Episode 297: Throuple Trouble (with Helen Lewis)

Summary

Blocked and Reported Episode 297: "Throuple Trouble" (with Helen Lewis)

Date: February 28, 2026
Hosts: Katie Herzog & Guest Host Helen Lewis
(Jesse Singal absent, referenced)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Katie Herzog welcomes back Atlantic staff writer and author Helen Lewis to discuss a variety of provocative, controversial, and darkly funny internet stories, both American and British. The main topics include a UK Tourette's scandal at the BAFTAs, the controversy around British "grooming gangs" and media coverage, and a deep-dive into Lindy West's new memoir on polyamory and contemporary feminism. The show features the pair’s trademark sarcastic, culture-war savvy banter and liberal use of gallows humor, with memorable quotes and thoughtful pushback on prevailing internet narratives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Helen’s US Trip, San Francisco, & Housing Dystopias (00:09–03:10)

• Helen’s impressions of San Francisco’s changing street life, from “post-zombie apocalypse” emptiness to recent attempts at revitalization.
  • “The downtown looked like a kind of post zombie apocalypse... apart from these really disturbed and troubled people.” (Helen Lewis, 01:13)
• Notable issue: Tech workers living in RVs on the streets due to unaffordable housing.
  • “These are not...homeless coders.” (Katie Herzog, 02:06)
• Comparison of London vs. San Francisco housing prices
  • “The average house price in Marin county… is over $2 million… The average British house price, even in London, is £500,000.” (Helen Lewis, 02:50)

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2. The BAFTA Tourette’s Scandal & The Cross-Cultural Panic (04:09–26:07)

Incident Recap & Tourette’s Explanation

• British man John Davidson (with Tourette’s and the rare symptom coprolalia) involuntarily shouts a racial slur at Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo while on stage at the BAFTAs.
• Helen contextualizes Davidson’s long public profile, explaining the mechanics and devastating social consequences of his condition.
  • “It's a...not only is it an involuntary tick...but also the whole point...is you say literally the worst thing you could possibly say.” (Helen Lewis, 05:11)
• Classic British Tourette’s documentary “John’s Not Mad” (BBC, late '80s); Davidson's decades-long presence in UK culture.
• Tourette’s media portrayal—humorous but tragic, disturbing, and stigmatized.
  • “If you get a lot of people with Tourette's together, they can kind of set each other off. Like a little chorus.” (Helen Lewis, 07:47)
  • “Your dog's got ginger pubes!...your dog's got tits!” (Helen Lewis, 07:54)

Media & Celebrity Responses

• Many observers, especially Americans, misunderstand the involuntary nature of Tourette’s, leading to accusations of intentional racism.
  • Jamie Foxx: “‘Out of all the words, you could have said Tourette’s made you say that? Nah, he meant that shit. Unacceptable.’” (Jamie Foxx on Instagram, quoted at 13:22)
  • Katie: “This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what Tourette’s is.”
• Helen explains the neurology ("two communication systems in the brain"), and how extreme tics emerge.
• Many UK observers and disability activists see the panic as lacking nuance and context.

Cultural & Editorial Handling

• BBC’s controversial failure to edit out the tirade from the broadcast—differing standards versus the US.
• No clear “good” solution: either confront Black celebrities with abuse, or cloak disabled individuals from public life.
  • “There are two things...either we tell black celebrities...they've got to put up with...having racial slurs shouted at them, or...tell a disabled guy that he has to be locked in a cupboard...” (Helen Lewis, 11:12)
• Satirical online responses (“If I had Tourette’s I’d just shout ‘trans rights’...because I’m a good person” (Helen Lewis, 24:12)), accidental hilarity (Google blurb: “See more on n-words”), and the complexity of public accommodations and disability.

Broader Lessons

• “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” (Helen Lewis, 36:55)
• The segment underscores the cultural gap between US and UK discourse on race, class, and disability.
  • “Americans took the racial insult as being the most important thing, whereas Brits...were more likely to look at it from a class-based perspective.” (Helen Lewis, 18:16)

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3. UK Grooming Gangs Controversy & Internet Reactions (27:40–47:46)

The Allegations

• Viral statement from MP Rupert Lowe’s “rape inquiry” making wild claims: extreme gang rape, torture, murders, and forced bestiality by police-protected Pakistani-heritage gangs.
• Katie’s initial reaction: skepticism ("My first thought...what kind of dog? And B, there's no way this happened. And yet no one on X seemed to be displaying the slightest hint of doubt." (Katie, 28:47)), concern about “satanic panic” vibes.

Helen’s Contextualization & Analysis

• Helen details the murky nature of UK inquiries and skepticism about the reliability/ulterior motives of Lowe’s project (a right-wing figure with ties to Musk/Farage).
  • "[Rupert Lowe] both claims that the media won't cover it, but he also won't let journalists into any of the sessions." (Helen Lewis, 32:33)
• The distortion of statistics on rape in England; conflation of reporting/legal reform with actual crime increase.
• Deep issues: media amplification, far-right focus on immigrants, social media incentives for sensationalized, unverifiable stories.
• The risk of undermining real survivors: “By putting this out there...he’s diminishing the seriousness of the actual rape gangs themselves.” (Katie Herzog, 37:13)

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4. Immigration, Cultural Difference, and Internet Racism (41:38–46:12)

• Hostile and misleading anti-immigration narratives online: conflation of crime with shifting demographics.
• Power Bottom Dad’s viral post on UK rape statistics is debunked.
• Context on UK vs. US immigrant demographics, integration challenges, and how stress, insularity, and social conservatism among some immigrant communities increase interpersonal and intergenerational difficulties.
  • “Some British Asian communities score higher on social conservatism and religiosity than their origin communities back in Southeast Asia.” (Helen Lewis, 44:26)

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5. Fat Positivity, Polyamory, and Lindy West’s New Memoir "Adult Braces" (49:56–81:17)

Setting the Scene

• Lindy West: Former Stranger/Jezebel/NYT writer, prominent 2010s fat acceptance/feminist voice, memoirist, and TV showrunner ("Shrill").
• West’s prominence in Seattle’s cultural scene, her family’s local celebrity, past controversies (with Dan Savage, with other media figures including Katie herself).

Memoir Dissection: Polyamory & Relationship Dynamics

• Memoir reveals Lindy’s “fairy tale” marriage was always non-monogamous, initially at husband Aham’s insistence.
  • “Her father died. They reconnected. He had a stipulation…their relationship had to be non-monogamous and she didn't want this. But she grudgingly went along…” (Katie Herzog, 55:34)
• Throuple situation emerges with Roya (slim, conventionally attractive) as third member. Book shifts from defiant positivity to a more bleak, muddied reality of unmet emotional and financial needs, chronic disappointment, unreciprocated attraction.
  • “He's got a wife who's got the big high powered job and then he's got like the sort of wife for fun and who quit her job.” (Helen Lewis, 65:08)
  • “Dude, my culture is not your costume. If you're going to talk like that, if you're going to call yourself queer, put a dick in your ass. Having two girlfriends doesn't make you queer.” (Katie Herzog, 66:43)

Money, Identity, and Memoir Reliability

• Recurring themes: financial instability despite public success, confusion around identities (Aham’s pronouns, sexual orientation), and journalistic skepticism about memoir "truth."
  • “If you write a memoir and your memo reveals...everything that you said before was maybe not entirely true, why should we believe you now?” (Katie Herzog, 71:13)
• The problem of influencer confessionals vs. actual reporting/detail.
  • “But she's basically an influencer, isn’t she?...they’re doing PR for the version of themselves." (Helen Lewis, 73:07)

Fat Positivity & Ozempic Era

• Intimate, at times painful reflection on fatness—paradoxically both a source of stigma and a career asset in the current cultural moment.
  • “She has benefited from her fatness in a way that she wouldn't have if she were born 10 or 20 years earlier…being unapologetically fat brought her fans and attention.” (Katie Herzog, 61:02)
• Skepticism from both hosts on Lindy’s principled refusal to take weight loss drugs (Ozempic et al.)
  • “Her view, which is that they’re kind of immoral...if you really believe that the side effects for GLP1s are that bad, you also wouldn’t vaccinate your kids.” (Helen Lewis, 62:34)
• Comparison to addiction models and resistance to pharmaceutical solutions.

Reflections on 2010s Feminism, Online Culture, & The Limits of Auto-memoir

• The “first-person industrial complex” and why culture-warring, navel-gazing memoirs feel so played out.
  • “It is not a nourishing way to be...imagine driving all the way through [America] and not being super interested in other people.” (Helen Lewis, 74:22)
  • “You go on a road trip across America, come back with the conclusion that you were right.” (Helen Lewis, 80:18)
• Both hosts express empathy for West’s struggles but skepticism about the stated happiness in her "throuple" and doubts about whether her journey is empowering or simply tragicomic.

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• “I think it's podcasters disease in many ways.” (Helen Lewis on Tourette’s, 05:53)
• “It was one of those classic things...why won’t journalists just take this on trust and uncritically report it?” (Helen Lewis on the rape inquiry, 32:56)
• “If I had Tourette’s, my tics would be shouting ‘trans rights!’...Because I’m a good person.” (Helen Lewis, 24:12)
• "[Lindy’s husband] seems to treat polyamory as though it's an orientation rather than a lifestyle...I'm poly, not I made the choice to fuck other people." (Katie Herzog, 58:20)
• “If you write a memoir and your memo reveals that everything that you said before was maybe not entirely true, why should we believe you now?” (Katie Herzog, 71:22)
• "Being unapologetically, unapologetically fat brought her fans and attention." (Katie Herzog, 61:02)
• "She should find herself a nice young man who will love her just. And just her. And if she just needs to be a boring, monogamous, straight woman...be subversive. It's fine!" (Helen Lewis, 80:24)

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Important Segments – Timestamps

• SF, housing & tech: 00:09–03:10
• BAFTA Tourette’s incident: 04:09–26:07
• Grooming gang allegations: 27:40–47:46
• Stats, context, and internet racism: 41:38–46:12
• Lindy West, 2010s feminism & Throuple Trouble: 49:56–81:17

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Episode Tone & Language

• Blunt, sarcastic, analytical, and irreverent
• Willingness to poke fun at both themselves and the culture-warriors around them
• British/American cross-cultural humor and snark
• Unfiltered talk about sex, disability, and social taboos

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Conclusion

The episode offers a witty yet deeply skeptical snapshot of modern culture-war internet, with much-needed context about both British and American public life. The hosts tackle outrage cycles, the dangers of sensationalized reporting, the messy reality of polyamory, and the limits of social justice-driven personal storytelling—always questioning surface narratives, and always with an eye for the absurd.

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Further Discussion & Q&A (For Primos)

Helen sticks around (post-episode) for primo subscriber questions on these and related topics. Join at blockedandreported.org for bonus content and community discussion.

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Transcript

[Helen Lewis]

Foreign.

[Katie Herzog]

Welcome to Blocked and Reported. I'm Katie Herzog. And joining me while Jesse is backseat driving a Waymo around San Francisco, we have Helen Lewis. Helen, welcome back.

[Helen Lewis]

Hello. I'm very excited to be here. It is. Yeah. I mean, I was with Jesse last week, so it feels like I've got custody of you on, like. Oh, you've got custody of me on different weekends, basically.

[Katie Herzog]

You know what? It is unfair to me that you and Jesse have seen each other in person and you and I are only Internet friends.

