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10. Project 1789
71 Plays17 days ago
Helen introduces Sarah to French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and in particular his writing on the proper education of women.
Check out our patreon at https://patreon.com/OdiumSymposium.
Episode art by @canis_kunst on Instagram.
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Transcript
Patriarchal Rhetoric and Femaleness
00:00:00
Speaker
That actually, wait, hang on. The more I think about it, not only is that actually meaningful, that's like a really clear encapsulation of a lot of patriarchal rhetoric. Every aspect of a woman's being and every moment that she exists has to be obsessed with her femaleness and with the implications of duty that it imposes on her.
00:00:21
Speaker
And then men, like they just don't have to think about it that much. Every once in a while they're male. It comes up sometimes.
Rousseau's Misogyny and Feminism
00:00:29
Speaker
Hi y'all, Helen here. This episode is about enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and in particular, his writing on the proper education of women.
00:00:38
Speaker
In particular, we see a pretty clear description of the subjugation of women. It gets presented to us as natural, necessary, and even desirable. We'll try to follow along the mental gymnastics of someone who theorized about freedom as a kind of ultimate value, but then managed to completely turn things around when it comes to talking about women.
00:00:58
Speaker
and we'll see how he was such a misogynist that he actually sort of helped to inspire the invention of feminism. We will also, as usual, see many ideas spelled out, in this case hundreds of years ago, that still plague us today.
00:01:13
Speaker
This one was super fun to record. I hope you all enjoy it 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.
00:01:32
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 right-blowing name. I'll suck you in your goddamn face. You'll stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
00:01:50
Speaker
some level of masochism.
Podcast Introduction
00:01:54
Speaker
Hi everyone, welcome to Odium Symposium. I'm Helen. I'm Sarah. This is a podcast where we read bigoted historical texts, usually misogynist ones, but it varies.
00:02:06
Speaker
We're workshopping the tagline a little bit. Yeah, we've been thinking like, okay, we read texts, like maybe that sounds a little dry and boring. Really, we want to talk about the production of bigotry and we are looking at sort of texts, but yeah, we're we're gonna see how our elevator pitch for the podcast evolves over time.
00:02:28
Speaker
We also want to shout out a new odium connoisseur. Yeah. Thank you to Nina for subscribing to our Patreon. We appreciate it so much. You can go to patreon.com slash odium symposium and subscribe.
00:02:43
Speaker
And for $5 a month, you will get many incredible benefits, by which I mean two, because there are two episodes that come out each month and you will get access to them a few days early.
00:02:55
Speaker
We are hoping to be able to record like more bonus content and also, you know, maybe get some nicer equipment and stuff and all of that is possible with Patreon money. So thank you again.
00:03:07
Speaker
So before we start, I need to expose your game from last last episode. Okay. So Helen, on two separate occasions, I brought up Disney movies.
00:03:20
Speaker
And in response, you said, oh yeah, the situation is also just like this Shakespeare play. That happened twice. And when I mentioned this to you while I was editing the episode, what did you say, Helen?
00:03:34
Speaker
I was like, yeah, the second time i I knew that I had done it the first time and I was actually on the lookout for a third time. i see. Yeah. All right, well, your treachery is on display now. It reminds me of the character Iago, who you know from Aladdin, of course.
00:03:51
Speaker
Of course. ah
00:03:56
Speaker
It doesn't remind me of anything in Shakespeare, strangely. Let's move on to our episode topic.
Rousseau's Biography and Enlightenment Context
00:04:04
Speaker
I feel like I've had a funny run of episodes where sometimes I think like, okay, this is going to be a lighter episode. This is going be a less serious episode. And actually going into the Althusser episode, which in my mind is one of the heaviest episodes we've done so far, before I started prepping it, I thought, okay, this one might be a lighter one.
00:04:22
Speaker
And it was not at all. And before that we had the heavy Shane Wolf episode, which also pretty intense, you know, talking about some pretty pretty dark stuff. And so this one, i was like, no, I really wanna do something that's not gonna be too heavy, that's gonna be interesting, that's gonna be illuminating about misogyny.
00:04:39
Speaker
And i think we might've gotten it, but we'll we'll see at the end of the episode whether I managed to pull this off. so Sarah, sorry. What do you know about the French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau?
00:04:54
Speaker
Not much. I know he wrote about the rights and liberties of man. So he was born in 1712 in Geneva to like a middle class family, not a super privileged upbringing. Like he wasn't an aristocrat, but definitely not like penniless.
00:05:12
Speaker
He had sort of a long interesting biography. We don't i don't want to get into his biography too much. It would just be like a lot of details that sort of aren't relevant for us. There is a really funny detail, which is that at the age of 20, he was like taken in by this noblewoman and had like some sort of affair with her. But the Wikipedia page describes the quote unquote like sexual nature of their relationship confused him.
00:05:36
Speaker
That's very cryptic. She was like 30. And it seems like it was it was some sort of thruple situation with her husband. And he was like not smart enough to figure out what to do with that.
00:05:48
Speaker
i guess it's not like an overt grooming situation like with Macron or whatever. But seems potentially a little a little weird. There's a big power imbalance when one person is a married noblewoman who is confusing you. That seems pretty evident.
00:06:04
Speaker
Yeah, and so I thought like, ooh, it could delve more into his biography and maybe this will unpick some of the later stuff he's writing, but then I didn't end up any finding an interesting angle for that. And so I just thought, yeah, I just like this very noncommittal, ambivalent statement that it confused him. Like it it really didn't, I don't really understand what that means. Anyway, he was a philosopher. He also was a like writer. He wrote some novels. He was a musician.
00:06:27
Speaker
But we're going to focus mostly on his philosophy today. So really quick background on like the Enlightenment as a philosophical movement. This is going to be like lightning speed, like philosophy 101. So people who know about this already will be mad at me being wrong, but that's fine. I don't want to spend more than five minutes talking about what the Enlightenment was, right? But basically the and Enlightenment was this period of like as a philosophical movement was almost a response to the scientific revolutions of like Galileo and Newton and this kind of reordering of the understanding of the world, philosophy noticed, hey, we used to have these ideas that everything in the world was highly teleological, that the way the world worked was like things did what they were supposed to, things did what they were constructed to do. But then suddenly you get all of these scientific theories which tell you that actually no, right? Like newton Newtonian mechanics doesn't tell you that
00:07:24
Speaker
things move because they are constructed to do that and they are fulfilling some divine purpose. It's describing a series of highly mechanistic laws that just describe what will happen. a common metaphor is that people come to see the world as more like clockwork than a story that was laid out ahead of time.
00:07:42
Speaker
And what you often see is that philosophy kind of trails behind and observes these either scientific or artistic movements and presents them in a sort of more abstract way. And so this is exactly what you see with starting with Descartes. i mean, usually it's understood that this period runs from Descartes through to Kant.
00:07:58
Speaker
that Descartes started from this position of sort of pure doubt. Like, what can we know if we reject all of these things that we're saying are true just on the basis of tradition and we try to figure out what we can actually support through reason and through thought? What do we end up with? And that was kind of his early project. And then through sort of Kant kind of crowning this movement with his critique of pure reason and critique of pure judgment and not, you know, by any means sort of solving these problems, but moving philosophy into a new era, right? And so usually this period is from And Descartes to Kant is pretty coherently thought of as like early modern philosophy.
00:08:31
Speaker
Okay, so that's the movement that Rousseau was a part of. He was primarily a political philosopher. He wrote a lot about, like, as you said, like society, the way things should be. He was also sort of an economic philosopher in a way and still understood these things were were highly tied together.
00:08:48
Speaker
But he wrote a lot about like how society should be, how it came to be, and how it should be organized. One of the common trends in political philosophy at the time was to kind of theorize about a state of nature. And this is really what Rousseau dealt with, was like the state of nature and the social contract.
Rousseau vs. Hobbes on Nature
00:09:03
Speaker
And there's theorizing about this for for hundreds of years before that, and it's not limited to the West in any way, but kind of one of the big earlier philosophers that Rousseau is maybe not directly referencing, but is participating in this tradition with is Hobbes.
00:09:17
Speaker
whose work of political philosophy 100 years earlier, the Leviathan, was basically saying, okay, and the state of nature is a state of war. Everyone is warring with each other. Man, you know, everyone is fighting everybody all the time. Life is, the famous quote, life was nasty, brutish, and short.
00:09:34
Speaker
And so what you needed was a strong central authority figure, to the a Leviathan, to impose its will to keep everybody in check so that you could have order and you could have a functioning society.
00:09:47
Speaker
Lots of different people had criticisms of this and objected to this. Rousseau had, I think, a somewhat interesting critique where he says, look, in a state of nature where people aren't interacting in a society, there's like no field for these wars to happen. That actually what you're describing when you're talking about a state of war is already...
00:10:10
Speaker
society and so Hobbes is painting socialized man and the the direct quote almost is Hobbes is painting socialized man and calling him natural man. And so Rousseau's big thing and he's often painted in paul in in thought today as sort of an opposite to Hobbes. He says actually the state of nature is a state of ultimate freedom.
00:10:29
Speaker
And the thing that, you know, he wrote something, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, which is about basically the origin of inequality is the beginning of private property, that it's property that really makes people unequal and causes these kinds of conflicts.
00:10:46
Speaker
There's an interesting parallel and divergence here from how a lot of, say, anarcho-capitalist types talk about how their ideal world would work because the natural vision that we as, and say natural, the natural vision that we as people living in the United States have of such a situation is that it'd be completely dominated by oligarchic interests, by billionaires, by corporations, that sort of thing. And they say that this kind of person, this kind of power structure can't exist without a society built around it that enforces advantages for the large, the powerful.
00:11:30
Speaker
Right. And so you get people, you get all sorts of people using
Marxist Interpretations of Rousseau
00:11:35
Speaker
Rousseau. You get this kind of anarcho-capitalist, this kind of libertarian readings of Rousseau. You get all sorts of Marxist readings of Rousseau.
00:11:43
Speaker
There's a pretty seminal series of lectures that were given by Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser in the 1970s about reading Rousseau and understanding really Rousseau as a Marxist, as a sort of proto-Marxist thinker.
00:11:57
Speaker
I think in general, you also see in a lot of Marxist, different I mean, a bunch of different strands of Marxist and communist thought, you see a kind of like, also an anarcho-primitivism that is kind of popular. And...
00:12:12
Speaker
you know, if we're talking about sort of personal stakes and and what what we think, like, I don't think I have, you know, perfect answers to these things. To me, it does strike me as sort of dangerously close to a kind of like return guy style thinking, right? Like, and I think there's a, you know, I was reading about this recently. There's a really interesting the the posthumous David Graeber history that he co-authored with David Wengrow, what was it called? The Dawn of Everything is this kind of like attempt to do big history and he spends a lot of it talking about kind of these two poles of Hobbes and Rousseau and the like
00:12:44
Speaker
in nature everyone is bad versus in nature everyone is good are both kind of highly reductive and that really and this you know his critique is sort of ah What seems like it should be an obvious one from an anthropology point of view which is to say you shouldn't just be theorizing abstractly about the state of nature you should be looking at real people and how they lived and When you do that it seems hard to recover either one of these ideas of state of nature although philosophers would then say, well, they're not talking about real people and how they live. They're trying to use these as a sort of model of thinking and understanding how to then model society as a social contract contract and all blah, blah, blah. Right. But that's not what this podcast is about.
00:13:23
Speaker
i mean, at some point, you do have to talk about like, what the hell the point of talking about the state of nature is Yeah. if you want to If you want to get into these ideas. Seriously, like, why is it relevant?
00:13:35
Speaker
Exactly. And so if this were what is the Enlightenment podcast, that's what we'd be doing. But instead, we're going to be talking about a later work he wrote called Emil on Education.
00:13:47
Speaker
This is actually still really widely and highly regarded in a lot of education studies. People still talk about this book a lot today for what it has to say about how to educate young people. There are some really good elements of it.
00:14:01
Speaker
He wants to talk about really a lack of theory about child development, a lack of understanding that children are not just children. adults, but then you scaled them down smaller, that there's really something to grapple with in terms of educating children and the right way to educate children. And at the time, it seems like child education was not really that well understood or cared about to a large extent.
00:14:27
Speaker
I've heard of this book before. I know it's super influential, but I don't know much about this, so I'm yeah getting even more excited.
Rousseau on Education and Gender Roles
00:14:34
Speaker
So a lot of how he frames this is that he wants to implement some of his political ideas into a theory about education.
00:14:43
Speaker
So it's it's separated into five books. So book one is basically a recap of his arguments about the state of nature. In nature, man is free, but we have to figure out the best way to live in a society.
00:14:55
Speaker
And so this book is going to be a treatise on how education should be carried out to make that work. There's some funny stuff in here that I think is really lazy academic style writing where he says basically, I'm not going to talk a lot about existing theories because the point of writing a book is to say what people don't know yet, not what people already know, which is kind of a really arrogant position.
00:15:18
Speaker
Yeah, the listeners can't see it, but I just rolled my eyes really hard. Yeah, a huge eye roll from Sarah. And, you know, this is a common, I think, way to try to dodge having to engage in conversation, having to engage in a more social vision, as opposed to some natural atomized vision of how academic discipline should work.
00:15:43
Speaker
Okay, so that's book one. Book two focuses on young boys. interact he He talks a lot about how really we should not be forcing kids just to like read all the time and stay inside. Instead of focusing on books and tradition, we should be focusing on developing the child's body and the interaction between the child and nature.
00:16:04
Speaker
I think he makes a lot of good points here. Like, it is true that just teaching, like telling kids all the things you want them to know and what they should be learning is probably a bad way to do education. And he is really sort of doing a proto version of what you see in a lot of like either mont Montessori style or these other learning methods where they're saying, hey, we should actually engage children's curiosity and Teach them in such a way that they're allowed to learn about what they want All right. these These are some good ideas Well, you had a very non-traditional education and you seem to have gotten a lot of value out of it.
00:16:43
Speaker
Yeah, i I really did and I also had a non-traditional education in the sense that they gave me a traditional education and it didn't take and it didn't work Amazing Yeah, what what Sarah's referencing for the listeners who don't know all of the all of the hell and lore is that I went to an anarchist school for one year. Before that, I did go to a school that called itself a Montessori school, but was sort of the opposite of a Montessori school. I went to a bunch of weird schools growing up, basically.
00:17:14
Speaker
Anyway, book three is about the selection of a trade. And there's some interesting stuff in here also when you think about like discourse today about like going to college versus going to a trade school. He's almost directly doing kind of like Oh, you know colleges are worthless. They just are you know indoctrination center He doesn't say indoctrination centers, right? But like colleges are terrible and like there are some good teachers in colleges But like mostly it's just like people regurgitating stuff and really you should go learn a trade trades are more useful and also Apprenticeship is a really good model for socialization You'll learn from role models that are suitable for you not only how to do the trade but how to conduct your life
00:17:56
Speaker
There is a very widespread urge to have schools and education model the power structures that exist outside of that context. And there's always this implicit claim that if you don't expose children to these power structures, then somehow they're going to be ill-equipped to go out into the world and do things.
