Why You Shouldn’t Share Your Private Life Online - Mary Harrington (4K)

Mary Harrington is a writer, columnist and author. Everyone has the temptation to share their life on the internet, but where does the line of sharing stop and oversharing begin? How has our performance for the crowd crept into our morals and changed the way we see the role of privacy around our personal lives? Expect to learn what Digital Modesty is, why liberals would more likely date an Only Fans worker than an OnlyFans subscriber, if there is a crisis with both masculinity and femininity in our culture, Mary’s thoughts on the surrogacy industry, why women need to develop a strategy for not getting what they want and much more... Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) 00:00 The Idea of Digital Modesty 06:14 How Phones Have Created a Surveillance Society 11:59 The Danger of Political Opinion on Social Media 18:31 Why the Left Wouldn’t Date OnlyFans Subscribers 21:17 The Message Behind the Barbie Movie 24:30 Is Our Culture Anti-Family? 29:33 The Crisis of Masculinity & Femininity 40:28 Why The Trad Wife Movement Won’t Work 47:39 How Divorce is a PsyOp 52:33 Mary’s Thoughts on Surrogacy 59:13 The Problem With Matt Walsh & the Right 1:11:57 The Ambivalent Role of Right-Wing Women 1:19:13 Where to Find Mary - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean by digital modesty?

• 0:01Mary Harrington?

  Oh, yeah, that's that's an idea I've been playing with a lot recently, which is really just about where we've got to with the exposure of everything on the internet. This is something I've found myself thinking about a lot more, and the more the more I found myself writing in public and speaking in public and really sort of being present online, whether it's on Twitter or wherever, which is, is there anything that we shouldn't be posting? And the more I think about that, the more the more I conclude that, yes, there are absolutely things that we shouldn't be posting, or rather, if there are things which if if we if we do share them, we should expect negative consequences to follow from that. I mean, I've and the more I thought, I've I've derived a set, I guess, of basic principles for what I won't post.

• 0:45Mary Harrington?

  I won't post selfies online. I mean, I'll post my face is all over the internet, right? But in the context of a conversation, you know, you and I here, you and I here, not we're not here to talk about my face. I mean, my face is just my face. We're here to we're here to exchange ideas and to have a conversation. But I won't post, I won't post selfies. Yeah, I can, I actually, I remember the point where I realized that I shouldn't, I didn't want to post selfies was was just after I could I ran over the finish line of a marathon a couple of years ago. And I trained for it, and I trained for it, and I trained for it, and I worked so hard at it. And at that point, I think I had maybe 10,000 followers on Twitter, and I and I took a photo of myself having crossed the finish line, looking like hell, completely exhausted, and high as a kite on endorphins. And I nearly I nearly pressed send, and then I was like, well, don't do that. Do not do that.

• 1:29Mary Harrington?

  And I and I deleted it, and I didn't, I did not post the selfie of myself having just crossed the finish line.

• 1:34Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:35Mary Harrington?

  Because I realized if I did, like, probably 75% of the people who follow me would say, great, well done, congratulations, and I get lots of love. The other 25% will be the people who hate follow, because they they exist. Once you get past a certain point, you get you have haters on the internet, because like people can find, people can hate anything. You know, that's just the law of the internet. People will find something insane to hate, even if it's just people doing like middle aged women doing marathons. And and then and and it would have, there would have been one mean comment, which would have just crushed me, and it would have ruined my day. And I thought, what's the easiest way of not experiencing that one mean comment? It's just not, just don't post the picture. But it's more than that. It's also that it exposes something intimate and personal, which I realized was just not something which was, it wasn't for everybody else.

• 2:18Mary Harrington?

  It was my my my, that that moment was for me, and it was for my for my family and for the people who'd supported me. It wasn't for and and for the people who'd who'd who'd who'd supported me to fundraise. It wasn't for. General consumption. And and I realised that actually there is a boundary. Um, and I've I've spent more time online, I've I've I've appeared in public more since then. And the more the more I do it, the more I've I've come to think that actually we need. Yeah, the the more exposed you are potentially online, the more. The more intentional you have to be about thinking, thinking, thinking clearly on where you draw the line.

• 2:51Chris Williamson?

  Like a digital hijab.

• 2:52Mary Harrington?

  Yeah. Well, I've I've I wouldn't use I that's that would be a problematic way of putting it in public, because I think there are. Borrowing from other people from a faith which I don't personally espouse um as as a metaphor.

• 3:05Chris Williamson?

  Digital modesty will do. Okay, so no selfies.

• 3:07Mary Harrington?

  So no selfies, no pictures of my home, no pictures of my child, no pictures of my husband. No discussing my husband, my child or my home, um except in the most general terms. Um, and and really no, no, no discussing intimate matters from my social life and my my family life and my home life. Um, unless it's in in the most general terms or with the consent of anybody else involved, because ultimately these are my these. By virtue of being relationships, they're things which don't just belong to me. And because it doesn't just belong to me, I can't mind it. I have no right to mind that for content.

• 3:39Chris Williamson?

  Justify for the non-content creator people why a degree of digital modesty is also a good idea.

• 3:47Mary Harrington?

  Okay, so the the more I thought about digital modesty, the more I realised that what we're actually talking about is is is setting boundaries on the culture of transparency. And this is really something which I think we've inherited from the nineteen sixties and the sort of hippie utopianism. And this idea that, you know, if we all let it all hang out, if we're just open about everything, if we all just share and we're we're honest and we're authentic. Then somehow everything is going to be better. And that might have been true, maybe that was true to an extent before the internet, because there was a limit on what you could share. But now we have the internet, we could theoretically be documenting literally every moment of our lives. And on those, you know, those people who've tried documenting literally every aspect of their lives online have generally ended up in some pretty horrible places.

• 4:27Mary Harrington?

  I mean, I can't remember the name of the guy, but there was there was a famous, there was a famous subculture, there there was some guy online who who. Who documented literally every aspect of his life and he ended up getting trolled and he he basically went to some very dark places and ended up. Yeah, yeah, and then in in profound kind of, yeah, really sinister kinds of audience capture.

• 4:49Chris Williamson?

  It wasn't Nicocado Avocado, was it?

• 4:51Mary Harrington?

  He's a more recent case in point, actually. I mean, you know, people who end up sort of, you know, crying and breaking up with and getting back together again with his boyfriend whilst eating enormous plates of food, basically for internet clout. You know, there's a, there's a sort of race to the bottom aspect there. But, but more generally, even for people who are not professional internet presence havers, the, the culture of, the, the culture of transparency and the sort of tyranny of transparency has negative effects. And I was thinking about this, but like in the context of dating. I mean, you, you know, periodically you see these TikToks, which, which young men or women put out where they're like, oh, you know, I, I just, I, I, I point of view, you're on a date and they're literally filming the date while they're on the date.

• 5:33Mary Harrington?

  And then they're criticizing the, the, the counterpart on the date while they're actually doing it. Or they've gone to the loo to make a TikTok about how, how their date is going wrong while they're actually having the date. And I'm thinking, well, if you, if you never draw a line and say, if, if you, if you arrive in a sort of potentially intimate situation, you've always got that imagined audience in your head, which is potentially everybody on the internet. How are you ever supposed to create a shared intimacy with anybody? And I was thinking, so it was like transparency is not just the enemy of desire. Transparency is the enemy of intimacy. It's the enemy of relationships. And if, if there's nothing, if there's no gap at all between what you'd say on main and what you'd say in private, there's, there's intimacy is just meaningless. It's not a thing.

• 6:13Chris Williamson?

  One of my friends who I came up doing club promo with, he was in Southampton and I was in Newcastle, running the same event, Carnage, which was an event where you bought a T-shirt as your ticket. And there was tasks on the back, like pulled a pig, got off with three randoms, swapped shoes with somebody, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Very sort of mid noughties, Larry British drinking culture stuff. And I was asking him where he thought that the Larry culture, which although maybe not exactly like emotionally healthy, is a kind of Liberated licentiousness, which kind of speaks of a degree of transparency and honesty and truth, like I'm just going to do what I want, right? I'm not going to perform.

• 6:56Chris Williamson?

  And where that had gone, where like the Larry, like, you know, pulled randoms in a club type thing, because that's not what happens. We see.

• 7:01Mary Harrington?

  Doesn't happen anymore.

• 7:02Chris Williamson?

  No, and he said it's because of this sort of.

• 7:04Mary Harrington?

  Imaginary audience.

• 7:05Chris Williamson?

  Starzy surveillance state run by gullible volunteers, which is everybody with a phone in their pocket.

• 7:10Mary Harrington?

  Yep, yep, exactly that. You know, there's no, there's no, you can't do pranks. You can't, you can't have a crazy night out with your friends anymore. I mean, we threw some completely bonkers parties when I was, when I was late teens, early twenties. I remember the Absence and Laughing Gas party, which I can only remember kind of in bursts. And that was a magical evening, which are unforgettable and also unrememberable. But there's absolutely no way that could have happened, any of it, if, if, if camera phones had been a thing at the time. And I'm thinking, you know, there are, there are a huge number of benefits that come there. There are new kinds of communication, the new forms of relationship. I mean, you and I wouldn't be sitting here talking to one another if it wasn't for this phenomenal technology that we have that brings people together in some ways.

• 7:55Mary Harrington?

  But if we, if we're not able and willing to set boundaries on what we will and won't share, then it, it, it will eventually scoop out everything that's inside us and leave us no scope for intimacy or interpersonal connection at all.

• 8:08Chris Williamson?

  Ultimately, everything becomes performant. Everything's content. So I had a conversation with George, my friend, earlier on, and we were saying, I had an aversion to taking photos for a while because given my Love Island alumnus status, I had seen a lot of people who did photos and I'd associated every time you take a photo of yourself or what you're doing or wherever, that is you shilling yourself for content on the internet. But that's not true. People took photos way longer before social media existed. So I had associated the only reason for taking a photo is to post it online. Therefore, I won't take a photo because I don't want to be one of those wanky Love Island people that post all of their life online. But that caused me to not post my life online, which I wasn't going to do anyway, but also not take any photos of the fun stuff that I was doing.

