The Demise of the Left: from Liberalism to Marxism | Naomi Wolf | EP 351

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 [Music] 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 to emulate the model of kind of narrating the danger of infectious diseases certainly using that element of disgust and contamination and 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 um 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 [Music] hello everyone I'm pleased today to talk to a thinker on the Progressive front uh 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 is 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 human looking forward very much to talking to Dr Wolf today to delve into the possession of the left uh reprehensible position 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 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 that standard answer is now I don't know precisely by the way if you 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 I've invited people especially political figures on the left to speak with me repeatedly dozens of times with uh with no um 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 so but it didn't 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 and human rights and and freedom um 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 um talk to you because um well for that reason uh but also because I you know I see that you describe yourself as a liberal and well 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 um I also see myself as 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 um but either way um you know since you're 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 that said I recognize your experience sadly I'm now in a situation in which I keep asking the left to counter you know the views that I'm publishing by other people on my news site you know I'm asking the left to engage with um the issues that I'm bringing up and I literally cannot get anyone to talk to me and I used to be you know until like two and a half years ago and firmly esconched 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 like I think I'm reasonably neutral as a psychological Observer of political Behavior I believe and and certainly one of the things I have noticed is that proclivity to cancel is most fundamentally a left-wing phenomena 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 who 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 let's start with your childhood so um tell me about 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 um I will just note before I do that that's a change I think Dr Peterson on the left um it didn't used to be the case just five years ago that uh it was canceling we can talk about that later if you like it's really important I think that these are non-western norms that um 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 um you know in very recent memory so um I was born in San Francisco uh I mean 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 um Jewish uh middle class household um very creative environment my father is also a poet and a teacher of creative writing so it was a very talky ready um imagination heavy environment and you know I was surrounded by the cultural ferment of the 60s and 70s in San Francisco so by the time I was a teenager you know the gay lgbtq right at that time was called the gay and lesbian Liberation movement the women's movement um you know immigrants rights uh it was all kind of um 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 um very beautiful place to grow up and then I went to Yale uh and that was a shock because I'd never you know I'm a I'm a California girl so I'd never experienced East Coast elitism hierarchies um and semitism you know before the peculiar racism of the p the Northeast I mean if you grew up in California it's a very diverse uh culture you know the it's not that we don't have racism in California but it's it's different it's a more inclusive Society it's less class bound so that was a shock um so that was when did you and you did an undergraduate at Yale I was an undergraduate Yale in English literature and what what year uh 1980 to 1984. 80 to 84. yeah okay yeah so yeah so we we do overlap almost perfectly in terms of of of of birth date Age and 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 uh time it had only recently allowed women in um I think in about 1976 and so still a super sexist place um and uh and and you know and and a lot of casual um 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 um 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 um you know very very casually at Yale uh and there was what 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 we 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 uh a variety of psychological viewpoints mean a huge part of what fuels sexual misbehavior on campus alcoholism right yeah I mean your language I think is is an interesting difference between us I would call it um criminal activity on campus oh okay okay well I I I I'm 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 I'm wondering the parties that you're describing mean we know perfectly well that there's a party culture at American universities and that that is alcohol fueled and there's a 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 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 to to what you experienced yeah so you're I mean we're diving right into an incredibly you know vexed and uh difficult subject but I'm happy to address it so you know I and 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 um and you know this is probably one of those areas on which we might have a lot of interesting disagreements um so I would say categorically alcohol you can't blame the uh culture of sexual accepted sexual violence and sexual harassment at Yale at that time on alcohol or drugs um at all uh the what you can blame it on is institutional toleration of sexual harassment and sexual violence I mean 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 um consequences um that that restricts um 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 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 uh 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 a lengthy reputation which I didn't know till afterwards of doing this to undergraduate women and two actually graduate students um and and I tried to get accountability from the institution um decades later and and it was just covered up covered up um 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 um it was it was quite terrifying at the time um because it was in a like in no way can this situation be you know blamed on on you know anyone not know exactly what she was doing um it was a situation in which he was my uh 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 um it was a I was writing poetry I was a very talented poet I was getting lots of awards and recognition for being a poet and um 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 