00:18:21
Speaker
So classrooms should be more like you interacting with your boss and being assigned to work. And the discussions around apprenticeship always very much remind me of that.
00:18:36
Speaker
There's no clear reason that we need to have an economically motivated power imbalance introduced into the classroom. Right. I do. I will say a lot of his argument actually has to do with trying to avoid.
00:18:56
Speaker
the imposition of what feels like arbitrary authority, so that it's not necessarily the economic motivation of you have to like perform this trade and do work, but the idea that you select a trade that you actually want to do and then seeing these authority figures in this trade that you already care about will be a good way to motivate actually paying attention to the things they're saying.
00:19:20
Speaker
it's Not that different, but he is trying to engage with like, how do we eliminate the feeling of arbitrary capricious authority in education is like one of his motivating principles here.
00:19:36
Speaker
I guess they hadn't invented the concept of mentorship yet. Yeah, I mean, he kind of is sort of just talking about mentorship, but it's... But when you're an apprentice, like, this person is actually your boss. Like, they do actually have power over you.
00:19:51
Speaker
Right. So that's book three. Book four is one of the funnier parts to me. He starts saying... Okay, book four is about sentiment. We have to teach children sentiment, right? When you become a teenager, that's when you develop like a theory of mind and an ability to think about other people.
00:20:10
Speaker
Unless you're autistic, and then that just never happens. I also thought about this. Sarah and I were both have been laughing about this idea that like this absurd claim that autistic people don't have theory of mind.
00:20:22
Speaker
And I think there's some parallels here because it really is just like people who think differently in different ways. You just assume like, oh, they don't have a theory of mind. And that really just lets you off the hook having to worry about them. i don't know. It's such a bizarre and extreme assumption to make.
00:20:39
Speaker
Yeah, so book four also contains some sections that got the book banned in certain places because it also describes how to teach kids about religion. And basically he has a whole passage about how like the only religion we should really teach kids is quote unquote natural religion, which is a kind of like enlightenment deism.
00:20:58
Speaker
And of course the church was like, hey, that's not cool. Like is section five about how as a young man say about 20 years You ought to get into a relationship with an older noble woman and her husband.
00:21:11
Speaker
That's not what section five is about. We're going to see what section five is about. That's what the episode is about is book five. Great. Here's a paragraph almost towards the end of book four. So the sentimental education of the child is done.
00:21:25
Speaker
Oh, I should also say as preface for this, the whole book is sort of theory about education, but then intermingled with narrative about a specific child named Emil that he is imagining like a tutor educating. So you're getting like the story of Emil's life. The time has come.
00:21:42
Speaker
We must now seek her in earnest, lest Emil should mistake someone else for Sophie and only discover his error when it is too late. Then farewell Paris, far-famed Paris, with all your noise and smoke and dirt, where the women have ceased to believe in honor and the men in virtue.
00:22:00
Speaker
We are in search of love, happiness, innocence. The further we go from Paris, the better. Okay, yeah, we're getting back to the agrarianism here.
00:22:11
Speaker
Yeah, so book five has sort of two sections. One is called Sophie of Woman and the other one is called of Travel, which we'll get to at the end a little bit. But most of what we're going to talk about is of woman.
00:22:26
Speaker
And the setup is basically it's time for a meal to find a wife. This is the appropriate moment for us to also talk about women and how women should be educated. And so Right, when they're in relation to men's need to get married.
00:22:41
Speaker
That's when women come Yeah, exactly. And again, we're seeing the agrarianism. We're seeing this disdain for city life for people who live in cities.
00:22:51
Speaker
This notion that in cities, women have ceased to believe in honor. I mean... They're all strumpets, Helen. Yeah, we don't need to get too much into like what 18th century Paris city life was like.
00:23:07
Speaker
There were certainly huge inequalities and economic hardships, etc. And so framing that all as it's because women have ceased to believe in honor, highly reactionary.
00:23:19
Speaker
We're going to like put Emil aside for a second and we're just going to talk about women and what women should be like and then how to educate women. And that's basically what the rest of the episode is going to be about. are you ready to learn about how to be a woman?
00:23:37
Speaker
Ooh, I'm not sure I am but I'll give it my best shot. Sophie should be as truly a woman as Emil is a man, ayee she must possess all those characters of her sex which are required to enable her to play her part in the physical and moral order.
00:23:55
Speaker
Let us inquire to begin with, in what respects her sex differs from our own. But for her sex, a woman is a man. She has the same organs, the same needs, the same faculties.
00:24:09
Speaker
The machine is the same in its construction. Its parts, its working, and its appearance are similar. Regard it as you will, the difference is only in degree.
00:24:19
Speaker
Okay, first reactions. Okay, so there's some stuff here that's making me uncomfortable, but also this understanding of men and women as not so similar, I think it can easily play to a modern audience as quite progressive.
00:24:38
Speaker
Yeah. It's also not that far from my understanding of how people typically thought about matters of sex back then. Right.
00:24:50
Speaker
People thought that, you know, the penis flips inside out and it becomes the vagina, which with today's techniques, it can. but With the wonders of modern technology...
00:25:03
Speaker
Yeah, but people had an understanding of women as just kind of inverted men more generally. And as on some fundamental level, not that different.
00:25:15
Speaker
Right, and I think even would rephrase some things, but I think this is not that far from something I think you could say, which is sort of just true. I mean, I would quibble with this part about the physical and moral order, right? That is doing lot of heavy lifting here. That's the part that's leaping out at me. Right, that's doing some, that's like the rug that things are being swept under, and we have to open that, you know, have to peer under that and see what's actually there, but... It feels a little more like the rug that's about to get pulled out from under my feet.
00:25:44
Speaker
Exactly. But the, so far at least, this isn't so bad. He's saying, look, men and women are, like, there's this thing called sex that is, like, the difference between them. And so we need to ask what that difference is. But keep in mind, by and large, largely the same. And I would say, yeah, that's kind of fair.
00:26:01
Speaker
So let's see. Yet where sex is concerned, man and woman are unlike. Each is the complement of the other. The difficulty in comparing them lies in our inability to decide, in either case, what is a matter of sex and what is not.
00:26:18
Speaker
General differences present themselves to the comparative anatomist and even to the superficial observer. They seem not to be a matter of sex, yet they are really sex differences, although the connection eludes our observation.
00:26:31
Speaker
How far such differences may extend we cannot tell. All we know for certain is that where man and woman are alike, we have to do with the characteristics of the species. Where they are unlike, we have to do with the characteristics of sex.
00:26:45
Speaker
Considered from these two standpoints, we find so many instances of likeness and unlikeness that it is perhaps one of the greatest marvels how nature has contrived to make two beings so like and yet so different.
00:26:56
Speaker
Okay, I mean, kind of what he's describing here is the social constructedness of sex, except he's like, whoa, whoa, hang on, hang on a sec. All of this is contrived, of course. All of this is set up from above.
00:27:09
Speaker
So much of this is actually like exactly what the social constructiveness of sex sort of means, right? He's he's actually playing out that phenomenon in text here. He's saying, okay, men and women, there are some anatomical differences. It's hard to decide.
00:27:29
Speaker
So we're gonna basically take it as a definition that the differences are sex differences, right? What it means for something to be a sex difference is an observed difference between men and women and that's what social constructivist theories of sex are saying, right? Like, yeah, it's just the same statement and it's just that he also thinks well, you know when we uncover what those differences are we're actually getting at something which and naturally was there before.
00:27:58
Speaker
Building up the whole argument and then rejecting the the conclusion. Yeah. Yeah. Let me read the last sentence again. Considered from these two standpoints, we find so many instances of likeness and unlikeness. It is perhaps one of the greatest of marvels how nature has contrived to make two beings so like and yet so different.
00:28:14
Speaker
He's like, this is weird. Like, it almost seems like this is inconsistent with nature contriving these two beings to be like... uniformly separated into two categories which are like and unlike in so many ways.
00:28:27
Speaker
So, you know, he's just sitting with the contradiction. He's not following through. Yeah, and it's fascinating to position him or to consider his position as an Enlightenment philosopher when he is supposed to be exactly questioning teleological narratives about the world.
00:28:45
Speaker
How quickly this is like falling apart as soon as it comes to asking questions about women. And basically with no cuts in between the excerpt you just read,
00:28:56
Speaker
Here's what he has to say next. Rolling my eyes on this inference is obvious and it is confirmed by experience it shows the vanity of the disputes as to the superiority or the equality of the sexes as if each sex pursuing the path marked out for it by nature were not more perfect in that very divergence
00:29:21
Speaker
rolling my eyes on camera than if it closely than if it more closely resembled the other.
Rousseau on Women's Nature and Modesty
00:29:27
Speaker
A perfect man and a perfect woman should no more be alike in mind than in face, and perfection admits of neither less nor more.
00:29:37
Speaker
and the union of the sexes, each alike contributes to the common end, but in different ways. From this diversity springs the first difference which may be observed between man and woman in their moral relations.
00:29:49
Speaker
The man should be strong and active. The woman should be weak and passive. The one must have both the power and the will. It is enough that the other should offer little resistance.
00:30:03
Speaker
When this principle is admitted, it follows that woman is specially made for man's delight. If man in his turn ought to be pleasing in her eyes, the necessity is less urgent.
00:30:14
Speaker
His virtue is in his strength. He pleases because he is strong. I grant you this is not the law of love, but it is the law of nature, which is older than love itself.
00:30:28
Speaker
I'm losing my fucking mind. Right? What is happening right now? ah So, okay, first off, the parallels with the bullshit that I am so tired of today yeah are just agonizing.
00:30:42
Speaker
But then also, in the last paragraph, he's just like, you know what? Maybe when it came to women, Hobbes kind of had it right. Yeah, right? It's so weak. And I saw this quote going around in a lot of responses to Emil, which is like, oh, his writing on women, it really, you know, crystallizes the feelings of the time, right? People really want to lean on that. That is actually in quotes, but unsighted. Like I couldn't figure out where the quote was from on like the Wikipedia page for Emil, but also in some other reviews. And people want to talk about, oh, it's of its time.
00:31:17
Speaker
This is just what people thought about women back then. And it's like, I don't know, it's so fucking weak. It's so... For this guy who wants to be this like contrarian and... and Provocative thinker and he's willing to go up against the church and say all these things and it's like, okay But then the second you get to talking about women you're you're just gonna say oh yeah Obviously there's moral differences, right? Obviously sex means that there's moral differences between men and women that's obvious like no so no argument needed there It's confirmed by experience like whose experience where like
00:31:54
Speaker
he's doing the like complementarianism thing of like, oh, men and women are just built for different things. And it just happens to be that men are the cooler, stronger, in-charge ones. And women should be, orient their existence around pleasing men.
00:32:10
Speaker
It's so pathetic. Yeah. ah Oh, this is excruciating. Yeah. um And also the intimations of sexual violence in this whole thing are...
00:32:25
Speaker
really unpleasant. Yeah. The woman is especially made for man's delight, and all she needs to do is not resist. And by the way, yeah, we all know men are kind of fucking ugly, but like, that doesn't matter because he's strong.
00:32:43
Speaker
And women might not like that they're ugly, but that doesn't matter because he's stronger than her. Like, that's about rape. That's really, it's not necessarily about, like, yeah the sexual act of rape, but it is, like, very much an endorsement of and a promulgation of rape culture.
00:33:02
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And in fact, he kind of expands on that a bit in the next couple of excerpts. Oh, no, Helen. Who can possibly suppose that nature has prescribed the same advances to the one sex as to the other, or that the first to feel desire should be the first to show it?
00:33:20
Speaker
What strange depravity of judgment! The consequences of the act being so different for the two sexes, is it natural that they should enter upon it with equal boldness?
00:33:32
Speaker
How can anyone fail to see that when the share of each is so unequal, if the one were not controlled by modesty as the other is controlled by nature, the result would be the destruction of both, and the human race would perish through the very means ordained for its continuance?
00:33:49
Speaker
Women so easily stir a man's senses and fan the ashes of a dying passion that if philosophy ever succeeded in introducing this custom into any unlucky country, especially if it were a warm country where more women are born than men, okay the men, tyrannized over by the women, would at last become their victims and would be dragged to their death without the least chance of escape.
00:34:15
Speaker
Female animals are without this sense of shame, but what of that? Are their desires as boundless as those of women, which are curbed by this shame? The desires of the animals are the result of necessity, and when the need is satisfied, the desire ceases.
00:34:31
Speaker
They no longer make a feint of repulsing the male, they do it in earnest. Their seasons of complacence are short and soon over. Impulse and restraint are alike the work of nature,
00:34:44
Speaker
But what would take the place of this negative instinct in women if you robbed them of their modesty? It's not good. It's not good, Sarah. Sarah is in so much pain right now. Like, this is awful.
00:34:58
Speaker
I mean, it reminds me a lot of Leacock. It reminds me a lot of Cato. Like, all of these common misogynist tropes we've seen again and again and again on this podcast of like, oh, not only are women, like, teleologically unequal,
00:35:13
Speaker
It's not that it would be impossible to construct a society where women have equality. It's that if you did such a thing, it would lead to ruination. would lead to men becoming the real victims. It would lead to like absolute destruction and the end of the natural order and the end of reproduction.
00:35:30
Speaker
i'm I'm awfully confused about what exactly the pathway to this destruction is supposed to be. It feels like there are some underlying assumptions. There's some cultural gap here. Right. How women being unrestrained by modesty would lead the men to being dragged to their death.
00:35:53
Speaker
I think, especially with this passage, but I think with some of these passages, it might be worth us picking apart. like just the direct meaning a little bit because some of this writing is a little bit dense and then I agree like there's some other context and some of it I can fill in and some of it I'm equally baffled like I was not able to really find what the hell he's talking about.
00:36:13
Speaker
I think it's worth pointing out here, right, this idea, oh, you know, the consequences of the act being so different, it is natural. Is it natural that should enter upon it with equal boldness? He's basically saying women get pregnant Right. There's a there's a there's a heavier physical consequence and in a way for sex.
00:36:32
Speaker
This is a bit interesting of a point to make, especially this is a world that has already contraception, that has an understanding of even certain like.
00:36:46
Speaker
Kinds of abortion, right? Like and obviously not all of our sort of modern techniques. But I was going to say this very much reads like an anti birth control rant right we have Already understandings of certain kinds of birth control certain kinds of abortion. This is also a world that has already had sort of witch hunts and you know condemning women as witches who were providing access to these sorts of things. So this statement about the consequences of the act is not an apolitical one. It's not a straightforwardly scientific claim. It is partly a political claim.
00:37:19
Speaker
And his claim is that the response to this fact of pregnancy should be women's modesty. That sort of all these other, he doesn't even address like all these other sort of technological responses to this situation and he's saying yeah it's just it has to be women's modesty and so yeah this is basically an evo psych argument like in early form if you have if philosophy succeeds at introducing this custom by which he means like equality of the sexes and the like sexual liberation of women
00:37:52
Speaker
then presumably, right, like the obvious conclusion from what he's saying earlier is there would be a lot more pregnancy. i I agree with you, though, that there is some missing link in the chain towards men being dragged to their death.
