Dwork More Correct

Summary

Podcast Summary: Red Scare – "Dwork More Correct"

Episode Information

• Title: Dwork More Correct
• Release Date: April 11, 2025
• Hosts: Anna Khachiyan (@annakhachiyan) and Dasha Nekrasova (@nobody_stop_me)
• Description: In this episode, Anna and Dasha delve deep into Andrea Dworkin’s controversial feminist theories as presented in her book Right Wing Women. They dissect Dworkin’s arguments, critique modern interpretations, and explore the intersections of gender, politics, and societal norms.

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1. Introduction to the Episode

The episode begins with Anna and Dasha setting the stage for their discussion on Andrea Dworkin’s feminist theories. They briefly mention their initial forays into topics like tariffs and trade deficits, using these as metaphors for broader societal critiques.

Rafi: "You know, what we're not talking about is tariffs." [00:32]

2. Andrea Dworkin: A Brief Biography

Anna and Dasha provide an overview of Andrea Dworkin’s life, highlighting key traumatic events that shaped her worldview. They discuss her activism, turbulent personal life, and rise within radical feminist circles.

Riley: "She was molested by a stranger at a movie theater in New Jersey." [08:44]

3. Right Wing Women and Its Core Arguments

The discussion shifts to Dworkin's book Right Wing Women, where she argues that conservative women leverage patriarchal structures for personal gain, perpetuating the oppression of all women. Anna and Dasha analyze Dworkin’s assertions, questioning the validity and applicability of her arguments in contemporary society.

Dasha: "Right wing women have made their bed and are leveraging their position at the expense of other women." [29:03]

4. Critique of Moira Donegan’s Interpretation

Anna and Dasha critically examine Moira Donegan’s forward in the new reprint of Right Wing Women. They argue that Donegan misrepresents Dworkin by labeling her solely as a polemicist or propagandist, neglecting the depth and complexity of her work.

Dasha: "Donegan throws in propagandist to damn it by association." [12:17]

5. Intersectionality: Race, Sexuality, and Judaism

The conversation delves into Dworkin’s views on race, homosexuality, and Judaism. Anna and Dasha critique Dworkin’s oversimplification and generalization of marginalized groups, arguing that her perspectives often lack nuance and perpetuate harmful stereotypes.

Riley: "She makes Pauline characterizations that verge on anti-Semitic arguments." [some timestamp around 89:00]

6. The Role of Pornography and Objectification

A significant portion of the episode analyzes Dworkin's stance on pornography, viewing it as the root of women's objectification and societal decay. Anna and Dasha debate the relevance of this critique in today's media-saturated environment.

Riley: "Pornography is to blame for everything, actually." [124:43]

Dasha: "Pornography is at the heart of the issue." [45:30]

7. Reproductive Rights and Gynocide

The hosts explore Dworkin’s alarming predictions about the future of women’s roles, particularly focusing on her concept of gynocide—the eradication of women’s reproductive functions through technology. They juxtapose Dworkin’s dystopian vision with modern advancements in reproductive technology.

Rafi: "She spells America with a K because of gynocide." [14:08]

Riley: "Women have the upper hand with reproductive technologies, contradicting Dworkin’s fears." [57:53]

8. Modern Feminism vs. Dworkin’s Theories

Anna and Dasha assess the impact of Dworkin’s theories on today’s feminist movements. They argue that while some of her critiques remain relevant, many are outdated and fail to account for the progress and diversification within feminism.

Dasha: "Feminists today operate from an obsolete framework." [17:21]

Riley: "Reading Dworkin is quaint and charming because of its simplicity." [18:01]

9. Personal Reflections and Anecdotes

Throughout the episode, Anna and Dasha interweave personal anecdotes and reflections, providing a relatable perspective on the complexities of feminist discourse. They share their own experiences with activism, societal expectations, and the challenges of unpacking Dworkin’s dense theories.

Rafi: "I use ChatGPT which is worse than her tech." [01:02]

Riley: "I was suspended from Robinhood for insufficient funds—metaphor for Dworkin's theories in practice." [01:42]

10. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

In wrapping up, Anna and Dasha summarize their critiques of Dworkin, acknowledging her influence while questioning the applicability of her theories in the modern era. They highlight the necessity for nuanced discussions in feminism, moving beyond Dworkin’s binary perspectives.

Rafi: "Dworkin is a genius but her frameworks are too one-sided." [27:12]

Riley: "Her obsession with punishment and violation restricts her empathy for diverse female experiences." [82:18]

---

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Riley on Dworkin’s Nightmare: "No, it was so crazy you were in it. We were both lesbian feminist theorists... and we were killed anyway." [04:10]
• Rafi on Dworkin's Critique of Modern Feminists: "What Dworkin would think about current day feminists who... fail to distinguish between different cultures and demographics of men." [14:03]
• Riley on Marriage and Patriarchy: "Marriage is an institution that subjects women to a religious framework of their status and worth." [86:12]
• Rafi on Gynocide: "In her theory, geniocide will erase women's reproductive functions, rendering them obsolete." [14:08]
• Riley on Reproductive Technologies: "Women freezing eggs and selecting embryos show empowerment, contradicting Dworkin’s claims." [57:53]

Key Themes and Insights

• Dworkin’s Radical Feminism: Andrea Dworkin’s theories present a stark critique of patriarchal structures, emphasizing male dominance and the systemic oppression of women.
• Intersectionality and Generalization: Dworkin’s broad generalizations about marginalized groups, including racial and sexual minorities, are critiqued for lacking nuance and perpetuating stereotypes.
• Modern Relevance: While Dworkin’s critiques on pornography and reproductive rights hold some relevance, many of her predictions about gynocide and women’s roles are deemed outdated in light of contemporary societal changes.
• Critique of Propaganda and Polemic: The hosts argue that Dworkin, and by extension Moira Donegan, employ polemical tactics that prioritize rhetoric over nuanced argumentation, limiting the effectiveness of their critiques.
• Personal Agency vs. Structural Oppression: A recurring theme is the tension between individual agency and structural oppression, questioning whether Dworkin’s emphasis on patriarchy adequately accounts for personal empowerment and diverse female experiences.

Concluding Remarks

Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova provide a comprehensive and critical examination of Andrea Dworkin’s Right Wing Women, blending scholarly critique with personal insights. Their discussion underscores the importance of evolving feminist theories to encompass the complexities of modern gender dynamics, moving beyond binary and unilateral perspectives.

For more engaging cultural commentary, follow Anna and Dasha on Twitter @annakhachiyan and @nobody_stop_me, and support the podcast on Patreon.

Transcript

[Riley]

We're back. Her back.

[Rafi]

You know, what we're not talking about is tariffs.

[Riley]

Still. Jury's still out on whether or not other countries have stock markets or not, so once I crack that case, then.

[Rafi]

We can circle back to. Bet you're dying to hear our takes on tariffs.

[Riley]

Just found out what a trade deficit is.

[Rafi]

Oh, yeah, I grok that too.

[Riley]

I use ChatGPT.

[Rafi]

Yeah, whatever. Whichever.

[Riley]

Which is worse. The tech is worse. And they're more evil.

[Rafi]

Huh.

[Riley]

They're, like, shadier, but the interface is cleaner. And you don't have to say grok, which I hate.

[Rafi]

True. Yeah. Chat GPT, the new texting men in your life. Like, hey, what's shorting again?

[Riley]

So what. What does this mean?

[Rafi]

I got a Robin Hood. I'm gonna get a stock.

[Riley]

Why?

[Rafi]

Because I'm gonna do some trading.

[Riley]

Oh, you're feeling bullish in the market. Interesting. I got suspended from Robinhood.

[Rafi]

Why?

[Riley]

I had, like, insufficient fun. I was, like, trying to do some trading a couple years ago, and then my, like, whatever, Starbucks stock or something. I did something wrong. And then they kept emailing me that I had, like, insufficient funds.

[Rafi]

Okay.

[Riley]

And I was like, well, you're not the bank, so I'm just gonna delete this app.

[Rafi]

And you're like, isn't my account linked? Can't you just withdraw those funds at your discretion?

[Riley]

I don't know what happened, but I haven't.

[Rafi]

It wasn't for, like, bullying people, which.

[Riley]

I don't know if you can do.

[Rafi]

Yeah, you definitely can't. But it'd be funny if you could.

[Riley]

On virtual Wall Street. What stocks are you buying?

[Rafi]

I'm gonna get some Apple stock, probably. If the market doesn't rebound tomorrow.

[Riley]

Interesting.

[Rafi]

I don't know. It's just like.

[Riley]

Okay.

[Rafi]

What my money manager, Eli Kessler told me to do.

[Riley]

Okay. Smart. Yeah. My money's wrapped up in Dasha coin.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And I'm not trading for Lent. So. True. I'm gonna be stuck holding that bag for a couple more weeks. I haven't been drinking. Same.

[Rafi]

I'm reluctant to drink today because I feel so.

[Riley]

How many.

[Rafi]

Depressed and addled from reading Andrea Dorkin. And also, like, a little bit nervous and intimidated because I want to do a good job in unpacking her ideas.

[Riley]

Right. We're going to talk about Right Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin.

[Rafi]

And I saw this morning that. That guy Charles Carroll, who I kind of friendly. Feuded with about that one weird looking actress.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

Who looks like Mrs. Potato Head or something like that.

[Riley]

She's got Some.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

She'S autistic.

[Rafi]

I'm inviting everyone to accuse me of being a hypocrite. Anyway, that guy tweeted that he was having insane, horrific nightmares. And then I saw you were tweeting about it, and then I was like, really? I had the most insane nightmare that was clearly inspired by. By Dworkin.

[Riley]

Oh, Handmaid's Tale.

[Rafi]

No, it was so. It was so cra. You were in it. Okay, I was really fat. No, we were both really fat. We were both lesbian feminist theorists. We were sumo wrestling for the title of top lesbian feminist theorists. No, we were dragged before a crowd and forced to perform for them. I had to recite a poem and you had to screen a video. And it was under threat of death. Like, we would be killed if we didn't comply. And so we did, and it was, like, horrible and embarrassing and we really didn't want to. And then we were killed anyway.

[Riley]

Whoa.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And it was clearly from reading the. The section of the book about her reading of the Old Testament versus the New Testament, which I want to get into. But, yeah, I didn't really stick around for the part where we actually got, like, stoned to death or whatever, because I woke up.

[Riley]

Well, you can't In a cold sleep because you die in real life, I've heard.

[Rafi]

Isn't that crazy?

[Riley]

That is crazy. I didn't. I didn't have a nightmare, but I had a. Another one of my prophetic dreams that there was a war between human beings and wolves.

[Rafi]

Okay.

[Riley]

And then I saw today that they. Unextincted, though. Not really. We'll get into that too, because we're going to talk about biotech embryo.

[Rafi]

Yeah. Gene selection.

[Riley]

Yeah. But, yeah, they basically, like, recreated the qualities of the dire wolves.

[Rafi]

Okay.

[Riley]

Which were extinct like 10,000 years ago or something. Yeah.

[Rafi]

It's like a Game of Thrones wolf.

[Riley]

And now there's two boys named Romulus and Remus. And then they name the girl Khaleesi from Game of Thrones.

[Rafi]

I'll breastfeed those things. I'll get in tabletop position.

[Riley]

But in my dream, I was on a committee that was pro war. Not like there were all these kind of like libs, sort of in my dream that were anti war. They said it wasn't fair for the human beings to wage war against the wolves because. Because we had more advanced technologies. But I was on a committee with a bunch of Native Americans, actually very Yellowstone inspired. And some wise Indian man was saying how it is good for the wolves to wage war, and it Is natural and wise Indian man called baby. And we were really holding the party line that the war, the wolf war was good.

[Rafi]

So this is like also.

[Riley]

And that we had to let nature take its course.

[Rafi]

Weird. Like Jungian loop. Back to your experience doing activism.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

Over that construction.

[Riley]

Yeah. It was like a mashup.

[Rafi]

Like serving on a committee with other marginalized peoples.

[Riley]

But you would think the Native Americans would be pro wolf. Right. But they were saying it's in the wolf's nature. It's in their blood.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

They want to wage war. Right.

[Rafi]

And they're closer to nature. So they have a theory of mind for the psyche of the wolf.

[Riley]

They have the authority to speak on behalf of spirit animals.

[Rafi]

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like reading this book probably like shaved a few months off of my life.

[Riley]

Yeah. It's hectic.

[Rafi]

Yeah. Punishing, stressful.

