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9. The First Misogynist
57 Plays8 days ago
Sarah introduces Helen to Joseph Swetnam, the man the word "misogyny" was coined to describe, who turns out to have gotten his ass beaten on four separate occasions by the authors of Elizabethan England.
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Episode art by @canis_kunst on Instagram.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Format Change
00:00:00
Speaker
hi this is Sarah. We're going to try a new thing where we intro each episode before the theme song.
Who is Joseph Swetnam?
00:00:05
Speaker
This episode is going to be about Joseph Swetnam, a fencer from the 1500s and 1600s.
00:00:11
Speaker
Among other things, he wrote a text about how much he hated women that got him so relentlessly dunked on by other authors that we still use a word coined just to describe him. Misogynist. Our last two episodes were pretty heavy, but this one is more about the joy of watching a guy who sucks get demolished.
00:00:28
Speaker
Enjoy. There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
00:00:45
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! listen, you the right, I'll suck you in your goddamn face. Let's stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
00:01:02
Speaker
some level of masochism.
00:01:06
Speaker
um Okay, any fun like anecdotes from this week? any Any good updates have you been doing this week, Sarah? I don't know. It's kind of hard to talk about like daily life updates and stuff because everything is just so wild in the political sphere. We kind of have this like internal rule of don't talk too much about like current events. you know it's so easy to just be like oh it's two people and they're just like rehashing the news and the discourse and the whatever like that podcast exists in like thousands of copies but at the same time we're not as of recording even three weeks into 2026 and already this year is so insane you're going to get coffee and the president is a pedophile exactly
00:01:56
Speaker
Okay, let's get into today's topic.
Origins and Meaning of 'Misogyny'
00:01:59
Speaker
Helen, have you heard of this thing called misogyny? Let's pretend for the listener that I haven't. In Greek, it's just woman hater, right? Just those two words put together.
00:02:12
Speaker
Technically, as a word, it's existed for a long time. But it didn't exist in English until the sixteen hundreds and it was coined in English to refer to a particular guy, Joseph Swetnip.
00:02:27
Speaker
And that is the guy we're talking about today. Okay, so like you went and you were like, we've got to talk about the OG misogynist. Okay, I like this. Exactly. I'm really excited. Joseph Swetnan was an English fencer and author.
00:02:43
Speaker
Biographical detail is very sparse about Joseph, but scholarship and his writing suggests that he was probably born in the possibly in Bristol, England. possibly in bristol england which is in the relatively sparsely populated West Country.
00:03:02
Speaker
He seems to have spent a lot of time in Plymouth, England, which is also in the West Country. But he had two books printed, so he almost certainly spent some time in London. Being fencer in this time period doesn't mean being an athlete or a performer of some kind. It means being a soldier who has a business training.
00:03:24
Speaker
Okay. We know that he eventually dies overseas, so that suggests that he had professional military service. And he was probably overseas campaigning when he died.
00:03:36
Speaker
Okay. This is the level of biographical detail we're working with, and I'm sorry, but that's like that's not going to change. We really don't know a lot about this guy. He publishes his first book in 1615.
00:03:49
Speaker
We will circle back to that. But he publishes his second book in 1617. And I'm going to send you a scan of the cover.
Swetnam's Fencing Book and False Claims
00:03:59
Speaker
The School of the Noble and Worthy Science of Defense.
00:04:04
Speaker
Being the first of any Englishman's invention which professed the said science so plainly described that any man may quickly come to the true knowledge of their weapons with small pains and little practice.
00:04:17
Speaker
Okay, so it's how to fight. Yeah, pretty much. And on the cover, we've got this like kind of charming, I think,
00:04:27
Speaker
wood engraving style depiction of two guys with absolutely massive swords just like going at it yeah it's pretty incredible the swords are as big as they are a surprising amount of it is saying that you need to practice a lot so this shit about small pains and little practice is kind of a scam to get you in the door Another part of this cover is, you may not have caught it, but he is explicitly claiming to have founded the first school of defense in England, like an actual school you can go to and get trained.
00:05:00
Speaker
There's no evidence of this, but it's also not that implausible that he just founded it somewhere where the records didn't survive. He also says that the way this book came about is that he was the fencing instructor for Prince Henry. And Prince Henry read the book and was like, wow, this is so good, man.
00:05:20
Speaker
You've got to publish this. And then Prince Henry died. And then he goes on for a page about how cool Prince Henry was when he was alive and how he was such a good musician and such a good conversationalist and blah, blah, blah, blah. blah So Prince Henry actually did have a swordsmanship tutor. His name is in the records.
00:05:39
Speaker
It was not this guy. Also, certain passages in this book are plagiarized. So we can't exactly like take him at word. Well, okay.
00:05:50
Speaker
The plagiarism thing is interesting. I would say it was pretty common for people to publish books and just like paste other pieces of books inside books. that Like, I don't know if i'm ready to condemn him as a plagiarist Yeah.
00:06:03
Speaker
Yeah, we're going to come back to that. Yeah, I also noticed that was just the the main title and the first subtitle, and then there's a bunch of other description, and I like the also many other good and profitable precepts and counsels for the managing of quarrels and ordering their life in many other matters. It's just kind of like, oh, a bunch of other random bullshit I just decided to throw in here.
00:06:21
Speaker
Right. Which is very charming. Here's his first two sentences. Okay, second sentence. ready?
00:06:33
Speaker
for except there be an order in all things all runeth to confusion but what do i mean to talk of orders which am no scholar nor have no learning but only a little experience which god and nature hath bestowed upon me okay second sentence are you ready As it is impossible to build a church without lime or stone, no more can a workman work without tools, yet to avoid idleness something I will make of it, although I cannot make it sound to so good a tune as I would, for want of learning.
00:07:02
Speaker
For I was never at Oxford, but while I baited my horse, nor at Cambridge, but while one Sturbridge fair lasted, wherefore? If you do examine me concerning learning, I shall answer you as the fellow did the gentleman, who, asking him the way to London, a pokeful of plums, sir, said he, or as he which came from a sermon was asked what he heard there, he said it was a good sermon, and the preacher spoke well.
00:07:28
Speaker
But he could not tell one word what he said. No more can I answer one word scholar-like or according to learning, yet both at Oxford and Cambridge I looked upon the scholars and they looked upon me, and so I became a little the older, but never the wiser.
00:07:43
Speaker
Wherefore, if I should continue tempting this book so long till I had put it in order, I should resemble those which do make their apparel so long of the newest fashion until they are quite out of fashion, or like as the fiddlers do their strings, who rest them and temper them so long until they bring them all out of time, tune, and reason, lest I should do so, I will let it go with this draft as it is, but...
00:08:03
Speaker
Well over page long.
00:08:15
Speaker
and stone's a great price i have here as it were mixed wheat and rye barley and oats beans and peas alltogether now take a little pains to separate that grain which thou likest best for thine own benefit well over a page long I was fighting for my life there.
00:08:34
Speaker
His introduction is 14 pages of this. When I looked up the responses of people today who study sword fighting and such to this book, they deemed it to be surprisingly practical.
00:08:46
Speaker
He advises always trying to arrange fights in such a way that the sun is in your opponent's eyes. So our weeb listeners might recognize this as one of Miyamoto Musashi's favorite tricks. He tells you to run like hell if a fight becomes two against one. He has a trick for if your weapon gets knocked out of your hands, what you're supposed to do is pull out your dagger and pretend you're going to throw it at your opponent's face and then scramble for the weapon because throwing a dagger that way won't actually do anything. And he has a short chapter on fighting while drunk.
