Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
7. Who's Afraid of Gerald Schoenewolfe?
61 Plays1 month ago
Sarah and Helen are forced to confront their penis envy as they dive into the writings of the psychoanalyst from hell.
Check out our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/odiumsymposium
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Philosophical Concepts
00:00:01
Speaker
There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
00:00:16
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! listen, you. Write a calling name.
Podcast Introduction: 'Odium Symposium'
00:00:23
Speaker
Let's get... Let's stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
00:00:33
Speaker
some level of masochism. Welcome to Odium Symposium. I'm Sarah. I'm Helen.
New Year's Resolutions Discussion
00:00:40
Speaker
We read historical bigoted texts, mostly misogynist ones, but it varies.
00:00:46
Speaker
Helen, how are you this week? Doing pretty well. so we're recording this before the new year, but it's going to get, this is going to be our first episode released in 2026. Do you have any new year's resolutions? Where are your new year's resolutions, Sarah?
00:01:01
Speaker
I never do New Year's resolutions because I've noticed that I never follow even like day to day resolutions. Okay. So a year seems a little ambitious. Yeah. I also am still trying to decide what I want mine to be. i thought a little bit about like, okay, maybe I'll spend, you know, i'm I've done this over a periods before. I'll be like, I'll spend this amount of time vegetarian. And I was like, you know what? Maybe 2026, my New Year's resolution will be a vegetarian.
00:01:25
Speaker
And then immediately I started bargaining with myself and I was like, well, maybe, you know, and I was like, you know what? I'll be vegetarian every Tuesday. Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah.
00:01:36
Speaker
Fingers crossed for some some resolution that you achieve or that accomplishes something in your life. Yeah, maybe we both have the resolution to end misogyny once and for all. You know, that will be our resolution. I'm not totally sure that's ambitious enough. For example, our podcast is about bigotry more generally. Yeah, I'm trying to like keep it small, you know? Okay, let's get into today's topic.
00:02:00
Speaker
All right. I'm like... the most nervous I've been for any episode because for days, okay, for the listener, for days Sarah's been messaging me like, you're going to lose your mind on this one. Absolutely. We've never done something this crazy before, so I've been like, what is what am I in for here?
00:02:19
Speaker
God, I really hope it lives up to expectations. This guy's been haunting my brain for over a month now. I can't can' handle it. I need to exercise him, Helen. Okay.
Exploration of Gerald Schoenewulf's Texts
00:02:31
Speaker
The text is one that I told you I had on hand, which is sexual animosity between men and women.
00:02:38
Speaker
And it's by Gerald Schoenewulf. Do you know anything about Gerald Schoenewulf? I do not. Nobody does. He's more of a return to our first episodes where we talked about like super obscure people.
00:02:52
Speaker
He does have some like public presence. He has been a public intellectual, but he's not the center of a movement. So he's just a weird guy. Okay, I love it.
00:03:06
Speaker
Still, I think his story is going to be illuminating about things in the broader culture.
Freudian Theories and Feminist Critiques
00:03:12
Speaker
Okay, I'm going to try to hold on to the fact, because I'm losing my mind here, that like he doesn't matter. and
00:03:21
Speaker
Maybe that'll help you like carry the emotional weight of what's about to happen to you. He will and quite possibly already has died in obscurity. We'll get into that. but Yeah.
00:03:32
Speaker
The text that we're looking at was published in 1989. It's a psychoanalytic text intended for a wide audience. Gerald himself was born in 1941 in Texas.
00:03:44
Speaker
He got a psychoanalysis PhD in 1981 from a college that went insolvent last year. And he is the author of more than 30 books.
00:03:55
Speaker
Where did he get his PhD? Like what country? Was it a US college? It was in the US. I want to say it was in Vermont, but I didn't actually write down the name of the college. It's not one that you've probably heard of.
00:04:07
Speaker
We'll fill out that biography a little more later, but it's going to stay sparse. And that sparseness is actually going to be part of our narrative around him. Okay. Yeah, one of the things I learned about psychoanalysis couple of years ago is depending where you are, there's like different schools that bitterly hate each other that also have almost exactly the same name.
00:04:32
Speaker
So I'm trying to remember exactly what it is, but there's like two in Paris that are both like direct, like Lacanian psychoanalysis institutes. And one of them is like the Freudian Center for Psychoanalysis. And one of them is like the Center for Freudian. It's not quite that, but it's like they're similar on that level, but they're like bitter rivals. And so i was like wondering...
00:04:50
Speaker
But we'll see what he we'll see what he thinks. But but psychoanalysis is its own funny internecine rivalry between people who have just like slightly different opinions on like ego formation or whatever. He's a hardline Freudian.
00:05:03
Speaker
Okay. This book, again, published in 1989. At this point in history, to be taking Freud at face value in therapeutic practice was already regarded as kind of cranky.
00:05:17
Speaker
Okay, so he doesn't like, he's not like a Jungian or a Lacanian or any of these guys. No, he Okay. Interesting. We've got a couple of Jungians coming up in future episodes, like none that I've like scheduled out, so I can't tell you when, but there's a lot of Odeon that comes out of these later schools, but I'm interested that we're going straight to the source with Freud and then also through this...
00:05:39
Speaker
crank. This isn't quite the Freud episode. Yeah. But we are going to learn about some Freud as we go. Okay, perfect. So here's our first excerpt from the book.
00:05:51
Speaker
Sexual animosity between men and women lies at the root of family discord. It also forms the basis for much of our social pathology.
00:06:02
Speaker
Where does it come from? Classical Freudians claim that sexual animosity grows out of women's penis envy and men's castration fear. However, feminist psychoanalysts, both male and female, have created a revised theory of female development that largely dismisses classical Freudian concepts and act attributes sexual animosity to cultural values that favor men and oppress women.
00:06:29
Speaker
To be sure, the subject of male and female sexual development and its effect on adult sexual relations is one of the more hotly debated in psychoanalysis, and the debate itself is often clouded in animosity.
00:06:42
Speaker
Many writings on the subject take on a moralizing tone, which by its very nature precludes calm and open discussion of the issues. This book takes a centrist position.
00:06:57
Speaker
oh no between the poles of feminism and masculinism. Okay, so to leftists like us, when we hear something like this, we're taking a centrist position. We're avoiding moralizing. We're for a calm and open discussion of the issues.
00:07:16
Speaker
We're standing to the side and just observing objectively. Hearing something like that is like having your face pressed against a hot stove, because we always know what's going to come, and it is not what is claimed.
00:07:28
Speaker
Right. Even here, it's followed immediately by this, like the polls of feminism and masculinism. But that's the thing is there isn't masculinism. Like if you asked someone what feminism was right out on the street, if you ask someone what feminism was, i mean, they could be wrong about the details. They could have an anti-feminist position. But broadly speaking, they would say something like what feminism is, right? Like people have an understanding what that is. Masculinism like isn't a thing.
00:07:55
Speaker
And so this immediately undermines this claim of like centrism because you have to write feminism evolves as a critique of society. So you're like inventing this like name called masculinism, which like doesn't exist, which is supposed to stand for this like classical Freudian narrative. But immediately it makes no sense.
00:08:14
Speaker
I'm going to tell you right now that this is going to continue escalating. It's just going to go up and up from here, but we're still pretty calm right now. Okay. So the next excerpt is going to get into some straightforward retelling of Freudian theories.
00:08:28
Speaker
Freud, 1918, 1925, 1931. nineteen eighteen nineteen twenty five nineteen thirty one So these are just citing different texts. Approached the subject of sexual animosity from the angles of psychosexual development, concentrating on the psychodynamics of the phallic stage during which males and females first become attracted to their parents of the opposite sex.
00:08:47
Speaker
Accordingly, animosity stems from the man's castration complex and the woman's penis envy. Men fear women because of unconscious pre-edible concerns about being devoured by the omnipotent mother,
00:09:00
Speaker
because of Oedipal guilt that forbids their getting too close to women lest they be contaminated by their physical inferiority, parentheses, lack of a penis, or castrated by the phallic father.
00:09:14
Speaker
To compensate for and defend against these fears, they put women on pedestals or disparage them or suppress them. Women, on the other hand, resent men because of unconscious pre-Oedipal feelings of narcissistic rage and inferiority surrounding the discovery that boys have penises and girls do not, and because of Oedipal anger at both parents for not righting this wrong.
00:09:37
Speaker
To compensate for this resentment, women attempt to control and manipulate men and to castrate them psychologically. However, because women do not fear castration, on a primary level they feel they have already been castrated, they are not as moral as men are, but particularly when it comes to the battle of the sexes.
00:09:58
Speaker
Oh my god. how are you feeling about this, Ellen? Really bad already. feeling so bad. Oh my god. He is retelling Freud here. I don't think any of this is exactly inaccurate. He is drawing up the very worst of Freud. i So that's the thing. I don't have enough of a familiarity with Freud to judge the accuracy of this as a retelling of Freud.
00:10:27
Speaker
So, you know, I don't really want to get into like, oh, he's wrong about Freud here. And I'm sure that... you know, maybe someone listening will will think like, oh, actually, this is a misunderstanding of what Freud meant by phallic stage or whatever. But Freud does have this description of women having penis envy, men having castration anxiety. Like those are pretty classically Freudian ideas.
00:10:49
Speaker
Certainly already by the 80s, there were conversations where people were talking about, well, there's a big problem here, which is that you're kind of painting having a vagina as just not having a penis, right? You're sort of interpreting vaginas as these empty organs, which is not what they are.
00:11:06
Speaker
And if you ask anyone who has one, that's not their experience of it. If you ask anyone who wants one, that's not their experience of not having one.
00:11:16
Speaker
Like we both would have lots of things to say personally about whether women have penis envy. You're right. We don't need to necessarily get into that. too much because that... No, and we're going to sit down and psychoanalyze you right now....is bringing... Right, that's bringing, like, even more layers that we need to to already realize why this is, like, terrible.
00:11:36
Speaker
Right, we both would disagree that men and women are defined by this one particular organ, right, which is sort of this bioessentialist view of gender is something we're both like, no, that's not true.
00:11:48
Speaker
But even bracketing how obviously bad that is, reading the vagina as just something which is... a wound is… Pretty misogynistic. Yeah. Having started off with a fairly misogynist description, he goes on to acknowledge that some oppression exists, he's kind of establishing his centrist credentials there, then he starts to go in on feminists a little bit.
00:12:13
Speaker
Indeed. Feminists have sought to refute Freud's theories about women through an attack on Freud himself. Books and articles have appeared, one after another, detailing his cocaine addiction, his distant relationship with his wife, his mother complex, his father complex, his sibling rivalry with his sisters...
00:12:35
Speaker
his supposed affair with his sister-in-law, his excessive attention to his youngest daughter, Anna, his desperate relationship with Wilhelm Fleiss, his deviations from classical psychoanalytic technique, his abandonment of the seduction theory, and his Victorian values.
