three generations, they were wealthy, more or less off the back of this one guy. And then his dad was a ne'er-do-well who squandered whatever money they had.
00:47:23
Speaker
Stephen had 11 siblings. His parents were attempted colonists in South Africa. They went down there. They didn't have a great time. The farm that they were supposed to till failed.
00:47:35
Speaker
Then they went back to England and then they had Stephen. So his biographer describes him as like surrounded by relics of imperial glory and having been steeped in imperialism. So for example, in the town in England, they had Admiral Nelson's ship and dry dock just hanging around. and there were all kinds of apparently historical artifacts and sites of that type.
00:47:55
Speaker
I love that like guy who likes what they're doing down in South Africa and decides to go. That was like, that was like how all of apartheid happened. Right. It was is like, people were like, this sounds like a cool project. I'm going to go. Like it was an intentional project of like racist oppression, but love how consistent this is as a type of guy through like Elon Musk's parents.
00:48:19
Speaker
Right. Like we heard about what's happening and we're just big fans and That's just like... Yeah, but I mean, also, they failed at that.
00:48:31
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, and often that's what happens because it turns out it's not ah glamorous life. don't know. I feel like if we' I don't want to get into like the dynamics of of South African apartheid because i feel like that deserves more attention than just a throwaway. But yeah, I mean, these people hate it. And it's like...
00:48:52
Speaker
you can see the beginnings of this kind of like grievance that's disconnected from reality because I'm thinking even now about the like recent, like, you know, declaration that white South Africans can claim refugee status and come to the U S. And so then a bunch of them did. And then they're like, Oh, but like,
00:49:11
Speaker
I didn't realize like if I do that, I can't go home. Like it's hard to go home. And also I didn't realize that if I do that, like where's the underclass of black people who will be my servants? No one is giving me a job. Like actually have to have health insurance. I'm on the wrong end of the hyper capitalism here. Exactly.
00:49:27
Speaker
And so you just have this complete delusion about, oh I'm actually a real victim here. I'm going to go to this place where they've had it figured out. And then it always turns out that those places are not running quite so well as the you know as it as it seems.
00:49:44
Speaker
After South Africa and after living in England for a while, his father makes another attempt at being a farmer and he moves them to a ramshackle little farm in Canada.
00:49:56
Speaker
And the family hates it. So his mom is, quote, heartbroken when she sees like the collection of just like outhouses and like barely holding together like buildings that is the farm.
00:50:09
Speaker
And he i really get the sense that he hated working with his hands and just like doing all this country shit, which is incredibly ironic considering what we read in that last essay.
00:50:24
Speaker
So they've been there for a while, and then their father just... bails. He abandons them. Stephen goes on to become a high school teacher, and he really hates it.
00:50:36
Speaker
And so in his spare time, he's studying economics because he feels that his lot in life is to be a John Stuart Mill who does really important work in his spare time.
00:50:51
Speaker
And eventually, he marries someone rich, and that gives him the opportunity to go off and do his PhD and political science and political economy. So he gets his degree and he gets a job at McGill University.
00:51:05
Speaker
So his political science work isn't entirely hated. He wrote a textbook that was like well received, but something he really wanted was be a famous and important economist, at least in the context of McGill.
00:51:20
Speaker
Okay, wait. So just to clarify, so he married a woman who had a lot more money and she supported him going to graduate school. That is my understanding. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. i I kind of have a sense of this guy as entitled.
00:51:35
Speaker
and don't know if you're getting that. I think you could say that. I think that's a...
00:51:40
Speaker
Absolutely the fair read. In his academic position, he is not exactly respected. So like, here's something I clipped from the biography. The pleasant situation in which he found himself in 1910 did not so much detract, as Sandwell had warned, from his position as an economic theorist, as it detracted attention from the fact that he actually was not properly qualified as an economist at all.
00:52:07
Speaker
Oh, no. Dr. Jacob Viner of Princeton, a distinguished economist who served as one of President Roosevelt's brain trusters, during the New Deal period studied under Leacock.
00:52:18
Speaker
His teaching, says Viner, of what he thought advanced economics was a farce. And I'm afraid some of us gave him a rough time until the girls in the class asked, out of pity for him, asked us to lay off. Indeed, a fellow student has said that Viner knew more about economics than did his mentor.
00:52:38
Speaker
Wow. Brutal. Brutal. Okay, at one point, his department head wrote a letter to his advisor asking if Leacock actually knew economics.
00:52:51
Speaker
And his advisor replied with just like ah vagueness and generalities. you just straight up dodged the question. So while he's busy like not being an economist, his humor writing starts taking off.
00:53:06
Speaker
He gets... Very famous. He actually becomes the top English speaking humorist in the world for a period of like 10 years. And most of what he wrote in that vein was not so much what we just looked at, but like little slice of life sketches, probably his most famous work.
00:53:25
Speaker
is ah book called Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. And so this consisted of a bunch of short stories about events in a small town.
00:53:36
Speaker
And these events... all consisted of gossip he'd heard in an actual little town. He changed the name of the town to Mariposa, but the disguise was very thin. In fact, when this was originally printed in like serialized form in newspapers, the actual names of people were used, which,
00:53:57
Speaker
made them very upset. A lot of the gossip he apparently got from like a town barber, and the barber got in big trouble in his community and had to apologize. So this book is like still pretty well known in Canada, I understand.
00:54:11
Speaker
The humorous stuff was selling great. He was getting an excellent reputation. He still had vague dreams of becoming the great Canadian novelist. So I'll leave it to you to judge the possibility of that.
00:54:24
Speaker
In any case, the rest of his life... He just gets this like avalanche of honorary decrees, awards, all kinds of recognition. He becomes the head of his department.
00:54:35
Speaker
And then upon his death, his significance just drops off a cliff. He has some buildings named after him. He's still you know a bit known as a humorist in Canada, but otherwise his influence is...
00:54:52
Speaker
near zero in the long term, I think. For example, Jack Benny, who is the originator of the sitcom format in the US, actually wonders out loud, like, why was this guy just like instantly forgotten in the US? He used to be a huge fan of him. What happened?
00:55:06
Speaker
Scholarly work, basically gone and forgotten. So there's like a an element of disposability to this guy's life, his ambitions, and what he produced.
00:55:19
Speaker
I was reading this, and I kept wondering, like you know who's going to remember Connor Friedersdorf? I mean, I'm thinking also of Bill Maher, right? like Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think Bill Maher because...
00:55:33
Speaker
You know, it sounds like, okay, humorist, basically what you have is like guy who is kind of funny, right? I mean, I'm willing to believe that like, okay, some of this humor is like, whatever, it's like competent and well done.
00:55:48
Speaker
and then as soon as he starts writing about like his politics and his understanding of like the way the world works, it just falls off a cliff. And it's like, you know, not just Bill Maher, but like all these comedians, right?
