#1021 - Louise Perry & Mary Harrington - The Performative Male Epidemic

Summary

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Modern Wisdom #1021 Summary: Louise Perry & Mary Harrington — The Performative Male Epidemic

Podcast: Modern Wisdom
Host: Chris Williamson
Guests: Louise Perry, Mary Harrington
Date: November 17, 2025

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Overview

This episode delves into contemporary shifts in male and female behaviors in relationships, dating, and society, with particular focus on the "Performative Male" archetype, declining birth rates, online culture's impact on mate selection, gendered social dynamics, and the evolution of both progressive and reactionary gender roles. The discussion is vibrant, witty, and deeply culturally literate, challenging common narratives and offering fresh frameworks for understanding issues like sexual recession, masculinity in crisis, and the shifting place of women in public and private life.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Sexual Recession & Birth Rate Decline

Timestamps: 01:00–14:00

• Americans are having less sex than ever before; this is “relationship-status agnostic,” impacting married and single people alike.
• Louise and Mary highlight factors: fewer long-term relationships, smartphone distraction, obesity, xenoestrogens, and the lure of "limbic capitalism" (the hijacking of primitive drives by profit-driven platforms).

  "People are just so besotted with the joys of limbic capitalism delivered via their phones that they just forget to behave like normal human beings and reproduce." — Mary Harrington (03:33)

• The global decline tracks with modernity and affluence, not just technology.
• The Taylor Swift “tradwife” hypothesis (whether celebrity engagements boost marriage/birth rates) is explored with healthy skepticism.
• Parasocial relationships might have substitutive effects: people experience celebrities’ milestones as their own social circle’s.

2. Cultural Commentary: Limbic Capitalism & the End of Culture

Timestamps: 06:14–14:00

• The hosts discuss whether birth rate decline is "nature taking its course," with modernity selecting against reproduction-friendly behaviors and cultures.

  "We are being selected against by our own commercial infrastructure." — Mary Harrington (07:15)

• Examples: K-pop stars’ childlessness as state policy, the link between high-status public figures and aspirational behaviors, and challenges in raising the status of parenthood.

3. Community, Technology, and the Loss of “Aunties”

Timestamps: 15:46–23:46

• Tech and apps are poor substitutes for intergenerational female wisdom—a critique of efforts to digitize childrearing and matchmaking that social networks used to handle.

  "You can try and replace [pattern recognition] with an app, but you can't, basically." — Louise Perry (17:38)

• British village life and the role of “aunties” (wise non-grandmother women) as essential but missing in modern social structures.

  "The reason I talk affectionately about my neighbors and my local community... is because living like this is what you have before trying to reverse engineer a technological replacement." — Louise Perry (21:07)

4. Memes & Archetypes: The Performative Male, Pick-Me & Himbo

Timestamps: 23:47–48:34

• Performative Males: An aesthetic/mating strategy of men who present as soft, non-threatening, “feminized” (think: matcha, tote bags, floppy hair—the “Labubu man”).
• The connection to “sneaky fucker” strategy and how socially progressive men sometimes hide conventional mating motives behind progressive presentation.

  "[Performative males] are just droopy and feminized in presentation...at least in presentation." — Louise Perry (26:24)

• Evolutionary Fitness Angle: Could “Labubu men” be more adapted to environments where female socioeconomic status is high and aggressive masculinity is devalued?
• Himbo: A new ideal emerges—physically strong, good-hearted, simple ("the human equivalent of a smiley face"), distinct from the “Labubu man.”

  "The new dream guy is beefy, placid, politically ambiguous... not the thinking man, just ‘man’." — Chris Williamson (39:07)

• Discussions span status games, female attraction, and class/gender dynamics in mate selection.

5. Class, Nationalism, and Community Fracture

Timestamps: 54:17–61:58

• Explores how concerns about nation and belonging are increasingly replaced by class and ethnic markers.
• Flag disputes in the UK expose class and ethnic divides; Normans vs. Saxons as a living legacy.

  "England has had a racialized caste system for a thousand years." — Louise Perry (56:12)

• Middle-class support for open borders vs. working-class opposition reflects misplaced costs of demographic change.

6. Gendered Online Behavior, Masculinity in Crisis, and Offline Formation

Timestamps: 61:58–82:50

• Performative “masculinity” online often mimics performative femininity, e.g., the “male to male transsexual” archetype—hyper-masculine men who are still operating via feminine-coded online behavior (gossip, posting physique).

  "Lifting so they can post physique is just the girliest, girliest thing to do." — Louise Perry (102:11)

• Social media is “structurally feminizing,” foreclosing avenues (like healthy male competition) needed for stable masculine identity formation.

  "It strikes me that getting men together to talk about their feelings is precisely the wrong way to go about it." — Louise Perry (81:17)

• Offline mentorship (“the uncles”) is vital for forming good men, especially for those from fatherless homes.

7. Mate Value, Cold Approach, and the Demise of Social Scaffolding

Timestamps: 84:21–100:59

• Post-MeToo, fears of reputational risk have further chilled male-female interactions. Both women and men struggle to accurately gauge their mate value.
• The “Tapp” (an app for warning about men’s reputations) is adjudged as a flawed attempt to digitally re-create local social knowledge.
• The importance of interlinked social networks—dinner parties, community—now undermined by fragmented lives and lack of physical gathering.

  "It assumes it’s a mutually affectionate relationship...there is also a continuum between that and domestic abuse." — Louise Perry (67:43)

8. Feminist Trends Shifting Right & Class-Inflected Signals

Timestamps: 124:30–134:14

• While young women skew left (“woke”) in many countries, both guests note historical and emerging trends of right-aligned female mobilization (e.g., “pink protests” for closing migrant hotels).

  "When [women] do [turn], they'll turn quickly." — Mary Harrington (130:28)

9. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Limbic Capitalism: "We are being selected against by our own commercial infrastructure." (07:15)
• Men and Social Media: "It strikes me that getting men together to talk about their feelings is precisely the wrong way to go about it." (81:17)
• Labubu Man: “He’s the male embodiment of a matcha drink.” — Chris Williamson (27:14)
• Competence in Mating: “Competence is hot and competence cashes out ultimately as can this guy protect me in a fistfight?” — Louise Perry (75:24)
• Social Scaffolding: “Women have to be willing to drop the silk glove if they want the man to make the first move." — Louise Perry (97:24)
• Class & National Identity: "England has had a racialized caste system for a thousand years." — Louise Perry (56:12)

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Timestamps for Segment Highlights

• [01:13] Sex recession, smartphones, and birth rates
• [03:33] The "limbic capitalism" thesis
• [06:07] Is the birth rate crisis Darwinian self-correction?
• [10:18] Role models, K-pop, and the status of parenthood
• [17:38] Social pattern recognition vs. tech solutions
• [23:47] Definition and emergence of "performative males"
• [39:07] Rise of the "himbo" and changing female preferences
• [54:17] Flags, class, and English tribalism
• [81:17] Feminization of online discourse; failure to form men offline
• [97:24] Social scaffolding in mate selection
• [124:30] Women, wokeness, and rightward shifts
• [130:28] Women turning to the right quickly

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Tone

The conversation is sharp, clever, self-aware, and frequently irreverent—never shrinking from controversy, but always informed by deep cultural and historical knowledge. There is a consistent thread of skepticism towards both simple progressive and reactionary answers to social ills, with a focus on subtlety and context—delivered with British wit.

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Further Reading from the Speakers

• Mary Harrington:

  • [Podcast] Made in Mother Matriarch
  • [Book] The Case Against the Sexual Revolution
  • [Substack] maryharrington.co.uk
  • [Column] Unherd

• Louise Perry:

  • [Book] Feminism Against Progress
  • [Substack, YouTube, Twitter] (handle: @MovingCircles)

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End of Summary
This episode offers a provocative, highly entertaining tour through the crisis in sex, masculinity, social cohesion, and the perils of seeking digital solutions to fundamentally analog human needs.

Transcript

[Chris Williamson]

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[Mary Harrington]

He goes first.

[Louise Perry]

Do you want to go first? I think I glanced at these statistics and what I thought was interesting and sort of haven't really had a chance to burrow into is how does it split between the long term path partnered and the casually and the unpartnered? Yeah, because that's, that's been generally the, the. That's where the commentary gets interesting and people have often the, the, the conservative side will say no, actually the, the, the not getting, they're not getting any is, is very much the people who are not married and actually the married are getting any. And if I remember rightly the recent headlines, actually the people who are not who are married are also becoming more panda.

[Chris Williamson]

Like sex recessions happening across the world. Yeah, it's happening across the relationship agnostic.

[Mary Harrington]

So I think that the paradox where people are simultaneously having less sex and apparently being at least more permissive towards casual sex, whether or not they're having lots of it, I think is solved by that marriage issue. So if people are less likely to be in long term partnerships and people in long term partnerships have more sex. So I think there's a model that works where say Gen Z are having casual sex, but they're only having casual sex. So like one hookup a year, for instance, works out as very little sex. But it's also not to say that casual sex culture doesn't exist, so you're.

[Chris Williamson]

Able to have both of these things.

[Mary Harrington]

I think that those things work and.

[Chris Williamson]

They might actually be causing each other.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah. But I also think it's plausible that even married people might be having less sex and that might be to do with things like obesity, things like, I don't know, xenoestrogens. Like there could be biological things going on or people just looking at their phones too much.

[Louise Perry]

I think people looking at their phones is at least as plausible at a practical level as xenoestrogens or any of the sort of exotic biological explanations. I mean, if you're. It's very, it's very absorbing and, you know, at the end of the day, you know, a certain amount of, A certain amount of action happens. Just, you know, nothing to do, nothing on tv, spontaneously out of bound, you're here, I'm here, you know.

[Mary Harrington]

Alice Evans, who's an academic at KCR in London, she blames smartphones for the birth rate crisis.

[Chris Williamson]

I mean.

[Louise Perry]

The line starts going down. They certainly track sometime before smartphones.

[Mary Harrington]

Well, it depends.

[Louise Perry]

It really goes off a tree or 60s, doesn't it?

[Mary Harrington]

It depends on which country you're looking at. But she notices, and I think this is true, that all the parts of the world that are seeing, have seen and are seeing the greatest drops in infertility. This does track with smartphone usage and the places where fertility is clinging on in, say, sub Saharan Africa, is where people are least likely to have smartphones. I think she's probably, I think probably the third factor that those things correlate with is actually modernity and affluence. And that's more complex, but it's interesting. I mean, her theory is that people are just so besotted with the joys of limbic capitalism delivered via their phones that they just forget to behave like normal human beings and reproduce.

[Chris Williamson]

Do you think Taylor Swift's tradwife arc will be enough to reverse birth rate decline?

[Louise Perry]

But she's not having a trad wife arc, is she?

[Chris Williamson]

She's engaged. Come on, let her do it. One step at a time.

[Louise Perry]

Come on.

[Chris Williamson]

Bloody hell.

[Mary Harrington]

What is she, 35?

[Chris Williamson]

Maybe?

[Mary Harrington]

It's not especially tradwifey to be.

[Chris Williamson]

You know what I mean, though? I mean, there was a poem by someone called Kaelyn. Weird. It's got tens of millions of views. Have you seen this? It's been Floating around the day Taylor Swift got engaged. Little girls screamed, grown women cried, and the awkward child we all carry inside finally felt chosen. My point, lots of women follow Taylor Swift. She's got engaged. Is this going to be a boon? Like it's a non zero impact on coupling. Right, but how big is it going to be?

[Mary Harrington]

So these things are mimetic. I'm with you there, but I don't know. I mean, that is. Okay, that is an interesting question. Like we know that with fertility, if you, if your sister, say, has a baby, you're more likely to have a baby in the year following and best friend, et cetera.

[Louise Perry]

Does it work when it's Taylor Swift?

[Mary Harrington]

Well, maybe. I mean, I was thinking maybe if it. Maybe parasocial relationships can have the same effect and probably actually people spend more. I mean, it occurred to me the other day that I see Donald Trump's face so much more often than I see like my neighbors faces, for instance. And that's probably true for you as.

[Chris Williamson]

Well because your neighbors are wearing Donald.

[Mary Harrington]

Trump masks as they walk to wind me up. Yeah, but the parasocial relationships, I mean, they do. Everyone who uses any kind of digital device is susceptible to them. So yeah, maybe. I mean, maybe Taylor might be able to trick her biggest fans into thinking my sister's just had a baby or when she does eventually have a baby, hopefully. So yeah, I think it's not negligible.

[Chris Williamson]

Birth rate decline might be a slightly bigger challenge than can be fixed by Taylor Swift.

[Mary Harrington]

Maybe a little bit.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, you could also make the case, I'm going to be provocative here, that birth rate decline is not so much a problem as just nature taking its course in the sense of a culture self correcting from a kind of a terminal spiral into a kind of a structural state of sterility. I mean, if the logical endpoint of Limbic capitalism, this superb phrase that Louise just raised, I mean, I don't know if you've come across this phrase before. It was coined by a writer called David Courtright, who wrote a book titled Limbic Capitalism, which is a critique of all the ways that, especially in more recent years, the, the way people make money. The most profitable source of new innovation is hacking people's basic primitive drives and redirecting them from what they're actually healthily meant to do towards making money for companies. So selling junk food, selling pornography, hacking people's dopamine systems so that they stay hypnotized by social media instead of getting it on or having, forming relationships or even frankly going Outside all of those things are instances of what Cortright calls limit capitalism. And I think you could make the case that if the direction of the general overall cultural direction of travel is such that that's the end point that we're currently destined towards, if it's resulting in people just not having babies, you could argue that if you take a step back, that's just evolution taking its course. We are being selected against by our own commercial infrastructure.

[Chris Williamson]

That's interesting.

[Louise Perry]

And the end point of that will be that the current. The current culture will very literally not be reproduced and will be replaced in two or three generations by some other culture which has somehow managed to unplug from the Skinner machine.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, okay.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, so in the long term, it's kind of optimistic, but in the short term, for the people who are committed to the limbic capitalist architecture, it looks like a disaster.

[Chris Williamson]

The conversation I had with Brad Wilcox, he was talking about why South Korea has got such a low birth rate. And one of his biggest theories is around K pop stars. Have you heard this one?

[Mary Harrington]

No.

[Chris Williamson]

Fucking brilliant. So the K pop revolution is very constructed. These people sort of apply. They go through Navy SEAL selection week and then they're done. And they're locked into these ironclad 360 24. 7 contracts. And in them they can't date. They're to be completely celibate for the entire time. Which means that.

[Louise Perry]

How long does it last, the contract?

[Chris Williamson]

Well, for as long as they're in the band. And if they want to go, and if they will, to begin dating, they would be out, right? Maybe. I don't know.

[Mary Harrington]

Maybe. What's the reasoning?

[Chris Williamson]

I think he didn't say that, but I'm gonna guess something like, we want you completely committed to this huge project and anything which is off that might muddy the water.

[Louise Perry]

There's also a cleaner parasocial relationship, isn't it as well, I suppose. You know, when you think about the relationship between Taylor Swift's fans, Taylor Swift's boyfriends, and Taylor Swift, you know, historic. You know, what was it? Matty Healy. And when she was dating him, they all went. Her entire fan base of squillion. Bajillions of women went absolutely bananas. They hated him and they. But like her fan base, basically split up the relationship.

[Chris Williamson]

That's a way to put it, that if you have a personal relationship, there is a part of you that is outside of the band. Right. So there is no personal. Right. And his point is that because you have the most popular, most aspirational role models within a country are all uncoupled and childless. That created a huge generational impact of you shouldn't be trying to have kids. And if that's true, there was a great example. I think it's the country of Georgia, very religious and they have this like superstar rock star pastor and he's the most popular guy in the entire country. And he tried to fix birth rate decline by saying, I will personally baptize the third child of any family.

[Louise Perry]

Oh, I remember that. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And these families are speed running through children in a desperate attempt to get the third. And so you can see people who are of high status are able to create incentives that encourage people who respect them in order to follow them. So the obvious thing, at least for Korea that you could fix overnight is the only way you can become a K pop star is if you are already a mother or father. Like that's the how you get in. And that means that every K pop star now is a example.