00:38:07
Speaker
I think I should maybe clarify for the listeners that when I describe this as a proto-evo-psych argument, i just don't I don't just mean that it deals with biological explanations for social and psychological phenomena.
00:38:22
Speaker
I mean that evolutionary psychology is itself a collection of just-so stories and apocalyptic predictions about the relations between the sexes and so on with more or less this quality of reasoning.
00:38:36
Speaker
I mean that in a derogatory sense. Right, right. And so, I mean, what would take the place of this negative instinct of women if you rob them of their modesty? Condoms, the pill, plan B, right? Like there's lots of things that will take the place of this if what you're actually talking about is empowering women to have bodily autonomy, right? like the way The way that I first read the second paragraph about the part where men would be dragged to their death It seems to be suggesting that if women were unrestrained by their modesty, they would fuck the men so much that society would just end. I kind of think that's what he's saying. I don't fully understand if that's really what he means. Like, it still seems a little bit strange, but... There's this obscure reference to introducing this custom into any unlucky country. And that's the thing that leads to the death. And it's not actually clear what specific custom he's referring to. I do think that there is some another very common misogynist trope we've seen again and again, which is like the paranoia fused with the sexual fantasy coming together into this sort of phantasm that doesn't really make sense if you are actually thinking on a textual level about what's happening. You kind of need to be taken by this sort of frothing...
00:39:59
Speaker
fantasy of being on the island where women are fucking everyone you need to be you need to be sitting at the window in your french apartment looking out on the street seeing right the wanton wenches passing outside and just thinking what if i were on an island chained in the basement and they were just fucking me over and over Exactly.
00:40:21
Speaker
So he he really, um' this is like all within the first few pages of this section. I've done very few cuts here because this is where he really gets into the meat of like, the nature of women before he gets into like therefore how are we can educate them so yeah this is where i really started to lose it this next excerpt whether the woman shares the man's passion or not whether she is willing or unwilling to satisfy it she always repulses him and defends herself though not always with the same vigor and therefore not always with the same success oh no
00:40:58
Speaker
If the siege is to be successful, the besieged must permit or direct the attack. How skillfully can she stimulate the efforts of the aggressor?
00:41:11
Speaker
The freest and most delightful of activities does not permit of any real violence. Okay, i need to pause in the middle of this sentence. Oh, I'm so sorry, Sarah. Okay, I'm normal now. I'm continuing.
00:41:29
Speaker
Reason and nature are alike against it. Nature, in that she has given the weaker party strength enough to resist if she chooses, reason, in that actual violence is not only the most brutal in itself, but it defeats its own ends.
00:41:45
Speaker
not only because the man thus declares war against his companion and thus gives her a right to defend her person and her liberty even at the cost of the enemy's life, but also because the woman alone is the judge of her condition, and a child would have no father if any man might usurp a father's rights." So...
Rousseau's Views on Rape and Myths
00:42:06
Speaker
what, like a decade back or something?
00:42:09
Speaker
There was a representative, I think his name was Clay Aiken, who went on mic and talked about how if women experience like legitimate rape, then their body can shut that down and prevent them from getting pregnant.
00:42:25
Speaker
Yeah, we don't need abortion rights because in the case of a legitimate rape, the body has ways of shutting it down. Yes. I was thinking exactly about that as well. Same thread. Same right spirit of reasoning.
00:42:38
Speaker
What exactly is going on with this last bit right here? The woman alone is the judge of her condition, and a child would have no father if any man might usurp a father's rights.
00:42:49
Speaker
Okay, so I think we need to kind of pick through what he's saying throughout the whole thing to really get, because it also took me a second to figure out what the hell he's talking about there. Yeah. It seems to me like he has some confusion over the purpose of rape.
00:43:02
Speaker
Exactly. The thesis of this paragraph is that rape is definitionally impossible. Right. Not textually, at least, although this is, of course, the implied meaning, because men are entitled to sex whenever they want, and the women's judgment doesn't come into it at all.
00:43:21
Speaker
Although, in practice, it is impossible to see any gap between what he is describing and that statement. But because women are just able to stop men from having sex with them, right? They're strong enough They're strong enough and they have to be strong enough because two reasons one If it ever escalated into real violence as opposed to some kind of pretend fun violence Then it just wouldn't be sexy like like sex is supposed to be fun violence isn't fun who would have violent sex now of course This is what you were saying.
00:44:02
Speaker
He doesn't understand what rape is about right? This is one of the things we've we've talked about before and is is a pretty common talking point like Rape isn't about sex, race it rape is about power. But his kind of second thing is that rape would be unnatural because like if it weren' if women weren't able to stop themselves from being raped through some magical unexplained means of just magically being strong enough, It would lead to a situation where women would become pregnant with not only the child not having a father, but no possibility of future children having a father because obviously who would marry this woman who already has a child.
00:44:40
Speaker
And so therefore, in order for that impossible situation, which was extremely common like then as now, of unmarried women having children because they had been sexually assaulted.
00:44:54
Speaker
Like, that happened, and that happens now. And you can look out on out of the window of your apartment in Paris or Geneva and see that happening. Somehow, that's just unnatural. So, of course, nature wouldn't permit it. And so we can just reject that that ever happened.
00:45:11
Speaker
And any of those cases must just be poor judgment for women. This is absolutely Eva's psych. right here. Two characteristic qualities.
00:45:22
Speaker
One is this reduction of sexual relations to this imagined teleological structure through the guise of fitness.
00:45:41
Speaker
It wouldn't make sense if things played out in this way for supposedly evolutionary reasons, but like the subtext actually is because that's how I understand nature would want it.
00:45:55
Speaker
So we see exactly that same thing here, except this guy is so far ahead of his time, he's just skipping the evolutionary step because it hasn't been invented yet, but he's managing to make that same argument anyway.
00:46:06
Speaker
And the other thing is the deliberate ignorance of actual power relations and imbalances. How strong is a woman?
00:46:17
Speaker
Well, let's just abstract that out and say that she's strong enough yeah How might societal factors impact a woman's ability to fight off a sexual assault or even her willingness to risk doing so?
00:46:32
Speaker
Let's not consider it. All that is abstracted away. This is just pen stroke by pen stroke evolutionary psychology argument. And he goes on.
00:46:43
Speaker
Thus, the different constitution of the two sexes leads us to a third conclusion, that the stronger party seems to be master.
00:46:53
Speaker
He hits like every trope we've seen so far. This is killing me. All right, I'm going to continue. I'll start over. Thus, the different constitution of the two sexes leads us to a third conclusion, that the stronger party seems to be a master.
00:47:09
Speaker
but is, as a matter of fact, dependent on the weaker, and that, not by any foolish custom of gallantry, nor yet by the magnanimity of the protector, but by an inexorable law of nature.
00:47:24
Speaker
For nature has endowed woman with the power of stimulating man's passions and excess of man's power of satisfying those passions. and has thus made him dependent on her good will, and compelled him in his turn to endeavor to please her, so that she may be willing to yield to his superior strength.
00:47:45
Speaker
Is it weakness which yields to force, or is it voluntary self-surrender? This uncertainty constitutes the chief charm of the man's victory.
00:47:56
Speaker
What?!
00:48:00
Speaker
What do you mean it constitutes the chief charm of the man's victor? Okay. And the woman is usually cunning enough to leave him in doubt. In this respect, the woman's mind exactly resembles her body.
00:48:14
Speaker
Far from being ashamed of her weakness, she is proud of it. Her soft muscles offer no resistance. She professes that she cannot lift the lightest weight. She would be ashamed to be strong.
00:48:28
Speaker
and why not only to gain an appearance of refinement she is too clever for that she is for providing herself beforehand with excuses with the right to be weak if she chooses name a more iconic duo than french philosophers and talking about how consent is a fake concept that should be abolished i don't think you can this is so randian i mean that in the least complimentary sense possible Yeah, it's really funny because, I mean, I didn't say it earlier, but the other time that I gave an even briefer description of, like, early modern philosophy and when Kant came up was in our Rand episode. Rand, like, hated a lot of these guys, and she hated a lot of these guys exactly because of this, like, position of...
00:49:12
Speaker
doubt, right? She was kind of too stupid to realize that when Descartes is saying, oh, we want to doubt everything to figure what we can prove, it's not because he wants to reject truth. It's actually because he wants to rescue truth.
00:49:24
Speaker
But it's so funny. Of course, these guys were not doing this. They're doing all the same shit she was doing of just... pretending it's objective, right? This is this is not only is it proto-EvoPsych, it's proto-objectivism, right? you You form your concepts by declaring them to be laws of nature, right? It's an inexorable law of nature.
00:49:42
Speaker
It's the same thing as saying, I have done the proper process of concept formation, so now my concepts have objective reality and I don't have to think about political or social implications.
00:49:53
Speaker
You know, if women don't want to be raped, why is it so hot when I'm in doubt as to whether I'm raping them? Blank out. Exactly! yeah Oh my god.
00:50:05
Speaker
okay You might say, Helen, he's arguing that rape doesn't exist. We have not only contemporary accounts, but also like historical accounts and mythological accounts and all sorts of storytelling about rape as a real thing that exists.
00:50:24
Speaker
How do you reconcile that? To which I would provide... This excerpt. the experience we have gained through our vices has considerably modified the views held in older times we rarely hear a violence for which there is so little occasion that it would hardly be credited yet such stories are common enough among the jews and ancient greeks for such views belong to the simplicity of nature and have only been uprooted by our profligacy.
00:50:53
Speaker
If fewer deeds of violence are quoted in our days, it is not that men are more temperate, but because they are less credulous. And a complaint which would have been believed among a simple people would only excite laughter among ourselves, therefore silence is the better course.
00:51:11
Speaker
This change in public opinion has had a perceptible effect on our morals. It has produced our modern gallantry. Men have found that their pleasures depend, more than they expected, on the goodwill of the fair sex, and have secured this goodwill by attentions which have had their reward.
00:51:29
Speaker
See how we find ourselves led unconsciously from the physical to the moral constitution. How from the grosser union of the sexes spring the sweet laws of love.
00:51:42
Speaker
Woman reigns not by the will of man, but by the decrees of nature herself. She had the power long before she showed it. That same Hercules who pro proposed to violate all the 50 daughters of Thespis was compelled to spin at the feet of Amphal.
00:52:00
Speaker
And Samson, the strong man, was less strong than Delilah. This power cannot be taken from woman. It is hers by right. She would have lost it long ago, were it possible. There's some stunning claims being made in this section.
00:52:16
Speaker
Yeah, okay, so let me just try and parse what he's actually saying here. So, first off, he's saying men have not actually become more temperate. They've not become less violent.
00:52:31
Speaker
It's just that we don't spread around these extravagant stories of violence because these days we're smarter than the ancients were and we don't fall for fake news. Exactly. And it's sort of both included in that fake news are mythological accounts of violence against women as well as like real actual accounts of rape against women.
00:52:50
Speaker
I cut a little bit from this just because it was already quite long, but there's like a whole part where he talks about a law in Deuteronomy that says if a man assaults a woman if it's in a city they both get punished but if it's in the countryside then only the man gets punished and the reason is exactly this like city country divide it's also a wrong reading like he's not that I want to back up Deuteronomy at all as any kind of moral source there's a lot of sus stuff in there but he's also doing like an incorrect reading of what that means at least in Jewish praxis so I wanted to bracket all that but He's basically saying we've learned that we should just not believe rape happens and that's why we don't hear these stories today is because rape doesn't happen. Right, right. But it actually never happened.
00:53:34
Speaker
We don't fall for fake news anymore. Bracket. By the way, women are lying about being raped. Yeah. Okay. So now that women are less capable of spreading fake rape allegations...
00:53:53
Speaker
Men have become gallant. They have discovered that actually it's better to persuade women to have sex with A little unclear what the cause and effect is here exactly. Yeah.
00:54:09
Speaker
But that's his claim. and then we just return to this idea that actually... women are more powerful because you can find a few instances of that in mythology, the same sort of mythology he just denounced as fake news.
00:54:27
Speaker
Well, it's also funny because I love this line, see how we find ourselves led unconsciously from the physical to the moral constitution, because I'm sorry, Rousseau, That was very, very apparent to me pages and pages ago when you first started randomly talking about the moral constitution. Like, he is trying to say like, aha, look at how subtle and clever I'm being, that I have unconsciously led you from considering physical things to moral things. And it's like, no, you actually did it with like,
00:54:55
Speaker
like, no grace at all, right? Like, it was such an obviously stupid move that now that you're drawing attention to that move and the fact that you think you were doing it well, it's, like, even stupider. you're so He's so goddamn stupid. Yeah, the rape culture vibes and then just the avalanche of tropes, like...
00:55:13
Speaker
I did kind of a little bit see them coming from within the first few excerpts. Yeah, I mean, you said like the third excerpt, like this is sort of hiding a bunch of rape culture. And I was like trying to bite my tongue because was like, yeah, that's going to get really explicit like immediately, right? Like it's obvious though, right? Because that's where it always has to go. Like if you want to talk about the natural subordination of women to men, that's what rape is. It's it's this assertion of this authority. God, oh my God. So.
00:55:41
Speaker
Oh, Rousseau. Ugh. You piece of shit. Remember when Althusser says, i am no Rousseau at the beginning of his book?
00:55:52
Speaker
I will say, Rousseau is a much better writer. Yeah. Especially comparing this text to Future Lasts Long Time, which we didn't talk about on the episode how pretentious of a title that is. Like, oh my god.
00:56:05
Speaker
i feel like that actually did make it through the edit. Maybe. But that book was... particularly badly written and to be honest i haven't got i haven't felt the urge to go back and really read other althusser texts after doing that episode but i will say like other reviewers and things talk about like yeah that text is like not among his better ones you're not revisiting our past episode subjects i read leecock every week i just assumed that you were thumbing through joseph back before bed every night Okay.
00:56:37
Speaker
So we've kind of gone through this little diversion into, by the way, rape is impossible. By the way, allegations of rape are always fake news because in the case of legitimate rape, the woman has a way of shutting it down, cetera, et cetera.
00:56:52
Speaker
And so we're getting back into, back on course a little bit about like what general moral duties of women are. I'm honestly expecting him at this point to just be like, listen,
00:57:03
Speaker
We need a Leviathan, but the important thing is that the Leviathan be a pedophile and have a bunch of pedophile friends. I mean, he's not going to say that. I could come out and say like, that's not where he's going with this so explicitly, but it really, it really does feel like that's not far from where we're at.
Gender Inequality and Dependency
00:57:22
Speaker
The mutual duties of the two sexes are not and cannot be equally binding on both. Women do wrong to complain of the inequality of man-made laws. Fuck you This inequality is not of man's making, or at any rate is not the result of mere prejudice, but of reason.
00:57:44
Speaker
She to whom nature has entrusted the care of the children must hold herself responsible for them to their father. No doubt every breach of faith is wrong, and every faithless husband who robs his wife of the sole reward of the stern duties of her sex is cruel and unjust.
00:58:03
Speaker
But the faithless wife is worse. She destroys the family and breaks the bonds of nature. When she gives her husband children who are not his own, she is both false to him and them.