00:56:01
Speaker
Like now, like before I was thinking of this guy, like, okay, this is this is the this is the Atlantic pundits talk, as you said, this is the Atlantic pundits talking about how like people are going to depopulate cities, right? This is like Jordan Peterson talking about whatever, you know, the dragon of chaos of either women or immigrants or whatever it is that is like eating Western society. But really this is like,
00:56:24
Speaker
stand-up comedians, right? This is also, like, a ah sort of the ancestor of modern-day, like, stand-up comedians who are, like, convinced that, like, the comedian is really, you know, a latter-day philosopher, right? Like, these humorists, right? Like, they're really, they're they're the court jesters. they're They're speaking truth to power. And it's like, actually, no, like, you should stop, right? Like, you you should actually stick to writing your funny little stories about life in a small town and away from trying to make any kind of serious point about the way the world works, because it turns out that like your understanding is like completely detached from reality and also extremely offensive. it
00:57:05
Speaker
And like, that's okay. Because it turns out that like, actually you can get away with probably writing. i mean, I'm sure there is some horrible stuff in the sketches of a small town or whatever. Right. Like I'm sure that like,
00:57:18
Speaker
We could go in there and we can say like, oh, look, this is a startlingly bad depiction of whatever happening. But you can kind of get away with that more as long as you're not trying to opine on like funny women are unattractive because they're actually responsible for like the racial downfall of mankind. Right.
00:57:38
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, he did get away with all this, though. Yes, um but I mean... He's hugely successful.
00:57:49
Speaker
Yeah, I guess I'm speaking more about like imagining this might be connected to his complete fall-off after his death. Yeah, but like i'm I don't think...
00:58:04
Speaker
I don't think the work of someone who's engaged in this kind of project is really intended to last. I don't think it's intended by the like machine that produces it or by the like people who read it. or the But I think it's pretty clear that he himself wanted to make a lasting impression.
00:58:25
Speaker
right And I think that's part of this drive towards... like I think this is part of why comedians do this. is like he doesn't respect his own other humor writing enough to to have the considered his legacy. So he wants to, i don't know, maybe I'm reading too much into it, but getting this PhD in political economy and like trying to be like a serious economic ah economist and trying to say something about, right? and And trying to say this is what society should look like. Like it all like kind of points towards this like very entitled desire to like,
00:59:03
Speaker
have an impact and not even really understand like what that impact is or care too much about it, right? But there is this kind of like drive there that I think is really common in this kind of aggrieved, entitled archetype.
00:59:17
Speaker
He definitely has clout chaser energy. Yeah, absolutely. Second worst kind of chaser. i don't know what you mean by that, Sarah.
00:59:27
Speaker
Okay, let's move on to the to the second essay.
Introducing 'The Woman Question'
00:59:31
Speaker
So this has a very promising title.
00:59:37
Speaker
The woman question. That's always great when you see like the X question. Nothing bad ever follows from that. This is interesting, right? Because whenever you see the X question, it's always like the question is, do we exterminate all of them? And the answer is usually yes.
00:59:54
Speaker
Right? Like that's what that means. But here, you know, Well, maybe there are different kinds of extermination. Yeah, exactly. i'm I mean, I'm wondering, like that he's going to have to handle this sort of obvious obstacle to that program, to that political project. So let's see ah let's see what he let's see what he does.
01:00:14
Speaker
Yeah. So this was this was published much earlier. This is in 1915. So we're right at the beginning of the period of his dominance as a humorist.
01:00:24
Speaker
Okay. So here's how here's how the woman question starts off. Okay, so we got a little comic here, little illustration, where I kind of can't tell what's happening.
01:00:39
Speaker
I think it's like some saloon doors. Yeah, and like it's it's a saloon door and a man and that that says closed, and this guy is there looking upset that he can't go in the saloon, and there's like a a lady cop.
01:00:52
Speaker
Who's like stopping him from entering the saloon? That's yes, that's exactly correct. So sitting the other day in what is called the Peacock Alley of one of our leading hotels, drinking tea with another thing like myself, a man at the next table were a superior, a group of superior beings in silk.
01:01:11
Speaker
Superior beings are is capitalized here. Talking. I couldn't help overhearing what they said, at least not when I held my head a little sideways. They were speaking of the war.
01:01:24
Speaker
There wouldn't have been any war, said one, if women were allowed to vote. No, indeed, chorused all the others. The woman who had spoken and looked about her defiantly. She wore spectacles and was of the type that we men used to call, in days when we still retained a little courage.
01:01:41
Speaker
An awful woman. Come, whispered my friend. There is no place for us. Let us go to the bar. No, I said. Leave me.
01:01:52
Speaker
i am going to write an article on the woman question. The time has come when it has got to be taken up and solved. Okay, so a few responses here.
01:02:03
Speaker
the first one is... He's doing us like this is like, he's like, oh, I heard this horrible thing women are saying. i got to hear about it because I'm going to write about it. So we're really on opposing teams here, right? Like this is why we're reading his thing because we're trying to make a podcast on the misogynist question.
01:02:24
Speaker
We are. Maybe that should be the title of this episode. The massage yeah i think this episode is the misogynist question. This is also, like, this is the same scene, right? It's always, like, women are an obstacle to just men hanging out.
01:02:40
Speaker
And, right, the men are in the club. Mm-hmm. And they're complaining about their bitch wives. Or the men are in ah restaurant having tea. Mm-hmm. And the women are talking and they're just, like, chattering inanely. And this is such a common...
01:02:59
Speaker
It immediately reminds me... Okay, so recently... i forget if we've talked about this off the pod, but... Have I told you about the movie Sam?
01:03:09
Speaker
Uh, no. Okay, do you know about this movie? Not at all. Okay. um It was going around like online a little bit um because ah another podcast, the the Kill James Bond podcast, reviewed it...
01:03:27
Speaker
I think like people were talking about it on blue sky, but it's basically, it's a rom-com sort of that is like somehow a film adaptation of every fiction, man not every fiction mania trope, but like it's a fiction mania movie.
01:03:47
Speaker
So it is like a force feminization fantasy movie but it's not an erotica movie like it's a mainstream produced movie there's a lot of layers to it um And it's the classic tale of like misogynist dude gets turned into a woman and like to teach him a lesson.
01:04:12
Speaker
But very little of the movie is like him. God, I that were me. Unironically, I mean, yes, it is like literally the plot of the movie is misogynist playboy dude who hates women.
01:04:27
Speaker
finds a mysterious shop owner in a mysterious little curiosity shop who gives him this magical tea that turns him into a woman immediately. Like the next morning he wakes up and he is like, and he like, you know so I guess she now starts going around in like a dysphoria hoodie um and immediately runs to her like gynecologist best friend and is like, you got to help me.
01:04:54
Speaker
yeah, you gotta help me. I'm boy moding and it's not working. Exactly. and like, there's like a little bit of time of like, Oh, I got to figure out like how to change back.