00:09:14
Speaker
His main advice is don't do it. His style is focused on keeping your distance and controlling space. I found a YouTube video about this claim he makes, which is that with a really solid lunge, you can nail someone with a 4-foot long sword while your back foot is 12 feet away.
00:09:38
Speaker
So Helen, I would like you to pull out the makeshift sword i had you acquire before this episode and just try and do a lunge where you kill someone who's 12 feet away.
00:09:51
Speaker
Okay, wait, so let me get this straight. So the listener can't, the listener, if they had a visual, they might get confused and think that what I'm holding right now is a Swiffer mop, but it's not. It's actually a four foot sword.
00:10:04
Speaker
So get that straight. So it's, I need to start 12 feet away and then do a lunge, but not move my back foot forward. That's right. And I need to kill someone 12 feet away.
00:10:17
Speaker
Yes. Okay. So assuming that my wingspan is about six feet and change,
00:10:26
Speaker
I could see it.
00:10:30
Speaker
If you're like 6'3 and you have long arms, you could do it probably. Yes, yes. It turns out it is it is doable. What's the average height of someone in 1617? Is it 6'3? don't think it's i don't think it's six three Yeah, you'd have to have a lot of training and flexibility to like snap this out too.
00:10:50
Speaker
Oh yeah, no, like I definitely i could not do it, to be clear. I'm saying like if i if I did you know big pains and much practice, I could i could figure it out eventually. like If you gave me a year, like at the end of a year I could do it, I think.
00:11:08
Speaker
I'm really glad you didn't hurt yourself doing that. I should have had you stretch for something before the episode. Okay, so for our purposes, there's not that much more to say about this particular book. There's a sort of memento mori section where he's like, listen, no matter how big a hotshot you think you are as a fighter, death comes in unexpected ways.
00:11:29
Speaker
And then he describes the death of a bunch of martial arts masters he's known. And the first one he talks about is this guy, Master Turner. And he says, he's a guy you've probably heard of because he was so good at stabbing eyes.
00:11:43
Speaker
But let me tell you, he just chopped at a bunch of people's heads and got lucky. And anyway, the last time he stabbed an eye, he immediately got shot and died. Not such a hotshot, actually. He should have followed my techniques.
00:11:54
Speaker
You know, this guy who's famous for being cool, well, he's a piece of shit and he should have listened to me. Like, what a fucking baller. i know. And it's so funny, too, that the thing this guy is supposed to be, like, so cool for doing is just, like, stabbing people in the eye I feel like if you stab enough people in the eye, like, you get a reputation for it, you know? Like, I don't know. I could see it. Okay, and then he goes on to describe a bunch of other martial arts master deaths.
00:12:18
Speaker
Henry Adlington, for killing his maester John Duell, was hanged. Furlong, he drunk a pint of aqua vitae at one draft, and he fell down and died presently. Westcoat, for some unkindness received of his own daughter, he went into a wood near Perrin in Cornwall, and there hanged himself.
00:12:38
Speaker
Richard Carrow, he died most miserably of the French disease in an old house near Plymouth, although he had a new suit of clothes from top to toe. Yet he was so loathsome a creature that nobody would let him harbor in his house, for part of his body was rotten and stunk above ground.
00:12:53
Speaker
Also, old Carter of Worcester lay a long time sick of a lingering disease, and being worn away to nothing but skin and bones, he died in his bed. And so of many more I could write, but it is not my intention to write a chronicle, and therefore these few shall serve for this time. I wrote it, but only to put you in mind, that you may so lead your lives daily and hourly, as if death were even at your heels." Now for the first book he published.
The Misogynistic Text and Public Reaction
00:13:19
Speaker
This had at least 19 editions in England, and at least another six in Dutch. The arraignment of lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant women, or the vanity of them, choose you whether with a commendation of wise, virtuous, and honest women.
00:13:39
Speaker
Pleasant for married men, profitable for young men, and hurtful to none. The first edition of this book is published under the pseudonym Thomas Tell Truth, which people would have recognized that was the pseudonym.
00:13:54
Speaker
But in the second edition, they either forgot to use his alias or just didn't bother. Thomas Tell Truth. Oh my god. ah Okay, so here's how he opens up the introduction.
00:14:07
Speaker
musing with myself, being idle, and having little ease to pass the time withal, and I being in a great collar against some women, I mean more than one, and so in wrath of my fury, taking my pen in hand to beguile the time withal, indeed I might have employed myself to better use than in such an idle business, and it were Better to pocket up a pelting injury than to entangle myself with such vermin, for this I know, that because women are women, therefore many will do that in an hour, which they many times will repent all their whole lifetime after.
00:14:40
Speaker
I know I shall be bitten by many, because I touch many, but before I go any further, let me whisper one word in your ears, and that is this. Whatsoever you think privately, i wish you to conceal it with silence.
00:14:51
Speaker
Lest in starting up to find fault you prove yourselves guilty of these monstrous accusations, which are here following against some women, and those which spurn, if they feel themselves touched, prove themselves stark fools in betraying their galled backs to the world. For this book touches no sort of women but such as when they hear it, will go about to reprove it.
00:15:15
Speaker
This is terrible. Oh my God. Okay, this is actually incredible because this is like, this is like a big bang moment, like for a lot of the misogyny we've seen later, right? Like condensed down into these few sentences. There's so much going on that we've seen like developed, but just to sit down and be like, I was bored and I was feeling mad about women.
00:15:38
Speaker
And so I decided to write about it and maybe you might be upset. ah But if you complain, that just proves me right. So, haha, bitch, fuck you. Like, oh, my God. Yeah, exactly.
00:15:56
Speaker
Yeah, you're immediately getting this sort of like trollish, vicious air that's going on here. He describes himself at one point in this book as being engaged in bear baiting.
00:16:10
Speaker
which, if you're not familiar, is the medieval practice torturing bears to death by chaining them up and having them fight dogs.
00:16:21
Speaker
It was hugely popular entertainment. like I think actually every single Shakespeare play contains references to like bears and bear baiting, because it was literally like... what are we going to do tonight, right? We got we got a couple pennies. We want to go to have some fun. we can go downtown and maybe we'll catch a play.
00:16:42
Speaker
Yeah, literally right next door to the major theaters, there was what was called a Bear Garden, which is just a place for exclusively doing this. Yeah, it's completely vile practice, but it was just like, it was the popular entertainment. Like, that was their version of Marvel slop. Ha So it could always be worse is the thing you need to realize. Okay, another excerpt.
00:17:07
Speaker
Women are all necessary evils, and yet not all given to wickedness, and yet many so bad that in my conceit, if I should speak the worst that I know by some women, I should make their ears glow that hear me, and my tongue would blister to report it. But it is a great discredit for a man to be accounted for a scold, for scolding is the manner of shrews. Therefore... I had rather answer them with silence which find fault than strive to win the cucking stool from them.
00:17:35
Speaker
Very contemporary. Now, methinks I hear some courteous dames give their rash judgments, and say that I, having no wit, ramble upon women which have more wit than men.
00:17:45
Speaker
To answer you again, if I lie about you, judge me unkind. But if I speak the truth, I shall be the better believed another time. And if I had wrote never so well, it is impossible to please all, and if never so ill, yet I shall please some.
00:18:00
Speaker
Let it be well or ill, I look for no praise for my labor. Huge doubt out there. I am weaned from my mother's teat and therefore never more to be fed with her pap.
