https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=yF0IKShXRRI
You started with the story of Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner, and I was just talking to my wife about that the other day. I think it was probably in a conversation motivated by the fact that this podcast was coming up, and we talked about the emergence of pornography during our lifetime, you know, and when both of us are around 60 and when we were young, the standard pornographic recourse, you might say, was playboy. But that soon multiplied like a hydra, and first of all, there was playboy. And it had some pretensions to something like culture, and there was a certain style associated with it, and a certain, what would you call it, veneer of sophistication. You know, it was all jazz and penthouses and New York and freedom and youth and, you know, sexual activity between consenting adults, all free of other entanglements but completely conscious of what they were doing. And there were highbrow interviews and, you know, sort of in-jokes. So playboy was quite effective at generating a kind of late, rat-pack cool around itself. But then the next iteration of the pornographic ascent was penthouse, and it was the harder core version of playboy. It got a lot more gynecological, let’s say. And then Hustler hit after that, and everybody knew at that point, no matter what their attitude was toward playboy, that we’d stepped into a new sort of swamp of monstrosity. And then, of course, it wasn’t long after that, 15 years maybe, something like that, that porn hit the internet, and then away we went. So let’s start talking about Marilyn Monroe and her. I mean, she embodied this feminine archetype of the sex kitten, I guess, the fem fatale tube. But she’s more on the sex kitten end of things, and she’s still an icon. And she’s an icon that even gave rise to figures such as Madonna, I would say, because Madonna played with the Marilyn Monroe image a lot and with a fair bit of success. But it’s not like Marilyn exactly had a good time with it. So she died very young, by her own hand. Why don’t you tell a little bit more of her story? Yeah, she had a fairly miserable life from start to finish. One of the reasons I decided to open the book by talking about Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner is partly because just through good luck from my perspective as a writer, they were born in exactly the same year, even though, of course, yeah, Monroe died young and Hefner lived well into his 90s. And they were both these incredible icons of the sexual revolution, Marilyn for her beauty and Hefner for his success with Playboy magazine. But they lived extraordinarily different lives, and they experienced sexual liberation, so-called, in completely different ways. Marilyn Monroe grew up in foster homes, was a victim of child sexual abuse and of domestic violence as an adult, and as you say, died by her own hand, longstanding substance abuse issues, et cetera. Hefner didn’t suffer in that way. I mean, I do think that actually by the time Hefner grew old, he had lost the glamour that he had as a younger man. I think that he is evidence of the fact that even the most successful Playboy has a shelf life, not as short a shelf life as the sexually liberated woman does. I mean, really, in reality, with a modern Western lifespan, you’re talking maybe a quarter of that. You might be really sexually desirable, which is why I think it’s risky to place all of your self-esteem on that value, or indeed to base your career, base your life around being sexually desirable, because it’s really not very long. Well, you know, that’s a good place to take a slight detour. You know, your book makes a moral case, and moral cases aren’t particularly popular now, but there are some interesting ways of discussing morality technically that I think might be worth delving into. So one of the things that people who are watching and listening might be interested in knowing is that people pursue different mating strategies, so to speak. That’s how evolutionary psychologists or biologists describe it, and you can make the same case in the animal kingdom to some degree. And there are short-term mating strategies, and that would be associated with an ethos of the glorification, let’s say, or the practice of casual sex, so sex without relationship. And one of the questions that you might ask is, are there pronounced differences between people who tend to pursue short-term mating strategies versus long-term mating strategies? Now, long-term mating strategy would be accompanied by the formulation of a relationship of mutual support. That’s what makes it sustainable. And the answer is, well, yeah, there are marked differences. One of the hallmarks of antisocial personality, and so that’s the personality characteristic set that is associated with criminality, is a proclivity towards short-term mating strategies, and that is associated with early onset of sexual activity and multiple sexual partners, and then in its more pathological form, a predatory or parasitical lifestyle in relationship to sex. And so that has been elaborated more recently into the analysis of so-called dark-ketrad personality characteristics. That’s an emerging model of the malevolent and pathological personality, and that involves Machiavellianism, which is manipulative, narcissistic, which is virtue-free attention-seeking. It’s a good way of thinking about it. Psychopathy, which is predatory parasitism, and sadism, which is positive delight in harm to other people. And all of those delightful characteristics are associated with a striking proclivity for short-term mating, and that brings up the stark realization that it’s a form of exploitation. That’s a good way of thinking about it. And it’s fundamentally the exploitation of women, because here’s a good way of defining women, since we don’t know how to do that in our society anymore, we might as well start with basics. Throughout the animal kingdom, this is true all the way from sperm and egg up to fully embodied being, the female is almost inevitably the sex that pours more resources into reproduction. So that means that women bear a higher cost for sexual reproduction in case anyone’s still too stupid to actually understand that. Might as well make it explicit. And what that also means is that if there’s exploitation going on in a sexual relationship, it’s most often, although not always, the male who has less at stake exploiting the female, who has far more at stake. And it’s enticing for young women to believe, I suppose, if they want to pursue hedonic pleasure, that they can escape from that reality, but it’s very difficult to. So that’s one element. And the next element with regard to morality is, if you’re playing a game that only works in the short term for others, but also for yourself, then that’s not a very good game. And the point you were making was that Maryland was playing a particularly short game. And even Hugh, who had less to lose, and