[Helen Lewis]

I know one day I'll make it to the Pacific Northwest, but you should. They put it a long way away from England, which was cruel of them. Like, that was that. Yeah, I'm angry with God about that one.

[Katie Herzog]

They did. I also hope to get to England at some point, but not until moose die. So it's going to be like 20 years.

[Helen Lewis]

Well, we can only hope, maybe 30.

[Katie Herzog]

Okay, Helen, welcome back. You need no introduction, but I'm going to give you one anyway. Helen Lewis is a staff writer at the Atlantic, the author of, among others, the 2025 book, the Genius Myth, and the Person Everyone Wishes hosted this podcast. So, Helen, you're just back from the U.S. how was your trip?

[Helen Lewis]

I actually really liked it the first time I went to San Francisco a year ago. I was really freaked out by it. I was like, where is everyone? The downtown looked like a kind of post zombie apocalypse. Right. Like, it was just empty apart from these really disturbed and troubled people.

[Katie Herzog]

The Fentanyl lean, I'm familiar.

[Helen Lewis]

Right. A lot of that and a lot of shopping carts slumping, which was just really horrible because they would. Those were the only people who were out on the streets. And I don't know whether or not it's. So Daniel Lurie, the mayor, has been in for a little while now. He's had a big plan to, like, rejuvenate the downtown, get shoppers and tourists back. But the last time I. The last two times I've been there, it has felt more like, you know, a normal city. But that has got some problems. Right. But it is weird. So I was staying in Mountain View for the conference, and they're like RVs parked on the road. And these. I was like, what these for? And they're for tech workers who just can't afford to. Yeah. Like, so.

[Katie Herzog]

Wow. So these are. These are not. These are not homeless? Well, I guess they are homeless people, but they're homeless coders.

[Helen Lewis]

Right. But, like, presumably people who are, you know, either they're on like an HB one And they just want to try and save as much money before they get kicked out. Or they're people who, like, haven't been able to get together a deposit despite working in a tech job. But yeah, no, the people coming out of them did not look like they were on their uppers. They looked like people who were just working a normal job. But having to live in a camper van in the back streets of Mountain

[Katie Herzog]

View, that's van life. Maybe they are preparing for the inevitable AI apocalypse. They're just going to work and then move back into the RV because that's all they'll be able to afford.

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah, well, I mean, California housing is probably sort of. The apocalypse has already happened. Right?

[Katie Herzog]

That's true.

[Helen Lewis]

I was.

[Katie Herzog]

What's more expensive, London or San Francisco?

[Helen Lewis]

Oh, San Francisco. Like the average house price in Marin county, just across the bay, is over $2 million. And that's the. That's the average. Whereas the average British house price, even In London is £500,000.

[Katie Herzog]

Really? Around steel. But you do make British money. Not you, but other people do make British money, so.

[Helen Lewis]

Oh, yeah. I mean, outside of London, England, the rest of. In the country is as poor as Mississippi. Right. It's like, it's in terms of salary, so it's hard to.

[Katie Herzog]

But how's the literacy rate?

[Helen Lewis]

There's a considerably few of banjos here, which I'm in favor of, but I can't comment on anything else. But yeah, so I kind of. California has grown on me a little bit after not initially liking it. And I was worried at the conference that. Because I thought Jesse was kind of the only person that I knew. And I really worried it was gonna be like my first day of school and I was gonna like, have to just kind of hang around with him at the lunch table and be like,

[Katie Herzog]

yeah, and it's Jesse. So it's like the worst. It's like you have the worst friend. You've saddled yourself with the biggest loser at the tech conference.

[Helen Lewis]

No, they love Jesse. He did a session on misinformation and it was like. It was very well attended and it didn't turn into like a group therapy session about people's problems with Ben Collins. It was just. It was just a really interesting. Yeah, right. It was just a really interesting kind of discussion from lots of academics and journalists. No, it was good.

[Katie Herzog]

All right, well, that's enough about Jesse. We have a lot to talk about today. In the second half of the show, we're going to be discussing 2010's feminism and the soon to be released Throuple Memoir by Lindy West. Helen is also going to stay on after the free show to answer questions submitted by our primo subscribers. But before we get to that, Helen, a lot has happened on your little island in the past few weeks. Prince Andrew was arrested. You wrote a piece about that in the Atlantic. So is Peter Mandelson, the former UK ambassador to the us, both implicated in the Epstein files. There's also the Rotherham rape inquiry. I want to get your take on that in a bit. But the most important story coming out of the UK is that a man with Tourette's syndrome shouted a racial slur, the bad one, at Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo at the baftas while they were on stage presenting an award. And I wanted to talk to you about this specifically because you've written about Tourette's. So let's start with that. Now, Jessica, the 80s baby explained to me that there's a very important backstory here that Americans probably don't understand. So can you explain that?

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah, I. So I caught up with this on Sunday night, San Francisco time, just before getting on my plane. So it had already happened on British time Sunday night. And then the Americans got a free whack at it for several hours when all the Brits had gone to bed, which I think was. Was bad for the discourse because the two things emerged. One was that a lot of people commenting, particularly people commenting from like, you know, like a race commentator perspective, right? That's how they see themselves as somebody who comments on black issues, didn't really understand what Tourette's is. That was another problem. And so they didn't understand that it's like an. It's a. Not only is it an involuntary tick if you've got coprolalia, which relatively few people with Tourette's have, but also the whole point of it is you say like, literally the worst thing that you could possibly say. So you walk into the tsa, check in line and you go like, I've got a bomb. Or, you know, whatever. Or like you show someone shows you their adorable new baby and you go, got a fat face. You know, don't think I'm really the father. You know, like most socially inappropriate thing you can is. Is exactly how it works, right? So I think I might have that. I think it's podcasters disease in many ways. So it's not a coincidence that he, like, he said it to act two black actors, because it'd be like, what is the exact worst thing that you could Say when you see two black actors, right? And he said it.

[Katie Herzog]

And so he is named. What's his name?

[Helen Lewis]

He's John Davidson.

[Katie Herzog]

Right.

[Helen Lewis]

And this was the second part of it. So Kat Rosenfeld wrote about it in the free press, and I was kind of surprised because she said, you know, once when I found out why John Davidson was at the BAFTAs, my soul left my body. And that said to me that I think if, you know, if someone as well informed as Kat had not kind of got the backstory to this, then people were coming to this without a lot of really, the, like, the necessary information to make sense of it.

[Katie Herzog]

He's not a known figure in the us, Right, Exactly.

[Helen Lewis]

So he's a Scottish guy who has been the subject of multiple BBC documentaries. The first one was called John's Not Mad, which was in, like, 1988, 89.

[Katie Herzog]

And mad in this case, does that mean crazy or angry?

[Helen Lewis]

Crazy.

[Katie Herzog]

Okay. Yeah.

[Helen Lewis]

Like, John's not. John's not insane, essentially. And it's one of the. I mean, if you watch it, it's such. Like a window into a golden age of lost accents. But essentially it's about. He lives in this relatively small Scottish city, and he's got one of those great Scottish acc. He just shouts out socially inappropriate things. And there's quite a sweet scene where they go to the Tourette's support group, and one of the things that also happens with people is they get echolalia, so they shout out things that they've heard other people shout. So unfortunately, if you get a lot of people.

[Katie Herzog]

Like a very filthy parrot, right?

[Helen Lewis]

But if you get a lot of people with Tourette's together, they can kind of set each other off. Like a little chorus. But it's. So it's. Which is quite sweet. They're all shouting like, your dog's got ginger pubes. No, someone. Your dog's got tits is one of them. And then there's another one that says, you've dyed your pubes ginger. And then the support worker then tries to say, you can claim incapacity benefit. And she ends up saying, capacity. And they all fall about laughing because they're like, oh, Miss. Miss. Like, you've called it off us, Miss. And I think, you know, there's a. There's a real thing in British culture of like, that. Not. It's the way the documentary presents it is. It's. It's like a burden for John, right? Like, this is just. And the film that he was there for, for the baftas, it's made it out of. It's called I Swear. And it's about, you know, the fact he goes to court, for example, to testify and he says, you know, I promise to tell the truth. No, I won't. And the judge just. The judge won't listen to him and take him seriously. He gets terribly beaten up because he accidentally sexually harasses a woman and then her boyfriend comes and like, beats him to within. It's for her life. It's not funny.

[Katie Herzog]

And yet I can't stop laughing.

[Helen Lewis]

No, it is funny. And like, because you talk to people with. I interviewed. For the first piece, I interviewed a guy called Glen Cooney, who's got Tourette's. And he said, you know, I just can't help but laugh at it because the tics are so absurd. So he's like, I saw a Chinese woman in the supermarket. And he said. And I went, konnichiwa. I know that's Japanese. In my conscious brain, I know that's Japanese.

[Katie Herzog]

You start that piece with this great line. Halfway through our conversation, Glenn Cooney calls me a four letter word often cited as the most offensive in the English language. But that's okay. He doesn't mean it. Was he Australian?

[Helen Lewis]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, also very Scottish as well. Like the C word is a. Is a. Is like an affectionate word. But that was the thing that kind of influenced me because I. And I think he might have called me fat as well. But like, you know, he's got Tourette's, he can't help it.

[Katie Herzog]

Yeah, and so there's a greater awareness of this in the UK in part because of this particular man.

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah, exactly.

[Katie Herzog]

Who called Michael B. Jordan. Slur.

[Helen Lewis]

Right. And there was a series of Big Brother, our reality TV show, with a guy called Pete who also had.

[Katie Herzog]

Do you only have one reality TV show?

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah, it's our one. The allocated one by quota. But like, that's the original one here, right? That's like the 1999, very first one. And Pete won it. And the other thing is that, you know, this guy's got an obe, which is a.

[Katie Herzog]

Which is a British Empire Order of the British Empire.

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah. So he went to visit the Queen and he by all accounts shouted, fuck the Queen. Fuck the Queen.

[Katie Herzog]

And that's why the Queen's dead.

[Helen Lewis]

No, that was Liz Truss that killed the Queen. And then he called. He called now King Charles a fucking parasite.

[Katie Herzog]

Fair.

[Helen Lewis]

You know, and the thing is that because she'd been forewarned, and frankly, I think the Queen had heard a lot worse, she kind of just Styled it

[Katie Herzog]

out probably from Prince Harry.

[Helen Lewis]

Right. So that's the. To me is a really interesting set of questions about this, is that everybody's sort of searching for, like, were people briefed? Was there a microphone near him? Like, should the BBC have edited out every story in Britain that becomes a controversy eventually becomes a BBC controversy? And my take on why that happened in this case is that there were lots of people who couldn't manage the competing rights in this case. So there's two things. One of which has got to happen is one, we've either got to tell black celebrities on a big night that they've got to put up with having, like, very humiliatingly and demeaningly having racial slurs shouted at them, or two, you've got to tell a disabled guy that he has to be locked in a cupboard and he's not allowed to go in public anymore. And so everyone was trying to hunt for a secret option number three by which would make this magically okay. And I think that's why they kind of. Everyone started to focus on the. Well, you know, what if there was a microphone near him? What if the BBC hadn't done it?

[Katie Herzog]

Yes.

[Helen Lewis]

And the thing that it reminded me of, I'm sure she won't mind me saying that she made this point. Becca, my friend, said it's a bit like, really, the babies on the wedding or the babies on the airplane discussion, Right?

