The Marxist Slide from Liberalism ｜ Naomi Wolf ｜ EP 351 (XC-SdRzRJuU)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=XC-SdRzRJuU

You should accept yourself just the way you are. What does that say about who I should become? Is that just now off the table because I’m already good enough in every way? So am I done or something? Get the hell up. Get your act together. Adopt some responsibility. Put your life together. Develop a vision. Unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within. Be a force for good in the world and that’ll be the adventure of your life. What happened in the 19th century, not just with contagious diseases, but with the typhus and cholera epidemics of the 1840s and early 1850s, which were devastating, just wiped out. You know, people would be kind of sick on Sunday and dead on Wednesday. That created a model in Western history that allowed later regimes to emulate the model of narrating the danger of infectious diseases, certainly using that element of disgust and contamination, an existential threat as a pretext for what authoritarians always want to do, which is eradicate liberties and consolidate control. So I think it is happening on two fronts. It happens organically on the psychological front, but then the state jumps in and says, well, we can save you from this existential threat. Just hand over all your rights. Hello, everyone. I’m pleased today to talk to a thinker on the progressive front for many decades, Dr. Naomi Wolf, an American author and journalist. Her first book, The Beauty Myth, challenged notions of attraction, arguing that they are societally fabricated. This publication became an international bestseller and cemented Wolf as one of the leading spokeswomen for the so-called third wave feminist movement. In recent years, interestingly enough, she’s come under fire, especially on the left, for becoming an anti-vaxxer and a conspiracy theorist, a strange destination for a progressive thinker, which led Wolf to write her most recent book, The Bodies of Others, The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War Against the Human. Looking forward very much to talking to Dr. Wolf today to delve into the possession of the left, reprehensible possession in her estimation by the Marxist doctrines that were popularized throughout the 20th century to understand how that’s come about and to analyze the role played by organizations such as the Chinese Communist Party. I guess the first question I have for you, Dr. Wolf, is why did you agree to talk to me? Why wouldn’t I? Oh, well, lots of people don’t. I’ve asked all sorts of people on the left for years to appear on my podcast. And the standard answer is… Now, I don’t know precisely, by the way, if you can be placed politically on the left. I know your views have changed somewhat dramatically over time and we’re going to investigate that. But no, I’ve invited people, especially political figures on the left, to speak with me repeatedly, dozens of times, with no success, let’s say. So it’s not a foregone conclusion. Most of the scientists and so forth that I ask to talk are, with very few exceptions, say yes. But that’s definitely not true on the more social, commentary, political side, especially in the political realm. But it wasn’t an issue as far as you were concerned. Well, I guess first I would say I’ll talk to anyone, especially about liberty and the Constitution, human rights and freedom. I think that’s my job. And it would be a very boring world if we only spoke to people with whom we know already we’re going to agree. And more importantly, maybe talk to you because, well, for that reason, but also because I see that you describe yourself as a liberal. And while from the outside it may seem as if my views have changed over the last couple of years, I really feel that they, I’ve stayed exactly the same and that the world has changed. And I also see myself as a classical liberal. So even if I didn’t, I want to talk to you because I like learning things and I like talking to people with whom I may not agree, I might learn something. But either way, since you seem to be concerned about human freedom and I’m concerned about human freedom, additionally, it wouldn’t occur to me not to talk to you. That said, I recognize your experience. Sadly, I’m now in a situation in which I keep asking the left to counter the views that I’m publishing by other people on my news site. I’m asking the left to engage with the issues that I’m bringing up and I literally cannot get anyone to talk to me. And I used to be, until like two and a half years ago, firmly ensconced in the left as a cultural figure. Right. Well, so I definitely want to delve into that because one of the things I really have observed, I think I’m reasonably neutral as a psychological observer of political behavior, I believe, and certainly one of the things I have noticed is that proclivity to cancel is most fundamentally a left-wing phenomenon. I’ve had very few people on the right refuse to talk to me, that’s for sure. And I’ve had many, even my friends on the left, and I’ve seen this in a relatively shocking way, I would say, fairly frequently, would refuse to talk to people that weren’t in their bailiwick. I think one of the punishments, actually, this is odd though, one of the punishments for refusing to talk to people whose opinions differ from yours is you end up squabbling with the people who disagree with you on your side over smaller and smaller things, even equally intently. So it’s not like you rid yourself of the necessity of disagreement. You just find yourself, what did Freud call that, the narcissism of small differences. The battles get, they rage more and more intently over smaller and smaller differences of opinion, which is sort of comical in a metaphysical way. So let’s start with your childhood. So tell me a little bit about your parents and about what it was like for you growing up. And I’m interested in how your intellectual interests developed. Sure. I will just note before I do that that’s a change, I think, Dr. Peterson, on the left. It didn’t used to be the case just five years ago that this cancelling, we can talk about that later if you like. It’s really important. I think that these are non-Western norms that have been kind of implanted in Western cultural discourse. It would have been shameful to cancel an opponent rather than engage with him or her, in very recent memory. So I was born in San Francisco. I think I’m exactly the same age you are. And I grew up in a, I guess, an academic household. My dad was a professor of English literature at San Francisco State University. My mom was a graduate student in anthropology when I was growing up. Jewish middle class household. Very creative environment. My father is also a poet and a teacher of creative writing. So it was a very talky, reedy, imagination heavy environment. And I was surrounded by the cultural ferment of the 60s and 70s in San Francisco. So by the time I was a teenager, the gay LGBTQ, right? At that time it was called the Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement. The women’s movement, you know, immigrants’ rights. It was all kind of a lot of social justice movements around me as I was growing up. And it seemed like the world was going to be fixed, really. I mean, it was very optimistic. Very beautiful place to grow up. And then I went to Yale. And that was a shock because I’d never, you know, I’m a California girl. So I’d never experienced East Coast, elitism, hierarchies, anti-Semitism, you know, before the peculiar racism of the Northeast. I mean, if you grew up in California, it’s a very diverse culture. You know, it’s not that we don’t have racism in California, but it’s different. It’s a more inclusive society. It’s less class bound. So that was a shock. So that was when did you and you did an undergraduate at Yale? I was an undergraduate at Yale in English literature. And what year? 1980 to 1984. 80 to 84. Yeah, OK. Yeah. So yeah. So we do overlap almost perfectly in terms of of birth date, age and education time. And so what what exactly did you experience at Yale? Like, how did that prejudicial environment make itself manifest to you as far as you were concerned? And was that something that other people were experiencing, too? Or was there something do you think about your background apart from the Semitic element of it? Was there something about your background? Do you think that tilted your experience more in that direction? How much of that was situational and how much personal in retrospect? Well, it was pretty, you know, Yale at that time, it had only recently allowed women in. I think in about 1976. And so still a super sexist place. And and you know, and a lot of casual kind of date rape and what we would today call sexual harassment. That wasn’t I think I think that was only recently codified or not yet fully codified at that time. I’ll have to check. But so you sort of felt, you know, I was not the only woman who felt beleaguered. I mean, you know, the parties at Yale in my time were described in Brett Kavanaugh’s hearings and they were very familiar to me. You know, people did get kind of raped and molested at parties, you know, very, very casually at Yale. And there was what do you think the attitude of the typical male undergraduate at that point? I don’t know if we would talk about the typical male undergraduate or if we would talk about the more dangerous typical male undergraduate. What do you think the attitude towards women was at that time? And I mean, I’m also interested in the sexual misbehavior problem. From a variety of psychological viewpoints, I mean, a huge part of what fuels sexual misbehavior on campus is alcohol. Alcohol is it right now. I mean, your language, I think, is is an interesting difference between us. I would call it criminal activity on campus. OK, OK. Well, I’m not I suppose trying to make the point that that’s not the case. I’ve thought a lot about how those sorts of activities might be addressed and regulated by universities. And they’re alcohol fueled to a degree that’s almost unimaginable. So alcohol itself is responsible for about 50 percent of violent crimes. And it’s the only drug we know that actually makes people violent. And so. So I’m wondering, the parties that you’re describing, we know perfectly well that there’s a party culture at American universities and that that is alcohol fueled. And there’s an alcohol is a very disinhibiting drug. And so if you have a proclivity in a particular direction, the alcohol is going to take all the stops off that. So if there’s an underlying misogyny or resentment, say, towards women, then that’s going to be amplified by an alcohol fueled event. I’m not trying to make a case for or against the presence of misogyny at Yale. I’m just wondering, in retrospect, when you look at that, what contributing factors do you see to what you do to what you experienced? Yeah. So you’re I mean, we’re diving right into an incredibly vexed and. Difficult subject, but I’m happy to address it. So, you know, I and I’m glad to be addressing it, because that’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. I know about your interest in gender dynamics and. You know, this is probably one of those areas on which we might have a lot of interesting disagreements. So I would say categorically, alcohol, you can’t blame the culture of sexual accepted, sexual violence and sexual harassment at Yale at that time on alcohol or drugs at