[Louise Perry]

But again, the entire architecture of limbic capitalism militates against that because the excitement clearly, I mean this is not a world I'm massively familiar with, but there's obviously like huge volumes of gossip content and huge amount of exposure and like every aspect of these people's lives, you know, down to their inner lives, is made available for strip mining by the media machine. Right. And under those circumstances, it's just not possible to be a parent because, you know, to be, to be there to be for your child or to be for your family is to keep some of that material, some of that intimate stuff protected from being strip mined and commercialized in that way. I mean, this is something you and I talk about, isn't it Louise? Like how, and in what, how you go. How one can go about existing in public while intentionally preserving a space of intimacy where family life happens and where.

[Chris Williamson]

That'S which is not subject to the digital modesty thing.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, digital modesty, exactly. And I mean I'm very intentional about what I post and when and how I share any information at all about my family. They're there and I love them. And if I don't talk about them, it's not because actually I secretly wish I wasn't part of that family. It's precisely because I respect their privacy and their stories are not mine to tell. But you know, to be a K pop star under, you know, to say you have to be a parent to be a K pop star would be to say you also have to be willing to strip mine your family.

[Chris Williamson]

That's true. I suppose you're strip mining your ability to have a family in the first iteration of it though, right? Like you're refusing to have. Okay, so on one side you are being puppeted by lack, and on the other side you are being puppeted by transparency.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, I think, you know, at the risk of getting very anti capitalist very early in this conversation, you know, perhaps the problem is the strip mining.

[Chris Williamson]

I mean, the position that we're all.

[Louise Perry]

In, you know, in the literal, physical, natural world as well as in the emotional world.

[Chris Williamson]

Good. Caveat. My point is we're all kind of under the impression or the awareness that that is a problem that's too big to be solved. So you need interventions that can. This is the world that we exist within that's so compelling to people and so seductive that you're not going to be able to stop that. You're not going to get people off smartphones. You're not going to stop social media from hacking the bottom of the brain stem. Okay, so what are the ways get Taylor Swift engaged? I don't know.

[Mary Harrington]

I think if there's any. So I think it's not the case that South Korea has no fertility because of K pop, but it probably is. If there was one easy intervention that you could at least attempt, it would be in the world of propaganda. Right. For the birth rates thing. So whether that be intentionally boosting mothers and fathers or yeah, obliging K pop stars to shag in an appropriate way or whatever the rules are, maybe that would work for trying to make parenthood higher status. The problem with any other type of birth rate intervention is that all of the other options are fairly appalling, I think, in terms of our actual ability to tolerate them. Because the cash transfers don't work is what we've learned. And so if the cash transfers don't work, we could try propaganda. After that we're just going to have.

[Chris Williamson]

To go evolution tech, stop the wi fi networks and kill data access from your phone.

[Mary Harrington]

We could try that, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

I just found that the Taylor Swift thing's been like in the reaction to that and then the subsequent reaction has been pretty interesting.

[Mary Harrington]

Well, you try and design a clever study to see if she boosts marriage and birth rates and we'll see.

[Chris Williamson]

Correlate your marriage rate with your Spotify listening habits.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

[Chris Williamson]

Safe Taylor Swift.

[Louise Perry]

No, I mean apparently a supermarket. Supermarket loyalty programs can already tell when somebody's pregnant even before they. Sometimes they realize it themselves. My Adam did that just by their search Patterns and purchase patterns.

[Mary Harrington]

I got an ad for pregnancy tests before I knew I was pregnant. The most recent time.

[Louise Perry]

Amazing.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah, yeah. The Internet's very clever.

[Louise Perry]

It's uncanny.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

There's an app called Aura A U R A and it's digital safety stuff. You put it on everybody's phone, but you can put it on your kid's phone. And it allows parents to have sort of surveillance that's safe without encroaching too much on privacy. At least that's the positioning. But it does things like it looks at how hard they're pressing the screen and it correlates that with their level of sort of psychological distress. And it looks at the last time that they went to, the last time they used it and the first time they used it in the morning. And then they correlate that with GPS data. It's all held securely, supposedly. And it's like it can deliver a report to a parent that says, when little Timmy goes to baseball, he sleeps for 45 minutes longer on average, and he's this percent less aggressive when he's pressing the screen, which suggests that it's very regulating for him.

[Mary Harrington]

His grandmother could have told you that, though.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of stuff is. A lot of this stuff is absolutely. It's a substitute for attentive, attuned interpersonal relationships from people who love you.

[Chris Williamson]

We're trying to re.

[Louise Perry]

Engineer through and there's a sense in which the more you offer a tech alternative to that, the more you create, the more you open the possibility that actually you can just do without the relationship. Yeah. Whereas. And it's going jumping slightly sideways from that to, you know, the power of older women for pattern recognition. I was talking to a local friend who has a son the same age as my daughter. We were talking about schools as we were walking our dogs, you know, very, very, very, very normy, very, very normie, very countryside, very. And he, he was telling me his wife, who's also my friend's mother, runs a local riding school. You know, it's one of those very classic kind of, you know, English kind of tier three riding schools where all the school ponies are very hairy and very muddy and generation after generation after generation of local girls, sort of from tween probably to mid teens have come through this riding stables. So my friend's mother in law has observed patterns of behaviour in possibly, I think, 25 years worth of local girls. And he and he and his wife are basing their school selection on what she has observed over 25 years about the change in disposition as those girls go off to different schools. So not Ofsted, not even what other parents think, not even what other parents are planning to do. But which schools instantly, which secondary schools instantly overnight transformed the girls that my mother in law saw from nice little girls into brats and which didn't. Wow. And that's the kind of stuff which you can try and you can try and replace with an app, but. But you can't, basically.

[Chris Williamson]

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[Mary Harrington]

If you ever read that classic blog, I think it's by an anonymous blogger from years ago about whams versus autists. So whams is a made up term. So the argument in the piece is great is we spend a lot of time talking about autism and identifying it in people and seeing it as an obviously bad thing. And we'll list all the ways in which autistic people suffer in the world and we see it as something to be treated, I mean obviously in extreme non verbal forms. Obviously that's appropriate. But to some extent it is just a personality type and It's a personality type you're more likely to see in men and is often pathologized. And the piece argues that. No, look, autism is just one end of a spectrum in terms of a disposition, in terms of being more interested in things than people and being very interested in systems and being quite socially withdrawn and whatever. We don't have a term for the other end of the spectrum, we just don't talk about the other end of the spectrum. But there is such a thing as someone being more interested in people than things, not really being interested in systems, being very extroverted and being very intuitive about everything and very like hypersensitive to emotion or whatever. Why don't we have a name for that? Because in extreme forms that's also a problem. And so the writer, who I think is male, calls them whams, which stands for nothing. It stands for nothing. It's just a word that you made up. So whammishness is like the opposite of being autistic. And that's a fantastic example of wamishness. Just pure like intuiting from the girls emotional states.

[Louise Perry]

I don't know, I mean it seems like a robust example of pattern recognition, the most kind of grounded and localistic kind of thing.

[Mary Harrington]

It's people focused.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, I know, I know this guy's mother in law. I've met her on a number of occasions. She's the least kind of emotionally labile individual you can imagine. She's like small, small square, thick set, extremely practical English horsewoman.

[Mary Harrington]

You know, you're relying very heavily on your neighbours not watching this movie.

[Louise Perry]

Sorry.

[Mary Harrington]

You'Re relying very heavily on your neighbours not watching.

[Louise Perry]

Well, I mean, I'm not going to name names and these are all people whom I love and respect. You know, I cite this as examples of what, what a functioning social fabric looks like absent.

[Chris Williamson]

This is classic British village life.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah. And the reason, the reason I talk about, you know, affectionately and respectfully, really deeply affectionately and respectfully about my neighbors and my local community in this way is because living, living like this is only is what you have before you start trying to reverse engineer a technological replacement for it.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah.

[Louise Perry]

And I mean, you know, these are, these are not people who are all up in each other's grills the whole time. You know, small town. Small town England is mostly people mind their own business.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Louise Perry]

But there's a sense in which you're known cumulatively over time just because you all show up in the same places and you go to the same playgroups. And whatever. And that's a very different way of being known and seen and observed than, for example, you know, creating a profile online or even, you know, having your data tracked and monetized by, by a supermarket shopping app or an algorithm that wants to sell you pregnancy tests. Very different.

[Chris Williamson]

It's certainly a missing archetype, I think, for the wise non grandmother influence in some young person's life. I think we call those the aunties.

[Mary Harrington]

Really.

[Chris Williamson]

That's why the group chat between us is aunties. That wasn't. That was not as flippant as you might have. And yeah, like those auntie influences. I don't live in the town or the country that I was born in. I've been displaced by my own choice. But most of my communication now is mediated through all of that. Where is the opportunity for some older matriarch woman to, you know, why aren't you married yet? Chris, bestow me the wisdom that's. I'm aware. That's a big question. I'm aware that.

[Louise Perry]

Well, I mean, I'm not expecting you to answer it now, but this is what all of the aunties will beast you with on every possible occasion.

[Chris Williamson]

I did highlight that at every. I actually dread now going to weddings because as a 37 year old unmarried man, every time that the vows are completed, the fucking eyes of Sauron all turn to the people who. Christopher, when are we, for fuck sake. I feel like I need to, you know, do some fugazi. Are those hors d' oeuvres over there? I must escape the situation.

[Mary Harrington]

That's what aunties are for.

[Louise Perry]

But that's what aunties do.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

So I mean your relationship, a lot of poking.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, you're, you know, on the one hand you long for the aunties and you want to create auntie groups. On the other hand, you want to run away from them when they beast you at weddings.

[Chris Williamson]

That's true. I think this is the, the auntie dynamic, you know, I mean, probably whatever, Thus. Yeah, correct. You know what I mean? All right. I want to talk about a kind of downstream from the Taylor Swift thing. I want to talk about pick me's and performative males because these are two memes that are taking off a little bit at the moment.

[Louise Perry]

Performative males. This is not one I've heard. Please say no.

[Chris Williamson]

Have you heard about performative males?

[Mary Harrington]

No.

[Louise Perry]

What is a performative male?

[Chris Williamson]

You need to get back on Twitter. You need to get back on Twitter.

[Mary Harrington]

Discourse now. He hasn't sent me a tweet. I just don't see it.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay.

[Louise Perry]

I've also been deliberately not very online all through the summer. I took my holiday from the Internet.

[Chris Williamson]

In England's last remaining phone black spot. I've decided to pick your fucking sabbatical from online life.

[Mary Harrington]

We've just reached the end of the.

[Chris Williamson]

Day, and today is the day that the kids go back to school. So had I asked you this in four weeks time, allow me to tell you about performative male. Okay, so.

[Louise Perry]

So you're gonna have to fill us in.

[Chris Williamson]

Let me. Let me do that. Okay, so performative males are. It's a call out. It's been very interesting. The trend emerged and almost immediately became kind of castigated. You know, like woke had an opportunity to be a legitimate term before it was a satirical term. Performative males have almost immediately become satirized. Performative male is a guy with floppy hair, sort of oversized, flared jeans. He's got a tote bag. He's reading some sort of literary fiction. He's got a matcher. He's not quite like a cinnamon roll boyfriend, husband thing.

[Louise Perry]

Is this not just the new soy.

[Chris Williamson]

Boy, maybe it might be kind of like an elevated hipster. Like a soft boy archetype, perhaps from sort of the late 2010s. It might be the equivalent of women wearing football shirts or Pink Floyd T shirts or like, kind of like the male. Imagine the male equivalent of a pick Me. But it's stripped of most of the raw, aggressive, kind of more masculine, more domineering.

[Louise Perry]

So let me, like, if I were to speculate, I would say this is the kind of guy who might employ the sneaky fucker mating strategy.

[Chris Williamson]

So this is why it's becoming, I think, immediately satirized. I think it's.

[Mary Harrington]

Liz, of course, knows what I do.

[Chris Williamson]

Yes, it's poorly hidden, pliable male mating tactics being called out very quickly, actually.

[Louise Perry]

Interestingly, I'm not sure how well this maps to performative males, but I remember discovering how very, very interestedly discovering just how high the proportion is of male feminists who subsequently end up being me too'd as sex pests.

[Mary Harrington]

I'm rewriting this piece.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, yeah. I think the lies. Yeah, four paragraphs.

[Mary Harrington]

Yes.

[Louise Perry]

Because they weren't sufficiently. Because they were just rumors and it was just. Yeah, well, allegedly.

[Chris Williamson]

Allegedly.

[Louise Perry]

We must remember that allegedly they gutted the article. But really the pattern is strong enough that even if you don't name names, it's. It's a thing. So. So these guys are. They're sort of droopy and feminized in presentation.

[Chris Williamson]

Flaccid flaccid man.

[Louise Perry]

@ least in presentation.

[Mary Harrington]

But heterosexual.

[Chris Williamson]

Heterosexual.

[Louise Perry]

Heterosexual.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the performative males being this. I think it's.

[Louise Perry]

Is it the one guy who comes to Pilates with you and then just like tries to hit.

[Chris Williamson]

We're getting close there. We're getting perilously close to like, what would have been the sneaky fucker Male feminist, the performative male. I think it's as much an aesthetic as anything else. Okay, so it might be the aesthetic, basically. It might just be a rework of the aesthetic of the sneaky fucker.

[Louise Perry]

What does he read? Does he read?

[Chris Williamson]

I'm not too sure what he would be. What he'd be reading. Yasmine. SHE LAUGHS. She's gone through. She's my source of sneaky fucker info. Because she's in it. She's in la. But it would be him sort of matcha. And he's the male embodiment of a matcha drink.

[Louise Perry]

Does he want Sarah J. Maas? I think this is what I'm trying to figure out.

[Mary Harrington]

What it reminds me of is the 70s when you had the men simultaneously embracing long hair and free love and whatever and being quite feminine and, you know, dodging the draft and stuff. So on the one hand being anti masculine, but then fully embracing the post sexual revolution opportunity to get women into bed. And feminists at the time complained about this. What it sounds like, though, is that the performative male adds a layer of like, consumerism, which is quite distinctively 2025. Is that right?

[Chris Williamson]

I think you've nailed it. Yeah. With the tote bag, with the dress, with the hair.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah. I mean, what is labubu on his bag?

[Chris Williamson]

Almost certainly Labubu. Actually, that's a better way to put it. If you could find a labubu with a matcher, it's Labubu males. Yes. Yeah, that's exact amazing.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah. I mean, one of the sort of depressing thoughts that crossed my mind the other day, you know, when you think about these sort of like this sort of noodle armed male phenotype, you know, with a labubu on his bag and a matcha in his hand. And maybe he actually literally does read Sarah J. Maas. And I think about them and you think about, you know, do I need to wait on this?

[Chris Williamson]

Okay, I just. The way that you construct sentences, I can't keep a straight face. It's fucking brilliant. Okay, go on.

[Louise Perry]

But I mean, you know, these kind of.

[Mary Harrington]

This.

[Louise Perry]

Stop it.

[Chris Williamson]

Sorry, sorry. I'm sorry. Okay, okay.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah. So Labubu guys. What if in fact they're more evolutionarily fit in terms in the context of what?

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, they've fucking adapted to the new environment.

[Louise Perry]

That's what I mean. Because it's like when you think about. When you think about the kind of work that everyone actually does now and when you think about the kind of social environments that particularly knowledge class people of either sex have to operate within actually being the kind of high T aggressive.

[Chris Williamson]

You're not sitting still in class, not sitting still.

[Louise Perry]

You know, those guys get medicalised and pathologized basically because they don't work in open plan offices.

[Chris Williamson]

Question on this, is this as close as a man can get to being female whilst still being reproductively viable for females to find attractive?

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, but basically.

[Chris Williamson]

And given that females have got this advantage socioeconomically in the education and in the workplace, this is like the new it's. And also I want to talk about MeToo at some point today. I wonder if this is the sort of post metoo acceptable what men think, even though incorrectly, I've been told, do not be domineering, do not be too forthcoming, do not be somebody that could make women feel threatened in any way. What's the least threatening? Labubu tote bag, floppy hair, Matcha drink.