00:58:16
Speaker
Her crime is not infidelity, but treason. To my mind, it is the source of dissension and of crime of every kind. Can any position be more wretched than that of the unhappy father who, when he clasps his child to his breast, is haunted by the suspicion that this is the child of another, the badge of his own dishonor, a thief who is robbing his own children of their inheritance?
00:58:42
Speaker
Under such circumstances, the family is little more than a group of secret enemies, armed against each other by a guilty woman who compels them to pretend to love one another.
00:58:54
Speaker
Thus, it is not enough that a wife should be faithful. Her husband, along with his friends and neighbors, must believe in her fidelity. She must be modest, devoted, retiring.
00:59:07
Speaker
She should have the witness not only of a good conscience, but of a good reputation. In a word, if a father must love his children, he must be able to respect their mother.
00:59:19
Speaker
For these reasons, it is not enough that the woman should be chaste. She must preserve her reputation and her good name. From these principles, there arises not only a moral difference between the sexes, but also a fresh motive for duty and propriety, which prescribes to women in particular the most scrupulous attention to their conduct, their manners, their behavior.
00:59:42
Speaker
Vague assertions as to the equality of the sexes and the similarity of their duties are only empty words. They are no answer to my argument. So, okay.
00:59:53
Speaker
So women have to be behaviorally locked down. They must be slaves to these patriarchal codes of conduct so that no one can doubt them because if men are paranoid about getting cucked,
01:00:07
Speaker
It will be their fault. That is what yeah so it's not like we need a pedophile leviathan. It's more like the world needs to be structured around a cuck fantasy.
01:00:18
Speaker
like its Yes. It's sort of similar, but it's a little different. Can any position be more wretched than that of the unhappy father who blah, blah, blah, blah blah Yeah, I mean, honestly, I feel like being a wife who is unable to express herself, unable to, it sounds like, probably talk to other men. You have to be modest modest, devoted, retiring, all this shit, just that her husband won't, like...
01:00:46
Speaker
have his nervous little fantasies in the middle of the fucking night. That sounds like a worse position. That sounds much worse. Yeah, I think I didn't end up. Let me see.
01:00:57
Speaker
Right. He gets very repetitive. so i ended up cutting a lot of stuff that I felt like, okay, this is just retreading the same ground. But one thing that he develops a bit more and that he makes explicit is quite a lot of what he talks about as virtue in men. And he's kind of talked here about, oh, like, virtue and vice in men and women are different and what's a vice in one is a virtue in the other and blah blah blah and one of the things he explicitly talks about it at quite length and I just haven't included any of those excerpts but you can already see some of it here is for men doing what's right
01:01:30
Speaker
even if other people think what you're doing is wrong, is a virtue. Having values and sticking by them and being an independent thinker and doing the right thing is kind of the ultimate manly virtue. Being a kind of Randian hero despite the haters, you might say.
01:01:45
Speaker
Exactly. And what he is implying here and outright says later is that it's the opposite for women. That actually focusing on doing what's right, even if you were surrounded by people who think you're doing the wrong thing is not what you should do if you're a woman, that women actually need to be guided by reputation.
01:02:09
Speaker
And this, like, this is an explanation of what patriarchy is, right? Like, he's explaining exactly a genuine material situation for women, which is,
01:02:23
Speaker
You are dependent for your entire livelihood on the opinions of the men around you. and so therefore you are led towards a life which is entirely restrained, which has no possibility for independence or self-expression. And to make a feminist critique of this is so easy. All you do is you stop, you you clip off the last part where it's like, this isn't an exerbal law of nature. And you say, actually, this is something we need to address and change in society. Right, right. Like, yeah, that, except I think the inexorable extinguishing of women's will is actually bad.
01:03:00
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. and it's at the surface of just men's fantasies, too. Like, at every point here, he emphasizes that really what's going on is inside the man's skull. It's not a material harm that's being addressed. It's just their feelings. Right. Right. And I mean, i would turn his last sentence around on him and say vague assertions that these are not answers to his argument are not answers to our argument. Like the equality of the sexes and like the dignity of of individual human beings are not.
01:03:35
Speaker
That's not empty words. Like you can't just declare my dignity to be an empty word. Fuck you. Yeah. Anyway. Okay. So he's got this whole section, which I was going to be include excerpts, but it just gets very repetitive. He just, he has the same couple of themes and he's just like elucidating different ways that they work. And he talks for a bit about women, right? Like not only do we need to have this kind of modesty because like we need to be, we need men to believe in our fidelity.
01:04:06
Speaker
But actually the nature of pregnancy and of child rearing, like it's such a gentle, know, it's such a right. She has to have a quiet, easy life while she nurses her children. and so therefore her education has to prepare her for this. Right. and And all of the stuff he said before is like, this is how women should be. And so education has to repair them to be this way, which again is like a huge question mark of if this isn't an exerbal law of nature, like why?
01:04:32
Speaker
do you need to then consider how to make women be this way through education? i mean, he is partly doing the same Leacock thing of saying like, it's not that women couldn't be otherwise, it's that if women were taught otherwise, it would be disastrous for society. ah Right, they would drag all the men off to their deaths. Exactly. That's obvious.
01:04:50
Speaker
But he's saying like, obviously women can't do big, strong masculine things like work a trade or go to war, because then it would be such a shock to then be at home nursing children. And so... He says, the male is only a male now and again. The female is always a female.
01:05:04
Speaker
What the fuck does that mean? It doesn't mean anything. and and And also, we have to educate women to love this because it can't be out of a sense of duty. It has to be out of a sense of love because that's what's going to keep the family together. That actually... Wait, hang on.
01:05:18
Speaker
The more I think about it, not only is that actually meaningful, that's like... a really clear encapsulation of a lot of patriarchal rhetoric. Every aspect of a woman's being and every moment that she exists has to be obsessed with her femaleness and with the implications of duty that it imposes on her.
01:05:38
Speaker
And then men, like, they just don't have to think about it that much. Every once in a while they're male. It comes up sometimes. Yeah, and so it's, I mean, and I'm skipping through it because we, it's very similar to what he says before about the the asymmetry of consequences from the sex act, right? Like he's saying women, because, you know, men are only men when they're having sex. I mean, men and women are both men and women, like when they're having sex, because it's sex differences, remember? But then women have this whole other thing of pregnancy and child rearing that men don't have to deal with. And so that's why their whole lives have to be structured in and and a different way. And of course, what does he say to the fact of places where that's not true?
01:06:21
Speaker
Let's see. excited to learn about some primitive backwards societies where women have rights. There are countries, I grant you, where women bear and rear children with little or no difficulty.
01:06:33
Speaker
But in those lands the men go half naked in all weathers. They strike down the wild beasts. They carry a canoe as easily as a knapsack. They pursue the chase for 700 or 800 leagues.
01:06:45
Speaker
They sleep in the open on the bare ground. They bear incredible fatigues and go many days without food. When women become strong, men become still stronger.
01:06:56
Speaker
When men become soft, women become softer. Change both the terms, and the ratio remains unaltered. This is so funny.
01:07:08
Speaker
I am quite aware that Plato in The Republic assigns the same gymnastics to women and men. Having got rid of the family, there is no place for women in his system of government, so he is forced to turn them into men.
01:07:23
Speaker
Will the bonds of convention hold firm without some foundation in nature? Can devotion to the state exist apart from the love of those near and dear to us? Can patriotism thrive except in the soil of that miniature fatherland, the home?
01:07:41
Speaker
Is it not the good son, the good husband, the good father, who makes the good citizen? That first bit there about how...
01:07:52
Speaker
good about how women becoming stronger just turns the men into superheroes is like one of the wildest things we've read in this podcast. Yeah, it's so funny. That's so bizarre.
01:08:04
Speaker
It's funny because it's actually, we we usually see the opposite thing happening, right? Like, oh, when women, when men become soft, Women become right. This is like what Peck was saying explaining right like Peck noticing that butch lesbians exist and then being like, okay How do I assimilate this into my worldview? It's because the men are getting soft and so women are becoming masculine and confusing the feminine women into wanting masculine women And society's falling apart and it's the faggot's fault, right? And so now we have like, well, if women became strong, men would just become stronger. Because remember, it's a law of nature. All of this is an inexorable law of nature.
01:08:43
Speaker
This really just raises the question as to why he doesn't want to make the women of France as powerful as possible. Right? So that everyone is just a bunch of Goliaths running around conquering fucking Europe. Really incredible. This reminds me of, okay, here's the level of cause and effect this reminds me of.
01:09:00
Speaker
So I am a huge fan of spicy food. I like food that is so spicy and makes me cry. And my father, a Brazilian guy, also a big fan of spicy food.
01:09:13
Speaker
And he said to me one day, I know why you like spicy food. You got it from me because when your mom was pregnant with you, I ate a lot of spicy food.
01:09:24
Speaker
King.
01:09:28
Speaker
That's like the level we're talking about here. It's so nonsensical. I love it. I absolutely love it. Okay. And now let us turn to Plato and the Republic in our learned discussion.
01:09:40
Speaker
yeah I find it very interesting, the just completely explicit parallel between the home and the nation.
01:09:51
Speaker
a theme that we in our current day are very familiar with, unfortunately. I mean, I think a lot of the project of Enlightenment philosophy, like when we talk about untangling these kinds of teleological narratives, I mean, that also entails that separating out like metaphysics and politics and ethics and as like different fields that have different things to say, right? Like prior to this, there wasn't an understanding of natural sciences versus metaphysical questions versus ethical questions. they These were all understood to be how of fused together.
01:10:28
Speaker
The way the world is is the way it's supposed to be. and the way you should treat each other should be in harmony with the laws of physics, right? There was this kind of melding of things. And one of the, I think, symptoms of that is the analogy between like the state and then the family and the body, right? There were these sort of different levels of understanding of like things functioning in harmony and like the state should be like one big family and the body is sort of a miniature state, right? There was this kind of understanding of like, oh, this is just all about like harmonious structures or whatever.
01:10:57
Speaker
And I think we realized today like, oh yeah, those are all different things and they should be understood differently. Like anatomy is different from political philosophy, but it was like not really understood to be different for a long time. And it's interesting to see like remnants of that still in the 1700s here.
01:11:11
Speaker
But I also wanted to put these two, I mean, these passages are like one right after the other. There's some cuts in the middle of the second passage, but like i can't reconcile like, okay, when when women get strong, men get stronger. But then in Plato's vision, he's turning women into men.
01:11:29
Speaker
and Also, this is going to cause the downfall of society and this is gonna cause a downfall society and Will the I mean this really gives the whole game away and is exactly what I'm talking about about his utter failure To carry out what is supposedly this whole project will the bonds of convention hold firm without some foundation in nature Earlier he wrote a tract that was so against the church that the book got banned, right? He he came out and he said, look, and he's talked for so long about how you should do what's right, you should do what's true, you shouldn't let what other people think, right, if you're a man, of course, you shouldn't let what other people think dictate what you know is correct. It's not a wholehearted like rejection of the notion of convention, but it is an understanding that, yes, sometimes conventions do hold firm when they shouldn't, just because that's how a convention works.
01:12:20
Speaker
And so to bring this out, to like trot this out here, just to talk about the subordination of women, is really weak. I think it's, well, I feel like it's kind of a remarkable illustration of how misogyny is such a natural gateway to all kinds of right-wing ideas and right-wing thinking.
01:12:40
Speaker
I mean, i know this is the guy who was against Hobbes. And yet I read this and it reads, honestly, it reads like proto-fascism.
01:12:51
Speaker
Right. As soon as women come into the picture, he's like, all right, I'm just going to ditch all that shit I was talking about earlier. The Leviathan is also structured in this way where first it talks about kind of metaphysical questions and questions of how the body is organized and questions of like physical laws in order to build up this political argument. So it's exactly that style of argument we're just talking about is sort of the foundational...
01:13:14
Speaker
piece of what Leviathan is doing. it's It's quite an interesting book. I mean, certainly not my political philosophy, but it's an interesting book to look at. And it does a lot of these same moves. I mean, I think you're right. Like, where is the, you know, anarchist leftism that we're supposed to be seeing in this text? It's just gone, right? As soon as we're talking about women, it's just gone.
01:13:33
Speaker
So he's getting more and more into, right? he's this is This is him starting to talk about education a little bit. He's talking about Plato Republic assigning the same gymnastics, right? Like, remember, like his vision of early education does involve a lot of physical education, developing the relationship of the body to the world. And so he's saying, you know, Plato said you should just have them do the same physical activities, but that's just turning women into men.
01:13:58
Speaker
We need to keep track of the differences. On the other hand, women are always exclaiming that we educate them for nothing but vanity and coquetry, that we keep them amused with trifles that we may be their masters.
01:14:10
Speaker
We are responsible, so they say, for the faults we attribute to them. How silly! What have men to do with the education of girls? What are you talking about? What is this book about, asshole? Okay.
01:14:22
Speaker
What is there to hinder their mothers educating them as they please? There are no colleges for girls, that so much the better for them. Would God there were none for the boys, their education would be more sensible and more wholesome.
01:14:37
Speaker
Who is it that compels a girl to waste her time on foolish trifles? Are they forced, against their will, to spend half their time over their toilet, following the example set them by you?
01:14:50
Speaker
Who prevents you teaching them, or having them taught, whatever seems good in their eyes? Is it our fault that we are charmed by their beauty and delighted by their errors and graces?
01:15:01
Speaker
if we are attracted and flattered by the arts they learn from you, if we love to see them prettily dressed, if we let them display at leisure the weapons by which we are subjugated.
01:15:14
Speaker
Well then, educate them like men. The more women are like men, the less influence they will have over men. And then men will be the masters in indeed. So before we do any responses, I just want to ah like little footnote.
01:15:28
Speaker
This line about spending half their time over the toilet is very funny. It of course is referring to toilet as like makeup and this sort of thing, not literally sitting on the toilet.
01:15:41
Speaker
But it is a funny sort of, way that that word has aged over time yeah i mean these days women often do spend half their time on the toilet because they have phones but yeah okay so he's really committed to this idea of women is like having the dominant hand over men Well, there's something interesting you could say here, right?
01:16:03
Speaker
Which is like, he's saying at the end, you know, the more women are like men, the less influence they will have over men, and then men will be masters indeed. i mean, you could make a feminist criticism here and say, i don't want women to be masters of men.
01:16:17
Speaker
I want women to be masters of themselves, right? I'm not interested in continuing women's influence over men. I'm interested in women continuing influence over themselves. And actually...
01:16:30
Speaker
You know who did make this feminist critique? Mary Wollstonecraft. There is a section of the Vindication of the Rights of Women, which is a specific response to Rousseau, in which she directly responds to this passage and is like, yeah, Rousseau, you're totally missing it.
01:16:48
Speaker
Like, I don't want women to like have this version of power you're talking about where we are able to manipulate men. I want women to have material control over their lives. This is exactly the pop understanding of feminism these days, by the way, is that it is a movement which seeks to establish the dominance of women over men.
Feminist Critique of Rousseau
01:17:10
Speaker
And I'm not just talking about like right wing spaces. I mean, like, this is just what people's understanding of it is. Yeah.
01:17:21
Speaker
And I mean, there's a couple texts around this time, but want this vindication of the rights of women is understood as sort of one of the founding texts of feminism as a movement.