00:18:10
Speaker
Wherefore, say what you will, for I will follow my own veins and unfolding every pleat and showing every wrinkle of a woman's disposition. There's an element of the time washing machine in this.
Modern Parallels to Swetnam's Rhetoric
00:18:21
Speaker
I mean, it's it's what we talked about with like the Cato episode with like, oh, it's almost shames me for like the good women, which is also the same as that tweet about the like, oh, I saw the woman in like the, what was it? The crack sucking leggings. And I didn't want to confront her about it because like my wife was that, right? Like the same thing that we've seen examples from today and also from thousands of years ago like,
00:18:45
Speaker
oh, you know, it's going to it's going to shame the good women if I really if i really give it my all and and say everything that I need to say about the bad women. But of course I need to say it anyway. And you can cancel me if you want.
00:18:58
Speaker
I feel like we could take this excerpt and just have it be a Manosphere post on X, like, today. You'd have to adjust the spelling addiction a little bit, but, like, that's it. Yeah, you you you know, people don't say, you know, but it is a great discredit for a man to be accounted for his gold. You would say like, all right, guys, I got to tell you all about women. And, you know, maybe it'll make some women feel bad to hear this because, you know, not all women are bad. And, you know, I don't want to be a nag. Like, I'm not trying to be some bitch, but we got to be honest here, right? Like, this is literally just you could just actually translate this into just contemporary English and it would fit on a Manosphere, like Twitter account or or something like that.
00:19:36
Speaker
Okay, so we're actually not going to look at too many excerpts from this book because it's kind of repetitive and it's not that...
00:19:48
Speaker
interesting once you've seen enough of it but i do want to give you some flavor and i do want to show you a little bit of some of the worst stuff that's in you mean he doesn't have like a systematic and insightful analysis of like the role of women in society and the problem with women like you mean it's just like repeating the same grievances over and over in like slightly different variances and talking about how smart he is and how brave he is for speaking the truth we're gonna circle back to this what you're saying is not just an own of him this is like an actual plot point in the episode okay another excerpt Oh my god. Women be shopping? Are we doing women be shopping? I'll read it. We're doing women be shopping.
00:20:24
Speaker
Spoiler for people who are about to listen to this excerpt. When a woman wanteth anything, she will flatter and speak fair, not much unlike the flattering butcher who gently claweth the ox when he intendeth to knock him on the head.
00:20:37
Speaker
But the thing being once obtained and their desires gained, then they will begin to look big and answer so stately and speak so scornfully that one would imagine they would never seek help nor crave comfort at thy hand anymore.
00:20:49
Speaker
But a woman is fitly compared to a ship, which being never so well rigged, Yet one thing or other is to be amended. Even so, give a woman all that she can demand today, yet she will be out of reparations tomorrow and want one thing or other.
00:21:06
Speaker
This is so funny. Like, women are only nice to you when they want something, but they want things all the time because women are like boats, right? Like, what is it they say? Like, the happiest day of your life is getting married and the second happiest day is getting divorced? Like, what's that?
00:21:24
Speaker
Helen, that's literally in this book. Oh my god. Okay, so just to like... Except not divorce. It's when your wife dies, he says. Oh, okay. But that's the thing people say about boats. Like, so he's continuing the boat analogy, right? Like, the happiest day is when you buy a boat, and the second happiest day is when you sell it, except about women, and he literally just does it. Oh my god.
00:21:43
Speaker
Yeah. Okay, another excerpt. I have really gotten inside the mind of the misogynist. That's probably not good for me, Sarah. It's gonna metastasize, and soon you will be a misogynist. I'm sorry.
00:21:55
Speaker
Lust causeth you to do such foul deeds which makes your sore heads forever afterwards seem spotted with black shame and everlasting infamy, by which means your graves after death are closed up with time's scandal.
00:22:11
Speaker
And yet women are easily wooed, and soon won, got with an apple, and lost with the pairing. Young wits are soon corrupted. Women's bright beauties breed curious thoughts, and golden gifts easily overcome wanton desires, with changing modesty into pastimes of vanity, and being once delighted therein, continue in the same without repentance.
00:22:33
Speaker
You are only the people's wonder, and misfortune's banding ball tossed up and down the world with woe upon woe. Yea, ten thousand woes will be galloping hard at your heels, and pursue you, wheresoever you go.
00:22:46
Speaker
For those of ill-report cannot so long stay in one place, but roam and wander about the world, and yet ever unfortunate, prospering in nothing, forsaken and cast out of all civil companies, still in fear lest authority with the sword of justice bar them of liberty.
00:23:02
Speaker
Lo, thus your lives are despised, walking like night owls in misery, and no comfort shall be your friend but only repentance, coming too late, and over dear bought, a penance and punishment due to all such hated creatures as these are.
00:23:16
Speaker
Therefore, believe all you unmarried wantons, and in believing grieve, that you have thus unluckily made yourself neither maids, widows, nor wives, but more vile than filthy channel dirt, fit to be swept out of the heart and suburbs of your country. O, then suffer not this world's pleasure to take from you the good thoughts of an honest life, but down, down upon your knees, you earthly serpents, and wash away your black sin with the Christal tears of true sorrow and repentance,
00:23:46
Speaker
So that when you wander from this enticing world, you may be washed and cleansed from this foul leprosy of nature. The like sexual undertones here are so uncomfortable.
00:23:58
Speaker
Like, oh, you know, okay. First, like, you know, step one, imagine a sinful, lustful woman. Like step two, like yell at her to get on her knees. Like, i don't know, guy, like. Not to be too pop culture-brained, but if you've seen The Hunchback of Notre Dame, he really is channeling the evil clergy member who's the villain of the movie, the one who's consumed with lust for the hot woman he sees in the streets and condemns her.
00:24:25
Speaker
There is also a Shakespeare play, which is about a like a city that's all corrupt and terrible, and everybody is just, you know, everybody is corrupt. But then, like, the Duke goes away, and his brother, who is this, like, obsessive, like, he wants to, you know, get things in order and put things right. And so he arrests this guy who was just doing adultery, I think, is actually his crime, and he he sentences him to death.
00:24:47
Speaker
And his sister, who is like a novice in a nunnery, so she's like going to become a nun, comes to try to like beg for his release. And then a bunch of the plot of the play is that the guy is like, I will release him if you sleep with me.
00:25:03
Speaker
And she's like, no. And then the brother is like, wait, why not? You could save my life. Like I'm going to get sent to death. And it's about this exactly this kind of dynamic of like, This obsession with order being really... Also, this is kind of in a different writing style.
00:25:21
Speaker
This is specifically in the style of a Hectorian priest. doesn't just like resemble the rhetoric of one. I think we can see in these excerpts that he kind of like shifts tones and like how he writes within each...
00:25:37
Speaker
Which is odd. Another excerpt. You're just like sending me these blocks of text that are just like the worst rhetoric imaginable. This is really ah this is really putting me in the contraption.
00:25:52
Speaker
If a man talks of any kind of beast or fowl, presently the nature is known. As for example, the lions are all strong and hardy, the hares are all fearful and cowardly, the does are all simple, and so of all beasts and fowls the like I mean, few are none swerving from this kind.
00:26:10
Speaker
But women have more contrary sorts of behavior than there be women, and therefore, impossible for a man to know all, know nor one part of women's qualities all the days of his life.
00:26:22
Speaker
Some with sweet words undermine their husbands, Delilah did Samson. And some with chiding and brawling are made weary of the world, as Socrates and others.