[Mary Harrington]

It's very HR friendly.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah. And I do get the impression like there's a lot of guys, particularly those who are sort of, you know, socialized into a more sort of progressive kind of thought world, who genuinely feel very distressed by the sort of high T aggressive male disposition. I just finished reading a book. I mean, it's a good book, very interesting piece of work by an ecological economist on care and the sort of Cinderella economy, as he puts it, of care and maintenance and systemic health and environmental and environmental sustainability and so on, which he sees as being again, strip mined, exploited and ultimately exhausted by the quote unquote real economy that we now have. And in it he has a whole chapter about the patriarchy, which I just found a really interesting read from a guy who's a successful guy and he's got adult children and he's obviously sporty and fit and intelligent, well read and so on. So like, you know, perfectly manly man within the terms of, you know, modern respectable liberal society. But he's furious about the patriarchy, you know, and he's. And what. And the. The passage I found most interesting is he has a little discussion about Daphne du Maurier's novels and Jamaica Inn particularly, and Rebecca. And he talks, you know, his reading of Daphne Du Maurier is as. Is as a feminist, you know, that it's a critique of gender, of gender relations between the sexes, you know, and particularly of, you know, the cr. Kind of susceptible vulnerability of women to male violence. But at one point he observes that Du Maurier's female characters are both vulnerable to male violence and also kind of turned on by it. He doesn't quite put it up, he doesn't quite put it like that. But there's obviously a real ambivalence in the way she writes and he doesn't know how to process it. And I find that really interesting just in the context of thinking about how the Labubu man presents, you know, I'm not suggesting that the author of this book is a Labubu man. He's a, he's not quite that. But there's something really interesting going on there about, you know, guys who've internalized the idea that to be a straightforwardly aggressive man in a style, in a perhaps quote unquote old fashioned style or more overtly patriarchal is bad. And that puts you in continuity with Andrew Tate and other people who are bad, obviously by definition. And therefore we must be something which is softer and more consensual and more kind of labooberish or, I don't know, something.

[Chris Williamson]

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[Mary Harrington]

Question, is it possible that everyone's having less sex because of the Labubu male? But seriously, like I Mean, it's crossed.

[Louise Perry]

My mind sometimes too.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah, we need more polarity.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, look, this is. To me, this just seems like the progeny of MeToo in many ways, that the message that a lot of men, the vast majority of well behaved, sexually disciplined, not pushy men took was, I shouldn't be pushy. It's like, well, yeah, you already weren't that pushy and maybe you actually weren't pushy enough. So the issue with the message, don't be too pushy, is that the men who really need to hear it will ignore it and the men who are already predisposed to believe it will take it to heart. So what you end up with is this weird selection effect where the bad actors still act badly and the ones who actually probably needed a little bit of a helping hand to go forward are like, oh, holy fuck. And maybe the Labuba man is just the final form of that he's taking it too seriously.

[Louise Perry]

At the risk of just pouring petrol on this conversation and then flinging a match in, strikes me that, you know, if your thesis is right. In fact, somewhere buried in all of this is actually a low level of sort of low level revulsion at labubuman and a yearning for a more direct and unmediated form of masculine sexual aggression. It has been suggested by people on the Internet whose names I now forget, that this is in fact a factor in the extremely politically sensitive subject of migration into the country across the English Channel, as in there are.

[Chris Williamson]

Here we go.

[Louise Perry]

That there are progressive women who kind of. Kind of enjoy the appearance of young men who haven't been laboobified yet.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow.

[Louise Perry]

This is. No, this is.

[Chris Williamson]

This is not because Labubu hasn't reached Syria.

[Louise Perry]

Labubu has not reached Syria. These guys are not noodle armed. These guys, in fact, have demonstrated considerable gumption. Gumption in making it from wherever it is that they originated to England. I mean, it's a genuinely impressive level of gumption involved.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah.

[Louise Perry]

And I don't know, maybe spicy.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, you really.

[Mary Harrington]

So I. Okay, two things. One is so.

[Louise Perry]

So having. Having just. I'm just gonna. Louis, I'm gonna hand you the petrol.

[Mary Harrington]

Cat. So I do actually agree with you. I was speaking to a journalist friend recently.

[Louise Perry]

No, you're not agreeing with me. You're agreeing with people on the Internet. Sorry, whose names I don't know.

[Mary Harrington]

I was speaking to a friend, a journalist friend recently who had been in Calais and speaking to these guys who were trying to come over the Channel and he said, like, what is really amazing is you'll talk to these guys about their life stories and it will be like, oh yeah, so I came from Sudan and I walked across half of Africa and then I got to Libya and then I got enslaved and so I was taken to another country where I was a slave and then I was gang raped and then I somehow escaped from that and then I swam across the channel. Whatever. It's like they tell this story and it's the most appalling thing you've ever heard. And they're physically. It's evident that they've been through this and these are like 20 year old guys or something. And then you ask them, why did you do it? And they're like, just like Manchester United. They'll offer some like, really weird, inadequate answer. It's not even like I want access to the welfare state because you could have got that in other European countries. It's. It's quite strange. And I do kind of get your point that there's an element of like crazy machoness about it.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow. If you're prepared to go through all of that for Manchester United, imagine what you'd do for your family and your partner.

[Mary Harrington]

I suppose so. The only thing I would say though is that the impression that I get from a lot of women who are very, very invested in refugees welcome kind of stuff is that they really infantilize these men at the same time. And there's a degree to which they're kind of scooping up the vulnerable, you know.

[Louise Perry]

You think this is a bit like the American pit bull ladies phenomenon?

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah, yeah. He's just misunderstood.

[Louise Perry]

I'll just add some more.

[Chris Williamson]

It's okay.

[Louise Perry]

This is another one of these discourses actually, probably related obliquely to Labuba Man. It's one of these memes that sloshes around in which a certain subtype of usually single American progressive women are accused of adopting actually obviously murderously, sociopathically dangerous rescue pitbulls as a kind of proxy for the sort of man they would never dream of admitting to fancying in real life.

[Chris Williamson]

Right, okay.

[Louise Perry]

So in a sense, you know, officially they're only allowed to date Labubu man. And that's in fact the only people who are within their social circles immediately. And so they adopt a pitbull to just kind of compensate.

[Chris Williamson]

So I see his lack of. I see your Labubu man.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And I raise you the newly nomenclatured himbo, which has actually come back around. The new dream guy is beefy, placid and politically ambiguous. Amid pitched debates about masculinity the himbo stands stoically above it all. As an alternative to the thinking man, the Renaissance man, or the family man. Today's himbo offers just man, a blurry image, a blunt political instrument, or just a caricature, the human equivalent of a smiley face. The himbo is in many senses, unreal, a wish fulfillment fantasy. His true self is concealed behind a set of doe like eyes, the content of his inferiority forever unconfirmed.

[Louise Perry]

So is this like Ken in Greta Gerwig's? But he says towards the end, if I'd realized patriarchy wasn't just about horses, I wouldn't have bothered.

[Chris Williamson]

Hunk with a heart of gold. Hunk with a heart of gold. I think. Who was the dude that did Magic Mike? Who was the guy, the actor that played Magic Mike.

[Mary Harrington]

Oh, my God.

[Chris Williamson]

Channing Tatum. Channing Tatum is often put forward as like him. But I actually. Channing Tatum follows me on Instagram, so I actually quite like him. But Hunk with a heart of gold, the human equivalent of a smiley face. What we've got here is basically, I think you're trying to cross the streams between Labuboo man in terms of disposition and front cover of a dark romance novel in terms of presentation.

[Mary Harrington]

I mean, it's a tricky tightrope for women because on the one hand, you want, and this is an eternal conundrum, you want a man who is going to protect you and protect your children and provide for you in times of. Of extreme threat. Right. But you also don't want someone who's gonna beat you up and beat up your children. And so that's tricky, the line that.

[Chris Williamson]

You'Ve got to perennially want.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah. And so the himbo is. I love a himbo.

[Louise Perry]

Right.

[Mary Harrington]

And the impression for my female friends is that himbos are very high status. I remember a friend talking to me about how attractive a himbo was, and she said she really, really didn't want, I guess, a Labubu man who was, like, excessively intellectual. She said, if I came home and he was like, I just read something in the New York Review of Books, I would kill myself. It' what she wants from a man. Right? Ahimbo does kind of tread that tightrope. Like he's physically capable clearly, of doing what's needed if you're at risk. But he's so sweethearted that he would never turn on you.

[Louise Perry]

Well, again, I mean, skipping sideways through this sort of untidy territory, there was a piece, I think it was in the New York Times, which is often a sort of barometer for what American middle class women in their 30s think about. About stuff in general. I think it was the New York Times, but it was, it was somewhere in that zone, that discursive zone. Anyway, on, on how. On a, on a. On a fascinating new trend of women marrying down and what they were actually talking about. No, no, but what they were talking about wasn't actually women marrying down. It was women marrying below their educational level. Yeah, actually they were financially, they were marrying up because these were, these were women with maybe a degree and a master's or a degree and a PhD or something, but no money and a mountain of debt.

[Chris Williamson]

It's like complex hypergamy who were marrying.

[Louise Perry]

Construction, you know, construction entrepreneurs or, you know, a successful plumber with a, with a, with several employees who was turning over, you know, chunks of change. And so, you know, in straightforward financial terms, you know, it's at least a match if not marrying up. But in intellectual and in terms of a particular type of caste, as distinct from straightforward economic levels, you know, she was, you know, some of these women were experiencing it as kind of marrying down. And I think there's something, there's something, you know, I think that speaks to your hymn Himbo in the sense that very sensibly, these extremely over educated women have married some guy who's going to appreciate their brains and also be able to pay the mortgage, you know, without trying to compete.

[Chris Williamson]

It seems like the Himbo is economically prepared and maybe educationally underdeveloped, whereas the Labubu man is maybe economically underdeveloped and over educated.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, would you rather have a guy who can talk? Would you rather have a guy who can talk contemporary literature but can't afford to buy you dinner? Or some guy who can fix the plumbing when it goes wrong? She just doesn't care what you think about books.

[Mary Harrington]

I have a funny story about this with my. It occurs to me you shouldn't be rocket science that my parents technically have that dynamic because my mum has a PhD and my dad has an undergraduate degree and then became a lawyer. But Anyone who knows PhDs don't translate into big money, right? So my dad's always out more. But there was this funny story about a time when he was at work, this is the age before the Internet, and someone referred to King Lear in talking about office politics. He was like, oh, someone's behaving like King Lear in relation to someone, and he didn't understand what they were saying. And he called my mom, like very quietly and said, what happens in King learn. It's a funny example of this, but there's something there.

[Chris Williamson]

How much do women find that endearing? How much do women find needing to intellectually coddle their partner beyond up to a certain point, how much do they find that is oh, noble savage.

[Mary Harrington]

I personally find that endearing. I don't know if I'm representing.

[Louise Perry]

If he's also sort of generally red blooded in his bearing and behavior and is also capable of fixing stuff around the house that goes wrong. I don't really see the problem.

[Mary Harrington]

Is very girly.

[Chris Williamson]

What about if it's the opposite? What about if it's somebody who can tell you what has been happening in the New York Review of Books but needs to call his dad if there's something broken in the toilet at your house?

[Louise Perry]

I mean competence, competence is very hot or should, you know.

[Chris Williamson]

Right. But this is competence within a particular domain. Because you could say the noble savage is incompetent when it comes to his intellectual development.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, I suppose, you know, zooming back a bit, you could probably make the case that we're currently in an age of flux where these never ending growth really does feel like it's come to an end. You know, politics is quite uncertain. You know, we've got war in Europe for the first time in a very long time and all kinds of things don't feel as certain and safe and stable as they used to. And it could be that in fact some of these very instinctive mating patterns are shifting, are going to shift or are perhaps already shifting in the light of how people assess their own prospects in that very much more uncertain world. So women who might have automatically, who might have gone for the intellectual guy because he can always buy, buy in a plumber are going to assess, you know, who they're likely, who their looks match and economic match is likely to be for a long term partnership and think, you know what actually like Labubu man, I need somebody who knows how, who knows how to use a shotgun or you know, or you know, there are various levels of deranged preferation that you can apply to that depending on, depending on your filter bubble. But there are, you understand what I'm saying?

[Mary Harrington]

It's like that study that men like fatter women when they're hungry.

[Louise Perry]

Right.

[Chris Williamson]

So I'm sure you've got an economic security hypothesis. Yeah, yeah.

[Louise Perry]

So it's perhaps the equivalent for women.

[Chris Williamson]

Women like more masculine men when it seems. That's a fucking awesome. Mac and Murphy, if you're listening, go and do that study for me.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, it seems like if that's empirically researchable, but intuitively it feels completely.

[Chris Williamson]

Right, super easy. Whatever the equivalent of the social, you know, the VIX index, if you're familiar with that, volatility within the market. Whatever the social equivalent of that. Okay, let's just have what are the popular types of. The preferred types of men? Would you want one that's more domineering or one that's a little bit more casual?

[Mary Harrington]

Whereas the point of being able to discourse about the New York Review of Books is status games. Right. And that's very much Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Tippy top. So that's the sort of thing that you're gonna jettison pretty quickly in these kind of conditions.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh. So the fact that you have the ability to do that suggests to me that in some ways maybe it's a luxury position. Oh, you've got the bottom levels looked after. Or maybe you're unable to look after the bott and you've kind of outsourced them or skipped over them in some sort of way.

[Mary Harrington]

Yes. I think that my friend who threatened suicide if her boyfriend read the new review of books, I think what she was referencing was someone who couldn't do the other stuff, who was prior.

[Chris Williamson]

He turned the triangle upside down.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah, yeah. That's what's unattractive.

[Chris Williamson]

So the only final bit on this himbo thing, what is it about the kind of. It's not someone who's saying, I want the Renaissance man man, I want the thinking man, including. Because presumably you could say I want to max out his physicality and also max out his mind. But it seems like it's actually preferable to have the slightly more doughy eyed human smiley face as a partner. The one thing that I would sort of maybe throw into the mix there is that if you have somebody that is both domineering, prestigious, sort of able to make things happen in the physical world and also has the intellect to be a little bit more connected, you run a much higher risk there of this guy's maybe going to be quite sought after in many ways. He's maybe going to be able to outwit me. Is that an element or what do you think's going on with this desire to actually kind of turn down the volume on the intellectual nature, simplicity, or.

[Mary Harrington]

Is it maybe a bit.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, realistically, guys like that are just relatively rare. So partly it's just a numbers game.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah. But also I feel like it's a bit girly to be too preoccupied with.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Thought and emotional.

[Louise Perry]

Just looping all of this, looping all of this back to the Taylor Swift theme. Would you not say that actually Taylor's choice of a husband perfectly encapsulates the himbo. Also Alana Del Rey. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's the kind of right wing coded equivalent, isn't she?

[Mary Harrington]

Lana Giselle. Ray has married a.

[Louise Perry]

Wasn't he like a crocodile?

[Mary Harrington]

Crocodile wrangler.

[Louise Perry]

It's incredible.

[Mary Harrington]

From Louisiana. I want to say something like that. He's slightly north normal blue collar guy. I mean, I don't know if blue collar is the right word if you're a crocodile wrangler. But green collar, he does a completely like very skilled, very like impressive big arms.

[Chris Williamson]

Masculine.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah. And has nothing.

[Louise Perry]

Extremely competent.

[Mary Harrington]

But then I was thinking if you're. If you're Lana Del Rey or you.

[Louise Perry]

Don'T have money, you don't need the money.

[Mary Harrington]

You don't need the money. And actually marrying someone who's in your field of work and people inevitably less successful than you is a nightmare because.

[Chris Williamson]

You'Re able to do. You're able to do more. Comparison high. So what does it mean to date hypergamously? If you are going cross who's above you?

[Mary Harrington]

If you're Taylor?

[Chris Williamson]

I picked someone from another industry. I picked someone that's a.