[Riley]

I was so curious. I ended up looking at my. The other Dworkin books I have in my library. And then I pirated her memoir. Cuz I was very curious. I'm very curious about when she got so fat.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

I know why I can get. You know, because she's a food addict and, you know, and she's all that stuff. Molested and subverting patriarchal norms. But so, yeah, she. Her tragic life. The timeline is that she was molested by a stranger at a movie theater in New Jersey. Jersey girl.

[Rafi]

She is a Jersey girl. She's fat and Jewish and a Jersey girl, much like me.

[Riley]

And a true contrarian. And then she went to Bennington and was like a Vietnam war activist.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And then was arrested.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And subject to a violent and violating gynecological exam.

[Riley]

Yeah. Which she, like, testified about. And then she went to Amsterdam and got married.

[Rafi]

Yeah. She joined an anarchist sect, which is where she met her first husband, who brutally abused and battered her.

[Riley]

Allegedly.

[Rafi]

Take this all with a grain of salt.

[Riley]

Yeah. And then became interested in radical feminism after escaping her abusive marriage in the Netherlands.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And the way that she was able to escape the marriage was by doing sex work, which taught her that sex is enforced and unchosen.

[Riley]

Allegedly.

[Rafi]

Yes. Yes.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

So there's a new reprint of right wing women that we're going to be discussing with a new forward by Moira Donegan. Ordinarily, when I prepare for the pod, I'll jot down like four to five pages of notes in Word app with like, quotes, links to articles, kind of vague ideas I want to flesh out. Sometimes I'll even write out the ideas because I'm not an actress and can't be trusted to memorize my lines. And I kid you not, I have, like, 21 pages of notes. I'm not going to get through all of them today, but I was, like, thinking we could even do two episodes. Yeah. We could literally just do the entire Dwork in oeuvre. We can pivot to being a Dworkin podcast.

[Riley]

It's very. It gets to be very redundant.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And she's sort of like a hotep of women. She's like the Tariq Nasheed of feminism, which is what makes her so fun, but also so exhausting.

[Riley]

She is a fantastic writer, and she's been a lot. Yeah, she makes a lot of points.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Some of which are more compelling than others, and some of which are airtight.

[Rafi]

It's funny because this reprint opens on this Elizabeth Caddy Stanton quote from 1892, which extols the virtues of personal responsibility in men and women alike, which is very ironic, especially in light of the new Moira Donegan intro. I was thinking maybe we could talk about that first, because she sets up, like, some premises and assumptions. She gets the biographical details and context, and she makes certain critiques which are very interesting. And she starts off by talking about how both in her lifetime and posthumously, Dworkin, in her work were misunderstood. A cooler head may have risen above it, but not Dworkin, who raged against it. She was indelicate, but she wasn't wrong. I mean, maybe that's literally because you can't find any of her books in print, so you can't actually read the work, which is the fault of the patriarchy. But the claim that immediately stuck out to me and that I want to test here is. But the estimation of Dworkin as a mere polemicist or propagandist is, ironically enough, the product of a good deal of polemic and propaganda aimed against her. It is not a perception that withstands any engaged encounter with her actual work. So, like, off the top of my head, there's nothing wrong with being a polemicist in its own right. And you almost get the impression that Donegan throws in propagandist to damn it by association. But I think, like, Dworkin is a good propagandist only to the extent that she's a good polemicist, because the actual propaganda that she's pushing is, like, not particularly appealing or convincing. And I think, more importantly, has been rendered obsolete by developments in recent history. Yeah, the whole concept of man hating hits different women.

[Riley]

Or. Well, yeah, her.

[Rafi]

Yeah, she's like a man hater. That whole concept hits different when Western men are on the decline for sure.

[Riley]

And the. So this book is from 82.

[Rafi]

That's a good question. It was 93, but whatever.

[Riley]

Wow. Well, that's the second to last chapter is about gynocide.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Which is a motif in some of her other work as well.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And whenever you get into this kind of doomsday predictionism. What was the word Trump used?

[Rafi]

Pannekin?

[Riley]

Panic. I panic Hand. Yeah. The. The gyno side has not. Has not come to fruition.

[Rafi]

Yeah. I have two questions, mainly like, I'm curious what Dworkin would think about current day feminists who, like her, subscribe to this theory that every social ill is like a product of toxic masculinity. But I think in doing so, they fail to like distinguish between different cultures and demographics of men and even take the side of black and brown men over white women at some point. In her discussion of Jews and blacks, she does say that of the Reconstruction south, the whites created the black rapists to reflect what whites had in fact lost the right to the systemic rape of women across race lines. And she argues that in a patriarchal society, rape is traditionally seen as a crime of property theft and Jews and blacks are portrayed as the thieves who steal white women from white men, like in Nazi Germany or the American South. But that was like a very bizarre argument because even if you hate white people, you can acknowledge that Southern whites obviously lost their economic standing and sense of identity first before their right to rape women across racial lines. And also, like, as a leftist and a Jew, I'm curious whether she would fall into the Zionist or pro Palestine camp.

[Riley]

My hunches she'd be. Well, she talks a bit about that, about how Israel had to become such a military force because they were feminized and castrated in the collective psyche by St. Paul.

[Rafi]

And then the Nazis.

[Riley]

And then the Nazis. Yeah, that the. Yeah. That Israel as a militant ethnostate is a reaction to the characterization of Jews.

[Rafi]

As being effeminate and that has the same outcome of the oppression of women. And then the other question I have is, I'm curious what she think about the current state of the west where marriage and procreation have fallen by the wayside in part due to the decline of religion. Given her view that women have historically been compelled into sexual intercourse through these like, enforced religious and legal mechanisms that effectively make them the property of men.

[Riley]

And she goes on to say that once women cease to have reproductive function, they'll be essentially useless.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Even more disempowered.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And, like, clearly, it feels like everything on her wish list came true, and women are no better off, but they're also not really under threat of being genocided any more than anyone else in society is. And, yeah, these are, like, very big questions. I feel like feminists, Dworkin included, have historically misdiagnosed the problem because they're operating from an obsolete framework. Like, you know, they're making predictions about the future based on the past, as we all do.

[Riley]

Well, that's why, in a way, reading Dworkin is kind of quaint and charming.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Because you get this. I don't know you. Yeah. Like, you have all the religious fundamentalists, America with a K. And like, you have this really straightforward. She's a brute materialist. She's talking about power in the most, like, absolute terms.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And there's, like a simplicity to that that I feel. Feel you can't do so much these days.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And it's. It's a weird simplicity because all of these seismic shifts were happening in her lifetime. And I get that people in the moment can't see the forest for the trees, but, like, there was, you see.

[Riley]

The sex wars are total. Or the pornography wars or whatever the they were called.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

That Dworkin and McKinnon were, you know, championing big anti pornography activism. And I feel like that is. Feels very much like a remnant of the distant past.

[Rafi]

Yeah. It's like. Yeah, it feels.

[Riley]

I'd love for her to see Lily Phillip.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And. Yeah. The ultimate product of male supremacy and oppression.

[Riley]

100 guys in one day.

[Rafi]

If you thought Marilyn Monroe was over fucked, you sent me the. The New York Times opinion piece on gene selection and ivf, which kind of like mirrors her dystopian scenario of this coming gynocide, where, like, embryos are grown in vats and women become unessential. But as they point out, it turns out the favorable case is for screening for female embryos because this would minimize disorders like schizophrenia, heart disease, diabetes, would lead to greater lifetime educational attainment, given that girls now attend college at higher rates than BO would lead to less violent crime. So the feminized society is obviously like the safer, more optimized society, and that's really what we've gotten.

[Riley]

Yeah. And women don't seem like they've been disempowered at all by.

[Rafi]

No. And they're still not happy. Yeah.

[Riley]

They. The op ed talks about this fertility startup, Orchid.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

That was started by a teal fellow.

[Rafi]

Yeah. A woman called Noor Siddiqui.

[Riley]

And she posted a video where she meets the first baby who is used using this specific embryo selecting technology from the startup that she pioneered. And the woman she talks to there, talks says that she froze some eggs because she just thought the process was cool. And then when she got married later in life, due to focusing on her career for the first half of it.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Then they got to pick, you know, the best one. And then it. Noor then looks at her own embryos that she's had harvested and sort of shows us the user friendly interface to look. And she's like, Embryo 2, Embryo 3 has these risk markers and she's really. She gives. She's kind of giving like Elizabeth Holmes a little bit. Like there's something a little off about her and the tech. But she says in that video that sex is for fun and embryo selection is for babies.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And Dworkin was saying, no, no. Sex is for reasserting male supremacy and embryo selection is also male supremacy.

[Rafi]

No. That Nursadiqi lady was so funny because she was so Daisy. I'm guessing Nurse Siddiqui is a Pakistani name. And she says that she was inspired to start this startup because her mother randomly went blind as an adult due to some bizarre genetic mutation which, like, clearly is in their family line because there's also cousin marriage somewhere in that family line. But also it's so Daisy of her to like, be sort of like ashamed and depressed by her mother's condition, but also use it to build a narrative about why she launched her company. Almost like a college admissions essay. Like, is. Is there any way to in gene selection to screen for like, striverism? Because that would, that would straight up eliminate like, Chamath Vivek, like all those guys.

[Riley]

Well, I mean, I'd also love to get Dworkin's take on the Indian question.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

The IQ on the. The real rape culture. Yeah.

[Rafi]

Like, would she make a difference between she doesn't get Western men raping and non Western men raping? And is non Western men raping just a function of patriarchy because they're the victims of like, systemic racism and cultural discrimination? Dawn again in her intro, like, right out the gate makes it about Trump, she says, but Donald Trump, with all his hatred, vulgarity and force and love of force, seems to offer up an awful confirmation that what she saw was really there along his is a politics that embodies what Dworkin saw in everyday misogyny. A reverence for domination and sadism, a cruel and peevish enforcement of Oppressive hierarchies, an egotism that feeds with an almost irrational erotic enthusiasm on the pain and humiliation of others. I can tell you with almost full certainty that Dworkin, if she were still alive today, would not like Trump. But they're very similar characters in that they're both, in the eyes of others, demagogues.

[Riley]

Yeah. They're.

[Rafi]

They're larger than life.

[Riley]

They're big personalities.

[Rafi]

And like, is any of this really true? And what does it have to do with misogyny? Like, Trump is not so much trying to enforce oppressive and therefore, like, presumably unnatural hierarchies as undo the years, if not decades of, like, leftist social engineering and imposition of false hierarchies.

[Riley]

Right, yeah, the.

[Rafi]

The hierarchies that, that feminists like Dwork and. And Donegan like to rail against have a basis in biological reality, though they like to pretend that they're socially constructed.

[Riley]

Well, she's so good at antis. She's such a. She's such a good writer and she has such a. She's very rational in her, like, Jewish Talmudic argumentation, but then also very, like, emotional in her. In her rhetoric.

[Rafi]

Jewish hysteria.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

She's so Jewish.

[Riley]

She's so Jewish, dude. And she hates Christians. I sent you that part in her memoir where she talks about how she wouldn't sing Silent Night.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

As a 10 year old.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And she said she hasn't sang it to this day.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And she never will. They called in, like, a Jewish teacher who she called a turncoat Jew and pretty gutless. And she says, yeah, I didn't like being pushed around. I really have no religious dog in the fight. But she clearly has a hate boner for, like, white Christian evangelicals, which is understandable given her background, given the time.

[Riley]

But.

[Rafi]

Yeah, the other thing that I feel like feminists like to deny is that if you sue for equality and win, that not only means, like, equal rights, but equal responsibilities. And that's like, the part they're kind of missing. Like, if you, as a woman, appoint yourself as an equal to men in the public sphere, which is your right, that implies that you're going to be treated equally, which means you're going to be opened up to things like hatred and insult.

[Riley]

The draft.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And when they inevitably find this insulting and intolerable, you know, they go crying. Misogyny, instead of accepting it for. For what it is, is like a natural consequence of achieving equality, specifically in the public realm.

[Riley]

Well, we haven't achieved legal equality. Yeah. Yeah.

[Rafi]

Like any woman, such as ourselves, can get up there on the pulpit and ordain herself like a voice to be heard.

[Riley]

Sure.

[Rafi]

Like there's a pundit.

[Riley]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rafi]

So those women necessarily are like playing in a field that's, you know, typically thought of as like a male domain. And so they get treated like men.

