← The Good Sex Project
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- [00:10]
Acast Announcer
ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.
- [00:18]
Max Rushton
Hello American podcast listeners. Max Rushton here from the Guardian Football Weekly, which I think you should give a listen. It is good. It comes out three times a week and the podcast delivers you analysis, news, both the good and the bad from the Beautiful Game and maybe even the occasional laugh. He's angry about everything.
- [00:32]
Melody Thomas
He doesn't have a great poker face, does he? I would like to play cards with Bruno Fernandes.
- [00:40]
Max Rushton
You can listen to the Guardian Football Weekly wherever you get your podcasts. Hopefully see you soon.
- [00:48]
Acast Announcer
ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com
- [00:58]
Dr. Rebecca Stringer
this podcast was made with the support of New Zealand On Air.
- [01:08]
Melody Thomas
Welcome back to the Good Sex Project. I'm Melody Thomas and this bonus episode is part incredible university lecture, part heart to heart with an onto it Auntie. I loved this conversation. I think you're going to really love it too. Here's what it's about. You might have noticed a shift over the last few years where ideas that we thought were settled like that gender equality is a good thing, that consent matters and that survivors should be believed, are apparently up for debate again, especially among young men. New Zealand's 2025 Gender Attitudes Survey backs that feeling up with actual numbers and the not good. So I sat down with Associate professor of Sociology, Gender Studies and Criminology at the University of Otago, Dr. Rebecca Stringer, to try and sense of it all. In this conversation we get into why this backlash feels so familiar. If you lived through the 90s, how the men's rights activists and looks maxes are running business models disguised as movements, the potential implications of chatbot girlfriends built to never disagree with you and what she'd actually say to a young man who feels like feminism has left him behind. Here's Dr. Stringer.
- [02:20]
Dr. Rebecca Stringer
So before 2023, there was fairly moderate to low numbers people agreeing with rape myths or viewing gender equality as gone too far. You know, very few people were ascribing to these ideas. And then in 2023 there was a jump in the number of people, particularly the number of men, broadly between the ages of 18 and 64, but particularly in that younger age group kind of 18 to 25, starting to ascribe to rape myths and suggest that it's men who are on the wrong side of gender inequality. So this idea that it's gone too far and now men are under the wheel. And so it's a really important survey and I'm really pleased that we're doing it because what it shows since 2023, when that kind of war on WOKE rhetoric really started to enter our political life to a really candid kind of degree, it shows that those ideas are having an impact and threatening in a way to reverse the significant progress that has been made here toward equality. We're far from being there. And so it's very disheartening to see people thinking that it's gone too far. So the war on WOKE is really having an impact here, particularly among young men. Yeah.
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Melody Thomas
So what is the. I mean, it might not be in this survey in particular, but I assume, given your areas of expertise, do you have ideas about what are the things that are impacting that push to the right for young men?
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Dr. Rebecca Stringer
I think I'd make two points here. The first is that to me, it's very familiar. So I'm in my early 50s, I lived through the 90s, and I watched a fairly extreme backlash against feminism and anti racism unfold across the 90s. And in the 90s, they were referring to people arguing for equality as politically correct. And the idea was that you were oppressing everybody with your thoughts on how equality could be achieved and your conviction that we ought to move in the direction of equality. And so political correctness was in those days, the put down. It was a way of short circuiting the argument for equality and really painting those who are arguing for equality as these unfair tyrants who hate people, you know. And so that's the first point. I see it as a renewal of a very long standing backlash against liberation politics. And the second point I'd make is that it seems to me that what might be perhaps new a little bit about the war on Woke currently is how it's conducted on social media. It's kind of been monetised. Everybody who is spouting this, I think of people like Andrew Tate and, you know, there are certain sort of real spokespeople people who have assumed responsibility for leading the charge in this war on woke. Right. And of course they're in business. They want likes, they want to expand their audience. Once they've got a large platform, there's all sorts of other things that they can do. So there's this kind of monetization or commercialization of misogyny and racism. So one stands to gain minor celebrity, one stands to gain kind of various business opportunities. And so I think that's the difference. There are people with real skin in this game. They're like, I'm gonna forge a career on being an Anti woke spokesperson. So I think we can't be just receiving these people as speaking their minds and on the soapbox, you know, and wanting to contribute to public debate. I think they're commercialising these views and standing to gain from it. Similar with the tradwives. You know, they're astute business women. Right. They're very much at work in a job where we see them supposedly choosing to have not worked. Right. They're monetizing, yeah, they're monetizing this sort of hard out gender dichotomy that amazingly they justify on the basis of biology, which I always, you know, think that's a bit funny. So I think social media has added new dimensions to the backlash and has maybe even created a context in which that backlash becomes a business and people are staking careers on it and trying to create careers and public Personas of some celebrity on it. So I think when you have people with skin in the game to that extent, they become very wedded to the untruths that they are disseminating. That's very different to somebody who maybe has doubts and wants to engage in political debate where you're not there to get paid, you're there to really listen and discover and be heard. So I don't think we have political debate happening in this space. I think we've got people attempting to create a minor celebrity for themselves off