[Louise Perry]

There is no way of doing hypergamy if you're Taylor Swift. Because she's just right.

[Chris Williamson]

The top of her own hierarchy.

[Louise Perry]

She's the apex. She's the apex of so many different hierarchies.

[Mary Harrington]

This is Will. Have you read the Status Game by.

[Louise Perry]

But Travis Kelsey, you know, he's enormous. You know, he's a successful player.

[Chris Williamson]

He'll outlift her. He's able to outrun her.

[Louise Perry]

You can pick her up and chuck, you can probably.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, he's got prestige and he's got standing in his own field and specifically in a cohort that she does not.

[Louise Perry]

That's right.

[Chris Williamson]

So if you walk into a different room, there are tons of people that couldn't give a fuck about Taylor Swift but will sprint toward Travis Kelce.

[Louise Perry]

Right?

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah, exactly. And this is. If you've read Will Storr's A Status Game, you've probably interviewed him at some point. His really, really good piece of life advice is that everyone is completely obsessed with status. You can't pretend that you're not. This is just the natural human condition to be preoccupied with status. But you can choose which status game you compete in to some extent. And you can. I realize that that one is bad for me or that I'm not gonna flourish in it, but you can just choose another one. And so, yeah, choosing having a spouse who's competing in a different status game from yourself I think is very sensible.

[Louise Perry]

A young friend who also has something of an Internet platform told me recently that he had tried dating women who also were Internet figures of some sort. And it was just hideous.

[Chris Williamson]

It feels too similar.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, it was just. It was too much of a difference.

[Chris Williamson]

Comparison's too direct.

[Louise Perry]

And there's a. And I guess I don't think like this wasn't his point, but it struck me that if you were. If you're both, if you both have a platform, you both have an audience, the temptation to turn your relationship into content would be almost. Would be tough.

[Chris Williamson]

This is Freya India's thing. Right. That all relationships are just brand collaborations.

[Louise Perry]

Right. And it doesn't have to be like that. But you really, if you're very online, you have to choose. You know, you're gonna survive much longer and stay much saner if your partner is not online at all. Or is it just not very interested in that.

[Chris Williamson]

Have you heard the theories that aliens are just the end of human evolution? That they're complete? Yeah. I'm bringing it back, I promise. They're sort of huge heads. Human heads have got bigger over time, although they actually got smaller at one point as well. But human heads are big. We seem to be getting lower. Testosterone less muscles, less sort of domineering physically. And that aliens, the classic sort of big head, big eyes thing is the completely atrophied in the body, but overdeveloped cognitively.

[Mary Harrington]

Well, they are to us as we are to chimps.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Cause we are weaker. Bigger brains. And then you just keep running that forward.

[Mary Harrington]

Even less hair on aliens as well.

[Chris Williamson]

Good point. I never really assessed the hair of an alien, but hair loss, it's just interesting to hear where your mind goes. I wonder whether Labubooman is kind of the same, sort of. I've adapted to my local environment. My local environment is one where, if I'm quite flaccid as a human and like a very flaccid human, I can sit in an office chair for longer, basically.

[Louise Perry]

Right. So the interesting. You know what, civilizations can go down as well as up. How long would it take after the shit hit the fan? Hypothetically speaking, in civilizationally, before the booboo man got his act together, it was either was either selected aggressively out of the picture altogether or actually needed to set his game. Shoot.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. I mean, how many people say, if Our country went to war, there's no way that I would fight for them. I've got asthma. Sorry. No, my, my athlete's foot precludes me from being able to go into the. You know, there's like all manner of different excuses and yeah, without selection pressure, people fold around whatever that situation is. They kind of get molded and shaped by it.

[Mary Harrington]

I think it's a really serious problem right now. If we did have some kind of serious strife in this country.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, it strikes me that one of the structural problems is that two or three generations of young people have now been, now been taught, you know, very methodically by the education system, by the sort of ambient public conversation that nation states are just not really. They're not the real political community. And actually the real political community is everyone is every human on the planet. You know, we're all just a continuous one big happy family. And yeah, under those circumstances, the idea that you could just snap people, people overnight back into thinking of themselves as an us, just in the context of the nation state, particularly in an age.

[Chris Williamson]

Of high demographic, you're trying to redraw territory.

[Louise Perry]

So having said no, no, actually universal humanity, yada yada, yada, and explicitly teaching that, and explicitly teaching children that nationalism is bad and that it caused Hitler and the Second World War and carnage and death and disaster for decades and generation after generation, and then you turn around the next day and you're like, oh, by the way, we're going to reinstate the draft because Putin. No. Do you blame the kids for say no? Fuck off.

[Chris Williamson]

That's such a good point. Holy shit.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, you know, even leaving, you know, there are various kind of uglier and more bitter versions of that story to do with ethnopolitics and so on, but fundamentally, I think that's the crux of it because it goes across the board. It's not just the right wing zoomers, it's also the left wing ones. They just don't buy it because they've been taught not to buy it.

[Mary Harrington]

Except that generally, I mean, if you watch these endless vox pops that you're referring to where you ask people, would you go to war for your country? And they all say no. What normally happens is that anyone who's member of an ethnic minority will say, oh, but I'm Jamaican or no, because I'm not from here or something, and actually you scratch the surface and everyone has a degree of ethocentrism.

[Louise Perry]

And this is actually what worries me, that having abolished or done their best to educate young children and young people out of thinking in terms of nation states, that people are not going to abandon having a tribe, but they're just going to draw the tribe around, people who look. Look like them. Once you scale that up to the level of, you know, you start looking at lines of conflict internal to a country, you know, along possibly different tribes, but a kind of Ulster situation, you know, potentially even within the country itself, which is a disturbing prospect. Brilliant.

[Mary Harrington]

Because of course, nation states are modern inventions and they are a bit fake.

[Louise Perry]

They are, they are, yeah. And I mean, and if you look at. If you look at the flag phenomenon that we've been seeing a lot recently, you know, that feels to me like a precursor to a kind of Ulsterization happening within the United Kingdom. I mean, it's deeply, deeply, deeply concerning.

[Mary Harrington]

I've been watching loads of TikTok videos of people having, increasingly commonly having confrontations between people putting up flags and people trying to take them down. A bridge near our house has now had, I think, four iterations of people putting up flags, taking them down, putting up. And they leave the cable ties every time. So that there's just like a porcupine kind of thing on the.

[Chris Williamson]

The graveyard of where patriotism used to be.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah.

[Mary Harrington]

And people putting up counter things and whatever. It's like a whole thing. And there's quite a lot of TikTok video videos of people having these confrontations. The main thing that jumps out at me as a Brit who's very sensitive to these things is the class difference. So the flaggers are always working class and the D flaggers are always middle class. And it's really obvious.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mary Harrington]

And why is it obvious or why is this happening?

[Chris Williamson]

Why is it happening?

[Mary Harrington]

Because I think the whole thing is a class rule, always has been.

[Louise Perry]

I think that's basically right.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, I was sort of obliquely thinking about this, writing about the Norman concept earlier this week. You know, this is where that particular class war began, because the English class system was originally not just a caste system, but also a racialized caste system, in that the ruling class, the Normans, arrived and just replaced the whole Anglo Saxon ruling class with their own. And they were a different ethnic group.

[Mary Harrington]

And I guess didn't interbreed that much.

[Louise Perry]

Well, I mean, to an extent, after a while. But people with Norman surnames are still, to this day more likely to be wealthy than those with Saxon.

[Mary Harrington]

No way overreacted in Oxford.

[Louise Perry]

People with names like Smith and Cooper are less likely to be rich than people with names like Glanville. Or, you know, Dennis or Grosvenor. Indeed. You know, the current Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, can trace his ancestry all the way back to 1066.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah.

[Louise Perry]

And is still a billionaire, still one of the richest people in the country. I think he's number 15.

[Chris Williamson]

Gregory Clark is punching the air right now.

[Louise Perry]

So, I mean, you know, you can, you know, never mind critical race theory. England has had a racialized cluster caste system all for a thousand years. And I think actually really, genuinely, that's a significant factor in what Louise is describing about this class war. There is a subset of more well off, culturally middle or upper class English people who identify much more with the Norman disposition. And then there are a group of people who think of themselves. I mean, it's even right there in the conflict between England, English and British, you know, British values, quote, unquote.

[Mary Harrington]

English flags.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, exit English flags. Right, yeah.

[Mary Harrington]

Mostly they, mostly alternate them. But I've noticed that like if you go to touristy places, they have Union Jacks up anyway because it's a bit twee. That's not, that's flagging. The St. George thing is Saxon flagging has to necessitate St. George's crosses, at least some of them. And it's an anti government gesture. And again, the comments you'll get all the time on social media, such a classic like midwit normie take is, oh, they don't have any GCCs and they don't have any teeth. Like basically something very, very class S directed at nativists. And I'm like, I mean, yes, you are right to identify that rift. And it's a consequence of the relationship with the globalized economy. If you do the sort of job that is vulnerable to the importation of cheap labor, of course you're going to hate it. Obviously you're going to hate it so much more than if you're doing a completely working, completely different industry. Like, yes, you've correctly identified this class fissure. And what we've seen for decades now has been upper middle classes inviting demographic change, which doesn't hurt them and does hurt, hurt the working classes.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, it drove Brexit and they learned nothing.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, it's a similar dynamic to what happened in America, but it's got a uniquely British flavour because of how.

[Louise Perry]

Because of the class system.

[Chris Williamson]

Correct, Precisely correct.

[Louise Perry]

Bluntly, because of the Normans.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, well, look, I use the word posh and get laughed at in America because it feels like me, I don't know, talking about herringbone or something. It's Just an odd term to use because even though most Americans understand what I mean mean, it's such an odd archaic like you don't talk about that. You would talk about race or education or wealth.

[Louise Perry]

It's probably from the Northeast.

[Chris Williamson]

Aren't you Newcastle. Well, Stockton.

[Louise Perry]

So you probably don't exactly have skin in either sides of these game because you're probably Viking in heritage.

[Chris Williamson]

I have no idea. I need to do my 23 me. I need to do my ancestry dot com.

[Louise Perry]

Well, don't. Because Data security, they're about to sell the whole database.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh God. And all of the murders I've done will come up. Yeah, they sell my data.

[Louise Perry]

No, don't do that. But I mean, people from the Northeast are ancestrally much more likely to. To be Danish. Scandinavian inheritance.

[Chris Williamson]

I sit outside of the hierarchy.

[Louise Perry]

So you can throw tomatoes at both the no one's out there.

[Chris Williamson]

And I do. And I do. I'm sure if you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start. Which is why I partnered with Function. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor over a hundred biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that take the data, put it in a simple dashboard and give you actionable insights. Insights and recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health to your hormone levels to your thyroid function and nutrient deficiencies. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you get from an annual physical. And getting your blood work done and drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands. But with Function, it is only $499. And right now they're giving a thousand Modern Wisdom listeners another hundred dollars off, bringing it down to $399. So just go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth.com modernwis that's functionhealth.com modernwisdom I don't know whether this is precisely true, and I hate the word going back to something that it feels like we just dispensed with because the word woke is so sort of tried and done and kind of lame. However, this feels like a uniquely new British brand of something akin to woke.

[Mary Harrington]

Flagging.

[Chris Williamson]

Yes. And the response to it. And it's the reason that I want to. I haven't got a different word for it. Broke wouldn't work as British. And woke. It has a dynamic that is exclusively present or mostly present in the uk, which is this sort of classist approach. Cause it exists a little bit in the US that people that were left of centre that were very pro immigration but the reason that they were doing it and the sort of accusations that they would make weren't the same. They weren't about. In the same way about being uneducated, in the same way about the way that people sort of presented the no teeth thing.

[Mary Harrington]

Although isn't that what Hillary was saying with the basket of deplorable. Like it was basically a class statement, it was more veiled. Whereas I guess here it tends to be more explicit, which was probably because we've had a thousand years of not being invaded. Right. So you can build up, they can ossify. Exactly.

[Louise Perry]

The situation in America is much more complicated because they've. Because everybody there.

[Chris Williamson]

Where do I stand in this hierarchy? I'm not sure, I've only been here for years.

[Louise Perry]

Everybody there is technically an immigrant at one point or another. So it's very much harder to do the nativist thing because the most recent Anglo Saxon phone arrivals weren't that long ago.

[Mary Harrington]

And it's also a problem of course, because here our elites are so incredibly Yankee brained that they assume you'll hear people talk about Britain being a nation of immigrants. No, it isn't. That is factually incorrect. Like Britain was 99% plus white British in the 1950s.

[Louise Perry]

It does strike me at times that casually conflating invasion and immigration is possibly not the wind they middle class advocates. Yeah, imagine it is.

[Mary Harrington]

Anyway, yeah, they're like, what about the Vikings?

[Louise Perry]

I can see some ways that that could back down.

[Chris Williamson]

Remember Lindisfarne?

[Mary Harrington]

Did we not embrace the Vikings? I. But because they're so Yankee brained they don't realize that. Actually no, like people here are indigenous to these islands going back a very long way. Not the same as in America.

[Chris Williamson]

I did wonder about what a land acknowledgement in the UK would look like.

[Mary Harrington]

Douglas Murray did this once, actually giving a speech and he did a land acknowledgement to the Duke of Westminster who owned the land.

[Louise Perry]

It was very funny.

[Mary Harrington]

He's a classic Douglas.

[Louise Perry]

Although really he. I mean strictly speaking the Duke of Westminster also counts as a college. Well, because that's Hugh Grosvenor who arrived with the Normans.

[Mary Harrington]

Ah, there we go.

[Louise Perry]

So I mean Hugh Grosvenor ought to be doing a land acknowledgement to the Saxons.

[Chris Williamson]

Your surname has scuppered you. Looping it back to the perennial discussion about stupid things to do with relationships on the Internet. Have you heard of Princess Treatment?

[Louise Perry]

What no.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, allow me. I mean you are spending a lot of time on TikTok. I would have expected this to come across okay. Princess treatment refers to various supposedly fairytale worthy gestures made by women's partners, including but never limited to lattes in bed, flowers every Friday, partner funded pedicures and doors being open for you. Nearly 130,000 Instagram posts congregate under it. However, this is immediately being taken to reductio ad absurdum. Courtney Palmer, self proclaimed housewife Princess. I do not interact with the waitress, I do not open any doors and I do not order my own food. You do not need to talk unless you are spoken to. You are not going to be laughing loudly, speaking loudly or demanding the attention of the rest the of restaurant. So Princess treatment, is this not sort.

[Louise Perry]

Of lifestyle BDSM with a say it's a sex thing. It's a totally a sex thing. It's a sex thing.

[Chris Williamson]

How have you both arrived at this? This is like that fucking anti wisdom thing where I haven't seen it. Like you're looking at this optical illusion.

[Louise Perry]

I'm like, what to be? I mean this is kind of a.

[Chris Williamson]

Mary Louise explain to the muggle in the room.

[Louise Perry]

It's a Mary and Louise group chat running joke about the tradwife. I mean there's the tradwife or autogynephrael. The. That's not this.

[Chris Williamson]

There's also what the tradwife autogynephile or.

[Louise Perry]

But there's also the continuity between right wing complementarian tradwife discourse and lifestyle bdsm, which it seems to me is just. It's really just a question of inflection, but it's basically the same conversation.

[Chris Williamson]

You're going to have to bring it down to earth a little bit.

[Louise Perry]

Okay, which of us is going to imagine that?

[Chris Williamson]

I didn't read the first three Harry Potter books and I've come in at the fourth. Please.

[Louise Perry]

So on the one hand you have, you know, it's often very protestant coded, sometimes quite American. There's a sort of religiously inflected discourse about how men do one set of tasks and play one set of roles within a long term relationship and women play the other. And everyone comes together as ordained by God in this dual dance of complementary unity. And then everything is good. And then in an entirely different political filter bubble, you have the people who embrace lifestyle bdsm, which is, is a. It's a way of living in a long term relationship where one person is always explicitly the dominant one who just gets to decide everything. And the other person is also always the submissive one who just says, yes, yes, master.