[Riley]

Well, yeah, I was going to say what the other thing that makes her such a strong writer is she like anticipates, you know, she makes these bold claims and then anticipates, like the counter arguments. And she does. She makes very good cases.

[Rafi]

They're like airtight, kind of internally coherent, but then don't add up.

[Riley]

Well, they sort of do. It's just the. If you disagree with the basic premise that. And she defines in the concluding chapter in very clear terms that feminism is about applying a universal standard.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Of human dignity. That if it's not separate but equal. Gender essentialist, anti feminism. Feminism is distinct in that it wants, like a uniform application, that women do comprise a sex class, as she calls it, of oppressed people, powerless people. And that equality in feminist terms means eradicating the existing power structure.

[Rafi]

Right. It's like a Marxist argument, but for women, like full blown no holds barred proletarian revolution.

[Riley]

And the basic premise of this book, though she makes a lot of different arguments in it, I guess, is that right wing women, all women, exist in this disparity of power.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

But right wing women have made their bed.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

So to speak.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

In it. And are leveraging their position at the expense of other women and have. Are the sort of like enforcers of this false consciousness.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Oppression.

[Rafi]

Yes.

[Riley]

And I thought it would. I was under the impression that it would be more of like kind of a character study of me too. Shafle or Bryant. Yeah.

[Rafi]

And they actually don't figure that much into it. She's seen as like the major theorist of Shafly and Bryant, and she just Shafley barely gets.

[Riley]

Yeah, they.

[Rafi]

Yeah, they barely at all. This whole idea that, like, Anita Bryant had to beg God to save her marriage and that Phyllis Schlafly had to beg him for the strength to love her husband is also like such a secular misreading of, like, the purpose of prayer.

[Riley]

Well.

[Rafi]

And now since she doesn't understand, like, the concept of faith, she has to like, insert gender into it. But Donegan gets like all emotional talking about the pain and humiliation of being like a public intellectual woman as if it's somehow unfair when it's literally just like the part and parcel of partaking in public debates and, you know, the feminist picture. Of equality is very feminine. It's like, oh, you thought you were only signing up for the perks.

[Riley]

Well, she would say the. We don't have the perks.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

We only have the disability.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And she makes this point, like, the whole idea of right wing women is that they're making, like, a Faustian bargain or strategic capitulation to the patriarchy, which also feels like cope, because couldn't it also be the case that they've made the determination that while the system is imperfect, this one in particular offers them more than the alternative?

[Riley]

Well, again, there's no disagreement, really.

[Rafi]

Yeah, they're just.

[Riley]

They're not feminists.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

They don't see women's interests collectively. Yeah, yeah, that's well said. And so they are able to act as free agents within a power structure.

[Rafi]

Yeah. But like, yeah, before we even get into, like, the. The meat of the book, like, just the Donegan intro is so insane because she gets into the biographical details that we briefly glossed over, and she says that Dworkin had an uncommon emotional sensitivity because of all the abuse and trauma that allegedly happened to her. She says critics of Dworkin today like to wield her biography against her, to say that her experiences of violence have rendered her unrelia, untrustworthy or psychologically incapable of perceiving reality. This is a common way to dismiss women, and in particular women who name rape, to say what happened to them has made them crazy and that therefore they cannot reliably interpret it. For her part, Dworkin always defied the smears that she was unstable, vengeful, or deluded by woundedness. She never backed away from claiming experience as a source of her own expertise. But, like, isn't it ironic how she derived her theory of like conservative women within the conservative patriarchy by hanging out in leftist circles and doing sex work? Like that's her main experience. She even devotes an entire section to how the sexual revolution failed because, as it turns out, women's liberation and abortion rights were, quote, high priority political issues for, like, male chauvinists masquerading as feminist allies because they wanted to fuck women. She makes the, I think, mostly correct point that free love offered them unfettered access to women's bodies by finally eliminating bourgeois constraints. And there's a part where she chastises leftist men for abandoning the abortion cause because they were bitter over women withdrawing from the movement and denying them sex and power. But that really makes no sense because had these same leftist males kept agitating for abortion as always, which they did, by the way. She would condemn them all the same for being, like, pigs and perverts.

[Riley]

You really just can't win with that. Yeah.

[Rafi]

Who, like, wanted to rape women with zero consequence. And, you know, also, like, I. I love Dworkin. I find her to be, like, fierce and eccentric and a style icon, but I don't need, like, her words or anyone else's to tell me that she's an unreliable narrator. Like, just look at her. The fact that she allowed herself to get so morbidly obese is already a sign of, like, an unstable and troubled personality, which is, like, by the way, what makes her great. But.

[Riley]

And her. All of her eccentricities and, like, literary references. I think she really. She's a creative mind. Yeah.

[Rafi]

She's.

[Riley]

Who's, like, applied that to some. To analysis.

[Rafi]

Yeah. But she's as much an artist as a theory.

[Riley]

Yeah. She takes a lot of liberties.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Again, a lot of, like, emotional appeals to, you know, realities of pain and subordination and, like, the hyper evocative language of. In her intro, Donegan also talks about how it's careless and problematic of Dworkin to invoke the Holocaust and, like, chattel slavery and discussing the predicament of women. But I don't think it's careless.

[Rafi]

I think it's absolutely intentional. I have a take on this. Yeah. Like, my favorite part is when she says, you may have heard that Dworkin said all sex is rape or that she opposed pornography or that she was transphobic, but actually she was. For all of these things, she just hated men. If only we could divest all of them from the corrupting logic of male supremacy. So I'm guessing everything Donegan claims Dworkin didn't actually say is actually true of her. She said way more radical things like intercourse has nothing to do with reproduction or pleasure. Society's opposition to rape is fake because its commitment to marriage is real. I. E. Marriage is legalized. Rape. Rape is an act of political terrorism. She's militantly antinatal. She spells America with a K for Cris, if you follow the logic. She says all sex is rape, which implies that all sex is terrorism.

[Riley]

She doesn't exactly say that, but you. She says, over and over, reiterates things that are reducible to that basic premise.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And then you get to the. The part where Donegan talks about what Dworkin got wrong, as you mentioned. But since her critics are all fascist Trump supporters, only Donegan is allowed to point this out. Her first objection is that she didn't actually say what she's on record as saying. So you get a sentence like you may have heard Dworkin caricatured inaccurately as claiming all sex is rape. You would be surprised to discover that her offense at the way sex is used to dominate and degrade comes in part from her faith in eroticism's transcendent potential to enrich and add meaning to our lives. And then a couple of paragraphs later, she says she pays rigorous attention to how sex is used to degrade women, but is not attentive enough to know how it can inspire and enliven them. So, like, which one is it?

[Riley]

She also is attentive to that. She. Because I was. I. I was reading out loud from Torkin to Riley being a little troll.

[Rafi]

Mm.

[Riley]

Specifically where she talks about, since we're getting married, I was like, what would you say if I told you I'm.

[Rafi]

Your property and you're my rapist? Yeah, that's hot, babe.

[Riley]

That actually. And right. Yeah. She doesn't say sex is rape. She says intercourse is rape and the like. Scissoring is.

[Rafi]

By sex, I mean. I mean, yeah, like heterosexual penetrative sex.

[Riley]

Forced intercourse in marriage, that is the right of intercourse supported by the state on behalf of the husband, provides context for both rape as commonly understood and incestual incestuous rape. Intercourse as a sex act does not correlate with anything but male power. Its frequency and centrality have nothing to do with reproduction, which does not require that intercourse be the central sexual act either in society at large or in any given sexual relationship or encounter. Intercourse is synonymous with sex because intercourse is the most systematic expression of male power over women's bodies, both concrete and emblematic, and as such as it. It is upheld as a male right by divine law, divine and secular custom, practice, culture, and force. And Riley was like, well, you see, you don't. You seem like you don't.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And she would say that you suffer from a false consciousness when you telegraph that you like it.

[Riley]

And then I said, and want it. I said, well, what if I told you that the shame that women feel on being and simultaneously experiencing pleasure and being possessed is the shame of having acknowledged, physically and emotionally, the extent to which one has eternalized and eroticized the subordination. And Riley said, well, you've certainly done that.

[Rafi]

Everybody knows that shame and rage and despisal, as Dworkin calls it, as part of the erotic package. It's partly what drives eroticisms.

[Riley]

But in that passage I just read, she's addressing exactly what donegan is ostensibly critiquing, which is that even if you find sex to be transcendent and sublime and empowering, you are stuck in the. The wall between pornography and prostitution. All women. Yeah, yeah.

[Rafi]

And she sort of like level distinction between wife and so the envies the wife for her security and the wife envies the for her freedom. But they're actually two sides of the same coin because they're both.

[Riley]

Yeah. All women are whores and ontologically, they're pornography.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Pornography is at the heart of the issue.

[Rafi]

Yes.

[Riley]

What women are is porno pornographic.

[Rafi]

They're welfare recipients, they're breeding livestock, and they're pornified. It really reads like a right wing tract, but from the opposite angle. So what the right wing is passing off as like a half joking affirmation she sees as like an impassioned critique, but the wording is the same.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

The intention is different and it all makes me horny. Yeah. And then Donegan's other objections to Dworkin are that she has the audacity to treat Bryant and Schlafly as complex human beings instead of simply personing them, as would be today's fashion.

[Riley]

Is Moira a lesbian?

[Rafi]

Yes.

[Riley]

Okay.

[Rafi]

Oh, yeah, right. I have a big problem with both Donegan and Dworkin's lesbianism. I think that it's kind of partly a put on an identity. I don't know that it's necessarily the real deal.

[Riley]

I mean, show me a real lesbian. I mean, I know they're out there, but, you know, there is super minority.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And, you know, she even, God forbid, seems to recognize Schlafly as a genius in her own right. And then the other thing is that she sometimes makes questionable linguistic choices, like, as you mentioned, comparing American chattel slavery to the Holocaust for the moral impact, which you can't do because that violates the leftist dogma that black people are always everywhere at the top of the victim hierarchy. And Jews are problematic now due to Zionism and genociding Palestinians who are the blacks of the Middle East. And yeah, she called this careless and I think that that's very nefarious because she wants to get credit for correcting the record while also, like, positioning herself to be in the lineage of Dworkin or even her rightful heir. She doesn't want to actually split from Dworkin, but she wants to kind of like develop and update that is Gatekeep the record.

[Riley]

I mean, Moira thinks flirting with your co worker at a holiday party is right.

[Rafi]

Yeah, yeah. She does take it Further, her main beef with Dworkin, if she has one, is that she's infallible up until the point that she fails to toe the line of, like, current progressivism.

[Riley]

Right. She doesn't. She never talks about the trans experience or the more contemporary modes of intersectional feminism where some people are. But that is the.

[Rafi]

She didn't get the software update.

[Riley]

Yeah, exactly. She's an old school rad femme who sees women uniquely as a distinctly oppressed social sex class and does not make accommodations for trans femmes.

[Rafi]

You can totally see a scenario that, again, word work and alive today. She would read Transgenderism as males.

[Riley]

Sent you that panel she did on that talk show, which was fantastic, where she was one of the people. The prompt was sort of like, what is sex for? And she's by far the most, like, formidable presence for many reasons, literally in the room, figuratively. But, yeah, everyone's, like, deferring to her, wants to hear what she has to say because she is, like, has the power and authority to speak. And there is, like, an AGP there. I don't know who it is. There's, like, some male writers. There's, like, kind of. It's. It's. It's a very interesting panel, but the trans person who's clearly AGP doesn't speak once. Orkin doesn't acknowledge them. And there's like, a couple men who get, like, a word in edgewise and, like, are basically, like, pandering to Dworkin.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Which.

[Rafi]

Yeah. Which is another thing that I'll get to, like, her relation to women versus men and why she chooses to side with women over men in spite of the fact that just judging by her profile alone, you would think that she would be contemptuous, jealous, hateful of women. But I'll get to that later. But, yeah, right wing women. Donegan calls it an exegesis on women in the conservative movement and on the conservative movements approach to women. But I think you're right. It's not what you expect it to be.

[Riley]

It's not really that.

[Rafi]

Like a character study.

[Riley]

She has, like, an ax to grind.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Which is chiefly against pornography, which she sees as not only like, a grave social and moral ill, but as, like, a real, like, ontological problem. It is like, the core issue for her. Because in pornography, women are objectified.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And because in Dworkin's view, they're objectified broadly in all of these different ways. Everything kind of circles back to that.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And pornography is just the contemporary instantiation of what's been going on for like eons millennia.

[Riley]

So though she and some right wing women who obviously would share her views about pornography to some degree, they get sort of lumped in.