00:26:33
Speaker
Socrates, when his wife did chide and brawl, would go out of the house till all were quiet again. But because he would not scold with her again, it grieved her the more. One time she watched his going out and threw a chamber pot out of a window on his head. Ha ha, quoth he, I thought after all this thunder, there would come rain.
00:26:51
Speaker
There is a history maketh mention of one man named Ananias, who invited a friend of his to go home with him to supper, but when he came home, he found his wife chiding and brawling with her maidens, whereat his guest was very much discontented.
00:27:07
Speaker
Ananias turning to him said, Good lord, how impatient art thou! I have suffered her these 20 years, and canst not thou abide her two hours? By which means he caused his wife to leave chiding and laughed out the matter.
00:27:22
Speaker
Okay, so this is boomer humor. Yeah. He's doing historical references, but just in the cause of like, I hate my wife jokes. Yeah, it's I hate my wife. And then it's this like other layer of animals are all the same, which is also kind of not true.
00:27:41
Speaker
But let's bracket that for a second. you know Animals are all the same. We know how to handle lions. We know how to handle does, right? But women, they're all different from each other. And it's like, yeah, dude, people are not like, it's such a weird observation to me. It's not that weird if you don't think women are people. I'm just saying. Yeah, exactly.
00:28:02
Speaker
Okay, so the reason I excerpted that is because a huge part of the book is just like that. Shitty boomer joke after shitty boomer joke, like couched within historical references, usually biblical references.
00:28:16
Speaker
There's a reason that this book resembles a collection of sexist jokes and scraps, because Here's something I found in the literature. This is from a book by Woodbridge that I'll talk more about later.
00:28:29
Speaker
Swetnum's habit of lifting passages from other authors for the School of Defense is the governing principle of the arraignment of women, which, much more than the School of Defense, is demonstrably a patchwork of passages taken from other works.
00:28:41
Speaker
The practice of copying other works was much criticized both before and in Swetnam's days. Thomas Decker, a formidable practitioner of verbal abuse, coined the phrase falconry to brand the practice of preying on other works. He wrote, the falconer, having scraped together certain small pairings of wit, he first cuts them handsomely in pretty pieces, and of those pieces doth he patch up up a book, thereby providing a contemporary portrayal of a true scissors and paste man.
00:29:10
Speaker
That's really funny. I love that image. So this is kind of like Uncle John's bathroom reader for sexist jokes of the 1600s. Yeah, this is kind of what I was saying about some of those sort of different perspectives on like plagiarism. Like today, if it was found that somebody had done this, it would be like, okay, this book is getting pulled, right? Like it would just be completely unacceptable in the publishing industry. But back then it was much more of a thing you could kind of get away with, but then some people really would criticize you and There's really interesting things about this is right around the period when like the contemporary notion of like authorship and owning a book and like being the owner of the book you author like really starts to come into play. So a really fun story I like here is
00:29:55
Speaker
I think it was the fifteen ninety s that the first edition, the first volume of Don Quixote is published by Cervantes. And then somebody writes an unauthorized sequel, which at the time would have just been like, yeah, somebody wrote a sequel, right? It wasn't really like this notion of like the right of an author is like very, very new. And so then he writes a sequel where Don Quixote and Sancho Panza meet two other characters also named Don Quixote and Sancho Panza,
00:30:22
Speaker
who are implied to be the ones from the unauthorized sequel. And he basically is just like ragging on this guy who wrote the unauthorized sequel, right? But this is right around the time when authors were starting to have this feeling of like, hey, you should actually be responsible for the stuff in your book and own it. And there should be something called authorship.
00:30:38
Speaker
This book is bad in the judgment of both contemporaries and later critics. They generally don't like that it's misogynistic, but mostly they just feel like it's a piece of shit as a work of craft.
00:30:53
Speaker
And people writing about it were just like baffled that it was selling so well. Yeah, I mean, his style is terrible. Yeah, it's so bad. It's so bad.
00:31:03
Speaker
And this feeds into the thing I really wanted to to talk about, which is the reaction to Sweatnam. Swetnam, apparently in total ignorance, wandered into a literary genre dating back to the 1500s,
Cultural Backlash: Pamphlets and Plays
00:31:17
Speaker
called by several names, and which I had never heard of until I did my initial poking around to figure out whether we should do a Swetnam episode.
00:31:25
Speaker
I found references to this genre in the literature as the woman question, the woman dispute, the woman controversy and probably most common people refer to it in french as the carrel de femme the listeners who again are dealing with an audio medium cannot see the extent to which my grin got wider and wider with each one of these like
00:31:52
Speaker
this is so funny i don't know like the genre of the woman question like jesus christ When I say this was a literary genre, I mean that in the same sense that we might talk about the romance genre today.
00:32:05
Speaker
There was an understanding of rules and tropes about how books, about whether women are good or bad, should be structured and written. The main text I used here was one by Linda Woodbridge, Women in the English Renaissance.
00:32:19
Speaker
According to her, works in what she called the formal controversy about women, which is her term for the genre, have the following characteristics. and I'm paraphrasing. First off, they're primarily about the essential nature of women.
00:32:35
Speaker
Second, they're written in the spirit of charitable debate, with no overt lashing out at women. Third, they address the nature of women in general, not just wives.
00:32:49
Speaker
Fourth, they're highly theoretical, and they use examples of historical women to address their larger theoretical points and catalog the virtues and vices of women.
00:33:03
Speaker
Fifth, stylistically they draw on classical modes of oration and dialogue.
00:33:10
Speaker
Woodbridge pinpoints the genre as starting with Sir Thomas Elliot's In Defense of Good Women in 1540. So this is not just like the dunking on women genre. This is like actual debate about are women good or bad?
00:33:24
Speaker
I am.
00:33:27
Speaker
This is upsetting.
00:33:31
Speaker
Like, yeah, this sucks, man. Are women good or bad? Like. Okay, actually, hold on. Sorry. I guess my one thing is like all of those points are just, again, manosphere points, right? Like, okay, what was like point number one? Primarily about the essential nature of women.
00:33:52
Speaker
Right, okay. So it's like, it's this, you know, first it's going to just got to be woman in general, right? Point number two was it's offered in the spirit of charitable debate. and It's not about lashing out. Like, yeah, like this is like the classic shit people are still doing, right? Where it's like, oh, we're just...
00:34:08
Speaker
I'm just saying, like, here's my point, right? Don't cancel me. Don't jump down my throat, right? Like, don't, I'm not, you know, I'm just saying, like, we got to have an open mind. You got to hear all sides. Like, maybe all women truly are ontologically evil, right? We just have to consider it, right? And then the use of, like, classical rhetoric and debate, like, again, i don't know, all these strategies are still so prevalent. Like, when are we gonna get rid of these guys? How do we get rid of these guys?
00:34:32
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of attempts in the scholarship I saw to try and, like, trace people aspects of early feminism back to these works. And it's true that you do have women writing in this genre defending women, but it's within such a patriarchal framework that like it's very difficult to see it as a true progenitor of like contemporary feminist thinking.
00:35:01
Speaker
Helen, can you describe for our audience what it means to be the main character on social media? Once someone, like if somebody says something really stupid and a bunch of people start like dunking on them, people will just start like, who don't want to maybe, maybe it starts with people who don't want to participate in the dunking.
00:35:20
Speaker
They just start making posts and they'll just assume you know who they're talking about. And if like enough people do this, everyone does know who you're talking about. And so it's just like the person everyone's talking about in a large cluster of whatever website it is.