[Chris Williamson]

There's a degree of entitlement though, here, which doesn't sound superbly submissive, does it?

[Louise Perry]

Well, I mean, this is where it gets actually, both complementarian right wing trad types and also lifestyle BDSmers will tell you that in fact the. The wife, slash submissive, depending on how you're framing it, you know, has plenty of say because in fact it's.

[Mary Harrington]

She's the one putting it online. It's never the man who's filming content of us, is it?

[Louise Perry]

Always the woman. That's true. Well, this is too much of a rabbit hole.

[Chris Williamson]

No, go do it, let's run it. I'm fascinated. I'm already fucking Alice in Wonderland here.

[Mary Harrington]

Women do this simultaneous. Like, I'm so submissive. And there's a lot of humble brag going on as well. Like, by the way, my husband. Husband can afford to buy.

[Chris Williamson]

It's the long nails, long hair, high heels.

[Mary Harrington]

Exactly right. But also she's calling the shots in terms of their social media presence.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And also, which is really what matters.

[Louise Perry]

In these sorts of very deliberately stylized, polarized relationships. You know, assuming it's a long term affectionate relationship that both parties want to continue and sustain and maintain, then actually the person who's formally giving way all the time has a lot of say because the other person has to second guess what they want all the time. That's interesting if you see, because I mean, you can't just order somebody around and say, no, you're gonna go and lick the floor clean or do the dishes or whatever. Because if you make decisions for both of you for long enough and actually the other person doesn't like your decisions, eventually, you know, the nominally, you become trained by them. Well, the nominally submissive one will vote with their feet, you know, assuming that it's a consensual, loving relationship. Otherwise you have to make decisions that both of want to abide by. So actually it's not as commanding as all of that, but it just sort of reflects, I think.

[Mary Harrington]

I mean, we both feel like there's nothing wrong with complementary gender roles. Like, within reason, they make sense. It's fine. Like, no complaint. What is weird about the lifestyle BDSM is when it's clearly done in an exaggerated way as a sex thing, like the motivation is not. This makes the household run more smoothly, this makes sense of our financial lives, et cetera. If it's this turns me on and I'm also doing it for an Online audience.

[Louise Perry]

That's weird.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah, that's weird.

[Louise Perry]

But I mean, you know, the difference. I don't really see a huge amount of difference in kind between that and princess treatment. If she's like, I'm just going to sit there, sit there at a restaurant and you have to guess, you know, you as my date slash partner, have to guess what it is that I want to eat and get it right. And you have to do all the legwork of interacting with the underlings. You have to pay and I'm just going to sit there. And nominally, yes, you know, you get to decide everything and you have to have the power, but also you have to guess and you have to get it right. So who, so who actually has the power in that situation?

[Chris Williamson]

It's a great point. Yeah. Wow, okay. I really have seen through the matrix here. Fuck me. Women are so much more sophisticated than men are with this bullshit.

[Louise Perry]

But yeah, I mean all of this, of course, you know, with the caveat that it's. It assumes that it's a mutually affectionate and consensual relationship. You know, under, you know, there are def. The result. There is also a continuum between that and domestic abuse. Because if the one financial prisoner. Yeah. Financial imprisonment, domestic abuse and so on, where somebody is calling the shots and actually the other person isn't free to leave through whatever combination of coercive control or other kinds of.

[Chris Williamson]

Does this not play into. Does this not play into another one of those lines that needs to be walked that it would be nice to be looked after? Yeah, it would be nice for my partner to know me so well that I actually can sort of take my foot off the gas a little bit. Wouldn't that be lovely? And then if you overdo the dose, the response curve gets really squirrely when you get toward the point, well, I can't leave anymore because I don't. I don't have my own phone, I don't have my own bank account. I don't have my own access to anything.

[Mary Harrington]

It's the big, big trade off. It is traditional gender roles that the woman has no financial independence.

[Chris Williamson]

And as soon as you derogate loyalty, as soon as you end up with divorce becoming more societally accepted and people being able to move from partner to partner more freely, that means that the cost for the man, the cost for anybody of leaving is so high and so common. Sorry. Is so low and it's so common that you need to have the insurance policy at all times because the likelihood of this just being marriage one as opposed to the marriage means that you've got to have the back door.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, it strikes me that maybe a possible explanation for why these complementary gender roles tend to appear either where somebody is extremely online and posting about it a lot, or else in the context of religious communities. It might make sense in terms of that failure mode, this sort of abusive failure mode in that if you're posting online about what a surrendered wife you are, actually, you're probably making bank. And so you're not all that surrendered after all. Because there's this other dimension to it, you know? Do you remember the whole discourse about Ballerina Farm and that?

[Chris Williamson]

No.

[Louise Perry]

Oh, okay. She Instagram star married to the heir of JetBlue.

[Chris Williamson]

Don't look at me. You didn't even know about himbos. Fucking hell.

[Louise Perry]

You have how many bajillion followers on Instagram? You've never come across Ballerina Farm.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay.

[Louise Perry]

Entirely. Entirely distinct influencer universe.

[Chris Williamson]

The echo chambers are very echoey here.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, the Internet is a big place. Okay, so Ballerina Farm, very beautiful, very accomplished, sort of trad life in Hannah Neeleman. Hannah Neeleman, married to this scion of the JetBlue family and inherited a load of money. And they have a farm where she does trad things and has lots of beautiful children and makes yogurt and it's all very crunchy. And love almonds. I mean. Right, Exactly. It's love. Like she. It's also like the content engine, which powers actually a very profitable business for them, selling, like, kitchen alien yogurt, whatever.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah.

[Louise Perry]

Like her. I think her sourdough starter kits cost like $100.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah.

[Louise Perry]

You know, she's. She's doing. She's doing all right at it. And yet, you know, there's this whole discourse about whether or not she's actually oppressed. And I'm like, what have you.

[Mary Harrington]

One of the things that people. Because she was profiled in the Times, the Times of London a while ago. And. And it was mentioned there were various details mentioned which a lot of women, primarily on the Internet, thought were alarming, like how exhausted she got. I mean, I'm not surprised she gets exhausted because she has so many kids close together. Yeah. But things like they don't have a nanny, they don't have any domestic help, but I mean, despite obviously being able to afford it, and they were like, oh, this is a sign that he's a pressing on. I thought, no, you know what? I actually get it. I think that she. There's a weird kind of Anglo thing going on, including Anglo American of like, no, I'm gonna do the hard thing on my own. I'm gonna do the deliberately disheartened.

[Louise Perry]

But also, you know, having recorded a few podcasts and seeing how the sausage gets made, you know, you look at how well produced her content is, there's a ton of people in that house all the time.

[Mary Harrington]

Oh yeah, just not a nanny specifically. Right. But like, that makes sense to me. I think that makes sense of her personality. And of course it is Hannah who is making all the content. She's running the show.

[Louise Perry]

In that sense, she's driving.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah.

[Louise Perry]

But it makes sense to me that the trad meme gets propagated either from within relig communities where there is actually a much thicker relationship. There is a thicker community of people surrounding the couple. You know, again, this is not foolproof because, you know, domestic abuse happens within religious communities as well, but it also, it provides some kind of ideological scaffolding for a couple such that, you know, potentially, potentially that could help to keep a relationship in line, you know, and stop, stop abuse creeping in and, and make sure, make sure things stink, make sure things are able to remain healthy.

[Chris Williamson]

Is that kind of a, an insurance policy that if I'm the one that's in control of the Instagram account, that ultimately if I am mistreated, it might be a financial victory for you, but it's a branding victory for me?

[Louise Perry]

Well, I mean, again, again, it's not foolproof. You know, I mean, this is, I can't name names, but I know from, I know from one noted right wing content producing woman that she, she's, she knows of and several women within that space who are posting sunny tradwife content while their husbands are also not treating them very well. You know, this is, this, this also happens. So it's definitely not foolproof as an insurance policy. I mean, at the end of the day, it's a fallen world, right? You know, people screw up and do horrible things. You know, I'm not sure there's a guaranteed way of hedging against that.

[Mary Harrington]

One way that does traditionally sort of work to hedge against being mistreated by your husband is male kin. Your own male kin. Is it Sonny Corleone in Godfather who beats up his sister's abuser or something like that. Right. Like in really those really traditional societies, if your recourse as a woman, if your husband is mistreating you, your dad.

[Louise Perry]

Goes around and breaks his legs.

[Chris Williamson]

The issue of patrilocal and matrilocal.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, I mean, this is probably something, Chris, that You're more able to speak to than either of us, which is about the formation of virtuous men.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm glad that you look at me and you think formation of virtuous men.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, as the only guy in this conversation, unfortunately, I think this one's yours to speak. But it seems to me that where have all the goodness men gone? Actually, the one part of the answer to that is that, you know, if we want good men, we need to be forming good men. And actually what forms men is not women. It's other men. And so, and I'm not sure we think nearly hard enough or specifically enough or concretely enough about how we go about forming men. And I mean, this sort of goes to your Labubu figure. You know, if the men that we're forming are sort of noodle armed Labubu guys rather than virtuous, capable, competent men, then that's not just a problem for men. That's a problem for everyone.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, I think a lot of the advice that men are given is about how to behave in a manner that makes women feel more comfortable. But if the which it seems to continually be reinforced. Forced male competition theory seems to be highly predictive of female attraction as opposed to actually female attraction. So there's a. This is the David Putz study. Have you seen this one where they looked, oh, this is fucking brilliant. You're going to love this.

[Mary Harrington]

So.

[Chris Williamson]

Photos of men were shown to both men and women. The women were asked to rate how attractive these men were. The men were asked to rate how likely they thought it was that this man would be able to beat them at a fight. The photos of the men were real people and they were tracked 12 months later. They brought the photo men into the lab and said, how many sexual partners have you had over the last year? The female attractiveness rating was basically non predictive and the male intimidation rating was highly correlated.

[Louise Perry]

Competence is hot and competence cashes out ultimately as can this guy protect me in a fistfight?

[Chris Williamson]

But it's the argument they also have.

[Mary Harrington]

Higher sex drives maybe, right?

[Chris Williamson]

They're higher t. There's some variables in here. They're going to be more forthcoming, they're going to be less agreeable. They're going to be chasing after it, making it happen as opposed to waiting for it to come to them. But still, you would think, at least given that women are the gatekeepers, and this is a direct, I find this guy more attractive than that one. You would have assumed it would have had like maybe equal amounts of predictive power but it didn't. The ovulatory shift thing got another decapitation the other day, which was women don't find men with beards any more or less attractive, but they are more sexually successful and men find them more intimidating. So it's this, whatever it is, women don't help you win. They just wait at the finish line to see who goes first. And it is male competition theory for this. But the issue is if guys are trying to labubu reverse engineer their way into what they think women want, want, a lot of the time they're entirely.

[Louise Perry]

Going about it the wrong way.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah, because we made labubu into a verb.

[Louise Perry]

Yes, they have labubed them.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, you've done gone labuboo'd yourself.

[Louise Perry]

Oh no, he's labooed himself.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh.

[Louise Perry]

Just climbed. Climbed up into my chest and died.

[Chris Williamson]

So I think the issue is, and this is what I really want you to get into here, post me too. Being able to talk frankly about anything which is not nerfed, rounded off edges, labubuified, flaccid soyman seems to be encouraging a type of guy that is perilously close to this world that we only just managed to reach escape velocity from. Like we just got away from this thing which was entitlement, Domineering, controlling entitlement. Even though the leboo men also have their own type of entitlement in a very sort of conniving militia. Yeah, yeah, sneaky way I don't think. I don't know where you get male to male advice on what it is that women truly want for long term success. Because what you end up with there is just going back to pick up artistry. Like almost all of the advice that comes out of the red pill world is for short term mating. Right. It's almost all about how to sort of do the fugazi thing to get a woman into bed. That's not necessarily what is good for you as a man. To signal for long term intention to her or to be effective for her as a long term partner or for yourself to actually form yourself into the kind of partner that can be a good long term option. But it'll probably get them into bed.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, I can't. I keep coming back to my conviction that this has to happen offline. Like online. Online advice is no good. Like whether it's Jordan, it could be the most good.

[Chris Williamson]

Is it reductive?

[Louise Perry]

Well, because they don't. Because they don't. The person doesn't know you. And actually, you know, actionable advice Actionable model probably comes from trusting, trusted, decent older men in your own community. And, you know, and really, a lot.

[Chris Williamson]

Of the time it's not the aunties.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah. The uncles. Yeah. The structural problem is that those intergenerational networks are in some cases almost completely gone. And I think that problem is particularly grave for young men growing up in fatherless households.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, especially if.

[Louise Perry]

And which is, you know, it's not a coincidence that those are the guys who end up joining gangs because there they're finding mentorship from older men. And that's literally the only. A kind of form of older male, you know, peer group mentorship. Older male mentorship that you can get.

[Chris Williamson]

Sat there with Bugsy Malone. Aaron Davies, who is famous ex gang member, now turned rapper and actor in Guy Ritchie movies, lives in Dubai, phenomenally wealthy, Very, very well read all the rest of it. And he was telling me about what it's like to be in a fatherless home. And then you have this gang, which is the surrogate of that, I think, even for me, because I. I didn't have many older friends or no older brothers or sisters or younger brothers or sisters. I was hungry or thirsty for role models in a way that I don't think I would have been if I'd had a more connected nuclear family. If there was more hooks for me to get in. Even if it had been an older sister, there would have been advice that was coming down. And if your dad is busy, even if he's not absent, as in, not in the household, if he's absent, as in there's one person working to try and fund on a. Not a salubrious wage in an attempt to try and fund three people's lives. That's something that you.

[Louise Perry]

It's still a model.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. And you're like, fuck, I'm hungry for more. I need more, more, more. And especially if most of your interaction occurs online, but online you're worried about saying something which is going to be deemed so toxic or. Or old from. You know, this was only allowed in 2012 and we've got past this and you can't talk that way about women anymore.

[Louise Perry]

I also think that there's something structurally feminizing or feminine about social media discourse, just in general, because it forecloses physical violence, obviously, because it's.

[Chris Williamson]

You're word selling your way through stuff.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah. You're word selling your way. Like it encourages endless talking and it forecloses physical violence. Whereas in my observation, I mean, maybe you can. I mean, I. I'm not really in my observation, like, the society of men, absent, the relation to women, sort of works the other way around. Like, actually, most of it is not really about conversation at all. It's about cooperating on getting something done.

[Chris Williamson]

That's why the men's Sheds initiative in Australia was so good.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah. And I mean, you know, it strikes me that, you know, getting men together to talk about their feelings is precisely the wrong way to go about it.

[Chris Williamson]

Get them together to fix a lawnmower and they might talk about their feelings.

[Louise Perry]

Alongside it, or just not in a way which is mutually understood and mutually respectful. But it seems to me civilizationally suicidal to create a situation where there are ever fewer opportunities for men to be together constructively offline. Learning from older men about how to work together and get stuff done. Except gang situations where actually the only thing you're learning to get done is stabbing, raping, murdering, or the drug trade. That seems to me like a completely insane scenario.

[Mary Harrington]

I wonder if low birth rates is part of it as well, in the sense that there was this great article in the Atlantic recently about the decline of cousins. You have so many fewer cousins now than even a generation or two ago because of people obviously having fewer children. And also when people are having children later, you end up with these long, thin families where you have very old, very young, but not that much, just not that many people. And it makes me think of that, that line from Kurt Vonnegut where he says, when a man and a woman have an argument nowadays, I'm just paraphrasing. They might think that they're arguing about sex or work or whatever, but what they're actually shouting at each other over and over again is, you are not enough people. Like, it's not realistic to expect your spouse to be everything that you need socially. Everything. And maybe if there were more brothers and cousins and uncles, because obviously uncles have to be brothers to begin with, right? Then there would be more.

[Chris Williamson]

You wouldn't need to be as many people because there would be more people.

[Mary Harrington]

There would be more male infrastructure available in particular.

[Louise Perry]

And again, this is also the dilemma, because Anglos actually don't like having Anglos. Quite like being.