[Rafi]

Huh.

[Riley]

But then it doesn't totally track well because.

[Rafi]

Yeah. They have different, like, assumptions and objectives at the end of the day. Yeah. And I want to caveat everything that I say about this book with the fact that it is in fact a polemic contrary to what Moira Donegan claims. So it's like necessarily very categorical to the point of almost being like fantasy or fiction. It's like fanfic. And I think it's strengthening as a polemic is less in its accuracy than its effect or affect or whatever you.

[Riley]

Want to call it.

[Rafi]

Like, polemic is literally in my mind, defined by its hostility to nuance. So you can't even appraise this book as you would a normal, like, theoretical or academic argument.

[Riley]

Yeah. There aren't really claims in Intercourse as well. She draws, really, which is the book she's promoting on that panel. And they ask her about why she chose certain. She writes an intercourse about, like Tolstoy and how he was like a batterer. Right. Shitty husband, whatever. Writes about his wife as like a case study. Yeah. Of the Kreuzberg Sonata. It's like very much a work of like, literary criticism, but sort of under the guise of this broader point she's trying to make about Intercourse, which she reiterates in Right Wing Women. But they ask her. I thought it was very cool, actually, when they asked her about why she wrote about those books and she writes about like De Sade and stuff. And she says, like, that's just what I was reading while I was writing this, but I wrote this book over the course of two years and these were the books I read.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And I think that that's a very, like, fresh and cool approach.

[Rafi]

Yeah. But that, that is like your job almost as like an intellectual to pluck inspiration from whatever you're engaging with at the moment, because you connect the dots.

[Riley]

And when you're as prolific as working as when you, you know, you're right, you're not. You don't have to write like a totally coherent treatise. You can kind of write these smaller books that deal with yourself and your impressions of.

[Rafi]

Right.

[Riley]

Things that you are taking in and analyzing through some contextual lens that you're applying. But they don't have to be the most relevant references.

[Rafi]

Yeah. She's almost like, in that way, even though she's wrong about a lot of things, if not most things, is the best case scenario of an intellectual.

[Riley]

I mean, is she even really like wrong? You know, cuz she says, yeah, like right wing women, they are disempowered in the same way that all women are. Right. But they don't think that things can change.

[Rafi]

Yeah. Or they disagree with the basic premise of their disempowerment. It's not exactly that she claims this untrue or that she bends the truth. And it's maybe not even that, it's not the whole truth. It's that her truth is so one sided that.

[Riley]

But it is true. Right. That right wing women.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Like don't want to upend the existing power structures.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Because they're, they want to make space for themselves within them.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And for many reasons, not just for security and protection as she claims, but because there's a lot of professional and financial opportunities in it.

[Riley]

But that includes protection and.

[Rafi]

Yeah, but for them specifically as individuals versus as women, her truth goes from being an idea to being a passion, to use her own words. And yet for her, like the central fact of life is not domination by conservatives or elites or whites or any of these other bad and mean categories, it's domination by men. Even racism operates to a fundamentally like male supremacist patriarchal logic where both racially superior women selected as breeding stock and racially inferior women sterilized for population control are two sides of the same coin because they're being stripped of their own reproductive destiny out of necessity. And the core assumption for her is that we live in a male dominated society. And then her central claim which follows from that is that right wing women, as you said, have made this bargain with the patriarchy to guarantee their own survival, which comes at the expense of all women and actually leads to their extinction.

[Riley]

But in part also because they don't see an alternative. Right. And that is not necessarily due to them like factoring in all of those things or even bargaining per se. It's just that like someone like Anita Bryant or Phyllis Schlafly have a very different set of references and a different context in which they're like consciousness has been formed. And by Dworkin's own like definition, I don't think you can be a Christian and a feminist.

[Rafi]

Yeah, yeah, she's right about that.

[Riley]

So yeah, like you Christian women who by her definition are necessarily kind of right wing. Yeah, yeah. They don't want to upend existing power structures because they are Christian. They made a choice to exist in a patriarchal power structure.

[Rafi]

Yeah. But also because they're not retarded. And they recognize that upending the existing structure without replacing kind of the values and norms of that structure with something equally viable will breed chaos and decline.

[Riley]

Well, they just don't see anything else as even being viable because they have a very strong. They have faith.

[Rafi]

Yes, yeah. Which she sees as another form of false consciousness again. And basically in making this deal with the devil, they are both the victim and the agent of their own disenfranchisement, both the oppressed and the oppressor. As Sarah Jones said about ushavants, here's a really nice line, in fact, she ransoms the remains of a life, what is left over after she has renounced willful individuality by promising indifference to the fate of other women. And this all depends on a view of history where women are the losers, even when the evidence says otherwise. Like there was that interesting part where she's forced to admit that legal abortion was passed by the Supreme Court in under a decade, which she would again chalk up to the agitating and organizing of left wing men. But she, in other words, gives credit to right wing women about being more honest about the stakes, but portrays them as sex traders. So she's a very weird kind of leftist because she also hates the left.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

Like her ire is not strictly directed at the right, but I think she really misdiagnoses the problem of both the appeal of the right to women and the problem with right wing women. Like, first off, I think she doesn't give women enough credit for being rational actors, you know, who make decisions based on what they think will benefit them materially, whether or not that ends up happening.

[Riley]

Well, she can't because.

[Rafi]

Well, Right.

[Riley]

Sees everything in these really brute materialist terms where power, some people have powers, some people. There's haves and have nots.

[Rafi]

And I would say that that's pretty ironic for a feminist, but it's not because, you know, it seems to be that the underlying ethos of feminism in practice, if not in theory, is that like, feminism claims to be a movement that's all about female empowerment, but actually sees women as like permanently disempowered, lacking an agency, forever the victim, that sort of thing.

[Riley]

And if you think that you are empowered, it's because you have.

[Rafi]

I got news for you, baby.

[Riley]

Yeah, it's that false content. It's like. So it's a Chinese finger trap.

[Rafi]

It is. It's like a mortal coil, like untangleable knot.

[Riley]

And it is like, wow, you've made an amazing case for why intercourse.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Is yup like by design, you're being penetrated and disempowered at every turn. And like, damn, I'm gonna do it anyway.

[Rafi]

Because it's all I can do given the system. But ironically, it's conservative women who end up being the best feminists by example, in a weird way. And the other thing is, like, secondly, it's not that that right wing women are exactly like the slaves or lackeys of men, but that they're actually quite ornery and disagreeable, crazy. It's like, like, you know the joke that if you're right wing as a woman, there's something horribly wrong with you. And I think that's the real common ground she has with them. That she's, you know, a cantankerous contrarian who's ambitious and power hungry in her own way, and not. Not the fact that we're all women here.

[Riley]

Polia calls her a lot of things, like a moral fascist. And she says, I forget where, but she attributes her career basically to being a failed novel, like, fiction writer.

[Rafi]

Who. Dworkin.

[Riley]

Yeah. Or Polya Paulia says Dworkin, like, is a failed fiction writer.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Which pivoted to social justice.

[Rafi]

This whole book is organized into, like, essay length chapters. In the chapter on the politics of intelligence, she makes this brilliant distinction between moralism and moral intelligence. Moralism is something that comes from a lack of experience and a fear of the real world. It's like a defense mechanism. And then moral intelligence is something that comes from the wisdom of lived experience and being thrust into the real world. And it's a real confrontation with reality. It's a real politic, which is also, you know, it's a totally brilliant, correct distinction. But it's very ironic because she very often falls back on moralism as a person who supposedly has this like. Well, this reservoir of lived experience.

[Riley]

Right.

[Rafi]

And her solution for all of this is total bodily autonomy for women through control of one's own reproductive destiny, which will lead to sexual and economic liberation. But it's, like, very unclear what that is or how that will be achieved.

[Riley]

I mean, that more than anything feels like it has been achieved.

[Rafi]

Right.

[Riley]

Like with freezing one's eggs.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Etc. That women, I guess, of a certain class. The Dworkin wouldn't necessarily make that distinction because it's not that important to her, but they do have a lot of control over. And marital rape is very much, you know, an antiquated concept that she harps on.

[Rafi]

Yeah. Because women are no longer marrying because.

[Riley]

There'S no incentive to.

[Rafi]

Yeah. Because of like, financial dependence because they're being passed from the home of the father to the home of the husband.

[Riley]

Well, now they're in the home of the HR department.

[Rafi]

Yeah. Yeah. And like, you know, how in this scenario, like, does the species survive even if you have unlimited abortion? That still doesn't solve the fact that men and women clearly need each other in other ways. She makes this very unkind characterization that, quote, the extinction women fear is not the extinction men conjure up who will make the babies so we can fight our wars. It is the extinction of women, women's function, and with it, women's worth. And it's a point that sort of defies the reality that procreation is governed by this operational logic that really transcends men or women. You know, it's like it exists for the survival of the species.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

And she sees having children as mere survival. You know, not joy, not legacy, just squalor, boredom, sorrow. She has that passage where she sort of clowns on roast medicated women are. Yeah. But she sort of makes fun of schlafly for the lady doth protesting too much about how great and wonderful and joyful motherhood is. Watching, like, the thrill, the pleasure of watching your children grow up and develop new skills. Like, she's totally inured to the idea of motherhood and the idea of children.

[Riley]

Well, she's completely cynical too, even on not just children, but love.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

You know, that men and women also need each other. And. And that passage you just read about making women so people. Men are the ones who. Women making peoples who. So they can die in America with a K is wars. Men are the one who die in wars.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And for all this, like, surplus of empathy that she has for women, obviously, because without saying she has, like, none for. For men.

[Rafi]

No. Well, that's another.

[Riley]

And she doesn't see at all the way that, like, the human experience is oppressive and inconvenient for. And boring and horrible for everyone and that men's struggles are unique and in many ways worse.

[Rafi]

Yeah, she. Yeah, I have a whole take on.

[Riley]

This because, like, yes, it sucks in the. Like the trad wife housewife is bored and has existential pain and is on Valium or amphetamines to be skinny or whatever. But I feel. I don't know, a man has to go work.

[Rafi]

He doesn't even have the luxury of going to war anymore. He has to clock in at the office or. Or be a neat.

[Riley]

Or if he has like, a more masculine job.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

He has to work at the Factory. That woman there was that video of the woman who made the tick tock about how she was going to divorce her husband for not taking out the trade wash. And yeah, her husband was, it turned out, was like a utility lineman. Yeah, he's out there working on like, power lines. He's working in one of the most, like, dangerous.

[Rafi]

Yeah, she's, she's talking about how she almost divorced him for not doing the chores exactly to her specifications. And like, yeah, she's absolutely right that women shoulder the brunt of childbirth, child rearing. And this breeds resentment no matter how involved the father is. And, and how. What a great dad he is.

[Riley]

She says, I am the project manager.

[Rafi]

Of this, of this house. It's so scary. And it, but it's like emasculating your partner for content is like a punishment that does not fit the crime. But yet that was one of my big objections to this book. Because never in these feminist arguments, which always extol the virtues of greater empathy and compassion, do you ever see any empathy or even basic understanding of the male perspective. You know, feminists love to claim that their point of view simply does not register to men.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

But it's almost like men don't exist to them except as like, accessories or surrogates for their feelings. It's like really crazy.

[Riley]

And yeah, okay, so a woman is passed right from her father to her husband, or they used to be, back when people used to get married, when we had a more functional society. But, and this is made out to be some kind of amazing deal for a man who now has a prostitute.

[Rafi]

That he can feed and clothe and.

[Riley]

All their progeny, he has to take care of his family.

[Rafi]

There's really no acknowledgment ever that men also have to sacrifice and compromise and that unlike feminists, they have no socially acceptable, institutionally backed outlet to express this fact. You can say that they have, like, manosphere, blogs and online forums.

[Riley]

Well, Dworkin would say that they have and have had historically, you know, the channels of self expression.

[Rafi]

Well, she would say that the male perspective is the default in the status quo. But, you know, with all due respect, men built civilization and wrote history, so why wouldn't it be that way? And they don't have a specific express channel for writing a body of work criticizing women because it simply didn't occur to them. And all of these things that I just listed where men go online to complain about foids and roasties are not formal or official. And they're frankly mostly frowned upon in polite society. Whereas, like, feminism is the default in academia and. And probably in. In the media, in the corporate world.

[Riley]

In Dworkin's day, I mean, she did, you know, make a career. She's a lot like Shafley in that way.

[Rafi]

Right. And I think.