uh no no evaluation and I didn't come from wealthy background I had to get a scholarship to 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 I 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 um 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 um I mean eventually eventually he left but that I mean first of all I had been you know 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 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 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 um 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 the 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 uh shocking um you know assault it's it's an assault so joke 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 what it 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 not no way to minimize how existentially terrifying it is to be molested by anyone bigger than you are um who's standing between you in an exit in a 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 trying I wasn't trying to reduce what you had told me to the the mere psychological consequence of betrayal I was just are 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 be 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 you're quite right I mean so sub so the initial trauma was was just the physical you know definitely 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 um my Dean and basically the you know 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 um 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 I wanted to be okay 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 um for the next you know three decades because he was still alive and and that wasn't an option for me um and even you know like all the way so tell me tell 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 I can understand vaguely why that would have had a cascading consequence but had you continued pursuing your um 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 uh might have otherwise provided for you um well that's a good question I I guess he casts such a gigantic Shadow over the whole field um I mean he was the great Authority in Victorian studies um you know at for decades after that you know and and it was just communicated to me that I couldn't get uh a letter of recommendation I couldn't get obviously I wasn't gonna even be in the same room with him to solicit a letter of recommendation but it it was communicated to me that the the way into graduate school like if I applied to any graduate school and and they saw that he had been on my transcript they would have said why don't you have a letter from Dr blue yeah okay okay okay I see yeah yeah and what's funny because that's a glare that's a glaring Omission totally and then that would have been up for questions and and whatever he wants to say he'll say and 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 you know molested them or approached them and they'd rejected him which I had done I guess in his view um he 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 you know feminist activist non-fiction writer in a popular non-fiction 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 to college so I became a Rhodes scholar in spite of him and I went to Oxford and I'll you know fast forward so it was finally I was like almost 50 and I thought okay it's safe to resume my education and become a professor of English literature went back to Oxford in midlife I finished my d-fill um in Victorian studies and when I submitted my defill and I succeeded and I passed my academic advisor at Oxford said you you need to submit this to um a journal uh you know Victorian studies journal and and and you've got to submit and you know it's edited by Harold Bloom you know you've gotta you've gotta submit this this is you know really distinguished work and I I said I can't I can't submit it to that journal um and I had to tell her why so that late and she agreed she agreed you know that was how many years later that was like 30 years later where it can't be 30 yeah no 30 years old so as as far as you're concerned this event side tracked you into an uh my domain of academic Pursuit that was very unlike okay how much how much do you think look first of all I should say if I'm gonna push you into places that you really don't want to talk about you just tell me okay because I'll back off and I'll talk about anything I'll tell you I'm a grown-up go ahead and ask 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 yep 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 uh 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 women 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 don't sort of fry 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 okay so now you went from Yale to was it to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar okay now okay now you you said that you're Ambitions to pursue a professorship in English literature were derailed but you did get a road 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 road scholarship that's not a simple thing yeah I can answer that easily um the Rhodes scholarship committee was looking for different things um they don't they weren't narrowly focused on um you know the gateway to uh credentialing someone for Graduate Studies in English literature they were looking for leadership and you know uh um I mean obviously my grades were good overall and I was considered you know A Gifted undergraduate I had lots of letters from my other professors so it was a different uh credentials so the lack of letter from Bloom didn't 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 can imagine that because that's happened to be 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 I have something that happened now I had I had many decades of of pursuing pretty much precisely what I wanted to pursue so that's a major difference but um I have some experience with being dislocated let's say um in a manner 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 um 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 road scholarship and what did you study as a road scholar now you're at Oxford and and what was it like what was it like being at Oxford compared to being at Yale well it was pretty exhilarating for me because uh it was pure academic um how can I put it well the Oxford experience as you no doubt know is completely different from an American University in the sense that you have these tiny uh seminars you have uh tutorials with your professor your Don and your like two students or three students and the professor and um 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 and again I you know was working on Victorian studies 19th century English literature um I was working on an M Phil at that time and you know I loved it it was it was the 80s in Britain so it was cold and and gloomy and thatchery and uh and and The Graduate students weren't particularly um Central to the Oxford experience was a very undergraduate experience