[Mary Harrington]

Chris doesn't want the aunties.

[Louise Perry]

You don't want the object.

[Chris Williamson]

Man, I made the fucking WhatsApp chat. Okay, look, I'm. I know that you run away from the moon.

[Louise Perry]

You run away from the myriads.

[Chris Williamson]

What's that thing? Did I contradict myself? Well, I'm deep. I contain multitudes.

[Mary Harrington]

Chris Multiplex est.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah, that's me. Before we continue this might be the most refreshing flavor that Element has ever made. It takes the classic taste of lemonade and makes it functional, giving your body back the sodium, potassium and magnesium that it loses when you sweat. No sugar, no junk, just the stuff that works. I've been drinking Element for over three years now and it genuinely feels different when I take it versus when I don't. And they back it with the best policy you see that that I've ever seen. No questions asked refunds, no time limit, you don't even need to return. That's how confident they are that you love it. Plus they offer free shipping in the US and right now you can get a free sample pack of all of their favorite flavours for your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com modernwisdom I'm like Neo in the Matrix dude, you're not going to win. That's drinklmnt.com modernwisdom let's do can you do a little postmortem on me too now we're kind of like what, 10, 12 years post the peak of that.

[Louise Perry]

We're both married and have been for a while. Were we the best people to do this? I don't know.

[Mary Harrington]

One thing I'll say about MeToo which I think people often get wrong this idea so that there's a common idea, maybe it's true that men used to approach women in bars or at work or whatever and do kind of cold approaches and now they don't do that because of MeToo has made them scared. That period, I think where men would find their spouses by doing cold approaches was really brief.

[Louise Perry]

I think you're completely right. It roughly coincides with and is connected to the very short flash in the pan era of free speech absolutism. Like free speech absolutism and cold approach dating are basically the same phenomenon where you abolish a whole load of old fashioned moreies and everybody just does what they want. But the but the afterburner of those moreies is still strong enough that nobody, nobody gets up to anything too disgusting.

[Mary Harrington]

They're huffing on the fumes of the.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, they're basically huffing on the fumes of conservative sort of pre pre sexual revolution.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah.

[Louise Perry]

Behavioral norms.

[Chris Williamson]

Why is that important? Why is the inclusion of that period of guys cold approaching women in bars or at work even having women in the workplace whilst men were able to date them also relatively narrow window?

[Louise Perry]

Cause it's cold approach presupposes a whole load of basic behavioral norms in order not just to be absolutely terrifying, call the police stuff, you know, being chatted up in the street by some guy assumes that they're gonna be able to judge it so that you don't just scream and run away. Right. And so that it, like there's an edge of fun, excitement and danger. And it requires a high trust society and frisson. It requires a high trust society fundamentally. And so actually does free speech absolutism because you're never really free to say anything you want. There are, there are always lines that it's possible to cross. That's just never not been the case and it never will be the case. But it seemed as though it was the case. Like the, the period. The people who are still really annoyed about the disappearance of free speech absolutism are maybe 10 years older than me. You know, I'm in my mid-40s now. And they were like, they came of age in an era where, you know, the social norms were still robust enough that people could make edgy jokes but basically got away with it. Nobody really crossed the line too far. Now we're just too diverse for free speech absolutism because there are so many different perspectives it's possible to have that, you know, you could actually genuinely end up frightening or offending or you know, inciting violence from any number of different subgroups.

[Chris Williamson]

You crossed some random one that you didn't know.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah. So it's just no longer possible. And it's the same with cold approach because I mean, you know, you know, going back to the sort of petrol flames conversation we were having before, you know, a lot of those scenarios are really at, you know, genuinely about mutual cultural and comprehension. You know, there are guys who've shown up in the country from wherever and maybe the only information they have about what British girls are like comes from, I don't know, Pornhub or you know, Instagram or whatever. So they have this very odd picture of what social norms here are like. And then they do do their best to put them into practice. At which point some, some 14 year old girl just screams and runs away, calls the police, he gets arrested. And then, and then, you know, there's.

[Mary Harrington]

A crowd outside in my.

[Louise Perry]

And there's a crowd outside the hotel where you, you've been put up. And you know, and I'm not trying to excuse any of this, but I'm saying, you know, to a degree, you know, this is a problem generated by, you know, it's, it's cold approach. It's PUA stuff that they're trying, literally that's what they're trying to do. But the cultural differences are such that it's just not possible.

[Chris Williamson]

The game got translated into Syrian and now we've got cold.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah. And now, and now we've got protests outside the Bell Hotel in Epping.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah, I didn't, I just, I.

[Louise Perry]

Don'T really know how you. Yeah, I'm not even going to try and speculate on how you solve that. But you know, certainly like the age of PUA is not coming back no shorter, you know, until, until we have some kind of homogenous culture again. And even then I'm not even sure it should, but. But also historically, like, it's just, it wasn't everything.

[Mary Harrington]

Even in a super homogeneous society, that's not how you meet your spouse, actually. You meet through people who know you. There's like reputations and interlocking social networks and stuff. You don't just go up to some lady in a bar and.

[Louise Perry]

No, no, no. I mean, that's why people used to have dinner parties. You know, people don't really have dinner parties anymore, do they? But that was how, that was how you, you set people up with your friends.

[Chris Williamson]

It's certainly not upbringing, it's certainly not a collegiate one where you've got both genders coming in. You know, when I think about the dinners that I have in Austin, maybe someone brings a woman, but that woman is not there to try and meet one of you. It's their partner.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, but I mean, as recently as Bridget Jones diary in the early aughts, you know, she writes very, very amusingly for the time about being invited along by her smug married friends to dinner parties where she's been set up with some unbelievably awkward sort of supposed eligible lawyer. And this keeps her. Because all of her friends are trying to. Trying to find someone for her to pair off with. This is just a completely normal way of doing things. Pre Internet dating, you know, the smug marrieds would have dinners where they'd invite, you know, one or two other smug married couples and then. And then a smattering of the eligible singles.

[Chris Williamson]

Of the singles.

[Louise Perry]

Well, you know, the eligible singles and would be, you know, in a sincere effort.

[Mary Harrington]

They're doing aunty.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, they're auntying. Yeah, that's literally what it is. It's auntying.

[Mary Harrington]

Both virtuous and it would be.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, virtuous. And also often incredibly cringe. Absolutely.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay. So if you, if you've got dissolving social Networks in irl because everybody is living their life mediated through the Internet. They've got fewer friends and they're spending less time outside. Does that for you explain the demise of this particular path for people meeting fewer parties, fewer friends.

[Louise Perry]

Also, people are poorer and their houses are smaller.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah, I'm trying to.

[Chris Williamson]

The parties are shitter. So you don't want to.

[Louise Perry]

That's just, I mean, you know, if you're living in a house share until you're 35, you can't really invite eight of your friends around for dinner very easily without annoying your housemates.

[Mary Harrington]

I'm trying to think about why I haven't done more of these dinner parties. We often do lunches and dinners with like another couple, particularly if they've got kids and then the kids play and that's great, but I don't know if I've ever done one when I invited.

[Chris Williamson]

That's just scaled childcare. That's just smarter childcare with the best scar.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah, Just hang out with your friends with kids on a Saturday. Your Saturdays immediately improve.

[Louise Perry]

But I've not missed. It's also a massive effort. Everybody works. And the time and mental energy you might deploy towards that is pointed at other things. And I'm not really sure how that.

[Chris Williamson]

Needing dual income here means that there's just less time perhaps for the wife to think, oh, how should we get. We'll get the Joneses over. We'll get the.

[Mary Harrington]

For me personally, it's more to do with the fact that we live at the very edge of a city of 10 million other people and our friends live at every point on the clock face. And realistically, getting everyone in the same place at the same time is quite difficult.

[Louise Perry]

If you're all gonna get together, you'd probably just meet. Meet somewhere.

[Mary Harrington]

Also, we can only seat six people at our dinner table.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, it's what I mean about, you.

[Chris Williamson]

Know, it has small furniture, small houses. That's interesting.

[Mary Harrington]

Bridget Jones was living in what, Islington?

[Louise Perry]

Right, exactly.

[Mary Harrington]

She's living on a journalist salary. Age like 30.

[Louise Perry]

I know. Yes.

[Mary Harrington]

On her own.

[Chris Williamson]

So I mean it's obviously fiction. So I have been. I was thinking for a little while about metoo to me T with the T app and that. You did see the T app, right? Okay. This is a little older. Come on, Louise.

[Mary Harrington]

The T app.

[Chris Williamson]

T app. It was that app.

[Louise Perry]

Unsubstantiated gossip circulator. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It says a reputation ruining app.

[Mary Harrington]

Yes, but so it was women gossiping about men. Men who screwed them over in their view.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay, yeah. And then there was a big data breach. There was sequences of big data breaches. And there was a bunch of people on the Internet who made a comparison between. Between these videos of women in Manhattan who steal men's salads, look at the name on the top of it, then message them on Instagram and say, I'm so sorry that I stole your salad. In a desperate attempt to try and overcome approach anxiety from men to women. There's these videos of girls in maxi dresses with their hair done, just going, I just want one guy to buy me a drink. Mid 20s, very voluptuous. There's another one of a woman walking through Central park, big naturals, low top, and she's saying, look at me. The skin's flowing, the boobs are out, and not a single guy is going to approach him, approach me. Today, some people made comparisons between the videos made by women saying they wished men approached them more who seemed quite eligible. And like the sort of women that you would imagine it happens to. With the data breach from the Tapp, that was not the same cohort when it comes to female mate value. It was much more short hair, piercings, little bit heavier set. And it was just an interesting world where you have the women that you think this might happen to a lot wanting it more and it not happening. Women who you might think it was a bit more scarce for being a part of a community who warn women off of men and actually are actively disincentivizing this. So it could be kind of this inverse luxury belief thing, which is like Isaiah Berlin's in a citadel. If I can't get what I want, I must teach myself to want what I can get. And then bind together like the female equivalent of sort of in seldom.

[Mary Harrington]

I suppose we're doing symmetry, sexual composition there. Right?

[Louise Perry]

Right.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the problem for the hot woman in Central park, it's the classic cartoon where the hot guy approaches and she's delighted, and then the ugly guy approaches and she calls hr. I mean, that is the difficulty. Like, you don't want to be approached.

[Louise Perry]

All day, every day. I want to be cold approached. But not by.

[Mary Harrington]

Not by you, not by him, by you. Yeah, exactly.

[Chris Williamson]

And every guy sees themselves as the not by you guy, apart from the ones that are too pushy. Because I don't think that guys have a good understanding of their own. I don't think guys have a good understanding of their own mate value. They have a good understanding of their own confidence or their disregard for female rejection. But that is not the same thing. As a success rating. Like I am friends with some of the fucking most eligible men in America that are single. And these guys are. You'd be like, you must actually swim through women in order to get to your front door. And they're just, just like drenched in self doubt and uncertainty and this sense of not knowing. And maybe this is a little bit of a, like a luxury challenge. It's a challenge of abundance, not one of scarcity where they actually need to weave through things in a different sort of way. And there's problems when you get to the higher altitudes as opposed to the lower ones. But men do not have a good understanding of their own mate value.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, yeah, just I'm going to stick my hand up and say, you know, I remember cold approach. Like I was there there, you know, I'm old.

[Chris Williamson]

I lived it and survived just about.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, I'm old enough to remember when that was actually a thing. And you know, being. What was the word they use now? Chirpsed. Being chatted up, we called it. Yeah, I remember that being a thing. And it was understood, you know, it starts happening to you when you're about 12 and it was understood by, you know, you, you and your girlfriends compare notes that the kind of guys who do that are probably not the ones who are going to become. Become your boyfriend. That's just, you know, cold approach might have been a thing and sometimes maybe.

[Chris Williamson]

For those guys because it's evident that you're one of a number, those guys would be fun.

[Louise Perry]

You know, you might let them buy you a drink and sort of chat to them and let them flirt with you for a bit. But it was understood that those are probably not the guys that you that are going to become your boyfriend for a whole host of reasons, but they're strategy men. Yeah, it's. You're right. So, okay, you're gonna have to unpack that, Louise, because this is more your wheelhouse than mine.

[Mary Harrington]

Surely every modern wisdom listen, knows about this. Our K selection, right. So our strategy. This is true in evolution biology in general, not just humans, that some species are more R strategists in that they will have lots of sex, lots of babies, except that most of those babies are going to die. The fast, die young kind strategy. Whereas K selection is like elephants or blue whales.

[Louise Perry]

Elephants versus rabbits, maybe.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah. So they'll have one baby that they'll really invest. And humans are kind of both, depending on context. We're more K strategists, but there are individual variations and you can kind of nudge in One way or the other. And yeah, I think the guys who come and sit in the bar.

[Louise Perry]

This is a big theme in your book, isn't it? There's the guys who. There's the chatter uppers who are probably there about sowing the seed as widely as possible. And then there's the.

[Chris Williamson]

But again, we're trying to find. We're trying to find this balance, right? It's Some, I think 8, 80% of women say that they want a man to make the first move. But how is that supposed to be done? In a manner. And this is how you labubu yourself, right, In a desperate attempt to try and couch your forthcomingness in a sufficiently cinnamon roll exterior.

[Louise Perry]

But actually what you need is not to labooby yourself. It's. What you need is the social scaffolding. You know, whether that's sort of, you.

[Chris Williamson]

Know, given that you don't have. But you don't have.

[Mary Harrington]

But you don't have it.

[Chris Williamson]

You've got a bootstrap it yourself, right?

[Mary Harrington]

The way that I did this with my husband as a sneaky get round is I heard that he was single. And so I told a friend who's a mutual friend, like, tell him to hit on me and I'll. And if he does, I'll say yes. And so we, we basically did that loop round.

[Chris Williamson]

Ah, okay. This is.

[Mary Harrington]

But that requires social scaffolding.

[Louise Perry]

This is what I mean about the social scaffolding. You know, there are all.

[Chris Williamson]

You sowed some seeds that this would be like a high return strategy. Like, oh, this holds the odds. The odds might look a little bit.

[Louise Perry]

Like, difficult, but it's a sure glove, basically.

[Mary Harrington]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Louise Perry]

And so, you know, there's an element of that, you know, women have to be willing to drop the silk glove if they want the man to make the first move. I mean, I'm sure you know the metaphor, you know, and then he can graciously hand it back.

[Mary Harrington]

Why are all these eligible men, you know, still not finding wives?

[Chris Williamson]

It depends. It's for different reasons. Some of them, some of them have got. Some of them have got themselves to the stage where they've got so much exposure that they are basically, they see any interaction as a potential downfall of their career.

[Mary Harrington]

Right. And they're worried about gold diggers, presumably.

[Chris Williamson]

More so about reputational destruction. Like post metoo. I didn't consent to that. He is this or that or the other. Especially if you've got a relatively squeaky clean public image or you're in an industry that is not as forgiving as. As say podcasting like Andrew Huberman's survival rate should be positive reinforcement for anybody in my side of the Internet. But if you're in slightly more mood.

[Louise Perry]

Was he completely fine after all of that?

[Chris Williamson]

Better.

[Mary Harrington]

I think actually he just posted through it.

[Louise Perry]

He was fine. That's always the advice, isn't it? Just post through it.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, just keep looking at sun in the morning and everything is fine. And he lived by that strategy. There's other reasons for it. I think that in the same way as women who are emotionally developed and want to find a partner who is able to hold their own in a conversation and understands their emotions and can be honest and truthful and wants to build a family and do all the rest of this stuff, that's a pretty refined taste for the most part. And a lot of the guys your lamp analogy around. If you haven't yet bought a house, trying to find a lamp that you like and put it in a house is probably pretty easy. Whereas if you've spent two decades building a very, very carefully crafted interior trying to find the perfect lamp to fit in, that is much more difficult. That's also a challenge. And your ability to discern good from bad lamps or your standard for lamps has also increased along with the complexity of the room that you're trying to put it in.

[Louise Perry]

Probably complicated further by the fact that people are not lamps and people come with their own agency and preferences and quotes.