01:05:08
Speaker
But that kind of goes away pretty quickly. And then it becomes a thing about how like now she's falling in love with her best friend. And it's, I need to watch this.
01:05:20
Speaker
It's not a good movie. But it's interestingly, it's not like, right? when When you hear like, oh, it's like a force femme movie, like it's not erotica.
01:05:31
Speaker
it is just like, um like it's shot very much like a mid 2010s, like classic kind of like comedy movie. Yeah, that's exactly the sense I was getting from your description. It's like a romantic comedy movie. Like produced, one of the producers on it is Mel Brooks because it is actually made by wife.
01:05:54
Speaker
son who goes by nicky brooks oh who wrote and directed it i see and somehow is very familiar like yeah i don't want to spend too much time talking on this movie but basically one of the opening scenes is to set up that this guy is a misogynist he is talking to his friend and there's these women at the next table and they're talking and he can't like, they can't even understand what the women are saying. It's just like, they're, they're annoying chattering.
01:06:26
Speaker
and then like two thirds of the way through the movie after like, she has kind of accepted like, okay, I have to figure out how to be a woman. And she went to this like evil, mean gay guy to like teach her how to be a proper woman. Like that's a whole sequence in the movie.
01:06:39
Speaker
They're like back at the same bar. And this time when the women are talking, she can actually understand what they're saying. And this is like a symbol for like how she's been incorporated into womanhood. Right.
01:06:51
Speaker
And woman parcel tongue. Exactly. And this is like, Oh my God, this is just on the front of my mind. Cause I watched this movie like two months ago, but it's just, it's such a trope. The like,
01:07:05
Speaker
Two dudes are trying to hang out and there's these annoying, chattering women talking, right? So something I want to highlight here. First off, like there's a little bit I cut out in between the two clips that I just sent you that you read as one.
01:07:19
Speaker
And one of the things they talk about there is how these awful women is claiming that like basically every problem in society would be solved by women being allowed to vote.
01:07:31
Speaker
One of the issues that she raises is the issue of drinking. And yes, that's right. Okay. I saw that. I was wondering when the saloon door thing was going to come in and I knew this was around prohibition.
01:07:45
Speaker
Yeah. In the U.S. at least, and this big movement of like, oh, we have to stop men from drinking so much. Yes. So the women's suffrage movement and prohibition were like tightly entwined.
01:08:00
Speaker
Part of that is just blaming the ill conditions of women who would be like beaten and otherwise assaulted by their husbands on on the presence of alcohol.
01:08:14
Speaker
Vice drives abusive women. They flee to the bar. I think there's a reason that they flee to the bar. Most of the clips I took out like don't involve the whole prohibition angle, but like it's there in the background.
01:08:30
Speaker
Okay. Yeah, it's definitely something I think we're going to see in future episodes because a lot of... I think there's a sense, like, people have today of, like, oh, Prohibition was, like, obviously silly. think there's a lot of truth to, like, it was sort of a bad political project.
01:08:48
Speaker
ah And I think we don't maybe have as as a society, like, enough of an understanding of, like, first of all, drinking is really expensive. So so for people who were sort of economically hard up, like...
01:08:59
Speaker
there was a real worry of like, oh, the husband's gonna like, right, there's there's this trope of like, oh, you got to make sure to like come home and give your paycheck to your wife, or you spend all the money on alcohol, and then you get really drunk and angry, and you're sort of angry about society collapsing in a lot of ways. I mean, things were changing a lot.
01:09:17
Speaker
You take that anger out on your wife, right? I mean, even as we saw in this other guy's essay, like 40 years later, 30 years later, 1915 to 1945,
01:09:26
Speaker
talking about like, oh, you know, the real adoring husband is the one who's going to buy presents to make up for his ill temper. I mean, there's this kind of understanding of like, oh, the ill temper coming from alcohol.
01:09:37
Speaker
It's no wonder that you get this movement of saying like, okay, then we should ban alcohol, right? If it's this, like the thing that's incorrect there is this like assertion that like, oh, the reason men have to like all be horrible and beat their wives is because of alcohol.
01:09:53
Speaker
That's incorrect, but it's like, no wonder you then get this movement of like, okay, we should make alcohol illegal, right? like um Yeah, I mean, there's all... There's all kinds of causes that we view as ah problematic at best that are um tied up with the with the women's suffrage movement and feminism of this era.
01:10:16
Speaker
um Eugenics in general was like a very progressive cause, for example. What we talk about now is like sex worker exclusionism, um also very progressive at the time.
01:10:29
Speaker
Okay, so let's let's dig in. so we understand the woman question, and the question is, I want to have tea with my friend, and i don't want to have to listen to these nagging creatures.
01:10:42
Speaker
No, no, that is table
Economic Perspective on Gender Roles
01:10:44
Speaker
setting. We do not understand the woman question yet. Okay, so that's just like, that's the sort of problematic that's going to lead to the question, that's then going to lead to the answer.
01:10:54
Speaker
Okay, so we're in sort of stage one. Well, okay. Maybe I'm... You might be a little bit... Still giving him too much credit for having an idea structure. Yeah, think you're being little bit generous when you're expecting this to logically lead into the I'm kind of searching for something to hold on to because I can tell... The other one started bad and got so bad, and this one is starting worse.
01:11:21
Speaker
So... I'm worried where we're going. Well, here's here's where he says what the woman problem is. The woman problem. The woman problem may be stated somewhat after this fashion.
01:11:33
Speaker
The great majority of the women of today find themselves without any means of support of their own. I refer, of course, to the civilized white women. I'm so sorry, Helen.
01:11:46
Speaker
The gay savage in her jungle, attired in a coconut leaf, armed with a club and adored with the neck of a soda water bottle is all right.
01:11:58
Speaker
trouble hasn't reached her yet. Like all savages, she has a far better time, more varied, more interesting, more worthy of a human being, than falls to the lot of the rank and file of civilized men and women.
01:12:16
Speaker
Very few of us recognize this great truth. We have a mean little vanity over our civilization. We are touchy about it. We do not realize that so far we have done little but increase the burden of work and multiply the means of death.
01:12:33
Speaker
But for the hope of better things to come, our civilization would not seem worthwhile. Reading this, it's immediately clear why you can immediately forget about this guy, like, as soon as he passed away, right? Like, he's not, like, this is so this is so table stakes. Like, this is just average...
01:12:58
Speaker
I was going to say like you can get chat GPT to generate this, but in reality, like chat GPT is probably too woke. You could get Grok to generate this easily, right? This is like every, every clip of, um, right. The like, especially the, like the AI girlfriend Grok that like goes on those rants about how like code is more reliable than flesh or whatever. And like real women suck.
01:13:20
Speaker
i mean, that's like what this is. This is just like, incoherent slop with, you know, okay, they're savages, but the savages are happier than us, but they're still savages. and I think, I think the context of the prior essay is,
01:13:38
Speaker
does tell us that that last sentence right there, but for the hope of better things to come, our civilization would not seem worthwhile. I don't think that's necessarily hyperbole. No, I mean, I think he literally means this kind of golden age mentality. I mean, he's literally a return guy in some sense, right? Except like, it's this completely incoherent desire of like, okay, I want...