00:12:52
Speaker
On the surface, feminists have psychoanalyzed Freud in order to invalidate his theories. On a deeper level, they have acted out their own sexual animosity by psychologically castrating the man who, it appears, gave them an interpretation they did not want to hear.
00:13:09
Speaker
Amazing. The more wrong they say Freud is, the more they're confirming his theory by attempting to castrate him. Well, it's funny because... He's accusing them of like, oh, you're just doing an ad hominem attack, right? You're just looking at his life.
00:13:24
Speaker
You know, we're undermining his ideas by focusing on his life. Like, that would be bad. And like, I'm sure there's people who do that, right? I'm sure whatever. Like, I'm sure there's people who are out there who are like, oh, yeah, like, he said all these things, but how can we trust him? He was addicted to cocaine. And I would agree. Like, that's poor critique.
00:13:41
Speaker
That's not really what a lot of these criticisms are about. And I think what a lot of later psychoanalysts, like feminist psychoanalysts would like to do is to say, look, like Freud completely revolutionized the way we understand like people and this description of the subconscious And the study of the subconscious, like, was this like new idea that I think like we all just accept now, right? I think that there isn't a sense to which like, there is some pretty widespread agreement that there's a certain level of Freudianism that even people who are like, oh, Freud was terrible or like, just accept, right? Like this sort of discovery of the subconscious is pretty huge.
00:14:25
Speaker
one of the critiques people are making is saying, look, he's really good when it comes to understanding that there is this like sort of parallel cognition that's called our subconscious that we don't have direct access to, but which affects us. And you can get access to it through all these different techniques.
00:14:41
Speaker
People look at his life in order to say like, he was reading his own life onto everybody, right? He wasn't good at separating people early childhood development as an abstract concept from his early childhood and then the childhood of his children, right? So this is why people focus on his life is to say, okay, here's the parts of Freud we can take and here's the parts we should discard.
00:15:07
Speaker
And to read that as just like, oh, you're just trying to discredit him by doing this. It's like, well, no, like he probably did have castration anxiety. And that's why he wrote so much about it and explained it. And it's just that it's not a universal thing.
00:15:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's pretty clear. Like, I don't know that men really are all that obsessed with castration, but it's just like a presumption of his work that everyone is like that. It's almost impossible not to observe that like, yeah, that's, you know, kind of your thing, Freud. Yeah.
00:15:35
Speaker
So this is just not what feminists critique. Sure, there are probably people who say this, right? But this is not what the feminist criticism is saying when they're looking at his life. It's not like this attempt to castrate him. It's this attempt to understand how to separate like stuff that was just really about him.
00:15:51
Speaker
So one of the things he talks about feminists criticizing is, quote, his abandonment of the seduction theory. This is an oblique reference to something called the Freudian cover-up. This was a theory that was introduced at a feminist conference in 1971.
00:16:09
Speaker
And the idea here is that one of the things that Freud promoted was the idea that sexual abuse of children happens frequently and that it has serious traumatic effects, that it's really harmful to the person. Later on, he moved away from emphasizing this and toward his theory of the Oedipal complex.
00:16:34
Speaker
And the claim of the Freudian cover-up theory is that he did this, first off, because of his personal discomfort with the idea that so many men were abusing children, and secondly, because of the discomfort of professional connections he had, and that the Oedipus theory is more or less a cover-up for sexual abuse.
00:16:58
Speaker
when this was introduced it more or less stayed within feminist circles i don't even know if he knows that it was presented in 1971 but in 1984 independently a psychoanalyst named masson published a book called the assault on truth freud's suppression of the seduction theory and this blew up it became like a big media thing and it really damaged psychoanalysis's reputation And so I think he's reacting to that.
00:17:30
Speaker
That narrative is one of saying, look, he had this theory, which he changed for this completely different theory. Even if you wanted to say, oh, it's, you know, it's cynical or it's whatever to assume that it's out of political and financial, you know, these, are these reasons that are, you know, pretty cynical reasons.
00:17:53
Speaker
It's like, okay, but it's still worth asking this question like if he was discovering in his clinical practice widespread child abuse which is like you know i've read a little bit about this like that's sort of what happened like he talked to kids who and he discovered that people had been abused right right like why not go with that there are questions about his theory that his personal life bears directly on i don't think it's inappropriate for feminists to critique
Impact of Societal Expectations on Gender Roles
00:18:20
Speaker
him as a man Victimology is a new area of research that has recently sprung up out of concern about some of these issues.
00:18:30
Speaker
Unfortunately, much of this research, in scare quotes, is biased, its goal being foreordained, to absolve victims of any responsibility for their victimization.
00:18:42
Speaker
In this respect, it is a propaganda effort on behalf of one side of the, quote, battle of the sexes, a quasi-science whose aim is to rally public opinion against victimizers,
00:18:56
Speaker
mostly men, and obtain public sympathy and absolution for victims, mostly women. The destructive aspect of such research is that it creates a paranoid view of male-female relations in which men are viewed as potential persecutors.
00:19:13
Speaker
At the same time, it rewards women for being victims, thereby fostering masochism. If a woman can get sympathy and attention and sometimes even praise for being a battered woman, and if at the same time she does not have to take responsibility for her contribution to an unhealthy relationship, ah there will be no motivation for her to grow.
00:19:37
Speaker
On the contrary, there will be a motivation for her to repeat the pattern that evokes so much sympathy and support and from which she comes out smelling like a rose while her male counterpart is castigated as a villain.
00:19:55
Speaker
Oh my god. ah Speaking of masochism, did you enjoy reading that excerpt? No. but Somehow in this relationship between the victimizers and the victims, it seems pretty clear that he thinks women are the victimizers as much as men are.
00:20:17
Speaker
Yeah, that is the paranoid fantasy. And it's something we see very much reflected today. i mean, when Me Too kicked in, how many articles by men did you see? How many clips from news anchors and such did you see where people were like, you know, you can't even flirt with a woman in the office anymore because she's going to get you fired. She's going to sue you.
00:20:42
Speaker
We're all victims now. I'm kind of interested in this victimology idea, though. It's a branch of criminology. And from what I could tell, it definitely does not seem to be based on the idea that it ought to absolve victims of responsibility for their victimization. Okay, so now he gets into what I would describe as secular complementarianism.
00:21:11
Speaker
On the other hand, research on gender roles seems to offer valid findings on how the role one is accorded in a society and the value society places on that role affect one's self-esteem and general attitude.
00:21:27
Speaker
The traditional roles of wife and mother have not been given the same respect as the traditional roles played by men. Thus, when public opinion surveys are conducted in which people are asked to rank occupations according to prestige and importance, the profession of surgeon, a traditionally male preserve, ranks first while homemaker or mother is usually ranked near the bottom.
00:21:50
Speaker
Nor are traditional women's roles portrayed as heroic in the popular media, as traditional men's roles are. We have been deluged with novels, plays, movies, and television shows about physicians, while there have been few works about the heroics of homemaking or motherhood.
00:22:07
Speaker
Such cultural influences cannot help but affect the relationship between the sexes and contribute to sexual animosity. They reinforce feminism and masculinism and bring about a competitive atmosphere between men and women, who vie for the same roles, rather than a complementary atmosphere.
00:22:24
Speaker
They have also had a destructive impact on the family and on child rearing. Since it is grunt old mother, unhappy with her role is less likely to care for her children with the same enthusiasm as a mother who is happy with her role.
00:22:36
Speaker
Okay, so first off, Complementarianism, usually a religious doctrine, which says essentially that men and women are made in different ways by God, and they are in a sense equal, but their intended roles are complementary.
00:22:53
Speaker
They support each other. In particular, they are different. He is doing a secular version of that. And a standard part of complementarian arguments is the claim that the problem with women being relegated to, say, a homemaking role is really that homemakers are not prestigious enough, that it is not socially acceptable for women to be at home.
00:23:23
Speaker
which of course is just a dodge of the real issues involved, which is women being forced into being homemakers, which is homemakers being underpaid if they are paid at all.
00:23:34
Speaker
It's fascinating because it's it is one of those things which continues to sort of haunt contemporary feminist discourse, which is like, It ought to be possible for someone in a family unit to say, like, yes, this is, like, a role that I want to take and should be, like, respected as, like, somebody who's actually doing labor towards, like, providing care for their family.
00:23:59
Speaker
while at the same time also acknowledging that there's like forces that are making women do this like against their will, right? I mean, this is a discussion that feminists actively have. Right. like It's a real discussion, and there's real sides to it. And it always ends up being used as this like cudgel by anti-feminists.
00:24:18
Speaker
Okay, now we're going to get into a little bit of his cranky elaboration on Freud's Sigmund Freud was also fond of dualities. In the beginning of his career, he conceived of libidinal energy as having both a sexual and an aggressive component.
00:24:36
Speaker
He later developed his dual instinct theory, postulating separate sexual and aggressive drives, which he called eros and with thanatos. Eros and thanatos.
00:24:48
Speaker
Eros and Thanatos, in their broadest sense, might be viewed as Western equivalents of yin and yang. This is not true. Sorry, that's me editorializing. That's not. but No.
00:24:59
Speaker
Eros is peace and love. Thanatos is aggression and hate. Eros is expansion. Thanatos is contraction. Eros is positive. Thanatos is negative. Although Freud did not refer to Eros and Thanatos as symbols of the masculine and feminine...
00:25:17
Speaker
he did give to Thanatos a connotation of back to the womb, which would suggest feminine meaning. Moreover, the fact that he built his clinical theories around the resolution of the Oedipus and Electra complexes, a dual concept if not a duality, is evidence of the significance he attributed to the relationship between men and women. Okay, so this is all wrong. So as you were pointing out, there's no real connection between Eros and Thanatos and yin and yang. He admits in the text right here that Freud himself did not describe Eros and Thanatos as masculine and feminine.
00:25:55
Speaker
He described them as the life and death drives and gave them no gender connotation. Yeah, sometimes Eros is like the sex drive. Libido. The death drive is a later invention, right? So he theorized a lot about Eros and a lot of early Freudian work is about how sex drives everything, right? Everything's about sex. This is like the conception a lot of people have of Freud is that really he's saying like everyone just wants to fuck all the time and that's what's driving all of human behavior. And then later he comes along and says, no, actually there's this other drive and it's intention with the sex drive and it's
00:26:32
Speaker
the death drive, right? And this is Eros and Thanatos. It's absolutely not masculine and feminine. That's crazy. and the The link here, the single Jenga block that he's building his whole connection here is that Thanatos has a connotation of, quote, back to the womb. i don't mean he cites ah This is a quote cited from some of Freud's work. And that's fascinating because he's just saying, okay, also like woman equals womb.
00:27:02
Speaker
Freud is saying the... Death drive is this is a kind of self-annihilating drive, and it is this push towards... Toward prior states.
00:27:15
Speaker
Right, back to the womb. He's talking about being the fetus in a womb. He's not talking about... ah It's such weird connection to be like, that means it's the feminine force. By the way, when he says the Oedipus and Electrocomplexes are a dual concept, if not a duality... First off, I have no idea what a dual concept, if not a duality, means...