• 8:52Chris Williamson?

  So I've got these huge dearths of my life where I don't have photos of me and my friends doing stuff. I went for lunch with Douglas the other day. I wanted to, like, I was like, I want to remember this. I want to remember the pink shirt that he was wearing and the fact I had Crocs on and like, you know, just like stuff. I'm like, okay, let's take a photo, but I have to get over my own fear that I'm doing it for content, even though I know I'm not going to post it. It's like, I go like, like fucking projecting myself into the future that I'm not a part of.

• 9:18Mary Harrington?

  But is the stuff that you would just categorically never photograph?

• 9:22Chris Williamson?

  No, no, I would, I would, it would be like times with friends, you know, like I'm on a hike with some friends or whatever. But I'm in nature and I feel like I'm supposed to be like, I'm primitive man here and I shouldn't have my phone out because it feels gauche somehow to do it or whatever, you know what I mean? It's like, here I am at the top of the mountain, but it's not, it's here I am with my friend that I've just taken a hike with. And I really want to remember this or maybe I'll frame it and put it on my wall at some point or something like, that seems like all of that stuff's a good idea, that's a good use of technology, up until the point at which you, everything becomes an OnlyFans for yourself.

• 9:52Mary Harrington?

  I don't know, and possibly slightly more radical than that in the sense that, well, I mean, I think about when I'm, I run a lot. So I'll run.

• 10:01Chris Williamson?

  Red flag.

• 10:03Mary Harrington?

  Well, you lift, I run, it's just, you know.

• 10:07Mary Harrington?

  So I run a lot and one of the reasons I run is because I can't do that whilst simultaneously scrolling. Like I, the reason.

• 10:14Chris Williamson?

  But you can lift, actually, you can do it in between sets.

• 10:16Mary Harrington?

  The reason, the reason I obsess about all of this stuff is because like I'm so, so hardwired to, to the, the rage machine. Like I'm so plugged into the internet, which is why I find myself kind of wrestling with the outer limits of it at all. And one of the reasons I run and one of the reasons I treat that as absolutely sacrosanct space in my life is because it's physically impossible to do that whilst simultaneously scrolling. And I have an absolutely cast iron rule for myself and it doesn't matter how beautiful the scene, doesn't matter how gorgeous the sunrise when I've gone for like a two hour dawn run and I'm out in the middle of nowhere. I will not stop and photograph it. I will not, I will not stop and record that because I don't want to allow space for that imaginary audience.

• 10:57Chris Williamson?

  See there, again, there's no reason, I understand why you do that. I think that's a noble, like, set of rules to set for yourself.

• 11:06Chris Williamson?

  The reason that that has happened is because of the social media side, not because of the photo side. Let's say that you had a beautiful photo album of all of the beautiful sunsets that you'd ever seen. It is again, this sort of crossing over of the barrier of not just this is for me, but that there is something inbuilt into technology that kind of like infect, it gets into me. And if I open my phone, oh my God, what if I see a fucking notification from Twitter and then I'm sucked into a scroll hole and my entire run is ruined and stuff like that. I'd say it's a shame that something which can be, you know, my videographer's got this like real special sort of point and click camera that is very low friction. And he bought it specifically, even though he had all of the kit in the world, but he bought this very specific camera, which is just point and shoot. And all it does is that. And he bought that to remove the friction and

• 11:51Chris Williamson?

  remove the performative nature of this. So I just think it's, it's an interesting blend. But we, you were talking before about how people who put a lot of themselves online, they can have unforeseen repercussions. I guess if a lot of people are clustering together over their political opinions, and if you even pseudonymously post hardcore political opinions on the internet, eventually the person that you're potentially looking to date is presumably going to get exposed to whatever it is that you do online. And if you are a hardcore, if you're fucking Bronze Age pervert or something, it's like, oh, all right. Like, and now I have this entire other side of you that needs to be folded into our dating pool. And I learned from Scott Galloway,

• 12:32Chris Williamson?

  in 1960, one in 25 parents had concerns about their child marrying someone from the opposite political party. By 2018, almost half of Democrat parents and a third of Republican parents had such concerns, and a third of each party sees the other party as an enemy. So given this sort of clustering around political opinions, more than many other things, and a lot of people doing the pseudonymous anonymous shitposting online thing.

• 12:58Chris Williamson?

  You are potentially creating a future in which your entire mating pool has been restricted by opinions that you had six months ago, and you've got the choice between either lying to somebody about your shitposting online thing, or trying to somehow fold that into a conversation that they can be accepting of.

• 13:13Mary Harrington?

  I'm not even sure how you how you resolve that. I mean, I'm fortunate, I'm immensely blessed in that my husband and I met some time ago, and this was just, this has just never really been, you know, before, before even really-

• 13:26Chris Williamson?

  Before you were an opinion sprayer.

• 13:27Mary Harrington?

  Before I was a professional opinion haver, a long time before I was a professional opinion haver, and really long before political polarization was anywhere near its current level of completely batshit crazy. So, I mean, it was, it was completely academic and, and the, honestly, honestly, Chris, the advice I give to anybody, anybody who's single and extremely online is, date somebody who's just not very online. You know, you can only have one very online person in a relationship, you know, except in the most unusual circumstances.

• 13:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, not two.

• 13:56Mary Harrington?

  Because, and anecdotally, from younger friends I know who are also opinion havers, whether anonymously or, or, or on their, under their own faces, anecdotally, it's a real problem. Because, well, I mean, you know, quoting one, one, one right wing anon, who I chat to periodically, who shall remain nameless, told me that, I mean, I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but, but essentially, he, he has, he has a real problem, because if he, like, he says, if your choices, your choices between an ego, a right wing ego, and they're generally, like, a little, they can be on the unstable side, or somebody who doesn't know anything about your opinions, in which case, how on earth are you going to explain

• 14:39Mary Harrington?

  what you do, what you spend all day doing online, and furthermore, what, what's going to happen when she finds out about your opinions on the internet?

• 14:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 14:46Mary Harrington?

  You know, it's, it's not going to be great, and it's a real problem. So, like, how, how are you supposed to form any kind of a, any, any kind of a genuine mutually satisfying relationship under those circumstances? I don't know the answer. I mean, I, I suppose I come back again to, to digital modesty and the idea that we have to reserve some, some space for intimacy, which is protected from- From the imaginary audience that we have on the internet. And actually, I think in some ways, what the anon's do is is wise in that sense. Because by virtue of being anon, they've already drawn a very clear boundary. You know, said there are, but but, you know, if you want to stay, if you're anon and you want to stay anon. Yeah, you, there are, there are, there's a whole swathe of stuff that you just can't share.

• 15:25Mary Harrington?

  You can't really post anything about where you are or what you do for a living or, you know, or or anything that's too close to what what your what your day to day activity is. And so and so that that creates just by, it's a very, a very blanket way of setting some boundaries on what you're willing to share. But for the rest of us, uh, it's it's a real challenge, knowing knowing where to draw those lines and where to and where to protect your. Where where to protect what's just yours and what belongs to you and the people you love.

• 15:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, Douglas taught me a couple of years ago, uh, keep your private life private. And I think, you know, one of the things that people can see is that. Relationships and makeups and breakups and the vicissitudes of your personal life. Can be a very effective wedge to begin levering, uh, to be able to create a an audience, right? It's the same as, it's the same as every person who decides to call out some other internet commentator and have an argument with them. That's a very effective way to garner.

• 16:26Mary Harrington?

  Eyeballs.

• 16:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, attention and eyeballs. But at what cost? What does it say about you? What sorts of conversations does it open up?

• 16:34Mary Harrington?

  Always wants more.

• 16:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, correct.

• 16:36Mary Harrington?

  Doesn't, doesn't matter what, how much you feed it, the machine always wants more.

• 16:38Chris Williamson?

  If you think that having a relationship is hard, try having a relationship with a couple of million people who are also invested in the outcomes of your relationship.

• 16:44Mary Harrington?

  Right, you know, every so often I see, you know, I I see anon's with a bit of a platform, you know, report that it it somehow, it somehow comes out that the two, two people who have a bit of a platform of, uh, having a relationship with one another. And all of a sudden, everybody cares and everybody wants, and I'm like, why am I even invested in this? I have no idea who these people are. But it's, I I don't know, maybe it's just a byproduct of being otherwise relatively atomized and feel like, and there's a basic human need to sort of feel like you have a wider community.

• 17:11Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if a little bit of it is kind of like, um, who wins in a fight between Batman? And Superman, like who gets into a relationship.

• 17:18Mary Harrington?

  Please say more. I don't know what you mean.

• 17:19Chris Williamson?

  Well, that like you've got two people, both of whom you know individually and they are now in a relationship.

• 17:24Mary Harrington?

  Right, right, right.

• 17:25Chris Williamson?

  And you go, oh, what happens if these two worlds collide or something?

• 17:28Mary Harrington?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:29Chris Williamson?

  You know, Brett Cooper got engaged the other day and she announced on the internet that it was like the back of her fiance's head.

• 17:37Chris Williamson?

  Maybe the side of his arm and his shoe or something. And it's like this, the first and last time that the internet's going to see a part of like my husband's body. He's fiance's body. He's not interested in being famous and I really like him for that. And that's what you've got there. It's like a one sided. Internet relationship. Uh, and she did a little bit of time talking about it and now she's just going to move on. But yeah, you, you've got to be careful and again, to kind of sing the song for the people who. Don't have a, a following or a desire to monetize it or any of the other things. It is a. Genie that does not go back in the box. Toothpaste does not go back in the tube because once there are photos of. Things that you have on the internet, the place that you live, the kids that you have, like little stuff like.

• 18:20Chris Williamson?

  You know, if you take a photo of your kid in their school uniform on the first day of school, guess what? That school uniform identifies which fucking school they go to. So yeah, very, very interesting. Talking about this, I found a study that I think is, is kind of associated. A survey was sent out breaking down whether participants of different political ideologies would refuse to date a current OnlyFans worker. And an OnlyFans subscriber. Percentages of participants who would not date a current OnlyFans worker. Left leaning forty three, moderate sixty three, right leaning eighty four. Percentages of women who would not date a current OnlyFans subscriber, left leaning seventy, moderate seventy eight, right eighty four. So right is eighty four for both, but there are way more.