01:14:02
Speaker
this sort of rural suburban life, right? Where it's like, we all live in suburbs, we all have our own acre, but then we're living this kind of farmer rural existence because that's, what's going to bring us closer to the savages. But also we need to do that because we don't want to be close to the savages. And also like,
01:14:17
Speaker
my vision of savage is like not actually referring to any real person who lives anywhere in the world, right? Like there's this um complete collapse of the notion of like, oh, there's actually like all over the world, all sorts of indigenous tribes that live in all sorts of different ways, right? And like, but somehow everyone in the West has this notion of like the way like, you know, huge air quotes, like tribes live or whatever, right? And which is just like, but it's not actually pointing to anyone who's ever lived anywhere.
01:14:47
Speaker
Like the gay savage in her jungle attired in a coconut leaf armed with a club. Like, who is that talking about? Like, yeah, it's just someone he made up. It's it's but it's not even like he made up whole cloth. Like, it's just this ambient, like, it's exactly going to appeal to the person who's like, oh, I know what you're talking about. And you're like, we don't have to specify any further like,
01:15:08
Speaker
what time period you're talking about, where you're talking about, how this woman actually lives. Like this works because so many people do have the like, just vision of the savage in their head.
01:15:22
Speaker
and that's what seems just like AI generated about it. There's like no specificity. It's just all, it's just all random. Like I just threw a bunch of words together. feel like I'm not making this point very coherently, but it's just, if you actually pick apart what he's trying to say, i don't think there's actually anything he's trying to say here.
01:15:38
Speaker
Like he opens the section with the woman problem may be stated somewhat after this fashion. There's no problem here. Like, what is the woman problem? Like he opens, he's like, okay, now I'm going to tell you what the woman problem is.
01:15:51
Speaker
The woman problem is, okay, think about a savage wearing a coconut leaf. And, but she's happy and we're not happy in our civilization.
01:16:02
Speaker
Like the only thing that makes it worthwhile is the better things to suc come. What's the woman problem? Okay. So I think that the woman problem in this essay is specifically economic.
01:16:14
Speaker
I think that's the main thing that's distinguishing the rambling of this essay essay from the rambling of the previous essay. So we're going to see all his power as an economist, all his analytic machinery put to use on this.
01:16:27
Speaker
Okay. I'm excited to see he's done graduate work in economics, got a PhD. He taught economics for a while. Absolutely. He's not the head of this department yet. His real area of expertise.
01:16:40
Speaker
Mm-hmm. So he points out that one reason that women are able to support themselves, but men aren't, is because men have access to work.
01:16:51
Speaker
And in contrast, a woman, on the other hand, has little or none. The world's work is open to her, but she cannot do it.
01:17:02
Speaker
She lacks the physical strength for laying bricks or digging coal. If put to work on a steel beam 100 feet above the ground, she would fall off. For the pursuit of business, her head is all wrong.
01:17:16
Speaker
Figures confuse her. She lacks sustained attention and in point of morals, the average woman is, even for business, too crooked. Okay, so i think we've really dug down to the nub the issue here.
01:17:30
Speaker
If you put a woman high up, she will fall. And she doesn't have the physical strength. I don't really see any influence of Freud.
01:17:42
Speaker
with Leacock, but I will point out that women being less moral was um a contentious claim that Freud made. And Freud was pretty big at the time.
01:17:54
Speaker
So it was in the zeitgeist a little bit. Yeah, I mean, thinking back to the other essay we read much later, where he's talking about like, oh you know, all the all the superficial changes, right? all Everything that changes, everything's new about the new woman could be washed off with soap and water.
01:18:09
Speaker
It's all superficial and people are the same as these' all they've always been. Well, suddenly, I mean, already we can find contradictions within each essay. So it's like, it's working a little too hard to like draw the two together and say like, these things written 30 years apart contradict each other.
01:18:24
Speaker
But already here, we're seeing like a completely different vision of the world, right? We're seeing the savage woman and the the modern urban woman are totally different. And here, right, he's saying women don't have the strength, the physical strength for these sorts of things. But he has to mean...
01:18:39
Speaker
women as a result of society, because he just got finished talking about how like the savage woman is fine, armed with a club. hmm. And then he's talking about women not being moral. I mean, I think it's interesting that that would be very, that's totally different than the way misogynists think about women today, right? Like, especially with regards to saying like, oh, women aren't good in business, right? I feel like you much more here today. I mean, maybe this is just anecdotal, I guess, because just based on the my sense of what what I hear around. But I feel like the the women are too crooked to do business.
01:19:16
Speaker
You hear usually the opposite, right? Like, Mm-hmm. Women are the moral center. Women are right women are our moral betters. as you know if ah And they don't understand the wheeling and dealing that business requires, right? Which is like exactly the opposite statement.
01:19:34
Speaker
Mm-hmm. But I don't even know if that's new or old. I mean, you can hear both simultaneously. No one is going to force him to actually become clear on that, right? But it's just, it's so nonsense.
01:19:44
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah, well, I mean, his his figure of a woman is naive, silly, childlike. I mean, not to come back to the beam thing a bit too much, but although it is a little bit stunning to me, but you know this is how you would describe what would happen to a child.
01:20:00
Speaker
If you put them on a steel beam. Like, oh, if you put a woman on a beam, she'd fall off. It's like, I mean, this is all happening in a world, you know, pre-OSHA, right? Like, now, you know, we would understand that, like, people need to be wearing, like, safety harnesses and clipped into things, right? And actually, part of that is because, like, men did regularly fall off of beams on construction sites, right? Like, it turns out that, like, yeah, it's really dangerous to be sitting on a beam high up in the air. Mm-hmm.
01:20:27
Speaker
Um... Well, I mean, have you ever seen like based accounts posting videos of like women working on an oil rig versus men working on an oil rig? Yeah, um I guess. Yeah. So the. So the men's video has a bunch of men who are just absolutely covered in shit.
01:20:45
Speaker
I assume not literal feces, but like those dirt, oil, whatever
Contrasting Gender Depictions in Workplaces
01:20:50
Speaker
covering them. I think they're lots i thinkre bare chested. and oh yeah they're just like slamming machinery around super hard. yeah And then the women, in contrast, are wearing clean clothes. they've got tucked in shirts and they're pushing like pristine bits of tubing around and locking them in like gently but firmly into other bits of tubing.
01:21:16
Speaker
And one of these is supposed to be real adult work. And the other one is supposed to be cut work. Yeah. I mean, i actually know someone so very similar story. I know somebody who works at a bank doing like investment banking.
01:21:40
Speaker
And he was telling me that as part of their like sensitivity training, they you know, they had a little presentation they had to sit through about like the importance of women in the workplace.