00:27:34
Speaker
But I think he's trying to skirt around the fact that Freud just doesn't view them that way. So the, quote, electrocomplex is the female equivalent of the Oedipus complex. And it brings me pain that I'm about to describe this at all. But the concept of the ah Oedipus complex is that little kids see their moms and they want to fuck them. And this creates a rivalry with their dads.
00:28:01
Speaker
And Freud just didn't really talk about a female equivalent of this. Jung did, and he named it the electric complex. And Freud hated that he did that and said, no, no, no these are not just like dual counterparts.
00:28:17
Speaker
But he really wants to pound home this duality thing. It's an important part of his centrism apparently. And so he just lies about what Freud says. I don't know too much about Jung.
00:28:29
Speaker
But the Jungian who this reminds me of the most is Jordan Peterson. This is Jordan Peterson shit. Talking about women as the death drive, as destruction, as the force of destruction, right? women Men and women are yin and yang, are Eros and Thanatos.
00:28:46
Speaker
This is Jordan Peterson shit. Like, this is... Unfortunately, you know, this guy was like, okay, this guy is obscure, like he didn't ever have cultural influence. Unfortunately, this idea has huge cultural influence. There's lots of people who who think men and women are locked in this eternal battle of creation and destruction.
00:29:03
Speaker
and seeing it spelled out so clearly like this just makes it so clear how stupid it is. Okay, so he spends some time setting up the idea that mothers fuck up their kids by subtly giving them bad vibes during infancy.
00:29:21
Speaker
This is a really important concept to him.
Analysis of Theories on Gender Development
00:29:24
Speaker
He then gets into Melanie Klein's work on what's called the object relations theory of childhood development, which he's a huge fan of.
00:29:34
Speaker
So I'm going to tell you honestly that I did not read any of Melanie Klein's books on this. The main one was 400 pages long. i was like, I'm not doing that.
00:29:46
Speaker
But I will note that earlier he described Freud as being criticized for two favoring his daughter, Anna Freud. Anna Freud was the main opponent of object relations theory.
00:29:58
Speaker
This is part of his participation in one of these episodes of factionalism that you talked about. Okay, so here's his summary of a bunch of Klein's work. And I'm being straightforward and saying, I don't know how accurate this is. Before I get into reading this factionalism, one thing I wanted to pull out in an earlier excerpt When he's talking about victimology, he puts research in scare quotes.
00:30:22
Speaker
And I think as we as we go into digging into like the specific fights between these fields, I just want to note like there's something funny about trying to draw the boundaries around like real research versus like fake research when this is what passes for research in...
00:30:39
Speaker
his mind. Klein contends that the seeds of gender aggression or sexual animosity are laid during the initial relationship between the infant and the mother's breast.
00:30:54
Speaker
According to Klein, the first objects that an infant interjects are the good mother and the bad mother, as represented by the mother's breast. Oh my god.
00:31:07
Speaker
When the breast is gratifying, the child thinks of it as good. If the breast is not there when the child wants it, the child thinks of it as bad. For the girl, the desire to suck or devour the penis is directly derived from her desire to do the same to her mother's breast. If she experiences the breast as a good breast, she will have positive feelings about it and feel grateful.
00:31:35
Speaker
If, due to repeated frustration, the child experiences the breast as bad, she will have negative feelings about it and will envy its power over her and want to devour it. Thus, Klein finds that the predisposition to penis envy begins at this stage.
00:31:55
Speaker
Not only do the envy and hatred she feels toward her mother color and intensify her sadistic fantasies against the penis, but her relations to the mother's breast affect her subsequent attitude towards men in other ways as well.
00:32:10
Speaker
Klein places the beginnings of the masculinity complex at this stage.
00:32:18
Speaker
For the boy, the breast is... This is going to be so damaging to you, Helen. I'm so sorry. For the boy, the breast is the precursor of the castration complex, which in turn leads to animosity and fear of women. If the boy experiences the breast is gratifying.
00:32:37
Speaker
he will think of it as a good breast and through a process of identification and then interjection, he will think of his penis as a good penis.
00:32:48
Speaker
On the other hand, if he experiences the breast as frustrating, he will perceive it as a bad breast and think of his penis as a bad penis.
00:33:00
Speaker
yeah i think At the same time... is killing me. This is killing At the same time, he also imagines that his mother has a penis, or several penises, inside her. These penises originally belonging to the father...
00:33:22
Speaker
If the boy experiences the breast as a bad breast, he then assumes that the penises inside the mother are also bad, and he will then turn away from her, and later from women in general, not wanting to assault them with his bad penis or to risk being assaulted by their internal bad penises. Thus, the initial relationship between the male infant and the breast lays a primitive superstructure in the unconscious that will affect all the future relationships with women.
00:33:52
Speaker
I've only got one thing to say about this, Sarah. Tits and a dick, best of both of worlds.
00:34:05
Speaker
Oh
00:34:12
Speaker
my god. I'm crying a little.
00:34:18
Speaker
Okay, yeah, so quote, research, end quote. Yeah, I'm really glad that I drew that out because bracketing for a second all the insane stuff we just read.
00:34:30
Speaker
which we're going to get into, the criticism of the feminist psychoanalysts as being too angry and yelling and clouding conversation.
00:34:41
Speaker
There is this obsession with like real discourse and real research and good thinking being characterized by like being able to talk calmly, which, like sure, there's this there's a certain element of of that which which makes sense, where you can say...
00:34:58
Speaker
If people are yelling, it's impossible to have a good conversation, right? But there's this, like, obsession with your own, like, logical goodness, where it's like, oh, I'm like a rational person. And so therefore, like, the conclusions I come to, and like, the things that I think about are are therefore rational, which is like, inherently at odds with actually...
00:35:19
Speaker
doing scientific exploration. And it's, I don't even think necessarily that like doing the scientific method and running double blind studies in the context of clinical psychology is like the only way to understand human psychology.
00:35:34
Speaker
But that's clearly what he wants to be kind of attaching himself to by talking about his research being good and versus, versus biased research that is just trying to make women victims.
00:35:47
Speaker
But it's crazy to compare like The thing he's trying to paint is this insane, you know this paranoid view of the sexes, which is just that men are victimizers and women are victims. And you know this this is over reading the view of male female relations. it's It's creating a paranoid view. This is so much more paranoid. like This whole thing is so it's reading so much more onto male female relations, right? like Saying that like, oh, women are victims.
00:36:18
Speaker
That's too paranoid. But thinking that during their early childhood, that relationship to the mother's breast is going to completely structure like the relationship you have for the rest of your life to like penises, and you're going to be imagining women as having various internal penises. like That is so much more paranoid, right? Like, how is that not a paranoid view? Where does he get off? Accusing the feminists of doing this, like, over-reading when he's here. yeah talking about how babies are developing and intensifying their sadistic fantasies against penises. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? it's so wild.
00:36:56
Speaker
There's like nothing to debunk here, because there's there's just nothing there's just nothing to it, right? This melange of breasts and penises like that he's just like thinking about constantly, it's so... Flying at you like a blizzard, like, what do you do with this? She has several penises inside her the originally belonged to the father, like, what does that mean?
00:37:17
Speaker
Like, the father is the generator of penises? like The generator of internal bad penises, yes. Yeah! Okay, so a theme we're seeing being developed here is the thing I mentioned earlier, where women are fucking up their kids. In particular, if you lavish a bunch of care on your infants, but you do so too impersonally, that causes problems.
00:37:41
Speaker
He describes how this works with boys, and then he throws out the following passage. In studying female homosexuality, okay, here we fucking go, female homosexuality.
00:37:55
Speaker
Kahn found a similar mother-infant relationship. He noted a form of pathogenic mothering in which the latent depression or overt hypochondriacal anxious depressiveness and lack of true affectivity toward the infant girl results in a kind of symbiosis.
00:38:12
Speaker
As was the case with male children, these mothers do not relate to the girl's whole self. Instead, they bind them in a symbiosis in which the infant is required to respond to the mother's needs rather than the reverse.
00:38:26
Speaker
A split then takes place. Mental ego development becomes dissociated from body ego development. The body ego becomes allied with the mother and her her mood while the mental ego tends to exploit the erogeneity of the body orifices and body surface out of an attempt to make restitution to the mother, to the deprived body ego, and to compensate for inner anxieties provoked by muted rage and anger.
00:38:56
Speaker
Such a child will develop a precocious form of masturbation as a self-consoling technique, which the mother will attempt to prohibit.
00:39:07
Speaker
This prohibition will only intensify the conflict and guilt and at the same time turn these activities into an omnipotent means of provoking a response from the mother. The sadomasochistic vicissitudes of the process...
00:39:19
Speaker
Khan states, can lead to a very profound predisposition towards pathological object relations and distortions of both the instinctual life and ego functions later. Well, that seems pretty clear to me.
00:39:34
Speaker
Okay, I think I need a second to parse this, actually. So he's saying... Oh, Helen, this is such a fool's errand. So the depressed mom ends up getting... requiring emotional...
00:39:47
Speaker
fulfillment from the the kid okay yeah this doesn't make any sense at all right it's just a wall of gibberish right like there's a there's a phenomenon that exists that corresponds to something he's maybe pointing to with his first sentence yeah this is crazy this is oh my god ah Helen, do you appreciate the mental distress I've been in? Because I've read this 300-page book cover-to-cover several times, and so much of it is like this.
00:40:20
Speaker
I mean, he's basically saying that depressed moms make their daughters lesbian AGPs. Yeah.
00:40:31
Speaker
Oh my god.
00:40:35
Speaker
Excerpt time. He's going to talk about Fred some more. For girls, the castration complex, parentheses, penis envy involves the awareness that little boys have something they do not a penis.
00:40:46
Speaker
Freud, citing a 1918 text, agrees with Klein and others that penis envy begins at an earlier phase of development that is before the age of three and is more closely allied to primal narcissism than to object love.
00:41:04
Speaker
In other words, little girls feel a lack of a penis as a blow to their self-esteem. Hence, it is a narcissistic injury.
00:41:15
Speaker
They feel cheated, first by their mothers, then by their fathers. For little girls, it is a shock, the effect of which is difficult to overcome. it is comparable, perhaps, to the shock of discovering one's own mortality.
00:41:30
Speaker
Freud explains, from the analyses of many neurotic women, we have learned that women go through an early phase in which they envy their brothers the token of maleness and feel themselves handicapped and ill-treated on account of it. He goes on to say, a mother's favoring of a brother over a sister can lead to an exacerbation of penis envy and resentment of the brother, which in turn leads later to an animosity toward men in general.
00:41:54
Speaker
In addition, Freud describes a link between penis envy and feminism. and this is a quote from Freud. Now, upon this penis envy follows that hostile embitterment displayed by women against men, never entirely absent in the relations between the sexes, the clearest indications of which are to be found in the writings and ambitions of emancipated women.