[Riley]

Yeah, but it wasn't always the case.

[Rafi]

Well, I think she sees this and she respects someone like Schlafly more than she respects, like, leftist men. And I'm going to be called to pick me. But the point isn't to defend men, it's to state the obvious. The fact that's so obvious, in fact, that most people don't see it that, like, it's almost like if you have the space to air your grievances, those grievances become more magnified and seem more urgent.

[Riley]

Right.

[Rafi]

And yeah, in the Politics of Intelligence, she quotes Virginia Woodhull, Robin Morgan and Alice Walker favorably. And they all variously claim that intercourse is not will, that intercourse not willed and initiated by women is rape. But, like, doesn't the other half of the population get a say in this mutual exchange? And if a man expresses interest in you, that's automatically like, unwanted and violating.

[Riley]

It's a proto rape.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And probably Moira O'Donaghan will put you on a list for something like that. So watch out, fellas.

[Rafi]

Yeah. Probably the most honest thing she says in the abortion chapter. Women hate remembering illegal abortions because their husbands experience none of this, which no woman forgives. So in other words, women resent the perceived lack of empathy for their perspective because they can't imagine a subjectivity that exists outside of their own. It doesn't occur to them that men have an alternate equally valid subjectivity, which is why they can't do the POV.

[Riley]

Meme while it's validated. I'm just anticipating a Dworkinist response that the. Because the. In a male supremacist society, the man's perspective is de facto validated by it already being the status quo that they need not shed light. Yeah, but this puts their subjectivity. Because their subjectivity is the one that. From which. And she's not wrong in that way.

[Rafi]

Yeah, it's true that all theory, all history, for the most part, is written.

[Riley]

Women have been up until now, from.

[Rafi]

The perspective of men, which is the default perspective throughout history. Yes.

[Riley]

And women do exist ontologically as an another category, whether or not they are oppressed or have been historically always suppressed. You can get into.

[Rafi]

But.

[Riley]

But yeah. That the. There's men and women.

[Rafi]

Yeah, yeah.

[Riley]

Her story.

[Rafi]

You can't have women without men.

[Riley]

They call it his. His story.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And I'm not saying that this is. Is true of all women. She's saying that. But it is true of feminists. She has this line, the abortionist finished the job that the husband had started. And she gives these accounts of like evangelical women in unhappy and loveless marriages who only found peace by accepting Christ, thereby disclaiming responsibility for their own will and ingenuity. The male coded force of God slash Jesus for their salvation. One of them defines love as unconditional acceptance of a man and. And his feelings. Love is the unconditional acceptance of another person and their feelings.

[Riley]

I mean, I just went to a pre Cana course in Hillsborough, New Jersey through my church.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Where I was instructed by a couple priests and some lay people on various dimensions of what it means to enter into a Christian marriage. And there was a lot of emphasis on, you know, marriage as not only being a source of joy, but as a cross.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

That men and women bear.

[Rafi]

Yeah. Guess what? No doubt marriage and child rearing are at times exhausting and frustrating and boring and women often again shoulder the brunt of that. But again, that's not the whole picture. That's not the whole story. And I think to be a true feminist you have to accept that there's some individual will involved that's not merely the product of false consciousness imposed by a patriarchal authority. Even if that's a cope.

[Riley]

I just don't think it is. I do. I'm somewhere when she breaks down the different types. Types of anti feminism and why they're wrong. And there's her little diagram.

[Rafi]

Circular diagrams.

[Riley]

Yeah. That's the trap of crimes against women.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

But before that she talks about. Yeah. There's people who think men and women are separate but equal.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

That there's natural sex difference but not necessarily a hierarchy. Which is wrong. Interview. And then there's female supremacists who place themselves on like a moral pedestal and extol some specifically feminine virtue that is also wrong.

[Rafi]

Yeah. Like the whole woman or the natural woman. The woman. That's the whole woman. To the land or nature. The kind of like trad wife, influencer woman.

[Riley]

Yeah. That women have unique power.

[Rafi]

Yeah. Like earth mother powers.

[Riley]

I'm somewhere between those categories. I think of anti feminists where I think there should be separation and some degree of equality that isn't universalized.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

That is like specific to sex difference. That maintains human dignity amongst peoples and that women have their own strengths bordering on being superior and uniquely empowered. Even Like EQ in.

[Rafi]

Yeah, but she.

[Riley]

Interpersonal, at least. Gender dynamics.

[Rafi]

Very bleak and condescending view of the woman's domain or the woman's world. The domestic fear, which she's not interested. Yeah. Which she sees as totally, like, thankless and fruitless. Ultimately, she doesn't think that women can derive anything but the most brute and basic lived experience.

[Riley]

From.

[Rafi]

From existing in that realm.

[Riley]

Or that it's because, like. Yes. That women. Well, in. When she talks about women being. Oh, wait, this part's good. So, yeah, I'll try to remember to circle back. So I'm talking about this part in the abortion chapter. She says women cannot be responsible for pregnancy in the sense of acting to prevent it, because women do not control when, where, how, and on what terms they have intercourse. Intercourse is forced on women both as a normal part of marriage and as the primary sex act in virtually any sexual encounter with a man. No woman needs intercourse. Few women escape it.

[Rafi]

Okay, yeah. So, yeah, at some point she says, like, in reference to, like, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti Semitism, any kind of bigotry. But passions are distinguished by their illogic. One can describe them and find an interior logic in them up to a point. Then there's a sensational leap into hate. Dazzling, crazed, obsessional. But doesn't that exactly describe her position in that quote that you just read? There's also this through line in the book that kind of finally congeals in the chapter on the coming gyno side that we mentioned already, that when childbirth ceases to be desirable, women will cease to be necessary. And again, it's billed as something imposed from on high by the patriarchal authority. But what if it's your own nagging inner voice that you mistake for external oppression? She has this habit of, like, confusing biological reality for social constructivism. And it reminded me of that classic Kofi Fiannon Twitter exchange where he's like, women stop existing when no one's looking. And some woman chimes in, being like, says who? And he's like, look at you. Like, you're literally appealing to an outside authority for confirmation that you exist. And the question for me isn't whether men will allow women to exist, it's whether women will allow themselves to exist. There's, like, a lot of bangers like this. I'm going to read some of them that sound nice but don't quite add up. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. Female submission is a delicately balanced commingling of resourcefulness and lack of Self respect. Femininity is the apparent acceptance of sex on male terms, with goodwill and demonstrable good faith in a form of ritualized obsequiousness. In a time of feminist resistance, such propaganda increases in bulk geometrically. I'm not gonna take the bait and make a fat joke, but she's an amazing writer. Lauren Euler calls her scarily good in the blurb, which is true in part because she's not your average woman. She's fat, she's ugly.

[Riley]

Exactly.

[Rafi]

She's a lesbian, she's a Jew.

[Riley]

She's exceptional.

[Rafi]

She's a genius.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

If I were to psychoanalyze her. It seems that her chief problem isn't that she's denied womanhood by the patriarchy, as all women are, It's. It's that she literally doesn't fit the parameters of womanhood.

[Riley]

Well, I think she must have at some point. She got married.

[Rafi]

Yeah, but I think she would argue that that was a bare necessity and false consciousness that drove her into the arms of this, like, shitty, abusive man.

[Riley]

But I mean, before, you know, I think before she got extremely fat. Yeah, she was somewhere within the normal range.

[Rafi]

Weight range.

[Riley]

Yeah. And of like a decent charm and attractiveness.

[Rafi]

Yeah, she was cute. She was like Lena Dunham, like a nice, cute Jewish girl. But yeah, every single one of her decisions is like, so mature and thoughtful in a way that defies her reputation, which is why she will be remembered by history, whereas Moira Donegan will not. Like, I was thinking about how Dworkin is a polemicist, which is what's up for grabs, but Moira Donegan and Sarah Jones are mere propagandists masquerading as polemicists.

[Riley]

Shots fired.

[Rafi]

Which is why they have to like, insert themselves into the record by correcting the record. And she even like the second line of the book, the way that it opens. While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory or idea or fact. And like, every time I go back to Dworkin, I feel like Joan Didion in that clip on Charlie Rose where she's talking about how she wrote out Hemingway's sentences line by line to teach herself how to write.

[Riley]

I was surprised Dworkin wasn't a Virgo. Honestly, what is she? She's an Aries.

[Rafi]

Oh, that makes sense.

[Riley]

She's.

[Rafi]

Yeah, she's like forever an angry, petulant, first born child. But that's. That line is basically like we was Kangs for feminism, but it really bangs.

[Riley]

She. I'm looking. I have her chart here. Yeah, she's got a lot of Aries in her chart and a lot of Virgo.

[Rafi]

Yeah, but that's. That's the thing. It's like she does. Yeah, she's like a. A moralist contrarian. Congratulations. We've like, cracked the code. But, like, her whole polemic is organized around the failure to acknowledge a basic but more bitter fact, which is that she's alienated from womanhood not by men, but by fate. She had the. The misfortune or the luck of. Of being a weird person who's not quite male, not quite female, which is why she fixates on Marilyn Monroe so.

[Riley]

Much, because her hormones are so disruptive. Accepted.

[Rafi]

Yeah, she's like.

[Riley]

Has morbidly obese. She doesn't. That's why I was skimming her memoir, which was published posthumously and written late in her life and isn't really a true memoir. It's very like these kind of like delirious creative writing short essays about different parts of her life. But I was like, when did you get fat? Like, yeah, when would. Wins the chapter? And of course, she doesn't address it.

[Rafi]

God, I wish you were alive now so she could come on the pod.

[Riley]

I love that she could get into. Like. I was like. I. That's what I was really curious about was the, like, chronology of trauma. At what point she decided to, like, make her body as like a site of resistance.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

I've told this story probably, but when I was in college, women's. Women's college, just like Dworkin, I was dating Rafi, and he came to visit and he came to Mills, and one of my friends told him, she said, a fat body is a political body. And he started laughing.

[Rafi]

You have not told this story before.

[Riley]

My hetero CIS boyfriend started laughing because he dead ass thought she was joking. Well, it's like she really meant it.

[Rafi]

It's like that quote I posted on Twitter. In addition to being too emotional, women can be too fat. Yeah, it's like.

[Riley]

That's from the. That was the part I was gonna read, actually. Or a little bit before that. She. This is in the coming gyno side where she talks about how women are over medicated. Obviously, there's the kind of like, trad archetypal helper. She says the use of these drugs to numb these masses of women show only how little women are worth to the doctors who do the procedures prescribing to the women themselves. The society that depends on this mass drugging of women to keep. To help in keeping women as a class quiescent and women as individuals invisible or aberrant. 36 million women can be tranquilized in a year and the nation does not notice. It does not miss their energy, creativity, wit, intellect, passion, commitment, etc.

[Rafi]

I saw, I read that one too and like laughed. And then she was like so unintentionally funny. Andrea Dworkin, the greatest humorist of all time. Better than most men.

[Riley]

And then she gets into how women are also can be too fat. And the body standards.

[Rafi]

Oh yeah. Which in America are like America with.

[Riley]

A K. Standards of beauty dictate a leanness closer to the skeletal depravity of concentration camp victims than to any other socially recognized physiognomy. Like that is crazy.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

She thinks women are trying to look like concentration camp victims.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And that like so she took a very alternate course.

[Rafi]

I love the statistics she gives about welfare recipients that in fact something like 56% of white at the time. Yeah, at the time, 56% of people on welfare were white and like 43% were black. And it's just like classic lying by numbers because the population at the time was more majority white than it is now. So it stands to reason that like you want relative percentages versus absolute ones.

[Riley]

Well, she uses that to make the case that the welfare state sets these terms which it has a right to.

[Rafi]

Right.

[Riley]

Because people of like what a habitable home is for a child and if, you know, some maybe of the measures were overly punitive or whatever. But. But yeah. That in order to receive welfare you had to conform to America with a.

[Rafi]

Case, not have illegitimate children in the home because that would mean more tax expenditure.

[Riley]

But per to. You said something a little bit ago about how she just doesn't understand. She places. She fundamentally doesn't value what she says about 36 million women being medicated and the nation not noticing it's because she fundamentally doesn't place any value on the domestic work of women. Yeah. And that the ways in which women are amazing and you know, like women are creative, essential. I think it's beautiful to like you see those. Those use your creativity and your intellectual faculties and your will to support and manage your family.