01:21:56
Speaker
And so this is actually the sort of like the DEI kind of like, this is supposed to be, you know, the woke spokesperson in the office telling everybody about how we need to respect women in the workplace.
01:22:07
Speaker
And they actually said as part of this presentation that like, it's important to have who, in the workplace, especially like on the trading floor, because like women are more intuitive and, you know, more like less likely to make rash decisions and let like maybe more risk averse. And it's good to balance out the like,
01:22:34
Speaker
men's like, you know, recklessness. ah huh And it's just like, you need the yin and the yang, you know? Exactly. And it wasn't exactly phrased like that, but that was the, that was the meaning of what was being said.
01:22:52
Speaker
and this person was sitting there like, what are you saying right now? Like, no, the reason we need to have women in the workplace is because like equality, like there's no, like, It's not because like women's nature makes them particularly suited to like be the sort of balancing point for men.
01:23:10
Speaker
And they're, you know, the the way that men are on the trading floor needs to be balanced out by like the woman's nature on the trading floor. No, it's just like, you can't be doing, this is the DEI presentation.
01:23:22
Speaker
Yeah, this is like, this this is the wokest point of the workplace. Yeah, like this is the woke counterpoint to the normally, i mean, fairly unwoke environment at an investment bank.
01:23:34
Speaker
um Okay, let's move on. Thus it comes about that woman is excluded to a great extent from the world's work and the world's pay.
01:23:45
Speaker
There is nothing really open to her except one thing, marriage. She must find a man who will be willing in return for her society to give her half of everything he has, allow her the sole use of his house during the daytime, pay her taxes and provide her clothes.
01:24:02
Speaker
This was formerly and for many centuries not such a bad solution of the question. The women did fairly well out of it. It was the habit to marry early and often. The house and home was an important place.
01:24:14
Speaker
The great majority of people high and low lived on the land. The work of the wife and the work of the husband ran closely together. one thing that is just driving me absolutely nuts looking through these is remembering how...
01:24:27
Speaker
for a significant part of his youth, he grew up on this farm and he hated it. all this All this prescription. i don't think any of this is really prescription for him, you know? No, of course not.
01:24:39
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So here we're sort of, I think, makes clear that the point of the previous passage or you know two passages ago, the the the statement of the woman question, he does mean the physical care of women.
01:24:55
Speaker
And of course, that doesn't present as a problem unless you are already sort of introduced into this understanding that women can't take care of themselves because... They're too top-heavy, I guess.
01:25:07
Speaker
Maybe it's that their breasts will make them tip over if they're on the beam. Maybe that's the problem. I don't know. but like Yeah, that actually makes sense. Shit, I think Stephen's right.
01:25:20
Speaker
But like the woman question is, like how do you address the fact that women are totally incompetent and incapable of doing anything? Marry them so that they can do all of your stuff for you.
01:25:32
Speaker
It's very unclear here, but... He views the current economic situation, and I'm using a vague term there deliberately, as undermining this institution of marriage and causing unmarried women to multiply into a ah terrible like societal tidal wave.
01:25:58
Speaker
And here's his description of these of these economic conditions. Then came the modern age, beginning, let us say, about 150 years ago.
01:26:13
Speaker
The distinguishing marks of it have been machinery in the modern city. The age of invention swept the people off the land. It herded them into factories, creating out of each man a poor, miserable Adam divorced from hereditary ties with no rights, no duties, and no place in the world except what his wages contract may confer on him.
01:26:36
Speaker
This is like, right, there's that, I forget who who who the the quote is attributed to, right? But there's this idea that um that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, right?
Modernity and Misogyny
01:26:47
Speaker
And and we're kind of getting the same thing but misogyny instead, right? Like there's this understanding that the modern age, which I mean, he's sort of saying like the precursor and development of what would like then be sort of called like Fordist capitalism is bad.
01:27:10
Speaker
Right. And i think, you know, certainly you can read all sorts of critiques of like, the modern age that are exactly what he's talking about, like in, you know, the novels of Charles Dickens, like this is one reason why Dickens novels are so popular is like, yeah, people are miserable and conditions in factories are terrible. And, and so you get this critique of, of society and this critique of modernity, but it just becomes totally incoherent because instead of being able to say the actual answer, which is like capitalist accumulation and the exploitation of labor, you instead have like, Oh, it's women.
01:27:50
Speaker
It's not even clear why this is related to the woman problem, I guess, um other than saying like it's undermining marriage, I guess. Like it's not even clear to me why this is related to the woman question.
01:28:02
Speaker
Yeah, it really it really isn't. He's pretty incoherent. I think it's evident that the that the general message is that you may feel unhappy under capitalism.
01:28:16
Speaker
And in fact, that does mean capitalism is bad. But while we're treating this whole issue, don't forget that the single biggest part of the solution is actually going to be that women need to be your slaves.
01:28:30
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's like we just got done talking about how women aren't suited for work. It actually turns out nobody is suited for work because it sucks working in a factory. so the solution is...
01:28:42
Speaker
you know, men have been swept off the land. Men aren't able to control or aren't able to have their acre anymore. So instead, as a sort of consolation prize, you should get like... You should get a plantation.
01:28:55
Speaker
You should get a woman who you can control. And also, but it's also important that that that woman is is giving you a lot of babies because that's what's going to get us out of this mess.
01:29:09
Speaker
Because he's simultaneously like, we need to preserve white culture But also our culture sucks and the savages are happier, but the savages are coming for us.
01:29:22
Speaker
So unmarried women are now present in vast profusion and that's a problem, but it's not a problem until this sort of like ancient demon arises.
01:29:38
Speaker
Thus... The unmarried woman, quiet distinct thing from the old maid of ancient times, came into existence and multiplied and increased till there were millions of her.
01:29:51
Speaker
Is it a social contagion, Sarah? It is social contagion. Are we about to see rapid onset spinster disease or whatever? Then there rose up in our own time, or within call of it, a deliverer.
01:30:05
Speaker
It was the awful woman with the spectacles, And the doctrine that she preached was woman's rights. She came as a new thing, ah hatchet in her hand, breaking glass. But in reality, she was no new thing at all and has her lineal descent in history from age to age.
01:30:25
Speaker
The Romans knew her as a civil and shuddered at her. The Middle Ages called her a witch and burnt her. The ancient law of England named her a scold and ducked her in a pond.
01:30:36
Speaker
But the men of the modern age living indoors and losing something of their ruder fiber grew afraid of her. The awful woman, meddlesome, vociferous, intrusive, came into her own.
01:30:50
Speaker
That's fascinating. I had it totally wrong. I thought he was saying modernity sucks and working in a factory sucks and we the men have been pushed out of...