[Katie Herzog]

Yeah.

[Helen Lewis]

If someone brings a baby on a plane, your heart sinks. Everyone's heart sinks. No one looks on this with joy. And anyone who says they are is lying. But it is absurd and restrictive to say that people with children should be banned from all public life. In case, you know, I'm trying to get a bit of rest on a transatlantic flight. So someone, you know, someone's just. Someone's just got a budge. And the question is, who in the situation has got to got to budge? And people just don't feel comfortable saying. It's the. It's the actors who've just got to. You've just got to put up with this. Right?

[Katie Herzog]

Yeah. So the BBC didn't. They failed to edit out him shouting this slur before the broadcast, which does seem like a serious misstep. They do edit these. These.

[Helen Lewis]

They.

[Katie Herzog]

They edit the broadcast. There was. People were complaining that another person, you know, said Free Palestine, and that was edit. I think that's incorrect. Like somebody. I don't even know who this person was. It was a British actor. Never heard of him. There are time limits to the speeches and the BBC and the Free Palestine comment came like 2 minutes and 30 seconds into this, into this thank you speech. They edited down to one minute. So I think that was a little bit un. But yes, probably setting the man with Tourette's in a seat near a microphone, which they did. Also probably a mistake, but we don't

[Helen Lewis]

know whether or not that microphone was switched on. Right. This is from John Davidson's statement afterwards. He said, you know, and he took himself out after it. And then there was a thing of why didn't he apologize? And he did apologize. Yes. So you were just getting a lot of wildly uninformed takes. I mean, the biggest person who reacted to it instantly was Jamie Foxx, the actor. Right.

[Katie Herzog]

I have his tweet pulled up here.

[Helen Lewis]

Oh, yeah, go on, read his tweet sent to me. Cause this is quite funny.

[Katie Herzog]

It looks like it was on Instagram, actually. He said, out of all the words, you. You could have said Tourette's made you say that. Nah, he meant that shit unacceptable, which. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what Tourette's is. He didn't mean it. That's what it is. It's involuntary. There's an American girl who has Tourette's, who has a reality TV show. She's constantly saying, Joe Barry, that Joe Biden is buried in her backyard and her mom has crabs. Do we think that, like, do we need to dig up her backyard? I mean, Jamie Foxx should. Should watch the documentary or the movie. Like, you know, he doesn't mean it literally. Involuntary. Do you understand, sort of the mechanism behind Tourette's?

[Helen Lewis]

There's a very good blog by Sophie Scott, friend of the podcast, on her substack, about this. But her explanation, and apologies to her if I'm mangling it, is that there are essentially two communication systems in the brain, a kind of involuntary one that is older, like a legacy of when we were just vocalizing. So that's yelps and tics and swear words, right? In the sense that if you hit your hand with a hammer, you just go, fucking hell. Right? You don't go, my God, that really hurt. I really wonder whether I've written it. Just, it's. It's. It's connected in some much more primal way. And then layered on top of that, you have your conscious ability to speak. So even people, I think, who get aphasia after a stroke, you know, they lose some words. They pro. They might not lose the, like, the involuntary. I don't think, really, I would encourage, if you know someone who's going to Stroke to go up and startle them and see what happens. That seems cruel. But, like, those are just two different things. So, you know, you can. You can end up, I think, getting the wires getting a bit it. Fritz. And the other thing that Sophie points out is there's really not particularly good treatments for it. I think one of the things they've tried is like antipsychotics. But this is why it was big. When I wrote about the contagious tics, which was another piece that I wrote during the pandemic, essentially TikTok tics. They were actually functional neurological disorder. They were a software glitch in some sense. So it was very important.

[Katie Herzog]

And you mean in terms of the fakers or in terms of people with actual tics, which one's the software glitch?

[Helen Lewis]

I don't think they are faking, per se, in the sense of malingering or doing it deliberately. I think it's something closer to. You wouldn't use the Freudian term anymore of conversion disorder, but I think it's more like, you know, in the same way that you can get pseudo epilepsy. Right. You can have people who fall down and have fits, and if you monitor their brain activity, they don't have the signature brain. Right.

[Katie Herzog]

It's psychosomatic.

[Helen Lewis]

Yes, it is. But that. And people get very upset by you using that word because they think it means it's that they're putting it on. But people aren't like, deliberately putting it on. It's their body's way of kind of showing them that the situation is intolerable or it's under some kind of terrible stress. Well, and then you.

[Katie Herzog]

But then you also see those. And I believe you wrote about this, the multiples. Did you write about that?

[Helen Lewis]

No. They are putting it on. They are, yeah.

[Katie Herzog]

Those are big. You can tell because they're setting up a camera, like changing outfits, like moving from one couch to another, having conversations with each other. Yeah, that seems. Also doesn't exist.

[Helen Lewis]

I mean, you know, we might talk about this in terms of some of the stories that have come out of Epstein and Grooming Gangs, but when anybody's story of trauma is incredibly cinematic and full of very rich and vivid detail that is scintillating and amazing. You should automatically kind of have a little winking light on your dashboard. And the same thing when someone. The form that someone's mental illness take is. That is them being able to perform in front of a camera, eight different Personas where they've got a different voice for each one. And you know, and they've all got a fully developed personality. If you've ever seen anybody in the grip of really difficult psychotic breakdown, it's just not coherent in that way.

[Katie Herzog]

Right. Okay, so I'm gonna read some more tweets, some more responses to this. So. Yes. So black celebrities very incensed about this. Jamel Hill asking for more grace for the person who shouted a racist slur instead of for Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo, who had to push through being embarrassed in front of their peers. But that's often the expectation that black people are just supposed to be okay with being disrespected and dehumanized so that other people don't feel bad. Yeah, he did apologize.

[Helen Lewis]

I do feel sympathetic to that because, you know, I'm on team. Like, it was really rough for Taylor Swift when Kanye west stormed the stage at the VMAs and told her that actually Beyonce should have won. She wasn't any good. Like, that was her big night. And that's happening to you in front of a number of people.

[Katie Herzog]

But he presumably had some control over his. Although it's Kanye, so who knows?

[Helen Lewis]

Well, it's bipolar.

[Katie Herzog]

Yeah.

[Helen Lewis]

I mean, but that's the thing. So I think. Think you can hold in your head the fact that it wasn't. It was hard for those actors. Like, they clearly had not been briefed adequately or had not read the briefing or whatever had happened. Like, they didn't take it in their stride. They were clearly knocked back by it. As you kind of would be.

[Katie Herzog]

As you would be. Yes. Yeah. Wendell Pierce said it's infuriating that the first reaction wasn't complete and full throated. Apologies to Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan. The insult to them takes priority. It doesn't matter. The reasoning for the racist Slurpee. I think it does matter, but. Okay.

[Helen Lewis]

I also think it's a bit hard in that John lives his entire life having to apologize constantly to people. And this was another difference is that I think that Americans took the racial insult as being the most important thing, whereas Brits were more likely to look at it from a class based perspective, which was that these guys are after this. They're going to go back to their life of being successful millionaires. Right. John is going to go back to his life of being a social outcast who works as a caretaker and was worried every time he leaves the house that he's gonna shout something at the wrong person and get beaten up.

[Katie Herzog]

Yeah.

[Helen Lewis]

Like on the oppressed minority scale, the one. The bit that Broke my heart is that he took his bike, like, push bike to the baftas because he doesn't like getting on public transport in case he ticks at people. And then someone, this is being London, stole his bike while he was in there. I know. I want to buy him a bike.

[Katie Herzog]

Yeah, you should buy him a bike. Let's do a GoFundMe for John.

[Helen Lewis]

No, I hope if there was a crowdfund, I would 100% contribute to it, because. But that is my feeling is that he lives a tough, marginalized life. It's hard. He's got a little rubber ring that he tries to bite down on so that he doesn't tick, but it doesn't. So one of the ways they can tell if it's a Tourette's stick is they have called the Premonitory Urge. So it's like a sneeze. You know it's coming, but you can't stop it. Yeah. And you can hold it in to some extent for a little bit, but actually that's very stressful. And then you might kind of of tick worse. And it can be physical, too. So John has ended up, like, punching his mum while she was driving him. Like, you know, you can flail out with your arms. It's. It's like. It's like being cursed. I mean, it's really. You know, And I think there's a lot of respect for him as a public figure for remaining upbeat, particularly when you saw those documentaries where he's. In the first one, he's literally just like an adolescent. He's a kid, you know, and it said, oh, this was a heartbreaking. He said, since John is an adolescent, a lot of his thoughts often revolve around sex, particularly when he sees a pregnant pretty woman. And I was like, who wants that as a teenager, right, that you just get horny and then you just shout, I'm very, extremely horny.

[Katie Herzog]

Yeah. And then Kat pointed out in her piece in the Free Press that this sort of irony of the fact that people were there to celebrate this fictionalized version of him and the actor who played John in this film. What's the film called?

[Helen Lewis]

I Swear.

[Katie Herzog]

I Swear. He won. He won a BAFTA for, I believe, Best Actor or something like that. And so at the same time, while they're celebrating sort of the fictionalized version of this, you know, this comes back

[Helen Lewis]

to the point that is often made by Enemy of the Pod, Freddy Debe, which is about the, like, the gentrification of disability.

[Katie Herzog]

Right.

[Helen Lewis]

Which is. And actually there's another brilliant piece that I would urge you to read, which is on the Guardian by Hannah Jane Parkinson about her bipolar disorder, in which she says it's not like a broken leg, that people like stories of, you know, someone overcoming their mental illness, but that's not how it is for lots of conditions. You know, you don't feel. Get over bipolar. You kind of live with it. Schizophrenia, in the case of Freddie, like, you know, and they're unpleasant and they can wait.

[Katie Herzog]

I don't think Freddie has schizophrenia. I think.

[Helen Lewis]

What does he have?

[Katie Herzog]

Bipolar.

[Helen Lewis]

Bipolar, yeah. But, you know. Yeah, whatever the disorder might be, it can just, you know, you live with it and you might get better for a bit, but you might relapse and it might make you act in ways that are kind of prickish and unpleasant. Right, right. We kind of. Everybody wants either the kind of uplifting struggle narrative or they want the kind of Cousin Helen in what Katie Did. Right. Where you're just a little suffering angel and you don't impose on anybody else and you're grateful for all the sympathy you receive.

[Katie Herzog]

Did you read Kanye's apology in the Wall Street Journal? His ad?

[Helen Lewis]

The thing is, it was quite reasonable, and it read like someone who'd got back on their meds. But I just also can think if I was anybody in his life, I'd kind of want to wait a few months and see if that really took.

[Katie Herzog]

Yeah, yeah. He also. It was. The timing was. You know, it was like four days before his album came out. Although I haven't heard much about the album. I don't know if it actually came out. So I think that made people suspicious. But I thought. I was fairly convinced. Convinced by it. Yeah. But maybe that's. Maybe that's part of his bipolar.

[Helen Lewis]

Well, you know. Yeah, it's. It's really. I think it's really tricky because it's about. It's about two competing goods. And I don't think the kind of prevailing liberal social justice framework is very good at dealing with that. Right. Is it? You know, and you see, it comes up. And I mean, obviously it comes up in the gender debate about, like, do we want to let trans women express their identities, or do we want women, biological females, to be able to have spaces of their own? And it's like, you kind of have to pick one in certain circumstances. Like, circumstances you can't make everybody happy. And, you know, there's a. There's, you know, like, there's religious context about that, too. Like the. Like, do you have to ice the gay cake if you're A, you know, religious baker. Like someone just has to lose when, you know, in those situations.