- [08:03]
Melody Thomas
this war on woke and we have a whole lot of seemingly disenfranchised young men. You know, when I was looking at this research, there was part of my brain that went, I will never agree with these points of view, but I can see where they come from. When we have this whole population of young men who maybe feel like they are losing out in a way that their fathers or grandfathers never did. You know, their mental health is really struggling, they are lonely or increasingly single or, you know, there's a lot of things that I think these men could point to as evidence of their disenfranchisement and of the fact that now men are the ones that are oppressed. What would you say to those young, young men?
- [08:50]
Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Well, I have a theory about that, which is I think there's a grand displacement of resentment going on. I think when you drill down what you're hearing, are young people very frightened about the future, feeling very insecure, seeing just how precarious their working lives are likely to be, how lacking in opportunity, and instead of looking to the rich and powerful and saying, wow, we could be governed better and perhaps a little less in their interests, And a little more in mine. They are accepting narratives that make emotional sense. A woman has taken your job, an immigrant has taken your job. Everything would be fine for you if it weren't for feminism and anti racism. That's not true. And nonetheless, it's seductive. It's a displacement of that felt fear. And so I say, I hear you on the fear, but let's examine really what's going on here. We're talking about a world where the majority of wealth is owned by a small minority of people. We have a growing billionaire class who is really starting to throw their weight around and trying to alter the form of political institutions to reflect what they want. We have the great majority of people being dispossessed. There's not trickle down economics, there's trickle up economics or flow up economics. And so I think when those young people look out and they probably are seeing something of a scene of devastation, they're probably right about most of that. But they need to think more and I would hope encounter views that encourage them to not fall for those blame women, blame migration kind of narratives. The war on woke rhetoric is doing a lot of work to protect the billionaire class, to give them some shelter while they assert themselves to make changes that are going to peel back the progressive gains that have been made and make restoring those gains that much more difficult. So that's what I see going on.
- [11:26]
Melody Thomas
And it's really important that we all hear views that are outside of our bubbles. But there's a lot of tired women out there who don't have the energy to be teaching these men or the patience. So I guess I'm asking you for advice for those of us who are tired. What's that? Where's the incentive to show up and continue to be empathetic?
- [11:49]
Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Yes, yes, leave it to me. It's tricky, isn't it? Because I totally understand, and I think that's a new point actually in sort of radical politics these days, that it's not the duty of people from the oppressed group to educate those not from the oppressed group about the oppression. And I like that idea. And I think if you're tired today and short on patience and you don't want to deal with it, I think that's absolutely fair enough. Because the thing is, all of the information is out there. It's just that we have some very determined spokespeople who it seems, don't get any sleep. They're just sort of constantly hashing the same points again and stoking the same fears. It's funny though, because I remember all of the arguments that we hear now were being made in the 90s at university. There were several of my peers, guys who were like, oh, yeah, all of you women are gonna go off and you'll all be fine. And, you know, we on the other hand, will be left behind. You know, they're all, they're all professors,
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Melody Thomas
you know, things turn out okay for them.
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Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Gallery directors, you know, famous, you know, and so, you know, there is this gap between what's predicted and then what happens, because of course, we still have a gender pay gap. We had these great strides here in Aotearoa toward reckoning with the gender pay gap, and they were all just cancelled, you know, so in the moment, the. The young person might be standing in front of you saying, my prospects are so much diminished by this woke agenda, but this is where I wish we could time travel. You know, fast forward 20 years and that person is likely to have, unless we have a revolution in the meantime, is likely to be standing in privilege just like they are now.