but so we were kind of Exiles together but it was exhilarating and the road scholarship of course what a privilege you know you're you're you're you're you're uh 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 um you know Blissful uh intellectual experience and the the seed of my first book um 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 Birch gold will help you convert an existing Ira or 401K into a tax sheltered Ira in physical precious metals with an A-Plus rating with the Better Business Bureau thousands of happy customers and countless five-star reviews you can trust Birch gold to protect your future text Jordan to 989898 to get your free info kit on gold today then talk to one of their precious metals Specialists that's Jordan to 989898 today [Music] the culture that you'd experienced at Yale that we already walked through how how different or similar was your experience on that front at Oxford now you're a little older and you're with a little older people so in principle the level of average reprehensible Behavior has decreased somewhat just on those grounds alone but were there Market differences in the in the social culture let's say and in the attitudes of the authorities that's interesting well it was still um you know 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 uh women could were not safe you know physically I mean that's just the case so even at Oxford you know certainly um rape took place with impunity uh there was one famous Professor who was always trying to seduce his undergraduates um but it was a lot you know Britain is a less violent culture in general so it didn't feel quite as systematically unsafe and and I didn't feel as I'm saying partly because it's a you know it's a yeah it's just a less violent culture um but it I you know I'm not going to say that those issues didn't warrant still very alive on campus they were um and in fact when I uh 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 of that country was the 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 it you know really rapists have impunity I can't stress that enough even now even with all the changes that that there have been in society um young women are somewhat safer on college campuses because of hard work of people like you know me and my colleagues in the 80s and 90s and early odds 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 you know raped or molested in some way and vanishingly few of them have gotten any kind of Justice at all you know from the perpetrator but moving along um I was very happy at Oxford and you know generally it was a 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 um the the image of women in in 19th century novels uh this ideal that emerged in the 19th century in well in virtually all of the great novels um you know certainly written by women but also in in Dickens and in um George Eliot uh of the this kind of passive childlike doll-like um beautiful uh kind of inert figure and and I was interested in that because this uh passive inner 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 um 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 um you know have access to education to have access to owning their own property uh so that there was a very vibrant and they were mobilizing for access to to um primary education as well so right when women were being empowered and empowering themselves to change society this inert um kind of backlash figure uh 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 tosto 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 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 and I mean Tolstoy is more of a sociologist in that regard but his female characters certainly aren't playing a secondary role even though it's it's a behind the scenes rule in some ways it's not a secondary rule at all in fact I would argue the opposite is the case in in tolstoy's world and I have no idea to what degree that was actually education Imperial Russia but I suspect it was probably the case to quite a degree yeah well I'm sure it was the case you know everywhere that women didn't have full legal rights but I think you're I think what you're saying is exactly right but it's also respectfully I think you know proofing the my thesis which is which went on to kind of morph into the thesis of the beauty myth which was my first book which is that um Britain was the place in which women were Up Above All European countries advocating for their rights legally and socially and economically therefore this um 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 um because they weren't a threat to the status quo you you described the Victorian English representation of women in 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 like what's your literary critic interpretation of the fact that that phenomena emerged phenomenon emerged yeah so I guess I focused most on um Dickens doll-like characters um but also if you look at Middle March um 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 um you know Dorothea kasabin who's complex and um has it rich in our life and is you know quite a revolutionary in her own right trying to change society um and then her kind of antagonist her antagonist who's this kind of you know pretty usually blonde um passive manipulative superficial character and you see that kind of dialectic in other novels at that time but also just in in popular culture I mean it was the dawn of um the dawn of of popular uh you know pop culture in the sense of lithography and um pretty soon photography by the 1840s 1850s and so you're also getting these Beauty ideals uh which were impossible of you know 17-inch waists corsets in which women couldn't breathe um literally the fashion of the middle of the 19th century in contrast to just like the 1820s 18 teens where you know Jane Austen's time women could move around right they could breathe they could walk they could argue they could uh you know 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 you know setting You Up in Flames got too near the fire uh layers of petticoats um as I mentioned Walden corsets that really didn't let you take a deep breath of you know clothing that weighed several pounds just you know in terms of the weight of of what you had to wear changes of clothes multiple times a day if you're middle class um the fact that you're dragging your skirts through kind of manure and mud uh all of this in interestingly um this kind of hampering fashion uh came about at just those decades in which women were asking let me ask you a question about that a couple of questions about that um so the first I have two very different questions the first is is that syphilis really became a widespread Public Health concern amongst the victorians and it was a very Dreadful disease and and took a very large number of forms and also was transmissible from mother to child and interestingly enough um the Europeans when they hit the Western Hemisphere 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 