00:35:35
Speaker
Yes, and in particular it's the person that everyone hates. Yeah, it's never good. So the origin of this term is a post about how there's one main goal on Twitter every day, and that goal is never to be the main character of Twitter.
00:35:51
Speaker
Swetnam becomes the main character. We get three pamphlets, which are kind of like the op-eds of the days, except op-eds these days are produced in massive quantities. There are like way fewer pamphlets than there are like op-eds. and And here's the first one that comes out.
00:36:10
Speaker
I love this title. A muzzle for melastomas, the cynical baiter of and foul mouther Barker against Eve's sex, or an apologetic answer to that irreligious and illiterate pamphlet made by Swetnam, by Rachel Specht.
00:36:29
Speaker
Yeah, so melastomas means just black mouth. You can see right from the title that These works are trying to sell themselves by presuming familiarity with Swetnam's actual text.
00:36:44
Speaker
For example, Swetnam makes the point of describing himself as bear baiting, and here we are with a reference to like baiting right up at the top. There's also this common theme we're going to see of describing him as needing to be muzzled, describing him as like a mad dog kind of thing.
00:37:00
Speaker
This is the only one of the works that's published that isn't either anonymous or published under a pseudonym. Here's the second pamphlet that comes out against him. Esther hath hanged Haman, or an answer to lewd pamphlet entitled The Arraignment of Women, with the arraignment of lewd, idol-frowed, and unconstant men and husbands, divided into two parts. The first proveth the dignity and worthiness of women out of divine testimonies, the second showing the estimation of the feminine sex in ancient and pagan times, all which is acknowledged by men themselves in their daily actions. written by Esther Sournam, neither maid, wife, nor widow, yet really all, and therefore experienced to defend all.
00:37:43
Speaker
John 8, 7, he that is without sin among you, let him cast, let him first cast a stone at her. Okay, i like that. Yeah, this is quite witty.
00:37:54
Speaker
Yeah, I like that the woman named Esther is like, Esther hath hanged Haman, which... Well, do you want to indicate for the listener, like, what's going on there? It is a biblical reference to what is, at least for Jews, the story of Purim, where Haman kind of convinced, um, Haman convinces Esther's husband who is the king, who I am admitting now i am bad Jew. I can't think of the name of the king, but basically to get rid of the Jews. And then she is, it's an example of like a strong, powerful woman. And she, you know, they, they met, she managed to convince her husband to save them. And, um,
00:38:29
Speaker
And Haman is the villain of the story. It's actually really fun when you celebrate Purim in Judaism, you have little noisemakers, and you like make, like anytime someone says Haman, you make noise and like boo. There's a very like good tradition of just like shitting on this guy. So she's kind of tapping into that a little bit.
00:38:45
Speaker
Also notice she describes herself as neither maid, wife, nor widow, yet really all, and therefore... Experienced to defend all. We hear him talking about how women are damned to a life of misery,
00:39:01
Speaker
and a life of becoming neither a maid, a wife, nor a widow. So again, like, there's this familiarity with the text that's part of how this book is selling itself. Last one.
00:39:13
Speaker
The worming of a mad dog or a sop for Cerberus, the jailer of hell. No confutation, but a sharp repudiation of the baiter of women.
00:39:25
Speaker
By Constantia Munda. Okay, so first off, the term worming here, I actually had a hell of a time tracking down what was meant by that. It turns out that going way back to ancient Greece, there was a belief that a particular muscle under the tongue of a dog was actually the cause of madness.
00:39:46
Speaker
That muscle is called the lyta, or the worm. And so it used to be a practice just cut this muscle out when they were a pup, which was called worming.
00:39:59
Speaker
That's wildly fucked up, but also that's what's going on here. Wait, how did they fit? Like rabies persisted in dogs where they had cut this muscle out. How did that not overheld this belief is widespread well into the eighteen hundreds It's unreal.
00:40:19
Speaker
I know they didn't have like modern medicine, but I guess it took them forever to figure out to wash their fucking hands. So whatever. out ah Oh my God. The scan here has some weird highlighting and stuff. That's because to actually get a scan of this, I ended up on a conspiracy site about how Marlowe actually wrote all of Shakespeare's plays.
00:40:39
Speaker
And after it had firmly established that, it went on to prove that basically everything else in the time period was also written by Marlowe. That's so cool. And this is one of the works that ah apparently Marlow wrote. Wait, they think he wrote this pamphlet?
00:40:55
Speaker
Yes, they think Marlow wrote The Worming of a Mad Dog. Did he also write The Arraignment of Women? Oh no, that's plagiarized. Okay, never mind. This pamphlet goes significantly harder than the previous two. In fact, the second one was actually written in the Crรฉlle de Femmes genre.
00:41:14
Speaker
The other two are not. This one is more polemical, maybe a little bit closer to Swetnam's tone. However, this is still not the main thing I wanted to talk about.
00:41:25
Speaker
The main thing I wanted to talk about was the final response to Swetnam, a play which ran at one of the least prestigious and most popular theaters in London. Here's a scan of the bill.
00:41:37
Speaker
Swetnam the Woman Hater, arraigned by women. A new comedy acted at the Red Bull by the late Queen's servants. You can see on the cover art, there's a bunch of women all arranged in some sort of courtroom scene and sitting on the throne at the center of the courtroom scene is another woman wearing a crown.
00:42:01
Speaker
And the one man in the figure is this guy with his back to the artist, camera, whatever, which you can take to be Swetnam. I have a question. Helen, are you ready to do some acting?
00:42:14
Speaker
Absolutely. Okay. The A plot of this is a ripoff of a novel called Griselle y Mirabella. It's a genre of chivalric love, so we'll talk about it a little bit, but as little as we can get away with, because what we're really interested in is the B-plot, which is about Swetnam.
00:42:33
Speaker
From the Dramatis Personae, we learn that Swetnam is in Italy. He's going by the alias Misogynos, and he has a clown servant named Swash.
00:42:45
Speaker
Misogynos?! Yes. I'm so excited. i immediately want them to like mount this play. Like I'm going to contact the local theater immediately. Helen, would you like to be Swash or Misogynos?
00:43:01
Speaker
Oh, the difficult choice. I think I got to be Misogynos. I'm i'm in the mind of the Misogynist. Okay, here we go. Scene two, enter misogynist Solus.
00:43:13
Speaker
By this my thundering book is pressed abroad. I long to hear what a report it bears. I know it will startle all our city dames. Worse than the roaring lions or the sound of a huge double cannon, Swetnam's name will be more terrible in women's ears than ever yet a misogynist's hath been.
00:43:34
Speaker
That's the first use of misogynist in the English language. interesting Enter Clown. Puff! Oh, give me some air! I am almost stifled! Puff! Oh, my sides!
00:43:48
Speaker
From whence com'st thou in such a puffing heat? Hast thou been running for a wager, Swash? Thou art horribly embossed! Haunted animal, foaming at the mouth. Where hast thou been?
00:44:00
Speaker
My life he was haunted with some spirit. A spirit? I think all the devils in hell have had a pinch at my haunches. I have been among the Furies. The Furies! a pox on your book. I have been paid a faith. You have set all the women in the town in an uproar.
00:44:17
Speaker
Why, what's the matter, Swash? Never was poor Swash so lashed and pashed and crashed and dashed as I have been. Look to yourself, they're up in arms for you.