- [14:10]
Melody Thomas
Something we've been looking into a little bit is increasing reports of people entering into romantic relationships with chatbots and the increasing number of especially AI or chatbot girlfriends that spout submissive and patriarchal views that never contest what their human partner says. Like, we're seeing very much these patriarchal ideas of what a good wife or a good girlfriend should be reinforced in these models. Which again, feels to me like that could do further damage when it comes to the increasing gap between men and women. Is that something that you've also explored or looked into or had thoughts about?
- [14:54]
Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Well, there are a lot of science fiction plots around this. And kind of a feminist critique of science fiction is that science fiction gives us these amazing technological, futuristic scenarios that we can hardly recognize. It's like, look, that's the future. And yet in these scenarios are these like antique gender norms. It's like driving a space age car with like doilies over all of the surfaces. Grandma's doilies. We're taking them with us. We've got these antique gender norms. And so having read the feminist critiques of science fiction, I was really with that idea of, you know, well, if this is the future, certainly categories such as woman and man have been substantially altered. And whereas our futuristic women and men. I mean, William Gibson wrote the book Neuromancer and invented the term cyberspace. And is the person who really fleshed out a lot of virtual reality well before it happens. And many moons ago I interviewed him. And the concept of the interview was, tell me about how it is that you're like the one sci fi author giving us different versions of man and woman. And he attributed all of it to his wife. But what a guy. And, you know, here we have a science fiction author who wasn't doing that thing that feminists. Right. To critique happens in so much of science fiction. And so that's sort of my response to these uses of new futuristic technologies to revive these antiques. I'm like, really? You want the future to be the past? And that's, that's kind of where I go with it. And I don't understand it. I don't understand why. Hey.
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Melody Thomas
So unimaginative.
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Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Yes, exactly, exactly. And I think currently, the kind of tech bro arrangements, those guys are really wanting to hang on to grandma's doilies. And you can see that in how Facebook has unfolded. So for me, the best Facebook memoir was written by Kathryn Loss called the Boy Kings. And as an amazingly literate person, she got the job really early on with Facebook to run customer service. Because if you're going to work at Facebook, you're going to have amazing skills with coding, right? But it wasn't long before Zuckerberg and the leadership realized that actually what they wanted and needed, sorry, were people who can talk to people, right? So they hire. It wasn't them, it was English lit majors, you know, and so they hire all of these English lit majors, mainly women. And then they move into their first two storey building and they've got the tech bros on one floor and mainly women working customer service on the other floor, which the tech bros referred to as the dumb floor. She records all of this in her book. And so the attitude there was quite perplexing. It's like, we can't have this futuristic technology without people who can talk to people. And I feel a little bit like those same people, I'm going to call them tech bros. People who are very talented at coding and who are involved in these startups. I think that whatever's rendered feminine, they don't value. They see it as somehow a thing of the past. So there's a sense in which the tech bros think that they can replace all the English lit majors they've had to hire with AI and with chatbots, that somehow that human labor can be outsourced to technology. And so I think that's what they're pressing toward. I think they don't want to be employing English lit majors who are women, you know, and they literally are looking to wipe that out using these technologies. I find that quite disturbing. And I think it's that same mentality that also says, well, women aren't the way we want them to be anymore, so we're going to create these artificial femininities. But these are guys holding on to grandma's doilies. They somehow want everything to change except gender norms. That position doesn't really make much sense. It's. If you're committed to exploring new futures and altering the way we do our things, then surely gender has to go in there. And since the 70s or the 60s, even earlier, we've had entire social movements devoted to opening up what gender might mean for all of us. I see that as a really promising, futuristic, exciting development. It doesn't make me frightened, it doesn't make me threatened. You know, I'm interested in that.
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Melody Thomas
Yeah. Have you noticed within your mahi and teaching, have you seen these shifts happening within your student base?