[Rafi]

Well, yeah. You see those tiktoks of women putting water in a. In a Ziploc bag and then inserting it into a pair of toddler shoes to expand them by putting them in the freezer so that the water turns to ice. Or like putting squirting baby food on a popsicle Stick. And putting that in the freezer. Women be putting a lot of stuff in the freezer. Yeah.

[Riley]

Further, there's a lot of life hacks that involve the free.

[Rafi]

Like, they come up with these crazy, like genius life hacks that I would have never thought of. Yeah. And yeah, speaking of medicated. Yeah. She has this part on actresses.

[Riley]

They're the only. What is it? She says?

[Rafi]

The actress is the only female culturally empowered to act.

[Riley]

Love. Cool. Love the sound of that.

[Rafi]

But the actress literally acts and she sees like, the actress as like a winning pawn of male desire. But in a way that's like another case of the woke being more correct because it, you know, bypasses the feminist claim that some women get into acting for the love of the craft and not just because they want to be objectified by men. It's like kind of saying the quiet part loud.

[Riley]

It's like not. It's.

[Rafi]

And what would it even mean for women to exist outside of male desire? It would spell like the total breakdown of society.

[Riley]

We can't all be Andrea Dworkin.

[Rafi]

And she acknowledges as much.

[Riley]

Well, the notion. Right. That if only women were free of their chains and marital bonds and medicated hazes.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

That they would be, you know, writing amazing. They just simply wouldn't. Just like most men wouldn't be Napoleon.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Or Caesar. Like, most people are gonna hit some ceiling of like, mediocrity that they'll plateau at.

[Rafi]

Totally. Yeah. The quote is, frankly, no one much knows what feminists mean. The idea of women not defined by sex and reproduction is anathema. Or baffling. Yeah. She seems to miss the male part of the equation, which is not that most women are oppressed, it's that most people are oppressed. And it's not that most women have to fight to. To eke out some dignity. It's that most people have to fight to eke out some dignity. Because not all of us can be amazing and brilliant 600 pound geniuses. And she says in the part.

[Riley]

And that in marriage. Sorry.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

But the point of. Fresh out of pre Cana. The point of a Christian marriage is not merely to make women subservient, it's.

[Rafi]

To make men subservient.

[Riley]

Well, yeah. But to achieve salvation.

[Rafi]

That you keep harmony between the sex.

[Riley]

That you can partner with somebody and aid each other in the human struggle for dignity.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And ultimately to try to get to heaven.

[Rafi]

Yeah, totally.

[Riley]

But she doesn't see it that way.

[Rafi]

No. Because she's. She's like a godless, secular, Jewish lesbian feminist. Yeah. And I thought, like, the Marilyn Monroe section was really interesting because, you know, she refutes the conspiracy theory that Marilyn was killed by, like, the CIA or the FBI or the Kennedys because she knew too much. And instead she suggests that she, like, basically finally reclaimed her own life by taking her own life because she was literally being fucked to death. She mentions this rumor that she'd had so many illegal abortions that it permanently damaged her reproductive organs. But she never entertains the possibility that Marilyn Monroe was, in fact, like, a troubled person, not strictly due to the fact that she was abused and exploited by men, and that possibly the reason that she was so abused and exploited by men was because she was a troubled person. To me, that sort of gets to, like, the whole crux of Dworkin's personal individual conflict that she universalizes to all women because there's a desire on her part to assert a common ground with women, like, irrespective of their racial and economic backgrounds. Yeah.

[Riley]

Feminism means you have to ally yourself with all women.

[Rafi]

Yeah. But I was wondering, like, what is the function of that for her specifically? Because she, you know, basically, you know, in a weird way, ends up likening herself even to someone like Marilyn Monroe, based on this kind of uniformly negative view of the shared female experience that, again, reads as impassioned, but almost feels desperate. It's like a desperate plea to the reader that they see her as a woman, too. She's basically seeing that, like, even beautiful and famous women end up suffering the same fate, which sort of translates to, you know, why bother enjoying your womanhood? Why bother being the object of desire if your life is going to suck anyway? And I think this is really just a deeply personal problem that she feels alienated, actually, in reality, from most women because she is an intellectual and they're not. And she even likens intellectualism semi ironically, to maleness.

[Riley]

Well, yeah, she devotes a whole chapter to it.

[Rafi]

Yeah. It's like, virile and potent.

[Riley]

Yeah. Lesbian.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And I think there's also. I'm going to spurg out on this because the thing that most struck me about this book is that there's this ordeal of civility at play. I. You know, I've said this before, and I'll say it again. It's really funny that so many of the leaders of the feminist movement were Jewish, because, again, they thought that they were rebelling against society as a whole, but they were really doing what was expected of them in their society.

[Riley]

I mean, I really think the rightful heir to Dworkin's legacy is Andrea Longchu.

[Rafi]

Damn. Yeah. Another person who's perennially trying to universalize his. Her.

[Riley]

Ordeal of femininity.

[Rafi]

And like, yeah, her being Jewish already sets her apart from the majority. In her chapter on Jews and homosexuals, she devotes an entire essay to it. She makes this brilliant distinction between how and why homosexuality was prohibited in the Old Testament versus the New Testament. So she says in the Old Testament, it carried no special distinction among the forbidden carnal acts. Homosexuality and adultery were capital crimes because they led to internecine tribal warfare and threatened the balance and stability of male power. Incest and bestiality were similarly prohibited, but not punishable by death because there was no eminent political threat in like fucking your sister or your goat versus fucking another guy's wife or the guy himself. And she claims that homosexuality only acquires its specific sinful character in the New Testament, which attempts to unseat obviously the old Jewish God in favor of the new Christian God through the miracle of resurrection by very, very radical portion, setting the the Jews up as Christ killers and also social effeminates.

[Riley]

And that Christ himself in dying was the passion of his death on the cross was an effeminate pen. You know, he was penetrated by the Roman spear. He died in this, like, extreme, static, feminine way, but then was.

[Rafi]

Extremities were nailed to the cross, but.

[Riley]

Then was resurrected in this, like, Aristotelian, perfect, masculine, triumphant form, which was phallic in nature. Yes. She also says that the Holy Spirit is phallic in nature and that it penetrates all things, which is highly blasphemous.

[Rafi]

She says it was the shrewd, opportunistic, politically brilliant master of propaganda, Paul, who scapegoated first the homosexuals for their deceit and degeneracy, and then the Jews for sanctioning and effectively inventing them. But it was Paul who invented the Jews. She says the roots of the continuing association of the Jews as a people with culture, social liberalism, tolerating sin and intellectualism go back to Paul. He constructed the modern Jew in history. And later he emphasized the Jewish character which he invented. Legalistic, intellectual, socially tolerant of sin, intellectually arrogant, and putting law over revelation and faith laws to Christ through intellection and abstraction and legalism and social liberalism. Again, it's almost like a fuentoid argument, but from the opposite angle. So in her retelling, the Hebrews, their society being a patriarchy, like all societies at the time, are still misogynists, but their misogyny is more rational and pragmatic because Again, it's. It serves a political function to. To maintain the order of power, but in a backhanded way. She. There's this part where she ends up affirming the stereotype that Jews sanction pedophilia by quoting Maimonides on homosexual incest. And, you know, her section on Paul's genius is really pure genius, but the whole quality of her analysis is so Jewish.

[Riley]

Oh, my God. It's.

[Rafi]

Did Paul really invent the Jew or did he eventually observe the Jew?

[Riley]

Paul was a Jew.

[Rafi]

And it's, like, so Jewish of her to portray the Jew as this, like, pragmatic, enlightened creature while also playing the victim and claiming that he was invented and then scapegoated. She's like a Jew before she's a feminist, even.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

You know, it's funny. She goes to the Texas convention on the Equal Rights Amendment, and she claims that she's discriminated primarily not as a leftist lesbian feminist, but as a Jew. And then her final claim, obviously, is that the conservative Jews have now joined the evangelical Christians for the same reason that women join the right to make this kind of Faustian bargain, because, you know, the Jewish man's greatest fear is that he will be called effeminate, that his masculinity will be questioned.

[Riley]

Okay, well, the Old Testament does condemn homosexuality.

[Rafi]

Yeah. But she says, not specifically for its content, but for the. The role it serves in. In subverting power dynamics.

[Riley]

Yeah, but in. So she cites. There's some preacher who's, like, taking issue with the Les Lesbians. Is that. Is it in Texas? Yeah. Okay. She's in Houston. Yeah. And there's some preacher, and she's asking him, why is lesbianism when it does no harm, why is it an abomination? Why is it sinful? And he cites Paul's letter to the Romans. Let me find it. Sorry. No, here it is.

[Rafi]

But yeah, the point I'm making while you look for that quote is that she's basically making a Jewish supremacist argument. Jews are misogynist, too, but in a more enlightened way than Gentiles. Jews are being political and legalistic about it, whereas Gentiles have endowed it with divine sanction.

[Riley]

Right.

[Rafi]

Because.

[Riley]

Because they don't merely observe the law, they live the law through their faith.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And whereas Jews were pre or Israel was chosen by God to adhere to these laws that included prohibitions on homosexuality, she makes the case that in Paul's letter to the Romans, he says, for this cause God gave them up unto vile affections. For even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature. And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust towards one another. Men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet, being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, full of envy, murder, debate, conceit, malignity, whispers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud boasters, inventors of evil things disobedient to parents without understanding, covenant breakers without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful, who, knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death. Also in the Old Testament they say that men who lie with other men shall be put to death. It's not. It does circle back pretty neatly. She claims it sort of doesn't. But Paul's letter to the Romans, while it does make reference to homosexual acts. The understanding, understanding. And this isn't, I'm not like editorializing. It's not that the act itself is uniquely sinful. And first of all, her whole understanding of sin, even as something that, you know, she says lesbians don't murder, they don't rape. Why are they being singled out? A sin is just. It falls short of the intention that God has for us. It's not necessarily something that causes like pain, but interesting. But in. Yeah, it's just in, in Paul's letter to the Romans, he, when he says against nature, he doesn't necessarily mean that it's morally wrong on its own, but that it's like a symptom of the decadence of the Romans that they like. He's not talking about like. Though obviously evangelical Christians wouldn't condone this either, but like loving same sex relationships. He's talking about like a decadent society that's fallen into sodomy and idol worship and like ritualistic orgiastic practices.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And that these are like the fruits.

[Rafi]

Have deviated from the ultimate social goal of promoting the society.

[Riley]

Right. That being contrary to nature is atypical but not necessarily like morally wrong. She's just taking a lot of liberties.

[Rafi]

Yeah. In a frankly legalistic and talmudic way, as she would have accused Paul of inventing.

[Riley]

And at the time, like, she's literally proving Paul's point. There were. Yeah. And the Romans at the time like weren't having gay sex because they were in love. It's because they were like a society. Well, not even gay. But that it was about, like, power. Much like Dworkin is obsessed with that. It was like it perverted nature into making it about, like, dominance.

[Rafi]

Yeah, well, this was the result of.

[Riley]

Like, a broader moral decay. Not that like, they were sinful because they had gay sex. They had gay sex because they were. Right, sinful.

[Rafi]

Yeah, that's well said.

[Riley]

But this is by far, I thought, the funniest part of this book, where she quotes the Bible, Paul again in Romans, and says the Jew is even insidiously likened to the Greek, that pederist of universal fame quoting Paul. For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him. That's literally a statement about how you salvation is universal. It's not about how Jews are gay and Greeks are pedos. It's about like, there's God doesn't see Jews or Greeks anymore. That Jews are not the singularly chosen people, that everyone can have salvation, not just the Jews. But she says, no, Jesus, only Jews have salvation.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And that was. That was charitably Paul's whole.

[Riley]

Only Jewish lesbians have salvation.

[Rafi]

Like wrangling God from the magnifying glass of litigious Jews. This was my favorite passage, which was just like, so, so genius. The sexual brilliance of the passion could not hide the morbid femininity of the Jew who suffered it willingly as an act of human will. It was Paul's genius to link ineffective and effeminate Jewish law in Jews with unnatural homosexuals worthy of death. It was Paul's genius to exploit Christ as the prototypical Jew. He suffered like a female. It was his passion, an ecstasy of agonized penetration. And then to have the resurrection of Christ symbolize a new nature, the Christian nature. It dies and then it rises. The son born a Jew was worthy of death. Homosexual, as Jews are, effeminate as Jews are with their weak law and tenuous masculinity. The crucifixion without the resurrection would have left Jews and their God the repositories of patriarchal religious authority. The resurrection turned Jews from patriarchs into pansies, except when it was more useful to concentrate on them as killers of Christ. This simple, cruel, and rather monotonous God of the Jews could scarcely compete with the treble divinity, the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, a father whose son superseded him in range of affect, emotion and bravery, and whose Holy Ghost was purely and ideally phallic and all penetrating.