00:44:30
Speaker
Why, have they weapons, Swash? The weapons, sir, i I'll be swore on they have, and cutting ones, I felt the smart of them. From the loins to the legs, from the head to the hams, from the front to the foot, I have not one free spot. Oh, I can show you, sir, such characters.
00:44:48
Speaker
What dost thou mean, man? Will thou shame thyself? Why, here's none but you and I, sir, is there? Good, good, Faith. This was a brave revenge. If it be so good, would you have had it for me.
00:44:59
Speaker
And if I live, i will make all the world to hate as I do this affliction, woman. But we shall be afflicted in the meantime. Pray, let's leave this land. If we stay here, we shall be torn to pieces.
00:45:13
Speaker
Would we have kept in our own country. There we are safe enough. You might have written, railed your belly full, and few or none would contradict you, sir. Oh, but for one that rid against me, Swash, I'd had a glorious conquest in that land.
00:45:26
Speaker
How my books took effect. How greedily the credulous people swallowed down my hooks. How rife debate sprang betwixt man and wife. The little infant that could hardly speak would call his mother whore. Oh, it was rare.
00:45:45
Speaker
O damned rogue! I stay but here and hope to see him hanged, and carry news to England. Then I know the women there will never see me want. For God he knows, I love him with my heart, but dare not show it for my very ears.
00:46:01
Speaker
What course, sir, shall we take to hide ourselves? The same we did at Bristow, fencing boy. Oh, tis a fearful name to females, swash. I have bought foils already, set up bills, hung up my two-hand sword, and changed my name. Call me Misogynos.
00:46:18
Speaker
A sodden nose. This is kind of hilarious. I love this. So there's a bunch of A-plot stuff. The next time we see Swetnam, he wanders onto the scene and immediately starts ranting about some woman he saw offstage and how mad it made him Enter Misogynos and Scanfardo.
00:46:37
Speaker
A woman! Why, the more I think of their wickedness, the more incomprehensible I find it. For they are coosening, collaguing, ungrateful, deceitful, wavering, waspish, light, toyish, proud, sullen, discourteous, cruel, inconstant, and whatnot.
00:46:54
Speaker
Yet they were created and by nature formed and therefore of all men to be avoided. Okay, so there's two characters, Lorenzo and Iago. Let's see this.
00:47:06
Speaker
i'll be Lorenzo. Oh, impious conclusion! What is he? I ne'er had conversation with him yet, but by report I'll tell you.
00:47:17
Speaker
He's a man whose breeding hath been like the scarab. Altogether upon the excrement of the time, and being swollen with poisonous vapors, he breaks wind in public to blast the reputation of all women. His acquaintance has been altogether amongst whores and bods, and therefore speaks but in his own element. His own unworthy foul deformity, because no female can affect the same, begets in him despair, and despair ennui.
00:47:43
Speaker
He cares not to defame their very souls, but that he's of the Turks' opinion. They have none. He is the viper, that not only gnaws upon his mother's fame, but seeks to eat through all women's reputations.
00:47:56
Speaker
Is it possible that Sicily should breed such a degenerate monster? Shame of men? Blame not your country. He's an Englishman. ah
00:48:09
Speaker
Okay, just a quick gloss here. do you have a do you know who the Turk is of the Turk's opinion? Yeah. Yeah, so this is in Islamophobic myth going way, way, way back, which claims that in the Quran, it says that women don't have souls.
00:48:26
Speaker
Interesting. You can still see this spread around today. I don't know if I've heard that. That's kind of fascinating. I've actually seen this doing research for this podcast before. Like it's, it's a persistent thing.
00:48:42
Speaker
Interesting. I do really like this kind of, there's something really funny here about this takedown of him, which is like, this is, he thinks this about women because these are the women he hangs around with.
00:48:59
Speaker
Right. The low women. You know, I would say that it is a, you know, maybe a sex worker exclusionary radical feminism. Yeah, there's a little. But it's it is funny because it's kind of turning around the thing he was doing in the pamphlet. Right. You can again kind of see some familiarity with the pamphlet because he's saying, oh, if you're affected by this, it it proves you right. And they're saying, well, the fact that you think this is what women are like, says something about the kind of women you hang out with.
00:49:28
Speaker
Obviously not a good feminist argument, but you can really see still people are familiar with this pamphlet and It's like a pretty classic thing where it's like, okay I'm gonna write a play and then I'm going to get all the dunks out that I wanted to get on the pamphlet By just having other characters dunk on this guy. It's pretty good. Also at least the way I read this they're being like this guy's so ugly He can't get laid and that's why he hates women Which is a line of argument I see so much these days in which drives me absolutely up the fucking wall because it's not a good criticism. Yeah, and it feels like it's a good criticism because it feels like, oh, we're really going to hit him where it hurts. But it's like, you're not going to motivate people to be feminist by saying it will get you laid. Like, that's not...
00:50:13
Speaker
If only it were so easy. I do like some of the the the monologue. We didn't really talk talk about it, but some of the monologue from Misogynos where he's talking about how beautiful it is that babies who can barely speak are calling their mother whore. Oh my god, that was so funny. That's such a good line. And you can really feel this is someone who sat with this pamphlet and hated it so much was like, oh my god, I hate this guy so much. i need to like write him as a fucking clown.
00:50:41
Speaker
So that element of it is a little cathartic, even though not necessarily a feminist play. Okay, so we have to talk a little bit about the A-plot. So the king of Sicily has a daughter and long-lost son.
00:50:56
Speaker
And long-lost son is the guy who's calling himself Lorenzo. as well as an evil scheming vizier, and for reasons there ends up being a trial in which the princess's life depends on determining whether men or women are the more moral gender.
00:51:13
Speaker
Arguing for the men, we have Swetnam. For the women, we have Lorenzo disguised as Atlanta the Amazon. The jury is all men, and Swetnam wins.
00:51:27
Speaker
He uses arguments from from his book, by the way, of course. Okay. The next day, enter misogynos and swash. Swash.
00:51:39
Speaker
At your buckler, sir? Perceives thou nothing, swash? How mean you, sir? No strange sign of alteration, hum? Beyond imagination.
00:51:51
Speaker
How, good swash? Why, from a fencer, you are turned into orator. Oh, cedunt arma togai, that's no wonder. Perceivest thou nothing else? Look I not pale? Are not my arms enfolded, my eyes fixed, my head dejected, my words passionate, and yet perceivest thou nothing?
00:52:11
Speaker
Kerent Armatoge means, like, let the arms be subordinate to the toga. It's like military to civil subordinates.
00:52:21
Speaker
Let me see, methinks you look, sir, like some desperate gamester that had lost all his estate in a dicing house. You met not with those money changers, did you? Or have you fallen amongst the female sex and they have paid you for your last day's work?
00:52:36
Speaker
No, no, thou art as wide as short in my disease. Thou never canst imagine what it is unless I tell thee, Swash, I am in love.
00:52:47
Speaker
In love? Nay, tis such a wonder, Swash, I scarce believe it can be so myself, and yet it is. Okay, I cut out a little bit here. We're skipping ahead slightly.
00:52:57
Speaker
Who in the name of women should this be? oh no. That's right. Oh no! What an obtuse conception dost thou bear did not I tell thee t'was Atlanta, Swash?
00:53:14
Speaker
Who? She Amazonian dame, your advocate? A masculine feminine?
00:53:25
Speaker
Helen has her eyes buried in her hands.