• 19:06Chris Williamson?

  Left leaning people who would date an OnlyFans worker than would date an OnlyFans subscriber. And I think that that says kind of quite a lot about some of the signaling. That people on the left are looking to do at the moment that like sex work is real work and we, you know, you can like monetize yourself as you wish. But there is still an inherent ick from women to the men who are a part of that ecosystem.

• 19:28Mary Harrington?

  I would, I would be curious to, to hear like what the, what the methodology was and whether there was any effort to control for preference falsification.

• 19:36Chris Williamson?

  How's that?

• 19:37Mary Harrington?

  Well, I mean, when you think about, when you think about what orthodoxy is on the left, around, you know, sex workers work and yada, yada, yada. I'd be willing to bet that there would be a subset of people who asked, you know, would you be willing to date an OnlyFans worker would lie. And even if they weren't actually, even if, actually, honestly, if you asked them in the pub privately off the record, they'd be like, yeah, no, that gives me the ick. If you ask them in that sort of a context, they would give, they would give the morally approved answer for, for their political tribe, which is, oh yeah, that's fine sex workers work. Or I don't know, maybe some of them genuinely don't care, but I'm willing to bet that it's a higher proportion actually of, of men on, on both sides of the political spectrum who don't actually find that appealing.

• 20:22Chris Williamson?

  What do you learn about the wouldn't date a current OnlyFans subscriber thing?

• 20:26Mary Harrington?

  Okay, so, so the difference between, well, like a guy who's addicted to porn is fundamentally low, low status, you know, and I think it's, it's moral, it's considered morally acceptable across the entire political spectrum to dunk on, to dunk on lonely, like masturbatory horn dogs. That's like, nobody, nobody cares about them, you know, that's, that's, you know, incels are low status.

• 20:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 20:48Mary Harrington?

  So, so, so.

• 20:49Chris Williamson?

  The perverts and the porn addicts.

• 20:50Mary Harrington?

  Yeah, the simps, the simps, the perverts and the, and the porn sick, like losers, like nobody cares about them, everyone's happy to dunk on them. So there's less of, less of a pressure to preference falsification. Whereas, whereas women, women in the sex industry have a much, much heftier architecture of sort of moral hectoring around them, at least on the left. So, so that would be, that would be my read on what's going on there.

• 21:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Mary Harrington?

  Preference falsification.

• 21:13Chris Williamson?

  What did you learn after the release of the Barbie movie? Did you reflect on sort of what that did culturally?

• 21:20Mary Harrington?

  Did it do anything culturally?

• 21:22Chris Williamson?

  I think there was an awful lot of conversations around what true feminist power, feminine power means and whether or not there is still this sort of rampant patriarchy that is kind of keeping women down and so on and so forth. And then there was the right wing reaction and there was the left wing, left wing rereaction to the right wing reaction and all the rest of it. So I, I thought it was interesting, you know, if anything that Ben Shapiro needs to do a 45 minute video about like after he's watched Dressed as Ken, I thought was an interesting, yeah, I thought it was an interesting opportunity.

• 21:54Mary Harrington?

  My favorite read on the Barbie movie was, was that it was a straightforwardly reactionary text and that it was. And that it was arguing fundamentally against feminism and arguing fundamentally for women as for the embodied differences between men and women. And that there was nothing progressive or feminist about it at all.

• 22:16Chris Williamson?

  How so? What would you say to the people who are like, how could you say this? There was obviously was pushing back against men and men were on the receiving end of all of the jokes and they laughed at them and all the rest of the things.

• 22:29Mary Harrington?

  But pregnant Barbie was expelled from the Barbie verse. I mean, there's no darker commentary on the on the on the boundaries of liberal feminism. I mean, this is what I spend my entire professional career harping on about Chris, is the fact that liberal feminism has a mother shaped blind spot. And it's right there in the film. It's as though it's as though the, I mean, even if it was meant as a liberal feminist text, it's a liberal feminist text that's telling on itself in a sort of compulsive verbal diarrhea-ish way. And this is the reactionary read of the Barbie movie. I mean, you know, I suppose you could say that it's in the night, like, a good piece of art is never a straightforward piece of political propaganda. You know, it doesn't work. Like, good stories are never

• 23:14Mary Harrington?

  straightforward moral lectures. You know, good stories always, always contain the other perspective and good stories are always just more complicated than that. But I mean, even if it was intended as a piece of feminist propaganda, it told on itself in some powerful ways, including by that detail of expelling pregnant Barbie from the Barbie verse.

• 23:33Chris Williamson?

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• 24:18Chris Williamson?

  pack of all eight flavors with your first box. Plus, there is a no BS, no questions asked refund policy, so you can buy it 100% risk free. That's drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. I was talking to Louise about the unobvious ways in which our culture is anti-family. I didn't get round to actually finding out, I just harped on myself. What would you say some of the ways that people might not realize that culture could be anti-family?

• 24:47Mary Harrington?

  Well, I can give you a very straightforward anecdote. So I don't live in London. I live, I live out in the boonies. I have, I've traveled into London with a toddler in a pushchair. And, you know, occasionally, somebody will help you up and down the steps on the tube with your pushchair. Sometimes people do, sometimes, sometimes people don't. But like, nobody will really give you the time of day. Nobody looks at your kid. Can't really, I'm not sure that I could explain why. I've also traveled into London with a dog. Everybody wants to talk to your dog.

• 25:17Chris Williamson?

  Right. Is it not just that dogs are better than humans across the board? Your, your, your, your daughter's beautiful and very lovely, but it's impossible to be better than a dog, I think. That's the way it works.

• 25:30Mary Harrington?

  You only say that because you don't have kids.

• 25:32Chris Williamson?

  True. Fair enough. Look, here's the thing that I've also realized. Dog walks past you, you're, everybody, a dog is kind of like, it's the world's pet. It's not your pet, because you are allowed to go over and tap it on the head and what's your name and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If someone, presumably, it might be nicer if more people acknowledged your daughter as she walked by. But if they started coming over and patting her on the head and

• 25:55Mary Harrington?

  I think in other countries, that actually happens. I mean, maybe not the feeding treats, but in other countries, like, people respond to a, to a random child completely differently. You get warm looks, you get interactions from strangers. It's only in Britain that people are like, oh, I must not look at your child. And I don't, I don't know that I, I don't fully understand the psychology behind not looking at somebody else's child or not wanting to even acknowledge that there's a little person in the vicinity. But there's something very distinctive about it.

• 26:18Chris Williamson?

  Do you wonder if it's like the non radar thing, that people are so concerned of being seen as like some latent sexual predator?

• 26:25Mary Harrington?

  There is, for men, that's definitely a factor. And I know that because I've, I've spoken about it with, with male friends and peers who, you know, who, who confirmed to me. That they'll, they'll be very cautious about interacting with, with mothers and children in, in, in a public setting. Because they're terrified of being labelled in that way. And I think there's something really toxic about that and something.

• 26:48Chris Williamson?

  Well, I've found, I think I've told you this, that over the last few years, my paternal instinct has started to kick in and children have gone from being super annoying and lame to like, kind of cute. So, but I, I see a child now, like, let's say it's like some little girls being walked along by her mother or father or whatever in the park near where I live. And I'm like, I want it like a grin at whoever the, over the top, go over the top.

• 27:10Mary Harrington?

  I'm like, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, I'm going this way. Okay.

• 27:16Chris Williamson?

  And I'm like.

• 27:16Mary Harrington?

  This is huge.

• 27:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, it's enough water. You're highly, you're a highly performance athlete. And I like have a grin at the child as they walk past and I'm thinking, oh, fucking hell. Like I'm the strange man, I'm like the, the 30 year old man.

• 27:27Mary Harrington?

  With a pocket full of Werther's originals.

• 27:29Chris Williamson?

  Precisely correct.

• 27:30Mary Harrington?

  I know, it's really dark. It's really dark. It's really dark. And I, and I want, I mean, you, the, the, the total number of nonsings today is not, no, no higher actually than it was 50, 20, 30, 50 years ago. If anything, so, but, but the, the, the level of panic is so much greater.

• 27:46Chris Williamson?

  Right. So the anti-child accepting and pleasantry culture isn't helping to reduce the nonsing rate. It's just making life for.

• 27:58Mary Harrington?

  It's just making life lonely.

• 27:59Chris Williamson?

  Mothers and kids like kind of more lame.

• 28:01Mary Harrington?

  I mean, it's very, it's, it's difficult. I, I don't know that I would be, I, I'd be cautious about drawing clear causal lines between those things and whether, whether the stranger danger and all of that panic is, is a cause or an effect, I, I'd be hesitant to speculate without a bit more data. But none, none of it, none of it helps you to feel any more part of a community when you're existing in public with a child, let alone multiple children.

• 28:27Chris Williamson?

  Right. Yeah. Does it feel alienating a little bit?

• 28:32Mary Harrington?

  Well, I mean, it's particularly palpable when you've got very small children. Because, I mean, before, once your kid is in school, you're sort of in this, you're kind of part of an ecosystem at that point. You know, you're part of the school mom's WhatsApp group and you're part of, you're part of a community and, you know, there are events you go to and you see the same kids around at Brownies or whatever. And so after you sort of start to fit in with a fabric of other people and you do realise that actually some, I mean, if you live in a small town, as I do at least, you know, that if you're fortunate enough to live somewhere like that, then that, something of that fabric is still there, even if you do have to go looking for it a little bit.

• 29:12Mary Harrington?

  But when you're a very new mum, particularly when it's your first, or in my case, my only, it feels like you've just fallen off the edge of the world into somewhere completely different. You know, old women will smile at you on the street, but pretty much, pretty much nobody, it's very hard to establish where you fit at all, apart from that.

• 29:33Chris Williamson?

  There's a lot, you know, going back to kind of, I guess, Barbie's cultural commentary, there's a lot of talk about the crisis of masculinity at the moment. If I was to make a prediction for the next sort of five to 10 years, I think that I would project out that there will be a big crisis of femininity coming down the pike, at least a little bit. I think that it can't be the case that women continue to grow up because there is a dearth of good male role models, but the female role models are no better. The only difference is that they're allowed to be on TV more, that they get more air time and that when women have problems, there is a little bit more mainstream sympathy.