[Mary Harrington]

The answer to the first problem about can I trust this woman not to wreck my reputation? Is probably it's to do with long standing social reputation. You basically need to know her friends who will tell you if she's a good person or not. Yeah, is she trustworthy? Is she crazy? Whatever. But that's not going to work with cold approach at all.

[Chris Williamson]

So much of this is if you're not enmeshed in social fabric where you know their friends and them and maybe their family and they know the same because it also disincentivizes people from doing. Doing fuckery. Right. Because the blast radius of that is going to impact social media.

[Louise Perry]

That's the charitable interpretation of what the T AP was trying to do, isn't it?

[Chris Williamson]

Is to try and surrogate.

[Louise Perry]

It's trying to compensate for the lack of social architecture.

[Chris Williamson]

That's the best Steelman case for the T. AP that I've ever heard. That it is a surrogate local community because everybody is.

[Louise Perry]

Because I mean that's how women used to keep in a sort of village scenario.

[Chris Williamson]

That's how women used to keep is he Trustworthy. Can I?

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

You heard what he did with such and such.

[Louise Perry]

Exactly, exactly. And it's an attempt to provide a tech fix for the absence of that. It's just that because it's only a tech fix, it doesn't work in quite the same way. And in fact it has all sorts of other horrendous.

[Chris Williamson]

So there's no repercussions if you make false accusations, if you say, oh, you heard what he did, and someone says that I did with such and such.

[Louise Perry]

Whereas in a real world, in a grounded, real world, relatively stable community, if you spread false rumors about somebody, eventually you'll get the blowback.

[Chris Williamson]

The TAPP is an artificial solution to an artificial problem. It's the G app DLP1s.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a zempic for reputation management. Yeah. Low trust reputation. Low trust relationship formation.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

65% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 think that guys can have their reputations destroyed for just speaking their mind. And 85% of young men who voted for Trump agree with that statement.

[Louise Perry]

See, one thing, just going back to, going back to our, our sort of leitmotif of the Labubu guy. What I find interesting, and this occurred to me earlier, is that the obviously, you know, not very appealing nature of Labubu guy doesn't seem to have produced a kind of backswing towards this very much more right wing identified male fingertips.

[Mary Harrington]

You know what it is? It's what our friend Catherine Dee calls the male to male to transsexual. That's the flip side to the Laboovy man.

[Chris Williamson]

What is the male to male transsexual?

[Louise Perry]

Guess.

[Mary Harrington]

What do you think?

[Chris Williamson]

Based on the name, it is a guy basically larping as a much more masculine version of himself.

[Louise Perry]

Yep.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Mary Harrington]

And really devoting his life to that transformation as well, which is actually quite.

[Chris Williamson]

A feminine thing to do.

[Louise Perry]

It is, it is. These are the guys who, who are, who are predominantly interested in lifting so they can post, post physique, which is just the girliest, girliest, girliest thing to do. You know, I firmly believe that guys should lift. I don't think they should post physique. I think that's disgusting.

[Chris Williamson]

Two days ago I had some guys that were both over 250 pounds. I would have loved to have seen you say that too. They would have both taken it. They would have both taken it really well. They would have both gone. You know what it is? You're probably right. I do take too many photos of me with my Top off.

[Louise Perry]

It's just really girly. Don't do it.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Louise Perry]

You know, be strong, be competent. That's really hot. Don't post physique. It's really good.

[Mary Harrington]

I mean it's an interesting point about social media being inherently feminine is so true. And you see this come out of the. The dissident. Right. Kind of manosphere is the wrong term. But that kind of hyper masculine decision. Right. Which yes, really valorizes masculinity, can be really negative about women, et cetera. But also includes a lot of selfies, a lot of gossiping on the Internet, a lot of like girly bickering.

[Louise Perry]

Never seen purity spiral like it.

[Mary Harrington]

Who coined this meme? No, I coined that meme. That kind of thing. I have never seen a girl early a bunch of men on the Internet. But you're wrong about everything.

[Louise Perry]

There are exceptions, you know, some of my best friends, et cetera. But what you say is on point. And some of this is just produced by the sort of selection effects of the Internet in that.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah, it's the Internet.

[Louise Perry]

You know, that milieu sort of draws a diverse.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, the Internet kind of optimizes for a very one dimensional perspective of a person. So Crispin Bumstead, what's that thing that Yasmine was talking about? Looks that can kill. But heart of gold or something. What is it? Okay. Oh, right, that's it. Looks that could kill you could kill you. And looks that could kill you is a cinnamon roll. Right. And Chris Bumstead, guy that sat here met. He's a six time Mr. Olympia. He's basically the modern world. Arnold Schwarzenegger, 25 million followers on Instagram. Met his now wife because she fell in love with a video of him crying on the Internet. So that's looks that could kill you is a cinnamon roll. And that Chris is one of a very small number of guys who have managed to thread the needle of highly masculine, highly feminine at the same time or at least highly masculine and embodied bothered about emotions. Emotions. Reads a lot of books and talks about. I don't believe in cry it out for raising our daughter Bradley. We're actually trying. I want to teach her that it's okay to feel and deep in therapy culture at the same time whilst being Adonis is Adonis as a guy and super strong and big and all the rest of the stuff. I don't think that there is a particularly good place for that. There isn't much room for many people to be able to thread that needle because it takes a long time to explain the nuance of what you are as a guy. Like, you look. And it would be much easier for him to just be brash if you presented in that way and had the personality of Andrew Tate. It's like, there we go. I've got that cliche. I've already got that archetype locked off. And if you're trying to accumulate attention online, you need to make it quick. You don't want it to be effortful. And I think it's just bad for Brand. Just do it. Explains what Nike is trying to get you to believe in as an ethos. It's not just do it. And here's a 5,000 word footnote explaining precisely what that means.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. The attention economy dynamic forces everyone to become a very reductive meme version of resolution. Yeah. And you have to. You have to accept that. I mean, I've long since learned that existing in public online means just not feeling obliged to correct like the. The bizarre versions of you that people have living rent free in their heads. Just like, don't waste your time doing that. No one's got time for that.

[Chris Williamson]

The best quote that I've heard around that is, I do not concern myself with the opinions of people who misunderstand me. I think that's so good. Hard to do because you want to correct the misdee. No, no, no, you don't. See, I remember the saddest version of.

[Louise Perry]

That I ever saw was when Mary Beard got canceled for saying something really innocuous and she posted a video of herself on Twitter crying. And she was obviously trying to get people to understand that, you know, in fact, she contained multitudes.

[Chris Williamson]

There's a real person here.

[Louise Perry]

There's a real person here. But all it did, all that did was incur more hate because that's just not how the Internet works. And you just have to. You have to post through, like, Andrew Huberman, be more Huberman.

[Chris Williamson]

That is a fucking phenomenal hashtag. Be more Huberman. Huberman, less Labubu. So what about the other side of this? I'm interested. I read this article on Substack, which both of you probably will have read about Shlub feminism. METOO is the death of shlub feminism.

[Mary Harrington]

No.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay, so this was that the thesis is MeToo protected women who were maybe a little more neurotic than is optimal and got much more attention from men than they would like. And what that meant was women who actually would have liked a bit more attention from men and were quite keen to try and find a Partner were immediately told, oh, my sweet summer child. You're not doing that because you want the attention of men. This is for yourself. You're wearing the makeup, you're doing the beautification, you're doing all the rest of the things because this is part of your empowerment. And it didn't allow any room for the shlub female. The Bridget Jones, the like hopeless romantic immediately became derogated because in you are doing something for men, put power in men and also inevitably meant that, well, you're encouraging some of the. You're making yourself not subservient but kind of at the mercy. It's like basically MeToo killed the Bridget Jones archetype in women and there's no place for that.

[Louise Perry]

Do you remember the essay Stacey is depressed? It was honor.

[Chris Williamson]

I remember reading that. Yeah. What was that?

[Louise Perry]

A similar theme, really, that there are lots of just quite ordinary looking people of both sexes, really, who'd be very happy to find an ordinary looking person of the opposite sex to love. And they're probably both a bit schlobby and so what? And that somehow this hyper competitive online dynamic of, you know, Chads and Stacy's and so on has just made it increasingly difficult. Like the guys are relegated to sort of neckbeard computer games gaming basement dwellerdom. And Stacey, meanwhile, is just. She's either a sort of disposable plaything for some Chad having been kind of psyoped into all of that by various kind of, you know, terrible Internet discourses. Or else she's just terminally single as well and also desperate for love. And Stacey is just miserable as a consequence. That feels sort of cognate with have.

[Chris Williamson]

We killed Bridget Jones?

[Louise Perry]

Have we killed Brilliant.

[Mary Harrington]

Sometimes there is just this great mystery about why some people are single. I was talking to someone yesterday who does a lot of like, she organizes Christian mingling things to try and get Christians to meet in real life. And she said that they always have an oversupply of women. And it's a classic thing in churches to have loads of really like earnest, often lovely, really eligible, attractive, etc. Women showing up desperate for a husband and they can't find them. And I think often you can't really tell without really, really knowing someone exactly what's going on there. Because whenever you hear doom and gloom about people finding it impossible to find partners now, et cetera, I think of all the people I know who are Stacey esque in so is it Stacey's depressed Stacey? Yeah, in that they're completely normal people and they have happy, flourishing family lives.

[Chris Williamson]

Does that make you more skeptical around the perennially single? And you think maybe everything's not as rosy on the outside side as it might seem.

[Mary Harrington]

It makes me assume something is going on.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah. I had a vigorous debate with a friend the other day who was like, it was a kind of a throwaway joke. He was like, oh, you know, maybe we should just send all of the incels to Ukraine where there's a massive shortage of men. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What makes you think that Ukrainian women want anything to do with those guys?

[Mary Harrington]

Oh, what, sorry, to fight and no, no, no to Ukrainian women?

[Louise Perry]

No, to make up the shortages.

[Chris Williamson]

Sex ratio.

[Louise Perry]

To recompensate the sex ratio.

[Mary Harrington]

Right.

[Louise Perry]

And I was like, whoa, you know, there might be like we're talking about actual people here and you know, sometimes these things can be complicated.

[Mary Harrington]

I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean that there's something terribly wrong with people who are single. Like I say comfortingly. Right. It doesn't mean that. It's just that there's probably something going on that is might be hard to see, like excessive pickiness or getting up to the moment of committing and backing off every time or something like that.

[Louise Perry]

There's probably something so committed to a professional career that actually there's just no bandwidth.

[Mary Harrington]

Because actually if you look around at the people you actually know in your life, not on the Internet, there isn't a correlation really between how attractive you are and how likely you are to be married. No, there isn't.

[Chris Williamson]

I did have this idea that maybe the birth rate and coupling is associated with obesity, but not because of some hormonal thing, but just that there is a minimum bar that humans will find other humans attractive at. And if you fall below it by eating yourself out of that window, everyone's just less hot and now there's less desire. According to across the board, you know, people tend to mate in terms of physical mate value and overall mate value, broadly, assortatively. Right. They're within their range. Maybe you can eat yourself below that.

[Louise Perry]

It also plausibly becomes a hormonal thing in that weight gain corresponds to higher levels of estrogen.

[Chris Williamson]

I agree. I don't think you even need that dynamic. I think it's just that if we assume that a well put together body is something that people will find sexually attractive. And as you get further and further away from that, actually on either side, but typically at the moment there's just.

[Louise Perry]

Less ogling going on generally.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, you just think you're less Ogle worthy.

[Mary Harrington]

Like Donald Winnicott's idea of the good enough mother.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm not familiar with that.

[Mary Harrington]

So he said that Mary will probably know this better than me. But he was a child psychotherapist.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, he was a.

[Mary Harrington]

Who argued that you don't need mothers to be perfect by any means. Like in order for children to be properly attached and develop happily, you just need the good enough mother, the mother who does, who meets the standard in terms of providing care for her baby. And yeah, maybe it's the good enough partner body. Yeah, they just hit that standard. Although I saw a man, some anonymous man recently comment which I thought was insightful that women of the last. I mean Ozempic is going to reverse this. By the way, we've surely hit peak obesity already but women having these things.

[Louise Perry]

Keep putting the prices up, presumably.

[Mary Harrington]

Well then it becomes even more desirable.

[Louise Perry]

Right. I don't think weight is ever going to stop being a status signal in an obesogenic culture. If a zempic looks like it might fix that, they'll just put up the price of a zempic and it just kicks the can down the road. I mean it's already happened. Eli Lilly just tripled the price, didn't they in the uk? So immediately thinness will remain a status signal. In an obesity eugenic culture, just the cost stops being one of self discipline and becomes literally just a cost.

[Chris Williamson]

It's a different sort of signal then though.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, it's a signal of what you. That's true. The meaning of the signal changes.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, massively.

[Louise Perry]

But the class, its class inflected nature does.

[Chris Williamson]

True. But I don't know whether class is associated with or previously was associated with weight.

[Louise Perry]

Yes, absolutely. Weight obesity is strongly negatively is strongly correlated with poverty on both sides of the pond.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay. And it may still be that, but for different reasons.

[Louise Perry]

Yes, just the reasons for that might change.

[Chris Williamson]

You can't afford this solution as opposed to you can't afford the textures, you can't afford the healthy alternative rather than.

[Louise Perry]

Exactly. You can't afford to shop at Whole Foods, you're too busy working three low paid jobs to go to the gym or whatever it becomes. You can't afford the jab.

[Mary Harrington]

Well, pre Ozempic and still probably now I think women have simultaneously become fatter and prettier because there's a lot more money in its venture.

[Chris Williamson]

Are those two separate dynamics?

[Louise Perry]

Well, in the face.

[Mary Harrington]

Right. And also things like hair. There's so much more sophisticated beauty tech available and using things like whatever retinols or doing it getting your eyebrows microbladed or stuff. That stuff has become very routine and very accessible and social media is full of, like, hacks on how to do all this expensive salon treatment on yourself. So I really think that the bar has moved a lot in terms of what women do to their faces and their hair.

[Louise Perry]

It has.

[Mary Harrington]

Even if they've also got that.

[Chris Williamson]

But maybe the technology for making men more. More attractive hasn't kept up in kind.

[Mary Harrington]

Men don't really try as well.

[Chris Williamson]

Right. But.

[Louise Perry]

And also, what makes men attractive isn't really. It's only secondarily or even tertiary. Appearance is secondary or tertiary.

[Mary Harrington]

But when we're talking fake turn is not going to make much difference to me.

[Chris Williamson]

But going to the gym, perhaps, you know, being.

[Louise Perry]

Being physically competent remains, remains the gold standard for being attractive and earning a breadwinner's wage. It goes with. It goes with having a reasonable physique, but I don't know. This is a hill I will die on. Scaffolder physique wins over gym physique any day of the week.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, I mean, I'm sure you've seen. Was it Olly Murs who did that transformation? And William Costello posted, tweeted about it.

[Louise Perry]

That's right. Yay.

[Chris Williamson]

I remember that. And then Sacha Baron Cohen did the same thing. Do you see who was on the front cover of Men's Fitness?

[Louise Perry]

Ha. I didn't say that.

[Mary Harrington]

I thought Olly Murs looked better shredded.

[Chris Williamson]

But you would be in the minority. Even if you do.

[Mary Harrington]

Apparently I was in minority.

[Chris Williamson]

You would be in the minority. And. And I had an idea around this.

[Louise Perry]

Which was he posted physique, though. It was posting physique. Instant turnoff. Sorry. On that basis alone, objectively, like, he looked good in the second picture, but he was posting physique.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay, but what if it had been a candid physique photo?

[Mary Harrington]

What if it was physique?

[Louise Perry]

That would have been a completely different ballgame. Totally different ballgame. Hard to say at that point. But it wasn't.

[Chris Williamson]

So there was basically. Sacha Baron Cohen did the same thing. I think he's in a superhero movie. He is the lead actor in some superhero movie. And he also got divorced at the same time. So it was breakup physique, superhero physique. And then you compare him with borax.

[Louise Perry]

So when guys get shredded, is that the equivalent of getting a new haircut?