00:53:32
Speaker
If misogynos turns out to be a chaser, I'm losing it. I'm just going to say that right now. Like, if this is just about out dunking on him because he's a chaser, swash, she must be more than female. has the
00:53:47
Speaker
That's a dick joke. Like, the person who wrote that meant that as a dick joke. Yeah. She must be more than female, has the power to mollify the temper of my love.
00:54:00
Speaker
Why, she's the greatest enemy you have. The greater is my glory, Swash, in that, that having vanquished all, I attain her. The prize consists alone in my eternal credit and renown. Oh, what a race of witty orators shall we beget betwixt us. Come, good Swash, I'll write a letter to her presently, which thou shalt carry. If thou speedst, I swear, thou shall be Swetnam's heir.
00:54:26
Speaker
So Swash takes the letter to Atlanta, who is just like hanging out with the queen, talking about recent events. Atlanta is like, Swash, you hate this guy, right?
00:54:38
Speaker
And Swash is like, oh yeah, i hate this guy. So the three of them all decide to collude against Swetnam and lure him to a particular orchard by responding positively to his letter. He shows up, Atlanta is there, and from hiding come the women of Sicily and they capture him and put him on trial.
00:54:57
Speaker
Okay. This next bit, I'm not quite sure how to like split it up because it's got more than two characters. Maybe we could just alternate and say who we are. I've edited the this section down just like for brevity.
00:55:12
Speaker
There's all these women in the audience, including someone whose character name is Old Woman. And to start with, we hear her saying, Guilty, guilty, guilty. Guilty of woman slander and defamation.
00:55:27
Speaker
Atlanta. Produce the books and read the title of them. Loretta. That is a a maid of the princess. The Arraignment of Idle, Forward, and Inconstant Women. Okay, who's this next character?
00:55:42
Speaker
Aurelia, that's the queen. arelia What say you, sir, to this? misogynous Show me my name, and then I'll yield unto it. arelia No, that's your policy and cowardice. You durst not publish what you dared to write. Thy man is witness to it.
00:56:00
Speaker
Sura, confess, or you shall be served of the same sauce. That part is toer to swash. swash and No, no, no, no, no. no no i'll I'll tell you all. He is no fencer.
00:56:11
Speaker
That's but for a show. And then there's this long monologue where he throws Swetnam under the bus as hard as he can in every respect. Amazing. And he ends it with a line, Then we came hither. This is all forsooth.
00:56:27
Speaker
Aurelia, tis enough. Misogynos, tis all as false as women. The crowd just yells, Stop his mouth! Atlanta, either be quiet or you are gagged again. Aurelia, proceed in judgment.
00:56:46
Speaker
Atlanta, madam, thus it is. First he shall wear this muzzle to express his barking humor against womankind, and he shall be led and publicly shown in every street of the city, and be bound in certain places to a post or stake, and beaten by all the honest women in the parish.
00:57:06
Speaker
misogynous Is that the worst? There will not one be found in all the city. atlanta Then he shall be whipped quite through the land, till he come to the seacoast, and then be shipped and sent to live amongst the infidels. arelia Call in his books, and let them all be burned and cast away, and his arraignment now put in the press, that he may live a shame unto his sex.
00:57:31
Speaker
Then Swetnam is led away, and that's the last of them we see in the play until the epilogue. Enter Swetnam muzzled and hauled in by women. Maybe for this one I'll do Swetnam. I'll do the others.
00:57:46
Speaker
Why do you hail me thus? Is't not enough? I have withstood a trial, been arraigned, endured the torture of sharp-pointed needles, the whip, and old wives' nails, but I must stand to have another jury pass on me?
00:57:58
Speaker
Loretta, it was a general wrong, therefore must have a general trial and a judgment too. And the princess chimes in, the greatest wrong was mine, he sought my life, which fact I freely pardon, to prove women are neither tyrannous nor cruel, though you report us so.
00:58:16
Speaker
I now repent, and thus to you, kind judges, I appeal. Methinks I see no anger in your eyes, mercy and beauty best to sympathize. And here forever I put off this shape, and with it all my spleen and malice too, and vow to let no time or act escape in which my service may be shown to you.
00:58:36
Speaker
And this my hand, which did my shame commence, shall with my sword be used in your defense. And that's the end of the play. What a cornball ending.
00:58:46
Speaker
I know, right? don't know. i was I really wanted to like this more, but as soon as it's like, okay, first we're going to make fun of him because like he's attracted to a woman who's secretly a man. Like, fuck off.
00:58:58
Speaker
He... Oh my god. Okay, so here's the thing. At no point... Is there like a oh, Atlanta was like actually a man kind of thing going on.
00:59:12
Speaker
In fact, she's just like hanging out with other women and like showing solidarity with them and like participating in their communal thing, including the trial of Swetnum.
00:59:24
Speaker
And it's just like, accept it. It's fine, which I thought was pretty interesting. Okay. Second, I kept thinking of fucking Paddington while I was reading this.
00:59:36
Speaker
Oh my god. Okay, for the listeners who have not seen them, in the first two Paddington movies, there are protracted bits where there's like a security guard guy who is a chaser and is really into men who have dressed up as women for plot reasons.
00:59:55
Speaker
Just came to mind. I do think it's funny, like, One of the other plays this reminded me of, which I think I've decided I'm not really going to be able to do an episode on, but, right, there's famously a pretty misogynist Shakespeare play, The Taming of the Shrew, which is all about how women, right, it's about one woman in particular who's a shrew, and then this guy who comes in and who's like, I'm going to tame her, right, and even some of this stuff that Swetnam is saying and this thing about being in love with Atlanta is Like he's saying, oh, I will be right renowned for being able to like tame this woman, right? like i will For having conquered her, right? This notion of conquering the woman is like a big part of the sort of action of Taming of the Shrew. And people try to play these games with Taming of the Shrew where they're like, oh, it's all set inside a frame narrative of this like drunk guy that they're making fun of by putting on this play for him. And you can kind of play that a little bit, but it's not great.
01:00:54
Speaker
And it's got some pretty gross stuff at the end where this woman gives a speech about like serving her husband well. And one of the interesting things about it is that another playwright wrote a play called The Tamer Tamed a few years later, where like the main character of or the the guy in The Taming of the Shrew just gets shit on like there was kind of this like culture of writing plays to respond to pop culture things like even shakespeare engages in this at times like one of his characters and some of his history plays is really popular so he writes like fan fiction of his own plays and that's what the merry wives of windsor is about which is actually also about a guy getting shit on by women so there's like interesting dualities here
01:01:41
Speaker
And these like ambiguities where it's like, okay, this is like, maybe there is also a genre here of like the play where it's the misogynist getting shit on, which is nevertheless like not very feminist. Like I would say this is like not a very feminist play on the basis of at least the excerpts we've read.
01:01:55
Speaker
But it's like, it's funny, like as much as there's this appetite for like, oh, we're going to talk about how women are bad. There's also this appetite for like women. getting revenge on these like shitty men but it's not necessarily like a feminist genre maybe there's something to explore there actually do think this is a feminist play i don't think it's a very feminist play i don't think it's sort of up to our standards of feminism but this doesn't strike me as less feminist than like a lot of lib feminism that i see floating around today
01:02:33
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. i mean, i guess, and I've talked a little bit about this in the past, where it's like, okay, maybe we should accept that, like, feminism should just be things that call themselves feminist, and then we can critique things as being different tendencies with good or bad aspects, like, within feminism.
01:02:53
Speaker
But I guess part of what I'm saying is, like i'm trying to think of other examples of like lib feminism that we also critique along these lines. A lot of those today like are explicitly trying to say like this is feminist.