00:42:18
Speaker
Oh my god. There is something here which is like women see the way that their parents treat their brother compared to themselves and it creates a kind of envy which shapes their psychology and shapes the relations between men and women.
00:42:41
Speaker
That is true. And then there's this whole layer on top where they're like, and also it's all about penises, which just doesn't make any fucking sense. And this is exactly the problem, right?
00:42:54
Speaker
Freud is correct. From the analyses of many neurotic women, we have learned that women go through an early phase in which they envy their brothers and feel themselves handicapped and ill-treated on account of it.
00:43:06
Speaker
Yeah. like I don't think Freud necessarily discovered this, but an explanation that like the source of animosity between men and women starts very early from this differential treatment between male and female children – like is true, and it's important to notice, and it's important to study.
00:43:26
Speaker
And then to just shove this like, oh so it must be about penises is so fucking stupid. Well, when you dislocate the issue onto the penises, what you're making it is a matter of biological destiny.
00:43:40
Speaker
You're exempting yourself from the need to engage in social negotiation around how this dynamic should work. It's baked in. Okay, he's going to start defending Freud against charges of sexism.
00:43:53
Speaker
Unfortunately, Freud used provocative language throughout his writings about female development. He writes that the effect of the castration complex on the girl is that she, quote, acknowledges the fact of her castration, the consequent superiority of the male and her own inferiority.
Defense and Critique of Freudian Language
00:44:10
Speaker
Freud means here that the girl acknowledges the apparent superiority of the male's sexual organ, and in her mind, the male himself then appears superior as well. He also writes, quote, There is yet another surprising effect of penis envy or of discovery of the inferiority of the clitoris, end quote. Here again, he means the apparent inferiority of the clitoris.
00:44:37
Speaker
This kind of language lends itself to misinterpretation. This is so funny to me. He's like, that thing you read, it's not that thing you just read. it didn't mean what it said.
00:44:48
Speaker
You know, it's interesting because I said, you know, we didn't need to necessarily get into the sort of the extra layer of like transness that like both of us would be much more skeptical of this notion of penis envy.
00:45:01
Speaker
And the idea of the vagina is like not having any existence. But one of the motors towards like better understanding this anatomy is the development of like vaginoplasty as a surgery. And it is true that early vaginoplasty is one of the things that was worse is that doctors thought vaginoplasty like didn't understand like the structure of the clitoris and that it's actually like there's like a much more complicated internal structure that isn't just like the thing you see on the outside.
00:45:26
Speaker
That understanding had developed much more by the 80s than it was in like 1925 when Freud is writing. And so you have to play this game because if you want to say like Freud's writing specifically about penises and vaginas as being the fundamental carrier of all male and female psychology,
00:45:45
Speaker
you have to say like, oh, he didn't mean that because it's just like, even if you want to be a hardcore Freudian, like he's just wrong about that. Like there's just something he's straightforwardly wrong about. And say so you need to just make up like, oh, he didn't say that. Like, of course he's going to say this because he wants to be a Freudian and Freud was just straightforwardly wrong about what a vagina was. This is part of why I wanted to emphasize at the start that this is not the Freud episode, is because this guy is so willing to misrepresent Freud. This is like the most blatant example. But also in the previous excerpt, he said that Freud agrees with Klein about the age at which penis envy starts.
00:46:22
Speaker
No, he doesn't. I drank a bunch of Freud before this episode started, and it's it's just not true. He's completely willing to lie about the guy, which ah limits our ability to create a critique of Freud through this episode through Shona Wolf.
00:46:38
Speaker
He isn't really even talking about Freudianism. He's talking about his own his own ideas about what like the relation between the sexes is, and then just reading it onto some Freud. Yeah. So now he has a chapter devoted largely to a typology of male narcissists.
Narcissism: Male and Female Perspectives
00:46:56
Speaker
There is the phallic narcissist. Helen, can you guess what the cause of phallic narcissism is? It's gotta be like
00:47:06
Speaker
penis too small. Wrong. It's the mother. There's the passive narcissist. Can you guess what the cause of the passive narcissist is? Okay. I'm going to guess it's the mother.
00:47:19
Speaker
Wow, you got it. Okay, there's the anal narcissist. Can you guess what the cause of the anal narcissist is? Well, he's a centrist, and we've already had two that are the fault of the mother, so for balance, it's definitely the father, right? the mother. Damn! Moral narcissist? Can you guess what the cause of that is?
00:47:38
Speaker
Okay, uh...
00:47:44
Speaker
Did you just blame everything on the mother?
00:47:47
Speaker
It's the mother. There's the psychopathic narcissist. Can you guess what the cause that is? Okay, I think I've learned this game. It's the mother. It's the mother. There's the reverse narcissist. Cause.
00:47:58
Speaker
The mother mother. There's the psychotic narcissist. Cause. He actually doesn't say. only gestures vaguely. But I'm guessing he gestures at the mother.
00:48:10
Speaker
It's too vague even for that. Okay. I'm just going to infer through the power of scientific induction. Yeah. Probably thinks it's the mother. Oh my God.
00:48:21
Speaker
So then he gets into a chapter devoted to a typology of female narcissists. Masculine aggressive narcissism.
00:48:33
Speaker
The masculine aggressive is sometimes referred to as the phallic woman. as she represents the girl who does not give up the fantasy of having a penis even when she becomes an adult.
00:48:48
Speaker
Many masculine aggressives take pride in their intelligence. It was this type that Reich called the big brain hysteric. These women often say that men are afraid of them because of their intelligence, but it is actually they who are afraid of intelligent men.
00:49:06
Speaker
Upon meeting a man who threatens them, they attempt to castrate him psychologically by conquering him with their brain slash phallus. That is, they try to outsmart him.
00:49:16
Speaker
Many leading feminist writers are masculine aggressives of big brain hysteric variety. Phallic woman mentioned. I find very entertaining his conflation of the brain slash phallus. He literally puts a slash between those two things. I find the phrase big brain hysteric very funny.
00:49:36
Speaker
I love the concept that being smarter than a man is castration. A woman who is smarter than you is a threat to your penis? is an idea that exists in the culture, and I think it kind of is due to Freud. like i'm I'm struggling to think of pre-Freudian expressions of this, right? Not being threatened by a smarter woman, but specifically… This is why I went to grad school. I wanted to be surrounded by smarter women for exactly this reason.
00:50:05
Speaker
Then why did you go to such a male-dominated field? Because I'm stupid. I don't know. And you know, it's not like, I don't know if he invented it, right? Like I'm sure someone can point to like this idea of being older or whatever, but it's just so funny.
00:50:17
Speaker
like can I highlight also the double standard on display here where when we talk about male violence against women, we're talking about actual male violence that occurs. When he talks about the feminist counterpart of this, we're just talking about a woman making him feel stupid.
00:50:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's like a woman being smarter than you, right? Because it's not even like a woman intentionally making you feel stupid or a woman like insulting you, right? He's talking about leading feminist writers, right? A woman who has opinions and writes them down.
00:50:49
Speaker
Could not give less of a fuck about him personally. Yeah. Okay, here's another type. This is the hysteric type of female narcissist.
00:51:00
Speaker
Many hysterics are attractive and seductive, containing conveying a message that they are sexually available. Yet the hysteric will turn on the man who makes a sexual advance and sometimes ridicule him.
00:51:13
Speaker
The degree of animosity varies. Some hysterics can be charming, competent women whose animosity is minimal and subtly expressed. Others can be lethal, driving men to an impotent, violent rage or to abject apathy.
00:51:27
Speaker
Movies such as The Blue Angel, in which a nightclub dancer drives a middle-aged college professor to ruin, provide graphic and moving illustrations of this theme. A typical maneuver of the angriest type of hysteric is to act seductively towards a male authority figure, such as a boss.
00:51:44
Speaker
When the boss makes an advance, she spurns him. The man, enraged, retaliates by firing her or with some other punitive action. She then sues him for sexual harassment.
00:51:57
Speaker
Unfortunately, men are usually too embarrassed to sue women for sexual harassment, although, as in this instance, it does happen. This is really vile.
00:52:08
Speaker
Yeah, this is true Odium right here. He's taken the typical account of actual workplace sexual harassment. a woman is harassed by her boss.
00:52:19
Speaker
And then when she complains, when she tries to protect herself, she's fired. And he says, that's actually sexual harassment on the part of the victim. Yeah. I mean, I think there's this very, very, very classic heightened of misogyny that I don't know if we've had an occasion to really get into on the podcast before, although I'm a little surprised it hasn't come up earlier, which is the bind I mean, it has come a little bit. The bind between.
00:52:51
Speaker
Like women are expected to make themselves pretty, but then doing so is actually for like for the purpose of seducing other men.
00:53:03
Speaker
We saw it a little bit in the Cato episode when they're talking, you know, because that was all about like. this law about being able to wear nice clothes. But there is this particular thing that like misogynists will constantly do where they're like, oh, you know, if you didn't want me to say these gross things to you, like, why did you wear like a hot outfit?
00:53:22
Speaker
Every aspect of a woman's presentation or even interior life really has to be about the harasser. She's not allowed to have a domain of expression or thought that's her own.
00:53:35
Speaker
Yeah, and it's even like taking this like very reasonable and understandable and like I think universal desire that's like people have to like look good and be seen as attractive is like then license for whatever advance a man wants to make, even up to like violating a woman's boundaries and and assaulting, harassing, whatever it is.
00:54:02
Speaker
And then ultimately firing her. Which, by the way, you should sue her for that. Right, because like this whole idea, what does acting seductively toward a male authority figure mean, right? like You showed your ankles in the workplace?
00:54:17
Speaker
You wore a low-cut top and you had your hair down one day? like I mean, you think about a guy like our boy Gerald here. I'm pretty sure he can take basically anything to be an invitation.
00:54:31
Speaker
Right. it really doesn't matter what the standards are it doesn't matter what the woman's intent is it's all internal to him part of what he's getting at here is in general i don't think he wants women to have any way to protect themselves and i think we'll see that in the next excerpt which is about the female anal narcissist anal narcissism female anal narcissists like male anals tend to have sadomasochistic relationships
00:55:03
Speaker
They may be sadistic or masochistic, and they will have a strong, obsessive-compulsive strap substructure to their character.
00:55:12
Speaker
The sadist views men as beasts who need to be tamed. Their penises and everything else about them is seen as dirty, including their feces, urine, and sperm. She will attempt to dominate...
00:55:27
Speaker
and train her spouse, nagging him about lifting the toilet lid before he urinates or insisting that he use condoms during sex.
00:55:41
Speaker
Oh boy. There's quite a swerve here between the really comical complaint that he has here that sometimes women don't want you to piss all over the toilet suit.
00:55:56
Speaker
And then him saying, by the way, women should not be allowed to insist on birth control. That is an attempt at domination. is an attempt at training. It is narcissistic.
00:56:09
Speaker
The complete and utter rejection of like any conversation about, like oh, like maybe this woman is actually worried about getting pregnant and like wants to control have control over her body. And it's just like, she thinks his sperm is dirty.