percent of the Native community and the native Community returned the favor in very minor ways one of which apparently was syphilis and 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 and so that's one question another question is the Victorian era was um 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 these this encumbrance in the name of beauty because they had the financial resources to sustain it you know there's there's an example of that biologically would be in principle would be the peacock's tale 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 and it seems to me that some of those Victorian accesses are reasonably understood on the biological front as manifestations of that kind of um what would you say well it's 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 uh 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 and and socially in Victorian England in particular and what do you think about the excess resource hypothesis on the Victorian outfitting front and people were getting quite Rich at that point and that was certainly one way of displaying it right yeah I understand um your questions so certainly you're absolutely right about the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea um as very fundamental to social concerns around sexuality in Britain in the 19th century absolutely and that was you know the source of the contagious diseases acts was this argument by the state and I think you know I think I I think it my most recent book outrageous which addresses this the book before my last one is about how how 19th century um viral uh epidemics including um 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 um 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 states it's the state's role to step into what had been very personal spaces and um and mediate this for the public good right we've seen that there's a there's an emergent literature on the political biological front indicating that one of the best predictors of authoritarian political beliefs in every 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 0.6 it's an unbelievably powerful relationship and it seems like an extension of what's the What's called the behavioral immune system and it can really get going well we saw that during covid right with 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 in the hospitals into more broad ethnic cleansing all the language they used was parasitism discussed contamination all disease Associated right yeah yeah so it's a very powerful motivational system when it gets activated absolutely no question you know it's so interesting to take care of your analysis from a psychological point of view and I know there's been important psychological work done on disgust um I 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 um that created a model in Western history that allowed later regimes to to emulate the model of kind of narrating the danger of infectious diseases certainly using that element of disgust and contamination and 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 um 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 you know then later other uh exploiters of this discourse um either consciously or not reference to remembered the effectiveness of of the states that being 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 um basil gets 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 um 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 um and the the metaphor that I look at then is the like the internet right you know they it established this idea that there's a Commons between us uh that can be contaminated from one person's private space to another person's private space and therefore the state needs to patrol and please the commons Elysium health is dedicated to tackling the biggest challenge in health aging and they make the benefits of Aging research accessible to 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life to change how quickly you age in honor of DNA day for a limited time Elysium is offering 15 off site-wide on all Elysium products go to elysiumhealth.com Jordan and enter code dnad23 at checkout to claim this offer before midnight on April 27th that's elysiumhealth.com Jordan enter code dnad23 for 15 off yeah well there's a real analog between the spread of information and the spread of viruses which is obviously why we say such things as it went viral it went viral so right right well and there's a real tension uh in human discourse that seems to be key to the distinction between conservatives and liberals is the conservatives tend to be more discussed 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 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 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 uh probability of genuine 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 and 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 derived 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 our absolute bloody catastrophe and could have been in well an apocalyptic catastrophe although we 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 ideation land the physical front and people certainly differ widely in their instinctive reactions to that too and so um IQ is actually associated with disgust sensitivity as it turns out so the lower your IQ the more discussed sensitive you are now the effect isn't walloping but it's not negative well you can also understand that 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 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 I a thousand percent so to to move up to the 20th century um and and this brings us kind of to my more recent work um absolutely there's a fantastic book called racial hygiene and of course the classic the Nazi doctors that makes just this point that um before there were or before the Nazis were even in power there was this very effective Public Health campaign that enlisted just like in the last few years um Medical Professional associations uh enlisted doctors um you know played on their desire for status and recognition and they were kind of corralled into uh 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 uh yeah well that the whole doctrine of racial Purity and blood Purity which was a Hallmark of Hitler's um populist attractiveness let's say was all contamination language absolutely I read Hitler's table talk for example it's very interesting book so it's a collection of his spontaneous discourse at dinner time over about a four year period and it's it's absolutely 100 percent saturated it's disgust-oriented language and he bathed four or five times a day oh my God it's quite 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 discussed axis and the the activation of what's being described as the extended immune system and so a discussed response is part of the behavioral immune system right 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 a behavioral immune system and if it gets politicized in a particularly pathological