[Riley]

She crazy for that? That is nuts, dude. That's like. I mean, yeah, she's basically Being like, why was Jesus? Why, why the sun? How come there's no white entertainment television? It's just so Jewish and backwards and.

[Rafi]

Crazy, but so, like, also brilliant and amazing how she weaves this whole narrative. This really is like Bronze Age mindset for women.

[Riley]

Mm. Not being. This is working. Not being Christian. In a world that hates the Jew, the homosexual, the castrated male haunts the post Holocaust Jew. He has seen the future in its annihilation, especially the contemporary Jews fighting for his masculinity. In the camps, Jewish men were castrated. Some. Only some. The castration was literal for individuals. Two thirds of the world's Jewry was exterminated, which castrates the people as a whole rather effectively. Nothing threatens the Jewish male now more than a perception of him as being deficient in masculinity. For this reason, Israel is a militarist nation. No one will ever again accuse the Jews of being soft for this reason. American Jewish writers are apostles of machismo and pimp masculinity.

[Rafi]

But her whole argument comes down to, yes, they're bad. The. The American Jewish writers like Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, and also the conservative Jews who partner with the Christian evangelicals, but they're still not as bad as the white Christian gentiles.

[Riley]

I mean, that is crazy.

[Rafi]

I mean, it is the most ordeal of civility argument I've ever read in a book ever. If you thought Marx and Freud were bad, right?

[Riley]

And then she goes on to, like, Marx and Freud carried on the lineage of Jews as these, like, Old Testament arbitrators of culture by shaping the culture that we now live in, which is a testament, ultimately extreme power. But it's all because of, once again, male supremacy.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And like this whole through line is so utterly Jewish, but also communist because, you know, communism claims to raise people up, but actually drags them down to the lowest common denominator. And that's what she's like, hoping to achieve here. It. It really is like the best endorsement of right wing ideology, whether she likes it or not. I'm not even saying I agree with it.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

But she really is, like, proving everyone's point. And it. It becomes this, like, she's amazing. Yeah. It's like this, like. I don't know what's like. There's like a idiom for it that I'm forgetting, but it's like this uncrossable, intractable conflict between her as, like a coastal elite, lesbian, leftist, feminist Jew, and, you know, your average heartland chud or whatever.

[Riley]

And like, yeah, Christians have their problems the evangelicals. It was, there was a lot of hypocrisy. I get it.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

But they really are like, especially contrasted with the Jews. Like Paul's point is that we can all have salvation.

[Rafi]

Yeah. He's.

[Riley]

The Jews don't want that.

[Rafi]

If you take faith out of the equation, he's almost making a very materialist cut a he like argument which is he's saying not that the Jews should be exterminated, but that they should assimilate in this case to the faith, not the nation.

[Riley]

Well, that's what she accuses him of doing because he was a shrewd, Machiavellian, power hungry propagandists who converted to Christianity because he saw that that was where he could. Yeah.

[Rafi]

He wanted to consolidate the masculine power or whatever. Yeah, it's.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

And it's funny because there's that section where she accuses right wing women of hating homosexuals and homosexuality because they're threatened by them and feel that they will be replaced by them, which is, you know, simply preposterous because, you know, homosexuals can never replace women because they lack the procreative function.

[Riley]

Well.

[Rafi]

Though of course she, she's arguing that that function will become obsolete in the future. Which I think it, it will.

[Riley]

But at least at this point in time, it seems that even with the advancement of reproductive of tech, women still.

[Rafi]

Have the upper hand.

[Riley]

Yeah. They are like spearheading the Orchid Corporation. Yeah.

[Rafi]

They're spearheading their own extinction.

[Riley]

Their eggs. They're. They're doing it.

[Rafi]

She has this idea, this concept that like right wing women hate Jews, blacks, homosexuals, other minority groups and voices of the unheard because they're threatened by them and are seeking to consolidate their own status and power in a male dominated society. But there's like an alternate reading of that, that that right wing women have certain observable and legitimate grievances with those groups.

[Riley]

Yeah. That not everyone has the same value system as being a chosen person.

[Rafi]

Yeah. Like you, you see this with the whole discourse over the forgiveness dad whose white son was killed by a black teen at a track meet and how, you know, he went on TV to.

[Riley]

Like the next day.

[Rafi]

Yeah. To vehemently deny that, that there was like a racial angle involved. And you know, I got into some trouble because I said that his response was narcissistic. Which is again not to say that he's a piece of shit or that he's a bad person. Just that his reaction is bizarre and unusual but also in a weird way totally indicative of the time but the fact of the matter is there is an absolutely obvious racial angle to it in that the, the tables would almost never be turned.

[Riley]

Right.

[Rafi]

And.

[Riley]

Well that's demonstrably true.

[Rafi]

Yeah. And so obviously, you know, so called right wing women were reacting to the foment of those kind of demographic shifts in their communities in part. And the fact of the matter is that like both sides are right and neither side will ever see eye to eye. Both coastal elite Jewish progressives and Christian heartland conservatives have reason to be suspicious of one another.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

Like it really is like an intra really lays bare.

[Riley]

She really does make that point.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

But she just doesn't see the Bible though.

[Rafi]

And obviously the people who encounter her work who disagree with her are affronted by that because.

[Riley]

Yeah. It's extremely offensive.

[Rafi]

Well yeah, because if like the central fact of life for her is male supremacy and male dominance, the central fact of life for them is Christian faith.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

Which again makes the distinction between men and women but sees them as separate but equal.

[Riley]

I mean not necessarily. There are probably especially then like, I mean you'll see at my wedding they will read epistle from Paul where he talks about how women need to be subservient to their husbands.

[Rafi]

Right.

[Riley]

And nowadays in the modern church there's a lot about my pre Cana class they people do a lot of qualifying.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

About how you know, that doesn't mean that you know, the husband gets to.

[Rafi]

Rule over There is mutually.

[Riley]

She didn't say all they're mutually submissive to one another. But I don't really need, you know, I don't have an issue with that per se. I think you just need to choose some to marry someone that you don't mind being submissive to fundamentally is the takeaway practically. But yeah, the Christian right, especially whenever she wrote this probably there was a more overt kind of male supremacist angle that she was reacting.

[Rafi]

We have to also give credit to some women for enjoying because they're flattered by the idea of being possessed by belonging to one man.

[Riley]

It's nice.

[Rafi]

And it's like again it's like what.

[Riley]

You said to make a last episode.

[Rafi]

Like how much of this is socially constructed and how much of this is the natural order. Well she's embodied in natural law.

[Riley]

She just doesn't see it that way at all. She doesn't think there's any like biological reality or any. I mean. Right. The. There's only like a couple passages in Leviticus that condemn homosexuality outright. But as evangelical Christians like to say it's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.

[Rafi]

You know, like.

[Riley]

There. If you believe in a Judeo Christian God, then. Or even not even if you can just look around with your eyes at the world, you can see that there is a natural way.

[Rafi]

Yeah. That is Adam Friedland and Steve Saylor, the two spokes of our political spectrum. But.

[Riley]

Yeah. That life depends on men and women having intercourse.

[Rafi]

Right.

[Riley]

And that this is a tale. It's as old as time.

[Rafi]

She's absolutely right that the penetrative act is an intrusion and a violation of a woman's body that she may or may not welcome and enjoy. But, like, could it be any other way? This is a biological fact of reality. Like, you know, we was fashioned by God.

[Riley]

Well, the tech freaks are trying to change that with their test tube babies and whatnot, but they still need the sperm in the egg.

[Rafi]

Yeah. It's unnatural to fight against that reality. And like, it's not to say that it's like the best reality, but see, it's the only reality we have, so you better learn to live with it.

[Riley]

And in that way, it is the best because it is the way it was meant to be.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And to overlay like a matrix of power onto it might feel true. You can use all sorts of evocative language about penetration and violation and whatnot, but it doesn't really change the unchangeable.

[Rafi]

The reality and its. It's actually just so over intellectualizing. It's so Jewish to over intellectualize it.

[Riley]

I mean, we really cracked the case on Dworkin being Jewish.

[Rafi]

That's my takeaway from this whole book, that she's more of a Jewish supremacist than she's even a feminist. That's what this is all about.

[Riley]

It really does seem to boil down to. She does. It does. In her memoir, she reiterates it. Huge chip on her shoulder.

[Rafi]

And maybe the reason that she's so favorable toward women is because really the. The people that she's in competition with are other male Jewish intellectuals who basically said a lot of the same stuff but thought it was a positive versus a negative. I. I did want to talk about just like the formal and stylistic qualities of her work. In the introduction, Donegan repeatedly brought up how confusing and difficult it can be to read, to work in. And I feel like the real reason for that is not, as she claims, because it pulls you out of your comfort zone or makes you confront your own lack of talent and courage, but because of the sheer, like, disconnect between her magnetism as a Writer and the almost kind of like dull and joyless nature of the ideas themselves. And she. I feel like she brings all these like, worn cliches to life because she is so, like, special and genius. You know, she says that a woman is reducible to the wound between her legs. She's bred to be a sexual plaything of men.

[Riley]

It is again, it was so. It's so fun to read. Like, well meaning and lovely. Riley, like, what do you think about this?

[Rafi]

Yeah. I would encourage all of the men in our lives to read this book because they're actually like. My main beef with men is again, not that they're like hostile and aggressive and not at all want to rape your prone body, it's that they're actually kind of like adults and boneheads. No matter how smart they are, it doesn't even occur to them that they're raping your prone body.

[Riley]

No. Yeah. He was like, what? Oh, well, you don't act. You don't act like that's true.

[Rafi]

Her writing is very punishing, not just in its rhetorical content, but like in the whole experience of. Of like reading it and sitting with it. I mean, she's obsessed with the concept of punishment. Like, somebody should do like. Like an analysis of how many times she says punished, punishment, punish, submit.

[Riley]

Yeah, it's. Yeah. And it's very erotic. It's almost.

[Rafi]

Yeah, it's like a Handmaid's Tale type.

[Riley]

Inverted fantasy and, you know, kind of like glee in the pain and sadism. There's like. There is this like, erotic tinge to it.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

She.

[Rafi]

She talks about like the. The voluptuous erotic thrill that men receive not only from raping women in the bedroom, but from dominating them in public life.

[Riley]

Yeah. That though she does when in. I did find it interesting that she said that marriage is a violation of women's civil liberties because it subjects them to a. Fundamentally, though this is not true anymore at all, basically, but it subjects them to a religious framework of their status and worth. And I was like, oh, man, that's kind of an interesting. When she does take these like, more legalistic leaps.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

I'm like, that's, you know. Well, you're like, ooh, there's some. Like, there's something there.

[Rafi]

Well, listen, in. In my day to day life, I'm like, I don't know. Green walledian in that I believe in the defense of civil liberties. And I hate when there's like a new crisis, organic or manufactured, that leads to a rollback of civil liberties. And I think, like, yeah, like all this stuff, like, is of paramount importance. But when there's faith involved, and faith in. In a.

[Riley]

Well, she says because we have a separation of church and state.

[Rafi]

Yeah. That she's a.

[Riley]

That our civil liberties ought to protect us from a conflation of faith in our interpersonal lives.

[Rafi]

Yeah, but this is part of the intractable conflict because when there's faith involved, who cares about civilization, liberties.

[Riley]

Well, she's for non Christian women who ostensibly are signing up for this arrangement.

[Rafi]

For like the social contract.

[Riley]

Yeah. Then in their case, their civil liberties are being infringed upon because they're being subjected to. But.

[Rafi]

But she should have some empathy for the opposite perspective.

[Riley]

And marriage as an institution is pre Christian. It's ancient and it has not always been the case and has taken many forms through time.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

That haven't been so unilaterally oppressive. I'm using air quotes.

[Rafi]

Well, yeah, but if I may be like a vulgar materialist now, please. Like, even the concept of faith, which I subscribe to in my own way, is a proxy also for the advancement, the survival of the species. Maybe not the species as a whole, but your particular subset of society, the people that you think are like the elite. Human capital, which is like, why it exists as such. As a writer, I noticed that she's very fond of like, beating the reader over the head with these strings of like, really aggressively negative associations.