• 30:12Mary Harrington?

  I think that's probably true. I mean, I suppose I would frame it very slightly differently. Like, the problem, as I see it, isn't, it's not necessarily just a crisis of masculinity or a crisis of femininity. It's a total crisis of embodied humanness, which hits the sexes differently and which is downstream of having developed a culture in which almost nothing about our physical bodies makes very much difference at all. At least if you live in, if you do a knowledge-based, if your occupation is in the world of information. I mean, if you're an oil rig worker, obviously, like, your physical body matters a lot, you know, to an extent, if you do something physical. But those, that, as a proportion of the economy, has been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking with de-industrial, first with the...

• 30:58Mary Harrington?

  The the the deep rural depopulation as agriculture industrialized and then with the industrial with with deindustrialization deindustrialization is the second tier of that, you know, the number of people who do manual work has been shrinking with every generation and and the number of people who do who who work in the world of information has been growing. And I mean, if you work in the world of information, it doesn't matter what shape your body is.

• 31:18Chris Williamson?

  Gender neutral occupation.

• 31:19Mary Harrington?

  Yeah, exactly. They're all gender neutral occupations. In theory, any of us could be driving a spreadsheet. It doesn't matter, you know, and

• 31:25Chris Williamson?

  Driving a spreadsheet.

• 31:26Mary Harrington?

  And arguably, I mean, the same the same goes arguably to a great extent for the for the being a professional opinion haver. It doesn't matter what sex you are.

• 31:32Chris Williamson?

  The keyboard wielders can be the same sex.

• 31:34Mary Harrington?

  Right. It doesn't matter. And and there's a real there's a concrete question which faces confronts all of us in that context, which is to what extent does do our bodies even matter? And I think really this is what the gender ideologues are pushing at from the opposite direction. You know, they're they're making a very strong statement that, you know, what shape my body is doesn't matter, so much so, in fact, that I'm entitled to remodel mine as I see fit. And and they and and making building a whole political platform on the basis of that premise. And and else but but everybody is confronted with the same question, even people who are not signed up to the whole sort of meat Lego worldview. Everyone's confronted with the same question. If if I'm driving a spreadsheet or being a professional opinion haver, like, what difference does it even matter? You know, who cares? Who cares what shape my body is? You know, is is masculinity or, you know,

• 32:18Mary Harrington?

  what does it mean to be a man or to be a woman when when we're all just, you know, disembodied heads on the internet? I don't know the answer to that, but I grapple with it every day.

• 32:26Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's definitely something I think that people grapple with. And ultimately, you know, given that work is maybe one of the most important things that you do, that might contribute. But there will be times where your biology and your predisposition smash up against your nature and the experiences that you have in life.

• 32:43Mary Harrington?

  I completely agree. And I think this is this is what we this is what it would benefit all of us to to be more to be talking more about and to be leaning more into. And I mean, sometimes it you I see people making early attempts at that or sort of trying to trying to find ways into that. You get these sort of ridiculous kind of trad subcultures, for example, who are trying to find ways to be men and women in a sort of posthuman age, which is really kind of what we're talking about here. Yeah. And and it kind of doesn't work. And it's kind of cringe. And often, I mean,

• 33:11Chris Williamson?

  What would be an example?

• 33:12Mary Harrington?

  Well, I mean, okay, so backing up a bit. So there was a there was a real like among the alt right in particular, this is something which I've been reading into a bit recently, among the alt right, you know, in between sort of 2016 and maybe 2020, there was a real There was a real boom in influences of both sexes, but actually quite a lot of young women who were who were calling for, you know, pushing back against the kind of modern degeneracy and saying, you know, we should all we should all re-embrace traditional gender roles and we should have more traditional set up relationships and that we could fight back against the collapse of everything in that way. As it turned out, a lot of those, a lot of the women who actually tried doing that just absolutely hated it, or the relationships were really messed up and it turned, you know, a lot of the relationships were abusive.

• 33:57Mary Harrington?

  And there are women who are coming out of that now, having survived and an alt-right attempt at a trad relationship, who are just massively beaten up and traumatized by the experience and who are now this sort of unhinged kind of subset of like post alt-right radical feminists.

• 34:13Chris Williamson?

  What was their, what was their experience of the relationship?

• 34:15Mary Harrington?

  Well, I mean, I, if you, if you want an example of somebody who went, who went all the way through one variant of this, you should look up Lauren Southern's story.

• 34:26Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 34:27Mary Harrington?

  I mean, you know, without wanting to make any comment on her opinions or her political trajectory, but I mean, she, she went through something along these lines and ended up living in a trailer park with a, with a toddler, you know, having, having married somebody who was possibly a fed.

• 34:39Chris Williamson?

  That's a full horseshoe.

• 34:41Mary Harrington?

  Yeah, right. I mean, it was a cra- absolutely crazy arc and, you know, having, having leaned all the way into being a kind of alt-right, you know, trad, anti-feminist influencer. She, yeah, she ended up as a single mother living in a trailer park and is now, I don't know what she's doing now. But yeah, I mean, there are, there are a great many people who, who sincerely tried to kind of re-synthesize something like the old, the old way of, of men and women interacting and have found that it just, just blew up underneath them. And I don't know, for all I know, there were, there are relationships who formed and which are still flourishing, but there are a lot, there are a lot of others that went extremely wrong.

• 35:11Chris Williamson?

  What is it that's blowing it up?

• 35:12Mary Harrington?

  I don't know. Honestly, I think like trying to, trying to reverse engineer a set of, a set of social sex differences without the material underpinnings which created those sex, those different sex, social norms is just, it's a, it's a fool's errand, honestly.

• 35:31Chris Williamson?

  What, like, can you get specific? Like vague but specific.

• 35:34Mary Harrington?

  Uh, I'll, I'll, I'll have to come at this from the other direction. So, so one of the themes, one of the themes in, I've written about in feminism against progress is the, the, those ways in which like men and women have both always worked. You know, at least up until the beginning of the industrial era, men and women always worked, but both sexes did, and they did so complementarily. Now, Ivan Illich writes beautifully about this in Gender, which I strongly recommend as a book if you're interested in, in the, the, the deep history of, of the relations between the sexes. And he writes, he writes about how in pre-modern, pre-modern agrarian, largely agrarian life, you know, men's work and women's work were always, are always different. And, and what constitutes men's work or women's work will vary depending on the context. But they're always different and they're always defined in relation to one another.

• 36:19Mary Harrington?

  And they're always ambiguously complementary. He describes it as like the relationship between your right hand and your left hand. They always know where they are in relation to one another. And they're always, they're, they're not the same, but they, but they mirror one another and they work together. And that's, and, and the nature of men's work and women's work in a, in a pre-modern.

• 36:34Chris Williamson?

  Harvesting and processing, for instance.

• 36:36Mary Harrington?

  Exactly, exactly. And there are, even down to the language used, down to the kind of the social spaces occupied, even, even down to the, the kinds of tools which are considered acceptable for one sex to use rather than the other. And the, you know, he describes villages where it would be considered deeply humiliating for a man to touch the tools that would be normally used by a woman. It was just completely unthinkable.

• 36:56Chris Williamson?

  Fucking rolling pin.

• 36:57Mary Harrington?

  Exactly. You know, it would be utterly, utterly unthinkable.

• 37:00Chris Williamson?

  Get off my pedestal and mortar.

• 37:01Mary Harrington?

  For, for one sex to touch the tools which are reserved for the other.

• 37:04Chris Williamson?

  How interesting.

• 37:05Mary Harrington?

  And, and so this is, and, and that, that emerges out of a material context in which everybody needs to work in order for survival to, in order, in order for, for life to happen. Um, and, and what happened, you know, as, as we, as the world has industrialized and we've entered, I mean, what, what he, what he calls the, the transition from vernacular gender, which is the ambiguously complementary world of men's work and women's work into the world, the world of economic sex, which is, which he, he describes, he describes as more sexist than, than the world of vernacular gender. Because although, although life is less gendered, in practice, by pretending that everything is unisex, you end up with. With women being structurally disadvantaged because tacitly the default becomes the masculine one.

• 37:47Mary Harrington?

  And this is the world, this is what Caroline Criado Perez talks about, which in another great book, Invisible Women, where she writes about how so much of the built environment and the physical environment and tools and norms and default, medical defaults, you know, crash test dummies and, you know, all surgical instruments and so on are all constructed for a male default. And the women's distinct physiology, which is subtly different and in some biomedical contexts extremely different, is just quietly rendered invisible. And this is really what Lilich is talking about when he talks about the more sexist nature of economic sex, because by refusing, by pretending that men and women are interchangeable, it renders, it effectively renders women.

• 38:32Chris Williamson?

  You've got a male default. Interestingly, I guess, when you move across into the world of mental health, you're looking at a female default, you know.

• 38:42Mary Harrington?

  I think that's very true.

• 38:43Chris Williamson?

  Therapy interventions.

• 38:44Mary Harrington?

  Just bringing this back to the question of why, why trying to reverse engineer ambiguous complementarity in the world of economic sex, now that we've got that vocabulary in place, I can maybe explain what I mean when I say it's a bit of a fool's errand. Because I mean, because in a sense, you know, you can't like, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. You can't, we can't go back to the world, to the world before modernity. We're stuck with it now. We're stuck with this world in which everybody's pretending that men and women are interchangeable. And to a significant extent, in the world of bits and bytes, we kind of are. And under those circumstances, to say, well, we're just going to decree that we're going to have a pre-modern division of sex labor within our private home.

• 39:27Mary Harrington?

  I mean, it's a, it can work. Like for some, for some people, it kind of does. But I think you just need to be a little bit less doctrinaire about it. And anybody who sets out to be rigidly ideological about it is setting themselves up for a toxic dynamic and potentially domestic abuse.

• 39:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 39:44Mary Harrington?