all. What you can blame it on is institutional toleration of sexual harassment and sexual violence. In other words, there was a culture of impunity. The people who knew that nothing would happen to them acted as if nothing would happen to them. And I too have studied, you know, gender dynamic, sexual assault, sexual harassment on campus for many decades. And for sure, when there’s a culture of impunity in any institution, rapists rape molesters molest. And when there’s a culture of consequences. That that restricts the tendencies that those people might have to rape or harass, you know, for sure. But what the young men around us at Yale and the faculty around us at Yale knew is that nothing bad would happen to them if they raped or molested women. And categorically, if you look at the cases at that time, you know, to this day, to some extent, the institution colluded in covering up rapes on campus, protecting athletes, especially who assaulted women on campus, protecting faculty. So I personally was molested by a famous professor, Dr. Harold Bloom, when I was a junior. And that was in a context in which he was completely not drinking alcohol. It was a context in which he and he had a lengthy reputation, which I didn’t know till afterwards, of doing this to undergraduate women. And two actually graduate students. And and I tried to get accountability from the institution decades later. And and it was just covered up, covered up. How old were you when that happened? I was 19 years old. And what what effect did that have on you metaphysically? Well, I think it had a last lifelong effect on me metaphysically. It was it was quite terrifying at the time because it was in a like in no way can this situation be blamed on anyone not knowing exactly what he was doing. It was a situation in which he was my advisor. He was my professor for an independent study course that that my academic advisor had recommended a close colleague of his, another famous academic, John Hollander. It was that I was writing poetry. I was a very talented poet. I was getting lots of awards and recognition for being a poet. And and, you know, he encouraged me to take this independent study with him. He ignored and ignored and ignored my submissions all semester. I was looking at the end of the semester with no no no evaluation. And I didn’t come from a wealthy background. I had to get a scholarship to go into graduate school. I was going to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship. So for many reasons, including just, you know, I was a student. I needed an evaluation. Finally, he said, you know, I will come to your house where you live and I will talk about your manuscript of poetry at that time. And that seemed almost normal because he worked with my roommate’s boyfriend in a project, an editorial project. So we all had a dinner party at his recommendation and then everyone left. And I thought he was going to evaluate my my semester’s work as he had promised to do. And he assaulted me basically. And we were alone in a house. And, you know, there was no one I could, you know, I couldn’t get away. He was huge. He was between me and the door. It was terrifying. You know, I mean, he didn’t get far. He put his hand on my thigh and I backed away from him and kind of got as far away from him as I could. And then he kind of got between me and the door. And. I mean, eventually, eventually he left. But the. I mean, first of all, I had been raped as a child 11 years before. So which, you know, when I try to talk about assault on campus and, you know, professors creating an environment of sexual assault on campus, a third of of minor women have been raped or assaulted or abused by trusted male role models, by the top or parent figures or parents by the time they’re 18. So, you know, I was already traumatized and I was already terrified. And so, but I did the best I could. It’s a double hit in a situation like that, too, because I imagine that you’re so you’re a good poet at that point. Undoubtedly, you’re extremely excited about the fact that someone who’s an eminent scholar is taking an interest in and is going to evaluate your work. And so you’re looking forward to that on that front. And then you find yourself in a situation where. Well, exactly the opposite of what is supposed to happen is happening, to put it mildly. And you said also that that was reminiscent of treatment that you had received at the hands of another man much earlier in your life. So this is kind of this important moment where we’re a little bit. Talking. Not in the same experiential plane, because. All of those considerations certainly, you know, would would arise, you know, months or years later, right. But but what I was concerned about at that moment was survival, because I did not know it would kill me, you know, because when women are raped or molested, especially very young women, you know, you don’t know that this person is not going to kill you, right. You you don’t know that you’re going to get out of this situation alive. And and I wish, you know, everyone who runs a university, I wish that they would understand that that is what is the experience of someone who is in a situation of being molested or raped. That they literally, you know, don’t know if they’re going to get out of it alive because it is such a terrifying, surreal, shocking. But, you know, assault, it’s it’s an assault. So, you know, after the fact, you know, this is why judges and juries and administrators always misunderstand rape and sexual assault. After the fact, it’s like, well, you know, he didn’t get very far. Well, you know, you didn’t get hurt very much or, you know, whatever it is. But at the time, it’s literally like, am I going to die? You know, does he have a knife? Does he have a gun? I mean, it’s absolutely a terror that I can’t even describe to you. And it probably would have been even if I hadn’t been raped as a child. Right. But, you know, there’s no way to minimize how existentially terrifying it is to be molested by anyone bigger than you are. Who’s standing between you and an exit in a house that’s far away from any kind of help. No one would have heard me if I had screamed. So. Yeah, well, I wasn’t I wasn’t trying to reduce what you had told me to the the mere psychological consequence of betrayal. I was just attempting, I suppose, in some sense, to amplify it by pointing out that not only did this happen to you, but it happened to you at the hands of someone who was trusted and who was entrusted with fostering your development. And and it’s the gap part of what constitutes psychological trauma is the gap between expected behavior and actual behavior. And in a situation where you’re at the hands of someone who has a stellar reputation and you’re at an institution that’s supposed to guide and develop you, then the depth of I mean, if someone attacks you in a dark alley in a rough part of town, that’s a terrible thing. But there isn’t that additional element of betrayal of an entire institution and an entire developmental pathway that goes along with it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t awful. It just misses one dimension of awful. Right. So thank you, Dr. Peterson. I so quite right. I mean, so subso the initial trauma was was just the physical, you know. Terror, terror, the subsequent trauma, you know, goes to what we were saying, like what allows a rape culture on campus. And, you know, that was when I brought this up with people around me, including my my my dean. And basically the 360 degree response from the institution was he’s well known for this. Don’t do anything about it. He’ll ruin your career. So and, you know, other other women tried to bring it up, had their careers destroyed. So why didn’t you have your career destroyed? Well, I think I did have my career destroyed. I wanted to be OK. You know, I wanted to be a an English professor, a professor in his same field. I wanted to teach Victorian literature, English literature. That’s all I wanted to do my whole life and be a poet. And I had to take a complete detour for the next, you know, three decades because he was still alive. And and that wasn’t an option for me. And even, you know, like all the way. So tell me, tell me, tell me exactly why it wasn’t an option for you. Like what what were the mechanics of the impositions that were put in front of you as a consequence of the sequence of events? So, I mean, I know he was very influential and I can understand vaguely why that would have had a cascading consequence. But had you continued pursuing your your education in the literature domain? Why exactly would it have been that you wouldn’t have been able to find the kind of academic job, for example, that your background might have might have otherwise provided for you? Well, that’s a good question. I guess he casts such a gigantic shadow over the whole field. I mean, he was the great authority in Victorian studies, you know, for decades after that. And and it was just communicated to me that I couldn’t get a letter of recommendation. I couldn’t get. Obviously, I wasn’t going to even be in the same room with him to solicit a letter of recommendation. But it was communicated to me that the way. Into graduate school, like if I applied to any graduate school and they saw that he had been on my transcript, they would have said, why don’t you have a letter from Dr. Blum? Yeah, OK, OK, OK, I see. Yeah, yeah. And what’s that’s a glare. That’s a glaring omission. Totally. And then it would have been up for question. You were the troublemaker. He was that they go to him. And and whatever he wants to say, he’ll say. And that was also communicated to me clearly by people who cared about me, who were warning me he, you know, he had done that before. Right. It didn’t even take women coming forward for him to ruin their careers. If he had molested them or approached them and they rejected him, which I had done, I guess, in his view. He made he closed every door academically. So it was clear to me that I had no future in my chosen field as long as he was alive. So I had to, you know, do something that was not my plan. I didn’t plan to be a feminist activist, nonfiction writer in a popular nonfiction genre for decades. I’m happy to have had eight international bestsellers. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to be a university professor. And then even as late as I went back to school, I’m fast forwarding a little bit. I thought it was safe because he was very elderly to go back to college. So I became a Rhodes scholar in spite of him. And I went to Oxford and I’ll fast forward. So it was finally I was like almost 50. And I thought, OK, it’s safe to resume my education and become a professor of English literature. Went back to Oxford in midlife. I finished my DPhil in Victorian Studies. And when I submitted my DPhil and I succeeded and I passed my academic advisor at Oxford said, you need to submit this to a journal, you know, Victorian Studies Journal. And you’ve got to submit it. You know, it’s edited by Harold Bloom. You know, you’ve got to submit this. This is really distinguished work. And I said, I can’t submit it to that journal. And I had to tell her why. So that late. And she agreed. She agreed. That was how many years later? That was like 30 years later. It can’t be 30. Yeah, no, 30 years later. So as far as you’re concerned, this event sidetracked you into a domain of academic pursuit. That was very unlike. OK, how much? How much do you think? Look, first of all, I should say, if I’m going to push you into places that you really don’t want to talk about, you just tell me, OK, because I’ll back off. Dr. Peterson, I’ll talk about anything. I’ll tell you. I’m a grown up. Go ahead. So. So. To what degree do you think the psychological consequences of what befell you? As well as the practical consequence, colored your writing and the the aims towards which you directed your writing from then on forward? Like, what would have you written about? Do you think had this not happened, what would have been your natural inclination of interest? I mean, all I ever wanted to do was teach. You know, I would have been writing about Ruskin. So you would have stuck relatively firmly, you think, to something like classical literary criticism. So I should point out for everyone who’s watching and listening, because it isn’t exactly obvious what the point of literary criticism is if you’re not knowledgeable about the field. And it’s easy to underestimate its significance in literary critics. Analyze. Productions of fiction, generally speaking, they analyze stories, and that turns out to be of utmost importance. And we’ve become more clear about that on the psychological front in recent years, because the structures through which we view the world, we described our stories. And so what literary critics do in the deepest sense is to analyze the maps that we use to orient ourselves in the world. And there isn’t anything more important in your life than getting your story straight. And people who are astute literary critics, not sure if Frey falls into this category, as far as I’m concerned, are extraordinarily helpful at helping people orient themselves in terms of where they devote their attention and their action. And so it’s easy for people who aren’t intellectually oriented, let’s say, and who don’t have a deep educational history to not understand why literary criticism is so important. But it is very important. And so you are going to devote yourself to classic literary scholarship. But you got derailed. And OK, so now you went from Yale to Oxford next as a Rhodes scholar. OK, now you said that your ambitions to pursue a professorship in English literature were derailed. But you did get a Rhodes scholarship. And that’s not easy. So how do you reconcile the potentially competing claims that, well, perhaps a career in English literature would have still been open to you, given that your academic background was positive enough so that you got a Rhodes scholarship? That’s not a simple thing. Yeah, I can answer that easily. The Rhodes Scholarship Committee was looking for different things. They don’t they weren’t narrowly focused on, you know, the gateway to credentialing someone for graduate studies in English literature. They were looking for leadership. And, you know, I mean, obviously, my grades were good overall. And I was considered a gifted undergraduate. I had lots of letters from my other professors. So it was a different credentials. So the lack of letter from Bloom wasn’t a stumbling block in relationship to the Rhodes Scholarship. Well, that’s a relief. Well, I mean, sure. But imagine, Dr. Peterson, if you had to succeed in an area that was entirely not your choice for your life. Yes, well, I could I could imagine that because that’s happened to me in the last seven years. So it’s well, I no longer a professor at the University of Toronto, which wasn’t exactly in my plans. In that respect, we have had similar journeys. I am sorry that happened. Now, I had I had many decades of pursuing pretty much precisely what I wanted to pursue. So that’s a major difference. But I have some experience with being dislocated, let’s say, in a matter that wasn’t, oh, well, you know, C’est la vie. Things have worked out quite well for me, but it wasn’t what I had planned. You know, and so and I suppose that’s the definition of life is it isn’t what you’ve planned. All right. So now you went off to pursue the Rhodes Scholarship. And what did you study as a Rhodes Scholar? Now you’re at Oxford. And what was it like being at what was it like being at Oxford compared to being at Yale? Well, it was pretty exhilarating for me because it was pure. Pure academic. How can I put it? Well, the Oxford experience, it’s you no doubt know, is completely different from an American university in the sense that you have these tiny seminars. You have tutorials with your professor, your Don and your like two students or three students and the professor. And and you kind of dive deeply into the text in that in that moment. And it’s a very, very pure form of scholarship. So that made me very happy because I am a true nerd. And again, I was working on Victorian studies, 19th century English literature. I was working on an MPhil at that time. And, you know, I loved it. It was it was the 80s in Britain. So it was cold and gloomy and thatchery and and the graduate students weren’t particularly. Central to the Oxford experience was a very undergraduate experience. But so we were kind of exiles together. But it was exhilarating. And the Rhodes Scholarship, of course, what a privilege. You know, your your your your. Expenses are paid for two or three years, depending on what you choose to just do it, you know, just study, just learn with a group of other really bright, of really bright people from all over the world. So it was a very, you know, blissful intellectual experience. And the seed of my first book was my my default thesis there. Or the start of my default thesis. Inflation has consequences as the Fed raises interest rates to combat out of control government spending. Long term bonds are diminishing in value, which is crippling the banks. Depositors are holding their breath and investors are bailing on bank stocks. Diversification has never been more important. The recent surge in gold prices is directly tied to an extremely volatile market. That is why gold has historically been a great hedge against the stock market and against inflation. Trust the experts at Birch Gold Group to help you diversify into gold. Text Jordan to 989898 to get a free info kit on gold. 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Well, it was still, you know, it was still, you know, I can’t stress enough that I in part became a famous feminist, you know, public intellectual because everywhere you went in the 80s, women were not safe, you know, physically. I mean, that’s just the case. So even at Oxford, you know, certainly rape took place with impunity. There was one famous professor who was always trying to seduce his undergraduates. But it was, you know, Britain is a less violent culture in general. So it didn’t feel quite as systematically unsafe. And I didn’t feel as unsafe, partly because it’s, you know, it’s just a less violent culture. But, you know, I’m not going to say that those issues weren’t still very alive on campus. They were. And in fact, when I left Oxford and I went to Edinburgh to write my first book, I worked at a rape crisis center. And, you know, that too was at that time, the whole city, all of that, all that country was a culture of impunity. Look, Dr. Peterson, to this day, you know, like six percent of rapes in Britain get prosecuted and no one even keeps statistics on how many of those get convicted. I mean, you know, really rapists have impunity. I can’t stress that enough. Even now, even with all the changes that there have been in society, young women are somewhat safer on college campuses. Because of hard work of people like me and my colleagues in the 80s and 90s and early aughts. But it is not, you know, it is not that we still live in a culture in which women, most of the women I know, have been raped or molested in some way and vanishingly few of them have gotten any kind of justice at all from the perpetrator. But moving along, I was very happy at Oxford. And, you know, generally it was a less violent culture. And so what question were you trying to address or questions were you trying to address when you were doing your master’s work at Oxford? What was what was paramount in your mind and why? So I was very interested in the. The image of women in 19th century novels, this ideal that emerged in the 19th century in, well, in virtually all of the great novels, you know, certainly written by women, but also in in Dickens and in George Eliot of the this kind of passive childlike doll like beautiful kind of. Inert figure, and I was interested in that because this passive, inert stereotype of femininity was emerging at just the time that there was historically the first wave of feminism in any Western society. In other words, women were organizing, they were organizing to defeat laws that were punitive in which women who looked like prostitutes could be taken off the street, you know, without due process. And they were organizing to, you know, have access to education, to have access to owning their own property so that there was very vibrant and they were mobilizing for access to primary education as well. So right when women were being empowered and empowering themselves to change society, this inert kind of backlash figure got constructed in as a cultural ideal. So I was writing about that. So let me ask you a question. Let me ask you a question about that. I mean, the representation of women in Victorian era literature in other countries, I think, was broader than that. So the women in Tolstoy, for example, Tolstoy is a very good example. I mean, the females in Dostoevsky novels are very complex psychologically, all his characters are. But in Tolstoy’s novels in particular, you get the sense that in the Victorian period and earlier in Imperial Russia, that the women were really running the society behind the scenes. Now, the men had the positions of formal nomenclature, but they were in the Tolstoyan world, they were really appendages to what was actually going on. The women were running society and gluing society together behind the scenes. And Tolstoy is more of a sociologist in that regard, but his female characters certainly aren’t playing a secondary role, even though it’s a behind the scenes role in some ways. It’s not a secondary role at all. In fact, I would argue the opposite is the case in Tolstoy’s world. I have no idea to what degree that was actually the case in Imperial Russia, but I suspect it was probably the case to quite a degree. Yeah, well, I’m sure it was the case everywhere that women didn’t have full legal rights. But I think what you’re saying is exactly right. But it’s also respectfully, I think, proving my thesis, which went on to kind of morph into the thesis of the beauty myth, which was my first book, which is that Britain was the place in which women were, above all European countries, advocating for their rights legally and socially and economically. Therefore, this backlash figure emerged, whereas in Imperial Russia, women had virtually no legal rights. And so this backlash figure didn’t need to emerge. They could be portrayed in all of their complexity because they weren’t a threat to the status quo. You describe the Victorian English representation of women in the literary domain as a backlash. And I guess I’m curious about which authors in particular you think that was characteristic of and then why you think that there would be a backlash of that sort. What’s your literary critic interpretation of the fact that that phenomenon emerged? Yeah, so I guess I focused most on Dickens’ doll-like characters. But also, if