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Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Interestingly, I. Reflecting what you were saying earlier about tiredness, I am noticing a real sense of being kind of battle weary among our students. And when we begin the feminist theory paper, we talk about what might have led people to come on into that paper. You know, how is it that you're interested in feminist theory, prepared to actually read the books? And increasingly, people's answers have been they're literally looking for a kind of rescue. They're either in an intense family Christmas, they're with relatives who are not supporting their gender identity, they're fighting it out with peers on social media and trying to explain, no, the gender pay gap isn't a myth. And here it is. And so they're actually coming into our papers looking for tools that, that they can use to persuade others that, no, this isn't a conspiracy, this isn't a war that's already been won and you're the victim of it. So if anything, what's become more and more heightened in recent years is almost, I would say, a sense of desperately wanting to improve one's knowledge so that one can face those interactions with a real sense of integrity. But certainly in my classes where they're going to be rewarded for it in marks for engaging and understanding those perspectives. Yeah, there's a sense of relief that, ah, there is a real counter argument here. And here it is, you know, wouldn't
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Melody Thomas
it be nice if we could replicate that? So maybe not Marx, but I guess the reward for engaging in books and getting to a deeper understanding of all of these things is, I don't know, human connection and peace and a future on this planet. You know, like Maybe if only we could have further incentivize those things. Going back to the Gender attitudes Survey, there's those statistics around percentages of people, and especially young men who believe that gender equality has either been won or has gone too far or is negatively impacting men now that they are the victims of gender inequality. But there's also other stuff. You referred to kind of briefly to the rape myths, beliefs. There were other attitudes to violence that were really frightening. I have them in front of me. But if you probably have them in your brain, can you tell us some of those stats?
- [23:02]
Dr. Rebecca Stringer
I don't remember the statistics specifically, but I know that we saw a rise in the number of people ascribing to rape myths and a rise in the number of people ascribing to those kind of perspectives on domestic violence. Violence that kind of exonerate and justify the violence. Or was she broke up with you and so of course he hit out this kind of attitude.
- [23:25]
Melody Thomas
Yeah, yeah, the violence one. In 2017, 8% of respondents agreed that physical violence is an understandable response to being broken up with. Whereas in 2025 it was, it had doubled. It was 17% of men. And some of those rape myths. 40% of men think false race rape accusations are common. 19% think that rape victims are responsible if they were drunk at the time
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Dr. Rebecca Stringer
about the drunkenness, it's important to point out that New Zealand law doesn't think that if the person was drunk then they can't have consented.
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Melody Thomas
Yeah, maybe. My question is how do we get in there before those influencers who are so incentivized to spout this rhetoric, to inflate their bank accounts with it? What's an effective counter? How do we fix it?
- [24:16]
Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Well, what I'm with is that the Gender attitudes survey started in 2017, which in all sorts of ways was a very hopeful moment. In October 2017, we have the MeToo movement. The movement of course had begun many years earlier. It was founded by Tarana Burke, who was doing community work in the southern states of the U.S. specifically for young women of colour who felt alienated by anti rape services or services for rape survivors feeling a little bit like they were oriented mainly to white women. And so she stepped into that space and created MeToo as a kind of one on one phrase that one could use among survivors. So it was about supporting survivors. And then Alyssa Milano became aware that to Tarana Burke was using this phrase and then put it on social media and away it goes without Tarana Burke knowing, actually. And then she soon found out and then they made sure to include her very centrally in the movement after that. And she regained her movement.
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Monica Reinagle
Right.
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Dr. Rebecca Stringer
But in the first month or so there were something like 11 million people who used that hashtag. And the objective of all of that was let's show planet Earth just, just how big this issue is. Right. And so we had a very hopeful moment in the sense that the truth of the scale of the situation was revealed. And then there were consequences for certain very key and sort of obvious examples in Hollywood for a long time what was going on around Harvey Weinstein was a so called open secret. And now action could actually be taken. And there was a ripple that went right through. All kind of contract making situations were suddenly places where one had to think about the ethics of sexual contact. So I thought of MeToo as an immensely hopeful moment. And for a good year there I really felt like we were going to get somewhere. But then I started to notice the backlash. I heard for example, another one of these guys in this sort of space, although he's supposedly non partisan, is Tony Robbins, kind of comes out of the U.S. he's like a lifestyle coach kind of guy. And he was saying, well, you know, employers are not going to be wanting to employ women anymore, are they? And this idea that to end sexual harassment women shouldn't have jobs, what a terrible underestimation of what the human's capable of there. Of like, okay, we just won't interact then so that there won't be any cross interaction.