[Katie Herzog]

What do you think about the gay cake? Do you think that he should have to ice the gay cake? Like, what if it's a gender reveal? Even worse,

[Helen Lewis]

I think the way that the British law came down on that, and actually it was. I think it was a gay couple who want to stay in bnb, which is if you're providing public services, you have to obey the law.

[Katie Herzog]

Right?

[Helen Lewis]

Like no one is making you have to be a baker.

[Katie Herzog]

I think that's how it, how it comes down in the US too. Public accommodations. You cannot tell someone. They cannot stay at their. At your hotel, but you can tell someone, I will not perform this artistic act. I won't cater your wedding. Which actually sounds fair to me. That sounds like a fair balance. We don't want to have a situation where gay people or black people or trans people aren't allowed at the diner. But should I be forced to endorse some, some message I don't agree with? Well, if you're a pharmacist, maybe, but if you're a cake baker, I think not.

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah, I just, it was a. I think to me the most obvious thing about it was that was the kind of US UK thing, right. And I think as I say, that was partly about class versus race. It was also about kind of level of Tourette's education. But there were, you know, there were some bad. There were some pretty. There was pretty bad British takes too. Did you see the. Oh yeah, this is my favorite one. And I think this was satire. But like very much on the edge was if I had Tourette's, my tics would be shouting trans rights. Vote Black Lives Matter. Because I'm a good person.

[Katie Herzog]

That was a good one. Hard to tell. Was there a Free Palestine flag in the bio? Hard to tell on that one.

[Helen Lewis]

Well, it was a red triangle. So it was like. And then there was another one that said. Said a lot of slave owners were disabled. And that just amused me because I just thought, is that the logical end of the doordash discourse? Right. Which is I have to order doordash because I can't leave the house. Is I have to own a slave. I can't leave the house. It's actually ableist. Abolitionist. Ableist.

[Katie Herzog]

That's true.

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah.

[Katie Herzog]

There was one. Besides the BBC not censoring this, there was one other major fuck up. So Google sent out a notification from. There was an article from the Hollywood Reporter how the Tourette's fallout unfolded. At the BAFTA Film Festival. And the. I can't. I. I can't even.

[Helen Lewis]

I'll say it. The linked. The link thing said see more on n words. And it was like. That was like the category tag page. And you're like, oh, God, how did that happen?

[Katie Herzog]

Not good, not good. So this is what happens when. When you let AI take over your. Your headline writing. Okay. Anything else you want to say about that?

[Helen Lewis]

I think he also called Paddington Bear a pedo, if that can be taken into evidence.

[Katie Herzog]

What do you think is under that trenchcoat?

[Helen Lewis]

Well, it's a little person. No, no, genuinely, there's a Paddington stage musical and the bear is played by two little people too.

[Katie Herzog]

Are they stacked on top of each other?

[Helen Lewis]

Not at the same time, no. Not in a trench coat, no. They alternate because it's presumably quite sweaty and unpleasant in there.

[Katie Herzog]

Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen. Okay, Helen. Another UK story crossed my time this week and as soon as it was posted for the next like 12 hours, it seemed to be the only thing on my feed. I think more. I think this was when. When Britains were sleeping. So this was more from Americans than from Brits. So this was posted by Rupert Lowe and he writes a statement from the rape gang inquiry. So let me read you a bit from that. It's long, so I'm just going to sort of bop around. Our inquiry panel has heard extensive and deeply distressing testimony from a survivor detailing prolonged and extreme abuse, exploitation and trafficking beginning in childhood and continuing over a number of years across multiple locations in the kingdom. Given the gravity of the allegations, we have thought long and hard about whether to release the following information. We believe, as does she, that the public deserves to know the truth about the rape gangs. The survivor's violent rape gang and abuse began at age 12. She was raped multiple times per day over many years. The rapes were filmed and were used as blackmail. The survivor has stated that multiple police officers were active perpetrators. Money was exchanged openly and destroyed her ability and willingness to seek help. Police vehicles were used to traffic her and some of the abuse events were called cop nights. The extreme pain she suffered included film torture in places called red rooms. The torture included waterboarding and strangulation by rope. Distressingly, she was raped by a dog. Filmed and forced to re watch the footage as men place bets. The coordination of this specific type of abuse was predominantly permitted by Pakistani heritage men during the specific period. Abuse who witnessed the murder of at least three girls, one of whom was allegedly killed as punishment for speaking to the police force. My first thought When I read this was a, what kind of dog? And B, there's no way this happened. And yet no one on X seemed to be displaying the slightest hint of doubt. It was taken for granted that this is obviously true. And maybe it is. You know, there are some cases like that of Giselle Pelico, the French woman who was drugged and raped by her husband and dozens of other men. Cases like that show you that stories that sound too. Too bad to be true are sometimes real. And, you know, maybe I'm just on high alert for the return of satanic panic because we're seeing people get publicly humiliated and fired for having a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, even if there is zero indication that they did anything illegal. And because some of the allegations to come out of the Epstein files are so obviously false, including ones about Trump, unfortunately, I do not think that he sexually assaulted a child, although it does sound like the FBI covered up some of those allegations, which is a scandal in itself. But there is so much obvious nonsense coming out of these files, nonsense people are taking seriously, that when I hear something like this, you know, dog rape, triple murder, police taking bets on what exactly? I'm not sure. Red rooms. My first instinct is doubt. But, you know, I'm not in the uk. I don't know much about this case or the cultural context here. The only Pakistani I know works at Google and has two golden goodles. I don't think he's representative of immigrants to the uk, So I wanted to check my gut on this with someone who knows more about it. So, Helen, what was your first response to this statement? You know, am I just a huge bitch for casting dad on the dog rape and triple murder story? What do you think about this?

[Helen Lewis]

I don't think so. My first response to that is that I would like to see some dates and. And, you know, like, it's all so vague. And so to give people a background on this, there are two different things going on. One is that the government under labor has promised an official inquiry into the grooming gangs. However, that seems to be being slow walked by the Civil Service from. I mean, there's no great enthusiasm for it because they think it'll be incredibly divisive and provide fuel to the far right. And then secondary to that is this

[Katie Herzog]

because the perpetrators were mostly Asian immigrants, right?

[Helen Lewis]

Not exclusively. Like there was a white grooming gang in Glasgow a while ago? Yes, particularly British Pakistanis, particularly from the Mirapur region, are overrepresented in the stats, although we don't know exactly to what extent, because the police have been until now pretty sporadic about recording perpetrated even like self identified perpetrator ethnic data. So Louise Casey, who is kind of the government troubleshooter was asked to look into this and she said a bit like Cass actually. She was like well the first thing I can tell you is that actually the data collection until now has been pretty shoddy. So the first thing I would want to do is to really like understand the contours of this problem. But that's you. So that's allegedly going on in the background. Labour had to be kind of dragged kicking and screaming towards that. They wanted local inquiries really and I understand that skepticism because if you look, we've got a Covid inquiry going on at the moment. It's going to cost millions upon millions. It's going to report 10 years later and mostly it's going to provide some very nice work for lawyers and the next pandemic will probably be completely different. So I can see the Andrew Norfolk who now unfortunately died. He really broke the story on the front page of the Times when he reported on the trials. Incredibly great, courageous piece of reporting. He was very ambivalent about the idea of an official inquiry because he thought it would just you know, essentially be a lot of middle class people making a lot of money and actually not really help any of the people involved. And I know people who've testified at the child sexual abuse inquiry who said they would basically re traumatize themselves telling the story again to people and nothing seemed to really come out of it. So that's one thing that's happening. At the same time Rupert Lowe, who was a former chair of. Let me get this right, Southampton.

[Katie Herzog]

Wait, let me interrupt you quick. And the inquiry is the goal here to figure out why these cases were not prosecuted in the beginning. What's the, what's the end goal of this, of making this, this sort of government panel.

[Helen Lewis]

So the government panels aim is to be like what lessons can we learn for better policing of this and better reporting and you know, whatever. Rupert Lowe's in his own one man band independent inquiry, which is what you quoted from, I don't think necessarily has such, such lofty aims. I think his is more about as he would see it, like casting light onto a scandal but liberal intelligentsia don't want you to talk about. So he's doing.

[Katie Herzog]

And who is he?

[Helen Lewis]

Well, yeah, so he's, he's. He used to be in Nigel Farage's party reform. But Nigel Farage has a problem which is that as soon as anyone Else's massive ego clashes with Nigel Farage's massive ego. They lose to Nigel Farage. So he is now out. He's got his own party, which is called Reclaim Restore. They've all got slightly the same name, all of these parties. And he basically has one massive fan. And that fan is Elon Musk. And Elon Musk boosts him all the time because Elon Musk doesn't like Nigel Farage. Because Nigel Farage won't let Tommy Robinson, the kind of far right provocateur who's now in Miami because everyone ends up in Miami eventually or Arizona. Yeah, right. He won't let Tommy Robinson into reform his party. So Elon Musk has fallen out with

[Katie Herzog]

Nigel Farage and is low an mp.

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah, he's now an independent mp.

[Katie Herzog]

Okay.

[Helen Lewis]

And so he's doing this funny thing of. He both claims that the media won't cover it, but he also won't let journalists into any of the sessions. So it's one of those classic things and you see it often with people on the left do this too, where a load of like completely nebulous, unverifiable stuff is handed out and it's like, why won't journalists just take this on trust and uncritically report it and like. Well, just parrot what I've said essentially. Right.

[Katie Herzog]

So if you, if you look up Rupert Lowe rape inquiry. So this, this, I'm not sure if this happened on, on your timeline as, as well, but this was every post, every post on my, on my timeline was this. And mostly from, mostly from Americans. So if you, if you look up Rupert Lowe rape inquiry, though there's no stories about this, which I found very surprising. Those allegations, triple murder, dog rape, are. So I figured American outlets would cover it. They don't appear to be unless Google. The Google News search is completely broken, which is possible. And nothing from the uk. I mean there are stories about the rape inquiry, but nothing about this particular, these particular allegations.

[Helen Lewis]

But it's a bit like, you know, remember when Tara Reid made all those accusations about Joe Biden touching her up and everybody was reluctant because the kind of. The right wing people had no incentive to look into whether or not they were true.

[Katie Herzog]

True.

[Helen Lewis]

And the left wing people looked into it, found that it wasn't massively true. But it's also quite hard to give someone a kind of clean bill of health. And so you end up with this slightly odd feeling that no one was really looking to it. What's probably more likely to happen is that people have Nothing like how. How do you follow up. How do you follow up that story and report whether or not it's true? She's given. You haven't got the name of the person, you haven't got the town it happened in. You haven't got the date, the time frame. She said that there are people murdered. Who are they, to me is a red, red flag because when girls disappear, even girls who are in care, someone notices. Yeah, right. And they don't turn up, or they turn up murdered or dead.

[Katie Herzog]

Right.

[Helen Lewis]

Now, you would expect that to get reported. That's not always true. Right. Like that Mad. That guy got away with murdering all those gay men and leaving them propped up against headstones. And it was recorded as natural causes and he was actually knocking them off.