00:56:27
Speaker
It's so stupid and it's so insulting to you, the reader. like Not only is he stupid, he thinks you're stupid and he's laughing at you as he writes this. Whether or not he believes it, on some level he is enjoying how stupid this is. He has to be.
00:56:46
Speaker
Well, we'll get into it later. But to be honest, like I kind of believe in his genuineness. I don't know. like I really don't think he can believe... that not wanting not wanting to sit on a piss covered toilet is obsessive cleanliness like this is either like if he's really genuine this is the stupidest motherfucker alive i think he might be the stupidest motherfucker alive oh my fucking god i'm so sorry all right hit me with the next excerpt i i don't know what else to say about this guy
00:57:25
Speaker
Okay, so now we're going to get into the effects of sexual animosity on society. Almost immediately, he describes what male narcissism is to him.
00:57:38
Speaker
It's identifying yourself as a man first, then as a human being, extolling masculinity and disparaging femininity. On the other hand, being a female narcissist means identifying as a woman first, then a human being,
00:57:53
Speaker
disowning the masculine part of yourself and extolling femininity. You become identified with femaleness and with the ideology of feminism.
00:58:05
Speaker
And then we start to go off the rails. Cardiner, 1954, examines the effects of mass movements on male-female relations and on society.
00:58:17
Speaker
And he takes a view similar to Hoffer's, asking whether the feminist movement, women's increasing aggressiveness, and men's increasing passivity are related to the enormous rise in homosexuality and mass movements.
00:58:31
Speaker
He wonders whether this increase in homosexuality will lead to a society in which homosexual values become the dominant force, in which the heterosexual lifestyle and the family gradually disappear. He wonders whether our society can survive such a trend, asserting that the separation of the sexes as typified by homosexuality leads to a decrease in the number of opportunities to be masculine and feminine, which in turn depresses self-esteem and gives rise to aggression and hatred.
00:59:01
Speaker
So he's citing this guy who wrote in 1954, so pre-AIDS. But writing in 1989, there's this link between homosexuality mass movements because at the time, gay people were facing mass death. Like there was a, the government was straight up ignoring a virus that was killing us in enormous numbers because they thought, oh, it's only gay people who are facing this thing.
00:59:29
Speaker
It's something which continues to have huge ramifications for like the queer community today. like There's lots of conversations about still this huge gap, this huge lack of queer elders because so many people died.
00:59:48
Speaker
To talk about the rise of homosexuality and mass movements, quote unquote, This is really bleak. To just completely ignore that context. To worry that homosexuality is becoming a dominant force like as people are dying. as i think he definitely approves of the AIDS epidemic.
01:00:09
Speaker
Right, because it's going to solve this crisis. Okay, this next excerpt is going to ramp all that
Critique of Feminist Movements and Societal Norms
01:00:15
Speaker
up. The more narcissistic a nation is... That is, the more its collective eros has been frustrated, the more viciously it will fight. Nazi Germany, which having been humiliated in World War I and then having endured a severe depression in which social pathology was rampant, frantically slaughtered people in World War II.
01:00:34
Speaker
In the context of this book, I feel very confident that the social pathology he just referred to refers to sexual degeneracy. by which I mean the relative cultural and sexual liberation experienced under the Weimar Republic.
01:00:51
Speaker
Most queer people know this, but hostility to queer people was central to Nazi ideology and to the rise to power. The first of the famous Nazi book burnings consisted of a raid on Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sex Research and its work on gay and trans people. It is my belief that what he's doing here is trying to suggest that gay people caused the Holocaust.
01:01:20
Speaker
I think he's more than trying to suggest it. I mean, he's saying straight up, like, the humiliation of World War I led to a severe depression. That depression was characterized by social pathology.
01:01:31
Speaker
And the more narcissistic a nation is, where narcissism is this... Narcissism is, like, as he's described before, right? He's just done this typology of narcissism. It doesn't necessarily... It's not quite the same thing as, like, what maybe we mean colloquially when we call someone narcissist. But this, like, obsession, this...
01:01:48
Speaker
obsession that comes from a frustration of the ego, right? He's saying this is what led to World War II is the pathology of like sexual deviance in Weimar Germany. And like, because this is another connection he draws that I didn't talk about because I was so stunned by his view of the rise of homosexuality that's completely ignoring the way that that queer people are being are dying in huge numbers. But he talks about like homosexuality is emerging out of a gender narcissism, right? Like feminism and male, sorry, feminism and female homosexuality are both arising from the narcissism of women as women and right. And male homosexuality is the narcissism of men as men. And so I don't even think it's like a suggestion. I think he is just, it is the straightforward meaning of this sentence that he's saying gay people caused the Holocaust.
01:02:46
Speaker
This is awful. This is really bad. I hate this guy. Yeah, this is this is real odium. Okay, let's do something a little bit lighter, which is to hop into the time washing machine.
01:02:59
Speaker
Yeah, I love the time washing machine. I love to be in the eternal 2025 1989.
01:03:07
Speaker
The first phase of the feminist cultural revolution, which served to intimidate opponents with its intensity and hysteria, was followed by a second stage during which a subtle political transformation occurred.
01:03:18
Speaker
The core of this stage was a kind of cultural revisionism and censorship, not unlike those that had accompanied previous cultural revolutions. Oh my god. For example, the late 1940s and early 1950s saw a right-wing cultural revolution during which, quote, McCarthyism, with its emphasis on patriotism and hatred of communism, became the prevailing value system.
01:03:42
Speaker
Books and papers propagated the new McCarthy line, and a hearing was held to purge from the government all communists and Communist Party sympathizers. if an individual even looked like a communist he might be fired censored snubbed by friends and stripped of his basic rights as a citizen similarly in the second stage of the feminist revolution feminist values with their emphasis on women's emancipation from quote male oppression replaced earlier values a new form of revisionism and censorship took hold in which quote sexists and quote sexism became the new scapegoats for women's and society's pent-up aggression
01:04:20
Speaker
An individual who became known as a sexist might have his writing censored, might be denied promotion at his job or tenure at a university, and in general might find himself snubbed, ostracized, and stigmatized by colleagues and friends.
01:04:36
Speaker
This is the time washing machine in like maybe the most extreme form we've seen so far, because I've had like exactly this conversation. Both having been mathematicians in 2020, Sarah and I will both remember.
01:04:52
Speaker
There was explicitly a letter that was published in the American Mathematical Society magazine. directly saying that the practice of asking for, or even the practice of expecting to see in job applications a diversity statement.
01:05:10
Speaker
So this practice is, you know, you can critique the practice of diversity statements, but basically there was this understanding, um and from math academia is the one I'm most familiar with, that when you're writing a job application, you include this diversity statement, which is basically a statement of, hey, we noticed that like,
01:05:27
Speaker
math is vastly disproportionately white men, and we need to actually like work actively to include other people and notice ways in which underrepresented groups are forced out of of academia.
01:05:38
Speaker
And so you should write like, what are the things that you are doing in your career to think broadly about like your social role and math as a social discipline. They published a letter, the American Mathematical Society notices published a letter which explicitly says like, oh, the practice of asking for diversity statements is actually the same as McCarthyism, if you think about it.
01:05:58
Speaker
People were dying in the streets. Yeah. They were getting shot. The discourse felt totally disconnected from reality because you know it kind of was. were all having like our genteel little arguments in which we brought out these absurd specters. Meanwhile, real oppression was happening all around us.
01:06:22
Speaker
And now here we are in 2025, and that sort of discourse seems more like a dead letter than ever. People are being rounded up and sent into concentration camps. And yet still we have to put up with this shit, the new McCarthyism, over and over and over and over and over. That's what we mean by the time washing machine.
01:06:43
Speaker
After this, he spends quite a while going on about homosexuals ruining society. He can't keep off of this theme for very long.
01:06:55
Speaker
And... It would get very repetitive if I clip too much of it, but I'm just going to send you a paragraph. This is from the end of a two-page rant about this. It was humankind's narcissism which resisted the knowledge that the world was round, that humans were descended from apes, and that human motives were largely unconscious.
01:07:15
Speaker
Similarly, homosexuals, who represent the two poles of male and female narcissism, resist the knowledge that their sexual behavior is a deviation from the norm and that such behavior on a wide scale may threaten the future of society.
01:07:28
Speaker
For homosexuality is more than an act between consenting adults. It is a long-term social movement which is destructive to male-female relations, the family, and child-rearing, since homosexuals are invariably carriers of sexual animosity and have problems with cross-sexual relationships.
01:07:45
Speaker
This is just classic homophobia, right? Like, this is just the classic homophobia. There's just nothing else to say about it. This is what people who think homosexuality is a sin, like, this is just what they think.
01:07:56
Speaker
Homosexuals are, like, the flat earthers of male-female relations. Like, it's...
01:08:03
Speaker
There's just nothing here. He then moves on to the most perfect example of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of c centrism I've ever seen.
Schoenewulf's Controversial Views on Patriarchy and Rape
01:08:15
Speaker
Neither masculinism and its aspect of misogyny, nor feminism and its undertow of hysteria is a viable form of liberation. Liberation is related to mastery of the self, not of others. What sexual narcissists call liberation is actually a kind of narcissistic sadomasochistic ritual.
01:08:35
Speaker
One which has recurred throughout history when one group rests political or moral control from another with the grandiose notion that its vision was superior to that of its predecessors.
01:08:48
Speaker
Political liberation, according to Lao Tzu, is a false liberation dependent upon the illusion of right and the forcing of that illusion on others. Spiritual liberation, the only kind of liberation that can resolve individual and social conflicts, requires self-understanding of a type advocated by psychoanalysts and by sages from ancient times to the present.
01:09:12
Speaker
Liberation means the resolution of psychic conflicts that stand in the way of gratifying the needs of eros. It entails neutralizing one's animosity and learning to live in harmony with oneself and others.
01:09:26
Speaker
It requires us to relinquish the notion that we are right and the enemy is wrong. For when one looks at life from an objective analytic perspective, there is no right or wrong. There are simply many variations of life, some adaptive, others not, all being a matter of luck. A Chinese proverb says to search for right and wrong is a sickness of the mind.
01:09:49
Speaker
This is literally that drill tweet. The wise man bowed his head and spoke. There's no difference between good and bad things. You moron. You fucking imbecile. it's just He's just doing it on the nose.
01:10:05
Speaker
By the way, I did look up this supposed proverb. First off, not a proverb. It's actually a line from a poem. The poem being about the art of meditation, the relationship between being the void.
01:10:23
Speaker
And also, it's not usually translated this way. It says, to be for or against is the disease of the mind. And again, it's talking about that in the context of meditation.
01:10:35
Speaker
I don't think it's trying to communicate anything about American centrism. You can try and read it that way. That's up to you. When I was looking this up, also, I saw it cited by Jonathan Haidt of the Coddling of the American Mind fam.