arguably on some dimensions more to gain, he was still pretty damn pathetic by the time he hit. I would say, what, mid-50s? I watched one of his late TV shows where he was touring Europe with his three blonde bimbos, who were not the world’s… They weren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer, let’s put it that way. And it was Hugh and his three blonde clones traipsing painfully from full, glamorous restaurant to full, glamorous restaurant through Europe, engaging in conversations so puerile and painful that anyone with any sense would have run away from the table screaming after five minutes. So he turned into his own parody. And that was quite clear. I mean, anybody with any sense at all, no matter how much they might have been enamored by his young and hypothetically glamorous self. If you had looked at that with a cold eye a few decades later, it was looking pretty oldest boy at the frat party and had that whole stench about it, I would say. All right, so back to Marilyn. You said that she had a pretty brutal upbringing and was exploited pretty early on. You might as well tell the story about her… the famous photographs that launched Playboy. Yes, so Marilyn was both the first cover star and also the first naked centerfold in the first issue of Playboy. But the naked photos were acquired without her consent. She’d taken them, or she’d had them taken many years before when she was much younger, for very little money, just because she was desperate. She’d signed the release with a false name, but somehow Hefner got hold of them and paid the photographer rather than her in order to publish them in Playboy. And she wasn’t even sent a free copy and was apparently very upset about it. Hefner ended up buying the crypt next to hers at the cemetery in Los Angeles, where they’re both buried. Obviously buried many decades after she was. But they never actually met in real life. So this whole kind of relationship between the two of them was very much initiated by him. And I mean, this is the point, though, I want to make with talking about Marilyn Monroe. She is very typical of female sex icons in having this kind of tragic backstory, multiple forms of exploitation by lots of people, most of them men. And yet she is held up as this iconic figure of the sexual revolution, which we’re supposed to believe was a good thing. Right, and my argument in the book, it is of course the case against the sexual revolution. My argument is not that it was entirely bad. I don’t think you can paint any huge historical event as entirely bad or entirely good. But I think that it has been falsely presented, mostly, by progressives through rose-tinted spectacles. And this is my attempt to counter that. Yeah, well, there’s no doubt she was an iconic figure, and still is, and part of the reason. It’s hard to say exactly why. I mean, there’s something obviously hyper-attractive about her. And I heard her interviewed once in a radio station where she said she could walk down the street. I believe her genuine name was Norma Rae. Is that right, Norma Rae? And she said she could walk down the street as Norma Rae and no one would look at her. Or she could walk down the street as Marilyn and then people would just be attracted to her like mad. And so I want to run a hypothesis by you, you know, given that backstory for female sexual icons, and this is often the case for girls who get dragged or who agree to participate in the pornography, the industry, that they’re often abandoned girls who have a history of fractured relationships and abuse. Now, so here’s a hypothesis. You know that Girls Without Fathers hit puberty one year earlier. That’s a real biological mystery, but here’s a hypothesis. So imagine that you’re bereft of male companionship and productivity and protection. And maybe that’s because your culture doesn’t have enough men. Sometimes that happens after wars, for example. Or maybe you’re just in an economic niche or a social niche where you’re unfortunate, you know. Now, why would you develop a year early from a puberty perspective? Well, the answer is one of the ways that women can attract male attention, obviously, and therefore in principle, companionship, protection, productivity, all of that, that might come along with a real relationship, is by being sexually attractive and available. And so if there’s a dearth of males in the local environment, then early puberty could easily be a way of increasing the probability of catching a mate early enough so you don’t starve to death, let’s say. OK, so then imagine that there’s a psychological equivalent to that. And this is where that waif-like femme fatale archetype might kick in. And so if you’re appealingly, vulnerably, beautiful and available, and then you have that magic that can go along with that when it’s transformed into something truly archetypal, which Marilyn did extraordinarily well, you know, there’s a bit of a little girl about her. She had a very girly voice, and that’s how she sang. And she had a kind of innocent, naive provocativeness that was amplified paradoxically by her overt sexuality. And so she had some of the appeal of a helpless child and some of the appeal of a truly mature woman. And that can be a very deadly combination. And I think the fact that it’s a deadly combination is also a kind of adaptation. So you can imagine that girls who are abused might turn to that pattern of seductive behavior, because if they turn on the charm full throttle in that manner, it increases the probability that even in their desperate economic straits, they might be able to attract a male. And of course, with Marilyn, that was elevated right to the point where she became literally the poster girl for that approach. You know, and then I mentioned Madonna a little earlier. When Madonna first came on the scene, I thought, she’s kind of interesting. She seems to be taking this Marilyn-like archetype, but toying with it consciously. You know, she was a businesswoman, pretty canny. She seemed to be in charge of her own image. You know? And I thought maybe she had a grip on the archetype, but it isn’t obvious to me at all that she did. Madonna’s life has been characterized by a continual pattern of sexual attention-seeking. And she’s also, I would say, turned into her own parody. Even in her, I think she’s in her late 60s now, if I remember correctly, she’s still doing, essentially, she’s still doing photo shoots that are leveraging pornographic attractiveness. And I mean, that requires a lot of maintenance and makeup by the time you’re at her stage of life. But it doesn’t really look to me like it’s aged particularly well. And that’s the problem with short-term mating strategy, is that it’s not a good iterating game. You can’t play it with other people continually. You have to have multiple partners. And it’s not a good pattern for your whole life course. That’s partly what makes it both immoral and unwise, is it just doesn’t work across the decades that you’re going to be alive.