  I mean, in practice, if you ask most married heterosexual married couples, they will, they'll, if pretty much any of them will tell you that there are jobs that he does and the job there are jobs that she does because that's just how it falls out and because you both prefer it that way. I mean, I can, I could give you.

• 39:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's like, what's that?

• 40:00Mary Harrington?

  Were it not for digital modesty, I could give you examples from my own family, but I'm not going to.

• 40:04Chris Williamson?

  There's a, it's like the specialization of labour, almost, right? But domestic specialization of labour.

• 40:12Mary Harrington?

  But there are, I mean, there are instances in my own family where the, the division of labour is counterintuitive. If you, if you were coming at it from a rigid doctrinaire point of view, it wouldn't, it wouldn't be the way it is. But, but it works that way because we both like it that way.

• 40:25Chris Williamson?

  So, moving forward, in that case, the, we should return to a trad con history in the future. Is that, that's just a dead end as far as you're concerned?

• 40:36Mary Harrington?

  Well, I, I think we need to be, we just need to be a bit more attentive to where we are. And I think we can, we can afford to be a little bit more respectful of the dynamics within individual couples. I mean, it's, it's generally like there are patterns which emerge, you know, in any, in any given heterosexual couple, you know, that's been together long term, there'll be, there'll be things which are more typical of the male partner and things which are more typical of the female partner. And I think, and that's fine, you know, we shouldn't be trying to fight against those stereotypes if, if they're what works for people. But I, but I, but I don't see much point in imposing, imposing kind of you should be doing this or you shouldn't be doing that. Yeah. Cause, cause ultimately, you know, people, people work out.

• 41:15Chris Williamson?

  People need guidelines. People do need guidelines.

• 41:17Mary Harrington?

  But, but people, you know, people work, people, people can figure out what works best for them. I mean, here's, here's one example. Talking in very general terms. I mean, I've made the argument that the problem with trad wives as such is that they're just not trad enough. In the sense that what they're harking back to is a sort of mid 20th century template, which was actually only true for a very small subset of the middle class, and which is in itself distinctively modern, because in pre-modern times, all women worked, apart from the very, very richest.

• 41:49Chris Williamson?

  Right, so you're saying, fucking send it further back agrarian, grab your pestle and mortar and hoe and get working in.

• 41:55Mary Harrington?

  So the question I want to ask is, what does a 21st century version of the pre-modern, productive household look like? You know, the house where the basic economic unit is your household. And so you've agreed, you're all in it together, you're there for the long term. You know, everything that you do, you do for the team. And then it's just a matter of agreeing, of figuring out how to get the best out of everybody. And I can't, I'm not interested in legislating for any given couple, what that looks like. And in a modern context, where most of us work in the world of bits and bytes anyway, I don't know, I can't, I can't make that determination for you. But there will be a way, you know, when you form your household and you make

• 42:39Mary Harrington?

  your decision about how you can get the best out of your productive household, there'll be a pattern. And I think there's no shame in accepting that sometimes that can fit into a more traditional mould.

• 42:51Chris Williamson?

  What was that insight that you had about women needing to develop a strategy for not having it all?

• 43:00Mary Harrington?

  Well, I guess that's just a variation on talking about productive households. Because, I mean, again, in feminism against progress, the analogy I've given is weaving, which I think is a very, it's a very powerful illustration of what happened to women's work at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, in that for some sort of 10, 20, 30,000 years prior to the Industrial Revolution, weaving was always women's work. And there are solid, practical reasons for that. You can, weaving is something, I mean, a household needs textiles, right? You know, you don't have textile factories, somebody needs to make textiles. You know, you need them for clothes and you need them for all sorts of different things. So somebody's got to do the weaving. And somebody's also got to look after the kids happily. Weaving and looking after kids are fairly compatible, because you can raise a loom off the floor, you can put down, you can put down your repetitive, you

• 43:45Mary Harrington?

  can do it whilst keeping an eye on toddlers or small people running around. And it's interruptible and it's social. So it's ideal work to be getting on with while you've also got small children underfoot. And so for millennia, millennia after millennia, weaving has been women's work. But weaving was also one of the first industries to move out of the home into factories. And at that point, it was much more difficult for it to continue to be women's work. And you know, those working class women who went to work in the textile mills had real dilemmas on their hands. Because I mean, what are you meant to do with your breastfed baby? You know, and there are horror stories about, you know, how women tried their best to cope with that. You know, babies drugged with opium or, you know, left to starve or, you

• 44:27Mary Harrington?

  know, left in the inadequate care of. Yeah, there's awful stuff. And then there are those women who respond by just saying, okay, fine, we're not going to make the textiles anymore. So we're just going to focus on different stuff. But the point is that, if you're... Yeah, weaving is a fine example of the kind of work which in pre-modern times took place within a productive household. And I suppose the question I have is, you know, what kinds of work? Let's say you want to be a mum. And let's say you've got small children around underfoot. What's the equivalent work that's a bit interruptible, that's a bit social,

• 45:11Mary Harrington?

  that's a bit, you can pick it up and put it down again?

• 45:13Chris Williamson?

  That's not what people think about when they think about have it all, though, right?

• 45:17Mary Harrington?

  Well, you can't have it all, come on. Everybody knows that. Or they ought to. Like enough feminists prior to me have levelled with the world. You know, you can't have it all. You know, you can have a lot. And you can have a great time doing it. But you can't have it all all of the time, all at once. You know, you have to do some things one after another.

• 45:36Chris Williamson?

  Louise said that she worked it out and she was doing 40 hours a week of breastfeeding. Like a more than full-time job of just that part, just that one vertical.

• 45:50Mary Harrington?

  Yeah.

• 45:50Chris Williamson?

  Underneath the child having process.

• 45:53Mary Harrington?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's not, that's not something you can outsource because it's not, it's not just food. You know, there's, there's a whole, the foundational layers of your child's.

• 46:02Chris Williamson?

  Mother making, child making.

• 46:03Mary Harrington?

  A foundational aspects of your child's capacity for self-regulation and your child's capacity for being, being an integrated person are laid down in those early, early interactions. And it's not something which can be subcontracted.

• 46:15Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that?

• 46:16Mary Harrington?

  Profoundly important.

• 46:17Chris Williamson?

  This was something that Mary Eberstadt said to me. She thinks that motherhood's a mimetic desire, at least in some, in some regard. That, um, you know, one of her answers to the birth rate decline is that

• 46:30Chris Williamson?

  fewer mothers beget fewer mothers.

• 46:33Mary Harrington?

  I think there's some truth in that.

• 46:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 46:35Mary Harrington?

  Yeah. I mean, if you think, I'm, I'm trying to think, how many, how many babies did I ever hold before my own? Not very many, to be honest, if any. It's possible. It's possible that the first baby I ever held was my own, or if not, if not the first, very, certainly very close to the first. And I was in my late thirties. You just think, this is crazy. You know, there was a, not, not even that long ago. There was a time when you, you'd have been, you'd have been left holding younger siblings or, um, other people's kids, or you'd have been around little babies. And it, and it wouldn't have been frightening in the same way. But it's, you know, the, one of the reasons, you know, middle, of middle-class older mothers like me sit and sit there, you know, with our, with our, our, our late-stage pregnancies frantically consuming baby books.

• 47:17Mary Harrington?

  Is because we just don't, we don't have that, we don't have that practice around us anymore. Um, because families have got smaller and extended families have got more scattered and extended families have got smaller as well. So, so the, the, as, as Mary so eloquently explains, um, in her, you know, she writes a lot about the, the shrinking of the family and the, the atomizing effect that that, that has and the loss that that imposes on.

• 47:39Chris Williamson?

  Adam Lane Smith's got this thing about how, um, don't forget that moving out of the house at eighteen is a psy-op by the mortgage industry to turn one family into two homes.

• 47:51Mary Harrington?

  Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, you could, you can make the argument, same argument for the divorce industry. You know, there are, there are genuinely op, uh, opinion pieces out there from divorce lawyers, um, arguing that divorce is good for the GDP, which it is.

• 48:02Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. I mean, Mia.

• 48:04Mary Harrington?

  I mean, it's kind of dark.

• 48:04Chris Williamson?

  Mia Khalifa, uh, very famous porn star, said, um,

• 48:11Chris Williamson?

  Marriage is nothing sacred. This is a recent video she put up. Marriage is nothing sacred. It's just a piece of paper. If the person that you're with isn't helping you grow, you need to let them go. Obviously, Mia Khalifa is a paragon of successful relationships. And

• 48:27Mary Harrington?

  I would respectfully disagree with the sentiment.

• 48:30Chris Williamson?

  And I just thought, I had this really, really great guy, and I'm going to send you the episode when it goes up. This dude called Mads Larsson, and he tracked all of the different Western mating ideologies over time, and how they were adaptive for the particular cultural time. And he goes through, you know, the agrarian, the romantic, and he calls the one that we're in now the confluence era. You know,

• 48:55Mary Harrington?

  I mean, the coinage which I've used in the book is, it's not actually my coinage. I forget the sociologists who coined it. But the self expressive marriage, which I think is a very good, and really what the quote, the quote from Khalifa that you just, you just offered, is a perfect expression of the, the self expressive marriage. This idea that, you know, your, your partner is, is a vector for your self actualization. And the moment they stop delivering on that front, you can kick them to the curb.

• 49:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 49:21Mary Harrington?

  You know, there's no, there's no sense of mutual solidarity. There's no sense of being in it for the long haul. There's no commitment to anything which is bigger than yourself necessarily. Except as it, except in this very transactional sense of it delivering goods for you. And, and the moment, the moment that starts to, that, that starts to falter, or you, it goes through a rough patch for any reason. You're wholly entitled to sever the contract and go and look for it somewhere else. It's incredibly consumerist paradigm. But I would, I, I argue that the, the issue with that is that we don't live in the age of, we no longer live in the age of, age of economic abundance, which, which underpinned and gave rise to that marriage ideology. It's just, you know, except for, except for the wealthiest, who are just rich enough to survive divorce and to have their children come out, you know,

• 50:06Mary Harrington?

  only mildly fucked up rather than deeply. You know, for everybody else who's further down the food chain, you know, I mean divorce, you know, divorce and single parenthood is an absolute catastrophe for a great many of the women who go through it, because it's almost always the women who end up with, with, with care of the children. And I mean, the, and the feminization of poverty, quote unquote, is directly downstream of the breakdown of, of families.