[Chris Williamson]

It's the pixie cut. But the dudes. Yeah, exactly. Going on a heavy course of testosterone is going and saying to your hairdresser, we're gonna do it today. I'm finally gonna get it off.

[Louise Perry]

I'm gonna get the pixie cut.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. So the. There was definitely an interesting question. I think that Ollie Mers is fat in one photo, shredded in another photo.

[Louise Perry]

He wasn't fat though. He's just a knob.

[Chris Williamson]

Relatively fat. He was maybe I would guess 15 to 18% body fat for the bro lifters in the audience. And then he probably got himself down to towards single figures. He wasn't like striated delts, but he was visible six pack abs, which is, that's not. Nothing like that's fucking. And it was not in an unbelievably long amount of time either. So, you know, he speed ran it, which is, you know, it's impressive. However, lots of women said this isn't attractive and lots of men said you don't know what you find attractive. What I think is happening there is that guys have, they place so much pride and weight on. If I can get jacked, women will find me attractive. That is a big poltergeist to kill. And if you do, you go, oh, maybe I don't have as much control over my mate value by going to the gym as I thought. Fuck. The illusion has been smashed.

[Mary Harrington]

This was my one recourse to.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, I sort of feel like actually, I mean, gym body is not a meaningless signal in the sense that it points to a measure of self discipline. Yeah, seriously consistent self discipline and individual willpower and so on, which is, you know, that that's a good signal but it's not the only one. And if you're also a massive weirdo, it's not going to cancel that out.

[Mary Harrington]

To be a little bit cynical about the women who said that they don't like the shredded physique. I think that like most women in the west are like a bit fat. Right. I mean the average American woman is like a size 18 or even 20 in American sizing. No, that's not right because it's.

[Louise Perry]

No, that can't be right.

[Mary Harrington]

It's a 16 in the UK. So was a 12 in the US. But basically the average American woman is like overweight. I don't think that she wants a shredded spouse because he shows her up.

[Chris Williamson]

There was a story I heard from a friend who was a powerlifter. Powerlifters go through big weight fluctuations. They're the fat boy lifters typically squat, bench, deadlift. And he then went and did a bodybuilding show and then he went and did weightlifting. So he went through all of the different strength sports and his girlfriend said to him, I felt my most comfortable when you were powerlifting, which is when you were fattest. And I felt my most insecure when you were weightlift, when you were bodybuilding, which is when you were leanest. There's certainly an argument to be made from like an EP standpoint, which is if a man is spending lots of effort on his own physique, that suggests that he is kind of advertising his beauty to other people, which may the whole dad bod thing is actually true. If you've got one extra spare calorie to spend, should you be spending it on yourself in terms of self beautification and enhancement, or should you be spending it on, on your family? And if you are getting more attention from the women around you, who are you doing this for? Well, maybe you're not quite as committed to the family as we thought you were. Where are those extra calories going? They're going on yourself. You're eating the chicken, you're going to the gym. That doesn't seem like the sort of thing that a committed father's doing. Have we not transcended this? Have you not got past this? You're actually doing it for. But in the interesting female beautification, maybe, but it's at least a couple more second third orders away. Men don't look at women wives that are beautifying themselves unless it's very provocative and overt in terms of the way that they present as you are doing that in order to advertise your eligibility to potential monkey branch lily pad backup mates.

[Louise Perry]

I feel like another factor in that is that, I mean, you know, feminists are fond of denouncing the male gaze, but there is unmistakably a difference in how men look at and evaluate other people's physiques. Actually, I think it's of both sexes and how women do. And there's a sense, you know, women beauty, you know, if you're a woman, you beautify yourself. You might moan about the male gaze, but also I think you'd probably miss it. And like, you know, when women, a lot of women, when they reach middle age, do miss it genuinely and, you know, there's a sense in which being checked out is part of what helps to form your sense of who you are, you know, rightly or wrongly. But that's, that's part of the sort of ongoing, constant kind of ambient intersexual dynamics. But men, like a man who's titivating himself, is implicitly doing it for the male gaze because women don't look at each other like that. This goes to what you were saying.

[Chris Williamson]

I don't think that men know that.

[Louise Perry]

They might not realize it. But the point is that from a woman's perspective, when a guy is titivating themselves, you know, implicitly, it's for the male gaze. And that's just a turn off because that's like, you're like, dude, you're in my.

[Chris Williamson]

It's either gay or ignorant of female preferences.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, yeah. Or possibly, you know, it's somewhere in that male to male transsexual territory.

[Mary Harrington]

Does it have to be gay? Can it not just be signalling to other men that contradiction?

[Louise Perry]

I mean it can be homophilic without necessarily being like actively, actively kind of sexually homophobic.

[Mary Harrington]

But it's orientated towards other men.

[Louise Perry]

But it's bro stuff in a way which implicitly excludes the woman, excludes women from the dialogue.

[Chris Williamson]

There's also a big failure of cross sex mindset, mind reading because guys are going, I find that intimidating. You must find it attractive. And some things that are intimidating are attractive and women don't know it. And then there's some things that men find intimidating which maybe women don't find attractive.

[Mary Harrington]

Women have make the same mistakes. Like with choosing clothes, I will often run past out if I, if I'm like doing something publicly, I'll run past my outfit, past my husband for not because he knows anything about fashion, precisely because he doesn't know anything about fashion. And sometimes because it's hard to tell the difference between do I like this because it's signaling status to other women and it's signaling that I'm very abreast of current fashions and I'm experimental in my choices and whatever. Or do I like this because it's actually like looks good and men are often actively turned off the high fashion impressing other women.

[Chris Williamson]

Have you ever seen, have you seen that video of the girl showing off her new boyfriend fit jeans to her boyfriend? So it's an American woman and the boyfriend is in the kitchen washing up or doing something and says, honey, I just got these new jeans and they're the sort of super loose fit, loose at the knee, loose at the ankle. What do you think? And he daydreams away to 10 years in the past when fitted jeans that you could see a girl's thighs and a girl's ass existed. And he sort of like shakes, swallows, and he goes, oh, they're lovely. And then she gets an even more baggy pair of jeans and he's on the floor sort of crying and holding himself. And there is certainly this weird lack of understanding in both ways about what it is that's. And then I guess, at least with guys, very few guys are dressing themselves to signal or to other men. Almost all guys are doing fashion exclusively for women, but women are doing fashion for men and for women. So they need to cross. I mean, it's the. I do not know the difference between a Birkin bag. Even though I know the name, I don't actually know anything else about them other than they're expensive and called Birkin. I guess if it said it on it, I'd know what it was. And something that's from peacocks. Right. And £10. I literally have no idea. So who, who is that for? It's for other women. Yeah, right. It's the, I guess, red bottom Louboutins. I know that just because it's a meme. But beyond that, I don't know. The shoes? I don't know. So this signal is, look at all of the luxury time that I have. Look at all of the spare capacity I have if I'm in a relationship with a partner. Look at how invested he is in me. You better not try and take my man. Look at. I'm. He's fucking 30 bags deep on this bag. On this literal bag. You're not taking him from me. Me, because he owes me.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

So you mentioned before we got started this trend of feminism and women turning to the right. What is that dynamic that we're seeing that's going on?

[Mary Harrington]

So it's quite a common view on the dissident right that women are innately left wing. So there are average psychological differences between men and women, which we've all talked about at length. Women tend to be more agreeable than men, more neurotic than men, more sensitive to social signals than men are. There are various differences. Obviously they vary between individuals, but they scale to being quite significant differences between the sexes. And one thing that does seem to be clear is that women tend to be more egalitarian in their own social groups, or at least in their female friendships. More overtly egalitarian. Yeah. And sometimes this gets interpreted as that means that women are left wing innately, and if you let women vote and participate in public life, they will drag everything to the left. I tend to think that's not true because there are so many examples historically of women being very enthusiastic participants in right coded political movements. I mean, obviously talking left and right is a bit complicated in the past, but say women participating enthusiastically in temperance And Prohibition would be one example. The church ladies phenomenon, where women are actually the ones enforcing conservative social norms locally, or even female participation in Nazism. I mean, it's probably not quite right actually to say that Nazism is right wing. It's complicated. But women were passionate, passionate participants in the rise of Hitler and in fact often had like weird sexual obsessions with Hitler, which you can read about at length, and had a kind of Beatlemania when he showed up and things like that. So the idea that women are always and forever like woke, I think is nuts. It clearly is the case, though, that at the moment, young women in particular skew woke a lot, and particularly in some countries, skew woke a lot. And there's a big sex gap up. I think it's more that there are some political movements which kind of tap into feminine preferences and woke is one of them. It has that. It's not so much the egalitarianism as the encouragement to scoop up and protect childlike figures. So whether that be trans people or refugees or whatever, encouraging women to channel those maternal energies towards certain groups. I think that's very powerful. Yeah.

[Louise Perry]

There's also infinite opportunities for moral dogpiling, which is just incredibly appealing if you're.

[Chris Williamson]

How so?

[Louise Perry]

I mean, if you can arbitrarily change which words are forbidden sort of every few months, and then mobilize your friends to attack somebody for getting it wrong. And you can use that as a means of conducting office politics.

[Mary Harrington]

Attacking people from a moral infractions.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, attacking people for moral infractions. You know, in a sense, it's kind of village. It's like women's village, modus operandi, or on steroids on the Internet and divorced from any meaningful application in real life or any sort of meaningful kind of breaking mechanisms.

[Mary Harrington]

I also think wokeness is quite emotionally compelling in the sense of feeling like you have this sense of purpose and crusade. And, you know, I think that young women in particular find that quite enticing. Wokeness doesn't really work on men, though, apart from the labuba men. But it doesn't. Like, it doesn't hit those. I think it. I like to think of it like Jonathan Haidt's idea of moral flavours. Like it doesn't hit the flavors that men have taste receptors for.

[Louise Perry]

I mean, I'm gonna say this carefully because otherwise I will get dogpiled by exactly these guys. But I do think it's correct. Even though this is. I do actually think it's right that there's a subset of the E right which is the equivalent of woke just predominantly for men. And by that, you know, I don't mean the woke. Right. In the sort of James Lindsay sense of being some sort of terrible thing that must be expelled from polite discourse because something, something civil libert or free speech or civil discourse and objectivity and all of that. What I actually think is going on is that the sort of woke pattern of social interaction and the E right pattern of social interaction are both updated versions very, very strongly gender coded of two political sides as mediated through the kind of interactions which it does not normal on the Internet, which are very much less rationalistic in both cases. Actually just visibly the case. Very much more unmoored from material realities, unmoored from localized communities, very abstracted happening in the Internet, full of all kinds of perverse financial incentives and geared mostly towards rage baiting on both sides than really towards substantive politics or even really getting anything done in the real world at all. They're extremely online and actually I found it very interesting watching the emergence of Zoran Mandani in this context in New York.

[Chris Williamson]

Bad bench press.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah. I mean, because he strikes me as a sort of. He's a sort of post literate leftist. I don't mean he himself is post literate, but he mobilizes a certain kind of very net native leftism and that's the source of his popularity. Whether or not. Whether or not he'll ever actually get elected and or deliver any policies is almost secondary to that. And there's a subset of Trumpism and MAGA which is that. But for the right and those two movements code they are respectively gendered. There are more women that embrace the Mamdanism and there are more men who embrace margaritism. And yes, of course there's some overlap, but they're both strongly gendered.

[Chris Williamson]

Are we seeing a trajectory pivot then at the moment is that some subversive.

[Louise Perry]

Are women turning to the right?

[Mary Harrington]

I think that when they do, they'll turn quickly. That's my main take.

[Louise Perry]

I'm actually going to quote a noted member of the E right in support of that Bronze Age pervert who said memorably, you remember also the mob is a woman, which I think is an important. What's that mean by that? I mean, I'm interpreting here, but the way I understand that is that the mob, as in a group, group of people highly, you know, morally aerated, angry, sort of mimetically charged, you know, wanting action now is, is actually, you know, is as much is as plausibly all female. As it is all male, you know, an angry mob can be of either sex, but the, the mob as a collective entity, Bronze Age pervert in this context, is, is suggesting is actually a very. Is a, is a, a female phenomenon.

[Mary Harrington]

Although of course if the mob's going to cut off your head, it'll have to involve some men.

[Louise Perry]

Yeah, I mean event.

[Mary Harrington]

But the emotional energy.

[Louise Perry]

The emotional energy is mimetic, it's contagious, it's collective.

[Mary Harrington]

So a concrete example of this would be what we've already talked about, refugees or immigration in general. And until now, the very strong energy from young women in particular has been to see ethnic minorities and refugees in particular as childlike figures in need of protection. And also to have this slightly, to see this cause as very emotional kind of. You get pulled along with the mimetic energy kind of thing. You could easily see that flip. And actually it becomes, and you're already seeing this among working class women in Britain definitely is that the childlike entity in need of protection is like literal children.

[Louise Perry]

I think one of the really underappreciated scissors here is actually whether or not you have kids, and I would bet any sum of money you care to name that you'll find more women on the refugees welcome side who don't have kids and more women on the. Actually, we've actually had no, very straightforwardly for the reason Louise just explained. If you're worried about your kids, that's an entirely different and very much smaller and more particular particularistic set of affections than if you want you love, quote unquote, the vulnerable in the abstract.

[Chris Williamson]

The inverse of this, I think is a big part of the reason why so many guys want to be entrepreneurs right now is displaced paternal instinct that they've got this project that they're working toward. They've got a purpose, a meaning, they've got a single thrust and drive. You know, my team, my staff, my purpose, whatever this thing is that's interesting is. Yeah, just supplanted family.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah. But you could easily, easily see, and I think we're already starting to see a right wing political movement propelled by women that is using exactly those political flavors that women are receptive to, like fear, women being more neurotic. So fear of threat, wanting to mother childlike or actual children figures and the kind of mimetic energy. There's no reason.

[Chris Williamson]

Where are we seeing that?

[Mary Harrington]

Well, I think we're probably seeing it with the women showing up outside migrant hotels.

[Louise Perry]

The pink protest protests. Yeah, yeah, that's what they're called. Yeah, no, they're not. They wear pink, right?

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah.

[Louise Perry]

Which is an interesting echo of the, of the Trump era pussy hat thing. Yeah, they're not wearing. But they're not wearing pink pussy hats, they're wearing pink T shirts and they're turning up saying, close the hotels and send them home.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah. And they're all over social media and at the moment this is very much contained, being a working class thing and middle class women are quite hostile to it mostly. But I think you could easily see that spread easily. And yeah, women turning to the right could become posy. Parker is an example of this already happening in that she's. Yeah, she's able to. Her movement is distinctively feminine and also not left wing.

[Louise Perry]

Not the very least.

[Mary Harrington]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Louise and Mary, you're both great. I really, really appreciate you. Where should people go to keep up to with all of the things you're saying and writing?

[Mary Harrington]

So my podcast is Made in Mother Matriarch, all the places that you find podcasts. My first book was the Case against the Sexual Revolution. I am writing a second book on birth rates, but having children has kind of got in the way of writing it. But I will finish it eventually.

[Chris Williamson]

Put your money where your mouth is. Put your fertility where your book is.

[Mary Harrington]

I know, I know. Well, it would quite have as much credibility would it if I wasn't walking the walk.

[Louise Perry]

I have a substack. Maryharrington.co.uk is where you'll find it. My regular column is, is at Unherd. I tweet, although not so much over the summer at Moving Circles. I post to YouTube.

[Chris Williamson]

School year started, everyone can go and follow you and you'll be back up to speed. And you've got a book.

[Louise Perry]

And my last book was Feminism Against Progress. I'm writing another one. This one is on politics after literacy. So Internet politics after the singularity if you like. We've already merged with our machines. What happens next?

[Chris Williamson]

Okay, Antis, I appreciate you very much. Thank you.

[Louise Perry]

There's been fun. Thank you.

[Chris Williamson]

I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or non fiction or real life stories and that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life changing reads that I've ever found and there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And it's completely free and you can get it right now by going to ChrisWillX.com/books that's ChrisWillX.com books.