[Katie Herzog]

Wait, where was this?

[Helen Lewis]

And these are. Oh, this is in Britain.

[Katie Herzog]

And when.

[Helen Lewis]

When Stephen Merchant played him in a recent drama, if you want to watch it. But it was basically like the police were like, oh, you know, these gays, they're always doing the chem. So I wouldn't be surprised if there was girls.

[Katie Herzog]

Minors is, I think, different. And we're presumably talking because Rupert lo. Because of. Who cares about. Presumably talking about young white girls, someone would have noticed, right?

[Helen Lewis]

But young white girls in care, probably that's the girls who are mostly targeted by grooming gangs. But even so, had there been three teenagers disappear in a small town within a period of five years, right. Even the British police might ask some questions about that. So that's one of the things that gives me. Also, I don't know if someone's been raped by a dog and they film it and play it back. What are you betting on?

[Katie Herzog]

That's the question. Betting on what?

[Helen Lewis]

It's not like a Porsche rape, like.

[Katie Herzog]

And how do you. And how do you. I have a dog. I have a dog who is an intact male. Like, how would you. It's not like dogs are like naturally sexually attracted to humans. It's not like humans are in heat. The mechanics of this, I find it. I find it questionable.

[Helen Lewis]

Okay, on that bit, I've got really terrible news for you, which is that there was a recent story about a drag queen who died in car a couple of years ago and there were suspicions it was a hate crime and they closed the streets for his cortege to go through. And then the inquest happened a couple of weeks ago and he was found with dog semen inside him. And the thesis was that he died maybe because he was allergic to dog semen.

[Katie Herzog]

Oh, my God. Okay. But was it rape, that's the question. Or was he? Well, yes.

[Helen Lewis]

The story from the guy who testified at the inquest was that this other guy was out walking his dog at 2am and they bumped into the drag queen and the drag queen having sex with his dog. And the guy was like, I wasn't into it, but I didn't, you know, but I let it carry on. And then, and you're like, I mean, sure, obviously it was not in the coroner's courts. Inquest to go, sure, Jan, yeah, yeah, sure. But, but no, people are, I'm afraid people are out there having sex with dogs.

[Katie Herzog]

I, I fully believe that people are out there having sex with dogs. What I, what I have, what I struggle with, it's the, it's the non consensual aspect of it. People have people intentionally having sex with dogs. Yes, but rape a dog, raping a person, I think that's different.

[Helen Lewis]

Right. And I think it's like the Christopher Hitchens always used to say, it's about religion, which is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Yes, I am open to the fact that that might have happened, but I really want to hear a lot like I would not put that in the paper until I had fully checked that out.

[Katie Herzog]

The other thing about this is that if this doesn't check out, if, if he never provides any more evidence, if this just, this story is just out there, then by putting this out there in a way that I personally find very irresponsible, I think he's diminishing the seriousness of the actual rape gangs themselves. He's, he's giving people a reason to cast doubt on other, on other girls and women's testimony.

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah, I mean this is why I always think that you need to do journalism on controversial subjects because otherwise you're leaving the failed claim to partisans of various types. And just as you know, people from that tendency are not wrong to say that talking about this has made the mainstream, particularly liberals, uncomfortable. It is equally true to say that it has been seized on by the far right to imply that only brown men do rapes. Like I nearly got into a fight someone who, it's one of these. I won't mention them because I don't need to get into any more beefs. But in like an anti woke commenter was just having a go and saying like why aren't you writing more this stuff about the grooming gangs? And I thought about this saying, why are you. Have you never shown any interest in the, in the Pelico case? Right. And you haven't and you haven't because you can't. There is no narrative there. That is to say that the libs won't talk about this. That is just a thing that happened. It was mostly white guys in rural France. And it's interesting for a whole bunch of different reasons, but like race isn't a part of it and so it doesn't fit neatly into your anti woke. They won't let you. This kind of framing, you're just not interested in how many people are interested in stories about sexual abuse of women. Women qua sexual abuse of women. Right. Versus how many people of them are only interested when that sexual abuse is done by their political opponent or a disfavored group, whether it be millionaires in the case of Epstein or whether it be Asians in the case of the grooming gangs.

[Katie Herzog]

Right, so Rupert Lowe, part of his platform is mass deportations. He's the. He's the maga maba. Is that what you call it? Of the uk Very Britain first. And you know, there does seem to be some danger here of this becoming a racist witch hunt based on the tweets that I was seeing or the expost that I was seeing. Which is kind of ironic because it's also true that the early reports of the grooming gangs were ignored by media at least I don't know about police because of this, but because people, because they were afraid of appearing racist. Julie Bendel has talked about this. And so by ignoring it when it, eventually it all comes out, which of course it did. People are having some, well, pretty racist reactions to it. As though, you know, the fact that Pakistani, some Pakistani immigrants or Asian immigrants are rapist means that no immigrants belong in the uk. So like I saw this post the other day from an account called Power Bottom dad one I guess Power Bottom dad was taken. The rape of England. The amount of rape in England has quadrupled in 10 years now the highest in the Western world. About a hundred times worse per 100,000 people than Poland changed. He included a graph there. And his immigra, his. His implication is that it was immigration. It's who is immigrating to the uk. That's what changed. And it is true that before Brexit, more. More immigrants to the UK were European. Post Brexit, EU immigration is down. Immigration from Africa, Asia, the Middle east is up. You know, and I do think maybe it's worth mentioning for our American listeners that the immigrants that the Asian immigrants that you get tend to be of a different demographic than the ones that we get in the US this is something that Jessica the 80s baby pointed out to me. She said, you guys get the Muslim immigrants who actually are the mythical doctors and engineers. That's true. Our immigration system tends to reward highly skilled workers, H1B visas, or at least until now, while the UK gets more refugees and low skilled workers. And of course, I'm not saying that that highly skilled workers don't rate people and refugees do. That's obviously not true. Although it would also be sort of silly to, to pretend that there's not a correlation between, you know, poverty and low educational attainment and higher rates of violent crime. That's real. And so Jessica said, I think these stories sound particularly unbelievable if your reference point is Zoran Mandami, but a lot more plausible if Jamal from the corner shop used to look down your top when you were, when you were a teenager. But in this case, Power Bottom dad wants. His numbers are just wrong. So writers fact check this and let me just read you from their fact check online posts that claim that United Kingdom has the highest rate per capita among the world's developed economies are missing key context, including that rape in the UK is defined more broadly than in other countries. So what changed is not immigration. What changed is how rape is defined and reported. And in case in places where there are robust legal systems where they actually punish rapists and protect victims, you're more likely to see victims report assaults. So according to Power bottom one, you, you know, Indonesia has among the lowest rape in the, in the world, but that's actually because Indonesia doesn't prosecute rape. Marital rape was legal until like four years ago.

[Helen Lewis]

And I think in some rural bits of the country, you still have Sharia law that sort of says if you are raped, then you're committing adultery. Right. And you're also culpable for a sexual crime, which is a powerful disincentive to reporting.

[Katie Herzog]

Right.

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah. I also think part of this comes to the part of a broader thing that's happened with the American right on X particularly, which is again, you see it in the tweets of Elon Musk, this belief that like Europe has been kind of invaded by Muslims and that this is something that is imminently happening to America. And you see like Elon Musk does a lot of tweets about the Shire and how like, we're just like the hobbits of the Shire, the white people of Britain, and we don't realize that the orcs are coming and we need the hard men of Gondor. Apparently Elon Musk to kind of come and save us from this. And it, you know, and it's kind of. And, and, and you see it all the time. Like you get these conservative men who sort of say, like, London is a no go area. And, and if you look at the, like, look at the homicide statistics, look at the violent crime statistic, compare them with DC and it's just like, son.

[Katie Herzog]

Right.

[Helen Lewis]

You know, you know, even probably like cities in red states will have more violent crime than the uk just because apart from anything else, we just have many fewer guns. Right. So our mad people have to stab people individually rather than going on a rampage and being able to take out like dozens at a time.

[Katie Herzog]

Yeah. A few years ago, Andy Ngo went to London and did one of these stories about Muslims invading the uk and he went to some area of London where they had signs that said basically like, no public intoxication. And he said that this was evidence of Sharia law. And it turns out it's just like you're not allowed to have open containers like every American city except for, except for New Orleans. Right.

[Helen Lewis]

They banned drinking on the tube just for everybody because it was probably like rowdy rugby labs.

[Katie Herzog]

Sharia law. That's Sharia law.

[Helen Lewis]

It's creeping Sharia. Yeah. So I don't, you know, I don't dismiss that there is a problem in some British Asian communities that are very insular. I was doing a talk with Alice Evans, who wrote a most amazingly titled Substack, which was like, what links Epstein files Grooming gangs and. And something else that was incredibly incendiary. But, you know, she pointed out to me that some British Asian communities score higher on social conservatism and religiosity than their origin communities back in Southeast Asia.

[Katie Herzog]

Interesting.

[Helen Lewis]

And that's. Yeah. And that's partly about the influence of radical Islam. You know, the Saudi Arabia has spent a lot of money over the last couple of decades preaching very strict interpretations of Islam and funding that. And also because people who are in minorities in a country can end up feeling quite embattled and that they're losing touch with their culture. And so they send their kids to like, after school, madrasas. And so you end up in these situations. And lots of, you know, traditionally lots of these people in Britain would have sent home for a home, quote, unquote, for a wife. Right. This would have been a thing as well, that they would have brought over women with less economic power and education who then would have been much less likely to work. Work, who had then been much less likely to have to learn to speak English. All of these things that make it possible for kind of more domestic and sexual abuse to happen. And you can't extract the grooming gang story from the story about the fact that in places where it happened very often, whichever clan network it was, they controlled the nighttime economy like they ran the taxi service. It'd be the classic one. And so there are all of these things added to which misogyny is definitely part of this. Not just on the racialized misogyny of the Asian men who think that white women are kind of slangs and because they're wandering around in short skirts, they're kind of everybody's property. But the misogyny of the police to whom it was reported who thought, so what if a 15 year old girl is having sex with 10 men a night, she's a tearaway, she's chosen to do this. They didn't treat it in some of these cases as just straight up and down, obviously child rape, something that no one could consent to. And so I don't mind talking about this subject, but it just seems like no one is able to have a, you know, fully coherent conversation about it, you know, from either side. There are kind of things that they don't, they don't want to bring into the full picture.

[Katie Herzog]

Well, so I wrote Julie Bindle because she did some of the first reporting on these, on these rape gangs. And I asked her what she thought of Rupert Lowe's statement and she said, I've heard worse, to be honest. Some of these men are proper sadist. I've met the woman at the center of the allegations and she seemed credible. But low would spend any yarn for political gain. So I don't know. I really don't. She also gave her own testimony for Lowe's inquiry and she said, much as I dislike Rupert Lowe and all he stands for, it was a platform not made available by our current government. I wanted to give evidence of my knowledge of these gangs and also support some of the survivors and their parents that chose to give evidence. So Julie is a little bit credulous on this than, than I think you or I are, but I'm skeptical. Dogs skeptical. And also, as you pointed out, dogs are. Dogs are haram.

[Helen Lewis]

Dogs are haram. Like very notoriously, you know, you don't

[Katie Herzog]

get rape is not. Dogs are.