• 50:27Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, I mean, it comes back to it again, the luxury beliefs idea. Rob was here this morning.

• 50:34Mary Harrington?

  Yes.

• 50:34Chris Williamson?

  Um. And it just bears repeating again, the best thing that I've learned from you, and you taught me it before your book was even out. The rules that are made by the upper classes are luxury beliefs that don't impact them. They impact the poorest women and the poorest families and the poorest children. So it is one straight line from chivalry is good and you should hold the door open for women that you don't know. As you go in and out of a hotel, right down to you shouldn't beat your wife. Like, it is a single straight, very slippery slope that gets slippery the closer that you get to the bottom.

• 51:09Mary Harrington?

  Yeah. I mean, and if, and what manifests as holding a door open at the top of the food chain is might, if you're lucky as a woman manifest at the bottom of the food chain as intervening when you see a woman being assaulted on a, on a tube platform. And, and the more, the more you attack the holding the door open, the, the less likely you are as a, as a sole traveller in late at night. You know, with no, who can't afford to get a taxi to have somebody come to your aid if you find yourself being attacked on a tube platform alone.

• 51:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Well, and again, obviously if you've got a denial of sex differences, well, why does the man need to step in?

• 51:41Mary Harrington?

  Just so, just so, you know, as though, as though the upper body strength and the physical weight and the height and all of those things had, had all suddenly been magically flattened by the fact that we're talking to each other on computer screens.

• 51:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I was talking to Douglas about this yesterday, that gentleman who's currently about to be on trial in New York for choking a guy out. That was, I think, dragging.

• 52:00Mary Harrington?

  It sounds as though he's going to be acquitted, but that was an insane trial. That was an insane effort to lynch somebody who was obviously doing, doing a, a public service.

• 52:09Chris Williamson?

  Think about how many people now in the interim, while this case is still an open loop. And maybe even after, if he gets acquitted, he's acquitted.

• 52:16Mary Harrington?

  The tutelary effect for any man tempted to intervene in a public situation like that is a disaster.

• 52:20Chris Williamson?

  Fucking scary.

• 52:21Mary Harrington?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I don't want to be, I don't want to be me tooed or, or, or the next George Floyd case or any of that stuff.

• 52:30Mary Harrington?

  Exactly. It's an absolute disaster.

• 52:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's scary. What's your thoughts on the surrogacy industry?

• 52:35Mary Harrington?

  I think it should be banned, all of it.

• 52:37Chris Williamson?

  Banned?

• 52:37Mary Harrington?

  Yeah. Across the board. I don't think surrogacy should be a thing.

• 52:41Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 52:43Mary Harrington?

  Little babies need their mothers. And mothers are not... No, a woman is not a factory. You know, gestation is not a process of manufacturing to produce a product which can then be handed over willy nilly to another carer. Pregnancy doesn't just create a baby, pregnancy creates a mother. Pregnancy rewires your brain. It transforms you through a series of... You know, you get sort of hormone bathed for nine months. Over the course of that, your body changes, your breasts change. Everything about you changes. And it completely reorients you towards...

• 53:22Chris Williamson?

  Ready to receive baby.

• 53:24Mary Harrington?

  Ready to receive and to receive baby and to prioritise the care of baby. So this is not just true across the human species, it's true across countless animal species. You're primed for attachment and you're primed for attunement to your child. And of course, this is not to say that... This is not to say that adoptive parents don't do a brilliant job. And there are countless adoptive parents who do wonderful jobs and do... And care for... and care wonderfully for their adopted children. However, everybody accepts that a motherless child is off to a weaker start than a child born into a loving home with their mother and father. And there's a reason for that.

• 54:04Mary Harrington?

  And it's because the attunement, that basic biological level of attunement and attachment that's primed through the process of pregnancy is essential from birth onwards to laying the absolute foundations of what it means to be an integrated person. And to say... And I think it's just profoundly morally wrong to say we should create a new life with the express intention of severing that bond at birth because somebody... just for the sake of adult desires. I think that's profoundly inverting the duty of care that we owe to dependent infants. You know, we should be prioritising their needs, not ours.

• 54:44Chris Williamson?

  Did you see the episode I did with Dr. Anna Machin about life of dad? And about how... yes, this, I'll send it to you, it's so good. So she looked at the role of fathers kind of throughout all of a child's upbringing to they leave the home and talked about how I think that one of her pregnancies was... Particularly difficult. And then she and the child had been taken away after the birth, which was successful and she was okay. And the dad was just left in there. No one even came up to him. And he just thought that like, mum could be dead, daughter, child could be dead.

• 55:24Chris Williamson?

  And no one ever spoke to him about it. You know, all of the pre-child classes, I don't know what they're called. All of them are focused on mum. Mum's the one that's going to give birth. It's her body that goes through the stress, et cetera, et cetera. But she said fathers can deal with like, post-child depression, what's it called?

• 55:42Mary Harrington?

  Postpartum.

• 55:43Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. Postpartum depression. Dads can get that. There's this really, really common issue that fathers encounter, which I saw firsthand, and then she talks about in the book, which is that wife is pregnant, future dad-to-be knows that wife is pregnant, six, seven, eight, nine months deep. Dad doesn't feel like he cares about child. Dad doesn't have any change in paternal instinct. Dad doesn't have any cascade.

• 56:09Mary Harrington?

  The bond develops after birth for dads. It develops. And then there's plenty of evidence.

• 56:13Chris Williamson?

  But they feel guilt and shame. And I was sat in this, I remember where I sat in Austin, with this room, like, 100 millionaire, 100 millionaire, billionaire, millionaire, millionaire, 100 millionaire, like, big hitters all the way around this room. And it was one of these, you know, guys, if anyone's got anything that they're, you know, they wanted a bit of advice on, we've got a room of people that are pretty capable in here, and you can say what you want. This dude was like, wife's eight months pregnant, don't think I'm going to love the kid. What do I do? And dude sat across from him was like, give it six months after the birth, everything will change. But that fear and the guilt and the shame, and can I tell my partner, does this mean I don't love my partner? Does this mean I'm going to be a terrible father? You know, all of these things, like, that one insight from that episode, I haven't had so many tags

• 56:57Chris Williamson?

  and messages from guys in a really long time. Because I thought, I thought I was broken. I thought I was defective. Or I am going through this right now. My wife is X months pregnant, or the child is three months old. I'm like, I just feel nothing for this kid. And

• 57:12Mary Harrington?

  And it just takes longer for men. Okay, so now bringing it back to surrogacy. So now imagine that instead of it being the dad who takes that long to develop the bond with the child. Now it's both parents because neither parent has been through the biological priming process of pregnancy.

• 57:27Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 57:28Mary Harrington?

  Now imagine, I can't prove that this is going to impact on the life of a newborn baby, but I would bet you any money that it will. And I think it's just profoundly wrong to take that immediate, immediate love of motherhood away from, to intentionally deprive a child of that in the name of adult desire. I just think that's profoundly morally wrong and we shouldn't be allowing it.

• 57:49Chris Williamson?

  I think I saw a video, I was told about a video of one of the Kardashians.

• 57:53Mary Harrington?

  Yes, one of the Kardashians who was very open about this. And she procured a child by surrogacy. Yep, it's human trafficking, Chris. It's human trafficking.

• 58:04Chris Williamson?

  Just using your own genetics.

• 58:05Mary Harrington?

  Yeah, it's human trafficking, using sometimes your own genetics. So she procured a baby via surrogacy and was very open about the fact that she really struggled to bond with the baby. And I was thinking, so, okay, like, well, we can all empathize with you, maybe, but like, can we just think about what the baby's going through here? This is a newborn baby who needs to be surrounded by love and responded to with care and nursed whenever, picked up and held whenever he or she needs it. And both parents are struggling to bond. Both parents are feeling nothing and both parents.

• 58:37Chris Williamson?

  There's enough nannies around to, you know, just pick it up. Give it to the nanny, the nanny will continue to pick it up.

• 58:42Mary Harrington?

  Yeah, I know, I just, inside reading that, I just wept for the baby who was still not being centered in the story. Even as Kardashian was talking about how she was, about her emotional journey, even then the child was not being centered in the story. And I just think it's profoundly, profoundly upside down. We owe a duty of care to the most dependent of all, the most vulnerable of all, which is our babies. And every time we prioritize our own desires over those of our babies, we're failing in that duty of care.

• 59:11Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean by Matt Walsh-ism? Tell me about Matt Walsh-ism.

• 59:17Mary Harrington?

  This is my, I mean, I don't, I don't normally, I don't normally pick named fights with, with people. But when I, when I talk about Matt Walshism, this is, this is a frustration I have sometimes with the, with certain elements on the, on, on the right, the sort of anti feminist right, if you like. You know, and this, this, this really comes down to where, where my arguments come from, which is about the material conditions and feminism emerging out of the, the technological transformations, first of the industrial era and later of the cyborg era. Um, and my, my argument that really we have to, we have to look at where we are in terms of the, the material and the technological conditions which are producing the, these, these challenges that we now face. And sometimes I find, I find myself frustrated with those elements on the right who seem to think that everything

• 1:00:02Mary Harrington?

  about modern life can stay the same, except what women do, and then everything will be fine.

• 1:00:06Chris Williamson?

  Give me an example.

• 1:00:07Mary Harrington?

  So, so for example, you know, it's, let me, let me think of an example.

• 1:00:14Mary Harrington?