01:17:33
Speaker
Separated from what we like think of as like proto-feminist movements before then right like this was really the beginning of like an understanding of feminism and so in some sense like Rousseau is so misogynist here that he is providing the like springboard and and jumping off point for the invention of feminism I don't want to give him any credit for the accomplishments of Mary Wollstonecraft. She, i mean, there's certainly problematic things about her, like, ah you know, whatever. But like, I'm not saying like, oh, he deserves any credit for that. But it's like, kind of funny. This is so bad that it was like, okay, you actually gave us something we can now use to say this understanding of women and women's place in society is exactly the thing I'm trying to say.
01:18:20
Speaker
No, that's not how I want women to be in society. It's kind of funny that this is actually the second episode in a row where we've had people just like springboarding off of misogynist men and creating concepts that would go on to be like a significant part of feminism.
01:18:39
Speaker
Like this argument that like actually what we're not seeking is dominance over men. And the previous episode, the coining of the word misogynist. Yeah. Like, and it's so just... This is dunkable, Helen. This is dunkable. And it's like, and it, you know, it it is dunkable. It was dunked on and it got dunked on so hard that we started feminism. Like,
01:19:02
Speaker
See, this actually displays how women are the true masters of society. Because men are just going out there trying to be their best misogynist selves. And what happens? These nasty feminists with their glasses come out and they coin words and counter arguments and that kind of thing. And then those gain social currency.
01:19:22
Speaker
Who's really in charge here? these woke feminazis with their shoes yeah i mean skipping forward a look a little bit right ah but he's done all this stuff he keeps talking about how women are really secretly in charge women are really secretly in charge and then we get to this passage when i consider the special purpose of woman when i observe her inclinations or reckon up her duties everything combines to indicate the mode of education she requires Men and women are made for each other, but their mutual dependence differs in degree.
01:19:57
Speaker
Man is dependent on woman through his desires. Woman is dependent on man through her desires and also through her needs. He could do without her better than she can do without him.
01:20:10
Speaker
Yeah, that's the problem, man. She cannot fulfill her purpose in life without his aid, without his goodwill, without his respect. She is dependent on our feelings, on the price we put upon her virtue, and the opinion we have of her charms and her desserts.
01:20:27
Speaker
Nature herself has decreed that woman, both for herself and her children, should be at the mercy of man's judgment. So like he knows he was talking shit earlier when he was like women are secretly in charge. Like he's saying here, oh, by the way, yeah, okay. Women are dependent on us for like all of our, all of their material needs and we need you. And it's just like, okay, yeah, so you're in charge. So you're the masters. Like why? Because you get to decide everything. Like he, he knows he was just lying. yeah, absolutely. Like what are we even still doing here man? Yeah there's around it like Like why did you spend all that time talking about women's secret power and then now you're just admitting it like now you're just coming out and saying like oh yeah by the way like men really when when it comes to things like resources and food and material needs like men are in charge of those and it's like yeah those are kind of fundamental dude like that's kind of how It's pretty big deal.
01:21:21
Speaker
There's this thing that's going on actually it's called the French Revolution it has a lot to do with material needs you might want to look it up I mean, that's what's crazy is that he wrote this in 1762. So like, you know, 1789 is the outbreak of the French Revolution. i mean, Rousseau was hugely influential to like French revolutionaries, and he actually died before the revolution broke out. But I mean, this book was actually used in revolutionary France to design the education system.
01:21:47
Speaker
um Some other fementous sex we get at the time, there's a declaration of the rights of woman and of the female citizen by Alain de Gouges is writing during the French Revolution to say like, hey, like, you know, we have this declaration of the rights of man, but like, come on, like women are people and we have rights too. And, you know, there's some...
01:22:04
Speaker
interesting stuff in there about sort of comparing women to colonized subjects. And some of this can be taken through kind of modern feminism and understood as like, oh, we should understand sort of overlapping shared struggles. And then some of it is not so great and is like, We shouldn't be saying directly, you know, women and colonized subjects are the same. We should really understand, you know, there's problems with that analogy. But yeah, a lot of this stuff is growing out of the fact that like this was really a not uncommon thing for revolutionaries to be like, yeah, declaration, you know, men, we got to be like independent. We got to be, you know, whatever. But also women like
01:22:41
Speaker
yeah, women women should be dependent on men, right? Like this total failure to like actually think about your principles at all when it comes to thinking about women. Anyway. It almost feels too obvious to call out, but also notice the implication here that the purpose of women is to bear and raise children, but that is not the purpose of men.
01:23:00
Speaker
There is a need for the race to continue. This is somehow women's responsibility because women get pregnant. but I wonder what he would say if you just asked him straightforwardly, like, what is the responsibility of men? Or like, what is the purpose of men?
01:23:14
Speaker
He talks about how men need to be fathers, right? The good father is the good citizen, but it's actually on women to make sure that men love them enough to stick around and be fathers.
01:23:25
Speaker
Yeah, but I can't help feeling that that's probably not the purpose of men. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. If you ask what the purpose of men is, I think you'd be like, oh, it's complicated.
01:23:36
Speaker
Here's all this philosophy. Yeah, it's it's so dumb. He's such a fucking idiot. like And this is why I'm trying to situate it with like other historical and contemporary thinkers, right? Because I don't want to just feel like, oh, we're going, right? don't want somebody to be like, oh, we're just going back. We're reading historical people. And from our modern contemporary vantage point, like, were able to say like this is really dumb but it's like in the terms of what he's writing and other Feminist writers at the time were saying This is stupid. You're being stupid.
Rousseau's Education for Docile Women
01:24:06
Speaker
And so i just don't buy it like people want to say like oh, yeah The rest of the book is good in this section is just is it just the feelings of women at the time? It's like no whose feelings like women were there writing
01:24:17
Speaker
and saying this is bullshit. And yeah, it is a serious intellectual and moral failure that he wrote this shit. I think this is something that we've actually managed to highlight in all our pre-1900s episodes so far, which I'm kind of pleased about.
01:24:31
Speaker
Yeah. Like even Cato had like Valerius. Yeah. Not to mention the women doing direct action. Yeah, women doing direct action. Yeah, love women doing direct action and also male feminists. Okay, so now he's like on this transition into talking about education for a while. And so now he's talking about like, okay, education has to create these sort of docile women who like have enough cunning to keep men's interest. Because actually, you need to keep a man's interest if you want to like have food and shelter, because men are in charge of things like food and shelter.
01:25:07
Speaker
Even though women are in charge. Even though women are secretly in charge. Uh-huh. Because they're hot. Because I can't stop thinking about them. Yeah. So now he's like, okay, but we got to teach women how to do this. Every woman desires to be pleasing in men's eyes.
01:25:23
Speaker
Oh. Oh, Rousseau, and this is right, but there is a great difference between wishing to please a man of worth, a really lovable man, and seeking to please those foppish mannequins who are a disgrace to their own sex and to the sex which they imitate.
01:25:44
Speaker
Neither nature nor reason can induce a woman to love an effeminate person, nor will she win love by imitating such a person. Oh my god. That was killing me.
01:25:57
Speaker
If a woman discards the quiet, modest bearing of her sex and adopts the heirs of such foolish creatures, she is not following her vocation. She is forsaking it.
01:26:07
Speaker
She is robbing herself of the rights to which she lays claim. If we were different, she says, the men would not like us. She is mistaken. Only a fool likes folly.
01:26:19
Speaker
To wish to attract such men only shows her own foolishness. If there were no frivolous men, women would soon make them, and women are more responsible for men's follies than men are for theirs.
01:26:33
Speaker
The woman who loves true manhood and seeks to find favor in its sight will adopt means adapted to her ends. Woman is a coquette by profession, but her coquetry varies with her aims.
01:26:47
Speaker
Let these aims be in accordance with those of nature. And a woman will receive a fitting education. So all women are shallow seductresses. So the only hope for a good woman is to have the right kind of target for your coquettish seduction. And also society is falling apart because men are becoming women and women are becoming men and it's all the faggot's fault. Right?
01:27:10
Speaker
Like... Ugh, I can hear the door clicking on the time washing machine. Yeah. What does this part mean? If we were different, she says, the men would not like us. She is mistaken.
01:27:21
Speaker
Only a fool likes folly. To wish to attract such men only shows her own foolishness. Is he saying that if women were to become more masculine, they would still get laid, there would still be men attracted to them, but those men would suck, they would be foppish mannequins, that sort of thing? He's saying that like there's women who do act more masculine, and then they have success seducing men, and then they say, this is obviously working for me, and he's saying, no, the fact that you are
01:27:54
Speaker
having successful relationships with men who are perhaps more effeminate is not evidence that you're doing the right thing because you're actually foolish for wanting that kind of man in the first place.
01:28:04
Speaker
I think he saw a T4T couple down at the coffeehouse and he got mad. Yeah. And he's like upset at T4T love. Like, yeah. Like unironically that yeah that's the vibe I'm getting.
01:28:16
Speaker
Yeah, I can imagine a situation right where he goes up to this sort of like butch woman and is like, hey, you're too masculine. And she's like, well, my boyfriend likes it. He's like, well, actually, you're wrong. Just going home and dipping his will furiously in the ink pot.
01:28:35
Speaker
Yeah. do you ever write with a quill? I've never written with a quill before, no. A little surprised, John. Huh, yeah. I guess. I guess I do give off quill vibes. I think you're quill, Helen.
01:28:47
Speaker
All right. There's so much here, so I'm going to like skip ahead a little bit. So he's talking about, finally, we're going to get into like the specifics of like early education of young girls.
01:28:57
Speaker
So we've we've understood what the perfect woman is. And so now we have to think about step by step, how do we make a young girl into the perfect woman? Oh, God, this is going to be so horrible.
01:29:08
Speaker
Isn't it just? Oh, the answer is going to be child abuse. I know that. However required, this early education of little girls is an excellent thing in itself. as the birth of the body must precede the birth of the mind, so the training of the body must precede the cultivation of the mind.
01:29:27
Speaker
This is true of both sexes, but the aim of physical training for boys and girls is not the same. In the one case, it is the development of strength, in the other, of grace.
01:29:38
Speaker
Not that these qualities should be peculiar to either sex, but that their relative values should be different. Women should be strong enough to do anything gracefully. men should be skillful enough to do anything easily.
01:29:52
Speaker
The exaggeration of feminine delicacy leads to effeminacy in men. Women should not be strong like men, but for them, so that their sons may be strong. Convents and boarding schools, with their plain food and ample opportunities for amusements, races, and games in the open air and in the garden, are better in this respect than the home, where the little girl is fed on delicacies, continually encouraged or reproved.
01:30:19
Speaker
where she is kept sitting in a stuffy room always under her mother's eye, afraid to stand or walk or speak or breathe, without a moment's freedom to play or jump or run or shout, or to be her natural, lively little self, there is either harmful indulgence or misguided severity, and no trace of reason.
01:30:39
Speaker
In this fashion, heart and body are alike destroyed. In Sparta, the girls used to take part in military sports, just like the boys. Not that they might go to war, but that they might bear sons who could endure hardship.
01:30:54
Speaker
That is not what I desire. To provide the state with soldiers, it is not necessary that the mother should carry a musket and master the Prussian drill. Yet, on the whole...
01:31:06
Speaker
I think the Greeks were very wise in this matter of physical training. Okay, so far, not as bad as I was expecting, but not good. You know, you asked, like, shouldn't he want women to be strong so that the men are Goliaths? And he does kind of understand that that's a conclusion of the thing he said earlier about, like, changing the terms and the ratio stays the same. He's like, okay, we can't have women be too feminine because then the men will start getting feminine. And so we need to make sure women are strong enough that the men have to be stronger.
01:31:36
Speaker
It's, yeah, and then there's something here about like, yeah, the oppressive home life for young girls that are constantly being watched and not able to play games and run around is bad. Get them socialized in the open air. And yeah, that's nice. That's cool. He goes on this whole tangent here about the Greeks and...
01:31:59
Speaker
how much he loves the Greeks and how much worse women are now than they were back in the days of the Greeks. And
Modern Comparisons and Misogyny
01:32:05
Speaker
it kind of comes out of nowhere and doesn't really fit in with the rest of the the argument, right? Like, I thought we had moved on to talking about education, but he's going to go on this whole separate...
01:32:17
Speaker
thing about the Greeks and how much he loves the Greeks. And I just had to clip it because it's so funny. When the Greek women married, they disappeared from public life. Within the four walls of their home, they devoted themselves to the care of their household and family.
01:32:32
Speaker
This is the mode of life prescribed for women alike by nature and reason. These women gave birth to the healthiest, strongest, and best proportioned men who had ever lived.
01:32:43
Speaker
And except in certain islands of ill repute, no women in the whole world, not even the Roman matrons, were ever at once so wise and so charming, so beautiful and so virtuous as the women of ancient Greece.
01:32:58
Speaker
It is admitted that their flowing garments, which did not cramp the figure, preserved in men and women alike the fine proportions which are seen in their statues. These are still the models of art, although nature is so disfigured that they are no longer to be found among us.
01:33:16
Speaker
The Gothic trammels, the innumerable bands which confine our limbs as in a press, were quite unknown. The Greek women were wholly unacquainted with those frames of whalebone in which our women distort rather than display their figures.
01:33:31
Speaker
It seems to me that this abuse, which is carried to an incredible degree of folly in England, must sooner or later lead to the production of a degenerate race. Moreover, I maintain that the charm which these corsets are supposed to produce is in the worst possible taste.
01:33:47
Speaker
It is not a pleasant thing to see a woman cut in two like a wasp. It offends both the eye and the imagination. A slender waist has its limits, like everything else, in proportion and suitability, and beyond these limits, it becomes a defect.
01:34:03
Speaker
This defect would be a glaring one in the nude, why should it be beautiful under the costume? I will not venture upon the reasons which induce women to encase themselves in these coats of mail.
01:34:14
Speaker
a clumsy figure, a large waist, are no doubt very ugly at twenty. But at thirty, they cease to offend the eye. And as we are bound to be what nature has made us at any given age, and as there is no deceiving the eye of man, such defects are less offensive at any age than the foolish affectations of a young thing of forty years.
01:34:37
Speaker
Everything which cramps and confines nature is in bad taste. This is as true of the adornments of the person as of the ador as of the ornaments of the mind. Life, health, common sense, and comfort must come first.
01:34:51
Speaker
There is no grace in discomfort. Langer is not refinement. There is no charm in ill health. Suffering may excite pity, but pleasure and delight demand the freshness of health.
01:35:02
Speaker
This is like so many things. First off, It continues to amaze me that he was like, fake news, fake news, all this ancient stuff, fake news, fake news, when it came to rape allegations. yeah But then like everything else we have heard him discuss about the ancients He's like losing his fucking mind over how cool they were and how true everything they said was. Yeah.
01:35:27
Speaker
This part gets so Reddit to me. Like when he's like, I feel like I'm reading, you know, a Redditor complain about like deceptive push-up bras or whatever the fuck, right? Like, oh these whalebone corsets and they're, they're tricking men. but But we always know, right? Like we always know that you're lying to us and you look pathetic with your attempts to look young and...