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Melody Thomas
And what an underestimation of men, right? That they can't exist in workspaces alongside women without assaulting or harassing them. Yeah, like lower your standards for men.
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Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Yeah, it's really nutty. And so there has been a backlash against MeToo. And also it pre existed MeToo, it was in struggles around Title 9 in the States which pertain to campus rape. And so the slogan was believe survivors. And that doesn't mean you have to think that absolutely everything said there is absolute fact without a doubt. It doesn't mean there should not be a legal process. What it says is resist what commonly happens, which is the survivor is not believed and instead is blamed. Let's stop blaming the victim. Let's stop hearing claims of sexual harassment, abuse and so forth as false statements that are power moves. Let's stop rushing to the assumption that this person is lying or seeking power or whatever. So, so believe survivors was about, hey, let's not give the usual reaction which is victim blame, you know. And so I think in post metoo what we end up with is this surfeit of false claims. I think that's where the opponents have gone. And so, you know, it's important to know for those in Aotearoa who think that there are some abundance of false rape claims, if, for example, you see something untoward happening in public space or at a party and you think, I think there's a sexual assault going on or about to happen, I'm just going to call the police. If you ring them and when they arrive, there's nothing found that'll be logged as a false report. And that happens a lot. So the idea that there are these conniving women sitting there or children just wanting to kneecap some guy by taking him down with a false rape claim or a false claim of sexual harassment is really nutty. It's nutty. Especially when you see how these women are treated, right?
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Melody Thomas
Like that's, these women aren't celebrated and, you know, their bank accounts aren't full and they're not. Why would you choose that?
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Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Right? So that kind of mean spirited response that says, you know, we're going to nasty a spike in false claims is very out of touch with the reality. Doesn't really understand what false claims are, I don't think, and how they happen. If they show up statistically, you have to understand that a good portion of them won't have come from, from a person who was directly involved. I really don't think that's known. And I think people need to know that also. I am the kind of feminist who is very conscious that men go through sexual violence, men go through sexual assault, sexual harassment and sexual abuse. And when we started to see this backlash against MeToo, I was really worried for women survivors, for trans survivors, for men survivors. When you have this kind of backlash, you have people privately deciding that using their own resources is just going to try and get through, because to speak about this publicly is too much. The opposition is, I'm going to be disowned. Nobody's going to want to know anymore. It'll be a taint on me forever. So people privately deciding to just get through without any public help, without the kind of support that plenty of people out there are wanting to extend to them, but they can't hear them through the backlash. So I like to really emphasise how important it is to acknowledge all survivors and to see what a terrifying context one has to confront in disclosing these days. And so when people do disclose and refuse to shut up and stick with their disclosure and move through for example, a legal process or a cultural process. Their bravery is to be absolutely cherished and celebrated. If you're a survivor speaker speaking out today, you should be so proud of yourself. You know, that is an amazing thing to do.
- [31:48]
Melody Thomas
Beautiful. A lot of young men and young men who are moving to the right or being pulled towards the right are turning away from progressive politics, in part because they see those politics as dismissive of their own challenges and concerns and as disadvantaging them based on something that they can't change, that they can't help being a man, being a white man. And I guess I am wondering if there are men or young men listening who feel like the left does not serve them. Are there ways in which you could speak to them to show them it
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Dr. Rebecca Stringer
really can remind them that Karl Marx was a white guy?
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Acast Announcer
That's true.
- [32:48]
Dr. Rebecca Stringer
You know, the left has had its own struggles in recent times. The British left, the American left, the organised socialist left during the MeToo era, had massive. There was a lot of internal organising that had to be rethought because they were systematically avoiding claims of sexual harassment and abuse. So the left is not some virtue church where everybody's perfect. The left is a place where we're all just figuring things out and we're doing it by reading, by fronting up to events, by being curious, by being open to new ideas, by trying to learn a whole lot. It's hard to learn all of this stuff. There's a lot of theory to take in. I would say stop being the best customer for these new goods that are on display, you know, ascribing to these backlash thoughts. And what's the guy? The guy who burned Barbie dolls after the Barbie movie?
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Melody Thomas
Oh, yeah, the. Ben Shapiro.