way you don't want to be in the category of contaminant to put it that way no mercy there's no mercy right there's no mercy weirdly enough too you know um when when the discussed 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 but 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 council 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 cancer culture which is a form of disgust related shunning okay totally yeah you anticipated what I was going to say I think in recent memory before 2020 indeed it was the right that was more reactive to not wanting to be and they used language like this in the 80s and it wasn't pretty you know I remember in the AIDS epidemic it was conservatives talking about um infectious the fear of infection from homosexuals or you know and it was ideological infection cultural infection as well as a fear which was irrational of physical infection um but but indeed the the polls had completely flipped um 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 um you know more open to Freedom right civil Free Speech the Free Speech movement uh and it was conservatives who were you know concerned about porousness if you like you know ideologically and in on a community level maybe even on a personal level Purity um and and absolutely in the last three years I agree with you like Amenia like tulip media like you know I keep going back to um extraordinary popular delusions The Madness of crowds you know a delusion has come upon 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 more shunning 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 uh you know well 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 some 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's 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 you know I don't I because I have no idea what to make of it I don't know I'm not I I'm not persuaded because you know the change is happening to to everyone and and yet the people who are remaining open-minded and my experience and who are willing to engage with the facts that are being brought forward by credible people that contradict the dominant narrative um are on our conservatives and Libertarians right now and yeah no 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 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 funnest 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 they 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 B pulling in the largest audiences I mean I 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 um they're more rigid and people who are rigid I mean going back to Charlie Chaplin and you know the The Great Dictator you know rigidity is always funny you know it needs to have fun poked at it um 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 you know in terms of my most recent work they're not willing to admit that they've been part of a you know 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 um roll out of the these mandates the MRNA injections um which my team of experts has found to be so very deadly and so very damaging so you know in a situation like that grown-ups say um okay you know we've got to re-examine 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 and they created they they welcomed a two-tier Society in you know erected in the space of less than two years that ostracized a whole sector of people and got them kicked out of their jobs um prevented kids who you know didn't have this injection from going to school in some states um you know mandated people to to their detriment and you know made people like their travel rates immensely in Canada immensely staggering manner it's shocking I can't go to 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 so the left betrayed all of its most cherished ideals and won't even space that so there's a gap gaping moral hole in the center of culture on the left um and until they recognized it and reckon with it and say oh my God you know we we became oppressors we became the equivalent of racist you know we we abandoned our our best ideals we became dogmatists and fundamentalists and and we abandoned science we abandoned compassion until they're able to do that um they 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 and literacy I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump started 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 percent of scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung amazing here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the price of Johann gooper 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 to civilization itself it is the most influential book in all history and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that okay so there's a lot of there's a lot to delve into there I I wanted to do that I want to go back to your book The Beauty myth and I want to um I want to say a few things on the beauty front and gather your reactions to those and um and I also am interested in I would say the motivations behind writing that book in relationship to the experiences that we already described so I spend a lot of time studying people like David Buss and bus is a very good example an evolutionary psychologist and 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 uh 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 zero 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 meet across hierarchies in 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 neotni and it's such a pervasive tendency that it even characterizes animated characters as uh Stephen J Gould was at pains to establish it's quite comical but one of the Hallmarks of cuteness is of babyishness of face and you can see that in the like plush toys and the sorts of things that are often bought as dolls for kids or 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 um 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. um 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 straitjacket that's placed on women in terms of the what the ideal of their sexual self-presentation mission right so thank you for asking you may be right it may actually have been 91 um came out first in Britain and then in the United States so respectfully I'm familiar with these arguments and uh respectfully I'm very familiar with David buss's work and I I think that it's fundamentally flawed and I'll I'll get to why um so first let me concede um you know of course uh it's it's thoroughly documented that there are markers of um health and attractiveness uh Health infertility that are often cross-cultural um and certainly symmetrical features um you know Rosy Skin showing good circulation you know youth uh all of those are kind of transcendental um markers for attractiveness however one giant intellectual flaw respectfully in um 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 um test for what women find attractive in men they they project or they construct kind of experiments or surveys that prove tendentiously in my view that women find wealth uh