01:35:49
Speaker
I'm thinking about the social media posts I've seen that are basically like, women tricking you with makeup is basically rape. And I think we as men-ness need to acknowledge this. And like, don't worry, I'm not saying fat women aren't disgusting. I agree with you, fat women.
01:36:05
Speaker
Fuck off! Like, oh my god. It's not like I'm even... I don't want to be put in a position where I'm defending whalebone corsets pinching women off at the waist. No, but it's like... It's not coming from a position of concern for the women's welfare when he says any of this.
01:36:23
Speaker
No, and yeah, like there is a certainly many conversations to have about like expectation, you know, expectations of women and and clothing and the use of of different expectations of beauty as methods of control. But like, yeah, I've worn shapewear. Contributing to the production of a degenerate race, huh, Helen? Exactly. It is just, oh my gosh. really want to know what these certain islands of ill repute.
01:36:49
Speaker
I think he's talking about Lemnos. So fucking funny. It's so ridiculous. He's so he's such a ridiculous man. Like just while we're on the subject of the Greeks, these fucking deceitful bitches with their corsets and their, you know, why can't women be wearing long flowing cloths that let us see their body all the time? like like Hiding that body. It's so how much of this was he writing, you know, with one hand as it were.
01:37:18
Speaker
I know. oh and the snide way he talks about women of age 40, sarcastically calling them young things. What the hell? And you see all of that still so much today whenever like any actress of any kind gets any sort of plastic surgery and people are like, oh, look at our plastic surgery. It looks so... it's And it's just like...
01:37:44
Speaker
fuck you. I don't know. Just fuck off. Like, oh my God. Like I can think of so many people I've interacted with who've expressed this kind of position, like whether it's seeing this stuff online or just in supposedly polite liberal discourse.
01:37:58
Speaker
In fact, i was recently at a wedding and it was like a family, wide extended family wedding. And like one of my uncles made a joke about like Walking around town earlier and seeing all these like older women wearing like young women's outfits right that like that were like unflattering and I really i took a pretty normal response of just like yeah i just don't think you should be commenting on that I really wanted to say something like the fact that you said that with me here at this table is misgendering to me like you clearly intended this to be like a
01:38:29
Speaker
ah male socialization moment and conversation like including me in this conversation is a form of misgendering but i didn't want to go there because he's already been weird about yeah anyway i see i think you should shove him under a car at the first opportunity anyway i'm struck by how vulgar russo is this can't be typical like do you see what i mean by that Yeah, it's it's really, i don't know. i think it might be sort of more common in this kind of 18th century writing. Like, I don't think we would have to start, I haven't really thought about it and dug through it, but like, it doesn't strike me that he's like more vulgar than say Voltaire.
01:39:08
Speaker
Like, I feel like if I went through Voltaire, I would find similar levels of vulgarity. And I think that there was a kind of vulgarity and like 18th century French enlightenment writing.
01:39:21
Speaker
that he could be kind of matching. But but i agree, like, it certainly seems to be doing something where he's trying to be like vulgar as a way of being like, oh, I'm being frank, I'm being open, I'm like, not hiding the truth from you. Which again, is really feels like the kind of thing you see today, right? Like vulgarity as a mark of reality. Right, right.
01:39:41
Speaker
Okay. So we went on our little tangent about beautiful Greek women and how when women are stuck at home draped in cloth all day, it's perfect. And when they're out in society and bound up in corsets, it's against nature.
01:39:52
Speaker
But now we're back on track. Okay, young girls, how do we raise young girls? And a lot of games boys and girls play are the same. This makes sense, Rousseau says, because men and women socialize together.
01:40:06
Speaker
They should have some interests in common because they have to interact in society. But there are some activities that are the specific purview of young girls and and young boys. so i just remembered that in the first excerpt, we started off with talking about how men and women are not so different.
01:40:23
Speaker
oh Yeah, that's gone. Oh my god That's just totally gone. That was just like a fig leaf of reasonableness before Like explaining the structure of how like a misogynist patriarchy ought to be ordered and how you go about Structuring the education of children to produce that. Yeah, like an actual fig leaf. It just fell off at the first gust of wind. Yeah, exactly
Literacy, Liberation, and Slavery Rhetoric
01:40:46
Speaker
Here is a little girl, busy all day with her doll.
01:40:50
Speaker
She is always changing its clothes, dressing and undressing it, trying new combinations of trimmings, well or ill-matched. Her fingers are clumsy, her taste is crude, but there is no mistaking her bent.
01:41:02
Speaker
In this endless occupation, time flies unheeded, the hours slip away unnoticed, even meals are forgotten. She is more eager for adornment than for food. But she is dressing her doll, not herself, you will say.
01:41:15
Speaker
Just so. She sees her doll. She cannot see herself. She cannot do anything for herself. She has neither the training nor the talent nor the strength. As yet, she herself is nothing.
01:41:27
Speaker
She is engrossed in her doll, and all her coquetry is devoted to it. This will not always be so. In due time, oh no. In due time, she will be her own doll.
01:41:41
Speaker
Ooh, gross metaphor there, Russo. Just straight up saying that what we can do is that we can teach children through the use of objects that they are objects, that they should be understood as and manipulated as objects.
01:41:58
Speaker
Also, she is more eager for adornment than for food. I think he may have found an autistic little girl.
01:42:06
Speaker
But also, I mean, that's really convenient, right? Because then the fact that women are entirely dependent for food on men is like not quite as drastic a situation, right?
01:42:17
Speaker
Yeah. Oh my God. But yeah, it's it's how do we create these sorts of women in society? I mean, brain brainwashing and child abuse, right? Like, so step one, teach little girls that we are objects.
01:42:34
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Yeah. If I object to little boys being made to learn to read... i should give some context for this. So he does talk about it's better to wait for... This is part of like the book two thing about developing the relationship with nature. It's it better to wait until the child naturally wants to learn to read than to just be forced to read a bunch of books.
01:42:55
Speaker
Okay, sure, whatever. Still more do I object to it for little girls until they are able to see the use of reading. We generally think more of our own ideas than theirs in our attempts to convince them of the utility of this art.
01:43:10
Speaker
After all, why should a little girl know how to read and write? Has she a house to manage? Most of them make a bad use of this fatal knowledge, and girls are so full of curiosity that few of them will fail to learn without compulsion.
01:43:26
Speaker
I once knew a little girl who learned to write before she could read, and she began to write with her needle. Unluckily, one day she caught a glimpse of herself in the glass while she was at this useful work, and thinking that the cramped attitude was not pretty, she flung away her pen.
01:43:43
Speaker
Her brother was no fonder of writing, but what he disliked was the constraint, not the look of the thing. Yeah, there's a lot going on here. And again, there's a lot that I think speaks to contemporary misogyny, you know, misogyny today. There's like a whole genre of internet posts. Like i'm thinking of one in particular, and I guess I should, i it's probably not a surprise that I used to occasionally browse shit Reddit says.
01:44:07
Speaker
Yeah, that that's on brand. There's one post in particular that was maybe the most fun I've ever had, like seeing on that on that subreddit was somebody made a post that was like, you feminazis ruined my relationship.
01:44:24
Speaker
And it was like a guy coming in to complain that he was dating this woman, but then she started browsing. I mean, it seemed like she was on ah SRS, but then was also just like reading feminism, like reading about feminism. And then she started complaining about things like, oh, how come, you know, all of the women in these like video games you're playing are always like pornographically drawn is like in what you feminazis don't understand. And it was just like, it was probably even a fake post because it was just too perfect. It hit all the points. But it was like, You feminazis don't understand like of course like women in the society would be dressed to appeal to men like of course It's realistic that like women would go around in bikinis or whatever right like it's just like it's just stupid right? But it's it's a very common trope and it's a very common idea that like oh women shouldn't know how to read because like then they're gonna read about feminism and obviously Feminism hadn't been invented yet, right? Like feminism wouldn't be invented until after Mary Wollstonecraft read this and was like damn this shit sucks I got to invent feminism
01:45:24
Speaker
But yeah, women are going to put this used to a fatal knowledge is like it's that's still what people think. Right. It's still you still hear it so much today. We shouldn't teach women how to read. What are they going to read like about how they're oppressed? And it's such a good argument for why literacy should actually be so foundational to education.
01:45:45
Speaker
Right. Literacy is so liberatory. And as you look across like globally at different liberation movements, so many like whether it's communism in Cuba or, you know, Pan-Arab, right, like all these different movements like focused on literacy because of this understanding that like it really is important.
01:46:00
Speaker
Yeah. If you don't have literacy, you can't read about how bad Rousseau sucks. And Rousseau understands on some level, it seems, how important it is on that in that way. And that's why it ought to be de-emphasized.
01:46:14
Speaker
And then women don't want to learn how to write anyway because they think they look ugly. i mean, come on.
01:46:20
Speaker
I once knew a little girl who learned to write before she could read and she began to write. I don't believe that. I don't believe that happened, Rousseau. I do not believe that happened. I don't even know what that means to be able to write before you're able to read. Yeah.
01:46:32
Speaker
I cut out a little bit here. He starts describing like, oh, she's like writing O's all the time. Like she just like learned some letters, it seemed. Okay, that's not that's not knowing how to write. No. sure Okay.
01:46:43
Speaker
Okay. Now it sounds like this could be pretty psychologically difficult for young girls constantly be brainwashed into a kind of docility. I think they actually like it.
01:46:54
Speaker
Let's see. Beware lest your girls become weary of their tasks and infatuated with their amusements. This often happens under our ordinary methods of education. where, as Phenelon says, all the tedium is on one side and all the pleasure on the other.
01:47:09
Speaker
If the rules already laid down are followed, the first of these dangers will be avoided, unless the child dislikes those about her. A little girl who is fond of her mother or her friend will work by her side all day without getting tired.
01:47:24
Speaker
The chatter alone will make up for any loss of liberty. Just like keep them distracted with like putting other women there, and it like women will chatter, and they'll amuse themselves, and don't worry about it. Yeah. I think you could...
01:47:35
Speaker
draw some interesting parallels here and i don't want to be too explicit about it because i don't have any of material on hand but i think you could draw some interesting parallels between what he's saying here and how people talked about slaves on plantations Not to suggest that the social roles and situations of women in France at this period and slaves on plantations were like the same, but this like logic of subjugation, this desire to paint work as actually like something of a relief and a social experience that could undergone endlessly.
01:48:18
Speaker
It feels very similar to me. This is one of the comparisons that both Wollstonecraft and then also Alain Ptegouges in her declaration of the rights of women and of the female citizen, like especially that that second work, she is explicitly comparing the situation for women in France to colonized subjects in Haiti and slaves. And she's talking about women as a kind of slave. And... you know, without getting into the details there, because I also didn't prep like talking about this comparison, there is something to be said there, right? Like, of course, you need to pay attention to the differences, you need to pay attention to the fact that if you're saying these are the same, then you are also erasing like the role of black women, right? Like if if being a woman is the same as being a slave, right? What if you're both right? Like, you know, that there's it's a lot more subtle than just saying these things are the same. But absolutely, these like techniques of subjugation share similarities. And it is, I think, you know, an ongoing feminist project to talk about how to understand those similarities and how to understand the way resistance to that should be structured and carried out. But that's absolutely something that like immediately women at the time were like, hey, this is actually, there's a similarity here and it's worth noticing.
01:49:24
Speaker
And,
Docility, Cunning, and Patriarchal Structures
01:49:25
Speaker
you know, and some of them did say like, oh, and actually this makes me think like we also shouldn't have slaves, right? Like it In its sort of good formulations, like this is part of what it does. It says, oh, i'm I'm realizing that like I am being subjugated in this way. Slaves are being subjugated in a very similar way. Oh, both of these are wrong. Like because I can recognize that this is bullshit, I can recognize that these other things are bullshit and we should come together and kill Rousseau and do a reign of terror. See, that's what makes this fatal knowledge.
01:49:53
Speaker
You learn to read, you recognize how different things suck, and then you start displaying solidarity. It's not good. You got to get rid of that shit. Yeah. This is where he gets pretty explicitly into an explanation of how we need to use child abuse to control children.
01:50:06
Speaker
Okay. All right. I've been waiting for so long. Just because they have, or ought to have, little freedom, they are apt to indulge themselves too fully with regard to such freedom as they have.
01:50:16
Speaker
They carry everything to extremes, and they devote themselves to their games with an enthusiasm even greater than that of boys. This is the second difficulty to which I referred.
01:50:27
Speaker
This enthusiasm must be kept in check, for it is the source of several vices commonly found among women—caprice and that extravagant admiration which leads a woman to regard a thing with rapture today and to be quite indifferent to it tomorrow.
01:50:42
Speaker
This fickleness of taste is as dangerous as exaggeration, and both spring from the same cause. Do not deprive them of mirth, laughter, noise, and romping games, but do not let them tire of one game and go off to another.
01:50:58
Speaker
Do not leave them for a moment without restraint. Train them to break off their games and return to their other occupations without a murmur. Habit is all that is needed as you have nature on your side.
01:51:11
Speaker
This habitual restraint produces a docility which woman requires all her life long, for she will always be in subjection to a man, or to man's judgment, and she will never be free to set her own opinion above his.
01:51:27
Speaker
Daughters must always be obedient, but mothers need not always be harsh. To make a girl docile, you need not make her miserable. To make her modest, you need not terrify her.
01:51:38
Speaker
On the contrary, I should not be sorry to see her aloud occasionally to exercise a little ingenuity. Not to escape punishment for her disobedience, but to evade the necessity for obedience.
01:51:50
Speaker
her dependence need not be made unpleasant, it is enough that she should realize that she is dependent. Cunning is a natural gift of woman. And so convinced am I that all our natural inclinations are right that I would cultivate this among others, only guarding against its abuse.
01:52:10
Speaker
Like on a certain level, what he's saying here is you need women to be docile. You need to constantly be restraining women, but there's a balance to be done because if you're just constantly right, if, if, if they're, if a woman is miserable and terrified, right?
01:52:27
Speaker
Like she won't be like a happy productive member of society. So you need to find the right balance of like mental subjugation whereby you can sort of gaslight a woman into thinking she's doing what she wants but really just never let her know a moment of actual freedom. And you need to strike that balance so that we can continue having a patriarchy. That's right. Subservience must be a matter of habit. Ideally, the woman doesn't even exercise her own will in choosing to obey. She doesn't choose to obey.
01:53:00
Speaker
She just does it. And you build this into the child early. You make sure that any source of enjoyment that they have is structured and subject to instantaneous suspension without question in order that. And he continues to talk a little bit about this notion of cunning as like the gift that women have. And he's trying to, again, rescue this notion of like women are secretly in charge. And so here's ah a really short little excerpt about that. What is is good, and no general law can be bad. This special skill with which the female sex is endowed is a fair equivalent for its lack of strength.
01:53:36
Speaker
Without it, woman would be man's slave, not his helpmeet. By her superiority in this respect, she maintains her equality with man and rules in obedience.
01:53:47
Speaker
What does what is is good and no general law can be bad i mean? Basically, this notion that women are cunning and manipulative and sly has to be a good thing because it's a natural fact.