[Helen Lewis]

But yeah, no, I think, I think, I think Julie's instinct is a good one, which is that lots of these, the women who've complained about this haven't been listened to. And Julie's Always on the side of survivors. My interest in it is always purely from that journalistic what can I prove? You know, because that's the hardest thing in the world, Right. And actually it's the only thing that makes allegations get taken seriously is nailing them down.

[Katie Herzog]

Right. And that's the case of. Of Gisele Pellico. I mean, without the video evidence and if her husband hadn't been arrested for upskirting. Upshotting women on the. On public transit, you know, I might not have believed that story.

[Helen Lewis]

I'll admit that 100% and completely absurdly like the idea that you would find 100 men within 40 miles of a tiny village in rural France who are not only willing to rape an unconscious woman, but be videotaped by some guy they just met on the Internet doing it. People have, you know, you'd think, well, no one's that stupid. Never mind. Like, never mind the, you know, never mind the being a massive sadistic pervert. You'd think, well, that sounds like a very dumb thing to like, let yourself be recorded doing. And no, no, they were that stupid. Yeah. Yeah.

[Katie Herzog]

All right, well, let's move on. You ready to talk about Lindy West?

[Helen Lewis]

I am so ready to talk about Lindy West.

[Katie Herzog]

Okay, well, before we get to that, let's do housekeeping. Helen, that's your moment.

[Helen Lewis]

This is a podcast on which I sometimes.

[Katie Herzog]

Not a video podcast, not a video podc. People know they are. I don't know if this is. If this is happening on your Netflix. Do you guys have Netflix in the uk?

[Helen Lewis]

Yes.

[Katie Herzog]

Yeah, you must have.

[Helen Lewis]

We just watched the fire.

[Katie Herzog]

You have all of those David Tennant shows they are doing. Netflix now has fucking podcasts.

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah, well, podcasts do great numbers on YouTube. Some people know.

[Katie Herzog]

Not mine.

[Helen Lewis]

I do the private I podcast and I lobbied for that to go on video just because we reliably get 2 or 300,000 views on YouTube. YouTube. Just by of us just sitting there being unphotogenic. And nonetheless, people are apparently willing to watch this.

[Katie Herzog]

I refuse to do this. This is why every time I do a video thing for any sort of podcast, I always have my microphone as much in front of my face as possible. It makes for a great video.

[Helen Lewis]

The microphone Burker, if you will.

[Katie Herzog]

Yeah.

[Helen Lewis]

Anyway, you should go to blockchainreported.org where you can sign up for extra episodes every month for Primos. You also therefore get to join. I said like a discord. No, there's certainly the comments section, which is the chat as we're going to Find out in the ama quite likely. And has asked some truly alarming questions. So it's a lovely community to join.

[Katie Herzog]

That's enough. Just please join us. $7 a month blocked andreported.org it is the best way to keep the show going. Really the only way to keep the show going. And I'm begging you to do it. All right, let's talk about Lindy west and 2010's feminism.

[Helen Lewis]

Well, I want you to set the scene because I there kept being references to the Stranger and ye Pacific Northwest and I thought, okay, so Katie must have met this person. So can you give us an idea about like what how important was Lindy west to 2010's culture?

[Katie Herzog]

So I have not actually met Lindy West. I've never had the pleasure. I came after she was at the Stranger. She was there quite a. Quite a few years before my time. She moved from the Stranger to Jezebel. She was a columnist for the New York Times for a while. She's extremely popular in Seattle. Very beloved. And her whole family is so her dad was a local jazz musician. Musician. He passed away a few years ago. Her husband aham. As we will hear about husband now in a throuple now they have dual custody of the husband, his sister, Ijamo Luo. Oh, who you sent me a link to. She had an interesting take on. On. Not actually interesting. She had a predictable take on the, on the baftas controversy. Ijama writes about race. Full disclosure, I hate that she. I've also, I've also also I've also never met Ijama in person. But after my G turn, she's very also very important, well liked in Seattle. Both of these people are. Are, you know, they, they, they get, they get asked on the public radio station. I don't they have events people come to in Seattle. I don't after my d transit. So Lindy had been a staffer at the Stranger. Ijma did a lot of freelance work there including at one point she. They flew her to Spokane and. And she interviewed Rachel Dolezal who at that point had adopted a Nigerian name that was also the name of Ijoma's sister, Indici.

[Helen Lewis]

And at the time, yeah, yeah, at

[Katie Herzog]

the time I thought the piece was hilarious and brilliant. And then Ijema was mad at me and I decided that she was a bully. But after my detransitioner article came out in 2017, Ijama who again much more popular than I especially at the time time where nobody had heard of me and with like Genuine power in this community. Actually, Jim and I have met. We did an event together after Trump was elected. We did a. Like a panel discussion. But that was the only time I met her. She got on Facebook Live and was on, like, in her car crying for like an hour about my detransitioner piece and then announced that she would no longer write for the Stranger because of me. I was a freelancer who had published, like, two articles for the Stranger. Nobody knew how it was. She was bullying me. So, no.

[Helen Lewis]

But also, didn't Lindy west have a run in with Dan Savage?

[Katie Herzog]

Oh, yes. So, yes, much more. Much more importantly. So Lindy is fat. And. And I'm not. I don't have to write.

[Helen Lewis]

That's not just you being rude, by the. But by the way, like, it's a big part of her writing identity.

[Katie Herzog]

Yes, yes.

[Helen Lewis]

And.

[Katie Herzog]

And she. Dan. And, you know, Dan was. Dan is Finn, a man who was.

[Helen Lewis]

A lot.

[Katie Herzog]

He has said, but he was also alive in the. You know, he's. He's a Gen Xer, actually. He's a boomer. He's that old. He's like the last. The last of the boomer. And Dan wrote some things in the 90s and earlier 2000s that were politically incorrect about fat people. And this is before the Fat Positivity movement. It was also back when you could say basically whatever you wanted. But Lindy was offended by this. And she wrote an essay, not. She wrote a blog post like, basically calling him out. And then that later got turned into a book called Shrill, which was about her time at the Stranger and also about sort of Fat Positivity was a message memoir. Shrill got turned into a show on Hulu starring A.D. bryant in the Lindy character. As though. Although we find out in the. And Lindy was a writer for that. And we found out in the. Not in the. In the memoir that this was apparently a terrible experience. But at the time, she sort of. I don't know, the public. The. Did you watch Shirley?

[Helen Lewis]

No, I didn't. I mean, so, yes, to recap, she is essentially like one of the big beasts of 2010s feminism, both through Jezebel, Guardian, New York Times, as you said, she wrote a piece about me, too that was very popular. That was like, this is a witch hunt. Yes, we're witches and we're hunting you.

[Katie Herzog]

The witches are coming.

[Helen Lewis]

He early on wrote a piece saying having a go. Rape jokes and comedy, which caused an enormous backlash and made her kind of like the punchline to every. Like, oh, Lindy West. Wouldn't like that. And then post shrill and post marriage to Aham. Am I getting his name? She kind of went a bit quiet.

[Katie Herzog]

Yeah. And she also. So she got off of Twitter years ago. And there is something about when you like, what's his name? Atlantic writer Ta Nehisi Coates. Like you, once you leave, like you, if you're lucky, you can reach a certain amount of success where you no longer have to be on Twitter. But you also. And I did this, I mean, not because I reached a certain amount of success, but because I was just tired of embarrassing myself. You do sort of remove yourself from the public conversation.

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah. You like, you cash out essentially. You go like, I've got enough attention, like I'm cashing in my chips and I'm gonna go and be famous.

[Katie Herzog]

I can, yeah, I can get a book contract. Yes. Or a TV show or whatever.

[Helen Lewis]

So the reason I wanted to talk to you about her was that she's got a new memoir out that's called Adult Braces. And it is catching up on like everything that happened with being super successful and then everything that happened with this fairy tale marriage to Aham. And spoiler alert, it's not so. It's not so happy. So there's an interview that I watched before. Read the memoir from October 2022, which is her talking about the fact that she's in a throuple and she. And wait, let's do, let's do a

[Katie Herzog]

little bit more of the backstory first. So she and, yeah, she and aham. Fairy tale marriage. It turns out that it was not a fairy tale marriage.

[Helen Lewis]

That.

[Katie Herzog]

Which we learned through this memoir that she, that aham. When they first got together, they broke up. And then when they were sort of reconnecting, her father died. They reconnected. He had a stipulation which is that, that the, the mar. Their relationship had to be non monogamous and she didn't want this. But she grudgingly went along with it, sort of telling herself, you know, he's a, he's a touring musician. If it happens. They had this sort of don't ask, don't tell policy. If it happens, it'll happen on the road. It'll be a one night stand. I'll never have to hear about it and probably he won't do it anyway. I think this is a fairly common thing to convince yourself of if you're the party who doesn't.

[Helen Lewis]

Right. But the reason that I bring up the 2022 interview is before this new memoir came out, the Approved version that was presented to the world was it was a little bit difficult for me when my husband hooked up with a girlfriend who. And Lindy is very open about this in the book, is tiny, thin, she's like five feet, very con and very conventionally attractive. She's like a little nymph. And, you know, and it was very much. And then, like, now I fancy her too. And like, everybody, everything is super happy. We're not sister wives. Like, we are one smoking hot banging

[Katie Herzog]

throuple with a big bed.

[Helen Lewis]

Right? And then you get, this is the bit that troubles me, you know? And also the thing that she was saying about being a fat activist was like, I'm happy about it. Right? Like, I want. And I became a symbol of, like, somebody who was okay with their weight. The world tried to shame me, and I wasn't. And then in this book, you find out that the story is much more complicated on both of those fronts, actually, naturally. And in a way that I was just. It made me very angry, actually, because I thought all the way through Lindy, three years ago would have said, someone like me who says that sounds like a horrible thing for your husband to do to you, would have said, no, I'm happy. I choose my choice. Right, Right. So.

[Katie Herzog]

So the backstory here is that he was. They have this arrangement. She thinks he's never really going to act on it, and if she finds out, and if. If he does, she won't find. Find out. Someone a fan DMS her and says, spoiler alert. Sorry, everyone, I saw your husband making out with someone at a bar. She confronts him and his response to that is long pause. You know, I'm polyamorous. And it turns out that he was actually. It wasn't just this one person. And she's not clear in this story. So the other woman's name is Roya that they're now in a trouble with. She's not clear if that woman he was kissing at the bar was Roya or someone else. It turns out later you get halfway through the book and you find out that it wasn't just this one person. There was at least one other. And he seems to treat polyamory as. As though it's an orientation rather than a lifestyle. Right? I'm poly not. I made the choice to fuck other people. I am polyamorous. Like, he was born that way, you know, And. And yes, you're right. Like, this is the sort of thing that I think Lindy of, not that long ago would have. Would have called bullshit on, like, Was Joseph Smith, Was he born that way? Was Osama bin Laden born that way? Are all men born that way? Or is it a choice that they make because they want to fuck other people?