or professional accomplishment attractive and that that kind of substitutes for physical Beauty but they don't ask women who are heterosexual um 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 you know symmetry they would find maybe you know sorry penis size um you know they would find maybe a a muscle tone that shows that they can kind of effectively you know impregnate a woman they they would probably find height as a marker right and it's notable to me like they they have 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 the the 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 tonight because to me that's also a conceptual flaw um 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 um so I I guess to me the whole field of evolutionary biological studies that conclude that sexual attractiveness is a is is kind of um gendered female and uh and that for males there are other proxies for sexual attractiveness is really convenient for men um because they don't have to come up against the raw brief fact that there are you know physical things women evaluate men for if they're heterosexual just like their physical things men 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 an 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 below average in attractiveness and women rate 80 percent of men as below average in physical attractiveness and well and and like I am I I want to be absolutely 100 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 totally the reason that women totally disagree with you I think that's out of date respectfully but I'll wait for you to finish okay well okay 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 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 Aid 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 of 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 let me just recognize that women are more at risk on the sexual and reproductive front I mean I recognize what you're saying there um I guess what I would say is there are as many I 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 uh 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 10 dashes and they're always talking about circumstances that no longer exist historically so um you know you could just as easily draw on I believe it's Helen Fisher who uh or other feminist evolutionary biologists who make the case that um women are best served by adultery because they're getting um a good range of sperm you know and the the best suited sperm is the is the sperms that doesn't count for that does account for uh 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 in second rate and then to change 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 it kind of loves this idea of the young fertile female who needs to find that unattractive older wealthy man um who happens to be a scientist 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 the species um so the reason I find these tendentious and and especially you know this notion of uh women optimizing the material the value of their partner to make up for their reproductive deficits um is that respectfully it's it's out of date uh 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 um 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 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 um 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 or considered really attractive to young men now so that's the 21st century phenomenon it never used to exist and um 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 uh is is is is is impeding your ability to kind of go it on your own totally agree with that um 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 gonna kind of go down the 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 um 21st century economic uh opportunities have made it possible to be an affluent single mom hire a caregiver or hire you know 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 is what we've seen results 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 21st century Society so I think the great unspoken or under analyzed phenomenon of 21st century is the deconstruction of the value of men um which completely upends The evolutionary biologists kind of narrative about men and women and you know respectfully to kind of end 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 um they do have value but it's not going to be the same thing where women could go to love them it's an interesting that's an interesting sub-topic because no 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 um in fact I think I have more female viewers than average by that Baseline standard I mean 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 while the probability that you're right and four billion people are wrong is one in four 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 of Cruz as men mature so what do you what do you think of that as attack I mean I I I want to thank you for my marriage because you are my husband's he said tell him he's my spirit animal you are one of my husband's kind of um you know role models and uh 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 um it was it's really attractive um so a hundred percent I agree with you why was it attractive why was it attractive so now I'm gonna throw a little bit of a wrench in your argument it was attractive to me because everyone likes some someone who is competent enough to you know make money I guess um at whatever level they're making money it shows that they're not a feckless immature you know dependent person uh and Everyone likes someone who can look after them but what I'm gonna 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 and that's not attractive because women you know I think that's the attractiveness of reciprocity you know it was 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 man will appreciate women who pick up a check is not necessarily because it's an indication of their confidence 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 no I I don't know and I don't know of any research that pertains specifically to that issue right I guess what I'm saying to jump in is that um 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 um contribute to to the household you know that doll-like you know what is her name um Twiggy like you know inert uh voiceless person I mean men who are competent May kind of give it a pat ISS 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 do you think that's a historical transformation or do you think it's more a return to something approximating Eternal Norm because here's something interesting for example the the name Eve the Hebrew original Hebrew term for the name Eve which unfortunately I can't remember at the moment means 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 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 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 happening from time to time and 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 um ideal uh and it is only