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Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Ben Shapiro. You know, the guy's got products. You don't want to buy the products. He really wants customers. Jordan Peterson, he was having trouble in his academic career and now he's kind of held up by all of these young men who have drunk the Kool Aid, purchased the products, trying to live by the rules for life, Avoiding vegetables. Avoiding vegetables, yeah. And I say, you know, there's something to be said for being more discerning about what you're literally consuming and who you're propping up. I worry about the extent to which those guys are just buying this product instead of exploring their own authenticity, and they're maybe tuning out to their own voice. I don't know, maybe try it on for size. But really, is this who you are? You're gonna let them tell you who you are. Because for me, the spaces outside of that sort of feminist spaces, left wing spaces, I don't find them particularly conformist. Invariably I find myself surrounded by, in those spaces, surrounded by people who are like me, wondering what their voice sounds like, like, and their authentic way in life. And if I were in charge for a day, how would I do things? So a greater openness and you know, look twice at that guy who's wanting you to subscribe to his this and that so that you're going to be supporting him to do what he does now.
- [35:32]
Melody Thomas
And if he's got rape and human trafficking convictions, maybe he's not your guru, maybe he's not the one to follow.
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Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Yeah, yeah.
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Melody Thomas
One of the areas in which the kind of war on woke is showing up and that rhetoric is showing up here in Aotearoa, you know, basically we're seeing an importation of the anti trans feelings and ideas. You know, a lot of the kind of second wave feminists I know have somewhat problematic ideas, I would say, or definitely don't align with my ideas when it comes to trans inclusivity. I suspect you are not on the same page as those people. How do we convince feminists who could, we could all be on the same team doing great work here that this is not a threat to you?
- [36:21]
Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Yeah, because, you know Broadsheet, right, The New Zealand feminist publication, which I just always thought was such a cool thing, I've renamed it Narrow Sheet because it is an anti trans platform. Anti trans, anti non binary gender. Right. So they're still working from the frame that was set by Janice Raymond in the 70s in her book. It's an important early articulation of feminist transphobia. So, you know, a lot of feminists kind of stuck to that, this transphobic position that reads trans women as kind of men who are posturing as women instead of understanding that transness is a thing and non binariness is a thing that actually, while they might be able to stride around confidently saying, I'm a woman, Hemi Raw. There are people who from a very young age are going, oh my God,
- [37:28]
Melody Thomas
they're calling me this thing, but I'm not the thing.
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Dr. Rebecca Stringer
You know, wouldn't it be nice if there were a world in which I had some choice about my gender identity and my gender expression and who have actually done the hard and difficult work of trying to create that world. And so I see there's a real lack of appreciation for the political, political activism that people have engaged with at great risks to themselves. So there's A kind of disrespect for fellow activists that I do not understand. There's a derealization of transness and non binaryness and gender fluidity that I also don't understand because feminists are the ones who open the whole question about gender. Germaine Greer is the Female Eunuch. She's avowedly transphobic. But the Female Eunuch is a book arguing that we don't know yet what femaleness is. And it ends with a question, what will you do? And then people go, trans, non binary, fluid gender. And she's like, no, don't do that. Hang on, Jermaine.
- [38:38]
Melody Thomas
I didn't mean that.
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Dr. Rebecca Stringer
You know, hang on, Jermaine, you asked a question and now here people are doing things and what, you don't have a category for that? So therefore you're just going to cancel that out? So I want to say y' all aren't feminists. You know, you might be loyal to that Janice Raymond position from the 1970s, but that means you're tuning out any number of feminists. You know, Anne Fausto Sterling, who wrote about the many different genders there are. But what I say to sort of the transphobes right now is, to paraphrase Pablo Neruda, you can try and cut the flowers, but you can't stop the spring, because gender fluidity is the hallmark of this generation. I know that there are going to be people within the emerging generation who are subscribed to your Jordan Peterson biz, but there are so many more for whom gender fluidity is completely natural, who just want to know the pronoun. And then we're going to use the pronoun. And nobody goes, oh, is that your pronoun? Right. So I'm privileged to know many of these people through my son. My son has a large group of friends, he's 16. And for them, gender fluidity, trans and non binary gender are completely normal. You can't even say, you know, they're accepting because they haven't thought on it and go, will we accept this or not? We will accept it. They're just like, yeah, of course. And they would look at a world where this is not allowed and be like, what? So that's what we're looking at. You can't stop this spring. Winston Peters has attempted to legislate against it. There are going to be continued efforts to say these genders aren't real. But I really don't see them succeeding because it's too built in now to how our emerging generation understand humanity and I think that's wonderful. I think it's completely awesome.