01:03:06
Speaker
And you know, I don't know at least so far if this play is really trying to say
01:03:17
Speaker
this is a feminist play or if it's just this guy sucks, let's make fun of him, right? So I don't know if it's a feminist play so much on those two levels. One is like, yeah, we definitely have critiques to make about what it thinks are good ways of dunking on this guy. But the other one is, it's not totally clear if the author or the company that puts it on is thinking of themselves as engaging in something broader than just dunking on this guy, right?
01:03:48
Speaker
Well, there's something kind of interesting here, which is i describe this theater as one of the most popular and least prestigious in London. And in fact, it had a reputation at the time as the rowdiest theater in London and like not actually a very woman friendly one.
01:04:06
Speaker
And so there's this whole discussion in the scholarship about like what putting on this place says about their attempts to like shift who their audience was.
01:04:18
Speaker
Right. But I think it's interesting because I think you could also turn that around and say, okay, this is an audience which is not a particularly, you know, woman heavy or feminist audience. So what is the function of this play? And I think it's a similar function to a lot of...
01:04:34
Speaker
what we would critique as not good feminist media today, which is if you get too explicit and too heavy handed with being misogynist, then it'll start to make people who even are kind of misogynist uncomfortable. So you do some kind of score settling and then that stops you from actually having to do any real changes to your analysis of how the world works or anything like that.
01:05:00
Speaker
But you get to be like, oh, look, we put on the feminist play, right? Mm-hmm. You critique Andrew Tate, but you don't critique Bill Clinton, say. Yeah. I think there is definitely something to be said about this comparison between like early 17th century like pamphlet culture and Twitter.
01:05:20
Speaker
Because this is also like this is a comparison I've seen made before, because people do talk about the democratizing influence of... not just like the invention of the printing press, which was a 15th century invention, but you know streamlining and and it becoming cheaper for people to just like print pamphlets all the time and how this had political effects because you do have this sense in which anyone with... you know It lowered the bar significantly to being able to publish things.
01:05:46
Speaker
And so you kind of get the same thing you get on Twitter, which is that you know there's that phenomenon where like journalists will complain about cancel culture on Twitter. And there are situations where people...
01:05:58
Speaker
Whatever, right? Like there's, there's, this isn't the podcast where we analyze what cancel culture is. But like one of the things that they're talking about is just like, before Twitter, it was much harder for me to go on Twitter and be like, you're a fucking idiot at a specific journalist. And now it's very easy.
01:06:15
Speaker
And journalists don't like that. And so they're like, we're being canceled. But there's kind of a similar thing here, right? Where this guy writes a book or also the writing of the book was probably much cheaper. I mean, it was much cheaper and it's unclear if he would have been able to publish a book if if it needed to be handwritten. But also people could just write these pamphlets and plays.
01:06:36
Speaker
So it's kind of funny to see this is like ah another element of the time washing machine that's like not maybe so bad or it's like, yeah, there is always this kind of, level of democratizing of media production.
01:06:50
Speaker
And it's funny to see where these things like hit the same notes. Let's do FAG ratings. Let's do FAG ratings. So we rate each of our authors on a three point scale.
01:07:05
Speaker
We rate their ferocity, their arrogance, and their gullibility, one to five for each. This is going to be tricky because we really know so little about this guy and the main text here is just like completely plagiarized.
01:07:21
Speaker
Keeping in mind that like a one is like not normal, right? Like a one is still like misogynist. I kind of don't know if I can do ferocity higher than a two for this guy. Like...
01:07:32
Speaker
It's so lazy to just be like, oh, you know, I was bored and I was thinking about how much I hate women. And so I decided to write about it and then just copy and paste a bunch of shit. Like, come on, man. I'm absolutely on the same page. He's a one nonferocity for me.
01:07:47
Speaker
Okay. I think I'm going to go down to a one as well.
01:07:53
Speaker
Okay. How are we feeling about arrogance? Arrogance.
01:07:59
Speaker
I think higher, but not at a five. Like... Helen, he might be a one on arrogance for me. Interesting. I think I'm gonna give him a two ah But you're right, like... The problem, fundamentally, is that our author here is just some fucking dude.
01:08:20
Speaker
Like, it takes a lot of time and effort to write a book, even if you're stealing every bit of it and cutting and pasting it. So he's not like a normal guy. But at the same time, i don't think of him as that distinct from the guy who just like, i don't know, buys a sexist joke book. Yeah, I think I can see your point. I think I'm going to stick with the two because I could imagine someone being less arrogant and still being someone we want to rate.
01:08:48
Speaker
but not much less. So i'm going to go with the two. I have no sense of gullibility here at all. Again, because we have such an empty, like we we have so little information about him, like we don't have a sense, right? mean, gullibility is also something that we, it's a more complicated category, because were really we're trying to measure like,
01:09:09
Speaker
Okay, here's how I think we've most successfully described like what gullibility is systematizing, right? Gullibility is if we understand what the role that this person has in the social reproduction of misogyny or of whatever the bigotry is, like how aware of that role is this person?
01:09:30
Speaker
and And so someone like you know, Enoch Powell, we made a gullibility five because he is not, like, he thinks that he's like a huge, like, leader and iconoclast and he's changing hearts and minds, but really he's like, that's not what he was doing and that's not what he was for. Whereas, like, Leacock kind of knew exactly that he was just like riding the grift, it feels like, from his things. so this is where I'm saying, i don't really know what Swetnam's role is in reproducing this stuff.
01:10:04
Speaker
I think probably a one for gullibility because I think his role is pretty clearly like just the participation and in and creation of this genre, not creation of the genre, but continuing of this genre. Well, that's part of why he got such a hard time is because he wasn't exactly continuing the genre. He was blundering into it and fucking it up.
01:10:25
Speaker
Okay. So I could see like a two or a three just because like, dude, you're supposed to stick in the genre, like we have rules and you didn't know you were a little blind to the rules, you didn't quite understand the way the game is played, you're a little stupid. I'm going to give him a 2 for that.
01:10:39
Speaker
I think a 2 is fair. I think we're in agreement. So that means I give him a 5 and you give him a 4, which is interesting because it's the guy who invented misogyny and yet we we're rating him very low. So, you know, misogyny, we don't really care about it that much. We're going to pivot this podcast away from that and toward topics like AI and cryptocurrency, actually.
01:10:59
Speaker
This podcast is brought to you by crypto.com. No, it's not. Oh my God. all right. think the only thing left to do is if you enjoyed listening to this, check us out on Patreon, patreon.com slash odium symposium for $5 a month. You can get a few days early access to episodes. You can get a shout out on the podcast. You can help us out in being able to produce this and maybe make more bonus content.
01:11:28
Speaker
We would love to make bonus content. We would love to have that make sense. Yeah. So also you could review us, tell your friends. We don't really know how to market a podcast and we're hoping that you will just do it for us. So you could get one of those layers on your cars, you know, like a lot of cyber trucks have, where they'll have like a naked Monian, like hentai woman, except it's an ad for Odium Symposium instead. Drive it around town.
01:11:55
Speaker
That would be really cool. Yeah. no it wouldn't be cool helen there's really nothing real there is no real and that's that's what's called the postmodern mentality if you do that maybe it will help you get the race you share the adventure of life justifies its suffering I don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins do it lie do it lie do it lie do it lie do it lie do lie do it lie i listen you the we not you on them let stay plastic I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
01:12:34
Speaker
Some level of masochism