01:31:05
Speaker
our proper place as like tiny little feudal Lords of our little land plots and are forced to work in the factory. So as a consolation, we should at least have women to do everything for us. But actually what he's saying is because of all of that, we have forgotten how to be true and strong and brave misogynists, right? Like, yeah,
01:31:26
Speaker
Yeah, and now we're hunting. He's literally saying, they are the daughters of the witches we didn't burn. I know! like He's literally doing, like you are the daughters of witches we didn't burn, and that's a problem. We should have burned more of you, and we should bring it back.
01:31:42
Speaker
Absolutely! He's going down one by one and like recounting all the sort of like ah ah lib the second wave of feminists like figures and metaphors, and he's just like...
01:31:55
Speaker
Yeah, no, that that's all literally true. you are, in fact, the daughters of the witches that we didn't burn. And um and I don't like that.
01:32:06
Speaker
God. it's It's astonishing too, because the figure of the awful woman. So first off, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to like find the history of this charm.
01:32:20
Speaker
And as far as I could tell, he just invented his whole cloth. So when I tried to find... like old references to the awful woman, I almost entirely ended up on academic articles about Stephen Leacock.
01:32:33
Speaker
OK, so this is this is his like little bugbearer. mean, he does do this thing, which I think is funny. like it nowadays reads very like Tumblr to me of like he'll just like capitalize something to like make it a thing. right So he's like earlier he's like superior being. you know He's like, oh, awful woman. like He capitalizes spectacles. The awful woman's spectacles. Yeah, the awful woman with the spectacles. That's ah that's an archetype. right he's he's like He's conjuring this like figure that is controlling society. The awful woman with the spectacles.
01:33:07
Speaker
I want to say it's nonsensical, but it's obviously not, right? Like, what is he talking about? He's talking about women who read, right? Like, the implication is like, what do you need those spectacles for? Like, are you trying to read? Like, are you trying to like, that's men's work, right?
01:33:20
Speaker
Uh-huh. God. Yeah. I mean, I just sent you a picture of the awful woman. Yeah. I mean, obviously that's the awful woman with the spectacles. Yeah. Maybe that should be the episode art.
01:33:30
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. um okay so for people who don't see the episode art, this is the woman featured in ah billion triggered memes. The backstory here is is a little bit sad. this is from an Alex Jones video entitled Trump supporters shut down protesters.
01:33:49
Speaker
And this woman is just having like a pretty civil argument with um and with ah an InfoWars employee. And she was having to yell because it was loud, but you know it was like a calm thing. And they clipped one frame of her.
01:34:10
Speaker
where her face looks angry, um her eyes are wide, her teeth are bared, and of course she's got glasses and short hair. And then that birthed a thousand jokes about triggered liberal women.
01:34:27
Speaker
And I kind of reject his description of the suffragettes as part of like a genuine a genuine, just like continuum of feminist demons through history.
01:34:42
Speaker
um But this reduction of women who care about women's rights to a singular figure um is remarkably consistent between now and then.
01:34:56
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, and I think it's interesting that like, he's writing this before. i mean, as you say, the like second wave feminism thing, but this idea that women who were burned at the stake as witches were really, that that really doing that was a way of enforcing a certain economic order, right? Like this is the sort of the thesis of, is it Calvin and the witch by Sylvia Federici and,
01:35:25
Speaker
a lot of this kind of like mid to late 20th century, like Marxist feminism builds off these ideas. And it's like, he's kind of saying that in a way, but on the other side of it, like he's just saying out like, yeah, like it's, it's it's like these women um need to be stopped, but it's not even clear.
01:35:47
Speaker
Like there's no explanation of, why they need to be stopped other than because they're women and women are bad,
Women's Suffrage and Voting Behavior
01:35:55
Speaker
right? There's no ah hu in fact, his version of, of a society where women can take care of themselves.
01:36:03
Speaker
Again, the savages like he admits that they're happier and it's better. And it's completely unaddressed. Like why that doesn't have anything to say about maybe we should trust women to take care of themselves more in our society.
01:36:21
Speaker
It's sort of taken as a given, no, that's crazy, that would never work. I mean, it really just doesn't make any sense. Well, I think it's just presumed that women's happiness just doesn't matter. Yeah. I think he's quite explicit about that.
01:36:34
Speaker
Okay, so now he's gotten onto the topic of the of the suffragettes. And at this point, the anti-suffrage movement is clearly losing.
01:36:45
Speaker
Like he knows it's he knows it's not going to win. After the women have obtained the vote, the question is, what are they going to do with it? The answer is nothing, or at any rate, nothing that men would not do without them.
01:36:56
Speaker
Their only visible use of it will be to elect men into office. Fortunately for us all, they will not elect women. Here and there, perhaps at the outset, it will be done as a result of a sort of s spite, a kind of sex antagonism bred by the controversy itself.
01:37:09
Speaker
But speaking broadly, the women's vote will not be used to elect women to office. Women do not think enough of one another to do that. Well, he's not totally wrong. is the most This is like the most cooking that I think he's done in any of the passages we've read. like The part that i have a huge issue with is the part where he says, thank God um hu that this is the case.
01:37:34
Speaker
um But I think it's unfortunately... okay, it's not like women hate other women, right? And this is the other thing is that like, because misogyny is like a structural societal force, women do it too.
01:37:46
Speaker
This is often turned into like, look, see, even women hate other women by misogynists. And I think this is wrong for various reasons. But he's correct in that actually, like, a lot of the women who were very involved in the suffrage movement and who pushed for women to get the vote, like joined the fascist party a decade later and were very involved in, then started pushing for like, we need traditional societies where women are at home, right? Like this.
01:38:19
Speaker
Yeah. Mary Richardson, a famous Canadian suffragette who ended up becoming the head of the women's section of the British union of fascists. Yeah.
01:38:30
Speaker
And I think, you know There's a whole conversation to be had here about like, well, I think part of what he's saying is correct in that like, okay, what are women going to do with the vote?
01:38:42
Speaker
And it's sort of the wrong question, right? Because it's sort of like, well, he's also correct that like giving women the vote is not a way to achieve like other goals of the liberation of women like other than giving women the vote, right? like In order for this argument to make any sense, you'd have to think that the enfranchisement of women doesn't on its own matter.
01:39:10
Speaker
And it's like, Hard to imagine. i mean, i don't think he actually cares all that much about democracy pretty clearly. He has like a pretty particular vision for how society should run and he thinks it should run a particular way. So it doesn't sound like he's actually all that invested in making sure that like liberal democracy is the order of the day. So I don't want to like impute, like put sort of liberal notions onto him.
01:39:34
Speaker
But like the reason women should be allowed to vote is because women should be allowed to vote. It's not like, oh, because I think women are going to like as a class enact some kind of like feminist liberation without other things happening.
01:39:45
Speaker
Right? like Yeah. Well, I mean, I think you pretty clearly can't enact any sort of real feminist liberation if women don't have the right to vote. It's not yeah like it's not it's not a goal in itself. It's a precondition. Exactly. it's like It's not like, oh, we give women the right to vote and that is going to lead to this kind of liberation. It's like, well, first of all, it is in itself liberatory to grant the right to vote to a class of people.