[Helen Lewis]

Right. That's the thing. There's a bit halfway through the memoir where she writes, I told you a Han was secretly seeing one woman in 2019. He was actually seeing two. And you're like, okay, so how am I supposed to trust. What can we trust, would you say, in this memoir if. If everything gets like, no, actually, I really need to make, you know, and the same thing. She goes to a, she goes to a therapist to try and get diagnosed with ADHD because she thinks it will explain the executive functioning issues that she's had all the way through her life. And she gets very miffed because A, the therapist tells her she's too high functioning to have adhd and B, they want to talk to her mother to talk about her childhood. And she says, none of my friends had to have this intrusive process with their mothers. And I went, well, in that case, your friends were diagnosis shopping. Because ADHD is a developmental disorder disorder. If it didn't develop in childhood, it isn't like you. If it's, if it, if you only

[Katie Herzog]

notice there's no adult onset or if there's maybe a brain tumor, but like,

[Helen Lewis]

then it's something else, then it's a different executive function disorder. This is a developmental disorder. So they should 100% be looking into your childhood because guess what? If you suddenly developed executive functioning issues suddenly a year ago, we do need to check you for that, like brain tumor or whatever it might be.

[Katie Herzog]

Right?

[Helen Lewis]

So.

[Katie Herzog]

Right. Her doctor sounded so responsible. Like, I've actually, I don't think I've ever heard of a doctor not giving someone Adderall when they ask for Adderall.

[Helen Lewis]

The only true honest doctor left in

[Katie Herzog]

America who's like, you can get it online.

[Helen Lewis]

It honestly sounds more like anxiety. Have you thought about getting some cbt? Then there's a great bit when she gets very cross about Ozempic and she says, wegovy has been approved for children as young as 12. When we don't even know the long term physical effects, let alone the mental ones. And you're like, wow, great point. I wonder if there are any other drugs we should maybe be really careful about giving to adolescents.

[Katie Herzog]

Yeah, her, the, the fat part was, you know, so much of this book, I, I felt sorry for her. And when she writes about fatness, her fatness and the way that she's been Been treated. It is very affecting. Although I also was thinking 40% of Americans are fat. Like, that's like, it's like.

[Helen Lewis]

But not in the circles.

[Katie Herzog]

Although she lives in Seattle, she moves in.

[Helen Lewis]

Right. And I do think she has had lots of people use her weight as a punchline to dismiss her opinion.

[Katie Herzog]

Right.

[Helen Lewis]

Which is like, you're only a feminist because you're ugly and I can't. Right. You know, I've had some of that. I'm sure you've had some of that. Like it's just a knee jerk response of dicks on the Internet. Just be like, why do I need to listen to you? I don't want to fuck you.

[Katie Herzog]

I think that's true. But I also think that she has benefited from her fatness in a way that she wouldn't have if she were born 10 or 20 years earlier. Because she was born at the right time for the fat positivity movement. I mean, she is very talented, she's very funny, no question about that. But being unapologetically, unapologetically fat brought her fans and attention. She's not, she doesn't look like Andrea, Andrea Dworkin. She's very pretty.

[Helen Lewis]

Right. And I think the fat positivity movement emerged for the best of reasons, as a kind of cope for the fact that almost no one managed to lose weight naturally on their own. Like once you bust your metabolism, your body always wants to get back to that weight and it will make you hungry until you eat, until you do. Right. So it was, you know, it was, it was a response to saying, well, look, we can't cure this. Almost no one the diets work for, so let's just accept ourselves as we are. And then came along the GLP1s. And the interesting thing to me is I feel like no moral feelings about GLP1s. Right. If they in the same way, like high blood pressure medicine or statins. And so I just. Her view, which is that they're kind of immoral, I think, actually. Right. She massively hams up the science side effects to a level that if you really believe that the side effects for GLP1s are that bad, you also wouldn't vaccinate your kids. Right. But it has to be that they're all a lie and big pharma and there's, you know, and you can't just go, do you know what? It's actually a bit nicer when I weigh a bit less. Like I don't, you know, it's not like a moral thing. One way or another. It's not, it's not, it's not immoral to be fat, but neither is it immoral to want to lose weight if your weight is causing you problems.

[Katie Herzog]

Right. It reminded me her, her writing about Ozempic reminded me of people who are hardliners against drugs like naltrexone, which, you know, my book is about. Her writing about her feelings about food reminded me of alcohol and drug addiction because of the sort of constant obsession. Her patterns, like she talked about eating in her car in secret, throwing away candy wrappers so no one would see the shame. All of that was very familiar to me. You know, she's got that, like I wrote in my book about sort of the booze noise, the obsession that this mental, this mental loop I could never seem to get out of. And she has that with food. She also said she was in constant food, physical and emotional pain. But she has this, she refuses to go on these drugs for sort of purity reasons or political reasons. Her, her explanation didn't quite even make sense to me. But she seems to be like these people in AA who think that, and not everyone in aa, hashtag, not all aa, there's this idea that using a drug to get out of addiction is cheating. You have to do it the harder way. Why? Why?

[Helen Lewis]

I, I, I mean, I think there's, and she does gesture towards this. I think at a couple of points, I think if she suddenly went down to being nine stone overnight, like in the way that.

[Katie Herzog]

What is the, what is that?

[Helen Lewis]

Oh, yeah, I guess, I don't know, like 60 kilograms? No, like, yeah, 160 kilograms.

[Katie Herzog]

What the hell is that?

[Helen Lewis]

I've gone more European, not less. No, it's like, it's about £90. No, that's way less than £100. Ten stone is £140. So, you know, but if she went down to being like a, if she went down to being like a size 10, right, like a mid size. Yeah, a US size 10, then it would be a bit like Amy Schumer, right? People would be like, but I loved you. You were my icon, that you were happy, and therefore I didn't need to be ashamed. Are you now telling me that you weren't happy? Was all this a lie?

[Katie Herzog]

She nods to that too. She says that, you know, that she, she talks about how she felt triggered by seeing fat people lose weight. And she also talks about how she felt owned by the fat positivity movement. So she has these very sort of conflicting views in her head that don't. She doesn't I don't know. She never seems to align them to me. In the book.

[Helen Lewis]

What would you say was your biggest red flag that you felt that you read about her relationship? Because I have a couple of bids.

[Katie Herzog]

Biggest red flag. The fact that he was fucking other people.

[Helen Lewis]

That's a pretty big one, I think for me. When it got to like, this guy has moved in like at least two other girlfriends. And also then his breadwinner, a wife.

[Katie Herzog]

Only one of them lives with them. Lives with them.

[Helen Lewis]

Right, but you know what I mean? Like he's essentially. He's got like a. He's got like a, like a wife who's got the big high powered job and then he's got like the sort of wife for fun and who quit her job.

[Katie Herzog]

Who? Roya. So the other wife, she was a artistic director in Portland. They're so another thing about this, this they're broke, they have no money and they moved from. From Lindy says that in something that they got priced out of Seattle out of their apartment in Seattle. She's a New York Times bestseller who had a television show based on her life. Who has earning capacity. They were broke. And I think this is because of poor money management. She says that she has this throwaway line in the book about how the IRS took away her passport for not paying taxes. I think that's true. So she has so her part of her. So basically she on a hump who has two children. She like mentions did you. Did you notice this?

[Helen Lewis]

Which are from another even more previous wife.

[Katie Herzog]

Yeah, he had kids as a teenager. Their kids are actually grown now. But she just like casually like there's like two lines about having kids about like her, her stepchildren or her children in the book. But doesn't explain the fact that there are children at all in this fucked up dynamic.

[Helen Lewis]

You know, there's a line to mention Storm about like people who believe in homeopathy, where it's like a pigeon pigeonhole has begun to form which is rapidly filled with pigeon. When she tells me her name is Storm. And. And there was a bit when she said when there's a footnote that says Aham is non binary. He they. And I was like, in what way is this guy and his Mormon sister wives non binary? Come on.

[Katie Herzog]

He calls himself queer. This fucking guy who she refers to as he in the book. And then in the body of the book and in the acknowledgments calls they. I guess it was too. They was too confusing for the. When you're talking about a Throuple. It is particularly confus. But she switches in the acknowledgments. Dude, my culture is not your costume. If you're going to talk like that, if you're going to call yourself queer, put a dick in your ass. Having two girlfriends doesn't make you queer.

[Helen Lewis]

No, I mean Joseph Smith. I just don't see any evidence at all that he's attracted to men or that his style is a tall fen. Right.

[Katie Herzog]

I looked at his Instagram yesterday and he has a photo of himself wearing a pink hat for pride.

[Helen Lewis]

That's what women do. And yeah. And then, okay, so then the other bit that was a major red flag is when she's in the middle of being super depressed, they, she, they decide that actually the thing that's going to get her out of this because she's not taking care of herself is that they're going to have a dom sub relationship that's based around him telling her to have a shower every day.

[Katie Herzog]

Yeah.

[Helen Lewis]

And that actually. And I was just like, what. Then the, what in the in loco parentis is this. Yeah. Like, so your, your boyfriend now has to just basically run your life for you. Right.

[Katie Herzog]

But he can't either. He's too irresponsible to pay the fucking bills. So they're broke. So they need to move Roya in because she's responsible enough to put labels on the leftovers and, and make sure the bills are paid. I actually thought there is a part she, she writes in the end of the book, sort of trying to, I think, convince everybody and herself that this is actually what she wants. She's really happy. And she writes this little section about how Roya takes care of stuff. And I thought about you, but. Because I thought she got a wife.

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah.

[Katie Herzog]

This is what she, she got a wife like you write about in your, in your genius book. You know, Lindy finally got someone because her husband can't take responsibility enough to make sure the bills are paid. She finally got, she got the assistance she needed. It's just that she's her husband.

[Helen Lewis]

I, I, yeah. And I just, and I know, you know, she says this in the book that people will say this and it's not true, but I'm afraid I'm going to go out and say I don't think that she's particularly sexually attracted to Roya. I think she's, she's, she's just not gay. No. And like, do you know what, Katie? Some people aren't gay and that's fine. We have to be accepting of That

[Katie Herzog]

I hear that from Phoebe Maltz Bovey. I've tried to convince her she's wrong that all women are a little bi, but, you know, But I think she's not right.

[Helen Lewis]

But no, I think lots more women than men are a little bit bi, but some are, like, 100% down the line heterosexual. They just like dick.

[Katie Herzog]

Yes.

[Helen Lewis]

Not at all interested in pussy. And, like. And I just think. I just do not get the vibe from her that she. That she is actually super into it. And all their messages to each other that she reproduces in the book are like the most formal things, like, dear sir, I wrote to you on the 16th inst. To say.

[Katie Herzog]

Yeah.

[Helen Lewis]

And it just. You know what it really reminded me of? It reminded me of another throuple, another great throuple of our time. The Lavery.

[Katie Herzog]

Yep. I knew that was coming. Yep.

[Helen Lewis]

Because there's a line in the great New York. What is it? It's the New York magazine piece about the super sexy, in which Daniel Lavery.

[Katie Herzog]

Okay, so. So. So will you backstory this for anybody who makes this particular episode?

[Helen Lewis]

So Grace Lavery, formerly Joe, a chap now, now a trans woman, married Mallory Ortberg, formerly writer for the Toast. So another great 2010s feminist writer.

[Katie Herzog]

So we've got a reverse heterosexual couple.

[Helen Lewis]

They both transitioned, and so now Grace is a trans woman. Danny's a trans man. Danny dropped his son because there was. He fell out with his family. There was a child abuse scandal in their church. And then at some point, they move in a woman called Lily, who is, again, thin and conventionally attractive, who then has Grace's baby. And then they do a thing about how it's great and they all sleep in the same bed. But there's this very telling line from Daniel about how he and Lily were on Quotes company manners with each other from. For a while.