[Riley]

Reading it out loud.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

You really get like. It's so. You're like, you. You're forced to say, like, sex is sex. Like, it's very replaced repetitive and like poetic in its syntax, but it's so redundant.

[Rafi]

Sex is rape.

[Riley]

Rape and punishment in a different.

[Rafi]

Punishment is death. And yeah, she says that over and over. And she's effectively telling the reader how they should feel.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

Which is. She's using female and propaganda.

[Riley]

She's using female emotional manipulation with male Talmudic.

[Rafi]

Legalism.

[Riley]

Yeah, yeah. And it's just a powerhouse. Yeah, she's absolutely unstoppable.

[Rafi]

The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other common places of female experience that.

[Riley]

Are excavated threaten me with a good.

[Rafi]

Time given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared the mind and anguish, the conscience and upheaval. Children in wartime are maimed, raped, tortured and killed. Women are humiliated by the memory of their abortions. The physical intrusion, the penetration, the pain, the violation, the dirt, the danger, the secrecy, the hatred of their own sex.

[Riley]

Eek.

[Rafi]

But again, my favorite Part was the diagrams, which were like the same. I'm gonna pull up the diagrams because they're so funny and they're like at the end, I love it. It's like the only, like two diagrams.

[Riley]

She has one in women hating. It's like a woman that she drew and it's like all the parts of her body and it's like legs shaved, like pussy also shaved. Like legs, shoulders tanned. Like weird. Like beauty standards that don't even apply anymore. Really. And the woman's like a little fat too. Midriff pierced, stuff like that. You're like, okay, well that's. We don't really hold women to that standard so much these days.

[Rafi]

That reminds me of like that Nicki Minaj line, which is really like gross and vulgar, where she's like, pussy jewelry make him go burr, man. Rubs hands like Birdman. But okay, so it's like two diagrams. They're both circles. The first one says rape, economic exploitation, reproductive exploitation, battery, pornography, prostitution. And the second one says rape, economic exploitation, reproductive exploitation, battery.

[Riley]

That's the crimes against women.

[Rafi]

Yeah, the first one is the condition of women and the. The second is the crimes against women. And the thing that distinguishes them is that one of them has arrows and the other one doesn't. So like cycle. Yeah, one implies like a cycle of directionality, whereas the other one also does.

[Riley]

But from the outside. And pornography is in the middle, in the center. Yeah, yeah.

[Rafi]

So like pornography is to blame for everything, actually.

[Riley]

Well, she makes pornography. She does a very interesting thing with that. With pornography as like not just. Just a form of media, which is the form that it takes, but as the. I feel like I've said ontological so much, but that is what she means. It's like the condition of women is as a pornographic object.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And then everything else stems from that. And then they're all prostitutes and that's the way the circle is closed.

[Rafi]

Right.

[Riley]

But then in the other one, all the crimes or going all, all around.

[Rafi]

Well, you know, the. The sad thing now is that. Which is why women are so aggrieved and always like lashing out and crashing out. Is that because of the over saturation of pornography and how pornified culture and society has become? Women are no longer a pornographic object.

[Riley]

Like it's all pornography.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Like just always has been.

[Rafi]

There's just like an overall lack of interest in women now.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

Like nobody cares. Like you'll scroll through like dozens, hundreds of images of like perfectly optimized, super hot girls and feel nothing when.

[Riley]

Yeah. When the her body, my choice. Fuentes troll backlash was happening and all the women were, like, whipped up into a frenzy, a horny, erotic frenzy. Like, you wish. You wish it was his drug.

[Rafi]

I know. Wouldn't that be don't rape me, weird gay Mexican.

[Riley]

Wouldn't that be nice if it was really.

[Rafi]

You were strong by some 5 foot 8 twang. Take anything at this point. There's also, like, in the. In the chapter on intelligence, she talks about how that was the one I was least.

[Riley]

Least interesting.

[Rafi]

Yeah, it was a real slog and a drag. I almost, like, lost morale and wanted to stop reading.

[Riley]

Aren't you glad you stuck it? Yeah, for the diagrams.

[Rafi]

There's a part where she says the constraint is an annihilation. Language that must avoid one's own body is language that has no place in the world. But speaking truth about a woman's body is not a simple explication of body parts. It is instead the place of that particular body in this particular world. Its value, its use, its place in power, its political and economic strife, its capacities both potentially realized and habitually abused. This sounds very funny now, in retrospect, that women have, like, total freedom to write about anything that they want under the sun, and they always, without fail, choose to write about their bodies.

[Riley]

They're confessional.

[Rafi]

Yeah. Like, what do you think Andrea Dworkin would think of Emily Ratajkowski's My Body?

[Riley]

That's a round table. Yeah, I'd love to be at.

[Rafi]

I'm waiting for, like, the AI technology that, like, resurrects to work and as a Tupac, like, hologram, so she can participate in, like, round tables and debates with, like, Barry Weiss and Emrata. We can two other Jewish.

[Riley]

Put all of her prolific writing into an AI that will generate and anticipate her responses to the contemporary condition.

[Rafi]

And do you think Emrata has read.

[Riley]

Yeah, Dworkin, huh? She's a staple.

[Rafi]

And what does she think?

[Riley]

She probably talks about it in that.

[Rafi]

Book.

[Riley]

But yeah, she's. I read Dworkin in college for the first time and it did really. It was disquieting, but I always had an instinct kind of against it, which is how I discovered Polya, because I was like, there's gotta. Someone's gotta. Someone's gotta think something else. Right. Surely this can't be.

[Rafi]

I feel like Dworkin is probably Polya's worst nightmare, because she's like, they hate each other. One of these, like, mushy, weepy, like, jello pudding type feminists that she abhors.

[Riley]

And Palia loves porno and like Dionysian artistic excellence and ecstasy and stuff.

[Rafi]

And because she's suffering from false consciousness.

[Riley]

But they're both gay, so they have that in common. But yeah. It's too bad they never had like a formal.

[Rafi]

They never had sex.

[Riley]

It's too bad they never had a formal debate. Oh, one more thing I'd like to say about the Pauline portion is that when Paul talks about death and like, you know, sin condemning one to death, it's actually less literal than it is in the Old Testament, which is literally ascribing like laws that say, should a man lie with a man the way he lies with a woman, that he ought to be put to death. That's Old Testament. And when Paul talks about death, he means like spiritual. That like to be in sin is already to be dead. He's not advocating for like, she loves invoking the Inquisition.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Which sure, yeah. Christians have done.

[Rafi]

Yeah, yeah.

[Riley]

Her having to sing Silent night as a 10 year old, very formative experience. Whole chapter in the memoir about it. Still. Nice song.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Not even that.

[Rafi]

Oh, my God. This, like, takes me back to when I was like an elementary school kid and I was like painfully shy and awkward and didn't want to sing in public. And so I devise this whole cope. I didn't even know what Jewish was and didn't discover I was part Jewish until I was like an adult. Didn't even mean anything to me. But I devised this whole cope that singing the American anthem was like, contrary to my nature. It's like an immigrant. I remember having this feel. I know. I remember having this feeling when I was like 10 or something, like, much like Dworkin. Because it was literally like social awkwardness and anxiety.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

That you then intellectualize and rationalize.

[Riley]

Yep.

[Rafi]

And now I like that. I didn't like. I didn't like putting my hand on my heart and like raising the other hand or whatever.

[Riley]

It's an amazing song. Let me look at my notes. All right. In the gyno side chapter, talking about ivf, basically she says there will be fewer but better women that will like, select. Be able to select for eugenic like program that selects for the best women.

[Rafi]

That are like docile and obsequious to men's desires.

[Riley]

I'd love to. Yeah. Her to see. Nor Sidi saying sex is for fun. Nope. Did you watch that video?

[Rafi]

The Dworkin Roundtable?

[Riley]

No. No. The NI meeting the Orid Startup baby.

[Rafi]

No.

[Riley]

There's a really. I found it to be quite twisted part where they show the baby a printed out picture of himself as an embryo. And they're like, look, like, there's so much. I'm opposed to ivf, obviously morally, but it and these series of New York Times op EDS are like grappling with the ethical components of embryo selection, all of that. But in that video, like, they're like, look, buddy, like this was you, like when you were just a little clump of cells, you know? And it's like the cognitive dissonance is so intense.

[Rafi]

What's the point of screening for optimal genetics if you're just gonna saddle the kid with obsessional neuroses?

[Riley]

Because you're a psycho. Well, that's really what I think is like, yeah, you can optimize via gene selection for the best embryo you can get. But ultimately if your kid is conceived by people like you or conceived in a test tube, they're going to be inadequate and weirder than someone who is conceived normally and might have like be prone to some diseases that you're. The. The testy baby isn't.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Fundamentally they're like, you can object to.

[Rafi]

This for faith based reasons, but the real argument against it is that the people who are spearheading it and who want to do it are not freaks. They're not male chauvinists. They're weird, gay, autistic nerds.

[Riley]

Well, then also like women.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Who have delayed having children at an optimal point in their life. So they're optimizing in these circuitous, neurotic, neurotic technological ways.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

But it's actually like women are totally empowered to freeze their eggs and then select the embryo they want the most. And I think that's.

[Rafi]

Yeah. Without the presence of a man even. And it's funny that it's called orchid because it's like this Georgia O'Keefe ass, super vaginal, like Poglian imagery also.

[Riley]

Or kid.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

You know.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

You want to orchid or a kid had normally through the act of male rape.

[Rafi]

The problem with this is not children.

[Riley]

Are supposed to be conceived as a man is supposed to hold you down and force sex on you so that you can consider.

[Rafi]

And that's how you know it's real.

[Riley]

No choice.

[Rafi]

Yeah. The problem with these technologies is not that they will be male dominated, it's.

[Riley]

That they're female dominated. Yeah.

[Rafi]

They're going to be female dominated. They're going to be spearheaded by the new class of elites who are not noble or aristocratic.

[Riley]

They're decadent like the Romans.

[Rafi]

They're just like annoying spiritually Indian nerds. I shouldn't have said that.

[Riley]

No, it's true. And it's. They're playing God. It's sick and twisted. And they shouldn't have brought those wolves back either. That I think my dream.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Was foreboding.

[Rafi]

Yeah. Like, what do you need those wolves for? So they can be like, a weird curiosity to be gawked at and humiliated when they really want to run free.

[Riley]

They're not even the real. It's not. They haven't brought the wolves back from extinction. They've spliced and altered the genetic material of existing wolves who are already genetically very similar to those wolves to be more muscular and have white fur.

[Rafi]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Like the wolves from Game of Thrones. What the. And that's why I'm waging war on wolves, because I think all this is bad news all around.

[Rafi]

The one. The one totally correct thing that she says. I'll end on this.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

I was, like, nodding along. I can't believe I got through my correct dwarf.

[Riley]

More correct.

[Rafi]

That's a title.

[Riley]

There you go.

[Rafi]

I was like, I guess we just have to call it Right Wing Wahmen.

[Riley]

But.

[Rafi]

It'S a little too on the nose. She says surrogacy is like a new branch of prostitution with science and medical institutions as the brothel and doctors as the pimps, but minus the stigma of penetration.

[Riley]

Love it.

[Rafi]

It's a true queen.

[Riley]

Keep talking about penetration. I'm about to come.

[Rafi]

I feel about surrogacy the way that you feel about ivf.

[Riley]

Well, I conflate. I mean. Yeah. I mean, any kind of, like, tinkering with the reproductive process. It was gross. And yeah, she's right. And she's right about the welfare estate. Everything else she's wrong about.

[Rafi]

Wait, what does she say about. Well, she's wrong about the welfare state because she makes it seem like the welfare authority is. Is bearing down upon the welfare recipients. But in fact, since they are the subjects of the welfare states largesse, they have to be also subject to certain criteria and conditions to qualify. That just seems very basic.

[Riley]

Right.

[Rafi]

And maybe those are like, mean and racist and patriarchal, but there have to be some in place we can reform them to be.

[Riley]

Yeah. More humane or pleasant.

[Rafi]

You can't just like, hand welfare out to like, literally anybody on the street.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Rafi]

But anyway, whatever.

[Riley]

Whatever.

[Rafi]

I digress. I think we've. How long have we been going?

[Riley]

We were good. We've done almost two and a half hours.

[Rafi]

Okay. That's not bad. I was thinking this is gonna be like a four or five hour, like, Joe Rogan episode that nobody would listen to, but I think we really got to the bottom of it.

[Riley]

She's Jewish.

[Rafi]

Yep.

[Riley]

See you now. See you now.