01:10:51
Speaker
That is going to be a future episode, by the way. Like, I think it's really worth getting into this this critique of centrism here for a second, right? Because I think that there's something real... about, right, what is the actual problem with centrism? Because I feel like we've both shit on centrists a lot, and we've done it in this episode, and we've also talked about it in the past, and we're both pretty anti-centrism. Like, I think centrism is, i mean, as you say, like, intellectually and morally bankrupt.
01:11:17
Speaker
So what is actually that critique? And the critique is that you're starting with this perspective, which is... you shouldn't be dogmatic about right and wrong. You shouldn't think that, you know, whatever your position on like objective morality is versus relativism versus whatever, right? You should at least recognize your own human fallibility to, to know objectively right and wrong.
01:11:44
Speaker
And there is an aspect of liberation not what he is calling spiritual, but what is, which is often called mental.
01:11:57
Speaker
And this is something which Marxist and like leftist movements are extremely aware of. There's thousands of pages by Marxists and Marx himself to move from there to saying like, actually, no,
01:12:16
Speaker
There's no such thing as like good political change. It's so empty. If you want to have this investment in like, oh, mental liberation is this process and spiritual liberation is a real thing. And you need to, you know, you need to actually resolve your own psychic conflicts. Like part of that is actually because that is a key process in your material liberation.
01:12:35
Speaker
It's totally stupid to think that there's no such thing as like material subjugation, right? Like that's what you'd have to believe to take this reading, which is to say like, oh, there's actually no such thing as political liberation. And it's like, well, no, that's obviously not true, right? You can point to very like specific political problems that like need to be solved. Yeah.
01:12:54
Speaker
Centrism is like not, there's no there's no values to it, there's no politics to it, because you you don't have actually anything you stand for, there's nothing you're fighting for. The thing that you want in centrism is to be regarded by other people as reasonable, but that's not actually a value of any kind.
01:13:09
Speaker
That's not what people usually mean when they talk about having values. I'm going to have a take on c centrism, but I'm saving it for later. And it's again, I mean, this is actually again very close to Jordan Peterson shit, right? This is like Jordan Peterson's whole thing is like, oh, instead of trying to go change the world, clean your room.
01:13:27
Speaker
Focus on caring for these basic local needs and that will empower you to like actualize yourself. That second part is like never part of the message that like, oh, that'll allow you to go out in the world and do things and change, you know, actually shape your life the way you want to. It's always like, oh, well, just keep just keep cleaning your room. Just keep, you know, never come together. Right. And and this is something we also see when he's talking about like homosexuality and math and feminism as narcissistic movements.
01:13:58
Speaker
He is saying that instead of the binding force being solidarity, being the shared recognition of your material situation, which is bringing you together try to work together to change it, it's actually narcissism.
01:14:14
Speaker
He is trying to convince us that solidarity is a form of narcissism, even though those two things could not be more opposed. It's so fucking stupid. I'm sensing some animosity toward this guy developing from you.
01:14:26
Speaker
I don't know, maybe you're locating a bunch of bad penises within him or something? Yeah, I'm actually just jealous of his penis. Hold on, there's a huge helicopter like going by the window right now. They're coming for you, Helen.
01:14:41
Speaker
They're coming to take my penis. Thank God. yeah Now I have a section titled Patriarchy, Matriarchy, or Egalitarianism. This is mostly about various animal studies and claiming that the sort of hierarchies that emerge in the natural world should govern what hierarchies exist in the human world.
01:15:06
Speaker
And spoiler, he straight up comes out in favor of patriarchy. He's like, yeah, that's the best way to do it. There is also a universal attitude of chivalry toward the female, according to Lorenz.
01:15:21
Speaker
Male dogs and wolves never bite females. Quote, absolute inhibitions against biting a female are found in hamsters, in certain finches, such as goldfinches, and even in several reptiles, for example, the South European emerald lizard.
01:15:35
Speaker
End quote. even when it appears that the female of the species is dominant in the mating of bull inches for example during which the female continually pecks at the male in reality the male remains dominant when a male bullfinch is pecked by his wife he in no way assumes a submissive attitude but on the contrary he shows sexual self- display and tenderness end quote the male is not pushed by the pecking of the female into a subordinate position this passage incredibly funny. Like, off...
01:16:06
Speaker
but rather shows his superiority by accepting her pecking without becoming aggressive himself nor does he let himself be put out of a sexual mood i find this passage incredibly funny like first off male dogs and wolves never bite females?
01:16:22
Speaker
This is not true. It's just a complete lie. I love the way he describes the male bullfinch as being pecked by his wife. Yeah, can we get into like bullfinch complementarianism? Like, okay, God made the male and the female bullfinches and they're there to support each other, but you know...
01:16:38
Speaker
ah does the Does the female bullfinch peck the male bullfinch because the female bullfinch's mother like fed her brother more worms, and so she has like worm envy? like Is the good worm and the bad worm, and then you have like a cloaca? like Does she have bad cloaca?
01:16:57
Speaker
The male bullfinch is probably full of bad worms. Yeah, she's trying to peck them out of him. Right. What? Also the pure I'm not owned energy of this. Yeah, the whole the whole thing of like, oh, you know, okay, it might look like the men are just sitting there, but actually that's them showing their superiority. Like, he's inventing like centrism for bullfinches.
01:17:19
Speaker
He's like, listen, the bullfinch is actually still full of like virile sexual energy, by the way. He doesn't let himself be put out of a sexual mood by all this. Just pure projection onto these fucking birds.
01:17:31
Speaker
Okay, the last half of the book consists of case studies. These are less entertaining, but more vicious than what proceeds.
01:17:42
Speaker
So i clipped just the single worst example that I found in those sections, but they're like terrible. I'm just not going to go over them. Once again, there is a middle ground between the position of male narcissists who assume that every woman who is raped somehow quote asks for it and the position of female narcissists who assume that no woman ever asks for it or in any way contributes to rape.
01:18:06
Speaker
There are cases in which women absolutely do not ask for it. Cases in which women are assaulted in their homes by strange intruders, for example. But there are other cases in which a woman really does ask for it.
01:18:19
Speaker
OK, so he's. Yeah. Nothing really to analyze there. Nothing funny about that. No, I mean, it's just straight up rape apology. Let's move on from the book itself and just ask, like, what the fuck is up with this guy?
01:18:34
Speaker
There is an organization, the ATCSI, which stands for the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity. In 2014, it changed from its prior name, which was NARTH, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality.
01:18:54
Speaker
Oh no. So he was on the board of this organization? Yes, that's right. A 2013 Vice article described Gerald Shonowulf by saying, quote, Dr. Gerald Shonowulf is NARTH's most prominent and loudest member, end quote.
01:19:11
Speaker
I think most of that reputation comes from a 2005 article he wrote called Gay Rights and Political Correctness, A Brief History,
01:19:21
Speaker
in which he accuses Marxism of promoting black and white thinking and suggests that it's responsible for a variety of rights movements. I am going to copy paste to you a couple of passages that got him in some hot water.
01:19:37
Speaker
Class warfare applied to racial issues. Subsequent to Marx, various human rights groups began using his ideology to rationalize their movements, particularly in America. First came the Civil Rights Movement, which began in the eighteen fifty s and was one of the causes of the Civil War.
01:19:54
Speaker
In this case, European Americans parentheses caucasians became the oppressors and African Americans became the oppressed. European Americans were demonized and African Americans were idealized.
01:20:07
Speaker
European Americans who had practiced slavery or segregation were viewed as all bad and African Americans were seen as all good. With all due respect, oh, thank God for his all due respect.
01:20:20
Speaker
There is another way or other ways to look at the race issue in America. It could be pointed out, for example, that Africa at the time of slavery was still primarily a jungle as yet uncivilized or industrialized. Life there was savage, as savage as the jungle for most people, and that it was the Africans themselves who first enslaved their own people. They sold their own people to other countries, and those brought to Europe, South America, America, and other countries were in many ways better off than they had been in Africa.
01:20:46
Speaker
But if one even begins to say these things, one is quickly shouted down as though one were a complete madman. If one tries to analyze race relations in America and point out that the liberal solution to racial discrimination tends to reinforce victimhood, again, one is quickly shouted down. We are not allowed to reason about civil rights. In fact, our whole approach to civil rights in America has been decided not by reason debate at all, but instead by a kind of mob rule and the hysteria of mob rule.
01:21:13
Speaker
It is the kind of mob rule described in such classic novels as the Oxbow Incident, in which a crowd of angry men are fueled by their growing hysteria to lynch an innocent man. The irony is that the civil rights movement has been vehement about pointing out the hysterical lynchings that took place in the Old South, but completely blind to its own hysterical tactics.
01:21:33
Speaker
Yeah, I can see why this got him in hot water. This is one of several different movements that he applies his conception of Marxism and so on to, saying that slaves were better off being slaves than than they were being free in Africa, drew condemnations from civil rights movement.
01:21:51
Speaker
There's this understanding of Marxism that a lot of people who don't really, like who are anti-Marxist or who, you know, mainstream American opinion on Marxism, which is that like, Right, and this is, again, Jordan Peterson shit. He, I think, I don't know if he coined the term, but he is, I think, the most prolific user of the term postmodern neo-Marxism, which is just this agglomeration of like, oh, I want to blame French philosophy and also communists and also, you know, just like putting together all these different groups that are kind of not the same at all and agglomerating them into this like conservative phantasm.
01:22:25
Speaker
But it's this idea that Marxism says like, oh, ruling class is evil and like exploitation is evil. And it's this like moral thing.
01:22:36
Speaker
And the thing is, Marx didn't like Marx's main contribution was not the discovery that exploitation is evil. People already knew that. People already knew exploitation was bad, and you don't need like thousands of pages of like capital and all this you know Marxism afterwards to tell you that exploitation is bad.
01:22:59
Speaker
What Marx actually did was show you that it is materially produced in society. What Marx did was actually show you the like economic... machine that produces these things. So this call for nuance, this call for understanding, which he is pretending to do and then filling in that nuance by saying, oh, the nuanced position is maybe the slaves had it better, which is absolutely horrific genocide denial.
01:23:28
Speaker
That actually is what Marxism is. It's this attempt to grapple with like the actual material reproduction of the class system outside of just a simple moral tale of these people are good and these people are bad.
01:23:46
Speaker
So that's like step one. Step two, locating the beginning of the civil rights movement as an 1850s and the cause of the civil war is fucking insane. Fascinated by that.
01:23:58
Speaker
what the fuck is he talking about? He's just talking about the abolition movement. He's asking for nuance, but first painting a picture which completely ignores the nuance that exists.
01:24:12
Speaker
And of course, but what by nuance, he means the position that just like lets him live his life the way he wants to and not have to think about his role in any of this. right This is the other part of centrism, is that centrism is obsessed with... right venerating like, oh, your ability to look between the two extremes and and focus on a more mental liberation. But then the outcome of it is always so fucking convenient for the centrist because it never actually asks you to do anything that's uncomfortable.