  That everything, everything that's wrong in the dating culture will be wrong if, if, would be fixed if women would just stop being whores. To tell, I mean, that's a very crude example, but it's a sentiment that I hear. You know, women just need to stop being whores and everything will be fine. And I'm like, well, okay, but you know, you, does that mean you're going to stop shagging around? Does that mean you're going to stop having contraceptive sex with, with random women? Does that mean you're going to stop watching porn? Does that mean, I mean, so many, I mean, so, somebody, yeah, so, so, so many of these quote unquote trad men have semi-public porn habits, you know, and will be completely indiscriminate about liking, like you sort of ethos accounts on, on Instagram, you know, whilst simultaneously inveighing against, against trad women, you know,

• 1:00:58Mary Harrington?

  displaying more than a few square inches of skin on the internet. And I'm thinking, will you look at yourselves for a minute? You know, I mean, if we're going to have chastity, can we have fucking chastity across the board? You know, I'm, I'm all for more chastity, but let's all, let's all be in, in the party, please. You know, and if, and if it really is just about everything staying the same, except what women do, then, oh yeah, to, to me, it's the right wing equivalent of thumb sucking. It's just failing to look at any of the deeper structural drivers of some of the difficulties that we face. And just, just retreating back into, oh, it's all, oh, it's just the fault of those nasty women. And sometimes, sometimes it is the fault of those nasty women, but not always, and it's never just us.

• 1:01:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's interesting. And to think about, um, that you got some rule of thumb about how. Every political movement, when it becomes mainstream, is reduced to its most idiot possible, idiotic possible version.

• 1:01:49Mary Harrington?

  Yes, the most imbecilic possible version of it.

• 1:01:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:52Mary Harrington?

  Well, it's guaranteed to be the one that goes mainstream.

• 1:01:55Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's just the path of least resistance of memes, right?

• 1:01:59Mary Harrington?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The more, the more reductive something becomes, the more.

• 1:02:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:03Mary Harrington?

  The more reductive it becomes.

• 1:02:04Chris Williamson?

  I, again, I had a conversation for two hours today about memes, you know, and the number of times that we quoted meme first explained later. Like, the stickiness, arms race of a lot of this stuff, uh, causes people to be able to get ineffectual ideas across with good branding and good advertising and good marketing. And I think that, uh, definitely a lot of the stuff that's coming out with regards to mating and dating advice is, a lot of the time, that. It's things that, on the surface, sounds, uh, triggers all manner of different biases, whether it be, uh, your sort of tribalism against the other party, the other sex, um, whether it's the path

• 1:02:46Chris Williamson?

  of least resistance that you're looking for. Like, there's a whole host of different reasons why people end up arising at, arriving at the particular conclusions that they do.

• 1:02:56Mary Harrington?

  But the more it gets boiled down to a set of just doctrinal talking points, the more useless it becomes. I mean, I don't really want to get into incel discourse because it's not, it's actually not a terrain I'm massively familiar with. But every so often I hear these talking points, which are trotted out pretty much kind of without, without any context or without any sense of qualification. Um, you know, like, like the one about, you know, eight, ten, 20% of the men are getting 80% of the women.

• 1:03:20Chris Williamson?

  Stop saying that. I haven't said that for, I haven't said that for two years.

• 1:03:22Mary Harrington?

  No, no, no, I'm not, I'm not saying you. I'm not saying you.

• 1:03:24Chris Williamson?

  I'm just putting it out there.

• 1:03:25Mary Harrington?

  But people trot it out as though it's just, as though it's just gospel truth. And I look around, or like, you know, women, women won't date somebody who's less than six feet tall. And I'm like, hello, do you have eyes? Do you ever go outside?

• 1:03:37Mary Harrington?

  You know, I'm, I'm, I mean,

• 1:03:37Chris Williamson?

  This is the terminally online issue, right? And again, both of us are, and this isn't me lambasting the people that are terminally online, it's me saying that if you are kind of the same way.

• 1:03:48Mary Harrington?

  Hello, I'm terminally online.

• 1:03:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but the way that the sniper tries to adjust, okay, so the wind is blowing 15 knots east to west, okay, so I adjust how I perceive what the target is. Like, if you spend this much time online, so Louise has this theory about yourself, right, that I'll give you, which is that you've got a barbell strategy, which is like extremism online and extremism touching grass and like never the twain shall meet and the gray area is where you go to die, right? This dark playground where you kind of like, I think her husband calls it good screen, bad screen. It's like I've spent enough time on bad screen today, which is working emails, so I get some good screen time tonight, which is watching Netflix or whatever. But ultimately, you're still within the confines of the game.

• 1:04:32Chris Williamson?

  And I, you know, said this a ton of times, the most egregious stories online are the ones that garner the most attention and people who don't ever spend any time not being online use those as an indication of what the real world is like, but they forget that those stories are selected for precisely because they're insane. The man leaves the house, comes back and the wife slept with the postman and the postman's dog and now he's, you know, left to die under a bridge with diabetic foot and gluten intolerance or something like that. That story's insane, which is why it garnered so much opinion and also so much attention. And you don't know if it's true. And even if it is true, it's probably unrepresentative.

• 1:05:12Mary Harrington?

  Here's a case, a fine example of that from actually not the dating discourse, but just to, just to illustrate the point. Yeah, there was a video that did the rounds the other day. Somebody compiled some zoomers wearing ridiculous clothes and made a little video compilation of zoomers wearing absurd outfits and put it out on the internet saying, you know, the zoomers are beyond redemption or some caption like that. You probably saw the video, but like, and they look stupid. Sure. I mean, I looked stupid when I was 19 as well. I wore ridiculous clothes and I was, I looked at this and I thought, and then later I watched this video and then later that day I drove, I drove through Cambridge, which is extremely full of young people, like it's very, very zoomer dense environment, Cambridge, because I had to go there for some, something or other. And I was, I was looking, looking along the streets, I was thinking.

• 1:05:57Mary Harrington?

  Is this, you know, the twenty something, you know, early twenty, eighteen year old, nineteen year old, twenty year old, one after another walks past me wearing just normal clothes. And I was looking at them thinking, no, you're not sartorially beyond redemption, you're just wearing normal clothes.

• 1:06:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, where's the cat ears?

• 1:06:14Mary Harrington?

  Yeah, exactly, where's the cat ears and the absurd kind of, you know, non-binary get up and the stilts?

• 1:06:19Chris Williamson?

  Technical a dream coat.

• 1:06:21Mary Harrington?

  And the eighteen inch platforms and whatever the hell else was in this stupid video. And I was thinking, no, literally, somebody has just gone and compiled the most extreme and egregious stupid, stupid clothing that some eighteen year olds were wearing. And they've tried to generalize that to everybody. And that's, that's just what the internet does, as you say. And, but when you apply that to the relationship discourse, then you end up in a situation where people, especially people who are not making much of an effort, for whatever reason, to reality test this against what's actually happening out there, you know, are really struggling and are finding themselves, you're sort of circling the drain a bit with, in terms of their assumptions and expectations.

• 1:06:55Chris Williamson?

  One of my friends referred to it as shadow boxing in imaginary hegemon. Fucking beautiful.

• 1:07:02Mary Harrington?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:03Chris Williamson?

  Right, that you have this thing that doesn't exist, that you're somehow compensating for and interacting with, despite the fact, again, it isn't there.

• 1:07:13Mary Harrington?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:14Chris Williamson?

  And it exists, like, in this ineffable place that everyone kind of perceives and no one ever sees, except for in this sort of virtual world, which then impacts the way that you show up. And then you get, you know, culture and counterculture occurs to, okay, well, fuck it, like, I'm gonna become a furry or whatever, because I've seen it on the internet and I know that it pisses off the right wing, or I'm gonna become a gun-toting MAGA Republican because I know that it pissed off the, you know, all the way down. So, yeah, it's, um.

• 1:07:41Mary Harrington?

  I give thanks every day for the fact that I have to show up at the same time every afternoon on the, for the school run pickup queue.

• 1:07:47Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:07:48Mary Harrington?

  I mean, it's not physically touching grass, but it does, it does that.

• 1:07:52Chris Williamson?

  Socially touching grass.

• 1:07:53Mary Harrington?

  You know, I spend, I spend all day, like, you know, Bluetooth's into the rage machine, and then I go and pick up my daughter from school, and I'm like, yes, and breathe out. You know, none of it, none of it is real.

• 1:08:05Chris Williamson?

  Everyone in M and S.

• 1:08:06Mary Harrington?

  You know, Twitter is not, Twitter actually is real life, but it's also not real life, and it's, it's important to remind yourself of the ways in which it's not true.

• 1:08:13Chris Williamson?

  I think. There should be, for every one hour that you spend on the internet, you should have to spend 60 seconds in the George at Asda clothing department, like just to be like, these are the fucking normal people again.

• 1:08:24Mary Harrington?

  You say that. I was really interested, you know, to notice in Sainsbury's, as in George, as in Marks and Spencer's, that maxi, long-sleeved maxi dresses have been all the rage for some time now.

• 1:08:36Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:08:37Mary Harrington?

  And I've been, I mean, I don't know, I don't know if I can infer anything.

• 1:08:40Chris Williamson?

  Is that one of the four horsemen of the sartorial apocalypse?

• 1:08:42Mary Harrington?

  I don't know. This is the thing, but I've been noticing it and I'm thinking, are we going to have a, is this just a sign of economic downturn? Is it just that, you know, because this is well documented, the hemlines go up when the, when the, when the, as the economy grows. And is it just a fact, is it just the fact that the women, that women are sensing, sensing the coming economic crisis?

• 1:09:02Chris Williamson?

  Well, I certainly.

• 1:09:03Mary Harrington?

  I don't know. Or is it, or is it the sexual counter-revolution? Or is it neither? Is it actually just oppression? I don't know.

• 1:09:08Chris Williamson?

  I certainly know that.

• 1:09:09Mary Harrington?

  But I've really noticed the trend.

• 1:09:10Chris Williamson?

  Self-objectification from women is correlated with wealth inequality in the local ecology. So that's an interesting one. Women seem to self-objectify and sexually objectify themselves. It was Candace Blake's study on the posting of sexy selfies. And her justification for it in terms of a mechanism was that it shows women not only how high they could climb, but how far they could fall with a partner. And when you see those two things side by side, it's run away from a life you don't want and run toward a life that you do. And that causes just, something comes online and it's like, I will wrangle myself, a husband, like activate breasts. And you do that through the sort of selfies that you

• 1:09:53Chris Williamson?

  do. And it was some insane volume, like millions of posts that they looked at to find these correlations on the internet. And yeah, that, that wealth inequality. So I definitely don't disagree that, you know, especially female behavior, but also male behavior too, can be impacted by local ecology, especially wealth inequality, GDP. I mean, we saw even, no one ever really spoke about this. I was waiting for a study to come out and someone may still do it. I thought that casual sex was going to drop after COVID due to a pathogen fear from women. Right, women have got a much lower threshold for disgust sensitivity, quite rightly, because they're more at risk of bearing some sort of burden.