you look at Middlemarch, there’s a very common kind of pairing in fiction in the middle of the 19th century, especially written by women, in which there’s Dorothea Casabin, who’s complex and has it rich in her life and is quite a revolutionary in her own right, trying to change society. And then her antagonist, who’s this pretty, usually blonde, passive, manipulative, superficial character. And you see that dialectic in other novels at that time, but also just in popular culture. I mean, it was the dawn of popular pop culture in the sense of lithography and pretty soon photography by the 1840s, 1850s. And so you’re also getting these beauty ideals, which were impossible, of 17-inch waists, corsets in which women couldn’t breathe, literally the fashion of the middle of the 19th century, in contrast to just like the 1820s, 1810s, where in Jane Austen’s time, women could move around. They could breathe, they could walk, they could argue, they could express their full personalities, even though they had no legal rights by the 1850s, with hoop skirts that were kind of five feet in diameter and posed a threat of setting you up in flames, got too near the fire. Layers of petticoats, as I mentioned, whalebone corsets that really didn’t let you take a deep breath. Clothing that weighed several pounds, just in terms of the weight of what you had to wear, changes of clothes multiple times a day if you’re middle class. The fact that you’re dragging your skirts through kind of manure and mud. All of this, interestingly, this kind of hampering fashion came about at just those decades in which women were… Let me ask you a question about that, a couple of questions about that. So the first, I have two very different questions. The first is that syphilis really became a widespread public health concern amongst the Victorians, and it was a very dreadful disease and took a very large number of forms, and also was transmissible from mother to child. And interestingly enough, the Europeans, when they hit the Western Hemisphere, had brought a whole host of extremely serious transmissible diseases with them, measles and mumps and smallpox, and that devastated the Native community, maybe up to 95% of the Native community. And the Native community returned the favor in very minor ways, one of which apparently was syphilis. So there was a real twist in sexual mores that characterized the Victorian period, in part because syphilis was such a terror. I think the age scare was nothing compared to the syphilis scare. And so it’s hard to know exactly what the emergent fact of syphilis did to the conceptualization of the relationships between men and women on the sexual front. It certainly made prostitution, for example, a much greater public health danger. And so that’s one question. Another question is the Victorian era was characterized by the generation of a substantive amount of wealth. And one could argue that part of what was happening on the Victorian beauty front was the advertisement by aristocrats that they could tolerate this encumbrance in the name of beauty because they had the financial resources to sustain it. There’s an example of that biologically would be, in principle, would be the peacock’s tail, which is extraordinarily beautiful, but also quite the encumbrance. And apparently part of what it signifies, especially if it’s perfectly symmetrical and well-formed and heavy, is that the male who sports that plumage has sufficient health and resources to pull that off without dying. And so now it seems to me that some of those Victorian excesses are reasonably understood on the biological front as manifestations of that kind of, what would you say? Well, it’s an exuberance of display on the sexual front. Now, there might be all sorts of negative consequences of that in relationship to other elements of women’s, well, men and women’s lives. But so well, so those are two parallel questions. How do you think the emergence of syphilis transformed the relationships between men and women politically and socially in Victorian England in particular? And what do you think about the excess resource hypothesis on the Victorian outfitting front? People were getting quite rich at that point, and that was certainly one way of displaying it. Right. Yeah, I understand your questions. So certainly you’re absolutely right about the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea as very fundamental to social concerns around sexuality in Britain in the 19th century. Absolutely. And that was the source of the contagious diseases acts was this argument by the state. And I think my most recent book, Outrageous, which addresses this before my last one, is about how 19th century viral epidemics, including contagious diseases like gonorrhea, but also typhus and cholera, were used by the state as a kind of pretext for controlling people and subverting their civil liberties. So definitely the argument of the state was, you know, these prostitutes or women who look like prostitutes or vectors of disease, they have to be managed and controlled. And the state’s role to step into what had been very personal spaces and mediate this for the public good. Right. We’ve seen that. There’s an emergent literature on the political biological front indicating that one of the best predictors of authoritarian political beliefs in any given geographical locale. So you can do this state by state or county by county or country by country. It scales is the prevalence of infectious disease. The higher the prevalence of infectious disease, the higher the probability of authoritarian political attitudes. And the correlation isn’t like point one or point two. Correlation is like point six. It’s an unbelievably powerful relationship. And it seems like an extension of what’s what’s called the behavioral immune system. And it can really get going. Well, we saw that during covid, right? We instantaneous transformation into something approximating authoritarianism and the motivational justification. What’s so interesting and horrible about this, by the way, is that that’s not a fear based motivation. It’s a disgust based motivation. And disgust is a lot more aggressive than fear, because if you’re afraid of something, you tend to avoid it. Whereas if you’re disgusted by something, your fundamental motivation is to eradicate it by any means necessary. If you look, for example, at the language that Hitler and his minions used when they were ramping up their public health pathology, prevention pathology to extend out of the mental asylums and the hospitals into more broad ethnic cleansing, all the language they used was paroxytism, disgust, contamination, all disease associated. And so, yeah, yeah. So it’s a very powerful motivational system when it gets activated. Absolutely no question. You know, it’s so interesting to hear your analysis from a psychological point of view. And I know there’s been important psychological work done on disgust. I would actually say it from a geopolitical perspective. What happened in the 19th century, not just with contagious diseases, but with the typhus and cholera epidemics of the 1840s and early 1850s, which were devastating, just wiped out, you know, people would be kind of sick on Sunday and dead on Wednesday. That created a model in Western history that allowed later regimes to emulate the model of kind of narrating the danger of infectious diseases, certainly using that element of disgust and contamination, existential threat as a pretext for what authoritarians always want to do, which is eradicate liberties and consolidate control. So I think it is happening on two fronts. Right. It happens organically on the psychological front. But then the state jumps in and says, well, we can save you from this existential threat. Just hand over all your rights. And I think that looking back, you know, certainly Hitler and then later other exploiters of this discourse, either consciously or not, referenced or remembered the effectiveness of the state stepping in in the 19th century, because what the state did, which is so fascinating, is that they created, they solved the infectious diseases threat by creating a network of sewers, Basel Getz network of sewers under London. And the first municipal sewage system solved the problem largely. It saved people. And so that was a fantastic argument for the state to say, look, individuals can’t do this. You know, the individual home with its with its cesspit, with its, you know, miasmas is the source of contamination. One person’s private contamination affects the commons. Therefore, you need the state to mediate the commons. And the metaphor that I look at then is the like the Internet, right? You know, it established this idea that there’s a commons between us that can be contaminated from one person’s private space to another person’s private space. And therefore, the state needs to patrol and police the commons. Elysium Health is dedicated to tackling the biggest challenge in health, aging, and they make the benefits of aging research accessible to everyone. Elysium creates innovative health products with clinically proven ingredients that enable customers to live healthy lives. Elysium works with leading institutions like Oxford and Yale, and they have dozens of the world’s best scientists working with them. Eight of them are Nobel Prize winners. Their flagship product, Basis, focuses on NAD supplementation, which is a key component in cellular aging. They’ve sold over three and a half million bottles of this supplement alone. Matter is a brain health supplement that slows natural brain loss. 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Well, and there’s a real tension in human discourse that seems to be key to the distinction between conservatives and liberals, is the conservatives tend to be more disgust sensitive and they’re more prone to react negatively to the potentially contaminating effects of interpersonal interaction. And that could be sexual or intellectual. The liberal types are it’s as if the liberals bet that the advantage to free exchange will outperform the disadvantage of contamination, whereas the conservatives tend to make the opposite bet. And the technical complexity of that is that sometimes the conservatives are right and sometimes the liberals are right. It depends because the conservatives tend to be more correct, let’s say, when multiple epidemics are raging out of control, whereas the liberals tend to be more correct when, for whatever reason, the probability of genuine contagion is relatively low. And you can take advantage of cross-border freedom and movement of information and people. But it’s a continual battle because, you know, this also complicates the sexual realm to an immense degree, because, of course, sexual intercourse is an excellent vector for disease transmission. And that throws people into an existential quandary constantly, because obviously the drive towards reproduction and the drive towards sexual pleasure opens up the danger on the epidemic front. We certainly saw that with the rise of AIDS, for example. I mean, there’s no doubt, biologically speaking, that the AIDS virus mutated to take advantage of certain forms of promiscuity. And so that’s an absolute bloody catastrophe and could have been, well, an apocalyptic catastrophe, although we seem to have got more or less on top of it. There’s always that specter of large-scale contamination lurking in the background on the ideational and the physical front. And people certainly differ widely in their instinctive reactions to that, too. And so IQ is actually associated with disgust sensitivity, as it turns out. So the lower your IQ, the more disgust sensitive you are. Now, the effect isn’t walloping, but it’s not negative. Well, you can also understand that, Abe, because imagine this, is that the smarter you are, the more useful the free exchange of information is, because you can take advantage of it. Well, if you can’t take advantage of it, you’re differentially exposed to the threat of contamination. And so that makes things as if things aren’t complicated enough already. That adds an additional dimension of complexity. One of the things that I learned that was truly horrifying, by the way, was the degree to which the progressive campaign towards ethnic extermination in Germany was driven by public health concerns and a hypothetical compassion that underlay that. If you examine that developmentally, it’s actually quite terrifying because the Nazis actually started their, what eventually became their extermination campaigns with public health campaigns that were quite effective at eliminating tuberculosis. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So a thousand percent. So to move up to the 20th century. And this brings us kind of to my more recent work. Absolutely. There’s a fantastic book called Racial Hygiene and, of course, the classic The Nazi Doctors that makes just this point that before there were, before the Nazis were even in power, there was this very effective public health campaign that enlisted, just like in the last few years, medical professional associations enlisted doctors, you know, played on their desire for status and recognition. And they were kind of corralled into being the moderators of racial hygiene. And that took the shape, of course, of rounding up teenagers who were impaired and sending them off for treatment. And then their families never saw them again. And that was years before the extermination camps. Well, the whole doctrine of racial purity and blood purity, which is a hallmark of Hitler’s populist attractiveness, let’s say, was all contamination language. And I read Hitler’s Table Talk, for example, it’s a very interesting book. So it’s a collection of his spontaneous discourse at dinnertime over about a four year period. And it’s absolutely 100 percent saturated, disgust oriented language. He bathed four or five times a day. Oh, my goodness. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and also he was a worshiper of will power. And there’s a really tight relationship between that proclivity for authoritarian control and the exercise of what you might describe as power and will. And that seems integrally associated with the disgust axis and the activation of what’s being described as the extended immune system. And so a disgust response is part of the behavioral immune system. And so if you see something disgusting and you gag, that’s that’s a physiological response, obviously, to some degree. But it’s also a psychological response. And that sense that you want to flee from or clean yourself if you’ve been contaminated is also an element of the behavioral immune system. And if it gets politicized in a particularly pathological way, you don’t want to be in the category of contaminant. Put it that way. No mercy. No mercy. Right. No mercy. Yes, I agree. That’s weirdly enough, too. You know, when when the disgust literature started to roll out, the proclivity for disgust associated contamination seemed to be more typical of people who had a conservative bent. It’s associated with conscientiousness, for example. And I don’t understand this at all. Something has changed in the last four or five years because you’ve seen the left possessed by this contamination frenzy, both on the ideational front in the form of cancel culture, but also in the. And I have no idea what to make of this. I mean, to me, it’s an absolute mystery, miracle in some sense that the left allied themselves with the pharmaceutical companies, because I couldn’t imagine that ever happening in my entire life. It’s like I thought you people put the pharmaceutical companies up there with the energy companies, let’s say in terms of intrinsically reprehensible. And then all of a sudden, under the covid pressure, I mean, it’s not like conservatives reacted much better because they really didn’t. But but it’s still very surprising to see the left doing that. And I don’t really understand what’s changed in the culture so that the left has picked up this contamination frenzy and has introduced it into extended immune adjacent behaviors like cancel culture, which is a form of disgust related shunning. Totally. Yeah, you anticipated what I was going to say. I think in recent memory before twenty twenty, indeed, it was the right that was more reactive to not wanting to be. And they use language like this in the 80s. It wasn’t pretty. You know, I remember in the AIDS epidemic, it was conservatives talking about infectious, the fear of infection from homosexuals or, you know, and it was ideological infection and cultural infection as well as a fear, which was irrational of physical infection. But but indeed, the polls had completely flipped. And it used to be, as you say, that liberals in America and I’m using the American usage of liberals, people on the left were more open to cross pollinating ideas, more open to immigrants, more open to the strange, the other, the alien, more open to freedom, civil free speech, the free speech movement. And it was conservatives who were concerned about. Horus, if you like, ideologically and on a community level, maybe even on a personal level, purity and absolutely in the last three years, I agree with you like a mania, like tulip mania, like, you know, I keep going back to extraordinary popular delusions, the madness of crowds. You know, a delusion has come up on the left in the last three years since covid that leads them to be more masky, more irrational about infection from covid, more shunning, you know, in a kind of tribal Old Testament sort of way than anyone could have ever believed and to have forgotten all of their critical thinking about things like. I wonder if you see one of the ways that Trump appealed to his populist conservative base was by using imagery of the wall. And that’s pretty effective imagery when you’re appealing to people who are intrinsically conservative. But I wonder maybe what’s happened is something like this is that the rate of change has accelerated to such a degree that it’s even exceeded the psychological capacity of those who are more open and creative to assimilate. Right. Because we’ve never been in a situation like that in the history of the world. I mean, I was ill for about two years and I was out of the technological world. And so all my computers got outdated, for example. And, you know, it took me about six months to put all my electronics back together so I could understand them after only a two year hiatus. And we’re in a situation now where there is unbelievable, unbelievably radical change in virtually every dimension of human endeavor that you can possibly imagine. And we don’t really know what even creative people, how even creative people will react when even their capacity for transformation has been exceeded. So maybe you’re seeing the emergence of a strange kind of conservatism on the more open left that wouldn’t have been likely in a time when things were changing somewhat slower. And I don’t I because I have no idea what to make of it. I don’t know. I’m not I’m not persuaded because, you know, the change is happening to everyone. And yet the people who are remaining open minded in my experience and who are willing to engage with the facts that are being brought forward by credible people that contradict the dominant narrative are conservatives and libertarians right now. And I know it’s very strange. And also you see a lot of rise of humor on the conservative and libertarian side as well. And this is something I also can’t make heads or tails of. I mean, emergence of organizations like the Babylon Bee. I mean, when they first emerged into the public consciousness, it was quite a shock to me because I thought, well, how the hell did the conservatives get the comedians? Like, that’s just not how things work. And but it is how things work at the moment. Certainly the funniest funniest comedy shows I’ve seen in the last three or four years have all had a I would say a conservative libertarian tilt to them, partly because those are the people who will say whatever it is that they have to say. And you see that in popular culture, too, is on on forums like Netflix. It is the more libertarian and conservative comedians who are certainly a the funniest and also be pulling in the largest audiences. And so I don’t know what’s unique of that. I mean, I think we can make of it. And I feel kind of empowered to say this is having spent my life on the left. You know, the left, hopefully temporarily has lost its mind. So there’s a lot more to make fun of. They’re more rigid and people who are rigid. I mean, going back to Charlie Chaplin and the great dictator, you know, the rigidity is always funny. You know, it needs to have fun poked at it. And the left is more irrational right now. I mean, they’re believing things that are not true or they’re not willing to admit that they’ve been wrong. Or in terms of my most recent work, they’re not willing to admit that they’ve been part of a condoning or facilitating the greatest crime against humanity ever, which we haven’t gotten into yet. But, you know, that’s my view of the rollout of these mandates, the mRNA injections, which my team of experts has found to be so very deadly and so very damaging. So, you know, in a situation like that, grownups say, OK, you know, we’ve got to reexamine the facts and I’m sorry. And they’re not able to do that. They’re being more and more stuck in delusion, more and more committed to delusion. And they created, they welcomed a two-tier society erected in the space of less than two years that ostracized a whole sector of people and got them kicked out of their jobs, prevented kids who didn’t have this injection from going to school in some states, you know, mandated people to their detriment. And, you know, made people like their travel rates immensely in Canada, immensely and staggering manner. It’s shocking. I can’t go to Canada. Canada used to be the most reasonable Western country in the world, and I can’t go to Canada for reasons that have nothing to do with science, right? Nothing to do with science. So the left betrayed all of its most cherished ideals and won’t even face that. So there’s a gaping moral hole in the center of culture on the left. And until they recognize it and reckon with it and say, oh, my God, you know, we became oppressors. We became the equivalent of racist. You know, we abandoned our best ideals. We became dogmatists and fundamentalists and we abandoned science. We abandoned compassion until they’re able to do that. They can’t come to terms with reality. We’ll be right back. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan’s new documentary, Logos in Literacy. I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jumpstarted the development of literacy across the entire world. Illiteracy was the norm. The pastor’s home was the first school, and every morning it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion. Probably 80% of scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing. Here we have a Gutenberg Bible, a Bible printed on the press of Johann Gutenberg. Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now the book is available to everyone. From Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to civilization itself. It is the most influential book in all of history and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that. Okay, so there’s a lot to delve into there. I want to do that. I want to go back to your book, The Beauty Myth, and I want to say a few things on the beauty front and gather your reactions to those. I also am interested in the motivations behind writing that book in relationship to the experiences that we already described. I spent a lot of time studying people like David Buss. Buss is a very good example, an evolutionary psychologist. I like David’s work a lot. I think he’s a very solid scientist and there’s been a lot of interesting work generated out of the evolutionary psychology literature on the gender relations front. So, for example, one of the more compelling findings from the evolutionary psychologists is the relationship between perceived sexual attractiveness, particularly in the long term mating context and socioeconomic status. Now, it’s probably not socioeconomic status as indexed by wealth. It’s probably wealth as an index of productive competence. But in any case, the correlation between perceived mate attractiveness with regards to women perceiving men, the correlation between socioeconomic status and perceived attractiveness is about 0.6, which is a higher correlation than the correlation between general cognitive ability and grades. And I use that as an example because that’s one of the most robust and powerful findings in the social sciences. Whereas the correlation between socioeconomic status and perceived mate attractiveness for women by men is 0 or slightly negative. So it’s a walloping difference and that’s associated with the proclivity of women to preferentially mate across hierarchies and up and men to mate across hierarchies and down. That’s relatively well established cross-culturally and the proclivity doesn’t ameliorate much in, say, the Scandinavian countries. It ameliorates slightly. And then there are other hallmarks of attractiveness on the female side and this is where I want to go with the beauty myth. We know that babies, for example, will gaze much longer, even as newborns, at symmetrical faces. And there is this doll-like aspect that you described. So one of the hallmarks of sexual attractiveness is neotenic faces. And so there’s a proclivity for organisms to evolve towards their juvenile forms. That’s neoteny. It’s such a pervasive tendency that it even characterizes animated characters as Stephen Jay Gould was at Pains to establish. It’s quite comical. But one of the hallmarks of cuteness is a babyishness of face. And you can see that in the plush toys and the sorts of things that are often bought as dolls for kids or for sentimental adults have very large eyes, very small noses, very symmetrical faces. There’s all sorts of hallmarks of beauty from a biological perspective. Many of them seem to be associated with fecundity, particularly on the female side. And that is very harsh. It’s a very, very harsh standard. And when I read the beauty myth, which was a long time ago, by the way, because it was published in what, 91? 93, 93, yeah. 93, 93. I was curious about what you made of the biological markers of beauty and what you, how you think that plays into what did you describe the Iron Maiden straight jacket that’s placed on women in terms of the, what the ideal of their sexual self-presentation. Right. So thank you for asking. You may be right. It may actually have been 91 came out first in Britain and then in the United States. So respectfully, I’m familiar with these arguments and respectfully, I’m very familiar with David Buss’s work. And I think that it’s fundamentally flawed and I’ll get to why. So first, let me concede, of course, it’s thoroughly documented that there are markers of health and attractiveness, health and fertility that are often cross-cultural. And certainly symmetrical features, you know, rosy skin showing good circulation, you know, youth, all of those are kind of transcendental markers for attractiveness. However, one giant intellectual flaw, respectfully in pretty much all of the studies that I’ve seen of the evolutionary biologists is that they focus on these markers in women and they don’t test for what women find attractive in men. They project or they construct kind of experiments or surveys that prove, tendentiously in my view, that women find wealth or professional accomplishment attractive and that that kind of substitutes for physical beauty. But they don’t ask women who are heterosexual, what are the markers for you of beauty in men or attractiveness in men? And if they did, and they don’t, they would find broad shoulders, they would find symmetry, they would find maybe, you know, sorry, penis size, you know, they would find maybe a muscle tone that shows that they can kind of effectively impregnate a woman. They would probably find height as a marker, right? And it’s notable to me. They have investigated that. I mean, there is a fair bit of overlap in the biomarkers, let’s say, for what men and women find mutually physically attractive. Although the way that’s manifested varies to some degree, as you pointed out, shoulder to waist ratio, for example, is a marker, as you can see in superhero portrayals of men, for example. And the cardinal difference seems to be too, though, you know, it’s also not the sophisticated evolutionary psychologists don’t assume that women are after wealth. What they assume is that women will use markers of wealth as indicators of productive competence. Right. But let me get this, please, because to me, that’s also a conceptual flaw. I’ll get to why in just a minute. But I know I have to note for the record as a feminist analyst that I have literally never seen a study that asks women if they find penis size a marker for sexual attractiveness. And I think scientists don’t want to run that study. Male scientists don’t want to run that study because it would be unpopular conclusions. So I guess to me, the whole field of evolutionary biological studies that conclude that sexual attractiveness is a is is kind of gendered female and and that for males, there are other proxies for sexual attractiveness is really convenient for men because they don’t have to come up against the raw, brute fact that there are, you know, physical things women evaluate men for if they’re heterosexual, just like their physical things men. OK, so let me ask you about that a little bit, too, because you say that it’s convenient for men. And so, I mean, I’m I’m never certain what form of differential perception on the part of each sex is convenient for which sex. I mean, the entire sexual battlefield, let’s say, is fraught with catastrophe and opportunity for both sexes. I mean, one of the things you do see, for example, is that women are much harsher in the evaluations of attractiveness of men than men are of women. So women men rate women 50 percent of women as below attractive, a below average in attractiveness, and women rate 80 percent of men as below average in physical attractiveness. And well, and like I want to be absolutely 100 percent crystal clear here that I am not blaming women for this. I understand why this is, I believe. Now, it’s in the interest of a woman biologically and practically to find a partner who is as competent as competent as she is or more competent, because fundamentally what she’s trying to do is redress the differential burden that reproduction places on women. And so the reason that women totally disagree with you, I think that’s out of date respectfully, but I’ll wait for you to finish. OK, well, OK. Well, so I’m curious about why you would why you would consider that because consider that out of date, because, first of all, one of the definitions of what constitutes female biologically is the female sex biologically speaking. And the female sex biologically speaking is almost invariably the sex that devotes more biological time and energy to reproduction than the alternative sex. So you see that even at the level of sperm and egg, because the egg has a volume that is multiple thousands of times larger than the sperm. And even at that level, there’s more resources being devoted to the difficult job of reproduction at the female level. And of course, women have a nine month gestation period, which is very onerous. And then they do. They are charged with primary responsibility for infant caregiving, especially during the first year. And we know perfectly well that the differential burden of reproduction on women is such that single women who have a child are much more likely to descend into poverty. And the reason for that, at least in part, is, well, it’s actually very difficult to have a child. And it’s a 40 hour a week job at minimum. And to add the necessity of working and providing on top of that means an 80 hour work week. And so it isn’t obvious to me why the hypothesis that women would be motivated to redress that fundamental biological differential. I don’t understand why that would be an objectionable hypothesis, even from the feminist perspective. Well, doesn’t it just recognize that women are more at risk on the sexual and reproductive front? I mean, I recognize what you’re saying there. I guess what I would say is there are as many like get first, let me say, I think the whole field of evolutionary biology. Being presented to explain contemporary 21st century gender roles or expectations or norms is respectfully, I think it has almost no intellectual merit. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude because you can I mean, I’ve read the whole range of evolutionary biologists, biologists who are usually invoked. Right. And they’re always tendentious and they’re always talking about circumstances that no longer exist historically. So, you know, you could just as easily draw on, I believe it’s Helen Fisher, who or other feminist evolutionary biologists who make the case that women are best served by adultery because they’re getting a good range of sperm. You know, and the best suited sperm is the is the sperm that’s going to win. That does it count for that does it count for for for cheating behavior? And most of the evolutionary psychologists who have their act together take that into account is that what the optimal strategy, if you’re being cold hearted about it biologically, especially for a woman who hasn’t optimized her mate choice, might be to find someone stable and second rate and then cheat sporadically to produce that biological diversity. And that does seem to be something approximating a stable biological solution, even though I don’t think it’s an optimal one. Right. Well, I think the sophisticated evolutionary psychologists have taken that into account. Gotcha. But let me just speak to why that kind of very beloved and I have to notice that it’s beloved of the whole kind of, you know, Dawkins crowd, the whole selfish gene crowd is kind of loves this idea of the young, fertile female who needs to find that unattractive, older, wealthy man who happened to be a scientist. And and and and also, you know, accounts for or always gives males a kind of, well, you’re just polygamous or you just need lots of sexual partners and it’s good for, you know, it’s good for the reproduction of the race of species. So the reason I find these tendentious and especially, you know, this notion of women optimizing the material value of their partner to make up for their reproductive deficits is that respectfully, it’s out of date. And what I mean by that is I totally concede that, you know, women is hard to be pregnant. It’s hard to have a baby. It puts you at a disadvantage. Certainly, it’s not accounted for in, you know, contemporary work expectations more so since the pandemic when everyone’s at home. But, you know, when you had to go to work, obviously, it’s put women at a disadvantage and they needed a provider for those two years. But I will say that now I think that young men, for instance, like a whole phenomenon that I find fascinating, I might find I might find it fascinating as an older woman who’s married a much younger man. But I find it fascinating that when I was writing the beauty myth, older women were considered done reproductively or sexually. And now that’s no longer the case. And that there’s this whole kind of expectation now of young men finding older women who are materially successful and who can, you know, provide them with with a good lifestyle really attractive. So I think that the evolutionary biologists haven’t accounted for that. You know, even women past reproductive age who are financially successful are considered really attractive to young men now. So that’s a 21st century phenomenon. It never used to exist. And the other thing that didn’t used to exist is if women have enough material resources now, they can hire someone and I’m not saying this is optimal. It’s very sad. I’m with you on the value of the nuclear family. But, you know, if they haven’t married someone who can look after them for that brief window, when a baby and you know, a nursing baby is is is is impeding your ability to kind of go it on your own. Totally agree with that. They can hire someone to help with those two years. So really the penalties for being a single mom, it’s not easy. If you don’t have resources, I completely concede you’re going to kind of go down the socioeconomic scale. But if you do have resources, that’s no longer the case. And that’s why you’re seeing, you know, so much of what you criticize. 21st century economic opportunities have made it possible to be an affluent single mom, hire a caregiver, hire someone to help you raise the baby basically when the baby’s tiny. And then starting from three years old, you know, there are there are child care centers, daycare centers that will take the baby. And so I think the evolutionary biologists haven’t accounted for what is going to result from that. It’s what we’ve seen result from it, which is I’m sorry to be rude, but the value of men has gone down. And I think that respectfully, that’s one of the things I think is most useful about your work. Respectfully, I’ve been thinking about this. I think that’s why you’ve been so targeted by the establishment is that you talk about the value of men. And you talk about, you know, how men can be relevant in and consider themselves to be relevant and have a role in 20th century economic opportunities. And I think that’s the most important thing about the 21st century society. So I think the great unspoken or under analyzed phenomenon of 21st century is the deconstruction of the value of men, which completely upends the evolutionary biologists kind of narrative about men and women. And I think that’s one of the things that I think is on a happy note, I do think the value of your work is that you’re trying to give men and succeeding in a lot of ways, a role in 21st century society in which they, they do have. They do have value, but it’s not going to be the same value for women to go to love. That’s an interesting subtopic because, you know, I’ve insisted to my viewers and listeners who are disproportionately male on the YouTube front, mostly because YouTube is disproportionately male, it’s about 75 25. And so I don’t differ from that much, by the way. In fact, I think I have more female viewers than average by that baseline standard. You know, I’ve, I’ve suggested to my young male viewers continually that if they’re rejected by all women out of hand, that they have to take that burden onto themselves and not assume that all the women are wrong. And that what they should strive to do. Well, the probability that you’re right and 4 billion people are wrong is one in 4 billion. It’s rather low. And so you have to take that as a brute fact in some sense. And it might be unfair in that women like men use a set of criteria that you could describe as arbitrary in some sense to make their judgments. But there’s some things you’re not going to win an argument against. And that’s definitely one of them. But one of the things I’ve suggested to young men is that if they concentrated on making themselves productive and generous, that the probability that that will increase their ability to find a mate is extraordinarily high. And I do think that’s the case. And that advantage accrues as men mature. So what do you what do you think of that as a tack? I mean, I want to thank you for my marriage, because you are my husband’s he said, tell him he’s my spirit. You are one of my husband’s kind of, you know, role models. And he listened to you. And so unlike other men of his generation, he he was all about like picking up the check and being a provider. And it was it’s really attractive. So 100% I agree with you. Why was it attractive? Why was it attractive? Why was it attractive? So now I’m going to throw a little bit of a wrench in your argument. It was attractive to me, because everyone likes someone who is competent enough to, you know, make money, I guess, at whatever level they’re making money, it shows that they’re not a feckless, immature, you know, dependent person. And everyone likes someone who can look after them. But what I’m going to add there is that I think men like women who can look after them, too. And I think men like women who are competent, too. And I think just like it’s sexy when a man picks up a check, it’s sexy when a woman picks up a check, you know, in due course. And I’ve heard plenty of men say, you know, well, I took her out three or four or five or six times, and she never made a gesture to pick up the check. And that’s not attractive, because women, you know, I think that’s the attractiveness of reciprocity. You know, is one of the things you really do want in a partner over the long run. And there’s probably nothing more important than this in a business relationship or a friendship or an intimate relationship is that fundamentally the relationship to be self sustaining has to be reciprocal. And that doesn’t mean that everybody gets obsessive about making sure that the distributions are 50 50, because they really should be 75 75, right? If you’re in a productive relationship, both of you are what you both receive is more than the sum total of what you both contribute, right? If you optimize the relationship. And I think part of the reason that men will appreciate women who pick up a check is not necessarily because it’s an indication of their competence. Although I think that’s part of it, I think it is definitely an indication of their willingness and ability to reciprocate, which is fundamentally now I don’t know. And I don’t know of any research that pertains specifically to that issue. Right. But I guess what I’m saying to jump in is that I think your analysis and the evolutionary biologist analysis is productively updated by this reality, which is fairly new that both genders are surveilling the landscape for people who are, you know, not only sexually and reproductively attractive, but who will reciprocate who will take care of them who can provide who are not dependent. And I do think that the kind of woman who was considered very sexy in the, you know, 60s when I was a child is no longer considered sexy because she’s not able to contribute to to the household, you know, that doll like, you know, what is her name? Twiggy like, you know, inert, voiceless person. I mean, men who are confident may kind of give it a pass, if her a passing admiring glance or have a one night stand with her, but I don’t think that that has a high value any longer as a partner. You think that’s a historical transformation? Or do you think it’s more a return to something approximating internal norm? Because here’s something interesting, for example, the name Eve, the original Hebrew term for the name Eve, which unfortunately, I can’t remember at the moment, means beneficial adversary. Really? So yeah, yes, it does. It does. And there’s a notion there that the person who’s the most well matched to you as a potential partner is not someone who passively submits to your demands, partly because your demands might be unreasonable and pathological. And that’s not good for you or them. But someone who’s capable of engaging you in something like a provocative and challenging reciprocal play. If you if you pick a play partner in a game, one on one basketball, for example, you’re not going to pick someone that you can easily dominate if you have any sense, because it’s not any fun. What you really want is someone who can spar with you at the limit of your ability. And that’s a strange way of conceptualizing a relationship. But it’s not strange if you know anything about how people engage in the processes that lead to further learning, for example, or the expansion of skill, is you’re looking for the edge of optimal competition. And I think there were periods of time and the Victorian period in England that you described might have been one of them, where the female ideal is tilted more towards one of passivity. And that might have been a reaction, as you pointed out to the increased agitation on the female front for a broader role in the public polity. But it isn’t obvious to me that historically speaking, the feminine ideal has been passive. That’s happened from time to time. So I’m so glad you said that we’re completely in alignment about that. It is what I’m describing is a return to a pre-industrial ideal. And it is only in the last 150 years or 200 years that the Industrial Revolution even made it possible to have what you described earlier, which is Thorsten Veblen’s description of a kind of doll like, you know, middle class or middle class woman whose only role is to be dressed and displayed and to display the wealth of her, her self. And that’s the kind of thing that we’re seeing in the last 150 years. And I think that’s the kind of thing that we’re seeing in the last 150 years. And I think that’s the kind of thing that we’re seeing in the last 150 years. And I think that’s the kind of thing that we’re seeing in the last 150 years. And I think that’s the kind of thing that we’re seeing in the last 150 years. And I think that’s the kind of thing that we’re seeing in the last 150 years. And I think that’s the kind of thing that we’re seeing in the last 150 years. And I think that’s the kind of thing that we’re seeing in the last 150 years. When the man was out hunting or if you were, you know, in a feudal society, could we versus or manage the crops or the kitchen garden or, you know, all the like, like literally a household before the Industrial Revolution had as active as a female sphere as a male sphere productively. And that only changed. Or people died. Pardon me? Or people died. Exactly. Absolutely