01:40:12
Speaker
Right? And the whole point is that you like... are actually enfranchising them into like the democratic process, like not to do like whatever, like everyone should have the right to vote because that is the thing that underwrites like the legitimacy of our government is that like,
01:40:28
Speaker
we all had the ability to vote on it. And like, even though i think there's a lot of problems with like contemporary electoralism, like the idea that, oh, you shouldn't have the right to vote. Like, what are you going to do with it? And especially to ask it of entire class of people, like, what are you going to do with it is is sort of nonsensical. It's completely missing the point that it's like, no, the whole point is that like everyone needs to have a say um in this process. And then secondly, like,
01:40:54
Speaker
yeah, women as a class aren't going to do this, but like there should be the possibility for political engagement of women. like It is such a like basic first step, and it's not like an engine that's going to automatically lead to other things. It's like something that just needs to happen in order for there to be any sense of like actual equality. I don't know. it just Yeah, I think maybe we should also emphasize that this is just raw cope.
01:41:16
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, he was certainly active in anti-suffrage politics before this. like the There's no question. And so you know him being like, well, this isn't going to change thing. it's it's it's I'm not owned material.
01:41:32
Speaker
It really is. Okay. Then he he pivots back to the ability of... women to work. The ordinary woman cannot do the ordinary man's work. She never has and never will. The reason why she can't are so many, that is she can't in so many different ways that it is not worthwhile to try to name them.
01:41:52
Speaker
I swear to God, he's one of the laziest writers I've ever read. you know that bit of like, but for a dollar, name a woman? i want to be like, for a dollar, name one reason women can't do men's work. Like,
01:42:03
Speaker
Anytime someone is like, oh, there's so many reasons, it's like, it's not even worth saying, you're right? You could say one. like Yeah, you know, it can't be that hard.
01:42:16
Speaker
They're teaming. I mean, to too thematically, you know, tie it into our our opening segment about Charlie Kirk, it is it is the same phenomenon behind like, oh, you know, Gavin Newsom opining about Charlie Kirk doing politics the right way. All these people talking about the brilliance, you know, in so many different ways, Charlie Kirk, you know, did this. It's like, okay, name one of them, right? Like, give me one example. It's just, it's such a good meter for cope. Anytime someone is like, there's so many reasons, it's not even worth naming one. It's like, that's like,
01:42:48
Speaker
I feel like that's going to be something we are going to see again and again, is the like, there's so many reasons it's not worth naming one. God. Okay, so here he goes on to describe something impossible.
Satire of Feminist Ideals
01:43:04
Speaker
Just moon logic stuff here. so The feminists, in fact, are haunted by the idea that it is possible for the average woman to have a life after that of the ordinary man.
01:43:16
Speaker
They imagine her as having a career... profession, a vocation, something which will be her life work, just as selling coal is the life work of the coal merchant.
01:43:27
Speaker
If this were so, the whole question would be solved. Women and we men would become equal and independent. It is thus indeed that the feminist sees them, though the roseate mist created by imagination, through the roseate mist created by imagination.
01:43:43
Speaker
Husband and wife appear as a couple of honorable partners who share a house together. Each is off to business in the morning. The husband is, let us say, a stockbroker.
01:43:55
Speaker
The wife manufactures iron and steel. The wife is a liberal. The husband a conservative. At their dinner, they have animated discussions over the tariff till it is time for them to go to their clubs.
01:44:06
Speaker
These two impossible creatures haunt the brain of the feminist and disport them in the pages of the up-to-date novel. The whole thing is mere fiction. It is quite impossible for women, the average and ordinary women, to go in for having a career.
01:44:20
Speaker
Nature has forbidden it. Okay, first of all, I love this, like... when are we going to get the like this exact Tim Allen sitcom about this couple? or like you know like This is just every 90s show. is like The wife manufactures steel, the husband's a stockbroker, the wife's a liberal, the husband's a conservative, and you just watch them have dinner. or Right. like right this is This is the default.
01:44:45
Speaker
This haunts the mind, not of the feminists, because... I don't think you'll ever find a feminist writing about this vision. This haunts the mind of like conservative reactionary comedians today. Like I'm pretty sure like, I'm pretty sure if I opened up like Hulu or, you know, Paramount plus or whatever, like I could find this exact show currently being made. Like that is like about this.
01:45:11
Speaker
And the other thing is like, I think reading this section, my first reaction to it is really interesting. to notice the similarity of a lot of contemporary anti-trans writing.
01:45:23
Speaker
Oh, interesting. Okay. where Tell me about that. Specifically, and I think it's not only new in this section, but like the thing that this really is drawing up is this idea of like nature is forbidding it. Right.
01:45:34
Speaker
And this leads to the obvious question. If nature is forbidding it, then you then there's nothing to worry about. Then you don't have to write this. You don't have to explain it. You don't have to do anything, right?
01:45:46
Speaker
It won't happen. So what's the point of writing a whole screed against it and politically organizing against it? And it's the same thing with like people who want to tell trans women, you will never be a woman. It's like, fine, then you actually don't have to worry about it. You actually don't have to do anything about it, right?
01:46:03
Speaker
There's this insistence of like, nature has forbidden this thing. It cannot happen, but it's undermined by the amount of energy dudes like this spend explaining why it can't happen. Because if it were really a natural law, it would be a natural law and it wouldn't be a problem. And yet, like, here we are, like, liberated trans women who, like, don't have seven children. I have terrible news, which is that you have severely overestimated him.
01:46:32
Speaker
um but no When he says nature has forbidden it, he doesn't mean that women won't want to go in for a career, even though that's, you know, what he's... Oh, no, I understand that he's saying, like, women will try to do this and it's foolish.
01:46:49
Speaker
He's saying that if women did this, society would end. So it's not possible. Right, but... Because society will preserve itself. Right, but that's my that's sort of the point is, like...
01:47:02
Speaker
like i yeah know and and this is And you can say the same thing about like a lot of the people arguing about, like oh, like you know a man can't be a woman or whatever, right? All these all these anti-trans tropes. It's like, yeah, like of course the thing they're saying is like people wanting to do this are a problem and are leading to the ruination of society.
01:47:18
Speaker
But it still doesn't totally answer the question of, like okay, if this happened, society would end. It's still saying like it is a natural law that women won't succeed in the workplace.
01:47:30
Speaker
Yeah, I guess it really just... It just feels like if you really thought that were the case, you wouldn't have to spend quite so much energy against it, right? like Okay, well, tearss are here's our last excerpt.
01:47:48
Speaker
Describing why nature is forbidden. Okay. The average woman must necessarily have, I can only give the figures roughly. about three and a quarter children.
01:48:00
Speaker
She must replace in the population herself and her husband with something over to allow for the people who never marry and for the children that do not reach maturity. If she fails to do this, the population comes to an end.