in the last 150 years or 200 years that um the Industrial Revolution even made it possible to have what you described earlier which is thorsten veblen's um description of a kind of doll-like you know middle class middle class woman whose only role is to be dressed and displayed and to display the wealth of her her spouse um that is recent and before the Industrial Revolution and in the you know in America you know which is why America is so interesting and American women are all around the world until recently admired as you know sexy Independent Women right is is you needed a partner who could you know if you're going west who could use a rifle if the Native Americans came to the homestead when the man was out hunting or if you were you know uh 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 um 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 so absolutely women and this goes back to the Old Testament you know that the value of a woman of Valor her prices above rubies and then it iterates all the things she does she we you know she weaves cloths she sells things to bring her you know in income for the household she's she's got so many areas of economic activity as well as moral activity um and that's been true for most of human history so those those things were always you know part of the marital equation before the 19th century you know not just is she beautiful uh conventionally physically but um what are her skill sets how does she embroider how does she cook you know how can she can she keep people alive um and so I'm just agreeing with you about that so then I'm just like updating it for a contemporary moment in which uh people live longer than ever um arguably uh healthy women past their child bearing years of the ability like you know we were all kind of decrepit crones you know by now women um past their child bearing years and and that's no longer the case because of changes in health and and I don't know what else and then um also the economic you know potential of women as I mentioned earlier has changed so much at least women who are middle or upper middle class um that that I think effectively updates your um your analysis but I love the place you're landing on which is um good meeting 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 they challenged the the the heroine to the Limit like it was all about the play the verbal play right the the provocation the back and forth you know no one wanted to marry that you know sober industrious guy who just provided you always wanted to marry the The Dashing hero who um you know I mean that classic scene of any romance movie based on these Austin 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 wanted a maid is someone who will challenge you it's so you grow and you're always learning yeah well it's also very it's also very useful to note I would say biologically 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 that marker in in and of itself that psychological transformation is occurring at the optimized rate and it's very useful to know that 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 who 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 and as you're describing this I also note I think you should read my book on the vagina which is a sequel to my book The Beauty myth because if you haven't yet um that is so much a part of women's arousal like women will describe if you ask women a woman what is sexy a man being funny is way at the top of this and why why is it sexy for a man to be funny because um women's kind of dopamine circuit is directly connected to their sexual response right and and so if someone's like exciting and this is why you know the heroes are always kind of taking women on adventures and and like your your whole kind of dopamine circuit which is so connected in women's sexual response is not activated by the boring guy who never who's on the couch who's you know channel surfing 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 um because of those pleasure centers being activated so really interesting right but that's different than just taking out like the boring guy who's a really interesting one because the thing about comedians is that they 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 to the niceties of time and place because your 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 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 that instinct for play is so deep that it actually deactivates the musculature and so it's not something 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 interesting to hear 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 a disheartening experiences that you had there that that derailed your central intellectual interest and and then you spent decades in the hinderlands 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 what 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 Peterson 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 um I was aware that I considered myself smart and an intellectual uh and I was constantly being objectified you know 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 you know Master it and integrate it to some extent so it was an analysis of objectification let's say yeah I don't think it was an analysis of sexual assault because I don't think objectification and sexual assaults are the same thing um but I 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 um and 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 um because they're on a Continuum and and the body responds to these things the way the body responds to torture or to war um and lots of good science has emerged about that um one really wonderful book is the body keeps score about trauma um right exactly so and then about kind of the Hinterlands I mean I I can't complain about my career uh having I mean it got derailed um 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 uh 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 um you know I got to be a famous public intellectual uh it wasn't my first choice right so I guess that's just what God had in store for me but it 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 your 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 um 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 um 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 surprised 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 I agree with the psychogenic epidemic of totalitarian impulse and the 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 uh so I'm not so much oh yes I'm not so much Persona non-grad as I once was so that's an interesting thing to see um so anyways we're gonna flip over to the Daily wear plus side and uh 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 guest on dailywireplus.com

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 783,645

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: XC-SdRzRJuU

Length: 109min 5sec (6545 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 24 2023