women. And this goes back to the Old Testament, you know, that the value of Eshet Chayil, a woman of valor, her price is above rubies. And then it iterates all the things she does. She weaves cloth. She sells things to bring in income for the household. She’s got so many areas of economic activity as well as moral activity. And that’s been true for most of human history. So those things were always part of the marital equation before the 19th century. Not just is she beautiful, conventionally, physically, but what are her skill sets? How does she embroider? How does she cook? You know, can she keep people alive? And so I’m disagreeing with you about that. So then I’m just updating it for a contemporary moment in which people live longer than ever. Arguably healthy women past their childbearing years have the ability. Like, you know, we were all kind of decrepit crones, you know, by now. Women past their childbearing years. And that’s no longer the case because of changes in health. And I don’t know. And then also the economic potential of women, as I mentioned earlier, has changed so much, at least women who are middle or upper middle class, that that, I think, effectively updates your analysis. But I love the place you’re landing on, which is good mating habits, extend, challenge the skill sets of both genders. And there I would say this is not new at all from a woman’s perspective or women’s literary history, because look at Jane Austen. That’s what all the dream men did. They challenged the heroin to the limit. Like, it was all about the play, the verbal play, right? The provocation, the back and forth. You know, no one wanted to marry that, you know, sober, industrious guy who just provided. And I think that’s the kind of thing that women who always wanted to marry the dashing hero who, you know, I mean, that classic scene of any romance movie based on these Austen novels, based on that whole kind of literary tradition of women writing, of the couple getting into an argument the first time they meet, you know, that is absolutely what you want. And a maid is someone who will challenge you and so you grow and you’re always learning. Yeah, well, it’s also very, it’s also very useful to note, I would say, by the way, that the marker for that optimized combat is the spirit of play. So if the repartee that is emerging is playful, that’s a biological marker that the information flow is being optimized. And that is a marker in and of itself that psychological transformation is occurring at the optimized rate. And it’s very useful to know that there’s an instinct for that and it is the instinct for play. It’s a good thing to keep at hand because you know then when you’re engaged in any activity, if you could elevate the level at which you’re engaged in that activity to the level of free play, that really means that you’re manifesting a real expertise in that domain. That would be certainly true in intellectual discourse. And I think we’ve managed that to some degree in our conversation so far today. Sure. And as you’re describing this, I also note, you should read my book on the vagina, which is a sequel to my book, The Beauty Myth, because if you haven’t yet, that is so much a part of women’s arousal. Like women will describe, if you ask a woman what is sexy, a man being funny is way at the top of this. Right, right, right. And why is it sexy for a man to be funny? Because women’s kind of dopamine circuit is directly connected to their sexual response, right? And so if someone’s like exciting, and this is why, you know, the heroes are always kind of taking women on adventures and like your whole kind of dopamine circuit, which is so connected in women’s sexual response, is not activated by the boring guy who’s on the couch, who’s channel surfing, who never goes anywhere, right? It’s activated by the man who wants to take you on adventures, who wants to appreciate your adventures, and who can make you laugh because of those pleasure centers being activated. So, really interesting, right? But that’s different than just taking out, like the boring guy with the big cramped parts. The laughter issue is a really interesting one because the thing about comedians is that they strike to the heart of the matter. They say what’s not sayable in a manner that’s socially acceptable, but slightly transgressive, right? And so they’re demonstrating when they do that, that they’re really attentive to the, what would you call it, to the niceties of time and place because your humor can’t go too far. It has to be exactly on the edge, and if it’s on the edge, it’ll produce that spontaneous outburst of laughter, which is also, interestingly enough, accompanied by muscular weakness, right? People can’t fight when they’re laughing because you can’t sustain any prolonged physical endeavor when you’re laughing. And so laughter puts you in a state of play right away. And so, it’s extremely interesting. These things are extremely deep, right? I mean, that instinct for play is so deep that it actually deactivates the musculature. And so it’s not something merely cognitive, no more than you think about whether something is funny before you laugh, because you don’t. You laugh long before you think about it, because you get the joke and you’re in the spirit of play. So let me ask you, we’re going to run out of time, unfortunately, and that’s too bad because there’s so many things we can talk about. I think what we should talk about on the Daily Wire Plus side is how you think the left cornered itself in the last decade. I’d really be interested to hear what you think about that. What I would like to do maybe to close up our conversation, because we are almost out of time, is I’m curious about, I’m always interested in people’s motivations, being a rabid clinical psychologist. And so I’m always digging under the surface, I suppose, to try to clarify things. And for me, and maybe for whoever I’m talking about. Now, you said that when you went to Yale and you had the unfortunate and terrifying experiences that you, and disheartening experiences that you had there, that that derailed your central intellectual interest. And then you spent decades in the hinterlands in some ways, exploring topics that weren’t your primary category of interest. And so I’m wondering, when you look back at the beauty myth, do you think that part of what you were doing perhaps was analyzing the perceptual preconditions for you having been categorized, let’s say by Harold Bloom, as an attackable target? I mean, were you investigating the, you see what I mean? Were you investigating the structure of prejudice, of perceptual prejudice, that increased the probability of objectification of the sort that you experienced in this very dramatic form? Yeah, that’s a great question, Dr. Peter. I mean, certainly consciously, I was aware as a very young woman, because I was a very young woman when I wrote the beauty myth, I was in my 20s, like early 20s. I was aware that I considered myself smart and an intellectual, and I was constantly being objectified. But in that, I’m completely having exactly similar experiences to millions of other very young women who are smart and capable and ambitious and constantly being objectified. So absolutely, the beauty myth was an effort to understand that in order to get through it and master it and integrate it to some extent. So it was an analysis of objectification, let’s say, at least in part. Yeah, I don’t think it was an analysis of sexual assault, because I don’t think objectification and sexual assault are the same thing. But I do think if you’re looking for unconscious motivations, my work dating from the end of America in which I was focused on torture and surveillance and my more recent work in which I recognized how violent and a coercive society can become definitely arose from my experience of being raped as a child and then molested as a young adult, because they’re on a continuum and the body responds to these things the way the body responds to torture or to war. And lots of good science has emerged about that. One really wonderful book is The Body Keeps Score about trauma. Bessel Van der Koek. Right, exactly. So, and then about kind of the hinterlands, I mean, I can’t complain about my career having, I mean, it got derailed, you know, like you got derailed productively. I guess I did choose my subjects. Obviously, I became more of an activist and I guess partly my experience of injustice and obstacles to a meritocratic outcome for me led to my, you know, engagement in more activist writing. And I can’t complain about that. It was necessary. It was helpful. I had to eat best sellers, as I mentioned. You know, I got to be a famous public intellectual. It wasn’t my first choice, right? So I guess that’s just what God had in store for me. But it certainly, I mean, I guess what I’m trying to say is it was a derailment of what I wanted to do. But I think it was a productive use of the last, you know, 35 years nonetheless. Yeah, well, I think, you know, part of the hallmark of a successful life is the ability to turn stumbling blocks into opportunities. I mean, you know that the best laid plans of mice and men and women, obviously as well, go astray. And the ability to be successful is to some degree the ability to dance with some of the arbitrary constrictions of fate. And so, you know, who knows how that works out in the final analysis. It doesn’t work out the way you envision things would to begin with. But I think that’s true of many people’s lives. Life takes all sorts of twists and turns. All right, so for everyone who’s listening and watching, it is going to be obvious to all of you that this conversation could go many more places. And it would have been good had we had the time to do that. But I am going to switch over to the Daily Wire Plus front. And I think we’re going to focus the conversation there on what’s happened on the political front on the left in recent years. I know Dr. Wolf has concentrated on that to a large degree, particularly in her reaction to the, well, we call it the COVID epidemic, but it really wasn’t. It was, you know, the Swedish data show, for example, if you do a two year smoothing of mortality, that there was no epidemic at all. Not surprising. In Sweden. It’s quite remarkable. And so really what we had was an epidemic of imitating Chinese authoritarians. That’s actually what we had. Yes, absolutely. It was a psychogenic epidemic of totalitarian impulse. And the COVID virus was the excuse for it, but not the reason. In fact, it isn’t obvious at all that there was a reason at all. And so that’s really quite terrifying. And so we can delve into that to some degree on the Daily Wire Plus side of things, too. And so for all of you watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention. Dr. Naomi Wolf, thank you for agreeing to talk to me today and to the Daily Wire Plus organization. Thanks for facilitating the conversation. The film crew here, I’m in Oxford today, so that’s always entertaining. And I got actually invited to the Oxford Literary Festival. Strange, strangeness of strange things. Yes. So I’m not so much. I guess I’m not so much persona non grata as I once was. So that’s an interesting thing to see. So anyways, we’re going to flip over to the Daily Wire Plus side. And thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. Thank you so much, Dr. Pearson. I appreciate it. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guests on DailyWirePlus.com.