• 1:10:34Chris Williamson?

  And given that we had just talk of disease and infection and virus and so on and so forth for a very long time. I thought that we were going to find a big after effect of that. It just turns out that all of the then three year olds, now six year olds are like can't read and have absolutely zero social skills. They've had a mask over their face for the last three years.

• 1:10:58Mary Harrington?

  Well, speaking as a mother of a seven year old, that's actually not observed, that's not the case amongst my daughter's cohort.

• 1:11:04Chris Williamson?

  That's good.

• 1:11:04Mary Harrington?

  You'll be pleased to know.

• 1:11:05Chris Williamson?

  That's good.

• 1:11:06Mary Harrington?

  And they all seem actually to be fairly normal and well adjusted kids.

• 1:11:08Chris Williamson?

  The reading age or the reading levels for sure, I think, across the, if you look at some of the studies that have been done, don't bode particularly well, it seems.

• 1:11:18Mary Harrington?

  What is definitely, what is absolutely clear is that there's a stark economic divide. There's a, the further down the food chain you are economically, the harder, the harder hit your children were. You know, for, for understandable reasons, you know, whether or not, whether it's because you had limited social capital to, or were struggling or were in a chaotic family, or, or simply had to, had to work irrespective of lockdown. And there your kids are home and there's just nobody to watch them. For a thousand and one different reasons, it's been absolutely disastrous for, for, for poorer children. To a degree which I think is unforgivable and shouldn't be forgiven.

• 1:11:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What are you most obsessed by as subcultures go? Or what are you going to be focused on over the next couple of months? Is there anything that's, that's particularly caught your eye?

• 1:12:06Mary Harrington?

  Actually, what I'm, I'm reviewing, I'm reviewing a leftist sociological academic text at the moment, which is kind of awful. It's called The Women of the Far Right. And I'm, I'm very interested in it as a text written by, written by the left about the right. But I'm also interested in the, the, I mean, it documents, it's a sort of, it's a kind of progressive sociological study of some alt-right female vloggers from the late, from the late, from sort of 2016 to 2019. Including Lauren Southern.

• 1:12:35Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:12:35Mary Harrington?

  And it's kind of badly written and it's kind of, it's, it's kind of dated, but it's also, it's also interesting as a, as a phenomenon. So I'm kind of, but, but, but really this is just a preamble. So one of the things I'm interested in and thinking about and really sort of grappling with is the ambivalent position of women within the larger conservative or right wing, the dissident movement. Cause it is ambivalent because there are, there are great many right wing, right wing men out there who really are virulently misogynistic.

• 1:13:00Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:13:00Mary Harrington?

  You know, and who genuinely just think women are not people. Um, and yet, um, there are a great many women out there who look at, who look at the sort of the, the emerging kind of doctrinaire orthodoxy of the kind of, the kind of the mad left, if you, you know what I mean by the mad left. Um, and who just say, this is not for me. And so there's a great many women who are kind of between those two poles and who are genuinely quite politically homeless. And I, it's a, it's something I think about a lot. You know, I don't really have any firm conclusions or sort of, you know, strong reflections on that.

• 1:13:28Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:13:28Mary Harrington?

  Um, except to say that this is a real, this is a real phenomenon. And I don't know, and it's like, I don't know. I mean, the, the, it sort of fits into a larger kind of reflection, I suppose, on, on digital cultures and where we are in the discourse. Cause it feels as though a great many of the trends which sort of erupted in the sort of two thousand fifteen, two thousand sixteen, you know, with kind of, you know, the Trumpaged and all the rest of it. Have kind of run their course now. You know, a lot of, a lot of those sort of quote unquote dissident subcultures have now pretty much percolated into the mainstream. You know, there's a whole new set of talking heads who are now pretty much, I mean, even Bronze Age pervert has been doxed. And is now, you know, is now on his foodie arc, which is just hilarious.

• 1:14:07Chris Williamson?

  Would you, would?

• 1:14:07Mary Harrington?

  So, so, so like, where do we go from here? Cause all, it seems like all, all that's left in the subculture is just this increasingly unhinged discourse about dating. And I just, I mean, I'm forty four and I've been married for ten years. So like, I've got nothing to add to that. So like, I mean, maybe I should just hang up my boots and go and do something else. And I mean, I make, maybe I'll start a bakery or maybe, or maybe.

• 1:14:25Chris Williamson?

  And you and Bronze, Bronze Age pervert can start the Bronze Age bakery. Yeah, I don't know. I think one of the reasons why everyone is always so interested in

• 1:14:36Chris Williamson?

  talking about the dating world is that it permits everybody to have an opinion, both those who participate and those who do not. Like if you don't know how fucking.

• 1:14:47Chris Williamson?

  NFL league goes like, what have you got to tell me about how Travis Kelsey should like change his like QB game or something like that? It doesn't matter. Whereas for dating, people do. People do have an idea of that. And because I remember when I was working in nightlife, one of my jobs was to do, I'm okay at copywriting. So I would write the copy for a lot of the social media posts. My business partner would do a lot more of the accounts and kind of back office stuff. No one went up to him, looked over his shoulder and gave him shit about the way that his spreadsheets looked. But everyone has a social media account. So everyone's a fucking expert. So everybody had, oh mate, I wouldn't have posted that at that time. Well, that's not the hashtag that I would have used. I thought I would definitely think that you could

• 1:15:32Chris Williamson?

  have done it this way. I'm like, all right, well, like, if you're going to scrutinize me, scrutinize the fucking. Yeah, exactly. And it just, it never happened. And I think that, you know, there's a few things that people all, it's why diet is such a breeding ground for people to argue because everyone's got to eat, right? Everybody has an idea about how, and it's death denialism as well. Like, no, I'm going to live longer than you. My veganism is going to beat your carnivoreism and blah, blah, blah. And ultimately, it just fucking comes down to people wanting to be able to espouse their opinions whilst being insulated from the impacts of them.

• 1:16:04Mary Harrington?

  One sort of one optimistic read we can put on that might be that, you know, if, if we're all still, still fixated on the relations between men and women, that I think that that's, that's a testament of sorts to the fact that the war on relationships is not going to, is never going to triumph completely. You know, men and women do still want to be together.

• 1:16:23Chris Williamson?

  And they're going to try and continue to thrash out this.

• 1:16:26Mary Harrington?

  Even if, even if they're kind of, you know, mud wrestling horribly at the moment, you know, at least on the internet. And again, you know, Twitter is not real life, even though it kind of is real life. And I just have to trust that somewhere, somewhere out of this messed up discourse.

• 1:16:39Chris Williamson?

  Maybe an answer that's fucking useful.

• 1:16:41Mary Harrington?

  And also that there are lots of perfectly nice and well adjusted young, young men and women who are finding one another and forming nice relationships. They're just, they just don't go anywhere near Twitter.

• 1:16:49Chris Williamson?

  You know, when I.

• 1:16:51Mary Harrington?

  I just have to assume that that's also true.

• 1:16:52Chris Williamson?

  One of the most like sanity reinforcing periods of my year. When I go home for Christmas and I'm at mum and dad's house and the the Gruffalo comes on, right? And I watch the Gruffalo and I think, who's this made for? This is made for families that are sat together around the fire, whether you be shopping at Waitrose or shopping at Little, like that's what it's built for and it works across the board.

• 1:17:17Mary Harrington?

  Great story. I know it pretty much by heart, I think.

• 1:17:19Chris Williamson?

  Gruffalo, Gruffalo's a solid story. Or, you know, like the boy, the mole, the fox and the horse, right? Like just stuff like that. And it always makes me, maybe it's just because Christmas is a kind of wistful, whimsical time of year that makes everyone happy. But um, that always, that's like my media equivalent of touching grass. I think that's one of the most grass-like uh, watching experiences. So what is this built to engender, right? It's like this very calming, very, what's that one with the dragon? What's that one with the dragon?

• 1:17:55Mary Harrington?

  Zog?

• 1:17:56Chris Williamson?

  Yes, thank you. It always rhymes.

• 1:17:57Mary Harrington?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58Chris Williamson?

  Um, which must be a nightmare to script. But um, yeah, all of those things. And I'm like, I, thirty-five-year-old childless man watches children's TV. This is another warning. So this is smiling at toddlers on a walk, isn't it? Um, but yeah, I happily watch that and it gives me, that's the stuff that my post-content clarity of that is like, ah, like, everything's a bit, everything's all right, I think.

• 1:18:22Mary Harrington?

  I think, I honestly do think we're gonna be all right. You know, I sincerely believe that it doesn't matter how hard we try and demolish our nature, it will always find a way back. I genuinely believe that. Even if, even if, as Louise sometimes worries, you know, our culture is so structurally antinatalist that we're just going to end up self-selecting against ourselves to the point that we just render ourselves extinct.

• 1:18:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:44Mary Harrington?

  Um, but, but it doesn't follow from that that all humans are going to go extinct. It'll just be the ones from this culture.

• 1:18:49Chris Williamson?

  The selection effect.

• 1:18:50Mary Harrington?

  Yeah. And so, so some humans somewhere will survive and it'll be the ones who've figured out how to unplug from the Skinner machine and go back to having kids. Um, but, but we, we like, one way or another, like, that subset of the culture which survives will be the one that figures out how to, how to get past this kind of messed up point that we're in. But, but some part of it will survive. You know, I think we're gonna be all right.

• 1:19:10Chris Williamson?

  That's the white pill that I want to finish on. Mary Harrington, ladies and gentlemen. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all the things that you're doing? And what can they expect of you over the next few months?

• 1:19:18Mary Harrington?

  I write regularly at Unheard. Um, my, my Substack is Reactionary Feminist. Um, you can find me on Twitter at Moving Circles.

• 1:19:25Chris Williamson?

  Hell yeah. Thank you, Mary.