01:24:44
Speaker
It is the complete, like, you just look at the world and you say, oh, well, actually, maybe it's more complicated. Maybe we should think a little bit more. And then you never have to fucking do anything.
01:24:55
Speaker
And actually, the fact that you never think about like the wider political ramifications of your actions or what your ethical obligations are to your narrowly your community and more broadly your community, like the fact that you never consider that is actually somehow a virtue now, because actually it's coming out of your understanding of nuance. And maybe slavery wasn't that bad.
01:25:18
Speaker
he did not end up getting kicked off North Sport for this. Okay, also I wanted to say, Narth, I'm assuming it's a conversion therapy group. It's a conversion therapy group. Okay, we should just explicitly say that, because I think both of us sort of immediately understood that when it talked about the research and treatment of homosexuality.
01:25:34
Speaker
The thing they're researching is how to quote-unquote cure homosexuality. Yeah, maybe we should actually say that conversion therapy is the process of applying psychological pressure to people to convince them that they have been cured of their homosexuality.
01:25:51
Speaker
Sometimes it involves physical torture. it's ah It's bad stuff. By the way, is far from the only place where he expresses these kinds of views.
01:26:02
Speaker
oh of course. Yeah. He has a 1991 book, The Art of Hating. i looked in that. I found an excerpt about South Africa that was... Real bad.
01:26:12
Speaker
Wait, The Art of Hating? The Art of Hating. Mostly I just really wanted to mention the title of that book. I kind of love that. I kind of want to read that now. and I mean, somebody should write a good book titled The Art of Hating. This is not it. It's just the same shit we've been reading.
01:26:28
Speaker
Okay. Gosh. So, okay. I really wanted to understand like who this guy was. And as I looked around, three things developed.
01:26:40
Speaker
First, I couldn't find any indication that he has a personal life. He never describes his personal journey or narrative, and nobody else writes about it.
01:26:52
Speaker
In an archived version of his old website, which no longer exists, I found out he's been married three times and seems to have one kid. That's all I could get.
01:27:04
Speaker
Second, this guy is still around.
Schoenewulf's Creative Projects and Controversies
01:27:07
Speaker
He's in his late 80s at this point, and he loves to make content. He writes screenplays. He writes books.
01:27:14
Speaker
He writes poems. He writes songs. He writes poem songs. He makes movies. He churns this stuff out. I found his YouTube channel. Here's a clip from a video he has titled, Who Am I?
01:27:29
Speaker
Introducing himself. I have not edited this at all.
01:27:50
Speaker
What? Words are flashing on the screen about how he's resisting political correctness. Oh my gosh.
01:28:00
Speaker
Hello. My name is Gerald Shana-Wolfe. And i wanted to take a moment to introduce myself before I continue these podcasts that are under the general title of Psychoanalysis Now.
01:28:17
Speaker
Okay, so he's a podcaster. I'm kind of speechless right now. Let me caveat that by saying i have no evidence that this podcast actually exists. I could not find it So I think he made the video intending to start a podcast series, and then he just never did it. Here he is describing his recent work of biographical fiction.
01:28:38
Speaker
Hello, I'm Gerald Shainewolf, a psychoanalyst and writer. I've just published a new book called Lizzie. It's a biographical novel about Lizzie Borden, which I think is the most authentic portrait of her ever written.
01:28:54
Speaker
I'd like to read you a chapter from the book about when she was molested by her father when she was six years old. Chapter five. Oh no.
01:29:06
Speaker
It was very dark in daddy's room and Lizzie could barely see her daddy. Okay, I cut it off there. no. Are you okay, Helen?
01:29:17
Speaker
I don't know if I'm okay. helen I don't know. if i'm okay
01:29:24
Speaker
wait The listeners can't listeners don't know this, but we have video feeds, and the look of pain on your face right now is indescribable.
01:29:35
Speaker
I've never seen you like this. I'm really glad you cut that off, because I was really like preparing myself for, like, okay, how is he going to like describe... like No, there's no way I would subject you to that.
01:29:46
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Like, because of course he thinks like Lizzie Borden, like he, she was like chopping up, like I'm imagining this book is just like her chopping up her parents and try to uncover the bad penises inside of them, right? Like that's what he thinks is happening.
01:30:00
Speaker
right He has a longstanding obsession with Lizzie Borden. In the Sexual Animosity book, one of the case studies is the study of someone named Lizzie, and he explicitly mentions her resemblance to Lizzie Borden.
01:30:20
Speaker
I looked and there is no evidence whatsoever that Lizzie Borden, who is most famous for allegedly murdering her parents and then being acquitted, there is no evidence whatsoever that she was abused by her parents.
01:30:34
Speaker
and I haven't really read up on Lizzie Borden, but that was not part of my understanding of of that story at all. It is quite a choice for him to choose this chapter to read. None of the other chapters of this book are up on YouTube.
01:30:47
Speaker
I think it's worth saying one of the maybe mainstream liberal objections to conversion therapy or the ways people try to argue with it is to say that it does not work.
01:30:58
Speaker
That's not really related to why I'm against it. Like, and it's a little worrying to think that if somebody came out tomorrow and said, oh, we found this method of conversion therapy that works, that somehow this would mean that the liberal consensus that conversion therapy should be banned would maybe start like wavering.
01:31:16
Speaker
Like the thing that's bad about conversion therapy is like, that it is torturing children. And in particular, it's often very pedophilic. The way that they that these like monsters try to, quote unquote, cure homosexuality is often like encouraging, you know somehow trying to encourage children to have the right kind of sexual feelings towards the like the proper gender, right whichever.
01:31:43
Speaker
Part of how that technique is also done is like, oh, if you know a young boy is gay, that's because he didn't get the right affection from his father. And so he's displacing this onto some you know homosexual urge. And so the way to do this is to actually have the right kind of same-sex affection.
01:32:06
Speaker
And so it often ends up with therapists, quote unquote, right? These these conversion therapists either like directly themselves forcing themselves on these kids or sort of forcing kids into affection with each other. Right. But in this very, in a way, which I think is just straightforwardly assault, but it all stems from this obsession with child sexuality, this obsession with, with child sexual development and trying to control and be involved in child sexuality, which is just straightforwardly pedophilic.
01:32:48
Speaker
It's so disgusting. And that's part of why I was in so much pain going into this chapter, because I realized, like, oh, this is his, like, pedophilic urge, which is the same reason he's, like, doing these things to kids in his, like, research of the treatment of homosexuality. Like, he's going to, like, vent that in this book about Lizzie Borden, where he has this, like, sexual erotic imagination about her being abused by her dad.
01:33:16
Speaker
Now, this guy is still alive, so I can't say that he is a... Yeah. Okay, so I looked up some of his works of fiction, and please enjoy this first description, which ties in very well to what we were just talking about.
01:33:37
Speaker
Testimonials for Dr. Shona Wolf's works. From a review of his feature film, Therapy. Although the wind chill was in single digits, the public screening of Dr. Gerald Schoenwolf's film Therapy at Anthology Film Archives' new filmmaker series was hot stuff indeed. Featuring but a few actors, Therapy portrays a budding therapist, male, his female patient, her father, and psychiatric supervisors. Doc and patient become romantically involved after she reports having been sexually abused.
01:34:09
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Let's chalk that up as a mark in favor of our unspoken hypothesis. Which we are not alleging. Right. Okay. So this one is called The Mayor Who Kissed an Intern with possibly what I might describe as the most self-published book cover of all time.
01:34:32
Speaker
And the it's like big block of text. Mayor who kissed an intern in like a sans serif font is taking up half the page and the other half of the page has got his name, Gerald Schoenwolf. And then this photo is like reproduction of a like sort of Picasso style cubist portrait. But it's not a Picasso. It's like some.
01:34:53
Speaker
um Presumably some like free, you know, copyright free image that he's allowed to use, like portrait of a woman in this kind of vaguely cubist style. But actually, it's not really cubist at all. Like everything is kind of placed correctly and it just looks weird.
01:35:05
Speaker
Here's the description of the book. The mayor who kissed an intern is a scathing satire of feminism and the woke agenda that has taken over American culture, centering on the relationship between Joey Mercutio, the self-effacing mayor of San Francisco, and Lily Bell Lee Witherspoon, a beautiful and eager intern. The book follows their story as she relentlessly seduces him into kissing her, then accuses him of rape.
01:35:31
Speaker
Since he is a beloved mayor, it is a great shock when her accusation is announced by feminist attorney Deborah Bittner on the steps of City Hall on a hot summer day. Before long, the mayor is reviled by liberal politicians and reporters across the world and required to sit before a panel and a booing crowd of over 100,000 people in a stadium near San Francisco Bay. Only his wife, Riley Wang...
01:35:57
Speaker
loves him as Joey waits for the verdict by a biased feminist panel. Ultimately, he is forced to vacate his job as mayor when the presiding judge, Lucinda Hogsford, announces, we find Joey mi Mercutio guilty of first-degree sexual degradation with intent,
01:36:18
Speaker
2nd degree sexual indignity with gross male toxication, 3rd degree sexual effrontery with unabashed masculine misanthropy, and finally, in all due disrespect, we find him guilty of 4th degree demonization of a woman, along with 1st, 2nd, and 4th degree objectification of the third kind.
01:36:42
Speaker
The story goes on to tell of Joey developing his garden, of Lily Bell's mercy fuck, of the lesbian party at City celebrating the banishing of all males to reprogramming camps, of a second panel which sentences Joey to be worshipped horse-whipped by Lily Bell, and to his, quote, and to, quote, his penis and testicles removed, as well as his upper and lower prostate, so that no male will ever objectify or tongue-rape a woman again.
01:37:13
Speaker
In the end, the Fugonauts, a strange species from outer space, take over the world and banish all feminists to a special pasture while Joey and Riley move to southern China and live happily after after.
01:37:28
Speaker
That wasn't me misreading it. He ends it with happily after after. Okay. Credit where it's due. He recognizes that no one is going to read this goddamn shit, so he better put the whole plot in the description.
01:37:39
Speaker
Because he's really proud of the plot. This is every beat of the book. Because no one's going to read this fucking shit. i I want to see the Broadway musical of this.
01:37:51
Speaker
Like, you know how there's like a musical of Reefer Madness? I did not know that, actually. Okay, so there's a musical of Reefer Madness. And it's basically like they took this propaganda film, Reefer Madness, and they werere like, this is actually super campy. Let's make it into a musical. And it's a hilarious musical where it's just like, it's totally insane.
01:38:08
Speaker
I think this... From this plot...
01:38:13
Speaker
I think this could pass on, right? Like, this could make an incredible, like, camp John Waters movie. I agree with that. Oh, that would be so good. That would be so good. Right? Like, I would watch the fuck out of this.
01:38:26
Speaker
Oh my god. Okay, this one's even better. Flugelhorn's Flight, or Kidnapped by Babes from Outer Space. And then the cover is...
01:38:38
Speaker
A photo of a woman that's like really grainy and then like just like ms paint painting on it to make her hair purple.