01:54:01
Speaker
So it can't be bad. And so therefore, it must be that that cunning, sly, coquettish nature of woman... is the thing that makes up for her lack of material freedom and means that she's not a slave. She's a help meat.
01:54:20
Speaker
The listeners cannot see. i think this is the most pained expression I've ever seen on Sarah's face. ah Okay. So Sarah is beet red and massaging her temples right now.
01:54:37
Speaker
hu I guess this is how he's squaring the circle of his rejection of Hobbes. Yeah, his saying, well, look, what I'm depicting as the state of nature here may be subjection, it may be tyranny, it may be apparently cruelty, but actually it can't be any of those things.
01:55:02
Speaker
Because the state of nature is kind. Not as a descriptive matter, but as a law. Whatever is the state of nature is therefore kind. And women being subservient is the state of nature. So we're all set. We're all good.
01:55:16
Speaker
Nothing else to see here. It's really fascinating because... This again is a big point that is like brought out by theorists about social construction of sex where you use sex as this kind of bucket to just put inconvenient things you don't want to address into, right? Like sex exactly functions as the immutable biological natural reality That can paper over inconsistencies in your sense of how the world should work.
01:55:46
Speaker
And we're again seeing that just exactly here, right? it's It's just that's how it has to be. Like that's just what it means to be a woman. So it's fine. So it's great. Good. And, you know, woman isn't man's slave because she can kind of outsmart him maybe. Has Voltaire written Candide yet? Right around this time. First published in 1759. So this 1762. Okay, I see. I see it.
01:56:06
Speaker
okay i see i see Well, he's had a chance to have that argument be decisively rebutted. but ah And maybe he just hasn't caught up the reading yet. Yeah. And again, like, it's not clear.
01:56:18
Speaker
i don't have any excerpts, but he seems to be able to display a more sophisticated level of thinking when it comes to anything but women. Like being able to say, right, that this rejection of Hobbes is a pretty sophisticated one. He is saying this thing you are imagining.
01:56:38
Speaker
as being natural is are actually already socialized. And if we really want to think about a state of nature, we need to think before this level of socialization, if it's going to have any use. And right, there there's some sophisticated arguments to make there, and it's a little hard to unpick, like,
01:56:54
Speaker
what Rousseau actually said there versus like what are sort of later materialist Marxist readings because a lot of the way that like later Marxist readings work is they kind of say like oh like this is what he actually meant the whole time and so it kind of it is a little hard to like read these texts and divest yourself of like our modern notions but Yeah, there's some sophisticated political argumentation happening elsewhere in this book, elsewhere in Rousseau. And it's just, he just stops being able to think when it comes to women. Anyway, he's got this whole section where, okay, so he keeps talking about obedience. He talks about natural cunning and how to like support women developing their natural cunning while also keeping them obedient. He talks a lot about dress. It's rehashing a lot of the stuff we saw about the Greeks. Like, don't do too much makeup. Like, you know, okay, when you're older and you start looking old and ugly and gross, like then you can start putting on more makeup. But for young girls, they're probably fine with just some eyeliner, right? Thanks for the makeup advice, Rousseau. And then he starts talking about how women be talking. Man, I will not be misandrist. I'm not going to be misandrist on the podcast. I'm not going to misandrist in general. I'm not going to go on a rant about men
01:58:01
Speaker
Okay, please continue. He says, women have ready tongues. They talk earlier, more easily, and more pleasantly than men. And you know, they might talk more, but that's actually to their credit because they're good at talking.
01:58:13
Speaker
And when you want to, quote, check a girl's prattle, you know, instead of asking a boy, like you you would ask a boy, what's the use of that? But you ask a girl, what effect will that have? Oh my god, implant anxiety into them so that they're afraid to talk.
01:58:27
Speaker
Yeah. I'm so mad right now. It's also important that you still teach them not to lie. Lying is still bad. so even though you should also teach them to like say things that will most please the men around them, you also need to make sure that they're not lying.
01:58:42
Speaker
But then because women are naturally inclined to be docile anyway, like women are more polite and women are whatever, right? What, you know, just all of this nonsense. But then he gets to this really wonderful section about sociality between women. The courtesy of woman to woman is another matter.
01:59:01
Speaker
Their manner is so constrained, their attention so chilly, they find each other so wearisome that they take little pains to conceal the fact and seem sincere even in their falsehood, since they take so little pains to conceal it.
01:59:16
Speaker
Still, young girls do sometimes become firm, sincerely attached to one another. At their age, good spirits take the place of a good disposition, and they are so pleased with themselves that they are pleased with everyone else.
01:59:29
Speaker
Moreover, it is certain that they kiss each other more affectionately and caress each other more gracefully in the presence of men, for they are proud to be able to arouse their envy without danger to themselves by the sight of favors which they know will arouse that envy.
01:59:48
Speaker
What the fuck? Incredible. Right. women Women need to learn how to talk in a way that pleases men. Women should always be aiming to please men with the things they say after the sort of first don't lie command. Women, therefore, can't really be like friends with other women because like then who would they be trying to please, right? Like women would just find each other tiring because they'd be You know, there's there's no men around um and then even when women are friends and even if they have like physical affection It's all about the men. It's really about the men Mm-hmm, of course. i mean what would be the point of doing anything for any other reason?
02:00:27
Speaker
In fact, I have it on good authority that When women become such good friends with each other they go into locked bedrooms And they take each other's clothes off and they kiss each other all over that's for men. Oh but
02:00:42
Speaker
I think this is the earliest instance that I've seen in a text of, you know, women, even women hate other women. Yeah. Which is just like such a firmly established anti-feminist trope. We had a little bit of that in Cato, didn't we? Of like, I guess it wasn't quite the same, but it was like, we can't, like the only reason women want to dress up is because they want to make other women feel bad. It's because they have these, this hierarchy. Yeah. Yeah.
02:01:12
Speaker
And the hierarchy is bad in Kato's view. It's a little bit different. I mean, I was also thinking, I mean, this is a little bit only tangentially related, but it also reminds me of the like really common like turf talking point, which is like if trans women really believe that they're women, then why don't trans women like date other trans women?
Moral Education and Patriarchal Anxiety
02:01:28
Speaker
And it's like, excuse me?
02:01:30
Speaker
Like, oh. Which again, like, I mean, we're going to do an episode on on something like this coming up because there's like so many different texts that that we can touch on. But yeah, if we're going to do an episode where we just map out trans polycule.
02:01:47
Speaker
And from node to node, it's just like 35 people long But it really is like again like understand that, you know I think when we start we have a first episode on like we haven't had any explicitly like transphobic texts like we've seen things where like gender and even here like this like oh, what feminine men and we were like talking about oh It seems like he just saw a t4t couple and freaked out But, you know, we when we start talking about, like, transphobia, where we're really going to see how much of it is just, like, the thinnest recostuming of misogyny. Anyway, we're nearing the end here, which is good. We've been recording for a while. He does talk a little bit about how we should approach teaching women about religion. Women aren't really suited for thinking about, like, big abstract metaphysical questions, though. So you got to keep the religion talk pretty concrete.
02:02:37
Speaker
But you do want to teach young girls about like death and like that, you know, what death is and how to like orient yourself around an awareness of death. So he's actually given us a little dialogue for how that should go.
02:02:50
Speaker
Would you like to be the nurse or the child? Oh my God. I'll be the child. Okay, so here's a little, he describes it as like a catechism for like teaching young girls about death. Can't believe we're doing a play again.
02:03:03
Speaker
me Okay, so I'm the nurse and Sarah's the child. Do you remember when your mother was a little girl? No, nurse. Why not? When you have such a good memory. I was not alive.
02:03:15
Speaker
Then you were not always alive. No. Will you live forever? Yes. Are you young or old? I am young. Is your grandmama young, old or young?
02:03:29
Speaker
She is old. Was she ever young? Yes. Why is she not young now? She has grown old. Will you grow any more?
02:03:40
Speaker
Oh, yes. And what becomes of big girls? They grow into women. And what becomes of women? They are mothers. And what becomes of mothers? They grow old.
02:03:51
Speaker
Will you grow old? When I am a mother. And what becomes of old people? I don't know. What became of your grandfather? He died.
02:04:03
Speaker
Footnote. The child will say this because she has heard it said, but you must make sure she knows what death is, for the idea is not so simple and within the child's grasp as people think.
02:04:13
Speaker
Why did he die? Because he was so old. What becomes of old people? They die. And when you are old? Oh, nurse, I don't want to die. My dear, no one wants to die and everybody dies. Why, will mama die too?
02:04:31
Speaker
Yes, like everybody else, women grow old as well as men, and old age ends in death. What must I do to grow old very, very slowly? Be good while you are little.
02:04:43
Speaker
I will always be good, nurse. So much the better, but do you suppose you will live forever? When we are so very old, you say we must die? You must die someday. Oh dear, i suppose I must.
02:04:55
Speaker
Who lived before you? My father and mother. And before them? Their father and mother. Who will live after you? My children. Who will live after them?
02:05:06
Speaker
Their children. And scene. There's a lot to talk about here. Not the least of which is this footnote where he's like, oh, by the way, you have to make sure they understand death already.
02:05:16
Speaker
Which kind of reveals that the purpose of this is not actually teaching the child about death. No, the purpose of this is something else, which is that's right to instill anxiety about one's own death in the child and then use that to enforce patriarchy.
02:05:36
Speaker
That's right. And in particular, to tell them that they mustn't breed in order to symbolically escape death. Really fascinating stuff. So that's a woman's religious education.
02:05:48
Speaker
oh right. That was the religious education. Well, I'm glad we got that out of the way. So now we need to talk about woman's moral education. I would not altogether blame those who would restrict a woman to the labors of her sex and would leave her in profound ignorance of everything else.
02:06:05
Speaker
but that would require a standard of morality at once very simple and very healthy, or a life withdrawn from the world. In great towns among immoral men, such a woman would be too easily led astray. Her virtue would too often be at the mercy of circumstances.
02:06:23
Speaker
In this age of philosophy, virtue must be able to resist temptation. She must know beforehand what she may hear and what she should think of it. Moreover, in submission to man's judgment, she should deserve his esteem.
02:06:38
Speaker
Above all, she should attain the esteem of her husband. She should not only make him love her person, she should make him approve her conduct. She should justify his choice before the world and do honor to her husband through the honor given to the wife.
02:06:53
Speaker
But how can she set about this task if she is ignorant of our institutions, our customs, our notions of propriety? If she knows nothing of the source of man's judgment, nor the passions by which it is swayed.
02:07:05
Speaker
Yeah, so like, it would be great if we could just keep women in the home completely and not teach them anything about the world and keep them totally isolated. But unfortunately, it's not really possible.
02:07:16
Speaker
You know, women are going to see the world. So we got to make sure that at least they understand how wicked the world is that they want to stay at home with their husbands all day. So that's moral education. Well, we're really whipping through entire fields of study, aren't we? Yeah, so here we're going to talk about her academic education. I mean, these are really slight, right? We've already covered how we abuse young girls into docile women.
02:07:40
Speaker
So now it's just like window dressing, like, okay, morality, academics, you know, these are sort of peripheral. Let's little frosting on the cake. To a women's education, yeah.
02:07:52
Speaker
The search for abstract and speculative truths, for principles and axioms in science, for all that tends to wide generalization, is beyond a woman's grasp.
02:08:04
Speaker
Their studies should be thoroughly practical. It is their business to apply the principles discovered by men. It is their place to make the observations which lead men to discover those principles.
02:08:15
Speaker
A woman's thoughts, beyond the range of her immediate duties, should be directed to the study of men, or the acquirement of that agreeable learning whose sole end is the formation of taste.
02:08:28
Speaker
For the works of genius are beyond her reach, and she has neither the accuracy nor the attention for a success in the exact sciences. As for the physical sciences, to decide the relations between living creatures and the laws of nature is the task of that sex which is more active and enterprising, which sees more things, that sex which is possessed of greater strength and is more accustomed to the exercise of that strength.
02:08:56
Speaker
Woman, weak as she is and limited in her range of observation, perceives and judges the forces at her disposal to supplement her weakness. And those forces are the passions of man Yeah, so really, I mean, this just puts all of it out on the table. Everything about a woman's education is secondary, is downstream of the fact that the entire purpose of a woman's life is to be pleasing to a man and raise his children.
02:09:27
Speaker
And whether it's understanding your own relationship with mortality and your place in the universe as being to produce children to symbolically escape death, or your moral education, which should be only enough so that you can understand how morally your husband is and also stay at home all day, or your academic education, which is, again, to be able to understand how to...
02:09:53
Speaker
manipulate slash trick your husband into feeding and clothing you. It's just,
Sequel to Emile and Domestic Chains
02:09:58
Speaker
you thought yeah, that's just all it is. that's That's everything about educating a woman. So the rest of the section, I mean, there's quite a bit more that we're not going to talk about where it gets more into like the plot of this guy, Emil, and then meeting Sophie and how Emil and Sophie should court each other. But to get really get into that, we'd have to talk more about like the specifics of this character and all this stuff. And I mean, it is a big chunk of the book, but it's like,
02:10:18
Speaker
It's all just implementation of these ideas. But these are the ideas that he's working with for like how you should raise women. And yeah, basically, Emil starts to fall for Sophie. And Sophie is given this, is told by her parents that she's going to be given the opportunity to pick her own husband, like contrary to the common practice of usually like the parents pick a husband and then the daughter approves or disapproves. Like she's going to be allowed to pick a husband and then the parents approve or disapprove. And he talks all all about how like this is a good way of manipulating women into being obedient is to make them think that they have freedom because then they will want to prove themselves worthy of the high esteem of their parents right but like all just you know implementing what he's saying earlier which is like you don't want your kid to be scared of you you just need to indoctrinate them correctly and with the right combination of restraint gaslighting habit forming
02:11:10
Speaker
you can make docile subjects of patriarchy. It's not great. I mean, just to add a little more context to this, I didn't clip this this part, but there's even a part where he like he addresses the fact that there are women scientists and there are women artists and women who do all these things he claims women are incapable of doing. And he says, well, I'm talking about the average woman. I'm not talking about prodigies. And, you know, you talk about this woman who is like super smart and able to do all these things, but like, I wouldn't want to marry her. oh what do you What do you mean you wouldn't want to marry her?
02:11:40
Speaker
Why not? you fucking loser. What's wrong with you? It's very explicitly saying not only, you know, this is beyond women's grasp is like not because the physical, you know, like not that women couldn't physically be taught to do these things. It's like it's it's beyond what nature, you know, huge scare quotes has ordained for women in society. Yeah, what he means is it's improper for women to do. these Right. Although I strongly suspect that if it came down to it, he really thinks women can't do these things.
02:12:14
Speaker
And if he acknowledges otherwise, then like, you know, that's just an irreconcilable conflict in his views that can be submerged, as so many others can, at the opportunity to do some misogyny.
02:12:26
Speaker
So the rest of the thing is about travel. There's this like whole sequence where the tutor says to Emil like oh now you have to travel and see the world so you can understand the world's customs. Mostly so you can understand that like every society and city in the world is corrupt and terrible and like the French countryside is the ideal place to live. And of course, Sophie is distraught that like having fallen in love with Emil, now she has to like put up without him for a while. Because of course, you don't bring your wife traveling with you. That'd be crazy. They're not married yet. It's like before they get married, he has to like complete his education to become a proper citizen. It's really weird stuff. Okay.