- [40:54]
Melody Thomas
Oh my God, I can't wait to share that. Is there anything that you were like. I definitely wanted to say that and didn't get to say that.
- [41:02]
Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Oh, who was it? Yeah, no. So I made a number of comments about, you know, the billionaire class, but I always like to mention Mackenzie Scott. McKenzie Scott is a billionaire who, who. She's the one who co began Amazon and she was the brains of, you know, a particular approach to transporting goods that that company took. And so she and Jeff Bezos divorced and she took the half that she earned as the co founder of Amazon and she uses it for good. And I can't say specifically she uses it for charity in the sense that traditional charity says, oh you poor people down there, I'm going to give you money and then I'll tell you what to do with it. She understands and respects the good sense that community organisations have. And so she donates money and she allows them to use their own goals and protocols learned in the field on the street. She trusts their knowledge and she funds what they do. And so I know that when Trump attempted to outlaw transness in the us, she gave several California properties to trans organisations so that they would always have a secure base of operation, not something that the state could take away. So I think when we think about the billionaire class, we often need to make these critical comments, you know, observing the extent to which they've been on the upside side of these upward distribution, redistributions of wealth through neoliberal politics. But also that, you know, except Mackenzie
- [42:40]
Melody Thomas
Scott, you know, you're telling me there's one ethical billionaire?
- [42:44]
Dr. Rebecca Stringer
There is one. Well, you know, Taylor Swift might be an ethical billionaire.
- [42:48]
Melody Thomas
Well, not the use of the jets.
- [42:49]
Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Right, right. So you know, Taylor not so much.
- [42:52]
Melody Thomas
And Beyonce, I'm not sure about either. Beyonce and Jay Z, I don't. So eat all the rich.
- [42:56]
Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Except MacKenzie.
- [42:57]
Melody Thomas
Except MacKenzie. Oh, that was a little cameo from our producer Kay at the end there. Miss you, Kay. Dr. Rebecca Stringer, thank you so much for your time. That was such an enjoyable and important conversation. If you listener want to go deeper, we'll link the gender attitude survey in the show notes along with some of Dr. Stringer's writing on feminist theory and victimhood. Kaki Te Ano the Good Sex project was made by PopSoc Media. It was written and developed by me, Melody Thomas. Our producer and audio editor is Kirsten Johnstone. Co producers are Kay Hecke and Elena Bates. Phil Brownlee recorded me in the studio and Our sound mix is by Mark Chesterman. Paddy Fred did the music and some of the sound design. Thank.
- [43:52]
Monica Reinagle
You.
- [43:58]
Melody Thomas
Mom, can you tell me a story?
- [44:00]
Carvana Narrator
Sure. Once upon a time, a mom needed a new car.
- [44:03]
Melody Thomas
Was she brave?
- [44:04]
Carvana Narrator
She was tired mostly. But she went to Carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required.
- [44:10]
Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Did you have to fight a dragon?
- [44:11]
Carvana Narrator
Nope. She bought it 100% online from her bed, actually.
- [44:15]
Melody Thomas
Was it scary?
- [44:16]
Carvana Narrator
Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be.
- [44:19]
Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Did the car have a sunroof?
- [44:20]
Carvana Narrator
It did, actually.
- [44:21]
Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Okay, good story.
- [44:22]
Carvana Narrator
Car buying you'll want to tell stories about. Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.
- [44:30]
Acast Announcer
Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.
- [44:38]
Monica Reinagle
I'm Monica Reinagle, nutritionist, author, and host of the Nutrition Diva podcast. We dig into the questions that you are actually asking. If it's okay to drink coffee on an empty stomach. Whether it's possible to retrain your sweet tooth. Which ultra processed foods you might actually want to include in your diet. We take a closer look at diet trends, fact check sketchy claims and track down the science so that you can feel more confident about what's on your plate. New episodes are released every Wednesday. Find Nutrition Diva on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening, and be sure to follow or subscribe so you don't miss a single episode.
- [45:24]
Acast Announcer
Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast. Com.