[Katie Herzog]

Yeah.

[Helen Lewis]

And it like that sounds to me a lot like my husband moved in a girlfriend, and I didn't really know how to talk to her rather than, man, this is some sexy times we're all having here in this extremely equal relationship.

[Katie Herzog]

It sounds so coercive. It does. And I feel a little bad not believing Lindy or Daniel's story when they insist that they're happy. I don't want to accuse somebody of false consciousness. You know, this is one of my. One of my beef with certain strains of feminism, not believing that someone can be a surrogate or a prostitute and actually enjoy it. I think that that is possible for people to do, and people should in generally in general, be taken for their work. But if you write a memoir and your memo reveals that everything that you said before was maybe not entirely true, why should we believe you now?

[Helen Lewis]

Right. That's how I feel. I just sort of think, okay, well, let me just. You know that great line of. I'm sure I've mentioned it before. The Christopher Hitchens line about, you know, whenever he's setting his watch, whenever some Republic Republican senator comes out and says something homophobic, and you'll be found in a truck stop bathroom. I kind of feel like when I was reading this, I was like, I'm gonna just set my watch for when you break up with a ham and then you do the memoir about. Actually, you know, I've really thought about this, and I wasn't into it. Maybe I'm wrong. But you know what? I'm kind of allowed to be. Because you've written a memoir, and I'm allowed to have opinions on it, and those are my opinions, really.

[Katie Herzog]

I felt the same way about her writing about Shrill. So the. The Hulu series, which I thought was pretty good. There were some. You know, there was, like, the book. There's a lot of virtue signaling in the TV show. The. The book has a lot of sort of throwaway lines about white people at, you know, not Lindy, but other white people. She's one of the good ones.

[Helen Lewis]

Karen's.

[Katie Herzog]

Karen, yes. Yeah.

[Helen Lewis]

She.

[Katie Herzog]

She does this road trip to the south and is basically judgmental of whatever. It's exactly what you would expect. But when she writes about Shrill, you know, her public. Her public Persona during that time, the sense I got from Lindy and from the others who were involved was that this was a empowering experience. You know, you had a. You had a fat, positive writer's room. You had a fat, positive set. Had this ever happened before? You know, they had this scene where all of these fat women are, like, dancing in this pool, and this is this incredible experience. Well, it turns out that working on Trill was a fucking nightmare. Nightmare. Nobody wanted Lindy there. They were mean to her. They ignored her. The cast and crew would go out partying and not invite her. And she was depressed. She was depressed the whole time. Okay, well, I love knowing the truth now, but again, why should we believe you? Believe what you say when it turns out that you've been obfuscating the truth this whole time.

[Helen Lewis]

But she's basically an influencer, isn't she? And you and I have had this discussion before about, like, the problem with influencers who turn their lives into content is that they're doing pictures PR for the version of themselves. And so when shrill was on right. She needed to do PR for Shrill. And the selling point of that show was like hey fellow fat women, like here's a show that you'll finally see yourself reflected in. It couldn't. And that's. That's not journalism. That's. That's pr. Right? Like that's publicity. And I feel like the same thing is that you know that this is a. But this is again, it's like PR for the kind of the personal brand of Lindy West. And I, I felt quite sorry for her about that. But I also thought it told a bigger story which was of that 2010s type of content that was very first person industrial complex. Because I got to the end of it and I thought she did an amazing road trip. She went some places I've been in America, like Wakulla Springs just outside Tallahassee, which is just a banger place to be. Savannah, Georgia, one of the most beautiful cities in America.

[Katie Herzog]

Eureka Springs, Bentonville. Yeah, she's. But she, she took. She did the sort. Yeah, it was a good road trip. Although she did say that it was going be to take her a month to drive from Seattle to the Keys and back again. And I read that part to Janet and Jana said that's stupid. You can do that in eight days.

[Helen Lewis]

Come on.

[Katie Herzog]

It is not a month long road trip. It doesn't have to be.

[Helen Lewis]

I thought you were going to be judgmental about the van life aspect of it after me being judgmental about the throuple. But. But the thing about it is that she doesn't do any reporting.

[Katie Herzog]

She barely talks to people.

[Helen Lewis]

It's so weird to me. And I just revealed to me that I used to be. You know, I'm sure you like she was an incandescent star of 2000 and tens journalism. Right. Like she was the one everybody like looked like she had the absolute dream. And in a way I texted Sarah Dytom to be like this is because who's also read the book. To be like this has been better than reading a gratitude like writing my gratitude journal because I'm so happy that I went and did reporting and didn't do personal blogging and personal memoir because although it might have seemed like she was super successful, she clearly did not enjoy that life. Like it is not a nourishing way to be. And I just think it's kind of imagine driving all the way through that and not not being like super and through post Covid, too. Like an incredibly interesting time politically for America. And you're just like, I don't know, it makes me sound like I'm from the 1950s or something. But like, yeah, all right, so your husband and his girlfriend are back in Seattle, but like, there's, there's life happening here too. And every so often she'll have a personal epiphany and like, jump off a log and it'll be very exciting. And I'm just going to be like, have you thought about being interested in other people?

[Katie Herzog]

Right. Her. Her. Her epiphanies are always about her. And of course, the, the final epiphany is that, yes, what I do really want is for my husband to move his girlfriend in. It's never about the world. She. She does. She does this tr. This road trip across the country drives you these interesting places and returns exactly the same. She has no better understanding of. Of America, no better understanding of the south, no better understanding of anybody who doesn't think like her. If anything, anything, she seems more judgmental of the rare people that she actually encountered.

[Helen Lewis]

Right. There's not even a kind of sort of cliched, I met a Trump voter and they were actually nice to me personally. Which, no, that. And that is just genuinely experience that will happen to you.

[Katie Herzog]

Right.

[Helen Lewis]

If you go to a Trump rally, yes, there'll be a bit when they shall shout at you about how you're the lying mainstream media, but actually, everyone will be just really. I even went to a Ron DeSantis rally and everybody was really nice to me.

[Katie Herzog]

Yeah. I mean, they'd arrest you if you say gay, but other than that, very nice.

[Helen Lewis]

Other than that, no, but you just meet charming young college Republicans wearing bow ties and with incredible teeth, and then, you know, and they're very polite.

[Katie Herzog]

It's very Seattle. Lindy reminds me of somebody who has never actually met somebody who doesn't think exactly like she does. And when she, when she goes on this road trip, those are the people she seeks out are also people who still think exactly like she does.

[Helen Lewis]

Well, there are bits where you can kind of see her desperately trying to escape it. Right. Like in the ADHD bits, there's bits where she wants to, like, take the piss out of this kind of level of self absorption and her diagnosis seeking. And it really just strikes me that in a way, white people say, you know, kind of, why did woke produce any really good art? You know, did that period produce any really great art? And I can kind of see why I can't Think of stuff that it did, because it was just. It was so doctrinaire and so unsubversive. Right. You had, like. I just. Yeah, I just think she's. She's a fundamentally good writer. However, someone should confiscate her exclamation mark key.

[Katie Herzog]

Oh, my God. She. She writes like a blog. I mean, it's like the all caps, the exclamation point. It's very strange. Well, whatever. It's her style.

[Helen Lewis]

But there are flashes of genuinely brilliant writing. Oh, yes. And I just. Which makes it even. Kind of even sadder, really, that it's being used to this end. Right. This undoubted talent that she has.

[Katie Herzog]

There's a section that is so funny about. So she rents this van. And the van. They do these murals on the side of the vans. And the first van that they presented her was a van that had the mural. One was of, like, a. Like a. Like a Brazilian black woman with, like, a thong and a giant ass. And, like, the gas. The gas cap was like the woman's butthole. I mean, that part. That section was genuinely very funny. Unfortunately, that's not the van that she ended up driving across the country.

[Helen Lewis]

I know, I know. What would Hunter S. Thompson have done? He would have dived in the butthole van.

[Katie Herzog]

Oh, yeah. There's also a section where she. She asked. She goes to get a tattoo, and she refers to the tattoo art artist as sir. And then she apologizes to him. She says, hey. I said gently, I'm sorry I called you sir without asking your pronouns first. He, of course, is like, what the

[Helen Lewis]

are you talking about?

[Katie Herzog]

And she. But she doesn't even seem to take the piss out of herself in that moment.

[Helen Lewis]

She.

[Katie Herzog]

She seems. And you know, bookstake. You write the book. It takes a year to get published. Maybe she wrote this before the great awokening totally crumbled, and that still made sense. But that's a very good moment to take a piss out. To take the piss out of yourself. And she was unable to find the humor in herself, asking this man what his pronouns were.

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah, I just think, you know, if she just spent, like, actually, given that they're all, like, Mormon, nothing would be better than for her to go and do a mission.

[Katie Herzog]

Mormons are way more fun, I have to tell you, than fucking Seattle leftists.

[Helen Lewis]

But you know what I mean? Like, genuinely, one of the brilliant things that Mormons do is they go and do their mission and they have to live somewhere completely different. Like, and the idea is, if your faith is strong and, like, whatever it is. You come back and you still want to be a Mormon. And I kind of think Seattle leftist should do a similar thing, which is that they should just go and live in like a really nice little college town in a red state and, and just meet some people who have completely different views to them.

[Katie Herzog]

Well, she, I mean her. So she moved to her family's cabin on the, on the coast. She is now the county that both of us live in now is much more. Not ethnically but much more politically diverse. My guess is that she does not engage with the actual locals here. That. My guess is that she still sort of keeps to herself and sticks to the blue line in the county.

[Helen Lewis]

Yeah, it's kind of, it's kind of sad because it's like one of the great things about being a writer is just going and putting yourself among people who are. Whose starting point for how they make decisions about life and how they see the world is completely different to yours. Like it's the most mind expanding thing. And I just think it's quite funny to go on an entire road trip across America, come back with a conclusion that you were right.

[Katie Herzog]

You were, you were right and so was your husband. What he needs, he just needs another girlfriend.

[Helen Lewis]

Just move in. Another girlfriend. Yeah, I know. I just. So, yeah, I did. I ended up feeling quite sad for her, which I'm sure she doesn't want my, my sympathy and my pity, but I just think she should find herself a nice young man who will love her just. And just her. And if she just needs to be a boring, monogamous, straight woman. Woman, you're in your 40s now. Be subversive. It's fine. Like live your best middle aged life. You know, maybe you want to go to bed at 9:00pm you know, it's. You want to eat at 5:30. Like a Floridian retired couple. These are the things that you can do in your 40s.

[Katie Herzog]

Exactly.

[Helen Lewis]

You can just admit I'm extremely basic. I like doing basic things.

[Katie Herzog]

Well, it's also, you know, what's going to happen when the novelty wears off of this situation. How many, how big is the bed? How many girlfriends is the home going to be able to move in because he's queer? This is just. He's square. He's poly, he's square.

[Helen Lewis]

He might accidentally move in a boyfriend because he just doesn't even see gender. Yeah. Yeah.

[Katie Herzog]

All right, Helen. Well, thank you so much. We're going to wrap this up for the free listeners and we're gonna stay on for the primos if you want to listen to the rest of this episode and get three extra episodes a month and our entire back catalog, that's hundreds of extra episodes and much more. Join us blocked andreported.org Our show is produced, as always, without from Jessica the 80s baby. See you next week.