02:13:00
Speaker
For the sort of little epilogue here, he wrote an incomplete sequel that he was working on up until he died, it seems. And then the sort of incomplete sequel was published after his death. And i didn't seek out or read the sequel, but I do have the Wikipedia synopsis.
02:13:21
Speaker
All right, I'm excited. In the incomplete sequel to Emile, Emile S. Sophie, English, Emilius and Sophia, published after Rousseau's death, Sophie is unfaithful in what it is hinted might be a drugged rape.
02:13:38
Speaker
I'm sorry, this is a book about how to educate children? Oh no this is this is a novel about these two. Like the earlier book is about how to educate children, right? It's a meal and education. But now this is about like good citizens in society. It's sort of a novelistic sequel that is supposed to be about living as an adult in society and like what someone educated properly, what a properly educated couple, like what would happen. You'll see what it's about. It's it's pretty bonkers.
02:14:05
Speaker
Okay, alright, so Sophie is unfaithful, her quotes and Emil, initially furious with her betrayal, remarks, "...the adulteries of the women of the world are not more than gallantries, but Sophia, an adulteress, is the most odious of all monsters.
02:14:24
Speaker
The distance between what she was and what she is is immense." no there is no disgrace no crime equal to hers shut the fuck up emil fuck you he later relents somewhat blaming himself for taking her to a city full of temptation but he still abandons her and their children Throughout the agonized internal monologue represented through letters to his old tutor, he repeatedly comments on all of the effective ties that he has formed in his domestic life.
02:14:56
Speaker
Quote, the chains his heart forged for itself, end quote. As he begins to recover from the shock, the reader is led to believe that these chains are not worth the price of possible pain.
02:15:09
Speaker
Quote, by renouncing my attachments to a single spot, I extended them to the whole earth. and while I ceased to be a citizen, became truly a man end quote While in La Nouvelle Héloïse... Nouvelle Héloïse, it's an earlier novel by Rousseau.
02:15:26
Speaker
While in La Nouvelle Héloïse, the ideal is domestic, rural happiness, if not bliss. In Emile and its sequel, the ideal is emotional self-sufficiency, which was the natural state of primitive pre-social man, but which for modern man can be attained only by the suppression of his natural inclinations.
02:15:47
Speaker
According to Dr. Wilson Pava, member of the Rousseau Association, quote, left unfinished, Emile S. Sophie reminds us of Rousseau's incomparable talent for producing a brilliant conjugation of literature and philosophy, as well as a productive approach of sentiment and reason through education.
02:16:07
Speaker
Sarah was doing like a jacking off motion for like the last third of that. Yeah.
02:16:13
Speaker
Yeah, I mean... The cuck fantasy came back. The cuck fantasy came back. The leaving it ambiguous whether or not it was a drugged rape, which is almost worse than making it explicitly a drugged rape because it actually explicitly seems to then say it doesn't matter.
02:16:31
Speaker
Well, as he was describing it earlier, like the chief attraction for men of sex with women is ambiguity around whether the act is rape. Right. Like he said that.
02:16:43
Speaker
Yes. So and then to say, okay, You know, most women, when they're unfaithful, that's fine. Women are whores. But Sophie was properly educated, and she was such a perfect being and a perfect docile being that it's even worse. And this is actually going to make me renounce all of my ties to society, and I have become properly a man by renouncing myself as a citizen of society. It is this, like, ultimate...
Rousseau's Philosophical Impact
02:17:12
Speaker
Culmination of his obsession with like the true freedom being to be outside society. This is such incel shit. Oh, yeah All I wrote for this in my notes is what a wretched man
02:17:26
Speaker
he truly hates women he really does yeah, I know that's such a banal observation But like the venom really comes through Yeah, so, you know, as I said at the beginning, like, Althusser loved Rousseau. I mean, a lot of philosophers love Rousseau. Althusser wrote extensively about Rousseau.
02:17:43
Speaker
He gave a pretty seminal, like, series of lectures that just a couple years ago got, like, republished in translation by Verso Books. Like, it's, it's like, still considered today, like, ooh, we should really study, you know, Rousseau's political philosophy and what Althusser has to say about Rousseau's political philosophy. And it's, like,
02:17:59
Speaker
Sure, maybe fine, whatever, right? He's talking about like discourse on the origin of inequality. i don't know. Maybe that's some of that stuff is good. I didn't read it because that's not what this episode was about. This episode is about just rank misogyny. Like how are all these guys just misogynists? Is this really the best you can do? French philosophy? Like this did this fucking guy? oh my God. It's something in the groundwater in France. That's my explanation at this point.
02:18:21
Speaker
It's too painful to think that it might be some sort of systemic oppression perpetuated down through the aeons by men who care only for their own pleasure and for the enjoyment of watching others be subjugated.
02:18:35
Speaker
That would just be much. Yeah, would really depressing that were the the groundwater. You can tell because we don't have similar problems here in the US. Oh my god. It's really funny, again, i mean, going back to this idea of, oh, it it you know it crystallized the ideas about women at the time. And it's like, well, it's also so much of ideas about women today.
02:18:53
Speaker
And one thing I was also thinking about is, like we like to make fun of rationalists today for being like, oh, we're following the tradition of like rational, like, enlightenment rationalists. And then they're all huge misogynists. And like, maybe we have to actually hand it to them to some extent. Like they kind of are following in this tradition, right? Like, I mean, they're not, i would describe it as convergent evolution. Right. But at the same time, my point is just, I could imagine some of this being on less wrong.
02:19:22
Speaker
Yeah, I could see that. One thing we've talked about, i think and we haven't really talked about on the podcast, but one thing that we have both sort of observed is a lot of contemporary rationalist and like post rationalist like spaces there, they engage in these sorts of rituals around rationality. And I feel like Rousseau is doing a very similar thing. And a lot of these things here where he's just engaging in this kind of ritual of invoking nature and a natural law.
02:19:46
Speaker
and Very little actual reasoning or argumentation is happening. It's just a little ritual. do you want to do FAG ratings? Yeah, so all of our subjects we rate on a three-part scale the an FAG scale so F for their ferocity depending on what manner of bigotry is but for aught in this case itd be ferocity towards women a for their arrogance and G for their gullibility one to five for each So ferocity is an interesting one for me because so much of what he's doing is pretty garden variety misogyny, just like really crystallized.
02:20:24
Speaker
So it's not maybe... At the level of someone where we're seeing, you know, calls for... Right, we we've you've given really high ratings. Like, our highest rating are are six. Or I think I gave... We both gave him a six is Andrew Anglin.
02:20:41
Speaker
Because he was like, we need to, like, rebuild the camps and do the Holocaust. Like, we need to finish the Holocaust, right? I mean, that's... That's pretty bad. Official stance of the podcast. That's pretty bad.
02:20:51
Speaker
And then, you know, Shane Wolf was a five because he was describing, well, all sorts of things. Right. But Rousseau is kind of like the main complaint I have in a way is like his clarity of understanding what it is that like the process of reproducing patriarchy, like what it requires Yeah, to me, the fact that he's setting out a system and a program for enforcing patriarchy and for perpetuating abuse, that carries weight for me.
02:21:24
Speaker
Yeah, so it's definitely not like a one, which, because again, we haven't had anyone, well, we actually both gave Swetna a one. Because a one doesn't mean you're normal. A one just means like you haven't risen above like the table stakes of being a misogynist. And I think he has done that. I think he's above a one.
02:21:41
Speaker
i would maybe put him at a three. Yeah, what did I give Leacock? We both gave Leacock a four. I'm kind of thinking of four. I could see it because i I was thinking a lot about Leacock throughout this. I think as I thought about differences, there's less there was less like of an explicitly like women are a racial invasion rhetoric, which was like a huge part of Leacock. But in part, that's sort of that sort of rhetoric was in was it around, like it it took a different form back then. And we are getting kind of the, we did get kind of the specter of the like the savage tribe with the the strong man. So I could see a four Yeah, this episode has definitely made me think about Leacock more than any of the others we've done so far.
02:22:24
Speaker
Especially, like, the agrarianism. Like, if Rousseau had just, like, held on a few centuries, then he would have found out that, you know, bombing is going to empty out all the cities and we'll just be living in the countryside from now on.
02:22:36
Speaker
Yeah. And I think, you know, the one thing is like, okay, that stuff, does that mean they're the same on ferocity? But you're right, there there is so little space between their two positions. Like the real differences are just historical context.
02:22:51
Speaker
And they're both engaged in political action to make their misogynistic projects reality. And for that reason, i also think he gets a five, same as Leacock.
02:23:04
Speaker
For arrogance? Yeah, for arrogance. Yeah, i agree. In a way, it seems like we should knock him down a little bit as hand. Actually, hang on. i'm I'm going to give him a four, actually. And so this is what I was gonna say. Like, I think I would give him a little bit of a handicap because he is a French philosopher.
02:23:20
Speaker
Like, you kind of can't. Like, Leacock was Canadian, right? So, like, this is the famous moral relativism of the left coming out here. Exactly, right? Like, it's kind of too easy to be like, look at this French philosopher. Isn't he so arrogant? Like, yeah.
02:23:38
Speaker
sorry to our french listeners if we have french listeners we just like being snooty about the french all right well i'm giving them a four for a different reason leacock kind of thought of himself as a universal threat so he wanted to be one of the great economists he wanted to be one of the great writers that sort of thing and he thought he was always being like held back with some trivial thing or another Russo is annoying. He can also kind of walk the walk in a way that I don't think Leacock could.
02:24:08
Speaker
Like he wanted to be this formative guy and then he unfortunately kind of was and like he actually did influence like huge political currents. So it's kind of like he didn't die and then immediately get forgotten the way Leacock did. I mean, Leacock isn't totally forgotten, but... By the way, if you haven't listened to our Leacock episode, I'm so sorry, but He's just the standard that we're judging by here.
02:24:31
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, yeah, if you haven't listened to it, like it literally is articles about women need to be subjugated to men because like women's equality and like in one particular case, like the right to vote would lead to women killing men and and taking over with so many of the same obsessions and And focuses. So i don't know how to decide between a four and a five. I'll go with a four. Okay.
02:24:56
Speaker
Okay. Gullibility. We've kind of, I think in the last few episodes, I've finally started to get a sense of like, okay, how do I explain gullibility as a concept and what it is? Right. and And what we really want to talk about with gullibility is one of the things we're interested in on this podcast is the role that these guys have in the production of bigotry. That like these texts don't just exist in a vacuum. They come from somewhere, which is, i mean, the person writing them, but also the social situation that produced these texts. And then they have an effect.
02:25:27
Speaker
And sometimes people seem really aware of their role. And then sometimes they don't seem aware at all. And they are like, they think they're doing something entirely different. And to some extent, they've fallen for their own propaganda to an extent, right? And so people who are low gullibility, we actually both gave, I gave Lee Kaka one and you gave Lee Kaka two on gullibility because we both understood like he kind of knows what he's doing and he's kind of using the fact that like there are people out there who will pay for misogynist writing, right?
02:26:03
Speaker
So he will sort of explain his misogyny in writing because that's going to get him career advancement. Whereas like high gullibility is someone like Enoch Powell, who, as far as we understood his role, I mean, we kind of came to a conclusion that his role was in part to kind of be the forbidden, you know, the guy who says what's forbidden so that the other conservatives sound more normal as they enact all of his policies. But he really thought he was and would be like a great orator and leader of a political movement that, know,
02:26:36
Speaker
sort of did happen but without him at the head. He was sort of a sacrificial lamb and he didn't understand that at all and so we gave him high gullibility. Where do we think Rousseau is on this scale? Or like what do we think his role is? It's difficult for me to see someone writing this while having delusions about what they're doing because this is sort of a project Okay.
02:27:01
Speaker
kind of thing okay He's laying it out in these terms that which have these broader philosophical elements, but he's trying to get like a specific set of policy recommendations implemented throughout France.
02:27:19
Speaker
And I think he understands what the import of those are, which is he thinks that will lead to the subjugation of women. I don't really see what the room for delusion there is about what his role in the and the production of bigotry is.
02:27:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think the only thing that might move me up from a one to a two is one of the things I think he is actually doing and that is is a crucial part of this role is the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, but also all sorts of political turmoil that were happening at the time were moments with like liberatory possibilities. So in a moment when you're saying we have to really question conventional wisdom about politics, about hierarchy, about the way society should be organized, this is a moment where you can really call into question the subjugation of women.
02:28:17
Speaker
And so part of his role is to provide an example for how you can sort of get away with not doing that. How you can say, I'm going to be an Enlightenment philosopher. I'm going to talk about the origin of inequality. I'm going to make this radical claim that actually inequality derives with private property. And we need to interrogate and understand the role of private property in our political lives.
02:28:44
Speaker
in order to reduce inequality, while at the same time not granting freedoms for women. And I don't know if he quite understands that what he is doing is allowing a certain... I think he is somewhat blind to this...
02:29:03
Speaker
gap in his like I'm going to be you know I'm going to to to really elucidate what is the true state of nature and I'm going to really think hard about what you know what a free life looks like especially with stuff like oh we've moved unconsciously from the physical to the moral construct right he does i think not fully understand the extent to which what he's doing is like closing a door and providing an example for how to Maintain conservative patriarchy while pretending to be a progressive, but I think you're right like he understands that this is Laying out a project of how to subjugate women which will then be used by people who are thinking actively at the time and 20 years after this is written about How to design a society will be used to continue the subjugation of women. So I'm gonna go with a two. Okay, gonna go the one so this puts me ten and And you are at a nine.
02:29:59
Speaker
So pretty low. i mean, the lowest we had, I gave Sweatnam a five. You give him a four. But we've seen 14s and 15s. So he's kind of middle of the road, which kind of makes sense. I kind of do think, yeah, he's pretty middle the road for what we've seen before.
02:30:15
Speaker
This was like a funny episode to go through and just see so many of the tropes kind of all distilled and clarified and laid out and the obsession with the Greeks and Railing against women in there, you know, their leggings. I mean their corsets. I mean their togas right like it's just uh-huh It's just like, you know, Rousseau like welcome to the time washing machine like it's all the same all the time forever yeah so i think that's our episode Yeah, so even though I just said it's all the same all the time forever Actually our episodes are different and you should listen to all of them and you should check out our patreon patreon.com slash odm symposium and you should Subscribe for five dollars a month and you can get access to episodes early and we will shout you out on the podcast Thank you again to Nina our new subscriber Thank you, Nina And if you want to hear us discuss some people that are not French
02:31:07
Speaker
That's too bad. Suck it up. We've got more French episodes in the pipeline. Yeah, we both kind of without planning realized like, oh no, there's a bunch of French people coming up. So maybe that's the elevator pitch. We discuss, welcome to Odium Symposium. We discuss French people.
02:31:25
Speaker
We're not doing that. We're not doing that. All right. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. 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.
02:31:46
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. I'll suck you your goddamn face. You'll stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
02:32:03
Speaker
some level of masochism.