01:48:11
Speaker
Any scheme of social life must allow for these three and a quarter children and for the years of care that must be devoted to them. The vacuum cleaner can take the place of the housewife. It cannot replace the mother." Oh, I see.
01:48:24
Speaker
So it's nature has forbidden it because how do we get children? Exactly. So this is kind of the same essay as the previous one.
01:48:35
Speaker
I know you've mentioned that, but I just want to repeat it. Yeah. I mean, and I think like still the parallel is similar, right? Because at bottom, that is the thing people are saying when they're saying like,
01:48:47
Speaker
you will never be a woman is a woman is somewhat right. Like it's not an accident that like even so-called, you know, feminists, whatever, like transphobic feminists, like that the, the sticking point is like producer of the large gametes. What's the like cringe phrase they're using now because they keep having to like, yeah, it's something about large gametes, but it's like,
01:49:06
Speaker
Women are babymakers, and so you will never be a woman because in my mind, woman means mother. Right. A woman is someone who is intended to be a mother.
01:49:18
Speaker
Right. But not even mother in the sense of, like, adoptive or, like... mother who gave birth to her children because every other version of motherhood is like a perversion of that like natural pure definition yeah i mean obviously i think we're going to see a lot of our misogyny uh our misogynist texts and our analysis are going to come down to women need to be making babies like why are you wearing glasses right you don't need make
01:49:50
Speaker
You don't need the vote to make a baby. You don't need a job to make a baby, right? Like the woman question is, yes how do we secure and economic position for women? ah And he he is very clear. I mean, often when you read when we read these, I feel like we're going to have to remind ourselves, oh, they're talking about white women and they're talking about white upper class women. So he at least had the courtesy to remind us himself that that's who he's talking about, right? Because he doesn't mean...
01:50:17
Speaker
like the underclass of of women of color who are going to be doing all the domestic labor, right? Like the vacuum cleaner can take the place of the housewife. What he really means is like some paid, you know, savage with a vacuum cleaner can replace the housewife.
01:50:31
Speaker
So he closes with just like these extraordinarily blunt two sentences. Women need not more freedom, but less.
01:50:43
Speaker
Social policy should proceed from the fundamental truth that women are and must be dependent.
01:50:52
Speaker
So that's Stephen Leacock for you. I got to say, I'm not seeing how he made it. I guess I am seeing how he made it, but top humorist, top working humorist for a decade.
01:51:06
Speaker
It's pretty extraordinary, right? Yeah. I really wonder how much of this had to do with like social connections, that kind of thing. But I also think we can't just discount the idea that there's just a lot of appetite among...
01:51:22
Speaker
the people who gatekeep publishing, that sort of thing, for people who will just keep the production of misogyny going. Yeah, I mean, and I guess that's a good place to sort of tie it up is like, of course, how does this guy get to be the top humor writer as well? There's a lot of money and influence behind the idea that women need to be dependent so that they can make babies. And it feels like very topical to be reading this and now, not that this idea has ever really gone away,
01:51:54
Speaker
But in the last couple of months, we've seen all these announcements about like, oh we're going to figure out what the cause of autism is, right? And the cause of autism is pregnant women taking Tylenol. So we need to make sure that we don't do that. and and we need to protect, right? Like we need to reorganize
Societal Expectations and Misogyny
01:52:09
Speaker
the healthcare system in the U.S. around protecting pregnant women and encouraging women to have babies and encouraging fertility.
01:52:16
Speaker
And outside the U.S. even, we're seeing a lot of this kind of idea in the discourse, right? Like, it feels like there's been this new resurgence of the place for women is in the home making babies.
01:52:29
Speaker
And, you know, we've seen Roe v. Wade get overturned in the U.S., right? And this idea of like, oh, like abortion and all those things. And, you know, that's all gone, right? We need to go back to our roots of like...
01:52:42
Speaker
making women dependent on men and forcing women to have babies. And so that's never really gone away. So it's not really surprising, I guess. that I don't know, the Tylenol thing?
01:52:53
Speaker
It's so bizarre. I mean, even among anti-vaxx and wellness fascist types from which this is springing, like that's ah that's a pretty fringe belief.
01:53:04
Speaker
And or it was until until the president started hosting press conferences where he repeated dozens of times that pregnant women should not take Tylenol. And I think the fact that something so strange and niche is being advanced is really a sign of how um pervasive and all encompassing the attack on women's role in society has become. It's coming from every possible angle, even ones that were too weird for us to to have really thought of before now.
01:53:38
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it really also shows us something else, which I've noticed as a theme in a lot of the texts that I've been thinking about bringing it to the show, is like people at varying levels of like being normal have their brains can have their brains just totally melted by misogyny, right? Like confronting this question, right? Like as soon as you bring up the specter of like, oh, the pregnant woman who must be protected because she's like furthering the race, like this is somehow a specter that has huge purchase in the minds of people who you might otherwise suspect of being normal.
01:54:13
Speaker
But then it turns out like you say like, oh, can women be funny? And then you find out two pages later that they're talking about like, the great masses of brutes who are threatening the very foundation of our society. And it's like, oh, that was always just below the surface. And I just needed to scratch this like one particular, right. I just needed to say like, what do you think about women to produce this like torrent of racial supremacy and misogyny?
01:54:43
Speaker
So I guess, yeah, that's, that's Steven Leacock. Yeah. May he continue to not even live in infamy. Yeah, I mean, this is probably the longest conversation that anyone has had about him since he passed away.
01:55:05
Speaker
Well, i think there I think there are academics writing about him. I know there are academics writing about him. So some of them are giving talks. They're they're having conversations with each other. So his memory is kept alive in that sense.
01:55:19
Speaker
But yeah, this is as close to pop culture relevance as say as I think he's ever going to get is a podcast with probably five listeners by two trans women. Amazing.
01:55:31
Speaker
Well...
Podcast Conclusion and Support
01:55:32
Speaker
All right, I guess we should ah we should wrap things up then. We should plug that I think if you are listening to this, you maybe already got it from our Patreon, but we should mention that we have a Patreon, patreon.com slash odiumsymposium.
01:55:47
Speaker
Currently, we don't have any benefits to subscribing other than if you want to just give us money. There's one tier and it's $5 a month. If you were listening to this and you were like, wow, the audio quality is really poor. Well, that's one thing that we'll go to contributing to.
01:56:00
Speaker
We also have a bunch of ideas for like bonus content episodes, um but no time to produce them. But that could be maybe become possible if we weren't doing this for no money. So that's the plug. you enjoyed listening to us, think about subscribing, but also it's fine if you don't.
01:56:14
Speaker
ah Anything else we should mention? Yeah, it's not fine if you don't subscribe. I'm watching you. I'm judging you. I will be fine with it, but Sarah may hunt you down. couldn't resist the worst racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
01:56:34
Speaker
Does Trump gonna have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! Now listen, you right-handling man, let's get......and you'll stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
01:56:47
Speaker
Some level of masochism.