01:38:54
Speaker
give her like a purple weirdly shaped nipple. And to make her eyes more blue. Oh, right. Yeah. When three naked babes sidle up to him one day and invite him to visit their spaceship, Hank Flugelhorn politely declines. But before he knows it, they have kidnapped and whisked him off to Plimphicthic Four, a planet in the third universe.
01:39:18
Speaker
On the way, he is strapped to their spermatron and forced to submit a sperm sample. Once on their planet, he is thrown in the clutches of Exquisitrix, whose job is to reprogram him so that he won't contaminate the creatures on her planet with the toxic behavioral habits he brought from Earth.
01:39:34
Speaker
Exquisitrix explains to him how all males have died off due to homopox, and now his job is to repopulate. a planet oh my fucking god after completing his orientation he throws himself into his work with brave dedication only to discover afterward that he has contracted the dreaded homopox but he manages to steal a ship and take off for earth with his favorite space gal snurd glup homopox homopox
01:40:14
Speaker
What? sco What?
01:40:20
Speaker
Do you want to read 190 pages of this? This is so, like, laden with just, like, his sexual obsessions, and he's, like, he it's clearly fantasy, like, it's, like, a sexual fantasy, right?
01:40:32
Speaker
Being kidnapped by hot alien space babes and told that you have to repopulate the planet, but also they're woke... They're woke. That's probably why all the males have died of homopox. Yeah. I mean, clearly the reprogramming is what like, they're like, oh, they want to reprogram his toxic behavioral habits or whatever. And then he catches homopox, like no points for guessing, like how those two are connected.
01:40:58
Speaker
the thing that really made this guy click for me was looking at his oldest book, 101 common therapeutic blunders and his most recent material that I could access without pain.
01:41:10
Speaker
and noticing that they were essentially identical. There's a difference of about 40 years between those two. He has not grown or evolved intellectually at all in that time.
01:41:24
Speaker
And I believe we can see how that happened by looking at the following excerpt. So this is from Sexual Animosity again. Adults hold power over children that is unmatched by any relationship that occurs in adult life except for slavery.
Centrism and Power Structures
01:41:40
Speaker
Miller observes that children have no rights and little power, hence their word when in conflict with the word of an adult is usually disregarded. The child is said to have a vivid imagination.
01:41:51
Speaker
This makes it easy for parents to act out with impunity their animosity towards children. The story of a patient with whom I worked illustrates this point.
01:42:03
Speaker
Suffering from symptoms induced by childhood sexual abuse by her mother and physical abuse by her father and siblings, she related how she ran away from home when she was eight years old, seeking refuge in a nearby church.
01:42:15
Speaker
She told the nuns in charge what had happened and described her a current dream in which a train ran over her mother. The nuns responded by chastising her for having such a naughty dream and for disrespecting her parents.
01:42:28
Speaker
They took her home, against the little girl's pleas and cries that she would be harmed, and reported to her parents what she had told them. The parents accused the child of making up stories, and the nuns left feeling they had acted appropriately.
01:42:40
Speaker
The parents then beat the child and berated her for, quote,
01:42:45
Speaker
Okay, so far...
01:42:48
Speaker
the girl grew up feeling like the family trader this suggestion had not only been implanted in her psyche by her parents but had also been reinforced by the nun's response the patient did not remember this incident until it came up in the course of treatment okay so far This is cooking.
01:43:07
Speaker
He's described a power dynamic that actually exists in the world. He's described some concrete consequences of it. This is the point at which someone with the ability to actually intellectualize would connect this to a broader discussion of how these power dynamics propagate and what they and what it means that they're prevalent in our society.
01:43:35
Speaker
at the exact point at which he was about have some insight,
01:43:48
Speaker
an anal narcissist will statistically dominate or masochistically submit to the child and an oral narcissist will infantilize or quote cling to the child so at the exact point at which he was about to have some insight What he did was he churned to his gibberish to protect him from the event.
01:44:06
Speaker
That, I think, is not only revealing of what psychoanalysis does for him, I think this reflects a pattern that exists within centrism, that is part of what defines it.
01:44:21
Speaker
You attach yourself to a framework of existing power, treating it as neutral and objective, and you use that structure to prevent your own personal and intellectual growth. So that's Gerald Schoenwolf.
01:44:34
Speaker
Yeah, that's pretty bad. Especially recently, there's been a trend in a lot of like psychoanalysis or you know sort of therapy more broadly here.
01:44:45
Speaker
to try to understand kind of the relationship between trauma and, right, try to maybe complicate this very Freudian idea of like, oh, problems in your personality arise from traumatic experiences of your childhood, right? This is another sort of like popular understanding of what Freud talks about, which is like, oh, you know, you go to psychoanalysis and they just tell you that all your problems are because of your mom.
01:45:12
Speaker
or because of your parents or because of you know something in early childhood. And like part of why this pedophilic obsession with children is so upsetting, I mean, other than just like pedophilia is upsetting and these things are upsetting, is like it really does matter.
01:45:31
Speaker
and It is hard to talk about childhood sexual development, but it really does matter that we talk about, that we understand that children have like an experience of sexuality and that that is something that can go very badly. And we have to think about like, what is a healthy version of that look like?
01:45:51
Speaker
And like, it is true that child abuse is really widespread. And it's something that not only do we have to understand structurally as something that we want to prevent from continuing to happen, but we need to understand what does it do to people later in your life? Like, what are the ramifications of that? How do you deal with that?
01:46:14
Speaker
the it's It's all the phallic narcissistic father that like, Yeah, he has a responsibility here and he abdicates it. Yeah. He punts to this garbage.
01:46:26
Speaker
So there's like an interesting trend that I've seen and some of these people I might actually pull for some odium episodes that i so because I strongly disagree with them. but But there's some interesting versions of this that I think are not straightforwardly odious where people do want to talk about like in some cases like paraphilias but even like homosexuality and
01:46:48
Speaker
trying to understand like sexuality, gender, and these things as like being something which like is formed by your subject and that like can be affected by childhood experiences out of an understanding that just walling those off as like things we can't discuss
01:47:09
Speaker
hurts patients.
01:47:12
Speaker
It's because there's like a real thing to study here. It's not like, oh, it's totally crank shit and none of it matters. like It all actually matters quite a lot. And so that makes it so much worse when people like this exist.
01:47:25
Speaker
you want to do FAG ratings?
01:47:28
Speaker
Let's do our FAG ratings. We rate each of our subjects on a three-point scale. F for ferocity, A for arrogance, and G for gullibility.
01:47:42
Speaker
One to five for each. Ferocity? I don't think I can give him less than a four. And I think on the basis of some unstated allegations, I might have to give him a five. He's a five for me.
01:47:59
Speaker
It's so disgusting to say gay people cost the Holocaust. It's so disgusting to say slavery...
01:48:11
Speaker
was actually better than being free in the primitive jungle of Africa. and they they They enslaved themselves. On their own, each of those is like at least a four. To have like encompassed both of those and then also be a conversion therapist, it's got to be five. like The thing stopping me from saying six is that at least he does think the Holocaust was bad.
01:48:37
Speaker
like In some sense. Like he's using it like he agrees that like gay like homosexuality should be criminalized, but he is using the Holocaust as an example of something bad that happened when when the Germans slaughtered people.
01:48:52
Speaker
Well, now I'm regretting not putting this in, but he does have a 1994 book entitled Why the Holocaust was Good. Wait, really? I made that up. Oh, OK.
01:49:02
Speaker
I was fully ready to believe you. Because like that's we gave Anglin a 6, and we gave Anglin a 6 on the basis that he was like, we have the Holocaust was good and we have to do it again. Arrogance. 5. Yeah.
01:49:17
Speaker
Hellen is happening. Can you feel it? I'm feeling it. i'm
01:49:23
Speaker
I'm feeling it because he's a 5 gullibility. Easy. Yeah, he is We've got our perfect 15. We did it. We did it, Sarah. It happened in our lifetimes.
01:49:35
Speaker
This guy sucks. This guy sucks so bad. oh like ah
01:49:42
Speaker
This is one of the worst, like, even as we're like laughing at like some of this stuff is really crazy. Like the knowledge of the abuse that he is like proximate to and variously aiding or committing.
01:50:03
Speaker
Truly harrowing stuff. Yeah, this guy's absolutely Anglin bad. i think we we gave Anglin like a cheater's 15, right? Yeah, i actually, this is your first 15. I gave Anglin a cheater's 15 because I thought he was more gullible.
01:50:20
Speaker
This guy, no evidence that he is anything but fully enthralled to this viewpoint. And I think, you know, especially with the last thing you pointed out, like he's using it protectively.
01:50:34
Speaker
Like I've seen a lot of cases or, you know, reading some psychoanalysis, like I've seen more than one case of, I've read more than one thing where I'm like, this feels more like you are trying to cope with the fact that if you really admitted how bad things were, you'd be too depressed.
01:50:53
Speaker
This is like by far the worst version of that cope. And it seems like a cope that has just totally like warped him into an actual monster. Yeah, I mean, in psychoanalysis, this concept of repeating your trauma,
01:51:12
Speaker
and enacting it over and over instead of healing is like very core. I don't want to say that what's going on with him is that he was traumatized by the experiences of his patients, and so he's protecting himself from that necessarily.
01:51:31
Speaker
But at the very least, like the evil inside him I think he's stuck in a pattern, in a loop, that protects him from dealing with that.
01:51:44
Speaker
I mean, i actually think it's really interesting because we're a little bit on the same wavelength because one of the things we're going to talk about, and this is not a spoiler and really in any way, but one of the things we're going to talk about next episode is the contemporary notion of trauma and the way in which trauma is kind of a depoliticizing concept.
Podcast Promotion and Listener Engagement
01:52:02
Speaker
If you understand that something, what somebody is doing as related to trauma, it is a way of ignoring the social and political ramifications of it.
01:52:15
Speaker
Okay, and now that we've presented you with a guy who is almost as bad as a human being possibly can be, be sure to tell your friends about the podcast. Yeah. We don't really know how to market or promote it, so we are just relying on you to spread the word.
01:52:33
Speaker
If you like our podcast, you should... One thing that podcasters always saying is to review them on Apple podcasts because quote, it really matters. We don't know if that's true, but if you like our podcast, like please review us because it's the black box. It's the algorithm guys who knows what they're up to. Maybe if we send them off, they'll respond.
01:52:56
Speaker
Yeah. You've got a YouTube channel. Now you can leave us YouTube comments, review us on Apple podcasts. Go to the Patreon, subscribe to get your episodes early. Yeah, if you're listening to this on the Tuesday or soon after the Tuesday comes out, you could have listened to it three or four days earlier if you gave us $5 a month. So yeah, become an odium connoisseur, patreon.com slash odium symposium.
01:53:22
Speaker
Okay, I think that's it. Yeah, bye. All right. Goodbye, lovelies. There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
01:53:43
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! Now listen, you. I'll suck you in your goddamn face. Let's stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
01:54:00
Speaker
some level of masochism.